Courage

In front of me is a white page. It could be a computer screen, a sheet of paper, or a canvas. It’s in my hands to write or draw anything on it. At the same time, the page is looking back at me. Everything that has shaped my identity up to that day—my life experiences, all the books I’ve read, the things I want to tell, what I know of art and literary history, everything that makes me who I am—meets the white page in a gaze. In my hands is the greatest freedom in the world, so vast that the thought of it makes me dizzy. I can write whatever I want on that page. It could be a poem, or I could talk about my favorite books. But as I look at the paper and as sentences begin to form, I notice how my freedoms grow increasingly constrained. Forms, the rules set by those who wrote before me, the structures that make a novel a novel, a story a story, the voices that say: don’t write inverted, write straight sentences. And yet the works that have moved me most have always come from artists who ignored these molds, who created their own language, their own world with a silent revolution. The writings I can’t get enough of reading—Anne Carson slipping incredible insights about love into academic books, or producing anachronistic translations of Antigone, for instance.

In her last few pieces, she speaks about how Parkinson’s disease has distorted her handwriting, and of the sorrow this causes her. But what a way she has of telling it. One reason I love Anne Carson so much is that the artists who have influenced us both are often the same. There is a powerful bond in being able to see magic in the same lifeless things—or in things that others find dull. Anne Carson doesn’t know me, but as a reader I know she is aware of my existence; she writes for me even without knowing me. Otherwise, she wouldn’t turn a mention of her handwriting into a meditation on Cy Twombly or Catullus. From a personal perspective, she opens a door into the worlds of literature and painting; both of us use that door. Anne Carson speaks of her trembling hand, of fears born of age. She is not the only one with trembling hands or advancing years, but she is the only one who connects that trembling to Cy Twombly. Through her words, we stand together before a painting; we look at it together, and I hold her trembling hand.

“Who is Cy Twombly?” asks Roland Barthes in his essay on the painter. Before a huge blank canvas, Twombly draws lines that seem childlike to us. Like every painter before him, he is bound to perspective and compositional rules, yet he doesn’t care about them. Carson once wrote that Twombly fell in love with certain poets at different times and created works inspired by them. Reading that makes me smile, because in an essay I once wrote about Anne Carson, I too had said that what I feel for her is a kind of romantic love.

I’ve just learned that poems describing works of visual art are called ekphrastic poems. What Twombly does isn’t ekphrasis, but Barthes says they can’t really be called paintings either. He explains their relation to calligraphy and writing. What Barthes writes is so beautiful that as I read, I feel Twombly’s paintings might exist only so these words could be written. Scribbles on canvas, more like scrawls, with “Virgil” written large. According to Barthes, this “Virgil” is not just a word; everything Virgil represents condenses and pours into the painting. The painter, deeply influenced by Mallarmé, is compared to the poet by the author of A Lover’s Discourse. He says Mallarmé dismantled the language of poetry as a tool of revolt; both artist and poet use letters as other things, until letters themselves cease to carry any graphic representation. I keep rereading to grasp what he means. The terms, the languages intermingle. 

Why do I care about all this, why does it give me such pleasure, and why do I think of her as I read? I am not an academic, I was simply someone who loved reading novels. What brought me here? That’s what I try to weigh. Perhaps it is language itself that creates this effect—language that produces novels, these paintings, everything. This is also what binds me to Anne Carson. Though she writes in English and I in Turkish, we share a common language. What matters is not the tongue but that her words reach me in my mother tongue. Mallarmé said: everything exists only to end up in a book. For me too, life counts as truly lived only once it has been written. Writing demands so much of us. To write something truly worth reading, we must either create new worlds or lay ourselves bare like an open wound. All our insecurities glare at us in a magnifying mirror, with sharp teeth. We try not to look up, and keep writing while the teeth sink into us, tearing flesh away. We read our words aloud, we cut and dissect ourselves again, we say the cruelest things to our writing, we despise it, we tear it up. Because at the end of the road lies the reader—that hypocrite, elegant monster who will dissect our work, even our lives, strip flesh from bone, swallow and digest us whole. We know this. That’s why all the effort.

They call what Catullus did in poetry a revolution, and dying at thirty didn’t stop him from being one of the greatest revolutionaries. It affects me too, that he and Sappho came from the same lands as I. Barthes wrote that Twombly’s works evoke a Mediterranean effect. The Mediterranean is also the greatest identity I hold on to. Living in different countries makes one reflect deeply on who they are. Even in being ourselves we are not free; there too, molds and rules exist. Yet the dark winters I endured without the sun were real, not learned traits. To swim in the Mediterranean, the Aegean, to feel salt in my hair, the sunsets, olives and figs—these are my identity, what fills my blank page from top to bottom. To grasp this, I had to survive sunless winters, freezing hands in the cold. The Mediterranean is an immense blend of memory and sensation; the Greek and Latin inscriptions we find in Twombly, the mythological, historical, and poetic culture, the entire form, color, and light born where land meets sea, Barthes says. Isn’t that marvelous? I recall Kalyopi, a friend I met by chance in Athens, who said: it is the light and sun of the Mediterranean that created this culture. An American painter using classical culture only to rebel against it, producing something utterly new within all the constraints of form (form always matters—think of Treplev in The Seagull, shouting, “We need new forms! New forms! And if we cannot have them, it would be better to have nothing at all!”). By adding childlike lines (though Barthes insists: never like children, for children struggle to produce such formless marks, whereas Twombly makes them with effortless irony), by sneering under his breath, he makes himself irresistible. From these tangled lines, Anne Carson writes one of the most sensitive essays I’ve ever read about aging, trembling hands, death. And with it she hurls me from one place to another.

I look at one of Twombly’s watercolors, Souvenir de l’Île des Saintes, hoping it will grant me the courage to write formless words that flow freely, words that can drift away in freedom.