Arrived in Moscow, with all its attendant inconveniences and outrageous expenses. Slept, then ate and wandered around the centre of town. The Kremlin wall, from the river side, is actually quite marvellous, and it has the advantage of the small irregularities and variations that are to be found in the brickwork of this period (sixteenth century?). Compare with Rye House, only on a vastly larger - almost monumental - scale. Some of the corner towers are the most effective, their rounded vastness, seen from close to, giving an impression of Unumschlingbarkeit (what would this be in English?). The wall itself, like much architecture of the period, sits somewhere between defensive functionality and architectural decoration. The variations of the placing of the arrow slits in the wall's crenellations was somehow particularly satisfying (why?).
Later you found Tsereteli's Peter the Great, a little further downriver on the opposite bank. First impression at a distance is of a telecommunications structure or a giant telegraph pole. As I got closer I found it was as shocking as I expected (a contradiction in terms?), with the toy boat on which Peter stands balanced on top of a tree-trunk-like structure, which might also be a spout of water, whose ? unroll like papyrus scrolls - perhaps even ionic capitals. The other notable feature was the flags, interestingly enough, which seem somehow utterly redundant to the sculpture. It is the arbitrary quality to much that is to be found in this work that particularly fascinates. Compare with the other kinds of arbitrariness (governmental, social) one encounters in the post-Soviet space. The uninhibited element of this arbitrariness is what fascinates (and the avant-garde was always seeking the end of inhibitions).
Having got here it isn't surprising to find your thoughts and concentration have fragmented: once a constant, personal space is lost (in the form of a flat), this too is gone. You find your mind occupied by immediate distractions, largely in the form of discomforts and impediments (lack of telephone, problems with language, the extortionate cost of everything here), which keep it from more relevant important considerations, notably regarding work. Your problems with the language have largely accounted for you reluctance in pursuing these; but there is also a general recalcitrance, almost a shyness. Undeniably it will mean you are wasting time, and consequently money. The fear that you will miss the 'obvious', and write an article that omits this and hence be refused, is not felt perhaps as strongly as it ought. You cannot be certain whether this is hubris or lack of experience (conceivably both; perhaps hubris merely is experience), but for a trip you have spent so much time planning, it has been badly organised. Whether you are capable of reproducing the relevant 'journalist' content for the article (and not just 'journalistic') remains to be seen.
Then there are the other 'false' distractions, posed by such familiar considerations, irrelevant now because unalterable, as to the legitimacy of the entire undertaking - for the FT of all papers - and its worthwhileness (given the other, more useful things you could be doing). The answer you give yourself to these is always the same: it is material for something that might be important (ie a book). But how satisfying is this answer really? If the book's material has been chosen and selected in this manner, won't it affect what it is; that is, turn it into, if not journalism, a work determined by the categories - the cliches - of journalism? Escaping these would require a wholly different approach: you, by contrast, are coming here to discover only what you already want to know. Where is the process of discovery here, the process of approaching something entirely new? If this comes of writing as action, then your writing, as with so much else you do, is not action. At times your own passivity shocks you: it has grown worse without your noticing it. It is a passivity also connected with a tendency to procrastinate, to postpone, to temporise; to that familiar phenomenon, a certain sign of 'depression', an inability to make decisions, and a tendency to regret them the moment they are made. Hence your behaviour up until now; the overall effect and characteristic of which is stasis and stagnation. And you continue producing false problems to distract yourself from this fact: a habit that has become so ingrained that you seem to have forgotten what a 'true' one might be. Introspection also serves as a distraction: thus the impulse to set things right can also be corrupted and manipulated by this habit (for want of a better word). Wandering around Moscow today and yesterday, you have noticed how things have not, in essence, changed since you lived here ten years ago. You have merely gotten older, moved a little nearer death, and wasted a vast volume of precious time, in fulfilment of your old, and prophetic, fear.
Note: drunk on metro today. He was hauled off the carriage by a policeman when the train was taken out of service who, in order to bring him round, twisted his ear quite ruthlessly, while repeating "vstavite... vstavite". This kind of small cruelty is common here - and always, or mostly, manages to appear 'justified' by the circumstances. Both the policeman regarded the drunk, and the drunk regarded himself, as so much human trash to be cleared away by the most effective means available; only to the drunk this meant vodka, to the policeman, ear-twisting.
