We wake up and it isn't raining. A good sign. My turn sleeping on the floor means that I'm unfortunately the first one up, mulling about with a slight stiffness in my back and in my neck. From out on the tiny, fourth-story balcony above the cafe, there's finally a strong sun smiling down on Idaplatz, and things are, for the most part, dry. Stiffness? Nothing a cup of tea can't tweak out of me. But first, a run to the little boys room. It's a sitting down kind of day, the kind that follows those long days on your feet with a pack on your back, or on the train for hours on end, or, you know, the rage nights. Today's a post-rage morning. A thing that leaves your head throbbing and your neck stiff. Your joints stiffs. My eyes are still strobing, and I rest my elbows on my knees just so my hands can hold my head's awful weight. The bathroom's like the Dutch one, except there's almost a manner of elegance to it. Nothing to extravagant to be sure, but more like the designers at Ikea had gotten their hands on boat bathroom model. It's clean and simple and just whiter, I guess, than the ones we'd privy-ed at in Holland. Even those sleek, sailed clippers out on Zurich's lake, it seems, are all cut diamonds of the raw, canal-weathered boats of Amsterdam. We're in a nation that hinges on alpine beauty in almost every aspect. Through the streets of Zurich and around the lake, one has the feeling that ancient architects of the city, those great boat designers, all were in a competition with Mother Nature herself, to match the delightful tranquility that she had laid before them, to make something worthy of the backdrop behind.
But a bathroom's attractiveness only does so much to sway the needle-filled mind of drunken traveler, and as my mind strains to focus past the acute harangue of morning's light, it's the curiosities of our host, Sara, that catch my eye. A handful of books sit spine-up in a little box by the foot of the Lou, and I reach in with inquiring interest. It does not disappoint. By the cover, I gather it's a book of photographs, though rather elementary in their subject matter. Simple objects, a bike, a baby-carriage, and others on some vaguely familiar background. The title's all in Swiss-German so it takes a turn of the page before my mind starts to tickle with intrigue. They are simple subjects, sure enough, although the technique is anything but. Many (perhaps most) times the magic of a work of art is in the medium, the means to the end. And as I turned the pages, the gears of thought churned, stiff as they were, to wrap my mind around each piece and its process, and for moments on end the body ache and head-pain would fall away to the far backseat of consciousness as these artists - for that's what they were - schemed and cut and positioned portraits in a photo-booth of just about everything too big to fit. To a Ron Burgundy, it was no doubt mind-bottling. And I think that's art, isn't it? The purpose anyway. To take our mind out of reality's torture for a moment, for a second even, and in that tiny span throw it in a bottle with a cork on top and huck it seaward at a long arc, so that your lost with it and nothing else.
