Two of Four Houses
The first spoke. What I see is a house, or the idea of a house, enormous and unknowable in its full extent, a house in which rooms only partly reveal themselves, in which mirrors are to be walked into, pictures disappeared into, in which chairs and beds are big enough to swallow you entirely. I can never see any part of this house, not one room, not one corridor clearly, only as a patchwork of dark and light (chiefly dark) containing isolated angles of objects or furniture. Its smell however is overpowering, and it has a music too, comprised of creaks, whispers and snuffles; rain on glass, branches on windows, someone yawning, someone singing in a kitchen, someone listening to a radio in a distant room, a music always elsewhere. There are rooms here with walls so damp you are guaranteed to get rheumatism, and floors so rotten it is dangerous to step on them. In the dark there are rusty old tins waiting to cut you. Some rooms are so filled with hatred you can smell it across a stairway. I couldn’t begin to number the attics and cellars; the pantries, privies and vaults; the kitchens are far below. There is no outside to this house. Nature is purely notional - a breeze that blows in through an open window, books that show men clinging to precipices or rafts, buckled across wires or lying in pits. Every so often a shudder passes through the fabric: the house is bending with some erotic dream. You touch your flesh and you know it is distended. You taste salt. Here and there you might glimpse couples huddling together, holding hands or shouting hoarsely at each other. You might see one cradling the head of the other, feeling a pulse, passing from a room carrying a bedpan or a towel.