Hír: heatwave

the utility futility of this blog is to travel without and within words, as you wish.
A wish for greater news, more hearted than rooted, more dual than prime-time.
Just because I cannot help it.
I believe it was intuition to feel the warmth of this unique September heatwave. It was history in paper and in sight. Through the glass window-pain of my old neighbour's read, I confused the sun for the past, as memory was so much present, presence.
It was all around us in the flower dress of her grandmother, in the powerful darkness of the night-train's yellow, in the encounter with her high-school friend. Or simply without.
It was presence and absurdity in one on my bottle's cover (Luis Figo, Portuguese football striker who recently came back from comfortable Quatar now figures on the advertising for the szentkirály Hungarian water), in his son's "Brasil" tee-shirt, in my own o'neill bag carrying a bunch of great Hungarian-made cds...
A wish is better than novelty in my view, as it is not taken for granted, nevertheless we generally wish for both.
Alas for air conditioning and the wish for ecological security, alas for the heatwave. Hungarian is not so much a country that thinks in the future as one that wishes for the future; a heavy burden but this present wish.
so my neighbour reads on his "national freedom" (népszabadság) for all the heat within, without; here and there.

still

I always wonder how things can change in a small paradise of reality.
Coming in at the gate of this lego-coloured building, through the doors under the piros-fehér-zöld flag, things could be as simple.. as imagination.
Leaving my bag at the entrance for trust to care for, entering the canteen a hundred little faces turn to face us with a shy little twinge in their eyes. Here the teacher turns to us with her passionate smile, and takes us up to the second floor. More happy adults, responsibilities fly in passion and youth in happiness. The warmest greetings, as solid as the years go by, as invisible as a window cleaned with care... People here know too well why they keep on living in this place. Back down from the office, through the corridors of this large family, and out of school, trust handing me my suitcase, and a warm african air brings us slowly and calmly through to our home, through Szolnoki út, past the television tower into the home.

Hajku for the lost branch

Not to write
words cut down
your choice
of grammar

Hajku de l'arbre coupé

Ne pas savoir écrire
des mots coupés
triste compagnie

ode to the polish verse commander

designed by history
the walls I saw reflected
upon me the words of comfort
of a disconcerting dreamer


The side-street of a glance
is in your pocket, in your grave
and wears no verb



in the night-time of a text
called love in colour
pavements said paint


deep into the crossroad
of green and dark lights
walks multiply

Terrain Vague

Two drops, just two drops

Twice the number of passing gent doubled
Blinking for all that dust, seeds of birth
Relaxed feeling of a sinking sun
Reflected in the Duna through the queens of Buda

Repeated the words of a picture, I thought
Shining from the top of that hill I thought
I saw you standing among those misrepresentations

Buda has one empty heart I imagined
Stone walk up to the rear of the great hungarian hills
I threw a stone back to the sun

Imagined the forest which leads
Through the labyrinth of Pest
Into the sunlight your reflection
Threw upon me, my memory.

házi kocsmája

Smell of tobacco in the plastic chairs
Soda in your cheap wine
Good wine is for food
Old coffee resting amidst the fumes
of menthol cigarettes
of mosquitoes from the Tisza

The dog is wailing for company
We recite our week's walks and encounters
How was work, where is the wine?
Home-mades and home-stomachs
Glory be for a bit of kocsmája
in my memory box

Oh for a good wine discussion




I wrote the following lines for the picture above last year. I was told by my girlfriend, who is Hungarian, that this description of her father’s “kocsmája” (* which stands for “his pub”) made her very sad. I wanted to know what exactly she felt, but she simply swept the matter away, as those were my own words, my own images – my own relative reality.
Of course this didn’t satisfy me. The remarks I receive when deciding to picture the debris of a broken-down building don't just stem from a sense of harmony between a population and a government's politics of representation, nor simply from a sense of national pride. To me, it's a gap in between pride and history.
The no-man lands of construction and the marginalised bits of history lie behind the big puma or macdonalds banners, and those kilometres of temporary walls are symbolic holes in a country having to imagine its future at extra euro-speed.
(The irony of an outsider's position, to catch the cracks whilst through his own country the wind of financial cracks blows down an economy so fragile)
The banners and temporary walls on the way to university, to the supermarket, to the bank, to the bar, to bed, to the night-job, to the tube... those banners stay up, reflected everywhere in the plastic colours left by soviet history. They stay up, and mirrors are everywhere that tell history in their own moments.
This, at least, is how I see my relative reality.

sok boldogság után