The Danger, The Rapture

There is little more tell about this trip.  No adventure, no drama.  These were quiet days, busy days spent indoors.  A coffee in a quiet nook alone with a notebook, a late night drink on the terrace briefly before bed.  There was only the small, intellectual ruckus I brought with me, my critical portmanteau.  We studied diaspora, among other things.  The universal rather than the specific kind.  Why do populations move?  The U.N. member raging against the U.N., the U.S., for doing too little, too much in Dafur.  She longed to go home, she said.  I thought her brave until I discovered she lived in Vienna.  The conference, I often said, could not perform its theory.  Not much of a statement, though.  Nothing ever can.  It was not that I wished to critique, but attitudes.  Once a professor said to me, "You just like to piss people off, don't you?"  He was not the first to say this, but my response remains what it was then: "I'd rather think that I want to shake people out of their complacency."  But it gets me into trouble.  Late one night sitting in the smoke-filled cafe with the organizers of the affair, one of the presenters said that I was an existentialist.  Oh shit, I thought, as adrenaline raced quickly up my spine.  Trouble here, I knew.  The famous professor, Austrian, long and lanky with a face like Herman Munster, looking like Godfather Death, formed a sudden a grin.  A gleeful grimace, really.  His Gauloises dangled from loose fingertips as in one of the Cahiers movies from the fifties, one by Jean Renoir.  And I would have enjoyed it all had what came next not been directed at me.  "Some existentialist," he said in his heavy German accent.  "He doesn't even smoke."  It was not the words, of course, but the internal chuckle and the slight shaking of the head back and forth, the inward gaze.  Retort ready, I knew things would only escalate with its delivery, and I was neither drunk enough nor inclined for that.

One night, an a cappella chorale from Arkansas appeared.  They were traveling through Europe for two weeks and the schloss had agreed to put them up for a night if they gave a performance.  We gathered in one of the large halls upstairs dutifully before dinner.  The rain had let up and the air turned golden as if for the moment.  A ragtag group of singers dressed in mismatched black clothing formed nervously in the front of the crowd.  And then. . . my god, it was wonderful.  You could not but worry for them for they looked so vulnerable like Oakies in the Great Depression migrating to the Promised Land, slightly odd, awkward.  And with each glorious note you could feel a great shock wave roll through the audience, the singers feeling it, too, gaining confidence with each wonderful note.  You cannot imagine a more unlikely group, so strange, misfits truly, and as I looked around the room I saw the rapture and suddenly I felt the convulsions rattle my body, too.  What was this?  I fought back tears.

When they finished. . . you've never seen such a reception.

At dinner that night, I asked everyone I could--"Did you cry?"  "Yes". . . "yes". . . "yes."  What was that about?  There are moments in life that cannot be explained, when everything comes together in some synergistic fashion.  Concordance.  Harmony.  All the energies aligned.

It was the highlight of the trip.  Later on the veranda overlooking the lake, I sat with two of the singers.  They did not look so odd now, not so much as a pair as they did as an assemblage.  Their town was small.  There was not much to do there.  You could see the dreams and aspirations, though, shining in their eyes.  Now they had toured Europe.  Their were fewer limits.

"What did you think of your performance this afternoon," I asked them.  They both smiled.  It had never been like that before, they said.  Not anywhere.