May 13-14. Bad Gastein and Vienna

Monday May 13. Bad Gastein and Tuesday May 14. Vienna. 

Dear Trail Friends

The bus ride from Salzburg to Bad Gastein was short and very beautiful. The mountains reminded me of Switzerland. I was very impressed by the bus driver negotiating the narrow roads with hairpin turns as we climbed the steep mountain above the village of Bad Gastein (which is in a valley). I was also impressed when we unloaded and walked the last distance (5 or 10 minutes) on even narrower roads, and welcomed by the young owner of the Villa Excelsior who energetically hoisted and tightly packed our luggage into the Villa van (which bragged in large letters on the side that Freud had been a guest there but of which alas I failed to get a photo.) I realized this was not the kind of hotel that typically hosts group tours and I felt grateful to the hotel for welcoming us and our travel agency for working with our eccentric vision of a tour. 

After we arrived and had lunch at a nearby cafe, Chris and I hiked up into a woods above the Villa. We encountered small patches of snow and just before we turned back there was enough snow on the trail for me to keep my promise that we would walk through snow (Photo 1)

Coming back I was struck by the dark woods and the contrasting light green of young trees just where we emerged from the dark. The patterns of color made me think of paintings by Wolf Kahn. I love it when art helps me look at and notice things in new ways. Photo 2 was taken and photo 3 was my drawing in appreciation of Kahn. 

Judy’s drawing (photo 4) Monday night at the Villa in Bad Gadstien was inspired by the sign outside the restaurant where we had our group dinner in Salzburg, a 680 year old restaurant called Zum Eulenspiegel. 

When I “wiki” Eulenspiegel I get, among other things, a prankster in German folklore, a satirical magazine, an opera, a tone poem, a symphonic poem, and a ballet. Literally translated it means “owl mirror” though it might also be a veiled pun for a low German phrase translating as “wipe-arse.” This leads me to want to include (photo 5) an odd little owl who caught my eye inside the restaurant (before I had discovered the meanings of the name). 

This really is part of the fun of travel for me, this free-floating attention where I notice little things and one thing leads to another, and another, and funny little connections.  Mirror for instance associates to the Kafka museum and to the Freud lectures. It also associates to Medusa and the mirror Perseus used so he could fight her (without the direct gaze on her face that would turn him to stone). 

Now Chris hasn’t talked about the Medusa story on the Freud trip, but she gave a lecture on the development of the Medusa myth last month at a Jung group in St. Paul. She talked about how the myth had its earliest roots in ritual. Before it was a story it was ritual - probably involving scary faces, masks -  ritual that helped people to come face to face with their deepest fears. To look their terror in the eyes. 

That idea of the gorgon as representing what I am most afraid to look at in myself - my own deepest fear and my anger - relates to the difficulties I’ve had today. It really started for me Sunday night when I was trying to use my gps to guide Chris, Judy, Peter and myself through the dark rainy night to one of the very few restaurants open in Salzburg on Mother’s Day. The gps was not working well, and giving confusing guidance and my iPhone was getting wet in the rain and I was getting frustrated and anxious when the iPhone went dark. I was in a panic. With my memory and directional challenges, I am extremely dependent on the iPhone gps to navigate the world around me. I was able to turn it back on, but it blacked out again. A third time it went in but it seemed to be guiding us in circles. I felt as if the others were annoyed with me, and I was certainly both annoyed with myself and in a panic. I managed to ask for help repeatedly and we did finally arrive, but I felt that we were all a little tense and it cast a shadow on our dinner. This was particularly sad because Chris’s lecture had been so wonderful and we were all feeling great just before we set out to find the restaurant. 

Then, Tuesday morning in Bad Gastien when we were about to load the bus to return toVienna Judy discovered that her wallet was missing. This immediately triggered panic in me and awareness of all the ways we can slip up and lose the illusion of control in our lives. The group was helpful - the owner called the cafe we had eaten in Monday, Chris Miller retraced Judy’s hike, I went back to actually look in the cafe, Angela urged Judy to go through her suitcase, we went through her pockets and backpack. Paige her roommate went back to their room to check under cushions and mattresses - and found it, under the mattress. Of course finding it dissolved much of the panic, but I continued to feel shaken and vulnerable. 

Then Peter asked me to help change the date of his return flight reservation. Now Peter does a whole lot for Chris and me (and lots of other people), he lives the “see what needs doing” motto of Chris’s mother, and we rarely get a chance to give back to him. This might have been the first time ever that he asked me to do something for him. So I was mad at both myself and him that I wasn’t in the mood to help him, and that got far worse as I got more and more tangled up in the internet and was unable to change the reservation but spent hours failing to make it and crating messes for myself. 

When we stopped for lunch Chris and I walked pretty much in circles around the restaurant, but there was grass and a tree I could lean up against and feel its calm and kindly presence supporting me (I feel my breath shift and sigh just by writing about it) and I started to untangle the fear and anger from the love and longing to contribute that were all mixed up with it. It felt like that was made possible by having one of those encounters like in the early gorgon ritual of looking it in the face. Returning its gaze. 

Chris told me she was in a bad mood herself. She’d really been disturbed, not so much by the lost wallet as by the panics Judy and I were in, and she hadn’t been able to shake her mood. Chris rarely gets into a bad mood and I teased her that this was a very rare (and therefore precious) state and I needed to take a picture to honor it. She puckered up her forehead and I took photo 6, and we both laughed. 

She told me I couldn’t include it in the blog because she didn’t want people on the tour to think of her as being in a bad mood when traveling with them, but I am hoping she will change her mind. If not, I’ll delete it. 

(I have by the way deleted it, and essentially this entire blog, once already by accident. I am now writing it for the second time at 2:30am. I am rather proud of myself. When I realized it was gone I just as my sister Judy would say “put on my big girl britches” and started to rewrite it). 

I’m not surprised actually that I (and maybe Chris too) am having some experiences that resemble the gorgon rituals. This Freud trip is after all a kind of pilgrimage in honor of Freud and his ideas. I remember Chris saying in her lecture, I think the most recent one, how as Freud got older he wondered how much difference there really was between people who had been analyzed and people who hadn’t. He referred to the “cure” of giving up the longing for a cure. He spoke of transforming “neurotic misery” into common unhappiness. Chris had said that might not seem like much but it was really a lot. The neurotic is alone, submerged in the drama of his/her unique pain, pain others can’t really understand. But the common unhappiness is one we something we recognize as a part of human condition, something we can sense in others’ eyes and faces and in their stories. That knowledge that others also bear what feels unbearable changes the experience of it. 

On the bus Marilyn in the seat in front heard me talking to Chris about his frustration always turns to anger for me and I so wish that  it didn’t. Marilyn turned and said that happened to her too, that frustration turned into anger. It was amazing the comfort I found  - almost like what I feel in the green world, when I lean against a tree - in that simple moment of recognizing a common unhappiness. 

Maybe the story of Perseus using the mirror to kill Medusa is relevant here. When I can see the gorgon face of what I fear in myself reflected in the mirror of another, does it lose its power to turn me to stone? It’s interesting that Perseus kills Medusa and then she becomes a part of Athena’s shield, Athena who is the great protector of civilization. Athena who (as I meant to say earlier when we were discussing the owl mirror) was so often depicted with an owl. 

This leads back to Freud and Chris talking about the little figure of Athena (in the poet HD’s Trubute to Freud she describes him telling her that she is the favorite of all his vast collection of ancient mythological figures) that Freud carried in his pocket when he departed Vienna for London. He wasn’t willing to trust her to go with all the other carefully crated figurines, which thanks to enormous efforts on the part of Marie Bonaparte, were being permitted by the gestapo to be transported to London. 

Part of the mission of psychoanalysis for Freud was helping people to sublimate, to tame their fierce and conflicting desires and drives enough to express them symbolically in ways that served civilization. This feels connected to the metaphor (though its a bit violent) of Perseus looking in the mirror to behead Medusa, and then the head becoming part of the shield with which the goddess defends civilization. Is the mirror in some sense analysis, the being seen and gaining the ability to see the shared human condition in ourselves and one another?

Now I want to segue to the view from our window at the Villa. The photo (photo (photo 7) disappointed me because it didn’t show the raindrops and the sparkle of light on them. But the spring buds, the shape of the branches, the mountains hidden by clouds in the distance ... it’s enough. 

This makes me aware of something else I left out. Photo 8 is the view looking back down at Villa Excelsior from our hike. In the first cluster of houses (above the village in the valley) the Villa has a dark red roof. It is nearly at the center just to the left of a dark steeple and a yellow building. 

I’m glad I had the walk but a little envious of those who arranged for massages and to experience the baths. I didn’t even realize that it was possible to experience a bath in the water from the hot springs (with radon, regarded as deeply healing in the part - Freud came as a treatment for chronic digestive problems) right there in the Villa. I really admire (and envy a little, and hope to emulate) the active curiosity with which some of my tour mates approach each new place we go. They just get right out there and investigate the possibilities and opportunities and go for it. I was really glad that Judy and Peter experienced the baths, even though I missed that. 

One experience I didn’t miss, though, thanks to the generosity and engagement of our tour mates John and Kevin, was Verdi’s MacBeth performed at the Vienna opera house. It was an astonishing experience. I thought that the live at the Met streamed opera was as good or better for me than being there in person. Was I ever wrong. The 3-dimensional presence of the cast and the stage set, the live music, the live voices, the excitement. Wow. I really mean wow. And I am really lucky I read the libretto and a little of the Shakespeare play on the bus to Vienna. There was so much in this and I can’t begin to tell you how moving it was, including seeing so many tour mates in front of us, behind us, above us. Maybe what moved me most were two images. One was a succession of young boys strutting and dancing, wearing gold crowns and wrapping themselves in bloody sheets (visually related to the bloody sheets after the murder of the king by MacBeth - a murder motivated by his, and Lady MacBeth’s, ambition and desire for glory, and then followed by many more murders - but you probably remember the story better than I do) who were part of a vision MacBeth had (this I think may be an addition of this director and not part of the libretto).  The other, also an addition by this director, was after MacBeth was killed and in some sense the good guys have won, and order has been restored, the common people who made the victory possible discover the red of blood on their hands and begin rubbing them the way Lady MacBeth did (when she began to go mad).

I tried to collage the next five photos but they lost the sense of the opera house, so here they are. Photo 9 shows tour mates Tom and Mary Locke in front of us. Photo 10 shows Shelley and Chuck behind us. Photo 11 shows where Janet and Marilyn we’re sitting (you can’t really see them but they are there). Photo 12 shows Chris, Peter, John and Kevin, and photo 13 is a selfie of Judy and me (we joked that maybe we would both try to draw it the next time we draw).  Lynne and Jennifer and Paige and one more person whose name I have momentarily forgotten were also there - we saw them in the lobby but I didnt see where they were sitting. But Chris’s friend Jerry who died of a sudden totally unexpected heart attack in March was it there, though he had already bought tickets and would have been there. I’m sure part of what motivated John to bring Chris (and me and Judy and Peter) to share this glorious experience was a desire the honor Jerry’s memory and Chris and Jerry’s special friendship. Jerry had a passion for music, especially show music, and opera and many of Chris’s most cherished memories are of evenings spent with him and his husband Louis at the Met. I’ve never forgotten (though I wasn’t there) how they came out after a Mozart opera and all agreed that “This is as good as it gets.” Music, they meant, and opera, and theater - but also life - also the city at night they all loved into which they emerged. For years I’ve used that to polarize with them. They love cities and culture, I love the green world and wilderness. I would say “this is as good as it gets” on the trail, at the crest of a mountain when a beautiful vista of mountains and trees suddenly spreads out in front of me. But it occurs to me tonight that I don’t have to choose. As Chris would say, I can love them both. Come to think of it, tonight at the opera was about as good as it gets. 

But I need to go back to Bad Gastien for a moment. One delight was a room with “Dr. Freud” on the door and knowing that Freud had stayed in this small room with a single bed. There was a framed note by Freud on the wall and Chris and I both photographed it (photo 14). At breakfast, Chris got the owners  (who were very busily moving around replenishing the breakfast buffet and providing thirty people with coffee and tea, and who by the way also had cooked and served the entire dinner on their own the previous evening including an extra course - the must-have white asparagus or spargel so beloved in May in much of Europe, which our guide Angela had requested at almost the last moment) ...Chris had gotten them to pause (photo 15) to read and translate Freud’s note. This was their best guess (as I remember it):

 For death, there is no herb that grows that can prevent it, nor for stupidity (or misunderstanding?) is there any rule. 

By the way, if you ever want to vacation for a week or two in a quiet and beautiful place, with a simple room with antique furnishings and dinner and breakfast provided (I would guess at a very reasonable price), massage, hot spring baths, walks in the woods and mountains, I could not recommend Villa Excelsior more highly. 

I want to add that I think I forgot to say (in this attempt to recreate what I formerly wrote and somehow accidentally erased) that these two young people opened the Villa a week ahead of their season, giving up a week of their vacation time, because of their enthusiasm for Freud’s historical relationship with the place and their desire to offer hospitality to a Freud Tour. The owner told us that they had records that showed Freud had stayed there seven times between 1916 and 1925, but that they had learned of an eighth time from a Freud family member who had an unpublished Freud letter written from the Villa Excelsior in 1908. That was the year of the first psychoanalytic conference in Salzburg. Maybe Freud journeyed from Salzburg to Bad Gastien too. 

The owner told another remarkable story to a tour mate. When Freud stayed there, he typically refused to see patients, even if asked to do so. But in one case apparently he asked a woman to participate in analysis with him. She was a peasant woman and the owners learned of it through a daughter (or later descendent?) The story was that Freud had regarded her as exceptionally healthy - and he wanted to understand through analysis how she was different from the rich women he worked with in Vienna. I wish he had written a case history about her. It would be a wonderful premise for a work of fiction, wouldn’t it?

But, my dear trail friend, do you know what really is as good as it gets? 

Writing this blog. Staying up until 2am writing it, then losing it and starting all over again and now it is 4:17am and I feel just as good as Chris and Lou and Jerry did stepping out of the Mozart opera into the city that night, and as I sometimes did stepping into and through the beauty of mountains and sky and trees when I was on the trail. 

This is as good as it gets. Thank you for the gift of your attention and presence that makes the blog possible. Without the mirror of your presence I couldn’t bear either the beauty or the gorgons. 

See you on the trail tomorrow, when we will fly to London and I will probably be a mess after missing an entire night’s sleep. Let’s see if I can sleep an hour or two now, before breakfast.