sweeping the fog of memory

Today as I write, as I walk in the streets of Pest and Buda, students are queuing for job interviews while parents are re-scheduling their lives for a third job. The strings of the Rom fiddler in Kálvin Tér metro station echo as the continuing hymn of displaced festivities. The hymn of the musician whose life is out of tune, yet whose life is as linear as some great composers desired their work. The patient melody of the present confronting the towering concertos of shaken states accompanies us on the metro that leads to Nyugati station, on the train to Ferihegy airport, through the clouds withstanding ridiculous cheap-flight commercials as we fly into Luton and Stansted, in a spiral of a wide-ranged imagery, colours and melodies that are now so characteristic of our European travels.

Sweeping the street he dresses his frame
In a theatre for the cold
And whenever he stops the light comes in
Place reflected in his everywhere

Sweeping into the street they dress that fame
A theatre of gold
And whenever they disappear with pens of silver
Space is nowhere but in the heart

Of the street colour’s metteur en scène

The baker had no change for my metro ticket and I didn’t want to confront the boor of controllers. I went back up the streets - the Forint [*Hungarian currency] was continuing his fall down; I breathed the cold air of a country whose Gas storage is emptying itself in the midst of the Russo-Ukrainian pipe wars.

Media-responsibilities are in transition, participation is everywhere and young adults finishing their studies run the risk of falling sick of the human record. Blogs are the bastard-children of the possibilities left by an era of words sinking in rivers, while rivers sing out the words in a language we are too busy to get to grips with.

“One is always ashamed when one finds out he is not a hero but a dupe: a dupe of History” (* Márai Sándor “Memoirs of Hungary 1944-48”)

I leave you with the mark of a bourgeois yet brilliant writer of his times (indeed Márai himself stresses who can write but the bourgeoisie? The deal is different now, but his commentary leaves a trace on the meaning of our travels to the east, the south and those poles of others’ existence), a poet dressing up the times of transition between two wars, while at this very hour a war is being waged simultaneously in the streets of Gaza and on my contacts’ facebook status.
The colours are grey indeed in this October house.

resisting the words of shade
pain to eat
through the blinds
of my tongue's memory
I answer snappily
at the air around me
for shaping the blue
that took me

frame for the new year