Poking around where I am not supposed to be

is a favorite pastime of mine.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream, said Edgar Allan Poe. Thinking about some writers who have opined on the dark side of life as I spend some time in in a dream within a dream –  the abandoned Contagious Disease Hospital at Ellis, taking around a group of photographers for a day of shooting poetic spaces.

On this stormy morning in the tristate, almost everything is so beautifully dark.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night, wrote Poe. We visit hushed stairwells.

The simplest things have a surprising potency.

Heat.

Even a doorknob seems to have a story to tell.

Textures are always amazing here at the Hospital.

But today especially, in low light, they seem to whisper. Loudly.

A view.

I see some of the things I’ve seen many times before, old favorites. Simple things.

The bird’s nest in a light fixture.

A legend.

Always loved how that sentiment might apply to everyday emotional challenges.

This unlikely chair.

Cracked windows open to wild courtyards. I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real, wrote Oscar Wilde in Dorian Gray.

The trees are both hideous and beautiful.

Mary Shelley wrote in Frankenstein, The world was to me a secret which I desired to devine.

There is golden light.

We’re open to the cold, storm-tossed waters of the Bay.

Everything more beautiful in the wet.

And I make some new discoveries. A bottle, miraculously untouched after a century.

Glass littering a floor

I feel both a little frightened and exhilarated. Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. Again, Shelley. She should know; she had the courage to write a novel that would revolutionize literature when she was just nineteen years old. (Her mother was famous women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.) 

So fortunate to be able to spend time in this iconic, moody place.

I see mysteries.

A ladder to nowhere.

More mysteries.

Some were healed here. Blue paint was thought to be calming, hence its use in the open bay psychiatric wards.

Things were clean, sanitary back in the day.

Some suffered. We know that people heaved themselves out the windows on the upper floors, hence the heavy-duty metal grates. Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Shelley.

Nurses bunked near the psych wards. Each of their dorm rooms has a screen door against the mosquitos that would have been hell in pre-air-conditioning, pre-Deet New York Harbor.

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched,  wrote Edgar Allan Poe.

There is a lot to touch your heart here.

If you only let it in.