Between its walls, you will have lived your life. The half-painted wall along the back, with two unopenable doors, then the diagonal brick walls which come down from the roofs – you can’t see over the fence. Absolute privacy here. That is a word for the yard: absolute. It relates to nothing but itself; all possibilities are contained here. How large is the yard? 20 foot by 12 foot of concrete, the back of the yard much higher than the front. It comes to a kind of wall behind which rainwater used to collect in a small lake.
When he came, dad drilled through the wall and inserted a plastic pipe so the water could drain. That’s what it does now, once you clear away the vegetation that accumulates at the top of the pipe. The water comes out of the pipe and into the kitchen drain. There are plants, too – ill looking, stripped of leaves on lower branches. I should’ve put some stones at the bottom of their pots, says a gardening friend. They need better drainage. No doubt. And for a long time, the upstairs drain ran out into the rainwater, and the concrete was covered in foamy washing up water. Now it is fixed. Now the concrete can be drained. Now it faces the sky, its grey-green surface facing upwards. Smooth stones from the beach on its surface. A brick. One of the bins – where is the other? On the other side of the back wall, out there in the street.
The yard. We’re never out there, my neighbours and I. Sometimes I’ll find cigarette butts flicked there from upstairs. And there is white kitchen towel I use to pick slugs from my wall and then throw them of the door. Mediocre sight! This is the yard of those who have not settled in life. Yard of the transitory, but of those nonetheless whose lives are kept within the walls of the yard. This morning, though it is still early, it is as if I’ve already lived and died in this yard. It’s over – everything’s finished. There’s no tomorrow, only the return of the day. Nothing in particular, that’s what this yard is called. The same nothing which returns each day. The nothing in particular which reveals itself in the morning, bare, held up to the sky for the sky to inspect.
All of the world is like this, I tell myself. This is what the world is like in all its quarters. It ends here, I tell myself; it begins and ends here. Why leave it? Why leave this room which faces the yard, in which I sit at the same level as the back of the yard, for work and for the office? Everything that can happen will happen here. Everything will happen; the sky will brighten and then the sky will darken. For that is all that can happen – the day returns and then the day disappears. Nothing happens, nothing changes but that. What mediocrity! But this is an absolute mediocrity, it is the law of the world, of the world’s appearing. What day is it? Every day. Who am I? Anyone, everyone who passes beneath the day.
Lars Iyer's Blog 