Salzburg, 9.7.03: Nuns and Sycamores

Sitting in train station, Westbahnhof, in Vienna waiting for our train to Salzburg. Trying to obtain a balanced impression of Vienna, no easy task. By their nature, impressions are, well, impressions: evanescent recordings of events that touch us like moth wings brushing the face at night, and then disappear. Nothing balanced about them.

I feel out of fairness to Vienna I should record how nice the waitress was to us in the restaurant our second night in Vienna. Without consulting my previous journal, I can’t recall the name of the section of the city. It was around the Lichtenstein Palace with the famous collection of Secessionist art, that turned out to be closed.

She spoke in a kind of coo, or the closest German can come to a coo. She called us, as she presented us the bill, Herrschaft.

All of this may have been shtick for the tourists or a cozening to try to get a tip. But I don’t think so. She seemed genuinely kind in an unaffected way, and too busy to fuss with false friendliness.

A pigeon has just sailed over my head, so close I saw it eye to eye. We’re inside the main Saal, I should stress. It, or another, is now tipping towards Steve. As Steve says, “That is a bold pigeon.” With all the feet and luggage going hither and yon, it’s lion-hearted, I’d say.

Now there are two of them, as if on patrol. If people approach, they tip a little faster, but giving the impression of being supremely in command of their surroundings and supremely unhurried.

As I wrote in the hotel one day in Vienna, a pigeon landed on the windowsill, stepped to the very inside edge of it, and then looked around and down. Seeing nothing to interest it, evidently, it flew off. Many rooms have little needle-like things on the outside sill to avert the pigeons.

As I talk about windows, I realize the architectural element I’ve been calling a pediment is a capital. I knew pediment wasn’t right, since what I’m describing wasn’t below but above the window—not a footer but a header.

But having no English dictionary at hand and being increasingly age-addled, I simply couldn’t think of the term. It’s obvious: pediment; capital. P is to c as head to toe.

Entirely new theme. I’m not doing well at that disappearing act I planned to practice this trip. It’s damnably hard to disappear. I’m not even sure what I mean by it, except that something inside me needs to be less present, less driven, less intently focused. Or is it more present and more focused on what really matters?

I’m worn out by the effort to control and/or respond to my surroundings and the people around me. I need a kind of…spirituality is the precise word…that enables me to rest more inside, simply be.

And I don’t know how to manage it at work or at play. At work, I tell myself the problem is job stress. But away from work, I don’t really unwind. The hypervigilance is inside me, like a second skin over my soul.

I understand so much, I think, Garcia Lorca’s desire to be a ghost, the pulse that beats on the other side. Is that a necessary impulse for anyone who wants to create? Or does it have to do in my life as in Garcia Lorca’s with being gay?

I can’t get that statue of the debased Jew out of my mind. I must see if the Internet has a picture of it. I need a shrine of such icons—this picture, one of Garcia Lorca….

We’re facing the escalator that comes up from the level below. Between where we sit and the escalator is a wall of glass. As people of a certain height rise up the escalator, the glass throws rays out of the back of their heads as if they’re wearing a curiously shaped crown of light. It happens suddenly and is as suddenly gone. When I first saw a woman with this halo, I thought she was actually wearing one of those glittering hats black churchwomen wear that can actually harm someone who hugs them.

Quotation from Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1948; repr. NY: St. Martin’s, 1976):

“Miserable people cannot afford to dislike each other. Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle” (74).

“He led the way through the rather dull little herb-garden—the idea of herbs is so much more exciting than the look of them…” (217).

+ + + + +

Wine before noon on a warm summer day, in a train whose rhythm recalls the experience of being enwombed: a recipe for sleep. I’m awake, barely, after a nap and a sudden jolting stop of the train. Small mountains in the distance, fields full of ripe wheat, villages with red-tiled roofs and Zwiebeltürm churches: the Austria of fairytale and fantasy, of the von Trapps.

Dodie Smith uses “raven” as a verb (to be ravenous for). Really? Pronounced like the bird or the adjective?

Beautiful countryside as we near Salzburg, very Mittelbergisch with higher mountains to the east. Pastures of cattle, something I haven’t seen since we left the Altvatergebirge in Moravia. Steve tells me due north is the Bavarian Oberpfalz. I can see it, the way that landscape (and culture) would naturally flow into this. Little lakes now, too, like ones around Munich, the Starnberger, e.g., but much smaller.

+ + + + +

In Salzburg now. I realized this morning as I looked out the window in Vienna that it was a sycamore I saw from our hotel window. Had the characteristic bark and those little balls sycamores have, but the leaves are a little different.

What made me remember: we’ve just walked up to the Benedictine abbey on Nonnberggasse and in front of the abbey church is a beautiful huge old sycamore, surrounded by benches on which a group of elderly folks were sitting and talking.

I like that tradition in German and Austrian towns and villages of having trees in a gathering place, with benches under them. I remember how Bubsheim in the beginning of the Alps in Württemburg has a huge linden surrounded by benches, which is an icon of the village. Hundertwasser’s passion for trees: his museum says he planted over 100,000, I recall. Amazing.

Vienna, 7.7.03: Schiele, Imperial Facades, and Hundertwasser House

Don’t feel like writing much. Don’t feel like much, period. In addition to the low spirits, I’m simply fatigued. We awoke—too early—to the sound of drills and clashing boards falling, as construction men do work right outside our window.

Also, as Cassandra Mortmain, the narrator of the book I’m reading now, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, says about her father, “He has always talked as if he had brought America home in his pocket” (p. 116). This vis-à-vis his generalizing about all of America on the basis of two lecture tours there….

I do the same, and have been in Vienna only two days. Which is why I call my impressions, impressions. They’re nothing more.

Another impression: even lower middle-class and working-class older women in Vienna have artfully arranged hair, the big-hair look. Suits the thin faces many of them seem to have. Also, to me, speaks of the bit of 19^th-century Romanticism still alive in the city’s self-image.

Or, it suddenly occurs to me, are we imitating the Queen and Queen Mum? Wechsberg’s “ein Smocking” in Vienna, My Vienna?

I’m museumed out. The Kunsthistorische Museum was overwhelming and a bit dusty, metaphorically speaking. The black marble, close rooms, and dark colors of the walls make one feel as if one is swimming at the bottom of the sea of history, with its full weight bearing down.

Of course, it’s unbelievable to see the Rubens, Brueghels, Dürers, and so on in full life. But room after room full on a muggy summer day became a recipe for an afternoon nap from which I woke logy-headed.

Then onto the Leopold, which was such a refreshing contrast. I’m very interested in the sociopolitical milieu of the Secessionists, a group I knew too little about, especially Anton Kolig (or was he a kind of stepchild?). His overt homoeroticism and male nudes stand out in a time and place that still used the female nude as fodder, despite glimmerings of a Bloomsburyesque sexual polymorphousness.

Especially in the life of Egon Schiele. That picture of the hermits, hung beside a bust portrait of him with the same face as one of the hermits, has to be a comment on his homosexuality. He did marry, if I understood correctly, but what a tormented life—being charged with a crime against nature, thrown out of a village for painting a nude in his garden, etc.: an Austrian Oscar Wilde. I want to know more.

The Hundertwasser place and exhibit: what to say? Fascinating, very attractive. Yet I was left wondering about his life. Is he yet another of those gay men of his generation who lived an ostensibly heterosexual life? Who was that Dominican who left the priesthood and spent his life as a poet in California, married to a woman? In retrospect, he said if he had it all to do over again, he’d live an openly gay life.

I ask all these questions in light of the story of Egon Schiele and Anton Kolig. Something generational seems to have forced gay men into such macho acting out. It’s all unattractive, too.

Hundertwasser also reminded me of Prof. X in graduate school—and the preceding remarks aren’t beside the point with that comparison. It takes a strong ego and lots of chutzpah to invent a world and promote oneself into a virtual industry. Prof. X has managed to do that in his field, and Hundertwasser did as an artist.

All that aside, his ideas are fascinating, engaging, the house a wonder, and I love his art, even if it at times borders on that mass-produced, mass-appealing kind of art that Klimt also ended up creating, whether he intended to do or not.

The morning and time there were restful. Now tired again. Sitting in a café in a gasse—Weihergasse? And if so, where’s the pond?—between our hotel and the cathedral, Immer Voll, recommended by our hotel lady. A nap’s in order, since we’re to go to a play this evening at the English Theater. Vienna does tire its guests. I’ve begun to think it’s impossible to understand Austria and its imperial history without being here—a very obvious statement, but I mean that in a sense less obvious, one hard to explain.

Part of what I mean is that Vienna doesn’t seem to yield its secrets easily, not as easily as Prague does, despite all those hidden courtyards and garrets. You have to work very hard to see and appreciate Vienna. It’s not user-friendly. It’s designed by aristocrats for aristocrats, with walls, hofs, secret gasses, and secret entrances.

Façades count for everything, grand vistas, and they all have some imperial reference. As in other “imperial” centers, the real life of the cultured and privileged goes on inside, behind shutters and walls—or so it appears.

Yet there’s a huge class of workers, always has been, living their own life in tenements that seem squalid, judging by what we saw today around the Hundertwasser museum. For those folks, by contrast, life seems to have been lived outside, in the coffeehouse or pub, anywhere but in the tenement with its central spigot for the whole building.