Ghosts and the volume of air

Thinking a lot about invisibility and visibility in a few different contexts.

I left a box of belongings in New York when I was here last, and upon returning collected it. In it was a short novel called Ghosts by an Argentinian author, César Aira, which I had purchased purely on the basis of its cover (I choose my wine in  the same fashion) - and which I absolutely loved when I read it last summer in small chunks on the train travelling to and from work mainly. I didn't bring much with me to read this time so when I retrieved the box in May I started re-reading the book. It is super pertinent to my thoughts for Unkept, and my general feeling/mood at present, although it's difficult to explain why. And I think intangibility, the elusiveness of understanding or the ability of the thing to resist being pinned down is essentially my criteria for what is good and worth giving more thought to. The novel tells of a Chilean worker's family who squat on the construction site of a large condominium building. The building is inhabited by ghosts, but only the workers and their families can see them - the rich people who are buying the apartments can't see them. It is a beautiful book where not a lot happens, but there are many oblique references to transcendence, perception, tricks of light and shadow, daydreaming, worlds beyond the physical, and a general sensitivity to the atmosphere. I love the aesthetic it conjures up - it's a bleached, hot, dry, white, quiet blankness with subtle imperfections and childish playfulness and innocence that accentuate an underlying beauty. Which I think is an interesting take on Polly's ideas behind Unkept. Here is an excerpt I really like which draws an indeterminate picture of a volume of air, whatever that may mean:

The third floor was the same, yet different; it wrapped the three of them in a fresh layer of silence. They say that silence increases with height, but Patri, who lived at altitude most of the time, wasn't so sure about that. Anyway, if it was true, and if there was a gradual increase, the difference between one floor and the next should have been perceptible, at least for someone with a sensitive enough ear, a musician, for example, listening in reverse, as it were. As she went from the fourth to the fifth floor, she felt the silence thicken, but that didn't prove anything, because the data of reality, as she had observed in the past, were produced by chance, or rather by an inextricable accumulation of chances. Also since it's well known that sounds rise (which must be because "they're lighter than air", as the saying goes, or a lighter kind of air), you should hear more noise as you go up; it should be quiet on the ground. True, sounds fade progressively as they rise, because height is a kind of distance. But under normal circumstances, human beings are at or near ground level. If a man were placed at a great height, and he looked down, somewhere near halfway he would see two corresponding limits, floating like magnetized Cartesian divers: the limit of sound as it passed into imperceptibility, and that of his own hearing range.

(César Aira, Ghosts,1990, trans. by Chris Andrews 2008, New Directions, New York, pp 52-53.)

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While working in my little shop the other day, a number of customers pointed out what looked to be a white towel suspended mid-air... a ghost... it was gently swaying about and visible only through the dirty window behind me. The window looks out into a weird void space in between the buildings, it's very narrow and tall because the buildings are tall, and then leads up to the sky. Another customer, an architect, told me that it became mandatory after many fires in Soho buildings in the 70s to instate these void spaces between the buildings, which can allow the fire to escape out. He said if you looked from the air you would see all the buildings in Soho have these small voids.