Chapter 10 "Istanbul" "Huzun"

The word hüzun, the Turkish word for "sorrow," has an Arabic root: it appears in tense (twice as "huzn" and three times as "hazen"), and its meaning does not differ from contemporary Turkish words.The Prophet Muhammad referred to the year when his wife Khatijah and uncle Taliyong both died as "Senetul huzn", or "year of sorrow", proving that the term was used to express a deep sense of loss in the heart.But if hüzun originally meant loss and the heartache and sorrow that went with it, my own reading suggests that a small philosophical fault line gradually formed in Islamic history over the next few hundred years.Over time, we see the emergence of two distinct hüzün, each evoking a distinct philosophical tradition.

According to the first tradition, when we invest too much in worldly pleasures and material interests, we experience the so-called "hüzun": its meaning is "If you are not so invested in this impermanent world, if you are a good and honest Muslim, you will I don’t care so much about loss in the world.”The second tradition comes from Sufi mysticism, which provides a more positive and compassionate understanding of the term "hüzun" and the life orientation of loss and sorrow.For Sufis, "hüzün" is the spiritual anguish felt by not being close enough to Allah and not doing enough for Allah in this world.The true Sufi is not concerned with mundane things like death, let alone external things: he feels sad, empty, and lacking because he is never close enough to Allah, never deep enough to understand Allah.Moreover, it was not the existence of hüzun that brought him pain, but its absence.He perceives hüzün by not experiencing it; he suffers because he does not suffer enough.According to this logic, it can be concluded that "Huzun" is highly respected by Islamic culture.If hüzün has been at the heart of Istanbul culture, poetry, and everyday life for the past two hundred years, it must be partly because we are proud of it.But to understand the meaning of hüzün over the past hundred years, and to convey its enduring power, it is necessary to mention more than the glory brought to the word by the Sufi tradition.To express the spiritual influence of the hüzün on the music of Istanbul over the past century, and to understand why the hüzün dominates the tone and symbolism of modern Turkish poetry, and why, like the great symbols of classical poetry, it has been abused and even misused, Understanding the worldly failure, lethargy, and spiritual torment expressed by hüzün as a central issue of cultural conception requires more than an understanding of the word's history and the glory we attach to it.To convey the strong sense of "hüzün" that Istanbul gave me as a child, it was necessary to describe the history of the city after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and - this is especially important - how this history was reflected in the city's "beautiful "The landscape and its people.Hüzün in Istanbul is not just an emotion evoked by music and poetry, but a way of looking at our common life; not just a state of mind, but a state of mind that ultimately both affirms and denies life.

To explore the multiple meanings of the word, we have to look back at thinkers who saw hüzun not as a poetic concept or a state of divine favor, but as a disease.According to Jindi, hüzün is not only about loss or death but also about other spiritual sufferings such as anger, love, resentment and unfounded fear. (The physician-philosopher Avicenna viewed hüzün in an equally broad sense, and it was for this reason that he suggested that a young man in a helpless love should be asked the boy for the girl's name. .) These ancient Islamic thinkers enumerated in a manner similar to Burton's enigmatic and entertaining tome "Anatomy of Melancholy" (about 1,500 pages long) in the early 17th century, making Avicenna's great work "The Melancholy" look like as proposed in this brochure).Like Avicenna, Burton takes a broad view of this "black misery," listing fear of death, love, failure, vice, and a variety of drinks and foods as possible causes, while the remedies he cites , equally broad in scope, combines medicine and philosophy, exhorting readers to find solace in reason, work, obedience, virtue, discipline, and fasting—another commonality between two works that demonstrate very different cultural traditions. Interesting example.

Thus, "hüzün" originates from the same "black passion" as melancholy, and its etymology is attributed to the earliest mention of the basic humor (sigma) in the time of Aristotle, and refers to the The same color and the pain of stagnation it alludes to.But here we see the essential difference between the two words: Burton, who prided himself on sickness, believed that sorrow leads to joyful solitude; since the sick man's imagination is thus strengthened, sorrow is sometimes a joyful confirmation; sorrow is solitude Effect or cause is irrelevant, and in both cases Burton sees loneliness as the heart and essence of melancholy.But for Kindi, who sees hüzün as both a mystical state (caused by the frustration of our common goal of becoming one with Allah) and a disease, the central concern is the same as all ancient Like Islamic thinkers, there is the "shema", the community of believers.He judged "Hüzun" according to "Shema"'s life principles, and proposed a way to return to the community.Basically, he sees hüzün as some kind of

conflicting experience. My starting point is the emotions a child feels when looking out through a steamy window.Now we come to understand that hüzün is not the sadness of one lonely person, but a dark emotion shared by millions.What I want to illustrate is the "hüzun" of the whole city of Istanbul. Before I describe this feeling which is unique to Istanbul and which unites the inhabitants of the city, it must be remembered that the primary goal of a landscape painter is to awaken in the beholder the same feelings which the painter arouses in him.This idea was especially popular among the Romantics of the mid-nineteenth century.When Baudelaire concluded that what influenced him most in Delacroix's painting was its melancholy, as did the Romantics and the Decadents after them, he said the term in a wholly positive way, as a compliment. .Six years after Baudelaire articulated his views on Delacroix (1846), his writer-critic friend Gautier visited Istanbul.Gautier's writings on the city left a deep impression on later writers such as Yahaya and Tempina. The meaning of praise.

But what I want to describe at this moment is not the sadness of Istanbul, but the hüzün that mirrors our own, the hzün that we proudly bear and share as a community.Feeling this kind of "hüzün" is equivalent to watching scenes and evoke memories, and the city itself becomes the portrayal of "hüzün" and the essence of "hüzün" in the memories.What I'm talking about is the early evening when the sun goes down, and the fathers walking home with plastic bags in the back streets under the street lights.An old Bosporus ferry moored at an abandoned ferry in the middle of winter, the crew on board scrubbed the deck, carried a bucket, and watched the black and white TV in the distance with one eye; staggered through financial crises and waited in fear all day long Old booksellers with customers coming to their door; barbers complaining about men getting fewer haircuts after the economic crisis; children playing with a ball between cars on cobbled roads; plastic shopping bags in hand while standing in remote stations waiting for a bus that never comes Masked women who talk to no one; the empty boathouses of old Bosphorus villas; The pimps; the crowds catching the ferry on a winter night; the rattling wooden planks of the pasha’s mansion, which now make even louder noises as the municipal headquarters; the women peeping through the curtains waiting for their husbands to return in the middle of the night; Old men selling religious readings, rosaries and pilgrimage oil in the atrium of a mosque; tens of thousands of identical apartment gates, their exteriors discolored by dirt, rust, soot, dust; ship whistles in the fog; the collapse of the Byzantine Empire The ruins of the old city wall; the empty market in the evening; the collapsed monastery "Tek"; the seagulls perched on the rusty barge, the barge's hull is covered with moss and mussels, standing upright under the downpour; the severe cold season The wisp of smoke from the single chimney of a century-old villa; the crowds fishing on both sides of the Galata Bridge; the cold reading room of the library; street photographers; the smell of breath in the theater; Movie theaters are now pornographic theaters frequented by shy men; streets where no women hang out after sunset; crowds gathering outside state-regulated brothels on a hot day from the south wind; The woman; the holy message spelled out in lights between the minarets of the mosque on holidays, letters missing where the light bulbs burned out; Become "Bam" of the taxi-sharing, panting up the narrow alleys and dirty streets of the city;

buses; the lead panels and rain gutters that are constantly being stolen from mosques; the cypress trees in the cemetery, which is like an urban cemetery leading to the second world; the dim lights seen on the evening boat from Kadikoy to Karakoy; Street kids trying to sell the same packet of tissues to everyone passing by; clock towers ignored; kids reading history textbooks about Ottoman exploits and the beatings those kids got at home; The days when the voters' rolls were compiled at home; the days when everyone had to stay at home for the census; the days when a curfew was suddenly announced so that terrorists could be searched for, and everyone sat in fear at home waiting for the "officials"; the days when no one read the newspapers. A letter from a reader published in one corner said that the dome of the nearby mosque that stood for 375 years was gradually collapsing, and asked why the state did not intervene; the underpass set up at a busy intersection; the overpass with dilapidated steps; The man who has been postcards for forty years; the beggar who begs you in the most unlikely places, and makes the same begs in the same place day after day; the piss-smelling piss on the crowded streets, on boats, in passages and underpasses the girls reading the column "Miss Gujin" in the Turkish popular newspaper Liberty Daily; Üsküdar with its windows glowing orange in the setting sun; the early morning when everyone is still asleep and the fisherman is about to go fishing Gulhan Park, known as the "zoo", where there are only two goats and three bored cats lazily staying in the cage; third-rate singers who imitate American singers and Turkish famous singers in cheap nightclubs; Top-notch singers; high school students who can only say yes and no after six years of endlessly tiresome English classes; immigrants waiting at the Galata quay; strewn across the deserted streets on winter nights Fruits and vegetables, garbage, plastic bags, scraps of paper, empty cloth bags and empty boxes in the market; beautiful masked woman timidly bargaining in a street market; young mother with three children struggling to walk; nine in the morning on November 10 At five o'clock the whole city pauses to pay homage to the father of Turkey, while ships honk their horns at sea; dried up, sprinklers stolen; side street apartments where the middle-class families of my childhood—doctors, lawyers, teachers and their wives and children—sat evenings listening to the radio, are now filled with Knitting and button machines packed with young girls working through the night for minimum wage to deliver urgent orders; the view of the Golden Horn from Galata Bridge towards Eyup; "Chimi" peddler; all that is damaged, dilapidated, and lost; storks flying south from the Balkans and northern and western Europe in late autumn, when flying over the Bosphorus and the islands of the Sea of ​​Marmara bow down

The view of the city; the crowd smoking after the domestic football games that always ended miserably in my childhood.That's all I'm talking about. Seeing "Hüzun" and paying homage to the various forms manifested in the streets, scenery, and people of the city, we finally perceive it everywhere: in the midwinter morning, when the sun suddenly shines on the Bosporus Sea, the slight mist As it rises from the sea, you can almost touch the deep hüzun, almost see it covering the inhabitants and the landscape like a film. Thus there is a great metaphysical distance between "hüzun" and what Burton called the melancholy of a solitary individual; yet "hüzun" and another form of melancholy described by Levi-Strauss in The Melancholic Tropics But very close.The tropical city of Levi-Strauss is not quite like the milder climate, more familiar terrain, and less difficult life of Istanbul on the 41st parallel north latitude.But the fragility of the lives of the people of Istanbul, the way they treat each other and the distance they feel from major Western cities all make it difficult for new arrivals to understand the city of Istanbul.Not knowing what to do, they considered it "mystical" and equated "hüzün" with Levi-Strauss' "melancholy". "Melancholy" is not some pain that afflicts a solitary individual; both "hüzun" and "melancholy" indicate a certain collective feeling, a certain atmosphere, a certain culture shared by millions.But the two words and the feelings they describe are not exactly the same, and we can point out the difference by saying that Istanbul is far richer than Delhi or São Paulo. (If you take a peek at the slums, these cities and their forms of poverty are actually very similar.) The difference is that Istanbul's glorious history and remnants of civilization can be seen everywhere.No matter how poorly maintained, no matter how neglected or surrounded by ugly concrete buildings, the great mosques and monuments of the city, as well as the ruins of the empire in the streets and alleys - the small arches, fountains and small mosques in the neighborhood - make life difficult. The people in it are heartbroken.

These things are not like the relics of great empires seen in western cities, preserved and proudly displayed like historical museums.Istanbulites just went on with their lives among the ruins.Many Western writers and travelers find this wonderful.But for more sensitive residents, the ruins serve as a reminder that the impoverished and sprawling city before us cannot achieve the same heights of wealth, power and culture.Just like watching the beautiful old wooden houses burn down one by one when I was a child, these unattended courtyards that merged with the surrounding dust and mud are also not something to be proud of.

When Dostoyevsky traveled to Switzerland, he tried to grasp the excessive pride of Genevans in their city. “They stare at even the simplest objects, like lampposts, as if they were the best and most beautiful thing in the world,” the West-hating patriot wrote in a letter.The people of Geneva are quite proud of their historic city, and even when asked which way is the easiest to go, they will say: "Go straight along this street, sir, past that elegant and ornate bronze fountain..." If The inhabitants of Istanbul do the same, and he may give directions as in the famous writer Rahim's story "Bediya and the beautiful Eleni": "Passing by Ibrahim Pasha's Haman (public bathhouse ), and go further. On your right, looking across the old site (Harman) you just passed, you will see a dilapidated house.” Today’s Istanbulites see everything that outsiders see in these miserable streets feeling anxious.

Confident enough residents may prefer to use the city's grocery stores and cafes as landmarks, which are now customary, as these are considered the jewels of modern Istanbul.But if one wishes to escape quickly from the huzun of ruins, one has to turn a blind eye to all historical monuments, to ignore the names of buildings or their architectural features.For many Istanbul residents, poverty and ignorance serve them well in this regard.History has become a meaningless vocabulary. They take the stones of the city wall and add them to modern materials to build new buildings or renovate old buildings with cement.But the hüzün don't let them go: their hüzün are heightened by vile and vain efforts to ignore and cut ties to the past. The hüzün arose out of their anguish over what they had lost, but also forced them to invent new misfortunes and new ways to express their poverty. The "gloom" that Levi-Strauss describes is what a Westerner might feel when he looks at a poor big city in the tropics, at the bustling crowds and their wretched lives.But he doesn’t see the city through their eyes: “Melancholy” connotes a guilt-ridden Westerner who soothes his pain by not letting clichés and prejudices distort his impressions.But "hüzün" is not the feeling of a bystander.Ottoman classical music, Turkish pop, and especially the wildly popular "arabesque" of the 1980s express this emotion to varying degrees, a feeling somewhere between physical pain and sadness and worry.Westerners who come to the city tend not to notice that even Nerval—whose own grief would eventually drive him to suicide—says that the colors, the street scene, the violence, and the rituals of the city refresh him. There are even accounts of hearing women laughing in cemeteries.Perhaps it was because he visited Istanbul at a time when it had not begun to grieve for the Ottoman glory days, or maybe he had to escape his own melancholy, which prompted him to write a lot of splendid oriental fantasies in Journey to the Orient. The "hüzün" carried by Istanbul is not a "disease with a cure" or "a natural suffering from which we have to be freed", but a "hüzün" borne voluntarily.So back to the melancholy that Burton asserts is "no joy/sweetness"; it echoes its self-deprecating wisdom and dares to boast of its central place in Istanbul life.Likewise, in Turkish poetry after the founding of the republic, the hüzün expresses the same sorrow from which no one can or will escape, a certain pain that ultimately saves our souls and gives depth.For the poet, hüzün is the misty window between him and the world.The life he projects on the sash is painful because life itself is painful.The same is true for the resigned residents of Istanbul.Still influenced by the honor it has received in Sufi literature, hüzün endows their resignation with a certain dignity, but it also explains why they choose to embrace failure, hesitation, frustration, and poverty with optimism and pride, showing that "hüzün" "Sorrow" is not the result of all the bitterness and loss in life, but the main reason.This also applies to the protagonists of the Turkish films of my childhood, and to many of my heroes of the same period: they all gave the impression that, having been born with this hüzün in their hearts, they Show no desire for money, success, or the woman you love. "Hüzün" not only paralyzes the inhabitants of Istanbul, but also provides them with hyperbole.This kind of feeling will not appear in Rastignac in Balzac's pen. What Rastignac ambitiously conveys and celebrates is the spirit of the modern city.The "hüzün" in Istanbul does not advocate the individual's rebellion against society, but instead shows that he has no intention of rebelling against social values ​​and customs, and encourages us to be optimistic about our fate and respect the virtues of harmony, consistency, and humility. "Hüzün" teaches patience in times of poverty, and encourages us to reverse-read the life and history of the city. It allows Istanbulites not to regard defeat and poverty as the end of history, but rather the glory they have chosen before they were born. starting point.So the glory we take from it risks being misleading.But it does show that the hüzün that Istanbul has undertaken is not a city-wide terminal illness, eternal poverty to be endured like sorrow, or black-and-white failure conundrums: it is its hüzün that it is honored to undertake. As early as 1580, Montaigne considered nothing honorable in what he called "melancholy" moods. (He used the term even though he knew he was a melancholic; years later, Flaubert, who was also diagnosed with melancholia, did the same.) Montaigne saw "melancholy" as the enemy of independent rationalism and individualism.According to his point of view, "melancholy" is not worthy to be juxtaposed with noble qualities such as wisdom, virtue, and morality, and he also agrees with Italians to associate "melancholy" with all kinds of madness and harm that are the root of all evils. Montaigne's own melancholy is as lonely as mourning, gnawing at the heart of the man alone with the book.But the "hüzün" in Istanbul is something felt and affirmed by the whole city.As Tempina describes the protagonists of Istanbul's sizable novel "Peace": the "hüzün" derived from the city's history makes them penniless and doomed. "Hüzun" is destined to make love have no peaceful ending.Just like in black and white old movies, even the most touching and true love stories, if it is set in Istanbul, it can be seen from the beginning that the "hüzün" that boys are born with will lead the story into melodrama. In these black-and-white films, as in "fine art" such as "Peace," the moment of identification is always the same.When the protagonist retreats into his own world, when he fails to show enough resolve or courage but succumbs to the circumstances that history and society impose on him, we embrace them, and the city embraces them.No matter how beautiful and famous the black and white street scenery shown in the play is, it still shines with "hüzün".Sometimes when I'm switching channels on the TV, I stumble upon a film that's halfway through, and some unusual idea pops into my head.When I see the protagonist walking on the cobblestone road in a poor area, looking up at the light in the window of a wooden house, thinking of his sweetheart who is about to marry someone else, or when the protagonist responds with humble pride to a rich and powerful The factory owner decided to accept the original appearance of life, and then turned to look at the black and white image of the Bosphorus. I felt that "Hüzun" did not come from the protagonist's broken and painful experience, nor did he fail to marry his beloved woman, but rather It seems that the "hüzün" that fills the scenery, streets and scenic spots has penetrated into the protagonist's heart and crushed his will.Therefore, if you want to know the protagonist's story and share his sorrow, it seems that you only need to look at the scenery.For the protagonists of these films, as for the protagonists of Tempina's "delicate art" novel "Peace," there are only two ways to face adversity: walk along the shores of the Bosphorus, or go to the city backstreet looking at the ruins.The hero's only recourse is to appeal to the crowd.But for Istanbul writers and poets stimulated by Western culture and wishing to engage with the contemporary world, the problem is more complicated.In addition to the sense of community brought by "Hüzun", they also yearn for Montaigne's rationalism and Thoreau's spiritual loneliness.In the first years of the 20th century, some people refer to these influences to create an image of Istanbul that, we must admit, is inseparable from Istanbul and therefore from my story.In writing this book, I engaged in incessant—sometimes intense—conversations (after voracious reading, hesitant long discussions, and coincidental wanderings) with four solitary writers who brought melancholy to modern times. of Istanbul.