Of Atmosphere
…maybe we were also surprised by the sudden commotion in the house: a flurry of people, of feet being wiped on the mat, of jackets and scarves being hung on hooks in the hall, of voices and sentences filling the air, questions about the house and how many we are and how long we have lived here.
On the Calculation of Volume - IV · Solvej Balle · p. 3
There is something happening spatially in the beginning of this book. The stranded few of the “anastrophe”, sent back to the same day again and again, are immediately blurred, whisps of particles occupying a shared volume. Like molecules of a gas, they mix and almost instantly merge.
The dimension of time has collapsed to a single point, one dimensional (but not quite). So Balle explores the way Tara and the others exist in space. The ways that they merge and become indistinct from one another. The air is filled with voices, filled with sounds created by the others in the house.
But now Ralf did light a fire and we sat there in the drawing room. With names and explanations swirling in the air around us. With a welter of words, with gesticulations and stories…
I don’t think I would have noticed this motif had I not started reading it in German. Struggling to remember the words and the grammar make this stick out at me.
It is easy enough to tell them apart. The bodies on the sofas and armchairs. The faces belonging to the bodies. The voices belong- ing to the faces. You listen first to one, then to another, and each time you turn your gaze toward one of the voices, you find that it belongs to a face and to a body with a hand behind its head or a way of leaning on the arm of the sofa. But then you realize that you have a hand behind your own head or that you are leaning in exactly the same way, and then someone else is telling a story and someone else again is borrowing a gesture. A leg is bent and drawn up onto a sofa, a pair of hands flits about, illustrating a point, and moments later another pair of hands flits and another leg is drawn up onto an armchair. It is warm in the room and someone picks up a sentence and repurposes it, because even though you quickly learn to recognize the voices and match them to faces and bodies, their movements ripple through the group, sentences are passed along, and gestures are mimicked or echoed, sometimes it’s just the twitch of an eyebrow or the tilt of a head traveling quietly from one person to the next.