Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals

Preliminary Designs

Preliminary Designs When you actuallybuild it, it calls for repair, spackle, cedar, tiny hardware. But not to know how to build! Only to design! Afantasia. In the lookout tower: rotating, sky-lit, circular compartments, glassy clean surfaces, a museum's unmessy curio drawers, counters, rooms of every shape in Geometry II or crystallography— garneto, the swallowtail twin crystal (a good practical interior for reversible despair). Someone is just doodling arches, viaducts, mottling low walls with yews, water with shadows of causeways, deigning to design more heavenly cities than Heaven; someone wants Rome and space colonies, acute angles, rulered lines racing to a turret painted diffusive blue. It's the need to plan (not plant) silhouette trees, gracile even weedy aerials in roofs, posit glaciers in view, 33 to turn inside into out, front to back, make windows into walls. Or windowseats into garden benches. I built shoebox houses, crayoned woods chosen for their light, snipped paper trellises, screens across a porch or yard—open enough for bees, finches, sphinx moths to pass through. Pasted on black and white photographs of wet flowers against waxy leaves . . . Preliminary designs: They are where we dwell now more than we will in some future. Before any weighable stone is laid, unbending support raised, centuries trusted, these are complete. "So you have spatialnightmares?" someone asks. No, always they are ecstatic. One is there, in the building, the structuring air pressing back, upshooting buttresses or nautiloid partitions. And the way I stand in the visions? Among many dissimilar storeys and stairways, unbuilt but near to the foot— which lifts me, with no scuff and less speed, level to level. 3 4 / O N E : P O R T R A Y A L S ...