When I started writing this, my idea was simply to recover the form of an existing discourse and wait for its contents to be revealed as I went along. Now, though, it looks as if just by beginning to write—and not for the first time—I’ve inadvertently come up against a secret mechanism, a secret way things have of working, and my clumsy fingers bashing away at the typewriter keys have somehow interfered with it. I feel trapped inside a mechanism I know nothing about, gripped by the magical fear that my apparently private, personal, and innocent act has put me in touch with a formidable and dangerous world, a world I can’t control and can only barely, uncertainly, feel is there.

That section of my past, to which I still haven’t managed to restore the emotional charge, goes on pressuring me from the hidden recesses of my unconscious. Meanwhile, my external reality is also pressuring me more and more, to work, to act, to do all kinds of things I don’t want to do. I’m trapped between two worlds, which ceaselessly call to me like two gaping, insatiable mouths. For too long now I’ve been unable to pay enough attention to one of the mouths, and when you don’t pay it enough attention, it ends up wanting to devour everything. I need to stand firm and decide what my priorities are: the most important thing has to be the inner self, the intimate call, the release of those frozen, and perhaps even slightly rotten, feelings. But I’m scared to face up to the task. I don’t know how to go about it; I haven’t got time to stop and look carefully into myself. And I’m frightened of getting lost for too long in that world of shadows, false pretenses, and old pain.

Exercises

December 6

The person writing these lines is the beginning of the new ME. Last night, when I was undressing for the shower, I saw an image of myself in the little bathroom mirror that I didn’t like one bit. “I hate this body,” I thought. Then I realized that I don’t hate this fat, misshapen body because it’s fat and misshapen, but instead that my body has become this way precisely because I’ve been hating it for so long. I realized that hating it will never help me to reshape it the way I’d like, and I also thought that being this physically monstrous must be an accurate reflection of how psychologically monstrous I am. “I need to change, body and soul,” I told myself then.

When I woke up this morning, I hadn’t forgotten or even broken off from this line of thinking. And I’d made a resolution—not a very clear one, admittedly, though the underlying attitude is clear enough.