While trying to find and apotheke that sold the type of face cream I wanted, I began wandering aimlessly, and quickly the area around Schillingstrasse became foreign. Gradually the Turkish neighborhoods started taking on new forms. Russian started popping up more frequently, and as I strolled through Gorlitzer Park an attractive black man started talking to me in Spanish, and I got to brush some of the dust of my first secondary language. With the the evening starting to set in, clamoring could be heard from the Dunmore Cave Pub as they got ready to open. More languages besides German started to fill the air, and a woman with a massive half wolf-looking dog waited at the corner with me. As I wandered further it was becoming readily apparent that no more apothekes could be found in the area. Though the search was a bust, I did encounter plenty of new places, met quite a few interesting people, ad found a delicious-looking Italian food restaurant. If I can find my way back there, I will definitely come visit again.

PsychischBahn

I challenge you to, at some point on this entire trip, from here to Istanbul, take a few moments for a few days to practice a bit of mindfulness regarding memories. We are currently in a place that most of us have never been, yet any spot in Berlin, big or small, can hold a small memory we thought was lost.
This is important to me//has taken a while for me to flesh out because it’s taken my own memory mindfulness to create. I have a lot of repressed memories–a lot of my childhood is absent. For some, remembering is the reconstruction of past selves, ghostly layers we can superimpose upon ourselves. For others, it’s a source of pain, a visceral rush of a completely inexplicable feeling that transports us elsewhere, all in the context of a big, beautiful, old, confusing city.
I challenge you to trace the faint impressions that return to you as you, for example, sit on a bench in Kreuzberg, or stand on the U7, or walk by the canal. Look out for the things that wash up, and jot them down.
When you are ready, sit down with your notebook and your computer and put them up, and then accept the ride it offers you. Take a trip through your own Psychic Self, in this dear Psychic City.

I know it’s overdue and I know there’s a chance that nobody will do it, but you can count on me to do so.

We carry inside ourselves more than we know at any given moment. We carry inside ourselves liminal tunnels to places unknown to anyone else. Can you crawl through them?

Choose a district of the city (stadtteil) that you have not yet spent much time in, or even yet visited – consult your map and …

Tempelhof Airfield of Vision: a game of Musical Views
Site: Flughafen Tempelhoff
Supplies: water & maybe some food for a shared snack

Groups of 4+ or the whole class if we can swing it

Meet in an open area of the park. Spend a few minutes orienting ourselves and each other to our surroundings by pointing out the directions, familiar landmarks, neighborhoods, the directions of our host families, the sun, the moon even, anything.

We will mark enough positions on the ground for everyone present. Four positions will turn toward each quarterly direction (north, east, south, west) and away from the group, the other positions will have variations of our class community involved in the field of vision.

Each of us takes a short turn trying out each perspective trying to pay attention to the shifts in thinking, mood, senses, judgments, needs, comfort, confusion, interest, anything again. I’ll keep time. The exercises ends after sitting with your original viewpoint for the second time.

This is a Psychic City assignment both Kate G. and I came up with. Kate is working on translation and I’m working on aesthetics and we thought about how to mix the two. I’ve been thinking a lot about the illusion of art and ideology and how the ideological message in artworks can never posit themselves in any sort of “pure” form – this relates directly to attempting to understand the proposed “meaning” behind a work when translating. We’ve discussed that these are two very similar mental processes.

The Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937 (hope y’all read your German history books) showcased art which had been labeled as deviant, essentially. Our assignment is going to be finding a piece of art by one of the artists whose work was displayed at the exhibition and:

1. Write a poem/prose/a short essay/make a drawing translating your experience of the artwork.

or

2. If you feel that you don’t know how to find any one of these artworks, find a piece of art which you find could be potentially deviant (if you believe in that sort of thing – if you don’t, pretend you do) and then do number one.

A helpful link:

http://www.listal.com/list/degenerate-art

This PsychicCity experiment will not be too hard, but it does have a couple steps to it. First, make your way to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche, right outside the Kurfürstendamm stop of the U9.

Do not listen to music (or whatever) on your way there.

When you arrive you will see a round, modern-looking building, an obviously old and war-damaged building, and a tower which is under construction. First stop is the old one. Inside there is lots to read about the old church, how it was destroyed, restored, etc; don’t read any of that. You can come back after if you want, but for now don’t read anything that isn’t carved in the stone of the place. Just walk around (as much as you can, it is small and there is bound to be some other tourists there, though there were not many when I visited), look at the engravings and sculptures, and write down some observation, quote, or whatever. Something short. Don’t, for the love of God, buy anything. Near the statue of Christ there are devotional candles, think about something you want and light one of these off one that is already burning. Do not use a lighter. You can give a small donation if you’d like but it’s up to you. God doesn’t care about donations.

Next, walk over and into the sanctuary (ie not the tower, which is some kind of hippie store or something). Find a place to sit. Not in the back or completely off to the side; somewhere you can see most of the space, and where you cannot feel hidden. Set down your bag, take off your jacket, and sit. Breathe. Don’t do anything until your heart comes down from travel-mode, and your mind stops thinking about what you’re supposed to be doing here. Look around you and rest. When you feel settled in write something. It doesn’t matter what you write–don’t try to be profound or clever–just fill up a page of your notebook. Then go to the devotional candles over to the right and think about something new that you want and light another candle (again, no lighter). Stand, sit, squat, or kneel and watch your candle for a minute. Breathe.

After this, find a spot in the platz outside and sit and watch people for a minute or two, and then write something else down. Now you are done and can go read the historical information if you want, but you are expressly forbidden to buy anything here, nor can you put on your headphones until you get home. When you do get home, type up what you wrote in each of the three spaces. You are free to add to it or edit if you want, but don’t feel like it’s supposed to be anything. If all you wrote was a grocery list, or the lyrics to TLC’s “Waterfalls” then cool! Post that!