Nicole Waldner’s tribute to János Pilinszky, published in Agenda Poetry in April 2022, deserves to be read far and wide: as the tribute that it is, as an introduction to Pilinszky and his translators, as a bracing commentary for those more familiar with his work, and as a piece of outstanding and urgent writing. With the author’s permission, I uploaded it to the “Straight Labyrinth” Pilinszky event website.
I don’t want to summarize it; it’s short enough that it can be read on its own terms without any preludes. I quoted from it a few days ago and am still thinking about that quote. But I do want to reflect a little on the phrase “a place of quiet fixity” (which appears in the final sentence of the first paragraph). Here is some of the larger context:
It was not Pilinszky’s anti-fascist stance to which the Communists objected; it was his Catholicism. Born and raised in a middle-class, intellectual, religious family, Pilinszky retained a lifelong relationship with the church, writing and editing for the small Catholic periodicals that just barely managed to survive the Communist era. Pilinszky’s Catholicism was both intimate and intimately bound up in sacrifice, suffering, responsibility and atonement. It is from this place of quiet fixity that Pilinszky’s poetry was born, and it influenced all of his existential and poetic choices.
“Quiet fixity,” in Pilinszky’s case, is anything but static; with its focus on the motions of the soul, it allows those motions to occur in the first place. (These are my thoughts, not those of the article.) Such fixity challenges and threatens us today just as it did the Hungarian Communist government, though differently. In our everyday lives, we are told that we should be visible, public, bustling around, plugged in, doing this and that, reacting to everything around us, and responding immediately to messages—a state of being that prevents not only introspection, but a deeper questioning of the world itself. This lie has social, economic, technological, and political layers, which combine and twist around us. A “place of quiet fixity” breaks the rules and calls out the deception. It is also much harder than running around.
But the phrase can also be misunderstood (or at least taken in different ways). To understand what Waldner means by it in reference to Pilinszky, read the entire essay.