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But indeed this is where the first shots were fired on Easter Sunday in 1991 and the first casualty was a park policeman. </p> +<p><amp-img alt="Azure Waters, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" height="195" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicebluewater.gif" width="230"></amp-img> The Serbs held the area for the duration of the conflict, though it's difficult to imagine why they wanted it. Lake Plitvice is chiefly notable for its natural beauty and as a gateway to the mountains, hardly a militarily strategic spot since no roads actually run up into, let alone over, the mountains. Nevertheless, here is where it began, though as with all beginnings, it did not really start here, it started with the leaders whose poisoned, greedy hearts and minds dragged the former Yugoslavia into a war no one wanted. +<break> +My parents rented a car in Budapest and we drove south through Hungary toward the Croatian border. The Hungarian countryside was unremarkable but pleasantly so; the same sort of scenery one might pass from Philadelphia to Pittsburg or London to Bath. Around lunch time we crossed over into Croatia, a country that had previously existed for me simply as a place where bad things happen — war, ethnic cleansing, etc — not a place at all actually, just a word. <amp-img alt="Mossy Tree reflection, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicetreereflection.gif" width="180"></amp-img>Like most Americans, I never had a real handle on the Bosnia/Croatia/Serbia war. I was dimly aware that The U.S. at some point, with the backing of U.N. (remember when we played by the rules?) launched a campaign of air strikes in Kosovo. For those that like me could never get it sorted, here's a quick rundown (taken half from guidebooks and half from some Croatians and Serbs I met). The former republic of Yugoslavia was an artificially created state that grew out of the end of world war two and a man named Tito. Tito is an interesting historical figure; he managed with some success to keep one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse countries in the world together for thirty-five years. Naturally there were some iron-fisted clampdowns and not everyone seems to have been fond of him, but in spite of his occasionally brutal tactics he did keep the peace (if at the expense of some). And his tactics were certainly no more brutal than the war that followed his death. Shortly after Tito died in 1980 Yugoslavia was hit by heavy inflation which resulted from Tito's habit of borrowing foreign money and Yugoslavia's inability to pay it back. </break></p> +<p>Slovenia was the first the break away and is the most ethnically and religiously coherent of the various Balkan states. For the most part Slovenia managed to stay out of the fighting that would soon engulf the area. The Croatians were the next to go, declaring independence in 1991 and finally getting U.N. recognition in 1992. That left Serbia, Bosnia and tiny Kosovo. The trouble was there were a lot of Serbians in Croatia, Croatians in Serbia, Bosnians in Croatia, etc. It's tough to say there was a good side and bad side in the war that followed, but isn't it always? The Serbians started the war; the first shot were fired at Lake Plitvice National Park where my parents and I were staying. And yes the Serbians are guilty of ethnic cleansing, rounding up and killing thousands of Croatians. But then the Croatians drove the Serbs out and turned around and engaged in more or less the same ethnic cleansing. War. Everybody loses. Everybody dies. </p> +<p>And so today there are four nations Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Bosnia Herzegovina, where Yugoslavia once existed. [Except, before I was able to get this to press, Montenegro has voted to break away from Serbia, so now there are five. I must publish this before Kosovo does the same.] For the most part the war and its effects are gone. Like Cambodia there is a landmine problem that will continue to exist and kill and main for some time to come, but the tensions seems to have passed and aside from a few bullet riddled buildings and bombed out, caved in roofs, you'd never guess that the largest European war since WWII ended just ten years ago.</p> +<p>Lake Plitvice National Park is a unique geological phenomena formed by two factors: porous karst limestone which absorbs water and erodes quickly, and mineral deposits from since departed glaciers. <amp-img alt="Walkway, Upper Lake, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" height="250" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicewalkway.gif" width="188"></amp-img>As lake water seeped into the Karst, the rock decayed forming a series of lakes and interconnecting waterfalls that cascade through the forests. The national park service has created some trails which pass along the edges of the waterfalls and lakes as they wind their way downhill (or if you're masochistic and/or not that bright—uphill). </p> +<p>The waters are both the clearest water I've ever seen and yet somehow manage to reflect a color close to bright teal and look a bit like photographs of Banff Canada where similar minerals create the same effect on Lake Louise.</p> +<p>But where Lake Louise is so dramatic as to be almost overwhelming, the natural beauty of Plitvice is quieter and less imposing. There is no overlook or scenic viewpoint with flash popping tourists and calendar worthy photographs, to experience Plitvice you have to get out of the car, <amp-img alt="Forest Floor, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitviceforest.gif" width="173"></amp-img>off the road and simply wander the forests in the cool of the morning or evening when the light filtering through the forest is softened by the subtle bending forces of the atmosphere and the forest floor becomes a leaf padded wonderland.</p> +<p>We started at the highest lake and walked downward through cascades of water and reed lined lakeshores, passing at times through the forests where the moss-covered old growth creates a canopy through which sunlight trickles in to form pools of light and shadow forever shifting about as you walk. Strangely there was very little in the way of wildlife. The lakes were choked full of fish, but the forests curiously empty, though I did see a frog lazing in the sunshine near the lakeshore. </p> +<p>As with any Karst area there are a number of caves in Lake Plitvice one of which forms a near vertical chasm through the hillside and can be climbed by means of a series of slippery switch-backing stone staircases. At the right time of day beams of sunlight fall in from above, <amp-img alt="Cave, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicecave.gif" width="165"></amp-img>illuminating the darker passageways and side tunnels which presumably, with a proper torch could be explored. But I neglected to bring any sort of torch and had to content myself with the main cavern.</p> +<p>The hillsides were covered in the green of spring, the dark shades of firs and the lighter, brighter leaves of beeches and maples. The most remarkable of these trees were the white firs whose branches had nearly florescent tips, the result of fresh spring growth. I spent the first evening in Lake Plitvice studying the white firs around our lodge, trying to make sense of how something so bright could eventually fade to the dark, almost black, green of the inner branches. The newly formed tips were such a striking viridescent contrast to the inner tangle that I couldn't help but wonder what lay within that nearly impenetrable jumble of darkness nearer to the trunk.</p> +<p>Near the inner tree where the evening light does not penetrate, some hidden gesture of nature as if to remind us that not everything is so easily seen, not everything is in grand sweeping gestures or romantic vistas, sure the highlights capture our attention, but what lies beneath in that dark tangle near the origins? Does the truth perhaps lie in there amongst the dense and inaccessible darkness? Or do I here sound too much like Joseph Conrad obsessed by the darkness of his river and the human heart he saw beating at the end of it?</p> +<p>It occurred to me that my thinking was mistaken, that in fact due to the physics of light, <amp-img alt="New Growth Pine Trees, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" height="169" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicepinetreetips.gif" width="330"></amp-img>the inner branches were in fact actually lighter, they appear darker because they reflect less light back to my eye, but without my eye and its entrapments what you might observe is actually a dense forest of light, all that light not given up by the world and therefore seen by us as darkness. Perhaps that's the reason a number of artists have chosen to start with a completely black canvas and add color on top of it, as if to transcend the limitations of the human eye.</p> +<p>But perhaps I am too technical since there is no way to <em>see</em> the world as we could say it really is, because the only means we have to see it are our own eyes, our poor senses cannot reveal this impenetrable universe in which not all is illuminated, not everything makes a sound and much carries the scent of nothing on some solar wind which none of us will ever perceive let alone understand.</p> +<p>I have read that in pure darkness the human eye is sensitive enough to detect a candle at a distance of forty kilometers. <amp-img alt="Rainbow, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicerainbow.gif" width="196"></amp-img>And yet in spite of this remarkable attunement to light, light is our limitation, without it nothing exists for us. Perhaps the inner branches of the firs and pines are merely the unyielding tangle of dead needles and cobwebs and beetles that I imagine and there is no metaphor, no truth which is what drives us out of bed in the vague hint of predawn to stand facing east at the shore of some body of water and wait with such anxious anticipations for the coming of the morning light on the water where, as Flaubert once wrote, “the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal.”</p> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/blue-milk.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/blue-milk.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..aabc3a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/blue-milk.html @@ -0,0 +1,343 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>Blue Milk - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="Looking down at the milky blue waters of Like Plitvice it's hard to believe that the largest European conflict since WWII began here. 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But indeed this is where the first shots were fired on Easter Sunday in 1991 and the first casualty was a park policeman. </p> +<p><img alt="Azure Waters, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" class="postpicright" height="195" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicebluewater.gif" width="230"/> The Serbs held the area for the duration of the conflict, though it’s difficult to imagine why they wanted it. Lake Plitvice is chiefly notable for its natural beauty and as a gateway to the mountains, hardly a militarily strategic spot since no roads actually run up into, let alone over, the mountains. Nevertheless, here is where it began, though as with all beginnings, it did not really start here, it started with the leaders whose poisoned, greedy hearts and minds dragged the former Yugoslavia into a war no one wanted. +<break> +My parents rented a car in Budapest and we drove south through Hungary toward the Croatian border. The Hungarian countryside was unremarkable but pleasantly so; the same sort of scenery one might pass from Philadelphia to Pittsburg or London to Bath. Around lunch time we crossed over into Croatia, a country that had previously existed for me simply as a place where bad things happen — war, ethnic cleansing, etc — not a place at all actually, just a word. <img alt="Mossy Tree reflection, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" class="postpic" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicetreereflection.gif" width="180"/>Like most Americans, I never had a real handle on the Bosnia/Croatia/Serbia war. I was dimly aware that The U.S. at some point, with the backing of U.N. (remember when we played by the rules?) launched a campaign of air strikes in Kosovo. For those that like me could never get it sorted, here’s a quick rundown (taken half from guidebooks and half from some Croatians and Serbs I met). The former republic of Yugoslavia was an artificially created state that grew out of the end of world war two and a man named Tito. Tito is an interesting historical figure; he managed with some success to keep one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse countries in the world together for thirty-five years. Naturally there were some iron-fisted clampdowns and not everyone seems to have been fond of him, but in spite of his occasionally brutal tactics he did keep the peace (if at the expense of some). And his tactics were certainly no more brutal than the war that followed his death. Shortly after Tito died in 1980 Yugoslavia was hit by heavy inflation which resulted from Tito’s habit of borrowing foreign money and Yugoslavia’s inability to pay it back. </p> +<p>Slovenia was the first the break away and is the most ethnically and religiously coherent of the various Balkan states. For the most part Slovenia managed to stay out of the fighting that would soon engulf the area. The Croatians were the next to go, declaring independence in 1991 and finally getting U.N. recognition in 1992. That left Serbia, Bosnia and tiny Kosovo. The trouble was there were a lot of Serbians in Croatia, Croatians in Serbia, Bosnians in Croatia, etc. It’s tough to say there was a good side and bad side in the war that followed, but isn’t it always? The Serbians started the war; the first shot were fired at Lake Plitvice National Park where my parents and I were staying. And yes the Serbians are guilty of ethnic cleansing, rounding up and killing thousands of Croatians. But then the Croatians drove the Serbs out and turned around and engaged in more or less the same ethnic cleansing. War. Everybody loses. Everybody dies. </p> +<p>And so today there are four nations Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Bosnia Herzegovina, where Yugoslavia once existed. [Except, before I was able to get this to press, Montenegro has voted to break away from Serbia, so now there are five. I must publish this before Kosovo does the same.] For the most part the war and its effects are gone. Like Cambodia there is a landmine problem that will continue to exist and kill and main for some time to come, but the tensions seems to have passed and aside from a few bullet riddled buildings and bombed out, caved in roofs, you’d never guess that the largest European war since WWII ended just ten years ago.</p> +<p>Lake Plitvice National Park is a unique geological phenomena formed by two factors: porous karst limestone which absorbs water and erodes quickly, and mineral deposits from since departed glaciers. <img alt="Walkway, Upper Lake, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" class="postpicright" height="250" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicewalkway.gif" width="188"/>As lake water seeped into the Karst, the rock decayed forming a series of lakes and interconnecting waterfalls that cascade through the forests. The national park service has created some trails which pass along the edges of the waterfalls and lakes as they wind their way downhill (or if you’re masochistic and/or not that bright—uphill). </p> +<p>The waters are both the clearest water I’ve ever seen and yet somehow manage to reflect a color close to bright teal and look a bit like photographs of Banff Canada where similar minerals create the same effect on Lake Louise.</p> +<p>But where Lake Louise is so dramatic as to be almost overwhelming, the natural beauty of Plitvice is quieter and less imposing. There is no overlook or scenic viewpoint with flash popping tourists and calendar worthy photographs, to experience Plitvice you have to get out of the car, <img alt="Forest Floor, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" class="postpic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitviceforest.gif" width="173"/>off the road and simply wander the forests in the cool of the morning or evening when the light filtering through the forest is softened by the subtle bending forces of the atmosphere and the forest floor becomes a leaf padded wonderland.</p> +<p>We started at the highest lake and walked downward through cascades of water and reed lined lakeshores, passing at times through the forests where the moss-covered old growth creates a canopy through which sunlight trickles in to form pools of light and shadow forever shifting about as you walk. Strangely there was very little in the way of wildlife. The lakes were choked full of fish, but the forests curiously empty, though I did see a frog lazing in the sunshine near the lakeshore. </p> +<p>As with any Karst area there are a number of caves in Lake Plitvice one of which forms a near vertical chasm through the hillside and can be climbed by means of a series of slippery switch-backing stone staircases. At the right time of day beams of sunlight fall in from above, <img alt="Cave, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" class="postpicright" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicecave.gif" width="165"/>illuminating the darker passageways and side tunnels which presumably, with a proper torch could be explored. But I neglected to bring any sort of torch and had to content myself with the main cavern.</p> +<p>The hillsides were covered in the green of spring, the dark shades of firs and the lighter, brighter leaves of beeches and maples. The most remarkable of these trees were the white firs whose branches had nearly florescent tips, the result of fresh spring growth. I spent the first evening in Lake Plitvice studying the white firs around our lodge, trying to make sense of how something so bright could eventually fade to the dark, almost black, green of the inner branches. The newly formed tips were such a striking viridescent contrast to the inner tangle that I couldn’t help but wonder what lay within that nearly impenetrable jumble of darkness nearer to the trunk.</p> +<p>Near the inner tree where the evening light does not penetrate, some hidden gesture of nature as if to remind us that not everything is so easily seen, not everything is in grand sweeping gestures or romantic vistas, sure the highlights capture our attention, but what lies beneath in that dark tangle near the origins? Does the truth perhaps lie in there amongst the dense and inaccessible darkness? Or do I here sound too much like Joseph Conrad obsessed by the darkness of his river and the human heart he saw beating at the end of it?</p> +<p>It occurred to me that my thinking was mistaken, that in fact due to the physics of light, <img alt="New Growth Pine Trees, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" class="postpic" height="169" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicepinetreetips.gif" width="330"/>the inner branches were in fact actually lighter, they appear darker because they reflect less light back to my eye, but without my eye and its entrapments what you might observe is actually a dense forest of light, all that light not given up by the world and therefore seen by us as darkness. Perhaps that’s the reason a number of artists have chosen to start with a completely black canvas and add color on top of it, as if to transcend the limitations of the human eye.</p> +<p>But perhaps I am too technical since there is no way to <em>see</em> the world as we could say it really is, because the only means we have to see it are our own eyes, our poor senses cannot reveal this impenetrable universe in which not all is illuminated, not everything makes a sound and much carries the scent of nothing on some solar wind which none of us will ever perceive let alone understand.</p> +<p>I have read that in pure darkness the human eye is sensitive enough to detect a candle at a distance of forty kilometers. <img alt="Rainbow, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" class="postpicright" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/plitvicerainbow.gif" width="196"/>And yet in spite of this remarkable attunement to light, light is our limitation, without it nothing exists for us. Perhaps the inner branches of the firs and pines are merely the unyielding tangle of dead needles and cobwebs and beetles that I imagine and there is no metaphor, no truth which is what drives us out of bed in the vague hint of predawn to stand facing east at the shore of some body of water and wait with such anxious anticipations for the coming of the morning light on the water where, as Flaubert once wrote, “the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal.”</p> + </div> + + </article> + + + <div class="nav-wrapper"> + <nav id="page-navigation" class="page-border-top"> + <ul> + <li id="prev"><span class="bl">Previous:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/refracted-light-and-grace" rel="prev" title=" Refracted Light and Grace">Refracted Light and Grace</a> + </li> + <li id="next"><span class="bl">Next:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/feel-good-lost" rel="next" title=" Feel Good Lost">Feel Good Lost</a> + </li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + + + + + + +<div class="comment--form--wrapper "> + +<div class="comment--form--header"> + <p class="hed">Thoughts?</p> + <p class="subhed">Please leave a reply:</p> +</div> +<form action="/comments/post/" method="post" class="comment--form"> + +<input type="hidden" name="rder" value="" /> + + + <input type="hidden" name="content_type" value="jrnl.entry" id="id_content_type"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="object_pk" value="58" id="id_object_pk"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="timestamp" value="1596833475" id="id_timestamp"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="security_hash" value="a496fc1235d05d366f822fc10f1ca8d41e5cac40" id="id_security_hash"> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_name">Name:</label> + <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="50" required id="id_name"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_email">Email address:</label> + <input type="email" name="email" required id="id_email"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_url">URL:</label> + <input type="url" name="url" id="id_url"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> + <div class="textarea-rounded"><textarea name="comment" cols="40" rows="10" maxlength="3000" required id="id_comment"> +</textarea></div> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset style="display:none;"> + <label for="id_honeypot">If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam:</label> + <input type="text" name="honeypot" id="id_honeypot"> + </fieldset> + + + <div class="submit"> + <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post btn" value="Post" /> + <input type="submit" name="preview" class="submit-preview btn" value="Preview" /> + </div> +</form> +<p style="font-size: 95%;"><strong>All comments are moderated</strong>, so you won’t see it right away. 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But indeed this is where the first shots were fired on Easter Sunday in 1991 and the first casualty was a park policeman.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/plitvicebluewater.gif" width="230" height="195" class="postpicright" alt="Azure Waters, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" /> The Serbs held the area for the duration of the conflict, though it's difficult to imagine why they wanted it. Lake Plitvice is chiefly notable for its natural beauty and as a gateway to the mountains, hardly a militarily strategic spot since no roads actually run up into, let alone over, the mountains. Nevertheless, here is where it began, though as with all beginnings, it did not really start here, it started with the leaders whose poisoned, greedy hearts and minds dragged the former Yugoslavia into a war no one wanted.
+<break>
+My parents rented a car in Budapest and we drove south through Hungary toward the Croatian border. The Hungarian countryside was unremarkable but pleasantly so; the same sort of scenery one might pass from Philadelphia to Pittsburg or London to Bath. Around lunch time we crossed over into Croatia, a country that had previously existed for me simply as a place where bad things happen — war, ethnic cleansing, etc — not a place at all actually, just a word. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/plitvicetreereflection.gif" width="180" height="240" class="postpic" alt="Mossy Tree reflection, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" />Like most Americans, I never had a real handle on the Bosnia/Croatia/Serbia war. I was dimly aware that The U.S. at some point, with the backing of U.N. (remember when we played by the rules?) launched a campaign of air strikes in Kosovo. For those that like me could never get it sorted, here's a quick rundown (taken half from guidebooks and half from some Croatians and Serbs I met). The former republic of Yugoslavia was an artificially created state that grew out of the end of world war two and a man named Tito. Tito is an interesting historical figure; he managed with some success to keep one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse countries in the world together for thirty-five years. Naturally there were some iron-fisted clampdowns and not everyone seems to have been fond of him, but in spite of his occasionally brutal tactics he did keep the peace (if at the expense of some). And his tactics were certainly no more brutal than the war that followed his death. Shortly after Tito died in 1980 Yugoslavia was hit by heavy inflation which resulted from Tito's habit of borrowing foreign money and Yugoslavia's inability to pay it back.
+
+Slovenia was the first the break away and is the most ethnically and religiously coherent of the various Balkan states. For the most part Slovenia managed to stay out of the fighting that would soon engulf the area. The Croatians were the next to go, declaring independence in 1991 and finally getting U.N. recognition in 1992. That left Serbia, Bosnia and tiny Kosovo. The trouble was there were a lot of Serbians in Croatia, Croatians in Serbia, Bosnians in Croatia, etc. It's tough to say there was a good side and bad side in the war that followed, but isn't it always? The Serbians started the war; the first shot were fired at Lake Plitvice National Park where my parents and I were staying. And yes the Serbians are guilty of ethnic cleansing, rounding up and killing thousands of Croatians. But then the Croatians drove the Serbs out and turned around and engaged in more or less the same ethnic cleansing. War. Everybody loses. Everybody dies.
+
+And so today there are four nations Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Bosnia Herzegovina, where Yugoslavia once existed. [Except, before I was able to get this to press, Montenegro has voted to break away from Serbia, so now there are five. I must publish this before Kosovo does the same.] For the most part the war and its effects are gone. Like Cambodia there is a landmine problem that will continue to exist and kill and main for some time to come, but the tensions seems to have passed and aside from a few bullet riddled buildings and bombed out, caved in roofs, you'd never guess that the largest European war since WWII ended just ten years ago.
+
+Lake Plitvice National Park is a unique geological phenomena formed by two factors: porous karst limestone which absorbs water and erodes quickly, and mineral deposits from since departed glaciers. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/plitvicewalkway.gif" width="188" height="250" class="postpicright" alt="Walkway, Upper Lake, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" />As lake water seeped into the Karst, the rock decayed forming a series of lakes and interconnecting waterfalls that cascade through the forests. The national park service has created some trails which pass along the edges of the waterfalls and lakes as they wind their way downhill (or if you're masochistic and/or not that bright—uphill).
+
+The waters are both the clearest water I've ever seen and yet somehow manage to reflect a color close to bright teal and look a bit like photographs of Banff Canada where similar minerals create the same effect on Lake Louise.
+
+But where Lake Louise is so dramatic as to be almost overwhelming, the natural beauty of Plitvice is quieter and less imposing. There is no overlook or scenic viewpoint with flash popping tourists and calendar worthy photographs, to experience Plitvice you have to get out of the car, <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/plitviceforest.gif" width="173" height="230" class="postpic" alt="Forest Floor, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" />off the road and simply wander the forests in the cool of the morning or evening when the light filtering through the forest is softened by the subtle bending forces of the atmosphere and the forest floor becomes a leaf padded wonderland.
+
+We started at the highest lake and walked downward through cascades of water and reed lined lakeshores, passing at times through the forests where the moss-covered old growth creates a canopy through which sunlight trickles in to form pools of light and shadow forever shifting about as you walk. Strangely there was very little in the way of wildlife. The lakes were choked full of fish, but the forests curiously empty, though I did see a frog lazing in the sunshine near the lakeshore.
+
+As with any Karst area there are a number of caves in Lake Plitvice one of which forms a near vertical chasm through the hillside and can be climbed by means of a series of slippery switch-backing stone staircases. At the right time of day beams of sunlight fall in from above, <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/plitvicecave.gif" width="165" height="220" class="postpicright" alt="Cave, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" />illuminating the darker passageways and side tunnels which presumably, with a proper torch could be explored. But I neglected to bring any sort of torch and had to content myself with the main cavern.
+
+The hillsides were covered in the green of spring, the dark shades of firs and the lighter, brighter leaves of beeches and maples. The most remarkable of these trees were the white firs whose branches had nearly florescent tips, the result of fresh spring growth. I spent the first evening in Lake Plitvice studying the white firs around our lodge, trying to make sense of how something so bright could eventually fade to the dark, almost black, green of the inner branches. The newly formed tips were such a striking viridescent contrast to the inner tangle that I couldn't help but wonder what lay within that nearly impenetrable jumble of darkness nearer to the trunk.
+
+Near the inner tree where the evening light does not penetrate, some hidden gesture of nature as if to remind us that not everything is so easily seen, not everything is in grand sweeping gestures or romantic vistas, sure the highlights capture our attention, but what lies beneath in that dark tangle near the origins? Does the truth perhaps lie in there amongst the dense and inaccessible darkness? Or do I here sound too much like Joseph Conrad obsessed by the darkness of his river and the human heart he saw beating at the end of it?
+
+It occurred to me that my thinking was mistaken, that in fact due to the physics of light, <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/plitvicepinetreetips.gif" width="330" height="169" class="postpic" alt="New Growth Pine Trees, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" />the inner branches were in fact actually lighter, they appear darker because they reflect less light back to my eye, but without my eye and its entrapments what you might observe is actually a dense forest of light, all that light not given up by the world and therefore seen by us as darkness. Perhaps that's the reason a number of artists have chosen to start with a completely black canvas and add color on top of it, as if to transcend the limitations of the human eye.
+
+But perhaps I am too technical since there is no way to <em>see</em> the world as we could say it really is, because the only means we have to see it are our own eyes, our poor senses cannot reveal this impenetrable universe in which not all is illuminated, not everything makes a sound and much carries the scent of nothing on some solar wind which none of us will ever perceive let alone understand.
+
+I have read that in pure darkness the human eye is sensitive enough to detect a candle at a distance of forty kilometers. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/plitvicerainbow.gif" width="196" height="240" class="postpicright" alt="Rainbow, Lake Plitvice, Croatia" />And yet in spite of this remarkable attunement to light, light is our limitation, without it nothing exists for us. Perhaps the inner branches of the firs and pines are merely the unyielding tangle of dead needles and cobwebs and beetles that I imagine and there is no metaphor, no truth which is what drives us out of bed in the vague hint of predawn to stand facing east at the shore of some body of water and wait with such anxious anticipations for the coming of the morning light on the water where, as Flaubert once wrote, “the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal.” diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/closing-time.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/closing-time.amp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4cb070b --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/closing-time.amp @@ -0,0 +1,180 @@ + + +<!doctype html> +<html amp lang="en"> +<head> +<meta charset="utf-8"> +<title>Closing Time</title> +<link rel="canonical" href="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/05/closing-time"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimum-scale=1"> + <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/> + <meta name="twitter:url" content="/jrnl/2006/05/closing-time"> + <meta name="twitter:description" content="This moment, on this train. 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I had been feeling a bit drab, far too much celebration of ANZAC day the previous evening (which is an Australian holiday to remember a battle on the first world war and was technically only appropriate for Peter the only Australian at Lost Paradise, but we wouldn't have wanted him to celebrate alone).</p> +<p><break> +I spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around downtown Trang, a pleasant little provincial riverside town. The train left just before sunset, sliding smoothly, far more smoothly than an India train, out of the station, through the suburbs of Trang and into the countryside with its banana trees and coconut palms and tamarind trees and bamboo thickets and jungly undergrowth of vines, some of which, if I'm not mistake, were Kudzu. The sky was a dull grey overcast with some strikingly dramatic cloud formations on the eastern horizon. I was lucky and had the two-person berth to myself for the majority of the journey. I sat by the window and watched the scenery slide by thinking about Wally and the rest probably motoring past Ko Muk or perhaps already back on Kradan unloading the weeks supplies into the cycle cart (Ko Kradan bus service) or maybe already back at the restaurant lounging under the thatched roofs telling stories over cold Chang. Barbeque orders would be placed and Ngu would be grilling or tinkering about with the one remaining generator. The dogs would be prowling about begging for scraps, the puppies wrestling in the yard, Tang and Blondie still off at the beach, lying in the shade, bellies full of chicken carcasses and pork scraps begged off the tourists that had lunch on the beach.</break></p> +<p>Children in backyards leaned over the fence watching the train as it passed. I thought also of the fact that my time in Southeast Asia was nearly over. Four days in Bangkok to do a bit of last minute work, maybe buy some bootleg DVDs and then poof it disappears from me for now. But it's less the place I will miss that the people, both the locals I've met and the travelers. I'll miss you Southeast Asia, you've changed my whole outlook on the world and shown me things I never dreamed I'd see.</p> +<p>Like the evening light now falling on the hillsides just north of Trang, a quiet, relaxed light that falls like one of Winslow Homer's washes over the green hills and white thunderheads turning them a golden orange against the distant blackness of a storm over the gulf of Thailand. Thailand in this light becomes a softer, subtler place, less dramatic and harsh than in the glare of the midday sun.</p> +<p>I started to write a bit of reminiscence, try to remember the highlights of my time in this part of the world before I return to the west, but about halfway through I kept thinking of a popular Buddhist saying—be here now. Most of these dispatches are written in past tense, but this time I want to simply be here now. This moment, on this train. This is the last time I'll post something from Southeast Asia. There is no way I could sum anything up for you, no way I can convey what I've seen and done and even what I have written of is only about one tenth of what I've actually done. So I'm not going to try.</p> +<p>I know it's hard to do when you're at home and working and everything is the same shit happening over and over again, but it really is true, that bit about tomorrow… that bit about yesterday… one is gone forever and the other will never arrive. There is only now. But I'm not very good at this sort of thing; instead I'll leave you with some thoughts from others:</p> +<p class="quote">"To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question." – <cite>Edward Abbey</cite></p> +<p class="quote">"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." – <cite>e.e. cummings</cite></p> +<p class="quote">"What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?" – <cite>George Eliot</cite></p> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/closing-time.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/closing-time.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d740c0d --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/closing-time.html @@ -0,0 +1,338 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>Closing Time - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="This moment, on this train. 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I had been feeling a bit drab, far too much celebration of ANZAC day the previous evening (which is an Australian holiday to remember a battle on the first world war and was technically only appropriate for Peter the only Australian at Lost Paradise, but we wouldn’t have wanted him to celebrate alone).</p> +<p>I spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around downtown Trang, a pleasant little provincial riverside town. The train left just before sunset, sliding smoothly, far more smoothly than an India train, out of the station, through the suburbs of Trang and into the countryside with its banana trees and coconut palms and tamarind trees and bamboo thickets and jungly undergrowth of vines, some of which, if I’m not mistake, were Kudzu. The sky was a dull grey overcast with some strikingly dramatic cloud formations on the eastern horizon. I was lucky and had the two-person berth to myself for the majority of the journey. I sat by the window and watched the scenery slide by thinking about Wally and the rest probably motoring past Ko Muk or perhaps already back on Kradan unloading the weeks supplies into the cycle cart (Ko Kradan bus service) or maybe already back at the restaurant lounging under the thatched roofs telling stories over cold Chang. Barbeque orders would be placed and Ngu would be grilling or tinkering about with the one remaining generator. The dogs would be prowling about begging for scraps, the puppies wrestling in the yard, Tang and Blondie still off at the beach, lying in the shade, bellies full of chicken carcasses and pork scraps begged off the tourists that had lunch on the beach.</p> +<p>Children in backyards leaned over the fence watching the train as it passed. I thought also of the fact that my time in Southeast Asia was nearly over. Four days in Bangkok to do a bit of last minute work, maybe buy some bootleg DVDs and then poof it disappears from me for now. But it’s less the place I will miss that the people, both the locals I’ve met and the travelers. I’ll miss you Southeast Asia, you’ve changed my whole outlook on the world and shown me things I never dreamed I’d see.</p> +<p>Like the evening light now falling on the hillsides just north of Trang, a quiet, relaxed light that falls like one of Winslow Homer’s washes over the green hills and white thunderheads turning them a golden orange against the distant blackness of a storm over the gulf of Thailand. Thailand in this light becomes a softer, subtler place, less dramatic and harsh than in the glare of the midday sun.</p> +<p>I started to write a bit of reminiscence, try to remember the highlights of my time in this part of the world before I return to the west, but about halfway through I kept thinking of a popular Buddhist saying—be here now. Most of these dispatches are written in past tense, but this time I want to simply be here now. This moment, on this train. This is the last time I’ll post something from Southeast Asia. There is no way I could sum anything up for you, no way I can convey what I’ve seen and done and even what I have written of is only about one tenth of what I’ve actually done. So I’m not going to try.</p> +<p>I know it’s hard to do when you’re at home and working and everything is the same shit happening over and over again, but it really is true, that bit about tomorrow… that bit about yesterday… one is gone forever and the other will never arrive. There is only now. But I’m not very good at this sort of thing; instead I’ll leave you with some thoughts from others:</p> +<p class="quote">“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.” – <cite>Edward Abbey</cite></p> + +<p class="quote">“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” – <cite>e.e. cummings</cite></p> + +<p class="quote">“What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” – <cite>George Eliot</cite></p> + </div> + + </article> + + + <div class="nav-wrapper"> + <nav id="page-navigation" class="page-border-top"> + <ul> + <li id="prev"><span class="bl">Previous:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/04/bird-paradise" rel="prev" title=" Bird of Paradise">Bird of Paradise</a> + </li> + <li id="next"><span class="bl">Next:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/london-calling" rel="next" title=" London Calling">London Calling</a> + </li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + + + + + + +<div class="comment--form--wrapper "> + +<div class="comment--form--header"> + <p class="hed">Thoughts?</p> + <p class="subhed">Please leave a reply:</p> +</div> +<form action="/comments/post/" method="post" class="comment--form"> + +<input type="hidden" name="rder" value="" /> + + + <input type="hidden" name="content_type" value="jrnl.entry" id="id_content_type"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="object_pk" value="55" id="id_object_pk"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="timestamp" value="1596833476" id="id_timestamp"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="security_hash" value="94cb5f82df0c9b381f74bd84ced268fb6cabcc0d" id="id_security_hash"> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_name">Name:</label> + <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="50" required id="id_name"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_email">Email address:</label> + <input type="email" name="email" required id="id_email"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_url">URL:</label> + <input type="url" name="url" id="id_url"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> + <div class="textarea-rounded"><textarea name="comment" cols="40" rows="10" maxlength="3000" required id="id_comment"> +</textarea></div> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset style="display:none;"> + <label for="id_honeypot">If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam:</label> + <input type="text" name="honeypot" id="id_honeypot"> + </fieldset> + + + <div class="submit"> + <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post btn" value="Post" /> + <input type="submit" name="preview" class="submit-preview btn" value="Preview" /> + </div> +</form> +<p style="font-size: 95%;"><strong>All comments are moderated</strong>, so you won’t see it right away. 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I had been feeling a bit drab, far too much celebration of ANZAC day the previous evening (which is an Australian holiday to remember a battle on the first world war and was technically only appropriate for Peter the only Australian at Lost Paradise, but we wouldn't have wanted him to celebrate alone).
+
+I spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around downtown Trang, a pleasant little provincial riverside town. The train left just before sunset, sliding smoothly, far more smoothly than an India train, out of the station, through the suburbs of Trang and into the countryside with its banana trees and coconut palms and tamarind trees and bamboo thickets and jungly undergrowth of vines, some of which, if I'm not mistake, were Kudzu. The sky was a dull grey overcast with some strikingly dramatic cloud formations on the eastern horizon. I was lucky and had the two-person berth to myself for the majority of the journey. I sat by the window and watched the scenery slide by thinking about Wally and the rest probably motoring past Ko Muk or perhaps already back on Kradan unloading the weeks supplies into the cycle cart (Ko Kradan bus service) or maybe already back at the restaurant lounging under the thatched roofs telling stories over cold Chang. Barbeque orders would be placed and Ngu would be grilling or tinkering about with the one remaining generator. The dogs would be prowling about begging for scraps, the puppies wrestling in the yard, Tang and Blondie still off at the beach, lying in the shade, bellies full of chicken carcasses and pork scraps begged off the tourists that had lunch on the beach.
+
+Children in backyards leaned over the fence watching the train as it passed. I thought also of the fact that my time in Southeast Asia was nearly over. Four days in Bangkok to do a bit of last minute work, maybe buy some bootleg DVDs and then poof it disappears from me for now. But it's less the place I will miss that the people, both the locals I've met and the travelers. I'll miss you Southeast Asia, you've changed my whole outlook on the world and shown me things I never dreamed I'd see.
+
+Like the evening light now falling on the hillsides just north of Trang, a quiet, relaxed light that falls like one of Winslow Homer's washes over the green hills and white thunderheads turning them a golden orange against the distant blackness of a storm over the gulf of Thailand. Thailand in this light becomes a softer, subtler place, less dramatic and harsh than in the glare of the midday sun.
+
+I started to write a bit of reminiscence, try to remember the highlights of my time in this part of the world before I return to the west, but about halfway through I kept thinking of a popular Buddhist saying—be here now. Most of these dispatches are written in past tense, but this time I want to simply be here now. This moment, on this train. This is the last time I'll post something from Southeast Asia. There is no way I could sum anything up for you, no way I can convey what I've seen and done and even what I have written of is only about one tenth of what I've actually done. So I'm not going to try.
+
+I know it's hard to do when you're at home and working and everything is the same shit happening over and over again, but it really is true, that bit about tomorrow… that bit about yesterday… one is gone forever and the other will never arrive. There is only now. But I'm not very good at this sort of thing; instead I'll leave you with some thoughts from others:
+
+<p class="quote">"To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question." – <cite>Edward Abbey</cite></p>
+
+<p class="quote">"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." – <cite>e.e. cummings</cite></p>
+
+<p class="quote">"What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?" – <cite>George Eliot</cite></p> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/feel-good-lost.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/feel-good-lost.amp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..69bc1cb --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/feel-good-lost.amp @@ -0,0 +1,196 @@ + + +<!doctype html> +<html amp lang="en"> +<head> +<meta charset="utf-8"> +<title>Feel Good Lost</title> +<link rel="canonical" href="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/05/feel-good-lost"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimum-scale=1"> + <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/> + <meta name="twitter:url" content="/jrnl/2006/05/feel-good-lost"> + <meta name="twitter:description" content="Down to the Dalmatian seaside where the highway hugs the Adriatic Sea and leads, eventually, to the fairy tale city of Dubrovnik. 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Eventually, after a four or five hour drive, we arrived at the seaside village of Dubrovnik. </p> +<p><break></break></p> +<p>A walled trading city whose origins can be traced as far back as the 7th century and variously controlled by the Byzantines, Venetians and Turks, Dubrovnik is encircled by high walls and filled with narrow cobblestones streets and looks from above like an endless sea of mottled red and orange roof tiles. </p> +<p>Owing to a curious set of circumstances our original hotel was overbooked and we were forced to go to a nicer one which also gave me a private room (I hate it when that happens). <amp-img alt="Sunset from my Hotel Window, Dubrovnik, Croatia" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovniksunset.gif" width="173"></amp-img>The Argentinean was very typically European, small rooms heavy draperies and most importantly an old and heavy cherry wood desk, the sort of desk where you could say sit down and get a bit of writing done. I am picky about only two things when it comes to writing, the desk my laptop sits on and/or, as the case may be, the pen I use. The wrong equipment often produces the wrong words, these things are important. Trust me.</p> +<p>The downside to the Argentinean was its location, a bit of a walk from the old walled city, but after getting settled we set out for a stroll through old town. Dubrovnik's old town area feels a bit like stepping back in time several centuries. </p> +<p>Most of the still standing buildings date from about 1468, though some were destroyed in the great earthquake of 1667, which leveled nearly everything on the Adriatic Sea. There are the remains of a monastery and nunnery, now merely crumbling walls and piled stones, which date from much early than the rest of the city, but by and large the city looks as it did in the fifteenth century. Long known as the Pearl of the Adriatic, many people think Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city in Europe and from what I've seen I believe them. <amp-img alt="Main Street Nightscape, Dubrovnik, Croatia" height="188" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovniknightmainstreet.gif" width="250"></amp-img>The downside of course is the resulting crowds, but most tourists seemed to be a bit older than me and for the most part headed home around ten. Insomniacs can have the place to themselves late at night and that's when the city looks its best anyway, the polished stone streets reflect the glittering lamplight and no one is around.</p> +<p>Dubrovnik is famous for its red tiled roofs. Apparently the tiles were unique, or perhaps just older than the other towns in the area, whatever the case nearly every photograph you're likely to see of the city is from above looking out over the roofs. Regrettably Dubrovnik was heavily shelled during the Bosnian conflict and roughly 65 percent of its buildings were hit, thus Dubrovnik's roofscape is not quite what it used to be. But to my eye it looked better with the new and slightly different tiles mottled together with older slightly yellower tiles. <amp-img alt="Dubrovnik Rooftops, Croatia" height="165" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovnikrooftops.gif" width="220"></amp-img>The contrast between the colors made the roofs look less a postcard perfect vision and more of an actual city. After all fairy tales are myth, reality looks a little more like someone parked a howitzer on the nearby hilltop and started lobbing injustice down on the world.</p> +<p>The next day we paid the rather exorbitant admission and set out to walk to walls. Dubrovnik's walls range from a thickness of about four meters to as much as ten in some spots and comprise a distance of roughly two kilometers as they zigzag around the city. Walking the walls seemed a bit surreal to me. It would be more proper to say I staggered about the walls in a sort of trance owing to the fact that I had never actually seen a fairy tale city. As with most things that overwhelm me I found myself staring at the often mundane details instead, stockings hanging from a clothesline, a row of potted plants on a windowsill, an olive tree growing over a crumbling stone wall, a garden of lupines and morningbells growing out of an old tile roof. Perhaps the most surreal thing about Dubrovnik is that it still a functioning city and even as we tourists walked about the walls staring down at the narrow streets running off in all directions, <amp-img alt="Stockings on the Clothesline, Dubrovnik, Croatia" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovnikstockings.gif" width="191"></amp-img>the people of Dubrovnik were tending their gardens and hanging out the days laundry or heading off to work. The sights from the walls looked like something out of a European children's story and any given window may well have contained a princess I simply overlooked.</p> +<p>To the best of my knowledge she was not a princess, but I did meet a lovely Croatia woman one night who, along with a couple of her friends attempted to explain the Bosnia-Croatia-Serbian conflict to me. However, about half way through both Martina and her friend Marco seemed to lose track of the thread. It may have been the beer, it may have been simply that there are better things to do, but halfway through Marco kind of shrugged and said roughly ‘I don't know, a bunch of assholes shot at us and we shot at them and then it stopped and now it's history,' which more or less covers it I believe.<break></break></p> +<p>I promised I would here mention that Marco and Martina had both recently moved to Dubrovnik to work at a lovely little ultra modern bar named <a href="http://www.igotfresh.com" title="Fresh.com">Fresh</a> which also serves various wraps and sandwiches by day. I only went out two nights in Dubrovnik (I had to make use of the lovely desk one night), but Fresh was by far the most fun. It's the sort of spot that aimed both at travelers and locals though on the particular night I was there there were only three of us there and two were new employees which I think made the owner nervous. So I have done my part, if you're in Dubrovnik, <a href="http:/www.igotfresh.com" title="Fresh.com">stop by Fresh</a> and have a drink or two.</p> +<p><amp-img alt="Rooftop Garden, Dubrovnik, Croatia" height="169" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovnikroofgarden.gif" width="230"></amp-img>Dubrovnik was something out of a fairy tale, or at least that's the only way I can contextualize it. I was thinking just the other day about American's fascination with Europe (the number of Americans in Europe is staggering compared to what I saw in Asia. If only 6% of Americans have passports and therefore can leave the country, 5.99% of them come to Europe). I think part of what compels Americans in Europe is simply the idea that there is some history beyond the eighteen-century. Things as simple as that existence of buildings older than the 19th century is somewhat magical to those of us that come from a country whose history is so short. There may be a few old buildings in New York, but by and large American buildings are recent, which is something I don't think Europeans can fully appreciate, surrounded as they are by everyday reminders of the past. We are new. We barely have a past. </p> +<p>When the majority of European cities were being designed and built America was as yet unknown. Thus for an American to be in a city like Dubrovnik is something akin to stepping into a history book. For instance, near where I grew up one of the oldest areas is a city called Orange. Orange has an "old town" circle area whose buildings date from the early 1920s. This is about as far back as Southern California history goes. When I lived in Athens, GA there were a handful of antebellum mansions that date from more like the late 1700s, but nothing goes back further. To see anything that existed before 1700 is I think, for many Americans, a shocking revelation. Sure we <strong>know</strong> that Europe is there and it has all this old architecture, just like I know central America exists, but it won't mean anything to me until I get there.</p> +<p>I've never really been one to dig too deep into the history of places, but something about Dubrovnik compelled me to. I spent the first evening digging around in a local bookshop and discovered that Dubrovnik can trace its history all the way back to the seventh century or so. But what I thought about later was not the actual history of Dubrovnik, but rather the realization that the longer I travel the more estranged I am from my own past and yet the more compelled I feel by history. Not that my past doesn't matter to me, in fact it matters immensely since I see the present as a collision between yesterday and tomorrow, but my own history seems to me now more of something I read in a book than events that actually happened. I could not for instance tell you much about what I was thinking before I felt on this trip, but I could talk for hours about Jim Thompson and the silk trade of Thailand. I don't remember what I did in Los Angeles last summer, but I know exactly when the Khmer Dynasty began construction on Angkor Wat.</p> +<p>When home fades, as it does when you travel, and your past begins to seem more like a secondhand memory, perhaps it's only natural that you feel a bit lost and maybe my fascination with history is merely a grasping at straws to recover something I've lost. <amp-img alt="Narrow Streets, Dubrovnik, Croatia" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovniknightstreet.gif" width="180"></amp-img>Perhaps this is the reason that expats gravitate toward each other, not because they feel some connection with home, but because they seek others who have lost that connection and the connection to the loss becomes their new home.</p> +<p>A friend of mine used to tell me that, owing to a childhood spent moving from town to town, she never felt like she really had a home. Someone recently wrote me in an email saying, much as Tom Wolfe's novel <em>You Can Never Go Home Again</em> implies, once you've left you will forever feel like a foreigner no matter where you may go. It's a difficult feeling to explain except to say that the further you go, through both time and space, the less you feel connected to anything that happened before you left.</p> +<p>But that's not to say I've forgotten you my friends, people remain every bit as real, it's the events that fade, the mindset that changes. And it isn't a bad thing, on the contrary I find it quite liberating. I am without a doubt happier traveling than I ever have been at home. For the first time in my life, on this trip, I feel like I'm doing what I am supposed to be doing. And it feels good.</p> +<p>Many people have written to ask what I plan to do when I get home. My quick answer is always, leave again. It may seem like I've been all over the place on this trip, but from my point of view I've merely revealed how little I've seen. The past, something called home, seems at this point unreal. There is so much of my own past that no longer fits in the present and I fear, as my friend said, that I will forever be a stranger in my own land.</p> +<p>And yet if anything becomes more real without a past, it's a connection to the present. It has become trite, that Buddhist saying, be here now, but now is where we live and no matter what you do you can't live in the past or the future, so indeed you may as well be here now and learn, as I am trying to do, how to feel good lost.</p> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/feel-good-lost.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/feel-good-lost.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8aa2d5b --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/feel-good-lost.html @@ -0,0 +1,346 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>Feel Good Lost - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="Down to the Dalmatian seaside where the highway hugs the Adriatic Sea and leads, eventually, to the fairy tale city of Dubrovnik. 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Eventually, after a four or five hour drive, we arrived at the seaside village of Dubrovnik. </p> +<p><break></p> +<p>A walled trading city whose origins can be traced as far back as the 7th century and variously controlled by the Byzantines, Venetians and Turks, Dubrovnik is encircled by high walls and filled with narrow cobblestones streets and looks from above like an endless sea of mottled red and orange roof tiles. </p> +<p>Owing to a curious set of circumstances our original hotel was overbooked and we were forced to go to a nicer one which also gave me a private room (I hate it when that happens). <img alt="Sunset from my Hotel Window, Dubrovnik, Croatia" class="postpicright" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovniksunset.gif" width="173"/>The Argentinean was very typically European, small rooms heavy draperies and most importantly an old and heavy cherry wood desk, the sort of desk where you could say sit down and get a bit of writing done. I am picky about only two things when it comes to writing, the desk my laptop sits on and/or, as the case may be, the pen I use. The wrong equipment often produces the wrong words, these things are important. Trust me.</p> +<p>The downside to the Argentinean was its location, a bit of a walk from the old walled city, but after getting settled we set out for a stroll through old town. Dubrovnik’s old town area feels a bit like stepping back in time several centuries. </p> +<p>Most of the still standing buildings date from about 1468, though some were destroyed in the great earthquake of 1667, which leveled nearly everything on the Adriatic Sea. There are the remains of a monastery and nunnery, now merely crumbling walls and piled stones, which date from much early than the rest of the city, but by and large the city looks as it did in the fifteenth century. Long known as the Pearl of the Adriatic, many people think Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city in Europe and from what I’ve seen I believe them. <img alt="Main Street Nightscape, Dubrovnik, Croatia" class="postpic" height="188" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovniknightmainstreet.gif" width="250"/>The downside of course is the resulting crowds, but most tourists seemed to be a bit older than me and for the most part headed home around ten. Insomniacs can have the place to themselves late at night and that’s when the city looks its best anyway, the polished stone streets reflect the glittering lamplight and no one is around.</p> +<p>Dubrovnik is famous for its red tiled roofs. Apparently the tiles were unique, or perhaps just older than the other towns in the area, whatever the case nearly every photograph you’re likely to see of the city is from above looking out over the roofs. Regrettably Dubrovnik was heavily shelled during the Bosnian conflict and roughly 65 percent of its buildings were hit, thus Dubrovnik’s roofscape is not quite what it used to be. But to my eye it looked better with the new and slightly different tiles mottled together with older slightly yellower tiles. <img alt="Dubrovnik Rooftops, Croatia" class="postpicright" height="165" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovnikrooftops.gif" width="220"/>The contrast between the colors made the roofs look less a postcard perfect vision and more of an actual city. After all fairy tales are myth, reality looks a little more like someone parked a howitzer on the nearby hilltop and started lobbing injustice down on the world.</p> +<p>The next day we paid the rather exorbitant admission and set out to walk to walls. Dubrovnik’s walls range from a thickness of about four meters to as much as ten in some spots and comprise a distance of roughly two kilometers as they zigzag around the city. Walking the walls seemed a bit surreal to me. It would be more proper to say I staggered about the walls in a sort of trance owing to the fact that I had never actually seen a fairy tale city. As with most things that overwhelm me I found myself staring at the often mundane details instead, stockings hanging from a clothesline, a row of potted plants on a windowsill, an olive tree growing over a crumbling stone wall, a garden of lupines and morningbells growing out of an old tile roof. Perhaps the most surreal thing about Dubrovnik is that it still a functioning city and even as we tourists walked about the walls staring down at the narrow streets running off in all directions, <img alt="Stockings on the Clothesline, Dubrovnik, Croatia" class="postpic" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovnikstockings.gif" width="191"/>the people of Dubrovnik were tending their gardens and hanging out the days laundry or heading off to work. The sights from the walls looked like something out of a European children’s story and any given window may well have contained a princess I simply overlooked.</p> +<p>To the best of my knowledge she was not a princess, but I did meet a lovely Croatia woman one night who, along with a couple of her friends attempted to explain the Bosnia-Croatia-Serbian conflict to me. However, about half way through both Martina and her friend Marco seemed to lose track of the thread. It may have been the beer, it may have been simply that there are better things to do, but halfway through Marco kind of shrugged and said roughly ‘I don’t know, a bunch of assholes shot at us and we shot at them and then it stopped and now it’s history,’ which more or less covers it I believe.<break></p> +<p>I promised I would here mention that Marco and Martina had both recently moved to Dubrovnik to work at a lovely little ultra modern bar named <a href="http://www.igotfresh.com" title="Fresh.com">Fresh</a> which also serves various wraps and sandwiches by day. I only went out two nights in Dubrovnik (I had to make use of the lovely desk one night), but Fresh was by far the most fun. It’s the sort of spot that aimed both at travelers and locals though on the particular night I was there there were only three of us there and two were new employees which I think made the owner nervous. So I have done my part, if you’re in Dubrovnik, <a href="http:/www.igotfresh.com" title="Fresh.com">stop by Fresh</a> and have a drink or two.</p> +<p><img alt="Rooftop Garden, Dubrovnik, Croatia" class="postpicright" height="169" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovnikroofgarden.gif" width="230"/>Dubrovnik was something out of a fairy tale, or at least that’s the only way I can contextualize it. I was thinking just the other day about American’s fascination with Europe (the number of Americans in Europe is staggering compared to what I saw in Asia. If only 6% of Americans have passports and therefore can leave the country, 5.99% of them come to Europe). I think part of what compels Americans in Europe is simply the idea that there is some history beyond the eighteen-century. Things as simple as that existence of buildings older than the 19th century is somewhat magical to those of us that come from a country whose history is so short. There may be a few old buildings in New York, but by and large American buildings are recent, which is something I don’t think Europeans can fully appreciate, surrounded as they are by everyday reminders of the past. We are new. We barely have a past. </p> +<p>When the majority of European cities were being designed and built America was as yet unknown. Thus for an American to be in a city like Dubrovnik is something akin to stepping into a history book. For instance, near where I grew up one of the oldest areas is a city called Orange. Orange has an “old town” circle area whose buildings date from the early 1920s. This is about as far back as Southern California history goes. When I lived in Athens, GA there were a handful of antebellum mansions that date from more like the late 1700s, but nothing goes back further. To see anything that existed before 1700 is I think, for many Americans, a shocking revelation. Sure we <strong>know</strong> that Europe is there and it has all this old architecture, just like I know central America exists, but it won’t mean anything to me until I get there.</p> +<p>I’ve never really been one to dig too deep into the history of places, but something about Dubrovnik compelled me to. I spent the first evening digging around in a local bookshop and discovered that Dubrovnik can trace its history all the way back to the seventh century or so. But what I thought about later was not the actual history of Dubrovnik, but rather the realization that the longer I travel the more estranged I am from my own past and yet the more compelled I feel by history. Not that my past doesn’t matter to me, in fact it matters immensely since I see the present as a collision between yesterday and tomorrow, but my own history seems to me now more of something I read in a book than events that actually happened. I could not for instance tell you much about what I was thinking before I felt on this trip, but I could talk for hours about Jim Thompson and the silk trade of Thailand. I don’t remember what I did in Los Angeles last summer, but I know exactly when the Khmer Dynasty began construction on Angkor Wat.</p> +<p>When home fades, as it does when you travel, and your past begins to seem more like a secondhand memory, perhaps it’s only natural that you feel a bit lost and maybe my fascination with history is merely a grasping at straws to recover something I’ve lost. <img alt="Narrow Streets, Dubrovnik, Croatia" class="postpic" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/dubrovniknightstreet.gif" width="180"/>Perhaps this is the reason that expats gravitate toward each other, not because they feel some connection with home, but because they seek others who have lost that connection and the connection to the loss becomes their new home.</p> +<p>A friend of mine used to tell me that, owing to a childhood spent moving from town to town, she never felt like she really had a home. Someone recently wrote me in an email saying, much as Tom Wolfe’s novel <em>You Can Never Go Home Again</em> implies, once you’ve left you will forever feel like a foreigner no matter where you may go. It’s a difficult feeling to explain except to say that the further you go, through both time and space, the less you feel connected to anything that happened before you left.</p> +<p>But that’s not to say I’ve forgotten you my friends, people remain every bit as real, it’s the events that fade, the mindset that changes. And it isn’t a bad thing, on the contrary I find it quite liberating. I am without a doubt happier traveling than I ever have been at home. For the first time in my life, on this trip, I feel like I’m doing what I am supposed to be doing. And it feels good.</p> +<p>Many people have written to ask what I plan to do when I get home. My quick answer is always, leave again. It may seem like I’ve been all over the place on this trip, but from my point of view I’ve merely revealed how little I’ve seen. The past, something called home, seems at this point unreal. There is so much of my own past that no longer fits in the present and I fear, as my friend said, that I will forever be a stranger in my own land.</p> +<p>And yet if anything becomes more real without a past, it’s a connection to the present. It has become trite, that Buddhist saying, be here now, but now is where we live and no matter what you do you can’t live in the past or the future, so indeed you may as well be here now and learn, as I am trying to do, how to feel good lost.</p> + </div> + + </article> + + + <div class="nav-wrapper"> + <nav id="page-navigation" class="page-border-top"> + <ul> + <li id="prev"><span class="bl">Previous:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/blue-milk" rel="prev" title=" Blue Milk">Blue Milk</a> + </li> + <li id="next"><span class="bl">Next:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/ghost" rel="next" title=" Ghost">Ghost</a> + </li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + + + + + + +<div class="comment--form--wrapper "> + +<div class="comment--form--header"> + <p class="hed">Thoughts?</p> + <p class="subhed">Please leave a reply:</p> +</div> +<form action="/comments/post/" method="post" class="comment--form"> + +<input type="hidden" name="rder" value="" /> + + + <input type="hidden" name="content_type" value="jrnl.entry" id="id_content_type"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="object_pk" value="59" id="id_object_pk"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="timestamp" value="1596833475" id="id_timestamp"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="security_hash" value="d7e1353c1155c5f1fb707dc84cff0698b33f3439" id="id_security_hash"> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_name">Name:</label> + <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="50" required id="id_name"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_email">Email address:</label> + <input type="email" name="email" required id="id_email"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_url">URL:</label> + <input type="url" name="url" id="id_url"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> + <div class="textarea-rounded"><textarea name="comment" cols="40" rows="10" maxlength="3000" required id="id_comment"> +</textarea></div> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset style="display:none;"> + <label for="id_honeypot">If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam:</label> + <input type="text" name="honeypot" id="id_honeypot"> + </fieldset> + + + <div class="submit"> + <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post btn" value="Post" /> + <input type="submit" name="preview" class="submit-preview btn" value="Preview" /> + </div> +</form> +<p style="font-size: 95%;"><strong>All comments are moderated</strong>, so you won’t see it right away. 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+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/dubrovnikcoastline.gif" width="223" height="220" class="postpic" alt="Coastline Near Dubrovnik, Croatia" />From the road I watched the cobalt seas specked occasionally with a yacht or fishing boat and forming a stark contrast with the red roof tiles of small villages and seaside hamlets such that, after a while, I had the sensation of having played too long with a color wheel, much the same way that staring at a word for too long can make one question the spelling. Eventually, after a four or five hour drive, we arrived at the seaside village of Dubrovnik.
+
+<break>
+
+A walled trading city whose origins can be traced as far back as the 7th century and variously controlled by the Byzantines, Venetians and Turks, Dubrovnik is encircled by high walls and filled with narrow cobblestones streets and looks from above like an endless sea of mottled red and orange roof tiles.
+
+Owing to a curious set of circumstances our original hotel was overbooked and we were forced to go to a nicer one which also gave me a private room (I hate it when that happens). <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/dubrovniksunset.gif" width="173" height="230" class="postpicright" alt="Sunset from my Hotel Window, Dubrovnik, Croatia" />The Argentinean was very typically European, small rooms heavy draperies and most importantly an old and heavy cherry wood desk, the sort of desk where you could say sit down and get a bit of writing done. I am picky about only two things when it comes to writing, the desk my laptop sits on and/or, as the case may be, the pen I use. The wrong equipment often produces the wrong words, these things are important. Trust me.
+
+The downside to the Argentinean was its location, a bit of a walk from the old walled city, but after getting settled we set out for a stroll through old town. Dubrovnik's old town area feels a bit like stepping back in time several centuries.
+
+Most of the still standing buildings date from about 1468, though some were destroyed in the great earthquake of 1667, which leveled nearly everything on the Adriatic Sea. There are the remains of a monastery and nunnery, now merely crumbling walls and piled stones, which date from much early than the rest of the city, but by and large the city looks as it did in the fifteenth century. Long known as the Pearl of the Adriatic, many people think Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city in Europe and from what I've seen I believe them. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/dubrovniknightmainstreet.gif" width="250" height="188" class="postpic" alt="Main Street Nightscape, Dubrovnik, Croatia" />The downside of course is the resulting crowds, but most tourists seemed to be a bit older than me and for the most part headed home around ten. Insomniacs can have the place to themselves late at night and that's when the city looks its best anyway, the polished stone streets reflect the glittering lamplight and no one is around.
+
+Dubrovnik is famous for its red tiled roofs. Apparently the tiles were unique, or perhaps just older than the other towns in the area, whatever the case nearly every photograph you're likely to see of the city is from above looking out over the roofs. Regrettably Dubrovnik was heavily shelled during the Bosnian conflict and roughly 65 percent of its buildings were hit, thus Dubrovnik's roofscape is not quite what it used to be. But to my eye it looked better with the new and slightly different tiles mottled together with older slightly yellower tiles. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/dubrovnikrooftops.gif" width="220" height="165" class="postpicright" alt="Dubrovnik Rooftops, Croatia" />The contrast between the colors made the roofs look less a postcard perfect vision and more of an actual city. After all fairy tales are myth, reality looks a little more like someone parked a howitzer on the nearby hilltop and started lobbing injustice down on the world.
+
+The next day we paid the rather exorbitant admission and set out to walk to walls. Dubrovnik's walls range from a thickness of about four meters to as much as ten in some spots and comprise a distance of roughly two kilometers as they zigzag around the city. Walking the walls seemed a bit surreal to me. It would be more proper to say I staggered about the walls in a sort of trance owing to the fact that I had never actually seen a fairy tale city. As with most things that overwhelm me I found myself staring at the often mundane details instead, stockings hanging from a clothesline, a row of potted plants on a windowsill, an olive tree growing over a crumbling stone wall, a garden of lupines and morningbells growing out of an old tile roof. Perhaps the most surreal thing about Dubrovnik is that it still a functioning city and even as we tourists walked about the walls staring down at the narrow streets running off in all directions, <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/dubrovnikstockings.gif" width="191" height="240" class="postpic" alt="Stockings on the Clothesline, Dubrovnik, Croatia" />the people of Dubrovnik were tending their gardens and hanging out the days laundry or heading off to work. The sights from the walls looked like something out of a European children's story and any given window may well have contained a princess I simply overlooked.
+
+To the best of my knowledge she was not a princess, but I did meet a lovely Croatia woman one night who, along with a couple of her friends attempted to explain the Bosnia-Croatia-Serbian conflict to me. However, about half way through both Martina and her friend Marco seemed to lose track of the thread. It may have been the beer, it may have been simply that there are better things to do, but halfway through Marco kind of shrugged and said roughly ‘I don't know, a bunch of assholes shot at us and we shot at them and then it stopped and now it's history,' which more or less covers it I believe.<break>
+
+I promised I would here mention that Marco and Martina had both recently moved to Dubrovnik to work at a lovely little ultra modern bar named <a href="http://www.igotfresh.com" title="Fresh.com">Fresh</a> which also serves various wraps and sandwiches by day. I only went out two nights in Dubrovnik (I had to make use of the lovely desk one night), but Fresh was by far the most fun. It's the sort of spot that aimed both at travelers and locals though on the particular night I was there there were only three of us there and two were new employees which I think made the owner nervous. So I have done my part, if you're in Dubrovnik, <a href="http:/www.igotfresh.com" title="Fresh.com">stop by Fresh</a> and have a drink or two.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/dubrovnikroofgarden.gif" width="230" height="169" class="postpicright" alt="Rooftop Garden, Dubrovnik, Croatia" />Dubrovnik was something out of a fairy tale, or at least that's the only way I can contextualize it. I was thinking just the other day about American's fascination with Europe (the number of Americans in Europe is staggering compared to what I saw in Asia. If only 6% of Americans have passports and therefore can leave the country, 5.99% of them come to Europe). I think part of what compels Americans in Europe is simply the idea that there is some history beyond the eighteen-century. Things as simple as that existence of buildings older than the 19th century is somewhat magical to those of us that come from a country whose history is so short. There may be a few old buildings in New York, but by and large American buildings are recent, which is something I don't think Europeans can fully appreciate, surrounded as they are by everyday reminders of the past. We are new. We barely have a past.
+
+When the majority of European cities were being designed and built America was as yet unknown. Thus for an American to be in a city like Dubrovnik is something akin to stepping into a history book. For instance, near where I grew up one of the oldest areas is a city called Orange. Orange has an "old town" circle area whose buildings date from the early 1920s. This is about as far back as Southern California history goes. When I lived in Athens, GA there were a handful of antebellum mansions that date from more like the late 1700s, but nothing goes back further. To see anything that existed before 1700 is I think, for many Americans, a shocking revelation. Sure we **know** that Europe is there and it has all this old architecture, just like I know central America exists, but it won't mean anything to me until I get there.
+
+I've never really been one to dig too deep into the history of places, but something about Dubrovnik compelled me to. I spent the first evening digging around in a local bookshop and discovered that Dubrovnik can trace its history all the way back to the seventh century or so. But what I thought about later was not the actual history of Dubrovnik, but rather the realization that the longer I travel the more estranged I am from my own past and yet the more compelled I feel by history. Not that my past doesn't matter to me, in fact it matters immensely since I see the present as a collision between yesterday and tomorrow, but my own history seems to me now more of something I read in a book than events that actually happened. I could not for instance tell you much about what I was thinking before I felt on this trip, but I could talk for hours about Jim Thompson and the silk trade of Thailand. I don't remember what I did in Los Angeles last summer, but I know exactly when the Khmer Dynasty began construction on Angkor Wat.
+
+When home fades, as it does when you travel, and your past begins to seem more like a secondhand memory, perhaps it's only natural that you feel a bit lost and maybe my fascination with history is merely a grasping at straws to recover something I've lost. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/dubrovniknightstreet.gif" width="180" height="240" class="postpic" alt="Narrow Streets, Dubrovnik, Croatia" />Perhaps this is the reason that expats gravitate toward each other, not because they feel some connection with home, but because they seek others who have lost that connection and the connection to the loss becomes their new home.
+
+A friend of mine used to tell me that, owing to a childhood spent moving from town to town, she never felt like she really had a home. Someone recently wrote me in an email saying, much as Tom Wolfe's novel *You Can Never Go Home Again* implies, once you've left you will forever feel like a foreigner no matter where you may go. It's a difficult feeling to explain except to say that the further you go, through both time and space, the less you feel connected to anything that happened before you left.
+
+But that's not to say I've forgotten you my friends, people remain every bit as real, it's the events that fade, the mindset that changes. And it isn't a bad thing, on the contrary I find it quite liberating. I am without a doubt happier traveling than I ever have been at home. For the first time in my life, on this trip, I feel like I'm doing what I am supposed to be doing. And it feels good.
+
+Many people have written to ask what I plan to do when I get home. My quick answer is always, leave again. It may seem like I've been all over the place on this trip, but from my point of view I've merely revealed how little I've seen. The past, something called home, seems at this point unreal. There is so much of my own past that no longer fits in the present and I fear, as my friend said, that I will forever be a stranger in my own land.
+
+And yet if anything becomes more real without a past, it's a connection to the present. It has become trite, that Buddhist saying, be here now, but now is where we live and no matter what you do you can't live in the past or the future, so indeed you may as well be here now and learn, as I am trying to do, how to feel good lost.
+ diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds.amp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..830712a --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds.amp @@ -0,0 +1,197 @@ + + +<!doctype html> +<html amp lang="en"> +<head> +<meta charset="utf-8"> +<title>Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds</title> +<link rel="canonical" href="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimum-scale=1"> + <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/> + <meta name="twitter:url" content="/jrnl/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds"> + <meta name="twitter:description" content="What happens when your last name becomes an adjective? Thinking of Kafka in the strange, yellow and yes, Kafkaesque city of Prague. 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A place, a scene on a street, a city, a whole country, colors your memory like a child's crayon scribbling across your pupils. Jaisalmer India looks reddish brown and pink in my memory, Laos a dusty beige mist, Ko Kradan Thailand a green and blue cloak… and Prague was a pale yellow just this side of ochre. </p> +<p><break> +<amp-img alt="Prague, Czech Republic, night" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/praguetowernight.jpg" width="165"></amp-img>It started from the moment we drove into town. Mildly lost, displaced and confused by road construction, we passed by a yellow building several times. I cannot say exactly why I noticed this yellow building over a thousand other, and perhaps more striking details, but it is the yellow building I remember. </break></p> +<p>And once the building lodged itself in my mind I seemed to develop some heightened observational acuity for the color yellow — stale champagne flat in its flute, crushed threads of saffron in little tins at the market, primrose blooms in a window planter, lotus in a pond, cough syrup for a child, ecru linen on the laundry line, tarnished gold lamps languishing unused in the dark corners of a hotel room, gilded Torah scrolls, the jaundiced skin of a Golem, faded magazines at the newsstand, sunflowers in a store window, chicken skin on the chopping block and a thousand other snapshots tinted yellow.</p> +<p><amp-img alt="Kafka Statue, Prague, Czech Republic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/praguekafkastatue.jpg" width="173"></amp-img>I read somewhere that yellow daffodils are a symbol of unrequited love. An agreed upon meaning for yellow buildings has thus far remained elusive in my research. Which is to say I never looked into it; I am content with the simplicity of memory unencumbered by meaning. Memory is a strange and mysterious thing, not to be fully trusted. For instance I can't say for sure, but I feel like I saw yellow daffodils in the New Jewish Cemetery near the grave of Franz Kafka, but it's entirely possible I invented this detail on reflection.</p> +<p>Whatever the case I do know that Prague was home to Franz Kafka, a man who has in death assumed a life so large his last name is an adjective in common parlance, Kafkaesque—an adjective I'm pretty sure I've used somewhere in these very pages.</p> +<p>I made a cursory visit to Kafka's tomb, just as I did to Proust's in Pere Lechaise, compelled by some sense of validation, as if standing in front of these slabs of granite one can finally feel like one has reached the end of the literary journey and yet knowing that in fact not only is that not true, but just the opposite is true. As with any journey made mainly in the mental space of books and stories, the infringement of the real into the world of the imagination was wholly disappointing. Kafka's grave is unremarkable in every way, a stone monument <amp-img alt="Franz Kafka's Grave, Prague" height="210" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/praguekafkagrave.jpg" width="158"></amp-img>standing over a patch of grass beneath which lies what at this point probably little more than dust and teeth, not unlike the dusty yellowing pages of Kafka's books mingling with the old stained-ivory smell of dust mites and dry rot in the musty air of libraries.</p> +<p>I have spent and still do spend, a fair amount of my time lost in books, stories and poems. One of my favorite lines from Kafka addresses literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.”</p> +<p>Someone recently wrote me an email asking me to spend more time talking about places and less time in these abstractions, talking about perhaps nothing at all. A Hemingway fan no doubt. I hate to disappoint, but I seem to feel the need to wield a hatchet against my own icy seas. It is tempting to extend Kafka's analogy in this day and age when there actually is a northwest passage and the literal ice of our seas melts with every passing day, but what I personally find compelling about Kafka's words is the absolute futility they imply. He could for instance have said a hatchet which chops at the frozen blocks of ice inside us, certainly that would imply some chance of success, but he did not. He wrote “frozen seas,” against which a hatchet is most certainly futile.</p> +<p>Futile but important, for without the hatchet there is no hope at all. And I think Kafka would agree with the notion that while literature may be a hatchet, there are other tools available, the important thing is to chop at the frozen seas, lest they overwhelm us and freeze our souls. And by soul I mean something akin to what I believe James Brown probably meant, something that is at once within us and outside us, something that does not seem to yellow with the passing of time, but as many believe, shall even outlast our teeth, our bones, our history far past the time when we are only a name in someone else's memory. </p> +<p>Just north of Prague's old town square and east of the River Vltava is Josefov, the old Jewish quarter of Prague. The Pinkas Synagogue on Siroka Street in Josefov is an unassuming pale, sand-colored building with a slightly sunken entrance. Inside is a small alter and little else. The floor is bare; there are no places for worshipers to sit. The synagogue is little more than walls. And on the walls inscribed in extremely small print are the names of the 77,297 Jewish citizens of Bohemia and Moravia who died in the Holocaust.</p> +<p>It is a stark place and yet not cold. It has a calmative warmth beneath the monstrousness of what it bears witness to that seems somehow hopeful in spite of the past. Some might believe that it is time to move beyond the Holocaust, time to forget, but they are wrong. It is important that we do not forget the Holocaust of World War Two nor any of the many that have happened since. It is important to remember these atrocities not because that might prevent another, which as we surely must realize by now is wishful thinking, <amp-img alt="Pinkas Synagogue, Josefov, Prague" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/praguepinkascloseup.jpg" width="240"></amp-img>but because those who died ought to be remembered as everyone who has died ought to be remembered, not for how they died, but for who they were. The Pinkas synagogue reminds us not of the deaths of the victims, but of the lives they once had, reduced here to their essence, their names. </p> +<p>Upstairs in the Pinkas Synagogue there is an exhibit of paintings done by the children in Theresienstadt (originally named Terezin), paintings that resemble the ones on your refrigerator if you have children or the ones your parents once hung on their refrigerator, except that these were painted by children awaiting transportation to the gas chamber. </p> +<p><amp-img alt="Pinkas Synagogue, Josefov, Prague" height="165" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/praguepinkas.jpg" width="220"></amp-img>It's easy to get rather angry at humanity when confronted with such things, but I stood there thinking instead that those children, young as they were and headed to a fate none of us can imagine, nevertheless managed to produce beautiful finger and brush paintings. Perhaps they were too young to realize what was happening to them, perhaps they were too innocent to conceive of such a thing happening, but what if they did know? What if they knew full well that they were going to die and yet they went on anyway, painting and being children because there was nothing else they could do? Because there is nothing else any of us can do.</p> +<p>Chopping. Chopping. Chopping.</p> +<p>[Today's title comes from a composition by John Cage. For those that aren't familiar with Cage or the piece, 4'33" is a piece of music in which the pianist comes on stage, opens the lid of the piano and sits down to play. For 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds he plays nothing. He then closes the piano, bows and walks offstage.</p> +<p>You can see where it would be tempting to see this as a somewhat pretentious intellectual exercise, but as with Duchamp's Fountain, I think to see this as <em>only</em> as some challenge to our accepted notions is simple minded. Of course it flies in the face of convention, but it also does much more.</p> +<p>Music, rhythm, harmony, melody and all its other components are capable of inducing all sorts of amazing things in us, both beautiful and terrifying which as Proust says in the quote that started this piece, widens our soul. So what happens when the music is not music, but an absence of music? What Cage has done is handed us Kafka's hatchet, in 4'33" the chopping of the frozen seas is left to the individual.</p> +<p>I've never actually seen 4'33" performed, but I would venture to say that it isn't silent. While the performer may not make any noise, there will likely be plenty of noise, traffic outside the theatre, a airplane passing overhead, perhaps the wail of an ambulance siren, and even inside—the ruffling of programs and papers of fellow concert goers shifting in their seats, the creaks and groans of humanity sitting still, perhaps even the sound of blood rushing through your veins and throbbing in your eardrums.</p> +<p>Unlike most public performances, 4'33" is intensely personal. There is no hatchet save the one in your own hand and perhaps 4'33"'s poor reception in some quarters comes from the fact that confronting the frozen seas alone is a desolate and intimidating experience, one we often shrink from in fear. But if the children of Terezin were capable of joy in the face of such a monstrosity, surely we can find a similar kind of hope.</p> +<p>I can't explain what it's like to stand in a place like Pinkas Synagogue or the killing fields or S21 or any other memorial of mass slaughter, but I can say this, there was no music and yet nor was there silence.] </p> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7cd30f3 --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds.html @@ -0,0 +1,350 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="What happens when your last name becomes an adjective? 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A place, a scene on a street, a city, a whole country, colors your memory like a child’s crayon scribbling across your pupils. Jaisalmer India looks reddish brown and pink in my memory, Laos a dusty beige mist, Ko Kradan Thailand a green and blue cloak… and Prague was a pale yellow just this side of ochre. </p> +<p><break> +<img alt="Prague, Czech Republic, night" class="postpic" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/praguetowernight.jpg" width="165"/>It started from the moment we drove into town. Mildly lost, displaced and confused by road construction, we passed by a yellow building several times. I cannot say exactly why I noticed this yellow building over a thousand other, and perhaps more striking details, but it is the yellow building I remember. </p> +<p>And once the building lodged itself in my mind I seemed to develop some heightened observational acuity for the color yellow — stale champagne flat in its flute, crushed threads of saffron in little tins at the market, primrose blooms in a window planter, lotus in a pond, cough syrup for a child, ecru linen on the laundry line, tarnished gold lamps languishing unused in the dark corners of a hotel room, gilded Torah scrolls, the jaundiced skin of a Golem, faded magazines at the newsstand, sunflowers in a store window, chicken skin on the chopping block and a thousand other snapshots tinted yellow.</p> +<p><img alt="Kafka Statue, Prague, Czech Republic" class="postpicright" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/praguekafkastatue.jpg" width="173"/>I read somewhere that yellow daffodils are a symbol of unrequited love. An agreed upon meaning for yellow buildings has thus far remained elusive in my research. Which is to say I never looked into it; I am content with the simplicity of memory unencumbered by meaning. Memory is a strange and mysterious thing, not to be fully trusted. For instance I can’t say for sure, but I feel like I saw yellow daffodils in the New Jewish Cemetery near the grave of Franz Kafka, but it’s entirely possible I invented this detail on reflection.</p> +<p>Whatever the case I do know that Prague was home to Franz Kafka, a man who has in death assumed a life so large his last name is an adjective in common parlance, Kafkaesque—an adjective I’m pretty sure I’ve used somewhere in these very pages.</p> +<p>I made a cursory visit to Kafka’s tomb, just as I did to Proust’s in Pere Lechaise, compelled by some sense of validation, as if standing in front of these slabs of granite one can finally feel like one has reached the end of the literary journey and yet knowing that in fact not only is that not true, but just the opposite is true. As with any journey made mainly in the mental space of books and stories, the infringement of the real into the world of the imagination was wholly disappointing. Kafka’s grave is unremarkable in every way, a stone monument <img alt="Franz Kafka's Grave, Prague" class="postpic" height="210" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/praguekafkagrave.jpg" width="158"/>standing over a patch of grass beneath which lies what at this point probably little more than dust and teeth, not unlike the dusty yellowing pages of Kafka’s books mingling with the old stained-ivory smell of dust mites and dry rot in the musty air of libraries.</p> +<p>I have spent and still do spend, a fair amount of my time lost in books, stories and poems. One of my favorite lines from Kafka addresses literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.”</p> +<p>Someone recently wrote me an email asking me to spend more time talking about places and less time in these abstractions, talking about perhaps nothing at all. A Hemingway fan no doubt. I hate to disappoint, but I seem to feel the need to wield a hatchet against my own icy seas. It is tempting to extend Kafka’s analogy in this day and age when there actually is a northwest passage and the literal ice of our seas melts with every passing day, but what I personally find compelling about Kafka’s words is the absolute futility they imply. He could for instance have said a hatchet which chops at the frozen blocks of ice inside us, certainly that would imply some chance of success, but he did not. He wrote “frozen seas,” against which a hatchet is most certainly futile.</p> +<p>Futile but important, for without the hatchet there is no hope at all. And I think Kafka would agree with the notion that while literature may be a hatchet, there are other tools available, the important thing is to chop at the frozen seas, lest they overwhelm us and freeze our souls. And by soul I mean something akin to what I believe James Brown probably meant, something that is at once within us and outside us, something that does not seem to yellow with the passing of time, but as many believe, shall even outlast our teeth, our bones, our history far past the time when we are only a name in someone else’s memory. </p> +<p>Just north of Prague’s old town square and east of the River Vltava is Josefov, the old Jewish quarter of Prague. The Pinkas Synagogue on Siroka Street in Josefov is an unassuming pale, sand-colored building with a slightly sunken entrance. Inside is a small alter and little else. The floor is bare; there are no places for worshipers to sit. The synagogue is little more than walls. And on the walls inscribed in extremely small print are the names of the 77,297 Jewish citizens of Bohemia and Moravia who died in the Holocaust.</p> +<p>It is a stark place and yet not cold. It has a calmative warmth beneath the monstrousness of what it bears witness to that seems somehow hopeful in spite of the past. Some might believe that it is time to move beyond the Holocaust, time to forget, but they are wrong. It is important that we do not forget the Holocaust of World War Two nor any of the many that have happened since. It is important to remember these atrocities not because that might prevent another, which as we surely must realize by now is wishful thinking, <img alt="Pinkas Synagogue, Josefov, Prague" class="postpicright" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/praguepinkascloseup.jpg" width="240"/>but because those who died ought to be remembered as everyone who has died ought to be remembered, not for how they died, but for who they were. The Pinkas synagogue reminds us not of the deaths of the victims, but of the lives they once had, reduced here to their essence, their names. </p> +<p>Upstairs in the Pinkas Synagogue there is an exhibit of paintings done by the children in Theresienstadt (originally named Terezin), paintings that resemble the ones on your refrigerator if you have children or the ones your parents once hung on their refrigerator, except that these were painted by children awaiting transportation to the gas chamber. </p> +<p><img alt="Pinkas Synagogue, Josefov, Prague" class="postpic" height="165" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/praguepinkas.jpg" width="220"/>It’s easy to get rather angry at humanity when confronted with such things, but I stood there thinking instead that those children, young as they were and headed to a fate none of us can imagine, nevertheless managed to produce beautiful finger and brush paintings. Perhaps they were too young to realize what was happening to them, perhaps they were too innocent to conceive of such a thing happening, but what if they did know? What if they knew full well that they were going to die and yet they went on anyway, painting and being children because there was nothing else they could do? Because there is nothing else any of us can do.</p> +<p>Chopping. Chopping. Chopping.</p> +<p>[Today’s title comes from a composition by John Cage. For those that aren’t familiar with Cage or the piece, 4‘33” is a piece of music in which the pianist comes on stage, opens the lid of the piano and sits down to play. For 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds he plays nothing. He then closes the piano, bows and walks offstage.</p> +<p>You can see where it would be tempting to see this as a somewhat pretentious intellectual exercise, but as with Duchamp’s Fountain, I think to see this as <em>only</em> as some challenge to our accepted notions is simple minded. Of course it flies in the face of convention, but it also does much more.</p> +<p>Music, rhythm, harmony, melody and all its other components are capable of inducing all sorts of amazing things in us, both beautiful and terrifying which as Proust says in the quote that started this piece, widens our soul. So what happens when the music is not music, but an absence of music? What Cage has done is handed us Kafka’s hatchet, in 4‘33” the chopping of the frozen seas is left to the individual.</p> +<p>I’ve never actually seen 4‘33” performed, but I would venture to say that it isn’t silent. While the performer may not make any noise, there will likely be plenty of noise, traffic outside the theatre, a airplane passing overhead, perhaps the wail of an ambulance siren, and even inside—the ruffling of programs and papers of fellow concert goers shifting in their seats, the creaks and groans of humanity sitting still, perhaps even the sound of blood rushing through your veins and throbbing in your eardrums.</p> +<p>Unlike most public performances, 4‘33” is intensely personal. There is no hatchet save the one in your own hand and perhaps 4‘33“‘s poor reception in some quarters comes from the fact that confronting the frozen seas alone is a desolate and intimidating experience, one we often shrink from in fear. But if the children of Terezin were capable of joy in the face of such a monstrosity, surely we can find a similar kind of hope.</p> +<p>I can’t explain what it’s like to stand in a place like Pinkas Synagogue or the killing fields or S21 or any other memorial of mass slaughter, but I can say this, there was no music and yet nor was there silence.] </p> + </div> + + </article> + + + <div class="nav-wrapper"> + <nav id="page-navigation" class="page-border-top"> + <ul> + <li id="prev"><span class="bl">Previous:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/inside-and-out" rel="prev" title=" Inside and Out">Inside and Out</a> + </li> + <li id="next"><span class="bl">Next:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/unreflected" rel="next" title=" Unreflected">Unreflected</a> + </li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + + + + + + +<div class="comment--form--wrapper "> + +<div class="comment--form--header"> + <p class="hed">Thoughts?</p> + <p class="subhed">Please leave a reply:</p> +</div> +<form action="/comments/post/" method="post" class="comment--form"> + +<input type="hidden" name="rder" value="" /> + + + <input type="hidden" name="content_type" value="jrnl.entry" id="id_content_type"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="object_pk" value="63" id="id_object_pk"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="timestamp" value="1596833474" id="id_timestamp"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="security_hash" value="f3ab14e0a40905bf162d3b0c3221aff56431dbeb" id="id_security_hash"> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_name">Name:</label> + <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="50" required id="id_name"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_email">Email address:</label> + <input type="email" name="email" required id="id_email"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_url">URL:</label> + <input type="url" name="url" id="id_url"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> + <div class="textarea-rounded"><textarea name="comment" cols="40" rows="10" maxlength="3000" required id="id_comment"> +</textarea></div> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset style="display:none;"> + <label for="id_honeypot">If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam:</label> + <input type="text" name="honeypot" id="id_honeypot"> + </fieldset> + + + <div class="submit"> + <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post btn" value="Post" /> + <input type="submit" name="preview" class="submit-preview btn" value="Preview" /> + </div> +</form> +<p style="font-size: 95%;"><strong>All comments are moderated</strong>, so you won’t see it right away. 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+
+<span class="drop">P</span>laces have signature colors, they inscribe themselves onto you in liquid strokes of a pen you never quite see until the ink rolls down your forehead and covers your eyes with a thin veil, the mist through which you come to see a place. A place, a scene on a street, a city, a whole country, colors your memory like a child's crayon scribbling across your pupils. Jaisalmer India looks reddish brown and pink in my memory, Laos a dusty beige mist, Ko Kradan Thailand a green and blue cloak… and Prague was a pale yellow just this side of ochre.
+
+<break>
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/praguetowernight.jpg" width="165" height="220" class="postpic" alt="Prague, Czech Republic, night" />It started from the moment we drove into town. Mildly lost, displaced and confused by road construction, we passed by a yellow building several times. I cannot say exactly why I noticed this yellow building over a thousand other, and perhaps more striking details, but it is the yellow building I remember.
+
+And once the building lodged itself in my mind I seemed to develop some heightened observational acuity for the color yellow — stale champagne flat in its flute, crushed threads of saffron in little tins at the market, primrose blooms in a window planter, lotus in a pond, cough syrup for a child, ecru linen on the laundry line, tarnished gold lamps languishing unused in the dark corners of a hotel room, gilded Torah scrolls, the jaundiced skin of a Golem, faded magazines at the newsstand, sunflowers in a store window, chicken skin on the chopping block and a thousand other snapshots tinted yellow.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/praguekafkastatue.jpg" width="173" height="230" class="postpicright" alt="Kafka Statue, Prague, Czech Republic" />I read somewhere that yellow daffodils are a symbol of unrequited love. An agreed upon meaning for yellow buildings has thus far remained elusive in my research. Which is to say I never looked into it; I am content with the simplicity of memory unencumbered by meaning. Memory is a strange and mysterious thing, not to be fully trusted. For instance I can't say for sure, but I feel like I saw yellow daffodils in the New Jewish Cemetery near the grave of Franz Kafka, but it's entirely possible I invented this detail on reflection.
+
+Whatever the case I do know that Prague was home to Franz Kafka, a man who has in death assumed a life so large his last name is an adjective in common parlance, Kafkaesque—an adjective I'm pretty sure I've used somewhere in these very pages.
+
+I made a cursory visit to Kafka's tomb, just as I did to Proust's in Pere Lechaise, compelled by some sense of validation, as if standing in front of these slabs of granite one can finally feel like one has reached the end of the literary journey and yet knowing that in fact not only is that not true, but just the opposite is true. As with any journey made mainly in the mental space of books and stories, the infringement of the real into the world of the imagination was wholly disappointing. Kafka's grave is unremarkable in every way, a stone monument <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/praguekafkagrave.jpg" width="158" height="210" class="postpic" alt="Franz Kafka's Grave, Prague" />standing over a patch of grass beneath which lies what at this point probably little more than dust and teeth, not unlike the dusty yellowing pages of Kafka's books mingling with the old stained-ivory smell of dust mites and dry rot in the musty air of libraries.
+
+I have spent and still do spend, a fair amount of my time lost in books, stories and poems. One of my favorite lines from Kafka addresses literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.”
+
+Someone recently wrote me an email asking me to spend more time talking about places and less time in these abstractions, talking about perhaps nothing at all. A Hemingway fan no doubt. I hate to disappoint, but I seem to feel the need to wield a hatchet against my own icy seas. It is tempting to extend Kafka's analogy in this day and age when there actually is a northwest passage and the literal ice of our seas melts with every passing day, but what I personally find compelling about Kafka's words is the absolute futility they imply. He could for instance have said a hatchet which chops at the frozen blocks of ice inside us, certainly that would imply some chance of success, but he did not. He wrote “frozen seas,” against which a hatchet is most certainly futile.
+
+Futile but important, for without the hatchet there is no hope at all. And I think Kafka would agree with the notion that while literature may be a hatchet, there are other tools available, the important thing is to chop at the frozen seas, lest they overwhelm us and freeze our souls. And by soul I mean something akin to what I believe James Brown probably meant, something that is at once within us and outside us, something that does not seem to yellow with the passing of time, but as many believe, shall even outlast our teeth, our bones, our history far past the time when we are only a name in someone else's memory.
+
+Just north of Prague's old town square and east of the River Vltava is Josefov, the old Jewish quarter of Prague. The Pinkas Synagogue on Siroka Street in Josefov is an unassuming pale, sand-colored building with a slightly sunken entrance. Inside is a small alter and little else. The floor is bare; there are no places for worshipers to sit. The synagogue is little more than walls. And on the walls inscribed in extremely small print are the names of the 77,297 Jewish citizens of Bohemia and Moravia who died in the Holocaust.
+
+It is a stark place and yet not cold. It has a calmative warmth beneath the monstrousness of what it bears witness to that seems somehow hopeful in spite of the past. Some might believe that it is time to move beyond the Holocaust, time to forget, but they are wrong. It is important that we do not forget the Holocaust of World War Two nor any of the many that have happened since. It is important to remember these atrocities not because that might prevent another, which as we surely must realize by now is wishful thinking, <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/praguepinkascloseup.jpg" width="240" height="180" class="postpicright" alt="Pinkas Synagogue, Josefov, Prague" />but because those who died ought to be remembered as everyone who has died ought to be remembered, not for how they died, but for who they were. The Pinkas synagogue reminds us not of the deaths of the victims, but of the lives they once had, reduced here to their essence, their names.
+
+Upstairs in the Pinkas Synagogue there is an exhibit of paintings done by the children in Theresienstadt (originally named Terezin), paintings that resemble the ones on your refrigerator if you have children or the ones your parents once hung on their refrigerator, except that these were painted by children awaiting transportation to the gas chamber.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/praguepinkas.jpg" width="220" height="165" class="postpic" alt="Pinkas Synagogue, Josefov, Prague" />It's easy to get rather angry at humanity when confronted with such things, but I stood there thinking instead that those children, young as they were and headed to a fate none of us can imagine, nevertheless managed to produce beautiful finger and brush paintings. Perhaps they were too young to realize what was happening to them, perhaps they were too innocent to conceive of such a thing happening, but what if they did know? What if they knew full well that they were going to die and yet they went on anyway, painting and being children because there was nothing else they could do? Because there is nothing else any of us can do.
+
+Chopping. Chopping. Chopping.
+
+[Today's title comes from a composition by John Cage. For those that aren't familiar with Cage or the piece, 4'33" is a piece of music in which the pianist comes on stage, opens the lid of the piano and sits down to play. For 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds he plays nothing. He then closes the piano, bows and walks offstage.
+
+You can see where it would be tempting to see this as a somewhat pretentious intellectual exercise, but as with Duchamp's Fountain, I think to see this as <em>only</em> as some challenge to our accepted notions is simple minded. Of course it flies in the face of convention, but it also does much more.
+
+Music, rhythm, harmony, melody and all its other components are capable of inducing all sorts of amazing things in us, both beautiful and terrifying which as Proust says in the quote that started this piece, widens our soul. So what happens when the music is not music, but an absence of music? What Cage has done is handed us Kafka's hatchet, in 4'33" the chopping of the frozen seas is left to the individual.
+
+I've never actually seen 4'33" performed, but I would venture to say that it isn't silent. While the performer may not make any noise, there will likely be plenty of noise, traffic outside the theatre, a airplane passing overhead, perhaps the wail of an ambulance siren, and even inside—the ruffling of programs and papers of fellow concert goers shifting in their seats, the creaks and groans of humanity sitting still, perhaps even the sound of blood rushing through your veins and throbbing in your eardrums.
+
+Unlike most public performances, 4'33" is intensely personal. There is no hatchet save the one in your own hand and perhaps 4'33"'s poor reception in some quarters comes from the fact that confronting the frozen seas alone is a desolate and intimidating experience, one we often shrink from in fear. But if the children of Terezin were capable of joy in the face of such a monstrosity, surely we can find a similar kind of hope.
+
+I can't explain what it's like to stand in a place like Pinkas Synagogue or the killing fields or S21 or any other memorial of mass slaughter, but I can say this, there was no music and yet nor was there silence.] diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/ghost.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/ghost.amp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5bfcdc6 --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/ghost.amp @@ -0,0 +1,188 @@ + + +<!doctype html> +<html amp lang="en"> +<head> +<meta charset="utf-8"> +<title>Ghost</title> +<link rel="canonical" href="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/05/ghost"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimum-scale=1"> + <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/> + <meta name="twitter:url" content="/jrnl/2006/05/ghost"> + <meta name="twitter:description" content="From the cobblestone alleys and arched doorways of Trogir, Croatia to Ljubljana, Slovenia, home of Europe's greatest graffiti. 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Like Dubrovnik, Trogir was a walled city of roughly Venetian vintage, but Trogir's wall has largely crumbled away or been removed, though I know not how or why. Still it had the gorgeous narrow cobblestone streets, arched doorways and high towering forts that give all these Dalmatian towns their Rapunzel-like fairly tale quality. </p> +<p>Trogir was notably different from Dubrovnik chiefly in that it was not inundated with tourists. There were tourists to be sure, but most of them were yachters who contented themselves by sitting in the waterfront cafes just in front of their moorings, admiring each other's yachts and telling sea tales. </p> +<p>The rest of the town was given over to a handful of tourists who disappeared among the narrow winding streets such that I often found myself walking for long periods of time undisturbed by a soul. We wandered into the main church,<amp-img alt="sunlight on alter, Trogir, Croatia" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/trogirchurchalter.jpg" width="210"></amp-img> a large stone block affair just off the central square and only recently restored, just before sundown. The church was small and unremarkable save for its old tombstones or at least headstones, embedded right in the floor next to the pews. I had recently finished reading an essay by W.G. Sebald in which he argues, among other things, that our use of tombstones and crypts is really spurred by an urge to lock the dead in the earth, which we cleverly disguise to ourselves as commemorative memorials. </p> +<p>I stood for a minute in the church watching the last sunbeams fall in through the windows near the roofline wondering if in fact just beneath me, buried in the fourteenth century, was some man or woman desperate to get out and wander the earth, slightly smaller than in life, as the dead are said to be, but larger in understanding and memory. <amp-img alt="Grave, Trogir, Croatia" height="173" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/trogirchurchgrave.jpg" width="230"></amp-img>I think it was Nabakov who said in one of his novel that writers and the dead travel in the same thing—the past. Indeed I have found, not just through sloth, that I prefer to write these anecdotes as past tense and see what remains with me a few days after I have left. </p> +<p>This is why perhaps I may seem to have missed some fairly key things, like for instance the oldest pharmacy in the world which I saw in Dubrovnik, because the truth is, I simply don't have time to record everything. I remember the pharmacy now with its a collection of shelves full of dusty bottles and curios who use has long been forgotten, but when <amp-img alt="Church Bell, Trogir, Croatia" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/trogirbell.jpg" width="163"></amp-img>I came to write of Dubrovnik it was not there. Memories come and go, pass through us like the ghosts that live in them. Sometimes they are there when we want them, sometimes they are not, and sometimes they are there when we don't want them as well. </p> +<p>So if I say in Trogir that I remember little more than the peculiar quality of the light as the sun set and electric lanterns began to come on, you will forgive me I hope for my inability to say more. Certain memories passed through me walking the streets of Trogir in the fading twilight, that are too old to speak of here, too far gone to retrace, it is enough for them to merely pass through, a bit of warmth and then they move on. I can say of Trogir though, <amp-img alt="Streets at Night, Trogir, Croatia" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/trogirstreetnight.jpg" width="180"></amp-img>if you don't believe in ghosts, have a late night walk in the old city and tell me how you feel about ghosts when you're done. I have never doubted that the dead move among us, and never been so sure of it as standing in that church staring down at the tombstones from the thirteenth century.</p> +<p>The following morning after watching the fisherman board their craft and motor out to sea, we climbed back in the car and drove on north to Ljubljana, Slovenia. Some of you may know that I have for some years (though not recently) published a literary journal under the name castagraf (which is currently being held ransom by some asshole domain squatters, so no link at the moment). To come to the point, in the course of several issues castagraf <amp-img alt="Ljubljana, Slovenia" height="173" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ljubljanariver.jpg" width="230"></amp-img>I published a number of Slovenian authors, most notably the highly esteemed Tomaz Salamun, Slovenia's national poet, or whatever title they have for the same idea. But along with Tomaz we published to two younger poets whom I would have liked to meet in Ljubljana, but I did not, owing in part to my own incompetence and in part to the estranged relationship I have with my former co-editor who processes their email address.</p> +<p><amp-img alt="Evening light, Ljubljana, Slovenia" height="158" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ljubljanasunlight.jpg" width="210"></amp-img>So I was unable to look you up Primoz and Gregor for which I am sorry. I should liked to have met you both. But I did enjoy Ljubljana for the two says I spent there, a truly lovely city to call home. Ljubljana is one part old European city and one part college town owing to its relatively small size and large university. The center of town is two streets running parallel on opposite sides of the river, each street lined with cafes and restaurants frequented by locals and tourists alike. </p> +<p>Though we spent a very short time in Ljubljana it remains one if my favorite European cities and it was fun to wander the streets where so many of my friends have previously been and which I had heard no shortage of stories about. It was nice as well to see the hometown of Tomaz Salamun whose poetry has had no small influence on my own.</p> +<p>I spent the evening walking the streets trying to get a feel for the city. As the sun set and it began to grow cooler I stopped to put on a sweater and noticed a singularly striking and a little bit frightening piece of graffiti. What struck me about it was the contrast between <amp-img alt="Graffiti, Ljubljana, Slovenia" height="188" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ljubljanagraffiti.jpg" width="220"></amp-img>the gleaming, blood dripping eyes of the bat-like creature above a bed of blooming flowers which seemed for a moment to perfectly encapsulate the contrast between pain and joy that makes up our world. Later that night I dreamed about the strange bat creature, something about it got the better of my imagination, already overrun as it was with ghosts and memories of the dead, but at the end of the dream, of which I recall very little, the flowers were just coming up out of the soil, and the bat was no longer anywhere to be found. +<break></break></p> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/ghost.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/ghost.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..73502ff --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/ghost.html @@ -0,0 +1,338 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>Ghost - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="From the cobblestone alleys and arched doorways of Trogir, Croatia to Ljubljana, Slovenia, home of Europe's greatest graffiti. 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Like Dubrovnik, Trogir was a walled city of roughly Venetian vintage, but Trogir’s wall has largely crumbled away or been removed, though I know not how or why. Still it had the gorgeous narrow cobblestone streets, arched doorways and high towering forts that give all these Dalmatian towns their Rapunzel-like fairly tale quality. </p> +<p>Trogir was notably different from Dubrovnik chiefly in that it was not inundated with tourists. There were tourists to be sure, but most of them were yachters who contented themselves by sitting in the waterfront cafes just in front of their moorings, admiring each other’s yachts and telling sea tales. </p> +<p>The rest of the town was given over to a handful of tourists who disappeared among the narrow winding streets such that I often found myself walking for long periods of time undisturbed by a soul. We wandered into the main church,<img alt="sunlight on alter, Trogir, Croatia" class="postpic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/trogirchurchalter.jpg" width="210"/> a large stone block affair just off the central square and only recently restored, just before sundown. The church was small and unremarkable save for its old tombstones or at least headstones, embedded right in the floor next to the pews. I had recently finished reading an essay by W.G. Sebald in which he argues, among other things, that our use of tombstones and crypts is really spurred by an urge to lock the dead in the earth, which we cleverly disguise to ourselves as commemorative memorials. </p> +<p>I stood for a minute in the church watching the last sunbeams fall in through the windows near the roofline wondering if in fact just beneath me, buried in the fourteenth century, was some man or woman desperate to get out and wander the earth, slightly smaller than in life, as the dead are said to be, but larger in understanding and memory. <img alt="Grave, Trogir, Croatia" class="postpicright" height="173" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/trogirchurchgrave.jpg" width="230"/>I think it was Nabakov who said in one of his novel that writers and the dead travel in the same thing—the past. Indeed I have found, not just through sloth, that I prefer to write these anecdotes as past tense and see what remains with me a few days after I have left. </p> +<p>This is why perhaps I may seem to have missed some fairly key things, like for instance the oldest pharmacy in the world which I saw in Dubrovnik, because the truth is, I simply don’t have time to record everything. I remember the pharmacy now with its a collection of shelves full of dusty bottles and curios who use has long been forgotten, but when <img alt="Church Bell, Trogir, Croatia" class="postpic" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/trogirbell.jpg" width="163"/>I came to write of Dubrovnik it was not there. Memories come and go, pass through us like the ghosts that live in them. Sometimes they are there when we want them, sometimes they are not, and sometimes they are there when we don’t want them as well. </p> +<p>So if I say in Trogir that I remember little more than the peculiar quality of the light as the sun set and electric lanterns began to come on, you will forgive me I hope for my inability to say more. Certain memories passed through me walking the streets of Trogir in the fading twilight, that are too old to speak of here, too far gone to retrace, it is enough for them to merely pass through, a bit of warmth and then they move on. I can say of Trogir though, <img alt="Streets at Night, Trogir, Croatia" class="postpicright" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/trogirstreetnight.jpg" width="180"/>if you don’t believe in ghosts, have a late night walk in the old city and tell me how you feel about ghosts when you’re done. I have never doubted that the dead move among us, and never been so sure of it as standing in that church staring down at the tombstones from the thirteenth century.</p> +<p>The following morning after watching the fisherman board their craft and motor out to sea, we climbed back in the car and drove on north to Ljubljana, Slovenia. Some of you may know that I have for some years (though not recently) published a literary journal under the name castagraf (which is currently being held ransom by some asshole domain squatters, so no link at the moment). To come to the point, in the course of several issues castagraf <img alt="Ljubljana, Slovenia" class="postpic" height="173" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ljubljanariver.jpg" width="230"/>I published a number of Slovenian authors, most notably the highly esteemed Tomaz Salamun, Slovenia’s national poet, or whatever title they have for the same idea. But along with Tomaz we published to two younger poets whom I would have liked to meet in Ljubljana, but I did not, owing in part to my own incompetence and in part to the estranged relationship I have with my former co-editor who processes their email address.</p> +<p><img alt="Evening light, Ljubljana, Slovenia" class="postpicright" height="158" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ljubljanasunlight.jpg" width="210"/>So I was unable to look you up Primoz and Gregor for which I am sorry. I should liked to have met you both. But I did enjoy Ljubljana for the two says I spent there, a truly lovely city to call home. Ljubljana is one part old European city and one part college town owing to its relatively small size and large university. The center of town is two streets running parallel on opposite sides of the river, each street lined with cafes and restaurants frequented by locals and tourists alike. </p> +<p>Though we spent a very short time in Ljubljana it remains one if my favorite European cities and it was fun to wander the streets where so many of my friends have previously been and which I had heard no shortage of stories about. It was nice as well to see the hometown of Tomaz Salamun whose poetry has had no small influence on my own.</p> +<p>I spent the evening walking the streets trying to get a feel for the city. As the sun set and it began to grow cooler I stopped to put on a sweater and noticed a singularly striking and a little bit frightening piece of graffiti. What struck me about it was the contrast between <img alt="Graffiti, Ljubljana, Slovenia" class="postpic" height="188" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ljubljanagraffiti.jpg" width="220"/>the gleaming, blood dripping eyes of the bat-like creature above a bed of blooming flowers which seemed for a moment to perfectly encapsulate the contrast between pain and joy that makes up our world. Later that night I dreamed about the strange bat creature, something about it got the better of my imagination, already overrun as it was with ghosts and memories of the dead, but at the end of the dream, of which I recall very little, the flowers were just coming up out of the soil, and the bat was no longer anywhere to be found. +<break></p> + </div> + + </article> + + + <div class="nav-wrapper"> + <nav id="page-navigation" class="page-border-top"> + <ul> + <li id="prev"><span class="bl">Previous:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/feel-good-lost" rel="prev" title=" Feel Good Lost">Feel Good Lost</a> + </li> + <li id="next"><span class="bl">Next:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two" rel="next" title=" The King of Carrot Flowers Part Two">The King of Carrot Flowers Part Two</a> + </li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + + + + + + +<div class="comment--form--wrapper "> + +<div class="comment--form--header"> + <p class="hed">Thoughts?</p> + <p class="subhed">Please leave a reply:</p> +</div> +<form action="/comments/post/" method="post" class="comment--form"> + +<input type="hidden" name="rder" value="" /> + + + <input type="hidden" name="content_type" value="jrnl.entry" id="id_content_type"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="object_pk" value="60" id="id_object_pk"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="timestamp" value="1596833475" id="id_timestamp"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="security_hash" value="621b6c168f78421d884fd406de73bd29a0b631c8" id="id_security_hash"> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_name">Name:</label> + <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="50" required id="id_name"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_email">Email address:</label> + <input type="email" name="email" required id="id_email"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_url">URL:</label> + <input type="url" name="url" id="id_url"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> + <div class="textarea-rounded"><textarea name="comment" cols="40" rows="10" maxlength="3000" required id="id_comment"> +</textarea></div> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset style="display:none;"> + <label for="id_honeypot">If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam:</label> + <input type="text" name="honeypot" id="id_honeypot"> + </fieldset> + + + <div class="submit"> + <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post btn" value="Post" /> + <input type="submit" name="preview" class="submit-preview btn" value="Preview" /> + </div> +</form> +<p style="font-size: 95%;"><strong>All comments are moderated</strong>, so you won’t see it right away. 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Like Dubrovnik, Trogir was a walled city of roughly Venetian vintage, but Trogir's wall has largely crumbled away or been removed, though I know not how or why. Still it had the gorgeous narrow cobblestone streets, arched doorways and high towering forts that give all these Dalmatian towns their Rapunzel-like fairly tale quality.
+
+Trogir was notably different from Dubrovnik chiefly in that it was not inundated with tourists. There were tourists to be sure, but most of them were yachters who contented themselves by sitting in the waterfront cafes just in front of their moorings, admiring each other's yachts and telling sea tales.
+
+The rest of the town was given over to a handful of tourists who disappeared among the narrow winding streets such that I often found myself walking for long periods of time undisturbed by a soul. We wandered into the main church,<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/trogirchurchalter.jpg" width="210" height="230" class="postpic" alt="sunlight on alter, Trogir, Croatia" /> a large stone block affair just off the central square and only recently restored, just before sundown. The church was small and unremarkable save for its old tombstones or at least headstones, embedded right in the floor next to the pews. I had recently finished reading an essay by W.G. Sebald in which he argues, among other things, that our use of tombstones and crypts is really spurred by an urge to lock the dead in the earth, which we cleverly disguise to ourselves as commemorative memorials.
+
+I stood for a minute in the church watching the last sunbeams fall in through the windows near the roofline wondering if in fact just beneath me, buried in the fourteenth century, was some man or woman desperate to get out and wander the earth, slightly smaller than in life, as the dead are said to be, but larger in understanding and memory. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/trogirchurchgrave.jpg" width="230" height="173" class="postpicright" alt="Grave, Trogir, Croatia" />I think it was Nabakov who said in one of his novel that writers and the dead travel in the same thing—the past. Indeed I have found, not just through sloth, that I prefer to write these anecdotes as past tense and see what remains with me a few days after I have left.
+
+This is why perhaps I may seem to have missed some fairly key things, like for instance the oldest pharmacy in the world which I saw in Dubrovnik, because the truth is, I simply don't have time to record everything. I remember the pharmacy now with its a collection of shelves full of dusty bottles and curios who use has long been forgotten, but when <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/trogirbell.jpg" width="163" height="220" class="postpic" alt="Church Bell, Trogir, Croatia" />I came to write of Dubrovnik it was not there. Memories come and go, pass through us like the ghosts that live in them. Sometimes they are there when we want them, sometimes they are not, and sometimes they are there when we don't want them as well.
+
+So if I say in Trogir that I remember little more than the peculiar quality of the light as the sun set and electric lanterns began to come on, you will forgive me I hope for my inability to say more. Certain memories passed through me walking the streets of Trogir in the fading twilight, that are too old to speak of here, too far gone to retrace, it is enough for them to merely pass through, a bit of warmth and then they move on. I can say of Trogir though, <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/trogirstreetnight.jpg" width="180" height="240" class="postpicright" alt="Streets at Night, Trogir, Croatia" />if you don't believe in ghosts, have a late night walk in the old city and tell me how you feel about ghosts when you're done. I have never doubted that the dead move among us, and never been so sure of it as standing in that church staring down at the tombstones from the thirteenth century.
+
+The following morning after watching the fisherman board their craft and motor out to sea, we climbed back in the car and drove on north to Ljubljana, Slovenia. Some of you may know that I have for some years (though not recently) published a literary journal under the name castagraf (which is currently being held ransom by some asshole domain squatters, so no link at the moment). To come to the point, in the course of several issues castagraf <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/ljubljanariver.jpg" width="230" height="173" class="postpic" alt="Ljubljana, Slovenia" />I published a number of Slovenian authors, most notably the highly esteemed Tomaz Salamun, Slovenia's national poet, or whatever title they have for the same idea. But along with Tomaz we published to two younger poets whom I would have liked to meet in Ljubljana, but I did not, owing in part to my own incompetence and in part to the estranged relationship I have with my former co-editor who processes their email address.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/ljubljanasunlight.jpg" width="210" height="158" class="postpicright" alt="Evening light, Ljubljana, Slovenia" />So I was unable to look you up Primoz and Gregor for which I am sorry. I should liked to have met you both. But I did enjoy Ljubljana for the two says I spent there, a truly lovely city to call home. Ljubljana is one part old European city and one part college town owing to its relatively small size and large university. The center of town is two streets running parallel on opposite sides of the river, each street lined with cafes and restaurants frequented by locals and tourists alike.
+
+Though we spent a very short time in Ljubljana it remains one if my favorite European cities and it was fun to wander the streets where so many of my friends have previously been and which I had heard no shortage of stories about. It was nice as well to see the hometown of Tomaz Salamun whose poetry has had no small influence on my own.
+
+I spent the evening walking the streets trying to get a feel for the city. As the sun set and it began to grow cooler I stopped to put on a sweater and noticed a singularly striking and a little bit frightening piece of graffiti. What struck me about it was the contrast between <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/ljubljanagraffiti.jpg" width="220" height="188" class="postpic" alt="Graffiti, Ljubljana, Slovenia" />the gleaming, blood dripping eyes of the bat-like creature above a bed of blooming flowers which seemed for a moment to perfectly encapsulate the contrast between pain and joy that makes up our world. Later that night I dreamed about the strange bat creature, something about it got the better of my imagination, already overrun as it was with ghosts and memories of the dead, but at the end of the dream, of which I recall very little, the flowers were just coming up out of the soil, and the bat was no longer anywhere to be found.
+<break> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/i-dont-sleep-i-dream.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/i-dont-sleep-i-dream.amp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0d2ddae --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/i-dont-sleep-i-dream.amp @@ -0,0 +1,271 @@ + + +<!doctype html> +<html amp lang="en"> +<head> +<meta charset="utf-8"> +<title>I Don't Sleep I Dream</title> +<link rel="canonical" href="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/05/i-dont-sleep-i-dream"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimum-scale=1"> + <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/> + <meta name="twitter:url" content="/jrnl/2006/05/i-dont-sleep-i-dream"> + <meta name="twitter:description" content="A mock interview with Sigmund Freud Vienna, composed in what was once the waiting room of Frued's office in Vienna, Austria. 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There are essentially only two rooms that bear any resemblance to what the place looked like in his day. In glass cases are a few knickknacks, figurines, actually it's a rather impressive collection with pieces from the Sumerian, India, Polynesia and other exotic locales. Another room is full of photographs and explanatory notation in German and English.</p> +<p><break> +The rest of the apartment is given over to something between an exhibition room and an art gallery. But what everyone came here for then is absent now. No word on where the couch might have gone or why some duplicate hasn't been made. Plenty of other sofas, divans and other reclining furniture are on display in one of the gallery rooms, but the original is nowhere to be found.</break></p> +<p><amp-img alt="Waiting Room, Frued's office, Vienna Austria" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennafreudoffice.jpg" width="212"></amp-img></p> +<p>The closest thing is up against the wall, behind a small writing desk in what was then the waiting room. There were no ropes saying you couldn't so I did what everyone used to come here for, to lie down on the divan and stare at the patternless ceiling until the patterns emerge as it were.</p> +<p>I lay down. I stared at the ceiling.</p> +<p>"Tell me about it."</p> +<p>"About what?"</p> +<p>"What did you come here for?"</p> +<p>"I'm not sure. I think I wanted to see it. To maybe have something to attach the abstractions too, maybe to know, rather than wonder — what did it look like? What sort of trees were on the street? What did the air taste like? How did the concrete and asphalt smell when it rained? What was the view from the window? How hot was the upstairs room where you worked? All the mundane details of life in places where I don't live... And I know I can't <em>know</em> these things in any real way without actually being there at the time. I know all I will find are half truths and suggestions, but the more I know the freer my imagination seems to become, the more it builds things out of the details, things which often bear no resemblance to reality but to me are more real."</p> +<p><amp-img alt="Window, Freud's Office, Vienna Austria" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennafreudwindow.jpg" width="172"></amp-img></p> +<p>"Interesting."</p> +<p>"Yeah it is. It totally contradicts an old quote from somebody named Suzuki that I used to like."</p> +<p>"Which is?"</p> +<p>"‘For the beginner an infinite range of possibilities exist, for the expert few options remain.' Or something along those lines. And I don't by any means consider myself an expert. In fact the more I know and see the more I feel like a beginner. I don't even know what an expert is."</p> +<p>"Perhaps that's the veiled significance of this Suzuki's words, that we are all beginners, that there are no experts so we are free, as you say, with our imaginations. But remember that imagination is not all daydreams and pretty flowers; there are monsters and demons in us too. There seems to be in us all a struggle between light and dark..."</p> +<p>"Like the Robert Mitchum movie? Or Spike Lee's version? A friend of mine claims that there are equal proportions of light and dark in the world, or good and evil or whatever metaphor you want to use, anyway her point is, I think, that these dualities are struggling for balance and that's where we find ourselves -- caught in that struggle. I think it's actually an idea she borrowed from Jewish Scripture, and it's a good metaphor so long as we consider the fact that which is which -- good/bad etc -- is wholly dependent on our judgments. That is, what you or I call dark or evil is actually neither, that is simple our interpretation of it. Not to be relativistic, which I don't like, in fact I think relativism misses out on the subtle undercurrents of life in favor of simplistic rationalism to offer an easy to grok interpretation of life's essential mysteries. But that said, there is some relativism in our interpretations of good and evil etc. Any given event, no matter how good it seems, is itself the result of all sorts of other events, some may have been good, some bad, but without them we wouldn't be doing that "good" thing now. And so with the future. If I give you some money to pay a debt that may be a good thing, but down the road it's possible that you will find yourself in a bad situation not just in spite of my good act, but perhaps because of it."</p> +<p>"Mmmhmm. Tell me about your dreams..."</p> +<p>"No."</p> +<p>"..."</p> +<p><amp-img alt="painting" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennamonster.jpg" width="150"></amp-img></p> +<p>"Okay. Just yesterday I dreamed a friend of mine was in trouble. So today I called her. Turns out she's not in trouble. She's doing just fine. So what the hell does that mean?"</p> +<p>"Perhaps you feel a certain helplessness at not being able to know whether your friend is in trouble or not. Your subconscious feels helpless and seeks to create a situation in which it can help someone else so that it alleviates the feelings of helplessness."</p> +<p>"..."</p> +<p>"The imagination can ruin and cripple as much as it can heal and give hope."</p> +<p>"Well don't you sort of have a vested interest in promoting that idea since your life's work hinges on it being true, on the notion that there is something wrong with me that I can not directly get to, but with assistance it can be drawn out..."</p> +<p>"My vested interest was in helping people for whom there was no help at the time."</p> +<p>"Okay. Fair enough. Sorry. There is just so much baggage around you. I want to believe, I really do."</p> +<p>"It's possible I was wrong, I did make some mistakes."</p> +<p>"Yeah you did. Turns out cocaine <em>is</em> addictive."</p> +<p>"I made bigger ones than that."</p> +<p>"I know, but I saw that quote over there on the wall by that picture of Dora."</p> +<p>"Ah yes. Dora." </p> +<p>"The one that got away huh? So, why was all of your early work focused on women?"</p> +<p>"..."</p> +<p>"Okay. Well.... Do you like what they've done with the place?"</p> +<p>"Well. It was just a place you know. This room we are sitting in was originally the waiting room, the consultations were in there. But it is just a place, one room is as good as another."</p> +<p>"Yeah. But weren't you the one who always directed attention toward trivialities like "methodological principle," which in some ways is influenced by the room, the mood it creates. I mean if you had disco lighting and Al Green playing when patients came over things would've been different no?"</p> +<p>"Yes I did say that. And methodology, set and setting as that American doctor put it, are important. But I also said sometimes a cigar..."</p> +<p>"Yeah and we all wish you hadn't. That undercuts almost everything else you said because it highlights the subjective — dare I say arbitrary? — interpretations in your theories. I mean what if Newton has said ‘well gravity exists, but it doesn't always exist, it certain doesn't exist for <em>me</em>? That's a bit elitist don't you think? In the end we'd have to conclude that either gravity doesn't exist or that a cigar is never just a cigar, neither of which are particularly helpful."</p> +<p>"You seem hostile toward me."</p> +<p>"I'm not hostile, I'm just saying that psychology and this therapy bit is, in the end, no different than the kind of insight you can get from a book or a night out with friends or just sitting on the toilet contemplating life. But you invested the whole process with a pseudo-scientific framework that makes some people think they can't find their own answers."</p> +<p>"People can't find their own answers. And even those that can find some can't find others. We cannot see our own subconscious, we can only see the effects of it, the manifestations of it."</p> +<p>"Look I'm not saying I have it all sussed out. Far from it. But what you're talking about seems to me like a rewritten metaphor for god. And I think your metaphors were wrong about some key stuff. Like Oedipus for example. First off mythology is probably not a good base to draw from if your goal is to make sweeping ‘scientific' generalizations about human development. And secondly the stages Oedipus passes through, well you skipped a fairly key one, he was abandoned by his parents as a baby, which is tantamount to child abuse and hardly seems archetypical to the way most children are raised. I think you were a brilliant literary critic centuries ahead of his time, but I think your science was, well, to be blunt, nonexistent. Which would have been fine except..."</p> +<p>"Hmmm. Yes. Perhaps. But I could argue that birth itself is abandonment"</p> +<p>"Please don't."</p> +<p>"I wasn't going to, I was just saying I <em>could</em>."</p> +<p>"And yet that Oedipal theory, while professional psychologists may not pay much attention to it, holds a powerful sway over how we perceive ourselves today. And it carries that weight because it passed and continues to pass as science. See science is our god now so anything that gets you the title doctor is perceived as having some authority that overrides even common sense."</p> +<p>"Well, in my defense, it isn't really all that different than the story of the fall in the Jewish and Christian mythologies which also influences how you see yourself. And I did have a degree in medicine."</p> +<p>"I know you did. I'm not debating your training or skills I'm saying that psychology is not was not and never will be a science."</p> +<p>"..."</p> +<p>"I'm sorry. It just isn't."</p> +<p>"Have you read The Interpre..."<amp-img alt="'Fire' by Giuseppe Arcimboldo" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennawar.jpg" width="190"></amp-img></p> +<p>"Yes. But to be honest I don't see why our dreams need to be interpreted. Isn't it possible that they have no meaning at all? That we really <em>really</em> want them to have meaning because this is what we do, we find connections, metaphors to link things, and we can find threads in our dreams that seem to connect them to this world, but in the end what if they are just dreams? Something outside meaning and interpretation because the world which they inhabit is guided by rules and schema that bear no resemblance to the ones that guide this world? What if there is no common language by which we can make interpretations, metaphors or any meaning at all out of our dreams?</p> +<p>"..."</p> +<p>"I'll tell you what does interest me though — the differences in the way we conduct ourselves in our dream lives and real lives and those people who seem to break down the differences."</p> +<p>"Such as?"</p> +<p>"Well on the positive side you have someone like Antonio Gaudí or Frank Stanford. But of course there's the negative side as well, Jeffrey Dahmer, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, etc."</p> +<p>"It's interesting that you choose artists and writers as representative of the positive and serial killers, despots and murderers as the negative... perhaps neither is really accurate. It's possible you know that Gaudí was inspired by imagination and Pol Pot by greed and lust for power and that neither of them is representative of someone bringing dreams to life."</p> +<p>"Yes but don't dreams underlie imagination and greed and lust and everything else? We act out our dreams in realities. In fact I would say nearly everything we do is an act of externalizing our dreams — the hopes, fears and strangeness that they contain. We bring them forth into the world of struggling forces and they are bandied and battered about by circumstances which are often beyond our control."</p> +<p>"Didn't you just say the opposite?"</p> +<p>"No I said it was possible that our dreams have no meaning in this world that we can ever understand, but that doesn't mean we don't spend our lives externalizing them and <em>trying</em> to understand them.</p> +<p>"Exactly. Sometimes you get art, other times murder, such is the nature of dreams and the world in which we find ourselves."</p> +<p>"..."</p> +<p>"..."</p> +<p>"What do you think of these art exhibits in the other room...?"</p> +<p>"That's the sort of rhetorical question you pose so you can skip over whatever my answer may be and delve into what you really wanted to talk about — what <em>you</em> think of the art in the other room. Why don't we skip what I think and you tell me what it is you must get off your chest?"</p> +<p>"You just can't put one over on you can you? I think the art's crap. In execution anyway. But I think the idea of the couch is very significant. I think the fact that you chose to have patients on a couch, or divan, or sofa or whatever you want to call it was genius, possibly your only moment of genius. I mean you could have had then in bed, but that's too close to actual sleep you could easily lose them in their unconscious worlds. You could have had them sit in a chair, but that's too formal, too far removed from dreams. The couch is perfect, reclined, perhaps close to sleep, but not all the way there, still able to pull back from the brink so to speak. It's like that sign over there says: ‘In a prone position, the clear certainties of thought can be diverted from their course into a twilight state of drowsiness and further into the anesthetized state of sleep or into the depths of illegitimate sexuality'"</p> +<p>"And I've noticed that this thing, this couch, which was fairly arbitrary by the way, has become the symbol of choice..."</p> +<p>"Yeah if I needed to create one of those universal language airport ideograms for psychology the couch would get the idea across. In the west anyway."</p> +<p>"But why do you think the art is ‘crap'?"</p> +<p>"I've come to think painting peaked in the 16th century or so. These modern things just don't have any soul, their narcissistic, self-absorbed, lacking depth... Though some of the painters around your day were good, Egon Schiele, Hannah Höch, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, others. I sound like a grumpy old man don't I?"</p> +<p>"Well. Yes. But there are great painters in every age, great writers, great musicians, great everything, you just have to know where to look and how to look."</p> +<p>"I know. I didn't mean it. I got carried away with my tendency toward hyperbole. I do that a lot, but I never really mean it, I just like to string the words together... I try you know. I try to find the good stuff. But sometimes I feel like I'm always trying and rarely succeeding."</p> +<p>"Trying is all that matters"</p> +<p>"Just yesterday I was thinking of an old cover from a new York literary magazine... It was a drawing of a pigeon or a dove or some sort of bird, a bird with one wing and one arm. The caption read: trying trying trying."</p> +<p>"Mmmm. Yes. About like that."</p> +<p>"Yeah I thought so too, that's why it's stuck with me. Everything seems to stick with me. And yet sometimes I deny remembering things which I remember better and more clearly than the person telling me about them just so I can see what they remember. I don't know why I do that."</p> +<p>"You're avoiding something."</p> +<p>"Maybe. Maybe I just enjoy hearing things retold by other people. Maybe I don't like to think too much about the past, my history, the world's history, our history. It can get pretty ugly at times. There is a whole lot of violence and bloodshed and war and famine in the past, sometimes I think that this whole notion of trying is waste of time. I mean we've yet to succeed. Big business runs the world, people die, wars are fought so certain people can gain access to certain things. It seems so totally pointless and stupid and yet we keep doing it. The forces keep struggling and we keep twisting and turning some riding atop and some crushed beneath."</p> +<p>"Yes the world is a mess. But if we stop trying then there isn't even the hope of anything getting better."</p> +<p>"Isn't that a tad bit delusional though? I mean if it's always going to be a mess than what's the difference? Why is hope necessary?"</p> +<p>"Because without hope there is no love. And without love there is nothing, because whoever loves becomes humble; those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism."</p> +<p>"And it's our narcissism that has us in the situation we find ourselves?"</p> +<p>"Among other things yes. Naturally nothing is reducible to any one factor, but I would say, did say in fact, that most of our problems, whether personal or geopolitical or anywhere in between, stem from our narcissism."</p> +<p><amp-img alt="'Winter' by Giuseppe Arcimboldo" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennaharvest.jpg" width="175"></amp-img></p> +<p>"See you were a much better writer than scientist."</p> +<p>"Well I once wrote, ‘Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me'"</p> +<p>"Well just about anybody could say that."</p> +<p>"..."</p> +<p>"A lot of people I know say they feel lost."</p> +<p>"They should read more poetry."</p> +<p>"Sometimes I feel lost too. I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing. Other times I feel like I am in the place where I should be. Lately I've been feeling more confident, but I worry about my friends."</p> +<p>"Love and work... Work and love, that's all there is."</p> +<p>"..."</p> +<p>[Note that some of this faux dialogue is actual quotes and some are more summaries and some I just made up. None of it is in any way intended to represent the opinions in the writings, lectures and other works of Sigmund Freud. More or less if something sounds like it's too smart for me to have come up, that's an actual Freud quote.]</p> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/i-dont-sleep-i-dream.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/i-dont-sleep-i-dream.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fcf5963 --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/i-dont-sleep-i-dream.html @@ -0,0 +1,423 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>I Don’t Sleep I Dream - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="A mock interview with Sigmund Freud Vienna, composed in what was once the waiting room of Frued's office in Vienna, Austria. 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There are essentially only two rooms that bear any resemblance to what the place looked like in his day. In glass cases are a few knickknacks, figurines, actually it’s a rather impressive collection with pieces from the Sumerian, India, Polynesia and other exotic locales. Another room is full of photographs and explanatory notation in German and English.</p> +<p><break> +The rest of the apartment is given over to something between an exhibition room and an art gallery. But what everyone came here for then is absent now. No word on where the couch might have gone or why some duplicate hasn’t been made. Plenty of other sofas, divans and other reclining furniture are on display in one of the gallery rooms, but the original is nowhere to be found.</p> +<p><img alt="Waiting Room, Frued's office, Vienna Austria" class="postpicright" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennafreudoffice.jpg" width="212"/></p> +<p>The closest thing is up against the wall, behind a small writing desk in what was then the waiting room. There were no ropes saying you couldn’t so I did what everyone used to come here for, to lie down on the divan and stare at the patternless ceiling until the patterns emerge as it were.</p> +<p>I lay down. I stared at the ceiling.</p> +<p>“Tell me about it.”</p> +<p>“About what?”</p> +<p>“What did you come here for?”</p> +<p>“I’m not sure. I think I wanted to see it. To maybe have something to attach the abstractions too, maybe to know, rather than wonder — what did it look like? What sort of trees were on the street? What did the air taste like? How did the concrete and asphalt smell when it rained? What was the view from the window? How hot was the upstairs room where you worked? All the mundane details of life in places where I don’t live… And I know I can’t <em>know</em> these things in any real way without actually being there at the time. I know all I will find are half truths and suggestions, but the more I know the freer my imagination seems to become, the more it builds things out of the details, things which often bear no resemblance to reality but to me are more real.”</p> +<p><img alt="Window, Freud's Office, Vienna Austria" class="postpic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennafreudwindow.jpg" width="172"/></p> +<p>“Interesting.”</p> +<p>“Yeah it is. It totally contradicts an old quote from somebody named Suzuki that I used to like.”</p> +<p>“Which is?”</p> +<p>“‘For the beginner an infinite range of possibilities exist, for the expert few options remain.’ Or something along those lines. And I don’t by any means consider myself an expert. In fact the more I know and see the more I feel like a beginner. I don’t even know what an expert is.”</p> +<p>“Perhaps that’s the veiled significance of this Suzuki’s words, that we are all beginners, that there are no experts so we are free, as you say, with our imaginations. But remember that imagination is not all daydreams and pretty flowers; there are monsters and demons in us too. There seems to be in us all a struggle between light and dark…”</p> +<p>“Like the Robert Mitchum movie? Or Spike Lee’s version? A friend of mine claims that there are equal proportions of light and dark in the world, or good and evil or whatever metaphor you want to use, anyway her point is, I think, that these dualities are struggling for balance and that’s where we find ourselves — caught in that struggle. I think it’s actually an idea she borrowed from Jewish Scripture, and it’s a good metaphor so long as we consider the fact that which is which — good/bad etc — is wholly dependent on our judgments. That is, what you or I call dark or evil is actually neither, that is simple our interpretation of it. Not to be relativistic, which I don’t like, in fact I think relativism misses out on the subtle undercurrents of life in favor of simplistic rationalism to offer an easy to grok interpretation of life’s essential mysteries. But that said, there is some relativism in our interpretations of good and evil etc. Any given event, no matter how good it seems, is itself the result of all sorts of other events, some may have been good, some bad, but without them we wouldn’t be doing that “good” thing now. And so with the future. If I give you some money to pay a debt that may be a good thing, but down the road it’s possible that you will find yourself in a bad situation not just in spite of my good act, but perhaps because of it.”</p> +<p>“Mmmhmm. Tell me about your dreams…”</p> +<p>“No.”</p> +<p>“…”</p> +<p><img alt="painting" class="postpicright" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennamonster.jpg" width="150"/></p> +<p>“Okay. Just yesterday I dreamed a friend of mine was in trouble. So today I called her. Turns out she’s not in trouble. She’s doing just fine. So what the hell does that mean?”</p> +<p>“Perhaps you feel a certain helplessness at not being able to know whether your friend is in trouble or not. Your subconscious feels helpless and seeks to create a situation in which it can help someone else so that it alleviates the feelings of helplessness.”</p> +<p>“…”</p> +<p>“The imagination can ruin and cripple as much as it can heal and give hope.”</p> +<p>“Well don’t you sort of have a vested interest in promoting that idea since your life’s work hinges on it being true, on the notion that there is something wrong with me that I can not directly get to, but with assistance it can be drawn out…”</p> +<p>“My vested interest was in helping people for whom there was no help at the time.”</p> +<p>“Okay. Fair enough. Sorry. There is just so much baggage around you. I want to believe, I really do.”</p> +<p>“It’s possible I was wrong, I did make some mistakes.”</p> +<p>“Yeah you did. Turns out cocaine <em>is</em> addictive.”</p> +<p>“I made bigger ones than that.”</p> +<p>“I know, but I saw that quote over there on the wall by that picture of Dora.”</p> +<p>“Ah yes. Dora.” </p> +<p>“The one that got away huh? So, why was all of your early work focused on women?”</p> +<p>“…”</p> +<p>“Okay. Well…. Do you like what they’ve done with the place?”</p> +<p>“Well. It was just a place you know. This room we are sitting in was originally the waiting room, the consultations were in there. But it is just a place, one room is as good as another.”</p> +<p>“Yeah. But weren’t you the one who always directed attention toward trivialities like “methodological principle,” which in some ways is influenced by the room, the mood it creates. I mean if you had disco lighting and Al Green playing when patients came over things would’ve been different no?”</p> +<p>“Yes I did say that. And methodology, set and setting as that American doctor put it, are important. But I also said sometimes a cigar…”</p> +<p>“Yeah and we all wish you hadn’t. That undercuts almost everything else you said because it highlights the subjective — dare I say arbitrary? — interpretations in your theories. I mean what if Newton has said ‘well gravity exists, but it doesn’t always exist, it certain doesn’t exist for <em>me</em>? That’s a bit elitist don’t you think? In the end we’d have to conclude that either gravity doesn’t exist or that a cigar is never just a cigar, neither of which are particularly helpful.”</p> +<p>“You seem hostile toward me.”</p> +<p>“I’m not hostile, I’m just saying that psychology and this therapy bit is, in the end, no different than the kind of insight you can get from a book or a night out with friends or just sitting on the toilet contemplating life. But you invested the whole process with a pseudo-scientific framework that makes some people think they can’t find their own answers.”</p> +<p>“People can’t find their own answers. And even those that can find some can’t find others. We cannot see our own subconscious, we can only see the effects of it, the manifestations of it.”</p> +<p>“Look I’m not saying I have it all sussed out. Far from it. But what you’re talking about seems to me like a rewritten metaphor for god. And I think your metaphors were wrong about some key stuff. Like Oedipus for example. First off mythology is probably not a good base to draw from if your goal is to make sweeping ‘scientific’ generalizations about human development. And secondly the stages Oedipus passes through, well you skipped a fairly key one, he was abandoned by his parents as a baby, which is tantamount to child abuse and hardly seems archetypical to the way most children are raised. I think you were a brilliant literary critic centuries ahead of his time, but I think your science was, well, to be blunt, nonexistent. Which would have been fine except…”</p> +<p>“Hmmm. Yes. Perhaps. But I could argue that birth itself is abandonment”</p> +<p>“Please don’t.”</p> +<p>“I wasn’t going to, I was just saying I <em>could</em>.”</p> +<p>“And yet that Oedipal theory, while professional psychologists may not pay much attention to it, holds a powerful sway over how we perceive ourselves today. And it carries that weight because it passed and continues to pass as science. See science is our god now so anything that gets you the title doctor is perceived as having some authority that overrides even common sense.”</p> +<p>“Well, in my defense, it isn’t really all that different than the story of the fall in the Jewish and Christian mythologies which also influences how you see yourself. And I did have a degree in medicine.”</p> +<p>“I know you did. I’m not debating your training or skills I’m saying that psychology is not was not and never will be a science.”</p> +<p>“…”</p> +<p>“I’m sorry. It just isn’t.”</p> +<p>“Have you read The Interpre…”<img alt="'Fire' by Giuseppe Arcimboldo" class="postpic" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennawar.jpg" width="190"/></p> +<p>“Yes. But to be honest I don’t see why our dreams need to be interpreted. Isn’t it possible that they have no meaning at all? That we really <em>really</em> want them to have meaning because this is what we do, we find connections, metaphors to link things, and we can find threads in our dreams that seem to connect them to this world, but in the end what if they are just dreams? Something outside meaning and interpretation because the world which they inhabit is guided by rules and schema that bear no resemblance to the ones that guide this world? What if there is no common language by which we can make interpretations, metaphors or any meaning at all out of our dreams?</p> +<p>“…”</p> +<p>“I’ll tell you what does interest me though — the differences in the way we conduct ourselves in our dream lives and real lives and those people who seem to break down the differences.”</p> +<p>“Such as?”</p> +<p>“Well on the positive side you have someone like Antonio Gaudí or Frank Stanford. But of course there’s the negative side as well, Jeffrey Dahmer, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, etc.”</p> +<p>“It’s interesting that you choose artists and writers as representative of the positive and serial killers, despots and murderers as the negative… perhaps neither is really accurate. It’s possible you know that Gaudí was inspired by imagination and Pol Pot by greed and lust for power and that neither of them is representative of someone bringing dreams to life.”</p> +<p>“Yes but don’t dreams underlie imagination and greed and lust and everything else? We act out our dreams in realities. In fact I would say nearly everything we do is an act of externalizing our dreams — the hopes, fears and strangeness that they contain. We bring them forth into the world of struggling forces and they are bandied and battered about by circumstances which are often beyond our control.”</p> +<p>“Didn’t you just say the opposite?”</p> +<p>“No I said it was possible that our dreams have no meaning in this world that we can ever understand, but that doesn’t mean we don’t spend our lives externalizing them and <em>trying</em> to understand them.</p> +<p>“Exactly. Sometimes you get art, other times murder, such is the nature of dreams and the world in which we find ourselves.”</p> +<p>“…”</p> +<p>“…”</p> +<p>“What do you think of these art exhibits in the other room…?”</p> +<p>“That’s the sort of rhetorical question you pose so you can skip over whatever my answer may be and delve into what you really wanted to talk about — what <em>you</em> think of the art in the other room. Why don’t we skip what I think and you tell me what it is you must get off your chest?”</p> +<p>“You just can’t put one over on you can you? I think the art’s crap. In execution anyway. But I think the idea of the couch is very significant. I think the fact that you chose to have patients on a couch, or divan, or sofa or whatever you want to call it was genius, possibly your only moment of genius. I mean you could have had then in bed, but that’s too close to actual sleep you could easily lose them in their unconscious worlds. You could have had them sit in a chair, but that’s too formal, too far removed from dreams. The couch is perfect, reclined, perhaps close to sleep, but not all the way there, still able to pull back from the brink so to speak. It’s like that sign over there says: ‘In a prone position, the clear certainties of thought can be diverted from their course into a twilight state of drowsiness and further into the anesthetized state of sleep or into the depths of illegitimate sexuality’”</p> +<p>“And I’ve noticed that this thing, this couch, which was fairly arbitrary by the way, has become the symbol of choice…”</p> +<p>“Yeah if I needed to create one of those universal language airport ideograms for psychology the couch would get the idea across. In the west anyway.”</p> +<p>“But why do you think the art is ‘crap’?”</p> +<p>“I’ve come to think painting peaked in the 16th century or so. These modern things just don’t have any soul, their narcissistic, self-absorbed, lacking depth… Though some of the painters around your day were good, Egon Schiele, Hannah Höch, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, others. I sound like a grumpy old man don’t I?”</p> +<p>“Well. Yes. But there are great painters in every age, great writers, great musicians, great everything, you just have to know where to look and how to look.”</p> +<p>“I know. I didn’t mean it. I got carried away with my tendency toward hyperbole. I do that a lot, but I never really mean it, I just like to string the words together… I try you know. I try to find the good stuff. But sometimes I feel like I’m always trying and rarely succeeding.”</p> +<p>“Trying is all that matters”</p> +<p>“Just yesterday I was thinking of an old cover from a new York literary magazine… It was a drawing of a pigeon or a dove or some sort of bird, a bird with one wing and one arm. The caption read: trying trying trying.”</p> +<p>“Mmmm. Yes. About like that.”</p> +<p>“Yeah I thought so too, that’s why it’s stuck with me. Everything seems to stick with me. And yet sometimes I deny remembering things which I remember better and more clearly than the person telling me about them just so I can see what they remember. I don’t know why I do that.”</p> +<p>“You’re avoiding something.”</p> +<p>“Maybe. Maybe I just enjoy hearing things retold by other people. Maybe I don’t like to think too much about the past, my history, the world’s history, our history. It can get pretty ugly at times. There is a whole lot of violence and bloodshed and war and famine in the past, sometimes I think that this whole notion of trying is waste of time. I mean we’ve yet to succeed. Big business runs the world, people die, wars are fought so certain people can gain access to certain things. It seems so totally pointless and stupid and yet we keep doing it. The forces keep struggling and we keep twisting and turning some riding atop and some crushed beneath.”</p> +<p>“Yes the world is a mess. But if we stop trying then there isn’t even the hope of anything getting better.”</p> +<p>“Isn’t that a tad bit delusional though? I mean if it’s always going to be a mess than what’s the difference? Why is hope necessary?”</p> +<p>“Because without hope there is no love. And without love there is nothing, because whoever loves becomes humble; those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.”</p> +<p>“And it’s our narcissism that has us in the situation we find ourselves?”</p> +<p>“Among other things yes. Naturally nothing is reducible to any one factor, but I would say, did say in fact, that most of our problems, whether personal or geopolitical or anywhere in between, stem from our narcissism.”</p> +<p><img alt="'Winter' by Giuseppe Arcimboldo" class="postpic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennaharvest.jpg" width="175"/></p> +<p>“See you were a much better writer than scientist.”</p> +<p>“Well I once wrote, ‘Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me’”</p> +<p>“Well just about anybody could say that.”</p> +<p>“…”</p> +<p>“A lot of people I know say they feel lost.”</p> +<p>“They should read more poetry.”</p> +<p>“Sometimes I feel lost too. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing. Other times I feel like I am in the place where I should be. Lately I’ve been feeling more confident, but I worry about my friends.”</p> +<p>“Love and work… Work and love, that’s all there is.”</p> +<p>“…”</p> +<p>[Note that some of this faux dialogue is actual quotes and some are more summaries and some I just made up. None of it is in any way intended to represent the opinions in the writings, lectures and other works of Sigmund Freud. More or less if something sounds like it’s too smart for me to have come up, that’s an actual Freud quote.]</p> + </div> + + </article> + + + <div class="nav-wrapper"> + <nav id="page-navigation" class="page-border-top"> + <ul> + <li id="prev"><span class="bl">Previous:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/unreflected" rel="prev" title=" Unreflected">Unreflected</a> + </li> + <li id="next"><span class="bl">Next:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/06/cadenza" rel="next" title=" Cadenza">Cadenza</a> + </li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + + + + + + +<div class="comment--form--wrapper "> + +<div class="comment--form--header"> + <p class="hed">Thoughts?</p> + <p class="subhed">Please leave a reply:</p> +</div> +<form action="/comments/post/" method="post" class="comment--form"> + +<input type="hidden" name="rder" value="" /> + + + <input type="hidden" name="content_type" value="jrnl.entry" id="id_content_type"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="object_pk" value="65" id="id_object_pk"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="timestamp" value="1596833474" id="id_timestamp"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="security_hash" value="65f2a07551908782858d0ad1f89aba0d70da5ca5" id="id_security_hash"> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_name">Name:</label> + <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="50" required id="id_name"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_email">Email address:</label> + <input type="email" name="email" required id="id_email"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_url">URL:</label> + <input type="url" name="url" id="id_url"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> + <div class="textarea-rounded"><textarea name="comment" cols="40" rows="10" maxlength="3000" required id="id_comment"> +</textarea></div> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset style="display:none;"> + <label for="id_honeypot">If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam:</label> + <input type="text" name="honeypot" id="id_honeypot"> + </fieldset> + + + <div class="submit"> + <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post btn" value="Post" /> + <input type="submit" name="preview" class="submit-preview btn" value="Preview" /> + </div> +</form> +<p style="font-size: 95%;"><strong>All comments are moderated</strong>, so you won’t see it right away. And please remember Kurt Vonnegut's rule: “god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” You can use Markdown or HTML to format your comments. The allowed tags are <code><b>, <i>, <em>, <strong>, <a></code>. 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There are essentially only two rooms that bear any resemblance to what the place looked like in his day. In glass cases are a few knickknacks, figurines, actually it's a rather impressive collection with pieces from the Sumerian, India, Polynesia and other exotic locales. Another room is full of photographs and explanatory notation in German and English.
+
+<break>
+The rest of the apartment is given over to something between an exhibition room and an art gallery. But what everyone came here for then is absent now. No word on where the couch might have gone or why some duplicate hasn't been made. Plenty of other sofas, divans and other reclining furniture are on display in one of the gallery rooms, but the original is nowhere to be found.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/viennafreudoffice.jpg" width="212" height="230" class="postpicright" alt="Waiting Room, Frued's office, Vienna Austria" />
+
+The closest thing is up against the wall, behind a small writing desk in what was then the waiting room. There were no ropes saying you couldn't so I did what everyone used to come here for, to lie down on the divan and stare at the patternless ceiling until the patterns emerge as it were.
+
+I lay down. I stared at the ceiling.
+
+"Tell me about it."
+
+"About what?"
+
+"What did you come here for?"
+
+"I'm not sure. I think I wanted to see it. To maybe have something to attach the abstractions too, maybe to know, rather than wonder — what did it look like? What sort of trees were on the street? What did the air taste like? How did the concrete and asphalt smell when it rained? What was the view from the window? How hot was the upstairs room where you worked? All the mundane details of life in places where I don't live... And I know I can't <em>know</em> these things in any real way without actually being there at the time. I know all I will find are half truths and suggestions, but the more I know the freer my imagination seems to become, the more it builds things out of the details, things which often bear no resemblance to reality but to me are more real."
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/viennafreudwindow.jpg" width="172" height="230" class="postpic" alt="Window, Freud's Office, Vienna Austria" />
+
+"Interesting."
+
+"Yeah it is. It totally contradicts an old quote from somebody named Suzuki that I used to like."
+
+"Which is?"
+
+"‘For the beginner an infinite range of possibilities exist, for the expert few options remain.' Or something along those lines. And I don't by any means consider myself an expert. In fact the more I know and see the more I feel like a beginner. I don't even know what an expert is."
+
+"Perhaps that's the veiled significance of this Suzuki's words, that we are all beginners, that there are no experts so we are free, as you say, with our imaginations. But remember that imagination is not all daydreams and pretty flowers; there are monsters and demons in us too. There seems to be in us all a struggle between light and dark..."
+
+"Like the Robert Mitchum movie? Or Spike Lee's version? A friend of mine claims that there are equal proportions of light and dark in the world, or good and evil or whatever metaphor you want to use, anyway her point is, I think, that these dualities are struggling for balance and that's where we find ourselves -- caught in that struggle. I think it's actually an idea she borrowed from Jewish Scripture, and it's a good metaphor so long as we consider the fact that which is which -- good/bad etc -- is wholly dependent on our judgments. That is, what you or I call dark or evil is actually neither, that is simple our interpretation of it. Not to be relativistic, which I don't like, in fact I think relativism misses out on the subtle undercurrents of life in favor of simplistic rationalism to offer an easy to grok interpretation of life's essential mysteries. But that said, there is some relativism in our interpretations of good and evil etc. Any given event, no matter how good it seems, is itself the result of all sorts of other events, some may have been good, some bad, but without them we wouldn't be doing that "good" thing now. And so with the future. If I give you some money to pay a debt that may be a good thing, but down the road it's possible that you will find yourself in a bad situation not just in spite of my good act, but perhaps because of it."
+
+"Mmmhmm. Tell me about your dreams..."
+
+"No."
+
+"..."
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/viennamonster.jpg" width="150" height="230" class="postpicright" alt="painting" />
+
+"Okay. Just yesterday I dreamed a friend of mine was in trouble. So today I called her. Turns out she's not in trouble. She's doing just fine. So what the hell does that mean?"
+
+"Perhaps you feel a certain helplessness at not being able to know whether your friend is in trouble or not. Your subconscious feels helpless and seeks to create a situation in which it can help someone else so that it alleviates the feelings of helplessness."
+
+"..."
+
+"The imagination can ruin and cripple as much as it can heal and give hope."
+
+"Well don't you sort of have a vested interest in promoting that idea since your life's work hinges on it being true, on the notion that there is something wrong with me that I can not directly get to, but with assistance it can be drawn out..."
+
+"My vested interest was in helping people for whom there was no help at the time."
+
+"Okay. Fair enough. Sorry. There is just so much baggage around you. I want to believe, I really do."
+
+"It's possible I was wrong, I did make some mistakes."
+
+"Yeah you did. Turns out cocaine <em>is</em> addictive."
+
+"I made bigger ones than that."
+
+"I know, but I saw that quote over there on the wall by that picture of Dora."
+
+"Ah yes. Dora."
+
+"The one that got away huh? So, why was all of your early work focused on women?"
+
+"..."
+
+"Okay. Well.... Do you like what they've done with the place?"
+
+"Well. It was just a place you know. This room we are sitting in was originally the waiting room, the consultations were in there. But it is just a place, one room is as good as another."
+
+"Yeah. But weren't you the one who always directed attention toward trivialities like "methodological principle," which in some ways is influenced by the room, the mood it creates. I mean if you had disco lighting and Al Green playing when patients came over things would've been different no?"
+
+"Yes I did say that. And methodology, set and setting as that American doctor put it, are important. But I also said sometimes a cigar..."
+
+"Yeah and we all wish you hadn't. That undercuts almost everything else you said because it highlights the subjective — dare I say arbitrary? — interpretations in your theories. I mean what if Newton has said ‘well gravity exists, but it doesn't always exist, it certain doesn't exist for <em>me</em>? That's a bit elitist don't you think? In the end we'd have to conclude that either gravity doesn't exist or that a cigar is never just a cigar, neither of which are particularly helpful."
+
+"You seem hostile toward me."
+
+"I'm not hostile, I'm just saying that psychology and this therapy bit is, in the end, no different than the kind of insight you can get from a book or a night out with friends or just sitting on the toilet contemplating life. But you invested the whole process with a pseudo-scientific framework that makes some people think they can't find their own answers."
+
+"People can't find their own answers. And even those that can find some can't find others. We cannot see our own subconscious, we can only see the effects of it, the manifestations of it."
+
+"Look I'm not saying I have it all sussed out. Far from it. But what you're talking about seems to me like a rewritten metaphor for god. And I think your metaphors were wrong about some key stuff. Like Oedipus for example. First off mythology is probably not a good base to draw from if your goal is to make sweeping ‘scientific' generalizations about human development. And secondly the stages Oedipus passes through, well you skipped a fairly key one, he was abandoned by his parents as a baby, which is tantamount to child abuse and hardly seems archetypical to the way most children are raised. I think you were a brilliant literary critic centuries ahead of his time, but I think your science was, well, to be blunt, nonexistent. Which would have been fine except..."
+
+"Hmmm. Yes. Perhaps. But I could argue that birth itself is abandonment"
+
+"Please don't."
+
+"I wasn't going to, I was just saying I <em>could</em>."
+
+"And yet that Oedipal theory, while professional psychologists may not pay much attention to it, holds a powerful sway over how we perceive ourselves today. And it carries that weight because it passed and continues to pass as science. See science is our god now so anything that gets you the title doctor is perceived as having some authority that overrides even common sense."
+
+"Well, in my defense, it isn't really all that different than the story of the fall in the Jewish and Christian mythologies which also influences how you see yourself. And I did have a degree in medicine."
+
+"I know you did. I'm not debating your training or skills I'm saying that psychology is not was not and never will be a science."
+
+"..."
+
+"I'm sorry. It just isn't."
+
+"Have you read The Interpre..."<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/viennawar.jpg" width="190" height="240" class="postpic" alt="'Fire' by Giuseppe Arcimboldo" />
+
+"Yes. But to be honest I don't see why our dreams need to be interpreted. Isn't it possible that they have no meaning at all? That we really <em>really</em> want them to have meaning because this is what we do, we find connections, metaphors to link things, and we can find threads in our dreams that seem to connect them to this world, but in the end what if they are just dreams? Something outside meaning and interpretation because the world which they inhabit is guided by rules and schema that bear no resemblance to the ones that guide this world? What if there is no common language by which we can make interpretations, metaphors or any meaning at all out of our dreams?
+
+"..."
+
+"I'll tell you what does interest me though — the differences in the way we conduct ourselves in our dream lives and real lives and those people who seem to break down the differences."
+
+"Such as?"
+
+"Well on the positive side you have someone like Antonio Gaudí or Frank Stanford. But of course there's the negative side as well, Jeffrey Dahmer, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, etc."
+
+"It's interesting that you choose artists and writers as representative of the positive and serial killers, despots and murderers as the negative... perhaps neither is really accurate. It's possible you know that Gaudí was inspired by imagination and Pol Pot by greed and lust for power and that neither of them is representative of someone bringing dreams to life."
+
+"Yes but don't dreams underlie imagination and greed and lust and everything else? We act out our dreams in realities. In fact I would say nearly everything we do is an act of externalizing our dreams — the hopes, fears and strangeness that they contain. We bring them forth into the world of struggling forces and they are bandied and battered about by circumstances which are often beyond our control."
+
+"Didn't you just say the opposite?"
+
+"No I said it was possible that our dreams have no meaning in this world that we can ever understand, but that doesn't mean we don't spend our lives externalizing them and <em>trying</em> to understand them.
+
+"Exactly. Sometimes you get art, other times murder, such is the nature of dreams and the world in which we find ourselves."
+
+"..."
+
+"..."
+
+"What do you think of these art exhibits in the other room...?"
+
+"That's the sort of rhetorical question you pose so you can skip over whatever my answer may be and delve into what you really wanted to talk about — what <em>you</em> think of the art in the other room. Why don't we skip what I think and you tell me what it is you must get off your chest?"
+
+"You just can't put one over on you can you? I think the art's crap. In execution anyway. But I think the idea of the couch is very significant. I think the fact that you chose to have patients on a couch, or divan, or sofa or whatever you want to call it was genius, possibly your only moment of genius. I mean you could have had then in bed, but that's too close to actual sleep you could easily lose them in their unconscious worlds. You could have had them sit in a chair, but that's too formal, too far removed from dreams. The couch is perfect, reclined, perhaps close to sleep, but not all the way there, still able to pull back from the brink so to speak. It's like that sign over there says: ‘In a prone position, the clear certainties of thought can be diverted from their course into a twilight state of drowsiness and further into the anesthetized state of sleep or into the depths of illegitimate sexuality'"
+
+"And I've noticed that this thing, this couch, which was fairly arbitrary by the way, has become the symbol of choice..."
+
+"Yeah if I needed to create one of those universal language airport ideograms for psychology the couch would get the idea across. In the west anyway."
+
+"But why do you think the art is ‘crap'?"
+
+"I've come to think painting peaked in the 16th century or so. These modern things just don't have any soul, their narcissistic, self-absorbed, lacking depth... Though some of the painters around your day were good, Egon Schiele, Hannah Höch, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, others. I sound like a grumpy old man don't I?"
+
+"Well. Yes. But there are great painters in every age, great writers, great musicians, great everything, you just have to know where to look and how to look."
+
+"I know. I didn't mean it. I got carried away with my tendency toward hyperbole. I do that a lot, but I never really mean it, I just like to string the words together... I try you know. I try to find the good stuff. But sometimes I feel like I'm always trying and rarely succeeding."
+
+"Trying is all that matters"
+
+"Just yesterday I was thinking of an old cover from a new York literary magazine... It was a drawing of a pigeon or a dove or some sort of bird, a bird with one wing and one arm. The caption read: trying trying trying."
+
+"Mmmm. Yes. About like that."
+
+"Yeah I thought so too, that's why it's stuck with me. Everything seems to stick with me. And yet sometimes I deny remembering things which I remember better and more clearly than the person telling me about them just so I can see what they remember. I don't know why I do that."
+
+"You're avoiding something."
+
+"Maybe. Maybe I just enjoy hearing things retold by other people. Maybe I don't like to think too much about the past, my history, the world's history, our history. It can get pretty ugly at times. There is a whole lot of violence and bloodshed and war and famine in the past, sometimes I think that this whole notion of trying is waste of time. I mean we've yet to succeed. Big business runs the world, people die, wars are fought so certain people can gain access to certain things. It seems so totally pointless and stupid and yet we keep doing it. The forces keep struggling and we keep twisting and turning some riding atop and some crushed beneath."
+
+"Yes the world is a mess. But if we stop trying then there isn't even the hope of anything getting better."
+
+"Isn't that a tad bit delusional though? I mean if it's always going to be a mess than what's the difference? Why is hope necessary?"
+
+"Because without hope there is no love. And without love there is nothing, because whoever loves becomes humble; those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism."
+
+"And it's our narcissism that has us in the situation we find ourselves?"
+
+"Among other things yes. Naturally nothing is reducible to any one factor, but I would say, did say in fact, that most of our problems, whether personal or geopolitical or anywhere in between, stem from our narcissism."
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/viennaharvest.jpg" width="175" height="230" class="postpic" alt="'Winter' by Giuseppe Arcimboldo" />
+
+"See you were a much better writer than scientist."
+
+"Well I once wrote, ‘Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me'"
+
+"Well just about anybody could say that."
+
+"..."
+
+"A lot of people I know say they feel lost."
+
+"They should read more poetry."
+
+"Sometimes I feel lost too. I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing. Other times I feel like I am in the place where I should be. Lately I've been feeling more confident, but I worry about my friends."
+
+"Love and work... Work and love, that's all there is."
+
+"..."
+
+[Note that some of this faux dialogue is actual quotes and some are more summaries and some I just made up. None of it is in any way intended to represent the opinions in the writings, lectures and other works of Sigmund Freud. More or less if something sounds like it's too smart for me to have come up, that's an actual Freud quote.] diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/index.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1f056e1 --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,134 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>Luxagraf - Topografical Writings: Archive</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="Luxagraf: recording journeys around the world and just next door."> + <meta name="author" content="Scott Gilbertson"> + <!--[if IE]> + <script src="/js/html5css3ie.min.js"></script> + <![endif]--> + <link rel="alternate" + type="application/rss+xml" + title="Luxagraf RSS feed" + href="https://luxagraf.net/rss/"> + <link rel="stylesheet" + 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datetime="2006-05-27T23:55:46-04:00">May 27, 2006</time> + </li> + <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds" title="Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds">Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds</a> + <time datetime="2006-05-26T14:50:24-04:00">May 26, 2006</time> + </li> + <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/05/inside-and-out" title="Inside and Out">Inside and Out</a> + <time datetime="2006-05-25T17:45:12-04:00">May 25, 2006</time> + </li> + <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two" title="The King of Carrot Flowers Part Two">The King of Carrot Flowers Part Two</a> + <time datetime="2006-05-22T20:44:33-04:00">May 22, 2006</time> + </li> + <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/05/ghost" title="Ghost">Ghost</a> + <time datetime="2006-05-19T19:37:07-04:00">May 19, 2006</time> + </li> + <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/05/feel-good-lost" title="Feel Good Lost">Feel Good Lost</a> + <time datetime="2006-05-18T00:38:37-04:00">May 18, 2006</time> + </li> + <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/05/blue-milk" title="Blue Milk">Blue Milk</a> + <time datetime="2006-05-16T00:32:27-04:00">May 16, 2006</time> + </li> + <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/05/refracted-light-and-grace" title="Refracted Light and Grace">Refracted Light and Grace</a> + <time datetime="2006-05-11T00:26:59-04:00">May 11, 2006</time> + </li> + <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/05/london-calling" title="London Calling">London Calling</a> + <time datetime="2006-05-10T00:16:42-04:00">May 10, 2006</time> + </li> + <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2006/05/closing-time" title="Closing Time">Closing Time</a> + <time datetime="2006-05-01T00:14:23-04:00">May 01, 2006</time> + </li> + </ul> + + + + <footer role="contentinfo"> + <nav class="bl"> + <ul> + <li><a href="/blogroll" title="Sites that inspire us">Blogroll</a></li> + <li><a href="/jrnl/feed.xml" title="RSS feed">Subscribe</a></li> + 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Like any European city worth its salt, it has a dramatic castle on a hill and all the trappings of the once glorious feudal age, but with only one day to spend, a stopover on the way to Prague, I decided, rather than try to run around seeing a bunch of stuff in a hurry, to simply pick a place and spend the day there. </p> +<p>As it happened, Cesky Krumlov was home to the magnificent Egon Schiele museum, just the sort of place I could while away an afternoon relaxing and wandering aimlessly through an art gallery, for it was indeed more of gallery than a museum. <amp-img alt="Castle Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" height="170" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovcastle.jpg" width="230"></amp-img>Schiele's mother was born in Cesky Krumlov and the artist was drawn here by some compulsion of scenery and setting several times during his life, painting the narrow cobblestone streets and wonderful mixture of Gothic and art nouveau architecture (which what was actually new in his day). One of the most beautiful things about European towns is the rich array of vibrant color schemes you see on even the most ordinary of buildings. The attention to detail that makes the difference between a building and work of art was everywhere in Cesky Krumlov, from the delicate pink and red complements of a fine dovetailed corner, to the white plaster and oak beams of the Egon Schiele museum, which, despite geometric differences, looked not unlike the Globe Theatre in London.</p> +<p><amp-img alt="Egon Schiele Sketch, Egon Schiele Museum, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" height="159" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovschiele1.jpg" width="240"></amp-img>The first time Schiele came to Cesky Krumlov he lived here for several years. It's entirely possible he would have lived here forever were it not that the otherwise conservative town more or less ran him out for what the history books loosely refer to has his “lifestyle.” I don't propose to know exactly what Schiele's lifestyle entailed, but it probably didn't help that his primary work at the time was a series of oils and sketches of nude pubescent girls. Europe, for all its supposed open-mindedness on art, has had its moments of prudishness. Walking the streets just adjacent the town square it wasn't hard to image Schiele being out of place here and from what I know of his life, he probably made little attempt to hide anything, for he seemed to live as he painted, openly, not provoking, but perhaps confused and somewhat dismayed that not everyone found the same joys in life that he had discovered. +<break> +I spent most of the afternoon wandering through the various rooms and the oversized attic of the building which made the most fascinating museums I've ever been in. Heavy, low-hanging oak beams with cracked white plaster ceiling between them and raw unvarnished floorboards that creaked and groaned with every footstep, as if reminding you constantly of your own presence, some subliminal mnemonic of temporal space, made the museum unlike any other I have been too here in Europe or anywhere else.</break></p> +<p><amp-img alt="Attic, Egon Schiele Museum, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" height="188" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovmuseum1.jpg" width="250"></amp-img>I've never been one to pay to much attentions to the details of curation, everything from the work selected to the way it's lit and hung, but for the first time I realized how important all those tiny little decisions are to the experience we the viewers come away with and the curation at the Egon Schiele museum was nothing short of genius (for an example of terrible curation stop by the pompous and ill-conceived J. Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles).</p> +<p>In addition to the permanent Schiele collection, the museum has several exhibitions as well which during the time of my visit were sketches and paintings by Alberto Giacometti and Eva Prokopcova. Giacometti's work was a mixed bag, some of his paintings weren't worth the cost of the oils he bought to make them, but one remarkable series of sketches redeemed him. A “graphic cycle” as the museum called it, entitled <strong>Paris Without End</strong>, featured the charcoal sketches Giacometti made toward the end of his life (most of which he spent in Paris). Displayed as the facing pages of a large sketchbook, the works were intended to become lithographs but that never happened and apparently the whole sequence had never been displayed together in its original form. Giacometti's <strong>Paris Without End</strong> formed a kind of walking tour of the city in sketch form, marvelously detailed and yet extraordinarily minimalist as well. I've developed a fascination with negative space and Giacometti was a marvelous study in what can be created by a few simple lines organizing an otherwise blank page to reveal a small scene of a Parisian side street, an awning in three strokes of pen, a lamppost in the brief blur of charcoal. Walking around the display, which was laid out side by side around a massive white walled room, I had the feeling of having accompanied Giacometti on a walk around Paris during which he might have paused to note something, trace out an outline, remark on a scene. As one continuous experience, that is, all the sketches taken as a whole, the sketches felt like an intensely personal look into another person's soul, to see for a moment how they view the world. Though I knew nothing of him when I arrived at the museum, I couldn't shake the feeling on leaving that we had known each other well and can see myself at some point strolling down an alley in Montparnesse and thinking to myself, oh yes, this is where Alberto stopped to sketch the girl stepping off the train, where he huddled under the cafe awning in the rain to trace out the splash of auto tires on uneven cobblestones. But in spite of the intimate nature of the works, or perhaps because of it, the sketches are not off putting or insular, but have an openness rather like a fun filled confession to which all were invited.</p> +<p>The other artist on display was a local Czech artist named Eva Prokopcova whose abstract sketches filled the one odd and out of place room in the museum, on the ground floor, a strangely modern industrial feeling room with bare walls and floor to ceiling windows which unfortunately created a good bit of glare. Upstairs was another room of her oil paintings <amp-img alt="Eva Prokopcova Ink Drawing, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovprokopcova1.jpg" width="165"></amp-img>which displayed chronologically around the room and gave a fascinating glimpse into the progression of the artist, both what changed and what remains the same. On first glance it was easy to see that Prokopcova had been moving away from realistic forms for some time and by the time I reached the far side of the room the canvases bore a stamp of abstraction and fascination with form that owed no small debt to Jackson Pollock, if not in style at least in underlying assumptions and conceptualization of those assumptions. And yet her work is nothing like Pollack's, where he swirled into increasingly muddy tones she seemed to be moving toward brighter and brighter colors and more contrasting tones, colors that exploded to reveal forms you might say.</p> +<p>The silence of the massive attic hall began to feel slightly oppressive to me after a while and so I wandered through low arched doorway to a smaller room which had one final, separate collection of works by Prokopova, a number of small eight by ten charcoals mounted one after the other, frame touching frame, and encircling the entire room at roughly chest height. Many of these had the most warmth and joy of anything in the museum, Schiele included, and I spent considerable time, circling the room twice to study the exquisite, chaotic stabs and blotches of ink that looked somehow contented in the afternoon light which streamed in through the attic window behind me. It was not unlike the inside of a ring I thought at one point. I sat down in a solitary chair in the middle of the room and tried to imagine myself sitting in the middle of a ring, as if the room were a transparent finger and I inside it. I spent some time considering whether this observation was purely my imagination or perhaps an intension of the artist to transport us, like Sun Ra perhaps, to some ringed planet where the senses spin and mingle more freely.</p> +<p>I sat for a while in an oversized armchair alone in the center of the small attic room watching the single beam of sunlight slowly move across the floorboards while I scribbled a few notes and listened to some music on my headphones. <amp-img alt="Egon Schiele Museum, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovmuseum2.jpg" width="240"></amp-img>I had recently become obsessed with the ambient work of Nobukazu Takemura, or in the convention of Japanese names, Takemura Nobukazu, which somehow seemed to perfectly fit the room, the solitary finger of light dragging across the floor to the quiet chant of children's voices mingled with warbles and bleats of strings and electronic instruments, piano lines that faded to trumpet blasts, the hollow whisper of air over half full bottles, the chime of bells, the tinkling of a jack-in-the-box, and so many sounds which I cannot conjure sources for, sounds which come from a space somewhere in the imagination, as if Takemura had reached behind the curtain of life, some back door to Saturn's outer rings, and retrieved a few moments of musical clarity which he played with until arriving at the xylophonic children's symphony that I could hear in my headphones. Eventually I found I had stopped writing altogether and was simply staring into space thinking about what it would feel like to touch sound. Takemura's compositions seem to wrap themselves around you like blanket on a wintry morning or the sun at the beach, they, not unlike I might add, many of Schiele's paintings, inhabit a space that once entered reminds you immediately why you're happy to be alive, why just being is sometimes enough, no traveling, no movement and very little thought of anything other than the scene laid out before you and perhaps a lingering desire to touch the sound, the wrap your own arms around some sonic wave as it breaks over you. Perhaps you can feel the structure of time disintegrating pleasantly about you, as if a giant hand were pulling apart a pomegranate to reveal a forest of stars and the quiet clouds of light between then, whole nebulae that at once envelope and carry you out over the shadowy afternoon light drenching the forested hills, the trees warbling with birdcalls, and then you slowly spiral down again. <amp-img alt="Egon Schiele Painting, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" height="174" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovschiele2.jpg" width="222"></amp-img>I thought of Kindinsky and his synesthesia, the man whose paintbrush sang to him, who painted in cello blue and trumpet reds. I've never heard a color, though I do think colors smell differently. The room with red walls has a scent far removed from the cool afternoon creams and peaches of the dining room in the house where I once lived. I was too old for the house as it turned out, but I remember the sunlight reflection off the stainless steel kitchen sink sang to me some mornings. </p> +<p>So far as I know Schiele did not hear color either and perhaps that's why he had to make it sing on the canvas, a cool dark sound you can almost hear drifting in the window from Cesky Krumlov's streets below.</p> +<p>It was the mingling sausage scents and hunger that finally drew me back downstairs and out into the streets where a synesthetic wonderland was dressed in evening light and sounded like a river running over… <amp-img alt="Vltava River, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovriver.jpg" width="173"></amp-img>I decided as I left the Schiele museum behind that we are all synthesists in a way, there are not those clear lines between our sense that we imagine, one cannot see without hearing and tasting and touching and smelling, the sun now before me visible between the narrow slices of buildings the reflection of orange light in the waters of the river, is inseparable from the taste of Budvar, the smell of mustard and shoe polish, the sound of bells, the flapping of pigeon wings, the taste of sausage, the cool damp of the evening air, the gurgle of the river, the voices drifting out of windows, the fine inlay work on the tile floor, the shape of my chair, the yellow brown walls, the schoolgirls laughing, the waitress's perfume, the man in the corner singing softly with a cigar between his lips; everything is always happening everywhere.</p> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/inside-and-out.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/inside-and-out.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4516751 --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/inside-and-out.html @@ -0,0 +1,339 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>Inside And Out - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="I've never heard a color, but I do think they smell differently. 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Like any European city worth its salt, it has a dramatic castle on a hill and all the trappings of the once glorious feudal age, but with only one day to spend, a stopover on the way to Prague, I decided, rather than try to run around seeing a bunch of stuff in a hurry, to simply pick a place and spend the day there. </p> +<p>As it happened, Cesky Krumlov was home to the magnificent Egon Schiele museum, just the sort of place I could while away an afternoon relaxing and wandering aimlessly through an art gallery, for it was indeed more of gallery than a museum. <img alt="Castle Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" class="postpic" height="170" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovcastle.jpg" width="230"/>Schiele’s mother was born in Cesky Krumlov and the artist was drawn here by some compulsion of scenery and setting several times during his life, painting the narrow cobblestone streets and wonderful mixture of Gothic and art nouveau architecture (which what was actually new in his day). One of the most beautiful things about European towns is the rich array of vibrant color schemes you see on even the most ordinary of buildings. The attention to detail that makes the difference between a building and work of art was everywhere in Cesky Krumlov, from the delicate pink and red complements of a fine dovetailed corner, to the white plaster and oak beams of the Egon Schiele museum, which, despite geometric differences, looked not unlike the Globe Theatre in London.</p> +<p><img alt="Egon Schiele Sketch, Egon Schiele Museum, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" class="postpicright" height="159" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovschiele1.jpg" width="240"/>The first time Schiele came to Cesky Krumlov he lived here for several years. It’s entirely possible he would have lived here forever were it not that the otherwise conservative town more or less ran him out for what the history books loosely refer to has his “lifestyle.” I don’t propose to know exactly what Schiele’s lifestyle entailed, but it probably didn’t help that his primary work at the time was a series of oils and sketches of nude pubescent girls. Europe, for all its supposed open-mindedness on art, has had its moments of prudishness. Walking the streets just adjacent the town square it wasn’t hard to image Schiele being out of place here and from what I know of his life, he probably made little attempt to hide anything, for he seemed to live as he painted, openly, not provoking, but perhaps confused and somewhat dismayed that not everyone found the same joys in life that he had discovered. +<break> +I spent most of the afternoon wandering through the various rooms and the oversized attic of the building which made the most fascinating museums I’ve ever been in. Heavy, low-hanging oak beams with cracked white plaster ceiling between them and raw unvarnished floorboards that creaked and groaned with every footstep, as if reminding you constantly of your own presence, some subliminal mnemonic of temporal space, made the museum unlike any other I have been too here in Europe or anywhere else.</p> +<p><img alt="Attic, Egon Schiele Museum, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" class="postpic" height="188" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovmuseum1.jpg" width="250"/>I’ve never been one to pay to much attentions to the details of curation, everything from the work selected to the way it’s lit and hung, but for the first time I realized how important all those tiny little decisions are to the experience we the viewers come away with and the curation at the Egon Schiele museum was nothing short of genius (for an example of terrible curation stop by the pompous and ill-conceived J. Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles).</p> +<p>In addition to the permanent Schiele collection, the museum has several exhibitions as well which during the time of my visit were sketches and paintings by Alberto Giacometti and Eva Prokopcova. Giacometti’s work was a mixed bag, some of his paintings weren’t worth the cost of the oils he bought to make them, but one remarkable series of sketches redeemed him. A “graphic cycle” as the museum called it, entitled <strong>Paris Without End</strong>, featured the charcoal sketches Giacometti made toward the end of his life (most of which he spent in Paris). Displayed as the facing pages of a large sketchbook, the works were intended to become lithographs but that never happened and apparently the whole sequence had never been displayed together in its original form. Giacometti’s <strong>Paris Without End</strong> formed a kind of walking tour of the city in sketch form, marvelously detailed and yet extraordinarily minimalist as well. I’ve developed a fascination with negative space and Giacometti was a marvelous study in what can be created by a few simple lines organizing an otherwise blank page to reveal a small scene of a Parisian side street, an awning in three strokes of pen, a lamppost in the brief blur of charcoal. Walking around the display, which was laid out side by side around a massive white walled room, I had the feeling of having accompanied Giacometti on a walk around Paris during which he might have paused to note something, trace out an outline, remark on a scene. As one continuous experience, that is, all the sketches taken as a whole, the sketches felt like an intensely personal look into another person’s soul, to see for a moment how they view the world. Though I knew nothing of him when I arrived at the museum, I couldn’t shake the feeling on leaving that we had known each other well and can see myself at some point strolling down an alley in Montparnesse and thinking to myself, oh yes, this is where Alberto stopped to sketch the girl stepping off the train, where he huddled under the cafe awning in the rain to trace out the splash of auto tires on uneven cobblestones. But in spite of the intimate nature of the works, or perhaps because of it, the sketches are not off putting or insular, but have an openness rather like a fun filled confession to which all were invited.</p> +<p>The other artist on display was a local Czech artist named Eva Prokopcova whose abstract sketches filled the one odd and out of place room in the museum, on the ground floor, a strangely modern industrial feeling room with bare walls and floor to ceiling windows which unfortunately created a good bit of glare. Upstairs was another room of her oil paintings <img alt="Eva Prokopcova Ink Drawing, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" class="postpicright" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovprokopcova1.jpg" width="165"/>which displayed chronologically around the room and gave a fascinating glimpse into the progression of the artist, both what changed and what remains the same. On first glance it was easy to see that Prokopcova had been moving away from realistic forms for some time and by the time I reached the far side of the room the canvases bore a stamp of abstraction and fascination with form that owed no small debt to Jackson Pollock, if not in style at least in underlying assumptions and conceptualization of those assumptions. And yet her work is nothing like Pollack’s, where he swirled into increasingly muddy tones she seemed to be moving toward brighter and brighter colors and more contrasting tones, colors that exploded to reveal forms you might say.</p> +<p>The silence of the massive attic hall began to feel slightly oppressive to me after a while and so I wandered through low arched doorway to a smaller room which had one final, separate collection of works by Prokopova, a number of small eight by ten charcoals mounted one after the other, frame touching frame, and encircling the entire room at roughly chest height. Many of these had the most warmth and joy of anything in the museum, Schiele included, and I spent considerable time, circling the room twice to study the exquisite, chaotic stabs and blotches of ink that looked somehow contented in the afternoon light which streamed in through the attic window behind me. It was not unlike the inside of a ring I thought at one point. I sat down in a solitary chair in the middle of the room and tried to imagine myself sitting in the middle of a ring, as if the room were a transparent finger and I inside it. I spent some time considering whether this observation was purely my imagination or perhaps an intension of the artist to transport us, like Sun Ra perhaps, to some ringed planet where the senses spin and mingle more freely.</p> +<p>I sat for a while in an oversized armchair alone in the center of the small attic room watching the single beam of sunlight slowly move across the floorboards while I scribbled a few notes and listened to some music on my headphones. <img alt="Egon Schiele Museum, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" class="postpic" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovmuseum2.jpg" width="240"/>I thought of Kindinsky and his synesthesia, the man whose paintbrush sang to him, who painted in cello blue and trumpet reds. I’ve never heard a color, though I do think colors smell differently. The room with red walls has a scent far removed from the cool afternoon creams and peaches of the dining room in the house where I once lived. I was too old for the house as it turned out, but I remember the sunlight reflection off the stainless steel kitchen sink sang to me some mornings. </p> +<p>So far as I know Schiele did not hear color either and perhaps that’s why he had to make it sing on the canvas, a cool dark sound you can almost hear drifting in the window from Cesky Krumlov’s streets below.</p> +<p>It was the mingling sausage scents and hunger that finally drew me back downstairs and out into the streets where a synesthetic wonderland was dressed in evening light and sounded like a river running over… <img alt="Vltava River, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" class="postpic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/ceskykrumlovriver.jpg" width="173"/>I decided as I left the Schiele museum behind that we are all synthesists in a way, there are not those clear lines between our sense that we imagine, one cannot see without hearing and tasting and touching and smelling, the sun now before me visible between the narrow slices of buildings the reflection of orange light in the waters of the river, is inseparable from the taste of Budvar, the smell of mustard and shoe polish, the sound of bells, the flapping of pigeon wings, the taste of sausage, the cool damp of the evening air, the gurgle of the river, the voices drifting out of windows, the fine inlay work on the tile floor, the shape of my chair, the yellow brown walls, the schoolgirls laughing, the waitress’s perfume, the man in the corner singing softly with a cigar between his lips; everything is always happening everywhere.</p> + </div> + + </article> + + + <div class="nav-wrapper"> + <nav id="page-navigation" class="page-border-top"> + <ul> + <li id="prev"><span class="bl">Previous:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two" rel="prev" title=" The King of Carrot Flowers Part Two">The King of Carrot Flowers Part Two</a> + </li> + <li id="next"><span class="bl">Next:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds" rel="next" title=" Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds">Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds</a> + </li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + + + + + + +<div class="comment--form--wrapper "> + +<div class="comment--form--header"> + <p class="hed">Thoughts?</p> + <p class="subhed">Please leave a reply:</p> +</div> +<form action="/comments/post/" method="post" class="comment--form"> + +<input type="hidden" name="rder" value="" /> + + + <input type="hidden" name="content_type" value="jrnl.entry" id="id_content_type"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="object_pk" value="62" id="id_object_pk"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="timestamp" value="1596833475" id="id_timestamp"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="security_hash" value="12f95f5351d1a8b5f49a4ee7371488db3c3ff619" id="id_security_hash"> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_name">Name:</label> + <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="50" required id="id_name"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_email">Email address:</label> + <input type="email" name="email" required id="id_email"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_url">URL:</label> + <input type="url" name="url" id="id_url"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> + <div class="textarea-rounded"><textarea name="comment" cols="40" rows="10" maxlength="3000" required id="id_comment"> +</textarea></div> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset style="display:none;"> + <label for="id_honeypot">If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam:</label> + <input type="text" name="honeypot" id="id_honeypot"> + </fieldset> + + + <div class="submit"> + <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post btn" value="Post" /> + <input type="submit" name="preview" class="submit-preview btn" value="Preview" /> + </div> +</form> +<p style="font-size: 95%;"><strong>All comments are moderated</strong>, so you won’t see it right away. 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Like any European city worth its salt, it has a dramatic castle on a hill and all the trappings of the once glorious feudal age, but with only one day to spend, a stopover on the way to Prague, I decided, rather than try to run around seeing a bunch of stuff in a hurry, to simply pick a place and spend the day there.
+
+As it happened, Cesky Krumlov was home to the magnificent Egon Schiele museum, just the sort of place I could while away an afternoon relaxing and wandering aimlessly through an art gallery, for it was indeed more of gallery than a museum. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/ceskykrumlovcastle.jpg" width="230" height="170" class="postpic" alt="Castle Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" />Schiele's mother was born in Cesky Krumlov and the artist was drawn here by some compulsion of scenery and setting several times during his life, painting the narrow cobblestone streets and wonderful mixture of Gothic and art nouveau architecture (which what was actually new in his day). One of the most beautiful things about European towns is the rich array of vibrant color schemes you see on even the most ordinary of buildings. The attention to detail that makes the difference between a building and work of art was everywhere in Cesky Krumlov, from the delicate pink and red complements of a fine dovetailed corner, to the white plaster and oak beams of the Egon Schiele museum, which, despite geometric differences, looked not unlike the Globe Theatre in London.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/ceskykrumlovschiele1.jpg" width="240" height="159" class="postpicright" alt="Egon Schiele Sketch, Egon Schiele Museum, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" />The first time Schiele came to Cesky Krumlov he lived here for several years. It's entirely possible he would have lived here forever were it not that the otherwise conservative town more or less ran him out for what the history books loosely refer to has his “lifestyle.” I don't propose to know exactly what Schiele's lifestyle entailed, but it probably didn't help that his primary work at the time was a series of oils and sketches of nude pubescent girls. Europe, for all its supposed open-mindedness on art, has had its moments of prudishness. Walking the streets just adjacent the town square it wasn't hard to image Schiele being out of place here and from what I know of his life, he probably made little attempt to hide anything, for he seemed to live as he painted, openly, not provoking, but perhaps confused and somewhat dismayed that not everyone found the same joys in life that he had discovered.
+<break>
+I spent most of the afternoon wandering through the various rooms and the oversized attic of the building which made the most fascinating museums I've ever been in. Heavy, low-hanging oak beams with cracked white plaster ceiling between them and raw unvarnished floorboards that creaked and groaned with every footstep, as if reminding you constantly of your own presence, some subliminal mnemonic of temporal space, made the museum unlike any other I have been too here in Europe or anywhere else.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/ceskykrumlovmuseum1.jpg" width="250" height="188" class="postpic" alt="Attic, Egon Schiele Museum, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" />I've never been one to pay to much attentions to the details of curation, everything from the work selected to the way it's lit and hung, but for the first time I realized how important all those tiny little decisions are to the experience we the viewers come away with and the curation at the Egon Schiele museum was nothing short of genius (for an example of terrible curation stop by the pompous and ill-conceived J. Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles).
+
+In addition to the permanent Schiele collection, the museum has several exhibitions as well which during the time of my visit were sketches and paintings by Alberto Giacometti and Eva Prokopcova. Giacometti's work was a mixed bag, some of his paintings weren't worth the cost of the oils he bought to make them, but one remarkable series of sketches redeemed him. A “graphic cycle” as the museum called it, entitled **Paris Without End**, featured the charcoal sketches Giacometti made toward the end of his life (most of which he spent in Paris). Displayed as the facing pages of a large sketchbook, the works were intended to become lithographs but that never happened and apparently the whole sequence had never been displayed together in its original form. Giacometti's **Paris Without End** formed a kind of walking tour of the city in sketch form, marvelously detailed and yet extraordinarily minimalist as well. I've developed a fascination with negative space and Giacometti was a marvelous study in what can be created by a few simple lines organizing an otherwise blank page to reveal a small scene of a Parisian side street, an awning in three strokes of pen, a lamppost in the brief blur of charcoal. Walking around the display, which was laid out side by side around a massive white walled room, I had the feeling of having accompanied Giacometti on a walk around Paris during which he might have paused to note something, trace out an outline, remark on a scene. As one continuous experience, that is, all the sketches taken as a whole, the sketches felt like an intensely personal look into another person's soul, to see for a moment how they view the world. Though I knew nothing of him when I arrived at the museum, I couldn't shake the feeling on leaving that we had known each other well and can see myself at some point strolling down an alley in Montparnesse and thinking to myself, oh yes, this is where Alberto stopped to sketch the girl stepping off the train, where he huddled under the cafe awning in the rain to trace out the splash of auto tires on uneven cobblestones. But in spite of the intimate nature of the works, or perhaps because of it, the sketches are not off putting or insular, but have an openness rather like a fun filled confession to which all were invited.
+
+The other artist on display was a local Czech artist named Eva Prokopcova whose abstract sketches filled the one odd and out of place room in the museum, on the ground floor, a strangely modern industrial feeling room with bare walls and floor to ceiling windows which unfortunately created a good bit of glare. Upstairs was another room of her oil paintings <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/ceskykrumlovprokopcova1.jpg" width="165" height="220" class="postpicright" alt="Eva Prokopcova Ink Drawing, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" />which displayed chronologically around the room and gave a fascinating glimpse into the progression of the artist, both what changed and what remains the same. On first glance it was easy to see that Prokopcova had been moving away from realistic forms for some time and by the time I reached the far side of the room the canvases bore a stamp of abstraction and fascination with form that owed no small debt to Jackson Pollock, if not in style at least in underlying assumptions and conceptualization of those assumptions. And yet her work is nothing like Pollack's, where he swirled into increasingly muddy tones she seemed to be moving toward brighter and brighter colors and more contrasting tones, colors that exploded to reveal forms you might say.
+
+The silence of the massive attic hall began to feel slightly oppressive to me after a while and so I wandered through low arched doorway to a smaller room which had one final, separate collection of works by Prokopova, a number of small eight by ten charcoals mounted one after the other, frame touching frame, and encircling the entire room at roughly chest height. Many of these had the most warmth and joy of anything in the museum, Schiele included, and I spent considerable time, circling the room twice to study the exquisite, chaotic stabs and blotches of ink that looked somehow contented in the afternoon light which streamed in through the attic window behind me. It was not unlike the inside of a ring I thought at one point. I sat down in a solitary chair in the middle of the room and tried to imagine myself sitting in the middle of a ring, as if the room were a transparent finger and I inside it. I spent some time considering whether this observation was purely my imagination or perhaps an intension of the artist to transport us, like Sun Ra perhaps, to some ringed planet where the senses spin and mingle more freely.
+
+I sat for a while in an oversized armchair alone in the center of the small attic room watching the single beam of sunlight slowly move across the floorboards while I scribbled a few notes and listened to some music on my headphones. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/ceskykrumlovmuseum2.jpg" width="240" height="180" class="postpic" alt="Egon Schiele Museum, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" />I had recently become obsessed with the ambient work of Nobukazu Takemura, or in the convention of Japanese names, Takemura Nobukazu, which somehow seemed to perfectly fit the room, the solitary finger of light dragging across the floor to the quiet chant of children's voices mingled with warbles and bleats of strings and electronic instruments, piano lines that faded to trumpet blasts, the hollow whisper of air over half full bottles, the chime of bells, the tinkling of a jack-in-the-box, and so many sounds which I cannot conjure sources for, sounds which come from a space somewhere in the imagination, as if Takemura had reached behind the curtain of life, some back door to Saturn's outer rings, and retrieved a few moments of musical clarity which he played with until arriving at the xylophonic children's symphony that I could hear in my headphones. Eventually I found I had stopped writing altogether and was simply staring into space thinking about what it would feel like to touch sound. Takemura's compositions seem to wrap themselves around you like blanket on a wintry morning or the sun at the beach, they, not unlike I might add, many of Schiele's paintings, inhabit a space that once entered reminds you immediately why you're happy to be alive, why just being is sometimes enough, no traveling, no movement and very little thought of anything other than the scene laid out before you and perhaps a lingering desire to touch the sound, the wrap your own arms around some sonic wave as it breaks over you. Perhaps you can feel the structure of time disintegrating pleasantly about you, as if a giant hand were pulling apart a pomegranate to reveal a forest of stars and the quiet clouds of light between then, whole nebulae that at once envelope and carry you out over the shadowy afternoon light drenching the forested hills, the trees warbling with birdcalls, and then you slowly spiral down again. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/ceskykrumlovschiele2.jpg" width="222" height="174" class="postpicright" alt="Egon Schiele Painting, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" />I thought of Kindinsky and his synesthesia, the man whose paintbrush sang to him, who painted in cello blue and trumpet reds. I've never heard a color, though I do think colors smell differently. The room with red walls has a scent far removed from the cool afternoon creams and peaches of the dining room in the house where I once lived. I was too old for the house as it turned out, but I remember the sunlight reflection off the stainless steel kitchen sink sang to me some mornings.
+
+So far as I know Schiele did not hear color either and perhaps that's why he had to make it sing on the canvas, a cool dark sound you can almost hear drifting in the window from Cesky Krumlov's streets below.
+
+It was the mingling sausage scents and hunger that finally drew me back downstairs and out into the streets where a synesthetic wonderland was dressed in evening light and sounded like a river running over… <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/ceskykrumlovriver.jpg" width="173" height="230" class="postpic" alt="Vltava River, Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic" />I decided as I left the Schiele museum behind that we are all synthesists in a way, there are not those clear lines between our sense that we imagine, one cannot see without hearing and tasting and touching and smelling, the sun now before me visible between the narrow slices of buildings the reflection of orange light in the waters of the river, is inseparable from the taste of Budvar, the smell of mustard and shoe polish, the sound of bells, the flapping of pigeon wings, the taste of sausage, the cool damp of the evening air, the gurgle of the river, the voices drifting out of windows, the fine inlay work on the tile floor, the shape of my chair, the yellow brown walls, the schoolgirls laughing, the waitress's perfume, the man in the corner singing softly with a cigar between his lips; everything is always happening everywhere. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two.amp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ddd4608 --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two.amp @@ -0,0 +1,191 @@ + + +<!doctype html> +<html amp lang="en"> +<head> +<meta charset="utf-8"> +<title>The King of Carrot Flowers Part Two</title> +<link rel="canonical" href="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimum-scale=1"> + <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/> + <meta name="twitter:url" content="/jrnl/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two"> + <meta name="twitter:description" content="Neutral Milk Hotel, the mountains of Bled Slovenia and just how many people can you fit in your heart? 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But owing to a change in the weather which turned from the perfect sunshine of the Dalmatian Coast to rather stormy skies, I did not see much of the sweeping panorama but instead found myself drawn to tiny little scenes in miniature which when examined closely held the same sweeping views but on a different scale. </p> +<p><amp-img alt="monastery, Bled Slovenia" height="192" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledmonastery.jpg" width="220"></amp-img>There is a roughly 200km loop of road that leads northwest out of Bled, through a pass in the Julian Alps and then down the other side, twisting and winding back toward Bled by way of craggy canyons, small hamlets and crystalline rivers. We set out sometime after breakfast and first stopped about halfway up to the pass to see a memorial to the prisoners of war who died building the road during the First World War. My parents walked uphill to the monument, but I elected to take a short walk through the forest. The hidden sun cast a fine even light, as if filtered through a veil of ash, over the forest such that there were few shadows and even the deepest reaches of the woods were visible. I stopped near the road to examine for a while the lichen clinging to the side of a tree, which first caught my eye as a grey-green confusion against otherwise dark brown bark, but, on looking closer, I noticed the confusion gave way to an organization. <amp-img alt="Lichens, Near Bled, Slovenia" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledlichens.jpg" width="170"></amp-img>The lichen grew in clumps and rows, much as a forest does and in the valleys and hallows between the pale green strands of lichen, dozens of tiny insects wandered in the midst of what, for them, must be towering fronds. Beetles and ants treaded up and down the rows of lichen, while tiny green insects hovered pensively just above, as if trying to decided whether to duck into the forest of pale silvery branches below. </p> +<p>Lichen are a composite plant consisting of a fungus which contains photosynthetic algae cells. I remember reading once that lichen grow very slowly and that these growths, which often appear on rocks and trees as a crustlike expansion, slowly covering over their surroundings, can live as long and sometimes longer than many of the trees to which they cling. I couldn't help but notice that lichen bears an uncanny resemblance to coral, which also hosts green algae in their tissues to draw nutrients from the sunlight. Coral is one of the smallest creatures in the world and yet it is the only animal whose architecture is visible from space. Only tiny coral joining together into colonies as it does is capable of making something so massive it's visible from well beyond our world. </p> +<p>Lichen may not be as spectacular in architectural achievement as coral, but then again, neither are we. I continued on into the forest lost in the strangeness of the thought that the largest things should come from the smallest sources. I walked aimlessly and rather slow, letting the forest step by step reveal a path, <amp-img alt="Forest, near Bled, Slovenia" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledforest.jpg" width="173"></amp-img>which it did; tree by tree, bush by bush it moved me to the only direction I could go. After walking maybe a hundred meters I came to a small clearing where the trees stood apart in a ring and forest floor turned to brilliant green grass and a kaleidoscope of colorful wildflowers—wild mustard, blue-eyed mary, woodruff, dandelions and many more whose names I do not know. I stood in the middle of the clearing and began, for no reason at all to turn in circles with my head tipped back, staring up at the branches and leaves of the white firs and pines swollen with yellow clumps of pollen. When I think of it now I see something a bit like the long panoramic sweeps through the forest that filmmaker Terrance Malik is so fond of, panning up into the canopy of trees and leaves with flashes of sunlight peaking through from behind the milky white low hanging clouds. I continued to spin slowly in a circle, stumbling at times but keeping my head up high until I began to feel as if I were floating up into the air, almost able to touch the top leaves of a nearby beech tree before slowly spiraling back down the earth.</p> +<p><amp-img alt="dandelions, near Bled, Slovenia" height="163" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bleddandelion.jpg" width="244"></amp-img>Eventually I was overcomes with dizziness and had to sit down in the middle of the clearing while the world still turned slowly around me. I lay back in the grass so I was eyelevel with the dandelion puffs and watched them shudder in the stray currents of air floating down from the pass which shook the beeches as well making their leaves flutter and quake. I would have been quite happy to have died in that moment, or to have suddenly flown off up into the heavens. There is a peace in mountains, forests, by the sea, in middle of Central Park, Jardin des Plantes, the Garmond in Vienna, a train station in Munich, that does, as the man said, passeth all understanding. Or perhaps, as I have come to believe, the place is entirely irrelevant, it is in fact a place within us that creates the peace, as place as Marc Bolan once sang, "deep in my heart that's big enough to hold, just about all of you." I lay there wondering with smile who exactly wouldn't fit in Marc Bolan's heart and with less of the smile who wouldn't fit in mine. I would like to think that there isn't anyone who wouldn't fit. In fact I decided that the folding chairs in my soul would well be carried down to my heart and used to hold the overflow. Eventually when I had worked out this oversight to my satisfaction, I sat up and lit a cigarette.</p> +<p>Through the trees behind me, if I craned my neck I could just make out the roof of the memorial. I began to wonder about the soldiers who died here from exhaustion and cold. I wondered if they found the mountains beautiful even in the midst of their forced labor. I wondered what they dreamed of at night as the slept in the tiny shelters which could scarcely have afforded them much comfort. After a while I could almost see them around me, ghostly figures shrunken slightly with death, still wearing the tattered uniforms and worn wool overcoats they were buried in <amp-img alt="Blue Flowers, near Bled, Slovenia" height="214" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledbluebells.jpg" width="230"></amp-img>standing in a half circle on the edge of the clearing, smiling, having found a place beyond the cold, beyond hatred, war and cynicism, happy to be free in some place where we will all one day go to return to the children we once were, to laugh and dance and sing and most of all be silly again. I raised myself on one elbow and looked behind me at the trees and between them the soldiers and smiled to salute them, and they smiled back as if to say it's okay, all is forgiven, you and me and they slowly turned to walk back through the woods. I followed their footsteps retracing my path in the forest back to the road, the car and world of the living.</p> +<p>By the time we reached the pass the clouds had descended over the upper reaches of the peaks and continued to spill down the hill like milk poured from heaven. We walked for a few minutes around the sandy soils of the high alpine tundra where only the hardiest of plants can grow, the tall trees absent, only stunted white firs and few beds of heather <amp-img alt="Mountains and clouds, near Bled, Slovenia" height="164" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledpassclouds.jpg" width="240"></amp-img>stretching up the sloping scree and talus peaks. At a small stand beside the park headquarters a little girl and her father were buying postcards from a souvenir stand, the girl repeating over and over to her dad, "look at my beautiful picture, look at my beautiful picture" as she clutched the small piece of paper to her overcoat. She then turned to her mother and began again, "mummy, look at my beautiful picture," as her parents ushered her back in the car.</p> +<p>As we made our way down the mountain the road joined up with a river and began to wind its way alongside it. We noticed a rickety suspension bridge at one point and felt compelled to stop and walk across it. My father and I walked to the other side, stopping to make some photographs and look at the strange milky blue water of Slovenian rivers, which seem to me the clearest most beautiful waters I've ever seen. I suppose the blue tinge is from the glacial silt, but that doesn't really make sense because it seems to me silt would be washed downstream by the force of the river. Whatever the case, the water is turquoise and standing beside it there is a smell I've never noticed before, a smell of clarity, if such a thing may be said to exist. <amp-img alt="suspension bridge, near Bled, slovenia" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledriverme.jpg" width="179"></amp-img>Little tuffs of cotton-like spores floated downwind in the breeze and I noticed one particular tree which seemed to be milking itself. A strange foamy liquid seeped out of every joint in its branches, bubbling in the sunlight until it settled to clear liquid and fell from the trees to land on our arms. It was not sticky and had no taste. If it was sap it had spent to long near the clear river water until it too had come to possess the same lucid transparency that seems to seep out of everything in Slovenia.</p> +<p>Down the far side of the pass we turned off onto a very narrow road and passed through several small towns consisting of stone farm houses, wooden sheds and barns and rocky walls dividing up the valley, which was a veritable explosion of spring wildflowers, so dense and colorful as to nearly hide the green grass beneath them. <amp-img alt="Cord wood, near Bled, Slovenia" height="172" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledwood.jpg" width="230"></amp-img>Beside nearly every house whether solitary on a plot of farmland or clustered in the number of small villages, was a stack of cordwood covered by a small lean-to or roof of some kind. I watched as these piles of firewood floated past my window reflecting on the almost eerie sense of pattern and order visible in them. It seemed to me rather like an architect had planned to intricate combination and balance of angles and light and shadow and positive and negative space, until in the end it more closely resembled a carefully thought out mosaic than a haphazard stack of split wood.</p> +<p>We stopped in one of the towns to visit an old church lying rather sleepily, nestled in a curve of the road under the shade of an elm which towered majestically above the church bell tower. <amp-img alt="Church, near Bled, Slovenia" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledchurch.jpg" width="174"></amp-img>I waited across the road while a German couple loitered around the front yard wanting for once to be alone in a church. The church was not remarkable architecturally, not listed in any guidebook, it was simply a village church, humble, but yet standing out from the other buildings by virtue of its tower. Eventually I walked up the steps and into the cool darkness of the foyer, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dim light before I could continue. As my pupils widened and the darkness took form and shape I made my way forward toward the altar where I stopped to study a small figurine of the Virgin Mary. Her face seemed peaceful looking down at the baby in her arms. I said a brief prayer for the soldiers and, as I looked at Mary and child, I began to think of the girl up at the pass with her beautiful pictures postcards, I thought of a Jeff Tweedy lyric, "my fangs have been pulled" and realized with great sigh that indeed, in the last eight months, my fangs have been pulled and all I want to do is show you my picture, my beautiful, but tragically incomplete picture. +<break></break></p> +<p>As I walked out of the church and back toward the car I remember something I believe Picasso said, that we are all trying to remember how to be children.</p> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a54671f --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/king-carrot-flowers-part-two.html @@ -0,0 +1,339 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>The King Of Carrot Flowers Part Two - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="Neutral Milk Hotel, the mountains of Bled Slovenia and just how many people can you fit in your heart? 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But owing to a change in the weather which turned from the perfect sunshine of the Dalmatian Coast to rather stormy skies, I did not see much of the sweeping panorama but instead found myself drawn to tiny little scenes in miniature which when examined closely held the same sweeping views but on a different scale. </p> +<p><img alt="monastery, Bled Slovenia" class="postpic" height="192" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledmonastery.jpg" width="220"/>The lichen grew in clumps and rows, much as a forest does and in the valleys and hallows between the pale green strands of lichen, dozens of tiny insects wandered in the midst of what, for them, must be towering fronds. Beetles and ants treaded up and down the rows of lichen, while tiny green insects hovered pensively just above, as if trying to decided whether to duck into the forest of pale silvery branches below. </p> +<p>Lichen are a composite plant consisting of a fungus which contains photosynthetic algae cells. I remember reading once that lichen grow very slowly and that these growths, which often appear on rocks and trees as a crustlike expansion, slowly covering over their surroundings, can live as long and sometimes longer than many of the trees to which they cling. I couldn’t help but notice that lichen bears an uncanny resemblance to coral, which also hosts green algae in their tissues to draw nutrients from the sunlight. Coral is one of the smallest creatures in the world and yet it is the only animal whose architecture is visible from space. Only tiny coral joining together into colonies as it does is capable of making something so massive it’s visible from well beyond our world. </p> +<p>Lichen may not be as spectacular in architectural achievement as coral, but then again, neither are we. I continued on into the forest lost in the strangeness of the thought that the largest things should come from the smallest sources. I walked aimlessly and rather slow, letting the forest step by step reveal a path, <img alt="Forest, near Bled, Slovenia" class="postpic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledforest.jpg" width="173"/>which it did; tree by tree, bush by bush it moved me to the only direction I could go. After walking maybe a hundred meters I came to a small clearing where the trees stood apart in a ring and forest floor turned to brilliant green grass and a kaleidoscope of colorful wildflowers—wild mustard, blue-eyed mary, woodruff, dandelions and many more whose names I do not know. I stood in the middle of the clearing and began, for no reason at all to turn in circles with my head tipped back, staring up at the branches and leaves of the white firs and pines swollen with yellow clumps of pollen. When I think of it now I see something a bit like the long panoramic sweeps through the forest that filmmaker Terrance Malik is so fond of, panning up into the canopy of trees and leaves with flashes of sunlight peaking through from behind the milky white low hanging clouds. I continued to spin slowly in a circle, stumbling at times but keeping my head up high until I began to feel as if I were floating up into the air, almost able to touch the top leaves of a nearby beech tree before slowly spiraling back down the earth.</p> +<p><img alt="dandelions, near Bled, Slovenia" class="postpicright" height="163" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bleddandelion.jpg" width="244"/>Eventually I was overcomes with dizziness and had to sit down in the middle of the clearing while the world still turned slowly around me. I lay back in the grass so I was eyelevel with the dandelion puffs and watched them shudder in the stray currents of air floating down from the pass which shook the beeches as well making their leaves flutter and quake. I would have been quite happy to have died in that moment, or to have suddenly flown off up into the heavens. There is a peace in mountains, forests, by the sea, in middle of Central Park, Jardin des Plantes, the Garmond in Vienna, a train station in Munich, that does, as the man said, passeth all understanding. Or perhaps, as I have come to believe, the place is entirely irrelevant, it is in fact a place within us that creates the peace, as place as Marc Bolan once sang, “deep in my heart that’s big enough to hold, just about all of you.” I lay there wondering with smile who exactly wouldn’t fit in Marc Bolan’s heart and with less of the smile who wouldn’t fit in mine. I would like to think that there isn’t anyone who wouldn’t fit. In fact I decided that the folding chairs in my soul would well be carried down to my heart and used to hold the overflow. Eventually when I had worked out this oversight to my satisfaction, I sat up and lit a cigarette.</p> +<p>Through the trees behind me, if I craned my neck I could just make out the roof of the memorial. I began to wonder about the soldiers who died here from exhaustion and cold. I wondered if they found the mountains beautiful even in the midst of their forced labor. I wondered what they dreamed of at night as the slept in the tiny shelters which could scarcely have afforded them much comfort. After a while I could almost see them around me, ghostly figures shrunken slightly with death, still wearing the tattered uniforms and worn wool overcoats they were buried in <img alt="Blue Flowers, near Bled, Slovenia" class="postpic" height="214" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledbluebells.jpg" width="230"/>standing in a half circle on the edge of the clearing, smiling, having found a place beyond the cold, beyond hatred, war and cynicism, happy to be free in some place where we will all one day go to return to the children we once were, to laugh and dance and sing and most of all be silly again. I raised myself on one elbow and looked behind me at the trees and between them the soldiers and smiled to salute them, and they smiled back as if to say it’s okay, all is forgiven, you and me and they slowly turned to walk back through the woods. I followed their footsteps retracing my path in the forest back to the road, the car and world of the living.</p> +<p>By the time we reached the pass the clouds had descended over the upper reaches of the peaks and continued to spill down the hill like milk poured from heaven. We walked for a few minutes around the sandy soils of the high alpine tundra where only the hardiest of plants can grow, the tall trees absent, only stunted white firs and few beds of heather <img alt="Mountains and clouds, near Bled, Slovenia" class="postpicright" height="164" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledpassclouds.jpg" width="240"/>stretching up the sloping scree and talus peaks. At a small stand beside the park headquarters a little girl and her father were buying postcards from a souvenir stand, the girl repeating over and over to her dad, “look at my beautiful picture, look at my beautiful picture” as she clutched the small piece of paper to her overcoat. She then turned to her mother and began again, “mummy, look at my beautiful picture,” as her parents ushered her back in the car.</p> +<p>As we made our way down the mountain the road joined up with a river and began to wind its way alongside it. We noticed a rickety suspension bridge at one point and felt compelled to stop and walk across it. My father and I walked to the other side, stopping to make some photographs and look at the strange milky blue water of Slovenian rivers, which seem to me the clearest most beautiful waters I’ve ever seen. I suppose the blue tinge is from the glacial silt, but that doesn’t really make sense because it seems to me silt would be washed downstream by the force of the river. Whatever the case, the water is turquoise and standing beside it there is a smell I’ve never noticed before, a smell of clarity, if such a thing may be said to exist. <img alt="suspension bridge, near Bled, slovenia" class="postpic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledriverme.jpg" width="179"/>Little tuffs of cotton-like spores floated downwind in the breeze and I noticed one particular tree which seemed to be milking itself. A strange foamy liquid seeped out of every joint in its branches, bubbling in the sunlight until it settled to clear liquid and fell from the trees to land on our arms. It was not sticky and had no taste. If it was sap it had spent to long near the clear river water until it too had come to possess the same lucid transparency that seems to seep out of everything in Slovenia.</p> +<p>Down the far side of the pass we turned off onto a very narrow road and passed through several small towns consisting of stone farm houses, wooden sheds and barns and rocky walls dividing up the valley, which was a veritable explosion of spring wildflowers, so dense and colorful as to nearly hide the green grass beneath them. <img alt="Cord wood, near Bled, Slovenia" class="postpicright" height="172" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledwood.jpg" width="230"/>Beside nearly every house whether solitary on a plot of farmland or clustered in the number of small villages, was a stack of cordwood covered by a small lean-to or roof of some kind. I watched as these piles of firewood floated past my window reflecting on the almost eerie sense of pattern and order visible in them. It seemed to me rather like an architect had planned to intricate combination and balance of angles and light and shadow and positive and negative space, until in the end it more closely resembled a carefully thought out mosaic than a haphazard stack of split wood.</p> +<p>We stopped in one of the towns to visit an old church lying rather sleepily, nestled in a curve of the road under the shade of an elm which towered majestically above the church bell tower. <img alt="Church, near Bled, Slovenia" class="postpic" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/bledchurch.jpg" width="174"/>I waited across the road while a German couple loitered around the front yard wanting for once to be alone in a church. The church was not remarkable architecturally, not listed in any guidebook, it was simply a village church, humble, but yet standing out from the other buildings by virtue of its tower. Eventually I walked up the steps and into the cool darkness of the foyer, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dim light before I could continue. As my pupils widened and the darkness took form and shape I made my way forward toward the altar where I stopped to study a small figurine of the Virgin Mary. Her face seemed peaceful looking down at the baby in her arms. I said a brief prayer for the soldiers and, as I looked at Mary and child, I began to think of the girl up at the pass with her beautiful pictures postcards, I thought of a Jeff Tweedy lyric, “my fangs have been pulled” and realized with great sigh that indeed, in the last eight months, my fangs have been pulled and all I want to do is show you my picture, my beautiful, but tragically incomplete picture. +<break></p> +<p>As I walked out of the church and back toward the car I remember something I believe Picasso said, that we are all trying to remember how to be children.</p> + </div> + + </article> + + + <div class="nav-wrapper"> + <nav id="page-navigation" class="page-border-top"> + <ul> + <li id="prev"><span class="bl">Previous:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/ghost" rel="prev" title=" Ghost">Ghost</a> + </li> + <li id="next"><span class="bl">Next:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/inside-and-out" rel="next" title=" Inside and Out">Inside and Out</a> + </li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + + + + + + +<div class="comment--form--wrapper "> + +<div class="comment--form--header"> + <p class="hed">Thoughts?</p> + <p class="subhed">Please leave a reply:</p> +</div> +<form action="/comments/post/" method="post" class="comment--form"> + +<input type="hidden" name="rder" value="" /> + + + <input type="hidden" name="content_type" value="jrnl.entry" id="id_content_type"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="object_pk" value="61" id="id_object_pk"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="timestamp" value="1596833475" id="id_timestamp"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="security_hash" value="ddc3b146cc111abd6ce7c22abc963f83c1418099" id="id_security_hash"> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_name">Name:</label> + <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="50" required id="id_name"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_email">Email address:</label> + <input type="email" name="email" required id="id_email"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_url">URL:</label> + <input type="url" name="url" id="id_url"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> + <div class="textarea-rounded"><textarea name="comment" cols="40" rows="10" maxlength="3000" required id="id_comment"> +</textarea></div> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset style="display:none;"> + <label for="id_honeypot">If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam:</label> + <input type="text" name="honeypot" id="id_honeypot"> + </fieldset> + + + <div class="submit"> + <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post btn" value="Post" /> + <input type="submit" name="preview" class="submit-preview btn" value="Preview" /> + </div> +</form> +<p style="font-size: 95%;"><strong>All comments are moderated</strong>, so you won’t see it right away. 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But owing to a change in the weather which turned from the perfect sunshine of the Dalmatian Coast to rather stormy skies, I did not see much of the sweeping panorama but instead found myself drawn to tiny little scenes in miniature which when examined closely held the same sweeping views but on a different scale.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/bledmonastery.jpg" width="220" height="192" class="postpic" alt="monastery, Bled Slovenia" />There is a roughly 200km loop of road that leads northwest out of Bled, through a pass in the Julian Alps and then down the other side, twisting and winding back toward Bled by way of craggy canyons, small hamlets and crystalline rivers. We set out sometime after breakfast and first stopped about halfway up to the pass to see a memorial to the prisoners of war who died building the road during the First World War. My parents walked uphill to the monument, but I elected to take a short walk through the forest. The hidden sun cast a fine even light, as if filtered through a veil of ash, over the forest such that there were few shadows and even the deepest reaches of the woods were visible. I stopped near the road to examine for a while the lichen clinging to the side of a tree, which first caught my eye as a grey-green confusion against otherwise dark brown bark, but, on looking closer, I noticed the confusion gave way to an organization. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/bledlichens.jpg" width="170" height="240" class="postpicright" alt="Lichens, Near Bled, Slovenia" />The lichen grew in clumps and rows, much as a forest does and in the valleys and hallows between the pale green strands of lichen, dozens of tiny insects wandered in the midst of what, for them, must be towering fronds. Beetles and ants treaded up and down the rows of lichen, while tiny green insects hovered pensively just above, as if trying to decided whether to duck into the forest of pale silvery branches below.
+
+Lichen are a composite plant consisting of a fungus which contains photosynthetic algae cells. I remember reading once that lichen grow very slowly and that these growths, which often appear on rocks and trees as a crustlike expansion, slowly covering over their surroundings, can live as long and sometimes longer than many of the trees to which they cling. I couldn't help but notice that lichen bears an uncanny resemblance to coral, which also hosts green algae in their tissues to draw nutrients from the sunlight. Coral is one of the smallest creatures in the world and yet it is the only animal whose architecture is visible from space. Only tiny coral joining together into colonies as it does is capable of making something so massive it's visible from well beyond our world.
+
+Lichen may not be as spectacular in architectural achievement as coral, but then again, neither are we. I continued on into the forest lost in the strangeness of the thought that the largest things should come from the smallest sources. I walked aimlessly and rather slow, letting the forest step by step reveal a path, <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/bledforest.jpg" width="173" height="230" class="postpic" alt="Forest, near Bled, Slovenia" />which it did; tree by tree, bush by bush it moved me to the only direction I could go. After walking maybe a hundred meters I came to a small clearing where the trees stood apart in a ring and forest floor turned to brilliant green grass and a kaleidoscope of colorful wildflowers—wild mustard, blue-eyed mary, woodruff, dandelions and many more whose names I do not know. I stood in the middle of the clearing and began, for no reason at all to turn in circles with my head tipped back, staring up at the branches and leaves of the white firs and pines swollen with yellow clumps of pollen. When I think of it now I see something a bit like the long panoramic sweeps through the forest that filmmaker Terrance Malik is so fond of, panning up into the canopy of trees and leaves with flashes of sunlight peaking through from behind the milky white low hanging clouds. I continued to spin slowly in a circle, stumbling at times but keeping my head up high until I began to feel as if I were floating up into the air, almost able to touch the top leaves of a nearby beech tree before slowly spiraling back down the earth.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/bleddandelion.jpg" width="244" height="163" class="postpicright" alt="dandelions, near Bled, Slovenia" />Eventually I was overcomes with dizziness and had to sit down in the middle of the clearing while the world still turned slowly around me. I lay back in the grass so I was eyelevel with the dandelion puffs and watched them shudder in the stray currents of air floating down from the pass which shook the beeches as well making their leaves flutter and quake. I would have been quite happy to have died in that moment, or to have suddenly flown off up into the heavens. There is a peace in mountains, forests, by the sea, in middle of Central Park, Jardin des Plantes, the Garmond in Vienna, a train station in Munich, that does, as the man said, passeth all understanding. Or perhaps, as I have come to believe, the place is entirely irrelevant, it is in fact a place within us that creates the peace, as place as Marc Bolan once sang, "deep in my heart that's big enough to hold, just about all of you." I lay there wondering with smile who exactly wouldn't fit in Marc Bolan's heart and with less of the smile who wouldn't fit in mine. I would like to think that there isn't anyone who wouldn't fit. In fact I decided that the folding chairs in my soul would well be carried down to my heart and used to hold the overflow. Eventually when I had worked out this oversight to my satisfaction, I sat up and lit a cigarette.
+
+Through the trees behind me, if I craned my neck I could just make out the roof of the memorial. I began to wonder about the soldiers who died here from exhaustion and cold. I wondered if they found the mountains beautiful even in the midst of their forced labor. I wondered what they dreamed of at night as the slept in the tiny shelters which could scarcely have afforded them much comfort. After a while I could almost see them around me, ghostly figures shrunken slightly with death, still wearing the tattered uniforms and worn wool overcoats they were buried in <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/bledbluebells.jpg" width="230" height="214" class="postpic" alt="Blue Flowers, near Bled, Slovenia" />standing in a half circle on the edge of the clearing, smiling, having found a place beyond the cold, beyond hatred, war and cynicism, happy to be free in some place where we will all one day go to return to the children we once were, to laugh and dance and sing and most of all be silly again. I raised myself on one elbow and looked behind me at the trees and between them the soldiers and smiled to salute them, and they smiled back as if to say it's okay, all is forgiven, you and me and they slowly turned to walk back through the woods. I followed their footsteps retracing my path in the forest back to the road, the car and world of the living.
+
+By the time we reached the pass the clouds had descended over the upper reaches of the peaks and continued to spill down the hill like milk poured from heaven. We walked for a few minutes around the sandy soils of the high alpine tundra where only the hardiest of plants can grow, the tall trees absent, only stunted white firs and few beds of heather <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/bledpassclouds.jpg" width="240" height="164" class="postpicright" alt="Mountains and clouds, near Bled, Slovenia" />stretching up the sloping scree and talus peaks. At a small stand beside the park headquarters a little girl and her father were buying postcards from a souvenir stand, the girl repeating over and over to her dad, "look at my beautiful picture, look at my beautiful picture" as she clutched the small piece of paper to her overcoat. She then turned to her mother and began again, "mummy, look at my beautiful picture," as her parents ushered her back in the car.
+
+As we made our way down the mountain the road joined up with a river and began to wind its way alongside it. We noticed a rickety suspension bridge at one point and felt compelled to stop and walk across it. My father and I walked to the other side, stopping to make some photographs and look at the strange milky blue water of Slovenian rivers, which seem to me the clearest most beautiful waters I've ever seen. I suppose the blue tinge is from the glacial silt, but that doesn't really make sense because it seems to me silt would be washed downstream by the force of the river. Whatever the case, the water is turquoise and standing beside it there is a smell I've never noticed before, a smell of clarity, if such a thing may be said to exist. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/bledriverme.jpg" width="179" height="230" class="postpic" alt="suspension bridge, near Bled, slovenia" />Little tuffs of cotton-like spores floated downwind in the breeze and I noticed one particular tree which seemed to be milking itself. A strange foamy liquid seeped out of every joint in its branches, bubbling in the sunlight until it settled to clear liquid and fell from the trees to land on our arms. It was not sticky and had no taste. If it was sap it had spent to long near the clear river water until it too had come to possess the same lucid transparency that seems to seep out of everything in Slovenia.
+
+Down the far side of the pass we turned off onto a very narrow road and passed through several small towns consisting of stone farm houses, wooden sheds and barns and rocky walls dividing up the valley, which was a veritable explosion of spring wildflowers, so dense and colorful as to nearly hide the green grass beneath them. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/bledwood.jpg" width="230" height="172" class="postpicright" alt="Cord wood, near Bled, Slovenia" />Beside nearly every house whether solitary on a plot of farmland or clustered in the number of small villages, was a stack of cordwood covered by a small lean-to or roof of some kind. I watched as these piles of firewood floated past my window reflecting on the almost eerie sense of pattern and order visible in them. It seemed to me rather like an architect had planned to intricate combination and balance of angles and light and shadow and positive and negative space, until in the end it more closely resembled a carefully thought out mosaic than a haphazard stack of split wood.
+
+We stopped in one of the towns to visit an old church lying rather sleepily, nestled in a curve of the road under the shade of an elm which towered majestically above the church bell tower. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/bledchurch.jpg" width="174" height="240" class="postpic" alt="Church, near Bled, Slovenia" />I waited across the road while a German couple loitered around the front yard wanting for once to be alone in a church. The church was not remarkable architecturally, not listed in any guidebook, it was simply a village church, humble, but yet standing out from the other buildings by virtue of its tower. Eventually I walked up the steps and into the cool darkness of the foyer, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dim light before I could continue. As my pupils widened and the darkness took form and shape I made my way forward toward the altar where I stopped to study a small figurine of the Virgin Mary. Her face seemed peaceful looking down at the baby in her arms. I said a brief prayer for the soldiers and, as I looked at Mary and child, I began to think of the girl up at the pass with her beautiful pictures postcards, I thought of a Jeff Tweedy lyric, "my fangs have been pulled" and realized with great sigh that indeed, in the last eight months, my fangs have been pulled and all I want to do is show you my picture, my beautiful, but tragically incomplete picture.
+<break>
+
+As I walked out of the church and back toward the car I remember something I believe Picasso said, that we are all trying to remember how to be children. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/london-calling.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/london-calling.amp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..336e4f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/london-calling.amp @@ -0,0 +1,210 @@ + + +<!doctype html> +<html amp lang="en"> +<head> +<meta charset="utf-8"> +<title>London Calling</title> +<link rel="canonical" href="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/05/london-calling"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimum-scale=1"> + <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/> + <meta name="twitter:url" content="/jrnl/2006/05/london-calling"> + <meta name="twitter:description" content="London called, but then it almost didn't answer. Or, how I got into Great Britain by making snide jokes about America. 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On me? None. I was planning to use that ATM behind you."<br/> +"Do you have any bank statements showing how much money you have?"<br/> +"Uh, no, I didn't know that I needed…"<br/> +"You have onward tickets?"<br/> +"Yes."<br/> +"May I see them?"<br/> +"Uh, no. I haven't printed the receipt yet."<br/> +"When are you planning to do that?"<br/> +"Soon."<br/> +"So you have no money, no proof of onward travel and no reason for coming to London?"<br/> +"Correct."<br/> +"If I showed up in the States you would turn me around and send me back…"<br/> +"Well, <strong>I</strong> wouldn't… and besides why would you want to go to the States?"<br/></p> +<p>This last line elicits the faint traces of a smile and the otherwise very serious and prim border agent relents. She says something about a verbal warning but stamps my passport anyway letting me into the U.K. I try not to run but hurry just in case she changes her mind. I find it highly ironic that of all the borders I've crossed in countries that were only recently at war the one in Heathrow was by far the hardest. That's the west for you. Reasons and rules. Welcome home. You were right Wally; you do have a lot more freedom on Ko Kradan than anywhere else. +<break> +My advice, when crossing borders and just generally when traveling, is to learn a bit of self-deprecation, or national deprecation, particularly if your American. By and large the world seems to like Americans, but that doesn't mean they don't enjoy making fun of us. We seem to be seen as sort of hapless idiots who don't really mean any harm, but just aren't very bright. Which is basically accurate I suppose. The nicest thing anyone's said to me on this trip was my friend Keith who looked at me one night and said, "you're the least American American I've met." So it goes.</break></p> +<p>I don't want to come off as being down on Americans, I'm not, but I do sympathize with the world's disdain for certain, er, character flaws we seem to have, such a tendency to be a bit squeamish and particular about sanitation. And our use of the English language is a bit um, primitive. But you don't need to travel to know that. The English for instance absolutely hate American slang and when you get down to words like, "dude" and "awesome" does make you sound a bit daft.</p> +<p>But I didn't come to England to practice the Queen's English; I came to see Thet who I met way back in <a href="http://luxagraf.net/2005/dec/05/camel-no-name/" title="Luxagraf Entry from Jaisalmer India">Jaisalmer India on the camel trek</a>. Thet and I kept in touch periodically and since my Thai visa expired a week before I was due in Budapest, she kindly said I could spend a few layover days with her in London. Thet and her flatmate live a few blocks off Holloway road in what I believe qualifies as North London (if I'm wrong about that set me straight in the comments section).</p> +<p>Compared to getting through customs, finding Thet's flat was ridiculously easy. After a lovely breakfast and some catch up travel stories, we set out to explore London. We took the bus down to Trafalgar square, walked through Chinatown and snacked on dim sum before making a brief walk through of the National Gallery. Then we ended up in SoHo where we managed to find a bar with £2 drinks at happy hour. Forgive me for interupting the narrative with pointless tangents, but I spent the last three months around Londoners so I had a fair number of expectations, er, misconceptions. The first thing I have to set straight is London's reputation as the most expensive place around. Now if you're coming in with dollars or euros or any currency other than pounds, yes London is expensive. But the expense is in the exchange rate. If you happen to live in London and earn pounds I think London is actually quite cheap. Drinks are rarely more than a fiver, a huge meal can be had for fewer than £10. I can't comment on rent, but in general living expenses in London are less than New York and certainly less than Paris. The key is to earn pounds. If you don't have sterling than yes London will drain your wallet in the time it takes you to work out the difference between pants and trousers.</p> +<p>The next day we set out for the Tate Modern and were joined by Thet's friend Terese who's originally from Sweden (Another friend of Thet's, Joy is from Thailand and her flatmate is from China. I traveled extensively in SE Asia with Londoners and spent my time in London with emigrants, which is exactly how I'd want it). <amp-img alt="London Bridge, London, England" height="228" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonbridge.jpg" width="205"></amp-img>After taking the bus down to Bank and having a look at London Bridge, we walked in the sunshine along the Thames. We paused briefly to inspect the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare's works were first brought to the stage. I didn't go in because I wasn't in the mood for an organized, narrated walk through. <amp-img alt="Shakespeare Globe Theatre, London, England" height="176" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonglobetheatre.jpg" width="240"></amp-img>Perhaps it's just the nerdy English major coming out in me, but it made me feel good to see that not only is Shakespeare still in print and still read, but the English have taken the time to reconstruct the Theatre as well (the original was destroyed by a fire and then The Globe V2 was destroyed by those pesky puritans). Art isn't dead. And people still read, pundits be damned. And the show always goes on.</p> +<p><a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/" title="Tate Modern Online">The Tate Modern</a> is an imposing, factory like building housing an impressive collection of Modern art. What's most impressive about the Tate Modern is that it's free (anyone been to the MOMA in New York lately? Decidedly not free), well you have to pay for the exhibitions, but the permanent collection is free. Unfortunately the Tate Modern was re-hanging much of their permanent collection (my museum timing has always been awful) so there was a limited amount of art on display. <amp-img alt="Cy Twombly, Tate Modern, London, England" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londontatecytwombly.jpg" width="161"></amp-img>There are a number of amazing pieces by Jean Miro and Max Ernst, as well as some Picassos and the usual suspects of 20th Century art. But for me the highlight was Cy Twombly's paintings and sculptures. I have a friend who loves Cy Twombly so I was familiar with his work through books and photos, but frankly it always seemed a bit jumbled and lacking to me. However when you get up close to the actual canvas the detail is amazing and something about the four paintings at the Tate (entitled Quattro Stagioni - a painting in four parts) were spellbinding to me. <amp-img alt="Cy Twombly, Tate Modern, London, England" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londontatecytwomblytwo.jpg" width="172"></amp-img>Its as if you can actually feel the swirling chaos begin to envelope you and then settle to produce a calm that wasn't there before you stepped in front of them. I must have spent twenty minutes staring at them. Long enough that Thet and Terese were already outside waiting for me. Eventually I tore myself away, though I honestly could have stood there for a couple of hours.</p> +<p>We walked down the river toward another gallery I have never heard of but which Thet promised me was good. It turned out that the gallery had packed it in and moved to Chelsea but I did get to see the London eye and Big Ben and Parliament and such tourist sites. <amp-img alt="Parliament, Thames River, London England" height="173" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonparliament.jpg" width="230"></amp-img>Eventually Terese had to go home and Thet and I stopped in at a riverside pub and sat outside drinking a few glasses of bitter. Oh yes, I forgot the best part, it was twenty degrees, the warmest day of the year so far in London and hardly a cloud in the sky. The atmosphere on the streets was near jubilation everyone smiling and invested with that same strange energy that I used to see after the first true thaw in Northampton. There is something about a long dark winter that makes you appreciate spring so much more. We sat in the sunshine and chatted about future trips and the essential differences between Americans and the British and then we headed home for a bite to eat.</p> +<p>The following day the thermometer climbed up to 25 Celsius and we scrapped our original plans in favor of a barbeque in Hampstead Heath. We stopped by the grocery store and picked up a disposable grill and a few pieces of chicken and sausage and headed for the park. After climbing up a hill that overlooked all of London we sat down in the high, unmowed spring grasses. Luckily said grasses were green and water logged or we would probably have burned down a good portion of Hampstead Heath with our portable grill. We did not, as is suggested in the instructions, elevate the grill on rocks or bricks. No, we just set it on the grass and lit it up. As the flames whipped in the wind and began to light the long strands of grass on fire we started to get a little nervous. I stayed by the grill trying to press the grass down on all sides so it wouldn't catch fire while Thet looked for some stones or something nonflammable to set the grill on. I was a little concerned that the heat from the bottom of the grill was going to ignite the hillside before she got back (we all know the temperature at which books burn thanks to Mr. Bradbury, but I haven't a clue what temperature grass begins to spontaneously combust). Fortunately Thet found a good size log and disaster was averted. I would like to have seen the look on that border agent's face if I had burned down Hampstead Heath. </p> +<p><amp-img alt="Hampstead Heath, London, England" height="173" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonmollyhampsteadheath.jpg" width="230"></amp-img>We grilled chicken and sausage and it wasn't long before every dog in the park was sniffing their way over to our little spot. For the most part they left when their owners called but one lab just stayed. Molly was her name and curiously she never went after the food. She simply sat in the grass in front of us and hung out. Perhaps she was just bored with her owner or maybe she was trying to escape the three poodles that she apparently lived with, whatever the case we had a dog for the afternoon. A friend of mine once suggested that there ought to be a dog rental service for those that wanted a dog, but not all the time. Well if you want a dog, get a grill and head for the park. Just be careful with the flames, London has a bad history of fires.</p> +<p><amp-img alt="Thet, Terese, Joy and me, London, England" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonthetteresejoyme.jpg" width="240"></amp-img>Later that night we met up with Terese and Joy and hit a few pubs on a street whose name I don't remember but which I gathered was well known for its bars and pubs. </p> +<p>My last day we took it easy. I accompanied Thet on a few errands (by bizarre stroke of chance I have now been to the employment offices of both England and France, but still never made it to one in the States) and then we went to another park. That evening after having the requisite dinner of fish and chips we wandered about to a few pubs and called it an early night since I was leaving quite early in the morning.</p> +<p>All in all I adjusted fairly quickly to being back in the west. Strangely the things that I thought might bother me didn't too much and things I hadn't considered became very noticeable. The most interesting change that I hadn't considered was the length of the day. For the last seven months I have been within a few hundred kilometers of the equator which means that the sun rises at about 6:30 and sets at about 6:30. In London however the sun doesn't set until well past eight at night, which completely messed up my sense of time. The best thing about the west though is that you can drink the tap water. I don't know why I enjoyed it so much, <amp-img alt="London at night from the bus" height="250" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonnightbus.jpg" width="193"></amp-img>probably simply because you can. And true tap water rarely tastes very good, but you don't realize what a great thing it is to brush your teeth in tap water until you haven't for a long time. Wash machines were also a revolutionary idea, too revolutionary for me.</p> +<p>I wish that I had been able to stay in London longer, it's by far my favorite city I've visited on this trip and the only other city I would rank with New York (Paris and Bangkok are both nice and I enjoyed them both, but neither of them is at the same level as New York and London). There is something about both New York and London that the minute I arrive, I feel at home, as if that is where I ought to be, have always been and may well be forever.</p> +<p>Many thanks to Thet and her friends for their hospitality and kindness to strangers; should I ever actually have a place in the U.S. you are all welcome whenever you like (and I'll read up on Manhattan landmarks so I can figure out where they are). Cheers.</p> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/london-calling.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/london-calling.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f119c38 --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/london-calling.html @@ -0,0 +1,359 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>London Calling - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="London called, but then it almost didn't answer. Or, how I got into Great Britain by making snide jokes about America. 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On me? None. I was planning to use that ATM behind you.”<br /> +“Do you have any bank statements showing how much money you have?”<br /> +“Uh, no, I didn’t know that I needed…”<br /> +“You have onward tickets?”<br /> +“Yes.”<br /> +“May I see them?”<br /> +“Uh, no. I haven’t printed the receipt yet.”<br /> +“When are you planning to do that?”<br /> +“Soon.”<br /> +“So you have no money, no proof of onward travel and no reason for coming to London?”<br /> +“Correct.”<br /> +“If I showed up in the States you would turn me around and send me back…”<br /> +“Well, <strong>I</strong> wouldn’t… and besides why would you want to go to the States?”<br /></p> +<p>This last line elicits the faint traces of a smile and the otherwise very serious and prim border agent relents. She says something about a verbal warning but stamps my passport anyway letting me into the U.K. I try not to run but hurry just in case she changes her mind. I find it highly ironic that of all the borders I’ve crossed in countries that were only recently at war the one in Heathrow was by far the hardest. That’s the west for you. Reasons and rules. Welcome home. You were right Wally; you do have a lot more freedom on Ko Kradan than anywhere else. +<break> +My advice, when crossing borders and just generally when traveling, is to learn a bit of self-deprecation, or national deprecation, particularly if your American. By and large the world seems to like Americans, but that doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy making fun of us. We seem to be seen as sort of hapless idiots who don’t really mean any harm, but just aren’t very bright. Which is basically accurate I suppose. The nicest thing anyone’s said to me on this trip was my friend Keith who looked at me one night and said, “you’re the least American American I’ve met.” So it goes.</p> +<p>I don’t want to come off as being down on Americans, I’m not, but I do sympathize with the world’s disdain for certain, er, character flaws we seem to have, such a tendency to be a bit squeamish and particular about sanitation. And our use of the English language is a bit um, primitive. But you don’t need to travel to know that. The English for instance absolutely hate American slang and when you get down to words like, “dude” and “awesome” does make you sound a bit daft.</p> +<p>But I didn’t come to England to practice the Queen’s English; I came to see Thet who I met way back in <a href="http://luxagraf.net/2005/dec/05/camel-no-name/" title="Luxagraf Entry from Jaisalmer India">Jaisalmer India on the camel trek</a>. Thet and I kept in touch periodically and since my Thai visa expired a week before I was due in Budapest, she kindly said I could spend a few layover days with her in London. Thet and her flatmate live a few blocks off Holloway road in what I believe qualifies as North London (if I’m wrong about that set me straight in the comments section).</p> +<p>Compared to getting through customs, finding Thet’s flat was ridiculously easy. After a lovely breakfast and some catch up travel stories, we set out to explore London. We took the bus down to Trafalgar square, walked through Chinatown and snacked on dim sum before making a brief walk through of the National Gallery. Then we ended up in SoHo where we managed to find a bar with £2 drinks at happy hour. Forgive me for interupting the narrative with pointless tangents, but I spent the last three months around Londoners so I had a fair number of expectations, er, misconceptions. The first thing I have to set straight is London’s reputation as the most expensive place around. Now if you’re coming in with dollars or euros or any currency other than pounds, yes London is expensive. But the expense is in the exchange rate. If you happen to live in London and earn pounds I think London is actually quite cheap. Drinks are rarely more than a fiver, a huge meal can be had for fewer than £10. I can’t comment on rent, but in general living expenses in London are less than New York and certainly less than Paris. The key is to earn pounds. If you don’t have sterling than yes London will drain your wallet in the time it takes you to work out the difference between pants and trousers.</p> +<p>The next day we set out for the Tate Modern and were joined by Thet’s friend Terese who’s originally from Sweden (Another friend of Thet’s, Joy is from Thailand and her flatmate is from China. I traveled extensively in SE Asia with Londoners and spent my time in London with emigrants, which is exactly how I’d want it). <img alt="London Bridge, London, England" class="postpic" height="228" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonbridge.jpg" width="205"/>Perhaps it’s just the nerdy English major coming out in me, but it made me feel good to see that not only is Shakespeare still in print and still read, but the English have taken the time to reconstruct the Theatre as well (the original was destroyed by a fire and then The Globe V2 was destroyed by those pesky puritans). Art isn’t dead. And people still read, pundits be damned. And the show always goes on.</p> +<p><a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/" title="Tate Modern Online">The Tate Modern</a> is an imposing, factory like building housing an impressive collection of Modern art. What’s most impressive about the Tate Modern is that it’s free (anyone been to the MOMA in New York lately? Decidedly not free), well you have to pay for the exhibitions, but the permanent collection is free. Unfortunately the Tate Modern was re-hanging much of their permanent collection (my museum timing has always been awful) so there was a limited amount of art on display. <img alt="Cy Twombly, Tate Modern, London, England" class="postpic" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londontatecytwombly.jpg" width="161"/>Its as if you can actually feel the swirling chaos begin to envelope you and then settle to produce a calm that wasn’t there before you stepped in front of them. I must have spent twenty minutes staring at them. Long enough that Thet and Terese were already outside waiting for me. Eventually I tore myself away, though I honestly could have stood there for a couple of hours.</p> +<p>We walked down the river toward another gallery I have never heard of but which Thet promised me was good. It turned out that the gallery had packed it in and moved to Chelsea but I did get to see the London eye and Big Ben and Parliament and such tourist sites. <img alt="Parliament, Thames River, London England" class="postpic" height="173" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonparliament.jpg" width="230"/>Eventually Terese had to go home and Thet and I stopped in at a riverside pub and sat outside drinking a few glasses of bitter. Oh yes, I forgot the best part, it was twenty degrees, the warmest day of the year so far in London and hardly a cloud in the sky. The atmosphere on the streets was near jubilation everyone smiling and invested with that same strange energy that I used to see after the first true thaw in Northampton. There is something about a long dark winter that makes you appreciate spring so much more. We sat in the sunshine and chatted about future trips and the essential differences between Americans and the British and then we headed home for a bite to eat.</p> +<p>The following day the thermometer climbed up to 25 Celsius and we scrapped our original plans in favor of a barbeque in Hampstead Heath. We stopped by the grocery store and picked up a disposable grill and a few pieces of chicken and sausage and headed for the park. After climbing up a hill that overlooked all of London we sat down in the high, unmowed spring grasses. Luckily said grasses were green and water logged or we would probably have burned down a good portion of Hampstead Heath with our portable grill. We did not, as is suggested in the instructions, elevate the grill on rocks or bricks. No, we just set it on the grass and lit it up. As the flames whipped in the wind and began to light the long strands of grass on fire we started to get a little nervous. I stayed by the grill trying to press the grass down on all sides so it wouldn’t catch fire while Thet looked for some stones or something nonflammable to set the grill on. I was a little concerned that the heat from the bottom of the grill was going to ignite the hillside before she got back (we all know the temperature at which books burn thanks to Mr. Bradbury, but I haven’t a clue what temperature grass begins to spontaneously combust). Fortunately Thet found a good size log and disaster was averted. I would like to have seen the look on that border agent’s face if I had burned down Hampstead Heath. </p> +<p><img alt="Hampstead Heath, London, England" class="postpicright" height="173" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonmollyhampsteadheath.jpg" width="230"/>We grilled chicken and sausage and it wasn’t long before every dog in the park was sniffing their way over to our little spot. For the most part they left when their owners called but one lab just stayed. Molly was her name and curiously she never went after the food. She simply sat in the grass in front of us and hung out. Perhaps she was just bored with her owner or maybe she was trying to escape the three poodles that she apparently lived with, whatever the case we had a dog for the afternoon. A friend of mine once suggested that there ought to be a dog rental service for those that wanted a dog, but not all the time. Well if you want a dog, get a grill and head for the park. Just be careful with the flames, London has a bad history of fires.</p> +<p><img alt="Thet, Terese, Joy and me, London, England" class="postpic" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonthetteresejoyme.jpg" width="240"/>Later that night we met up with Terese and Joy and hit a few pubs on a street whose name I don’t remember but which I gathered was well known for its bars and pubs. </p> +<p>My last day we took it easy. I accompanied Thet on a few errands (by bizarre stroke of chance I have now been to the employment offices of both England and France, but still never made it to one in the States) and then we went to another park. That evening after having the requisite dinner of fish and chips we wandered about to a few pubs and called it an early night since I was leaving quite early in the morning.</p> +<p>All in all I adjusted fairly quickly to being back in the west. Strangely the things that I thought might bother me didn’t too much and things I hadn’t considered became very noticeable. The most interesting change that I hadn’t considered was the length of the day. For the last seven months I have been within a few hundred kilometers of the equator which means that the sun rises at about 6:30 and sets at about 6:30. In London however the sun doesn’t set until well past eight at night, which completely messed up my sense of time. The best thing about the west though is that you can drink the tap water. I don’t know why I enjoyed it so much, <img alt="London at night from the bus" class="postpicright" height="250" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/londonnightbus.jpg" width="193"/>probably simply because you can. And true tap water rarely tastes very good, but you don’t realize what a great thing it is to brush your teeth in tap water until you haven’t for a long time. Wash machines were also a revolutionary idea, too revolutionary for me.</p> +<p>I wish that I had been able to stay in London longer, it’s by far my favorite city I’ve visited on this trip and the only other city I would rank with New York (Paris and Bangkok are both nice and I enjoyed them both, but neither of them is at the same level as New York and London). There is something about both New York and London that the minute I arrive, I feel at home, as if that is where I ought to be, have always been and may well be forever.</p> +<p>Many thanks to Thet and her friends for their hospitality and kindness to strangers; should I ever actually have a place in the U.S. you are all welcome whenever you like (and I’ll read up on Manhattan landmarks so I can figure out where they are). 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+(shrug) (smile)<br />
+"How much money are you bringing in?"<br />
+"Money? On me? None. I was planning to use that ATM behind you."<br />
+"Do you have any bank statements showing how much money you have?"<br />
+"Uh, no, I didn't know that I needed…"<br />
+"You have onward tickets?"<br />
+"Yes."<br />
+"May I see them?"<br />
+"Uh, no. I haven't printed the receipt yet."<br />
+"When are you planning to do that?"<br />
+"Soon."<br />
+"So you have no money, no proof of onward travel and no reason for coming to London?"<br />
+"Correct."<br />
+"If I showed up in the States you would turn me around and send me back…"<br />
+"Well, **I** wouldn't… and besides why would you want to go to the States?"<br />
+
+This last line elicits the faint traces of a smile and the otherwise very serious and prim border agent relents. She says something about a verbal warning but stamps my passport anyway letting me into the U.K. I try not to run but hurry just in case she changes her mind. I find it highly ironic that of all the borders I've crossed in countries that were only recently at war the one in Heathrow was by far the hardest. That's the west for you. Reasons and rules. Welcome home. You were right Wally; you do have a lot more freedom on Ko Kradan than anywhere else.
+<break>
+My advice, when crossing borders and just generally when traveling, is to learn a bit of self-deprecation, or national deprecation, particularly if your American. By and large the world seems to like Americans, but that doesn't mean they don't enjoy making fun of us. We seem to be seen as sort of hapless idiots who don't really mean any harm, but just aren't very bright. Which is basically accurate I suppose. The nicest thing anyone's said to me on this trip was my friend Keith who looked at me one night and said, "you're the least American American I've met." So it goes.
+
+I don't want to come off as being down on Americans, I'm not, but I do sympathize with the world's disdain for certain, er, character flaws we seem to have, such a tendency to be a bit squeamish and particular about sanitation. And our use of the English language is a bit um, primitive. But you don't need to travel to know that. The English for instance absolutely hate American slang and when you get down to words like, "dude" and "awesome" does make you sound a bit daft.
+
+But I didn't come to England to practice the Queen's English; I came to see Thet who I met way back in <a href="http://luxagraf.net/2005/dec/05/camel-no-name/" title="Luxagraf Entry from Jaisalmer India">Jaisalmer India on the camel trek</a>. Thet and I kept in touch periodically and since my Thai visa expired a week before I was due in Budapest, she kindly said I could spend a few layover days with her in London. Thet and her flatmate live a few blocks off Holloway road in what I believe qualifies as North London (if I'm wrong about that set me straight in the comments section).
+
+Compared to getting through customs, finding Thet's flat was ridiculously easy. After a lovely breakfast and some catch up travel stories, we set out to explore London. We took the bus down to Trafalgar square, walked through Chinatown and snacked on dim sum before making a brief walk through of the National Gallery. Then we ended up in SoHo where we managed to find a bar with £2 drinks at happy hour. Forgive me for interupting the narrative with pointless tangents, but I spent the last three months around Londoners so I had a fair number of expectations, er, misconceptions. The first thing I have to set straight is London's reputation as the most expensive place around. Now if you're coming in with dollars or euros or any currency other than pounds, yes London is expensive. But the expense is in the exchange rate. If you happen to live in London and earn pounds I think London is actually quite cheap. Drinks are rarely more than a fiver, a huge meal can be had for fewer than £10. I can't comment on rent, but in general living expenses in London are less than New York and certainly less than Paris. The key is to earn pounds. If you don't have sterling than yes London will drain your wallet in the time it takes you to work out the difference between pants and trousers.
+
+The next day we set out for the Tate Modern and were joined by Thet's friend Terese who's originally from Sweden (Another friend of Thet's, Joy is from Thailand and her flatmate is from China. I traveled extensively in SE Asia with Londoners and spent my time in London with emigrants, which is exactly how I'd want it). <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/londonbridge.jpg" width="205" height="228" class="postpic" alt="London Bridge, London, England" />After taking the bus down to Bank and having a look at London Bridge, we walked in the sunshine along the Thames. We paused briefly to inspect the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare's works were first brought to the stage. I didn't go in because I wasn't in the mood for an organized, narrated walk through. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/londonglobetheatre.jpg" width="240" height="176" class="postpicright" alt="Shakespeare Globe Theatre, London, England" />Perhaps it's just the nerdy English major coming out in me, but it made me feel good to see that not only is Shakespeare still in print and still read, but the English have taken the time to reconstruct the Theatre as well (the original was destroyed by a fire and then The Globe V2 was destroyed by those pesky puritans). Art isn't dead. And people still read, pundits be damned. And the show always goes on.
+
+<a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/" title="Tate Modern Online">The Tate Modern</a> is an imposing, factory like building housing an impressive collection of Modern art. What's most impressive about the Tate Modern is that it's free (anyone been to the MOMA in New York lately? Decidedly not free), well you have to pay for the exhibitions, but the permanent collection is free. Unfortunately the Tate Modern was re-hanging much of their permanent collection (my museum timing has always been awful) so there was a limited amount of art on display. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/londontatecytwombly.jpg" width="161" height="230" class="postpic" alt="Cy Twombly, Tate Modern, London, England" />There are a number of amazing pieces by Jean Miro and Max Ernst, as well as some Picassos and the usual suspects of 20th Century art. But for me the highlight was Cy Twombly's paintings and sculptures. I have a friend who loves Cy Twombly so I was familiar with his work through books and photos, but frankly it always seemed a bit jumbled and lacking to me. However when you get up close to the actual canvas the detail is amazing and something about the four paintings at the Tate (entitled Quattro Stagioni - a painting in four parts) were spellbinding to me. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/londontatecytwomblytwo.jpg" width="172" height="240" class="postpicright" alt="Cy Twombly, Tate Modern, London, England" />Its as if you can actually feel the swirling chaos begin to envelope you and then settle to produce a calm that wasn't there before you stepped in front of them. I must have spent twenty minutes staring at them. Long enough that Thet and Terese were already outside waiting for me. Eventually I tore myself away, though I honestly could have stood there for a couple of hours.
+
+We walked down the river toward another gallery I have never heard of but which Thet promised me was good. It turned out that the gallery had packed it in and moved to Chelsea but I did get to see the London eye and Big Ben and Parliament and such tourist sites. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/londonparliament.jpg" width="230" height="173" class="postpic" alt="Parliament, Thames River, London England" />Eventually Terese had to go home and Thet and I stopped in at a riverside pub and sat outside drinking a few glasses of bitter. Oh yes, I forgot the best part, it was twenty degrees, the warmest day of the year so far in London and hardly a cloud in the sky. The atmosphere on the streets was near jubilation everyone smiling and invested with that same strange energy that I used to see after the first true thaw in Northampton. There is something about a long dark winter that makes you appreciate spring so much more. We sat in the sunshine and chatted about future trips and the essential differences between Americans and the British and then we headed home for a bite to eat.
+
+The following day the thermometer climbed up to 25 Celsius and we scrapped our original plans in favor of a barbeque in Hampstead Heath. We stopped by the grocery store and picked up a disposable grill and a few pieces of chicken and sausage and headed for the park. After climbing up a hill that overlooked all of London we sat down in the high, unmowed spring grasses. Luckily said grasses were green and water logged or we would probably have burned down a good portion of Hampstead Heath with our portable grill. We did not, as is suggested in the instructions, elevate the grill on rocks or bricks. No, we just set it on the grass and lit it up. As the flames whipped in the wind and began to light the long strands of grass on fire we started to get a little nervous. I stayed by the grill trying to press the grass down on all sides so it wouldn't catch fire while Thet looked for some stones or something nonflammable to set the grill on. I was a little concerned that the heat from the bottom of the grill was going to ignite the hillside before she got back (we all know the temperature at which books burn thanks to Mr. Bradbury, but I haven't a clue what temperature grass begins to spontaneously combust). Fortunately Thet found a good size log and disaster was averted. I would like to have seen the look on that border agent's face if I had burned down Hampstead Heath.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/londonmollyhampsteadheath.jpg" width="230" height="173" class="postpicright" alt="Hampstead Heath, London, England" />We grilled chicken and sausage and it wasn't long before every dog in the park was sniffing their way over to our little spot. For the most part they left when their owners called but one lab just stayed. Molly was her name and curiously she never went after the food. She simply sat in the grass in front of us and hung out. Perhaps she was just bored with her owner or maybe she was trying to escape the three poodles that she apparently lived with, whatever the case we had a dog for the afternoon. A friend of mine once suggested that there ought to be a dog rental service for those that wanted a dog, but not all the time. Well if you want a dog, get a grill and head for the park. Just be careful with the flames, London has a bad history of fires.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/londonthetteresejoyme.jpg" width="240" height="180" class="postpic" alt="Thet, Terese, Joy and me, London, England" />Later that night we met up with Terese and Joy and hit a few pubs on a street whose name I don't remember but which I gathered was well known for its bars and pubs.
+
+My last day we took it easy. I accompanied Thet on a few errands (by bizarre stroke of chance I have now been to the employment offices of both England and France, but still never made it to one in the States) and then we went to another park. That evening after having the requisite dinner of fish and chips we wandered about to a few pubs and called it an early night since I was leaving quite early in the morning.
+
+All in all I adjusted fairly quickly to being back in the west. Strangely the things that I thought might bother me didn't too much and things I hadn't considered became very noticeable. The most interesting change that I hadn't considered was the length of the day. For the last seven months I have been within a few hundred kilometers of the equator which means that the sun rises at about 6:30 and sets at about 6:30. In London however the sun doesn't set until well past eight at night, which completely messed up my sense of time. The best thing about the west though is that you can drink the tap water. I don't know why I enjoyed it so much, <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/londonnightbus.jpg" width="193" height="250" class="postpicright" alt="London at night from the bus" />probably simply because you can. And true tap water rarely tastes very good, but you don't realize what a great thing it is to brush your teeth in tap water until you haven't for a long time. Wash machines were also a revolutionary idea, too revolutionary for me.
+
+I wish that I had been able to stay in London longer, it's by far my favorite city I've visited on this trip and the only other city I would rank with New York (Paris and Bangkok are both nice and I enjoyed them both, but neither of them is at the same level as New York and London). There is something about both New York and London that the minute I arrive, I feel at home, as if that is where I ought to be, have always been and may well be forever.
+
+Many thanks to Thet and her friends for their hospitality and kindness to strangers; should I ever actually have a place in the U.S. you are all welcome whenever you like (and I'll read up on Manhattan landmarks so I can figure out where they are). 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Every colonizing country seems to leave behind some token of itself, a scent, not unlike a dog pausing to lift a leg on every tree it passes. </p> +<p>The French tend to leave behind Arc de Triomphes of varying sizes and a deep knowledge of bread making. With the Spanish it tends toward Stucco churches, the English a habit of afternoon tea and some distilleries. The Soviets version of leg lifting can be seen in the form of monstrous, boxy concrete high-rise apartment buildings as ugly, cheerless and cold as the former regime itself.</p> +<p><break></break></p> +<p>From the air over a Budapest the most immediately striking feature are the Soviet style high-rises just outside the old town areas. Which is not so say Hungarian architecture is lacking, just perhaps not as conspicuous ugly as that of the Soviets. I'm sure in due time the Hungarians will tear down these architectural insults as they have all the statues of Party leaders and Communist heroes (which some entrepreneurial sort bought up and placed in a park where today for a modest fee you can see Lenin and Stalin immortalized in iron and carefully quarantined outside of the city which never wanted anything to do with them), but for the time being the dominate the view from the air.</p> +<p>I spent a few minutes, maybe half an hour, at the airport studying the blocky structures from a distance, trying to get away from the immediately oppressive feeling they gave me. Eventually my shuttle bus arrived and pulled me out of the dismal stupor I had fallen into. The jostling of luggage and fellow passengers finding seats in the van provided a human inertia that slowly propelled me out of the gloomy mood that had crept over me. As we drove out of the suburbs toward the city I watched as the Soviet style apartment buildings slowly gave way to blocks of older vaguely Art Nouveau buildings until finally when we crossed the bridge into Pest I was confronted with the modern Budapest—the faceless glass of modern hotels juxtaposed against a background of striking Gothic-spired Churches and Baroque facades.</p> +<p>Budapest actually consists of two cities, Buda and Pest separated by the Danube River. The hotel where we were staying was located on the Pest side of the river. <amp-img alt="Danube banks Budapest Hungary" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestriverwalk.gif" width="194"></amp-img>High on the fifth floor, where my suitably generic but comfortable room was located, my balcony afforded a view of the small riverside walkway below where several cafes had tables and umbrellas overlooking the Danube and then beyond where the river floated lazily by and in the background Buda's Castle Hill district rose up from the opposite bank. I also had a clear view of the so-called Chain Bridge a few hundred meters up the river, one of three or four bridges that span the Danube linking Buda and Pest. </p> +<p>After getting settled in the hotel we decided to head out for a bit of an explore up the banks of the river. Walking along the Danube that night as the sun slowly sank behind the north end of Castle Hill and the shadows lengthened across the face of the old Parliament building, I came across a strange and vaguely disturbing monument of iron shoes sitting in pairs at the edge of the river. Most monuments, whether they commemorate misery or good fortune, exist as positive space, a statue in a square, a wall under some leafy trees, a cannon pointing out over a field, but a few, particularly those that commemorate loss, evoke emptiness and anguish through a sculptural negative space. </p> +<p>The iron shoes scattered there beside the river seemed to me a kind of sculptural synecdoche, tiny parts chosen to represent a whole which was forcibly removed from time. <amp-img alt="Shoe Memorial, Budapest, Hungary" height="250" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestshoes.gif" width="188"></amp-img>Approaching the shoes scattered on the concrete embankment one does not at first realize they are iron or even a sculpture as the iron is quite blackened and in the fading light of evening they looked as if a group of people simply left their shoes for an afternoon swim. But on closer examination one quickly notices that the styles and cuts of the shoes are outdated and harkened from some moment in the past. But it's a moment curiously suspended, as if the owners might at any moment climb back up out of the river into which they were cast and reclaim their lost footwear. </p> +<p>None of the various guidebooks we were carrying mentioned the monument, but a small plague embedded in the concrete back away from the shoes themselves commemorates the deaths of thousands Jews who were forced into the Danube by the Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazi Party). What's most striking about Sculptor Gyula Pauer's memorial is its quietude in the midst of so many rather loud, larger than life monuments and buildings like the towering pose of the nearby parliament buildings whose Gothic high arches and turrets seemed suddenly overwrought and desperate in their attempt to establish themselves. I thought of how sometimes the quietest statements are the most powerful, the way for instance Nick Drake's <em>Pink Moon</em>, though almost whispering at times, is one of the most formidable records I've heard.</p> +<p>The shoes sitting quietly there on the embankment, very nearly in the shadow of the Margit Island Bridge and so still against the backdrop of the Danube waters reminded me of Newton's famous analogy comparing the concept of time to the Thames River. <amp-img alt="Castle Hill Buda, Budapest, Hungary" height="173" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestcastlehillsunset.gif" width="230"></amp-img>If a substitution of rivers may be allowed, the shoes then seemed to me to perfectly capture a moment, a frozen piece of time which allowed one to circumventing the present through a sculptural trapdoor, to return to something that refused to be swept away by the river.</p> +<p>I recalled one evening in Cambodia when Rob remarked with some surprise that neither Matt nor Debi nor I had any kind of timepiece between us. And in fact none of us ever had. I don't know about either of them but I don't wear a watch. Once some years ago I badly burned my arm with boiling water. Most of the skin on the back of my hand and part of my wrist sloughed off and was cut away by surgeons. By a strange trick of physics the leather band of the wristwatch I was wearing at the time, wicked the water away from my skin before it could be burned. Thus I had a thin band of flesh surrounded by two rather disgusting areas of boiled skin. Eventually of course the burned skin healed, but curiously, the skin where my watch had been remained several shades lighter than that of the burned areas. In spite of the fact that the watch ostensibly saved my skin, it was that protected portion that looked out of place in the end. I decided then that I would never wear a watch again.</p> +<p>How I translated a burn and bit of discolored skin into an intense dislike of mechanical time is something I can't quite explain except to say that perhaps noticing what was not on my wrist suddenly made me keenly aware of other things that also were not there. Eventually the whole concept of time came to seem too arbitrary to me. Morning, evening, spring, fall these words evoke things, numbers require second hand translation and seem to me a wasted effort.</p> +<p>Later that evening after dinner I sat for a while outside on the balcony smoking cigarettes and contemplating the nightscape of Castle Hill which rose up out of the shimmering Danube waters. The drone of car horns in the distance and the electric <amp-img alt="Castle Hill, Buda, Budapest, Hungary" height="164" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestcastlehillnight.gif" width="230"></amp-img>tram squealing out of the station filled the evening air. A riverboat slowly churned up river with a handful of tourists pointing cameras back toward the banks, capturing moments of time, moments they will likely playback later for family and loved ones who were not there. I sincerely doubt if any of them will ever say “this was taken at 7 pm on May 10th.” Instead they will likely say this was our first evening in Budapest, this was the night we sailed along a river, and this was where we walked, danced and swam.</p> +<p>We set out early the next day to explore the Castle Hill area which is the oldest part of the city. The name Castle Hill fails to encapsulate the area. The left side of the hill is actually a palace where the kings once ruled and now stand several museums. The right side of the hill, still encircled by the castle walls contains Buda's old town quarter. All total the area is more than a kilometer long and encompasses a small city, referred to now as “old town” since like it or not time is our major marker of space.</p> +<p>Castle hill is a sprawling affair that reminded me somewhat of the similarly sprawling City Palace in Udaipur India. Both occupy the top of reasonable sized hills and both encircle what were once functioning cities. And both were constructed over long periods of time according the changing whims of successive rulers until looking at them today they become a reflection of the changing architectural tastes of their respective cultures.</p> +<p>Which is not to say that these two very different places have much in common beyond being large castles built on hills. When traveling for long periods of time it's easy to slip into the comfortable notion that one has seen and done certain things that need not be seen or done again. It is in other words easy to feel that if you've seen one tree you've seen them all. But if that were truly the case we could live the life of lightening bugs and be done with it by sunrise. A beech is not a maple is not an oak is certainly not a white fir, the differences in bark and leaves and roots and scent and shade and a million other things will leap out at you provided you pay attention. The notion that the part can be representative of the whole is popular in postmodernist circles, but take it outside the academic and it quickly shows itself as it is—a failure of the imagination.</p> +<p>I believe that one could pick at random any one object and study it, look at it, feel it, breathe it, hear it and be with it every day for the rest of your life without ever really being able to say that you know it, that you understand it, that it has failed to move you, provoke you or challenge you in some way you weren't expecting. One of my favorite characters in film is Harvey Keitel's character in Wayne Wang's <em>Smoke</em>. Keitel's character, Aggie, takes the same photograph of the same scene from the same place at the same time every day for ten years and has all the prints in massive photo albums and explains to John Hurt's character the subtle differences between each. That's the sort of patience and dedication and love that we all ought to aspire to. </p> +<p>We spent the better part of the morning wandering the castle grounds, the narrow streets of old town and a made brief visit to the Hungarian National Gallery. Eventually some clouds rolled in and after lunch a light drizzle began to fall. My parents decided to head back since they were still adjusting to the time change. <amp-img alt="Old Town Castle Hill, Budapest, Hungary" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestcasthillstreet.gif" width="180"></amp-img>I set out to find the underground passageways that lace the hillside beneath the castle. Most of the area from Budapest south is largely comprised a very porous limestone known as Karst (which, if you've been reading this site for while, you may remember also formed the caves I visited in Laos). Over millions of years the water that seeps into the Karst eventually carves out caves and tunnels. The ones beneath Castle Hill in Buda have been slightly improved by man over the centuries and have served as everything from wine cellar to bomb shelter depending on the times.</p> +<p>Today for a modest fee you can wander through a labyrinth of damp tunnels with dim lights and faux cave paintings in what I believe is supposed to give you taste of Neolithic religion and superstition or at least someone's idea of Neolithic caves, but unfortunately it comes off a little too campy to be all that interesting. It was a nice escape from the rain, but when I emerged out the far end of the tunnel I was craving something a little less Disneylandish.</p> +<p>I set out alone to escape the crowds of Castle Hill and explore the more modern parts of the city. Something in a travel brochure on the airplane had caught my eye and I decided to see if I could find my way to the tomb of Gul Baba a Turkish Whirling dervish <amp-img alt="Gul Baba, Whirling Dervish, Budapest, Hungary" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestgulbaba.gif" width="165"></amp-img>who died in Budapest in 1541. I don't know much about whirling dervishes aside from the fact that their Turkish in origin and a friend of mine is in a band of the same name (if you're curious you can visit <a href="http://www.myspace.com/thewhirlingdervish" title="Info on Whirling Dervish the band">whirling dervish's website for more info on the band</a>, but the rumor has it that Gul Baba brought the rose to Buda and the hill on which the tomb rests is known as Rose Hill.</p> +<p>The truth is that while the Dervish tomb appealed to me I mostly wanted to walk through the streets of the real part of the city since the downside to four star travel is that you're typically sequestered in tourist ghettos, though in Budapest it was more of a business traveler ghetto. In either case you don't really get to see the everyday life of the locals. So I walked through the rain to the tomb, made a few photographs and ducked into a cafe on my way home for a cup of coffee and bite of Hungarian pastry. </p> +<p>I sat in the back corner of the cafe waiting for the rain to let up thinking of the Hungarian Museum of Fine Art. For the most part there was little of note. The only highlight outside the Spanish gallery of El Grecco and Goya was a single piece from Gauguin's period in Tahiti. I don't recall the name of the painting, <amp-img alt="Old Woman at Window, Hungary" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestwindowwoman.gif" width="240"></amp-img>it wasn't very large, but the vibrant colors and almost overwhelming sense of passion and life made it fairly leap off the wall next to more muted Monet's and Picassos. Gauguin paid attention and he loved what he saw. His fascination with color seems to have eclipsed nearly every other concern in his mind. Figures are vague as if transitory and chiefly memorable for the light they reflect, background and foreground blend, what matters is not the precise place, nor the precise time, but the color, the color of the world that distinguishes not between only shade and tone and hue and tint to reveal the kaleidoscope that is always all around us.</p> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/refracted-light-and-grace.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/refracted-light-and-grace.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e7fb2bc --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/refracted-light-and-grace.html @@ -0,0 +1,349 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>Refracted Light And Grace - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="Going upscale in Budapest: watching the Danube from my balcony, smoking cigarettes and enjoying the nightscape of Buda's Castle Hill. 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Every colonizing country seems to leave behind some token of itself, a scent, not unlike a dog pausing to lift a leg on every tree it passes. </p> +<p>The French tend to leave behind Arc de Triomphes of varying sizes and a deep knowledge of bread making. With the Spanish it tends toward Stucco churches, the English a habit of afternoon tea and some distilleries. The Soviets version of leg lifting can be seen in the form of monstrous, boxy concrete high-rise apartment buildings as ugly, cheerless and cold as the former regime itself.</p> +<p><break></p> +<p>From the air over a Budapest the most immediately striking feature are the Soviet style high-rises just outside the old town areas. Which is not so say Hungarian architecture is lacking, just perhaps not as conspicuous ugly as that of the Soviets. I’m sure in due time the Hungarians will tear down these architectural insults as they have all the statues of Party leaders and Communist heroes (which some entrepreneurial sort bought up and placed in a park where today for a modest fee you can see Lenin and Stalin immortalized in iron and carefully quarantined outside of the city which never wanted anything to do with them), but for the time being the dominate the view from the air.</p> +<p>I spent a few minutes, maybe half an hour, at the airport studying the blocky structures from a distance, trying to get away from the immediately oppressive feeling they gave me. Eventually my shuttle bus arrived and pulled me out of the dismal stupor I had fallen into. The jostling of luggage and fellow passengers finding seats in the van provided a human inertia that slowly propelled me out of the gloomy mood that had crept over me. As we drove out of the suburbs toward the city I watched as the Soviet style apartment buildings slowly gave way to blocks of older vaguely Art Nouveau buildings until finally when we crossed the bridge into Pest I was confronted with the modern Budapest—the faceless glass of modern hotels juxtaposed against a background of striking Gothic-spired Churches and Baroque facades.</p> +<p>Budapest actually consists of two cities, Buda and Pest separated by the Danube River. The hotel where we were staying was located on the Pest side of the river. <img alt="Danube banks Budapest Hungary" class="postpicright" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestriverwalk.gif" width="194"/>High on the fifth floor, where my suitably generic but comfortable room was located, my balcony afforded a view of the small riverside walkway below where several cafes had tables and umbrellas overlooking the Danube and then beyond where the river floated lazily by and in the background Buda’s Castle Hill district rose up from the opposite bank. I also had a clear view of the so-called Chain Bridge a few hundred meters up the river, one of three or four bridges that span the Danube linking Buda and Pest. </p> +<p>After getting settled in the hotel we decided to head out for a bit of an explore up the banks of the river. Walking along the Danube that night as the sun slowly sank behind the north end of Castle Hill and the shadows lengthened across the face of the old Parliament building, I came across a strange and vaguely disturbing monument of iron shoes sitting in pairs at the edge of the river. Most monuments, whether they commemorate misery or good fortune, exist as positive space, a statue in a square, a wall under some leafy trees, a cannon pointing out over a field, but a few, particularly those that commemorate loss, evoke emptiness and anguish through a sculptural negative space. </p> +<p>The iron shoes scattered there beside the river seemed to me a kind of sculptural synecdoche, tiny parts chosen to represent a whole which was forcibly removed from time. <img alt="Shoe Memorial, Budapest, Hungary" class="postpic" height="250" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestshoes.gif" width="188"/>Approaching the shoes scattered on the concrete embankment one does not at first realize they are iron or even a sculpture as the iron is quite blackened and in the fading light of evening they looked as if a group of people simply left their shoes for an afternoon swim. But on closer examination one quickly notices that the styles and cuts of the shoes are outdated and harkened from some moment in the past. But it’s a moment curiously suspended, as if the owners might at any moment climb back up out of the river into which they were cast and reclaim their lost footwear. </p> +<p>None of the various guidebooks we were carrying mentioned the monument, but a small plague embedded in the concrete back away from the shoes themselves commemorates the deaths of thousands Jews who were forced into the Danube by the Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazi Party). What’s most striking about Sculptor Gyula Pauer’s memorial is its quietude in the midst of so many rather loud, larger than life monuments and buildings like the towering pose of the nearby parliament buildings whose Gothic high arches and turrets seemed suddenly overwrought and desperate in their attempt to establish themselves. I thought of how sometimes the quietest statements are the most powerful, the way for instance Nick Drake’s <em>Pink Moon</em>, though almost whispering at times, is one of the most formidable records I’ve heard.</p> +<p>The shoes sitting quietly there on the embankment, very nearly in the shadow of the Margit Island Bridge and so still against the backdrop of the Danube waters reminded me of Newton’s famous analogy comparing the concept of time to the Thames River. <img alt="Castle Hill Buda, Budapest, Hungary" class="postpicright" height="173" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestcastlehillsunset.gif" width="230"/>If a substitution of rivers may be allowed, the shoes then seemed to me to perfectly capture a moment, a frozen piece of time which allowed one to circumventing the present through a sculptural trapdoor, to return to something that refused to be swept away by the river.</p> +<p>I recalled one evening in Cambodia when Rob remarked with some surprise that neither Matt nor Debi nor I had any kind of timepiece between us. And in fact none of us ever had. I don’t know about either of them but I don’t wear a watch. Once some years ago I badly burned my arm with boiling water. Most of the skin on the back of my hand and part of my wrist sloughed off and was cut away by surgeons. By a strange trick of physics the leather band of the wristwatch I was wearing at the time, wicked the water away from my skin before it could be burned. Thus I had a thin band of flesh surrounded by two rather disgusting areas of boiled skin. Eventually of course the burned skin healed, but curiously, the skin where my watch had been remained several shades lighter than that of the burned areas. In spite of the fact that the watch ostensibly saved my skin, it was that protected portion that looked out of place in the end. I decided then that I would never wear a watch again.</p> +<p>How I translated a burn and bit of discolored skin into an intense dislike of mechanical time is something I can’t quite explain except to say that perhaps noticing what was not on my wrist suddenly made me keenly aware of other things that also were not there. Eventually the whole concept of time came to seem too arbitrary to me. Morning, evening, spring, fall these words evoke things, numbers require second hand translation and seem to me a wasted effort.</p> +<p>Later that evening after dinner I sat for a while outside on the balcony smoking cigarettes and contemplating the nightscape of Castle Hill which rose up out of the shimmering Danube waters. The drone of car horns in the distance and the electric <img alt="Castle Hill, Buda, Budapest, Hungary" class="postpic" height="164" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestcastlehillnight.gif" width="230"/>tram squealing out of the station filled the evening air. A riverboat slowly churned up river with a handful of tourists pointing cameras back toward the banks, capturing moments of time, moments they will likely playback later for family and loved ones who were not there. I sincerely doubt if any of them will ever say “this was taken at 7 pm on May 10th.” Instead they will likely say this was our first evening in Budapest, this was the night we sailed along a river, and this was where we walked, danced and swam.</p> +<p>We set out early the next day to explore the Castle Hill area which is the oldest part of the city. The name Castle Hill fails to encapsulate the area. The left side of the hill is actually a palace where the kings once ruled and now stand several museums. The right side of the hill, still encircled by the castle walls contains Buda’s old town quarter. All total the area is more than a kilometer long and encompasses a small city, referred to now as “old town” since like it or not time is our major marker of space.</p> +<p>Castle hill is a sprawling affair that reminded me somewhat of the similarly sprawling City Palace in Udaipur India. Both occupy the top of reasonable sized hills and both encircle what were once functioning cities. And both were constructed over long periods of time according the changing whims of successive rulers until looking at them today they become a reflection of the changing architectural tastes of their respective cultures.</p> +<p>Which is not to say that these two very different places have much in common beyond being large castles built on hills. When traveling for long periods of time it’s easy to slip into the comfortable notion that one has seen and done certain things that need not be seen or done again. It is in other words easy to feel that if you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all. But if that were truly the case we could live the life of lightening bugs and be done with it by sunrise. A beech is not a maple is not an oak is certainly not a white fir, the differences in bark and leaves and roots and scent and shade and a million other things will leap out at you provided you pay attention. The notion that the part can be representative of the whole is popular in postmodernist circles, but take it outside the academic and it quickly shows itself as it is—a failure of the imagination.</p> +<p>I believe that one could pick at random any one object and study it, look at it, feel it, breathe it, hear it and be with it every day for the rest of your life without ever really being able to say that you know it, that you understand it, that it has failed to move you, provoke you or challenge you in some way you weren’t expecting. One of my favorite characters in film is Harvey Keitel’s character in Wayne Wang’s <em>Smoke</em>. Keitel’s character, Aggie, takes the same photograph of the same scene from the same place at the same time every day for ten years and has all the prints in massive photo albums and explains to John Hurt’s character the subtle differences between each. That’s the sort of patience and dedication and love that we all ought to aspire to. </p> +<p>We spent the better part of the morning wandering the castle grounds, the narrow streets of old town and a made brief visit to the Hungarian National Gallery. Eventually some clouds rolled in and after lunch a light drizzle began to fall. My parents decided to head back since they were still adjusting to the time change. <img alt="Old Town Castle Hill, Budapest, Hungary" class="postpicright" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestcasthillstreet.gif" width="180"/>I set out to find the underground passageways that lace the hillside beneath the castle. Most of the area from Budapest south is largely comprised a very porous limestone known as Karst (which, if you’ve been reading this site for while, you may remember also formed the caves I visited in Laos). Over millions of years the water that seeps into the Karst eventually carves out caves and tunnels. The ones beneath Castle Hill in Buda have been slightly improved by man over the centuries and have served as everything from wine cellar to bomb shelter depending on the times.</p> +<p>Today for a modest fee you can wander through a labyrinth of damp tunnels with dim lights and faux cave paintings in what I believe is supposed to give you taste of Neolithic religion and superstition or at least someone’s idea of Neolithic caves, but unfortunately it comes off a little too campy to be all that interesting. It was a nice escape from the rain, but when I emerged out the far end of the tunnel I was craving something a little less Disneylandish.</p> +<p>I set out alone to escape the crowds of Castle Hill and explore the more modern parts of the city. Something in a travel brochure on the airplane had caught my eye and I decided to see if I could find my way to the tomb of Gul Baba a Turkish Whirling dervish <img alt="Gul Baba, Whirling Dervish, Budapest, Hungary" class="postpic" height="220" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestgulbaba.gif" width="165"/>who died in Budapest in 1541. I don’t know much about whirling dervishes aside from the fact that their Turkish in origin and a friend of mine is in a band of the same name (if you’re curious you can visit <a href="http://www.myspace.com/thewhirlingdervish" title="Info on Whirling Dervish the band">whirling dervish’s website for more info on the band</a>, but the rumor has it that Gul Baba brought the rose to Buda and the hill on which the tomb rests is known as Rose Hill.</p> +<p>The truth is that while the Dervish tomb appealed to me I mostly wanted to walk through the streets of the real part of the city since the downside to four star travel is that you’re typically sequestered in tourist ghettos, though in Budapest it was more of a business traveler ghetto. In either case you don’t really get to see the everyday life of the locals. So I walked through the rain to the tomb, made a few photographs and ducked into a cafe on my way home for a cup of coffee and bite of Hungarian pastry. </p> +<p>I sat in the back corner of the cafe waiting for the rain to let up thinking of the Hungarian Museum of Fine Art. For the most part there was little of note. The only highlight outside the Spanish gallery of El Grecco and Goya was a single piece from Gauguin’s period in Tahiti. I don’t recall the name of the painting, <img alt="Old Woman at Window, Hungary" class="postpicright" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/budapestwindowwoman.gif" width="240"/>it wasn’t very large, but the vibrant colors and almost overwhelming sense of passion and life made it fairly leap off the wall next to more muted Monet’s and Picassos. Gauguin paid attention and he loved what he saw. His fascination with color seems to have eclipsed nearly every other concern in his mind. Figures are vague as if transitory and chiefly memorable for the light they reflect, background and foreground blend, what matters is not the precise place, nor the precise time, but the color, the color of the world that distinguishes not between only shade and tone and hue and tint to reveal the kaleidoscope that is always all around us.</p> + </div> + + </article> + + + <div class="nav-wrapper"> + <nav id="page-navigation" class="page-border-top"> + <ul> + <li id="prev"><span class="bl">Previous:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/london-calling" rel="prev" title=" London Calling">London Calling</a> + </li> + <li id="next"><span class="bl">Next:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/blue-milk" rel="next" title=" Blue Milk">Blue Milk</a> + </li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + + + + + + +<div class="comment--form--wrapper "> + +<div class="comment--form--header"> + <p class="hed">Thoughts?</p> + <p class="subhed">Please leave a reply:</p> +</div> +<form action="/comments/post/" method="post" class="comment--form"> + +<input type="hidden" name="rder" value="" /> + + + <input type="hidden" name="content_type" value="jrnl.entry" id="id_content_type"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="object_pk" value="57" id="id_object_pk"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="timestamp" value="1596833476" id="id_timestamp"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="security_hash" value="0cd870f2e7fbd176a2e9811754dac262680c2ab1" id="id_security_hash"> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_name">Name:</label> + <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="50" required id="id_name"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_email">Email address:</label> + <input type="email" name="email" required id="id_email"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_url">URL:</label> + <input type="url" name="url" id="id_url"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> + <div class="textarea-rounded"><textarea name="comment" cols="40" rows="10" maxlength="3000" required id="id_comment"> +</textarea></div> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset style="display:none;"> + <label for="id_honeypot">If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam:</label> + <input type="text" name="honeypot" id="id_honeypot"> + </fieldset> + + + <div class="submit"> + <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post btn" value="Post" /> + <input type="submit" name="preview" class="submit-preview btn" value="Preview" /> + </div> +</form> +<p style="font-size: 95%;"><strong>All comments are moderated</strong>, so you won’t see it right away. 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Every colonizing country seems to leave behind some token of itself, a scent, not unlike a dog pausing to lift a leg on every tree it passes.
+
+The French tend to leave behind Arc de Triomphes of varying sizes and a deep knowledge of bread making. With the Spanish it tends toward Stucco churches, the English a habit of afternoon tea and some distilleries. The Soviets version of leg lifting can be seen in the form of monstrous, boxy concrete high-rise apartment buildings as ugly, cheerless and cold as the former regime itself.
+
+<break>
+
+From the air over a Budapest the most immediately striking feature are the Soviet style high-rises just outside the old town areas. Which is not so say Hungarian architecture is lacking, just perhaps not as conspicuous ugly as that of the Soviets. I'm sure in due time the Hungarians will tear down these architectural insults as they have all the statues of Party leaders and Communist heroes (which some entrepreneurial sort bought up and placed in a park where today for a modest fee you can see Lenin and Stalin immortalized in iron and carefully quarantined outside of the city which never wanted anything to do with them), but for the time being the dominate the view from the air.
+
+I spent a few minutes, maybe half an hour, at the airport studying the blocky structures from a distance, trying to get away from the immediately oppressive feeling they gave me. Eventually my shuttle bus arrived and pulled me out of the dismal stupor I had fallen into. The jostling of luggage and fellow passengers finding seats in the van provided a human inertia that slowly propelled me out of the gloomy mood that had crept over me. As we drove out of the suburbs toward the city I watched as the Soviet style apartment buildings slowly gave way to blocks of older vaguely Art Nouveau buildings until finally when we crossed the bridge into Pest I was confronted with the modern Budapest—the faceless glass of modern hotels juxtaposed against a background of striking Gothic-spired Churches and Baroque facades.
+
+Budapest actually consists of two cities, Buda and Pest separated by the Danube River. The hotel where we were staying was located on the Pest side of the river. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/budapestriverwalk.gif" width="194" height="230" class="postpicright" alt="Danube banks Budapest Hungary" />High on the fifth floor, where my suitably generic but comfortable room was located, my balcony afforded a view of the small riverside walkway below where several cafes had tables and umbrellas overlooking the Danube and then beyond where the river floated lazily by and in the background Buda's Castle Hill district rose up from the opposite bank. I also had a clear view of the so-called Chain Bridge a few hundred meters up the river, one of three or four bridges that span the Danube linking Buda and Pest.
+
+After getting settled in the hotel we decided to head out for a bit of an explore up the banks of the river. Walking along the Danube that night as the sun slowly sank behind the north end of Castle Hill and the shadows lengthened across the face of the old Parliament building, I came across a strange and vaguely disturbing monument of iron shoes sitting in pairs at the edge of the river. Most monuments, whether they commemorate misery or good fortune, exist as positive space, a statue in a square, a wall under some leafy trees, a cannon pointing out over a field, but a few, particularly those that commemorate loss, evoke emptiness and anguish through a sculptural negative space.
+
+The iron shoes scattered there beside the river seemed to me a kind of sculptural synecdoche, tiny parts chosen to represent a whole which was forcibly removed from time. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/budapestshoes.gif" width="188" height="250" class="postpic" alt="Shoe Memorial, Budapest, Hungary" />Approaching the shoes scattered on the concrete embankment one does not at first realize they are iron or even a sculpture as the iron is quite blackened and in the fading light of evening they looked as if a group of people simply left their shoes for an afternoon swim. But on closer examination one quickly notices that the styles and cuts of the shoes are outdated and harkened from some moment in the past. But it's a moment curiously suspended, as if the owners might at any moment climb back up out of the river into which they were cast and reclaim their lost footwear.
+
+None of the various guidebooks we were carrying mentioned the monument, but a small plague embedded in the concrete back away from the shoes themselves commemorates the deaths of thousands Jews who were forced into the Danube by the Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazi Party). What's most striking about Sculptor Gyula Pauer's memorial is its quietude in the midst of so many rather loud, larger than life monuments and buildings like the towering pose of the nearby parliament buildings whose Gothic high arches and turrets seemed suddenly overwrought and desperate in their attempt to establish themselves. I thought of how sometimes the quietest statements are the most powerful, the way for instance Nick Drake's <em>Pink Moon</em>, though almost whispering at times, is one of the most formidable records I've heard.
+
+The shoes sitting quietly there on the embankment, very nearly in the shadow of the Margit Island Bridge and so still against the backdrop of the Danube waters reminded me of Newton's famous analogy comparing the concept of time to the Thames River. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/budapestcastlehillsunset.gif" width="230" height="173" class="postpicright" alt="Castle Hill Buda, Budapest, Hungary" />If a substitution of rivers may be allowed, the shoes then seemed to me to perfectly capture a moment, a frozen piece of time which allowed one to circumventing the present through a sculptural trapdoor, to return to something that refused to be swept away by the river.
+
+I recalled one evening in Cambodia when Rob remarked with some surprise that neither Matt nor Debi nor I had any kind of timepiece between us. And in fact none of us ever had. I don't know about either of them but I don't wear a watch. Once some years ago I badly burned my arm with boiling water. Most of the skin on the back of my hand and part of my wrist sloughed off and was cut away by surgeons. By a strange trick of physics the leather band of the wristwatch I was wearing at the time, wicked the water away from my skin before it could be burned. Thus I had a thin band of flesh surrounded by two rather disgusting areas of boiled skin. Eventually of course the burned skin healed, but curiously, the skin where my watch had been remained several shades lighter than that of the burned areas. In spite of the fact that the watch ostensibly saved my skin, it was that protected portion that looked out of place in the end. I decided then that I would never wear a watch again.
+
+How I translated a burn and bit of discolored skin into an intense dislike of mechanical time is something I can't quite explain except to say that perhaps noticing what was not on my wrist suddenly made me keenly aware of other things that also were not there. Eventually the whole concept of time came to seem too arbitrary to me. Morning, evening, spring, fall these words evoke things, numbers require second hand translation and seem to me a wasted effort.
+
+Later that evening after dinner I sat for a while outside on the balcony smoking cigarettes and contemplating the nightscape of Castle Hill which rose up out of the shimmering Danube waters. The drone of car horns in the distance and the electric <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/budapestcastlehillnight.gif" width="230" height="164" class="postpic" alt="Castle Hill, Buda, Budapest, Hungary" />tram squealing out of the station filled the evening air. A riverboat slowly churned up river with a handful of tourists pointing cameras back toward the banks, capturing moments of time, moments they will likely playback later for family and loved ones who were not there. I sincerely doubt if any of them will ever say “this was taken at 7 pm on May 10th.” Instead they will likely say this was our first evening in Budapest, this was the night we sailed along a river, and this was where we walked, danced and swam.
+
+We set out early the next day to explore the Castle Hill area which is the oldest part of the city. The name Castle Hill fails to encapsulate the area. The left side of the hill is actually a palace where the kings once ruled and now stand several museums. The right side of the hill, still encircled by the castle walls contains Buda's old town quarter. All total the area is more than a kilometer long and encompasses a small city, referred to now as “old town” since like it or not time is our major marker of space.
+
+Castle hill is a sprawling affair that reminded me somewhat of the similarly sprawling City Palace in Udaipur India. Both occupy the top of reasonable sized hills and both encircle what were once functioning cities. And both were constructed over long periods of time according the changing whims of successive rulers until looking at them today they become a reflection of the changing architectural tastes of their respective cultures.
+
+Which is not to say that these two very different places have much in common beyond being large castles built on hills. When traveling for long periods of time it's easy to slip into the comfortable notion that one has seen and done certain things that need not be seen or done again. It is in other words easy to feel that if you've seen one tree you've seen them all. But if that were truly the case we could live the life of lightening bugs and be done with it by sunrise. A beech is not a maple is not an oak is certainly not a white fir, the differences in bark and leaves and roots and scent and shade and a million other things will leap out at you provided you pay attention. The notion that the part can be representative of the whole is popular in postmodernist circles, but take it outside the academic and it quickly shows itself as it is—a failure of the imagination.
+
+I believe that one could pick at random any one object and study it, look at it, feel it, breathe it, hear it and be with it every day for the rest of your life without ever really being able to say that you know it, that you understand it, that it has failed to move you, provoke you or challenge you in some way you weren't expecting. One of my favorite characters in film is Harvey Keitel's character in Wayne Wang's <em>Smoke</em>. Keitel's character, Aggie, takes the same photograph of the same scene from the same place at the same time every day for ten years and has all the prints in massive photo albums and explains to John Hurt's character the subtle differences between each. That's the sort of patience and dedication and love that we all ought to aspire to.
+
+We spent the better part of the morning wandering the castle grounds, the narrow streets of old town and a made brief visit to the Hungarian National Gallery. Eventually some clouds rolled in and after lunch a light drizzle began to fall. My parents decided to head back since they were still adjusting to the time change. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/budapestcasthillstreet.gif" width="180" height="240" class="postpicright" alt="Old Town Castle Hill, Budapest, Hungary" />I set out to find the underground passageways that lace the hillside beneath the castle. Most of the area from Budapest south is largely comprised a very porous limestone known as Karst (which, if you've been reading this site for while, you may remember also formed the caves I visited in Laos). Over millions of years the water that seeps into the Karst eventually carves out caves and tunnels. The ones beneath Castle Hill in Buda have been slightly improved by man over the centuries and have served as everything from wine cellar to bomb shelter depending on the times.
+
+Today for a modest fee you can wander through a labyrinth of damp tunnels with dim lights and faux cave paintings in what I believe is supposed to give you taste of Neolithic religion and superstition or at least someone's idea of Neolithic caves, but unfortunately it comes off a little too campy to be all that interesting. It was a nice escape from the rain, but when I emerged out the far end of the tunnel I was craving something a little less Disneylandish.
+
+I set out alone to escape the crowds of Castle Hill and explore the more modern parts of the city. Something in a travel brochure on the airplane had caught my eye and I decided to see if I could find my way to the tomb of Gul Baba a Turkish Whirling dervish <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/budapestgulbaba.gif" width="165" height="220" class="postpic" alt="Gul Baba, Whirling Dervish, Budapest, Hungary" />who died in Budapest in 1541. I don't know much about whirling dervishes aside from the fact that their Turkish in origin and a friend of mine is in a band of the same name (if you're curious you can visit <a href="http://www.myspace.com/thewhirlingdervish" title="Info on Whirling Dervish the band">whirling dervish's website for more info on the band</a>, but the rumor has it that Gul Baba brought the rose to Buda and the hill on which the tomb rests is known as Rose Hill.
+
+The truth is that while the Dervish tomb appealed to me I mostly wanted to walk through the streets of the real part of the city since the downside to four star travel is that you're typically sequestered in tourist ghettos, though in Budapest it was more of a business traveler ghetto. In either case you don't really get to see the everyday life of the locals. So I walked through the rain to the tomb, made a few photographs and ducked into a cafe on my way home for a cup of coffee and bite of Hungarian pastry.
+
+I sat in the back corner of the cafe waiting for the rain to let up thinking of the Hungarian Museum of Fine Art. For the most part there was little of note. The only highlight outside the Spanish gallery of El Grecco and Goya was a single piece from Gauguin's period in Tahiti. I don't recall the name of the painting, <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/budapestwindowwoman.gif" width="240" height="180" class="postpicright" alt="Old Woman at Window, Hungary" />it wasn't very large, but the vibrant colors and almost overwhelming sense of passion and life made it fairly leap off the wall next to more muted Monet's and Picassos. Gauguin paid attention and he loved what he saw. His fascination with color seems to have eclipsed nearly every other concern in his mind. Figures are vague as if transitory and chiefly memorable for the light they reflect, background and foreground blend, what matters is not the precise place, nor the precise time, but the color, the color of the world that distinguishes not between only shade and tone and hue and tint to reveal the kaleidoscope that is always all around us. diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/unreflected.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/unreflected.amp new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e49f254 --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/unreflected.amp @@ -0,0 +1,201 @@ + + +<!doctype html> +<html amp lang="en"> +<head> +<meta charset="utf-8"> +<title>Unreflected</title> +<link rel="canonical" href="https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2006/05/unreflected"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,minimum-scale=1"> + <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"/> + <meta name="twitter:url" content="/jrnl/2006/05/unreflected"> + <meta name="twitter:description" content="Finding Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and learning to play Frogger on the Ringstraße. 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Before this trip I was a dedicated driver, I've driven coast to coast across the U.S. six times and countless trips through the west, new England and the south (I once did LA to Atlanta in 26 hours straight through), but for some reason I've lost my taste for driving. So I was actually elated when we ditched the car in Prague and hopped a train for Vienna. Public transportation is much much better, you can relax, have a beer and meet strangers with funny hats.</p> +<p><break> +<amp-img alt="" height="216" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/mantrain.jpg" width="200"></amp-img>Of course sometimes public transportation breaks and you find yourself in Slovakia instead of Austria, but these things are temporary. Usually. Or at least in this case it was. We spent a few hours loitering on Slovakian tracks waiting for another train to pass and then continued on in a roundabout way to Vienna during which time I was regretfully reminded of the inanity involved in conversing with Young American Males.</break></p> +<p>Vienna is a strange city; one I had trouble wrapping my head around at first. The old town area lies inside the Ringstraße (hereafter referred to as Ringstrasse because writing out that entity in html is a pain)<sup id="fnr-001"><a href="#fn-001">[1]</a></sup>. The Ringstrasse is a wide circular boulevard that runs, as its name implies, in a circle around the old city center. Inside the Ringstrasse are the fantastically massive Hapsburg Palace, several large churches and the upscale tourist destinations, hotels, shops and that sort of thing. The old city is ostensibly closed to traffic, though that doesn't see to stop the taxis, and consequently it's the tourist hub of Vienna.</p> +<p>Though I'm sure it was a carefully studied urban planning venture, which on paper sounds like a beautiful idea, a vehicleless downtown full of street markets, cafes, cobblestones and coffeehouses, in practice the Ringstrasse effectively isolates the center of Vienna and it left me feeling a bit trapped. Though I was excited to leave the car behind in Prague, I found myself once again seemingly wedged and isolated by vehicles as I watched a dizzying circle entrapping downtown visitors like corralled cattle. One afternoon I sat on a bench beside the Ringstrasse, smoking cigarettes under the still dripping leaves of an elm tree, watching the traffic ferry past like a scene in Koyaanisqatsi, and started to wonder if Frogger was by chance designed by an Austrian.</p> +<p><amp-img alt="St Stephens Cathedral, Vienna, Austria" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennaststephens.jpg" width="161"></amp-img>After a day or two wandering among the Baroque facade of St. Stephens Cathedral, snacking of vast arrays of sausage and cabbage, learning to love oversize pints of hefeweizen, and generally avoiding all things castle or palace-like, I finally ventured out to the Kunsthistorisches Museum (which is admittedly not actually outside the Ringstrasse, but something about just seeing the vast open space just beyond the boulevard made me feel like I was again part of a city rather than stuck in a hole, cut off in the middle of a city).</p> +<p>The Kunsthistorisches Museum contains probably the best collection of art outside of France — Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Raphael, Velazquez, Bruegel and a certain Italian for whom I have a festering personal obsession, which shall be addressed shortly — and what's remarkable about this magnificent assemblage is that the vast majority of it was once the Hapsburg's private collection. The history of European ruling families is soaked in money, petty squabbles, the occasional inbreeding and plenty of sordid underbellies, but some of these families did have remarkable aesthetic vision in spite of their various handicaps. Yes I do think that wealth and power are handicaps to understanding the world around you because they remove you from the intricate struggles of everyday life and that in turn is a handicap to anything that might be called the development of an aesthetic sense based on something more than whim, fancy or cultural popularity, but let's be clear that handicaps are not insurmountable as the Hapsburg collection attests, which is to say that occasionally rich people are able to grasp greatness.</p> +<p>It had just stopped raining when I made my way from our penzion over to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, rivulets of water ran between the cobblestone cracks and seeped through the long since worn-through soles of my shoes which caused my socks to make disturbing squishing sounds as I walked. The sky was a heavy leaden grey and looked as if it might start again the chilly drizzling rain that had been hanging around ever since we arrived. After paying the requisite fees and obtaining an audio guide (which I generally never bother with but for some reason on that day I felt the need to hear a voice), I wandered about the foyer for a minute absorbing the heavy baroque ceilings three stories overhead and the dark wood floors scuffed by the feet of the millions who passed through before me.</p> +<p>I had come mainly to see the works of Hieronymus Bosch, or at least out the painters mentioned in the brochure at our penzion, Bosch was the only one I found exciting. If you've never seen a Hieronymus Bosch painting they can be a bit shocking, especially considering he was painting around the turn of the 16<sup>th</sup> century. Bosch mixed mysticism, realism, religious symbolism, highly cerebral sense of irony, and magical iconography into a phantasmagoric stew that puts to shame the later so-called surrealists. Though I don't know that much about either of them Bosch and William Blake always come together in my mind. <amp-img alt="Paradise, or Allegory of Vanity, Hieronymus Bosch" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennabosch.jpg" width="179"></amp-img>Carl Jung called Bosch "The master of the monstrous… the discoverer of the unconscious," which could just as easily be applied to Blake. Philip II of Spain bought up the vast majority of Bosch's work long ago, and I probably shouldn't have expected to find much at the Kunsthistorisches Museum since I already knew most of his work is in the Prado Museum in Madrid, but I was a bit disappointed to find there were only two paintings in the Kunsthistorisches (<strong>The Adoration of the Kings</strong> is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for those looking for something closer to home). </p> +<p>Having rushed impatiently through the museum to find the Bosch, which, was every bit as gorgeous as I had hoped, though I was disappointed that the one I liked, <strong>Paradise, or Allegory of Vanity</strong>, didn't have an audio tour entry, I retraced my steps and wandered about the maze-like floor plan absorbing Dutch and Flemish painters whose names rang like a distant telephone you can hear, one you have in fact been hearing for years, but have never bothered to answer; maybe you didn't know it was a telephone, perhaps it just sounded like a murmur, that far off tone of the alarm clock before the world resolves itself out of sleep and becomes an actual object, a thing, an alarm, a phone, a Vermeer. But as semanticists are always pointing out, objects are not actually things, they are events, molecules arriving simultaneously at a lavish ballroom party, spinning, coalescing and collapsing in time to become what we <strong>call</strong> an object. And I don't mean that to be some overwrought analytical deconstruction, but rather as a beautiful thing, an object, whether it be a Vermeer or a Nokia, is an event happening, one which we can participate in, can join in, in fact can not avoid since the event happens solely so that we may see it. And from that perspective there is no historical burden to carry about, no cultural/political/social constructs to worry about, simply a painting coming together in the moment as our eyes sweep across it, which isn't to say that history, context and culture are irrelevant, rather they are optional, they are the gowns and tuxedos of the arriving molecules, the historical costumes of events which sometimes enrich our experience and sometimes stifle it with their gaudiness.</p> +<p>Off in the side corridor of the Italian wing I rounded a corner still listening to my audio guide rattle on about Rembrant and rather abruptly came face to face with a painting I had been wanting to see for years — <strong>Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror</strong> (my photograph is less than stellar, for a much better image see the <a href="http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/parmigia/convex.html" title="Web Gallery of Art, image collection, virtual museum, searchable database of European fine arts (1100-1850)">Web Gallery of Art version</a> which allows for zooming and enlarging). </p> +<p>I originally came across Parmigianino through the title of John Ashbery's<sup id="fnr-002"><a href="#fn-002">[2]</a></sup> noted collection of poems, <strong>Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror</strong>. Parmigianino's painting of the same title was the inspiration and graces the cover of Ashbery's book. There is that old adage about judgment and books and covers and things you ought not to do and yet I have often found that in fact sometimes you can judge a book by its cover and Ashbery's collection is, to my mind, such an example. I spent hours of class time studying that painting while others wrestled with the intentions and slippery meanings of the words inside. </p> +<p>What I never realized until I walked up to it in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, is that the actual painting is convex. Parmigianino had a ball of wood milled and them he sliced off the face of it to have convex surface on which to work. And that's just the beginning of the complexities of <strong>Self Portrait</strong>.</p> +<p><amp-img alt="Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Parmigianino" height="247" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennaselfportrait.jpg" width="260"></amp-img>What drew Ashbery and countless other critics to the painting are the subtle layers within it. Painted as a testament of personal skill, Parmigianino presented the canvas along with two others to Pope Clement VII hoping for a commission. Some have suggested that the enlarged forearm and hand are meant to suggest the artists skills, a sort of mildly disguised bit of self promotion, which sounds fine until you remember that if this is indeed what Parmigianino saw in a convex mirror, then the arm thrust forward is the left arm, not the right, which is traditionally associated with the painter's skills. This is perhaps one of the more trivial points in the painting, but it hints at the kind of layers of meaning and mystery which Parmigianino managed, whether intentional or not, to work into the painting. </p> +<p>There is within this small (just under 10 inches in diameter) painting so much to dwell on that I spent several hours studying it (Luckily for me there was a chair against the wall just opposite).</p> +<p>I am not an art critic nor am I a fan of the open-ended scholarly interpretation crap I just indulged in, but I do like to be able to say with some clarity, why I like something rather than simply leave it as self evident or begging the question, and yet it is very hard to say why I like this painting. After spending so much time with it, which I can assure is about one hour and fifty minutes longer than I've ever spent looking at any other painting, I realized it's the distortion within the distortion that compels me, the reflection of what isn't, reflected again in pigment, it's an opening of worlds, a stabbing at understanding which underlies all our endeavors in some way, a recognition of the complexities within complexities. I would like to see another painting of someone looking between two convex mirrors such that an infinite series of outwardly telescoping reflections was created.</p> +<p>When I was younger I travelled a good deal with my parents mainly camping in the southwestern US. My parents had a 1969 Ford truck with a camper on top. The size and shape of the camper necessitated large mirrors that extended out quite a ways from the door. The main mirror was rectangular and flat, a one to one reflection, but in the lower right corner of the large mirror a small convex mirror had be glued on to provide a wide angle view. Since I generally rode in the passenger's seat of the truck I spent most of the time staring at my distorted reflection, moving my hand in and out with the rush of wind watching it grow larger and more unnaturally arched and warped the closer I brought it to the mirror.</p> +<p>The first time I saw Parmigianino's <strong>Self Portrait</strong> on the cover of Ashbery's book I thought of the truck mirror and the millions of associations that came with those memories. <strong>Self Portrait</strong> came over time to amalgamate a collection of previously forgotten or overlooked memories until it attached itself and in many way became an inseparable part of the memories themselves. Rather than bandying about under the weight of historical context or canonical scholarship, it collapses now as an event in my own life.</p> +<p>My friend Mike said something to me the other day about realizing that it's fairly easy to find your way through a house of mirrors if you simply stare at your feet, but then, what's the fun in that? He's right and similarly, life can be fairly simple if you stare at the ground and don't worry to much about what's going on a round you, but the point of the house of mirrors maze isn't to solve it, to get to the end and leave, the point is stumble about, bump into walls, into other people, into your own distorted reflection and have fun while you do it. And in some way that's the pleasure I find in Parmigianino's <strong>Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror</strong>, a reminder that the distortions are the real adventure, the real enjoyment and also the real truth.</p> +<ol class="footnote"> +<li id="fn-001"> +<p class="note1">1. For language nerds (because I know some of you are): That entity, the ß, or Eszett as it's known, is a ligature of a long s dating from before the middle ages when ss was a separate letter of the alphabet (in English as well). The Eszett is fading out in modern German (officially dropped by the Swiss years ago and as anecdotally told to me by my friend Jackie, not all that common in modern Germany either), but its usage is still quite popular in Austria. According to the <a href="http://www.answers.com/topic/german-spelling-reform-of-1996" title="Ubernerdy: Read about the German Spelling Reform of 1996">German Spelling Reform of 1996</a> the letter "ß" is to appear only after long vowels and diphthongs. <a class="footnoteBackLink" href="#fnr-001" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn-002"> +<p class="note1">2. As with anyone who has studied 20<sup>th</sup> century literature I passed through a certain period in which I became semi-obsessed with John Ashbery. Lots of post grad poetry students (I used to hang around with a lot of post grad poetry students) seem to think it's passé to extol someone as popular and widely established as John Ashbery, but that's just silly. I still, along with Wallace Stevens, Bernadette Mayer, Frank Stanford and Alice Notley consider him to be one of the truly great writers of our times. <a class="footnoteBackLink" href="#fnr-002" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></p> +</li> +</ol> + </div> + </article> +</main> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/unreflected.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/unreflected.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f1e407d --- /dev/null +++ b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2006/05/unreflected.html @@ -0,0 +1,354 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html +class="detail single" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> + +<head> + <title>Unreflected - by Scott Gilbertson</title> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <meta name="description" + content="Finding Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and learning to play Frogger on the Ringstraße. 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Before this trip I was a dedicated driver, I’ve driven coast to coast across the U.S. six times and countless trips through the west, new England and the south (I once did LA to Atlanta in 26 hours straight through), but for some reason I’ve lost my taste for driving. So I was actually elated when we ditched the car in Prague and hopped a train for Vienna. Public transportation is much much better, you can relax, have a beer and meet strangers with funny hats.</p> +<p><break> +<img alt="" class="postpic" height="216" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/mantrain.jpg" width="200"/>Of course sometimes public transportation breaks and you find yourself in Slovakia instead of Austria, but these things are temporary. Usually. Or at least in this case it was. We spent a few hours loitering on Slovakian tracks waiting for another train to pass and then continued on in a roundabout way to Vienna during which time I was regretfully reminded of the inanity involved in conversing with Young American Males.</p> +<p>Vienna is a strange city; one I had trouble wrapping my head around at first. The old town area lies inside the Ringstraße (hereafter referred to as Ringstrasse because writing out that entity in html is a pain)<sup id="fnr-001"><a href="#fn-001">[1]</a></sup>. The Ringstrasse is a wide circular boulevard that runs, as its name implies, in a circle around the old city center. Inside the Ringstrasse are the fantastically massive Hapsburg Palace, several large churches and the upscale tourist destinations, hotels, shops and that sort of thing. The old city is ostensibly closed to traffic, though that doesn’t see to stop the taxis, and consequently it’s the tourist hub of Vienna.</p> +<p>Though I’m sure it was a carefully studied urban planning venture, which on paper sounds like a beautiful idea, a vehicleless downtown full of street markets, cafes, cobblestones and coffeehouses, in practice the Ringstrasse effectively isolates the center of Vienna and it left me feeling a bit trapped. Though I was excited to leave the car behind in Prague, I found myself once again seemingly wedged and isolated by vehicles as I watched a dizzying circle entrapping downtown visitors like corralled cattle. One afternoon I sat on a bench beside the Ringstrasse, smoking cigarettes under the still dripping leaves of an elm tree, watching the traffic ferry past like a scene in Koyaanisqatsi, and started to wonder if Frogger was by chance designed by an Austrian.</p> +<p><img alt="St Stephens Cathedral, Vienna, Austria" class="postpicright" height="230" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennaststephens.jpg" width="161"/>After a day or two wandering among the Baroque facade of St. Stephens Cathedral, snacking of vast arrays of sausage and cabbage, learning to love oversize pints of hefeweizen, and generally avoiding all things castle or palace-like, I finally ventured out to the Kunsthistorisches Museum (which is admittedly not actually outside the Ringstrasse, but something about just seeing the vast open space just beyond the boulevard made me feel like I was again part of a city rather than stuck in a hole, cut off in the middle of a city).</p> +<p>The Kunsthistorisches Museum contains probably the best collection of art outside of France — Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Raphael, Velazquez, Bruegel and a certain Italian for whom I have a festering personal obsession, which shall be addressed shortly — and what’s remarkable about this magnificent assemblage is that the vast majority of it was once the Hapsburg’s private collection. The history of European ruling families is soaked in money, petty squabbles, the occasional inbreeding and plenty of sordid underbellies, but some of these families did have remarkable aesthetic vision in spite of their various handicaps. Yes I do think that wealth and power are handicaps to understanding the world around you because they remove you from the intricate struggles of everyday life and that in turn is a handicap to anything that might be called the development of an aesthetic sense based on something more than whim, fancy or cultural popularity, but let’s be clear that handicaps are not insurmountable as the Hapsburg collection attests, which is to say that occasionally rich people are able to grasp greatness.</p> +<p>It had just stopped raining when I made my way from our penzion over to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, rivulets of water ran between the cobblestone cracks and seeped through the long since worn-through soles of my shoes which caused my socks to make disturbing squishing sounds as I walked. The sky was a heavy leaden grey and looked as if it might start again the chilly drizzling rain that had been hanging around ever since we arrived. After paying the requisite fees and obtaining an audio guide (which I generally never bother with but for some reason on that day I felt the need to hear a voice), I wandered about the foyer for a minute absorbing the heavy baroque ceilings three stories overhead and the dark wood floors scuffed by the feet of the millions who passed through before me.</p> +<p>I had come mainly to see the works of Hieronymus Bosch, or at least out the painters mentioned in the brochure at our penzion, Bosch was the only one I found exciting. If you’ve never seen a Hieronymus Bosch painting they can be a bit shocking, especially considering he was painting around the turn of the 16<sup>th</sup> century. Bosch mixed mysticism, realism, religious symbolism, highly cerebral sense of irony, and magical iconography into a phantasmagoric stew that puts to shame the later so-called surrealists. Though I don’t know that much about either of them Bosch and William Blake always come together in my mind. <img alt="Paradise, or Allegory of Vanity, Hieronymus Bosch" class="postpic" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennabosch.jpg" width="179"/>Carl Jung called Bosch “The master of the monstrous… the discoverer of the unconscious,” which could just as easily be applied to Blake. Philip II of Spain bought up the vast majority of Bosch’s work long ago, and I probably shouldn’t have expected to find much at the Kunsthistorisches Museum since I already knew most of his work is in the Prado Museum in Madrid, but I was a bit disappointed to find there were only two paintings in the Kunsthistorisches (<strong>The Adoration of the Kings</strong> is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for those looking for something closer to home). </p> +<p>Having rushed impatiently through the museum to find the Bosch, which, was every bit as gorgeous as I had hoped, though I was disappointed that the one I liked, <strong>Paradise, or Allegory of Vanity</strong>, didn’t have an audio tour entry, I retraced my steps and wandered about the maze-like floor plan absorbing Dutch and Flemish painters whose names rang like a distant telephone you can hear, one you have in fact been hearing for years, but have never bothered to answer; maybe you didn’t know it was a telephone, perhaps it just sounded like a murmur, that far off tone of the alarm clock before the world resolves itself out of sleep and becomes an actual object, a thing, an alarm, a phone, a Vermeer. But as semanticists are always pointing out, objects are not actually things, they are events, molecules arriving simultaneously at a lavish ballroom party, spinning, coalescing and collapsing in time to become what we <strong>call</strong> an object. And I don’t mean that to be some overwrought analytical deconstruction, but rather as a beautiful thing, an object, whether it be a Vermeer or a Nokia, is an event happening, one which we can participate in, can join in, in fact can not avoid since the event happens solely so that we may see it. And from that perspective there is no historical burden to carry about, no cultural/political/social constructs to worry about, simply a painting coming together in the moment as our eyes sweep across it, which isn’t to say that history, context and culture are irrelevant, rather they are optional, they are the gowns and tuxedos of the arriving molecules, the historical costumes of events which sometimes enrich our experience and sometimes stifle it with their gaudiness.</p> +<p>Off in the side corridor of the Italian wing I rounded a corner still listening to my audio guide rattle on about Rembrant and rather abruptly came face to face with a painting I had been wanting to see for years — <strong>Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror</strong> (my photograph is less than stellar, for a much better image see the <a href="http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/parmigia/convex.html" title="Web Gallery of Art, image collection, virtual museum, searchable database of European fine arts (1100-1850)">Web Gallery of Art version</a> which allows for zooming and enlarging). </p> +<p>I originally came across Parmigianino through the title of John Ashbery’s<sup id="fnr-002"><a href="#fn-002">[2]</a></sup> noted collection of poems, <strong>Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror</strong>. Parmigianino’s painting of the same title was the inspiration and graces the cover of Ashbery’s book. There is that old adage about judgment and books and covers and things you ought not to do and yet I have often found that in fact sometimes you can judge a book by its cover and Ashbery’s collection is, to my mind, such an example. I spent hours of class time studying that painting while others wrestled with the intentions and slippery meanings of the words inside. </p> +<p>What I never realized until I walked up to it in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, is that the actual painting is convex. Parmigianino had a ball of wood milled and them he sliced off the face of it to have convex surface on which to work. And that’s just the beginning of the complexities of <strong>Self Portrait</strong>.</p> +<p><img alt="Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Parmigianino" class="postpicright" height="247" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2006/viennaselfportrait.jpg" width="260"/>What drew Ashbery and countless other critics to the painting are the subtle layers within it. Painted as a testament of personal skill, Parmigianino presented the canvas along with two others to Pope Clement VII hoping for a commission. Some have suggested that the enlarged forearm and hand are meant to suggest the artists skills, a sort of mildly disguised bit of self promotion, which sounds fine until you remember that if this is indeed what Parmigianino saw in a convex mirror, then the arm thrust forward is the left arm, not the right, which is traditionally associated with the painter’s skills. This is perhaps one of the more trivial points in the painting, but it hints at the kind of layers of meaning and mystery which Parmigianino managed, whether intentional or not, to work into the painting. </p> +<p>There is within this small (just under 10 inches in diameter) painting so much to dwell on that I spent several hours studying it (Luckily for me there was a chair against the wall just opposite).</p> +<p>I am not an art critic nor am I a fan of the open-ended scholarly interpretation crap I just indulged in, but I do like to be able to say with some clarity, why I like something rather than simply leave it as self evident or begging the question, and yet it is very hard to say why I like this painting. After spending so much time with it, which I can assure is about one hour and fifty minutes longer than I’ve ever spent looking at any other painting, I realized it’s the distortion within the distortion that compels me, the reflection of what isn’t, reflected again in pigment, it’s an opening of worlds, a stabbing at understanding which underlies all our endeavors in some way, a recognition of the complexities within complexities. I would like to see another painting of someone looking between two convex mirrors such that an infinite series of outwardly telescoping reflections was created.</p> +<p>When I was younger I travelled a good deal with my parents mainly camping in the southwestern US. My parents had a 1969 Ford truck with a camper on top. The size and shape of the camper necessitated large mirrors that extended out quite a ways from the door. The main mirror was rectangular and flat, a one to one reflection, but in the lower right corner of the large mirror a small convex mirror had be glued on to provide a wide angle view. Since I generally rode in the passenger’s seat of the truck I spent most of the time staring at my distorted reflection, moving my hand in and out with the rush of wind watching it grow larger and more unnaturally arched and warped the closer I brought it to the mirror.</p> +<p>The first time I saw Parmigianino’s <strong>Self Portrait</strong> on the cover of Ashbery’s book I thought of the truck mirror and the millions of associations that came with those memories. <strong>Self Portrait</strong> came over time to amalgamate a collection of previously forgotten or overlooked memories until it attached itself and in many way became an inseparable part of the memories themselves. Rather than bandying about under the weight of historical context or canonical scholarship, it collapses now as an event in my own life.</p> +<p>My friend Mike said something to me the other day about realizing that it’s fairly easy to find your way through a house of mirrors if you simply stare at your feet, but then, what’s the fun in that? He’s right and similarly, life can be fairly simple if you stare at the ground and don’t worry to much about what’s going on a round you, but the point of the house of mirrors maze isn’t to solve it, to get to the end and leave, the point is stumble about, bump into walls, into other people, into your own distorted reflection and have fun while you do it. And in some way that’s the pleasure I find in Parmigianino’s <strong>Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror</strong>, a reminder that the distortions are the real adventure, the real enjoyment and also the real truth.</p> +<ol class="footnote"> +<li id="fn-001"> +<p class="note1">1. For language nerds (because I know some of you are): That entity, the ß, or Eszett as it’s known, is a ligature of a long s dating from before the middle ages when ss was a separate letter of the alphabet (in English as well). The Eszett is fading out in modern German (officially dropped by the Swiss years ago and as anecdotally told to me by my friend Jackie, not all that common in modern Germany either), but its usage is still quite popular in Austria. According to the <a href="http://www.answers.com/topic/german-spelling-reform-of-1996" title="Ubernerdy: Read about the German Spelling Reform of 1996">German Spelling Reform of 1996</a> the letter “ß” is to appear only after long vowels and diphthongs. <a href="#fnr-001" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn-002"> +<p class="note1">2. As with anyone who has studied 20<sup>th</sup> century literature I passed through a certain period in which I became semi-obsessed with John Ashbery. Lots of post grad poetry students (I used to hang around with a lot of post grad poetry students) seem to think it’s passé to extol someone as popular and widely established as John Ashbery, but that’s just silly. I still, along with Wallace Stevens, Bernadette Mayer, Frank Stanford and Alice Notley consider him to be one of the truly great writers of our times. <a href="#fnr-002" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></p> +</li> +</ol> + </div> + + </article> + + + <div class="nav-wrapper"> + <nav id="page-navigation" class="page-border-top"> + <ul> + <li id="prev"><span class="bl">Previous:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/four-minutes-thirty-three-seconds" rel="prev" title=" Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds">Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds</a> + </li> + <li id="next"><span class="bl">Next:</span> + <a href="/jrnl/2006/05/i-dont-sleep-i-dream" rel="next" title=" I Don't Sleep I Dream">I Don't Sleep I Dream</a> + </li> + </ul> + </nav> + </div> + + + + + + +<div class="comment--form--wrapper "> + +<div class="comment--form--header"> + <p class="hed">Thoughts?</p> + <p class="subhed">Please leave a reply:</p> +</div> +<form action="/comments/post/" method="post" class="comment--form"> + +<input type="hidden" name="rder" value="" /> + + + <input type="hidden" name="content_type" value="jrnl.entry" id="id_content_type"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="object_pk" value="64" id="id_object_pk"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="timestamp" value="1596833474" id="id_timestamp"> + + + + <input type="hidden" name="security_hash" value="3244b6391ca62e1033933aa0cd71d3ffe9d71a3f" id="id_security_hash"> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_name">Name:</label> + <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="50" required id="id_name"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_email">Email address:</label> + <input type="email" name="email" required id="id_email"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_url">URL:</label> + <input type="url" name="url" id="id_url"> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset > + <label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> + <div class="textarea-rounded"><textarea name="comment" cols="40" rows="10" maxlength="3000" required id="id_comment"> +</textarea></div> + </fieldset> + + + + <fieldset style="display:none;"> + <label for="id_honeypot">If you enter anything in this field your comment will be treated as spam:</label> + <input type="text" name="honeypot" id="id_honeypot"> + </fieldset> + + + <div class="submit"> + <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post btn" value="Post" /> + <input type="submit" name="preview" class="submit-preview btn" value="Preview" /> + </div> +</form> +<p style="font-size: 95%;"><strong>All comments are moderated</strong>, so you won’t see it right away. 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Before this trip I was a dedicated driver, I've driven coast to coast across the U.S. six times and countless trips through the west, new England and the south (I once did LA to Atlanta in 26 hours straight through), but for some reason I've lost my taste for driving. So I was actually elated when we ditched the car in Prague and hopped a train for Vienna. Public transportation is much much better, you can relax, have a beer and meet strangers with funny hats.
+
+<break>
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/mantrain.jpg" width="200" height="216" class="postpic" alt="" />Of course sometimes public transportation breaks and you find yourself in Slovakia instead of Austria, but these things are temporary. Usually. Or at least in this case it was. We spent a few hours loitering on Slovakian tracks waiting for another train to pass and then continued on in a roundabout way to Vienna during which time I was regretfully reminded of the inanity involved in conversing with Young American Males.
+
+Vienna is a strange city; one I had trouble wrapping my head around at first. The old town area lies inside the Ringstraße (hereafter referred to as Ringstrasse because writing out that entity in html is a pain)<sup id="fnr-001"><a href="#fn-001">[1]</a></sup>. The Ringstrasse is a wide circular boulevard that runs, as its name implies, in a circle around the old city center. Inside the Ringstrasse are the fantastically massive Hapsburg Palace, several large churches and the upscale tourist destinations, hotels, shops and that sort of thing. The old city is ostensibly closed to traffic, though that doesn't see to stop the taxis, and consequently it's the tourist hub of Vienna.
+
+Though I'm sure it was a carefully studied urban planning venture, which on paper sounds like a beautiful idea, a vehicleless downtown full of street markets, cafes, cobblestones and coffeehouses, in practice the Ringstrasse effectively isolates the center of Vienna and it left me feeling a bit trapped. Though I was excited to leave the car behind in Prague, I found myself once again seemingly wedged and isolated by vehicles as I watched a dizzying circle entrapping downtown visitors like corralled cattle. One afternoon I sat on a bench beside the Ringstrasse, smoking cigarettes under the still dripping leaves of an elm tree, watching the traffic ferry past like a scene in Koyaanisqatsi, and started to wonder if Frogger was by chance designed by an Austrian.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/viennaststephens.jpg" width="161" height="230" class="postpicright" alt="St Stephens Cathedral, Vienna, Austria" />After a day or two wandering among the Baroque facade of St. Stephens Cathedral, snacking of vast arrays of sausage and cabbage, learning to love oversize pints of hefeweizen, and generally avoiding all things castle or palace-like, I finally ventured out to the Kunsthistorisches Museum (which is admittedly not actually outside the Ringstrasse, but something about just seeing the vast open space just beyond the boulevard made me feel like I was again part of a city rather than stuck in a hole, cut off in the middle of a city).
+
+The Kunsthistorisches Museum contains probably the best collection of art outside of France — Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Raphael, Velazquez, Bruegel and a certain Italian for whom I have a festering personal obsession, which shall be addressed shortly — and what's remarkable about this magnificent assemblage is that the vast majority of it was once the Hapsburg's private collection. The history of European ruling families is soaked in money, petty squabbles, the occasional inbreeding and plenty of sordid underbellies, but some of these families did have remarkable aesthetic vision in spite of their various handicaps. Yes I do think that wealth and power are handicaps to understanding the world around you because they remove you from the intricate struggles of everyday life and that in turn is a handicap to anything that might be called the development of an aesthetic sense based on something more than whim, fancy or cultural popularity, but let's be clear that handicaps are not insurmountable as the Hapsburg collection attests, which is to say that occasionally rich people are able to grasp greatness.
+
+It had just stopped raining when I made my way from our penzion over to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, rivulets of water ran between the cobblestone cracks and seeped through the long since worn-through soles of my shoes which caused my socks to make disturbing squishing sounds as I walked. The sky was a heavy leaden grey and looked as if it might start again the chilly drizzling rain that had been hanging around ever since we arrived. After paying the requisite fees and obtaining an audio guide (which I generally never bother with but for some reason on that day I felt the need to hear a voice), I wandered about the foyer for a minute absorbing the heavy baroque ceilings three stories overhead and the dark wood floors scuffed by the feet of the millions who passed through before me.
+
+I had come mainly to see the works of Hieronymus Bosch, or at least out the painters mentioned in the brochure at our penzion, Bosch was the only one I found exciting. If you've never seen a Hieronymus Bosch painting they can be a bit shocking, especially considering he was painting around the turn of the 16<sup>th</sup> century. Bosch mixed mysticism, realism, religious symbolism, highly cerebral sense of irony, and magical iconography into a phantasmagoric stew that puts to shame the later so-called surrealists. Though I don't know that much about either of them Bosch and William Blake always come together in my mind. <img src="[[base_url]]/2006/viennabosch.jpg" width="179" height="240" class="postpic" alt="Paradise, or Allegory of Vanity, Hieronymus Bosch" />Carl Jung called Bosch "The master of the monstrous… the discoverer of the unconscious," which could just as easily be applied to Blake. Philip II of Spain bought up the vast majority of Bosch's work long ago, and I probably shouldn't have expected to find much at the Kunsthistorisches Museum since I already knew most of his work is in the Prado Museum in Madrid, but I was a bit disappointed to find there were only two paintings in the Kunsthistorisches (**The Adoration of the Kings** is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for those looking for something closer to home).
+
+Having rushed impatiently through the museum to find the Bosch, which, was every bit as gorgeous as I had hoped, though I was disappointed that the one I liked, **Paradise, or Allegory of Vanity**, didn't have an audio tour entry, I retraced my steps and wandered about the maze-like floor plan absorbing Dutch and Flemish painters whose names rang like a distant telephone you can hear, one you have in fact been hearing for years, but have never bothered to answer; maybe you didn't know it was a telephone, perhaps it just sounded like a murmur, that far off tone of the alarm clock before the world resolves itself out of sleep and becomes an actual object, a thing, an alarm, a phone, a Vermeer. But as semanticists are always pointing out, objects are not actually things, they are events, molecules arriving simultaneously at a lavish ballroom party, spinning, coalescing and collapsing in time to become what we **call** an object. And I don't mean that to be some overwrought analytical deconstruction, but rather as a beautiful thing, an object, whether it be a Vermeer or a Nokia, is an event happening, one which we can participate in, can join in, in fact can not avoid since the event happens solely so that we may see it. And from that perspective there is no historical burden to carry about, no cultural/political/social constructs to worry about, simply a painting coming together in the moment as our eyes sweep across it, which isn't to say that history, context and culture are irrelevant, rather they are optional, they are the gowns and tuxedos of the arriving molecules, the historical costumes of events which sometimes enrich our experience and sometimes stifle it with their gaudiness.
+
+Off in the side corridor of the Italian wing I rounded a corner still listening to my audio guide rattle on about Rembrant and rather abruptly came face to face with a painting I had been wanting to see for years — **Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror** (my photograph is less than stellar, for a much better image see the <a href="http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/parmigia/convex.html" title="Web Gallery of Art, image collection, virtual museum, searchable database of European fine arts (1100-1850)">Web Gallery of Art version</a> which allows for zooming and enlarging).
+
+I originally came across Parmigianino through the title of John Ashbery's<sup id="fnr-002"><a href="#fn-002">[2]</a></sup> noted collection of poems, **Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror**. Parmigianino's painting of the same title was the inspiration and graces the cover of Ashbery's book. There is that old adage about judgment and books and covers and things you ought not to do and yet I have often found that in fact sometimes you can judge a book by its cover and Ashbery's collection is, to my mind, such an example. I spent hours of class time studying that painting while others wrestled with the intentions and slippery meanings of the words inside.
+
+What I never realized until I walked up to it in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, is that the actual painting is convex. Parmigianino had a ball of wood milled and them he sliced off the face of it to have convex surface on which to work. And that's just the beginning of the complexities of **Self Portrait**.
+
+<img src="[[base_url]]/2006/viennaselfportrait.jpg" width="260" height="247" class="postpicright" alt="Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Parmigianino" />What drew Ashbery and countless other critics to the painting are the subtle layers within it. Painted as a testament of personal skill, Parmigianino presented the canvas along with two others to Pope Clement VII hoping for a commission. Some have suggested that the enlarged forearm and hand are meant to suggest the artists skills, a sort of mildly disguised bit of self promotion, which sounds fine until you remember that if this is indeed what Parmigianino saw in a convex mirror, then the arm thrust forward is the left arm, not the right, which is traditionally associated with the painter's skills. This is perhaps one of the more trivial points in the painting, but it hints at the kind of layers of meaning and mystery which Parmigianino managed, whether intentional or not, to work into the painting.
+
+There is within this small (just under 10 inches in diameter) painting so much to dwell on that I spent several hours studying it (Luckily for me there was a chair against the wall just opposite).
+
+I am not an art critic nor am I a fan of the open-ended scholarly interpretation crap I just indulged in, but I do like to be able to say with some clarity, why I like something rather than simply leave it as self evident or begging the question, and yet it is very hard to say why I like this painting. After spending so much time with it, which I can assure is about one hour and fifty minutes longer than I've ever spent looking at any other painting, I realized it's the distortion within the distortion that compels me, the reflection of what isn't, reflected again in pigment, it's an opening of worlds, a stabbing at understanding which underlies all our endeavors in some way, a recognition of the complexities within complexities. I would like to see another painting of someone looking between two convex mirrors such that an infinite series of outwardly telescoping reflections was created.
+
+When I was younger I travelled a good deal with my parents mainly camping in the southwestern US. My parents had a 1969 Ford truck with a camper on top. The size and shape of the camper necessitated large mirrors that extended out quite a ways from the door. The main mirror was rectangular and flat, a one to one reflection, but in the lower right corner of the large mirror a small convex mirror had be glued on to provide a wide angle view. Since I generally rode in the passenger's seat of the truck I spent most of the time staring at my distorted reflection, moving my hand in and out with the rush of wind watching it grow larger and more unnaturally arched and warped the closer I brought it to the mirror.
+
+The first time I saw Parmigianino's **Self Portrait** on the cover of Ashbery's book I thought of the truck mirror and the millions of associations that came with those memories. **Self Portrait** came over time to amalgamate a collection of previously forgotten or overlooked memories until it attached itself and in many way became an inseparable part of the memories themselves. Rather than bandying about under the weight of historical context or canonical scholarship, it collapses now as an event in my own life.
+
+My friend Mike said something to me the other day about realizing that it's fairly easy to find your way through a house of mirrors if you simply stare at your feet, but then, what's the fun in that? He's right and similarly, life can be fairly simple if you stare at the ground and don't worry to much about what's going on a round you, but the point of the house of mirrors maze isn't to solve it, to get to the end and leave, the point is stumble about, bump into walls, into other people, into your own distorted reflection and have fun while you do it. And in some way that's the pleasure I find in Parmigianino's **Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror**, a reminder that the distortions are the real adventure, the real enjoyment and also the real truth.
+
+
+<ol class="footnote">
+<li id="fn-001">
+<p class="note1">1. For language nerds (because I know some of you are): That entity, the ß, or Eszett as it's known, is a ligature of a long s dating from before the middle ages when ss was a separate letter of the alphabet (in English as well). The Eszett is fading out in modern German (officially dropped by the Swiss years ago and as anecdotally told to me by my friend Jackie, not all that common in modern Germany either), but its usage is still quite popular in Austria. According to the <a href="http://www.answers.com/topic/german-spelling-reform-of-1996" title="Ubernerdy: Read about the German Spelling Reform of 1996">German Spelling Reform of 1996</a> the letter "ß" is to appear only after long vowels and diphthongs. <a href="#fnr-001" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn-002">
+<p class="note1">2. As with anyone who has studied 20<sup>th</sup> century literature I passed through a certain period in which I became semi-obsessed with John Ashbery. Lots of post grad poetry students (I used to hang around with a lot of post grad poetry students) seem to think it's passé to extol someone as popular and widely established as John Ashbery, but that's just silly. I still, along with Wallace Stevens, Bernadette Mayer, Frank Stanford and Alice Notley consider him to be one of the truly great writers of our times. <a href="#fnr-002" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol> |