I’m really delighted to have a post about Beelitz Heilstätten up on the Slow Travel Berlin site today:
http://www.slowtravelberlin.com/2012/12/06/beelitz-heilstatten-the-phantom-sanatorium/
Prelude to my book The Phantom Sanatorium: Beelitz Heilstätten, which is coming out with Chicago University Press / Solar Art Directives real soon.
And, were this not cause for joy enough, it’s snowing today in Berlin 
I was walking around Mitte the other day when this glitter caught my eye. A little way along Mulackstrasse, somebody, or some bodies with hands and scissors, had tied pieces of metallic gift ribbon all over a metal fence separating a vacant lot from the street.
Vacant, except for discarded bottles and a bicycle basket, and of course the wild plants, busy with their gardening, who have taken it over in the meantime.
The beauty of the decoration, which reminded me of the clootie ribbons that people leave at sacred sites in the British Isles with their wishes tucked in them, was that I had no idea who’d done it, or why. Whether it was for the sake of people, or fence, or plants, or the bottles and bicycle basket – or for all or none of them and something else besides.
Last month, on an achingly clear autumn Sunday, I went on the official tour of the abandoned sanatorium complex Beelitz Heilstätten, southwest of Berlin, led by local historian Irene Krause.
With my extremely basic German, the detail of the tour was lost on me, and being confined to the exteriors of the ruined buildings was cumulatively less interesting than trespassing unofficially inside them, as I did in August 2010 and shared, with a little background history of the sanatorium, in this post.* Yet it was still worth doing, as I gained a (marginally) clearer sense of the layout of the vast site, and saw a couple of key buildings I’d not visited previously: the power generation plant:
and the women’s surgical building:
whose once miraculously intact, equipped operating theatres have now been decimated by vandalism.
Beelitz Heilstätten exists in tension, in limbo. Different aspects of its practical fate cancel each other out. It is the most extensive Grade II listed historical site in the Brandenberg region, so it can’t simply be bulldozed; yet the site is so large and now in such dereliction that successive waves of hopeful developers who lay claim to the regeneration of this or that segment can never generate enough capital to carry their plans forward. Aspirations languish, then fade quietly away. They’re stymied too by the fact that in 2000, the Berlin urban transport zones were reorganised, and Beelitz Heilstätten station expelled out of zone C into greater Brandenburg, meaning that the site is deemed much less valuable and attractive as a talking-money development proposition.
The original sanatorium buildings are intractably sturdy and immaculately constructed, built as they were on the principle that ‘the most expensive is the cheapest’; but where their roofs have broken open after long and persistent neglect, the penetration of the elements hastens the inevitable.
Parts of the complex have been renovated as a neurological rehabilitation centre, a facility for the treatment and study of Parkinson’s disease, and as housing: signs of their active life, patients and visitors, burst in around the edges of the tour.
After the greater part of the site was abandoned in 2000, the intrepid could explore more or less at will; but following the death of a young party-goer a few years back, greater efforts have been put into boarding and bricking up the doorways, windows and access tunnels, and concerns among would-be explorers about being intercepted by the police have increased. The site is too large and cumbersome to maintain a constant, effective security presence, though, so visitors blatantly flout the token ‘Keep Out’ signs. We went through the absurd but necessary charade of being let through a locked gate into the northern section of the complex, just yards away from a gap where a fence panel had been removed and people were coming and going freely. Not just the obvious hipsters and urban explorers, either: there were many ordinary families and couples looking to be simply having a pleasant Sunday out, meandering and even picnicking amid the off-limits ruination.
This … but … yet Beelitz Heilstätten for the present remains. A scheme to bring formal tourist revenue to the site by building a series of aerial walkways has been mooted, but like the other schemes for the site is still neither here, nor there.
* A book documenting this illicit journey, The Phantom Sanatorium: Beelitz Heilstätten, will be published by University of Chicago Press / Solar Art Directives at the end of November 2012.
I’m back in Berlin, after a year of absence for the most part of which I was not expecting to return here.
So it goes.
This blog used to be called Astral Cat’s Abroadcast, and was a motley collection of ruminations about whatever happened to interest me at the time, but was still mostly about Berlin.
I stopped posting to it when I left Berlin, and began a new blog, The Place Between Stories. At the same time, I noticed that the old Berlin posts were still getting traffic.
Moving back to Berlin, I realise that I still want a place to record my wanderings and wonderings around and about this city, and that they fit better into a blog with ‘Berlin’ somehow in the title – where interested people can find and connect to them – than in the place between stories.
Although there’s always a connection, so that’s also in the title.
So, welcome (back) to Berlin and Between, and to more from here soon.
photo by Bridget McKenzie
What follows is a very personal and in many ways quite abstract response to being at Uncivilization this year. It strikes a very different note to other reactions that I’ve read, but then this year I felt myself walking an often solitary path that had much to do with finding myself in odd places outside the general flow of events for purposes that I don’t yet or fully understand – if indeed there is anything to understand. Given more time I would have doubtless written otherwise and possibly even managed some jokes, but wanted to catch the flavour of the experience before life sweeps it onward, as is its wont.
Four basic things will happen in a ritual, if it’s a good one.
First, showing up with intent – a decision that might well get made outside the dominion of the conscious mind.
Second, breakdown. Any expectations brought in will be shattered, confounded; the old shell left in fragments of fear, dislocation, grief, insignificance.
Third, reconnection. Cohesions arise from the blackened ashes, broken pieces begin to slot back together in new alignments.
Last, the journey back to normal life, which demands – if the work of the ritual is to be fulfilled – the processing and reintegration of whatever painful illuminations participating in the ritual has drawn down.
If you were at Uncivilization this weekend just gone, whether witting or not you were part of a ritual – a very real and very powerful one. A ritual that stretched its presence and implications right through and beyond the more obviously ritualistic moments: gathering around the fire to hear Tom Hirons tell the tale of Ivashko Medvhedko (upon which skin-shuddering magic I stumbled about halfway through), following the call of the piper into the dark forest as the mysteries of Liminal unfolded, singing together in a haunting refrain as the festival drew to its close.
Some participants were working to hold and move the energies and spaces of this ritual in time-honoured traditions (including the routine alchemy of event organisation), while others took a bold attitude of radical improvisation, feeling a push to let conjure something beyond the ken of what traditions hand forward. Some knew just enough to not fully know what they were unleashing; some sensed just enough to behave in the manner of very small children let loose with a box of matches. Some felt a crackle pass through them but had no name to lend it; some stepped into their walk-on parts oblivious and without missing a beat. Some passed an enjoyable weekend of learning and sharing and discovering the company of like-minded others, and some, I’m sure, are still trying to work out what hit them.
All of us, regardless of what we brought with us or thought we were doing there, of whether at the end we called time by labelling our participation or the festival itself success or failure or something more equivocal, were conduits for something greater. Greater than the gestalt of human festivity and honest companionship, greater than any inherited or re-learned capacity to engage as equals with the powers of the next-to-wild place where we had gathered: of the chalk and the copper beech groves and the early morning magpies and the towering montbretia. Something precious, and also dangerous, to the extent that we were invoking something out of our back pockets; only part-knowing, as an impromptu collective, what we were about. And in moments it drew close to us – sometimes you know it when the fine hairs on your human body stand erect – the sacred mystery, the breath upon which the universe turns.
It touched me as I was taking part in the chorus of Liminal on the Saturday night, already transformed by uncharacteristic clothes, face paint and a lantern in the dark into somebody other than I think I am, processing through the woods and coming to the last punctuation place: a naked man curled foetal around an illuminated deer skeleton scattered with rose petals, then suddenly the clearing beneath the beeches opened out and came alive in a scatter of flickering lights, its silence swallowing our footsteps and our words.
Although I’d tried to come to Uncivilization with my mind open, still the expectations crowded in, all ready to be broken and exceeded. Advance plans to forage and take writing workshops were overtaken by other necessities, my sense of timing was chronically misaligned, doors that I fully expected to open stayed stonily closed, and others that intimated distraction quietly asked to be avoided. All this stranding left me bang on cue to step into other roles that were wanted of me: to lend ears and hands under the radar, to be with the power of council and find a home for my grief, to listen for tightly guarded silences, to learn truly for myself how vital the gift of a story can be.
To carry a red thread, a connection trailing from place to place. Worn outside for the eye to see and dropped upon the ground; carried alone on the inside and gifted to the ground.
There are symbols, and stories, that you encounter outside in the world around you, and you think ‘isn’t that intriguing’ or ‘wow how lovely’ or ‘oh, that’s an interesting way to look at it’, and there they sit outside you.
And there is a moment to be lived when it dawns on you that the reason you encountered those symbols, and stories, or that you took more notice of them than of others, is because they are the ones that emerge from inside you to give your life the shapes that it has.
Do people really choose the rhythms and myths they live by, or do the choices get made because the rhythms and myths have already chosen them? When is it possible or wise to choose against the grain of your own rhythm or mythology – which question assumes of course that you think of yourself as having a rhythm, a mythology – and when does such a move drag against you as much as any other ill-fitting relationship would do?
Spirals attract me. Labyrinths, cup-and-ring markings, nautilus shells, water disappearing down the plughole. I know that the worldwide recurrence of the spiral as a symbol is said to be because it is the shape of life itself – encoded deep in the double helix of DNA. ‘Said to be’ shows you the intellectual form in which I know that piece of knowledge; I have also listened to more than one person tell me that the idea of life heading in the straight line of time’s arrow makes no sense for them, that their personal history is rather composed of the same old stuff looping back again and again under different guises. But I’ve also come recently to realise – though ‘understand’ is better – that the prevailing dynamics of my own life all twist and turn in spirals; and now this dawning has reached me I also understand that this is nothing like as straightforward as ‘ah, got it’ and carrying on tidily from there. It’s neither ‘straight’ nor ‘forward’; it’s about touching the grain of something there but evasive, in blindness.
Thirty minutes a morning, five or six mornings a week, more consistently than not for the past eleven years, I practice yoga. Up until recently, my mental image of my yoga practice was that this regularity ought to guarantee some basic predictability of performance, with a slow and gentle orientation – given my general laziness, and shortage of ambition – towards improvement. Greater flexibility, better balance and strength, a steadily expanding repertoire of asanas. The reality is that my yoga constantly spirals, ebbing and flowing through gradations between two outlying states, in one of which I am alert and stretchy and can meet myself to be challenged and go further with ease, and in the other am stiff and blurred and wobbly, as if submerged in stagnant oily water beneath the surface of myself, barely able to lever my truculent body through the easiest, gentlest poses. The notional goal of ‘improvement’ makes less sense to me now (though I can in the same breath speak evidence of such improvement), than yoga as a mind/body microscope, the meditation that it is anyway, through which you learn to feel whatever place you’re at more acutely, and with more compassion.
So my regular yoga oscillates; in other pursuits with which I choose to fill my time there is little regularity to perceive or second-guess. I go like an adolescent through phases, pursuing drawing or photography or this writing (the thing I do most of) for a while with an enthusiasm that will stretch and inspire me to learn new things inside it, until one morning I wake up and just don’t feel like it, that a door has closed and I have zero energy and motivation to push it back open. Then in kicks the background anxiety that whatever it was will never come back, and that if I want to practice this thing as much as I tell myself I want to, then the least I can do is do it like my yoga, with habitual regularity, riding out the ebbs and flows. More often than not the motivation to do x will come back -when I least expect it. Some days I will sit at the computer for hours and peck at my Twitter and Facebook feeds every fifteen minutes like a battery chicken and fret about my mind turning to battery chicken feed (even though a good percentage of the incisive stuff that I learn about the world these days comes via Twitter); some days I am not even moved to switch the computer on, but will wander the city for hours or converse or concentrate on writing or drawing or reading a book, the old-fashioned paper-and-board kind. Statistical averages, the illusions of even regularity that they conjure – average number of hours spent on Twitter per week, average number of hours spent walking per week – are thin abstractions that mean little to me, because they don’t capture the quality of this shifting experience, distended then waned; nor how I feel inside each variation, nor what highly differentiated needs the constant changes might nourish.
If I were the kind of person given to keeping track, in theory I could keep records of my biorhythms and my menstrual cycle, take note of the weather and the changing seasons and the phases of the moon, note down what I ate and drank and how much sleep I got and whether I stayed unruffled or got caught up the stupid argument, and cross-reference all these with my work habits and mind/body yoga sensations and my capricious moods in general, to see if there is any pattern to be discerned. I don’t, though (nor do I question the value of such tracking for those inclined to pursue it). Not just from laziness, but because I wouldn’t know where to stop tracking, what might make a difference to the pattern and what not, since even the slightest unperceived butterfly-wing flapping across my tracks might in theory affect them. In yoga, for instance, I notice that how far I’ve walked, over what surfaces, and in which footwear will register as a difference in how I feel and move over the following days.
Also, there would be the severe temptation of prediction; of overconfidently projecting any patterns that emerged forward into the future. More than spoiling the surprise, the predictions would most likely turn out plain wrong. My experience is not of circles, where each stage recurs in a place that can be foreseen precisely – like the notchable waystations of solstices and equinoxes – but of uneven spirals that have their vaguely familiar comings and goings, but never on-the-dot predictability or repetition. Always some margin for variation, perhaps because of that perpetual unperceived flapping of things changing and so causing the spirals to change, or perhaps simply a mystery.
The tale of Euridyce in Greek mythology and the tale of Lot’s wife in the Bible are both stories of women lost because they looked back. Is there something else in these stories, if they are turned to face the other way? Dougald Hine wrote a blog post recently about glimpsing something of the patterns and story-figures that shape his own life, which are to do with improvising, walking backwards, gathering up fragments of cultural and social habit left behind in the past and seeing whether they can be reinvented for use in the present. One of the thoughts his post brought me was that these moments when you suddenly recognise a pattern in your own life have two edges. The trick, the hard part, is to note the patterns, and yet to keep improvising and not-knowing; recognising that perceiving patterns can be of help when looking back or navigating the immediate present, but if you take a pattern as read, try to project it too far into an unpredictable future and walk into it, you will be lost. Something will change, throwing out the design you thought was there; some unforeseen miracle or misfortune, some butterfly previously absent, or not perceived.
The uneven spiral of my life is its default, what I tend to settle into anyway, in the absence of strong external or internal pressures to do otherwise. Observing it, to the extent that it will reveal itself to be observed, I wonder more deliberately about the depths and twists of learning to work honestly with this pattern, of adapting to it whatever work I might in future choose to do; or consciously choosing the kinds of work that flow most easily with it.
The wondering comes because I’m approaching a blind curve, around which those decisions will start arising, and while there’s no predicting exactly what they are or where they might take me, I am beginning to touch, in this dark, an evasive grain to go with.
Today there’s one month to go until the second Dark Mountain Festival, Uncivilization 2011, gets underway at the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire, over the weekend of 19-21 August. My ticket is booked; I’m getting excited and looking forward, at the same time reminding myself to keep an open mind and heart for whatever might unfold.
This year’s curated programme strand is taking a ‘less-is-more’ approach: a mix of talks, conversations, workshops, readings, music- and performance-making weave together, and around each other, the cultural and practical dimensions of the Dark Mountain Project. What other festival, indeed – as Dougald Hine writes in his guest piece on the Festival for the Transition Network – features a scythe-wielding poet, an ex-banker proposing the idea of a mortgage strike, and talks on the future of universities and publishing alongside workshops on foraging and wild poetry? There’s also plenty of free spacetime designed into the weekend, for the incidental meetings and nourishing conversations that are so vital to the Project’s ethos, as well as a dedicated space for on-the-spot offerings by festival-goers.
Some of the items on my personal not-to-miss list are Tom Hirons’ storytelling on Friday night, the Collapsonomics panel, and the opportunity to grow my foraging skills; my one firm commitment is having volunteered to dive headfirst out of my comfort zone and join the chorus – which mercifully (for you) doesn’t involve me singing 
– for the performance of Liminal, curated by Dougie Strang, on the Saturday night. And most of all, I’m looking forward to encounters and conversations with fellow Mountaineers, to reconnecting with some of the folks I met last year; and most especially to getting to know as flesh-and-blood people all those whom I’ve come to know through social media in the meantime. Woven into the Festival’s spirit this year is this timely and welcome call from Eleanor Saitta, to play with the social rules of how we meet and converse with others, to consider how we might dismantle the invisible walls that create inclusion and exclusion, feelings of ownership shadowed by those who feel left out.
Attending the Dark Mountain Festival in Llangollen last year was a transformative experience for me; which I wrote about here and here. Re-reading these posts now, I’m honoured and touched that they’ve reached a wider audience and connected to others’ experiences of encountering the Dark Mountain, in Wales and elsewhere; I’m also genuinely startled (even a bit unnerved) by the level of heartfelt candour and self-exposure in those posts – startled by the extent to which the experience of last year’s Festival took me out of myself, pushed me to express things and write in ways that normally I don’t.
Approaching this year’s festival, which I’m doing while slowly reading and savouring the second Dark Mountain Book – a longer response to which I’m hoping to offer as a Part 2 to this post – I come back again, as others also are doing, to what Dark Mountain means to me. Why it’s become so important and feels so essential; even though, like Rima Staines, whose enchanting artwork graces the cover of Dark Mountain 2, I’m hard pushed to put it succinctly into words. There are the clear questions and preoccupations: ‘what do we do after we stop pretending?’, ‘what are the new or old stories that might help us live well and navigate through a coming collapse?’; but embracing those and other questions, and all the ways in which they might be answered (or simply lived with), is the sense of Dark Mountain as a place. A place, and a journey. Rima’s words describe so well the tangle and irresistible call of that journey – ‘a kind of steep brambly path towards some sort of wild and old truth which we are invited to head for as the citadels of civilisation crumble around us’ – while bloggers cricket7642 and eladise are among those who catch the hearthlike character of the place – the former calls it ‘an inviting, relaxed version of being in limbo’ – where people are drawn to gather and connect with like-minded others, sensing that there are other stories to hear and tell. A place – in a world still hooked on speed and false certainty – where it’s okay to slow down, to ask questions that don’t have easy answers, to admit that you haven’t a clue and that it’s fine to start from there.
This year’s Uncivilization Festival will be rooting this metaphorical place in much wilder, woodier and more intimate surroundings than Llangollen – here’s a little video taster from the organisers of what the Sustainability Centre looks like and offers (there will be locally-sourced vegetarian food and proper beer into the bargain).
It’s a venue that seems ideally suited to host the Dark Mountain, and I’m sure many of us are excited and intrigued to see what the guiding spirits of that place might bring to the proceedings. Out of the chaotic crucible of last year’s festival, and everything that was both magical and exasperating about it, Uncivilization 2011 will change and grow, shapeshift and unfold. I can’t wait to be there and see what will happen.
Tickets for Uncivilization 2011 are available here – snap yours up quickly because they’re selling fast!
