Garden Aeroplane Traps

Five years, and nothing happened. Nothing happened – that’s what we decided as we walked down the stairwell. And wasn’t it doomed – five years ago, it nearly coincided with …? It ‘began’ the day after the catastrophe. A bad sign. Everything that has happened since has done so under a bad sign.

Events want to complete themselves, to fall into linear sequence. Each episode wants to be caused by the one before it, as in a novel. How then to narrate those moments that seem to slip out of time, that are not allowed to come to completion?

The récit, the tale is supposed to bear upon what happened in the past – a single event, that a narrator mulls over in the present. But what happens when that event never completed itself, and thus never really happened, detaching itself from all linearity?

Did it happen? You cannot be sure. It has not coalesced, has not rounded itself off into an episode. What happened? But even that is unknown. It was not allowed to happen; it was not supposed to. But what did not happen broke into the order of time, it turned there. The détourned instant, the fragment broken from time’s course: what does it want but completion, the future in which it could arrive?

It hasn’t happened yet. It isn’t finished. Or: it still hasn’t happened, and that is what is happening. So we came to incarnate that non-event, the future of what will not happen. Until what happens is trapped by what does not, unfolding against it, a tragic struggle, freedom against necessity.

Time has passed. How old are we now? How impossibly old? We have outlived the event, missed our appointment. Or it is that it has outlived us, but not in time, not in our order of time.

Somewhere else, in another life, we are becoming younger, together. Younger: and all the way to the inception of the event.

And meanwhile? I miss you even when I’m with you. Or: am I ever with you when I’m with you?

Faith: it will happen. It will be brought to completion, now as for the first time. Yes, that is our freedom, lived somewhere else.

And meanwhile, this ‘other’ freedom, the instant stranded by time, which asks for mercy. You said – or was it me – ‘is it ever going to happen?’ I said – or was it you? – ‘another five years …?’ Each time, it was the unfinished instant that spoke, we knew it.

Was it pitiful? Resigned? I’ll use this word instead: indifferent. It was indifferent to us. And wasn’t that its charm?

Charm: the ‘background’ of speech, always there. Indifferent, but there. We could depend upon it. Everything we said it tore apart, gently. Everything said was dispersed across its surface.

Like the wind that passes among the table things in Mirror, turning them over. A bottle rolls and falls to the ground. Isn’t that the miracle of Mirror – that it is made up of the continuity shots that are supposed to pass unnoticed in a film? Continuity – when a camera is held onto a face for too long, when it lingers over a detail. What happens then? What fails to happen?

Isn’t it very beautiful, the sense that what happens does not do so for you? Indifference: that I do not possess the world, or myself. That I barely possess myself – and you? – who are you?

As though you can only see it from the corner of your eye. As though it is reached only by indirection. – ‘I cannot find my way there.’ – ‘Ah, but it will find you.’ To be found – but by what? By what is indifferent to you. Finding you as it would find anyone. But you, now, are this anyone. Happiness: to be no one in particular.

It is His-Majesty-the-Baby, as Freud calls him, who must be killed. The brilliant, charming child, centre of the world. But how is the child – the child who still lives within you – to be found by someone other than his parents, or those around him who are like his parents? How to live an obscure life? How to be found by the obscure?

Write not to find, but to lose. No: write to be found – write every day so it will find you, what does not approach directly. Then a blog is like one of Ernst’s Garden Aeroplane Traps.

Five years: waiting waits beside us, without object. Waiting turns in itself.

Write until you are neglected by writing. Until writing writes itself. ‘Itself’: there where it is not, and you are not.

Wait until it does not know you are waiting. Until waiting loses itself object and all transitivity. Only then will it come. Only then will I be able to say to you, come.