From nostalgia for home

Notes on an Imaginary Dwelling

Smiles filled the space, which, despite being the house’s music room, seemed more like the anteroom of an opera house, minutes before a pompous premiere. The large arches that separated the space from a beautiful garden adorned with colorful plants and crisscrossing paths seemed to have been there for many years. The cold autumn night wind blew through the balustrade, quickly absorbing the melodious music that filled the room. A boy in a white sailor suit looked surreptitiously through the large pianos scattered around the space. He saw more and more smiles on the faces of the people dancing so uniformly and harmoniously, or laughter on the lips of those who were so happily arguing. The radiant faces were another adornment to the cloth-wrapped figures who wandered from one room to another, firmly hoping for a more pleasant moment. The gentle, sympathetic music shone as brightly as the marble of the hallway surrounding the grand staircase leading to the second floor, and more precisely, to a mysterious painting that leads the observer to his fantasies of the primitive earthly paradise; or at least causes a slight feeling of discontent when their minds ask themselves, “Where is Eve?” Which reminds them of their destiny. And after a renewed smile, they resume their course, this time, to meet a beautiful lady behind so many dresses. Behind his mother’s generous attire, the boy found a momentary refuge, for he no longer knew where to look to rest his thoughts for even a moment. The walls were painted, and the lamps seemed always ready to fall. Colorful carpets pointed the right way. Shine and curves were everywhere. There was not a single place on his horizon devoid of detail, nor a moment of stillness in the air. It’s not difficult to imagine the level of boredom an eight-year-old child can experience at a sumptuous party of the Viennese aristocracy at the turn of the century. Nor is it difficult to understand why the thoughts running through their mind are unknown to most of us. “Why should one tell the truth when it can be beneficial to tell a lie?” Not every child thinks this. Only a cursed child. And now what is truly difficult is understanding the meaning of these thoughts. Even more so when this search constantly brings us closer to the crumbling of the pillars that support our real world. It is difficult and painful to remove the smoke soaked into our eyes; the smoke over which the massive moral columns on which we have been sitting since we decided to delegate the function of remembering events to objects were projected. It is not easy to realize that the real world and the possible world are different, and not only different, but in general they do not agree. Reality and possibility are the world and the subject, and there is no system for commensurate equivalence. And at the point where these worlds touch in the body, in the skin, it is not possible to find a measure that works in both cases for each infinity, separately. The actual infinity and the possible infinity. Limited by the word or by the absence of it itself. Limited by the infinitely large and by the infinitely small. These limits of reason, represented by the word, as the outer limit of the body; of the ineffable, are the meaning of the thoughts of this child, who was called Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Now, after awakening and seeing, strangely, the events that happen daily are no longer inescapable consequences of a historical development, but ineffable problems predicted more than a century ago by the thinkers who inhabited Austro-Hungarian Vienna at the end of the century. We might understand why a struggle rages within us, revealing the meaning of dwelling. And it is simply a matter of returning to the themes that inspired this Viennese generation, to see how they become as relevant today as what we can imagine happening on the streets of Vienna, as fictitious as the images on television newscasts.

Then, like a house of cards, the long-sought happiness that progress and the Western world had promised us, through democracy, capitalism, and modernity, collapses in our consciousness. We are on the brink of a void that leads us to self-exile from the world. From a world characterized by dehumanization, loneliness, and the establishment of technology as constitutive of the world.

By rediscovering the forgotten world that stood behind the name of an empire on the empty crown of Franz Joseph, reflected in the image of today’s world, the doors are opened that lead us to unearth the truth so cleverly hidden by history. The truth that these illustrious and desperate Viennese wanted to tell us with silent cries. Musil, Krauss, Loos, Wittgenstein, . . .

. . . The house I built for Gretl is the product of a decidedly sensitive ear and good education, the expression of a great understanding (of culture, etc.). But the primordial life, the wild life struggling to come to the surface . . . that’s what’s missing. So you could say it’s not healthy.

. . . . Surely the primordial thing that was missing, that thing struggling to come to the surface, we understand when we hear what he said at another time, “Within all great art there is a wild animal: tamed.” This wild animal, who has been tamed by the world, is missing from this house. The inhabitant. An animal tamed by the world, like his sister Gretl, or like Melville’s Bartleby, or like the individual who works at Loos’s Chicago Tribune, or like any of us.

It is this specific house, designed with the intention of a glove, to perfectly fit our individual needs, that demonstrates the impossibility of a house. A house like those of old. This house should be located in the exact geometric center of the Kobernausse forest (or Kundmanngasse), and should serve as the residence and supreme happiness of its sister. The house would be a cone. An inverted cone, which is more like a tomb. A house that leads us to think of a tomb, or an uninhabitable house. Or rather, it is a tomb that serves as a home for the inhabitant.

A house that leads us to discover the uninhabitable world, the world of names, of the image. The house represents the house like Magritte’s pipe. This world that Rilke mentions in “The Duino Elegies”; a world where the tree is no longer a tree. A world to which Lord Chandós can no longer refer. A world that Wittgenstein tried to show, limited by his own language, since it was this that constituted it.

A world of images in which these Viennese daily saw the cause of their passions, against which they struggled in their work, in a battle against moral and aesthetic degradation. It was a struggle against the value of things in images, against the applied arts, against ornamentation in everyday utensils, in architecture as a city, in language, or in music. A struggle that is taking hold, and which is in itself the crisis of Western culture; it surrounds us daily and affects the development of our lives.

Our reason chooses the dialectical path, for it thus manages to create a logical structure in thought; and thus allows us to link question with answer. Perhaps after all, I understand that it is not necessary to find answers, but rather to ask questions. Isn’t it time to finally ask ourselves, what did this cursed generation of Austrians mean?

REFLECTIONS ON THE CONE? CORRECTION? THE HOUSE

WITTGENSTEIN’S HOUSE

It’s located in the third district, and precisely as the guidebooks at Kundmanngasse No. 19 conscientiously state, it’s the famous house built in 1926 by Paul Engelmann for Wittgenstein, who collaborated on the architectural project. Upon arrival, it seems as if the house, which Wittgenstein had built for his sister, doesn’t exist, because the street runs from number 13 to 21, skipping the numbers in between; the streets are raised, interrupted by seemingly abandoned construction sites. With some effort, one discovers that the house is on the other side, and that the entrance used to be from Parkgasse. The building, with its nested cubic shapes and its dirty yellow-ochre color, looks like an empty box. It now houses the Bulgarian embassy, which occupied and restored it in the 1970s, and its cultural section. It’s six in the evening, the door is open, and a window is lit, but no one is visible. A table with four upside-down chairs sits on a veranda. Two large bronze statues of Cyril and Methodius, the two Slavic saints, dominate the garden. Wittgenstein obviously didn’t place them there.

Jean Pierre Vernant presents, in his interpretation, the relationship between Hestia and Hermes as that of neighbors. Neighbors through mutual contact, since Hermes dwells in the doorways, and Hestia is the hearth itself. Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth, of the fire that forms the fixed point in the world; and Hermes, the messenger, his place, the door, ready to leave. For Vernant, they represent, in the symbolism of Greek mythology, space and movement.

By opening the doors wider to interpretation, and even to reverie, we might find a path that allows us to come closer to understanding why the house is no longer the house. Hestia is the virgin, in charge of the hearth’s fire. She renounced weddings to become the center of the home. Hestia is a fixed point, remaining static in the center, organizing and orienting human space. By being at the center, she isolates herself and encloses herself within, within, and thus she is, from being static. Being in a state of residence, a dwelling, or a house.

Hermes, messenger between Gods and mortals, is movement, passage, and mediation between strangers. He is transformation: transformation is motivated by fire, as a transformative element. Hermes dwells at the doorways of houses and cities, or at crossroads and borders. Hermes is the prowler of doors, and as Homer describes him, “slipping obliquely through keyholes, like an autumn breeze, like a mist,” he stops at nothing, neither doors nor walls. He is a thief who arrives stealthily, unseen nor invited, he comes from behind. His journey is incorporeal; he wears Hades’s helmet that makes him invisible and winged sandals that make distances disappear.

The ties are set, all that remains is to weave them.

Hestia, divinity of fire and of hearth sacrifices, time freezes her static, fixed. Isolating yourself within yourself, you become the room. The room of being. Being at the point that guides and organizes me, in a world that is all the same. Who is Hermes really? Why his recurring visits? Does he perhaps maintain secret relations with the virgin Hestia?

The geometric rationality of those architectural forms, desired by the philosopher who so relentlessly explored the possibilities and limits of thought, now seems to reveal, in an arid manifestation, a uselessness that makes one’s heart clench. We wonder what Wittgenstein wanted with this building, whether he wanted to build a house or proof of the impossibility of a true house, of what was once called home. Who knows what limits those square shapes ideally sought to draw in their thinking, what ineffable spaces and images they were to ascetically exclude, to leave out.

What could Wittgenstein have wanted to leave out? Why is a house no longer a house? At what point did it cease to be the home, the archetype, the way of inhabiting the world? These answers make no sense if we ourselves forget the matter and inhabit the image of the world. Because the house, before we were born, and even before any person we know was born, was the dwelling place of our body, in an indistinguishable world. The house limited familiarity and was the measure of the world. A house founded with sacrifice, with transforming fire, which, turning into smoke, transmitted its message to heaven, to the gods. Smoke as a link between heaven and earth, like fire in the hearth. The bonfire. The house taught me the inside and the outside. But the subject locked himself inside and believed he had found the freedom of being. He left his identity, his memory, in his objects. The house held nothing back. The house, the original form of living, was lost to history. A house that inhabits and shapes the myth. The myth that reason seeks to forget.

THE HOUSE OF MYTH

At the base of the great statue of Zeus at Olympia, Phidias arranged a gathering of the Greek deities. The gathering of gods was segregated into pairs, which in turn were between Helios, the sun, and Selene, the moon. In the center, Aphrodite and Eros preside over marriages. The couples are related to each other by the bonds established in pre-Homeric tradition. Zeus-Hera, Poseidon-Amphitrite, and Hephaestus-Charis are husband and wife. Helios and Selene are siblings, like Apollo and Artemis; Aphrodite and Eros are mother and son. And Athena is the protector of Hercules. One couple remains adrift, with no known ties in tradition. They are Hermes and Hestia. They are neither spouses nor relatives, and their relationship is unknown through the myths that allow them to be united to form the frieze.

Hermes dwells in the gates, on the walls. Hades’s helmet has made you invisible even to the gaze of the gods. And while Remus writhes in his grave with envy, your silence has now fallen silent. For you are the privileged one, in whose sandals lies the power of the leap. Hermes, messenger, clever thief, no one sees your sorrow that has cost others their lives. For you do not like the door, for that is not your way out. You go out and enter without warning, without being seen or expected. In your sandals, the magic that makes distances disappear. Distances that are world, behind the wall and the limit. Distance, or outside the room, of being, of being. It is Hermes who manages to enter the Oikos, the confines of Hestia.

Invisible Hermes, traveling through the pneuma like electromagnetic particles, your winged sandals make distances disappear at the speed of light. You have stolen from Hestia’s own bosom what she jealously guarded. She has lost her feet, she no longer stands on the world. Hermes is his own image; your ability to not be, to be in two places at once, is your magic. In it lies ubiquity, a power only the gods possessed; in your image he finds rebirth. Hermes, clever thief, you have stolen more than I can possibly know.