Parking Lot – The Space Between

"I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving,

intangible, untouched and almost untouchable,

deep routed; places that might be points of references, of departure,

Of origin:

My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may

Have been born, the tree I may have seen grown (that my father may have planted

the day I may have been born), the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories …

Such places don’t exist, and it's because they don’t exist that space becomes a

question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be

appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it.

It's never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.

My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them.

Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me,

oblivion will infiltrate my memory, I shall look at few old yellowing photographs

with broken edges without recognizing them. The words 'phone directory available

 within' or 'snacks served at any hour'  will no longer be written up in a semi – circle

in a white porcelain letters on the windows of the little café in the Rue coquilhere.

Spaces melting like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and

leaves me only shapeless shreds:

To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive;

To wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a

furrow, a trace, a mark of a few signs"

Georges Perec, Space (continuation and end), Paris 1973 - 1974[1]