Flitting, contribution to NOIT — 5

LYDIA HOUNAT JUDITH HAGAN

FLITTING KABYLE-GIRL: ON MY

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INHABITATION It acts like weather, with its pressures and, sometimes, violence in a sensitive measure. But it’s also lighter; like a photometeor, some weathers are rarer. Some weathers, rarely seen, make belief of sight, and absorb into the taste of things like blood in the mouth. There can be attempts to measure temperature, but its reason grows multiple. Its reason is squirming under the very act of looking.

As a subject of the room (is regal). As subjected to the room (is prisoner). As subject to the room (is pawn). As the subject of the room (is plinth).

But here, the room is the subject; I am the one who changes. My regal, my prisoner, my pawn, my plinth — my changes subject the room, inconstantly. The room is changed, mostly, and changes rarely.

Swimming in the sea, I suffer a warm patch — its why disturbs me. As in a broth, spice and salt conspiring, things bunch up, coagulate, as in — surfing through the Thames, underwater weathers toss up contents by collection: shoals of clay pipes, of costume jewellery, of plastic and plastic-wrapped bodies. As in, also, weathers in agreement, moving winds and rain, in bouts.

(Consider if a weather rushed in all directions: a flock of atoms scattered.) A soup, a sea, a weather current — so too, a room coagulates its parts, its functions and its weathers. I suffer a warm patch.

Time sends out with it space, so too a room with it time.

That must be why, when nothing is happening — The room has tried to bargain with you, plants are grown to occlude its store of gloom. Its aims are in its under-

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current, and its undercurrent is dismissed by a surface of scent — that noise putting off your nose-for-worry. The room sighs and it creaks, the room withholds its silence.

The room groans its objections, the room clutches you, crushes you, is insisting that you whisper.

— when nothing is happening, a room becomes a cobweb, getting dusty and sticking its peripheries. I hear you are domesticated. I hear you are living in one place. I hear you grind yourself to dust. What happened to your plans for moving? You let those webs grow agency. Over time, nothing moving, still it changes. You change within your dusty layer.

No, not a passive receptacle. Sometimes the room is altering us.

Sometimes there’s a room that no one will enter. Perhaps it is beckoned into existence by expectation only, it exists only when expected to, and then — such a stinking foreboding on guard at the gate. Perhaps a key, a key stained red, a horrendous key keeps at bay the inquisitive kept, until — curiosity. Perhaps a dream of a room that’s relentlessly opening, perhaps undiscovered ingressions in old habitats — internal doors opening to reveal yet more doors. Perhaps — there’s a dream of a room that no one will enter.

In a house, arranged by mood, contents consume upon arrival: you, your rooms, and your moods — inventory.

The master plot thickened by ancillary contents in accepted arrangements: spatulas, remote controls, and wire hangers define the largest parts. Paraphernalia in geomantic scatterings divine the names by process: the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom. In some ancient cultures, arranged by feeling — ancient cultures, and your

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rooms — inventory.

A room is found between its space and its performers, between its inventory and its uses. A good performance is quiet, but not inherently quiet. If the room is noise and the performance of the room is noise, the performance of the room is quiet. Of a room, there is agreement (as coagulate). Dissentists — those scattered atoms — will be meted by consensus. With what receptors is it read? How does it transmit? There is the precipice of silence — in waiting, praying, or reading rooms. The precipice is asking for it.

A room is not inherently anything, unless – A space that can be occupied, or where something can be done.

— unless a room is an enclosed space it is not a room: a lunchbox, a shut drawer, the body held tightly by itself.

Room’s only constant is space. Its only actions, affect.

But it’s no scant thing, there is no meekness to it. We only say: there are limits, enclosures without a trap, places, spaces to occupy, to belong, to be absorbed into.

A room is a flat net ascended into shape. It is the movement that complicates the either end of stasis. Rooms move with their purpose, to receive or take, or to retain, or (like we said) time sends out with it space, and so a room, raised and razed, is the universe exploding. Is it something from nothing, or nothing from nothing? Or, is it something from someone?

A room is an unfolded piece of music, or, a piece of music is unfolding and then: a room.

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INHABITANT The surface is flitting, hosting, expression ranging, and on loan. What is the accent? How do you accent? Ask for it humbly, my drink, please, we are serving me my drink, please. She thinks she is humbly. The surface is flitting.

Everything that sits below the site of surface, reflected upwards. But upwards from where? And when do we get to the actual wet? Did you keep your eyes open while you were submerged?

It is not enough to stare at a tree, to remember history.

See: acid spring and think — obsessively drawn circles.

But to consider what belongs to it, and what is lent. A bargaining over millennia, between millions. A sensation of seeing, leading to eating etc. Expression ranging. Whatever the case, a loch, or an iceberg, or a home on the heath — there is likely more below the surface.

Doing a flit — everything emptied, start again. A person is a room that you can occupy. First you must sense their weather, know how to act there, then work out their privacy, eke out their intimacy. This is good acting, but shady action. Extreme empaths may, however, completely disappear in the other, may, by their target, be mistaken for a mirror. This can be considered doing a flit. Then further: to try to get within people plural.

A parent with an arm around their child, a neighbour’s arguing unit of four, couples in supermarkets, sharing their baskets. Made by exclusion, their their, my my — I can’t get into it, the interiority of all that; inside them, a room opens up.

Privacy is another matter. To open a door with crowbar force, no keys, no invitation. Hey, how’s it going is

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an aggression, tasked again and again on the surface of others, scratching questions. Complained about is a list of questions. Complaining most when talked to. Complaining of invasion, concerned with privacy.

She entered the room, no; she enters the room. Entering the room, it loped about her, not the walls, it was, that man was there, and before, it had been light before she entered, and there, a lightness that really meant — but no, the room meant nothing — because they were on their way, a lightness. But they had not arrived. All she had was this man, and her mind kept track of him, kept track so that she might keep her distance — this was one of those anti-hunts — she was now laying out the square cushions, how to make this a welcoming place, or was it supposed to be professional, and the man, loping about her, in another room, but about her, and she even leaving, even out on the street, in the sun, even with those sweet others, the man loped about her — how he irked her — and so she played at getting away, played at the antihunt all day.

INHABITED A room is a weight sometimes, weighed down by its dearth — what it’s not for, or, personne est la etcetera.

Jean Paul Sartre explained that to be noted missing from a room was all he ever wanted. Well, where is he now?

I was into filling spaces, tucking secrets into corners: miniature scrolls in tiny scrawl; my age, my name, the date. I thought I could make an artefact, I thought I could peg myself in historic corners. I exist in a skip, somewhere, a blip. Twenty-two bedrooms in thirty-three years. Our rooms do not remember us.

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The side of a building pulled down in part demolishment exposes the residue of lived space. Individual rooms, individual’s rooms, are noted for their generic décor: wall colour, skirting boards, and fireplace trimmings (or, more likely, radiator silhouettes). The choices there of paint or paper, and the heat stained outlines — trace the entropy of warmth, and the energy spent decorating.

Our rooms do not remember us.

A room that doesn’t contain who it used to is a room holding its breath. A missing person, not missing to your particular, but to the whole world, and missing from the home. The room felt it, behind its closed door, I felt it.

But to look at the room after, there was more disgust than I could master.

A home is a home until it is emptied.

A home is felt, and then, your flatmate comes home and you clear out.

Or your flatmate doesn’t come home.

A home is a home until a SWAT team comes in, until a policeman puts his foot in the doorway, until — A corporation, a heedless body ruled by — well that’s a human law, that’s got to be a human law.

I remember feeling complete I remember feeling nothing, indication completeness.

I remember noticing once it was gone, this person is gone.

Rooms as delimit, as the anti-vertigo, but set a mirror in there and unbound is the space between the walls. It is the opposite of someone missing, it is excess rather than lessness. It is appendage, it is annex, it is extension without prolongment, without the extending of surfaces.

A mirror in the room of a missing person is waiting for

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a very long time.

Consider a room before you enter. Consider: a room you know, a room you once knew, a room unknown, and a room not yet built. To apprehend it in images, looking before arriving, to anticipate the mismatch shuffling at the ingress. Ring the bell, or, find a key. A place without host, or, the host is key, kept under code. Could be a renta-room, could be, one evening, startled by one of the worst attacks — a whipping, around the room, a grip of non-presence. Could be the rent-a-room, it emanates, it is sickening, it is too-close-to-blankness yet: inhabited.

It is touching the edges and is crept between gaps in the skins. It is there without the presence. Sitting down on a chair — is warm already — warmed by some other body.

Spilling from it, is pouring to the floor, is breathing is breathed in the smell of the welcome daffodils. Rent-aroom daffodils freed from the body. Daffodils enter here.

A room in a city is constructed for loss, to denote: loss.

A room becomes a sculpture, a fissure. A room is a hole that exists whether attention is paid or not. There is (but this is cliche) a cold void. There is in that city an un-slice that pretends to nothing.

HABIT She takes a turn of the room, with her sister, a turn of the room to show off all its angles, the body of the room, their bodies, from every side, seen, to see the room from the view of with her sister. In the coming months, they would turn the room into a) a baby’s room b) a studio in which to paint c) spare room for turning.

Rooms are fictions. A bar exists in specific politics, it feels for the abrupt other, and discovers itself there. That

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other may attempt at ingress, to ingratiate itself, but only makes the border surer. The traditional set re-inherited, its origins somewhere deep, towards the Jesus barrier, possibly. There is a fiction that holds it together.

In a cafeteria, everyone eats (almost) the same thing, sits in (almost) the same places and ways. But clear the tables, clear the tills, the counters too, the wall hangings that remind you: you’re in the art school, the hospital, the shopping centre. You’re in a dream of some long-ago schoolroom — it’s under construction, it’s in the business of shifting. All of these cleared, a space cleared of function, a shape that in its inverse reveals what it doesn’t contain. The name of the room is a challenge. A game of call my bluff.

Rooms are delicate fictions. What if I task you to disrupt it? What if you go to the gallery and get yourself a bad reputation? What if, in the library, you argue with the person who takes your chair. In a church, you say the lines loud, to be heard on the altar; you too know the words to transubstantiation. But clear the pews, the tabernacle, the altar; the name of a room is a challenge.

You watch them — the newcomer to the place. You interpret their choices, their gait, the time of day that’s free enough to stop by and enquire, the ring-less fingers, the tear in the jacket, and maybe, the tears in their clothes, cartoonish hair, a blue poly-bag filled with stuff.

The first time you walk into a public room, all faces turn to you — unquestionably: newcomer. But re-enter a few times, or just once but for a really long time, do it energetically. Do it slowly and methodically, do it so many times mechanically that at some point you get to know the way to enter, the way to do it without

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performance, in every circumstance. Now watch for the newcomers.

To walk into a new building and to know exactly how to use it, its rules, what is expected. Just once, for people to look and think — she’s new here, but wow, what a natural. You practice walking into rooms, you study for months, enacting every turn in its plans, studying the hours, the events that might take place. You walk into a room like it’s your own, when she walked into a room, when you walked into the room, the people thought it belonged to you. You walked in disguise, you walk into the room for the first time. The prodigal.

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