August 21st, Thessaloniki
Yesterday I ran into someone here, a school friend whom I hadn’t seen for five years. This is an incomprehensible, unanalyzable physiognomy, so ambiguous, as ambiguous as it is meaningful, smiling, cheerful…
As soon as he saw me, he cried out “Is that you?” and without giving me time to shake his hand or ask what he was doing, he continued with a flood of words, like the eruption of an artesian well: “Oh, if you only knew how happy I am to see you. You haven’t changed at all… How am I? Undoubtedly fine, right… Yes, I continue to come here very faithfully. Will you stay here long? Ha… Come now, I’m going to my studio, dear fellow, come with me, look… You won’t refuse, because I’m asking.”
With the rapid speed of his speech, I answered: “I’m not refusing. I accept, but…”
Within the suddenly awakened sincere charm of our old informality, laughing and pleased, I said jokingly that if he permitted, I wanted to be able to address him and ask him some things about his life, and suddenly, returning, I repeated one of the most pleasant memories of our companionship from five years ago: “This too undoubtedly needs your kindness, your mercy, my dear bandit, do you permit?”
Laughing, he lined up four “okays” one after another: “Okay, okay, okay, okay.”
At school, because he wouldn’t give anyone a chance to speak, we would all say to him: “You’re such a bandit that you mercilessly seize the right to speak from every person you encounter!” Perhaps due to the effect of the oblivion awakened by the memory of this, he drifted off for a few seconds; I began to take advantage of the opportunity: “Have you been here long?”
“For three years…”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m a painter; we’re going, you’ll see. Look at my studio, how beautiful… For three years I haven’t gotten tired…”
Now I couldn’t ask anything; he was telling: after leaving school he went to Beirut, then came here; as well as giving art lessons at some private schools, he was also giving private lessons. But his family in Istanbul was sending three letters a week; they definitely wanted him to come… They were going to marry him off, and he absolutely couldn’t agree to this…
While listening to him, I couldn’t pay attention to my surroundings; we were passing through places I didn’t know. He had linked his arm with mine. We had arrived at his studio.
“Here it is,” he said. A narrow street with regular, clean sidewalks… In the large room on the ground floor of the house across the way, three young Greek girls and a small child who could be estimated at ten years old were sitting.
They greeted him with smiles; I was beginning to joke, “Oh, your neighbors are quite suitable for the wisdom of wonders…” We started climbing a steep staircase; without giving me a chance to continue, he was saying: “Oh, if you knew how consoling this art, this fine art is, how compassionate! Who denies the greatness of the fine arts? Whoever imagines any fault in it is a treacherous insensitive; only the poor are excepted. In my opinion, those who don’t have personal wealth are not worthy of being adherents of fine arts, not even admirers. The fine arts don’t earn money, they earn fame; they don’t give bread, they give consolation; they don’t establish happiness, they applaud existing happiness. In short, while it can never make a residence from an artist, it decorates and furnishes it perfectly.”
He took a small key from his pocket that wasn’t proportionate to the large door; he opened the door with it, we entered. A pleasant smell of paint greeted us; this was a spacious room, almost a salon. About twenty easels stood in a subdued and dormant silence beneath large and incomplete paintings. This strange disorder forced me to ask: “Does someone else also work here?”
“No, just me.”
“Then aren’t all these easels too much?”
He answered laughing: “Ooh, my dear, you know my nature; I get bored with everything quickly. I start another before finishing one. True, I complete small plates, but the large ones! Until now I haven’t been able to complete a single one. I can’t bear to throw away the ones I’ve started; so they’re condemned to live half-finished like prematurely born children. Their mourning awakens other pains in me; those awakened pains, mixing with artistic imagination, become a vision.”
“Here’s a painting for you!”
He grabbed me by the arm and took me to the corner of the room, to the corner where the light shadows consisting of murky lights filtering through the lowered white curtains of the large windows were concentrating. He lifted the blue and thin paper covering the painting on a stylish beech easel. This was a complete picture. It was so wonderful that it made me think with a feeling similar to that ambiguous trance-inducing effect that beautiful things suddenly awaken in souls: A darkish studio. Many incomplete paintings… Paint pots knocked over on the ground, whiting packages… Bottles, plates… Among these, a young painter with abundant brown hair was thinking, absorbed in his large white palette, in his brushes forming a bundle, which he had left on a low stool; over his right shoulder, a fairy with a pink and captivating fan was waving his hair and smiling with compassionate gazes. Involuntarily I said, “Oh, how beautiful. What do you call this?”
“‘The Sweet Dream’—isn’t that good?”
I couldn’t leave in front of the painting as if magnetized; this artistic chaos… The unintentional formations of invisible shadows, the so-natural depiction of the small sweat drops on the forehead of the young painter whom the fairy was fanning… All of this amazed me. He pulled me by the arm, showed me his other paintings, those large and incomplete paintings, and explained. After seeing “The Sweet Dream,” these seemed very common compared to it.
Finally he said, “Come on, let’s go to my room.” We left the studio and entered an adjacent room. My friend had arranged this place with an artistic taste resulting from the happy breadth of his fortune. Under thick and navy blue curtains, blue and thin tulles resembled the torn large and transparent wings of a large butterfly. A small table, on it a dark Japanese cloth, symmetrical paintings on the walls… And valuable prayer rugs. A large armchair, on the right of the window a navy blue velvet sofa… A small walnut bookcase, then a large carpet that covered the entire floor. He took his pack from his pocket and gave me a cigarette. I had sat in the chair in front of the table, smoking the cigarette he gave me, breathing the confined air of this pleasant environment, light and dirty, turned navy blue by the navy blue furnishings. My eyes had become absorbed in the paperweight on the papers that were undoubtedly destined to not be exposed to any current. This was a crystal sphere larger than an egg. I took it in my hand and understood it was a very artistically made clock; the numbers appeared very large as if being looked at with a magnifying glass, and from under the thick crystal it was barely noticeable that it was working. My friend asked: “What do you think of my life, my effort?”
Putting the paperweight back on those immobile papers, I turned to him: “Oh, I’m envious, but if you had a little perseverance to complete your incomplete paintings…”
Smoking his cigarette violently, he said, “Please, don’t wish for me this thing called perseverance… I detest it. If I were to feel the slightest perseverance toward something I’m occupied with, I’m definitely sure that all failures, sorrows, regrets would gather in me. The more I can move away from it, the happier I become. And everyone is the same.”
I laughed: “How can such a thing be… Such a strange, such a contrary opinion?…”
Again a flood of words, like the roaring laughter of a nearby waterfall, overflowed from his lips: “On the contrary, quite correct and natural…”
Now let me explain the philosophy of perseverance; perhaps you’ll find this wrong, but you’re excused, because all our judgments change according to our points of view. Even though our way of thinking is the same, the fact that our points of view differ from each other is enough to put chasms between us. It’s the strangeness in this point of view that distances all debates from results. Now let me state my point of view:
“General and without metaphor… Perseverance, we embellish it, decorate it, accept it as something great, right? However, let’s think of this impartially and nakedly; let’s change its moral name to a word indicating the same meaning, what happens? For example, stubbornness, a kind of stubbornness… There’s no need to say who stubbornness belongs to. You know this too. There’s a creature famous for its stubbornness that persists and perseveres with all its existence not to cross over a small stream. It receives several kilometers of beating. It’s so persevering that its poor owner is forced to change the road. Now the attachment of this animal stubbornness, that is, perseverance, ends with a good beating, but in the speaking animal, in humans? It continues throughout life. Nothing can close the wound it opens. For example, imagine a merchant; this gentleman is engaged in cotton trade, has lost half his fortune. Now if he doesn’t insist, that is, if he doesn’t persevere, if he changes his trade, perhaps he’ll be able to close the breach in his fortune. This ‘perhaps’ is certainly more certain and useful than the ‘perhaps’ in his perseverance in the imagination that ‘perhaps I’ll gain back what I lost this way.’ Nevertheless, he still perseveres, and goes bankrupt in that trade. It’s the same in literature; think of the Parnassians, then the Romantics, some among the Symbolists… Pardon, let’s think of our own literature. Here are the New ones, here are the Old ones… Isn’t progress merely detaching from the old? This is my opinion… Because there’s no such thing that can be called a work of progress that resembles its old version! Such-and-such thing is progressing, it’s said, meaning it’s changing state, transforming, in short, coming out of oldness. Along with everything else, literature will naturally progress, that is, separate from the old; condemning it to oldness is an empty thing like preventing the natural law of progress. So those who judge the truth from this point of view didn’t persevere in their old method, in writing ghazals, in composing odes; they inclined toward progress, that is, toward newness; they created the books that today occupy the most revered places in our libraries. I know a poet who, after writing ghazals for years, changed his method, didn’t persist against the truth, that is, didn’t persevere, progressed by inclining toward true literature, and has gained the respect of the most capable writers. Then there’s a gentleman I know who was very intelligent, virtuous, knowledgeable… He persevered in this method. And in the Fevaid journal published in Bursa at the time, he declared his stubbornness: “…We cannot abandon the valley of ghazals; if it’s said ‘no one is forcing you; you can compose in whatever valley you wish, you’ve been reduced to three or five people,’ we respond with complete pride that ‘there are many intelligent people growing up, naturally gifted with true poetic talent, enough to revive this valley.'” Today, in his fifteen-year literary life, he has no work other than ghazals filled with cold and unpleasant words like ‘ne vakte dek’ instead of ‘ne vakte kadar.’ Now if this gentleman hadn’t persevered, that is, hadn’t been stubborn, if he had abandoned that old limited literary style, today with his rumored unknown power, he might have been a useful writer or a poet read without dozing off. The stubbornness of some persevering people has darkened their logic, even made them forget poor Isagoge. They say: ‘We want to revive the old literary style.’ If you ask them: ‘Oh, has the old literary style died? What about Fuzuli, Baki, Nef’i, Nedim, Naili-i Kadim and their works?’ ‘No,’ they say, ‘they’re immortal.’ Then how can something that doesn’t die, something immortal, be revived? Here’s a contradiction that hasn’t come together but has almost collided. Perseverance, I think, is harmful in everything like this… Yes, if you think about it, something that will succeed has absolutely no need for perseverance; you succeed in it naturally, without getting bored. A thing that you have difficulty in attempting—then you need perseverance, stubbornness, that is, need to suffer. Then let’s come to gambling: I have twenty liras in a separate pocket of my bag. I follow a method of my own; I harvest the fruits of all gamblers’ perseverance, the yield of their stubbornness, look how: Divide this twenty liras into four, it makes five liras. So every night I go to the gambling table. I start playing. If my five liras is gone, I say ‘I have no luck tonight’ and get up. If I win ten liras, I say ‘this is enough’ and get up again. Now, on the night I give five liras, if I give five more, then another five, maybe another five more to get it back with the stubbornness of taking it back again, my capital… pardon, my principal will be destroyed. Or on the night I won ten liras, if I persevere in this effort, defeated by the dream of winning all the money shining on the green cloth, how do I know I won’t lose what I won besides making a loss? Do you believe that with this method I take more money than my principal every month and never make a loss? Look; a month is thirty nights… If fifteen of them are unlucky, fifteen must be lucky… My lucky nights give me ten liras, while my unlucky nights take my five liras. I taught this to all my friends, but because they were severely defeated by their stubbornness—the stubbornness to get back their losses when they lose, to win more when they win—they couldn’t benefit.”
He had forgotten his cigarette; he brought it to his mouth, it had gone out. He got up, took the match, relit his cigarette and continued:
“Yes, stubbornness in everything… For example, look at me. When I came here, I had started English; three months passed and I still couldn’t read a correct phrase. I thought and admitted that I have no aptitude for this; I immediately quit and started German; this was easy, suitable for me. Now, if I had persevered, saying I started English once, not only would I not have learned it, but I would have lost German too. Now I honestly confess that I owe my German to my lack of perseverance. Look, you liked ‘The Sweet Dream’ very much, didn’t you? However, if I had possessed the perseverance you advise and desire, naturally I would have completed those paintings you saw; then I wouldn’t have felt the mourning, the pain of those half-abandoned paintings, ‘The Sweet Dream’ couldn’t have come into existence. If I had been persevering, true, I would have possessed twenty common and large paintings, but never a ‘Sweet Dream’… This painting you liked, my friend, I also owe to my lack of perseverance. Oh, how to explain… Because I want to say everything I’ll say all at once, I can’t say any of it. I’m mixing up the evidence I want to present; the logical harmony is lost. Finally, let me repeat again that perseverance means stubbornness. And stubbornness offers humans ten times the beatings it fed that famous stubborn one, and we apparently call this feast ‘bad luck.’ Don’t ever recommend it to me. It’s the death of an artist, it means going blind; the greatest poets, the truest artists, the greatest geniuses are the world’s most chaotic and least persevering. There’s no perseverance even in nature. Which of a century’s three hundred sixty-some thousand days resembles each other? An eternal demand for change… Those who consider perseverance natural are those who imagine absolute motion on earth. No matter how stable they are, they become upset with a relative stubbornness before time’s absolute change. You’ll say nonsense, right? My opinion is nonsense?”
Through the blue and white smoke of his cigarette, leaning as if lying on the sofa, his legs crossed one over the other, in the shape of a living question mark, he was looking at me with bright gazes. I couldn’t decide what answer to give, how to object. Finally, with the confused astonishment of an old wisdom-seller, calm and hesitant, I whispered: “Really nonsense… Because ‘Like a tree, those who are rooted are stable.'”
He burst out with a violent laugh, jumped up, put his hands on my shoulders; he was still laughing. “Here,” he said, “in you too there’s a perseverance that concerns your point of view…”
