29. By Now There Was Hardly a Moment When I Wasn't Thinking About Her Tree

"Kemal once told me: ‘I felt pain as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness.’ This expression had made us both smile, just like the safsa flower did in chapter fifty-one, but we never spoke of the paradox therein. If “darkness” or the color “black”’ are the absence of light, then “black lamp” is a perfect oxymoron. So what did Kemal mean when he spoke of the black lamp coming on just like the communal lights in a block of flats switch off when their timer runs out? I built this Black Light Machine to illustrate fully that Kemal’s words are always so precise that they can be represented by objects. I made use of one of those small cog wheeled and hand levered pasta-making machines that Istanbul’s Levantine families were using towards the end of the 19th century, and of parts of clockwork mechanisms from the same period, around the time this building was being constructed. Our museum does not just feature objects, painted vistas, pictures and photographs; similes and metaphors too are objects of thorough scrutiny. The painting in the background is the work of Ahmet Isikci. Ahmet Isıkçı, who has read this chapter attentively, states that Kemal’s thoughts and the intensity of his heartache have set fire to this tree." (The Innocence of Objects by Orhan Pamuk)

"Kemal once told me: ‘I felt pain as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness.’ This expression had made us both smile, just like the safsa flower did in chapter fifty-one, but we never spoke of the paradox therein. If “darkness” or the color “black”’ are the absence of light, then “black lamp” is a perfect oxymoron. So what did Kemal mean when he spoke of the black lamp coming on just like the communal lights in a block of flats switch off when their timer runs out? I built this Black Light Machine to illustrate fully that Kemal’s words are always so precise that they can be represented by objects. I made use of one of those small cog wheeled and hand levered pasta-making machines that Istanbul’s Levantine families were using towards the end of the 19th century, and of parts of clockwork mechanisms from the same period, around the time this building was being constructed. Our museum does not just feature objects, painted vistas, pictures and photographs; similes and metaphors too are objects of thorough scrutiny. The painting in the background is the work of Ahmet Isikci. Ahmet Isıkçı, who has read this chapter attentively, states that Kemal’s thoughts and the intensity of his heartache have set fire to this tree." (The Innocence of Objects by Orhan Pamuk)