Corners

  

Looking through my old photos, I find the recurring subject of unattainable but alluring scenes-within-scenes. 

  

This is an idea with which I, like us all, have been obsessed: nesting. But it's not enough to call it an idea. It's a sensation. Like I myself am something coiled, furled, layered, furnished and furnishing, filled with discreet but deserving life. Ready to be lain out, to finally breathe. To be picked and pulled apart with gentle fingers, turned over and over, discovered, felt, tasted, by something beyond my comprehension, just as I seek to do to the things which find tack within my unknowably narrow purview. As though the accumulated pith of dreams and experiences (heavy and smooth and softly glowing in lobes and nuggets, like gold bullion and soft) is to be flayed and gently roasted, consumed by some parallel and innocent being.

Of course the beauty of these images is the mystery, the invocation of warmth and safety. A hint of an experience. What is that sunlight doing in that "empty" space? Who is present to give it purpose? To make it real? Is spirit manifested from nothing in that place, to give the light its necessary resolve so that the universe does not fall to bits? (It's almost a feeling of pride, jealousy: "Sunlight, let that room be! For I am not in it.") Michel Tournier - a writer whom I much admire - refers to the beauty of the unraveling of the universe's nesting as "a quarry within a quarry". I believe for any home to foster any full sense of being, being well, of a being-well*, it must maintain this sense of nesting, mystery, which eludes even its owners, builders. This is the only way to make a home feel at home in the world, for this is the nature of the world and all of its mechanisms are driven by questions, or the absence of experience. Not answers, if such a thing even exists.

...

When Uncle Jimbob had to clean the well he would draw out all the water and lower you down into the darkness on a little wooden sling of a seat. You dreamt of it...(for you had been so bred as a well-creature, brother to the bucket, lowered empty and pulled up full and brimming clear to be drunk down by waiting thirst - child of wheel and cistern-child,  with gift of turning)

...                                                                                                                                                     House of Breath by William Goyen

   

So, whaddya say, let's try to cohere all this clutter? Well, architecturally, this becomes a conversation about the corner. On a more primary phenomenological level, the corner is something to be avoided. Generally, then, I will advocate vaulted ceilings and, where possible, rounded walls, because they embrace us, they recognize that we are round creatures. This is the purpose of corner molding. (Certainly for a child to be conceived in a box-shaped womb sounds inhumane.) Corners are innately repellent of our nature: they do not welcome us into their space and, no matter how we might push ourselves into them to rout them - perhaps as a pouting child - they always enclose something beyond reach. Corners are the original fractal; crop but a tighter portion and a corner will always regain itself. And this is why they are actually necessary, in moderation, for any proper home.

Corners are a presence. I love my apartment, but it is too large for just myself. I feel the emptiness of the unoccupied rooms like a threat. Corners are similar, but different in effect by a difference in degree; corners are smaller than us, and so are comforting to have around. Corners are also a concession. They say that I live in a world where I cannot know everything. That I love the mystery and would like for it to have its own place, cohabiting me. Whatever you would like to name this mystery does not matter. God, the higgs boson. Mystery fills out the corners of all life and it always will. Corners are where our dreams find periodic refuge from us. I dream of being smaller, always. I dream of honing myself to explore the smaller and smaller corners of the universe. A fine being can walk through more doors than a giant. And certainly, if God exists, he is found out by the tiniest of things.

More than anyone, children need corners. A good home has hidden corners, corners behind miniature doors. Known, but rarely seen. This not only welcomes their imagination into the world, but it acclimates them to mystery. As a result, they will be comfortable when they cannot know something. They will relish it.

*See Bachelard's The Poetics of Space