The Threshold

Clearing my throat to say – what? At the threshold of writing, but what to write? And now dream instead of a writing that remains at the threshold, that reports nothing, or, by way of that reportage only announces the simple fact that it was possible.

At the threshold: a crowded office. The Arbus book arrives, another Xmas present. And with it, a letter from Corwood. There's a new Jandek album being packaged: Skirting the Edge: the 60th? the 61st?

Then cardboard packaging, remnants from lunch, jumpers for the cold weather, anti-bacterial cleaner. Sun Kil Moon playing again: 'Lost Verses': wasn't I going to write about that? Wasn't I going to make it my 'song of the year'? Laughter.

Beside me the manuscript with its crossings out and annotations. I haven't worked on it for a while – for how long? There's no time. Or rather, the time you get is so short, too short for anything except standing at the threshold.

Clearing my throat – but to say – what? What was it you wanted to write? To achieve by writing? No matter. What's left: to mark the moment when you could begin, when you drew the day around you and made a space to begin. To begin – and then to end immediately. That's what the day permitted. That's what it took away.

December 12th. Five years ago (nearly five years …) I began writing here. Five years ago to mark a threshold, the same one I'm marking here. Not to say anything. No communication. Except: it was possible to write. Except: I wanted to write and I wrote.

In the office: six bottles of wine in a cardboard carrier. A post of Neal's Yard moisturiser. An El Vez poster from that shop in Knoxville, peeling from the wall. And this to say: what? That the day and this space could be gathered here. That the day folded itself into a place in which I could write. And then, almost instantaneously, could no longer write.