One painting is full of life and the other is desolate.

“Should I make you, world, again,

could I give back the leaf its skeleton, the air”

George’s skeleton and the narrators are both gone. Her mom passed away, and she tries to live

with and without her. On the other hand, the narrator does not try to be both but one; a writer.

This shows in the pictures as well; How to be both, the painting has both sides but in the Enigma

of Arivall, it is a stuckness in a place two characters, one looking back and one looking forward,

both not moving.

The narrator tried to be a man he is not, and when others saw him as the man he is, he felt

nothing but shame. The humiliation he felt was so great that he rejected every opportunity to

make him live in the world, so by not living it, he still made it alive and saw things as

“materials”. He does not write back to Angela at the end because he is Victor to them, not him,

and for the whole thing, we still do not catch his name, as he is still lost on the pier, waiting to

go, waiting to come. All at once he feels in limbo, “we are all migrants of our own existence

now.”(Smith 37) He was a migrant for himself but not for his writer self. It was the shame, too,

“that made me keep my eyes closed”(Naipaul 126) likewise he shut down his identity. Looking

from the outside, picking details he liked, and acting as the god, the upper side of the painting,

sadly for them, they “come and nobody even bats an eyelid. (Smith 46). Being on the upper side

is what the narrator wants but he does not recognize in the first place that he is already living in

down. Nothing is like how they seem, but dreams are dreams. (Pessoa,503) If dreams are
touched they lose their essence as dreams and die. Fantasies need to be untouched and what

makes them is this.

The beauty of the painting comes from it being alive. Something is always happening, it is like

“Where is Waldo?” it is a different picture when you try to look for waldo and a different one

when you just look from it from the outside; seeing Icarus falling and not seeing Icarus falling,

the picture changes with what you see. “Everything is nothing but a charming game.”(Smith,45)

The charm of the game is that it is the unknown, the narrator saw a different London from

Dickens's eyes and saw later with his eyes later as a man from Trinidad. He did not see it as

unknown but as usual. “But it is only me who wants to wrap around your dreams, and Have you

any dreams you'd like to sell, dreams of loneliness?”

In the picture “Enigma of Arrival,” he looks lost, looking for the map he has from Dickens, but it

doesn't look like he is in the right direction. He looks stuck, not moving in the chess board, not

making a move. Stands there and looks around. Realizes there are no ships in the warf, “his life’s

journey had been made.”(Naipaul,172) The narrator moves into the down of the blue after the

fog disappeared, “when the reality surrounded me English literature ceased to be universal.”And

man and the writer became one, space and time became one and he does not need to go on a

journey because he is already there, sometimes under the blue sometimes up the blue. “I a a u

opn ook.”(Smith,58) Both open and not open at the same time. Fantasy and life together, seeing

things that are not there, but their effects still go on. Past is as present as the past, it is about

remembering. George wanted to watch porn to remember the injustice that happened to the girl

but she can simply remember something else. Remember the good times with her mother just

like the narrator remembers Africa.

If it had lived, it will continue to live.(Aruoba 32)

(yasanmis olan, hep yasiyacaktir.)

Citations

Naipaul, V. S. The Enigma of Arrival. Vintage Books, 1987.

Smith, Ali. How to Be Both. Anchor Books, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC,

2015.

Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet: Composed by Bernardo Soares, Assistant

Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon. Exact Change, 1998. (I have the turkish

translation of the book and since I could not find the english version I translated)

Mac, Fleetwood. “Dreams.” Rumours. Ken Caillat and Richard Dashut, 1977.

Rich, Adrienne Cecile . In Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970 , Rich, Adrienne Cecile, 230-231.

New York: 1993

Aruoba Oruç. De Ki Işte. Metis, 2018. (There is no translation for this Turkish

philosophy book so I translated)