07.16.07
I am Called Black (Orhan Pamuk)
Now that I have readily yielded myself over to Orhan Pamuk’s
book, My Name is Red, I simply cannot
sit still… the caravan moves on and I am intently seizing every grain of sand
that touches my senses and taking notes. This philosophical marvel and intellectual challenge is an odyssey
through art, love, power, religion and has as many faces as there are grains in
a handful of desert sand. In my previous
post, I described him as an ancient hero of art and defender of coffee. In this
entry, I will ruminate more on his angle of being a sultan of art.
“Pamuk wanted to
become a painter, and when he was sixteen set himself the task of copying
Persian miniatures. He once said that he wanted to paint Istanbul just as Pissarro and
Utrillo would have done. He now paints through words, working assiduously,
seven days a week. He writes slowly, with a pen, not a computer, and has never
done another job, except be a writer.” Georgia Brown
Long before I read Georgia Brown’s remark, this phrase alone
from chapter five convinced me adequately that this man understands art the way
one should:
…another essential
virtue: To avoid disappointment in art, one must not treat it as a career. Despite whatever great artistic sense and
talent a man might possess, he ought to seek money and power elsewhere to avoid
forsaking his art when he fails to receive proper compensation for his gifts
and efforts.
On the eleventh chapter, Black
converses with the Head Illuminator. The
master says;
Painting is the silence
of thought and the music of sight.
Black: My great
master, my dear sir, what separates the genuine miniaturist from the ordinary?
Head Illuminator: There
is no single measure that can distinguish the great miniaturist from the
unskilled and faithless one. This
changes with time. Yet the skills and morality with which he would face the
evils that threaten art are of significance. Today, in order to determine just how genuine a young painter is, I’d
ask him three questions.
Has he come to
believe, under the sway of recent custom as well as the influence of the
Chinese and the European Franks that he ought to have an individual painting
technique, his own style… as an illustrator, does he want to have a manner, an
aspect distinct from others, and does he attempt to prove this by signing his
name somewhere in his work like the Frankish masters? To determine precisely
these things, I’d first ask him a question about ‘style’ and ‘signature.’
Then I’d want to learn
how this illustrator felt about volumes changing hands, being unbound, and our
pictures being used in other books and in other eras after the shahs and
sultans who’d commissioned them have died. This is a subtle issue demanding a response beyond one’s being simply
upset or pleased by it. Thus, I’d ask
the illustrator a question about ‘time’ – an illustrator’s time…
The third would be
‘blindness’! Blindness is silence. If
you combine what I’ve just now said, the first and second questions,
‘blindness’ will emerge. It’s the
farthest one can go in illustrating; it is seeing what appears out of Allah’s
own blackness.
In the twelfth chapter where my caravan advances in a
snail-like pace in order to absorb much. Butterfly speaks to Black;
“As long as the number
of worthless artists motivated by money and fame instead of the pleasure of
seeing and a belief in their craft increases, we will continue to witness much
more vulgarity and greed akin to this preoccupation with ‘style’ and
‘signature.’” I made this introduction because this was the way it is done, not
because I believed what I said. True ability
and talent couldn’t be corrupted even by the love of gold or fame.
