Other Space

‘This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go.’

D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923

Recently I was in a taxi with a few friends, and we were chatting with the driver. I’d experienced cabbies of all hues over time, ranging from angry bigots to perceptive and interesting ones. This guy was definitely of the more enlightened variety, talking softly with us, hearing what we had to say, and offering plenty of insights himself.

At some point we were discussing going to crowded venues. He told us he tended to avoid them because they tended to feel clautrophobic and volatile. “I’m like Jason Bourne,” he said, referring to the secret agent character, “always looking for the exits.”  His wife had questioned why he was all right with football games which had tens of thousands of spectators, to which he replied that if you thought about it, the entire central part of a stadium was mostly empty, which made him feel safe.

This interesting perspective touched on something I’d been working on, an essay about melodramas around the crop circle phenomenon. At some point one impressively large formation attracted a lot of attention, including from the army, yet no one actually went inside it. It was like there was an expectant atmosphere where no one dared move. I was the one who initiated going in, simply walking straight to the other side, and lying down. I experienced a profound sense of peace and awareness pervading everything. I was very still until I realised there were people walking around suddenly. I decided to return to my car to find a lot more people, including soldiers, had arrived. It was like I’d been gone for ages when I could have sworn only a couple of minutes had passed.

In retrospect though, it wasn’t all the soldiers and the guns, and the adventurers –  some of them coming from very far away – that left the most profound impression. It was the sense of being at peace with myself and the world around me when I entered the circle.

Meditators will recognise the analogy here, that beyond the cacophonous whirlwinds of our thoughts and emotions, is a stillness within from which all the melodramas can be witnessed, for they are not who we are. ‘Be still, and know.’ 

I was also reminded of another area of my research that was reflected nicely by the crop circle experience and the shifting of perspective regarding stadiums, that of aspects of spaces we may not recognise.

In part this was because I’d recently finished Ghosts of the British Museum by Noah Angell, a book I’d picked up in the little free library outside our local church. (The eagle-eyed among you may spot plenty of interesting synchronicity in that sentence!)  This proved to be one of the most interesting reads I’d had in a long time.

Subtitled ‘A True Story of Colonial Loot and Restless Objects’, it looks at the museum as something completely different from its famous image; for most of the museum is hidden, and much of the activity goes on at night away from public eyes. The main source of Angell’s information was the security guards who had plenty of hair-raising stories to tell, despite efforts from museum officials to control the narrative. At some point in his research, Angell was interested in the ‘stone tape’ theory, that stones record past events which can then be played over and over again, what we call hauntings. But even if that were true, it would only explain a portion of the stories. I had another take on the subject.

A lot of Feng Shui can be boiled down to one simple thing:  a balance of yin and yang. A healthy house will be two-thirds yang (bright and dry, say) and only one-third yin (dark and humid). If you get the balance wrong with too much yang, the place becomes restless and stressful, like many workplaces. Too yin and it becomes lethargic, unhealthy and even haunted. Graveyards ideally are the other way round, one-third yang and two-thirds yin, so the yin earth can ‘recycle’ any residual energies from those buried.   

Complications arise when there are abrupt shifts from extreme yang to extreme yin. A good example would be a school. In a day school, the yang activity when it is light and full of ebullient children, dramatically shifting to yin in the evening and for the rest of the night, is ideal breeding ground for spirits. With a boarding school this happens in the holidays. Many people can testify just how spooky schools can be in these ‘yin’ periods. South Korea hit a nerve with their very successful Whispering Corridors ghost stories, all set in schools.   

The British Museum therefore strikes me as a perfect candidate for spooky goings on. Most of the rooms are off-limits to the public, there are burial relics throughout the building including the famous sarcophagi, and it is dark and quiet at night, all very yin. The sudden burst of extreme activity during the day as thousands of people traipse through select rooms, then with the sudden cessation when the museum closes, will act like a trigger point for any energies that may have been dormant. They have no chance of actual rest. Angell does a very good job at portraying the museum as really a sort of United Nations tomb for the various cultures; but it’s not a very good tomb as both peace and proper respect are denied for a lot of the objects.

Hospitals are another interesting example of how different they can be with just a shift in perspective. I had to go looking for a consultant some months ago and spent ages wandering around poorly lit labyrinthine corridors, into dead ends and poky little rooms. You need hospitals to be fairly yin to provide respite, but it strikes me that even a slightly stronger emphasis on brightness and openness may provide more healing.

However, whilst ostensibly places centred around death and dying, or the prevention of that, hospitals can be extremely lively. Dr Cox in the TV show Scrubs says at some point their only job as doctors is to delay the inevitable. Despite this, Scrubs is a comedy and taps strongly into the life-affirmative qualities of medicine. A doctor once told me he thought it one of the most accurate depictions of ward life he’d seen on television.

Certainly when I was on a ward a couple of years ago (as described in an earlier post), the amount of life going on around me was fascinating and, indeed, often comedic. One character in particular stands out for me regarding the subject of this post, and that was an elderly gentleman very much on the threshold who would get out of his bed and start wandering around the corridors with a cheeky grin on his face. When a nurse asked him what he was looking for, he said, “The room with bright light and lots of people.”  Of course, there was no such place on the ward in this reality.

Yet it is all the same reality really. The centre of the circle is as much part of it as the circumference; the museum at night is an aspect of its world during the day and vice versa; this world and that world, two sides of the same coin. It is simply a question of where you step.

The other space is actually this space.