There were things that went into the house at the beginning of our marriage that may never leave: forks, tin openers, pans, chairs. If I leave, some of these things will leave with me; beds will come blinking into the clear day. It seems unfair to drag them out — their scarred legs, their wrinkled bedspreads — half dead, into the light.
In hotels, things come and go frequently, and nothing there is shabby, unless it’s shabby chic. Things from home seldom go into hotels, though it often happens the other way round. Some things go out of hotels and into home, the small things that come for free, like shampoo, like soap (or, rather, they are included in the price). But a guest would not take the lamps, the rugs, the pictures, no, though some do remove the robes, the bath towels, the ashtrays. Some people I know collect these things, displaying them in their own bathrooms or, more often, guest rooms, so their guests feel they might not be at home, but in a hotel.
Thinking about things happens when I have some distance on them. In a hotel I have some distance on how things are at home, but I have no distance from the things in the hotel. Although some of them are the same things I have at home, I don’t react to them in at all the same way as I do there. Where else but in hotels are things so entirely different — so disposable, and so much worshipped? Being full of things that are replaced as soon as they stop working as part of the whole, a hotel is a thing in itself. In a hotel, everything must be just so.
II
For our second home (mortgaged, unfurnished) I bought: white sheets, beige armchairs, white curtains. He bought a red sofa. I was frightened. I painted the walls in a shade called Elephant’s Breath. He bought a rug with stripes the color of coromandel. I bought a white rug for the bedroom. It was impractical. He bought white kitchen units. They showed every speck. I was a lady in the drawing room, he was a lady in the kitchen, where I was the cook, but he was not. We were both whores, perhaps, but not necessarily in the bedroom.
That red sofa. He made the first mark, blood-colored. I carried blood with me all the time. From time to time I let it out, which was not practical with all that beige. My friend (female, older, visiting) said, “Why is there blood in the toilet?” I looked at the white porcelain, said, “Well, it must have been me.” She was — temporarily — mystified. The sheets in the hotels I visited were always white, no matter what color the covers. In one hotel, I bled on the white sheets, rinsed them under the showerhead and dried them with the hairdryer. I had a duty to the hotel, a duty not to be too human.
FREUD
The pride taken by women in the appearance of their genitals is quite a special feature of their vanity; and disorders of the genitals which they think calculated to inspire feelings of repugnance or even disgust have an incredible power of humiliating them.1
In a hotel, which is ideal, I too am ideal.
You were always reluctant to go to hotels. Now I know why.
Still, I feel better lying here alone in my hotel, than I would talking to someone who doesn’t want to be talked to, across the white hotel stretches of sheet and table cloth.
FREUD
When Dora talked of Frau K she praised the “delightful whiteness of her body.”
At home I stripped the covers off the bed. It looked nude. It was no longer white. And there were our negatives imprinted in its dirty flesh. They were no longer ours. At home, our temporary shadows smudged themselves across the permanent furniture. They got shorter as the years got longer. You would have thought the opposite, that, as the proportion of our lives increased as a percentage of the lives of our books, our pans, our plates, the bricks and mortar of our home, we’d have made some mark upon it, but these objects showed no sign of diminishing, and our shadows, which seemed at first to grow longer, wore themselves out across them, and shrank as the sun moved across the day.
Move a chair, and the room looks temporary.
III
HEIDEGGER
We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers.
Bauen (German: to build), Heidegger tells us in his essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” also means “to dwell” but the English word “dwell” is not related to “to build.” Dwell, says Webster’s Dictionary (1913) means:
1To delay; to linger.
2To abide; to remain; to continue.
Synonyms. — To inhabit; live; abide; sojourn; reside; continue; stay; rest.
In English, dwell is an unheimlich word, a word that contains its opposite. The word comes from the Old English dwellan, “to lead astray, hinder, delay” (in Middle English “to tarry, remain in a place”). It is a word of Germanic origin, a word related to Middle Dutch dwellen “to stun, perplex” and Old Norse dvelja “delay, tarry, stay.”
Old English dwellan also means “to mislead, deceive,” originally “to make a fool of,” from Proto-Germanic dwelan (cognates: Old Norse dvöl “delay,” dvali “sleep”; Old High German twellen “to hinder, delay”; Danish dvale “trance, stupor,” dvaelbær “narcotic berry,” a source of Middle English dwale “nightshade”), from Proto Indo-European dhwel-, extended form of root dheu- “dust, cloud, vapor, smoke” (and related notions of “defective perception or wits”). Related to Old English gedweola “error, heresy, madness.” The sense shifted in Middle English through “hinder, delay,” to “linger” (c.1200, as still in phrase to dwell upon), to “make a home” (mid-13c.). Related: Dwelled; dwelt; dwells.2
It seems we dwell through force, or through deception. It seems (“to lead astray,” “to stun”) that dwell is something we do not do, but something that is done to us. We are dwelt on.
You don’t have to be mad to live here, but it helps.
IV
HEIDEGGER
This thinking of homelessness, rather than bemoaning the absence of a home, concerns itself with the presence within our homes of that which cannot be thought.
Home. How could I think of living anywhere else? Other places exist only to show you how good it is. These places might be technicolor, but technicolor isn’t — what? — sustainable? Home, like in the hometel magazines, is in black and white. There’s no place like home, and if you say it three times you’ll be there. But in order to say it you have to be not-there. You can only think about home from elsewhere.
From my hotel I think of my home, which asked so much of me that I could no longer think. I was not at home with thinking there, was always busy doing, though, whatever I did, it never felt like I was building anything. We lived there for a long time. All of our building went on there. Now I can’t think what color the door was.
There are parts of home I have already forgotten, the parts I thought of as yours. I don’t go into them anymore. Even to think of going into them would mean more work. You will not do the work. You will notice if I do it, but you won’t think twice.
It’s not the not-working, it’s then not-thinking. Sometimes you treat this place like a hotel!