29/7/07

The towerblocks swaying gently, like ships at anchor, against the horizon of lights: an optical illusion caused by your own (unconscious) movement, which must persist during the day, but which you are only able to perceive at night, presumably because the high contrast of dark and light enables the eye to register smaller movements.

Are you capable of writing poetry? The question is not an honest one; it should rather be: do you want to, do you need to? And the answer, judging from the last few thousand words, is that you do not, at least not yet. The objectives based on technical incompetence, on disdain for the amateurishness you believe you will express your thoughts with, are spurious; since this would amount to an argument not to begin at all. More convincing, perhaps, is the notion of suppression: that of a need, or of a self, that might successfully express itself this way. But this too is doubtful, for self-expression in your experience has always involved an active stance, the taking of a position, rather than a letting out or releasing what is suppressed. You act, and then you consider how you have acted; you do not give yourself 'permission' (or do you? Remember the Surrealist – you forget who – who spoke of another writer as having given him 'la grande permission' to write as he felt he needed).

Donne was right (at least by his own deeply reactionary lights): solitude is 'the Devil's company', and regular social engagement is effective in keeping you sane, not least because it sustains, and enforces, a consistent sense of identity, without which you discover that 'identity' does not exist, or certainly that it isn't what you thought it was, as its components begin to come apart. This, surely, is part of the mechanism operating here. You need to keep in mind that every act is a willed one, and some of what seems an abdication of will is actually a perverse kind of self-punishment (and hence supremely deliberate). If this is the case, then it becomes in principle possible to change.