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MSerres-Visit To A House
MSerres-Visit To A House
Michel Serres
Behind the yard, shut off by a fence and gate, secluded, lying in front
of the garden enclosed by a high wall, the house comes together within its
walls. Distant, sheltered, aloof from the world. Inside of it, hard stone or
rough concrete covers itself with coatings, skins, with progressively more
delicate membranes: fine grain plasterwork, smooth plaster of Paris,
wallpaper or paint, with tapestries decorated with patterns, ornaments,
flowers; the house puts layer upon layer, it begins with coarse ones and
ends with pictures. Vertically, there is the same kind of complexity: hollow
spaces for plumbing, gauged brick, steel girders, floor boards, carpeting,
rugs. It all culminates in ornaments and tendrils. And the house closes the
openings as well: window shutters, window frames, double glasswork or
coloured panes, thin wispy curtains, heavy drapes, decorative shabraques,
and at one time, deep jambs: it is a casing which is made to be closed and
surrounds itself with obstacles when it opens up. We must have thougt we
no longer needed to fear this world, that it be only intersected by signals,
when recently we so abruptly opened up our homes. A house functions like
a transformer, where forces come to rest, like a high-energy filter or
converter. Outside, a bitter cold spring or frosty dawn prevails; inside, calm
pictures dream incessantly and do not prohibit conversation. It is inside
that the space of language takes on form. A brain-box, one could say, a
skull. Casings transform the world into colourful patterns, into pictures
which hang on walls, they transform the countryside into tapestries, the
city into abstract compositions. It es their task to replace the sun by a heater
and the world by icons, the rustle of the wind by a few kind words. And the
cellar turns alcohol into odours.
In a house which has been built in this manner, the philosopher writes,
thinks and perceives. Inside. I see, he says, an apple tree through the
window. He seeks the origin of knowledge and puts hims~lf at the
beginning; in this genesis, he inevitably discovers a garden, and in· this
garden only the apple tree interests him, fascinates him: he sees its
blossoms. A long treatise on the tree follows, the drawing which he may
make of it, the picture which he has of it, or the words which he writes,
which he finds in his language about that which is absent in every orchard.
He forgets the window, forgets the jamb, the curtain, the opaque or
transparent panes and, depending on whether he lives in the north or the
south, the sliding mechanism or espagnolette catch. He forgets the house
and its opening in front of the apple tree. The tree, unprotected in the
pouring rain, houses screeching birds at night in its boughs, where they
nest; to prune the tree outside is one thing, to describe it inside, another.
The house, beyond all water, wind, cold, fog, light and darkness, and once
also beyond all noise, shelters - just as the belly of a ship separates us from
the coldness of the ocean. It is a second skin which enlarges our sensorium.
It is a casing, then sight, an eye. A sense of hearing and an auricle. The house
gazes at the apple tree through the window. The skull-house calmly
observes the apple tree through the porthole. One could call the window, a
medioscope, mesoscope or isoscope. It was in this manner that Captain
Nemo made his way slowly, behind the cargo hatch of the Nautilus, to
classifications of fish, to taxonomy, the dictionary of natural history,
instead of to the ocean. The scholar looks at the mounted butterfly in the
glass case or the Linnean chart through his pince-nez, or microbes through
his microscope. Behind the window, the picture of the apple tree
takes on contours, even if the window does nothing to alter its dimensions
The philosopher does not pay attention to the blossoms and fruits - is it an
acacia or a maple? -, behind the window stands a phantom, in the same way
that we say that behind the pupil or the lense, the delicate reproduction of
an object comes into being on the retina. Through the tympanum of the
window shutters, the storm becomes a plaintive moan, through the
vestibule and the spiral of the staircase, it turns into information.
The house stares through its windows at the vineyards and the thyme
plants. There are orange ornaments, a web of lies, devious oranges on its
walls. The philosopher forgets that the house which has been built up
around him transforms an olive grove into a painting by Max Ernst. The
architect has forgotten this as well. And he feels fortunate when the next
grape harvest outside turns into a maiden with a grape inside. The house
processes that which is given, which can be a threat, and softens it to icons;
it is a casing which produces pictures, a socket or an eye, a camera obscura,
a shed, where specks of sunlight only glitter through a narrow slit, an ear.
Architecture produces painting, as if the fresco or the painting hanging on
the wall were to reveal the final cause of all that is erected. The purpose of
architecture is painting or tapestry. What one took to be ornament becomes
the goal, or at least the result. The wall exists for the painting, the window
for the picture. And the padded door for the secrets of the bedroom.