I really don’t care about looking for jobs now (23rd April 2006)

I really don’t care about looking for jobs now. I will never find a better job than this. All I want now is to lose myself in classical music. Just accept this will take a long while to get over. You are heading for ruin. Concentrate on the positives. Concentrate on writing with blue hands in cold stoveless rooms like Nietzsche, heading to the cold icy air of the mountains, where the air is thinner & there are less people. I always want to get to where there are less people. I seem to have lost interest in art museums, in classical music concerts. I am just lost in an emptiness. All there is is drinking. This coming week I will devote to writing, staying up all night, into the early hours of the morning. Funny how sweet & lovely to me the new brown top barmaid was; she was gorgeous to me. Jane was lovely to me. Even though my life is getting better year on year, there is always a period each year when I go into real psychological darkness & desperate straits. 

“But despite his literary success, Crane was a profoundly tormented man. Poetry sustained him in a life that otherwise teetered on the brink of collapse. When he wasn’t writing, he spent much of his time engaged in fleeting homosexual encounters and alcohol binges. In 1932, three years after meeting Lorca, Crane committed suicide by leaping from a ship into the Caribbean”. 

“Crane tends to be labelled as American poetry’s answer to both Rimbaud and Keats. Like the young Rimbaud he believed a poet’s vision derived from systematic deregulation of the senses; many of his poems were written in an alcohol-induced frenzy while listening to the same song on his Victrola over and over again, while his tireless, often dangerous cruising of the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Hoboken waterfronts – occasionally under the pseudonym Mike Drayton, in honour of the Elizabethan poet – shocked more conservative friends such as Allen Tate and Yvor Winters……..By the time he arrived in Mexico in 1931 he was grey-haired, puffy-featured, and subject to hallucinations, delirium tremens, and corrosive self-disgust. He wrote only one poem there, the sublime “The Broken Tower”, in which he acknowledged his inability to do more than merely “trace the visionary company of love”, or hold for longer than “an instant in the wind / each desperate choice”. A month after completing it in late March of 1932, Crane decided he had no choices left at all.”