M.H. Bowker’s Walls is a contemplative essay that is sometimes playful and sometimes grave. At first blush, its subject matter would appear simple. Walls considers (1) the psychic meaning of walls and (2) the meaning of psychic walls. It turns out that these two subjects are intimately and interestingly related, such that meditating on one turns out to be fruitful in terms of our understanding of the other.
In a series of short, varied chapters Walls moves between the psychoanalytic consulting room and the border crossing, the philosophical treatise and the nursery rhyme. Bowker treats walls literally and metaphorically, from the “wall” between nature and civilization, to Franz Kafka’s musings on the Great Wall of China, then to the walling off of a person’s interior world. There is even a place for Humpty Dumpty. What emerges is a sustained meditation on interiority itself: How walls constitute the inside and outside of a self, how the barriers we raise in the psyche mirror and are mirrored by the walls we raise in the world.
In each of its short chapters, Walls has been written with an intention of inclusivity. That is, no advanced prior knowledge or specialized jargon is necessary for the reader to appreciate what may be found herein. This of course implies that, very often, the reader and the author find themselves beginning from first principles, which is always far more difficult than people seem to believe.