Interior Design
Since I was a baby I’ve had what a doctor once labeled for me as Stereotypies. I rapidly flap my arms up and down while rigidly opening and closing my hands. It means I’m incredibly excited and that my mind has taken me deep into fantasy, to a point of forgetting about the people and the space immediately around me. Since entering school as a little kid, these episodes have occurred much less frequently, to the point where most people I know likely aren’t even aware I do this. For a long time I took for granted that this must have happened because I learned to control them in social space, that I learned it wasn’t exactly normal to aggressively wave my arms around for no observable reason, among large groups of people.
More recently I’ve come to a different conclusion. What if these moments are fewer and far between, not because I consciously absorbed some embarrassment or guilt about them, but because I just don’t have the time to dissolve into my interior-space and lose myself in imagination anymore. Perhaps social space manifests in such a way that it doesn’t leave room for inner-space.
When I say inner-space, I don’t necessarily mean where concrete thought and concept generation happen, although that is a part of the landscape too. I’m thinking about visualizing, about generating images within ourselves that have a specific and transient architecture. All we do with our free-time now seems to involve consuming images, whether it be going to the movies, streaming the latest binge-worthy show on Netflix, being bombarded with the freshest tableaus of absurdity from the daily news cycle, or scrolling through scenes from the endlessly eventful lives of our friends on Instagram, there’s always more visual candy to feast on. This flow works in the opposite direction as well. Social Media has created an environment in which, even if one doesn’t make a living as a cultural producer of images, one still has to generate a designed self online. The feeling is, if I don’t have a consumable image, I don’t exist. Existence is predicated on being visible and recognizable to others. But what about the act of conjuring images that only we ourselves can experience, that never leave our mind’s eye, a kind of masturbation that allows us to get-off on the mere act of generating private screenings in our heads. I’m not talking about fantasizing as a means of reaching literal bodily climax, I’m talking about fantasy as an end, as a form of pleasure in-itself. We live outside a rhythm that allows us to flex this visualizing muscle. The privilege of personal space and time, of health, of relative comfort in one’s own body are all necessary to indulge in this private joy.
Another crucial ingredient in cultivating this garden of hallucination is boredom. Today, there are so many tools of entertainment that eliminate the need for fantasy. Boredom is the threshold that must be crossed in order to ignite the imagination. Even when I was little and lost in another world, unselfconsciously flapping my arms about in response to the excitement in my own head, these moments surely came about because I had no other way of amusing myself. If my Power Ranger action-figures were inaccessible, I had no markers to draw with, there was no TV in sight, and no family or friends around to play the-floor-is-lava with me, what else was I to do besides get lost in my own private paradise. And paradise not because I could imagine how I’d reach these fantastical horizons in the real world, but paradise precisely because it was out-of-reach, invisible, imaginary and incomprehensible. I felt a rising intimacy with an image inside of me because of its closeness to me and because of its unresolvable distance from me at the same moment. As numerous art theorists and philosophers have observed, the beauty in art appears in part because of a distance that is maintained. You don’t want to eat a Mondrian painting. You don’t go rubbing your skin on a Richard Serra sculpture (maybe I’m being presumptuous here). Engagement with the imaginary as imaginary allows us to both create this distance and maintain something special and personal to us. Ownership without possession. In maintaining this kind of relationship to our interior horizons, a veil of mystery is preserved. There is no anxious attempt to catch and nail down what we see on a conquest for definitive self-knowledge. The reel merely runs and we can enjoy the strangeness of its luminous streaming.
Books exist in a bizarre middle-space of image production, as objects that do not project complete images into the minds of readers, but that create parameters within which visualizing can begin. To what degree does a reader coming across a vivid description of a living room in a novel actually need to see the black and white lettering across the page before their sense of self is projected into another dimension. And of course, there is a seemingly boundless horizon of ways in which the same setting could be described by different authors with different styles. Is it important to include that the couch is blue? If I mention a couch, but don’t specify a color, what will the reader imagine? If the dialogue between two characters is really the focal point of the scene, should I just leave it at, “in the living room…” and allow the reader to fill in the details of the architecture as they please? Not to mention, these aesthetic choices aside, the inevitability that any two readers reading the exact same description of a living room will undoubtably visualize two totally different environments. Reading any kind of descriptive language then becomes a shortcut to this open dimension of fantasy within ourselves. We are prompted with specific images, but the shading of their details relies on our input. The language is indisputably what composes the book, but it is the perceptual event within which has meaning and emotional resonance. I am grateful to the writers of my favorite novels not only for generating instances of charming dialogue, choosing language that seems to perfectly articulate relatable emotional experiences, or composing narrative undulations that seduce and surprise me. I am grateful to them for providing me with a map that allows me to create and envision a world that is totally my own, that lives inside me.
— I once had a partner who refused to look at photos of musicians that she liked. Her reasoning was that if she was able to associate a face with the music, to have a pre-made picture of its source, all she would be able to do while listening to the music would be some variation on imagining the person singing or playing their instruments. On the other hand, if she didn’t have a clue what the person looked like, her imagination was free to get lost in the narrative of the lyrics, or just the sonic movements themselves, and to visualize more openly. Instead of merely picturing her own personal Tiny Desk Concert, she could lose herself in more abstract visions conjured by the sounds and emotional oscillations in what she heard. American dancer and globally renowned choreographer, William Forsythe, has an elaborate visualization process that he goes through on a regular basis while going to sleep. He starts by picturing a number, starting with one, and tries to rotate it in his mind without losing track of the image at any point along its path. He does this repeatedly with the same number until he is confidently able to spin its image along both X and Y axes without it disappearing at any point. (In attempting this myself I’ve found the number five to be particularly difficult.) He’ll vary this practice by increasing the number of numbers he tries to hold in his mind simultaneously. For example, can you picture two number threes and rotate them at the same time? Apparently he will do this with fish as well. Hold onto the image of a fish in your mind and really try to see its shape and color. Picture it swimming around you. Now, add another that looks totally different and see how many you can keep track of at the same time. It makes sense to me that someone who undoubtably spends countless hours visualizing the flowing bodies of dancers would find this simplified yet equally choreographic practice soothing and centering. —
These days I’m wondering what it would take to allow myself to return to my daydreaming with the level of intensity that used to trigger my stereotypies. What would be required to have such fearless abandon in relationship to my fantasies that I didn’t have to avoid looking at them whilst around others? Entering this dimension does not need to be an asocial practice. Private life is, of course, never private to begin with. Our fantasies are inevitably composed of language, figures, symbols and situations that initially come to us from the world without. Perhaps with this in mind we can better equip ourselves to reshape our social environment and our time, in a way that might allow for the “real” and the imaginary within us to coexist. Fantasy is a part of life, not its cut-off shadow.
(A conversation with Kallan Dana about attention-span that took place outside a bar in Williamsburg 2022; Bachelard [1958] 1964; Forsythe 2012; Groys 2023; Weil [1947] 1952; Woolf 1925)
* This method of “citation” is derived from that used by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart in their book The Hundred.
