XXX

A quick history that explains most of it, hopefully without being too boring.

I was born, I gurgled, mum gave me a crayon, I started drawing.

I went to school, the teachers said "Stop drawing! Do as you're told!"

I kept on drawing, secretly, but I still won the paper aeroplane and model car contests.

I went to high school, the teachers said "Do as you're told! Call us Sir! If you don't do exactly what we tell you, you'll end up working 5am shifts in a factory for the rest of your life!"

I said, "Bollocks." I still got 7As and 2 Bs.

Then I went to 6th form, met my friends, got an A in art and a C in German without turning up to half the exams. 6th form was quite good, I suppose.

After that I went to three different art colleges, never met a single real artist in any of them, and took up a career as a full-time depressive alcoholic. They were right: disobedience leads to ruin.

I still think I was right and they were wrong, but that's not the question these days - it's purely practical.

These days, I merely dream that I still have the potential to do something good in my life - in reality, I take another drag at a rolly, another swig of Special Brew, and thank god for the wealth of my father

XX

I can't believe what I wrote before. My emotional conviction is that I have wasted my life so far, but I don't believe that I can do nothing but acquiesce in decay.

All I want to do is write stories that deal with my own affective hollowness and hopelessness of love, about my own experiences of amorous failure, and of finding such overwhelming satiety in unexpected phenomena of such monumental beauty, that all other concerns are washed away.

I think my love life has been so unsuccesful because I'm a romantic, of the old school - Sublimity is what I need. There is no such thing as true love between Romantics, only confluence of a cataclysmically sublime experience.

I think I would have done better to be born a gentlewoman whose literary* parents indulged her passion from and early age, and to have eloped with some poets to Switzerland, thence to partake of Laudanum and set down the strange phantasies that came to me, as if in a dream, but with every solidity of physical apprehension...

*feminist mum, of course

X

I don't suppose there is anything worse for the poet-prospector, the insatiable addict of the Mother Lode, than contemplation of a wealthless future whilst the wealth-giving oil gutters its last from a deep-drilled well.

This stuff of glory is hellishly deceitful, to a fallibly deceitful mind; perhaps if one were a saint one would live suffused, but I doubt any saint has felt the need to write poetry, for the same reason: poetry is the simulated sainthood of the sinful - that is to say, poetry is the fiction of divinity, not the actual, and poets themselves have far more in common with demons, being often in daily conversance with the same.

I've been reading about saturation diving recently: divers enter a pressure vessel, are compressed to a high atmospheric pressure and breathe a precisely controlled mixture of gases, so that they can carry out work at several hundreds of metres of depth; afterwards, they are required to spend long periods, even days, being gradually decompressed so as to avoid the boiling of gases in their blood which had previously been kept liquid by the high atmospheric pressure inside their chamber.

I've no analogies to draw; nothing in my present life moves me very much, and nothing in reading about such marvels of technophysiology moves me to write much either.

I sometimes have the idea of drawing up a design for my perfect house (combining observatory, library, catacomb, rather personalised dungeon, etc) and given up, because I am not architecturally trained. I'd love to design an aeroplane, but I lack the engineering and aerodynamical skills; there's not much else I'd like to do.

I like to get drunk, because at least then I can ramble on about things until I get bored/fall asleep/trash my room so dad has to come and sort it out.

My life is useless. This is apparent to me now in the utmost clarity - I've had the suspicion since about the age of 15 or so, but it's been glaring me in the face for so long, and every single thing I've tried, every suggestion I've followed has failed so absolutely, that it's about time I faced it once and for all: I am a failure.

If there is one conclusion I've come to, it's that there are two things that could have saved me from this rock bottom (I'm only saved from homelessness by my father's financial help):

1) Utter, ruthless arrogance

or 2) Courage.

Since I have neither, I'm likely to go on for a few decades more, putting a brave face on things as they slowly fall apart, until my liver gives out on me.

I am a poet with nothing to write, an artist with nothing to paint, a musician with nothing to play. Dumb, invisible, and silent - a shadow of what could have been. A waste of rare vitality, a crime.