21.08.00 : labyrinths and labour

Mon. 21st August

Hi all, been reading Mark Danielewski's 'House of Leaves', which I know Pat is reading too and some of you may have already come across. It's a strange intertextual, Borgesian like fiction "centering" (I'll come back to this) around a film of a family moving into a house who find an impossible, labrynthine other 'house' in a corridor off their living room. Too much to describe in any detail here, but the text is full of footnoted asides, commentaries and references that spin the narrative off into analytical sourcing and theorising that seems to almost offer the 'impossible house' (a kind of 'thalamus' really, - an inner chamber, of actual space or a location in the brain/mind) up as a conceptual 'chamber', where questions of space, reality/fiction, habitation and what another book I'm reading (Body, Memory and Architecture) refers to as the "emotional spatiality of the human body" can be considered and explored.

ANYWAY, there is a risk that I might start wandering off into interminable tangents given the soaking my brain has received since my reading this morning, so I'll try to keep focussed... SO, at one point the text goes on a long disucssion about labyrinths - at the same time, or near enough to the same time, it is talking about ideas of the 'center' - spatially and subjectively (not surprisingly). Apparantly the word labyrinth has its origins from the latin or greek (can't remember now) for labour - the connection being that being in a labyrinth involved the ceaseless process of trying to find your way out, it is impossible to rest, to stop, to find 'residence' in the space of the labyrinth, it is therefore a space of labour or a space that defines a labour - the work of getting out of it. The text also talks in this section of Derrida's ideas about the center and how the center precludes or limits the 'play' of the structure.
The other book I'm reading (well dipping in and out of) - Body, Memory and Architecture by Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore ( bit old fashioned but has some stimulating moments) also talks about the center of the home - a socially proscribed orientation point - whether it is the fireplace, the TV or the front door, our (domestic anyway) buildings tend to locate clear central points, points/places/objects which act as social or external markers for the 'emotional spatiality' of the body (the individual). Without these centers, these axes, we lose our sense of where we are, indeed I suppose, who we are. [there's lots of other stuff on this 'emotional spatiality' which of course is where our sense of space runs counter to the laws of gravity and physics and is much more a psychological and experiential 'inner sense' rather than something organised through the exteriority of seeing. (Lots of interesting stuff to think about here in terms of the historical over emphaisis on the visual and its connection to classical thought oriented around fixed points of perspective,the individual, the grid and the 'center')] Anyway, I'm rambling again... but getting nearer to the point (see the pull of centering is there in discourse too. I know that this is an old model that current, contemporary thinking seeks to deconstruct, but I do wonder how possible, how realistic that is - as a footnote to that, see Rosi Braidotti's critique of Deleuze and Guattari's 'body without organs', it's a good one!)
However, to continue... in 'Body,Memory..' they go on to talk about how we come to 'posess' a house/space. I take posession in this context to mean 'inhabit' - how to we make it ours. And here they talk about a senseory occupation of the space that involves more than just 'seeing' - it is a haptic occupation of the space that 'happens' (!).
Now this is where I get back round to the labyrinth idea. Haptic essentially means touching, in Bloomer and Moore's terms it is those processes of decorating, cleaning, placing objects etc. that 'claims' the space as ones own. In that sense i think it's interesting how certain kinds of neurosis play themselves out in an overly obsessive 'haptic' occuaption of a space - excessive cleaning, working or perhaps travelling if this space of 'home' is split between two locations. Now for me this brings back in the notion of 'labour'. I'm not sure of the derivation of the word labour itself but I think it has something to do with a physical and often repetitive activity, very much concerned with process, as distinct from a task, which is goal orientated. So what it makes me wonder is as we become inhabitants of increasingly more labyrinthine structures of living, are we more in need of these 'haptic' labours to find ways to be in these places/lives? Does our apparant desire for decentering (if that really is what's going on) bring with it a need to develop more skills at dynamic, intuitive, experiential ways of 'being' somewhere. And if it does, what are those skills?
I can't help thinking of a chat I had a few months ago with Gregg and Gary about their last performance piece, where they walked two bridges in a Norwegian town for 18 hours. They described this a very profound experience of 'becoming place' (my words) with the people of the town. For me this walking is entirely 'haptic'. Primarily because it is not going anywhere. It is a labour (or a practice) of walking and it opens up another space in the structure of the town.

Going back to Danielewski's book, briefly (I promise!) he also writes a lot in the book, in various ways, about exploration and the endurance in exploration and waiting - the experiences of being both in and outside of the 'labyrinth'(the unknown?). There is something in this for me about what kind of labour we need to live in this evolving labyrinthine world. And it links to exploration. Whatever it is that drives or drove people to go into places that no one had ever been before, of which they had little idea what they would find etc. etc. whatever made them do it in the first place, must be a different thing from the thing that enabled them to endure the 'place' once they were there (i.e. lost enough to know they had reached the unknown that they were after). After the initial impulse and the final (if they were lucky) achievement, there must have been/be a process (of labour?, a labour of love?) that sustained them, that allowed them to remain stable (although many didn't), that gave them faith to keep going. My hunch is that whatever that is, it has nothing to do with the beginning or the end of that exploration, but more to do with exploring itself - being in a state that has no boundaries, but has immense detail, much to consider, much nourish the moment.

Sorry to go on so long. Going to go swimming now. A haptic exorcise.

bests Brigid