the quietest room in the v&a

You find the most beautiful places in the world don't have many human beings in them: old churches-just wood and stone and high windows-in the midst of the city; run-down libraries and their dusty books, with the odd eccentric small kid, his shirt hanging out, the only feature of his face that anyone would remember being his thick black glasses with their heavy lenses; Mosques have far too many people in them to be beautiful, but the mausoleum of Imam Bukhari in Uzbekistan is peaceful, with its trees and cool running water, and in Istanbul there is the wonderful Rustum Pasha, which no-one can find...

Postman's park in London, for anyone who is interested.

Must admit my nerves are a bit frayed at the moment. The excess of light in 'the south' wears me down. Search for quiet rooms, unlit back rooms to escape the din and babble, tourists and academics, and what the moderns love to call "access" to the whole world. Think there's probably a bit too much access to it if you ask me, but there you go, that's just me.

The best thing about the v&a is that it is endless. Your attention may, all of a sudden, be drawn to the smallest of unassuming objects and there's a strange satisfaction in thinking something has escaped all the analysis and fanfare created by the culture industry, as if the object, too, had been seeking out this quiet space. 500 years, a thousand. Human hands passing over it, human history running by its side, all of that dissolved and forgotten behind the exquisite glass case...

The most alluring of the quiet rooms, though, is somewhere else. The heart's desires are stilled, time is framed behind the silver, slowly inheriting the black, and the clocks all tell the wrong time. In winter the back garden becomes Japanese in its repose and each room relates to this absence. Sun and time pass here, mostly over it and sometimes in it, and yet still there is the memory of a cool shade that resists the fierceness of the days. This is the only empty room in the world I would trade for. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't another room in this room of mine?

This tapestry moves

as the morning lights up.

And they who are in it move

and love its moving

from sleep to Idea

born on the breathing

of a distant harmonium, To See

is their desire

as they wander estranged.

---Ed Dorn (via Nomadics)