cellar doors, peepholes, and apple trees

December 17, 2023

“Church Door, Old Bethpage Restoration Village,” Derek Owens

When shooting photos I've always been drawn to doors, even as far back as high school. They're good subjects. They sit still, practically reek of symbolism, and frame well. Something satisfying about turning the camera to get that vertical shot, aligning it with the outline of the door. Like a puzzle piece clicking into place.

This weekend my mind is led (which is what my newsletters will be--casual, impromptu little essais in the Montaigne-ish sense: a meandering, a wandering around, in a woods of its own making) to think on a few doors that have caught my eye.

Étant Donnés. Which I have issues with. It's the construction of his assemblage, the execution--to work on one's "last big thing" for years and years while keeping it a secret--that intrigues me the most. That and the magnificent doors. Inside though, I'm sorry, but I find it a creepy let-down. Not the indecipherable, enigmatic nature of it, which should be its saving quality. (And I love the kitschy little waterfall.) But Duchamp's anatomically awkward, splayed female nude echoes too closely hundreds of images of women's bodies abandoned in the weeds--on tv crime dramas, film, newspapers. (I live in the part of the world some have referred to as "Long Island Babylon," the Gilgo Beach murders not far away, so it's all literally a little too close to home.) I mean, to spend two decades on your culminating master stroke, only to choose this as your subject? Still, you can't discount those doors, the sheer magnetism of them, pulling you in. Even if you know what's on the other side. Just to take one more look, to see if you maybe this time you'll get it. Which you won't.

Basquiat's doors; I wish I'd snapped a shot of one of his refrigerators when I saw it in a show last year. That his final work might be a painting (a devil) on the door of his drug dealer seems almost too scripted, a final incantation. For the longest time I avoided looking at Basquiat's work. I mean, I was genuinely repelled. It wasn't until looking at some paintings of my own (I'll post them eventually) which were influenced by a cache of my drawings as a child that I realized why: he'd already figured out what I'd unknowingly been trying and failing to do. Definitely some scratching of a shared itch going on there and on some level it unnerved me. Even now after poring over his work I eventually reach a point where I have to turn away, it gets too hot.

Christian Marclay's film Doors, a nearly hour-long stitching of clips from film and television of people passing through doors, edited so as to seem one long, endless race through rooms and hallways and buildings. Art Vlog gives a nice sample; jump to around 2'10" for the excerpt. His film isn't just funny but wonderfully seductive as each clip pulls you into the next, eager to see who pops out on the other side, then again, and again.

(I've always fantasized about making a compendium of film clichés. Gathering, say, every scene in a movie where the phone rings and an actor stares at it, brow furrowed, before answering, as if they've never seen a telephone before. Or where a car or dumpster bomb goes off in the background as hypercool characters in the foreground walk casually toward us in slo-mo, unflinching and unphased. I'll never make good on my little fantasy, and all the more reason to love Christian Marclay. Though he's doing something far more interesting; Doors, and his masterpiece The Clock, aren't just pattern recognition; they seem to modulate time, shaping and dissecting it.)

"If the doors of perception were cleansed", Blake famously writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern". I can't say I'm keen on the whole "seeing the Infinite" business. Maybe because it calls to mind Yayoi Kusama's infinity rooms, which I'd like more if they weren't endlessly and forever captured on instagram, apropos as that might be. Besides, when I was in college, entering Lucas Samaras's "Mirrored Room" (and not having to wait in line to do so, closing the door behind me and being able to stay in there for as long as I wanted) already did the trick for me. (That entire freshman visit to the Albright-Knox! My first ever face to face encounter with so much 20th c. art, my only museum experience prior to that being the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, NY. To see in the flesh all this stuff I'd just been studying in Modern Art History. Discovering--who knew!-- that De Kooning's pigment could be so thick. Felt like a kid from Kansas seeing the ocean for the first time.)

Yet Blake's bit about having to wipe clean one's perceptive doors and peek through the narrow chinks of the psychic cave strikes a chord. Many years ago I had a particularly vivid dream of being in an abandoned house. In the rear of this house there was a basement door leading outside, a small dirty window set in the upper half of the door. Inside the house I'm standing at this door, the stairs leading down to the basement behind me. Unable to see through the window, I wipe away a circle of grime with the back of my hand to peer outside. The back yard has been untended for years, the lawn a sea of rolling tufts of dry, dead grass. If I remember correctly (which of course I don't; the dream was decades ago, I've no doubt tweaked and misremembered it a lot since then) I've just come up from the basement and am trying to get out, but the door is locked.

But then the dream scene suddenly shifts and I'm standing outside in that back yard, under a dead, or dormant, apple tree, those waves of papery grasses billowing about my feet. And as I regard the abandoned house, looking at that cellar door, I see, through the little spot cleared in the smudgy window, my own face staring back at me.

It sounds ominous, the way I've described it here, but the dream carries no sinister affect. (Basements, hidden crawlspaces in walls, the felt presence of underground monsters and shadowy entities--these were not uncommon tropes in my younger dreamscapes, and were usually oddly comforting.) If anything I was intrigued, during the dream and in recounting it afterwards, about being able to be at once on both sides of that cellar door: inside ("in a doors") and outside ("forth of doors").

Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception uses Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a launching point for his own mescaline visions. With him the door metaphor becomes a toggle switch between the mundane and the hallucinatory, and it calls to mind Barbara Myerhoff's account of the Huichol Indians, their vivid, hilarious word substitutions during the annual peyote hunt. Words becoming their opposites, yet still embodying the other.

And doors doing just that, their limen, the threshold, occupying neither one side nor the other but the space between. The door, then, as a conduit of exchange. For me this calls to mind (that phrase again--as if writing this were enacting a kind of haloo-ing out at the mind lost in its selfsame woods) the recent discovery that teeny tiny packets of information can be sent from one (teeny, tiny) black hole to another. (The visible excitement of the scientists describing their discovery is contagious.)

As I write this I'm dipping into the Wikipedia entry for Barbara Myheroff to refresh my memory and am startled by her anecdote about how as a child she and her grandmother would sit by a window and tell stories about the neighbors. And how on one cold day, the window covered in frost, her grandmother warmed a penny in her hand and pressed it to the window, creating a viewing hole for the two of them to see through.

And then, on its heels, another unexpected echo. In recalling how "cellar door" has been considered by many to be the most beautiful phrase in English, I find my way to a blog post by Anna Smol, a Tolkein scholar, who details how Tolkein and others before him underscored the lyricism of those two words. At the end of the post a reader comments on how their mother used to sing the "cellar door" song: "Playmate, come out and play with me. Come bring your dollies three, climb up my apple tree, slide down my rain barrel onto my cellar door, and we’ll be jolly friends forever more."

Did my Welsh great grandmother ever sing that song to me? (Otherwise, why an apple tree in my dream?) If so I've no such memory. But I do remember sitting on her lap in her house in Penn Yan, by the radiator that kept her warm. She'd tell me stories and when I wasn't entranced by her whiskers we’d look out the dining room window.

Cellar doors, peepholes, and apple trees. Such are the pleasures of these unexpected dives down rabbit holes, and twisty turns through rabbitty doors.

— Derek

Bonus shot of Franz Kamin’s doors, with holes cut in them, from his essay with the mouthful of a title “Confessional Abstract to Reinadumbrate an Initial Theory of Holes” from Active Anthology, ed. George Quasha, 1974: