WEBVTT

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"Berggasse 19, I say.

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The Freud House?

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Who should ask why that?

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There's nothing
there, believe me.

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Wasn't he a coke-head?

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My son asks in all seriousness.

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And the question sails over
the heads of all but Jyoti

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who smiles and nods.

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The conspiratorial friendship
is starting to grow.

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Bergasse is very near
my labs, should we can

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take the tram there tomorrow.

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But it's not what you think.

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It's just a couple of rooms
with photos on the walls.

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Boring, Jyoti hums, as
my boy suppresses a grin.

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We're there at 11 o'clock the
next morning, my son and I,

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and Jyoti who's brought
his guitar along.

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He'll do Freud
with us, and we'll

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do the music shops with him.

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He's promised us a tour of
the lowlife dives of Vienna.

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The coffee shops where
the punkers hang out,

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the places where he'd
spent his high school years

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avoiding expectations
to be good and dutiful.

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The first cousins have gone out
for a proper Viennese lunch.

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Kaffee-schlag and Sachertorte. Nothing that has
to do with the man who once

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compared the ego, rational
and altruistic, to Europe,

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and the libido, rapacious
and murderous to Asia,

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inspires my wife to sympathy.

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A foolish little man racist
and chauvinist with bad science

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to justify it.

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It is a sunny summer day.

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Cool but bright,
sweater weather.

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Children are playing on
the sidewalk of Berggasse

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outside the corner Apotheke.

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That's the drugstore.

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Jyoti says to us, watch this.

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You think the Austrians
know anything?

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He asked the oldest boy, do
you know the Freud House?

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Did they just move in?

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Yes?

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Get that?

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He laughs, turning to us.

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My son translates it.

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You can ask anyone
in the street.

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Oh yeah, it doesn't matter.

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One group wants to forget,
the other never knew.

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We cross over the narrow street,
looking for the brass plates

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outside of the formal doors.

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Number 19 is just
a flat as it always

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was, squeezed between
other flats and offices.

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Usha was right it's
only an old doctor's

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office cluttered with photos.

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The second cousin's brows
respectfully faintly

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embarrassed by all the fuss.

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It's all Jyoti can do
not unzip his guitar case

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and start banging out something
scandalous for the Freud

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Museum.

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I don't know what
I expected to find.

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This is the room where all
of them came, I want to say.

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Princess Marie sat there and
the young Viennese Circle.

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See their pictures?

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Met here in this room.

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In this room, someone
challenged the incomprehensible.

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Maybe with bad science and
bad politics, in the name

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nevertheless of reason.

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The smallest facts of
the deepest gravity.

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Chance events were
all connected.

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Public events with a ritualized
form of private projection.

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Son, are you listening?

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Someone dared to say our
dreams had a pattern.

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Our dysfunctions, a cause.

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Our beliefs, a pathology.

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On the walls, the Holy
Roman Empire surrenders,

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and Freud stands on the dias,
Vienna's most honored, most

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famous citizen as the
Austrian Republic is declared.

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Here Freud is
welcoming the president

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of the republic and his
cabinet to the 3/4 century

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anniversary of The
Interpretation of Dreams.

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His birth cottage is
decked with bunting.

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And it chokes me
suddenly, the realization

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that science and music and
literature can be so advanced

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and do nothing to influence
a political culture

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in its infancy.

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Austrian democracy was
younger than Ghana's when

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the Nazis crushed it.

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I want to turn to my
son and remind him

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of the great despairing poems I
read to him of Yeats, of Auden.

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The vast literature
of the Holocaust

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that radiates from this
room, and thousands others

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like it in the city and echoes
off these gray sunny streets.

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The tradition however
faintly I belong to.

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Poems about the
imbalance of what

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we are capable of
feeling and thinking,

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and what we have inflicted.

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They've gone.

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They heard the music outside,
the ticket seller tells me.

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They said for you
to follow the music.

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At first I hear nothing.

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I watched the children across
the street and the old women

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slogging their way
from shop to shop,

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carrying groceries
in string bags.

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Bergasse slopes downward,
and I follow it a block,

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half-imagining a rhythm.

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A few high notes and
a beat in the air.

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Turn right twist left.

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People are in the street
now following something.

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Up ahead in a small square
of the rim of a fountain,

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I can see them.

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Clowns juggling and a
small crowd clustered.

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The performers wear top
hats and putty noses.

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Their cheeks are reddened.

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And one of the boys is
darker than all the others,

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in a borrowed top hat crouched
on one knee like Chuck Berry.

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Cutting in front of the clowns
and drummers, leading everyone

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in lyrics I can't
quite understand.

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And at the edge of the fountain
is my boy in a borrowed vest

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and putty nose,
punching a tambourine

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and doing a snake dance
on the fountains edge."

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