an an viyana / moment by moment wien: 1st district

1st district etiketine sahip kayıtlar gösteriliyor. Tüm kayıtları göster

12 Aralık 2010 Pazar

stories and other fragile things (always striving)

a fish about to slip back into the sea

suk; naschmarkt

on the way to semperdepot

karlsplatz, accidental rainbow, only on sunny days onlt at thr right angle

monument to the fly; october 2010; vienna; schillerplatz

"Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it."
*

"She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here."

"..It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill."
— Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things)

11 Aralık 2010 Cumartesi

A longing to wander tears my heart

near karmeliterplatz; 2nd district

in front of the akademie, schillerplatz; 1st district

3rd district; near kardinal nagl platz

on the way back from the Gloriette, it was already dark. just stood still by the trees along the road. stood still and thanked the trees for their beauty. stood still and i watched and listened and smelled. shut my eyes and i could see. i cried to the beauty -to the presence- of the trees that day. a winter night i cried to the beauty of the trees. the trunks. the branches. the roots. leaves. slight movements in tune with the wind. i was seeing the trees these trees for the first time in my life. fascinating. fascinating. absolutely fascinating. imagined the fluid exchange between the earth and the veins of the tree. imagined the trees breathing. i thanked them for the air. for the freshness in the air. i cried to the stillness of the trees. to the silent witnesses of history.

(this was after our conversation with franziska at yak&yeti. she suggested that i go to the zoo and to the gloriette. i did so. )

Hietzing is the 13th municipal District of Vienna (German: 13. Bezirk, Hietzing). It is located west of the central districts, west ofMeidling.^[2] Hietzing is a heavily populated urban area with many residential buildings, but also contains large areas of the Vienna Woods, along with Schönbrunn Palace.^[1]^[2]

"Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

...
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. (... ) Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness."
— Hermann Hesse

All social life is essentially practical / crash course on wien

Café Central (German: das Café Central) is a coffeehouse in Vienna. It is located in the Innere Stadt district at Herrengasse 14 in the former Bank and Stockmarket Building (Bank- und Börsengebäude), today called the Palais Ferstel after its architect Heinrich von Ferstel. / wiki.

this one is not relevant, but i like it because of the flying / scattering connection

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

through a crash course on foot, the experience of vienna transcends visibility. triggering the realm of the visible at the right points, you enter the realm of a history re-written each time it is imagined.

a social life IS essentially practical.

as we step into the cafe central, warmth takes over... the aesthetic arches and the tall ceiling lifts you up... the tables and the seats and all other material stuff is perceived to be trivial in a sense. in terms of scale. one could compare it with the experience in a church or an ancient mosque.

hmm. cafe central: the mosque for the well-read

my accidental guide (for this crash course of vienna) asks me if i had seen the movie "Klimt." no! why did i miss that?

so as it turns out, this CAfe CEntral also appeared in that movie.

the café was opened in 1860, and in the late 19th century it became a key meeting place of the Viennese intellectual scene. Key regulars included: Peter Altenberg, Theodor Herzl, Alfred Adler,^] Egon Friedell, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anton Kuh, Adolf Loos, Leo Perutz, Alfred Polgar and Leon Trotsky. In January 1913 alone, Josip Broz Tito, Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky (the latter two being regulars) were patrons of the establishment.^/Until 1938 the café was called the "Chess school" (Die Schachhochschule) because of the presence of many chess players. / The Vienna Circle of logical positivists held many meetings before and after World War I.

A well known story is that when Victor Adler objected to Count Berchtold, foreign minister of Austria-Hungary, that war would provoke revolution in Russia, even if not in the Habsburg monarchy, he replied: "And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) sitting over there at the Cafe Central?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_Central

where was that sculpture with the woman holding a fish in her hand? the masonic connection?

“Filozoflar dünyayı, yalnızca, çeşitli şekillerde yorumlamışlardır; oysa sorun onu değiştirmektir.”

Feuerbach Üzerine Tezler, Karl Marx