Bisesquicentennial Harmonies

I'm reading another massive Hungarian novel.  Not sure if it's the Satantango ripple effect or just coincidence, but these novels have engaged me in 2026.  It occurred tonight that I once picked Hungary for a European country report in primary school-- those days when an encyclopedia column and a globe was all that was required. I remember making a topographical map out of colored clays on a piece of plywood... I loved doing these things... but aside from the Magyars and Saint Stephen I recalled little.  My current book-- Celestial Harmonies-- is a sort of tour de force of legend, history, personal recollections and downright lies and fabrications. It's wildly baroque and epic.

Surely these modern authors would be thrilled by their recent election; the literature is suffused with Communist resentment and Nazi guilt. For some reason the city of Budapest itself fascinates me-- the two sides, like yin and yang, separated by water, joined by a bridge. My novel is divided into two parts which fact seems to echo this geography like a metaphor; meanwhile I have much trouble with the names and have no clue of pronunciation.  

In personal experience I have known three Hungarian men-- all of whom were named Imre. One of these was my 'date' for the Bicentennial celebrations in the summer of 1976.  I'd just graduated from college and Imre was a political science PhD candidate.  He had a kind of Brian Jones haircut and wore khaki suits with blue shirts that matched his eyes.  I guess he was cute but I only remember seeing the Tall Ships downtown, and walking from the seaport all the way uptown to Yorkville where he ordered some Hungarian traditional dinner in his native language.

Here I am with this memory which surfaced fifty years later in another American celebratory milestone year in which I curiously find myself steeped in Hungarian lore. There's a tiny irony.  And the fact that this is a year of patriotic guilt as opposed to celebration... American politics and the way our national spirit has been distorted into a Munchian monster resembling Shame more than Pride.  

For those of us who are born and raised with cumulative guilt, this keeps us awake.  Guilt, as they say, is a Motherfucker. I lie awake some nights trying to invent metaphors for the couple-- like shame is the distorted haunting shadow of guilt... the hangover that doesn't clear.  I have friends-- recovered alcoholics and more, who seem married to shame. And yet... there are people like our president who don't seem to understand the meaning of either concept. They golf away their cares while we empaths toss and turn, worry about immigrants and displaced Palestinian children-- wounded Iranian protestors and the starving babies of Sudan. 

King Charles, for one, never looks happy. His expression is appropriately pained and compassionate most of the time-- his known pleasure was rock music-- Status Quo and loud bands that drowned out his sorrows and worries... the guilt that is implicit in anyone so privileged by birth. There is nobility in being a sad king. He has his reasons, too.

The stepsister of guilt and shame is blame.  We empaths tend to point fingers at ourselves... if only I hadn't left my college boyfriend he might not have died... if I'd skipped that Theoretical Shes gig at CBGB's my daughter might have been born healthy. How far can I go? Parents who have lost children in mass shootings and other tragedies manage to find a way to place blame... on the shooter's parents, or the gun companies... on the Camp Mystic administrators.  Lawyers encourage this thinking. It's profitable. Does this make anything better?  Yes for justice, no for misplaced cause and effect.

The shocking killing and suicide by Justin Fairfax last week shook us all. How does one pay for mistakes and crippling guilt or shame or self-hatred?  It's a hideous chain of emotional disturbance and a residual curse for his children. Yesterday's mass shooting by a father in Louisiana is nearly impossible to process. How does one begin with love and arrive at these hideous endpoints? How to minimize damage in these cases? What makes some of us fret and suffer over things we cannot control? I read somewhere that without man, God would be horribly bored.  And without God man would be innocent. Is it fear of judgement that makes us behave or not?  What is compassion and how can one keep it reasonably humanitarian versus uselessly dramatic?

As someone who feels small things disproportionately, I have had to temper my instincts with a kind of rationale-- hiding parental worry and panic, blinking back tears on the subway and streets for struggling unfortunates. Does empathy help? If one is a physical therapist-- yes, or as a musician, executing an ensemble vision...  But not always.  We get in our own way, we suffer and damage ourselves and others. I recognize and adore my friends who love too much, too easily, who fall on their proverbial face time and again and end up as victims... emptying pockets for undeserving predators we don't always recognize. Manipulative panhandlers park themselves outside posh restaurants to try to extort these feelings. It's painful but one must draw a boundary.

Hungary is among the landlocked countries... I think of these as having little relief, somehow... nowhere to breathe. The 2026 celebratory year creates a kind of memory arc for those of us who recall 1976.  I wonder what happened to my friend Imre who walked the city with me in his suit-- whether he returned to Budapest and worked for change in a new generation which could perhaps forget their former German alliance. Here... what a different post-Watergate America we walked-- hopeful enough to elect Jimmy Carter who stood for decency and humanity.  I was old enough to have my young guilt and shames but Vietnam had finished... the guilty president resigned. I had none of the dreadful national guilt and shame I feel now especially when I leave the country. Lost integrity, trust... and where is the blame now? Not a question of nostalgia, but future.  It took the Hungarians a long time to effect change, but they managed. On the 4th of July, I imagine all those who voted for the current president standing up and raising their guilty hand in admission.  Then I will celebrate.

We Can Be Mayors....

In the midst of the World Series, NBA season opening, football Sundays, I am a little obsessed with the mayoral race.  Of course my son taught me that in sports, there is a clear winner and something uniquely satisfying about clarity in this complicated world.  But in light of the recent gambling scandal, one begins to doubt.  Where politics is concerned, we have once again sunk back into petty messaging and accusations.  These pertain to the contest, I suppose... but once the voting is over, then the real game begins, and this is worrying.

I took an out-of-town break yesterday and visited the spectacular new art museum at my alma mater. The breathtaking concept of the architecture-- the way the building combined a sense of future with traditional breadth of collecting... was uplifting.  Unfortunately, even this project was stained by negative allegations against the architect; still, his design, which was already in progress, is stellar.

Cult of personality, when I was more naive, integrated one's work occasionally with who one was.  Now,  'persona' has eclipsed what they actually do. The whole lucrative business of branding bases itself on the concept that a celebrity can convince us to do/buy nearly anything. It's worrying... as though all of America has this teenage brain which is unable to separate fact and reality from fantasy and facade.

Visiting old universities and colleges, the 'scent' of academia is palpable and appealing.  I wondered what I'd be if I'd stayed with my art studies, as planned.  At this moment, I'd have probably aged out of the new curatorial generation and contented myself with restoring old paintings or regretting not having taken up the bass. Water under the bridge.  I did have some great conversations and reminisced about old days and my intimacy with the objects in the former museum building where I occasionally pored over manuscripts and painted treasures in a back room.

Sunday night I watched a Tarkovsky film-- Stalker.  It's an extraordinary piece of work with even the film texture a particular choice-- alternating from sepia-tone to rich color-- from depressing, dark reality to a kind of spiritual epiphany. Without doing a movie review, it is both terrifying and then reassuring-- from the ominous post-apocalyptic wasteland to the resilience of the human spirit.  The dialogue stands out; it's poetic, philosophical and inspiring.  One quote stayed with me 'Passion is nothing but the friction of the soul against the outside world'... something like that, which may actually have been lifted from Herman Hesse.

On the way back from Princeton it was cold and damp... leather jacket weather... but I found myself waiting on a train platform with a young student dressed in a sequined sort of bathing suit with a small skirt-- no sleeves, no jacket-- bare legs with high-heeled white boots.  Her flesh was on display;  ditto the fact that she did not shave or groom herself anywhere-- an odd combination.  She was freezing, on her way to a Sabrina Carpenter concert where she would go directly from the train to the venue.  No one really stared at her but in case she needed protection, we struck up a conversation-- about the concert, about her studies.  She worked as a valet summers and spent all her money on concert merch.  Within minutes another woman appeared -- in a pink satin mini dress-- bare arms, with gold fishnets and the same white boots.  They did not know one another.  It was extraordinary... the pink dress was studying neuro-biology and had only a bag with books.  A coat, she told me, would ruin her outfit.  She, too, was shivering. 

No judgment.  In my day we wore jeans to concerts-- there were few 'followers' or even pussy hats or costume choices, although the Zappa Halloween show was something to see.  These girls had the confidence to get on a commuter train-- alone, dressed this way... well, it is Halloween week... but this was something else. Still, I have to concede that their passion, their hero-- white pop-Disney-girlie-dress-up icon, was as valid as my Rolling Stones and Proust and Caspar David Friedrich schoolgirl obsessions.

I fail to understand the current culture of superhero movies, the custom of adults dressing up in costumes, imitating comic books.  Is life so terrifying that one needs to arm oneself against it, imagine one can bend reality with these powers and super traits? Superman reversing the spin of the world to reverse time and save his love-- was a novel idea, but the unlikely movie scenarios come one after another, at the expense of what used to be considered the 'art' of film. It seems not just juvenile but absurd. And while I understand little boys wearing sports jerseys and gear to games, I don't 'see' grown men vying for sports jerseys at auctions for millions of dollars-- or even collecting sneakers and dressing up for games. Then I think of the World Cup and there's something legitimately passionate and patriotic about the spectators. 

It all comes down to this nagging question in my head: who are we and have we changed?  I think we have.  I mean, I have to admire these two Princeton students-- not even 20, for committing to their passion...for wearing it in and out of context... like a movement for them, I suppose. The incredibly lucrative marketing of the merchandise-- the commodification of fame-- well, that's another story. In my day star athletes made a tiny fraction of what bench players now command. 

Getting back to the elections, I have a harder and harder time deciphering who the candidates are. Their opponents define them by their mistakes and failures; we the voters try to see beyond this to their leadership capabilities and their true commitment.  No one at this level is pure. Separating ambition from mission is difficult. I can't help seeing Mamdani in a mirror wearing a superhero cape; he seems too much of that generation to me, and I am also influenced by my son who met him as an aspiring rapper. It worries me.

We are no longer either what we eat, or what we say we are, in politics. Nor are we what we wear, as we learn from the athletes who switch teams and uniforms according to payout. Dressing as Sabrina Carpenter doesn't make us singers or superstars or beautiful, but it does take us a little out of our own reality... and it makes us part of something. Those two women made friends on the train... maybe lifelong friends. That matters. 

I am off to the polls at the moment; I am not thrilled with either choice and I am not defined by my vote. I think in my student days-- anticipating my first eligible Presidential election--I WAS that. Despite Watergate, I had belief and conviction... volunteered and worked for them. I was exploring my soul, trying to understand art and uncover my personal 'calling' by experiencing friction with the outside world. Fifty years later-- badly dressed, and certainly not in costume, I'll pick a candidate and tonight I'll watch the World Series, but I'll always take Tarkovsky.