ABSTRACT
The setting for Chasm: A Weekend is not only located between the swirling majesty of Sedona’s canyons but also within the solid architectural stillness of the Xanadu-like desert ranch known as Windcote. This lived-in, labyrinthine, internalised space makes for a sharp contrast with the gigantic, macrocosmic desert domain on the exterior. Compared to the roughness, exposure, and vast expanses of sparse terrain outside, the interiors of Windcote are more immediately tangible, sheltered, and contained. However, neither of these netherworlds is ever completely safe. While Windcote offers accommodation and caters for a variety of locked door perversions and other
surrealist-flavoured desires, one can never make oneself truly at home. The desert chasm and child’s nursery are umbilical in their attachment, as well as coexisting in perpetual, dialectical tension. Both spaces are topographically embedded as an insideout synecdoche. Where my previous chapter could be conceptualised as a gorge walk or desert tour navigating the reader through Tanning’s painterly, sculptural, and textual topographies towards a narrative descent of fatal accidents, this chapter turns to the domestic domain through a series of scenarios which collapse into one another. The nested nature of such narratives is encapsulated in the miniature, microcosmic world of childhood found in the seven-year-old character Destina’s nursery on the third floor, interpreted here as an attic-like repository for the historical surrealist imagination.
