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.