Kitsch & other excerpts from "Anecdotes from the Western Bubble", by Thoreau Lovell

I think the Celts selected this spot for a burial mound because of the constant wind—to push the ship of bones past the boundary of the Living Lands. I think they thought the long, unruly grass would keep the flies and crickets away and that no future person would discover the portal of golden riches that lay beneath my feet. I don’t think the Celts ever imagined I would walk up 30 wooden steps and sit on a bench bolted to a slab of stone at the very top of this hill, any more than they imagined Roman legions marching across the plains and destroying their civilization, if “destroying” is the right word.

I don’t speak Celt or Latin or ancient Alamanish, or even modern German, I can’t see into the past through the lens of those languages. I am simply enjoying sitting alone on this hilltop bench gazing over endless fields of subsidized corn at another hill that lurches up from the valley—that hill with a dark and majestic disposition, even on a sunny day like this. Then I remember my sister-in-law telling me the Nazis built something on that hill, although she didn’t say what it was. Were the Romans just as bad as the Nazis? Hard to say. I’m an innocent who can’t parse evil.

There’s a restaurant in Hochdorf, the closest village to the Celtic burial mound, where I’ve eaten a few times for birthdays and other special occasions. What makes the restaurant special is the museum-like array of objects and artwork that line the walls. Everything seemingly dull pewter gray or dim, washed-out blue or a slightly foul-looking brown with a hint of dried ocher—dead country animals, like the somber long-eared hare, the cute German porcupine, the mighty stag with cathedral-like antlers, hanging next to dozens of worn wood and metal farm implements which I can’t begin to name or to imagine the intended uses of, hanging next to paintings of valleys, of forests, of maids and old women and old men and children and dogs and fish, and my mind balks at trying to remember any more details beyond the magnetic attraction I felt when I first stepped inside the restaurant and the uncomfortable feeling when I left that nothing masks cruelty better than kitsch.

My mother-in-law lives a short walk away. She was ten-years-old when the war ended. She is a working-class woman who worked her way into a good life. But she gets on my nerves with her insecurities and the way she traps my wife in a vortex of never doing enough. I like to get out of the house, to walk her old German shepherd through the corn fields, with a book in my backpack. This afternoon it’s too windy to read, and I’m confused about what’s old and what’s young. I want to say the wind and the sun, the clouds and the intensely blue sky, are old—not the burial mound, or the gold man with a wooden wagon found inside the hill. But looking down at the nearest farm, where Polish laborers tend sugar beets, corn, and potatoes, I think I’m about to change my mind.