Places where I had intimate interaction and that shared themselves with me for a time. Not the bolted-down desks where I was made to sit and write at school that felt like writing from a cage. A living room couch in the basement apartment where I was young, at home, with my legs bent over a stack of pillows and a pad propped on my thighs. That was also where I liked to read but there were just two rooms and that was where the TV was.
On the floor that was covered by a rug, I watched TV. I tried to write while TV was on, but the TV found its way into the words. I could block everything out when I read and I had to learn to do that when I wrote, and then undo it. Then to be able to slide between doing it and not doing it, consciously and naturally.
The next place was on my bed. I had a desk but it was in a dark corner and the only light was a too-bright overhead. I used it for storage and to lose things in. I wrote on my bed. Sometimes I wrote at the kitchen table, looking up at the street level traffic.
At school, the desks became movable but the rooms were distracting. It was like writing while blocking out and I wandered off course, went on tangents. I didn’t like the place and I wanted to get it over quickly.
I wrote on my bed pretty much all the way through school. I lowered my bed to the floor and pushed it under a window. Now I had the bed and the floor and a window. I was happy! I typed at a kitchen table.
My first writing table was old office furniture, heavy squared maple legs and a scarred top. It had one drawer underneath. I covered it in cloth that women gave me. I arranged objects at the far corners. I was attracted to bronze and used bronzed baby-shoe book ends to hold up the line that I was using. A feather-tipped quill pen sat in an empty, red ink jar. I padded my rolling chair. It was my table. It welcomed me into its embrace. Then I added a plant to grow by the window next to my table. I would ride on the vibrations of my things, along with stereo music.
The TV and radio could be somewhere else. Maybe the radio should be by the bed. I had the necessary elements of a room! Just a window, lamps, a rug, my records, books and stereo. A place to go to the bathroom and to eat. Later, I hung things that interested me on the walls.
The room grew to hold bookcases and paintings. My desk became a blank door set up across sawhorses. There was a lamp at either end. A typewriter and my padded rolling chair. A chair for someone else that I made look like I used for reading, but I still read in my bed on the floor, by my radio and TV. I sat by my multiplying plants.
So what makes a study?
My first thoughts are about things, books and a table but maybe it is a place that provides a sense of comfortable privacy. Maybe it’s wherever you wind up most alone. Maybe it is the place where you perform your last dance. Or the one after that.
Planks of wood on cinder-blocks, a bronzed cup from the 1905 World Fair: they were parts of older studies that didn’t make the trip. Either they were misplaced, discarded, or crumbled.
Always a table somewhere. Once across an opening that looked across to the kitchen. Once in a room that leaked from ice damming.
Then there was my window on the lake from a small room that overlooked it. There was a floor to ceiling built-in bookcase and closets on one entire wall. I added another bookcase and the computer furniture that was now so important to my writing. But it was from my chair at the computer table that I looked out daily on the wonders of the ever changing lake.
Now my study is a room with scarred furniture. Refinished pieces that are thought to be too heavy today. I still do not write at my desk. Now I have an L shaped work station with two computers and a printer and a modem and a router. My router looks like an old style desk set, pens sticking out of their slots that are now antennae for reception. My walls are filled with collages and photographs but none are of family and all have found a family here. My Chippendale fan back chair sits in this room with the secretary it sat next to 70 years ago and in a different world. I came to visit then and now I have brought them back together after so many years and experiences. I feel what they carry for each other across overlapping rugs.
There is one window but I mostly keep it covered to shut out the light. My plants have moved next door and have their own room.