Written by Dániel Lőwy. Original publication: Irodalmi Jelen, 2021, vol. 21, no. 231, pp. 47–56.

Loaded iron trucks
carried his childhood away

Only death can end a person’s youth
and birth.
(Karel Čapek: Meteor)

Géza found himself at a young age. At the age of twenty, he said he felt his personality had matured and his emotional development had come to an end. Those he considered his friends until then would remain his friends, but those he accepted later would have to strictly meet his expectations. He burst onto the literary scene with his first poem, like Pallas Athena springing from Zeus’s head: fully armed. The eternally cynical and sarcastic literary critic Antal K. Jakab, who destroyed most novice writers in the readers’ column of the Cluj-based magazine Utunk, published Géza’s poem Heaven’s Temple as “the poet’s first appearance.” Let us venture back to Géza Szőcs’s beginnings, his childhood, his teenage years, and the period of his first poetry collections. Through our shared childhood, adolescence, and many years of friendship, the author of these lines could not be left out of some of Géza’s stories.

Color-coded report card with deducted conduct points

It is not surprising that Hungarian teachers were the bane of high school students. They were respected, but also feared. In ninth grade, his teacher’s favorite phrases, which she repeated often, were “like a bolt from the blue” and “the camel is the ship of the desert.” Géza wrote in his midterm paper, “like sunshine from an overcast sky” and “the ship is the camel of the sea.” Among other things, this resulted in an overly strict conduct grade. He proudly showed his report card to his friends.

At the same time, one of his classmates recalled that Géza never quoted poems flawlessly; he rewrote several lines by Petőfi and Arany János. Knowing his unusually good memory, Géza’s apparent inaccuracy, like Mozart’s correction of Salieri or Michael Haydn’s melodies, may have been an early manifestation of his poetic vein.

I remember well his high school essay on Transylvanian prose writers, in which he explained that “while Nyírő merely describes the Szekler people, Tamási projects the inner driving forces of the Szekler way of thinking.”

From Frescobaldi to The Magic Flute

I sat down at the piano,
put on my birch bark gloves, and sang
(Géza Szőcs: House on the Shore, Next to the Harbor Station)

Géza had no formal musical training. So it came as a surprise when, as a teenager, he asked how long it would take to learn to play the piano. It turned out that he wanted to accompany a young cellist who was attending music school.

“Imagine,” he said, “my friends are walking down the street, unaware of anything, and suddenly they see a poster that says ‘Chamber music evening: accompanied on the piano by Géza Szőcs’! How surprised they would be!

His desire to stand out from the crowd undoubtedly stemmed from his constant rejection of dull, ordinary, uninteresting, and insignificant personalities. Feedback from his environment was important to him, as was the image he had created and that others had formed of him. He paid attention to what people said, spread, whispered, or gossiped about him. He believed that the worst thing was for his environment to be indifferent to him.

Whenever he visited me, he would ask for “something soothing, like Frescobaldi’s music” from my extensive record collection. Classical music accompanied him throughout his life. In his poem Stone Roots by the Wall, the “never-heard bird concert” evoked associations with Wagner and Bruckner. He dedicated his cycle of poems Excerpts from an Opera Libretto to New Zealand coloratura soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and German tenor Sigfried Jerusalem. One line from this cycle – “To die in a bathtub among whales!” – was inspired by the brush of Géza’s childhood friend, the surrealist painter Valentin Lustig.

Géza Szőcs initiated the release of recordings by violinist and conductor Sándor Végh, who was born in Cluj-Napoca and lived in Salzburg, on compact disc (the first release was the double album Végh in Hungary, and I am aware of eight further CD releases). At his suggestion, a bust of Sándor Végh was erected in the foyer of the Cluj Opera House. (They could also name a street after him, and now after Géza too.) Most recently, in collaboration with György Selmeczi, he retranslated the libretto of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. He was able to attend the premiere in Cluj-Napoca on October 3.

Which path leads to life?

Space, infinity, opens up in our minds and hearts
(Géza Szőcs: Three Bears Growled)

There is a famous logic puzzle about two doors guarded by two guards, one door leading to life and the other to death. The first guard always tells the truth, the second always lies. You can only ask one question to one of the guards (you don’t know whether he is the truth-teller or the liar). From his answer, you must identify which door leads to life.

The traditional solution is based on double negation: you ask the first guard what the second guard would answer if you asked him whether this door leads to life.

Well, Géza solved this with a single straightforward question. When he presented it to his mathematician friends, they were so skeptical that two of them ended up playing the role of the guards to check it out. And it worked. By the way, he was so proud of solving the logic puzzle that he asked me to mention it if I ever wrote about it. It was as if he sensed that he was leaving before me.

Win under any circumstances!

Be with me, good fortune
May Heaven be with me
Create night above my head.
(Géza Szőcs: When the falcon…)

I must start from further back. On one of my birthdays, my father surprised me with a homemade Monopoly game (we called it Capitaly back then). He drew the game board and wrote the banknotes on colored paper cut to size with ink, using a traditional pen with a wide, flat nib ending in a ink reservoir. He ordered the box, tiny green houses with red roofs, rectangular hotels with yellow walls and red roofs, and game pieces from the toy factory in Körösfő, which was still in operation at the time. Battles lasting into the night began for the best plots of land. We did business, offered generous sums, or haggled, formed trusts and founded counter-trusts, became triumphantly rich or went bankrupt, and left the game with our tails between our legs. We all loved to win, but Géza always wanted to win. He threw himself into the game with enormous ambition, as if the fate of the world depended on it. For years, we intended to play again, to fight another Capitaly battle, but it never happened.

Later, his passion for games shifted to card games. Géza played with the same determination, mainly playing canasta. I remember when we were invited to play canasta against our hosts in their newly built, elegant villa on Görögtemplom Street. They were very well-coordinated partners, communicating with lots of little signals, which Géza and I noticed throughout the game, although we couldn’t decipher them. It mattered whether they held their cards higher or lower, whether they drew the card from the right or left side, whether the card in the middle stood out somewhat from the others, not to mention their glances and eye movements. Géza and I rarely played together because we were always separated due to our notorious luck. Therefore, we only knew each other’s playing styles as opponents. That evening, not only “knowledge” but also luck played into our hands, until we inflicted a humiliating defeat on our increasingly gloomy hosts. We won by more than 12,000 points, while they finished with a deficit of 500 points. The result would certainly still be recorded in the history of canasta if we had published it in time. Our visit ended in a frosty atmosphere, amid meaningless pleasantries.

With an odd license plate number, it is forbidden

to drive on the narrow streets where
a crooked wooden ladder leads to the sky
(Géza Szőcs: The Writer and the Wheels)

We held our ten-year high school reunion at a motel near Kolozsvár because, according to a measure introduced in the early 1980s, all events had to end before midnight in order to “avoid disturbing the peace.” Since we had rented all the rooms, we retreated there after the restaurant closed to continue the party. Although Géza was not our classmate, he knew almost everyone in our class well. So he decided to visit us late in the evening. He persuaded my ever-enterprising father to take them to Gyaluba in his car. It can be called an adventure because they left late on Saturday night, but by dawn on Sunday, our Dacia with its odd-numbered license plate was no longer allowed on the road. Although gasoline was available in very limited quantities and could only be purchased with a ration card, half of all cars were banned from public roads on Sundays. So when they returned home around 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, they were already well into the prohibited time slot. By then, Géza was driving, because it didn’t matter to him if his license was suspended. He would just “get it back” somehow. Indeed, in a country rife with corruption, almost anything could be “arranged” with a little money and the right connections. They drove past the police station near Cluj-Napoca with their headlights off and luckily managed to avoid being stopped.

Pheromone perfume,

Mandelbrot sets and gray matter**…

the development of human civilization seems to foreshadow
great troubles – the disorganized, chaotic
intrusion into research is precisely what
the sometimes sluggish pace and control of the academic world
, and it is the same world that maps out the ways out and
solutions.
(Géza Szőcs: Irodalmi Jelen, June 28, 2009)

As his speech at the Báthory Awards ceremony suggests, Géza was also very knowledgeable in the field of natural sciences; he was interested in everything, read everything, and took notes. This enabled him to contribute meaningfully to any topic in conversation. According to cultural and art historian Jacob Burckhardt, true universality does not consist in knowing many things, but in loving many things.

In Germany, in 1980

I first heard about pheromone perfumes from Géza, which can be used to attract the opposite sex. (Years later, I became a perfumer at a cosmetics factory in Cluj-Napoca, but even there they didn’t know about pheromones.) He had been interested in fractals since 1975, shortly after the term was introduced. He followed research on Mandelbrot sets closely from the moment the term was coined in 1982.

In the summer of 2018, we had lunch on the terrace of the Vadrózsa restaurant in Buda, in the company of the three most renowned Hungarian physicists living in three different countries: Ferenc Krausz, Ferenc Mezei, and Sándor Szalay were present. Géza asked unusual, difficult questions about black holes, dark matter, and antiparticles, reflecting his wide-ranging interests and up-to-date scientific knowledge. As a philosopher, he was invited to open the 11th World Congress of the International Symmetry Society in Kanazawa. In his introduction, he said that “the mysterious world of symmetry, from the shape of butterflies to quantum physics, from poetry to the architecture of cathedrals, offers much to explore and interpret” for the relatively small but extremely diverse community of experts.

He would certainly have been at the forefront of science, although he would hardly have been able to focus his research on a single or even a few carefully selected topics. If he had applied and capitalized on his boundless way of thinking in science, it is conceivable that he could have created a previously non-existent interdisciplinary field, which could even have resulted in a paradigm shift.

One of his significant plans, which will now never come to fruition, was to re-edit the volume originally compiled by Gaëtan Picon, Korunk szellemi körképe (The Intellectual Panorama of Our Age), the fifth edition of which was published in 1966 by Occidental Press in Washington. Géza Szőcs could have brought together the most significant contemporary Hungarian scientists in a joint project; to name just a few: mathematician Béla Bollobás, a leading figure in combinatorics and graph theory; physicist Ferenc Krausz, developer of the superfast attosecond laser; physicist Ferenc Mezei, capable of producing neutron beams; network researcher Albert László Barabási, a scholar of scale-free networks; astronomer Sándor Szalay, an expert in astrophysics, galaxy formation, and cosmology; astronomer Gáspár Bakos, who has made significant contributions to the study of planets orbiting other stars and time-dependent phenomena, and has discovered more than a hundred new exoplanets; psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, developer of the Flow theory, and even philosopher Miklós Tamás Gáspár, who was sometimes a friend and sometimes an enemy. Géza believed that, after six and a half decades, there was a need for an up-to-date, 21st-century intellectual landscape that would include genetics, microbiology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, space research, network theory, and information technology, among other fields.

Portrait photos in reverse time

I bathed in craters
and drank wine and lava
I saw face to face
the great death of a bear.
(Géza Szőcs: Bear in the sky, with a telescope in its paw)

In front of me are several black-and-white photographs. They were taken in the villa on Eperjes Street, in Cluj-Napoca, around Christmas, in the early seventies. Most of those who appear in them are now gone.

Pista Darkó always took care of his appearance; he sits comfortably in an armchair, wearing an elegant suit, a white shirt, a polka-dot tie, his legs crossed. The talented actor and promising writer of the Forrás collection was the first to pass away, at the age of twenty-eight; the circumstances of his death remain unclear to this day. In another photo, Péter Egyed, with a large moustache and a somewhat satanic look, stands next to Kati Andrási, who gazes gloomily ahead through her dark-rimmed glasses. Perhaps she is sad, knowing that just a few years later, on New Year’s Eve, he threw himself over the upstairs railing and fell into oblivion. Péter, who wrote and published a new volume virtually every year, was taken by a malignant tumor at the age of sixty-four.

Dezső Palotás sits with his large hands in front of him, so the photograph only shows his long hair and half of his eyes. He died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty-eight. Finally, Géza sits next to a bottle of soda water, wearing a striped shirt, in a pose reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker, although his right hand rests on his forehead rather than his chin. His eternally active, turbulent life, like the length of a commissioned essay, was limited to sixty-seven years by the editors in the heavens. The years of creative people are measured and distributed with a tight fist.