You won’t get a real answer if you ask me why I’m in Berlin. The only true, albeit shortened, response is long, in which you’d have to let me trace behavioral patterns to demonstrate that my going to Berlin is really no different than spending a day’s allowance on a jar of muscadet honey, a take-away curry wurst and an assortment of German gummy bears (notice, all these things I have never tasted until today)…
It is Berlin, and it is not just Berlin that brought me here. It without a doubt is the compulsion to up and leave that pushed and continues to push me away from comfort, routine, friends and family. Berlin is secondary to the compulsion, whose kinetic force will drive me from here, soon, too.
One thing though has changed since Paris at seventeen – I no longer expect to discover something altogether better. Newness, I’ve come to realize (what with all of the money I’ve blown on “new” foods in foreign supermarkets, for example) teases me with the promise of something tantalizing, beyond imagination, something ideal, something—and here’s the clutch—inhuman. The actual result and the old usurper of my unconscious anticipation, named confusion or just bland banality, prompts the opposite of disappointment. Yes, two negatives make a positive, and I find my senses opened, my mouth ajar with a dropped jaw a sideways smile and a chuckle.
Time to get to work, I can’t wait to get to work, when I settle into my studio next week.
It is Berlin, and it is not just Berlin that brought me here. It without a doubt is the compulsion to up and leave that pushed and continues to push me away from comfort, routine, friends and family. Berlin is secondary to the compulsion, whose kinetic force will drive me from here, soon, too.
One thing though has changed since Paris at seventeen – I no longer expect to discover something altogether better. Newness, I’ve come to realize (what with all of the money I’ve blown on “new” foods in foreign supermarkets, for example) teases me with the promise of something tantalizing, beyond imagination, something ideal, something—and here’s the clutch—inhuman. The actual result and the old usurper of my unconscious anticipation, named confusion or just bland banality, prompts the opposite of disappointment. Yes, two negatives make a positive, and I find my senses opened, my mouth ajar with a dropped jaw a sideways smile and a chuckle.
Time to get to work, I can’t wait to get to work, when I settle into my studio next week.
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