| Dear Friends, |
| I would like these not sent letters to mark the end of “wasted angst” in my life. I’ve never regretted anything so much as having particular individual worries, in a certain sense anachronistic ones, whereas general worries, worries about our time (or at any rate those that can be reduced to such: like your problem in paying the rent, for instance) are so many and so vast and so much “my own” that I feel they are enough to fill all my “worryability” and even my interest and enjoyment in living. So from now on I want to dedicate myself entirely to these letters. |
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| I am already aware of the traps in this and that’s why for some time now my first need has been to “de-professionalize” myself, to get myself out of the stranglehold that has dominated the last twenty-five years of my life, critiquing immediately, commenting on things before having time to form an informed and well-considered opinion on them. I want to build a new kind of daily program for myself where I can finally get into something, something definitive (within the limits of historical possibility), something not dishonest or insincere (unlike the way today’s artist always behaves, more or less). |
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| For that reason I made several plans for myself with this project: …to maintain my contacts with reality and the world, but while careful, of course, not to get lost in unnecessary activities that support the status quo; and also to set up my own individual work not as an “artist” any more but as an autonomous historical agent, utilizing notes, comments, books, and a load of other things within reach, always with the care necessary to avoid affirming a culture that wants me worried and perpetually desperate. |
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| I’ve also taken comfort in knowing you understand this stuff first hand. |
| jeremy |
