Dissect and Sever

I could have seen Ms Chi today. She would have bought me food, and we would have laughed about something absolutely ridiculous because that is what friends do. I got a call about an hour ago, letting me know of whatever it is they were doing, but I can't bring myself to get out of the house. There are things I must do. I must save the term and stop being a child. I know for a fact that it'll be difficult for a person like me to straighten out.

Apathy is lethal. It is also contagious. It was when I got sick on my shoes that I knew I had to fix this. I've getting progressively unhealthier in the physical sense, but that is the least of the troubles. I'd also lost interest in my studies, thinking only of leaves and draughts and a different Arcadia - that in which Truth exists - reading different books, keeping Worlds at arms distance; for each man, woman and child is a World, but I won't speak of it right now.

But how could I do such a thing? I'm all words, little action. I'm too familiar with the bad old ways, which involve hazes and staying in bed for hours. The truth is, there is an answer: finding someone who is more or less an equal. It has been done - once, with Nancy, that sweet boy. I saw more than half of myself in him, and there was a part of both I did not like: that excess of woe, that Edgar Poe fixation on the dark, negative pulses. So I severed what I had left of sadness, and I haven't had it since. Sadness is an inferior emotion, and we would all be better without it. I am personally glad to be rid of it.

There is another feeling I must do away with: that of being purple and gold, of knowing oneself better than all the rest. Perhaps 'knowing' is not the correct word, but the point stands: one truly believes himself superior, and the notion is inevitably made Fact by Conscience itself. So I've found a second Mirror: smug, skeptical, insufferably knowledgeable, not unlike myself, which I will be using but not pursuing. This Attic face (and what a sweet-looking face!) will be but a tool for my own self-improvement. I will watch, not touch, speak without influence and inevitably dissect.

Dissect and sever the concept of superiority. I propose this for myself, and though this Apollo may remain abrasive, furtively violent in his elitism, I have decided to be rid of this. It is not the time for lovers, nor for attempts at loving. This has cost me many a mistress or friend, which is unforgivable. Though I do find him attractive, both in the aesthetic sense and on the fact that he reminds of myself, I do not want him. He takes pride in the parts I will be amputating.

A Study on Aestho-Autogamy

Which is an homage or imitation of the style of the late Mr Flann O'Brien, contemporary Irish author and prime theoretician of aestho-psycho-eugenics, a science of the senses. To engage in such endeavour I have fashioned a figure based in both reality and fiction, a main example of the latter being the human devil Fergus McPhellimey.

In order to construct the figure of the mystic, I have built the concept not on the necessarily literary, but on the physical-perceptive.

Nature of variables: visual, auditory, olfactory.

The mystic knows of runes and numbers, taking into account the Good and the Bad Numerals, the separation of the odd from the even. Thus, his view of the world is made not from the mere set of eyes, but from a collective of the aforementioned. His knowledge of the preternatural sciences allows him to operate a rudimentary Aleph, stored only in the contours of the brain.

Physical description, literary version: The mystic wears without malicious intent the face of the god Apollo, patron of light and knowledge, which women of impressionable character find invariably irresistible. His skin is honey-gold, and his hair, of a nondescript brown shade, is particularly vulnerable to strong winds. He dons a jacket of dusty quality and mass-produced origin and, having deemed the use of beads insensitive to the gypsy class, keeps his wrists bare. Conclusion of the foregoing.

Moste Versatile Bacterium

August 19.

READ EPICURUS.

To do.

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow as suggested by one Fionn Regan.
I wonder what'd be like to stay at Dylan Thomas's. He did. I was not watching.

As things go, the boy with brown arms has chosen a career in A. If he knew half of anything, he'd picked a way from all things drab and ended up an ARTIST, however destitute. One can just know he'll be asked to make ugly things. Supply & demand call for industrialization, a depersonalization of the former good things, voluntary obliteration of the self. But ART is its own master, and the Roman law maxim on blasphemy was this:

Let the gods avenge themselves.


Friday, August 20.
Could Pythagoras be labelled a theosophist?

Perhaps, perhaps not.
He belongs to a different class to, say, Krishnamurti, so obsessed with "the" teachings (in reality, pertaining only to him) and not actually doing a thing.

"To end all war, all men must unite," he says; I paraphrase.

In the real world of true things, men unite under flags, with which he disagrees. But more importantly, men unite against a certain Other. The point stands that it is much simpler to form a group against something rather than for it. The world of conventional politics revolves around the notion of gathered hate; out of hate, for hate. What of love?

People disagree on what should be considered ideal, or important. Curiously, most people hate much of the same things. It is understandable.


September, the Third.

Imagine the Holy Marriage of Yersinia pestis and facebending jack of all trades, master of none E. coli hisself.
What of it?

E. coli, moste versatile bacterium, is able to mutate into very nearly anything.

The Yersinia-Escherichia union, contracted for purely diplomatic reasons, will be the end of the world as we know it. I am not lying about this.

I, Maurice

I was never Clive, at all.

So, I'll stay around for a chance encounter with my own Alec, whoever that may be. Somebody willing to climb the ladder from the outside. I may be pingeonholing myself, but this is the manner in which I see it and you should not adopt it for your own. I'm everybody's Risley; you should know this by now. Not even I take myself too seriously.

I'm an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort. But more importantly, I construct life from archetypes. "Life imitates Art," said an old friend of mine, and I believe him. If it means I have been driven to make a poor man's Maurice, then so be it. I am that which I am: only I could change myself.

I don't think Maus could be my Alec.

I do, however, hope that the person who I thought to be Maurice - but was, in reality, some sort of Clive - does not end in any way unhappy. (The world is rife with sad marriages as is.) I do think that each of us had a bit of either character. I was Clive in how I ended things, firstly, for which I should be ashamed. And then there were all those awful boys and that horrible woman I was friends with for a while.

I am not Patroclus.

In Which I Am Invaded

Utter infestation.

There are flies, everywhere. You'd think something had died here. I perceive no foul smells, however. Nobody else has, to my knowledge, and lest this become The Rats in the Walls— with Flies!, I have nothing to worry about.

Unless, of course, gnats carry diseases. I am most displeased.

School begins next Monday and I have yet to finish Island. Ergo, I am ashamed.

Regarding Boy Prostitutes

And me, I'm just a dilly boy
Fresh flower pressed Picadilly boy
Hands on hips, pout on lips
Meat, rag-tag like a dilly boy
He's the sweetest girl, the sweetest girl in the world

If I ever had a band, I'd call it the Nancy Boys. We'd write songs inspired on Plato's Symposium, the heavy metal lead and improper maiden aunts. Our wardrobe? Ill-fitting three-pieces, excess rouge and endangered animals.

I would be so proud.

I am out of cigarettes, clean clothing and any way to contact the goat beast Baphomet.

Maripric has made herself unavailable and I feel something horrible might have happened to her. Alack, I can only imagine the eldritch horror of facing one’s mother, of all things. Dear Silvia is also Missing in Action, or in other words, “probably dead.” Truth is she has been put on a bus to her hometown. I am jealous.

I, a wretched city boy, have little interest in our filthy capital. Many claim to love her, but given her unfortunate face, I doubt their sincerity. Perhaps they are just being polite. Objectively, Lima is hardly better than a shanty. But we live in “uncertain times” and people are allowed to say anything. Theoretically, they are also allowed to say that Lima is a wonderful place and whatnot. Why they would actually do such a thing is beyond my comprehension.

But who am I to pick and choose? I have been wearing the same trousers for the last two or three days. I suppose I may correct this in the morning, when I have showered and purchased some treats for me, myself and I in the shape of gold-white deathsticks.

Happiness

I am on my back and this feels very good. I don’t have anything left.

I had to smoke with matches and felt like a very poor person. My fingers are sullied with ash.

Hello.

He Who Had His Lips Painted

A gash sat by my ear. The cut had scabbed and browned, and though my fingers itched to peel it clean they longed, too, for pen, canvas and fire. Papers of various origin and quality lay strewn across the parquetry. At least some of them came from university, equally unessential and unread. Others had wounds and burns from cigarette light. Most of them were new. Few of my older drafts had escaped the Purges. When I was younger I would gather them in stacks, and take them to the terrace in a bin. Then I would set them alight, leaving just a mound of ash.

The methodical witch-hunt and burning was the sole defining action of my young adulthood, it being the closest thing I knew to the obliteration of the past, the mutability of the future. Thoughtlessly, with the inevitability of one who asserts a faith, I fathomed the peace that would come if the notebooks I’d filled as a child no longer existed. Only then would there be no account left of my foolishness, and nobody would remember. What is curious is that even had they survived, they could only account for events and thoughts that, due to a periodic revision of reality, had never truly happened. The events depicted would appear disjointed, even contradictory when confronted to whichever happened to be the newest version. It was what it was. I was rewriting history, or one of the many histories. But Life is but a book, I said, meant to be reworked and redone. The works I systematically burned were first, second, third drafts. They were not publishable. They were riddled with holes, like an old coat. They feigned jadedness, like bad children.

It was when I picked the scab that I remembered a half-written story, a line left at the close. It involved a man of heft, the return of the boutonniere and matters of dubious legality – notably, the consumption of leaf. Alphonse Llewellyn, Esq., would indulge in letter-writing under the influence of the Lotus flower, to the general displeasure of his recipients. He would roll a yellow petal and hide it beneath his tongue, with or without the aid of Slavic spirit, and commence his writing. Alphonse Llewellyn, Esq., would correspond with a cat named Rum’n’cola and concede her tours of his estate, during which he would take numerous photographs.

I revelled in the thought, for I had once met a man similar to this Alphonse Llewellyn and loved him all the more for it. Truth be told, I had based one upon the other; each became another and melded into one. Though they had always been vaguely similar, in a “few would ever notice” sort of way, by the closing chapter they had become the same. It was only upon finishing the draft that I realised the truth I had set in stone. I had to change my protagonist in order to conserve what little anonymity we had left, lest my thoughts be bare to the self-appointed critic. With a certain optimism, I vowed not to shift his essence or core. If in reality he knew the language of flowers I would make him a lepidopterist; if he dabbled in the crafts, I would hand him a cuatro. [...]

A List of Reasonable Fears

Live wires.

Faces of Meth.

Being sent down for:
a) Indecent behaviour
b) Poor academic performance

The leaves are crumpled at the bottom and I must remind myself to pass tomorrow's final. Jasmine tea has failed to wake me further, and might as well be counterproductive: it has the power to relax rather than induce alertness. Coffee is unthinkable, and I will not have it.

Tomorrow I will go to school in the guise of Edgar Poe: pensive, dressed in black and generally disagreeable. Also, disheveled.



St Oscar cannot save me now. It is much too late.

I Love You, Alphonse Llewellyn

I am a boy in a book.

Somebody’s making shit up about me and I’ll end up living it.

Some people would like to think I’ll write a novel: if such is true, then this is by all means a metafictional account. Somebody has written about a young person attempting to write a book. Said person then had his Hero write of the possibility of having been created a character of an artistic demiurge; therefore being, in reality, no more than ink upon a page, somebody else’s brainchild without thought or emotion beyond that of another’s creative intent.

Only as a character does one have a purpose per se. Free will is a wild gene. Unless the process of storytelling is collective and largely disorganised, and comes from many minds as opposed to one, the pieces will mesh. The author knows the end beforehand, and will actively work toward a goal: that of making his idea work. There is no nonsense in fiction. Crude reality is imperfect in its execution, and cannot be regarded as beautiful. Reality’s narrator is cursed by a stutter.

The word pensive derives from the Old French and means having the appearance of thought, particularly of the hopeless sort. To be pensive means to appear as though one has something on their mind.

I know you are, but what am I?

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My lungs are not too black.

I am not very kind. I am hardly a logician. I am not entirely aware of social regulations, and may thus act shamelessly.

I am open to infidelity in a marriage. I must have lovers permitted for myself, as well. This is not a fault.

Familiarity need not breed contempt and children.

The viability of time travel would confirm the age old assumption of a predestined future.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Postscript: I've listed everything you stole since we met: stole no kisses, just some books and the odd cigarette.

Alfred Mansfield, Preeminent Pulp Writer

For the time being, it is imperative that I stop entertaining “a certain pre-Raphaelite aestheticism that worships the medieval concept of beauty as a reflection of the Hellenic ideal of the young male form,” it being what it is and I lacking time and effort to rework my style as Alfred Mansfield, preeminent pulp writer.

Health: My throat has been afflicted. I cannot sing or talk as I used to. Step to take: cut back on the cigarettes.

Writing: I’ve christened the third volume after Little Nancy. I see no mistake in such a choice. My notebooks and this journal itself are but romans à clef. There is enough conjecture as to whether Nancy was a virgin suicide, a closeted communist, lacking in will or truly a man, only the last of which is undoubtedly true.

Expectations, Short-term:
Pass finals, raise my grades.
Acquire a trilby and/or a boater.
Decide whether to app Borges, or not. Sade would be too much for me.

Great* Expectations, Long-term:
Get into a British exchange programme. If UCL’s not on the list by then, I’m off to Kent.
Meet with a certain expatriate, if prospect n. one goes well.
Finish the novel.
Become politically active.
Ultimately, work under the radar.

* ‘Great’ being synonymous with ‘unrealistic’.

To a Pall Mall Critic

“The enfant terrible, with his shameless love of truth.”

I’ve realised I might never renounce Oscar.

His words have shaped me, taken me to brown 1889. A type of nostalgia creeps for what was never mine, but what can I say of it? The man can gather his share of lovers – ‘cultists’ a more accurate term, and build them in whichever manner he pleases.

As many a spinster said of Christ, “To know him is to love him.” At fourteen, the sight of his full face clogged my cogwheels. Most likely, it does still. He has untied, undone, reworked.

I am only thankful.