in the hall of mirrors

[untitled]

Ravel glides through my fingers into air.

My touch is shaky, robe falling loose, aches span
my ribs, so tired. Not tired of thinking of you:
dark, broad chords spin out past the lamp’s circle.

Conjuring you into the room behind me:
would you turn away if I made a mistake,
would you leave the room, or stay and listen?

Would you come put strong hands lightly
on my shoulders, lean your hips, thighs
into my back, gently, not disturb my arms,

stand within the reverberant web of notes,
read with me the fine net of lines and figures,
silently share what only musicians know?

I play slowly, trying to never reach the last chords,
wanting to freeze this forward-spinning time, falling
that great distance, afraid to have to turn

and face the empty room.

[Los Angeles, 6/9-10/14/92]

Persona

Last Tuesday, I was in a pub with a colleague from another university, and was eventually joined by a circle of friends from my own university (most of whom have blogs, by the way). We had fun, I was rather giddy (saying some tacky things, but I have friends all over the world who are accustomed to my tendency to do that); I enjoyed myself, especially in contrast to my feelings of the previous three or four days (which had given rise to a few fairly depressing posts); but the difference between those emotional states bothered me a bit.

Last night, Barry and his partner Paul, and my dear friend P–, came over for dinner, and to discuss the workshop Barry and I are going to run in October about AIDS and writing. Great fun again; I cooked, rather chaotically (chicken, tomatoes, leeks, all with rather lot of chili oil, in pasta with lots of pepper), and we all got along famously. Then P– stayed over, and that is always satisfyingly and rather domestically comforting; it actually makes this feel like a home, which is wonderful of course. I felt odd about it again, though, and told P– so; he said it was just Catholic guilt, but I don't think I agree – aside from the fact that I'm not Catholic, it doesn't seem that I don't think I deserve to enjoy myself.

Instead, it just feels as though my life is oddly out of balance – oddly because I don't think I'm entirely dysfunctional: always, through the years, I have had many close friends, now scattered on several continents (even in the worst times, I knew there were always wonderful people I could call who cared what happened to me). And, in a social setting, I may be rather silly, but I get along well with lots of people; and I can enjoy things, respond to things, relate to people and places.

So: why is there such a painful gap, such a disturbing lacuna, around the area of editing, research, writing? These are things I enjoy, at least theoretically, and in fact they're the only things I do that really matter to me; and at more reactive tasks (answering the phone, responding to an emergency e-mail) I don't do badly. But generating my own universe on the page: even knowing that all writers and many academics have serious difficulties with that, my own problems seem rather bizarre and nonsensical. I just can't figure out why it's so hard.

And now the school year is going to start, and I can't regard it with anything but dismay (though blahfeme seems actually stoked about it – an apparently admirable emotion I can't even understand at this point, let alone identify with). It all seems so oppressive: needing to engage with a variety of people, to make the usual mistakes, to make real decisions and respond to real problems and personalities – I'm not excited about it, especially as this prefatory week has already included collisions, and as I keep feeling I've taken on more responsibility than I'm really interested in engaging with.

Back when I was doing Jungian analysis in the late 1980s, with my remarkable and rather bizarre mountain climber of an analyst (perfect for me, as I wanted to go far and deep to understand myself – so many therapists refuse to go further than what is necessary to make one content), we discussed my diagnosis. That was kind of a concession on his part, since he knew I would talk and read about it anyway. He said that my experience of myself as diffuse and unclear represented the fragmentation of my personality (in ways distantly related to narcissistic and borderline personality disorders – very distantly in the latter case, I might add, I've never been that screwed up – borderlines are of course pretty scary). He said that the way I managed to get by was through depending on my persona, that is, the external image of myself as presented to others.

This is, of course, backwards: a 'normal' person should have an integrated personality, and base their persona loosely on it. I was sort of doing it the other way around, since my persona was fairly solid and well-defined, while my 'self' wasn't quite so well put together. Which doesn't mean I was concealing myself – on the contrary – but perhaps what I was concealing (and not very well, as I've always complained about this to friends) was my own fragmentation, my own endless uncertainty about what I want.

I'm a long way from that time and from the person I was then; almost twenty years from when I started analysis, and fifteen from when I finished. But the problem, if it is one, is such a basic part of me – I just wish I knew how to move further past it....

Old Songs

[Los Angeles, 1991]

Late again, and the woman at the desk is pleasant about it, but I will lose time from my appointment.  The tanning salon is an increasingly important convenience for me, it clears up, however temporarily, the waves of red lesions across my arms and torso.  And I look rather dashing with a tan, if I say so myself.  She hurries me into place at the large, swiveling face machine with a friendly pat.

The strangest thing about tanning salons is the enforced nothingness, the formal, unmoving period of placing the face, the body, under glass and metal copies of the sun.  Sometimes I fall a great distance into a dream-stupor so alien to the salon environment that I come out of it bemused, speaking in an alien tongue; or I drift from place to envisioned place, looking for something to, I don’t know what.  The blaze of the face machine snapping on, and I shut my eyes immediately, carefully.

And, of course, boredom.  Uncomfortable, the force of heat against my face.  I turn my head back and forth to get away.  But if I endure this light, my skin will clear up somewhat, perhaps, and even though I haven’t been working out, I’ll look fairly good.  And maybe that will be enough to hold on to my proto-lover, or boyfriend may be the accurate term, or at least: the man with whom I have a quasi-relationship.  Demi-relationship.  No, I prefer to hope: proto-relationship, the beginnings of earthly glory, stepping onto a golden path that will be wonderful and enlivening, soaked with love and intimacy and such.  Or at least affection.  Though short, as it will last only until one of us runs out of T-cells.

Music playing endlessly in the background, a station of the current pop inanities, sometimes varied with older songs whose sharp edges have been worn by years of familiarity.  Music noticeable now, because one of those old songs is putting on an appearance, and the parts of my brain that hold the patterns of sounds, of songs, are already flowing into familiar channels before my conscious mind can identify the words:

it’s a cool night

The heard words trigger an armature of memory that supplies the rest of the lyrics, the chords, the entire feeling of the song.

just want to hold you
by the firelight

I had a strong reaction to this song when I first knew it, what, ten years ago?  A pleasant tune, and what was it about those chords?

if it don’t feel right
you can go

Yes, the astonishment of the backup voices, the way they suddenly appear in soft chords to color and emphasize those unexpected words, added notes like soft, shimmering lights,

it’s a
cool
night

and the words keep repeating, there’s not much material really, but the pattern is so subtle and rich that I react to it every time

just want to hold you

and that must be why it was so successful, the sensual surprise of the chords and

by the
fire
light

the gently falling harmonies, but they always land in that strange,

if it don’t
feel
right

wistful line, how odd, to open the door in that gentle way, setting some fantasy lover free, free because of a sort of

you can go

I responded to this so strongly ten years ago when I was young, it meant something, it spoke of the softness, the eroticism of, but not an insistent, no, instead more of

cool night

as though everything would work out, I could see the fireplace and the vague forms of fantasy lovers as though in a vision, and me, and I could see

want to hold

and everything would somehow be so much less lonely, the unendingly cold winds would stop blowing and I would have arms around me,

fire light

I thought it would all work out so gloriously, and so soon, by 1981 at the very latest, about the same time when the first AIDS cases appeared,

if it don’t

and that someone would love me so much that it wouldn’t matter how I looked, or if I were clumsy or uncertain, that we would be happy and so safe

you can go

and life wouldn’t be so strung out, like our last trip through the desert, when he drove while I gazed out on the flat, hopeless horizon, the waterless dusts, knowing that it was possible to go great distances in any direction but that things would never change however far you went,

hold you

and that life is too much like that desert now, far from the rich, green forests where I grew up, that I expected

it don’t feel right

and I want that back, that vision, I want to have had, at one time, that kind of love, that kind of life, the things I hoped for and believed in when I was twenty-odd,

if it don’t

not this shaky existence, the drugs and the knife-edge futures, sick faces, and all the polished appearances over dried hearts, and

by the fire light

I’m crying, how awkward, I can only hope that before the light box turns off and rises away from my face that this damned song, those chords, will end, and how can I wipe my face before everyone sees that

you can go

[Los Angeles, 11/20/91-4/19/92]

Two places at once

The past few days of depression: it might be worth acknowledging something that might not be evident from this blog – that I have been here before, and for long periods of time. In fact  the blog is not only about recording/reflecting that anomie, that hopelessness, which has become so normative over the years; but also about possibly helping to get past it, about writing through it.

Lying on the couch, here in northern England – which reflects similar days over the past four years since moving here – also has a more distant mirror (shades of Barbara Tuchman): a scratchier couch in a warmer climate, from the late 1980s through 1992 in Los Angeles. There is a strange way that my mood, my memories and ideas, are merged with the ones from that time – as though it is difficult (especially when I am half asleep) to tell whether it is 1992 or 2006.

That time did produce some of my darkest stories – I was involved in Terry's HIV+ writing workshop, I was fairly permanently stalled on my PhD, and I certainly wasn't expecting to live for much longer (I was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, and this was well before the 1996 medications changed the shape of the future).

1992 itself was a strange time, sunny but  with a deep internal darkness: I knew I had to leave Los Angeles, was moving to San Francisco – what I don't know was, why did I move? That summer was so bleak, I was so fearful and tired – the move was so difficult; I can't even imagine why it had to be done: what possible good could it have been for me to move back to the Bay Area, expensive and complicated as it was to manage? Perhaps I felt trapped between pressures of keeping the apartment, maintaining a car and part-time job, in Los Angeles, when I thought I could be better taken care of in San Francisco – if I were to fall ill and die, not having a car and being able to connect more closely with the gay community would make life in the Bay Area easier. And probably I thought I would be able to connect with a person, to make a relationship during my last days – I can't figure it out, and don't remember enough... but certainly none of my thinking from that time involve anything about career or long-term plans.

It is strange: such complete despair that year, such utter surrender to the end of my expectations. It may seem odd to mix my attitudes now with those – now I am frustrated at my disaffection around writing, and getting promoted, and living somewhere where I'm happier – how could those be the same?

Perhaps that is what is so confusing: suspended between being despair and anxiety, between work and dying – and I still haven't made the difference clear to myself: probably because, no matter what seems true on the surface, I'm always caught between those anyway....

The Shape of What It Means

[Los Angeles, 1991]

I am in the waiting room, going through my outline and list of readings for the degree exam in musical aesthetics. First is Cooke: naïve, but he made a good shot at figuring out the basic problems. If only he weren’t such a dilettante – he works his arguments right up to their most remarkable implications, then backs off into an absurd mysticism, claiming: we can’t ever really know why music works. Well, I don’t buy it. The nurse calls me in to write down my symptoms. How many days has it been like this? Has there been any blood? Your chart says you’re allergic to sulfa?

Are you in pain now? Yes.

Back out to the rows of plastic chairs to wait again. Ingarden, defining the work of music: fine, that’s clear. No problems. Of course, he doesn’t get anywhere near the problem of meaning. Meyer and information theory, okay. Limited point of view, it avoids the ecstasy, the eroticism of music. Hard to care much about what he thinks. Don’t any of them care, don’t they remember why they wanted to play music in the first place? A pleasant older nurse comes out with my file and says: Walk along the orange line and turn left.

Temperature and blood pressure, the usual routine. I should be nicer to the nurse, be willing to chat, but I’m tired and distant after three days of sudden sickness, watching my body draining so rapidly, it’s frightening. He tells me to sit and wait again. Nattiez, that’s someone I would argue with, he thinks what music means is merely its grammar, its syntax: how we understand the relation between the notes, between the phrases. But it must be more than that, otherwise music would be a matter of chess games, equations, which, I admit, have their attractions, but – it must be so much more. The primary care doctor calls me in.

Answering the same questions all over again. But at the end I ask a few questions of my own: what is cryptosporidia? From the Greek, and with that malicious prefix, as though the disease is a secret code that can’t be broken. Well, she says, it shows up sometimes in people in your condition. And she answers once more, well, there is one experimental drug, but for the most part, no, there is no successful treatment. She goes out to consult with the doctor from the AIDS clinic, leaving me to take my clothes off and lay them on the chair, and sit with a hospital robe in my lap. And again I think of the question of what it means, how we got to music in the first place, what does it mirror? Why do we make these sounds? She comes back in, and examines me with a slightly alarming thoroughness. She speaks carefully, telling me about the tests: yes, we really should check these things. You’ll probably be fine. Don’t think about it too much, there’s no use worrying before we know.

I think music has some absolutely lucid, powerful relation to the way we think, the order in which we go through things, how feelings and ideas develop in our heads. I think it mirrors what we really are, the content erased and replaced with notes. Not a metaphor or image as in writing, where it resembles something we think about what we are, what we feel: but the structure of how we feel, the pattern of the thing itself. She tells me I can get dressed and take the samples down to the lab.

I seem to be perilously close to some sort of Baroque theory of affects, as though the patterns of music resemble certain standard movements in our blood and organs, four temperaments, eight, maybe more; as though the falling notes recall our sobs, the long sweet ones our cries of sorrow or ecstasy. Or the Japanese: they weep because the koto recalls for them the flight of cranes into the sunset, they envision a loss and a fading, and they become sad, resigned. But no, that’s a cultural construction, I’m not talking about that. It’s more than that, it must be more. The man taking my blood is a little rough; he apologizes, and I press the cotton into my arm. I leave the lab and find my way through the labyrinth of white halls to the parking lot.

In the car, I sit for a moment. I am numb and tired, angry at them for charging me money I don’t have for tests that frighten me, not wanting to think of what is happening, of the story my body is unfolding, and of its probable end. I put on a tape of gentle music, melancholy and distant: guitar and piano. How do composers imagine it, how do they write such stuff? It sounds like wisdom, but a wisdom we cannot touch, living on the other side of a permeable but unbreakable membrane. But the truth is, I am blessed in this: I know more about music than most people. And about the meaning of music, the structure, the unending attempt to find out why it goes this way, and why we also go that way when it does: I must understand more about it than all but, perhaps, some few thousands of the people in the world, maybe less. I thought I had something special to say, I wanted to write papers, or a book that would magically illuminate us all, tell about the lights that guide us through our lives. But that takes time, time and energy, and both are failing me more quickly each day. And why, when I hear this gentle, stepped falling of the guitar notes between those of the piano, does it bring me away from the numbness, back into myself?

It is the exact shape of grief. Not a metaphor or a picture, not the description of the things that put me into this place, but the place itself, the shape of its movement through time and my body. I can hear the form of my own sorrow as I drive home through the endless traffic, crying quietly and listening to the music. And I still can’t answer the question: how does it do that?

Maybe if I knew, I would live forever.

[Los Angeles, 6/25/91-4/19/92]

Dim / reflections

Positions... different ways of viewing life – my life, my life as it is now, my life in my imagination, or if you prefer, life generally....

(a) Resistance to writing is a neurotic symptom, related to being a rigid and immature judgmental personality, constellated with various feelings/strategies of fear/laziness/self-justification, etc. My anxious reactions to the impending restart of the school year are more neurotic symptoms, from someone who is both rather self-indulgent and also somewhat oversensitive to the emotional eruptions and conflicts that all humans engage in as entirely normal social practice.

Or: (b) Health concerns (minor symptoms relating to a major condition which are not in themselves, however, major) and side effects of medications (notably Ritonavir and Efavirenz) together form a general and long-term physiologically depressive state that makes it difficult to be energetic, to approach problems proactively, to engage smoothly with others, etc. This is exacerbated by personal isolation (lack of supportive personal relationships at home), a weak social life out of the home, and poor adjustment to an alien climate with less sunshine, warmth, etc.

[Addendum: (b1) generalized toxicity related to medications mentioned in (b) exacerbated by current liver problems; liver reacting to subject taking numerous commercial food supplements that are overburdening it and causing rises in liver enzymes, etc., creating a general context of a body out of balance.]

Or: (c) Writing in this context is just a way of being coerced into various cultural/institutional structures – commercialization/consumerism applied to academic writing, and to writing generally. The book is a product – and worst of all, the academic book is an unreadable product (a consumer object that is not consumable, something designed purely to maintain a financial/institutional structure of production, purchase, measurement, etc.). My worries around productivity are actually elaborated versions of a need to conform, and my battles with it are a bid for freedom, or at least a bid to show that I know what my bonds look like.

That would mean that my doubts are rooted in a wider awareness of the very real falsity [sic?] of my position – a realization that my world is indeed both trammeled and dependent on political/cultural structures that are only internally viable, and in fact are simply one rather minor kind of nonsense that is common in my time. Consider in this context Proust's fussing about what people think of him, or even more appositely Musil's tangled ideas about a Viennese culture that is rotting to pieces around him – one cannot help feeling from time to time when reading Musil, 'oh get over it', since all the things he is anguishing over will have vanished a few short years later in any case. Maybe in fifty years, climate change will be such that anyone reading about such worries as these would be similarly thinking, 'oh get over it', and wonder why I didn't give everything up and go live in the Orkneys.

(This is the kind of interpretation that could also encourage giving away all one's goods and becoming some kind of monk, or joining a commune, or moving to a South Sea Island, or even joining the Foreign Legion. Unfortunately, my postmodern, passive position dictates that it is more probable that I will simply buy a DVD of a film about the Foreign Legion – I'm thinking of Beau Travail, of course – and watch it to look at all the muscular soldiers and their engagements with life and death, instead of actually going anywhere, instead of actually doing anything.)

All this, and much more equally useless analysis and reflection, has occurred in a context of two days of dimness, of a shadowy sense of reality, of the past and the future held in a suspended world of temporal fractures and multiple possibilities... a sort of quantum-universe awareness of one's life....

***

As we are once again in the hall of mirrors, what are some of the reflections of these moods and ideas, lying around on my Parsons table? A book of Karl Kraus' aphorisms (distilled bitterness, like Unicum, that peculiarly named, unpleasant-tasting digestive liqueur Joe was so proud of having bought back from Hungary); South Park flickering by on television, with Kenny's parents telling him the story of Job, so he can get over his troubles (hemorrhoids, as it happens); and Stephen Micus playing through iTunes – a fine musician whose graceful, dignified mixtures of traditions perfectly fit my mood.

How can, in fact, these extended chants in Persian, in the strong 'belt' region of his baritone, have such power, as they repeatedly and fierily hit the note above the tonic and wail around it, holding yet longing, falling and returning, mourning yet resigned –

One flings one's hands open to the desert winds, and tries to give everything up to them: take it, take it all....

Solaris

Continued light-headed, or perhaps woozy, all afternoon. Didn't go to Catherine's birthday dinner. Did go in for interview with prospective postgraduate – and I'm sorry if it sounds heartless, but what a waste of time that was. Well I suppose that in the larger sense, as I gave her advice about where she should consider studying, that it wasn't wasted – for her.

Later: less weak, but a headache that won't go away. Perhaps it is an overburdened liver; I obviously need to cut back on the supplements to find that out (unless I have the nerve, and it would take a great deal of that, to go into the clinic and demand a blood test on liver function).

And still later: an episode ('Strain') of Law & Order/Special Victims Unit on television, about AIDS, gay men, clubs, a new deadly strain, murders, drugs. The killer targeted PWAs who had infected his brother: and although he was convicted, I was a bit dismayed that no one seemed to feel very strongly that he was a madman. Of course it's an ambivalent situation – but not that ambivalent, I think.

And, still with this headache, I finally switched over to the last ten minutes of the 2002 remake of Solaris; I had known it was on television, but since I have the DVD, it seemed silly to watch a broadcast. That was, of course, enough for me for the evening: although I understand some of the complaints about the film, I nevertheless think that the remake is extraordinarily beautiful – the colors, the slow, calm words, the eerie, half-unexplained plot, the shimmering music, the bruised, haunted look in Clooney's eyes, the emotional resonance of the whole: the truth is, it is virtually my favorite movie.

Complaints? Of course: popular culture belongs to everybody, and everybody always has opinions, often negative ones. Film is collaborative, negotiated (like opera and musicals, and much theater); there is hardly a film that doesn't at moments step down to a lowest common denominator, and slightly spoil its own taste. Most of the complaints are comparisons with Lem's 1961 book, or Tarkovsky's 1972 film; I'm not willing to fall for those – the book is too heavily, scientifically conceptual (though brilliant) and the music for the Tarkovsky is not as successful (I can't hear the Bach out of context; it seems to me more like the quasi-parodic use of classical musics in Kubrick's 2001).

Yes, towards the end, there are two mistakes: the hand held out to the phantom child is too overtly Sistine; and Rheya's final speech is too long. But the whole is such a beautifully constructed poem: all the words of the book have been stripped out, and only the emotional core is left – all played out in a claustrophobically narrow range of images, and supported by an utterly beautiful film score by Cliff Martinez, which seems to use what must have been a vast amount of time studying Ligeti's orchestral works from the 1960s. The music is, in fact, so beautifully made and so hypnotic that, this winter, I listened to it over and over....

Those final words: up until the extra sentences that slightly clutter the ending, they are entirely perfect. They are, in fact, answers to the griefs and nightmares of the past twenty-five years, at least for me. Kelvin has apparently somehow returned to his home; we see a repeat of the first scene where he is making dinner, cuts his finger, etc.; but this time it ends slightly differently – as he washes his finger, the cut vanishes. When he sees that, he knows things are no longer as they were: he turns to see his dead wife walk into the room, and he asks her, his eyes huge with love, grief, and a hint of fear – "Am I alive, or am I dead?" And Rheya, smiling up at him wutg love and comfort, gives the perfect answer, which I have found so strangely consoling: "We don't have to think like that any more."

I identify almost too completely with the film. It's heartless of me to say so, of course – not as my reaction to that student interview was heartless, but in a different way; because friends and family inevitably find it important that one not have a heart that seems utterly broken. That's why I don't share this film, or my other favorite Urbania (also about grief and the aftermath of loss) very often. But the truth is: those shots from the opening of Solaris, of Kelvin sitting on his bed looking out bleakly at the rain, are just too utterly real for me. And too familiar.

... My headache is – not gone, but – fading....

vertigo

After taking my pills a few hours ago, started to feel strange – tingling, disoriented. An acute sense of feeling my internal organs (possibly illusory – there aren't any nerves in there, are there?) and a shimmer of minor aches. (This after being pleased that my gums stopped aching after I took some echinacea....)

I have to get up and go in to the office – I've scheduled an interview with a Singapore applicant at 3:30 – but am shaky and somewhat strange – don't feel bad exactly but sort of febrile....

Perhaps the doctor is right: I can't take a wide variety of supplements, not with my liver on the edge of trouble. Or perhaps....

And: it's a good thing I avoided watching 28 Days on television the other night. Can't deal with certain things being put into my imagination....

S.E.P.

Telephone call on a Sunday, from the police in a small village in the county south of here. Apparently someone has disappeared, and the neighbors are worried about him – someone I've never met: but someone who is on my list of contacts for HIV patients who want to talk to someone.

This is a guy who called me more than a year ago; he decided not to meet with any of us – but apparently he called my telephone number again lately, and it was his last call before he drove away. And I wasn't here....

Well, there's nothing I can do. I missed the call; who knows, hopefully he's all right. I told the police what little I know.

It does shift the shape of the universe, of course: in ways that include all the obvious aspects of being concerned about another person in trouble, and how that draws attention away from oneself; and the possibility that something really awful has happened, which makes all my complaints look ludicrous.

And it feels strange to have only this tangential connection to something that might have gone terribly wrong, and to have nothing whatsoever you can do about it – someone else's problem?....

***

LATER UPDATE: Forty-eight hours later: received a telephone call from the head of Psychology at the Hospital – he has come home, and he is okay. It is true, though, that he was thinking of (planning on?) committing suicide... so we are lucky. And a good thing too....

Maintenance

Tonight I was doing my rather intricate monthly bagging of pills – I've been doing it for years. It is a possibly somewhat over-meticulous response to, on the one hand, the intricate demands of HIV medications and the many supplements I take; and, on the other, my tendency to lose track of everyday actions unless they are carefully prepared.

Thirty large plastic bags, thirty small plastic bags (of the types used by drug dealers – when I lived in Los Angeles four years ago, I discovered a gold mine in a head shop on Westwood Boulevard – I had to have them order extra bags for me, and bought several years' worth – who knows what they thought I was doing). All laid out in rows on my Parsons coffee table, which has accompanied me in my (involuntary) travels from the other side of the world. From that point it is necessary to be careful – no sneezing, no knocking the table; I set out numerous pills, one by one, next to the bags, then funnel them all into the bag. The funnel was a helpful innovation from my dear Hong Kong roommate, the sweet but rather helpless one – it was his idea to cut off the top of a large water bottle and use it as a funnel.

The whole boring process takes about three hours; I generally do it in front of the television... the rather silly and deflating punchline of tonight's three-hour, tedious but slightly comforting task, was to realize that I had done a month's worth before that was on a different shelf of the refrigerator. So I didn't need to do this... and I won't have to touch it again until around the end of September, soon after school has restarted.

After two days trying to analyze and shift the ground between mere maintenance and productivity, having to do this again is slightly frustrating, but – on the other hand, I guess it is necessary. Any innovations in writing will of course have to fit into daily needs, no matter what. It shouldn't be difficult, but it does mean that what I experience as the conflict between will and laziness gets reconfigured as the conflict between valuable and tedious activities....

Or perhaps this all only seems intricate from the inside. From the outside it must seem so simple....