There is a creative camp, mostly based on visual art activities, organised by Kópia Kollektíva six years ago now in my homeland, in a village where I was invited to present my work last year, and this year I just went there to meet someone dear to me. I didn’t want to do anything productive, especially since my relationship with images had become very ambiguous and heavy. I’ve never ever felt anything like this before, as if I were in a complicated romantic relationship with a heavy workload, a truly long couple’s history, and no grounding or perspective for the future.
So I went to the camp for only one day. No expectations, no plans for doing anything useful, only to hang out and exist. But there was a literature workshop, and I entered; it could do no harm since I am a photographer. And I stayed in the camp.
First, it seemed like an exciting experiment; having photography as my main medium, listening to texts and writing was fun. But the most surprising feeling came when I was listening to the texts and realised that it felt good because they were in Hungarian. It was only one and a half weeks after arriving home, and I was still thinking in Spanish. No one noticed; I did everything to hide it, but as I was telling stories, I just felt that the whole structure and phrases were coming in Spanish, as if I were walking in high heels, which looked great on me; I was confident, but still somehow uncomfortable. But this time it was my mother tongue! I felt ashamed. It was what it was: the price paid for living abroad, walking in high heels all the time. The excitement and awe of wanting to read One Hundred Years of Solitude or The Garden of Forking Paths in the original is long gone, and here I am in eternal high heels, trying to find a new pair of shoes.
The text we were reading was from Györffy Ákos’ A hegyi füzet; in the group, I was surrounded by young ones. We had to highlight interesting parts of the text individually. My highlight from a long story was:
“He spoke in an unknown language; I couldn’t understand a single word. All I knew was that he was speaking in a very ancient language, one that no one but him understood anymore. It seemed as though he were reciting a poem, a verse of unsurpassed beauty.”
(“Ismeretlen nyelven beszélt, nem értettem egy szavát sem. Csak annyit tudtam, hogy nagyon régi nyelven szól, egy olyan nyelven, amelyet rajta kívül senki sem ért már. Úgy tűnt, mintha egy költeményt mondana el, egy felülmúlhatatlan szépségű verset.”)
And someone from the group, a 16-year-old girl, just asked, “But how can beauty be unsurpassed if it is unknown?”
After a long journey and several rational dead ends, hearing and facing destiny from the mouth of Pythia, the high priestess of Apollo in Delphi. Just leaving the known beauty behind is like facing death. And in a way, it IS death. I even know the feeling; it is the same before the start of any new project, when I don’t really know what I am doing, whether it makes sense or not, sometimes yes, sometimes not. It has never been so frightening as it is now. And I will be struggling in high heels as long as I am not brave enough to change my shoes.