Sunday December 11, 1983
I've been ill, and sedentary, sleeping a lot more than usual, staying in all day. What am I resting for?
I've not managed to do much work in the apartment, painting, nor even get back into my reading. Such is the cost of thinking thoughts that are not yet conscious.
I am daydreaming, as if to bring the power of dreams to life.
Books, yes. I am putting together a pile of things to take with me to read in India, when I go. I am looking forward to the trip. I am restless here, though I wish it weren't so.
Not a word from Merchant-Ivory on the editing front. Someday there will be a project to keep me in New York, allow me to become part of the city again while I work.
My unemployment again draws me overseas. I'm offered jobs abroad, but not here. I feel like a stranger.
The problem is unlocking the mind from it's accustomed ways of moving about, down the same paths and streets, the same greetings, the same habits, the same thoughts about the same people.
What other turf is there in any man's mind, never before explored?
A man grapples with a lock that does not bind him. He needs only to stop and see that the chain is free. But with the head lowered, how can he see anything?
How to meet the task head on, yet be free from it?
Exploration of the world, for me now, means venturing into new territories of thought.
In travel, I pass through chasms of memories, beneath dried fruit clinging to naked branches. One must not touch the fruit of the past. It is not real! It is not edible.
I stop in places altogether new and strange, never before conceived or imagined. Could this place possibly be one's own? So foreign, so strange and different, yet already holding some minuscule part of my being.
