An Essay of Temporality: Grappling With Theory

So...here is my first stab at a paper which situates my thesis in its contextual discourses. I had hoped to create an essay which flows in a rolling and gentle way - a series of thoughts strung together by a series of thresholds woven into one another...
... I still have some work to do, and the ending has yet to be written...but without further ado:


Facing Temporality:
The Fragility of Decay, the Atmosphere of the Uncanny, and the Bed

I should like to begin with the idea of the bed; The bed intrigues me in its intimacy, and in the fragility that it signifies. It is a place – a space of memory, identity, and meaning; A place resonates with one’s experiential past, and therein finds its own identity. Marc Auge, in his essay From Places to Non-Places, describes place as something stable, intimate, and rooted in the familiar. The bed is dear to us as a place of refuge, and a source of comfort. It is the place where we submit ourselves, after to toils of the day, to utter vulnerability – trusting in its guardianship in the hours of sleep. In sleep, we relinquish all control to the raveling landscape of the subconscious. This is an enchanting idea; The bed as the steward of the body, a house of safe-keeping, as the mind sinks away into the pools of the imaginary. Gaston Bachelard refers to the house as a cradle, a refuge that appeals to our primitive need to enclose and protect ourselves. The bed then takes up, where the house leaves off in the transition into sleep. The bed is a threshold, an architecture of dreams, by which we happily succumb to the vastness beyond – but more on this later.

Let us return to the theme of intimacy; The bed knows the body. Jules Michelet writes, of the building of a bird’s nest, that this home is formed so intimately, by and for the body, that it is an extension of the bird itself.

“…the bird’s tool is its own body…th house is a bird’s very person; it is its form and its most immediate effort.”

The bed is etched with the identity of the body. Georges Perec writes, in his Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, that the bed becomes so immersed in the space of the body that it becomes singular to the individual; “…we have only one bed, which is our bed.” Michel Leivis describes the bed as an island, upon which we find comfort in solitude. We turn, scrunch, flatten, plump, twist, wrench, and kick to make the bed our own. It is often times such an intimate, and telling portrayal of its user, that it can expose our most vulnerable of secrets, and strip us bare to reveal the raw truths of our lives. It can be the picture of vulnerability.

Because the bed is of a nature so universal in its representation, it behaves in much the same manner as an architectural place; Indeed it is a repository of memory, and a framework upon which identities may be strung. That is to say, it is an object upon which we project past experience. Changes in the projected meaning can be understood in great emotional poignancy, without any regard for intellectual comprehension. If the bed appears in the guise of the unfamiliar, its meaning fluctuates. In Edouard Manet’s Olympia the bed becomes confrontational – a podium from which a challenge is cast, a stage upon which defiance is cultivated. The bed is a protagonist not often credited for its voice in the literature of the ages. In Homer’s Odyssey for example, the bed appears as a destination, representing the solidarity of the home as an anchor enduring the weathers of Odysseus’ epic journey, and the unwavering fidelity of his wife Penelope, in the face of an unrelenting wave of suitors. But I digress. The distilled sense of place that appeals to me predominantly, is its chameleon-like qualities – the ability of the bed to shift identities, to shed meanings, and the subsequent atmospheres therein created.

Segue to the deathbed. To be sure, there are many doors that are opened by this, most sacred of thresholds, however I propose to open only those that speak of human fragility, and the atmosphere of absence. The vulnerability of the bed in life, is emphasized in quite a different way in death. I have spoken of the memory of the bed as place, and its intimacy with the body – it follows then that the deathbed, imbued with the identity and the traces of the life that it has served, becomes unfamiliar in its lifelessness, as though it were an amputated limb. That is to say that one can sense the loss and the vacancy of the bed that was once to intimately connected to the body. Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as that which is homely becoming unhomely or, the threat of the Other emerging from the woodwork of our most vulnerable of strong-holds, unbeknownst to us. We become repulsed by the Other before we can even fully recognize it as such. We understand it first sensorily, before we can comprehend it intellectually. It is this human fragility that interests me. How is it that vulnerability can take such a hold of our senses? How can it seep from the pooled shadows of the subconscious and grip us in fear before we even have the chance to recognize it? It is this element of the uncanny that addresses temporality – that emerges to converse directly with the intimacy of the bed and the human fragility it portrays. It is the emptiness of the deathbed that is so Other to us, but what of accepting our temporality as fact, and welcoming it therein? It is this surrender to the tides of time, and the acceptance of the Other that I find so fascinating in its defiance of the natural human instinct. Is it possible to play amidst decay? Be at home with desolation? Embrace the uncanny? Anthony Vidler describes the architectural uncanny, and the places of decay as a disfiguration, terrible in the thoughts it brings forth from the depths of the onlooker. He references Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la Mer, who speaks eloquently of the uncanny of decay, as something that emerges from within ourselves.

“ The house, like man, can become a skeleton. A superstition is enough to kill it. Then it is terrible.” p51

It is the violence of the uncanny that possesses the majority of its disturbing nature, but what is of greater discomfort is the juxtaposition of the fragile and the treacherous that sinks cold into the bones.

The deathbed stands now as the story teller of the unknown, a liminal space, an edge condition – both terrifying and seductive in its vertigo, a sentinel, leading into the dark. E. A. Poe describes this unnerving sensory perception of the architectural uncanny in his story The Fall of the House of Usher, in which the house becomes the tomb.

“ I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit…the feeling was unrelieved by an of the half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible…bleak walls…vacant eye-like windows…white trunks of decayed trees…an utter depression of the soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation…there was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart…” p88

The atmosphere of decay is valuable for facing Otherness, and becoming one with the edge condition. Although it is sometimes fearsome (in a similar vein to the Sublime), there is beauty in the natural process of decay, and the presence of the inevitable therein. These atmospheres churn the corners of one’s soul, demanding an emotional understanding of place. They are, by this nature, elusive and resistant to definition.

The sensation of the uncanny in these spaces, is often amplified by the traces of human life that stand testament to the passing of time and the architecture’s memory – palimpsests of collapsed eras. Perec, speaks of these objects of memory as a residue that has accumulated over the history of a life.

" The passage of time (my History) leaves behind a residue that accumulates: photographs, drawings, the corpses of long since dried-up felt pens, shirts, non-returnable glasses and returnable glasses, cigar wrappers, tins, erasers, postcards, books, dust and knickknacks: this is what I call my fortune." p24-25

These objects take on identity, just as the bed becomes an extension of the body, and a witness to intimacy.

By enveloping this emblem of human fragility within the landscape of collapse and desolation, the bed becomes charged with the atmosphere created in this juxtaposition. In contrasting the clean, the comforting, the safe, the vulnerable, and the familiar with the dirty, the threatening, the fearsome, the dark, and the unfamiliar, we can know the uncanny through the medium of experience. What is the emotional understanding of the uncanny, of the atmosphere of decay, and how can we describe it? How can we comfortably step off the edge? How do we welcome the chilling expanse?

The bed; A place we trust as a gateway into the realm of sleep, a threshold to the vastness of dreams, and the sheer immensity of death. A place to pass into what is beyond our control or understanding, and the accompanying fear that surrounds the unknown. To face our temporality, and to embrace desolation is to have an intimate and accepting understanding of fear, and in so doing dissolve the boundaries of fear itself.