The first time ever I saw your face

As I was looking over the contents page of Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book last night wondering what kind of post to write, I caught an echo of this song, popularised by Roberta Flack and most recently by David Cook. There’s a link to the first chapter of Pamuk’s novel, which is “The First Time Galip Saw Rüya”. The rest of the novel pretty much describes how Galip misses his wife and his cousin Celál (the two have disappeared together) and almost goes mad looking for them, all the while interspersing the action with Celál’s imaginative and wide-ranging columns. In the spirit of Celál’s writing, here’s a riff on The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.

The first time ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave
To the dark and the empty skies my love.

The first time ever I saw your face … in real-life was at the Seattle coffee shop in Durbanville. It was a Saturday afternoon and you were wearing your favourite red top and blue jeans. When you saw me your blue eyes lit up with a mixture of relief, anxiety and possibly admiration. My eyes lit up too and in those first few moments I could tell that there was a mutual attraction. That first date was nine hours long and included a slightly iffy movie (What Happens in Vegas) and a lot of first impressions over coffee, drinks and dinner.

“The first time ever I saw your face” makes me think of love and relationships. What’s it like the first time a mother and baby catch sight of each other? The baby sees only in parts so it’s not like there’s a flashbulb moment – “Aha, so that’s my mom” – but at some point that flashbulb moment does happen and it lights up its whole face. Scientists have mapped a mother’s brain chemistry when she sees her infant smile and it’s quite amazing. I’d be interested to see what happens with fathers and the random control group!

But “the first time ever I saw your face” also makes me think, quite appropriately for The Black Book, about faces and mirrors. We know that mirroring is an essential part of parenting. The infant’s self-concept develops out of the self that is mirrored back to him/her. And if it wasn’t so hot in this office I’d find some links to self psychology and the development of the self concept. But while on mirrors and mirroring, there’s another song that springs to mind. When Michael Jackson sings that he’s talking to the Man in the Mirror, who exactly is he talking to? Is it the (black) Michael that he was or the new, supposedly improved (white) version? Which reminds me of this: “The most powerful man in the world and the best golfer in the world are both black men. Michael Jackson must be kicking himself.”

The first time I ever saw your face … At what age do we first see ourselves in the mirror? And at what age do we notice for the first time that if you hold up a mirror to a mirror then you have an endless series of reflections? Perhaps it’s the same way with our imaginations – an endless series of reflections and projections.

Looks like I’m all riffed out for the day. But if you want the link to David Cook singing his version then you’ll find it here.

Why she left

I’m a slow reader so it’s taken me 40 pages to get really hooked by Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book. First there were all the different Turkish names and characters to get used to. Who’s Galip again? Is he married to Rüya? I have enough difficulty with P’s friends and spouses and children so a whole cast of Turkish characters was always going to be a challenge.

But now that I’ve arrived at the central plot I can relax into the story. Basically, Galip’s wife has left him. Gone. Disappeared with nothing more than a 19-word farewell letter. As the blurb says:

Could she have left him for her ex-husband, Celál, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celál, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celál’s identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns …

I also have to agree with the blurb-writer that Pamuk’s novel is “a cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul”. The style is clever too and I like the way he intersperses the story with Celál’s entertaining (and intricately told) columns. I’ve just read the one about Alaaddin’s shop and I loved the way it enabled him to provide wry commentary on such a wide spectrum of Istanbul’s population.

For me there are also echoes of Tim Winton’s The Riders (in which Scully tries in vain to work out why his wife never arrives at their new home in Ireland). It’s a powerful question: who do women (and people generally) leave? As someone who’s been both a leaver and a leave, it’s a poignant mystery which involves suitable soul-searching. I’m guessing that Galip’s story will become a detective story to find the mysterious Rüya but I’m enjoying the psychological side of it. I’ll keep you posted. One quote:

He took comfort in the promise Rüya made next: it too was four words: I’ll be in touch. He sat up all night, waiting in vain.
All night, the radiators and water pipes groaned, gurgled and sighed. There were flurries of snow. The boza seller wandered past at one point, hawking his millet drinks, but he never came back. For hours on end, Galip and Rüya’s green signature stared at each other …