Washing Away

I wanted to say something, but it became blurry. “Do you remember what we were doing between visiting the tower and having lunch?” I asked him. He thought for a moment, then shook his head. Nothing – blank – the memory of a moment just an hour ago was gone, for both of us. I wondered why it had slipped away. In front of us was the view of the large lake that we had been visiting for a few hours. Was it our fuzzy group brain, where conversations, thoughts, and stories melting into each other? Were we just overwhelmed? Or was the scene just too – too mundane? Too slick? Our thoughts just sliding away with nothing to grasp onto?

We knew that swallowed by the water, underneath the smooth surface lies the gigantic crater of a coal mine. I tried hard to overlay my memories of the mine and the view in front of me. Just like putting two old slides on top of each other and holding them up to the light. “You’re an architect, it’s your job to imagine spaces,” I told myself. It didn’t work.

“Where we’re driving right now, you can swim in twenty years,” our tour guide in the bus was explaining the coal mine, two days ago. I saw bushes and pipes and was curious to drive deeper into the layers of soil. I understood everything clearly. But the images of sand, water, villages, trees, and so-called landscapes that had to move and had be removed were, slipping into each other without making sense.

In front of us, the lake: Swallowed by the watery smooth surface, lies the gigantic topography, the relief that was carved by circling machines. Washed away is the rough sand, the rusty pipes, the dirty coal, and hopefully with that one’s own past. The offer is tempting: The lake swallows, and for the silent acceptance, there is endless vacation at the good old Ostsee for the tired worker. As smooth as the lake, so smooth will become the cycle paths (psychopaths), for rolling without resistance and without disturbance, where nothing sticks, no thought nor emotion, for eternal forgetting. The circles of the machine turning into circles around the lake into circles of the earth around the sun. For eternal energy provided by eternal sun beams hitting a clear and clean surface – once again. The water blue panels providing green energy just as green as the trees and leaves planted behind fences. Which just again keep inside what belongs inside and outside what’s supposed to be outside. Everywhere slick, slippery, smooth surfaces that don’t give hold to any thought, whichdon’t disrupt and don’t disturb – made in Germany.

The concept seems clear – another time another system. Everyone is nodding, looking at the plan, looking back to the lake, searching for the mine, but the memory already slips away.