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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 perfectum perpetuum (compared to a praesens perfectum continuum) is the abstraction 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. + 144 +
