Empty Rooms
An empty room has character, mainly due to the lack of it. You can take away the people and the wall hangings and the furniture but you’re left with a feel, often bleak, and of course you’re left with a smell, perhaps of unwashed leather or infested mattresses, perhaps of damp. A reminder of things that were, not things that are, an imprint on a place of what had once been, and any feel you can pick up from an empty room is coloured by the fact that whatever once lived there is now lost.
Yet some of the best things happen in supposedly empty rooms. The revelations and epiphanies that strike when everything is stripped bare and all that remains is the cold and isolated you, preferably in the dark. Nobody’s watching and nothing you do will actually dramatically change the state of the room, it’s just you, and there will never be anyone else with you in this empty room save what you conjure in your own head.
Maybe you could have a party in the empty room.
You could even lay out an imaginary table with imaginary tea cups and imaginary cakes, yes, imaginary Battenberg for all your imaginary guests to come and sit and take an afternoon with you in this room. Obviously you’ve closed the curtains. It wouldn’t be a party if someone wasn’t excluded from it, and by this time, by the time you’ve put the imaginary cloth on the imaginary tables and set out the imaginary chairs just right, you’re probably quite at home in your empty room, even before the Mad Hatter and March Hare arrive.
As with all parties though, there will probably be gatecrashers. With nothing real to anchor the empty room and just what you create, one supposes that things may get a bit out of control and you the writer may lose your grip on who you’re inviting to the party, and just as Sylvia Plath hands you the last of a joint to hand grenade and the imaginary marmoset who was just oh-so-stoned is throwing up with his head down the imaginary toilet in the imaginary bathroom there’s a knock on the door and it looks like your mother’s arrived and she’s not happy with the drugs you’ve been taking, no sir.
What happens next is up to you, really. You don’t have a choice in the matter as such, but it’s only your head that can determine for sure. Maybe swarms of imaginary jellyfish descend from the ceiling and orbit your head before attacking your mother in acrimonious rage. Maybe your guests encourage you to simply ignore the maternal spectre, “Come on”, says Sylvia Plath with Thom Yorke nodding in the background, “It’s your party, you kill the joint.” Maybe you do that and eventually your mother leaves.
Maybe though the instant she opens the door your guests all disappear, or warp and melt until you’re surrounded by the face and form of a disapproving caregiver. Or perhaps she opens the door and that’s it.
The room’s empty again and it’s just you and the smell. Maybe you write your name in the dust with one finger and play with the hem of your dirty dress that was probably white once with the other hand. You look at your name and it looks back and you can convince yourself you’re real. Or you can let that glimpse of reality seal you here in this prison forever.
Elsewhere.
Notations & Nihilism 