Jumping the Points ? – A View from Hungary by Martin Smith

Every living person has certain feelings about the world around him. It is these feelings, common to all men, which

are the raw materials of the artist's inspiration. This he must 'translate', into the structure of an art form, whether

music, poetry or painting. The problem of the painter is this 'translation'; that is, he has to create some arrangement

Goods train near Mátézalka, Hungary

It is the most extraordinary thing to have jumped countries. Of course we all travel as Michael Ayrton’s wife so crushingly told my provincially-minded art master and myself when I was seventeen (“We artists, you know, we do travel…“) and travel is something I have done before. But it is so astonishing to find a perfect parallel existence waiting for me in Hungary. So I multiply 'my' lives...I have one in Georgia, I have a brand new one here in a small, very English seeming town in a sunny place where I have a role and identity, all set up in advance for me...and I have a past in the UK, a past which blurs with every day that passes. To go back to it would be a huge and unwelcome effort. I am teaching my students two wonderful works of literature; or I hope to be....and as they are young, they will be stretching themselves to find the meanings as well. Of course, I always feel that art is a closed book, but that its revelations are always available to the person who goes 'to the interface', as I call it....the interface is a magical place where life suddenly sheds its cloak of ordinariness and becomes magical as it should be.

Children are so refreshing because they sense this magic and even live in its ecosystem until deadening routines, adumbrated in the interests of civilization, gradually bring all creativity to a halt. There is a huge conspiracy afoot to reassure citizens that life is normal and predictable no more than that and that our purpose here is to be born, eat, digest, sleep, reproduce, work and die none the wiser for our

70 years on the planet. Since mankind fears to know and live with this truth that life is beautiful and infinitely renewable, and above all a heroic, individual, quest for a personal and special coded message intended for you and you alone, and that if you hit a suitable time warp you can renew it - make it exponentially richer - (for example, time happens at half the speed here for me in Hungary than it did for me in Georgia) - I guess that there are many unhappy, unfulfilled and empty lives.

This also happens because humanity steadfastly refuses to wake up to the fact that life is not an empty stage upon which we must enact a life without script (like a bad Beckett play!) but a Mozart opera fully written and ready for us, waiting for us to sing our role, a singing for which we are somehow magically prepared in advance.... That is the fundamental philosophical error of terrorists. Not only is their whole plan of action primitive in the extreme, but it does not even cohere with a defensible theory of what life on the planet is all about anyway. And that’s something quite irrespective of religions, which are at best a subtle dress to hide the nakedness and wonder of the human created in the image of God.

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Ever had that feeling, when you go to a musical performance, wow they have really prepared for this, look at the instruments, the professionalism...the obvious highest quality materials that have gone into making the percussion instruments, for example, or the wonderful Steinway with its name enblazoned soberly but hitting you in the face, upon which someone will perform, and in this performance bring you new realizations about what, say, Beethoven found as being new and fresh and so far undocumented in life; and thus had to say with notes? Well so much this much , is obvious to me….that others, somewhere along the line, also felt (and have felt) the new freshness of life and reacted to it by making art works and doing great things…. although I had to struggle for that last bit about time travel and infinitely renewable life energy. To find that out I had to do what no-one else has done, move from early twenty-first century Georgia to late eighteenth-century Hungary (two countries administratively entirely with dust in their eyes) and do so specifically as a freelance and with my own eyes open, that is, making my move potentially as a writer… Although I am not sure I realized that at the time of transit.

(Of course our physical lives will change format eventually through death and that sweet sickness of disappearance from the visible spectrum, which is not so bad as all that when we know that beyond it even more beautiful patterns await us…. So enjoy! And meanwhile…I have to teach…civilization…To eleven-year-olds….The paradox is complete….More on that later…!)

Daniel Barenboim in performance