I’ve lost my rhythm of blogging, so today I’m trying to get started again. I’ll just be posting a variety of stray photos in my files with my comments.

Rudy, Jr., took my picture in a clown wig the other day.

I’ve been to the San Jose airport a couple of times. They have a fairly awesome robot/sculpture at the arrivals gate in terminal A.

A rooftop in Geneva. I love rooftops.

A stone leg in Lisbon, with inlaid tiling.

A beat old roll-up shade in Lisbon. I like how funky Lisbon is.

A plumber’s truck in Lisbon. When the driver’s in the van, the drawing on the door represents his body.

A pipe draining into the flume at Lexington Reservoir in Los Gatos. It’s still overflowing a little bit.

Moray eels at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I went there with my big brother Embry. It was jam-packed as usual.

A fence in Berkeley. I’m always a little amazed at how well perspective takes care of itself.

Yet another picture of the Mittens in Monument Valley this summer.

Some laundry in Lisbon. The laundry adds a lot of color to the narrow streets.

The food bar at the Museum of Tiles in Lisbon. This is a great place.

A waterfall near the Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos. I like the contrast between the analog flow of the water and the digital steps of the concrete walls of the fall.

I’m running out of Munich pictures, so you’ll see some Lisbon pictures mixed in with today’s post, which touches on three heavy or philosophical topics.

[Creepy cat in Lisbon graveyard.]

(1) The Germans are, as one would expect, very thorough, and very attentive to rules. One doesn’t cross an empty street if the pedestrian “Walk” light isn’t on. If I show my ID to a museum ticket-seller to get the senior rate, she’s actually going to read the month, day and year of my birthday. When the woman in the grocery-store hands me my bag of food, she admonishes me to hold both handles of the bag lest I spill my purchases. Another woman advised me about how to heat up a Munich-style white hotdog without (auugh!) bursting it. But there’s a cheerful, agreeable quality to all this, a kind of “We’re playing this game together,” attitude.

[Balloon used for lamp fixture in Lisbon church.]

Walking around, I keep admiring how attractive, tidy and cultured the Germans are. In the course of my life, I’ve lived in Germany for about three years, and I’m comfortable here. But, having been away for so long now, I’m also sensitive to the sinister side of Germany—I’m referring of course to the Nazis.

All three of my uncles were officers in the German army—they had no choice but to enlist. My uncle Rudolf von Bitter died on the Russian front, the other two were captured and served time in Russian and English prison camps. My grandfather Rudolf von Bitter is said to have helped the underground resistance against the Nazis. The family sent my mother to America in 1937 so that at least one of them would survive the coming war.

I’m not blindly on the Germans’ side— we even have a few Jewish ancestors far up in our German family tree, and if the Third Reich had gone on indefinitely, my relatives might have ended up in the death camps. Even so, it’s not reasonable to assume that typical Germans are racists and heartless killers—any more than it’s reasonable to think the same about all Americans in the wake of Hiroshima, say, or My Lai.

[A nice patch of wall in Sintra, Portugal.]

But still. Why did the Germans have to act so terribly in the Second World War? It’s undeniable that the Nazis had huge popular support. I found myself wishing that it were somehow possible to change history so that the horror had never happened. I was wishing that my race could be cleared of blood-guilt.

I talked this over with my cousin Rudolf. He, of course, has thought about these questions quite a bit. I’ll condense and paraphrase his remarks.

[Tiled Rossio Square in Lisbon.]

“If you are accused of a crime, or if the group you belong to is accused, it’s better to begin by admitting your guilt. Denial leads nowhere. Hitler is part of the German character. And, yes, we have our fine culture as well, for instance, Goethe. But to imagine that we could somehow keep the Goethe and get rid of the Hitler is a lie. G and H. Next to each other in the alphabet. I also think of Goethe’s story, Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice); a meditation on the dark side of intellectual and technological power.”

[Chuch tile with holy candles in Lisbon.]

No real answer.

(2) Looking for things to do that didn’t involve walking, I went to a concert in a former imperial church, a sequence of seven Haydn sonatas based on Jesus’s “Seven Last Words,” these being the seven direct quotes of Him that appear in the Gosper of Saint Luke.

My favorite of these is where the Good Thief says, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus seems to agree with that, and says, “Verily I say unto you, today you shall be with me in paradise.”

[German concert crowd.]

I once had an interesting discussion of this passage with my old science-writer mentor, Martin Gardner. Some religious sects have take the exchange between Jesus and the Good Thief to mean that your soul isn’t in fact immortal on its own, but is, rather, a pattern of information that God stores in His memory so that He can resurrect you. Sometimes the word “soul sleep” is associated with this notion, but if you try Googling or looking in Wikipedia, you find a bewildering gamut of variations on this (heretical by some lights) doctrine.

[Me in Lisbon with a statue of poet Fernando Pessoa]

Keeping it simple, to me the Thief/Jesus exchange suggests that the soul can in fact be represented as software, that is, as a pattern of information that God (or a sufficiently large computer memory) can store.

“Remember me!” What a great request.

(3) On my last day, I rode Rudolf’s bike to the Neue Pinakothek, a Munich museum with 19th and early 20th century art. The Neue Pinakothek had a nice Ferdinand Hodler, shown above, and a couple of good van Goghs. Studying his works in awe, I started thinking it might be fun to try some paintings in which I use enough extra paint to build up an impasto relief of brush strokes.

I always wonder why van Gogh killed himself. Wouldn’t you be happy if you could paint that well? I guess he was out there alone on some kind of unbearable edge. It’s hard to visualize just how crazy some artists are. It occurs to me to do an SF move on van Gogh—that is, to imagine a future kind of art with its own kind of crazy artist. The notion of future art forms fasinates me.

I also noticed an Honore Daumier painting of some excited folks goggling at an onstage drama. Antonio Damasio argues in his book The Feeling of What Happens, that the essence of consciousness is to have, get this, a mental image oneself watching one’s life unfold. At level 1, we simply are em embedded in life, we’re like the actors on the stage. At level 2, we can stand aside a bit, and see life as a spectacle. At level 3, which is where Damasio says consciousness kicks in, we are aware of ourselves as detached observers of life’s passing scene. You’re looking at the Daumier painting of yourself. As I discuss in my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, (see the online version of the relevant passage here), all of Damasio’s levels can, at least in principle, be modeled in computer software.

[Egyptian style rings at Gold and Silver Market in the Scwabing district of Munich. Like language tokens.]

After the museum, I sat in their very pleasant outdoor cafe for a long time, eating while reading Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, a book I’d dug up at Rudolf’s apartment—I think his daughter had it assigned for her English class. After two and a half weeks, I was kind of done with doing something touristic every minute. I was edging towards the next level—of simply living abroad.

It had been awhile since I’d read Chandler, and I’d forgotten just how wonderful a writer he is. His use of language is exquisite, as in his thumbnail sketches of his characters’ personalities. And his dialog is wonderful, rife with odd-ball 1930s slang—probably nobody ever really talked that way, but the patois makes for a wonderful seamless level of discourse that holds his worlds together.

From Farewell My Lovely: “I felt like an amputed leg.” “…my bank account was still trying to crawl under a duck…”

[Water works building near dam in Los Gatos, California]

Chandler’s slang reminds of the way that I often make up a standard slang for my SFictional worlds. I’ve learned that it works best if the words in this alternate language are short, easily spelled, and easy to say, like the well-polished words in actual human speech. Sometimes one can repurpose an existing word, but it’s often better to invent a previously unused word—if you scratch around a bit, you’ll find there’s really quite a few good and usable syllables that don’t happen to be standard English words. In picking a made-up word, you have to be keenly aware of the word’s associations, that is, if it sounds a bit like some real word.

[Theatiner church in Munich.]

Anyway, my time in Munich finally ran out and, next step, next step, next step, I called a taxi to pick me up at 5 am to take me to the station to catch a suburban train to the airport, etc. And now polishing these notes, I’m looking across my desk at our cozy backyard.

Thank you, Cosmos! It was a good trip.

I went by a favorite little museum of mine, Villa Stuck, the Jugendstil home of this odd turn of the century artist, Franz Stuck.

Stuck was a handsome, sociable man. He seems to have worked his way up, making a career as an artist and architect, marrying a possibly wealthy American woman, being made a noble and becoming “von Stuck,” and teaching art for many years at the Munich art academy, with students such as Paul Klee and Fritz Albers.

Stuck isn’t really the most talented painter—his images are almost like outsider art, filled with idiosyncratic mythological references and slavering eroticism. His 1898 painting, “Die Wippe” (“The Seesaw”) all but shows a pair of women, a blonde and a brunette, sharing a dildo, with one of the women leering and the other blushing and turning her head.

But Stuck was something more than a painter—he was an impresario, perhaps a bit like a Pop artist. He made elaborate, architectural gilded frames for his paintings—particularly for his greatest hit, Die Suende (or “Sin”), which he copied and resold a number of times over. And he used the modernist expedient of photographing models and using those images to lay out his paintings. I like Stuck more than Sylvia does—of his work she once remarked, “Did this guy ever go outside and look at anything real?”

It’s not just the art in Villa Stuck, it’s the building itself, with every surface completely decorated. And upstairs in his studio is a copy of Die Suende atop a huge altar with polished nautilus shells on it. I love artists. Like so many of the buildings in Munich, Villa Stuck had to be restored after World War II.

[Kley’s “The Krupp Works Devils” Click to see larger image.]

The Villa Stuck had an interesting temporary exhibition of works by Heinrich Kley. There was one large and amazing 1913 painting of the Krupp steel mill, Die Krupp’schen Teufel (“The Krupp Works Devils”), with huge demons commingling with the workers—the demons representing, I think, the elemental forces of nature involved in smelting—as opposed to the evils of arms-manufacture. Kley did this work on commission from the Krupp company shortly before World War One.

[Kley’s “Dancing School #1” Click to see larger image.]

In later years, Kley became a regular cartoonist for the legendary journal Simplicissimus, and he did a number of cartoons of animals behaving like people. In 1912, he created a classic comic strip that’s alternately called “Die Tanzschule” (“Dancing School”) or “Die Tanzkurs” (“The Dance Lesson”), in which an Elephant and a Crocodile are learning to do ballet.

[Kley’s “Dancing School #2” Click to see larger image.]

Studying Kley’s “Die Tanzschule” on the wall actually made me laugh out loud. The elephant and the crocodile aren’t merely playful, they want to learn to dance, they’re transported by their motions, and the crocodile howls and sobs with the elephant steps on her tail.

I wish I had better images of “Die Tanzschule”—due to the hypervigilant guards, I had to settle for photographing the rather poor reproduction of this work in the show’s catalog, and then Photoshopping them to look a little better. Note that I did manage to get a shot of the actual canvas of ” Die Krupp’schen Teufel ” as shown further back up the page.

In 1940 “Die Tanzschule” served as an inspiration for part of the ”Dance of the Hours,” scene in the Disney animated film Fantasia. In Villa Stuck, they had a few drawings from the Disney film to drive home this point .

But the crocodiles in the Disney seem witless, each with the same fixed “devilish” smile in the corners of their mouths. And the Disney elephants are too cute. Disney vs. Heinrich Kley is a bit like the low humor of Douglas Adams vs. the heart-piercing wit of the still-insufficiently-recognized grandmaster Robert Sheckley.

Another thing I did in Munich was go to the Krone Circus.

I like circuses anyway, but a European circus seems especially cool, perhaps everyone there is a European local—you pretty much never see another American tourist at the circus.

It was a one-ring circus with elephants, a pair of clowns, and some trapeze artists. There’s no spectacle I love more than acrobat women riding on elephants!

It reminded me of a time about thirteen years ago, when I had a sabbatical, and Sylvia and I bummed around Europe for over five weeks—and we went to this little circus in Vienna, and I had a kind of revelation when I came out. Here’s the passage:

Sunday afternoon, the 27th of September, 1998, there was a strange moment — S and I went to the Circus Roncalli at 3 PM, it was lovely, so full of color and laughter and love. And then we came outside and there was a chill in the air, and some low gray clouds — though still with blue showing through — and some of the leaves on the tree were yellow and it was like all of a sudden it was Fall, and it had come perhaps gradually and we’d been too busy playing to notice, it had been Summer when we left home, but now we’d stayed away so long that it was Fall, us off in a distant city, a feeling of having stayed away longer than I’d realized, and a feeling, too, that, in the great “year” of my life it’s Fall. It turned to Fall while we were at the Circus.

I received no revelation this time, although I did get two or three good photos.

One more outing I managed was to see the München Volkstheater production of the Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weil musical, Der Dreigroschen Oper. (Three-penny Opera). It was cool to be in the huge crowds at the concert, the circus and the play. I had trouble understanding the rapid-fire dialog at the musical, but they had a seven-piece live band, and an amazing rendition of “Mackie Messer,” a song from the play that we know as the pop standard “Mack the Knife”

[ The “Static Man” in Lisbon. Holds Guiness record for motionlessness. Somehow he has a hidden harness that suspends him in air from a cane sticking up from a platform.]

The actor singing “Mackie Messer,” really tore it up. He was sleazy, unshaven, in a powder blue suit with no tie—like an on-the-skids lounge singer, but German as well. I’d almost forgotten this side of the Germans, that is, the expressionist, Grimm-brothers, Cabinet-of-Doctor-Caligari, freak-show, Scorpions heavy-metal aspect.

I left both the circus and the musical before they were over. I was mainly thinking about getting back to cousin Rudolf’s apartment and lying on the couch. Or riding the tram and looking at people on the street. I’ve noticed this before—when I go out to shows alone, I find it hard to sit through the whole thing. It’s not as much fun without someone to share your enjoyment. I recall one of my friends telling me that, after his wife left him, he was unable to go sit through an entire movie in a theater. Perhaps we’re such creatures of the herd that when we’re alone, we feel impelled to range about in the hope of striking up a conversation.