1. Žižek: the ideal is an ideological effect. Keep it distant, faraway, and you know you are safe from the present. The book you’re writing now can be as bad as you please because you are dreaming of the book to come.
Of course I write too quickly and too much; I write – or I used to write – a great deal. As if by rushing I would draw myself towards the fiery book which did not yet exist and could not exist. And if it existed? I would lose my purchase on the future. No future, no escape, only a present which collapsed in itself and drew me with it into that infinitely dense point from which nothing escapes.
‘You fear the present?’ – ‘I fear the present unbound from the future, a present that turns in itself, which can find nothing itself, sterile repetition’.
2. On one of those infinite afternoons in Manchester(2001), I took Feinstein’s biography of Tsvetayeva to the delicatessen. It had just arrived, that biography, but I had read it first many years before, at a university library. Tsveteyeva’s letters. I have only read quotes from those letters – quite long ones. As I read, I know they take the place in me of the one who strives and breaks himself in striving. Intensity without form or limit. To escape the present, the afternoon, unemployment or underemployment …
True, I can write this because I did escape. A job; another city. Only as I write the new book I find myself in the same eternal present and experience the same infinite wearing away …
3. Foolishness: over Christmas, finding myself back in the house in which I grew up, I reread the diaries I wrote as a teenager. What did I find? A fear of afternoons, of the everyday. Record of a conversation with an older friend who had said to me (it was 1992): you are lost. Yes, lost, unemployed or underemployed. Data entry in what is called the ‘Silicon Valley’ of the South. Cycling to the university library where I would first read Tsvetayeva. Without a future.
No future: it’s endurable. More recently (1999), I found myself back in that same ‘Silicon Valley’, learning to drive and, in doing so, inventing a little future for myself despite the absence of a job, the absence of work. I was writing, I think. What was I writing? A draft of the first book. I passed my test, drove once on my own and moved back to the North.
Why, this morning, am I writing about the infinite wearing away rather than working on the book? To reawaken the ideal, to give myself that blazing future which would allow me to close my eyes to the present. Even the words ‘Tsvetayeva’s letters’ allow this. As if, by reminding me of her suffering, her ardency I can conjure away the bad pages of my new book.
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