In the southern part of Berlin, there is a nature reserve. It’s more like a ‘nature assertion’ though, because it is a bright green, wooded place of birdsong that has grown over an old shunting yard.
At the entrance, some of the old structures remain: a water tower, that half of the old shed that wasn’t bombed in the Second World War, a bridge, and a steam engine from the 1920s.
You only walk on paths here, some of which were made by pouring concrete between some of the old tracks, while others are steel grids floating above the ground so that the grass can grow beneath them. This is so that you don’t disturb the wildlife.
The last passenger trains used these tracks in 1952; the last goods train in 1969. And then the place was left to languish. In the nineties, there was talk of reclaiming the area for development but an effort by citizens won the Südgelände for preservation. A black-and-white aerial photograph shows the scab of human activity on the skin of this 18-hectare patch of earth around eighty years ago, and then a colour one shows the green skin of nature’s fix in recent years.
The place is full of butterflies and crickets and grasshoppers and mantises and ants and worms and birds and owls and squirrels. As we were coming down an overgrown path, I saw in the distance a twitch of movement and I stopped because something was watching us approach. It was too shadowy to see properly and when I took another step, it up and headed into the undergrowth. It was a fox. Skittish and wild. Not like the ones I’ve seen in London that look like they’re one minute away from knocking on your door to ask whether they can take the rubbish out for you.
This was the place Sam took me for my birthday last Friday. A walk among ruins. A shower of chocolate and books could not have made me happier than a walk among ruins. Ruins are a magnet for me, and the more recent, the more magnetic.
The false ideas we have of immutability and our own immortality is so compelling, and to see those ideas crumbled and overgrown, to step over the moss and sprout of natural reclamation, is like sitting under the Milky Way in the wilderness on a moonless night – and from there you can fill in all your own cliches about feeling small and humble and grateful to be alive for less than a flicker of a second of eternity.
All men take a secret delight in beholding ruins. This sentiment arises from the frailty of our nature, and from a secret conformity between those destroyed monuments and the fleetingness of our own existence.
(François-René de Chateaubriand in The Genius of Christianity
‘Hyperart’ and the hyper-useless
Yesterday I was walking with a visiting friend on the North side of the city, when she stopped dead in front of an ornate green contraption on the side of the road and eloquently said, ‘Huh?’
I was able to give an explanation, which made me feel like quite chuffed, because I seldom retain details that make for interesting spice in conversations nor am able to give explanations for things I know. Generally, Sam provides the facts and I provide the murmurs of awe and appreciation. But in this case, I was able to say, unequivocally, ‘water pump!’
There are around 2 000 of these fantastical beasts around Berlin, and the most fascinating thing about them is that they are not monuments to nostalgia, but actual working water pumps, which my friend discovered when she began to pump it.
They can be used in emergencies. Which is why they are disqualified from being what the artist Akasegawa Genpei called ‘hyperart’.
Genpei said that the useless relics that remain from the built environment become art. They weren’t made to be art, but they become more art-like than art through their uselessness. These little leftovers are called ‘Thomassons’.
Since Sam told me about Thomassons a few years ago, I spot them everywhere and try to work out what their function used to be. Thomassons fall into the emotional categories of both ‘ruins’ and ‘art’ for me and are an intense private pleasure in my meanderings. Once you start seeing them, you can’t stop.
Anyway, the green Berlin water pumps are not Thomassons because they still pump water. But they don’t quite fit into the often boring category of ‘city furniture’ either because, like so many built things in Europe, they are ostentatiously decorative.
Come virtue signal for me
I’ve been filling my brain things that have to do with – try not to roll your eyes – self-discovery.
We are so surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of positive psychology on social media, that it’s all starting to sound like muscular whoo-hoo, mostly because a lot of it is coming from the mouths of very butch, very fit men who look like they smell nice, and who have trillions of followers, trillions of muscles and, they claim, trillions of cash. If they added some candles and incense, and did their Canva slides in a loopy font, they would sound quite a lot like the kind of people whose signature social media styles include pictures of them standing one-legged on a bejewelled bare foot in a forest, wearing a kaftan, and with their hands in prayer position.
Despite how it sounds, I’m not really mocking either category of self-improvement character. Archetypes – and stereotypes – are useful shorthand we tend to default to, and I’m all for people improving themselves so we can fix the social order and put the brakes on environmental destruction.
So (wow, digression much?) here’s why I’ve been reading things I don’t usually read: I’m considering studying or retraining.
In trying to imagine a life entirely different to the one I already lead (which, I rather like, it must be said), I get sucked down all kinds of rabbit holes. Like discovering my ‘signature strengths’ after watching this video about why virtue ‘is the key to happiness’. (If ever there was a clickbait phrase in headline writing it is ‘why X is the key to happiness’, but the video comes down strongly on the side of science and research, so don’t knock it too hard before you watch it.)
Are you dying to know what my signature strengths are? Cos I’m dying to tell you. So here you go:
Creativity
Curiosity
Love
Humour
Perspective/wise counsel
Of these five, three fall into the wisdom category. Try to make that sexy in social media without slipping into the pneumatic tube of fake fame – ha!
If you want to know what yours are, here’s the link. And yes, of course you have to fill in your email address, but your deal with the internet devil was sealed long ago, and the organisation the website belongs to seems above board (I checked). So, go on.
Let me know if you do it and what you thought of your results. I am inviting you, in fact, to virtue signal to me. I want to know what occupies the top range of your righteousness scale.
What has occupied me
We went to Tai Chi in the park again on Monday. The fattest purple-est earthworm crawled over my foot causing me to make loud, embarrassing sounds of revulsion and causing everyone in the circle to pause mid-slow-mo hand-circling to gawk at my foot-flinging dance.
I’ve been reading an entertaining book called Cleaver by Tim Parks, which I picked up for small change. Rory and I went to St George’s, an English secondhand bookstore, while he was in Berlin last week. He bought me a small book of Zadie Smith essays for my birthday because he knows how I feel about her, and asked me to recommend where to start with Zadie Smith. I said I couldn’t talk about Zadie Smith and her husband Nick Laird in any reasonable way and that I had no idea what to tell him about where to start. A day later, I managed to wring a starting point from my the muddle of my admiration for the author, and referred him to the podcast where Smith reads The Lazy River. I also bought myself Ann Carson’s book of poems called Red Doc>.
One of my projects this year was to not buy books. I have failed.
I’ve been listening to the song that my daughter arranged my tear-and-laughter inducing birthday video to and which, truly, you must listen to, because it is beautiful, but you may never claim it as your song, because it’s my song.
It takes pride of place on my birthday playlist, which is called ‘Fiftyfuckingfive’.
Lots of love,
still from Berlin,
K.
TEAMWORK and ZEST are my lowest scores 😂
I love your writing SO much. Thank you