Ethnography:
Prague: Things That Happened Along The Way
or
There And Back Again
for Jerry Zaslove
by Bruce Lord
Preface to Jerry: I just wanted to say that the process of writing the ethnography (both in Prague and in Vancouver), while taxing, confusing and almost too emotionally intense at times, has been a vital and necessary step in integrating my life in Prague into my life in Vancouver. People have of course been asking me “What was it like?” from the day I arrived home, and I found that the two months hadn’t settled in my mind to the point where I could give them anything more than hyperbole which fell short and a few anecdotes. I now have something to give them, and something to keep for myself. Thanks. While I was in Prague, I tried to wrap my brain around this assignment (even as I was writing it there): what dominant themes kept recurring during my visit, what sort of format could this assignment take? The more I got to know Prague, the more I realised that “getting to know Prague” is, for all intents and purposes, a fallacy. Its history is far too varied and layered to approach with any ideals of “summing up” the city1. Sampling a bit of whatever the city throws at you and planning out a few key visits, sights and experiences with no expectations of “seeing everything” or “doing everything” seems to me to be the only way of experiencing anything that could actually be called Prague, rather than some false portrait that speaks only to the writer/traveler's self, not the city (I’ll own up to my own biases in just a bit). In any case, that’s all that this paper can hope to be: fragments, photographs, moments. The things of the place that struck me at the time and that I took home with me, allowing them to change me long after I’d changed what little of the place I did.
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Arrival. First words written in Prague:
Off the plane, through customs with disgruntled ex-soviet nodding grunt, onto a charter bus and down along freeway that could be anywhere, Alberta even. Soon you start swerving though backstreets: you're on cobblestone. Graffiti that means nothing to you. Swirling avenues painted green green green so many trees and red brick and tile speckled in defiance then turn a corner and you see God or you see man or you realise how small and wonderful you are staring at the palace cathedral black black black spires and testament to something you know nothing about you were asking five hours ago what is a city this is a city this is a city this is a city this is Prague. Prague. You must put a period after its name each time you write it. Prague. Like a singing stone, like a tenement full of moldy old saints. Prague. Blood tanks Mozart song forest alcove path doorway parabolas of green soldiers holding AKs and buildings buildings buildings making love to your eyes for the first time in your life your eyes are not being raped they are being made love to you cannot turn without stumbling over a fountain that has more stories than any father's father's father has ever heard. You fall in love, dumbstruck. You know that your could live here and spend your life laughing and never knowing why you know this is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen in your paltry twenty one years you know you could never truly fathom any of this you run down streets running your hands across ancient walls and banging them against iron doors why would you ever leave how could you ever leave this this which is that that you have not ever seen and still might not yet see you have been awake for twenty nine and a half hours and you have never felt this awake or alive you wonder if you ever really were alive before this, this like an an an an an object, person, place thing that makes ridiculous metaphors of icebergs and wars and concertos and revelations you were inhabiting while you walked tonight come to mind as readily as you know that they are absurd surreal out of place like penguins in the sahara like butterflies exploding from your mind like poems poems poems poems so many poems that they fly forth like uncontrollable piss or laughter all burdens burned by a green invisible fire of shame redemption and a holy birthing that is always reveling in the moment of its fruition always reaching its climax has been climaxing for thousands and hundreds of years and places you couldn't even pronounce let alone understand so why would you even bother it is late late oh so very late even in this city of cemeteries and doors that open into the nothings and within but you still want to run down the cobblestones run up the tile that has been flavoured with the blood of ages especially since your brand new roommate is snoring at an alarming volume and you feel your limbs begin to numb, leaden and fall and if there ever was a time not to sleep and if there ever was a time not to think about time the way we do but to engage it like a sculpture then this would be it you are so close and have so far to go why does it infest like this never curing never killing taking possession the way an old lover's hands take hold of everything you ever are, have been and will be in the long dead night. I am in Prague. I am in Prague. I am in Prague.
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That’s it. That’s how I came to Prague. I brought many things with me, but the first sight I caught of the spires of St. Vitus Cathedral gave me a shock of culture (not culture shock) that scattered everything back into the subconscious for most of the duration of my stay. Pieces of “home” would occasionally surface, collide with the reality that we formed for ourselves as non-Praguers, non-tourists, denizens of the kolej, whatever we were. So. Now that I’ve come back (to a place that is, as Jerry called it, a place with a name I know, but not the same place I left), perhaps I can say something about where and what I was before I left here (wherever that may be). I think that my political beliefs were perhaps the part of myself that most affected the ways in which I perceived Prague and Czech life, so I’ll mention those. At home, while I have strong political beliefs, I’d always rejected political “isms”, worried that as soon as government reached the point where it was identifiable as a system (ie, an “ism”), it begins to render some instances of human thought, experience and emotion subordinate. That being said, I tend to agree with what would typically be referred to as socialist policies and beliefs. Living in a country which presently has very little in the way of a socialist presence in government yet tolerates the term means that I often have the luxury of opposing entrenched governmental structures, theorizing that “we should” implement other policies, that “if we only” did this or that, things would be better; in short, the type of government I support has never existed in my lifetime in my home country. Visiting a former Soviet satellite state that spent over half of its existence controlled by a totalitarian “socialist” state didn’t necessarily challenge my political convictions; it would be more accurate to say that it forced me to reassess my willingness to draw a clear connection between my “we shoulds” and “if we onlys” and the results of such actions. While in Prague, making the same statements about what government should and should not be doing as I would at home no longer placed me in the category of the facile dissident2; my ideals were those that had been co-opted by “the system”, the system against which dissidents here had fought against and been punished by.
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Thoughts on "Play With Stones", a short film by Jan Svankmejer:
As systems grow more and more complex, expression becomes a function not of mind, but of a compelling biological necessity. This inversion of the supposed "natural" order is not initially apparent, although a quick observation of the physical actions of the inhabitants of and visitors to any city will show a large majority of expression and movement solely founded upon and devoted to the continuation of routine. Attempts at independent movement invariably culminate in cannibalism and broken bones: you will be dumped in the bucket by the Director God.
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One of the more curious aspects of the “Europe’s Centre Around AD 1000” exhibits (besides the blatant pro-EU historical revisionism) was the relative lack of depictions of Jesus. At first, it seemed as though one couldn’t escape the image of Jesus in the Czech Republic: churches, galleries, museums. I realised that the image of Jesus was most readily present in smaller towns, such as the small museum in Sumava dedicated to folk art that had an entire floor dedicated to depictions of the crucifixion by local artisans over the centuries. At the “Europe’s Centre Around AD 1000” exhibit, however, Jesus was barely present. The focus was primarily upon images of royalty, lineage, dynasty. The only religious symbol that recurred time and again at the exhibit was that of the Hand Of God. I sketched one such Hand from a pater found in the grave of Archbishop Gervasius. The hand had been engraved upon the nimbus of the pater as a symbol of the Eucharist.
The symbol of Jesus crucified is a clear, visceral and personal one. As Christians who advocate personal relationships with God without any mediation claim, the image is one that does not need interpretation and can be understood by all, hence its popularity amongst peasants and inhabitants of small rural towns with uneducated populaces. The Hand Of God, however, is much more of a symbol of authority than sacrifice and divine right more than Christian egalitarianism. Throughout the museum exhibit, the efforts of Emperors to unify Europe are praised as being noble and motivated by the best of intentions. Images of these Emperors being chosen and guided by God abound: there are family trees which attempt to trace royal lineages back to the caesars and even to Christ himself. The Hand Of God symbolizes the calling of someone by a higher power to a higher purpose. Mark 1.9 describes the Spirit of God descending from heaven at Christ’s baptism to identify him as his “beloved son”. The Hand Of God is used much in the same way: to justify the exalted station of the Emperors to those who live below him/Him. By using the symbol of the Hand Of God, the exhibit’s curators stir the memory of a time in history when religious power and righteousness the sole property of the elect, of the deified Emperor. Jesus’ sacrifice is too universal, not hierarchical enough. The idea that the only kingdom is the kingdom of God evidently has no place in the EU.
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Just walked out of the ossuary at Kutna Hora. I feel deflated and fulfilled. It met my expectations, maybe even exceeded them. Took two rolls of film, maybe 20 postcards. Want to go back, take more measured shots, get some breathing room, do some writing, check out the graveyard. Farrah grabbed a piece of the cobblestone floor and gave it to me. Jerry says that it's a failed attempt to rationalise the experience of death, as per the Enlightenment dictum, and I can see what he means. What I saw was not death, it was not horror. It was death's shadow that is cast as It walks away. It was a collection of husks, shells, that which remains cobbled together in a beauteous attempt at saying in a measured tone that death shall have no dominion, as Vaclav quoted Thomas. More than ever, I'd love to become part of something like that, no matter if the concept behind such a work of art is flawed. It is something, it is formation, an arrangement of that which one day I will no longer have any control over because there will be no I. We cannot rationalise death, never hold it ransom in a sack as the myth imagines, but the after can be managed, made beautiful, just in the way we can control, experience, make use of our lives. It's a consoling thought, really. I should readjust my wishes for my remains after my death. Complete effacement is still perfectly acceptable, but if at all possible, put my bones to use, any use at all. Make matches out of the phosphor in my body or nails out of my iron, like in I Served The King Of England3. Eat me. Shape my skull, femurs, ribs and fingers into a chandelier. Mummify me and leave me in a rocking chair so that you'll have someone to talk to on long winter nights. Do whatever you wish, as long as you do not place me in consecrated ground that will be avoided, stepped around, visited, kept separate from the world of life, because when I am gone I shall have no right to ask for property and territory from the earth, nor deference and privilege from humanity. I love life, and this is how I wish to serve it, in any capacity, in death.
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Wandering through the national gallery I come across “Chair (Usurper)”, a beautiful song captured in rust assemblage sculpture by Ales Vesely. I stare at it for twenty minutes. As the rest of the museum fades away, the idea of liberating art from museums occurs to me (as it does later at the Medek exhibit). I want to take this throne away from here, away from the hordes of identical women who follow three feet behind me when I enter the room (the idea of slashing the museum’s highly overrated Van Gough with the Swiss army knife I have in my pocket never occurred to me until they made me realise that they were worried I might do such a thing). In the next room I find a piece whose liberation would be much easier. “Demonstration Of One”, instructions for an “event” by Milan Knizak:
Stand still in a crowd, unfold a piece of paper, stand on it, take off your ordinary clothes and put on something unusual, e.g. a jacket half red, half green with a tiny saw hanging from the lapel, a lone handkerchief pinned onto the back. Display a poster on which is written:
I BEG PASSERS BY, IF POSSIBLE, TO CROW WHILE PASSING THIS PLACE.
Lie down on the piece of paper, read a book, tear out the finished pages. Then stand up, crumple the paper, burn it, sweep up the ashes carefully, change clothes and leave.
That this concept has been neutered, frozen and held up as capital-A “Art” in the museum bothers me, but the fact that the essence and vitae of the piece can be taken, freely distributed by anyone who wants it is heartening. I can steal a completely authentic and original Knizak out from under the worried eyes of these old women, without them ever being the wiser.
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A man stands at a currency exchange kiosk in an international airport. He places one hundred American dollars on the counter and exchanges them for pounds sterling. He exchanges the pounds for crowns, the crowns for yen, the yen for dollars and again and again until the exchange rate decimates him, leaving him a small, fragile and disarmed grasshopper on the tile floor of an international airport.
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factories that manufacture an eternal twilight
you would want to still go on living
not to comprehend the slavery that makes this smokestack city
tick
from “Acrobat”, by Vítezlav Nezval.
Kladno was a place of contradictions for me. The lecture that Vaclav gave about the history of the town’s factories and the various industries that have come to and abandoned the town, in addition to the sight of a scant few men working amongst the ruins of buildings which must have once employed thousands reminded me that the place had a long legacy of suffering, strife and failed ambition. In spite of this, I couldn’t help but be amazed by the beauty I found in the place. It was astounding purely on the basis of its aesthetics, but more than that, Kladno was also a large-scale depiction of an organic process of death. Unlike the ossuary, the art I saw in the rotting foundries and towers was not the work of any master craftsman or artist, but rather the natural effects of economics and oxidization. That some of the factories had decayed to the point that vegetation was beginning to overtake the rusted metal, nature physically erasing the remnants of the brotherhood of work the way it was economically and spiritually erased by corruption and mismanagement, was a much more powerful and realistic illustration of the Ozymandian “as we are, you shall be” moral than that of Johannes Reint’s ossuary.
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Coming up out of the Muzeum metro station, Tim and I come across a large gathering in Wenceslas Square, just at the foot of the national museum. There’s a stage, music, a large crowd of people. It doesn’t take much time to figure out what’s going on, and even less time to be completely stunned by it. We’ve stumbled into the Czech Communist Party’s final rally before the election. We’re probably the youngest people there. A crowd of people, average age looks to be sixty, mills about smiling politely while “Oh Yeah”, a cliched American dance track that’s fifteen years old blasts out from the speakers. In a grim coincidence or gesture of defiance to mass public opinion, the rally is less than a foot away from a memorial, “dedicated to the victims of communism”. Whatever the victims of communism were fighting, and whatever its supporters were advocating, it can’t have been this. In the middle of the rally a booth has been set up. Tim and I grab the free promotional swag, unable to believe that the cheap pens and candy we’re picking up is being given to us by The Party. The Party™. The force that drove out the authors we’re reading and fueled their anger and writing. All reduced to this cheap carnivalesque show. Surreal doesn’t begin to describe it. We take some pictures, but I doubt they’ll be able to convey the moment to people back home. I think the poster I was given says it all: a charicature drawing of candidate Jiri Dolejs smiling broadly, while in the background a cartoon depiction of one of the stunning leggy blonde women who strut through the city stands at the top of a ladder wearing a red dress, picking cherries from a tree, bending over just enough to show her panties, celebrating domestic product. Communism as a mass culture that was derailed, now spiraling off, trying to entertain foreigners (the ubiquitous red CCCP shirts one sees in tourist kitsch stores everywhere) as the last true believers grow old and fade away.
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The A Metro line was one of my favourite places in Prague. I could go and watch people for hours, never be noticed myself because I would never speak and give myself away as a foreigner. Some of the stations were warm, full of life and colour, like Malostranska. Others were sterile and pale, like Strasnická. I rode the entire line several times, took rolls of photos and wrote in my journal at every station:
June 25, 5:39 pm: Hradcanska.
As soon as I’d taken a picture of the design on the station’s wall, a middle aged man began to speak to me in Czech, possibly asking a question. It took a couple of “nem levim ceska”s to make him understand. I think he was trying to tell me that taking a photo of the station was useless. “It’s nothing,” he said to me, as if I didn’t know that I was wasting film. Just after that, one of the ubiquitous boys in military uniforms asked me a question in a very supplicatory way. It sounded as if he was asking if the metro had just come. Another “nem levim ceska”. He backed away, apologising. “Sorry, sir.” A girl who was going through the national gallery at the same time as me passed through the station just now. I’d noticed her originally because she and her friend had spent a long time looking at the Vasely “Usurper” piece, much in the way I had. The ebb and flow of these people, rigid like clockwork, fragile like ceramic. Watching them is like watching water. Streaming in and out of unison, sluicing off at the appropriate veins, arteries, rivers. And I a stone. No, not a stone. Maybe a leaf who moves more slowly, stays behind, snagged on something, a sight, a thought, amazed by the structures of the carrying system, but inevitable moving as well, at my own speed, in my own rhythms.
The architecture of Prague made many impressions upon me4 , but none were as compelling as that of the metro system. A design that had to be functional, that an entire populace would interface with on a daily basis. The repeating patterns of the tiled walls that slowly changed colours as you traveled along the line made me think of formal, mathematic music: retaining the same structure but changing content and thus your own placement within the piece.
Flooding disrupts subway
PRAGUE - The Czech subway system will not be repaired until Christmas and the city is asking why as officials try to shift the blame for severe flooding. Seventeen metro stations out of Prague’s total of 51 have been left submerged by the floods that devastated the Czech Republic and large swathes of Central Europe last week.
-The Vancouver Sun, Page A13, August 24, 2002.
The fact that the subway stations were flooded, and perhaps would be radically altered when they were repaired astounded me. Already, less than two months since I left Prague, I’m beginning to look at the photographs I took, even the ones I am in differently. There is a separation between myself and the life and action depicted in the photos. My remembrances of Prague as I tell and retell stories of my trip to others and myself will be mediated not only by my memory, but also the photos, which will never shift or be questioned. What if I return to Prague and find that the Malostranska station, my favourite which I took countless photos of, is no longer the same shades of green, silver and bronze? I do not know which of the forms of memory of the metro landscape I can trust: my eyes, my photos, my own mind. The sea will remain frozen in these three parts; no axe can break something already divided.
1 Because of this, I liked Peter Demetz’s approach of focussing in on individual thinkers, leaders, and movements from periods in Prague’s history, and providing a sort of cross-section of Prague life.
2 “In this country you can say what you like / because no one will listen to you anyway”, as Margaret Atwood (who has never had to worry about being forced into exile for her writing, and hasn’t had to worry about no one not listening to her for quite some time) described Canada in her “Notes Towards A Poem That Can Never Be Written”.
3 That what Ditey learns is, in fact, that the abandonment of ego to the service of humanity and that a life of simplicity holds far more reward than pursuing materialist goals may seem somewhat facile, but the path that he takes is one so rich and vibrant that the reader finds it easy to forgive his naive follies, even as they are happening. That he learns never to regret his life should perhaps be added to this: yet another parallel I saw between I Served The King Of England and the novels of Hesse, specifically Siddhartha.
4 Like many students, I found the architectural forms and movements that we encountered in Prague to be amongst the most challenging concepts we had to think about. I could acknowledge and recognize the differences between Renaissance, art nouveau and minimalist architecture, but the societal implications of the differences baffled me. Unlike painting and writing, for example, architecture is a form that almost always must serve a physical utilitarian purpose. The physical limitations of how a building can be constructed also place boundaries upon the architect’s artistic voice that the painter and writer do not suffer. Declarations of revolution or of the nature of the human spirit cannot be expressed in architecture in the modes in which we are used to dealing with them: words, sound, images. Additionally, coming from a comparatively young country whose oldest buildings would be amongst the most modern of Prague’s, and in which the quotation and sampling of previous architectural schools is commonplace, recognizing an art nouveau building as a strong attack upon traditional societal values as well as aesthetic ones is a challenge.
Copyright 2003, Bruce Lord.
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