eMotion
Walking
Borderland
Between Hadersdorf and Purkersdorf
What is in a change of light? What is the space under a bridge?
So many greens as there are shades in the spectrum. And each colour, like a fractal, shows within its own range all colours.
That human engineering, painted some shade of green, standing in for something rather brown or grey, if not black — how does it insist on itself, next to all grown kinds of green?
Is this a friendly encounter, under the bridge over a river, a stream, a current, a brook, the “Wienfluss”, a bridge between Hadersdorf and Purkersdorf, red Vienna and (formerly) black Niederösterreich?
We do not feel the love, we rather feed on a change of light, a slight informational, perceptive mico-difference that is to us the equivalent of good food.
MAR/04
As to us, we do not dance with the trash. We hunt it.
We hunt the trash, moving along the trace of Green.
Along that banister installed so long ago. That guide to civilisation, that taming of wildly grown greenerie, that Otto-Wagner-Green, passing through that city, taking everyone by the hand to lead them back to some cradle of good manners and style and taste …
What is it to us? We are not in need of tutelage. We are not in need of some branded “well mannered green”, behaving as if faking copper’s noble aging process, but in an instant version, to be used everywhere, on anything.
Oh green can be so treacherous!
Continue reading “MAR/04”MAR/03
Eins lebt auf Routen.
Als Routen durch Landschaften, die hart aufeinander stoßen oder weich ineinander gleiten. Da fährt eins immer wieder Bahnen ab. Und auf den Bahnen trifft es was.
Die Plastikdinger sind uns eigentlich Feind. Wir meiden sie. Wir versuchen sie zu ignorieren. Doch als wir auf dieser Brücke, die vor allem eine Straße ist, wie man auch hört, auf einen der innig geliebten Freunde, den Bach (Hainbach heißt er genau) hinunterschauten, mussten wir sehen dass eine von ihnen — aber hat es überhaupt Sinn, bei diesem Massenprodukt, diesem reinen Müll, von einem Individuum zu sprechen? — dass eine von ihnen derzeit zwischen zwei wohlgesetzten Steinen haust, die anscheinend lange schon den freien Lauf des Baches aufhalten und vom allzu wilden Anschwellen abhalten sollen.
Continue reading “MAR/03”Hadersdorf
In Vienna’s West, where forest borders on city and they interpenetrate each other, there is an area of hard and soft edges of different environments, times and uses. Here in Hadersdorf you can try out how to make a passage through spaces and zones.
One was on the way to one of the three supermarkets where one leaves too much money in the Corona Lockdown, because the cult of buying goods is almost the only way one can still please one’s social Eros.
There, at the intersection of supermarket, street and pavement, a path opened up where people walk, run, even cycle. Another flight line opened this way out.
The stream.
It is the Mauerbach, once regulated, now probably de-regulated, but the green of the railing of the bridge,
exactly where the Mauerbach joins the Wienfluss, still bears witness to the Otto Wagner era around 1900, when it was certain that all rivers and streams were to be forced into narrow, straight beds by human technology. So that they would not dare to breathe with the swelling of the seasons.
Half-ruined structures of an engineering system that is hard to guess, things that almost everyone overlooks who doesn’t know anything about them, prepare the eyes for the difference to the structures of branches and twigs that never seem as ruined as what humans have made of them.
Such a very different relationship to entropy has this living wood.
Attention moves, zoom-like, closer and sees: Here is habitat, here is food for other species.
The rose hips in winter — called h æ ʧ ɛ r l n by the locals. Wonder how they taste to the birds?
And then, a humansign of the very first order, showing itself among the trees.
A church, the one of “Mariahilf” (=HelpMary, indicating that it is Mary who should help humans, not humans helping her.)
Some of us were held under some water there long ago. They don’t remember. It is called “baptism.” Men in long dresses do it. It this particular humanculture this used to be perceived as an excellent and long tested act to naturalize human animals into the world. In the name of three male, or not exactly gendered, higher beings. But this house in which this happened is named after a woman, the one who supposedly has given birth to the second of the three, many solar years ago.
Thus a primal initiation into the world long common in these parts.
(Yet maybe not quite the right one if one understands that the “world” is really a world of worlds)
Suburbia. Sou-b-Urbia. Susususupp-Urbia
Suburbia. Sou-b-Urbia. Susususupp-Urbia.
That is how we know it. That typical area of so many variants of nothingness.
Nothingness of so many shades and colours.
A street, along the street buildings and fields, small shops and private industries – here it is a small saw mill, or rather just someone who owns a machine for cutting wood.
He rarely is in, but when he was, he was friendly with us strange ones.
Yet we might have been mistaken, as it is not at all certain that he saw us passing through.
This is suburbia, where the symbolic border of city and country meets the more porouse thresholds of plant life and built structures, new and decaying, taken over by plant life again.
It can be almost rustic, but then it sells its rustic capital to attract core families and green minded, middle class BoBos.
And once they move in, talking green but bringing their cars, rustic it will be no more.
We pass through it, more than once, for we do not feed off wood or gasoline or well meaning lies, we feed off the many divers micro-variants of suburban boredom.
The good kind.