There is a whole history of puzzlement around the unfathomability of non-existence. Trying to think of nothing I always open my eyes to knowing that all I achieved was ending up in a strange place. One suspiciously simple claim: existence always happens in places. Being is in space, non-being is not – place and not-place are as decisive a distinction as yes and no, which rules everything. As I am not yet familiar with non-existence, I can only talk about the yes of it, and go many places.
Existence – the big one, the everything – is constant. But there is something smaller and more temporal than that grand sprawl, which is the mysterious case of the singular “I exist.” Human life, with the language to speak of it. I ask: how to domesticate existence, to speak of it precisely? The kind that flickers into being then diminishes beneath the horizon of time. We pass through. In that sense, I call our delimited existence-ness: inhabitation.
Inhabitation shapes up differently in different places. Every place has a sort of invisible geometry, let’s call it, represented in the individual mind as an internal map of the entire world. The internal map is temperamental, complex, it bloats the topography of some actual places to map out all sorts of points and lines, diminishes others into muscle memory.
This makes the inhabiting-dimension seem vague and immaterial, almost telepathic. But the sense of a place creates psychological maps of all sorts of conventions (like politeness, language, opinion, movement) or lack thereof. A consensus of invisible geometry is gestured to by the way a place is sustained and treated by its inhabitants. Inhabiting a place often means taking in a set of tacit understandings and imperatives, those corresponding to a childhood home or the whole world.
Inhabiting is bound with a felt scope of possibility (what can be done, what can be changed, what can be said).
I’ve become fascinated by how we inhabit somehow uninhabitable places, resigned not to forces of generative change but to those of creeping decay. Ihabiting obviously gets complicated when the place we inhabit seems to be uninhabitable, dying in some way. When there’s no upkeep to animate these places, they slowly hang their necks, accumulating a gradual weight of rot like fruit on tree branches. Like an unkempt home, a failing state, a town abandoned to its overgrowth and just hanging on. In the song Blaise Bailey Finnegan III by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a sort of an audio documentary, a man with a voice resonating like rusted cans fantastically lambastes the detritus that is modern America. He says it’s a “third world, third rate, third class slum!” that the rest of its people seem unable
to realise. He’s almost impractically pessimistic. Angered, like the scope of his inhabitation, its vividness, is so vast and clear that it hurts.
There is a sense of scale attributed with the corresponding space. Sometimes people’s sense of space ends at the walls of a room they are in. Sometimes it ends where their attention is (that is, at the metaphorical edge of their skull), never quite filling the physicality of their inhabiting. And sometimes, their sense of space is disquietingly vast. This final state is often daunting, as the whole expanse of space without boundaries floods through at any given point, unyielding. This might look like, for example, the man in the song sensing the corruption and detritus of an entire nation and feeling the weight of that pull him into psychic disarray. The map tumbles into places imagined or unseen.
For those particularly observant, the sense of a place is mirrored in their psychological landscape as a map of what is and is not possible. The Blaise Bailey Finnegan III type fights against his world, outraged by the antipathetic blindness its other inhabitants exude. As for the disaffected, we wonder, do they secretly feel the same? Or do they accept it all because they have simply never imagined alternatives to this space? I suspect most just draw the comfortable boundaries of their inhabitation at more convenient points – the end of a daily commute, the door of the home, for example.
But for others, inhabitation is untethered. It is an imaginative but precarious mind that extends itself outside the first dimension of thinking where it actually is. The capacity is imaginative because it sees what else could be. Inhabiting, alongside the capacity to see alternate maps of inhabiting, makes for complex minds. The sorts of characters produced in places of decay, but with enough information and, crucially, imagination to conceive of superlative alternatives.
Nevertheless, although imagination spurs the realisation of the invisible geometry of a place, it does not guarantee its change – the potential consequences are approximately threefold:
- The imaginative person sees clearly the invisible geometry of their inhabitation by seeing alternative ways of living and then, for better or worse, bends it to their will by then enacting the alternatives, or
- Gives up, or,
- Flees.
So inhabiting is interlinked with the map of possibility (or the impression of possibility) of action. But the recognition of this map, precisely when it reveals unpleasantness, turns it into something even
more daunting, clear and drawn. I think the most intense moments of obsession with that leering force control happen when invisible things suddenly become as rigid as a diagram. When giant quiet forces composed of many little participants, like implacable detritus or expectation or other invisible geometries, are seen with the terror of absolute clarity. It’s at this point that the inhabitant either runs, or lets themselves be stifled, or indeed oscillates between the two.
Recall how the sense of a place can be felt as expansive or localised, or psychological. Imagination, in this way, is a purely generative force. Far from just reconfiguring reality as it is in place, with all its staleness, imagination points our attention towards the future. It surprises us by dredging up states of affairs not yet realised, always idealising, always seeing what could be. So it is that imagination breaks forth from the ever-sedimenting expectations that can make invisible geometries claustrophobic.
A creative force is learning both to pay attention to and learning how to terraform the geography of our inhabitation, our sense of place, mapping out possibilities upon all scales, to potentially enact them in actual space.
It is for this reason that I love grocery stores.
Systematic as a diagram, but ridiculous in their scope of possibility, the modern grocery store represents to me all the richness of existing in space. In Leichhardt marketplace, I map out where I’ve been, what I usually buy, with the unspecified knowledge that there are things in this place I couldn’t even fathom yet (brandy butter, fluorescent blue laundry power called Soupline, some frozen dessert with improbable series numbers in the ingredients list like superstitious signs). My sense of possibility is immense. The simplest map of straight isles and a flat plane, replete with abundance and conventions like not shutting oneself in a fridge or throwing mini croissants at strangers – this bizarre place we can inhabit – is almost a good metaphor for something as vast as existence.
