Now I can see in the power lines the gentle cursive writing of letters I can’t read, and I can sense in the railroad ties a pattern that is in fact deceptively simple, a line that might even put to the lie the secret of mortality whispered silently to us by autobahns and apartment windows, promised to be doled out to us in marks, and francs, and the ever popular Euro, the soon to be arriving Euro, the wonderful utopic Euro that may actually arrive to these block of countries that finally now realize how much they need each other.

Meanwhile the world continues, glimpsed in cigarette ads and bluejean logos, a world where the symbol and the sigil brands themselves upon the world. Lightning loosed upon the world, the lightning of letters and logos, a silent thunderstorm of newsprint, darkening the skies of the mind. Meanwhile we look at buildings of stacked pie tins, cakeglasses, a wonderful world of desserts, keeping us diverted from who’s actually sitting at the big boy's table, who's actually indulging themselves in the mealtime of the rich, who’s not having to worry about the lines of boxcars spilling their dark secrets (like Pandora's Box) out on the highway during rush hour. That' the way the world works for us, but not for them. They get the chance to see that life only occasionally, when they choose, to, just as bored children might change to the educational channel from time to time. It's a foreign world to them, mostly boring but sometimes capable of sustaining the weight of their indolent fantasies. Meanwhile the world writes itself, the world is written, the ley lines squirming through the lines of the earth like a living worm, like mutable penmanship, like elemental cursive moving under our feet, flanked by the mighty metalwork of Dresden station.

Upon this secret world, we roll our luggage and grip each other's hands in greeting and farewell, the tentative goodbye and hellos of mortality, the sunflowers that think themselves redwoods. We live much longer than flies and arguably more successfully, but seeing us all now, buzzing and scuttling across the dessication of Dresden station, I have to wonder. (I always have to wonder, it's in my contract.) As long as the beautiful women are there, on that side of the glass, beautiful and untouchable and looking for the men they have come to hug, there's little choice but for me to wonder how a world could have been created that could have no place for me. Perhaps I'm one of those symbols in Godel's Theorem, there only to prove that the system is complete enough to acknowledge its incompleteness.

[…]

It's an x-ray world when looked directly out at it: filters and filters of dirt on the window and cigarette smoke here in the car give the world the look of a book cover that's been left out in the sun for too long.

[…]

There is no start to this. There is no end to this. There is only, maybe, an end to us. But I wonder. I wonder if the skull I held in the catacombs of Paris hold its memories tight to its breast , or if those memories, like the breasts, have dissipated long ago. Dave, a Vonnegut reader like me, is having a certain amount of trouble believing that Dresden is not a pile of slag, but an actual town. Its destruction was so complete, and described so completely by Vonnegut, that I really wonder what is the city that is more real to me, that city in that book, or this city that is beautiful and verdant and somewhat unkempt rolled out before me, being revolved around me on an axis too large for me to see. If the difference between what exists and what doesn't exist is so great, why do so many people get them confused so easily?

Is it something to do with those mysterious sigils and the writing in the powerlines? Or is it the wiring of our minds, that the perception of what we see is so affected by what we think that we actually believe that the world before us might easily be mistaken for a hat, or a coat, or bedtime story told by alcoholics to their children, in the dimming lights of the bedrooms, whispered by freemasons in meeting halls, mistakenly believed to have been in places that they were not, and mistakenly assumed to be people that they have never been?

Talking to students in our hostel room last night, I wondered about America, if maybe America can't be seen as the world's most dysfunctional parent, capable of tremendous generosity on the one hand and on the other, incredible cruelty and shrewdness. A cold-hearted father of a land that always seems surprised when accused of atrocities that it's committed. And us, our children, or its acquiescent wives, going forth and offering condolences and cookies, and friendly apologies for bombing and turning the ideas of mini-malls into viruses of the mind, spreading like syphilis over the already blighted land. This is certainly the right neck of woods to talk about blight. Outer Dresden has buildings where not a window remains, followed by rebuilt university buildings and mini-marts with Pepsi sigils hanging overhead. Lonely smokestacks followed by the eczema of power plant transformers. There's no transmutation here. The lead is turned into lead. It's just slightly lighter lead, as this is just an ingot of the mind, a digital slagheap, coke and smelt and hopefully at least a few hotly glowing embers, the coals of the secret flame, I hope, caught, if only in your mind for a second, of the mysterious heatless fire that never goes out, that somehow is still capable of warming us as we pass through the ruins of the Czech republic, toward the wirehanger question mark of Prague.

Previous: October 29, 2001--On The Train From Paris to Berlin

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