When I was nine or ten years old, my grandmother gave me a book full of so many random, interesting facts and tidbits of science and history I sometimes think it’s the secret source of all my adult obsessions. It was in this book that I first read about the mansions in Newport, those seaside castles constructed during the Gilded Age to showcase the wealth made possible, among other scandals, by a total lack of income taxes. I lived in the desert in West Texas—I’d never been to the East Coast at all—and Newport seemed otherworldly to me.
I went to Newport for the first time at the age of twenty-five. My parents had come up to visit me in Boston, where I’d just finished my MFA, and we rented a car to drive to Rhode Island for the day. I wanted to be overwhelmed, which is one of the most self-defeating desires. I think we went to three, maybe four of the mansions. My father took a picture of me outside the Breakers, the Vanderbilts’ 100,000-square-foot summer home, my hair whipped around in the coastal air, that I used as my author photo in my first book of poetry.
Earlier this year, my husband and I moved to Providence. A friend came to visit on the Fourth of July, and we drove out again, over two very long, arced bridges, to tour the Breakers. We parked near the spot where my father had snapped me. I remembered the park-like grounds, the cliff walk that runs behind the house along the ocean, and the much-photographed exterior of the house. That book I’d read as a child had one, a grainy black-and-white photo of a lawn party, the women with their hats and their parasols, and what architects would call the house’s rear elevation, which is simply the back of the house. But after almost twenty years—I’m forty-three now—I remembered very little about the inside. Very little looked familiar. I did remember the disappointment I always feel when I finally see something I’ve wanted to see since I was a child, and the disappointment I always feel on a tour of a historic home, the way the ropes and your overdetermined path through the house make it all feel fake, like a diorama, a scale model in a museum, and not the real house.
Then, about halfway through the tour, I entered a room that gave me such a powerful sense of repetition I turned around and entered the room again. I hadn’t known that I’d been waiting for it, but it was the room I had been picturing when I tried to imagine the house. It had, metonymically, come to stand as my memory for the whole interior. The memory was so strong; I couldn’t believe it wasn’t the first room in the tour. But it takes about an hour just to get through the first floor, and this was a bedroom, on the second floor—the guest bedroom, which you reach after passing through the upper loggia, a sort of glorified balcony. Maybe the loggia acts as a kind of reset, where you inevitably pause to look out at the ocean, before returning to the proper interior of the house. The bedroom has red carpet—of course I remembered the red carpet, red like the inside of your mind—and there’s a velvet rope walkway to lead you through the center of the long room, in one door and out another. The bed, which seems too small, is on the left; there are several little clusters of furniture all along the opposite side, clusters of chairs and tables, more than one desk—all the bedrooms are like this. There seem to be dozens of extra chairs. It’s striking that the volume of the rooms was a problem for the very rich. The furniture available didn’t scale to the size of the rooms, so you just had to put more of it in them. My mother, I remember, was walking to my right, the first time I entered that red room, and thought about the problem of the furniture. I must have remembered the room so clearly because it’s the room where I had an idea I’ve taken with me—a thought I have re-thought, a thought that has remained mine.
I think this is important: memories and ideas happen in a place. An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place. It has to give one the feeling of entering a room.
The architect Christopher Alexander has written that “the experience of entering a building influences the way you feel inside the building.” “If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival.” He cites a report called “Fairs, Exhibits, Pavilions, and their Audiences,” in which the authors describe observing people drift in and out of various exhibits, impassive and unengaged. There was one exhibit, however, where visitors had to cross a “huge, deep-pile, bright orange carpet on the way in.” The exhibit itself was no better than the others, they said, but people lingered there because they’d made a journey of sorts to enter. They’d crossed a kind of Willy Wonka or Wizard of Oz threshold, into a different realm. They felt changed.
Another experiment showed people judge houses with greater degrees of transition between inside and outside to be more “houselike.” If there is a courtyard or a partially hidden garden or a curving pathway to the front entrance, the house exhibits more “houseness.” The transitional space makes room for a shift in mood, for what Alexander calls “ambiguous territories” and “intimacy gradients”—increasing degrees of closeness, as you reach the inner realm. The vogue for conversation pits exploited this phenomenon. The act of descending, getting closer to the earth, is metaphysical; it changes how you speak and think. It is literally profound.
I have lately been reading lots of architecture books, because I love buildings, and because I love the books themselves, their terminology and conventions. They have lots of pictures and diagrams, and the pictures have good captions—the captions are not merely labels, not mere information. They add style, like all good paratext. Here’s one, from The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable, by Robert Harbison, in a chapter on ruins: “Apollo launching site, Florida, disused after having served its purpose once.” It appears beneath a mysterious concrete platform that looks so abandoned there’s nothing around it for scale—it’s hard to tell if it’s the size of a car or a building. There’s something bleak and withholding about this caption, as though neither the image nor language can answer for human behavior. Another caption in Harbison’s book appears beneath a photo of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Abbey in an Oak Forest: “The church, the trees, humanity itself, are in ruins.” Christopher Alexander’s captions have a fascinating way of using ellipses: “An edge that can be used . . .” one reads, or rather, “An edge that can be used [DOT DOT DOT].” Another appears beneath two rough drawings of the spaces, the positive gaps, made by groupings of nearby buildings: “This space can be felt: it is distinct:—a place [DOT DOT DOT] and it is convex. This space is vague, amorphous, ‘nothing.’ ” He puts nothing in quotes—space is only “nothing” if you do not transform it.
These architecture books often have a seductive authority. Harbison tells me, unbelievably, that “Most buildings aren’t really architecture.” He tells me “uselessness is the most sublime of all human constructs.” Or take the first sentence of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, by Robert Venturi: “I like complexity and contradiction in architecture.” That’s the first sentence. I love that. It’s so simple—he’s just telling you how he feels about the concepts already introduced by the title—but so confident. I feel it instantly tells me what kind of book I am reading, the way you instantly know, upon entering a party, what kind of party you’re at.
Architecture books are full of good writing, and they’re also full of good writing advice. Venturi writes that he likes buildings that are “boring as well as ‘interesting.’ ” He puts interesting in quotes, but not boring—interesting is the more suspicious category. I feel the same about books—I don’t trust books that aren’t a little boring. And art can be boring in interesting ways. (My friend Sommer said about the Beatles documentary, “I loved how boring it was.”) Venturi likes “messy vitality over obvious unity,” “richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning.” He writes that “Mies [van der Rohe] makes wonderful buildings only because he ignores many aspects of a building. If he solved more problems, his buildings would be far less potent.” And perhaps my favorite bit of accidental writing advice from this book: “A building with no ‘imperfect’ part can have no perfect part, because contrast supports meaning.”
I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the site,” he writes, in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction; “Work on the site, stay on the site, let the site tell you its secrets.” Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm. It’s a place where all my best thinking can go for a period of time, a place where the thoughts can be collected and arranged for more density of meaning. This place necessarily has structure, if it feels like a place. There’s a classic architecture book called Why Buildings Stand Up. We call any building, or part of a building, or thing like a building, a structure, if it succeeds in standing up. The structure is the system of elements in the building that make things go up—the load-bearing elements, walls and beams and columns, that counteract gravity. They counteract quote-unquote nothing, so empty space becomes a place.
My favorite museums are house museums, like the Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, or Peggy Guggenheim’s house in Venice, repurposed spaces with multiple paths through, plenty of nooks and intimacy gradients, rooms with lots of light and plants that feel like the outdoors, or outdoor spaces with partial walls and ceilings that feel like rooms. The space of the essay does have edges, but the edges are a little bit ragged and open. As you start to explore the territory, it’s like you’re tethered to a tree in the courtyard, but the tether can be rather long. The tree is the idea you’re building your house or your essay around. You can wander rather far from the original tree, but only so far. Your reader can feel the tether too. It is sometimes slack and sometimes taut. The variance in tension is pleasurable. You want the tether to get very taut sometimes—you have wandered very far from the tree.
We call attention to the tether whenever we make a transition. Think of an essay in very short sections or fragments. Each break yanks the tether, as if the tree is calling you back. This effect can be very intentional, as in Mary-Kim Arnold’s book-length essay, Litany for the Long Moment, which uses as its structural scaffolding the questionnaire from a Korean tv show that reunites separated families. There’s poignancy to the pull of the tether each time we return to a question. “who are you looking for?” this book asks itself several times, attempting to answer and then asking again. “when do you miss your mother or family the most?” “did you ever face any difficulty in your life and how did you overcome it? please explain in detail.” Again: “who are you looking for?” again: “how did you overcome it?” The book ends with three attempts at Question 14: “write a letter to your mother.” In parentheses: “(a long letter.)” The first attempt is half a page. The question repeats. The second is a little longer. The question repeats. The third is the longest. The stop of the tether each time we read the question, the choke of it, forces us to feel the difficulty in the material for the writer. When the structure is apparent, the reader and the writer are in the same place.
Or look at Thot by Chanté L. Reid, another book-length essay in short, lyric sections. Each section looks like, and may be, a poem; certainly the text uses space on the page the way poems do, with short lines and staircase-like margins. The book’s speaker is writing a thesis on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and the form of the essay makes cascades of meaning by showing its history of self-revision, clarification, expansion, all the available options stacked on top of one another. For example, when asked, “What’s the paper about,” the speaker responds:
I don’t know
Beloved
Medea
Vampires
Image
Futurity
Time and space
I don’t know—stuff
Books and shit.
Here the tautness of the tether mimics line breaks in a poem, that hard brake effect like a seatbelt catching, momentum versus inertia. And there’s a friction in the book between academic language and everyday diction, between lit theory and casual conversation. Both registers are present in the essay, in what Venturi might describe as a “hyperproximity,” like the meaning-creating contrast of new glass buildings next to old stone churches in old cities. Reid is fluent in both the “high” and “low” registers, and perhaps suspicious of both, or at least suspects that neither in itself is sufficient for completeness of meaning. So, in its tension, the tether seems aware of that interplay, of these different but overlapping attitudes.
A break in an essay is a visual rest that we read as both sonic and temporal. The voice of the text stops. Because of the pause inherent in that break, which at least momentarily stops momentum, there is more pressure on a fragment to be interesting in itself. A great work in fragments shows less of its work, but we feel the work in the force of the fragments. There’s another level of thinking that occurs through momentum, that pauses less, and records its own work. This second kind of work, or second kind of thinking, is akin to a very loose tether.
Think of a long, flowing essay like “In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki. Tanizaki has so much to say on shadows that it never feels like he’s changing the subject, when he begins to talk about toilets (“In such places the distinction between the clean and the unclean is best left obscure,” he writes), and then a bowl of soup (a lacquerware bowl, in a dim room, allows “a moment of mystery,” “a moment of trance”), and then puppets, and then teeth blackening. There’s enough rope to walk through the whole house without it ever catching. The second time I read “In Praise of Shadows,” with a gap of years between, I was surprised to find the things I underlined then were the same things I’d underline now. Like this bit of pyromaniac nostalgia in a passage about electric stoves: “Without the red glow of the coals, the whole mood of winter is lost.” We do change, presumably, but when we go to the same place, we may have the same thoughts. They may feel, for a moment, like new thoughts, because we have changed, but the thoughts are the same.
There’s a third way to work with the tether, which is to change the subject abruptly without any signals, visual or verbal—no section break like an exit sign, no audio guide telling you the intro is over and you’re about to see the most important part of the tour. The Moscow theater group whose ideas eventually became what we know today as Method acting had a concept called justification, which allowed actors to use any motivations they needed to act the way they wanted to act in the scene. The justification for the action didn’t need to have an obvious relation to the script, or be obvious to the audience at all. I think this is a useful technique for the writer with a tether. You don’t have to explain why you’re changing the subject, as long as you have a reason.
I especially love this effect, a sudden effect like entering the only room in the house with red carpet. You’ve turned a corner, and the tether gets caught, but it can be loosened, so after a moment’s maneuvering you smoothly enter the next room. I love that moment of resolvable tension, the hyperproximity of disparate elements, a “chaotic juxtaposition,” as in the opening paragraphs of David James Duncan’s essay “Cherish This Ecstasy.” It begins like so:
The peregrine falcon was brought back from the brink of extinction by a ban on DDT, but also by a peregrine-falcon mating hat invented by an ornithologist at Cornell University. If you can’t buy this, Google it. Female falcons had grown dangerously scarce. A few wistful males nevertheless maintained a sort of sexual loitering ground. The hat was imagined, constructed, then forthrightly worn by the ornithologist as he patrolled this loitering ground, singing, Chee-up! Chee-up! and bowing like an overpolite Japanese Buddhist trying to tell somebody goodbye. For reasons neither scientists nor fashion designers entirely understand, this inspired the occasional male falcon to dive onto the ornithologist’s head, fuck the hat, and fire endangered sperm into the hat’s hidden rubber receptacle. The last few females were then artificially inseminated so that their chicks could be raised in DDT-free captivity. The young produced in this way saved the peregrine from extinction—a success story from the annals of human meddling, one as rare as debacles like DDT are common.
That’s the first paragraph. And here’s the second paragraph:
The same year that I was researching a novel about birds entering extinction while my first marriage was doing the same, I wrote a long, intimate letter to the Cornell ornithologist. That he was a stranger perhaps explains the intimacy, strangers being preferable to friends when things as personal as marriages are falling to ruin. That he’d managed to save a species explains my blind trust. It’s been decades since I wrote the letter, and I didn’t keep a copy. Memory fixates on times of intense passage, but also mythologizes them. Allowing for this paradox, here is everything I remember about my letter to the ornithologist:
I think the energy in this is thrilling, the Venturian perversity and “violent adjacencies of scale,” the dizzying zag from the bird-mating hat to the long-ago death of a marriage. I have often re-read these two paragraphs in order to remember the jolt I felt on first reading them. This is somewhat a mistake, as the paragraphs don’t hold up to intensive scrutiny. Having copied and pasted them into my own document, this space I control, I find I badly want to edit them. I want to cut the line about Google—so unnecessary, since I already want to believe him—and demand a less exoticizing, orientalist metaphor. I don’t want those sentences in my essay. But still I must admire the move between paragraphs, the insistence on adjacency between the world of verifiable “fact,” of DDT and falcons, and the inside world of memory and personal mythology, which to each of us is ultimately the more real world. Novalis said, “In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.” Some essays have rigidity of structure and not enough mood; some essays are all mood in shapeless space. Great essays have both, are in control of both, but just in control. The veil of order is structure; the chaos that shimmers, the light that moves inside the text, is mood. Mood moving through structure may be what gives essays energy, the energy that nearly escapes control.
Let’s return for a moment to that line of Robert Harbison’s: “Most buildings aren’t really architecture.” I find it outrageous, but also, I understand it perfectly. There’s a sense in which most books aren’t writing—by which I mean, by the time they are published, the original vision of the author, which may have been unrealizable to begin with, has undergone many rounds of compromise and corruption. It has become a group project and a commodity. Fighting the commodification of your writing will prove difficult, sometimes impossible. But I think it’s worth resisting. This resistance may require a paradox: You have to protect, with hyper-controlling vigilance, what is almost uncontrolled in your writing—its complexity and chaos, its charismatic shimmer. There are famous architectural plans that have never been built—I read about some of them in that same book of marvels my grandmother gave me. The Palace of the Soviets was supposed to be massive, taller than the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building and much larger at the base than either, with a colossal statue of Lenin standing at the top, several hundred feet tall on its own. Construction was begun but never finished, as resources were diverted toward World War II.
The eighteenth-century French architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu was part of a historical moment that was later called “visionary architecture” or, more deflatingly, “paper architecture.” At the time, the École des Beaux-Arts was holding many architectural competitions, which resulted in dozens of fantastical, impractical designs. Lequeu’s designs were both playfully literal and surrealist. There was one for a stable in the shape of a giant cow. Another is a beautiful gate to a hunting ground festooned with stone animal heads—it looks like something by Magritte. The drawings are richly annotated—Lequeu was reportedly “obsessed with captions”—and thus they are literary artifacts too. It’s dangerous for me to talk about this; I almost love drawings of architecture more than I love books. But I think a book can be closer to a plan for a book than a building can be to a drawing. A book and its plans are both ideas on paper. A book is one of the more buildable utopias.
This lecture I’ve been working on has itself become a place. It started as notes, ideas on paper, but as I built them into sentences and paragraphs it took on the impression of a frame. There’s a point when the frame seems finished; I’m reluctant to change the fundamental shape. But I’m adding walls and doors and windows, light fixtures, furniture. I’m building from the inside. All of this is functional, but also aesthetic. What kind of place do you want to be in? When an essay starts to get a bit ungainly, I often think about the Winchester Mystery House, which, it won’t surprise you to hear, I read about in that book from my grandmother. Sarah Winchester, the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, believed she was haunted by the ghosts of the victims of Winchester guns. On the advice of a medium, she attempted to appease them by building them a house. The house is full of peculiar, seemingly useless features like one-inch-deep closets, stairs leading up to the ceiling, doors on exterior walls of upper stories that open onto nothing. It was under continuous construction until she died.
As I modify the house of my essay, all the corners and transitions and passageways start to create different wings, which have their own moods. They give the essay what we might call sub-realms. Christopher Alexander, writing in the 1970s, said that many modern buildings give us feelings of acute disorientation. I think of endless hospital hallways, or apartment complexes with multiple clonelike constructions differentiated only by numbers or letters. It induces mazeophobia, the fear of getting lost. A navigable building has “nested realms” you can easily draw from memory, mappable realms, and, as Alexander writes, the realms “must have names”: “This requires, in turn, that they be well enough defined physically, so that they can in fact be named.” The sub-realms in an essay needn’t actually be named—though they can be, as in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, with its many little titles, for each sub-realm and sub-sub-realm: “The Fear of being Touched.” “The Open and the Closed Crowd.” “Invisible Crowds.” “Slowness, or the Remoteness of the Goal.” But the sub-realms must be distinct enough in shape or in mood or both that they could be named. As readers, we love essays that have sub-realms because they allow us to enter the essay in multiple ways. People like to be able to roam through a building by their own path, to choose their own doors, which is why guided tours can be unsatisfying. (At the Breakers, once you get to the gift shop, you can wander around for as long as you like, but you can’t go back inside the house.) I think we like to read texts with multiple levels and multiple parts, parts with different moods, so we can have favorite parts, so we can have our own relationship to the text as a whole—the way I have a favorite part of “Prufrock,” which is my part of the poem—mine, as in, This is my song. I didn’t write the song, I just love it so much I feel ownership. Differentiated parts allow us to talk about a part as a way of talking about the whole. One part can become your metonymic key to the rest of the text, a mnemonic key to the whole memory.
Engineering is a function, but architecture is aesthetic. You’re not just designing for function—you want people to feel a certain way. Churches have high ceilings because they make one feel exalted, smaller and in awe. A visible roof makes a house feel cozier—the roof is a sign of shelter. My new living room, somewhat oddly, is the smallest room in the house, but the closeness of the furniture makes it cozy, almost like a pillow fort; if the floor was lava you could jump from the sofa to the armchair. Alcoves and reading nooks make one feel safely conspiratorial, like you have permission to keep some secrets. Trees are crucial to architecture, in Alexander’s view, because they create places; they can become the roof of an outdoor room, or form an arch or a gateway we can pass through as a spell to change our mood. Windows too create places, sub-realms in rooms where the light pools, where people are drawn to sit and read, or look out at the storm. And then there’s the realm of the fireplace. I love the word fireplace—the place where we put our fire.
When I’m writing, I’m trying to be an architect. I’m trying to get the reader to feel the way I do; even when I don’t intend to convince them of something, and most of the time I don’t, writing is a subtly coercive act. The coercion is cooperative, like any performance. More precisely, I want a reader to arrive at my thought and feel close to the way I felt when I thought it. This may be authorial fantasy, delusions of grandeur, impossible dream, but it is what I want. I’m making the place where the thought is possible. I’m building a house to showcase the tree.
