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).