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?