Rooms Extract 1: By Way Of Introduction

ABSTRACT

This is a collection of short form writings about rooms — those of the mind, and in real space. Explorative and playful in tone, form and character, they intend to reflect with both thoughtfulness and humour on the rooms of their writer.

I was looking for a subject that wouldn't bind me, wouldn’t wall me in, and antithetically, I found myself here.

Written as poems, stories, essays, instructions, and lists — these works are vehicles sent to examine the pattern of their housing character, their surrounding structures. Language and form have been very carefully chosen. Each work’s room, its organizing feature, has been given as much care and consideration as the content it holds.

These rooms are formed as places to install thinking, a position from which to measure one’s self, and reflect on culture. They are a personal exploration too, on the contemporary situation of an unmarried woman in her 30s; on loneliness, on living in a large city, on memory, on privacy, on safety and constancy and how, inhabiting that same space is anxiety, fear, and dissolution in balance.

These works are multiple because my rooms are multiple. They are for exploring, turning through door after door, about these ideas. Our rooms are exhaustless.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION.................................................7 The Figurehead How can anything be like a room?

ROOM OF HUM AN TO HUM AN.........................11 Jigsaw Puzzle entre nous, this letter How is a city like a room? “far off, the shopping centres empty and darken” "the streets are like pipes into which men are sucked up" The guilty look of the mountains from the city A few lines composed at work on the tenth floor of the Switch House Ach Wein, or, A Letter from Vienna Notes on the catacombs at St. Michael’s church The trouble with talking about mountains Your jaw - destroyer of towns ROOM S W ITH INVITATIONS............................30 The walls of these rooms To see the world in a [fabricated room], infinity [within its walls] The Red Studio Rumours from His Story Tai Shani’s Bell Jar Baggy and Breathing Greta’s Room Snakes and Ladders

A Game of Shaping Belief and its transports Worlding SETS, PROPS, FILM S............................................50 The Miracle Fly Biting point The Love Witch Sunday Set (A Wendy) between two K’s Crumpled ghost You disappoint me Lesson Plan REAL ROOM S......................................................65 Glossary of Rooms In the library at night Library Archetypes Gavin’s Room OFFICE WORK Train to Edinburgh (notes) The Supermarket EAVES On Shop Windows

ROOM S OF THE M IND.......................................88 Architecture of yourself Clogged Furniture Room of Fear POLES clock pick Both are April Seminar Rooms of Language When accents change, reasons vary Sundays The room of my gender The Female Archetype Idea For A Short Story OH MY ROOMS, MY PRIVACY Your bed becomes a boat again BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................114 Quotes in order of appearance Full Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

THE FIGUREHEAD

You can write it with a figurehead, but that is all she is.

The figurehead might look like someone, or just something, or many vague things that have to find some communal point in order to point the way.

Yes, in this instance, it’s a figurehead. A banner, too, or a flag. A state with an emblem, or rather, many states. Yes, many states with a shared emblem, like a blue sheet with many stars encircled. Yes, you remember drawing in a childhood classroom, counting carefully all those stars.

This is a figurehead, but as we know, figureheads can come apart.

So what are the states? (Or rather, what are the rooms?) There is a working against genre, in the understanding that in genre there are many things at work. These rooms are multiple, and moving. There are many corridors, or acts, that contain in themselves many rooms for opening, for walking in and for finding passages and ways between.

These rooms do not attempt a house, replete and contained. They aim to open yet more rooms, and to find a way towards your rooms, or invite you into mine.

There are explorations of language, and mental space (and the problems they contain), and relations between things and people and experience, for edges, and atmosphere, and surface and stories.

What is it that you’re thinking of?

I think of languages and I think of the beach boys. I think of turns of phrase, and I think of John Ashbery. I think of the need for capital letters, and appropriate email sign offs. I think of thought, and of the skull encasing it, and then I shiver with you. I think of us and how we reach it, how we reach for we. I think about my clothes, about my damp basement flat, and about the movement of moisture and mould, and about absorbency. I think a lot about membranes, and diffusion and the liquids that move across them, and I think about the NHS, and about blue and brown inhalers. I think and then I stop thinking about gender.

I think of my name, my own home in language.

HOW CAN ANYTHING BE LIKE A ROOM?

It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things definitely aren’t it. This gloved hand, for instance, that glides so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

John Ashbery — Life is a Dream What have I done to this time in my life? I have tried to turn everything into a room! Gathering in bits and scraps, my own roving mind with all its structures — with ambiance — is processing to this tune.

Not good enough? My mind is but a cutlery drawer.

The overall picture? The maps I imagine are not kind I’m looking for. The closest image I can muster is something closing down while continually opening up. Troubled? You bet.

Reading is an invitation from a glove to a hand. The strangeness of another’s words becoming your words, to fit for a time in a room, and look out its windows at everything belonging to its world. Whatever the view — that’s your lot. A familiar that stalks about the frontier of your thinking.

My rooms are yours for occupation, the strangeness of a stranger entering these words, a hand gliding into a hand.

ROOM OF HUMAN TO HUMAN

JIGSAW PUZZLE

In a roundtable discussion, you say something to which everyone laughs, but it was not meant to be funny. It was not meant to be funny, and so throughout the laughs you carry on talking and its like a film where everyone sobers up and has missed most of what you say because you do not raise your voice.

You are so willing to speak in riddles. People think it strange, but you care very little.

I know what you mean.

When I talk, I sometimes have difficulty, but I’ve got no problem being alone with a jigsaw. I’ve been memorising a lot of poetry lately.

JOAN DIDION — Play It As It Lays Fuck it, I said to Helene. Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life.

I watched a pretty forgettable film about a kidnapped child. The police team had brought in this star detective, and to demonstrate his skill they tipped out a box of jigsaw pieces. After turning over four or five, he was able to describe perfectly all the picture’s details. I think they were trying to say he was lonely.

Let meaning more discreetly find its path.

I read an essay about the prized locution of ancient Chinese emperors, how citing poetry was a form of power, altering the states of mind of one another, how in shifting attention from personal bias, universality could be attributed to individual plight. It said that people did not proceed in a stereotyped fashion. I wonder at the ancient emperor stereotype for quotation.

AUDRE LORDE — Black Women Writers at Work I used to speak in poetry [‌] People would say, well what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing I still cannot speak. I am silently quoting from behind my lips, a quiet ventriloquy that is good enough for me.