At the left is an illustration from some step-by-step instructions, and on the right is the last sticker from a nearly empty feuille.
Dear diary,
I’m sad and tired today. Why? I don’t know; there isn’t one single clear reason. Part of my sadness comes from the fact that I’m not more well-known. I don’t need to be famous exactly, but I wish that more people cared about my writings. I wish I meant more to the world.
I offer this next jokey thought only while stressing that I’m the opposite of suicidal:
I imagine myself calling the suicide help line someday and the operator telling me that I’m one of the few human lives that isn’t worth their time to save. That would be unfortunate, if not even the suicide help line cared enough to talk you down from your ledge.
But I would never stand on a ledge anyway, because I’m scared of heights. Isn’t that funny: it proves that I don’t understand the concept of self-slaughter. No, actually it proves only that I dislike pain.
Anxiety is a type of pain, and I don’t want to feel it, even if it’s only for a second or two while falling to my death. I think that everything should be easy, even dying.
I’ve said it a million times: Being anxious is inseparable from being intelligent. I don’t think that these traits correlate directly; in other words: it’s incorrect to say that the smarter one is, the higher one’s anxiety level will be. But I think that even the calmest super-genius will suffer from nervousness more than your average soul.
Therefore, I don’t, in truth, want to rid myself of fear.
Another thing to consider is the fact that you cannot ever know what a person is feeling – you must trust what they tell you about their inward state; but there’s no way to “check the math” of their claim. I’ve had doctors tell me that if I hadn’t come to them for help with my nerves, they would never have guessed that I felt overanxious, because I carry myself calmly. This makes me furious at my body. To feel baseless fear intensely while appearing unruffled to others is like finding that you are Edvard Munch’s Scream of Nature occupying the back seat of a motorcar that has fully tinted windows. What I’m trying to say is that, because the windows are practically opaque, passersby cannot see inside to help the suffering masterpiece.
In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes as follows about the Arcadian god Pan:
The emotion that he instilled in human beings who by accident adventured into his domain was “panic” fear, a sudden, groundless fright. Any trifling cause then—the break of a twig, the flutter of a leaf—would flood the mind with imagined danger, and in the frantic effort to escape from his own aroused unconscious the victim expired in a flight of dread.
This is all too familiar to me. (I’ve expired in a flight of dread about nine thrillion times.) So Pan’s domain must be the slightly suburban city, because that’s where I get MY daily doses of panic. Instead of the breaking of twigs, there is pounding on walls, slamming of doors, shouts in the street. And instead of the fluttering of leaves, there are trashy autos lacking mufflers, and sports utility vehicles with mega-bass subwoofers vulturing round our block all night. (These latter remind me of some festering, moldered version of the cruising teens from the film American Graffiti (1973); I sigh for those carefree days, back before the fad of earth-shattering percussion was even a glimmer in its corporate distributor’s eye.) Yet I did not “accidentally adventure” into this nightmare; over the years, this place slowly ambushed me. For I’ve been here forever, and it wasn’t formerly so scary. Unless it’s been this way all along, and I’m only noticing its terrors now because I’ve reached the age when Dante moved to the woods.
But all this talk about inflaming my fear is inflaming my fear; so I will abruptly change the subject. To soothe me, I’ll copy a couple of verses that I happened upon in my morning’s reading of Alcoran:
What is to come is better for you
than what has gone before...
That’s from sura 93, “Early Hours of Morning” (as usual, Ahmed Ali’s translation); and this next is from 94, “The Opening Up”:
Surely with hardship there is ease.
With hardship indeed there is ease.
OK I’m calm now, thanks. Panic averted. —But the problem with being at ease is that one grows lazy. So now I’m stupid and lethargic because well-balanced in temperament, and I will therefore ruin this entry by just allowing it to become another quotation repository.
The U.S. cinephile Roger Ebert, I’ve heard, used to host a festival where he’d screen a worthwhile movie with a crowd, and he’d pause the film anytime anyone in the audience indicated that they had an observation to share. This resulted in a slow, choppy viewing of the film, yet presumably deeper than would’ve been possible without the distractions. I try to do the same thing with my daily public readings, where I go to a park and read aloud from my favorite books; but there’s not a big enough crowd (it consists, so far, solely of my sweetheart, who is a mob of one) so nobody ever interrupts with any remarks. Nevertheless I persevere. Today we finished André Breton’s 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism.” A number of parts at the very end appeal to me; I might as well note them down here before doomsday erases all excellence and spares only the vulgar. First, here’s a fragment that occurs in the midst of a footnote – I’d like to have used this as an epigraph for my collected writings:
The accused has published a book which is an outrage to public decency.
And I’d be tempted to include the following extra half-sentence from later in the same note. I suppose ultimately I’d decide against doing so, because I’d rather avoid identifying too closely with that ‘S’-label (I’m wary of groups); but the idea is immensely attractive to me:
His only defense is claiming that he does not consider himself to be the author of his book, said book being no more and no less than a Surrealist concoction which precludes any question of merit or lack of merit on the part of the person who signs it...
That is genuinely how I felt about my writings, after finishing them; and I was THIS CLOSE to publishing them all anonymously. I still wish that I had.
Now it’s a silly coincidence that this next Breton excerpt is also from a footnote, but in the last couple pages of his manifesto there are two statements in proximity that contain asterisks that lead to longer notes that contain words of interest; so I’ll see you in court.
We must absolutely get to the bottom of this. Today, June 8, 1924, about one o’clock, the voice whispered to me: “Béthune, Béthune.” What did it mean? I have never been to Béthune, and have only the vaguest notion as to where it is located on the map of France. Béthune evokes nothing for me, not even a scene from The Three Musketeers. I should have left for Béthune, where perhaps there was something awaiting me; that would have been too simple, really.
Not only is he (like an ancient prophet) called to Béthune for no apparent reason, but what pleases me most about this is the nonchalance with which Breton declines the invitation: “that would have been too simple, really.” I compare how, in the biblical book bearing his name, after receiving his prophetic summons, Jonah flees from Yahweh God and thus learns the hard way that you can run but never hide. Also I’m reminded of this passage from Acts of the Apostles in the King James version’s “New Testament,” which I consider humorous (because the very Spirit they’re trying to serve keeps blocking the evangelists, denying them passage, until the final fever-dream in Troas, which, out of apparent desperation, they interpret as God giving them the green light for a mission to Macedonia) although I’m sure it was not intended to be so farcical; it concerns my arch-nemesis the Apostle Paul:
Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of Galatia, they were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia.
After they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go into Bithynia: but the Spirit suffered them not.
And they passing by Mysia came down to Troas, and a vision appeared to Paul in the night: There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, “Come over into Macedonia, and help us.” And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavoured to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them.
Compared to this, Breton’s unconcerned abstention feels like a fresh breeze. Now here’s more from near the end of the ’24 manifesto:
Men’s piety does not fool me. The Surrealist voice that shook Cumae, Dodona, and Delphi is nothing more than the voice which dictates my less irascible speeches to me. My time must not be its time, why should this voice help me resolve the childish problem of my destiny? I pretend, unfortunately, to act in a world where, in order to take into account its suggestions, I would be obliged to resort to two kinds of interpreters, one to translate its judgments for me, the other, impossible to find, to transmit to my fellow men whatever sense I could make out of them.
For superficial reasons, this brings to mind those passages that deal with “speaking in tongues” and prophesying, from Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians.
If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret. (14:27)
But I like best the following verse, which seems far more in line with Breton’s perspective:
And the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. (14:32)
Actually, now that I think of it, that perspective is closer to Emerson than to Breton. As I said before, I love both sages but prefer Waldo. Contra the above, Breton seems to want to subject the prophets to the spirits, so much that the prophets dissolve into their spirits. But I suspect that he only embraced the idea of automatism because he assumed that the best part of his being would, on the profoundest level of reality, turn out to share an identity with the Unconscious Itself.
Also, just for the record, this next blemish from the same chapter is one of the reasons I despise the apostle and call St. Paul my arch-nemesis:
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church. (14:34-35)
So here let me abandon Paul to his own advice:
But if any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant. (14:38)
(Just now, as I was copying the verse above, I heard a dog bark in the distance, and I heard a human bark back at the dog; then the dog and the human barked at each other for a while. I take this as a sign.)
I’m sorry that my intellect instinctively sinks to the level of wanting to compare André Breton with Paul of Tarsus, but both of these sons of Adam desired to start cults, and one was thrust upon me from before my birth (I mean that I had no choice but to “join” it, which later necessitated a great escape from Paul’s blood-cult of Christ), and the other appealed to my maturer mind but I chose to embrace it through rejection (also because I’ll be part of no club that’ll have me), in the way that true strength does not slay wild animals so as to display their stuffed remains but rather accepts as a divine gift any glimpse of their prowess in action, however far-off and fleeting.
Yet nature will not be in full possessed,
And they who trueliest love her, heralds are
And harbingers of a majestic race,
Who, having more absorbed, more largely yield,
And walk on earth as the sun walks in the sphere.
(That’s from a manuscript poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson.) Also, now that I’m relaxed, I can’t resist giving one more frightful quote. When I referred above to the famous composition by Edvard Munch, I searched out his name in the encyclopedia to make sure I had all my ducks in a row, and I stumbled across this passage from his diary (the entry is headed “Nice 22 January 1892”):
I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.
P.S.
I wish that I had my own show on TV. Not a “reality” show but a “based on the life of” type of thing. I guess you’d call that a biopic? But I’d rather not have to die before it gets made, as I assume is the case with biopics; plus I’d want to have creative control over its every aspect; so maybe call it an autobiopic. Yet it should be an ongoing series rather than just one film. It will be scripted and acted, but I’ll play myself. So I will be one character, and my sweetheart will be the other character, and the show will be filmed as a situation comedy. It will be bright in mood, honest, and uplifting. Like an after-school special, except there’ll never be any moral lesson; and the show does not teach anything. Nothing happens, but we never make jokes about it like Seinfeld. My show will be truly boring and nobody will watch it. My character is distinguished, but the audience secretly favors my sweetheart’s character, as she is kind and cheerful, whereas I’m always high-strung with a closed mind and a shriveled heart plus I think I’m so clever. And I use the show as an excuse to showcase my favorite music, which I insert prominently as background audio everywhere. One episode, for instance, features me and my sweetheart traveling to a shoe store to buy me a new pair of shoes, because my old ones are tattered; on the way, there is a lengthy shot of us driving, with a song on the soundtrack. This song is a cool track that you have never heard before, and you are thankful that I have introduced you to it. And I work closely with the show’s editors, every step of the way, so that some of the semi-fictional moments pass rapidly, and some pass slowly, while some repeat from different angles and distances – thus, events are weirdly emphasized. But in the end, no matter how uninteresting some people may find my show, I try sincerely to make everything smooth and polished: so it always appears slick and craftily lit, like a magazine ad — I pay for topnotch cinematography — to give you that “everything’s OK” feeling, even if you ignore it. I intend the show to feel as though, even when you watch it, you’ve slept through it. Everything nondescript and gentle and normal.
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