HOUSE OF THE WIND - MAY DAY

Out of one window, Zizkov television tower … Out of another (opposite), Plecnik’s Church of the Sacred Heart … Vinohrady, Praha … Nearby, Hrbitov Olsany, a mostly 19th-century cemetery (a nominally ‘dead’ cemetery, and, therefore, very much alive …), necropolis, jam-packed, crumbling mausolea-lined streets and avenues, ivy-covered iron crosses, tombs upon tombs, as many as twelve burials per plot … Plot upon plot (subplot by subplot) … narrative lines twirled in time (lost) in a sign of ‘the given’, and ‘the taken-away’ … Encased, engulfed in an urban forest … urban chasm (chaosmos) … One mausoleum or two now fully restored, others boarded, bricked-up and/or broken (vandalized), abandoned, yet not forgotten … A tomb designed by Jan Kotera (neo-classicist and Secession-inspired Czech architect), assisted by an artist (name slipped away, now, from memory, unrecognized) … Jan Kotera, the renowned architect whom invited Plecnik to Prague in the 1920s ??? …

Crazy Daisy (U Sladecku) café nearby, entered through a red, British phone booth … shades of time-traveling … Ancient (antique) appliances and accouterments of times past adorning walls, ledges, shelves (stove-top toaster … concertina, French horns … defunct Granta, Simplex, Royal, Remington typewriters … tennis racket and press … mantle with clocks, all telling different times, cameras, lantern, radio …) … An undulating caerulean-blue ceiling cloth with golden stars ‘penetrated’ by the severed trunk of a birch tree (axis mundi) … Consumer detritus from another era (eras), two days following May Day and the Czech Lands’ entry into the EU, street parades, parties and demonstrations, oddly at odds, marking the moment, marking time-always-passing … Almost 200 years of history buried in the wild, overgrown temenos of Vinohrad cemetery across the way … New granite cube, fan-paving has been added at the entrance road just inside the main gate …

Monuments … doors left ajar, frozen in stone …bored (idling) angels …brooding putti/bambini … half-abstracted willow/wisteria … obelisk … urns … trace of angel gone (flown/stolen) … graveyard of funerary syntax (styles/histories) … Gothic-baroque syntheses, diminutive Romanesque rotunda (engulfed in shadows, with saplings and grass sprouting from its tiled roof) … monstrous granite bell-shaped tombeau …

Lime (Tilia) alleys, maple seedlings bursting forth here and there, ivy clamoring over most everything, occasional walnut … Wild herbs … forbs … wandering vines … Generic garden plants and otherwise gone astray … ‘weeds’ … Nettle, myrtle, ferns, Rosa, Viola, dandelion …

A house where the wind lives … empty awaiting new tenants … photographer Jan Saudek’s atelier one floor below where these words now appear … photographer/aesthetician of paradoxes … The empty room swept by the breezes sweeping in through open windows … All windows left open to sweep away the past … Some furnishings, a single pot to boil water … Empty cabinets and wardrobes, strange green upholstered couch and chair …

The wind inhabits this house, pulsing … breathing … The windows sigh, opening and closing, nothing fixed, latches warped, fittings decayed, worn, never meeting … Water runs slowly across the kitchen floor, leaking from the drain of the sink, a stream marked (now) by two sets of footprints …

The world unwound … all things in their own time … erasures and re-writings … What is needed is reverse landscape architecture (and reverse architecture) … to erase things outmoded, useless, to open space (new space / time) to other things, to /S/ome-thing Else … to undo what has been wound too tightly, overwrought, manic things that occlude everything else, /S/ …The night-sky is always there, even at mid-day (with tea), seen from the ‘now’ of / within the Imagination … the ‘sound’ foundation of things … to which all things return, from which all things arrive (appear) and are freely given … Erasing things ‘writes’ other things (some-times …) … allows what is continually repressed to make its way into the world, along its own axis, in its own manner of speaking, and in its own time … 

GK (Praha, 05/04/04)

A version of this travelogue, as open-verse poem, appeared in Log 3 (Autumn 2004) …
On-line version - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/vinohrady.rtf