May 29 24
This morning I woke at 4 to beautiful birdsong in the very impressive room were staying in. I tried to capture both to mixed success.
This was the light through the trees onto our vaulted ceiling. The more impressive aspect was the manner in which the cast shadows moved:
I’m not sure. It was 4 in the morning but I found it quite breathtaking at the time.
This is the call I heard- which according to my brief cross reference of youtube videos of birdcalls of the Buda forests might be some Hawfinches?
Anna’s house is quite beautiful- its a set of three apartments with a multigenerational residency of her extended family. I was told it was an architecture project by her mother funded by money hidden1 from the nazi regime through the time on the soviets and then ultimately distributed after his death.
The house itself is in Buda, which is the part of Budapest to the west of the Danube (it seems a bit ridiculous and Dr Seuss-y that this is the naming convention of the city). We went down towards the Danube in a street car because we wanted to utilize the Sulphuric baths, which are a common as well as age worn activity for the residents of Budapest.
Before entering the Gellért Sauna we found ourselves in front of this church embedded into a cave next door. The cave-church was originally created by a hermit out of the same sulphuric muddy springs (the sáros fürdő) which feed the sauna baths. I know about this because I remember reading about it when I was researching Hungary. I learned nothing in the strange cave museum. The main thing I remember is that the entire thing was made of concrete, presumably a reconstruction of its original visage, but less likely to collapse on the numerous visitors.
A part of me continues to feel dispossessed of the world when I see that we can no longer look at it in the way the hermit did. Going into the saunas I had no belief that there was a particularly non-symbolic medical value to the mineral water. I enjoyed the sensual aspects of it (I love a sauna), but I couldn’t even suspend my disbelief enough to buy Anna’s insistence that it cured her acne in past visits. The hermit took the water to have healing properties such that he used it to dispense mercy from God to the sick, and created the cave complex to worship this grace.
The cave chapel went through several phases, and modern entrances were built around the time that an Art Deco behemoth hotel (which we walked through to get to the spa) was erected next door. At some point an ersatz cavern concrete construction replaced the natural rock walls. The audio guide features an incredibly odd coldplay song played off a repurposed nokia phone.
The media aspect of the museum was particularly fascinating. Up above the entrance room a lonely television served instructional videos to visitors.
In contrast to the dislocation I felt at the cavern and the spa in its own way, I’ve felt the beautiful intensity ascribed to the Danube in many works of fiction, and in particular in The Blue Danube by Strauss, which I’ve been listening to while here quite a bit, along with Bartok and Ligeti. I don’t know what it is about Hungarians but they’re musical output has been quite good. It’s quite late and I need to fly tomorrow. I feel saddened by the end of this European tour but I have a bit of homesickness. Maybe not to my home precisely, but to the sense that I’m working towards personal aggrandizement.
This I learned from the conversation yesterday which was part of why I was feeling insecure about the dullness of my family background. This feeling returned later in the day when Genevieve was describing at length her impressive grandfather, who was a naval war hero in WWII, for example. I also had a similar deep moment of shame because Anna asked me about having college debt, which I don’t have. I offered that my grandfather had invented the machine that makes the odor in natural gas, and she pressed on to ask if my parents were otherwise wealthy, which I had to answer in the affirmative. I felt for a long time after that she saw me correctly as a failure out of the rich wasp class, and that my accomplishments, of which there are already none to speak of, could never count for anything due to my total lack of consequences.