'What do you think is wrong with you?' But W. knows already. Is it the plaster dust, continually falling from the ceiling? Is it the filth on the kitchen counter, or the cans of stale beer? Is it the fact the whole flat is tilting sideways like the deck of a ship in a storm?
Sometimes W. is sure it's the yard. The shore of concrete, at the same level as the window, covered in algae. It's like the end of the world out there, W. says. Dead plants, no more than sticks in pots. The long crack in the kitchen wall, that lets in the rain. The mold encrusted hopper, overrunning with water. My God, he says. It's no wonder I'm always depressed, W. say.
But then, too, there's the damp, the omnipresent damp. It's no wonder that I cough constantly. Even he, W., has a cough, and he's only been visiting for the weekend. He's staggering around like Widow Twankey. How can I do it to him? How can I do it to myself?
It's fate, that's what I tell him. It couldn't have been otherwise. But it could!, W. says. It could have been different. Why do I know nothing of hope? Why do I refuse it, hope, when it burns so ardently in W.? Do I really think we're at the end? Is this it: the incontrovertible end?
The concrete shore: planes have crashed against it. Suicide have dashed their heads against it. Tragic heroes with torn-out eyes have wandered across it. Antigone led her father, the blind Oedipus across the yard, looking only for a place to die. The corridors of Elsinor gave unto the concrete over which Hamlet wandered like a ghost.
To be, not to be … Neither one of them. Neither/nor: neither death nor life. Neither the end nor a new beginning. Concrete: the end, but the endless end. Death, but deferred death, dying without term.
Lars Iyer's Blog 