Budapest

June 6, 2014

Train from Vienna, the ground gradually rising and breaking into disorderly hills as we near Budapest. It’s like two worlds divided by a magic river, flat modern Pest, Buda all ancient and spread across a hill on the other side. The Zoltan Kodaly Choir School is on the Buda side, so I will be crossing over the schone blaue Donau all but daily. Not only is it on the Buda side, but tucked away in the single most obscure address in Europe, so that after walking for an hour to get to the vicinity, I walked another, around and around, trying to find the actual building. You can’t get there at all unless someone tells you to mount some steps, for the street, as far as I went, does not seem to connect to a any other street, but only to a system of steep stairs up from other streets. It is also, of course, not on the tourist maps. The Belgium Embassy lies across the street, so there must be some traffic other than frustrated American pedestrians. The people I asked for directions were kind. It was wonderful to watch them find enough English to be helpful. Did treat myself coming homeward to wine beside the river, where I had a sight of the beautiful Parliament first at sunset and then begin to twinkle with lights. Happy streets, though my legs ached terribly by then. The youth on the streets made me think of a colossal Galway. When I arrived at the Promenade Hotel they gave me a quite horrible room on an inside atrium with no window (and no bathtub, but only a nozzle aimed at the bathroom floor). I complained, and they gave me, for 10 euros a day more, a splendid one right above the street, where light and air and noise come wonderfully through. The farther east one goes, the scammier the hotels get, pretending that things like windows and tubs are options which one adds by paying a higher price. Istanbul was scammier than this, though the Promenade is plenty scammy, and one must watch one’s step. I slept fitfully because of the din from the street, but I never mind that, and I think my dreams are affected by what is going on down there. One long dream involved a group of young girls discussing what they thought of the soul.

My heart leapt when I walked out onto the streets of Budapest as it did not on the streets of Vienna. There is no explaining these things.

Vienna 3

June 5, 2014

Ordered Schnitzel without knowing what it was. Not only did I not like it, but it was the largest portion of anything I have ever been served, overlapping the plate around all the rim. The waiter gave be a bag to take it home in.

Viennese beggars are aggressive and do not, like some others, go to the bother of actually looking like they need a hand-out. I am an exceptional target because I am alone.

Dreams last night that had to do with disguising property so that people won’t want to take it, and then of a great tree falling on 62. I dreamed of a great crack in the wall, then woke and saw it is a vine climbing the wall of my ventilator shaft.

Went to the Jewish Museum, but didn’t go in, because the first thing you see is guns, and you imagine from that all that’s coming. Was shortchanged in a famous café across the street.

Made my way to the Leopold, where I felt immediate and profound harmony with the great figures of the Secession, especially Klimt, who, it turns out, painted a lot more things than decadent gilded women, and all those paintings are more interesting. My own painting is, by intuition, Secessionist. Made my way from there to the Secessionist building surmounted by the dome called locally the Golden Cabbage. The Beethoven Frieze is unspeakably wonderful. Walked and walked, stopped often to drink. Great pain in my legs, sometimes, but it went away when I stretched or sat down, so I kept moving. Crossed the Donau Canal as the half moon rode in the sky. One block from this spot is the liveliest place in Vienna, and I didn’t know it until an hour ago. Crossed the water and came back, and on this side watched a huge brown spider repairing her web by moonlight. She was the best. She was the Beethoven Frieze. She made me happy.

I leave Vienna tomorrow. All last nights are fully of the melancholy of what might have been. Might as well lie back and enjoy it.

Vienna 2

June 4, 2014

Abstemious breakfast, then I lit out for the Albertina under the most perfect of all skies. The Albertina was a consolation prize to the Archduke Albert for losing the governorship of Belgium, and I think he came out on the better side. What a gracious building, among the most gracious art museums in the world, if you consider the building’s own self. As for the collection, it was refreshing and fascinating, partially because it was new to me. Wrote down what I thought of the paintings in my little blue journal. It is heavily German, and that is somewhat the way my tastes in visual art run, so all was well. Had white wine in the shade after the Albertina, then moseyed over to the Theater Museum, which I did not understand. Meant to hit the great mass of museums lying just beyond the Heldenplatz, but instead met there a boy of the most fetching energy and directness, who wanted to take me on a tour (he being a guide for Alte Stadt Tours) on a kind of adapted fire truck. Took the tour. As he promised, his narrative was lively and richly wrought. As near as I could tell his German and his English presentations were identical. He got only a few things wrong, and one was asserting that Urania was the Muse of Entertainment. In some ways that’s bettering the fact. I’m glad I took the tour, not only for his diverting presence, but in that it helped me orient in this intricate city. Specifically, it helped me find the Muzikvereins, in whose golden concert hall I attended a concert which in substance was largely last night’s, except that the musicians wore brocade and powdered wigs. Both were more tourist events than concerts, so I tried to (and succeeded in) tamping down my fury at the audience’s crassness. About 60 percent of the audience was Japanese. One sad truth I know about the world is that the Japanese take to many pictures. There are no events and no places, only settings for Japanese people to be gazing into phone cameras. During the exit after the concert, one gentleman stopped five hundred people pouring down the staircase so he could snap a shot of the bust of Clara Schuman.  Both nights the bassoonist has been seven layers of handsome. I assumed it was the same one, but decided it wasn’t. Maybe there’s something about the bassoon.

You can take a Third Man tour of the Viennese sewers.

How lovely Imperial Austria would have been if it had not also been a political reality, if the emperor had been just a kind old man who watched people dance. SiSi, Franz Joseph’s Kaiserin, is hugely popular, I suppose a little like Lady Di, both unconventional reluctant royals and violently dead.

Caught a glimpse of my legs in the full-length hotel mirror. They qualify as a hideous deformity. I suppose I’m glad that they still work, after a fashioned, like an old beat-up jalopy damaged almost beyond recognition, but still running.

The hotel has no bar–a misfortune, for a nightcap would end the night perfectly.

Vienna

June 3, 2014

Installed in my adequate room in the adequate Hotel Karntnerhof, though I’d like to know what message I send out that gets me a room typically overlooking the ventilation shaft. A placard warns me that I can be surcharged 50 euro if I leave a bad smell in the room. The journey here – though crushingly long--was not particularly eventful, except for the turbulent Turkish woman in the middle seat, who had to be up and down constantly, and who had to carry on a conversation with the German woman on the other side of her, invariably checking with me for translation.

Descending over the colors of the Austrian countryside I noticed that, whereas Ireland would be emerald and gold, Austria was sap green and dull gold, everything as if mixed with a little misty gray, with a little less edge and more dignity. The city is a little complicated to navigate, but I am finding where I’m going. First stop is Stephansdom, another of the world’s great churches off my list. Its gloomy Gothic is out of keeping with the rest of the city. Yet it is surrounded my carousels and merchant carts, and is the family playground of the city. I met there a young man who said he played bass with the Wiener Residenzorchester. Turns out he indeed does so, for I went to the concert at Auersperg Palace, and there he was onstage, in a tuxedo, looking far more uncomfortable than he did on the Platz. The concert was in the oval Rosenkavaliersaal, which may be the shapeliest and most civilized room I ever encountered. The program was ripe plums from Mozart and Strauss (the waltz one) and not what I would have chosen if music had been the point of the evening. That said, the music was beautiful in the context for which it was written–like seeing Shakespear at the Globe-- and everything gleamed with old gold and crystal and pink marble. The perfection of art which is such an effort elsewhere is here a mere gesture, a shrug, perfection being default setting and unexceptional. Even the loudmouthed hag a few rows back, who never stopped chattering, became part of the music, like one string out of tune, or noise from the distant street. In the midst of “La chi darem la mano” I burst into tears, everything was perfect.

As I type, one of the hotel workers sings in the basement, thinking no one hears her, the sound coming up my ventilator like smoke up a chimney.

June 2, 2014

Ready to travel with diarrhea and an attack (moderate) of gout. So what else is new? The gout medicine, as I observed before, relives the pain in my shoulders. I resist associating these things with growing old. I fight them, certain that they can be made to go away, and I can get back to “real life.”  Curiously lacking in my customary travel anxiety. Happy to get going, secure in having lined up all sorts of reliable people to keep things moving here. Good Cantaria rehearsal last night with diminished summer forces.  Why my own voice sometimes sounds glorious to be and sometimes barely marginal I don’t know. Does it sound the same to others at the same times?

Found Lucio Ivaldi on the Internet, explaining his music to The Birth of Color. I got to hear my name said in honey-dripping Italian.

Sweet Maud cat licking my toes–

Woke in utter darkness, utter stillness--

June 1, 2014

Woke and took a walk through the neighborhood before dawn. Kelley says she says bears, and I wanted to see bears, but of course I did not. I saw the silhouettes of birds on branches and wires. You could tell there was a being there, and that it was pouring out music, but if I were the alien I have been postulating for my journey, I might not know what it was. Would I think they were organic, or maybe speakers set out by a kindly people so sleepers would have a musical waking?

Went downtown to Suzanne’s show at Blue Spiral, and bought one of her paintings. Bees were the theme, and my small painting has layerings of bees over music.

Stung my eye with some plant toxin while weeding at 62. It will be suspicious for me to sit on the plane weeping.

May 31, 2014

What an odd journey will begin on Monday! Except for the barest housing and transportation essentials, I have made no preparations. I have not studied the German I meant to study. I have not researched points of interest in Vienna or Budapest. I always thought it would be better for me to travel like it was just the continuation of an ordinary week, and maybe I’ve achieved that. I’ll work out a fiction wherein I am an alien set down in a strange city, ignorant of the languages and customs of the people, and see if can make my way.  I’m picturing Vienna in misty blue day and Budapest under moonlight.

Vomited out the first Yeats play in four days. Maybe that went so well because I was meant to be doing something else.

Odd days. If I picture them, they are like a great disc, as the books picture the discs the planets ride around the sun. The center is peopled with matter and souls, and matter and souls are spread through the outer reaches, but here, where I am, there is only me, a rock floating where a planet failed to form. It is not unlovely, but it is curious and solitary. One can’t figure out exactly how one arrived.