[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent April 2003]
I’ll try to ramble less this time.
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Prague. It feels like a Kafka protagonist, not in control of its circumstances, locked in a curious relationship of two-way exploitation, reluctant to act out of spite or stubborness or fear, probably destined for regret. The tourists have definitely come and the city weighs heavy with them, and with its own response. There is great beauty here but an autistic failure to relate it to the world outside. As a populace, the Czechs have woken up from their long sleep under Communist rule; as a city, Prague is still disoriented. A visit here is not exactly disappointing, but somehow it lacks the power to move – if it were a tale, it would be one with a lot of incident, but no thematic power.
One crucial exception: the Charles Bridge. It is like a flexing muscle across the Moldova, utterly certain of its place and its message. I will remember it clearly.
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Dogs are either running free or on leads and muzzled. In the hotel restaurant a brown snout nudged past my brother’s elbow, eager for his steak. It looked like a friendly moray eel.
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I have met my parents and my older brother and we are travelling to Budapest tomorrow! Family is grand. They are well, since you asked.
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Today we visited one of the more infamous concentration camps, Terezin (thereisenstadt), the model ghetto. Sombre. The museums were full of documentation, the intricate workings of a managed atrocity, and art, the sketches and words of the Jews interned there. A jarring combination, speaking to deeply-understood themes of the dehumanising power of bureaucracy and the soul-defining power of art. I could say a lot more, but as always with such places, words will fail to convey much more than the barest understanding; I felt like I was just starting to glimpse something, something fearful and perhaps oddly beautiful, from the time I spent there. It is, if nothing else, a reminder of our shared humanity, through
remembrance of its most terrible denials.
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And a quartet performed Dvorak, Bach, others. Great musicians perform in lovingly restored classical venues to crowds of tourists lured by cheaply photocopied advertisements pushed on them by street hawkers. The contradictions of Prague. It will be a different place in ten years, and I sincerely hope it comes more fully into itself.
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Shouts to Tina C, happy birthday!
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morgue