THIS WEEK’S WINNER
Jaime D. Dianzon of Muntinlupa City has a BS degree in chemical engineering from Manuel L. Quezon University and is currently a freelance tutor in Latin, English, Filipino, math, chemistry and physics. He says he “languished in college for 10 long years,” from Adamson University to UP to MLQU, distracted by ““Maoist agitprop” until finally finding his current path.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
— Francis Bacon, On Studies (1625)
Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City is one book that is not just tasted, not just swallowed, nor even chewed and digested in the ordinary sense. It must be ruminated! Ruminants — cattle, caribous, camels — have this curious habit of chewing the cud slowly, then swallowing and storing it temporarily in the rumen, the first and the largest of their four stomach chambers. The cud is later regurgitated and the cycle is repeated, again and again and again. Men — and women, of course — are ruminants, too, but of a different sort. They ruminate not cud, but ideas. Once they get hold of an idea, they turn it over in their heads this way and that, and then shelve it in some alcove inside their mind. The idea is retrieved at a later time and ruminated further. Istanbul must be read that way. And I urge Pamuk readers to do so.
My first reading of Pamuk’s memoir took me to Istanbul, circa 1957. There I met five-year-old Orhan: sad, solemn, introspective. Orhan’s parents have just separated — one of their many stormy separations — and decide to separate their two sons as well. The older Levket goes on to live in the Pamuk Apartments in Niflantafl with his grandmother. Meantime Orhan stays with his aunt in Cihangir. “Look! That’s you!” his aunt tells him, pointing to the sweet, doe-eyed boy in a kitschy portrait that hangs on a wall in her house. In fact, the “cute boy” in the small white frame looks like him. From here on, the ghost of that other Orhan, the happy Orhan, is to haunt him until well into his adolescence. Later, as he turns into a young man, another ghost begins to haunt him — the ghost of majestic Constantinople looming mistily over the crumbling ruins of his Istanbul.
Straddling the Bosporus Strait, where the Golden Horn meets the Sea of Marmara, Constantinople prominently stands at the crossroads of the Old World — Asia in the East, Europe in the West, the Black Sea in the North, and the Mediterranean Sea in the South. Wielding control over all major trade routes between Asia and Europe, both by land and by sea, the city naturally emerged as the center of commerce, culture and diplomacy in its time. Through most of the Christian era, it was the largest and richest of all cities in the world and so came to be known as the “Queen of Cities.” Constantinople also held the distinction of being the only city astride two continents and thrice capital of great empires — the Roman Empire (330-395 AD), the Byzantine Empire (395-1453 AD), and the Ottoman Empire (1453-1923 AD). Then in 1923, the Ataturkian revolution spearheaded by Mustafa Kemal abruptly put an end to the sultanate and led to the establishment of the Turkish republic, with Ankara as its new capital. Constantinople, officially renamed Istanbul, gradually lost its importance, except as a historical relic. It is this Istanbul that I am to tour with Orhan as he reminisces on his childhood and early manhood.
Istanbul, Orhan laments, is a city soaked in hüzün, the Turkish word for melancholy. Well aware that much is lost in translation, Orhan belabors his self-contrived definition, making it both the underlying thesis and theme of his memoir. Hüzün, he postulates, is the collective melancholy of all Istanbullus: self-negating, yet self-affirming, so pervasive that it seeps down to ever smaller units of Istanbul’s society, down to the level of the individual. Orhan builds his case by tracing the source of his sadness to his family’s distressing circumstances and ultimately to the deplorable condition of Istanbul during his time. Intertwining his own biography with Istanbul’s history, he chronicles the events that shaped his identity.
The Pamuks belong to Istanbul’s haute bourgeoisie, a social status that comes with material wealth. Riding the crest of the Atatürk regime’s reconstruction efforts following the revolution, Orhan’s paternal grandfather successfully built up the family fortune by building railroads. Like so many large Ottoman families, the entire Pamuk clan is housed under one roof, each branch of the family occupying a floor in the five-story Pamuk Apartments. To Orhan, the apartment building is a “dark museum house” crammed with unplayed pianos, locked glass cabinets of untouched teacups, turban shelves without turbans, and art nouveau screens with nothing to screen. This is the cheerless setting of Orhan’s life story, in which he witnesses episode after episode of a turbulent family life — his eccentric grandmother’s domineering habits; his father’s and uncles’ squandering of the family fortune; his uncles’ and aunts’ endless squabbles; his own parents’ teetering marriage; his elder brother’s senseless beatings. Orhan feels desolate. Hoping to find solace in Istanbul’s “consoling streets,” he steps out of the Pamuk Apartments only to find himself in a bigger museum, afflicted with even greater turbulence. Istanbul is a repository of architectural relics — the Egyptian Obelisk, the Hagia Sophia, the Basilica Cistern, the Topkapi Palace, the Sultan Ahmet Square, the Blue Mosque, among so many others. At the same time, it is the locus of sporadic civil disturbances and manmade calamities. Old wooden mansions are burned down and replaced by modern concrete buildings; tanker fires break out on the Bosporus at night; tens of thousands of Kurds and Armenians are massacred; city shops are looted and destroyed; packs of dogs roam the streets freely. Pamuk’s entire memoir is reminiscent of Dante’s descent in the Inferno. And, like Dante, Orhan emerges victorious in the end, having at last found his identity. “I don’t want to be an artist. I’m going to be a writer.”
My second reading of Istanbul took me back to Manila, mid-September of this year. Still reeking of hüzün, which had rubbed off on me thanks to Orhan, I began to draw parallels between Manila and Istanbul as I tentatively sipped a hot cup of espresso in one of the coffee shops about Intramuros. Old Manila, just like Old Istanbul, is a walled city. After Magellan’s fleet completed the circumnavigation of the globe, Manila stood prominently at the crossroads of the New World. To the East, beyond the Embocadero (San Bernardino Strait), stretched the vast Pacific Ocean, a water bridge to the Americas; to the West sprawled giant China, the exotic subject of Marco Polo’s travelogue; to the North loomed militaristic Japan, whose frequent incursions into its neighbors’ territories put the Spanish government in Manila constantly at bay; to the South lay the fabled Moluccas, the land of spices, then worth their weight in gold. Manila, too, holds many distinctions. Fort Santiago once kept a famed prisoner, Dr. Jose Rizal, whose writings brought about the birth of the first democracy in Asia. The nearby San Agustin Church and the neighboring Manila Cathedral serve as constant reminders that the Philippines is the first and the only Christian nation in Asia. Some few strides down south is the Rizal Park, site of mammoth gatherings of Filipinos, such as on the occasion of the three papal visits and the political rally of ex-President Cory Aquino, denouncing the electoral fraud during the 1986 snap election. Not long after, the first People Power Revolution broke out at EDSA, setting up a model for the peaceful transfer of power to be emulated a few years later by the Eastern bloc countries and by the USSR itself. Yet for all these achievements, Manila now pathetically lags behind Singapore, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and other tiger cities of Asia. I felt desolate. Could it be that I, too, am called to be a writer?
That was meant to be a rhetorical question. But reading Istanbul a third time, I felt obliged to come up with an answer. Let me put it this way. I used to have two favorite pastimes — reading and ruminating. When I’ve got no work to do, I either grab something to read or while away the time just musing. My reading fare covers the whole gamut of printed matter — from the prosaic (biscuit wrappers and shampoo sachets) to the popular (daily papers and best sellers) to the technical (arts and sciences) to the sublime (the Holy Bible and the Koran). I read both trash and gems. It’s when I ruminate that I separate (Pardon the mixed metaphor!) the chaff from the grain. Ruminating, I’d say, is a calisthenics of the mind. It develops mental strength, agility and gracefulness — the ability to memorize, to reason out, to make judgments, to solve problems, to create, and to guide the hand that holds the brush, the chisel, the pen. But how come I don’t write? While I’m a perennial reader, I’m only an occasional writer. Not even! I’m just an accidental writer. Once, I wrote a Latin elegy for a cherished tutee, who met an untimely death in a freak motorcycle accident. Two hours was all it took to compose. But I was desolate then! Under normal circumstances, I find writing a strenuous activity. It makes me sweat. How often have I experienced spending an hour or so staring at a blank page of a Word document when I should be furiously tapping at the keyboard. The problem is that I write only when I’m asked to write. I don’t write as a pastime as I do reading and ruminating. But now that I’ve read Orhan Pamuk’s memoir thrice, I’m inspired to take up the pen for good. From this moment on, I’ll write for writing’s sake. Now, I have three favorite pastimes — reading, ruminating, and writing.
I’m still at a crossroads. Should I continue writing as a pastime or sing a paean to Orhan’s muse? Now I’m on my fourth reading of Istanbul. Maybe the answer will come.