Eureka. I have found the word I knew must be. Happy, a word, a day, how appropriate for thoughts of time and space. Place/space senses led me to it, working out the lexical lack with friends who care what kind of word could fill that gap without a martyred reek or a scenester’s fleeting folly, yet still express a titan countenance, lighted by the sun and known by generations to have been around a while.

Spatial. Of or relating to space. Inner space, distribution of space, occupation of space, living space, making space, “the freedom and scope to live, think, and develop in a way that suits one,”* suitable space; suited, sartorially. Cyberspace. Headspace. Ornamented accordingly. H E R E are intersecting possibilities of text and relationship: readings, revisited, from the ground up.

More than the perceptual regard for one’s own space, or home, or room, or chamber, corner, cupboard, cupola, attic, atelier, suite, it implies the extensions of these, the neighbourhoods and village greens and metropolises and overseas, plans, dreams, wishful wanderings, both in the meat and projected through a choice screen, fixated, fingertapping, catapulted, rocket astral projection flying, diving the abyss, writ accurate, passionate, proven, diligent, with or without the thinnest skin.

It began with a word from Jasmine.

J:
Two hipster dreams of home
from a fab blog called theselby.com.
Xo,
J 

O:
Let us build a large and empty house, furnish it with broken windows, overexposed magazines, and empty frames, flatten it with leftover rag rugs and draped unfinished hairshirts, centre it with meditation stools and Dutch blue china, corner it with tiny pyramids, and fill it with our favourite ghosts Wednesday after next.

O:
Those pictures of home are the most beautiful things I have seen in a long time and that bearded man with his white white teeth makes me want to be everybody.
xo

The Selby: the space Sartorialist?

J:
cyber-sartorial ideas
this is such a phenomenon, one that affects everyone’s beings so much it is the new Dasein

And so: the spatialist.

*quot. from the Dictionary Mac app entry on “space, n.” though parsing my etymological expectations with the help of the OED was what brought me to space. This happened following a brief and semi-hopeful flirtation with piazza and piazzan, at which point I reexamined the entry on place, and found at II. 3. a.: “Room, available space. Also: a space that can be occupied.” And indeed, this sense has been around for a while, i.e., c1230. The thesaurus here suggests space (legitimized by its use in the given definition), jumping to (its earliest) a1387; so far so good. From there, with the firm guidance of the suffix -al, summarily meaning of or relating to (though I’d happily spend another forty-five minutes rereading the OED‘s thoroughgoing lessons on -al, and you can too), I quickly arrived at spatial. But the real excitement was the inclusion of the word spatialist. Heady.

Thus lexically equipped, a cursory survey online shows more evidence that spatial is, indeed, the word.

Further reading can, for example, be found here and here.