Those who are in the minority know that they have to do more, and the better they are

Whoever takes the Consolation book of poems, and whether you read it all the way through or just skim through it, you may be confronted with the fact that despite the loss and grief, joy and light are just as dominant in it, and present with the same kind of weight. How much work is it to make them go hand in hand? From the book it seems as if this is a simple, self-explanatory thing.

The good thing is that it goes without saying, and I think it does. My worldview is circular. It is basic knowledge that what goes up comes down, and then back down. The alternation of light and darkness is also coded into us, the belief in this moves people, and people who love plants know that life comes from rotting, and the seed is nourished by rotting. Today, we somehow expect ourselves to be happy all the time. I am a person whose pain and pleasure are very extreme. But as a lucky person, I have a great capacity for joy, because in my childhood I was allowed and taught to be very happy, and something of this child remained in me. Of course, keeping this up in the dark is hard work, but you have to leave the door open. Like a child whose fear is driven away by a crack of light. In the book, this light shining through the gap appears, which is not the peak of happiness, but a half-baked state, when we know it’s dark, but we also know there will be light.

Was the consolation, which speaks for itself, a process or a turning point, a sudden enlightenment?

Sometimes this reverses itself, enlightenment can come to a person in the most unexpected moments. Of course, you have to prepare your soul for it. But I was very happy that at that time I learned that mourning work exists, that mourning is work, a patient wait. This was not so obvious long ago. Little by little, one convinces oneself, or makes sure, that absence is presence. The singer Evelin Tóth told me that when her mother died, they told her: your resources have dried up. I just wanted to show that this source is inexhaustible. In the past, I was very careful not to push my mystical side to the fore, since I am an objective poet, I come from a family of scientists, I have a PhD myself, and writing also requires a kind of support. Childbirth and the loss of my mother, when my relationship with existence changed. I can’t support myself. In addition, the poet is also a kind of shaman, somehow a mediator of the community. A medium who is in contact with the spirit world. This book also conveys a little towards the spirit world, through grief. In other words, grief functions as a door in this book through which you can see the light.

The grief work seems to have helped him somehow tame the wholeness, pinch it by the neck, and hand it over.

It took courage, like the other turning point in my life when I became a mother. I have already tried to let go of the pain of missing a mother, it is not good to remember the person from the other world by crying, since she gave us so much joy. If we loved, we should not remember the pain, the loss, a very strong lack in the shape of a mother will always remain, but we must be careful to fill it with the memories of the past. This is how we can create a future for our relationship with the lost. I feel this connection very much now, but there is no need to drag anyone to the ground, if we constantly live in the spirit, then we cannot take care of our daily tasks. Of course, a very strong mother-shaped deficit always remains.

There is a sentence in the book that light softens the material. This can be positive or negative. Another paradox, which you seem to be able to operate well.

It was hard for me to get to the point of accepting this, because it’s black and white, and it’s easy to get the idea that it’s self-contradictory. However, I think that every thinker has a duty to contradict himself, to argue with himself. The worker of the spirit, that is, the intellectual, has the duty not to get stuck in his principles, and the poet’s element is plasticity, becoming a material that softens with heat. The Proteus structure. If only because anyone who deals with words constantly runs into the ambiguity of words. I play with words all the time, fiddling with them involuntarily. One gets caught up in one word at a time, and one’s brain begins to run over it. For example, in my short story Eltart, which I wrote the other day, I play with the fact that this word has three meanings. Words are very strange, they can lie and tell the truth in the same minute. In such a world, where there is reflection, there is duality, paradox, and if we don’t accept that, then we are finished.

It is also striking in this volume how much melody there is in spite of the subject. The melody is also a kind of handhold, does it help keep you in shape? To keep the poem together, too, if the words are derailing?

I really believe in music as a primary force. Everything, crying, writing, breathing, and all meaningful writing has a rhythm, but the poem is different, the music really holds it, gives it meaning. Of course, I also write in form because it’s easier to remember. The title of my other new book A humpback. I need that hump, that certain one death sentencere, because the point is not the meaning of the words, but the fact of humming, the possibility of singing, that can overcome fear. If we are afraid, we cannot sing. Singing is a consolation. As long as we mourn and scream, as long as we scratch our skin and beat our heads against the wall, we cannot be comforted and we cannot sing. The poem is a word, so it is not shouting, not crying, not yelling. (For example, I couldn’t write during that time. I was screaming Jim Morrison.) The mourner also received mourners a long time ago, because he couldn’t even sing the church hymns. Because it’s form, and then it’s not just about form. The mourning woman is meant to give shape to the pain of the mourner. This is important to me: to do the mourning. There are specific poems in it that I wrote as a consolation for someone. In the past, I wrote many mourning poems, so I tried to deal with the absence of those I lost, and on the other hand, to keep in touch with them.

The process of mourning work is less visible in the volume, but rather only its result, the wink at completeness. Despite the fact that he said that this is his most confessional, most personal volume, it shows little of the debris, the pain part.

Because that’s not my job. Grief is not the first, but consolation. And you can’t console from scraps. Or we comfort someone by hugging them and saying all kinds of nonsense into their ears – like comforting a child. That bumping. But grief is too painful for that, it really breaks you. Thus, in order to be able to console, we must first pick up our scattered pieces. And you have to build from the ruins, from the pieces of memories, like a mosaic maker. I didn’t want to die anyway. And I had to pull myself together to survive. That word is apt. Pull yourself together! – with a small broom. You have to get your health back, your joy back. And that’s why there is this great collection in the volume – the tight forms, even the playfulness. The comforting rhymes. The fact that rhyme, rhythm, and melody exist at all is a comforting thing in itself. Hits and huf-huf music are also good examples of this.
This volume is not trauma poetry, not trauma writing. But that doesn’t make his songs lies. I belong to the Lator school, that is New Moon, Holmi to his circle, a WestI am the heir of many, so I learned that you can transpose your own pain. It’s not about showing the debris, my priority is above. I could look at the debris, but I’m a poet looking up, a poet walking on clouds, looking at the stars – I feel like that’s my job. I watch for the hope that wants to grow out of the rubble in the cracks. I was recently at Nick Cave’s concert, his two sons died, he was on the floor, yet he showed the ladder between heaven and earth. Maybe these poems will take you somewhere.

And the broken person, if someone shows him the light, what can he do with it?

You don’t have to do anything with it, but I think the mourners still need it, because the epitaphs testify to that. If communication with God ceases, then love and the death around us are what connect us to something not of this world, because in these two we can experience metaphysics, some kind of secret. The poem can help in this experience. Singing is an elevated state of being.

Does melodiousness and playing with language confirm that life is just a game that should not be lost sight of?

It took me a long time to realize this. It wasn’t obvious, because I’m not a playful person, except for words. I don’t like to play because it means not only ease, but also compliance with rules. A free cage in which we are locked. I learned this from Weöres, and it requires Weöres’s enormous freedom and squeamishness, which triumphed over his own fragmented life and depressed constitution and brought him out of the darkness. Like Paprikayancsi, when he runs away with his head under his arm. This volume is pretty consistent in that it doesn’t really crumble, but instead pulls itself out of the darkness and celebrates life. At least he’s trying really hard. This volume is intentionally beautiful.

Containing children’s poems A humpback as if it were a piece of paper Consolationto. Both are readable and encouraging.

It should make me happy, I guess. The two volumes were published almost simultaneously. With Emese Molnár, who wrote my previous volume Advent calendarhe also set it to music, I worked on the concept. Because it’s good to sulk, it’s good to laugh. Vigass grew out of Emese’s request for a poem for his mother’s death. These poems are often a little psalm-like, uplifting. They don’t calm me down, they lift me up; calmness smoothes me out, it pushes me out, pulls me up. Because I’m not calm at all. (laughs)

What do we screw up by wanting to come out of grief in such a way that we think we have to look for this smoothing out, this reassurance? Maybe we’re looking for the exit in the wrong place?

I don’t know, maybe. Although it may be, it is also a matter of structure. In any case, I’m a restless creature, I can’t calm down. My mother is both present and absent. There is none. It exists because I have it, and it doesn’t exist because objectively it doesn’t exist. This is the consolation of the nervous again. But whoever wants to go to space will get damn hard things, everything around him will be whistling so that every part of him aches, so space is not a calm place. The Sun glows, the photon is always moving. I need the glow, the whirlwind, the vortex of being. I don’t want to fade away.

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The weight of capital flies, the burden lifts, writes. As the saying goes, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. What do you think, do traumas and crises really increase a person’s strength and not weaken it?

I myself have used this saying many times because I like it. I was socialized in the fact that the palm tree grows under the burden – it was also important, because I grew up in a minority, and in Transylvania we learned for life that the sand must form into pearls in the shell. Anyone who is a minority person knows that the more burdens are placed on them, the harder it is, the more they have to perform, and the better they are, they always straighten up and don’t give up. On the other hand, in the first place, if something doesn’t kill you, you carry the answer in yourself. With a rough example: my mother died, not me. I didn’t die from it, but I suffered a lot. I was in great despair, but the desire to live was greater. The compulsion to live is terrible. I faced the darkness, but I didn’t go into it. Life is stronger, death cannot enter our heads. I realized that if grief wanted to kill me, it would have, but once I survived, I had to live. It’s that simple. There is no almost, there is no “almost killed”: almost is no.