Judy Tihany 2004

Looking for a particular thing in a museum is like looking for a word in a dictionary - you keep being led astray. There was a little bronze tomb guardian, something between a dog and a nightmare, who looked as if he could lick his weight in demons or anything else that came his way. Although I wasn't dead I felt safer with him around. A place like that Chinese gallery is bound to be haunted by ghosts, demons, who knows what. For that matter, every place I know is haunted by ghosts, demons and absent friends.

- from THE BAT TATTOO

I placed this quote on a wall between two automatic money-tellers on a bank shopfront in a Sydney suburb called Summer Hill. Afterwards I sat in my car and watched as one man stared at it, then later as a woman didn't seem to see it at all. This quote resonates as (a) I love looking in the dictionary, and (b) I carry my ghosts, demons and absent friends with me always.

Love and much happiness to Russ,

Judy
xxx

Judy Tihany 2003

Well! What a day! It seems that when you start to look for a quote, they all rear up at you on their hind legs and squeal "Me! Me! Choose me!!"

Anyway, after much agonising, I settled on this one (ignoring the piteous wails of all the rest):

Dionysus and 'the other' are outside us and within us. So is Hermes, the Priapic god, the thief-god, the god of roadways and night journeys, of chance and change and all kinds of shadowy connections. Here I quote myself from The Medusa Frequency:

Hermes is a mode of event, a shift in the relativities of the moment, a new disposition of energies. There's what you might call a frequency of probability when complementary equivalents offer and anything can be anything.

- from The Bear in Max Ernst's Bedroom
an essay from The Moment Under The Moment

I then went to the luggage section of David Jones Department Store (a lovely big, elegant store in Sydney) and looked for Hermes brand luggage - but they didn't have any. So I placed the yellow sheet inside a 'Travelite' backpack.

Now who will buy this backpack?

This quotation covers my favourite territory: that we don't actually know what anything is, and that anything is possible.

With strangely fond greetings to all my unknown collaborators,

Judy

Judy Tihany 2002

On the rainy Monday 4 Feb I was visiting Mollymook (a small coastal town in New South Wales, 4 hours south of Sydney). After driving around for a while, I placed this in the letterbox of somebody who had a sign out the front of their house which said ‘Hypnotherapy and Tarot Readings’:

from THE MARZIPAN PIG

The upstairs mouse at No. 6 had watched the hibiscus plant in the front bedroom for a long time.

She had seen the showy flowers one after another bloom and shrivel and fall to the floor.

She used to sit behind the skirting board thinking how she would go about it if she were a hibiscus flower.

Sometimes when there was no one in the bedroom she would run out onto the carpet and strike hibiscus poses in front of the full-length glass.

‘Poor silly things,’ she used to say to herself. ‘They’re pretty enough but they have no grasp. One after another they make the same mistake: they let go. The thing to do is, once you've bloomed, hold on.

Just simply hold on and don’t let go.’

With happiness to have been able to participate in this strange and lovely event, and the best of wishes to Russ,

Judy Tihany

Judy Tihany - profile

Judy Tihany passed away on 26th August 2004. She was one of the first participants in SA4QE on its inception in 2002 and, as a fellow Hoban fan and Kraken member remarked, "Her thoughtful comments, her particular voice and her cheerfulness will be greatly missed." I was fortunate to meet "Ukulele Lola" when she visited London once (she took me to see the brilliant Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain in Hackney) and have fine memories of a fascinating evening in the presence of a warm, compassionate, creative, musical and humorous person.

- Richard Cooper


I've been looking at Judy Tihany's SA4QE entries. All of them with love and good wishes from a person I've never seen or spoken to. She was a musician and performer and I never heard her music, never saw her perform. But the love. Who can define the emotions that go out from us or come in to us. Reading all kinds of books, not all of them first-class, I find tears running down my face at various scenes. Cigarette dies shielding Bertie Cecil from the firing squad in Under Two Flags; Sidney Carton mounts the stairs to the guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities; The dwarf sees himself in a mirror in The Birthday of the Infanta. Love exists in words, is evoked by words, goes to and comes from persons who never existed. But it's real. And the love from and to real people is real wherever they are and however they are, alive and dead. The love from Judy is real and my love that goes to her now is real. Love is a mystery.

- Russell Hoban