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@es0mhi
I can very much relate to a) the tension which languages to choose for writing (although for me my autoglossophobia helped me quite a lt to write in English), and b) the desire for longer pieces whilst one isn't capable to keep ideas growing and simmering in ones's mind until their time to be written down has come. This danger of premature verbalisation... it's very grave, and Social Media entice one to give away the things that need more time. In that sense, Social Media are a medium and vehicle of betrayal.

Not being capable to hold an idea for long so that it can ripe and show to oneself what it means at all is one of the reasons I didn't update my blog in a long time, and when I did, it was more or less war stuff, thus rather ugly but in need to be written as I found myself constantly in the situation of seemingly watching a soccer game while the majority around me in this forsaken country seems to attend a basketball game. The exchanges with you last winter have been very helpful in this regard as you cut (past tense) through much of my typical German bourgeois left-leaning sentimentality when it comes to Russia. Writing about this helped a bit but otherwise I lost pretty much track of what I was really out to write about. So, again, I can relate with your hesitation, the feeling of upset, the confusion, the feeling of being lost that I assume you're experiencing. Correct me if I'm wrong.

There is, at least in my opinion, a larger factor at play here. It is one of the reaons why I spoke about Twitter as the place of haunted facts yesterday. To me it seems obvious that when things lose their ambiguity and ambivlance and when they start to become literal and unequicoval, that that is the time when borders harden, when violence rises, and wars finally start. It's simply not the case that because people can no longer bear uncertainity, complexity, and ambivlance that -- hurrrah! -- they let themselves slide into war and aggression. No. It's when thing turn out literal, when they become literal and one-sided, that the time of violence has arrived. And so I'd guess that what you're expieriencing (and what I indeed feel to be happening) is that you can no longer express yourself because as someone from the humanities you cannot get a hold on the brute force of practical constraints, of fact-ism, of unequivocality. There is a reson why we from the humanities engaged in such studies that have as their primary condition an acceptance of ambiguity, perspectives, multi-layered sense. Obviously, as scientists, we still need to work for objectivity, educated estimates, sound arguments. But still. When the world has become one-dimensional -- what's left for us to do other than either take side or to shut up? So I guess much of your writing problems may come from this place. They indeed came for me.

Perhaps this German song may be of some comfort: It's from the 1980s, with a text by the Austrian-Jewish poet Theodor Kramer from 1938s. It's about emigration and the pain and reluctance the lyrical I feels when contemplating the need to go. I always found it more to be about not having to leave one's country but having to leave one's own biography and personal history of thoughts and ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7KKiD2xN7k )

Before that gets too depressive: George Scialabba has a new collectin of essays out in August ("Only a Voice" https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/733921/only-a-voice-by-george-scialabba/ ). I find him most helpful, esp. when I don't want to tread the waters of Leon Wieseltier.

All the best to you!

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