Bootstrapping

The wheelie bins, the straggly plants: always begin with the yard, I told myself once, and then you’ll always have something to write. As though the yard worked a kind of reduction on the one who, on the other side of the window, would write of what it contained. Write of the yard, and you’ll at least be writing of something. You’ll always have that, the north-facing yard, in its open mediocity.

Baron Munchausen was able to pull himself out of the ocean by his bootstraps. To bootstrap writing is to as though lift writing out of the details it is made to record. As though you could separate writing from writing. As though there were a pure ‘to write’ that sought to free itself from what is said.

And isn’t this a beautiful thought, that that writing would lift itself through everything you write of your life? That it would set fire your entire life in order to rise, phoenix-like, from the flames. Unless there is a way of living that is like that burning, and life is separable from life as writing is from writing. ‘To live’: but what would that mean?

Mediocre life, open on all sides. Who is that leans over me, offering me a mirror for my perfect nothingness? I am the host of the one who is mirrored thus, who lives in me and by way of me. A life, a writing: at the heart of my mediocrity I burst into flame.