Everything simple is deceptively so. A door is overlooked because it is stepped through.

​

A door is merely a means to an end, leading to elsewhere, elsewhen. Imagine the joke King Minos might have played on Theseus by building a door to the entrance of the labyrinth. It would be deeply unnecessary in a place with no exit. Even worse would have been to construct it just after Theseus entered the maze. Theseus: I don’t remember this being here. He proceeds to turn back and is entangled in his own spool.

​

Though, a door also could be conceived in terms of what it is not: an understated introduction; a foyer’s postscript; adjunct to the day-bright awning; footnote to a job’s failed interview; a place of jams, ins, pressures; condescension lodged between one wall and another, neither willing to budge; or else that thing which you hit your head against thinking that if only you do it enough times it will move an inch. 

​

Perhaps anything which can be understood is like a door: it must let itself be opened, it must yield to understanding. 

​

To be a door, assume it’s not that whatever comes knocking can come through, only those for whom there is an invitation can pass. If there is breaking and entering, trespassing, doors are such that they can be subject to such events, so doors are normative (also door-mat-ive); every vampire knows this. If you jimmy the door, chisel at the frame, buttress your way, what will you have learned? Consider doors as embedded: the door in its frame in the wall, the wall in the building, the building complex as one among multitudes of human institutions. Human institutions as they are framed by the vast non-human world. How those massive doors of the New York Public Library would quickly be consumed by a patina of moss and vines if humans suddenly were extinct, as would statues of thinkers and names of saintly statement. Remember that if the door exists, its singularity is embedded in forms: the city; the country; the author at the tavern, writing. Think of all the notes left on a given door. All those “I’ll be back soon” notes, all that paper that had to end up scrapped, while the door remains. 

​

As evidenced by a particular door, part of a stone house in Bularati, Albania, a door can resist and invite simultaneously: its broken latch held by a makeshift brass padlock offers a glimpse of summertime foliage; perhaps just beyond, clusters of grapes hang from a trellis. Piled stone roof tiles (presumably dislodged from the same structure, or leftover), from which peek out the dregs of autumn leaves, suggest the nothing coming out and the other nothing coming in, colliding. 

​

Here the message is subtle; in the door to a mineshaft it is not. 

​

*

​​

People speak also of the doors of perception, and since traveling expands one’s perception it can be considered a door. In all my travels I have wanted simply to find nothing [1]. This particular nothing has been variously described as “just a hole in the ground” (said of a natural spring) or “nothing to see there” (said of an abandoned house), or “but no one goes there” (said of a small gorge), or “they are big and old” (said of olive trees). I have also found many doors along my travels, though none carried so much as a dismissive remark.

 

I think this shows that I have desired to stumble upon an unreal door. In my travels I have wanted to find nothing, represented in terms of a door which one might enter only to return to one’s entry point, a revolving door—a structure bypassing the search for one’s beginning, yet leading to the freshest possible perspective; the point of anticipation before having set out on a journey, so filled with hope that I can only describe it as a feeling of striving toward the impossible. 

​​

At times I have found such striving in abandoned doors, or so seldom used they may as well be abandoned, those particular nothings which at least for me come alive precisely because they feel abandoned. Here, in some of the old wooden doors of Bularati you see a window into time, once-bright paint peeling unpredictably, the rusted grit of iron that is the envy of pure field abstract expressionism, its emulsified look tantalizingly human, while incautiously piled stones serve as a reminder to the traveler not to physically follow the eyes’ lead—though they have entered the corresponding artwork already.

 

Because it has been several years since I visited, Bularati has become an imaginary place. 

 

The doors and windows that were looked out of time and time again, swelling with moonlight’s dancing, ridges of blue paint chipping: things as they are become exhausting (this, in spite of the fact that it is so passive, looking out of the door, or if that door happened to be framed by faux wood paneling, watching television). There is a Yaya who may have looked out of the crack in the door after she finished pruning grape vines, sighing with some interest in what her grandson is doing, playing street ball with friends and cranking the deafening music of another culture, another world; things seemed to be shifting so quickly there was no way to describe it, still you could see it before your eyes, through the crack in the door. 

 

Doesn’t a door also represent a limitation, a boundary of experience, that if you pull too hard you can unhinge it as you can become unhinged; then to think about it constructively means: measure, a life neither materialistic and acquisitive nor swimming with the latest fads. A comfort in being antique and quaint. Even a solace, as when you knock on the wooden door of a friend and he answers and the door creaks open with its familiar jazz riff, its screen-door mosquito-net clatter upon entry. 

 

I once overheard something from behind a door. Before a spirit was to be ensouled God presented the spirit with a glass of water, saying “This represents all the goods in your life—family, housing, food, wealth—if you drink it all at once it will be very sweet, but very bitter toward the end; or you can choose to sip it as you go through life.” Now you can well imagine there would be those among the spirits that greedily imbibe their cup, and others to mete it out, and still others who set it aside completely. 

 

Which are you?

 

*

​​

Compare the peaceful route the gaze takes as it looks upon a face to its movement across a page of poetry—white space serves as disruption, inserting the prosaic. Or even worse, the saccadic eyes as a nice piece of calculation is performed, or an elaborate lie constructed, pace as such is understood relative to a subject’s possible bodily motions. Only when you examine the decoration of a door—as I have studied door knockers and the tessellated battle scenes with lions on a section of the Ishtar gate—can something similar be observed. 

 

The usual phenomenon, though, is that of looking through, forward into whatever future one will step if one steps through the door, and in this way there are no doors into which one steps backwards, no doors into the past. The door is vertical, has breadth, yet it might as well lack dimension entirely. (The perceptual gaze as it applies itself in other areas, as for instance constructing from depth, breadth, and then “aha” “seeing” the cube, is out of place here, taken for granted except to carpenters.)  

 

The door prepares us for reality—a person who bursts through the door unannounced becomes someone to us—suddenly they are the center of attention as the door closes behind them (doors they open). A violinist makes his entrance on stage, long after the luthier had found him among the hollows, forceps grasp a baby as it moves through the door of its mother, the velvet curtains hanging in the backdrop, yellow tassels dangle as he blitzes through the cadenza, that passageway that reveals most his individuality, wrists rocking their vibrato. To me, he makes the cadenza in the Brahms’ concerto sound like Paganini. A knock announces a stranger at the door who in some unseen way could be if not the devil, death. 

 

The door can be a site for violence, as it welcomes opening or not. Think of the violence of a door slammed shut, when the latch nearly breaks, or the hinges shake loose, or splinters collect with dust in the doorjamb, bolts rusted shut. It might also be an ordinary object not cooperating. At my apartment on Pearl St. the floor had forty-two pine boards and the door only closed if locked by the engaged brass bolt, providing a feeling of being trapped while being closed. This feeling dissipated the longer I lived there, ultimately providing a sense of security, for me; but I recall the night a woman I had been with ran down the stairs of my building, tears streaming, after I had had to open the door for her. She hadn’t noticed what for me had become commonplace, that it was dead-bolted. Little reassurance, when your one-night-stand yells down to you that his door only closes when locked. 

 

While doors can be a site of violence and an avenue of flight, I’ll say something about why I was inspired to write this piece. That’s because doors can also at the institutional level reflect our fallen state. Heaven may be a kind of doorless hierarchy, but here on earth in mental wards doors mean processing, access, control, authority, management. An ex of mine who worked with mental patients described how one of them put it so succinctly (I am with some license adding the last two lines as an article of faith):

 

The door you find doesn't open. 

This door isn't for you. 

There is a door that leads to all

other doors.  

 

*

 

In Kafka’s fable “Before the Law,” which I misremember as “Before the Door,” a man spends his years pleading for admittance to the Law, seemingly guarded by an imposing sentinel. When the man is old and frail, his beard at arm’s length, though he can only speak in a whisper he still thinks he has one last good question: why is it that in all that time no one else has asked to gain admittance to the Law. The sentinel leans down and tells him that the door is for him alone, “And now I am going to shut it,” he says. 

 

I used to see myself that way, as awaiting some form of meaningfulness uniquely mine, to be unlocked by another person, or perhaps just by some particularly intense conjugation with some ideal; but not every door opens when unlocked by some unique key (or any key at all) though some doors only close when locked. What kind of knocker might a door have that leads to a soulful kingdom: an eagles’ head? A gargoyle? The heart’s closed fist, or just some generic iron ring? I will say this: if a door leads to the Law itself, it had better not be too mundane. 

 

Once upon a time, before they indicated property boundaries, public and private spaces, let alone some tangible division between this realm and the divine, a door might have seemed like an aperture: the rawhide tent flap drawing weariness into its golden interior; the porous thatch you’d have to manage; bamboo or straw, heather or sedge rustling in a wind, echoed by animals sharing a dirt floor with humans sleeping head to head; an artifact, but not exactly of our choosing or design. 

 

Still, they could have meant security.

 

As I close the door leading onto the porch a green bug clings to the glass; I shouldn’t say “clings,” or “green,” and “bug” is frankly insulting. But I was trying to pay more attention to the door than the insect. Still in bed, thought stirs, molds into shape, the bread or the basket, the fruit, as if beginning again. Perhaps unaware of its motion, you ask: What kind? What species is it? Which taxonomies we help ourselves to as language slides its cruel marriage of word and thing toward blue abyss. It’s disgusting how the door looms wide open. 

 

*

 

Architecturally the door is a part of an entrance to some larger structure (why can’t it be like in Alice in Wonderland?), does not exist in its own right, presents a façade the eye tracks and in tracking is first to uncover the structure’s hyperreal dimensionality—hence the ornate distractedness, the curvature of a face of a wood-carved gargoyle brings the stranger, the salesman, catches by this stationary element of surprise where a plain veneer would have allowed his mind to focus on questions of whom, introductions, ownership, prestige, small talk. 

 

Sometimes that wider structure is consumerism, industry.

 

The door of a restaurant swings open hundreds of times per day, with each customer a sign that business is well, that life is going on; it releases the scent of freshly baked bread into the outdoors, indoors the staff is refreshed by the wind, a chef whose arm connects the long wooden arm of the bread peel wipes his brow and smiles, the scent of dampened ozone reminds him of his backyard; the doors of the oven also open, to be checked periodically so nothing burns, to remind us of the hearth’s fire—these seamless transitions, chatting, doors swinging the old fashioned dinging of the cash register door opening and closing, foster a kind of tense movement as staff dance to the rhythms of the door to the kitchen (and if not, they’re out) unquestioned or something that is no one’s place to question. 

 

A philosopher like David Benatar would never think to himself here, as he might when walking out of his front door: better that one never be born.

 

I remember the pugilistic door to the prep station at the bar where I worked temporarily. It revealed a sublime realm of appearances, in the beads of sweat of waiters in the zone, in the least opened steamed mussel as other barbacks bantered back and forth, and I was suddenly privy to it, I who had spent half my life in the walls of academia, privy to these morsels of gossip, the real as it appeared from behind the swinging kitchen door, the fragments of dreams—dreams of opening a business, of being a quarterback, of profit and lust—and the slow but steady betterment of persons who had escaped those doors. 

 

The upscale clientele never caught so much as a glimpse.

 

*

 

The doors to the chapel closed. Faint organ sounds coming from inside the chapel, flutterings of stops being pulled, woodland reeds, the mechanics of air and steam engine lit by human touch (torch?) as the organism’s fingers, deftly cascading, keep measure, tremulously to the entire organ, “beater type” in Schnitzger style. I wonder in one of those daydreams you have during a classical concert how something so ethereal can be so material: oak and poplar pipes, 99% lead, 80 tin, 28 tin with trace copper, bismuth, antimony, boxwood keys, ebony sharps, pedals: trommet, cornett, spitzfloet, waldfloit, siffloet, sexquinaltern and tertian, scharft, duleian, rohrfloet and gedackt…

 

In a musical composition, a single moment in time can be a door, as I when I say to myself with a certain faith: this is the door that leads to all other doors, and mean ‘this’ to open present into future. 

 

The Buxtehude Passacaglia described time as a transparent wall through which past, present, and future move. That is the only way in which the concentrated crystals of unresolved dissonances could proceed through their cosmic motions, otherwise time would be a grouping of incoherent noises. But as often happens in concert daydreams, I found myself trying to imagine something more difficult: past, present, and future separated by two impenetrable walls. The first, separating past and present, took the form of a concrete pillar extending up into the sky indefinitely; likewise for the pillar separating present and future. 

 

I realized then the paradox of not being able to travel into the future (and not merely with my thoughts), the possibility of change as this past self and present self slammed on either side into solid loam. I then saw how movement was possible: if we envision present, and future as concrete slabs each separated from the other by some indefinite but finite distance, so that when you walk off the edge of the slab that is the present you fall down into future plane, which imperceptibly becomes your new present as you gather yourself and walk toward the new edge, only ever existing along this edge which both knows you and does not know you, as it is your present and your future, but neither is the past present to you. 

 

It began to seem to me that if I could only stretch out the perceived duration of conscious experience, walking along this edge, balancing on it without falling in, I could save my past by not allowing my present to become my future. Is this simply: to be lost in a memory?

 

*

 

A door as a kind of framing device, a concept.

 

Suppose we don’t fetishize “door” and “keyhole”; then note how the stars speak: we are moving, our light through. They speak even this way 

without moving their lips. 

 

In the inside there is a brook flowing, flowering down the mountain. 

It requires no mirror. 

It is simply you. 

 

It is. 

​

​

 

The possible strophe of the door is the brook flowing with a background landscape of stained glass roses. 

Stems of purity. 

 

Purity. 

 

The door’s barrier, its peculiar labor of balancing time, ungrips from its sway. The whole world 

falls away

 

the door. 

 

the do. 

 

the

 

he

 

the scratches it carried from the Siege of Paris as the Norse broke its maidenhead 

with their own, 

culled from a Viking warship 

 

together the two do-ers clashed, and this gate that was the gate between good and evil 

and love and hate 

flew open 

 

the doves—what 

 

did they care? 

 

*

 

When Kafka says the cage goes in search of the bird, he means that the oppressive force only exerts its freedom in relation to what it oppresses. In other words, the cage is caged prior to finding the bird, and is dependent upon the bird’s freedom as a limiting condition of its freedom/lack of passivity.  

 

* 

​

Now there are doors, and then there are doors. What I mean is, as easily as any foot can walk through them, cages. They are the things that can make you go crazy, yes things, that can gnaw at your soul for no good reason, things through which the door is reconstructed around you, as if it knew more of your temperament than you, as though there were any such gateway to you, you who had become a thing. Thus the cage things. 

 

From which it follows that things cage. 

 

Where I learned to be a professor there was one Manchester hall almost recklessly famous for having, you guessed it, wooden doors. 

 

Solid oak doors so heavy that whoever knocked could not be heard on the other side, which is to say it was profoundly introspective. Now there is a way of thinking about introspection that would say that it can occur in a crowd, a club, a bar, on the subway. That’s not the kind of introspection I mean. But think the root: introspect. A kind of bulbous onion stuck in the ground, only to be dug up much later, to be turned into something, transformed into soup. 

 

But where you put your head on the desk in the carrel and the janitor walking by thought you were sleeping but you weren’t you were deep in the thought everglades of timelessness that you didn’t even spy or notice the janitor so that whole story is one you had to make up at the cost of clarifying anything you had to use a metaphor and insodoing chose one that spoke to you that kind of thinking that kind of introspection is what I mean 

 

now people will go where they go will run this through a machine for sense making 

as poesis is making 

they will find it 

 

dull, they will knock against it with their knuckles, again and again.

 

 

You may come to realize this of your own life: that there were times when doors swung wide open while you stood by and watched.