Oldal 146 [146]
ENIKŐ SEPSI
Crime and Punishment
To Sheryl Sutton
The walled-in imagination
continues to repeat it —
the face is still there
throned in the electric chair of the moment
the nape dipped in cliff
the beautiful hand —
the porous skin of your presence.
And still the summer goes on.
Let down your scepter, Queen.”
Crime and punishment creates the present tense of the liminal, banished state
of the woman and the memory of the spectator keeping in mind and repeating
the same scene over and over again. In Pilinszky’s poems, this praesens perfec¬
tum perpetuum (compared to a praesens perfectum continuum) is the abstrac¬
tion of an irredeemable past tense elevated to the level of poetry, where there is
no time, there is only the reversible time of the Passion becoming the abstract
image of the Shoah and all murders committed in the twentieth century. The
poem also refers, in its title, to Pilinszky’s favorite author, Dostoyevsky.
Figure 2. Deafman Glance with Alain Bertran and Sheryl Sutton (1971). Photograph
by Martin Bough. Source: www.robertwilson.com
1 Pilinszky: Sheryl Sutton, 40-41.
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