Doors windows beginnings endings

It is after we get a little bit bigger and stop playing with LEGOS and building blocks that we accept as a fact that you can’t build a house out of doors and windows. Such a house is an absurdity! Even the least little hovel, even a tent with a mere flap for a door, should have an enclosed space beyond that flap; the whole point of the flap or door is to lead into the enclosed space. The whole point of a window is to break the monotonous grip of a room, its fist around you. But the room doesn’t exist for the window! That would be carrying the revolution too far.
 
And yet, even though this is the wisdom we absorb as surely as the hair starts to sprout on various parts of our bodies after we are children, still, when we start building an article, a story, a poem, a thesis, a dissertation, a novel, etc., how often do we find that the rule of doors and houses is damn difficult to follow. Indeed, there is a certain type of critic since Aristotle which likes to judge the house exclusively by the back door – does it open out onto good fortune and a marriage? Or does it open onto suicide, the daughter hanging by the rope in the tomb, the self-blinded, exiled king? Yes, that back door, the gentlemen of the press – and the producers in Hollywood – tend to hang around it.
Peguy, that maddest of all reactionaries, Deleuze’s nominee for the Catholic Kierkegaard, wrote a long essay, Clio, in which Clio herself, the muse of history, speaks. She speaks, of course, in riddles and repetitions. The repetitions in Peguy’s prose make you rub your eyes. You wonder if some mishap in the editing synapse, some editing epilepsy, is going on, as sentences and phrases keep repeating themselves. But you eventually get it that this is intended to some end, that this glossolalia is bound for glory. Anyway, after recounting the sins of her father Zeus, that ur-absent father, busy fucking, raping and raging out there in the wilds, she adds that his one truly virtuous attribute is to the god of doors – that whereever there is a door, there is the godhead.

“All that he has, my poor father, and he never perhaps suspect it, was not his force, of which he was so proud; it was not that power that he considered with so much pride; he didn’t suspect it perhaps that his single saving grace, my friend, was that he was the God of doors and the threshold of doors, that there was not a shipwrecked wretch on the sea, stretch out supplicating hands, towards some distant trireme, glanced in the fall of the waves, it is that a shipwrecked write on the earth does not stretch out his supplicating hands, it is that not a sailing bark does not sink unprotected, not a fugitive, not an outloaw, not an exile, not a phugas, not an exsul, not a miserable wretch, not a blind person, Homer, Oedipus, and Priam at the feet of Achilles, and Ulysses at the knees of Nausicaa, not a shipwrecked wretch knocking at the threshold of a door…[imagine here a page full of similar improbable instances encompassing more and more territory and time] that not a door opens to a stranger without him being there to preside, that not a door closes without his majesty, by a sacrilege, is wounded.”

This is a high elevation, indeed, of doors. A plea for doors, and, continuing my homology between doors and the beginnings and ends of texts, a plea for the divinity of those threshholds. Myself, though, I think inviting the stranger in – which of course must be done by every storyteller and constructor of Lego creations – does not mean ignoring the devils that also preside at front and back doors, and judge the whole encounter, the hospitality to the stranger, the stranger’s havoc and woe, on whether someone comes out the back door in the end, with her problems resolved.
Sometimes, in fact I would say most times, the house collapses. What I like is the structured collapse. I just by boobytrap standards, not Aristotle’s.