21/7/07

You cannot afford to miss another entry, not merely for reasons of consistency or practice, but because you need to set down certain impressions and thoughts while still fresh in your mind. Which, though? For the whole experience of the journey to Sochi was strangely affectless, an effort, or exercise, of plodding through dead time, of filling - enduring - the period between departure and arrival. The series of discoveries you half expected to make did not manifest themselves; instead there was a recognition, an encounter with the same. The Tseretelis proved merely to be the kind of people you talked about with S., only writ large - or rather, one might say, with a lot of money. and was it precisely then for this that you expended so much time, effort and money - for yet another exercise in contemplating and measuring another nothingness, another void? If so, the time has come to determine whether this contemplation constitutes pure escapism - pure avoidance of what needs to be done - or whether on the contrary it can be put to genuine use. At present you incline very much towards the former opinion (although when have you not?). It does need to be kept in mind, though, that anything you do here is in an important sense without consequence (for you personally that is; in so far as you can always leave, nothing will have an adverse effect on your 'career', job prospects, personal life, etc). And your interest, if such it can be called, in art is impure in so far as it originated in art's conditions of production, in its social determinants, than in the work itself. As you yourself said, the provenance of any artwork, its 'nationality', should in an obvious and most important sense be of no interest. Thus your involvement in the former Soviet Union becomes an extended exercise in 'sociological analysis', in engagement without the commitment and responsibilities - and without the sacrifice (in your case, of certain 'ambitions'). The inevitable outcome of this is, at some point along the way, dishonesty - dishonesty at various levels, but all of it essentially amounting to a pretence of work (let us say, in the Marxist sense) and consequently the pretence of self-realisation, where there is none. It is as if, as you have so often done, you were standing apart from yourself and watching yourself do things, and approving or disapproving (as you arguably are now). This dishonesty you most acutely feel in your articles (the product of that work), but it is surely elsewhere as well - perhaps notably in the state of constant distractedness you have now got so used to that you are ever less aware of it. Your ability to think productively and constructively seems ever more to be a thing of the past: this need not be a permanent state of affairs, but it is undeniable that every day that goes past in this way is one lost for ever. The danger is that this exercise, which was aimed at resisting this process, will actually become another means of its progression, in so far as it might constitute a palliative, or a distraction, from it. Perhaps the best thing to do at this point is to turn your attention outwards rather than inwards: this means that your next entry must be about what you experience here, rather than what you subjectively feel - if time and exhaustion will permit it.