SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v1]
[6/26/1995]
I’m becoming more perceptive to the strange and haunting effects of the psychogeography of the empty complex on the mind, of the divisions of space within.
This is a dead space which repels the living. A Sartrean hell. No matter where I am here, in any room, in any hall, in all of my wandering, the repeating pathways, I’m always lost, displaced, deviated. I do things without thinking, not consciously so it seems. I no longer rationalize what I do or censure my thoughts. I suddenly find myself doing pushups, punching the air or running down a hall. Suddenly I’m laughing to myself for no reason. Suddenly I feel a volatility in me — a destructive impulse with nothing to destroy.
I might be only reacting and adjusting to the isolation, the insulation, the walls within which I’m always free and always trapped. I’ve imprisoned myself here, stranded myself in this Robinsonade paradise, in the desert of my imagination.
[6/23/1995]
I sense I’m already losing hold of reality here in the vertigo of empty space, the heady oxygenation of void. This is a space which I can’t access, which I can’t enter, which repels me.
This empty room: an unphotographable space. This is non-place. A prefigurative space. A rectilinear void. A reflection of nothing. A territory of the invisible psyche.
[6/10/1995]
Behind the door, nothing. An empty room. A room which exhausts description. A room without objects, without symbols. A space which is a silence, which is prismatic and mercurial of light, vertiginous of space. A pure energy field.
It’s a room I’m drawn into, which exposes me in its bareness. A room which has been hidden away — hidden behind furniture, behind mirrors. Now unburied, exhumed from time. A space unfulfilled, unclaimed, wanting. Its white nihility reflects subliminal fear, exhilaration, desire, cacoethes, mania.
The room is a corridor in time without distance or direction in space.
[6/25/1995]
Behind the materiality and faculty of certain discrete objects — objects sacrosanct, diabolic, daemonological → fetishes, totems, icons — there is a symbolic dimension, a super-functionary quintessence, a psychodynamic force which is inseparable from the objecthood and value-function → a shadow, a dark essence there between that which is the object and that which is a mental resonance, an essence of thingness which is indefinite.
The shadow, however psychical, is a force in the real. It’s the object as it exists in the mind, the resilient force beyond the materialism. It’s the shadow-form of an object which appears in dreams.
This tenement complex has a such a shadow: a shadow in the echo of its form; a shadow without space in the dimensions of time; a shadow of which nothing is connected, like notes decoupled from music; a shadow which is felt as a presence — of temperature, of sense, only to the attuned receiver, the hyperaware; a shadow disturbed on film, in the manipulation of recorded image; a shadow, like a demonism, invoked. This is a shadow-complex of many chambers in which the wraiths thereof forever wander and re-wander without time and cross paths without knowing, the revenants present amongst the living.
[6/26/1995]
I’m tormented by an incompleteness, a disparity. I exist doubly — my body and its image are disconnected and far apart. I am only a shadow in pursuit of my reflection.
