Room In A Room

From the profane to the sacred: the vision of a room in a room

I had given up trying to sleep and gone into the living room and turned on the TV. I was flipping through the channels when some rock music caught my ear. It was being broadcast on one of those encoded satellite channels where the image is scrambled but the sound is intact; the channel happened to be a porno channel, which came on only after midnight. Not bad, I thought about the music, which had, appropriately, a  captivatingly sexy beat. The sounds of a man and a woman having vigorous sex weren’t that bad either; at least they were real, which is to say that they didn’t sound dubbed. I started dancing, something I haven’t done in years. (Talk about dating myself: the last time I danced with any real enthusiasm was back in the late seventies and early eighties, during the disco craze.) I had my eyes closed. Suddenly, I saw this room in a room. It was rectangular in shape, open at the top, with two entrances diagonally opposite each other, at each end of the longer walls; each entrance had a threshold of steps to cross – two up, two down. From the profane to the sacred, I thought, for I understood the room as a divider of the larger space into an inner and outer space, with the inner space functioning as a kind of sacred space. An inner sanctum. Over the following days and weeks, I saw a number of ways of using the room in a process. As a place that you could go into in order to get things out, for example. Onto the walls. I saw people writing and drawing and painting directly on the walls. I saw teenage boys building such a room. Let them build the space they would occupy, I thought. What they would be building on the outside, they would also be building on the inside.