Tonight's sky was full with clouds in enormous formations, like a map of Anatolia. Huge thunder clouds moved in from the northwest. They rolled in from the sea over central Europe to Berlin. The sky was a patchwork of light, the clear prussian blue of evening was accented with monoliths of white. Earlier, the clouds passed across the setting sun and glowed like immense chinese lanterns. Thunder and darkened billows still tower over the western sky where the sun dropped from sight. These clouds could be seen ringing out massive gray curtains of rain. Suddenly they were upon Berlin and I left the roof as the report of thunder filled the Hof. When the rain came it fell square to the ground, direct and uninterrupted. There were no wind blown torrents. It was like the watering of a garden and the plants were animated by the falling sheets of rain. Above the trees, outside my bedroom window, I looked down upon a rolling canopy of leaves shivering with the flood. In twenty minutes it was all over. 

 The S-Bahn Station at Alexanderplatz, the East's beloved Alex, had an other-worldly feel at night. Walking there was like passing into a caldron of time. Alexanderplatz was caught in a social vortex which accelerated one into a strange present, pulled from an even more inexplicable past. In my mind, I imagined I could reconstruct Berlin's past by observing the rails which passed through Alex. There was, not far from here, a station known as the Palace of Tears, near the once named Marx-Engels Platz, where DDR 'burgers' shunned by their comrades passed into exile, through the subway of the west. Further on, passing into the western half of the city, were the ruined tracks of the Anhalter Bahnhof, choked with a fifty year growth of white birch trees. 

There are tracks that parallel the Kiefholz Straße, near Treptower Park. These crossed a tressel bridge to reach the western bank of the Landwehrkanal and at various, more congenial times, transported coal between the two Berlins. The landscape there was desolate and barren. From the bridge one could still observe a row of steel lamp-posts which once illuminated the now phantom wall. Here one was a short distance from the vast dusty lot which marked the site of the Görlitzer Bahnhof. The place was haunted by the remains of a tiled pedestrian corridor, once interior to the now vanished structure of the rail station. The residents of Schlesisches Tor, my friend Ulla's grandmother included, would run to this spot and huddle along the narrow passageway, during the frequent Allied bombing of the city at the end of the war. Now the decapitated tunnel lies like an open wound across the face of this open stretch of land. Soon it too will be covered by one of Berlin's many layers. 

This is a city of phantoms. During the DDR days it was the phantom maps, with their grayed-out city core representing the forbidden west, that left no clues for the easterner of what to expect on the other side of the wall.Today it is the wall itself that has become the phantom, along with the procession of S-Bahn place names which have been banished as non-places: Dimitroff Straße, Marx-Engels Platz, Leninallee, Karl-Maron Straße, Bruno-Leuschner Straße, Otto-Winzer Straße. These are the fallen victims of cultural re-alignment. In Berlin the emotional landscape is hidden, like terrain under a new coat of snow. So much so that people can speak of a 'Mauer im Kopf', an intangible presence shouldered by 3.5 million inhabitants. The outlines of the recent past are similarly blanketed over. On the surface there remains a metallic calm which denies the turbulant past. The edges are still there but they are just below the surface, just under what one can see. Like the neon signs newly placed along the Karl-Liebknecht Strasse, which barely cover the faded signage of their predecessor, most buildings bear a palimpsest of the city's earlier tracings. Only someone who knew the nature of the city's scars could perceive the tenderness that was present in those places. Never tranquil, till the end of the world that is Berlin! Immer Unruhig! 

 What a strange metamorphosis! This energy 
which drives me to reject all that I have known, 
all that I am comfortable with, is insanity. I jump into this new world 
and find it entirely intact waiting for me to fill my place.  
How uncanny and almost haunting! Things really are bigger than the sum total of their parts. I feel I could have been here for years and yet? 
The world shifts and political empires rise and fall.  
The landscape changes and people move from place to place. What is it that guides the change, something which passes beyond consciousness?  
What a strange world of rich and diverse bounty.  
I came to the brink in New York, to the edge of the abyss.  
I hauled a friend in from over the edge  
and then by some virtue I won myself freedom. 
The 10,000 things all went flushing down the toilet.  
Cars, beaches, summer houses, theaters, drinks, dinners the whole 
world of it went out in a whirlwind of events. 

 I hear the fireworks outside and I scramble to get out and up high enough to get a view. I have to be fast. I rush for the ladder to the roof and being unfamiliar with it and its shakiness, I back off. I run into the street. I can still hear the fireworks around me, up high, but just out of view. I race to the corner where I surely could see them. As I arrive at the spot, I see the afterglow of the last shot. They are gone, the time is up. 

 SACKGASSE! I spent this night walking through Kreuzberg, from Sylvia's house along the Paul-Lincke Ufer eastward. The drizzle was just enough to moisten my forehead. As my mind wandered I began a long line of reflection. It had been clear to me from the start that there was much at stake in returning to Berlin: The state of my marriage was unclear. My life in New York was shattered and in some moments I even called my soundness of mind into question. But returning to Berlin was necessary. It was my re-awakening. There is passion here, the tempo of which brings on a fever in me. I have too much energy. I feel I can not extract myself from the force of experiences. I am caught in a stream of emotion and events. I can not sleep and as I walk off my insomnia my mind moves rapidly through the night. For a moment I stand at the Hobrecht Brücke. I watch the white swans glide through the evening water. Their phantom-like images are distorted by a winter breeze. The shadow of the bridge encases their reflection in a frame of darkness. The streets have been fairly empty and very quiet. This evening holds a looming potential. Above the streets the ardor of lovers charge the night air with sound. This drifts down from an open window as I pass. There is no end to my loneliness. It gnaws at me. I am losing everything I value. I fulfill a dream and yet the dream promises nothing. Emptiness. Soon another apparition will fill the void.