Prague as a kind of idea

I'm oddly pleased that few if any will read this.

What I want to express is on the vague edge of saying. I probably won't be able to muster appropriate words. I will sound lost and addle-brained. I'll proceed anyway.


Is it the onset of eccentricity when a permanent, unusual, and resonant space has opened inside one's head? Questionable boundaries there are spherical walls textured with invisible dreamstuff. The atmosphere inside is partly toxic, the way certain hallucinogens can be poisonous or mystical.

Music flows through this dimension, but only remembered music. Some older, some modern. It sets the mood for looking around at what is not actually there, at what are only quivering figments.

Tragedy and absence have left traces in this possible Prague.

Poetry walks slowly here, smoking blue cigarettes. It wears old hats and strange fabrics, leans against walls and shrugs in shadows. Owing to an unwritten law of transmutation, angst and desire become something else. They become poems of beauty and equipoise, brushed by wind or lamplight. They present their powerful symbols of the unapparent. Poetry here blooms naturally, as if the weather of being.

Stories also shuffle through this space, winter and summer. They pause on bridges, staring into icy or glimmering water. Some are tales of how nightmare is a stern yet tearful guardian angel watching into you. Then stories move on, bearing their forgotten burdens.

Sometimes, I meet someone there. We have quiet conversations about the water, about the deep colors of living, about the absurdity of dying.


Who can say for sure if that Prague isn't there inside the real Prague?