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.