stairs

the stairs at night, we pause at the top of them looking down into the entrance of the abyss, an abyss. You pause at the platform edge, even with ankle level led lights you know it will tempt you to fall. The flight of wooden stairs gives walking a significance that it rarely does when walking through the streets, the stairs remind us that beyond the simple act of rising and descending in space, walking is a progress, even in the night when we cannot tell how many steps we must descend to reach the floor below. I descending the stirs a drift? could we have a theory of the drift and stairs? Even as we avoid falling by touching the invisible brass rail which grants us a sense of stability, in the dark between the led lights we resist the experiment of overcoming obstacles, instead we tread carefully in the unseen. The stairs require extra effort, extra concentration so that we experience the act of walking at its most extreme, its an adventure, and produces a heroism worthy of achilles and the Scythian princess pentheselia. In the night we disrupt the pattern of sleep to descend a flight of stairs which gives our disrupted night purpose. Climbing back up the stairs a (after visiting the artichoke in the kitchen, looking at a book by Spinoza, stilling our imagination or taking pills to relieve our headache) becomes an adventure, a nomadic excursion where we can never know what lies in wait for us. A missed step, a fall upwards and downwards, stepping barefoot on a small puddle of spit water. The bannister which in day light is brass but at night is cool almost invisible metal too touch, curves round the bottom of the stairs and then stops. Becomes wood. The depth of the stairs the width of the steps as we descend or climb to our bed. To slip back into the warmth of the bed, on a rare day she wakes, or half asleep speaks…