It's autumn, oh, yes, the skeletal horses in the fields, and the leafless trees rubbing the sky's grey belly certainly attest to that. Level after level after level of gray, as if the world were a low resolution screen--the world on glass, covered with insincere craftsmanship, painted for quick sale in cheap art fairs, in weekend street galleries, the world as caught by the insincere and the speedy. The world, in short, very much like the way I catch the world, and only the occasional (less than occasional) moment of purity counterpointing all the swift graytone perceptions, the illusion of depth created through negative space and the judicious use of gradation. Suddenly we have a town in France, suddenly it's the undescribed bullet train, suddenly we're in the middle of Jeff's life. You can't help but hold up the book with an expression to indicate that it smells bad. Who wrote this?

And who, I ask? I 'm looking up now at the blinding eye of the sun, brilliant even through the layers of high cloud cover--more gray and white, although finally with some streaks of blue far up there. But I look at the sun, looking down unblinkingly like the eye of a reptile and wonder if this is the author I should thank. I want to be believe that there's a warmer ore mammalian eye up there. But maybe not. Maybe the secret all pet owners know is that the world is a gnostic dream--a petting zoo gone awry. The fish are outside the tank watching us. It's the lizard's terrarium that holds us now. And there's not much to do but watch us foul our water and spill our food, let the cows fall where they may. As long as the music keeps playing, I guess we really can't be too upset.

[…]

Yes, the phantom limb, the scourge of San Francisco, and only brave M. Druisellet can curb the evil mastermind's terrible plans for vengeance! The phantom limb, mistaken by other people as their own heart or their own mind, but actually my renegade soul, escaped from me during a fierce attack of heartbreak, and lurking even now in the BART tunnels under the city.

And while it runs amok, here I am, the only man who could stop it, on the train moving through the vast trainyard and car dealership that is Brussels (admittedly traveling by rail will make almost any city seem like a vast trainyard). Actually, now that we've turned a corner, Brussels seems more interesting to me--a modern city with some sort of ancient ruin in the center and the typical Provencal-style buildings, as functional and as decorative as shoe trees, plus the complete regularity with which windows are applied to them, as if it were every European's guaranteed right to defenestrate themselves at a moment's notice.

It may seem arrogant, but I think Europe has a lot to learn from us Americans now. How, after all, will Europe take to the coming homogenization--greater than it's ever been--presented by the Euro and its borders, perhaps never before spread so wide. How sorry a state of affairs conquerors would find this now. Who has replaced the blood of our countrymen with milk, they would ask. Who allows such free interbreeding between cultures?

The answer, of course, would be America, land of the mongrel and the mutt, the weak-blooded and the apathetic; my lack of history, my lack of culture, except for what I choose to make of it. The Internet seems odd over here, not nearly as in place as I thought it would be. I can't help but seeing all the Internet signs with the jaundiced eye of a San Franciscan. Perhaps the Internet is a particularly American dynamic, an American "utility" that people don't really want or need in a world of porous borders. Maybe the Europeans will want their own little Euronets, where they can meet people from their own countries, their own history. History is spread everywhere across like Europe, like mayonnaise, inescapable and informing the way every person dressses, every person sits, every person sleeps. Whereas the Internet is about an attempt to build history and culture in a country that has traditionally tried to destory it--let us build our own culture, let us choose our own history. Such ideas would seem impossible everywhere but in America. But here in Europe where there are already too many histories, too many cultures, and you can walk down the street to the local church three times older than America, who needs or wants to build a culture? It would be like putting a swimming pool in an aquarium.

I'm torn, then, as to what I would say to the Europeans if they were to ask me for advice. Part of me is tempted to say, throw out your culture, put in the megamall. There is not much good that can come from your brasseries that all serve the same thing badly, there is nothing to be gained, no comfort to be had in a house filled with old ghosts and open windows. Burn down the trainyards, destroy your old lederhosen, and for god's sake destroy your belief in anarchy. How embarrassing is it to see signs supporting anarchy in cities so old they've outlived every possible citizen dozens of times over. Anarchists in European cities just seem to me like badly spoiled children. I can see it in America where history is mutable and corrupt. But in Europe? Come on! If you're that fond of anarchy why are you keeping all these ugly old buildings? Why are you shivering under the weight of woolen blankets in hard-walled rooms? Why do you keep passing the open windows? There is nothing be had here of anarchy. Either embrace your part as drone and messenger, as citizen and envoy of a city that is the actual European (not you) or else cast off this mark of Cain and try to begin again. It took you thousands of years to invent the bourgeois and half of you still act like you want to get rid of him. I would call the bourgeois the greatest creation since sliced bread if it wasn't for the fact that I believe the bourgeois was a by-product of sliced bread and so is contemporaneous.

No, admit to yourselves what anarchy is in Europe. It's a hobby: lepidoptery, philately, anarchy.

[…]

Between my typing and this keyboard, the English language is devolving before what would be my very eyes if I was even looking at it. Instead, I'm staring at a variety of passengers in the mirror above me, at the backs of the French businessmen in the seat in front of Dave, in the dashing about of the bored children who seem to yell and shriek and cause the youngest one to burst into tears every eight minutes. It would actually be more quiet to be riding outside the train at this point, and I've thought about wandering to another car, or else kicking the kids up to the next coach. I guess we're not allowed any special privileges in second class, such as infanticide.

[…]

I think also that my history where we have Redwoods and intelligences that walk in the woods far older than these cities, have left me a bit more jaded than perhaps other Americans. To be in a wood and feel the breath on your neck of something that was old long before men even glimpsed the forest line, much less tried to enter it, makes me wonder if I'm to have few surprises in Europe apart for the occasional ogling of the architecture. Or perhaps I'm missing the point of Europe, which is that it is our first alien intelligence, the city as subject, as hero of a narrative, and a chance to visit that narrative even as it's being acted out. To see Beowulf when Beowulf was young, to move through the veins of Daedalus as he constructs the prison from which no one can escape. And perhaps I'm just fooling myself, but when the catacombs of Paris are roughly as old as San Francisco and hold 6 million people (outnumbering San Franciscans by at least six to one), it seems to me that I'm come from a city that is about sentient as a retarded infant. It has received so little succor, it has barely begun to open its eye and look around and it has been mired in the stunting cigarette smoke of political corruption for most of its life--it amuses me that I was ever afraid of San Francisco, its sentience.

To be afraid of a city is to be afraid of one's own death, but the more comfortable with that subject one becomes, the more comfortable a city is. It's not half as horrible as the woods, as the field, as the stream, where nature has programmed itself with a blind thrusting version of mindfulness that is avaricious and yet apathetic, barely avoidable and awesome; only rarely strange, but even then more strange than Paris can aspire to. All cities that have streets are, if you think about it, only streetwalkers, possessing their initial gaudy appeal and then later their laziness and vanity. Whereas to live in the country is to have the willow-wife, the river wife, the lady of the woods, a relationship that is both stranger and deeper, capable of troubling and depressing but also rewarding at a level that is almost religious, to grow old and die in the crushing, ever-fecund arms of the willow wife, as opposed to dying alone, with the chattery gossip of the streetwalker city in your ear. If there is an appeal to Europe, I've decided, it's that the cities can frequently resemble nature. They can be so imperious as to resemble the silent wives of nature, even though it is in fact merely the stillness of the matronly madam, the borrowed airs of those who inherited strength through simple attrition, those who have cut low the forests of their own youth. The city, though, is all whore, and all chatter, talking outside your window and not caring if you die. Whereas the willow wife will hold her breath, if only for a minute, before she continues to envelop your house, and your body, and all that you have accomplished. To be married to the wood, or to live in the adultery of the city: are those the only choices available to me? Maybe there's something else I'll realize as we move through Berlin, through Prague and toward Venice, another possibility that will be offered through the embellishment of urban accretion.

[…]

I don't know why I love the train so much. After all, the train is merely a bus without any potential for free will. Or, come to think of it, maybe that's what I love about the train.

[…]

Just now, as I'm sitting here writing finally with my eyes closed, I can't help but wonder how safe it is to be riding at this high speed with one's eyes closed. What does the future hold to a man who willingly blinds himself to it. It's somewhat hard to believe that the future will provide if you're not willing to do anything about it. "Chance favors the prepared monkey." I believe Pasteur himself, whose face is currently in my wallet, said that. But who knows. There are guys like Einstein, to whom you can attribute any sort of half-assed truism and people will repeat it endlessly. Or you can say something that seems to finally have more than the slightest gram of truth to it, and all of a sudden every one wants to believe that Einstein wrote it, or that Murphy legislated it, and it's nothing like that. The world and the ideas exist---more and more I'm not sure if we exist as anything other than a conduit between the two. We are horses, we are autos, we are trains, shuttling about the passengers who live inside us to their desired destination.

[…]

The dingy glass of the Berlin supertrain makes one think of all of the surrounding countryside as dingier than one would necessarily expect it to be. The seats on the train are comfortable but claustrophobic--it's like being smothered to death by a beloved uncle or aunt, perhaps. I'm sitting across from a woman with a face like poorly baked bread. Not particularly old, but having even a greater amount of the sort of joylessness and dead-eyed maturity I've come to expect from most Euros.

Let's see, what else? Oh, yes. Mr. Tod's Wild Ride. I thought that one up while in the snug bathroom, the jostling moving bathroom, the sort of odd anti-uterus in which one doesn't kick but is kicked. And also none of this three language stuff for us now---it's all German all the time, unless they're breaking into Danish or some other sort of thing I'm not following. The houses are spinning right by, and I don't know why but I get the feeling I'm not going to like Germany much. So far it seems like France but with the flavor boiled out of it. More songs about buildings and food, I guess you'd call it.

[…]

Previous: October 28, 2001--Paris, France

Next: October 31, 2001--On The Train To Prague

Email me.

All material on these pages is ©2001 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.