In the Dark Room

by Brian Dillon

  Standing in this empty room on a grey autumn morning whose light, after I have removed the curtains, hardly penetrates the gloom, I am half convinced that all of this is my fault. The decision to sell the house was mine, and after a good deal of fury, tentative consultation with relatives and, I suppose, some reflection on what our barely adult lives have become, my brothers have acquiesced. I have spent long, desperate hours trying to convince them that it is the only sensible option, given the state of disrepair into which the house has fallen and the need to pay for three university educations. I have not managed to broach my actual motivation. We are freeing ourselves from the constant torment of living in a house that was once a family home and is now a persistent reminder of what we have lost. We never speak of that loss – of our mother’s long illness and eventual death in the summer of 1985, or of our more recently deceased father – and so I am somehow content to take the part of the acquisitive older brother, eager to cash in his inheritance. In the face of our unspeakable shared grief, there is comfort in a merely mercenary act, a role that sees me rightly condemned to be the last to look on our empty home and to feel the breath of its gathering phantoms. And so I stand in this room, alternately paralysed by the knowledge of what I am leaving and agitated to the point of panic by the need to excavate as much space around me as possible before my time runs out.

  Leaving a house for the last time, we can be tempted into an odd fantasy. We start to see it as a sort of ruin; or rather as a pair of ruins, one of which exists only in our imagination. The other is the real space in which we drift about, disconsolately or impatiently, depending on the circumstances of our leave-taking. Our vision of the house splits in two: we see it as we imagine it once was, and in its present state. The latter image is just a ghost of the former. Leaving the house in which one grew up, the chasm between the two times seems especially deep. But haven’t we missed something? What gets repressed, as we prepare to go, is not the space itself, but how it felt to live there. The house is only ever what we make of it, and remake, from day to day: to live in a house means ceaselessly refashioning it, reimagining, forgetting and recollecting a place that never stops changing, even if (as is the case in my own family home) we’re rarely tempted to redecorate or rebuild.

  The texture of a domestic life is woven out of minute readjustments, fantasies and regrets, none of which quite approaches the grand gesture of leaving; but each is itself a sort of abandonment. The slow time of childhood makes these subtle changes seem all the more dramatic. I remember, as a child, feeling these little pangs of loss: dreaming, for example, of the large double bed I slept in until I was about eight years old. Years later, I could still wake, stretch, and expect not to reach the edges of the mattress. As a child, each time you register a disappearance, you think: this is how the house used to be. You recall the solid circle of a badly scratched and stained coffee table that once stood in the centre of a room (and that has now effectively vanished, though it supports a television in the corner of the room); or the familiar sliding doors of a cabinet that was once mounted above the kitchen table and that now sits, awkwardly upended, by the back door, the undignified repository of stray carrier bags. Even more mobile and fragile artifacts seem weighted with nostalgia once torn from their usual homes. A pile of magazines – of pious import, delivered to our door monthly, and conjuring up a world of sunburned missionaries and their grateful congregations – suggests a whole historical era, cut short when the house was extended and a new kitchen inaugurated a fresh, short-lived attempt at order. Each small adjustment to the world of the house contributes to a kind of domestic archaeology, made, for the child, out of well-worn edges and dusty surfaces.

  ¶ Theatre of memory

  The notion of the house as a repository of memory is an ancient one. In the classical ‘art of memory’, the surest way to remember a speech or a story is mentally to disperse its parts about a real or imaginary house. The method has its mythical origin in a tale told by the great rhetorician Cicero in his manual for speech-makers, De oratore. In Thessaly, writes Cicero, a noble man named Scopas employed a poet, Simonides, to re-cite a lyric poem at a banquet. Scopas demands that the poet praise both himself and the gods Castor and Pollux; Simonides, he says, will receive half his fee from the twin deities themselves. Simonides is briefly called away from the celebration by two men demanding to see him outside (they will turn out to be Castor and Pollux). While he is away, the roof of the banqueting hall collapses, crushing Scopas and his guests. Only Simonides can identify the mangled corpses: he has remembered exactly where each guest was sitting. Thus, says Cicero, the art of memory was born, according to which architecture is the model for well-ordered recollection:

  he inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.

  Common sense tells us that memory is itself a sort of space, in which are piled up or squirrelled away all manner of essential or useless objects: the memories which we cherish or should like to lose. But Cicero goes one better, making an image of this ‘place’ out of an actual architecture.

  The classical masters of memory have nothing to say about the relationship between memory and home. They imagine instead an ideal house: if it corresponds to a real one, it is only because the orator has discovered an ideal order there, a succession of niches in which to stash the different elements of the text to be remembered. But the rhetorician, wandering in his head from one room to another, laying down in each the concepts, images or words he wishes to recall, can still teach us something about the way memory deals with a more intimate architecture. Mnemonic theorists, from classical times onwards, expend a good deal of intellectual energy on the question of what it is exactly that one should imagine hidden away in the house of memory: a word or a thing. They conclude for the most part that the technique works best when the mind grasps for an object or a picture rather than a word. Of course, the classical student of memory is more interested in the abstract structure of his imagined house than in its status as a domestic interior. But perhaps he has hit on a crucial aspect of the relationship between houses and memory: the teachers of the art of memory tell us that a well-known house is naturally a better repository of memories than an imagined one. What we recall is the image of the house in all its familiarity, rather than a purely abstract sequence we can replay there in our minds.

  What do I remember when I think of a house in which I’ve lived? More than anything, a sense of what it felt like to move about in that medium. I remember the quality of light in a bedroom at dawn; the sudden acoustic shift that occurred when I opened a bathroom door; the curve near the head of a staircase that was a little too steep to run down and a little too wearying on the way up; the warmth of a kitchen in a house without central heating; a door that nobody, not even your parents, who warned you time and again not to do it, could resist slamming; the knowledge that the house had an attic that you had never actually seen (the tiny hatch was too perilously placed above the staircase) but that, despite all evidence to the contrary, you liked to imagine stocked with the fascinating detritus of past generations which an attic ought to contain; the odd sensation, as you wheeled your bicycle along the narrow passageway at the side of the house, that the building was rooted in concrete, in brick foundations, in earth and rock to which you otherwise gave no thought at all; an electric heater, original to the house, which was built into the bedroom wall, and which, you imagined, would kill you stone dead if you flicked its switch and poked it with a finger even before it had begun to glow. Imagine the house, and you picture a passage from empty space to tangible things, from the feeling of moving in an abstract territory to the shock of rediscovering the objects it contains.
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  In the house of our memory, we’re always present, feeling our way round a physicality we know as well as our own bodies. But to see that house empty, to walk around in it for the last time, is to catch sight of a less tangible image: the ghost of ourselves, wandering from room to room like a bad student of classical rhetoric, failing to find the proper places to deposit his lesson. He’s lost his bearings: nothing is in the right place, and all the wrong memories lurk dustily in corners, or tumble from their nooks to fall at his feet, broken reminders of his misplaced perspective.

  ¶ Walking and falling

  Alone in the house, my task now is to ensure, in a phrase which intrudes into my consciousness from somewhere between the silence of the room and the murmur of the traffic outside, that we have not left anything behind. The room is empty; that much is certain. The last argued-over item of furniture – an old armchair, the frayed corners of which still hid the plywood board that my father inserted years before in an effort to alleviate his back pain – has been consigned to the skip. I could stand in its place, in the centre of the room; I could easily walk from that spot in any direction, into the emptiness that the room has become, and nothing would impede my step. But the space is suddenly so full, so teeming with bodies and things, so strewn with objects, gestures and faces, chaotic with years, that I can hardly breathe. Something has clouded my peripheral vision, pressed in on me from the outskirts of my awareness of the room, so that it is only with the weak remembrance of habit that I can edge my way tentatively towards the door, following, half-consciously, the route I would have taken around the edge of a sofa, skirting outstretched legs and discarded newspapers, making for the refuge of a patch of carpet just inside the room, which now seems, alarmingly, brighter than the windowed side.

  I reach the door and step out into the hall with a peculiar mixture of fear and faint pride. Whatever it was that enclosed and overcame me in that empty room, it was merely the effect, I tell myself, of fatigue and a too vivid sense of the drama of my leaving. I am, after all, only acting the part of the orphan taking his final tour of the family home, rehearsing a scene I know to be almost comically freighted with cliché and easy sentiment. There is no need for histrionics here. Nobody is going to congratulate me for a twinge of filial regret, or make of my bereft last turn about the house an epic of grief or pity. But equally, there is nobody here to begrudge me a certain melodramatic cast of mind. I am, I remind myself, ‘leaving home’, and my unease is nothing but an access of self-consciousness about that resonant phrase, nothing more than my overdeveloped sense of my own bereavement. I’m starring, at last, in my own secret performance of a loss which feels unreal and unbearable at the same time.

  The hall is not a place to panic. Compared to the shifting planes and uncertain light of the room I have just left, its darkness and narrowness are reassuring. It is as if I have stepped into the still centre of the house, a place that feels strangely submerged, sunk snugly into the foundations of a building that is otherwise tottering and vertiginous, undermined by so many recent emotional tremors. Here I am able at once to call to mind more distant and serene memories. Perhaps it is my perception that I am standing at the bottom of something, in the well formed between the staircase and the closed sitting-room door, that encourages me to look upwards towards the light from a window just below the head of the stairs. I feel suddenly very small, as if I’ve been dropped into a sort of ravine which recalls me instantly to my childhood perception of this spot. Of all the spaces of the house, this was the most precipitous: a deep and thrillingly perpendicular shaft dug into the middle of my imaginative world. The stairs turned abruptly up to a landing, the thick, square, white railings of which could be glimpsed by the child standing in the hall. The narrowness of the gap between the edge of the landing and the bannisters below – a distance of a few inches, which only properly revealed itself if I looked from directly below or above – made it, in my imagination, a lethal drop: a fantasized crevasse which opened, dizzyingly, out of the white landscape of bannister and staircase.

  Into that abyss, I hurled a varied cast of doomed adventurers. Several hapless explorers and reckless Arctic commandos met their ends here. It was the site, too, of more carefully convened experiments. As I feel myself once again dwarfed by the slim column of air above me, I remember that my brothers and I, our curiosity awoken in the pages of a recently acquired encyclopaedia, once emulated Galileo’s famous demonstration of the equal velocity of differently weighted descending bodies; we let fall a succession of heavy and light objects from our own imagined sunny balustrade. Our endeavours culminated in imitation of Leonardo da Vinci: we had fashioned, out of straws, paper and tape, a replica of his pyramidal parachute. A tiny plastic soldier had been hung by threads from its four corners, and the fragile ensemble had been launched into the void between the landing and the stairs.

  That little figure is falling now, in my dazed imagination, as I stand for the last time in the hallway. But his speed and trajectory are unclear. Should he plummet, lopsided and ungainly, to the floor? Or should he drift out from the stairs to spin slowly and elegantly across the hall, buoyed up for a few amazing seconds above the faded circles of a red and yellow carpet I once imagined dotted with treacherous lakes and quicksands, before coming to rest (executing, in the child’s eye, a perfect parachutist’s roll) safely at my feet? I can no longer picture the exact fate of our intrepid jumper; my airy and whimsical recollection lands stiffly in the present again. I am faintly embarrassed to find myself likening my orphaned plunge into the thin, uncertain atmosphere of the future to this half-recalled, half-fancied descent. I need to keep moving, to avoid getting tangled in the threads of an unnecessary and lethargic recollection. On no account am I to let my body be caught in attitudes inherited from the life I had led here, or feel myself repeating the gestures of the past: the glance towards the top of the stairs, the swerve around an item of absent furniture. A single look into each room will suffice; there is, after all, nothing to detain me here.

  I quicken my pace, dashing to the top of the stairs with the obscure conviction that each room must now be reduced to the platitude of a vacant tableau, a snapshot of an empty stage set. I stop in the doorway of my bedroom and see only its bare floors and naked walls. I refuse to cross to the window or step into the corner where a wardrobe once stood (it lies now at an awkward angle on top of the skip outside). The house, I tell myself, is just a series of empty boxes to be ticked, a stock to be inventoried and shut away. I will remember simply this: the empty house, the evidence of a past finally evacuated of the almost physical presence that overcame me downstairs. I close the doors of the other two bedrooms after only the most cursory glances inside.

  I am accumulating images, but keeping my distance from the depths of these rooms, as if the nothingness at their centres might swallow me whole, drag me back into the memories I have finally left behind. At the last moment, I have transformed the space into a safely cartographic set of images which I will take with me to my new home. There, I hope, they will be submerged by new experience, overlain to the point of illegibility. This is the thought that gives me the energy to descend the stairs again, to look briefly into the vacant dining room, to hurry across the kitchen and check that doors and windows are locked, and emerge once more into the hall.

  I have closed each door in turn behind me, and the whole house now wraps its silence around me. The only sounds come from the road outside where, very soon, I will take the bags that lie at my feet by the front door. I stand for the last time in the pebbled light from the door’s large octagonal window: a form which for years, as I left the house, I briefly reconfigured as six-sided, and just as quickly (for such an alternative seemed unworkably squat and awkward) re-formed into its actual shape, as if summoning an impossibly mutable space out of the lineaments I knew so well. I am seeing now, I imagine, in this final instant before I open the door, the proper outline of the house: a geometry to be measured and forgotten. A shadow moves across
the glass, and I know it is time to leave.

  ¶ A haunted house

  In the autumn of 2004, a few months after I had begun trying to picture once again my own family home as it stood empty on that morning eleven years earlier, I travelled to see a work of art which I suspected might have something to say about the relationship between houses and memory. The work, by the English artist Tacita Dean, is a film – or rather, three related and subtly different films – entitled Boots. On the day in question, I arrived at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, where the film was to be installed for the next month, to discover that I had mistaken the date of the exhibition’s opening: it was not due to begin for another four days. The security guard who informed me of my mistake, however, was sympathetic, and I was directed upstairs to three adjacent rooms, where two technicians were busily preparing a trio of ancient and recalcitrant 16mm projectors. I explained my error, and they agreed that as soon as they had got the first version of the film running (focus was so far proving difficult), I could enter the first darkened room and watch a still slightly shaky back-up print of Dean’s film.

  Boots is a meditation on architecture and memory, shot in a vast Art Deco villa in Portugal that is now used as exhibition space by a nearby museum. The film takes its title from the nickname of an old family friend of the artist’s, so named for his orthopaedic boot, the sound of which, as it strikes the gleaming wooden floors of the villa, echoes through the twenty minutes of the first of the film’s three versions. The octogenarian Boots, his frail body supported by two walking sticks, wanders through the house alone, apparently recalling as he goes the building’s former, now deceased, inhabitant: a woman, Blanche, with whom, many years ago, he had an affair. In fact, the story he fashions out of the odd muttered reminiscence or sudden exclamation is at least partly fictional. Boots, unscripted, invents his own memories to fill rooms that are brilliantly sunlit and quite empty. He improvises his own character, while Dean’s camera gives the house itself a grandly melancholy personality, composed of cool shadows and sudden, blazing expanses of light. As the old man moves through the villa, the viewer realizes that the figure on screen is seeing a quite different film: a series of tableaux made, perhaps, out of his own past, now projected on to the pristine surfaces of an empty house.