The Search of Appearance – Poems of Hungary
Author(s): Donald Wesling / Language(s): English
/ Issue: 03/2012
We arrived in Budapest for a year’s stay on the day Princess Diana died, 1997, so these poems speak for an earlier era, then recently post-communist. The eleven poems the Editor has selected, six in this issue and five in the next, were written as part of a plan to learn Hungarian people, history, places, writing, language, everything, experiencing one country illimitably. Rainer Maria Rilke, I knew, had said he experienced Spain illimitably, and I wanted that with Hungary. My method was to be called The Search of Appearance, in the belief that with informed search what you perceive is what you get. In a non-dualism, learned from philosophers of science Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, the reality-appearance opposition is not useful. Words that guided me then are from American poet Wallace Stevens’s essay, The Relations between Poetry and Painting: “[What’s needed is] a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above experience, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety.” Stevens (who died in 1955) had never left Connecticut except to vacation in Florida, but if he were in Hungary now, I asked, how would his sensibility, like mine that of a landscapist, be turned toward history and civil society? Seeing and hearing would need to be sharpened, trusted for heavy registration, and I had to take advice on what to read.
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