Traumplatz and the never ending joy of pigeons in top hats

The first time I came to Slovenia, I was a very different person than I am now. I was in my early twenties and traveling one summer, having my first taste of how large clusters of the world close in July and August. Growing up in New York meant (means) having a vague idea that people take time off but never actually experiencing it, because even on those long, hazy summer day,s we have to go into offices or kitchens or even schools for our shifts.

Slovenia was and is perfectly scaled to human size. The rolling hills of the countryside were framed and maybe even enveloped by jagged, imposing mountain ranges, little brothers being watched over by protective older sisters. Tidy houses dotted the landscape; their sloped, auburn tiled roofs seemed to wave at each other across the divides of azure rivers. It was beautifully uniform without ever feeling repetitive, as if both man and nature had decided that there was nothing wrong with things being just right.

When that halcyon summer ended I went back to school, where I was increasingly convinced that my destiny was to remain in academia and become the kind of person that people paid to think. I liked thinking and found that I wasn't half bad at it, and couldn't see much point in doing anything else. As years went on I took fewer holidays and dove further into the specific topics that allow academics to be employed for a very long time. And that's where I met Mike, in the niche corner.

Mike and I met in a cafe in Montreal where I was studying political theory and he was working on physics. It was my first Master's Degree and his second Bachelor's. The best part about our meeting is that we didn't introduce ourselves to each other for the first few hours that we sat talking, and we didn't really care about knowing each other's names. Because we were friends from the very first moment.

We boxed together at our local gym and then became roommates when my marriage ended, and when I sat down on the floor and cried he sat with me. When I failed my comprehensive exam in the PhD program I'd entered, Mike was the only one who knew what to say (he said, "ah, well, what does Plato know?). When I celebrated ten years off drugs, Mike and I cooked together in our kitchen and set up a giant plastic table in the apartment he had made alive again. When he went to Australia and I went to Algeria, we met again in Paris and laughed at stupid things on the banks of the Canal St. Martin. And when he called me some years later to tell me his mom had died, I sat down on the floor and cried in the tiny restaurant in the middle of Italy where I was hiding. And I told him to come sit with me. And he did.

During that time, we didn't talk about his loss or my failure because Mike and I have always loved each other simply by being present. Neither one of us ever has the right thing to say, and we don't ask. We say dumb things and make each other laugh, and that is how it works for us and it works very well. We annoy each other like siblings, and we bicker at times like an old married couple, and we debate together like colleagues, and then we laugh together like idiots. Because we are family.

So we didn't talk about those things and instead talked about a conference his PhD advisor had been holding in Washington DC called New Directions in the Foundations of Physics, one day while we sat together in a 12th-century Cistercian Abbey where Mark and I were working. Wouldn't it be great if we could do it here, he said? And of course we said, yeah sure we can do it. Because it was Mike, and there was no question. So we figured it out and made something from nothing, and then suddenly we had fifty of the most brilliant minds specialized in the most incomprehensible thing, all gathered in that same Abbey for a dinner.  No one died (though a few passports were lost), and we decided to do it again.

Jeff Bub, the founder of the conference and Mike's advisor came to stay at our house that first year, sitting in our little garden in medieval Tuscania with us and also never once talking about what he did. We were friends from the very moment. Jeff's most magical trait is the barely perceptible pause he makes right before he starts laughing uproariously, a perfectly unexpected dramatic pause that allows you to wonder whether it's all gone wrong. And then when it hasn't, the laughter is that much better. It never fails.

We'd invite participants to our house before, after, or during the conference and we'd all sit in that garden together talking about nothing in particular. One of those years, a man named Sandu Popescu tried to explain quantum physics to us using the metaphor of pigeons wearing hats, which makes just as much sense to me now as it didn't make then. But there was a moment that I really felt like I could almost touch it, that it almost made sense, and then it evaporated when Jeff started laughing. And then Mike started laughing. And then it didn't matter anymore that I'd never understand it. Because those laughs.

The New Directions Conference became a feature in our lives but as the world paused in 2020 and 2021, so too did that yearly reunion. In that same time I had begun to come to terms with my own failures, the academic path I hadn't chosen and the choices I'd made instead. I'd begun to write for Lonely Planet after being found by Dan, a fine person who saw something in me that I had long ceased to see in myself. My first book was about Umbria and Sardinia, and then he asked me if I was interested in doing others. "Ever been to Slovenia?"

I don't speak German but I have long aspired to, mostly because I love the way that words can compound and conjoin, becoming entirely new concepts. One of my favorite words is traumplatz, the dream place. Dream in the real sense, the detachment from reality or at least, the bent perspective that comes from spending a little bit of time in the place between asleep and awake. I like that it might not be perfect, I like that it might change, and I like that it might not be a place at all. Slovenia became a bit of a traumplatz for me during those months: it was one of the most difficult periods I’d been through in years, where I was unexpectedly reckoning with things that I had buried for decades. Those things might come to me like waking nightmares in the middle of an Alpine lodge, or when I felt the urge to disappear on the banks of the Drava River. I loved having a purpose but questioned how I could possibly deserve it, and that too made me feel suspended between states of being. 

But then, on the very last stop after four months of touring Slovenia, I came to a valley in the middle of nowhere. At least, the middle of my nowhere. There was a hotel and a waterfall and a woman who spoke to me about physics and the nature of reality and how the universe works and all of a sudden I realized that what I needed, what I had needed all along, was right there. I needed a reason to call Mike. And there it was. 

“I know where we should have the New Directions Conference.” 

“Ok.” Traumplatz. 

We called Jeff and he came with his wife Robin to the Hotel Plesnik, this little magical place in the middle of a magical place. We rode on the Solčava Panoramic Road and stopped at a little farm known for its goat milk ice cream, and there Jeff tried to explain to us the nature of quantum physics using different flavors of goat milk ice cream. And it makes just as much sense to me as it didn’t make then, and I couldn’t even touch it. But I was mesmerized by the brilliance that one person could hold in their head. Jeff didn’t laugh, and neither did we. I looked at Mike, but he knew. He knew it all those years before because he’s always known it. You never think about how smart someone truly can be until you see it shine from them, until you see them shimmer. 

So we called Aleksandra, my contact at the tourism board who has become a dear friend and asked her to join this tiny team of people who make this conference happen and thankfully she said yes, because there aren’t enough pigeons in the world to replace her (especially when they all get lost in the space time continuum. Or do they? I haven’t got a clue). 

And so it was that once again, Mike saved me a little bit, the same way he always has. Without knowing it, without meaning it. Because I still do not know how to reconcile the failures I have had, and I am not yet convinced that any of my successes quite compensate for it. But I know that every year, sixty of the biggest brains I’ve ever known get together in magical places to talk about things I’ll never understand, and now they do it in a country that I have grown to love like a long lost family member. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? The world will save us, if we give it the chance. 

Today is Mike’s birthday and we’re spending it together with friends on Lake Bohinj, where Sartre once sought refuge and where Agatha Christie once said was “too beautiful for murder”. He’s gone horseback riding and I found a place on the lake to stop for a while.  I think later we’ll sit somewhere and laugh, and we will not have to talk about anything in particular. The first time I came to Slovenia, I was a very different person than I am now. But some things, the good things, have joined me for the ride.