Imaginative Geographies

Extracting more existential dimensions from my old posts, from the history I thought I’d lost, like an amnesiac rediscovering his memories. An excerpt from my October 23rd, 2006 entry:

It's the little sounds that create a sense of space. The distant hum of conversation like angels whispering secrets in each others ears, the clinking of cutlery in a hidden kitchen like laughing children. A door closes somewhere, another one opens, a cat's meow and a pigeon cooing. These tiny gifts carried by the wind and presented like homage to a lost innocence, like timeless vibrato.

What brought me back to that post was something I read yesterday in Orientalism. Here, Edward Said describes Gaston Bachelard’s concept of the ‘poetics of space’:

The inside of a house, [Bachelard] said, acquires a sense of intimacy, secrecy, security, real or imagined, because of the experiences that come to seem appropriate for it. The objective space of a house – its corners, corridors, cellar rooms – is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a house may be haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical. So space acquires emotional or even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here.

Spaces also have histories, and those histories give them an identity, “real or imagined.” They borrow them, accumulate them, erase them and recreate them; like human beings, spaces have lives of their own. In my experience, our interaction with spaces works on at least three levels: a space can either have a history of its own; it can be endowed with a history, subjected to a history (this in the sense that Said means where the Orient, for example, is assigned a history by the Orientalist); and lastly, a space can borrow the history of the person experiencing it. All three of these can function independently or in conjunction with one another.

When I first moved into my new apartment, I had really no knowledge of the building or who had occupied it before me. There was no objective history I could reference so my initial experience with the apartment was based on my own history. I described the place as “cottagelike” because that, for me, was what it was. It borrowed my history and adopted that identity. Over time, its other history began to emerge: the Star of David relief outside the front door, the realization that all of the other apartments are occupied by members of one family, that this is an add-on apartment, formerly a terrace, etc etc. That’s not to say its initial identity was supplanted by this new one. My apartment still feels cottagelike, at least to me. Instead, it now has multiple identities. It is a persevering minority (you don’t find many Jews in Istanbul these days), an unexpected arrival (in the sense that it must have been built to accommodate a sudden addition to the family), an aberration or outsider in other words, which is fitting considering the outsiders who now occupy it.

I’m sure more identities will come as together we, my apartment and I, accumulate more histories. That is the magic of space.