The Prison Of Facts, a short nonfiction piece published in Palooka magazine

 This essay can be found in my collection, How The Quiet Breathes https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quiet-Breathes-John-Michael-Flynn/dp/0999461796

 

The Prison of Facts

 

 

 

 

During pre-Euro, EU, and let’s-build-a-wall days that some of us still remember fondly, Japanese tourists were flocking to Germany, outnumbered only by Americans. After mingling among them in bus-tour groups as they shot with SLRs and Instamatics various snaps of the Cologne cathedral, I’d had enough. I wasn’t the raw, original soul-seeker I’d fancied myself to be, so I chose to remedy this by following the Rhine by train to Koblenz. I selected this destination because I liked the sound of the city’s name. I was young, fit, energetic, and convinced serendipity, not planning, was one’s best ally when it came to travel.

Journal at the ready, I marveled at mist shrouding an occasional castle set into hills above the Rhine. It was dark and raining when my train arrived to Koblenz. Unsure I wanted to stay there, I dawdled in a phone booth awhile to keep dry. After returning to the train station to study a posted schedule, I chose an express to Munich where I spent hours sipping bottles of Spatengold in a billiard hall, musing over the movies I’d direct, the women I’d meet, the money I’d make, and whether it had been a mistake to fly solo to Europe with a meagre budget and spare knowledge of any language other than English. As a nineteen-year-old, I hadn’t yet realized I was a cliché—didn’t know what I wanted from life and believed I’d find it through meandering outside of myself on another continent. However, I did feel keenly aware it was a luxury to spend time abroad, using my own hard-earned savings to process doubts and fulfill hungers. Most of my friends back home, if not in college or the military, were stuck in low-paying, unattractive jobs.

Regardless of my many oh-so-urgent concerns regarding my value to the world, the night passed, as it tends to do. It was cold—mid-December—I wanted to save Deutschmarks, so I slept on newspapers I laid under a tree in one of Munich’s parks. I curled into a ball, kept my head inside my sleeping bag, and breathed into my fists. Shivering, I fought a hunger that gnawed. I rose now and then to relieve myself and to walk off the ache in my kidneys. 

 After enduring such a night, I figured there was nothing I couldn’t handle. I spent another two days wandering Munich, sleeping in the same park, grateful it didn’t snow. I visited museums where I stayed warm and dry and napped on various benches while taking lessons in composition from the massive mural paintings of Reubens. 

I’d learned little about Bavaria or Germany. Was there

a difference? I was to blame. I hadn’t acquainted

myself with any Germans. Hadn’t spoken to anyone,

making extra sure to avoid Americans, easily spotted,

who, like me, frequented sites tourists were expected

to visit. 

Feet wet, nose runny, resenting the growing suspicion that I was my own worst enemy, I described in my journal my reactions to the works of European painters, many of whom I was discovering for the first time. I listed names, dates, countries of origin, titles of masterworks, and unique qualities I thought justified reputations. From Hals to Durer, I vowed to continue learning about them once I returned to the States. I couldn’t paint, but I could use a camera and light to capture what a human face might express. This understanding, be it the depth in a glance, the angle of a tilted forehead, or the secret in a smile, defined an essential and lasting human element. Coupled with an elevated sense of craft, it lifted any image above the norm into what I found myself venerating as the magical realm of art. 

I also found myself jotting down memories from childhood and high school days. This frustrated me because I thought I should only be using my journal to explain city streets, architecture, and art I’d witnessed. I should have stayed home if I wanted to write about where I’d been.

Dreary worries about my future compounded my loneliness. I stared, anguished, at my reflection in a train station window. What would all this sojourning lead to? It didn’t seem right to travel for the sake of staying in motion. My journey had to amount to something. Yet a part of me took pride in the way I rolled along, fancied myself a gypsy, brushed off the fact that so many, back in America, had mortgaged their lives to car loans, picket fences, and delusions of security. None of those conventional banalities for this champion of the road. 

To prove it, I boarded an all-nighter to Vienna, sharing a compartment with two florid women whose double chins reminded me of the cheery faces I’d seen in many German paintings. Animated, a gleam in their eyes, they spoke with hand gestures and big grins. They were from Austria and insisted I eat with them. From a travel bag, they spread a towel over our shared seat, delighting in my appetite. I feasted on hard rolls, salami, sharp cheeses, little cakes, sugary cookies, and chocolate-covered cherries. Showing a maternal pride, they watched me drink glass after glass of a semisweet white wine until I became woozy. My face flushed, my belly full, I had to hold the ache in my ribs as I laughed with them, astounded by how much I’d eaten. 

Eventually, I dozed off. I didn’t see them wrap their leftovers in cloth napkins and store them in a canvas bag. When ready to sleep, they roused me, and together we pulled out seat bottoms that met at their front edges to turn the compartment into a small bedroom. We three slept side by side, each curled under a blanket. The train arrived at eight a.m.

I welcomed the bite in Vienna’s morning air and the

crystals that frosted tree limbs in parks, dripped off

the windows of trolley cars, and slid in rising sunshine

down steep cathedral roofs. I sauntered without aim,

grateful to the women, wishing I’d written down their

names and had been able to thank them in their 

language. They’d stayed on the train. I regretted the

stiffness I’d shown when saying goodbye. Guarded,

liking my reticence too much, at the very least I

should have taken their picture. 

I leaned my head back and let light snowfall tickle my tongue. Recalling The Third Man, a favorite movie, I imagined myself Harry Lime, reputedly dead, but not really, existing anonymously. Nobody in the world knew my whereabouts. 

As it fell against my lips, I reveled in the lustrous brilliancy of fresh snow. I watched it gather to transform a statue of Strauss holding a violin. It swept windows and rooftops into the kind of incandescent winter dreamscape I’d imagined when a child. I rode trolley cars, not knowing my destination. I loved how they squealed and sent off sparks. One time, a driver had to stop to use a long pole to relink a steel connector that had run off its overhead rail. 

I spent a few days following suggestions in my guidebook, eating in wine cellars where the servers spoke English. I spent blissful and maudlin hours craning my neck skyward in cathedrals or absorbing in awe the paintings of Bruegel and Bosch. The genius of those two painters astounded me. I had a newfound passion. No matter my future, art would play a role. 

I wrote in my journal: 

Before film, the pictorial universe was rendered

sublimely by hand on canvas and wood. I should view

the classic paintings of the world to develop an

informed sense of line, color, and composition. All

that is modern should be judged with skepticism. The

modern shocks, untested by time, and is too often a

tight-lipped celebration of minimalism and reduction.

Am I pretentious for thinking this? I don’t think so.

The worst fakes are those practitioners who sprint to

the church of Modernism without pausing to be

humbled by all that’s come before them. 

 

Snow fell each day, at times fluffy and shot through with sun. At other times leaden, it brought a gloom that darkened my mood to match the slate of a low sky. Unwashed, tired, I abandoned my budget in favor of more wine, hot sausages, and bread, feasting until drowsy and then walking off my stupor through slush in the early twilight along one of Vienna’s many sidewalks. I didn’t know the name of any streets or boulevards or parks. I craved each moment without the prison of facts. If I spent my life studying art, only one fact was needed, and it stated that everyone’s future remained a mystery, so why bother with plans and preparations.

Trolley cars whined past. I didn’t know where they were bound for or which neighborhood I was in. I thought of Joseph Cotton again, the actor who played Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s brilliant film. Every celebrated film director found malleable actors to work with many times. Welles had done so with Cotton. Griffiths with Gish. Scorsese with De Niro.

To save money, instead of taking a room, I paid for a key to a locker for my backpack, an encumbrance which made little sense in the city. I slept on a dry bench where it was safe as long as policemen didn’t find me. I woke each day before morning rush hour, my back sore, to watch ashen light seep through the station’s high cathedral windows. I loosened up as I poked about and got out of the station before commuters arrived, all the while shaking off night stiffness in my joints. As Harry Lime must have discovered, I learned that Vienna hosted plenty of ghosts. They longed for companionship, and I was happy to oblige them, but what I really needed was someone to talk to and touch. That’s when I remembered Janet. She’d said I reminded her of a character in a Michener novel called The Drifters that was popular at that time. I’d never read that book or author, though it seemed everyone else had. Janet was classy, educated, a little older than me, already had her bachelor’s. She’d studied Europe’s history, architecture, and art. She’d found me amusing, too, called me a creative spirit. We’d hit it off over beers in Amsterdam. I’d told her I questioned everything and liked to imagine the way life should be, but because of that even my mother scolded me for living in Dreamland. 

Wasn’t Janet out of my league? She was, and

hooking up with her meant surrendering to facts.

Okay, I’d do it, I was too lonely. I read my guidebook,

learning a little about Switzerland and the destination

she’d mentioned, Grindelwald, a ski resort near a trio

of alpine peaks: the Eiger, Wetterhorn, and the

Schreckhorn, which stood highest of the three at

roughly 13,000 feet. I’d always been too poor and

clumsy to ski, but if Janet was there, as she’d said, I

was convinced she’d welcome me. We’d eat fondue

and later make love. I was scripting the romantic

movie we would soon star in. After all, she’d tendered

an invitation. 

A variety of trains would take me first to Interlaken. Once there, I could board a local that ran high into the Alps, stopping only at Grindelwald. This local departed once in the morning and in the evening.

When I arrived at Interlaken, dusk had settled, and

snow angled eerily out of the gloom. Alone on a

platform, having learned it was the last stop, I began

to fear the scheduled local to Grindelwald wouldn’t

come. I halted a man in a parka who was crossing the

platform and asked him. He spoke French. Using lively

gestures, he explained that snowfall had prompted the

train’s early departure. He thrust an arm forward to

emphasize deep into the mountains. He paused for a

moment. His eyes blossomed. He said he’d give me a

ride to the train’s next scheduled stop. We’d beat the

train there and he’d drop me off.

Elated by such generosity, I did my best to express my gratitude in fourth-grade French. I hopped into his little pickup and off we bumped along a narrow road. I didn’t say a word. Nor did he ask questions. Silent goodwill brewed between us. I tried to see out my window through falling snow. He drove, determined, as if he knew God smiled down on him for such a deed. 

We pulled up to a platform shaped like a pagoda. We waited until we saw the approaching beacon of the train’s nose, a pencil-shaped lance filled with luminous snow. It reminded me of the lens light spiking the darkness in the projection-room scene of Citizen Kane. 

The man exclaimed in French, “Hurry, hurry.” 

I stumbled along with my backpack, thanking him as I bounded into the train. Again, I’d forgotten to get a name. When would I learn to value the lives of these kind strangers, rather than just obsess over my emotions upon meeting them? I hoped that the generous Frenchman would understand, but I didn’t like regretting my consistent lack of selflessness.

On board, panting, I dropped to a wooden bench not unlike one I’d slept on in Vienna. The train felt chilly and appeared empty of passengers. Still, I had to smile. All forces of benevolence were working in my favor. My visit to Janet was meant to be. I sat back and closed my eyes as the train began to roll. The vent below my seat provided more noise than warmth, but this beat another night in a station. Doubts, however, began to grow. Since Janet didn’t know I was coming, there was a chance she wouldn’t be there. Nope. I shouldn’t think about the calculated risk I was taking. Better to dream big while gazing out a window at the majestic Alps. 

Dusk had turned to night. I couldn’t see a thing. Frost had begun to cover the black glass of each window. Not one passenger. How strange. I wondered why. I dozed a while, surprised no conductor had asked me to purchase a ticket. When I awoke, I felt chilled to the bone, my fingers and toes numb. My throat felt scratchy as I breathed air that had become thinner, damper, more frigid. The train car creaked and chortled so slowly that I assumed the tracks were covered in places with increasingly dense, drifting snow.

The wagon I rode in reminded me of an old subway car. Air drafts whistled through gaps and seams. Now and then, high swirling winds sounded soft explosions that shook the wagon. At times, the climb got so steep that my back felt pinned to my cold, hard seat. Increasingly leaner air pressure began to needle my eardrums. No shared body heat or conversation distracted me. I rolled my shoulders and blew into my fists. What had I gotten myself into? I had to act. I couldn’t sit still. I took off my boots, dried my feet, and changed my socks. I scribbled oddball phrases in my journal until my fingers grew stiff and I fell asleep, the journal spilling to the floor.

 When I awoke, shivering, my nose and ears felt burnt with cold. I searched between seats until I found my journal. Pages were wet, the ink of my scribbles blurred. Little piles of snow had formed on seats where some windows, though closed, hadn’t sealed completely. This local wagon wasn’t a showpiece in tourist-oriented Switzerland, but I shouldn’t dwell on that. What I needed were gloves, a scarf, long underwear—none of which were in my backpack. 

Had to move, get the blood flowing. Maybe I’d find someone in the next wagon. It was a short train, only two wagons and the locomotive. I hurried to the door leading to the second wagon, but I couldn’t open it. Through the yellowish light of a square window I saw the second wagon was also empty. I remained the only passenger, and it was still snowing. Winds gusted higher, more frequently, the air sharper. This wasn’t just heavy snowfall. It was a blizzard in the Swiss Alps. What would I do when, and if, I arrived? The train creaked, struggling along as if sounding my despair. Snow continued slashing the windows. I paced the wagon and dropped into different seats, feeling dread, despondent, asking myself what on earth I had done.