The Blank Page

"When looking to the Void, remember, the Void stares back"
Friedrich Nietzsche

Or so has been attributed to him. I haven't found anything attributing that to him. I think it's a yogi-ism, a quote that's been repeated so many times that it's either lost it's original quote or has been attributed to someone who's never said it on record.

"Mehr Licht!" Were Goethe's last words. I know this not from any book about him, or in any class I've taken. I know this from the time I was looking at a bust of him in Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. At the time it was known as Czechoslovakia. My father and I and my first wife had went into the newly freed Republic after Frank Zappa inspired Vaclav Havel's Velvet Revolution. Thanks to them, when my father came back to Europe after a forty year hiatus, we were visiting a city that was known by Goethe as Carlsbad.

In German, the "bad" means bath, and usually a city with the word in it, had some kind of natural spring, usually it was attributed with some kind of therapeutic properties attributed to them. Most of these towns existed before the Romans showed up and civilised the place. My favorite town with a Wine Festival was Bad Durkheim

Here is where it is in Germany


Partly because of the name, but also thanks to the Pagan nature of the festival itself has lived on after all this time with such little change.

It's definitely, a tribute to Bacchus or Dionysus, take your pick, the god who looks like Jim Morrison and had stories of death and rebirth before there was a Christ.The name doesn't really matter, because it's the festival that's trancsendant. At this festival the wine flows, golden and seet and crisp and dry and the meat-on-a-stick is deliscious, and the champignons or mushrooms and schnecken (snails) are devine in their sustenance.

In the halls, the liter glasses are constantly being refilled, and the people are jovial. Throughout the streets of the town, among the pedestrians, people toting squirt guns and plastic bopper hammers would tag others likewise armed. The Rules of Engagement were unwritten and seemingly unspoken, yet followed by everyone, even the American Servicemen.

Ah, those were the days. Germany had just reunited, and I would get free drinks seemingly everywhere. In conversation, I would be asked why I was in Germany, and why my German was so passable I would tell them simply that my father was in the Army from '49 to 51 and while here he learned German. He taught it to me when I grew up, and I always wanted to come to Germany, so I am now in the Air Force.

I'd invariably get a beer or wine and a toast to my dad. I don't know if I ever thanked him for all the free drinks I'd gotten thanks to him.

If there is an afterlife, I know there's a German version of it with a Bad Durkheim, and a Munchen.