Walls

In the course of my constant weeding I came across a piece of paper on which I had written,
'Denken Sie zehn Minuten nach; wo steht ihre Mauer?' - Think for ten minutes; where does your wall stand?
I don't know whether I saw this in the Checkpoint Charlie museum or whether I saw it written on one of the remaining sections of wall, but it certainly made me stop and think for a lot longer than ten minutes.

Walls, actual, symbolic, imagined. The real Berlin wall separated families, stood as a reminder of the war to them, encouraged art, the panels have been tagged, graffitied, some have amazing artwork on them. I understood something about Art that I had never done before visiting Berlin, things can be expressed through Art that cannot be expressed any other way. The Wall was a divider like the surgery that stops one part of the brain from communicating with the other.

Hadrian's wall was supposed to protect the Roman part of Britain from the savages in the North. The walls we put up inside our heads, are they like that in a symbolic sense? Protecting the civilised parts of our minds from what we can't cope with ?

Moral walls, the architects of genocide within Germany must have erected something to stop them from seeing what they were doing to other human beings. And within, the German people must have built barriers to cope with the suspicions about what was happening to friends, neighbours, people they knew, dealt with, to survive, not knowing if this could be their families next, maybe it was - what started with lies about Jews soon became lies about gypsies, Witnesses, homosexuals, the less able, the disbelief that their country was being eaten away from within, so that at the end, when all is revealed, they didn't just all lose their minds from the horror.

Our own walls. What do we need protecting from ? The things we can't deal with, the wild things, the strange, unrecognisable forms, that which we can't pigeonhole or understand, the things that threaten us.
And sometimes we have walls that protect us from ourselves, walls that save us from self destruction.
I think the important thing is to know where our walls stand and why they are there, then we can decide whether we need to tear them down or live with them.