The Instant by Amy Liptrot

Author:Amy Liptrot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

DIVING INTO BERGHAIN

June

Strawberry Moon

YEARS AGO, B TOLD ME that the best way to get through a crowd at a nightclub or concert is to dance your way through. The bodies around you will have more sympathy for a dancer – they’ll shift and accommodate, flex and bend – than for someone simply pushing.

I remembered that advice this midsummer, at the techno club, where not only were most other people intoxicated but were also speaking German. I was disoriented but the best way through my discomfort was to dance. On the dancefloor, I had the sensation that we were deep underwater, swimming in bass. The dancers were seabed beasties: crabs and urchins and anemones. I could luxuriate in the strangeness, in the beat, my arms floating up, light and smoke caught in the bubbles.

A lot of my twenties was spent in discos and bars and clubs but the nights got wilder then worse, and I ended up in rehab. I have not been back to a club for four years but, this summer, I planned a field trip. I would make a controlled scientific excursion to a nightclub. On the solstice, I would go, sober and alone, to Berlin’s famous Berghain, a huge techno club with 1,500 capacity in a 1950s electrical power plant, built when it was East Berlin, part of the GDR.

For the last three years, I’ve spent my time in Orkney. I spent my time there relearning the landscape and rebuilding myself: swimming in the sea, watching seabirds, taking boat trips to small islands. I went snorkelling and was amazed by what I saw in cold Scottish waters: exotic colours, brighter below the surface than above, and wonderful creatures, like sea slugs and urchins. I regained some wonder at the world and the sea helped me in my sobriety. Now, I want to apply the things I’ve learned about observing nature to the city and to people.

Berlin is 600 kilometres from the ocean and often, because the sea has become so important to me, I wonder why I’ve moved here. In most of my Facebook profile pictures I am on the edge of a cliff or entering water. How can I find these places in Berlin? Unmoored and drifting far from home, I’m seeking the sea in a land-locked city. B sent me some seaweed held in resin so I can carry the ocean around my neck. And I’ve been finding water where I can: visiting swimming pools, lakes, saunas, and even a flotation tank. But I did not expect to find the sea in a techno club.

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