Over the Border

Reporting from the outer limits of the critical frontier

riting is going VERY BADLY at present. I try checklists of topics, reading and research. I try getting away from my desk to write in bars and libraries. I try getting up to write at 6 a.m. and writing drunk at midnight. I relapse into daytime TV, I try talking things over with people. Another three Guardian articles loom, for which I must drop everything, done or undone; and now this: I have no idea why on earth I agreed to write all this stuff to begin with.
‘That a man should publish three or 30 articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the world’, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, in ‘An Apology for Idlers’ (1877).1 The world may be indifferent, but one’s editors aren’t. People are shouting at me from several countries at once, and I can’t do a thing to get them off my case. And a living, after all, must be made. Stevenson well understood the paradox, as he turned in his essay on idleness – the product, no doubt, of considerable effort.
However, my self-imposed solitude and ‘you can’t stand up till you’ve written 250 words’ regimes don’t work – nothing does any good. I have seriously considered plagiarism, but I’m too lazy to look the right bits up and not clever enough to paraphrase and cover my tracks. I let my subconscious mull things over, but I just get bad dreams.
This won’t do at all. We need a bit of perspective, and to remember that Stevenson, in the same essay, also urged us to ‘look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives as a recluse [...] or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil feature in other people’s lives. They would be happier if he were dead.’2
Wanting to avoid the worst, I have long cherished the idea of going away somewhere to write. To rent an apartment in a city where no one knows me and get down to that book I have rashly intimated that I am writing: this is the sort of daydream I present myself with at precisely those times when I am obliged to find words and don’t have any. The walls are closing in. I think it must be the same for many artists in their studios. I know it happened in mine – I should have listened sooner to my inner voice, or rather to the deafening silence that announced the fact that we were no longer on speaking terms. The silence roared on for years. But going away is not quite the same as giving up.
There are those who complain when, given a great furlough or a sabbatical from teaching or some other onerous professional responsibility, they say they have wasted their one great opportunity and achieved precisely nothing, that they returned with nought to show from their travels and their efforts. Counting their luck, these hopeful souls go off to some artist-in-residency somewhere only to find themselves in jail or thrown out of town, having got terrifyingly and very publicly drunk, started fights or screwed their host’s wife, her husband, their kids or the beloved family dog, and got found out. Perhaps they accidentally burnt down whatever foundation it was they were staying at. In any case, they got no work done when they were there, not even the thinking kind, which is precisely the condition they were in before they left home, and also the reason why they inevitably went off the rails once they got there. There was no getting away from it.
Or they went off alone and checked into a hotel to get some solitude and to absorb some exotic local colour or a sense of a world suspended and some anonymity and a break from all those deadlines and their long-suffering families, and they just sat in their rooms and wept. Home, it appears, in the familiar guise of their own worst fears, insisted on travelling with them, even though they had crossed several frontiers to get away from it all. They queued for their visas and had their passports stamped, suffered inoculations, spent hours checking with the Foreign Office whether wars, famine, disease or some burgeoning political situation were likely to impede their transit or make life difficult in some way or other on their arrival. They don’t want too many interruptions when they are penning their little missives on the enigmas of Otherness, the dislocations of temporary exile, the excoriations of solitude. They want to discover

Adrian Searle