Lajos Gulacsy:The Magician’s Garden 1906/7
I sense the lustful, embracing scent of the flowers and incense on this rapturous scene. I feel the painter’s longing for a long-passed era far from his senseless time of the simmering world war. The male figure is most likely the artist himself, Lajos Gulacsy, who was a genius and a lunatic in the same body and mind. As I am trying to write my thoughts down, I feel bitterness over the fact that I am going to tell yet another depressed walk of life. I tried – I really did – to find an artist blessed with a better life, but I ran into another sad story again. I could not throw it away. Lajos Gulacsy’s story is as sad and depressing as it is beautiful and magical.
A tall and skinny man who wears tight stockings, a tapered hat, and beaked shoes of a medieval jester: that is Gulacsy. He invented his own world and he called it Na’conxypan. He says strange words to you, in the Na’conxypanian language. He is a prince from Na’conxypan, a place somewhere between Japan and the moon. Gulacsy is the only person on Earth who can speak this language. He must be very lonely. Gavars live in Na’conxypan in sponge-cake houses, the size of the houses correlating to the habitants’ brain-sizes.
Gulacsy misses his beloved country very much and often dreams about it. If you ask him nicely, he plays Na’conxypanian songs on the pianoforte for you.
Gulacsy wanders on the streets of Italy because they remind him of his world. He admires Florence and the Renaissance, the café houses of Padua, and Venice, where he hears the world is at war and it terrifies him. He witnesses his own execution one day. Prince Piripiri of Na’conxypan cannot bear this ugly world, not anymore. It is time to go back to his place at the next full moon. He tries to take his own life.
He seeks Na’conxypan to no avail. It is too late: He looses all his ties to this world, and now he is half-living in an ethereal state.
The Mother Asylum takes him into her walls for woozily long years, until he stops painting, until he goes blind. He never says a word to anyone. To whom would he talk, anyway? Who could understand his words? Only a magician or a jester. Only a gavar from Na’conxypan.
