On the Maestro

I’m already missing the Maestro.

It’s been a long and serious acquaintance, beginning in a Vermont winter when, as part of a six-week course in Latin American fiction, I opened One Hundred Years of Solitude and felt the world and my paradigms shift.

It was required reading in a class that both thwarted and enthralled me.  The teacher couldn’t teach: we had all established that when he marched us through some wonderful stories by Juan Rulfo and Julio Cortazar, offering plot summaries instead of the hows and whys of understanding, shedding no light on unfamiliar ground, but still managing to do one basic thing that a college class should always do—to make introductions to something rich and strange and entirely new to the students.

So here I was, in a snow-smothered New England dormitory, translated to Macondo, impelled by one of the greatest opening sentences in fiction:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

It was the best novel I read in college.  One Hundred Years of Solitude was many things—a profound meditation on myth and history, a truly, ardently Latin American novel, and one of the most breath-takingly beautiful virtuoso performances in the whole goddamned world of storytelling. By now there are no spoilers: Garcia Marquez’s great scenes and almost musical narrative sequences are so fixed in our memories that they are icons of modernism.  The visits of the gypsies, the plague of insomnia, the Banana Company Massacre.  If you know the book, the simple phrases conjure recollection—the convoluted epic, stories popping in and out of each other like tales in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 

It was a kind of novel I had never seen.  Something that seemed to me entirely new in prose fiction, though I would find out later that One Hundred Years had illustrious ancestors—other Latin American authors like Carpentier and Asturias. European writers like Calvino and Kafka and strange old Bruno Schultz.  The way that the fantastic brushed against the plausible, the way the voice of the story refused to take sides—it was all telling me that the space of imagining was wider than the world itself, a lesson Tolkien had taught me years before, but revisited in new form.  Macondo felt historical, and indeed it was.  Latin American history—Western Hemispheric history—with the mythic volume cranked up.  It helped me revisit the fantastic, refashion legend and folklore, in ways that fast became important to my way of seeing things and telling stories.  If Tolkien’s writing inspired me, the inspiration was shaped by Garcia Marquez.

Through One Hundred Years I met my best friend, Gali Sanchez, who shared my passion for the book.  It provided us with the first point of intersection.

And the book provided me with my one fanboy moment in adulthood.  When Rhonda and I were in Florence in 2007, standing in a cramped, three-hour line to enter the Uffizi Gallery, we stood in front of an amiable young woman whose fluent English was laced with a South American accent—one I could not place.  So I asked her where she came from, and found out she was Colombian.  “Oh!” I said. “My favorite living novelist comes from Colombia.” 

At the mention of the Maestro’s name she smiled quietly and said, “He’s my uncle.”

There was not room enough in the Uffizi queue to kneel or grovel.  I was not the worst of fanboys, careful not to rhapsodize, to ask about the health of a distinguished man in his eighties.  I left his work to the side, talked to the young woman about her uncle, trying not to presume that he was my uncle, too, but at that time, as in the years since that icy Vermont winter, I felt as though he was.

Perhaps my favorite moment in One Hundred Years was a moment of goodbyes.  Remedios the Beauty, the addle-witted “most beautiful women in the world”, has cut a wide oblivious swath through the men of Macondo, leaving behind a trail of ruined suitors:

Remedios the Beauty stayed there wandering through the desert of solitude, bearing no cross on her back, maturing in her dreams without nightmares, her interminable baths, her unscheduled meals, her deep and prolonged silences that had no memory until one afternoon in March, when Fernanda wanted to fold her brabant sheets in the garden and asked the women in the house for help. She had just begun when Amaranta noticed that Remedios the Beauty was covered all over by an intense paleness.

   “Don’t you feel well??she asked her.

                Remedios the Beauty, who was clutching the sheet by the other end, gave a pitying smile.

                “Quite the opposite,?she said, “I never felt better.?

                She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.

What a way to go out.  Aloft in a mercy of light.  My dear, inventive uncle of the soul, may you find that mercy wherever you’re headed.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On Sligo and Yeats, Mrs. Furey and an Early Pilgrimage

As part of my preparation for teaching a class on travel writing this May, I've been reading Phil Cousineau's The Art of Pilgrimage. Some of this very fine book deflects into popular religious writing—I figured it would, given the traditional associations with "pilgrimage", so I ventured into it with full knowledge that those parts of the book would not be too much in my wheelhouse—but I'm still seeing strong questions raised by a book that is more supple, more searching than I had first assumed.  It's making  me think about pilgrimages of my own, of  qualities that turn sight-seeing into pilgrimage, destination into shrine.

The first pilgrimage I took, or at least the first I recognized as pilgrimage, was in Ireland in the late 90s.  It took a conventional form: we took a bus up to Sligo from Galway, the idea being to touch the hem of Yeats' garment and to see the country of his poems.

I would have preferred train to Bus Eireann.  Everyone who knows me knows my love of rails.  But the Intercity Line—then and now, as I understand—sent the traveler way east into central Ireland to connect from Galway, and so we took the bus, on roads that were still winding and through a cloudy West of Ireland terrain that reminded me how I loved the countryside there, but how it always felt as though you took in the landscape at a gloomy slant, at wintry dusk even though our trip was in June.

We arrived in Sligo at an equally somber moment.  Our June was the June of 1997, and the Troubles had flared up again following the shooting of two members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.  The political climate was as somber as the weather, and we were dropped off in a hushed, even gloomy heart of the town, where we made our way to the tourist center and stood in line for one of the standard tours until a Mrs. Furey came up to us and offered her services as chauffeur and guide.

Needless to say, it's a good rule of thumb to avoid offers you meet in these circumstances.  I accepted, though, relying on what I'd admit was a degree of sexism (yes, women would be capable of a good old-fashioned kidnapping or drygulch, but let's face it: they are much less likely to do so than men), but also on my seasoned intuition when it came to character.  Mrs. Furey was warm, humorous, but altogether businesslike: we would pay for the trip, but she would deliver our money's worth.

Also, wasn't Michael Furey the young man from the west of Ireland who died for the love of Greta Conroy in James Joyce's magnificent story, "The Dead"?  The one that Gabriel Conroy dreamed his wife was dreaming of?  A young man obscured in the fiction of memory, in the memory of memory, and then to make obscurity complete, only a fictional character to begin with?  And was Michael Furey Mrs. Furey's oblique ancestor,  recalled vaguely by a latter-day writer on a quest preoccupied with visiting a dead poet's grave in Sligo?  The temptation deepened enough to give in to it, to surrender the facts and the good sense, and we were off in Mrs. Furey's van through winding, obscure roads, to Innisfree and Lissadell and the grave at Ben Bulben.

Yeats people know these places filtered through the glamour of the poems.  So in ways it becomes superfluous to go on about how one or the other of them might have disappointed when you see them firsthand.  Yeats brought poetry to them to understand them, to connect them with his life and people,  and now we bring that poetry with us, and a dim island like Innisfree becomes unique and evocative because the poetry mediates our experience.  And Lissadell, the great home of the Gore-Booth family and the center of what Auden called "that parish of rich women" who were Yeats' patrons and companions,

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle…

was barely furnished, the floors checkerboarded with dust framed by the carpets' stripped-down warp and weft.  Mrs. Furey's story about Yeats and the male friends of the Gore-Booth family sitting in the kitchen and throwing knives at rats seemed appropriate in the surroundings. 

I understand that there is no longer public access to Lissadell.  The current owners restored it then raised objections, whether from some dog-in-the-manger possessiveness or from a justified nervousness about trespassers.  In either case, it was good to go when we went, years before that litigation, and to know, having seen the place, that the great poet was right about something more than its decrepit beauty:

Dear shadows, now you know it all,

All the folly of a fight

With a common wrong or right.

The innocent and the beautiful.

Have no enemy but time.

On from there we went, Mrs. Furey and Rhonda and I, to the banks of Lough Gill, staring out across the waters at the famous Isle of Innisfree, a shoulder of green amid gray waters.  At that distance the "bee-loud glades" and the perpetual, beckoning call of the Isle were inaudible.  The only wonder that I felt was the one I had prepared myself for—the resonance of the place, having decided its meaning before I arrived. 

All I remember of the island was there before I saw it.  I had done my share of traveling, but I was new to pilgrimage.

When we arrived at Drumcliff Churchyard, under the distant hulking shadow of Ben Bulben, it was the moment of epiphany.  It was my version of Canterbury, Bodh Gaya, the Kaaba.  Because I've lived my days in more secular poetry, and though Yeats was hardly a saint, the poems were to me the relics of sainthood. 

 

But of course, the grave was the shrine.  Limestone, stark in its simplicity, inscribed with the famous epitaph he wrote for himself (about casting "a cold eye/on life, on death"—I knew it by heart in my 20s, still recalled from memory all of the poems I've used in this piece, an indication that I've never quite left the faith).   But no epiphany, no cemetery revelation.  A reverent hush, a sense of homage, but no different from that by any graveside.  It could have been anyone buried there.

And the funny thing is that, indeed, it could have been anyone.  A decade later I learned that it is probable that Yeats is not buried in Drumcliff Churchyard after all.  Yeats died in France in early 1939, his body buried there, intended for transport back to Ireland when, according to the poet, the newspapers would have forgotten about him and the final internment could happen with a minimum of fuss.  But 1939 marked the outbreak of the war.  The body in the French grave was ostensibly moved to Drumcliff in 1948, but in the intervening years, confusion has risen, Yeats not alone in being "transplanted" after the conflict.  In short, though the body in the Sligo grave might be Yeats', it is far more likely, people think now, that some unknown Frenchman awaits eternity on a high rocky spot in Ireland.

Which speaks to pilgrimage, doesn't it?  I've traveled since, and I've thought more about my travels, and now I think that pilgrimage is less a journey to a place than one guided by an inner prompting—something you need to do, perhaps, to get out of your system, to say you have done it, to follow, in some way, the poetry to its source.  Only to discover, perhaps, that the poetry itself was the source, and that wherever you go, that pilgrimage is with you.  It's what the old man said in "The Circus Animals' Desertion," or something near it:

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.

©2014 Michael Williams

On Pest and Heroes Square, and Alms for Oblivion

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion."

                        Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

Buda is the glamour half of Budapest, east side of the Danube, home of the Castle District, Matthias Church, the Fishermen's Bastion, and highly expensive housing.

Pest, on the other hand, is the place where Hungarian things get done, from the Parliament east to Heroes Square, that brilliant, almost sepulchral plaza of arches and statuary nearby our lodgings while we stayed in the city.

The first night in Budapest, wearied by the long flights and a delay in London Heathrow, we decided on a walk toward Heroes Square (or Hősök tere),  the tourist site on my map that was closest to the hotel.  I was unprepared for Heroes Square, proceeding under the assumption that it was the Statue Park, the odd reliquary for Soviet communism that in reality lies a short distance outside the city—a place that we ended up not visiting this time in Budapest.  So I imagined those dismal Eastern Bloc constructions—outsized remnants of socialist realism, where the men all looked like Stalin, and those women who didn't look like Stalin looked like Stalin's mistresses.  We were headed, I assumed, toward the kind of display that our own Cold Warriors would have warned us about in the Missile Crisis days had they cared anything at all about poetry or art, had they not vied with the bleak propaganda of communist art by simply not caring about any form of artistic expression that didn't sell.

In short, I expected very little.  It was a first-night, off-the-plane excursion.  I was pleasantly surprised.

The statues around Heroes Square were indeed outsized, and a kind of late 19^th century Romanticism that's not necessarily to my liking.  But at least it wasn't the Politburo.

Two colonnades form a half circle at the eastern edge of the plaza, atop them symbolic figures representing War and Peace, Work and Welfare.  Within the colonnade stand the Heroes, and it is immediately apparent that War is the most influential of the stone emblems: kings and commanders dominate the lineup.  I suppose that the sentiment of its time was not unlike 19^th century America's love affair with its generals.  And yet among them were men of peace—or at least the peaceful faces of men of war.  King Matthias and his scholars.  Coloman of Hungary, king and bishop, who stood against the witch burnings of his time, burnings still recalled by the sculpture at our hotel entrance, where the witch, entangled in blackened bronze, fades into the surrounding buildings and the power lines.

A more magnificent statue dominates Heroes Square. Standing tall and brilliant in front of the intersection of the colonnades is the famous statue of the Archangel Gabriel.  We were told by our guide the next day that this statue was "voted the best statue of Gabriel in the world, by those who know"—an enigmatic statement that left me wondering who those Gabriel experts might be.  Nevertheless, the statue—the archangel holding a crown—is impressive, and perhaps “those who know” are altogether right in this matter.

The square is framed by art museums.  On the north side is the Museum of Fine Arts, which when we visited was, to my delight, housing a traveling Caravaggio exhibition. The Palace of Arts, on the south side of the square, was a center of performing arts, and the events scheduled for the time of our stay were specifically national and contemporary, so we picked tradition over exploration and planned our Caravaggio visit for the following day.

Which speaks to a point.  As an artist of sorts, I am usually inclined toward the new and experimental.  But here on markedly foreign turf, more tourist than artist, I gravitated toward the known, the sanctioned, the familiar.  Caravaggio wasn't even Hungarian, I would remind myself in the days that followed, as the opportunity offered by the Palace of Arts faded behind me on the train to Vienna.  In Hungary I brushed against a vivid culture and history almost completely alien from my own, and it made me think about anonymity, that sometimes good work is lost in place as well as in time. 

And as an artist of minor sorts, I am more and more humbled by the inevitability that the survival of my own work is dependent on these large and immovable things: that it is limited by the restraints of home geography and sequestered talents.  That as writers we see things pass from print, search for recommended books to find they haven't been published in years and that the search in the most obscure sites may roust no words out of oblivion and decay.

Only a block or two from the square is the bizarrely eclectic Vajdahunyad castle, a relative newcomer to the cityscape when you consider the old origins of some of the structures across the Danube. Built in the same era (and with the same impulse) as Heroes Square, it is a gallimaufry of architectural styles—Baroque, Gothic, Renaissance, Romanesque all gathered together and lost in a strange larger purpose—entire in its oddness, occasional awkwardness, and beauty.  It houses two famous statues: one of Bela Lugosi, of course, and another of Anonymous.

A testimony to all writers, artists (and people in general) whose names have been lost to geography and time, the statue supposedly commemorates a chronicler of King Bela (not Lugosi, but a 12^th or 13^th century Hungarian monarch—for here the trouble lies, in that there are several King Belas, and we don't know to which this writer attached himself).  At the foot of the statue, I'm told by a favorite student of mine, the mathematician Paul Erdos met with a number of his fellows, apparently an unparalleled assemblage of mathematical genius, although again these are names as lost to me as that of Coloman, Matthias, or the "true identity" behind this statue.  The pen the statue holds is the subject of a local superstition: it seems that students rub it for good luck on their exams, summoning recall out of bronze and oblivion, hoping that memory and insight will have their academic backs until the test is over and time begins again.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On the City, and Freedom, and Light

So there it was, and here I was.  Alone in the last room of the museum, in front of me a floating display of a city caught in mist and light.

It was supposedly Prague, of course: Prague filled with the light at the end of the Burrow you glimpse on occasion in some of Kafka's fiction—the Castle, perhaps, or the world born from Grete Samsa's music in the last section of "The Metamorphosis".  Kafka calls it "the unknown nourishment".  Gregor Samsa looks for it and fails to find it, as does the Hunger Artist:

"Because," said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little…"because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was continuing to fast. ("The Hunger Artist", tr. Ian Johnston)

That search for the missing place, the forgotten place, or the place that may not exist (or if it does, is remote and bathed in impenetrable light) is a part of the desire and yearning of Kafka's work that drew me from the start—not only because it was so well rendered but also because I shared it, have always shared it.  And in a way, this trip—and for that matter, all my trips and journeys—are toward a place I imagine very much as the museum notes proposed it, rather vaguely and tentatively and perhaps even mundanely, as "free of evil".


"Free of evil," indeed.  If it can't be a place of good, an eternal place (because such places have always been impossible to imagine, at least for me), let it at least carry that much  freedom and release. 

As I had entered the museum, for the first time I had been asked by the clerk if I were eligible for the senior discount.  Of course it was insulting (I am still a few years away), and Rhonda kindly assured me it had to do with my hair, gray since 40.  But for some reason now, it made sense in the presence of that nebulous light, the buildings in the fog, a lone man walking.

We don't have long in any place, people.  Our stay here is a trip, a journey, a holiday. There's a good in that as well as a sadness.  No matter how often epiphany comes, no matter the moments of time outside time, the holidays of soul, we slip back into the mundane and forgetful, where nourishment fades and vanishes into imagined distances. And perhaps knowing that for what it is, settling into it and finding the good there, is one form of difficult nourishment.


I walked back into the city, lightstruck and cold on the west bank of the Vltava, and over the Charles Bridge, where dozens of statues played at immortality, their subjects and inspirations eternally free somewhere.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Burrow

It was a descent into what the Museum calls "the Burrow"—an image famous in the Kafka stories, of course, especially the one by that very name.  The congested dark, the maze-like confusion and comfort, the peace and fascination with the elaborate burrow which stands for your consciousness, your mind, your work—all of those things and none of them.  How you love and hate that hermetically sealed privacy of soul, how you want and don't want company there.  It's an image from Kafka's "The Burrow" I bought into at once, but this stairway, lit in a heat-lamp red, goes down into a dreadful depth, and those who designed the museum have stripped all elements of refuge and retreat from this cellar lined with file cabinets, drawers opened now and then to reveal letters, manuscript pages, glassed-in first editions of the books.  You wander in it like in a glossy, smothering maze, its harsh surfaces making you forget those simultaneous moments of contentment, of self-containment, like when the narrator of "The Burrow" talks about the peace and silence of the place:

But the most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over. For the time being, however, the silence is still with me. For hours I can stroll through my passages  and hear nothing except the rustling of some little creature, which I immediately  reduce to silence between my jaws, or the pattering of soil, which draws my attention  to the need for repair; otherwise all is still. The fragrance of the woods floats in; the place feels both warm and cool. Sometimes I lie down and roll about in the passage with pure joy. When autumn sets in, to possess a burrow like mine, and a roof over your head, is great good fortune for anyone getting on in years. Every hundred yards I have widened the passages into little round cells; there I can curl myself up in comfort and lie warm. There I sleep the sweet sleep of tranquility, of satisfied desire, of achieved ambition; for I possess a house. I do not know whether it is a habit that still persists from former days, or whether the perils even of this house of mine are great enough to awaken me; but invariably every now and then I start up out of profound sleep and listen, listen into the stillness which reigns here unchanged day and night, smile contentedly, and then sink with loosened limbs into still profounder sleep. (Complete Stories, tr. Willa & Edwin Muir, Schocken, 1972, p.327).

That was the Burrow I knew and loved—the comfort of the mind and of the work.  And of course, Kafka is having fun at its expense: not that of the mind or the work, but of the comfort.  Of course the stillness of the Burrow is about to be shot to hell in the narrator's anxieties, his fear of encroachment, but it's there as well in the story.  The Kafka Museum, however, has made the Burrow into a Bureau, a bleak landscape of drawers and paperwork that taps into one of the things we call Kafkaesque—the nightmarish modern landscape of duplicate copies, signings and cosigning, initialing and dating each page.  It's only part of the Burrow, but the part we recognize at once. 

And the part that inhabits dozens of my nightmares. No wonder it unsettles me, this museum cellar, striking fear into the only person I know who messed up three attempts at applying for a library card (Name? Address? Phone #?) because of my phobia of filling out forms.  It is a gauntlet of cabinets: I test one, then another, but the only drawers that open are the ones they have opened already.  Of course I want to look at the first editions, want the sights I expected from a still and safe museum, but the landscape is smothering me, the passage is too tight.  

Probably every good museum gives each visitor, at its best, a sense of "what it was like being there"—an atmosphere, an insight, a tone of setting and design.  I had glimpsed the Kafkaesque bureaucratic mazes in the fiction, inhaled their unhealthy disquiet like secondary smoke.  But it was here, on the killing floor of the Burrow, that I felt it all most viscerally, knew why I had been scared to descend those steps, and that my apprehension was right and modern and profound.  And personal.  I looked for the exit.  I wanted this to be over.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Ghosts of Kafka's Women

And now, in the shadow of a large room I remember as windowless (though I might be mistaken, because my attentions were focused on making sense of the displays around me), Rhonda and I split up briefly, she bound for an exhibit that sets forth Kafka's connections to the Jewish dramatic community in the city.  There was an odd cylindrical structure here, in which you could stand and be immersed in images of the Prague Yiddish theater of Kafka's time, the photos on a kind of wavering, plexi-glass tube that swirled around you—uncomfortably for me, because it was too much immersion, no place for distance or perspective or repose.  It was a question of temperament: I am forever a book guy, I believe, who dips in and out of the artist's world at the reader's discretion.  If a scene in a book becomes too immediate, too raw, I can close the covers and gather my breath, regroup before I read again.  Theatre, on the other hand, presumes: it is all around you, and it unnerves me.

             So as a respite, while Rhonda watches ghostly shapes dance around her, I move into the next alcove, devoted to the women in Kafka's life.

What makes us pick another person is usually unclear when we look back.  Many people don't know that I met Rhonda relatively late, that it may end up that I spent half of my life without knowing her. The time before her was roundabout and vague, not all of it ill spent, but much of it chasing after companions that were not the right ones, not really.  There was a marriage before I met her that was unhappy, that was too much immersion and no solitude—one that I was glad to leave by the time I left it.  I look back on it as though it was someone else's life, glimpsed through glass cases and without definite shape or emotional insides.  It happened—there are records that testify—but I no longer remember, no longer think of it, as my life with Rhonda is the only life there is, and the older memories—those before Rhonda, before the first marriage even—are more vivid to me, but like recollections of childhood, though they lasted into my twenties.  The loves of the past come as characters in varied textures of ghostliness, and only Rhonda is completely and utterly real.

Felice Bauer

Kafka was hardly austere when it came to romance, I was to find out.  A number of women figured in his life, and he managed to be engaged three times—twice to the same woman, the Felice Bauer to whom he dedicated that first great story "The Judgment". In her photos she looks heavy-featured, assuring, decent.  There had to be something in her character that drew him, then pushed him away, then drew him again after several intervening years.  Perhaps she stood for something reputable, something stable and upright that he courted and rejected and could not stop longing for in what should have been the midlife of his thirties.  This part felt intrusive, gossipy, but I kept at the speculation anyway: maybe Kafka thought, as some people think, preparing their way for marital disaster, that because the beloved seems to display certain qualities, admirable qualities, that he or she stands for those virtues or joys or comforts.  Like a character in a story or a play, the person you love can be both fleshly, intelligent creature and a gathering of words, ideas, images, all of which are in danger of being solely yours.  It's the old inside/outside song and dance, object and subject, Apollo and Dionysus, actor and role, and a cluster of all those tensions that go into your choosing whom you choose and why that person chooses you.

Julie Wohyrzek

And after his engagements to Felice, Kafka was engaged a third time, to a more simple, less educated Julie Wohyrzek, whose Zionist beliefs were objectionable to his domineering father.  It is tempting to see Wohyrzek's role as a kind of rescuer—from complexities and ambiguities and striving for paternal approval into the freedom of setting it all aside, the intensities of thinking and thinking too much.  During this period of his life, he supposedly had a brief affair with Grete Bloch, with whom he may or may not have fathered a son.  The last two loves of his life—the intense Milena Jisenská, Czech writer and activist, to whom the "Letter to Milena" was addressed, and Dora Diamant, who I understand sparked his interest in the Talmud, who survived him, and who (of all the women I have mentioned) alone survived the death camps.  In each case, the need of the soul emerged in human form, in female form, and at least in retrospect, these women, no doubt full and vibrant and beautiful in their own lives (because those things, too, drew the Master, they had to) survive in glass cases as the pictures I show you, as hieroglyphs that tell and conceal fragments of inner lives that brushed against his, like stories that mask human truths as they reveal.  They are characters in a play or book now: I read them obliquely and at my peril as I passed through them toward a stairwell leading down, toward a narrow corridor red-lit and unsettling. 

Milena  Jisenská 

I actually did not want to go there.  Physically, even viscerally.  It was like the stairwell to the cellar in the final chapters of my own Trajan's Arch, as though, in a kind of homage to Kafka, a doorway had opened between his work and my own--cramped and diminished and, from where I stood, intimidating. Something stopped me at the top of those stairs.  But you had to descend to see it all, so I took a deep, uncomfortable breath and moved down the stairs.  Text ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Museum Ghosts of Prague

And then into the museum, a shadowy foyer with a tightly spiraled boat's stair leading up to the exhibit. 

                Some travelers reviewed this place as "quirky"—a word I have come to hate, not only because it's been tagged to my work in the past as a kind of dismissal, but also because in general it condescends to the pure strangeness of things.  Here initial letters and manuscripts from Kafka's ancestors—of course the oppressive and intimidating father among them prominently—and a family tree illustrated with photographs and other portraits receding as you followed back to the family origins in the 17^th century, obscure ancestors of Baroque Prague, the faces leading up to Kafka himself and the childhood portraits of his three lovely sisters—Ottla, Elli, and Valli, their lines ending abruptly at Chelmno and Auschwitz.  This display circles a small, makeshift theatre, a classroom screen, five folding chairs in front of it. 

                On the screen, early films of Prague cascade and ripple as though you were watching the city through water.  Recognizable buildings emerge from the light—St. Vitus', the Astronomical Clock, the buildings that frame the Old Town Square –but not in the light that we had been seeing them over the past three days, the beautiful architectural "sights" and "vistas".  Instead, they formed the circumference of an oppressive round followed by the child Kafka to and from school. 

I did a walk like that myself—or one of the same distance—but hardly through beautiful and narrow Baroque streets. Mine was over desolate, working-class suburban terrain., but the desolation was external for that time and for a few years following, a span in which I felt celebrated and loved, lacking the genius and insight of young Kafka, his nerve-end sense of the nuanced, atmospheric menace of his home life. Later he would write of this almost preternaturally beautiful city, in language that appeared on the provisional screen in front of me: Prague doesn’t let go of us. This mother has claws. We have to submit or –. We would have to set fire to it in two places, at Vyšehrad and at the Prague Castle, then we might get away. 

I wondered how anyone could want to burn this city in order to leave it entirely.  It seems impossible until you think of your own town, its particular pull and drain on its every inhabitant, no more or less in these cities than in any others, no more extraordinary because you are the young it has tried to eat, you are the one confined and injured by its custom.  Is it every city, every home, that celebrates the wrong children while wronging the ones it overlooks?  Or does it wrong the ones its celebrates, limning them in a tight circle whose outer edge is its own castles and high places?

And yes, I was thinking these things, weighed down by museum dark and ambiguous light, as I picked myself up to move to the next room on the journey.  ©2014 Michael Williams