Three Steps

I am a little higher now than I was in the afternoon. Higher, and I can see out a little, back over this day and the few days before. I have a perspective; I can survey the landscape; I’m not the insect who scuttles along the ground, or the prisoner staked to it and quartered by four horses. A little higher, then, and for what I’ve written. Higher by virtue of those few blocks of writing – three of them, monuments to something but to what? To themselves, perhaps. No: to the blocky substance of which they were made, those three blocks. To their substance, simple as it is, unanalysable. That fell out of my sky. That lodged themselves in the desert and let me climb up a little, and look around.

It’s evening now. Seven o’clock, which means past the dangerous hours. The wine is left unopened; tonight an evening without alcohol. And it’s raining outside. And cold. And I’m inside, in my living room. Saturday night and the washing machine beside me, and all the kitchen furniture. And the imperial blue, almost indigo of the Corwood CDs in their cases. Staring up. Looking up so I can take and place them in the player.

I should get to know another phase of Jandek, I know that. I set it as a task: write about the ludic Jandek, about Modern Dances. Write about that … and this command fading into the air. Because it is small miracle there’s any writing at all. It’s enough just to surface, to breathe. Nothing needs to be done. Nothing must be; and besides, it’s a Bank Holiday, and there’s no work Monday, and I can finish the essay I’m writing tomorrow …

No commands, then. Nothing I should have to do, and not even to listen to the ludic Jandek. And I’m braced against the day, I’ve made a start – I started three times, there were three posts, three steps up the ladder. But in truth, each was the same step, just like all the posts here. A single step, and one that has to be retaken over again.