REAL ROOMS
THE PREDICTABILITY OF THESE ROOMS is, in a word, exquisite. These rooms in a word. […] We were hoping to pay more, to be made to pay in public. We desire a flat, affected tone. A beware of dog on keep off grass. The glass ceiling is exquisite. Is it made of glass? No, glass. Ben Lerner — Angle of Yaw
GLOSSARY OF ROOMS
Anteroom: A room depending on your others. TV Room: A room that drags you out of your mind. (Also known as family room, living room or lounge.) Kitchen: A room used for clichÊs about hearts and parties. Difficult to inventory. Shrine Room: A place for displaying the accomplishments of the favourite child. If childless, then dogs or other hobbies. Utility room: Useful for family jokes about punishment. Dining Room: Used for real punishment. Garage: Used for playing between (mir)age & (porri)dge. Cloakroom (aka hall cupboard): During The Blitz an old lady sheltered there (aka a ghost). Bathroom: Most beloved room. Conservatory: Halfway house for plants, graves, and affluence. Porch: Don’t you let me catch you standing there. Larder: A room for quaint cooking programmes.
The Shed: Handmade room for standing alone in smelling the garden centre. Foyer: a waste of space really. Dream room: (such as cellars, attics, lofts, or eaves) Untamed spaces known frequently in hauntings. Bedroom: Perhaps your only room. Fainting room: Built for “pelvic massages� in case of hysteria. Still room: Still a room.
GAVIN’S ROOM
I’ve made a short retelling of it. How to come back from facts to the truth of matter — our rooms do not remember us. A room is holding its breath. A missing person, not missing to your particular, but to the whole world, and missing from the room. The room felt it, behind its closed door, I felt it. Afterwards, to look at the room, there was more disgust than I could master. A certain kind of death has nothing to cling to, it just passes through a poor posture of living and afterwards, you’re changed; this slow going. Instructions remain active in his situation; rent, bills and other stuff are maintained by amassed finances — his fossil parts in their systems permit our persistent dailiness. A home is a home until it is emptied. A home is felt, and then, your flatmate comes home and you clear out. Or your flatmate doesn’t come home. A home is a home until a swat team comes in, until a policeman puts his foot in the doorway, until — A corporation, a headless body ruled by — well that’s a human law, that’s got to be a human law.
I remember feeling complete I remember feeling nothing, indicating completeness I remember noticing once it was gone, this person is gone. They told me thieves look under your pillows first. Why we still keep our secrets there, I don’t know. A policeman found this note. Perhaps it shows an instinct saying sleep is private. Anyway, I’m sorry for the intrusion. Your mother’s medium (the séance lady) said you were standing right behind me. A joke from which a lot is missing. What is the passing point of accident? We are guilty of doubt, of seeing in everything the losing lot. But tamed to the point of precipice, even there, difference can’t fall from this mystery. Still, I just don’t think this thin surrender, rather, something like cool rage, and I’m glad of it. A tea towel slung over the clock fixes the ugly sight of it (its history). We hold onto your books, which you held in much the same way — our shells are never quite emptied. We all live differently now, seeing you occasionally, like through a tea towel in the bulk of strangers. By slim atonement, you create in rooms your double haunting: the chance of completeness — by occupation or by emptiness.
ROOM OF FEAR
Montaigne notes that fears of superstitious things (goblins, werewolves, great-grandsires rising from their graves) are things for “simple folk”. As though — without the sharp definition of evidence, fears remain baseless. But any fear pours its alarm around the mind’s position. If I were preoccupied by ghosts, my fear would fill them in. Straying thoughts, in a mind as hard as any soldier’s, or to equivocate, policeman, broker, or other credible worker, will find for fear a shape in matter. They say fear separates from anxiety by its apprehension of time, and outward specificity — that fear responds to threats here and now, and anxiety to some thing in some general future. But what if the mind’s shape has agency? And what if an institution haunts me? Better understood — I have forgotten my reason for writing this. Sitting in my university’s café, from which (due to an administrative error) I am suspended, my fear takes shape in a nebulous and conglomerate thing. Fear of the algorithm’s authority; of ‘catch-22’ situations; fear that my time, money, and purpose have slipped through this institution’s many handless fingers. A shape is wrenched from me and I can’t get that monster out of my mind.
I am one of Montaigne’s simple folk — afraid of an ungraspable thing formed through the belief in the human tale of institution, provoking — well is it fear or anxiety? Its shape is both diffuse, and specific, both in the present, and timeless. A mass of individuals bound behind a front with its own purpose, with its own ties to companies and corporations — its stakeholders. How can I fight that? How can I fly from it? It is a perfect monster. Like Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows — horrors of the mind are more penetrating than those of the body. In fear, I flit through responses: I run, I freeze, and I fight. But I also have panic attacks, insomnia, and nightmares. And further: I have been hallucinating: webs and spiders, and disembodied hands, crouching shadows and tidal waves; always I am dreaming of tidal waves. The curt fear I’ve experienced through discernable objects: a knife pushing its shape from under clothing; the growling of an unseen animal; alone and lost in the Grunewald; stepping accidentally in sinking sand — these are horrors, yes, but their product is comprehendible. This other — I don’t know how to know it. Fear is so often conducting. It is conducting this essay. Fear is a preventative. Procrastination is a condition of. Fear has me taken, in my th
34 year, trailing off into nothing. Fear has me, but then is overtaken by another fear. And finally I’ve thought a little about this essay.