Urban Exploring: Sober Thoughts On A Brewery

 

Rolling around Schoeneweide, again, I notice a gate open at the old brewery. It looks like a host extending a personal invitation to come in and look around. 

Much obliged if I do...

Eyes gazing upward of piles of rubble, grazing lofty, grandiose walls, all faded formidability that waits but never gives up its stature. 

What is it about this delirious, valueless space, that keeps my mind straying off track, returning to center, re- balanced?

Drawn into halls and bays that are  grandiose, soaring, extravagant as they are abandoned and unkempt. Like a pebble strewn beach or an overgrown field, this building needs nothing but the elements and awareness to sustain it.

 

The structure itself is actually formed of art. It's a very Berlin approach, the accidental breach of order spilling colour from every molecule of the city. No new beginnings or means to an end, just an eternity of mutual need.

Spaces needing souls needing a space. The purest objective of all. 

[Thinking of souls: I pass a striking skull script in the dark, gleaming yellow]

An accidental gallery,

validated by the present. The idea that there has to be a curator, a benefactor from the exchange - a third party - is, in itself, forced. The tension it creates falls away in here. 

Another heresy not found in nature, absent from anything people have left behind.

Sparrows don’t turn a profit for the plants they eat. Worms don’t turn a profit for the soil they devour. Dropping the seeds of life in a new patch is enough to sustain the cycle of plenty. We alone have been taught to forget this through Pavlovian lessons repeated daily - training us to seek meaning at the expense of inborn grace.

Endlessly chasing a flow that we break 

with every pre-planned act.

Maybe Berlin is a preview of the end of the world, and that's a part of its mystique. Think Sao Paulo or Detroit. Maybe... people want to see what they’ll miss when the Earth returns to an authentic state they were unable to attain, despite their relentless, stampeding pursuit of it.

It's more rewarding to exist / explore in this derelict brewery than in any new place built with ‘purpose’ in mind. 

“Our house is on fire”: and people in burning houses often pass away in their sleep, don't they? Snug in their misplaced trust. Is that why I'm having these thoughts in a GDR brewery, a decorated temple to man made amnesia?

Rising rainbows, drenched in shadows; they remind me of a Minoan temple that I saw recreated in a documentary, one time. It had these hinged windows that the priestesses would open up at dawn, let the light from the waves on the nearby sea zigzag in, splashing playful patterns on the walls. 

The experts revealed that these were enhanced by coloured glass and stones set in sconces. The earliest lightshow known to man was made by... a woman. Typical.

In these dark rooms, we are temporarily the elements’ creator, maker, manufacturer… and we’ll do anything to sustain that illusion

even destroying their beauty to construct more walls around them.

But why, for all these millennia, have we sat in the dark, waiting for beauty to come to us – so we can harness it in perfect mechanisms that only we can affect, alter or create? Are we embracing what we admire or just using walls to exclude whatever fails to admire us back?

 

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A giant figure on a wall in the yard appears to be holding a smartphone. I name him the Lonely Giant in my head. Like a big, outsized “me” that we have all created, looking down at a miniaturized world all day,on tiny screens. 

'What kind of giants are we that can’t control such a small universe?' We think, silently, frantically punching more buttons. As if speed can make up for our sense of lost direction.

The West is a lonely giant: dwarfing and overshadowing what it only ever wanted to engage with.  But maybe all it ever wanted was to have the world in its arms: not at its fingertips, nor at its feet.