Despite various dyspepsia (we are eating and drinking too well, and my gut was a wreck before I came), we are getting work done – perhaps the equivalent of four to six hours of steady work a day. It would be more if we weren’t going to restaurants. This is, of course, Gerhard’s life – and to a slightly lesser extent Kunsu’s (Kunsu was never quite as steadily, energetically active, and his health in the past few years hasn’t been quite perfect, so he rests more often); as well as the other hard-working Stipendiaten – German artists with government funding, steadily making things and making things happen.
I’m reading Leon Edel’s group biography of Bloomsbury – also a collective of working artists (who, not incidentally, benefited from aristocratic incomes, at least up to a point). The working artist, the working writer: the people those artists’ colonies are made for – I would have loved to be one of those. I could still be that kind of working writer – God knows, despite my university work, there is easily enough time left in the week that I could do so….
This feeling about this book about Gerhard; which was first conceived of in 1994 (nearly thirteen years ago!), and which has dogged me from continent to continent: piles of paper, translations, stuff – all horribly unmanageable, looming as dreadful and monstrously un-finishable. An albatross around my neck, stinking of fish, with feathers falling all over the place. And now, going from paper to paper, chatting with Gerhard, it feels so easily manageable – it’s just a book: as W. and Spurious urged me at dinner a couple of weeks ago, just crank it out – it won’t be what you want it to be, it won’t seem any good, but it will be done, and that alone will be good.
It all seems so easy at the moment: in the freshness of German spring; a change that is clearly as good as a rest; and the pleasantly, calmly energetic atmosphere that Gerhard always creates; I wonder, why would I have made this so difficult? The answer from old est seminars was always: humans are hard-wired to solve problems; and when we don’t have enough problems we make them. Which makes perfect sense in my case: in years of unproductivity, I haven’t been starving, haven’t been homeless or without a roof over my head; I need the problem of simply not putting words on paper, ridiculous as that problem clearly is.
That question always comes up, though: why make it all so difficult? And memory responds, idiotically, using tunes that don’t ever leave the back of the head, with as useful an answer as any: Because, because, because, because, beca-a-a-use… because of the wonderful….
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