Vyhľadávanie
Two images – Japanese image
In the age of Bushido one of the noblest samurai of Japan offered himself in exchange for the captive of a gang of brigands. Those thugs were prepared to break the promise they had made, adn when their cruelty was challenged by the deep silent dignity of their worthy prisoner, they set about tormenting him, expecting to relish the pain they would see in his face. The samurai admired the blooming cherry tree near by. When they put out his eyes, he kept his face turned in the direction where he intuited the location of the last remaining beauty of the place. Even with their bloody hands his captors could not rob him of his composure and could not enjoy any outward manifestation of his pain. They guessed that the cherry tree gave him strength to remain stoic, and therefore they chopped down the cherry tree and destroyed it. But the beautiful image survived in his memory. Then they spun his body around and around so that he would lose his sense of direction, they made him deaf, they castrated him, and they cut off his limbs; but still his blind face turned always toward the right direction. Even when drunk with their own power, goaded by their own cruelty, and triumphant to have a victim of such high rank, they failed to coerce from the samurai the satisfaction they were lusting for. The more fanatically they attacked what remained of the body, and even the ground around the body, the more distinctly they perceived his silence, dignity, and serene admiration of the cherry tree. When they looked at one another, noting their heightened frustration, they began to understand just what they had been so zealous to destroy, and that image entered them, so clear and sovereign that they will never forget it - it will persist in them, not claimed as their own, not belonging to them, but as the essence of what had incited their fury and caused them to wage such destruction. In the end it had defeated them. It had won.
Maybe in honor of this sage, the best of the best Japanese painters customarily change their famous names, adopting unknown ones, and begin anew elsewhere, not confused by the trappings of success. They make a new start with the most difficult subject in the art of painting, and they dedicate themselves to the single image of the branch of the blooming cherry tree. And when from the painted twig and blossoms there emanates as in one breath the basest and the loftiest, when the artist is no longer an obstacle to transmission but rather the clear transparent medium, when the picture is visited by the confused bees, and when the colors generate a hushed murmur and vibration and sweetness of the blooming cherry twig, the best of the best Japanese painters desist then from painting and find solitude in nature, to use their new experience, which surpasses both the artist and the work of art, to understand what cannot be expressed in words, what is never discussed, what cannot be communicated but must be self-achieved.
Two images – the image of Lehnice
Somewhere between Budapest and Vienna there is a small Slovak village called Lehnice where, soon after World War Two, several dirt-poor women intent on looting from the Castle of Andrassy broke into a large baroque salon. They came too late, for everything useful had already been taken and everything not useful had been destroyed. Above the oversized eight-meter-wide concert grand piano, which had been hacked to pieces, and which the Count had formerly lent once a year for the most prestigious concert, above the last reverberations of the hacking, above glory and its destruction, hung the largest known canvas by Rembrandt. The Count`s intention of balancing the largest grand piano by the largest masterpiece of painting had been foiled. The impoverished women rather liked the painting. They took it down off the wall; with shards of glass from the broken window they cut it out of its guilded baroque frame; and, overjoyed, they hurried outdoors – into brilliant daylight, directly to the creek, where they beat the canvas against the rocks and pounded it to get rid of the stiff oil pigment, the redundancy of Rembrandt; and, elated by their ingenuity and their new-found richtes, they used the larger pieces, of a green-grey tint, to sew for their children practical and durable trousers. The small remaining pieces of the picture were used for diapers.
Three warmths – the warmth of English pilots
Like other miracles, resurrection is much discussed. It is a popular topic, written about, spoken of, sung, and celebrated. The unclothed girls who voluntarily lay with dead pilots are not written about, spoken of, sung, or celbrated, because they were naked, and also because of something else. And therefore day-by-day they took off their clothes and with goose pimpes along their spines and on their thighs they lay down beneath frozen pilots, shot down in aerial warfare over England; these men were day-by-day dragged by nets from the icy waters of the North Sea, in such a state of hypothermia that they were clinically dead, or virtually so. Contemporary medicine could not have saved them. At one time, a priest whose name is now frogotten was conducting last rites for one such pilot. Out of compassion he allowed the dead man`s distraught sweetheart to press herself against the frozen body, and when she removed her garments he looked the other way. This pilot was the first one resurrected. The priest thus discovered the power of human warmth and he invited dozens of young girls to do likewise. He was killed by the jealous lover of one such girl. Day-by-day the girls with goose pimples a long their spines and on their thighs lay down with the frozen pilots, sometimes in pairs, sometimes three or four together, regardless of whether they were virgins, prostitutes, or nuns, and they put their warm flesh against cold dead bodies. This human warmth, for lack of which infants die, is not discussed. It is a silent agreement of official public opinion, for the right and the duty of giving and getting human warmth will destroy the comfort of alienation. The resurrection is studied and celebrated by plenty of lonely crowds. And modern scientific medicine is still today not able to explain the mechanisms involed when human warmth resurrects.
Three warmths –the warmth of Parisian bordellos
A terrorizer of Parisian bordellos between the two World Wars was an invalid who had lost everything in the war, his legs, his hands, his sex, who entered the bordellos secretly; he let himself be carried to the madam and he bought the youngest, least experienced prostitutes or the less beautiful ones; he gave orders to have them bound to the table with their mouths open anad his body above the mouth, and he waited for the moment when he would have to defecate, the moment when his excrement would enter the mouth. His excrement was the only thing the war had left him, the war continuing this way; as for the girls in Parisian bordellos between the two World Wars, girls lived, live, and will live between two wars but these only between two wars, they were openly frightened to taste the war in this way and fulfill their most honorable patriotic duty – to serve a war hero, to warm the remainder of his blood, that which was not left on the battlefield, anad to give him joy in making use of what had been left to him by his fate.
Three warmths - the warmth of a winter game of Russian children
World War Two. Russian children skate on frozen soldiers.
The gun under the floorboards
Now about one Latin-American failure on the part of a loving brother, who wanted to redeem the lost virginity of his sester, which had been sold by their mother to a government executioner while the girl was strung out on drugs. This brother invented and overe three years secretly developed a gun, and he timed the killing of the executioner directly while the latter was acting in his professional capacity, performing last rites. Just as so unexpectedly the sweetness of slavery had come from the sister`s sex opened by the modther, just so unexpectedly was the executioner during the last rites surprised by the blast of fire, and the cathedral filled with music was sweetly scented by cooked human flesh. The same way the executioner licked his lip at the moment of taking the sister`s virginity, exactly that way the government people in the first row of the cathedral licked their lips in response to the sweet aroma of cooked human flesh. Vengeance consisted of these parallels between crime and punshment. His revenge accomplished, the brother was killed by other executioners. His abdomen was sliced open and together with other victims he was dropped alive from a plane into the silent ocean. The innovative gun which could have served as the prototype for popular secret production of arms for the next general uprising remained limited to this individual revenge, resting under the floorboards of an abandoned concert hall.
Six times – the time of tribal Indians
There exists an East German saying about the Indian soul in John F. Kennedy Airport in New York in 1980.
One East German editor was in that year for the first and last time in the U.S.A. and from Frankfort am Main in West Germany he sat and ate and flew aboard the plane with his first and last Indian. Duration of the flight in 1980 was about twelve hours, and that time they spent together was sufficient for them to know that both of them would be going on to Washington.
For the last time they saw each other at the Kennedy Airport terminal, where the East German editor was in a great hurry, in his eagerness to lose no moment of his single chance to see America, and he was rushing to catch the connecting plane to Washington. The earlier flight had been delayed and he had a chance for a seat on it. The Indian, by contrast, was sitting quietly, his eyes closed, in one of the waiting-room seats with a built-in TV that showed a blank screen. The East German in comradely solidarity tapped him on the shoulder and advised him of the chance to catch an earlier flight. The Indian opened his eyes and responded that he had to wait. Surprised, the East German editor asked why, how come, anad wherefore, or something of the sort, and the Indian explained that he had to wait for his soul. His body, he said, had arrived in New York, but his soul was still on its way.
Translated by Blossom S. Kirschenbaum and Andrej Ferko
