No sign of rats today; just the smashed up black box where they were hiding, and to which I took a hammer, but found nothing there.
Evening; darkness in the yard. No rat-squeaks. No rat-bodies following the wall. Why didn’t they come from pest control as they were supposed to? Why not more piles of poison, spooned from a tub?
No rats, and no Visitor to be disgusted by them. I came home early, lay down; finished a book, thought of reading another one. Then the News, but I felt too dispersed to focus. Who was watching, anyway? And no dinner, prepared from what was gathered from the best shops, all local, all organic, to be eaten together on the leaf of the table that is now folded down.
Evening, and I can play what music I want, and do what I want, on my own. No one upstairs, either; they’re between tenants. No one above me: what peace. But no-one with me: no peace. For it is not as if you can smooth your life flat like the page upon which you might begin to write. Nothing to smooth down or say; was I waiting all those weeks to say something? was there something important to be said? Laughter. Of course not.
A tin of mackerel for dinner. Why not? And then another one. Ricecakes, olive oil, and now an open bottle of wine, I tell myself, to narrow down the night. And nothing to say, nothing in particular, only that gap that opens between the saying and the said (I’ll call it that); between the voice I would want to hear and the words I need to give it. Between the voice that does not need me, and the words I should abandon to it, without caring, without premeditation.
To neglect a page to life: why that formula? To neglect it until it stands up, a quivering arch through which no one passes but through which everything might. An arch – but to where? To this world, this one, and at last.
And the voice? Wind through the arch. The call of this world, this one.
Lars Iyer's Blog 