Chapter 16 - Dark Night of the Soul: Travels in Europe

Berlin remains one of my favourite cities in the world. I spent a lot of time here, developing my photography, as I re-entered the world. In the Woods, in the chill of a winter’s day, a long walk among the trees led to coming across a solitary cyclist taking a rest among the charcoal trees. The colour scheme worked in tandem, the dark orange accentuating the colours of autumn and winter and the grey giving a dark, moody effect, with powerful shadows, almost in black and white, but with streaks of dark orange leaves; it remains one of my personal favourites of all my early photographs.

Kreuzberg was my favourite area of Berlin. I did a lot of photography there, but above all I often got lost while walking in the vast city and shot nostalgic interpretations of the canals. The contrasting side often prevailed however, as I also sought to show the vibrant and energetic side of the Postdamer Platz, the “bright lights, big city” atmosphere that I had originally imagined Berlin to be.

Yet in its true heart, Berlin is the capital of culture in today’s Europe. I was influenced by films such as “Victoria”, a pulsating, brilliant film about split second decisions revealing people’s characters and deepest, most meaningful moments, shot in real-time and with an energetic, exciting scenario. It is the epitome of cool, which is today’s Berlin.

The city also has an excellent music scene, and is arguably the centre of the music I mainly listen to, contemporary classical, or “post-classical” music - an undoubted influence when creating the artwork “Les Oiseaux D’un Autre Temps” - ”The Birds of Another Time”.

Rising from the ashes of a dark history, like a phoenix from the flames, like the city itself re-emerging from its wartime history, I was re-invigorated by the beauty of travel. I travelled to Portugal. Lisbon is one of my favourite cities in the world, having been inspired to travel here after seeing the film Lisbon Story by Wim Wenders, one of his lesser-known yet most beautiful films, a follow-up to to the engrossing road trip film “Kings of the Road”. Lisbon is one of the most relaxing cities in the world, with a very laid-back vibe. There is an easy feeling here. The people are friendly and sociable and compared to other European cities, there does not appear to be a great degree of pressure; the weather is a key factor, being usually very sunny, but pleasantly cool, because of its proximity to the sea. I walked along the promenade by the sea in the cloudless sunshine, among the cool spring breeze. I saw a couple laying down together facing in opposite directions, yet both looking up at the sky. The lady was pregnant, and there was trust and happiness emanating from them both. Coupled with the soft, purple-tinted light, the resulting photograph left a lasting memory of the beautiful city of Lisbon, with something very warm and intimate in the air.

In the heart of Lisbon I walked uphill along the winding streets, that influenced Fernando Pessoa to write the outstanding”Book of Disquiet”, a work of literature of the greatest depth and immensity.

Lisbon transforms at night, and I explored the meandering streets of the Alfama, under the orange glow of the lamplights illuminating the faces of the night. A beautiful scene is difficult to forget; through the lens of photography, the night is brought vividly to life.

In the light of day, I walked on. The square of a thousand stories was here. In Lisbon, there is a square somewhere to the west which I discovered by exploring the city, though whose name I have forgotten. I used to go to this square every day, and by the fountains, I would photograph the people passing by. A photograph that remains tells a story, through the contrast of the divided frame, on the left a woman alone reading, gazing out and on the right a couple in love embracing with warmth; the conflict between the mind and the emotions, playing itself out in front of this whitewashed stone fountain, with a yellow-tinted, creamy glint in the spring sunlight.

I moved on to Sintra. Climbing up Sintra was for me at the time a transformative experience. It is a mountain and town not too distant from Lisbon and is a UNESCO protected world heritage site. When I first arrived I was not sure what I would do. Most people would have organised a tourist coach to take them to the very top to stand in the Moorish castle at the summit. I decided to hike up Sintra myself on foot, while wearing my jeans. It was not such a crazy idea. Along the way up I witnessed some truly beautiful scenery that most do not see, among a lush canopy of green.

At the top of the summit, I stood tall and looked out over the vast expanse in the horizon, lost in the white. The view was breathtaking, and the air was crisp, invigorating the senses.

On the way down I got talking to a tuk-tuk driver, who, surprised but glad that there was a free spirit who wanted to climb the mountain on foot, exclaimed to me: “you are a hero”. In the Valley of the Lakes, on the way down, I explored the area at the bottom of the mountain of Sintra on the other side. I came to a small lake to take photographs. And all of a sudden, I came across a sight that is very rarely seen in nature - a black swan. Black swans are seen, and beauty is found unexpectedly in the unlikeliest of places, when you have least been looking for it.

Later, my travels took me to Porto, a city of great atmosphere. On the Ponte Dom Luis bridge, at sunset, a photograph was taken high up on the bridge above Porto. On top of the world, I waited for the sunset. Viewed from high up in the sky, the beautiful line of houses was kissed by the gentle glow of the fading light, embracing the rays of the setting sun.

High up on the bridge of dreams, all one needed to do was look down on the world below, unfolding its dramatic story, when it became captured in a photographic form, creating a memory that remains forever.

The next day, I woke up at dawn, and explored the streets, lost in a place I could not define, in a world of beauty that arises with the twinkling lights of a city beginning to emerge from its peaceful slumber. There arose one of my most successful pieces of work, named after the autobiography by Vladimir Nabokov, “Speak, Memory”. Emerging from the breaking of the city daylight, it is hard to grasp that one can be lucky enough to experience this distant dream.

Strolling in Porto’s hilly streets, near the blood-red roofs of houses seen from above the Ponte Dom Luis bridge, release the bird was a popular shot of a man on the wall as graffiti, “releasing” the bird flying past. It is about many things metaphorically, such as releasing the things that harm us, and letting us be free, if one chooses to look at the photograph with a depth of perception. Sadly I did not perceive such depth, for I could not later identify the man portrayed by the wall design as he releases the bird; possibly it is the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, though I cannot be sure.

On the bridge at sunset, I saw beauty when none existed, anathema to all of a lifetime’s dark affliction, through its long journey seeking for the absolute, as it radiated beauty from the shadows of the falling sunset.

When reflecting on my journey to Porto, the city ingrained itself on the heart, easily embraced, and the memories are difficult to leave behind. Porto offered so much to the traveller, the inherent drama of its high location coupled with its intimate atmosphere, expressed a world wherein photography was the only story. For this seemingly unostentatious city is tightly coiled with a dark beauty ready to explode within the photographic frame, as the storied beauty of the city unfolds.

I travelled to Vienna, my next destination. While walking these streets in the old city enclosed by the Ringstrasse, there is a certain majesty to the grand mansions from the Austro-Hungarian empire, lit up by lighting decorations above the designer clothing stores, selling jewellery and wedding dresses. It was clean, and well to do, yet I found much of the central city sterile, uniform and dull. I sat in the Central Cafe, the place where the fin de siècle intellectuals such as pseudo-scientist Sigmund Freud and the artist Egon Schiele used to spend their days, nursing a cigarette, putting down their book on psychoanaalysis at the approach of their friend, with whom they would then engage in a debate on the intellectual issues of the day, all the while being glared at by the jealous waiter, waiting to take away their empty coffee cups, adjusting his bow tie, straightening his waistcoat and clicking his heels to turn away, when he realised that they had spent two hours in the cafe, and had not paid, nor were they going to, but he could not ask the gentlemen to leave. And neither can the intellectual world today, as Freud’s influence is all over behavioural interpretations of otherwise genetically influenced psychological conditions, with most medical establishments treating the symptoms of psychiatric disorders, and rarely the cause, because of his pervasive views of”the environment” shaping a person’s “unconscious”, which continues to cloud the psychiatric establishment to this day. Likewise, Schiele’s modernist art-works are an eyesore in Vienna’s modern gallery of art, having long departed from aesthetically agreed principles of classical artistic beauty. Enjoyable as these perambulations were, Vienna was not the city for me, though its strategically placed hot-dog stands of bratwursts injected with melted cheese were a constant source of cheap and immediately gratifying nutrition. They may have prattled in the cafe while twirling their moustache there, but I left them behind.

From here, I travelled on to Prague. Prague is a picturesque city, and the dark orange roofs of houses sit prettily along the River Vlatva on a clear spring day. They sit compact among a cluster of narrow alleys, where one walks in the quaint enclosure of the old city streets around the castle. It is a pretty city, on the surface, yet once one braves the crowds along the Charles Bridge, dodging the dreaded selfie-stick, there does not seem to be much left beneath the surface. Like a beautiful woman, everyone wants her, but she may have a shallow personality, and you may well quickly become bored. I certainly did.

Beneath the facade, Prague is cold, like any other European city. I am talking only of atmosphere, for there are pleasant people to be found all over this world. Yet the impression remains that like anywhere else in Europe, people are hidden, people are cruel. They live their lives indoors, behind their private facades, their true selves hidden from others. If one wants to experience life flowing by behind the tourist postcards and lines of families taking selfies, one is better off travelling to the beautiful cities of the Chinese, Asian, Islamic and Turkish worlds, where life and colourful scenarios appear to be more varied, and people live their lives outdoors, with stories and scenes unfolding directly before your eyes. It was a hard journey, along the cold night, here in Prague. Dark Night of the Soul, which surprisingly emerged as my most successful photograph, is about solitude and loneliness of the night. A work of street photography, it is shot vertically with a silhouette against the tall night buildings creating a sense of scale in the photograph. Yet if one looks at my photograph deeply, they will see that it is actually not a lone figure walking the night at all. Behind him is the shadow of a woman. It shows that if we look deeper within the depths of our loneliness and personal darkness, we will see that we are not alone.

I heard a voice there in the dead of night, the voice of music in my mind. I imagined that I was talking to my mother about the pains of life, like Maynard James Keenan in his heartfelt song: "Wake up son of mine Mum I've got something to tell you Changes come Life will have its way With your pride son Take it like a man. Hang on son of mine A storm is blowing up your horizon Changes come keep your dignity Take the high road Take it like a man. Like the rain This too shall pass It's just a broken heart, son This pain will pass away". I had to accept the changes coming in life, and walk with a head held high, walk with dignity, for all things come and go, and come to pass, and return, and pass again, like the cycle of the seasons and the tides of the sea.

However, there are beautiful, nostalgic things about Prague. The climb up to the hill of Petrin on the edge of the main city was beautiful. As one waits there for twilight and darkness to fall, they will see the twinkling of the bright lights of one of the most scenic cities in Europe glittering in the darkness. And as I stood here tonight, I remembered scenes from my life.

I stayed in Sweden with an ex-girlfriend. We stayed in a house with her family, high up on a hill in the woods. Everything was cold, as the snow crunched under my feet on long walks through the Swedish woods, with silence all around for miles. To climb up to the house, one needed to have legs of steel. From the cold of the woods, nose frozen, hands numb, I walked into the cosy warmth of the house, and my body thawed, melting in the warmth. I stayed at a Christmas get-together there in their Swedish community. It was wonderful to experience the warmth of a family get-together that I had never had. Before this we lived together in a flat in London, in some kind of domestic life that I could never commit to. But she hurt me a lot, and she wanted to have children, which I was not ready for. I had to be free. I left her behind when I moved back home. I travelled to Stockholm alone, and explored the cobbled streets of the old town for hours, and walked across lake Malaren. I knew that if I got lost, people would help out. In his excellent book “The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia” Michael Booth examines the question of whether the Scandinavian people are the happiest people on earth. He finds social problems behind the concept of “Hygge”, the communal feeling of good will and cozy cheerfulness; however, studies have proved that the Scandinavian people, with their flexible, socially minded and generous provisions for their citizens, such as high taxation and investment in public bodies such as schools and hospitals, and their communally minded attitude, really are the “happiest” people in the world. I visited Copenhagen with a friend in 2017. I must say that Copenhagen was disappointing and culturally a very homogenous, uniform place. This does the city a disservice however, because one of the wonderful things about Copenhagen is the Glyptoteket, a large, formerly private collection of sculpture that is a wonder to behold.

Some incredibly powerful, dramatic, Teutonically influenced sculptures await, redolent of sturm und drang, angst and weltschmerz. Here I photographed the image “Wings of Copenhagen”. Significantly, it was also on a Germanic note that I named the photograph after the film “Wings of Desire”, by the German director Wim Wenders, originally named Der Himmel Uber Berlin.

Although Copenhagen is a communally based, co-operative city with educated ideas among a young population, it is often a place of uniformity, homogenous thinking and functional and practical dullness, and it is therefore difficult to avoid the critical judgement that Berlin is a culturally superior environment, redolent with auspicious photographic opportunities and aesthetic potential. Having said this, one of my favourite images of Copenhagen (there were only a handful from my entire journey) was a captivating scene of a girl reading by a serene pond in the Botanical Gardens. I believe here that the warmth, intimacy and contemplative feeling shone through.

Norway was the most beautiful part of all my Scandinavian travels. I travelled to Bergen in my mid-20s with a friend. This city, where the streets were clean, lay on the harbour area where caviar was sold, where the bookshops were filled with outstanding books and even the youth hostel bed-sheets seemed to smell like the fragrance of roses. Taking a stroll in the public park in Bergen was blissful, and everything was fine. One fine day, we sailed out into the fjords. Though I knew that there was a darkness here, that this was the home of the writer Knut Hamsun, who withdrew from life and wandered the streets of Norway in self-imposed isolation, hungry and alone. I had just read his novel “Hunger”, but what remained with me was a single quote: “I wasn't going to be ridiculous, you could die from too much pride”. That seems to be ultimately the key message in the novel. The pride of the individual (and his obsessive pursuit of his own ideals) cannot sustain that individual. There is a need for society as much as there is a need for individual development. No human can transcend their humanity in terms of escaping from social interaction, at least in an economically developed state. It was in my view the social alienation that had contributed to his madness. And not only the deprivation of social interaction, but the deprivation of love (with Ylajali), which is another form of social interaction. This is in addition to his deprivation of individual prosperity in terms of monetary wealth. The novel highlights the need for society and comes closer to showing human nature, as Aristotle's 'social animal' than the warning posed by the alienated outcast of Camus' 'The Outsider'. Hamsun shows the importance of this when he shows the consequences of when a human is deprived of his deepest needs.

I travelled on to Amsterdam. Here I walked for hours among the circular waterways and canals, looking for beautiful scenes, yet they never came. No matter how many hours of exploration I worked hard for, among the canals, waterways and endless bicycles, I came away with only three photographs worthy of the quality that I aspire towards. My feet hurt, and I had no worthy photography to my name, that sought depth and luminous beauty. It was not that Amsterdam was a tacky place, though it was certainly deprived of any aesthetic feeling around many of the central areas. It was simply dull, and after days of walking, all of the canals started to look the same.

The Dutch are a society founded upon an elaborate and detailed system of rules and regulations, many of which are interpreted strictly and literally, Ben Coates explains in “Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands”. Yet I was tired of this dogmatic approach in Amsterdam, and I turned away in weary resignation when a restaurant refused to serve dinner because it was 5.58pm and not 6pm, even though their kitchen had been open and serving food all day, because, “I am sorry Sir, but rules are rules”. It went to show just how prescriptive and limiting the life here appeared to be, a far cry from the “anything goes” attitude of chaotic and energetic cities of the Chinese and Islamic world. I have no hesitation in saying that Amsterdam is pedestrian by comparison, for numerous reasons. I walked in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam, which was a pleasant time, among its expanse of well-manicured green lawns and water-fountains, but I somehow felt that I needed more than this. The world of the east was calling, Istanbul, and deep down in my heart of hearts, here in Amsterdam, I knew that this was the end of my European journey. Sitting here in a dull Amsterdam cafe, I remembered all the beautiful travels with my family in younger years, and how I could once again recapture the magic I had lost.

I had always travelled. I travelled to Croatia, to Makarska, on family holidays by the sunny beaches among the faded stones of Dalmatian houses, “restless nights in one night cheap hotels, and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells”. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot was an influence at this time, and I read The Brothers Kramazov here on a beach in Hvar, while my cousin and his friends mock-fought and bantered with each other, kicking at the splashing waves. Croatia can be a beautiful place, the squawking of seagulls in the salty air and the freshly laundered sheets of our guest-house calling out to me from the depths of memory. In Makarska, alone I explored this town, in the same place for too long. Family holidays took us to Spain, and took us to Mexico. Mexico is an exciting memory, where my mother got lost in the train station in Mexico city, at that time the largest city in the world. The beachside resort in Acapulco was a sunny, idyllic place, the epitome of “leisure tourism”. But still, I needed more. One of the only memories that remains is my relentless weightlifting in the gym, trying to become a body-builder. I gave up on such vain notions long ago, but at that time, wanted to travel out in the city to find an independent gym with free weights, where I could do 20-rep squats until I could cry out in pain. So I got on a bus, and I remember the faces of the local Mexicans, as they stared at me with disguised hostility in their eyes. In Mexico, we saw the Aztec ruins, and explored the ancient wonders of a peaceful civilisation long-since disappeared.

Many years later, I spent Christmas alone in Florence, Italy. It was a beautiful time, my December. I wandered the cold, winding streets of Florence, my breath steaming up the chilly air, as I explored the winding streets in the dead of winter. I walked into the Uffizi gallery and its wonderful collection of Renaissance sculpture. In the safety of the warmth inside, looking out of the window, breath on glass, steaming up, then dispersing, evaporating to show the city view.

A powerful sculpture that made the biggest impression on me is by Giambologna and is found in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. It depicts the entanglement of people, the top figure trying to break free, but held down by the figures below. It reminded me of the track Fire Made Flesh, by one of my favourite bands, called Caspian. Their video on Youtube, Fire Made Flesh AudioTree Live, is immense and I sometimes wonder if it is the best live video performance I have ever seen, as it develops into an incredible crescendo. The song starts with a quote from Charles Bukowski - “go all the way”, previously quoted in full at the beginning of my book. It is about the sacrifices of being an artist, and has resonated with me forever.

When I emerged, I walked to the Ponte Vecchio bridge, and leaned on the stone looking out at the yellow-tinted houses beyond, waiting for the spread of twilight. The sunset was beautiful, as the sky gently turned a blushing shade of violet, as a silhouette of a boatman emerged onto the scene, gently drifting into the sunset beyond.

The next day, I walked out of the city, and climbed up to the Piazzale Michelangelo. In the chill of Christmas-time in winter, I saw Brunelleschi’s dome from high up on the vantage point, the dome’s shapely burgundy tower rising timelessly above the city skyline in the hazy December mist.

Until the end of the dream, a song by the band Evanescence was playing in my head: “Dream, follow your heart until it bleeds - until the end of the dream”. I would continue to dream; but I was a long way from home. Back home, my mother was ill. She had been diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, severe, sudden, shock-like pain in the side of the face, after which her life was never the same. I had not known that while I was here in Florence, following my heart until it bleeds, that she had been hospitalised. I worried for my mother, and the severe pain she was suffering from. It was an uncertain time, as for the first time, I would have to face life alone, against every obstacle, without my mother’s guiding hand. With a heavy heart, I returned home to the UK. But I knew deep down, that this was not the end of the dream.

Read on for the next chapter via the home page, as we are about to enter our journey together to - THE UNITED KINGDOM......