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(translated by Jonathan Bolton)

How to Paint a Picture of Brno

If you really want to paint a picture of Brno, with everything that belongs to that endeavor, then I must require you to take several preliminary steps beforehand. Begin by searching out two young people in Brno, preferably a man and a woman. The choice is completely up to you, and you should choose -- I don't want to say cautiously, but definitely thoughtfully. Then you should select a Brno neighborhood where the two will meet. And again, it's basically up to you whether it's Žabovřesky, with its neighborly gardens snuggling up to one another, or Masaryk's Quarter, with the now somewhat faded luxury of the wealthier middle classes; smoke-stained Komarov or picturesque Husovice; the proud and self-sufficient Královo Pole; Židenice, pushed to the periphery, or Pisárky, stepping toward the woods. And once you’ve chosen your neighborhood, settle the couple there and for God's sake give them time. And when it happens and at last the egg is laid, both of them will take turns sitting on it. Until one day you'll tap on the shell from inside and they'll help you break through.
And lo and behold, you're out. But don't hurry with anything yet, because under no circumstances should what awaits you be rushed.
At first, your life will not differ significantly from the life around you. Don’t expect any favors along those lines, none whatsoever. Nothing will avoid you and no relief will be provided. And it would be good to know, right from the beginning, that you’ll get the urge to run away from your city a hundred times. Brno is a city on which there lies the curse of provincialism, and when you look back, you'll see one poet who has stuck the barrel of a gun in his mouth, and another who has hanged himself in a newly built house, and a painter who's cut his veins, and dozens of painters and poets who fled and are fleeing here as if from the plague. And when you look upwards in Brno, it can't escape you that the sky here is shot through with the ominous omnipotence of mediocrity, like dry rot. Nevertheless, please do not leave. Only if you persevere can we proceed to the next phase.
So now may I let you in on the secret that, in fact, you won't need a canvas, or paints, or a brush? At first sight, Brno is an absolutely insignificant city; what's more, it is walled in by a protective embankment of ugliness, and so it takes a long time before anyone realizes that something is hiding underneath it all, something that will demand far more from you than any painter's craft.
Now do you understand why it was so important for you to keep an eye on everything having to do with you, from the very beginning? To choose even your parents thoughtfully? Why, your assignment did not begin when you decided one morning to paint the city; that task preceded your birth, conception, and the meeting of your parents, that task preceded the first light touch of something with something. For unlike all other cities, Brno will feed on your body and your blood, and you are the material you must work with.
The first thing to draw your attention is the surprising metamorphosis of the glove you've thrown down. Damn! you say, startled, until you slowly grow used to it. But once the process is in motion, not even you will be able to stop it, and you will never again be sure whether what you're experiencing is a sudden event in your stomach or an elevator's movement in the shaft of an apartment building. The lumps of office buildings on Žerotinovo and Šilingrovo Squares will rise on your body, and where the Café Bellevue used to stand, your gigantic thumb will swell up, an enormous fragment that lives its own life. Don’t have the audacity to cough, if you don't want the shock waves to hurl customers from the bistro on Cejl Street, and the tic that occasionally tugs at your face is just a trolleybus crossing Solniční Avenue. Deep in the casemates of Špilberk Castle, your kidney does its stubborn work, and in the morning your night-time dreams will fly out as a flock of pigeons to turn the square a sulfurous gray. Your tongue, fond of delicacies, will dive into the reservoir of the Brno Dam to hunt up a forgotten olive from the bottom.
And one ill-tempered morning your head will hurt like hell, as if Brno’s power plant, God forbid, were preparing to explode again. Your joints will creak, along with the bridge's overstrained pillars, and one of the boorish caryatids on the main square will prick up your ears. On the billboard behind the train station, your eye will open. And then you'll understand: everything that was supposed to happen has happened, and the work is at an end. Pull down your pants, sign one of your half-moons, and walk quickly away from it all.