Category Archives: Writing

You fell out of life. As if you’d stepped into a mirror and the world was now out there. All it took was one step. But sometimes one step is enough to find yourself back in life. A single step, sometimes that can cover more ground than a lifetime of thought.

When did you fall out of life? Let’s go over it again. This time I’ll talk, it might help. It’ll interest no one, don’t worry. Let’s try to remember, like a drunk trying to remember the night’s events to himself before he falls sleep. I want to think about the year it all went wrong.

There was a disused farm, but that isn’t the beginning. I can’t start at the beginning either. There was a pebble courtyard and a house with a solid brown door. Red barn doors and white flaking walls with windows full of spider webs. Interesting musty smells in the empty cow house, pig house, corn sluice, in the shed full of rusty machinery. The haylofts had been left as they were, the feral cats who made their home there were still being fed.

I turned you against yourself.

You walked beside yourself, beside me, that was your life, wasn’t it? Towards night buses in the country dark and train stations where you stood smoking cigarettes you didn’t want. Why are those the moments I remember tonight? Elsinore train station on Sunday nights. Sitting waiting in the dark: it seemed you were always waiting, just as I was waiting. Perhaps we were waiting for each other, from a long time apart, but a time that may not be as long as you think. The dark train station that smelled of piss, the piss of Swedes who took the ferry across the Sound to buy alcohol. The Swedes who were always dragging trolleys loaded with beer and spirits.

One step, sometimes that all it takes, that’s all I want to say tonight.

Now my mind’s eye sweeps across Elsinore, that beautiful cold city, across the harbour, across the cobblestone streets filled with the liquor shops, across the castle itself, its canons, its breakwaters made of black granite blocks, across the Sound to the coast beyond. What was in your head when you sat on the bench every weekend, on your way back from your grandparents’ farm? What in your empty head, that hadn’t started to read, that had hardly started to think? Wasn’t I in the process of being born then, in some obscure region of your mind? Perhaps these words themselves were already being born then, on those nights.

You may think I malformed you, that I was the one who pulled you out of life, into the mirror. You may be right.

Wake up from your slumber, your mirrored dreams. Help me pull you back.

‘Do you know what I really think?’ he blurts, ‘my own opinion? I think time is running short. I think time is running short. I think there are forces of evil in the world. I think that global capitalism is just, like, one inch away from being everywhere. I think now is not the time to be frittering away playing in a silly-assed post-rock band. I think everything you do in the face of this is inadequate.’ Everything? ‘Yeah!’ he exclaims. ‘Which is good, it’s all good, it’s good to make feeble attempts, right? I think that’s what they are. It’s like throwing yourself up against a big fucking wall and the wall is just getting bigger and bigger…’

— Efrim Menuck

X has taken to his bed again, he tells me. I lie there all day, he says. It’s all gone to shit. You’re shit, I say. You’re the cloud of shit that’s covering my life. I would have been a success without you. I could have done anything better than anyone if it weren’t for you, he says. I would have had gumption, get-up-and-go, a can-do attitude, all that.

Job interviews, X tells me, that’s what we need! The more important and professional the better. A round table of influential men and women in business suits, severity and seriousness, that’s what we need. Job interviews every day! Or maybe we could get them to install some kind of CCTV system, he says, then we could just stay at home, then they could see it for themselves, without our bullshit. To live in the public eye, he says, twenty-four hours a day, like they used to live under God’s eye, that’ll teach us, that’ll straighten us up. Or we could go on one of those shows, he says, imagine us trying to present a serious business proposal!

When I started reading I found I couldn’t read properly: the sound of a car outside made me imagine the driver and where he or she was going, an overheard word made me think of some old conversation, which returned me to the words on the page and made me turn the page back and forth. When I started writing I found I couldn’t write properly: I’d get distracted by the movements of the pen in my hand and the ink marks on the page, or the cooing of a pigeon, which made me turn the page back and forth. Reading and writing themselves became distractions, as I suppose they had been from the beginning, parts of the long, drawn-out distraction that was my life.

Oh God, X says, I feel it under the surface again, it’s coming, it’s still there, I’m terrified, look at me! What am I terrified of, what’s there to be terrified of? Oh Christ help me, you’re no help, he says. Who can I turn to? It’s all there like it always was, we have to do something, we have to get out, what can we do? I’m still scared, he says, scared of nothing, it’s waiting to get us, Oh Jesus, we need to get out, let’s go do something, see a movie, I don’t care how bad it is, anything, dive into the sea, find someone to talk to, run down the street, my stomach’s turning, nothing’s right, nothing’s changed, it’s still bubbling under the surface like my bubbling guts, this is a nightmare, do something, why can’t you help? Let’s get a few bottles, X says, and have a quiet night in.

Writing: no going back, no going forward. At the end and beginning of your tether.

In the field of writing before I can identify myself. I’ve fallen into some kind of error. Begin again, end again.

You wrote: writing enclosed you outside yourself. You wrote: nothing spoke through your words like wind through leaves.

When I began writing I’d get distracted by the movements of the pen in my hand and the ink marks on the page. Sometimes the hand of writing gripped mine, but the beginning never really got off to a start. Instead it doubled up as an ending, making writing both beginning and end.

It’s obvious, X tells me, I have to go mad. Balls-out mad, right-round-the-bend-looney-tunes mad. I have to pass over to the other side, that’s the only sane thing to do. Real madness, not all this shit, he says, pointing around. Maybe then I’ll be real, maybe we’ll be real.