Visualisation of the word in Coşkuyla Ölmek (Dying with Joy)

In Şule Gürbüz’s works, life corresponds to an adventure, a hole of misery, self-awareness, home of restiveness, dissatisfaction of worldly existence as a result of internal self-view, a lifetime, which is impossible to comprehend through glancing self-reflection and in preparation of death. The characters play on like puppets within a time frame suspended in life. In this sense, life to them turns into a stage, a shadow play stage. Therefore, questions, most especially self-posed questions of the characters through self-view become significant. State, like many other words in her works, is used with a double entendre. State is used for both present time and existing situation together; that is, being and time go hand in hand. 

Entirety plays an important role in Gürbüz’s works. In fact, human states in the world and the constant existence of a setting, which can be considered almost as a kind of “human comedy” make entirety possible. Characters question their existence in this world, and in this questioning, youth and upbringing, being unable to be raised, maturing emerge as important phases.

The problem from which Gürbüz’s third book, Coşkuyla Ölmek (Dying with Joy) takes its departure is entirety, a key feature of her narrative writing.

As in the other works of Gürbüz, this book, composed of four parts, has a composition that has both an individual integrity in itself and the entire book. Human state/s, deeds and self-contemplation in the world, and that this contemplation results in naivety are the common grounds in the four stories of the book.

The four stories, Ruhuna Fatiha (God Bless His Soul), “Akılsız Adam” (Mindless Man), “Akılsız Adamın Oğlu Sadullah Efendi” (Mindless Man’s Son, Master Sadullah) and “Rüya İmiş” (Apparently It Was a Dream), respectively tell the stories of a man in his 50s going out, having a meal and giving his leftovers to the workers in the house; the thoughts of a man on his son, who cannot live the life his father wants him to live; the life that the son in the second story lives with his father and his experiences after this life through the son’s eyes; and Hikmet, who lives in the same neighbourhood with his friend, Eyüp, and Hikmet’s marriage to Cemile and their routine life.

The common ground in four parts of the book is a routine, in fact mediocre life rather than a life filled with bewilderment, excitement and exuberance, and the distress that prevails over this life. The basic question of the story that strikes the reader as an element going along with this distress is that the characters watch this routine from a distance, see a kind of scenery, called living at a distance. Therefore, a scenery-like state, which is fed off the distance between what occurs and what is expected to occur, and emerge through these actions of looking, watching and viewing – the essential elements making up Gürbüz’s style in her works – should be referred to.

Concretisation/Meal, Kitchen and Middle-Class Lifestyle

The first step here is the concretisation of notions. The main element of concretisation in the first story of Coşkuyla Ölmek, Ruhuna Fatiha is the protagonist, who eat out and thoroughly experience the moments of eating, and in Rüya Imiş, it is the meal for the character who drowned in the boredom of the middle class lifestyle:

“I woke up as if I was a sheep with slaughtered at night and born as a lamb in the morning. I woke up as a mere lamb; to the one who slaughtered me, to the reason why I slaughtered, to the knife shined before my eyes in my final moment, to the sky I looked at and could not know if I was alone or not when I was brought down on my side. I just woke up as a mere lamb that did not try to cover me up, leaning on me, whip the butcher. I felt like sticking some grass in my mouth and lolling it out loosely. I wished that I had a mother sheep with sad looks, not troubled with the lice that swarmed the layers of her wool, and that we hadn’t known which one of us was more naïve. I arose from my bed just as a lamb would do. I barely kept myself from baaing. This state of mine was all gone when I had coffee and browsed through the newspapers a little. It was as if I sent this state of mine off. A husky lamb was drifting away from the one thinking it is stupid and boring. I didn’t fully consent to this, nor hindered it from leaving. I gave a little glance at it leaving. As I turned my head, I got to see the newcomer: a goat who belittled the sheep” (p. 19-20).

The manner of becoming a lamb for the person having a meal will continue throughout the first part of the book, “Ruhuna Fatiha”. The concretisation continues with the lamb’s state before it is slaughtered: “Not from the outside, I know, yet still, inside, I struggled severely. I had no choice but to wait for it to fade naturally just as a bad odour did; and my nose would obviously adapt to this smell a bit, too.” (p. 31)

The concretisation through having a meal is related to taste in the second part of the book, Akılsız Adam: “In the first day in Üsküdar, as Master Sadullah was walking his slightly wet and loose fingers on my hand, and the plastic bag carrying a section of Koran and hanging around his neck and his mindless head were moving side to side, I looked at the sea and shores across the sea, and it was as if a sea was parted inside me and spewed out every grain of its salt on to me. I had a sneaky taste of this salt by gently lingering my tongue on my lips.” (p. 45)

In the third part, “Akılsız Adamın Oğlu Sadullah Efendi”, concretisation is related to cooking, preparing something by reducing and preserving: “He would appreciate some moments, a word and look, and sudden offering, but as he knew these had neither beginning nor the end, he would feel as if he captured a magical moment, cut it off and kept it.” (p. 108). He turns to himself after the tasting: “For the first time, I leaned myself over myself and touched myself with my tongue.” (p. 120)

Thus, in the concretisation in the second story, Akılsız Adam, a tone of slowly entering the kitchen is sensed: “I sometimes rolled myself with a rolling pin into thin flat rounds, offered myself to Master Sadullah and waited for him to play with me like dough.” (p. 54) Towards the end of the third story, Akılsız Adamın Oğlu Sadullah Efendi, the world turns into a kitchen. Concretisation in this story takes places through this kitchen. “Master Sadullah, time has stuck onto us, it remained where it poured to, how sticky, how overwhelming and brown, what a smell of pulp, look at the folk shutting themselves in their houses so early…” (p. 113). In the last story, Rüya İmiş, what his friend, Hikmet said reminds him of ice cream:

“Eyüp sometimes goes to see the girls recommended to him, and explained to them on what grounds he saw them jovially. This appetite that I resented at the time, later looked reasonable and, indeed, only a bowl of ice cream to me.” (p. 162). As for his family, they are making soup: “Eyüp, apparently, was more untroubled than me. His folks did not thicken words by lowering or raising the heat at intervals; what the looked at was concrete, comprehensible and visible things.” (p. 167)

For the concretisation in parallel with tedium of middle-class lifestyle prevailing in the whole book, the world of plants, which helps avoiding this tedium, is pun in place. Hence, this turns into an element that will be used abundantly in the author’s latest story, Öyle miymiş.

“I never knew who I was to be such a big thing, if everything was so small that even I looked big, in what kind of a person I grew so big while my eyes couldn’t find anything smaller than me. I realised that it wasn’t me, but just the tip of a dream; whatever it was, I was something in mind. Otherwise, what was I to grow in someone, and take up space and augment? (p. 101)

The concretisation here includes the growing of a plant, and it corresponds to a blooming flower later on in the book: “Partial uproars were breaking up inside me, but they were dwindling away before causing anything and building up.” (p. 135) On the other hand, tedium, monotony and recurrences in middle class lifestyle form another aspect of concretisation in the book:

“Sometimes, I had the flash of an image of dust and dirt at the times I swept away an emotion I was certain about out of the door; and the impermanence I felt about waiting for the moment, when some of that dust and dirt would fly around and enter the house floating in the air, and the inside would become outside, caused pressure on my chest.” (p. 50)

Outings are like recurring visits:

“Mistake has not got crushed under our feet while we went about, on the contrary, it survived these outings.” (p. 117) The preparation of making a fire in the house, “My slender intuition was mincing me, and the thick one was beating Master Sadullah up.” (p. 79), and arranging the objects in the house, “I stocked up and wrote down the total of my resentment and deep hard feelings towards everybody in the world in Master Sadullah just like a best verse. I hung it inside me; anyone wishing can see it. But those who see it wouldn’t want it.” (p. 60)

Concretisation: Self and Distance to Self

Another aspect of concretisation in Coşkuyla Ölmek emerges in the self-directed gaze of narrator-protagonist. Here, from the first to the last part of the book, self-contemplation and distance, which are considered necessary for this contemplation, emerge in various forms. At the beginning of this work, there is an absence of distance to self: “Inside me, the distance for me to talk to myself, to the situation, to a pita maker, to others I can tell about the situation, I can tell about ‘me and what happened to me’ had not widened yet. We clung to each other very tightly; we were walking with that state.” (p. 33) Later on, the distance from the self gradually lessens in this concretisation: “My self was preparing to go by my self. I needed to find my self first. It is impossible to find it. I’ve searched for it a lifetime; where it is, who it is, am I going to find it now?” (p. 34) However, that distance is not caught up:

“Although I sometimes lost my nerve in the household and roared, saying ‘I am not one of you!’, and retreat with a few books I took from the bookcase, I would just sit there along with sidelong looks when my book, wherever Old Goriot came from, fell out of my hand. My whole snootiness was the distance between retreating to French country 5-6 minutes away from here and my return to my room like a bird with a return ticket in my hand. They’d look at me as if to say ‘So, you’ve gone and what have you seen there?’, and fortunately they couldn’t receive an answer.” (p. 149)

The self positions against its self: “I lived my own life by stepping back, stood aside and came to the fore a bit, as I said, I was twenty four.” (p. 158). He sometimes looks at his self as if he is not himself: “I regarded my fifty something years of life as the ultimate award of my lifetime. As a matter of fact, I felt sorry for the lack of my realisation after so many years. I said, slightly turning round, ‘this venerable person is without a doubt more progressive than me, so let me utilise this person by affiliating him.’ (p. 25)

In the distance established with the self, dreams, what was learnt and pain are the elements that cause an increase in distance. What is dreamed runs away: “I had a small drum made for Master Sadullah. It didn’t turn out as I imagined, but wasn’t it a dream of herd of wild horses that ran away? Yes, it was. They ran away and left this small drum to me.” (p. 47). Those, who lost consciousness, wish to be involved in them. In other words, what is learnt is no different than a balloon: “What is learnt does not remain with you anymore; it goes to the new and unknown. Seemingly, life is at ease there.” (p. 94). As for pain, it moves about but cannot find an owner, and looked for a heart that will endure it.” (p. 118)

Images/Sceneries

One other main element constituting the author’s style in Coşkuyla Ölmek is seeing/visualisation in parallel to concretisation. Here, unlike concretisation, becoming the scenery-like state, mentioned in the beginning of this article, comes into prominence. The reason why I used becoming scenery-like state instead of becoming scenery is that the author presents visualisation as an object to watch, almost leaving the image in a frame pretending to hang it on a wall etc. to watch. From the second part of the book onward, this intensifies, because the protagonist in the first part has “become” a person in his fifties. Master Sadullah in the second part is like that by soul rather than by age; however, he needs scenery since he contemplates on youth at times:

“Ah, life is lived like this; life is lived unawaringly. I mean glancing over with living the life, and when one comes to his senses and begins to receive the news of his life, he takes a look at his own life to see what life has been for them, but still can’t utter a word about it.  You know when one looks at his childhood and teenage photos, he’d be as if he looks at someone else, find his face, his expression would be different than he thinks. When you stretch this photo and draw it as a veil over the entire life, that is the veil.” (p. 41)

Time is frozen as it is in a space and almost trapped. For this reason, just as the characters live within a suspended life, images emerge in a frozen state in a frame ensuring being suspended:

“Master Sadullah and I came in, got in the corner, looked outside from inside, looked at our states inside from inside, at the sky and grey colour, at the thundering rain for this reason, at the durable branches of the tree, at those who keeps being driven about, at muddy puddles on the ground. I was wondering what Master Sadullah heard from this scenery. I was wondering what hearing was like, how I heard what, and how I believed and was sure of the trueness of what I heard.” (p 52)

A person, who is remembered by the protagonist from the past, also has his share of in this state of frozenness: “The deceased Master Rıza, in my childhood, was my father’s mate. He was the member of the Kadiriye sect, and a decent, orderly, slightly prickly person and a misanthrope. Originally a calligrapher, he worked as a civil servant as entailed by those times. He would look at the world and that era with a look that almost said, ‘Yes, I am here, but not one of you.’ His view was solid and real. What he heard was truthful and secure. However, if his existence here as well as all these images and pictures – look, I’m not saying all that’s happened; in my eyes, there is no such thing as what’s lived through – all these images as a background decoration, all these fluctuant pictures as winter and summer, spring and autumn, these pictures falling like a curtain, and that pine tree was real, and if the smell of snow, millions of insects squirming for some reason underneath bark were genuine; Master Rıza did not have faint in none of those” (p. 77). Life, here, is described as a suspended image: “Living is being suspended in this way all around in the now and in clusters within its age for a while with what falls upon us from the past.” (p. 88)

The main object creating the image is the place where the individual occupies as his self and I. Thus, a dual perspective will be obtained. ‘I’ involves all of the genetic and environmental factors that make up an individual, and self is that ‘I’ talks on everything comprising of the self and self’s reply to this talk: “While I talked or stood around, I would suddenly feel this state of being suspended and fall into motionlessness in this state of being pictured. Within the eternity of objects and the living, when I saw the picture of myself in the picture of a moment, I would just stand back and watch others and myself in the space, where it was hung. This was both a state of being in which a sorrow passed from my head through to the end of me like a pain inside me and in my usual self; a state that made up all what I saw, knew and sensed while I talked about life and everything; virtually a state that was pointed to me.” (p. 90)

In the book, “Akılsız Adam” and “Akılsız Adamın Oğlu Sadullah Efendi” are the counterparts of the self and I through the father and son. The father and son face one another. We see the son through the father’s eyes, and father through the son’s eyes. This perspective merges in a mirror: “I looked at the eau-de-nil mirror on a wood frame across me. I realised later that I’d entered the mirror. I looked and looked at Master Sadullah, and Master Sadullah looked back at me, and I looked deeper into the mirror. I so madly desired to be engaged into the colour of eau-de-nil with a stare that the strength of my desire brought me round. It took me from one self to another self of me. Who am I in?” (p.61) Looking at a view plays an important role for each character. For Refik Iyisoy, in particular, the world is like a place for looking and watching: “Apparently, he had a relaxed upbringing in a relaxed environment. Since working hard and daily survival did not attach to him, he had the chance to look around. And that was it; he simply could do nothing but looked around and got trapped in looking.” (p. 99) Being trapped in the look then combines with watching: “My father sat at the calligraphy table, looked at all his things, watched whatever he was watching almost every single day.” (p. 110)

This state of looking seems to try and find something got lost in time: “My father looked and looked. He had looked during his whole life.” (p. 111) Everything that got trapped in the gaze begins to find meaning in the eyes of someone else. Master Sadullah, who tries to turn I into the self, comprehends this state, sometimes described as bizarre, in the house where he comes after his father dies: “The music that my father listened to in the balcony, trees he looked at and watched their swaying, courtyards he went in and out, mosques, slopes, market places, all those things he grieved over were the images that I wanted them to end. I wanted to come out of them. When I got involved in these images later on, in other words, felt all these obsolete and bizarre states completely out of myself and in another meaning of the world, I began not to be bothered.” (p. 116) Time is frozen and trapped in a look, but this is also a secret. Look seems to be an element that will unlock this mystery:

“When I looked at myself and others, I did not have faith at all in myself to see the truth. Whatever the image passing by me at that moment, I looked at it. I knew that that was only a passing by me and also passing by taking the truth away. I sometimes would look behind it; it would have been changed.” (p. 129)

Therefore, nothing in the state of being should be missed while watching:

“I went to the park by the river in the morning. The elderly people were talking about quietness and peace in spite of all the quietness and peace, and when the fact that it is partly cloudy was added, the subject was dropped.

Ducks were swimming, and a few seemed partly preoccupied and partly pawing around hastily as if they were in a hurry, making noises on the riverbank. A few children were wandering with their mothers along with the ducks on the riverside. The weather was chilly and partly cloudy. What little there was to talk about in life if it was not made up. All this quietness, little splashes of water, the faint steps of the duck, and sometimes a tree branch hanging over. A spastic young man in his bony body, stumbling and saying, ‘Watch out! Get out of the way! I am unsteady on my feet!’, the elderly casting furtive glances at the young man and a faint sentence spilling out of their mouths: ‘It may rain in the evening.’” (p. 135)

There is a time carrying traces of the past, flowing from the past through now, transforming into a scenery even when it becomes an object there:

“In my childhood, I would see some elderly people who did not have the heart to eat a candy, would look at the cucumber turning it in their hand, and wipe and polish a tin. It was as if they weren’t old, but left with this off the world, and looked, wiped, didn’t have the heart to spend and polished. And I would keep looking insanely at tables, bottles, and acacia tree branches overhanging before me.” (p. 177)

Watching and looking mean something only when one discovers a secret. Other than that, it is just inertia:

“I wish everything and everyone passed and we stayed strong, steady and confident at our places. I wish we looked through the window and watched the drowned, the oppressed, the neglected…” (p. 186)

As life flows on before us, living transforms into a thing trapped solely in this view, and doesn’t actually exist, or a dream that appears to be the reflection of these:

“This age of mine and the time I have reached, what I’ve seen and that balcony my life carries me on, that table, that family of mine I carry, my nape, my belly, that glass I hold in my hand, that street I look at; it is now obvious that whatever I see I realise I become, I will be in these by looking at here. Saying something to me looking at this scenery, the fact that what I’ll ever see is this; its destiny was sealed, written, incised. Turning my head away is pointless, ignoring is useless, pretending not to belong is in vain; here’s the balcony, here’s the scenery, here’s life. If I exist and am real, here I am.” (p. 189)

Another aspect of the scenery is presented along with details and objects. Through each detail, the routine of middle class lifestyle, in fact, of life generally are presented through a fast narration, a summarised image:

 “And we got married, and soon felt a burden on us, but yearning for a woman was stronger, partly net, partly curtain, two sofas, a divan, a sewing machine turned into a covered wrestler at the times it wasn’t used, a few books, a reversed cross word, a vase on a formica-finished bookcase, two ashtrays, and doll brought from Germany, the bedroom is light, in fact, very light in colour, two bedside cabinets, a few folk poems in the top drawer of my bedside cabinet for my lust not to amaze the population and national income in the country, in my wife’s bedside cabinet is something two-finger width that is called ‘window curtain’ and made out of old vests or knickers in order to soak vaginal discharge, a two-part wardrobe, right is my wife’s and left mine, back part is for hidden dresses for wearing in public, casual wear is within reach, the upper part is something like a closet for bedding, you take a stool to stand on it and scrabble the storage bags to find the right bedding asking the one waiting on the floor. And a dressing table, half used and very strong perfume, my fragrance that I wore a few times and turned into a pimp and was only kept for its nice bottle shaped like a pine cone, in the drawer of the table was a tin box with a lid on which a Chinese palace was embossed and in the box was an eye pencil used up to the size of my wife’s knuckle, two lipsticks, a hairpin slanted in a shape to scrape what left from a used up lipstick, a cologne on the table, a few novellas of course only Franco Gasparri, a mirror with one side is a magnifying and the other is normal, don’t ever look at yourself on the magnifying side.” (p. 147-148)

In Coşkuyla Ölmek, characters try to combine existing in the world with time. Therefore, what matters for them is a conscious life. This cannot be achieved at beginning, but one discovers, realises it suddenly:

“My past, childhood and periods I’d spent with my father had got nothing to do with my now, but this very moment in Grenoble in this very cold weather, what was this stone that suddenly made me jump out of my skin, made the coffee spray out of my mouth, turned me into dust by toppling over me from the past while I was drinking coffee and peering about, sat in my car parked in a petrol station?” (p. 128)

Gürbüz says in an interview:

“Time seems as if one feels himself within a real eternity and sudden realisation that comes along maybe not through thinking about it as one’s perception related to it grows, but with dizziness.”

Writers, Works, References

An important aspect of Şule Gürbüz’s texts, and one of the elements that creates her writing style is tradition. The desire and eagerness to live the life like a religion, and keep religion at one side of life as a perception and culture at the same time like writers, such as Yahya Kemal and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar also exist in Gürbüz’s works. “Akılsız Adam” and “Akılsız Adamın Oğlu Sadullah Efendi” included in Coşkuyla Ölmek are greetings to writers, such as Tanpınar and Yahya Kemal. On the other hand, not only perception or intuition but also style in this greeting stand in the text as a diffusing element: “The world was the consequence of a life that is led on it or following the life that was led before.” (p. 48) This sentence reminding both Tanpınar and Yahya Kemal further merges with another writer, Hüseyin Rahmi: “The more obvious the road taken and place dwelled were, the more in number their seekers were, but those who could find the real seeker and trail that disappeared in the roiling dust to create a new trail are so few.” (p. 48) Hüseyin Rahmi’s cynicism and attitude, almost comical against the existing and inviting purposelessness appear here. Further in the excerpt, Ahmet Haşim welcomes us: “The known path didn’t lead to known destinations. Taking the known path was actually disregarding any paths and discovery.” (p. 48) Later on, Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar awaits us: “The known path was not even setting off, but staying at home.” (p. 48)

The narrator has an attitude that seems to talk to these writers and works in the fact that tradition is involved in the texts this way. As seen in the above excerpt, the writer talks like her favourite writers and poets as she greets them, but does not copy them. Since this is a dialogue, she adds her words to saying like them:

“Painters could not finish their work, by profession, of course, before their deadlines. They apparently became skilful by doing this. In our country, not doing but being unable to do something is considered as skilfulness in every occupational group.” (p. 17)

Here, particularly with the second sentence, perception coming from Oğuz Atay’s irony is added to the writer’s words. So, this state of perceiving brings the old and new together in the texts. Thus, time becomes entirety. Hence, in Coşkuyla Ölmek, as in the other works of Gürbüz, reading a book and conversations on the texts, and the characters mentioning various book titles stand out. Behçet Necatigil’s poems, Yahya Efendi’s collected poems, Nabi, Muallim Naci, Ahmet Haşim, Ziya Osman Saba, Butor, Foucault and Balzac are the directly mentioned writers and poets in Coşkuyla Ölmek. In Zamanın Farkında and Öyle miymiş?, reading a book and references to writers stand out. While greeting writers, Gürbüz sometimes makes references explicitly rather than mentioning names. For instance, “I feel as if I move out of the current moment when I ask myself if I am in the moment.” (p. 128), is one of the typical examples of this. In this excerpt, she makes a reference to Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s verse, “I am neither in nor out of time.”

Making a reference to literary texts from various periods in a different text, and conversing with them is another way of reinterpreting them. By any means, when a text, which is pulled apart from its period and context, exists in another texts, it finds a new meaning. Therefore, the uniqueness and singularity come to the fore. This also indicates that not only individuals but also texts have a memory. This is the continuation of an attitude similar to concretisation, visualisation and putting what visualised aside. The narrator, who puts her thoughts, emotions and her self along herself, and sometimes moves them away, places what she reads and her relationship with them next to the protagonist. Thus, concretisation in her texts then creates a perspective parallel to visualisation. Here, there is also an artisan attitude. While Gürbüz gathers the texts that she greets, she meticulously places them into her text as if they are objects. “That means that during the years we were scolded, democracy had not been taken roots in the country yet, but was ready to place a slap into our ears. And of course, we were slapped! We sure were! And that is the reason why we were half deaf, however, now I can say that those who were never slapped wouldn’t know how to listen.” (p. 146)

In these sentences reminding of Oğuz Atay, Atay’s words are placed into Gürbüz’s style like objects rather than individual words. Thus, a method is developed in order to bewail after those passing by. Just like calligraphy is replaced by modern painting. Through this method, Gürbüz seems to say to us why calligraphy has to die, and whether or not it can survive along with modern painting. In this respect, the entirety, particularly highlighted in her works, is significant. “In my depicting my imagination and opinion, embracing them as real and corresponding things, and eventually writing them, I’ve always had a secret gratitude and admiration for the images flowing indefinitely before my eyes, and sometimes the objects to appear in due time and provide completeness giving me an entirety.”

This admiration and amazement towards what is looked and seen are like a way to objectify them. In a form where fiction is pushed aside, the best way to express existing in a flow built through repetition in the entirety of state of being is to narrate it repeatedly with various styles. And this enables multiple perspectives to coexist in the work. In Coşkuyla Ölmek, intuition gets visualised in these repetition and abundance of styles.

As Master Sadullah looks at the world, he turns his intuitions to what he sees. For instance, when his son is born, from the very beginning, he reflects his intuitions to his son, and therefore, materialises both imaginations and intuitions in the existence of the son. However, thing don’t turn out the way he wants them to. And the son opposes these expectations that he does not know about through an intuition. And then, after his father’s death, makes an effort to understand him again through an intuition. In “Ruhuna Fatiha”, the narrator-protagonist senses that the painters have an expectation from the very beginning. In “Rüya İmiş”, Hikmet senses what will happen as soon as the question of marriage comes up. These are not a realisation or comprehension, because there is not a state that can exactly be described or known. All these emerge as things that can be sensed due to obscurity. Intuition forms the entire scenery of the work in both individual stories and the entire book in Coşkuyla Ölmek. “Being in a state of sensing time falls into great misery, a profound intuition, a sudden accumulation of images. This is in fact a strong intellectual memory. An experience, which takes place between the self and life of a person and cannot be transferred to someone else, remains as a memory fixed in the mind. With its colour and residue, that short but highly conscious sentiment is intense and penetrating enough to devaluate many things in the world in spite of its pain.  I made the protagonist, Akılsız Adam, in Coşkuyla Ölmek talk from this position of intuition. And these talks were necessarily in the position of being symbolic, poetic and figurative for the reasons I mentioned before. Those who say know what they see and talk about very well, but those who hear, read or listen only senses if they may sense a silhouette.” Şule Gürbüz presents visuality as scenery by concretising abstract notions. This scenery stands as a hung signboard that brings notions, language and texts of literature one after another in this look, and the word becomes visualised this way. In the entirety here, music is also important: “While I write my works, I have and could never plunged into a something like a symphony, a big fiction. I could not even dream of it. For me, a literary work is a band of classical music instruments: The first composition, second composition, ağır semai, yürük semai.

It includes four parts, and as in the last two pages of “Öyle miymiş?”, the work ends followed by a short play of instruments… I mean it ends not abruptly, but in an ended continuation like a short tambour solo in a ride, changing but nested from uşşak to rast maqams, but does not actually end; it quiets down. Since my own melodic structure and sounds inside me are voiced in this way, and always-classical instruments play inside me, I suppose I behave according to this. This does not produce a multi-articulated structure, but may come up to a state that is interconnected but can be read separately, individually, at the same time, sensed various dynamisms within the same maqam.”7 The fact that music forms a composition in this way does in fact enables the word to visualise, furthermore diverge into intuitivism, highlighted by the author, as well, through a rhythm.

Let’s leave the last word to author:

“Story, for me, is a tarred state, where a meaning acquired through which life’s excesses, unperceptive days passed in an emotionless way and void extend to sorrow, is pushed onto the person with a subtle sentiment; it is very close to poetry. However, if seeing where the essential picture is and where life moves extend to being able to paint the picture, then it is author’s or story’s job to discover what to tell looking at life and humans, and what is mysterious where and which part of whom, and work on there.”

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