ROOMS OF THE MIND
One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted — One need not be a House — The Brain has Corridors — surpassing Material Place — — Emily Dickinson
EAVES
I put myself in my third bedroom — back in the pliable rights of childhood to choose the space of its building. A 1980s conversion — this once-bungalow sprung into its second story with leftovers. A triangular gap joined the house’s sloping roof to the room’s straight backed, and Artexed walls — wrapping the home in its long-edged perimeter we learned to call the eaves. Warping the end of containment into something like a Shakespearean forest — a space of play, of panic, of privacy, and dreams — where things might be woken. Not just wasp’s nests that sting in their sleep, but connecting the dormancy of dust with danger — sisters switching lights off at your furthest point, fingering your way home, avoiding a fall through the insulation that separates the ground from the ground below. I was built in a room, but eaves formed around my mind — playing guard and median to trends and laws and other big ideas. (Dissolving too, is the median space of the page, where a mind can meet the not-yet world, and where the world, too, can reach it.) Like any creature of pliable rights, I don’t mind too much about the shape of our meeting. (Sometimes) I’m guarded and (sometimes) I don’t care, like — you don’t often bother me, and quite often do.
ARCHITECTURE OF YOURSELF
The time of day you wrap your grip around is nothing like a bedroom in the morning. Some flowers cluster by the window (it is January for it is cold) and you have no other time to watch a bird and listen — and anyway, now it’s just pigeon feet that come calling. Nothing like a bedroom in the morning with the whole day plucking at it, insisting duration. Not waking on the right or the wrong side of the bed, rather, just waking, trying to do all versions of up. Sometimes I spend a long time thinking before opening my eyes, then waste the rest of the day. Earliest Human Beds Found in South Africa: without separation; a bed was an eating, working, or sleeping place. Breakfast in bed may have been an almost daily occurrence. May have been an almost. So said the autopsy. Try to find the ends of yourself. Try to locate the separation between your points of contact and the rest of them. They come for your ears, your eyes, and your fingers, for contact in general. Meeting happens mostly in the brain (your sensors are feeding it). They come at you with language and it reaches you. Lets say your bed is your limit, and think of the beyond that reaches it. Are you thinking of a great weight of impatient water? (Actually, no, never mind your bed — your bed keeps you already too
busy what with your eating, working and sleeping.) Sometimes it feels the search for edges is a search for defence — to find a stopper to the flow of borrowing and taking. You might feel diminished by interaction; you might feel like a one-way library. (Sorry, I am in a mood.) I am severely worked up. Sitting in my room one morning (my bedroom, my boundary) a stranger knocks (ignored) knocks again, asking: how do I grind my girlfriend’s coffee? I sit with my eyes dry but body heaving. The pause is repetitively tasked upon. Stillness inside from outside — a room should be a pause. What’s needed is a place to view what moves from another place. A separation from life that isn’t its opposite. But these stillnesses, when you find them flung from chaos, even then, your heart (in its pause) is repetitively tasked upon. Nothing like a bedroom in the morning, shielded by a stiff door, shielded from what in this century we call flatmates. Modern humans are skilled at organizing their living spaces it went on. This century’s courting of something like friendship. Elizabeth Hardwick — Sleepless Nights The sharing of premises, premises laid out in these hotels with a brilliant economy that could make of strangers a mock family and turn a family into strangers. This sharing was all “living together” meant between us.
Some borrowings, freely given (the library discontinued CD fees) make stronger your edges when needed. It’s too quaint to say (but here I am saying it) there’s someone else’s boundary to exist in. Listening to a library CD (I know, quaint but) Arvo Pärt’s chorales (I know) expand in the crumbling firmament of my thinking and I turn the volume up to its loudest so nothing else can enter, and (I know) everyone outside the room, my leaky chamber, will think things about me, and (I know) turning up the volume in angst is a cliché I’ve outgrown, but sorry, your thinking can’t reach me, I’m in someone else’s boundary. A short seminar on edges: Samuel Beckett — The Unnamable [T]hat’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin !as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness… Joan Didion — Play It As It Lays By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other. Anne Carson — We've Only Just Begun
I was soaked into Washington’s dread: it had no edge. That is what boredom is; the moment with no edge. To survive you need an edge. To survive you need an edge. When I am tired, I imagine myself locked in my favourite bathroom. When I am very tired, I imagine myself held in a cupped palm. Often when I am tired, I am an animal, which in human terms, is not surviving. A short anecdote on edges: My niece, pre-verbal fluency, drew a vastly round figure (the archetypal mama) and inside her is a circle (a womb) containing another smiling figure (the child) in the shape of the male genitalia (face at the head) and at the base, between two circles — the female counterpart. If ever I could imagine more flow through completeness or continuity. I keep it on my bedside wall.