A corridor is a funnel that narrows and tightens until–what? A door? Another passageway? That’s the ecstasy and the agony of a corridor. It is both exhilarating and terrifying, pleasurable and horrible.
In his non-fiction book about horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King writes:
Nothing is so frightening as what’s behind the closed door. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. ‘A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible’, the audience thinks, ‘but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall’.
The artistic work of horror is almost always a disappointment. It is the classic no-win situation. You can scare people with the unknown for a long, long time but sooner or later, as in poker, you have to turn your cards up. You have to open the door and show the audience what’s behind it.
There are corridors that lead to closed doors behind which unspeakable horror and grief may reside. And with each wary step forward, we grow new disaster. We give it a makeover with new and more terrifying faces and voices, and then we give the makeover a makeover. If the loss of my current job would be devastating, the prospect that I would go jobless for months is even more devastating. If a bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible, a bug a hundred feet tall would be even more horrible. And when the doors at the end of the corridors are opened, revealing something bad–but not too bad–we may be relieved. But we are also bone-tired from trepidation, from harrowing minutes or hours, searing days or months spent in the corridor.
The Sanctuary of a Corridor is a transitional place, a place suspended in time, a nether world through which the impending door is but a faint, dark outline in the distance. And terrible or wonderful as this transition may be, we live large here. If nightmares grow arms and legs of epic proportions, so may dreams.
Lauren Oliver of NPR describes John Crowley’s novel, Little, Big as a strange novel which might be best regarded through the metaphor of its central setting: Edgewood, the house in which many generations (and permutations) of the Drinkwater family live. Edgewood is designed by the patriarch, a renowned architect, to be many houses within a single structure. It unfolds, as the viewer circles around it, to reveal many different facades — Victorian, modern, gothic — like a complex piece of origami.
Edgewood is a house of corridors that unfold like a complex piece of origami. Here is a place where one might dream her way through a nether world of possibilities. Crowley writes:
She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl’s wings and talons and became other than conscious.
This is the stuff that the best corridors are made of: consciousness that grew owl’s wings and talons, moments when the sparkling darkness behind [one’s] lids became ordered and doors opened. I can say with certainty that I, too, have lived my best life in dreams. In dreams, I have said and done what I could not (or would not) in consciousness. I have lived larger than my humble existence in a perpetual state of possibilities.
In the corridor, as the director of my own feature film, I can cut scenes that fail to inspire, re-shoot those that deserve closer, tighter frames, and filter light in such a glorious way that I appear, scene after scene, with softer edges, back-lit and haloed. Corridors permit such creative license, for in a suspended state, anything and everything is possible.
In this state, I have walked down corridors to interviews. With each step, I created scenes in which titles and salaries grew exponentially as I moved towards the door. In this state, I have walked down corridors to obstetricians’ offices. With each step, I created scenes in which the babies I held were beautiful boys, then beautiful girls, then armfuls of beautiful boys and girls. And in this state, I have walked down corridors to doors through which I would never enter again. With each step, I relived the best of the years inside those buildings, embellishing them with richer notes and hues.
In the end, the Sanctuary of a Corridor is a necessary journey for many of us, the time we can spend anticipating, mulling, wondering, and dreaming. Destinations with all their inevitability will always be there, waiting with resolute doors that will open into what they must. For those who live their best lives in dreams, doors that stay closed–if only for a moment longer–offer a few more yards of corridor in the sparkling darkness behind one’s lids.
