Compression and release
A year ago I visited and was transfixed by the Pope-Leighey House -- a Frank Lloyd Wright design about four miles from home. The corridors are small and narrow and organized, like a train corridor, so that you are enclosed and directed in how you go through the space (imagine a pinball machine). They are simultaneously light, airy, and fragrant from the waxed wood construction (so that you are comforted and embraced in the space). At the end of the small halls, a sudden release into a great room filled with windows and light and a very high ceiling takes your breath away.
Months ago I visited another such space, ancient, stirring, and possibly among the inspirations for the compression-and-release sensation that Wright and his successors were creating.
Carn Euny, a fogou in Cornwall, is an iron age underground passage that leads to a large cave-like room. The purpose of these fogous is unknown, but best speculation is that they served for ritual space. Again, a small narrow tunnel -- in this case cool, earthy, damp, and overgrown with fern and bioluminescent moss -- leads you, pulls you almost, under the ground. At the end of the tunnel, a sudden release into a great room with a very high ceiling, space for a fire, and some sort of altar or display space takes your breath away.
This compression-and-release sensation isn't limited to space. I'm reading Dai Sijie's book, Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch, and realized that the concept can easily be applied to a state of mind. Here, Sijie neatly mirrors the physical sensation of compression and release (from under the covers and in the darkness) with the mental sensation:
"At this moment, in his hear-seat carriage, Muo is seized by the same vertigo he felt twenty years earlier (on 15 February 1980, to be precise) in a room measuring six square metres, with tiered bunks shared by eight students. It was a damp and chilly room, where the air smelled of greasy water, instant noodles, and accumulated trash that stung the eyes -- an atmosphere that still pervades the dormitories of Chinese universities. It was past midnight (a strict lights-out at 11 p.m.), and the dormitories, five identical nine-storey buildings, three for boys and two for girls, were plunged into obedient darkness and silence. For the first time in his life, young Muo, then aged twenty and a student of classical Chinese literature, was holding in his hand a book by Freud titled The Interpretation of Dreams....Lying on a top bunk under the coverlet, he read the book by the tremulous yellow beam of his flashlight, poring over the foreign words, tracing one line after another, pausing frequently to focus on some abstraction and then losing himself all over again in a long, labryrinthine passage before reaching a period or even a comma. When he came upon Freud's commentary about a staircase in a dream, it was as if a brick had been hurled through the window and hit him in the head. Pulling tight the coverlet, stained with sweat and other nocturnal emissions, he wondered whether Freud had penetrated the meanderings of Muo's own brain to witness one of its recurrent spectacles, or indeed whether he wasn't by astonishing coincidence dreaming the very dreams that Freud had dreamt before him, in another place. That night, Freud ignited a joyful flame in the spirit of this disciple-to-be. Muo threw down his sorry blanket, switched on an overhead lamp, and despite his roommates' groaning chorus of complaint, entered into a state of beatitude produced by his communion with a living god, reading and rereading the mystical sentences out loud...."
My compression and release? I dunno what it'll be -- the release part at least. As for compression, I'm wound tight as catgut.
Months ago I visited another such space, ancient, stirring, and possibly among the inspirations for the compression-and-release sensation that Wright and his successors were creating.
Carn Euny, a fogou in Cornwall, is an iron age underground passage that leads to a large cave-like room. The purpose of these fogous is unknown, but best speculation is that they served for ritual space. Again, a small narrow tunnel -- in this case cool, earthy, damp, and overgrown with fern and bioluminescent moss -- leads you, pulls you almost, under the ground. At the end of the tunnel, a sudden release into a great room with a very high ceiling, space for a fire, and some sort of altar or display space takes your breath away.
This compression-and-release sensation isn't limited to space. I'm reading Dai Sijie's book, Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch, and realized that the concept can easily be applied to a state of mind. Here, Sijie neatly mirrors the physical sensation of compression and release (from under the covers and in the darkness) with the mental sensation:
"At this moment, in his hear-seat carriage, Muo is seized by the same vertigo he felt twenty years earlier (on 15 February 1980, to be precise) in a room measuring six square metres, with tiered bunks shared by eight students. It was a damp and chilly room, where the air smelled of greasy water, instant noodles, and accumulated trash that stung the eyes -- an atmosphere that still pervades the dormitories of Chinese universities. It was past midnight (a strict lights-out at 11 p.m.), and the dormitories, five identical nine-storey buildings, three for boys and two for girls, were plunged into obedient darkness and silence. For the first time in his life, young Muo, then aged twenty and a student of classical Chinese literature, was holding in his hand a book by Freud titled The Interpretation of Dreams....Lying on a top bunk under the coverlet, he read the book by the tremulous yellow beam of his flashlight, poring over the foreign words, tracing one line after another, pausing frequently to focus on some abstraction and then losing himself all over again in a long, labryrinthine passage before reaching a period or even a comma. When he came upon Freud's commentary about a staircase in a dream, it was as if a brick had been hurled through the window and hit him in the head. Pulling tight the coverlet, stained with sweat and other nocturnal emissions, he wondered whether Freud had penetrated the meanderings of Muo's own brain to witness one of its recurrent spectacles, or indeed whether he wasn't by astonishing coincidence dreaming the very dreams that Freud had dreamt before him, in another place. That night, Freud ignited a joyful flame in the spirit of this disciple-to-be. Muo threw down his sorry blanket, switched on an overhead lamp, and despite his roommates' groaning chorus of complaint, entered into a state of beatitude produced by his communion with a living god, reading and rereading the mystical sentences out loud...."
My compression and release? I dunno what it'll be -- the release part at least. As for compression, I'm wound tight as catgut.