Das Titel Foto hat mein siebenjähriger Enkel in der Tate Modern aufgenommen. Es passt zu meiner aktuellen Lebenssituation mich nach Innen auszurichten, denn ich habe ein neues Manuskript begonnen. Weg von den schnellen Überschriften und den Bildern, die mittlerweile meistens fake sind, zu meditativem Text. Warum ich schreibe? Es muss sein, gibt mir bei meinem Leben in vielen Plätzen Wurzeln.

ENGLISH

In der Tate Modern können Kinder ihre Bilder an die Wand projezieren.

Liebe Leser, wenn Ihr euch die Zeit nehmt und mein unten abgedrucktes Vorwort (Prelude) lest, wisst Ihr  was mein neues Thema ist.  Ich schreibe in Englisch, weil ich in dieser, mir doch fremden Sprache, mich nicht hinter Worthülsen verlieren kann. Bitte gebt mir ein feed back, wie ihr den Mut über mich selbst zu schreiben findet. Einfach nur ein paar Sätze.

Ich war 3 Wochen in London und bin jetzt in Berlin. Oh, wie gemütlich ist Berlin! Wie schön die schnuckeligen Läden im Prenzlauer Berg und alle reden mit mir. Da scheint eine andere Beziehung zur Zeit da zu sein als in London today. Und die breiten Alleen und die großen alten Wohnblocks, die gelben Blätter auf der Strasse und die gemütlichen Cafes! Die sind gut für den lifestyle.

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Warum sind die Menschen in Deutschland so alarmiert, wenn sie so entspannte Städte haben? Vielleicht haben sie zu viel Zeit sich Gedanken über eine untergehende Welt zu machen? Ja, das kann sein. Aber diese Gedanken müssen sich in politischen Aktivismus einbringen, oder solche Untergangsgedanken lassen, und das was schön ist geniessen und eine gute Energie verbreiten: Make love not war!’ – Immer noch ein cooler Spruch.

ENGLISH

Why are people in Germany so alarmed when they have such laid-back cities? Maybe they have too much time to worry about the end of the world? Yeah, that could be it. But they need to channel those thoughts into political activism—or let go of such doomsday thoughts—and enjoy the beauty around them and spread positive energy: “Make love, not war!”—Still a cool slogan.

Hier mein neue Arbeit in progress…

Work, buy, consume, die

The treasure inside / Being enlightened

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose…

Kris Kristofferson / Fred Foster, 1969

Prelude

I step down from the bus. Soft rain touches my face, and its drizzle paints everything with magic. The Rose Garden’s last autumn blooms shine a rare yellow, keeping the red hidden inside, as if the blossom’s secret were guarded. Walking through Hyde Park, I am in awe – how could I forget its vastness?

The Serpentine’s dark, warm Gallery space invites me in. The work of Amar Kanwar is on display. At the entrance is written: ‘Sometimes the future is the past, and the past is the present.’ I have cherished this sentence and  even started one of my unfinished novels with it, yet there lies a space or a realisation, marking the difference between then and now, which decides where we wish to drop anchor to just be. When we cannot distinguish what was from what is, time becomes frightening.

Half a century ago, I acted in a play here. I remember blue-eyed Pierce Brosnan, a young boy of barely eighteen years, focused on what a successful career requires; he remained a stranger to my mind, which searched in every direction to find its path. But acting with him was fun, even when surrealist director Jeff Nuttall’s chaotic ideas were too much for my nineteen-year-old self.

Being back in the Serpentine Gallery again after decades, I want to dive and get lost in the present, admiring the Indian artist’s work. Texture exposed to light, and a film about a professor dropping out of university to move into the rainforest and start living at the bare minimum in an old , discharged waggon. A theme that occupied me already way back in my first London days. Not the successful ones but those with failure are the key unlocking the wrong calculations of society. I once more hear a force calling: you carry the rebellious spirit and wish to a drop out! But where will be my place today? Isn’t the drive to conform to the dictation of a powerful few a giant wave overfloating all?

Leaving  the comforting vision of the artist’s inspiring work I face weather that had turned into a storm: How do I reach Notting Hill Gate? Most people have left and the lonely park reviles its inborn quietness with old trees and high standing grass as I walk up to Lancaster Gate. The rain is pouring down heavy now.

Gladly I reach the road to get into a bus, singing silently a song of the Incredible String band: ‘Things look great in Notting Hill Gate, we sit around and meditate, only you know the reason why, I fly in the sky so high.’ But what memory exposes is no longer here.  The place is touristy, hectic and the commercial world has taken over. I enter a big healthfood shop and long for our old unique healthfood shop back in the seventies, which sold goods without packaging and we believed in revolution through eating habits and lifestyle; now this modern shop offers more packaging and more advertising. The sloagans ‘Save Mother Earth’ or ‘Avoid wasting’ seem to be exchanged with ‘Enjoy now’ and ‘Take as much as you can from our offers.’ Though eating healthy is in vogue the question remains: Why to build a good body when the environment is polluted? Not only the air and the water are loaded with pollution, but also the vibrations in London are dominated by humanity’s hunger for sensation. Soaked throughout, I am full of questions.

To love London today is harder than it was then. Moments do exist were past, and present and future show as one inseparable unit and that might be happiness when a sudden feeling of  ‘this is home’, and  ‘I am rooted like a tree’ envolves. For such a strong sensation a relationship to nature is requiered. When did citizens of townships loose their understanding for a balance between the unnatural and natural?

This loss is something in my under awareness, fragments, but they all weigh heavy causing spells of melancholy.  It goes back to days in my childhood, when the radical change from natural to artificial living started. Episodes of then I carry like an unseen sack on my shoulders.

I was maybe nine years and roamed around with classmates in the Neckar valley behind our school in Wangen, a subburb of Stuttgart. I can still see the unkept old house standing like a leftover item, a slow mover in a shop, in the wild grassland of the riverbed. Someone said an old woman lives there alone, but she was not to be seen. Was she a witch? I was attracted to her and loved the space she lived in. Often, I stood aside and stared at the building, when the others played.

Noone else was allowed to build anything here as the whole area was kept uncared and was dedicated to the future progress for the newly planned harbour bringing ships from the Rhein. All this lovely spaces with beavers, and  birds, butterflies and long blades of grass, sandy banks and clear water will soon be gone was known to us kids. The fairy-tale spirit around the grey cottage, with broken shatters in this wonderful but negleted landscap was a place consecrated for decline.

A bit further up the river in Untertürkheim, the important people had already  tamed the river into straight lines, build big chambers with large landing places. The huge white fuel tanks were looking like spaceships, something not for the present, forms I was not accustomed to. Futuristic.

I never knew when they took down the house and where the old woman went to. I had changed to higher secondary school from Wangen to Untertürkheim.

Picturing the day when my father was taking my hand to explore the new harbour in Wangen,  were I once roamed around freely, I see us walking on an empty asphalt road witnessing many of the white oil containers and  Beton buildings in what was once the riverbed, our beloved playground. Even today I feel the pain trotting along next to my father on a broad build street for lorries, looking at this egg-white tanks, killer of the world of many species.  I can still smell petrol and dead fish along the straightened-out banks. Where there was sand nothing but walls out of cement. Our shoes stayed clean, but the memory can never wipe out the once living ground.

My father, looking at all this achievments, remained lika a stone. He showed no emotions and said not a word. Wether he thought of what he had lost in the second world in war in Kaliningrad, or wether he saw the tressures of the sandy beaches at the Kurische Nehrung, where he could pick up lumps of amber, all which was lost to him now being  a refugee  in Stuttgart, I was too young to find out. He must have been pressured by so much loss, beeing a communist and havind deserted Hitlers army in Russia, he must have been deaf and indiffrent to any loss and change. And he would have been full of suspect for the new capitalist uprise happening right in Wangen, the district district where he hoped to settle down and find roots again. All that was in vain. What for this progress, when human behavier can inflict loss to all of us and start a new war anytime? I could not find out what occupied his mind then. He remained an absent father, lost in his own loss.

Standing in Notting Hill Gate today, more than his fate or my own, I fear the loss, which will come due to  mens doing.  I greatly fear the loss humanity will face when defending believes and saying yes to more weapons and more destruction. And this comes with the complete disconnection to nature’s ways. Now the artificial is the hero.

The walk to the new harbour was probably the only  walk my dad took me along. On most other occations when my mother entrusted me to go for a walk with father, he would take me straight to the Wirtshaus to drink. I sadly sat there with broken fellows and their war stories. All drunken. Not knowing what to do, but feeling it was not right be there.

My father did not believe in building up anything again. He spend all the money my smart mother earned on alcohol till he could die of alcohol. Why do our politicians once more force their population becoming kriegstüchtig, prepare them to fight a war again? Its sheer madness: creating loss after loss, for nothing but gain for the powerful few?

 My mother managed to take me in the school holidays away from the fights over alcohol, away from my father, to the mountains of the Alps. There again I developed my strong bond to natural living. We stayed in a wooden house by a mountain stream, that whispered all night: I am alive. I am the spirit that makes things grow. Staring at the signs of the branches at the wooden wall I knew one day I will live in the wooden house, in a home  which will create a space for peace. I found it in Airlenbach im Odenwald. I had no idea that I would also return to London an create a home with children and grandchildren too.

Waiting for another bus, my coat wet and healthy groceries on my back, I speak to fate: Are you the mystery of our lives, or do you hold the unexpected that makes life worth living? I climb aboard the red double-decker, full of hope.

Now read my story.