Salzburg, 19.7.03: Wiedersehen and Travel Jitters

Sitting in Salzburg airport. Just realized the days preparing for a trip are interstitial. You’re neither here nor there. Taking melatonin to try to change the body’s clock makes things even more surreal, because you’re trying to get your body to function on time that’s halfway around the world.

My body—I—am less and less flexible. It wants to do things its old accustomed way. It’s not designed to hurtle through air, wake up in Salzburg and go to bed in Little Rock (God willing).

I pity the folks in the long lines headed where? Italy? Our Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt is much less in demand. Austrians don’t go to Germany for vacations, it seems. Like the Germans, their fancies turn southward.

Now on plane as it takes off from Frankfurt. Disparate thoughts as the trip ends, ones hard to draw together into any thematic unity—a process made more difficult from fatigue after two relatively sleepless nights in which I tossed and turned with digestive upset.

One of the books I read while traveling—perhaps Tielsch—speaks about the apparent contingency of so much of our experience. I’m struck by how we never know what chance encounter will lead to what outcome.

Last night, at the dinner at Leopoldskron (to which fellows were permitted to invite guests), I sat next to a man from Vienna, someone with the Austrian Ministry of Education. We talked a while about our background, and then he mentioned that his wife, an Iranian, had lived in Little Rock. When I shared my card with him, he said, “Ah, yes! I know this college. My wife was offered a position in its music department.”

What are the chances? The book I’m now reading, Nicholas Crane’s Clear Water Rising, mentions vis-à-vis such encounters that we need the feeling we’re not alone. We want “chance” to be meaning-full.

The Viennese man—C. Deman, as well as I could understand the last name—said as we parted, “I do not believe such things happen by chance.” Yet, if meaningful and meant, how? And where’s the meaning. It’s not apparent.

Thinking this morning as we left Salzburg, where the hotel proprietors, Herr and Frau Illmer said goodbye, of the habit of saying Wiedersehen, when we know perfectly well it’s not true. Or my family’s habit of never saying goodbye, but that we’ll see someone again soon….

The only way this makes sense is in light of the ancient belief in the communion of saints: all our lives count somehow, somewhere. It’s in that “space” that we connect, that chance has no real meaning, that we’ll see each other again.

Do I believe that? Not sure. It’s easy to say, isn’t it?

And do I connect or want to connect with the very rude young man originally seated beside me? Steve and I were seated across the aisle from each other. When the man approached, he signaled that it was his seat by tossing two books, one after another, across me onto the seat, with nary a word.

Steve got up and asked if he’d like an aisle seat, since we’re traveling together. Without batting an eyelash, he said, “Absolutely not! I had an aisle seat on the way over and am tired of being bumped.” A simple thanks but no thanks would have amply sufficed.

Something in me wants to tell him life or God will teach him to be less aggressively unkind. Something else tells me he’s a dime a dozen; forget about him.

But if I believe what I wrote previously, even this man’s life connects to mine, and an encounter charged with what I thought was negative meaning may have some other significance, in the ultimate realm of things.

Crane and his book: why on earth read about a man’s trek across the mountainous chain crossing Europe from Finnisterre to Istanbul, while traveling myself? I’m not sure I loke the book, its protest-too-much machismo, its derivative glances over the shoulder at Patrick Leigh Fermor.

He talks about how he both had to take this trek and also had o cope with great pain at each leave taking from his wife, who met him periodically on the trip. But if the parting was so painful, why take the trip, when they’d been married only a year?

It’s rather easy—and perhaps cheap—to say that there’s a big element of Freudian need to vanquish the father, to prove himself as phallically endowed as his father. He mentions that his father took such treks, daring lightning to strike, led by cool logic. He self-consciously dogs the footsteps of Hemingway—and who more driven by the need to prove phallic power in the face of unacknowledged homoerotic desire than Hemingway?

But to be fair to Crane, he does also say that his grandmother, 94 when he left on his trip, was a famous traveler and trekker, so perhaps it’s merely in his blood.

And in the end, every journey, no matter how long, how short, is a journey of the human heart.

Salzburg, 18.7.03: Evening Storms and Nazi Secrets

Occupying a wet bench this morning. Fierce storms about 4 P.M. yesterday with high winds and rain into the night. As we walked over this morning, I saw lots of branches torn from limbs. The Schloss gardener is using his leaf blower—an intrusive, atmosphere-polluting and quintessentially American device in this quintessentially American enclave—to blow leaves from the lawn. Nothing too good for the Americans in Europe. We’ll out-green-law ‘em and show ‘em how to do it right in the process, by golly.

My mountain clad in beautiful clouds today. I’ll drop the cutesy pretense with quotation marks—it’s mine mine mine! In the sense about which Georgia O’Keefe wrote when she said that, if you paint a mountain, it becomes yours…. I suddenly realize I’ve been writing this mountain for a week; that makes it (them, more precisely) mine.

Steve has just walked up and reminded me the mountains were crystalline clear as we walked over a moment ago. The onion-dome tower of the church at the elder home was glorious against them. Shows you just how quickly the weather changes here, and, in particular, what a personality my mountains have.

I just noticed someone has moved the top piece to one of the two pillars leading to the Leopoldskron pond. Right as the walkway ends at the lake in front of this bench are two square pillars with iron hinges in them. They obviously once had a gate.

I knew, could tell my looking, that the tops moved and the insides were hollow. One has been slightly askew ever since I arrived here.

They’re sinister to me. I connect them with the remark the Indian man made to me early in the week re: how no one knows what dark things occurred here in the Nazi period. They look ugly-functional-heavy, like other things I’ve seen the Nazis put up, particularly that vile crypt under Braunschweig cathedral.

As with the crypt, they do have a dark feel to them, as if they experienced who knows what vile acts? Mareille says the Braunschweig crypt was used for occult acts, possibly human sacrifice.

One of the themes of Tielsch’s book is how the Nazis gradually tried to repaganize holidays like Christmas and Easter. The children were taught in school that Easter was “really” an old Germanic holiday centering on Ostrava, and that the egg (fertility) and lamb symbols both came from pagan days.

She says the Catholic farmers and villagers of southern Moravia simply ignored all this, and the churches remained full, with beautiful music. (She’s frank, though, about the fact that people who reported her parents for infractions like treating foreign prisoners [father was a doctor], giving vouchers for baby clothes to Czech women, getting milk and eggs from the grandparents’ farm, or having a tiny hole in their blackout screen) were fellow villagers, sometimes relatives, who sang just as heartily at the midnight Masses at Christmas and Easter.

What did the church dignitaries think, I wonder, after inviting the Nazis into Austria and blessing their cause? How did they respond as the movement became more overtly anti-Christian?

Another fascinating detail her book mentions is that, on Easter Sunday in 1940, I think it was, the sky over Austrian and all of Europe became blood red. She says at the same time there were fierce magnetic storms in America. Makes you wonder if something was stirred up in the elements with all that occult activity going on, or if God was trying to get attention in the midst of it all and warn where things were headed.

I suddenly realize I have not said what (besides the grim design) of these pillars in front of the pond makes me wonder about their association with dark Nazi doings. It’s the hollow interior. I have a feeling, totally unfounded but hard to shake, that something’s inside them (or has been). What that something would be, I couldn’t say. I don’t want to look inside.

Final thoughts as I leave my mountains? I’m not good at goodbyes. I feel the Proustian insight deeply, that leave-taking is a little death.

They are so beautiful, though, and it’s consoling to know they’ll remain even when I’m going in all senses of the word. It’s that longevity of mountains, and their seeming oblivion to human cycles, that makes them so appealing. This has to be why they figure so largely in world religions including Judaism as symbols of God’s encircling arms or unshakeable love and protection.

I clearly do have mountain blood in my genes, and was drawn to mountains even as a child, when I’d war (in vain) for my father over his insistence that we vacation at the beach. The mountains draw me, and I feel at home in them as no place else.

The colors of the pond and sky—green, blue, gray, and white—are so restful. I’m grateful for such a beautiful spot to read, write, and think in for a week. Can now smell the pond as the ducks stir it up and the sun creeps to the north shore. A dank smell, undertones of fish and the mud at the bottom. Under the darkening sky, the pond is greener, the mountains more blue and silvery gray. Their green patches, both fields and trees, recede into the mountains. One brilliant yellow leaf is sailing west in front of me, its colors caught beautifully by the sunshine.

Uh oh. Angry ducks. They were sunning on the bank and a very frisky pair of retrievers, one golden, the other a black lab, has run up to them. Such a flipping, flopping, and quacking you’ve never seen and heard. One nosy large drake who saw all this and sailed with his harem across the pond has come to investigate and is staring at me head on from out in the pond, cocking his head first this way and then that. I don’t know if he’s curious because he saw the dogs’ owner throw a stick there, or if this is his way of waning me and the dogs to leave the ducklings—his ducklings—alone.

Are there water snakes in Austria? If not, then I don’t know what I just saw swim across snout raised in front of me. The dogs’ activity is making everybody curious. I devoutly hope if it is a snake that it didn’t land east of me and is planning to give me a nasty surprise by slithering past my feet in a moment.

The dogs are singularly uninterested in the ducks. It’s tricks they want. And how they enjoy the water!

Salzburg, 16.7.03: Duck Strength and High Summer Drought

Entekraft: that’s the word that popped into my mind as I awoke this morning. Why on earth? I do seem to recall that I thought I heard a duck flying overhead, but why Duck Strength? The games the mind plays when unfettered. If I could only harness some of that capriciousness and creativity for “everyday.”

Salzburg, 14.7.03: Mozart and Berghorn

Back at the Schloss again, watching BBC news. Another soldier killed in Iraq, and more evidence that Bush lied about nuclear weapons in Iraq. It all feels very distant. I feel removed. But, then, I did so even before we left. I feel like a helpless bystander watching a story unfold seeing the inevitable horror, unable to do anything.

Steve read last night that the Schloss was inhabited in the 16^th century (or 17^th?) by a bishop who persecuted the Protestants of Salzburg. He had himself painted as a cardinal, because he evidently expected to be elevated to that auspicious office. But he was apparently extreme even for the counter-Reformation papacy, and was never made cardinal.

And then the Nazi history of this place, the expulsion of its Jewish owners the Reinhards: as the Indian man I met yesterday said, who knows what dark things occurred here?

Joy and pleasure are as evanescent as the clouds above the mountains. Or is it that, in history, things seek a nimbus, and those mountains keep trying to form one as fast as the winds blow it away?

Quotation from Ilse Tielsch, The Ancestral Pyramid (trans. David Scrase [Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 2001]): “I am standing in my own past, I think, and I tell myself that if I want to continue to follow the trail of those who lived before me and learn more about them, then I may not leave anyone out, may not jump over them” (36).

Desultory thoughts as day wanes: I can see “my” mountains from the bedroom window at our hotel (7:30 P.M.). They’re bathed, a word I choose very particularly, in Western light. No feature except their outline stands out in the beautiful sky, which is like heaven’s lining become pearl, white and shining, the land beneath it all imbued with gold. It helps, perhaps, that I have on my reading glasses—landscape al Greco—since they permit me to see clearly only about three feet in advance of my face.

Still, the evening light here is amazing. It doesn’t fade and mute to dusk as in the American South. It remains clear and strong up to nightfall, but becomes more and more gold as it becomes horizontal. This light goes wondrously well with the soft pastel colors of Austrian buildings. The house I’m looking at now is a square four-story solidly build one, painted soft yellow with white trim. A pretty wrought-iron balcony is off what I assume is a bedroom on the top story, with two French doors opening onto it. Above that, a gable with a triangular capital mirrored by two triangular side pieces surrounding a window with a round arch.

The evening light catches the yellow on the house’s walls, lifting and illuminating some patches, throwing others into shadows cast by the ornate and intricate detailed corner moldings of the house. Behind the houses, the light catches the fresh-mown hay, turning it to a gold with hues matching those in the yellow paint, but intermixed with light green.

Salzburg in summer is a city made for evening. Steve and I took a walk about two hours ago and had coffee and strudel (he) or florentiner (I) at a bakery across from the Kajetaner church, on its platz. Wonderful time to sit out. The bakery had only a solitary table and two chairs outside, so we were its exclusive patrons. No need to put up with others chattering and gawking around us as we enjoyed our coffee and pastries.

The chairs were good, honest, plain, sturdy oak, unlike the mesh and steel or aluminum most cafes use, which sling you back into an almost supine position, the preferred position, apparently, of haughty Eurogawkers. Immediately prior to reaching it, we’d stopped at a gallery, nameless on its stamp, at #40 in the Kaigasse, and bought a painting. It’s a mixed-medium (charcoal and watercolor) of a church with two spires and what seems to be a rainbow or storm in the sky beside the church.

I like it. It’s dark, not one of the prettified tourist pictures of the Dom or other Salzburg churches. The gallery owner, who clearly wanted us to buy it, called it mystical, and I think the word fits.

It was expensive—180 euros—though she claimed she gave us a deal, telling us it had been priced (painted 2001) at 500 Schillings, which translates to more than 180 euros. The artist, she told us, is a Macedonian who now lives in Salzburg. His name’s on the back of the painting, Nivolu Toplev, as well as I can read it.

More desultory thoughts: the lady at Nonnberg the other day was wrong about the German name for sycamore. It’s not Platane, as she said. Regina and Helga thought she was wrong, and turned to be precisely right. Platane is the plane tree I’m told you can find in Marseille and southern France, and which I can’t imagine.

Sycamore, the German dictionary tells me, is Berghorn—mountain maple, in the German mind. (Is a sycamore a form of maple?)

Thinking back to Regina and Helga: I’m sure I heard them say “an” for “und,” and “na” for “nay”—how do you spell that alternate German word for nein? I don’t find it under any spelling in our dictionary.

I also notice that that women in Salzburg speak at a much higher pitch than Helga and Regina, who speak very much down in the throat. All the women I recall from Jöhlingen seemed to be deep-voiced, while these Austrian women speak much more musically, like flutes. The city of Mozart, the city of flute-speaking women.