This house is like a well, or something under the ocean. Enter from the light, busy street, and one falls down a shaft of darkness, into a pool of steady dark. Through the windows the street is no longer the same: white half-curtains blur the cars, and all we can see is the treetops, and the sky. They take on a resonance, like something seen through dark glass.
The world outside appears richer, like a miniature. There are only so many trees, so much sky. Every drop is precious.
Under the dark in the rooms, plants grow spectacularly tall. The darkness nourishes them, makes them vibrate. Here one can make out a real tulip, here the blossom of white rhododendron. Green, green are the leaves of avocado, dragon tree, geranium, coleus, philodendron, green and pink prayer plant, and starred with lavender and pink the African violets. Heavy tubs wait, settled on the floor, while the trees grow tall and tall.
Everything waits in the dark.
Dark old furniture waits. Mahogany, cherry – it waits as the dragon trees wait. In a forest under the sea, darkness grows.
As one moves around the floor of the sea, paintings swim by. Paintings, rolled and stacked on a dark, leather-covered table, paintings on canvases stretched and stacked between the table, a chair, and the wall. Colors swim by, as though the paintings were only color, free-flowing paint; as though they were painted on the air, on the water of the lagoon that is their home. Colors swim like fish, in and out; one swims among them, holding out wavering arms to balance, to move by.
When one comes to the entrance to this house, one pauses: shall one continue, past the door, along the street which seems to buoy one up, keep one‘s sensations light and blond, like a sandy beach? Or shall one – just for a moment – go into the house to settle with oneself a little? If one goes on, there will be no reckoning. One will chuff through the sand of the light, lighter than air. Nothing will happen. But if one goes through the door, the house will exact its price: it will make one think, in the darkness that is like a flower.
And strange levels of thought will emerge from the murky light. One may never want to go out in the sun again.
The house changes one. At first, entering, one thinks, I‘m the same. I can remain impervious to this darkness, pat my hair, have a cup of tea, go out again on the street, just as I am. But sit, and the things swimming by lay hold of one, like children playing blind man‘s buff under the water, reaching their arms for something. One sinks into the ledges of the place, doubled over, like a diver down too long, and breathes shallowly, and listens to the silence, to the thoughts. Thoughts like dark and flashing children swimming. They do not know one is there. They dive.
One has to resign oneself to the weight of the water, the darkness. If one is to live here, one must accommodate oneself to its elements. How dark, how large, a piano, under water. How viscous, how tangible one‘s feelings. Inner and out become homogenized in 32
the dark sea water flowing in and out, one‘s breath creating the world around one, the currents of the pool, the ocean flowing, becoming one‘s thoughts.
Life is weighty beneath the sea. Still, one is free to float, turning, tumbling, as in sleep.
Through the channels of the mind, the mind which arises in sea water to the necessary beat of the street, now and then, as if to say, I have developed, I have evolved, I have grown lovely legs, I can live on land – and which then plunges, with a sigh of regret and welcome, down the depths of home.