'The House'

"It grows larger
wall after wall
sliding
on some miraculous arrangement
of panels,
blond and weightless
as balsa, making space
for windows, alcoves,
more rooms, stairways
and passages, all
bathed
in light, with here
and there the green
flower of a tree,
vines, streams
casually
breaking through —
what a change
from the cramped
room at the centre
where I began, where I crouched
and was safe,
but could hardly
breathe! Day after day
I labour at it;
night after night
I keep going —
I'm clearing new ground,
I'm lugging boards,
I'm measuring,
I'm hanging sheets of glass,
I'm nailing down the hardwoods,
The thresholds —
I'm hinging the doors —
Once they are up they will lift
their easy latches, they will open
like wings."

"The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound. Among the most difficult of memories, well beyond any geometry that can be drawn, we must recapture the quality of the light..."

"What I see is a house, or the idea of a house, enormous and unknowable in its full extent, a house in which rooms only partly reveal themselves, in which mirrors are to be walked into, pictures disappeared into, in which chairs and beds are big enough to swallow you entirely. I can never see any part of this house, not one room, not one corridor clearly, only as a patchwork of dark and light (chiefly dark) containing isolated angles of objects or furniture. [...] and it has a music too, comprised of creaks, whispers and snuffles; rain on glass, branches on windows, someone singing in a kitchen, someone listening to a radio in a distant room, a music always elsewhere. [...] Some rooms are so filled with hatred you can smell it across a stairway. I couldn't begin to number the attics and cellars; the pantries, privies and vaults; the kitchens far below. There is no outside to this house."

"I conceal myself in the shadows of a cistern or in the corner of a corridor and pretend that I am being searched for. There are rooftops from which I let myself fall until I bloody myself. At any time I can shut my eyes and pretend that I am asleep, breathing deeply. (Sometimes I really do sleep, sometimes the colour of the day has changed by the time I open my eyes)."

"I have also meditated on the house. Each part of the house repeats many times, any particular place is another place. There is not one cistern, courtyard, drinking fountain, manger; there are fourteen (infinite) mangers, drinking fountains, courtyards, cisterns. The house is the size of the world; better said, it is the world. Nevertheless, by dint of exhausting all the dusty galleries of grey stone and the courtyards with their cisterns, I have reached the street and I have seen the temple of Axes and the sea. This I did not understand until a night vision revealed to me that there are also fourteen (infinite) seas and temples. Everything exists many times over."

"Communication is more than just words, communication is architecture; because of course it is quite obvious that a house which would be built without that Will - that desire to communicate - would not look the way your house looks today."

sike[r]

"Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality."

"A new novel by Danielewski requires a new way of reading.

A different angle of entry, if you will."