here/in

dwellingmaps:

VI

Sometimes the house grows and spreads so that, in order to live in it, greater elasticity of daydreaming, a daydream that is less clearly outlined is needed. ‘My house,’ writes Georges Spyridaki, ‘is diaphanous, but it is not of glass. It is more of the nature of vapour. Its walls contract and expand as I desire. At times, I draw them close about me like protective armour … But at others, I let the walls of my house blossom out in their own space which is infinitely extensible.’

— Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (House and Universe) plus Lucinda Hitchcock, strips of Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space on a window, 1993.

 

the fog magnified

The houses either side of that sad street,

So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood

Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist,

Unclean and yellow, inundated space-

— Baudelaire, from ‘The Seven Old Men’

 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,        

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

— T.S. Eliot, from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock