Hova rohan az oázis és miért?
Where to and Why Is the Oasis Running?

Summary/Abstract: This essay about a poem and its metaphoric title is written by its author as a belated reader. The title is considered both in its direct (geographic-scientific and pragmatic) and its metaphoric sense. Oases don’t produce metaphors, humans do, thanks to their individuality, an inseparable complex of their inner and outer life which ultimately depends on their being alive, as it does for any oasis before it dries out. Oasis on the Run is the title of a poem published in a book in 1970. It is a montage of sixty six Roman numbered parts without titles. The root metaphor is placed in the essay in the context of Nietzsche’s phrase “the desert is growing, woe to him who is hiding deserts”, as referred to by Heidegger in 1950/51 and implied by Beckett’s Endgame, interpreted as a gloomier version of his Waiting for Godot, eternal return of the same absurd. The poem, however, is about the survival of the oasis, fully aware that an oasis only exits in a desert. Theories are expected to be coherent, poems by contrast to be cohesive, as are metaphors. The contention proposed in the essay turns on the difference in theories and in poems between absolute metaphors, metaphors not allowing any conceptual resolution. Oasis on the Run is a play unto itself, an absolute metaphor that does not allow a key to the code other than the entire poem, the closed system of a poetic text “coming to life” as an open system in the environment of a living human being, always an individual, how many of them may there be of them anywhere and at any time.

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