SEMIO OBJECTS (12)

By: Serdar Paktin
May 17, 2021

One in a series of 25 nonfiction narratives about semioticians’ significant objects. Presented to HILOBROW’s readers by Project:Object.

NEY

You think because you understand one, you must also understand two, because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and. — Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi

I came across this quote from the Sufi mystic Rumi during a meaning-crisis phase in my senior year at university. Inspiring me to think beyond the visible and to look for what’s invisible in-between, this quote opened my eyes not only to Rumi’s teaching, but to the meaning within relationality.

I had a very action-oriented adolescence and training: I attended a military boarding school, then Turkey’s Air Force Academy. But although my family expected a military career to be a lifelong journey for me, I quit at age 19. The meaning crisis I experienced a few years later was sparked in part by this drastic change; I didn’t know what I really wanted to do with my life. Luckily, during that year-long introspective phase I encountered Rumi.

Rumi’s magnum opus, the massive work of mystical poetry Masnawi (w. 1258–1273), is one of the most influential works of Sufism. It begins with a story told by a ney — that is, the mournful-sounding reed flute. “The Song of the Reed,” as the story is known in English, is a symbolic one: “Listen to the ney, what it says / It tells a story of yearning.” Because it was cut from the reedbed, separated from where it belongs, the ney makes a crying sound whenever it is played. Each of us is like a ney, says Rumi: Soul is blown into the hollow reed of our body whenever we draw a breath, and we yearn to return to where we came from.

Because I was sent away to school at a young age, I could relate to the ney’s yearning. The instrument became an important symbol, to me, of Rumi’s philosophy, which is based on the search for meaning — through relationality — in everyday life. A couple of years later, I was able to acquire a ney of my own, from a neymaster in Istanbul. Although I’ve never learned to play it well, I carry it with me everywhere I live around the world. It’s a gate to my soul.

One last anecdote. Once, when I was traveling through Miami International Airport, TSA officers came across my ney and assumed it was “some kind of weapon.” An extensive search of my possessions and person followed. I tried to explain that it was the gate to my soul, but I don’t think that they understood.

MOVIE OBJECTS: INTRODUCTION | Ramona Lyons on EYE OF THE SERPENT (CONAN THE BARBARIAN) | Faythe Levine on BEDKNOB (BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS) | Gerald Peary on CUP OF COFFEE (THE BIG HEAT) | Christopher Orr on TOM’S HAT (MILLER’S CROSSING) | Lynn Peril on TRANSISTOR RADIO (DR. STRANGELOVE) | & 20 MORE.

SEMIO OBJECTS (12)

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