'Chair Creaks, Though No One Sits there': Decomposition and Liquidity

Abstract

How to describe and analyse a process from within, without self-aggrandisement, without exaggeration, yet engage a dispassionate listener? How to remember each small incident that influenced the outcome, and how to recall significant moments of revelation or realisation from the past, recent and distant, the pressure they may have exerted on the making of a single work? These are discursive notes, perhaps addressing the subject. The work may have begun in a room, though this seems unlikely. If it did begin in a room, then the room may have been quiet; if that were the case (which I'm inclined to accept for the sake of argument) then that quiet room was not just one room, because quiet rooms build up in your life: rooms within rooms within rooms, rooms in dreams, and now virtual myspace rooms and chat rooms. All these rooms were themselves enfolded within unfamiliar rooms that age barely remembers (or chooses to forget): those rooms of dread and pleasure, action and boredom, safety and danger. Their atmosphere accumulates, standing in relation to the feeling of being in rooms when something big was at stake: classroom, exam room, bedroom. 'Clocks spring to mind', I began to write (until realising that springing insinuates itself into the text as a pun, and puns are not my style, but clocks once defined the feeling of rooms): clocks ticking, measuring time, slowly, quietly, a presence, an interior atmosphere, dividing time with their chimes, then resuming their steady plod through ... what exactly? Each tick and tock seemed to freeze time, and if the clock stopped then the feeling of a room would change, dramatically. 'The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long,' wrote Virginia Woolf in Jacob's Room. Indoor silence once was occupied, regulated and even articulated by a clock; it was not silence at all, of course, but the tick and the tock were paroxysms around which silence seemed to gather, like vultures round a corpse, waiting for the ungiven signal for decomposition. Now we have digital clocks, small battery operated clocks with a tick so fugitive that only paranoid listening in the middle of the night can search it out, and the visual noise but apparent audio silence of numerical displays on TVs, ovens, microwaves, computers and phones--so quiet rooms and the people within them now float within a more continuous and subliminal form of air. All of these devices radiate electromagnetic emissions, so their silence is illusory. With the right equipment, they materialise, just like the things of the air thronging H.P. Lovecraft's fiction. There are other small sounds; maybe they form wisps into solids, glue pieces into forms, keep people sane, or shield them from loneliness and the void. Georges Perec wrote about the man who stared at nothing, his radio playing at such low volume that no one really knew if he could hear it, yet when Madame Nochere went to switch it off, he stopped her. He listened to the hit parade every night: that was his claim. When I was a teenager, I listened to the hit parade at low volume, night, bedclothes, sleeping parents ... also indulging in melancholy, as is standard, and it being the 1960s, there was plenty of material to feed both needs. Poignant in its description of fragility, vulnerability, isolation bordering on chronic withdrawal, one of Brian Wilson's most revealing ballads, 'In My Room', described the bedroom as a world, a friend, a confidant, a refuge, an ear, a place of listening in which other people were absent. The lyrics, written by Gary Usher, were prophetic, since they anticipated Brian's notorious withdrawal into pyjamas--a bed-bound descent into the maelstrom of high calorie food, TV and cocaine that began in summer 1973 and ended in late 1975. Mark Rothko, also famously troubled, wrote interesting things about air. 'Tactile space, or for the sake of simplicity, let us call it air, which exists between objects or shapes in the picture, is painted so that it gives the impression of a solid,' he wrote. …