[lit-ideas] Describing Spaces
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 12:29:26 +0900
Julie's wonderful description of the balance of chaos and order in her
home set me to thinking about other vivid descriptions of spaces.
Here, for example, is William Gibson's scene-setting opening to
_Pattern Recognition_,
> Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to
> the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
> It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides,
> brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands
> for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option
> now.
> Not even food, as Damien's new kitchen is as devoid of edible content
> as its designers' display windows in Camden High Street. Very
> handsome, the upper cabinets faced in canary-yellow laminate, the
> lower with lacquered, unstained apple-ply. Very clean and almost
> entirely empty, save for a carton containing two dry pucks of Weetabix
> and some loose packages of herbal tea. Nothing at all in the German
> fridge, so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain
> monomers.
> She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London,
> that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is
> leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the
> vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of
> thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly,
> and are left behind, and must awaited, upon arrival, like lost
> luggage.
As an evocation of a highly-designed yet ultimately empty,
techno-saturated lifestyle, this is, to me, hard to beat. I notice the
aural/visual poetry, like all those c's in the opening line,
"Cayce....Camden...circling...circadian" or the hissing of the s's in
the second paragraph, "spectral....stirring...sex....sedation."
I wonder what others see, how they react to this passage, what other
descriptions of spaces might affect them strongly.....
John L. McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama, Japan 220-0006
Tel 81-45-314-9324
Email John.McCreery@xxxxxxxxxxxx
"Making Symbols is Our Business"
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