The Room continued

(see earlier posts)

The room felt a sense of responsibility for itself for the first time, but not very clearly. In fact, it was mainly just manifested in the spines of the shelves. They were doing a sterling job; after all, poets like to read…

These spines underpinned the room, but not in some traditional, physical sense; nor yet metaphysically. The structure of consciousness, the room may or may not have been discovering, could be seen as crossing the boundaries of the physical and the non-physical. For that, indeed, is what consciousness may be – the bridge between the world of thought and the world of form. So to start with the architecturally sound pillars seemed to make sense, as they supported both the physicality of the literature and the placing of that physicality within the life-space of the poet/invader. But that’s all hokum, isn’t it?

The room, were its consciousness able to grasp the basic tenets of metaphysics, or literature, would clearly reject such high-falluting concepts as being strictly irrelevant to the process it was experiencing. Does a mother think about the socio-political landscape of expanding humanity in the moment of birth? Does a new nation consider the very concept of identity as it creates its new national anthem, national flag and national system of government. We guess not (but can only guess, being neither a new mother nor a new nation).

The situation of birth, the moment of consciousness, the concept of creation and awake-ness, does not lend itself to analysis easily. In fact, it usually excludes it. We cannot remember our own moment of genesis, neither of form nor of thought. We cannot imagine the concept of non-consciousness, even in ourselves, despite the transparent truth of the matter. Thus to write about the consciousness of a nonhuman form, as a human, is mere folly.