(the making of the hut)
I have, of late, been fingering the spirit. All this talking, setting the record straight, has slowly taken its toll. The analogy – if I might be permitted one – is with a ball in a ball bearing. I have a mind to incompletion. What I’m driving at is ‘play’. And this surprises me, this latitude, for are there not yet important facts to be nailed down: the final exposure of George, the ultimate, and inevitable treachery of ‘K’? And I can hardly deny the urgency, the LED shows 87:42, which means, what with eating and sleeping, somewhere considerably below 50. There is much still to relate, much information still to organize - and how sweet the impulse, in the face of it, to make hay.
I’m half-inclined to put this down to Satie, who can, of course, be the most congenial of companions. (I have tried listening to The Charlatans but increasingly I can’t find the mood.) I am more convinced than ever that Satie’s ‘Gymnopédies’ are the measure of his own duplicity, the little embellishments he presented his wife after visits to his mistress, sophisticated departures from a squalid truth. Except that to my knowledge Satie never committed any crime, and so was never himself driven to an act of closure – for which read disclosure, for which read setting the record straight. No, all Satie was ever guilty of was a little light-fingered deviation, from which followed an ornamentation that became a way of life. It’s right there, in the notation, in his unsustainable little episodes – Satie was one of the world’s more accomplished liars.