They crowd up against me, catching my attention, but disappearing before I turn my head. Or at least there is nothing to see, but the it may not be the visual sense I need to use, but rather some other process that I have never learned to use, dazzled as I am by the visual, the sounds, the touches, the tastes and the smells. Smells, last to come to mind but ever present. Perhaps what I am after is what has come down from the past. Distant and not so distant. Handed down through the generations of human lives.
To write, to let people know, to give glimpses of a mind. To get lost in the fascination of mind; my own or the mind of another. Writing reveals something of a mind from centuries past. Mind and its variety of arts, it’s music, it’s language, it’s dance and mark making efforts to share, to affect, to organise the things of the mind and hence the things of the world.
A bit more from Danube, this is from a section about the character of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (page 135):
‘Adam Wandruszka has pointed out that Frederick III, who died in 1493, already showed the typical traits later canonised by the the Hapsburg myth: the symbiosis of inadequacy and wisdom, the inability to act translated into shrewd prudence and far-seeing strategy, hesitation and contradiction elevated to the level of normal conduct, the yearning for peace and quiet mingled with the strength to accept interminable, insoluble conflicts.’
Such good stuff! It leaves me wondering how I picked up these traits at a young age, gradually assembling them into a modus vivendi, with the obvious differences that I had not been born into the nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It must begin with the building appreciation of one’s inadequacy, one’s impotence to do anything about certain fixed foundations about the situation one is born into. At the same time for me there was a secret appreciation of my superiority. It had to be secret because there was no evidence for it. This is the stuff of comedy.
