I’m suddenly fascinated with French novelist Marie Darrieussecq, not just for her work but also because of her unique approach to the writing process. In a recent talk for the Frieze Foundation (available as a free download for anyone interested), she borrowed ideas from biology, philosophy, anthropology, and astrophysics, among other seemingly unrelated disciplines, to explain the writer’s place on and in relation to the planet. While writing, she strives to achieve a state of absence in both mind and body so as to become purely a part of the earth and its processes. She says, “the earth writes through me…I really sound like a crazy person.”

Almost. But as artists, isn’t that what we do–drive ourselves crazy with our own thoughts? What so intrigued me about Darrieussecq was her extreme emphasis on awareness. She considers everything from the activities at the molecular level to the shape of the moon. They’re the sort of thoughts that tend to make a person feel very insignificant in the scheme of things. But I suppose that’s the point. Darrieussecq notes that we tend to forget we humans are merely animals, only exceptional in that we’ve reached a state of civilization wherein we have no more predators. However, she says, “in our archaic mind we are still those people in caves to escape the bears, and I also write not about that, but with that.” Word.

Darrieussecq also read from her short story “Ghost Flat (A Modern Couple),” a metaphysical and existential work which I enjoyed enormously and transcribed for you, below. She wrote the story at the request of two architects, Décosterd and Rahm, based on the “ghost apartment” they invented, an interesting space-efficient architectural design you can read more about here. The short story was published about a decade ago in Japan, and apparently isn’t available anywhere (that, or Google has failed me). After the jump, a transcript of Darrieussecq’s reading of “Ghost Flat (A Modern Couple).”

“Ghost Flat (A Modern Couple)” by Marie Darrieussecq

Tokyo had become so beautiful, so big, that living in it was like an honor granted by Japan to a European woman like me. I walked and walked as far and as long as I could, north and south, east and west, and I would observe the growth of the city around me, upwards and downwards, in Yokohama and Chiba, and the rise of the rail tracks and the spreading bracken of airports, that pulsating vegetable growth of the city. Then I hailed a cab and went back home, still in wonder, to my twenty-square-meter flat, which was like an honor the city was granting me. In a way, the city had accepted that I lodged inside it. I was a lodger in Tokyo. I had become one of its inhabitants.

Standing on the earth in Tokyo, you cannot forget the precise volume you represent, inside and out. Hollow organs, full organs, the way air and water occupies us as we occupy them, our impermeability to rain, and our resistance to wind, the dampness of our mouths, of our mucous membranes, our clothes below which the air we’re breathing heats up, and our envelopes’ overall porosity to atoms in waves. On the earth, nowhere else. The city had, in a way, accepted that I lodged inside it, that I lodged my arms and legs in it, without having to bend them too much, that I lodged my head and body without having to shrink my skin or bend my thoughts. Like creeping bracken, my thoughts could extend outwards, spreading over the city from my lodgings. I was a lodger in Tokyo. I was living there. I knew that I was one of its inhabitants, because it could never become habitual to me. The city never left me in peace. It advanced, it developed, casting its treats around me. I was the tiny point around which its labyrinth and my thoughts constantly reorganized themselves. I felt the air envelope me, molding a hollow of my volume. I felt the ground beneath my feet send back my weight precisely, and the forces of gravity holding me, accompanying me. Practically the same was here as elsewhere. Tokyo is a city of the earth, its suburbs Chiba and Yokohama, and its extensions into the sea and the air. I was occupying about two cubic meters of Tokyo when I moved around, and to lodge my body in its biological activities–sleep, food, hygiene–I was occupying twenty square meters, or about forty cubic meters, of a 36-floor building.

The bridges scared me. If I crossed them, what new territory would I be in? How to avoid getting lost, how to get back home. My measurement was walking, hours of walking, during which my body went onto the end of its strength. Then I hailed a cab and went back home by showing my address written in ideograms on a card that never left my side. I went home beneath the neon, across the asphalt, in the luminescent air dotted by yellow bodywork. I went home to my twenty square meters. I had been provided with a ghost flat, designed by the architects Décosterd and Rahm. I do not think that their objective was to solve the housing crisis in overcrowded cities, but instead to invite us to sleep inside a city like fluid, or like ivy or bracken, to live less solidly than usual. I let my lodgings enter into me, and the flat shifted around inside the building, not like a cube, but like a mobile. We were volumes moving one in the other, in the city, and on the revolving and rotating planet. I was like a hermit crab, which lodges its growing, changing shape in different shells. I was accepting, apparently, the fluctuations of my earthly self.

I was a lodger in Tokyo. I was living there. The volume my body occupied found its place there, little by little. I took one step forward, then turned to observe the space I had just occupied, to see the volume of air where my body had been. I moved on. The air closed in behind me. The city opened out in front, both intact and moving. I felt it on the surface of my skin, in the exchanges between my body and its biology. Air and toxins, steam, and the eye contact between us, and the noises we directed at each other, and the little electric shocks when I touched a handrail in the underground, or the bonnet of a cab. I was aware of myself standing on the earth in Tokyo, where you lose sight of the planet. I was aware of belonging to what is called a city, and the regular, almost calm, seismic alarms reminded me of the crust and magma further on, even out of sight, below the asphalt and the car parks, beneath the the tires of the yellow cabs.

You occupy certain volume. You have to lodge your body somewhere. There is not much space in Tokyo for humans, and yet they lodge there in great numbers, and I was one of its inhabitants. I remembered what that meant, especially in the train stations, where people who have only cardboard lodge. Then, my neighbors: the sky, the ground and air exchanges. I was living there, and sometimes I went to temples to listen to the silence of such habitations. Then I took a cab home.

Nowhere better than the ghost flat where I lived in Tokyo. If I wanted to sleep, I switched the lighting to between 400 and 500 nanometers, and the bedroom appeared. If I wanted to eat, I turned it up to between 600 and 800 nanometers, and had the kitchen. To make the living room appear, I picked 500 to 600. And if I wanted the bathroom, I went into the ultraviolet zone, between 350 and 400.

One day, when I turned on the red light, he appeared, there, in the kitchen, at the little table. He looked so at home and peaceable that I didn’t feel scared.

There was just one window, which was used for all the spaces, and I liked to leave it slightly open, so that the city’s neon would come in to disturb the cunning layout of my twenty square meters. The city and its lights offered other possibilities. The specter of bed, when I was at the table, the phantom of kitchen, when I was in bed.

Another day, he was there in my bed, bathed in blue light, and I wanted to lie down beside him.

Of course, you needed a good memory. The invisible objects are still there. They remain place. In natural light, the light we are used to, the flat looked cluttered, even with its minimal, Japanese-style finishings. At mealtimes, you had to remember where the bed was, so as not to trip over it. In the bathroom, avoid bumping into the table. But you soon learn to become fluid. You vary yourself according to the wavelength. You change your shape, your volume, your color, and you then belong so completely to the space, that the flat lived in me just as much as I did in it. Clarity of thought became one of its dimensions.

At mealtimes, he tended to appear in the living room, but not always. He ate whatever I placed on the table. He drank green tea. Was he Japanese? I no longer knew if I was European.

I was thinking more clearly, writing more clearly, dreaming more clearly, because I was more clearly absent from what usually held me down. Almost nothing mattered anymore. Just breathing, and the sensation of being there, and thoughts cast out to meet with the world with no concern for longitude or latitude, for what it generally termed “space.”

I continued walking through the city, but I came home earlier. I was never sure to find him there. When he did not appear, I missed him. I switched the flats through its various  modes: kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, looking for him. Was he crossing through the wavelength while I was adjusting the lights? Were we missing each other from one vision to the next? From room to room, were we bumping into each other? But maybe he was not there, not at all, he had gone somewhere else, in another frequency, in the building, in the city, in its heights and its depths. So I turned off the lights, I closed my eyes, and I moved around my twenty square meters whose basic forms I now knew. Bed, furniture, I slipped between the shapes, and perhaps through them, I hoped that the black space would contain him. I inched forward, my hands held out. I was violently aware of the void around me. Did all ghost flats have their tenants? Were they pre-inhabited? Had my visitor been provided by the architects, and how to interpret his presence: as my guest, or my host? Someone who was there before, or had arrived afterwards? The invisible objects are still there. They remain in place.

I started walking around Tokyo again, and when I came home, he was there once more, apparently not expecting me but welcoming in his own way. Little by little, I realized that he would always come back, just as I did from my walks, appearing and disappearing. We were living in the same mode. We shared the same mode of presence. He never bumped into the furniture. I placed some sushi on the table, and he ate them. Of course, you needed a good memory, but you soon learned to become fluid. There was just one bed for two. It was our way of living. It was our way of being there. It was our way of being together in Tokyo.