Omar dislikes chairs, doesn’t have any in his place in Havana and generally avoids them as much as he may. His rationale is that they remove us from the ground.
It’s true our lives would be much altered if we eliminated them (and their decadent cousin, the sofa) from our days and nights, and with them a lot of their associative furniture condiments, like side tables and their lamps, etc.
This would be a fundamental remapping of our days: What’s your living room look like without sitting casts? With what would you replace them? You might finally have room for your own, homemade R. Serra! A sans-chairs world would be a terrific benefit to our flexibility and lower our gravitational centers. People might be more included to make love, also, as presumably we’d already be or close to lying down, a big initial hurdle. It might even increase connection to our base chakras, which we will need for the journey ahead.
Please note, however, we won’t want to deep-six tables, as they are useful surfaces on which to work. Of course Hemingway, who had a place in Havana, wrote standing up, as did Virginia Woolf. I thought I read Rilke did, yet can’t corroborate that. I’ve never written formally in a standing position yet written many poems on the hoof or standing into notebooks or a recording device. It’s got a different dynamic, and I’ve found a more collaborative one relative to any environment in which you may find yourself.
Yet at Bernadette and Phil’s gathering yesterday (the Utopia post yesterday, citing link to its free PDF edition, noting that according its “Utopian Copyright” they all should be ) Marie Warsh, the daughter of Lewis Warsh and Bernadette, read from Utopia a section entitled “UTOPIA CHAIRS,” written by Rosemary Meyer. As she writes (and Marie read, standing up), “In the last stages of declining capitalism in North American, chairs were often the topic of desirous conversation.”
Attached is the text for you to read (click and expand) silently or aloud lying around with friends—just like utopia!