Stories (from the series “infinite houses”)
infallible houses 1
There were twenty-eight dormitories and a waiting room in the indigo house. The dormitories were octagon shaped. They lie against each other, in a beehive plan. The floor was of one type of tile. There were no doors. There were mosquito nets. The ceiling was so washed out that its color could be that of earth or of night.
People remembered their dreams in the indigo house. Details. And furthermore. According to Pliny, in order to incite premonitory dreams in the Incubator of Lebadeia, the visitor was shrouded in a white cloth and thrown to an abyss carrying honeyed cakes to feed the serpents. There were sequential ablutions.
In contrast, the oracular operation in the indigo house was much simpler. Only to sleep. To sleep in this house.
Lie in a room. Even without undressing. Dream. Even with your eyes open. Speechless. Close your eyes. Note that the preferred position is face up.
There are no bathrooms in the indigo house. So that the sleepers (the visitors, the seers) must venture out to the ponds of miasmas of adjacent patios. Sleepwalkers drown. Sleep then is not casual. The future is not casual.
You are lying face up one night, thinking that dreaming is the house, the ambit of the house, its multiplicity of rooms, of bodies, of mosquito nets (maybe). And you ask yourself, can a dream be contained in a fiction? Isn’t there a particular quality of being, of existing in a dream that can never be completely reclaimed when awake? Can the dream experience be truly translated to an alert state? (Analogously, can memory be translated to reality? Or are we dealing in fatal strategies?) In this vein, the dream can never fully be its recount (a story, this story) but always something else, paradoxically only comparable in its complexity not to the character of its rudimentary recreation but to the intricate nature of lived reality itself. Thus, the inevitable conclusion, dreams cannot predict the future (they cannot be simplified into a prospective narrative). The only possible mechanism to give the impression of prophecy is for the dream to become tangible (to vibrate in such mysterious harmonics with the walking reality) that it becomes ipso facto the future.
A pregnant woman in a floral dress is standing up in the waiting room of the indigo house. All seats have been taken. She has worked all morning in a textile factory of the Essex-Delancy district. She has walked through gothic urban landscapes. There might be hours before she is assigned a room for dreaming. But she falls asleep, standing, untimely. She dreams. She dreams that the son she is carrying will be a light, a splendor.
This is enough. She does not wait for a sleeping chamber. She leaves. She writes down the dream and gives copies to her family. But in doing so, imprisoning the dream in the confines of a narration (a written story) she cancels it, undoing her son’s happy future (the boy is devoured by hares).*
*Let us analyze this outcome. If it’s true that the woman robs the original happy ending dream of its efficacy by turning it into a mere tale, it’s also true that the woman’s story and its unhappy ending are part of yet another story which I have narrated. It might seem that in order for the dream to escape the story that contains the story, the ending should now be happy. However, if we add yet another metanarrative layer, considering this note in itself as a tale about the tale of the house that contains the tale of the woman, this will lead again to an unhappy ending and thus ad infinitum, as we elaborate commentaries on commentaries. This dynamic seems to evoke dreams inside dreams (adjacent realities, passing from one to the other through awakenings). It somehow also resonates with the disposition of the rooms in the indigo house.
inalienable houses 1
The yellow house provided a place for writing.
At Margarite Duras’ Neauphle-le-Château residence it was the room with the blue armoires on the second floor; for Virginia Woolf, the lodge at Monk’s House in Rodmell; at Nara Mansur Cao’s apartment in the neighborhood of La Víbora, it was the kitchen; then, a sombre Japanese toilet at Junichiro Tanizaki’s.
“The world is coming!”, read the headlines.
“The world beyond is coming!”
The world is a synthetic fiber hooked to an obsidian spinning wheel in the vestibule of the yellow house.
(It tenses.)
[It runs. (It breaks.)]
(It tenses.)
(So-)
indifferent houses 1
In the house, there was always a washing or a drying machine on, a copier reproducing papers, a blender producing refreshing beverages: a sensation of movement and time.
Among the presences in the emerald house, there was a Boddhisatva. The Boddhisatva’s power was immense. He would spend his time consulting The Three Worlds according to King Ruang and drawing out mucus and eating it. Stereotypically, he had a big belly and smiled.
One day, a creature comes to the house, a vampyr.
The vampyr sucks the Boddhisatva and proceeds to suck all the equipment in the house. His stomachal veins protuberate.
To the vampyr’s astonishment, the house remains operational, in spite of the collapse of its machinery.
Then the poor vampyr attempts to suck the house. But he is unsuccessful.
This dénouement points to different readings: the house was tease and punishment for the vampyr (and for the Boddhisatva); the house was nibbana for the Boddhisatva (and for the vampyr); the house did not have the slightest concern for the Boddhisatva, nor for the vampyr, nor for the apparatuses, it gave a rat’s ass.
innocent houses 1
The blue cadet house was a hotel room.
involuted houses 1
You could not walk in the fallow house.
incommensurable houses 1
The ultramarine house was a model for terraforming.
invoked houses 1
The green house was a song. The melodic progression, dramatically beautiful, that is, poetic, that is, almost unfinished.
inviting houses 1
It was rumored that the moiré house, an art nouveau building in the sector of San Telmo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is one of the earthly gates to hell. It contrasts with other infernal accesses [with the flaming gas crater of Darvaza in a desert in Turkmenistan (“the Shinning of Karakum”), the Cave of the Sybil near the Vesuvius, Pluto’s Portal in the ancient city of Hierapolis, the ghost city of Fengdu in the Yangtze]. A relative domesticity characterizes it.
This unpretentiousness does not stop the moiré house from being, like the other doors, a tourist magnet. Visitors come attracted not only by the unanimous promise of the underworld, but by the tango classes for cisgender couples offered here.
inert houses 1
When one mentions that the cobalt house contains interdicted words, the image of a dilapidated ruin covered with obscene graffiti comes to mind. This is not the case. The forbidden words are not visible on the walls or in any other element of the house. They are not embedded in its mass. Nor do they conform to secret codes, nor to any symbolic spatial sequence. In fact, it is unclear how the hidden words are manifested in the minds of those who occupy the cobalt house for a certain amount of time. It is nevertheless perceived that it is only by virtue of simple presence of the humans in the house that the discovery of the words is possible (even when the persons are continuously blindfolded, with their ears shut with wax or inside sensory deprivation chambers or in virtual reality immersions).
What – you might ask– is the nature of these words? They are familiar. Absolutely pedestrian. But at the same time fleeting, unpredictable, impossible to generate in the human consciousness at that moment without the agency of the dwelling.
People are unfleshed when they receive these words, they become something like outlines or skeletons.
The cobalt house is an example of modernist architecture. Its lines are simple, its ornamentation, sparse. It features an interior garden and a geometrical staircase.
informal houses 1
In the prefecture of Ōita in the province of Kyūshū, the Mountbatten pink house, the whole house, was known as a tsukumogami. Tsukumogami are objects that disuse, desire or time have brought a psychic cosmic charge to. Found among the yōkai, they are different from the kami -deities-, the yūrei -ghosts-, the oni -ogres or demons from the Heian period, common in the old Heian capital, today Kyoto-, and the kanjū, giant monster of Japanese cinema. They are also referred as bakemono, “anomalous and shifting thing.”
So it happened that one day the house, while remaining a house, transformed itself into a head. People began to ascribe to it smoke, grinding eyes, seeds, gums, fulgurant tentacles.
The Mountbatten pink house (under another appellation) appears in an illustrated scroll (the Hyakkiyagyō emaki) of the Muromachi period attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu (¿1434?-¿1525?).
It was temperately feared, being mainly a source of wonder and anecdote. It is mentioned by Margarita Guerrero and Jorge Luis Borges in the editio princeps of their bestiary.
invigorating houses 1
Some people place the lavender house in the Caribbean, in a Caribbean republic; others, in a Nordic region, among tundra of ice; still others, in a space of ambiguity where tombstones and waves share rough edges, salient features. Everyone agrees that on one side the house faces the sea, while on another it faces the cemetery.
A patakí or Yoruba story tells how Yemaya, then goddess of the Cemetery, invites the Ocean deity Oya, to look at her house. Oya emerges from the sea and from a nearby hill watches the cemetery. She exclaims: “What a beautiful and well-ordered terrain, with so many little white constructions!... The hill near the shore from where Oya and Yemaya watch the graveyard would be the future site of the lavender house. “Let’s exchange places!”, proposes Yemaya. And eagerly, they trade dominions. That is how dust and sea mist touch and create the other horizon, the human horizon. That is how Yemaya becomes lady of the seas and Oya becomes patron of cities of dead. Upon entering through the gates of her new kingdom and finding a proliferation of carcasses with the substance undone, Oya mounts in fire, fury and spirals and charges her sister Obba (Saint Rita) with digging the holes and her sister Yewa (Saint Cecilia) with completely decaying the bodies.
Oya – Opéré làlàóyàn. A gbé agbòn obì siwaju oko. O-ni-ìl ós ìn Oya rúmú bi eni gbé ike Oya òpèrè, ‘wá gbà je, kò dé inú.
Carnations of a very pointed color, almost bidimensional, like stickers, grew in front of the house. The plants had the faculty of remaining fresh over the tombstones and when thrown to the sea.
Yemayá Olokun atara mawá Oyu debeke o ma won, ba li ko si sere si Iyá Omío.
Yemayá Olokun atara mawá, osaya bi. Olokun, Iyamí Yemayá-
I lived in the house in 1952 after the Great War where I lost one arm and both legs. I had many experiences with the so-called “phantom limbs” (feeling my missing extremities still there). I loved the house for the wind coming from both sides. There I had the revelation that I was the son of both, Yemaya and Oya. This was before the spread of the religion through the Florida and New York diaspora.
I often swam in the sea or ran through the cemetery. But when I flew, I was a one arm torso with a head. I think that the location of the house helped me to understand the nature of the ghost, of having two mothers.
The peacock feather would surge from the soil in the market, from the salt in the water or from the border (the house).
The worst thing about the campaigns is the return home, the retrievable losses, the mystery of the hours.
Today is September 7. The eve.
Today we must bury a body (in earth or water). It’s a believer.
But it can happen tomorrow.
Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya is a Puerto Rican experimenter, writer and stage director of East Indian ascent. He is the founder of Casa Cruz de la Luna, a multidisciplinary artistic project with a double base: San Germán, Puerto Rico and New York City. As a theatre artist his work has travelled to Cuba, Perú, Mexico, England, Spain, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, through the United States and through the island. As a writer, he has been recipient of: the Casa del Teatro Playwriting Award (Dominican Republic), the Asunción Prize for queer drama (Pregones Theatre, New York), the National Playwriting Award from the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture, the Alfaguarra/Santillana Award for Young Adults’ Literature (Puerto Rico) and first prizes in short fiction from the Puerto Rico PEN Club and the Puerto Rican Atheneum.
This year he will be resident writer at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, New York), docent affiliate writer at the Playwrights’ Center (Minneapolis) and will continue to develop “Unbounding [sic] Prometheus” a performance piece exploring memory, digital writing technologies and disability which began to take shape on December 2023 as part of an artistic residence in CultureHub (at La Mama, NYC). He will also explore performatively, literarily and videographically houses in ruins in small towns in the Southwest of Puerto Rico, as part of Beta local’s Máquina Simple Fellowship sponsored by the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Aravind holds a Ph.D. in theatre historiography from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Theatre Arts and Dance and an M.D. from Mayo Medical School (U.S.A.).
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