proximoception | (no subject)

Invisible houses are lives.

Attackers of utopia say it can never be that way, that it's there in the very word. There is no place where we can stay safe and happy.

But there must be a place where we can stay safest, happiest, logically, though not necessarily a way to identify it. And probably not one place, what with boredom, what with love of the new, what with strokes of ill fortune, but a movement among places. A way. The home we seek - because how can you not seek where you're happiest and safest? - must not be bound by walls. It can't be described as a building, quite. But presumably it will involve places where we sleep, eat, shelter, work. Our dream home will include houses. Being what we are it would have to.

Hence the (unintended?) resonance of "in my house are many mansions" I imagine. We'd need a few, surely. Or at least a shack and a beach and a bar and the house of another.

We have modes of life that drift away then back. Hence the resonance (intended) of "love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement" - one of our many.

But there are things that are like a house: like that day when young when you looked out at the rain and understood, registered why you were in with the chairs and rugs and dryness. Like that time you went into her house or into his and found that you were welcome there. A house is where needs are met, where life becomes what life can be where they're finally met. A thing for you, not on you or past you.

And I hardly need to mention the other kind. The invisible house where a house, a way you once walked, is no longer there. Hence you can no longer see it. It is there in the sentence 'A house is no longer there.' The invisible house is there in these words, scraps and signs.

It's not quite a metaphor, either, the way a road can be just a metaphor (not always - sometimes a road is a wallless, a ceilingless hallway).

There's something about where you are, where you were that truly is physical. Hence I would never call these houses intangible. Your memories never fall through the floor, however they decay. Therefore they have one. Your memories are chambered.

As are your expectations, made of memories. Nobody wants the world, and nobody ever had it. We had houses. We want houses. The present house is the intangible one, the one where the feel can change, where it's hard to feel what it feels like or where it quite ends.

Calvino's cities, Carson's towns, Hawthorne's towns and forests - these are nearby, of course. Maybe cities and forests are where you go to find or escape from a house. Melville's boats and islands? I don't want to emphasize the boundaries here.

And the other other invisible house, the chapel or tower? What if we're in someone else's house, is I guess the idea. Someone who lives and intends and is not us. The Ring Girl's barn or chainsaw massacrer's abattoir - or sudden castle where something's expected of us. Here we are at something else's expectation. Or trapped in someone else's planned-out life.

"What would be neat is if there were a hatch." Where will our home be? Where is our tomb?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Have you read House of Leaves?

How is that? I often pick the book up in the store and marvel at the prettiness and the excellent production, but I think it'd drive me crazy to read it, nonlinear and digressiony and footnotey as it apparently is.

It's un-even. Some parts are intriguing - the stuff about the house is the most intriguing - but most of the character description is un-inspired.

Nope, but I've been wondering about it in this context (and about Gravity's Rainbow in the Court-Tristero-Fairies one - I got far enough this last time to note that the System was often pluralized).

I skimmed around in it when it was published to find the Bloom reference - which seemed pretty lame, I thought. But I cared nothing about nonexistent houses then.

It's pretty willfully Borgesian - sort of not Borges on his own terms even while using his terms - which is the wrong way to approach Borges, I think. I think if you read it without any expectations of literary greatness, you might enjoy the story. You can skip the Johnny Truant sections without missing anything.

In the novel I'm not writing, where the story lines do not intersect as such but the narratives do (I can see that to explain what I mean, I'm going to have to just do it, which is intimidating), each story centers on a house. The houses are physically utterly distinct, no ghosts or echoes from one story to another, and yet the ways the characters inhabit them make them similar to the reader.

(That's surely an invisible house: one in the mind of the reader of an unwritten work.)

Sounds viable but challenging. Readers are going to expect them to finally dovetail into each other - you'd have to neutralize or play off of that somehow to avoid final disappointment.