It brings both bewilderment and relief to discover, through the beautiful solitude which arises in the company of books, that once upon a time there worked a verbal soul that so closely mimics one’s own contemplations. A poet and writer who too failed to honor the tried and tested; who lived in hope of escaping the monotone and in his escape discovered the unlimited capacity we largely fail to engage:
That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us; to have courage for the most strange the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter … But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Fear of the Inexplicable, reading in April 2019
What for Rilke is the riverbed of endless possibilities for me is the symbol of continuity in repetition of the tried and tested:
Those are the rivulets of thought that slowly (at geological pace, perhaps) creep into the surfaces of the internal vacuum, popping out like veins in harsh exertion. Tiny, precarious gorges of unexpected thought, of the realisation that life is so much more than a tried and tested progression. From the monolithic riverbed I see the intricate network illuminate in each direction with its countless feeble paths, those ideas and aspirations conceived but unattempted.
~ myself, May 2018
Where he sees the monotone as a static wallow along the bank, I see it in motion along the uniform canyon that tradition and custom have forged into the collective consciousness; for life and time move forward even if guided along constant parameters. Where Rilke sees the riverbed as the source of possibility, for me this arrives further downstream where the surges and currents have calmed to a delta of countless interconnected rivulets that one may choose to navigate. Choosing to do so carries with it the fear of a dead end, of the unknown conclusion that may well see you trapped in shallow sand. And yet, it is only in this uncertainty that I find solace; in the indication that one may choose truth or trap, and that the choice itself embodies all that makes life more than just coincidence or replicated recurrence.
To fear not life’s unpredictabilities;
To embrace and release into its unknown;
To comprehend that all is us and we are all
And that our own solitary mind is what spawns and curbs the bloody wounds
We so readily attribute to the hands of others.
I plead that you should not read this as a conceitful attempt to equate myself in any way to the genius of Rilke. Rather, I intend to observe the lover I have found in him; one who pours into the chalice of my creativity; who mirrors my contemplations and understandings a century in the past and who shines a light on the universality of my concerns; evading time and space and echoing back through that unlimited capacity which will forever guard the humanity in us.
… that I dwell more comfortably in sorrow than I do in joy.
Happiness and positivity, those habitual mantras, are void and null without the presence of profound sorrow; it is this exquisite state that constitutes the sole reference against which joy may bounce. The way death defines life and life defines death too is part of this self-validating dance of the binary, with either outcome inextricably linked to the other’s existence.
My conscious life began with suffering. Long before infinity and mortality should have been concepts for a young mind to contemplate, my gentleness was plunged into that vacuum where tears and sleep were all that rendered emotion effectual, or bearable. I embraced the unembraceable and settled in the place where my suffering could equate to love; the place where it could fill the chasm of all the things I would have said and done with a sadness so pure it revealed to me the inherently spiritual genesis of human emotion. And so I stayed there, for a while.
Such sorrow is companion for life (I will die with it by my side), even as the episodes of complete surrender begin to abate. Once less than incessant, spiritual suffering slowly gives way to nothingness; to a flatness where down and hence up and vice versa are no longer upheld. There stands the barren wasteland of no binaries and no existence – a void where mental exertion remains the only thing that makes you human. The terrifying feeling of neither 1 or 0, yes or no and the sense that this may never change. There I stood, trapped where no emotion is present so as to manifest its opposite.
The ones who persevere shall eventually overcome the emptiness and return to those pairs locked in perpetual self-definition. Having made it through the hollow abyss I remain forever conscious that the joy I feel is borne out of my intimate companion, my sorrow; and that whilst I may have mastered the exquisite pain, in happiness I am but a fledgling. All which I feel, which may appear exaggerated or ‘uncool’ (to degrade the language to the exhausted level of millennial expression) springs from the terrifying nothingness I carried for so long. No longer empty, I shall not for a second regret that I spoke passionately of how I care for or admire you, as anything is better than naught; and I shall never shy away from that profound sadness, for joy can spring from nothing else.
… shine through the aesthetic of its entertainment.
Who are we and where are we headed?
Earlier this week I knowingly purchased a product containing palm oil for the first time in years. It was a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, a kind that my mother used to buy for me and my sister as young children growing up in a foreign country. I felt a craving for the sense of comfort and familiarity the taste would bring, indulging in gustatory nostalgia despite my full knowledge of the role palm oil production plays in plunging us deeper into the environmental abyss.
Later that night, I dreamt of a baby orangutan. The anthropomorphic intelligence of the animal shook me deeply, unnerved as I was at the air of comprehension and sadness I saw in its eyes. A sadness whose source was revealed to me but a moment later as the ensuing scene depicted the destruction of native forests propelled by the ‘cost-cutting’ force of palm oil and its use in almost any supermarket-bought confectionary. In what could have easily ended up on the pile of dreams I will never remember, my subconscious awareness retaliated against my conscious profligacy, a duality that encapsulates the angst of my generation – a generation crushed between instant access to gratification and the deepening sense of impending doom that new reports continue to deliver.
A generation that thinks twice about childbearing as we imagine the reality our offspring will face.
A generation in the midst of an identity crisis, where a subtle understanding of our responsibility to act clashes with the paralysing scale and complexity of the existential threats we collectively face.
A generation whose subconscious perceives the imminent disruption in food supplies, the unprecedented migratory flows and the violent conflict that shall ensue as those in possession of what is scarce defend it from the desperate.
A generation in the midst of a technological revolution, hoping with minimal conviction that it shall automatically deliver us from the void.
A generation of dubious financial means disheartened by late capitalism’s recent failures.
A generation that sees meritocracy as little more than a pretentious artifact of the historical imagination.
A generation which knows more and understands less than any previous one.
A generation that sees intellectualism and expertise scorned as the politics of sensationalism feed a myopic short-terminism.
A generation of exuberance and preoccupation with ‘seizing the moment’, afflicted by the numbing weight of epidemic depression.
Who am I?
I am a young female living in Berlin.
I dedicate considerable time to securing my material sustenance.
I escape the triviality of my day-to-day through art and conversation. Galleries, clubs and bars, along with the ample entertainment space offered by my flat’s spacious living room, are places where I engage with myself and others on those topics that tickle the intellectual fancy. Surrounded by liberal and artistic people of various walks of life, I am inclined to believe that I roam the traditional breeding grounds of revolutionaries and visionaries; of people who live passion, breathe calling and fear not the criticism of having their naive heads in the clouds; of people who think and feel and exude their essence into the world through artistic output and activism.
Berlin is a beautiful place to meet such people. Dreamers who cannot afford any other European metropolis or ones escaping political disaster in their own countries are drawn to the broken history, the accessible culture and romantic self-abandon (self-destructiveness, perhaps?) so deeply engrained in the city’s image. Young, poor, sexy, all mixing and mingling in the city’s throbbing, distributed vessel: the electronic music scene and its countless dark abodes, big and small.
What about the scene?
Electronic music dominates the clubs, fueling the city’s largest offline platform for meeting strangers and spending one’s time in a blatantly unproductive manner, for hours or days depending on stamina and budget. A dynamic force and living advertisement that draws thousands (hundreds of thousands, perhaps?) and which constitutes a phenomenon of entertainment that has gone truly global. All the cool kids are doing it and the aesthetic it brags carries deeply engrained truths about our generation’s internal state.
We enter the darkness and become one. We flaunt our individuality and sexuality in extravagant fashion, piercings, tattoos. We dispel our fears through self-prescribed anaesthetic, releasing into the numbing wrap of Ketamine and the loving acceptance of MDMA as we speed through another night that shall produce sparse memories and new friends. ‘Why not?’ we ask as we seek to banish the cognitive burden of the seemingly insurmountable challenges we collectively face. We return to tribalism, aiming to lock our minds into the present, individuals in a larger organism of others who share our skepticism of what tomorrow holds. Visionaries and activists fighting the battle of instant gratification, pushing for equality and freedom on the hyper-localised level of the dance floor. The short-term is king and ‘in the long run we are all dead’ never carried more meaning.
Arguably, this new entertainment is little but the manifestation of a sense of helplessness shared by those who ought to be working towards utopia, but instead surrender to the hypnotism of the repetitive bass-line. Though the concept of the dance club has existed for several decades, gone are the days of happy-go-lucky disco where the world is love and boogying all night carries no sense of trepidation. Today, we stand at the crossroads of dance and atonality, a development in music appearing at the beginning of the previous century. This new form of composition, arising as a strain of the expressionist revolution, took grip in an ‘Old’ continent on the brink of modernity and a world on the brink of destruction at unprecedented scale; a world about to experience the birth of a binary rivalry in political structure that would shape the entire century to come and one which could sense that something was amiss.
In the words of Théo Lessour (in Berlin Sampler, pg. 13)
In atonal music, ‘gone is the reassuring predictability of melodic modes and motifs, leaving instead a pointed reminder of uncertainty and the fundamentally incoherent nature of things.
The natural bonds of harmony being replaced with an arbitrary feeling of chaos and desolation … simple mathematical coordinates afloat in a spiritually empty vacuum;
Atonality’s recent comeback may prove to be a permanent one. Aside from impending environmental cataclysm, our generation’s sense of emotional paralysis, uncertainty and incoherency are further accentuated by the fact that, unlike people at the start of the previous century, our historical memory already carries extreme frames of reference for what excesses violence can claim. ‘There until the bitter end’ is a frequent verbalisation of the party’s ending. Or are we still talking about partying?
There is no moral to this story. Rather, it is a piece of social commentary ambitiously aiming to deconstruct the psychology reflected in the aesthetic of Berlin’s entertainment. We find ourselves at a cultural frontier that reverberates through the entire world, carrying with it a truth about an entire generation’s internal state. I know that you know that we all know, and yes, our premonition is correct. Let’s dance fearlessly, together as individuals, until the music stops.
Notes From Afar 