I’ve always loved literature. This is, of course, a risky statement, because people who say that tend to have something a bit off about them. And yes, something is off. With me, at least. You see, I loved it for exactly the reason people usually mock: I loved imagining “the poet might have meant”. In most cases, I heard something completely different in the works than what the textbooks said.
But what’s wrong with that? I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all. If someone writes something, why can’t I interpret it my own way? It took me a long time to realise: these works are good precisely because everyone reads something different into them. They mean something different to everyone. That’s exactly why they end up in textbooks! Not because they have one “correct” interpretation, but because they have countless correct interpretations.
When you see:
“You send me the cooled butterfly body of your dead love
This is how you wish me luck for the future”
(Ákos – Come Back)
…you don’t simply feel abandoned. You feel death, transience, shattering beauty, distance – everything at once. If your imagination doesn’t kick in, then it’s just a notice. Instructions. A user manual.
Good literature is mysterious. It never tells us what to think about it. It stands before us like a girl after a first date — silent in the doorway, waiting. Waiting to see what will happen. What you’ll see in her. Whether you’ll see anything at all. Will there be a kiss, or just an awkward goodbye? And what’s the best part of it all? Well, we can never be wrong. We can fall in love with it, have a brief affair with it, or say goodbye with indifference. Either way, it stays with us.
From a very young age, I didn’t just look for that certain “something” in books. In music, in buildings, even in graffiti. Music especially captivated me. I’m not just talking about lyrics – as a child, I often couldn’t grasp their deeper meaning anyway – but that strange kind of harmony that arises when words, melodies, and instruments speak at the same time.
My mother, sadly, was an extremely simple soul. In truth, so was the rest of my family. They sensed that I didn’t quite fit in, but had no idea what to do with it. Sure, they brought my report cards to work and bragged about me, but I never truly felt supported.
For a long time, I didn’t understand why I was different. Then in high school, I first heard about the laws of intelligence inheritance – thousands of genes combine, and sometimes everything “falls into the right place.” That’s how average parents can end up with an exceptionally intelligent child. I was one of those rare statistical anomalies. Essentially, a mutant.
But no problem, nature eventually eliminates extremes. According to science, this process happens across generations. This can be observed in my children, too – they’re exceptionally intelligent, but perhaps a degree less than I was. “Regression to the mean” is actually one of the most important regulators of our entire world, since systems naturally strive for balance and stability! Whether they’re financial, social, or biological.
And I’ve strayed from the original topic again. I was talking about my mother, who could endlessly listen to Italo disco songs that were impossible to tell apart, and she didn’t understand the lyrics either. My mother visibly enjoyed these songs. Maybe precisely because she didn’t understand them. Because this way the music remained purely music, she didn’t have to think about it. Once, however, for some reason, she recorded a Zoran song from the radio. “My Father Believed” was the title. It was a fantastic experience. I listened to it. Every note, every word.
Perhaps this explains why my first album cassette was a Zoran album. I loved it, listened to it, but strangely, I never bought another Zoran record. As if this one song had said everything I needed to know from Zoran. He wasn’t important – what I discovered through him was. That a song could mean more than what you think about it at first listen.
A little later, I turned toward heavier rock. P. Mobil, Dinamit, Hobo, Korál and similar bands. This was the period in my life when I thought that the louder I listened to music, the more true it would become. And in a certain sense, it was true.
Let’s pause for a moment here. By the time of this concert, Tunyó was no longer with us – his performance was played from video. But as he sings in the song, I’d like to believe that’s how it happened for him, and one day it will happen to me too:
“A dishevelled bird in the air,
no longer held aloft, not even by its heart.
It slowly descended. Landed before me.
With eyes closed, it simply passed into another world.”
As I grew up, my musical taste became more diverse. Everything from alternative to opera fit in. The reality is that I have no idea how “diverse musical taste” develops in a person. This isn’t some conscious process. It doesn’t work like someone wakes up one day thinking, “Well, today comes reggae. I’ll get to know it, love it. Tomorrow, dark-electro can come.” More often than not, it was blind luck that led me to a new world. And when I say luck, I mean very bizarre situations, the kind that even the most imaginative novelist wouldn’t dare write, because no one would believe it.
Like in 1985, when we ended up at a Depeche Mode concert completely by accident.
We were coming home from Palatinus beach when we saw a poster at the bus stop. It wasn’t big, just a cheap blue-black flyer, the kind you’d see advertising community centre events. There were four “leather-clad” guys on it, in black clothes, with serious faces. So naturally we guessed what any sensible person would: some new metal band.
We went. We were stunned. First by the audience, then by the music. The Hungarian opening band sounded really bad. At least that’s how I felt then. Later, I got to know their music and liked it, but on that day everything they did specifically irritated me. It probably wasn’t their fault, but mine. Sometimes a person needs a little time to prepare for the unexpected.
There we stood, surrounded by East German, Czech, and Polish fans in studded leather jackets, with long hair, just staring. Then Depeche Mode came on, and we still didn’t move. We just stood and watched them. Watched them go up on stage, stand behind the synthesisers, and start… well… um… Playing music? Actually, yes, but completely differently than anything I’d known before.
Five or six songs had already passed when I noticed that I was gently stepping side to side to the rhythm of the music. I was dancing! During “Photographic,” it finally changed something in me permanently. What was in that song? Memories. Flashing lights. Pictures that someone takes to preserve something. Not just the lyrics, the choppy rhythm, the stage lights also floored me. I just stood there at thirteen years old and understood: this is me. This is what I do, what I will do. I photograph. Not with a camera, but in my head. I store every moment, every sound, every image, so that later – even decades later – I can retrieve them.
“Photographic” didn’t change me by accident. But because I recognized myself in it.
What would a textbook analysis look like if I had to write it? (To those reading my blog in English, I apologise in advance. First, Hungarian is a far more expressive language; second, my English may not fully capture everything I wish to convey.)
“One of the heaviest and most sensitive songs from Depeche Mode’s early period, Photographic, conceals far more than its mechanical surface initially suggests. At its core, the song uses the metaphor of photography to reveal an inner world: the prison of memory, the ache of inaction, and the way the past— if left unresolved —can slowly eclipse the present.
The repeated line “I take pictures, photographic pictures” speaks of emotional paralysis. The narrator doesn’t live in the moment; he captures it, preserves it, because he can no longer truly experience it. In this way, the past does not fade into memory but becomes a compulsive loop. These recurring technological references are symbols of the alienation of personal relationships. Only fragments remain from life, mere copies of reality. Just cold, recorded signals.
The stark contrast of “bright light–dark room” echoes through the song like a pulse. The light represents recognition — the painful clarity of the past — while the dark room is the realm of repression, of what we push beneath consciousness. The narrator drifts between these poles, seemingly unable to decide whether to let go of the memory or drown in its details.
The line ‘I said I’d write a letter, but I never had the time’ takes on particularly heavy meaning. Behind this seemingly banal excuse lurks the shaping of an entire fate: the decision he didn’t make, the gesture he failed to make. This sentence is no longer just about the unresolved relationship with the other, but about how a person carries a missed moment throughout their entire life. The whole song becomes a kind of fixed grieving process: not for death, but for the slow extinction of a relationship.
‘Photographic’ thus becomes the sound image of an inner state – the confession of a person who only observes, archives, documents, but cannot live. It’s no wonder that in this textual context, the photograph is not a tool of remembering, but proof of the impossibility of forgetting. Just as every picture freezes a moment, this song also preserves a consciousness frozen in an emotional state: where quiet regret, longed-for but never-taken steps, and helplessness against time are all present at once. ‘Photographic’ is not just a song, but a frozen life feeling.”