look around your room
“look around your room, or any space that you love and call home, and write about some aspect of it.”
my apartment is a mess right now. there are times where i can do nothing else until i have vacuumed and wiped and dusted everything to a showroom finish. then there are other times, right now for instance, where i am content to let everything accumulate, for crumbs and cat hair to gather in the carpet, for papers and letters and reference books, journals, index cards, half-finished artworks, pens, pencils, bowls of fruit, cups and coasters to overflow every free surface.
here is what is on my dining table, which is also my work table because it’s large and sturdy. a fruit bowl with a single sweet potato and some miscellaneous debris. journals. a gridpaper journal which i use to keep track of what i’m working on (currently outdated). a layflat journal with several recent pages of wildflower drawings (golden everlastings and sundews). underneath it, a field guide to australian wildflowers. a box of index cards, my zettelkasten. the card visible is from february 2022 and titled two capabilities of the archive. spiralbound notepads.
a copy of life, a user’s manual, which i took off the shelf to see how georges perec writes out his long lists of things and makes them interesting. more reference books. one titled the book of birds and nearby an accordion-fold bestiary in which i’ve been copying out the medieval and renaissance plates of owls. human anatomy for artists with my last study pressed between its pages, a frontal view of the femur. bridgman’s complete guide to drawing from life with a kraft paper pad on top, filled with skeletons and interlocking body parts.
handmade sketchbook, which has also become a repository for sketches on loose paper and for anything i don’t want to show other people. another handmade sketchbook, originally made for fanart of the last outpost but which now also holds drawings of my cat. the journal portable i take with me when i go out walking or to cafes, surprisingly thick for something so compact. i started it in june of last year and probably won’t fill it until late next year.
if i packed it all away i might have more space to eat at, and to work at too, instead of having to push back the owls and wildflowers and osteological studies and erotica and loose notes and teetering piles of paper and books each time i sat down at it. but then experience tells me that if i moved everything back onto the shelves, back into neat stacks, no work would get done at all.
it was easier to balance my conflicting desires for order and disorder when i had a studio, when i was studying. it was on the second storey of one of the oldest buildings in the city. so much stuff had fallen into the pits and grooves of its beautiful timber flooring, or been smeared into the grain, that one more year’s dust and grime did not matter in the slightest. the windows faced west and in the midyear afternoons the light coming down from the mountain lit everything up in warm reds and oranges. i could leave it as untidy as i pleased.
i passed by that building recently and it was gutted for renovations. the days of cheap working spaces are over now. it’s full price or nothing. so it is that my apartment has become my studio. things fall off tables and get worked into the carpeting. my cat wanders through the mess and meows at me for dinner. on the nights i’m too tired or sad to work, all the unfinished things are there in the room to confront me.
but i love this too. i’m reminded of the artists who moved into cheap lofts in manhattan when it was still a hellhole, and who have managed to live and work and hold on in them even as the city has rapidly gentrified around them. i’m reminded of tove jannson stating that the most important things for her were work, then love. there is something to letting it all intermingle in the same space, letting the messiness accumulate, letting all the mismatched bits and pieces of my life sprawl comfortably without a care for who might see them. forever vacuuming out the charcoal dust.
return to muse ariadne