for each I lose a thousand words
Some of you might enjoy this. It's an excerpt from Sylvia Plachy's out of print book Unguided Tour, which should be on its way in to my arms. She's such a magical creature.
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It is said that if a centipede were to stop and think about how he walks, he would get tangled in all his legs. I'm about to get tangled, but still I have to try to understand why my legs move so that I'll remember or maybe be allowed to forget. Hungary is my fountain of youth, my birthplace. Every few years a longing drives me back to the shrine of my innocence. The first few times the Hungarian words caressed me, the clang of streetcars and the air heavy with Eastern European cigarettes, diesel fuel, and coal burning gave back lost meanings and all the sights and tastes were soul food. But now my grandmother, aunt, and uncle are dead, and the children of my friends as well as my own child are not children anymore. No one asks me important questions like: "How do you love me, with the love of a friend or the love of a mother?" The apartment I grew up in is crumbling and has been without our presence for so long that it holds no more secrets. All that is left is what I carry with me, and I am forgetting and losing everything. An upside-down glass is always kept on the kitchen table to conjure up all the spirits in my house and help me find whatever is lost at the moment. In the storybook of my childhood, Kököjszi and Bobojsza, two elves, friends and protectors of a little boy, Andris, were pranksters who would hide objects by sitting on them and making them invisible. The same elves or their relatives reside in my house too, and I need the glass and some serious spirits to help me find my keys and other things. The "collected" unconscious someone once dubbed my house. It is filled with cracked and tarnished things I've been given or found, and most of my clothes have ghosts in the seams. Every few months a homeless man with the same last name as mine leaves a note on the porch to tell me he waits for me in New Jersey. He thinks I'm his long-lost kidnapped daughter. He found me in the phone book, the way my mother still searches for her younger brother who got lost during the war. "I'd like..." my father uttered, trying to say something important nine years ago in his hospital bed, but the stroke he suffered choked the rest of the words inside him. He waved his hand with a bird's last flutter, and died a few hours later. That night in my dream he stood by the front door in silence, darkly, until a gust dissolved him. I planted an oak the week he died. The neighborhood boys, tired of tearing off ants' legs, twisted its branches and gashed its trunk, but still it stands, tall and straight. Lost cats eat in its protective shade. "What is the name of this island?" asked Andris. "This is Remembrance Island You'll come here when you are big. You'll always come here when you have troubles. When they hurt you or hit you, or when you don't understand what they say or when they don't understand what you say. Take good care of it," said Kököjszi and Bobojsza, "the rest are in the Land of the Lost." Which is worse, the sadness of a loss or the emptiness of not remembering? Losses and gains, like waves, toss you until a big one comes along with the power to stun, to leave you speechless and driven to find a voice that will release the pain. For me, leaving Hungary in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 was such a loss. I had a day's notice to say good-bye and to fill up with all that I loved in my first thirteen years. I visited everyone I could and looked around me with the intensity of the dying. How could one's universe disappear in one day? For some time after, hormones raging in my body, mute and not comprehending the languages around me, as a flüchtling in Vienna and as a greenhorn in Union City, I tried to connect with an alien world through my eyes. I sketched and hoped to be an artist, and then I found photography. The camera was the armor I needed, it shielded my timidity, gave me an excuse to stare, and allowed me to enter into unimaginable worlds, from where I could return with mementos. The pictures I take seem to live in me long before I see them. They are always there waiting for the right light to make me find them. Still, for each picture I take I lose a thousand words and it continues to slip away. Yet I just keep on collecting little moments, bits of everything and everyone. It all started with flowers. From weekend excursions into the mountains I would return clutching a bouquet. The child in my favorite fairytale also liked flowers. One day she saw a field blue with flowers. It was the color of the sky. She picked a bunch and took them home to give to her mother. When they wilted she squeezed the last drops of blue from the petals and with the paint covered the inside lid of her wooden toy box. Suddenly there was a glow coming from the box. She lifted the top and saw a tiny sun and dancing clouds. At night the moon would come and she'd be lost in dreams under the little sparkling stars. The toys were soon displaced for they would get drenched from sudden storms. Life and art used to tug at me from opposite directions and they still do. But now after about twenty-five years of photography, my body warps to its demand. Wall-eyed, I'm no longer on parallel tracks; my right hungrily searches for visions while my left prevents my fall. Everywhere I go I carry these lead weights, my cameras. Maybe I'd float without anchors. The monkey in my dream was warm and fuzzy and full of love. It was a joy to be with him. One day I had to leave for a while and when I came back I couldn't find him anywhere, but then I saw him. He was there, under a rock in a puddle. I rushed to pull him out, but it was just a sheet of paper. I shook it, I tried to dry it, I wanted it warm and fuzzy again, but it remained a piece of paper, a photograph.
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It is said that if a centipede were to stop and think about how he walks, he would get tangled in all his legs. I'm about to get tangled, but still I have to try to understand why my legs move so that I'll remember or maybe be allowed to forget. Hungary is my fountain of youth, my birthplace. Every few years a longing drives me back to the shrine of my innocence. The first few times the Hungarian words caressed me, the clang of streetcars and the air heavy with Eastern European cigarettes, diesel fuel, and coal burning gave back lost meanings and all the sights and tastes were soul food. But now my grandmother, aunt, and uncle are dead, and the children of my friends as well as my own child are not children anymore. No one asks me important questions like: "How do you love me, with the love of a friend or the love of a mother?" The apartment I grew up in is crumbling and has been without our presence for so long that it holds no more secrets. All that is left is what I carry with me, and I am forgetting and losing everything. An upside-down glass is always kept on the kitchen table to conjure up all the spirits in my house and help me find whatever is lost at the moment. In the storybook of my childhood, Kököjszi and Bobojsza, two elves, friends and protectors of a little boy, Andris, were pranksters who would hide objects by sitting on them and making them invisible. The same elves or their relatives reside in my house too, and I need the glass and some serious spirits to help me find my keys and other things. The "collected" unconscious someone once dubbed my house. It is filled with cracked and tarnished things I've been given or found, and most of my clothes have ghosts in the seams. Every few months a homeless man with the same last name as mine leaves a note on the porch to tell me he waits for me in New Jersey. He thinks I'm his long-lost kidnapped daughter. He found me in the phone book, the way my mother still searches for her younger brother who got lost during the war. "I'd like..." my father uttered, trying to say something important nine years ago in his hospital bed, but the stroke he suffered choked the rest of the words inside him. He waved his hand with a bird's last flutter, and died a few hours later. That night in my dream he stood by the front door in silence, darkly, until a gust dissolved him. I planted an oak the week he died. The neighborhood boys, tired of tearing off ants' legs, twisted its branches and gashed its trunk, but still it stands, tall and straight. Lost cats eat in its protective shade. "What is the name of this island?" asked Andris. "This is Remembrance Island You'll come here when you are big. You'll always come here when you have troubles. When they hurt you or hit you, or when you don't understand what they say or when they don't understand what you say. Take good care of it," said Kököjszi and Bobojsza, "the rest are in the Land of the Lost." Which is worse, the sadness of a loss or the emptiness of not remembering? Losses and gains, like waves, toss you until a big one comes along with the power to stun, to leave you speechless and driven to find a voice that will release the pain. For me, leaving Hungary in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 was such a loss. I had a day's notice to say good-bye and to fill up with all that I loved in my first thirteen years. I visited everyone I could and looked around me with the intensity of the dying. How could one's universe disappear in one day? For some time after, hormones raging in my body, mute and not comprehending the languages around me, as a flüchtling in Vienna and as a greenhorn in Union City, I tried to connect with an alien world through my eyes. I sketched and hoped to be an artist, and then I found photography. The camera was the armor I needed, it shielded my timidity, gave me an excuse to stare, and allowed me to enter into unimaginable worlds, from where I could return with mementos. The pictures I take seem to live in me long before I see them. They are always there waiting for the right light to make me find them. Still, for each picture I take I lose a thousand words and it continues to slip away. Yet I just keep on collecting little moments, bits of everything and everyone. It all started with flowers. From weekend excursions into the mountains I would return clutching a bouquet. The child in my favorite fairytale also liked flowers. One day she saw a field blue with flowers. It was the color of the sky. She picked a bunch and took them home to give to her mother. When they wilted she squeezed the last drops of blue from the petals and with the paint covered the inside lid of her wooden toy box. Suddenly there was a glow coming from the box. She lifted the top and saw a tiny sun and dancing clouds. At night the moon would come and she'd be lost in dreams under the little sparkling stars. The toys were soon displaced for they would get drenched from sudden storms. Life and art used to tug at me from opposite directions and they still do. But now after about twenty-five years of photography, my body warps to its demand. Wall-eyed, I'm no longer on parallel tracks; my right hungrily searches for visions while my left prevents my fall. Everywhere I go I carry these lead weights, my cameras. Maybe I'd float without anchors. The monkey in my dream was warm and fuzzy and full of love. It was a joy to be with him. One day I had to leave for a while and when I came back I couldn't find him anywhere, but then I saw him. He was there, under a rock in a puddle. I rushed to pull him out, but it was just a sheet of paper. I shook it, I tried to dry it, I wanted it warm and fuzzy again, but it remained a piece of paper, a photograph.