Creature of the Shade

confronting vegetation: Sambucus nigra

Late summer in Europe hasn't felt as botanically abundant as the same season in the Pacific Northwest, where I often am this time of year.  But one plant caught my eye at once, on my first day off the plane, and since then I've been photographing it all across the continent: 

It's Sambucus nigra, black elderberry, of the same genus as common red elderberry of North America, Sambucus recemosa.  But whereas red elderberry carries its berries in an upright spray, black elderberries are bigger and heavier, so they hang down, often form great cascades of these triangular berry clusters.  They don't taste much better than a red elderberry, but they certainly look like they taste better.

ich sprache franchement schrecklich deutsch, non?

Travelling in German-speaking lands for the first time in 25 years, I'm noticing interesting shapes in the way my German comes back, or doesn't.

I studied German all through high-school and then for a year in college, and a few years after that, in 1982, I visited just the smallest corner of Germany, Aachen to be exact.  A few years after that I had my last occasion to pass a test in German, and since then the language has lain fallow, useless to me.  (I think I wrongly suspected that the Germans are so practical that they'd all learned English by now.  This of course is the old fallacy of judging a country by its overseas travellers -- always an unrepresentative sample.)

But in 1986 I studied French very fast, basically fulltime over one summer, and then spent a quarter in Paris.  At the end of that process I was pretty functional in French, though of course there were limits to how much of a conversation I could have with that level of study.

What I find now is that my French appears to have accumulated directly on top of my German, as though it's a more recent archaeological layer.  When I want a German word, my mind delivers the French word.  Then, if I pick up the French word and firmly put it to one side (always thanking it of course), I find that the German word is there, right under where the French word was.

Clearly, this sort of heavy-lifting can't be done at the pace of a conversation.  So what tends to happen is that I grab what German words are handy to convey my meaning, and end up saying, as I did to a nice man at the Leopold Museum store in Vienna:  "Gibt`s ein Buch sur Anton Koenig?" -- "Is there a book on Anton Koenig?" -- which is correct German except for sur, which is correct French.  There are only so many French words that one can dig up and set aside while talking in real time, so some of them slip through.

Now after a bit, I did progress to the point of saying things like "Dieses Hemd wird es eingehen?" -- which is all German words but in a distinctly French word order -- literally "This shirt will it shrink?" 

I worry that my mind seems to have only one place to store foreign languages, and is storing them there in a LIFO (last in, first out) queue -- which is exactly what archaeological strata are.  Indeed, the few Spanish words I know, mostly learned for a trip to Chile in 2004, are on top of the French words, and presumably the German is under that.  I hope these mixed-language sentences that I utter don't convey that I think all non-English languages are interchangeable, but there's no controlling what people with think.  All I can do is struggle on, digging up German while tripping on French, like a 1.5-legged man hobbling over rough terrain toward a rapidly setting sun.

vienna: the express treatment

Over the last 12 days I've had great times in Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, and now Berlin, where I'll be for the rest of this week.  Human Transit has taken the bulk of my blogging time, and even so it still hasn't gotten out of Vienna.  So I expect this blog will get briefer, sharper shards of impression, easily laid down in the minutes to spare.

So apart from the joy and kindness of Art Nouveau, Vienna might be reduced to this.  The disturbing uniformity of the average 19th century street, as though imperial and bourgeois impulses, on their opposite trajectories, can coexist only if we pretend to be a little boring:

The over-the-topness of the late 19th century Hapsburgs, explained by the usual narrative about greatest-decadence-just-before-the-fall, all of which is also, frankly, a little boring:

The particular Hapsburg habit of building things that are just too big for their site, as though the buildings had swelled in place and might soon explode and hurt someone.

The charming and harmless Friedenreich Hundertwasser cult, expressed not just in his wildly touristed house:

 

... but also in a piece of industrial architecture, part of the works a municipal utility, that tourists aren't told about, and only discover if they're curious about that tower that's not in the guidebook ...

The relief at encountering a living cultural space, something whose current life was more interesting than its inevitable original function as an expression of someone's power.  Here Vienna's crowning achievement is the Museum Quarter, an adaptation of what was once the royal stables, now a lively collection of eclectic small museums anchored by two major museums devoted to art since 1900.  Its large courtyard features simple but endearing yellow furnishings that draw people from all over the city for the sheer pleasure of lounging in them.  

It's the only space I've seen in Europe that seems to do what Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square or Melbourne's Federation Square do -- namely to feel like the whole city's livingroom, focused yet casual.

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What else?  Well, some of the Hapsburg pageantry does contain human experience after all.  In the end, I identified most with these two characters, near the bottom of one of those grand Baroque cascades of (literally) petrified humanity.  

on art nouveau

I have little to add to my Human Transit post on Art Nouveau, except that ---

Except that I think it's the first period of design that's fundamentally kind. Compared to it, every older style seems to be so clearly about power -- the power of one dead man over others.

 

This isn't to say that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals or the painters of Baroque gold leaf weren't kind people, but still, those styles, indeed, all the styles I can think of before about 1890, were clearly meant to convey power, to put you in your place. They were about the power of God, or of the state, or in most cases both kinds of power in symbiosis. 

Why does Art Nouveau seem so unsuited to the eternal agenda of power? Is it because, for the first time, a style of design seemed to reflect the raw beauty of the organic, of life itself? 

Until then, the only beauty that design had noticed -- apart from landscape as captured in painting -- was that of the human body. Art Nouveau took its inspiration from the calmer beauty of plants, a beauty that's really unsuited to power agendas of any kind.  The artist, of course, is appearing as a power center for the first time in these years. Art Nouveau could serve the cult of the artist, of course, but it doesn't transfer well to any larger power, whether of state or church.

Even Impressionism in painting -- barely a decade older than Art Nouveau -- is always very much about how nature strikes human eyes. It's about the psychology of human perception. And while there's no avoiding that topic when discussing any art, Art Nouveau seemed aware of an organic essence of all things, and that this essence would would go on without us, and that it could be beautiful.