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?