Salzburg, 10.7.03: Oberskrems and Die Wärme

Sitting at Leopoldskron while Steve introduces himself to the seminar organizers. I’m on a bench under beautiful old trees—beeches?—that have a lattice of some very old vines going up their trunks. That is, the vines themselves are the lattice. It’s as if they were artfully arranged to form a lattice design. I can’t see any leaves to identify the vines, but they’re enormous, at least a foot across where they spring from the ground.

At my feet, between two granite pillars and down granite steps, is a lake, serene and green with myriads of green trees reflected in it. A soul-making place to sit.

And then interrupted. Steve brought me inside, we did email, and are now on the bench outside the nuns’ church, under the venerable sycamore I so much admired yesterday. I have my back in a corner of the stone wall, very old and irregular, and am facing the arch leading to the church. A cool wind is coming down from the mountains. It couldn’t be a more beautiful summer day, cooler and less humid than yesterday when we arrived.

In the distance behind me on both sides are the Alps, and the gold spire of a church is immediately below—Erhardskirche, I believe. I’m enjoying the beautiful place, the climate, the respite from work and worry (the latter meant relatively).

We’ve just had a lunch we bought at a Feinkost shop in the street on which our hotel (Struber Garni) is located, Nonnthalerhauptstrasse. We’ve had smoked farmer’s sausage, gherkins, farmer’s bread, tomatoes, apples, a smelly Alpenzeller cheese, beer, and orange juice—accompanied by a tube of Oberskrems I picked up thinking I was getting mustard. The shop lady must have thought what bizarre people these Americans (or English, as the hotel manager thought we were) are: Oberskrems with farmer’s sausage.

Oberskrems is one of the great discoveries of this trip. We’ve had it twice, both times, I think, with smoked trout. It’s delicious, a mix of whipped cream, horseradish, a bit of vinegar, and a touch of sugar.

Two Franciscans, youngish, have just walked past in full habit. One, somewhat bald and with reddish brown hair and nice brown eyes, has just waved and spoken to the nuns’ workman, who has scythed the wildflowers bordering their lane, Nonnberggasse. He then looks at me with a half smile and perhaps to see if I have noticed his cheery greeting of the workman, who is working in the full sun with no shirt. I freeze. Why is it I can’t return a smile under such circumstances? The other, younger, looks very austere.

I gather many German Catholics believe none of their priests is gay or engages in gay activities. MJR was very dismissive when Steve suggested such a possibility for her uncle, a priest. Why? I wonder. Is it true? Is homosexuality impossible for German people to imagine? What is deep in their tribal culture that makes that human possibility impossible to imagine?

Dream last night: men descend to earth in an auto, ingratiate themselves. Once accepted, they transmute into alligators. They announce that they are the lords of creation as identified in Genesis. Humans have had it wrong. We’re their herd, to manage and consume as we’ve done with “lower” animals.

Somehow, a group of us have foreseen this and have hidden in an old school. One discovers the headmaster has killed and stashed the bodies of pupils all in a kind of crawlspace in the school. He hides among the bodies.

The alligators are extraordinarily good at sniffing out the hidden humans. They suspect someone’s in the bodies, but for some reason, can’t sniff him out. They’re determined to find him. They leave no one. The head alligator has to keep all the others fed, or they turn on each other, thrashing about and gnashing their teeth in a menacing way.

The alligators find a church full of people who seem to think hiding in a church will offer them sanctuary. They find this hilarious. It elicits their cruelty. They pick out people to torment, biting off bits at a time and laughing uproariously. They’re angry when a man they’ve been torturing this way dies of shock.

Then it becomes apparent one group of people has been left totally alone. We realize they’re chosen to breed continuing stock, and have been chosen because of their humanity. But a significant proportion of this group are gay men. The alligators admit they’ve made this mistake before: the gays appeal because of their gifts and humanity, but aren’t good breeding stock.

Why this dream? I decided this morning lots of factors interplay: that statue of the debased Jew, who’s both alligator-like in his prone position and the sacrificial victim; a scene I saw on German t.v. a few nights ago of native Americans torturing a man by lifting him with ropes affixed to stakes thrust horizontally through his chest; perhaps even a tree we passed yesterday, which I may have seen and which has a trimmed section very like an alligator’s face.

Another factor may have been hearing two early adolescents talking last evening as we walked to the restaurant about die Wärme. The inhumanity of humans to humans….

And now as we write, a remarkable occurrence. Some people have sat down on the bench, Americans. Steve helps them with directions. The woman sounds Irish. I ask if she is. She says American, but her father was Irish. I ask from where. She says Offaly.

She asks about my Irish roots. I say Mullinavat. She’s astonished. Her uncle was schoolmaster there. She has relatives there. She gives me her name and address and says she intends to ask her family about my Ryans.

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.