Ahmet Hamdi “you and me”

“The past is always present. In order to live as ourselves, we are obliged to reckon with and come to terms with it at every moment. ….. This is our greatest issue; where and how we will connect with the past, we are all children of a crisis of consciousness and self, we all live in a case of “to be or not to be” that is sharper than Hamlet. As we embrace it, we will have a closer hold on our lives and our work. Perhaps it is enough to just search and knock on all doors…”

Ahmet Hamdi: “Let’s not forget that Bursa and Istanbul are as sacred cities as Mecca and Medina for the ancients,” he was of the opinion. According to him, art was like love, it did not deceive, it made one thirsty. Istanbul is either not loved at all; or it is loved like a woman who is loved very much; that is, it is loved with special attention to every aspect and every feature, going crazy.

“Every Istanbulite knows that morning on the Bosphorus has a completely different flavor than other neighborhoods, and that watching the lights of Istanbul come on in the evening from the Çamlıca hills fills one with a different kind of sadness,” he wrote.

In order not to be used as a tool in daily politics, I am sharing the thoughts of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, who passed away sixty years ago, about dictatorship, right-wing and left-wing in his work “As I Live”, so that some people will get a share of it? If not, there is no problem:

“The great quality of modern dictators is that they follow events. Mussolini did the same. He preferred the easiest path, the one that everyone else had taken. Instead of establishing an Italy that would be a solid limb of a European union, a Mediterranean federation, he wanted to revive ancient Rome. The Algerian robe, the Venetian crown drew him away from the realities of the day. He sacrificed reality to an opera setting. Instead of reaching out to the suffering nations, he preferred to strangle them like a weasel. A man could be a weasel. But the world could not consent to be a chicken coop.

…….

The right wing only says Turkey, a Turkish history that does not go beyond blind, memorized boasting, only domestic politics and propaganda. The left says there is no Turkey and there is no need for it; or says something similar; they want and accept a Turkey that they are bending every day, that is breaking a little more, that will eliminate those who consider themselves as an entity among entities. I am after a Türkiye that is open to the future, that settles accounts with the past, within the world. Here is my situation within the country.

…….

I am coming to the right wing again. It is very difficult, even impossible, to be a right winger. First of all, the most ignorant and stupid people in my country are right wingers. Or they are obviously treacherous and immoral. Peyami Safa... Can you come across someone more disgusting than Peyami Safa? Then there is the era itself. You don't come across a right wing even in the West anymore. The bourgeoisie defends itself with police and military force. When it comes to the left, my God, we have leftist writers, leftist poets, young poets, left-wing men, advanced men, asceticism, stupidity, ignorance. And worse than all of these is the new language. Inverted sentences, worse than denying history is not knowing history. Having no culture. Neither right nor leftist...”

My dear friends, I don't know if anything has changed after sixty, seventy years.

It didn't work for me. And the emotional tone of the poem "You and I" hasn't changed at all:

"Don't drink it, it will poison you at the first sip

The wine that fortune has poured into my glass.

Every night she makes me sleep in her arms,

Every morning, suffering kisses my forehead.

You are a twenty year old spring

The wind of joy blows in your shadow.

Every line on my thinking forehead

It's like a winter without spring

The horizons shout to you, “Come!”

Screaming with flowers in their hands

Life calls you with its loud voice,

The ground you trampled me on…”