My interior life became blocked up (2nd July 1997)

My interior life became blocked up. Silted up. It became increasingly unnavigable. Harder and harder to squeeze through and get through each day. Then in 1995, that deposited more silt in one go than anything before, and that was the last straw. The river completely stopped, and it flooded. Now after the black months, we could dredge it. The interior river became free-flowing again, clear and fresh, but it was still the same river. It still came from the same source, and issued in the same place. You tried to change the river’s course, and make it flow into the exterior world. You’ve improved my life by dredging the interior river and getting me moving again.

Make me strong enough to bear the loneliness (30th June 1997)

Make me strong enough to bear the loneliness, endure my writing life with no one to share it with. 

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.

It's better to indulge yourself than keep denying yourself isn't it? (28th June 1997)

It's better to indulge yourself, than keep denying yourself, isn't it? The strength I feel in my newspaper diary on June 28 this year, compared to the weakness and fragility of last year.

The Astral or home. Go and get it out of your system. Get it over with. Do something that makes me feel really dirty and ashamed, that way I will get a creative spark the next day. A compost heap glows with all the radioactivity, all the fireflies and dung beetles feeding on it. The dung in the bats cave. All the life it supports. How inspiring Malandra model was, National Portrait Gallery vampire Tuesday was. The strength of my revulsion propels me to creative ideas.

21/6: The Sun's ingress into Cancer gives you plenty to think about. Psychologically you have been under enormous pressure, especially over sexual and money matters. In the coming weeks you have to accept many things you have been trying to avoid. You can't.

25/6: There are a series of thoughts going through your head concerning your most private passions and secret fantasies. What is obvious is you aren't satisfying internal urges, mainly due to not understanding your own psychology. If you can't, how can anyone else?

At bad times I yearn to be a monk (27th June 1997)

At bad times I yearn to be a monk, to be allowed to live for ever in total silence and contemplation. Then I think I can do that here. All that getting me to talk, it's just stupid. Being with other people just makes me so unhappy. I need my privacy and my silence. That is who I am. It hurt me because Sarah always ignored that. If you can't be alone, you need to carry that peace around with you.

Walking down the road in my coat in the drizzling rain, it felt so much like September; I thought how much I love going to Sunset Strip after Chandos in the dark afternoons. That little cauldron of colour and girls. With no emotion involved, the way it should be. Pouring with rain as I came back.

I'm looking for self-realisation, and I will only find that in my writing. I want to explore that now, now you've helped me find the secret door in.

Sex dancers who create their own fictional world in the orange light amidst the blackness, and drag you into it. God, I can't wait for September. The thought of red Gillian Anderson dancing in black lace dress. Why can't May lead into September? I want Ruby, Sneaker Pimps, Placebo, Swiss gold, Chandos, Sunset Strip, models in Brewer Street warm boudoirs before football in the black Wednesday evenings.

This vampiric period has coincided with Batman & Batgirl! Purple & black.

Am I Blue? 1920s New York jazz club atmosphere, smoky, ferns, illegal drink. The orgasmic sexy intoxication of Tristan und Isolde is no greater than when a stripper's eyes meet those of a certain man's and they just steadily look at each other for a few prolonged moments. 

We've had 11 days of continuous rain and gloom (26th June 1997)

We've had 11 days of continuous rain and gloom. It's been lovely. September weather. Phnom Penh monsoon weather. We've just got a month of hot July to get through, then we're up to August 6th, when everything should get better. 

I can hardly wait for September gloom, rain, darkness, going to pictures, Chandos with my Evening Standard, then walking through the black volcanic cauldron to Dean Street and Sunset Strip. Then coming out to go to Chelsea or the Coliseum. It's a good life. I just need enough to live on. Work for short spells to give me this. 

"But when Wilde put aside the tragic role which he played with such zest, and gave rein to his intelligence, he realised that he had not altered in the least, and that if anything prison had intensified his individuality:" "'At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.'" "'To regret one's own experience is to arrest one's own development.'" "'I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does.'" "'I am far more of an individualist than ever I was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation.'" "'My ruin came not from too great individualism of life, but from too little. The one disgraceful, unpardonable, and to all time contemptible action of my life, was to allow myself to appeal to society for help and protection.'"

Only a week to go then we're out of June! (25th June 1997)

Only a week to go, then we're out of June! Yesterday was the darkest, stormiest, rainiest day I can remember. I can't remember the last time it rained so much. This is the rainiest week I can remember. This time next week we'll be into July. Then we'll be counting down to August 6th. In February/March 1991 I grew so much, and progressed so much, having been held back for a year. I was held back for 6 months at the Post Office. 

"Rayfield reveals Chekhov as a Don Juan, promiscuous and ferociously unwilling to allow further intimacy after sex. Since he was very attractive to women and moved in advanced Bohemian circles, there were not a few cast-off women in distress whom he repulsed and kept at bay by teasing. He also used their painful experiences as material for his plays. Not only this: from the age of 13 he frequented brothels, and liked to boast to his men friends about the exotic prostitutes he used, dusky-skinned, Japanese and French. Writers are complicated beasts. Chekhov needed privacy and freedom more than he wanted loving intimacy with sexual partners. Out of this privacy came the great stories and plays. How do we measure the sufferings of the women he hurt and abused against his greatness?"

 

 

I felt like Oscar Wilde leaving his rent boys as I left the Astral (18th June 1997)

I felt like Oscar Wilde leaving his rent boys as I left the Astral, walking the streets back, everyone watching me. I suppose I just imagined it. The films were very good. Perfect Pair. Cliffbanger. Busting Out. Shock. The very tall blonde in pink swimsuit in Cliffbanger, she was fantastic. NEVER AGAIN. £8.80. 

I'm a writer. I'm like Vincent. I'm like F.G.Lorca. I'm like Franz Kafka. Weak pathetic creatures, can you imagine them sitting at a desk in an office? Keep them at arm's length as much as possible. I just want to be left alone, in my own little world, to write my stories. 

It's no good making me go against my nature. They won't accept me. You wouldn't either. I found it difficult. Like a homosexual for a long while finds it difficult to accept his own nature. You should help me accept it and make the best of it. Was this the end of Cuba? Maybe. Already I want to see the pink bikini tall Cliffbanger girl again. 

I'm ashamed of my sleazy life, but it's my nature. Control it. Put it into my writing. 

The necessarily secretive world of Victorian homosexuals. I'm beautiful like Federico. Fucked up like Vincent, writing pathetic helpless scribbles. Cowardly like F Kafka. 

Vampires get great pleasure from sucking blood, but it's a very lonely and empty life. Oscar Wilde's shame was his rent boys; mine is the Astral Cinema, and Sunset Strip. It is a nasty, unpleasant, necessary hygienic ritual, weekly it seems. It is my gutter. I'm a prince, in dark blue & black. 

They are all Fu Manchu films.