Szilárd Demeter:Géza Szőcs 70 – Commemorative Evening at the Petőfi Literary Museum 2023. on 9 November

We know who Géza Szőcs was. Do we know? We don’t know. There were many Géza Szőcs, each of them had a Géza. Géza himself appeared in various ways, as the mood took him. Sometimes as a Hungarian, other times as a Chinese, or a dolphin, or a swan who returned from America as an Indian, came to help Father Bem at Segesvár, and so on ad infinitum. He was able to be both King Attila the Hun and the producer of a Hollywood production making a film about Attila. Who Géza Szőcs was, we do not know, but it is not our business to know, it was enough to guess that he at least knew when and why he changed his form.

What we are here to do today is to prepare the answer to the dead poet’s ten-point question: who will be Géza Szőcs?

I can’t answer that because I can’t. Only the happy Old God and the cigar-smoking Géza Szőcs know this.

I do know one thing. Géza left us a task back in the eighties of the last century, and I quote:

“YOU ARE THE HOTEL OF MY FURTHER DESTINY.

With a good heart, or in return for the fortune I have left you

I’d also like to ask you something: if you’ve eaten, guys,

and drank and loved me: you will talk and even talk for me, won’t you?

which I would have said for sure: you won’t let that go down your throats, will you? as I would have written in that poem.

WHILE THEY DRAG ME AWAY

ON THE RATTLING HORSE-DRAWN CARRIAGE OF COMA

WILL REMAIN AS MY LEGACY TO YOU

AMIT ELMONDTAM

AND WHAT I DIDN’T TELL YOU

I”.

That is why we are here today. To remind ourselves, our descendants, that we have a duty: to say again and again what Géza said, and to say what the poet did not say.

An impossible mission, because we are not Géza Szőcs. Perhaps the last time the Lord gave us such a great task was when He breathed the Spirit into human flesh.

But impossible doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. In fact, Géza’s life lesson is that the impossible means that there is something worth getting up in the morning, eating, drinking, loving – and talking about.

We are here today because this is the place where words cannot be bitter in our throats.

And he cannot be bitter because we had a Géza Szőcs. We have a Géza Szőcs. And let us have our Géza!

God help us all!