Been a few days and I haven’t felt like writing. Rapidly ascending that small steep boulder problem has left me uncertain what to do next. I can’t even bother to watch Biggest Loser. In fact, I have already missed the first three episodes. I am beginning to think that this is a different style of project. If ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE has a strongly procedural aspect, if it represents lived actions in terms of the language of a certain form of art (Conceptual Art), then Bouldering Diary attempts the reverse. It subjects art to the arbitrariness of everyday life – that is, to my wayward approach to bouldering and climbing. If I stick with the term bouldering in the title, it is because it suggests small, private, largely insignificant problems. Yet I may also write about climbing, because, in any case, the same rules apply.
I will say then without any real hope of rendering it in terms adequate to art that I went climbing on Saturday down at Nowra. Led five climbs, without falling once. Particularly happy to have easily led the juggy roof climb, Eat My Spinning Blades of Steel, Motherfucker, which I would have last successfully climbed close to twenty years ago. I begin to wonder then about possibly climbing all the hardest routes that I used to climb. Perhaps that would lend life to this project? Or perhaps I could avoid all reference to my original climbing past? Perhaps I could try to climb an altogether different climb – one harder than I have ever attempted before?
Art will just have to find its own way amongst all of this, at the margins of all of this.