You are here at the end where there is a house. But you may not enter this house because there is no inside. It is not empty inside—there simply is no inside just as there is no inside of the color green. If there was something inside of the color green, that something would have to be something other than the color green. There can be something inside of a house but not this house because this house does not have an inside like the color green does not have an inside. This house is, after all, at the end. Outside of the house is what there is: a large field with trees at the far end. There is a small mailbox here. You open it and discover a note that seems to be for someone staying in the house – which is, of course, impossible under the circumstances.
You could walk into this field toward the trees, but you do not because you are merely passing by. What would you do there anyway? You could enjoy the view for a time but then what? Linger about in a field with some trees? And anyway, you are more concerned with the house and the nature of its inside because you cannot help yourself or because you are stubborn or because you are curious or because you are interested in the mystery of it. A field and some trees is just a field and some trees, but a house with no inside is something else. No inside! You want to understand, you want to see, see what no inside looks like.
It looks like such a normal house. It is white with green trim and shutters. There is a stone walkway leading up to a small porch and a front door, large and green. But it only looks like a door. It has a handle and a solid, heavy knocker and everything, but it does not function as a door. It will never open. You try it to be sure. It doesn’t open. In a manner altogether perfunctory, you knock with the knocker. You wait politely but nothing happens – just as expected. You look around the porch, but there is nothing to see – just a porch. You knock again – more deliberately and more forcefully this time – not because you think someone will eventually answer but because you find the sound of the knock and the feel of the knocker to be somehow satisfying. You scrunch the note as best you can into the doorjamb.
You step off the porch to investigate further and find another porch that seems to wrap around the house but you see no other doors or windows on this side. Now that you find yourself already some way into the field, you decide to continue walking toward the trees at the far end. Why not? Usually, you would just pass right by only thinking about the possibility of taking such a leisurely jaunt. But this house that has no inside has you wondering and dreaming, and the field and trees may now become something other than a field and trees. As you walk, a whole world shows itself to you—a world that was not there before but that has always been available somehow. You, too, become something else—the Hunter of Masks, Gardener of Stars. Here in this moment, you are a conjurer, a generator of uncertain things, of fleeting worlds! You are not even sure what these things are or what they might mean, but they are there just the same: a passage in which you see your friend or else someone very much like your friend or else you as you want to be seen doing something not altogether important but requiring a great deal of your attention and from which you may faintly hear the notes of a song being played upon an instrument that sounds muffled because it is so far away inside this passage, infinitely far yet still audible, and there is an interesting phrase here that might be an apt description of you or your friend or that might be the name of the song that you can no longer hear and have already forgotten just as you have already forgotten the interesting phrase because the passage which you have been following has now led you to some downtown area or village where people are walking amongst the shops and banks and apartments and where you are not even there at all. You are nowhere, outside. You are observing and wondering how this anonymous village should have come to seem more real than you yourself. You keep watching with the expectation that something must happen soon.
But nothing ever happens. The people just keep walking. Now you are approaching the trees at the end of the field. The intriguing things of which you were not sure are gone just like wisps of smoke into the sky never to return again. Here there is only the bark of the tree trunks, the wind moving the branches and leaves, the dead grass and dirt underfoot. And, if you kept walking, there would be all of the objects to be found beyond these trees—reeds and tall grasses bordering a lazily flowing river, more fields, more trees, mountains. But you do not have time for more walking—you have errands to run and appointments to keep! Now you are Whatever-Your-Name-Is and the idea of a house with no inside seems laughable to you. And what of the world you glimpsed mere moments ago? The world that somehow sprang from a field and some trees? Wasn’t that only a game, a trick wherein your mind was freed and allowed to wander more loosely amongst the associations available to it rather like a dream in which there are no consequences for choosing an irrelevant memory? You turn around to look at the house from here. How unremarkable it is! As unimportant as any other. You feel foolish to have thought that it was something special. And, as you walk back toward the house from the far end of the field, you wonder if it is so special for a house to have no inside anyway.
Near the house again, you can see that it is already different, transformed somehow from before. White with green trim. Is that what it was before? You cannot recall. Wisps gone forever. Ah, but the words are not gone. They are still right there. Yes, right up there. Have a look for yourself. Of course, you may have thought “green” by mistake when you meant “black.” There is no way to be sure now, but something seems different. One thing is the same though: you may still not enter this house because there is still no inside to it. Nor shall there ever be. You step onto the porch that wraps around. The house is in worse condition than it seemed from afar. Old leaves covering loose boards, paint peeling. Shabby as it is, you cannot find a point of entry. But you can’t quite accept that nothing is on the other side. Turning the corner you can see a window up ahead. You approach it because now you are Hoaxer’s Brainchild and you want to see what no inside looks like. You are at the window now. You use your hands to block the light around your eyes and put your face up to the glass.
And there you are!
Just you. No inside! Just you as you-looking. A stillness. Nothing else. Nothing more—not here anyway.
I could walk back into the field toward the trees again. But why? A house with no inside has as much to offer as a field and trees. There seems to be nothing more for me here. This is what happens at the end. But this does not stop me from looking sadly at the house that has become arbitrarily special to me—this house, these trees, these leaves, this grass, this dirt. But it is already different now, something else, the same emptiness which befalls every thing and whose former significance, if it ever could be said to have had any, has blown away with the wind. All that I can do now is continue to pass by and remember, perhaps, that I once lingered here for a time. Here there was something. I’m not quite sure what it was, but for a little while I was able to be something other than Whatever-My-Name-Is and I could be again. Over and over again. But somewhere else for now—a place where something calls out to me. I have to move on because I am a rider and this house is at the end, this house that has no inside: the precise location where everything that has not yet taken place may begin and begin again without conclusion.
It is, as ever, up to you. Shall we skip ahead?
{ } VK Arkiv 