ESSAY
The Room Arkin Frany
1. Water has intruded my room. From above, a hairline crack on the ceiling has been breached by rain, forming small globes of water that run along the same path seemingly equidistant and perfectly timed. They drop to the floor like seconds of an hourglass on three points of impact. I collect the water with two buckets and a basin on each and wait for them to stop. It is the monsoon season and with it the erratic rain. In my room it comes in immeasurable degrees, always it conquers my home, running the length of the room every time. I share it with water. 2. I live alone in a studio-type apartment. A 36-square meter concrete domicile. No partitions. No hallways. It is essentially a room, a four-walled sanctuary for domestic demands and creative conquests. I have lived here for more than a year now. I have endured the sweltering summer heat. I have withstood the wintry Amihan mornings. And I will perhaps prevail beyond persistent precipitation. No home is quite perfect, we make do with what we get. 3. There is not much to do when it rains. I can’t exactly go out of the house considering the various inconveniences rain brings. So I make the best out of it. In this weather, the bed’s warm allure is almost irresistible. Ideally, I could bring a book to bed and spend all day reading. But most of the time, I spend the time scrolling on social media feeds, sharing memes, laughing at TikTok videos. Rarely, I find the energy to write. 4. In ancient Greece, studios are rooms where the most intellectual minds made each of their magnum opus in sculpture, painting, poetry, philosophy, and many more. In the walls of their studios, they believed, were their muses. Ancient societies believed that creativity did not come from humans, but rather it was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from a distant unknowable source. The Greeks called them daemons. Socrates believed he had a daemon who spoke wisdom from afar. The Romans called them genius. 5. Perhaps, a genius lives with me in my room. That being said, I think we have a lot of things to figure out. 6. The word stanza comes from the Italian word for room. 7. I live in a stanza, a lyric dwelling place in four walls of concrete. This is where my genius thrives. This is home. 8. Antecedent to a poem: “When raindrops fall in stanzas…” 9. Is this oasis? This insight so sudden and insistent in the dearth of my leak-abundant room, it seeps through the drought of my mind, while I am held captive by this grain of an idea inside this concrete studio, this creative abode. I surrender and I go to work. 10. Opus caementicium made the Pantheon possible. Opus caementicium made all magnum opus concrete.
{23}
