|
Often, architecture
invokes us to use its line to rope off space. We are as Mr. Square
in Flatland, who finds happiness in his house of five lines, a.k.a.
the pentagon. We are the aboriginal storyteller - scratching a
circle in the earth around ourselves at the fireside, until the
magic of Flatland leaves us hungry for our inevitable inhabitation
in the triune of x, y, and z. And in our hunger for z, we extrude
the inscription of the line upward and draw our space around us - we
take comfort in the coddled surround of the waddled cube of our
favorite blanket, gathering around the hearth of bedtime story
flashlight. We walk into the construct of the lines - four walls, a bottom and a top. But what of the space within the
line itself? What of the space within the thickness of a line? What
of the poche of the line?
When I was younger, one
of the stories the aboriginal within me told at the fireside of that
always dimming 2-C flashlight, under the dwelling of the bedsheets
filled with words, was of Nils the Elf. I read this story
incessantly as I imagined Nils was right under my bed. And the small
hole in the wall where Nils lived was the gate to my imagination. I
would slide under the bed and touch the magic tack next to this
oh-so- ordinary mouse door, and be transposed in scale to 3/32.
Greeted by Nils at the entrance we would race around the poche of
the very walls that kept me in - or out.
Nils the Elf planted the
seed within the fertile space of the poche and it did grow. Until I
found myself occupying, as we all have, the space behind the
furnace, sleeping within the toe space under the stairs. Only it
didn’t click till I found myself in a small architecture firm, was
handed a pencil, and was given my first of many givens, the task of
pocheing a plan. And here, within the mark of the poche, was more
poche and the further I crawled in, the further I could see in until
I turned around and used my vantage point to see out from within.
In the studio, late at
night, I with my Nils of the day would knock on the lines as walls
to test their depth and possibilities for occupation. The magic tack
was now a chair to climb up into the ceiling and over the partition
wall till we would find ourselves back within the comfort zone of
the poche where pinholes were our windows and imperfections our
furniture.
We were home - just as
the three bears are home within the poche of the tree. We simply
have to be willing to sit in papa bear’s too hard chair or sink
into mama bear’s bed. For in the poche we see and feel with
heightened senses. Anne Dillard says in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
The gaps are the
things. The gaps are the spirit’s one home. The altitudes and
latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can
discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man
unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to
see the back parts of God. They are the fissures between
mountains and cells the wind lances through. The icy narrowing
fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into gaps. If you
find them. They will shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps.
Squeak into a gap in the soil. Turn. Unlock - more than a maple
- a universe.
The poche offers such
gaps and is the gateway - as Nils the Elf’s tack and mouse hole is
a gateway to another universe of perception. The backs of the walls
we see create fiords of poche within and we do cross through these
gaps on a regular basis. In the kitchen, the pantry is only a
sticky jamb away, and each time we cross from one kinship of space
to another, the poche must be parted in order to let us pass. We
even fatten these thresholds in order to make our spaces hold their
breaths at their vestibules. Breathe deep when next you are greeted
by the double set of doors. Smell the quiet, caught air in the
gullet of the entrance.
Or, when next you take
in a stage set, look in your mind's eye to the room just beyond the
wings and envy those who so easily may slide behind the view. Even
within the set are pocheist possibilities waiting to be occupied.
Sleep under your desks and cross bridges of time from building to
building, even if the bridge comes from inside.
Giovanni Piranesi was
master of such bridges of and within the mind. In his drawings of
the Prison at Le Carceri we see bridges leading only to the other
side in order to look back on where we have been. Getting into the
poche offers the same practical dilemma. We enter into the poche to
look back out and see the world and our lives anew. Thomas Merton
wrote:
There is always a
temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making
itsy-bitsy statues. There is always an enormous temptation in
all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals
and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so
self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from
the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never
merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the
rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it. The
world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and
bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we
should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should
be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
We try to view
differently so we aren’t itsy-bitsy friends. We muck through the
roughest gaps of rage and try to measure the horizon of this
extravagance. But if we want to discover the full-fledged wideness
of this world, then we better not take for granted the overlap - the
spaces between - the poche. So we tally the net square footage
within our domain, and we please the inerts of the wall by visiting,
and when we do visit we set those whispers free. It is as Jeremiah
(33:10-11) prophesied:
In this place of
which you say, "It is a waste"… there shall be
heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness,
the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the
voices of those who sing.
Look for the poche and
crawl in, whether it be the closet in your home or the cabinet in
your mother’s kitchen. Take the leap of scale and touch the magic
tack. Nils the Elf is always waiting, and even if you break a few
chairs, you too can be Goldilocks.
As e.e. cummings said:
listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
all I ask is that when you go you pause at the poche
|
