—for LM, arrow, guide

I

10:00 and the ringing of bells from Szent István’s towers. Which happened yesterday is happening today will happen tomorrow what continuous present is this. The ringing of bells contiguous with sparrows starting from the square, light pooling around the window that I was or will be, am sitting in. Fanlike and bellowing sounds apprehended as music as the gasping of the broken mechanical bird. Which is what I have come to call the borrowed clock the furnished apartment in Budapest I inhabit this following sound until it blends with the whir of blood and returns to reside in my chest. To correspond with the problem of the present tense is the action of the poem. And so to tune into the moment means exceeding any given form.

But nevertheless we traverse. With another rhythm we were off the platform and walking through the station and I was describing the workings of language in another language. I was lost in a geometrical puzzle of colored light, of event become gesture lending itself to a series of gestures until you pointed to a keyhole in one of a series of green-battered doors and I stopped. And as I bent to look I was yielded over to the gilded room inside, to the inaccessibility of chandelier and brocade, the intact waiting room of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in counterpoint to my body weighted by other bodies, by having been moved to the capital by the labor of a train. That we are constituted by such moments of hinging yields to the field overtaken by the sweetness of mint and so to dwell there in silence even as the cold of earth seeps into the fabric of my dress. I document this by sound constructed in the base of my throat and call this doctrine something individual, a process of pulling on gloves, buttoned to the elbow, and then unbuttoning, pulling off.

Agamben begins “The Original Structure of the Work of Art”—Chapter 9 of The Man Without Content—by quoting an obscure statement about rhythm-as-source made by Hölderlin, during his mad years. Bettina von Arnim, who frequently visited his rooms in Zimmer’s house, transcribed the utterance and included it in her book, Die Gündercode, calling the statement oracular. In attempt to come into correspondence with the phrase, Agamben turns to Book II of Aristotle’s Physics. Here Aristotle philosophizes the essence of nature, building an argument about rhythm and nature from quotations taken from Antiphon the Sophist, whose work we have only in fragment. As such, Agamben creates a chapter on origins from a foundation of lack: Antiphon’s body of work exists (for us, for Agamben) only in quotation. Hölderlin, here, exists only as transcription, quotation, for his words were absorbed into walls just seconds after uttering.

Agamben: “Seeking the essence of nature, he [Aristotle] relates the opinion of the sophist Antiphon, according to whom nature is τὸπρω + τον  ρρύθμιστον, that which is in itself shapeless and without structure, inarticulate matter subtended to any shape and mutation, that is, the prime and irreducible element identified by some with fire, by others with earth, air, and water (Aristotle, Physics 1 93)a). In contrast to τὸ πρω + τον  ρρύθμιστον, ῥυθμός is what adds itself to this immutable substratum and, by adding itself to it, composes and shapes it, giving it structure. In this sense, rhythm is structure, scheme, in opposition to elemental, inarticulate nature.”

We go by tram to the park, get off near a small building erected as an art gallery for the 1884 National Exposition, flowerbeds mulched and seeded, mud-path, a jogger passing we wait for the light at the corner. Stefánia út before us a row of embassies, previously mansions inhabited by minor Austro-Hungarian aristocracy. First we pass Libya undulating art nouveau lines dingy-white plaster with peach trim, metal shutters clamped over each window. Do you see you say gesturing to a vacant expanse of the building’s wall there used to be a mural there. In the overgrown garden a plexi-glass structure not a greenhouse but a surveillance-proof conference room. What code triggers your secrets the building’s secrets the street’s secrets we pass Switzerland, Iran, turn right at Thököly út, continue to no. 61. Our destination is a four-story building, ochre plaster, built in 1911 in the Folk Art Nouveau style by Lajos Ybl, the nephew of famous architect Miklós Ybl, designer of the Opera on Andrássy útca. In this version of the story you point out the building’s asymmetry, folk motifs embedded in wrought iron planters under each window you say you see the floral design here becomes geometrical a gesture rather than figurative organic form. In another version of the story the building is four years old and we have arrived home. I am trying to look fresh in my wool walking suit. This takes considerable effort for the March sun has the strength of summer, the Setter pants on his leash, I say nothing in response to your monologue on war, nation, duty.

Rhetoric originated as a tool for categorizing the ways source texts can be transformed for particular trajectories of reuse: (1) adiectio (expansion/ superabundance/ addition); (2) detractio (abridgement/ lack/ omission/ subtraction; (3) immutatio (switching/ interchange/ substitution/ transmutation); (4) transmutatio (transferring/ transposition). These categories of change also govern the formation of figures of speech and can be employed regardless of the genre or nature of the original. To what extent does transformation hinge on the nature of source, to what extent does it hinge on a pointed how of action? A response, it turns with how we look at it I turn with how I look at it set on its edge the poem spins.

II

Some source texts have the stability of earth, some of water, some of fire, others of air. The present moment, as source, occupies shifting space. A fragment of text without knowledge of the primary language. A flicker of branchlight on 18th century walls. Walking over the Lánchíd, which translates from Hungarian to English as Chain Bridge and so becomes for me figurative, instructive, for I learn lánc = chain; híd = bridge. And so the orientation of the walk depends upon the saying. I turn with how I look at it, a linking of languages of names that add, omit, substitute, transfer. And while an allegorical statue of Justice converts a relatively stable concept into a known image (blindfold, scales), a realist statue of an ordinary woman posed on a faux balcony in a residential neighborhood of Budapest bevels. There is no consistent narrative explaining how or why she exists: she connects to several concepts (woman, balcony, stone) to no concept at all (not myth, not Bible, not tale). And so hinges on the how of the connection of action, the moment of making from a collection of forms: love lost life lost an experimental sculptural addition.

Conventions of narrative serve future and past, lead away from the liminal moment unless layered, doubled back. I name this action “past” and the moment becomes otherwise (Title: My Life from Back Lot to Bridge in 50 Seconds or Less. Title: My Life as Released Balloon). I name this by future tense and it becomes a map to where the instant might go, now risen like a wave of heat delivering me unto a desert, shifting dunes, the blearing down of noon (Title: Searing into the Sunset, A Misguided Romance. Title: Thank You for the Lack Lacan). But how to form the present tense from the inside. I see my reflection in the window. I stand making a moving image, writing out of the ringing of bells. To language at the source. To refuse the stance of naming the moment for it names me. The action of the poem says you don’t get to choose.

We go by tram to the park, walk past the exhibition hall at its edge. We stop to admire the building’s tiled niches they flank the steep entryway stairs and upon inspection they are not tile but plaster molded to look like tile. The building was erected to be an art gallery for the 1884 National Exposition was used to display medical instruments during the 1896 Millennium Celebration it now houses temporary exhibitions such as the current feature: Folk Motifs as Analogy for Chemical Compounds. We continue up Stefánia út past the embassies first Libya then Switzerland so crisp in its lemon yellow its grand and mellow lines a breeze catches its white cross its poppy red flag. Wisteria is soon to bloom over windows its fence tall, modern, spiked. We turn right at Thököly út, stop in front of no. 61, I run my fingers over the low stone wall crumbling in places to show its interior, mortar and stones it was not uncommon you say to use stones from the Danube as filler. In this version of the story you point to folk motifs echoed in wrought iron window boxes, the building’s asymmetrical features the contrast between straight and undulating lines. In another version you are the architect’s son. You have just returned from studies in France you are yourself an architect are shy with new knowledge with this visit to the construction site, with telling your father of the methods architects of the chateaux along the Loire used to create the illusion of symmetry. In fulfillment of the dictates of mathematical form, when exterior pattern demanded a window, but the structure of the building would not support an opening, architects installed blind windows: lintel and pediment affixed to façade. Often, an allegorical figure, sculpted in half-relief, creates the impression of inhabiting. Justice standing at a window that doesn’t exit. Time peering out to see if her boat has come. Your mind’s eye full of French air of white stone and blue tile roofs of pilasters, arcaded loggias, terraces, turrets you wonder if your father is listening.

I document this by sound constructed in the base of my throat and call this doctrine something individual, a process for pulling on gloves, buttoned to the elbow, and then unbuttoning, pulling off. But nevertheless we traverse. That we are constituted by such moments of hinging yields to the field overtaken by the sweetness of mint, and so to dwell there in silence even as the cold of earth seeps into the fabric of my dress. With another rhythm, we were off the platform and walking through the station and I was describing the workings of language in another language. And as I bent to look I was yielded over to the gilded room inside, to the inaccessibility of chandelier and brocade, the intact waiting room of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in counterpoint to my body weighted by other bodies, by having been moved to the capital by the labor of a train. I was lost in a geometrical puzzle of colored light, of event become gesture lending itself to a series of gestures until you pointed to a keyhole in one of a series of green-battered doors and I stopped.

Agamben: “If we look at the different meanings the word ‘structure’ assumes today in the natural sciences, we notice that they all rotate around a definition derived from the psychology of form, which Lalande, in the second edition of his dictionary of philosophy, summarizes as follows: ‘in opposition to a simple combination of elements, a whole formed by phenomena in solidarity, such that each phenomenon depends on the others and can be what it is only in and through its relation to them.’ Structure then, like Gestalt, is a whole that contains something more than the simple sum of its parts.”

While The Man without Content, taken as source text, is solid enough for me to excerpt—to cut phrases from the work and solder them onto my own—it also, as text, embodies fluidity. Type on a page become syllable of concept and image in the mind. Become thought, translation, translated. Into English, Agamben’s Italian. And Bettina von Arnim’s German transcription of Hölderlin’s oracular statement. Here it is: “Everything is rhythm, the entire destiny of man is one heavenly rhythm, just as every work of art is one rhythm, and everything swings from the poetizing lips of the god.” How to approach such liquidity. This phrase, Agamben admits, is at first blush too obscure to tempt conversion into a philosophical query. In the very next sentence he yields to temptation, begins correspondence with the statement by transforming it into a question: “what is rhythm, which Hölderlin attributes to the work of art as its original characteristic?” Transformation: speech to text. Transformation: statement to question. Such is the passage from present to future. To build a lattice from this.

III

On the question of whether or not Antiphon the Sophist was or was not the same person as Antiphon the Orator, Statesman, Rhetorician, Logographer—Classists disagree. Fifteen of the Orator’s speeches are extant: all take cases of homicide as subject. Though regarded as the founder of political oratory, the only public address made by the Orator himself was at his trial for treason, which he lost. And so was condemned to death. Of Antiphon the Sophist we have only fragments preserved as quotation via other work. In On Truth he juxtaposes the repressive qualities of convention and law with nature, making a plea for nature’s need of spontaneity and freedom. Nature, in its essence, is free. And so why, he asks us, torment human nature by infliction of unnatural law?

To experience the present moment from the inside out does not exclude veils of individual and cultural perception, but moves through and with them knowingly. And so to dress authentically is to make out of veil, out of copy, out of layers at play with body-rhythms. I walk across the Lánchíd alone, hearing you say “gyermekláncfű,” then “child-chain-grass,” to which I answered “dandelion.” I walk across the Lánchíd and experience it through my acquaintance with its picture in my guidebook, through the mineral taste of the air, through the sestina-essay I have just been writing, the Agamben I am reading, taking all of this in we are part and parcel. Addition to and subtraction from become the vehicles transforming something foreign into something I am familiar with. The source changes as the moment turns, I turn, we turn and so become the how of the connection, a collection of forms: love lost life lost a faux balcony an experimental sculptural addition.

Agamben: “This ambiguity is not due to a simple imprecision or an arbitrariness on the part of the scholars who use the word "structure"; rather, it is the consequence of a difficulty already observed by Aristotle at the end of the seventh book of the Metaphysics. Here he asks what causes the fact that—in an ensemble that is not a mere aggregate (σωρός), but unity (ἕν, which corresponds to structure in the sense we have seen)—the whole is more than the simple combination of its elements: why, for instance, the syllable βα is not the consonant / plus the vowel, but something else, ἕτερόν τι.”

To refuse the position of sedimentation. Which is not to refuse the lines leading out from event’s center, but to pry them open weave them cut them loose and watch them float over the bridge in wind. Which is not to refuse the sentence but admit to being laden, to the problem of how much can a sentence hold. The philosopher translates source into questions of discipline. The narrator translates source into cause in effect. The poem a bird a bullet an arabesque for I was born to be a door a grate a photograph and when you click the image the light shifts and shelters for we took a walk and told the story in at least four different ways. The winter-thin air and the sun as if July. The birds shadowing themselves over the façades of buildings. We passed out pages of the script to strangers and sent them on their way, the role of the woman on a balcony performed by a girl a mother a grandmother a father as we floated down the river in a burning boat. As we climbed the Great Pyramid of Cholula as we walked through the mall past empty storefronts. Poem action poem.

I was lost in a geometrical puzzle of colored light of event become gesture lending itself to a series of gestures until you pointed to a keyhole in one of a series of green-battered doors and I stopped. I document this by sound constructed in the base of the throat and call this doctrine something individual, a process of pulling on gloves, buttoned to the elbow, and then unbuttoning, pulled off. And as I bent to look I was yielded over to the gilded room inside, to the inaccessibility of chandelier and brocade, the intact waiting room of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in counterpoint to my body weighted by other bodies, by having been moved to the capital by the labor of a train. But nevertheless we traverse. With another rhythm we were off the platform and walking through the station and I was describing the workings of language in another language. That we are constituted by such moments of hinging yields to the field overtaken by the sweetness of mint, and so to dwell there in silence even as cold seeps into the fabric of my dress.

We go by tram to the park we walk past the exhibition hall we make a detour from the mud path draw close to the building. You point up to the lintel the winged lions the maidens reclining, medallions bearing allegories of art. Near the entranceway a large plaster pot on a pedestal meant to hold flowers but now cracked and a weed grows out of its base. We return to the path, walk out of the park up Stefánia út past the embassies first Libya then Switzerland then a modern office building, late 70s, glass, then the small palace that houses Iran, garden meticulously kept, white wrought iron lattices over each window, cameras tracking. A plaque at the gate I cannot resist running my fingers over the Arabic script. We turn right up Thököly út to no. 61. You point to the undulating lines, the folk motifs, the ways in which the building courts asymmetry. In another version of this story as we stand here you tell me tomorrow you leave for the front. Without a word I hand you the Setter’s leash, I unlatch the gate, traverse the garden push open the heavy door, climb the stairs to our second floor flat. Entering, unpinning my hat, tossed on the divan with gloves, pocketbook, I cross the room I fling the French doors open to balcony, branch-light. I step out into this.

IV

By tram to the park then walking past the exhibition hall we detour, we walk over grass so recently pushed from winter earth. We inspect the building’s brickwork and here, you point to a corner, it crumbles. The brick is only siding and underneath we see mortar and stones taken from the river. There is an alternate authenticity in this. We walk up Stefánia út. past Libya, Switzerland, Iran. Traffic stalled at a light, traffic beginning again you point above the treeline to the royal blue Zsolnay tile roof of the Geological Institute its highest spire topped with a globe, 4 stone figures hold it up. We walk up Thököly út, stop in front of no. 61. The ochre-colored plaster crumbles along the building’s edges. Someone practices Für Elise, which means it is warm enough for open windows. There is and there is not something remarkable here. We move to see the side of the building and a large stone balcony, second floor, comes into view. As if appended after the fact the scale is much too grand for this building, has the proportions of Andrássy útca, not a residential street. A woman stands near the railing, leaning slightly forward to look into the distance, branch shadows playing over the expectant expression of her face. The opening I expect to see behind her has been plastered over, bricked in. What is it to be made of ochre-colored stone?

What rhythm of light worked its way through the tower window of Hölderlin’s room in the carpenter’s house? What rhythm of the carpenter’s wife approaching the door to listen to listen to what the madman was saying? What rhythm of the family waking the family taking tea the family knocking at the tower door? Bettina and Achim von Arnim’s visits punctuated these rhythms. Did Hölderlin correspond with disruption as fluidity or stone? Bettina describes his joy when playing the piano and writing spontaneous verse for his guests, signing his line “Scardanelli” with some fantastic date in the future. The moon grown heavy and then shedding. The clouds grown heavy with water and then shedding. The air become heavy with dust and then a little storm a little ceasing. A little trace and weave.

That we are constituted by such moments of hinging yields to the field overtaken by the sweetness of mint, and so to dwell there in silence even as the cold of earth seeps into the fabric of my dress. I was lost in a geometrical puzzle of colored light, of event become gesture lending itself to a series of gestures until you pointed to a keyhold in one of a series of green-battered doors and I stopped. With another rhythm we were off the platform and walking through the station and I was describing the workings of language in another language. I document this by sound constructed in the base of my throat and call this doctrine something individual, a process of pulling on gloves, buttoned to the elbow, and then unbuttoning, pulling off. But nevertheless we traverse. And as I bent to look I was yielded over to the gilded room inside, to the inaccessibility of chandelier and brocade, the intact waiting room of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in counterpoint to my body weighted by other bodies, by having been moved to the capital by the labor of a train.

Experienced from the inside out, to articulate the outside edges structuring the internal means there exists no such thing as a universal now, but only a personal here and now articulating itself just past collective language. The poem as amateur philosopher. Amateur as in unprofessional, unpaid, but also as from French, from Italian amatore, from Latin amator ‘lover,’ from amare ‘to love.’ As such, a source text: narratives angled out to imply that an authentic experience of the present requires a personal how of language. Not a language irrecoverably hermetic, but a language that imprints, is imprinted, with origin, with its own unfolding bridge to photograph, walking layered over walking. I was added to, subtracted from, interchanged, transposed. To use inherited structures but to admit the ways in which one is, in turn, used by them. Become liquid, solid, fire, air.

In response to the present tense the poem shaves her head weaves her hair with mint and thyme wears white wears black wears nothing at all. Now as threshold as airport as revolving door. The moment of utterance performs an act for more than weddings and breaking. Because I sacrificed the small owl and so became again blank became again under the moon and waiting for the hinge of seasons to proclaim me, to make me such a claim. The poem a knife-edge between past and future it shaves weaves wears (Saint Augustine). Indexical of now, here, you, I. I am I because my little dog knows me (G. Stein). Because walked through the garden naming before the story of desire replaced the drive to puncture the skin of the apple to fill my mouth with flesh and juice. The body then become figurine. Desiring machine. And so wrapped in gauze and put in a sawdust-lined box. This the the the poem does.

(Agamben) “For Aristotle, the "something else" that causes the whole to be more than the sum of its parts had to be something radically other, that is, not an element that existed in the same way as the others-even if it were a prime, more universal element—but something that could be found only by abandoning the terrain of division ad infinitum to enter a more essential dimension. Aristotle designates this dimension as the αἰτόα του + εἰ + ναι, the "cause of being," and the principle that gives origin and maintains every thing in presence: not a material element but Form (μορ!ὴ καὶ εἰ +δος). Therefore, in the passage from the second book of the Physics referred to earlier, Aristotle refuses the theory expounded by Antiphon and by all those who define nature as elementary matter, τὸ  ρρύθμιστον, and instead identifies nature, that is, the original principle of presence, precisely with ῥυθμὸς, structure understood as synonymous with Form.”

V

Agamben: “Precisely because rhythm is that which causes the work of art to be what it is, it is also Measure and logos (ration) in the Greek sense of that which gives every thing its proper station in presence. Rhythm attains this essential dimension, and is Measure in this original meaning, only for this reason is it able to open a region to human appearance in which it can be perceived as original cipher and numerus, as calculable measure expressible in number.”

By tram to the park and then walking past the exhibition hall we are drawn to circle the building to notice inscriptions on some of its bricks. Initials: SL and SJ then MP and KS. Dates: 1923, 1936. Symbols, a treble clef carved first with emphasis then fading I run my fingers over cross-hatches, tally marks. Then crossing the street underneath the web of cables powering electric busses that run up Stefánia past the embassies (first Libya, now Switzerland, Iran). We turn right at Thököly út, stop in front of no 61, ochre plaster, undulating lines, river stones we move to view the side of the building the balcony the stone woman looking not at us but into the distance. This is why we have come. You tell me the first story. They are newlyweds. The First World War. He, a doctor, goes to the font she waits on the balcony day after day looking towards the train station. In 1918 she dies of the Spanish Flu. He returns, walls in the balcony, commissions a statue. Fidelity. Loss. In the second story she escapes the Spanish flu she waits on the balcony he never returns. When she dies in the 50s, the landlady’s daughter, a sculptor, takes up a collection, has the balcony walled in, creates the woman’s likeness in stone. Her critics do not approve of the statue’s realist style. It does not match the rest of the building. She does not argue because she knows they haven’t been listening.

In response to the present moment the poem becomes a body painted with luminescent paint, center stage, spotlight circumscribed. The poem as artificial organic material as slow moving in a writhing manner as performing a self performing being-out-of-context. There was rhythm in this, just as Hölderlin insists that everything is rhythm and the entire destiny of man is one heavenly rhythm, just as every work of art is one rhythm uttered from the lips of the architect. He said this under his breath and his visitor, who had come with a picnic basket of lilies always lilies for the slowly dying, played something nice on the piano before going. He said this to the pigeons and the rooftop pavilion inhabited first by a soldier with a gun and then by a series of lovers. We know this after the fact but what was it like in the close quarters of those rooms. The dawn streaming in with an intensity never to be mistaken for noon. To correspond with this, to lean into the poem’s tense.

Bettina von Arnim, the Countess of Arnim born Elisabeth Catharina Ludovica Magdalena Brentano. Bettina von Arnim writer, publisher, composer, singer, visual artist, illustrator, patron of young talent and social activist was nothing if not a master of correspondence. Her musical composition style was unconventional in that it molded and melded her favorite features of the old—folk music and historic themes—with unusual harmonies, phrase lengths and improvisations that became synonymous with the music of the time. She created the first musical settings for Hölderlin’s poems.

To use inherited structures but to admit the ways in which one is, in turn, as turn, used by them. In the center of the Hungarian National Museum exhibit about István Széchenyi, the great 19th century Hungarian statesman who, among many other public works and acts of nation building, supported the building of the Lánchíd, there is a room dedicated to the display of artifacts dating from his institutionalization after his breakdown, including the chair he sat in when he committed suicide by a shot to his head. The windowless walls of this room are painted black and none of the Hungarian text is translated into English. The significance of this angles out, understood by turning. Between self and world is a screen upon which plays a double-projection, the screen catching signs of the world and so watch them play. The screen catching, from the other side, signs of the self. And so to imagine circumnavigating the screen, viewing it from all angles. To wonder at having been admitted to the room, the screen revolving like a coin set to spin on its edge. Tails-heads-tails-heads until the object becomes spherical, becomes a semi-transparent orb. A little world, made cunningly.

And as I bent to look I was yielded over to the gilded room inside, to the inaccessibility of chandelier and brocade, the intact waiting room of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in counterpoint to my body weighted by other bodies, by having been moved to the capital by the labor of a train. That we are constituted by such movements of hinging yields to the field overtaken by the sweetness of mint, and so to dwell there in silence even as the cold of earth seeps into the fabric of my dress. But nevertheless we traverse. I was lost in a geometrical puzzle of colored light, of event become gesture lending itself to a series of gestures until you pointed to a keyhole in one of a series of green-battered doors and I stopped. I document this by sound constructed in the base of my throat and call this doctrine something individual, a process of pulling on gloves, buttoned to the elbow, then unbuttoning, pulling off. With another rhythm we were off the platform and walking through the station I was describing the workings of language in another language.

VI

With another rhythm we were off the platform and walking through the station I was describing the workings of language in another language. And as I bent to look I was yielded over to the gilded room inside, to the inaccessibility of chandelier and brocade, the intact waiting room of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in counterpoint to my body weighted by other bodies, by having been moved to the capital by the labor of a train. I document this by sound constructed in the base of my throat and call this doctrine something individual, a process of pulling on gloves, buttoned to the elbow, and then unbuttoning, pulling off. That we are constituted by such moments of hinging yields to the field overtaken by the sweetness of mint, and so to dwell there in silence even as the cold of earth seeps into the fabric of my dress. I was lost in a geometrical puzzle of colored light, of event become gesture leading itself to a series of gestures until you pointed to a keyhole in one of a series of green-battered doors and I stopped. But nevertheless we traverse.

Agamben: To look at a work of art, therefore, means to be hurled out into a more original time: it means ecstasy in the epochal opening of rhythm, which gives and holds back. Only by starting from this situation of man’s relationship with the work of art is it possible to comprehend how this relationship—if it is authentic—is also for man the highest engagement, that is, the engagement that keeps him in the truth and grants to his dwelling on earth its original status.

If origin entails fiction what transforms must bear this imprint of imagination of I took chisel to stone and image from photograph. Deep in our conversation as we travel by tram to the park you move from describing the crane you saw lift a sunken barge from the Danube to describing the Dutch vessel pulled from the piles of compacted garbage where the World Trade Centers once stood. If origin is physical what transforms must bear this motion and in gesturing with my hand I say hand, I say you. I say this vista we move through which means you-who-have-walked-with-me-in-this-landscape-and-in-time, which means you-who-exist-as-another-connected-to-me-as-I-am-to-you-now. Which means although we are separate we cannot but conceive of one-another without contributing, transforming aspects of ourselves. As such what is a we but a coin set to spin. Adiectio, detractio, immutatio, transmutatio.

We go by tram to the park. We walk past the exhibition hall, flowerbeds mulched and seeded, mud path, a jogger passes us. We pass a bronze statue of two women in early twentieth century dress they are holding books one of them reads one of them looks into the distance. Then up Stefánia út past Libya, Switzerland, Iran, past a closed café on the corner of Thököly út. It is Sunday it is the beginning of March. We wait for the light we look at the red brick spire of the Rosary Church in the distance before us, after we visit the stone woman we will continue up Thököly út in the church’s direction we will enter to stand under the dome, gold and white, an inverse Faberge egg. The light turns green we walk up the street we stop in front of no. 61. You gesture towards the right of the building. Then towards the left. I nod I run my hands along the crumbled stone fence feel far from traffic. Für Elise plays. A dog barks. We move just past the building you stop and turn I stop and turn I see why we have come, our shadows slanting over the sidewalk, the stone balcony the stone woman, the branch-shadows shifting as a breeze startles up. A changing of seasons. Architect. Late afternoon.

The root question is that of correspondence. How to come into proper relation how to answer accordingly how to respond in register. You write me a letter I write you a letter. You ask me a question I answer with a gesture. You paint me into a portrait I take a photo of you bent over the hem of my dress. But how to correspond with language and moment such as Hölderlin’s utterance. What sort of source text are we, is this. Spoken and so momentarily inhabited. Spoken by a schizophrenic a state of being that has lost the chords of the past and projects radical frequencies into the future. How to read this how to decipher the moment how to write it down. Agamben address the problem of correspondence by imposing disciplinary frame: the tradition of Aristotle, the philosophical problem posed as a question. Bettina von Arnim address the problem of transcription of utterance into text, of poem into musical setting. Is either form of correspondence more natal to the phrase as he uttered it in guttural tones as he uttered it in the voice of a child as he uttered it while slowly stirring his tea and taking in the window’s view?

The poem, falling through the air to a camera on burst mode capturing her as swan dive as headlong as into the well she threw a stone and then she followed. What form of structure is proper to the present tense. How much yield to the sentence to this schema-sestina of numerical patterning. For the constructed world exists in relation to an unknowable endangered world (Brenda Hillman). The endangered world including species and environments, cultures and modes of reading writing talking through the night under the blear of stars. This, from me to you. This, from me to the path etched along the river become a question of correspondence become what form of structure is natal to the present tense what form to complex the frame.