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. 

(i can't) think.

"In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.
In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.
In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.
I realized, through it all, that…
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back." 

- Albert Camus 

Came across this poignant quote yesterday while browsing, of all things, Instagram (#poignantquote). Had almost no control over my memory and musings as they transposed themselves halfway across the globe to recall my darling sister, as Berlin gives in helplessly to yet another harsh German winter much too soon. Neither is Singapore any better off at the moment - the heavens insolently empty their overflowing bladders, relieving themselves unceremoniously day after day on us miserable humans, no end to it in sight. Tears of angels, wrath of nature, an eternity of grey gloom. 

Well back to the point - the quote ought to inspire plenty more than this, but humans are indeed, by nature, superficial, no? What a pity that thinking hard can be so exhausting. In any case, its beauty struck me hard (on the head I believe, for it placed me under its comatose spell and before I knew it my legs had carried my weary body to the bookstore and back and on my desk lay Camus' The Sea Close By and The Stranger. And with it, an emptier pocket.) 

Was struck a second time upon essaying to read the first page of The Sea. "I grew up in the sea and poverty was sumptuous, then I lost the sea and found all luxuries grey and poverty unbearable." "Oh how beautiful," my mind concluded. Too tired to even attempt to comprehend. Irreverent me. 

Came to a conclusion for the second time in one day: today is certainly not a good day to begin on Camus. There will always be a tomorrow for that. Back to Proust before bedtime - back to warm and mellow images, to music-words, to cosmetic poetic beauty, deep-masked memory - good thinking can wait. 

More on Camus some other day. And so, off to dreamland.