Writing

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I decided I wanted to spend less time making shows and more time writing books. This decision was something like: performance feels a bit dead to me, let’s change careers and see what happens. And yet practically the moment I made this mental shift, as soon as I began to take this decision a bit more seriously, something changed. It wasn’t precisely that I couldn’t write anymore, though it’s also true that writing itself has become more difficult. It was more like: something within the writing hardened, became more (but I’m not exactly sure if this is right word) rigid. My writing was no longer as loose or free. It was as if I could now feel in the choice of words and syntax that it was no longer something I just did in my spare time for fun. It had become more careful, more crafted, more professional. And yet, in this sense, ‘professionalism’ is everything I hate about writing, about art. The writing that moves me most is always so vulnerable, written ‘for oneself and for strangers’, anarchic, surprising, (surprising both to the reader and to the author), full of loose ends and unanswerable questions. Perhaps I am only in a sad mood, but these days as I write, or think, I can feel these qualities slipping away. I can see them in the distance, yet find it more and more difficult to reach out towards them. Of course, all of this most likely has something to do with aging. But the ways in which one must, to a certain extent, remain amateur in order to stay alive, they have never felt more dear.



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