Words About Lighting a Cigar and Spitting Veganisms

*(Or: It Stages Two Modalities of Movement—Bloch/Dietsche Walks Toward the Not-Yet (Hope, Futurity, Dichtergang), While Benjamin/Gallant Walks Within the Already-Haunted (Memory, Ruin, Unfolding).)

by Justin Gallant, Cohort ‘24 and Lucas Alan Dietsche, Cohort ‘23

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“...we got ghost all on our own

while Berlin became linearlized

over the silence,

biting, grooming, growling ecology,

Ericka sedated and not-yet splattered on the concretes… (“East Berlin 2025: I Walk with Bloch,” Getzner Poetry YouTube channel)

For the June 2025 Residency in Berlin, there was walking poetically in the spirit of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. Lucas became enthralled with Ernst Bloch, famous for his philosophical concepts of utopia and Nicht-noch-Sein—his way of articulating the “not-yet-being” of human possibility—stands out for his unorthodox Marxism and his insistence on the “upright gait” (der aufrechte Gang) (Bloch 1959). When joined with poetry and the act of walking - (Dichtergang)—represents the strengths of latent futures and the pulse of hope. No city embodies this paradoxical rhythm more than Berlin as a place at once fractured and resurgent, always marked by the need for der aufrechte Gang and always in need of utopias.

Always armed with a Toscano cigar and coffee, Dictergang engages with Lucas, the echo of Bloch’s pipe, the nicht-nocht-sein wafting through the march, and early June wind-sun through the Plattenbau of East German apartments. Lucas felt thrown-into-being as Heidegger wrote while the Dietschean Dictergang around Rosa Luxembourg Platz and Karl Marx Alle (Heidegger 1927). Poetically felt that the der aufrechte Gang with Gallant at the East German (Deutschland Democratik Republik) museum, with other DDR buildings, as well with cohort member William Justice to composer Felix Mendelsohn’s grave. The walks centered around the statue of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and the East German Radio Tower, while telling Dr. Howard Caygill jokes related to the DDR. Here, poetically while Dietschen Dictergangen with Bloch and thinks (Denken) about the ghost of Benjamin:

“spontaneous levity consumes polyphonic mist as the riesling rain …

the hope gets better...

i am not resisting the brief benjaminian sun-scape…

...2nite i remember siphoning possible-yets…” (“East Berlin2025: I Walk with Bloch,” Getzner Poetry YouTube channel).

The poem evokes a surreal, polyphonic atmosphere, merging temporal and Blochian utopian imagery. This imaginarian blur disrupts how the walk itself becomes a form of poetic wandering through the streets of Berlin—an embodied meditation on temporality and becoming. From this sensibility emerged the Die Bloch Bloc, a whimsical (pun on the anarchist movement Black Bloc) yet politically charged collective inspired by Ernst Bloch’s vision of unorthodox revolution and his philosophy of the possible-yets—those latent futures hovering within the present, awaiting their realization frothing with poet-philosopher upright walking.

If the Dietschean Dictengangen walks upright toward utopia, animated by the possible-yets and the future's demands, Gallant’s Benjamin walks obliquely through the already-haunted. Our joint method is a split gait to embody the Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen (the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous): one step forward into hope, one step diagonal into ruin…

Driftzoa:

We're walking Berlin in Benjamin’s register: Eingedenken, or remembrance that metabolizes what wasn’t redeemed (Benjamin 1968). This resists nostalgia; a way of reading sites as structures—doorways, corridors, timetables, “passagen”; the walker as an instrument. In Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900, memory is architecture instead of recall (Benjamin 2006).

The group has moved 50 feet in 40 minutes. You walk ahead with Angela, talking about architecture and the unseen structure between architecture and information. You mention “structured fluidity.” She says she likes the term. The sun cuts through the wind; your side aches. Then you see the sign: Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz. The room is still intact. That is the problem.

It’s too quiet. The sun dapples through trees. White walls. Ornamental floors. Birds. Beauty as horror. Here, genocide was turned into logistics—violence by protocol. The meeting lasted ninety minutes just before breakfast. Coffee was likely served. Bureaucracy didn’t conceal atrocity; it was atrocity. Evil wore a tidy suit, and spoke in a passive tense: “Necessary steps were agreed upon” (Gallant). Silence doesn’t mean peace; order doesn’t mean reason. 

Outside, the garden pretends symmetry: rows of trees, lights on one side, missing speakers on another. The more you look, the less aligned the whole scene is. You think about bubbles—no, foam: each form clinging to itself, pretending integrity while consuming the rest. Just a repetitive subnormal of self-similarity pulsing the tangential movement of the wave that carried it, as if it itself did any moving. Fascism as surface tension–Let it dissipate. You smoke while “9mm” by Brutalismus 3000 pounds through your headphones. Hitler used a 7.65mm. Berlin has moved about 1.35mm worth of calibers.

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We drift into the trail around the lake. JC says, “The swan turned into a swimmer.” It has. What was once a swan is now a human swimming in the lake. We’ve been standing around for a while. Howard makes some comments on the serenity of the situation. Then the group starts moving again, and he goes, “I love the anarchy of the situation—a group movement or flow without archē.”

The group wanders to the ferry and it’s closed. Of course. Howard mentions we can swim. We start walking toward the boardwalk lookout point. “We aren’t actually going to swim, are we?” someone asks.

You tell Howard that’s the drift—that we aren’t just moving through the flow and acting, but we are also being acted upon.

“Yeah,” he says, “but it’s still a human structure that should be working…”

He laughs, “for us!”

“If there’s any takeaway there, Howard, it’s that part of the drift.”

He grins, “Ah, but why’s it still going back and forth if it isn’t letting us on? That’s the real drift.”

“Well,” you say, “maybe it’s just taking people back from the island and there are more there to get off the island instead of letting anyone on the island.”

He nods, “Oh yeah—to not leave anyone behind.”

“Yeah,” you say, “that’s philosophy though, right? It’s good to know the architecture or structure of entanglement, but philosophy is always trying to tease out the tangles and say, ‘well how does this entanglement function?’”

Not Potsdamer Platz—Potsdam. Beautiful, composed. Prestige, clean, and full of naked baby gold statues, a Schloss, and a refurbished core (curated calm). You suspect the stillness. Order lingers like instructions never revoked. The park closes soon. Howard mentions he studied here. Arbor overhears it being called “the poor area.” You look it up—once working-class, now gentrified. In active tension, “Every garden path ends in an agreement,” you think. “No one enforces the rules, but everyone still obeys.” Even beauty here keeps the cadence of command (Gallant).

Inside, Frederick’s summer palace glows with decorum. Nearby, a windmill still stands: the miller who defied the king. A myth of resistance preserved by order itself. Students admire the ivy gates. “To protect the plants,” someone says. Yet every plant is cut into shape. Protection and control blur.

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Howard decides to walk to the pagoda, but time is against us, so we turn around. Lucas tells Howard he should dirempt the self, not rely on the fantasm of time management. You say, “Time management isn’t about saying ‘No linear time? Then no time at all.’ It’s about relational immersion into different drifts of temporality. In this case, the park is closing. Our time continues while this one resets.”

By midnight in Alexanderplatz (32,000 steps) you’ve traversed ghosts, philosophies, exhaustion. Violent folds × Recombinatory collapse; the ache, the cigarette, and the theory binge. A recursive process of becoming: a dynamic entanglement where past, present, and future constantly remix, and open new exits through the “vortexical frothening”. Hogschloggin (pseudo-German field slang where thought and appetite blur): overconsumption as method. Too much thought, too much being. The philosopher’s binge where meaning and appetite collapse.

Berlin refuses comfort. Its truth folds into ache, appetite, and excess. Ancient gods often had more than one personage, faces for their personalities and they were all true. Multiplicity comes to all of us, but some are better at weaving a loom of consistency. This tapestry looks made by many hands. Looking down, that’s not weaving—that’s crochet. Holding up the pattern it is macrame. Tossing it aside makes it a wool blanket. You are allergic. “Love doesn’t come from Berlin,” your ribs remind you, with the Angel Novalis swirling into the metastable ecology of time (Brutalismus 3000 2023; Benjamin 1968).

Lucas jokes about the “Bloch Bloc.” Utopie? Nicht-Jetzt! Not now. Not yet. Noch-nicht. A militant latency, a hope held in delay. If Black Bloc masks identity, Bloch Bloc masks conclusion. Its flag of black and gray resists closure. Ernst Bloch’s “Not-Yet-Conscious” becomes a tactical posture. “The essential function of utopia is to call the world into question.” Bloch Bloc doesn’t seize the means. It teases the potential (Bloch 1986).

The Bloc seeds because every revolution needs its ghost logic. We don’t want the future now; we want the structure that lets futures grow. Recalled during a delay on the S-Bahn while talking about how “philosophy doesn’t solve, it rehearses.” Tactical futurity / Militancy of Delay / Post-Antifa Symbolics. The Bloch Bloc smashes timelines and radicalizes its temporality (Bloch 1986).

Berlin is not offering a warm embrace; the city instead entangles. Between Bloch’s upright gait and Benjamin’s haunted drift, philosophy becomes choreography with the not-yet and no-longer sharing a step. You don’t trust time. You trust pattern, repetition, distortion–you trust the cracks in the sidewalk and the way a smell can ruin you. To write from memory is to build ruins with care; to let collapse guide new configuration.

Walking Berlin is that method: each step an Eingedenken, remembrance that metabolizes the Ungleichzeitigkeiten, the non-simultaneities of past and present. Noch-nicht and immer-schon (Benjamin 1968; Bloch 1991).

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When people ask, “If not now, when?”

Answer: “Already. And not yet.”

…because that’s the most dangerous position of all.

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Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Translated by Howard Eiland, Harvard University Press, 2006 (1932–38).

— — —. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968.

Bloch, Ernst. Heritage of Our Times. Translated by Neville and Stephen Plaice, Polity Press, 1991.

— — —. Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Suhrkamp, 1954–1959. (The Principle of Hope. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, MIT Press, 1986.)

Getzner Poetry. “East Berlin2025: I Walk with Bloch.” YouTube, uploaded by Getzner Poetry, YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@Getznerpoetics], accessed 13 Oct. 2025.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper & Row, 1962 (1927).

Brutalismus 3000. “9 mm.” Love and Fury, 2023.

Gallant, Justin. Archē / Recursive Field Texts. “University of Muri” press, 2025.