Auracular Spaces #1: London and Libraries

I remember the first time I realized that there is an invisible mist or essence around me and other people, an aura of sorts. It looks like empty space, but it is inhabited with sensory receptors and meanings.

I was sitting in one of six chairs at a heavy oak table. My work was spread out in front of me, and my molecules and meanings were also spread out, maybe eight inches all around my body, maybe even farther. It must have been farther because when another person took a seat opposite me and began to spread out his work and his molecules and meanings, mine were disrupted. I tried to continue thinking, but my processes had been punctured. I made the reasonable request that the person move to another table and he was offended. That chair was empty, the space was free. Wasn’t it? No, it was most certainly occupied, though he could not see or believe that it was.

The image in my mind of what my aura looks like, if it could be seen, is something close to what we see in magnified images of zooplankton: an undulating misty gel that floats around my solid flesh and bone, spreading like a three dimensional halo with indistinct boundaries and a very delicate, sensitive skin just one scintilla thin.

That is just my personal space. There are many kinds of auracular spaces, both personal and communal; human and natural. There is also a resonance between the individual spaces and those larger spaces that are also filled with meanings and sensory experience. More than a resonance even, it is a visceral attraction, a kind of magnetic allure. We go to certain spaces—and we create certain types of spaces through architecture—that tickle and amplify the auracular sense.

In work-a-day life, the zooplankton don’t register in awareness and I’m not attuned to my aura while commuting from station to station. On the other hand, in wandering time and thinking time, the aura unfolds and glows with sensitivity . . .
We strolled up the Strand, past the Inns of Court to St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was closed, so we used the opportunity to have a bit of refreshment and conversation, and then took the tube to Westminster and enjoyed a leisurely stretch of time meandering around the tombs and chapels of the Abbey centered around the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor (c.1002-1066). Mosaics here date from 1268. Old cathedrals always evoke in me questions of sacred space: what architectural manifestations realize the worshipful thoughts of cultures and generations? What exactly were those populations worshiping, and why do we (I) visit these spaces in awe? Sacred space may be a species of what I am calling auracular space.

And a cathedral may be a species of human enclosure that seeks to replicate the experience of awe felt in some natural spaces. In his diary of 1832, the twenty-two year old Charles Darwin speaks of the rain forest of Brazil in these terms.

Whilst seated on a tree, & eating my luncheon in the sublime solitude of the forest, the pleasure I experience is unspeakable . . . . I can only add raptures to former raptures . . . . I was led by feelings ... to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul ... [W]hilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind. I well remember by conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/diary/1832.html

Human feats of soaring; enclosed space of stone or steel and glass are attempts to replicate that experience in human settlements. St. Chapelle in Paris filters light through colored glass to achieve a related effect, not soaring height, but visually intense and stimulating space. Is the effect of a place like Stonehenge thought to be the same? Was it an attempt to evoke other senses or to evoke spirit directly?

After Westminster we search out the underground Cabinet War Rooms where Churchill and his advisers spent the most dangerous days and nights of WWII. The rooms are preserved just as they were at the end of the war. Broadcasts of Churchill encouraging the citizens of England are tremendously moving in several rooms where photographs of the effects of German bombing surround the listener. Especially after seeing Copenhagen the previous evening, we can’t help but be awed by evidence of the devastation and extremity of war. In this space, I realize that I don’t fully appreciate my father’s perpetual retelling his landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day and liberating Europe with the First Infantry. This was the defining experience of his life.

Exhausted by so much concentrated viewing, listening, feeling, we take a respite in a low-ceilinged pub with another version of bitters and fish and chips and then return to our hotel for a rest and planning for the evening. By the time we get re-mobilized, a movie seems the best idea and we take a London cab (quite the luxury experience!) to see a film called The Last September about the final days of English imperialism in Ireland as “the troubles” were beginning to erupt. Some fine performances, but a very difficult script, confusing, gaps, etc. We walked home and found a late snack of hummus and nutty wheat bread at a local mini-mart just before closing.

We missed breakfast time at the hotel on Saturday morning, but that’s vacation! We walked to the nearby British Library and in far more beautiful, indeed inspiring, surroundings, had a brunch-time snack. This library, opened within the past two years, is a sacred space of a different kind. Its modern design wants a little exploring before full appreciation dawns on the explorer. The feature that transformed it from a building into a work of art for me was the six-story glass tower of books at its centre. Called “the King’s Library” this collection of 65,000 volumes from George III’s library is a stunningly beautiful, and yet practical, column that defines the core public space in the entire building. To be in the presence of this commitment to the history of human thought seems to me a kind of worship. I could sit here, in the fullness of this presence, and read and talk all day.

We spend deeply-felt time in the hushed and darkened manuscript room noting the qualities of documents such as the Magna Carta, the letter of King John listing the “liberties conceded by him to his subjects” in 1215, as well as many handwritten manuscripts of our favorite literary figures: Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, among others. In this room, you can put on headsets and press a button to listen to the recorded voice of many of the figures who did public broadcasts in the early years of radio. We both listened to Virginia Woolf’s broadcast from April 20, 1937 of an essay called “Craftsmanship.”

This power of suggestion is one of the most mysterious properties of words. . . . Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. . . . they are so stored with meanings, with memories . . .

[Words] hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change. Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity--their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. (203, 206)

We also spent some time with a real printing press and heavy metal pieces of type in another room. We are both attracted to the physical object of “book” as an important experience rapidly diminishing in importance in our globalized world. What does it mean if the texture and subtleties of paper, color, and weight are no longer associated with the process of reading or learning? Does it mean anything? We have always been subject to changes in technology that have one generation lamenting the loss of their valued experiences while another embraces new modes and values. Some say we gain the very fullness of association that Virginia Woolf lauds through our new web-based technology where links create a finely threaded network of meanings, echoes, memories, and potential futures. Have we lost very much as we gain this speed of technological association? I think so. It feels different to experience the associations coming via synapse firing in one’s own brain than via hypertext links across the internet. Loss or gain, is anyone measuring this?

It was hard to leave the rich auracular space within the library that resonates at the same frequency as my own aura. Vincent and I had our first date in the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. He was sitting outside on the steps between the stone lions waiting for me, wearing a red shirt. I approached via 41st Street and saw him first. We sat beside one another in the main reading room for hours. The compatibility established in that afternoon will last us a lifetime.