There is that old Jewish adage: “you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” But I am not a weatherman, I guess, because I don’t have my finger on the pulse of anything. I can’t read the cues of what is “now” [more]
There is that old Jewish adage: “you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” But I am not a weatherman, I guess, because I don’t have my finger on the pulse of anything. I can’t read the cues of what is “now” because I am – what am I? – I am somewhere else in my mind right now. In the Middle Ages, perhaps. In the east. I think of Yehuda Halevi’s 12th century poem which is, like the man, full of passionate longing. And it rings truer to me now than ever: “My heart is in the east, and I in the uttermost west–How can I find savour in food? How shall it be sweet to me?” In this state of affairs, how can I tell you which way the wind is blowing? I can’t. I am farther west than Halevi: I am in Texas, extreme western Spain, to put it in terms Halevi might have understood. And that heart of mine here in the 21st century, the one that dwells in the east, doesn’t really reach as far in the east as Halevi’s did back in the 12th century. That’s because I am pro-diaspora because Israel exists. He was a Zionist because it didn’t. In the context of this strange dispersion I feel, Georg tells me it is important to think of a new way to talk about the weather. And his words stuck with me for some days. But what I have to say about weather is not new: it is altneu, old and new. Old because Humboldt and Musil and Mann did it all already. They mixed prose with weather, weather with culture, weather description to the extreme so as to document every facet of our life here on earth. But new perhaps because I am certain now that the way we talk about the weather is not a special, rarified language separate from the way we talk about everything else. A weather report is just a close reading of a state of affairs, a case of extreme hermeneutics. The big narrative gets lost. So I remembered a case in which I was talking to someone about the weather but the gist of the conversation had very little to do with the weather. Or put another way, it was a discussion of weather because weather seemed to make natural and neutral a series of contentious, manmade historical events, whole eras and clashing of civilizations, the migration of peoples, and their impact on Austria. In my second autumn in Vienna, I got this weird lung ailment/allergy thing. It started in July (it was boiling hot that July in Vienna) and it lasted as an acute illness until August and then went on until mid to late November as this latent illness that I could not shake. I couldn’t breathe. Allergy pills, inhalers, nothing would help. I didn’t have enough air to get up the stairs to my apartment. I started to become depressed, I stopped wanting to eat, and I didn’t want to leave my apartment. More than one helpful Viennese friend told me this has to do with “dust” in the city and another person even called it “historical dust.” Others blamed the Danube, its mold, its flooding and leaving a layer of mold over the city. Again, this sounded to me like some sort of metaphor for the death of empire and the fact that parts of Vienna still seem like a Wunderkabinett curated by an old grand dame long retired from the Oper. A young, prolific writer who loves satire looked at me once after I huffed and puffed up the four flights of stairs to his apartment and said the only serious thing I ever heard him say to me: “Oh dear, I wondered when this would happen to you. Most of my friends get the Viennese malaise after they move here. It’s terrible. It keeps them from doing anything. Whatever you do, get out of town for a while, geh ins Grüne. Und komm wieder gut heim.” I was touched he thought of my home as Vienna. Indeed, since then, this is where my heart lies “in the east.” So then I went to Burgenland for a few weeks to visit a friend there and ended up through another friend at the house of some wealthy Austrian man who clearly voted for the ÖVP. I think he was in banking. He had two children, one 9 and the other 11, both who thought I was German because I spoke Schuldeutsch, stilted German in complete sentences with no flattening of vowels. Over dinner (I remember it was Forelle blau), the father, who was clearly the head of the family, was eager to talk to me in a way that wasn’t exactly healthy because I was at least 20 years younger than he was. He wanted to know if I liked Austria and I told him that I honestly do but that my feelings were tempered by my illness that wouldn’t go away, and that this is why I had left Vienna altogether, to see if “the dust hypothesis” could be true. And the Austrian man nodded and leaned forward: This is a common problem, he explained, caused by the stagnant air over the Pannonian plain (aka. Hungary, the Roman term for the flatlands over Hungary that reach to Vienna, where there was a very large Roman soldier encampment and a training fort in Carnuntum centrally located to send Roman soldiers in every direction of the Empire). He went on: in the late summer and fall, air from North Africa comes up to Pannonia and stays there. It is trapped air. It makes the skies sunny and there’s a Hoch that stays over the plain without moving for weeks and weeks. Even when the weather becomes cooler in Vienna, the North African air, its diseases, its bacteria and the illnesses from the humanity in North Africa, illnesses that we are not prepared for, geschweige denn eine Amerikanerin, we are not immune to them, and so we breathe it in, and it makes us ill, depressed, sluggish and causes pneumonia for the weak. And did I know the fact that in the month of November, 1/3 of all Viennese have a form of pneumonia, because each year the North African virus has mutated on the air and again the Viennese are infected with the North African illness that sits with us until the Föhn comes in and clears it all away, down from the mountain. Without the Föhn, we could not be free of the malaise. I think he used the word, Seuche. And so while I was concentrating hard on his German (he spoke with a burgenländischem Dialekt), I had just enough brain space left over for me to register that this was his way of talking about some historical condition of the Austrians, made true because he talked about it in meterological terms. How they were torn between two poles: between the continental north and maybe also the west on the one side and North Africa and its eastern Mediterranean temperament on the other. And this was something that the Hungarians were also somehow responsible for because it is THEIR Pannonian plain that traps that North African air. The Huns gathered there for years!! And then, like a baptism, the Föhn from Switzerland washes over the Pannonian plains. The mountain air blows all that Tod in Venedig air away and every year, a new spirit retakes the Austrians. In Burgenland, we can breathe again, he said. Depending on your political orientation, I suppose that new spirit could be characterized as either Aufklärung or fascist populism and hard-nosed, free market capitalism. The banker, the ÖVP voter telling me this story, didn’t mention that last sentence about politics. I was on edge back then because of Jörg Haider and couldn’t help myself from thinking that last bit. A week later I was back in Vienna. As for my health, things had gotten better thanks to an early snow. It seemed I could breathe more easily and could feel nearly normal if I did some inhaling exercises with the windows open for a few minutes every morning. I noticed my neighbors hanging their bed covers, their Schlafsäcke out their windows at that hour, nearly every morning. This ritual was always exotic to me since we don’t do that in the US and well, you know. Maybe they were trying to get the ancestral Viennese dust out of their bedcovers. It’s long, arduous work, clearing out historical dust: from the Romans who passed through from the south with Tiberias, to the Babenbergers who came from the Bavarian north to rule Ostarichi around the time Jehuda Halevi wrote about his heart being somewhere else besides Spain. Then there were of course the Crusaders who came from the west and used Vienna as a pit stop on their own journeys east. Perhaps they were following their hearts that lay in parts east. In any case, they often hung around Vienna on their way there, if they ever even made it to those Holy Lands. They marched in and left their dust. Later, Gräfin Hahn Hahn, running away from the winds of revolution in Germany, embarked on her women’s liberation journey to the east to Jerusalem. She passed through Vienna right as she saw the aporias of her worldly life come into focus. She claims in her memoires about that journey that around Vienna, she set herself free from the pursuit of fame and turned her glance to the immortal. At once, the idols of pride she had once worshipped turned into dust. More dust for the Schlafsäcke, I thought. I told my Viennese writer friend, the satirist who always thought about things as either/or, about my Burgenland man and his theory about the Pannonian plain, how it is a half Asian menace that traps winds and sentiments from North Africa. The satirist shrugged his shoulders and said: Well, it’s all the other way around. The air of Pannonia makes us stable in the summer and the dust settles. It’s the Föhn itself, the Jauk, that blows everything around again and makes us crazy. Is it the Südföhn or the Nordföhn that does the most damage? I asked. My writer satirist friend was diffident. He shrugged. Föhnkrankheit is documented fact, he said. The long history of psychosis, the migraines and the suicides, which were studied by well-meaning Austrian doctors in the 19th century. He mentioned Heinrich Hoffmann’s book that recounted Hitler complaining in Munich once that the Föhn was making him depressed in 1931. Made him want to leave to a place far from where the Föhn could reach him. To the north. To the east. And I thought: another layer of historical dust. Another way the wind blows. For some years after this one when the lung ailment first hit me in Vienna, I battled my breathing problems. It wasn’t always disabling and it came to seem normal after some months. When I returned to Chicago, my breathing cleared immediately. In the windy city, it’s hard to hold on to anything for very long. When I was back there, a German colleague, a Berliner by origin, saw me in the office. She stopped shuffling her papers for a moment and looked at me, oh, you are back. Rumor is, you became quite ill with some lung problem while you were in Vienna. “Really set you back, I heard.” (She said it as if she relished those last words and in fact our relationship was rather strained.) “Amazing,” she said and she sighed. “It sounds like it’s straight from a novel.” Now she’s a professor somewhere in some Ivy League College, saying something like that to one of her literature students. I never thought she was very good at hermeneutics, though. Is that so important anymore?