The fire confined to a fire-place was no doubt for man the first object of reverie, the symbol of repose, the invitation to repose. One can hardly conceive of a philosophy of repose that would not include a reverie before a flaming log fire.
Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Dear friends,
It is now seventy-two days to the end of the year. The days have turned cool and the nights cold. It is that season of life in the woods when the charcoal cooking fires of summer give way to wood fires and open flame.
While the design work on our Virginia Frame continues at Stemann Pease, this past week we turned our attention to the fireplace. The construction of the firebox and chimney is still a long ways off, for we intend to pause at the stage of the frame in order to learn all it has to teach us about the last three hundred years of cultural change. But before there were frames there was the fire, and we are now at a stage where important framing questions require us to understand what relationship to the fire we expect to take.
A frontier house like the California House is misunderstood as a small house, much more as a "tiny house." That view only makes sense when seen from long after the fact, when people have actually come to occupy large houses. A single-room frontier house is not a very small house, it is a very large fireplace. All its dimensions and shapes and relations derive directly from the fire. That is why the sizes and shapes of such dwellings are so extraordinarily consistent, from the African roundhouse to the Stonehenge hut to the pre-contact tipi to the settler's cabin. "Style" in such a house is almost entirely a function of local materials and climate and long tradition. All the rest is a place for fire.
What to do with the fire was the single most important question we had to answer in building the original incarnation of the Innermost House. There were a thousand questions, of course, and we had none of the wise advisors we have now to guide us. We proceeded of necessity by trial and error, and there were a very great many errors. In a way, we had to rehearse the whole history of building errors in lesser volume, and all our conundrums began with the fire.
When we first framed the California house, we had in mind to sit on the floor in the manner of the Japanese. Diana and I had reduced our material belongings at that point to a carry-on bag apiece, save a few boxes of books we had stored. We owned no furniture. We had been introduced to Japanese floor-sitting the year before as guests of the Zen priest and tea master, the Rev. Ulrich Haas, when we stayed in his Japanese home at the edge of the Black Forest in Germany. When I look back now, I think it was to the generous and sensitive hospitality of Ulrich that we owe much of the inspiration for Innermost House.
So we began on the floor around our would-be fire in California. Japanese hearths are set into the floor near the center of the room, as they were in American Indian tipis and wigwams and igloos. But we knew we would have our books at last, and that they would be set in a tall bookcase at the side of a room just two people deep by one person wide, too small for a fireplace anywhere but on the wall. So our first trial resulted in the migration of the central hearth to the side of the room, just as it had so migrated in medieval Europe.
With the frame for the hearth on one side and the frame for the bookcase on the other, we sat down on the makeshift floor and found the seven feet of bookcase looming over us like a giant. We could reach nothing but books on the bottom shelf. So we surrendered to the necessity of chairs, but only broad, low, flat, "deep-seating" chairs that effectively lifted the floor up with us and brought the books within reach. Then we found our proximity to the fire was compromised, so we lifted the hearth up to correspond with the chairs, thus regaining a floor-sitting relationship to the fire. That is why the chairs, hearth, and bookcase in the California House appear as you see them in the images.
Now we are rehearsing the same questions, but in relation to an older, more English fireplace. The California House was heir to examples at the edge of the western frontier in the late 19th century, where Spanish and English precedent met in a Mediterranean climate. The Virginia House is set in a quite different climate at a much earlier date in the 17th century, when the Tidewater region was last a frontier.
So I wrote to Ulrich, a Founding Advisor at Innermost House and dear friend of twenty years. Ulrich has enjoyed a most unusual career. Raised in the winemaking world of Germany, as a young man he found himself powerfully drawn to things Japanese. In the 1970s he managed to secure a place in the new "Midorikai" program in Kyoto, through which serious non-Japanese students were allowed to study the Way of Tea at the Urasenke Professional College of Chado. This was a dream almost too wild to dream in those days, and would shape the rest of Ulrich's life.
The founder of the Midorikai program was Sen Soshitsu XV, hereditary heir to the ancient tea lineage of Urasenke and a humanitarian of international renown. Ulrich completed his tea studies, was eventually ordained a Zen priest, and so became one the very first Westerners to carry the ancient Way of Tea to practitioners outside Japan. His entire career has been devoted to refining the practice of that most spiritual of arts.
Ulrich wrote back with all the sensitivity and good sense of a sage. He gently disabused me of any fantasies of floor-sitting again this time. As he said with a smile I could almost see, after all these many years on his knees, "I begin to love chairs." At Innermost House we are always driving toward simplicity, but only "for its elegancy, not for its austerity."
So it would appear we are back to some manner of low chair, possibly an outdoor chair as at the California house, or even some very plain wing-back chair, such as was used in the 18th century to focus the heat of the fire.
There are many more decisions still to be made about the fireplace, some of them quite subtle and difficult. But that one decision made will permit us to frame the future firebox now for breadth and height. Until next week, keep the home fires burning, dear friends.
Yours with pleasure,
Michael
The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.
IMAGES
D. Lorence, “IH II, Hearth Fire”
Adobe Stock, Japan Image: “A Shaft of Light”
Courtesy of Ulrich Haas
QUOTATIONS
”The fire confined to a fire-place. . .” Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire