Rooms
I have seen too few Daddy-Long-Legs this year, but here is one now. From Handke, I learnt that such creatures belong to the threshold. But over what do I cross? The world as threshold; this room - the flat - is exchangable with any other. The thudding of music upstairs, the sound of music next door the same as always, the same as last year and the year before.
I play music to drown out music; I speak on the phone so I will not hear them speak. This has always happened as it happens now: this is but one room in a sequence of rooms. They are all the same, and with the same disappointing view: a grotty backyard, pools of drain water, dying plants. Today and tomorrow, the same view.
Can you reach me here, friend? I imagine the Daddy Long Legs is your embodiment - that you have come to me in this form to witness me and allow me to witness myself. Then the Daddy-Long-Legs is an emblem of writing. Sign of incompletion, sign of not yet beginning, mobile threshold that makes this room a threshold.
The Threshold
Friend of the threshold - friend who brings me to the threshold, just as you told me I bring you to the threshold - in what body do I come to you? How does it reach you, the address from the threshold, which says, this room will be one of other rooms; you will move from here to there, and the world will be unloosened by your movement? How do I reach you as a sign of the threshold?
What did we speak of then, at that time? We never said anything, that's what you said. Nothing said, everything unsaid. But as though that unsaid was the unsaying of the world, and there were no more lies and hypocrisy. Propitious silence, that was the world's intake of breath, the taking of air to the bottom of its lungs. Silence in which the world drew back to its birth, and so was the morning through which we passed the first morning of the world.
Silence, unsaying. Silence - the unloosening of everything spoken. But there was a saying by this silence. Saying that unspeaks - saying that yet speaks the word that cannot be spoken. Incomplete word! Word that never begins! But to share speech thus - speech that passes from one to the other, speech that begins without completing itself - is to lighten the world.
Lightened Speech
Of what did we speak? Our world was too small, too confining. What were we going to do, we who were to leave school? Truancy: we wandered to the park in the schoolday. Who was there? No one; or perhaps a mother with a pram. We were there, but there was no one else there. Restlessness first of all, that's what bore what we said. What was to happen? The old life was coming to an end - this was welcome, we were never satisfied with it, and the new one was beginning - but what was to begin?
Lightened speech. What was lightened was the past, and the burden of the past. Newness: not, now, the life we would pass in the suburbs, nor the life in the new companies that were appearing all over the Thames Valley, nor the life of our friends who were to disappear into those companies, but of what gave itself as we spoke of this life and of our friends. Newness: to speak of the world, of a past shared and a shared present, was already to lighten it.
Now our truancy was redoubled in the truancy of saying. The lies of the world were unsaid. Corruption became innocent; the world was born again and we passed in the first morning of the creation. The first morning: dawn, over the suburbs. And the first night: dusk, over the suburbs. We met at the threshold, the dawn and the dusk and by our speech, the world was lightened.
Daddy Long Legs
I haven't seen for you for many years. How did you know to send me a Daddy Long Legs as your envoy? Through my window and drawn by the light, a foreleg twitching before it in the air as it flies, it is your emissary. But how do I reach you? What creatures are for you a sign of speech?