Reading Day, Happy Places
Last fall we had the good luck to be in Florence for a couple of weeks and one of the highlights was visiting the Odeon Theatre and which is now also a Libreria / bookstore. I’m sure I posted about it at the time, but as I began spiralling after looking at the news this weekend (I know you likely know that feeling), I needed to get my brain headed somewhere else, and I thought of the Odeon as a happy place. I was thinking about the instruction to touch grass which is mocked, but hey, it works. And another thing that helps is for me to look at photos of a previous happy place.
So I spent time also reading about ordinary affect theory, affect theory and architecture. Which led me to think about my happy places on this earth. Of which there are many. My study, my backyard. And how weird it is that we might get to be in our happy places at this particular moment in history. And I’ve been thinking about how even so in the past, my brain has broken, being in these places. My goal these days is to protect my own nervous system because what use am I to anyone in a broken state. Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism has said that they are “interested in how people live through historical moments of loss.” We are in the middle of a great shift, ongoingly, and Berlant says that the historical present is “a middle without boundaries, edges, a shape. It is experienced in transitions and transactions.” And though they wrote this before the present historical moment, they talk about the “urgencies of livelihood” where “futurity” is without assurance. Certainly de-stabilized. And this seems in the face of others’ more life and death situations to be a small thing to complain about, one’s future livelihood. You might be “happily managing things” or “discouraged but maintaining” while others are mentally on the edge.
In catastrophe, in the traumosphere of today, how do we live? I remember reading, during all the unknowns of the early pandemic, Berlant’s words, that we are in a spot “when one no longer knows what to do or how to live and yet, while unknowing, must adjust.” It was comforting somehow to feel understood in this way, less alone. All of us in the unknowing, adjusting, adjusting.
What happens when we attend to the ordinary affects in public spaces, or in private ones? What happens when we don’t?
Kathleen Stewart says that “the ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life.” How do public feelings intersect with our private feelings, sensations, our nerves? She says that “ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They’re things that happen.” They are banalities, or sufferings, intensities, shocks, connections, circuits of forces, conditions. When we attend to ordinary affects, we see how palpable they are, shifting though as they are. We are talking about the layered “textures of a scene,” “sharp and vague” and there is resonance, connection, sparks.
In Architecture and Affect, Lilian Chee says that her approach to “affect in architecture is unified by attunement to the body and the embodied.” And, “Affect moves us; affect is concerned with troublesome things that stick to us.” Interestingly, there is a connection to ethics. She says there is a “consequence to how we choose to think and act in response to each situation. Ethics is about how we inhabit uncertainty, together.”
Looking at architecture through a lens of affect could “offer insights into how people belong, how they experience attachment, manage anxiety, hold up hope and achieve security.”
Things happen, that’s all they ever do. When we look at how things happen in a space and then compile anecdotes and stories around that — what can we learn from that? How can we “think and write amidst things, people, the world around us; to move back and forth between architecture and something else…”
I admit, I was very much drawn to the Chee book because of the chapter on the Raffles Hotel tiger. She talks about the “problematic transformation” being revealed in the commodification of the stories being told. “The Billiard Room encountered through its tiger story — through the embodied acts of looking from the underside, hunting down uncertain facts, and the oral traditions of small talk and storytelling — is not a passive space.”
Maybe every public space has its tiger.
Thanks to a post on Instagram by Ru Kotryna, I went down a rabbit hole thinking about “neuroception” and Stephen Porges. In her slide she says that neuroception describes “the unconscious way the nervous system scans for danger or ease.” It’s “triggered by posture, light, facial expression, and spatial context. In hospitality, neuroception is the silent handshake between space and guest. High ceilings can open the breath. Warm-toned lighting relaxes the vagus nerve. Clear sightlines reduce vigilance.” What are the spaces we relax in and why?
The Polyvagal Theory is controversial but practically I’m interested in what makes a “happy place.” As the world changes and collapses in all sorts of ways around us, who gets to be in places where they feel at ease, happy, or at the very least safe, relaxed?
I think back to all the museums and galleries and libraries I visited in Italy and what drew me to them. Today though I’m thinking about the Odeon in Firenze and the delight of it. I’m remembering the wonderful architecture, the inviting books as you walk in, the colours, the lighting. The fun of seeing what will be on the screen next, the Italian subtitles. Sitting in the seats with a book and a coffee, lifting your head up now and again to see what’s on the screen. The moment of buying the book about the history of the Odeon and finding one of the co-authors worked there and then getting the book signed! That feeling that you were in a special place, one with history, and hope, a future.
I’ll pop up some more photos of the Odeon on my Instagram, if you’re interested in flipping through.
