To show or to tell

If I had put a picture in this post it would have been of a large piece of concrete with the graffitied face of a king on it.

Actually it would have been four large pieces of concrete with two kings: one smiling and the other grim and foreboding.

I think it would have been an impressive photo; each piece of concrete stands about 4 meters high and is housed in an imposing glass structure inside a steel pavilion. There's no doubt as to the talent of the artist who painted the two figures; they're vibrant, colourful, evocative and engaging.

But the impact these four pieces of concrete had on me had little to do with their visual appeal or their imposing size. This wasn't primarily a visual experience so much as a narrative one. What I was looking at seemed vaguely familiar and when I read the label on the glass the sharp crack of recognition took me back to Berlin in 1991 and a New Year's Eve spent amongst people celebrating the destruction of these same pieces of concrete.

No photo can show the complexity of what these four pieces of concrete represent. The Berlin Wall is so burdened with historical significance that knowledge clouds any attempt to view it simply as an object.

How utterly incongruous, after twenty one years, to walk out of my new apartment in Singapore, cross the road, and find my former self standing rugged-up and shivering in the last hours of a Berlin, December night.