What Lies Beneath

As fundamentally organic, a house does not come into existence without exposing itself to radical diminishment. A house dies, and in that death closes down, defining itself as an imposition rather than an opening. And yet, the house remains lived in. There is no departure, only an after-effect. To live on, in, over, beyond, around: there is hope in this lingering, a hope of renewal through commitment. The commitment is telling: it reveals a struggle between the wilderness which lies with the superimposed order of time and memory.

But to live on means to be a vessel for the dead house. The body is porous, able to absorb its surrounding environment, often without the mind being conscious of such an involvement. Place is parasitic in this fashion, it leaches upon the body, pressing down with greater intensity the nearer it reaches its end. Here, we cross into a process of altered mimesis: an identification of otherness, estrangement, and erosion as bridging the gap between self and place. The imitation of place carries with it the modulation of self. We are told by Georges Rodenbach how:

In love, the way [resemblance] operates is principally in charm of a new woman appearing who resembles our former lover….[Hughes] possessed what one might call a ‘sense of resemblance,’ an extra sense, frail and sickly, which linked things to each other by a thousand tenuous threads, related tress to the Virgin Mary, creating a spiritual telegraphy between his soul and the grief-stricken towers of Bruges (p. 60).

The mutating gesture of mimesis proves advantageous for Rodenbach: by its very power, Bruges comes to assume an amorphous similarity to the inner experience of lack. Only it is a negative mimesis: a correspondence in which death and absence (dis)embody themselves in space, each revolving in their mutual erosion. The house dies, and with it the city, too. The process of mimesis is in every sense metamorphic. It mutates, stretching beyond the walls of the house, leaking through the windows, seeping through the keyhole, until the domestic correspondence between the extinct house and the subject colonizes a broader region:

Like the timeline of the house, the absorbing gesture of mimesis proves finite. Mimesis is an active identification, empowered by the continuity of time and memory. To merge these two realms, mimesis relies on the imagination to produce a synthesis. Assimilation is thus also a falsification, a willful drive towards oblivion, death, and the undifferentiated. Architecturally, this death-encompassing reaches a limit. As the grip of mimetic death loosens, so place becomes exposed to a foreign landscape. What lies beneath the death of a house is thus the glacial indifference of a world beyond the anthropomorphic superimposition of loss and presence.