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, 17.7.03: Ponds, Mountains, and Observers Observed

“My” mountains swathed in mist from the forest screen at their base about halfway up. They seem in a pensive mood today, melancholy as a Miltonian nun. The white cloud and lack of sunshine make the trees on the shoreline, especially the dark first, the star of today’s show. I feel as if I could be someplace like New England—Maine, perhaps—early on a summer’s morning as summer just begins to look towards fall.

Clouds clearing, mountains in almost full view. The rain has made the pastures on them intensely green. All looks new under the light blue sky. A ridge of very white clouds lying along the backs of the mountains helps to accentuate the green. The eastern faces, I now see, and had never noticed this before, are all clad in firs. The sky lift is headed up to the peak, a tiny speck in the sky.

These last few days I’ve lived as if in a glass bubble, feeling observed, disgruntled, down-hearted. Down-hearted: like gathering in or gathering home, one of those phrases from old Southern hymns that I like very much. Why do I feel down-hearted…?

I came to Europe telling myself to melt in, to be invisible, to give up self-consciousness in order to observe. I’m not doing a good job of it, of enjoying a wonderful summer day in which dark clouds have given way to blue skies, cumulus clouds, and a nice breeze. This and one more day in Salzburg: I should enjoy them!

But how? I don’t know how ever to be free of my own miserable self. Yes, a certain kind of self-consciousness is necessary if one is to observe and write. But the kind I have is crippling and stifling.

Tielsch (246): “Certainly no one stopped to consider that they, too, might one day have to move away, even if no Führer would give the call, that they too could be forced one day to live in temporary quarters, and that they themselves might be grateful for a friendly word or a friendly gesture.”

Salzburg, 15.7.03: Wild Astilbe and Monastic Cellars

At my lake bench again. Again, the clear early morning reflection of the mountains in the lake. For the first time, swans swimming in the middle of the lake rather than hovering on shore—two together, one (the drake?) straggling behind. So serene, the way they move, and with such seeming certitude of their majesty. You’d never think, looking at them, they could be capable of such viciousness.

We walked around the lake this morning. The Schloss from the other side is impressive, as our hotel manager told us this morning. But the shoreline is depressingly dirty, littered with paper, cigarette butts, spent matches. One not-too-friendly shirtless man fishing. Gave us that head-lowered, eyes appraising from below look some men cultivate to signal aggression—a very animal look, one rooted in the testosterone-laden days of scrimmaging for raw deer haunches. It’s actually funny, in this day and age.

Men: what to do with them (us)? We encountered one of us out jogging, mid-50s, one of those military-type billed caps down over his eyes. The cap, the jogging, screamed American.

As we approached, another appraising, cool look. Jaws working, but no sound. Steve tells me a somebody M. from D.C. who spoke the first day at the seminar, singularly unimpressive.

These men. They rule the earth, or think they do. From the outside, life seems so easy for them. They form a network spanning the globe, getting their own men to the inside, keeping the rest at bay.

And they have so many accomplices at gatherings like this. Steve tells me a Dr. W., Hong Kong-born but American-educated, spoke yesterday and predicted a future out of H.G. Wells. By the early 21^st century, only a tiny proportion of folks (but who?) will do the work to sustain the rest of us (we assume, of course, that we’ll be the sustained and not the sustainers).

Steve and others asked critical questions: if this will be true in the future, isn’t it true even now that we have ample resources to go around? And isn’t your projection based on the assumption that we’ll conquer disease and there’ll be no epidemics? With AIDS, is that not counter-intuitive?

Steve says W. shrugged the questions off. They didn’t even count. He actually said science will conquer AIDS and other diseases. Others—from Serbia, India—persisted in asking, but W. ignored them. In this very American, very macho, enclave formed by the Mellon Foundation in Salzburg, such questions may not be asked. It’s as if ghosts were asking them.

Not only that, but a woman from Virginia and a man from California teamed up and attacked the nay-sayers. The California man, who works with ETS or some testing service, got onto the need of U.S. colleges to screen foreign students: Ausländer aus! The Serbia woman asked how you’d identify the threatening ones.

I should have thought we have more than enough endemic violence in America to worry about. Every year, we ourselves, we Americans, kill more of each other wantonly, with handguns, than 9/11 did, I daresay.

Our focus is all wrong. Religion ought to refocus us, but institutionally, it seems only to mirror the world of macho male pseudo power. I saw on BBC news yesterday that Rev. John has removed himself from consideration as a bishop in England. Rowan Williams was talking, and I didn’t get the gist, whether he was relieved or saying the kerfuffle over John exposes how far from the gospels some of us are.

In such a world, a relief to think about astilbe. It is wild astilbe I’ve been seeing in that boggy meadow, I now realize. I saw some cultivated astilbe in a garden yesterday, and the leaves are the same. The wild is white, whereas the cultivated was mauve and its flowers much larger.

Tielsch, Ancestral Pyramid: “Whatever we are began a long time before us. We can live for a longish time as if there were no past, as if the present and the future were alone important, but the past catches up with us” (81). (A significant passage, one I need to photocopy in its entirety.)

A flock of ducks now swimming to the shore, just past the large tree to the east of me. The lead duck, a sentry, larger, evidently a drake, gingerly webfoots his way up the incline and looks carefully around. Another outrider sentry, also a drake, I believe, guards the west flank and stares at me. Are they more worried about humans, dogs, or cats?

They’re now across the lawn almost at the little porch of the guest residence. They’re picking away at the lawn. Looks as if it may have been mown yesterday, but if so, not while I was on the bench. What do they harvest—insects? Seeds? Are they hoping to find crumbs from folks who’ve had coffee here?

Now the ducks are completely gone. Can’t see them anywhere. They for sure didn’t re-enter the water at the point where they left it. They did seem to take notice when a group across the lake began to honk furiously. That is, one of the sentries stood stock still and lifted his head as high as it could be lifted.

Have they made their way inside somehow? I hear a honk that seems to come from inside the guesthouse, and thought I heard a scream in there a moment ago. Will there be gebratene Ente and knödels for supper?

No, there they go into the water, lead duck honking. Is he calling to the others across the lake, or calling his flock, which looks smaller, all in a straight line following him? Now they’re in flock mode again.

My question about gebratene Ente: what does it mean to be a young Austrian today? In Vienna, younger people told us twice they’re vegetarian. How self-consciously do younger Austrians adopt the cultural patterns of their heritage?

Specifically, what do they think of and how do they relate to the church? People in habits everywhere, many of them young; fresh flowers in front of the wayside shrines; people praying in churches or listening to the office at the Benedictine chapel, actually participating in it at the Franciscan church: does this mean Austrian youth are flocking to church and ardently Catholic?

I haven’t been here long enough to know, but somehow I think not. To me, at a feeling level, it feels as if the church acts as a kind of check on the culture, making it more conservative than, say, German culture. But it doesn’t feel as if the church compels the involvement of large numbers of youth in a more than formal, superficial way.

Sitting in the beautiful little green park across from St. Erhard’s church now. I discovered it a few days ago. It’s gloriously shady in this hot, dry weather, and has a wonderful view of the church across the street with its red, black, and gold clock about to strike 4, and its Corinthian columns. The apartment building next to the church is also pleasant, gray to match the trim on the church, with window boxes of various-hued geraniums.

An old lady in a straw hat sits on the bench to my left staring at the clock tower and talking to herself. Upwind, unfortunately, is a dark-haired pony-tailed man smoking.

As 4 approaches, Talking Lady is leaning back on the bench and clutching it with both hands. Maybe the clanging bells hold some portentous significance for her.

By the apartment building is another, green plastered (pastel) with white trim and a very shiny new copper roof, catching the rays of brilliant sun and as brilliantly throwing them into the street.

We’ve had a long afternoon—Steve’s free afternoon. A walk back behind town along the ridge (Mönchbergstrasse?) leading to the Altstadt, then lunch at an undistinguished and rather dirty restaurant. We both had Tagestellers—I noodles and ham, Steve bratwurst and sauerkraut. Steve drank beer, I Gespritzter. My noodles were fatty, but nicely prepared, with fried onion and fresh chopped marjoram, an herb Austrians use often.

Then a walk to a Buchhandlung we’d seen in the Altstadt, where I bought Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I remember it being recommended in a “High Profile” interview in the Democrat-Gazette by that woman in D.C.—something Norwood?—whose distinguished Southern art collection was on display at the Arkansas Museum of Art. It’s where I first saw and loved that Virginia artist Eldridge Bagley. Her father, I seem to recall, was once a senator.

After that, ices on one of the old streets in the heart of the Altstadt. Steve had Heidelbeer, which was good, and I an awful pistachio. Heidelbeeren, it turns out, are bilberries. But what’s a bilberry? Our hotel lady says like a blueberry, but not quite the same. A huckleberry, then, of some sort?

Speaking of semantic distinctions, I find what I’ve been calling a lake at Leopoldskron is actually a pond, Leopoldskron Weiher. If so, it’s a darned large pond.

After the ices, a tour of the museum of modern art, which turns out to be quite a disappointment after Vienna. The ground floor was closed—new exhibit being installed—and the whole thing seems to be an extension of the Rupertinum.

Still, on the top two floors was a decent enough exhibit of Nolde and other German expressionists. Only trouble, we’d seen much of this at the Altona Museum and Barlach Haus in Hamburg, though there was a Barlach engraving I’d never seen. Didn’t even know he did engravings.

And now back. A very hot day, and the hotel lady says supposed to be hotter tomorrow, with storms by evening. She says the weather has been more extreme—very hot and dry, followed by fiercer storms—in recent years.

Oh, clean forgot. We stepped into St. Peter’s church, a mishmash of styles dominated by Italianate Baroque, and discovered it’s the Stiftkirche for the oldest Benedictine monastery in the German-speaking world, founded in the 7^th century.

As we left, we noticed a Keller for the monastery. Turned out to be a wonderful little patio restaurant noted for its wine since the 9^th century. We had cappuccino and apple strudel with vanilla ice cream, a very pleasant respite in the heat of the day. Looking up from the patio, you see right overhead the mountain with the women’s monastery and the Festung: church, abbey, and restaurant are all built right against the mountain. Benedictus montes, Bernadus valles, amavit.

Same hayfield, same mountains I watched last night through the window at this hour. And yet not the same. The light I saw then, the angle of sun against earth, the wind ruffling leaves in trees: all are different, subtly but decisively so. You can never recapture a moment….

You can only hope for other moments, ones beautiful, moving, soft, stirring—above all, full of meaning. This is certainly a moment. The mountains are again as though illuminated by soft light from within.

But it’s not the same moment as yesterday. For one thing, the unfamiliarity of what I saw then is more familiar now, even if slightly so, and I am slightly less wonderstruck.

That hay: we smelled it into the night. It was, as Steve predicted, very dry by noon today, though the hayfields were wet with heavy dew as we walked to the Schloss early in the morning. The farmer was mowing another field, and as Steve pointed out, the tires of his hay-cutting machine were glistening with the dew.

Yet the hay that had blown or been strewn onto the path by the machine that spreads it out was entirely dry by noon. It crunched beneath our feet as we walked on it. If rain’s in the forecast, I’d have thought the farmer would be gathering it in now. But not so. Maybe tomorrow before the evening storms….

Gathering in: an image and phrase I like, one with deep religious overtones for me. Bringing in the sheaves…. That book with a title something like Gathering Home, a first novel by an Alabama writer, Vicki Covington?: I gave it to my mother, and she told me she’d read and been moved by it. A point of contact in those awful years when I thought mind could never leap to mind across the chasm that divided us….

Now I smell the hay. Wind must be just right or, as I pointed out to Steve, the increasing humidity of evening brings smells out. New Orleans is never so redolent (and foetid) as on a hot summer’s night—a hot muggy summer’s night.

That evanescent evening-breeze smell of new-mown hay and thoughts of a tiny spark of connection with my mother not too long before she died: the most I can hope for in my life is that there have been sparks of connection that have meant something to others. From my side, the spark with my mother via that book seems so dim, an evanescent flash. But perhaps it meant more to her. And from God’s-eye view, who knows what any such spark might mean?

Is this what ultimately pushes one to write—the need to coax such sparks out of the dailyness of one’s (and others’) existence? I can’t think of a better reason, really.

Whatever bird flies over at night as sun sets (and why do I expect them to have American or British names and identities—meadowlark? purple martin?) makes a shrill, unpleasant cry, very high-pitched and monotonal. It’s not the meadowlark of fable. I can’t recall if purple martins sound this way. I do faintly remember that one evening when C.J. McNaspy had us take him, late in his life, to the Lake Pontchartrain bridge to see the martins nest at night. They arrived by the thousands and (seeming) tens of thousands. He enjoyed it so. I didn’t appreciate it, and feel guilty. I was so wrapped up in the aftermath of the Belmont Abbey experience. C.J. had recommended us to Fr. Placid and knew him personally.

What a poor friend I’ve been to so many people. I ought to have valued those final moments with C.J. more. It may well be the last time I saw him. Was this the trip we made when Bruce B. died? If so, it was our last trip to New Orleans, and I was, of course, also much engaged with taking care of my mother, though she wasn’t with us the evening we went to the causeway, of that I’m sure.

I ought to have been more attentive. Seeing Steve (who’s now at a cookout for the seminar) sleep this afternoon, I realized how little I do to give him bodily comfort, and how much he does for me. I’m a selfish sod—don’t know the American expression that gets it quite so apt as the Brits do.

The mountains now gray-purple in their go-to-sleep clothes. Light is waning. I hope Steve’s walk back will be safe. There are crossings, bicyclists, and he may drink wine or beer. May the angels accompany him as he wends his way back. And may I be a person of larger heart, more depth, more penetrating vision, and less self concern (above all).