Go into Brussels like pulling into a great palmhouse (11th August 2006)

Go into Brussels like pulling into a great palmhouse, gigantic tropical ferns and trees and butterflies all around me. A steaming primordial paradise. With soot on the leaves. Let it become an overheated, closed, hothouse. Go into Munich the same way. Go into Vienna the same way. The more poor I became the more I travelled miserably, to Empire, Atlantic City, Pour Platin, Golden Gate. When you are happy people are attracted to you like to a magnet & you have great times. As I get poorer, I become more miserable & only have bad times. How happy I will feel when I reduce my Barclaycard to zero!!!! The long project starts here.

OK so it has taken 8 months for me to get my position this bad. It follows it will take another 8 months to get it back even to where it was before, owing £3,900. How fantastic to see that Paul Delvaux Pygmalion picture again! De Chirico’s Melancholy of the Beautiful Day! Now let me spend all these long hours in my flat, my little nest, my eagle’s eyrie, going through all my old notebooks, manuscripts, book margins, typing up everything from my previous holidays that can be of use in my journals. Finally going through all those newspapers. Oh what joy this next few days off is going to be! I will live on cokes & hamburgers from McDonald’s next door. At night I will treat myself to a couple of pints in the Calcutta. Maybe once a week treat myself to Dionysus and the Sunset Cinema and Demi or Pamela. I must get to the Rebels & Martyrs exhibition next week. Of course I cannot give up my nest. What a crying tragedy that will be. That is the best thing in my life. That is the nuclear option. If I spent £800 on beer & strippers in the last two months I should therefore be able to pay off £800 on my Barclaycard over the next two months? This is where I turn my life around, and the fightback starts. I ache to see that Paul Delvaux picture for real in the Brussels Museum of Modern Art! How I ache to see Dali’s The Temptation of St Anthony in the flesh again! 

“Today, visitors to the Wiertz Museum enter into a highly preserved atmosphere from a revolutionary era favourable for contemplation, inner reflection or daydreams… ” How fantastic to see La Belle Rosine again! Le Tresors de Satan! La Figure Tombale! How much I want to get back to Brussels! I will have to go on a pilgrimage to Felicien Rops in Namur, I think. The train to Berlin is 7½ hours and costs 236 euros!!! About £180? Wouldn’t it be better to get an Interrail pass for £380 so I can go from Brussels to Nuremberg instead for one night stay, on to Munich for two nights stay, on to Vienna for two nights, before the long journey up to Berlin for my last four nights? For sure, that is £1,200 gone just on train & hotels!!! Add on another £100 a day for expenses, that is £1,200, making a total trip of £2,400. Almost impossible to be less than that. A 12-day trip has to come to at least that. I think I am going to have to accept that I will be flying from Heathrow to each of my destinations for four-day holidays at a time. Maybe with a two month gap between each holiday? I could maybe combine Brussels & Berlin on the first trip at Halloween, £60 Eurostar plus £180 Berlin train, comes to £240, not to bad for say an 8 day trip, and then in the New Year combine Brussels with Munich & Vienna, if my savings have continued! How I ache to see the huge Fountain of Inspiration in Brussels again, and the Mars & Venus on the opposite wall. So full of personal meaning, more than ever now. Getting back to Brussels will be such a symbol of my rebirth. It will be very emotional, before then pushing on to my reunion with Berlin Plaza and Berlin Zoo. Brussels can never be enough on its own. Brussels is always the stopping off point, the starting point, the staging post. I could even go to Berlin for a one night stand in January to see La Traviata?

I want to write books the like of which have never been seen before (5th August 2006)

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 Orphée 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 does; 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, -----, Melani, Amanda, Pamela, Lydia, 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 temptation is to give into 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 Museum 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 Steven’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. For the true connoisseurs of smut.

THOSE INCREDIBLE FELICIEN ROPS PICTURES I WAS LOOKING AT THIS MORNING SO MUCH MAKE ME WANT TO GO BACK TO BRUSSELS AGAIN (13th Feb 2006)

THOSE INCREDIBLE FELICIEN ROPS PICTURES I WAS LOOKING AT THIS MORNING SO MUCH MAKE ME WANT TO GO BACK TO BRUSSELS AGAIN. IT HAS BECOME AN INCREDIBLY EROTIC PLACE AGAIN—THE TOWN OF ROPS, OF WIERTZ, OF CLARISSE. JUST TWO MORE NIGHTS TO GET THROUGH THEN I CAN GET BACK TO THE CALCUTTA & THE FLYING SCOTSMAN, AND OSCARS & THE ABCAT—I AM ADDICTED. I AM AN OPIUM ADDICT. HERE IN LONDON, IN KING'S CROSS AND WHITECHAPEL; UNDER THE CHANNEL ON EUROSTAR TO BRUSSELS; IN BERLIN, AND IN VIENNA. MY THEME: “THE VISCERAL PLEASURE IN DETACHMENT OF AN AUTISTIC PERSON”. THOSE INCREDIBLE FELICIEN ROPS AND WIERTZ PICTURES MAKE ME WANT TO GO BACK TO BRUSSELS (AND NAMUR, AND THE EMPIRE AND THE GARE DU NORD). THOSE INCREDIBLE GEORGE GROSZ & OTTO DIX PICTURES, AND TILLA DURIEUX AS CIRCE AND VIKTOR MULLER’S SALOME HOLDING JOKANAAN’S HEAD MAKE ME WANT TO GO BACK TO BERLIN (AND MON CHERI & GOLDEN GATE & MONTE CARLO & CIRO). THOSE INCREDIBLE HANS MAKART PICTURES MAKE ME WANT TO GO BACK TO VIENNA (AND THE GURTEL). 

MY OPIUM ADDICTION HAS ALREADY CAUSED ME TO RUN UP A £5,060 DEBT ON MY CREDIT CARDS. “GET TO GRIPS WITH THE IDEA THAT IT IS EATING AWAY AT YOUR MONEY, YOUR LOVE AND YOUR LIFE.” NOW I WANT TO PLUNGE BACK TO BERLIN, & VIENNA, & BRUSSELS. DIVING DEEPER INTO DARKNESS! I AM COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE TO A WOMAN’S PROMPTINGS, LIKE AMANDA IN SUNSET, OR --- IN THE SCOTSMAN, OR THE BLONDE ON CHARING CROSS TUBE PLATFORM. I AM NARCISSUS, I AM DORIAN GRAY. I SEEM TO HAVE FORGOTTEN THE PASSION, AND LOST THE DESIRE. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IS “REALLY A CHARACTER STUDY OF A MAN FOR WHOM LOVE SEEMS AN IMPOSSIBILITY, AND SO HAS THROWN HIMSELF INTO HIS WORK IN AN EFFORT TO ESCAPE HIS SAD PREDICAMENT.” 

SOLIPSISM: “YOUR WANTS & WISHES ARE ALL THAT COUNT, AND YOU MUSTN’T EVEN THINK OF GIVING WAY OR GIVING IN.” THE GREATEST THING THAT HAS HAPPENED THIS YEAR WAS SEEING M-- AGAIN. THERE HAVE BEEN NO REAL GREAT EVENTS THIS YEAR, INSTEAD JUST THE LOW LEVEL PLEASURE OF BEING IN MY OWN HOUSE, AND DRINKING IN THE CALCUTTA, AND MAKING SLOW PROGRESS ON AUTISMUS, AND LOTTA, AND THE COLD ICY AIR OF THE MOUNTAINS. THIS IS WHAT I AM PAYING £541 A MONTH FOR. IT IS AN INVESTMENT TO GIVE BIRTH TO MY FUTURE PERSON. I WILL WORK HARD TO GET ME THROUGH TO BERLIN IN MAY.

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.