.: …a flight of uncarpeted stairs. Something about the sight, and the phrase, has caught me the past number of days, ever since wandering through the hollows of the old Westfield house for a single day. The halo of light streaming through the window– a bright whitish-blue & snow-refracted light– stopped me and made me fumble for a camera (yes– such is the depths of my desire for enregistrement lately). I suppose, if I chose to dig in, I could assemble an explanation-machine that would produce the whys, measuring the symbols to my life at the moment; reductions, stripping, cleaning, looking, adding, remodeling, reconstructing; but also the halo, the hope, the dream, the expectation, the purity, the idealism, the quest for beauty, the intoxication with the other worlds, the lingering belief in angels and afterlife. And I guess it is there, and I am churning out explanations before I can quite measure the truth of them.

But I hope that in seeing the machine, I can realize the inevitability of explanations and see them rendered useless. Better to quiet these turbines and dynamos that couple and discharge offspring into my mouth and, hence, into the world. If I am silent, perhaps there still can be surprise. After all, Emerson does say, “mount to paradise/By the stairway of surprise”; and isn’t that what I am after, with my picture of the window?

I came up stairs into the world, for I was born in a cellar
–William Congreve

I left behind me rounded wooden slats; stairs worn so smooth by passing feet, sock and dirt and skin-oil, that they gleamed in the winter sunlight. Motion upward made the house creak and sway, not in any indication of weakness, but rather of recognition: the language that a structure speaks, an answer to the vocabulary of weights and pressures, velocities, masses and contacts. Wood beam and floorboard, nail and screw, dust and oil, creak and lean, groan and tremor, flex and bow. Running up the stairway always changes your life– in ways remeniscent, if in contrast, to the fish who live their entire lives never leaving some strata of the ocean, dominated by an instinctive ceiling, and floor. Up the stairs entered you into a new world, a new strata, sound of the television falling away, the quiet of books, or the intimacies of the telephone sitting by the bedside…

The stairway is not
a thing of gleaming strands
a radiant evanescence
for angels� feet that only glance in their tread, and need not
touch the stone.
–Denise Levertov

But that is the difficulty, which of course is the ease with which one transports the transporter into metaphysics, and no longer mere motion. It is the production of the machine that reifies, makes the verbs beliefs, and can make any scaffolding that raises or supports into a stairway to heaven. And not that I am not complicit– and not that I am not eager for the explanations- it’s just, despite the miraculous appearance of light on my slats and banister of my childhood, I am simply, after all, trying to see the stairs.

Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
–Edna St. Vincent Millay