The first day in Berlin I found myself in a dim-lit cafeteria reading a book, when someone approached me. It was a girl I had accidentally locked eyes with a couple of hours ago, across the room, during no more but no less than a couple of seconds.
She was somewhat an stereotypical alternative scene berlinese girl: not from berlin, with futuristic short dark retro hair, heavily decorated with minimal ornaments, androgynously feminine, and full of other contradictions. She unapologetically sat next to me, and asked me what was I doing there. "At last." I thought. I had all this imaginary answers to this imaginary question planned in my head, perhaps because the real answer was that there was no real answer, and I was beginning to fear I would never use them.
"You mean like, in Berlin, or in general?"
"Both."
"Just visiting."
I guess she found the manufactured natural answer quite amusing, because she smiled and slightly turned her head to the side in a way that could only be interpreted as thinking "who is this guy?". We continued talking. And then, we talked some more.
For whatever reason I can't fully understand, she unanimously decided she would be my guide during the following days of whatever I was going to get into. And I, I would be his new toy to play with. I put no resistance whatsoever: on cue, I let go.
What followed was a blend of days and nights exploring the labyrinthine world of underground Berlin holding the hand of a complete stranger, everything I though was important about myself slowly being either forgotten or gracefully lost in translation. The nights were filled by the lights of hidden clubs on basements and the slow evenings captained by abandoned churches stained glass and monumental history (jungian urban jungles) and my belongings resting peacefully on a hostel I paid but never went to, sleeping instead on artists flats and ground level mattresses full of people I could barely talk to but fully understood were chained to their wings. Mohammedian angels painting the streets with colors, exhaling their freedoms as pure cigarette smoke; Asian dragons fire-breathing tattoos into the monuments; effigies of motionless worlds now in permanent movement who connive children into a laughter that sounds obscene when juxtaposed to the bizarre machinery of the night.
I emerged, alive. Not even recognizing myself. But the world clock was counting alexandrines that, from the heartbeat of a humming-bird, slowed down to complete silence. We knew the ending would happen, that my regression (like Algernon's) into my old, usual self, was inevitable. But even knowing it, or perhaps because of it, she didn't leave my side.
And one day, without notice, I felt tired. My head was clouded from too much sky.
She understood, as we can only understand each other, and I took the next flight home. We didn't exchange numbers. Didn't take photos. Don't even know her full name. But every time I look at a map and see this city, I will remember her ―and that's the only oath we imposed to each other. As I come back to my home not fully having changed but aware that the whole world is not now as it was: between the dazing carnival of yet unnamed design drugs and lost sensations, in an small moment between the future and the past (any of them!) remember me.
That I existed, that I was here.
Now, of course. None of that ever happened.
Because that sort of stuff doesn't happen to people like you and me. And by "people like you and me" I mean young white men not-so-young-anymore with an unfortunate talent for introspection, and somewhat emotionally detached from the social realities of real life (and a tendency to daydream).
Well, one part is true: I was in Berlin with no clear idea why.
I went to Brussels for a couple of days to visit a friend of mine, which sounds plausible, but to those who know me and my general aversion to travel (not for the traveling part of it, anyway) will know that's already an anomaly. But I do these things, these planned improvisations, from time to time, to try to shake myself from painful complacency. The thing is, once there I remembered I had nothing to do, and nowhere to go; and because I had already made it this far out of my little room shaped universe, I decided to go a little further. I spent a couple of days in the Ruhr valley, trying to get myself in the appropriate mindset of being on my own, and not in the over-welcomed visit to the European capital that felt as being held my hand instead that the actual survivalist experience travelling is like. Not because of the conditions. I get used to unsanitary habitats, lack of resources and hostile environments rather quickly. To me, the dangers of travel are more closely linked to the psychological aspects of being utterly and unapologetically aimless and alone without the usual distractions that I use to cope with it and know too well than any particular discomfort or danger. My hope was, that without those guardrails, I would drive myself into a point of explosion in which apotheothic hopelessness transforms into either a sort of heroic nihilistic euphoric liberation or a permanent dark age. More on that later. For now, having to choose a destination, a fictitious goal to justify my means, Berlin sounded as a sufficiently poetic and logical end.
So there I was, in a big city I didn't speak the language for. My feet destroyed, my legs trembling. At night, without having slept the night before (I can't sleep in buses) rambling the streets. Resisting the urge to go back to the hostel with empty hands. It was Saturday, but eerily silent. I went to a couple of places I found interesting in google maps, popular nightclubs and concert venues with history you can read articles about. But there was nothing there. One of them was now some sort of swinger party for forty and fifty years old, the other held a random concert where nobody was waiting outside but a bored security guard. Where the hell are all the weird kids?
Here's another made-up reason I invented to explain why I am here: I want to find people like me.
Which is a pipe dream of mine, of course. Because who the hell am I anyway. I went to another club, where I could smell the tribalism a mile away. There was no way they would me enter in their world. I made up another scenario in my mind: I would go there, they would stop me, ask me why they would let me in and I would shrug and say "I don't care about anything anymore." and they would open the velvet curtain as if I had said the secret password or the magic words. But these are not the people that get it. It's a costume. A performance. Isn't mine too? If I really didn't care, I would just go in. Or jump from a window. Or give all my money to the first homeless person that crosses my path. Or spend the night with a prostitute. The nightlife here is vibrant, if you know where to look. But I can stop having the feeling that it's somewhat empty; sustained only by it's own mythos. People come to Berlin looking for that story (like me) playing out roles in its ongoing theater of liberation even when the true stakes have faded. The essence the clubs try to preserve with their staunching elitism and closed door policy is already gone.
Long story short, I kept walking.
I was determined to rip out from the jaws of existence a night I could remember. I only needed this city to give me something. Anything. Not because I wanted to have fun. Not because of the stupid drugs. Not because of the stupid people. But because me, myself, I'm fading. I desperately needed a proof that I ever existed, that I was there, that there's still something to do and somewhere to go, that the past and the present haven't been totally lost in this sea of permeable uncertainty.
The night before, I was sitting alone on the park floor in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
I can't think of a place in the modern world with more symbolic mythical power. It's image has always meant something to me, although I don't know what, or why. I had been walking (lots of walking in this essay) from the bus station in the middle of the night with all my stuff freezing cold through a street that crosses a fucking national park in which every kilometer looks the exact same as the last one in order to get to this exact place just before sunrise to try to induce myself a near-religious experience and because the idea sounded cool and because I can't read distances very well.
And there I was, and there it was.
And I remember thinking: "I feel like I've been here before."
And I started to scrutinize my memories. Was it possible I have already been in Berlin and I just don't remember? Maybe in highschool? I couldn't find such a file in my memory, but neither a definitive negative answer. The worst part, the scary part, is that that's actually a possibility. There's a world in which I have been here and I don't remember. That I already had the ominous sensation of historic gravitas of this place I was expecting to feel now, forgot about it, and grew immune to it's effects. A few days later, in a holocaust memorial, I saw a picture of the gate during the Third Reich; with the torches, and the iconography. I felt a profound sense of dislocation. When I was there, considering how heavy it looks, felt rather weightless. It was just a place, after all. That's the curse of everything, really. When you strip it down and watch it naked, stuff tends to be just stuff and people just people. Banality overcomes the cultural void as much as the waves of stupid tourists, street performers and the kebab bistros their ruins are surrounded by.
The "liquidity", the lack of clear unambiguous symbolism of the place didn't help at all. What did this place meant, to people from here? It's a monument to glory or an humiliation? Have they abandoned any significance to the tourists, tried to empty this places of relevance by turning them into museums?
Back to the present, I started to wander around. Following lights, sounds and incomprehensible street signs. And eventually I found a very small place with mediocre but beautiful live music coming from the inside. An somewhat strange bar with somewhat strange people that had lots of useless dusty decoration and a river that flowed from the ceiling through the counter and into the depths of a floor rack. I traveled thousands of kilometers to end up in a place that's just like the places I don't longer go in my home town. But well, it was better than nothing.
For as long as I have been here (and I have been here for a long time) the city has changed.
It changed in the early nineties, after the fall of the wall (obviously). It's wasn't all about the families being reunited or the end of the cold war or all that stuff that happened in the moment it came down. It was more about the all-acompassing sensation that everything was possible. We catched up to the freedoms of modernity that had happened in the world after the second world war in a quite compressed amount of time.
I was twenty. I remember very fondly those times.
Then the city changed again, about a decade later. This was the era of television, pop culture, globalization, the future was here. All the techno clubs and underground scenes started to emerge inside the abandoned buildings. People from abroad started to arrive.
Now, it's changing again, but it's not like the other times. I see franchise chains everywhere, big billboards of emblematic brands and products, people from all over the world living in the street. Most of the artists I knew have left or are old, like me. The whole world is changing again, but there's no... reaction.
I was talking with one of the musicians in the outside of the small bar. It was the first proper conversation I had since I got here in Germany about a week ago, and the first conversation at all with someone that was not from the outside. The brief and impromptu summary of dozens of years of world history by that random slightly drunk teutonic guy catapulted my mind into a youtube video I had seen while half asleep about a month ago.
"What are you doing after the orgy?" I asked my imaginary berliner girlfriend, with a whisper.
What the musician talked about was a chronology of liberation. All those past changes were the result of a population subverting or liberating themselves from something. Now, there was nothing to liberate. There was nothing to do after the orgy, but recreate the orgy. Discover or invent new forms of suppression and performatively liberate ourselves from it, in an unending cycle of cathartic simulation fueled and channeled by buying useless stuff. Political liberation, sexual liberation, collective liberation, self liberation. Liberation of the arts, liberation of the woman, liberation of the man, liberation of the children. Liberation of information, liberation of production. Liberation from the senses, liberation from the mind. Liberation from life, liberation from death. Cybernetic liberation. We buy ourselves time, comfort, identity. Freedom, from fear. Security, from uncertainty. Woman's liberation, children's liberation.
But what to do after that?
Most people trying to liberate themselves are smart insanely overeducated students trying to play the part of outcasts and fleeing from overprotective parents and contemporary nothingness, while the true outcasts from society are just picking bottles from their attempts at casual recreation. I guess subversion is not so fun when the only thing to break free from is misery and hunger.
I woke up the next morning, really struggling, stretching my head, trying to figure out where I really was.
On the one hand, it was obvious where I was. The buildings, google maps, the beautiful parks, the language, the clubs, the big signs: all said the same thing and really put an effort into making it very clear. On the other hand, this place was just another big western multicultural city, and the things (big and small) that separate one from another are sometimes only visible to me because I have lived in one before; but water is water everywhere, no matter what this formless substance invented by David Foster Wallace is exactly made of. At the end of the day, I'm drinking Arabian coffee, getting groceries at a German supermarket, browsing phone made in China, speaking in English and thinking about Spanish women. Not so different from what I would be doing back home. Maybe that's the problem, that no matter what happens during the day; doing this or doing that going there and going nowhere, I would always come back to the dark room and light of a screen. And that's not a problem only with travel: it's something that's happening through the whole spectrum of experience. This could be in Australia or in Canada or back home for all I know, if someone bothered to put a lot of Turkish people there too. Sometimes I have fun imagining how an archaeologist a thousand years in the future would be rather confused by the ruins of our cities, and instead of being able to draw a map of nation states as we know them today, he would find the remnants of an Starbucks and just write "Modern Western Civilization" in a piece of paper, in a similar way we do when we talk about Greece or The Roman Empire.
We find ourselves in the peculiar circumstance to be living in the future.
To those who asked upon my return if I liked Berlin or not, I said (almost euphemistically) that it's a city of contrasts. Nothing illustrates it better than a great photo I never took of an small blonde girl walking alone with a pink halloween dress dragging her school bag next to a giant and obscene street painting and about a hundred cars. The pathologically acceptance and openness with the hermetic causeways of social circles. The fact that it has been repeatedly reconstructed from it's ruins. The permanent construction of an monumental myths that aims to look much older than the actual age of one of the young nation-states on Earth, with the traumatic experience and memory of the not-so-recent past.
Is Berlin Berlin? Is Germany Germany? Is anything anything? I am me, me.
About me:
My name is Charlie Gordon. Well, not really, but that's of no importance. I am a former (or failed) sailor, physics student, writer, professional videogames player, child chess prodigy, drug dealer, pick-up artist, barrel-rider, photographer, and many other things. But all that also lacks any importance. I came here prepared not only with mental answers to what was doing in this place, but also for the one about who I was, and having to summarize it into a single phrase or a couple of words (like when you have to do in collage where met random people all the time). I have met some people here, made friends also, but "who we were" simply never came up.
That's the "liquidity of the self" in modernity, pushed to the extreme when you travel around.
You're no-one. Not in the sense that you are nothing, but in the sense that you are no-one in particular. You could be anyone. You are anyone. That's the point of it. Lacking the usual context in which what we perceive as a natural self expresses itself in very particular ways, we find ourselves in a position of initial defenseless that we can overcome adopting unusual shapes that can be revealed as surprisingly fitting and would never be adopted without resistance in our original containers ―or how Vera put more simply: "I am a ballerina in Thailand".
The resulting psychological state is both deeply dehumanizing and powerfully liberating, stabilizing in one of those positions at time and painfully transitioning to the other every once in a while. I know because I've lived it. Lots of people crave it, and that's why they love traveling so much. And also because of the realness of the questing needed to get simple things done, which is only enjoyable as long as you don't overthink about how manufactured and unnecessary it is.
I wasn't just traveling to see places. I was traveling to experience the spiritual-psychological journey of fucking off. For that reason and not any other I grabbed my shit a week earlier into a tiny backpack and well, fuck off. That's how I plan my life, not scheduling visits to stupid museums or booking flights (which explains why I always end up sleeping in weird places) but instead I decide where I go and what I do according to vague unwritten narrative rules I try to follow "the spirit" of. In order to do that I was trying to recreate and speedrun the whole process of living abroad, not simply doing tourism. The experience needed a certain pause, a certain programmed looseness to it, and to do so I needed more time that what I would possibly spend walking all over historical landmarks. I needed to spend a whole day in my room. I needed to develop a routine going to get breakfast at the same exact supermarket (and then break it). I needed to miss home, I needed to overshare drunkenly, I needed to met someone and also forget him afterwards. I needed to go to clubs and more importantly, not go to clubs. See where the absolute boredom and lack contextual referents and even lack of a tangible past got me to. And at last, have some time to think what the hell was I going to do with the rest of my life.
But I couldn't do it.
Walking around, I was absent. Through the hell of uncertainty I could not sense any clarity. Much less an opposite reaction upon touching the surface of complete nothingness we instinctively have. There were no hero plays. I discovered myself not really thinking much at all, besides on trivial unimportant things like what to eat or where to order the next coffee. Mostly, I was just reacting. The only stuff I could sense in my stream of conscious and my eyes could see were strangely fragmented. People's faces. Past memories. Empty streets. Children crying.
During the apocalyptic depths of a couple of days I found myself again trapped into a cycle.
Remembering too much, thinking too little, talking with people from my past.
Making and breaking promises to myself. Again.
Dreaming.
The last day in Berlin I was at the airport (I hope you don't mind my recollection of this journey is as fragmented as it felt living it) and I was looking at people. Preceding this journey and trying to justify the expense to myself, I had given me these days to figure out what to do when I would come back. The first thing I did was give me a couple more weeks and go to Berlin just to stall that decision. The second thing I did was realize I was just going to torture myself for the duration of my stay so I dropped the question instantly. How big my surprise was, when I was waiting about eight hours during the night in the empty liminal terminal number two alone in complete silence that I still expected an answer.
I have been home for a couple of days and I still don't have one.
The problem is that a non-answer is an answer in itself. The "just continue doing what you're doing until you consume itself into nothingness uroboros style" type of answer. I don't know. I think I found a middle ground, or yet another stalling tactic, in writing all this stuff and going day by day instead of taking imperial decisions about "the rest of my life" as if some heroic pursuit were the only alternative to becoming a ghostly figure. I don't know. We enter the terrain of non-choice, what feels like lingering forever in the slopes of mount doom. I feel like if I haven't done so (break out) I won't in the future. And I don't just think it as that could be just a prosaic self-fulfilling prophecy: I feel it. I feel it in my bones. I am bone-tired, brain-tired, soul-tired. Luckily, my legs still work mostly fine.
Another thing I wanted to do here, and no small one in importance, was to do photography. Not take photos, do photography (or maybe the other way around). I wanted to do a bit of everything, but specially of people. Berlin has a richness of people that made me myself instantly disinterested in looking at almost anything else.
But there was a problem. A problem I have trained for and tried to solve with half-empty success.
You have to make photos of people that do not ask for it.
I mean, you could ask for it. But you lose the moment. You could hide, but usually that's a bad idea. Just genuine, candid street photographs that try to capture a corner of the world. Nevermind the technical problems that gives you, just go there, point the camera at someone you thing is interesting for whatever reason and walk away. Do it for the art, do it for the later you that will treasure them forever, it's not even a picture of the person, it's a picture about the concept of the person. If they get mad, you just don't care. They will forget about it in a couple of seconds. You just smile at them and say "beautiful, thank you very much" and you will make their day.
Couldn't do it.
I don't know why.
I have all the possible intellectual, artistic, rational reasons to be able to do it. I just can't break that resistance. Making it once or twice doesn't break the ice. I used to be able to do this stuff. Not this in particular, but yes the whole "breaking the resistance" thing. These years of emotional and intellectual monasticism have really changed me for the worse. I used to be better, and it didn't even have anything to do with being dumber. I used to have the strength. I am conscious of it, an that's the worst part.
I felt deeply humiliated.
And I did photos regardless, using various tricks to avoid the whole confrontation part of it. Doing so I've archived some results and some very needed dexterical training. But that wasn't the point. Every interesting situation, beautiful scene, decadent scenario, funny hat, couple smiling were not things to enjoy but painful reminders and guilt inducing instants because I was unable to capture them. It's not the same "missing a photo" because permanent photographic hypervigilance is impossible to archive, than "can't do it". And surely but slowly, the whole thing was getting into me. I was sliding into a profound state of inwardness well camouflaged by a mascarade of contemplation.
About Berlin:
―This is so fucking beautiful.
Paul couldn't stop repeating, and sniffing after each sentence, as all the other hostel guys constantly did; probably because they were at the aftermath of another cocaine-binge night at some club and their sinuses were fighting for their lives.
―Man, you've been in Berlin for a week. How come you haven't seen this place before?
―I don't know. I've been busy.
The scene was quite funny. To me, at least. We were four hostel guys, now visiting the right side of the giant park behind the gate in a clouded Sunday morning. They looked like stripped right out of a club, wearing a mixture of strange stuff and sports clothing, playing tourist, trying too hard to enjoy the scenery and "reconnect with nature". They did not melt well with the local population, acting somewhat normal and engaging in conversation that felt surreal even when talking about the mundane. There was this DJ from Miami, a moody homesick Italian I connected rather quickly with when we discovered we could understand each other in our native languages, a huge guy with brown skin that had a recent spiritual awakening and loved meditation and anime and cocaine, and then there was me. To whom being in groups of misfits always felt oddly natural.
Conversation was fragmented and mostly nonsensical, but quite brilliant. It operated in the form of sketches, as everyone was fighting something in their head, being regret, withdraw, inner monologue, or internalized anger. We met up at the hostel by chance earlier that morning (like every morning) and this time decided to go for a walk.
―You don't need to pay the ticket for the U-Bhan, just get in.
―Why are you paying it, then?
―I don't know. I saw that guy paying and now I feel like I have to. But you don't have to.
―Yeah, trust us. We haven't been paying all week.
―You realize this doesn't give me a lot of confidence, do you.
But it was fine, and after ten days of walking everywhere all day I realized there was no barriers at the exits of the underground metro system, and I could get around everywhere for free. The train was rather empty, and I started talking about music with the DJ, about playing guitar, about artificial intelligence, about how to eat properly, and I don't remember what else. By the end of the ride, we were in a wagon-wide conversation that included some other tourists, a German young gal and his grandmother. In introverted Berlin, that was nothing short of a miracle; and it all started because someone liked the old ladies shoes.
It's rather curious, how people have hidden talents or interests they seem to not quite remember at all time. It's like, you hang out with this guy, do nothing all day ever, his life is a mess, and three days into the conversation he suddenly remembers he spent ten years in a conservatory and can play the piano at a professional level or something like that. The kind of superpowers that despite what cool social interaction might suggest, are not developed through a single evening or a couple of spare days of productivity but instead require constant hard work and deep competence. You met them at this state, in this circumstances and moment of their life, and never imagine they could be capable of something like that. And yet they are. They have just been a "little lost" lately.
I'm not that different.
―Oh look at that tree, man. It's fucking beautiful. This is just what I needed (sniff).
And then I took a photo of him and the tree, with the Italian guy shaking it violently so autumn leaves would be dramatically falling upon the scene while he very naturally looked into the distance.
If ever hold at gunpoint, I will admit that, yes. Berlin is beautiful and you should totally visit. But I don't do so without a silent warning sign. It's not only the big obvious things, or the scattered parks all over the city that sometimes look like some kind of impromptu Rivendel, but more about the unexpected nooks you find all over the place. It's a city that, if you try to look at focused too much on the whole, you'll miss entirely. I found an ancient bookstore full of fantasy and science fiction books with hidden rooms and an "evil books" section. A bar filled with candles and esoteric propaganda that looked like a satanic dungeon with incantations written on the walls. A transvestite ballerina was recording tik-toks upon a giant and immense soviet memorial of war. A dadaist sweatshop, a nightclub that doubled as a DVD archive, the most beautiful random interior yards you can imagine, whole alternative villages. Sometimes it was even surreal, as when I found a fox crossing a street. Overall, it has this schizophrenic quality, not of madness or delirium, but of permeability; you know how paranoids are always obsessed with something crossing boundaries, about threshold not being quite there, about things entering their skin or thoughts entering their brain from distant satellites. The wall felt the same: a painted portion of it just planted there (well, reconstructed, not even in it's original site) effectively dividing nothing.
It's none of this parts what makes Berlin what it is, but it's juxtaposition. Like onions, it comes in layers.
I went to a memorial. There was a great architectural park made of huge nameless blocks of concrete of various heights arranged in perfect files and columns. Underground, there was a permanent exposition. It was free to enter, like most museums and memorials about anything related to nazism, but I had to pass a security check. Inside, I started reading. And eventually, I got tired of it. The information was interesting (although nothing I didn't knew from before) but the sheer accumulation of misery and disaster, and the claustrophobic aura of the place was getting into me. I could hear murmurs and standardized voices coming from the audio-description gadgets you could buy at the entrance echoing in the walls. There was a room, and then another, and then another, about more and more murdered people. When I reached my breaking point and I no longer felt obligated to continue looking, I found the exit and emerged into the middle of the concrete block labyrinth. There was this silence. I started walking, slowly. The sun projected hard shadows perfectly aligned into the floor. From time to time, you would cross another person out of nothing, and your slightly bewildered eyes would instinctively look at each others for a fraction of a second, and then they would lower their gaze, and both of you would continue their path across the tombs.
10/10
But then again,
―The homeless problem is a bit out of hand, don't you think?
―I mean, I don't need ten different people trying to sell me heroin every time I leave the hostel.
―Yes, two or three is fine. But ten kind of feels a little too much.
―At least they're really polite about it.
―That's true. Very polite.
Roland, a refugee from Ukraine I gave a cigarette to in Alexander Platz once, was not so conciliating.
―There's too many damn people from abroad. Everything's dirty. Germans act and talk nice but they hate us, and want nothing to do with any of us.
The irony of the outsiders being anti-immigration and the local people being traumatized by their history into a radical position of total acceptance was not lost to me. Lots of anti-fascists stickers everywhere, and common people too afraid to have any opinion that could be considered bad, obsessed with being the good guys, and that it's eating them alive. I noticed a lot of school and highschool children in cold war and second world war museums. I never considered how it makes them feel. Do they see that and be like "that's crazy what this people did" or are they like "this is us"? The museums themselves seem to want to ask this question, and suggest and insist a line more like "this could be us", ignoring the genz humorous connotation of the phrase. They put an extraordinary amount of effort on those places. I don't question it, I think it's important, but I can't seem to exactly pinpoint the exact reason why. Are they trying to atone? Are they trying to remember? Do they feel an obligation to do so? Do they want to apply for their reinsertion into the human race? It seems the more lost Germany becomes, the more they find an anchor in remembering the terrible past, however terrible it is. It gives them a point of reference, even if it's one to run from, or redeem for. All these empty giant building, reduced to museums. I expected to find history there, a busy building with lots of people doing important things and a plaque or maybe an small room at the entrance remembering that the same place has been in a century the home of the Wiemar Republic, the Nazi Reich, the Soviet Occupation and now federal Germany. And there was history, too much history. But it wasn't live history, it was dead history. Governance has moved into more austere bureaucratic places, but despite this change in presentation power operates quite the same. About before all that, it's as if nothing ever happened. As if Berlin emerged at the wake of the twenties. As if this power came from nowhere. The very well cared for historic building, magnificent building, seemed to suggest a much older history, but I suspected that an intentional design choice, as if this place had been manufacturing his past from his foundation. I am not talking about the holocaust, obviously. I am talking about a much deeper sensation. The manufacture of permanence, the worker painting with black coat a seemingly roman pillar, pristine white rock, to make it look authentic and old. I saw paintings supporting Palestine, I saw paintings supporting killing Palestine, there were security guards twenty four hours in front of synagogues, and barbed wire around construction sites. I started to stop avoiding passing close by people living on the streets, prostitutes talking to me, and ignoring junkies asking for whatever or just talking very loud. I stopped avoiding eye contact. It's not that I got used to it, it's that, I just decided to stop. I felt closer to them that I did to the people entering clothing stores, or the local people that ignored me thinking I couldn't notice being ignored. Living in Berlin one gets used to a certain form of constant abuse from the city. Not to the body, but to the soul. It's not that it does so in purpose, but it feels like deep down it doesn't care much about it, you know? A girl I was talking about one day (a real one this time, I promise) called it "the capital of loneliness", and if I don't know if I agree with that assessment, the fact that such words were uttered feels very relevant to me.
This city, man.
It desperately longs for a sense of permanence, more than for any particular part of the past itself.
Something that would tell me where I was and who I was. A narrative that would draw dotted lines in the sand to be followed even if fading; to that end every past was desirable, the most memorable, the most rich (even when unequivocally terrible) for every story of redemption needs a clear and unbroken succession of events to call "it's own past". To be free from the fear of every again having agency about his own destiny instead of going nowhere, constantly unbecoming.
If in my earlier works about my life as a collage student, I anthropomorphized Barcelona as my secret lover, Berlin was very obviously myself.
No wonder I was so angry at it.
As I lie here waiting, the moment passes during which I am myself in myself, and again I lose all feeling of body or sensation. Charlie is drawing me down into myself. I stare inward in the center of my unseeing eye at the red spot that transforms itself into a multipetaled flower ―the shimmering, swirling, luminescent flower that lies deep in the core of my unconscious.I am shrinking. Not in the sense of the atoms of my body becoming closer and more dense, but a fusion-as the atoms of my-self merge into microcosm. There will be great heat and unbearable light ―the hell within hell― but I don't look at the light, only at the flower, unmultiplying, undividing itself back from the many toward one. And for an instant the shimmering flower turns into the golden disk twirling on a string, and then to the bubble of swirling rainbows, and finally I am back in the cave where everything is quiet and dark and I swim the wet labyrinth searching for one to receive me... embrace me... absorb me... into itself.
That I may begin.In the core I see the light again, an opening in the darkest of caves, now tiny and far away-through the wrong end of a telescope-brilliant, blinding, shimmering, and once again the multipetaled flower (swirling lotus-that floats near the entrance of the unconscious). At the entrance of that cave I will find the answer, if I dare go back and plunge through it into the grotto of light beyond.Not yet!I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been. And as I start through the opening, I feel the pressure around me, propelling me in violent wavelike motions toward the mouth of the cave.
I finished the book at four in the morning, in the dark of my bunk-bed, sharing room with half a dozen grown-up strangers. Haven't done much all day, but drink coffee-to-go black coffee with no cream and read in my bed. I wasn't feeling like doing anything at all. That was part of my plan, obviously, to have enough days to not be counting them and be able to feel like if I don't have to do anything, but I still felt a little bit bad about it, so I started reading in the afternoon and couldn't stop until a part of me died at the end.
Next morning I woke up and nothing had changed.
Like I said before and repeat now, the hardest part about dying is the next day. I got some breakfast from a nearby supermarket, sat in a table in silence, and went to the interior section for yet another half-hour smoke break. I felt right at home in this place.
The first hostel I went to was quite nice, met a couple of travelers there: an Argentinian guy that owned food stores for dogs and a gorgeous Brazilian girl that lived in Germany and liked to take photos. The second hostel (and last) I went to was this one, the second cheapest I could find, which is my buying strategy for most things. But this place was not simple a hostel. It was more like an entire ecosystem. There were some travelers, but also people that seemed to live here. Also street people that managed to get enough cash for a night and a shower, club party guys that you would not see at all during the night and find sleeping during the day, happy escorts, snoring engineers, disgraced chefs, upcoming prophets, and probably my favorite: an Arabic guy that liked to talk to himself all day and all night long. I could distinguish only a few words from his constant rambling: cocacola, mafia, allah, cigarette. At the beginning I was quite uncomfortable by it's presence, as were most of the newcomers in our room, but later I found it quite funny; specially when someone new came and started looking around for an explanation and wondering if it was going to be like this during their whole stance, bewildered that we all reacted as if that was a normal occurrence. I could only smile at them, contain the laughter and say: "Welcome."
From the first day, despite my policy of not getting involved with anything around me and general detachment and general propensity to avoid fully engaging with experience, I found myself being caught in the tangle of their lives. We would casually meet up at the smoking section and make a recollection of all the crazy shit that happened the day before to and with whoever was around there. That's how I knew the majority of the guys. A core of them (the ones I went to the park with, plus two young Australian bros) remained together despite not knowing each other before coming here, and they were going to Poland later, and then dispersing for a week and then meeting again in the Czech Republic or god knows where. I decided not to join them, but it could been perfectly went the other way.
Then there was Roger (I don't remember the real name).
When I listed the kinds of people that were here, the one thing they had in common was that they ended up in this place because it was cheap as fuck, and all of them would be somewhere else if they could afford it. Not Roger. He was here by choice. He was here because he loved the aura and the possibilities a place like this gave him.
He was a british Blackrock lawyer executive that had won millions in the lottery about a decade ago, or as he said it "a fat capitalist pig". He had properties all over the world and spent his time traveling, managing them, and arguing on the phone with his mom. He liked going to beneficiaries for "free food" and to describe the size of rooms he owned performing huge steps all over the place. One day I went out to the street for a smoke and met him there. He liked to approach random people and start conversations, and I think he got a surprise when he realized I wasn't another junkie that either avoided him or started to incoherently ramble. He was an educated man, casually generous but not naive, homosexual with three kids, sensible but strikingly amoral, with a lesser fare attitude and passion for being at the center of things. But all those qualities usually went unnoticed, because what was striking about him is that he was about two meters tall and fucking huge.
I describe him not because it's important to any particular story, but because it's incredibly funny to do so.
He introduced me to a guy in his forties that was also staying at the hostel and was trying to rent one of his apartments in cash. I could sense the stimulants addiction in everything he did. There was also a kind of perverted quality to him, how he moved and how he talked and the clothes he wear, but maybe that's because he was French. We ended up talking quite a lot. Sometimes he was somewhat coherent, and made an effort to do so, but most of the time we talked into an incomprehensible mixture of languages I could barely follow about the most varied things possible. But when I could understand, sometime he made a lot of sense. He was just this kind of people that assume you already know everything about their life so they don't have to give context to anything, and they do so to save time. The result was that, by the end of the week, I finally had learned enough about him to state with a moderately high degree of confidence that he was a chef.
I encountered him, in two separate occasions, at random in the middle of Berlin. One time, close to the hostel, the other, more than half an hour from there. He sat with me, and we started talking. I explained to him my problems about making street photos, and he laughed, took the camera and made about ten photographs of a girl that was passing by, all while smiling, waving at her and calling her beautiful. The girl enjoyed it a lot. And they were good photographs too. So I took the camera and made the same thing, emboldened by what I just witnessed. My girl smiled even more than his. Then I saw the face of my friend, totally horrified, signaling me to stop.
―You can't take photo of muslim girl, their brothers will come and kill you.
I found it very comical, like that scene from the movie about life being beautiful set in the holocaust. Just the moment I dared to do it, it was at the wrong person at the wrong time. That episode didn't change anything, nor one way or the other. I already knew could do that too, if given the situation. And don't really think that much about it as I'm doing it. My problems are not about punctual bravery to overcome social anxiety, but about a larger metaphysical inability to fully engage with the world; an impotence in perpetual tension by a deep fear of missing out as life is passing by, and significant moments are slipping through the cracks of space and time, unrecorded and unremembered. As a result, I have entire folders painfully full of photographs of people looking the other way. I don't have the energy to fight my demons all day, and much less alone. Being with someone, and doing it as part of a natural interaction with them while laughing about it was a totally different thing.
It may sound very dumb and childish (and might not seem like it) but being with other people sometimes gives me a lot of courage.
―What I don't understand is why I always have to do it alone!
I was shouting at the wrong person, as usual. We were in Barcelona, the day after landing.
There's this girl I sometimes met with, and been doing so every five or six months since we first met. She suggested I do all this stuff and never do anything with it (meaning the whole of writing, and music, and videos, and stuff) that I should move it, market it, market myself, show it to people. But she did so saying I never "finish" things, which struck a nerve. I put blood and tears into "finishing" my stuff, it's not easy, and suggesting such a thing seems to imply I just begin and leave it halfway when the excitement for the new thing has banished. The idea that "the thing" itself ―even when complete― is not enough, awakened my fury: because I'm in heroic artistic denial about it.
I hadn't even slept in my bed yet and I was already trapped once again in endless philosophical conversation. Not that it matters or excuses me or anything, but less than twenty four hours ago I was in a concentration camp. In the front fence, in iron, you could read "work will make you free". Now, being in front of the girl I have been most part of the last two years in distant platonic unresolved love with, and casually walking the streets of what felt like home, I felt as if a lightning bolt had slowly fallen upon me. But instead of killing me (like it should've) or given me superpowers, had left me in an strangely serene, intense and impossible juxtaposition of beings; in desperate clarity, or maybe in clear desperation. Who knows. She doesn't know it yet, but I don't think we're going to see each other ever again. I knew, then and there. I hadn't decided it yet, but I knew.
Here are some pieces of fictional conversation between us that never happened but capture the gist of it.
―And you? You also don't do the things.
―I tried to do this things, but it doesn't feel natural. I don't feel I can be me.
―But there's not such thing. There's not a "you". There's a multiplicity of possible you.
―Maybe... But I know what I'm comfortable with.
―Aren't you afraid?
―Of what?
―Of missing it. Of internalizing so much what you think are, getting so comfortable in that (despite all the problems) that you become incapable of anything else. Of consuming so much fantasy in your own head that when the time comes, and there's an opportunity, and something happens there will be no dramatic rain or dramatic music and you will miss it entirely. You will look back at it as a distant memory and think "was that it?". Because I am afraid, of living in this little room, this shoe-box, with my little puzzles, projects and T-shaped mazes. And live well, and be fine with it, then resent a second before dying, when my oxygen deprived brain remembers the infinite.
―I just think... You could do more. You just don't want to.
―I know...
The day before leaving for Brussels, I woke up from a dream. You can read about it here. I spent the night writing, and barely got any sleep. Then my mother took me to the airport, and there while I waited, I don't know why, I started to imagine what I would do if the plane was hijacked or had a problem or something and I had ten minutes to send a couple of messages to say goodbye. It's not that I feared that scenario. In a way, I welcomed it. It put me, before starting, in a very strange state of mind I didn't break from during the rest of my journey.
Three weeks later, I was at the airport again. We have talked about this. Nothing at all had happened, no breakthrough was archived, and I demanded myself an answer about what to do with the rest of my life. But I had time. I started watching the people. There was this drunk guy trying to sleep in the terminal without a flying ticket that liked to scream incoherently from time to time. Some security people went to talk with him and ended up dragging him from the premises. German is such a beautiful language. Then I watched for about half an hour a girl with flowers waiting for someone. The time was passing and that someone wasn't coming, and she was getting increasingly nervous. Eventually she started walking around, looking for him. Eventually, she left my sight. I went outside to smoke a cigarette, and found her there, gazing at every possible direction. Then, a guy tapped in his shoulder, she started crying and they began a (I kid you not) ten minutes uninterrupted hug. I had to seriously stop myself from clapping. It was absolute cinema. Then, nothing again.
I didn't felt like reading. I didn't felt like looking at my phone. I didn't felt like deciding anything or thinking about anything. I just felt like walking.
Five hours later I was stripping my belt in the airplane chair. Isn't it great that chairs can fly? I was utterly, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually destroyed. The staff was trying to rush things to leave on time, but were doing so being very carefully so that nobody noticed. I couldn't give less of a shit if they left a window open and we were going to be soon a fiery ball of flames a couple thousand feet in the air. It was almost morning already, there was some light, but the clouds formed a dense white dome over the sky. As we were taking off and gaining altitude, I sensed my mind get lighter, and my eyelids closing in. The uncaring clouds were engulfing us all into a shapeless enclosure. And then, out of the blue, the inside of the plane became suddenly illuminated. We had just broke out of the dome and pierced through the other side where a boundless sunrise was waiting. You could hear gasping from the people that got to see it. And I smiled, watched a little bit, and again closed my eyes. Couldn't hide a faint smile while I though to myself:
"Well, that's a new sight."
Only this city could award me with a moment of absolute beauty just the moment I'm leaving it for good. If it's a farewell gift or a last "fuck you", I cannot tell, and neither could you.
It's been a few days since I've returned, and so far the only thing I have been doing is seeing known faces, writing, listening to music and taking some more photographs. I like doing it, and sometimes it feels like the image is fighting to burst out of the frame, jump through the screen and kill you right then and there (otherwise, what's the point). But who knows, maybe tomorrow I will decide I don't want to take another one ever again. It's not that far-fetched, it has happened before. In fact, now that I think of it, the first thing I did back home (after a proper shower and clean clothes) was play the guitar. No idea why. I didn't plan it, I didn't miss it. At least the first thing I did wasn't to turn on the computer and start playing videogames; and I haven't done so yet, but it's a matter of time. I can feel myself regressing as I write this, in the same dark room all this began, everything starting to be properly folded into categories and written words to be promptly forgotten and remembered only as a bad dream. For I can't wait to be drowned into my old and new, small and big projects to placebo myself into the rich poor man's version of a meaningful life once again; while actually most of the time offering it for sacrifice to the youtube algorithm gods. Not much has changed back here, I think. As every time I leave somewhere for a moderately extended period of time, everything seems stubbornly in the same place at my return. Not like it matters. I don't even know if I myself changed: after all, water remains water. But when I asked a friend who also was traveling these days, he surprised me with "I think I did, but not because of the journey. I change all the time".
I don't know what to tell people that ask me if they should visit Berlin, or what to tell you about it, or about anything, or anyone, or anywhere. I don't know what I will do with the rest of my life and I don't think I ever will. And I don't even have the decency to suggest to you that such thing is something to embrace, rather than just another thing to survive.
pd: this post originally contained a lot more photos. i decided to get rid of most of them and make this as purely text as I felt able to. if you want to see more useless pretty pictures, i have put them in a separate article for you to feast you eyes on without the constant yapping.
pdd: could i ask you a favor? there's this place, in the backyard, inside the hostel. if i don't make it out of this room ever again, could you put some flowers there, for me? to what it was, to what it could have been. for i've always liked flowers.
