'If I drew a house, I felt as if it were my house. I felt I owned everything I drew!'

Be it a Deleuzean conception of walking along, all alone in some foreign city, or Le Corbusier’s conception of the Radiant City, or John Bunyan’s description of the Celestial City, or Joseph Conrad’s take on London, the “Great City,” or of the crowded streets of Brussels, the “sepulchral city,” or of Theodore Dreiser’s vicissitudes of Kansas City, or Mistry’s description of the “City by the Sea,” or Alan Paton’s evocative portrayal of the ‘great city of Johannesburg’, every city scape has its own enthrall and its enamour! Ain’t it?

Maybe that’s one reason why cityscapes have been an all-time favourite jaunty-haunt for poets and writers across times and climes!

This painting of the cityscape in all its intricate hues has been so amazingly captured in the works of a plethora of writers whose poetic frames and cadenced sketches make even the most remotely unseen skeletoned lives and their respective cultures come to life with flesh and blood in their rhapsodic phrases and rapturous lines!

Sample this, from Haruki Murakami’s After Dark!

In fact, it’s anybody’s guess then, that this beautiful Murakami-ean depiction of the wonderful cityscape through his amazingly descriptive sketches has real enriched the elegance and the grace of this read beyond measure, for us all! No wonder this legend has been translated into more than a fifty languages and counting…!

For once, try to visualize now, right now, dear reader, a ‘still’ or a ‘tableau’ in such picturesque ‘word-painting’ right in front of your eyes, from Murakami’s description of a lovely cityscape in such evocative lines –

Here we go –

Eyes mark the shape of the city.

Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature—or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

Our line of sight chooses an area of concentrated brightness and, focusing there, silently descends to it—a sea of neon colours. They call this place an "amusement district." The giant digital screens fastened to the sides of buildings fall silent as midnight approaches, but loudspeakers on storefronts keep pumping out exaggerated hip-hop bass lines. A large game centre crammed with young people; wild electronic sounds; a group of college students spilling out from a bar; teenage girls with brilliant bleached hair, healthy legs thrusting out from microminiskirts; dark-suited men racing across diagonal crossings for the last trains to the suburbs. Even at this hour, the karaoke club pitchmen keep shouting for customers. A flashy black station wagon drifts down the street as if taking stock of the district through its blacktinted windows. The car looks like a deep-sea creature with specialised skin and organs. Two young policemen patrol the street with tense expressions, but no one seems to notice them. The district plays by its own rules at a time like this. The season is late autumn. No wind is blowing, but the air carries a chill. The date is just about to change.

That’s Murakami for us all!

Now let’s move on to yet another famed writer of today, Orhan Pamuk, whose autobiographical read titled, Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003), forms the subject matter of discussion on today’s kutty little post!

A scoop of a vignette from Pamuk’s description of his cityscape for us all –

Accustomed as I was to the semidarkness of our bleak museum house, I preferred being indoors. The street below, the avenues beyond, the city’s poor neighborhoods seemed as dangerous as those in a black-and-white gangster film. And with this attraction to the shadow world, I have always preferred the winter to the summer in Istanbul. I love the early evenings when autumn is slipping into winter, when the leafless trees are trembling in the north wind and people in black coats and jackets are rushing home through the darkening streets. I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions; only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading.

When I watch the black-and-white crowds rushing through the darkening streets of a winter’s evening, I feel a deep sense of fellowship, almost as if the night has cloaked our lives, our streets, our every belonging in a blanket of darkness, as if once we’re safe in our houses, our bedrooms, our beds, we can return to dreams of our long-gone riches, our legendary past. And likewise, as I watch dusk descend like a poem in the pale light of the streetlamps to engulf these old neighborhoods, it comforts me to know that for the night at least we are safe; the shameful poverty of our city is cloaked from Western eyes.

A photograph by Ara Guler perfectly captures the lonely back streets of my childhood, where concrete apartment buildings stand beside old wooden houses, the streetlamps illuminate nothing, and the chiaroscuro of twilight—the thing that for me defines the city—has descended. (Though today concrete apartments have come to crowd out the old wooden houses, the feeling is the same.)

No wonder then that Pamuk has given us an impressive epigraph from Ahmet Rasim, ‘The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy,’ that suavely sets the tone and the tenor of his absorbing read for us all. 

Well, that’s just for a snippety sample for us all from Orhan Pamuk! This enthralling autobiographical read titled, Istanbul: Memories and the City was published in the year 2003, and translated into English by yet another equally well-known novelist Maureen Freely. Interestingly, Maureen’s translation has set the benchmark and the basis for Pamuk’s memoir to be translated into other languages, as she has had the privilege of working in tandem with Pamuk himself on this amazing translation!

So yesss! Full credits and plaudits to Maureen on her impeccable translation, which makes us transcend our very own space and time and enter the Istanbul of Pamuk in one subtle change of gear!

Cityscape descriptions apart, Orhan Pamuk also excels in bringing out those nostalgic childhood memories in such vivid recollects! It’s something akin to Orhan leading us all by hand, to his childhood home to relive with the other Orhan, (the child Orhan!) and take a delightful peek into the cityscape of Istanbul!

Indeed, memories of his past give him such huge doses of nostalgia, but they are of a different type, altogether! To Orhan, past memories give him a melancholic kind of nostalgia, which Orhan refers to as collective nostalgia, that seems to have seeped into the psyche and the spirit of every Istanbulite!

Being a painter himself, (indeed, as Orhan confesses, although he had such a natural flair for the brush, he had always wanted to be a writer!) Orhan presents us with such vivid descriptive paint-sketches in words, charting as he does, from the imperial Ottomanic past, to the Turkish present of his day, the collective nostalgia, and the ‘end-of-empire’ melancholy.

Tempted to give a preview into his love for painting and drawing, by the legend himself, from off his memoir –

Not long after I started school, I discovered a pleasure in drawing and painting. Perhaps discover is the wrong word; it implies that there was something, like the New World, waiting to be found. If there was a secret love of or talent for painting lurking inside me, I was not aware of it by the time I started school. It would be more accurate to say that I painted because I found it blissful. The invention of my talent came afterward; at the start there was no such thing.

Perhaps I did have talent, but that was not the point. I simply found painting made me happy. That was the important part.

Pamuk at his painting

One day after I’d done a drawing at school, everyone crowded around me to see it. The teacher with the crooked teeth even hung it on the wall. I felt like a conjurer pulling rabbits and pigeons from my sleeves—all I had to do was draw these marvels, show them off, and rake in the praise.

Gazing proudly at my creation, I would move my head from right to left, peering closely at some detail before standing back to take it all in. Yes, here was a thing of beauty and I had made it. No, it wasn’t perfect, but still, I’d drawn it and it was beautiful. It had been a pleasure to create it, and now it was a pleasure to stand back from it and pretend I was someone else, admiring my picture through the window.

But sometimes, looking at my drawing through someone else’s eyes, I’d notice a defect. Or else I’d be seized with a desire to prolong the joy I’d felt while drawing it. The fastest way of doing this was to add another cloud, a few more birds, a leaf.

In later years, there were times when I thought I’d ruined my drawings with these further touches. But there is no denying they could return me to the initial euphoria of creation, so I couldn’t stop myself.

What sort of pleasure did I take in drawing? Here your fifty-year-old memoirist must put a little distance between himself and the child he once was:

I took pleasure in drawing because it allowed me to create instant miracles that everyone around me appreciated. Even before I was done, I was looking forward to the praise and love my drawing would elicit. As this expectation deepened, it became part of the act of creation and part of its joy.

 After a time, my hand had become as skilled as my eyes. So if I was drawing a very fine tree, it felt as if my hand were moving without my directing it. As I watched the pencil race across the page, I would look on in amazement, as if the drawing were the proof of another presence, as if someone else had taken up residence in my body. As I marveled at his work, aspiring to become his equal, another part of my brain was busy inspecting the curves of the branches, the placement of the mountains, the composition as a whole, reflecting that I had created this scene on a blank piece of paper. 

My mind was at the tip of my pen, acting before I could think; at the same time it could survey what I had already done. This second line of perception, this ability to analyze my progress, was the pleasure this small artist felt when he looked at the discovery of his courage and his freedom. To step outside myself, to know the second person who had taken up residence inside me, was to retrace the dividing line that appeared as my pencil slipped across the paper, like a boy sledding in the snow.

The things I drew, no matter how imaginary the house, the tree, the cloud, had a basis in material reality. If I drew a house, I felt as if it were my house. I felt I owned everything I drew. To explore this world, to live inside the trees and scenes I drew, to depict a world so real I could show other people, was an escape from the boredom of the present moment.

I was living in this world of my own—reading books I shared with no one, painting, acquainting myself with the back streets.

Sometimes I wouldn’t leave our Besiktas house at all but spent the whole day reading. Sometimes I would take a thick book (The Possessed, War and Peace, Buddenbrooks) with me and read it during class.

For newbies on Orhan Pamuk: Pamuk, is the first Nobel laureate from Turkey, with more than fifteen literary awards to his cap! Added, his works have been translated into more than fifty languages!

Pamuk’s predominantly powerful theme is his profound preoccupation with the past! Well, and that’s because, as Orhan himself says, Turkey in itself represents a buried Ottaman past, and the present can only be redeemed by digging up and ‘uncovering’ this past!

To cap it up, be it in pen or paint, Pamuk the painter’s evocative panoramic portraits of the past, are an inimitable class of their own!

Past compare!

images: theartsdeskdotcom, amazondotcom