Můstek (Prague Metro)

And what if instructions were followed and all the manuscripts were destroyed? The stories of inequitable trials and faceless castle corridors, destroyed. The fantasy fables about country weddings and insect-men, destroyed. The daily records of Habsburg immobility at the end of Empire, destroyed. The underlining of Judaic theory beneath the manners of an industrial city, destroyed. The demand for perfection of the work always meant a work was never complete. Like appointments and trips, he was going to call it off. Major decisions like engagements, he would procrastinate and then cancel. The generations no one, least he, could have imagined? The passengers at Můstek Metro reading his deluxe edition? Complete with stupendous footnotes? Well, one passenger anyway, in the front carriage. Other passengers are not so concerned. “Oh, that guy, the one who thought he was a cockroach.” “I had to do him at school. What a depressive!” “ This is something I don’t need in my life right now.” “Sure, they have a museum for him in Malástrana. They even sell tee-shirts.” Notwithstanding, because we read his words at all, survival is an attribute we know about Franz Kafka. Bohumil Hrabal, ditto. Who in his book ‘Total Fears’ wrote that Czech history is a “constantly postponed beginning, and a simultaneous ending.” He must have had in mind several watershed moments. The breakthroughs of Czech nationalists, the non-stop non-starts of normalisation. His sardonic words speak for the country. An original proud state from medieval times. It is older than Russia, more coherent than Germany, yet Bohemia is in the middle. It is always going to get in the way of other people’s ambitions. They will interfere. It is a nation with a mind of its own. It will change its mind. The reader returns to ‘Total Fears’ as if  a contagion were upon him. Is Hrabal’s own way of writing a “constantly postponed beginning, and a simultaneous ending”? And what if none survived? His taoist tales of living and dying, pulped. His perverse adventures in provincial hotels, shredded. His interminable self-reference, that is a form of high comedy, recycled. His wizardly interviews that mock the occupation, lost. Instead of samizdat and creamy monographs coming at the rate he wrote them, all his published work had been force-fed into a scrap machine? His prolific output of comic genius reduced to pulp? All those nights at the sign of the Golden Tiger, come to nothing, nights of nought. His sceptical view of Russians, Americans, all equally cruel and capable of calculated betrayal, lost in bundles of reconditioned paper. But this especial book was purchased in a handsome imprint from that grand bookshop on Václavské Náměstí. There is a woman in the third carriage reading a copy right now, at  Můstek. These little bridges written by one pontifex minimus or another. They connect us to the Prague we can now imagine, or only imagine.

The medieval bridge found at the metro station and now on permanent display.

Florenc (Prague Metro)

Pronounced Florents. Authorities haven’t deflected our questions about a missing [E] by mounting red and yellow plaques where an [E] could be hidden. Why, is itself an abstract capital in this most ancient of capitals. Is the station paying tribute to the Parisian novelist who wrote a whole novel without the main letter of the alphabet? [E]xcept there is another [E] there already. Remove the [E] and watch the line turn nil. The Tuscan city came before the Prague quarter came before the hotel came before the station. It was Sokolovská during the rain dribbly drab days of normalisation, down below so-called Sokol Street. O the wonder then of somewhere obscure and realist only available by [E]scalator! Hidden behind every plaque is an [E]mergency, the days of clampdown or liberation. They are no longer there but we can kind of see them if we look close enough. There are sober days when it is recalled how it could happen again: tanks, protests, speeches, enforced treaties. For under every Prague plaque is [E]xile, where Italy or England or America contain their own stories, of loneliness and repair. There we notice leaders-in-waiting, their every thought on the undeniable future. Interchange stations are a child’s game for the newcomer, following the yellow line [B] and the red line [C] to find the other platform. Though crowds of Czechs have forgotten what it’s like to be a child. It’s the workday, alone together. Because the thing that is missing is probably [E]xistentialism, no one has time. What is suppressed here is any kind of [E]xtravagance, something they may not need, being surrounded by such architecture, such centuries of [E]xhibition building. Mucha as much a swirl of [E]ffervescence as Kafka a firmness of [E]nergy, ever anxious for [E]rror. Not that I ever exited via Florenc. It was an underground vision from a  Metro window,a golden shrine, a minute of indulgence. I never had to step out there every day. I never had to live with the mundane reality, as the cliché goes, as clichés will. It is other people’s fragile natures must be tested in a place like Florenc. Pronounced Florents, by the Czechs. Dante refers to Bohemia, though he never visited. His whole life was spent piecing together again the city he couldn’t return to. He returned every day of his life, one way or another, in words and thoughts. He went down into the underground, as if that could lessen the pain. He could have filled volumes with the social transgressions of Prague. There is not an [E]book with the capacity to include all Dante had to say, but then it wasn’t his city. The pain is the lesson. He wished to fill the [E]mptiness with the world as he knew it, the world left behind. Not that the plaques at Florenc hide an [E], they are the colours of the two lines of a Metro that cross over at this station, an epsilon meeting at this one place under the one [E]arth.  

Hradčanská (Prague Metro)

So fast, so direct, so immediate, the vehicle of necessity. Under the ground the passengers read and stare inside the tidy carriages. Words in their books and looks of ambition in their eyes animate the spaces below the earth. They are that much closer to the fires inside the planet, that much further away from Baroque-blue sky. Temptation is only a moment distant away, or the resolution to accept what is given. Books close. The carriages come to a standstill. To alight may mean returning to the scene of bureaucratic inertia or the maelstrom of power decisions or the locality of the official crime. There’s always going to be someone with a problem up top, and someone else who has to find an answer to the problem. Those without a problem stay seated. For us, time to alight. What reasons drive educated beings to think it worth going to the top? They are much too busy to ask the question, far too efficient to factor in doubt. The clamour of dozens of unknowns, well, unknown to one another, that is, fills the doorways and rushes over the platform before it is too late. Too late for what, though? It is early in the day. The escalators are not selective. No syncopated step has your name written on it. So it is wise to become friends with the escalator. Its rhythmic rise is purely functional, but we are given to think it is (actually) a great leveller. No one will be particularly sorry, in the long term, at least. Then, what is up above, only what we always suspected? Where one decade is much like another. The king of flowers stands in the gallery of his heated subjects, about to watch the whole thing fall. Suave ambassadors wheedle and outwit who won’t be back tomorrow. The lookouts have more influence than the princes in a city ruled by diamond-eyed invaders. Most anything you care to mention is here in files, ready for questioning, ready to trip the switch. And as they come up into sunlit streets from Hradčanská below, all the windows of the Castle stare silently at the city below. Because as usual it is this year in this story, the first year of the world. The old streets going up there wind and divert, made in an age with more time on its hands. Briefcases fly like drones parallel to the ground. Faces assume the bearing of acquired control, playing on their keyboards like fingers of rain. When will be the day of reckoning? Does it come to us in laughter and tears? Was it always there in signs and wonders? Or is it solemn the way commuters are solemn, going up to the environs of the Castle one morning? Their faces set to the consequences, their demeanour deliberate, their minds immersing in the task. Yet every word for the Castle and environs confounds their individuality: keep, court, cell, juryroom, office, bureau, chamber, labyrinth, purgatory.

Pankrác (Prague Metro)

One who knows from the doctor for a certainty it is their last year alive, gazes at everyone and everything with a wonder they cannot express. The man in black could be a priest, a professor, or a secret service agent. A woman is sharpening a knife in her mind. A lonely man in his fifth day of mediation is losing interest in dissembling. While behind him on the down escalator is the shop assistant who has been doing this for too long and should go back to study, or anything, really, other than this stuff, down. Someone else carries the burden of being thought of as just someone else. They go down every Monday and Tuesday to catch the train at Pankrác Metro. The student carries in his head all the confusions that cannot reach a page of his essay. The young man with the downloads of European electronica  in his ears refuses to catch anyone’s eye. The middle man who has replaced his consumption of women with consumption of Pilsner Urquell, waits immobile for the amber state to pass. A woman of independent demeanour is, you would never think it, about to explode any minute with pent-up fury. Every Tuesday and Wednesday they are on the escalator to Pankrác, in English Pancras, after nearby Saint Pancras Church. He misses someone so much that the escalator could be a cloud, a flying carpet. The beauty descends, who may be going to see her new boyfriend or may be going to see the ex or may be just going, somewhere, else. Every Wednesday and Thursday they find themselves again on the platform of Pankrác Metro, Pankrác being where the Pankrác Remand Centre is found, Pankrác being Prague slang for a prison. The woman is beyond caring now the moment of loss has arrived full force. While that man over there is the same difficult individual he was when he was a teenager. Every Thursday and Friday, Pankrác again, Saint Pancras Station, streamlined, neutral; or else a joke prison, a place they share as they stand in line first thing in the morning. The man with too much computer in his fibres is numbly staring at the tracks. The woman with time on her hands lets time fix her hair and paint her lips in a tiny mirror.  The child with her grandmother could solve this knot with a simple twist. In her bag the lifetime resident keeps a packet of of headache tablets and a safety weapon. The man in his newspaper is in the world where chancellors berate and climate change argues, until the red and silver train comes in at his feet. The woman with tactics always finds a window by standing on the same platform tiles where the door opens. A man is wondering how he got into such a stupid argument last night and regrets it all, until next week. 

Superlative

Top Ten List of Superlative People

1. The person most ready to walk the extra mile.
2. The person I love the most.
3. The happiest person in the street.
4. The unhappiest person in the world.
5. The person who found again the thing of greatest value they had lost.
6. The person who remembers the true greatness of those who have died.
7. The person with no time to read best lists.
8. The person who tells people to get real by walking on water.
9. The person who keeps listening.
10. The person who is the mostest ever in my humble opinion.

Next week: Top Ten List of the Very Best People Ever Ever.

Dejvická (Prague Metro)

Panels on the wall of Dejvická Metro Station

Kingstown was the imperial way of claiming Ireland, with its hints at King’s Own. Anyone coming into or out of Ireland was left in no doubt about the occupying nation. It stood on the east coast of the island like a royal standard, embossed and distinctive. First day in Prague means taking the bus from Ruzyně International Airport, past the green meadows and outlying homes of orange and white, the shady trees sleepy in the warm air. Children talk vividly, teenagers slump and drawl, adults watch with one eye on the time. At the train stop the locals stay put while the plane travellers clamber out for the connection at the metro station known as Dejvická. It is the terminus of Line A, something we find by turning our unfolded maps in circles until the orientation is right. The entrance goes down below the boulevard known as Evropská Třída. How to pronounce all of these words with their quiffs and moustaches and monocles! Spaniards, a mother and her daughter, can see I have no idea which station to travel to, so while we wait on a seat for the next train they turn unfolded maps in clockwise directions and engage in comic Anglo-Hispanic, until the girl points excitedly at Invalidovna. The platform is temporarily populated with representatives of five continents, their languages back to basics as they confront the mysteries of Czech. But it wasn’t always the case. The station was opened ten years after normalisation was introduced, on the 12^th of August 1978. It was called Leninova. No busts of the Bolshevik greet the tourist these days at the top of the escalator, or down in the vaults, or through the closed circuit. Vladimir no longer signs off on the passports. The houses all around look spruce in the lazy day, not scratched and uncleaned when they were part of being normal. The grimaces of wealthy Czechs in Dejvice must have been permanent before the wind changed, taking the metro to work in town. But still it is a wonder how the tunnels were blasted into place by the Russians and Czechs, a subterranean memory of Moscow. The rulers who flew in from that place would have been driven to The Castle in flash cars. But the embossment stayed in place, tribute to the gaunt man with the hatred of what kings owned, until the Velvet Revolution. He was always going to be a problem father-figure, staring balefully and jutting his pointy beard. Leninova was renamed Dejvická in 1990, after the ancient district in which the station is located in Prague 6. Dejvice, site of Roman camps and one of the oldest monasteries in Bohemia became the new home of the Velvet Underground. The Spanish ladies stepped onto the train. We kept on with our Spanglish, wondering the while what sights we were missing many many metres above our heads. 

 

Dejvická Metro under construction in the 1970s

Invalidovna (Prague Metro)

Walls of yellow pressed metal arch over the train tunnel at Invalidovna. The Russians built the metro for the Czechs, maybe as compensation for reclaiming the country in 1968. The authorities called it normalisation. But unlike Moscow, where the Communists constructed underground stations to rival the conquered Romanov palaces, in Prague it was state-of-the-art functional. Through the arches we find the escalators beckon at the end of the hallway. Escalators rattle at top speed as we step lightly and quickly onto the next offering. Their steps click-clack woodenly, their ascent is sharp. Light that must come from the sky is visible up above: it could be Dante by Doré. It’s the weekend in Karlin and no one is in the streets. Long grass barely moves in the stillness of the fields around housing complexes. Grass flowers with prickly leaves dandle in the air. Clever weeds link in to the footpaths. We walk towards what the map says is the hotel but there is no one in sight and summer heat increases. At last, near a chained-up premises stands a policeman, not doing much, what with everyone being asleep or in one of the parks or swimming at the pool. The name of the hotel is on a card. He reads the card and points down the street about one hundred yards. Invalidovna itself is nowhere to seen in this landscape of closed down ruins, commission housing and new hotels. It was Prague’s hôtel des invalids, built in the 1730s as a hospital and dormitory for war veterans. The hotel brochure helps: “Only a ninth of the original design was ever completed. At most, about 1200 inmates lived there. In 1935, all inhabitants moved to another "invalidovna" and the building was used by the Czech army. After this, it was used as an army archive. The building was damaged by a large flood in 2002, and most of the archive materials was destroyed. The building currently awaits an expensive reconstruction. One possible future use is as a part of the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University.” On a pillar in the hotel lobby is a plaque with a blue line, showing where the floodwater reached; it is about the height of the reception counter. Slowly the scene comes into our minds, as we imagine it from the upstairs window, after booking in. The Vltava broke its banks at Karlin, the most vulnerable low-lying inner suburb of Prague. It damaged irreparably the lines of nearby shops. They have all been razed and a ‘park’ of unchecked trees grows for a kilometre between the hotels and the river. The water flooded everything in Karlin, so much of the place had to be rebuilt. The water saturated the soil, turning it into a quagmire. The floodwaters raced everywhere as they rose, pouring down into every drain and crevice. Most particularly, the vast escalator shaft that takes us down into the station of Invalidovna. The waters poured inexorably into the underground, making infernal streams and bringing everything down there to a stop. Karlin recovers after ten years. But memory is a trickster. Unlike the other stations on the line, there are no pressed metal arches over the tunnel walls at Invalidovna. That is how it would be remembered, but only the colour is right, when we google image it, home in Australia.

Tremor (Philip Hunter)

 Waking Waking we read the straight words of The Wimmera Mail-Times for October 18^th, 2011. ‘Mystery earth tremor shakes Horsham’, writes Caroline Tang, and she continues. ‘A mystery earth tremor shook a Horsham street on Tuesday last week. Steve Kemp, who was at home in Citrus Avenue, said he was alarmed by a 'massive bang' which shook his house for about five to 10 seconds at 4.15pm. Mr Kemp said he thought a large object had slammed into the back of his property. He said he ran outside and could not find anything. "My next door neighbour came out and said things had come off the wall in her house," Mr Kemp said. "We live across the road from Howden Toyota and half a dozen of their mechanics had come outside and were also trying to work out what was going on. "Looking up Citrus Avenue, a fair few people were looking around as well." Mr Kemp said he had checked the Geoscience Australia website and nothing had been recorded. He said the bang was louder than a sonic boom or aircraft, both of which he had heard before, and suggested it was an earth tremor. "There was a fire in a truck here in January on the Western Highway ? all the tyres exploded ? the bang I heard was three times as loud as that, easily," Mr Kemp said. "I have experienced earthquakes before, so that's why I thought it was one." He said his home's front windows also rattled for about 20 seconds around midnight on the same day. Geoscience Australia seismologists checked their seismic network stations for the Horsham area around the time of the Citrus Avenue tremor, but found no seismic activity. A Geoscience Australia spokeswoman said the tremor was unlikely to have been an earthquake. The Mail-Times reported in June that a 3.8-magnitude earthquake had hit the Grampians, the second largest on record in the region, with slight aftershocks recorded.’ End quote.

 Dreaming  The signature is the first sign of human contact over the land. We see the great curves and rolls and wriggles as the signature comes clear. Here it comes, the slight tremor of the writing hand, and there it goes. All writing comes out this way, as the letters form with the tremor of nerve and finger and eye. Our name emerges in writing, a tremor of the mind and word shape. The human body, so still so enveloped in repose, and yet even at our calmest there are minor tremors: the chest rise and falls, arteries pulse close to the surface, our eyelids flicker as we experience a dream definition. 

Tremor, 2013 (Philip Hunter)

Geobloom (Philip Hunter)

Waking Geobloom is a brand of Philadelphia blouse. It’s a jewellery firm in the purlieus of Budapest. Geobloom also seems to be a start-up company for cactus nurseries. But hits online are mainly for Philip Hunter originals, so I suppose he invented the word. Geometry and geography and geology work together, giving shape to the amorphous world. From the start we were drawing lines in the dirt, making sense of our little horizons. Even our words do it, make sense of the amorphous. Joyce loved portmanteaus and on Bloomsday they get new airings. The main character is forever calculating the distance between himself and the next thing that comes into sight. Perspective is just the start of the story. A little explored subject is the implication in the book that everything comes into flower. NeoGeo, for example, was a shortlived art movement. It was made by people who inhabited dulux rooms in the suburbs, and further in. They seemed to prefer pink and tangerine, who knows why. But Hunter is plein air, his geo blooms day and night, imperceptibly at times, across the ancient lands called the Wimmera. His colours roughly detail the earth he knows so well, but are a state of mind as well.

Dreaming The volcanoes shot red flowers of lava and ash into the atmosphere. Streams too hot for seeds, sounds too sudden for reflection. The hills grew into mountains, bafflingly beautiful as the many angiosperm petals. Swirls of oceanic replenishment bubbled like steamed pods. Explosions were followed by erasure and overlong overlay and cooling and crack-up and crustation and erosion and photosynthetic buildup and wastefall and it’s all so long ago. Even if the results are permanently under our feet. And will change again with the next climate climax. We step forth like the man in Ulysses, a strange combination of empirical certainty and emotional challenge. We cannot picture the past yet here it is all before us, hard as nails, changeable as fire in the wind. Inside our heads the geobloom of our brain, high on its rootsy root stem system of nerves, imagines the universe breaking open into new forms. In our dreams it is alive. It is a geometry of different shapes, a geography bearing the flowers of necessity (for their shapes are necessity), a geology to which we are anchored no matter how much we bounce about or step lightly or lie down, like now, picturing the sky.




Geobloom No. 1, 2012 (Philip Hunter)

Lithosphere (Philip Hunter)

Waking The Greeks knew the world was round. Every day there were fig leaves and eye sockets and curved letters. They had hard evidence, just not final evidence. And so did everyone else, more or less, which is why it’s impossible to say how a flat Earth theory invented for a nineteenth century novel about Columbus could come to be treated as credible history. Easy for the incredulous, maybe. No European medieval astronomers thought that, flat. Lithosphere is also a nineteenth century invention using two words from the Greek, lithos meaning stone or rock plus sphaira, meaning sphere. The hard evidence included the simple fact that the world bends, that ships go below the horizon, that land does not rise up forever but recedes downwards. Hence the need for landmarks. And songlines. The strength of the Earth resides in the lithosphere. Hard and seemingly without a language of its own, hardly moving over ages, it bears us and is our one home. Here between the airlessness of the outside universe and the fires not far below where we walk abroad, there is a maze of desire in our bodies, a search for patterns going on under our skull caps. Some call it the mantle. The lithosphere, it is all before us, so hard to love but all we have. To be lived with, by and by, understood through tedium and ecstasy. We live with tedium and ecstasy.
Dreaming But the Waking definition is so mundane, we think, even for a miracle. The lithosphere is waves of evidence. Condensation and precipitation leave everything in their trail. Great fogs and miles of trees give way to morning light and ploughed fields. Their ripples and touches and atmospheres and reflections rise above the lithosphere like thoughts that will be thought. So various and multiform are these presences, no one language contains them and efforts to do so sound all Greek to me. Whether from the plane porthole or eyesight at ground zero, the horizon is blur and colour, bending ever so. The lithosphere is that inexorable stone and grit we stare at as if our final home. We wish to rise above it, like fog and trees and ocean. We are dust, we are red earth. Words falter forth like some painter alone at his easel of ease. The lithosphere is all aboriginal (small a-, big A-, both) to us. It’s all it is.



Lithosphere, 2013 (Philip Hunter)