I don’t want a real woman (6th Feb 1997)

I don’t want a real woman, that would steal my time and freedom; my peace and quiet, I only want to go to prostitutes when I feel like it. I really don’t want a girlfriend, you know that, I couldn’t bear that. I do want a naked girl to myself every few weeks just to relieve the sexual pressure, I do know that. So that’s the problem solved then. Real girls I definitely don’t want. Prostitutes I do. That is my ideal perfect solution. Find where the models work. That is my desire. I don’t need to be ashamed and repressed like Hugh Grant. Be like Sickert, Wedekind, Toulouse-Lautrec. Sitting in the front row of Carnival Strip Monday and feeling so ruthless and in control decided it, told me I could do it. I was surprised to realise at last I could do it, I was ready for it. It is necessary for the next stage of my development.

 

The block of ice can't help giving off a cold air (4th Feb 1997)

The block of ice can't help giving off a cold air, it doesn’t do it deliberately. It's not its fault. The block of ice doesn’t want to be a block of ice, it would much rather be a warm pool teeming with micro-bacterial life. It’s punishment enough to be trapped as a block of ice, it doesn’t need abuse from other people as well. It doesn’t need punishment from outside, being is punishment enough. 

Strindberg. Munch. Hugh Grant. David Mellor. Judge the worth of a person by looking at their enemies. Eric Cantona used the ugliness and abuse to fuel him, give him power. Perhaps that’s what Sarah meant me to do. 

To ween yourself off the morphine and accept some modicum of reality. To suffer the abuse, and to not be crushed by it, but triumph to confound them. To confound! To draw power from abuse, take it in, convert it and use it back at them to confound and distress them, make them see themselves for the small people they are. Hugh Grant gives me strength, and inspiration! 

Their silly self-humiliation is the sweet air I need to breathe. Schadenfreude. Their attempted pain is what gives me pleasure. Eric Cantona came back from his private despair to win the double with Manchester United and be voted player of the year by the press. The adversity was what he needed to wrest his triumph. Hugh Grant needs his shameful incident to build his triumph. I need my shameful incidents to build my triumph. 

I inject their abuse like Sherlock Holmes injects cocaine. I will have my Baker Street rooms. It strengthens me, and thrills me, and becomes my dearest companion.

I know this morphine (this composure) is a painkiller not a cure (30th Jan 1997)

I know this morphine (this composure) is a painkiller not a cure. The disease is still there, but it’s better to have the painkiller than the pain. The disease I believe is incurable. So I will need this morphine forever. I am now finding more and better strains of it. Morphine rather than pain. Composure rather than decomposure. Voluptuous luxuries rather than black emptiness. Composure and morality, as long as people don’t get too close, then I have to go on the defensive to keep them out. No one is going to deflect me from my path, to the hanging gardens of Babylon, my Swiss bank vaults.

Good it's a challenge, it's an expedition; to the Lost World (25th Jan 1997)

Good, it's a challenge, it's an expedition; to the Lost World.

 

“Love for Proust is agonising jealousy" (21st Jan 1997)

“Love, for Proust, is agonising jealousy; there is no room for fondness or companionship. Finally, there is disillusion and indifference, and the sorrow felt by Swann when he realises he has wasted his life pining for a woman he doesn’t even like. 

The narrator sees a poetic vision of beauty and elegance, the Guermantes and their friends framed in a box at the theatre, glistening with jewels and unattainable glamour, but already ironic laughter is not far away. When he meets them, and is invited to dinner, he soon discovers the distressing banality of the world of the rich and nobly born. It is one more disillusion. Even the celebrated wit of the Duchess herself is simply paradox spiced with malice. 

The third occasion the narrator is projected into lost time is when he treads on a loose cobblestone in a Paris courtyard. He finds himself in St Mark’s, walking on the uneven marble floor. Venice, for him, is art. Unlike love, or Paris society, art never disappoints, or disillusions. He knows he has within him a work of art waiting to be written. After one last party with his friends grown old and wrinkled, where he finds the grandees, formerly so exclusive, married to the very people they refused to receive, he shuts himself up and works until his dying day.” 

I’ve worked really hard in this month of January; no time for anything else. 

“Pinter’s silence is due to fear. Fear of being known. Fear of knowing other people. Fear of intimacy. Silence to protect ourselves.”

Going down the stairs the house felt so Poe-esque (20th Jan 1997)

Going down the stairs, the house felt so Poe-esque; warm and lovely.

There is some humanity in my brain and she grabs hold of it and pulls it out so I can be human and warm in that room (19th Jan 1997)

There is some humanity in my brain, and she grabs hold of it and pulls it out so I can be human and warm in that room; but outside it drifts off again somewhere inside my brain and I can't find it and be inside it. 

When she was saying, you've got three options, you can come back to see Dr A--, you can think about it for a few months, or you can do nothing. But I would suggest you don't choose the third option because nothing is going to improve for you. Maybe she was really talking about the sex then. You can go and do something about it, you can think about it for a few weeks or months before doing something about it, or you can just do nothing, shunt it to back of brain and try to forget it, deny it, deny the sexual urge like I denied M, but then nothing would improve. And at the end: I hope you do something, a very meaningful and deliberate choice of words, looking me in the eye, hand on shoulder.

If you spend your whole life alone it's not surprising you become bitter and resentful of people who have wronged you (13th Jan 1997)

If you spend your whole life alone it's not surprising you become bitter and resentful of people who have wronged you. That is why coming here is so special for me, the only place I feel warm feelings directed at me. The street feels a hostile place to me. I realise I cannot come here forever, but for this short time it's just such a sanctuary. 

"Are you living by archaic rules or self-made regulations? If so, it's time you got out of the prehistoric groove and reorganised and restructured your daily life and routines. Time-honoured and traditional practices that work can stay, but nothing else!"