1/8/07

1/8/07

The English countryside in summer: green trees and hedgerows, yellow (or ochre) fields, pale blue sky. A strict division of zoning of colour fields, each seemingly allocated to denote a different function: a manufactured and regulated landscape, subject to distinct divisions of space. But hardly country in the real sense (at least, not along the line between Cambridge and London), but more land as yet residual to urban sprawl: a determinant of the city, an unintended leftover of it. Perhaps the most visible sign of this is how the structures being built in it are uncompromisingly urban: they take no heed of the fact they are surrounded by ‘nature’, and nature, by virtue of this, appears ‘degraded’ in the light of this dissonance. (Notice how sensitive you were to this degraded state of nature when you were a kid; wasn’t it one reason why you disliked the country so intensely?)The approach to London is now so heavily built up that one is no longer conscious of entering the limits of the city: the distinction has ceased to exist. The category of ‘country’ needs to be rethought, at least in southern England – or abandoned.
Most striking of all though is how all your antipathies and ‘weaknesses’ were revived the moment you came back here. You are more conscious than ever of how much England bores you – though ‘boredom’ hardly covers the sense of helpless despair you find yourself feeling (or perhaps: indulging yourself in) when you are here. It may be that having remained in this country has been one of the biggest mistakes of your life, and that you should have paid attention to, and acted upon, your early desires to go abroad: to Germany, to the United States, to Russia. You cannot at the moment say, and it is pointless trying to determine which. No amount of looking back will resolve these questions definitively, because the ultimate meaning of those events can only be determined retrospectively, by what you do now. Needless to say, it is not England in itself that is intensely boring, but the life that you have made for yourself here. (but what of the lives you might make for yourself?)

Tarkovsky as Slavophile: how much of the ideology of his films might be found in, say, the work of Glazunov? Could he merely be offering a more ‘sophisticated’ version of Glazunov’s ‘narrative’? And if so, does Mirror give the more exhaustive exposition of this narrative (consider, for example, the shots of soldiers marching across Lake Lagoda to relieve Leningrad as a modern, Slavophile version of Benjamin’s victors’ triumph, only instead of cultural artefacts they bear in their arms both the cause of their suffering and the means of their liberation, namely weapons). Could a painting, however large, ever hope to comment upon this film; can a non-narrative art offer commentary upon a narrative one? And what would be the point if it did? Would it not have to incorporate the ‘scene’ into its own symbolic narrative (a la Glazunov), only in a way that is formally more innovative and interesting? Imageine the artist: a young, clever careerist, who has accepted a commission to decorate the lobby, and perhaps also the stairs, of the Chechen parliament with a mural – whose subject is either the history of the Chechen people or of Chechen-Russian friendship. For this he uses Tarkovsky, though works by Tolstoy and Lermontov also feature, as do certain Chechen writers (who?). Title is History of the Vainakh. It is decided that it should encompass the recent Chechen war, whose causes in the picture are fudged, so to speak, and whose monstrous suffering is sentimentalised. He needs to create allegorical figures to represent each people. Its theme should be the gradual acceptance, through a series of horrific defeats, of the reality of Russian hegemony. The most heroic act is this acceptance. The picture will be self-consciously in the tradition of Russian imperialist romanticisation of the Caucasus. His struggle is to stop his real loathing of the Chechens seeping into his work. His solution is to make his own loathing of Chechens an attribute of the Chechens in his picture, whose implacable resentment of imperialist rule is thereby made palpable. In his spare time he is making his own work about the country: a long poem entitled Impressions of Chechnya.

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.

31/7/07

The arched brick arcades along King's Cross station have a likeable austerity: they remind you of how many of your childhood memories must be of these bare, brick, utilitarian walls (usually part of some railway engineering works), for their presence has lodged itself somewhere deep in your subconscious. The back wall of your parent's garden is surely one source of this, as is Auden Place which adjoins it. Interesting that the courtyard full of ruins cars that you remember playing in should have become a doubtful memory, and deeply confused with dream. Other high, brick walls include the cutting below the bridge at Chalk Farm, and the Roundhouse – both creations of the railway. They are always sinister and deeply familiar, and they always signify entrapment. The fondness you have for them must by nature be ambiguous. You shall never escape because you shall always return. Ironic that presently haute-bourgeois Primrose Hill should remain at bottom an industrial landscape. Or rather, industrialisation itself becomes a layer or sediment of the past (laid down, among other places, in your own mind). Other brick walls: along Chalk Farm Road, around Primrose Hill School (the school itself brick, tall and forbidding), along the canal: the vaults of the bridges over the canal particularly. You remember now that your childhood was haunted precisely by the ghosts of industrialisation, by its vanishing folk-memories, which adults, who themselves had hardly any direct memory of them, would parade in front of you as a means of inspiring fear, awe, and obedience.

28/7/07 (Dali at the Tate)

Re Dali; the crucial development he made in Surrealist painting was the literalisation – that is, the rendering realist and photographic – of its hitherto semi-abstract forms, the introduction of three-dimensional, illusionist pictorial space into the flat spaces of, say, a Miro. Consider the transition from the early ‘Cubist’ and beach and bather scenes to the ‘properly’ Surrealist works of the late twenties and thirties. This introduction of ‘conventional’ pictorial space brings with it metaphor: something neither Cubism nor pure abstraction were capable of – or intended to – generate. And metaphor, of course, belonged to the terrain of the subconscious. Compare Dali’s literalisation of ‘abstract’ forms with Donne’s literalisation of poetic metaphor, which set the preconditions for ‘metaphysical poetry’. Donne’s method, too, involved a commitment to precision and clarity. Both could be interpreted as a kind of petrification or ossification of form. And both, of course, implied a reactionary aesthetics (I think it is safe to say) which comprised an earlier, ‘good’ phase (the twenties and thirties, the Songs and Sonnets), and a later degenerated one (the ‘Hollywood’ period, the religious poetry).

The exhibition is interesting in revealing how early the connection with Hollywood, and mass culture in general, came; as well as Dali’s clear ambitions in this area. But it is also clear that Dali’s later career was an overt and extravagant selling out, a long, and apparently gleeful, prostitution of the methods worked out in its earlier phase. The paintings, this time, seemed less than successful: you admired them from afar. It was Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or that stood out; those, and a few of this collage letters.

28/7/07

Note a quality that several works of ‘innovative’ British writing and filmmaking of the 1970s seems to share: a kind of directionlessness, which does not allow itself to end coherently. The later (and not only later) novels of B.S. Johnson, Chris Petit’s Radio On, and the Clash documentary by Hazan and Mingay all exhibit this, and it is of course difficult now not to interpret it in the context of the wider directionlessness, and the impending political dead end, experienced by the left in the later seventies. In each case there is the sense of something being initiated that is not sustained, like the weak attempts at narrative development that intersperse the documentary. As Petit said of making Radio On, “when there’s few other people around doing what you’re doing, it makes it difficult to get better”. And none of them in fact did get better; Petit’s subsequent career, and Johnson’s death – perhaps – show this (though with Johnson there were obviously other reasons for his suicide). Indeed Johnson’s suicide could be interpreted as an index of his commitment, and ambition.

But what all these works manage to convey despite, or perhaps because of, their deficiencies is a remarkably strong sense of the time in which they were made – the Clash documentary in particular. The variety of nostalgia this carries with it is interesting in itself: the dilapidation and crass ugliness of the urban environment it depicts, together with the physical (and linguistic) unruliness of those that appear in it, both today carry the memory of a social space less tightly controlled and administered than it is today. Next to contemporary urban ‘regeneration’ projects, with their ‘landscaped’ public areas and bristling with CCTV cameras, their installment of retail units in almost every available space, the neglected, decaying urban landscapes of the nineteen seventies speak of lost freedoms – if also, perhaps, of greater physical dangers. The verbal violence in the form of swearing, which is indiscriminate and thereby almost, at times, good natured, is another instance of this; today it, together with obscene gestures like the fuck off sign (so ubiquitous in the seventies), has almost completely disappeared, and obscenities have acquired a violent charge they probably never had in the past (perhaps, too, they are more likely to provoke violence if used – or rather, state violence, the intervention of the police). What all this amounts to is that the working class, carnivalesque atmosphere that one sees present at the gigs – which is wild, spontaneous, uncontrolled and open to all, and which inherently involves risk – has become ever more difficult to create, if it is possible now at all. Tillmans has spoken of this process in one of his exhibition catalogues, and no doubt it has been widely commented on by others. Your own ‘conservatism’, and ‘dislike’ of popular music has meant that you have only become fully aware of it recently – and in large part by virtue of your experience in the former Soviet Union, where one quickly becomes aware of the absence of physical controls on movement through the urban environment which are so ubiquitous in the west that one no longer notices them. This process of suppression, or absorption, of spontaneous social activity and its replacement, ‘from above’, with its controlled simulacrum has been one of the most striking developments of the last thirty years. It goes hand in hand with processes of ‘professionalisation’ (also notably absent in the Clash documentary), and the creation and saturation of information technology and media markets, whose simulacra come to substitute themselves for the things they represent. What seems in the documentary to express all that is anachronistic and naïve in the rather befuddled political stance it tries to assume, is the basic, and unquestioned, assumption that the band’s politics and its professional ambitions within the music world were somehow compatible, and would not inevitably come into contradiction with each other. This assumption has not survived. Perhaps the Clash only seem so good now in the light of what happened next in popular music. Who, if anyone, might properly be considered their heir today?

25/7/07

This stay in Riga was ill-judged, and almost certainly wasted: an unnecessary interruption and distraction to the article you should now be planning in your mind (interesting how the nearer you come to writing it the further you travel away from it in your mind: an apparently self-frustrating process, but apparently also a necessary one). But there were one or two compensations, most notably the Museum of the Occupation, which turn out in the circumstances – though this may only have been a consequence of having recently left Russia – to be reasonably even-handed in its account of recent Latvian history, as well as informative. There was perhaps too little emphasis on the population’s general support for the Nazi invasion of 1941, and still less on popular Latvian participation in the SS and Wehrmacht. But it was better than one might have expected; only the tacit treatment of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as morally equivalent – that is, as occupying foreign dictatorships – jarred. One had a policy of imprisoning or executing all opposition, real or imagined; the other had a programme of genocide: though both were heinous, they were fundamentally different. But the core of the Latvian perspective remained national sovereignty, or rather the taking away of it: next to this, everything else came second (since on this view the Holocaust itself can be seen as a consequence of the abolition of national independence). It is for this reason surely that the museum compared unfavourably the Soviet policy of resettling 700,000 Russians in their country with the proposed Nazi one of installing only 174,000 Germans. And it is so in part no doubt because of the political repercussions this policy of resettlement is still having.

Otherwise Riga seems to have become richer, sleeker and more expensive over the last year, with the old town beginning to lose the last vestiges of its crumbling Soviet facades and turning into an all too familiar tourist zone of cafes, restaurants and bars: an affectless, neutral and almost generic Euro-space. The city itself is physically remarkably modest and self-effacing: low-lying and dispersed, and situated either side of an enormously wide river, it is almost invisible from its banks, so that it still retains, oddly enough, the character of a settlement that it must have had since it was founded. Riga is largely without pretensions: this is one of its attractions.

But why are you writing approvingly of the Latvian Museum of the Occupation when you opposed the Georgian one? What difference does thirty years make (or even, for that matter, two hundred)? Or is it that the Latvians are northern Europeans and consequently undeserving of Russian domination, while the Georgians are southerners in need of “modernising” (=civilising) by their large neighbour? Doesn’t your difference in attitude towards the two reveal a racist and imperialist discrimination? And if so, where have you gone wrong: in believing the Latvians or in disbelieving the Georgians?

22/7/07

When all urban, or architectural, space becomes 'ideologised' - that is, consciously made the product and expression of a specific ideology - then everything within it becomes metaphor. Thus at VDNKH today the occupation by small, tawdry, privately-owned shops of the Stalinst pavilions lining its boulevards was metaphor made concrete, and in what is perhaps the crudest and most obvious of ways: the impression of a new, dysfunctional market economy camping out in the ruins of a defunct empire is palpable. Perhaps most remarkable - 'expressive' - of this are two things: the exhibition of the 'economic achievements of the peoples of the Russian Federation' held in the central exhibition hall, which was clearly an attempted revival of the great shows of the past, but which really amounted to a tawdry collection tourist trinkets and a lot of rather self-congratulatory photographs of official committees and receptions; and an exhibition of waxworks, whose real focus of interest was not, as its 'official' publicity claimed, figures of Hitler or Brezhnev, but people with severe congenital defects - parasitic twins, extra eyes, no legs, etc: in other words, it was a collection of sideshow freaks in wax. There was something highly fitting about the fact that this show should be in the central pavilion of the park of economic achievements, surrounded by friezes and statues of workers, collective farm girls and scientists. For both are, in their respective senses, popular forms of art: only the libidinal shift that became expressible with the fall of Communism couldn't be clearer. And indeed what was undeniable was that VDNKH remains as popular a weekend destination for families as it probably was in Soviet times; the crowds were numerous and seemed to throng the shops selling cheap electric goods, the cafes playing their cacophony of tinny music, and even photographed themselves climbing all over the architecture - which remains eminently photographable, not only despite but because of the changes that have taken place. To place wax simulacra of freaks in the centre of this complex somehow makes perfect sense - you now only need to work out why (is it merely a return of the architecture-ideology's repressed?). This tradition of public architecture was always, it seems, popular in the sense of being accessible, immediately comprehensible and applicable (in theory) to all: it was both 'inclusive' and asserted a norm, an ideal. It is, peculiarly, in its festive atmosphere - the atmosphere aimed at at VDNKH - that this norm seems most false, most forced. VDNKH is a place of eternal celebration, although the objects of the celebration have long since disappeared. It is another instance of the aesthetic of the facade: no surprise that Bulatov used it in his work. What is the significance of the literal text in his paintings, which superimposes itself upon the visual one of the ideologised environment? Is it perhaps that the ideology has now become so undermined and weakened t requires 'support' in this textual form? Is it that it has petrified now to pure image (= photograph), whose 'affectlessness' and redundancy requires a caption? These buildings, like certain scenes from a Werner Herzog film, have become materialised dreams:

Heaven smiles, and states and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

What aura, what charge is it that these ruins or fragments have retained - or indeed acquired?
Consider the ideological materialisation (or the materialisation of ideology), the pavilion building and the dream, and the affinities among these.
Note how VDNKH, with its variously themed pavilions representing different branches of industry and different Soviet nationalities provides a kind of ideological model or map of the Soviet Union.

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.

19/7/07

As is so often the case with Russian art, it is precisely the similarities with western art that can be misleading.
Consider Conceptualism in relation to to the avant-garde as an outcome of the latter's manifest failure.
But there is another, sneaking suspicion a westerner feels before Moscow Conceptualism as well: the sense this is the continuation of another, older tradition in Russian art, one that goes back to icon painting: the image as the mere visual prop for contemplation, combined with indifference to its formal and material qualities, of its manner of making. It could be this, I think, that lies behind a certain amount of irritation one can feel towards Russian art: this privileging of the what over the how, this approaching of a visual object as a text.
Could it be this that lies behind the disappointment one feels on discovering that the post-Soviet art of the Left is in fact indistinguishable from its 'apolitical' counterparts? It is only in their content that they differ - or rather, in the position that this content implies.

"... more often than not the western left wing art community, while subjecting capitalist society to criticism, leave the notion of bourgeois consciousness as a vector for the development of society as something that is inviolable.
"[In our memories of the Soviet Union] we often forget that we had a real experience of being in a space that was impossible to privatise. Albeit at times unsightly and uncultivated ... it was nevertheless cleared of the barest possible representation of class or proprietorial priorities."
(Keti Chukhrov)

This reproduces Kagarlitsky's view of Soviet society of being, strictly speaking, classless (though shot through with social inequalities). It insists on the significance and value of the Soviet experience all the way through its existence, rather than discounting anything that happened after, say, 1928. This seems to revive a crucial difference between the eastern and western Left: and connected with it is Chukhrov's point about bourgeois consciousness and culture. In the west it seems to many increasingly meaningless to speak of 'bourgeois' culture, since the culture that was bourgeois is now in a sense everyone's, having infiltrated the common mode of thinking - and what is more seems ever more the product and outcome of a mode of production rather than a specific 'ruling class' (as in a a distinctly identifiable social group).
"The Soviet inheritance as the absence of bourgeois consciousness": its nature thus defined negatively.
The Soviet space lies in this zone of material dereliction (between the intellectual and the 'common person'). Isn't this what Boris Mikhailov's work is about? Isn't here still trying to put himself in a common space with those around him.

18/7/07

The Tretyakov not as you remembered it (but then, why should it be?), and what you found there you still probably see too completely through Berger's account of it - that is, of an art that concerned itself wholly with subject matter, rather than with form or means - which is probably a simplification, or at least an approximation, of the reality. And certainly there are other terms in which it could be understood. What comes across most forcefully is an unrelieved tradition of academic easel painting which, even in its 'non-conformist' form, conforms wholly to the academic canon, including, or perhaps especially, in its strict division into genres: portraits, history paintings, landscapes, religious (= Biblical historical) works, genre painting (which is essentially what the Wanderers' works can be classified as, perhaps by default). The result are a series of works, or painters, reminiscent of the 'official' works of other European countries: Ivanov as a Russian Pre-Raphaelite, Bruillov as a cod history painter, Vereschagin as the tradition's Orientalist - and chronicler of the Russian empire's conquest of Central Asia - Vasnetsov as representing official art, Repin as the figurehead of the semi-official loyal opposition, with his looser brushwork and 'socially committed' themes, Serov and his rather charming soft-focus pieces as a gentle gesture of Impressionism, followed by some truly dreadful limp-wristed Art Nouveau, and concluded finally by Serebriakova, whose self-portrait before her mirror is extremely likeable, but the rest of whose work is of no account. But the rule is a more or less overt sentimentalism, which when it is effective is so with a rather direct, artless charm that sometimes demands a certain suspension of critical faculties. Subtlety, allusiveness, compositional inventiveness, conscious experimentation are all largely absent. This, it must be said, seems to include psychological complexity: Repin's Ivan Grozny and his Son amounts to the most ludicrous historical ham acting (and compare his expression with that of the German soldier in the Stalingrad diorama: this tradition evidently had its consequences and repercussions). There are other examples, all of which turn around the reduction of personality to 'types' (as in Repin's Boyara Morozova), or the use of the most crude and hackneyed symbolism or visual motifs (as in Young Oaks). Indeed it may well be the case that Vereschagin is the most interesting of the lot, with his imperialist Orientalism, which insists on rendering every feature of 'barbaric' Islamic architecture, and his obsession with decapitated Russian soldiers (a fear of castration in the face of the Asiatic 'other'?). That, and his effective rendering of the fierce southern light in these countries.
Rublev, as before, left little or no effect upon you, though you still are not sure whether you saw more than a fraction of his work at the museum.

Later conversations with V.T. and A. Sh. were painful (though each for different reasons) and revealed yourself to yourself in ways you did not like: the conversation with T because you involved yourself in an unnecessary lie (meaning that at some point you fully accept 'his' logic (or rather, the logic you ascribe him) and want to be accepted on 'his' terms) - namely that you had forgotten the name of the road your hotel is in. With Sh. because it became evident in the course of the conversation that he was pretty crudely trying to 'sell' you his art - with forced friendliness, with empty conversational padding; and you, of course, were happy to play along with this, out of, supposedly, 'politeness'. It was only later when you took your time to look carefully, or fairly carefully, at his catalogue that you realised the extent of your mistake: behind the wittiness of some of the work is something unpleasantly ingratiating in its idiocy, even slightly ugly: the 'themes' reveal this most. You need to remember how things get lost in translation in both directions, and signs and symbols that have one meaning here will have another in the west, even though they appear to be identical. There are also some unintentional effects that become less interesting by virtue of being revealed as unintentional. Perhaps Zizek was only too right, and the appeal to human 'warmth', human 'feeling' is to be identified as the most ideological of moves. Contrast this with R. and M., who wait to see what you have to offer rather than expecting or trying to elicit anything from you. Perhaps what defines, or ought to define, the Left is that they are in some sense those who want precisely nothing from you. There may be a parallel to be drawn here with Proust's account of the allegorical figures in Giotto's fresco: the virtues, including Charity, are stern-faced and unsmiling: it is their symbols, what they represent, and not what they themselves are, that determine their meaning. Proust is almost certainly right to identify this as a quality of those virtues, which require a certain self-sufficiency, a certain strength.
But try to remember exactly what it is Sh. said. Note that he at no point really criticised Tsereteli: he relayed other people's criticisms of him. And perhaps he sees himself as having something in common with him as an outsider. But all my questions about the influence exercised by any 'context' Tsereteli has created were answered in the negative, in so far as they were answered at all: he did not find them interesting. What he had to say about Guelman and political consulting was interesting, but only in so far as it told you something you did not already know, and revealed unexpected links between contemporary art and politics.

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'.

16/7/07

Today went better, though not in the sense of getting anything done, but of at least making contacts and setting up meetings; I had expected that everything would get done in the last few days of my stay here and that expectation is turning out to be correct. Tomorrow I have a meeting with R. and then M., and the day after that probably with Mi. and Sh. (for whatever that's worth). What will come of the latter two is hard to say, and it probably isn't worth worrying about. Other than that, though, the day was pretty much wasted (as so many have been up until now); it being a Monday, all museums were closed (except, of course, Zurab), and there was little to do but wander about the city, getting hungry and tired and overspending you budget on food. The metro gives an interesting, and alternative, experience of the city, offering a sort of underground variant of it, all the more memorable as the stations here are consciously designed to convey a sense of place, of a sort. Thus Arbatskaya, for example, has a quite different atmosphere to what lies above it, yet both possess their own reality and both are in a peculiar sense connected - though the underground world changes at a much slower rate to the one above, if it changes at all. Perhaps this is why you find it comforting: below the streets, the built environment bequeathed by the Soviet system remains largely intact. The metro, on its endlessly long, almost dreamlike escalator rides (reminding you of angels ascending the dark tunnel towards the shining light of heaven in that Bosch triptych) allows one to study the faces of the passengers coming the other way fairly carefully. Here, unlike Georgia, it is not so much a case of establishing a new taxonomy as of measuring differences between here and the west. For it appears as if people's features are more pronounced here in comparison with there: high cheekbones are higher, oval faces are more oval, long noses are longer, with the result that they are capable of being both strikingly beautiful and strikingly unbeautiful (and sometimes in some strange, indefinable way, both at once). The fashions - I mean the women's fashions - seem to echo this: more overt, upfront, 'extrovert' than in the west. This is one big change upon eleven years ago, when most people's clothes remained largely Soviet.
This afternoon you visited Novospassky Monastery, saw the cathedral with its much-damaged and somewhat repainted sixteenth century (?) frescoes, and attended part of a service. An atmosphere of tranquility still pervaded, but within the walls of the complex the space felt confined and claustrophobic: one needed fields and woods around it to breathe, which, no doubt, it once had. As usual, you found the atmosphere of obscurantist mysticism repellent, and you left after a short while, though not without noting of the whitewashed walls, with their trees and hollyhocks planted outside, that the monks probably had a very pleasant life there. Note how different the spatial arrangements are to any western church: all is laid out concentrically around the central point of the dome, both the cathedral itself and the monastery walls that enclose it, whereas in a western church the focus of attention is always at an altar at the far end opposite the entrance, and the building presents you with a visual narrative, of sorts, as you approach it: hence the soaring columns and vaults of Gothic. In a Russian cathedral you encircle the point of focus, rather than approach it. In this sense western churches are more theatrical in that they introduce something of the effect of a proscenium arch (columns flanking the altar), while eastern churches, if theatrical at all, are so as theatres in the round and their wall paintings emphasise this, being 'free flowing', covering every available space almost indiscriminately, so that they are evident everywhere you look. The monastery reminded you ultimately of something else as well: the Russian practice, present into Soviet times and even, or especially, today, of building self-enclosed complexes that operate as virtually independent units: a symptom, perhaps, of the tendency for the (political and economic) 'systems' connecting them here to fall apart at short notice. Thus Novospassky and Mosfilm are linked - have, indeed, a surprising amount in common. And consider also what kind of films Tarkovsky made at Mosfilm, with scenes including the island house floating in a shapeless sea (Solaris), the half-ruined complex housing the printing press (Mirror), the Zone (Stalker), and later, of course, after he'd left Russia, the 'crude but effective' shot of the Russian house within the Italian cathedral (Nostalgia). None of this seems coincidental: it comes from an experience of space, and an understanding of the semiotics and symbolism of that space. And note too how the space between these complexes - these 'homesteads' or 'settlements' - with its uneven, arbitrary and shapeless quality, is equally revealing. It expresses something of the social arrangements involved in establishing societies in vast, empty and limitless spaces.

15/7/07

Museum of Modern Art, Petrovka
Suprematism collection: note the homology between the (apparently flying, or at least moving) rods and blocks of Suprematist compositions, and abstract film animation, specifically the visual sequence of the Pearl & Dean advertisement at the cinema. In other words, we are now obliged (in some sense) to look at these 'transcendental' works through the visual filter - or point of reference, or visual imagination - of commercial visual culture, advertising and animation in particular. Does this mean that advertising becomes the 'truth' of these works, perhaps in part by means of the Australian artist who made animated abstract advertisement for the GPO back in the thirties? Or is it rather that advertising is the mere dialectical antithesis of these, itself to be succeeded by some kind of synthesis that will restore the 'transcendental' element? (See Ilya Tchasnik, Composition, 1920s). Malevich's faceless peasants: are you coming round to (at least) some of them? Note unexpected connection here with Dali.

Benjamin, at least, shared his hotel room with only one other person when he wrote his Moscow Diary; I must be sharing mine with at least six. It is both this, the lack of any personal (private) space, and the exhaustion from constant walking, that makes writing difficult - or that, at least, is my excuse. Mathews' exercise was a morning one, preparatory to actual work: yours - have you mentioned this already? - has no such function: it has become a mere end in itself, a duty to be fulfilled before the day passes. In this sense it begins and ends with itself, leading nowhere (but only, that is, since you let it do so). The day, with its predictable frustrations, and its recurring memories of Moscow of eleven years ago where you spent many an unhappy hour wandering around alone, as you are today, and as you will be for the next week or so, ended acceptably enough, and with the encouraging and unexpected news that M. will be in town tomorrow. The hostel was again so crowded - and you found its guests so objectionable - that you decided to take refuge, once again, in a cafe where you are writing this. It is open twenty-four hours a day and the staff seem to work incredibly long hours; as, indeed, it seems many of the service personnel do here, the people working in bars, restaurants and kiosks. The industry here seems to draw on a vast pool of un-unionised and young labour. Indeed youth seems to be much in evidence walking around the city, and you can't tell whether it is the summer or your own thoughts on the few months of your own youth you spent here that has drawn your attention to to this fact. Other, related (but how?) observations include: that people are better dressed (which does not necessarily mean, more successfully), appear better fed (that is, somewhat healthier, and perhaps 'cleaner'), and the number of people carting bags and trolleys of saleable goods - mainly foodstuffs - around the metro has declined dramatically, as has the number of kiosks and small street traders. All this is surely a sign of both rising prosperity - at least in the city - and a greater degree of control of the streets by the authorities, who have obviously at some point forcibly moved a good deal of petty traders off the main thoroughfares and into a few designated areas down certain sidestreets. Thus poverty and hand to mouth livelihoods persist, but their existence has been repressed as best the city authorities can manage (or get away with). This particular area of Moscow, just east of Pushkinskaya, seems particularly to have been gentrified, and the streets near here with the old, aristocratic houses make Moscow appear far more attractive than you ever remember it looking. Correlative with this process is the fate of certain pieces of Soviet-era architecture. The famous Constructivist Izvestia building on Pushkin Square, a rare survival from the twenties, has an advertising hoarding on its roof now, which lights up at night. It remains the offices of the paper, now a pro-business financial daily (apparently). Ten years ago you remembered thinking that Muscovites were mocked by their revolutionary monuments (notably the 'caryatids' in Ploschad' Revolutsii metro). Today it is the monuments that are mocked. Their 'ideological' significance has wholly evaporated; but they have yet to acquire a 'historical' one (in so far as 'history' isn't mere ideology itself). This exposes them, and makes them appear vulnerable and frail.

12/7/07

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.

10/7/07

There is a danger these entries will become mere theory (for which read: inherited and acquired, not discovered thoughts) as they become perfunctory, a duty and not an exercise. If you have little to say today it is not because the day was so uneventful, but because its events had, for your purposes at least, so little immediate significance. Tomorrow night you will be heading for Minsk (without, it should be noted, a transit visa), and if all goes well arriving in Moscow tomorrow morning, where you have, as yet, nowhere to stay. Again you wonder whether the various difficulties you have engineered for yourself - inaccurate passport details on ticket, less than respectable visa - were made deliberately (unconsciously) or purely by chance. If deliberately, the imminent work should prove more than compensatory. Your real concern is, in fact - in so far as you 'have' one - what you are to do next year; or rather, how you are to decide. To imagine that the coming two weeks will decide it is naive. It will come down to questions of self-confidence and determination. Last night you dreamt of Nell and she advised you to go to university; at the time this advice seemed compelling, but now, who knows? If you were to take the decision to stay you would of course be on your own, working without any kind of critical support or advice - or so you think. Nor is there, of course, any guarantee that what you might find would be interesting or useful - it might be profoundly dull. This raises again the question of openness or commitment to your subject (which is...?) without which no writing is possible.

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).

7/7/07

Reversion to type (this sounds like a section from Minima Moralia): this is not always an 'unhealthy' phenomenon. Yesterday when you were rude to the young (Indian) employee at the bank, this struck you as radically ambiguous act: on the one hand racist and classist: her English was not fluent and she had difficulty understanding you; on the other, a wholly healthy reaction against anonymous corporate structures by which our lives are governed, and behind which people like her (lowly employees 'threatened' by customers) are obliged to hide. The two are not completely separable, and provide an illustration of how, on the one hand, a 'politically correct' radical act is not possible, and, on the other, of how reactionary powers and institutions (in this case banks) have appropriated the terminology of progressive modernity (in this case anti-racism). Incidentally, they also exemplify the attractions of a certain variety of populist, anti-corporate neo-fascism, which rejects the tyranny of these institutions and the thought policing involved in political correctness. It is also worth remembering that your rudeness, had you not been cut off (by her?) might actually have been effective: she was about to connect you to the relevant department. Why, though, this should involve a 'reversion' is perhaps questionable: 'there is a little racist in all of us' may well be true, but does it really constitute a kind of ur-self, a basic, reptilian social brain of which the others are mere outgrowths? Here, then, is exemplified one of the 'pleasures' of coming here: that of escaping the pacifying, anaesthetising and - at least as you experience it - paralysing effect of late capitalist social structures, among which you must include the family (keep in mind here the family as an economic unit, a regulator and shaper of consumption patterns). All of these do not so much disappear, but are attenuated on coming here, and that constant, gnawing anxiety and the depredations of the superego, which seems to keep you passive in order the better to deliver its kicking, seem to have almost gone completely. The ability to concentrate, that other great casualty of it, has improved here somewhat but is still far from what it might be (or is that merely a persistent illusion?)
It may be good to relate some of these phenomena - those pertaining to the superego especially, and the sense of being 'unqualified' to do certain things - to the division of labour more generally. The connection may not be a direct one, and the division certainly cannot constitute their only cause, but it certainly seems to be there. The passage from a society where labour is strictly divided, and has been for some time, to one where it is less so, is instructive and seems to open up possibilities. It also explains such ideological phenomena as 'nationalism', in so far as, for example, people here still 'seem' to be Georgians before they are bankers (see below), whereas in the west it is the other way round: their 'social role' (ie position within the system of production) has precedence, while their (national, cultural etc) identity takes second place to it - becomes an adjunct to it, even an ornament; becomes, in other words, just so much 'cultural junk'. Hence certain modern novels (and not only Mathews') with their 'cargoes of cultural junk'. What becomes of interest in these is how that cultural junk - the redundant residues of past ages that we have been (apparently arbitrarily) left with - now gets shifted around, manipulated, disassembled, reassembled, shaped into new patterns and how, through these processes, the system (including the libidinal system) delineates, manifests itself (given that it cannot manifest itself 'directly').
Note regarding the banker you met today the sense of someone still playing a role, someone whose mask does not yet completely fit. Also note, regarding the Georgianness of employees, that the same organisational chaos - at least in terms of finding information, of contacting individuals - and of superfluous and underemployed labour, was as evident at the bank as it was everywhere else. The large numbers of young men hanging around in lobbies and corridors talking to each other animatedly but not apparently doing anything, while certain cool, air-conditioned offices remained empty, reminded you very much of the parliament building fifteen years ago (that other centre of power) - in conditions that, in almost every other circumstance, are very different.

6/7/07

You allow yourself to get too easily distracted: even trivial things occupy too much of your time, not least because you use them to postpone the most important. Not having regular, adult responsibilities exposes you to yourself: to your faults and weaknesses, which are allowed to grow and run riot. Couldn't, though, the propensity to postpone what is important, to concern yourself with the trivial and the unnecessary, be regarded as the dominant truth of your adult life? And how then does this relate to the peculiarly persistent, or rather recurring, ambition you are dealing with (or indeed subject to) now? Is it important, or merely another distraction? If a distraction, why have you put it off for so long? If important, why do you hope for nothing from it, why do you expect - now at least, but even, in a different sense, before - the whole enterprise to turn to ashes in your hands (by which you don't necessarily mean 'fail')? Why this overwhelming need to leave the realisation of your plans inviolate (it need hardly be pointed out that this is not the only thing you need to leave inviolate)? 'Lenin's great achievement was not to have feared success' - you need not agree with the specific contents of this statement (though you should certainly by now have formulated some consistent position on it - another postponement) in order to agree with its general truth. Why should fear of success and fear of failure be so closely interlinked? Here again, when L. asked you this question you could offer no adequate answer. Clearly, though, the strong suspicion that you fear success (an inheritance from your father) and your confusions and doubts over ambition (that is, which kind of success exactly) must surely be connected. Your hope was always - your vague, underlying hope, that is - that commitment would show the way out of this dilemma, and that conscious engagement with what was vital and real, and above all, necessary, would overcome all this neurotic procrastination, which was really nothing more than the consequence of conceiving human self-realisation as the accumulation of cultural capital for the purposes of professional advancement and social display. Who wouldn't, in these circumstances, become indifferent among this multitude of choices and possibilities, each offering a slightly different version of the same. Couldn't one perhaps see this neurosis not as the consequence of bourgeois self-indulgence, but as a kind of confused rejection of the poverty, the paucity, of contemporary 'affluent society' life? Then the struggle might become, no longer shameful and contemplative, but heroic.

5/7/07

But concerning doubts: you must surely have noticed how every attempt at 'self-realisation' is accompanied by psychological stresses of this kind, as if some part of you were desperately opposing it, determinedly trying to slam on some kind of psychic (and not so psychic) breaks that will halt the project before it is realised. It is precisely this that makes it so difficult to answer the fundamental, and fundamentally important, question of what it is you want to do, for your 'immediate' accessible feelings and reactions are not reliable - are, on the contrary, all too often deliberately deceptive (you suspect). And what seems to lie behind all of this, but what is much more probably merely its rationalisation, is the notion that at some, now obviously inaccessible, point in the past you took a wrong turning, and that as a result every subsequent step taken has only led you further astray from this path abandoned long ago. Because this point of departure is now inaccessible, there is no point returning to it: error and confusion, ever more deeply plunged into, are the only available courses of action now. Even taking what would have been the 'right' course of action in the past will now no longer rectify things, nor even significantly ameliorate them, for the time for correctly taking it is long over.
The knowledge that this notion of a jolt or a break in the course of a life that subsequently affects, infects and compromises all the events that follow it could only be illusory does not in the least (or let us say, does barely) affect its influence which persists as the reality, the context in which this knowledge is comprehended. Perhaps the only sensible course of action in these conditions must be not to ignore or reject or try to escape this reality, but to go on acting within it, not as if it were not there, but as if it were of little account. This terrible, corrosive and paralysing sense of not knowing why you are acting the way you are, not knowing your reasons for doing what you are doing cannot be escaped but must in some form be worked through, in some confidence that the meaning generated by acting this way may in time alter this perception of past events - and thereby of present events. Or perhaps indeed without this confidence, without any kind of hope at all, but only the determination that the past will not continue to exercise its tyranny over the present - and with the awareness that your own 'happiness' must be of secondary importance to this determination.

4/7/07

Now that the entire undertaking has become possible, even, so to speak, inevitable, you are assailed by doubts and self-recriminations regarding its whole purpose and value. Since you're now used to this, the experience is not as disagreeable as it might once have been; but the doubts, or rather the arguments behind them, remain real enough. Only two, immediate ones need be touched on here: why an interview, and why an article of such great length? The answer to both is hardly defensible: because the magazine required them of you (in effect). Other, wider questions cluster round the central one of why you are according your subject this attention and making him the subject of 'free' (albeit 'bad') publicity to begin with - which leads on to a second, namely; what is being enacted here? Why this need to approach in this way people who disgust and appall you? For undoubtedly you have had it for some time. It amounts to a kind of playing with 'evil', perhaps with death, that seems in some way fundamentally dishonest - or perhaps, even worse, just dull (certainly 'narcissistic'). But connected with it somehow is a kind masochism whose nature you've never really been able to properly determine, but which manifests itself, at least in this case, as a need somehow to morally compromise yourself. This interview offers several opportunities for this: obvious, but also the more refined one of shaking someone's hand only to pull him flat on his face: a kind of passive aggressiveness, or even a schoolboy aggressiveness, that seems capable only of reflecting badly upon you, and of making the whole undertaking suspect.