essaying architecture

Elisa Gabbert, “The Essay as Realm”:

This lecture I’ve been working on has itself become a place. It started as notes, ideas on paper, but as I built them into sentences and paragraphs it took on the impression of a frame. There’s a point when the frame seems finished; I’m reluctant to change the fundamental shape. But I’m adding walls and doors and windows, light fixtures, furniture. I’m building from the inside. All of this is functional, but also aesthetic. What kind of place do you want to be in? When an essay starts to get a bit ungainly, I often think about the Winchester Mystery House, which, it won’t surprise you to hear, I read about in that book from my grandmother. Sarah Winchester, the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, believed she was haunted by the ghosts of the victims of Winchester guns. On the advice of a medium, she attempted to appease them by building them a house. The house is full of peculiar, seemingly useless features like one-inch-deep closets, stairs leading up to the ceiling, doors on exterior walls of upper stories that open onto nothing. It was under continuous construction until she died.

As I modify the house of my essay, all the corners and transitions and passageways start to create different wings, which have their own moods. They give the essay what we might call sub-realms. Christopher Alexander, writing in the 1970s, said that many modern buildings give us feelings of acute disorientation. I think of endless hospital hallways, or apartment complexes with multiple clonelike constructions differentiated only by numbers or letters. It induces mazeophobia, the fear of getting lost. A navigable building has “nested realms” you can easily draw from memory, mappable realms, and, as Alexander writes, the realms “must have names”: “This requires, in turn, that they be well enough defined physically, so that they can in fact be named.” The sub-realms in an essay needn’t actually be named — though they can be, as in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, with its many little titles, for each sub-realm and sub-sub-realm: “The Fear of being Touched.” “The Open and the Closed Crowd.” “Invisible Crowds.” “Slowness, or the Remoteness of the Goal.” But the sub-realms must be distinct enough in shape or in mood or both that they could be named. As readers, we love essays that have sub-realms because they allow us to enter the essay in multiple ways. People like to be able to roam through a building by their own path, to choose their own doors, which is why guided tours can be unsatisfying.

This is beautiful. I love essays about essays, especially when they’re this imaginative. I’ve written a few myself, including this one.