The Language of a Room

by Pat Murphy McClelland

“By remembering houses and rooms we learn to abide within ourselves.”

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

On a blistering day in late July, a few weeks after my husband’s death, slightly maddened by fresh grief and by a jolting sense of possibility, I decided to convert his study into a project room. The task was Sisyphean, but manic energy held sway. I undertook its major challenge: to disassemble a heavy six-foot table and move it from my study to Don’s. I struggled to remove the four legs, each weighing a stone. Free of its supports, the gargantuan tabletop was ready to move; except, it didn’t fit through the doorway. I knew enough about the physical laws of the universe to calm my panic – if it had once fit it would again, would it not?

Three hours later, tilting it this way and that, nicking walls, scraping hardwood floors, and defying gravity, I successfully angled it out one door and into the other. And spent another crazed three hours setting up a room I grasped the meanings of only in retrospect. Perhaps all deeply-remembered space reveals its meaning only with the passage of time.

Ostensibly I intended this room as a place to work on projects. “To project” – the word resonates with futurity – is to plan, throw out, devise in the mind, or communicate vividly to an audience. As it turned out, I was creating a space reflective of my interior state. With no conscious awareness, and impelled by the deep transformational drive of grief, I was recreating Don’s domain, making it over into a mirror of myself. That room revealed aspects of me that might otherwise have remained concealed. Things speak to us, tell our secrets.

Enter.

You will know at once that you have entered a woman’s room. Containers, emblems of secret psychological life, fill its space: boxes and bins; wooden chests; a white wicker trunk; 4-drawered bins on rolling casters; an ancient Singer sewing machine in a domed wooden case. Several see-through acrylic boxes are filled with fabric rainbows: lime green and jeweled pink silk, remnants of the quilted ring pillow I made for our daughter’s wedding six weeks ago; 4-inch squares of checks and stripes, cut from Don’s vast shirt collection to someday make an heirloom quilt; mauve damask to recover the dining room chairs; royal blue cotton destined for curtains; bolts of heavy yellow canvas to remake old directors chairs; rolls of polyester batting, cotton muslin; scraps of lace. Plastic boxes filled with buttons, snaps, zippers, hooks and eyes, seam bindings, border trims, ribbon. Plastic boxes filled with thread of every hue wound on old wooden spools, available only at estate sales. A box of small handmade artist books; some Don’s, others he bartered for on the underground network. A shoe box of old maps circled and arrowed with former destinations. Plain cardboard boxes crammed with photos and family archives, in need of sorting, wanting narrative. A box of empty boxes, too beautiful to throw away, wanting to be filled.

Bears, the totem animal of the McClelland family, keep company with boxes in this room. On the south wall hangs an oil painting, a gift from an artist friend, of two bears – a priapic male playing upon a set of pipes to woo a coy ursine lady out from the rose bush she hides behind. Alongside hangs a companion piece, a fabric banner: a round brown bear couple holding hands and dancing with great abandon. Three soap stone polar bears perch on the sill of the window where the sun sets; a few inches down, a rugged brown bear chiseled from stone, weighed down by the gravity of his being, offers an empty honey pot to a small barely bear our daughter made in preschool ceramics.

Her artwork fills another wall – an oil painting of a foolish rubber duck who casts a shadow four times its size; a self-portrait painted in high school, a somber brooding face of black and green and blue, emerging from a black and brown chess board background; a dark and eerie oil painting of a squat, female mannequin facing the black and brown shadows out of which she came. My favorite is a framed construction consisting of a scrolled white plaster-of-Paris background dotted with delicate brown feathers and nine small white masks of an eyeless child’s face.

Take a look to your right as you leave the project room at a quilted valentine that I made for Don to celebrate the success of his first of five brain surgeries. Four squares of black, separated by blue and white and pink flowered fabric strips form a rectangle. The black rectangle is bordered in pink, the pink bordered in black. A blue satin heart dominates each square; in the center of each is an almond-shaped, blue crystal jewel. Years later this piece continues the tale I was living then. The four squares and four hearts invoke traditional images of the self. The colors – the black of death and the unconscious; the blue of sadness, depression, devotion, maleness, and imagination; and the pink of emotions, the flesh and the feminine – suggest how this piece images my state at the time, a tangled mix of anger/love, despair/hope, and the containment of marriage threatened by the separation of death.

But enough parsing. This room and its objects speak for themselves. And this cataloguing of objects has served a purpose. It tells me why my project room struggled into being. I needed a material somewhere to contain the unconscious power, erotic energies, and easy feminine distractions of my former wife-mother-self, needed to keep these symbols visible and charged next to, not in front of or within me, so I could sit in my adjacent study of sterner design, stitching a verbal quilt of memories layered with sickness, loss, death, and regret. I needed to configure space that would teach me how to abide within.

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