Plastering

(3 April 01)

“A room of one’s own,” how long I’d dreamed of it.  The room was quiet and light, just what I’d hoped for.    When I met with the landlady to sign the lease, we glanced at the walls: “Well yes,” she said, “they could be refreshed.”  Then we glanced at the ceiling, and she just nodded her head.  I’d never seen such a sorry ceiling in my life, it had several large cracks from one end to the other, and the paint was peeling off all over.  It looked like a road full of potholes.  There were also several large cracks in the walls.  But since I liked the room and had some experience in painting, and minor re-plastering, I took it.  Once all of the boxes had been carried up the six flights of stairs, I opened the one in which I’d packed essentials and work clothes.  Opening all the other boxes would have to wait until the work was done.

The walls in the apartment were so covered with grease, dirt, and mildew, that I spent the first three days just scrubbing through the layers of filth.  Then I spent days and days scraping loose plaster off the walls and ceiling.  As I scraped, thick chunks came falling down leaving large patches of bare board.  The more I scraped, the more the plaster fell off in thick layers.  Areas that had looked as if they had just needed slight repair became gaping wounds.  So many wounds, so many scars, a topological map began to unfold.

Night after night for several weeks I worked on the room. As I worked, I repeated to myself: “It’s not my place, I didn’t buy it,” but I couldn’t bring myself do a half done job.  I gouged deep into the cracks opening them up as wide as I could. I imagined a knife stabbing in, a surgeon’s scalpel.    Stabbing, again and again. Who am I stabbing?  I delved into the wounds, opening them, and widening them, until I’d reached the frontiers where the flesh was healthy.  Following the lines of scars, cutting deeper into wounds that had never healed, I began to think of the bare room as my body; gradually it was becoming my body, and my life.  It occurred to me that the abysses were like the deep wounds I’ve been opening up and working on in psychoanalysis, where words are the tools with which I dig deep and wide, determined to get well.  Just the other day my psychiatrist mentioned that I was describing the apartment like myself, that I was doing the repair work as tenaciously as I was working on healing my own wounds in therapy.  But the work on my room will take much less time than the work on myself.

During the first week of working on the room, I explored the radio trying to find a station that I liked.  I’d find a song I liked and then the following song wouldn’t go with it at all, it seemed like the d.j.s were choosing songs at random.  Station after station got on my nerves.  It drove me crazy having to climb up and down the ladder and wash my hands in order to change the station every song or two.  It was becoming urgent to find a good station before I got into the plastering.  Finally I found a Middle Eastern station that I liked; calming liturgical music: the tedious work I was doing became a form of meditation.

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