by A. A. Gill
Freud could have only come up with analysis in Vienna. This is dysfunction central. In fact, I’ve always wondered what would’ve happened to mental illness if Freud had lived in Brazil and Jung in Ghana. (It is a known tonto fact that all nutters go doolally sycophantically to please their doctors. So Freudian patients have Freudian fruit-loops, and Jungians are two Jungian sandwiches short of an ego picnic.) Brazilian analysis would’ve been quite different to Austrian. Vienna is the Greenwich Mean Time of bats in the barn. To start with, the city looks like a very elaborate, very disturbed dream. You walk through streets of buildings encrusted and barnacled with obsessive frotting decorations and it makes you wonder who planned them and whoever said, yes, that’s exactly what we’re looking for, with a lot of flying angels and eagles with crowns fighting the fish people over the front door. And I like the 20-foot naked elves holding up the stable.
Vienna is a plaster-and-marble porn show of violent nudity. They’re everywhere; look up and there’s always a straining buttock looking back at you. This all obviously started off as being a bit of neoclassical decorative fun and municipal showing-off but soon it became a vast art-therapy class of collective neuroses. Vienna is one big dream therapy session. You look at the pulsating, perky and penetrative porticos and then you look at the Viennese walking underneath them and you realise that they’re thought bubbles of unconscious desire, the mumbling of the Austrian id. What you’d never guess by just looking at them – conservative, straight-laced and buttoned-up to the neck, hatted and polite and quite polished. And nutty as a chipmunk’s breakfast.
The result of the surreal culmination of this righteous probity with the marble profligacy is to make everything seem like a Freudian slip. Waiters arrive and leer, ‘Would you like cream on that?’ and you feel yourself blushing, and every single waiter says it. ‘Do you want cream on that?’ About everything. Cream and whipped cream are the optional extras to all of Austrian gastronomy, and, one suspects, quite a lot of other Austrian life as well. Every culture has its endemic condiment: chilli, ketchup, mayonnaise, vinegar, mustard; Austrians like their cream. After a bit you realise there are few things that aren’t improved by a fatty, frothy Freudian squirt.
I predict that Vienna is set to become this year’s fashionable European city. We’ve had a couple of decades of discovering the great baroque and Baltic cities from divided Europe and now Riga and Prague, Budapest and Tallinn have been swamped by stag parties and boy racers rallying Porches across the autobahn of socialism for charity, and it’s time to look again at the unfashionable Old World Europe, and you can’t get much more unfashionable and Old World than Vienna. It doesn’t even make an effort to get with it. Occasional excrescences of Euromunicipal public-space sculpture look even more absurdly temporary and graffiti-like in Vienna than they do in other places.
The conservative nature of the city is a lot of its charm. People here aren’t friendly, they’re polite, and once you get used to the idea that the waiter isn’t going to ask you how you are and tell you his nickname and mention how great you’re looking or compliment you on your choice of water, but just say good morning and ask what you’d like, it’s actually a blessed relief. You walk through the opulent shopping streets and look at the goods crammed into them and you realise that this is a city from a time before life’s long diet and guilty consumption. Before fur was a moral issue rather than one of insulation. Where it was decided that tradition will always trump innovation.
This may lead to a sort of entrenched, institutionalised collective conservatism, but after years and years of chasing the new and the latest thing, and after the everchanging menu of experience and entertainment, it’s nice to be relieved of the relentless urban chores of the contemporary. More than a relief, it feels somehow adult. Vienna is undoubtedly a grown-up city, and has been for a few hundred years. Their neuroses and dirty little obsessions come from before the First World War. Vienna may be mad, but it’s old mad. It’s been spared the whole 20th-century me-me-me New-Age fashion therapy and the self-absorption of the modern age. Here men and women aren’t from Venus or Mars, they’re from Innsbruck and a very good family in the Tyrol.
And it makes you realise how much of travel is an excuse to not behave your age, to slip the leash of responsibility and commitment. Abroad gives us permission to drink, behave, letch and, worst of all, dress like our teenage selves. It’s about being childish, and Vienna isn’t like that. Restaurants don’t have a dress code – they don’t need one because Vienna has a dress code. You dress your age, and appropriately to dine with other grown-ups. And only when you’re wearing a jacket and tie can you get an infantile whipped-cream moustache.
Snail’s pace
There is something undeniably appealing in the idea of slowness – as long as you don’t actually need to be anywhere.
On November the 11th last year, I found myself in an airport. They had the two-minute silence at the 11th hour. We stood, most of us, beside our suitcases, heads bowed. It was the most uncomfortable two minutes I’ve ever had in an airport. Airports are designed and imbued with a sense of lateness, of rushing. The whole ethos of an airport is the hurry and scamper of infuriation and clock-watching. It is dozens of time-zones pressed, one on top of the other, in an unforgiving and relentless box.
The Slow Food movement begat the Slow City movement. It is now something of a force for change in Europe. It’ll be a slow change. There is something immensely attractive about slowness. Something that becomes languorously. We think of those lunches that turn into tea and then cocktails. Of flipping the sign on the shop door and taking an hour on the couch. Everything you think of with slowness comes with an accompaniment of sybaritism. Slow soup, slow-ripened peaches, slow kisses. Strolling and sauntering and occasionally lolling. A handwritten note, a hand-picked posy of flowers. Setting the table properly with the right knives and forks and enough glasses and everyone sitting down to eat and chat. Reading books with a hat on. (You, not the book.)
And then if you ever actually do get to spend some time, any time at all, in a slow city, you see what it’s really like. Try Istanbul or Bombay or Rio or the thousand other fractious, jammed, infuriated, smoking, honking, frustrated places. Try driving through rural Madagascar for six hours in second gear because there’s not a road that could accommodate third. If you want to know the dystopian side of slow, ask yourself, would you want a slower internet or a slower shower?
The Slow Food and Slow City movements are attractive in a pre-Einstein way. You’ll remember the old German with the fast hair pointed out that time is relative, and what is relative for you is the time between pushing the button for the lift and then pushing it again because you imagine the lift has a shorter attention span than you do and may have forgotten that you’re here waiting. The relativity of time of you ordering a beer and the waitress bringing it is also, for the waitress, the time between you ordering the beer and then asking her again if she’s forgotten the beer when she’s been on her feet for four hours, there are three other tables waiting for their bills and you look like the sort of bloke who thinks a tip is a place you put your rubbish. A quickie means quite different things to different people. A quick drink is never quick, nor is it ever singular.
The Slow Food and Slow City movements speak to a terrible yearning of urban folk, people who feel the timing of their lives has been taken out of their control, who are being forced to run faster and faster by the collective aspiration and fear of others. The relative time isn’t the gap between their pushing the lift button and then pushing it again; it is the gap between their buttons being pushed and then pushed again. Cities push all our buttons like Turkish taxi drivers push their horns. Ideally we would like to move at a leisurely pace through a town where everyone else is sprinting. Which is essentially what you do when you go on holiday: you meander around somebody else’s day from hell.
There is an inescapable feeling that the collective button-pushing time is speeding up our lives. That we live mo
re like fruit-flies than our fathers and that they lived shorter times than our great-grandfathers. The horse was replaced by the car, then the plane, then the internet, so the music of time has gone from a waltz to a jive, to a body-popping breakbeat. There is an uncomfortable feeling that every new invention that cuts time’s corner to make time slip more sympathetically in fact forces us to run ever faster. The convenience is only ever an assistance to some previous machine, so that live music gives way to wind-up gramophones and then the wireless and CDs and iTunes. Each one benefits the technology, not the violinist, nor indeed the audience.
This is an old man’s gripe, the feeling that I’m becoming Schrödinger’s cat. You will all remember that Schrödinger’s cat is trapped in a box with a particle of decaying atomic matter, and it may be both dead and alive simultaneously, and it’ll only become one or the other when the box is opened. I don’t understand it either. But I know that we often feel like cats in a box, both running and stationary, fixtures of a mad German-scientist thought-experiment. Schrödinger also invented a new word to go with his morbid-vital moggy: verschränkung. I think it means messed-up, confused and complicated. I don’t know. But it sounds like the way I sometimes feel.
I travel because when you move at a different pace from your own environment you can be very speedy in slow towns and you can put your feet up in hectic ones. You dance to an internal beat that is not yet synchronised to the place you’re in. One of the greatest pleasures is to eat fast food at your leisure. To queue up with the clock-watching locals as they shuffle for their slice of pizza, or click their fingers for their tortilla. To sip a second cup of coffee in the early morning commuter-rush to offices, eating other people’s time. It’s like picking the minutes out of their pockets.
And, cantankerously, I always keep my watch on the time of the place I’ve just come from. It denies the imperative of the local, remains aloof and above the herd. It doesn’t need to speed. It’s like Schrödinger’s watch – one time caught in a locked canister in another time, both alive, both ticking away, together but separate.
Here in England, sales of oranges have plummeted. It’s not that people don’t like oranges – they drink gallons of orange juice – it’s just that they can’t find the time to peel one any more. Or rather, the thought of the time it would take to peel an orange seems excessive or extravagant. So they will forgo the pleasure of a well-peeled orange. I remember my grandfather used to peel one every Sunday after his nap. He carried a small silver knife for the purpose. It was as much craftsman’s pride as anything. It was a prophetic Slow movement and he did it not so much for the orange, but because he’d been in the trenches, spent four years without fresh fruit. He took the time to peel it and give a perfect segment to his grandson as an act of atonement and remembrance for the blokes who never would.
Ancient isle
Where in the world could you literally be anywhere on earth? Mad, mad Madagascar of course.
‘Where are we?’ asked Tom the photographer. It’s somewhere with an unpronounceable name. Obviously not unpronounceable for the inhabitants of wherever we are, just us visitors. ‘No,’ he said, ‘what country are we in?’ We arrived together. You had the tickets. There’s a stamp in your passport. You know which country we’re in. ‘No,’ he said again, forcibly, ‘what I mean is, if you didn’t know what country we were in, where would you think we were, and would you think that perhaps we might be where we are?’ Right, let’s have a look.
Where we precisely are is in a small restaurant eating meat and rice and chilli sauce. The room’s cheap. It has votive pictures of Christ and his mum, and fairy lights. It’s unmistakably Catholic. There are other people here. They look a bit Latin American, a touch southern Indian, a little bit northern African. There’s a woman with an elaborate ’50s hairdo and a man wearing a woman’s Sunday church hat without irony or, as far as I can tell, insanity. There’s another man in a suit with a pork-pie hat. Outside, the street looks sort of French, colonial, perhaps a bit West Indian. Run-down poor two-storey shophouses, but polite and nice. The road’s more holes than road. And there are human rickshaws. There are very few places in the world that still have human rickshaws, and there’s a big old Asian cow with a hump being reluctantly dragged by the nose by a small boy who is definitely African. It’s hot. And it’s a conundrum.
We could be in Central America. Brazil, the Bahamas, the French bits of the Caribbean. Beyond the town, the landscape looks like central Asia in part, and Bali in another part. This is the most unexpected, mixed-up place I can remember. ‘It’s mad,’ said Tom, ‘really mad.’ And indeed that’s exactly where we were: Madagascar.
This place, or these places, confirms a theory I’ve been incubating about the shape of the world. Countries that’ve been surrounded by sea grow up different from everywhere else. Nations whose borders are random lines in the sand or the snow or run along rivers or roads may not like their neighbours, but they grow to be like them. It’s a homogeneity that grows from propinquity, whether you like it or not. You only have to hang out in the Middle East for a couple of days to be surprised by how similar all the furiously denouncing and competing groups are, how similar their demands, how similar their fury, how it all seems like a series of echoes. European countries merge, one into the other, till at the edges they all become Monaco, or Switzerland or Holland or Belgium or Luxembourg. But the islands – the UK, Ireland, Corsica – are all still distinctively, for better or worse, their own places. It’s a geographical version of the old human quandary: are we formed by nature or nurture? Are countries made by culture or geography? Islands prove, I think, that geography makes people what they are.
The most socially distinctive places I’ve ever visited are, in order, Cuba, Iceland, Haiti, Tasmania and Madagascar. Island people become vital and exotic. They make up stories about themselves and have obsessive fantasies and shared superstitions because over time those shared tics and eccentricities become communally held character traits. All people from small islands dance funny. When in Cuba, it’s funny, but brilliant and original, spectacularly erotic and deeply enviable, but it’s still odd. Cubans dance all the time. In the queue for the chemist, sitting down, in their sleep. Icelanders also dance weirdly, with strange Nordic exuberance, like men with imaginary salmon down their pants. As soon as we landed in Madagascar, I said to Tom, we’ve gotta find some dancers, they’re going to be terpsichorean gold. And they were. A sort of synchronised flashing, with cramp, to music that is the African version of the Macarena, played on guitars made out of fruit boxes.
People haven’t been in Madagascar all that long. Still new here – still learning the ropes. A mere 1300 years. The oldest island on earth with the youngest human inhabitants. Actually, Iceland’s younger, by about 500 years. The original refugees here didn’t come as you might expect from Africa just over the way, but from right across the Indian Ocean from Indonesia. Later, people did come from across the strait from Mozambique to make a singularly attractive half-Asian, half-African people who rise above the sum of their parts and, thanks to a brief spell of French colonialism and some English Methodist missionaries, are split between Catholicism and Protestantism, which is really only the wrapping that hides their old ghostly beliefs in extreme ancestor worship.
They’ve nurtured an extreme dysfunctional hybrid that transcends its heredity and its history. They have become the children of an astonishing geography with 10 distinct climates and habitats and more indigenous green things than anywhere else on earth. The Malagasy have gone about transforming their island, planting the rice they must’ve carried carefully in their outrigger canoes from Indonesia and herding the humpbacked cows that may have come from southern India or Africa. If you’re a conservationist or a New-World earthful ecologist, then the arrival of humans in Madagascar has been an unmitigated disaster. They have for a thousand-odd years rigorously burnt away the forest, made extinct several species of lemur and the largest bird ever to stand on this land, the mythical
roc.
But ecologists and environmentalists always think that about people. They never look at humans as anything other than the problem to be blamed and fettered and laden with collective historical guilt. They’ve never looked at our beauty and ingenuity and the vivacity of people and what they build and grow and the lives they spin. Malagasy are as fascinating and as memorable as any of the weird species on this island. The burnt landscape that was created for the cattle and the rice is just as astonishing and memorable as the forest. The unlikely combination of Asia and Africa in this land is miraculous and wholly unexpected.
Australia and Madagascar have a very particular thing in common. It’s the baobab. There are said to be nine species of that remarkable hollow tree that the bushmen of the Kalahari say was planted upside-down by an angry devil. Seven of them exist only here in Madagascar. One lives in Africa and one in Australia. A keepsake, a souvenir from a time when all three were part of the überdaddy continent Gondwana.
Quickly, without looking, what’s the capital of Madagascar? If you knew it was Antananarivo, buy yourself a beer. Now say it to the person sitting next to you. If you managed without stuttering, giggling, repeating, spitting and arriving at no fewer and no more than six syllables, buy everyone in the office a beer. It is the most impossible language. It sounds like Swahili spoken with an African accent and it loves syllables almost as much as it loves As. They insert extra As wherever they can. It’s a language that could only arise on an island. It’s not meant to be spoken by outsiders. John Donne made the oft-repeated clichéd observation that no man is an island. It’s a truth about men, but it’s also an implied truth about islands, that they stand apart. That they’re not like other lumps of land. That the things that happen on them only happen on them. Visit Madagascar – while stocks last.
