Spatial Imaginings


(front cover to the 1982 Picador edition of Autobiography)


 I have decided to delay my PhD application. I am perfectly happy with my subject and my proposed thesis, but I don’t think it’s the right time in my life to be doing it. When I start a project, I usually have to focus all my thoughts on just that one project. Every waking moment will revolve around rehearsing the argument, finding faults or cracks in the logic, changing perspectives, absorbing new information etc. And, with the other projects and elements of my life vying for attention, I simply do not think I can fully dedicate myself to several years of just this project.

I think that I have always had a spatialised way of thinking. To me a project, be it an essay, a piece of fiction, or even a book I’m reading, exists as a world in my imagination. To dedicate myself to this project is to dwell in and explore this world and, in this sense, it is like keeping a house. Satisfaction comes ultimately not from the full development of this house, but from the process of living in it. This desire for my own private world to exist in also extends itself to the physical realm, where I often prefer the introverted, contemplative cultivation of a dwelling to extroverted expedition into elsewheres. Smaller spaces allow my mind to unfurl and hang about the various things that constitute that place. It goes beyond simple feelings of cosiness and comfort, it’s a sense of deeper wellbeing and nurturing of creativity.

This is a feeling I share with the subject of my thesis, John Cowper Powys, revealed in a section of his Autobiography (1934) I felt compelled to reproduce in full here:


“Deep in my nature – inherited directly from my father – was a longing to escape from organized society and find a temporary home for myself, a private, secret domain of my own, where no one could intrude, where it was indeed almost impossible for anyone to intrude! This instinct – and I like to fancy it was an atavism going back to the times when our Welsh ancestors hid themselves in their mountain fastnesses – was composed of two kindred impulses, one to escape into the wilds, and the other to make a home of your own, a lair, a retreat, an embattled fortress, into which you could retire and defy society.

My dominant desire during the whole of my school life – whether in the Prep. or in the Big School – was to lead a double existence and while just “getting by” in the School Dimension, to find my real happiness in a secret subjective Dimension where I was “monarch of all I surveyed.” […] But the whole question of the deep and complicated pleasure I got from these overgrown banks above Lover’s Lane is an obscure and subtle one. Some would say it had to do with that deep-rooted longing in human hearts to return to the security of the maternal womb, but I think it was more closely allied with a desire to substitute a secret reality of my own for the reality created by humanity. A longing for a lair, for a cave, for a fortress, for any hidden domain, which cannot be disturbed, is still deep in my nature, It is doubtless for this reason that I have always wanted to live in narrow quarters, a little house in the country or in a single room in the city, and that I have a positive detestation of large houses. The feeling of being safe and snug in a hidden retreat, while the world passes by outside and cannot reach you, is very dear to me.” 

(Powys, 85-86)


Reading Powys’s Autobiography has been a continual source of inspiration, I would say that thus far it is a far more satisfying work than any of the novels I’ve read from him. Whereas they tend to get trapped in their own little humdrum (yet nonetheless magical) microcosms, this work has all the vividness of a life actually lived, directly exploring its profundity and weirdness rather than being slowly conjured by the contrivances of plot (Yet, his plots do serve as a manifestation of his spatial imagination. They ramble at a mundane pace, continually hindering all narrative progression in favour of internal cultivation). I like Powys’s work a lot, I would love to write my thesis on his work, but I am not ready to put it under the surgical knife of academic exegesis when it still brings so much magic and inspiration to my own life and creative practices.

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