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.