PILGRIM'S PROGRESS: 5/14/26
A GALLERY OF MY LIFE IN BERLIN
1.
Standing in the stairwell last week at my neighbourhood opera house, Neukölln Oper, which is more an avant-garde loft-like studio space, I think, than a real opera house any longer. Or that is what I experienced when I saw a Dutch theatre collective perform a piece called Noise in a huge open space on one of its floors.
This is how the production was described at the Oper’s website: “In an intensely immersive performance opera, born out of the urgency to learn how to navigate a world in collapse, the Rotterdam-based performance collective Club Gewalt asks: how can you re-adjust your senses under the constant static of information predicting the apocalypse? How do we give meaning to a future that doesn’t overflow with prosperity? Can we fall in love with being human all over again? And: is this the moment to find God? Cuz: never waste a good crisis. …. Imagine fluorescent lighting. Imagine a PowerPoint presentation. Imagine a young professional mom. Imagine a semi-intellectual seminar on recovering after a postnatal depression. Imagine an analog synthesizer on wheels. Imagine a musical song about your baby falling off the couch. Imagine the world collapsing. Imagine far too many words. Imagine far too much emotion. Imagine far too little hope. Imagine hope. … What starts as a hallucinatory seminar on how to overcome an existential crisis, ends in a cathartic submersion in noise.”
The voices were incredible - the dramaturgy not so much. All the members came out dressed identically in long red wigs and pantsuits and looked as if Julianne Moore were playing Hillary Clinton by channeling Maureen O’Hara for a targeted audience of those who, trust me, had never heard of Maureen O’Hara. I had.
Each floor of the stairwell at Neukölln Oper has alternating lettering. The one above and below this one in which I’m standing each has a giant NO, which stands for the the opera company but it also seems to be a counterpoint to this word, RISK, I was standing beside when the other one is looked at as a word itself and not a two-lettered acronym.
I took the “no” I said to my former life lived in another kind of floor-through loft filled with my possessions and, letting them go, used it as my cue to set out to live a life that others might look on as a risky one. But I felt the bigger risk was to stay and continue that existence as a non-journey into stagnation. That’s the risk of NO RISK in that stagnation will become confused with a desired stillness. I am on an ever-onward pilgrimage now in this simplified life to understand what it means to carry stillness within myself and not live any longer within my own stagnation.
In his book, By the River Phaedra I Sat Down and Wept, Paulo Coelho wrote:
“Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point everyone looks back – she will hear her heart saying, ‘What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage; the certainty that you wasted your life.’ …
“You have to take risks … We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. Every day, God gives us the sun--and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven't perceived that moment, that it doesn't exist--that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists--a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles.”
2.
I had brunch on Sunday with a couple of new friends. That’s film and theatre director and writer, Yony Leyser in the centre, with his husband, Philip, who is a doctor and GP here. Yony’s films include, among others, the remarkable documentaries William S. Burroughs: A Man Within and Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution (which its also a book.) His narrative films include Desire Will Set You Free. Yony has lived here in Berlin since 2010. And as an example of everything connecting, he is the son of an Israeli-Iranian mother and a German Jewish father. “Let’s stand in front of this Free Gaza wall,” he said on Sunday after our brunch to take this selfie which honestly could be just about any wall you point to here in overly graffitied and political Berlin, especially in Neukölln where we’d just eaten at Myxa. It’s a great little cafe but Berlin is packed full of great little ones. I even have a speck of my vegan porridge still on my lip because it’s a city, too, where vegan porridge is served on Sundays.
Burroughs:
“As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”
…
“Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency."
…
“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of true romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. this is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness …”
…
“You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.”
3.
The cat inside and The Cat Inside.
More Burroughs:
“The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow. The white cat is ‘the cleaner’ or ‘the animal that cleans itself,’ described by the Sanskrit word Margaras, which means ‘the hunter who follows the track; the investigator; the skip tracer.’ The white cat is the hunter and the killer, his path lighted by the silvery moon. All dark, hidden places and beings are revealed in that inexorably gentle light. You can't shake your white cat because your white cat is you. You can't hide from your white cat because your white cat hides with you.”
…
“A Nazi initiation into the upper reaches of the SS was to gouge out the eye of a pet cat after feeding the cat and cuddling it for a month. This exercise was designed to eliminate all traces of pity-poison and mold a full Übermensch. There is a very sound magical postulate involved: the practitioner achieves superhuman status by performing some atrocious, revolting, subhuman act. In Morocco, magic men gain power by eating their own excrement.”
…
“‘Are you Billy?’ I ask.
"‘I'm anybody who loves me,’ he answers.”
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