THE SEAGULL INSIDE ME

If I were asked what true love is, I'd first recall the pain in my chest. Just as the French poet Louis Aragon put it: “There is no happy love.” It's destined to hurt like a dagger because it demands too much. Even worse, it never looks for balance, often leading to a story of giving and giving and never reaching the prize I dreamed of reaching. This I call “the black death in love”.

But even after that, the soul still gambles for the same unreachable goal, worsening
things and ushering in the next phase: a catharsis which I call “a white death.” White, because this death throws me beyond the horizon of my fears and cleanses the heart with tears, ultimately bringing silence, reconciliation, then emancipation and rebirth.

Last January I had reached a catharsis in a romantic relationship. It was my white death. The morning after, I woke up, walked directly to my piano and wrote an impromtu song about a woman trapped inside a pier building demolished by high waves during a thunderstorm at night. Her love boat was broken, the man who had been stabbing her every day had disappeared, yet now the sun was shining, and the seagulls were flying and crying in the air, beckoning her beyond the horizon of the Marmara Sea. These seagulls symbolized the fearless journey of love, to die again without regret. I sang this new song in an upper register, completely out of my vocal comfort zone, and suddenly I had an Aha! moment, realizing that “true love is really hard to find”.

Then the following week, I visited Nisan Berkol, a friend of mine and a marvelous
practitioner of somatic dialogue. I asked if she could embody the seagull inside me with her somatic dance performance Then, I noticed something strange; one of the walls of her studio was damp, with the paint puffed out and torn apart. Over this water-beaten wall, she had painted a red heart with a paint oozing down from its bottom to serve as a backdrop for our performance.

So, I acted out the woman in pain (to symbolize the black death in love) and she
embodied the seagull (the catharsis, the white death which will bring emancipation) in her studio. We also performed under a concave wave breaker on the shore of the Marmara Sea. There, the seagull inside of me found her home, ready to fly away crying. But first, she had to die.

Sanat Deliorman (song writer, vocals, somatic dialogue)
Nisan Berkol (somatic dialogue, vocals, setting design)
Elif Öner (filming, cinematography and video editing)

Istanbul, March 2024