ADVENTURES IN A DIFFICULT WORLD. ( chapter one)

By Chris Whitley

Thu, 11 May 2006

2820 reads

Below, under, beneath, a subterranean ambiguous membrane pressed in all around us -- another space. beyond our twisted mortal coil, beyond the thin veil of consciousness. A space of possibility, distinct from this world as that between the pause and flight of birds. Only the wilful strength of those clutching claws of Tennyson's dreaming eagle, over viewing his kingdom from a high lonely crag, holds him from that other realm of majestic soaring flight!

CHAPTER ONE

Berlin

On this sunny Autumn afternoon I'm sitting looking at a tree from the window of the Trommel (Drum) -- my favourite bar in Berlin at the moment. I'm wondering why this chestnut tree is so green, while on both sides of it, as far as the eye can see, all the other chestnut trees are dry and golden-brown. It seems to have something biblical about it! Or, has this tree sought and found a deeper richer substrata?
Besides the owner, Rothe, who is somewhere around, I'm the only one here. The bar isn't officially open for another half hour, but it's no sweat. While we have very little, besides dope in common, Rothe and I get along well. And I'll build a pure spliff to smoke with him, while he's getting ready to open. And as if on cue, he suddenly appears from the back room with two green beer bottles in each hand looking like a magician about to tie a balloon-animal.
My name is Rig. It's not my real name. My real name is Stewart Rigly ' so, you can see where the alias comes from, and why I've stuck with this childhood moniker. For a 'Stewart' I've never felt like, and 'Stu', well, it just sticks in the throat. And still now at fifty-three, even my siblings call me Rig.
The year is 2000. Seven years ago I found myself here in Berlin after years of travel, mostly around Europe. This is the longest time I've stayed in one place since I sprang Blighty. Berlin has become a shelter for me. I finally found a city I could tolerate, and which tolerates me.... Here you can remain yourself, unlike many cities, such as London, or any other soulless British city, for that matter, where you must adjust yourself to it. Metaphorically speaking when you live in a City like London, you are either of the quick or the dead... While, on the other hand, a city like Rome is like a very elegant, dreamy elderly lady-- still beautiful and ravaging, who embraces you -- although a little too tight, and she dominates your every thought!
But it was to Berlin! Berlin! -- with its new come back clothes, but, dirty underwear -- where you have the room to be anything you want to be, and nobody cares who you are. Where, unlike Britain, nobody whips you every day for calling yourself an artist. Where you can, if you listen carefully, still hear the echo -- though faint -- of the Berlin of the twenties. But of course, it has rounded up its fair share of wannabes, phonies, posers, dot-heads, and paper noses. Though no more than anywhere else. And, to its great credit, it has also attracted a handful of thorough-going, free thinking bohemians, with their wild child-like eyes for those sublime sweet diamonds!
*****
One of the first things people say to you when you say you want to write is: know your audience. Shit! My audience is anyone who picks up this book. My audience are phantoms -- my audience is you! -- whoever you are -- right here now! Why be selective? Why limit myself? Why skewer my spectral reader with a narrow pointed label? I'm not about to write a few hundred thousand words just to find a market of phantoms. Plato must have pondered this when he threw his little gem into the pot: 'A teacher selects a pupil, but a book does not select its readers'. You know, true democracy is only in books...
So I've decided to give you my life... To sing my song. Of a journey of lives within a life. I don't know why I've chosen to write about my life at this moment, for I've never been one for shovelling backwards, and I've been expressing myself happily for years as a painter and sculptor. Although, I have been forever a great lover of books. They have always enthralled me, and sometimes a book can save your life! oh yes, with love, beauty, and truth.
I have never got over the magic of those little squiggles on paper, which when you look at them explode into meaning in your head -- suddenly you are within a consciousness of another, full of ideas and stories of that mind. A mind that may have lived a unique life in a different time. And when it bursts magically from the page into our consciousness it lives once again.... and again.... ad infinitum. 'Someone said, 'a book is a perfect object.'
Over the last months I've become aware something is happening with me -- I may be having another of my famous breakouts, or maybe it's mid-life crisis...
Three months ago I suddenly give up tobacco! -- smoked happily and conscientiously for near on forty years, and quit just like that! Now I smoke only the weed of wisdom in pure spliffs, or in my little old hash-pipe 'Pipi'. And another thing – astonishingly – I've begun regular jogging and swimming! This is like a fish who starts breathing air and takes up cycling! What is this all about? I mean.... I understand why I run, I want to keep fit. The same with the smoking. But what is this writing business? And why all these things together now?
There I was everyday in my studio, canvas looking wonderfully stretched before me, and me sat looking at it, and thinking about writing. Sometimes I'd play around with charcoal, pencil, paper, as you do, but nothing... uninspired! This had never happened to me before... But visually! my head was full of stuff... But I wanted to put it into words in black and white.
I found myself constantly reflecting upon my past; the memories were forcing themselves on my consciousness. And it began to feel somehow very important for me to write it all down. I have to guess it's a need to say something direct. Maybe my mind wants to catch all those memories I can't paint. Maybe writing is a sure way of being free of the power memory has over us.... Maybe writing it will be is a catharsis. 'Cause, somewhere within me there's a mouse of a mystery gnawing at the foundations. It nags at me; does it want to make sense of my past? Is that it. As if it were the riddle of the Sphinx, that solved, would bring down a great curtain, revealing a simple mechanism for a new and deeper understanding -- like the Rosette Stone that suddenly becomes readable.
But something is growing that insists on expression.... Or, have I merely and quietly gone to pasture...? I doubt it -- as I said, revisiting the past and chewing the cud, was never my cup of meat. So, I will treat the whole thing as just one more unfolding mystery in the on going adventure, which is the life of Rig Rigley.
And why not write my life down? -- for it can never be said it has been mundane -- I haven't left dull tracks. But, god's socks, I only hope I can discern an appropriate way to relate it to such a bunch of allusive and ambiguous souls as yourselves.
This is my first book, I must try to get it just right... I want to write the kind of book I like to read – pump some blood into it, make sparks fly and bring it to life. The instinct – as a painter – is to improvise – a wonderful state of mind -- and to kind of weave the readers into atapestry. But I ask for no more than the readers' reality of their own imagination.
I can't tell you about the people I have been without also telling you about the person I've become; am becoming, and my unfolding life here in Berlin.
So, here I am, in the Trummel writing, while killing a couple of hours before I have to go home to prepare the next English lessons. An hour of intermediate English with two very proper middle-aged East German secretaries: Antje and Anne, who, for one hour a week for the last three years, have been improving their English with me. Then, my very beautiful Russian kindergarten teacher, Tatjana will come, who is reading Breakfast at Tiffiny's. Which can be a bit like hard work for me -- her grammar is good, but her vocabulary is limited. So I spend oodles of time explaining things, while falling into her big, soft, brown, wonderful eyes. She's married with two kids!