The Divine Lord (Played by The Dummy) was lying on His Side—on a thin mat, under an airy window. He propped His Forearm on His Elbow, and leaned His Head in His hand. He was All "Heart"—and Belly. His Voice was Intestinally Deep. And He never thought.
Then, the terrific cute creature came in (Played by The Ventriloquist). You had to love it, immediately. It had big eyes—and a round, bald head. He was a juicy little round one, with a blue body. And his poor little teeth hung out—in two great big ones, in the center of his upper lip. And there were only some little hairs, in his ears. He was nude, like the Divine Lord—but all "head", and not much heart, and belly. And his voice was a little peeping, twisting sound—like a small boy in his self-pity.
The Incident, The First Room, Chapter 4 The Mummery Book
The various scripts of limitation that constitute the loci of The Mummery Book appear as "rooms" — even as the room of nature, the space-time structure that surrounds and confines all beings. Existing all at once and in conflict with each other, these rooms represent the limited and problematic frames that enclose the points of view of their inhabitants, the lenses through which they relate to reality.
Every man and woman lives a lie because he or she perceives reality from a limited point-of-view, the various shadowy rooms that darken conventional human consciousness, which Adi Da Samraj compares to a camera obscura, a "point-of-view machine" that registers "Living Light" — the fundamental and indivisible nature of reality — from an always particular and narrow angle in space-time, and thus breaks up the inherent unity of reality:
The room was built with many irregular planes. With forms that Rolled! and Buttressed! in the floors and walls and ceilings—but, in a complicated symmetry of repetitions. Like a paisley, or a fractal—shaped like everybody's mind.
The room was overgrown with forms and images. Pouring from a nowhere—like a colored glade, in crystal mountains.
There were a few solid doors—to enter and to serve the room. No exit to the outside was suggested. And there were no windows, at all. Except, for a tiny, Circular ceiling-Hole, to Pure Sun-light—High above the crystal disk.
The room was a play of images. Perhaps from within. Perhaps from without. Perhaps—it was a camera obscura!
The room motif in The Mummery Book is a commentary on the enclosed ego sense, the self-referring interpretation of reality that each individual appropriates through a narrow mind-aperture as his or her world-truth.
And if there are only interpretations, partial or false metanarratives and their driblets, and nothing ultimate in which to base them, then the result is a Nietzschean collision of wills, a perspectival war of all against all, in the attempt to impose upon the unknown substrate of the world one’s own limited schema. The Mummery Book describes this collision as the "Neighbor-Wars":
"And every single body was Cut! Down—to its own size of mind! And every individual declared a separate State!"
This is the poisonous human ego with its outlaw vision, the "Mom-and-Dad battalions, of every cult-of-pairs."
The room serves as the overarching metaphor of the constantly shifting, minified perspectives of The Mummery Book: room as a degraded peek at totality, room as an inevitably narrowed glint.
These enclosed points of view are multiplied and refracted endlessly like mirror images in a barber shop (The Incident / The First Room / Chapter 10) or the myriad hairs on its checkerboard floor (Chapter 11) — a reality that turns intense and violent, until the whole "Room of rooms" ("Shape of Shapes") plunges into perspectival multiplicity and the divided, divisive, suffering world that we know.
It is across such rooms Raymond must make his way in The Mummery Book (from "The First Room" of Raymond’s birth; to the "separate room" of Bue Ma: "A kind of Mom—but, all grown out"; to the "Spired! room" of the Tabernacle of the "falsified" religion of "Saint-and-Ear" in order to transcend the trammels of mind into which he has been born, in order to know and be "the room—Itself."
