Our destiny was to set out on a path that we knew the end of, but not the aftermath, and destiny was written mostly for those who were at odds with themselves. Unlike the humble existence of insects, birds, flowers, cats, dogs, mountains and stones, which know their limits but do not look for a reason, the burden of the answers to the questions inherent in the existence of human beings who challenge with what they know, the burden of the answers they seek but cannot find, the weight that never passes, must have been the beginning of everything… The beginning of everything, the fragility of the first pen stroke in the decree of man’s unique destiny… “Oh, our fragility…” Yet how little we are aware of the core of our existence, our delicately wrought fragility…
I don’t know how many masters of the heart can describe fragility more elegantly and gracefully than Eugenio Borgna, but the very first page of On Fragilitybegins with his magnificent observations:
“The dominant slogans in the world see vulnerability as something superfluous and outdated, raw and diseased, devoid of solidity and meaning, whereas in vulnerability there is sensitivity, delicacy, tenderness and exhausted gentleness, an intuition for what cannot be expressed or seen, which allows us to identify more easily and enthusiastically with the moods, affections and existential modes of others.”
Indeed, isn’t the fragility that permeates the very essence of life, of our existence, sacrificed to the populist with the dominant slogans as if it doesn’t exist, as if it is absent, as if the fragile is a weak, inferior link in the chain of our species, and therefore the strong must survive, and the weak, as a requirement of natural selection, must at best be negated or even discarded? However, the human model depicted by the dominant ideals and postmodern principles is more fragile than all the fragilities it criticizes, and the fact that it sees the denial of fragility as a weakness is perhaps the result of a defense mechanism based on projection…
And on and on Borgna goes; he handles phenomena in which fragility is the leaven with a subtlety akin to a poet summarizing a voluminous experience in a few lines. He talks about the fragility of interpersonal experiences, the fragility of words, silence, joy, hope. He says that joy is an intangible, extremely naïve and completely present emotion, which is why it is different from happiness. For example, joy, which is not registered by the perception of the continuity of time and therefore cannot be experienced in relation to the past and the future, appears as a miraculous experience that I live in the present without forcing myself to do so, even though it is fleeting and escapist. Moreover, it points to the potential hidden in “joy” that even in the most difficult, unbearable and complicated times of life, life can be worth living again, that the tree of life can spring up again from its roots that have lost none of their vitality. Borgna’s lines on fragility remind me of what my beloved Yûnus, who said, “I neither rejoice in wealth nor regret absence…” and the wise hearts of other masters of the heart have known since time immemorial…
Although the word “fragility” resonates negatively in the mind at first utterance, it gradually becomes clear how semantically encompassing it is; our resentments, our sadness as well as the fragility of joy point to this diversity of meaning. In every aspect of life, that sometimes painful, but mostly naive fragility appears. In the succession of the seasons; in the way trees turn from one color to another according to the season, turning green into red and red into yellow; in the way the night breaks in the day and the day dies in the night; in the end of every conversation that begins; in the beginning of a new love that sprouts in the middle of the hopes that end; in the scream of a mother giving birth; in the evaporating time that attaches the first steps taken by the baby to the young manhood… So much so that those who know that fragility is like an ontological pattern that is finely woven into existence, linking every creation and decay, and those who realize this like Yûnus do not run away from fragility; on the contrary, they embrace the metamorphosis in fragility, the naive change in all other attributes that come with fragility.
It is as if there is a bending in the fragile; like every letter other than the elephant bends, twists, turns to itself from a corner…In other words, the fragile is existential… Our peace, our faith, our hope, our dreams, our joys, our sense of security, our sense of trust, our health, our posture, our position, our status, our wealth, our poverty are also fragile. And even our charm, which is shaken when we walk in high heels and the thin heel gets caught between two cobblestones and breaks…
After Borgna’s writings on fragility, every sentence I write is also fragile…
Just as I was reading Borgna, I grabbed Ahmet Inam’s thin book, On the Thin Things in Our Lives, which I had the illusion that it shone for a moment with its thin silhouette from my library. I randomly opened a page from Hodja, the title read “Wounds of Conversation”… “Wounds of Conversation”… Conversation is also fragile. As long as the one you love does not respond to love, your resentment increases.
“I’m hurt.” Says Mr. Ahmet.
“Because I am fragile. Because I live open to the future, because I am hopeful. I’ve been broken and I’ve learned how big the world is. Who am I? I couldn’t learn. That’s why I’ve always been hurt. Resentment is a subtle sensitivity towards people…” and adds:
“Resentment is a privilege. We often don’t know it. We turn it into resentment and run inside ourselves: “Okay, it’s over. You can’t see my face anymore!” Perhaps with these words we want to say “love me, look at my face, my helpless gaze that touches you”.
Why is it a privilege? Broken is understanding. Who is about to understand…”
Who am I? I didn’t learn… Maybe this is my biggest resentment between me and God. Nevertheless, the lines in which he presents resentment as a privilege, again light a fragile light of hope in my twilight heart… Who am I? This is the question to which all branches of fragility rise from their roots to the sky… Fragile is the question whose answers I search for in many other channels, and when I cannot find them, I break again… If “fragile” is an ontological fact, then I say, it is inevitable that the questions you cannot find the answer to are also fragile. So the answers to fragile questions can only be fragile answers. This gives me a new wave of hope. Perhaps the very asking itself is the point here…
The things we hold on to are also fragile. We work hard, sometimes without being sure what it is for. When our work pays off, we become stronger and forget our fragility. But forgetting is also fragile. The holder (?) of an office to which everyone bows, where a single word can move the earth, becomes the focus of mocking glances as he walks through the corridors of his office the next morning. How fragile is his office, from which he was dismissed without his knowledge… “I listened to him for hours on his bad days. I always supported him, we ate and drank together, I opened my house to him when he separated from his wife, I cried with him. I considered him a friend…” says a friend of mine. “I knew as a friend…” One gets offended at how little one knows about what one thinks one knows; beforehand, it is actually self-suggestion…Friendship is fragile like that… There are of course very beautiful friendships that are not offended but fragile, friendships that time has refined, refined, made fragile. They are not resentful of each other, even if they meet once a year, the conversation will continue as if they met yesterday, but time and circumstances are fragile…
And here my mind makes another leap as I attempt to lift the curtains of fragility one by one… As the Sufis say, “it is easy not to offend, the main thing is not to offend”… I hear it in my ear. The vague sounds and images of a realm that is not fragile flood my heart, and I feel a little relieved…
