TERSLİKLER, ZITLIKLAR, YANILGILAR

“Tersten kalkma” denen olayın bilimsel açıklamasını bulmak istiyorum. Çünkü var. Yani bilimsel açıklamayı bilmem ama böyle bir şey var. Bu sabah uyandığım anda fark ettim ki üzerimde acayip bir gerginlik, dedim ki kendi kendime, “Neden bu kadar negatifsin, böyle devam edersen kötü bir şeyler olacak!” Ve oldu da. Önemli bir şeyi kaybettiğimi fark ettim. Nerde kaybettiğimi de biliyorum. Aslında çok fazla önemli değil, yenisi bulunabilir, ama zaten negatifim ya, ona taktım kafayı şimdi. Daha uyanalı yarım saat oldu ama fark ettim ki bunu yazmazsam bugün planladığım hiç bir şeyi hakkıyla yapamayacağım. Hep aklımda o kaybettiğim şey olacak, ve onun siniriyle daha da kötü şeyler gelecek başıma.
Bu aralar Ursula K. Le Guin’in Yerdeniz serisini okuyorum. Şu anda üçüncü kitaptayım, toplam beş kitap. Çok ilginç bir seri. Yüzüklerin Efendisi’ni bir kenara koyarsak, ilk defa okuduğum fantastik tarzda bir romanda hikayeden çok yazılım tarzı dikkatimi çekiyor. Baştan söylemeliyim, Yerdeniz’in hikayesi çok sürükleyici değil, her an sonra ne olacak merak etmiyorsunuz. Ama ayrıntılar çok etkileyici, tasvirler çok canlı. Okurken çok zevk alıyorum.
Bu dönem seçmeli ders olarak 17. Yüzyıl İngiliz dili ve edebiyatı alıyorum. Midterm olmak yerine bir paper istedi hoca bizden. 17. Yüzyılda yaşamış iki şairi, istediğimiz yazım şeklini kullanarak karşılaştırmamızı istedi. Ben de tarihte hayatını sürdürmek için çalışmış ve para kazanmış ilk ünlü kadın olan Aphra Behn ve zamanının en koyu püritanistlerinden Andrew Marvell’i karşılaştırdım. Yani tamamen zıt iki insanı anlattım. Aphra Behn’in ağzından yazdım, sanki Andrew Marvell ile mektuplaşıyorlar gibi. Sonuçta paper’dan gerçekten yüksek bir not aldım. Hocanın yanına gittim, ne düşündüğünü öğrenmek için. Bir mühendislik öğrencisinden böyle bir kağıt okumak onu şok etmiş, böyle söyledi. Sizinle, yazdığımı burada paylaşmak istiyorum ve eğer zaman bulursanız yazıda geçen eserleri okumanızı şiddetle tavsiye ediyorum.

MEETING AT ETERNITY
Although it has been more than ten years, I very well remember when his first letter came. I remember it so clearly because it was the time that I had already fallen and started to rise again. I had seen colonial life, had become ‘Behn’, lost my husband, had become ‘Astrea’ in my espionage duty, had almost drowned in dept, been in prison and been released. It was the very time I understood that my survival depended upon my pen. We had lived through many; the war, many theories of politics, many beliefs of religion, nature’s disasters… We had seen the power of the king and we had seen the power of the parliament. We had seen both lose power. We had seen Cromwell and the dark period for theatres, the banning of the newspapers and reading of all letters by postal authorities without permission. Although, when his first letter came, more than ten years had passed from those times, I always thought that it was the reason why my correspondent never revealed his true identity. Now that I know who he is, I come to think maybe this was not the reason. Maybe he thought that I would refuse to send him letters if I knew who he was; maybe he was right.
First he started sending me the poems he wrote and then we started discussing our literature. He was honest, from the beginning he told me that he was writing under a false identity and if I went to the address on the letters to find him, all I’d find would be a post box. So I decided to accept it the way it is: an intellectual relationship with a friend who has no voice but only a pen.
The subject which we mostly argued about was our ways of understanding love. It was after ‘The Dutch Lover’ was performed that he sent me the letter part of which I give in his own words:
“I had the chance to watch your latest play, The Dutch Lover last week; I am very affected by it. However, I must say that while watching the maidservant singing “The Willing Mistress”, I felt like you are answering my “To His Coy Mistress”. I don’t think such calmness is possible for a lady who wishes to mate with her lover. I understand that our patriarchal society is pushing the women to remain silent about their desires and not “return the same” to the man’s kisses since men can do anything for their wishes; we even saw a king being executed. However, in that song, I felt unrealistically calm. I believe that love cannot be found on the object of love but rather on the way to reach that object. It’s the tension between the two sides that keeps the spirit of love. Do you remember my poem “The Definition of Love”? The lovers are like the parallel lines that cannot physically touch but can only touch at eternity which is something we can only imagine. This is actually the way to keep love perfect. You can understand this idea more clearly if you consider the name of the poem along with the last two lines. It is “the” definition of love, there is no other definition and it also involves the meaning of limitations of love. The limitations lie in that the two poles cannot physically meet, it remains an idea; it is both union and opposition: Conjunction of the mind, and opposition of the stars”.
I answered him saying that he was right in that the women are supposed to be ‘coy’ rather than ‘willing’ according to the common sense which is mostly created by men. In writing ‘The Willing Mistress’ from the female narrative voice I meant to show the repressed feelings of a woman against love. However, we must understand that those are just the woman’s feelings; we don’t know what the man thinks about the situation as the last line says “Who can guess the rest?”. I told him that love’s war-like nature is a men-originated feature. These thoughts inspired me to start writing the play Abdelazer and I started with a song “Love Armed”. In the song I emphasized that the common point of a man and a woman is that they are both shaped by love and in a recursive sense, they also shape their love. For a man, it means pride, fury and power; for a woman the desire leading to ‘sighs and tears’. This men - created notion of sexual love kingdom ruled by the male usually collapses when the women don’t act their parts accordingly. That discussion led me to write ‘The Disappointment’ some years later. If ‘The Willing Mistress’ was not a complete answer to his ‘to His Coy Mistress’, I think ‘The Disappointment’ was. His poem was of the man reminding the lady that she will lose her beauty when her life ends soon and commit a crime by rejecting him; my answer was that the enemy is actually the man whose life depended on the “coyness” of the lady, when she becomes willing, no lifetime is left for his love. In his poem he used the colour red to symbolize the sexuality of the woman but I believe it must have been the red symbolizing the blushing which makes her attractive. Also, in his poem he isn’t trying to persuade the lady with compliments but he’s threatening her as comparing the bed and the grave; both private places but in the grave “none I think do there embrace”; however, he’s not sure of that, he only thinks so. As I answered in ‘The Disappointment’; love can exist in the bed only when the lady is opposing, when she is showing her love, she ends up “leaving him fainting on the gloomy bed”.
When I wrote to him stating these opinions, he told me that the perfect harmony between the woman and man is not possible, it can only be established in eternity and he gave an example from my work; like Oroonoko and Imoinda can only unite after death. He sent me his poem “The Garden” and said that our bodies are only our confinements, when our souls leave our body, the transience of life will end and we will again find our origin of perfection. He also stated that the main character in his poem isn’t himself otherwise it would be “To My Coy Mistress”. After this letter, I answered this time objecting to the absence of the woman in ‘The Garden’, however I didn’t receive any reply. I never heard of him for five years until last week when I heard that the unpublished works of Andrew Marvell are published. When I bought the book I was faced with the poems of my unidentified correspondent.
Considering politics, religion, ideologies, life styles, education; these were the times that we faced many oppositions. Mr. Marvell and I were on the opposite sides in all of those areas however we only discussed ‘love’ and even those discussions took our many years. After all, I understand that love is a battlefield; not only sexually but also intellectually and can even exist between a man and a woman who, physically, haven’t even met at all and can only meet at eternity.