(01)
The Bed (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
I Am Vertical
But I would rather be horizontal.
Sylvia Plath
The world included her phone, her bed, these jewels.
Sheila Heti, Pure Colour
There’s no place like my room.
Phoebe Bridgers
My eyes are still heavy. I remain lying in bed, shielded from physical dangers, from polluted air, from the endless flood of information, from obligations, from the infinitely reproduced actions that make up the routine of daily life. Shielded from illness, from the compulsion to form an opinion on every event. Threats grow ever more visible, and my body’s response is stillness. I fold into myself. Objects that tether me to the world lie scattered on the carpet, orbiting around my handbag. They seem to be looking longingly at me. Beyond the curtain—the line that separates here from elsewhere—it smells of anguish. The city never sleeps. The remnants of a heart pierced by an arrow can be glimpsed on the fogged-up window. Everything slows down. It’s cold outside.
I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night.
I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Months ago, the term “bed rotting” went viral: the deliberate retreat into bed, rejecting responsibilities and the demand for productivity until one feels rested enough—or until muscle atrophy sets in. If movement is associated with progress and transformation, social media encourages us to stay horizontal, to retreat into a pretty room. The heroine of this aesthetic is the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh. In it, a twenty-something woman decides to spend an entire year hibernating in her New York apartment, aided by pharmaceuticals that deepen her sense of depersonalization.
The bed is my stage, where I seek protection. Warm beds, glass-walled rooms, climate-controlled interiors. I wonder how much of this space between the sheets—or the perimeter of the sofa—is public, and how much is private. Beneath the utopia of becoming one with my bed, of reveling in comfort, lies the beating heart of somnolent Victorian ladies dismissed as fragile, under the conviction that sleep was a feminine indulgence. In winter, I behave like a melancholic animal: curled up, I seek warmth.
The truth is, I’m not alone. From my bed, I see without being seen—or so I think. I caress the laptop screen because I am still a body among bodies. I open the browser and access the world outside, the world beyond the bed. This reality, which I allow to rest beside me while sharing a pillow, feels more ordered, slower. It is more fantastic than the one waiting beyond the bedroom door. And yet, how much of online life still hurts.
I yawn and, as it could not be otherwise, I dream in images.
If I kept going, I thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form.
This was my hope. This was my dream.
Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Every night, I gaze at the vast space that opens at the foot of my bed. I rest and trust that I will wither here, and then I will bloom. I will rise from the bed and take a hot bath to feel more like myself than ever before.
The longer I lay there in the clear, hot water, the purer I felt, and when I finally got out and wrapped myself in one of the big, soft, white hotel towels, I felt pure and sweet as a baby.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
(02)
Entropy (Tracey Emin)
I am rooted, but I flow.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
I transit in a thousand pieces.
Translated from: Nuria Gómez Gabriel, Traumacore.
Crónicas de una disociación feminista
In the late nineties, Tracey Emin spent four days in bed, navigating what she called “a complete and absolute breakdown.” This mundane furniture became the stage for her depressive episode, an experiment in flirting with the abyss. And chaos ensued. At the foot of Emin’s bed laid a wreckage, like debris washed ashore after a storm: empty cigarette cartons, vodka bottles, makeup, newspapers, crumpled tissues, a pregnancy test, a stuffed dog and used underwear. These objects bore witness to her isolation and vulnerability. The artist recalled that at one point, she got up to get a glass of water. When she looked at the chaos she had created, she saw art.
The artwork My Bed draws attention as a sign of the absence of the body. The bedsheets, stained with menstrual blood, remind me of details such as folds of fabrics of Baroque sculptures made by the great masters. A fold creates texture. A turbulence like sea foam, inseparable from darkness, secrecy, and pain. To look at Emin’s work is to know that these remnants of an emotional shipwreck tell a story.
Emin recreated her bed so it could be exhibited. It is a self-portrait, a confession. But the bedsheets can also be read as a canvas that dialogues with the omnipresence of beds in art history. Since the Renaissance, beds have been showcases for female nudity or settings for erotic scenes, always complicit in the male gaze. On Emin’s bed, the grotesque and the visceral lie horizontally, staging the rupture of traditional feminine expectations.
For a Victorian woman, the greatest liberation was to stretch her dreaming body within her bed, uncorseted, freed from the decorum dictated by the morality of her time. In Emin’s era, it was the messy and confessional aesthetic of the work that proved transgressive.
I find myself flirting with the idea of life as a succession of beds, of rooms both mine and borrowed, sometimes cluttered with objects that say something about me, sometimes minimalist, testifying that my self is elsewhere. Always horizontal, I watch objects pile around me: fragments of my personal history: photos, drawings, glasses, half-written postcards…
(03)
The Desk (Creative Shelter)
Here is relative. Here is where I am connected and where my writing emerges. Here is a connected room of one’s own, but a room of one’s own does not always stay the same, although it is invariably a space for privacy and concentration.
Remedios Zafra, A Connected Room of One’s Own
Lying in bed is not just escapism. Tied to illness, eroticism, and death, this furniture has also become a creative space. Lying next to my laptop, I savor my coffee before swallowing it, and I remind myself that I always create from my body. Inside room 44, I feel less suffocated by daily life.
A hotel can also be a room of one’s own, to borrow Virginia Woolf’s phrase—a personal yet collective space to think, write, and create. Inevitably, I fantasize about the Barbizon, a women-only hotel that opened in 1927 in Manhattan, a few years after women won the right to vote. Young women from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, seeking careers, romance, or adventure, projected their dreams onto spaces like these, which offered an escape from the family home and a semblance of security in a still-unequal society.
The Barbizon rooms, furnished with single beds and desks, offered independence and inspiration to women who would later become literary icons, like Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion. Yet the energy of the Barbizon also came from its communal spaces: opulent and enormous lounges. As Plath wrote to her mother, guests were encouraged to dress elegantly and femininely, contributing to the atmosphere that would make the hotel a legend for decades. I imagine the poet caught in the act of writing, sitting at the desk of my hotel room, with her back to me, with that aura of sophisticated mystery. Her outfit combines what were undoubtedly her colors: red, white, and black.
All hotels make me think of the artist Sophie Calle. This one is no exception, because the room number coincides with one of the rooms featured in her project L’Hôtel (1981–1983). Calle worked for several weeks as a maid in a Venetian hotel, and had the opportunity to photograph the personal belongings of the guests, document the state of the rooms, and speculate on the identities of their temporary occupants, blurring the line between fiction and reality. What would the artist think of the belongings that accompany me? Would she be equally fascinated and make them public through her photographs? Are they anything more than subtle approximations of a self I never quite know how to capture?
A hotel room, once everything has been packed away and your
mess is all that remains, your mess, becomes a beautiful trace of you.
Translated from: Alessandro Baricco, Questa storia
It is sunset. Amber rays play across the cover of one of my books. I pick it up and choose a phrase at random to start writing. I want to narrate the traces of these imaginary guests, to listen absentmindedly as their stories intertwine in the hotel’s lounge. Let their voices lull me to sleep and keep me warm.
