August 19 -24. Geneva, NYC.

Back in Geneva, Switzerland. This place is so dang tidy.

I took some nice little walks while my wife tied up loose ends with her family.

The path went near some geese. As I approached them, they all began to honk. Geese are great guardians.

I saw some cows, which is always nice. Each of them wore a bell tuned to a different note. Wonderful aleatory music. “Aleatory” means “random.” Click this link for a four meg MPG movie of the cows. As usual, it's only jerky the first time you play it.

I sat in a comfortable leather chair in the OMPI/WIPO lobby, this means “World Intellectual Property Organization,” it’s a branch of the UN, led for many years by my father-in-law Arpad. This building was Arpad’s castle — he picked out nearly everything in this luxurious lobby, above all the rich marble floors. He assembled marbles of a dozen or so nations: gray, red, pink, beige, blue, green.

The marbles are inlaid in a spiral pattern leading to a trickling Euromoderne wall-fountain. The Hungarian marble has pride of place. Arpad was always happy and energetic in this building, the place reminds me of his dynamic, charming younger self. It’s best to remember the departed at their peak.

In The Hollow Earth, I wrote about flying pigs whose bodies taper off to be like shrimp in the rear. I called them shrigs. One of the items Arpad left behind was a boar tusk cigar-cutter shaped exactly like a shrig.

I like riding around on Lake Geneva on these cheap water-busses called “mouettes.” Geneva has this huge “jet d’eau” fountain shooting high out of the lake.

A cutlery shop on the main street of Geneva holds a little Swiss Knife Museum. Behold one of the world’s largest Swiss knives.

The end of lake Geneva turns into the Rhone river, which runs west out of town, soon joined by the Arve, angling up from the south. the two meet at a little-frequented corner of town called Jonction (French for Junction). I was impressed by how clear and green and lovely is the Rhone (on the right). The Arve (on the left) — flowing from, ahem, France — is gray and it smells bad. The grayness is, actually, because it’s from the stony alps. But the stink is pollution.

I walked down to the Jonction this afternoon, remembering old times.

About twenty years ago, we were visiting here and I spent a day walking around Geneva. I was working on my novel The Hollow Earth then, and looking up at a flock of birds in the sky over the lake, maybe seagulls, I imagined a sea that floats in mid-air: the inspiration for my fictional “Umpteen Seas.”

Near the jet d'eau, a seagull’s wings mirror the arch of a stone pier. At the end of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, my man Eddie Poe describes the entrance to the Hollow Earth, with the birds eternally calling, “Teke-lili.”

Later that day, like today, I made my way down to the grassy bank of the Rhone.

The bridge and turbine building remind me of Half Life, especially with a couple on the bridge throwing rocks — or barrel-bombs — down into the river.

Lots of graffiti at the Jonction. The grassy bank where I remembered sitting to slip off my clothes for swimming and perhaps to make a note about the Umpteen Seas on my usual pocket-square of paper twenty years ago — the bank is covered with dog turds, packed in like an Escher tessellation, unspeakably foul.

Here's a link to a Geneva skate shop , quite a cool site with a skate video.

And then it was back to the USA. We stopped in holy Queens, NY, to visit our granddaughter.

In the evening I was lying on my back on the couch in my PJs, almost ready for sleep, and my daughter parked her baby on my chest, on my heart, just where our three children used to lie. The baby tossed a bit, raising her heavy sticky-skin head a few times, then settling in and dozing. I felt her as a field of energy, a glowing ingot. My granddaughter, how wonderful. Life is an ongoing pleasant surprise.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2005 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.