The world and the village

Exercise to do with my children if and when I have them…

First: the room. A big desk tucked in the corner of the large, openly laid out ground floor of a nineteenth century townhouse, somewhere in Europe…sort of like Isabelle Huppert’s workspace in Malina and when Miranda arrives in Brooklyn, in Season 6 of SATC. My desk is in an airy salon painted the palest shade of blue-green with deep russet wooden parquet floors. White decorative flourishes on the mantelpiece and ceiling. 

My desk is perfectly sized with a finely grained surface and gentle, delicate details, a crystal a pen a diary a stack of papers a Ganesha statue as tall as my thumb a ring of coffee remains an assortment of books placed just right. But not like in that Rashida Jones and Bill Murray movie, I jot down, On The Rocks, late Sophia Coppola. Because here there is balance and lucidity, this exercise is anti-paranoiac, the desk is where it’s meant to be, all is where it’s meant to be, so that I can simultaneously see out the windows, peeking through my long transparent curtains, and turning back, onto the fullness of the space within.

My children are very young now but I need to paint, write, to create, for myself yes but for them, too, to show them I have a self at all, to show them what that’s like. So how to synthesize their being and my making. Instructions:

- Put a small tarp on the floor next to the desk, add toys and things, music streams out from a recorder. Tell them: this is your autonomous zone, this is your little village, where you can always do as you wish, safe for I am close by, whatever happens to me and my desk, you will always have your village… 

- The tarp has many folds, unfold a square of tarp for each developmental stage I observe from my desk perch. Eventually they begin to control the process of unfolding. Over the course of five, six, seven years, the tarp expands to cover the entire room, so that my desk becomes an island in their ocean, a sturdy solitary thing while their space to play takes shape in broad, amorphous mass.

- Eventually the tarp climbs up the staircase and rolls from the windows. The tarp shimmies down the block, the little village of my children’s tarp starts to paper our neighborhood, waving hello to passersby, witnesses to its unfurling. To its peppy little village walk. Now the tarp peeks through windows, too.

- From the little desk in the corner, where once it was I watchfully observing it, the tarp spreads so vast, multiplies so far, passes through all barriers in time and space, that the little village becomes the world.