Separate Rooms

Oct 31 2019

We never used to sleep

in separate rooms.

Never had the luxury of solitude

nor its burden,

when we lived in small nomadic bands

of blood and kin

and bonds of reciprocity.

When strangers were rare,

and fearing them

safer than trust.

It was in a heap

before a frugal fire

   —    a skin tent,

a circular yurt of felted wool,

a drafty wooden hovel   —

no walls or dividers

the cattle brought inside.

Animal heat

the touch of skin

the scent of habitation,

the funk of bodies

in a closed space

the mother's milk of presence.

Yet now, find ourselves alone

in the city's mad cacophony,

its grandeur and spectacle

its chaos and filth.

Unseen

by the multitudes who hurry past

in tough hermetic bubbles

of one-way glass,

elbows out

and eyes fixed on screens.

Even so, we want, desire, need

to be known,

as we once were;

even alone

even cast out.

I sleep fitfully, these days

in this privileged state of solitude,

an anonymous soul

in interminable nights

in a metropolis of strangers.

The ticking clock

a siren blares

the shouts of drunken brawlers,

traffic noise

as passing lights

strobe against the wall.

The door ajar

a window cracked

a breath of city air.

The scent of long awaited rain,

the first light drops

on warm black pavement.

And wafting-up in toxic waves

the blue-tinged smell of exhaust.
Uncomfortably hot

in this spartan box of a room;

even with the open door,

even when sleeping alone.

With our usual blinkered perspective of “the now”, it's hard to appreciate that the idea of dividing our homes into rooms, or sleeping by ourselves, or even the notion of a “bedroom” at all, are innovations of modernity. For the vast majority of human history, we slept communally and inhabited open spaces (so contemporary designs that feature “open concept” houses are more throwback than cutting edge): the standard right angled rectangles in which we now live were, in the past, more organic and intimate.

There is talk of loneliness and alienation as epidemic in modern society. So the poem depicts the anonymity of big cities; our solipsistic pursuit of the self – connected by our phones, but also disconnected because of them; and ultimately, the speaker of the poem who, sleepless in his spare solitary room, feels invisible while desperately wanting to be “known”.

It is thought by anthropologists that our ancestors lived in subsistence nomadic communities of about 150. This is known as the “Dunbar number” (first proposed in the 1990s by Robin Dunbar): quoting Wikipedia, “a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.” We might live in some vast metropolis, but we probably persist in constructing communities, even if partially virtual ones – that recapitulate this number. But perhaps it takes

Animal heat

the touch of skin

the scent of habitation,

the funk of bodies

in a closed space

the mother's milk of presence.

to truly feel the secure sense of home and place that satisfies this basic need.