This is a somewhat peculiar poem. Made of the texture of a peculiar conversation, fragmented. An impossible dialogue about the impossible nature of the poetic enterprise. A dialogue in the Beckettian sense: the dialogue of the absurd, the voice of the speculating mind. It is a disintegrating dialogue of a deconstructed world Nemes Nagy constructs of objects, wreckage, debris, of the thrown away: the ‘dreck’. The Beckettian tone makes it uncertain whether the addresser and the addressee are separable; the ‘you’ and the ‘I’ emerging into one self-contradictory monologue. Who is being spoken to? The reader? Everyone? No-one? Without the ‘Other’, life and the world do not make sense – we need a partner in this dialogue, a real or an imagined one, who agrees and disagrees, argues and comes to a consensus with us about the insignificant mysteries of the world.

 

About a tram station, for instance – whether it is ‘possible’ or ‘impossible’ to describe this station that may not even exist, with tropes that do not suffice. The long trusted poetic image becomes ‘unsaid’, ‘silenced’, the poetic image the poet had thought to be positioned ‘at the crossroad of enormous powers’ now fades away into unfinished as ifs and it looks as ifs. For, as Nemes Nagy says in another poem, all observation is futile, ‘all looking is superfluous’. ‘Now’, she says, ‘I look at nothing’. The trope one had confided in falls into silence, or plummets into the colloquial, because nothing we utter is good enough to make this world comprehensible. It is safer to ‘look at nothing’ and let the ellipsis talk; to let the ellipsis erect ‘another world’, with ‘another sky’.

Yet, ‘one must write’, Nemes Nagy says, despite the very fact that we do not know at all ‘what we are doing’. One must speak, Beckett agrees. One must go on with the usual meticulous precision in focusing merely on ‘the details’, on the insignificant, for example on a ‘single cat of minimal consequences’, or on a ‘contingent content of a station’; one must focus on the lifeless by removing the contingent. And what will we find? An insignificant miracle: that the invisible, the unsaid, the lifeless has more solidity than what the eye can catch. That only by fixating on the objective world like the ‘hunter on its prey’ will we find something that may give us a shield against the existential experiences of a whole generation: not only against the experience of war, ‘but of a sense of annihilation, or of life-threat after which it becomes doubtable whether it is possible to live on or not.’

 

This sense of annihilation does lurk in the poem too – in the scene of the tram station crumbling away, existent or non-existent, with its carved wooden pillars, a country veranda in autumnal light. Corpses of crush barriers around it, leaning on a heap of broken stone between railway sleepers. With rusty cable bushes in the grass. Floating stone-stairway’s oblique plane on the hillside. Characteristic. Characteristically large post-blast stairway. They have blown it out. Only the bunker is untouched, the iron door open, rubbish inside. Two persons could fit in, just. Standard size. Characteristic. If we could ‘strip away the contingent, the blackness of astronomical charts and the night sky’s silver landmarks would be visible behind it.’ There is one single lesson Nemes Nagy teaches us: that even if all that we had confided in is ‘blown’, the ‘law is invisible’ and we humans stand at the points of intersection between that which has life and that which is lifeless.

 

There is life in the lifeless, these objects indeed ‘live’ on the ‘hillside’. Not too many. For example, two stone posts up there, an old, familiar entrance somewhere. A trunk tipped between them. Two stone posts, behind them a forest track with an uncertain, overgrown bend, as if it were leaving somewhere. The tram station leads us into the realm of poetic articulation; it forces us to confront the ‘unnamable’; and by this articulation we may be able to grasp the world in its incomprehensibility.

 

Nonetheless, this language we think we possess is deceptive, playful and leaves one perplexed. It is almost impossible to say what we mean, however hard we try: ‘Look at the table, the door, the carburettor, crowd hysterics, the mountain goat, look at them carefully. And then try to transform the carpet fringe into words.’ We may go back and forth in our linguistic struggles as there are so many hills, serpentine paths, diversions, that it could be behind any waves of the hills, behind another canyon another ravine could appear, that wasn’t blown up, was blown up but renovated 30 years before, ruined, un-ruined, but still. We may indeed go back and forth, yet it may leave us with nothing, with only the promise of itself, as it may have already ‘escaped’, been ‘cancelled’, ‘misinterpreted’, ‘blown away’ or ‘renovated’; and whether we, the ‘you’ and the ‘I’ argue about this or not, disagree or not, it may be just that it simply isn’t, that it isn’t at all, that it isn’t there at all.