Stumbling into Strangers, Cities Blurring, Quiet Berlin, Evolving Brussels, Into the Squats
Thousands and thousands of protesters are in Paris, Al told me about, striking, riots, teargas.
Caroline didn’t see them.
But they were out there, said Al. He saw them on CNN.
The teenager and I were here in Berlin, quiet for a moment, sitting with ourselves, the city with itself.
Andreas met me at the Mein Bar on Auguststrasse, chatting about Blade Runner, ai and what the world is becoming. It all feels like we’ve been here before. Hal revolting in 2001, taking out Frank, unwilling to go, the computer unwilling to turn off:
“dave i am afraid i can t do that
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it
I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me.”
Paradigm shifting, machines enveloping us, chatbots, not really sure whose human and whose a replicant. Can’t really tell who's saying what. Action, reaction.
We still need poems and stories, labor and people.
Even if somethings amiss.
That morning, Extinction Rebellion screamed:
“There is enough money!
The money for the transformation is there, it is only unfairly distributed and the wrong people are asked to pay!” causing a ruckus, throwing paint in bank lobbies, at oil companies. “Biodiversity crisis,”shouted activists, reminding us of a dirty little secret. “The richest humans, theirs multinational corporations and their destruction ….”
I ride by Invalidenpark, by the encampment where people are camping, making signs, recalling Occupy NYC, looking at the tents, past parts of the wall, remnants of past wars, stories of families separated. Half of families on one side, the other on the other, a man shot trying to cross from East to West to see his mom.
Past Mensch Meier, I ride to get my camera, left behind at the club. No cameras in Berlin clubs.
Drop by for the next party, they tell me.
I stop by the Greifswalder DIY skatepark, on my way back home, recalling the teenager here.
There are still secret places here, still surprises, to find on a quiet day moving through the city.
I find myself sitting outside a train station in Brussels, looking at the people arriving and departing, the immigrants, the workers, flaneurs, strolling.
I stop for a coffee in a cafe, mixing in the latte, sitting at the bench.
People walk by. Sometimes you see them again. Sometimes they disappear. Between this life and somewhere else. Trains and trams, by bike and à pied. From here elsewhere, Bucharest and Congo, moving between this city and that, this life and that, that world, born, disappearing, vanishing... Maybe I'll never see them again... Sometimes strangers change everything, holding and reminding us.
Things break and we try to put them together.
And we search for each other.
Grocery store workers on strike, by a renovated church. Their kids play soccer. Parents at the picket line, few else are joining them.
We spend all day, walking and thinking about the world, chatting, up all night, catching up.
Sunday drive through the countryside, past Waterloo, talking about the battle there, Sunday 18 June 1815. Napoleon’s last stand.
One battle after another, through time, really since the Thirty Years War, says Andreas.
Empires fall, colonies rise.
And Feb 5, 1885 King Leopold II had his way in the Congo, another colony, and another horror.
Some toppled, a few Leopold statues still stand throughout the city.
We find ourselves back at the train station at Place Luxembourg train station by the European Parliament, looking at the postwar institutions, built to prevent a repeat.
The Nazis rolled over Belgium to get to France, and the Americans rolled over Belgium to get the Nazis out. The world had had enough.
NATO and the EU followed, by the time it was over. Brussels said it would be happy to host organizations that supported peace.
Each day, we wonder what it could look like to think about reconciliation, there or here.
More killings in the US, a kid buzzed the wrong buzzer shot.
Not many Berlinners celebrate passover. Few have even heard of it.
Back to Berlin, I watch the city scream, billboards and flyers, zines and protests, streetwalkers and tram riders, one story after another, histories blur.
Sometimes we gain something on the road, sometimes something disappears. I couldn’t tell which was which, or if I was any closer to this world or that?
Pieces of our lives disappear. We learn to let them go and find new things, losing things from one space to the next, Berlin to Brussels to Berlin.
Back in Berlin, I scrambled about, taking it all in, catching up with classes and school friends, zipping from appointment to appointment, bike rides and shows.
Hands off our homes, says the mural, among other adventures with music and cops at Kopi, Deriva (Punk, Italy) - Compulsion (Punk, Berlin) playing in the dirty basement in this epic squat contending with ever encroaching development. “The Köpi is a self-organized, independent and non-profit living space and cultural project. People who are involved and work here do that voluntarily in their spare time and not for money.”
I think about my friends, those close, and those far away, reading Irwin’s friendship book on the bus to the doctor. “In casual conversation, through his smiling silences and occasionally wry remark, he would let you know that he already knew whatever it was that you knew,” writes Epstein, recalling an old academic colleague. “Some would call it arrogance. But there was something genuinely boyish and likable about him. Then again, there was something closed off and rigidly stubborn and closed off as well about him as well. Like a UXB demolitions sapper, he was never wrong until it was too late. And by then the damage had been done to others as well as to himself.”
The damage had been done, I thought standing at the bus stop, snapping a shot of the restaurant with a focus on Balkan specialization. I’m thinking about refugees, migrants, immigrants, anarchists, revolutionaries, immigrants, climate and Mayday demonstrations,posters up on the walls. A woman starts singing. I snap a photo. She waves and takes a bow.
My friend LAK calls. We chat about the crazy USA, history, wedge issues, trans politics, our movements, our friends, libraries, a few enemies, notions of progress, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, on and on...
The city opens up to people in strange and wonderful ways, one conversation, one encounter with one stranger, one friend at a time.
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