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.