Aritra Sanyal
The Photographic Pose in Murat’s Poetry
Explaining why he preferred an objective style, which often was labeled as ‘unemotional’, Mani Kaul, the acclaimed Indian New Wave filmmaker, postulated the adverse role played by sentiments in a text that could otherwise leave a great, productive impact on the minds of the audience. ‘Thoughts and feelings must not be used as something with which you feed the audience, but should be used as a tool to bring about a totality, a whole providing a slow but deep functional change in the minds of the audience to make them capable of creative thinking’. ‘Methods’, he adds further, ‘should be related to the concept and not used merely to relate the concept’.1 Even if what we sense here is Kaul’s prejudice against a text’s (film, or literature) tendency to provoke sentimental involvement on the part of the audience or readers, this opinion defines the purpose of ‘objectivity’. And such term is bound to recur invariably in any discussion of any text by Murat Nemet-Nejat. Moreover, the critical engagement of the statement focuses on a text’s serious responsibility to create a profound impact rather than a jerky atmosphere. We can say, this responsibility, forming the crux of a poet’s journey, plays a pivotal role in guiding the author’s choice of behavior vis-à-vis his/her handling of language.
Murat’s poetry book, The Spiritual Life of Replicants (2011) draws inspiration from the Ridley Scott directed movie ‘Blade Runner’ (which again is based on Philip. K. Dick’s novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’). His next book, Animals of Dawn (2016) adds a description of the text: one character in search of five acts, performance notes for Hamlet; while his following book Io’s Song (2019) is a declared ‘biographical essay’. In these texts, Murat’s approach is that of a critic. And he demands unorthodox attention to his poetry; because the choices he makes before and after writing are not something the ‘casual reader of verse’ (as T.S Eliot put it in Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry) is ready for. Animals of Dawn begins with a series of quotations in unnumbered pages; starting from the Turkish poet Ilhan Berk’s The Book of Things:
How does it feel to inhabit Chaos, to write in his inhabitation. This question never died out in me, the subject losing its
interdependence, trading places with things, even only for an instant.
I am starting such a long trip… approaching the subject from left from right, but never capturing it: only whirling around. At the nearest
approach to start from the beginning again.
as if lovers in each others’ arm, as if love made of pebbles.
Then on the next page, Murat goes on to quote from the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan’s poem “Wall Street”:
…
tonight I shall propose your turn to beat me
a finite stretch of time the windows of Wall Street dark for eons –
infinity marries in mourning
my civil service pocket watch is running up
my lapin gloves must be returned
tonight convert symmetry into seduction
in this soft side street – walled street – my body will be fasting
This quotation is immediately followed by another from T.S.Eliot’s seminal text, Hamlet and His Problems: ‘So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure’. The page closes with a disjointed separate quote: “The ghost is my shepherd…” The quotations on the page next to it are from Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (‘We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning’) and from a definition of Poems as Commentary. The series of quotations then concludes with a clipped passage from S.T Coleridge’s Hamlet. One must derive an idea of the range of studies Murat arms himself with for the text – some of them pertain to Hamlet, and rest, being tangentially related, are ‘made’ relevant. There is an interplay of forces, centripetal and centrifugal, both. This arrangement seemingly serves a definite purpose – to prepare the audience for a radical journey into the world of Hamlet, and also the world ‘about’ Hamlet. This very journey leads the readers to the center stage of the functional change in their relationship with a text.
Murat explores Hamlet as he decodes Eliot’s and Coleridge’s thoughts on it, and Heisenberg’s writing on physics. He lets Hamlet, the text, enjoy its growth in the history of studies on it and the creative thinking of a reader. Following the tradition of critics, he adds some more layers to it too, tainting, in the process, several unrelated texts – like Ayhan’s and Berk’s texts, with the color of Hamlet. But what he does with this rich network of texts is the most crucial thing. The quotations are used here like ‘doors’ – the poet enters ‘through’ them. The ‘doors’ are, as usual, left at an in-between position in the journey – neither fully outside, nor fully inside. I believe this is the role intertextuality plays in Murat’s works: allusions, references to other texts are never allowed to leave the poem cramped. Reading ‘Ophelia’s Wandering Eye’ (p 59), for instance, can elucidate the point.
I'm looking,
through the opening recently left
in the fog
by your brow
leaning on the glass,
at you
haunched over hurrying crossing the street
to enter the car
and as if as if protected by the arch of the pouring
rain.
The last line, italicized, marks an entry in the index section: “Ophelia’s Wandering Eye” is an adaptation from Gökçenur’s poem “The Opening That Your Forehead Left In the Fog.” Had the reader overlooked the italicized style in the last line, and the index number put there, the line, in its own right, would have never drawn our attention to the ‘source’ text mentioned in the index. The central image carried in the poem by Murat indeed borrows inspiration from Gökçenur’s poem – but that does not make “Ophelia’s Wandering Eye” less than an original text. Having said that, we must come to understand that this referencing is integral to the inner politics of Murat’s poems, this is the fundamental style of his texts. His trance is made of wakefulness – the poet in him is always aware of and acknowledges the vast field of work that has conditioned the readers so far. We can say, this is the ground for him to deal with the issue of authorship. The first page inside the main body of the text has a poem (without any title) that addresses the question quite directly:
I want to make Hamlet, to dis appear.
The lightning that didn’t strike made me disappear completely.
Is he talking about the spark of inspiration to create a text that is already in existence, to overwhelm the established one with newness? There are several answers to this question, not all of them are aligned. Breaking up the ‘disappear’ (dis appear) as he does in the first line provides a sharp contrast to the ‘normalcy’ of the idea to ‘disappear’ as written in the second line. The word-break as a consequence of the abrupt interjection of space between the letters offers an ‘optical code’ (which he mentions in Io’s Song, p 125) that makes the word ‘appear’ assume greater meaning than its commonly accepted sense.
All Murat’s collections are book-length poems where fragments, apparently disparate in looks, are organically integrated. His three works make abundantly clear how aggressively committed Murat is to subverting the comfort zones of the readers. The philosophy of challenging the stereotypes is hinted at in the concluding portion of The Peripheral Space of Photography (2003) where Murat admits that photographic images have inspired in him a desire to explore ‘…subversive possibilities which may be very useful in developing a poetry with a new relation to its reader and to the culture surrounding it, a poetry which reinvigorates words in a new way by relating them in and to space.’ (p 98)
This is significant in many ways because it is most probably the resultant force of the very ambition that encouraged Murat to play with an ‘assumed ‘I’’ each time in each book. In his second book and in his third it is the viewer of a play performance or reader of a text and a man who can recount the events of life discarding the flow of narrative affected by first-hand nostalgia. These attempts exhibit an aspect of the style Murat prefers; the style that exploits an objective distance from the subject – but surprisingly, his writing occasionally shines with tears and smiles, thus enlivening the readers’ journey through the books. While it is obvious that these works are no less than well-organized attacks on the well-established ideas of books and genres, what appears more interesting and, of course, dangerous, is that these works reveal Murat’s skepticism about the traditional concept of authorship, and he never ceases putting it under tension.
Going back to The Peripheral Space of Photography, one cannot help noticing Murat’s disapproval of photographs that foreground the photographer’s intention.
Unless in a book, no photograph is given the “empty” space around itself to breath. The exhibition, by aggressively framing each photograph by a white card-board, focuses compulsively on the photographer’s focus. The implicit aesthetic in the exhibition is that what makes photography an “art” is the photographer’s choice of “frame”.’ (p 39)
The brash refusal to accept a photographer’s mediation between the viewer of a photograph and the subject being photographed may initially sound baffling; but one must take in consideration Murat’s resolution to establish the autonomy of photography in an area not thematically related to paintings.
The irreducible distinction between contemporaneous painting and photography must be understood. In painting the dialogue is essentially between the painter (the artist as the manipulator of the medium) and the viewer. The subject is irrelevant, immaterial. In photography, the subject takes over the position of the “artist” in the dialogue. It resists to be an object. In photography the photographer is pushed towards erasure, transparence because forced to share his/ her position with the subject.’ (p 14- 15)
Murat is engaging this incisive analysis with photography in its purest form – while the recent trend all over the social media in the name of ‘conceptual photography’ involves editing, filters that enable the imposition of artificial, unrealistic colors in an attempt to articulate the reimagined, dolled up scenario. The effort to do so leads one right away to transgressing the basic principle of photography; as it unwittingly inches closer to the idea of painting. Murat’s strong support lies with a faithful representation of reality in photography.
Thereness is also integral to photography’s democracy, what enables it to become a dialogue between subject and observer and pushes the photographer to the background. Would the gesture, pose, the choice to look at the camera or not have any significance without the assumption that these images in the photographs at one time “existed”, that at a crucial moment “chose” to act in a certain way, that the specific action was independent from the photographer? “Thereness,” the belief that photography is “reproducing” the image that was already “there,” is the underlying faith, dogma of photography, specifically American 19th Century photography’. (p 79- 80)
Having agreed on all the propositions made here, one must admit that the very existence of a photograph is inextricably dependant on a photographer’s choice to capture a moment. While Murat accepts the fact that in the 20th Century advanced technology facilitated the ‘hostile and endless genera-tion of virtual images posturing as truths’, what he never directly acknowledges is the fact that the photographer’s choice gives birth to photography or otherwise, so many lost moments.
As far as photography is concerned, as Murat says, there is a dialogue between the onlooker and the subject of the photograph; and the photographer, with an objective position, is pushed to the background. We can see that his primary focus is on the engagement of onlookers’ responses. The functional change Murat unobtrusively brings to the readers’ minds comes from his unequivocal ambition to regulate the readers’ responses. As previously discussed, allusions to different texts in a poem are nothing but an act of paying attention to the existing reaction to the idea he is working on. It is also true that he destabilizes the preempted balance to introduce a new one.
Murat’s reiterative insistence -‘The most powerful space in a photograph resides in its peripheral space and the blank space, the glow, extending around, beyond the frame.’(p 37) emphasizes a photograph’s identity as a ‘medium’, and not an ‘art object’, a piece of paper of reflection (in both senses of the term). The kernel of the problem surrounding Murat’s complicated relationship with the concept of authorship can be traced here. Is he searching for a language that will push a poet to the background while leaving his text as a medium for the readers to communicate with the content freely? He has no choice left then, but inventing newer methods to question every inch of established literature, to make the process of writing (even in relation to books he has already finished writing and published) unending by making the readers a more active part of the production of poems. All his abstractions will always be pieced together into an invisible poem that has several final drafts. Interestingly, the scientific interpretation of the process of photography he gives in the book almost reverberates the mimesis theory – it is a reflection, ‘always imperfect, slanted because it involves a change of medium’(p 38), through the failure of light. But where does he assume the commanding position of a poet?
Back in 2017, in a conversation for The Dreaming Machine, Murat, talking about his poems pitched against his voluminous translational works describes the locus standi of his ‘I’ in his texts.
…My own poetry has very little ‘lyric I’, therefore, identity in that sense. The lyric ‘I’ constantly splits into different perspectives, identities. My focus is on ideas, specific words or multiple voices. I write long poems. My identity derives from the way I connect the different parts, the music of the movement from one part to the other.2
The complex idea about identity – the ‘individual voice’ of an active poet has to be a dynamic thing – like a living organism – prone to growth and development. All his poems being reflexive– are poems (with a spirit of analytical non-fictional work) about poems. In The Peripheral Space of Photography, Murat sees a subject’s ‘pose’ as nothing but its effort to come to terms with the lens. ‘…[L]ooking at the lens is the original, integral act of photography’ (p 15). If we imagine Murat’s texts captured in a frame, we will only discover that the ‘pose’ of the subject, ‘the text’ involves the text’s full awareness of its surrounding, it is akin to a live wire that lets the current from other texts flow through itself . In a way, he makes the text ‘camera conscious’ without relegating it a stiff, starchy expression. This is where Murat exercises the power of authorship.
This sharp style is the simple answer to the tension between his subjectivity and his objective outlook; their frames – in other words, the limitations of the terms – are demolished. All his poems, in a way, give ‘speech to a previously silent multitude’ of the themes: the ‘spiritual life’ of the replicants; the ‘performance notes’ for Hamlet, a biographical essay written in the form of poetry. These challenge the basic premises of all the genres mentioned. The function of the numerous quotations, references in Murat’s poems is to cause a more directly interactive relationship with the readers – they are alerted constantly, barely ever allowed to remain overwhelmed.
2.
But much of what we characterize as Murat's writing today did not come into being until 2011, when his second book, The Spiritual Life of Replicants arrived (he wrote poems, but did not publish any book). Starting from that point, in 2016 and 2019 Murat moved further away from the style he used in The Bridge (1977), which was a direct recounting of memory in a personal way that exposes the emotional vulnerability of the poet like no other text of his. This simplicity was to mature into a complex, well-crafted language in his later works. So, it will not be wrong to conclude that for 34 years the identity of Murat’s language remained far from what it is today. In the gap between his first and second books, he kept himself overwhelmingly occupied with translation and critical works. Translation of Orhan Veli, I, Orhan Veli came out in 1989; Ece Ayhan’s A Blind Cat and Orthodoxies, also a translation, was published in 1997; The Peripheral Space of Photography came out in 2003; Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry and Seylan Erözçelik’s Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds – both of them translations – made their respective appearances in 2004 and 2010. What is interesting is that there are obvious instances that accentuate Murat’s desire to assimilate his experiences as a translator and a contemplative critic into his poetry. His translated pieces make startling entries in his poems, and his poetics, especially of his later works, carry his idea of photography (he confesses in The Peripheral Space of Photography, ‘It is an essay about language by a poet’, p 98). These nuances are not highlighted in The Bridge, but they exist in the form of possibilities. The five-part book-length poem starts with lyrical reminiscence:
My mind desires a stony residence
A span to tangle with
As I walk down the street to buy the bridge
That a stranger had offered me – one murky night –
Nodded from his head – he promised. –
Fished out a wild secret from his pocket.
Dostoevski knew no more of the gray color of
cobblestones
Than I know of the gray sinew of the river,
Charmed by its snaky yearning, I cherish its residence in
my soul,
Nourished by its schemes.
I walk musing,
A stranger had offered me – one murky night –
The Brooklyn Bridge,
Whose arches spin inward as a mad calendar
Of time.
A stranger stumbled on nothing, on the flat street;
Then the earth swallowed him;
Now the sidewalks, pregnant with loneliness, pout
As a repugnant friend,
Concern themselves with nothing, but themselves;
I had thought them more lasting in their crowded moments.
The journey of a young man into the new world begins thus. He feels his growth in terms of his changing perspective of the bridge, of which he once wanted to take possession from a stranger on a murky night. The five-part book presents snippets from his memory, and there are portions that foreshadow the language he was later to develop. In the last section of the book, Murat describes the intricate designs of a boat, and subtly compares it with a poem that is never finished.
“You are not supposed to be here!"
but I am
my eyes traveled inside
hidden
behind diagonal
stairs,
he looked
up his work, his eyes
surrounded by grease.
Shook his finger
bumped the door
the greasy engine man
the iron door, painted gray, slightly open,
i saw him
Then we receive a piece of curious information from the poet, curious because it provokes us to see through the surface: ‘details: the engine department is not a place one is permitted to go in. Sometimes they leave the gate open for fresh air. One is not supposed to look in, even.’ (p 62) Murat himself is the trespasser here, he takes us to the prohibited areas – like the site where poems are born. Nobody is supposed to peep into the intricate part of the machinery – but we see it through him. The plain enjoyment of the ride, as a consequence, is contaminated with the knowledge, the awareness of the entire boat – what and who keeps it afloat.
His insistence on prioritizing the onlookers’ dialogue with the subject of photography, rather than the photographer leaves a space for us to ask about his standpoint in the matrix – who is he talking as, a photographer or an onlooker? There is no clear answer to this, probably because Murat has moved a few steps back to stand outside the triangle. For a similar reason, one can not easily locate his commanding position in his texts – he conveys the idea of fluidity by making the author ‘dis appear’. Murat takes the authorship of the ‘peripheral’ space of a text.
Notes
Explaining why he preferred an objective style, which often was labeled as ‘unemotional’, Mani Kaul, the acclaimed Indian New Wave filmmaker, postulated the adverse role played by sentiments in a text that could otherwise leave a great, productive impact on the minds of the audience. ‘Thoughts and feelings must not be used as something with which you feed the audience, but should be used as a tool to bring about a totality, a whole providing a slow but deep functional change in the minds of the audience to make them capable of creative thinking’. ‘Methods’, he adds further, ‘should be related to the concept and not used merely to relate the concept’.1 Even if what we sense here is Kaul’s prejudice against a text’s (film, or literature) tendency to provoke sentimental involvement on the part of the audience or readers, this opinion defines the purpose of ‘objectivity’. And such term is bound to recur invariably in any discussion of any text by Murat Nemet-Nejat. Moreover, the critical engagement of the statement focuses on a text’s serious responsibility to create a profound impact rather than a jerky atmosphere. We can say, this responsibility, forming the crux of a poet’s journey, plays a pivotal role in guiding the author’s choice of behavior vis-à-vis his/her handling of language.
Murat’s poetry book, The Spiritual Life of Replicants (2011) draws inspiration from the Ridley Scott directed movie ‘Blade Runner’ (which again is based on Philip. K. Dick’s novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’). His next book, Animals of Dawn (2016) adds a description of the text: one character in search of five acts, performance notes for Hamlet; while his following book Io’s Song (2019) is a declared ‘biographical essay’. In these texts, Murat’s approach is that of a critic. And he demands unorthodox attention to his poetry; because the choices he makes before and after writing are not something the ‘casual reader of verse’ (as T.S Eliot put it in Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry) is ready for. Animals of Dawn begins with a series of quotations in unnumbered pages; starting from the Turkish poet Ilhan Berk’s The Book of Things:
How does it feel to inhabit Chaos, to write in his inhabitation. This question never died out in me, the subject losing its
interdependence, trading places with things, even only for an instant.
I am starting such a long trip… approaching the subject from left from right, but never capturing it: only whirling around. At the nearest
approach to start from the beginning again.
as if lovers in each others’ arm, as if love made of pebbles.
Then on the next page, Murat goes on to quote from the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan’s poem “Wall Street”:
…
tonight I shall propose your turn to beat me
a finite stretch of time the windows of Wall Street dark for eons –
infinity marries in mourning
my civil service pocket watch is running up
my lapin gloves must be returned
tonight convert symmetry into seduction
in this soft side street – walled street – my body will be fasting
This quotation is immediately followed by another from T.S.Eliot’s seminal text, Hamlet and His Problems: ‘So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure’. The page closes with a disjointed separate quote: “The ghost is my shepherd…” The quotations on the page next to it are from Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (‘We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning’) and from a definition of Poems as Commentary. The series of quotations then concludes with a clipped passage from S.T Coleridge’s Hamlet. One must derive an idea of the range of studies Murat arms himself with for the text – some of them pertain to Hamlet, and rest, being tangentially related, are ‘made’ relevant. There is an interplay of forces, centripetal and centrifugal, both. This arrangement seemingly serves a definite purpose – to prepare the audience for a radical journey into the world of Hamlet, and also the world ‘about’ Hamlet. This very journey leads the readers to the center stage of the functional change in their relationship with a text.
Murat explores Hamlet as he decodes Eliot’s and Coleridge’s thoughts on it, and Heisenberg’s writing on physics. He lets Hamlet, the text, enjoy its growth in the history of studies on it and the creative thinking of a reader. Following the tradition of critics, he adds some more layers to it too, tainting, in the process, several unrelated texts – like Ayhan’s and Berk’s texts, with the color of Hamlet. But what he does with this rich network of texts is the most crucial thing. The quotations are used here like ‘doors’ – the poet enters ‘through’ them. The ‘doors’ are, as usual, left at an in-between position in the journey – neither fully outside, nor fully inside. I believe this is the role intertextuality plays in Murat’s works: allusions, references to other texts are never allowed to leave the poem cramped. Reading ‘Ophelia’s Wandering Eye’ (p 59), for instance, can elucidate the point.
I'm looking,
through the opening recently left
in the fog
by your brow
leaning on the glass,
at you
haunched over hurrying crossing the street
to enter the car
and as if as if protected by the arch of the pouring
rain.
The last line, italicized, marks an entry in the index section: “Ophelia’s Wandering Eye” is an adaptation from Gökçenur’s poem “The Opening That Your Forehead Left In the Fog.” Had the reader overlooked the italicized style in the last line, and the index number put there, the line, in its own right, would have never drawn our attention to the ‘source’ text mentioned in the index. The central image carried in the poem by Murat indeed borrows inspiration from Gökçenur’s poem – but that does not make “Ophelia’s Wandering Eye” less than an original text. Having said that, we must come to understand that this referencing is integral to the inner politics of Murat’s poems, this is the fundamental style of his texts. His trance is made of wakefulness – the poet in him is always aware of and acknowledges the vast field of work that has conditioned the readers so far. We can say, this is the ground for him to deal with the issue of authorship. The first page inside the main body of the text has a poem (without any title) that addresses the question quite directly:
I want to make Hamlet, to dis appear.
The lightning that didn’t strike made me disappear completely.
Is he talking about the spark of inspiration to create a text that is already in existence, to overwhelm the established one with newness? There are several answers to this question, not all of them are aligned. Breaking up the ‘disappear’ (dis appear) as he does in the first line provides a sharp contrast to the ‘normalcy’ of the idea to ‘disappear’ as written in the second line. The word-break as a consequence of the abrupt interjection of space between the letters offers an ‘optical code’ (which he mentions in Io’s Song, p 125) that makes the word ‘appear’ assume greater meaning than its commonly accepted sense.
All Murat’s collections are book-length poems where fragments, apparently disparate in looks, are organically integrated. His three works make abundantly clear how aggressively committed Murat is to subverting the comfort zones of the readers. The philosophy of challenging the stereotypes is hinted at in the concluding portion of The Peripheral Space of Photography (2003) where Murat admits that photographic images have inspired in him a desire to explore ‘…subversive possibilities which may be very useful in developing a poetry with a new relation to its reader and to the culture surrounding it, a poetry which reinvigorates words in a new way by relating them in and to space.’ (p 98)
This is significant in many ways because it is most probably the resultant force of the very ambition that encouraged Murat to play with an ‘assumed ‘I’’ each time in each book. In his second book and in his third it is the viewer of a play performance or reader of a text and a man who can recount the events of life discarding the flow of narrative affected by first-hand nostalgia. These attempts exhibit an aspect of the style Murat prefers; the style that exploits an objective distance from the subject – but surprisingly, his writing occasionally shines with tears and smiles, thus enlivening the readers’ journey through the books. While it is obvious that these works are no less than well-organized attacks on the well-established ideas of books and genres, what appears more interesting and, of course, dangerous, is that these works reveal Murat’s skepticism about the traditional concept of authorship, and he never ceases putting it under tension.
Going back to The Peripheral Space of Photography, one cannot help noticing Murat’s disapproval of photographs that foreground the photographer’s intention.
Unless in a book, no photograph is given the “empty” space around itself to breath. The exhibition, by aggressively framing each photograph by a white card-board, focuses compulsively on the photographer’s focus. The implicit aesthetic in the exhibition is that what makes photography an “art” is the photographer’s choice of “frame”.’ (p 39)
The brash refusal to accept a photographer’s mediation between the viewer of a photograph and the subject being photographed may initially sound baffling; but one must take in consideration Murat’s resolution to establish the autonomy of photography in an area not thematically related to paintings.
The irreducible distinction between contemporaneous painting and photography must be understood. In painting the dialogue is essentially between the painter (the artist as the manipulator of the medium) and the viewer. The subject is irrelevant, immaterial. In photography, the subject takes over the position of the “artist” in the dialogue. It resists to be an object. In photography the photographer is pushed towards erasure, transparence because forced to share his/ her position with the subject.’ (p 14- 15)
Murat is engaging this incisive analysis with photography in its purest form – while the recent trend all over the social media in the name of ‘conceptual photography’ involves editing, filters that enable the imposition of artificial, unrealistic colors in an attempt to articulate the reimagined, dolled up scenario. The effort to do so leads one right away to transgressing the basic principle of photography; as it unwittingly inches closer to the idea of painting. Murat’s strong support lies with a faithful representation of reality in photography.
Thereness is also integral to photography’s democracy, what enables it to become a dialogue between subject and observer and pushes the photographer to the background. Would the gesture, pose, the choice to look at the camera or not have any significance without the assumption that these images in the photographs at one time “existed”, that at a crucial moment “chose” to act in a certain way, that the specific action was independent from the photographer? “Thereness,” the belief that photography is “reproducing” the image that was already “there,” is the underlying faith, dogma of photography, specifically American 19th Century photography’. (p 79- 80)
Having agreed on all the propositions made here, one must admit that the very existence of a photograph is inextricably dependant on a photographer’s choice to capture a moment. While Murat accepts the fact that in the 20th Century advanced technology facilitated the ‘hostile and endless genera-tion of virtual images posturing as truths’, what he never directly acknowledges is the fact that the photographer’s choice gives birth to photography or otherwise, so many lost moments.
As far as photography is concerned, as Murat says, there is a dialogue between the onlooker and the subject of the photograph; and the photographer, with an objective position, is pushed to the background. We can see that his primary focus is on the engagement of onlookers’ responses. The functional change Murat unobtrusively brings to the readers’ minds comes from his unequivocal ambition to regulate the readers’ responses. As previously discussed, allusions to different texts in a poem are nothing but an act of paying attention to the existing reaction to the idea he is working on. It is also true that he destabilizes the preempted balance to introduce a new one.
Murat’s reiterative insistence -‘The most powerful space in a photograph resides in its peripheral space and the blank space, the glow, extending around, beyond the frame.’(p 37) emphasizes a photograph’s identity as a ‘medium’, and not an ‘art object’, a piece of paper of reflection (in both senses of the term). The kernel of the problem surrounding Murat’s complicated relationship with the concept of authorship can be traced here. Is he searching for a language that will push a poet to the background while leaving his text as a medium for the readers to communicate with the content freely? He has no choice left then, but inventing newer methods to question every inch of established literature, to make the process of writing (even in relation to books he has already finished writing and published) unending by making the readers a more active part of the production of poems. All his abstractions will always be pieced together into an invisible poem that has several final drafts. Interestingly, the scientific interpretation of the process of photography he gives in the book almost reverberates the mimesis theory – it is a reflection, ‘always imperfect, slanted because it involves a change of medium’(p 38), through the failure of light. But where does he assume the commanding position of a poet?
Back in 2017, in a conversation for The Dreaming Machine, Murat, talking about his poems pitched against his voluminous translational works describes the locus standi of his ‘I’ in his texts.
…My own poetry has very little ‘lyric I’, therefore, identity in that sense. The lyric ‘I’ constantly splits into different perspectives, identities. My focus is on ideas, specific words or multiple voices. I write long poems. My identity derives from the way I connect the different parts, the music of the movement from one part to the other.2
The complex idea about identity – the ‘individual voice’ of an active poet has to be a dynamic thing – like a living organism – prone to growth and development. All his poems being reflexive– are poems (with a spirit of analytical non-fictional work) about poems. In The Peripheral Space of Photography, Murat sees a subject’s ‘pose’ as nothing but its effort to come to terms with the lens. ‘…[L]ooking at the lens is the original, integral act of photography’ (p 15). If we imagine Murat’s texts captured in a frame, we will only discover that the ‘pose’ of the subject, ‘the text’ involves the text’s full awareness of its surrounding, it is akin to a live wire that lets the current from other texts flow through itself . In a way, he makes the text ‘camera conscious’ without relegating it a stiff, starchy expression. This is where Murat exercises the power of authorship.
This sharp style is the simple answer to the tension between his subjectivity and his objective outlook; their frames – in other words, the limitations of the terms – are demolished. All his poems, in a way, give ‘speech to a previously silent multitude’ of the themes: the ‘spiritual life’ of the replicants; the ‘performance notes’ for Hamlet, a biographical essay written in the form of poetry. These challenge the basic premises of all the genres mentioned. The function of the numerous quotations, references in Murat’s poems is to cause a more directly interactive relationship with the readers – they are alerted constantly, barely ever allowed to remain overwhelmed.
2.
But much of what we characterize as Murat's writing today did not come into being until 2011, when his second book, The Spiritual Life of Replicants arrived (he wrote poems, but did not publish any book). Starting from that point, in 2016 and 2019 Murat moved further away from the style he used in The Bridge (1977), which was a direct recounting of memory in a personal way that exposes the emotional vulnerability of the poet like no other text of his. This simplicity was to mature into a complex, well-crafted language in his later works. So, it will not be wrong to conclude that for 34 years the identity of Murat’s language remained far from what it is today. In the gap between his first and second books, he kept himself overwhelmingly occupied with translation and critical works. Translation of Orhan Veli, I, Orhan Veli came out in 1989; Ece Ayhan’s A Blind Cat and Orthodoxies, also a translation, was published in 1997; The Peripheral Space of Photography came out in 2003; Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry and Seylan Erözçelik’s Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds – both of them translations – made their respective appearances in 2004 and 2010. What is interesting is that there are obvious instances that accentuate Murat’s desire to assimilate his experiences as a translator and a contemplative critic into his poetry. His translated pieces make startling entries in his poems, and his poetics, especially of his later works, carry his idea of photography (he confesses in The Peripheral Space of Photography, ‘It is an essay about language by a poet’, p 98). These nuances are not highlighted in The Bridge, but they exist in the form of possibilities. The five-part book-length poem starts with lyrical reminiscence:
My mind desires a stony residence
A span to tangle with
As I walk down the street to buy the bridge
That a stranger had offered me – one murky night –
Nodded from his head – he promised. –
Fished out a wild secret from his pocket.
Dostoevski knew no more of the gray color of
cobblestones
Than I know of the gray sinew of the river,
Charmed by its snaky yearning, I cherish its residence in
my soul,
Nourished by its schemes.
I walk musing,
A stranger had offered me – one murky night –
The Brooklyn Bridge,
Whose arches spin inward as a mad calendar
Of time.
A stranger stumbled on nothing, on the flat street;
Then the earth swallowed him;
Now the sidewalks, pregnant with loneliness, pout
As a repugnant friend,
Concern themselves with nothing, but themselves;
I had thought them more lasting in their crowded moments.
The journey of a young man into the new world begins thus. He feels his growth in terms of his changing perspective of the bridge, of which he once wanted to take possession from a stranger on a murky night. The five-part book presents snippets from his memory, and there are portions that foreshadow the language he was later to develop. In the last section of the book, Murat describes the intricate designs of a boat, and subtly compares it with a poem that is never finished.
“You are not supposed to be here!"
but I am
my eyes traveled inside
hidden
behind diagonal
stairs,
he looked
up his work, his eyes
surrounded by grease.
Shook his finger
bumped the door
the greasy engine man
the iron door, painted gray, slightly open,
i saw him
Then we receive a piece of curious information from the poet, curious because it provokes us to see through the surface: ‘details: the engine department is not a place one is permitted to go in. Sometimes they leave the gate open for fresh air. One is not supposed to look in, even.’ (p 62) Murat himself is the trespasser here, he takes us to the prohibited areas – like the site where poems are born. Nobody is supposed to peep into the intricate part of the machinery – but we see it through him. The plain enjoyment of the ride, as a consequence, is contaminated with the knowledge, the awareness of the entire boat – what and who keeps it afloat.
His insistence on prioritizing the onlookers’ dialogue with the subject of photography, rather than the photographer leaves a space for us to ask about his standpoint in the matrix – who is he talking as, a photographer or an onlooker? There is no clear answer to this, probably because Murat has moved a few steps back to stand outside the triangle. For a similar reason, one can not easily locate his commanding position in his texts – he conveys the idea of fluidity by making the author ‘dis appear’. Murat takes the authorship of the ‘peripheral’ space of a text.
Notes
- Why Mani Kaul’s Films Are Different, by Krishna Chaudhuri. Meet the Makers… (15). Film World, September, 1972.
- Writing in the Crack between Two Languages: Aritra Sanyal Interviews Murat Nemet-Nejat. The Dreaming Machine. May, 2019. http://www.thedreamingmachine.com/writing-in-the-crack-between-two-languages-aritra-sanyal-interviews-murat-nemet-nejat/