Chalk it up to Impermanence (July 2021)

I love giving tours of my house. It could be that I like meeting new people, or enjoy the walk it affords me. Maybe because, after living here for nearly two years, I'm just proud to know so much about it. I've given so many tours by now that I have a script pretty much down, complete with where to get new members to turn off the lights behind us or my joke about our mop closet tiger; Sometimes I start from the O'Keeffe side, sometimes the Renaissance side- I literally know this tour back to front. I think I keep coming back to this experience of giving a tour because it reminds me to look at Escher from a fresh pair of eyes. From walking through the front door and being worried about someone noticing that the smoking area smells like smoke of varying forms ("Is my kid moving into a dirty hippie commune?" I imagine their mom would think), to showing off O'Keeffe's cornucopia of cereals, lunchmeats, and spoons (okay, not always spoons. But the floor is clean!) and telling them about save meals, I get a chance to see this house from a less-jaded perspective, not only for what it is but for what it could be, what we wish it was.

When I get to the Rec room, though, where we (used to) have parties, Board Meetings, and casual hangouts, I can never judge a new member's reaction to the walls, covered in chalk art from years of creative (and sometimes influenced) scrawls from members past and gone. To them, I imagine, it looks a lot like it did to me when I first saw them, partly because I was so overwhelmed then by the general information I was receiving that I had no bandwidth for the specific line drawings or cryptic phrases in this one small part of a very large tour, and largely because the walls, for the most part, really do look the same as they did two years ago. Very seldom does any small piece get erased, and never (in my memory) has the whole room been. There has never been much empty space left, either, so I can't imagine more than, oh, five new pieces have been added since then. I worry that, to new eyes, this just looks like a dirty party room with weird lights, a ping-pong table and a big couch.

For me, now, though, it looks like the room where I made a lot of great memories. What that room looks like, the art on that wall, is what it looked like when I belted out a karaoke duet of "So Long, Marianne" with a really close friend the night before he moved back to Britain. It looked like that every time I lost a game of pool to an old housemate who was trying to become a pool shark over quarantine. It looked like that on New Years Eves, birthdays, LoTR extended cut movie marathons, on afternoons after class my first semester here, reading a guff copy of Beloved. Those writings were the backdrop for conversations that shaped the trajectory of my life. They got here before I did; They stand there, like monuments to someone else's past, and remind me of my own. 

After the rec room, I walk my tour-ee down the hallway; When we come to the big door with a grate, I stop everyone quietly, and peek through. Looking at my watch, I whisper "I wonder if he's up. Yeah, I think he's usually up by now." before opening up the mop closet, turning on the light, and introducing our new member to the mural of a tiger painted inside. After that, it's on to O'Keeffe kitchen, but not before I mention the small bulletin board where our house constitution is posted next to our standing rules. I give a little bit of a spiel about democracy, how we set and follow our own rules, and hope that's enough to give them a feeling of ownership over their new home.

I spend a lot more time thinking about the Escher House Constitution than probably anyone else. It's a very niche document to bother reading, but I think it's important. At 19 pages, it was written in 2014 by a few people, only two I know to have met. One of those people, Jonas Kersulis, was a big part of defining for me what it meant to be an engaged member in this house, so there are parts of it I read in his voice. It defines a lot of what it feels like to live in Escher, like our pet policy, governmental system, labor and fining procedures, who our officers are and what powers and responsibilities they have. It lays out what the suites are, where they exist, and what they're named. For a document written by college students, it's absolutely remarkable. Most of what's in it is still pretty close to how we do things as a house, and it is for the most part fairly well written. But it has some significant flaws- A grammatical error, here and there, a cryptic and ineffective pet policy, and outdated references to ICC Standing Rules that were reorganized in 2016. And it has never been changed.

Article 10 of the EHC outlines the procedure for amendments to itself. When I moved in, it required ballots to be administered to every member's mailbox and collected after three days. In order for the amendment to pass, half of the house would need to vote yes on it. Escher is a massive house, and for some of its up to 165 people it's a participatory democracy, but for many others it is simply a place to live and be with other people- As a result, we historically have low democratic participation, so much so that getting half of the house to vote at all on anything has been impossible, let alone getting them to agree. The unfortunate effect of this policy was that nobody bothered to try to pass any amendment until the summertime, when occupancy is usually low enough that you had a fleeting chance at adequate agreement. This was, to my knowledge, never successful either, although it may have been attempted.

When I think about encouraging the feeling of ownership over your home, about Escherites being encouraged to participate in fixing the system they are a part of, I get more and more annoyed that the bar to amending our house processes is so high. I think the way that it is high particularly favors the voices of old members over the concerns and needs of current ones, and it centers the inactions of the apathetic over the actions of the caring. When we don't have control over our founding document, we have no great incentive to keep it alive, to follow or even bother reading it. When we can't remove vestigial rules or adapt to current circumstances, we have no choice but to skirt them or suffer for our inflexibility. 

My time at Escher is limited- This is my last year here. I'm going to be a senior, and then hopefully move off to grad school somewhere. In my time, I've seen a lot of change. I've made a lot of change, too, and it's all I can do to hope that it's been for the better. With the help of some housemates I wrote, submitted, and got passed the first amendment to the EHC in Escher's living memory. It was to make it easier to amend. The night of the 4th of July, over a backing track of fireworks, I went down to the rec room, took as many pictures as I could, and wiped down the walls of the pool room. There is already new chalk art in the pool room. It is beautiful, and the people who made it are here, now.

Most of the people that were senior to me when I moved in have moved on. They live in other places now, do other things. That's what this house does- people move in, people move out. This state of constant change is part of the beauty of Escher's Metamorphosis over time. It goes on like this, with small enough changes that you hardly notice, until you look up one day and everything is different, everyone you knew is gone and everyone who knows you is new. Sure, there are some things that don't change; Every fall, we run out of cups for a few weeks until the new folks remember to bring them back from their rooms, and the sun always rises over Valhalla and sets on Walden. We'll keep worrying that the power will go out during a storm and we'll lose all the food in our walk-in- And I have faith that Escher will continue being a beautiful place to live. But people move out, and people move in. A chalk wall is an inherently temporary medium, and the constitution was written to be changed by those it serves. I think I  try to give tours of my house because I get a chance to see the work I've done, and the work I have yet to do- For what I wish it had been when I got here, for what it can be when I leave.