A photograph is
an image formed on a light-sensitive surface by a camera and developed by
chemical means to produce a positive print, claims Webster’s Dictionary.
It is not an image itself that creates value, but the ideas and thoughts that
are painted in that image which, when brought out, give definition to those
colors. In other words, a photograph has no meaning unless that photograph can
create thoughts within a person. Photographs are a physical representation of
something, and unless these representations are extracted, photographs have no
meaning. A poem is a photograph of an author; it is a physical representation
of images. In order to extract a poem, one must dissect the activities that
lead to that point in time.
War is “a state of open,
armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or
parties”(Brown, 1278). Our leaders, at times, refuse
to compromise and so exist conflicts. There are no doubts that a war has
effects on a person, physically, subconsciously, and emotionally. Young men go
away to wars and come back as adults, and at times they don’t come back. Being
surrounded by an environment which consist of all but emotions for years
definitely changes how a person view’s life. In Perched on Nothing’s
Branch, Attila Jozsef, paints the kind of man he has become after World
War I.
Jozsef comes home after the war, only to find, his mother not home. “I
feel like cursing, so mama yell at me,” he says. I believes in nothing- he
confusingly screams in “Nothing, Nothing”(82). We can fell passion and anger
when he tells us that the temperature in his mouth is 98.6. At times reality
terrifies him and so he escapes by smoking, looking for God, advocating for the
communist party, yet he is supposed to believe in nothing. He wants to think
that he believes in nothing because he has seen contradicting beliefs in war
and so is afraid to be on the wrong side, yet he still believes that he
believes in nothing.
Jozsef is still fighting a war in his head. He wants to escape from
thing that comfort him, because he afraid to be shocked, and so he has created
life in art, and life in nature. Why art and nature we may ask? It’s these
things that have no answers, because they have no questions. The author is
fixated on his mother because he wants to protect the only thing that’s truly
his: “I should have eaten you,” this way she can always be inside of him where
eyes never close with comfort, and so harm never comes unexpected. The train
tracks represent his mother lap, and he goes there because he wishes that he
could go back into his mother’s wound to be nurtured.
A wise man once said, “life is about seeing,” it’s how a person views conditions around him/her. Attila Jozsef has chosen to protect all that he loves by constantly analyzing conditions around. He escapes into beautiful images only because harm may come his way. It’s a person’s environment that makes that person what he or she is, and so if you were to put another person through all that Attila has gone through then you would end up with a duplicate of Attila himself. In other word, every minute of his life has accumulated to create this so called poet. The ability of the mind to conceive ideas by looking at transformed tree is beyond amazing. All these ideas/emotions are extracted from this so called poet, and so a poet he must be.