MSerres-Visit to a House

8/8/2019 MSerres-Visit to a House

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Visit to a House

Michel Serres

Behind the yard, shut off by a fence and gate, secluded, lying in front

of the garden enclosed by a high wall, the house comes together within itswalls. Distant, sheltered, aloof from the world. Inside of it, hard stone or

rough concrete covers itself with coatings, skins, with progressively moredelicate membranes: fine grain plasterwork, smooth plaster of Paris,wallpaper or paint, with tapestries decorated with patterns, ornaments,flowers; the house puts layer upon layer, it begins with coarse ones and

ends with pictures. Vertically, there is the same kind of complexity: hollowspaces for plumbing, gauged brick, steel girders, floor boards, carpeting,rugs. It all culminates in ornaments and tendrils. And the house closes the

openings as well: window shutters, window frames, double glasswork or

coloured panes, thin wispy curtains, heavy drapes, decorative shabraques,

and at one time, deep jambs: it is a casing which is made to be closed andsurrounds itself with obstacles when it opens up. We must have thougt weno longer needed to fear this world, that it be only intersected by signals,

when recently we so abruptly opened up our homes. A house functions like

a transformer, where forces come to rest, like a high-energy filter or

converter. Outside, a bitter cold springor frosty dawn prevails; inside, calm

pictures dream incessantly and do not prohibit conversation. It is insidethat the space of language takes on form. A brain-box, one could say, a

skull. Casings transform the world into colourful patterns, into pictureswhich hang on walls, they transform the countryside into tapestries, thecity intoabstract compositions. I t es their task to replace the sun by a heater

and the world by icons, the rustle of the wind by a few kind words. And the

cellar turns alcohol into odours.In a house which has been built in this manner, the philosopher writes,

thinks and perceives. Inside. I see, he says, an apple tree through the

window. He seeks the origin of knowledge and puts h i m s ~ l f at thebeginning; in this genesis, he inevitably discovers a garden, and in· this

garden only the apple tree interests him, fascinates him: he sees its

blossoms. A long treatise on the tree follows, the drawing which he maymake of it, the picture which he has of it, or the words which he writes,which he finds in his language about that which is absent in every orchard.He forgets the window, forgets the jamb, the curtain, the opaque or

transparent panes and, depending on whether he lives in the north or the

south, the sliding mechanism or espagnolette catch. He forgets the houseand its opening in front of the apple tree. The tree, unprotected in the



acacia or a maple? -, behind the window stands a phantom, in the same way

that we say that behind the pupil or the lense, the delicate reproduction ofan object comes into being on the retina. Through the tympanum of the

window shutters, the storm becomes a plaintive moan, through thevestibule and the spiral of the staircase, it turns into information.

The house stares through its windows at the vineyards and the thymeplants. There are orange ornaments, a web of lies, devious oranges on its

walls. The philosopher forgets that the house which has been built uparound him transforms an olive grove into a painting by Max Ernst. The

architect has forgotten this as well. And he feels fortunate when the next

grape harvest outside turns into a maiden with a grape inside. The house

processes that which is given, which can be a threat, and softens it to icons;it is a casing which produces pictures, a socket or an eye, a camera obscura,

a shed, where specks of sunlight only glitter through a narrow slit, an ear.Architecture produces painting, as if the fresco or the painting hanging onthe wall were to reveal the final cause of all that is erected. The purpose of

architecture is painting or tapestry. What one took to be ornament becomesthe goal, or at least the result. The wall exists for the painting, the window

for the picture. And the padded door for the secrets of the bedroom.

Thephilosopher writes about perception, yet he already lives inside of

it, he lives in a kind of perception, embedded in his house like the pupil inthe eye. The writer forgets the window, forgets where he is sitting and hispassive work, and looks at the painting. Or, when he looks at a painting, he

believes it to be a window. He forgets the house, the soft casing, which ends

at the window. He sees the picture, looks absent-mindedly at some icons,

which quickly become abstract having been destroyed by an iconoclastic

wave, and looks at his sheet of paper covered with language, where hediscovers the given.

The house represents a casing for pictures, like a skull or an eye. Thephilosopher resides in his problem. The world used to be called thesensorium ofGod -let us call the house, the sensorium of man. The heavens

are full of our small efforts.

The room in the house shuts one casing inside the other. When one

slipped into a fold-away bed on Ouessant or into a bed with a canopy in

Rambouillet or Versailles, one was able to count still one more casing, asomewhat darker one in the illuminated big one. The linens form a bag

inside the boxes which fit inside of each other, rarely does one slip into



Krzysztof Pruszkowski:

KMK1991

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MSerres-Visit to a House