I don’t know where to begin to describe the objects of my writing room. I want to call it my writing room.
I don’t know what literary equivalent I would hope to model here. For the room gets dusty, as the evidential table fan and it’s filled and clogged grate; the strewn paper and notebooks that pile on like Autumn’s front lawn; a terminal moraine tat of slurry across the crowded room. Built high are cascades of topple-ready books on the floor, that crowd my chair, and the books on every surface--columns deep and gaging.
One side of the room is covered in shelving. They stand as the only organized fashion of the place. And at the center, a queen, unmade, fitted sheet always unfit for it’s assigned, rather ideal place.
The desk, corner desk, with shelving and build for a computer. It was a gift; a hand-me-down. It is filled, as every surface should--with junk, a bowl of change, business cards, unplaced photos, envelopes, my stapler and office tools, dusty printer, computer, and my wall of prescription pills.
All these, here, disposable all. They crowd. They comfort. They confuse. They are Stone Aged ax handles.
Now I do not think of myself a collector. To collect. It might seem to me an acknowledgment of some defeat; a substitute for emptiness. But these books. We have gathered them all over our married lives. It is a relationship with these things. These books. Maybe this is nerdish, perhaps adulterous, almost religious. . . I am a keeper of these symbols; they have been arranged and ordered and rearranged as numbered as the books themselves. Sometimes they are left stacked and unordered for a remoteness, a magic uncertainty, a hidden treasure. On the wall, they stand as they should; alphabetized for their significance, their stance, their proximity and relative names to another, as if Boyle and Bellow or Wallace and Woolf should have somehow known the other.
These books. They are transactions for a date to come, a date I may not live to meet them at. But stand by me, I have willed them.
I don’t know what literary equivalent I would hope to model here. For the room gets dusty, as the evidential table fan and it’s filled and clogged grate; the strewn paper and notebooks that pile on like Autumn’s front lawn; a terminal moraine tat of slurry across the crowded room. Built high are cascades of topple-ready books on the floor, that crowd my chair, and the books on every surface--columns deep and gaging.
One side of the room is covered in shelving. They stand as the only organized fashion of the place. And at the center, a queen, unmade, fitted sheet always unfit for it’s assigned, rather ideal place.
The desk, corner desk, with shelving and build for a computer. It was a gift; a hand-me-down. It is filled, as every surface should--with junk, a bowl of change, business cards, unplaced photos, envelopes, my stapler and office tools, dusty printer, computer, and my wall of prescription pills.
All these, here, disposable all. They crowd. They comfort. They confuse. They are Stone Aged ax handles.
Now I do not think of myself a collector. To collect. It might seem to me an acknowledgment of some defeat; a substitute for emptiness. But these books. We have gathered them all over our married lives. It is a relationship with these things. These books. Maybe this is nerdish, perhaps adulterous, almost religious. . . I am a keeper of these symbols; they have been arranged and ordered and rearranged as numbered as the books themselves. Sometimes they are left stacked and unordered for a remoteness, a magic uncertainty, a hidden treasure. On the wall, they stand as they should; alphabetized for their significance, their stance, their proximity and relative names to another, as if Boyle and Bellow or Wallace and Woolf should have somehow known the other.
These books. They are transactions for a date to come, a date I may not live to meet them at. But stand by me, I have willed them.
