Spatiality Book 3 Excerpt

The following is an excerpt from the third book of my scifi/fantasy series Spatiality. It is drawn directly from my short story the "Memory Ruin," which served as the genesis of my entire saga. it is the most architectonic part of the book and synthesized my ideas of the intertwining of memory and space and its effect on the psyche.

He stopped in the fourth chamber and looked about, absorbing the disquieting sense of it.  He felt oddly small and disoriented within it, the large bulging space pushing against him on all sides. He felt constrained and suffocated. And yet they seemed somehow familiar to him. He felt as if he had seen something like them before. At the same time, he felt a sense of fear tied to a distant pain; he wasn’t certain what it meant.  The more he stared up at the surfaces around him, the more removed he felt from his consciousness. He felt as if his physical being was dissolving into the confines of the space.  There was an overwhelming sense of distancing from himself.  His own consciousness had begun to feel foreign to him.  He felt dislocated and confused, the fear becoming palpable. He felt himself half-stumbling, half-running from the ovoid chamber, desperately, as if in a panicked state. 

He rushed through twisting tunnel after twisting tunnel of decayed metal, through rooms of stone containing jagged, chaotic constructs forming spaces within spaces, breaking through the ceilings and walls.  He climbed stairs, barely clinging to their supports to narrow walkways and parapets and roof terraces.  He walked through rooms open to the sky, their roofs ruptured, but always there was the scabrous parasite of decayed metal plates partially enveloping the rupture. He entered vast spaces with huge pillars and great domes fractured and split, dazzling light falling onto great flagstone floors. There were rooms littered with debris, bits of wall, broken hulks of metal, their function he could not guess. He entered curved and jagged volumes of space clinging to the edge of another broken stone room, the edges of the spaces, silent tensions pushing against one another.  

He entered plazas and courtyards, their space suggested only by a broken statue or lone fragment of metal standing naked in the wan light. Spaces flowed into the next, room after room, one construct to the next, each suggesting or possessing a fragment of the next, all woven together. Sometimes smooth and seamless, sometimes jarring and violent.  All the while he carried out conversations with himself, trying to remember, trying to make sense of all that was happening to him. He didn’t even know if they were voiced aloud or not.  All he could hear was the silent echo of his footsteps, the creak of metal or the whistling of the wind through an opening. 

The loneliness and desolation of the place and the unnamed fear that lingered over him threatened to undo him altogether. The gap that was forming within him was as cold and empty as the spaces he now occupied.  As he struggled with these thoughts and feelings and the dislocating foreignness of his surroundings, his awareness erupted, blinding him with a burst of blue light. Everything around him seemed to become part of his consciousness, the thoughts melding with his senses.  

The walls, the surfaces, the space, the emptiness, the light, the colors, it all became vivid beyond all those senses.  His self was everywhere. He could feel it flowing inward and out, through everything around him.  It all began to enter his consciousness, down to the elemental frameworks. His self was becoming fused with the surrounding environment and it with him.  He could not perceive his own movement, or his own body. He knew he was moving; he was not in the same space, the same instance. His movement was continuous, instantaneous.  He could not perceive the empty space where his mind spoke to him.  It was now everywhere. 

And then there was a flicker of an image from within, cutting at him, then receding back.  He pushed it away, forcibly.  The flood of inputs and stimuli from the changing self surged back to fill the void where it attempted to inject itself.  And then there it was again, a fleeting image and, in its wake, a palpable sensory and emotional torrent.  Again he thrust it away.  He was so close.  He could almost perceive the strands of his awareness stretching outward past the confines of his surroundings, beyond what his eyes could see.  The perceptions continued to fill him, and they were all there, immediate, and continuous.  He felt as if his body could no longer contain this new self, as if it could tear through the confines of his flesh.  

And suddenly, piercing through all of this was an image, a memory.  It was so strong and achingly familiar. He collapsed to his knees, overwhelmed by the astonishing sharpness of it. It filled his mind, replacing that tantalizing, infinite awareness. 

Before him stood a sharp, jutting slab of basalt, a shining, smooth blackness piercing the edge of the space. The ceiling above dropped violently towards him, then receded sharply back up in draping folds of encrusted metal, folds upon folds, pushing outward from the walls into the space.  The remnants of the day's light cascaded into the space, delineating and rendering sharply the folds of the roof, revealing the network of cracks and lines in the broken black tile of the floor. He could see all of these forces colliding dynamically through the space, and resonating through him. 

And yet, there it was, layered across this perception, in a thickened veil of sensations.  It was a face, a gentle smiling face, a face he sensed he had come to know better than his own.  A face and a spirit he had left behind. But he couldn’t remember her no matter how much he tried. Staring into those eyes now, he felt a powerful sense of loss and he could feel tears forming and running down his cheeks. Suddenly he was overwhelmed with emptiness and despair at all that he had left behind. 

And now he felt blind, drifting in uncertainty. He got to his feet and wiped his dirty and tear-stained face. As he stood there he tried to remember her again, but could not even conjure up the image. Who was she, why did she feel so important to him? Why couldn’t he remember her? Here he stood in this vessel, this construct of space and matter, the forces that had brought him to this point were within him; they were a part of him. The complexity of these forces was beyond his grasp, and yet here he was. 

 He felt as if he couldn’t take another step forward or back. He was there, and it didn’t matter. His past was lost to him, carried in a distant, unknowable fibrous current of memory. This memory, this woman he wanted so much to remember, was all he had remaining to him. How could he go on? How could he continue? He wanted so much to remember her. He wanted to be with her. 

Exhausted and emotionally drained he collapsed against the black stone wall and stared listlessly into space. Then he lay down in the dust and went to sleep.

The Memory Ruin

Spatiality began its life as a speculative short story I wrote for a class in architecture school called “The Memory Ruin.” It told the story of a man who had abandoned everything he had known and wandered lost in the wilderness until encountering the ruins of an ancient city that had been built over with a grafting of structures of almost an alien nature. There he must confront his past and the memories of what he had left behind. Many of the pieces of that story make it into the beginning of Spatiality Book 3. I was very interested in the tensions that could be elicited between the formalism of an architecture of ancient stone and a nearly chaotic construction of metal inscribed over it and how that could affect one’s perceptions of self, space, time and memory.

Many of my interests while in school that inform my series Spatiality concerned ruins, ancient forgotten places, echoing with lost memories. Additionally I am very interested in how architecture is informed by and informs our memories, much of which I covered in my last post. A ruin is a particular sort of memory space, one that contains the tracings of all that had come before and is now lost.

I lived in Italy as a child for few years and I strongly recall the relationship between the ancient Roman architecture, the medieval world built upon that and the modern that now inhabits it. I always remembered whenever there was construction of any kind, there were ancient Roman ruins being uncovered. Besides the castles, bridges and narrow medieval streets of hill towns, the Roman Forum was the greatest playground a child could ask for. So I was keenly aware that all civilization is built upon the remains of the one that preceded it. This idea runs through both “The Memory Ruin” and Spatiality.

Also at the time when I was writing “The Memory Ruin,” adaptive reuse was a very prevalent subject and although I felt like there was a strong case to be made for the possibilities of adaptive reuse I was less interested in inhabiting an existing structure seamlessly or “politely” as it were, but in a disruptive or expressively contrasting way that could elicited the very strongest aspects of both the new and existing structure. My fifth year thesis project attempted to explore this idea by creating a series of grafted structures within and around an abandoned rural water treatment facility to create a sort of retreat/spa or sanatorium where there was a “taking of the waters” literally within the boundaries of the old holding tanks. 

One of my strongest influences at the time was Lebbeus Woods, who created incredibly evocative drawings and models of constructs in war-torn and otherwise damaged places and introduced the idea of an architecture that was radical, almost anarchical in nature, populated with concepts of parasites, grafting, scars, sutures, scabs and the like. These concepts greatly informed some of “The Memory Ruin,” Spatiality, as well as my own architectural thinking.


About this time I also became very interested in abandoned industrial ruins, factories, steel mills and plants in places like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Bethlehem, PA, Richmond, VA and mines in West Virginia. I began traveling to some of these places and photographing them. I found them to be very evocative, filled with the melancholy, that sense of loss that inhabited the ancient Roman ruins I encountered as a child.  These structures rusting and decayed, caked with grime and overgrown with moss and plants, are slowly disintegrating back into the past.