Saturday morning.
Wind howling.
Buses whirling out of Alexanderplatz.
Through the chilly December, from Berlin to Leipzig where my old protest buddy lives, plants art, journal of aesthetics from LA to Berlin.
Into the East, out of the Hauptbahnhof, it's crisp and frosty in Leipzig, more snow.
Inside, kids are whirling in the carousel, outside people angling for change.
An older man puts something in their cup.
Excited.
Outside, they are drinking glühwein.
A wonderful, winter city opens a space outside.
All year, I read Goethe to try to make sense of the place and its history, its spirit.
Line after line, the poem reveals something about all of us.
“Two souls live in me, alas, Irreconcilable with one another."
Dante offered a modern world a trip into an underworld of ourselves,
Goethe a double, ever split, like most of us.
Out of the train station, Marc takes me to the Auerbach's Keller, an aged restaurant, beer hall, where Goethe is fabled to have written his Dr Faustus.
And Mephistopheles served everyone’s favorite wine, weakening to yield to temptation.
Marc and I cover our usual topics, movements, the city, its protests, right and left, kids growing and families shifting, our writing and hopes, leading us through a winter market.
Leipzig is full of culture, coffee shops, squats and relics, the church where Bach was cantor, and the house on Goldschmidtstraße 12 where Mendelssohn rediscovered Bach. On we walk through St. Thomas Church, as well as the war memorial, Völkerschlachtdenkmal, past socialist architecture, and neighborhoods where they burn construction machines there to gentrify.
We stroll by St. Nicholas Church where Monday protests sparked revolutions, prayers and unification, public light and colored glass cubes, active will and political consciousness, remembering those who could not find it to the square in 1989, those who fell as
the Germans beat back Napoleon, and the East navigated world wars, a Cold War. The Monday demos have turned right wing. Much to learn from these streets.
THrough more markets, a snow white park, lined with majestic trees, we walk through the goings on of Leipzig, signs, all colors are beautiful, refugees are welcome here, and a group burnt a kebab place out of spite, most all in a day that started in Berlin, looking for the bus to Leipzig Hauptbahnhof from Alexanderplatz.
The struggle for the geist of Germany is ongoing,
In Berlin, a man tells me about his installation, a film of the ring, the S train through the city, a circle, return, circling the city, curling, right and left, through ourselves, no beginning or end, a story, a return, a myth, a train line, a route, an unknown, a circle, eternal return.
Our friend Nina, reminds us of the ghosts, the suffragettes,
seeing @ninaeschoenefeld's new work "enemy within" an homage to suffragettes now and then, through time.
Their return and ours, and mine, the wheels turning.
A day, a journey, on the bus home, looking out of the winter, snow, darkness between Leipzig and Berlin, missed buses, an odyssey, here to there and back home.
Robert Burns’
“Winter a Dirge” leaps from the page:
“The wintry west extends his blast,
Or, the stormy north sends driving forth
While tumbling brown, the burn comes down,
And bird and beast in covert rest,
The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,
Let others fear, to me more dear
The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,
The leafless trees my fancy please,
The teenagers back from Buddapest, Al from New York.
Back to Berlin, back to berghain, bodies pumping, wind swirling into the night.
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