thomas m wilson

Yesterday I began my journey south. I looked out on this grey weather from the left window at the dimples of rain on the muddy Elbe River as it flows past steep grass banks, and yellow and green steeply pitched three-story mansions behind, and wooded slope behind them.  I would soon enter Bohemia for the first time as we cross the border and enter the land of my grandfather’s family, Jewish members of the Hapsburg Empire. 

I feel good to feel free and mobile and agile on the surface of the earth.  The beauty of the river valley to my left was surprising me as we wound forward.  It is the river Elbe, slowing and then quickly flowing through green and lush Saxony in south-east Germany. Mist hangs in the valley above white stone cliffs high above.  This river valley carried our train south and I saw some of the most beautiful and lushly forested landscape I had seen anywhere in Germany. 

And so let’s be honest. The old town of Prague has been killed by the huge crowds of tourists in 2023.  It makes visiting the old town square almost unenviable so thickly does the crowd jostle.  But the walk up to the castle at the top of the hill thins out the numbers because the climb is relatively steep.  Up there you can appreciate Prague a little more. 

This morning I walked up through the green and quiet park behind my hotel, and over the hill to visit the library of Strahov Monastery.   This was completed in 1679, and there is a surfeit of stucco decoration on the walls and ceiling.  The bellowing American tourists marred the atmosphere of contemplative calm that I was hoping for, but the space is still impressive. 

The highlight of this afternoon was watching the Prague Symphony Orchestra perform in Wallenstein Garden.  They were playing in the 1627 loggia whose ceiling is painted with frescoes depicting the battle of Troy.  They played, amongst other things, the score of Lawrence of Arabia, and the visual context couldn’t have been more dramatically appropriate, ancient Trojan battle scenes and all.  A crowd of thousands of Czechs had gathered in the gardens to watch. 

If you have never visited a place it is understandable that certain films or other bits of culture might colour your perception of that place. In 1996 a film called Kolya came out which is set in Prague. The main character is a down on his luck bachelor who lives in a wonderful medieval tower and plays the cello. And so for me Prague has always been associated with classical music and medieval spires dimly seen through misty window pains. It is fitting then that I was able to hear some classical music on my one day in the city.

Tomorrow the journey south continues…

Why do I linger in places like this? Perhaps this is why…

‘Teach me mortality, frighten me

into the present.  Help me to find

the heft of these days.’

-Jack Gilbert

Another place that you can find mental and spiritual space for peace and reflection is the old Jewish cemetery, and so here I returned this morning.

…two great gods in a vault of starlight

  Play ponderingly at chess; and at the game’s end

  One of the pieces, shaken, falls to the floor

  And runs to the darkest corner; and that piece

  Forgotten there, left motionless, is I….

  Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power,

  Am only one of millions, mostly silent;

  One who came with lips and hands and a heart,

  Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it.

  Say that the fates of time and space obscured me,

  Led me a thousand ways to pain, bemused me,

  Wrapped me in ugliness; and like great spiders

  Dispatched me at their leisure…. Well, what then?

  Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,

  The horns of glory blowing above my burial?

-Conrad Aiken from Tetelestai

…nothing human remains. You are

the earth and air; you are in the beauty of the ocean

And the great streaming triumphs of sundown; you are alive

and well in the tender grass rejoicing

When soft rain falls all night…

-Robinson Jeffers from Hungerfield

This afternoon I was at the Humbolt Forum, and spend some time in the section on Melanesia and Micronesia.  A wonderful experience has been designed by the museums curators, where you are taken by large projected video up the Sepik river on the north coast of Papua New Guinea, one of the great rivers of the world, still full of wildness and grandeur. Then you walk down a stair case and stand in front of a traditional men’s house and its triumphant gable.  These houses up to 25 metres in situ, and this was smaller but was still extremely large so that it took up two or three floors of space.  I stood in front of a flat large touch screen and went through old photos of these places.  And what came into my mind, but the tympanum (the section above a door lintel) with its carvings and images of old men representing saints and so on above the main entrance to English and French cathedrals… Strangely this came into my mind… As I looked up at the row of large stylised faces of men looking down at me from the gabled front of this Sepik River men’s house.  Humans repeating motifs and patterns in the world over thousand of years and, deserts and oceans and forests away.

These houses were for men to be initiated into the world of the spirits and the ancestors. As I spent more time learning about this Sepik river architecture, about how these houses are built, and what they were for, I remembered the ancient and enclosed world of PNG traditional culture that I had learned about from watching the famous triology of documentaries by Australians Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, from reading Throwim Way Leg by Tim Flannery, and other sources. It is a cultural cosmos, complete and elaborate and proud, to rival any other cultural cosmos in the world.  Unlike English aristocrats who emulated ancient Rome in their architecture and culture, these men and women did not know about the outside world until the twentieth century.  They were not ‘remote’, they were not ‘on the periphery of world affairs’, they were not ‘far away from the centres of power’, etc.  They were at the centre of their cultural and natural universe.  Living cultures thousands of years old full of rituals, architecture, art, rites of passages, languages, knowledge of the plants and animals and weather of their world. 

Being here in this section of the Humbolt Forum made me want to take a long canoe with an outboard up the Sepik.  It gave me feel refreshed to remember that peoples and cultures close to my home in Perth, W.A. have until recent decades, felt secure in their place in the cosmos, and were planted in a dense culture that showed no deference to Greek democracy, Shakespearean drama, Claudean landscapes, industrial revolutions, or European monarchs.  That existed proudly independently and confidently, naked and strong and ingenious amongst their yams and their pigs and their forests full of vines and mountains and wide brown rivers. 

After immersing myself for half an hour in the architectural traditions of this culture along the Sepik River, and standing under the eves of one of its towering products, high above me, I moved on.  I walked to a bai, a traditional house for ceremonies, made in Palau, in Micronesia.  Yes, they have an actual bai here in the Humbolt Forum in Berlin.  It was made in the first decade of the twentieth century for a German ethnologist by the locals over three months, then shipped to Berlin.  And so I took my shoes off and stepped inside the raised platform of the bai, under its thatched roof.  The beams above me were carved with figures and animals, each telling a different story.  I sat next to the stones of the central hearth and pressed a button, and a disembodied voice from the rafters above me told me the stories of the people.  As each story was recounted I could look up and find it represented in carvings on different beams.  This made me think of the way the story of the bible is carved into wood and stone in English churches, from medieval times when most people were illiterate and stories were best represented that way.  It was the same here in this old Palauan culture.  What a wonderful experience. 

But it felt strange that I had come all the way to Berlin to have this experience, when I live in a country that is, comparatively, just next door to PNG and Palua.  Why don’t we tell these stories in Australia, to become more acquainted with our geographical neighbourhood more intimately?  I also reflected on how all of these rituals and ceremonies on the Sepik River had their swan song in the 1980s, and since then the triumph of meddling Christian missionaries have pretty much ended it all.  What continues is now done mainly for the tourists, what little come to this often violent area of the planet.  What a horrible thing to usher in the demise of cultures many thousand of years old through bigoted proselytising of your own holy book.  It is bad enough when you meet, as I have, people working in mining in PNG who don’t seem to care much about the people whose rivers they are polluting, but worse when people actively dissuade others from following their own cultural inclinations because of their own religious self-righteousness.

Still, thank you Humbolt Forum. You have widened my field of vision.