Munich is such a beautiful city. Lots of buildings were bombed in the war, but the Germans have restored it out the wazoo. In spots, Munich is almost like a theme park, although even the new things are build from solid metal and stone. Things are solid and well-proportioned, with lots of trees.

Since I was alone in Munich for much of time time, I wrote more notes and took more pix than in the other spots, so I’ll break this material into several posts, with the tense somewhat randomly oscillating between present and past—which is, I suppose, vaguely appropriate.

The Theatinerkirche in the downtown (in the right on the picture above) was pretty much reduced to rubble, but the Germans put it back the way it used to be.

The Altes Rathaus (old town hall) got destroyed, and was rebuilt in a fairly ugly way, but there’s a gothic-looking Neue Rathaus (new town hall) from 1908 (shown on the left above) that’s pretty cool, although my cousin Rudolf says it’s kitsch in that it imitates being medieval Gothic.

The Altes Rathaus has some wonderful wrought iron, I liked the fairytale-border-illo quality of that frog shown above.

And there’s some great old Jugendstil (that is, German Art Nouveau,) buildings as well.

The apartment block where my cousin Rudolf lives with his family on the fourth floor is Jugendstil, and there’s a cute carved bear on newel post at the bottom of the well-waxed flights of walk-up stairs. Very 1910.

Some amazing buildings in Munich are relatively uncelebrated like, for instance, the Jugendstil lecture hall at the Leopold Maxmillian University. And, like I say, there’s a bunch of amazing Jugendstil houses around, too. I love that stuff. Will we ever find our way back to the wonders of heavily ornamented architecture? Or are we stuck with cheap-ass blank walls for the rest of time?

I’m half-German—my mother was the sister of my Cousin Rudolf’s father. Not that they bore any resemblance to this cartoony old painting of a mermaid and merman.

My cousin Rudolf von Bitter is a smart guy. He’s an author in his own right, with quite a few books—this link searches German Amazon, with a couple of mine sneaking in. He organizes author videos for the Bavarian TV channel. He also has a LiteraVideo webpage with some quirky authorial videos that he’s made on his own.

He drives a beat-up old-style VW beetle, he sought out one made in Mexico for the authentic old-school look. I called it a dreckige Käfer (dirty beetle.) His manner of talking shares a quality of Bruce Sterling’s—you can never quite tell when he’s being sarcastic. We were making dinner plans, and he exclaimed, “Schweinebraten um sechs!” (Roast pork at six o’clock!) I kind of thought he was mocking the eating habits of the average German, but that night he did in fact order Schweinebraten, albeit at seven. He does it, but he mocks it at the same time.

It was good sitting with Rudolf’s family, enjoying the glow of their home, and listening to them, sharing food.

A restaurant where we ate together had a life-sized bronze sculpture of a pig outside. I posed with it, and a drunk Bavarian smoking outside the restaurant said to me, “Schweine gehören zusammen.” (“Pigs belong together.”) But I’m not going to run the picture of me with the bronze pig. Instead here I am with one of Christina’s sculptures.

I’m referring to Rudolf’s wife Christina von Bitter . She’s a wonderful artist—she makes sculptures of whimsical large constructions from wire, paper and paste, some pink, but mostly white.

[My mother, Marianne von Bitter, in 1936.]

Rudolf’s two children are very well-bred and pleasant. His 17-year-old daughter looks a little like my mother looks in a photo taken when she was about 20. There’s a certain shape of nose that my mother and I and Cousin Rudolf have, the von Bitter nose, and I see a little of that in Rudolf’s daughter. And there’s some similarity in their brows. How touching to come back to Germany and find an echo of Mom. It’s touching and a bit uncanny.

One of Rudolf’s neighbors puts a special New Year’s inscription in chalk on their door every year, I saw a few more of these around town. They have to do with Epiphany, the Feast of the Kings. The letters stand for Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar—the names of the kings.

[Hans Cranach the Elder, “The Mouth of Truth” (If you tell a lie, it bites your hand)]

Unlike me, cousin Rudolf has actually read the whole of The Phenomenology of the Mind by our common great-great-great-grandfather Georg Hegel. He advised me on a tactic for finally plowing through it. “Read it like a novel. Even better, follow the advice of the Hegel scholar Ernst Bloch, and read the Phenomenology in parallel with Goethe’s Faust.”

By the way, here’s a zoomable PDF of our shared family tree, which was made up by our common uncle, also a Rudolf von Bitter, who died young in WWII. You read it in reverse, that is, Uncle Rudolf is at the top, and his ancestors are futher down. My name is Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, you understand. So cousin Rudolf and I would be one step furthere above the top of our uncle’s family tree. You can find Hegel down there among the ancestors.

Rudolf and his wife Christina and their two children were about to drive to Italy for a family vacation—it’s an eight to ten hour drive. They like to listen to an audio books on CDs during these long drives to pass the time. Christina had considered getting Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but instead had gotten an Agatha Christie novel (in German). And Rudolf exclaims, “No, I have gotten CDs of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess. It’s really very funny.”

Although I was in fact sympathetic to Rudolf’s proposal, at the same time it’s incongruity cracked me up, it was like something a Woody Allen character would do—“Uh, yeah, I like to play a tape of Kafka’s The Trial when I’m a long trip with my family.” Rudolf is truly my cousin.

I didn’t make it to the famous Hofbrau Haus this time, although I did swing by an outdoor offshoot of the Hofbrau near a Chinese Tower in the park. A brass band pumps oompah music from two stories up in the tower, and you can buy a soft pretzel the size of a baseball catcher’s face protector.

Munich is Beer City, and it took some effort on my part to maintain a sane frame of mind. I actually saw a group of ten guys pedaling a bar down the street, a man-powered trolley, complete with a giant wooden keg of beer, big steins on the bar-top, and rowdy singing.

I had one non-alcoholic Lowenbrau in a beer garden, just for old times’ sake, but that was enough. For the rest of the time, I stuck to a pleasant drink that Christina von Bitter steered me to: Apfelshorle, which is apple juice with sparkling water mixed in.

I had a pleasant flashback, walking into a museum of crystals run by the geology group at the local university. When we were living in Heidelberg from 1978-1980, there were some displays like that, and I’d look at them while working on an early draft of Infinity and the Mind, my nonfiction book about infinity, and at the same time writing White Light, my novel about a guy who climbs to higher of levels of infinity in the afterworld. Each endeavor was feeding the other. And those crystals came to seem like symbols to me, and I dreamed about them. Here’s a quote about this from my forthcoming memoir, Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf von Bitter Rucker.

I got into a very pleasant and exalted mental state during this period of time. I remember having a magical dream in which I was scrambling up the ridge of a mountain. The stone underfoot was slippery pieces of shale, and among the stones I was finding wonderful polyhedral crystals the size of chestnuts or hedgehogs. Even within the dream, I knew that these treasures represented my wonderful new ideas.

I liked seeing German words written out everywhere, I might smile at odd German surnames I spot, such as “Pfnür,” which sounds a bit like my SF word, “fnoor”. It’s great hearing German spoken aloud. My Muttersprache, the mother tongue. Everything sounds somewhat funny to me in German. At one point I heard a woman complaining about an acquaintance. “Die blöde Kuh! Sie ruft mich ewig an.” (“The stupid cow. She’s always phoning me.”) Love it.

I’d almost forgotten that I can speak German, but the skill comes back quickly. It’s like remembering you can ride a bicycle. One thing I always need to remember is that I have to push the accent so hard that, from the inside, it feels like I’m straining and overdoing it. But if I don’t make that extra effort, nobody can understand me. Certainly the locals treat me better if I try. They think it’s cute to hear an American talk half-decent German. Like seeing a dog walk on his hind legs.

The working-class locals—the echt Bavarians—have a cozy way of rolling their R’s. But my cousin Rudolf and his family speak the standard, less-accented German, the so-called hoch Deutsch.

After Rudolf and his family left for their trip, I was my own for a few days, into my own head, which was fun, although at times a little lonely. I was definitely slowing down. Like a clock winding down. My legs were beyond tired after two weeks of vacationing. So I spend a lot of time sitting down in cafes.

In the mornings I lie on Rudolf’s couch for awhile. When I’m motionless, it feels so good that it’s hard to get up. Sitting with my legs crossed is an active sensual pleasure. I’m at a point where every day I want to walk a little less. So when I go out, I sometimes ride Rudolf’s bicycle.

But it’s good to get out. I saw five or six guys surfing on a standing wave where a piped surge of water flows out into a park meadow, an artificial stream called the Ice Canal. It’s next to a bridge, and a big crowd was watching. Each guy would manage a minute or two on the wobbly wave, then eat it and get swept downstream. Surf München!

I feel like I’m having an extra inning of vacation here, a bonus round. Listening to an ensemble of classical musicians on the street, complete with grand piano. I start thinking about my life, and again about the Nested Scrolls autobiography I wrote, and about how much better things have turned out for me than I’d ever hoped.

The sweet music fills my throat.

It was intensely nostalgic to return to Geneva. I first visited Sylvia at her parents’ apartment there in 1964, the summer after my freshman year at Swarthmore. And we were married at the American Episcopal Church in Geneva in June, 1967.

Sylvia’s father Arpad worked at a branch of the United Nations called WIPO, for the World Intellectual Property Organization, and eventually he became the Director-General. Up until 2005, Sylvia and I visited Geneva once or sometimes twice a year—call it forty trips for me. And we always brought the kids along. We were were in Geneva with our children as newborns, as toddlers, as teens, as twenty-year-olds—over and over, year after year.

Sometimes I’d split off from the family and spend a few hours wandering the downtown alone. The biggest sight is, of course, the famous fountain in the lake, the jet d’eau. I remember working on some of my novels in Geneva—for instance I got the idea for the floating “Umpteen Seas” of The Hollow Earth by imagining Lake Geneva lifting up to hang suspended in the air, a giant, jiggling glob.

This time around, Sylvia and I stayed, for the first time ever, in a Geneva hotel. We found a fairly inexpensive two-star hotel called La Bel’ Espérance, run by, of all people, the Salvation Army. Not that the hotel guests were street people, they were low-end business types and frugal tourists like ourselves. The nice thing about the hotel is that it’s on a quiet side-street in the heart of the cute medieval part of Geneva called the Vielle Ville, not far from a nice old cafe-lined plaza called the Bourg de Four.

One thing that kept striking me about Geneva was how many things have remained unchanged over the forty years I’ve been going there. Although it seems as if they’re continually doing construction on the city—a lot of this work involved retrofitting or strengthening or restoring or refurbishing the same stuff that’s always been there. It’s worth noting that there’s not much graffiti in Geneva. Although I’d gotten to enjoy the wall decorations in Lisbon, it was kind of relaxing to see the unblemished gray and beige walls of Genève.

It being April, the weather fluctuated between rain and sun. Lush chestnut trees line the old city wall around the Vielle Ville. After so many visits, I know the streets of Geneva very well—better, really, than I’d expected. At every turn, new memories came floating up.

Our daughter Isabel and her husband turned up in Geneva the same day as us, and we had a lot of fun walking around with them, showing them some of our favorite spots. We four had a nice lunch at a cafe that Sylvia and I have always loved, it’s in an 1890s pavilion in a park below the old city wall, the park also holds some buildings of the University of Geneva.

We got together with Sylvia’s brother, her nieces, and her step-mother. Lots of warm family visiting,

One particular evening Sylvia and I ate in a bistro with four of the young people. It was warm and cozy in there, a magical evening, one of those times that stands forever as a kind of oasis along one’s long journey through life. One of us had a horsemeat steak, which is a common thing over there. I had ice-cream flambé. Sylvia’s neice Diana told us that when Swiss kids are in bands they sometimes sing a fake English that they call Yogurt—I guess it’s a relative of the “French” that the waiters’ speak in the Café La Boeuf segments of Prairie Home Companion.

On the last day, we visited Sylvia’s step-mother. A sweet woman. She took us to see the the “Tulip Festival” in Morges. It wasn’t like a festival in sense of crowds or an admission fee.

It was bed after bed of incredibly gorgeous tulips in a green park at the edge of Lake Geneva, with towering mountains plunging into the lake on the other side.

Hardly anyone there. We wandered in, gorged on beauty, and left.

By the time we hit Geneva, Sylvia and I had entered a zone of exponentially increasing physical exhaustion. I was walking slower and slower, like a watch running down. There’s something exquisitely pleasurable about being so tired out. I’m very aware of my body, and I deeply savor each moment that I can sit down. The fatigue is like a cushion that I recline upon.

During my afternoon rests and my idle evening hours, I spend hours playing with my photos in my Lightroom program, tweaking my new memories in real time: clarity, contrast, vibrance, exposure, brightness, blacks.

Right next to our hotel I saw a window of high-priced amplifiers which, how retro, include non-digital vacuum tubes. Analog has always been where the truest gnarl is at.

Sylvia and I hit the Museum of Art and History, visiting my two favorite rooms there. In one room are the paintings of Felix Vallotton (1865-1925), a guy with an amazing sense of color. He does mythological kinds of scenes, only the characters are very much recognizable as turn-of-the-century individuals. The paintings are a little bit peculiar…unfortunately I didn’t get a shot of any of them.

In my other favorite room are works by the Geneva artist, Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918). He has several styles. In one style he paints amazing scenes of lakes and mountains, quite modern and impressionistic, with really wonderful hues. The paintings take on an abstract, symbolic energy. Hodler has one particular blue that I wish I knew how to mix. The guard told me to take photos, but I snuck one of his “Lac de Thoune” 1909.

I got photos of three of Hodler’s self-portraits as well. These are wonderfully expressive and remarkably differentiated from each other. He’s making a face in this one, like a guy in a photobooth. These works speak to me as an aging writer, as Hodler did them in 1916 and 1917, shortly before his death at age 65. What vigor, self-knowledge, irony!

The days of our long vacation roll on, each day with its own little tasks and hurdles. I can imagine being paralyzed with fear and worry—even now, after years of travel, I have tendencies in that direction. But in reality, it’s just one step at a time. Walk to the tram stop. Get the tram to the train station. Find the train track. Etc. And if you flub a step—like if you to see a sight and it’s closed because it’s, whatever, Tuesday afternoon, you can always do something else. If you miss a connection and spend an extra night, you can always find a room.

The Swiss public transport is like a clock. The trams, busses, and train cars are of an extravagantly high quality, they roll smoothly, they’re frequent and ubiquitous. One aspect of using public transport is that we spend a fair amount of time waiting in public places. I didn’t bring my smart phone on this trip. So how to use the time? Look around, duh.

If restless, I pull out the folded square of paper I usually carry in my back pocket and write down what I see, for later incorporation into my travel notes and blog posts. Or I take a photo of a pattern I see in the surroundings.

On the platform in Geneva, waiting for the train to Zurich and on to Munich, I noticed that the people in Europe are thinner than Americans on the whole. No adults wear baseball caps. Almost nobody shaves their head. Leather shoes are more the rule than sport shoes.

Good to see you again, Geneva. I’ll be back.

I was in Lisbon alone for four or five days in 1994, I was in a surrealist movie, Manual of Evasion: LX94, directed by Edgar Pêra and featuring some great Portuguese actors plus me, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. I wrote up my 1994 impressions of the trip in a piece “The Manual of Evasion” that I’ve put online. (Originally it appeared in the old-school print version of Boing Boing, and in my book of essays, Seek.)

That first trip was a wild, happy time, and I’ve always had fond memories of it, and had wanted to bring Sylvia to Lisbon so she could experience this city too. Today I’ll blog about our trip, and post some of the photos I took, with a few of the photos by Sylvia. I have even more photos that I’ll work into future blog posts. You can also see my Lisbon photos (in a largeri resolution) in my Flickr set, “2011, Lisbon.”

[Edgar Pêra]

Before setting out, I got in touch with Edgar, and he was still in Lisbon making films, getting plenty of work, and he was happy we were coming.

We got to Lisbon on April 2nd. We stayed at a nice mid-range hotel called the York House, it’s a small retrofitted convent in a residential neighborhood about two kilometers east of the main downtown. I picked it for sentimental reasons, remembering how much fun I had when I stayed there in 1994.

I loved the York House then, and I love it now. We ended up in cozy, quiet modern room with a view of a courtyard with a well and a hill of the city.

One of the closest buildings looked like a hippopotamus or maybe a monkey to me. Once I started seeing the face, I couldn’t “unsee” it, but that was fine. The monkey was my friend, and every morning the sun would light him up. We’d thought we might move to another town during out stay, but the room was pleasant, and moving seemed like too much trouble, so we stayed there eight nights in all.

At first I had a little trouble readjusting to Lisbon. It’s always difficult—and sometimes disappointing—to revisit the places where you had good times in the past.

And coming back to Lisbon seventeen years after the last visit—well, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson are both dead, for one thing. Initially I felt wistfully haunted by their ghosts, and I missed them. Also, in Lisbon 1994, I was high on the local hashish much of the time Even though I’ve now been clean for many years, I did feel, more than usual, the strain of living life just as it is.

Basically I had to discover Lisbon again, this time with Sylvia along, and without having Edgar ferrying me around from one happening to the next. But after a couple of days we were fully into it.

We had a wonderful time looking at Lisbon—touring Lisbon is more about just walking around than it is about seeing individual sights. Some days we’d walk up to a nearby cathedral, Basilica da Estela, which happened to be a place where you can catch a tram into town.

Working our way up the long hill, we marveled at how many of the buildings are covered with beautiful tiles, called azulejos in Portuguese. I love the tiles for many reasons. There’s a rich mathematical element to tilings, with interesting patterns to contemplate. They come in bright and exciting colors. And, washed by the rain as they are, they’re fairly shiny and clean.

The most common tilings are repeating patterns, but some artists assemble large images from sets of unique tiles—murals constructed a bit like jigsaw puzzles, only the puzzle-pieces are squares 14 cm on a side. The 17th Century monastery São Vicente de Fora was filled with Delft-blue tile murals.

It occurred to me at some point that one of my favorite artists, David Hockney, has used the assembled-grid trick in two different ways—first in creating large images as collages of Polaroid photos, and, more recently, in making mural-sized paintings out of small modular canvases arranged in a columns and rows.

I got so into the tiles that I even visited the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, the Museum of Tiles, a smallish building, a bit out of the way, but with a nice cafeteria. They had some great nineteenth century tile murals.

The first day, we hiked up the hill, eating some wonderful and unfamiliar pastries at a pasteleria, saw a wedding at the cathedral, and hopped on the 28 tram, which is by way of being (among tourists) the favorite tram in Lisbon, as it rattles up and down the hills of Lisbon like a slalom rollercoaster, and passes by some of the best-known sights.

The Lisbon trams are single cars, as in San Francisco, but more streamlined, painted a bright yellow, and a bit shorter than most tram-cars, like minisubs. In spots the tracks are set down in zigzag to slow the pace up and down hills, and on the the tighter turns, the wacky trams swoop across the tracks going in the other direction so as to make the curve.

One of the pleasures of the trams is that the windows open all the way, so that you can ride along fully immersed in the environment.

You’re part of the 3D spectacle of Lisboa street-life with hundreds of little scenes playing as you trundle by—not to mention the mini-dramas within the space of the tram itself.

When Sylvia I we were downtown, we usually wandered the zillion quaint narrow streets, drifting down into the old Alfama neighborhood.

On the hills, with the numerous arches and alleyways, the tiled walls, the staircases, the flapping laundry, and the perspectives above and below, the scenes take on the quality of Escher etchings, with the dimensions looping back on themselves and bending around corners to shake hands.

The patches of color fit together into wonderful abstract compositions.

Another notable aspect of the street scenes is the very large amount of graffiti. In addition to the dull, standardized name tags, there’s a lot of really large and Mediterranean-feeling splashes of color. There’s also some nice stencil work as well.

For that matter, even the plaster is interesting.

At one point we managed to connect with a Portuguese writer, Rui Zink, who took us along the street where he was born, in a neighborhood near the Rossio square, a bit livelier than the Alfama.

He was proud that the most famous of the Portuguese fado singers, Amalia Rodrigues, had been born in his neighborhood. Like many Portuguese authors, Rui has few books out in English—his but see his children’s book, The Boy Who Did Not Like Television.

Sometimes Sylvia and I would sit in a cafe people-watching, with great characters walking by: intense Portuguese, Euro-hipsters, Africans, old people and people with babies, everyone quite mellow and tolerant with each other.

We also got together with my old director, Edgar Pêra. One day he met us at the hotel and escorted us to the art museum down the block, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antigua—it’s the biggest art museum in Portugal.

As this was Monday, the museum was closed, but Edgar’s production company had gotten permission to film there. He took me to Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony triptych—where a film-crew of six awaited, with lights set up, ready to film me with the Bosch masterpiece in high-def video. Now that’s the kind of welcome I like at a museum!

Edgar asked me a few leading questions, and I ended up talking about the painting for about forty-five minutes. The reason we’d set up this shoot is that, a couple of years ago, I thought a lot about this particular Bosch triptych. It appears in my novel Hylozoic, where my main character Jayjay is working as an assistant to Hieronymus Bosch himself, and Bosch is in fact working on the the St. Anthony triptych. I see St. Anthony as Bosch’s transreal representation of himself. You can find some of my research notes on Bosch in my Writing Notes for Hylozoic, which is downloadable as a free PDF at my Hylozoic web page.

In conversation, both Edgar and Rui Zink were fairly critical of Spain. It’s taken considerable determination and individualization for Portugal to stay independent of Spain all these years. Speaking of the Spanish language, a Portuguese might say, for instance, “They use flat, simple, vowels, all the same. That’s why they can’t learn Portuguese.” Note that the Portuguese language has a lot of vowel sounds with a slide in the middle or at the end, also it has many sibilant sounds. It’s often remarked that spoken Portuguese sounds a little like Russian.

Sylvia and I had a number of memorable meals—maybe the best was a lunch in a hole in the wall in the Graça neighborhood above Alfama. It was all locals there, very casual, with fresh-caught fish. Near the end of our meal, a guy came by to spray the street.

A dog lay sleeping in a window, now and then glancing over at us.

[The bridge across the Teja resembles the San Francisco Golden Gate.]

We had another awesome lunch in a tiny village called Porto Brandão which we reached by riding a cheap ferry from Belem across the Teja river that marks Lisbon’s northern edge.

At this place—it’s Mare Viva, the big but not imposing restaurant facing the water—we had a lobster stew, unwisely ordering a portion for two, which included the meat four spiny lobsters. The portions in Portugal tend towards the huge.

[Dig the space-warped look of that street-lamp shadow. And the wall itself!]

As in Spain, going out to dinner in Portugal takes patience, as you can’t really go into a restaurant before 9 pm. If you break down and go at 8, you’ll either be completely alone or at the mercy of chatty American tourists. We had a lot of cod, some octopus, sole, olives with everything, and, worth mentioning again, the amazing pastries.

[The sign means “I Think But I Don’t Exist”. I think.]

The fanciest dinner we had was with Edgar Pêra and his friend Joana Amaral Dias. They drove us to a place on a hill overlook Lisbon and the Castelo de São Jorge. A big celebrity was eating at the next table, the now-retired Portuguese soccer great, Eusebio, who played for the Benfica team.

Joana is a very interesting person, beautiful and witty, a sometime member of the Portuguese parliament, and the author of a best-selling 2010 Portuguese book, Maníacos de Qualidade, (Maniacs of Quality) describing eight odd-ball characters in Portuguese history.

Sylvia were impressed to actually see Joana on TV the next day, debating the merits of the proposed 80 billion Euro bailout of the Portuguese economy by the EU. We had no way of understanding a word, but she had good presentation, speaking intensely, then ending with a smile. I hope some English-language publisher picks up her book.

One day Sylvia and I took the train to Sintra, a village about forty minutes from the city center.

We climbed the insanely long rampart wall of a 9th century Moorish castle. It was a rough trek for us oldsters, with uneven footing, but we made it to the top.

[Click to see larger image.]

And then we walked around a folly of a Romanticist castle nearby, the Palacio da Pena built on the ruins of a monastery around 1850.

Love the snaky stone vortex amid the orderly tesselation.

The place was quite hallucinatory.

Another big site we saw was the Monasterio de Jerónimos in Bélem, a few kilometers east of town. This place was built in the early 1500s when Manuel I was riding high off the money the Portuguese were bringing in from Vasco da Gama’s newly-discovered route to India. The ceiling in the chapel is just outrageous.

As were the arcades.

Some locals were putting on a funny medieval play about people trying to get into heaven, Gil Vincente’s “Auto Da Barca Do Inferno.”

And a tile mural apparently depicts a Bible scene when locals ask Joseph of Egypt why the hell he can’t start wearing pants?

We visited a lot of churches, at least a dozen, maybe twenty, starting with the pink one down the street from the York House. If nothing else, a church is always a shady spot where you can comfortably sit down.

[This dome is in the National Pantheon, not really a church.]

And then you can stare up at the great, high vault, and study the quirky religious art. It’s odd how much energy people have put into obsessively depicting the same little constellation of possibly mythical events.

One of the more striking churches was the Igreja de São Roque in Bairro Alto, one of the higher areas that surround the low Baixa downtown. It had side chapels with sculptures and haut-reliefs encrusting their walls and ceilings. Two or three of the chapels were infested with angel babies, teeming, pullulating, like meal worms in flour, like maggots in decaying flesh, like thousand-headed litters of rats. Really kind of disturbing.

And in the center of one of these chapels was a statue of—the Virgin, with a heap of angel-babies accumulating in mounds beneath the hem of her robe. Why don’t the call Mary the Mother instead of the Virgin? That would make a lot more sense. Why try and separate the basic reality of sex from reproduction? Christianity is hella strange. But, of course, all religions are. The really weird doctrines serve as hooks that make the faiths stick in your mind.

At one point we saw a funeral go by with a brass band, the horns long-winded and melancholy, in a gorgeous way. They played that funeral march that you hear in old-school cartoons: DAH-DAH-dah-DAAH-DINH-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-DAAAAH. Across the street, two old ladies in a window prayed over the cortege.

[Genuine “witch broom” spotted in the Cemetery of Pleasures.]

Another day we visited an old graveyard, the Cemitério dos Prazeres, or Cemetery of Pleasure, which struck us as depressing. When we were younger, graveyards seemed funky and fun, but we’re realizing that we’ve reached the point where we’d rather not spend any time in them at all. We’ll be there for good soon enough. This said, the place was very scenic, with rows of marble mausoleums amid cypresses, graveyard cats slicking around, and icons of winged hourglasses. “Time flies! What the f*ck am I doing in a graveyard? Outta here.”

Seeing so many babies and old people, not to mention that wedding and a couple of funerals, and all the tombs in the churches, I started thinking about the wheel of life, and how things change. Walking along I’d sometimes ask myself: Am I deliriously happy? Why not? I’m on a great vacation! But of course my legs were increasingly tired. And I had that slight, nagging desire to get high.

[Statue like a strand of DNA, with a drinker lounging at its base.]

Thinking this through having a mug of tea at a place called “pois, café” (pois means “yes”) near the Sé (cathedral) one afternoon, I remember that I can in fact be high in the now-moment. Preachy word-mongering or profound truth?

[Shadow of a tile roof on a pink wall, with the ubiquitous cobblestone sidewalk.]

I look at the chairs and tables, just so. The light on their surfaces. The azulejo tile logo on the truck outside, loving the sensory impact of the colors. Tiles on the facing wall across the narrow street. I’m high.

After all, what did getting high really do for me in the old days? It detached me from my worried, got me to see the world as shapes and colors, and put me into the now. But, aha, I can do all of that without taking anything!

I’m relieved at being seated, with every part of my body awake, sweaty, throbbing from my wanderings around town. I take off my shoes and savor the coolness of the rough, ancient stones haphazardly assembled to floor this high-ceilinged room—might have been a workshop or a stable once.

Writing helps me center, helps me be high. And isn’t it great to be without a cellphone, off the grid, beyond telephonic intervention, where whatever I’m up to is, like, “It is what it is.”

I learned that catch-phrase in 1988 from our then-new friend Faustin from Mill Valley. At first hearing, it struck me as mystically profound, like the first hearing of “All if One,” or “Be Here Now,” or “Let it come down.” It’s all about turning off the gerbil-wheel of carking, swinking care. “Put it all down, only go straight.”

The next day I was resting on a park bench with Sylvia, wearing my floppy blue wool beret against the intense southern sun, and I took of my shoes again. A woman gave me a look. Oh, oh! I was a Beat Barefoot Bum in a Beret!

Sylvia got some of our friends and family to write haikus for my 65th birthday. Here are most of them, along with some random photos from the last few weeks. Cake-cutting photo by Emilio Rojas.

I think I’m going to take most of April off from blogging and tweeting. If you get bored with waiting for new posts, maybe add some haikus of your own as comments here! Any topic is okay, they don’t have to be about me or my birthday. Happy spring!

By the way, what is a haiku exactly? Well, there’s a precise Japanese formula, but in English it’s a little vague. Generally you’re talking about a three-line poem with seventeen or so syllables, distributed in a pattern of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables. But the rules aren’t crucial, you can have plus or minus a syllable or two here or there. It’s all about the twist, the insight, the zap, the aha.

Rudy paints the sea
A giant mutant lobster
Shooting laser beams
    —Vernon Head

Hey babe let’s go out tonight
Under the full moon
It’s raining cherry blossoms
    —Sylvia Rucker

on a 4 D trip
o life is a flabber gas
wave on ye old tree
    —Georgia Rucker

Odd cephalopod
Alien contacts on Earth
Rudy knew it first
     —Penny Thomas

We miss Rudy’s bash
Many friends brave winter storm
Let them eat cake, yes!
    —R.U. Sirius and Eve

chicken chicken chick
chicken chicken chicken chick
chicken chicken hen
     —Rudy Rucker, Jr.

Live long and prosper
Another trip ‘round the sun
Spring day, snowy hair
     —Nathaniel Hellerstein

O legendary
SF dude, scroll down, log off.
Young pups scratch at door.
     —Terry Bisson

He likes to meld (a lot!)
in the Grand Garden of hot
Heliogenic Breath
    —Henny Nijland

Wielding his brush and pen
the silver-haired patriarch
portrays strange worlds.
    —Michael Beeson

The fog lifts. Morning!
Rudy gazes out away,
Twinkling at the door.
    —Hilary Gordon

A violin plays
Celebrate, dance and jig
The family circles
    —Courtney Lasseter

new piles of spam
turn to a pineapple ham
real life always sweet
    —Georgia Rucker

Photographer extraordinaire
To you
Heureux Anniversaire
    —Zan Thomas

sixty-five, a number,
nothing more:
and, to be quite clear,
nothing less
    —Frank Thomas

Floods, landslides, tsunamis reign
Water abounding
One diamond drop, hovering
    —Helen Han

Gnarly nature flows
Gnarly writer wiser grows
Rudy 65, wow!
    —Emilio Rojas

Hot damn, it’s overflowing
March waterfall
Gnarly and pseudorandom
    —Sylvia Rucker

Rudy pleasure birthday
Number of rational
No, number of real!
    —Nick Herbert

frogs croak and rumble
rudy rucker ruminating
stochastic flesh is love
    —Michael Blumlein

I’m in Mendocino with Nancy on a little vacation.
I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to your party.
(Wait, how many syllables is that?)
    —Jon Pearce