We are not certain – we never seem to be these days. Somewhere in the measure of time between adolescence and adulthood all that brash self-confidence ebbed away and we longed to be the thing we always railed against – children. In time that assertion may return, in the way that the term Boomer is now synonymous with self ascribed ignorance and close mindedness. The admirable young people for whom the inherited earth is a landscape of poverty and environmental cataclysm are right in that sneering assessment – how much leeway can you expect for the good that you did, if it stopped at the exact moment that virtue impeded attainment and meaningless growth?
Certainty is a memory now, but we still pretend where it is needed, though every day in the Old Country is like a series of flashbacks that soften the gaze. Turn the head slightly down an unfamiliar alley and it releases a memory: here is where the wind blew sudden and cold, and we ducked into a shop to escape the sudden snow, and the Old Man pointed out the tiny doorway and explained the reason why and we noticed the uneven floor and that was his voice and that was the smell of his clothes and that was everything and then we return to walking, trying not to cry because He is dying, everything is dying.
Everything is dying and yet there are still moments of weariness, and we fall into routines. We make love every morning, and then shower and go to the hospital to visit him, stop on a way for a coffee. We are aware that we are a novelty in the village, and order the same coffee and bread each morning, and when the waitress retires to her counter we speak about how different everything is, and wonderful. It’s the way a latte really means ‘milky’ served in a tall glass and as pale as the skin under our arms. The way the Austrians provide a small tray with the coffee, napkin, sweet biscuit and soda water as complements. The way everything is so wonderful, even here in this slightly shabby industrial village, close enough to the Alps to highlight the dullness, the lack of beauty in the postwar architecture, the way the modern era and influx new migrants seem to have sapped the community feel. Austria was always at its worst when it denied the validity of the outside world. Austria was always at its best when it ignored the outside world and we gathered in the snow as a community and carried on traditions centuries old because that’s who we were. Now the streets are empty, the gathering places closed down. Where is everyone?
We arrive too early at the hospital, but it is no hardship to wait on the 7th floor and look out the view of the waiting room. We see the Church and Cathedral first, then the Military academy, beyond that the sweep of fields beyond the town and then left to right the sweep of the Alps, the Semmering Pass, Schneeberg and the Hohe Wand. We caress each other and decide where we will spend the day after the brief visit here- what paths we will explore.
If the Old Man is doing well, we take him down to the garden grounds of the hospital which are filled with languorously swaying trees, and we look and thm and he tells us about them. We roll his wheelchair up to them and he touches the bark. In the midst of this is an old building that was once the maternity hospital – now a museum. We go in once and look around, but we feel the immense sadness of the frightened lives that began and ended here for mothers and babies alike. We talk about his ongoing treatments – when he can come home after nearly 9 months in the hospital. When his prosthetic legs can be made and fitted. When he can cut back on his smoking and drinking. When he might be deemed well enough to travel home to Australia to die.
What advice for the dying then? What rules could we set for you now, that you would heed, when intransigence so often brought you where you are? What secrets to your heart could be unlocked? You are busy trying to get the blood to flow and the breath to come. We are busy hiking trails after visiting hours are finished, drinking in the world that you loved but are unable to touch from the shackles of a wheelchair. We are all busy.
You are afraid of leaving before things are resolved, before those you love are safe. We are afraid because we see only one certainty anymore, and fight it by living vigorously, making love on forest trails and gazing into eyes, sunsets, the endless rivers. We are all afraid.
LIfe is a series of flashbacks that refuse to leave, as though your touch opened generational memory, we feel strange familiarity in new places. In a darkened Beech filled valley we hear the echoes of a picnicking party a hundred years ago, and the ghosts of their laughter and singing leave images that flicker the way the aftershock of the sun imprints upon closed eyes. We visited the caves and then went up to the grass where we ate and drank and lay among the wildflowers were, before electricity and benzine, before the final fall of the Empire that stretched across Europe. We see these visions but cannot hold onto them, nor express them adequately.
One evening we walk into the fields to pick strawberries and watch the world sleep. I take the photograph above. We see all the sky above, and the boundless wheat curtailed by stretches of forest where deer emerge to step delicately into the whispering expanses of grass. We are dying, we are all dying, but we persist in paying homage to life. We worship the sweet taste of new air, the traceries of the contrails in the jetstream, the buried voices of the dead that emerge from the earth as the stars awaken in the fading day.
One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.
Edward Abbey
Blaze of Obscurity 