2018 Europe Trip Journal

2018 Europe Trip Journal

July 3-4

I am writing at the gate for Icelandair’s daily 20:40 flight 632 from Boston to Reykjavik. Airport terminals seem like bardo terminals. We don’t build bardo terminals—Tibetan monks or Yaqui shamans do, but airport terminals serve as mythological stand-ins. Ghost travel through them in various trance states, unlike but also like the dead.

I am trying get at something, an underlying emotion of sadness, excitement, and wonder. Here are two unrelated thoughts prior to starting my trip journal:

(One) The world is divided between those who believe we are souls on a journey of transformation and those who consider us incidental by-products of molecular activity who will be expunged. Either belief is dwarfed by the vividness of reality, but I board a night plane with the sense I am a soul, plus the fear I am not, plus the intuition that in this “terminal,” these are the same.

(Two) We are flying out of Trump’s America on July 4^th eve with mildly mischievous relief, though it is mitigated by the knowledge that Crisis Trump is civilizational.           

A woman seated next to us at the Legal Seafood restaurant at Logan airport wants to tell us where she is going as we both await our bills. She and her husband (in the men’s room) are headed to Cannes for the thirteenth straight year. Upon hearing some of our itinerary, she remarks with unexpected vehemence. “I couldn’t go to Poland or Hungary because of the Holocaust. I once ended up in Prague and was immediately nauseous. I had to leave. How can you do it as a Jew?”

I said, “I can’t tell the difference between what happened then and what’s happening now.”

She surprised me by laughing. “I am going to borrow that line.”

There are many wonders looking down from a Boston-to-Reykjavik flight, but none of them were available on this trip, which was conducted solely above cloud banks. For a better view, you can check out my 2006 Europe travel journal. At dawn that year I saw Iceland’s puzzle piece sitting in the ocean like a map of that same island; on the return flight (from Reykjavik to SFO instead of Logan) Greenland’s glaciers were melting in present time: rivers and floes from 37,000 feet. This time I watched the reflection of a gibbous Moon on the metal of wing and the patterns of clouds. I had the sense of three orbs of vastly different size and shifting zodiacal position, the plane afloat among them like a hand of unintended divination.

The turbulence never got too bad, but it was omnipresent, a bumpy passage through choppy air. Either the Boeing computers kept finding a gentler layer or our path had both smooth intervals and jarring crescendos.

I haven’t been able to sleep on planes for years because dozing always turns into a sensation of falling and I awake with a start. I experienced the entire five hours as meditation on being propelled through the atmosphere at 550 mph. They put on a good camouflaging over it, but that’s what it is.

There was reassuring land underneath us for about a third of the flight (per the screen map plus occasional glimpses through clouds of habitation lights). I tend to forget how far North America’s last rocks extend toward the Old World, how tantalizingly off the chart those must have dangled at the edge of the Middle Ages, familiar only to a few Irish and Basque fishermen and brave cartographers: Newfoundland, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, St. Johns, then several tiny islands before the actual Atlantic crossing. The Labrador Sea marks the end of the New World and beginning of the Old. At its far shore, another hour or so later, we cross over the bottom flap of Greenland under clouds.

The Homeric softness of the first tender touch of Eos illumines the cloud tops pink and yellow. This far north and high, she separates moonlight from her glow for only a long hour before her rosy fingers spread.

As we approach Iceland, tiny clouds below larger ones seem to float on the ocean, touching it evanescently. The outskirts of Iceland on trajectory to Keflavik Airport suggest a distant NASA’s most landfall: a rocky slope on Saturn’s hydrocarbon moon Titan. The colors and shapes of Iceland’s rocks, salt marshes, and shore are so brilliant and phosphorescent that azure flowers are indistinguishable from malachite ores. Both are jagged splotches in water-color craters—remnants of a three-billion-year Pre-Cambrian geology.

As I stare down and then close my eyes, I experience autonomous visions of strange worlds, brilliantly melting colors, never-before-seen or imagined shapes and dimensions twisting and folding seamlessly into and out of each other. I try John Friedlander’s Sethian system to take it to the astral plane, but the effort adds nothing to what is already happening.

Compared to 2006’s quaint wooden halls of Viking nobility, Keflavik has expanded quite unnobly. It looks like any other airport now, standardized to metal, plastic, and display screens. It has also grown faster than its capacity, throwing us into an international chaos that feels like Mexico City and Grand Central Station. Mobs of polyglot travelers headed to multiple cities on Icelandair planes— the outcome of a successful transportation model—crisscross in opposing streams. There are youths with backpacks, families trying to herd children together, people in wheelchairs, others moving with difficulty or on crutches. There is no room or plan to accommodate so many or such variety. Motion stalls in gridlocks.

What I had thought of as a leisurely two hours between flights with which to get some Icelandic smoked salmon for breakfast (per 2006) is a chimera. Two hours is no time at all, as the late landing of our plane followed by its pause for traffic on the tarmac runs into required passport entry to the EU. Slow-moving visa-check lines intercept transit between gates; the logjam creeps like TSA terrorist screening tiers at U.S. airports.

Missing our plane turns was not a concern. They are holding flights to accommodate arriving cannisters from Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, etc., constant multi-language announcements and instructions to debarking passengers for flights to Munich, Helsinki, London, Rome, as new discharges add their streams.

Our gate is not even alongside a plane. We line up at a door and, after a forty-minute tedious stall, are herded in in 44 degrees and drizzle to a standing-room, strap-holding bus. Though I am carrying a flannel shirt and a hoodie, I don’t put them on. The rain feels good after 90 degrees and thunderstorms in Boston.

We are driven a surprisingly great distance, weaving around parked planes to a jet sitting alone and far from the terminals. The landscape is Icelandair City, their jets everywhere and none with other logos.

So many people are lined up for Copenhagen at the gate I can’t imagine we’d all fit in one plane, a common illusion at an airport. Yet a scale diagram on the Logan wall showed how big these objects are. One 757 can hold seven elephants, six RVs, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Once the bus delivers our population, our plane turns out to be only spottily filled.

A three-hour flight after five hours on a prior plane and another hour and a half of processing, forced marches in crowds, long lines, and standing sleeplessly feels like being dragged through a mud run. Yet time moves along, and the Icelandair vehicle glides smoothly through complicated layers of fog, mist, and clouds, and then crosses over water, the Norwegian Sea, an interzone of North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. After seventy-five or so minutes, we encounter the broken landforms of outer Norway and then, across the water, Denmark’s Dakota-like farmland. These farmers’ ancestral relatives migrated and put their stamp on the American landscape. As we cross father into Denmark, dramatic arrangements of land and water wrap around each other unpredictably.

Flight 1204’s landing is dramatic. The plane sweeps far out over sunny Copenhagen harbor, tilting its wings several times, taking gradual aim back at the land. From above, I see dozens of separate rivers and rivulets running among one another in shades of dark blue and blue-green. The complex patterning is both riverine and whirlpool-like. I have never noticed such a textured oceanic motif with currents so perceptible, like looking at an ultraviolet photograph of the harbor.

A magnificent row of modern white windmills leads to shore.

I am now feeling a second wind and have been listening to my iPod shuffle for the last forty-five minutes. I heard Bach and Cesar Franck and Tindersticks (French cinema music) and reggae and Merle Haggard and Townes Van Zandt and the Four Seasons “Working my way back to You, babe….” and Fats Domino finding his thrill on Blueberry Hill when I interrupt the shuffle’s concert by choosing Danny Kaye singing Copenhagen, digitalized long ago from Lindy’s scratchy children’s record, and turn the earbuds over to her. It’s her birthday, July 4^th and we are above Copenhagen at last.

The song has little to do with the modern city, which is represented in my mind by the political serial Borgen, but I am recapturing her mysterious childhood magic: “… wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen, / salty old queen of the sea….” The entire history of Earth and my own lifetime seems to hang in the balance.  “Let us clink and drink one down.” The quaff is magical and touches a forbidden place like the etheric root of all existence. Yes, surely we are born to celebrate this manifestation: “Let us clink and drink one down.”

The Copenhagen airport is more futuristic than any American airport I know. The rest of the world has glided past our contentious, bureaucracy-ridden, politically polarized oligarchy into a gentler modernity. The most striking feature is Sneaker ads in giant pixel-like panels, parts of which morph at different speeds, displays more riveting than their commodity, a hint of Tom Cruise/Samantha Morton landscapes in “Minority Report,” an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story.

The movement of people and objects along the corridor suggest Ikea (a neighboring polity but a related aesthetic): long lines of cute buggies being pulled by cabs, thin young women on electrified scooters, witty graffiti-like messages on the walls in Danish and English through construction zones. I am in the euphoria of landing here, being in Copenhagen on July 4th when a major crisis hits.

Something that tends to happen to me, and I forget it that it does though I vow to stay alert the next time: I develop holes in my head during travel, especially after a sleepless night, experience amnesias and hallucinations without knowing it. Forgetting I am in this state is part of the state. I leave and lose stuff. I have parted with prescription glasses, a CD player (before iPods), jackets, bags of carefully packed food, treasured books, and (a year ago) an iPod I miraculously recovered. I have temporarily misplaced suitcases and carry-ons but remembered in time with an airport start. I seem to go into a sleepwalk mode and lose the link between body memory and mental tracking.

This time after getting our baggage and proceeding out of the station, we headed to the ticketing area for the trains with instructions to get to the inter-city line closest to our host Marianne Bentzen’s station, Hellerup. She kindly offered to pick us up if we phoned once we were aboard. We were to be guests of her and her husband David Reis, gifted their basement apartment for eight days.

Marianne is a longtime colleague of Peter Levine, the trauma and Somatic Experiencing innovator we publish with North Atlantic Books. She is his Danish organizer, and we publish a few of her books too. I met her only once briefly and do not know David, so the offer of their apartment to virtual strangers, even if associates, was generous.

We were going on a list of instructions with no sense of surrounding geography or what the name Hellerup means or its position in relation to ours. In other circumstances I would have mapped out the journey scrupulously in advance. Instead, I was merely following instructions without context or geography. The crowds flowing from the airport into the train terminal and street were aggressive and dizzying, coalescing at long lines to buy tickets from machines. I didn’t know what kind of ticket to get or how to purchase it, but a suited official with decent enough English to help presided over many confused customers. He was a youngish man with a slightly sullen temperament.

I found him acerbic, as he ordered me online when I approached while he was helping countless others in rapid-fire fashion, but he grew on me as I watched his performance of sustained individuality with a uniquely droll sense of humor though carrying out repetitious, stressful tasks in several languages. He came and stood beside me and instructed step by step as I got the correct ticket (I showed him the instructions on my phone). He never punched for me, making me backtrack from my own errors.

After I had the ticket, he gave me a far too quick rundown on which train to take, what especially to avoid, and how to find the track in the labyrinth ahead. Somewhere in the mix of these events, I was sure that I had put my backpack down with the suitcases, which Lindy was guarding while I maneuvered in tight crowds at the machines. When I returned and couldn’t find it by her, I was frantic, realizing that it must have been grabbed by one of those sleuth pickpocket-like thieves who roam stations drawing on skills developed by decades of working the crowds as well as natural selection among their kind favoring the best like wolves and fisher cats. If you fell asleep in their invisible jungle, you became instant prey to their prowling. They didn’t care what they took or its personal value to you—why would they give a shit at this point in history and global crisis? What does your suffering mean against their marginalization and unjustly imposed pain? After they have stripped your item for its valuables, they discard it so that you could will recover items of worth only to you.

This self-contained image and narrative ran its full cinema through my mind in an instant, a certainty it was now my reality and an ensuing sense of desperation, for the backpack had my visa, my computer, my international driver’s license, and other irreplaceable items. We rushed to the guy helping ticket buyers, Lindy in tears, and he broke character and his task-load and walked us outside the lines as he informed us that we immediately had to call the station garde—the police. He confirmed my belated premonition that, yes, the station was crawling with thieves and you couldn’t take your eyes off anything for a moment. Alas, advice rendered too late. I felt torrents of bitter regret. But regret is cheap in the swiftly-moving streams of modernity. One is usually a step late. That’s the point of scams and predations, and they are getting worse.

Then my panic shifted to an inexplicable calm and certainty that this would work out somehow. I was curious and amused. I might not get my backpack, but it would still be okay. I don’t know how I knew this, but from the moment I did I proceeded without horror. The sense was heady, supernatural, as if I had entered a benign state of shock but also clairsentience.

This mood relaxed me a bit but didn’t initially improve our situation. We went looking for the garde post like proverbial chickens without heads but soon got tangled in the crowds. That was the absolute low point—no backpack, no idea where we were headed or what we were looking for, crowds of debarking passengers pouring around chauffeurs and relatives with signs—a fast-moving river against whose stream we were forging out way though overwhelmed by the torrent coming the other way out of the airport. Where was the garde station? What did it look like? We saw only shops. There was nothing that remotely resembled such a thing and we were approaching endgame at the gate from the airport. We couldn’t go back in without going through security

Picture us there, the camera panning away, American couple in a hopeless mess. Then cut to the next scene. You can do that.

We encountered a garde in a yellow coat hurrying past and persuaded him to stop for the telling of our sad tale. At first, he was resistant, wanting to get where he was going, but he finally decided to take us on. I have forgotten Lars’ last name, though I would like to have kept it for full thanks in this journal. As he took stock of our situation, he rearranged it in terms I hadn’t considered, for I was not up to date on how stations work these days. For better or worse, we were being watched, everywhere and at every moment. There is no part of the Copenhagen airport or train station that is not under full-time camera surveillance (probably every other major airport and train station too). He said that he would have headquarters run the tape and see what happened. A moment that seemed lost forever was magically recoverable. We would see the sly thief, watch him make his move. It is dismaying how racist the imagination is at such a moment. But at least our existential situation had turned into data-processing, which had a different Philip K. Dick ring.

Reviewing the tape entailed calling on his noisy walkie-talkie-like apparatus and getting the police to rerun the correct tape, but first we had to return to the spot where it happened and reenact the event for Lars. We walked to the ticket area and set the scene; he noted coordinates and called them in. The process took about twenty minutes; they had to find, rewind, and review the tape. Guess what? My backpack was never with us. I had a false memory.

Attention turned to the baggage carousel. It was the main other conceivable site. There was now hope that the thief of my imagination might not have been involved; he was stealing something else elsewhere. The baggage area, again, was inside the airport, past security, and passengers could not return—a sign had made that clear. Lars called back to the camera room and had them look at the carousel. Indeed there was a blue and gray backpack matching my description sitting alongside Carousel 3 in present time. His associate was sent there. A long procedure followed during which I had to prove my identity to Lars’ satisfaction and he relayed it to his counterpart who by then had secured the backpack and was going through it and asking a battery of questions about its contents. I had all the right answers. He appeared with it in hand, a precious reunion. Catastrophe averted. There was much to think about, and I did through the rest of the journey to Hellerup.

I had set it down beside Lindy, but the act was before we got our suitcases. At that time I had left her and gone to look at a board enumerating modes local transportation. When I came back, I helped pull our suitcases off the carousel and left without the backpack. In some sort of plane-flight amnesia, I walked out of the airport into the train station imagining that my backpack was on my back. Then I transposed the memory of the carousel to the ticket machines.

There is an alternate interpretation, but it will strain credulity for many of you. At my moment of clarity, I exceeded my ability and rose to a higher plane like the Causal or Atmic, switched probability tracks in a Sethian mode, and moved into a reality in which I recovered my backpack. I did so because the consequences of losing it were too great. The entire trip would have been put at unrecoverable risk. That’s beyond confirmation though, in a certain sense, switching probability tracks is what we’re doing all the time, and sometimes our innate clairvoyance jumps the track. Since I had not to lose it, I became superman and changed history. In Sethian terms I created a new reality. I may not have been allowed to control its outcome, but I could give it my best shot and enhance the odds in my favor.

A more down-to-earth explanation is that I unconsciously remembered that the backpack was at the carousel, so I felt calm despite the crisis. But if I was able to do that, why did I leave it there in the first place? How did amnesia meld with clairvoyance? Or maybe these are not opposites. Perhaps I arranged the whole thing to remind myself that probability tracks can be switched and that this is important news for other reasons.

I would add a related consideration that is true either way. The thief came and took my backpack. He had to; he frequents airports and train terminals and is in the process of stealing them right now across the globe. I read about him in guidebooks to places we are headed in Eastern Europe. At the moment he didn’t take my backpack he was stealing some other sleepy tourist’s computer and passport or pickpocketing a wallet or grabbing a neglected purse. My psychic feat (or pure luck) displaced him instantly elsewhere without even his awareness that he was being displaced.

We proceeded to follow our instructions issued at the ticketing machines, to take the train to Central Station and change lines. It was difficult to get any backup reassurance at Track 2 because pretty much everyone was coming off a plane and querying in English, French, Chinese, Japanese, etc. Finally a young Danish guy arrived and took charge. He not only reinforced that all but two of us were on the right track but stuck with Lindy and me because we had the most difficult route, going to the Hellerup station rather than midtown, and it happened to be his course too. He personally guided us off the train at Central Station to the correct downstairs platform. As our new train flew through the countryside, I recalled Carl Dreyer’s black-and-white lens on an Ordet-like landscape. Even that close to Copenhagen center vast fields, big sky, bike riders filled Dreyer’s 1950s view.

Marianne met us with her car and, after restorative sleep and organizing our possessions in our room, we had a late dinner fixed by her and David mostly from their garden with some organic meat. It began at nine p.m. local time and, in the land of the midnight sun, proceeded until 11:30. The hour was meaningless because of jet lag.

David is an energy healer. Marianne is a psychotherapist and trainer of psychotherapists internationally. She is also a certified mindfulness teacher in an offbeat Danish branch of the system of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. Our discussion ranged among many topics: the integration of energy healing and psychotherapy, developmental trauma, Ken Wilber’s Buddhism (personal versus spiritual maturity), the relationship between Buddhist practice and psychotherapy, the origin and development of Peter Levine’s trauma system, and countless other topics. It was a high-noosphere sail after a down-in-the-trenches trek, and it completed the conversion of two days into one.

July 5

If tourism is going to be more than collecting sites and checking off guidebook destinations, you have to reinvent it creatively from the ground up. We had a good starting place, for we were not in a hotel or tourist hub but a residential neighborhood. Our experience began with locating ourselves in the maze of streets with long unmemorizable Danish compound names, 5h3n getting oriented to sources of food and transportation. Each trial run was an experience, a unit of meaningful tourism.

In a new place, nothing is customized or packaged. The riddles are there to be solved, moment by moment. Selected can’t-miss sites get so overseen that it is difficult to see anything at all, to observe what’s actually there. It is hard even to deconstruct because you first have to deconstruct global tourism and then you have to deconstruct your American provinciality.

Our entry to Copenhagen consisted of a morning foray to neighborhood shops, then an afternoon run to the center of town. The latter meant familiarizing ourselves with the S-Tog local train, a different line from the inter-city train we took from Kastrup Airport.

We set out on the morning foray with Lindy’s hand-drawn replica of our host’s hand-drawn map on a whiteboard. We were aiming for the nearest shopping area, a long avenue called Jaegersborg. Since we didn’t have a full-area map, we had to trust a series of lefts and rights (right, left, left, right, etc.). If you substitute a right for a left (which I did almost at once), you end up in a mirror image and eventually have to flip the mirror to restore the directions. We did so eventually, without discovering my early mistake until our second try later in the afternoon. The mirror got turned around finally by a taxi driver stopping to clean his windows. We hit Jaegersborg twenty minutes later than we might have and from the end rather than midway.

During the hikes I noted two local customs which I haven’t seen applied in the States. Bike lanes run between parked cars and the pedestrian sidewalk. The idle vehicles form a solid barrier protecting cyclists from fast-moving and/or distracted drivers instead of wedging cyclists between their “wall” and traffic.

Later in the day we saw that each car on the S-train has a quiet compartment partially soundproofed from a larger area in which cell use is permitted.

Overall I considered it a successful day id tourism. Mainly it was pleasurable to be in Copenhagen and to be in Denmark. Never been here before, I atudied parts of its history in high school. I watched plentiful Danish films. I read translations of Danish writing. I met Danes in the U.S. I even published Danish authors. Now I was in Denmark. Denmark.  Every sight and smell and sound was Denmark. Denmark was the air, the light, the colors and smells of flowers along residential streets, gardenia-like lilacs and giant honeysuckle blossoms, loud and intricate bird choruses that seem to encompass whole neighborhoods, cats that come to visit and cats that look and dart off, children playing noisily amid the bird choirs, cyclists of assorted ages zooming past—all of it Denmark, 360 degrees. That’s tourism. It’s the young server at the Japanese restaurant to which we trooped on Jaegersborg for a late dinner. The waiter grew increasingly fond of us as we did of him. He brought us samples and stayed around for him to jive and practice English at our outdoor table while the restaurant emptied of diners approaching 22:00 closing time (remember, land of the midnight sun, we didn’t set out to eat till 20:30). Our new friend graduated from high school a week ago. When we needed to pay, he unlocked the door and invited us in for more banter around the credit-card machine, exchanges like—Lindy: “Your English is so good.” Him: “I’ve had to study it since seventh grade.” Lindy: “Will you go to college.” Him: A silly grin, then “May be. [A longish “may”] I’m thinking about it.”

In a briefer encounter earlier in the day, a tall red-haired late-twenties Dane with his girlfriend at the S-Tog station took care helping us get two passengers onto our discount train card (loaned to us by our hosts whom we will repay for our accrued rides at the end). We had just gotten evicted from the C-line train (but spared a fine for a first offense) by a stern though not unsympathetic lady inspector for failing to get two people (in fact, even one) on the current fare correctly (she had a scanner). We had to get off at the next stop, find a way to do it right, and await the next train.

The system is complicated. You have to press the plus sign before holding the card before the scanner, the opposite of the English instructions on the machine. To our surprise the same inspector was on the next train, but, with the help, we had gotten it right.

Tourism is solving riddles as they arise. After taking the train initially from Charlottenlund, our station, to an intended destination Central Station (Københavns Hovedbanegård), we were convinced otherwise by an older woman holding a bicycle who spied on our conversation. At her insistence, we exited with her at Nørreport, two stops early, for her touted walk through the older part of the city. She promised it was a short and interesting hike and would get us to Central Station. It wasn’t either. The shopping district she praised was flashy international shops and brands. We eventually got to generic government buildings, churches, parks, street theater, and buskers (classical and pop), but we had run out of energy while two kilometers from Central Station (after query of a bank guard). We impulsively hopped on a Hop On/Hop off double-decker (550 crowns, but divide by 6 for approximate dollars), and sat for the next ninety minutes on the open-air upper deck in relaxed viewing of much of the inner city: districts, docks, statues, parks, fountains, museums, etc., without the loud, continuous narration of a regular tour bus. We could look, imagine, and space out, and it was all interesting whatever it was, down to individual birds and children running in parks and incidents on the street and colorful shops: Danny Kaye’s wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. The ticket also included a boat tour, tomorrow’s plan.

Earlier in the day, back on our morning outing, we learned at a Meny branch supermarket that the key word for our preferred items was “økologiske,” recalling the old Oecology Issue of Io,for which we used the Greek diphthong and confused people who kept saying ”oh-ecology” or ”what’s oh-ecology?”

It’s oikos, house—the science of the house of Earth. I used it too on my first book, Solar Journal: Oecological Sections.

Once familiarized with the ø symbol, we were able to get a bunch of decent items at an otherwise industrial-food mart. Later in the day by Central Station (where we finally hopped off the Hop on/Hop off and headed blindly to our ticket-machine flunk and eviction), we splurged at a health-food market run by an African dude with a smoothly twanged Harry Belafonte lilt: cookies, dried fruit, nuts, coconut water, organic cacao bars, hazel nuts, coconut chips, ø ginger sodas, etc. (I had been carrying my empty backpack for just such an encounter).

What have I missed? Maybe sharing an odd lunch in the park after the supermarket and on the way home, four dishes in one plastic container from a tiny salad takeout place on Jaegersborg with a funny young Japanese proprietor: beets, beans, samosas, barley, etc. (though the beets leaked and made a mess). While eating, we were visited by dogs roaming from their walkers, some of them quite beautiful (Alaskan and sheepherding), some aggressive labs or pit bulls. Before that, we got, what else?, Danishes, and sat on a bench in front of the bakery. Mine was a poppy-seed roll with more poppy-seeds and poppy-seed layers than dough.

Travel journals can triv out and turn into postcards from abroad. I will quit while I have a modicum of dignity. It’s eleven p.m. anyway, twilight.

July 6

Copenhagen’s canals and inner harbor are their own world, a stripped-open portal to the life of the city which I think of as København after having seen the name on so many boats. A trip through this realm discloses variants of lives and lifestyles, eras and technologies, periods of Danish and European history.

The boat ride may be unabashed tourism, but the sheer expanse of water dilutes that energy, dissolving it in its spacious vista. Although an announcer with a mike identified sites and objects onshore and afloat, our guide was a laid-back college-age guy who spoke in a fluently sonorous voice in three languages—first Danish, then English, then German—which mellowed out his energy. Danish phonemes served as a lyrical and local preamble. His English was lightly accented with succinct information, the German added a somber World War II timbre and raised us to history and the greater European region. He was accompanied by two much older beefier men who alternated the piloting.

We started out in a canal, worked our way down into the inner harbor, made a wide cross-harbor swoop across the vast bay, and reentered the canal system at a different point, from where we progressed down a narrow water avenue, a motley array of boats parked on either side. The whole trip took about seventy-five minutes. A few things stand out:

• Copenhagen’s more ancient canal bridges are low, narrow, and cut in stone. As instructed, one must keep seated, bend a bit, and hold arms on board while passing through their dark echo chambers.
• Boats are anything that floats, from giant ocean liners housing more people than some towns and villages, to indescribable small barges, dories, scows, ketches, and tubs used as homes, restaurants, bars, and recreational floats. They fill Copenhagen’s near water in abundance.
• Copenhagen uses its waterfront space with fractal brilliance, converting old factories, missile silos, piers, wharves, military barracks, abandoned shopping districts, earlier centuries’ neighborhoods, and leftover structures of divergent origin and function into apartments and office spaces. These cluster along the shoreline, towering in glass and colorful metal, jutting out on densely packed piers like square and round Leggo constructions, often piled atop each other. The ingenuity of design is insect-like. People spill like seals onto little bits of stone surface and lie in the sun.
• The wars and cold wars of the twentieth century and the fortifications and military machinations of prior centuries, back to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), are visible (particularly when pointed out by our guide). All their paraphernalia have been decommissioned. Even artifacts as recent as missile-bearing destroyers from NATO’s Soviet years and submarines from the last Iraq war look antique and quaint compared to the digital combat and the crisis of displacement that dominate the present trans-global battle zone. The historical wars and their arsenals are clearly over, and their landscape has been adapted to moew serene uses—the missile silo is so skillfully redesigned that it looks more like brilliant architecture and daring artistry than expedient makeover. The greater war or crisis hovers like a ghost of something manifesting.

Denmark was historically a warring imperial nation and then a NATO stalwart, but it is presently at peace, showing deep amelioration and nonviolence. Though America’s wing of Republicans, Conservatives, and Trumpites vilifies Scandinavian socialist paradises, it is where Trump himself wants all his immigrants to come from. Even he blindly admires civilization.

• Space along the inner canals is precious; there is a ten-year wait for berths. Many of the vessels look like lifetime commitments: cherished hobbies and never finished weekend projects. They comprise homes, second homes, vacation spots, and hangouts of an evasiuve nature. Old tugboats have been refurbished into houses with gardens and dining areas. Many boats and barges have plants, sculptures, patios, attached kites (wildly diving imitation birds), and flags of no nation. They resemble portable, floating landfill more than agents of the sea, though there are plenty of active yachts, motorboats, and sleek craft that come and go from their berths even as we pass. Families move along in small motorboats, children dangling toy boats or ducks in the water, food on board. These floating picnics have their spreads on boards covering most of the boat not occupied by people.
• In a vast area of the inner harbor, on one side are luxury apartments of the most modern, fancy, and upper-echelon sort. On the other are floating hippie junks, yawls, barges, conversions,. etc., decorated baroquely, meta-politically, and in full Aquarian splendor such that it would take an entire thesis to dissect the symbology and bricolage of any one object and a new field of hermeneutics and iconography to unravel the collective message and historical layering of Copenhagen’s Freetown Christianshavn, which has its own schools, laws, policing, and mores, a floating surreal, sci-fi borough having been left to partial self-rule by a tolerant government.
• Hominids are sunbathing everywhere, making use of any platform, dock, and waterfront structure. The water must be cold because only two are swimming, but taking advantage of sun and water proximity is as ubiquitous as the surface area will allow.
• The overall waterfront reads not only as an intersection of the inner city with the commerce and international trade of the European zeitgeist but as a vivisection of a metropolis by marine activity. Various churches, financial districts, and neighborhoods are set in context to water. The integral geography of Copenhagen is still a labyrinth, but you can discern various urban tangles and historical configurations of districts from a boat in a way that is hidden on land.
• Mediaeval, Renaissance, and twenty-first-century Copenhagen flow together so that you might overlook how anomalous and incompatible the pieces are, like movies playing on adjacent screens or abutting holograms. Yet it obviously works.
• Though the various waterfronts, on both narrow canals and in the capacious inner harbor, are characterized by a spirit of creativity, tolerance, and social fluidity, the scope of individual wealth also stands out: floating cocktail lounges of the partying gentry and entitled youth, many of them no doubt first-generation “haves”; castles and docks of the royal family, past and present, used or never used and later converted into luxury apartments, motorcraft full of careless young people defying courtesy, buzzing tour boats, causing angry responses and shaking fists from the grizzled old hands overseeing our vessel.
• Ecocity København is quite evident. Sprawling shoreline edifices heat themselves from their own lighting and are cooled in the summer from the water. Wind and solar power preen proudly and are politically supported. A giant modern plant burns daily deliveries of trash, garbage, and indigestible metals and debris into electricity and heat that flow into homes throughout the city.

Though even the most ecologically minded don’t take the matter seriously on a daily basis (who could?), humankind’s continuation on this orb depends on converting linear accretion and consumption into cyclical activity (“sustainable” the ambient word). I think that this may happen. Our host David Reis agreed, as we stood by the recycling bins outside his house earlier talking about the untagged future. It seemed to either of us that unimaginable things must happen, both terrible and inspirational and, in either case, alchemical, for civilization, or what will remain of it, to re-root. I am not a pessimist, though I do feel like a stranger in a strange land, a visitor to someone’s fucked-up planet. Clearly I am not. I am a fully indentured native with DNA roots in the Pliocene. My ancestors and I are the crisis (per Pogo) in its unfolding and, hopefully, my descendants will be a part of its solution to which I am providing a quantum of the paradigm. David and I finally decided that it was a longer conversation than the trip he was about to take to the hardware store allowed. He was getting piping for an anthroposophical fountain he was building in the backyard. After dinner we would watch it in its first hours of operation, sending waveforms through a sensitive chaos of water. Will higher energies and subtle bodies play an astral role down the road for Operation Earth? They must, but how they will break into materialism’s trance is a mystery untold.

The waterway trip was relaxing, though in touristville we always seem to land beside an inconsolable baby or hyperactive tot (in this case, the former), whether on the bus to the airport (would he ever stop yowling?), to the waiting area at the airport gate (taking his hat on and off compulsively while a girl ran back and forth at her fullest speed in front of us), on the plane (two rows back), or now in front of us on the tour boat. This child was the worst of the lot, and his American mother and grandmother seemed clueless and counterintuitive, his father and sister uninterested, leading to the women agitating more than settling the infant. He was directly in front of me and, though I am not skilled at seeing auras, I tried to see his, looking at him with a sense of his past lives and soul. Whenever I did, he riveted on me and broke into a smile. I accomplished this feat maybe four times during the ride, though he always returned to raw howling.

Early afternoon before the boat ride and later afternoon following it were dominated by transportation. Getting to Central Station on the S-Tog was eventful again around the matter of getting the right data onto the card for onboard inspection. We succeeded but, in the process, ended up filling our card with way too much money and I also left my credit card in the confusion of a card-rejecting station machine such that it had to be rescued by Marianne. American credit cards can’t be used in Danish machines because they don’t have the right sort of pin numbers. We had to fill the card independently at a 7-11 at Central Station even as our hosts were filling it by computer.

En route back, getting ourselves into the S-Tog part of the Nørreport station (the local rather than the inter-city trains) took many mistakes and wrong platforms and more time getting lost than getting home. Though I scanned my card in the inter-city part of the station, it still showed the correct data for the inspector. I also remembered to clear it, as required, at “oud” both times, though barely.

After getting to town initially, we rode the Hop on/Hop off from Central Station to the boat tour. The supposed half-hour ride was nearly doubled by customers joining it at a hotel and then a cruise ship. Each stop took ten to fifteen minutes for the driver to run new credit cards. But that left time for additional customers to arrive, so that it seemed like we might never leave. Since we had a day of paid-for rides on the bus, it seemed worth using the purchase to get to the boat dock (only seven stops from Central Station), but in retrospect a cab would have been cheaper and much faster. As it was, we arrived just in time for a departing boat.

We rode the bus again after the boat ride, aiming at the Botanical Gardens (stop 20). It required re-seeing some scenery, but it was quite different on review, a pleasant journey in the second deck in bright sun. Entrance to Gardens was free and, though they were technically open, the greenhouses were all locked, though walking paths and a lily-pad-filled pond made the locale the a visit—these plus an old crumbling brick building that suggested an eighteenth-century herbarium. We had hoped to see advertised exotic fungi and giant butterflies, so the closed greenhouses were a disappointment for such a long ride.

From the Gardens we hiked to the afore-mentioned layers of the Nørreport station where we got lost among trains.

For all the problems, the basic shape of Copenhagen was becoming familiar on only our second full day. For instance, I understood why we took the inter-city train the first time and the S-tog afterward, though both stopped at Hellerup. The S-tog alone stopped at Charlottenlund, walking distance to our house.

In the early morning before all this happened, I joined Marianne in her garden, picking currants and a few raspberries, for about an hour. She initiated it, approaching me at my laptop with tea in the dining room and saying that if I would keep her company while she picked, we could have a talk. I was a willing plucker as well, as I enjoy filling containers of blueberries, huckleberries, and black chokeberries in Maine.

Our conversation ranged over many topics, some of them partial repeats: the Soul in the cosmos, intergenerational trauma, the role of epigenetics and the parietal lobe in trauma in families, the Buddhist perspective on individual personality development and the formation of identity, the creation of transpersonal and collective information fields, the way that the archetypal flows into and organizes the personal as opposed to vice versa, her own life and development from Elizabeth Marchand’s bodywork through radical Danish Buddhism to somatic experiencing, and my own present sense of emerging space and painful transition.

I knew what a privilege this was. Marianne is an advanced psychotherapist who sees virtually no individual patients anymore. She has been licensed at the fifth level as a senior Buddhist practitioner to give individual transmissions. She trains psychotherapists and lectures to hundreds of them at a time throughout Europe. She is a recognized superstar who brings psychoanalysis and Buddhism (and general spirituality) together in a unique way with her singular perspective and credentials from her trainings and teachers. She has both knowledge and knowledge’s context, a rare and precious combination. Basically I was allowed a rich, wide-ranging private session, including both my own issues and our shared confessions. We conducted light psychospiritual transference, using intellectual as well as emotional energy and synergizing them, while filling a container to the brim with berries.

Boat trips and travels through Copenhagen are well and good, but this was the jewel of my day and is what stays with me and fills me with warmth by night. We can build cities over generations, and they are marvelous to behold—and yes today I’d rather be viewing new cultures and geographies than much of anything else because I am going through a mysterious inner change, but angelic connection helps. Transparent recognition of our soul presence in this Creation and reality and shared stories are the lifeblood of aliveness. They are beacons in a more darkly folded and entangled place than a train station, and I need them to be able to sleep and to want to awake to the next day. Without them, I am lost in anonymous murk.  I am grateful to be in the presence of guides and seers. It has always been my first compass of journeying.

I understand now how one can simply receive. Beneficent waves from near at hand and unimaginably far arrive simultaneously. Distance matters not at all in a universe like this. So, thanks for those healing waves.

Late in the day, after Lindy’s and my return from downtown, David, Marianne, and we shared our differently elicited dinners (their Indian takeout, our cooking from the supermarket and health-food store), making an indoor picnic with discussion of such things as Neanderthal genes in our genome, telepathy, and epigenetics and generational trauma (again) plus the usual range of personal, political, and randomly arising topics, before going to the backyard to view the operations of David’s splendid new fountain.

July 7

In the morning Lindy and I took the S-tog to Central Station and went on a 10 a.m. walking tour of central Copenhagen. Our guide was a distinguished woman of roughly our age, Bodil Teide. Right off, she admitted a serious bias toward history and warned us off the tour if we didn’t want to hear that. It cost 100 kroner, about $16.50, each. There were six of us: two young women from L.A. taking in all the Scandinavian countries in a whirlwind, and a younger and older Swiss woman travelling together and trying to sustain two tours per day through different layers of Copenhagen. We moved at a leisurely pace in bright sun, delectable breezes off the harbor.

For all my talk about the value of a water view in seeing København with perspective, today proved the equal value of plodding through the interstices of a hive with a knowledgeable bee. We walked Copenhagen’s layered history, street to street, plaza to plaza, from church to shops to school to government building to statue, integrating the relationship between the bright reality surrounding us and collectively kept records of how we got to it, at least the part of it that is still standing as opposed to that only in the Akashic records (though there is a subtle frequency at which the past merges as ghosts with breezes and sunlight).

These are the hardest types of tourist experiences to write about because everything I learned and saw would be better gleaned from a history book or travel guide or in widely available postcards of Copenhagen’s key sights. It is much more difficult to deconstruct a jumble of information and impressions and say what was special or generated deeper images.

Toward the tour’s beginning, we stood in the oldest market area where Vikings came to shop, to buy and sell after raids. Bodil remarked that the area was still oriented by the same oblique arrangement of buildings, so the Vikings would probably recognize where they were, though they would be higher in relation to sea level, standing atop centuries of matted-down litter. I scanned the square for what would most surprise her seafaring ancestors and decided that, aside from obvious things like a shop called Miami (a little out of their Westfaring range), the biggest anomaly might be the Amnesty International offices marked in gold letters. Amnesty would be a concept outside their worldview and ethics. But who is to say what meanings coexist at a given time? Who can speak for their situational view of empathy and mercy?

Idly I tried an astral vibration to see what Viking energy might still be present. I was in over my head psychically, but I did get something striking: “We are not who you think we are, so you do not know how to read our energy. Forget judging us by your view of our compassion.” The energy of thetransmission was the site’s Viking energy for me.

Danish history is set by some milestone events that are commonly overlooked. Each is one version of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects: the Black Death, the little Ice Age, the fortification of small port villages, the Reformation, the English destruction of the Danish fleet in the first decade of the nineteenth century. I couldn’t remember which war that was. Why exactly were the British shelling Copenhagen in 1807 such that we can see blackened stone still today? Bodil explained that the Danes were collateral damage in the English attempt to prevent Napoleon from getting his hands on the second largest military fleet in Europe. The largest ultimately prevailed under Lord Horatio Nelson. He used the Copenhagen church steeple as his compass.

I use a definition of hyperobjects I gleaned from Tim’s lectures: “entities that are massively distributed in time and space, at least relative to human scales…. Hyperobjects are viscous, molten, nonlocal, phased, and inter-objective…. They appear in the human world as products of our thinking through the ecological crisis we have entered…. [T]his is the moment at which massive nonhuman, nonsentient entities make decisive contact with humans, ending various human concepts such as world, horizon, nature, and even environment. Art in the time of hyperobjects isn’t simply art about hyperobjects but art that seeks to evoke hyperobjectivity in its very form….”

That is what makes tourist deconstruction so difficult. We are staring at a crisis unfolding while pretending to see something else. I think of hyperobjects as colliding information systems within the human commons, chaos fields emerging from multi-convergences of the unknown actual universe with human activities and symbols. Hyperobjectivity is a useful way to translate a walking tour into larger grids of information even as evoking a Viking astral frequency is a way to attract energies and entities from beyond one’s ken.

Absalon, the twelfth-century bishop of Roksilde and organizer of the original fortification of the fishing village that became Copenhagen, stands or sits on various horses and pedestals in both symbolic and lineal recognition of his founding of the modern metropolis. His largest and most militaristic representation rests atop a stone pedestal across which simply cut waves of individual herring swim, indicating that his power, the power of the state, the basis of the Danish polity, rests on fish in general and herring in particular. I am guessing that the builders of the statue meant it one way and I take it another. To them it was a slightly condescending nod, given the majesty of the statue and the slim figurations of the fish. To me it reveals the hyperobjective relationship between the two icons is deeper unconsciously and millennially than on the stone.

I found other juxtapositions: enlightened kings, astronomical discoveries, wars, and fires, overlapping with one another and present-day shopping activities and musicians at fountains and statues. People lived in these actual orange and red structures. Being in their lingering energy fields is different from reading about them in a book. That the man who lost his entire family in a theater fire in the seventeenth century used the money meant for his children’s education to build the college dormitory that stands before us seems anomalous with the atrocities of the era, the surreal madness that swept Scandinavia into a Thirty Years’ War. One realizes that gentleness and good will have always coexisted with avarice, narcissism, and recreational violence. Likewise, structures from the Middle Ages and Renaissance hold their own in a modern city. Habitation on a sacred, fragile planet is part of the subtext that goes unspoken, though I try Bodil on the relationship of the dorm to that weird seventeenth-century war and she says, “Yes, I thought that too.” Sometimes buildings are all we have to set against oligarchies, the only thing that restrains and mellows them, until or unless they decide to raze those too and disseminate a greater homeless population.

At one point we looked at an old hospital—I think it was one of Copenhagen’s three Mediaeval structures still standing. In Bodil’s account of its era, hospitals were poorhouses while doctors attended most middle-class and rich sick folks in their homes. She segued into an account of beggar kings, leaders of bands of poor people whose job was to maintain their flocks and keep other poor people from joining. She laughed a bit sarcastically, adding something like, “Things haven’t changed much, have they?” No, they haven’t.

A few other things stood out in retrospect. On our spanning of a canal, we saw an underwater sculpture, or its top; it was actually six or seven separate pieces around a merman, representing an underwater tale whose plot I forget. The issue was that most of the figures could be seen only from atop looking down, and as a fraction of their whole in the dark water. Although I don’t think the intention was avant-garde, the effect stirred avant-garde discursions, including a French modern sense of erasure, that what is unseeable is as important as what is visible (or what is missing as important as what is present) as long as the missing or unseeable is actually there.

I also thought about how the statue’s story was too Hans-Christian to take into account the undine energy of mermaids and mermen—they are not just underwater, or not even underwater. Embodiment at an astral frequency means “swimming” in an astral medium even when breathing air and with ordinary legs instead of a fishtail. Andersen’s fairy tales, including those of mermaids, arise from a lost kingdom of faery energy but still the lore of a physical Earth.

The storefront of what we would call Danishes (and the Danish call Vienna cakes) was scrumptious in its varieties, twists, sugar coats, jams, seeds clusters, and degrees of crust and soft dough, and it led Bodil, as she stopped us to look, to a fuller discourse of the little Ice Age and how oats and rye in these sweets mark how far south in Europe they originated, for the inability to grow wheat during cold summers only progressed south as far as a wavy line through Austria and other European duchies.

A walking tour of downtown Copenhagen, in summation, constitutedtales of little mermaids, rye fields, and kings and Tasmanian princesses as per the most recent Danish royal bride, but it had a subtext: we are alive and archaeological both and, though we are not obscured in time (yet), we stand in dynamic interplay with hyperobjects. They are not on our tour list but they are what we see.

The afternoon marked a change in direction. We returned to the house, got our prepared overnight backpacks, and walked back to the S-Tog. We changed at Central Station to the inter-city and left Denmark, going to Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city and not far from Copenhagen, about a half hour by train. To get from the Danish land mass to the Swedish land mass, the inter-city crosses a dramatic bridge over the Öresund. Because of the refugee crisis in Europe, we encountered passport control getting off the train, though we were still in the EU.

This side trip was set in motion six years earlier when we made a different European itinerary, a trip we never took, that included accepting a home exchange in Malmö. I still had the email of our partner and, like a squirrel who knows where nuts are stored. I found Thomas Lunderquist’s one on my computer. A radio journalist for the Swedish equivalent of BBC or NPR, he invited us to stay for a night at his multi-generational family home down the coast from Malmö in Höllviken. Thomas was born the same year (1969) as our son Robin.

I wanted to go to Malmö in part because it is a great word, a mix of a cookie and a dog, and just plain cute. It also was a way to see Sweden, a place in which I have greater interest than a mere overnight: the films of Lukas Moodysson and Ingmar Bergman, the plays of August Strindberg, the European country welcoming of refuges regardless of origin. One day is better than coming close and missing.

Thomas met us at passport control and walked us to the car where his 85-year-old father, Thorsten Lunderquist, a retired judge from Malmö, sat in the driver’s seat. En route, Thomas assured us that his father had never had an accident and simply liked to drive. He took the backseat and talked to Lindy, while I talked to Thorsten, a man of relentless irony and teasing. There was no option but to joust back. His English was decent though a bit vague, so I didn’t always understand the joke, drawing an occasional light jab of the judge’s arm.

It is wonderful how in travelling you just plop down in the most random situations that instantly become nonrandom and heartwarming, in this case the family of Thomas, Thorsten, Thorsten’s wife (and Thomas’ mother) Maud, and Thomas’ sister Sofia and her two visiting friends—a Swedish summer weekend at a beach house on the Baltic (in the family since 1947). Interestingly Maud is Jewish, though raised in Malmö after her father’s escape from Poland, while Thorsten is Lutheran, making Thomas and his sister half-Jewish like our kids.

`           It happened to be the day that Sweden was playing England in the World Cup quarterfinals in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the streets were filled with people in the bright Swedish national color yellow, close to my favorite color. I do not follow European football, but I joined Thomas for a while before the t.v. and amused him with my few literary references to “soccer”: Roddy Doyle’s Patty Clarke, Ha, Ha, Ha; Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric; and my friend (and NAB author) Bruce Lee’s vilification of American football as being ridiculous for its staccato rather than continuous action (Elvis Costello’s base player, Bruce wrote books we published on Bruce Lee, Wing Chun, and Kung fu). England took a 1-0 lead on a header and looked to be the better team (they ultimately won 2-0). Thomas walked his parents and us to the Falsterbo Canal and Baltic Sea beach before hurrying back to watch the second half.

The canal was presented as a stretch of water opened to the Baltic by Swedish engineers during World War II in order to get ships out around German mines. The Germans blocked had Swedish and Danish vessels going between the Öresund and the Baltic around Falsterbo and Skanör. The canal is slightly salty, without fish, and quite cold—a popular swimming site, though only a single woman was in the water because everyone else was watching the football. Torsten and Maud went right down the ladder into the frigid water from decades of acquaintance with it. Lindy followed soon after. I waited for five indecisive minutes and initially swam underwater. It was too cold for longer than a minute.

After a half hour, we left the canal and walked to beach on the Baltic, a hike through heather, reeds, rib grass, and rock roses, with quails and rabbits scurrying through the brush. The sand on the beach was soft as powder. The aroma of rotting seaweed was sulphurous. We spent several hours in lazy talk with Maud, feeling the sand, idly burying feet and arms. I took the extra step of applying its powdery pack medicinally to my body as an experiment. It was fine and dry and full of negative ions.

Thorsten had gone back ahead of Maud, Lindy, and me to fix the dinner, another prerogative he insisted on. On my earlier request, the chicken was, in his words, “fed only corn but is not eating much now.” At eight (20:00) we had a lively family dinner on the back porch during which Thorsten diagnosed each of the foreigners’ manners, and Lindy couldn’t live down her many ice cubes in red wine—he said she was clearly not European. I was identified as American for eating my small round potato with a fork without using my knife.

The rise of Hitler in Germany was discussed at length—it is still omnipresent. Thorsten had many opinions as to how he took power with only 32% of the vote. The conversation moved to Trump, and Lindy and I had ample opportunity to discuss American politics with Swedes, a fertile territory because one has the America-centric illusion that everyone else gets our melodramas and the nuances of our electorate and parties. They don’t, and there were many openings for our opinions and comments on them. The topic eventually ran its course, and the evening rolled on, as evenings in the north must, toward 22:00 sunset. Three wood pigeons, plumper as well as more individual and aggressive than the more familiar (to me) urban pigeons (they don’t flock and they keep better hygiene), engaged in a ferocious battle or courtship on a tree branch and then the garage roof. Thorsten said that they hired these birds for the summer to entertain their guests. Later he intentionally confused what Lindy was saying into a claim she was about to take a course in Yiddish in Lithuania (closer to what Thomas was doing for a radio show). Her outrage delighted him.

Folks are in fact still talking, and I am writing, catching up with the days, but the journal ends here, leaving us in the warm evening of Höllviken summer a family dinner at a Swedish beach house providing its own context.

An interesting aside before closing: as the discussion turns to swallows (for which they seek the English word from the Swedish), I realized that if we weren’t there, they would be having almost the same conversation but in Swedish.

July 8

The bright yellow Swedish sun is not the color of the Swedish flag or football team but the subtler yellow of morning, the garden, doves cooing, and a wisdom outside of time, drenching history, drenching knowledge, drenching a multidimensional Earth. It fills this summer house by the seaside, by the sand, by the cat Timon meowing in his feline timelessness. The flow of esoteric information is not but might as well be Swedenborgian for its capacity to erase everything else for a moment and be only itself. It flows from old apples in the grass and the beach roses and reeds. It is an essence and sorrow beyond thought.

The Swedenborgian catharsis expands dreamlike into its own mineralogical philosophy, filling the morning with bird cries as swallows swoop—what other word is there for what they are doing in the high air, as they own the English “sw” field above this house?

The Lunderquists prepared bundles of dough the night before and have put them into the oven. Now they produce hard rolls with rye and oats mixed in with wheat. We share a long family breakfast on the sun porch.

Thorsten and Maud leave early with towels, touting the water and proselytizing and teasing us about what we will be missing. No one but them wants to venture into the sea that early. After breakfast Lindy and I make the trek together in the crowds on Ljungsätersvägen—no football game today, the local papers thanking Sweden’s star for the ride, bright yellow back page of Sydsvenskan reads, “Tack for fest, Granen!”

A flow of families is walking, electrobiking, biking, wagoning, and autoing toward the white sands and Baltic. We go to the pier on the canal. The water is a tad warmer today but still an icy alembic. The body goes in, sensations flow through it, too many of them to account or arrange, so it is a mixture of psychic and emotional fields settling in a swim. I like being a ray-like starfish, immersed and radiating as a different kind of creature. Maybe it is its own astral visitation. I say all this now, but at the moment it was just the water, its bone-deep icy vibrations, their liberation of a lifetime of feelings, rising to a Sweden of many people in the canal: little blonde girls and their parents and older people, everyone cleansing body and spirit.

Afterwards Lindy and I walk through the reeds to the Baltic shore and lie in the white powder, soft and grounding, full of mineralogical philosophy and vital energy pulled out of the sun and up from the earth. One can simply lie in its orgone bed and feel excess emotion and energy and grief pulled out.

Thorsten again insisted on right of driver to take us and his son back to Malmö, about thirty kilometers and minutes. The outing concluded with a fast tour of residential Malmö, where we got to see the house where Thorsten raised his family, including his fruit trees and vines, grapes that produced forty bottles of wine one year and a new apricot from which he insisted Lindy get the single ripe fruit of the day.

After dropping Thorsten off, Thomas took the wheel and we went to his house to see the new floor he was installing. That led to a garden tour with an emphasis on tasting currants, admiring the apple and plum, and evaluating the shade cast by the neighbor’s giant maple, which Thomas reckoned was out of scale with the neighborhood—these were small yards with gardening space duly apportioned—hence the tree should be cut, though he hated killing any tree. I was most taken with the tansy in front. I consider the tansy blossoms of New England an almost perfect yellow-orange, but these were even yellower and five times the blossom sphere of any tansy I have seen. The medicinal smell, a little tangier here, never fails to elicit Mediaeval apothecaries as well as the beating of my own tansy-phoric heart.

We were next taken to the center of town: the library, museum, and train station. Malmö has several architectural marvels including a tower with a DNA helical twist and a new branch to the library with ceilings that seem stratospheric with a radiance of soft light through near total glass. We were finally left at the art museum’s restaurant so that we could eat lunch before boarding the train back to Copenhagen. Large numbers of fresh breads and hard dark Scandinavian crackers covered a table for taking by diners. I ended up with a pickled salmon dish I might have avoided in the States for the heavy sour cream, but fish, onions, warm potatoes, radishes, and lettuce mixed well. Lindy had a thick tannish-green cauliflower soup with a gourmet flavor—she never eats cauliflower otherwise and complains about its smell when it is being steamed. All came with the breads and crackers and ginger juice.

The bookstore had a section for local Swedish avant-garde writers, and my attention fell on a pamphlet called Male Gazes by a female-to-male trans. Alternating Swedish and English pages offered passages that cut through the crises of Western sociopolitical life:

“I used to be a woman. I didn’t realize how much I was objectified until I became a man. Suddenly, my presence became less viable…. Like, somehow I’d become the default, no longer something special or view-worthy. I like that—not being gazed at anymore by men. It feels more powerful. But that’s not why I became a man. It’s just an unforeseen bonus.

“As a woman, I was self-conscious of my appearance. As if all the years of being looked at and assessed caused me to internalize the notion that my presence served a particular purpose—to reaffirm masculinity and the tacit right of all men to tell me who I am. I appeared as I did out of obedience. The reward was affirmation. I sought the satisfied glances of men as confirmation that I had successfully fulfilled my role. I was someone worth desiring, therefore I was someone. Invisibility as a woman was the most horrifying prospect of failure.

“The male gaze is everywhere. Even as a well-educated, thought-driven woman, at least a few times a day my mind returns to thoughts of my body and whether or not it’s good enough.

“I was thirteen when I lost my virginity to him. From then on, my kindness and warmth consisted and was measured in the amount of times I said “yes.” Now I am soulless and merciless, for every man has heard a “NO.” I love being soulless if that equals self-respect. I love being merciless if that means loving myself.

“The male gaze is of no importance.”

My response is affirmative. Even to the degree I don’t suffer the male gaze on me, it radiates and splinters through my cultural and personal space. I am male. I don’t deny the gaze, but the mindless capitalization of it has hijacked the culture and hijacked the connection between upper and lower chakras. It is a prison.

We arrived in Sweden at 15:00 and left at 15:30 the next day on the train to Copenhagen. The Copenhagen airport station of our debacle seemed months ago. We switched to the S-Tog to Charlottenlund, caught a train just at the closing doors. David by chance picked us up walking from the station, and we shared some fruit before heading out on our own to the Asian-fusion Koii on Jaegersbord for dinner.

July 9

Lindy went horseback riding with Marianne at 10:00 in the morning, her first such outing since her teen years. She got to guide and trot and communicate with Marianne’s Icelandic pony, while Marianne borrowed a friend’s and they went on some trails.

I eventually took the train into town, exiting at the Nørreport station and walking aimlessly for the next four and a half hours. It wasn’t totally aimless, as I had goals, but they never came to much. Walking was the event, the neutrality of being in another country and observing with sustained curiosity, thinking my own thoughts in the shifting scenery.

I wanted to see Christianshavn, so I walked there initially, falling in with a hippie family (a couple with young teen boys) who invited me to follow them after I asked directions upon nearing the bridge to that section of town. The part of Christianshavn I saw looked like the rest of Copenhagen more or less, a bit funkier street activity. It also turned out that the last canal our tour boat went down was in Christianshavn: floating homes with vegetable plots.

Then I walked all the back to Nørreport with the goal of going to see the butterflies at the Botanical Gardens but turned the wrong way and wandered into and through a large park with lakes (it turned out to be Örstads Park) before asking two older guys on a bench for the Gardens and getting turned around and sent back the other way. Not that it mattered much where I walked. Plus, all museums, including the butterfly greenhouse, were closed on Monday, disappointing their other arriving visitors.

I hiked from the Botanical Gardens to Central Station, a complicated course as well as a good distance, getting off-course many times while passing sites I recognized from the walking tour. They had a different feeling come upon them randomly, as my map of Copenhagen adjusted. Wandering with goallessness is easier in a foreign city where there is so much to observe. I chose not to ask my way to the station for a while, content to intuit streets and see what appeared.

I almost stopped at a few restaurants but wasn’t hungry enough to break the rhythm of the wander. I passed crowds in squares, listened briefly to jazz bands (jazz week in Copenhagen), walked in churchyards, sat by fountains and tracked paths of water sprinkes, looked in store windows, watched boats and birds—all parts of a full meander. I finally had a ginger drink at the health-food store and boarded the S-Tog as Central Station.

Night. Totally, totally different. David and Marianne invited Lindy and me to the third floor for a dinner they had prepared, and for two hours we had the sort of lively exchange that one might expect with people who do energy work and reflective-listening therapy during much of the day. Some of the exchange followed from the horses and led to a discussion of animal intelligence and human-animal dialogues. The meal was on their back porch and the issue of animal communication came to include wood pigeons on the roof and a hornet that kept buzzing the beers before having to be rescued from mine—always back to how to people communicate with animals without imposing their prerogative and authority, lots of criticism of horse whisperers by Marianne, then a side trip through how democracy can sustain itself in light of the impact of fear and conspiracy theories to parts of the brain that are millions of years old and go back at least to fishes as opposed to the types of reflection needed for governance that arise in parts of the brain only 200,000 years old. We evaluated the near inextricable entanglement of progressive liberalism with scientism, hence liberals’ own susceptibility not to conspiracy theories as such but to the corporate packaging of progressive materialism (as against alternative medicines or the communications of tree through their root systems and other things outside the box that many liberals assign to the same quackery as denial of climate change). On the whole, a mare’s nest of complication.

The greater course of discussion regarded systems therapy and their differences and changes from the eighties to the present in Europe and the States, the gist being that most prior dynamics had been abandoned or transformed into new methods of individual and mutual reflective listening, notably a systems approach here in Denmark. Marianne doesn’t teach in the U.S. anymore because the different therapy communities in which she worked are not open to the new synergistic methods developing in Denmark, Germany, and Holland. One side topic was how that it is impossible to get people to levels beyond where they are, which is what therapists routinely do, so how to reach people where they actually are instead and enable them to develop from their own resources.

We segued to David’s energy work, querying him on how it is done, ways to reach the dying, either to bring them back or allow them to pass, and how that related to the overall auric field in which they had incarnated and drew from. Part of the issue David and Marianne raised in their way is that the energy finds its own directions, and in the work you learn to read it and guide it and, to some degree, restore its direction and vitality. But you don’t interfere with it.

 David shifted my query about whether the energy he tapped was etheric to the more embracing notion that at his level the auric energies flow from all frequencies and sources simultaneously, and he dowses the field beyond names.

The currants from our picking the other morning made their way into Marianne’s dessert as a sauce with other berries and whipped cream.

After Lindy went downstairs, I stayed with David and Marianne for what I expected would be an additional half hour of discussion and it exploded into one of those epitome conversations: the nature of souls in the universe, the effect of the collective in trauma, etc. Marianne surmised that particularly powerful traumas like the one that led to suicides in my natal family cause individuals to lose personal identity or form imperfect boundaries and then they merge with the collective trauma which is boundaryless and cannot be encompassed. WE went from there to what our roles must be in redeeming collective trauma individually. How do we change its condition in the world and the civilization even as it dwarfs us?

We passed from the role of the collective in generating atrocities like concentration camps to the work of humans in the crisis of their own existence, the nature of esoteric process, the relationship of the erotic and the esoteric, and the communication of souls. We went on for another two hours. At one point, brilliant Marianne pulled together mystical Christianity (Thomas Merton, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart), Buddhist nonduality, Seth, Jung, shamanism, and a lot else in one fell swoop (causing David to jokingly insert, “You’ve got it, Marianne!”). She concluded with an image of the soul attempting to evolve, to touch matter and feel suffering, and spread its light into the darkness. She was talking about the nature of the human journey and why we suffer, as we batted back and forth notions of the Divine in relation to the Creation.

I tried to square Marianne’s deeply committed nondual Buddhist practice with notions of the individual soul. She smiled and said, “But I’m a Christian mystic and a Jungian too,” and went on whow that she could hold duality and nonduality, the collective and the personal, suffering and redemption.

July 10

Lindy and I decided to go to opposite attractions across the street from each other near the Nørreport station. First we walked to the Charlottenlund S station, , a ten-minute stroll through swish suburban streets, lots of colorful gardens and a few massive apartment buildings at the end. At the okologiske Bread Garden alongside the station, you can dip samples of the most recent loaf out of the oven in olive oil or get a large cookie or raspberry tart.

We had finally mastered the shining blue dot of the ticket machine. The trick is that the machines differ. There’s no absolute autopilot protocol. You have to reason with the screen. The one at Charlottenlund accepts the + for the second passenger at a different point in the sequence than the one at Nørreport or Central Station. David says the system ran over-budget; then its technology was dated by the time it was implemented. We boarded a quick-arriving train.

Lindy wanted to see a Danish castle, and the Rosenberg castle was across the street from the butterfly house and Natural History Museum—an ideal contiguity. After leaving her in a queue at the castle, I walked half of a long block to the corner, though my target was directly across the street (traffic travels fast and is pedestrian blind). I came in through the museum courtyard and wandered back into the Botanical Gardens. I got on the short line for the butterfly greenhouse, following a crowd of many ages and nationalities, bought my ticket, and entered.

Not reading Danish, I walked an entire greenhouse of cactuses looking for butterflies without seeing one. I dawdled, at least appreciating the cactuses, bright yellow and red flowers on giants of the deserts displaced to meditate and bloom in the north. Then the exit from the cactus greenhouse became the entrance to a double greenhouse of butterfly madness.

Butterflies bring lightness, color, dance, surprise, but mostly lightness, large fluttering wings bearing an awakened worm. There was so many of them that we visitors experienced brief landings on our clothes, hair, hands. A sense of their world was conferred by touch. They said silently: “We alight, we like your colors, we are not afraid of you. What do you think of us, big ones?” That’s my version of unconscious “butterfly think.”

According to the wall chart, there were about ten or so varieties. My favorite by far was the Blue Morpho, significantly larger than the rest, with iridescent wings. Its blue glowed radiantly. How often do you see giant blue butterflies on the loose, let alone in numbers? Their wingspan gave them a more stable gait in the air than the others, as they seemed to float around each other, chasing in pairs and trios.

The wall chart attributed natural selection of their iridescent blue to the fact that it scared predators, e.g., more blue ones survived. I am a neo-Darwinian by education and birth, so I will buy it, but add a touch of Steinerite Paul Klee blue for the Lemurian vibration. Blue for poison, but also blue for fifth-chakra light.

Four of the varieties were orange, identified as Julia, Postman, Tiger Wing, and East Mexican Banner. With the morphos, they flapped a quiet symphony in orange and blue, though there were some yellows and some flying things with transparent veined rings.

I did not feel bad for the butterflies’ captivity, though I had imagined I might. Their zoo was planted with their favorite flowers and, if that wasn’t sufficient, their hosts had hung thin cross-strips of banana, orange, and watermelon from the ceiling: high-surface-area candy wafers delicacies for clustering. Others were strewn in the dirt around the plants. It was butterfly nirvana.

I walked the short distance from there through the Botanical Gardens to the Natural History Museum.

People in Denmark are assiduously ethical. If I had wanted to go to both the butterfly house and museum, I should have bought my ticket at the museum and gotten a discount. When the young woman at the counter informed me of this after I had paid, I said I had already been to the butterflies. She took my ticket back (despite my saying it was okay), deducted the cost of the greenhouse, and sold me another, juggling the difference in her computer. S

ince there was no one behind me in line, I asked her for help on the location of the next museum Lindy and I wanted to go to. She went onto her computer to see, then found and marked a map and gave it to me. The whole interaction, six or seven minutes, came automatically to her.

The Natural History Museum was nicely contained and manageable for only one hour to look. I grew up in NYC going to the local Museum of Natural History, and it required multiple several-hour visits for the barest coverage. The entire Copenhagen MNH could have fit in one of its exhibit halls. Its first floor was divided into (1) astronomy (with emphases on asteroids, meteors, Mars, Vesta, and a film on the Big Bang and formation of the Solar System), (2) geology (galena, dolemite, iron pyrites, and their affines), (3) the formation of the Denmark shelf from pre-Cambrian through Pliocene times, and (4) a room loosely dubbed The Cabinet of Curiosities modelled after the collection of sixteenth-century Danish physician Ole Worm; it included birds, bones, fish, spears, rattles, antlers, small-animal taxidermy, the figure of an Eskimo with a kayak. Some of these were in separate exhibit cases, and a portion of it was in a large reenactment of Worms’ Museum. The room reminded me of Maine’s Museum of Cryptozoology.

The sense of “museum” as a Foucauldian “legenda” (“things told”) pervaded the Copenhagen one and it didn’t just apply to one room. The whole gestalt was a legenda for its single fragments of Moon and Mars, one-of-a-kind rocks, assortment of sea-heart nuts washed up on Danish shores from tropical rainforests, reconstructions of Pliocene underwater snail, fish, and plant life (including a grouping with Ikea-like names: snegl, haj, moler, fugle and musling—a palaeo-wonderland).

The Copenhagen NMH’s second floor was devoted entirely to dinosaurs’ skeletons and models of dinosaur eggs and late embryology.

I felt the whole CMNH thing as a single wave: early stars building up elements through iron, secondary explosions seeding contemporary space-time with elements, Earth forming in the solar gyre, Cambrian lavas, trilobites and sea worms, an expression of awakening predatory and fearful reptile consciousness in the explosion of giant Triassic and Jurassic forms, the mammals and forests of the Pliocene, Cro Magnon intelligence coming finally to the cabinets of curiosities and civilized cities of Holocene Earth.

I won’t claim a clairsentient vision; it’s more that the entire pattern has an implicit shape and emergent form for me. It is all legenda, hence sticks together as a super-fairy-tale of a strange place: Earth after the unknown astral kingdoms of Lemuria and Atlantis, unknown because they were pre-physical. It is what Rudolf Steiner and his associates called “physical evolution ascending” to meet “spiritual evolution descending”—two interfusing waves.

The Museum of Natural History not only taxonomizes and analyzes morphologies; it can’t help but show, in its rush of organized language and strict symbology—those blond- bearded, smiling young Danish astronomers on the video speaking to a docile public like priests—the emergence of a shape that transcends its individual parts and brings seashells and suns together in a singular etiology or archetypal morphology. D’Arcy Thompson got its essence in his 1900 classic On Growth and Form. The CMNH was a Museum of Growth and Form.

Nice tiny stuffed dinosaurs in the gift shop, but no room in my suitcase to cart them back for grandchildren.

I met Lindy outside the Rosenberg castle. She distinguished from the one we saw in Ireland last year as being the home of a big-deal king rather than the large house of a feudal noble keeping up with his neighbors in Mediaeval suburbia. It had guards around its crown jewels.

We started the long trek toward the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, aiming on my map. We set out in the general direction of Christianshavn. The Art Center was farther out on the same spit of land.

We didn’t know yet that it was unrealistic to think we could walk the entire way. It was not unrealistic to walk; that is, to get going on foot to the right part of town, eat lunch somewhere en route. We trekked deep into the inner city—ten minutes, twenty minutes, a half hour, our avenue bending away city center to aim for the bridge over the canal. We passed through more conventional neighborhoods without the usual tourist crowds or scenic sites (cinema museums, t.v. stations, all of it interesting). We settled on a modest basement Japanese wok place: a tall young long-haired Dane guy taking orders and a grizzled old Japanese chef working beside him on a grill—tight quarters, only a few tables. While building our respective noodle dishes from three columns of categories (noodle, vegetable or meat, and sauce), we learned from the young Dane how far our destination was—much too great a distance to walk. His recommendation was to take the 9A bus—its route passed very near. Getting to its correct avenue was too complicated. Once on the street, we found his combination of a right followed by two sort-of lefts (an uncertainly wavy hand confirmed by the nodding chef) impossible to apply. Instead, we took a taxi from a waiting row. We hadn’t splurged on one yet, and this was the moment.

The driver was voluble, telling us, among other things, what ordinary words in Danish were insults in Swedish, then narrating the list of drugs you could and couldn’t buy, none of them legal, in Christianshavn as we passed through it.

Somehow I had missed its core on my walk, the converted Army barracks of Christiana, dense wild-looking hive visible through openings. We saw it tantalizingly from the cab: combination Stone Age village, carnival, farmers’ market, and Burning Man. I wished I could have entered for a close look, but we sped on after briefly slowing for a view.

The Culture Center was in its own converted military facility—Navy in this case—in a remote part of the city still mostly undeveloped but beginning to come to life with new businesses and lofts. The district itself, Refsholevej, was significantly beyond Christianshavn (more than half the entire cab ride). Then the Center, hard for the driver to find among obscurely numbered zones, was at the farthest tip of the district. It would have been at least an hour’s walk after reaching Christiana.

The Center was sparer than spare, three exhibits in a gigantic space that could have housed a whole modern-art museum of hundreds of paintings. Lindy noted its contrast to the Rosenberg castle, a new avant-garde Denmark against an old royal one.

We had missed the display of model Korean-War-era U.S. jets filled with dirt and plants, but photos of them get across the CCC’s radical aesthetic. The current exhibits were less political One room held about fifteen three-person metal swings for swinging together. I held off doing that with Lindy till we were ready to leave because I had gotten a bit motion-sick from the taxi driver’s lurching style.

The second room was a giant silver ball swinging from the ceiling like a pendulum—and I mean gigantic. If it had fallen, you might have heard it in Sweden. It was silver like a mirror, so you could see your reflection and those of others, including the children lying on their backs, squirming and showing it their bellies. Your image changed in size and distortion as the ball swung. You could also walk around the room and change your position and size on the sphere.

The third exhibit, a video installation, took up most of our time at CCC. Song 1 is a thirty-five-minute-long projection on roughly sixteen screens in an enclosing circle, put together by Los Angeles artist Doug Aitkin. Sixteen screens means sixteen coordinated projectors in a dynamic and varied flow. The content was L.A., but the technology, spaciousness, and audience were Danish—I don’t think there were other tourists in our small cluster. The film involved eight or so individual musical artists, many of them well known, singing “I Only Have Eyes For You” in different eras and styles for Aitkin’s lens. They included the Flamingos’ doo-wop version and Tilda Swinton’s new Piafy torch performance. All of these renditions arose in a rhythmic flow of video clips that oscillated between the singer and L.A. past and present: performance of the song was synched to the heartbeat of the metropolis around it.

The screens usually showed the same image on all of them, which was a grand crescendo in itself; they sometimes showed an image flowing from screen to screen, and sometimes they brought all sixteen screens together in a single huge, wide image. Less often they kaleidoscoped the image into complex abstract forms while continually changing the  kaleidoscope’s depth of field and focal point. The sound was “I Only Have Eyes for You” in one or another version, solo or group, male or female, young or old, the song breaking abruptly in (and then abruptly out) at one part or another of its own lyrics and melody, or there was a sustained din or sustained silence.

The montage of images was a mix: of course the singers or singer performing the song, then the same performers, in awkward or thoughtful silence being probed by the camera while standing or walking in L.A., then all sorts of street scenes from car lights to garages to folks moving about and hanging out, in studios, cafés, traffic, then just lights, then the inside of a factory with laborers at different work stations (the complex Google-like image of the entire floor of the factory with its individual activities filled the screen). Then two of the workers became singers of “I Only Have Eyes for You” as if the scene foreshadowed La La Land” (the video was 2012), then the factory kaleidoscoped, then what looked like hundreds of L.A.’s superimposed on each other in a galaxy of stars surging together (or maybe the video itself dissolving). Cut with these were frequent images of old-fashioned studio sound-tape winding, the reels kaleidoscoped periodically or otherwise changed in scale and relationship to the frame.

The entire installation could be watched from within the circle (most people were lying inside the concavity) or on a mirror-image convexity from the outside. Inside the circle, the experience was upbeat, revelatory: high-quality sound of one mysterious song in sync and syncopation with rushes of images playing out on multiple possibilities of sixteen screens. Avant-garde art, at its best, integrates structural imagery with obscure feelings without having to name them, bringing them to momentary peak clarity (different for each viewer) that dissolves into the next montage.

This kind of projection was its own medium, a different way to tell a story: part painting in motion, part performance piece, part cylindrical installation, part movie, part immersive rock video, part surveillance camera bank, part dance, part Stan Brakhage redux, and so on. It defied genre, yet had a redemptive, irregular beat like atonal experimental music, pulling everything in it up to the level of—well, a song, as “I Only Have Eyes for You” gave it a broken melody.

The bathrooms almost constituted a fourth exhibit. One entered their zone like the hall of swings, each toilet a private elegant room in a row of such rooms. The line between exterior exhibit and interior function was kept intentionally fluid Spaciousness, deconstruction and reconstruction of expectation, and attention to subtext were everywhere.

The cab to the Culture Center had cost the equivalent of $40. It was not necessary to spend that much again (or more: Central Station, our target, was farther than the Japanese wok place). We took the 9A bus back into town, which wasn’t hard to locate on a spit of land, as there was only one eligible street. We just missed one, but buses proved plentiful because the line otherwise ran through the center of Copenhagen and each one had to complete its route here. The journey didn’t take much longer than the cab, and we could use our same transit cards on a shining blue dot. At Central Station we caught the train to Charlottenlund.

For two hours in the late afternoon, we sat in David’s office, working on reflective listening. We had paid him for a hands-on demonstration. Like all such systems—I felt yes, okay, and no, get me out of here!—clarity followed by its own obfuscation. Key dyad: “I say…..”  “What do you think I said?” “Here is what you said. Am I right?” “Yes, now it’s my turn.” Or “No, here is what you missed….,” and so on. Passing a pen like a talking stick.

It’s fine to learn new techniques—can’t go wrong with knowledge itself—but don’t forget William Blake: make your own system or be enslaved by another’s.

July 11

Last day in Copenhagen, taking stock. Such a flow of images and feelings, from within, from without. I am lost in a traveler’s maze without a roost.

I like it here. I don’t want to leave. I am dying to get out of our cloister and away from the “perfect” couple in whose reflection we are daily cast.

It rained last night, a fine drizzle. We walked to and from Koii in the rain for dinner. It’s been so sunny that the rain was a mood shift, an implicit deepening. It’s sunny again this morning; magpies, wood pigeons, and smaller birds congregate at the feeder by the new fountain, roses in full pink and yellow bloom, squashes and squash flowers in a thick basil patch (we had basil salad with hand-made Cretan olive oil two nights ago with David and Marianne).

Marianne’s concept of “civilizational trauma” stayed with me all morning. I accepted it as premise and then went back to my current practices: moving auric energies, dissolving pictures. More arose each time as soon as I did—so the practice is to dissolve those too, and the next ones, and the next. We come from electrons, we contain electrons, so in the auric field, which is not bound to mass and its friction, we can be as fast as electrons. You don’t ask what the picture is (it goes by too quickly anyway), you don’t have to ask, and you can’t and don’t know. You do as bid from within. Then I went through my t’ai chi set very slowly under the magpies’ instructive gaze: keep light, use wings for balance, stay pouncy and alert.

I sat in the sun by the herbs and roses and apple tree and felt the pictures return, their false and unknowable futures, their stale and stuck pasts. I couldn’t do the work of a lifetime in five minutes, but that was the job anyway. Civilizational trauma. Personal trauma. The privilege of light and sun and embodiment.

The flapping of wood-pigeon wings was as loud as if someone were shaking rugs. Present time. Always and only the Now.

Marianne had offered to take us to one special Danish site for the afternoon, a rare time free of work for her given her heavy schedule. We settled on the Viking Museum at Roskilde, a forty-minute drive from Charlottenlund. It was built on a fjord where five partial Viking ships were found on the shoals. Salvage of them began in 1962, and a museum and center were created around their reconstruction, featuring the Viking era in general.

I preferred this to her other options: Deer Park, downtown wharf, Christiana. During my graduate-school years I read books on the Vikings and parts of the Sagas themselves, not for any academic reason but because I was taken with pre-Columbian contact between Europe and North America. I was developing my own theme about four badlands: the Prairie, the Ice, the Moon, and the City, which became the basis for a literature course I taught five years later at Goddard. Students read poetry and prose on all four environments and evaluated and compared what made them badlands.

Another inducement: my favorite boat as a child was also a Viking ship. It had no sails or accoutrements, just the wooden shape, but it was the winner of many of my bathtub races.

The journey also afforded us a chance to hang out in the car and continue our many seminar. En route, we talked about the difference between spiritual and psychological maturity from the standpoint that intentional communities and charismatic spiritual teachers, especially in the West, suffered from unbalanced development. The thread started after a traffic incident with my mention of how some advanced Buddhist practitioners I know expressed road rage in a form no different from a cut-off truck driver. What did that mean? Highway and car seemed to give a regressive permission, but it was still life and should still be practice.

Marianne talked about the differences between the skills, emotional paths, and neurological and brain development of the two modes (spiritual and psychological). People can learn, for instance, to be good at meditating, but the ability often remains encapsulated and does not carry over to interpersonal relationships. She concluded, “If you want to address road rage, then you have to practice working on road rage, or any other personal characteristic. You don’t get rid of road rage on a three-day sitting retreat.”

We wafted over Chõgyam Trungpa, Adi Da, and Andrew Cohen individually under the rubric—each of us had stories, guru gossip. We landed on the guru’s claim that his initiation can be transferred sexually, hence building spiritual harems. This is a much discussed topic, especially in light of the Me Too movement.

Marianne brought a different contemporary view from her own blend of spiritual and psychological practices and her knowledge about emotional development and the brain. I don’t want to valorize her take—there are lots of valid views around the larger topic—but she did bring clarity and conviction from decades of Buddhist practice combined with forty-five years training psychotherapists.

She proposed that many gurus can’t tell the difference between their own process and that of the student’s. When sexual transference doesn’t work, they get frustrated, lose erotic interest, and create the equivalent of spiritual boot camp for their former lovers. The women are harangued and made to meditate under harsh conditions, ostensibly for their own good, as if to bail out the mistake.

“I go with Townes Van Zandt,” I joked. “It’s noooo deal, / you can’t sell that stuff to me.”

Marianne laughed too, so I finished TVZ’s trope, “It’s no deal. / I’m going back to Tennessee.”

Somewhere at the heart of the modern crisis, where rubber hits road, is the failure of egocentrism to get outside itself and empathize with the entire collective that it is suffering and reflecting its suffering through each member. Instead it chooses a particular community or ethnic group or ideology or the abstract planetary environment. It tends to shift only to the next rung of its own narcissism: my practice, my sect, my country, my people, instead of recognizing itself as one’s 7.6 billionth part of collective karma.  This is a bit of a non sequitur, but it is hard to reproduce a conversation interspersed with commentary on the Danish landscape.

The museum was both wonderful and tedious, as museums are. It is difficult to generate hours of viewer fascination from a few rotting timbers of thousand-year-old ships, but the curators did a decent job of creating context. Ship-building crafts were presented on site. You could see movies of each of these activities, but they wouldn’t have the smell of fresh wood and sharp penetrating aroma of wood tar or the up-close whooshing rhythms of a bellows melting metal for nails, blowing off excess heat onto our face and in our noses, the intimate touch of carved and sticky wood. You wouldn’t feel the breeze off the fjord as sample ships sailed across it at full mast.

Other stations showed the making of ropes from animal and plant fibers (a very strong tar aroma there), the melting of raw metal (children in line to shape and then pound newly formed nails), the looms to weaves flax sails.

I had loved the Viking mold as a child, perhaps for archetypal reasons. The deep curves and imbedded spirals of the ships reflected basic spiral patterns in the universe, from Qabalistic Tree of Life to microdimensionally fabricated DNA.

Great ships even if mean sailors! I will get to that later.

Outdoors between the stations and the indoor museum were Viking games for children (and adults), for instance tossing a wooden hammer at statues of giants. Neither Lindy nor I knocked one over, though Lindy hit one squarely. Marianne had done it before and deferred.

The lecture tour was tedious—canned descriptions and stock history from a young man who kept looking at his cue cards and reciting practice English. Bored children amusing themselves in spontaneous games were more interesting the spiel. We eventually bailed and walked around to museum exhibits. The actual five restored ships from surviving timbers were the highlight; none of them had even forty percent of their wood, but the preserved boards were fit into reconstructions of the whole shapes.

The ships were not accidentally downed in the fjord. They were located atop one another in a stack in the main channel and weighted down with stones. They were likely retired boats with many voyages and much salt in them, sunk there in order to block Roskilde from invaders.

We visited a shop full of Northland souvenirs and read walls of historical maps and displays with quotes from the Sagas and other sources from the Viking period, roughly between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Viking piracy and the ensuing culture made a unique Scandinavian bridge between Mesolithic and the Mediaeval landscapes.

The most exciting exhibit was two authentic three-quarter Viking ships (the other quarter was cut away for “passengers” to climb aboard) in a darkened room. We could sit on the boards like rowers while speeded-up projections on the walls took us through twenty-four hours: darkness with constellations and a moon in the sky, the burst of sunrise, a swiftly climbing sun, water all around for a long stretch, then a thunderstorm with darkness, lightning, and tumultuous waves. The scenery was not a movie; it was digitally stylized, an arty scrim—more grainy and calligraphic more than realistic. That enhanced rather than detracted from the sense of voyaging.

On hooks hung Viking costumes, robes and headdresses, for mostly (but not soleky) children to put on and be photographed aboard ships. We skipped the dress-up but “sailed” through an entire night and day.

For all its mythological and cosmological import and ship-building acumen, the “Viking” cult fostered a cruel, primitive marauding of peaceful village for personal gain and ethnic superiority. Nice ships—very nice ships—but terrible manners. Vikings sacked mostly English and Celtic communities and monasteries (sometimes Russian ones); they conquered lands and took slaves, especially women. The description of their practices with women (as described on the wall) uneasily recalled our discussion of gurus on our drive out. The latter has been mitigated and ameliorated by modernity but is fueled by the same narcissistic draw to the combination of eros, terror, and knowledge— to dance with Shiva.

The pillaging, raping, torturing, and killing of captured slave women speaks in a different way to a profound confusion about the relation of spiritual and emotional life. Where that always lands whenever spiritual practice or ritual is involved is an attempt, often desperate in its symbologies, to make a passable bridge between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Painful stuff to read and impossible to hide even in neutralized museum parlance.

In Viking funerals, the violated slave women were cremated beside dead lords with their murdered horses and various jewels and other treasures. In high Viking society, the goal was to convert the secular gains of the living into a phase that could be carried with them elsewhere in spirit form. No one wants to lose status or power gained on one plane when being forced to cross to another. But death permits no bargains, even for modern gurus with their clever bardo language—hence, all the more powerful the ritual displacement and consolation.

All these big guns are in play among the Vikings: sex, murder, consuming fire, transubstantiation. No apologies for the Norsemen, and none given by their descendants. Consider that Lindy’s 12.5% Scandinavian DNA is ostensibly from Viking invasions of the British Isles. She is roughly 37% English-Irish-Celtic-Welsh, thus expresses more chromosomes of victims than intruders. Yet she has both. Like the rest of the habitants of the modern world, she is the descendant of a dialectic. Collective karma has an exquisite way of continually setting itself before us at multiple levels of paradox and challenge.

Café Knarr ostensibly served Viking-oriented food. I suppose my flatbread and currant juice qualified. I would have preferred Vinland cloudberry juice, though I don’t know if I would have liked it as much as I like the name.

On the trip back I took the opportunity to hone in on how Marianne would interpret my childhood family dynamics, how they might tilt into her themes of inter-generational and collective trauma. It was like an ad-libbed psychoanalytic session in an electric car on a Danish highway, Lindy chiming in with questions (she had had her own formal session with Marianne in the morning).

I don’t automatically take Marianne’s view as gospel, but it adds to my growing wisdom of a lifetime about the strange situation in which I was raised. The suicides of my mother, brother, and sister speak for themselves, but so does my own survival, especially given that I was considered the single crazy member of the household while my siblings and I were growing up. That the crazy one survived and the sane ones didn’t could not be a mere coincidence.

I don’t experience the old terror in the way that it once played such a big role in imagination as well as in each of my family member’s suicides, but I experience an occasional horrific sense of time stopping, of being frozen in a life. Nothing I do or think fits the world I am in. Marianne recognized it at once not only from her clinical practice but occasional flare-ups of her own trauma, though from an entirely different etiology. She described it as being like a fly caught in amber and interpreted it as the moment or crack in which personal trauma is inundated by collective trauma, which is way too much for any person to handle so personality structure breaks down and is perceived as time standing still.

Right or wrong in whatever way any such explanation could be, it’s a good story to put with my others. Marianne went on to say that constant collective pain would be too overwhelming, so we have to tap collective, archetypal joy too, to antidote it.

That was the marquee for my life: joy and sorrow, epiphany and terror. I quoted another song for her, Dion and the Belmonts’ “Teenager in Love”: “One day I feel so happy, / next day I feel so sad. / Guess I’ll learn to take / the good with the bad.”

            “You got it,” she said.

A bit on, she affirmed my roster of psychic techniques for working with trauma, changing its shape and energy using energetic roses, but we agreed that it wasn’t something that got cured. You add texture, depth, and context, and that allows you to find your way through life, your current playing.

We moved to the question of murderous rage I sometimes intuited in people such that it was difficult for me to tell the difference between rage that was murderous and rage that was only weird mad. I had chronic paranoid fantasies that someone was going to murder us while we slept. “The collective can’t distinguish,” Marianne said. “In the collective, all rage is murderous rage.” The Holocaustgave justification and manifest form to that. Paranoia is revelation at the wrong frequency.

Leaving to go inside, I teased, “You didn’t know you were getting so much psychoanalytic discussion when you invited us.”

“I didn’t,” she agreed, “but I’m such a psychotherapy nerd I love all the information I can get. And it’s not just psychology. I’m pretty nerdy in general.” I suspected as much when she didn’t want to throw the hammer at the wooden giants. But then she is a horse whisperer.

July 12

Up at 4 a.m. for a 7:20 flight from Copenhagen to Berlin Schonefeld. It’s hard to get to sleep when you know you have to wake so early. At dawn we pulled our stuff together for the first time in eight days: change of cities, change from public transportation to awaiting rental car, change from being in company to being on our own, change from an upscale Western city to the Eastern bloc.

David and Marianne drove us to the airport, kind of them to get up and participate in the ritual of our departure. I was half-asleep in the car.

Copenhagen’s airport proved vaster than I remembered on arrival. Much of it was made up of duty-free shops. Their modernistic screens took the form of tiny lit cubes like E.T. heads on stalks that should have been displayed at the Copenhagen Center for Contemporary Culture. Here they were advertising perfumes, clothing, and electronics. It seemed that the majority of energy had gone into creating a giant shopping mall that dwarfed the departure gates and made ours hard to find. It wasn’t an airport with shops. It was a shopping mall with planes.

An international crowd gathered in the airport and at the boarding gate: African families, Middle Easterners with head scarves, Chinese groups, Japanese couples, a Babel of language across a Germanic/Slavic axis, some irritatingly on cells in a crowded boarding area.

Norwegian Air has a great reputation for a budget carrier, and everything about the check-in and boarding process confirmed it. It was succinct and professional. We boarded so fast, though having to walk on the tarmac rather than through a covered passageway, that we pulled away from the gate ten minutes early. Why not? The plane was full, every ticket-holder was accounted for, and the runaway was clear

We took off over Copenhagen and the bay, the same veiny pattern of rivulets visible across the harbor; then we ascended over a stretch of land, rising straight above a second shoreline and the Baltic.

It was a cloudy day, and we bumped through cumulus layers in rising, then penetrated higher altocumulus clouds and sailed above them. We reached our cruising altitude only about five minutes before beginning our descent into  Berlin’s Schonefeld. The time in the air was forty-five minutes. It was raining and windy in Berlin, and the descent was quite turbulent, though it never seems as worrisome when you are surfing like a rock falling through a medium with currents than when you are trying to gain altitude through it.

We spent almost two hours at the Avis rental agency through which we had gotten our car via Auto Europe. Luckily the single baffled attendant was delightful to watch, both during his routine with the party in front of us and us. He seemed like a flummoxed Weimar Republic hotel clerk, as he turned filling out the form into an act of light comedy. It wasn’t exactly a Groucho Marx routine—I don’t watch enough World War II movies to name the precise character—but “Groucho Marx” gets across the spirit of it. He asked himself the same questions over and over in German while also asking his customers, laughing as if it were all part of the routine and they were helping zero in on the advanced algebra contained in the form. I was sleepy enough not to care and stayed amused and happy, while Lindy went back to the terminal to eat. (I am copying this from my travel journal, but I have to admit, I no longer understand the events I am describing.)

By the time Lindy returned, his supervisor had just appeared, an efficient, helpful woman. That speeded things up—she could answer his questions rather than having him asking himself—but she let him proceed as her trainee. She was in her early fifties, he in his later fifties, but she was the manager and he was clearly a beginner. While he labored away, talking to himself, she took the time to go over our instructions for finding the highway to Poland, over and over until she was sure we got them.

Truth was, the clerk was a very affable guy and eager to please, us as much as her. At her suggestion, he accompanied us to the car to answer questions and help us with the GPS. She had tried out my Auto Europe GPS and said the car had a better one, but it needed to be changed from German to English. The guy walked alongside us in the rain, as he helped Lindy with her suitcase and carried an umbrella. The car was a Leon, an equivalent to the VW Golf. Its GPS came on in German while he was talking to himself in German too, to get it to English, but he was gallant and patient, finally also switching the country to Poland, though failing at listing our hotel address in Poznań. We settled on entering on destination the destination as just Poznań. That would get us most of the way.

After the Avis clerk left, the rain turned into such a deluge that one would think twice about driving in it, let alone in a strange car in a strange country with an unpracticed gear shift. People stop under bridges for downpours like this. I used the time to take a spin around the lot and then reparked. I decided to get my raincoat but couldn’t open the trunk. We looked at the manual, but it was in German. I hurried back to the Avis office, about a minute away running, and got totally drenched. A customer on line at Avis explained: you have to hold the key next the rear emblem and reach under it, something that would have taken me a long time, if ever, to figure out.

I returned and quickly opened the trunk and my suitcase. By then I needed to change my shirt, socks, and shoes; they felt like wash that hadn’t even gone through a spin cycle. I got in the driver’s seat, started again, and discovered I couldn’t get the car to back up. After a futile minute of my attempts to pull the ball in various directions. Lindy wanted a shot and succeeded after a number of attempts. It worked the opposite of the previous summer’s shift—you had to push the ball down to go into reverse. Her success rewarded her with being the first driver.

The rain had subsided somewhat, and the woman’s directions that we had been memorized and applied worked like a charm. We went first toward Berlin and Dresden on 133; after about ten minutes (the computer voice confirming) exited for Frankfurt Oder and Warsaw (there are two Frankfurts in Germany, and they are distinguished by their local river). That put us on A12/A10. We thought that would be sufficient to enter and cross Poland, but we needed to switch to A/10 after forty-five minutes or so, which led to a last-minute of having lanes amid huge industrial trucks with Eastern European plates (mostly Poland—PL—but also Latvia (LT), Lithuania, Hungary, etc.). Cars’ driving style reminded us of Italy. They came up behind you in the left lane at 100 mph or more, forcing you immediately to the right. Most of the speeding vehicles had Russian plates, but a few were from other Eastern European countries.

There was no passport control at the Polish border, but a toll ticket was soon issued by machine and we wondered how we would pay without Polish currency. The change in country was marked at once by tall thin pines with high canopies and a more consistently rural landscape. Slavic letter combinations replaced Roman orthography, many more z’s as well letter combinations that don’t in Romance or German tongues (“zl” for instance; later we saw “zb,” “zdz,” “zwl”).

We were hoping for a credit-card option for the toll and were glad to find one as we approached Poznań a couple of hours later. By then we had stopped at a gas station to switch drivers. The GPS, which only took the city of Poznań in Berlin accepted the hotel address, Aleje Karola Marcinkowskiego 22 there.

Construction in Poznan created a complicated labyrinth of cobblestone streets and street-car tracks, more crosswalks than traffic lights.

The main thing that jumped out at me was the wear and poverty, on buildings and the people. It felt a bit like New York’s Spanish Harlem, but it was related to Harlem only in the broadest millennial migration pattern, east to west across the globe. It was Eastern Europe, part of the World War zone.

How quickly we got here from Berlin (three hours) reminded me of the German tanks and what happened not so long ago.

Fair Swedes and fair Poles are both common in the States, and their looks overlap: pale blonde men, women, and children, light colored eyes. But the vibes are slightly different. In Scandinavia I felt the liberated, somewhat carefree north. Here I sensed the interior of Europe, its conflicts, its emergence from Neolithic migrations, ancient farms, early so-called barbarian kingdoms beyond Rome, then Christianization, feudalism, the Reformation, international markets, and the birth of nations. Genes, race, agriculture, commerce, and the dialectics of history left their marks. I do not want to go back over worn territory, especially in a quick journal, just to say I felt something and saw it and feel privileged to be on site at last rather than in high-school history class. That’s what travel is. We can’t go to other planets in the Milky Way or other galaxies, but we can go to other places on our orb. Poland isn’t Africa, Asia, or the Peruvian rainforest, so I don’t claim an exotic adventure, but it also isn’t Boston or San Francisco.

We finally saw Hotel Rzymski and parked right in front. Easy check-in, convenient underground city garage a few blocks away, ticket to be redeemed. A trolley ran on tracks with an electric line on the cobblestone right outside our window, a treat to listen to on its rounds— music of steel and stone, a heavy percussion with a rattle and slight clangs or clinks, plus the long flute and panpipes of gradually responding brakes, all together a repeated John Cage adagio. It was also a pure train from an old sound-effects record, a band called “Polish trolley stop.”

Poznań was arbitrary in its selection. I picked it as roughly halfway between Berlin and Warsaw. I figured that what was already a complicated day didn’t need a herculean push to Warsaw. My distant DNA relative in Warsaw, Ewa S. chose it over the farther shot of Łódź.

My journal has a second shot at a description of the same thing:

A trolley ran on tracks with an electric line on the cobblestone right outside our window, a heavy percussion with a rattle and slight clangs or clinks, plus the long flute and panpipes of gradually responding brakes, all together a repeated John Cage adagio. It was also a pure train from an old sound-effects record, a band called “Polish trolley stop.” Till late at night and beginning early, the trolley turned the melodic weight of gravity into a huge xylophone, wheels distributing the resistance of ground, the stringency of the rail holding its reality together in a beautiful extended squeal.

We went out into the street headed for the Old Square, ready to be satisfied with anything. It was Poland after all, with all that that entails, historically, culturally, mystically.

I thought to inventory the people on the street for this journal. I asked myself, what distinguished them from elsewhere? It was hard. Faces are not my strong suit, so bear with my amateur (and I hope not ethnically insulting) inventory. I saw a Mongolian steppe Polish look, a wide pancaked face (more noticeable in women), also punk Poland, redneck Poland, beer-belly Poland, Roger Maris crewcut Poland (reminiscent of Andy, the young Polish dude who presides over organic Thai food at the Berkeley farmers’ market), fashionable Poland in female riffs off the latest international styles, fairy-tale damsel Poland (our waitress when we stopped at an outdoor café), Raquel Welsh pout-face Poland (older teen girls), mysterious magi of hermetic Poland (looking like John Dee with their pointed beards and deep gazes as they hurried to their rounds), Chopin Poland (potential orchestra conductors), plus lots of good old boys and good old girls who could just as well be in Akron. Okay, enough.

The introduction of a new language, Polish, was musical with its own rhythm and melody, whether lilting or booming or in shouts or conversations passed, a twang reminiscent of Slavic tongues in the States. Noam Chomsky, before he became mainly political, proposed that all languages share a deep syntax and move through identical logic strings into varying morphophonemics. I assumed that some deep neurological grid attuned the English melodies in my mind with the Polish melodies in the street.

Poznań’s Old Square was stunning beyond any expectations. You could not have gone to Rome or Florence and seen more magnificent buildings. The town hall was a tour de force: porticos on balconies, vertical gold on lavender-backdrop icons of saints, a long horizontal row of them near the roof, plus a gold decorated clock at the peak suggesting the Prague astrological one. The hall itself looked like an ornate chess piece or a composite tarot card. We ate facing it. The meal was pleasant but overly starchy—I got potato soup and cabbage dumplings, Lindy breaded veal—this is Poznań not Paris. We sat for well over an hour watching the action in the Square: young Polish couples, gangs of duded boys, kids chasing each other and pigeons (of course), baby carriages bouncing babies on cobblestone, jugglers with soccer balls, a gypsy boy and girl (probably brother and sister) begging with an accordion they took turns playing, and the always ubiquitous urban pigeons, one of whom pulled in his legs and rested his belly on a cobblestone startlingly near us, relaxing in the late sun.

When Lindy rose to look (because a pillar blocked her), she was sure she would scare him off, but he twisted his head and flashed a brief unconcerned glance out of his black dinosaur eye.

 the courtyard (and elsewhere in town), buildings were stuck together in Italian-like Renaissance façades with fancy turrets and crowns. Each was painted: light blue, gray, pink, light green, light orange, dark brown, etc. On some of these were engraved figures: a duck, a cat (or perhaps not a cat but a dancing cow), a flower pot, a devil or demon. At a distance they looked like woodcut stamps. Up close they became colored stone reliefs. The building with the demon, some sort of amorphous homunculus figure, seemed to top a fraternal lodge or what was once a lodge; it was now a shop, but it was hard to tell because the building was closed and dark. The hermetic tradition of Western Europe certainly extended to old Poland.

What added to the delight of the Old Square of Poznań was that it was pretty much local. Not entirely without tourists—we were there, after all—but with tourists well diluted in the townie activity. It felt like a lively Mexican town square.

After dinner, we continued to the end of our side and found ourselves a magnificent church: enormous, orange-tinged, with multiple towers, fronts, crosses on turrets. We could have been in Rome, but then there would have been Roman crowds. This was the centerpiece of the Catholic archdiocese, a max of splendor and artistry: Renaissance Poland counts as much as Renaissance Italy. We walked in.

Having been raised a participatory Episcopalian, Lindy had enough high church in her to bow, walk to a pew, and put her head down. The interior was, to use the word of the decade, awesome. If you enclosed a small city block inside a cathedral, raised its ceiling three or four stories, and filled its cubic space in every nook and cranny with elaborate religious icons, statues, gargoyles, icons, saints, altars, and naves sprouting other naves (like the inside curves of a Viking ship projected into sacred space), you might get an idea of what the Old Square church was like. The altar glowed with a gold luminosity. To look at it was to feel the permeation of the Divine down to your cells and bones.

We sat respectfully as music began—an engulfing organ sound, full of timber and spirit. Suddenly priests appeared by the altar in robes and sang in Polish. Then one spoke at length, his words projected on a screen.

Most of the people participated in the language and ceremony, crossing themselves when appropriate. Polish Catholicism is no minor province in the hierarchy of Rome. We were in its sanctum, and we let its sound and faith radiate through us. Not knowing the language kept it numinous. Even in a Slavic tongue I did not miss the invocation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—that devotional three-beat acknowledgment of the Trinity. I believe in it to the degree I believe in what it is invoking—something about divinity, faith, the magic of incarnation, the atonement of sin—and not just because the first guy was a rebel rabbi. We may each receive it in different ways, but its persistence shows it to be an authentic vibration in the evolving noosphere of the planet. The Christ message, even if misheard and misused, is real.

We stayed for a while, considering rude to get up and go after blundering into a ceremony. We picked a change in voices after a resumption of organ music to bow and leave. A woman’s voice was continuing the ceremony.

Outside, we reversed our traverse of the square, going counterclockwise this time, and came back up the hill to Hotel Rzymski, its name an orthographic rebus in its own right. Before turning toward it, we went to the adjacent Wolnosci Square, which sported a significant fountain, a modern bee-hive-like cuboid structure of plastic or glass lenses, vaguely resembling a collapsing tetrahedron. Wolnosci was a modern hangout, especially by comparison to the Old Sqyare. Water cascaded down the structure’s cubes, their irregular and precariously tilted wings leading to increased turbulence and off-splashing. It was still not enough for boys who filled soda bottles and ran around shaking them and spraying each other so that they were all dripping wet.

One could walk right through the center of the fountain pretty much unscathed because the artifact was divided in two, sort of anatomically like left-brain, right-brain and you go down the corpus callosum. The music on the other side was decidedly not Polish. A Hindu band of three guys and two young women on a blanket was playing paired drums and a sitar and chanting ecstatically. It was a full authentic sound in its own right. One girl with dreadlock-like knotted braids and an urchin’s face carried the mantra deeper and deeper as she swept bowls in front of her with an almost distracted hand bearing a brush. She was my star because she deepened the sound in my brain and when I looked at her eyes I saw she was penetrating deep dangerous space. The dyed-blonde girl next to her was much more spectacular, a flamboyant costume and lots of up-and-down belly-dancing-like motion. She was a much bigger person too and more conventionally charismatic in the usual sense. She stole the show for most, but every time I looked at the eyes of the chanter, I felt an immortal summons and a clarion of eros beyond beauty or gender.

Poznań is a chaotic mix of the ancient and the new, so the transition from the sacred church to the street band was cohesive. Two young girls in dresses and long, formal coats roller-skated around the Hindu band on fancy slim blades, giving the scene the feeling of a rock video in the making.

We returned to the square at nine for dessert (cheesecake and raspberry mousse with pressed apple-pear drinks). We sat and watched the activity and darkening sky, Earth lights like stars, fires of torches heating the customers at the cafés, a light cacophony in the air. Darker yet, more lights, a louder, spunkier din. The one band across the row was not Polish but Latin, outside Café Havana. It put out an adeptly quickened “La Bamba.” In the years since the fifties and Richie Valenzuela’s death, the melody has become more and more occult and salient; it calls for something revolutionary that is not a jihad.

Till late at night and beginning early, the trolley turned the melodic weight of gravity into a huge xylophone, wheels distributing the resistance of ground, the stringency of the rail holding its reality together in a beautiful extended squeal.

            Only later did I realize that Poznań was Potsdam in English!

July 13

Most of the morning in Poznań was given to catching up on our respective trip journals. We hung around the hotel breakfast room which had enough smoked fish, olives, and fruit, to cover for other deficiencies. I put my fennel tea bag in their hot water.

We walked to the Square to get food for the trip east: lamb and chicken pockets, some pastries at a bakery. My food standards had dropped through the floor, forget okologiske. I did manage to get an extra bottle of cold-pressed beet-apple juice during dessert the night before.

Axiomatic that it is difficult to travel in a country where you don’t know the language; lost in translation” dogged us through the day.

I was the one who parked the car in space 126 in the underground garage, so I was the one to go retrieve it after getting my stamp on the ticket from the front desk. I have a bad feeling about parking garages (beyond them being where murders take place in movies) since having gotten stuck in ones twice in the last decade, first in Berkeley, then in Portland, Maine, both times through no mistake of mine. It took over an hour to get out of each. That same karma came into play.

I got in the car, ticket on the seat beside, backed out of the tight space, and wound around the snail shell toward daylight. But there was no one at the electronic gate and no way to inform the card-gobbling machine that mine had an ink stamp on the back. Cars began backing up behind me, some swerving abruptly to the one other exit lane.

It took twenty long gruesome minutes to resolve the affair during which countless cars had to recognize the problem, back up, turn their steering wheels sharply, and switch lanes. As the object of everyone’s distress and anger, I sat there dripping sweat from my forehead in the hot and muggy car, wanting to disappear.

A guy eventually came from the garage’s office in his own leisurely time, took my ticket, and went back to the office to check it, leaving me at the front of the line for almost ten more minutes. The backup became epic when four guys in a sports car ran into the only other exit gate, jamming it, and began yelling at it. Yet no one in the office apparently considered the situation urgent.

I fled the car and went to the office. A man and a woman were in debate with each other while on the phone with the Rzymski. It turned out that they were waiting for the hotel to verify my identity. Even after they did so by room number and name, it turned out that the stamp only gave me a discount, not free parking, something (according to the garage folks) on  whichthe Rzymski routinely misinformed guests. Hard to believe that such a thing could go on for days, let alone years, but apparently it had. I paid, got a new ticket to put in the machine, and barely got the Leon into first in time to beat the closing gate.

I immediately ran into another crisis. Getting to the garage had been an easy two-block shot from the hotel in the direction of traffic. Leaving the garage in the same direction, the only one offered, put me on a fast-moving one-way street going away from the hotel. I hadn’t thought to put the Rzymski’s address into the GPS—after all, I could see the hotel from the garage. I didn’t have it with me or know how to recall it from the system. I was swept farther into traffic and sequential neighborhoods on a series of one-way streets, traveling quite a few kilometers through the busy inner city and away from the Rzymski. My attempts to get going in the right direction put me in a many=street loop that I completed three times before I realized I was going in circles.

Then came crisis three. To break the loop I went down a street with trolley tracks, something I saw cars doing. Only this set of tracks was not for auto traffic. Cement ended, and I got marooned in soft dirt before the pavement recommenced. The car barely made it over the ridge back onto stone.

Finally some good luck. I saw signs for Al. K. Marcinkowskiego and followed them to the street itself. I was so turned around by then that I was looking to make a U-turn to get on the side of the street of the hotel when I pulled up right alongside it. Lindy was waiting in the lobby, and we got our stuff into the car.

Then I remembered something from my walk to the parking garage—a regret at the time—and ran down the block to remedy it, dropping five of my coins into the cup of the beggar woman sitting on the corner. She was a throwback to people I routinely gave money to in childhood. I lost the knack at some point because I couldn’t tell who the poor people were anymore, what was real poverty and what was trolling for drugs or a scam. I have a few Berkeley horror stories of trying to help a street person and getting in too deep. I have no idea how much money I gave the woman, but her smile made any amount worth it.

While we were parked in the hotel loading zone, we tried entering Królewska 47 in Warszawa into the GPS, but neither of the units would accept the address. I settled on entering Grzybowski because the Airbnb apartment was described as overlooking a plaza of that name.

The drive to Warsaw was about three and a half hours, and I did most of all, all except the last twenty miles after we stopped at a gas station for a rest stop where we tried unsuccessfully to enter address again.

A2 was similar to A10 from Berlin into Poland. Its right lane was packed with giant trucks moving merchandise east, going fifty to sixty miles per hour. The left was effectively without a speed limit, so cars hit a hundred miles per hour or whatever their engines would deliver. The faster lane also included people passing the trucks, a regular necessity, especially when they line up in convoys. This creates a situation where, after a careful look, you bolt into the passing lane and are confronted with a fast-approaching car having to slow down to your mere eighty to eight-five, not happy, usually honking, hanging dangerously on your bumper, threatening sometimes to pass on your right which would result in a crash. Sometimes I just stubbornly held my ground because I saw a convoy of more trucks ahead. Other times I dove back into the truck lineup to escape the honking and near collisions that somehow never materialized. I finally got into a rhythm, averaging 120-140 kilometers per hour with the iPod shuffle on, as Lindy slept much of the way.

Somewhere short of midway to Warsaw, I stopped for gas. This was before our final stop to change drivers. We had yet to find a gas gauge on the Leon. After scrupulous searching, I decided there wasn’t one, that the car must have another way of telling you are running out of fuel, probably in German. We stopped as a precaution—after all, we had come all the way from Berlin on one tank.

Getting gas at the stop provided a vintage “lost in translation” moment. No one spoke English, and there was no credit-card access on the pumps. The lady at the cash register kept talking very fast in Polish despite my language deficit and continued responses in English. Finally I figured it out. It was not a self-pump station. An attendant walked outside with me, filled the Leon, and walked me back in to pay. Attendants were doing that for everyone, not just lost Americans. I told myself to look around the next time instead of assuming.

Gas stations on Polish highways serve as the lone rest stops, so there were picnic tables at them, and we ate our pockets and a few bites of a supersweet pastry.

Entering the outskirts of Warsaw, we ran into a clash between the road signs to Warszawa Centrum and the voice on the GPS telling us to exit at seemingly unlikely spots well out of the center. We decided to override the voice, choosing to get deep into the city before leaving the main traffic flow. The voice graciously accepted and reprogammed. Eventually the tall buildings at city center showed that we were aimed bull’s eye at Centrum.

In a magical way, a modern city deepens like a dream. I have found this to be the case from Halifax to San Diego. Outer streets and stray warehouses become avenues with buildings. Fast-moving habitation zones sprout dense thoroughfares. Suddenly you are in busy streets full of urban traffic. In Out of Babylon I wrote: “No one builds cities, they build themselves.”

Of course, the GPS ran out of instructions as soon as we hit Grzybowski Street. We had no idea where Królewska was, and none of five people on different streets knew, even two Policja in their official vehicle each of whom looked carefully at our printout and shook his head.

It took three more stops and quizzing people to get ourselves to the apartment stage by stage. We weren’t that far from it where the GPS ran out, but with heavy traffic, major road construction, one-way streets, and avenues forbidding a U-turn, it took that many modifications of the instructions to re-hit Królewska in the vicinity of Grzybowski Plaza. To see the word “Królewska” on a road sign was a relief, almost fairy-tale-like, after so many street signs with long Polish words that were beyond the phonetic capacity of the GPS. It was usually, “Turn right in two hundred meters at—” you’ve got to be kidding!— eight garbled syllables followed by “Ulrice.”

A doorman at the upscale Westin Hotel got us going in the right direction, e.g., the wrong direction: away from our destination but toward the approach to it through a necessary labyrinth of one-way streets. When we had no idea how to proceed farther, a stopped cab driver provided three complicated, valuable turns that we had to hear several times to memorize and place in correct relationship to each other. From there, he said, it’s too complicated to explain; ask someone.

I did—a delivery-truck guy who proposed an illegal U-turn. I did, then tuirned down what looked like a dead-end alley. It came out on Królewska! There was even a single parking space right in front of us. These were parallel-park, front-wheels-on-the-curb—I was driving by then (as you probably guessed) and warned Lindy about a major bump coming up. The curb was precipitously high for such a maneuver, but I had already escaped stee[er trolley tracks.

I stayed with the car while Lindy went looking for 47. She came back reporting not only that she found it but the door code really worked. As for the parking space, without any Polish, we couldn’t get the ticket machine to issue a parking validation from my Visa card, and I stopped trying when I began to worry about the economic consequences of pressing random buttons. It turned out not to matter. We later walked out on the street with Ewa, and the space was free from 18:00 Friday till 8:00 Monday. (I will explain more about Ewa later. I knew her solely from a DNA test on which she had a relatively high score for me._

I had called Ewa twice while stuck looking, but she didn’t own a car, so was unable to figure out our locations or give location help. Once we were in the apartment, though, she promised to come by in an hour.

A trivia point about Polish lifts. The ground floor is always 0 (zero), not G or M.

I had pictured something spiffier from the Airbnb listing. We are on the fifth floor of mainly student housing. Someone had clearly purchased an apartment in order solely to rent out to tourists. The place was a mess, and it took a phone call to get the Internet to work (the owners had provided both the wrong server and the wrong password; they owned many such apartments).

The place was really small. People bigger than us could not have fit in the cubby for the toilet and would have had to angle their legs out. The bed filled the bedroom entirely. The curtain springs were broken and required climbing on a chair to raise and lower thin drapes.

At least the site was close to the center of town. It looked one way on modern Warsaw, which could have been New York City or any 2018 international urban cluster. It looked the other way on a torn-down strip of apartments, innards of bare exposed stone with plywood inserted where window slots had been, an incomplete renovation (Ewa said) from the Soviet era. Warsaw is perceptibly remaking itself from the inside-out, cancelling World War II as well.

I met Ewa S. this way: First, I submitted my saliva swab to Heritage.com and got a DNA profile: 100% Ashkenazi Jewish. That meant that neither my paternal nor maternal lines bred with offspring out of a European Jewish community or, if they did, the contributions of DNA segments were meager enough to get filtered out.

Since age thirty-one, more than half my life, I knew that my blood father was Bernard (Bingo) Brandt, a man I never met with whom my mother had an affair while married to Paul Grossinger. I have written about this matter in the forthcoming edition of Out of Babylon. When I discovered my Brandt origin, I tried to make touch with my father,  but he did not respond and eventually died unknown to me. I did make decent relationships with two genetic half-brothers, Neither of them, however, was interested in DNA or tracking down ancestral family in Europe.

My DNA sample did lead to a few other relatives internationally, though my maternal and paternal lines were not distinguished from each other, and I did not share enough DNA with anyone new to be worth pursuing. These “relatives” were at the level of second cousin three times removed or fourth cousin twice removed—enough DNA segments to show common ancestry but not enough for actual genealogy.

Then one of my distant cousins living in Jerusalem persuaded me to download my DNA from Heritage and upload to another site called Gedmatch, which broke it down into segments. That enabled him to analyze my lineage and conclude that he and I shared a relative in Hungary sometime before 1700.

A more surprising result came later. A genealogist in Atlanta, Gary Palgon, who was constructing a family tree for a woman I didn’t know named Dara Grossinger, came upon me as a distant relative sharing DNA with her; yet he read in my Heritage profile that I did not consider myself a genetic Grossinger. He wondered if I would help clarify the situation, since I was related to the Grossingers in some fashion. I agreed to his request to send a swab to Family Tree DNA for a Y-DNA analysis, which would yield just my paternal line through males.

In order to establish a definitive link or nonlink, Gary also had to submit a sample from Dara’s late father Jerome, a relative who could be traced directly to a brother of my legal grandfather Harry Grossinger (Jerome had left behind saliva for the test). These showed that I was definitely not in Dara’s Grossinger lineage, somewhat of a relief, since I resemble the Brandts and don’t look at all like the Grossingers. The Grossingers are mostly very large, the Brandts significantly smaller. My late younger half-brother Jon and my son Robin are both over six feet, while I am more like 5’ 10”, taller than Brandts but shorter than Turetskys (Jon’s paternal lineage) and Houghs (Robin’s maternal lineage). By the way, Jon was who told me that Paul Grossinger wasn’t my father after he got out of Sheppard Pratt, a mental hospital, following our mother’s suicide. It took me another year and a half to discover who my genetic father was. My mother never chose to tell me any of this. In fact, she had me believe that her second husband, Bob Towers (born Reuben Turetzky) was my father, leading me to be raised Richard Towers until age 12 when I became Richard Grossinger. At thirty-one, I found out that that was a fiction too. Out of Babylon, a title I derived from Jon’s favorite reggae song at one point, was an accurate trope for this mess. Jon committed suicide in 2005 and my sister Debby did also in 2016; they were respectively fifty-seven and sixty-four. My mother was fifty-five.  

My Y DNA sample showed a relatively close link to a Sigmund Shvimer living in Boca Raton. I contacted him and got the following email from which I will excerpt below (I don’t know if Brandt is a derivation from a shtetl name like Towers from Turetsky, but whether it is or not, Shvimer or Shwimmer serves as a back-up patrilineage). Sigmund wrote:

“Regarding paternal DNA test: I guess, you’ve got J1-M265 paternal linage like me. This is very well studied and called CMH (Cohen Modal Haplotype) it means only one thing: all of your paternal linage takes path from Aaron, brother of Moses…. I knew that I am a Cohen, in Jewish community this knowledge passes from generation to generation and considered to be a big deal. I knew that I am a Cohen, in Jewish community this knowledge passes from generation to generation and considered to be a big deal.

My grandfather Joachim Szwimer (Polish variant of Schwimmer) was a real Cohen, religious and dedicated man, he had 11 children including my dad. I was in Poland last year. Jews came to Bedzin in 1226 from Spain. Three of Joachim’s brothers emigrated from Poland in 1910-14 to Canada and USA.

My father was born in Poland, during WWII escaped from Nazis to Russia, survived the war and had four children. I am the baby in the family, born in 1950. I came to US from Russia in 1990 (Detroit area), five years ago relocated to Florida…. I am an engineer with my own firm, still working.

As for your travelling in Poland, I have two cousins in Warsaw. Zosia S. does not speak English, however her daughter Ewa does. They are very nice and would be glad to meet you in Warsaw.”

Basically Sigmund’s father and Ewa’s mother were siblings when he fled east to Russia (rather than try to go west through Nazi Germany itself). Then he raised his family there, including Sigmund. By the time Sigmund made contact with his Polish cousins, a generation had passed. As per his suggestion, I contacted Ewa and then spoke to her on Skype. She picked out the Królewska apartment from ones listed on Airbnb, and we made plans to get together in Warsaw.

An hour after we moved into Królewska 47, Ewa arrived. I wasn’t looking for a lost sister and didn’t expect a resemblance. I was looking, at most, for something intuitive or energetic. She represented my paternal line about which I knew little, and I could provide nothing to help tie Sigmund’s ancestral story to the Brandts.

Ewa (pronounced Eva) fulfilled the energetic aspect. She resonated with something both slightly familiar and totally unknown. About five foot four, reddish-haired, with a wide face and bright, intelligent eyes behind her glasses, she engaged both of us with cautious curiosity and sophisticated articulation, given that her English was spotty or rusty. Her enthusiasm for conversation and our bond grew as we walked into the twilight.

First, we checked the parked Leon to make sure that it didn’t violate the Polish instructions on the meter and street. Then we walked about six blocks through a spiffy part of town to a restaurant called Der Elefant, a coincidental choice since I was wearing a San Diego Zoo T-shirt with an elephant and elephant baby on it. Der Elefant was three restaurants in one with an overlapping menu. Ewa negotiated our way into the lesser of of them, though all were packed. We were seated at a table beside fish offerings on nearby ice. I ordered stuffed European river bass. What arrived a small browned fish with a lot of prickly rosemary hard for the tongue to distinguish from bones.

Ewa provided no connection to Jews in Poland or the Holocaust. Her father was Catholic, and she was raised Catholic, though she emphasized that her parents were atheists and she had no religion. She said that she was Catholic only in the sense that ninety percent of Poland was nominally Catholic. No family members she knew had died in the Holocaust and, given her birth year (1975), she related more to escaping the shadow of the Soviet occupation. Her mother didn’t disclose her Jewish heritage till very recently in the context of first cousin Sigmund contacting them. Since Zosia didn’t speak English and Sigmund didn’t speak Polish, they communicated in Russian. Given the power and extent of the Holocaust in Poland, it was remarkable that it left no mark on Ewa, but then she didn’t identify as Jewish.

A psychology major at Warsaw University, she worked as Human Relations manager at FedEx, which had bought the Polish company at which she had been employed. Her life had been conducted mostly in the Warsaw area; she had travelled only briefly to Krakow, Berlin, and Budapest and had recently been to the U.S. with her mother to go to a reunion of Sigmund’s family in Boca Raton.

The migrations of our shared Spanish and Eastern European ancestors, parallel for generations, had separated dramatically sometime before my blood father passed his DNA onto me during his brief acquaintance with my mother.

After diner, Ewa walked us back to Królewska and showed us our neighborhood so that we would know where to go for breakfast and groceries. We walked around the fancy redeveloped side of the block, full of eateries that could have been on upper Madison Avenue in New York or north Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. The large number of bikers and walkers led Ewa to recall her surprise about the auto orientation of American, how strange it was not to see lots of people and biking walking.

We had grown up in different worlds, but the fact that we shared some segments of DNA gave a subtle flavor to our reunion—two descendants of an ancient wandering tribe witnessing each other in an unknowable future world.

July 14

Ewa showed up at eleven a.m. to take us out for the day. We had walked only five or six blocks and were about to cross a park when dark clouds appeared overhead and raindrops began to fall. The temperature dropped quickly and quite palpably. Since the sky in the distance was even darker, we hurried back to the apartment and changed clothes. Ewa had an umbrella. We didn’t, though I had a poncho-like raincoat.

We entered the park with its towering horse chestnuts. Rain, which was in the forecast for tomorrow (Sunday) but not today, began to fall in earnest, as Lindy crowded under Ewa’s umbrella. I relied on my waterproof jacket and hood.

For a while the horse-chestnut leaves held most of the moisture, but that would only last so long before we began getting soaked. Ewa suggest an immediate change of plans and we made a beeline for the nearest museum, a distance of about six blocks counting both a park and streets on the other side.

Lindy thought that another umbrella was the first priority, but Ewa insisted that shelter should come first because there was no nearby shop at which we might buy one.

We climbed a temporary ramp to stone steps and became the only patrons standing outside a museum whose doors were locked. A tall, thin young blonde woman arrived just after us and pounded on the door and called with no success. She said in fluent English that she was late for work and assured us that the place would open in a minute or less. Then she left in exasperation for an employees’ door. A docent finally opened the doors at about ten minutes past the listed noon opening time.

I had no idea what kind of museum it was, and the name, Zacheta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, gave no clue. I didn’t much care as long as it meant getting out of the rain. I would have looked at Greek statues, Mediaeval tapestries, or Polish abstract expressionists. A white marble Caesar holding a trident of Neptune overlooked the entrance halfway up the stairs suggested baseline “classical” and that’s what I expected, but the statue turned out to be so unlike anything else in the museum that, when we left, the figure seemed to preside in pure irony, collateral damage of time travel, unsure where to point his scepter.

Zacheta Galeria was a Warsaw version of the Copenhagen Center for Contemporary Culture. More than a dry spot out of the rain, it mesmerized Lindy and me (and probably Ewa) for the next ninety minutes.

At junctures like this, it is hard to know what to include in a travel journal. You don’t need a museum tour from me, so I will try for an overview; yet some exhibit description is unavoidable.

We began at a section called “Amplifying Nature” or maybe that was the name of the entire show and then the exhibit area was called “Tango on Sixteen Square Meters.” Either is possible. Its underlying rationale was practical as well as well as aesthetic, to show how we needed to sprawl less and occupy smaller multi-use spaces as the human population increased in what the curator’s text rightly called the Anthropocene. The Holocene is over, and we are in a dangerous  situation that geographer Stephanie Wakefield calls “the Anthropocene Back Loop” in a book of that name. From a safe Holocene front loop, we now have to accept our movement into an Anthropocene (human-driven) back loop, an unsafe operating space.

Emphasizing the precariousness of civilization’s current urban dwelling situations, the exhibit offered architectural responses and remedies, showing ways to intensify space and integrate Polish habitation patterns with emerging global phenomena and limitations.

Rooms and buildings were reduced to their essential parts. Bedroom, computer space, and dining area were shrunk to pittances, as figurines lived their lives within their own arm-spans. Ornate older rooms were shown side by side with synopsized equivalents, as eating, working, and sleeping occurred in the same adaptable spaces. For instance, beds vanished into walls, sinks became tables, and wash hung from an extended shower nozzle.

The exhibition was subtler than mere shrinkage; at one point it incorporated an edited English translation of Borges’ short story “The Lottery” as a way of understanding civilization’s wagering of possible futures.

The most striking part of this exhibit was a 1980 film Tango by Zbigniew Rybczyńsk.It wasn’t exactly a movie, more like a series of animated cartoon loops inhabited by real people: the same characters repeating their identical actions like bodies in prescribed orbits in a dining-room-like space with a new character added every few loops until the room became as crowded as a mammalian anthill. Since the characters were on loops, they continued their identical activities without interacting or even noticing each other. You can watch the film for yourself. (I don’t find it at the 2018 link seven years later, but here is a new link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z27z7oLQb3o).) My own account is from memory and I am not going to rewatch it to check.

Tango starts with a boy bouncing a ball through an open window, retrieving it, and going back out. A nursing mother offers her breast to a baby, then puts it in a crib. A man delivers a package and sets it on a shelf. A thief slinks along the wall, makes his move, and steals it, leaving by the window. A woman in a long coat brings soup. A handyman enters and stands on the table to change the light bulb, then falls off and through the floor. A young man begins exercising, flexing a bicep like Popeye the Sailor Man and then standing on his head on a chair. A plumber carries a toilet to install. A woman cleans a fish. A uniformed officer looks around and departs. A man takes out the trash. A cleaning woman begins sweeping. Each of these people enters and leaves the room, returning to repeat the action, as the space becomes fuller and fuller, the loops flowing faster  together.

Later arrivals are edgier. A drunk staggers through the room while imbibing from his bottle. A blonde woman takes off her dress, stands totally naked, and puts on a new one and fresh panties. A young man and young woman enter kissing and have intercourse on the couch. After they leave, a man brings in a dog, set it on the couch, and reprimands it. Meanwhile the thief keeps stealing the package, the light bulb keeps getting changed, the ball keeps coming through the window, the baby keeps getting nursed, the woman keeps undressing and putting on her new dress. Then the cycle reverses and the room empties out in backward loops. At the end, the boy throws the ball out the window and does not return, a man is left sleeping on the bed.

Tango seemed to be in the exhibit to address the sense of crowded urban space.

In surrounding rooms, a series of connected exhibits featured the minimalist art of Japanese-born Polish artist Koji Kamoji (he had been in Poland since 1959). In printed statements, he explained his art as Buddhist-inspired spiritual exercises for the emergence of spirit and as a conversation with himself in which each outward image could reveal a hidden inner one. His work included child-like paintings and drawings, some in color, some in black and white; various sizes of sculptural objects of plywood, rocks, metal rods, paper, and aluminum, suggesting both a child’s primitive simplicity and aesthetic sophistication, and a room of paper lantern-like objects with holes forming a tunnel to look through at each other.

Another whole room used aluminum foil to mimic water and allowed visitors, even though in wheelchairs, to traverse the water on ramps. A guard was supposed to be making sure that visitors behaved as they walked alongside the aluminum sea, though she was enjoying her cell phone instead.

These exhibits were upstairs and we walked them first. Downstairs was a combined curation of three important Polish architects who were also social activists, animators and, for lack of a better term, morphologists. Their interests matched many of my own aesthetics, for I have been drawn to dimension-teasing topologies going back to mathematician friends in college. The trio—Jerzy Soltan, Lech Tomaszewski, and Andrej Jan Wroblewski—explored complex three- and four-dimensional objects and their geometries in developmental drawings and mathematical diagrams, made small moebius-strip-like statues, and created calligraphic splashes, swirls, and asterisks in indefinite space so that human intention “interfered” with repetitive forms of a seismometer-like or electroencephalogram-like pen. Many objects combined sculpture and painting, e.g., colorful Joan Miró-like petroglyphs covering Hans Arp-like sculptures. Along the way, these guys designed stadiums, pieces of furniture, vehicles, and houses.

My description may contain assignments of art to the wrong artists and transpositions of what I saw into what I remembered. If I were an art critic doing a review of the show, I’d go back and check it out. Instead, this is an intersection of the objective show with my subjective takes and the flaws of memory )like Apollonaire’s “scenery and costumes linked only by factitious bonds”),

I was also working with psychic energy, trying to project energetic forms from my aura into the art and initiate an informational exchange not all that different from what most of the artists proposed they were doing in their descriptions of their works. They were all shooting for magic and perceptual transformations. I directed streams of excess energy in my aura into the forms and let them contain, cleanse, and dissolve them. As Koji Kamoji proposed (my inexact quote), “I call it ‘annunciation’ with caution in a Christian country, but all art is religious art, the emergence of spirit and the will to live.” Amen. (I had a streak of projecting psychic energy in art museums for a time. I believe that I describe it in Volume 3 of Dark Pool of Light, but I haven’t done it for years. Basicallly I found that some paintings began moving internally at an astral frequency,)

Ewa, Lindy, and I proceeded outdoors past many major buildings Ewa identified including the presidential palace, but in the rain I was not paying much attention. I was looking for an umbrella store. What stayed with me was a sculpture of steps leading upward to nowhere that commemorated a 2010 plane crash that killed ninety-six people, most of them government officials and including the president at the time, Lech Kaczynski, and his wife Maria. The crash, though it took place in thick fog, has since given rise to conspiracy theories regarding political assassination, especially since the crash was in Russia.

Demonstrators around the statue were setting flowers for photographers. Ewa said that the crash was still referred in Poland to as “the catastrophe” and had entered into the national psyche on conflicting levels; for instance, the activity around the statue we saw was controversial, as Right Wing and Left Wing battled to claim the event. The demonstration looked Right-Wing to me, but I didn’t ask. There is a certain pseudo-patriotic paranoia in which they converge.

Synchronously I am watching Just One Look, a Polish murder-mystery thriller series on Netflix, though the subtitles are so unreadable that I finally changed to dubbed because the plot is so entangled it is difficult enough to figure out knowing what is being said. The film shows a Warsaw we never saw, and the rather violent plot involves another national tragedy, fictional I assume: a fire set  by an arsonist at rock concert fifteen years before the timeline of the film resulting in the deaths of, I believe, 23 or 28 people with one survivor, Greta, the main character, and identity shifts reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. It feels strange to be editing writing about a placid, tourists’ Warsaw while watching the guts of Warsaw on t.v.

There was another demonstration at the presidential palace with photographs of many events I didn’t understand and three just of a goat. I have no idea how the goat got implicated in politics, but I didn’t ask Ewa because the increasing rain was crying out for shelter or an umbrella.

Happily we passed a row of vendors who offered a few well-hidden fancy umbrellas among stacks of souvenirs. With umbrellas, we went into Warsaw’s Old Town (Stare Miasto) and visited a square similar to the one in Poznań, though more modest. These reflected an era when Warsaw was a modest settlement and Poznań was the virtual capital of Polish territory.

Ewa made a reservation down a small alley at a restaurant called Karmnik. Her mother Zosia was to join us there in an hour. I asked the meaning of the name. Ewa didn’t know the name for it in English but said it was a feeding place for birds.  We walked from there for a ways up a hill to an iron grillwork filled with lovers’ locks—relationships sealed symbolically with metal. We looked out over the Vistula, the river that divides Warsaw, at the hills and buildings on the other side. Ewa pointed to places where she had lived.

After that, we walked back to the Square and into a church to get out of the downpour and tourist crush. We rested in a pew for twenty minutes. When we left, the rain was coming down so hard that we ran to the restaurant early and sat waiting for Zosia who came a full hour later than expected, so we did not begin eating till 15:30. By then, after almost two hours sitting idly in a restaurant waiting, any excitement of Warsaw dwindled into weariness and a wish to be home.

Finally Zosia appeared with a vigorous nod of the head and an equally firm handshake. Since she does not speak English, Ewa had to interpret. A more mature and hardened version of Ewa, the mother was concerned at once to know if I was really a relative or my DNA was “just a coincidence” (per Eva’s translation). I tried to reassure her by explaining how infallible DNA was, but she didn’t care about amino acids and did not believe that Brandts and Shvimers were connected in any way. She got out her copy of the book of the Shvimers’ recent family reunion at Sigmund’s in Boca Raton. We looked at many family trees and photographs, some pictures going back three generations in Poland and Russia. Most, however were of those black robed and bearded folks’ descendants gathered safely after the Holocaust in Florida. We saw Sigmund as a baby, then a young boy, and at present with a beard.

When I suggested that Sigmund’s grandfather was a Cohen and a religious man (as Sigmund proposed), Zosia scoffed and demurred through Ewa, “He was a tailor, not a rabbi.”

I felt that some of the Shvimer clan looked like me, but it was more a Hebrew tribal resemblance than my own particular lineage. Zosia continued to ask for clarification—she had left home in heavy rain and demanded recompense, either proof or a chance to banish me forever from her clan (clearly her preference)—so right there at lunch I emailed genealogist Gary Palgon on my cell, asking him how, if Y DNA could go only from father to son, Brandts diverged from Shvimers, let alone Cohens. In a return email, he put the matter in perspective:

“Surnames typically were only taken in the late 1790s to the early 1800s so the relationship goes back further than that. The Y-DNA goes back to about 25 generations so at 25 yards per generation as an average, that’s 625 years, which would date back to 1393!”

1393! Zosia’s look on hearing this was memorable and nonverbal “1393! Go home, you fraud! I knew it!”

In one sense, she was right. She, Ewa, Sigmund and I did share an ancestor, but a lot of water had been under many bridges since, migrations from Western to Eastern Europe, and naming and renaming of clans. Our last common ancestor could have lived in Mediaeval Spain. The DNA that had brought us together in modern times was not a bad thing, though it was unsatisfactory to someone looking for functional family ties. To Zosia, 1393 was ridiculous. But distant tribal connection means something. Ewa accepted our kinship and honored it, and that was enough. We decided to call each other “DNA cousins.”

“23andme,” the cuter-named DNA site, has a playful, almost sacrilegious tone to older people (though we were older than Zosia) who take family known without labs, microscopes, and algorithms seriously. To me, this was all amusing and fascinating. I not only wrote Out of Babylon; I wrote Embryogenesis and Embryos, Galaxies, and Sentient Beings.” To Zosia it was tiddliwinks and modernity at its most intrusive and vulgar

For our late lunch at Karmnik, I had a vegi-burger and everyone else had goose dumplings. I said, “Our treat,” and put down a credit card. We walked back through the Old Town via various squares. A fistfight broke out between two young men right in front of us, and I realized how rarely I saw people violently and audibly sock each other’s faces into. It happens in New York and Detroit too, but it seemed closer to the ambient energy here. On either side of the tourist flow were men holding bottles and arguing, but like those loops in Tango they never connected. Looking backward, I see a harbinger of Just One Look, which had much worse fighting and much worse mayhem than fighting.

We left Zosia at the tram, and Ewa walked us back to our apartment just in time, for the biggest deluge of the day followed. A parade of dark clouds continued over the city for the rest of the day with periodic dumps on everything while imposing the rule of temporary night.

After napping, I went myself for a long exploratory walk under the umbrella and met a lost Frenchman who fell in with me for a few blocks. He initiated our conversation at a long traffic light. Relieved to find someone who shared any language with him, “even my poor English,” he said that being confused was what tourism was about “what do you Americans call it, rolling with punches?” He added he preferred the rain to the current heat wave in Paris. Tourism is also about meeting chance people since everyone is on the road of life and death.

During my reconnoiter, I never found the organic market listed on the Airbnb map in our room, my main goal, but I come upon an automatic teller with English and a restaurant based on a mixture of Hebrew and French themes where Lindy and I went for dinner under an umbrella.

July 15

I got soaked and chilled yesterday and had a difficult, headachey night with chills. I felt sick in the morning but nothing as bad I feared. With heavy rain continuing, it was a chance to rest. We didn’t set out till at last a break in the weather mid-day. Our goal was the Warsaw City History Museum or Museum of Warsaw, recommended by Ewa as the best of many museum options.

We decided on a cab because of the unpredictable weather and also not knowing our way. We drew a bad bull. A cabbie shot in the front of one we hailed and we docilely and guiltily got in. The driver claimed never to have heard of a Warsaw History Museum or Museum of Warsaw. Lindy said that taking us to Old Square would sufficient but, in his partial English, he proposed instead to take us to the Jewish museum. Since that was also on our list, we agreed.

He was a middle-aged bruiser, a skinhead with a series of bizarre shoulder and head twitches, a scary guy out of a mafia movie—I think now again of the out-of-control hitman in Just One Look. Our cabbie drove very fast and ran red lights by margins beyond plausible denial, yet he took much too long getting to the museum, about fifteen minutes, for which he charged us $40.

How much of a scam this was didn’t register until I used the GPS on my cell to find our way back to our place on foot two and half hours later in late-afternoon sun. Even going slowly and stopping to look at things, plus a phone error that required backtracking, we made it in twenty-five minutes. The guidebook had warned of that sort of cab ride In Warsaw.

It was also a godsend because the Jewish Museum was a revelation, bringing together many themes on the trip and in my life in general. Whatever his motive, he made the right choice for us. Maybe it took a German skinhead to deliver us to the Jewish Museum and overcharge us for the privilege.

The Museum was a gigantic modern structure at the end of a long, spare memorial plaza. Entering it was more stringent than going through security at any airport. After putting belongings on a belt and passing through radar, everyone was individually checked by a guard with a hand-held device. He took his time too, having us hold out our arms and turn. Even as a ritual, it served as a resounding statement of the reality for which the museum sootd.

Once inside, I went to check out the cafeteria because we hadn’t had lunch and I had barely had breakfast. While I did, Lindy bought tickets and got us automated hand-held speakers describing the exhibits. We ate first: groats, apple pancakes, hummus, and matzoh-ball soup—it was a Jewish museum.

We entered the exhibit area not knowing the lay of the land, but it soon became clear the discrete displays were linked in chronological order, each integrated with the next in theme a part of an overall developing narrative—a slow meandering trail up and down the bowels of the building as through history. The exhibits themselves were intricately designed in multi-media: models, wall charts, movies, display cases of objects, audio outlets, interactive screens, etc.

Unless I am in error, mainly ordinary Poles predominated, treating the place just like any other recreational museum jaunt on a Sunday: whole families and children, though they were selective—no children were allowed in the Holocaust section.

You followed the arrows and numbers. Numbers pushed on our voiceboxes tripped a description and historical background for the exhibit of that number.

We did not realize for a while that there were sixty exhibits, so we dawdled from 1100 AD into the sixteenth century. When we realized we had used up much of our stamina, we skipped ahead to World War I and continued from there. Here are some of my impressions in no particular order:

Being Jewish has always a challenge. I relate to some parts of it and fight against others. I am appalled by any implied association with Zionism and the fascist Jewish state (interestingly, it was less controversial to put it this way in 2018, so I am leaving it as is; the reality since the October 6th Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli decimation of Gaza has made the situation and current comments about it both more and less nuanced). Here is part of a much longer passage from Out of Babylon:

Why do the Jews have to have suffered more horrific martyrdoms than Nigerians, Xhosas, Asante, Nzima, Armenians, Cherokees, Gypsies, Asháninka, or Wiradjuri? Who granted this cosmic exceptionalism?

The root of Likud politics is not hatred of Arabs gluttony. It is a fury at God, a desire to taunt and humiliate Him—for His weakness, for staining Paradise with Hebrew blood. Likudnik warriors mean to show Him that they can man up, be as courageous and ruthless as He failed to be—that they remain His loyal henchmen and foot soldiers, no matter how sorry His retreat. They will live by His sword and prove worthy of its Gevurah-like blade. They will plant their own Tree of Life and let it flourish. We’ve got science now—atom-splitting reactors and recombinant DNA—tools you forbade us upfront in Genesis 2:17.

So fuck your Unmanifest and all its nothingburgers. We own the milk and honey and have the chutzpah to defend it from river to sea. We will kill your enemies because they’re our enemies.

If Yahweh needed to raise an Army—and clearly He did after Auschwitz and Al Naqba—they would forge the Hebrew alphabet into weaponry and mass-produce the finest planes and pilots, tanks and defense forces since Eden, F-35 fighter jets and surface-to-surface missiles. They would hatch a golem by geoengineering and synthetic biology.

Our estate runs from the Aleph of Creation to the ministry of Jesus Christ to Madonna with her sefira pins. I am proud of Qabalism, the Hebrew roots of gematria, Gnosticism, and the tetragrammaton. If we are the Chosen People, which we aren’t any more than Tibetans or Maoris or Xhosas, then we should be deciphering the blueprint of the cosmos, as we did for epochs leading to the Zohar and Talmud, space-time relativity, and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. We should be exalting and decoding Creation like our rabbis and cantors: Shimon bar-Yochai, Gershon Scholem, Albert Einstein, Baba Ram Dass, George Gershwin, Jonas Salk, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon. We can interpret everything from Dead Sea Scrolls and periodic charts to dreams and traumas, genomes of humans, beasts, plants, and viruses.

Where do those endowments come from? Who put a super decoder inside us? If it wasn’t Yahweh downloading strands into our genome, wherefrom such techgnosis? What the anvil, William Blake, what the chain? Was it genetic engineering by Anunnaki?

I love it that Mary Magdalene fostered divine-light activation of her DNA such that an advanced soul same from another galaxy, vibrating at too high a frequency to incarnate through the usual mating process. I love it that a Hebrew Christos by the name of Jesus or Yeshua became the planet’s Messiah and changed its vibration, bringing an interstellar teaching, then transubstantiating in a rainbow body. Now that’s a rabbi!

I understand that Irving Berlin’s melodies are about neither Yuletide nor a white Christmas but something that happened in a snowless land or another galaxy.

In rhe Warsaw museum I look at pictures of historical Jews and feel like running from their exotic, bedraggled appearances. I am not one of them. I look at historical Jews and see the long, mysterious, traumatic path by which my historical body and brain were given. I accept.

The genealogical confirmation I sought with Ewa and Zosia was in the museum in a way in would never be in Shvimer family records. Jews from Spain discovered Poland (Polin) very early, in the eleventh century I think, well before it was a cohesive political entity. It was a magical, mythical place for many of them, and they used a mistaken etymology of Polin to view forested land to as a destined home in exile.

Why Jews wandered from the Middle East to Mediaeval Spain is its own matter, but from Spain they continued to follow trade routes east, making livelihoods as traders, merchants, and nascent bankers. Their friendships and business ties were prized by Polish nobility who liked their transport of desired goods, accurate accounting, and investments in their domains. Jews who settled in Polish territory were integrated into Polish life and given full and even exceptional rights, for instance were allowed to mint their owns coins (some of the oldest artifacts in the museum, early bitcoinage).  Entrepreneurial business is in the culture or blood or both. Jews married into Polish families. Whether the “Esther” of one exhibit was the wife or concubine of a Polish king is unclear from conflicting commentary, but she bore children in his lineage.

The Museum depicts multiple aspects of Jewish economic, political, and religious life in Poland era by era with sample books, documents, and objects of trade. Communities in Warsaw, Potsdam, Krakow, and other cities are covered in depth with urban maps and displays, showing Jewish settlements. One can hold objects, sit in facsimile reconstructions of temples, print pages on old Jewish presses, and participate in interactions and debates of the time.

Historically in Poland, Jews were prominent publishers and bookpeople, but also often the local tavern- and inn-keepers (Poles tended to prefer the Jewish style of hospitality). The former speaks to my own career, the latter to that of the Grossinger family; Grossinger’s Resort was a Polish-Jewish inn re-writ large.

Jews were already in Poland when the first major political-geographical entity in the region formed: the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. In it, Jews stepped into a major political and economic role. They had already been in the culture a long time.

The Holocaust caught the Jewish community by surprise in Poland because, by then, they had been there for so many centuries and generations and were so interwoven in economic and social life they seemed. To themselves they felt inextricable and immune.

Yes, there were periodic spates of racism and jealousies and reprisals from Christian neighbors who felt Jews were getting special treatment or becoming too prosperous and powerful; by comparison—and there was always the church problem of the Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Messiah and the New Testament as a holy book. These turned out to be foreshadowings of the reckonings to come, but they also could have died away. Both aspects were present at some level throughout: acceptance and inclusion; resentment, threats, and isolated incidents of violence along with neighborly inclusions.

Through the centuries, though, Jews feared being murdered in their sleep; this collective trauma was written on the walls of the Jewish Museum as clearly as Marianne’s excavation of it in Copenhagen. But the balance could have tipped either way—that’s the case in any such situation from Rwanda to suburban London and Paris.

The first major upheaval was when Cossacks, Tartars, and Ruthenians from the East wreaked havoc on the Commonwealth, killing Poles as well as Jews. I believe this was in the seventeenth century. The awakening from epochs of peaceful coexistence led to Jewish messianic movements: shades of cargo cults and ghost dances but with a Zoharic flavor.

Poland only formed as a modern nation after World War I.

The German invasion, concentration camps, and Holocaust are covered in depth through ten-plus exhibits, each with its own artifacts, films, sounds, quotes on walls, and narratives, from displacement and ghettoization to overcrowding, disease, and starvation in the ghettos; then removal to concentration camps and the industrialization of mass murder. You can sit in an imaginary Warsaw trolley and watch window screens showing the round-up and slaughter of Jews in neighborhood and ghettos.

The horror and inescapability of the Holocaust are always lost in the reductive technology of videos and the bland arrogance—Arendtian banality—of documents (Nazi decrees, forged passports, etc.), and the inevitable miniaturization and dissociation of archiving, but the psyche still absorbs these images, records, and testimonies, and tries to reconcile and find any rationale or explanation. A lot of bad things have happened since, but the character of the Holocaust remains unique in its systematic dehumanization. The removal of indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands and slavery are just as horrific and on a greater scale, but there is something about the cold industrialization and ideological purism of the Nazi affair than stands alone as if it came from an interstellar hell realm. Though the Stone Ages and ancient history are filled with similar dehumanizations, the Holocaust was proof that Homo sapiens as a species was not evolving psychospiritually or in terms of emotional intelligence. Things have not improved in the Anthropocene Back Loop and new era of oligarchs and White supremacists.

Despite all prior representations of the Holocaust—and they have been legion: movies, books, long editorials, etc.—the Warsaw Jewish Museum’s World War II rooms add context, poignancy, recognition, and waves of vicarious grief; it is wrenching to watch the plight of people—any people—long integrated into a society being uprooted, isolated, ghettoized, and mechanically slaughtered. The story never loses its power. Walking through the exhibits, I am overwhelmed by layers of sorrow. At a certain point I can’t tell the collective from the personal, the Holocaust from the suicides in my family, the Jews of Poland from the Armenians of Turkey or Tutsis in the Congo. I walk from exhibit to exhibit, see films of masses herded along, stare at documents and personal belongings, numb and dissociated and, at the same time, drenched by waves of something more occult than simple grief. It is at the level of stars and galaxies and evokes the cosmic portal of Renaissance Jewish bimahs, altars, zodiacs, and holy books in the exhibits.

What ceremony is being played out in the universe at large as it plunges into its own fathomless depth (look at the violence behind starry night), seeking some sort of compensatory devastation and sorrow to elucidate the sheer texture and majesty of being rather than nothingness? How much farther have we to go? How can we bear the ride?

One exhibit is divided into black and white sections, black for Jews who escaped or tried to escape the Holocaust by hiding in cities and forests and bunkers, white for those who passed or tried to pass as Catholics in plain sight, using forged papers and/or by changing their names and identities.

Lists of the dead are inscribed on walls. We walk on top of the names of streets where Jews were collected. The curators try repeatedly to get the scope across, to save the dignity of individuals whose dignity and identity were stolen, to make it real, and then to make it real again. Actual rubble on the museum floor matches the rubble in the photographs. Grzybowski Square, where we briefly reside in privilege and freedom a mere seventy-five years later, was a major assembly point for Jews being gathered for dispatch to gas chambers.

About ten exhibits represent the post-Holocaust years. The Jewish population was reduced by ninety percent in the Holocaust, but afterwards Jewish culture and social life reignited. The museum tracks Jewish politics and political parties in Polish life from back in the nineteenth century: pre-Zionist, Zionist, nationalist, pre-Communist, Communist, religious but anti-Zionist, etc. Exhibits cover emigration to America, Sweden, Israel, and other twentieth and twenty-first-century destinations; suppression and persecution under Stalin; identification of some Jews with Communism, blame of Jew by Poles for Soviet collaboration, finally films of the current revival of Polish Jewish life.

We walked back in the welcome sun, wending our way with a faith in our GPS despite its periodically contradictoring instructions, e.g., turn right and turn left at the same corner. At such points, we showed the screen to a pedestrian, ideally someone on a bike, and got directed.

Warsaw 2018 was at peace and friendly. A Jew, if that’s what I am, could walk its streets in confidence. I was an American and tourist first anways.

Heavy showers returned in the evening.

We walked to the Hebrew-French restaurant, Menora, for dinner where they were celebrating Bastille Day and a football victory. Crowded among young diners,  Polish and American pop music, maybe Spotify, on a spaker, the sound of Polish conversations locating us continually in Warsaw, I thought again of how special and specific it is to have done this. Menora is in Grzybowski Square, and space-time is pouring through its portal like a river that cannot be stopped, even then, even now, even yet.

In the morning we will sit at this same restaurant for breakfast and watch fashionably dressed women ride by on bicycles, likely en route to work; six hours later they will do likewise in New York City and Boston, though more probably in taxis and on foot. The views, imagined and actual, match. It’s a global economy. A massive old church, a stone’s throw away, is shrunk onto a historic page by massive glass skyscrapers and glass towers in the near distance, several blocks farther away.

German planes bombed this zone to rubble in repeating film clips in the Jewish Museum, but human life rearises like exotic mushrooms or crystalline ova from its genome’s DNA. A hundred years from now, what? What here? What of us? What yet of them, twelve million Jews and Poles? Where has the universe, will the universe, the Akashic field, place and have placed them? What has the zodiac in store for us?

I find comparisons of Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump specious and ideologically indulgent, but there are unmistakable correlations (remember, this written in 2018).The intentional goading and rabblerousing of anti-intellectual masses, xenophobia in spades, blaming the outsider for the intrinsic problems of a rigged oligarchic, plutocratic economy—a glorified Ponzi scheme—the dispossessed working class blaming educated liberals for the woes of samsara.

That Jews can be woven warp and woof, thread and pixel, into the socioeconomic structure and political hierarchy of a community, into its pop culture—as concubine, as son-in-law, as lawyer, as banker, as spice merchant, as seer and publisher, as shaman—and then unwoven from the fabric, thread by thread and pixel by pixel, is the overriding story.

Maybe it will be the Mexicans, Malians, Syrians and Sikhs this time rather than Jews, but then they will be the Jews, just as the Jews can be the Nazis and wreak holocausts too.

Humanity’s hope, I conclude at bedtime (because I need something to reassure me) is the capacity for empathic suffering—suffering, depth, and common cause with the dispossessed and impoverished. That is the legacy I would claim we would earn, beyond relativity, gematria, and “the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.” Beyond, and yet all that too.

At night like on our other two here, we hear the sounds of drunk carousing outside our window, sounds of glass smashed, pro forma for weekend partying Ewa said. From the fifth floor it is an echo of another world.

July 16

Warsaw to Krakow was supposed to be a three-to-four hour drive and, by leaving early, we hoped to have some of the afternoon in Krakow. It took over almost seven hours to get from our parking place on the street in Warsaw to our hotel in Krakow. The main encumbrance was road construction: three different junctures where traffic from each direction had to alternate with traffic from the other direction, meaning long waits for our turn. There were other slowdowns: most of the way was not on superhighways like A2. We passed through towns with their own traffic jams, pedestrian crossings, and cars turning. It also continued to rain, sometimes lightly but occasionally in blinding enough torrents to slow traffic.

It was engaging to look at: farms, fields of grain, meters of corn, wildflowers, distinctive small towns. If one could be transported to such vistas on an average Monday or Thursday, it would be worth the trouble—and it was.

Getting into Krakow was its own challenge. About five miles from our reservation at Hotel Dom Polonii, Rynek Główny 14, traffic slowed to bumper to bumper, moving in spurts, but stopped for long periods. After an hour of this, I suggested that Lindy try her cell to see what it said about the address. The Maps program had an entirely different idea of how to enter town, calling for an immediate U-turn. That was appealing because traffic was moving freely in the other direction on the opposite side of a brief mall. I took the next available left and started the other way. We were soon directed to the right into the city with the two voices squabbling, as Lindy couldn’t get the car system shut off.

As we edged through narrow, crowded streets to within less than a kilometer of Dom Polonii (by both assessments), logic broke down; neither program could offer more than “Return to the route.” Rain was heavy just then, and we were in a densely populated area of the old city alongside the campus of an old university. It looked as though either Martin Luther or Paracelsus could have delivered theses from its steps. There was also little maneuvering room for cars going two ways, especially with pedestrians using the street. I saw a parking spot and dove in, ran through the rain into a shop, and asked the woman for directions by holding out my reservation printout for Dom Polonii.  She didn’t speak English but pointed in the opposite direction from where we were going and to the right. Taking her at her word, I was able to make a U-turn at the end of the street by the campus. I came back up the street, made a right, and turned with the street. At that point, the combination of pedestrians in the road and car gridlock prevented progress. Both GPS’s said in slightly different language, “Walk from here to your destination.” Luckily there was a parking spot available. Lindy put her cell on “Walk” and we continued on foot. Even then, the instructions were confused, telling us to turn right, then left at the same corner. We picked the right. We entered the Old Square (Stare Miasto). Almost immediately it said that we had arrived at our destination, though there was no hotel in sight. The Square was a tight landscape of large churches, shops, and tourists—a noisy carnival.

As we walked along, looking, I suddenly saw the words “Dom Polonii: It wasn’t exactly a hotel. It was an opera house selling tickets to the evening’s performance. We had to show the reservation to get past the ticket-taker at the door.

Inside, a tall, pleasant-looking, bespectacled young man with attractively messy facial stubble and a smattering of English led us up three long flights to a woman in an office who requested payment before further discussion. We asked about the room and parking. She shook her head ambiguously and got on the phone. Pointing to it, she said, “Boss.” Her boss apparently told her to have the young man help us. She shouted for him, gave him keys, and he led us to our room: another flight up. There was no lift, and it wasn’t four normal floors. Each was a double story with a landing. It was eight floors. There were only three guest rooms in the establishment, all of them on the top floor. At the end of our ascent, we got a grand old spacious room, worthy of a manor, and a view overlooking the OId Square, but was it worth the hassles and climb? Dom Polonii was likely a mistake. I had fallen for an online advertisement, touting the value of being right on the Old Square. It didn’t mention eight stories, no lift, and no access by car.

`Lindy stayed in the room, as I led the guy back to our parking spot, fingers crossed that I could reverse my path through the labyrinth and find it.

I was relieved to see its EU AZ license mid-block after consecutive lefts. The Dom Polonii employee proposed, in roundabout phrases and sign language, that he meant to take our suitcases back from there to the room (great!) and also for me to re-park the car because I was in a fifteen-minute zone.

“Fifteen not fifty,” he clarified when I asked because I had already been there a half hour. “Must move. Ticket.”

He walked me several blocks downhill and around two corners going different ways to an outdoor lot of dirt and broken concrete in a converted courtyard reached by a short narrow alleyway. We walked back to the car. I got out two suitcases and pulled up one handle. He pulled up the other and left, wheeling one in each arm.

To get to the lot by car, I had to make a U-turn in the only way it could be done on such a narrow street, by using the opposite sidewalk. With heavy pedestrian traffic on both street and sidewalk, you don’t want to watch this. It happened by sheer intention and gradual, meticulous degrees, back and forth, turning the wheels as pedestrians ignored my disturbance. I found the alley, not a sure thing. I followed the instructions of the attendant to park, paid him by credit card, grabbed both our backpacks with computers and retraced my steps to the Dom Polonii. By then, the rain had let up enough to make all this possible without an umbrella.

We hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so we went down into the Square. As noted, it was packed with tourist crowds walking in more than two directions. There were also horse-drawn carriages, solicitors with handouts, and performing costumed figures trying to entice people into exhibits—for instance, a guy dressed entirely in mirror tiles (face included) and another with movies running across his body.

Krakow’s Old Square is spot-on remarkable, but you have change your view and filter out the noise to see it: giant churches, longstanding statues, restored buildings, both in the Square and on the streets leading to it. With this many tourists, barkers, and the general chaos of mobile modernity, the scenery dissipates and loses its integrity. It becomes more like a fake stage set of itself, much as a Vegas reproduction of the same buildings would be. It isn’t quite that bad—you are in a real place, and some of the grandeur and historic integrity sticks—but the view is moment-to-moment higgledy-piggledy versus the architectural landscape that has supposedly drawn and withstood the masses since it stood once with integrity and in perspective.

 And then the horses! Two double-horse carriages, each horse decorated with metal-embossed frocks on its body as if from an imperial stable, went back and forth, back and forth, clop-clop, forcing pedestrians out of the road into gridlock on the sidewalks amid cigarette smoke. But you came here to see what it is and be there, so it is and we were; it was human and more than possible, calling for constant mercy and forgiveness, for being bumped into distractedly, for being who they were, for the endless riddle of Earth.

We hadn’t gotten far past Dom Polonii, maybe forty feet, when a tall affable young man accosted us in Polish, then changed at once to English—he must have heard the lingo in our heads clairaudiently. He assured us that the restaurant he stood in front of had the best food in Krakow (we later realized that most restaurants around the Square employed such a similar fisher to pull fish out of the stream). He went on to describe Marmolada’s superlatives: home cooking, Italian and Polish or Russian food whatever you desired, a terrace in back so you could sit in light out of the rain.

We were hungry, had no idea what we were looking for, plus it was easier to comply than resist. It was actually tasty, well-cooked food, especially the mushroom soup and potato dumplings, but it took forty minutes from when we ordered for dishes to appear.

At one point I used the restaurant rest room. It called for going down two winding flights into a basement, across a dirt-floor wine cellar and behind a door that looked like something on a jail cell in a dungeon. It felt like a mafia landsca[e, but I kept up my gumption and got to pee.

After food, Lindy wanted to rest, so she made the long trek up the stairs and I set out on a hike to the one site in Krakow I wanted to see: the Vortex at the Wawel castle. According to the guy selling opera tickets at the door of Dom Polonii, Wawel was only a seven-minute walk along Grodzka Clowny, the continuation of Rynek Clowny.

I learned about the Vortex in an old guidebook. It is in the Wawel courtyard, which could have been anywhere within ten kilometers of Dom Polonii but was just a few blocks off the Square. It is considered by some Hindus to be one of the most powerful energy sites on the planet, apparently the conjunction of multiple lei lines. Since there few comparable vortices, yogis and other pundits come all the way from India to Krakow to visit it. The guidebook treated it tongue-in-cheek, as merely a legend, but it was a hot legend leading to real pilgrimages. As long as we were in Krakow, I wanted to go test it and myself and see if I could feel the energy.

Grodzka wound gradually out of the old Square. One church got my attention for its spectacular ornate construction but mostly an unusual row of life-sized religious statues spaced on a row of pedestals in front, giving the edifice another axis or larger-than-life fourth dimension.

Wawel was an immense, full-fledged castle and castle grounds on a hilltop. You could be born in such a place and not see all its rooms in a lifetime. It more accurately enveloped the hill it squatted on. Access to its grounds was not immediately evident from Grodzka, but I followed crowds around the corner, down an adjoining street, and up a very long ramp. I ended up in a courtyard, but where was the courtyard in relation to the energy sink? There were several adjoining courtyards and, to make matters worse, I had neglected to bring pages torn from the old guide.

I did have my cell, so looked it up. There was nothing tongue-in-cheek about the Internet description. This was as real a vortex as Sedona and much more highly regarded for its depth of energy. The site of the vortex’s strongest radiation was at the northwest corner of the central courtyard under the chapel connecting the castle to the cathedral on its grounds. To my delight and relief, a tunnel-like passage connected the buildings, as proposed, in the second courtyard I entered. I saw no wandering holymen, or anyone, aimed toward the chapel, but I walked to the spot, fearing I would feel nothing.

As I entered the tunnel under the chapel, I felt a sharp tug, unmistakably tangible. It went from my head down my spine and flowed the way a magnetic field might. I stood in its strongest grip for a few minutes, experimenting with its shape and degree of tug, shifting my position and then coming back to central current. As I stood there, people—mostly tourists—ambled through the tunnel joining courtyards as if it were nothing but a conduit. No one else was interested or noticed. Where were the Hindus? Where were the hippies? Had no one else read the guidebook or read about the vortex online?

I began to doubt my perception. Maybe I was feeling tension and weariness in my neck from the long drive. Three times I went elsewhere among the courtyards and returned. On my departure, the sensation diminished at once, dissipating entirely with distance. It came back as I regained the spot: strongest down my spine.

I looked again at the people strolling obliviously through the tunnel, chatting, kids running. I wanted to scream “Vortex ahoy, vortex ahoy!” but most of them wouldn’t care, and no one who was speaking was speaking English anyway. Among the passers-through were one Indian gent and a cluster of long-haired, piercings-bearing young millennials gabbing in Italian. Did they know nothing of the force?

After a while, I remembered that I should receive the current and not go out after it. I did, closing my eyes. The inner-eye image was of an axis passing through the Earth, and not just the Earth but beyond, perhaps all the way to the galactic center. It was dark and dense, potent and stable. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I received the energy neutrally and let it give me what it would. I needed healing and asked for it.

I walked back to the room and, after the walk from Wawel and ascent up the stairs, collapsed on the bed.

That evening around 7:00 p.m., Lindy and I went on a long saunter, past the churches, past Wawel, over the trolley tracks, into the Jewish quarter. In 2018 it was just a rundown section of town. An large old synagogue and a few buildings with Hebrew letters were the only old indicators of pre-Holocaust Polish Jews. To peek into the synagogue required a fee, so we skipped the look. It wasn’t just the minor cost; it was the aggressive woman at the door. She bordered on the sort of monetary-fixation caricature that makes me not want to be Jewish. I can’t remember a single church in Europe that charged a fee, let alone had a collector at the door. She didn’t even look official. She could have been a scammer, but I didn’t think so, as she grabbed the arm of a man slipping by to indoors unaware, held out her box, and said, “Must pay.”

`           Walking in the Jewish quarter at night, on narrow streets, away from the crowds of the Square, in relative silence (an occasional hollow sound or voice) resonated with something old and familiar—and did again even more strongly later when I went out alone, downhill to the car to retrieve a few items. In a subliminal, unnotable way that blended with ordinary reality, I felt akin to these streets. I melded into them. Perhaps it was creative imagination or wishful thinking, but I had an intimation of ancestral resonance. Even if it was imagination, it gave me a feeling of sanctuary and drama, the drama of a lifetime that is essentially unknown through its passage, like at every moment going from the unknown to the unknown in relation to any particular other lifetime of myself or of any of my ancestors. The truth mystery was ambient but palpable. That was the main import of Krakow to me—not a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court but a JewBu Berkeley New Yorker during the waning of the Middle Ages Poland. The sensation was so quiet I would have missed before taking classes at the Berkeley Psychic Institute and training with John Friedlander.

On Lindy’s and my way back from the Jewish district to the Square, a guesswork of crisscrossing streets at twilight, we passed a vegan Indian restaurant we had seen en route. We stopped there and ordered the light dinner: papadums, lentil mash, rice, and naan. It took half an hour, but least, three women on a makeshift stage sang Sanskrit ragas and prayers; the trio were playful and soulful. The youngest found immediate deep epiphany but broke into shy laughter like a young girl; she caused a screech of feedback from her mike.

A final reason not to book a room on a Stare Miasto. The racket and horses never stopped. In fact, it got worse into the a.m. hours: singing, shouting, exulting, lit drones and kites and balloons flying by our window. I was tired enough to sleep through most of it and turn the rest into a dream.

July 17

I made an abrupt change in plans while walking back from Wawel. We were supposed to head to Budapest today, but it took so long to get to Krakow that it didn’t feel right to leave right away the next morning. We could try a daytrip to Auschwitz.

That sounds wrong on two levels. It disrespects those who had to go there, and it turns a deeper calling into a tourist destination. One goes to Auschwitz because it is an obligation, to bring yourself as witness to where it happened, to respect the dead, to acknowledge the horror and inhuman suffering.

Bowing internally, I moved our Budapest reservation forward by a day and figured we could stay somewhere in between Krakow and Budapest in Slovakia overnight after visiting Auschwitz. Our four-day landlord in Budapest was graciously willing to reduce it to three, but plenty else stood in the way of Auschwitz that morning.

I was sick. I never got the immobilizing flu or cold I feared, but I know what “sick” feels like. I didn’t want to do anything—I didn’t want to eat, mov, and certainly not deal with being eight floors up in a converted old opera house and having to leave it, get all our stuff to the car, and drive a distance. That seemed at herculean scale relative the state of my body and brain. And it was raining hard again, with a forecast of “heavy rain and wind.”

Lindy went out for breakfast, and I went back to sleep. When I got up, she still wasn’t back, so I found a place on the Square for takeout pancakes. They came covered with sweetened fruits, but options were few. Most places did not do takeout.

I met the manager of the Dom Polonii, a man my age. He was as copious and beneficent as a mafia don and as situational. It was our problem, he deemed, to get our suitcases down eight flights and to the car. I slowly established rapport—eons ago he had lived three years in Chicago and was inspired to talk about it, how you could fit all of Poland into that one city (I figured he meant the population). We chatted about the States, the history of Dom Polonii. I praised it. After a while he said he would find someone of the proper age to help us get our suitcases downstairs. We could handle getting them to the car. I wondered about driving in front because I had seen vehicles there, but he said that the street and adjacent streets closed at ten, half an hour ago, so we would have to wheel them all the way.

We had that in airports and, though the lot was many blocks away, it was no different than going from an airport to a subway station. Krakow is pure touristville, so there were people rolling suitcases all about us. With our backpacks on, bags of food and takeout in hand, we covered the distance of about six blocks, over cobblestone and mixed concrete and dirt.

Lindy felt a lot better than I did and she had also had breakfast, so she drove. The passage out of Krakow by GPS was unsettling. We went due north, back toward Warsaw, away from Budapest. It took confidence in the GPS to proceed in the opposite direction to where we were going. Lindy was more actively worried than me, but I reminded her that it was the same leaving Warsaw—you had to go north to go south, you had to enter the greater highway system away from the city. She was inclined to bail, get off, and ask someone, like at a gas station, but that seemed dubious in unknown territory on a busy highway in rain.

We had three GPS’s if you counted ours cells as a single one, and they all said the same—north—so we stuck to the highway toward Warsaw.

It would have helped matters if we had thought to phonetically translate the town that kept coming up in the system: Oświęcim. That is the Polish name for the place. Auschwitz is merely Germanized phonetic orthography. It was the same place if you pronounced the Polish properly instead of as Oh-wee-essem.

Lindy’s fear of being on the wrong road was soon contagious. The day had hardly begun, and I felt wiped out and daunted. Everything seemed against our getting to Auschwitz. I was tempted to say, “Fuck it. Let’s just put Budapest in the GPS and blow the whole deal.”

Picture our worsening situation. As the road finally turned west, we encountered the heaviest rain and wind of a pretty much unbroken series of squalls since Berlin. The storm was blinding, as wind battled the tiny car’s attempt at acceleration. It balked at going forward and swayed on the road. We had to blast the heater to keep the window defogged. By usual standards, this was dangerous to the point of insane. Our friends and family, if they could have seen us, would have been rightly concerned. It was a terrible day to be out on the road, but back when my father tried to talk us out of marrying, he said we were too stubborn to get along. We stubbornly persisted.

Auschwitz was supposed to be about seventy-five minutes from Krakow on a course mainly due west. Under stormy conditions, it took more like a hundred. After we exited at Oświęcim (an hour or so), we followed a series of roads and roundabouts into countryside. That made sense. By putting the camps where they did, the Germans tried to hide Auschwitz-Birkenwald from the world. The many consecutive rural roundabouts baffled the GPS, and on one occasion we were sent in the wrong direction, then onto a side street and down an obscure dead-end lane, as it tried to compensate. There is no skyhook to get one out of situations like that. Patience, faith—that’s the allotment. You make a U-turn, retrace, regain confidence. The language barrier is constant—road signs and pedestrians can resolve the most basic issues. One craves English like water or air, though I hated lingustic provincialism in myself.

After the phonetics finally snapped in, the name Oświęcim became a more reliable guide than the GPS. Finally, at three kilometers from the site of the concentration camp, signs began footnoting the Auschwitz Museum under Oświęcim. The absence of signage to that point was either fabulous understatement or an unconscious continuation of the German wish to downplay the place.

I had surmised that the harsh weather might at least have driven down the crowds. That was a fantasy. Like us, others had inked in a day for Auschwitz. The parking area was jammed with tourist buses and cars trying to maneuver around one another. It took a while to pay for parking and then find a spot deep in the lot.

We trooped with crowds toward the buildings. By then the rain had subsided to an ordinary downpour. We carried our decorative Polish umbrellas There were lines for headphones, souvenirs, sausages, drinks, headphones, tour groups. It felt like outside a ballpark; only the game would have been rained out long ago. Among all that, nothing registered as an actual ticket window. We asked a guard. Tickets were the longest of all the lines, queueing in a giant curve on the outskirts of the plaza by a wire fence. I had looked at that line and dreaded its meaning. We got on the end.

As we stood under ours umbrellas among other people with umbrellas, still getting wet from windblown droplets, occasionally having to step through puddles because rain had saturated the ground in swaths, I wondered again if we should bail for Budapest, maybe get halfway there. I made a half-serious suggestion to Lindy that if we hadn’t reached the windows of a far-off building, where presently two boys in yellow raincoats stood, by 1:30, we should give it up and go. That seemed past the halfway point to the ticket windows. Lindy concurred. The line moved slowly, but it moved. We got to the spot of the yellow raincoats by 1:25, forty minutes after I had set the deadline.

Four ticket-takers should have had the line zipping along, but completing the purchase was a several-stage process. First, it cost a hundred zlotys each, so a credit card had to be produced. Then the female ticket seller needed our IDs for recording; then she had to assign us to a group, you couldn’t march in and look around like in other museums. Access to the camps was strictly monitored and controlled. The woman put us in the next English tour, starting at 2:15. She pointed to where it was already queueing in the rain. There was fifteen minutes, so we went inside instead, found the cafeteria right away, and got lunch. I found the options more suitable to my state than the starch-dominated stuff I had been eating since we got to Poland: chicken soup and a plate of string beans; I decided to forego a main dish. I’m sure the chicken wasn’t organic, but to worry about such a thing at Auschwitz bordered on blasphemy.

The cafeteria tables carried polyglot to almost symphonic level. Some of the audible tongues sounded like nothing I had ever heard. Perhaps Martians or Pleiadians were among us, checking out the Luciferian disaster that happened here. That’s how many of them looked, or maybe they looked like ghosts of the Auschwitz dead, even the young somewhat; they were a bit feral and primitive, including the scowling young E.T. dude down our table who kept rolling a cigarette (no smoking allowed) he never lit. The ambiance was spooky, but the attendance impressive. Whatever their reasons, people were here to see a death camp. Then suddenly we had to hurry not to miss our tour.

Bathrooms downstairs cost two zlotys, there was an attendant making sure to collect from each eager customer. Lucky we still had coins.

We queued for English. Then in the unabating rain, we slogged through mud, people trying to keep their umbrellas from snaring each other’s. The line moved sluggishly because security was code red: emptying of pockets and X-raying. Then it turned out that you needed your credit-card receipt as well as your ticket for entry. Lindy had to quickly dig ours out of her handbag. The ticket had a different use. It unpeeled, to be pasted on one’s jacket. Ours said “English.”

We passed into a courtyard where groups for different languages clustered, looking for their leaders. A small composite image of an American/British flag designated our tour

We were dispatched at once to get headphones and a little box. That was not for recordings but to listen to our guide. Our aggregation was large, so he spoke into a mike. His voice reached us through the earphones, though I heard him a lot of the time without them

Logistics and timing were strict, almost martial. Groups in English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Hebrew, and other languages were being led on the same procession in close sequence like planes on a runway. As one group left an area, another group streamed in. The system was well timed. We never had to wait to enter or delay the group behind us.

The guide was impeccable in both tone and content. There aren’t many ways to tell the things he had to say. He was flat, neutral to the point of offhand. At first, he seemed cold, but I grew in admiration, especially as more neurotic and ideologically driven members of our group tried to provoke him into emoting or giving a heated opinion. He had what I came to think of as the “Polish back story” regarding Auschwitz: “Some really bad shit went down here, but we didn’t do it. We were victims too. This was solely a Nazi production. The concentration camps were built on Polish territory by occupying forces of the German Third Reich.” He said more than that: “Remember too, this is a death camp. Move in quiet and respect. Please do not take photographs here. Sir, I said no photographs here. Please don’t talk. This is a place of death.”

“Here you may take pictures if you want, but no flashes. Respect those who suffered here.”

Only at tour’s end did he reveal that SS soldiers occupied his family house, as they did of many Polish families in the region, evicting the residents. But occupation was only reason the building survived the war. He expressed remorse for hiw minor collaboration.

How to describe the carnage and its artifacts, evidence, and ghastly remnants and mementos? We saw all the things you would guess we saw: blown-up photographs of people arriving and being situated. Their desperate, haunted faces are iconic, but being on site gave them new meaning and power. I’m sure that everyone pictured being confined to cramped dwelling quarters with mattresses or straw on stone and animal-like urinals and wash basins. Beyond comprehension were the torture cells, gallows, racks, a crematorium, gas chambers, rooms where medical experiments were carried out on mostly women and children. The electric fence and guard station were still standing, though the fence was no longer live nor were there pretend guards. We walked on crushed bricks and mud through yards and into buildings—no attempt to mitigate realistic reconstruction of the camp. Our guide said that this was a difficult day to do such a tour, “so, please watch the hazards.” There was no way to avoid getting soaked, shoes and socks and pants cuffs, but (again) we were the lucky ones.

Auschwitz Camp Number One had perhaps forty buildings or maybe more; after all, it was a former Polish army barracks. We entered maybe five and spent an average of fifteen minutes in each, going through its corridors and rooms in detail.

Two things stood out for me: (ri4w5) six or so huge museums cases filled with objects taken from prisoners by the Nazis (our guide said “Nasis” which gave it an uglier ring).

Those dragooned to the internment camp, mostly by train in box cars meant for animals, were told that they were going to live here, so they hauled their belongings in sacks and suitcases. They thought they would eventually go home. The guide remarked dryly that in fact they were there to be executed, so the only way out was through the chimneys.

They were ordered to leave their possessions outside in piles (plenty of photographs of the grim moment of recognition). There the Nazis sorted through them, sending fine things to Berlin and poorer things to factories for salvage and recycling. I would have been fooled. I would have brought my electric typewriter and baseball glove.

Each museum display case of items was deep, tall, and wide behind glass that blocked the stench. They were greater in scale than ones that show mammal activity on an African veldt with taxidermy and landscape simulation. One case was filled with scalpings: women’s hair stacked up, tens of thousands of individuals’. Think of all that dry, faded hair piled to waist height, so much hair that it was beyond calculation or reckoning—yet a fraction of what was scalped when Auschwitz’s was open for business.

A smaller case demonstrated how this hair was used to make mattresses. The SS similarly removed the gold from teeth and turned it into bars in Berlin.

Another case was filled  suitcases of those who entered Auschwitz, most with names still on them, familiar names and surnames, just different people. They thought that were coming to a settlement camp, so they labelled their belongings. It was a trick not only to make them compliant travelers but to have them cart good merchandise for confiscation by the Nazis.

Another case was filled with shaving-soap brushes and hairbrushes. Another was filled with kitchenware. Another was filled with children’s shoes, another with adult shoes. A smaller one had cans of facial and hand cream, discolored and rusted.

And this was just what hadn’t been sent to Berlin at the time of the Russian liberation of the Polish camps. The sheer scale—the compulsive sorting of plunder alongside the industrialization of slaughter by the daily thousands—was overwhelming. Yet we kept moving along through it, the guide’s voice framing the obvious, as had and would Hannah Arendt, hopefully forever: the banality of evil, its most obvious characteristic, the reason it is so difficult to heal, the way it hides even from itself.

Imbedded in a glass shrine were ashes and bones gathered from the crematorium grounds: ground litter. The main residual material of bodies was dumped into the Vistula.

Then (two) there were two corridors of faces of the executed, many of them Poles since no consistent record was of Jews. Mugshots of the condemned had been methodically taken by the SS, eyes at the cameras like deer in headlights. The negatives were secretly saved and smuggled out, I believe by a Polish worker to bear witness to the “disappeared.” The museum printed these in identical size and put them in frames on the wall, men on the right, women on the left. In a second vestibule where Jews joined the photographed Poles, men were on both sides.

I stared into the eyes of the condemned, as many as I could assimilate as moved, each an intentionally full snapshot into my brain.

I knew these people. They were my friends and neighbors, my fellow citizens. I had seen them in summer camp and classrooms and on subway trains, in crowds on New York and Berkeley streets, in the starting lineups of football and baseball teams. I knew them by their descendants and tribesmates: Roger Maris, Johnny Unitas, Mike Gminski, Stan Mikita.

I tried to acknowledge each that I had a moment to focus on, turning ceremonially from right to left, man, then woman, then man, then woman, as we moved in a procession.

Credit to Ed Dorn’s Recollection of the Gran Apacheria: They were beautiful. They were ugly. They were resolute, defiant. They were defeated and grim. They were laughing. They were resigned and already dead. They refused to die, to disappear.

I thought, “I SEE YOU.” I didn’t use those words. It was a pure psychic and heart beam.

That it was seventy-eight years later merely added to the impact of our meeting here today. “I SEE YOU. I WILL ALWAYS SEE YOU . YOU WILL BE SEEN EVERY DAY BY SOMEONE. YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.”

That’s not true; of course, they will be forgotten, as we will beWe will forget history, so we will repeat it. We already have. But the sentiment has to be thought and spoken silently because our word alone can make it true, even beyond universes, because we were given consciousness and words, to empower blindly, to share with those who had their words taken away.

I had some the same meditation with less sustained attention as I stared into the giant photos in earlier rooms: eyes of women and children getting off the train, being evaluated for death by the SS guards, standing in line for the gas chamber: “I am here. I can’t know what you are suffering, but I will take responsibility for my own life from here on out and live in accordance with your courage, your effrontery and faith. I understand what it is not to be you, and I respect that as much as I acknowledge your suffering. I must respect it in order to honor you. I must live the life you would have if you had somehow escaped from here.

My own cowardice shamed me, but I felt raised to a new standard of candor and obligation.

Maybe the biggest thing for me at Auschwitz as well as a reason I wanted to come: my lifelong terror. It had always contained Auschwitz-like images even when I was too young to know what. The initial trigger of my childhood panic was a radio voice sending a figure down the dungeon stairs.

I am not arguing for a simple, linear past life, that I died here and was reincarnated in New York. I was born on the November 1944 day that most scholars set for Anne Frank’s death at Auschwitz-Birkenwald, but I take that symbolically more than literally. I am thinking of collective trauma. Or maybe it was a past life out of which I flew into my mother’s fling with Bingo Brandt.

In any case, by whatever belief system, I tried to read Auschwitz psychically. At first, I was too overwhelmed emotionally to read or switch vibration. All I felt was rushes of heart energy, grief, and an ancient numbness in the aftermath of my unearned survival. Then I remembered to receive.

It has always been striking to me how ordinary are the most profound psychic transmissions. What I received when I simply listened was the last thing I expected to feel: relief, wave upon gentle wave of relief.

The images outside matched the terror within. Something that had been elusive and spectral was irrefutably real.

Prisoners had to bathe in cold water in the winter. They were starved and asphyxiated, hung above the ground in such a manner that their arms broke (then executed because they were useless to work), put in cramped stone enclosures without being able to stand, executed for helping others. I didn’t feel relief from that. I felt fresh shock and horror and dismay at the darkness that permeates Creation despite Buddha’s source luminosity and Brahma’s eternal mind. Yet because suffering is a singularity I glimpsed the larger service, and I was comforted that it could still be gotten at in this life in this body.There was no redemption in these events.

On a subtle-body level, I witnessed an inkling of what it was or that it was.

We left with a great gift—our lives—and a weighty obligation, to live well enough and in enough honesty to atone even a small amount for these deaths.

Our entry fee entitled us to a second two-hour tour, at Birkenwald, but it was 3:45 and we needed to get a start toward Budapest, plus we were exhausted physically and emotionally, and very wet. We walked out of Auschwitz Concentration Camp One. We went back to the car.

If we had thought that driving through a bit of Poland, all of Slovakia, and a bit of Hungary to Budapest was like crossing Nebraska, the reality was sobering. Eastern Europe is still relict Soviet era and impenetrable.

It started out deceptively easy: the GPS turned us around, put us on a decent rural road; we stopped for gas, got assurance from a fellow driver at the next pump that this was indeed the right road for Slovakia and Budapest and there were no tolls in Poland, so we turned our last zlotys into gas.

I figured that we could put in about three hours, maybe four, and do half of what was listed on the GPS’s as a six to six-and-a-half-hour trip. Then we could stop for dinner and stay at a hotel. Divided into two days, the drive should have been relatively easy. We were coasting along, following the GPS’s instructions for working our way through and around a Polish village called Kozy on a rural back road when the road just ended: sand. We could see the concrete surface continuing up a hill ahead, but there was a significant drop onto the dirt, no cars anywhere in sight, no indication that the road was passable, no signage even in Polish. A man beside the road looked as if he might speak English. He didn’t and couldn’t communicate anything useful in sign language, though he tried. There was a third option, a side road that was neither where we had come from nor the sand. As we tried it, the GPS went crazy, telling us to turn into tiny lanes that led into farmland or down local streets, then to make an immediate U-turn. It took us back to the dirt. We also could retrace our steps back toward Auschwitz. We chose the dirt. There was a significant thump, but we got down and then back up again without damage. We continued on the pavement, but after the road curved, we came to another break in the concrete, this one with a much more significant drop and all sorts of wire mesh extending from the concrete above the sand. It was not the type of thing one ever drove into. It looked like too much of a fall for the car plus too great risk of puncturing a tire on sharp metal.

We turned around and went in the only other direction, but that road led to homes and a cul de sac. We were now trapped between sand and a dead end. It looked like endgame, a jam with no way graceful or even ungraceful way out. What do you do? Find the police? They might not even speak English

A teenager strolling along the street presented an option. Unlike the previous guy, he did not look as if he spoke English. He was large, oafish in gait, and had earbuds on. I pulled over, got out, and hurried up to him. He looked startled as he took out the earbuds. In fact, he spoke perfect English. He tutored it in his high school.

We carry hidden biases, some of which underlie unconscious racism. This youth was a gem, intelligent, articulate, and fulsome. He first suggested that we change our GPS destination from Budapest to Bratislava because he said that aiming at Budapest would get us in a lot of trouble locally throughout Poland and Slovakia.

He then explained that we had no choice but to go through the second sand hazard. If we did that and then continued on the road and took the second left, it would lead to a major highway. We thanked him copiously.

When we returned to the drop, we saw that other cars managed by getting their wheels onto a narrow rise in the sand and stone, which let them avoid the metal. We picked the same spot and plunged over the edge as slowly as gravity would allow. In fact, one car coming from the other direction lost patience with us and went flying up over the edge at high speed. It was still quite a thump.

After we exited sand hazard two, the second left did lead to a highway, not a major one but, after our plight, it felt like 401 through Canada. Euphoria lasted about seven minutes. Then traffic stopped totally. We were in a row of mostly giant trucks, and we could see unmoving trucks on a hill far ahead. It looked like hours of waiting, nowhere to go, nothing to do but live it out. The GPS had warned of deteriorated road conditions and the need for an alternate route, but we hadn’t taken it seriously—plus we didn’t know alternate routes, and we trusted the Polish highway authority. The delay turned out to be only an hour and thirty-five minutes. Then we saw what was holding things up: a missing stretch of concrete, this one on the highway, three lanes from three directions being siphoned into the one remaining lane with ours getting the worst deal because the feeder lane was to our right. I had wrongly guessed that it was an accident.

In her journal, Lindy described Slovakian roads as bandaids between open wounds. The first hazard was in Poland, but we thought we were already in Slovakia, a detail which amused our high-school helper.

It was getting late, but we were finally moving, so we zoomed along the superhighway. We didn’t know when we entered Slovakia—no signage—but after a while we figured we had gone too far for it to still be Poland. The superhighway eventually downgraded into more ordinary highway, then slow rural roads, but we kept going partly because there were no hotels or restaurants. In fact, there was little of anything but homes and occasional factories and mining pits. It was truly desolate and almost all trucks. We were a lone car. It was also raining hard.

Around 7:30 p.m., traffic stopped again for no evident reason—it was moving well in the other direction. As we crept along, we were tantalized by an unlikely godsend: the first hotel indication in Slovakia, that they actually had such things. We saw signs for Hotel Centrum and kept seeing signs for it. Finally at 8:15, having covered only eight kilometers in forty-five minutes, we were rescued again—a sign with an arrow, a right turn onto a road, a small town with a shopping center up a rise of about a kilometer, then a left turn for Hotel Centrum.

Hotel Centrum was a squat round tower, incongruously modern-looking for its locale. Two young women stood outside smoking. I asked them, negligent of language, “Is this a real working hotel?” One of them nodded vigorously as she put out her cigarette, crushing it on the ground. She pointed to a door to her left, not the obvious main entrance—the main door was locked. I went in and addressed an older woman at the desk. She responded by shaking her head; she had no English. The young woman came rushing in and took over—she was an employee. She had the barest smidgen of English, but it was more than anyone else and it served, and she was one of the great giggle girls of all time with a single piercing of a little gem above the midline of her upper lip.

It was only her second week of work, and she had trouble with just about everything—the registration form, the credit-card machine, the government form for foreigners (she had to register our passport numbers and file at once with the local police, an unhappy Slovakian surprise). When she saw that we were from the United States, she was beside herself with giggles. She kept bending over laughing and then apologizing. She finally got across that she had never met an American before. The mere fact made us movie stars.

She was not only a giggle girl, she was a standing “lost in translation” machine. She described how to get to our room four times, and we went in three wrong directions: upstairs to a banquet area, outside around the corner to warehouses, and to the left into the gym. The correct staircase was actually just to her right, but she was giggling so much, probably at using book-taught English for real for the first time, that she never tried to personify her words. It was as if they were just practice.

There was no lift, and the room was three flights up. I left my suitcase in the car and carried Lindy’s.

The giggle girl directed us to the one restaurant in town, and we spent forty minutes looking for it without success, first on foot, then by car. We had her sheet of paper with the name, Rustica, to show people, and we generated several attempts at sign-language directions from people who didn’t speak English, the most ambitious by a sprightly complement of three teen girls who also taught us that the local name for pedestrian crosswalks, English in fact: “zebras.”

No luck even after their valiant attempt. Everything was locked up and dark. One block revealed just how impoverished this area was beyond the Centrum’s modern tower, satellite dishes, and an Internet signal: apartment buildings made of crumbling, stained cinderblocks surrounded by men drinking from bottles and children running around. The garbage cans smelled so strong that it was hard to walk on their side of the street.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Czech Republic dumped what it regarded as backwater Slovakia for more than just ethnic reasons.

Only after we gave up, returned to Centrum, and admitted that we hadn’t found Rustica did our girl shake her head in consternation, leave the desk, run outside, and point outside. It was directly across the street in the tiny mall. I had initially asked her if that bar was it and she said, “No, not there.” In the same conversation she declared Rustica a ten-minute walk. When Lindy thought that it sounded a little long for that late and so dark out, she said, “Maybe five,” as if complying in words moved it instantly closer. That was how uncommitted she was to the meaning of her language. We went across the mall. By then (22:00), the kitchen was closed, but the waitress nicely got them to make us a pizza.

The Centrum was a strange mixture of modern and throwback: full sports-equipment room but no elevator; dark halls with lights that came on very late after you had walked past them; a chair in our room that didn’t merely collapse but pulverized as Lindy sat typing on it.

The town was Čadca. We looked at a map in the morning and realized that we had made little progress on our larger journey. Putting Bratislava in the GPS had sent us mainly west along the mountain ranges. We were still near Poland and at least six hours from Budapest.

July 18

The day didn’t have an agenda beyond getting to Budapest, and it took all of it. We left Čadca around ten and arrived in Budapest close to five. We ate some of the Centrum’s minimal breakfast, then our own snacks, skipping lunch. What did we encounter on our Slovakian transit?

Rain. Lots of rain, often torrential, no surprise based on the weather system we were in or what was forecast.

Bandaid roads. Stretches of highway that ended in dirt or an unmarked detour. At one such spot way deep in the countryside, we made a bad choice and got told so repeatedly by the GPS that it seemed hysterical, “Make an immediate U-turn, make an immediate U-turn,” so we did. It turned out that you could cross the dirt if you waited. We went back to the spot of decision. There had been no other vehicles when we arrived, so we didn’t appreciate our options. Now we saw what was happening: traffic from opposite directions got alternate turns crossing the “desert.”

Detours. At another problematic junction we were forced off a main road, maybe G6, onto a tiny side road, maybe 2142, into vast fields. Both roads are too tiny for anyone to find on a map of Slovakia; the numbers are from the GPS map on the car screen. As long it said we were 2142 and the mileage to Budapest (around 240 kilometers at that point) kept going down, we felt that we were okay. Also an occasional bus or truck from the other direction was reassuring: we were not alone on the highway in exile.

Mirages. The road felt almost happenstance; it seemed to end at a barn or slow to a cul de sac at a pasture but always found a way to keep going. The scenery was drop-dead beautiful: long flat stone houses as if exhibits from the eighteenth century or mid-Renaissance, town by town. If you could relax, it was a gift disguised as a detour; the gift was Slovakia.  If you planned sightseeing in rural Slovakia for a day, this was the gold standard. With the pressure of a day of driving ahead and a goal based on a reservation in Budapest, it felt like slow torture. We did about thirty miles like this in over an hour.

The mountains of Slovakia. People spoke of them in awe. Whenever I asked for driving advice—best roads and approximate time frame across Slovakia—in Poland, I got told, Slovakia is counter-intuitive because the mountains scramble everything. Those are mere words until you are crossing one high pass after another and descending into valleys behind huge trucks, with equally huge trucks barreling around sharp curves from the other direction, spraying water over the windshield as the wipers clears it. We whizzed by trucks whizzing by us in rain for three hours, every one a potential wipeout. At times, it seemed there were only mountains, slow, winding roads for a hundred kilometers to the next range, and driving rain.

The landscape was sumptuous, melancholy, and lush—like a rain forest at times, trees hanging from small cliffs and outcroppings right over the road—fairy-tale-like. When we rush through the interstices of modern life, we lose the metabolic and neurovisceral capacity for the “here” as well as the “now.”

We talked of stopping for lunch but never saw anything worth breaking our marathon. We stopped only for gas and rest rooms and to change drivers. No one spoke English at either of two stations. They didn’t respond to the word “English.” At one, it was a chore to figure out the sequence of pumping and paying. The woman seemed perplexed when I tried handing her my card before getting gas. She kept giving it back. Driveaways were apparently not a problem here.

Progress was always slow with periodic detours and backups but also some superhighways when least expected, then ending abruptly. We went through three sleek modern tunnels. One of them was maybe two kilometers with huge venting fans.

The mountains ran almost the length of the country but dwindled in size as we got more south, away from the Baltic and toward the Black Sea and Mediterranean.

Slovakia was not meant to be a major part of our trip, but we absorbed it in depth. I saw a lot of it and have an impression of a land of contrasts: sprawling wilderness and succinct intense habitations. modernity struggling to take root and sticking in fits and starts, tradition and custom holding on vigorously, decay and poverty in between.

Route. We went from Čadca to Zilina to Banska-Bystrica (the 2142 detour somewhere in there) to Zwolan, eastward to Ziar to Sahy at the border. Slovakian Route 66 covered the last hundred or so kilometers: 90 kilometers per hour between towns, 50 within, lots of police cars parked on side roads facing the highway. Thoughts of possible encounters gave rise to Kafkaesque paranoia and plots with the Slovakian language the only medium of negotiation out, so I kept to the speed limit religiously.

No marker or checkpoint for Hungary, but letters of words changed from a Slavic look to a Uralic Hungarian-Finnish orthography odd apparent resonances to Korean and Italian (per Noam Chomsky and the glottochronologists). The road crossed seamlessly into Hungary, changing numbers (E77/R1, I believe). After some ninety kilometers through Hungary, Budapest came on suddenly, and we were in a huge city resembling New York and Paris. We crossed a bridge over the Danube and looked at magnificent public buildings, tastefully colored stone of apartments and townhouses covered with elegant sculptural reliefs on the sides, and rising to spires, turrets, Crosses, statues, and other elaborate stonework. The sides of many buildings were painted in a way that suggested Greek Orthodox stained-glass imagery, though it was pure Hungarian, drawing on many regional melting-pot styles and themes.

The GPS went smoothly, making eight or nine street changes toward our address, the number remaining continuing to descend. The last eight kilometers took an extra hour, bumper-to-bumper 17:00 traffic, about five green lights for every one met. The GPS said we were there, though we were on a busy street of shops with a different name than our reservation but—another bailout—a woman pulled out of a parking spot in front of us in an area so busy and filled with construction that cars were double-parked on the sidewalk. From there we phoned the rental manager, a middle-aged woman named Zsuzsa. From my reading aloud of store names, she said we were very, very close. In fact, we were so close that she walked to our spot, identified us, directed us at once to get money from an exchange on the block to pay the parking machine (whose instructions she read aloud); then she helped with our baggage.

Once at Servitza Terrace 5, it took an hour for us to get initiated into entering and exiting.

The apartment was rented from a friend who owns several rental properties in Budapest. He is, more accurately, the friend of a friend. John was a home-exchange partner in New York City in 2002, a law professor who connected us to a retired law-professor friend who had just moved to Berkeley, who then became a friend of ours; he reminded us earlier in the year of John and his apartments in Budapest after we talked of planning to travel in Eastern Europe.

First you needed a key or code to get in the outer door through an alcove set off from the street. Then you took a rather intimidating lift in an unsettling free-standing shaft. You got off at the fifth and top floor and immediately needed a key to open the gate to two fifth-floor apartments accessed from their balconies, meaning a walk past a Hitchcock vertigo drop of five stories with only a narrow passage to stand on and none-too-impressive iron grillwork alone keeping you from the edge. Zsuzsa said the first gate had to be locked or the neighbor became actively furious. Three steps beyond was a private gate to the apartment, then in another five the door to the apartment itself. Each gate had a different sort of lock and its own key. Each had to be locked both entering and exiting, and two of the keys and their locks were very sticky. Quite a ritual—a prologue to a prologue to a prologue to a chapter worth entering.

The apartment itself was nice with a kitchen and loft and many residential conveniences, but you had to do the great gauntlet each time exiting and reentering.

Zsuzsa indicated that our vehicle had to go in a “parking house”; it wasn’t safe on the street and we also didn’t want to have to keep updating the meter. She had helped guests arriving on airplanes and trains, so she did not know where to go for a car. She spent fifteen minutes looking on her pad and calling around before settling on a parking house that she indicated was somewhat far to drive (fifteen minutes on complicated one-way streets) but a short walk back (five). She gave it to us by coordinate code.

 I had never entered one before, but the cell accepted it. Problem was, it didn’t actually know how to get us there. In slow-moving rush-hour traffic, it provided contradictory directions, lefts where there were no streets to turn on, instructions that changed as we were carrying them out. It sent us in a circle. Just when we had gotten fifteen minutes till arriving down to three, it bumped it up to nineteen—one-way streets making a minor mistake quite consequential, as short distances became extended roundabout journeys.

It seemed that there was no way to find the garage and no way to get back to our place without stopping and reentering its address. Then I saw a big P to the right and dove across two lanes and down an entrance to the underground. It wasn’t Zsuzsa’s structure, but who cared? It ate cars. We paid in advance for three nights (63 euros). I backed the Leon into a tight spot by the office where two friendly guys calculated the florin-dollar exchange, so that we didn’t think we were paying $70,000 for our overnight space.

The cell couldn’t get us back to the apartment by walking directions any better than it could find the parking house. It didn’t grok Budapest at all. In fact, the little ball kept moving away from the blue line of a route while we were standing still. It was apparently saying, “I am trying to find you from satellite, so I am moving and I am also scanning.” We switched to Lindy’s phone, ignored the map and followed the voice. It got us close enough that we were able to improvise the rest.

We went out later for our first real meal of the day—a big city after big mountains—and settled on a nearby Syrian restaurant with outdoor tables. It turned out to be a good choice. The hummus tasted like fresh-made halvah, and a sesame-yogurt-fava mix was interesting (the menu called its dominant vegetable not fava but horse beans).

The best part of the meal was two bright young Swedish guys travelling through Europe together (they had come from Bratislava, were headed to Lisbon). They sat at the next table, and we talked periodically about Sweden, Euro and American sports (hockey, football), movies (Lucas Moodysson), Portugal, Slovakia, traveling, etc. One guy was medium dark and in finance, the other was classic Swedish blond and in digital (as he put it). They spoke sophisticated English and were sophisticated in general. The data guy’s description of a high-school year in Iowa had a wry de Tocqueville wit, as he sorted rednecks from his beloved pop culture and rock music.

Sometimes you encounter other tourists who are enough on your wavelength for real camaraderie, despite differences of age, interests, or country of origin. A very long day crossing Slovakia ended well.

July 19

Budapest, where to begin? You cannot wrap words around something so vast and complex. More than Copenhagen and Warsaw, Budapest is a four-dimensional scroll of imbedded history and historic artifacts: monuments, statues, churches, halls, plaques—centuries worth of structures and moods mixed together in a riot of sights, colors, vibrations, voices. The city is especially ornate and elaborate as if being prepared for a ball.

I don’t really want to talk about the history or the monuments. It would be exhausting and needless, given the plentiful literature available.

What can I say instead? For one, it is sunny at last, a boon after days of rain, wind, saturated ground, and deep puddling. I also no longer feel sick, improving gradually over the last three days despite the arduous travels.

On our first full day in Budapest, Lindy and I rode entire route of the Hop on/Hop off bus: 27 stops crossing the Danube twice over different bridges between two once-separate cities, Buda and Pest (pronounced Pesht). I know that tour buses are the height of kitsch and banality, but how else are you going to see a huge city without knowledge of its transit system or streets? You need Ariadne’s thread always, metaphorical or drawn by talking bus, to find your way, even (for that matter) in a dream.

The sequence leading to the bus: I went out early to scope out the day in advance. I walked the length of our avenue, several blocks as recommended by Zsuzsa, but couldn’t find the tourist information “gazebo” she promised was right there. I circled the whole area and was about to give up when I realized I was looking for the wrong thing: a fixed station. The cart under the umbrella was not selling sausages or corn but giving tourist information and selling tours.

I engaged in a friendly conversation with one of the young men. His hair was in a topknot, a common youth style here, and he spoke fluent Anglo jive. He was amused by my way of conversation, a little more ironic than the usual (he indicated), and we hit it off. I didn’t buy a ticket but got a full lowdown. I didn’t buy a ticket because I wanted to use cash, as Lindy had gotten a hige stash of florins by mistake, and we needed to spend them while in Hungary. The amount was not as much as the 10,000 notes suggested. Looking at, you’d think we were carrying a year’s salary; it was $300. Hungary had decided to keep its local currency, though inflated, and protect the price structure and fixed-income citizens, so did not adopt the euro. Everything paradoxically cost four or five figures of currency but was, by contrast, inexpensive.

As I left the booth, I asked my new buddy’s name: Richard. The two Richards laughed, shook hands, and exchanged cards. Mr. Marofsfi’s card deemed him a “scout” for Vivo 7 Sports; manning the booth was part-time.

Lindy and I came back after lunch and paid Richard 15,000 florins for two days’ use of the bus and a boat ride on the Danube. Sitting in the upper deck of the sightseeing vehicle, I enjoyed the sun and scenery: wash on a line, children running in a playground, a stuffed fox in a window, two guys drinking together and whacking each other gently, the blend of stylish shops in bold English and old, old storefronts with archaic renditions of distinctive Hungarian orthography.

These were more compelling to my natural gaze gigantic wedding-cake structures and rows of heroic male statues.

In high school I passed exams on chunks of Hungarian history, but I have substantially forgotten it: the original Celtic settlements, the Magyar invasion and takeover, Hungarian kingdoms, Christianization, the Habsburgs and Austria-Hungary Empire, breakup with World War I, formation of modern Hungary. From there, it’s modern history: invasion by Germany, inclusion in the Soviet bloc, the violent 1956 rebellion where the Hungarians expressed their displeasure with the Kremlin by hanging the bodies of Russian soldiers they executed and mutilated in the streets of Budapest. Now fascist populism was on the uprise, but invisible to tourists still.

How quiet and fashionable Budapest is on stage: heavy-metal cafés, posters for modern-dance events with twisty naked bodies, long high-end shopping thoroughfares like Fifth Avenue or Champs Elysées. Hungary is called the eastern Paris, a cutting-edge incubator of science, arts, and culture. Having transcended its outlier language and mestizo history, and bombs that fell not so long ago, it coheres today in a lively fusion that looks and sounds as Arabic and Turkish as it does Finnish and Celtic.

One of the most startling sights around Budapest reminds me of sci-fi comics of my childhood: large numbers of predominantly young people riding on motorized two-wheel vehicles in the format of hand trucks. I looked at one closely enough to read its name; they are called Segway Two-Wheel Stand-up Scooters. In the old comics, people stood on such vehicles, holding the handlebars and looking relaxed as they floated above streets and avenues. Pest’s stand-up scooters are ubiquitous, but they don’t fly and they share the streets with old-fashioned foot-propelled scooters, skateboards, and bikes pulling wagons.

In some ways, Budapest is more futuristic than New York. The scooters lend a dramatic post-post-modern flavor. At the organic restaurant at which we ate lunch, each table was a computer screen and you had to order by a “mouse: map with its controls under the table, changing pages and clicking on items. Neither Lindy nor I could control the mouse, but it was the only way into the system. The waiter had to sit down at our table and order for us.

An entire generation was growing up more tied to Silicon Valley than the Third Reich and the Soviets, though you spot a few of the oldtimers, wending through the streets like Hungarian dolls or escapees from paintings of another time. Once again, the modernity converged with a much older land.

We took the boat between 17:00 and 18:30. It went along the Pest side first, the highlight of the slow chug being the decorated Parliament building, a mirage of more baroque limestone frills than limestone structure and running a length of at least a city block. The boat circled elongated Margaret Island in the center of the Danube; it is a park and recreation area, many joggers, dogs, bikes, and kayaks (around the shore), but it was of great military value for armies going back centuries, from Tartars to Nazis and Soviets. We came back along the Buda side, which was more the source settlement of Budapest, a hill of traditionally wealthy homes where far less of the active modern city is now situated. Buda was dominated by the castle, now a mix of offices with a museum featuring a Frida Kahlo show.

The kitsch on the boat and the bus was irritating and dominating. On the boat, periodically the taped commentary stopped—and it was already uninspired jabber interrupted by hotel and chainstore endorsements—then loud music blared, usually rap, which hardly matched the clientele. What about wistfully watching the water and shoreline. This was the Danube, after all!

On the bus if I used the earphones, I heard light music in between the commentary. I found it oppressive too and mostly left the earbuds off, so I missed a lot of what I was looking at was, historically and functionally. I liked looking at it anyway.

It is an indirect result of the commoditization of the world that time is considered dead—useless—if it does encase some commodity in its passage. Piped music is, by definition, “free fun,” even in a dentist’s office or elevator. It has nothing to do with what is going on around it. It might as well be playing nurseries, hospitals, and morgues; it probably is.

One worthwhile fact I did hear: Budapest is slowly turning into a gigantic tourism zone and Euro office space. City-dwellers are migrating out, not as rapidly as they once did, but the overnight population is still dropping.

Earlier, during my morning outing, I left Richard the scout and set out to find the parking garage where we left our car in order to get some items we had mistakenly left. I used a giant ferris wheel in a square with a fountain as my astrolabe. I knew the garage was under it. My method was to align the wheel’s angle from many blocks off with my course toward it and then to navigate away from it in reverse back to the apartment. As the wheel’s circular orientation turned within the landscape, I knew where I was. Otherwise, all the directions were the same, and the many unknown streets looked like one another or at least look equally promising.

We passed that ferris wheel numerous times on the bus tour, and each encounter, from a different direction and set of sights, making new coordinates. In one day, I had gotten a working map, as Budapest graduated from an enigmatic, entangled jungle to a network of cohesive neighborhoods that I had observed from the outside (a boat on the Danube) and the inside (a tour bus in its route). I understood the raw outlines of the geography.

At night, Lindy and I followed our apartment owner John’s directions to his favorite café, a fancy Hungarian restaurant on a small nearby square. We had not been able to find it the previous night, so I wrote for more explicit instructions. John’s response was indicative of how one navigates unknown geographical space, probably back to hominid hunting bands, only groves and stones rather than blocks and buildings.

The Gerloczy is: “Out the door and walk straight ahead across the little square, past the construction, or rather between the two construction sites, and take a right at the corner with the church on the right. You’ll be walking down a smallish street with the city’s municipal buildings and relatively nondescript city hall on your left.  Walk one long block on your left (I think it’s two on the right; the first street doesn’t continue across), and you get to a small square on your left.  Look across the square and that’s the Gerloczy.”

It took a second pass because we neglected the right at the church:

While we ate outdoors, what ensued beside us was an unexplained drama involving a city truck that was able to raise itself off the ground on a four-wheel jack, a police car, a man in a crane, flashing lights, a siren, and an incident, either criminal or electrical, in the apartment building next door. Its seeming illogic, a pure rebus, was more than half its entertainment value.

The hardest thing to get across is a thing I have been trying to capture on the whole trip: the dimensions of a new place (Budapest presently): the senses—smells and sounds and kinesthesia, what it feels like to be there.

We are only in Budapest for two-plus days, an unfortunate outcome of an overly ambitious itinerary, but we have begun to dwell where we are, taking baby steps toward entering the circulatory system beneath canned tours and international franchises and tourist ricochets. Budapest is the regular breeze off the Danube with its many qualities of touch and cool—what the guidebook calls the “lungs” joining Buda and Pest. It’s the construction across the street from our apartment, men working at different levels of girders, calling out to each other in Hungarian, singing and joking. It is the medley of colors and sounds on the street beneath them.

I felt like telling that to a tourist who asked me for my favorite thing. I did not want to be insulting or arrogant, so I stayed silent while Lindy extolled the boat ride. But the often unacknowledged truth is that the best thing is suddenly seeing a totally ordinary event specific and endemic to the place and realizing, “Budapest.”

I have avoided writing about my “crisis” during this trip, keeping the travel journal just that and the crisis in Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, but here is a snipped from Episodes:

Using a U.S. free phone in our Budapest apartment, I called my astrologer friend Ellias Lonsdale. “I suddenly feel like a walk-in in my own body,” I told him.

“You’re in the abyss,” he said. “You can’t go back to where you were, and you can’t see what’s ahead or how long it will take to get there. There are no signs along the way.” After tarrying in star consultation, he added, “We don’t get to go from one comfort zone to another. And you’re not a walk-in either. The other guy was a walk-in. This is you.”

July 20

On our last day, we have two goals: the synagogue and a mineral bath, the former in the morning, the latter in the afternoon.

We had passed the Budapest Synagogue twice on the tour bus. It is at the scale of the great churches of Europe and looks a bit like a mosque with its elaborate Moorish domes. A twenty-minute walk from our apartment: up the avenue to the corner where Richard sold me the bus-and-boat tickets, right down a major thoroughfare, so major that at one spot that an underground tunnel like a subway station (and leading to one) functions as a pedestrian roundabout. The passageway, filled with shops, replaces traffic lights and crosswalks. Its unlikely name, Astoria, honors the old hotel on the corner

A Japanese lady from France, also looking for the synagogue, fell in with us. She carried a map, so was primed for a last-minute turn to the right that we had not been expecting. Its location off the main avenue came into play when we tried to return afterwards, because the exit from the synagogue grounds led us onto a different street and, even though we reoriented to a major thoroughfare, we were on a different one and eventually ended up lost and having to take a cab back. The GPS was useless again during this walkabout. We turned out to be only a few blocks away but in an unfamiliar direction. We could have walked it faster than the cab in traffic.

The synagogue for me was a mixture of highs and lows. The lowest low was the sale of souvenirs throughout the building, particularly around its entry and the entry to the sacred binah and altar. The offerings were even unintentionally borderline anti-Semitic, merchandizing Nazi stereotypes of Jews. The process of churning out junk mementos is so mindless that it doesn’t make distinctions. Jewish stereotypes were turned into dolls, rabbi marionettes, magnets, shirts, and just about every common form of tchotchkes. The writing on one shirt stays with me. For what? For its implied Jewosj chauvinism and faux hipness or maybe its inadvertent metaphysical clarity, something like, “Moses was the first to download from the Cloud.”

The Dohany Street Synagogue, or Great Synagogue of Budapest and largest in Eurasia, was built in the mid-nineteenth century and restored after World War II, having been anti-Semitically re-tasked and violated by the fervent Arrow Cross (basically Hungarian Nazi gangs), then the German army, and finally the Soviet siege of Budapest. A basilica-like construction sprawls over much of a block with two minaret-like octagonal towers topped by onion-shaped domes painted Iranian blue and gold.

The synagogue is included within the synagogue complex which includes a burial ground for victims of the Arrow Cross and Nazi occupations, a series of shrines and artistic tributes, and an unfortunate (to my mind) abstract Tree of Life featuring flowing metallic branches of a tin-like silver metal. It could be regarded as an authentic rendition of the occult if one gave the sculptor hidden genius and lots of latitude—the benefit of the doubt. Then you might assume he was representing lines of energy flowinfg from the Sefirot. Otherwise, it was a soft secular stand-in for a precise numerological construct.

We sat in a pew of the synagogue for some twenty minutes. I stared at the concave inside of the blue-and-white esoteric design inside the dome above the altar (not one of the high onion-like domes). It had a tarot-card look and reminded me of the visualizations in Philip Moffat’s book on the Nine Bodies yoga of Swami Balyogi Premvani—I had been meditating on these images in May. The ones in Moffat’s book carry energy, especially when the images are internalized and viewed again from memory in inner sight with closed eyes. The dome had a similar energy.

As I tried to internalize its artistry, I was aided by an environmental effect: architectural meteorology. A rounded stained-glass window at the top of the dome let in varying degrees of light as clouds passed overhead, causing the design to change albedo and color and deepen on its own. The chamber was a self-internalizing meditation.

I got my best results from neutrally watching the play of light and shade on the colors and shapes. Initially I thought of it as representing Atmic world-formation energy, writing the laws of physics from outside the universe. From there I decided to play out the entire seven-planes system, assigning Astral and Etheric energies to parts of the shrine and the massive organ pipes. The application broke down. The synagogue was oriented toward a different energy field. Of course, there is a singular Divine energy, but it splays into and through the world in myriad motifs. Once I looked about eclectically, I saw portals of stained glass and altars and statues at so many different levels that I lost bearing in any particular system and simply absorbed untranslated esoteric information. The dome changed to a real or imaginal interface between Atmic and Causal planes, its degrees of light representing molecular flux in the tension of the two planes’ dialectic. I conceded the light from above to a Monadic or Adi plane, but it was also like Yahweh illuminating worlds as thoughtforms as they arose in his consciousness.

As my mind wandered in this game, I wondered about the missing Buddhic plane. In not assigning it, I had skipped over the collective and clairvoyant domain. Then I realized a potential difference between a church and a synagogue. A church altar palpably radiated Buddhic and Astral energy. A synagogue (Binah) vibrated more at Atmic and Astral frequencies. In other words, get the formation of the universe first; then introduce sacrifice, Rainbow bodies. and compassion later. Both temples had Etheric frequencies evoked by the nadis of their organs.

My reverie was interrupted by a guide. It turned out that by sitting behind a British flag, we had located ourselves in a series of pews waiting for a tour of the synagogue in English. The stock Hungarian Jewish history that followed was marginally interesting, but it was not conducive to meditation.

I didn’t join the tour but instead tried to pick my vibration up after the group left. I understood that I was forcing things by then, so I sat in place for a while and let whatever wanted to come come. None of what arose was esoteric in the usual sense, but it was “visions in a synagogue,” so they were esoteric by default. Things in my life turned into seeds incubating their own magic. Time will tell if they shall grow, blossom, and fruit. But isn’t that the way it is with the planting of any actual Tree of Life?

A small museum of Hungarian Jewish life occupied another part of the grounds. Our ticket entitled us to entry. I had an agenda, so we went, though we were tired. Given that a DNA relative in Jerusalem tracked my Gedmatch upload to a shared ancestor of him and me in Hungary sometime before 1700, I wanted to look for images of this man or woman. The museum provided very few paintings; it was mainly religious artifacts: prayerbooks, menorahs, tfilim, silver goblets, prayer shawls, etc. The only painting I related to was an 112-year-old eighteenth-century rabbi. My eyes met his. We looked at each other for a moment outside of time.

In the afternoon, Lindy and I set off for Széchenyl Baths, one of the many thermal mineral spas in Budapest, though (according to the tourist-information guide) the only one on the Pest side of the Danube. Similar to in Reykjavik, public baths are an indigenous feature of the city, as Hungary sits on a sea of geothermal energy. An urban bathhouse seemed worth the commitment for both therapeutic and ethnographic reasons.

Getting there was a many-stage journey. We hiked back to the Great Synagogue where we waited for the Hop on/Hop off (stop 5). We stayed on it about forty minutes along many avenues, all the way out to the statue-and-monument complex of Heroes’ Square. Again I enjoyed warming sun, breezes off the Danube, sights across the irreconcilable variety of an urban complex, a feeling that this could be Istanbul at one moment, London at another, Warsaw, Moscow, Spanish Harlem…. The flow of scenes was engaging, though nothing stood out.

What am I to say of a woman dancing before two men on a sidewalk, a group of teens bopping through crowds on their stand-up scooters, a sudden flight of pigeons landing on a balcony beneath a painted wall the museum quality of Caravaggio, smells of cooking and exhaust and spices or perfumes, sculptures imbedded in alcoves cut into walls, a fat taxi driver kicking the car of a man who almost sideswiped him as he stood by his cab? Did I see a thousand or five thousand separate such sights, each thread weaving itself into Budapest’s reality.

At stop 11, we got off and walked beyond the statues across a bridge over a lake in which kids rode motorized toy boats shaped like police cars, fire engines, swans, and lions; through a wooded park, past a large castle complex, to a yellow early twentieth-century Neo-Baroque sprawl: the baths. We paid and each of us was given a plastic wrist band. I thought these were for identification by guards, but the silver circle on them was not a decoration; it had a computer chip for entry.

One changed in a tiny chamber along a hall of such chambers. The etiquette was pleasantly informal, as neither men nor women minded appearing briefly naked in the corridor of opening and closing doors.

Next came the lockers. Almost all of them had their handles turned to red, meaning they were in use. In fact, all of them were taken till we came to a few open ones at the very end—and these were being gobbled up fast. I quickly put my hand on one but had no idea how to operate it. A bovine man with a military general’s face observed me sternly. He was an unlikely character to step in to help, but he grew impatient watching my gestures of bafflement, as I looked around to see what others might be doing, but no one was at the initial stage, so I played with the handle.

He came up to me and, speaking Hungarian with apparent awareness I couldn’t understand him (perhaps an indication that they did not speak my language here but that of the Empire), roughly grabbed my hand with startling intimacy and held it so that the silver circle on the wrist band faced the edge of the locker handle. A light flashed above the handle. That allowed the knob to turn.

He stayed forcefully instructive, grabbing my hand several more times to demonstrate the sequence of getting the door open, locked, and open again. Even after we placed our clothes, cells, purse, wallet, etc., within, he had us open it and close it again, to make sure we could.

A minor episode of tough love, but love (or at least care).

The rest of the entry consisted of striding through a shallow enclosed puddle to the indoor bathing area. Two large pools were absolutely packed, mostly with young people. First, one showered at a bank of nozzles, then went into the crowd.

There was a light mineral aroma, but the olfactory sense wewasre dominated by the dimensionality of the people: many resting quietly along the side, some engaged in conversation, a few teens in water play, some couples smooching, some guys holding girls aloft so that they could drop back their heads and float supported.

One young couple was doing a water-medium version of a fox trot.

The bathing was racially diverse: Asian, Slavic, Hungarian, Turkish, Arabic, Mongolian, Japanese, Chinese, African. Given the stateliness of the environs and our mixed demography, it felt a bit Roman Empire, but also World War I Austro-Hungary; it had a slightly Woodstock flavor.

The pools were of slightly varying temperature. Both were packed and intimate, but the hotter one was more crowded and intimate, as we brushed periodically against one another and could not help impinging arms and legs with strangers as we sat on the ledge around the ledge. The number of people with their differences and different looks and styles and energies, especially engaged in such a primal and sensual activity, held my attention while the hidden salts ostensibly communicated with my cells. How medicinal these waters were or were thought to be was ratified by a separate “patients’ entrance.”

We stayed thirty-five minutes. Leaving meant a reversal of the ritual: shower, locker (opened on the first try), dressing room, return of the bracelet, long walk back through the city park, reboarding the bus, sitting in it through traffic from stop 11 to 15, Ferenciek Square. The entire round trip to bathe took almost five hours for a short dip in the pool, but the outing was worth it. We were trying to soak up as much of Budapest as we could in a short time, and there are many types of soaks.

We walked three blocks to our avenue, then down it and, because it was late, we stopped right there at the Syrian restaurant for dinner at an outdoor table.

I addressed my crisis in Out of Babylon:

On my return to the States, struggling with months of depression, I took a friend’s advice and called psychic Steve Lumiere. I made an appointment for a phone consult. He was known for guiding malign entities to the place in the universe where their healing could begin; everything had a home.

After a “gateway” look—he in Southern California, me in Maine—he told me that he saw an ancestral hex, an energy cord shaped like an umbilicus.

I was skeptical. His clearing began with a prayer of peace: Universal Forces of Light. Please help me to forgive everyone who has harmed me. Please help everyone I have harmed to forgive me. Please help everyone to forgive themselves. Please help me to forgive myself. Totally and completely. Now and forever.

I forgave my mother, Bingo, Jon, and anyone else I thought of as I conjured them.

Then on instruction I asked, “Who has placed this curse on me?”

With each repetition of the question, a spirit appeared—a visualization. I dispersed it, familiar or anonymous, in my next out-breath. I proceeded as if hexes, magical attacks, and crossed energies had haunted my family. After all, Louis Brandt bribed a rabbi to help Sandy Koufax against rival batters. Bunny told me that Selig and Malke hired Jewish sorcerers to hex their hotel competitors. Jinxes were tribal tactics.

With each sounding of “Who has placed this curse on me?” the flow of figures accelerated. Some came from throughout my life. Others I didn’t know who they were or where they came.

They were and weren’t cartoon-like goblins of Anti-Semitic folklore. They were and weren’t a 112-year-old rabbi whose eyes met mine briefly from a painting in a Budapest synagogue. I saw Bob Towers’ creature from the black lagoon and Martha’s devil incarnate. The entities surged past me in moiré-like waves finally turning into a single spirit whom I thanked, forgave, and dissolved.

July 21

To set up our departure today the night before, I walked to the underground garage to make sure I could find it without straying. I didn’t want to get stranded or lost while bringing suitcases.  In the morning, I retraced my steps, rolling both of them for the fifteen-minute trip. I stowed them in the car.

On the way back, I wanted to use up the rest of our florins, about 12,000, by buying food for lunch.  I found the nearby 24/7 grocery store recommended in our apartment notes, but behind a spiffy façade was a gutted insides. I settled on packaged food at a vegan place set up mainly for takeout, Oh Green. I still had about 4200 florins left, so I continued to the Syrian restaurant and got some more food and plastic bottles of water for the car. It didn’t quite use the florins up, but I figured it didn’t matter.

Just before we left for good, I ran back to the Syrian place to get some more water. This time the manager went to the back and fetched me a karge bottle. We exchanged well wishes. Then I saw our waiter from both nights, a large smiling man named Zsost (if I remember his badge correctly). I handed him the remainder of the money.

“What for?” he asked, broken English not affront.

“A tip.”

He shook his head, “Not needed,” then raised his forearm for, I suddenly understood, a bump. Our forearms met. Then the manager gave me a thumbs-up and “safe travels.” I left smiling and feeling right with myself and the world.

I hate the motto “no good deed goes unpunished,” but it fits here. At a highway Shell station, we weren’t allowed to use the bathrooms before paying a hundred florins each. We had no Hungarian cash left, and the employees wouldn’t put it in my credit card. A bilingual Hungarian woman interceded vociferously on our behalf, but three staff members all shook their heads, righteously digging in their heels and defending what? Shell? Hungary? Finally she convinced them to run a credit card for 200 florins. If I’m calculating right, that should show up as seven or eight cents on our bill.

The highway out of Budapest was jammed, bumper-to-bumper for over an hour. It looked like a very long day ahead—240 miles to Ljubljana plus missing a scheduled dinner (Lindy’s and my bookstore talk had been cancelled because too many of the folks who were going to attend it were out of town on summer holiday).

Then traffic broke free. We coasted most of the way from there, on the way encountering the afore-mentioned staff at the Shell station. The textured Hungarian landscape offered grand, mysterious vistas and large lakes—an unknown planet glimpsed from afar but glimpsed.

At the border, signs immediately directed Ljubljana traffic to the right, Zagreb to the left with a warning that E70 had obstructions and delays. Highway construction diverted us into alternate lanes twice, losing a half hour. After that, we moved quickly again. The Slovenian countryside was pastoral, rolling hills and cows, very green. Three long tunnels outside Ljubljana dwarfed the Slovakian ones in length.

Our host in Ljubljana was Rok Zavrtanik, publisher of Sanje (Dream) Press with which we had done business for more than a decade around the English translation of the prominent World War II Slovenian novel Alamut. The author, Vladimir Bartol, tried to use a Mediaeval Persian assassins cult to disguise his attack on Mussolini and ended up brilliantly foreshadowing Al-Qaeda. The book sells in big numbers everywhere but the U.S., a reverse of the usual pattern and a burr in the relation between us and Sanje: why should the biggest market have the smallest sale? The book just hasn’t caught on the U.S. the way it has in Franceand Turkey.

Rok was supposed to direct us to our destination as we got closer, but he didn’t respond to emails after 300 km. At 10 km I finally phoned him, but too late for him to orient us, we were already in the city and having to make rapid-fire choices (we had only put Ljubljana in the GPS). He had been occupied with other arriving guests, a couple from Australia who lived part-time in Slovenia, both writers. He finally was able to text us an address for a bed-and-breakfast called Slamič. We put it into the GPS, worked our way around construction, and parked on a narrow street. Rok pulled up soon after and got of his car: medium height, slighter and softer than I had imagined, glasses and a topknot. We hugged—finally meeting in person after eleven years of skyping and emailing, standing on Kersnikova ulice, next to construction in the rain.

We had been going to stay at his small apartment, but he decided at the last minute that because of the heat wave and high humidity, we would be more comfortable in our own space, suggesting that Sanje and North Atlantic split the modest cost. Slamič was where Sanje usually put up visiting authors. It was elegant, more like a hotel than a bed and breakfast, and it had an underground lot.

The rain had broken the drought, but it was more steamy than cool out.

After we settled, Rok drove us to his bookstore, House of Dreaming, on Trubarjeva cesta 29. Mainly Slovenian titles with a small English section, it smelled nostalgically like an American literary bookstore of the seventies, a nearly extinct venue in the States these days. From there he drove us a short distance to a Lebanese restaurant where we joined his other couple. Both of them were writers. She was Slovenian, and he was Australian and much older. They weren’t faraway travelers like us; they lived at her family home in the country each year during Southern Hemisphere winters. They had driven into the city for the day.  

The pair had met and married relatively recently. Each was involved in animal lives and animal rights, a detail that dominated the meal. She was working on a thesis based on the life of a young sheep she had raised. He had recently written a novel in which a dying pig served as the narrator, telling his life story to the young hunter who had shot him. He described himself as “the Borges of Australia.” The shared meal was, of course, vegan.

The conversation, though savvy and literary, wound through sluices I needed a lot more energy to manage than I had after a day of driving. I found the exchanges enervating, a barrage of intellectual show-and-tell. It was a long, long meal—a social event around food summoned periodically in Slovenian—before Rok brought us back to our room at 9:00 p.m. My weariness and discomfort made it hard to sleep. The air remained sticky humid. Not feeling well made it an interminable fits-and-starts and broken-dreams night. I never got back to sleep after 4 a.m.

July 22

Getting sick while traveling is its own special hell and tribulation, a bit like one of those Slovakian highways that end in sand without reference points or instructions. You have to invent the next step from where you are. I woke with a feeling like a combination of flu and migraine: chills, nausea, perceptual disorientation. But we had big plans. Rok and his girlfriend Andreja were taking us to caves. I decided it would be a decent risk—only an hour away Rok said, and in the country. I thought I could manage it, and a day in the room looked dreary

Lindy and I realized later that we both drew a wrong impression of where we were going from Rok’s “lost in translation” description. He described ancient caves with roots in Neolithic Europe. We pictured driving into the country and being the only ones at a remote sacred site, or maybe among a few pilgrims honoring Druid and shamanic origins. In fact, he was proposing a visit of a major tourist site, the Škocjanske Caves (Park Škocjanske jame) in the mountains to the west. That became clear only when we arrived and found ourselves in a parking lot filled with tourist buses and packed with cars being directed to a few remaining slots, then a very long queue for getting in. The place was so mobbed that there was even some doubt as to whether we would get to enter the caves, as there were limits on how many people could go at any one time. Rok said that he had never seen it crowded like thi.

The day unfolded against a backdrop of the international music concert and poetry reading planned that evening for the Triple Bridges in central Ljubljana, a fifteen-year-old annual event featuring improvisations of sixteen of the best musicians from Europe. Rok was one of the event’s coordinators. Unfortunately thunderstorms were forecast, and Rok was on his cell and iPad during the entire outing, exchanging information with his cohorts about whether to move or cancel the event. Expensive instruments and equipment were involved and could not be out in the rain.

Thunderstorms were not just forecast. They broke into a sunny morning with bursts of rain and thunder as we drove. Since I am susceptible to motion sickness and was already sick, being in a car was flirting with disaster. I’m the one who got motion sick last year on an all-day tour bus out of Galway, Ireland, and not only became a spectacle, but caused us to abandon the tour only a third of the way through and take an expensive cab back to Galway.

I was pondering this this as Rok drove in speedy zigzag European fashion through town and onto the highway, alternately making conversation with me and talking on his cell while giving every impression of heading for a major accident from distraction (for instance, taking his eyes off the road to dial). I guessed that this was how he lived, and he was still alive at fifty-six, so I wasn’t too worried on that score. I sat in the front beside him. Lindy admitted later that she was distracted by talking with Andreja, a lively, talkative young woman of forty years who was both super-cheerful and quite brilliant, someone equally out of a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and who could write such a novel. She had the elegance of a century ago and laughed like a continual fountain.  As Rok made phone calls, I half-listened to the women’s conversation and talked to Rok when he was available. I felt occasional waves of vertigo. Was I crazy to have done this

Rok’s a sweet, intense guy—a Marxist literary intellectual running a highbrow publishing company in a difficult country from which to publish (not a big audience for the books and expensive to translate either way). During the journey we covered a good range—personal, philosophical, political—though Rok’s English speech rhythms were often difficult to follow, and my body fluctuated perioidically into a somewhat hallucinatory state, as I struggled to grasp Rok’s English and participate with the gusto he had earned for being a good colleague and speaking in my language. At moments, I felt as though I was not far from the Galway tour bus, but at the worst pangs of nausea and chills, I managed to find a bottom and hold on there without falling through.

Rok was happy that I was very open and frank, saying he was not used to that with friends even after many years. I said that to play roles with each other was a missed opportunity and waste of time (plus I didn’t have the energy). He agreed heartily and segued into a soliloquy about the demise of the world—the loss of cultures, languages, and species. He lamented, what could be done by a small publisher in Slovenia? Yet he had hopes that he could spark some sort of international literary revival through his various projects and maybe even involve indigenous Africans and Native Americans too. All this was his circling back to saying that it was good to be open and honest with each other as a beginning, but then we fell back into politics, culture, capitalism, etc.

I tried to turn the conversation to the contrast between the political, environmental landscape in which we necessarily lived and the subtler disembodied intelligence of the Earth, which was always readjusting toward meaning and spiritual freedom, but my language didn’t translate. He wanted me to be more specific about who those disembodied intelligences were. I said they weren’t a “who”; they were an Akashic sort of field that included our ancestors, spirits on other planes associated with the Earth like faeries and devas, animals and plants, and the collective voice of the planet, including lost species and experiences of lost languages. That was too New Agey for Rok, though he is a spiritual as well as a literary and political publisher. I produced a minor disaster when I used the word “divine.” Though they had spoken of a kind of numinous animal intelligence (though they didn’t use the word “numinous”), “divine” evoked organized religion to them—forbidden speech. But they didn’t permit Donna Haraway either—too intellectual and academic, not emotional and empathic enough. They considered hre one of the world’s least anthropomorphic authors purely anthropomorphic by their standards. Oh well….

Rok drove toward Italy and Trieste, along the highway that Lindy and I had taken to Ljubljana in 2006, our first time here, a trip leading to our becoming a publisher of Slovenian books in English and eventually connecting and collaborating with Rok from back in the States. Because of traffic, it took somewhat longer than planned. We exited in pleasant countryside, which Rok described as Slovenia gradating to its part with a Mediterranean climate and landscape. Mountains rose in the distance, and the fields were a medley of wildflowers. A left turnoff to the Škocjanske Caves came fairly quickly. That’s when we realized where we were going—no private cave.

It was sunny at that moment, but much like our time in Poland, a clear summer day was also a runway for gigantic, visibly forming black nimbi among cumulus herds. Soon after parking and entering the visitors’ center, we had to retreat to the car for umbrellas and jackets.

It took about a half hour in queue to buy tickets and another forty-minute wait to join the next tour—Škocjanske was another site that did not permit visitors to wander—the caves were too dangerous. Rok had debated which of three tours we should take and finally selected a longer one than planned: two-and-a-half kilometers within the caverns. He made this choice for three reasons: (one) it was raining, and this was the most covered hike; (two) he had never been on that trail and had always wanted to see it; and (three) the concert looked ninety-percent sure to be cancelled, so we had the afternoon without having to hurry back. While we waited at the café, he was on his phone and iPad and rolled and smoked cigarettes continually.

When you don’t know what you are getting into, there are continual surprises. Our group was mammoth, about two-hundred-fifty people—a surprise—and we had to walk through quite a stretch of countryside in the rain even to get to the mouth of the cave—another surprise. Maybe it wasn’t a whole kilometer, but it wasn’t much less. This march took place in heavy rain and through puddles—a repeat of Auschwitz (though only in its watery aspect!). It was hard to hold an umbrellas in such a way as not to get somewhat soaked, and of course shoes and socks were sopped. Remarkably some tourists wore sandals and had no rain gear. They got wet, gracefully or miserably, hard to tell.

We were dispatched into the caves in groups of fifty, each with its leader. The first tour was in Slovenian, the remaining ones in English. We got siphoned into the second English tour; Rok and Andreja joined us as honorary English speakers so we could stick together. The trail took about seventy-five minutes to walk, including eight or so stops along the way at which the young woman leading our group gave a talk as we gathered in the semi-darkness. We went deep down into the cavernous spaces and climbed back up several times, all of it on lit paths with strong guard rails. Lights were also directed across vast vistas within so that the caves’ remarkable features were visible—there was, of course, no natural daylight anywhere.

Realize that Škocjanske wasn’t a mere cave; it was a continuity of mammoth caves, some of them stretching three hundred meters across and above us. In that sense, it was one cave with many chambers. A classic drip structure showing complex variegated features of all sorts as if in a natural art gallery conducted by slow drips on a canvas carved by a great river. A sense of grandeur and wonder prevailed for the entire journey. The giant caverns and sinkholes were formed by dissolution and collapses of limestone making up western Slovenia’s distinctive karst landscape. I will give some impressions:

We started in Silent Cave, a stone grotto laced with stalactites and stalagmites. The scale was as if you were outdoors looking at the night sky. Of course, it wasn’t that capacious, but it was closer to a planetarium than what you might think of as a cave. The air in Silent Cave was distinguished as “hollow” or “still” as opposed to Murmuring Cave, which rose to the din of the Reka River, the main architect of the caves, with its own big interior waterfall. Running water and falling water merged in a tympany.

My sense was that the caves released another faint sound above the decibels of the river: a fine, silent sizzle. I was considering the alien intelligence of stone. Stone doesn’t have to be animate to be alive, and it doesn’t have to process information cognitively to be conscious. In a universe in which molecules carry an innate capacity for mind, any artifact forged of matter has latent intelligence. The thoughts of stone are so alien to human consciousness that it doesn’t count in our annals of “intelligent life in the universe,” but it is an intelligence that shares a universe with us.

In my sleepless, nauseous low-energy state, I found the vistas a bit hallucinogenic and more dwarfing than I would have in an ordinary phase of consciousness. I couldn’t quite pull myself up to my full marching-forward solidity, so I bowed inwardly to stone as a kind of supernal presence ruling its own primordial temple. Even so, I didn’t have the vim or strength to stand up and address it as a peer.

I didn’t want my vertigo to get too strong with a huge precipice right alongside the trail. Looking down, I thought about the two suicides from heights in my families (mother and sister) jumping out of windows. It was hard to avoid thinking about when looking straight down.

I felt the caves’ cold, damp energy, an occasional drip on my hair or a hand or pleasantly on my face. I reminded myself how neutral and therapeutic earth energy is. I tried to breathe in the clay and radiate in it through my orifices and down my gut.

The marly sheen of the stone near us, rounded it into knobby clusters like underwater plants. It seemed for a surreal moment to Lindy to be encased in plastic to protect visitors from ooze.

Our guide was daffy. I enjoyed her slaphappy pirouettes and little round dances around the features, her joy at being able to lead people through a place she called “heaven.” I didn’t like her continual slapstick and anthropomorphisms: “there’s Romeo and Juliet,” “there’s a shark waiting to bite you,” “there’s a real troglodyte.” It was as though the actual immensity of the situation created nervous laughter.

I think that when you’re in a temple, or at least a holy place, you react modestly and are courteous. You don’t make fun of your hosts or create jokes at their expense. You see such a place better, and let others see it better, if you take it seriously on its own terms, and try to meet them modestly.

Her jokes made people laugh, but they diminished the scale and wisdom of the caverns. If stone is thinking, or at least designing and transferring information, it is doing it very slowly. You have to slow down too and imagine the transmission, like the thoughts of the Sun (or any star) as described in Gurdjieffian literature or in Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Whipping Star where Sol urgently needs to address its planetary creatures. Making cartoons out of the caves’ figurations, as if they were silly human statues, takes away from the time scale of stone and water.

The guide did, in fact, spew high numbers and deep dates about the slowness of the formation process, how many years it took to make a single stalagmite or column, one drip at a time, how long it took to hollow out and adorn this chamber inside the earth—but these were human facts, not stone’s ones. They get into minds that have no capacity to grasp such temporal and spatial enormity anyway. They do not get into the body or psyche the way stone does, and we were there to honor and commune with stone.

In psychic work, one tries to ground in the earth in order to be receptive to other vibrations. Although the Škocjanske caves were a spectacular formation and entrance to the deep earth, they were only a convenient gate, like an open portal in an illimitable body. The whole of the underground is like this, whether packed solid or cysting in deeper unknown caverns. We had gone into the womb of Gaia and were in contact with her wholeness. I imagine that our Neolithic forebears perceived that in that way, a mode of proprioception that is lost to us. We see the attraction and put it on an unnecessary pedestal. To them, it was all magic. Our pedestal—the whole superstructure of the Visitors’ Center and set-up for guides and tours, is human; the stone is pagan.

Rok’s Australian guest went on and on the night before about there that Dante got his inspiration for The Divine Comedy by visiting Škocjanske caves which are near the Italian border. Andreja, who wasn’t present for that comment, mistakenly attributed the reference to me and asked whether I really believed it. I said somewhat irritatedly (though not with her), “It doesn’t matter because Dante is not about a cave but an actual inferno and paradiso. The cave is at best a prop for that vision.” That is what I had wanted to say at the dinner but held my peace.

“Of course,” she replied, “but the concept is still interesting.”

I thought about the trope again after our exchange. In a way, the cave is literally Dante’s “inferno” in that it proposes that human identity, once released from the human body and physical plane, create their own meaning, landscapes, punishments, hell realms, and terms for self-redemption. If Dante was being led by a deva named Beatrice, he might have glimpsed the lineaments of such a vision here. In that sense, I think of the caves as presenting terms for what it means to be on stone time—outside of human space and time as we know them. I apologize for being tedious about this single issue.

Murmuring Cave features, as noted, the river Reka running so far down below that it looks like at the bottom of a Martian canyon; it is a tiny thread filling the air with its melodic hiss (“Reka” means “river” in Slovenian, a repeated recitation of the guide). She said that the ceiling is filled with sleeping bats, which adds another inaudible, invisible presence to the intelligence there.

From way above, the waterfall looks like a pulsing cloud, but we eventually work our way up next to it and the river and see how smooth the water is, rolling over the anvil of the stone before breaking into chaos theory.

Each winding down requires an arduous, hearts-pounding, hike back up. Far across the caverns, one can see the other tour groups winding like little trains along the walls. It is a haunting artificial night in a haunting city to which we are unchaste visitors. I don’t think that stone is ultimately bothered by us because it is so large and magnanimous, but we have attached our frail artifacts to it and tried to tame it like a wild horse. I leave feeling that I was a tiny bug that Škocjanske exuded without noticing. Škocjanske is also not its name.

Perhaps the most stunning view of the trip was how luminous the green foliage looked at the exit like a gateway to a fairy kingdom. One doesn’t realize how troglodyte one’s perception becomes in a world of limestone, iron, and clay. Chlorophyll waits at the opening of a kingdom it can’t enter, and says, “Welcome back to the world of DNA, fellow being of cells.” I felt as if I were approaching a Renaissance painting and walking into it.

It is powerful to meditate with stone and experience its stability, neutrality, and capacity for time travel, and it is also powerful to walk  through the cusp from Stygian caverns to a sun-fed garden.

Bad news, our guide says. The lift is broken. We must walk six hundred stairs back to the surface. This is exactly what Rok’s friend experienced when he went to Škocjanske years ago. “Ask if the lift is working,” he told us, “before you go down.” But he had serious foot injuries and a kind of hand crutch.

“What did you do?” Lindy wondered.

“What do you think? I walked. Slowly.”

That’s what we did too. I actually went ahead of our exiting group because I was worried about not having enough energy for the steps. Getting away from the crowd and measuring my steps in breaths, I was glad to outpace my own doubts and the migrainous sensations that crowds evoke for one who is already dizzy.

Not everyone exited post haste; many stopped to look at various views, as our tour broke apart. I made it up all the steps with relative ease and deepened breath and felt better for it. Rok said I must be in good shape.

We didn’t leave the tourist center for almost an hour because Rok wanted to be on his cell and iPad. We set up at an outdoor table off the café. Since Rok is a chainsmoker, I went into the sun next to a fence and lay against it, taking catnaps from which I awoke with discombobulating starts.

Finally we started back around 15:00. The car ride to Ljubljana was difficult, lots of rain, and for some reason Rok did not turn on the windshield wipers through much of it, so drove in an impressionistic painting. I was not going to comment on his style. He was continually on the cell, but he picked a few his moments to query me about publishing.

Rok followed with tour of Ljubljana afterward. I understood how proud he was of his evolving town, even as a confirmed Marxist critic of the capitalist forces driving it, and I did my best I to respond. I finally asked to be taken back. Lindy, enjoying Andreja, didn’t notice the Ljubljana detour for a long time but then asked when we were getting home.

I lay on the bed in concern. I couldn’t continue the trip in this state. What would that mean in terms of room cancellations and trying to get a return flight? How sick was I really? Would I recover?

As it turned out, being out of the car took away a layer, and then a brief nap took away another. I was hungry too.

While we were still in our room, a startling thunderstorm breathed right down on Slamič. Lightning split the sky like Thor’s bright sword, and thunder sent its vibration through the building and our bodies. Ljubljana turned to temporary night. Yet fifteen minutes later, around 18:30, the world was calm, and Lindy and I set out with a map to find a restaurant. It would be my first food all day, and I was appreciative of an appetite.

We walked in a steady drizzle. I rejected some nearby bar-like places that Lindy was willing to try out to get it over with. I wanted to be in the center of town. The walk was also interesting. Slovenia has more graffiti, and more artistic graffiti (plus assorted graphemic splatter on walls) than Copenhagen, Warsaw, and Budapest combined. Graffito is a local mania. In 2006 we stood before art in tunnels as if in a museum, taking photographs..

We fell in with crowds and, in ten minutes, were walking on the same avenue we had traveled from Hotel Park on our first outing here in 2006. We were finally somewhere we had been. I remembered how wide-eyed and naïve we were on that maiden walk in Eastern Europe, down an avenue of exotic shops toward the Triple Bridges. We were more blasé; they didn’t look exotic anymore.

A Statue of Slovenian national poet France Prešeren’s marks the square of his name—the symbolic center of Ljubljana and the place where the concert was supposed to be. Twelve years ago we had eaten dinner with Slovenian novelist Miha Mazzini just off this spot. Another evening we had listened to music by these bridges.

Given a wide choice of restaurants, we trusted our old novelist friend’s judgment and picked out the same outdoor café by the Lubljanica River.We sat under heat lamps and a canopy and ordered traditional Slovenian dishes (nonorganic meat is supposedly not as bad as in in the States because of stringent EU requirements). Before food came, I saw a distinctive feature I remembered from 2006 repeated. Aggressive sparrows came to the table and tried to attack our bread basket directly, at other tables too as waiters continually shooed them off. Birds dive-bombing your dining table on its edge was pure Ljubljanica. I saw the activity wherever I looked. Large brown crows perched along the stone-work railing overlooking the river and being fed crumbs by a small girl.

July 23

Late morning Lindy stayed in the room to work and I went out for a walk. I varied from the path to the Triple Bridges, though still headed in the direction of Ljubljana center. I entered a countercultural stretch: organic restaurants, funky stores. Then I turned the corner onto a fashionable block like Madison Avenue. One window featured Ivanka Trump in her stepmother’s country—a stepmother almost too young to be her mother, also her father’s subconscious erotic list toward the Eastern Bloc.

I am struck again by how modern Eastern Europe feels in spots here and in Budapest, as if it has leaped ahead of America; the urban landscape crisper, more comfortably fast-tracking through time. The street feels futuristic: computer monitors above shops, experimental music, a lamp in a store window made of monkeys holding light bulbs. Nothing dramatic: a mood, a sense of freedom, a different path to capitalism.

I came back to the room, thinking I would work and Lindy might go for her own walk, but she wanted to go back with me and get lunch. Rok and Andreja had already said that they were busy till around two, so we had a couple of hours on our own. We weren’t interested in ordinary tourist fare anyway; we had done that years ago here. Rok was the reason we added Ljubljana to our itinerary, though both planned events—my reading and his concert—had been cancelled.

As we walked back along my path, I pointed out one of the restaurants I had seen, a place advertising itself as healthy Ayurvedic. It was called Small Restaurant and was small with tables mostly on the street. A fixed-price lunch menu offered squash soup, a chick-pea pancake or lentil curry, etc. Lindy got curry, me the pancake. Neither was very good. It felt like stuff oneself might throw together from leftovers. Suddenly Lindy got severe abdominal cramps. She went to the bathroom and came back feeling even worse. I paid, and we hurried back to the Slamič. Her cramps were bad enough that we had to pause along the way several times for her to bend over and rest. As soon as we got back, I called Rok about where to go for a doctor. He said that he and Andreja would hurry over. It was 14:00 by then.

When they arrived, Lindy was feeling a bit better but wanted to sleep. We didn’t want to leave her in that state, so the three of us sat outside and then, at Rok’s suggestion, I made a course change. I wrote to the hotel in Zagreb, Croatia, explaining our situation and asking to cancel our reservation for the next day (they graciously agreed without charge).

Then we booked a room at the Slamič for one more night. There was also only one room left and we had to grab it because places all over town were booked at this height of tourist season.

Rok and Andreja felt there was little to gain by going to Zagreb for only two days—and it would add four hours driving time to our next stop in Vienna (counting back and forth). Plus, Lindy’s situation put the whole trip in doubt.

Rok, Andreja, and I talked for the next five hours in a shifting landscape. First we talked on the patio of Slamič, but they hadn’t eaten and were hungry and wanted me to join them at a restaurant. I checked on Lindy several times. She confirmed wanting to sleep and said we should just go—she had the cell if needed. The next time I looked in, she was asleep, so we left.

We walked to a different part of town, a moderately long hike, in order to go to Rok’s favorite childhood pizza place; he said he had a sudden nostaltic craving for it. We were there for two hours. Then we walked back and sat on the Slamič patio talking for another hour and a half. Lindy was still asleep at seven, so Rok suggested I wake her and see if she wanted to join us for dinner. Also she was getting out of a normal sleep cycle. When I went back, she was awake and said that she felt better and would like to get out.

In our five hours together Rok, Andreja, and I had created a world of camaraderie and talk. I can remember doing things like that in younger days with friends—talk, talk, talk; go anywhere and everywhere in words; delve, confess, celebrate, lament, bitch, enthuse, etc. And this was a younger country, still awakening to the modern rush. A walk-talk pizza afternoon was normal, pleasurable, worth slowing down for. This was finally my chance to do what I came for: be in Ljubljana with Rok.

What territory did we cover? The simplest answer is that we marched right through the big themes: life and death, our existential situation, love, soul, art, healing, initiation. A potpourri of politics, personal storytelling, and publishing and writing shoptalk. Our synergy came from the topics but was mostly the weave of them through each other, gathering and reinforcing depth. We became good friends, and then we became better friends, as we told each other truths that mattered. Before the telling, we thought we knew each other better than we actually did. Afterwards it was as though we had been friends for decades. A few summaries of something impossible to encapsulate:

Andreja wrote her undergraduate thesis on the intertextual conversation between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, deconstructing the reverberations between their poems and their marriage. She was now writing a graduate thesis in Comparative Literature on views of Utopia in three Spanish authors: Cervantes, Borges, and the Argentinan Julio Cortazar, spinner of the anti-novel Hopscotch. She considered that classic “utopian” novels like Brave New World and 1984 were actually dystopian and was exploring the fluidly paradoxical distinction between utopia and dystopia in the human vision. (Interestingly I had written my first paper ever in eighth grade on those two utopian books and a third, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel,  Looking Backward).

Andreja surprised me, as having such an astute literary and political intellect, yet being as fluent and astute in astrology too. Her relationship with Rok was a new one, and she was trying to tease out their challenges from their birth charts with antithetical elements from the zodiac. She was Pisces, he Aries. From the untapped depths of her Pisces ocean, she wanted to inspire Rok to fulfill his Aries destiny as an innovator and leader.

She guessed my Scorpio sign. “You can’t ever give up or not follow through on something you know or believe. You are bound to Scorpio truth-seeking, which is unrelenting.”

“For Scorpios,” I added, “It’s survival.”

I stopped the journal here after reading the next two paragraphs and deciding to sleep on what I had written in 2018 and figure out what to do about it in 2025. My initial instinct was to find a way to excise it, but it didn’t come out easily. In the morning I concluded that since an earlier version of this journal was already posted on my website and has been for six and half years and been sent to a pre-Substack list of readers I kept then, I would leave it in with time-induced modifications.

In 2018, Rok and I had to clarify our relationship. Some of it was wrapped around local novelist, filmmaker, martial artist, and philosopher Miha Mazzini, a man we both knew, who had functioned as a sort of trickster and double-agent (see my 2006 Europe Trip Journal for his introduction). In 2006, Miha had satirized Rok to me (since I was about to work with him as a publisher) while giving the impression that he barely knew hime. According to Rok (now that we were mutually truth-and-reconciling in 2018), the two had had a longstanding professional connection that deteriorated after a series of failed collaborations. When at some point between 2006 and 2018 I asked Miha to serve as my liaison to Rok, he said, “I can’t go to see Rok because I don’t have a violin.” I asked him what the Balkan riddle meant, and he said, “I would need a violin to play for his sob stories.”

I have edited this to emphasize a friendly theater between the two playing off me because they have no actual enmity, only a playful rivalry—and Miha is closer to Lindy’s and my age, Rok a bit older than our son. While sometime around 2012 Miha was satirizing Rok, Rok later satirized Miha, and each of them, in turn, made deserved private jokes about me to each other.

The three of us were changing continually, as all people are, and now that I haven’t been a publisher myself for pretty much the duration of the time since Lindy’s and my visit with Rok in Slovenia (2018 to 2025), I want to renounce and apologize for the way I behaved when I was a publisher and worked with both of them, leading to their jibes behind my back. That’s why I say “deservedly.”

Inner Traditions doesn’t publish literary books, so I have been unable to acquire Miha’s current novel, which he has tentatively called It’s Personal (but it is in need of a title change because the translator he hired to put it into English missed a nuance of “personal/impersonal” in going from Slavic to English) despite the fact that it gets about as “Mind Body Spirit” as Miha has gotten. I have tried to place it elsewhere (Seven Stories, for instance) without success, but I encourage any possible leads in this regard to contact me for a file of the book if they are a possible publisher or a link to one (barring the obvious exception).

As for Rok, his press, Sanje (remember, Dream) is Mind Body Spirit as well as literary and political, so there might be foreign-rights commerce either way with Inner Traditions. I hope that I wrote Rok as much when I joined Inner Traditions, but I haven’t heard from him, so I will reiterate the message here so as to reinforce it for him or for someone pass it on to him as a go-between, if not Miha, then another Slovenian writer or mutual acquaintance on this list.

As for Miha’s current novel, AKA It’s Personal, I haven’t finished it, so I will continue looking for an angle whereby it might work at Inner Traditions or elsewhere. [The line between a looking-backward travel journal and a present-time net-casting has broken down here, so I will go back to the narrative.

                                                                        *

The series of revelations and clarifications between me and Rok took much layering as we went back and forth. For instance, Rok felt he had not taken me seriously as a writer because I was defined for him by Miha’s disparagements and also at the center of the multiple complications of handling the somewhat failing English version of Alamut. Now he regretted that he didn’t know better who I was because he would have publicized my visit through the Slovenian literary and intellectual community. It was a lost opportunity unless I returned.

In our talk we also landed upon one of my favorite dichotomies, the one that began this travel journal: the fundamental disparity between those who believe that consciousness is incidental and solely molecular and those who believe the universe had a latent luminosity creating its own realities out of the physics of its own conscious evolution—souls descending into molecular concatenations ascending versus mere molecules. As we fired back and forth between us in a volley that had brilliant plays on both sides, the equivalents of successful lobs and last-second backhand return, Rok felt that this line of discourse should have been held in the public arena, especially for Ljubljanans who appreciated intellectual volleys more than Americans and didn’t get enough of them, and he was sorry that it didn’t happen.

Going forward, I used a combination of Miha’s “violin” versions of Rok and Andreja’s spurring of him to fulfill his Aries potential to say that he should trust his own radical instincts and continue to push forward regardless of results—to trust his intention over immediate success: Rok Zavrtanik for whom a Balkan riddling friend claimed to need a violin was also Rok Zavrtanik who had lost hope in his Aries mission. I suggested that he exercise the symbolic butterfly’s wings in Tokyo (or real ones in Ljubljana) that could change the weather in New York—the quantum particle that implodes into a universe or Buddhist tonglen whereby one breathes one’s own spirit and compassion into the world. I was getting a bit worked up and ornate by then and not sure where to draw that line and start descending. I did by concluding that he could do it as a publisher more than a writer but perhaps as a different kind of writer than he had been.

Andreja and I formed a tag-team dialogue of encouragment. But it was also a trio-logue, for Rok nuanced our comments in terms of his own personal and professional struggles.

This exchange was perhaps our headiest dance, though I would add here that the funk I was in in Ljubljana in 2018 lasted until October 2020 when I emerged to find myself exactly where Rok presciently proposed I should be on our walk. For Rok (with whom I have been out of touch since 2018) and for readers following this thread, I will add a snippet from late in Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, the part about my resolution of my funk. I can’t give more without spilling over into the entire book, so it serves as a bit of an ad. For a photograph of Rok, Lindy, and me in Ljubljana, see the previous “2018 Trip Journal post” for July 22:

“My micro-orbit took 850 days. There was no shortcut, no deluxe ticket, no wormhole from one comfort zone to another. You have to swim the sea, feel the cold and slosh of its water, know that you won’t necessarily survive. I hadn’t confronted the implications of Bingo and Martha’s fast and fiery fling, my embodiment of forbidden knowledge, my choice to get born like Houdini, bound in chains and boxed in a casket, because I knew I could get out. Then I had to do it.

My fugue was a potentized droplet of a Hopi vision quest, a Tibetan ceremony, and Ron Sieh’s Dzochen. . . .

My recovery didn’t require verbiage or rules. The geese had delivered that message. You can skip all the practices as long as you acknowledge a universe of thoughtforms that you and the Arcturians are spinning like etheric arachnids.

You change by being willing to change. Even Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift have individuation crises. Elvis Presley and Bryce Harper too. It’s one big clown car down here.”

As for those geese, they came half a year after this trip in January 2019. Here is another snippet from Episodes:

“Lindy and I returned to California on an Airbnb for the winter and I began weekly sessions with a local disciple of Peter Levine. Getting to his office meant entering an all-hours stampede through the claustrophobic Caldicott tunnel. I exited to Walnut Creek, then took an elevator to the top floor of a professional turret where somatic experiencing was dispensed along with financial and dental services. I quit after a flock of geese landed with a racket on the deck outside our window. They were spirit animals as well as birds, and they brought more wisdom than our exercises, for they had a more salient message: “When you fly, fly; land when you land, and put your feet down.” They were gigantic and couldn’t be dismissed.”

                                                                        *

When Rok, Andreja, and I were done with the restaurant, everyone went to the rest rooms. We came back to our table to get our stuff and found the remaining piece of pizza swarming with sparrows pecking and pulling at it, flapping their wings to get angle, leverage, and space. I counted fifteen birds in close quarters on one slice of pizza.

As we were walking back to Slamič, Andreja said—and I paraphrase, “I love being Slovenian. I love Ljubljana. I go away through Europe, even to Paris and Madrid, and I am called back. It’s the Slavic soul calling me. I went to the Belgrade book fair after Frankfurt, and I loved it in a way I couldn’t love Frankfurt. You don’t feel the soul anywhere there. When I’m away from Slovenia, I miss my homeland. When I was fifteen, I spent two months with relatives in Toronto. I was so excited to be in North America, but after a while I couldn’t wait to feel the Slavic soul again. Then here I am a while, and I feel restless. I think, what am I doing, living my life in this little boutique country?”

I double-checked her phrasing.

“Boutique country,” she repeated.

Such a perfect phrase for perky charmed-life Slovenia, the one Yugoslavian province that became a country almost without bloodshed and carnal madness that consumed the Balkan south. Slovenia didn’t have centuries-long ricochets of tribal warfare and nursed grudges that re-gestated during World War II and broke out in the barbaric civil wars of Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Albania.

Back at Slamič, Andreja insisted that I should knew more about Rok and what he had suffered for his activism in Slovenia. As a college student, he was almost imprisoned several times, as he protested the introduction of capitalism with its corruption when Slovenia emerged from the protections of Yugoslavia. For more than a decade he had been a marked man, subject to government investigations and harassment, bricks thrown through Sanje windows, personal threats, financial mischief to his accounts. She felt that I had to know this to understand where his despair and sense of tragedy came from.

Rok’s post-college political action had begun with his opposition to a new tax on books. It quickly expanded to his opposing corruption in the Slovenian government, including a major right-wing politician, Janez Janša, at one point the country’s prime minister, who, according to Rok, was involved in blatant international arms dealing and intentionally inflaming conflict within the region to increase his profits, thereby sullying the national honor and reputation. “We are always a small peaceful country,” Andreja said. “We do not make wars or empires. This is not our way. This is nothing less than a person’s horrible, greedy corruption.”

It turned out that Rok had organized the largest political protest in Slovenian history, a legacy that caused people to rise at cafés to greet him or wave on the street. This was a lot more salient than being merely the publisher of Alamut.

            How complicated human interaction is when you try to track its many levels and time at the same time.

With Lindy joining us, we walked all the way to Slovenia’s Old Town where Rok picked out a restaurant he remembered from long ago: Špajza. The maître d said they were expecting a large party, but he managed to seat us at a corner of the rear garden. There Rok was greeted by a smiling young man—tall, intelligent-looking, bald, glasses. He introduced himself as Gregor. It turned out that both Slovenians were shepherding American couples. In an oddly thorough ritual, all seven people shook hands with each other. The two Slovenians then joked about their “duckling tourists” in their language and, then gabbed away while the Americans stayed silent.

Lindy lingered at Gregor’s table and reported that he had invited us to join him for spells during the dinner. Rok identified Gregor as a prominent Slovenian intellectual, philosopher, and author.

It took twenty-five minutes for the waiter to come for our order. The menu was as ancient as the landscape: horse and young horse, bear, rabbit, deer, etc.

I went to Gregor’s table first, after ordering (duck). Lindy stuck to soup.

Gregor and friends were discussing Trump, how someone could blatantly lie and be known to be lying, yet no one cared. I said that he was communicating subtexts to his supporters and also was cannily, though without explicit knowledge, exploiting the ever-present dialectics of competing layers of truth, as even we were now. They had pretty much covered that territory on their own, much more succinctly, as philosophers but welcomed corsort. They were mainly interested, I think, in the breakdown of the public philosophical dialogue, which is itself a philosophical dialogue, or anti-dialogue. After a while, I added that I thought of Trump as generating a cult observance that had more to do with scientology or fans of Manchester United Football than logic: observance without analysis, information without points of reference.

Gregor and the American Jack had been in graduate school together somewhere in Europe I didn’t catch. Gregor had written a book on Spinoza and Hegel, translaating their ideas into contemporary metaphysics. Hearing that, I told him about my chunk of Bottoming Out the Universe on my website, acknowledging that it was a long shot to be a match for where he was. [The book itself would be published in 2020]

Jack was finishing his own book on the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a controversial figure in international politics as well as philosophy, partly for his brash celebrity and Trump-like vulgarity. Both of them were involved in the Žižekian renaissance originating in Ljubljana—they were peripheral Žižekians. That was the only option, for Žižek was the only real Žižekian. I will not explore Žižek here, as it is too capacious and abstruse a topic.

Back at our table, the mention of Žižek instigated new debate. Andreja thought him “clever” not brilliant, and Rok felt that his more brilliant statements were intentionally contradicted by other things he said—the effect of someone who had learned how to be an undifferentiated, multidirectional water hose. You could add the confusion he caused by courting celebrity. I mused that Žižek was the Trump of philosophy, not only an insatiable egotist but an outlier who contradicted himself as a matter of principle as well as a gauntlet to his adversaries to catch him or find a big enough construct to crush the meta-literal reality he was generating. It was, I proposed, impossible, for the reality was always faster.

Trying to eat soup and a roll did not work for Lindy. Her cramps returned and we had to leave the restaurant suddenly and take a cab back to Slamič.

With Rok dictating the process, we made a plan to take a Metro cab to Urgenca (the Emergency Room) first thing in the morning.

I lay in bed for hours worrying about what might be wrong with her, considering the options too of an early trip bail with its nightmare of logistics: reservations, car rental, Airbnb people in our house in Portland, and so on.

A more optimistic plan had us proceeding to Vienna, then continuing to Prague and Berlin and flying home when planned. All I could do was wait till morning.

July 24

We spent six hours at the Ljubljana Emergency Room today. Well, Lindy spent four and a half hours inside the Emergency Room, and I spent six hours in the waiting room. It is what happens when you go to such a place. It is not intentionally slow, but it has to handle unexpected exigencies and crises of the day and work them into a bureaucracy. There is no such thing as a short visit, especially if you are an American in a Slovenian hospital.

We were impressed by the tone and thoroughness of the system. It was firm and orderly but humane. It dispensed with a certain amount of ritual—no gowns, and patients in line for treatment lay on rolling beds along the windows of the waiting room. The room was spacious enough to absorb them and the people on chairs and still feel like mostly empty space. I had plenty of room to wander when I wanted to think and worry about things rather than work on the computer or use the free public Internet. I need to feel and see what was happening. It was not the time or place to zone out.

For the most part, people weren’t in that bad shape—no victims of gunshots like in most American urban waiting rooms, seemingly no addicts overdosing either. Yet a very elderly woman—she looked 100 or near it—arrived in tremendous pain. She moaned and screamed continuously, a mournful and penetrating sound that dominated the space while she was in our midst, an interminably long fifteen minutes, probably seeming like hours to her. I moved away, wanting to give her as much privacy and respect as possible. I tried psychically to project reassurance and comfort. Yet I did see her face and age.

I thought, and I know this is a cliché, , “We are born in pain and die in pain.” In her I saw an image like Alex Grey’s painting of the soul leaving the body. The soul is free, but the body doesn’t recognize it. The individual clings to the body and its pain at the moment of departure. Who wants to leave a home of a hundred years? What sea turtle wants to give up its shell?

While her cries sounded like an undeviating moan and scream, each cry was individual, almost operatic in the precision of its formation. If you listened—and I did, as I wouldn’t have when I was younger or more distracted—you heard a sacred chant, an ethereal music, the aria of incarnation, souls in bodies. She was telling the truth from deep in her being, and it was a chance to listen and appreciate. That was what I gained by not zoning out. I went where her tortured song took me, into myself.

The tale of the day for me otherwise was tedium, patience, and meandering consideration—lots of time to think, ponder, and assay. We took a cab there at 8:15, arrived at 8:30, left at 14:45. The majority of that time was empty even for Lindy. Her assigned physician was called to an emergency elsewhere and nothing with her case could proceed until the woman’s return. Another span—over an hour—was just waiting for paperwork to be completed for Lindy’s release. At one point, she pleaded with one of the aides, saying that we had been there for almost five hours. His response, “It’s tough, but that’s how Urgenca works. If you come here, you must be prepared to wait.”

At one point, a very friendly, compassionate aide, a young man, came to me with a prescription for her. I was directed to a bridge across the road to get it filled. More patience, as I waited my turn on a line for about a half hour. It was waiting one place rather than another, but at least it was fresh scenery—I could look at Slovenian packaging of aloe vera and echinacea.

For all that, surprisingly little was resolved. I came away still considering food poisoning as a likely culprit. The exam and X-ray ruled out intestinal and stomach blockages, but they needed an ultrasound from another facility to explore gallstones as the cause. That would have to have been at a private facility, and the physician in charge said that they were not even allowed to recommend one. Her assistant privately worked with us on calling two places, but it wasn’t possible to get an appointment that day. The doctor said that our travel plans were our business; she could only speak to medical issues, and she recommended an ultrasound, if not here, then in Vienna.

I was part of that conversation and I probed whether the blood test actually suggested gall stones or she was just being cautionary. She wouldn’t answer that, but she qualified that the elevated liver enzymes could be completely innocent, she had no baseline to compare the results to.

Lindy was firm on wanting to proceed with the trip. She felt she was fine and leaned toward an explanation of food poisoning. It came instantly after a bite of curry.

As we left, I felt both that the doctors and attendants were wonderful (everyone there also spoke fluent English) but that we knew little more than if we hadn’t gone. A few things were ruled out, but another was added to the potential list.

We waited twenty minutes for a cab, returned to the Slamič in heavy traffic, changed rooms, and waited another half hour for Rok and Andreja to come by for what became a 16:30 lunch. They wanted to drive to Gostilna Čad, a famous Slovenian restaurant in a park about a mile outside of town. Driving there through construction took almost forty-five minutes with parking. Lindy and I had actually walked to that same restaurant from our hotel in 2006.

Lindy felt okay before, during, and after the meal—a big relief, making her, for me anyway, the hero of the lunch. On the other hand, she was totally confident, uninvolved in my concern, wanting to order freely and objecting to my suggestions about eating safely and healthily, in fact mostly defying them. She seemed remarkably intrepid after a day of abdominal pain and not being able to hold down food plus six hours in an Emergency Room and an uncertain verdict. I felt that the trip, and her health, hung in the balance and she should proceed with caution. She ordered chicken, vegetable skewers, and a spinach pie, and survived without pain. She concluded that she didn’t have gall stones.

Our conversation was predominantly historical and political, triggered curiously by the waiter, a cheerful round Bosnian fellow. He made a joke in Slovenian that had Rok and Andreja laughing in agreement. The moment translated to the whole meal and enveloped it in successive waves and circlings back to recover lost threads and resolve misunderstandings that followed from his spark.

When the waiter walked away, Rok reinterpreted and deconstructed, “He said, ‘Americans are stupid enough to think that we were miserable during Yugoslavia. That was paradise compared to this. Everyone was happy. Everyone had a job. You could drive from Ljubljana to Belgrade and sleep in the fields along the way and no one bothered you. No more. Not since the Americans took over.’”

I understood that Rok felt that the Yugoslavian consortium in which he grew up was a socialist paradise protected by Tito. I didn’t get how strongly he felt a nostalgia and was committed to its legacy till then, how firmly he believed that international capitalism and contemptible arms dealing turned a rich, peaceful country into a poor one and ethnic groups that had been at peace for generations against one another. To him, that was the dominant explanation for the Balkan wars and current national crisis. “We were bought by the capitalists,” he said, “and now they own us. When you take their money, there is no innocence. You are bound to their bidding thereafter.”

That led to a long discourse about the entanglements of capitalism, corruption, currency manipulation such that you couldn’t unravel or untangle their web, though Rok was sure he had a number of its threads, stuff on which he had published books. He described the laundering of old Yugoslavian currency through Bosnia and other vulnerable republics, selling them back their own old dinars at twice their purchase price in weapons.

We segued from there to the history of Slovenia as a country. Rok felt that the Carantanian forerunners of Slovenia played a seminal role throughout ancient and Mediaeval Europe before being confined to a territory that included parts of present-day Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Slovenia, and then Slovenia itself, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and willingly joined a confederation of Croats and Serbs to form Slovenia and escape Hapsburg rule after World War I. Slovenian culture was not just Slovenian; it was close to the root culture of all of Europe.

I asked lots of questions, about Russia, Serbia, Croatia, Italy, and the like. Rok was more strongly pro-Russian than I was prepared for from his earlier comments and in general. He felt that an EU was a sham without Russia, which was a huge part of European culture, spirit, and language. He declared NATO the prime terrorist organization in the world. He sided with Putin, who, he explained, was defending Russia against the West’s repeated attempts to destroy it: “Ukraine is merely the most recent.”

He and Andreja vociferously defended Putin against Pussy Riot, whose behavior they criticized as an intentional desecration of shrines to make a provocation. I remarked how crisscross our political lines hjad become: freedom to do radical art, on the one hand, something they would surely support against government censorship and reprisal, versus the capitalist attempt to undermine and destabilize any noncomplying polity.

This was 2018. I would argue far more fiercely and uncompromisingly for Ukraine and against Putin today, but the web of contradictions in which we are entangled has also become so much more entangled that each benign trail has a negative detour ahead and every malign trail has some sort of beneficial payoff. Trump-Musk 2025 leads where? In 2018 Musk was living in South Africa and hadn’t given children ridiculous names, made himself ungraciously wealthy off other’s creativity and work, or swung a chain saw in delighted political theater and let slip a Nazi salute as irresistibly as Peter Sellers playing Dr. Stranglelove in the film of that name.

Sanje had published a Slovenian translation of the writings of radical Russian journalist, Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya, murdered at age 48 on Putin’s birthday and widely attributed in the West to the calculations and mafia-like behind-the-scenes tactics of Putin himself. Rok, her publisher, blamed her assassination on NATO; he considered it a staged event, a false flag to provoke world opinion against Putin and Russia. That seemed a stretch to me, but I kept my mouth shut.

While conversation ran along these lines, Rok also used his computer to show us videos of arts festivals in Slovenian and talked about the beautiful countryside and his passion for rock climbing and skiing. Like Andreja, he kept his heart here in the homeland. He said he would never go to America, just on principle. Even to go was to sanction its behavior. He relented slightly to suggest he might come if Bernie Sanders were President and invited him personally.

We said warm goodbyes, as they left us back at the Slamič.

I too love Ljubljana, its bells every quarter hour. I went out again at twilight to walk to the countercultural street and maybe get some fruit or drinks for the car tomorrow. Every day-time store was closed, but the energy at twilight was buoyant and cheerful. Peace radiated, if a city can radiate peace. Ljubljana is a pleasant place to be, maybe too pleasant for the world as it is.

I passed Small Restaurant. It was closed, but a man and woman were cleaning up. They responded to my knock. I told them what happened, assuring them that I didn’t assume that my wife had gotten food poisoning there. I was just checking. They took the matter quite seriously. The waitress said that she had been consuming that curry all day and not gotten sick, but they phoned the woman who owned the place, an Ayurvedic physician. She heard out the story translated into Slovenian, and it was translated back that the symptoms did not sound like food poisoning to her but that she was willing to come in at once and examine my wife at no cost if I wanted—a remarkable offer. I said that it wasn’t necessary. I was merely wanting to remove food poisoning as an option, so it didn’t distract from other possible causes. I do think that it was food poison, perhaps not the whole batch but the chunk Lindy got.

They were closed but I wondered if I might buy a ginger beer. The guy produced one and said it was on the house. I thanked him and walked into the welcoming Ljubljana night, the music of Slovenian language in the air: source Europa, modern Europa, eternal Europa.

July 25-26

The next lap of our trip involved getting from Ljubljana to Berlin, a phase in doubt at the Emergency Room a day earlier. Yet Lindy felt fine in the morning.

The long drive—about 1000 kilometers— and its intervening two stops were a late add-on. We didn’t initially plan to go to either Vienna or Prague. We were going to fly from Zagreb to Berlin (Copenhagen to Warsaw too). Renting a car was intended for the loop from Warsaw to Krakow to Budapest to Ljubljana, returning it In Zagreb. I had arrived at that because there were no suitable plane or train links in terms of expense or time. For instance, you could take a train from Budapest to Ljubljana in twelve hours—much too long for the distance—and to fly there meant going by way Berlin or Oslo or some other city.

But to rent a car in Warsaw and return it in Zagreb meant a $1200 drop-off fee. The car needed to be rented and returned to the same city. Copenhagen to Warsaw to Copenhagen meant going around or ferrying across the Baltic twice, so Berlin became the ideal port: start and end there.

Zagreb to Berlin was too long for one or even two days and, since two iconic cities, Vienna and Prague, fell at approximate thirds of the way, an ideal division of road time yielded stops in each. The downside was that we wouldn’t have much time to explore either.

After Lindy got sick, our starting city became Ljubljana instead of Zagreb. That also saved a couple of hours driving on the first day. Our host in Vienna was Camilia, a Jungian therapist and translator who had read my work and six years earlier invited me to speak at the Jung Institute there. That was on the trip we never took. She couldn’t repeat the offer—the summer was not a good time for a public talk—but she extended an invitation to visit and stay in her apartment. We had planned on two nights, and she was fine with our arriving a day earlier. That at least gave us one full day in Vienna, a ridiculously meager allotment for such a vast city, but more than a rest stop.

Camilia emailed us to arrive no sooner than 17:00 because she had clients. That meant hanging around Ljubljana for the morning. We used the outdoor patio of Slamič to work on our trip journals and then walked into town center to buy some fruit and drinks for the road (we had saved leftovers from the previous day’s lunch too).

It was a bittersweet farewell to a friendly city that had provided good friends and seen us through crises gently. We entered the familiar pedestrian flow amid heavy traffic and backed-up buses. We parked briefly at a convenient spot by Small Restaurant and the hip shops. We went to the organic café for drinks, then the fruit shop. When the proprietor heard that we were buying raspberries and peaches for travel, she washed and repacked them for us in the back. We left Ljubljana at 12:20.

Driving into and out of a city is like unwinding from within a snail shell, quick turns and interpretations of GPS instructions, street changes and curls every 200 or 600 hundred meters or after 2.5 kilometers. The eye in the sky is essential. It would be impossible to improvise or do from a mapquest list, especially in countries with Slavic (and Uralic) languages. Even so, the voice’s garble of Slavic street names approached useless, making the visual map and kilometer distances essential.

The discursion out of Ljubljana to a highway had a few complications. The GPS was ultimately leading us to A2, a huge highway, but we didn’t know that ahead of time. The algorithm passed up two major highways with road signs indicating Austria, sending us instead onto back roads through suburbs, suggesting it might take us to Vienna through the mountains on the horizon, perhaps on similar winding roads to those we had encountered in Slovakia. We decided to give it two more minutes before looking for help when A2 appeared in the countryside like a giant knife cutting high-speed traffic through farmland.

The second complication was a grasshopper that attached itself to the front window of our car and rode through much of Ljubljana with us. It wasn’t a common American cricket; it was a smaller, lither thing that seemed fragile and stubborn, as it radiated a Pinocchio-like energy or personality. Its mistake had been made in one unlucky jump, and I wanted to give it its best shot at survival, though not at the risk of getting out of the car in traffic during red lights of uncertain duration. I also wanted to find some grass, so it wouldn’t end up on the highway. No ideal spot appeared for eight or nine kilometers, but the creature hung on, distracting the driver (me). Then I drew a timely red by a park. Unfortunately the hitchhiker hopped away as I reached for it. I think it landed in the road but close enough to the curb that I could hold out hope for a longer life.

Even after we got on A2, we weren’t sure we were on the right road. We had forgotten to leave out our map of Slovenia and Austria. That meant relying on a road map of all of Europe as backup. However, the kilometers to Vienna, which began in the high 300s, kept dropping, reassuring me somewhat, and Lindy found the far-most destination on Slovenian road signs, Maribor, on the map, and said our direction was more or less correct. Yet everything was so scrunched together at that scale that she worried we were going too far east without heading north.  I thought about stopping at a gas station, but we plunged into the mountains and through very long tunnels. After forty-five minutes, we found ourselves in another world—alpine valleys with farms and chalets—hurtling away from Ljubljana at 140 KMH toward somewhere hopefully Wien. The massive trucks and unofficial truck convoys were our company. This prevalent transportation system, different from its equivalent in the States in terms of average truck size and sheer number of vehicles, indicates how much EU commerce is conducted on the highway.

After a while Graz began showing up on road signs, a good Austrian destination for someone going to Wien. We crossed into Austria at Maribor and drove another couple of hours. Vienna developed in farmland: warehouses, outskirts, then urban access roads. Camilia’s apartment at Wurzingergasse 4 turned out to be several kilometers northwest of Vienna Centrum and involved several road changes and complicated turns among crisscrossing trolleys in late-afternoon traffic. The people on the streets, none of whom I knew, all looked familiar. It’s amazing how equally various and common the draws of our genome are

Traffic kept pushing our GPS arrival time until we pulled into an ample parking place on a tree-lined street of magnificent old apartment buildings just as the car clock went to 17:00. We could not have accomplished that if we had tried. Jack Finney used the finely graded aspect of time in his science-fiction novels to show how hard it was to aim for an exact intercession of both space and time in time travel (e.g., to prevent the Titanic from hitting its iceberg).

We did not initially find Camilia’s name among residents of Wurzingergasse 4. Our error was in not looking for a less weather-beaten roster. You needed to go around the corner for the active one. “Everyone on that list is dead,” she remarked dryly after we rang her ten minutes later.

She was a ball of fire, as unlike a central-casting Jungian therapist as you could get. She was more like a character from a Tennessee Williams play—full of vim, drama, stories, and questions, all performed with zest and upbeat camaraderie. Her vibe was a blend of her backgrounds: an Austrian Texan. She talked fast and big and put out lots of information, optimism, mothering, and organization of our time in Vienna, as she told us about the dinner she was preparing, things to do, and mixed in her own life story. To Lindy’s brazen question, she said age was irrelevant, but I would guess her to be somewhere in her fifties.

Camilia’s second-floor apartment was spacious with huge, high ceilings, minimalist modern light fixtures and bookstands, and enough rooms and doors to get lost occasionally in the Viennese maze. The bookshelves were packed with familiar literary, psychological, and esoteric topics in several languages. She graciously deeded us her room and stayed in her study. Because of the heat and keeping the balcony doors wide open for a night breeze, going to the bathroom at night felt like trooping under the stars.

The flat had been Camelia’ grandparents’ apartment. She had lived in for a long time and bought it a few years ago. Though raised into her teens in Houston, she decided at fifteen to stay in Austria, her mother’s nativity, and finish her growing up and schooling in Europe. Her father had founded the Department of Religion at Rice University, preceding our friend Jeffrey Kripal by one as chair. Kripal, an important author on the relation between paranormal topics and spiritual and pop-culture traditions, was the source of Camelia discovering my work.

As we ate chilled soup and pasta on the balcony, the heat broke and we watched a small thunderstorm. Long past food, we talked Jung, Freud, Kripal, Robert Kelly, Stan Brakhage, alchemy, cosmology, neuroscience, yoga and, of course, our lives as we knew them. Camilia made one long speech about “Me Too,” expressing sympathy for the intention but explaining how ridiculous it sounded in most European countries, especially Italy. “Different cultures, different boundaries,” she said.

In the morning Camilia was putting together breakfast while gathering guidebooks, and making lists for us. That we were spending only one full day didn’t stop her from itemizing a week’s worth of attractions and writing recommendations down. She also generously bought us one-day public-transit tickets, refusing reimbursement by saying, “You can buy me ones in Maine or San Francisco.”

We did not plan on anything more adventurous than the trolley. The trolley was a challenging enough system as well as an attractive ride. We had seen plenty of them, new and old, in other cities without getting a chance to ride. It was a pleasure to take one of necessity: it was the only expedient way into Vienna Centrum from Wurzingergasse.

The nearest tram stop was two blocks (a left at the end of Camilia’s street and then a right)—you could hear the song of the wheels from the apartment. Being a legitimated passenger was easy compared to the complicated Copenhagen system—just validate the ticket in a stamping machine on the tram, and it was good for twenty-four hours. No sign-out.

Our tram was three cars long. We sat and watched Vienna neighborhoods flow past for about a half hour. In the old-fashioned trolley, modern video screens mounted throughout the cars ran regular news, ads, and a list of stops, changing as we went. This city was diffuse and quiet compared to Budapest. Everything was well-kept-up; we saw no slums. The sense of settled elegance resembled Copenhagen but it was much more spread out with continuous new faces of itself as the trolley rumbled along its track—rows of shops, then rows of houses, then more shops: cities within a city. The diversity of streets and neighborhoods reminded me of New York.

Camilia had told us to get off at Berggasse, the penultimate stop. Our goal was the Freud Museum. We realized only at the last moment that Berggasse was not the name of a stop, for the stops came to an end at Schottentor, and Berggasse wasn’t in the remaining list. We found an English-speaking passenger who said, “Get off now,” as the wheels screeched to a stop. We hastened onto the street and looked around—where next? I remembered the direction of Camilia’s wave for after the tram—memorably to the left. We crossed the street and found ourselves on Berggasse, a wide mostly residential thoroughfare. The guidebook put our goal at 19, and numbers were ascending from 9, so we were almost there by luck and chance.

The Freud Museum, marked by a banner on the street, was apparently closed—open Tuesday and Wednesday and this was Thursday. I persisted only because a sign in English pointed to a door on the left and indicated that the first floor was available for free viewing—nothing about days of the week. Its giant oaken door was locked, but a buzzer released it. We wandered through a courtyard and followed signs to the Freud Bookstore. That turned out to mean the museum as well.

Despite Thursday, people were wandering around the first floor. Other floors were apparently available too with a ticket, but there seemed no need for us. The holdings upstairs were mainly libraries, books in Austrian or German. There was no explanation of why the place was open on a Thursday or why, for that matter, they were selling tickets if the upper floors were closed for renovation (as a sign in multiple languages informed).

We walked around the section that was available, most of it letters and books in display cases, thus unreadable for non-German speakers, but a few stray artifacts from Freud’s rooms that could have come from any house of the period: a chair, dish, etc. Camilia had said that the important stuff was in an equivalent facility in London.

The value of the museum to me was indirect and imaginal. I attended two major Freudian analysts in New York as a child during the fifties, both of them long dead. Now I was at Freud’s office and home, where he saw patients, visiting it on behalf of them and that child, completing a historical and mythological cycle: the origin of psychoanalysis and my own initiation in it.

What I got from the exhibits, insofar as I could slide beneath their subtexts, was that Freud’s paradigmatic web of symbols, radical and shamanic in Western thought, was also of its own time, drawing on a rich and forgotten etiology. I pictured a streetcar headed into the future that still had enough décor to support it, rattling out of an arcane realm that once fused science, philosophy, and health. Now the thread has been cut, and Freud’s psychiatric session, having shed most of its literary and naturopathic antecedents, was a sleek bullet-train plunging through the pharmacological present. Freud himself had abandoned early harbingers of neurochemical reductionism along with the old cell-sectioning machine in the museum. He forsook biological medicine to synergize a new paradigm of unconscious meanings and psychosomatically derived health.

Not much but at least a snippet of lingering energy for a dogged child who attempted to read Interpretation of Dreams in sixth grade. Here is something I wrote in Episodes but didn’t include in my trip journal regarding my funk:

“Camilla recommended a visit to the Sigmund Freud Museum. ‘Take the tram near my house and get off at the Berggasse stop. To visit the altar of your old psychiatrist will be a perfect antidote.’

She was right. Standing in Freud’s library, I tapped the spirit of Dr. Fabian for guidance and felt a return ping.”

Outside on Berggasse, I recalled Camilia’s second directional wave for there. We wended further down the street and to the right where we encountered, as promised, tracks for the ring trolley that circled the old city, the golden triangle at the heart of downtown Vienna. Boarding with our all-day ticket, we rumbled past magnificent palaces, churches, parliament, museums, opera house, etc.—this, after all, was Habsburg Vienna. We got off at the central station—Oper Karlsplatz—and stepped into the midst of crowds and tour buses. Now what to do?

We discussed a walking tour with two different ticket-hustlers, one male, one female, in yellow and orange frocks. Each rattled off options so fast it was hard to gather much except that no plan cost less than 39 euros, which meant spending close to $100 for a two-day package of bus and boat rides and free museum entries, almost none of which we would use. They did offer a walking tour from the Opera House for 15 euros; the next one in English left at 14:30, two-and-a half hours away. We made a plan to shoot for that and try to get lunch and go to one museum in the interim.

The main throughfare by the Opera House was a Burger King/KFC zone. On side streets proclaimed as fashion alleys were fancy cafés. We spent time wandering and debating where to eat in the humidity, finally settling on a generic Chinese restaurant with outdoor tables as a safe choice. Maybe it was, but I didn’t feel too good for the rest of the day. It might have been MSG or a reverse placebo effect—the place had a sloppy vibe to it, and imagination is the basis of placebo.

We returned to the ring trolley and took it one stop back to the museum complex—huge institutional buildings in a row. To the left and across the street was a gigantic courtyard of separate museums around a large statue. It was hard to interpret the theme of each, but we gathered from the placards above one entry (kometen, etc.) that it was a museum of natural history and planetarium. Across the courtyard, a distance of more than a city block, was another museum that we guessed was history or history of art. The building was monumental and daunting for one hour.

Drawn by poster for a Gustav Klimt exhibit, we angled to the top of the courtyard, opposite our entry point, and entered a more modest structure called Museumsquartier. It had an indoors, but it was mostly shops and a thoroughfare which led into a smaller plaza dominated by big recreational chairs made of a rubbery plastic and in the shape of sans-serif boats—one knew because they were called “boats.” They were strewn around a fountain. I mention this because we each lay in one for about five minutes in exhaustion after going to the museum.

Although this was the opposite of getting out of the heat—the chairs were almost too hot to lie on—it was relaxing in a sauna sort of way.

We entered the Leopold Museum beyond the fountains and spent our there viewing two artists, forty-five minutes on Klimt.

Gustav Klimt is one of those artists whose images have stayed with me long after I first viewed them years ago. Certain painters cast such spell. Offhand, my deep imagers include Yves Tanguy, Edward Hopper, the illustrators of Lascaux and Chauvet caves, Alex Grey, Hieronymus Bosch, and my long-time favorite, Joan Miró. Klimt fills me with a world of transitional forms and meanings. His art mixed a forerunner of Daliesque surrealism with something more classical: Greek statues or Degas nudes with a bit of Pacific Northwest totem poles in the way he folds faces into runic panels. Klimt has always suggested something elusive, erotic, and occult in the tense of a tomb or shroud but not nearly so morbid—more like the space where birth and death meet and where unknown parameters arise in the gusto of life as it enfolds into its esoteric origins. That’s a messy approximation, but it captures the impression I went in with. Four or five rooms of the Leopold filled with Klimt works gave me a chance to interrogate him and internalize him more. I came away moved and changed internally, which is all you can ask of great art and you don’t always get, even from the masters.

I was way too enthusiastic, so my entire cell-phone activity from Copenhagen to Prague consisted of photographs of my DNA relatives in Warsaw, a photograph of Rok, Andreja, and Lindy in Ljubljana, and fifteen photos of Klimt paintings. It wasn’t just enthusiasm; Klimt painted aspects of the depression I was in, so I took the pictures as a way of internalizing and preserving the images. I could have bought a book, but I could have done that without traveling to Vienna and the Museumsquartier.

The exhibit started out with a room of line drawings and concise anatomies; then a room to highlight Klimt’s three controversial paintings for the faculties of the University of Vienna commissioned by the Ministry of Education (I assume these were replicas of the ceiling panels: huge many-featured landscapes requiring long section-by-section scans to take in the intricate detail).

The panels were painted for the faculties of philosophy, medicine, and jurisprudence (law), respectively. They showed blue, violet, green fields of abstract space in which faces and apparitions flowed in panoramas. The mask-like visages could have been Egyptian or figures from Germanic myths and fairy tales. They appeared in bubbles or amorphously shaped, constrained fields like distortions or negative space. Scroll-like sections wrapped around their bodies suggested vines or continuations of negative fields. The figures were barely tinted black-and-white, which made them unripe, placental in their fish-tanks—asleep, dormant, or entranced. In the medicine panel, singularly bright-colored Hygeia, daughter of Aesculapius, brought the accouterments of her arts and healing energy (and colors) to suffering humans floating upward through the underwater or interstellar morass.

The next room was filled with Klimt’s subtly tinted, unconventionally scaled landscapes: the undulating surface of a turquoise lake so foreshortened that the canvass almost became op-art watery waves with a glow of blue meeting jagged brown rocks in the far distance.

An adjoining room featured Klimt’s major painting (“Death and Life”) on the phases of birth, life, and death. Down the hall was a companion work that was unfinished when the died (the same sorts of masks were interpolated in a different way). In the major canvass, Death in the form of skeleton with just its skull showing and wrapped in a light blue shroud of black crosses and religious pictographs stares across the canvass at seven figures folded around and into one another, representing the phases of life becoming phases of death. A woman and a woman with a newborn child are followed by people in the prime of life, then an old man with head bowed. None of the figures are anatomically complete; they are composed also of the background mosaic pattern and hide each other’s forms: a classic Klimt totem pole.

In the unfinished painting across the room, the totem pole disintegrated into heads floating amid sections of naked bodies in a rich, disorganized field of hieroglyphic and decorative motifs. One woman turns into a purple shawl; another shows her bare back and butt; another breaks into designs of glyph-like doodles or patterns on indigenous pottery.

My passage through the exhibit concluded with Klimt’s relationships with women, which involved female bodies and erotic anatomy. The captions discussed his mistress, models, and illegitimate children, as art and life dovetailed.

In the collection of sketches, the bodies are fully female but like blossoms or flowers—genitalized but unsexualized. They run a gamut of body and personality types and fin-de-siécle classes (working girls and ladies of society) and ethnic groups (Jewish, Muslim, Christian). The celebratory anatomy is through the lens of Klimt’s mild deconstruction.

Vienna was a perfect site for a retrospective. Gustav Klimt was a hometown boy who painted local landscapes in the latter part of the nineteenth century and through World War I. He was in conflict with government authorities and his peers. The panels for the University building were wild, and Klimt reacted to criticism of them that included calls for their removal:

“Enough of censorship. I will take matters into my own hands. I want to break away. I want to shake off all this unpleasant ridiculousness impeding my work and regain my freedom. I renounce everything.”

He added that the Ministry of Education attacked real art and artists and protected “only what is weak and false.”

When I said I got energy from Klimt’s work, I meant his will to delve beneath the surface, his engagement with the hidden and complex, his defiance of custom and stricture, his merging of mythical and collective forms with the actual world phenomena, and his excavation of sex as teleology. He performed a healing function and left me with a sense of my own passage through the life mystery.

Afterward, the people in the crowds on the streets of Vienna and on the tram seemed twisted about each other in Klimt chimeras.

We had only about fifteen minutes left to view one other artist, and we selected the heralded Slovenian painter, Zoran Mušič. His work was mostly landscapes that he referred to as “dream landscapes” or “roots,” adding that he always returned to the same horses, the same elusive internal vistas, even as he painted actual scenes in different regions of Europe. The most striking part of his displayed oeuvre to my view was a room of simple line drawings of bodies found at Dachau concentration camp. Mušič left out lines in the bodies, a sparseness to indicate lesion and trauma.

We dawdled long enough at the museum and then the boat chairs that we had to hurry across two big courtyards to get a ring trolley and make it one stop back in time to join the walking tour. Our guide was a short, middle-aged, rotund woman with black wide-legged trousers, a few facial piercings, and a stylish navy-blue felt hat worn at a tilt; she was like an actress strolling out of a Brecht opera in full song. She was arrantly fluent, brash, and played to being fashionably lewd, patting the fanny of one statue while remarking that the worn brass showed she wasn’t the first and twitting the sexual behavior of the Habsburgs in continual asides.

The tour, though, was tedious, especially in such heat. We looked at statues and more statues, churches and more churches, a palace, the royal stable, and we heard histories and back stories. The most lengthy was about two competing chocolate shops run by a father and his son, each claiming the exclusive rights to a chocolate-cake recipe. A judge resolved the dispute by imposing variations on the layers of marmalade allowed in each shop’s version of the dessert.

A few details stuck: (1) The cutting of dead nobles into three parts to be transported back from the Crusades for home burial. 2. The number of rooms in the Habsburg castle; 2600 sticks in my mind, which is at least in the ballpark—Vienna was the center of the Austro-Hungary Empire that we had been circling through Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia. 3. The grim, contorted face of a stone figure in a statue, a man who had died from the plague, pitched toward us out of the base of the pedestal below a series of episodes in maybe marble and gilded leaf reifying triumph over the plague by the forces of God. The Trinity at the top was shiny gold. Below its divine illumination, the Habsburg king (Leopold I believe) kneeled in obeisance, his crown removed in humility and gratitude before the greater forces that saved him. He had promised to construct a statue—this one if spared death from the plague, an enemy who did not discriminate the nobles from serfs.

The most exciting part of the walking tour was my race into a souvenir shop for a plastic bottle of ice water at 2 euros for us to share: an oasis.

Getting back on the tram meant reversing directions and filling in the gap created by the walk to the Freud Museum. At the suggestion of one of the tour pitch women, we grabbed the next tram at the stop from which we had gone to the Leopold Museum, but I made a mistake. Because we had taken the Number 2, I assumed that it would get us along the same avenue to the correct stop, Schottentor, to catch the 41 back to Camilia’s. After the museums, though, the trolley turned. I didn’t catch it at at once because trolley tracks are trolley tracks and a ring trolley goes in a ring.

Luckily I stood up soon after to look at the map; there was no Schottentor stop. We were on the wrong tram. A woman who got off at the next stop with us proposed plunging down subway stairs at which she pointed and going two stops, but that looked like being shot into the space-time continuum of Vienna, and neither of us had nerve for traveling blind underground based on barely understood directions in broken English. “Let’s see if you can get us out of this one,” Lindy remarked, referring to my track record in central Slovakia at discontinued roads and in Budapest where the GPS lost its bearings. I looked around, stared down the subway stairs, thought about it, and proposed that we walk back to where the trolley last curved to see if there was one that went straight at that point.

It took only two blocks and turned out to be the right guess. Where the 2-tram curved, a 1 tram went straight. We walked another two blocks to a stop, caught a waiting 1. I asked passengers about Schottentor; it was the next stop. One of the men who confirmed this led us through a pedestrian tunnel to a station where many trolley lines began or converged. A 41, as promised on the board, arrived in four minutes.

We sat facing a young man and his six-year-old son wearing a Sri Lanka T-shirt with a lion. There was no video screen in our car, and the Austrian street names sounded alike, so I asked the guy how far to Scheibenbergstrasse, our stop. The boy replied for him in rapid German, having plenty to say about the various ways of the avenue, pronouncing the names like a pro. None were relevant to our situation, but that inspired conversation. The father and translator, a Brit married to an American, went to graduate school in botany in Vienna a few years ago, then moved to New Zealand, then returned, was now working in “digital.” “The job of your era,” I said. He nodded, adding that Vienna was the perfect city to raise a child and German the right language now as it wouldn’t have been a century prior.

Camilia had planned a small gathering for the evening, and she wanted me to give a half-hour talk and then answer questions. Her guests were a female craniosacral therapist and a male professor of religion at the University and his Indian wife (the guy was Camilia’s yoga teacher). I was feeling the after-effects of the lunch as well as our treks through the hot day and did not have much energy for something I had been looking forward to in the morning.

Camilia had intended the event to take place at an outdoor vineyard restaurant, but amassing thunderheads led her to decide to change and make quick light dishes—lentils, salad, fruit cakes. We convened on the balcony. From there we watched the storm at close quarters. It was heavier than the one the evening before and, when people started feeling droplets, the giant windows were swung shut. Conversation proceeded around the table.

My presentation never had a lecture phase, it was a discussion from the get-go—a complicated exchange, as the other guests felt out my position on various topics while I tried to navigate theirs so as not to say anything too provocative or polarizing. The fluctuating drift was difficult to read. Though everyone held metaphysical beliefs, everyone was skeptical in their way. The professor’s wife, a mindfulness teacher, exhibited the deepest faith. She didn’t reveal herself often, but when she did, she was precise and unwavering.

Camilia had posed Jane Roberts’ channelings of the aggregate interdimensional entity Seth as a topic that would interest people and about which they knew little. I read some Seth quotes off my computer and tried to put him in context. The professor specialized in what he called “unorganized religions” like Course in Miracles and Oahspe. He taught Buddhism too, but the others were his specialty. His scholarship meant that he already knew Seth and had strong convictions and opinions about him and other what-he-called “New Age religions.” Since he was gracious, he revealed his academic biases by degrees, accepting Seth’s relative validity compared to other channelings before finally coming to a skeptical academic position. UFOs (Oofoos, as he called them) he dismised entirely, “I believe people see them and think they are abducted, but I do not think that the Oofoos exist. The people who think they are abducted by space beings are projecting mental pathology.” This informed his position: these systems were interesting only as social phenomena.

The craniosacral therapist was openly enthusiastic, as I mentioned planes of consciousness, group souls, and the like. Then out of the blue she proposed that all this credulity was more a result of the breakdown of the culture and lack of real contact between people. Involvement in spirits, she added, was a substitute for human relationships. Her quirky point had validity, but it was a curious and revealing non sequitur. Her enthusiasm was greater than her faith.

That’s the way such conversations go. After a while, I was too tired and sick to carry on, so I collapsed on the bed thinking to take a brief rest. Instead, I fell asleep for the night without explaining my absence or saying goodbye. That was a surprise to everyone, including me, but my presentation had never gotten off the ground. In the morning Camilia said graciously that they probably went on too long anyway, “Can you believe, we consumed four bottles of wine.”

July 27-30

We hung around Wurzingergasse till noon, partly to rest and recuperate and partly for me to check out the nearby health-food store and restock our supplies. With Camilia’s coaching, I did a solo run on the tram. There were the usual unexpected curves. First, I couldn’t figure out how to buy a ticket despite with euros in hand. When I went to the shop Camilia named, the proprietess simply gave me change for my ten-euro note. [Reading this several years later, I can’t figure out why this is a curve.]

When I asked for the ticket in English, she responded in German, pointing in the direction of the tracks. Camilia had said it was only three stops and she had been stopped by an inspector only once in a year. Even if I was, she added, I could play dumb and show yesterday’s ticket. She thought I should chance it. After the shop I agreed.

On a piece of paper Camilia had written down my destination as well as the stop, but the trouble was, she put the German “health-food store” rather than the store’s name, a switch of which I was unaware. When I got off the tram, I stood looking about in vain on the busy crossroads of avenues. I finally tried pedestrians who sent me to two other stores several blocks in opposite directions. The second time, I was standing right outside the store I wanted. It was called Prokopp but had no signage and the window was painted in white. Once it was finally identified by an astute guy who pointed back across the street, I found a cornucopia and left with 58 euros worth: a bag of fruit, nuts, organic snacks, cereals, and a loaf of fresh bread and pastries.

We started driving with the help of the GPS and got to a highway sooner than in other cities and immediately picked up signs for Praha. We coasted through Austria to the Czech border.

The entrance to a country of which Václav Havel was once so proud was now a row of strip shows, casinos, and pornography with as graphic full-color images of women, the operative phrase being “inflagranti,” probably regional code for a high number of X’s. Alongside the sex shops was a amusement park with childlike cartoon figures among rides and a giant Earth-like sphere, which gave the whole thing an Orlando qua Vegas quality. This was the Czech Republic 2018. The pornography continued for a good twenty kilometers inside the border.

Without restraint or exception, international capitalism balances out all commodity differential between polities, usually to the lowest common denominator.

After a while, we began seeing distinctive Czech rural towns of the sort I remembered from our 1993 visit. Back then they were from the train and it was just after the fall of the Soviet Union. These ones we drove straight through the middle of, regularly stopping and starting. They not only hadn’t changed much from 1993 but were near identical to ones we had seen in the other half of the former Czechoslovakia. The division of the former nation was not as evident in the countryside.

I also recalled something from high-school history I had forgotten while in Slovakia. When Neville Chamberlain signed his widely ridiculed peace treaty with Hitler—a misjudgment on his part that led to compensations for the next seventy years, misjudgments in the other direction—it was said that by giving away Czechoslovakia without a fight, the British prime minister had put teeth in Hitler’s army. The teeth were the mountains we had driven through the week prior. I hadn’t thought of that then as we struggled through. I don’t even know how the metaphor works or if I am remembering it correctly, but it took being in the Czech Republic to grok that we were in old Czechoslovakia. When we entered Slovakia from southern Poland, it was like a strange attractor emerging from a black hole.

About 100 kilometers from Prague, construction stopped traffic. We progressed two kilometers in an hour and a half. The delay was discouraging, especially since we thought that we were finally on major roads—of course, major roads need to be resurfaced and periodically enlarged. But at this stage of exhaustion and physical weariness, I didn’t have much enthusiasm for driving. Operating the clutch to inch along became physically painful—neck, shoulders,m and back. I was relieved when, at one point, some people got out of their cars and waved. We didn’t try to communicate—they likely didn’t speak English— but shared grins and shrugs of “what can you do?” restored my energy and revived my mood. Even in cars, primates are social animals.

When we finally got to a breakout, the hazard turned out to be nothing but an arrow set in the middle of the road forcing two lanes into one. No one was monitoring it and there wasn’t a red-green signal as at other such spots, so traffic converged and competed in near gridlock. In the euphoria of the open road, I joined the parade, whizzing heedlessly at 140-160 KMH like driver a bumper car at an amusement park.

Everything factored in, it took us a bit more than five hours to go from Vienna to Prague. I have written each time about how cities materialize from outskirts to envelopment. The image of stars with their solar systems separated by interstellar space occurred to me this time, though it is a mixed metaphor because solar systems are held by gravitational fields and cities are cultural fields. Each city is also unique. Prague sat in the distance on its plains, hieroglyphic enough from far away that if you looked at it without scale it could have been Easter Island statues as easily as tall buildings. Its density slowly congealed, to maintain the astrophysical metaphor, like a thickening meteor field. The GPS sprung to new life and wound us through a tight snail shell of narrow streets to Krkonošská. We were staying there in a room in an Airbnb apartment recommended by a friend, contracted directly instead of through Airbnb. The woman renting the room, Taťjána Matoušková, had advised me when I called that there was no parking on her street except for unloading. I expected a rushed emptying of the car, but there were many fifteen-minute spaces on her block (distinguished by a blue line as opposed to a white line allowing long-term parking by meter). We ended up leaving our car in the space for a couple of hours because her looks out the window and intuition told her that the police were done with the block. I finally moved the car two blocks away to a white area. The parking machine was already shut off by then for the weekend, so it stayed peaceably in its spot while we were in Prague.

A room in a private apartment is a bit like being in a boarding house, as our host explained her rules of conduct: shoes (she provided slippers), keys, use of the kitchen and bathrooms, hot water, the refrigerator, etc. Meanwhile she provided watermelon slices and talked at length about what we might like to see. Without her knowing our particular interests, the flood of information was useless. It was more interesting to blend with her enthusiasm and earnest use of English, and her discussion gave me a sense of what was near and how far we were from the central square of the old town: the Stare Miasto.

After a while she walked us to a nearby park and pointed out a dinner place she favored: a beer garden in a section of the park quartered off into such eateries. A pleasantly raucous, jovial scene, it was a convenient way to eat without a long search.

Dogs are apparently permitted in Czech restaurants because a couple with two goofy ones provided continual amusement across the aisle, as the cowed animals tried to interpret their situation and what was required of them, breaking rules repeatedly and getting up on the table. They probably wondered when they were going to get fed. Dog dishes were eventually provided on at ground level, and the meal was shared.

Afterwards we walked to the end of the park and viewed the old town below from about two kilometers. Stare Miasto was the main part of Prague we hung out in in 1993, and its distance from 2018’s hilltop park seemed one of time as well as space, like staring into a scale model of memory.

The hillside was packed with people on blankets watching the sunset (or maybe waiting for a concert but probably watching the sunset). More of them were smoking than not—a feature of Europe that one has to accept. Yet it seemed retro that the dominant feature of the landscape was the absence of breathable air to go with a lucent view. I value individual freedom over behavior police—and as Rok pointed out (rolling another piece of paper around his tobacco), the ambient radiation from nuclear-weapons testing and cell towers is more dangerous—still it made joining the crowd unappealing.

Instead we sat on a bench and watched twilight activity: a guy practicing roller-blading turns and lifts while his young daughter and her friends watched, a younger girl throwing a larger-than-volleyball-sized ball in the air and catching it on the fly or first or second bounce and occasionally spinning in place while it was in the air to create a surprise, the faces of the passing—old , young, in between; merry, pensive, beaten down, lost in thought, private moods and mysteries—universal cues imbedded in unknown cultural experiences.

In the morning, Lindy worked while I set out on a walkabout—I let circumstances determine how long and far I went. I took it a piece at a time. First, I retraced our path to the park; then I turned to the opposite axis toward the city. I walked down a series of nondescript residential streets, keeping the tall, needle-like television tower with its triangular pod supports as my compass point. I reached a small cluster of houses with an empty lot filled with junk and graffiti on the side. I thought it might be a cul de sac, but it opened out into a path along a concrete wall overlooking vast train yards and tracks: the Praha rail station. Roughly a city block of tracks and stored train cars formed an insurmountable barrier to the Old Town.

I decided to follow the wall to its end and see if there was a pedestrian bridge. After three or so city blocks on my left, I reached a busy street with a crosswalk. An underground tunnel appeared immediately around the corner. I walked through it past its many vendors. I stood on the other side of the tracks by the National Museum, a palace-scale  building under renovation. As I walked, streams of tourist traffic became a classic flowing, posing, polyglot mob. I walked past shops, tour barkers, restaurants. It was exhilarating—sights, sounds, smells, even the heat and cigarette smoke.

I stood by a building site that provided peepholes for folks of different heights to view construction workers on the job. Around the peepholes was a photograph history of Prague through the wars of the twentieth century to its revival as a modern city. Where people died, fashionable cafés now stood, as those three Greek fates turned history on a dime and wove new patterns into their cloth. Nazi and Soviet tanks rolled not so long ago where I stood.

I walked to the edge of Old Town, took a few cell photos from a crowded narrow street and sent them as postcards to friends. I figured I had gone far enough for a scouting expedition and wanted to be sure I could find my way back. I had memorized a series of landmarks, so I turned around and began looking for the first checkpoint. I stopped at the last street stand for a large bottle of water to bring back to our room (to carry it the least distance), then went past the museum, under the tunnel, “up Spook Hill,” as a children’s book of our kids described the reverse of a night outing when Spook Hill proved too scary because of an owl. It was a sauna-like climb in the heat, and I arrived back at the apartment with sweat dripping like water.

An hour later, Lindy and I followed my trail back through the park, along the wall, under the railroad tracks, into the tourist stream and, after forty minutes, to an organic vegetarian restaurant I had noticed just before two narrow alleys entered the Old Square, as new and old buildings parsed fractal space in the Praha grid. It was closed on Saturdays. I didn’t want to repeat my experience at the Vienna Chinese place or Lindy’s at Small Restaurant. We began scanning the street. The closest outdoor café, about fifty feet away, was quickly rejected—hamburger pictures and the word barbecue with smoke coming out of it. Then I realized the sign also said, “free range, no antibiotics, local farmers.” We grabbed an outdoor table.

We split a chicken soup and range-fed cheeseburger as we were entertained by the tourist parade: families, gaggles of teens, fashionably dressed women, tour groups, ugly Americans in abundance (not all of them American anymore—Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East now provide their share from the new oligarchies).

High-testosterone male energy was in abundance, as groups of men dressed in team costumes or matching garb passed, singing, running, and cheering together for no apparent reason except thank-goodness-it’s-Saturday and a desire to stir up exuberance. Their transits lent a Bacchanalia flavor. Several men carried inflated female dolls from an erotica shop.

After lunch we continued into the Stare Miasto, Prague’s old-town Square. We had stood in is center twenty-five years earlier. Sadly the great astrological clock that timed Prague’s microcosmic and macrocosmic transits from the top of a towering town hall was away on renovation, a large resemblance of its occult horary draped along the building’s side. The gigantic Gothic church with its “Spook Hill” towers overlooked a row of buildings opposite it.

The elegant pastel-colored houses that seemed so unusual fronting the Square in an architectural ring in 1993 had been replicated for us in Lucca, Sienna, and other Italian cities and Ljubljana in 2006, and on this trip in Poznań, Warsaw, and Vienna. It was an architectural style. Each of these squares had once been the nucleus of a walled city, an enclave under military protection. A city, like a crab, can grow beyond its shell only when the barrier is dissolved.

Entering Prague’s Old Square in 2018 had elements of walking along New York’s 42nd Street with its tourist eddies around mercantile weirdness: people dressed as large stuffed animals (a gigantic panda the most humongous), others posing as superheroes or cartoon characters, and silver-, brass-, and gold-painted figures, some of them seemingly suspended in air (more on those later). The activity was to get money for being photographed, usually with tourists posing alongside. The circus belied the historicity and dignity of the buildings. God knows what Gothic spires and the astrological clock (when it was working) made of the Kali Yuga.

We had only the one day here, and our commitment to wander through Prague. We were tired of walking tours, Hop On/Hop Offs, and boat trips, so we had to substitute our own trajectory. We had till an 18:30 dinner reservation, about five hours.

Wandering for five hours, even in a place as visual and entertaining as Old Prague, is an art. Cultivating a right eye takes patience and a continually improvised aesthetic. You don’t want to end up looking at looking (at one extreme) and you don’t want to take the mix of mundane and unusual vistas for granted and walk as if in New York or Boston.

A quickly-forming thundercloud sent people scampering to protected tunnels, but it didn’t drop much water, and the sprinkle was refreshing on an 87-degree afternoon.

As we passed out of the Square, we decided to head toward the Vltava River which bisects Praha and is spanned by many bridges which deserve the overused adjective “quaint.” Just then, a group of scooters, some with individuals, some with couples, all honking noisily as if at a wedding, motored through. It seemed at first a minor procession of noisy vehicles, perhaps a tour, but it went on for almost fifteen minutes and hundreds of scooters so that one could only stare and wonder how many more there could be.

Once the vehicles passed, we continued in the same direction, expecting to intersect the Vitava at some point. It curled around the Old Square district and couldn’t be missed.

Hyper-male energy continued—a bunch of men in a café dressed in orange and blowing horns, a klatch of black dudes in uniform running in formation and carrying a European football, guys in groups shouting as loud as they could every few steps. The weirdest phenomenon of that sort included women too. Beer aficionados sat along raised rows in little carts, drinking from mugs at a counter as they pedaled furiously, causing the carts to make their way along the street while a bartender steered. The people in these rolling saloons wanted appreciation, so they shouted to pedestrians and tried to elicit solidarity and applause. Behind Europa and its history was (not unexpectedly) a working-class partying and drinking town.

We alternately walked and rested on benches or along fountains. We passed a surrealist Kafka statue, his figure emerging out of a body where a head should be. Nearby restaurants and a hotel honored him.

As we got more beyond Stare Miasto, the landscape began to break from the fractal density of Old Town into a generic European new/old diffusiveness that could have been Dublin, Copenhagen, or Budapest. We reached the Vltava at a bridge dominated by boat tours: smaller boats (like ones we had ridden on the Danube) and whole floating restaurants. By then we were tired and sat on the edge by the water watching the maritime activity but particularly the swans which floated up to us in groups and singly. They were used to being fed by mammals, and we should have saved something from lunch but didn’t foresee the moment. Swans are evocative, evoking royal ponds, the “Ugly Duckling,” and a grace that transcends their aggressive nature. Our daughter, when about five, extended a hand to a swan at a San Francisco pond and got a painful bite: they are animals not fairies and not that far from the Jurassic pugnacity of Tinbergen’s herring-gull world.

After a while we got up and walked along the river. More serious and darker thunderclouds were amassing, and rain began to fall in earnest. We took shelter in an art-museum café, ordering water. Lindy got a raspberry pudding to legitimize our stay. A general note I forgot to mention in previous installments: water is not free anywhere—and tap water is not provided at restaurants. If you want it, you must order bottled water, sparkling or still, at a modest fee.

The rain was not so heavy that we couldn’t sit outside under a canopy. When a wind visited briefly, we and other customers fastened inside. After the storm passed, we reversed our direction and headed back, reentering the Old Square from the other side. We had spent two hours outside the Old Square, but it was still only 16:00; We had two and a half hours to go before dinner.

The aesthetic eye was failing, so we were considering returning to the room, then taking a taxi to dinner, though it was an hour’s hike back uphill. We finally decided to relax in the Square and let time flow. Experiences evolved in the natural theater of the world.

The first was a burst of symphonic music. The crowd shifted in a wave around the spot. An entire orchestra of Chinese children around age ten were playing together: violins, violas, bassoon, trumpet, tuba, clarinet, horns, oboes, tenor saxophones, cello, flutes, piccolos, and percussion. I know the instruments because they handed out programs in English. With that many children playing with skill, it was like attending an open-air concert close-up.

The pamphlet said that the performers were from the Ying Wa Primary School of Hong Kong, on their 2018 Symphony Orchestra Europe Tour, which was sponsored by the Hong Kong chapter of the Church of Christ in China. As they performed Peter and the Wolf, parents flocked among them shooting still and videos, making an entertaining scene to watch. There were really two layers to the performance. Peter and the Wolf was the extent of the concert layer; then they swirled and diluted with their parents into the crowd.

Other events were proceeding routinely throughout the square. A young bare-chested man juggled balls and pins in succession. A float of a jinni shot out of an Aladdin’s Lamp for photographs, but the guy might not have had a permit—the police seemed to be issuing him a summons. The giant panda was gathering children for photo ops without harassment.

The metallic men were very mysterious—one was suspended off the top of a shovel he held, the other flew off the back of a motorcycle. There seemed no way that they could be floating, and certainly no human had strength to suspend themselves like that. I considered at first that they were animated statues, but they waved and winked, as people dropped money into boxes beside them. I decided they were real and that maybe they were supported on hidden wires inside their clothes, though neither the shovel nor the motorcycle seemed in position to hold their weight; the shovel wasn’t even on the ground. (I looked online later and read that the “floating man” illusion is created by strategically placed steel rods and plates.)

A group of guys running together and cheering erupted in celebration over a young woman’s pink sneakers. It was good-humored, and the woman was street-smart enough to enjoy the attention without getting embarrassed. She teased right back, though It took a while for them to negotiate a language exchange, as people stopped to watch. Initially it was a matter of interpreting facial expressions and body movements. She was Lithuanian; they were Polish. They had apparently tried inter-intelligibility of Slavic and failed, and defaulted quickly to English. She said, “My sneakers aren’t that special, and you guys are just looking for an excuse to get a lady’s attention.”

They laughed and denied it and avowed that those sneakers were indeed very special, playing off each other lines like stand-up comics. Then they lifted her in the air to examine the shoes more closely and gave her a short spin and ride in the Square. A guy wrote on one of the shoes’ bottoms while she laughed. They observed her leg and midriff tattoos and complimented her on them as well. The scene had formed a gathering eddy by then. They set her back on her feet and laughed as she righted herself. Improv over, they continued in opposite directions.

These events were a preamble to a Chinese man in his mid-twenties, loose black shirt and white pants—he threw down a large metal hoop and circled it dramatically. He walked to his computer and put on light spiritual music, then proceeded to do acrobatic movements in the hoop (the circumference of which he fit like a Robert Fludd drawing). He also made the hoop a reference point on the ground and moved around it in modern-dance moves: twists, bends, high leg kicks, sharp breaks in tempo, leaps, and tumbles. While inside the hoop he used virtually every possibility it afforded, spinning around in it on the ground, then changing his weight so that it turned toward the ground and he was aimed face-down and making circles with different parts of the circumference touching the ground in a moiré-like pattern. He could shift his weight so that the hoop changed position without him losing his position inside it or its motion. The performance was a tour de force, and we were among those who rushed up to put money in his box—five-euro notes in our case. We hung around and talked to him after other conversations dissipated.

He was a trained modern dancer, a t’ai chi adept too, twenty-five years old from Taiwan. He was travelling around the world, doing street performances and auditioning with dance companies. He had been in Europe, South America, Australia, and briefly, he said, the States at Duke University. This was his Prague stop. He cited Merce Cunningham, José Limon, Alvin Ailey, and Pina Bausch, the late German female choreographer whom I consider the top of the art. I took down his name, Shaoyang, and gave him my card. I offered to show my video of him to people in the States and try to set up something in New York or the Bay Area. He promised to email me and hasn’t. I feel privileged to have seen him. This wasn’t Cirque du Soleil; it was avant-garde choreography in Prague’s Stare Miaso, so much more special.

Before we left the Square, Shaoyang did a second performance, this one shirtless, as a little boy, possibly Roma, stood close and met his gaze. I was ready this time and videoed it at length on my iPhone: three minutes, sixteen seconds. I don’t have the skills to send by email or I’d attach (it’s too large a file). I will try posting to Facebook.

The hours melted away amid these events; it was 17:50. We set out for our reservation at the restaurant, a vegetarian place called Lehka Hlava (Clear Head). It was recommended by the same friend who gave us the Airbnb. The address at Boršov 2 seemed straightforward enough, and the iPhone GPS showed it to be a twelve-minute walk from where we stood. The street names on the screen matched the street signs along the route, and both distance and time till arrival gradually went down. Then suddenly, as in Budapest, the program lost its bearings and we were much farther away from our destination than when we started. I noticed that the GPS had also changed the destination address to Republiky 50. It did so every time I went back and refused to take Boršov 2. It was now 18:15, and I headed to a row of cabs.

A streets sign posted throughout Prague warned of the “Prague cab ride.” English text showed the cities of the world in descending order of price to the airport—I don’t remember the amounts. At the top is Prague, followed by places like New York, London, Hong Kong, etc. But that is only the “Prague cab ride.” At the bottom of the list is what a cab to the Prague airport should cost.

We had already taken a “Prague cab ride” in Warsaw, so I was wary as I approached the taxi cluster, discussing the conflicting addresses with a young cabbie who stepped out of the row of chatting colleagues. He looked affable and honest and promised he could get us to the restaurant in ten minutes. Wait a second!  How do you even know which is the correct address? He didn’t speak enough English for resolving the ambiguity. He said, “Boršov 2,” and all but insisted we enter his cab. I told we didn’t have crowns; he said he would accept a credit card or euros.

What followed was a “Prague cab ride,” and it was wild. He went in and out of streets, screeching over curbs, bouncing on cobblestones. He zoomed along the Vltava, past the bridges where we had walked, reentered the old city streets and continued to weave a maze in and out of narrow lanes, routinely going over curves. When traffic caused him to stop,  I asked how much longer, and he said the same thing as when we started, “Ten minutes.” There was nothing to do but stay calm and hope that this was no worse than a “Prague cab ride.”

After another ten minutes he stopped on at a corner and asked us to get out, pointing down a narrow cobblestone lane. I understood that his cab wouldn’t fit and this was the end of the ride. When Lindy objected to being left at a place other than our destination, he got angry, slamming his hand against the steering wheel and pulling back onto the street with a jerk, apparently intending to drive on the sidewalk or go around the block to prove his point. I said sharply that we would get out here and I took out my wallet and asked how much.

“Fifteen euros.”

Lindy had been scared throughout the ride and was vocal that we were being scammed. She talked in his hearing range. From his angry words, I got that this insult was the last straw; he was furious at her for doubting his honesty and said so, indicating something about running down pedestrians to satisfy her. Bad scene.

I don’t know if fifteen euros was a fair price, given the meandering route, road construction, and with the inner square inaccessible by car. Maybe he planned a “Prague cab ride” from the get-go; maybe he was aggravated and getting revenge. I gave him a twenty-euro note, got back five, and we walked down the lane. Luckily Lehka Hlava was a great restaurant and very pretty inside, a Mexican lizard painted on the curve of the ceiling. Its menu would hold its own in Berkeley or SoHo, and we had seitan and tofu dishes replicating Czech specialties without the meat.

After the meal, one of the women at the front called us a cab and explained how to avoid getting scammed in the future. She gave us a number like 14014 for a dispatched cab that had to record its pickup and delivery sites and the fee charged.

We walked to the top of the lane and got a ride all the way back to Krkonošská—a longer distance than the earlier cab ride—for ten euros. The driver didn’t take credit cards, but I was able to put the amount together in euros from what I had left: the five and coins, adding as a tip my remaining coins for his cheerfulness and honesty.

We left at eight the next morning for Berlin, another three-to-four-hour drive. It proved an easy coast. Sunday helped because a long single lane forced by road construction in the northern Czech Republic slowed but did not stop traffic. The border with Germany was marked by a sign and then a tunnel. Soon after, we got a quick unplanned tour of Dresden, rebuilt after World War II. Passing through the center to another road was the only time in the route that we were off a major highway.

Our apartment was part of a nonsimultaneous home exchange with a young artist couple, Corrinna and Marko, who had stayed in Maine last summer. They were on vacation in Italy, and had left the key for us at a small market on their block, Heim Getränke. The GPS brought us quickly to Kienitzer Straße, just off a major thoroughfare, Karl-Marx Straße. AA few minutes after noon, we parked at the top of the street and found the shop at number 6. After being handed an envelope with keys, we walked up the block.

The sort of heat that we hadn’t experienced yet on the trip—more like rain, wind, and cold—reminded me of sweltering Augusts in New York City. In addition, Corrinna and Marko’s flat was five flights and five landings up with no lift. It was a chore for me to get the suitcases up in phases. The apartment itself was worth it, spacious and decorated creatively and with the subtle aesthetic and political allusions of two Berlin artists.

Our neighborhood was called Neukölin—transitional, edgy, Turkish and Arabic, young, loud. After we got our stuff in, I walked Karl-Marx Straße for forty-five minutes, back and forth, finally finding an ATM. There were lots of black headscarves, burkas, Syrian restaurants, Middle Eastern teens hanging out, hookah bars and street cafés (probably cannabis rather than opium) with mostly young men socializing while vaping. The scene was youthful as well as Middle Eastern: loud with music and shouting, hiply graffiti-ed and postered walls and, of course, on public statues too.

This was Berlin, I reminded myself, and Berlin had always been at the edge: the rich Weimar counterculture, cauldron of Nazi legions, site of the Allied airlift, JFK’s Cold War rallying cry, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” The Berlin wall dividing the city between the Communist East and Capitalist West was built by the GDR in 1961 and came down three years before our first visit in 1993.

We needed to return the car to the Avis facility at Schonefeld airport. I was up for the adventure on my own, and Lindy was happy to rest. It was 90 degrees and the air resembled steam. I got instructions on how to get back from Schonefeld from a woman on the second floor, Katarina, Corrinna and Marko’s best friend in the building.

Putting Schonefeld in the GPS, I inadvertently entered the town of Schonefeld Süd. It was a twenty-minute drive, which meant I had to abort suddenly. I shut off the GPS and followed German signs for the airport. The airplane pictograph was my compass.

I arrived at the parking lot where we had been given the Leon seventeen days earlier in chilly rain. The sight completed our rental-car circle—almost 3000 kilometers—and reassured me I was in the right place. But the car didn’t go back in its corral. German signs told all car rentals to enter the parking structure, which I did mainly because I couldn’t think of a quick alternative. I took an entry ticket, which raised the gate. I was happy to see an immediate second gate for rental cars. Inserting the ticket opened it and took me out of the garage sector. I left the keys and the car. Someone else could have it. It would be glad never to cross Slovakia again.              

I walked back to the airport and tried to work a ticket machine for the bus. There was no English, so I had to guess, never a great idea when a credit card has been inserted. I produced a lot of activity and the extrusion of a small cardboard slip. I suspected that it wasn’t a ticket and it wasn’t. An impatient taxi dispatcher confirmed. I hoped I hadn’t been charged and wondered how to get a ticket. He shrugged and walked away.               

My bus, X-7, pulled up. I got in line and tried to pay the driver with euros. He shook his head. I tentatively held up the cardboard slip, but he didn’t want to see it. He said “Nein“ to the question: “English?“ then talked at great length in German. I was starting to turn and leave the bus when the man boarding behind me said, “He is telling you to get on and pay at the U-Bahn.“ I took a seat in the back.               

The X-7 had only had one stop in its repertoire. It passed through various suburbs and ended up ten minutes later at the Rubow station, the last stop on our Karl-Marx Straße U-Bahn 6 line. My translator on the bus pointed out the entrance to the U-bahn diagonally across the street. Stairs led straight down to a platform and tracks and I still had no ticket. The only option in sight was the newstand, but it was the right one. To the question of “English?“ the vendor gave the same English answer I heard in every country (other than a shake of the head), “A bit.“ As advised, I bought a transit four-pack for nine euros.

I boarded a train and was relieved when the first stop matched my map. It was nine more stops to Karl-Marx Straße. I rode as if back in New York with a German New Wave vibe—Lou Reed singing, “In Berlin, by the wall / you were five foot ten inches tall…”

In fact, I loved being here, the people on the train: spiffy kids, scruffy men, women with head scarves, lilts and pitches of German phonemes from the non-Latin side of my Anglo lexicon.

I emerged like a prairie dog from its tunnel into the Karl-Marx Straße melee beside a Syrian restuarant.

When Lindy and I went out to find a place for dinner, I’d like to say that we stopped at a Syrian place, but carcasses hanging from hooks with flies and being sliced by bearded men with long knives was a bit too real for actual dining. We picked a courtyard patio and had a sedate German meal.

The night was barely cooling after the scorcher, people hanging in the street for its moving air, men in undershirts. One guy on our block was beating a metal pole against his metal railing and screaming in German. The cries were both plaintive and bellicose, ambient through the lesser din. The Nazi overlay to German will never quite vanish for a Jewish war baby, but I go toward them, not away.

The flavor of a place is not negotiable, and I’d rather be in the mix than at a downtown hotel.

I have been flagging a bit on this journal. A trip journal is driven by a narrative of a trip, so various abstruse things get included (see William Least Heat Moon as the poster boy for that), stuff that one wouldn’t write about otherwise, making some of it tedious and forced—a writing exercise with rules.

The trip began for me with a rush of energy and newness, but the road works its own transformation and deepens experience outside of a trip journal’s range. Less reportage, more internalization. The outsider loses his edge. Social events that don’t fit the genre add to the mismatch, as situations waver between the reportable and the private. I have debated whether to report on conversations when participants did not realize I was going to put them online. It’s potentially a violation of ethics. Occasionally I have been asked remove names or exchanges from trip journals—and I have.

In addition, the sheer heat of Berlin drains energy from writing. Trooping up five double flights each is also exhausting.

It is wonderful to be here, and I will write a separate entry after we leave, pulling together the final five days. The account developing in my head already feels more like a poem than a story: riding with the crowds on the U-bahn, the system’s frequently-spaced yellow cars, pushing a button or moving a lever to open the doors at our stop (the husky German men who rushed to extricate a young woman in a chador with a large baby carriage and two toddlers from the doors’ surprisingly unforgiving force), crossing the platform many times from the U7 to the U6 (and vice versa) at Mehringdamme, querying pedestrians on the street and in the stations for directions and having them walk and talk English with us, viewing a contemporary-art museum for an afternoon (lasers, installations, photographs, and an hundred-fifty-year history of Berlin art), attending a sound installation at a Wedding District gallery (an alpha-wave reverberation to accompany the setting of the Sun), walking through the dense Turkish Market along the Lendwehrkanal with an American Facebook friend (she lives in Berlin) and its intense aromas of red, yellow, and orange spices, fish on ice, mint and other leaves, vendors singing in Turkish, the bright colors of patterns on fabrics and carpets.

A Turkish vendor in the U-bahn asked where we were from

Me: “The States”

Him: “What about Trump?”

[Lindy: thumb down]

Him: “I think he’s funny. He makes me laugh.”

Yet another vote for entertainment value. Guy’s not in the electorate, but his fellow goofballs are.

I did a bad job matching the U-bahn map to the location of the art museum and got us two kilometers away when there were closer stops. We finally sprung for a cab. The guy was en route to a radio call, but Old Jacobstrasse 142 was on his way, so he summoned us in. I sat in the front, and he gave a lesson about new and old version of the street having to do with the transition from divided to whole Berlin. The fee was five euros and change. I gave him a note and held out my hand of coins for his interpretation. He fussed with them for about ten seconds before saying, “Not so.”

I loved the phrase and said it back with a laugh, as I pulled out a different bill. “Not so.”

“Not so,” he repeated and joined me laughing. Then we said it together, as I waved goodbye.

Our apartment windows are wide open all the time for any cross-breeze, and the street provides music like something composed by John Cage: continual German and Turkish voices, lots of children (cries at different pitches, sonorous and shrill, word-formation babble like clucking chicks from the kindergarten down the block, yelps of delight and confrontation from the general scene), piercing tone-shifting sirens (police and ambulances but not the SS), crows calling, dogs barking (some gruff, some whiney; now a dog fight, owners adjudicating in a clinch of German), a lone horn playing familiar pop tunes for well over an hour, the chimes of the nearby church, glass smashing near the liquor store, fossil-fuel acceleration and percussion of tires waxing and waning, metallic clangs of nearby construction (a intermittent hollow pounding that suggests the beginning of a bongo rhythm), car horns, the plangent rhythmic cooing of doves, a more distant and mournful trumpet probing its own timber, screeches of car radios (rap that sounds initially like machinery from the construction site), a thrashing sound like a mechanical sneeze, deafening motorcycle crescendo, a drill, a car door, the rumble of a truck, a young boy’s sweet voice calling, “Omar, eiya Omar,” diffuse metallic hammering, the thunder of a street sweeper, an occasional clink or light stick sound, too many sounds at once short-circuiting in drones, Omar voice now calling, “Hallo, hallo.”

We used July 30th to rest—found the nearby supermarket for some food (it had an organic section). We cooked in the apartment malgré an electric stove that turned on only sometimes and oils and vinegars in lovely but unlabelled bottles (go by color and smell). No matter—the lesson is how little you need when it comes down to it. Much less than this. Most of the planet lives on less.

July 31-August 5

The first day in downtown Berlin we adopted tourist status. With a big city and blank agenda, the Hop on/Hop Off bus was the easiest, least expensive entrée, especially in the heat. We didn’t want to walk around or go on a walking tour. We began with the U-bahn, our local stop Karl-Marx Straße on the 7 line. I guessed that we could change at Mehringdamme to the 6 and go into the heart of the city. That worked as drawn up. It was only four or five stops to Mehringdamme, a walk across the platform, and then another five or six stops to Friedrichstraße, not far from the Brandenburg Gate. Buses no doubt circled there.

Berlin trains are promptly timed—one per five or so minutes. They ae crowded but full of interesting people.

You never know where you are going to emerge your first time at any new stop of a subway.. Friedrichstraße looked about eighty percent like New York’s Madison Avenue and otherwise like an outdoor shopping mall—very upscale, mostly national brand stores. Gauging the gradient of activity and general cues, I picked a direction to walk, left out of the station. A woman stood on the next block, singing opera and hitting very high notes. From the station I thought it was a recording. I don’t think I ever saw an opera busker before. We continued a few blocks, but it was not walking weather—dripped sweat freely. I saw lots of city buses but no tourist ones.

At that moment a young woman in her thirties catching up beside us began conversing in German, realized quickly and switched to fluent English. “Horrible, isn’t it? This is the climate change we’ve been dreading. Berlin has been hot since April, and this week is the total pits. Where are you from?”

She had spent a recent year living in Ukiah, California, and told us we were walking in a good direction for the tourist bus, “though who would know? I never take one!” We continued walking together, chatting. After about five minutes, we reached a large avenue; she looked left and then right and said, “Go right. The Brandenburg gate is that way. You’d think I’d know by now without looking. I only grew up here.”

In one block to the right we found a stop for the Hop On/Hop Off, bought a two-day pass (26 euros), and waited for the next doubledecker.

Sitting up high in the sun was pleasant for a while in the motion-created breeze. The bus’s circuit comprised nineteen stops in about two hours as we wove back and forth between the former East and West Berlin, a canned tape telling us about museums, large statues from various centuries, fountains, government buildings, company headquarters,  former SS headquarters, the train station, prime minister’s office, the original fishing village (in the Eastern sector), honorary sections of the wall (deteriorating “under tourist woodpeckers,” the voice said), the tall rotating radio tower and viewing port (pride of the GDR), Checkpoint Charlie (jazzed up in dramatic reenactment of the days of the wall so that it was like looking down at a movie set), sentinet-like sections of the wall itself, the Canal full of kayaks and swans, across the Spree River grand bridges. Berlin was booming, towering cranes everywhere, not just on our own block

It was hard to know where to hop off for our late lunch. We waited too long in hopes of hitting the Turkish Market and missed rows of compatible restaurants in Charlottenburg. Our goal of Alexanderplatz was a misjudgment: a non-consumer commercial district. That meant staying on the bus four additional stops and another half hour long until we got to a thoroughfare of indifferent cafés. It was now 4:30, and most of them were closed. We tried one that had an open bar. They weren’t serving, but a kind maitre d’ assessing two heat-wilted Americans got the requested sandwiches from the menu out of the kitchen: avocado and salted Norwegian salmon.

We mainly wanted to get back to the apartment and await evening cool. The Branderburg Gate U-bahn was the closest, but that meant going one stop to meet the 6 line. We arrived at Friedrichstraße to find a different landscape from the one at which we exited and no U-bahn 6—lots of other U-bahns and S-bahns but an exhaustive search of station lists and overhead signs did not produce mention of a 6. Yet there had to be one. We had taken it to Friedrichstraße.

I suggested leaving the station and looking on the street, especially as our ticket was good for reentering. An older transit worker smoking on the stairs—I hardly cared about his ambient air quality as we puzzled over my map together—did not speak English but was determined to help us. Sign language worked. We had to walk a block away to a different station to get the 6: take the  6 to Mehringdamme, change to the 7. Emerge into meat smoke and hookah bars of Karl-Marx Straße.

Our goal the second day was the Berlinsche Galerie Museum für Moderne Kunst at 142 Jakobstraße. I should have called the museum for the correct stop but relied on my mental overlay of a subway map on a street map. We switched from U-bahn 6 to U-bahn  7 and then took U-bahn 1 to get to what I thought was the general area. But we were actually within walking distance on the 7 line. The 1 took us two kilometers away. After a long diagnosis by a generous bike messenger on his cell led to the conclusion that it was too far to walk and we would have to retrace out steps, we grabbed a passing cab. He deposited us in front of a modern building with an interesting sidewalk of alphabetical letters in block-like mosaics.

The museum’s ground floor was devoted to contemporary work and current exhibits. The upper floor was a retrospective of Berlin art from 1870. We spent most of our time in the contemporary works.

The exhibit in the opening vestibule could pass as art rather than science insofar as it was a metaphorical demonstration of quantum entanglement by two lasers triggering each other as they share a single intense undulating red and yellow beam. A warning sign confirmed that it would not be good to get in its way.

The tour de force of the ground floor was an exhibit of work by a photographer I had not heard of. Born in Sibu, Romania, in 1972, Loredana Nemes fled the Communist regime at fourteen, receiving asylum in Aachen, Germany, learning the language and studying mathematics before switching careers to photography. During that period she also spent time in Iran. All three countries influenced her eye. She moved to Berlin in 2001 with a goal of establishing herself there. The show, Gier Angst Liebe (“Grief Fear Love”) was the culmination of a long back-and-forth courtship between her and the Museum and a breakthrough for both.

Nemes’ work is technically and thematically varied. Before I read her bio, I spent a long time looking at slow-motion images of birds (mainly their open wings) descending in clusters into water. Nemes created the impression of layered strokes with her lens so that I wondered if I was looking at paintings. The grain and texture in the white of the birds and the black of the medium into which they were splashing hung between oil and ink. One photograph was especially painting-like: a chaotic white spill on black. Another was all black medium, yet with strokes that dramatically set off its neighbors with their white eddies.

The photos were remarkably similar to videos I took with my cell phone a few years ago of gulls in Camden, Maine. I threw bread crumbs in the water of the harbor and filmed the gulls in slow motion, allowing one to see the spiral shapes imbedded in the swinging arcs of their wings. Mine was random and in motion; Nemes, by contrast, picked precise moments when particular shapes formed and explored them in depth.

I walked this series of about fifteen photographs several times in each direction and saw the images differently, both singly and in their flipbook-like sequence, each time past.

The opposite wall of that large room and a whole smaller adjoining room exhibited varied black-and-white portraits of people, usually pairs of people and with two slightly different images set next to each other with a small gap, so the twinning was doubled and each work had a slightly stereoptic effect, also resembling the way that images move a hair in iPhone renditions.

Nemes’ subjects ran the gamut of modernity, pop and formal both; her subjects included young, old; cultured, working-class; adults, teens in teen milieus (sports regalia, piercings) and teens in compliance with their parents pictured alongside. None of her subjects was beautiful in a “model” sense, but Nemes’ probing and loving treatment brought out the distinctive character in each person that made him or her more beautiful (and individual) than synthetically molded and made-up models. Some were marginally ugly or grotesque but never at Diane Arbus’ level.

I walked this exhibit also several times and felt as though I got to know myself and what I looked like better by getting to know the gathering of Nemes subjects. The exhibit was so different from the birds that my first time through, before I read the caption, I assumed it was a different photographer.

By the time I looked at Nemes’ third exhibit (also in its own room), I was “onto” her and made an educated guess before I hit the English captions. It was a different genre from the other two. Hidden in a burka, Nemes captured the culture of Turkish men in the clubs and cafés of Neukölin. It was the female gaze at men looking at a woman they couldn’t see, and it gave a different twist to the male gaze that I wrote of earlier in this journal (per Malmo, Sweden). Many of the photographs were fuzzy, indicating either the method of imaging or the sense of a spy-cam.

Even after these, I looked at photographs in a fourth room and was sure that they were not Nemes until I read the text on the wall. These were images of partial anatomies—lips, chests, arms—in search of bodies. Nemes wrote a handout for the series entitled “Ocna. Closer Scrutiny.” A couple of pages long, it opened (in translation), “There are bodies which can think themselves straight, and days so crooked that one might step out of them with a hunch. And then a cherry pit comes along and saves the day into temporary eternity by spitting itself before the feet of a dream. The latter jerks, rubs an eye and weeps.”

Later in the piece she wrote, “Today I threw myself into the river again and everything felt free. My wooden arms floated on the waving water and leaves grew out of the smooth fingers. Also, the stammer drifted out of the mouth, swam a few laps and went on shore.”

The relationship between words and images was more seminal for their indirectness.  Loredana Nemes is a great, little-known artist. Though the internet is more bereft of her work than it should be, you can learn something from a search. She reminds me a bit of my late friend, photographer Lynne Cohen. Nemes varied her topics more than Lynne, who stuck mostly to domestic and industrial landscapes, but the tone struck is similar

I spent time at several other exhibits on the first floor but won’t write of all of them. I walked in one room prepared by funk installation artists Edward and Nancy Reddin Keinholz: an LA art opening. All of the guests were giant installations: manikins, dolls. Their faces were masks, most of them resembling gas masks qua elephant men. Their chests bore square machines that looked like seismographs that were registering their thoughts, speech, and opinions. On the walls, the paintings they were viewing were grotesque montages or fragments, suggesting disasters, diseases, accidents, atavisms. They weren’t paintings so much as pastiches and parodies of art. At the entryway was a dried-out punch-bowl beside dried-out cocktail glasses, all of which once held libation and lemons. A tape played a light background noise of conversations recorded at actual LA openings.

The power of the exhibit was created by oneself walking among dolls of human height and look as if they were real people. It gave a slightly surreal sense. You experienced yourself in such a perfectly-replicated scaled fake environment that your own looking and breathing reality began to feel strange and anomalous. It was a fairy tale gone wrong, a moment frozen in time and eroding (Stephen King captured a similar horror in The Langoliers). I liked taking a step back while in the room, regaining my own identity and autonomy, and looking at real people standing among installation people, staring at the whole as if I were at a real art opening s that it didn’t entirely matter who was alive and who was a doll. It was Reddin Keinholzs’ critique of the critics, that the event was artificial and innately cynical at root.

The other place on the ground floor where I put in substantial time was the movie room, mainly after Lindy and I took a break for juice and German desserts on the patio. A yellowjacket, too fond of her raspberry yogurt cake, caught itself between her fingers. She got stung and went to the bathroom to hold it under cold water. She came back with a swollen finger.

It didn’t occur to me until I had made numerous trips to the movie room that I was looking at different South American documentaries, not one film at different parts. In my mind I had them all linked in a single meta-movie. They had English subtitles. The topics included people who lived off collecting from garbage heaps (their culture and politics), mercury miners and their culture and leaders, and criminals interviewed in jail about their crimes. The latter was the most powerful and moving.

The prison set-up was striking. The questioner was invisible. The imprisoned man wore not just a disguise but an elaborate mask as if at a Mardi Gras parade, adding to the existential drama and changing the deeper meaning of the questions. One street robber and murderer wore what looked like a faceless ostrich head, adding an odd absurdity to the seriousness of the crimes he had committed. The same questions, asked at different points in the sequence, elicited slightly different answers each time: “Why did you commit your crime?” “Are you sorry?” “What did it feel like?”

Reponses to the latter included: “Nothing.” “A game.” “It was my job. I liked having no boss.”

“Did you care for your victim?”

“No, it was the way we got money. I beat or choked them until they passed out. Then I took what I wanted.”

“Are you sorry?”

“No.”

“What have you learned in prison?”

The mining film began with an unmoving camera Andy Warhol-like focused on machines moving dirt at a mine. This single shot lasted for maybe five minutes as only the large steam-shovels and dump trucks moved. Then sound was added, primarily the noise of the engines. After a cut, the camera had moved up close.

If this was part of the mercury-mining film—I didn’t watch that part long enough to find out—it progressed to long lines of miners winding up underground tunnels in the dark, each with a head lamp, as one of them talked about the degrees of mercury poisoning.

The hundred-fifty-year retrospective upstairs included political and pop cartoons, abstract expressionist canvasses, tiny amulet-faces made by a painter in a hospital, realistic portraits of prominent people, a commissioned series of five paintings for a private pre-War Jewish home showing different dances of the soul in a body, photographs of Berlin after World War II (bombed buildings and streets stripped as naked as animals after a butcher), many genres of graphic art, small statues, etc. It required more than the part of a day we gave it. One distinctive thing: the museum had an interesting presentation of small relief sculptures of some paintings, replicating their elements as if on a colored bar graph.

After we had viewed all we were capable of, we discovered that we were not far from a U-bahn station—we could walk to in twenty minutes. That was when I realized my mapping mistake. The path to the station took us along a meandering residential street, on lanes between buildings, and finally to busy Kochstraße. We continue past the station and looked at the Checkpoint Charlie theater where American soldiers, or more likely actors playing American soldiers, stood at the old hut and got photographed by people as they pretended to look at documents.

An exhibit where the wall used to be had tributes and accounts of mostly failed attempts to escape East Berlin to the West. Each of these was heart-breaking in its near miss and startling in the brutality of the GDR troops who shot like escapees like target practice, then let bodies lie in no man’s land.

We used the second day on our bus ticket to view the transition from East to West again. When we were in Germany in 1993, East Berlin looked like a slum, a no man’s land beside the West. Now it was hard to tell difference. In some ways, the East was more modern, but it was also more conservative with fewer refugees—no reason to hide or feign any longer. We got off at Friedrichstraße and took the 6-7 combination back to Karl-Marx Straße.

We purposely lay low for much of the next 90-degree day, planning to go to a sound installation qua experimental-music concert at night. We took the U6 much farther towards Tegel than we had, exiting at Leopoldplatz in a nondescript urban neighborhood of spacious streets, mainly big stores, interesting graffiti on everything from stoops and benches to the usual walls. It took a while to find Gallery Wedding because the opposite sides of the street had different numbering systems and we were walking on the side starting at 1 and going up very slowly when the gallery was at 146-7, right across the street. Even-odd on the same side was a tipoff that something was off, so I suggested crossing the street. A laser-like light was shining inside the gallery, but no one was being allowed in until 19:57, exactly one hour before sunset. The performance was to last an hour, ending with the sun setting.

Mostly young people crowded in and sat mostly on the radiators and floor. A fortyish “DJ”, apparently Ricardo Carioba, the announced headliner, sat a synthesizer and began playing. The room was dark; the windows were tinted; one was open to the sun. The music was you might imagine the solar wind sounds like. Carioba worked the dials furiously, but the outcome was relatively unvaried, rising and sinking and whistling. It also sounded like crickets but not crickets by themselves: crickets in a choir with synthetic electricity. I liked it. It resonated with my skeleton and brain and helped me sink into a contemplative state.

About seventy people sat along the walls and on the floor of Gallery Wedding at the start, but when the sun finally set, maybe thirty jad lasted.

It seemed a little strange when Carioba got a huge applause, walked to the center of the room, bowed, and give both thumbs up. It wasn’t that he hadn’t done anything; he had worked his butt off at the synthesizer. It was more that I had no yardstick to tell the difference between his composition and actual crickets or the solar wind or, for that matter, digeridoos. I don’t even know if the work was composed or improvised. It didn’t matter because it’s not often that the sun sets inside an art installation.

Friday we planned to meet my Facebook friend Maya at the Turkish Market. Its U-bahn station was really close to our house: two U7 stops to Hermanplatz, a change to U8 and one stop to Schonleinstrasse. Exit the station at Maybachufer by the canal and market. Maya would be meeting us at the top of the stairs.

I didn’t know her age (45, it turned out), job (teaching English online), or nationality (American, born in Montana, raised in New Guinea by hippies turned born-again missionary parents, then college at USC), or how she became a Facebook post (she thought it was some post of mine that had gotten shared and she liked). Once she read on Facebook that we were coming to Berlin, she offered to hang out, but online clients kept getting in the way. She finally set aside Friday from 11 a.m. till the evening.

Maya had emailed that the market was a fine place to meet but forewarned that it was not as special as “Turkish Market” sounded. She was right. It was a particularly large farmers’ market resembling a Mexican mercado in its range of goods and colorfulness and scents. I wished that I could have taken more time, sampled spices, picked out some of the fruits and vegetables I had never heard of, had a slice of watermelon, bought some zigzig-colored Turkish socks. But we were fly-overs, talking and exchanging histories.

Maya’s lifestyle was driven by a contemporary politics. She had wanted out of the States early, feeling from watching the LA riots that things were only going to get worse. Berlin attracted her the most, but she first lived in Budapest for three years and commuted from there to teaching jobs in Austria. A wanderer and seeker, she was settled now, having just married a German musician.

She mentioned that she was not aware initially that we were the parents of Miranda July, but she knew it by the time we walked. Born one year before Miranda, she identified with her as a peer and a related sensibility. She had started out wanting to be a literary writer or artist herself but had been captivated by journeying and a slightly apocalyptic sense of the world that had her more ducking under waves than trying to dazzle and ride them. For instance, she had spent some time as part of an official couch-surfing group, going with others from one funky habitat after another, making ends meet by teaching English.

We were looking for a place to eat, and nothing was working out. The market was lacking its usual coterie of lunch vendors, and many of the restaurants along the canal were closed. It may have been tourist season in Europe, but restauranteurs were tourists elsewhere. We got so thirsty that we stopped and bought fresh-squeezed drinks from a Turkish vendor. I was tempted by orange and apple but chose mulberry juice, a cold dark red pour from a pitcher into a plastic bottle handed to me. I began sipping the rich infusion.  Then a small incident happened that speaks for itself.

We were walking across the bridge over the canal, and I didn’t see a speeding municipal truck coming around the corner to my left. I continued into the street—there was no light, just a crosswalk. Maya and Lindy grabbed me and pulled me back just in time. Lindy said, “You almost just got killed. We saved your life.”

I am a careful street-crosser and have never had a close call like that. The heat made everything a bit light-headed, plus there were pedestrians entering the crosswalk from the other side and I had taken my cue from them and had not looked to the left. Crosswalks here are effectively optional from the drivers’ side. The truck had no stopping margin at its speed. Maya said simply, “That was crazy!”

In an alternate reality, my body was lying on the street and I was hovering over it, wondering what happened. Then this reality continued.
            Harvard UFO researcher John Mack was not so fortunate in September 2004 when he walking alone en route to give an evening lecture at a T.E. Lawrence Society-sponsored coference in London, England—no one to pull him back from walking into a left-cornering car being driven drunk.

We finally settled on one of the few open restaurants—Vietnamese. We ordered papaya and rice-noodle lime-juice salads. Afterwards we walked the market a second time, as Maya proposed we find a way out of the heat for the afternoon. Her three choices were the Pergamon Museum, an island in the park, or a boat ride. We debated the attractiveness of each and finally went with Lindy’s desire to get into a Spree River breeze.

The journey to the water was more elaborate than long. We walked to a different U-bahn, took it some distance, then changed trains, sat out a fifteen-minute delay on an el section, crossed a high bridge with a wonderful but slightly scary view given the ricketiness of the structure, and walked through construction to get to a buried U-bahn station. I didn’t have to navigate where we were any longer. I just followed Maya.

Soon after we exited, we saw a discount boat-ticket stand, bought three rides, and hurried to the dock. For the next hour we sat on the river as a soft-spoken man, narrating alternately in English and German, identified buildings and gave history. The breeze wasn’t much, and the sun beat down. I I sat in the emptier part of the boat in the sun with a Brooklyn Nets hat on, while Maya and Lindy took most of the ride in the shade. I met some German and Slovenian fans.

As I looked for the old division between East and West, the guide pointed out remaining GDR institutional apartments and a new building wave sweeping across East Berlin. Where the wall reached the water, memorial markings waterside remembered victims of attempted escapes. Since the river ran through both East and West, the wall crossed it, and there had been extra underwater gating, the guide said, to prevent scuba escapes. A strange sensibility that dominates borders. Once upon a time Neanderthal and Cro Magnon roamed wall-less and species-less.

Maya got off the U-bahn at the Turkish Market to reclaim her bike. We hugged her goodbye as the train came to a stop, a friend of a day.

We lay low on August 4, our last day traveling in the Old World. We ventured out for lunch, thinking to go to an organic café we had passed on one of our evening walks. It turned out to be a grocery store, so we chanced one of the hanging-meat establishments, this one Turkish. We ordered safely: lentil soup and Turkish pizza. The pizza looked like more of a meal in the menu picture, but it was just a big slice of flavored dough that came with a cup of liquid yogurt puffing over the side like whipped cream.

We set out early evening on an outing to a dance concert at an avant-garde space in a remote part of Berlin: U-bahn 7 to Mehringdamme, U-bahn 6 to Oranienburger Tor. The tram from there to Kastanienallee was the hardest part. Many trams crisscrossed where we got off the train, and it took two wrong platforms to find the right one.

Maya had said we could walk to Kastanienallee 79 from the U-bahn stop, but as the tram wound around corners and performed a labyrinth for twenty minutes, that looked improbable. These were much more upscale neighborhoods than where we were staying. They looked like the nicest sections of renovated Brooklyn.

Dock 11 was reached through a small alley and a courtyard. We were probably the only people there over thirty. Everyone else was bounding around like hares. Lindy’s necklace broke while we waited on line to enter, and numerous young people scrambled around, accomplishing recovering just about every tiny bead from the pavement. Before entering the space, everyone got to cool off by removing shoes (and socks) standing in a large pail of ice water. It was freezing and the level of bluish liquid (herbs?) reached my knees. As we left the dip, we were offered a clinch of rosemary sprigs to smell. A young woman at the entrance to the space dried each person’s feet with a towel. What I had thought first was a foot-cleansing to protect the floor was a cooling ritual. Most people, not I, put their shoes back on right afterwards.

The performance was young and amateur but interesting: about ten dancers. There wasn’t a distinction between what was dance and what were everyday movements, so people loitered on the stage, stumbled, tripped, dodged falling parts of the set, made short speeches in English, appeared to fix things or get in the way. Yet it was apparently all choreographed, and some of it was too brilliant to be improvised, but who knows? A high-energy series of interactions recalled Contact Improvisation and could have been all or none of it adlibbed.

Dancers carried each other or tumbled over each other. At one point, two young women jitterbugged frenetically, mirroring each other’s moves One dancer’s head was covered a skiing face mask. After a while, still wearing the mask, he went and played a synthesizer that sounded a bit like the sunset concert of the earlier night. The avant-garde Berlin aria was everywhere and had replaced the death rites of the Third Reich as if nourished by the macabre improvs of Nazi soldiers and their Stasi successors.

At intermission, all the dancers came into the audience, waved fans, and sprayed everyone directly with mint water. Berlin’s heat wave had gotten included in the dance.

We had a worrisome 40-minute wait for the Number 12 tram as the sky darkened—we needed time to get ready for the morning. Then a passenger on the tram suggested using the earlier Natural History Museum stop for U-bahn 6. We held our breath until we reached the tracks and saw a 6 marked Rudow.

August 5, it took 24 hours to get home. The journey started at 6:30 a.m. with closing the windows, locking the door, and putting the flat keys in the mailbox. The day was bookended by two cab rides totaling an hour. Eleven hours were spent waiting in four airports (Berlin, Copenhagen, Reykjavik, and Boston, the latter for the bus to Portland). Ten hours were spent on three planes: Norwegian Air from Berlin to Copenhagen (1 hour), Icelandair from Copenhagen to Reykjavik (3.5 hours), a huge Icelandair jet from Reykjavik to Boston (5.5 hours). The best part of the day was a dinner at Keflavik Airport, Icelandic smoked salmon and carrot-ginger juice. Looking at Iceland’s geological landscape from the sky, I wished we had actually spent some time in Iceland as we did in 2006.

Two hours were spent on the bus from Boston to Portland. Our last cab driver was a pro-Trump Sudanese man who gave a bit heavy of a sermon for a day without sleep. He wanted to make America as great again as it was when he came fifteen years ago.

A couple of hours out of Reykjavik, Flight 1633 to Boston passed over the bottom tip of Greenland. The clouds had briefly cleared, and I saw that stunning vista of mountains, glaciers, and melting ice. I don’t mean this in a climate-change sense—I mean it in the sense of the Oracle at Delphi which speaks not in facts  but riddles. The glaciers speak to Trump’s America and a world on fire, “Bide well, fellow beings. We have a journey together yet untaken. It will be most elucidating for both of us.” I will close by giving you a glimpse from the air.

2025 Afterword

I didn’t think that the 2018 Europe Trip would be our last trip abroad at the time. We imagined Greece and Portugal. At this point, those look unlikely. First COVID-19 (whose seeds were being covertly planted and whose shadow cast no shadow)  intervened, and it isn’t just the virus—though the virus has not fully mutated yet—it was also a steep jump in prices following the pandemic as if tourism exiting in 2018 through the back door confronted 2022 with only front doors. That has been followed by a revival of the “ugly American,” meaning various factions abroad favoring any American for collateral damage. The alertness level required has increased at the expense of the relaxation level. Poor people can’t afford routine tourist travel anymore. Poor noncitizens, and even rich ones, chance not being allowed back in; even some rich naturalized citizens are at risk—false crimes can be pinned on them. Some rich people I know fear getting kidnapped for ransom pretty much anywhere in Eurasia. The mood carries over from the airports to the planes to hotels, hostels, and streets.

I find myself occasionally counting generations. My maternal great-great grandparents were born in the United States, so that may be buffer enough there. I don’t know the history of my blood great-great-grandparents, but I hear that they have three or more generations of protection too. However, my legal father is the one who counts, and his parents migrated from Poland. If AI starts asking for the U.S. population to be cut, very unlikely the barbarians will have to start paring somewhere. It is not yet a matter of threats; it is a matter of tone of existence, the world to which one awakes daily from sleep. It is as Claude Lévi-Strauss’ translators put it, not just Tristes Tropiques but World on the Wane.

Lindy is in no equivalent jeopardy; she has Mayflower Society on both sides, pathways from William Brewster and John Hough, but it is not as though the Mayflower landed on an unpopulated shore.

            But we are both aging out of travel. Lindy has arthritic impediments to walking. She will need knee replacements to hike in the way that we did in Ireland and Berlin. It is not impossible—she has an appointment with a surgeon in June. Her rheumatoid factor meanwhile is being kept in control by a pharmaceutical, with homeopathy attempting backup magic.

            I do have one more travel journal to share. It is from 2014 and involves a meandering trip from Berkeley to Maine. We drove a car there: 4569.8 miles over 38 days, an extra 1442.8 miles to visit friends on the way. We entered Mexico once at El Paso and crossed Canada from Michigan to Quebec.