In order to save time and energy evil should not even be uttered and good should only be done.

Lamplight – Lámpafény#5

Ágnes Nemes Nagy: The Thirst/A Szomj

How to put it? The words cannot find my lips:
what thirst for you, plaguing me, is this?
If my body was a carnivorous flower,
falling for my scent, you’d be devoured.
It could be mine your dark and lukewarm skin,
your delicate hand you use for self-protecting
which in every crashing last minute
says it: even so, I haven’t changed a bit.
your arm bending over my arm is mine,
your hair’s glittering, dark plume is mine
and glides with me, glides like a wing
in rocking landscape, eternal, twinkling.
I would drink in your melting meat
that’s like the tropics, thick and sweet,
and your flavour’s thrilling pizzazz
that’s like ancient sage and puzzlegrass.
And your wavy soul I’ll take it all in
(it’s like a lamp over your head hovering)
I’ll take you all in greedily, insatiably
If my body was a carnivorous flower.
-But this? What else is there? I can never rest.
You love me, I love you. How hopeless.

Lamplight/Lámpafény #4

Lajos Kassák: Herald!/Üzenj

Come on, let’s talk come on, let’s talk
You and Me
come on, let’s talk not with sharp-edged rough but with soft
rounded words
the way we learned from lovers
almost indistinctly
the way oak leaves talk with each other.

Tell me something beautiful
so that I can tell You something beautiful.
Talk to my eyes
to my forehead
straightly to my heart
You talk to Me
and I talk to You.
From the shores of a dream, herald!
with the laughter of a newborn [herald!]
with the waves of sea [herald!]
with playful dolphins [herald!]
with the clang of bells [herald!]
with an eagle
as it floats in the blue sky. [herald!]

My little one
my imagined birdie.
You and Me
let’s talk about the world
in which we wander
never finding each other.

Lamplight/Lámpafény – #3

Attila József: To sit, to stand, to kill, to die/Ülni, állni, ölni, halni

To toss away this chair,

to squat in front of train,

to climb up hill with care,

to turn out the sack down dale

to feed my old spider a bee

to caress an old lady

tasty bean soup to eat

here’s the mud to tiptoe in it

on rail track to lay my lid

just to walk around the pond

to sit clothed on its bottom

to blush amidst the sparkly waves

to bloom among the sunflowers –

or just to sigh a beauty

just a fly to shoo off

and my book to dust off –

to spit in my mirror

right in the middle,

to make peace with my foes,

kill them all with swords,

to check the blood, it pours,

to watch a girl, she turns –

or to simply sit idle –

to set Budapest on fire

to wait for a bird on my crumb,

to smash my bad loaf on the ground,

get my valentine to shreak,

her little sister to squeeze,

and if accountable to the world,

to leave it, never to see me –

 

oh, binder, deliverer,

now this rhyme’s writer,

jokester, and lamenter,

my life, you chooser!

Lamplight/Lámpafény- # 2

Sándor Weöres: Do not lean out of the window/Kihajolni Veszélyes

Not on pad but wooden seat

I wiggled waggled on the train,

I did lean out of the window

There goes my hat in a blow.

 

Where does my hat wander now?

Swallowed maybe by the mire

It’s all sludgy in and out;

in reed-country frog-manor.

 

Running through meads freely

Somersaulting wildly

Spinning like the windmill

Swift, deft like a monkey.

 

Twirling in the whirlwind,

Flies up into the blue,

Rests upon the fullest moon

Gazing at the welkin.

 

Although it is possible

You’ve found it and carry it

But you’d never wear it

Such a worthless outfit.

 

Lamplight/Lámpafény – #1

Sándor Weöres: Way /Út

All comes apart in obedience

All is ambiguous in indulgence

All ripens in attentiveness

On the Roof

The mother woke up suddenly and saw the pale light on the wall. The light-bulb underneath the rake of the roof was smuggling its glim inside the darkest corner of the bedroom. She felt restless again. She knew very well what was going on but she could not find a comforting explanation for it so she rushed out of the room not minding her sleeping husband’s unfriendly mumbling.

Once in the hallway she carefully opened the front door and tiptoed out in the courtyard. It was a late summer’s night but the air was still warm and balmy. Only the severe melancholics were probably able to smell the vague, peppery pinch of autumn. With a voice as mild as possible she launched her worrying question up into the dark where the narrow terrace topped an even narrower vestibule “Are you there, dear”? “Yes, mum”, “Aren’t you coming down, it’s almost two in the morning”. “Just a few more minutes, mum” the daughter replied. “Be careful when you climb down the ladder” the mother said and waited without moving, looking up into the starry night. “I’ll be down in ten” the daughter finally answered.

The mother returned to bed feeling much more at ease and fell asleep almost instantly. It was something in her daughter’s voice that calmed her down. Something made her think her daughter was just as safe up on the roof as she would have been in her own bed. School will start in two weeks, the mother thought, and this will eventually end and the child, as weird as she was at times, would return to her normal teenager’s issues.

The daughter was stargazing for almost three weeks and by now she sort of knew when would her mother come out and ask her to go to bed. Every night she felt the moment of her coming more accurately than the night before yet she was always taken by surprise.

She being the cause of her mother’s sleeplessness made her sad. But not too sad. She comforted herself thinking that her mother had nothing to worry about and the interruption would last just a few minutes. But the most important thing that comforted her was that her mother would wake up to a house at peace.

At least, the daughter thought, these nights were not like those long sleepless nights when they had to witness in horror the violent fits of her drunk father.

Up on the terrace the daughter was wisening up, at least that’s how she felt, that’s what she thought even though she was incapable to articulate anything of her new knowledge. Her vocabulary was probably less evolved than it should have been for a child her age. Images were bombing her brain and her eyes were eating up the universe by night, grinding it and piling it up in the back of her mind.

But the state in which these images would appear she could not enter right away. First, her attention was caught by the street lights and rooftops she could see from the terrace. She was listening to the dogs, crickets, cars, to the slamming of windows or porches as the neighbors prepared to call it a night. The distant ding-dong of the street bell at the railroad crossing filled the darkness and, when a train would pass whistling, she would slowly whistle along with it and wonder about the meaning of the sudden warmth in her eyes that right away loaded her chest fastening her breathing.

Later she would lay down on her back. In this position it was only worth looking up where planes were coming and going with flickering and colored lights. If she looked further up she could see the artificial satellites moving steadily and lofty on their trajectories. In comparison, the planes looked fussy. Gradually, she would become exhausted, lazy. She would not move her limbs and if she felt a little piece of cement detached form the terrace’s floor pressing her skin, she would rarely remove it. Her brain would start the show just about now.

Looking at the big sky was not like looking at an immense and infinite space, it was more like looking inside a dark, damp cave. She could feel the cold air coming out of it drying and cooling the moist of her eyeballs. It had a vague odor she would never be able to describe. Entering this cave needed her courage, but only for the first step. After that, she forgot everything about herself.

With the cement floor pressing her back she felt big as a planet with no trajectory but wandering freely. Most of the times all seemed like a reflection in a mirror. It seemed to her she was exploring the iris of her own eyes with a gigantic magnifying glass. The only thing that she could clearly think and utter was “All is hunger”. She was fourteen and boiling. Her days were as tormented as any other girl’s her age but at night, on the terrace she was different, somehow younger and older at the same time.

All that she learned up there that she could actually use during daytime was that the only words worth saying were NO and YES. In her case, NO to everything she knew before and YES to anything she never heard of yet. As she could not come up with a satisfying conclusion to her experience on the roof she choose to try to recreate that state of mind whenever possible during daytime. She would look at everything and everybody the same way as she watched the stars, the satellites and the planes. She would eat them up with her eyes. And all she saw was hunger. The same hunger as in the skies. Not good, not bad, just plain hunger.

Even the rocks that randomly lay next to each other in a river or on a hill had some sort of tension between them and that tension was hunger. She was hoping that all that she felt and saw on the roof will crawl out from the back of her head and will eventually reach the tip of her tongue. A thousand revelations and only three words to describe them. At first she felt dumb because she had the urge to share the experience with her friends. But that disappeared on the first week – not finding the right words she just kept it all for herself and later it became something more than just another thing to brag about. It became a secret.

After another two weeks school started. The first couple of days she behaved as usually, enthusiastically catching up with her colleagues after the summer break but each day, on the way home, she encouraged herself: “Tomorrow, tomorrow I will do it”.

Finally, after another week she was there, standing in front of her class shushing her colleagues and when there finally was something one can barely call silence she said “I won’t be talking for a while, not unless I can’t avoid it, so don’t feel offended if I’m not talking to you and please don’t ask me why”. There was almost a whole second of complete silence then the class continued to enjoy the break as if nothing had happened, as if that complete moment of silence was just a coincidence – everyone was just finishing a sentence, a shriek, an action at the same time. “Did they hear me?” she asked herself but she didn’t bother to care. She kept her word for two years. The best years.

Glengarry Glen Ross – James Foley

“Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, for where we are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.”
― Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

Most of the stories depicting devils show them having an entertaining, fulfilling job tempting us. A job that sounds more like a hobby. The story of Glengarry Glen Ross says it otherwise. What miserable lives poor devils have!

Not our fight against temptation makes the devil’s job difficult. We rarely fight back and if we do we rarely win. Sometimes we just don’t have what they want, what they must take from us.

But why would a devil ask for something we cannot give? Shouldn’t he know better? He knows it very well but there are some factors even the devil cannot ignore. He belongs to an organization, he has several bosses and, what a novelty, a pain-in-the-ass supervisor who’s not only irritatingly following rules and orders but also seems to be playing for the opposite team!

The Willy Loman-like devils, the junior sales representatives of hell, always get the worst leads. Two per day. Plenty, you’ll see, even for the kind that never sleeps. Their situation is so desperate that trying to corrupt the supervisor to give out one good lead is not surprising. This extreme act, a devil tempting another devil, is what I’d call the temptation with a Droste effect, la tentation mise en abyme, meta-temptation, the ultimate temptation etc. Kevin Spacey and Jack Lemmon are both on top of this situation.

If a junior devil has some talent, some luck – luck seems to strike making no difference between humans, devils and angels – and closes a weak lead, he has a chance to get better leads and to start a real career.

Do you remember John Milton, the CEO of hell aka Milton-Chadwick-Watters, the New York law firm? The John Milton with Al Pacino’s face? The devil’s advocate – 1997?. In Glengarry Glen Ross he’s at the beginning of his outstanding career. He goes by the name of Ricky Roma but has the same Al Pacino shape.

The other devils get to use remarkable vehicles too like Ed Harris and Alan Arkin. Their exasperating dialogues are wrapped around another quote from Dr. Faustus: “The end of logic is to dispute well”.

Or maybe this movie is only about ordinary human salesmen.

Under the Skin – Jonathan Glazer

Breathtaking landscapes grow superb with a patient camera shooting them, with Johansson mysteriously moving about, drowning lust-driven men in a pitch black alien kitchenette or what the heck is that floor stands for!?!

It seems that altruism and humbleness can save your life but these only buy you extra time. The real and final protection is egoism and its primal manifestation: fear.

Basic needs like lust, greed etc are the ones that usually get you in trouble therefore all traps, alien traps as well, are based on these drives. So, think twice when an incredible good offer comes to you out of the blue.

Chanel that egoism to self-protection, get really scared then get really wild and you’ll probably see another day, at least when it comes to encounters of third kind.

L’inconnu du lac – Alain Guiraudie

L’inconnu du lac is a terrifying parable on lust. Lust that works as a weird hybris that defies survival instincts; the men driven by this cathartic lust pretty consciously invite death in.

Its minimalist form and content is achieved through classic rigor of image, purist rhythm of editing and discreet humoristic counterpoint in a sinister story. This way elegance is guaranteed even in the scenes and shots less expected.

One filming location and a limited number of actions: men talking, men swimming, men sunbathing, men fucking, men parking cars and men killing each other. Paradise! The murder ingredient does not make it half a paradise and does not make it a perverted paradise either. Violent death seems not to diminish the Eden-like quality of the place – not on its metaphysical level where this thriller actually sets its goals.