Saying goodbye to Berlin. All the history, the hofs, the cafes, the dark hallways. Messages in bathroom stalls. Strangers and smirks and lit uBahn station tiles. The haircuts, the black. Dogs waiting outside Lidl off-leash. Seven spätis on my block. The canal. Sourdough brötchen for breakfast, with extra butter. The zimt rolls. Working at Clue. Kotti. The first time I tried to pronounce Straße. The complaints and the appreciations. Grey skies in winter. Fucking February. Sonnenallee. Hermannstraße. Karl-Marx-Straße. An apartment all to myself. Quiet mornings. Summer sidewalk seating. The smell of cigarettes. Nah? Sunset at 4pm; sunset at 11pm. Candle-lit bars. Clubs with no phone policies. Femme attire including white sneakers on the dancefloor. Faces full of speed and ketamine. Event poster on event poster on event poster on event poster. The first warm day of spring. 3€ slices at Pazzi. Buying groceries at the Schillermarkt. Cherry blossoms and momentous parks. Eyes on thighs and catcalls. That one pitbull on Dresdenerstraße. She’s not there anymore though. Grunewald? Bad pot at Hasenheide. Learning the proper sdrauna regimen. Nudity. Being scolded by an aufgussmeister. Seeking bougieness in Mitte. Falafel und halloumi teller, bitte. Azzam. (But Maroush is better.) Reminding grown men not to litter. Open air festivals. Feeling empty then full. Looping thoughts. Australians, Australians everywhere. Natural wine. Getting into Berghain. Not getting into Berghain. The wedding caravans of honking Mercedes. The wedding dress shops of Neukölln. The chocolate cake at L’eustache. Ambulance sirens. Keith. Blaming and praising Angela Merkel. Sitting topless at Tempelhof Airport. Funkhaus. Being called Frau. Spilling gluhwein at Christmas markets. Unapologetic PDA. Still saying hella. Babies in backpacks and bike baskets. Abandoned TVs and mattresses. Cryptic heartbroken messages. Gold plates under your shoe. The Ausländerbehörde. A mountain made of rubble. Trees you wish could talk. Rides on the front of his bike. Music everywhere. The people. All seeking and leaving and finding and hiding and yearning and making and changing. See you soon/never/always.
Letters
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Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given to you because you have not been able to live them.”
“We are placed into life as into the element with which we are the most affinity, and moreover we have after thousands of years adaptation come to resemble this life so closely that if we keep still we can, thanks to our facility for mimicry, hardly be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it holds terrors they are our terrors, if it has its abysses these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers we must try to love them. And if we only organize our life according to the principle which teaches us always to hold to what is difficult, then what now still appears most foreign will become our most intimate and most reliable experience… Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.”
“One day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being. This step forward (at first against the will of the men who are left behind) will transform the experience of love, which is now full of error, alter it root and branch, reshape it into a relation between two human beings and no longer between man and woman. And this more human form of love (which will be performed in infinitely gentle and considerate fashion, true and clear in its creating of bonds and dissolving of them) will resemble the one we are struggling and toiling to prepare the way for, the love that consists in two solitudes proctecting, defining, and welcoming one another.”
“Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where it all comes from and where it is leading? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Unreasonable
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Reason is unquestionably a fine thing, but reason is no more than reason, and gives fulfillment only to man’s reasoning capacity, while desires are a manifestation of the whole of life — I mean the whole of human life, both with its reason and with all its itches and scratches. And though our life in these manifestations will often turn out a pretty sorry mess, it is still life and not a mere extraction of square roots. After all, I quite naturally want to live in order to fulfill my whole capacity for living, and not in order to fulfill my reasoning capacity alone, which is no more than some one-twentieth of my capacity for living. What does reason know? It knows only what it has managed to learn, while human nature acts as a complete entity, with all that is in it, consciously or unconsciously; and though it may be wrong, it’s nevertheless alive.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground
Ambivalent attachment
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Her powerlessness to communicate is apparent in the dialogue she writes: the people talk along lines that never cross; each has his own language, which the other does not understand. Even in love, especially in love, any exchange is impossible, because Violette Leduc cannot accept a duality in which she sees lurking the threat of separation.”
– Simone de Beauvoir
La Bâtarde preface
Words to nerves
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Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer…”
– José Saramago
Blindness
The mental and metaphysical effects of microdosing LSD
It’s 7am on the uBahn. Eyes still puffy from the night before. A woman slowly nibbles her morning brötchen while staring into the static on the broken TV above. Everyone is silent. And in this crowd of straight faces, there I am: grinning like an idiot. Why? I have a little secret. There’s acid under my tongue.
This slightly mischievous feeling is familiar to me. I’ve taken 1P-LSD (a legal LSD analog in Germany) over 50 times in the last six months. Most doses have been small. So small that they’ve merely lifted my mood, generally speaking. But somehow each and every time still feels brand new.
These ritual doses have drastically improved my life and reshaped my perception, but what’s really been going on inside my head? It seems my brain has been especially malleable these last few months. I’ve been able to untangle the knots of thought that eclipsed my reality and made everything a little darker.
Continue reading “The mental and metaphysical effects of microdosing LSD”
Mix
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Ambiguity is the warp of life, not something to be eliminated. Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making shifts and making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with pattern, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.”
– Catherine Bateson
Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way
