Berlin dispatch

living neurotically during the war

I’m in Berlin again, kind of by accident. Every time I’ve come to this city it’s felt like something happening to me, but I like it here, maybe even love it. I’m staying in the enormous green apartment of a generous friend and translating the ingredients on the back of her tinctures and teas into English and still not knowing what they mean. When I get home, I will have to sort my life out in a big way. But for now, the pit bull I am taking care of is my only tether to the world, the only responsibility I have except for theoretically working on my novel.

Mostly, I’m talking about my very nascent book to strangers who are like, “wow, that’s really great and very cool!” in that sort of harrowingly agreeable German English, and running plot points by my boyfriend, who gently encourages me to get them down on paper, and instead of actually writing I am spending most of my time staring at things. Here, all the trees are slowly moving, leaves whispering. The sides of buildings are covered in sheaths of ivy, disparate strands that stir and heave together like a body. Sitting under the Roman columns of the national gallery, I watch light bounce on cool, shadowed stone, light fuzzing around the heads of far away people, caught in their hair. White light shining from the side body of a stone woman archer.

light and shadow and red red red

It’s unbearably hot in the sun and I seek it out anyway. I fall asleep in a hammock with the dog next to me and wake up with a tan line like a shark fin marking my leg. I like to see how sweaty and lightheaded I can make myself before seeking out shade. I’m reading Remembrance of Things Past, a surrender to my long, one-sided battle against the idea of Proust (I once pretended I didn’t know who he was to spite a boy I found pretentious in college.) And of course, like so many things I resist, it’s exactly what I need. Slow and delicate and delicious and tender. Proust writes of reading in bed as a child: “I would be lying stretched out on my bed, a book in my hand, in my room which trembled with the effort to defend its frail, transparent coolness against the afternoon sun, behind its almost closed shutters through which, however, a reflection of the sunlight had contrived to slip in on its golden wings, remaining motionless, between glass and woodwork, in a corner, like a butterfly poised upon a flower.” It’s validating reading this after I already had spent a lot of time gesturing vaguely at the sky and talking about the light and then getting embarrassed about being a bad conversationalist. What are people supposed to say, “I also like when the light is like this”? But it does feel like everything is trembling: resisting heat, resisting the decay of time, holding onto hidden water, passing sound around. A cool room in the summer is a portal, a chasm, a tomb.

Being anywhere unusual makes me think about the elemental: light and shadow, heat and respite, tenderness and cruelty. These are the thoughts of childhood, when one practices a deep but erratic attention to things adults have already generalized. I guess that’s why we go anywhere, partially, to feel childlike again, to practice being new in the world.

Here, I’m chronically overcaffeinated. Eating good fruit, a dinner guest of lots of kind benefactors. Weepily happy about getting to lay around and think. Laughing loudly on silent train cars, running down the streets as a joke, wearing colorful dresses that mark me as a tourist. I feel extremely alive. This redbloodedness only makes the specter of death in the city clearer.

That Ilya Kaminsky quote, “we lived happily during the war” echoes in my head, reverberating off the cool stone, shining back at me off the surface of the Spree. I imagine everywhere I am reduced to rubble. A friend stays with us and wakes us before sunrise to tell us that the US has bombed Iran. I immediately think about my advisor in grad school, a brilliant professor of medical anthropology, who was born and raised in Tehran and as a very young girl fought to end leprosy in the city. Now as an adult she writes cool, clearheaded news reports about her people’s suffering. A few days later, my friend wakes us early again–I assume the worst–to tell us that Zohran Mamdani has won the Democratic nomination for mayor in New York City. I cry watching his acceptance speech and feel overcome with dread about how the world will chew him up. I know I’m not supposed to be romantic about electoralism, but he reminds me of my family, of my father, of my African-born-Indian grandfather and his gentle, smiling pursuit of peace. Hope burns like an atrophied muscle. I don’t know how to use it.

Later in the week, we go to an outdoor show by the river to see friends of friends performing. Everyone is alt-hot and heavily tattooed, whipping fans around. There are sofas on raised beds, spinning platforms, hot tubs full of soapy, surely UTI-inducing water. The band is crushing, the music is electric, the kind of music that’s so good it makes you contort your face like you’ve smelled something bad. The random partygoers I meet after are 70% lovely and 30% excruciating. Lots of white people in collars talking about being immigrants to Germany. Lots of massaging and moaning and talking about clown shows and sculptures and using the word “lovely”. I can be a fan of self-indulgence, but I don’t like a masquerade. All of this has an unmistakeable air of self-righteousness, like painstakingly being yourself is a form of moral absolution, permission to disengage from the material world and its discontents. Art is not enough!!!!! I want to scream. Then again, I’m here too, both feeling tortured and having a lot of fun. A man asks my friend, extremely politely, if he can walk her on a leash. It’s kind of refreshing to see someone take action for once, instead of being so theoretical. I dance more and more wildly, thrashing my body around, literally using it as a weapon, a defense missile to explode the potential for anyone to tell me more about their studio practice.

Maybe I would have hated the hippies. Maybe I love being a hater. Then again, at least everyone here seems to be DOING something, even if it’s medium-good yarn work. Making something. My favorite person from the night is a stoic German metalworker who runs a workshop out of the green room and shows me his new handmade lamp.

The next morning, a woman projectile vomits into the hollyhocks outside the apartment while I eat ice cream and read about the IDF gunning down Palestinians trying to get aid. I go to “Japanese-inflected brunch” in a gorgeous leafy courtyard and discover on my way to the bathroom that the building used to be a school for Jewish girls who were all murdered or deported by the Nazis. I pull an Oblique Strategies card that says “Repetition is a form of change.” The last time I was here, everything also felt interminable. There’s not a very interesting way to say sometimes things are one way and other times they’re another.

I keep showing up to museums late, like an hour before they close, running through them with the audio guide headphones slipping off my ears. I like all the paintings where the light feels real, conjured through the canvas, not so much painted on as pulled out. I see the Yoko Ono retrospective, which is a little eye-rolly but also helpful. I love Morning Piece, when Ono sold broken glass from milk bottles labeled with the dates of future mornings. She said, “'It's a useless act, but by inserting such a useless act into everyday life, perhaps I can delay culture a little.” I return to this when I wonder why write anything, why reproduce my easy life and neurotic monologue. Maybe slowing things down is reason enough.