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)