Berlin Thoughts

Berlin: 1 August, 2017 

There is so much in this city that still remains so broken, so scarred. This city is rapidly changing, getting a facelift, some therapy, plastic surgery – yes, artificially. The old Tacheles is boarded up, its artists and squatters pushed out of the former shopping arcade beneath a shattered dome of dirty glass. Cranes and flashy property ads take the place of weeds, colonising the deserted parking lot that once stood square in the heart of Berlin. Echoes of the bombs that once devastated this city can barely be heard, drowned out by the honking of impatient taxi drivers in shiny Mercedes on Friedrichstraße. Traces of graffiti – public art that once graced the walls of these war-torn skeletons – are being cleaned away; the bars of former East Berlin being razed one by one, rubbing out the Soviet past of Berlin-Mitte. Few seem to notice: cyclists whizz past, cars speed by, trams ring their bells, tourists (in hoards) take their silly selfies. After all, the city’s most expensive homes are right next door. Berlin’s gotta grow, no? Growth is good, growth is needed, desired…? Growth…?

I finish up a meal of organic vegan dumplings in a minimalist café that runs fully on renewable energy. Rather, I sit on the benches outside this shining exemplar of sustainability, studying this curious junction in the heart of the city. It has four corners, vastly different: one, a magnificent 1700s baroque building in gilded gold housing a Scandinavian furniture store; two, a shoddy 1900s structure in dirty brown with its brick cracks patched up with careless white streaks, an old Italian bar below with glaring red neon lights flashing; three, a newly-built structure of concrete and glass, home to an advertising agency; four, nothingness – a plot of weeds with aged and splintered billboards feebly attempting to keep nosy tourists out, the flat walls of the buildings around lucky enough to have survived the bombs covered in severe graffiti.

I tire of this disjointed scene and mount my bike grudgingly (I have always lamented the lack of bike lanes in this European capital, but what would one expect in a city once so divided, each half wildly organically growing, spreading, multiplying beyond capacity? But let us not lose our focus). I live in the north of Berlin-Mitte – former East, formerly socialist, formerly Soviet. I live in a brand new structure of glass and steel, next to the BND, next to Daniel Libeskind – chic, coveted. This street was once by No Man’s Land – international oblivion, belonging to no nation, no human. Not today. No trace of that exists, save for a double brick line across the asphalt marked ‘Berlin Wall’. I often tire of this area – it has no character, a missing soul.

So I take my bike on a little 10-minute detour behind my apartment – ‘Kieler Weg’ reads the sign. I am stopped in my tracks by a dystopian landscape just a few minutes away: a hulking tower of raw concrete flanked by apartment blocks at the end of the lane overlooks a silent canal separating me from a desolate landscape of cranes and weeds. The hulking turret has a plaque: ‘in memoriam: to all who were killed attempting to cross the Berlin Wall’. Where I stand, where I walk freely, once a site of death and separation. Sickened, I move on along the canal. A faded brick structure stands alone on the opposite bank, dressed in graffiti, its windows long-since boarded up. A pool of weeds threatens to consume it, as do the cranes. They work in unison for nothing else exists here. Few know of this place, so well marked out for the remembrance of posterity.

As the sun bleeds red across the night sky, I cycle northwards. Berlin-Wedding, once a capitalist Western district, now mostly undesired by the people of this city. A hastily-constructed eyesore of TV dishes, Turkish flags, and sex shops looms before me. Funny how things work. 25 years ago, risking one’s life jumping the Wall from East to West, Mitte to Wedding. Now young dreamers and old men strive for the opposite, for the ‘chic’, the ‘fashionable’ – to afford the rents in the former East, now masked. Confused and a little sad, I turn back, away from the impending storm, to Mitte and my soulless modern structure of a home.

Fred.

Dedicated to a friend who is a brother above all, a brother who has shared the emotions and experiences of a most fascinating and fulfilling month in this Life I have been given; a blessed journey through what Life truly is, and one that has taught me many-a-lesson and made me a slightly-more-whole human being. 

And Fred leaves. Never has a friend felt so much like a brother. Traversing the whole of Russia, Mongolia, and China together - the Gobi, Siberia, the communist capitals of the world; going through literal shit together, buses that never came, freak snowstorms, desert heat on horseback, trudging up and down sand dunes; poking fun at people, the neverending jokes and laughter (even when being stopped by the PLA in China); sticking it out in a ger together, putting up with a cat in the house (multiple times), late-night starscape photography in the middle of nowhere in the desert, exploring neverending Hutongs while making a million-and-one friends and enemies along the way; eating our way through the world, one country at a time; driving top down through a city come-to-life in spring, my dearest Berlin, zipping about tree-lined avenues just bursting with red, green, yellow, purple, with radiant blue skies overhead as the wind whips through our hair and caresses our faces; coasting down the autobahn, liberated from the world at 220 kilometers per sixty minutes, pure black asphalt opening up before us, the way the icy lake did as we coasted down hills on our not-so-little quad bike in our baggy pants; all this - this joy, this happiness, this overwhelming positivity and radiance of bliss and sunshine and life - was it really but a month? 

Never has a friend felt so much like a brother, one who feels so close to my parents that he can’t bear to call them “uncle” or “auntie” or “Mr./Mrs. Sohan”, and instead lies in limbo, for calling them “mom” and “dad” may not evoke reciprocal emotions and instead perhaps the opposite coupled with pure awkwardness. Emotions - what I feel now, sitting at my table, sipping the tea we just bought at the cafe made of coffee bean shells, in an empty and quiet home, so devoid of life, even as the cheerful sun fills the room with its golden light and the cool spring breeze scents these four walls. 

Strange bittersweet nostalgia seizes me as the birds chirp in the garden, where we had a barbeque what felt like yesterday; and I can’t be either happy or sad, joyous or depressed - I lie in limbo too, for memories are to be locked in the deepest recesses of the heart, to be savoured in those special moments when life seizes you with joyous nostalgia, and life is truly lived. These words I write capture but a fraction of what lies in my mind. To choose the pen or the sword is an inane query, for as the world spins around and around and day turns to night, it is only we, who sit so small and alone beneath the vast canvas of the starry night in the steppes and plains in that gentle valley of simple joy - it is we who feel and we who smile quietly at the beauty of recollection, of memory. 

In memory of this beautiful month, 1 April - 1 May, 2015. 

PASSAGE - through time and through nowhere

 7 January 2015, on an old train in the middle of nowhere, for today, 'nowhere' finds itself in the Polish countryside

Oh how tremendously life has changed in the past few weeks. 

I think back fondly: Saturday mornings spent wandering the streets of Chinatown, witnessing night turning into day in clubs encircling the Bay that selfsame evening, gazing down upon the glittering city from a multiplicity of glittering skyscrapers; Sundays in glitzy shopping malls, or out in the sunshine and warmth of that cheerful island. Weekdays spent in camp (really, it wasn't so bad): the brick-red parade square and the gleaming silver flagpoles, the less-than-luxurious bunks and the rusty little gym. The smiles of friends, the less than stellar food - the shared suffering. The warm familiarity of it all, of that life. 

But today I find myself in a carriage on an old, perhaps Soviet train, being whisked through golden fields and snowy forests, as countless little Polish villages, scarred by unendingly harsh winters and a painful history, flash past the grimy windows. I press up to the glass, my breath fogging up the icy pane, watching landscapes of green, gold, and white melt into one another. 

At this moment, the snow drives down hard; sheets of ice slide rapidly down the windowpane. The next, an expanse of gold, dotted with now almost-bare trees, as dogs romp about against a backdrop of grazing horses, while the rare villager rides past on his creaking bicycle, baskets filled to the brim, for winter has arrived and shall remain. All this time, I sit pensively, a witness, as the train whistles sound, piercing the still silence of the landscape. It is something almost out of an old black and white feature. Flocks of frightened birds are sent up into the air as panting cars sit at ramshackle crossings, waiting for their turn to pass. 

I catch a glimpse of a copse of white birches; a split-second later, they're gone. Warsaw is approaching fast. I hide myself warmly in my many layers of wool and cotton. My scarf tenderly hugs my shivering neck. Gemütlichkeit. I step out onto the platform, and so the next adventure begins. 

new year.

10.45 am
31 December, 2014 

a thought, written on an U-Bahn train while passing Hohenzollernplatz

What's the big deal about the New Year, anyway? This insignificant planet completes another tedious revolution around a burning yellow sphere, and we, in our dingy holes underground, atop our structures barely a fraction of the height of the great mountains, in our minuscule dwellings and trifling lives - we flash lights and blare music that we alone hear. We alone. Alcohol, our toxic creation, consumes our self-important being; we dance, we sing, we sleep.

And with the best resolutions which fade one day later, another sunrise begins, another revolution about the same burning ball, on the same tiny planet. And so on. Etc.

Oh, so I guess it would be customary to say it now. Happy New Year, guys.

nightfall

19 December, 11.56 pm 

Here I sit alone, propped up in my snug bed - the last remaining object in what was once my homely room. The wall lamp bathes these pillows and quilts in a warm light, the solitary red bed standing silently by the drawn curtains. Every tap of a key on my keyboard is accompanied by an eerie echo that resonates against the bare walls. Now-empty shelves cast dark shadows upon the naked wood of untenanted cabinets, their rows of books and former inhabitants now crated, readying themselves for a voyage halfway across the globe. 

Here I sit alone, my mind clouded with thoughts. The present is eternity, the now, this eternal moment. But this moment has now faded and has become the past. We now stand in the future. And so the cycle repeats. Boxes lie in dusty corners, a haphazard skyline in their own right. I will soon put out the lamp, and night will fall upon this cardboard microcosm. 

Here I sit alone, feverish and aching. Illness has decided to pay me a visit, its malicious farewell kiss to me. My eyes cloud over, and I yearn for Sleep. But Sleep refuses to come. My body anxiously awaits the raps on that door; will Sleep come knocking? All remains silent. In this bed, the final keepsake of my blissful childhood, I prepare myself for the final slumber, for its crate arrives on the morrow. Au revoir. Auf Wiedersehen. 

Thoughts swirl. This chapter has exceeded its confines. It is overgrown, imprudent, excessive. It must end. My mind isn’t ready. No. Yet, it must. I hear my sighs in the echoes. All is still. 

I flick the switch for the final time. And with an imperceptible hum, night has fallen. 

change.

Today marks about one hundred days till I’m gone and out of this country, and this harsh bit of reality only just set in this afternoon. "Why ‘harsh’?", many of you may be asking. I complain about this island incessantly, don’t I? Too hot, too expensive, too meaningless, too humid, too boring, too modern, too concrete, too un-European, too Asian. ‘Stop controlling yourself, Niall, just let it out. We all know you wanna get your ass outta here,’ you’re probably sneering. 

Well, maybe I do. And maybe I don’t. It was a rainy afternoon and long bus rides, especially during thunderstorms (even if it’s en-route to raiding another camp), never fail to be the perfect opportunity for some reflection. 

Everyone’s asleep. The pervasive silence is punctuated by the noise of little droplets of rain pattering against cold glass, of the spray beneath the tyres, that hush - it lulls you into a reverie of involuntary inertia and pensiveness. I curl up on the seat and think. I thought about how disjointed it would all be - that dim old Mowbray Road I take to camp everyday - in a matter of months, I wouldn’t be walking on it anymore. Or driving on it. That asphalt will be 10,000 miles away, no longer under these dusty army boots of mine. Heck, the car I drive would probably be in the scrapyard by then, and where these boots I’m wearing will be then - well, my guess is as good as yours. 

And Lord, it may be many, many years before I set foot in this country again. And that was when my heart experienced an unfamiliar yet all-too-agonising ache. I have a few weeks’ grace before this cozy home inevitably transforms itself into a storehouse of cardboard boxes, bursting at the brim; before I’m uprooted and have to leave the beautiful people and dear friends I’ve gotten to know behind; before I abandon all that is familiar to me. Perhaps a little too familiar. 

Before I begin a new chapter in my life. 

Never have I lived in one country for this many years at a stretch, and this sentimentality worries me. “You shouldn’t be feeling this way,” I’ve been told countless times. “You should be used to it - you’ve been doing it since you were born - literally,” they say. But I’m human, too, you know. Emotions and sentiments constitute my soul, the way they do everyone else’s. But mine have taken me over, they dominate, they reign, sie beherrschen. And this must not be. 

Comfort is danger, inertia is poison. Routine is toxic, familiarity dulls. Pull yourself up and out, Niall. These chains must splinter. They must go. They tether you to the mundane, to the tedious, to the commonplace and the banal. My heart screams, “no”, my mind shrieks, “yes”. I am in conflict. 

Perhaps it is time to treasure the mundane. One hundred days of monotony (and ordinariness) remain. Chapter 7 of my life begins thereafter. I desire it, yet I don’t. But I desire it nonetheless, passionately. And that desire shall suffice for now. 

Chapter 7 will be brief - es wird kurz sein - just eight months short. And an even more exciting and trying journey will begin thereafter. But it shall soon be time for change for the better, and for inevitable change - change that is charging at me, raging by the minute, coming ever closer, closer, closer - for that change must I ever be ready. 

THIS IS BERLIN. DAS IST BERLIN.

"Good morning Berlin,
You can be so ugly, so dirty and grey,
You can be so beautifully appalling." 

- "Schwarz zu Blau" (Peter Fox) 

An ugly city. A gritty, grimy, disfigured, maimed, triumphant, and bewitching city. It will catch you, grip you, strangle you - sacrifice yourself to it, let go. Eyes on the walls that scrutinised the Stasi, they scrutinise you now. Now-blind eyes that peered into the lives of communist automatons - they peer into yours now. Eyes sprayed in rainbow paint, layer upon layer of colour and texture, of hideousness upon beauty and beauty upon hideousness; eyes of owls, of druggies, of goggled Martians upon walls of defunct factories of the departed East - they watch. 

A glistening river of blue is traversed by a gleaming yellow train - the blue and the yellow, they grate under the stare of an icy sun. Yet it is winter and a frigid wind howls through the alley. Scraps of subsistence show themselves in a busy rustling, the wings of feculent pigeons; green alcohol-stained shards tinkle menacingly against cobblestone as the roar of diesel from a passing truck momentarily drowns out all other noise. 

Along the street, a primitive Mercedes has received a new paint job - it now gleams the colours of the rainbow, star rusting, as it rests upon the kerb; a scruffy stray snoozes lazily beneath its broken fender to drown out the unrelenting tumult of freedom that reverberates through the winter air. "Fuck alley", in all-too-legible scrawl on the fifth storey of an unfinished block, adds the finishing touches to the scene. All is illuminated by a glaring blue sky. 

I stand beneath psychedelic construction hoarding, considering some makeshift posters - "You - Me - One Being; Allah, Maria, God, Buddha", it reads. James Blunt's new album is being advertised right beneath - a creative passerby has given him a new hairdo - paint dyes his hair a neon orange. An elderly man with studs through his chin materialises behind me, says, "you Thai?" I say I'm from Singapore. He tells me about his stopover in Singapore in animated German, complete with beaming eyes and gesticulations (never mind the brown booze bottle in his hand). He then wishes me a "schöner Tag" and leaves on his merry way. 

I get shouted at by a drunkard down the street - "good day to be alive, huh?" Black, white; old, young; tall, short; gay, straight; pierced, unadorned; tattooed, undecorated. Another German with a tremendous nose ring asks me something about what we stop to observe - a queer lady reclining in a wooden chair in the gaping hole of a construction site. "Ein Tourist" he explains he is, thinking I was a local (who perhaps somehow turned Asian one fine day). 

People stare, glance, look - I walk. It's all amicable curiosity, really. Unless they're drunk. (Or high). The needle stands far off, the centrepiece of the spectacle. Der Fernsehturm, it's called. Crowning glory of expired socialism, now the icon of this swarming metropolis. Before me stands a row of bricks across the street. An almost indiscernible reminder that the Wall once stood. Right here. To the left, an abandoned Trabi stands proudly on display, rusting. Behind it, boys stumble out of a club, drunk, smoking (weed?). Cigarettes don't smell ordinary. It is noon. Layers of history criss-cross beneath my feet; life surges past me in an unhurried rush. 

I am appallingly in love with this city. I am alive. This city. A one-legged veteran of unending wars, it hobbles nobly, medals gleaming; no spoils, no takings, just living, breathing, unvanquished. 

This is Berlin. Das ist Berlin. 

Cuvrystraße, Kreuzberg, Berlin.

(365 ± 30) days ago

It was (365 ± 30) days ago that I had a nightly routine (a ritual, almost), which now seems to unfortunately have been lost to me. I would clutch close to me either a glass of creamy Irish Bailey's or red wine (or a hot mug of chamomile tea other nights when I was feeling decidedly less "European"), don my warm and fluffy house slippers to keep my toes snug, wrap my pyjamas tight and close to me, and venture to the large, blue oak door with the brass door handle that stood at the end of the entrance hall; grasping the knob with my free hand, I would, with a great effort, pry open the magical portal. (I'm sounding a tad akin to a modern and slightly less long-winded Proust now - just goes to show what Swann's Way is doing to me…) 

I would thereby stand at the convergence of that fierce and icy cold without and that toasty, homely warmth within, exposed savagely to a strange mélange of sensations of tingling and shuddering, and that sense of pleasurable warmth that courses through one's body and veins, brought about by the exquisiteness of a touch of alcohol - this can only be described as purest Gemütlichkeit. An expanse of white snow would unveil itself before me as in a fairy tale, a noble bed of immaculate white receiving the gentle caresses of newly-fallen flakes, a blanket of purity to be ruthlessly desecrated the next morning by vicious and happy children - but that would at least spell an end to the asphyxiated misery of whatever blades of withering grass remained unconsciously existing beneath. 

It's been a year, plus-minus, since I last had the chance of being embraced by nature almost in the comfort of my own home. Perhaps I don't do this much anymore since it's just too warm this winter (5˚ at night - that's indeed warm - eat your hearts out, people stuck back in truly hot and humid Singapore) and not a freak -15˚ as it was last year. Or maybe it's just that I've gotten lazy and my bed just seems a little more welcoming than the cold beyond. Or maybe it's just that conspicuous dearth of snow this time around, the lack of that something that makes this gloomy time of year truly etwas Besonderes. 

thoughts on art and a city (taken from a no-longer-needed-college-application-essay)

So I'm flying off home to Germany tonight, and I no longer need to apply for college (since I've a place), so why not blog one of my now-useless essays which I had intended to submit and make it a tad less useless? 

If the world were art-less, I doubt I would choose the option of life over oblivion, I recently remarked to a friend over tea. I rarely exaggerate, and this is no exception. What a tragedy that so many newly-developed countries shun art, thinking it "impractical" and "inessential", and that my home country counts as one of them. Singapore suffers from a terminal stage of what I term the "Asian Materialism Syndrome", a disease I diagnosed her with after she left me inexplicably "empty" after just four brief years. Unlike San Francisco and Berlin, two cities I had previously called home, life seemed overwhelmingly "sterile". Perhaps it is not clear that culture simply cannot be engineered, despite the futilely dauntless efforts of certain governments and societies. Some fail to fathom that culture is not to be found solely in the concert halls and museums of a metropolis, but on its streets and in its back-alleys too. And if even Chinatown in an Asian capital has to be meticulously engineered, something is clearly awry. For two years, this desire to be "filled" by art plagued me while I served in the army - it is not easy for concrete skyscrapers and prefab housing to inspire a human being above and beyond the mundane. 

Probing aural art more closely, I do additionally veer towards inarticulateness when it comes to describing music. After all, "[music] commences where speech ends." (Alphonse de Lamartine). It is something that gnaws at my core and drains me, yet fills me to the point of cathartic excess. There is something just so noble and so penetrating about the sound that a piano creates that stirs me more than it does others, in a way that all else is incapable of - especially the sound of that old upright piano sitting in its dusty corner of our living room. It is a trove of memories of my past 19 years of existence, its threadbare hammers having experienced all of my agony and ecstasy, my passions and my sadness. It was akin to an old friend I could rely on, or rather one that I could invariably force into empathising or rejoicing with me. I lived vicariously through it, and it "lived" vicariously through me. It saw me grow up, in technique and emotion, and I grew up through it, sensing and thinking ever more astutely. 

I breathe in the cultures and landscapes of the world when time prevents me from traveling, seeing the world without ever having to leave the piano bench. Much of my interior maturity was born through this wonderful, living instrument, and never will I neglect what that old piano and its enticing art taught my heart and my mind. 

These brief encounters unblinded me - I could suddenly "breathe" once more. Art, no matter how vast a concept, dictates the movements of my heart and my mind, filling my life with an indescribable richness and beauty. This is its power and its allure. 

the day i became "niall" again

I witnessed something beautiful and visceral last week: I got my identity back. 

It was ten months ago that I had my new "identity" shoved into my arms in the blink of an eye (quite literally so) as a near-bald, bespectacled army recruit, too damn petrified of the terrors of the tangled bureaucracy (and of arbitrary, almost whimsical punishments from just a step up that shaky ladder (three chevrons, anyone?), on which I was perched upon the lowest, most depressing rung). 

The first horror I encountered on that diabolical island was my new name. On the right side of my chest, inky threads like squirming black worms wound themselves up into a maleficent formation, wrapping themselves stubbornly around the fabric of my new rough, green uniform. 

"S H YANG", it read. 

Understatement would it be to claim that I felt nauseatingly frustrated, oh shock horror, at my "new" name. "Uh, sorry sergeant, but this is actually not my name," I mumbled in subdued tones. He responded with a deafening torrent of words, honestly unintelligible and utterly incomprehensible to this day thanks to his very…oriental…rendition of "English". I later had another conscript translate into bona fide English what he had bellowed to me: bluntly reworded - "I don't give a f***". Charming first day it was. 

And so it was that I lived for months on end as a recruit, then as a trainee, and so on, with a strange other name. Feeling foreign to oneself is a feeling foreign in itself to me, and feeling scorn for something is something foreign to my emotional palette, and I hated feeling foreign to myself, and so I felt layers of scorn and foreign-ness for many months. Such is my life. 

But habit is indeed a great deadener, and glances at myself in the mirror that used to yield great ire and distress at my new name stamped on my chest melted into the vicissitudes of life. Until one day I realised how utterly idiotic it was that a last name, "SOHAN", very much Indian (though only a quarter of me captures that heritage), was transformed by some truly narrow minds into a very Chinese name - "So Han". The ire and distress returned that fateful day. 

Ire and distress more at my own inaction, rather. So that day, I simply picked up the phone, made a quick order for a few dollars of name tags that spelled out "NIALL", and smiled in relief as I went to bed that night. 

They came a month later. I witnessed the little old hunchbacked lady behind her antique Singer sewing machine grin in glee, ripping off my erstwhile name with unprecedented force and vigorously piercing the same rough, green uniform with my "new" name, hammering it in with a pounding needle. I watched and smiled a tired smile. 

And one short minute later, I became "me" again. Niall. Me.