For Hölderlin...

For some reason, sooner than dozens of far greater lines, the line of Hölderlin's that's stayed most deeply lodged in my mind is the modest almanachal observation
zur Märzenzeit, wo gleich ist Tag und Nacht.
This Märzenzeit has, for many years now, been an especially memorious time for me. It's this time of year that poor, itinerant, rootless people like myself tend to choose as our best time to quit one country and settle in another. In March and April, if the settling doesn't "take" for some reason and we end up homeless in the place that we planned to make our home, the warm months are not so far away, so that prospect of homelessness is not so awful as it would have been, say, in November.
There tends to be lodged, then, most deeply and firmly in the minds of us Cain-like wanderers on the earth, who've seen, to our sorrow, so many different countries, the image of each one as it is - or often, rather, as we hear its more settled inhabitants think and talk about it -specifically in this fleeting Hölderlinian Märzenzeit.
The "most German season" remained, for example, for me, throughout the whole thirty years after I first arrived there alone and penniless in the March of 1997, "the season of the asparaguses", "die Spargelzeit", when this peculiar vegetable seems to cast a spell on Germany's cafes and supermarkets and the peculiar odour that its consumption endows on human urine becomes a pervasive atmosphere that, diffused from the public pissoirs, fills the streets and squares of even its greatest cities.
It's been almost three years now since I first arrived in Hungary. But this is my first spring here outside the big cities and it is as if I am arriving in a new country after all.
Walking this morning in the woods on the north bank of the Danube, I noted not only, with apprehension and a certain fraternal affection, how many of the homeless and the destitute, housed in tents and abandoned railway carriages, these woods have become a shelter for but also that this "March time", at least here in this part of Hungary, could hardly be given a more appropriate name than "the time of the woodpeckers".
The forests echo and re-echo with the sound of these vigorous birds' beaks penetrating the barks of the trees in search of the insects that form a large proportion of their nourishment. I wander amidst the complex drum-chorus, revising and re-revising the metaphor of the equally sharp-beaked kingfisher with which I tried to capture, yesterday, the essence of the epistemic template that unites the synchronic linguistics of Saussure, the power analytics of Nietzsche, and the stance taken by the Austrian School economist Carl Menger in his dispute with the historicist Gustav von Schmoller.