Terrās aliō calentēs sōle
Franz Pokorny
I saw her again at the opulent hilltop villa of the Danube Institute, the boutique centre-right think tank presided over by veteran Thatcher speechwriter John O’Sullivan. She stood before the panoramic windows with two overfull glasses of orange juice in her hand, the Budapest waterfront resplending behind her in the winter sun. She was one of those girls I once coffee with for exactly 90 minutes and will spend the rest of my life thinking about, less out of desire than to understand what her existence meant — 90 minutes is not a long time, so this has to be pieced together from the thin source material in the way that one might try to reconstruct, say, Heraclitus’ system from the surviving fragments of papyri. One of those girls… or of those girls, one? The names change, details are added and subtracted to and from her face, her hair changes from blonde to light brown to a deep caramel, yet her eyes ever burn the same pale blue. They — she — glides around me like a ghost.
The point of literature is not to be haunted, but to haunt. The African primitives who believe a portrait can trap a man’s soul may be operating from a dubious epistemology, but the point is unimpeachable. To write about someone is to seal them for all time in an enchanted chamber, and only she whose soul is too expansive for the word alone to contain can escape. The writer has only one response to this cheek: to paint a kind of trompe-l’œil with language, in which those elusive aspects of a person’s character appear to break through from the confines of the picture and vanish into a transcendent realm. To see her reaching out for the infinite and to stretch your hand out with her.
Modernism, insofar as anything called that actually merits the name, sought to push the age-old, hylomorphic concept of art beyond its limits, tearing back the moth-eaten brocade of form and substance and revealing a world of pure ideas beyond. Only a master at the zenith of his powers can truly relish in the breakdown of perspective, the collapse of line and structure, the dissolution of representation into pure will, or its negation. But as the new styles attained orthodoxy in the art schools, the modernists’ dissolution of form lost its inner dynamism and staled into an idea of formlessness, which itself decayed into „postmodern“ or „contemporary“ art requiring no technical skill to produce. The artist was reduced to no more than a gallerist, and, freed from form and content, „art“ became unmediated experience; something to self-consciously enjoy while strolling through the cool open spaces of the gallery (there are echoes here of the 19th century passage of Western thought from idealism to existentialism, but this is a whole other matter entirely). The coincidental was elevated to the status of the essential, the sensory became the intellectual, and the occasional („that sense of time and place“) took the pulpit of the eternal.
I caught her eye across the gallery. Gleaming white walls, sleek right angles, warm lights that bathed the room in a synaesthesia of milky reds and blues, blurring into a nostalgic fragrance which I could not quite place — this atmosphere you can find at any „atelier“ from Prenzlauer Berg to Pskov. A sallow glass of white sparkled in her hand, though I knew her not to drink. Droplets condensed on silver ice buckets containing unopened bottles of Moet somewhere out of sight — or had I errantly deduced their presence from first principles? The works on display that evening were actually those of the gallerist: once just another starving artist, a commission from one of the defence contractors that had recently opened up a new „campus“ in the city’s southern suburbs had furnished him with the funds to buy the space and fit it out after his own aesthetic proclivities. It was a pure non-place; nihility yearning for dimension, the silence of an orchestra waiting for the conductor to raise his baton, and other flowery metaphors which his gallery frankly did not deserve.
It was not the things in themselves that so animated her, but the idea of these things; of high-minded conversation rubbing shoulders with the greats of art and culture, of minimalistic nordic aesthetics, of wealth, happiness, summer evenings in an eternal somewhere else. In a sleeveless black dress, her dark blonde hair falling below her shoulders, she dissolved into the atmosphere; a stroke on the canvas he had painted in the perfumed September air. A dilettante with acrylics, unspeakable with watercolours, just plain bad with oils, he had found in the guests at his soirees his true medium, and his masterpiece was to create a world in which she could be.