Like a dream. Like running through open space under a knowing Sky. Like silence—after a really loud life. Like a trance that enchants you. Europe. Like finding a corner of shade in a battlefield of blistering sun. Like sitting in it.
Spellbound.
If Neverland exists and Peter Pan still lives, then Switzerland must be on the way to Wendy Darling and the Lost Boys. Or maybe it's humanity's version of a land J.M. Barrie dared to imagine and to which we can only aspire. Maybe it's just the best version of it that we have. But it'll do, I'm sure.
There's a peace in Zurich that I have not felt anywhere.
We boarded the train to Landeck on a clear afternoon. Boys fiddled with phones and reflections in mirrors as I readied the camera for what was to come. Moving forward and sitting backward. Looking sideways while thinking straight. English before me and German behind me. Swiss German. Schweizer Deutsch. The kind that makes you stop in your tracks. Have I heard that before? Berlin, 2010—where the rubber meets the road and where a young Jew meets a young German.
Preconceptions. Like what about the past? And, should I really be talking to this guy? Or that girl. The one that turned me upside down and inside out, at a memorial somewhere.
Noises. Like the one we heard at the Barracks in Sachsenhausen that were barely audible. Spaces. Like the visible ones which weren't there. Well, where are they if not here? Stephan told us: the history of mass murder is the history of things you can no longer see. Oh.
But that stupid history. That stupid, stupid, stupid history. Who are you, anyway? And what have you done with half the world? Berlin, where it's blurry. Where Walls becomes Art after War becomes Peace, and where images flash before your eyes without asking permission.
Like a train bound for the mountains on the way to Neverland. Postcard mountains. The kind that make your eyes glisten in disbelief. That make you incredulous, but not enough to keep you from documenting the journey. Evidence. Do people really live up there? I asked. Green pastures. Steep hills. Remote cottages. But all the way up there? How do they get up there? Hold on to your children and belongings up there, please. And for a moment I wondered, who are their children? What are their belongings? And when the firewood depletes and the cool of the lake sneaks up from below? What then?
Europe carries little secrets on her back. They're too much for one generation to carry, and so we whisper them to each other in dark, brushed alleyways so that we won't forget what the cobblestones know. The cobblestones are shy and won't tell us much. But not the Stolpersteine—they're telling. Sometimes more than we want them to be. They're screaming. They're memory. And they'll be here to remind us when we forget. When our children become curious and we become tired.
Now? Now I’m in Austria. Where the sunlight breaks and chases. Where the mountains play a game with it and loop around the clouds they just fall short of. Forty German teenagers are currently on their way here from Munich. I hope they're as excited as I am. I hope we'll grow together and tell secrets to one another. About our identities, and about the future. About our fears and about our hopes. About the mountains, and about the clouds. And about who beat who when the sun came chasing after them with secrets from the past.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Time We Let Free
Fear is not the only thing that hides in closets. Nor are shadows.
Memories, too, hide in closets—masking as old, worn-out jeans and rumpled t-shirts. Memories we may at some point wanted to deal with, but want no longer. Maybe these memories are in fact fears, or maybe they are romantic imaginings we had in our youths but which we have tucked under our beds at 14 or 15 because we were afraid of some shadows haunting us in the form of ghosts.
We believed in ghosts, then.
But sometimes memories are long and gone, their conception far and before the time that is now our own. Sometimes memories are histories, whether real or imaginary.
And often these histories precede us. They develop in generations different in thought and influence than what we have perceived of as familiar, and have become emblematic of transformations we perhaps once read of in glancing fashion but know very little about. As it were, these histories existed before we knew what was or was not in our closets or under our beds: before we first donned our baby body-suits and our size-zero slippers with teddy-bear patterns; before we knew of girls and boys and crushes and heartbreaks; and before we could consciously be scared of anything, let alone shadows that creep around in the dusty corners of our bedrooms where sunlight is—at best—a casual visitor (intruder?).
Yet they implicate us. These memories bind us. Much like traffic lights do, and systems of governance. Beehives and the instructions manual for kite-flying. (And what to do when your string gets tangled.) The law of gravity and that of cause and effect. Frustrating yet steadfast rules of sport. Baking bread and braiding hair. Skydiving. Tap dancing. Tap water. Snow days.
And love. And hate. And hate out of love. And love of hate. And the kind of hate that really makes us love a person, even when all we want to do is let them go.
Yes, these are memories, too. Perhaps they are learned, but so too is the history of war and the history of peace. So is the history of everything in between.
They are unspoken ghosts—these stories and statutes and smells and smiles of yesteryear. And still, in the closet they lay. And under our beds. Alongside the old notes that we used to pass in class when we first learned the rules of engagement. What was allowed and what was less allowed. Flirting and playing and wishing and dreaming. Alongside the titanium tennis racquet in silver (which no one had seen, but us) and the deflated tennis balls with faded, dying print. Alongside the grade reports and the old CD's. Alongside the children's books and the decks of cards. Alongside our deepest secrets, which the sun told the shadows when they rendezvoused.
It's time we let free. That we learned how to disentangle the kite and let it soar with a wave of the wind—ride the shape of a cloud and maybe kiss a raindrop or two. It's time we faced history, and time we faced ourselves.
No, I'm not only talking about the bad history of the world. Also the good. The happy. The charming. The refreshing and the audaciously creative history.
Like that painting you made one day in 4th grade, came home—through the kitchen, up the stairs, into your room—and threw away for whomever would catch.
Like that moment in elementary, middle, or high school that you wanted everyone to see but which no one was there for.
Like that picture of how it could have been to feel the fountain's water splashing against your face on that immaculate summer day when her friends were playing outside—laughing, living.
But how you dropped it, once, and how it shattered.
And how a new picture, with a new fountain, with a new summer day, and with laughing, and with living, and with water—how that would have set you free, and still can.
Memories, too, hide in closets—masking as old, worn-out jeans and rumpled t-shirts. Memories we may at some point wanted to deal with, but want no longer. Maybe these memories are in fact fears, or maybe they are romantic imaginings we had in our youths but which we have tucked under our beds at 14 or 15 because we were afraid of some shadows haunting us in the form of ghosts.
We believed in ghosts, then.
But sometimes memories are long and gone, their conception far and before the time that is now our own. Sometimes memories are histories, whether real or imaginary.
And often these histories precede us. They develop in generations different in thought and influence than what we have perceived of as familiar, and have become emblematic of transformations we perhaps once read of in glancing fashion but know very little about. As it were, these histories existed before we knew what was or was not in our closets or under our beds: before we first donned our baby body-suits and our size-zero slippers with teddy-bear patterns; before we knew of girls and boys and crushes and heartbreaks; and before we could consciously be scared of anything, let alone shadows that creep around in the dusty corners of our bedrooms where sunlight is—at best—a casual visitor (intruder?).
Yet they implicate us. These memories bind us. Much like traffic lights do, and systems of governance. Beehives and the instructions manual for kite-flying. (And what to do when your string gets tangled.) The law of gravity and that of cause and effect. Frustrating yet steadfast rules of sport. Baking bread and braiding hair. Skydiving. Tap dancing. Tap water. Snow days.
And love. And hate. And hate out of love. And love of hate. And the kind of hate that really makes us love a person, even when all we want to do is let them go.
Yes, these are memories, too. Perhaps they are learned, but so too is the history of war and the history of peace. So is the history of everything in between.
They are unspoken ghosts—these stories and statutes and smells and smiles of yesteryear. And still, in the closet they lay. And under our beds. Alongside the old notes that we used to pass in class when we first learned the rules of engagement. What was allowed and what was less allowed. Flirting and playing and wishing and dreaming. Alongside the titanium tennis racquet in silver (which no one had seen, but us) and the deflated tennis balls with faded, dying print. Alongside the grade reports and the old CD's. Alongside the children's books and the decks of cards. Alongside our deepest secrets, which the sun told the shadows when they rendezvoused.
It's time we let free. That we learned how to disentangle the kite and let it soar with a wave of the wind—ride the shape of a cloud and maybe kiss a raindrop or two. It's time we faced history, and time we faced ourselves.
No, I'm not only talking about the bad history of the world. Also the good. The happy. The charming. The refreshing and the audaciously creative history.
Like that painting you made one day in 4th grade, came home—through the kitchen, up the stairs, into your room—and threw away for whomever would catch.
Like that moment in elementary, middle, or high school that you wanted everyone to see but which no one was there for.
Like that picture of how it could have been to feel the fountain's water splashing against your face on that immaculate summer day when her friends were playing outside—laughing, living.
But how you dropped it, once, and how it shattered.
And how a new picture, with a new fountain, with a new summer day, and with laughing, and with living, and with water—how that would have set you free, and still can.
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