Tamara Geissler (tamara.geissler@stjudesuni.cw.uk)
To: Dyson Watt (dyson.watt@stjudesuni.cw.uk)
Dear Dyson,
Here is the final draft of my dissertation. You may tell me that I have already submitted one, but you would be wrong. You may also tell me this dissertation is several months overdue, for which I sincerely apologise, but I do have a valid reason for not delivering it on the deadline. I am also certain it is under the word count by a wide margin, but I can write no more. I have said all that I have to say.
I also ask that you forward this email to my parents.
Kind regards,
Tamara
Symmetry: A study of the effects of artificial environments on biological organisms
By Tamara Geissler
Abstract: From about the time of mid-way through last vacation, I have been trapped in a building which resembles a shopping centre in its aesthetics, but proceeds linearly in a single direction and generates a strong feeling of limitlessness. Through prolonged exposure to this structure, I intend to document and explore, using myself as the subject, the effects a utilitarian and artificial environment has on animals evolved to function in a natural setting, with a particular focus given to the symmetrical/non-symmetrical dichotomy.
Nature is not symmetrical. Though her faces may seem the same from afar, no two flowers or trees ever grow the same. They are wild things: I define the ‘wild’ here as the opposite of the ‘symmetrical.’ The wild is imperfect. It is affected by its environment, its development changes depending on the resources and spaces provided to it, and it tends towards entropy and decay. It is designed to survive while living, but when it is dead it helps the living survive. In short, the wild has a visible connection to the world around it. It is part of an ecosystem, and every organism born of the wild is unique.
Humans, despite the deeply entrenched belief in our separation from the natural world within Anglo-Protestant culture, are also natural things. We were born in the forests and on the plains, and though the world we have created has altered our minds, our souls have not changed. Indeed, up until recently, even the ‘man-made’ world was still largely natural – not a removal of the forest so much as a displacement; bringing the forest to us. Examine the material record from even a few centuries ago, and no two tools, no two pieces of carpentry or thatching, are ever truly the same. They are still, in their own way, wild things.
It is for these reasons that I argue, of all the locations in our modern world, the shopping centre is often among those which inspire the most acute dread.
I began to develop this hypothesis as I walked through the “fashion section” of the industrial building in which I found myself. Entire aisles were clogged with interchangeable floral-patterned dresses that seemed to stretch for miles; another with branded shirts, a further one with short shorts, an even further one with block foam sandals. I was grateful for the sandal aisle, as my trainers had begun to fall apart and I had developed horrible blisters on my feet. My socks were also beyond repair, but I imagined that a few miles ahead would be another aisle filled with them.
I had learned by this point in my journey that if I was desperately in need of something the building would provide it to me. Using these observations, I have defined two different categories of shops in the building: recurrent and non-recurrent. Recurrent shops generally contain food, clothes, bath stuff, and beds, and appear when I am hungry, in need of clothes, dirty, or exhausted. The bedrooms are unique because they are the only rooms in which I can remain for an extended duration: I shall elaborate on this later.
The other kind of room is the non-recurrent. These appear only once and contain non-essential items e.g. candles, furniture, cooking appliances. Initially these rooms supplied normal homeware products, but the deeper I have progressed into the building the stranger these items have become. I have encountered a room selling fishing gear, another selling Eastern musical instruments, and one that only sold various kinds of knives.
Returning to the subject of the fashion section: I tried a few items of clothing on as I passed through. After all, if I was in a clothes store, I had come to buy clothes. Just as when I was in the delicatessen I had come for cold meats, or when I was in the perfume store, I had surely come to buy perfume – even when I knew, rationally, that I had not come here for anything, that I would never buy any of the things I took because there was no counter to pay at. This is the second major compulsion/delusion I have noted comes over me in the building. It has a way of convincing me that whichever room I am in is the room I came for, until I can find nothing I want and I am made to move to the next room to find what it was I must have really come for. In this way, the second compulsion interlocks with the first.
The clothes were all cheaply made of hot glued seams and plastic fabrics, but I rifled through them anyway. None of the labels ever indicate where they have been made, and there are no instructions for washing them. The only details they retain are material and size, but I firmly believe these are not designed to assist people in any way.
I rifled through a rack of T-Shirts with a tasteful floral pattern on them looking for something in my size (XL) but, as always, there weren’t any. Logically, I knew exactly what would happen next, but I picked up a size L shirt anyway and attempted to put it on. It felt like an iron maiden – the shirt wouldn’t even have been large enough for most of my size M friends. It pressed down on my lungs and sides, constricting me, choking me, but I continued to try and force the buttons closed. I was pressing down so hard on my sides that my vision had begun to grow fuzzy and my eyes swam with stars, but the shirt gave way before me. The seams joining the back to the front tore apart and I could breathe again.
Buttoned up it still rolled up over my stomach, and pinched about my arms, itched at the back of my neck. I turned and walked onwards, ready for the next stage in the ritual. A full-length mirror lay embedded in the wall, and I stared myself down: red eyes, large bags, bloody socks, ruined shirt. It was hard not to feel deeply resentful of this alien who had occupied the glass. This beaten down, worn out stranger who barely had any resemblance to the bright, determined, vivacious person I had been when I had taken the wrong turn that brought me here. I can not even remember what I wanted to buy anymore: I can not remember many things.
I can no longer picture what my grandmother's face looks like without consulting the images on my phone. Me and my mother used to take the train to Highgate and see her every weekend, every year until she died. I remember, after the funeral and the legal affairs were settled, my mother took an old dress of hers and gave it to me for my birthday. She had had it retailored to fit me, as my grandmother was of a similar build to myself. She told me that her great-grandmother had made it for her daughter when she left home, and that my grandmother had wanted to give it to me.
I remember wearing that dress for the first time – how can I remember a dress so vividly but not my grandmother's face? I stood in front of a cheval glass in my bedroom and watched how the velvet shimmered when I moved it in the light. Some of the stitches were slightly wonky and asymmetrical, and it was not as lustrous as it had been fifty years ago, but I did not mind. I felt a sense of comfort when I wore that dress. It made me feel more connected to my family, to my history; it made me feel like less of an aberration when I looked around me and saw only waifs and models in my lectures.
But not here. There was no space for me here.
In the corner of the mirror, a mannequin loomed over me. Placed upon a plinth, its featureless face still managed to sneer at me. There were mannequins everywhere in that room, standing between each of the aisles, perfectly poised and perfectly proportioned. Frozen mid-strut, their white skin so smooth in the lights, they seemed elevated above me not just physically but symbolically as well. They were like the statues of old gods: physically flawless, never ageing, eternally assured. Vitruvian men and pin-up girls rolled into one. The human ideal.
Except that our old idols were never truly immortal. They corroded and decayed, were swallowed up by the Earth from which they were rended. Their noses snapped off, their arms bisected, their skin made rough by the rain. When these Aphrodites reach their end, after however many reincarnations it takes, they shall lay in the fields and cease to rot. No: much rather they will poison the Earth herself, and claim their final victory in obsolescence.
It is this, I argue, that makes mannequins deeply unsettling. Statues at least imply the involvement of the natural world: a singular person must have sculpted it, using tools handcrafted by others, and material extracted from the Earth. It is a painstakingly rendered depiction of an idealised figure, yes, but still a figure that must be created through the referencing and collaging of living models. The mannequin, on the other hand, is designed to efface the human touch. Objectively someone had to design the mannequin, design the machine that builds the mannequins, maintain the machine that builds the mannequins, drive the car that transports the mannequins, dress the mannequin, and finally pose the mannequin for it to arrive in its current position. But because it lacks any sense of individuality, because its body and features exist without reference to a real human being, it generates the feeling of inhumanity, of alienation.
Of course, this is the paradox of the wild and the symmetrical. Trees, for example, can grow of their own accord without human intervention yet do not generate a feeling of alienation. Mannequins, on the other hand, cannot exist without someone to build them, yet repel people. One would make a journey to look at an interesting tree, but almost no one will go to see a specific mannequin. Uniformity is antithetical to humanity, and yet it is everything that we idealise.
What happens, then, when one encounters a mannequin that really hasn’t been built by anyone? That simply made itself?
They are afraid of it, of course.
One location the shopping centre has much in common with is the hotel. According to a day and night cycle, the human mind understands that certain areas will appear to be empty at certain times. For example, a field will appear to be empty at night. However, the crucial difference between a field and a liminal space, is that the field is never truly empty, and you will not be punished for entering it. A liminal space is different. It can provide as many beverages and comforts as it wants, but to be within it is to be aware that your presence is temporary.
In his essay “Das Unheimliche” (1919), Freud noted that unheimliche was the opposite of the German word heimlich, meaning the uncanny is, literally, the unhomely. Something that is not a home. This is, perhaps, also the definition of the liminal space. It explains the major distinction between a hotel and a house. Everyone who lives in a house changes it in some way, just as any animal will alter their habitat: hotels are designed not to be changed. They must never be made homely.
I speculate that this is why hauntings have such a grip on the human imagination. We can not imagine making a space our own and then finding that all our presence and all of its effects are impermanent. Perhaps the popularity of the ‘haunted hotel’ is a method of managing this disconnect – we invent permanent residents for an ephemeral space in order to manage the cognitive dissonance of an unalterable habitat.
It is interesting, then, that show rooms are never haunted. This is likely because show rooms are never inhabited, even for a short time. They are spaces for no-one, facsimiles of comfort and domesticity that resist sincerely providing either.
I know this empirically because, after hours of walking through wooden boxes with tasteful plants and sterile furniture sitting inside of them, the building will grace me with a bedroom. I will lie down upon the clean sheets and close my eyes against the overbearing lights above me and fall asleep instantly. After all, one is supposed to sleep in a bed, so that must be what I came here for.
It is time now to return to the first compulsion I referenced earlier. If I remain in one room for too long, I begin to experience an overwhelming sensation of physical discomfort. This begins at a low-level, similar to the tight chested sensation one experiences when stressed or anxious, and begins to steadily become more unbearable. The next stage is hyper-ventilation and shaking, followed by sweating and parasthesia, then nausea, dizziness, vomiting. And then the strangest part begins.
The only time I ever reached this stage was early into my journey, when I attempted to turn around and retrace my steps. The building still sold fairly ordinary objects at that time, and so I was progressing through a section that sold garden decorations. The further back I moved, the worse my symptoms became, until I reached the point that I vomited into a flower pot and then dry-heaved saliva into the rest of them. It was then that I fell.
I would have said I tripped, but my feet hadn’t met anything. My legs simply failed to respond to my brain telling them to walk anymore, and I collapsed onto my face. Still, I refused to give up. I don’t know why. The woman who walked into this store was clearly a far stronger-willed one than who I am now. I began to crawl along the floor, dragging myself miniscule inch by miniscule inch across the clean white ground. I am fairly certain I began to scream, but the pain was so great it obliterated my memory. It felt as if someone had taken every inch of my body and had begun to twist it like an arm, like someone was pulling my neck backwards by the hair. And then I saw red against the white floor and I realised that that was exactly what was happening.
The backs of my fingers had, somehow, begun to peel off of my skeleton. My nails had fallen, no, been pulled out, leaving raw squares in their wake. These, in turn, dangled off of the pink, unfinished skin beneath, as the tops of my fingers began to curl off like peeled potato skin, dangling limply. I could see the wrinkles on my knuckles were stretching downwards – indeed, that wrinkles of skin had appeared the whole way down my arm. My entire body was reaching backwards, and I could do nothing but obey it.
Being betrayed by my own body is not a new feeling. But it has never been as acute or as violent as it was in that moment.
And given how violent the efforts of the building to make me progress are, it is notable that the one exception to this is the beds. I may linger on a bed for however long I wish until I fall asleep, and it is only when I awake that I must continue my journey. Unfortunately, by the time I reach a bed I am so physically exhausted that I fall asleep almost immediately, and so I do not consciously experience a break from walking. This, I propose, is the intention. The building wishes me to progress and do nothing but progress, but if a basic human need for sleep is not fulfilled then I will not be able to. The best method then is to work me until I collapse, provide me with no dreams or memories associated with my period of rest, and then make me continue immediately after waking, thereby creating a seemingly constant experience of movement from my perspective. The building is most intelligent.
I often wonder what happens in the building while I am asleep. When I am awake, I appear to be entirely alone. I never hear or talk to anyone. I never find any traces of anyone else ever having been here. Strangely, I still have access to the internet, but only to look at other people. I can watch videos on YouTube or scroll through Instagram reels and photo albums, but If I try to type any messages or leave any comments they simply will not send. But there is a very real difference between seeing a person through the cultivated image they project online and being able to actually see, smell, and touch somebody in the flesh.
There is nowhere to charge my phone, and my battery pack has run out, so I only use it minimally now in order to type out this essay. I write all of my first and second drafts on various labels or parts of fabric I’ve cut off. The building was generous enough to allow me to walk through a stationary store once, though it did not give me a notebook. It also let me walk through a whole room filled with phone displays, but none of them came with chargers. Subjectively, it felt like it was laughing at me.
And this is what makes it so hard to believe that I am truly alone. There is intention in everything that happens to me: either to torment me or to keep me alive. Or to erase my presence. For, every time that I awake, those fluorescent lights digging into my skull, the showrooms exactly the same as they were when I slept, and begin to walk, I look behind me and find that the bed has already been remade.
How many other people have been here? How many other people have walked through these exact same rooms and slept in the exact same beds as me? Perhaps they are all still here, only further ahead of me. Maybe, if I could work up the strength to run, I could catch up to someone. But I don’t. The building's eagerness for me to go forward makes me resistant to speeding up the process.
Is there any end to this place? Does everyone who comes here just continue walking forever until they die of old age? Or do we all just end up at some final room where there’s a pile of skeletons and no where else to go and starve to death? Or does the building just not give us any more food beyond a certain point so we just starve to death while walking?
In order to know what the purpose of my journey is, I have to know what the purpose of the building is. And in order to understand the purpose of a building, one must examine its design.
The building is strictly linear. It only moves in one direction. Therefore, the purpose of the building must be to move people towards a destination, like an airport. But if its primary purpose is to allow only linear movement, then what is the point of the appearance of the shopping centre? What is the point of all the products if they cannot be taken anywhere else, or indeed, paid for? Why compel people to use them? Why select them to generate discomfort?
I would say that the facade of the shopping centre is a form of ‘camouflage’ for the building: that is designed to blend in with a genuine shopping centre so that its prey does not realise at what point they have entered it. But then why maintain the facade the whole way through?
Describing it as a ‘camouflage’ also feels wrong. It is not a predator, it is a building. But then can’t buildings be predators? Or at least their creators? Why, for instance, do shops always place the sweet treats and the cheapest items right before the checkout? Why do airports hold you up in areas with expensive perfumes and restaurants? The same principle could apply, except for one absolute certainty: nobody ever built the building.
This is, logically, impossible. Somebody has to build a building. They are artificial environments, not natural ones. But nobody could have built this. Nobody human at least. And so perhaps asking what the purpose of the design is is utterly pointless. Nobody looks at a birch tree and starts wondering whose idea it was to give it bark that looks like eyes, after all. Maybe the building just exists. Maybe the building made itself, and now it just keeps growing, reaching ever further like a weed. Maybe its only purpose is to grow, and moving people through is just a vestigial evolutionary quirk in its mimicry, like an appendix.
A similar quirk could be the ceiling. The labyrinth of pipes and wiring above me is only thinly hidden behind various, segmented white panels. Such a design can only result from a budgetary decision – it is too expensive to fill in the whole ceiling of a building like this. But it doesn’t understand that. It’s just copying the real thing.
I often wonder what would happen if I broke them. If I puncture the pipes, will blood spill out rather than water? If I pull out the wires will I find frayed nerves within the PVC? Are there lungs inside the vents, pushing and pulling the same air forever?
Is the building wild? Does it have no plan, like me? Am I just going to walk until I find more food? Rest? Company? Am I satisfied with merely surviving, moving from one room to the next on an eternal chase like a lion in the savannah? Or am I cattle, being herded through a maze to the slaughter?
For all my speculation, I find the latter most likely. It is worth exploring all avenues of investigation in this place but, as I said earlier, everything is far too intentional not to have some sort of purpose. For example, much as the building has never sold me chargers, it has never sold me clocks. I can not see the clock on my phone either. It has, intentionally, removed every means of telling the time or assessing how long I have been here, placed me into complete isolation, and given me no respite from its cruelty. There is only one place I can think of that is designed that way. A prison.
If there is another location that has always filled me with a sense of unease, it has been toyshops. As a child, you believe that your toys are precious things, unique beings with personalities and affections. It’s why buying a new version of the same toy doesn’t cheer up a child who has lost the first: even if it looks the same, it is not the same.
Toyshops, then, despite being associated with the appetites of a budding consumerist, always upset me. One Christmas, my parents took me to a toyshop so that I could pick out whichever one I liked the most. We had never been wealthy, and they did not want to waste money on a toy I might not like, so letting me pick my own was the best financial choice. At the time, I had a favourite toy called Buzzy, who was a bee. I did not have my current range of vocabulary at the age of eight.
When we walked into the store, I saw an entire row full of stuffed bees, huddled between the tinsel and the fairy lights. I realised that every single one of these bees looked exactly like Buzzy, right down to the label on their sides. He wasn’t an individual. He wasn’t special. And I burst into tears.
My parents mistakenly believed that I was crying because I did not have exclusive ownership of Buzzy. But what had actually devastated me was what this could mean for me. As a child, everyone tries to validate you by reassuring you that you are unique. That your flaws and your imperfections (and my size was counted as an imperfection), as well as your strengths, are all entirely your own. You are completely irreplaceable. But if I could have believed such a thing about my own toy, and found that it wasn’t true, what value could the same sentiment possibly have from the mouths of my parents and teachers?
I was walking out from a lighting area – or was it bath stuffs? – and into a children's section. In the corner they had what looked like, from a distance, large baskets stuffed with toys. Having been alone for so long, and deprived of so many comforts, I decided that I would indulge myself by taking one. I had no reason to believe the building would stop me as long as I kept moving.
As I got closer, they began to resolve into what looked to be large dolls, almost as big as a young child themself. I was rather confused by this at first, but then decided that they might be designed for older children, as they were quite lifelike, enough to warrant a certain degree of care that a toddler couldn’t give.
Then I realised just how lifelike they actually were.
Piled, one on top of the other, across the several baskets, were smiling children. Each basket held a different kind of child – one a young blonde girl, another a little dark haired boy – but despite differing across the baskets, within them every child was exactly the same. They all had perfect little smiles, and none of them blinked. When I touched their skin it was cold, but not clammy, like a corpse. They weren’t decaying: they just simply weren’t alive.
I held it to one of the little girls' throats, and cut her open. Smoothly. Like a package. Her blood came out in a slow, sluggish drip. There was no heart pumping behind it.
I ran.
I know I said that I would never run. That I wouldn’t make the purpose of my imprisonment any more efficient. But I had to get away from there. I had to get away.
Not that it did me any good. It hasn’t stopped. The butcher’s aisle still sells beef and ham, but sometimes I find certain packages mislabelled. At least, I deeply hope that they are mislabelled. The padding in the lingerie bras are certainly not made out of PU foam anymore. And the show rooms are not empty. There are people standing in them, or sleeping, or seated around a table. They all smile, or laugh, or look peaceful. But none of them ever move. None of them ever breathe.
Whenever I walk past these figures, I get a strange sense of deja vu. As if I may have seen some of these people before. On the underground, on the street, on social media somewhere. I dare not touch them. I can not bear the idea of touching them and finding them cold and smooth.
And that isn’t all. You see, I met someone the other day. They were walking in the other direction to me – back towards the entrance. Wherever that is. Whenever that is. She was a woman. She was my age, and my height, and my build. She had the same mousy hair and messy up-do, the same cheap T-shirt and slobbish joggers. She even almost had my face as she passed me. Except for the fact that I have a smile line on the left-side of my face, sporadic freckles, and a chipped tooth. And when I was close to her, I could see that her freckles were perfectly symmetrical on both sides of her face. And when she smiled at me, there were no lines around her mouth. And when I could see her teeth, they were all perfectly even. Symmetrical
And then she walked past me as I stood in place and watched her go on. I stood and watched her even as my chest closed up, even as I began to shake, and hyperventilate, and felt bile rise in my throat. I stood there until I could not see her in the distance anymore and my shirt was covered with half digested meat. And then I continued to walk. Because what else is there to do?
I have written this dissertation as a final measure. I have developed a theory about this place. About its nature. And it is that this place is a desert of the artificial. A desert has its own eco-system, but it is an eco-system that rejects human attempts at artifice. Our urban lifestyle cannot be supported there. And in the exact same way, this building is an eco-system of the artificial that rejects human connections to the natural. And so, the only way to communicate that would befit the building would be an unnatural method of conveying information. A form entirely designed for a man-made world, intentionally devoid of personal emotion and casual language. A dissertation, for example.
I do not expect to escape. I only wish to convey this information to the outside world. To prevent others from becoming lost in the desert. Because I am absolutely certain that there are others. I am absolutely certain that they are already on the path here; that they have, perhaps, always been on the path their entire lives; that the path may even predate their birth.
I know why I’m here. This is a place where nothing belongs. Everything here is just waiting to leave, and everything is interchangeable because it’s all the same, inside and out. And to take an object out of a shop, you need to exchange something of equal worth. Something with symbolic value. But nothing here can have real value because they are all equally disposable. They are not wild things. And, perhaps, that is why they need to bring the forest to them.
Because nature is not symmetrical.
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