If a horse stops in front of your house for no reason.
If a horse comes in the night.
I turn the matter over and over in my mind and on my computer.
When rooms go quiet buildings speak.
Surround.
Straus calls forth superstitions embedded in spaces.
Casts them out.
Soft little sounds dampened by must.
Like a small mouse nibbling on the sepia pages of water-warped books lined up under a windowsill.
Like something shuffling through the front gate, through the years.
Like a closed door swinging open and nobody’s there.
Exaggerated narratives, nervous fantasies, fear.
It’s alright though, I’m OK here.
It was just the rain, sweeping into enclosure, which seems to pass as a curtain over “Nana.”
And the furtive shadows pass of all of those who have been…
Took most everything off of my bedroom walls to try to hear them more.
To see surfaces not necessarily as exteriors.
The way the radiator’s hissing stream has left its mark on that strip of air.
How “House” actually opens with a gestural clanging as if from angry heating pipes, metal on metal, like in that other place I lived for a while, never sleeping because of them.
Or now bells from the church down the street.
In a way a door frame can angle, crookedly, and little impressions made by things once there, which meant, for a while, somewhere.
Tossed.
Passing symbols, exhausted.
Pain.
To be shy and sure about them, like Straus, those details.
Brave.
Leave it alone.
Sit with it.
Then look again and have it look in such a way as to feel it.
Non-representational documentation of what’s real.
Undefined actual experiences.
Attune to a series of rhythms that are then abstracted into muddled patterns.
A series of knocks in “Past.”
Hollow clicks.
High heels on wood, tile, stone.
“Petted” or something like a lullaby to ease us out of an album that loops effortlessly and I want to loop endlessly.
What each of us really is and has is the past.
All we have is the catalogue of the possibilities that didn’t fail.
Of the experiences that are ready to be repeated.
What is left is what remains where there is nothing left.
Little ideas, 11232.
What’s that though?
Treasures, Straus’s, which exist within the range of a human shout.
Actual secrets.
Questions that lie there unanswered, like fallen branches.
Magical sequences of motions.
Like reaching up into a cupboard for a cup.
Pivoting some dish.
Flattening the bedspread.
Straightening up pairs of shoes.
Arranging a dried flower in vase or two.
To enter a hall that ends in a door that opens to a hall.
Gurgling from the toilet.
A dripping tap.
Impressions of all of that.
Interpretations of specificities and notions of nothing in particular.
Water, as a room, a source: reliable and imprecise.
[Visit full site to view media]Big Room by Ulla Straus