Four horsemen
I saw it at the end of the Canadian part of my dream... I looked through the fence, made of metal bars that had circular cross-sections (like the bars in the windows of prisons, or those that are used to protect buildings from the robbery). The shape of the fence was deformed, and, in the trees behind the fence, there were blue, glittering, patiently looking eyes of the horses. These eyes seemed to have an autonomous presence. They were hanging in the space on their own, somewhat further than expected (as if from slightly behind the moving, observer-dependent, point of focus – so the rest of the horse-form was emerging, from the trees and fence’s bars, only with respect to this ‘transhorizontal’ point), yet at the correct place, just in order to create a clear, recognisable (even if somewhat abstract) form of horses for whoever was looking through these bars of the deformed fence, towards these eyes between the trees. I knew that it is the final, and the greatest, of all of the sculptures I saw in this dream. I was astonished by the masterhood of the composition, and also nearly terrified by the feeling of the presence coming from these eyes, the palpable sensation of them seeing on their own.
Later I met four members of «Хүн Хүртү» – first I saw them walking nearby, and later they were sitting on the chairs under the wall behind these trees. This wall seemed to be the place at which the horses’ eyes (so, also the focal point of the whole dynamic sculpture) were currently located. I felt the human dimension of this experience as calming, and bringing peacefulness to the, previously somewhat disturbing, situation. I wanted to make a photo, in order to document the presence of the horses-sculpture in the moment when they seemed to be most stable, yet, by some reason, it did not happen. I was hoping that maybe few days later «Хүн Хүртү» will return to Bratislava during their concert tour (although this particular fence looked like the fences that used to be typical, back in the days, in Ząbki), and I will get a second chance to make this photo. However, I felt that this hope will not be fulfilled.
Later I have walked along some old street, paved in cobblestones, in some old European city that had an Austro-Hungarian vibe, and I’ve met four musicians, who were also blacksmiths. There was a strong feeling as if they were enjoying themselves with an easiness and even some silliness, after their work hours. At the superficial level, there seemed to be even some disorganised chaos in their actions, almost as if they were drunk. There was also something strange happening around: it was a very late night, so late that it was already turning into an early morning, however the time was going backwards, so with the subsequent moments it was getting darker and darker. All of that had the taste as if I was allowed to participate, at least for some time, in a process that had, at least partially, an otherworldly character, and I felt thankful for having this opportunity. One of the musicians-blacksmiths told: “let’s do the fire”, and the other one took a heavy multibarrelled machine gun, and started to throw out a long fire flames out of it. That fire looked as if it was thrown out of a flamethrower, however it was not burning the things, and was opposite of being sticky: it was penetrating through the objects without destroying them – as if showing their inherent emptiness instead. I was doing photos of all of that, in order to document the factual reality of this situation. We went further along the street (with the night getting darker and darker, moving far away, backwards, from the early morning), as if in the direction of the place, where the fence with the horses-sculpture was. One of the intensifying aspects of the process was that (from time to time, yet with an increasing average frequency) some of the musicians-blacksmiths were exhibiting prolonged moments of a complete absence of facial mimics, indicating the rapid increase of the nonattachmental presence. I knew that I am allowed to go further on with them, because I understand the meaning of this otherwise heavily abnormal situation. We walked along the street, stopping from time to time, and during those stops some new things were happening. At a certain moment, when we have stopped for the next stage of (what I already understood to be) the ritual, I saw that they are holding each other’s hands, and that their bodies started to melt into a single object during this process. At certain moment, I was touched by one of them, and I started to also experience this melting. During this process the contours of the bodies not only became fused into a single continuous object, but the body became something like a pulsating alive primordial matter, undoing the cosmogenic specialisation into forms and functions, and returning to something like a life-outpouring pure potentiality. It became clear to me that the earlier, somewhat even humoresque, human form of the musicians-blacksmiths, was a mere conventional appearance, while the current experience is an entrance to their actual nature. This experience of interconnectedness was short, yet very clear and intense. One of them, who also became more individuated for a moment, has kindly reminded me that already at the previous stop (or even two stops before) I was directly informed that the next stop will be the last one that I will be allowed to participate in, and then I will have to leave. I was thankful for all of this experience, and I have left their presence, while still clearly and strongly feeling all of the major elements of it, including the formless pulsation of the merged life-outpouring, the nonattachmental silencing of form-emergence, and the otherworldly presence of horse-eyes that were seeing as if from behind the horizon of focus.
While still experiencing the pulsating presence and partial dissolution of the boundary of the autonomous body-object (and thus the partial dissolution of the sense of the autonomous self), I came upon an unexpected vivid memory that back in the spring semester of the second class of the secondary school, when I still lived in the house in Ząbki, I wrote a poetic text «Four horsemen» (with a red handwritten title), that was naive yet also freshly profound. I have also recalled that this text was lost, as if stolen, and this realisation came to me with a wave of sadness. On the other hand, I had a very strong and strange feeling that this text was a prefiguration of the striking experience that I’ve just had.
Вторая ночь полнолуния после 80-го Дня Победы (13.V.25), Bratislava-Kramáre