ACH WEIN, OR, A LETTER FROM VIENNA
I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are. Samuel Beckett — The Expelled 1. I was surrounded by things to do with flight: a wind sock, a sunrise, a barrier on wheels like a toy train, the hand of my neighbour unbearably flopping on its lap. (Still that hand haunts me.) Why is a lake not alive? Why does water move in a river if the ground is all flat around it? The whole earth is in fact much flatter than once supposed. Up high miniaturises, and in this long exhale light is highly imaginary. 2. A friend said that the spider is a fearful thing because of its acute difference from humans. Does that mean the same for all other distant things, like Mozart, and mathematics? Between the airport and the city, the CAT passes a tinsel town of aluminium tubes and pipes. Larger steel structures hold gas cylinders and a huge white golf ball gleams extra in the snow, ladders clinging to its globeish sides. All of this is a great distance from the body’s putty. But, there is somehow a fondness in it. Something in its scale and constructedness.
Given a chance, walking there would produce an occasional stunned understanding of the dishonesty and earnestness of our own cities. The tourist board has the train stops now in a pitch-dark tunnel. Resting here lends a dazzle to the opening, causing an eyes-wide arrival. 3. Visiting a cemetery with a friend means you cannot hear silence. Rubbing graves for warmth, we knocked on doors of tombs looking for the toilets, and smoked a cigarette between Vienna’s most famous decomposers. Beethoven left behind a set of instructions to be followed precisely. His non-words poised for action are read repetitively. As I write, Lisitsa trammels (grace yes yes) the keyboard, toying with emotions and chocking with jokes, but that’s not the point. The point is — am I hearing Beethoven? The extent of embodiment is possession unlike any other beyond-the-grave communion. I listen to a translation of the world’s oldest written music — an ancient Hurrian hymn, 3400 years old. 4. I like the word abroad — I only think to use after its appearance at the end of Samuel Beckett’s The Expelled. 5. Vienna is so bright after Scotland. Its grey is less grey, less shabby. It makes a stately show of things.
Everything is quite yellow, grounded leaves, my jacket, the Servitenkirche on Grünentorgasse clanging out the demi-hour — all quite yellow. We see a window crowded with knives and manikin heads. Die Philosophie im Boudoir. Everything is sick because of a lack of sleep. Today is too scary for visibility. Gutter drips sound their falling steps, which follow, and I am seized by myself. An embargo on breath, I lean on a wall, and am quite sure I just heard the white stone wailing. Votives stuck in with flowers, dusted and dead dry. 6. It is something, quite something, that Vienna’s oldest cemetery is ensconced by the Roussau retirement home. It seems a shame, that sort of stillness by near stillness. The stones, in German and Hebrew, spell that something in the language is living, with moss and such.
IDEA FOR A SHORT STORY
A story about how, everywhere the character turns, there is a person there trying to get information from them. Different scenes in their lives — they are in the middle of living, and then that hand is back on the shoulder, or that face pressed up against the window. Always calm, always asking for answers, for information. Perhaps the character has forgotten there were bad things they had done, or witnessed being done. Or maybe there was something they had forgotten about themselves — some deeply bad trait — and this forgetfulness weakened their defences, made them vulnerable to discovery. But perhaps it’s just facts, statements, information. A constant need for information.
NOTES ON THE CATACOMBS AT ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH
On a visit to the catacombs in St. Michael’s church, I learnt that it was the site for the first performance of Mozart’s Requiem after his death. I’m told the crypt is bigger than the church, and that it is some-hundred years old, but I’m not sure how many, because I distracted after learning the former (there is more below the surface). The ratios go on: thousands of bodies to hundreds of coffins. One such coffin contains one of Mozart’s librettists and I’m wondering which side he listened from. The stone slabs of the floor were cut with openings for bodies to slide down. They say the smell was not good for praying, and so covers were made for the holes. Later, stairs were built for access, so that bodies could get up again. Down below, the floor rose over time (that tide) with dirt and bones. Skulls — too many to keep, too precious to throw away. In the crypt’s stone arches, a monk inscribed his cleaning notes: Today we put the skulls on the wall to make the crypt more lively. My teeth ache and the sight of it. My notebook says: They died, then dried The crypt and the draft Air vents taught bodies the right kind of decay: nails and wigs, and taffeta were preserved on accidental mummies, their shoes outwaiting their need.
The sound and shape of my accent is strange in this foreign bearing, abroad, and alive with the dead. A Belgian man, old and squat stumbles on bones, and strangers look at each other living. When night comes, who climbs down to switch off the lamps? I ask our guide. She climbs up with the dark behind her, on a path leading home. This morning, bounded by a tiled up room, in a treat of being alone, she wishes for a closed in box to carry her life in. She recalls the woman, 300 years older, her choices removed and replaced with glass. She is marked for having looked through her window, having seen her head tilted to one side, her dress spread around her, its silk surviving, as silk does.