On Shore

To be on shore means to exist in between — between water and land, motion and rest. By staying there, you just make a temporary pause before the journey continues. You don’t belong there; you don’t stay for long. It’s a point of passage. 

When this story began, I had already been living in Vienna for two years. All the other places I lived before, I felt as if I had a string tightly knotting me to them. But here, I felt estranged from the city. My thoughts kept returning to my former life, weaving Vienna into a web of comparisons with my evanescent and therefore cherished past. 

My connection to a city has always stemmed from my connections to its people, so I went out in search of guides. I met the first stranger at Maria am Gestade, a church once standing on the high bank of one of the Danube arms. That bank no longer exists: the river was regulated and redirected. The church remains standing there, transformed, and only its name carries the memory of being close to water’s edge. I asked this stranger about their place of power, and they directed me to where I was to find the next guide. 

To speak about a place of power, about home — is to open a portal leading from the world of the Other — through it — back to yourself. A hint is enough, a single name, just something to put the listener in an oneiric situation, set them on the threshold of a day-dream, in which they shall find repose in the past*, their own past. By asking such questions, I invite this kind of mental immersion: reviving the place and all the things the dreamer associates with it. Things that I do not know about it and could never know. 

When I visit these places, I cannot find the places of power my strangers were describing. Yet through experiencing each location I relate to it, make it my own, not necessarily as a place of power as it is, but as a node linking my previous stranger, through me, to the next. 

The stories of my strangers are merely impulses that guide my search, helping me to create my own Vienna, a map of meaningful places. If you take a look at the map, you will see that the movement is linear, though I often circle back. The metaphysical journey, however, is shaped by everything that came before. Each new conversation unfolds through the echoes of the previous ones, the old ones taking on new meanings through the new. By opening windows and doors in each place of power, I can freely walk through them — transcending the boundaries of space and time.

~

* Bachelard G. The Poetics of Space / Transl. from the French by M. Jolas, with a foreword by J. R. Stilgoe. — Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. — p. 13.