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Orpheus: The infinite!
7 October 1951,
was a cold, dark, deserted night
we were thirty people, a knife wouldn't part our lips
then we saw you from the wagon
languorously flowing
we all took out our cigarettes, lit up
and sang folk song.
--Ilhan Berk, Turkish Poet
 1 In a folk story, a sparrow starts a journey to ask this question from all the creatures”:’ who is the greatest?’ The mountain says grass, the grass says goat, the goat says wolf, and the wolf says the dog, the dog points to a shepherd, and the shepherd point to his flute. This story waits for a moment when the wolves come to the herd; the shepherd is alone and feels the wolves are coming. He uses his flute and plays, the voice reaches another shepherd and he plays too, little by little, the whole country is playing and all the shepherds gather to fight against wolves. In this story, flute has not appeared in its poetical function; also, the shepherd is not a poet. The voice of flute, in this story points to function of language. Flute sends a sign or a message to express something. This folktale says that language is the greatest. In addition, the story knows that flute in this function can only gather shepherds, because they all have the same profit. This story, by describing this role of language, shows the ways of forming duality between human and the world. 7 October 1951 was a dark, cold, and deserted night. No one could speak. The language became dumb in that absolute coldness. All the human acts were impossible. There was no possibility for interpretation to bring conceptual meaning into the episode. The weight of reality abandoned the power of language, the power that have made gap between human and the world in order to aggrandize itself. There was a real absence for meaning -not a conceptual meaning originated from interpretation-. Our world is an interpreted world, and "in this interpreted world, we do not feel securely at home.” . This world is not a safe and secure place for us all, and Rilke thinks that interpretation has created this danger. The main role of a poet is to bring this lost safety back into the world. The safety which is not the child of this or that conceptual interpretation, but it is the child of experiencing a mystery that suspends the interpretations and as Ryokan says, there you can see: "Enlightenment and Illusion are two side of a coin, universal and particular are the same, and the heart searches for a true companion". The safety of that night of Bashu, the poet, and the whores were touching life inside this un-ended haiku: "under the same roof/ the whores slept too/ the flowers and the moon."
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