I’ve been reading Sweet Juniper like it’s my job, and I just had a realization while looking at this, and also thinking about what my mom said the other day. I’ve long thought about writing about buildings, and I know that I’ll do “real” writing about buildings like I did in my Architectural History classes. I’ll write about the way that light enters a room, I’ll write about the juxtaposition of materials, I’ll write about the spaces they enclose and the spaces they occupy. But I also want to write building fiction, and I think I know a little more about that now.
These days, we talk in our profession about how buildings should be built to last. How they are investments, or ways of sharing our values across time. We say, or the Europeans say to us, that in Europe, you don’t build with the idea something will come down, you build so that it can stay up, even if it needs patching and fixing. Buildings are bigger than us, and I think that it makes sense that they would have a longer life span than us, the same way very large trees and whales and elephants do. And, they’re even less able to care for themselves than plants, which are immobile but have some pretty kick-ass ways of feeding and repairing themselves. So, as long as we’re in a symbiotic relationship with buildings, we keep them warm and weed-free, and they keep us safe and dry. But, they also observe us in a way we sometimes notice, and they watch each other and the part of the world that they can perceive (I don’t really believe that real buildings do any of this, these are now my fictional buildings, and maybe, a little bit, what I’d like real buildings to do, too). They are our memory keepers. But, I think they’re memory keepers that keep the full experience within them. A photo album is full of snapshots, a treasure box full of the little objects, but a house, it’s inhabited by ghosts, and those ghosts are both what is good in life and what we would normally like to forget about in life.
So, I think that’s what these buildings in my stories, whenever I may eventually write them, will be – the keepers of the ghosts, the large and sort of helpless, but intensely wise by the time that they’re abandoned, beings that see everything that we do, all the objects we cherish and the arguments that we have and the plants and animals that we don’t really understand, and the way that we’re mostly confused, and keep most of their opinions to themselves. Maybe that’s a little why we get sad when we knock them down, even when we know they have to go – we know they’ve seen a lot and have stoically endured it.
What my mom said – “It seems as if for most people, like myself, buildings once created become things, possibly very lovely and appreciated things, but still things, whereas for you, buildings once created become creatures, beings, alive and organic and able to act upon other creatures, interact with them being to being.” What do these ones think about us? Do they miss their neighbors?