Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act /
Falls (this hotel room)—TS Eliot feat. Tracey Slaughter
If a lovechild between Jorge Luis Borges and punk-vanguard, Poly Styrene, or between Patti Smith and Bertrand Russell, or between Hildegard of Bingen and Nick Cave, existed—Tracey Slaughter’s poem would be the hissing, raging, head-butting progeny. Her (this) hotel room is a bunker of heat, of heart, and of post-coital Socrates. It is a space as riddle, as a joke so raw it’s blind to its punchline. Its people are operative. It demands witness. It is gestalt in its cordoning—a latch bifurcating two realities. The hotel room wants beyond itself. It’s a macrophage nibbling on the cell walls. Sloppy boundaries that gazeth into the Abyss and let it enter—‘windows vending darkness’, a space that ‘swallow(s) outer darkness, mirror by mirror’. To be hostage to a hotel room is to surrender to its will. To be ‘someone to be pierced’. A ‘shallow’ or a ‘hollow’ to be consummated. A refurnishing of an empty warehouse. A sticky-plaster held over an arterial bleed.
A hotel room is the motel room fully self-actualised. An internal window turned into a patio view of swimming pool and mountains. A Remington hairdryer upgraded to a GHD. Were the hotel room a character in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs it would squat in the upper decks, drink Scotch from the minibar, order duck-fat potatoes from room service, and wear a French flax linen bathrobe after safe sex. One might conjecture that a hotel room is existentially satisfied, but Slaughter’s room is hot and horny and braying for jeopardy. The hotel room is a striving thing, so close to the singularity itself that, waist deep in its wallpaper, you can find ‘the trembling hand of god’. Slaughter’s hotel room is a Tardis, a wormhole, a Plato’s cave or a linoleumed annex to some Kantian ‘thing in itself’. It’s Eliot’s ‘twilight kingdom’.
Between the desire / And the spasm / Between the potency / And the
existence / Between the essence / And the descent / Falls (this hotel room)…
Slaughter’s writing is violent and blistering. The blade of a Santoku knife. A hand slapped through a receipt spike. A snail loping unwittingly into a puddle of hand-sanitiser. A leaning in to the instincts we carry shamefully and dangerously. Our casual and somnolent violence—‘bloodsong of mosquitoes on the wall’. The loneliest consent. And the non-consent of being hurled into a world that is a ‘padded trap’, a Kurtzian horror that is ‘motherfucking primordial’. It’s the hotel room of nightmares and wet dreams, both. A room number 217. A place where proximity to god means proximity to everything cheap, and spent, and lost. But there is more to this place than seediness and pubic-haired sheets, headboards, greyed pillows and facedown fibres. This is a place that holds itself metaphysically distinct. A Narnian wardrobe, an Alice’s rabbit hole, a twister in some Kansas backwater that resolves in an axiom that ‘there is no place like home’. This hotel room is a homelessness at the crux of what it is to be a person in the world. Tracey Slaughter finds us vagrant and dispossessed, and offers her poetry genius to hold us tight. And we can smuggle the cheap shampoos and the hot cocoa sachets and the half-dry logoed biros. But this is not all softcore hustling and transience. Slaughter’s hotel wants ‘someone to stay. Someone to own’. What can anybody want but that.
elizabeth morton