10/7/07

There is a danger these entries will become mere theory (for which read: inherited and acquired, not discovered thoughts) as they become perfunctory, a duty and not an exercise. If you have little to say today it is not because the day was so uneventful, but because its events had, for your purposes at least, so little immediate significance. Tomorrow night you will be heading for Minsk (without, it should be noted, a transit visa), and if all goes well arriving in Moscow tomorrow morning, where you have, as yet, nowhere to stay. Again you wonder whether the various difficulties you have engineered for yourself - inaccurate passport details on ticket, less than respectable visa - were made deliberately (unconsciously) or purely by chance. If deliberately, the imminent work should prove more than compensatory. Your real concern is, in fact - in so far as you 'have' one - what you are to do next year; or rather, how you are to decide. To imagine that the coming two weeks will decide it is naive. It will come down to questions of self-confidence and determination. Last night you dreamt of Nell and she advised you to go to university; at the time this advice seemed compelling, but now, who knows? If you were to take the decision to stay you would of course be on your own, working without any kind of critical support or advice - or so you think. Nor is there, of course, any guarantee that what you might find would be interesting or useful - it might be profoundly dull. This raises again the question of openness or commitment to your subject (which is...?) without which no writing is possible.

9/7/07

This morning unable to think: unable even to decipher the Russian for 'eighty' when the building administrator presented me with a bill. This is the effect - I hope - of the sleepless night spent being bitten by insects (the new, Russian insect repellent proving to be completely ineffective). But there is another sense as well: that you have somehow stopped thinking creatively (=intellectually), and are now content merely to pass your time in a pleasant, convivial, mildly inebriated haze. This, even if something of an exaggeration, is disastrous as a tendency: there is a sense of responsibility here, even if a small one, to make some kind of contribution while you can - to come here to behave egoistically as you have seems hardly defensible.
You were stupid to speak too much last night about your plans. It seems you are determined to put off the moment of decision until as late as possible - or rather, to 'incriminate' yourself as deeply as you can when you do make it. The self-destructiveness of this course of action and your apparent indifference to this self-destructiveness should bother you more than it now does. But for how long has that been the case (remember N.'s sculpture of you)?
Yesterday, or rather this weekend, was another example of how easily your self-confidence can be rocked, even blown away by a thing lighter than air. It is connected to this indecision, of course, but also your sense of unpreparedness, your inaction in the face of what is to come. Why aren't you getting up earlier and working harder (you've already made some excuses about this)? Why aren't you preparing notes on Tsereteli, or organising the hotel in Moscow? Why does, even now, this apparent inertia persist? One danger of the freelancing approach (one of many) is that you end up writing selectively, about what interests you only, and therefore 'discover' only what you set out to find (ie each 'approach' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy). This relates to the more general problem of the foreign, the other, as a fantasy-screen on which you project your desire: the undertaking does not, fundamentally, open you up, expose you to the world, but closes you off from it; and this in turn relates to the act of coming here as a form of escape, rather than for any other purpose (the ambition of writing literature seems to be fundamentally opposed to the ambition of 'changing' the world).

7/7/07

Reversion to type (this sounds like a section from Minima Moralia): this is not always an 'unhealthy' phenomenon. Yesterday when you were rude to the young (Indian) employee at the bank, this struck you as radically ambiguous act: on the one hand racist and classist: her English was not fluent and she had difficulty understanding you; on the other, a wholly healthy reaction against anonymous corporate structures by which our lives are governed, and behind which people like her (lowly employees 'threatened' by customers) are obliged to hide. The two are not completely separable, and provide an illustration of how, on the one hand, a 'politically correct' radical act is not possible, and, on the other, of how reactionary powers and institutions (in this case banks) have appropriated the terminology of progressive modernity (in this case anti-racism). Incidentally, they also exemplify the attractions of a certain variety of populist, anti-corporate neo-fascism, which rejects the tyranny of these institutions and the thought policing involved in political correctness. It is also worth remembering that your rudeness, had you not been cut off (by her?) might actually have been effective: she was about to connect you to the relevant department. Why, though, this should involve a 'reversion' is perhaps questionable: 'there is a little racist in all of us' may well be true, but does it really constitute a kind of ur-self, a basic, reptilian social brain of which the others are mere outgrowths? Here, then, is exemplified one of the 'pleasures' of coming here: that of escaping the pacifying, anaesthetising and - at least as you experience it - paralysing effect of late capitalist social structures, among which you must include the family (keep in mind here the family as an economic unit, a regulator and shaper of consumption patterns). All of these do not so much disappear, but are attenuated on coming here, and that constant, gnawing anxiety and the depredations of the superego, which seems to keep you passive in order the better to deliver its kicking, seem to have almost gone completely. The ability to concentrate, that other great casualty of it, has improved here somewhat but is still far from what it might be (or is that merely a persistent illusion?)
It may be good to relate some of these phenomena - those pertaining to the superego especially, and the sense of being 'unqualified' to do certain things - to the division of labour more generally. The connection may not be a direct one, and the division certainly cannot constitute their only cause, but it certainly seems to be there. The passage from a society where labour is strictly divided, and has been for some time, to one where it is less so, is instructive and seems to open up possibilities. It also explains such ideological phenomena as 'nationalism', in so far as, for example, people here still 'seem' to be Georgians before they are bankers (see below), whereas in the west it is the other way round: their 'social role' (ie position within the system of production) has precedence, while their (national, cultural etc) identity takes second place to it - becomes an adjunct to it, even an ornament; becomes, in other words, just so much 'cultural junk'. Hence certain modern novels (and not only Mathews') with their 'cargoes of cultural junk'. What becomes of interest in these is how that cultural junk - the redundant residues of past ages that we have been (apparently arbitrarily) left with - now gets shifted around, manipulated, disassembled, reassembled, shaped into new patterns and how, through these processes, the system (including the libidinal system) delineates, manifests itself (given that it cannot manifest itself 'directly').
Note regarding the banker you met today the sense of someone still playing a role, someone whose mask does not yet completely fit. Also note, regarding the Georgianness of employees, that the same organisational chaos - at least in terms of finding information, of contacting individuals - and of superfluous and underemployed labour, was as evident at the bank as it was everywhere else. The large numbers of young men hanging around in lobbies and corridors talking to each other animatedly but not apparently doing anything, while certain cool, air-conditioned offices remained empty, reminded you very much of the parliament building fifteen years ago (that other centre of power) - in conditions that, in almost every other circumstance, are very different.

6/7/07

You allow yourself to get too easily distracted: even trivial things occupy too much of your time, not least because you use them to postpone the most important. Not having regular, adult responsibilities exposes you to yourself: to your faults and weaknesses, which are allowed to grow and run riot. Couldn't, though, the propensity to postpone what is important, to concern yourself with the trivial and the unnecessary, be regarded as the dominant truth of your adult life? And how then does this relate to the peculiarly persistent, or rather recurring, ambition you are dealing with (or indeed subject to) now? Is it important, or merely another distraction? If a distraction, why have you put it off for so long? If important, why do you hope for nothing from it, why do you expect - now at least, but even, in a different sense, before - the whole enterprise to turn to ashes in your hands (by which you don't necessarily mean 'fail')? Why this overwhelming need to leave the realisation of your plans inviolate (it need hardly be pointed out that this is not the only thing you need to leave inviolate)? 'Lenin's great achievement was not to have feared success' - you need not agree with the specific contents of this statement (though you should certainly by now have formulated some consistent position on it - another postponement) in order to agree with its general truth. Why should fear of success and fear of failure be so closely interlinked? Here again, when L. asked you this question you could offer no adequate answer. Clearly, though, the strong suspicion that you fear success (an inheritance from your father) and your confusions and doubts over ambition (that is, which kind of success exactly) must surely be connected. Your hope was always - your vague, underlying hope, that is - that commitment would show the way out of this dilemma, and that conscious engagement with what was vital and real, and above all, necessary, would overcome all this neurotic procrastination, which was really nothing more than the consequence of conceiving human self-realisation as the accumulation of cultural capital for the purposes of professional advancement and social display. Who wouldn't, in these circumstances, become indifferent among this multitude of choices and possibilities, each offering a slightly different version of the same. Couldn't one perhaps see this neurosis not as the consequence of bourgeois self-indulgence, but as a kind of confused rejection of the poverty, the paucity, of contemporary 'affluent society' life? Then the struggle might become, no longer shameful and contemplative, but heroic.

5/7/07

But concerning doubts: you must surely have noticed how every attempt at 'self-realisation' is accompanied by psychological stresses of this kind, as if some part of you were desperately opposing it, determinedly trying to slam on some kind of psychic (and not so psychic) breaks that will halt the project before it is realised. It is precisely this that makes it so difficult to answer the fundamental, and fundamentally important, question of what it is you want to do, for your 'immediate' accessible feelings and reactions are not reliable - are, on the contrary, all too often deliberately deceptive (you suspect). And what seems to lie behind all of this, but what is much more probably merely its rationalisation, is the notion that at some, now obviously inaccessible, point in the past you took a wrong turning, and that as a result every subsequent step taken has only led you further astray from this path abandoned long ago. Because this point of departure is now inaccessible, there is no point returning to it: error and confusion, ever more deeply plunged into, are the only available courses of action now. Even taking what would have been the 'right' course of action in the past will now no longer rectify things, nor even significantly ameliorate them, for the time for correctly taking it is long over.
The knowledge that this notion of a jolt or a break in the course of a life that subsequently affects, infects and compromises all the events that follow it could only be illusory does not in the least (or let us say, does barely) affect its influence which persists as the reality, the context in which this knowledge is comprehended. Perhaps the only sensible course of action in these conditions must be not to ignore or reject or try to escape this reality, but to go on acting within it, not as if it were not there, but as if it were of little account. This terrible, corrosive and paralysing sense of not knowing why you are acting the way you are, not knowing your reasons for doing what you are doing cannot be escaped but must in some form be worked through, in some confidence that the meaning generated by acting this way may in time alter this perception of past events - and thereby of present events. Or perhaps indeed without this confidence, without any kind of hope at all, but only the determination that the past will not continue to exercise its tyranny over the present - and with the awareness that your own 'happiness' must be of secondary importance to this determination.

4/7/07

Now that the entire undertaking has become possible, even, so to speak, inevitable, you are assailed by doubts and self-recriminations regarding its whole purpose and value. Since you're now used to this, the experience is not as disagreeable as it might once have been; but the doubts, or rather the arguments behind them, remain real enough. Only two, immediate ones need be touched on here: why an interview, and why an article of such great length? The answer to both is hardly defensible: because the magazine required them of you (in effect). Other, wider questions cluster round the central one of why you are according your subject this attention and making him the subject of 'free' (albeit 'bad') publicity to begin with - which leads on to a second, namely; what is being enacted here? Why this need to approach in this way people who disgust and appall you? For undoubtedly you have had it for some time. It amounts to a kind of playing with 'evil', perhaps with death, that seems in some way fundamentally dishonest - or perhaps, even worse, just dull (certainly 'narcissistic'). But connected with it somehow is a kind masochism whose nature you've never really been able to properly determine, but which manifests itself, at least in this case, as a need somehow to morally compromise yourself. This interview offers several opportunities for this: obvious, but also the more refined one of shaking someone's hand only to pull him flat on his face: a kind of passive aggressiveness, or even a schoolboy aggressiveness, that seems capable only of reflecting badly upon you, and of making the whole undertaking suspect.

3/7/07

"... as we, pale captives, creep to death". If this line, from a sixteenth, perhaps seventeenth, century poem, first and last read at school when you were twelve, and whose author you no longer remember (if you ever did), and, as you were aware even then, of dubious artistic quality, has stayed with you all the years since, it is surely because it seemed then - and now - to express some fundamental truth about life. And perhaps the fact that it still seems to do so is itself a 'direct' consequence of your initial recognition of it as undeniable (a recognition conditioned, surely, by attitudes acquired from your father);in other words, its truth was of the self-fulfilling kind. On the other hand, if there is anything to be argued with in it, it isn't the final final destination it ordains, but the manner of getting there: why must we inevitably creep, as opposed to walk or march or run? Is it merely to prolong things here with a shameful dawdling, a cowardly dragging of the heels that is concerned only with postponing the inevitable? Or do we creep because awed and terrified by the final end, reminded constantly by it of the vanity of any human undertaking? If the line contains any truth, it is perhaps of the kind we default to out of despair or exhaustion, the consequence of mental rather than physical weakness, whereby the world becomes too hostile, too dangerous, for us to face it any more: then you are reduced to creeping. But for the rest of life, perhaps even for most of it, that need not be the case. Why should knowledge of one's transience and eventual certain annihilation destroy meaning, either now or at all? Isn't meaning itself an inherently transient phenomenon? Doesn't it fit 'naturally' within the scheme of finitude? Seen in this light, the pale captives creeping to death start to seem a bit absurd, a kind of baroque Grand Guignol. It aims at merely scaring, while misapprehending the real nature of mortality (which is what exactly?)

2/7/07

The events of last night happened because of your own passivity; had you left when you wanted to (and when you should have) you would have avoided an unpleasant encounter, giving assurances you have no intention of keeping (and therefore made yourself 'complicit' with those you have lied to, since their 'real' aim, or so you like to imagine, is to involve you in their untruth), and, finally, drinking too much so that the next morning was wasted (it is now 12.21pm). It also revealed to you, as if it needed revealing, how fragile your self-confidence is, that requires only a minor event to shake it. The causes of this fragility may seem obvious enough, but they probably need some looking into nevertheless; specifically the reasons why your self-respect seems predicated upon your success in enterprises you do not consider of any vital, intrinsic value; while you stay away from, or find pretexts to postpone, undertakings that might matter to you (you seem to imagine the important projects might grow out of an agglomeration of the unimportant - why?) You have always imagined this was not simple fear of failure but something more, linked to a persistent and destructive uncertainty about what it is you really 'want' (or at least, an apparent uncertainty); but isn't at least part of it, even a substantial part, nothing more than a simple fear of failure? And if some part of it is fear of success, isn't this a fear that anticipates a success that crumbles to dust in your hands - that sees it as proving, on its realisation, not to be 'success' at all (for which read: not to be what you expected of it)? Why should this chill you so much, or, to put it another way, why should you expect so much of any successful action (as if it were going to resolve something definitively, and once and for all). Why build up success this way, so as to make any attempt at it seem vain? What do you gain from this?

Note

Twenty odd years ago, the American writer Harry Mathews devised an exercise for overcoming, as he put it, "the anxiety of the blank page". Following Stendahl's injunction of vingt lignes par jour, genie ou pas, he began over the course of a year "many writing days with a stint of at least twenty lines, based on whatever came into my head".
The entries that precede this, and the ones that follow, were conceived along the same lines. Like Mathews' exercise, they were written "on a pad reserved for the purpose" (which seems somehow important, at least to the person writing them); unlike it, they were preparatory to nothing and an end in themselves. Rather than act as a warm up exercise, their main purpose was to ensure that I wrote at least something on any given day, irrespective of whether it was useful or interesting. By addressing primarily myself, I found I was largely relieved of the pressure to be either.
The twenty lines in question refer not to sentences, nor even rows of print, but to handwritten lines in a notebook, which means that they are capable of standing for a variable number of words. Mathews' entries tend to average at three hundred; these, at five, come to a little more by consistently breaking the rule.

30/6/07

The city, a narrow band of buildings, is tightly enclosed by steep, ridged hills, with Sololaki, the old Armenian quarter, lying in the neat right angle formed by the confluence of two of these. This constitutes the city's south-eastern district, lying on the edge of its medieval settlement and at the eastern end of the main thoroughfare of Rustaveli Avenue. The latter runs in rough parallel to the Mtqari, the city's river, which is spanned by three central bridges: the Mtekhi, the Baratishvili and the Chugereti. Beyond the middle one of these, on the left bank of the river, lies the district of Alvabari, where two of the city's most recent architectural additions are to be found: the cathedral of Sameba, the largest church in the country, and the presidential palace, a kind of low-budget Reichstag, Beyond them the ground rises again to the city's northern hills, surmounted by ranks of Soviet tower block settlements.
It is remarkable how undeveloped the city still remains beyond its main thoroughfare. A street or two up from Rustaveli and one might be in a provincial town; a street or two more and one might be in a rural village: it still has that air of langour, of stasis, and of quiet, crumbling decay. The abruptness of the surrounding slopes means that the houses come to an end very suddenly, and nature, at least in the form of the wooded scrubland that climbs up the side of the hill, makes its presence clearly felt. Beyond the Pantheon and the church of Mtatsminda, the route up the southern slope peters out into an earthen track, in places precipitously steep and worn away by landslides. Elsewhere it is interrupted by concrete steps, broken and ruined by countless rivulets of water pouring off the upper plateau. The cable car station at the bottom of the hill is undergoing restoration, as is its terminus and park at the top, and will, supposedly, be operational in a few months' time. But this interstitial area, too steep to build on, remains semi-wild, an indice of the modern city's precarious foothold on the land it covers; and to it has been confined the city's refuse, both in the form of popular, semi-pagan practices that surround the shrine and in the existence of stray dogs, who accompanied me in m climb up the hill (only to turn off at one point and later reappear: they knew a short cut that I did not).
One effect of the now widespread renovation is the fencing off of buildings and areas that formerly you were free to walk around, a kind of surreptitious enclosure of the commons, since you strongly suspect that once the fences are removed, access will no longer be as free as it once was. You will have to pay for the cable car and the amusement park; you will no longer be free to walk on the flower beds.
In an alley in the streets above the town you came upon a tiny and frail kitten - one of the tiniest and frailest you have ever seen. It looked at you with an expression not so much of fear but of jaded horror, as if, in its short life, it had already grown used to encountering only sources of terror. You feel you may have seen the same expression in certain children: it has a perverse affinity with a kind of continual wonderment at everything. This was most apparent in its eyes, which were yellow, albuminous and rheumy, and seemed on the point of dissolution and decay, of actually falling out of their sockets and sliding down its face, as if in recognition of how close it was to death, and of how its life were nothing more substantial than a breath of air, and as if decay were already composing itself within its living body, within the very eyes that gave the anguished expression of this life, for the moment that it would be extinguished.

Mann's Doctor Faustus might become acceptable as a work of literature once one takes it as a series of reflective essays cast in novelistic form. There is no inherent reason why the novel shouldn't be given this function. One need also accept that it is a novel about modernism, about the experience of its birth - at least in music - rather than itself modernist. This may well prove true of all Mann's work, who like Rilke was born (1875) a little too early to participate fully in the movement, though young enough to be present at its birth. Mann becomes a kind of Moses, who sees the promised land but is unable to enter it. His novels take the only alternative open to realist fiction if it is to retain serious ambitions for itself: they turn into essays.

29/6/07

The danger is of this becoming a mere empty exercise: you have already procrastinated fifteen minutes (fifteen minutes) before putting pen to paper; thus a process aimed at enabling writing becomes itself threatened with the very blockage it aimed to free. There would be nothing new to this: the proliferation of control committees in the Soviet apparat, of bureaucracies aimed at cutting down and controlling the size of the bureaucracy, is the other instance you always think of: the reforms succeeding only in relocating (at best) the problems they were aimed at solving to another position within the system, like a superegoic agency that merely expresses the neurosis it seeks to control.
The self as state, as community, as multitude: why has this been such a persistent trope in you thinking? Is it merely because you were studying politics and political theory at a time when you would have been better engaged in (aesthetically inclined) introspection (Mallarme as opposed to Marx)? It seems likely that the reasons go deeper than this, and that the conflation of the two expresses something basic to your way of thinking: a monstrous solipsism on the one hand (the political world as self writ large, the social and historical processes that play themselves out in it analogous to psychic ones), and, on the other, a readiness to see the self as a determinant of that political world, as a mere, perhaps artificial, creation of it. Thus there is an ambiguity to it, which leaves open a 'liberating' potential, though there is no denying that the emphasis has always been on the side of the solipsistic. Are your journeys here merely extended exercises in solipsism, in which you can find yourself projected on the fantasy screen of the 'Caucasus'? The capacity for maintaining an openness to people and to aesthetic experiences seems crucial here; something you have always found such an effort (but then, you have so little experience), but which is vital if you are to achieve anything. Amis thought he could deduce teh quality of the person (and by implication, the life) from the quality of the prose: this is an unfashionable view, but there is probably some truth to it. And the same applies to novels themselves: they translate a life, a life experience, into an aesthetic form, and the translation preserves, and carries with it, all the strengths and failings of that life. Thus when you judge an artwork you are also judging its maker - unavoidably, and perhaps somewhat coldly and callously. The irony of the novel, a form opened up by new possibilities in human experience, the notion that one's life need no longer conform to some socially predetermined plot, that it can be something 'novel' in itself, is that it (the form) is now succumbing to the development and extension of those very possibilities (or at least their 'bad' development); the insertion of 'choice' into all areas of human activity, into the most vital and important actions one can commit in one's life. To be effective, the novel, like all art forms, required a restriction or barrier that is now disappearing: it required freedom within certain limitations. It is not that now one necessarily has greater freedom, but that those limitations have redistributed, reshaped themselves. In doing so they have created a new internal landscape - or rather, flattened the barrier between the internal and the external - which calls for some new innovation.

28/6/07

The 'dilemma' you have created for yourself, wholly of your own making, is revealing: it is as if you cannot act (ie do any of this) not only without a 'clock ticking', but also without making yourself responsible for everything - and by extension, by making yourself guilty, by putting yourself in the position where you cannot but incur blame. This alone - some externalised, superegoic force - provides motivation. You always knew that something else could - it has in the past - and you always knew that the 'incentives' it would provide would be more effective (or rather, you always believed this. You never had enough evidence to know it). Thus hurt pride - let's face it - produced the first trip here all those years ago, and if that did not prove as successful as you'd hoped, it is presumably only because your pride was not hurt enough, that the essential thing or quality that makes you you did not feel sufficiently endangered; although you now know that it was (or to put it another way, you retrospectively let it become such). The sum of you preceding actions - and to be fair, not only these - engineered the breakdown of the fantasy (as Zizek might say), with the result you are familiar with: that peculiar indifference to yourself and to everything else, that knowledge that certain alternatives in life were possible, if you wanted to pursue them; but that very same knowledge of their possibility seeming to rule them out as a worthwhile pursuit. What is ironic about this, admittedly artificial, world-weariness is that it rapidly becomes indistinguishable from laziness and regression into a kind of childish petulance. You made yourself a schmuck, and you made yourself such for reasons that were strangely and inextricably linked to your efforts and motives for escaping schmuckdom; that impatience you felt with yourself and with others, or indeed with the 'world', becoming diverted, or perhaps inverted, so that it was no longer an enervated longing for self-realisation, but rather a despairing desire for stasis, for remaining, in the face of the passage of time, the same; or at least for postponing that passage. It was in other words another kind of escape, but an escape into hiding, from which there is - so far as you can tell - no exit other than the one by which you came in, so that the question merely became one of how long you would remain 'down there' before realising this (or rather, admitting it to yourself).
All these errors and stupidities were, or rather seemed to be, predicated upon an infantile notion: that a thought or emotion has no true reality unless expressed in words: otherwise there is merely the Humean 'bundle of impressions', the play of passing desires, whims and fears, none of which ever add up to anything in themselves unless caught and moulded in the discipline of language; in other words, beneath an outer crust, all is 'mess'. This is an utterly miserable notion of humanity, made all the more powerful for its partial truth (desires are, after all, 'artificial' things). But it needs to be opposed, not simply by Marxist strategy, by 'action', but by a theory of the self that privileges desire, that insists upon its position as vital, and which does not, as empiricism and the whole tradition of thought that you associate with the complacent, middle-class milieu in which you grew up seems to do, regard which desires one has as a matter of fundamental indifference, and insists as what is most important only that they be satisfied; indeed advises that one choose one's desires carefully, judiciously, so that they be ones that are satisfiable. Against this, at least this, you must oppose yourself utterly - and you must be prepared to accept the consequences of this opposition.

27/6/07

This exercise, which is supposed to be conducted in the morning (as preparation for a day of production), fails at precisely that time because the start of the day crowds your head with thoughts of responsibilities - largely non-existent ones - and of longings or regrets. The latter, a wistful, remorseful daydreaming, seems particularly well entrenched, and could be, indeed probably is, the whole reason for your presence here, as well as conceivably for some of the more important events of your life. You need to keep in mind that the purpose of the regret is to induce the state of distracted, dreamy remembrance, a revisiting and reshaping of events that now exist safely in the past, rather than the other way round (that is, regret is not a consequence of dreaming, but its cause). It is, in other words, a means of producing stasis and inactivity, and of thwarting the old enemy, change. And consider how many of your friends and family also fear change, perhaps even more than you do. Your collective fear reinforces, or at least confirms, each other's, and you all become engaged together in a vain exercise: resisting the passage of time by keeping everything the same; rather like effecting a symbolic death in order to outwit a real one.
What is the way out of this? You had always assumed the answer to be: work ('real' work, as opposed to the mere earning of money), but this is probably an illusion, or at least not the whole truth. The answer, of course, is that no one thing can provide a way out, but rather a process, one that presumably does not consist in instrumentalising your life towards some single goal or purpose (which itself will provide ample opportunities for postponement, for putting things off one way or another). This is presumably true even of political and 'intellectual' engagement or of artistic 'creation'. Or rather, these latter can only successfully follow on from the 'process', they cannot establish it. Why is it that most, if not all, of you adult life has been spent running before you could walk, or as a paraplegic with ambitions of becoming a tightrope walker? The putting of the cart before the horse has been as much a theme as 'lack of commitment' (which might in some respects be regarded as 'over-commitment'). It implies both lack of confidence and an overweening excess of it; the two being strangely related in a manner you have yet to define properly.

26/6/07

You are starting to assign this exercise too much importance and treat it with too much circumspection; thinking about what you're going to write, making notes, will defeat its very object, which is to maintain, or at least encourage, an openness to experience, by relaxing the degree of conscious control over where that attention is directed. You do not only suffer from this in writing: this morning you procrastinated over going out to take photographs because you felt guilty over 'wasting' the day that way (would you have felt any more content had you spent it scurrying around 'earning money'?). Then you headed up to Mtatsminda, which, like so many places in Tbilisi, the aura of having barely perceptibly, but definitively, changed: perhaps most evident in the busload of women who arrived as you did in a sort of organised outing, evidently to visit the church. You considered climbing all the way up to the park at the summit, but in the end turned back and descended by the long, narrow stairway by the funicular: the latter appears, if not already to be in operation, then about to be. The best places for taking photographs - at least the kind of photographs you wanted to take - turned out to be, not surprisingly, in the residential streets off the main drag of Rustaveli. Indeed, Rustaveli very much presents a facade of prosperity that is barely one block thick: away from it, the western shops and restaurants disappear and are replaced by the ubiquitous grocery stores, which are all oddly alike. For the photographs you decided on nothing adventurous - and not only that, but highly derivative - imposing a 'constrictive form' on subject matter (graffitied walls, doorways and posters) and composition - like rather rigid, abstract paintings.
Mtatsminda still had a sheep in its grounds lying under the shade of a bush and looking sickly and dehydrated: what is it exactly that you find complacent about these religious customs and rituals (remember how Nell perceived a complacency in suicide bombers)? You suspect the pictures will turn out dull without exception, in part because black and white does not lend itself to the form you've chosen, but in part also because photos tend to convey the commitment (courage?) and dedication with which they were taken, and your had very little of these. You will have to start using your time more carefully and getting more done with what you have available: extravagances of this kind cannot be too often repeated.

25/6/07

Re Solaris: note how the giant ocean exhibits characteristics and forms of a microscopic organism (an analogy that becomes most apparent in the scene where Kris examines Rheya's blood); thus in it the qualities of the vast and the minuscule are combined. Note also how it combines body-like qualities with architectural ones: the descriptions of its formations (extensors, mimoids, symmetriads) are distinctly physiological, to the point of being indecent, even obscene; but the architectural language in which they are described neutralises this effect. This combination of the immense and the microscopic, of the organic and the inorganic, is surely integral to Lem's fundamental achievement in the work, which is to devise formations that both invite a reading as metaphors and at the same time resist it (in a manner not dissimilar to certain aesthetic innovations of modernism). Your first reading of the symmetriads, for example, was as some symbol of collective human endeavour and striving towards some ultimate self-realisation or knowledge (whether social, philosophical or existential), which - this being the work of an east European writer - always and inevitably falls short of its aim and collapses back into chaos and disorder. Think of Newtonian physics being succeeded by Einsteinian relativity theory, which in turn will be succeeded by something else; in each case the beautiful and complex symmetriad that represents the theory (and Lem makes this connection quite overt) is doomed to degeneration and decay. This was presumably part of the attraction of Lem's book for Tarkovsky, who so obviously delights in the Vergaenglichkeit of things. On this view, Solaristics, the study of the planet, must be a metaphor for philosophy, the study of knowledge itself; and the despair and discouragement experienced by its practitioners arises only from the fact that it is a philosophy that has mistaken itself for a science, which expects to 'progress' and uncover substantive truths about the world; whereas this, of course, is not the function of philosophy at all. Perhaps the enlightenment held out by the book, if it holds any out at all, amounts merely to one of realising this mistake.

24/6/07

Your conviction that your life and all attempts at self-realisation in it ('professional', existential, amorous) are essentially pathetic (in both senses of the word) is of course self-fulfilling; it is also one you apply to others. This is something you (again) came aware of on reading M.: where he found exhilaration, wonderment, joy etc. you found only trite middle-class pieties (to misquote the man himself). No doubt this capacity of his in part accounts for his success with women: he made them 'feel good' about themselves, whereas you require from them that they make you feel good about yourself. It is not surprising that he got considerably more takers.
There is no going back to your 'old self', the one who, though perhaps capable of thoughts like these, would never have dreamt of putting them down on paper (on the ludicrous principle that a thought unexpressed is as good as nonexistent). This is just as well, but there are occasionally times when you miss that determined suppression of your own internal life - which you (rightly in a sense) associated with regret, self-pity and stagnation, and which is bound up with memories of your first visit here. There was something liberating in emptying yourself into your work - or at least your actions - and there being nothing of significance left over. The east has the effect of shocking you out of self-absorption: this presumably is one reason while you feel better not so much while you are here, but upon returning from here.

One possibility that neither Lem in his book nor Tarkovsky in his film considered, but that Soderbergh did (and it is his one at least half-successful innovation) is that one of the crew on the station in Solaris might be visited by precisely himself. This then opens up the possibility of one of the two killing his double and then finding himself unable to tell with certainty whether he is the original or the copy (in much the same way that the ventriloquist 'becomes' his dummy after 'killing' it in the film The Dead of Night). But Lem and Tarkovsky seemed to imagine that the real of one's desire could only be manifested in another person - not oneself, or more specifically, an earlier version of oneself (which, at least in their 'alternate' forms, we know to be haunting us).

23/6/07

Barbara Tuchman's August 1914 contains the reproduction of a cartoon from a contemporary French newspaper: it shows a skeleton lying upon (what I can best recall as) the churned, bomb-ravaged earth, with the kaiser, in pickelheuber and greatcoat, standing over him. The skeleton extends its hand up to the kaiser languidly, despairingly; the line beneath the picture is "Remplace-moi, je suis fatigue."
Why did this image make such a great impression on you at the time, and why has it stayed with you since? Certain reasons are obvious: your excessive fear, as a child, of all physical manifestations of death, and of skulls and skeletons especially. The terror of the living death, of the dead invading the lives of the living, haunted your childhood. Then there was the child's indignance at the notion that an actual physical person might be something more monstrous or destructive than a metaphysical force, for childhood is a time when fundamental and ultimate powers appear exclusively to be the property of supernatural powers; it stands to a child's reason that this should be so. Finally, though, there was - to you at the time at least - what seemed the utterly perverse notion that death might be capable of being tired. It was this perhaps that scandalised and horrified you most, and in your memory it is bound up with various symbolic and semantic confusions that the figure of death evoked for you: how could the individual skeleton stand for all the dead? Perhaps more specifically, how could the force that reduced people to skeletons be a skeleton itself: how could death itself be dead?
None of this, though, answers your question: why has the image stayed with you? Perhaps the answer is in part that the relation between the death and the kaiser in the cartoon is that between a parent and a child: at one point - and yours are reaching that point now - the parent will ask the child to replace him, because he is tired. In other words, the cartoon also enacts the symbolic death of the parent. The parent here being death, the child is here being called upon to assume that role: you must now die (read: kill) in my place, for I have grown weary of it.
The death in question here needs no elucidating (or at least, you're not going to elucidate it) ; but isn't it precisely this that you've spent your entire life determined to escape; wasn't this, in some fundamental sense, its 'meaning'? And isn't it precisely this that you have failed to do? So that now in the economy of killing and dying you must take your appointed place.

Related to this is of course another memory, not quite as early, but also concerning images, this time filmic ones (someone needs to write a monograph on the cultural significance of the late night art film on TV - a phenomenon that is now disappearing with the rise of pay per view television and the relative ubiquity of DVDs. The fact that scheduling always put these films out late at night - that is, when any potential viewer would be near sleep, his subconscious perhaps more alert and impressionable - seems of considerable importance here. This was how you were introduced to Bergman and Eastern European filmmakers. And Borremans' works, which rely so much on filmic images, seem to have been shaped by this experience. It seems to be one that is specific to your generation).
The film in question was Papillon, one that you may conceivably have seen once since (but also a long time ago), but which you have never, so far as you can remember, seen through from beginning to end. In fact the only sequence you can remember from it is the dream one, and of that only the last scene clearly, when the prisoner stands before a panel of strange judges who find him guilty. He asks them why, since he knows (this being a dream) they know he is innocent of the crime he has been imprisoned for - "you know I didn't kill that pimp" - they reply; "guilty of leading a wasted life".
Again there are several reasons why this scene from what, to you at the time, seemed an otherwise unremarkable and even rather boring film, should have stayed with you. But the fundamental reasons seem the same as, or at least related to, the cartoon: the notion of the real crime not being any socially recognised one (such as murder), nor even the one that 'society' thinks you are guilty of, but the secret truth of a wasted life. This of course was also K.'s crime in The Trial, or so you now believe, and it was for this reason too presumably that his work made such an impression upon you when you came across it. The question is, how could you have been so prescient? How could you have seen your future in this film aged eleven, or whatever it was? This isn't merely the effect of a retroactively selective memory; something in you sensed this possible danger even then. And then, in desperately trying to avoid it, ensured all the more carefully that it would come true

21/6/07

You spent today merely solving - and not even that - problems you created for yourself by coming here, namely those related to establishing an internet connection. In this sense at least the day was quite deliberately wasted. But this wandering around the city has perhaps another function, for it is a place that has come to exist for you more as a set of memories of itself than in reality - a ghost city. So it has become that favourite pastime of yours; a stumbling around the ruins of your own past. That past is in ruins because what was constructed there was never completed, and not only because what little was built - essentially foundations - has since been allowed to decay. And what is the 'pleasure', if such it can be called, in revisiting it? In fact at least only to confirm yourself on your current course, to reassure yourself of catastrophe, in what amounts to a continual, circular making and unmaking of desires and intentions. The purpose of this process needs no explanation. Do its mechanics? Probably not either. But going back to its origins - its Entstehung - might serve some purpose in determining how to deactivate it, if, indeed, that can be done. For its attraction relates to an experience of conscious becoming, and of rapid change, which you seem now unable or unwilling to regain, or even to attempt, and for which you seek to compensate yourself with these senseless simulacrums of it. The memory of these times is also embittered by another, bleaker conviction: the feeling that whatever then lent you impetus - including the confidence, the arrogance, above all the desire - acquired for you by your expensive and unhappy education; another example, if one were needed, of the fact that all you have achieved of value, or even of any interest, has been acquired for you by a system that would supply it only on receipt of (your father's) money, and which you claimed, at least overtly, always to have loathed and held in contempt. The lesson you seem to be intent on teaching yourself here is: my opposition to this system has been both fraudulent and self-destructive, fraudulent because it was never sincerely felt - a fact betrayed by my subsequent actions - and destructive because anything I have achieved of value in my life has come as a result of desires and needs (and energies) given me by this 'system' - a fact most clearly revealed by my behaviour in the time I have spent out of it. The point, it then seems, is to stop teaching yourself this lesson. But which part of its thesis, precisely, is false? The notion that the 'desire', which you valued when you acted upon it, derived from factors external to yourself (to the 'system'), or the desire itself? If the former, why do you keep behaving as if this were, on the contrary, true? If the latter, what does this leave you with? What is there left to desire once this one, that featured so importantly in your life, has been abandoned?

20/6/07

If your hair were an army deployed in the field, and your hairline its front line (we're thinking of a Napoleonic army here), then the tactics of the (invisible) enemy would be clear: advance simultaneously on its left and right flanks to drive corridors deep into its opponent's ranks, then concentrate its fire on the resulting salient formed on the crown, which it will eventually envelop, cut off from the main body of the retreating army, and safely massacre. This process, already far advanced, has left a too-broad forehead still broader, a naked and senseless expanse between brow and hairline, while the hair itself now grows well behind the point at which the skull begins to curve away and level off, accentuating its bulging, domed appearance. In the meantime both the disc of the frontal bone and the sharp, rectangular edges of the temporal bone above and behind the brows have become more pronounced, introducing a geometrical element where before there was none, their lines of fissure appearing, at times, like those of distinct metal plates beneath the flesh. At the bottom end of the forehead a jutting brow echoes, though distantly and invertedly, its upper curve, on which grow a pair of wiry, too bushy eyebrows. The eyes beneath this brow, largish (really?), bluish and roundish, are correspondingly deep set: so much so that the lids are barely visible unless I close them. Between them the bridge of the nose narrows, then broadens again to a flattened point, which looks angular in profile and blunt in three-quarter profile and makes it strangely hard to draw; an effect, perhaps, of the oddly pinched flare of the nostrils that fold beneath it. To either side of the nose are a pair of flat, indeed virtually invisible cheekbones that descend almost featurelessly into the cheeks themselves. Each of these is composed of two planes: an upper, pinkish one that surrounds the nose and the muzzle, and a lateral, greyer (because bestubbled) one which descends almost vertically to the jawline. This lateral cheek plane, and the jaw in which it terminates, is, besides the hair, perhaps the biggest physical change that has happened to me since maturity: the wings of the jawbone, which originally formed a far narrower angle at my chin, folding gradually outwards to produce a 'fuller' face.
Beneath the nose, and at the lowest point where the frontal and lateral cheeks meet is the mouth: smallish, thin-lipped, and with the wings of the upper lip sharply divided. It sits within a sort of sagging triangle of flesh, whose apex would be the middle of the nose, whose two diagonal sides descend in lightly curving lines from the upper corners of the nostrils to the lower, and outer, corners of the mouth, and whose base is a strict line beneath the lower lip, where the muscles of the lower mouth, which hang like fleshy pouches - or perhaps like Hale's sunken eggs - beneath and either side of the lower lip, meet the bonier structures of the lower chin. The latter is squarish, almost box-like in some respects, and curves inwards peculiarly so that the line of the jaw is not straight but undulating. Beneath it descends a shortish, narrowish neck.
As I've grown older I've begun to recognise elements not so much of my father - whom I undoubtedly resemble in certain respects (the eyes especially, or so N. tells me) - but less immediate relatives such as my grandfather and uncles. My nose, for example, looks like a less pronounced version of my mother's brother's; the line of the cheek and jaw, and the angle of the ears as they meet it, like old photographs of my mother's father in his stiff-collared shirt and crewcut (or whatever it was called); and the knobblier features of my face - the forehead perhaps, certain elements about the nose, and the baldness - of my paternal grandfather. It is only of my mother herself that I see no traces - unless it is the mouth. But that, of course, may merely be because I am constitutively unable to see them.

19/6/07

A taxonomy of Georgian faces: this would be wholly possible, even quite diverting, as well as very un-PC, since the faces one sees, both male and female, tend to categorise themselves quite readily. I keep seeing bits and pieces of friends and acquaintances in the strangers I pass on the street. Would I see the same in England, had England been genetically as little 'internationalised' as Georgia? Probably. Here you start categorising faces by people you know, but eventually you would have to move towards some 'universal' type defined by abstract forms ('ovoid', 'rectangular', etc). It is probably beyond you. But this sense of the same facial type returning does remind you of, say, Brave New World and its test tube children. Does Georgia have anything in common with that novel's dystopia? Not really: the tawdriness of its national dream, as represented by the TV monitors above the escalators in the underground, playing silently, and presumably endlessly, some great Eurovision-style outpouring of nationalist sentiment in song, in which members of the armed forces sing arm in arm with children in traditional costume, is far more po-faced and conservative than anything you could come across in Huxley's world state (that is, if I'm remembering right). The genetic homogenities noticeable here are not of course the consequence of extreme modernisation but its opposite. Huxley's notion of the future now looks dated in any case because he saw it, in what today looks like a very 1930s manner, as the outcome of a growing material standardisation, whereas today what seems to have been standardised is rather more the 'immaterial' - experiences, personalities, dreams, desires (or that may merely be my prejudice).
This (semi-)aimless wandering around an increasingly familiar city: why do you feel compelled to do it (do you feel compelled)? You don't really like it; but then there is so little now that you like, or even seem capable of liking. It is probably another case of a compulsion to repeat, bound up with memories of your first time here, and - perhaps - altered and elaborated with every subsequent stay into a habit. You seem to have a peculiar difficulty in acquiring new desires, or at least of allowing your existing ones to develop: instead you turn to the past and try to retrieve some from there as a way out of the present impasse. This is, of course, a doomed exercise; and it is knowledge of this fact, presumably, that produces that curiously frenetic excitement you feel when pursuing it most energetically (in so far as you pursue it energetically at all). And yet you seem capable of no other excitement: rather, at best, relief (when H. replied about your article). Tomorrow, or some time this week, the FT will probably refuse the piece on T., and you will feel indifferent about it, though you don't know what else you're going to do.

Setting yourself painful tasks, and then avoiding them: this is the ultimate strategy for non-production, for stasis. The tasks begin and end in you: never leave you, never manifest themselves. Nothing is risked, and nothing is gained. Instead you distract yourself dishonestly with formulations of what you might, but which you know you won't, do. The re-reading of books that you are already familiar with (sometimes too well) as a prompt for writing is another example of this (or rather, a variation upon it). The painful tasks listed above will need to be engaged with, not if you are to produce anything new, but if you are to prove to yourself you are capable of writing about things that genuinely 'matter' (and therefore contain their own momentum, rather than the one you have to apply to your work by 'superegoic' means). Could you not regard your entire set of 'journalistic' projects as an elaborate diversionary tactic - unless that is, they are a form of sublimation. And when does sublimation turn into diversion?

18/6/07

The essential questions 'do you care' and 'are you prepared to do anything about it' remain; only the faculty of your mind that poses them cannot itself be exempted from the considerations it addresses: 'do you care whether you care' , 'are you prepared to do anything about doing anything about it' then become the crucial - and perhaps more useful - questions. This doubling, this second-ordering of desires and intentions expresses, perhaps, the unsolvability of the problem as it is now framed, but also a real, and of course disturbing, crisis, whose non-resolution, as your question implies, seems to have been predetermined in advance. Coming here has changed nothing: as if it could (though how many times have you thought that?) Only, perhaps, slowed your productivity - if that were possible - and revived how much you miss N. Oddly enough, you seem to feel little desperation at the prospect of what you are now about not to do: the question of whether this should be treated with the same alarm as these other considerations (it clearly belongs among them) can be solved later. For the time being you need to concern yourself with boring 'practical', and, let's face it, to some extent manufactured problems. The necessity of engaging with these has revealed how your habitual avoidance, or rather cocooning of yourself against them only augments your habitual numbness. Real self-realisation requires some external resistance to it in order to become possible at all. When money removes obstacles of this kind, one can only spend more money to regain them - or can one?

Memorable today was the oddly aggressive sexuality of the young women who formed the exclusive staff of a shop near here (there must have been five or six of them), expressed not so much by their demeanour as by the clothes they were wearing: a female version of machismo. Otherwise changes can be limited to a somewhat more liberal sprinkling of superficial wealth - some bigger and shinier cars, the renovation of some buildings (most notably the pharmacy beneath the mayor's office): one can see wealth, as opposed to poverty, spreading out from the 'tourist' streets of the old town. The transformation has gained a momentum of inevitability to it now, and is fascinating to watch in its own way: the city is turning into something else. It is interesting how crucial the use of lighting, especially at night, has become in this: it transforms the appearance of buildings, rather than the buildings themselves - a kind of renovation lite - and has a clear analogy with the 'mediatised phantasmagoria' expressed by so many of the exhibitions at the Moscow Biennale, something based on the notion that a third wave of modernisation, a digital one, will be able to manifest itself out of nothing and come to hover exhilaratingly above the existing degraded infrastructure, like a software programme above its hardware substratum, or a complex computer language above its binary component.

17/6/07

The view from above the clouds: a pristine Arctic waste, perfect and monotonous (monotonously perfect?), interrupted here and there by chasms or eruptions of banked 'snow'. In the distance the cloud sheet thins to a watery border, as if melting into some icy, cerulean lagoon, while beyond it the light strikes distant ranges of white peaks, which reflect it like mountain ridges. Strange how in the upper reaches of the atmosphere natural formations seen to imitate each other. The appearances are deceptive: when a plane passed momentarily beneath us, I thought at first it was a bird. There are no normal measures of scale up here, and what seems only several dozen feet below is actually several hundred.
You sweated a lot last night (why? you are not ill) and couldn't sleep. In the morning it was only when you were listening to the radio, or making the coffee, that you remembered your dream, some word or action jogging the memory. N. must have been in it, but what you really recall is C., who seemed to offer some conduit of reconciliation and who had, by some means or other, learned to talk. Not terribly well: I remember his vocabulary was limited, and once you strayed beyond its boundaries he very quickly lost interest: his gaze would wander, and he would fall silent. But talk he could, and our conversation was amicable enough. I recall he spoke about the sea, and whether he had ever visited it (I knew very well he had) and whether he liked it. Only he did not know the word for 'sea'; I had to use 'a lot of water', or 'water as far as you can see', and then he grasped me. I had that peculiar impression, as one sometimes does with children, of having not a 'real' conversation with him but rather a rehearsal for one (since 'conversation' does not come naturally but has to be acquired), but nevertheless he seemed pleased enough to see me, as I was him for a change, and I remember embracing him and patting his sides.

The possibility of the two-dimensional 'spectacular' filmic image becoming three-dimensional and solid, of its invading our reality and supplanting it: this is what the Argentines (Borges and Bioy Casares) felt so acutely. Why? Should we assume that before he wrote Solaris, Lem had read The Invention of Morel?

Riga: its flat land, and its incredibly broad, flat river mouth. A line of pale yellow beach divides the bluegreen sea from the greenblue land, like white piping on the lapel of suit.

The high reflectivity of surface in these large, glass and steel buildings (airports), which seems to augment itself by their great number: on the long corridor to the departure gate at Stanstead, people seemed to be turning right and vanishing into some void, while others at the same time seemed to be emerging out of it and their ghostly forms moving - almost - through me. This spatial disorientation produces an affectless uncaniness, projecting people's bodies into thin air and open space: it produces a spatial confusion amid conditions of banality and boredom, as if attempting to compensate for the latter (remember for example the bus ride from Kennedy in New York: the effect relies, of course, on the presence of a clear, sharp light). Remember also your reflection in that shop window on New Oxford Street: incredibly sharp but strangely colourless, as if the plate glass were lined with some photographic emulsion that fixed only black and white (itself already an 'old tech' notion).