The Room continued...

...Thus to write about the consciousness of a nonhuman form, as a human, is mere folly.

Thus the room did not deconstruct the looming reality of its existence. It simply became. As it began to be it did not ask itself existential questions but rather practical ones. Its first real question (to itself, of course) was “what is that?” This was in response to its sudden perception of the other, the non-self. For what lay outside the room was the phenomenal, overbearing and terrifying nonsense of everything.

Having no organs, no senses as such, the room was not able to divine what this non-self was, but it was sufficiently aware to understand the distinction. At this stage, we can realise that the room’s collective birth of a single, divided consciousness is not the same in any way to our own experience of sense, or self. A child does not understand the non-self for many months. This room, this being was made up of the ephemera of the wider world, and was not born from a union of cells, but from their death, reshaping and decay.

The carelessly collated clothes, lying in heaps for sorting, washing and ironing; one dead moth, crispy and brittle in its silent and unmourned solitude; the furniture, certainly the dominant force in terms of volume and strength; the books that stood and wilted proudly on the shelves; the unwashed and stale bedclothes; the quiet shoes and the dust and dirt that gathered in their creases and soles; the detritus of the poet’s life – letters (often unopened), pens (often unused), tangled ties (worn but once) and, of course, the walls, floor and ceiling, topped by the carpet and the paintwork.

The room’s uniting feature, as so often is the case at the start, were not its shared political beliefs, nor shared economic interest nor even its carefully selected and highly tasteful colour scheme, but rather its shared physicality and presence. Like a tribe of men rising from the desert, or the swamp, it perceived its own borders and self clearly, but lacked the ability to see beyond itself. The other emanated only fear and uncertainty. Without success, without joy, the room could not yet know excitement – only dread – the natural concern of a living being obsessed with its own survival.

But the comparisons must end there. A tribe of men surrenders individual action and decisions to a central force, usually an individual. That could not happen here – there was no disagreement, no scarcity or economies of scale that could be used here. Here the consciousness, not the political system, was genuinely all inclusive, and thus here there was only one – both trader and politician, doctor and assassin, cop and robber – if somewhat confused.