Where am I?

A coworker recently asked me which route I take when driving home. I stumbled in my description. “I go out the garage, take the left side of the little street loop. Take a left, go past the library, in between the library and the hospital on the right, you know… Then past the hospital, I take a right; that curves up to 35…” Huh?

My primary profession at the moment, hopefully not much longer, is architecture. But I don’t know names. I don’t know names of streets or buildings or people usually. To me, names are arbitrary things that are attached to deeper essences. The names usually don’t have much at all to do with the actual things or their deeper meanings. So I don’t remember them.

I remember shapes and colors and people walking past a rusting metal wall. That was in Washington D.C. where I lived for a while. I remember a hotel lobby where someone was murdered a couple of weeks prior with MS13 scratched on the wall of a centuries old church in front of the hotel. I remember a huge wind blowing leaves around the narrow street in front of Diego Rivera’s house in Mexico City and thinking that this was his spirit welcoming me. I have no idea what the name of that street is. Tall windows, somber gardens, cantilevered stair up to a loft, that’s all. I remember a giant red neon OCHO peeking out between some palms at the end of that street outside the office tower where I now work; that street I can’t remember the name of that I take past the library, with the hospital on the right.

This is all very strange for someone in the architecture field. I should know things and stand up confidently and declare my place in the world. But I don’t. I’m fairly confident, but mostly about the fact that I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing most of the time. I experience my environment through the lens of existence. Hooking conversations and anecdotes to fragments of walls and textures and smells.

When I enter a virtual world, most of these clumps of event on which I build my structural framework of reality and memory are missing. But there’s another element involved here; another filter through which I perceive the world. When it’s dark and cold outside with the wind whipping the house, I think of the old pawnbroker from ‘Crime & Punishment’ tormenting the young murderer from beyond the grave in his tiny, bleak attic room. When I see a report about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the BBC, I think of the childish corporal in ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ living an actual war through the heroic war stories he will tell after the war is over; peeking at reality through a small slit between his scarf and hat. When I think of the tedious days of work in a monolithic glass office building, I think of the savage in his lighthouse in ‘Brave New World’ looking very much the caricature of a Native American in a 1950’s spaghetti western. When a helicopter lands on that hospital across from the library that I pass on the way home, the savage hangs himself in the lighthouse as the clones swarm in, landing like mosquitoes in their helicomics.

It’s not the morbidity that I’m focusing on in these stories. They just happen to be what I’ve read lately. They shape my current landscape as much as a conversation I’ll have with someone on the street today. They inform the conversation.

And that, in my long, roundabout way, is my point. Reading informs our lives and helps shape us into what we want to become. It puts us in conversation with other people and their wrestlings with existence across time and place. Whether people come to the conversation through a virtual world or through a physical artifact is irrelevant, just as long as they come. Our job is to coax and cajole if need be to get them there. If this can happen on a virtual island in a virtual place, so be it.