“Ich muss nicht schreiben…”. I don’t know who Peter Stamm was talking to when he said this, perhaps only talking to himself, but, product of a tidy Swiss mind, he wrote it down afterwards so that eventually the phrase found its way into print under his name.
Our Merzstall by contrast is an untidy and leaky construction, the patch is close to the issue of yellow brown fluids which constantly flow through, and a (Swiss, or clockwork, or other) logic for finding our way into commercial print appears to be entirely missing.
“Ich muss nicht schreiben…”, which, impersonally speaking, stops one in ones tracks. Or it ought to, the same as the nineteenth ‘Bartleby Effect’, only we lack the (the American, or novelist) moral courage or certainties of Melville to put into effect. So we wait.
We wait, and we wait. It is part of our aesthetic. Our aesthetic? In a nutshell it is N + 2: mostly cardboard, corrugated iron and plastic sheet assemblage, and waiting, and the idea of ending a story to us is improbable, strange, and rather queer.
Recall the warning of Angela Carter on (Shakespeare’s and other) endings, “Truthfully these glorious pauses do sometimes occur in the discordant narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop and stay there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further then you can call it a happy ending.”