The Space Needle and the Spire

Last night I dreamed I had a glass of wine with one of my new roommates. We climbed up many flights of stairs and passed through many strangely angled rooms until we were high up in one of the turrets of an old stone building. He pulled at the handles of the French doors and they swung wide to reveal a balcony. We leaned against the wrought-iron fence and looked out over the courtyard – our faces catching the rain. The grounds were veined with rivers, opaque and churning in the gray drizzle. One ringed our building in a sinister moat -- rushing up the walls with a spray that met the rain at our feet and receded.

“It’s not always a river,” my roommate explains – his accent German. “Only when there is rain. When there is sun, it is a park. Good for reading.”

“Okay,” I say, filing this as fact among the many other unbelievables that come with a new place. This is how German lawns work.

Then we are sitting in a music studio and he’s playing the clarinet and I can’t sing through all the bubblegum in my mouth… but that’s beside the point.

My apartment building

I wake up in the semi-dark and survey my plywood roost. In the black notebook by my bed, I jot down my dream in chicken scrawl and check my alarm clock. Noon. Oops. I turn back into my pillow. A disco ball sprays light on neon branches behind my eyes – a ghost image from the night before. It’s tempting to sink back there, but the guilt’s taken hold. With a groan I stumble down the narrow ladder from my lofted bed.

I don’t live in a tower, but my legs burn by the time I get to my floor and my roommate does have French doors that open onto a small balcony. The building is a stately brick and concrete holdout from 1884. Its gray façade is cracked like a desert floor. The large vines trained up its sides, faded trompe-l'oeil molding, and gilded stairwell mirrors lend it a castle-like appearance.

Our flat is one floor. Eight bedrooms are built out from the sturdy walls with simple beams and plywood. There are few right angles. It’s a home-improvement project without a master plan. Layers of additions perch awkwardly one atop the last. The bedrooms curve around a common space with a King Arthur-style picnic table in the center, built to seat fourteen. The shelves lining every wall are brimming with glass jugs, tubs of grain, dishware, electrical wires and spices.

My room has a playful quality to it. Our critic in residence at MICA stressed the importance of play, especially for artists. It exercises your creative muscles, setting boundaries to expand into and resist. The stakes are lower, failure is more fun and the possibilities of actions and consequences aren’t confined to the ‘real.’

Worktables run the length of my walls – the rough kind that you can really work on. A claw-foot ceramic bathtub on wheels lives under one. My bed is like a kid’s fort – the sheets were designed for a young boy with red and blue shapes. The duvet cover is slightly too small for the duvet and the duvet just a tad too short for my legs.

Fernsehturm

I spent part of today making pilgrimages to the two towers I had seen when walking Berlin. They stood out in my mind as two city sentinels -- one futuristic and one medieval – watching over two very different neighborhoods in the city. The Fernsehturm (television tower) in Mitte and the Wasserturm (water tower) in Friedrichschain. Technological and elemental. Sci-fi and fantasy. Both out of this world.

We like to climb towers to get oriented to the surrounding landscape and gain perspective on our relationship to it. But we don’t always like what we find up there – sometimes the height makes us dizzy. In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, (the definitive source on any kind of travel) a capital punishment on one planet involves showing someone his size relative to the rest of the universe. Strapped to a state-of-the-art super planetarium, his mind is blown as he shrinks and shrinks in comparison to the ever-expanding space.

Anselm Kiefer often uses an attic in his work to connote headspace. As with many other artists and writers, for Kiefer the different levels of a dwelling correspond to different parts of the body– the basement represents our base animal instincts and a tower is a space for our philosophical voices to gather.

Wasserturm

Towers are a staple setting for fairytales. Somehow, it’s always a girl who is locked up in one. Often, such as in the Grimm’s version of Rapunzel, she is not kept there out of ill will, but a desire to separate her from the rest of the world. Parallel to those in an extended sleep, she exists in a state of arrested development and innocence. But even though she's not mistreated and has a great view, she always wants down. The story can only progress when trouble finds her (usually in the form of a man), she gets her hands dirty and moves on. Rapunzel is caught trying to escape, beaten by the sorceress who held her captive and abandoned in the woods. Her prince is thrown from the tower and blinded. It is years before he stumbles upon her, now with twins, and they reunite in the forest.

Maybe it makes sense to seek high ground when you first find yourself in a foreign land. A good defensive strategy for sure. A safe but lonely place. But I’ve read enough fairytales to know girl can’t stay up here forever.

Fernsehtum seen from Friedrichschain