Ágnes Lehóczky
MELANCHOLY SWIMMER
And dawn wouldn’t come till dawn when the non-swimmer,
the permanently dehydrated simulacrum swimmer, the
would-be swimmer, pale-skinned, quasi-invisible, turns up in
our summer sleep at the focus of polis’ civic space for silent
thinking and begins to write down what thinking is. And the
thinking thought, the knowing thought is of a melancholic
past always already advancing, long-erased events one
thought to be motionless and idle motioning an inch closer to
where we are every time we think. Thinking that is to come is
thinking of the history of now, an alternative thought of
thinking in which the hydrophilic would never reach margins,
fluidity fuses into concrete and the thinking thought, we are
thinking of, remains unthought-of. Underground panorama,
acropolis sky. The pool, the thinking place in which the
hydrophilic would see cyclops underwater and thinking,
reaching the bottom of the pool, bounces back to the initial
thought with which it began thinking of anything at all. For
now thinking in the world, is always already and only pool.
Pool emptiful. Liquefaction holds no idiosyncratic thought, o
water, unthinking materia prima. Above the pool hefty bodies
of noisy mating gulls… But, look, silent correspondent sans
soul, didn’t Barthes blame the absence of the thoughtful on
love’s deceptive grammar, on the overflow of body fluids
which suffocate thought that is: a syntax so dense of thinking
lack that thinking itself turns impassible? O the apathetic
thought. Where thinking fails thinking the impossible. Didn’t
Nietzsche blame it on the fall of tragedy? I blames it on
soulless motel rooms of the necropolis. The unthinkable
height of heliopolis. The anonymous author blames it on the
artificial quotas between history’s unbearable/bare estates.
Look, thoughtless reader, Hans Castorp’s sickness is self-
inflicted. Stachura’s Janek Pradera in Axing walks off one
night into a winter storm. Buchner’s Lenz disappears in the
Alps for good. Benjamin confronts the cyclop in a hotel room
in the Catalan town of Portbou. Attila József meets the
minotaur in the maze of the South Danubian rail route, a
frosty December evening in 1937 (although when I say
frosty, I don’t mean to sound emotive; I mean that the night
was extremely cold). Woolf meets the medusa deep under the
River Ouse. Radnóti’s nightmare, deprived of any human
thought (while the roar of canons rolls from Bulgaria) begins
in the hills of Serbia and ends in Western Hungary near the
Austrian border on the outskirts of the village of Abda. He
insists on holding on to his notebook along the last journey.
The Bridge Man’s monster manifests itself in a gunshot to his
head after he leaves the Goergen Asylum of Döbling.
Rockenbauer, the diver, faces it at the foot of Naszály in a
small orchard with chestnut trees. The new born calf escaped
this kind of end but only because Anna was there to dive after
her in one of the offshoots of the River Cam one afternoon
this spring. She swam behind the animal covered in mud and
shit and pushed her towards the riverbank with all her
strength. These exclusive cosmic events fulfilling our
antagonists’ desire to lead organic life back into its inanimate
state. To put an absolute end to thought. But look, my silent
correspondent sans thought, melancholy swimmer, the hyper-
real swimmer, the non-swimmer insists. And it insists on
thinking of a thinking which can endure its own thought.
Early winter was already cold that year, temperature falling
under zero. Two trucks rolled in to the factory yard early
morning, as early as six am. Both pigs were transported from
one of the best home-farms of the Eastern country. And the
feast soon would begin. Imagining or remembering the busy
scene from Brueghel’s memoir may help, if not more
accurate than one’s own recollections. The dismantling of the
bodies, a Renaissance medical atlas, rigorous anatomic
precision; the aesthetics of slaughter a posteriori. Then
thought, the secondary. The meticulous tip-toing of a small
group of men and women. The industrious self-involvement.
Not one left without a job. (I is the one hiding in the
bathroom covering ears, nose, eyes and mouth). Bile, flesh,
burning fur, the carcass. Intestines stripped by drawing them
through fists. Stained concrete and ice. It was winter
everywhere. This winter for me was always already blood.
There is no real difference, the dead poet claims in her
notebook posthumously found in her Buda apartment left
behind, on twentieth-century poetics, between perpetrator and
its subject; they take it in turns over the history of grammar.
Because there are places, they say, whose function as place is
transparent, a transparency always already controversial, like
contourless water in the public pool, or the vacuum of
thoughtless thinking as if they have been travelling through
various temporary addresses through a timeless atlas of the
emptied out human mind. My patient correspondent sans
words, I woke and the sky was painted purple illuminating
the house opposite, a lighthouse in the dark, in an
otherworldly light. It looked as if the building had been
derelict for many years, almost haunted. And as if the
traveller, who has just woken up, would have just arrived all
at once at the house he had been searching for all his life.
Post Scriptum. A common badger crossed the road in the city
centre in Sheffield a few metres in front of me as I was
cycling to the pool this morning. The one you have been to,
with yellow and black stripes. Before it crossed, it would
look both ways, as if to see if cars were coming. Then
vanished quickly in a stranger’s garden whose name I do not
know. I saw the badger later drawn on an information board
for walkers in the woods. It became the schema of itself
which explained its structure and anatomy. A secretive
mammal, the encyclopaedia also said. So should this book be
about defining love? A letter in which I will want to write in
a discursive manner as if I were really typing it to you. And a
kind of typing which is meant to be performed with an
alternative affection? The type of love W. S. Graham paints
into words in his letters to Peter Lanyon, or the kind Denise
breathes into poems to a dead son. The love Cezanne injects
into apples. And at this point of the eulogy I can hear you say
I am contradicting myself yet again. And that this paradox is
insufferable for you. But would you accept your role and
become my dead reader following the manic edits of the
faithful typist, always already seated whose name, we don’t
know why, but we don’t know, the letter writer’s meta-
hieroglyphs, the public servant’s self-reflexive Gardiner sign
Y3s (whereby one should imagine the symbol of a scribe's
ink-mixing palette, a vertical case to hold writing reeds, and a
leather pouch to hold the black and red ink blocks),
disputations about summer and winter pool, his dreamy
doodles on amoraphobia, long-spun debates between bird and
fish. Would you, nameless love? Without fleeing to the edge
of Holkham Bay? Always already no further, as we live on an
island and because beyond that only the sea and the North
Pole. Without reacting or interrupting? Post Scriptum 2. Yet
could all this be a poor aporia lacking scribal thought and
cursive tradition, a thinking lack, a bottomless discourse ad
nauseam. Ad vitam aeternam. Ad drowning? For where the
pool ends, the body begins and where cold concrete
dominates, the warm ink tiled sky fades. Post Scriptum 3.
There is a tiny Norwegian island in the Oslo Fjord, a former
children’s prison from which once a boy attempted to escape.
He’d been sent there for killing a whale. But of course we all
know that the boy was the whale. That the story is merely
allegory. He ran across the frozen fjord to reach the mainland
but fell into an ice gap and submerged. And it’s because
water: constitutes of nothing other than intuition. A life
instinct; as if somehow you could conquer weight and ignore
the decadent bar (p 2.45 p /bar= F/A, the ratio of force on the
area over which that force is distributed) on your skin that, as
if it were lead, drags your body downwards.
Copyright © Ágnes Lehóczky 2016
Ágnes Lehóczky was born in Budapest in 1976. She has had three poetry collections published in the UK: Budapest to Babel (Egg Box 2008), Rememberer (Egg Box 2012) and Carillonneur (Shearsman 2014), and three in Hungarian: Station X (Universitas 2000), Medallion (Universitas 2002) and Palimpszeszt (Magyar Napló 2015). She was Hungary's representative poet for Poetry Parnassus at the Southbank Centre during London's Cultural Olympiad in Summer 2012. Her collection of essays on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Poetry: the Geometry of Living Substance, was published in 2011 by Cambridge Scholars and a libretto of hers was commissioned by Writers' Centre Norwich for The Voice Project at Norwich Cathedral as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2011. A sequence of her prose poems, Parasite of Town, on psycho-geographic aspects of Sheffield, was commissioned by Citybooks Sheffield in 2011. She co-edited Sheffield Anthology: Poems from the City Imagined (Smith / Doorstop 2012) with Adam Piette. She currently works as a lecturer and teaches creative writing at the University of Sheffield. Her new poetry collection on swimming pools is scheduled for 2017.