PETER VALENTE Engages
published in Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry edited by Murat Nemet-Nejat
(Talisman House, 2004)
In Seyhan Erözçelik’s Coffee
Grinds, life is presented as unstable, as a continuum of experiences, part
of “a long journey” within the arc of ascent and descent.[2]
In the very first of the twenty-four
readings of the fortune, the central themes of Coffee Grinds are
suggested. There are people, “stretching toward the sky,” “all together they
are on a long journey, mixing with the smoke, and becoming an object.” The poet
writes, “one single object unified by smoke.” He speaks of a unification
between the object and the subject. Out of the multiplicity of phenomena there
arises a single object. There are three roads all “opening towards the same
place, the sky, emptiness,” “pure, blessed, emptiness,” the destruction of the
ego, the union with it. It refers to the emptiness, a tabula rasa. In the poem, God is never mentioned. But
the arc of ascent and descent, this consummation, is simultaneous, there is no
division between the micro and macrocosm, indeed, “the sky turns human.”
Fortune 20 tells of a
“ferocious beast” (echo of the first Canto in Dante?) who “drowns in a brook”
and is “reborn in the cup” and continues to say, “to put it another way, it’s
jumped a threshold. / To another world.” This is the “yearning” for a
parallel space, for non-being, that
“other world” where there is no interference from the ego. The woman is
“amazed at everything or ready to be amazed, childlike / Not childlike, a child,
a baby.” Regression to the origin. But, “distress, to continue the analogy, /
is fed by the placenta, finding sustenance, gaining its existence from it;”
Melancholy begins at birth. The original state of unity is broken; there is
instead a multiplicity of phenomena and this is what causes suffering: “But
now, with the rupture of the distress, the distress has increased.” “The
fortune has dried;” there is a potential source of despair since, “the
movements of time sometimes are much slower than the forward movement of our
hopes.” This forward, linear perception of time is also a cause of suffering; one
fails to experience the simultaneity of past, present and future during the arc
of ascent/descent. It is a sobering experience rather than the dizzy,
disoriented feeling of ecstasy that is at the heart of Sufism.
Then, in fortune 15, there is
an image of affectionate display; she (it seems that the person receiving the
reading is a woman) caresses a man’s head as it lies on her lap. But this
causes a greater distress. It’s even worse than she could have imagined and
this is because, in another fortune, “you’re caught between two worlds,” the
worlds of the spiritual and the material, “reborn,” “between sky and earth.” Yet
the poet writes, “seen from another angle…” And this is how the fortune
operates; it is a kind of seeing, of interpreting the world, subjectively; fate
is a fusion of being and looking at that being.
Interestingly, in fortune 22,
the fortuneteller sees the woman being followed by saints and then corrects himself,
“Nooo, fools!” In Tarot, the number associated with the Fool is zero, the
number of unlimited potential, and the card is an indicator of the purity and
open-hearted energy of the child. But zero also suggests unity before division,
the pure, blessed, “emptiness” that is the implicit goal of Sufi practice. He
concludes, “the signs have disappeared now. Beautiful.” We are
outside language itself for a moment; even the fortune is stalled. There is a
brief interlude where perhaps that “blessed emptiness” is felt. But as life is
unstable, anxiety does not end, but continues, albeit in another form, takes on
the form of another beast. A wonderful aspect of the fortunes is how they speak
of the “animal spirits that populate the universe…the dome of the sky.”
In fortune 23, the
fortuneteller reveals the only way in which this can end: “the ending of
anxieties depends on an arrival at the sky.” Therefore, the 23rd
fortune echoes the first fortune, where, “the mountain is flying to the sky…leaving
its main mass of land behind.” Indeed, Coffee Grinds is about a kind of
vertical movement, the thrust is upward, through the destruction of the ego,
and the absorption of multiplicity into unity, the zero that indicates the
presence of the Fool. But these anxieties have their “roots on earth” and
because of this, “they must cut off all ties with earth.”
The final piece, written in
English, suggests a kind of erotic relation between the fortuneteller and the
woman; the fortuneteller speaks about the validity of a fortune; he speaks of
the importance of not writing down the fortune because then it becomes invalid;
it “is to be read and interpreted only” (it is “a spirit echo of the world”)
yet the “written word, sign is what matters.” It is what matters, but at the
same time it is a prison from which he cannot escape, hence, while the poet is
inspired by the woman, the mother, (one reveals oneself by looking at others,
using the universe as a mirror), he cannot escape from despair. And this
despair is associated with the act of writing and reading itself. Therefore,
the poet says, “Ikra / My desperation, Milady. With all my heart, Seyhan
Erözçelik.” The poet, like the fortuneteller, is at once the teller of the
truth and a liar. Therefore, while the written word matters there is also a
sense that was is hidden is just as important as what is revealed.
ROSESTRIKES
Rosestrikes
is an altogether different kind of book than Coffee Grinds but what makes them work together as a whole is how
their similarities as well as their differences are woven together so
seamlessly. The fortunes in Coffee Grinds
are indeed “moody” and changeable, and yet the overwhelming thrust of the poems
is vertical, towards unification of the disparate elements of consciousness,
and the destruction of the ego in the arc of ascent/descent. On the other hand,
Rosestrikes are a series of poems
concerned with fragmentation, loss, despair and pain. The rose generally stands
for the soul in Sufism. In alchemy, it is the red tincture that suggests a
successful transformation. It is also ‘solar’ and male, as opposed to the white
rose that is female. In these poems, its function is also linguistic and in
this way the rose is almost divested of its traditional meanings and takes on a different character dependent
on the word it is attached to. At one point the poet writes, “roses are
multiplying / multiplying” which suggests dispersion rather than unification,
the central theme in these poems.
The very first poem, “Rosethroat”
contains images of pain and loss: the narrator screams until his throat is
hoarse, the suggestion being that he has failed to unify with the female, the
pain he feels “has no relief,” a “thorn” pricks his heel. The scene is bloody
and the “heartflesh dry like a rose.” And furthermore, “loves are burning. /
Town is burning” and “A love is burning, / no water;” these images of war and
holocaust and a desire that is not relieved contribute to the overwhelming
sense that these poems will be about destruction, separation, an inability to
destroy the ego and unify in love. In fact, these poems are in one sense about
how the ego causes
suffering.
The material fails to transform
into the spiritual and thus the union is a failure; in “Cherryrose” the lover
kisses so fervently that his lips become “cherryrose” like the beloved’s, but
the poet writes “your lips, / still taste like lips.” And then the ironic,
“Thanks!” Love has failed to transform the lover because they have not arisen
to the spiritual state and remain bound by transitory images. In “Moonrose” he
writes, “Here, / get hold of me. The poet speaks of the desperation of the
lover, the desire to be reborn, “taken,” in both of its senses. There is the
sickness of birth, of being, in a fallen world. And then there is the call to
the “invisible groom”, a desire to be ravaged: “Rape me. / With my invisible
groom. // In your crime / bed.” There is something criminal about this union.
It is a “rape” in a “crime bed.” This is the subversive element in Sufi
sexuality. Spiritual union is conceived of as a transgressive and violent
experience.
In “Rosebelief” the poet is
heartsick and there is a rejection of belief in a higher spiritual plane but
also a rejection of the premise of Coffee Grinds: “If you do not kiss what good
/ are roses? // Let them fade, / I’m no believer. // You can’t read a fortune /
from its roses.” There is a sense of loss throughout these poems, for example,
when the poet writes, “Passing myself / I pass out // The moon rises. / The
rose has left with you” and that the heart is exiled. There are two aspects of
the self at war with one another. The self fails to achieve a state of union
with the 'other.' Even the image of a bird in flight is described as a “flying
prison.” In “Constellationrose” the poet is exiled from the sky, rooted to the
earth, and unable to ‘fly’, to destroy the ego, and become unified in love; he
writes, “Under / I’m silent. This silence also implies wonder.
Even the “spiritual world” rejects
and mocks the lover: “Angels laughed at me…it seems the devil / made a pass…The
fire having fooled me, / hitting on me, / is fueling me.” This is the fallen
world, the exile from paradise. As you write, “While desire is eternal and
unobstructed, love is only possible from a state of fallen grace – a
consciousness of loss.” And And so we are spurred on by desire that arises from
a sense of lack, of something missing, or amiss in the world and in ourselves:
“The adoration lanced long ago / is still bleeding.”
But in “Spin o sa” there are
lines that suggest the dizziness that is a prelude to ecstasy in Sufism: “the
rose is spinning, / at the pit / c h / of the vertigo.” There is in this line
the word “pit” as if the rose is spinning at the edge of it. But there is also
the word “pitch,” which implies a sudden turn and also can suggest the black
color that in alchemy refers to the initial chaos from which all the elements
arose. Here is the whirling blackness of the initial chaos over which the “rose
is spinning,” over which the poet is spinning. In a single image the ecstatic
dizziness of the spinning rose (poet) is fused with the whirling primal chaos:
you write, “through the prism of multiplicity, disintegration and chaos to have
a glimpse of the divine (Islamic or pagan) unity" is the essence of the
Sufi experience. Earlier in the poem, a marten is on the “skyscraper / of the
soul cleaning / its windows.” And at the end of the poem we read, “the clock
stopping / now;” this is the moment where linear time is destroyed and past,
present, and future are simultaneous This "stopping" also implies
death. Both meanings exist simultaneously.
These are all moments, like in Coffee
Grinds, where the poems seem to present an alternative experience that counters
the overwhelming sense of loss and despair. But these experiences of union and
dispersion do not necessarily occur independently and sometimes the experiences
are simultaneous. For example, in “Revolverrose” the poet writes “i collapse /
in your arms.” The lines suggest union, the lover is exhausted. The title
contains the word, ‘revolver’ which suggests perhaps a kind of violence or
death involved. Here perhaps is the death of the ego. Or perhaps this
exhaustion can be a result of the dizzy ecstatic vertigo that a lover in Sufism
experiences when he is rising to a higher spiritual plane.
And yet, “the elements dispersing
too far…too far…far / rose is the mirage…the mirage / in the dust.” Here is an
ultimate realization that the rose itself, which in one sense stands for
reality in these poems, is an illusion, a mirage. “The storm / has elapsed,”
the veil is lifted and reality itself proves to be an illusion. And in “The
Death of Gestures” comes acceptance: “Occasionally, we say this / to ourselves:
/ this is life, this is it, / we did this, / thus. / Where’re we now” and
“nothing can be the same as before.” This is the hard-won realization that pain
has taught the poet. This life, here, even this body that I call my own, is
temporary, and with this comes the realization of mortality: “Besides, / i see
the skull in my face / in the mirror.” But despite death, “people need each
other. / Why love together otherwise?”
Which leads naturally to a memory
of childhood, the “tabula rasa” that Erozcelik refers to in his drawing. There
is a realization that death is “a childhood disease.” And there is the trauma
that he speaks of, that involves crushing the frost with the heel of his foot:
“Because the inside of frost is hollow, the sound it makes being crushed is
interesting.” So the first pain is associated with a sound, a piece of music.
And in the poem the poet asks, “Is that, in essence, Achilles’ scream?”
Achilles screamed three times when he learned of the death of Patroclus, thus
causing the Trojans to re-route their troops so he could retrieve the body. He
ignores Thetis’ warning that if he avenges Patroclus’ death he himself will
die. So that primal ‘sound’ has associated with it a fierce overwhelming love
in the face of profound loss and the awareness that even what one loves is
destined to fade away, or die. Furthermore, the poet writes, “Fragments of
frost broke the weave / in the heart, cut it / loose…only the cut endures.”
There is a break in the continuum, a rift in the eternal, and we are
time-bound, painfully aware of our own mortality in this fallen world. And
this, despite our almost hysterical desire to love: “I want to put my hook into
your heart so that you can’t unhook me.” In Rosestrikes,
this signals the change from innocence to experience, which is a kind of death.
And from this first death desire is born.
[1] Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds by Seyhan Erözçelik and translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat was published in 2010 by Talisman House. This volume contains two books by Erözçelik.
[2] The Sufi concept of the
arc of descent and ascent is the movement from the multiplicity of phenomena to
the unity with divine essence and the reverse. This movement is not sequential
but continuous, two aspects of this divine essence.
*****
Peter Valente is the author of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna (Punctum Books, 2014), which was nominated for a Lambda award, The Artaud Variations (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), Let the Games Begin: Five Roman Writers (Talisman House, 2015), two books of photography, Blue (Spuyten Duyvil) and Street Level (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), two translations from the Italian, Blackout by Nanni Balestrini (Commune Editions, 2017) and Whatever the Name by Pierre Lepori (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), Two Novellas: Parthenogenesis & Plague in the Imperial City (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), a collaboration with Kevin Killian, Ekstasis (blazeVOX, 2017) and the chapbook, Forge of Words a Forest (Jensen Daniels, 1998). He is the co-translator of the chapbook, Selected Late Letters of Antonin Artaud, 1945-1947 (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2014), and has translated the work of Luis Cernuda, Gérard de Nerval, Cesare Viviani, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as numerous Ancient Greek and Latin authors. He is presently at work on a book for Semiotext(e). In 2010, he turned to filmmaking and has completed 60 shorts to date, 24 of which were screened at Anthology Film Archives.
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