17/7/07

It is now 10.10pm, and you fear you are too tired to write anything of significance now, since the effect of your stay here has been one of gradual bu cumulative exhaustion: your days are spent walking around the city as the hostel offers no space - or at least no quiet space, away from backpacker idiocies and banalities - in which to relax or think. One, perhaps paradoxical (but why?), effect of the meetings today was to remind you who you are, as it were; or rather what you have become, the common world of intellectual judgement and discussion offering you a definition, as it were, of this -: not a flattering one, but a useful one perhaps, nevertheless. The damage inflicted by your decision, if that is what it could be called, not to pursue an intellectual career, at least a PhD, could hardly be clearer, and the profound holes and gaps in your reading, especially regarding political position and the aesthetics it implies, undoubtedly influence your reception here, which might have been more enthusiastic, but more importantly what you might have done here, which might have been more useful. As it is, by trying to fit all into the Procrustean bed of 'being a writer', you have come away with nothing, or very little, and perhaps deservedly so. It raises the old question of whether to study first before coming here; but time now is so short, your room for manoeuvre ever more limited. In a sense you have allowed money to subsidise time: so that you could consume as cheap and plentiful a commodity that was in fact scarce and precious. There is, of course, no discovery involved in this realisation: you knew it all along. Perhaps the best that could be said of it is that it was a decision against a career decision, against the logic of success - but that is little enough as it is. And there is an obvious sense in which rejecting 'success' - or fearing it - is the most total of capitulations to the 'system'. R. had in many ways more, and better, ideas about the interview than you did: but why should this surprise you, since he knows the situation so much better? And how useful N. would have been here, for the purpose of posing technical questions (the folds indeed are one thing, but how many others might there be?). You have little doubt the interview is likely to work: it is the wider questions its - possible - success leaves unanswered that you will have to face. What can you usefully achieve in a year here, apart from learn Russian and read a few books? How could anything you hope to achieve amount to anything other than a kind of dilettanteism, the inevitable consequence of your initial decision to write? And isn't Russia, after all, in reality another means for you to avoid engagement (since you will always be an outsider here) than to commit to it? Isn't it the case that art is always attendant upon life, always the outcome and expression of it, never the other way round (notice here that your question merely implies the conclusion of turning the life into the artwork, it is the whole way it is proposed that it perpetuates the error)? But isn't it also the case that art requires the dedication, even sacrifice, of life to it, not the other way round? Otherwise you are in danger of trying to make life conform to art, to how you think it ought to be, or rather, to how you think it ought to be in order to be worthy of being written about. Since when did writing demand such stringent criteria for noteworthiness? But they are not stringent, merely normal. You have to make your way towards normality before you can hope to write. And this is because you cannot accept any other fate for yourself than 'normality' (which itself is... ? Precisely the fulfilment of a norm; the norm constituting, not only some narcissistic ego-ideal, but also some minimal demand of existence, of life, that you cannot relinquish (at least, not unless it is at some in the present circumstances unimaginable cost)). It isn't useful, or even interesting, to ask at this point whether it is too late to attain it, whether you have already become someone you are destined to loathe, or at least hold in contempt. You have no choice (because there is no choice, it is not a question of choice; choice does not belong to this domain) but to try.

Note that on the way back to the metro you found that the extremely proficient blues band you had passed several hours before was still playing in the underpass by the Arbat metro station, having attracted an if anything larger, and certainly drunker and more raucous, crowd. This instance of public street music and communal street dancing in which the bar and pub crowds, as well as the local drunks, participated, surprised you: a survival of some kind of common space, inconceivable really in London, where the stratifications within society have been more deeply laid. How much longer is it likely to last?
it seems, judging from the couples you have noticed (and not noticed) on the metro that open expressions of female sexuality are socially acceptable, while male homosexuality is not. 'Discuss'.