OVERLAPPING RIPPLES

We were in Vienna for three days this week for the opening of Joel’s retrospective, which is traveling Europe. During the days, while he was busy with interviews and press conferences, I wandered the streets in search of a city I’d wanted to see for decades. I had missed it in my teens when, running out of money while hitching around the continent, I settled for Saltzburg, a summer down bed in a pen pal's home and hot chocolate and a pastry which, while flaky and tasty was, I was sure, inferior to those made in Vienna.

Fifty years later, I find myself sitting in a taxi on my way to what I assume will be the Vienna of my dreams. To the right, the Stadtpark, voluptuous in summer greens and cool shadows. To my left, a poster for a dance performance; the date, 16th July, leaps off the poster and sets my insides aquiver; an unexpected, close to uncontrollable, reaction; a fluttering that starts in my belly and threatens to engulf the rest of me.

Numbers and letters when arranged in a particular gathering can, for all of us, strike a central nerve of memory. 16th July, 1971 was the due date of my firstborn. And as the autopsy would later reveal, was the day she died, my body holding onto her for another 2 days before induced labor expelled her into another realm.

The light turns green, the taxi moves on, and I calm my grieving body. Yet in some eerie sense Vienna echoes that experience; another expectation come to naught. A city strangely devoid of people and pastries.

But I must here tip my cap to the entire staff of the Kunsthaus Museum, https://www.kunsthauswien.com/en/museum comprised mainly of women who were kindness and generosity itself, not only to Joel but also to me. How heartening it is to find women in positions traditionally owned by men; women who have managed to retain their compassion and humor and sisterly respect while tapping into the more masculine drive of ambition and assertiveness, holding their own without aggression. To Bettina, Verena, Eva, Sabine and Sophie my admiration and thanks.

The museum itself, originally a chair factory, was bought and transformed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, an Austrian artist and free spirit who knew a thing or two about the snatch of death having lost some 60 plus family members in the Holocaust. www.hundertwasser.com/ He believed that a straight line was ungodly and immoral and certainly his life was anything but a straight line. His paintings reflect the color the glory, the madness and the joy of life’s spiraling, unfathomable mystery. He gave political speeches in the nude, travelled the world, married twice and birthed a daughter. He also built many buildings and a boat he named The Rainy Day in which he travelled to New Zealand over the course of 3 years and where he now lies, as was his wish, buried naked below a Tulip tree.

His rendering of the building which houses his art as well as Photography exhibitions, literally keeps you on your toes and in the moment; the floors and stairs undulating beneath one’s feet so that one must continually take stock of where one is and rebalance accordingly. What a great metaphor for life, for aren’t we all, in spite of our efforts to control, always at sea?

I didn’t find my Vienna and after hours of searching would return to our hotel room where I found pleasure in light and shadow and slivers of reality susceptible to abstraction.

Yet, Vienna was rich with people. 800 of them attended Joel’s opening and stayed until midnight. And many people travelled great distance, among them Ralph Goertz, the curator of Joel’s show at the NRW Forum in Dusseldorf; Joshua, a young friend who travelled 12 hours by bus from Heidelburg where he is working in a factory this summer in order to fund his 2nd year at Studio Marangoni in Florence. And another man, Fate Velaj, who drove 15 hours from Albania.

This kind of energy and spirit, much like Hundertwasser’s is an inspiration. The instinct to say, “yes” to adventure and serendipity, to follow the winding road and avoid the straight-of-way. Even if it means sometimes being trapped in a metal tube, winging its way from Vienna to Florence and in which we are surrounded by Austrian toddlers with man-sized voices, their plump, gleeful faces playing peek-a-boo with us between the seats; a near euphoric experience until one of them dumps a load of Teutonic shit in its diaper, a powerful aroma that brought tears to my eyes. So yes, shit happens, there are no straight lines, and there a not guarantees of finding one’s Vienna.

But what joy to come in the garden gate, to unpack, to make a light dinner and sit under the shade of the trees. 

And into the ever-widening circles of life, pebbles of possibility are continually tossed, so that the next ripple arrives before the last disappears. This morning, the date of Amy’s arrival into and departure from this earthly plane, a text arrives telling us that my nephew, Simon, and Sarah, his lady-love, have delivered a baby boy into this world. An overlapping ripple that from now on will grace this sorrowful date with joy.