The House Seen from Nowhere

Author: Keith Waldrop

Publisher: Litmus Press (2002)

In Keith Waldrop’s The House Seen from Nowhere, we are invited into a meditational drift that explores the “tense emptiness” of being. The construction of all that surrounds us, the carpentry, wavering between order and the instability of order, is manifest in syntax and etymology. In this house, which is all things—body, fortress, residence, logic, language, mortality—we find mirrors, echoes, and spirits: “the figures light/delineates not/the light itself.” Where we might use Zeno’s Paradox to understand the relation between the knower and the known, it is in Keith’s house that we find the paradox of “empty distinctions,” a tension between asymmetrical opposites. The house exists “not to inclose but / to include // without redemption.”