28.03.00 - 30.03.00 : living in books

Tues. 28th March

Just back from Chicago.
The book that I live in is one of Jeanette Winterson's. My favorites are Sexing the Cherry and The World and Other Places.

More later... Pat

Thurs. 30th March

What is it like to live in a book? In early monasteries, before ordering and indexing was necessary, books were shelved with their pages facing outwards. It was the logical way of lifting a book and moving it from shelf to table. Some of my favorite spaces are ancient libraries where you find yourself face to face with the edge of each page. At first I thought that an architectural space having the texture and visual beauty one of these parchment volumes would be a place that I would like to live, then I realized that I am in the midst of designing a new working and living space that is just the opposite. More about that later.
Brigid asks what book I live in? For me it is Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, where the spaces are more similar to my architecture. I'm rereading it to find the paragraphs where I feel most at home, realizing that home, for me, is not always the most comfortable place. "The family who lived in the house were dedicated to a strange custom. Not one of them would allow their feet to touch the floor It is well known that the ceiling of one room is the floor of another, but the household ignores this ever-downward necessity and continues ever upward, celebrating ceilings but denying floors, and so their house never ends and they must travel by winch or rope from room to room, calling to one another as they go. I spent the night in my suspended bed and slept badly. At dawn I was leaning out of the window, a rope round my waist. The moon was still visible; it seemed to me that I was closer to the moon than to the ground. A cold wind numbed my ears. Then I saw her. She was climbing down from her window on a thin rope which she cut and re-knotted a number of times during the descent. I strained my eyes to follow her, but she was gone." "words rising up, form a thick cloud over the city, which every so often must be thoroughly cleansed of too much language. Men and women in balloons fly up from the main square and, armed with mops and scrubbing brushes, do battle with the canopy of words trapped under the sun. The words resist erasure. The oldest and most stubborn form a thick crust of chattering rage. Cleaners have been bitten by words still quarrelling, and one famous lawsuit a woman whose mop had been eaten and whose hand was badly mauled by a vicious row sought to bring the original antagonists to curt. The men responsible made their defense on the grounds that the words no longer belonged to them. Towards the end of the day we joined with the other balloons brushing away the last few stray and vagabond words. The sky under the setting sun was the colour of veined marble., and a great peace surrounded us. As we descended through the clean air we saw, passing us by from time to time, new flocks of words coming from people in the streets who, not content with the weight of their lives, continually turned the heaviest of things into the lightest of properties."

Pat

Thurs.30th March

Following the 'living in books' thread with great interest - offer the following, more on how writing might become,compose and create for us an environment as lived as it is read... A favourite writer of mine - the late Dennis Potter (TV 'drama' series writer mainly UK - Pennies From Heaven, The Singing Detective) - also produced a number of books. In The Changing Forest, a Potter in his late 20's returns to his place of childhood, and later his place of dying - the rural Forest of Dean, to write said piece - something of a literary and compassionate ethnographic approach to that particular old land as it slowl y found the new world in the early 60's. The book, like Ronald Blythe's Akenfield, operates through a series of interviews - here he meets an elderly man in his home, lamenting the loss of previously strong religious community in the village:
"He expressed, without embarrassment or self-consciousness, that evocative power of passages of literature constantly heard or thought about each day and lay hold of pieces of landscape or patches of the day, so that a biblical passage begins to look, in a slow mix, like a particular place, and the place to sound like the paragraph, physically distilled out of familiar words. The Dead Sea, the dead sea, was the large dreary pond near a pit where he had once worked, edged with reeds, stones, trees...Yea , though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death: trees again, barren looking in a winter scene...an overhung, shadowy, stumbly lane where people walked quickly, whistling"
Some 30 years later Potter is giving a last interview, he has a cancer that should have already killed him had he not decided to write TWO(!) final series's, something to stand 'as my last words' - he's giving the interview to a TV station, in an empty TV studio. The interviewer picks up on how the bible and his childhood seemed to become confused and always feature heavily as backdrop to his works - the bible was his first language, tells Potter as he drinks equal measures of Morphine and white wine: "It was the Holy Land - I knew Cannop Ponds by the pit where Dad worked, I knew where the Valley of the Shadow of Death was, the lane where the overhanging trees were. As I said i was a coward. At dusk I'd whistle going down that particular lane..."
Potter here not only walking through that 'slow mix' - but as he retells his work and life for a final public time he also inhabits the elderly man's recollection, his place in that previous book, and his written and read relationship to a place both men knew they weren't going to inhabit for muc h longer... two passages that have fascinated me...

Bests Gregg