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).