I am decadent and rotten (16th October 2006)

I am decadent and rotten. I can lust after the great sex dancers of the Flying Scotsman, as much as I lust after the great pianists, Irina Botan, Mihaela Ursuleasa, Valentina Igoshina, Nadia Giliova; the great violinists Tatiana Burman, Janine Jansen, the great opera singers Elena Prokina, Barbara Frittoli, Anna Caterina Antonacci, Stefania Bonfadelli. Is this bad of me? Is this wrong of me? “Saw the same two men on the Cally Road” This will be my Die Fackel. This will be my Simplicissimus. Devoted to the Flying Scotsman pub, the Wigmore Hall, English National Opera, the Black Hole of Calcutta pub, the Lemon Tree. After my great depression of these last few weeks, I see now that depression was the chrysalis, in which some metamorphosis was taking place, to give birth to this beautiful butterfly. Nana. It seems sad, but as sad experiences go it is one of the best. Men lusting after women is the engine of the world. 

Decorated all over by pictures of the Anna Friel Lulu. I live in a lush, overgrown, tropical paradise. I push through the great ferns and fronds, brushing the black train soot off the leaves, till I find the door of the Scotsman, and surreptitiously disappear inside, into the wonderland within that scarcely anyone passing by can imagine. How many times I myself passed by this door without it occurring to me what went on within. All those wasted years of my life! 

Some days I think I am going to go in that door and find just a normal pub, like a Wetherspoon’s or an All Bar One, and I will realise I dreamed the whole thing. It will be like the wardrobe that the children went through to enter their snowy Narnia, but then one day just becomes—a wardrobe. 

“Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Wedekind (1864-1918) German playwright, who began his career working in business and in a circus. He became an actor and singer, and a playwright. The plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit), 1893 and Die Busche der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), 1904 depict a society riven by the demands of lust and greed reinforcing his main thesis that the repression of sexuality results in perversion and tragedy. The two plays were later staged together as the Lulu plays.” “All Wedekind’s plays, with their sex-ridden men, women and children, their gentlemen crooks, and their grotesque yet vivid cranks, typify the feverish spirit of the years before 1914. Perhaps less shocking now to our society they remain valid statements of repressed and thwarted sexuality.” Information from The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre and The Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Repressed, and thwarted sexuality! My constant and dearest companions and bedfellows! You mean sexuality comes in any other kinds? Thus due to my bizarre and troubling psychopathology, my mummy never loved me, I was dropped on my head as a baby, or something, I am a Lost Boy, repressed and thwarted, my Eros bends instead, during interludes, to the butterflies and the nightingales of the Scotsman, my Midnight Bell. But increasingly I find the interludes are becoming longer and more enjoyable, and I do not want the real Acts to begin again. The interludes between the real thing are becoming more real to me than the real thing, and the real thing seems not worth a light. My life becomes one long dark pleasurable interlude between womb and tomb. It used to be my cure for a broken heart. Now it has become where my heart most wants to be. I cannot imagine loving any girl who was not a Salome dancing for Herod, or a Mata Hari. Wouldn’t it be great to take a nightime picture of the Bell & use it as my cover page for The Serpent’s Egg! I want my Flying Scotsman website to be suffused with Anna Friel’s Lulu, and with Salome, and with Nana, and with heady steamy sensuousness. Cloying, overpowering, romantic nihilistic sweetness. Tension, Eroticism, Repulsive Pathology. “The most over-perfumed drama in the language” “‘Where is she who gave herself unto the Captains of Assyria, who have baldricks on their loins, and tiaras of divers colours on their heads?” I want it to be filled with cut and paste things from all around me. The fuggy atmosphere. As Black Narcissus helped me over the madness of losing Pooky, maybe the new Serpent’s Egg may help me over the madness of losing —–. 

You’ve got to hide your love away; though it is the most natural thing in the world to want to sing it from the rooftops. Each man kills the thing he loves. They are all Salomes, dancing for King Herod. 

I have always centred my life around the great train stations: Munich Hauptbahnhof, Wien Westbahnhof, Berlin Zoo, Brussels Gare du Midi, in London, Charing Cross and King's Cross. I am so pleased Eurostar is now coming to King’s Cross. Will the Flying Scotsman survive? They are the black smokers on the ocean floor around which life congregates.

I pore over the weather forecasts with such interest (25th Sept 2006)

I pore over the weather forecasts with such interest, as it tells me when the best time is to go back to the shining road. Weather therefore assumes a special significance to me, the same way Justice Palaces do, the same way Bourses do, the same way Cathedrals do. Everything is Eros.

Natalie Maines used to be such a happy go lucky always smiling always laughing kind of girl, then after one throwaway line at a concert, America turned against her and actually tried to destroy her, actually tried to make her want to kill herself. The same way Britain turned against Beckham after one split-second momentary error of judgement, and tried to destroy him, totally crush him, make him want to kill himself. To survive this sudden amazing breathtaking unexpected onslaught, to survive this sudden hate, which you could never have believed if you were not seeing it and hearing it for yourself aimed directly at your person every single day, you must become hard and tough, a fighter, you must kill something in your heart, and you will never be quite the same happy go lucky smiling laughing person again. It will age you very quickly, and make you grow up very quickly. Natalie Maines suddenly looks older, quite drawn, though still of course unbelievably beautiful. But you can see she is an older, wiser, sadder person now, not quite so ever ready with the laugh & the smile. There is a shadow on her, the way there was on Beckham forever after. You find it very hard to trust again. Your faith in the goodness of human beings is almost completely shattered. Almost. Those who keep on loving you, keep on being warm to you, are what keep you going.

After Lamm's what else is there to do for me in Munich apart from struggling to the New Pin & trying to make it back to the Intercity before I explode? (4th August 2006)

After Lamm's what else is there to do for me in Munich, apart from struggling to the New Pin & trying to make it back to the Intercity before I explode? Nothing. Really. Lamm's is the be all and end all of my every day in Munich. At nights, the White Coffin becomes the be all and end all but I think even that has finished for me now, as it has become just full of memories which the here and now increasingly struggles to live up to. The more fantastic memories you have built up in a place, or exquisitely painful ones, the more blood you have left on the tracks, the harder it is to get the same thrill out of the place & the more disappointing it becomes. It becomes a law of diminishing returns. There is a rising arc of your first few visits when it gets better & better, then you reach the zenith, then level off, then the arc inexorably descends, and every trip becomes increasingly distressingly flat and uneventful. The whores get more flat-chested and unattractive every time you go. In Berlin, Yulia, Riccarda, Iga, Diana, gone forever. Maybe they were always poor but the excitement of going somewhere new made them seem more sexy and alluring than they really were. The more you return the more you tend to see the same women in the cold light of day, as it were, and you realise they weren’t all they were cracked up to be. 

I want to write books the like of which have never been seen before. Journals of a man subsumed in a life of emptiness and nothingness, but who revels in and gorges himself on this emptiness and nothingness, like a mother eating her own placenta. Journals about the visceral pleasure in detachment of an autistic person. About transcendency, about finding lenses that enable one to focus all the rays of this emptiness and nothingness like a magnifying glass used to focus the rays of the sun to start a fire, like the mirror that Orphee steps through to enter the Underworld, and then the transcendency flares into life like a white phosphorescent explosion, and one orgies in the transcendency, in the sublime orgasmic detachment from everything and everyone around you, in the supreme quality of emptiness and nothingness stretched to the nth degree like a taut violin string that is at any moment about to break but never quite goes; what exquisite pleasure is then to be found. If Guy Debord’s view of life was to seek the perfect point of inebriation, mine is to locate the perfect point of transcendental orgasmic detachment. The nights I would go to the Coliseum and have to creep in the darkness to the gentleman’s toilets and furiously masturbate so aroused was I. The nights at the opera in Berlin, when I had to leave at the interval in search of Kant and cunt, so highly-strung and aroused had I become. 

It is possible to take an aesthetic appreciation in fine pornography, fine aids to arousal and ejaculation; indeed it is impossible not to. The night in Munich I had to leave Strauss’s Arabella in desperate race back to Schiller and Goethe. It was Karl Kraus who said a woman can sometimes be an acceptable substitute for masturbation, but that it requires an awful lot of imagination. When I think of all the brief connections I have made this year with women, Florence, Melani, Amanda, Pamela, Olga, I can say that not one of them gave me an iota of the pleasure that I felt when the woman in the cinema let the men crowd around her with their cocks out, and let me wrap her hair around my cock to masturbate with in the dark. Transgression is not only possible, but beautiful. I would go further. Transgression is not only beautiful, it is essential. The double life is absolutely essential in order to save one’s life. 

Oh I cannot wait to get back to Nuremberg again! To go back to the Pils Bar to look for Martina! To go back to the Caribic on a Saturday night! My trips always used to be a three-way battle between Love, Art and Eros, this in the days when I was tormented by my desires and my repression, and the more I repressed my desires the more they overwhelmed me. Truly the only way to avoid tempation is to give in to it. Only by indulging your tormenting desire does that desire go away and leave you free to go on with more constructive things, like writing about it. In the last two or three years, however, I have achieved a unity of the three. Love, Art and Eros have been forged together so everything I do is motivated and fuelled by the combination of the three. I go to the Wiertz Museum during the day, and walk around that extraordinary single big room–alone, always alone–and already achieve a fine erection. My cock strains hugely in my trousers and rolls from side to side like a ship in a storm as I walk slowly around the room. By the time I penetrate into the three smaller rooms at the end of the corridor, it is all I can do not to remove my swollen member from its captivity and frig myself maniacally there & then on the spot. How Wiertz’s Napoleon arouses me, his Satan. Because I remember every time I have been here before, it was a precursor to the exquisite coils of desire I would envelop myself in later that night, so the Wiertz Musuem serves as the appetiser, the foreplay, the anteroom on the first floor, as it were, to the brothel on the second. 

Similarly, I go to the Museum of Modern Art in order to arouse myself by looking again at the deliciously dirty Paul Delvaux pictures, the Profond des Plaisirs, Salvador Dali’s Temptation of St Anthony, Tresors de Satan, and Alfred Brooks’s Salome, knowing what it will lead to later. How can I not walk around art galleries with an erection! Especially if there is some sexy woman walking around the galleries just ahead of you, so you sometimes pass her and she sometimes passes you, in an erotic dance, a waltz, where you both know less than half your mind is on the pictures, and your eyes are surreptitiously looking at each other much more than at the paintings on the wall! Oh art galleries are the most erotic places on Earth! Classical music concerts, too. I have never met so many single women as I did when I used to go to concerts every week. The red scallop neck top girl who followed me back into the auditorium at the Barbican after the interval, and who as I looked up from my notebook, I made suddenly electric eye contact with. For the entire second half of the concert, as she sat two rows in front of me, her chest rose and fell like she had been running, so excited and aroused had she become about what might happen between us afterwards. Of course, nothing did. I sidled miserably home on my own, hating myself more with every step I took, but still–the mutual arousal and anticipation had been thrilling. So many times I have had encounters like this at classical music concerts. The Irish-looking lush in front of me in the Wigmore Hall ticket queue, who kept looking back at me, and then for no discernible reason bent right over, so I could see up her skirt. Women can be quite primitive in their seduction techniques sometimes. And people say to me “How boring! Art galleries! Classical music concerts!” They have no idea. The highly developed dirty mind, the truly smutty intellect, can find sex in a pot plant. And don’t get me started on tropical palmhouses and butterfly houses! Steamy indeed! Steamy in every sense of the word! I want to write smutty monographs of no more than 45 or 50 pages each, to document how deliciously dirty the world is.