Mónica de la Torre

From Parallel Interiors (work-in-progress)

Subject: Round robin

Dear Florianne,

            We played a game last night. Each of us had to ask the person to our left one question. Once we’d completed the circle, we went in the opposite direction. Among us were an architect who is also a poet and an artist who makes books and incorporates literature into her work. The artist asked the architect: “What makes a home a home?” This sparked a lively conversation for which we bent the rule that only the person to whom the question was addressed could speak.

We were in one of the three historic modern houses in Wellfleet to which we have been given access as part of a residency program in Cape Cod. So far, we’d spent every night making dinner and socializing at a different house. Each place had a specific feel owing to how its particular architecture created a singular mood. Instead of leaving me with the feeling that one night bled into another indistinctly—the company was the same every night, after all—I experienced each evening as a discrete unit, of which last night’s, at the Kugel/Gips house, was the most complete so far.

Here the relationship between the house’s interior and exterior was perfectly reciprocal in terms both formal and empirical. Each window dramatized a part of the surrounding woods worth looking at by the sheer fact of its having been framed. There was a short path to a pond that led to a larger pond through a sluiceway. Canoes and kayaks extended an invitation to inhabit the landscape further, beyond merely contemplating it from the house. We did just that before the architect, who was also our host that evening, made a scallop risotto for us on a stovetop that was turned toward as opposed to away from us, like in most kitchens. This was not an island proper, just a spatial solution to make the open kitchen feel roomier and optimize a hallway. The simple reversal of the stovetop’s orientation created conditions for a rare type of interaction. What was on display was the process and generosity of preparing a meal aimed at sustaining conviviality, not the culinary chops of the person doing the cooking out of sight. The space was narrow, so it also created a sense of intimacy among us as we gathered around, but it didn’t feel tight or confining since we could easily walk over to the living room or the couple of set-off areas on the various decks surrounding the house’s interior.       

In answer to the question, the architect replied that the only thing he could not provide a client with is precisely that which makes a home feel like a home. The rest of us pushed back. Certainly an architect’s choices could facilitate or be an obstacle for harmonious interactions between a house’s dwellers. What were those choices? Take the houses we’ve been in, for instance. All of them are cozy, modestly scaled. Their materials are decidedly not ostentatious. In most instances they’re surprisingly humble, in fact: cinder blocks, plywood, salvaged wood beams. They’re grounding, in this way.

The conversation veered toward the music playing in the living room, which I think was Peso Pluma. Meanwhile I thought of Marcel Breuer’s house, which we’d visited the day before. It was still owned by his son Tamas and therefore had not been restored yet. Beat-up Cesca chairs surrounded the povera assemblages functioning as tables: piled up cinder blocks with slabs of wood or stone for a top with dry hydrangeas in vases as ornament. On one of those tables we were shown Tamas’s contact sheets with pictures of people socializing in the now dust-filled spaces that had sat untouched for decades. One in particular had caught my eye. On one of his visits, fellow Bauhausler Xanti Schawinsky, shirtless, seems to be telling animated stories to a group that includes Breuer’s daughter Cesca, after whom the ubiquitous chair was named, and Christina Bevington, a striking French/Senegalese woman who’d worked with Breuer in the 1960s.

What would we look like to them? I imagined them aghast at the thought of intruders like us poring over these images of them in their private spaces. Poring over their possessions, their pungent-smelling paperbacks, newspaper clippings, custom jewelry, stationary, postcards, and hand-scribbled notes. One atop a surface littered with discarded straw wrappers and cables for obsolete devices seemed appropriate for the occasion. It had been written twice over, as if the first time the quote was transcribed the ink was too dim and not legible enough: “The universe is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere… says Giordano Bruno.” The editor/artist/writer among us repeated the phrase “says Giordano Bruno” and laughed. A thin line framed the quote, which once had been taped to a wall next to a cartoon of two people in profile smiling at each other.

            My thoughts returned to the dinner table when I heard someone say that the dwellers of these homes, many of whom had fled Europe during World War II, knew how to live well. Another one objected. How do we know that? What remains accessible to us is how they modeled living as an art, as a dynamic process involving control over the material world. They tailored interior spaces so they matched their values: the artful balance of form and function, transparency and the nonhierarchical, the easeful flow from one space to another. But of their actual inner lives we have no clue. How could we even get glimpses of it? Perhaps only through their letters and journals, but these hadn’t been left in the houses to which we had been given access.  

Has anyone gone to Gropius’s master houses at the Bauhaus in Dessau, I asked? It puts everything in context. It’s chilling to think that the same iconic building complex that housed a radical art school became the place where German bombers were assembled in the 1930s, bombers whose capacity for destruction was first tested during the bombing of Guernica in 1937. It all connects. In the back of my mind were the unmarked graves in Rukeyser’s writing, and the sense memory of people speaking about Spanish refugees when I was growing up. Back then I was ignorant of what the phrase meant but intuited that it involved a historical tragedy from the body language that invariably accompanied it.         

             As the game winded down, questions associated with social guilt and death came up. Things could’ve gotten heavy, but most of us had done microdoses of mushrooms and were feeling rather euphoric. The last question of the evening was a joke: “How do you feel about Princess Diana’s death?” I can’t remember who asked it. Everyone burst into laughter. I paused the recording.   

Love,
M 

PS: Before visiting the Bauhaus at Dessau, I was much more familiar with Bauhaus the band than the German art school. Bauhaus, for me, stood for a brand of counterculture that escaped the clichés of the hippie generation to which my parents ambivalently belonged. I had aspired to punkdom in the early 1980s but I lacked the commitment to nihilism and was aware of the perpetual belatedness of my choices, so I settled for New Wave, feeling that its weird humor and theatricalization of awkwardness were a good match for my misfit affectations. So the other day when I heard The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst on the radio, I was surprised to discover that Bauhaus is thought of as a goth band. I never thought of myself as goth as a young adult. Back then I also didn’t care to find out that the neighborhood we lived in had actual connections to the movement after which one of my favorite bands had taken its name.

Subject: Meander

Dear Flo,

I learned two things today. Reading a book on Black Mountain that I brought from one of the houses, the Weidlinger, over to Kohlberg, where my friends and I are staying, I realized that a meander, in noun form, is an actual design motif. I never thought of it other than as a verb. I’m in the process of discovering its formal potency as I continue sending you these dispatches.

And so it is that on our first morning here, meandering about—truly—in the dunes, when I got to one of the tallest points, with an imposing view of the ocean, I looked down to find a plaque besides where I stood that said:

Ati 1925–2014

She loved it here          

            I have a fondness for that particular year since my grandmother was born then too, so I pay extra attention whenever I encounter it.

The Ati in question was Gropius’s adopted daughter. Word has it that she used to squat Kohlberg while the house sat unoccupied after 2001, waiting to be demolished once the twenty-five-year lease allowing for buildings to remain in the Cape Cod National Seashore had expired. Lucky for us, the demolition never happened. The house, built in 1960 by one Luther Crowell, a descendant of a long line of ship captains, was restored in 2018. His heritage was imprinted on his design of the two-level house surrounded by ocean views on three sides. It sits on a high dune, so when walking in, the only thing that appears to be dividing it from the Atlantic Ocean is a deck with period lounge chairs and a wooden table. From the front of the house, the downstairs area is not visible, so by sheer optical effect it appears to be submerged.

Like a stationary ship, the house creates the illusion of being at the center of the ocean’s enormity. The upstairs is a relatively small open-plan rectangle with a sizable kitchen delimited by a counter. Only a curtain divides the living room from the sleeping area. If I were a different type of person, I would not have drawn the curtain at night and would’ve woken up early enough each morning to write as I contemplated a magnificent sunrise—the rosy-fingered dawn, invariably always different. I only managed on two or three occasions, when we hadn’t stayed up chatting and drinking until late or I didn’t try to convince myself I was still asleep when the others entered the kitchen. They weren’t noisy, but sound traveled through the wooden planks that made up the floor so much that I dared not flush the minuscule toilet adjacent to the bedroom for fear of waking them up. The tininess of the gestures generating sounds threatening to take us out of the blissful, reflective state in relation to the landscape’s vastness seemed almost incongruous.

Kohlberg is currently eligible for the National Registry of Historic Places. I’m not sure you need to know much about Lawrence Kolhberg, the psychologist and Harvard professor who commissioned it. He wrote about moral development. I tried reading a book of his at the house and found it dry and impenetrable, much as I was intrigued by his theory that morality develops in stages and goes from simply revolving around reward and punishment, in children, to adults’ implementation of their own ethical values. We arrived on October 8. I was so busy getting ready for the trip that I hardly paid attention to the news on October 7 or during the drive. During our stay, questions of moral judgement became more insistent by the day. The book didn’t speak to any of them, and I was trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to keep my focus on these dispatches for you. I kept going back to the letter I’d written you when we arrived at the Cape, and the question I ask: “… it sounds trite, but perhaps for that very reason avoiding it isn’t an option: How to inhabit the present while engaging a sense of the historical as fully as possible? Is this even feasible?” That question receded as I kept returning to a related question about determinism: Is history destiny?

            The day we were leaving the Cape, as we were pulling out of the driveway, the author of a new biography of Mahler was going down the list of Alma’s many husbands and lovers while being interviewed on public radio: “Gustav Klimt, Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel….” He spoke of trying to give her a fuller dimension in his book, of focusing on her as a composer whose career was botched by her support of the genius of the men in her life. What to call this coincidence? A haunting? Serendipity? A random collision? Perhaps just mere proof of the mind’s incorrigible propensity to establish correspondences.

More soon,
M