Peter Riley: The Dance at Mociu – Preface by the Author
Most of them I call "factual stories". That is to say, things did happen more-or-less as described (or failed to, or appeared to, both of which I accept), and personal and place names are unaltered, but they remain constructed things. Those I don’t call factual stories I call prose-poems, which means that nothing happened but there was a certain something in the air. We went there in search of music; everything else was glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, and hung on the frailty of singular instances. But instances which clearly could not occur anywhere else.
The first section derives from a tour in a hired car around Romania in 1998. It has to do with not knowing where you are, and noticing things which might later develop into glimpses of something. But the pieces in sections 2 and 3 at Poienile Izei, Mociu, and the second at Budesti were also during this tour.
The second section stays in Maramures, a mountain-ringed enclave in the far north of Transylvania against the border with Ukraine, which became the base of all subsequent visits through the generous hospitality of Ioan and Anuta Pop in their house in Hoteni. The villages of the two valleys here, the Mara and the Iza, have a character quite distinct from the rest of Transylvania or anywhere else, most evidently relict, but also, as I claim, advanced, or at least exemplary. This is of course highly contentious in a world dominated by a materialism which regrets its own results.
For a directly opposed view based on roughly the same amount of experience in exactly the same place, see the TV film "The Last Peasants" by Angus MacQueen (first shown March 2003). Crudely: that behind the pastoral glamour it is a place for the old and the dull; all the bright young things can’t wait to get out and away from a life of poverty and toil. I don’t altogether deny this view, but most places can offer major contrary versions of themselves and this wasn’t the one we were looking for. We were looking for what held the place together rather than what was out to destroy it, in the hope that some things, not easily locatable elsewhere, might be unerasable. We didn’t go there to be disillusioned; we can be disillusioned where we are.
Of course one worries about what’s going to happen to the area, but so one does of most areas, perhaps all of them.
The third section has pieces taking place in several different parts of Transylvania proper, including Hungarian-speaking villages of the centre and west, visited from Maramures or passed through on the way there or back.
It should be added that in five years some of these places have changed considerably, especially as new non-traditional houses have sprung up everywhere, and the description "villages of wooden houses" is now only selectively valid. Tractors are replacing horse transport in some areas and lorry routes for forestry or quarrying are being driven through many villages, so that the very low ambient noise level of "Quiet Pastures with a Small Thunderstorm" is in process of erosion. Many of these changes are themselves the result of the efficiency of the traditional agricultural system.
Further ramifications of these visits are in my poem sequence Sett Two which can be consulted on the Jacket Magazine website (Australia, edited by John Tranter).
Peter Riley