JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1888 [An entry in the Museum of Impossible and Imaginary Things series.]

I found this lovely series of images at the fantastic Public Domain Review blog–I was very and instantly taken by them, as they immediately suggested themselves to repurposing. (They were truly meant to illustrate the proper posture of the domestic worker; but now of course they are open to vast interpretation, creative speculation, and mild fantasy.)  To this observer their original insistence is gone, even at an historical micro-level (except for a history of housework):  they aren’t so much an illustration of housework and the postures by which a person would conduct them, but as a map of the silences encountered in the daily cleaning of a house.  It is all fiction of course, but the photographs do have an overwhelming sense of beckoning silence to them, even in their depiction of motion–even though they are a series on dealing with proper movement, they all seem strangely static, like marble.

And so they become a geography of house-bound silence, made by silent geographers, capturing moments of silence in moments of near-silent work.  And if I was the one compiling these geographic interests (and I might as well be), I would want to position the five greatest house-silences so that they could be found once again.  And so:

Location 60: back stairs, beyond kitchen.

Sounds and silence: olympic kneeling done in pursuit of dusting invisible pollens from floor. A very quiet Shaker step waits in the background. It is mostly the silence of the whitewashed stair that commands this image, and not the diligence of the dust.

Location 32: kitchen entry/semi-hall.

Sounds and silence: Old uncovered wooden floor and oak-handled broom, well-polished leather boots with new heals.  The silence is that which comes after the light sweeping is finished is the elusive “great grandmother sound” of satisfied work being completed.