Do you ever think about your ceilings? I do. Sometimes. Not very often. I mean, they just hang there, right?

Wrong. They mean something.

I was sitting in my desk chair this afternoon, taking a brief break from housecleaning – shredding some of the crapity crap crap people insist on sending me snailmail. I leaned back in the chair and looked up at my ceilings, and this is what I saw:

click to enlarge

And for some reason, looking up at my ceilings – which as you see are cottage cheese, acoustic ceilings – made me suddenly quite happy. Maybe because my place has a new roof, and this ceiling is one of the structures that keeps me safe from the elements. Maybe because the texture is so silly, imperfect and benign. Maybe because I’ve been in other places with such ceilings, in which I felt accepted, safe and loved.

I’ve thought about ceilings before. Several years ago, I wrote a prose poem/short story called Shasta in the Wind, in which the protagonist faces the prospect of suicide:

Walter looked at his idea, blue steel reflecting nothing in the dim lit room. There was nothing at all but weight in his hands. The sandpipers skittered and poked the sand about his feet and Shasta tugged, and then he heard it: Far at the southern end of Tar Harbor came the Amtrak he was waiting for. The ride he was promised, for which he held the ticket in his hands, and Shasta tugged the other end of it. Walter looked down and saw the air around the dog was going blue and the dog was pulling him into the blue. He felt with his tongue for a place for his big idea to fit; felt lightly as rising smoke the coffered ceiling of despair.

Ha ha! The roof of the mouth becomes a ceiling of despair, and the perfect place to fit the muzzle of poor Walter’s little gun. Does he do it? Read the story and find out, good pilgrim; I’m not giving it away.

And why coffered, you ask, beyond the obvious? Why, check this out, in good old T.S. Eliot:

In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her
strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or
liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours;
stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these
ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern
on the coffered ceiling.

You’ll find that in A Game of Chess, one of the sections of The Waste Land.

In college, I did a senior paper on Eliot’s poems, which included observations on eroticism. My professor, whom I admired greatly, said that the eroticism in Prufrock was gay, but I didn’t buy that. He also said there was a symbolic vagina in the laquearia, the coffered ceiling, in the text above. I had some trouble paying cash for that one too. But so it goes.

As a final observation on the importance of ceilings, I refer you to the films of Orson Wells.

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