Nature – URBAN LIAISONS

WELCOME TO MY URBAN JUNGLE

Every big city offers diverse hidden corners quite often disregarded and ignored. So here are some pictures from my home-town Berlin showing the steadiness and flexibility of nature in a great municipal area full of people, technology and traffic. This is even surprising me regularly and unexpectedly.

Though, wildness must be nothing strange in a metropole.

Still life with an occupied old wheelbarrow.

Plants as a very welcomed neighbourhood.

A weird view on the huge waste-power-plant Ruhleben

The stony ruins of the past provide a solid foundation of tomorrow’s jungle.

THE DESERT IS ALIVE

I made this photograph long time ago with analog technique in the Sahara of Southern-Tunisia during an oasis trip from Tozeur to Tamerza – still one of my favourite travel remembrances showing a single bush in an area of burst soil most likely due to more heavy rainfalls some time ago. When ever I watch this photograph again, the quite bizarre scenery reminds me of the power and resilience in life and nature against all the odds.

THE LAKE – A DAYDREAM

Now I am swimming again in the middle of Lake Constance and then suddenly I see myself sitting in a cinema and watching a puristic black-white picture where I am also swimming while trying to reach the shore there near the village Goldbach. In the cinema I am accompanied by my old friend little-Buddha, just 5 years old and already englightened by birth. Then I am moving to the projection room, and see myself sitting in the audience watching a film about me in the Lake Constance, and then I am plunging into the film and feel the cold water and the wind is heavily blowing from the landside making it difficult to approach anyhow. A heavily armed sailing boat with modern looking pirates is passing by and picking me up; the sailors are telling me not to be anxious until we finally reach the wellknown heathen caves of Goldbach, nobody knows for sure today who did construct them and why.

Heathen caves near Goldbach, steel engraving by Konrad Corrady, ca. 1850

SO JUST CUT THAT PLANT IN HALF!

“It’s no accident that we continually refer to ourselves as individuals: the term comes from the Latin ‘in’ (which here means not) and ‘dividuus’ (divisible). Our body really is indivisible: if we’re cut in half, the two halves can’t live separately; they die. But if we cut a plant in half, the two parts can still live independently, for the simple reason that a plant isn’t an individual. In fact, the right way to think about a tree, a cactus, or a shrub is not to compare it to a human being or any other animal, but to picture it as a colony. A tree is much more like a colony of bees or ants than an individual animal.”

from: Brilliant Green, Stefano Mancuso / Allesandro Viola, 2015, p. 36

THE VALLEY OF IGNORANCE (*)

And thus it happened in the land of the Saxonians in the big glacial valley long time ago that the native dinosaurs (dinosaurus saxonis) marched to the old city of Dresden in order to meet their unnoble companions. They fiercely trampled through the city and aggressively shouted “We are very hungry” although there was enough to eat for everybody. Those dinosaurs telling them that there was enough to eat were blamed as liars and traitors. And their well known slogan “Stop the migration of orientalist dinos for our homeland’s sake” was carved all over the country in trees and rocks although there lived only very few foreign dinosaurs (dinosaurus orientalis) all around Saxonia. So which disease had broken out in this naive valley? Was is just blindness or simply stupidity?

‘Dinosaurus saxonis’ watching the skyline of Dresden at 70 million B.C.

Wise dinosaurs examined this situation in all details and found out that the virus of xenophobia had affected a lot of the local dinosaurs. This diabolic virus induces to believe that all one’s unjustified prejudices are the only valid reality. The clueless being struck by the disease are then no longer capable to show any kind of hospitality or friendly and polite behaviour. With the inflationary spread of the virus these dinosaurs got more and more aggressive leading finally to the critical stage where acts of ruthless terror against foreign dinosaurs (dinosaurus orientalis) took place everywhere. The flames of this vicious fire jeopardized the well-being of all creatures, however all plants were resistent against it fortunately.

So the intelligent plants finally decided to produce their already existing anti-viral substance in high doses in their leaves. And because all local dinosaurs were eating them, the further outbreak of this diabolic suffering could finally be stopped with great plant-based efforts successfully after a couple of time. And in the legendary realm of the plants till today everybody knows this famous story from prehistoric eons. But beware, the virus has survived in diverse mutations till our postmodern digital times. So take care when you visit Dresden at a Monday evening near the Semper opera when the Pegida-Movement is distributing once again its mischievous populist poison.

(*) During the time of the German Democratic Republic (1945-1990) the area around the city of Dresden was as well entitled satirically “Tal der Ahnungslosen”, because radio and television programs from the Western part of Germany were not available there.

TRANSMUTATION IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH

Again we have to observe that megalomaniac leaders bustle about at the horizon and assure the amorphous serpents creeping over the streets that it would still be a grand creation to survive on these rails of civilization. A blotted vision attacks the alien visitor in a fever of amok: a false expectation and endless questions. So why should one still continue the decoding of the round-about in the interspace of opulent stoppers while copulating with the mimicry in legendary madness effects and all this just in order to get a further permission here in the globalized desert?

Stupid collapsing quant, because you only smell excitement behind the balloon where the mutants dehumanize riotings, but the silo remains stable in the molecular wind where the weird insight’s silver awaits the later coming invader. Dilettantes, your stirring must be louder than such a smelly metadiscourse. Filth must vanish under the slogan: One blight on the nation for everybody! Because now, it really becomes embarassing in Europe.

No illusion is capable to fake this universe – neither a symbolical reversal of a digital graphic nor an allegorical exaggeration at the banks of the revolt. The eternal shadow of ourselves sticks to us like death and reminds us to accept intensely the temptations of this myth because the realm of shadow can not be organized. In no hiding place this treasury can be revealed after the magic language of left places signified to give up the cool silence and to trust the spectacular wild paths leading finally through the foggy gorge and osseous labyrinth of urbanized and postmodern misunderstandings.

LOST CITIES IN THE JUNGLE

The Castle of Chichen-Itza, 1843, drawing by Frederick Catherwood

“In 1519 Hernan Cortez, the great Spanish conquistator stormed and took the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. He did not then, and he never knew, that it was built upon the ruins of the Mayan civilization. Five years later he travelled across what is now the little republic of Honduras, hacking his way foot by foot through an almost impene-trable forest given over to reptiles and insects and the odours of putrefaction. Had he turned aside from the path he was cutting, by only a fraction, he would have come to a little stream where he would have found in the midst of all this luxuriant foliage the ruins of what had once been a great city. It was the city of Copan, the chief light amongst others such as Tikal or Palenque of the Mayan civilization which existed between A.D. 176 and A.D. 620. They are still, far from all other human habitations, lost in the powerful tropical forest which like some sylvan boa-constrictor, has literally swallowed them up and is now devouring them at its leisure, prising the finehewn, close-laid stones apart with its writhing roots and tendrils.”

John Stewart Collis in “The Vision of Glory, The extraordinary Nature of the Ordinary”

Main Front of the Palace of the Nuns, Chichen-Itza 1859, photography by Désiré Charnay