The containing sorrow

 

Kreuzberg Merkezi – It's stamped on the façade in the annex over the street connecting the two buildings, leaving passage underneath to the cars, which, however, need to give preference to pedestrians, who walk around and across one side to another on the street, as the repeated white marks in the asphalt below their feet indicate. 

Kreuzberg Zentrum,  says the translation to the previous expression, and It will be seen on the other side as the passerby turns its neck behind and above, while follows its path across this gate desguised as building, that gains a name as soon as the fellow understands its actual location: Kottibusser Tor.

A car and a bycicle approach the gate, reducing the speed when they take notice of a man, in the middle of the street, right beneath that gate, who slowly wobbles and stumbles with an empty bottle in one hand, while the other gesticulates as if confronted an invisible interloctutor. 

A lather jacket (synthetic, most likely), enough for the mild cold which had been down that night – and a high and tight haircut, nothing different from the current dominant masculine fashion trend, giving that figure some sort of class inespecificity, while the skin colour, facial features and beard would suggest one that could easily subscribe to a particular ethnic estereotype.

He hurls to the ground the empty glass bottle, which shatters at the same time that the hand articulates a conclusive performance following the throwing movement, as to declare the inexcusable intentionality of the gesture; as he had hurled a molotov cocktail prepared in a Sternburg bottle.

The glass, breaking at the very moment it touches the floor, is a hostile announcement; a note to those who would come later to be remembered of the scene they never really saw, except for the broken pieces left in place, as minor obstacles to their feet or wheels. 

But what exactly it's being announced there? 

Maybe the inconvenience of the liquid abscence, the liquid the man with the empty bottle had drunk minutes earlier? 

As if the bottle could be pledged guilty for its own emptyness, and its hardness exposed by the impact against the ground were to be both setenced punishment and a statement for its current uselessness... 

Or the agression was to be directed to the asphalt, the main representative of a system stitched through and around big concrete structures all over, because the man with the empty bottle were a victme of this same system, now somehow conscious of the unyielding field of determinations to which he was subjugated, and ready to get to this exact instant, a moment of open grievance? 

As a neglected human being on that cold night, while some others placed their enormous glass mugs over a coaster in which one could read a message claiming for civil desobedience of any nature. Even if in the most banksian way of an imaginary molotov cocktail throwing man. 

If one in confrontation with this question had access to the private content of the man, subject of one's attention, one would know the particular reason for that attitude, who knows, a bad day, a spontaneous insatisfaction, a broken heart... Because a subject, whoever they are, contains way more than the narrow frames of my observational remarks.

The others around keep silence for a brief moment when hearing the bottle to burst on the ground. The performance of violence has always a public in view. Its consequent materiality carries within the archetype of the attentive eyes that witnessed, even in the case of those eyes being merely imagined by an inibriated author or simply one out of one's mind. 

The bottle is by nature a prop. Even better: it's an instrument, because it amplifies the action of the handler in a convulsive discharge of textures and sounds that, as the music of a particular celebrated tradition, has purpose and meaning.

But the scene is left behing. While one rides its bike, they will leave behind also the memory of the bottle throwing individual. A few meters from there, when crossing the bridge over the Landwehr channel, the glass shrapnel – multiplied along the way around and ahead, as unmarked „crime scenes“ - will evoke, each of which, a vague scene in which a subject, now absent, expresses hostility likewise the bottle thrower.

There will be only a few minutes until this conscious beholder holds a bottle in its own hands, from which one feeds onself or any other inebriation (anesthetic or of excitation), and to which one will devote the same attention one devotes to a poetic text or an advertisement. 

Possibly, one will place the bottle - by now empty - over a wall at sight or in an uncovered corner, to be picked up by the hands of another person, who will use it accordingly to the role and the tipyfied behavior that the city defined for this one.

The broken hearts, nevetheless, will remain unseen in the chests of their respective hosts. But, as the bottle, they carry in their own shapes also a content to be revealed. Containing and transfering their liquids – and their messages – in the same manner the bodies, that carry them, do.