Ode
Here I am sitting. It has happened to everyone, and will happen to everyone as long as there is a human being on Earth. More correctly, “man” will live on Earth as long as this happens to him. It happens to him, and he dies, because he has to die. This is how it is defined, with the French ‘petit mort’ only mentioned in parentheses.
My dear fellow human beings: I can wish you nothing better, nothing more, than to live this great and small death. No matter if it’s once or a hundred times, just let that light come on, just let that fearful fluttering in your stomach, just cry and laugh, be disappointed and perish in all love, believe that there can be “something” before the “nothing” consumes everything.
Art is a very simple thing, it starts and ends here: from the ‘petite mort’ to the ‘grande mort’. There it is in the sounds, in the dead black notes, the feeling that has torn a man apart, blown him to heaven and cast him into hell. The man is no longer alive: I say Mahler, I say Bartók, but these are just names, letters. Their little deaths have survived that final, that all-covering dies irae, dies illa. And now I, a late offspring, with the storm-torn, living hearts of great old lovers in my hands, I cry out to the darkness: Oh death, where is your sting?
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Author: Máté Hámori
