What outside space reflects your inside space?
I've been reading The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard recently:
Amongst a lot of stuff about car crashes, astronauts and images of dead politicians and film stars there's an extremely interesting idea.
Throughout the book he tries to turn character and place inside out, considering the landscape to be part of the nervous system or body of the characters. At various points characters gravitate to certain places and try to change them, as those space were inside of their mind rather than outside them, so that building something outside of yourself is a way of creating something inside yourself.
This set me thinking: What spaces best reflect us? Which spaces do we consider to be extensions of ourselves? Are there any places that we feel sum us up better than other things we can say about ourselves?
I suppose we try to make our homes a mirror of our best intentions about ourselves, with comforts and furniture and ornament, but they more often become reflections of how we really are. For example, the more disorderly my thinking becomes, the more disorderly my home.
In terms of outside spaces, I love motorway services. there's seems to be something about motorways and motorway services that sum up something about me. They're both exotic and mundane. They in-between points that no-one visits in and of themselves. People wash up there regularly. They promise great mysteries but they are only glimpsed briefly.
Have you ever had the experience of changing a space around you so that it changes how you think or feel, as if you were modifying your own nervous system? A very simple example of this is rearranging an office so that it becomes a place to work efficiently. You do this, you come into it and you work. This could be seen as rearranging the outside world as a means of rearranging your interior world.
So, a few questions to chew over there.
Space and place: where do you stop and the outside world begin?
Cheers,
Mark Brown, editor (on leave), www.ABCtales.com
