One year on (Part Two)

Moving to Berlin was such a monumental adventure that as soon as I arrived here I was determined to record every last detail.  As part of this project I started my blog and began keeping a diary.  However, the diary didn’t quite work out as I’d intended, becoming merely a bland and neutral list of things I’d done.  A typical entry is this, from last November:

Monday 25^th – Start of the Christmas markets – cold crisp weather.  Bought some DVDs from the bargain boxes outside the shop on Schönhauser Allee.  Wandered down to the market at the Kulturbrauerei, & had flammkuchen from the man in the funny hat.  So delicious, especially with the fairy-liquid coloured garlic sauce.  Stopped on the way back for coffee at Atopia.  Think the wintry weather has finally rolled into town. 

And this, from July, is no better:

Sunday 6^th – Baking hot.  We walked down to the Mauerpark, loped around the flea market then down to La Focacceria for a couple of slices of pizza.  Bought a bottle of water in Gleimstrasse and poured some over my head just to cool down.  In the evening we had a few beers at Wohnzimmer, sitting outside. 

It’s hardly Samuel Pepys.  All that my diary is able to tell really me is that on a particular day I’d been in a particular bar or café or walked down a particular street, with a few mentions of the weather thrown in.  I have attempted to address this by writing more fully about my day to day experiences but I wonder if it’s even possible to produce an accurate account of something while you are actually immersed in it and whether it might only be later, when you are able to properly reflect, that you can begin to deal with it appropriately. 

Another reason for my lack of productivity in this could also be that I’ve been having such a bloody good time.  Philip Larkin once said that happiness ‘writes white’, that it produces only empty pages.  It’s certainly true that I can always find plenty to say about my more negative experiences while trying to write interestingly about the brilliant stuff is often just beyond me.

Part of the problem might also lie with Berlin itself.  Back in June, I went to hear Rory MacLean discuss his book, Berlin: Imagine a City.  One of the points that came up in the discussion was the difficulty of writing about the city, as though it were somehow evading attempts to commit it to paper.

But whilst my ability to write about my life in Berlin has been somewhat inhibited at times, my creative imagination has flourished.  Besides focusing, often manically, on the various fictional pieces that I’ve been working on for years, I have found myself writing down some of my experiences as though they too were events in a fictional narrative.  Approaching it this way, treating myself as a character in my own ‘story’ and creating fictional counterparts for the people I’ve come to know, has seemed a much easier undertaking.   I’ve tended mainly to do this when I’ve had my more unusual or disorientating experiences so these accounts often have a darkly comical feel.  They also amount to a sizeable narrative that bears only a passing resemblance to the characters or events that inspired it. 

It’s very unreliable as a memoir but maybe in producing it I’ve inadvertently dug the foundations for my epic Berlin novel?