Mart-deBlog

"Essay deadline, Saturday at noon." It is Friday night and my maturity boots are waiting impatiently to enter the Magnet club. Ingmar (my cousin) leans against me and I trip past the bouncers. I am inside. A girl with wolfs' ears chases a guy with a red hood and a girl with red rubber bands in her hair stairs at my pants. They are my bad-taste pants. A German rockets at me but then jumps into Ingmar, it is his roommate. I walk to the wardrobe with my arm scraping the red brick wall. The floor is also red and liquidish. A tiger's tail whips my knees and a pair of red stockings pass by me. The bass takes me on trip and time is forgotten. The German roommate pulls me up, and screams some German at me. I nod and get a spliff in my hands. While I am guided to the courtyard I take a puff and the world starts spinning. That fucking dizziness again. My legs trip over other legs and my right shoulder does not leave the walls. The rough bricks are my only guide. I straighten my neck and see only colors. Everyone is gone, away in the blur. I lost it. A faint focusing of "toilette" draws my attention and in slow-motion my old leather boots carry me. With a sigh I sink onto my knees and stick my fingers in my throat. I do not feel anything, only the lumps that pass my swollen tongue. With my head against the spray-painted wall, I close my eyes... But the darkness makes the world spin away so I force my eyelids open. And I focus. I focus on a little mushroom drawn beneath the handle of the toilet-door. I raise myself slowly and smirk, remembering the 8 hrs of nonstop writing on heroism in the Iliad. It seemed so far away now. Straightening my shoulders and fixing my eyesight on the narrow point that was clear enough to recognize things, I open the door. A bunny stood right in front of me. She pointed the way. Screaming pinks flicker at me. A continuous stream of make-up masques. Waves of heads in front of me. With my arms I part the mass of neck-ties and upright collars, exploding yellows and starry skirts. Like a cowboy I calculate every step. My boots never forsake me.

Then I am on my black bike again, zigzagging I passed the half-empty bottle of wodka that I had left there in Knaackstrasse. I kicked it over and captured Troje.

The weekend of 12 - 14 Oct we went with the ECLA (both professors and students) to the Harzgebirgten where the witches live and Goethe's Faust joins in a Bacchanale, and the medieval village Quedlinenburg with 1000 yrs old timbre-houses. The trip was meant to 'stimulate the social bonding', which is really quite a sad and artificial context. You're sitting together in the train, looking around and thinking 'Do we reeally have to talk to each other, we're going to be stuck together for too long anyhow' 38 students studying, eating and living together is already a crazy social experiment without the mountains. But by the time we were walking up the mountains and happily kicking the leaves on the granite stone, there was a softening attitude towards each other. We were close to singing and there was happiness in abundance. Friends and foes approached and everything cleared against the background of mountain forest and time-frozen villages; and of course our share of beer and bratwurst. "It rocked."

So here I am. My first week in Berlin is over and the settling feeling slowly fades away. Whoever moved somewhere for a longer period might recognize the feeling of many processes going on under the surface of your mind, times goes slow and it is hard to fall asleep. I have the feeling that I have been here for a long time already. That does not mean that I have completely settled, it only means that so much happens in my mind that time stretches out like a rubber band. People who know me, probably already expect that I am trying hard to be aware of what is going on in my head, to raise stuff above the surface. But well, I have not really been able to grasp it. Of course it is easy to make guesses, there should be tons of mental processes as social adaptation, new habit formation, setting goals and changing self-perception. But the real processes of settling are simply beyond me, it is too much and too intricate.

In Hong Kong my experiences were radically different. I think that I never truly settled there, I was lost in translation, lost in bewilderment and psychedelia. I was a constant stranger. Berlin is the exact opposite of Hong Kong, it is open. There is just so much within reach, so much things I could do or worlds I could enter. This gives rise to a certain pressure, "will it ever be enough, whatever I do?" Thus a paradox arises in which Berlin remains out of reach, there seems to be an infinite amount of necessary experiences lying between me and Berlin. And then there is the ECLA obstructing me from having these experiences, frustrating, since I just know that both ECLA and Berlin are the right environments for me in so many ways. But then maybe this is also a misperception of myself (maybe I'm thinking to be more alternative or more scholarly than I actually am, who knows).

But this is all nothing more than guesswork, I have no clear idea what is going on with me right now. But what I am driving at is that I might here confront that restlessness hidden somewhere deep in me. It takes an extremely ambivalent situation to bring up the true face of it, I think. And I start to believe that I am exactly in such an environment: I live as close to 'the right place' as possible, yet I am for removed from it, in my books and studies. What do I want from my surroundings? Am I a hermit or a social animal? Should I find peace or be forever on the search for new experiences? Is my time going to be spend in ECLA or Berlin?

There is the saying of 'uitvliegen', in the sense of flying away from home. When I was sitting in the train to Berlin with my fat suitcase and stuffed backpack, I really felt as close to flying as one can get. It is an experience in which the senses get clear, sounds become piercing and sight becomes full. There is a new sensitivity, well-known from the childhood when everything still hurts. Although it is sad to have a melting mind, it is rejuvenating at the same time. In a way my summer prepared me for it, like a circle coming around I softened my mind back to when I entered college. I went back to computer games and careless indifference, uprooting my ways of the past three years. It is an essential experience to feel the existential control over your life, the sense of power over who one is. During my teenage years, I consciously did this every year, I recreated myself during summer sitting in the sun and looking back without contemplation, but somehow I could not do it anymore when I got into my twenties. But I think I now know how it happens: by the bounding of a period, an absolute ending of a self and its time, after which an absolute a new beginning will always follow. In this case it was the moment between the leaving behind of a home and the entering of a new environment, a moment of being disconnected. My period in Holland was clearly bounded, it ended with the last high-five with my brother; just as my life in Berlin had a clear boundary: the moment I had set foot in Ostbahnhof surrounded by the mass of Berliners in which I just fit. Two clear boundaries and nothing in between. Discontinuity is the secret.