After Munich
I have to confess that I’m quite happy to have left Munich. And to the Bavarian kingdom at large I have a feeling comparable to a situation in which you must excuse yourself from a well-furnished but ugly cottage in which you were expected to stay the night with distant relatives.
And to go further, it’s difficult because the hostess has just proposed a windy-pathed board game with acrylic pieces of ridiculous detail that’s really best played with 6 people. And your leaving will make it five. So they all give you a deeply tragic look because they’re truly trying their best to manufacture enjoyment but are entirely too stilted to pull off the charade. Especially without you.
So you leave for the nearest motel, end up somewhere in central California, recall a gothic accordion player on the street, and question the difference between beauty and power – hoping the excellent insulation and square tables aren’t facilitating designs for greatness that may flash across those anxious, scary blue eyes.
Inside Slovenia
The country struck me perhaps for its similarity to Idaho and Colorado, and but for its idea of remoteness without human growth.
Croatia
Incredible for its lack of any guiding figure. For its center-less-ness and ancient walls that in some sense seem eternal. That its people will always carry on. Knowing that regimes will come and go and they will always be simply the coast.
Budapest
A city that is the closest remnant to what you might understand as Babylonia. A place that was once rich and now evokes more the idea of a mess. That its rulers never had plans beyond the exquisite.
Prague
Most remarkable for its feeling of revelation, a heart within Baroque misery.
Stockholm
In some sense, nothing but cold. Unconquerable and uncontested. They were able to sit things out. And in fact they do still.
From the North
“What’s the word for someone who can read between the lines?”
I looked at him in that Sodermalm bedroom, and I wanted so badly to know his answer
Knew so badly that I should
But sometimes you have to sit and recognize that your vocabulary is poor
That you’re still learning English
It was not always my father’s language
Looking at that Jester standing at the old end of the Charles Bridge I wish only that I had taken a picture
For if I were to draw it, it would need to be a tapestry for all of Europe
With studied baroque lines intersecting the intangible 21st century
How could I?
IV
The question of what comes next is uncertain enough to be uncomfortable
As if “may I please skip ahead”
“Am I to be great”
, to be rich?”
May I be content to the understanding that there were once castles and darkness
And misery is less widespread
That I simply live somewhere warm
Brooklynn
Did you know ‘hello’ became popularized only with the rise of the telephone? The operators were really debating what to make it. It was almost ‘ahoy’. Some abstracted indication that you’re there.
There’s a way to bring this together and as I’ve gone through Europe I’ve recognized more and more how limited communication is; which is to say it will be made better. You think of talking to your great great grandkids and how they might speak, what stories their buildings will tell, what new nations and religions might form. And you just want to make sure you’re doing everything you can to help them be most communicative. Providing rituals to help them dance in the dark.
So any way.