Jumping the Points ?

A View from Hungary

by

Martin Smith

Goods train near Mtzalka, Hungary

It is the most extraordinary thing to have jumped countries. Of course we all travel
as Michael Ayrtons wife so crushingly told my provincially-minded art master and
myself when I was seventeen (We artists, you know, we do travel) and travel
is something I have done before. But it is so astonishing to find a perfect parallel
existence waiting for me in Hungary. So I multiply 'my' lives...I have one in Georgia,
I have a brand new one here in a small, very English seeming town in a sunny place
where I have a role and identity, all set up in advance for me...and I have a past in
the UK, a past which blurs with every day that passes. To go back to it would be a
huge and unwelcome effort. I am teaching my students two wonderful works of
literature; or I hope to be....and as they are young, they will be stretching
themselves to find the meanings as well. Of course, I always feel that art is a closed
book, but that its revelations are always available to the person who goes 'to the
interface', as I call it....the interface is a magical place where life suddenly sheds its
cloak of ordinariness and becomes magical as it should be.

Children are so refreshing because they sense this magic and even live in its
ecosystem until deadening routines, adumbrated in the interests of civilization,
gradually bring all creativity to a halt. There is a huge conspiracy afoot to reassure
citizens that life is normal and predictable no more than that and that our
purpose here is to be born, eat, digest, sleep, reproduce, work and die none the
wiser for our 70 years on the planet. Since mankind fears to know and live with this
truth that life is beautiful and infinitely renewable, and above all a heroic, individual,
quest for a personal and special coded message intended for you and you alone,
and that if you hit a suitable time warp you can renew it - make it exponentially
richer - (for example, time happens at half the speed here for me in Hungary than it
did for me in Georgia) - I guess that there are many unhappy, unfulfilled and empty
lives.
This also happens because humanity steadfastly refuses to wake up to the fact that
life is not an empty stage upon which we must enact a life without script (like a bad
Beckett play!) but a Mozart opera fully written and ready for us, waiting for us to
sing our role, a singing for which we are somehow magically prepared in advance....
That is the fundamental philosophical error of terrorists. Not only is their whole plan
of action primitive in the extreme, but it does not even cohere with a defensible
theory of what life on the planet is all about anyway. And thats something quite
irrespective of religions, which are at best a subtle dress to hide the nakedness and
wonder of the human created in the image of God.
*
Ever had that feeling, when you go to a musical performance, wow they have really
prepared for this, look at the instruments, the professionalism...the obvious highest
quality materials that have gone into making the percussion instruments, for
example, or the wonderful Steinway with its name enblazoned soberly but hitting
you in the face, upon which someone will perform, and in this performance bring
you new realizations about what, say, Beethoven found as being new and fresh and
so far undocumented in life; and thus had to say with notes? Well so much this
much , is obvious to me.that others, somewhere along the line, also felt (and
have felt) the new freshness of life and reacted to it by making art works and doing
great things. although I had to struggle for that last bit about time travel and
infinitely renewable life energy. To find that out I had to do what no-one else has
done, move from early twenty-first century Georgia to late eighteenth-century
Hungary (two countries administratively entirely with dust in their eyes) and do so
specifically as a freelance and with my own eyes open, that is, making my move
potentially as a writer Although I am not sure I realized that at the time of transit.
(Of course our physical lives will change format eventually through death and that
sweet sickness of disappearance from the visible spectrum, which is not so bad as
all that when we know that beyond it even more beautiful patterns await us. So

enjoy! And meanwhileI have to teachcivilizationTo eleven-year-olds.The

paradox is complete.More on that later!)

Daniel Barenboim in performance