Sometimes people are like waves,

That never come ashore,

That spend their time on the bay,

Dredging up the lumps of coal.

And sometimes people are like a door

Through which the years pass.

Like poems the objects that we make are a collection of habits which remain long after the first encounter. Wave like they have the tendency to come and go when you least expect, to present themselves piece by piece, a fragmented domesticity of old plate, a sort of dead mail for old tenants that we have been obliged to hang on to.

I received a lot of that in the first years I spent living and working in an office at Commerce House. Through their letters those that came before me continued to make themselves apparent; long after the "fire sale", long after, as one newspaper succinctly put it, "the soup kitchens have come to pyramid city". In relation to this the letters were so many relics from which a past network of deals, free water coolers, free lunches and p.c.s could be reconstructed.

For a time, just so as to fit in, I gave myself the identity of such a business, even to the point of getting up early so as to come to work and gripe with everyone else about the agents and their inability to repair the lifts. Not that there was really a great need, over the years that I spent there the old tenants had begun to move out. What remained was the litter they left, the unpaid bills, the invitations to various consumer networks they could no longer access. It became apparent their position had been a temporary one, a making do until something better came their way.

Years earlier I had been intrigued by the idea of sending cards, filled with gobbledy gook, envelopes filled with shards. At this time not much happened, the only thing being sent being interpreted as a plea for help by a student prayer group. The card therefore seems to be part of a project that didn't get off the ground but found its counterpart in the letters I found later in my office. Emptied of use these now had become a threat to themselves as much as their would be recipients. A poetry of trouble.

In Benjamin's essay "The Philosophy of History" the "messianic" is a moment of ongoing potential, an entrance and an exit. Instead of seeking to transcend the labyrinth it calls for its reengagement. The unanswered letter, the unpaid bill, the perversity apparent in any object, asks for nothing less.

Brandt McCook