The Room in Context (2)

Indulge the Room, and its curiosities. For it may help free you from your own unrealised pre-conceptions and unconscious goals and fears. Of course, equally, it may not.
So upon what did the Room next seize, or chance, to lead its growth? Would it be one of these monstrous human themes - creation, nature/nurture, or even love? Could it even derive any information from such a theme, or would it simply abstract something utterly unintended or unhelpful therefrom?

The answer, dear (or indeed cheap) reader, is NO.

The next stimulus, although related, in the way that all things are intertwined, to these grandiose themes, was to be far more base, far more primitive even than these great ideas and concepts that still shape and tear society and civilisation apart.

The Room was suddenly conscious of a discarded rubber prophylactic which contained a liquid. Of course, I hardly need tell you now, it did not conceive of this in these terms. A strange container, perhaps, would be a better way of expressing its reaction. And a strange content as well, indeed.

Had the musings of dead and living poets (ah, Morrissey) given it enough context to draw meaning from this dead tube of rubber that once removed a potential life? (Don't worry, the Room is not interested in anti-abortion diatribes) Could it conceive (aha) of the implications of the tube? Again, the answer was NO.

But it did start to force the Room to accept the possibility of another, alien presence within it. Of another existence. For the tube was clearly not a thing of the Room. And therefore (our minds can seize the logic of this far faster than the Room could) someone must have made or brought it.

The possibility of the other, as well as that of making/creation, had now been seeded deep within the emerging processes of the Room. Soon, one hopes, it would be able to ask and be confuted by the great themes...

The Room in Context (1)

Which was just as well. It wouldn't have coped well with such a world.

The youngling, the god-child and the mewling infant all have their archetypes from which they issue and to which they aspire or react against. There is always a woman, a man or a god, or some semi-divine or zoomorphic equivalent which provides us with a neat structure of derivation, which implies comparison.

In some ways, the creation of the Room's emotional framework is like the birth of the cosmos. Like the emergence of Gaia from Chaos, or the Biggest of Big Bangs, or the very existence of the Christian God, it is something of a mystery. Do you have sufficient faith to swallow that mystery? Or will you reject it as many have rejected the creation stories (we must tread carefully with 'myth' here) in their own societies? For this is as real as they are.

What did God model himself on? How did Gaia grow to become or create the parched spines that spanned the Ancient World? What does the babe, lacking a parent (even a substitute) emulate, imitate and eventually emanicipate himself from?

Our world is fascinated, however indirectly, with such anomalies, because to understand them, is to understand the universe, in some small, perhaps small-town, fashion. Witness the popularity with a span of generations of 'Tarzan' - on the face of it a simple child's tale, but actually a study (if unscientific!) of the translation of man's development into the natural world, with overtones of the recapture or reentry to that Eden that we have all lost.

But, how far we have come, dear (as you have now become to us) reader, from the idea and the feeling of the Room. Tarzan is a far easier vehicle for such a comparison or exploration of our nature and the nature of change, of development and of continuity. The idea of an abstract Room taking on the challenge of striving alone to define its identity with no pattern is harder to grasp, like a greased vine that sends our hero tumbling into the jaws of a dislocated (cinematically) crocodile or lion.

Indulge the Room, and its curiosities. For it may help free you from your own unrealised pre-conceptions and unconscious goals and fears. Of course, equally, it may not.