BOOK TWO: SEPARATION -- The Separations in His Vision and Under His Rule
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind --
As if my Brain had split --
I tried to match it -- Seam by Seam --
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before --
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls -- upon the Floor.
-- EMILY DICKINSON, 1896
WHERE HE BEGINS
Separation
I begin to sing of rich-haired Demeter, awful goddess -- of her and her trim-ankled daughter whom Aidoneus rapt away, given to him by all-seeing Zeus, the loud-thunderer.
-- Homeric Hymn to Demeter
Her womb from her body. Separation. Her clitoris from her vulva. Cleaving. Desire from her body. We were told that bodies rising to heaven lose their vulvas, their ovaries, wombs, that her body in resurrection becomes a male body.
The Divine Image from woman, severing, immortality from the garden, exile, the golden calf split, birth, sorrow, suffering. We were told that the blood of a woman after childbirth conveys uncleanness. That if a woman's uterus is detached and falls to the ground, that she is unclean. Her body from the sacred. Spirit from flesh. We were told that if a woman has an issue and that issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be impure for seven days. The impure from the pure. The defiled from the holy. And whoever touches her, we heard, was also impure. Spirit from matter. And we were told that if our garments are stained we are unclean back to the time we can remember seeing our garments unstained, that we must rub seven substances over these stains, and immerse our soiled garments.
Separation. The clean from the unclean. The decaying, the putrid, the polluted, the fetid, the eroded, waste, defecation, from the unchanging. The changing from the sacred. We heard it spoken that if a grave is plowed up in a field so that the bones of the dead are lost in the soil of the field, this soil conveys uncleanness. That if a member is severed from a corpse, this too conveys uncleanness, even an olive pit's bulk of flesh. That if marrow is left in a bone there is uncleanness. And of the place where we gathered to weep near the graveyard, we heard that planting and sowing were forbidden since our grieving may have tempted unclean flesh to the soil. And we learned that the dead body must be separated from the city.
Death from the city. Wilderness from the city. Wildness from the city. The Cemetery. The Garden. The Zoological Garden. We were told that a wolf circled the walls of the city. That he ate little children. That he ate women. That he lured us away from the city with his tricks. That he was a seducer and he feasted on the flesh of the foolish, and the blood of the errant and sinful stained the snow under his jaws.
The errant from the city. The ghetto. The ghetto of Jews. The ghetto of Moors. The quarter of prostitutes. The ghetto of blacks. The neighborhood of lesbians. The prison. The witch house. The underworld. The underground. The sewer. Space Divided. The inch. The foot. The mile. The boundary. The border. The nation. The promised land. The chosen ones. The prophets, the elect, the vanguard, the sanctified, the canonized, and the canonizers. We were told that when he tried to rape her, she said, "No, it is against God's wishes." That although she was stabbed fourteen times, she did not raise her hands to stop him, but only to prevent her defilement. That she forgave him afterward. That her mother forgave him. We were told that because of these acts she was blessed, that we were to look on her as a saint.
Anger from her body. Intellect from her body. Separation. Interrogation. Purification. The test by fire. Space Divided: Heaven from hell. Time Divided: Mortality from immortality. Cataclysm. The last judgment. Judgment from emotion, from sensation. Sensation from idea. The sensation of color from the ray of light. Optics. Music from the sound wave. Acoustics. The laws of nature from nature. The lasting from the transient. The story came down to us that he feared she might conceive a son and that this son might depose him. The immutable from the mutable. Res extensa. Res cogitans. Splitting. Reduction. Sensual fact peeled away from number. Number. Measurement. The measured from the immeasurable. Quantity from the cave of illusions. The mind from the body. Thus we heard that he coaxed her to him and then he opened his mouth and swallowed her whole, that he was then seized with a raging headache, that his skull seemed to burst, that from his skull was born a daughter in his image, wielding a sword and shouting.
Her will from her body. The knower from the known. The speaker from the mute. Self from self. From the nocturnal. From the nightmare. Discovery from dream. Her will from her body. We were told in a story that he pursued her. That she fled from him. She fled into the water. She became a fish. He became a beaver. She leaped ashore. She became an otter, a pig, a fox, a mare, a lion. He became a lynx, a bear, a wolf, an elk, a tiger. She became a goose. He became a swan. That he forced her to his will and she bore his daughter.
Her name from her daughter. The named from the unnamed. The spoken from the spoken. The daughter from the mother. Somewhere we heard the story that she who made the earth yield, the seed grow, had her daughter taken from her. We heard that one day when her daughter was playing in the fields the earth separated and that from this gaping crevice sprang her abductor. That she dreaded him. That not knowing he had blessed this event, she cried out for help from her father. That not knowing one nearby could hear from her cave, she cried out rape. That wishing for her mother she cried out again and again and her voice rang against mountains and across seas until it reached her mother's ears. Cleaving. The part from the whole. The reduction of the element from the compound. Nitrogen from liquid air by boiling. Oxygen from air by boiling. Hydrogen from water by electric current, by steam passed over hot carbon. We knew from this story that her mother was seized with pain when she heard her daughter's cry. It occurs to us that she must have felt herself rent apart. That she flew like a wild bird, we were told, over land and sea, asking what had happened to her daughter. That no one would tell her the truth. Carbon dioxide separated from limestone by heat. Iodine oxidized from sea water, bromide oxidized from sea water, chlorine from the electrolysis of salt, fluorine from the electrolysis of salt. We remembered that finally she met one who had heard her daughter's cry. That together they searched for her, that together they carried torches, that they learned the story together of her daughter's rape, that the sunlight told them she was lost to her mother. That her mother became bitter, we knew, that she was unforgiving, that she left herself, that she lived in the body of an old woman, in the body of a housekeeper, and played the part of a nurse. (That she cared for the son of a king, while she shaped the body of this boy over her fires into immortality.) That finally she revealed herself in rage. But that though she demanded to be recognized for who she was, no recognition would appease her. That she remembered her daughter, the soft hair down her spine. Her daughter's voice. Her terror. And that she could do nothing to save her. She ate nothing. She drank nothing. She refused existence. She was mute. She withheld herself. She was numb. And the earth would not yield, and the seed would not sprout. The land was devastated and the sea shrank into itself in an agony of loss and the sky was black with dread. Silver from lead. Copper. Gold. Silicon from sand, quartz, rock, crystal, potassium from sylvite, carnalite, langbeinite from ancient sea beds, platinum from iridium, osmium, palladium from alluvial deposits, manganese from oxide, silicates and carbonates from the floor of the oceans, plutonium from uranium, uranium from pitchblende, uraninite, carnotite, phosphate rock.
Loss. Grief. Parting. The gentle from the terrible. Suffering from knowledge. Separation. Tearing away. Breaking. The skin of the sea otter we were told from the sea otter that the world would be tested by fire, the tusk of the elephant that souls would be weighed from the elephant and judged according to a balance sheet the pelt of each life of the fox from the fox that there is a book the feather of the egret in which everything has been inscribed from the egret, the weed that the risen will wear this book around their necks as a passport from the flower, the metal from the mountain, uranium from the metal, plutonium from uranium, the electron from the atom, the atom splitting, energy from matter, the womb, spirit, from her body, from matter, cataclysm, splitting, the chromosome split, spirit burned from flesh, desire devastated from the earth.
The Image
SPANISH DANCER (oil, cardboard) We testify WOMAN AND CHILD (ink, chalk, paper) that we were called woman. WOMAN IN WHITE MANTILLA (oil, canvas) We were called woman STANDING NUDE WITH RAISED ARMS (gouache) and we were called nature HEAD OF A WOMAN (sepia wash) and we were the objects HEAD (oil, canvas) THE DRESSING TABLE (oil, canvas) BOTTLE OF RUM (oil, canvas) of his art. LANDSCAPE (oil, canvas) STILL LIFE (oil, canvas) THE MODEL (oil, canvas) WOMAN IN AN ARMCHAIR (gouache, watercolor) TABLE IN FRONT OF AN OPEN WINDOW (gouache, watercolor) WOMAN WITH FAN (oil, canvas) TWO NUDES (gouache, pencil) STILL LIFE (oil) We were the objects SEATED DANCER WOMAN AT THE BEACH MOTHER AND CHILD HEAD OF A WOMAN MATERNITY SEATED NUDE THREE NUDES of his art Mata Hari (her navel is like a round goblet) Salome (always filled) Delilah (her belly like a heap of wheat) Eve (surrounded by lilies) Lolita (her breasts like two young roes) and these were the names Helen of Troy (her eyes) Guinevere (like fish pools) we were given Clytemnestra (the joints of her thighs) the Sirens (like jewels).
The Sirens We say (She was a Phantom) these were the names (of delight) we were given, Annabel Lee (a lovely apparition sent) We say these were the stories La Belle Dame Sans Merci of our lives. (To be a moment's ornament) We were called Miss Prue and Pamela and Dora, old bag, old bawd, Potiphar's wife and Hera, the nagging wife of Zeus (my wife with the hourglass waist) we were called Lilith and the Daughters of Zion, Jezebel and Madame Flaubert and the nagging wife of Socrates (with the wait of an otter in tiger's jaws) and bitch and crone and cunt and the Lady of the Lake (with eyelashes like strokes of childish writing) and the nagging wife of Abraham Lincoln and we were called Justine, we were called Lady Brett Ashley, we were called The False Duessa, harlot, heifer, mare and the nagging wife (my wife with the matchstick wrists) of Rip Van Winkle (whose neck is pearl barley) we were called quail, slattern and Lady Macbeth (whose throat is a golden dale) we were called shrew, we were called sow, we were called vixen (with the springtime buttocks, and sex of seaweed and stale sweets, with mirror sex, with eyes of wood always under the ax).
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We say we were called woman WOMAN SLEEPING we were called good
as gold WOMAN IN AN ARMCHAIR we were called Sonia Semyonova,
Little Dorrit WOMAN'S HEAD AND SELF-PORTRAIT and we were
called Patient Griselda WOMAN IN A GARDEN HEAD OF A BULL AND
JUG (oil, canvas) CAT EATING A BIRD (oil, canvas) WOMAN SEATED IN
ARMCHAIR (oil, canvas) WOMAN AND BIRD CAGE BY WINDOW
WOMAN IN ARMCHAIR HEAD OF A WOMAN WITH EARRINGS WOMEN
OF ALGIERS PORTRAIT OF DORA MAAR PORTRAIT OF JACQUELINE
PORTRAIT OF MME. H.P. WOMAN IN A TURKISH COSTUME IN ARMCHAIR
NUDE UNDER A PINE TREE WOMEN AND CHILDREN THE
SABINES NUDE SEATED NUDES STANDING NUDE RECLINING WOMAN
NUDE WOMAN WITH BIRD BUST OF A WOMAN WOMAN STILL LIFE
WOMEN STILL LIFE WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN
WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN
WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN
WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN
WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN
WOMAN WOMAN
WOMAN
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WOMAN
Woman of Woman belonging to
Woman given to Woman sent for (But
the women, it was written, and the little ones,
and the cattle and all that is in the city, even all the
spoil thereof shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat
the spoil of thine enemies.) Woman taken, WOMAN (It is written that
the whole mind and body of woman changes by virtue of the male
power of fecundation in coitu.) subjugated. woman drawn hither and
thither (And it is written that the meaning of woman is to be meaningless.)
woman known (And it is pronounced that as a man knows a
flower or a tree, and possesses these objects with his mind, that in the
moment of carnal knowledge both husband and wife are changed forever;
he can never return to ignorance, she never returns to virginity.)
wife, wife of, wife belonging to (And the body of the wife, it is set
down, is part of the body of the husband. And it is recorded that of
that body, she is the flesh, and he is the head.)
Marriage
Dearly beloved, you have come here to be united into this holy estate We are the empty vessel it behooveth you, then, to declare, in the presence of God and these witnesses we are the body the flesh the sincere intent you both have. We are one with him Who giveth this woman to be married to this man? and he is the one. Wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded husband We bear his name to live with him after God's ordinance in the holy state of matrimony? His knowledge is our knowledge, what he asks of us we give. Matter impressed. We are the background, the body, we receive. Matter impressed with heat. The enlarging of the molecule. The polymerization of material. The desirable flexibility. The formation of plastic. We have heard the story of the foolish virgins who were not always waiting for the bridegrooms. We wait. The making of plasticity. The material molded to desire. The synthesis of polyamide. The coupling of hexamethylene diamine with adipic acid. Nylon. We have heard the story of Zeus's mother, of how she forbade marriage to Zeus, of how she feared the violence of his lust. The material shaped. Of how Zeus raped his mother. Phenol mixed with formaldehyde. We comply. Bakelite. The material shaped at will. Ethylene reacting with chlorine. Polyvinyl chloride. Polystyrene. Plexiglass. Polythene. Polythylene. We know that after Zeus married Hera he angered her with infidelity. And we heard that after she rebelled against him he hung her from the sky, putting golden bracelets around her wrists and anvils about her ankles. The material easily shaped. We obey. Artificial rubber. Artificial wood. Artificial leather. Easily used. Teflon. Silicone. Corfam. Malleable. Cellophane. Polyurethane foam. Mutable. Glass fiber resins. Bent to use. DDT 24-D. Ammonic detergent. We have heard the story of Daphne. That she did not want to marry. That when Apollo pursued her, she fled. That when he seized her, she would not yield and she called out for help to her father, and that her father changed her to a laurel tree. And we heard that after this Apollo told her, "Your leaf shall know no decay. You shall always be as you are now, and I shall wear you for my crown." Benzene. Hexachloride. We yield. Dichlorobenzene solvents. Polypropylene plastics. Design. The formation of the earth in strata. The convenient stratification of the elements. The utility of the complexities of the earth. The convenience of resources. The availability of treasure. We were told that we exist for his needs, that we are a necessity. Mineral salt. Coal. Metallic ores. That it is in our nature to be needed. The production of soil for agriculture. The general dispersal of metals useful to man. The disposition of certain animals for domestication. The provision of food and raiment by plants and animals. The size of animals in relation to man. The convenience of the size of goats for milking. The convenience of the size of ripened corn. The value of labor. The labor theory of value. Her labor married to his value. We were told that Zeus swallowed Metis whole Her labor that from his belly disappearing she gave him advice. Her labor not counted in his production. We are the empty vessel, the background, the body. His name given to her labor. The wife of the laborer called working class. The wife of the shopkeeper called petit bourgeois. The wife of the factory owner called bourgeois. We were told that since it is in our nature to be needed wilt thou love him, comfort him, honor him, obey him that his need is our need and keep him in sickness and in health and that his happiness is our happiness and forsaking all others, keep thee only to him in all things, so long as you both shall live? And if we should suffer at his hands In the presence of God and these witnesses. I take thee we must have wished for this suffering to be my wedded husband that his sins are our sins and plight thee my troth that without him, we are not till death do us part.
POWER (HE TAMES WHAT IS WILD)
The Hunt
Is it by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the milky way?
-- HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick
And at last she could bear the burden of herself no more. She was to be had for the taking, To be had for the taking.
-- D. H. LAWRENCE, Lady Chatterley's Lover
She has captured his heart. She has overcome him. He cannot tear his eyes away. He is burning with passion. He cannot live without her. He pursues her. She makes him pursue her. The faster she runs, the stronger his desire. He will overtake her. He will make her his own. He will have her. (The boy chases the doe and her yearling for nearly two hours. She keeps running despite her wounds. He pursues her through pastures, over fences, groves of trees, crossing the road, up hills, volleys of rifle shots sounding, until perhaps twenty bullets are embedded in her body.) She has no mercy. She has dressed to excite his desire. She has no scruples. She has painted herself for him. She makes supple movements to entice him. She is without a soul. Beneath her painted face is flesh, are bones. She reveals only part of herself to him. She is wild. She flees whenever he approaches. She is teasing him. (Finally, she is defeated and falls and he sees that half of her head has been blown off, that one leg is gone, her abdomen split from her tail to her head, and her organs hang outside her body. Then four men encircle the fawn and harvest her too.) He is an easy target, he says. He says he is pierced. Love has shot him through, he says. He is a familiar mark. Riddled. Stripped to the bone. He is conquered, he says. (The boys, fond of hunting hare, search in particular for pregnant females.) He is fighting for his life. He faces annihilation in her, he says. He is losing himself to her, he says. Now, he must conquer her wildness, he says, he must tame her before she drives him wild, he says. (Once catching their prey, they step on her back, breaking it, and they call this "dancing on the hare.") Thus he goes on his knees to her. Thus he wins her over, he tells her he wants her. He makes her his own. He encloses her. He encircles her. He puts her under lock and key. He protects her. (Approaching the great mammals, the hunters make little sounds which they know will make the elephants form a defensive circle.) And once she is his, he prizes his delight. He feasts his eyes on her. He adorns her luxuriantly. He gives her ivory. He gives her perfume. (The older matriarchs stand to the outside of the circle to protect the calves and younger mothers.) He covers her with the skins of mink, beaver, muskrat, seal, raccoon, otter, ermine, fox, the feathers of ostriches, osprey, egret, ibis. (The hunters then encircle that circle and fire first into the bodies of the matriarchs. When these older elephants fall, the younger panic, yet unwilling to leave the bodies of their dead mothers, they make easy targets.) And thus he makes her soft. He makes her calm. He makes her grateful to him. He has tamed her, he says. She is content to be his, he says. (In the winter, if a single wolf has leaped over the walls of the city and terrorized the streets, the hunters go out in a band to rid the forest of the whole pack.) Her voice is now soothing to him. Her eyes no longer blaze, but look on him serenely. When he calls to her, she gives herself to him. Her ferocity lies under him. (The body of the great whale is strapped with explosives.) Now nothing of the old beast remains in her. (Eastern Bison, extinct 1825; Spectacled Cormorant, extinct 1852; Cape Lion, extinct 1865; Bonin Night Heron, extinct 1889; Barbary Lion, extinct 1922; Great Auk, extinct 1944.) And he can trust her wholly with himself. So he is blazing when he enters her, and she is consumed. (Florida Key Deer, vanishing; Wild Indian Buffalo, vanishing; Great Sable Antelope, vanishing.) Because she is his, she offers no resistance. She is a place of rest for him. A place of his making. And when his flesh begins to yield and his skin melts into her, he becomes soft, and he is without fear; he does not lose himself; though something in him gives way, he is not lost in her, because she is his now: he has captured her.
The Zoological Garden
Wild, wild things will turn on you
You have got to set them free.
-- CRIS WILLIAMSON, "Wild Things"
In the cage is the lion. She paces with her memories. Her body is a record of her past. As she moves back and forth, one may see it all: the lean frame, the muscular legs, the paw enclosing long sharp claws, the astonishing speed of her response. She was born in this garden. She has never in her life stretched those legs. Never darted farther than twenty yards at a time. Only once did she use her claws. Only once did she feel them sink into flesh. And it was her keeper's flesh. Her keeper whom she loves, who feeds her, who would never dream of harming her, who protects her. Who in his mercy forgave her mad attack, saying this was in her nature, to be cruel at a whim, to try to kill what she loves. He had come into her cage as he usually did early in the morning to change her water, always at the same time of day, in the same manner, speaking softly to her, careful to make no sudden movement, keeping his distance, when suddenly she sank down, deep down into herself, the way wild animals do before they spring, and then she had risen on all her strong legs, and swiped him in one long, powerful, graceful movement across the arm. How lucky for her he survived the blow. The keeper and his friends shot her with a gun to make her sleep. Through her half-open lids she knew they made movements around her. They fed her with tubes. They observed her. They wrote comments in notebooks. And finally they rendered a judgment. She was normal. She was a normal wild beast, whose power is dangerous, whose anger can kill, they had said. Be more careful of her, they advised. Allow her less excitement. Perhaps let her exercise more. She understood none of this. She understood only the look of fear in her keeper's eyes. And now she paces. Paces as if she were angry, as if she were on the edge of frenzy. The spectators imagine she is going through the movements of the hunt, or that she is readying her body for survival. But she knows no life outside the garden. She has no notion of anger over what she could have been, or might be. No idea of rebellion.
It is only her body that knows of these things, moving her, daily, hourly, back and forth, back and forth, before the bars of her cage.
The Garden
And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.... Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
-- GENESIS 3:12, 23, 24
She was in the garden, sequestered behind bushes, as night came, just as the other children were called in, and so she stayed quiet, she said, as a mouse, so that she could be out there alone. And when the cries of the others had gone indoors, in this new silence she began to hear the movements of birds. So she stayed still and watched them. Then she felt, she said, the earth beneath her feet coming closer to her. And she began to play with the berries and the plants and finally to whisper to the birds.
And the birds, she said afterward, whispered to her. And thus when, hearing her mother's frightened voice, she appeared finally from the dark tangle of trees and shrubs, her face was so radiant that her mother, amazed to see this new joy in her daughter, did not tell her then what she knew she would soon have to say. That those bushes her daughter hid behind can also hide strangers, that for her shadows speak danger, that in such places little girls must be afraid.
HIS VIGILANCE (HOW HE MUST KEEP WATCH)
Space Divided
Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth.
-- WILLIAM BLAKE, The proverbs of Hell
Miletus initiated the practice of the mathematical "plat," based not on a topographical reality but on numerical configurations.
-- SIBYL MOHOLY-NAGY, Matrix of Man
The mile. The acre. The inch and the foot. The gallon and the ton. The upper and lower, left and right, side, front, back, under, ante, post. The large and the small. Number and name. Perimeter. Classification. Separation. Shape.
***
Space Divided.
***
The Mile. As in thirty miles north of Oklahoma City (is a plant for the manufacture of plutonium) or six miles west of St. Louis (is the St. Louis Public Zoo) or one mile and a half north of Soledad (lies the Central Facility for Soledad State Prison) or two hundred miles southwest of Berlin (in the district of Bamberg, there once existed a house for the trying of witches) or six miles west of the city of Corona (is the California Institution for Women) or two miles south of Napa (is Napa State Hospital for the mentally ill).
***
Space. The Acre. For example, 500,000 acres (of the Ozarks have been sprayed with herbicide) or 936 acres (comprise the central facility at Soledad) or 199 acres (are in the California Institute for Women) or 81 acres (are part of the St. Louis Zoo).
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Space. The Inch and the Foot. Divided. As in eight foot long (pencil-thin metal rods are used to store the plutonium) or thirteen feet by seven feet by nine feet (is judged the proper size for a cell used for continual separation and solitary confinement) or fourteen to eighteen inches (should be the thickness of the walls dividing cells) or eighteen inches (of stone should separate the cell from the corridor) or five thousand square feet (is the size of a pool accommodating several seals and one sea elephant) or fourteen thousand square feet (are allotted for the primate house) or thirty feet (are needed to widen the public ramp for the lion show).
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Divided. The Gallon. The Ton. As in a million and one half gallons (of 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid and 2,4,5-tetrachlorophenoxyacetic acid are stored on Johnston Island) or forty thousand tons (of 2,4,5-tetrachlorophenoxyacetic acid were dropped over the Vietnamese countryside) or tons (of toolproof steel were used in the construction of Sing Sing Prison).
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Divided. Upper and Lower. At the Side. Under. Left and Right. Ante. Space. As in upper and lower (chapels were in the two-story building) or at the side (was an outbuilding which was the torture chamber) or under (the building ran a stream used for test by immersion) or to the right (of the entrance hall was the warder's room) or to the left and right (of the corridor leading to the chapel opened eight separate cells) or to the right (are cell blocks and shops for hardened criminals who will not leave their quarters) or on the left (is the hospital for the abnormal) or antechambers (for the judges adjoined the chapel) or on the upper story (are cages for lions) or on the lower (are rest rooms for the public) or to the left (of the hospital was the death house).
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Space Divided, as in Large and Small. The largest of three (arenas is the chimpanzee show) or the small (mammal house) or a small (room on the upper story called the confession chamber).
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Divided. Name. Number. As in the name Hexenhaus (House of the Witches) or the number eighteen (cells and a room for a warder) or twenty-six (witches could be held in the house at any one time).
Divided by Perimeters and Classifications, such as a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence (secured at the bottom to a concrete curb and topped by three strands of barbed wire, with ten armed guard towers, lined in two parallel rows of five) or such as four classes of inmates (900 average, 150 a disciplinary group, 150 defective or abnormal, 400 an honor group) or such as the three classes of animals (Reptiles, Birds, Mammals) or the three classes of structures needing remodeling (by priority: First Priority, aviary, lion house, seal basin, west parking lot, east refreshment pavilion, et cetera; Second Priority, reptile house, small mammal house, et cetera; Third Priority, primate house, lion show, and so forth).
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Space Divided by Separations, as in separate corridors (are provided for the guards and the prisoners) or each floor is separated from the other floor, or there are eight separate cell blocks, or the dining room has two separate entrances (so that the classes of inmates may be kept separate) or there are several separate cottages (a cottage for colored girls, a cottage for the younger girls, a cottage for older women, a cottage for women on the honor role, a cottage for women being disciplined, a cottage for the incorrigible), or as in separation is enforced (in the Auburn system by a rule of silence, and because the inmates must keep their eyes downward and walk in lock step).
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And finally, the Divisions of Space are seen as Shapes, such as an elliptical arc (forms the outside wall of the upper and lower chapel in the Hexenhaus) or a square (the shape of the lion house) or a circle (the shape for a prison in which there may be constant surveillance from the center) or such as the rectangular shape of a cell.
Or the shape of a measuring rod.