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5/18/42
Creation of the best order comes from the greatest need. Who never has sat on the edge of his bed weeping through the night, conscious of the tongueless voice within him, thirsting after the beautiful tone, the exquisite line of verse, the perfect stroke, the flavor in his mouth that would tell him perfection, does not know what I suffer now, and will never create. Let me be, says my own voice. Let this first painful child deliver itself. Then come, if you will, probe and test and kill me, but I shall never die then. In the air-pockets, in the mountain tops, in the clothes of all mankind, in the rock of the earth and the cement of the pavements, in the waters of the seas I shall be then! But I that am heavy laden now, leave me be. I shall fashion my own tongue out of the dross of the fire, I shall find it buried in the twisted ashes. It will be there for me, it will be like no one else’s. Then I shall speak not greatness, not life, not growth perhaps, not family nor brotherly love, but speak the need of others like me who have not found their tongues, or for whom perhaps there will never be a tongue but mine. The duty is great and the burden is heavy on me, but the work will be the deepest joy on earth. Not life shall I create, not life, but truth above all, as no one has seen it before.
6/3/42
I am too familiar to myself—too old—and rather boring. The avenues of varied goals are closing up. And wherever, even, I commence the long pull anew, I shall have with me the same teeth with the same fillings, the same aches on rainy days, the same wrinkles in my forehead. Is this some chance unfortunate combination of elements in me? In my body? In my brain? This scar upon my finger, this birthmark on my arm—should they have been elsewhere, perhaps half an inch? How would another carry them, and how notice them or how forget them? I feel my grave about my shoulders, the light grows dim never to rise again, my breath is feeble and disinterested. Oh, but I shall live so much longer! And there will be moments, whole weeks, whole years when there will be no grave and no mold-smell. But intervals there will be, too, when I, regaining energy meted by the dry crabbed hand of sleep, of food, of intercourse, will see as though my eyes turned inward to reality, the hollow-orbed face of death, the flaking skin like medieval painted saints, and know then that life is one long business of dying.
6/29/42
The sensation of failing always, leads to this in the still active person: a desire to be “someone else,” the feeling that even with a new and propitious idea, the executor is the same, the executor and artist is “I,” bringing inevitably the old train of faults the old plan of stumble-blocks, makes one want a new inside, a whole new inside.
SEPTEMBER 10, 1942
[...] I am old enough to want to live my own life. I have done experimenting, wasting precious time that is ever running shorter. I should gladly give up—ridiculous phrase—my drinking, dinner going, cocktails, absurdities!
9/27/42
Sometimes I feel so much wiser than my body: then I begin to feel wiser than my head, and finally wonder what it is that feels wiser, that is wiser, which brings me once more to the insolvable problem of what am I? I do not believe in happiness or the so-called normalcy as the ideal of human life. People who are “ideally happy” are ideally stupid. Consequently I do not believe in the remedial work of modern psychiatrists. The greatest contribution they could make to the world and to all its posterity would be to leave abnormal people alone to follow their own noses, stars, lodestones, divining rods, phantasies or what have you.
The world is filled with the peas that have rolled down the center of the board into the most full partition. Psychiatrists spend their time trying to push the odd peas over the barrier into the already crowded mean, in order to make mere regular peas to which they sincerely intend to point with pride. I believe that people should be allowed to go the whole hog with their perversions, abnormalities, unhappinesses and construction or destruction. Mad people are the only active people. They have built the world. Mad people, constructive geniuses, should have only enough normal intelligence to enable them to escape the forces that would normalize them.
OCTOBER 13, 1942
Never before have I been so enraptured with my life! It’s quite an impersonal sensation. It comes when I am alone or with someone, when I am reading a splendid book, looking at an imaginative image, or listening to good music. It came today, with fantastic and sustained force, when I was listening to “Sheep May Safely Graze” by J. S. Bach in a music shop during my lunch hour. It came on even more strongly when I read a page in Mysticism by [Evelyn] Underhill. It’s my faith—it’s my life. There is nothing but art.
Another ordinary day at the office. Miss Weick was moved to the other office. I’m with Goldberg, around whom I can’t smoke as much as I’d like. I am filled with inexpressible happiness. Yet it is sadness too. It is much greater than I. I do not concern myself with my own person: only with my aspirations, my desires, my work. I concern myself with the things I love.FF
NOVEMBER 24, 1942
[...]
I do not spend enough time thinking when I write. I have a surfeit of ideas and good ideas, but it takes so long to get from them to their actualization. I must change my life.
12/11/42
Sometimes I have the strange belief that there is a remedy for every sensation of discomfort, physical or mental. When I drink water after long thirst, eat food after hungering, or once every five years take bicarbonate of soda for a digestive ailment (nervous indigestion) and when the pain passes in two or three minutes, the dull ache inside of me lifting and disappearing, keep on at my books with the fathomless ingratitude of a young person who has always been healthy, when such things occur then I think one may always make arrangements to stay comfortable all one’s life. And yet this is the very opposite of what I have always believed (since I began believing anything, around the age of fourteen) and what is in my blood to believe. I believe in constant discomfort, varied equally like the ups and downs of a business chart about its line of normalcy, as the natural state of mankind. Therefore these happy, blind, animallike “insights” disturb me.
1/27/43
I came home one night towards midnight, so drunk with alcohol and cigarette and sleepiness that I weaved from one side of the pavement to the other. Out of a Third Avenue bar came a boy and girl about sixteen. “Take care of that cold!” the girl said with all the love, warmth, sacrificial, miraculous power of women throughout the ages! “You take care of it for me!” said the boy. “I will!” as they parted. I followed the girl to her home two blocks away, half trotting over the snow and slush to keep up with her. I almost spoke to her. I loved the sense of fiction in the scene. I should not have remembered very well if I had heard this in soberness. My sodden brain supplied the mood, the style, the atmosphere and the tones unplayed above and below, the multitudinous sketch lines which a writer might have put in before and after, some of which he would have left unsaid, like those I imagined I was seeing and experiencing. Drinking is a fine imitation of the artistic process. The brain jumps directly to that which it seeks always: truth, and the answer to the question, what are we, and what caverns of thought and passion and sensation can we not attain? There is therefore something of the artist in every drunkard and I say God bless them all. The proportion of men drunks to the smaller number of women drunks is parallel to that of the men artists to the women. And perhaps there is something homosexual about the women drunks too: they care not for their appearance, and they have definitely learned to play.
7/25/43
My own work is unfinished, and I owe a great debt to all those who have fed and clothed me all these years. I owe a different debt to the one I love best. All the tears I should have shed in a long lifetime are coming now and mean nothing to me. There is no life nor truth without the one I love. There is no optimism and no accomplishment. There is no health and no future.
I have wanted long labors, of detail, and perfection, affection and great care, worthy of past artists. Inspiration is a great arc of momentum, and the momentum is love, and love requited. I cannot speak humbly enough of all the humble things I have to speak of. The absence of you has torn my insides out! I am sick with tears, and sick with the stoppage of my love. My love is greater than I, and dammed up has risen and drowned me! What does this night foretell? A quiet house, a peaceful fireplaced room, with a woman in a long brown velvet dress. What does this foretell?—Good work and healthful days? I don’t believe it, because God has made this moment too poignant, and actually too perfect of its kind. My mouth is bitter and I don’t want to kiss you. No, I am not in command of myself, but love is in command of me, and this love is destructive, though meant to be creative. Never more than at this minute, was I ready to meet the Omnipotent One. Never more fearless, never more proud of myself and never more humbled before this power infinitely greater than I.