So here I stand, in my gallery (well, that’s a lie, here I sit at a computer screen in the library, but since my piece is based around the idea of perpetuating the fiction of what things are not, then this is fairly appropriate. Let’s close our eyes and imagine I’m in my gallery. Then open them again so that you can read this post. There, that’s better).
Before me lie quite a few things – mundane things, everyday, if we look at them with our eyes. Here’s one now:
‘Isolation and immobility, then, are the two conditions the imagination requires if it is to be preserved from the ruinous distractions or ‘invasions’ of reality.’ (1977, pp., 41)
Certainly, this applies in the creation of my mythologies, if I write within the gallery, in a place I have re-appropriated as an escapist sanctuary for the purposes of performance anyway, my work is generally more productive, though sometimes the sheer banality of the place works against me. Immobility, too, helps the imagination – my imagination anyway. Blindfolded and tucked away into my little sleeping-ledge it is sometimes easier to let my mind drift and adapt pre-existing pieces of narrative. Isolation though, works not only for me, but for the audience of my piece – the last thing I want in my gallery are the ‘invasions of reality’ as Sturrock puts it. While it helps that the living room tends to be silent as the grave, the space itself has a Spartan cell-like feel to it (indeed, one of my first ideas for performance in there was of me portraying a prisoner within these monastic confines, but the rationale was never truly there) which can only accentuate feelings of isolation from reality. The grate down near the floor that allows a link to reality outside the house seems only to increase feelings of isolation, since even though you have a link to the outside, you feel even more withdrawn from it somehow.
Currently, I still have a couple more narratives to write fully but I have forsaken some last sessions within the gallery to visit home (ridiculous, I know!). I wonder if I will still be able to create absorbing legends when I don’t have access to the isolation and immobility the gallery can provide to me. I worry that my current narratives will deteriorate over time and not cling to the meaning they once held, or never held at all. I wrestle with the idea that meaning is fluid or completely unnecessary and that all I provide as the blind curator is an alternative viewing of the real, wrapping it in the fictional, the escapist. However, in the end, it may just be out of control – reading Borges own works of fiction, I am struck by this particular passage from The Library of Babel in relation to my own worries about the contents of my gallery:
‘Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes of inexhaustible stairways for the traveller and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god.’ (1964, pp., 79)
Now, I cannot knowingly cite my gallery as the work of a divine entity, but this passage shows me that ownership of the gallery is not mine, not even close – it exists ab aeterno and will show me in time what it wants to say.
References:
Borges, J. L., 1964. Labyrinths. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd.
Sturrock, J., 1977. Paper Tigers: The ideal fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.