This perhaps is another theme for my Journals—not just impermanence, temporality, good things have to be enjoyed quickly because they will not last long—but the glory of despair. The rich resource that despair is. From despair you can draw all your power, your nutrients, your munitions. Ready to come again. Every time I read some schoolchild has killed himself because he was bullied at school, I think, oh, you didn’t realise! How you can use that temporary despair to absolutely fill you with power! The power to totally destroy your pathetic opponents!
Tag Archives: despair
I was only in London (at work) for just over a week
I was only in London (at work) for just over a week between the two Vienna visits, but so much seemed to happen in those few days. A lot of developments. All of them may come to nothing once we get to December, but they were dramatic nevertheless. Life is always full of twists & turns. That is why I feel so sorry when you hear about these young people, kids at school, who kill themselves in despair—I want to say to them just hang on you fools! Things can change in a moment! Just hang on and around the next corner your life may completely change! Despair is a rich black resource, like a mother chewing on her own placenta. Feed on despair. Let it fill you up with strength & power for when the moment is right, for you to rise again. For you to bloom, and to blossom. For you to rise above your would-be tormentors and let them wither in your shadow. Despair is the greatest resource any human being can ever feed on, and you need to feed on it and gorge yourself on it. It is the fertiliser that will grow your blooms. It gives you all the strength you need, to come again.
The 1990s end of century was the sexiest time of my life
The 1990s end of century was the sexiest time of my life; it was also the most painful time of my life. Do the two things always go together? I tend to think I need to direct my life back into painful waters in order to feel that sexiness again. A real erotic masochism. Make yourself lonely, make yourself isolated, make yourself a scandal, bring shame & despair & desperation down on yourself—only then will you be able to feel the real electric prickle of naked, rampant, not giving a fuck about anyone eroticism again.
Despair does not bother me. In fact I turn it into a fetish
Despair does not bother me. In fact I turn it into a fetish, and gorge on it like a mother eating her own placenta. Despair for me is an aphrodisiac, the blacker the better, I take it like a jelly and it keeps me hard for hours. Only in despair do I bloom and blossom like an orchid. It is the shit that fertilises me. It is my most natural and comforting state, like a child wetting the bed and lying there in the lovely warmth of his piss, because he just can’t be bothered anymore. The child watching others playing ball in the playground but he just thinks what for?: and cannot find any motivation to join in. He is already in another world.
By any measure in Nuremberg and here in Munich I have seen some of the most beautiful Tallulahs and Esmeraldas I have ever seen
By any measure, in Nuremberg and here in Munich I have seen some of the most beautiful Tallulahs and Esmeraldas I have ever seen, and yet I have done nothing with any of them. I have been in every club just to look, study, on reconnaissance. If I had travelled in despair, in some black tunnel that I was so familiar with in my former years, in what I called my “golden age” of travelling, then I would certainly have done something with one of the stunning window girls of Nuremberg, or in Munich with the extraordinary Natalia in Cabaret Imperial; yes, a young naughtier Steve Nicks, but now I realise more than anything a potential new Riccarda. Even busty Dara in the Dolly Bar, or blonde Claudia in Atlantic City.
What is extraordinary, no let’s say merely revealing, about travelling repeatedly back to the same places
What is extraordinary, no let’s say merely revealing, about travelling repeatedly back to the same places as I do, as is my wont, is not only to record how each place has changed since you were last here, but more importantly how you yourself have changed since you were last here. Sometimes you can meet each other at a bad moment for each other, and it is a disaster! Other times, by chance (it can not be by design) you meet each other at a good moment for both of you, and it is wonderful! But I think to really enjoy travel, and really experience amazing moments, you have to be in despair at home. But I am not; I am very calm at home, and I have had a very calm holiday here in Nuremberg and Munich, with Berlin still to come. The entrance to Rechthaler Hof toilets used to have a little table with a dish on it and a plea for visitors to leave some coins. This has now gone. I really wonder why. This is a mark of how much Spaten beer I have currently consumed.
I feel now like I did before my first grand tour
I feel now like I did before my first grand tour to Sweden, Berlin, Vienna and Munich in 1999; incredibly small and attacked, yet hoping to learn something about myself in the despair and the black nights and the loneliness of my journey. This is when the wolves all come out and fall upon you.
I do think there is something sexy in illness, in disease, in fever
I do think there is something sexy in illness, in disease, in fever. When your body is mired in swamplike, creepy crawly things, and you cannot go out, when your libido is brought to a halt, then your erotic wells start to fill up and you crave release and erotic abandon again. The same way despair is essential for erotic excitement, disease and fever serves the same purpose. I am a great advocate for despair! A great advocate for disease! A great advocate for fever! The cheapest, most tawdry, and awful sexual experiences of my life are the ones I never forget, and the ones I yearn to experience again. The more awful it was, the more I seem to crave it.
Always this nagging desire for disease and despair! to dash myself onto the rocks!
Always this nagging desire for disease and despair! to dash myself onto the rocks! to let myself be lured by the Circes once more. Always this longing for infection and bleach-splashed streets of Venice. What is Venice but Venus. Ironically it is probably only the infection I am already suffering from that is preventing me from giving in to the desires to ruin myself further in disaster. Venus and Tannhauser. The times when I was in despair were also my most vibrant, and most rich to dig back into now, and find coal, and oil and diamonds and rubies and emeralds. Isn’t it amazing that Oscar Wilde, Elephant Man, Jack the Ripper, Ernest Dowson, Walter Sickert, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, et al, et al, et al, were all in London at the same time? What an extraordinary time, what an extraordinary city Victorian London was. The idea of giving it all up, to go and live in Brazil at the top of a waterfall, on the edge of a precipice.
Yes I have got a safe sinecure at the moment
Yes, I have got a safe sinecure at the moment, a safe harbour, but in reality it can end at any moment. I am at the whims of others. As long as they like me, they will favour me and protect me; as soon as they change their mind, I will be back on stormy seas again, and back in the financial abyss. I am never away from the financial precipice. It is easy to look back at my years when I was single as some kind of erotic paradise, which in many senses they were, but that would be to forget the absolute despair I was in all of the time. Deep sadness and sombreness and pain. And as I always say I think the true heights of eroticism are not possible without despair. It is only despair that grows and ripens the fruits of eroticism. Dirty smutty sexuality thrives in the damp, dark places of despair, like a fungal infection. It flourishes in the places where no one really wants to be. This is one of those eternal ironies—the highs can only be found in the lows. Student of Nietzsche as I am, we should all be grateful to our times of sickness. To know the true high nights of Eros again one must dive deeper into darkness, and one is no longer prepared to do that, as it would cost too much, and throw away too much that is most precious. I have too much to lose now.
Still the temptation to throw myself into the void remains
Still the temptation to throw myself into the void remains. To touch the void. I need to be on the edge: of loneliness, shame, misery, humiliation, despair. I have blotted my copybook.
While I am reeling off the list of my former ‘glories’ it might seem I am not happy with my life now
While I am reeling off the list of my former ‘glories’ it might seem I am not happy with my life now and wish to go back to how I was then; in fact, I spent all those years in absolute despair. Now I have found happiness and love in my life I can no longer experience these ‘glories’, and that leads me to think that the glories are impossible without despair. There can be no glory without despair. Despair is the vital prerequisite for glory. You cannot experience the ‘high nights that persuade us to put off suicide’ unless you are indeed on the precipice of suicide. When you are happy you are on much more of an even keel; there are no highs and lows. The highs would not have been possible without the lows; perhaps. This is why I always say there is so much to be said for despair, there is such richness in it, and people who are in despair just need to be made aware of what a rich and nourishing state it can be, and to just hold on and come through the other side so they can enjoy those riches that it forms.
I look back on the old days of travelling as a Golden Age and yet when I look at the words I wrote back then why was I so sad?
I look back on the old days of travelling as a Golden Age, and yet when I look at the words I wrote back then why was I so sad? Despite the sadness and pain of my life back then I was having the most extraordinary highs in Berlin, Vienna and Munich. Maybe it was the sadness and pain that produced the highs, that provided the essential conditions in which highs could occur anyway. In that rotting marsh gas of my despair sparks can ignite very easily.
It used to be a frozen world. It is not anymore. It used to be icy and I used to be lonely
It used to be a frozen world. It is not anymore. It used to be icy, and I used to be lonely, and in pain, and in despair, and I had the most exquisite erotic pleasures. Now I am happy, content, pain-free, and struggle to achieve any erotic delight whatsoever. Both because I am happy now and because the internet has wiped everywhere out. And I have turned –. A triple whammy. The way Grand Prix tyres are said to ‘fall off a cliff’ quite suddenly after 8 or 9 laps, and I think my testosterone levels did the same about two years ago—coincident with marriage and settling down and family life, or because of it?
To write I have to be in extremis. In intense solitude, loneliness, despair, isolation
To write I have to be in extremis. In intense solitude, loneliness, despair, isolation. That is why I keep travelling. I am piling up a mountain a debt, dancing on the volcano, by continuing to go back to Berlin and Vienna, time after time. I am loading —– and me with such a financial timebomb. I miss feeling like a sexual instrument, a finely tuned violin, my strings quivering at every slightest erotic stimulus. Every breath of wind made me quiver with lustful pleasure. Reading Lotta, I remember how much I fell in love with her. An 18 year old Swedish blonde girl, with big breasts. I wanted her so much. Amazing to think that was nine years ago, and she is now 27, probably married with kids. Just ships that passed in the night. Writing is my life. As are —–, and strippers. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” I was alive then, but in such pain and despair. I am calm and content now, but feel less alive.
When you have nothing a little thing becomes everything
When you have nothing, a little thing becomes everything. However, when you have something, a little thing seems like nothing. How I miss the great days—that massive black Congolese cock in Brussels hotel toilet, the massive breasts of Martina in Nuremberg, epic amazing nights. This is the crux of my problem, and why I cannot enjoy the double life now. For it to be worthwhile, the old life has got to offer something extraordinary, and it never does, and perhaps never did. Only when you have nothing does everything in the gutter glitter like gold. Don’t I want the freedom of being free again? The cold icy air of total loneliness, total solitude, total despair? Maybe we should try it for a while—a trial separation. The trouble is I think I want to be the lonely old man staring into a pint in the pub every day. That has always seemed attractive to me. While creating my body of work that no one will ever read. Journals 1996-2007, and the others that follow. I can only be alone, I think. I love her, and will love her till the day I die, but I can only be alone, and can only make her unhappy when I’m with her. J.G. Farrell water turning to hard ice, causing such sadness to the women who tried to love him. The price of the man is the head of the artist, as Munch thought. As Nial F says, you can’t mix work and marriage. You have to give up too much. Ah now Sex on Fire. I can only be free when I don’t have a home to go to. When we split up, every sight of her will become so thrilling, I will swoon, like before. I love her more than anything in the world, and yet I love my complete freedom—I don’t know how to put the two things together. This is the tragedy of me and ——. Use Somebody, oh all those amazing trips to Southend. Don’t I need to split up, so I can miss her again?
It is better to stay drunk because then it gives me beer goggles and every woman suddenly looks beautiful
It is better to stay drunk, because then it gives me beer goggles and every woman suddenly looks beautiful, and one starts to feel turned on; it is better to stay in this aroused state. Debord spent every day searching for the perfect point of inebriation; but of course as soon as it is achieved it is passed, and lost. Drink, giant tropical ferns, fauna and flora, classical music, naked women dancing. This is my lush life. —– gives me incredible freedom within the marriage to enjoy this; but I still have not successfully found the lush life I want. I am still searching for the lushness I feel I need. I tend to concentrate my search in King’s Cross and Soho but think I must search further afield. I found nothing in Brussels, Berlin or Vienna . I have got to find it in me first. You carry the weather with you. I wonder have I ever had a great experience sober? All the great experiences of my life, all the high nights that persuade us to put off suicide, came when I was drunk, I am sure of it. I am not capable of highs, of pleasure, when I am not drunk. When one starts drinking, anything becomes possible. The door to all sorts of pleasures opens. Rubicons can be crossed. Ishtar Gates passed through. Riccarda, Iga, Diana, Yulia, Emily, Martina, would never have happened if I was not drunk. Drink is the precondition for anything happening. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Those amazing, amazing nights I had in Munich, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna were all fuelled by drink. Then why was I so unhappy? I had the freedom but craved something real. I was eviscerated by loneliness and emptiness. I was ripe for falling in love with the woman of my life, and then there was —– . “I don’t have a boyfriend in London !” Now I want to go back and enjoy all those places I used to enjoy. So I go back but—I find all those places are dark and closed down, no longer in business, and those that are open are filled with hideous crones, the same crones that excited me so much just 5, 6 years ago. Is loneliness, despair, essential to being able to enjoy the lush life?
If —– did leave me wouldn’t the despair of sitting at the Ibis bar drinking my Stellas be absolutely exquisite?
If —– did leave me, wouldn’t the despair of sitting at the Ibis bar drinking my Stellas be absolutely exquisite? In that nihilistic frame of mind would I not take pleasure from ANYTHING I might find at Gare du Nord? Nihilism, that is the ingredient that I am missing, without that I believe eroticism is not possible. Over the last 13 months, the times when it looked like —– and me were finished, and she just left the house without telling where she was going, the wild rausch and intoxication I felt in storming drunkenly around London looking for her was incredible. If —– did leave me, wouldn’t the despair of sitting at the Berlin Plaza bar with my Berliner Pils be absolutely exquisite? Before debauching myself in a kino with total nihilism? If —– did leave me, wouldn’t the despair of sitting at the Dorint bar with my Zipfers be absolutely exquisite? Always this pleasure in despair. It is all I have known all my life, it is all I knew from the moment I was born. It is all I am comfortable with, it is the only air I can breathe. In a family, I feel like a fish out of water. I cannot breathe. I can only breathe in pain and despair. Book that flight to Vienna. Precipitate that crisis. Perhaps we should just split up for a while. Europe only comes to life for me when I have nothing at home and am totally nihilistic. Then I have all the time in the world on my hands, I can spend one day going to the Belvedere and St Stephen’s, the next day going to KHM and the Butterfly House, but more than anything just sitting at bars watching the world go by thinking about the girl I lost.
The three days of exquisite masturbation in Vienna in 2001 on the way to Oslo are a legend of my life
The three days of exquisite masturbation in Vienna in 2001 on the way to Oslo are a legend of my life. I don’t know what came over me. Well I do, and that was the strange thing, instead of catching myself in a tissue or my underwear I laid back and let it come all over my stomach and chest, time and time again. I have never done that before or since. It was a mixture of the black psychotic despair I travelled with combined with the sinful seductiveness in the Vienna air, I think. It was a combustible mixture and it was just set off. The days with Lotta & Sophia are a legend of my life. Maria in Pour Platin is a legend of my life. I feel like just going ahead and booking my April flight now and done with it. Despair and hopelessness are the vital ingredients for a true eroticism I think. Perhaps I need —— to leave me before I will ever know true erotic pleasure again. The pain and despair of that will overwhelm anything I have ever felt before. I want to really wallow in that pain and despair again. Am I really prepared to let —— go to do that? Perhaps better if I go to Vienna as soon as possible so I can answer a question to myself—provoke the crisis now, and now see what comes out of the crisis. There needs to be an explosion and a reordering. Perhaps when the smoke clears she will be gone, then I will be alone for the rest of my life.
I didn’t feel like going out and doing anything naughty but I told myself that one has to alter one’s senses when one gets the chance
I didn’t feel like going out and doing anything naughty, but I told myself that one has to alter one’s senses when one gets the chance. It is like having a big stretch when one gets up in the mornings; one would not want to stay in that position all day, but to do it and then relax back to normal felt really good. Forcing myself to do something naughty is the same; one feels so much better afterwards. For me writing is a thing of coldness, iciness, hardness, darkness, despair and solitude. I can only write as if I am still alone; sometimes, disturbingly, I wonder if I would not be better off if I was alone again, just so I could write like I used to. But that is madness. I wrote about my decades of loneliness, that has been done. I must write about my new reality now. Perhaps that means I must find a double life, in order to have something to write about—for having something to write about seems to me the only point of life.
My desperation to get out of Berlin and back to Moloch to see —– at the ——– has cost me an extra £830
My desperation to get out of Berlin and back to Moloch to see —– at the ——– has cost me an extra £830. It is beyond belief. This madness. I could not go another day without seeing her. What reception awaits? I could not bear to stay one more day in Berlin. I will never come back again. I can’t wait to get back to Moloch. 12 arrival. Plus an hour 30 minutes to the ——– 130. Drink like a fish to prepare to see her again. I will never travel without her again. If I do anything I do it in Moloch. Now I wish I had stayed in Brussels Friday. Then when I decided to rush back home to see —– it would have just been two hours and I’d have been there. I could have gone to Wiertz and Modern Art and Palais de Justice and drank in Murphy’s Bar watching the plump Belgian girls passing. Going to Berlin was a disaster. Going so far away from —– was too much. Before I was even half way to Berlin I wanted to turn back, and rush back home to her. It may take me a long time to rediscover my poise and composure after this three days but I shall. It was a good experience because I learnt travelling is finished for me. Berlin is finished for me. Brussels is finished for me. Is it just Moloch then? And what there? Can I find something to do there? Write my books. Finish the four books. Now I am in the post-travelling period. I cannot go back. The highlights of this trip. None. Absolutely none. All I remember is the black cock in that party video. Maybe I need to force myself back to cinema again. The only interesting moment was in the Cine ABC. The film was an erotic Murder on the Orient Express from about 1972 but the sound was so bad it was fully ten minutes before I realised it was in English. The sex scenes seemed to only last 2-3 minutes before the man came, so it was very realistic, unlike the modern porn films. Then the red-green disco dots rotated on the screen and a girl walked down the aisle between us dressed in what looked like an NHS patient’s smock which she removed on stage to begin dancing around a chair. She looked totally bored and contemptuous, like a voluptuous Nicole, but I found her arousing. After her two songs finished she put her smock back on and walked back up the aisle past us and the film resumed. Now I think I could spend many happy hours here! Oh why didn’t I stay in Brussels! The temptation of Berlin was too much for me and it has proved ruinous. So. I like ruins! The tropical shrubbery and ferns growing in the ruins, classical music playing from gramophones in nooks and crannies. I find ruins fertile and rich and always seek them out, and am happiest in them. They are erotic. Degeneracy is erotic. Despair is erotic. On flickering cinema screens Despair is playing, Dirk Bogarde watching himself make love to his voluptuous wife Lydia. Serpent’s Egg, The Beast. Now, Murder on the Orient Express. Bad Timing. I wander through the overgrown gardens of giant ferns and step through the open French windows of the library and sit in a red leather armchair. A huge negroid woman removes her dress and kneels in front of me. I am ruined and she ruins me some more. I ruin myself all over her face and gigantic breasts. Hubba Bubba. Now I want to be in my Brussels hotel bar again; I want to be in Murphy’s watching the plump Brussels girls. I want to be spending my nights in Cine ABC (and was that another one I saw just down the road?). But oh there are no music channels on the TVs. Nor in Berlin. Orient Express. Is that the title of my long-awaited new book? Let me commence a new career of sinning in Moloch. I need to sin. I sin therefore I am. Olga, Vanessa, Arrika and Evalina were all still in Berlin all looking much much worse for wear and nothing like the voluptuous beauties of my memory. It was a shocking eye-opener. Were they really that bad before? I will not remember one single woman from this holiday. Maybe it is because I am married now (am I still?) to the sexiest woman in the world, I really don’t look so much or care so much. Going to Berlin was a mad crazy thing and I salute myself for it, as I sit in the library gazing out to the lush fronds crowding around the French windows, the last heat of summer warming me, butterflies chasing each other in and out. Already I am frisky again! But I do not summon my negroid; I search for something else. I think this rush helter skelter back to London that has cost me £850 is glorious and mad and crazy. I must lead a double life in the ruins. I crave ruins and degradation. All that talk in Stations 2006 about how much I longed to go back to Europe is perfect for Casanova. But now it is something else; about being able to find a life in the ruins while remaining married. Important concepts are starting to emerge and crystallise after this strange two days in Brussels and Berlin.
The Stripper 