Monday, September 26, 2011

Devil’s Mountain


Far beneath it all lies a network of concrete hallways that spreads like fingers through the earth. Light can’t make it down there anymore and the structure would have collapsed a long time ago if it hadn’t been cursed with an invincible skeleton. So when bombing didn’t work, they buried it alive.

This was the college that Albert Speer designed for Nazi military technology and what they piled on its grave were the remains of 400,000 German homes. The Allies carted the rubble in 80 truckloads a day until the pile was the highest point in Berlin. It’s called Teufelsberg or Devil’s Mountain.

Kiefer’s words, “Over your city grass will grow,” come to mind. A hardscrabble carpet of green has managed to take hold above the stone. And on top of this, during the Cold War in what was then the British Sector of West Berlin, the Americans erected an intelligence center. Three bulbous metal towers loom on its summit. Three great eyes with satellite retinas were trained unblinkingly on the East. They’ve been abandoned since two years after the wall fell. Today their ruined shells peel like birch bark.

And this evening, on the very top of this many-layered place, a boy stands with a kite that stretches far up into the darkening sky.

I am here with my roommate. Helles beer (which means bright in German but still feels appropriate) in hand, we climb to the top for a view of the city. Around us everything that can be lifted is hoisted into the sky. Toy gliders, kites, remote controlled airplanes. A man reclines alongside his fuchsia paraglider and sews on another neon yellow triangle. I look out over Berlin, spotting the Fernsehturm (TV tower) that I wrote about when I first arrived and am able to spin the rest of the city out from there. The wind takes up the smell of hash that the teenagers use to gain altitude. High. The people have chosen to elevate this dark place and not look down.

It should be said that David Lynch tried to buy the land in order to build a Happiness College.

Sure, he could be here. Trapped with the rest of the damaged things in the underground pit. Dante’s Devil would fit the bill. Once in God’s favor, he tried to overtake the Lord and was thrown out of Heaven. The impact he made as he fell through the earth created 9 circles of Hell and stuck him in the deepest one. Dante’s Satan is a giant beast, trapped for eternity in a layer of ice that the slow beating of his wings continually refreezes. The others in his realm are frozen immobile, their bodies contorted as grotesque ice sculptures. The debris that was expelled from the earth when he crashed formed the mountain of Purgatory – as high as Hell is deep. A pile of rubble made from the consequence of great sin. Something to climb to get perspective.

Monday, September 19, 2011

She Taketh Away


Allison Fall performing in ANTINOMIES: GEGENSÄTZE at gallery OPEN on Sunday

I saw two performances at galerie OPEN yesterday. In both, women destroyed their work.

Madeline Stillwell broke through and demolished the white box shelter that she had built for “hibernation.” Allison Fall filled and stacked the porcelain dishware she’d cast until the pile was so heavy that each new plate broke the one underneath it with the bright scream of china. They climbed on top of their Towers of Babel until they laid them flat, and both creator and creation lay mumbling on the floor.

Madeline Stillwell performing in ANTINOMIES: GEGENSÄTZE at galerie OPEN on Sunday

Neither woman seemed to have much regard for keeping her body intact. Boundaries between work and worker were breached through Madeline’s covering herself in the clay that enforced her structure and gargling clay water. Allison covered herself and her sculptures in coco bean pigment and spit up porcelain goo. The body’s fate was locked in with that of the work and it was clear that the entropy of each piece would play out until there was no more energy to work through. When Allison sat high up on a column of shattering porcelain, I couldn’t help but gasp as glass and flesh came down in a tangled pile.

There were aspects of ritual in each – especially in Allison’s piece. She started in a pure white dress holding a cup up to us as an offering and prostrating herself on the floor. Before she took each new basin of liquid porcelain, she would hold it up as if in recognition of a sacrifice.

We could think of these artists (or artists in general for that matter) as the creators of their own small universes. The construction of the sculptures was the generative half of their duties and what we witnessed was the part where she taketh away. What was white and whole became sullied and oozing. We came full circle and were left to wonder, what goddess destroys her children?

The answer, of course, is most of them. Goddesses from all over, especially in polytheist religions, are not just the creators, but masters of destruction as well. I see Madeline and Allison’s performances as a rejection of the pure Virgin Mary style maker who is at odds only with exterior world evils, and relating to the complex feminine archetype of the goddess who deals in life and death and doesn’t always have her shit together.

Since we are in Germany, we can look to Freyja. She takes care of the love stuff, fertility and childbirth, but she also commands the Valkyries who chose which men die on the battlefield and watch over them in the Realm of the Gods. She is a warrior but often finds herself broken by the long absences of her husband and is known for crying red gold tears. To cope, she finds other lovers or shape shifts into different forms in which she wanders earth in search of him.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

You Can’t Take It With You

Ever met a Cephalophore? I hadn’t either until I happened upon one last week chilling with his angel posse on top of some griffins and a dwarf. They were on the façade of Notre Dame along with so many other miraculous creatures it made your head spin. Dennis (which is the name of this particular Cephalophore) looked quite contented, regal even, holding his head in his hands and looking down on me with a slight patronizing smirk.

The pagans beheaded this Parisian bishop on Montmartre – a sacred site for them that is now one of Paris’ bustling cultural hoods. Dennis was undaunted by this setback, however. He picked up his noggin and carried it for miles up to the top of the hill, preaching all the way. A pretty unique way to go, one would think. However, Dennis is in good company with a slew of other saints that took lifelessness on their own time scale. Some finished the passage they were reading before laying down to rest (true nerds, these). A young boy waited for his dad to get home so that he could bring the head to his mom for a kiss. I know these dead men walking were impressive displays of the power of Christian faith above polytheism and all, but I have to ask. What’s more pagan than that?

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Black Madonna

Last week my mom and I traveled to some of France’s hot spots – those places where people have been drawn for centuries. Power centers strong enough that just the mention of them floods the mind with romantic notions, visions of the moon seen through a knot of gnarled vines and grand palaces upholstered with deep plums and burgundies.


Paris is a gorgeous tangle of tributes to itself. Each one is an attempt to prove its particular love to the city. Navigating through the gem-encrusted sediment of all those monuments, architectural acrobatics and displays of power, as well as the buzz of the live hive that continues to build it higher, one wonders what’s beneath it all? What’s the source?


When you make your way towards one of the world’s great treasures, it’s hard to feel anything but the pace of the multi-lane tourist highway that’s been constructed to herd as many bodies to and from the site as possible. The roads you walk have been trampled flat by a constant stampede of people hungry for awe. When your turn comes, you buy a ticket, you approach said wonder and you have a small handful of seconds to be or to not be wowed before you are pushed out of the way by an entitled German spinster. But this is da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine! And I didn’t get a chance to see the brush strokes!


On the fast-track tour of world wonders, I find myself peering behind strips of loose wallpaper and squinting between fence rails to see how a night light animates a messy backyard. When you find the thing that makes your heart race, instead of scheduling a time slot to have that particular sensation, you don’t have to share the energy with anyone. You get to revel in the thrill of the hunt. There is an intimate trade of your lavish affections for its energizing spark.


The big attractions have to work so hard to please each of the thousands of pilgrims in turn, to still have something to give the last stragglers that run breathless though the Louvre at closing time. The Mona Lisa has to have such steely reserve to keep her smile steady and hold onto her secret even when, in the mid-afternoon’s cacophonous crowds and claustrophobic jostling, it would be such a relief to toss it into the sea of greedy camera lenses and be done with it. But she holds it close so that she can present it again the next morning, all shiny, dark and whole.


We took a train to the south through the French countryside and along the ragged, sun-soaked coast. I don’t feel like I got a particularly pure draught of the French landscape, since, when we finally offered ourselves prostrate to the sun, we were on a manicured beach where our moves had been choreographed to minimize exertion long ago. Plush beach chairs and shade-chasing umbrellas. Beautiful boys with trays of sweet liquors that asked you if there was anything else they could do for you. But I could sense the nature of the place lapping at the shores of all the landscaping and human niceties. It was there in the rocky shallows where the water rose from ankle-height to wrap itself around your thighs and take you down in seconds. You could taste it in the thick, savory brine of the sea.

I happened to be reading a novel where the characters were conducting thorough, in-depth studies of the gods, demigods and magic properties of Provence. This was very fortunate for me, seeing as though it made for much less digging myself. Because, let’s face it, the land is really rocky. And I was on vacation.


After a particularly rigorous period of field research and before they attempted an involved summoning spell of a local goddess, my characters took a vacation to France’s south coast. This meant that I had the extreme pleasure of floating in and out of their beach trip and my own. The quality of light in each and the unforgiving, pebbled beaches were indivisible. Topless French woman would walk onto one shore and lay down in another. I alternated from letting the waves hypnotize me and reading sentences like “(She) watched the sea foam draw webs and Hebrew letters on the surface of the water and then erase them again.” I fell back more heavily into my own beach chair when my rumbling stomach suggested that the local rose we’d been gulping down all afternoon hadn’t quite made it to my bloodstream, at which point I would venture out into the crowded, unedited streets for a glass of my own.

“Like wine, Provencal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.” (Lev Grossman, The Magician King, Pg 214)


Apparently there was also a strong thread of “mother-magic” in the region. Early stuff, possibly stemming from Cybele, Diana and Isis. There was a local goddess who reigned over the spheres of earth magic, sex and childbirth. Her face was always half in shadow. She was subsumed by the Christian Mary much later but not entirely diffused. The deeper the researchers looked into the old stories of the region, the landscape and its artwork, the more they saw her darker visage glow through Mary’s mask.

“(The) goddess dealt in gapes and olives, the dark, intense fruit of hard, gnarled trees and vines. And she had daughters too: the dryads, ferocious defenders of the forests. The goddess was warm, even humorous, and loving, but she had a second aspect, terrible in its bleakness: a mourning aspect that she assumed in winter, when she descended to the underworld, away from the light… A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.” (Grossman, 325)