1998

11th January 1998

The double life is absolutely vital, to save one’s life.

"A six-page letter from Sir Stephen Spender that was almost totally devoted to a discussion of the vexed question of Wittgenstein’s sexuality, and also raised some interesting questions about the nature of biography. “Wittgenstein chooses to live in the most remote places...An important point of such aloneness is that it removes him from temptations of promiscuity, towns—London, Vienna—being haunts of anonymous promiscuity. For the solitary, the anonymous promiscuous relationship is a kind of solution. It may also have the added attraction of providing situations which can be satisfying on some level, of people who do not know anything about one another coming together in the fulfilment of a need…The ‘rough trade’ of the Prater provides meetings of this kind, and even if the boys met are intellectually & spiritually zero, their lusts, raised as it were to some point of ecstacy, are not always so."

"The duty to oneself, the duty of genius."

"Nabokov resolves his stories with a cataclysmic “scandal” or a diminuendo, when an unimportant life relapses patiently into itself", like a collapsing star. Like my visit to the Vienna Freud Hotel (a massive building in 6998 Vienna, like the impact the Empire State Building made on the world in 1931).

I see a life unfulfilled on every level, which failed to ignite as it should have done given the unlimited store of material waiting for a spark; my tombstone will have as its epitaph: "I think you asked too much of me".

As addicted to the morphine as ever.

9th January 1998

I’m not married. I’m not cheating on anyone. I do want the rooms again. Monday perhaps or Tuesday.

I love the sexiness of Soho: the rooms and Astral. I lead the Double Life. It will give me the impetus to go to work.

Allowing yourself sexual desire is what makes the blood flow, repressing it is killing yourself.

"“I like the word ‘decadence’” gushed Verlaine, “all gleaming with crimson...It is made up of a mixture of carnal spirit and melancholy flesh and all the violent splendours of the Byzantine empire…the collapse into flames of races exhausted by sensation at the invading sound of the enemy trumpets.” Byzantium was the final ruined flourish of the Roman empire, ruled by Justinian and his wife Theodora (prostitute, pantomime actress, diligent caretaker of her own beauty), and loved as an emblem by the French Decadents of whom Verlaine was the clearest sickly voice."

"Ludwig II of Bavaria sought his perfect realm of imagination and beauty. He was another ruler who bankrupted his exchequer in the decadent pursuit. His brother Otto went mad; his aunt Alexandra spent much of her life tormented by the delusion she had swallowed a grand piano made of glass; Ludwig too was probably not too sane. But he was usually gentle. This secret, ashamed masturbator, who was obsessed with Versailles, put on performances of Parsifal in his grotto with himself as the sole member of the audience."

Other people worry, meanwhile up above in the rooms, the decadents are doing their thing.

7th January 1998

Because I'm dark, and beautiful, and highly intelligent: a potent mix.

5th January 1998

I do want pornography, and I always will. But I do miss the real contact with the girls at the Post Office. Francis Bacon article in Time Out. Being a homosexual, said Daniel Farson, he lived his life “absolutely racked by guilt”. Francis Bacon’s dark side, painting pictures of “exhilarated despair”.

Get myself up and organised very early tomorrow morning, so I’m ahead of schedule all the way through the day: the impossible dream.

The thrill to be back up London again, the yellow shop, the pub, then Sunset Strip, Astral, Soho Cinema!

Sarah would say: you’ve got to bite the bullet some day. Or you don’t have to, and then you’ll be alone and unhappy all your life. You can’t keep carrying out relationships at this romantic abstract level, you must at some time talk to people if you want to have a proper relationship.

I’m doing with my life what I want to do with my life: spending my time in porn cinemas.

4th January 1998

I can’t wait for the sex to begin. Now I’m going to keep on doing it without stopping. The double life of Franz Schubert. I am an autistic, private person, normal love is impossible for me. The rampancy of my double life will give me the spark to go to work and earn lots of money and get on with girls there. The Post Office was good, I liked it.

    I am haunted by sexual desires. Sarah isn’t, she’s got a boyfriend, a partner and a home. People who have no relationships are haunted by sexual desires.

    Federico Garcia Lorca led a necessarily double life. Franz Schubert led a necessarily double life. Kafka, Van Gogh. All repressed people do, people for whom relationships are not possible: these people must all lead a double life. The thrill of the porn films: there’s nothing to match it, is there! The excitement gripping my chest of the first film before Christmas, the clinic, the nervous erotic anticipation! I am addicted. As addicted to the morphine as ever.

3rd January 1998

I can’t wait to get back to Soho: it’s my natural environment, and that’s it. Oh, I ache for the Chandos pub! The smell, the excitement, the sleaze of Astral! The excitement of those films. The game is the best thing in my life. I prefer to build on something already existing. 

“After he succumbed to the orgiastic pleasures of the Venusberg”.

2nd January 1998

Oh, I can’t wait till I can get back to Soho! The excitement of the New Year is always an erotic one. The dark nights now start. Spend my money in Soho, and earn it in some part-time job.

It is so exciting planning when my first visit back to London will be! My chest aches with bloody excitement. 

I said “this is the most luxuriant time of my life, isn’t it? All this time to myself, every day, with money to spend on cinema every week”. Now it is luxuriant because I know at any time I can go back to part-time work and meet the P.O. girls.

The sleazy excitement grips my stomach. I like it because it’s sleazy.

1st January 1998

31st December 1998

Everything revolves around the writing: I am unimportant.

30th December 1998

I have successfully wound all the people of ------- up! This was my role as a bohemian artist, an Oscar Wilde, a Van Gogh, a Francis Bacon, "what sort of artist would I be if I felt ashamed?". The mark of his success, this was proof that he was on the right path, the Baconian path to greatness. Sensing himself rejected, he rejoiced in FIERCE OPPOSITION.

He had made his choice, and he was reveling in it; how galling for people!

It's all they've got.

28th December 1998

Bad time? I'm having a very good time, thank you! This is the best time of my life. He had made his choice. He chose dissolution, dissipation. The blonde bob Sophie Dahl lookalike: I came using my hands in my trousers on Vicenza night: that's why I go to Sunset Strip. THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHAT PLEASURE THEY WERE MISSING OUT ON. NOW HE WANTED MORE SINFUL PLEASURE. HE NEEDED TO MOVE IT UP TO A HIGHER LEVEL. THE SHEER THRILL OF SEXUAL RAMPANCY, YOU ONLY GET THIS FROM ILLICIT SLEAZY DANGER.

He was open to falling from grace. I take what you give, not enough.

He regretted all the time he'd wasted NOT indulging his pleasure.

I know I'm not writing anything for the story yet; but this period will all be rich source material when I come to write my Death in Venice or whatever. I am getting the material, the depth, and pressing it down: something will be produced.

It must eat them away, what I am getting up to!

27th December 1998

OH THE JOY OF MY FREEDOM NOW.

OH HOW I LOVE MY WRITING, AND MY READING BOOKS.

Of course I must go out to the pictures on my day off, of course I can't stay in all day. They hated him because he was GETTING AWAY WITH IT. He was living a life of freedom and pleasure which they were jealous of.

DISSOLUTE! AMORAL! IMMENSELY INTELLIGENT SPRIG!

GETTING AWAY WITH IT!

Boxing Day 26th December 1998

HOW HE LOVED TEASING! WITH WHAT HE WAS GETTING AWAY WITH!

At this moment, he felt nothing but happiness and excitement: because he liked what he found in himself.

OH, THIS WAS SO DIONYSIAN NOW! SO DIRTY, SO KINKY, SO SLEAZY, SO ILLICIT! THEY HAD JUST MULTIPLIED, AND DEEPENED, AND INTENSIFIED HIS PLEASURES!

"They all think me hostile, obstinate or misanthropic, how unjust they are to me, for they do not know the secret reason I appear that way. It is not possible for me to say 'speak louder, shout, I am deaf'. How can I live if my enemies, who are many, believe I no longer possess the one sense that should be perfect to a higher degree in me than in others?"

"The way they hated him disgusted me. He was too good for them. His fire offended their small brains."

The European anthem: that puts me in the same nation as Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Napoleon, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Caesar. Living in ------- he was too big a fish not to bump up against the side of the tank.

I have my moments. I am my own creation. SQUARES. He lived on the edge.

Christmas Day 25th December 1998

I devote my life to eroticism, and then write about it: this is my work, like it was Egon Schiele's, like it was Francis Bacon's. The Victoria job is to fund this mission.

I hate the thought of toning down my behaviour, so that I don't feel ashamed. I would rather feel ashamed, it is so much more of a "releasing" feeling. Yes, I've done something so bad, and dirty and shaming, but it's over now, put it behind me. But by toning down your behaviour, reining yourself in, there's never a sense of something being over: the moment of shame has just been delayed. So why delay? Be rampant always. Always do the illicit thing. He loved the Soho environment, the illicit thrill.

OH, WHAT JOY HE WAS GOING TO HAVE NOW, WHAT PLEASURE, NOW THE PRESSURE WAS OFF!

Christmas Eve 24th December 1998

Over Christmas, I need to really set up a new system of working, so that in the short bits of time I get I can still punch in a little bit of work every time.

Their cultural life was so poor, when his was so rich. Their erotic life was so poor, when his was so rich. He chose richness over poorness, every time. He chose INDULGENCE. He chose PLEASURE. How hateful this was to the small people.

Still ENJOYING, still INDULGING, and now he'd got a JOB and was EARNING MONEY as well; how that shot them up the backside.

He was like Joe Orton: he was not stupid enough not to do what he wanted with his genitals while he had the chance. Sinful passion--for himself!

They felt left out, of his riches. His creatures to do his bidding.

Fact 1: I'm more happy about myself than ever before. Fact 2: People are more vicious to me than ever before. This is, I think, instructive.

Power is through INDULGENCE. The morality of sociability: if you are not a social person you will be hounded most viciously by the social, "decent" people: sociability is decency. Have they got a shock coming. The dunces of society: the last to know the joke was on them. Those with brains are always victorious, all the way down the line.

His religion was INDULGENCE.

The EXQUISITE quality of my pleasure, indulged.

How people hate it: someone who's enjoying himself more than them! Someone who's indulging himself more than them! A SYBARITE; and unashamed of it, which was what gave him his TERRIFYING POWER. Using it wisely was the thing now. People were frightened he might be enjoying himself. He liked pushing things to the edge. But he still pleasurably stayed enclosed, and engorged, and rich.

23rd December 1998

I'm kinky: Yes. I'm dirty: Yes. I'm loving every sybaritic pleasurable moment of it: Yes!

He was still indulging, he was still flaunting his black schoolboy eroticism under their noses.

Because they're not very bright! How they hated his beauty, & his intelligence, & his riches, & his black mischievous schoolboy eroticism.

HE HAD MADE HIS CHOICE, AND THAT WAS WHAT HE PREFERRED: THE DOUBLE LIFE OF FRANZ SCHUBERT. BURSTING WITH THE PLEASURES HE WAS HEADING TO NOW.

22nd December 1998

His life revolved around Priapism. Could he make a life out of Priapism?

Continue to flaunt his riches under their noses, his black schoolboy mischief. He was an artist, he led a Bohemian life. He loved his dirty eroticism.

Like Clinton he bounced up, and benefited from every crisis.

He loved his erotic life.

For every one person that joins in the abuse against him, one person will warm to him & have tenderness for him. For every one person that wants to make him feel disgusting, one person will look at him with strengthened desire.

This is the way of the world: haters always lose. Jealousy destroys no one but themselves. The rest of us continue to smile sweetly, and bloom & blossom.

21st December 1998

The thing that they most hated him for was his serenity. He still seemed so content. I treasure working at the moment, because it is giving me "My Season in Hell". HE WAS DIFFERENT, THAT WAS HIS GLORY. Ubermensch!

To be a hermit is the greatest desire. To have the money to do that. I am with Friedrich Nietzsche, I am with Thomas Mann, I am with Edvard Munch.

Smilingly, amusedly observe, as you get to them, more & more. Keep spying, keep using. Look at the quality of your enemies, and be EXHILARATED.

I am Priapic. I am Aubrey Beardsley. He would rather stay here, and show people up.

Take great encouragement: the barometer is rising: you are getting to them more & more. This is the most important factor of ALL: it is of central significance. He lived in a beautiful world all of his own: no sound or sign from the real world ever reached him.

What were people criticising him for? For doing exactly what he wanted to do at every minute of the day. Well, that was all right then! He going to carry right on, doing more & more. Once upon a time, a year past or two, he was weak and would have succumbed to this, but now they had missed the boat.

He believed in living his life for HIM, and doing exactly what he wanted to do. And that was now exactly what he was doing, deliciously, sybaritically.

How exquisite things were now, how delicious.

Black schoolboy erotic mischief, winding people up, tricking them into destroying themselves. Black masked & cloaked Fantomas looming over Paris, pulling all the strings. And he didn't need to do anything: he was rich, and beautiful, and indulging his schoolboy eroticism.

They were destroying themselves in an inferno. While he watched serenely from outside, when they thought they still had him trapped in the box at the centre of it. ------- was being consumed in the fire, and soon he would be leaving the blazing town behind.

20th December 1998

When he thought how much his erotic life had given him. Company was horrible to him. HE WAS TOO BUSY ENJOYING HIMSELF. Wind people up with what they're missing. And I'm still collecting for my book all the time. BLACK SCHOOLBOY EROTIC MISCHIEF! FLAUNTING IT UNDER THEIR NOSES!

"Looking good, walking tall, you feel a changed person since this time last month. Friends may be edgy at times, loved ones still landing you with unwanted chores, but you know what your limits are & how to cope. So go for it now: flaunt your charms shamelessly, be upfront & flirt outrageously. But keep a sharp eye on finances--your extravagant streak is showing in a major way. On Tuesday, be prepared to dig your heels in over one discussion."

19th December 1998

He loved causing mischief. He was a mischief-maker.

This heightened level of consciousness was INTOXICATING. Pierrot was still writing his book, having more ideas than ever now. THE SOUNDS OF THE JUNGLE IN MY BEAUTIFUL SOUTH AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY BASE OF MANAUS, BEFORE GOING TO THE OPERA HOUSE.

He was still writing his big book. He had shown he could take it, and now they were wondering what they could do next. I want to earn the money to spend in New & Marx & bookshops.

18th December 1998

If there's something you want to do, to do it in the teeth of opposition makes it all the sweeter. He wanted to be himself. This was apparently a radical statement; so be it, this then was his radical mission.

He was a writer. He was strong & powerful, he could do what he wanted, and get away with it every time; because he lived in his jewel-encrusted room, his bank vaults. His randomness made him powerful.

The mischievous heart inside Pierrot.

They were jealous of him because he was a writer; they didn't know what he was putting in his books. They were terrified of his power.

IT IS A TIME OF PURE SEX COMING UP.

THE SOUNDS OF THE JUNGLE! The macaws and howler monkeys, Last Chance to See 1988, before heading off with the blazing orange volcano to the opera house. BE PERMANENTLY RANDY, PERMANENTLY HORNY. EVERYTHING FEEDS MY HORNY EROTICISM, EVERY STEP, EVERY BEND, EVERY FRISSON.

What else was there to write about? The people had given him his subject at last.

17th December 1998

He was creating this unique story. How he loved the mad spontaneous adventure. The chance to wind the stupid people up. The biggest buzz ever. How the mischievous Harlequin side of Pierrot loved it. Making this the best Christmas ever.

16th December 1998

I take what I need then withdraw. The blood trickling down my chin. Keep spying, keep writing. I need the job so I can keep buying books, like Nietzsche and Mann, because Victoria is my university, and so I can keep writing my book.

I need to be in this heightened state to be able to write.

He was playing his own game, and sticking to his own line, keeping writing, biding his time. The book will be testament to the PURE PLEASURE of his life. Feeling...threatened, are we, dears?

HE STIRRED THINGS UP, TO TRY TO GET SOME REACTION. SO HE COULD SPY ON PEOPLE, AND USE THEM.

THE RICHNESS HE WAS GATHERING; THE COAL & OIL THIS WOULD TURN INTO. The sounds of the jungle, in my 1920s Lost World adventure, in South America. The power he held over them. NOW HE HAD THE CHANCE TO LUXURIANTLY WIPE THE BLOOD FROM HIS MOUTH. HE WANTED THINGS MADE HARDER STILL. I am NIETZSCHE. I am for MYSELF. 

Perhaps people lack a sense of humour? Do they think that might be possible? Perhaps they realised all too well how they were being played. HE WAS LAYING THEM OUT BEFORE HIM, SO HE COULD DISSECT THEM. Did he make them feel inadequate? Not as intelligent as him? Not as beautiful as him? Not as serene as him? Not as sexually rampant as him? MY GOODNESS, NO WONDER THEY ARE SO JEALOUS OF HIM! As he blooms and blossoms above them.

15th December 1998

If people are against you, then that just makes it more enjoyable to stick to your own line. To carry on doing exactly what I want to do. How Pierrot loves annoying people. How he BASKED in it. How people hated him because he read books, and wrote books. How Pierrot loved it.

How Pierrot loved working in the centre of London. The EVIL POWERS it gave Pierrot. Bothering people so much with his strangeness. Nothing is any good unless it's in the teeth of opposition. How Pierrot loved it. It was SO EXCITING. BEAUTIFUL PIERROT, who never spread any nastiness anywhere. He was keeping his head down, writing his books, biding his time. He didn't need to respond to anything yet people were desperately trying to make him break his "purdah", but he wouldn't, he would still keep writing, picking up more & more reserves.

If people were against Pierrot, then that just made it more interesting.

He didn't need to respond because he was rich, and they had taken nothing of his richness away from him: so what was the problem? They needed to attack because they were poor, and wanted to grab his riches from him. If he responded they could, so because he didn't respond they hated him all the more.

Keep on spying, keep on writing!

BUT ISN'T IT EXCITING! ISN'T IT A FANTASTIC ADVENTURE!

At the end of it, people are just going to have a lot to be ashamed of, and I am going to have a book. Keep your nerve, bide your time, wait for the moment.

"Time and time again you question your own abilities, and colleagues and companions continually rush to your defence. Not until you have total belief in yourself and all you've achieved will you find the fulfillment you seek. The treasure is there for the taking. Find the self-determination to help yourself."

14th December 1998

How I love it. How hilarious I find it. How stupid they make themselves look. How I love aggravating the stupid people. I measure my success by the number of people I can annoy, that is the ladder I am climbing up.

I WANT MORE WEAPONS, I WANT MORE ATTENTION. I do exactly what I want to do, exactly how I want to do it.

I AM NIETZSCHE. I AM VAN GOGH.

13th December 1998

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings! RUB THEIR NOSES IN IT. The Great Game. The Fantastic Game. The jealousy of the have-nots against the haves. I am dark blue F.G.Lorca, smiling sweetly, quietly building his empire, beneath the shroud he places on it. I need the spur it gives me. I need MORE people to be against me: work on it. The thrill, the S&M stimulation, the PLEASURE. Be nobody's darling. They inject a bit more electricity into me every day. More stimulation, more pleasure. I live for pure pleasure. I am a sybarite.

I feed on everything people give me. I LOVE ANNOYING PEOPLE, I LOVE WINDING PEOPLE UP, THEY ARE PLAYING INTO MY HANDS, PRINCE FANTOMAS IS PULLING THEIR STRINGS. THEY ARE GIVING ME THE STIMULATION & THE PLEASURE I NEED.

Still getting away with it: how that infuriates them. King of Kings.

I DO WHAT I WANT. BEHAVE DISGUSTINGLY.

12th December 1998

LOOK ON ME, PLEASE. LOOK ON MY BEAUTY, IF YOU WANT.

Important to remember: I AM BUILDING MY EMPIRE ALL THE TIME, and they are completely impotent to stop me. I HOLD TO MY LINE, protected against all the vicissitudes of life. The pleasures, the pleasures, the pleasures. I am Ozymandias, king of kings. It's a fantastic game, despite all their poisonous, vicious efforts I sweetly smiling hold to my line and continue setting up my empire. This is the richest time of my life. The most pleasurable, the most stimulating. At my meteorological station at the end of the world, I make my precious measurements & recordings: and things are going all right, things are starting to turn very powerfully in my direction. It comes with rampancy, my dark blue F.G.Lorca beauty.

I LIKE RISK. I LIKE PROVOKING. I LIKE BEING ON THAT NERVOUS HIGH-WIRE EDGE.

I LOVE SETTING UP MY OWN RANDOM, SPONTANEOUS, DIFFERENT LIFE, IN MY OWN STRANGE OZYMANDIAN WORLD, AND I DO IT WITH DETERMINATION, AND TOTAL SWEETLY-SMILING SINGLE-MINDEDNESS.

Every time I get a piece of criticism, I know I have got another piece of my Ozymandian world just right.

They're clutching at straws while I'm clutching at whores, they're clutching at my coattails, because they know I'm moving beyond them. I enjoy a challenge, even though it is rather a weak one. Come! My stupid enemies! Let me run rings around you again! Let me press all your buttons and ring all your bells, and get you dancing to my tune once again!

11th December 1998

The full realisation of what it is to be me. This is the richest time for my writing. Fine, let them do what they want, meanwhile I am building my own empire. They are shooting themselves in the foot. I am languid, in my voluptuousness.

10th December 1998

They put me more in the right with every word they say, and let me off the hook! They have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They have let Fantomas escape again.

Egon Schiele nights. I go to places of jealousy & hostility, because I get a thrill out of it, I get a kick out of it.

They have liberated me, that is what they have done. They have freed me to greater pleasures ahead, greater stimulation. The gilded gutter life, the strange & ridiculous world of Francis Bacon.

How hateful for them, they try to hold me back, knock me, and I just keep racing past & doing the things I enjoy. You do exactly what you want, and you carry on. Rub their noses in my specialness. Anything which increases my STIMULATION and POWER. Danger, risk, friction.

I'm creating something in my book which people cannot discern yet, and that is very worrying to them. It is frightening for them in this place of foreboding, and jealousy. The disadvantaged.

9th December 1998

The stupid people are identifying themselves! I am on a different level to them, where they cannot reach me. I make the small people feel small, and they hate me so intensely for it. I am too busy thinking about PLEASURE. I swell & grow, till I am so much bigger than people around me. They are letting their bitterness show. Laughter is a sign of their FEAR. I am a different creature, enabling me to do things they cannot. I'm KINKY, and that is the thing I like best about myself. They fear and are jealous of my RAMPANCY.

8th December 1998

I am Aubrey Beardsley. Don't they like me doing exactly what I want to do? Oh DEAR, what a shame. Because they think I'm special. I am aristocratic, superior, looking down on all of them. I am Francis Bacon: "What sort of artist would I be if I was ashamed?".

7th December 1998

I'm going to shock them with my sexuality, and the triumph of it, like Oscar Wilde shocked them with the triumph of his dandyish rampant teasing homosexuality--defeating them because he was SHAMELESS--as Joe Orton defeated them,  because he was shameless; there will be earthquakes like Nietzsche caused.

I'm different, and I'm proud of the type I am, I'm not going to change one dot, just become even MORE rampant, even more strong, I'm going to flaunt my riches & freedom & pleasures in their faces MORE THAN EVER. I am a law-breaker.

My genius & my shameless sybarism is going to confound and run rings round their small baffled little minds.

You don't like me doing exactly what I want to do? Does that bother you? Does that eat you away?

This fantastic Victorian material.

For them to see I'm still enjoying myself, doing the VERY THING they sought to destroy me with. Oh it doesn't get more delicious that that. I am with Oscar now, with Aubrey, with Vincent, with Salvador, with Federico.

They thought they could crush me with my sexual desires? That is how I realise myself! That is how I blossom to my full glory. That is what powers me to my emerging brilliance & riches. Because I am madder and more eccentric and more rampant and more perverted and more strange than they could POSSIBLY IMAGINE, they will turn away screaming with fright.

I like to walk towards the flames. Give me some flames, please. Test me with more fire.

Why do you all dislike me so much? Why could that be? I WONDER.

I live for IMMORALITY. I live for the ILLICIT THRILL. I live for the SLEAZY FLESHPOTS. Wonderfully POLITICALLY INCORRECT. A law-killer. "A host of insane pranks". My perverse Beardsleyan sexual desires are the thing I like best about myself. I am PIERROT LUNAIRE.

6th December 1998

Did they think I would wilt? I have blossomed!

5th December 1998

People are jealous because I'm doing the things they can't, because I'm doing things they wouldn't have the nerve to do, such cowardly little people they are, so frightened of ever doing anything that might make them stand out from the crowd. The illicit thrill! I am addicted to it.

People are frightened of me, because I'm a wild card; they can't understand me, they can't control me or contain me; that (apparently) eats them away. I, meanwhile, become more rampant, more stimulated, more pleasure-loving.

Love is the most important thing and I love me.

"To be booed is a back-handed compliment because they feel threatened by you."

People hate me because they know they haven't got what I've got, my riches, my treasures, my beauty, my intelligence, my serenity, my genius.

Because I am blooming & blossoming above them, and the more they throw at me the more I bloom & blossom.

4th December 1998

Don't do anything precipitately.

How people jealously sniped at Elizabeth, trying in vain to dent her supremacy at all. I am Elizabeth.

You think you take my pleasure away from me? Oh, have you got a shock coming! I AM Francis Bacon. I AM Aubrey Beardsley. I AM Oscar Wilde. I AM Franz Schubert. I AM Salvador Dali. What lies next for me? RAMPANCY!

3rd December 1998

Prince, Fantomas standing above them all, pulling their strings. Exultant! But I need the drug of alcohol inside me to feel this.

The pleasure I am heading to, the pleasure I am saving up for myself.

I am secretly thrilled for them to humiliate & disgrace themselves in their attempts to bring me down, or make any dent on my superiority whatsoever. While I inexorably rise, while I remorselessly bloom & blossom above them. I can imagine how infuriating for them it must be. "He's just not being defeated!" They seek to rub my nose in my "shame"; instead I rub their noses in my pleasures, in the voluptuous bosoms & buttocks I exultantly smother myself in.

I need people to be against me: the power, and the stimulation they are giving me. My bank account is filling up a bit more every day, my pleasures are being stored up a bit more every day, my book is being stored up a bit more every day.

Freer, more alive, hypersensitive on the scented sea of bosoms.

This is my choice. Franz Schubert & the double life. Rooms & clubs is what I PREFER.

They are SO FRIGHTENED of me. They give me such a sense of my power, my volcano, my sex, my triumph over them. A triumph of beauty, intellect, serenity, spontaneity. I'm grinning because I'm having the time of my life. They think I'm trying to ride out the storm in safe harbour; I'm heading out to sea as fast as I can. I LIVE FOR STORMS.

I've made my choice, I prefer my way of doing things. I'm afraid no one can stop my onward road to pleasure & stimulation. I'm for ME. I delight in my eccentricity. Rampancy. Be stronger & stronger, & weirder & weirder than ever, like Josef Kiss.

1st December 1998

It is an artist's job to shock normal small people's good taste. What sort of artist would I be if I felt ashamed! SALVADOR DALI! VINCENT VAN GOGH! Franz Schubert. I've made the choice, and I'm revelling in it.

30th November 1998

You can flounder in my wake if you want; you can grab whatever rubious crumbs fall off my table if you want. I am not ungenerous.

They cannot invade my magic world, my citadel: they furiously snipe from outside, stewing in their envy & hatred & jealousy of me. Every compliment gives me so much material. It puts me above them more every time. Makes my world richer & more magical every time. Makes my flowers bloom & blossom more every time.

They don't like it because I'm doing the things they'd like to do, but are too frightened to, because I always do exactly what I want, spontaneously. Taoist. I'm indulging my sexuality to the FULL. How they hate me because they cannot leave a dent on me. I continue to rampantly indulge my sexuality & they can do nothing to deflect me.

The Double Life of Franz Schubert.

I'm keeping my equilibrium, and writing my books; what are they doing?

I'M DOING EXACTLY WHAT I WANT, AND THEY HATE IT. IT'S EATING THEM AWAY. I'm loving this Christmas in Victoria life, how that infuriates them. All the pleasures I enjoy which are out of their reach. How I love winding people up. Every time their back is turned I am advancing another few hundred rubies towards my goal. They cannot stop my writing, that's what they hate.

29th November 1998

I need them to fill me up with POWER, I need to suck up this STIMULANT.

This is the most thrilled I've ever been, the most strong I've ever felt, the least fractured I've ever felt; is that the result they were expecting?  I'm laughing, and they're still stuck in their sad, thin little lives.

I want their disapproval; I court their disapproval. This is what my power base is predicated on. The more disapproval I get, the more powerful I become, the more stimulating my pleasures become.

Immerse myself in Victoria, to research my book.

I've got you twisted around my finger.  Sensuously, erotically, rub my back pocket, because that is where I have you.

Everything you do gives me more POWER, and stimulates my pleasures more & more. I can tap into reserves of pleasure beyond their imagination. Sherlock Holmes breathed, "These are rich mines, Watson!"

I'm for me! "It is not selfishness to live as one wishes to live; true selfishness is forcing others to live as one wishes to live." I am right on track; it is all going very sweetly exactly to plan. I like everything that happens to me because I can then write about it; GIVE ME MORE! I win every time, all the way down the line, because THIS IS WHAT I WANTED.

It fuels me. I take sado-masochistic pleasure in everything. They are so envious of me for my sexual rampancy, my Dionysian lifestyle. That I spend all my time in Soho, how they hate me for it. The more I have grown into my power, the more they fear me and hate me. They can see it is having no effect on me, I am enjoying my sybaritic pleasures more than ever.

I AM PERVERSE, & DEGRADED, LIKE COLONEL PYAT!

28th November 1998

I go from strength to strength. I have so much pleasure now; my life is ruled by my sexual drives. I need them, to push the continents further apart. I move spontaneously moment to moment. It is ALWAYS worth it. "He thinks he can do what he wants. And he does!"

I am Egon Schiele. They hate me for my sexual rampancy. They hate me for my beauty, my intelligence, my ruthlessness, my contentment; THEY ARE TERRIFIED OF ME, and what I might achieve.

I am thrilled to let their behaviour stand beside mine, for any neutral judge to witness.

I am still here and going from strength to strength. How it eats them away. It was worth it, and it's always worth it, and I'm continuing to get away with it. I'm enjoying my theatre, my opera, my cinema, my JOB, my writing, my sex.

It gives them a choice to make:  I like seeing them give themselves away over it.

They are envious about what sexual rampancy I get up to, and they are BETRAYING IT. I'm flattered that you're that interested in me!

I like it because I'm doing exactly what I want. EVERYTHING'S GOING VERY NICELY TO PLAN, THANK YOU VERY MUCH! The sound the stupid make; and their stupidness makes them  jealous. I accept these compliments into my bag of riches very gratefully.

27th November 1998

"Scorpios are cloaked in mystery.They have the ability to reinvent themselves many times in this life. At your most adventurous, there is nothing to touch you. There is a lot of the daredevil in you. You like to flirt with taboos. What is forbidden attracts you like a magnet."

Like Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express and The Blue Angel.

"Your ego blockings are two-pronged--domination and isolation. Emotional avoidance keeps you hidden away from personal contact and that's a lonely place to be. It's easy for you to be so caught up in your own world that you are unobtainable, even to your loved ones. With your stubbornness and determination, it's not surprising that your transforming path is surrender."

I'm blazing a scorching path forward now, and they bitterly hate me for it, leaving them behind again; like Malcolm Lowry/The Consul in Under the Volcano.

I take what I need, whenever I need it. I am striding on to success after success, and how they hate it. (I need this to fuel me).

The noises are the sound the worried make; the sound the frightened & the jealous make. I am with President Clinton. Are things not all right for them? Ah dear.

26th November 1998

It was worth it. This life is for me: It was given to me. They haven't realised this, they are blind to the potential in themselves, and always will be. I am a RISK TAKER! They live thin, weak lives. Everything serves my story, and they are just pawns, and how they hate it. How they despise me for pulling all their strings.

24th November 1998

How they hate him for enjoying himself! I do EXACTLY WHAT I WANT, how they hate it.

Egon Schiele nights.

23rd November 1998

I like my life! And if they disapprove, oh dear, that's really a shame isn't it. I live for pleasure. I always have and I always will, and if they don't, if they're too scared and too repressed, then I feel really sorry for them.

Pope Tuesday & Thursday were very important highs for me. They sought to rub my nose in my shame; instead I rub their noses in my pleasures.

21st November 1998

I'm glad you know about me now. They have freed me at last. I hold a force I can't contain. I love my Dionysian lifestyle. I love living for pure pleasure. You exposed me & sought then to destroy me, thinking it would all be over by Christmas; instead you just handed me power over you. The more muck you spread about me, the more my power spread; now there are more and more people wondering about me and all the dirty things I get up to; more and more people now who cannot get me off their minds. Their laughter grows ever more hollow, and worried, as I just bloom & blossom and tower above them more than ever; they gave me the energy & the fertiliser I needed. Everything they do feeds me, and plays into my hands.

Watch & learn, as I hand you a masterclass: Oh no what to do when attacked & hounded & pursued? Bloom, and blossom. Oh no what to do when beset by enemies? Play them like a piano. What to do when they think you cornered? Disappear from their midst. What to do when they have forgotten all about you? Land in the centre of them, splashing them with your waves.

Yes, I'm glad you know about me now. This terrible knowledge is going to destroy you. I am never going to let you forget about me now. I am going to provoke you and provoke you until you wish you had never known anything about me. I am going to flaunt myself, flaunt myself, flaunt my illicit pleasures in your pig stupid faces until you just wish you could forget all about me. But I will never let you.

18th November 1998

This is my Rimbaud's hell.

Fill my boots all I can now, I will have a long while to write my book afterwards.

A Season in Hell.

Where's A--?

I've got to stay till the New Year.

I'm about to sign my life away for the next six weeks.

17th November 1998

I'm in the group with Aubrey Beardsley, Salvador Dali, Van Gogh. I do EXACTLY what I want to do. I'm with Tao. Freud. Nietzsche. I am an ARTIST. They hate my BRAIN. This excitement. This spark. This stimulation. They hate my DIONYSIAN FRENZY, my INTELLIGENCE, which they are so JEALOUS of. Go on winding them up all through winter. Do it to wind them up. Rachmaninov, Rachmaninov.

THE JOB IS SO EASY. Make it my kingdom.

16th November 1998

I am FRANCIS BACON. I am AUBREY BEARDSLEY. I am SALVADOR DALI. Cuddle myself down in the warmth of my brilliance, and my bloom, and my success, and my eroticism.

12th November 1998

A strange day; now I am ready for the backlash. Like Mary Gasalee, Josef Kiss, and David Mummery, I hear every word said around me. Go as far as you want to go, disregarding the opinions of others.

10th November 1998

MY SPIRIT OF MISCHIEF LOVES IT! I went into the Duke of York pub at lunchtime, my little nook & cranny, and it was lovely. Josef Kiss and Mary Gasalee, David Mummery, Mother London, Mother London! Lying there on my back reading my book, where else could I do that? WINDING THEM UP AND ENJOYING MY PLEASURES! What is the problem, all they're doing is attacking me for something I do for PLEASURE, and if I do it for pleasure I will continue to do it for pleasure, deliciously. I am spontaneous, in harmony with my nature, I go where my Tao takes me. All it means is I'm not REPRESSED. By writing about it (mischievously) I take it away from them as a weapon. I can give it up at any time, and return to my books about my solipsism. Philip O'Connor was a drunk, and a tramp for many years, before writing his Memoirs of a Public Baby.

I am quite marvelously BRAZEN!

I felt so Charles Dickensian in the York! The cockroach running over my paper and disappearing into the wood.

"Nietzsche equated the Dionysian with the superabundance of creative energy that foments 'desire for destruction, change and becoming'. Or, as Zarathustra is made to put it, 'whoever wants to be a creator in good and evil, he must first be an annihilator and destroy values.' In an 1885 notebook Nietzsche described the Dionysian as 'that acme of joy at which a man can feel apotheosised, can feel that Nature is justifying itself in him'."

I sip from many cups. I think their attention is sweet and funny, it makes me warm to them. It is sexy, stimulating! I'm only gaining £-- a week, but I'm perhaps gaining more than that by being in the Dickensian York for an hour, being in the middle of Victoria in the heart of Mother London. I like that nervous edginess, I need to live on that nervous edge.

9th November 1998

"In a landmark New York Times essay, British journalist Andrew Sullivan identified this new breed as 'the scolds'--an army of finger-wagging moralisers, epitomised by Prosecutor Starr and energised by Christian conservatives, telling others how they should live, 'losing sight of the principles of privacy & restraint' that were once their own.

In so doing, they have vacated what used to be some of the right's richest territory--personal liberty. The result is an opportunity for the centre-left to take this ground for themselves. While their enemies peer into men's souls, they now have the chance to offer themselves as the true defenders of personal freedom. They can even reclaim 'family values'--insisting that it was not they who polluted the cultural bloodstream with the semi-pornography of the Starr report, nor they who expanded the intrusive scope of government with wire-taps, seized phone-bills and the unforgiving day-long interrogation of a 24-year-old woman."

I do exactly what I want to do, I always have done, and always will. Keep your eye on the goal. It was horrifying but I'm not dead. The most I can ever say. Be weird, be the king of weird. I AM AUBREY WEIRDSLEY. Be dissolute, and degenerate. There is a chance for me to LIVE A NEW STORY. Live A NEW CHAPTER.

8th November 1998

It is a sign they don't like me doing what I want to do; what a terrible admiring, what a wonderful compliment, what a fantastic hold over them this gives me! My mind is too powerful, they are too small, they are too far below me. A man does not worry if the ants beneath the sole of his boot approved of him. I was prepared to be with them, but then I saw repeatedly the quality of what they were offering me was so poor, a watery gruel at best, but more usually quite determined and vicious poison, that I saw I was right in my instinct to rely on my own rich nourishment with no regard to them. I cannot help it if my tastes are more refined than them.

7th November 1998

I’m like a lighthouse, I let them dash themselves to pieces against me, with ever rising fury they bash their brains out. Like a moth hitting the blazing bulb, they are too stupid to have any understanding of where they are going wrong; while I blaze on! Burning forever with my constant supply of inner fuel which they can find no way to cut off. I love it that I have wound people up that much: I will not take moral judgement from people who throw abuse at me in the street: with that they betray their moral inferiority to me.

All their huffing and puffing, I still sail blithely on! You don't need to get revenge against people who are embarrassing themselves. When they abuse me they please me. Good God, thank goodness I am not like you.

They're the ones with problems, because they've got no beauty or intellect. I do want New again; I like it there. I love being against everybody: what a thrill it gives me. PERSONAL LIBERTY. I have no obligation to follow the conventional social norms. I am free of that because I was never taught. I AM KASPAR HAUSER. YOU SAD PEOPLE: I do exactly what I want. How they hate me for it.

I am a Nietzschean "superior man": that is what they hate, because they cannot lay a glove on me. BECAUSE I DO EXACTLY WHAT I WANT: HOW THEY HATE IT. I DEFY ALL CONVENTIONAL SOCIAL NORMS.

How their minds must boggle about what I get up to! It must be eating them away, secretly they must be so envious. Pure life of the mind. We intellectuals know no moral bounds, we ubermensch, we superior men!

5th November 1998 (Plot Night. Guy Fawkes Night)

I need this, I need to be pushed to this extreme place, where I have no distractions. EVERYTHING BRINGS PROGRESS. Stick to your line. My grinning rampancy infuriates them. They raise the tension, and I rise in power with it, and rise in pleasure. I was in limbo for -- years, then I took the path that was waiting for me the whole time. I do exactly what I want at every second of the day. They hate it because they can't stop me, because I am invincible to them.

4th November 1998

I love this exciting position I'm in now. So what am I going to do here? ELEGANCE. Whatever they try to throw at me, I have the ability to ride the crest of it and not be buried under it. A flowering inferno. I am WILD, and RAMPANT, and they can do nothing to stop me. They think they will crush me with DESPAIR. My greatest danger is HUBRIS.

Their crude contempt seems to me to prove my superiority, and thus fills me with POWER, and PLEASURE. Their punishment: I become just more glorious.

3rd November 1998

Stick to my own line. Like Jean Cocteau. Like Van Gogh. Like Oscar Wilde. Like Francis Bacon. These stupid people don't realise I've been here before. I am trained in this. I do what I want, sybaritically, every minute of the day.

For every one person who starts down the path of abusing me, I believe there is one person who feels great sympathy and comradeship for me, and one girl who secretly is attracted to me.

What revelations they push me to!

I am tempting them. I am daring them. I am being deliberately provocative.

2nd November 1998

I am RANDOM. I am a WILD CARD. Opposition just makes it more enjoyable to continue doing the things you want to do. I needed to lure my enemies out into the open, so I could pick them off once and for all, to ruthlessly put the Catholic plotters to death, so I could start my reign safe, and unrivalled.

They've tried this before, and it never worked before, and they just embarrassed themselves; and now they're trying the same thing again, so dim light bulb-less are they. They do it because they are FRIGHTENED to approach me directly. I am the dark prince they are FRIGHTENED of.

It is a more difficult route, but it is one I had to take; it is what I wanted; now I'm starting to reap the rewards. You've got to realise how blessed you are. Put yourself at the centre of them. Where they are terrified.

I AM INK ON THE PAGE.

1st November 1998

If Laurence Olivier gave full force to his power, people would have run from the theatre screaming. I am strong now because I am in harmony with my nature. You know if you've got anything special, there are going to be lots of people out there who are going to try to bring you down, so you must just always hold to your own line, never be distracted from it.

'Puppet-master shows he can still pull Italy's strings': what a fantastic title!

They are giving me such a fascinating subject to study.

Because it makes a comparison between my behaviour and their behaviour, and I LIKE that comparison! That comparison puts me in a very rosy light indeed. These people have been boiling with their petty resentment and their petty jealousy of me for years, and now I’ve tempted them out of the woodwork, they’ve been forced to step forward and identify themselves, there they were, the stupid people, the people boiling with resentment, the people burning with jealousy; in the end they couldn’t hide it any longer!

They’re trying to catch hold of my coattails, in a desperate attempt to pull me back to them; they’re trying to grab the crumbs off my table.

It's always worth it.

31st October 1998

It puts me into the state of peace I need.

Let them ponder how the history books will judge them--I think they've got a hard time ahead of them.

They are cutting the ground from under their own feet, and repairing my position for me. I am daring them to shame themselves. I am tempting them into it, and they are too stupid to avoid it.

"Both the Sun and Venus in Scorpio are now challenged by Uranus, in Aquarius, and you appear to have serious needs and strong urges this weekend. But you mustn't worry if you encounter a certain amount of resistance. All it means is someone finds it difficult to handle you--and you know the reason for that."

"Refuse to be rattled or riled by rumours about your work or private affairs. True, you have broken away from your usual routine and might soon embark on an inventive money-making venture. However, you owe it to nobody to explain your thinking or justify your actions. Don't rise to the bait."

30th October 1998

My private world is MAGNIFICENT. My Eros was getting better & better. My body had become liquid. Liquid pleasure. I lived for Eros. My decisions were magnificent. They're not coping well with me, are they! This is, is it not, a failure on their part. The higher the tension, the better I perform.

Must I become stone? says Elizabeth, after the death of the Catholic plotters and her decision to reject all suitors. Must I remain untouched? You must be divine, Walsingham tells her. A symbol. Nero says the same thing, his heart was turning to stone.

It is a complicated condition I've got, it takes time to understand it.

Their jealousy rises them into hostility, and hostility poisons only themselves, while handing victory to their serene, contented enemy. I sit on my throne, like Elizabeth, divine, symbol, imperious in my dominion.

I enjoy a nice life of SHEER PLEASURE.

29th October 1998

Why would I want it to stop?! Jealousy is the supreme compliment, and it is giving me such great rich material!

I have successfully wound them up, haven't I.

It spreads like gangrene, that's what it does. It spreads like a virus, throughout any group of people who regularly mix and spend time together, until they are all infected by it. I infected them with it, I stuck my great big hypodermic needle right into the heart of them.

I got the 115 train, went in the four Charing Cross Road second hand bookshops. Got Freud paperback and The Mask of Fu Manchu, perhaps go back for Gloriana? Then had 2½ pints in Chandos, before agonising whether to go to Soho Cinema or Elizabeth. Went for McDonald's which was very nice, then Elizabeth, which was superb, very moving. To think I was sitting there in that cinema in the heart of the great capital city of London which wouldn't have been a great city but for her. It was fantastic. Then had to rush to get to  Britannicus on time, and found the place half empty, very quiet, but that was very good, too, especially Toby Stephens, I liked it better than Phedre. On the train home I was thinking how nice it is to come home from something intellectual, but already I'm looking forward to the other.

My story is what excites me, I'll do anything to service it. I'm in a sleep, but I'm having such nice dreams I don't want to wake up. I am an ARTIST. I want the tension INCREASED.

"I am intrigued by the geography of sin. In the 16th century Queen Elizabeth was constantly ordering her courtiers home, away from the temptations of the capital and back to guarding their estates. The Stuarts were more careless, and paid the price. London has always been in a class of its own for degradation. It was the citadel of gin, the Great Wen, "the city of feverish idleness" to Trollope's squirearchy, "driven here and there in search of some gratification that never comes". In the 1860s, the Lancet calculated that there were an astonishing 80,000 prostitutes in London. They lined up each night in rows outside the Bank of England, as they later did outside the Dorchester Hotel.

To outsiders, big cities are always places of moral menace. They were places to which some went for company but others for solitude, to pursue in secret the vices and desires which country people held up to censure or ridicule. People come to cities not to find people but to escape them. Cities embrace not just excitement and ambition, but also loneliness. They attract those who seek solace in that loneliness, sometimes unconventional solace.

Sex is part of the electricity of the city. Like drugs, sex is one of the most lucrative, unrecorded and unmentionable London industries. From the rent boys of St Pancras to the high-class bedsits of Marylebone, a market for sex has developed as an adjunct to London's tourism business. (Though it is still minute compared with the era of "Victorian values".)

The selling of sex flourishes largely because, like drugs, it operates largely outside the bounds of regulation. Nothing does more for the wealth of a city than a human demand whose supply is declared illegal by government.

Cities have always thrived on black markets. London has thrived on spivs, pimps, drug-dealers, thieves, corrupt planners and, above all, on illicit and covert sex. Some of these markets may be glamorous. Most are wretched, sad and tragic. Politics can pass judgment on them. Other can condemn. The city goes about its business as ever, simply answering a need."

28th October 1998

I am so detached from my own life, I observe and comment and write on it with lascivious delight. I use "Ernst Graf" as my own testbed.

27th October 1998

Shore yourself together so when the flood comes you become an immediate floating raft. Pure spirit, and they can't stand my rampancy.

Got tube to Virgin and bought the Garbage CD but couldn't use the tokens because they split from WH Smith's two weeks before! Then Yellow. Got my Britannicus ticket for £11. Then I had my three pints in Chandos before Soho Cinema. Go Go Contest, Africa Rising (again), Disruption (reminded me so much of Tracie Andrews!), then Bow Down Backstreet, all black, one of the best ever! It got the better of me, unfortunately, quite accidentally, so I didn't stay for Number 5.

In Soho Cinema I was thinking I want that Victoria job, so I can keep coming back to Soho Cinema.

25th October 1998

I take a more rumbustious path through life.  More exciting, sybaritic, pleasurable. Use everything you can find as your catalyst, even the opposition. Use everything as fuel to propel me. For an Autistic person life is always wonderful, because they see things that normal people can't. Always look for experience, and progress. To quote Noel Coward: "I rise above it, frankly love it!"

24th October 1998

"Coleridge suffered from 'a derangement in his intellectual and moral constitution.' Given this, Coleridge is fortunate to have Richard Holmes as his biographer. He writes of Coleridge as 'his usual, rambling, magnificent, highly metaphysical self.' He adores Coleridge's philosophical waywardness...seemingly efficient only at dependence: he moved from one household to another, scrounging bed & board.

But away from the hot salons of his public career, a much more desperate Coleridge struggled with himself. He was, of course, an opium addict, and he alternated his frantic public appearances with deep collapses. Poisoned by opium, his body swelled monstrously and his insides froze into constipation. Partly, one suspects, this boom & bust cycle was temperamental, the advance and retreat of a manic depressive. But in his bedroom, administering his own enemas with a brass syringe, Coleridge suffered terrible shame at the spectacle of his damaged self."

Foiled! "You will never win," they spat. He smiled calmly. "You make it more certain with every word you say."

"Let me see if  I've got this right: your life is so dull you need me to provide some excitement for you." This is their absolute terror: that I am gaining from it, the whole time.

"The sun in Scorpio puts you at your most daring, sensual and dramatic, and woe betide any sign that gets in your way."

23rd October 1998

I live on a sea of scented bosoms.

HOW THEY HATE ME FOR MY RAMPANCY! HOW THEY ENVY ME FOR MY SYBARISM! HOW THEY BEGRUDGE ME FOR MY SCENTED SEA OF BOSOMS!

This is my natural environment. It is what I feel most at home in, and most thrilled by.

I admire the way I take everyone on.

Sybaritism requires opposition. To provide the frisson of rich pleasurable excitement. They hate it, because they are thick, not very intelligent, disadvantaged, with no prospects. They hate me for my RAMPANCY. My SYBARITISM. My SCENTED SEA OF BOSOMS.

"You've been very bold, brave, strong and decisive lately. So where is the reward for your courage? It is right here, in your need to be even more brave, bold, strong and decisive. By redefining the rules of a certain game, you have shifted a crucial balance of power in your favour. That power, though, will do you no good unless you exert it. To stop is to decide that, having fought hard to earn your place in a vital race, you will retire before it has even been run. Your only choice is to battle on."

"Certain individuals would like you to believe they are better off than they actually are. However, it would be cruel and unthinking to call their bluff, and embarrassing for all if they could produce no evidence of their good fortune. Turn a blind eye to the matter and let everyone hold on to their pride."

22nd October 1998

I'm doing exactly what I want, I'm holding to my line, I'm sticking to my mechanism. I am a poet, I write for The Yellow Book, like Aubrey Beardsley. It's been such a grey, wet, rainy week, I would have loved to have been out; but it will just make it more enjoyable next week.

I don't care a fig! I am Francis Bacon. What sort of artist would I be if I felt ashamed! The days when you go out, aren't they good? Aren't they rich, fond memories, like last Thursday?! I love the glory of my stories, they have very little to offer besides that. Is it possible to go out tomorrow? Any mind that doesn't obey mine bores me.

21st October 1998

I am ECCENTRIC! Gloriously, rampantly, joyfully, mischievously ECCENTRIC! It is a fabulous game. I don't regret anything I've done--I did it for glory.

20th October 1998

I wanted it to be an open discussion, with nothing ruled in and nothing ruled out. Just to talk amidst the destruction and see what naturally emerged. Let the river take its natural course. But I felt she was dictating the course too much, she was trying to shunt this river down one particular siding, to mix metaphors, a siding which denied my rich imagination, my rich inner world. She was trying to influence the outcome too much, she was loading the dice, and that bothered me: I wanted to talk to someone and thereby come to a solution myself. It was too directed.

You see it as being fossilised. I see it as being rich and fabulous.

Go because it annoys them, do everything because it annoys them, be me because it annoys them. This is only Stage 1 of my life. I must write the way Van Gogh had to paint. I take risks, and still escape their clutches every time.

19th October 1998

The stress & tension of the German Romantics is what I need.

I have achieved LIBERATION. I am in harmony with nature now. I am spontaneous. I live in my sybaritic pleasures. I want to put myself at the heart of it. Wherever my enemies are gathering, I want to suddenly appear in the heart of them. I seek their enmity. It is the mark of approval I need to reassure me. It makes things interesting, does it not.

18th October 1998

I love the voluptuous priapism of my life since Pope Friday.

I wanted a free discussion, where nothing was ruled in and nothing was ruled out. We could just explore all the options.

I like taking them on in tight, small, dangerous places, and beating them. He knows there are enemies, so he chooses the battles, lures them in, and takes them on in micro-encounters of his own choosing. I don't feel under siege; it's in the small tight places that I come into my own and am transformed. They follow this little man into the dead end, to find the 12ft monster has got THEM. In these small, tight, dangerous places, I come into my POWER. When they have me cornered, that is when they are at my mercy.

I must keep my concentration absolutely poised and centred on my writing. I must never take my eyes off that ball.

RAMPANCY!

15th October 1998

It’s like a conspiracy, if someone keeps trying to cover something up, you immediately start to think what have they got to hide. Jealousy is like gangrene, it spreads and spreads. And I’m not going away. I’m going to spread through them a bit more. This is just the beginning. I put myself in the middle of the situation, where I can patiently politely pick them apart.  My ability to operate in small, tight, dangerous places.

Enemy, thy name is jealousy. And I’ve got you in my pocket. I let you plan your armies, and gather your troops, and you don’t realise it is all taking place in my pocket, I’m watching your secret plotting with tears of hilarity rolling down my cheeks. They’ve bitten off a bit more than they can chew in taking me on. Damaged people can be dangerous, because they cannot be hurt. You like being provocative? No. I don’t pick the fights. But if people WANT to attack, then I shall take deep pleasure in running rings around them. Enemies are the best thing you can have. It proves you must be doing something right. Look at Clinton. (Beethoven. Oscar Wilde. Etc). Do the viciousness of the attacks on him come solely from the crime he committed? I think we all know the answer is no.

14th October 1998

I have achieved LIBERATION. It is a positive step, like volcanic eruptions. I do exactly what I want, and I ENJOY it, that's what they cannot stand. A paradigm shift, that's what the Pope idea was. I was quite ruthlessly autistic with Lucrezia, I came out feeling like a dark autistic prince. I am going to more & more extreme places, but what else is there? She looked very sad & down. I am sure next week will be the last. I have gone past the point of no return. As a baby I was left to observe what was happening around me, so that is what I've become. It is not her area of expertise. I am in the Autistic spectrum, but finally to be in a position where I can observe it, and write about it, this luscious opulent dark kingdom, ruled by Pope Pius XII.

Sarah wants me to wear a corset, hold everything in; be ashamed of all my bumps & curves. But I want to be a real human being, and let it all hang out, as nature intended.

I thought if I wanted to talk about autism, at last, I'm in the right place! How wrong could I be.

13th October 1998

Saw Love is the Devil, which was OK, bit boring. Then got opera leaflet then pub, then cinema. Africa Rising was superior stuff on location in the jungle, then Buttman in Rio & Havana, the Rumpman from before, then Perfect Pair from before, which was better than I remembered! Then a Shannon Tweed film!

What sort of artist would I be, Bacon/Jacobi was saying, if I was ashamed of the things I do. I was thinking all day I am an artist, and do what I need for my painting, ruthlessly, eccentrically, bohemianly!

Do exactly what I want, wildly, rampantly! Jealousy is the sincerest form of flattery. Oscar knew, Francis knew, Vincent knew. I do it on purpose, to wind them up, to give me energy, and they are playing into my hands. I loom above them like Fantomas, pulling all their strings. They are clay in my hands. The jealousy of the disadvantaged. 

12th October 1998

I'm weird, solitary. Devoting all my resources to my writing.

11th October 1998

"Use it, channel this energy, find a way to express it, suddenly it becomes a gift, something very valuable. Kafka dealt with his paranoia by writing some of the great masterworks."

10th October 1998 Pope Day

They are nothing, I can take or leave them as I please. The disadvantaged find it very hard to cope; they have no intelligence, and no prospects. I let the monkeys do what they want down in their little world.

I am the Vatican; of course! I am the Pope Pius XII  in his blood red robes leaving the German President's palace in Berlin 1929 with the statues, outside a guard in trenchcoat & helmet. I am the Swiss banks with all the Nazi gold in their vaults, and I am also the Vatican not releasing their wartime documents. The pope is connected to the Francis Bacon pictures as well. The blood red government has taken charge in brown dome Berlin, and the pope sweeps in to visit.

What a fantastic new game it is.

Be rampant.

9th October 1998

Let them come to see how ruthless I am in quite heartlessly picking off my targets.

8th October 1998

Jealousy's a terrible thing. Anything that's useful.

The woman that must never be mentioned. Brilliant man that Sherlock Holmes is, this was the one case he could never solve: what happened to his emotional life? Who stole his emotional life. It is the one mystery he can never solve.

This is my favourite game.

Whatever the catalyst is doesn't matter, as long as there is a catalyst. You're facilitating my revolution. I now want to celebrate me & my life, celebrate my differentness. Glory in it. I know this is the most exciting time of my life.

7th October 1998

I'm young; by the time I'm 48 I might just be hitting my stride, coming into my power.

The walk back across Leicester Square is always exciting, that disorientation is what is so exciting about it. I move on different planes, special spheres, a sea of scented bosoms.

6th October 1998

Have love & respect in your heart at all times, how that infuriates them! and defeats them! They are powerless to do anything to dent me at all. They are trying to increase the tension, thereby playing straight into my hands. Tension is what I've been trying to generate for the last six years.

5th October 1998

"Pornography at its best is art, as Titian, Michelangelo and Leonardo knew; at its mildest it is erotica; and at its most direct it is a checklist of activities and fetishes to which the user responds with masturbation. Most experts in venereal behaviour argue that it is a safety valve. Ours is a hypocritical society, and we should take note of the retiring film censor. We have had our fill of censorship and must not forget the great battles of the Sixties -- Lady Chatterley, Fanny Hill and Oz among them -- which led to what intellectual freedom we now enjoy when sex is the subject of art and literature. The option for those ready to find offence is to walk away from it, ask for the return of ticket money at an exhibition or a film, turn off the television, eschew the magazine and video tape and no one should tell the rest of us what we may or may not see, or do with a consenting adult.

We condemn the prostitute and will not acknowledge that her resource has saved many a marriage and the sanity of many an unmarriageable man -- as has pornography. We damn the pornographer too readily without recognising that his work is as old as civilisation and that its crudest forms are much more a stimulus to quick release than an encouragement to mimicry and a specious excuse for the rapist caught in the act. Too many of my generation have been damaged by foolish Protestant prohibitions and pseudo-Christian cant; generations following mine should be free of pretence, inhibition and deceit, free to have access to pornography and the prostitute without the interference of authorities and the dishonest condemnation of society. Think on these things on Friday."

The project continues.

"Hugo Wolf produced some of the most intense & expressive songs ever written. But this was achieved at the cost of mental stability. Periods of intense creativity were followed by times of desolation &despair & exacerbated by the effects of syphilis acquired in Viennese brothels."

I roll amongst them like a hand grenade with the pin pulled out.

4th October 1998

I feel just about ready for the return now. Now it is cold, & dark, & inhospitable. Now the warm places come into their own. I might need my haircut first though.

You make a lot of enemies. I must be doing something right then. Lynch mobs are almost always wrong; that is the characteristic feature of them.

3rd October 1998

It is a complicated game I am playing on them, and they are yet to divine it. One day a week to indulge in dangerous excess, and let myself go completely; that's not been done so far. That is what is needed. I miss the opera! Listening to The Flying Dutchman makes me want to go back and see it now. I create my own drama! My own sturm & drang.

1st October 1998

I'm lost in my own rich little world, and they envy me. Van Gogh was weird; he couldn't fit into normal social society. He just doggedly kept painting. You've get to get into the whole trance, the frame of mind. It's no use going there half-heartedly. Leave it till next week when it will be more committed, I can give myself to it totally.

30th September 1998

If I'm busy in my private universe, I feel I'm making progress. It is a game. I do my own thing, and I leave them all behind. I am a vampire; I take what I need.

I like flushing people out. Give them the rope to hang themselves. Everything THRILLS me.

'Therapy': my desire to give myself up to it, which real life won't allow. It's painful to me because it is so detached. I want to give myself to it, all or nothing: I want a year out of life and travel to Vienna, like Hans Castorp travelling to the Magic Mountain sanatorium for the cure.

29th September 1998

28th September 1998

People try & distract attention away from their own problems. I have successfully courted public opinion over the years, till I am in the position I would choose. Laughter to try & hurt, this is the sign of the stupid: they are playing into my hands. This tension is my raw material.

The sad French melancholy of rainy Dean Street in Soho. Charles Aznavour.

27th September 1998

26th September 1998

The starting conditions created a deep disturbance, then you let the program run, and all the ramifications and consequences are what we see now.

I'm proud of doing things eccentrically.

"At home, the new chancellor will sire the 'Berlin Republic' by overseeing the shift of power and governance from Bonn to Berlin, an important psychological shift into a new era, perhaps not only in Germany but more broadly and gradually in Europe. And most important, the new leader will need to inject fresh energy to combat the lethargy and paralysis that have settled over Bonn politics like a muggy Rhine mist in the past couple of years."

24th September 1998

Obsessively document my life in my books.

22nd September 1998

I don't associate with Lorca, Wilde, Van Gogh, because they were great, but because they lived through the painful search for self-acceptance that I have been tormented by.

It is a wonderful ADVENTURE, a psychic EXPLORATION of unrevealed terrain.

20th September 1998

Remember how good Red Riding Hood and the others in that 6 hours were! That's why I go to Soho Cinema, and will continue to do so. I am kinky, like Francis Bacon. The problem is I've been too careful. I must become MORE kinky, go over the edge again, then it will be Vienna necks & drugs & rock'n'roll, that's the only time it gets good. The Egon Schiele nights. Push over the edge, find that tension again; Soho Cinema now feels so safe, because I know I'm going home afterwards; the tension of wanting the rooms isn't there; it will be from now on!

All that matters is that sexual excitement, that Egon Schiele night feeling, the sybaritism, the scented sea of bosoms; yes I want Sunset again then room, yes I want Soho Cinema again then room.

19th September 1998

"The price of wisdom is above rubies. The mirth of the wicked is brief, and God brings them down."

18th September 1998

Talent does what it can, genius does what it must.

17th September 1998

It is a noble mission "to show them all". I may not succeed, but it will be an interesting journey, and I will know at the end of my life that I did something worthwhile with it.

16th September 1998

I create rich material for me to write about, so it turns into coal & oil. Egon Schiele night, pure eroticism! They just make my pleasure more exquisite.

Fulfillment, Kidnap, Bend Over Brazilian Babes.

15th September 1998

They hate me because they realise they've been lured into starting a battle they cannot win, and their position is just getting worse. They are faced with a dilemma now: the more they attack the more power they give me. It is a terrible position they have got themselves into.

14th September 1998

I move on a higher level, through a different medium.

13th September 1998

I shall say "Thank you, for handing me complete victory. Thank you for multiplying the depth & richness & power & pleasure of my life."

"As long as he's happy, doing what HE wants to do, he doesn't care."

12th September 1998

They envy my beauty, my serenity, and my intelligence. This is my weather and my time. I take from everybody; sucking their blood. How envious they are that they don't know where I go on Saturdays, where I go when I get the train to Charing X and theatre, opera & cinema, how envious they don't know where I go inside my inner kingdom. They have completed my victory for me.

How envious they are about me, how frustrated they are by me; what a supreme compliment. What an interesting, exciting, rich life I lead. I am ruthless, and malicious. I've finally lured them in, and tricked them, and trapped them.

11th September 1998

I am powerful, and striding around Vienna, invincible now; they have made me powerful.

10th September 1998

Artists need to be at the edge of society. If I was in the middle of it, I'd be a plumber, or a plasterer. In the midst you can't see the wood for the trees.

They think by attacking me they are weakening me or sapping my strength; on the contrary, they are providing me with my power.

Sex, drugs and rock & roll--sounds like a good life to me. Necks, drugs and rock & roll.

They are unhappy because they are poor; I am serene because I am rich (not financially).

"It is perhaps not surprising that many of the artists, writers and intellectuals who grew up during the declining years of the Habsburg power were obsessed with change. Decay, death and disaster seemed to haunt their every waking hour and to provide the substance of their nightmares.

The pre-eminent city of the realm was Vienna. It was the metropolis where the Habsburgs held court, the magnet which attracted the brightest and the best. In 1900, with a population of more than 2 million, it was the fourth largest city in Europe. And less than half of its inhabitants had been born there. All the languages of the Empire, from Rumanian to Romany, from Polish to Italian, could be heard on its streets. It was excitingly cosmopolitan, confident and energetic. It was, it firmly believed, the centre of the world.

Vienna was not only the hub of the Empire. It was also one of the most exciting cultural centres on earth, envied for the quality of its theatre and music. Its relaxed way of life, its refusal to take the world too seriously, were legendary, especially in such foreign parts as Prussia where no one had ever learned to relax." In my mind; this is where all the work goes on. "While popular songs romanticised casual sexual liaisons and waxed lyrical about the pleasures of an evening in a separee, a vociferous minority attacked the double standard in morality, dramatised the plight of the prostitute" When the clocks go back, that's when winter really starts, the season of the flesh really starts. How I love the sounds of the jungle; like the members of the expedition in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. How I thrive and flourish from strength to strength. "and saw a link between sexual hypocrisy and the contrast between appearance and reality at every level of public life. There was something rotten at the very core of society, they argued, and the epidemic of prostitution was merely one sign of it."

"Something else which made Vienna unusual was the amount of serious thought given (it was a scientific experiment, throwing a stone into the pond of ignorance & stupidity & mediocrity, and watching them make monkeys of themselves) to human sexuality. Richard Krafft-Ebing, Otto Weininger and Sigmund Freud are only the most famous of those who investigated sexual behaviour in a scientific way. Frank Wedekind, Robert Musil and Arthur Schnitzler were only the most radical of those many writers who introduced sexual problems into their plays & novels."

"Loos was a member of the circle of artists and writers grouped around another great enemy of show and pretence. This was Karl Kraus, founder and publisher of the literary paper Die Fackel (The Torch) which, after 1911, he also wrote single-handed. Like some Old Testament prophet, Kraus saw the evidence of hypocrisy all around him and foresaw the ruin it would cause.

For Kraus, the decline of civilised values which was inevitably registered by a similar decline in language, had gone so far that it could no longer be halted. Vienna itself was a proving ground for world destruction and The Last Days of Mankind (Kraus's greatest work, and unstageable play of mammoth proportions about the corruption of the ruling class and the Great War, written in 1922) were not far away." I want to move towards a new honesty in my writing, and in my letters to ---.

Things are getting better in ------: incontrovertible fact No.1. No.2 I have moved onto a new and higher level. It is the Salome Syndrome: because I don't show any interest in them they become hysterically spiteful and malicious. No.3 If people want to attack me then I shall take deep pleasure in running rings around them: it's their choice.

5th September 1998

It is exhilarating, is it not! I am on a scented sea of bosoms. Me and voluptuous Sophie Dahl is all there is. I am Fantomas looming over Paris. With the Taoist smile: "It is wealth to be content".

Lashing with rain now, 12.47. Spitting as I went down the road. It makes them edgy, they've thrown everything they've got at me, and I'm still here. How I relish the battle, how exhilarating it is.

4th September 1998

You've got to hold to your own line, at all times. I am very sorry for them, but I have to tell them that those with brains will always win in the end. "If you're in the mood to say what you like, certain individuals may retaliate in kind. Don't think of being defeated or shouted down. Your ability to bounce back will see you through.... You have an adventurous spirit, but a Mars-Uranus clash could make you feel especially restless. Try not to take any opposition to your plans too seriously; but assume the right to move on, when and where you please." All the good things in my life; all the riches. I threaten them so much.

I am collecting such rich material from them. Everything they do gives me energy. How I have trapped them.

"He says the true appeal of the vampire myth is still that it's 'about the pleasures of forbidden excess, addiction and drugs'. Ingrid Pitt agrees. The appeal of the vampire, she says, 'is more than ever about sex, because we lead such a banal, computerised existence. The myth is about this throbbing, heaving body that needs feeding.' Much like the imagination, in fact."

This has probably been the year of worst attacks, and it has been the year of most wisdom, and power, and growth, and strength.

Life is hard, are we not allowed to find our own best way through it? Or must we just do as the majority says?

I frustrate them with my impregnability, and imperturbability.

The gap is widening, I won't give them the victory they want, and this makes them edgy & scared, and then more vicious, and so more frustrated. They are on a losing spiral all the way.

Have sympathy, for they are trying to cope as best they can, with the lack of intelligence and lack of beauty which makes the world a very scary place for them. I have sympathy for them, like they were my own children.

3rd September 1998

They can't tell what my secret source is, and that enrages them.

2nd September 1998

I like doing it because it annoys them.

What a compliment to me; how threatened they must be by me, beautiful intelligent man, how jealous they must be. THE TAOIST SMILE. I like doing it so I am going to continue to do what I like. Like a Freud, Brendel, Zweig in Vienna. I set them up so I can write about it. Like actors putting on weight to play a part. I've got so many interests which they cannot reach into, and cannot lay a glove on. The spits of rain out there as the cars hiss by tonight. I love the rough & tumble of it; I love the sounds of the jungle. I'm ravenous and rapacious in making things happen for my book. They don't understand they are being played. This is me dedicating myself to freedom; it is a necessary part of it. The jealousy & the raging bitterness of those left behind; those trying to clutch hold of your coat-tails.

How my spirit has been enlivened. I like stormy weather. I will continue to go to defy them.

Now I've decided to keep my Nazi gold! There was a brief window when they could have had some of it, but they lost their chance.

I've been made strong by their opposition, my frail maimed spirit has been MADE strong. You have the volcano inside you. The raging fire inside me, the boiling lava, that draws everyone to me. I am Geoffrey Firmin in Under the Volcano.

I LOOM OVER THEM, LIKE FANTOMAS OVER PARIS, PULLING THEIR STRINGS; AND THEY CANNOT ESCAPE ME. I CAN SEE INTO EVERY ROOM AT NIGHT, I CAN REACH DOWN EVERY CHIMNEY, EVERY TUBE TUNNEL, EVERY TELEPHONE LINE, EVERY CABLE. I have wormed my way into their small minds, and they take me home with them, obsessively wondering wondering WHAT I am getting up to. The attacks have become bigger, I've had to loom up bigger & bigger to continue to be above them all. But the more they attack, the more I bloom & blossom. The more I shoot up and tower and flower above them, leaving them withering in my shadow. Anything that involves pretence is not the right solution.

"It is wealth to be content." I don't know if it is coincidence, but my contentment has risen at the same time as the attacks. I think this is instructive. Coming up the stairs, and it's raining outside, 1116pm, the drains are gurgling, gutters running fast, and pouring down I see the bright white light of houses opposite, and I feel such a sudden sense of excitement. I came up like I'm supercharged. This is the beauty of my life now.

The sounds of the jungle. I'm lost in my own little world.

Perhaps you shouldn't live life so conformistly; live life more wildly, and spontaneously! It is invaluable, it is rich material.

1st September 1998

They can't understand why I haven't been destroyed yet. In fact they just give me more power & strength.

31st August 1998

I like disturbing them, unsettling them, constantly ruffling their feathers. They deserve everything they're now getting. "The frisson of being close to corruption."

30th August 1998

I am brilliant because I get great material out of it. How I emerge with fresh inspiration and reborn energy; like a snake sloughing off its skin at periodic intervals. It is all a game to me, you stupid people. Don't you realise, I am playing you like a violin, you are playing your parts without realising it, like miniatures in my Grand Tour game.

It's like the shaming of the Swiss, I put up with it for too long; now it's gone too far. I'm not putting up with it anymore. Society tries to make you feel ashamed for being anti-social, and therapy joins in with this conspiracy. It's like Capricorn One. The fact is you HAVE to be sociable. No, you don't. You're trying to force this line on me. But I won't buy that line, and that makes me too difficult apparently.

28th August 1998

Once you open your mouth to say a bad word to someone, then you've stuck a poison dart into yourself. If you hurt another human being, it never goes away; it stains you forever.

"Fuelled by honest contempt, Hitchens clearly enjoyed taking the revenge that those with brains always ultimately get, and he did it brilliantly, and without mercy."

I love the opposition, don't I? The electricity it gives, the tasty sweet blood in my mouth (Frankenstein AND Dracula!). It proves I am as glorious as I thought, I am a Napoleon. What fools they let me make of them. I am eccentric and blasé, and carefree about it: I am now enjoying such rich sybaritic pleasures, and having the time of my life. They are providing me with the electricity I need to ride on this wave of the scented sea of bosoms.

I am completely carefree, and reckless, and spontaneous, and Priapic, and Situationist.

I love the wildness of my life; don't these petty people realise that? You've got to live WILDLY. The more opposition I get, the more I like it. People with brains will always ultimately gain the victory, that's what they cannot stand. I shall enjoy watching them dig deeper holes for themselves, because it's going to rebound on them, not me. And in the meantime I am gathering all the richness into my stories. I'm starting to enjoy all my deep sybaritic pleasures.

27th August 1998

Writers think about it, and respond eight years later.

26th August 1998

If you feel fear, eat it. Eat your own carcass of fear, fuel yourself with its rich nutrients. Raining now, fine long needles, soft but fast, nice rustling sound, 959am. I didn't need her panic & drama, I needed some understanding & empathy. It took me a long while to get back to where I was at the beginning.

I'm like Bill Clinton, every so often he slips up again. And it gets him into such embarrassing trouble. But to his enemies' infuriation he always bounces back as brazenly as ever. How infuriating for them that I enjoy all of it. I revel in it all, with my Taoist mischievous smile.

I love the pleasure in pain. If they can provide me with more opposition they will provide me with more pleasure. He just smiled. "Well, I'm sorry if I'm giving you a hard time." And does that make you insanely jealous? I thrive on opposition, it fills me up with power like connecting Frankenstein's monster to the electricity. Now they're getting scared, because they're making their position worse & worse, and getting no result from it.

25th August 1998

I am a monster, I am rapacious, I eat them all up for breakfast. Oh dear, are you jealous?

The secret is rampancy; they don't know how powerful I am; I will shock & terrify them. I live in a world of fantasy, and sybaritic pleasure.

If they want to pick a fight with me, then I shall take pleasure in running rings around them.

23rd August 1998

I've had a difficult, and unusual road, but I believe it is for a purpose: to be my unique person, write my unique reportage, to exploit myself to the nth degree. It's hard for someone with a normal social brain to understand what it's like for someone with borderline autism. I'm reluctant to give myself with people, because I know I need to give myself to my writing. How does an autistic person live his life? That is a very specialised problem; it is not done by forcing them to talk to people they really don't want to talk to.

The purpose of life is to dream. To enjoy all the sybaritic pleasures you can, and write about it. The purpose of life is to gild one's cage as much as one can. To line one's rut with fur.

22nd August 1998

I am gilding my cage. I am lining my rut with fur. I devote my life to nothing but pleasure, while at the same time writing about it.

21st August 1998

Very dark and grey this 8am morning. I take what I need, like Taste the Blood of Dracula, now I'm writing about it. I am more evil & sadistic than they can possibly imagine. I WANT this electricity. I do it to generate this electricity, this keenness.

They let me make fools of them. All the notebooks of the eight years weren't wasted, they are full of the starting ideas which can all be developed and exploited later e.g. the Wickhamnauts and Edwardnauts. They were starts of ideas; only now am I ready to write.

They fear me so much, they are desperate for any stick to try and beat me with, because I am a beautiful intellectual. The last 8 years has been the chrysalis stage, Writing is my chance to round on my critics and make them see they had lost all along.

"You may produce the one line that the world needs, and justifies your existence. The other lines are all forgotten, they don't matter."

20th August 1998

"It is doubtful you will take a back seat now, particularly if you have already mapped out your route or decided on a course of action. However, the likelihood is that someone will pursue you, without any regard for your feelings. Either way, you must remain true to yourself today." That is the important thing, remain true to yourself. S put unbearable pressure on me.

19th August 1998

Smiling, and tucking my scarf in my neck, and loving it. Poor them. Where do I get my supreme confidence from, what is my well-spring, it must infuriate them. Like where is the source of the Nile. The world's great river, the world's great civilisation.

18th August 1998

If they take me on, they give me power; they cannot win.

With my specialness, wildness, I show my complete POWER over them, my complete invincibility to their dullard stupidity. I am afraid I'm going to have to keep frustrating them by continuing to enjoy my sybaritic pleasures.

It was always my natural road, but I tried to fight my natural road, because I was horrified by its implications. Like a vampire, or a homosexual.

How delicious my insouciance is. I am more alive than them. I ride on a scented sea of bosoms. They cannot get their hands on my secret treasure. I love the thrill of the chase, the excitement they give me. They laugh because they hate their own inadequacies. Wherever they go, they will be treated to my SUPREME CONFIDENCE; my calm happy unflinching TAOIST SMILE.

I yearn for everyone to be against me, they are playing into my hands.

My implacable TAOIST SMILE, and my SUPREME CONFIDENCE, will face them wherever they go. They will never get away from it, like Nayland Smith can never get away from Fu Manchu.

17th August 1998

My behaviour is strange but it is strange for a reason, it's no good just slapping me on the wrist. I was a branch that grew in a strange direction from the start, it is inconvenient but that's the way it is.

They can do NOTHING to dent my irrepressible optimism. My sybaritic pleasure-filled joyousness. Just because they are in the majority, they seem to think that makes them right, while I'm here to tell them it doesn't. And I shall take pleasure in constantly reminding them. This feels like the verge of the most exciting time in my life.

T.S.Eliot: Arnold's Dover Beach: Live all you can. Force moment to its crisis.

I want to describe life from an extreme place, so they are playing into my hands.

I love forcing things to their crisis, mischievously, deliciously, I'm addicted to it. I love finding new victims, who fall into my clutches, get caught in my web and lured into my lair.

15th August 1998

"People would often talk about him to me; they said he was unstable, moody, even neurotic; I liked being the only one who understood him. If he was sometimes blunt and rude, as people claimed, it was certainly only as a defence. For he possessed that rarest of all gifts, which I should call goodness if the word had not been so abused; let me say that he really cared about people."

Because I'm beyond their understanding. "In letter to De Beauvoir through the autumn of 1948, Algren explained how unhappy he was with his the existence he was leading, how tired he was of solitude and intellectual isolation."

Life is unbearable if you're undecided, that's the thing. Well I've decided now, and I'm going all out with it.

14th August 1998

They feel inferior to me. It is important to remember that. My intelligence, my place in the world of poetry, the realms of High Art I move in; my beauty, my genius. My tangent.

I just don't like being with other people; does this mean that I've got no value and worth? Sarah seemed to think so.

"Adjust your sights accordingly and focus on life's more profitable encounters."

The joke is on them; I play them like a piano. I've suffered this all my life, and I've stayed beautiful, while they have grown more ugly & more angry. I have my brilliance that won't go away. I'm attracted to a certain type, I love it. It is the blood I gorge on.

I love that sleazy world, it's so comforting.

Enjoy living randomly, spontaneously. I am the random wild card, I strike when & where I want.

How I love winding the stupid people up. I didn't think they were very intelligent at nursery, and I haven't changed my view one bit. I have remained true to myself, to my own line, and kept my conscience clear, lured them into further uglifying and stupidifying themselves. I loom over them like a GIANT, an intellectual & beautiful colossus.

I've put myself in a fascinating, intense position, so I can study myself and my surroundings, and the reaction of others to me, from this position. I seek the tangent, the ellipse. I'm not going to repress my Eros just so as not to alert other people to it. I am WILD.

13th August 1998

It is like swatting a fly.

I am collecting the material they give me; how they feed me with electricity. The glue I need. How I love annoying people with my beauty, and intelligence, and genius.

What a brilliant story it is; what a brilliant seam I've mischievously tapped into.

To get anywhere in what I'm trying to do, I have to go further & further out to the black edges of consciousness; I have to go to MORE extreme places. That can only increase the hostility and the green-eyed jealousy of the ignorant & unintelligent who slather in my wake, foaming & frothing at the mouth in their impotent fury.

The richness, the rich mixture!

How I like it when people try to get at me. All they can do is try and harm me, because they are powerless to take my riches away from me.

I haven't exploded yet, haven't published, I am preparing, throughout my 20s I am preparing, waiting for the moment when I explode, when I bloom & blossom, when I emerge from my chrysalis.

Big window still open, but grey and very cool and fresh.

12th August 1998

How I love the sounds of the jungle.

How the stupid people hate me; what a compliment that is. How they torment themselves to try to get my attention. This is the effect great people like me have on the little people.

11th August 1998

They don't like me because I've got courage not to be a sheep, desperately fit in. I'm too busy living my own life, and enjoying my life, my sybaritic pleasures. How that annoys them. The outsider likes opposition, like Camus. I've got them on the run. Laughing at other people, with deliberate spiteful intent, they damn themselves; and I am drawing them into it. How I love winding people up.

If I go to Victoria, it will be in order to write a new chapter in my book.

A scented sea of bosoms, remember that!

8th August 1998

I grew up on the black & white Tarzan films and the beautiful Maureen O'Sullivan, I grew up on the black & white Flash Gordon series and the beautiful Dale Arden.

They slather and boil in my wake, and I sail on serenely. They feed me a little bit MORE electricity. The little people will try all they can, but never dent me, never scratch me, never slow me, they can only speed my progress more, put more solar wind in my sails, more electricity in me. They feed my deep sense of romantic herohood, they feed my megalomania, they feed my deep sense of joy, and sybaritic pleasure, they make the blood in my mouth sweeter and sweeter. I LIKE turning people against me. I like listening out for their obsession with me. I thrive on alienation, laughter, abuse, attacks; it powers me; it multiplies my deep sybaritic pleasures. It enriches my experience of life, pleasure in pain. How they are DEFEATED. I let them dash themselves to pieces against me, because I am immovable brilliance, genius, power, sybaritism. I LIKE MY POSITION. I am in a very safe place here, with my trees and lushness in the bowl of protecting buildings behind, on a scented sea of bosoms.

The romantic hero loves the sybaritic pleasures of pain.

Can you imagine their petty, boring, ordinary little lives?

7th August 1998

Society cannot stand anyone who won't play by their rules, so they gleefully try to destroy that person, but then when that person won't even play along in being destroyed, they get enraged and infuriated, and it is very hard for them.

When you resort to abuse it is a revealing sign that you have lost the argument, and in fact you never had a valid argument in the first place; abuse is the unintelligent's substitute; a very blunt and ineffective weapon. How easy it is to play such people like a piano; to run rings around them; to tease them until you have driven them mad.

They cannot stand it because they know I will always triumph over them; my intelligence will never go away, my beauty will never go away, my power will never go away--they are all INCREASING. Every time I force them into abuse is a victory for me, and another defeat for them. It just proves I am annoying them, it just proves they have let me get under their skin.

I have nothing to be embarrassed about,  because I'm not the one throwing abuse at other human beings; they have got a lot to feel uncomfortable about. I LIKE IT that they are so obsessed with me, it is very pleasantly flattering.

They have made a serious and fatal tactical error. THE POWER THEY HAVE GIVEN ME. Reap the bounty of it now.

Psychologically, to abuse others is a sign you hate yourself. To attack others is the moment you defeat yourself.

They thought I would become weak, and I have become stronger. It must be very infuriating for them. How they boost my ego. It is sign that they are frightened of me.  I'M SORRY, YOU PEOPLE, BUT I'M GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH. I'm sorry that it infuriates you so. I'm strange, and I like it, and I'm hanging onto it. The wildness, the spontaneity, the rampancy, the freedom of my life.

The other person's grass is never greener, what petty, dead end, little lives they lead, can you imagine? The horror! How they must be infuriated that they STILL cannot get to me.

6th August 1998

I have had to learn ways to bind my own wound; I have had to make my own bandages, and my own balm. I am my own creation, I was left uncreated, unformed, in a burning building. I am wild, and rampant, and completely reckless.

3rd August 1998

They attack because they're powerless, and frustrated; seething with jealousy and envy: ---the green-eyed monster.

I love the freedom of being unattached, I love the power of being on the fringe and not privy to any responsibilities; I love the Baudelairian perspective this gives me. Frankly, my position is delicious, and very precious. This is just what I've always wanted, the life of the flaneur, the sybaritic pleasures. I've got my life already, like Francis Bacon; I have got my gilded gutter life, my sleazy double life. Everything is in place, and I mean everything.

1st August 1998

Be ruthless, and vicious, and sadistic.

I’m not frightened of being ECCENTRIC, I’m PROUD of it, it is my glory, by singling me out they are playing into my hands, they are puffing me up even more with  a sense of my own specialness and brilliance which I suspected I had, now they’re proving it. They don’t seem to realise: to be eccentric and totally ignored would be terrible, to be eccentric and given all the special attention, that is what eccentrics crave and glory in. They are giving me precisely what I revel in. This is the size of their defeat. Is this really the only price I have to pay for my genius?

Been thundering and drizzling all afternoon and evening (7pm now). Other people’s lives are not so happy. That is why it doesn’t pay to go round laughing at other people. If you keep to your line, and keep a clear conscience you’re always going to come out of it stronger; and they only even weaker.

It’s like Will Hunting trying to explain how much he likes his job as janitor and how noble it is, when inside he’s dying away.

You’ve got to hold your nerve, hold to your own line, withstand all the pressure, stick to your own gameplan; to make your mark in the world of poetry, to have your success there, success being measured in attaining the highest equilibrium of mind, the greatest spiritual calm, and deep pleasure.

It’s like Napoleon trying to present his Egyptian campaign as a brilliant glorious success, glossing over the Battle of the  Nile defeat to Nelson.

To be alone in this world makes it hard to find your equilibrium, but to have to find it under constant sniping fire makes it more of a trial still, but it makes the satisfaction greater when  you do find it and keep it.

31st July 1998

That’s what I like to do, and they can’t stop me. I am the way I want to be, and they don’t like it, they don’t like my brilliance, my intelligence, my beauty, my serenity, my grace—they are my pawns. They are playing into my hands, they are falling into their parts in my experiment without realising they are giving me the research I need.

Don’t they think perhaps it is a sign of their own insecurity? Do they not think they are giving the game away a little?

“A misunderstanding could damage your reputation and injure your confidence. As everything intensifies, patience is your last resort. Despite outer confusion, remain calm if you can, as your inner experience will be full of inspiration and brilliance.”

“Luckily your independent temperament isn’t too bothered by lack of co-operation from other people this week. You’ve got your own agenda and you are quite happy to get on with it. You see obstacles and delays as opportunities for change, but do guard against finding a new problem to replace the old one you’ve just solved.”

Don’t dim your light for anyone. You can never have enough enemies. I will enjoy taking them on.

Do whatever you know people are going to reproach you for; dare them; wind them up.

30th July 1998

I’m suffering from an addiction I don’t want to be cured of. Soho is experiencing life at second hand. First hand is not possible, I can’t get excited about something I’ve never known. The Dionysian frenzy of it. The thrill of doing something illicit, the thrill of burying your whole life in illicitness.

The thrill of going to U-- in winter would be nice; I’ve done the hard bit which I dreaded of going during summer; I should relish the winter visits now. These empty drifting days are beautiful aren’t they! I am a ------ologist, a 1930s Indiana Jones of the mind. I am Moriarty. I feel so filled and tingling with my brilliance, genius and beauty down there this morning.

Very brief but heavy shower, and one burst of thunder.

29th July 1998

To put myself on the edge of existence, and see what’s there; hold myself there in that extreme place. In that extreme place you can record yourself. You have to get beyond people before you can really start to record. Relationships are a messy nuisance. Unnecessary pressure and strain. I am one of the wonders of the world because I do lean at a strange angle. It is a good fix, I don’t really want to give it up do I? You’re dragging me back from the edge of existence. Psychologically it hadn’t ended; psychologically I needed it to end properly, then I could go on with my life. I am anarchic and wild. Be anarchic and wild in every second!

24th July 1998

How I love the sounds of the jungle! I want to become an "unrestrained colourist with a richness of line bordering on the violent"!

I am Dracula, I am tall and dark and mysterious, and brilliant, and intelligent, and genius, and rich: what more could I possibly want?? I take their unending squeals of abuse as a compliment, and as such are warmed by them.

You think I should change to fit in with your dogma, when surely your dogma should change to encompass my extremes?

17th July 1998

I feel like a butterfly, and you’ve pinned me to the board; every time I flutter my wings a bit you hit the pin in even further. I want to find my own way to live, I don’t like it if you think you’ve already got the answer. The patient is likely to fall back inside themselves again. I think if you won’t admit the problem you can’t help soften it.

15th July 1998

Oscar Wilde showed the stupid people up for what they are; I hope that is what I can do, too. One day if I’ve got 60 or 80 books behind me, that body of work will show the stupid people up, it will educate people about people who are borderline autistic, demonstrate that that is as valid and as valuable a thing to be as anything else. It is about seeing value in everything. A writer, etc. We have a fundamental difference, I have an autist’s neutrality. What do we need slugs, and millipedes and ants for, people say; but in fact they are all performing a vital function, they are all part of the brilliant biodiversity of the planet. Like if rainforest is destroyed, they bewail 20 species have been lost that no one had seen yet! And they are right to bewail that! L-- might only be useful to me when it reverts to a correspondence relationship. She says whenever I talk to her about Sarah I always sound very scathing (?), when we seemed to have a warm and important relationship. Felt miserable there, and coming out.

It is about helping me accept my isolation. It is about helping someone accept their incurable cancer and make their remaining life as rich and exciting as possible.

If you keep contradicting me, it will make me defensive. I am a rare endangered species, and if you keep contradicting I feel you want to wipe me out, too. If you allow me to continue living, we can start to make progress. I love my little brother so much, I cannot let you destroy him and all he stands for. He has been attacked and abused all his life, and told it was his fault, but not anymore. I’m taking a different path but that is the only way I can extract the material I need to extract. I tried living normally, in a bewildered limbo, for 28 years, now I’m going into the jungle to extract that extinction. My differentness must be preserved because that is what is special about me: that gives me the only advantage I’ve got. If you keep trying to trip me up, then I’m always going to have to defend myself, aren’t I? I go through life, hypersensitive, looking for the first sign of an obsession I can cling onto; because my obsessions are my glories, they are my glorious surreal creations.

“A sense of one’s own strangeness” is a wonderful thing to discover in life, and you try to take that away. I must fight to the death to protect that. I find this philosophical conversation stimulating and unblocking. A lifelong bid to heal that wound, to be left alone is the way to live life, because it is what M showed me. If I have to stop living alone, you are forcing me to abandon that little baby forever, then he would die.

14th July 1998

I am superior and triumphant, and they are worsening their position all the time. Let them wonder; as I happily continue along my merry little way. Great people do attract the abuse of the stupid people, they feel afraid of me. Oscar Wilde had it, Van Gogh had it; they recognise I am great and are terrified of me.

It is interesting; what material they give me.

I am showing them how to live life on the edge. I am refining my rough genius, making it more pointed and sophisticated and deadly.

I am living in a fantasy world, a hellish world of mining the coalface, like in Outland with Sean Connery on some remote Jupiter moon; but the rewards are enormous for those prepared to do it.

I love the abandon and Dionysian negation of Marxworld.

I love their opposition. How their opposition thrills me. What electricity they give to my life. What sexual power. Completely immerse myself in that sleazy yellow Marxworld; it is MY world; it is where I know myself best, it is where I belong. I thrive and flourish and bloom on whatever energy they can give me; whatever blood they let me suck. I am in the position I would choose to be in.

I TAKE WHAT I NEED FOR MY BOOK.

They're jealous because they can't touch my riches, they are out of reach, I move in realms & opera houses & cinemas & football stadiums & pubs & restaurants & clubs they don't understand, that are barred to them forever. They can't stand not being able to move in my circles. How I kill myself laughing at them; how pathetic they make themselves look.

This is my fix. They are providing me with my red fix.

They don't understand how I am using them, sucking them vampirically. Give me more! I am rapacious. I'm forever out of their reach, and that's all they can do.

9th July 1998

Jumping to please other people, you'll  be jumping all your life. Because that's the way THEY are? That's not the way I am, does that matter?

My dreams, my fantasies, my riches: That is my paradise, that no one else can compete with, that is what they are jealous of, that is what they fear. They are trying to launch pre-emptive strikes to stop me, but fail miserably and become increasingly desperate.

I have a weakness, a penchant, a liking for sex clubs.

I am a powerful polemicist on my own behalf.

I thought I could come back and have a conversation on a more intelligent basis than before. Not indoctrination. Sarah's got a lot to learn. Maybe if I write 60 or 80 books, that body of work will help educate people.

7th July 1998

This quest to find out what's wrong with me, instead of trying to get better; they want to paper over what's wrong with me, pretend it's not there.

The closer the threat of work comes, the more desperately I yearn to return to Sunset Strip. The more exquisite it becomes, the more I taste the blood in my mouth, the pain in my gums. Joe Orton, "if you want to get fucked, get fucked; when you're dead you'll regret neglecting your genitals." I EXULT in being different, and doing things differently.

At 28, Frank Sinatra just started inventing himself, in  New York. I can just start now.

What if there's nothing there? I am a genius of nothingness. The nothingness an abandoned baby feels.

6th July 1998

I want to give myself over to P&P, I want to lead the double life.

"Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton. A funny, depressing, vivid and mundane chronicle of London pub life before the war. From the early evening hope of the night's first drink to the stale cigarette smoke and unfulfilled promise of last orders, Patrick Hamilton describes the highs & lows of career alcoholism and observes the brutality of barroom philosophising."

I'm a solitary creature and to be frank, that's how I want it. With some money in my bank, my situation is perfect.

Dandys Boys Better Beware, a great dancer song, like the Americans Nirvana & Levelllers dance! Loud, and agressive and raucous, turned way up loud! I want to completely lose myself in Soho.

Be weird and monstrous and elegant like Will Self.

I am flattered by their attention. I want more of it. It shows they are thinking about me.

I believe in hedonism, doing everything for pleasure on the spur of the moment. A sensationalist. I have set them up for their fall now. I'm flattered by the attention.

5th July 1998

They think I'm the victim, but I'm the master criminal. I'm the Fantomas leaning over Paris pulling all the strings, including theirs. Let them carry on thinking I'm the victim; that's how us criminal masterminds get away with it.

4th July 1998

Isabella Rossellini nude getting out of swimming pool; be wild and rampant.

3rd July 1998

It's a test of my willpower, to see if I can do something I hate for six months. Fresh material, fresh flesh, fresh blood! A new feeding ground. Always do something you think you can't. Then you can go back to your sybaritic lifestyle, thinking that you've earned it.

1st July 1998

Victoria is part of the story as much as sitting here is. I'll be able to afford records again, spectacles, second hand bookshops. Lorca went to New York and hated every minute of it, he was unhappy for six months. Do the same. Be writing the story while I'm AT Victoria, in my head, in my notebooks. I am fire, I am volcano, while I'm at Victoria. I'm doing it because Lorca was unhappy for six months in New York.

29th June 1998

It will give me freedom. To come back from a mission in Egypt back to the camp and the tent-room of Rima, the expedition photographer. I'm sorry, but I don't lead a conventional life. I am an explorer in the desert, like T.E.Lawrence.

I WANT to take all they throw at me; they don't throw enough. I have my passing fancies.

28th June 1998

27th June 1998

I live on a different level, because I MAKE my own level.

I am playing a trick on them. I am working an elaborate scheme on them.

26th June 1998

I am creative, and inventive. It is all part of the Game. The abuse they attempt to heap on me gives me the electricity I need. I go to Soho, delightedly, rampantly, I revel in it, I exult in defying them and frustrating them again. I need them to fill me up with power, with their electricity, so the monster can LIVE.

I have caught them in my trap.

I do everything for my greater glory; everything is to make me more powerful.

"You will weave your way through life, taking jobs when you have to, always staying one step ahead of your pursuers."

Now I've set myself this challenge: phase 1 is completed, everyone is against me, I've got the starting conditions set up perfectly: now I start to make my achievements using this electricity, this material, in the teeth of this storm. Hold your line, no matter what; despite all the knockers and their bitter hatred and spitefulness; hold to your line, keep your nerve. They only attack so fiercely because they are terrified, because they know you have found the right line, which will elude them forever.

22nd June 1998

I am afraid I will just have to frustrate them with my invincibility, and my ruthlessness.

"New York represented more than a refuge for Lorca. When he returned to Spain in 1931, he had undergone a change: As his friend, the poet Luis Cernuda, remarked: 'I seemed to note a greater decisiveness in his attitude, as if something once intimate and secret in him had been affirmed.'"

I operate by my own mad rules. In my own secret game.

I'm not giving them anything ever, because I'm not like them. I am Van Gogh. I am Oscar Wilde. Just drift. I am the monk in a monastery. Life is beautiful, and exciting.

19th June 1998

18th June 1998

You must love every second of your history: whether it's good or bad makes no difference: it is all experience just the same. Good or bad has no meaning, because you are a detached observer only. Bad experiences ARE no spur to me to change, because they are simply another thing to observe and record and make something out of. Nothing really gets you down for long, because the worse it is, the richer the slime it produces. Like that bat cave in NW Guinea or somewhere.

I don't want to be other than what I am, I just want help to be what I am. I think it is fake and bogus to try to bend me to be other than what I am, but being what I am is hard.

A river must follow line of least resistance: trying to change it ruins the whole ecosystem; perhaps at last I am realising that. I need an other to discuss my strange predicament with. Ripped by the pressure to be like other people; it's bad enough to be myself without the pressure of being like other people.

I'm reckless, and wild.

I need to discuss this final transition to another life, before I can feel happy with it.

There was no great shock; it's not like what wiped out the dinosaurs, where's the smoking gun, where's the crater; I was born dead; we all born dead, but then we are stimulated and activated, but with me I was born dead, and then that was it, I've always stayed dead. It's no good trying to activate me now.

I want to go further out on a limb, I want to be in even more extreme position.

"Come in No.9 your time is up." "We've only got 6 boats." "Oh. Are you in trouble No.6? Are you in trouble No.6?" I disappeared off the end of the scale years ago.--I was trying to impress that point on Sarah, I want to talk to someone about why it is precluded.

16th June 1998

I like being in this extreme place; I secretly, privately, love it. I giggle hysterically to myself at the unbelievable hedonistic pleasure of my situation.

14th June 1998

How I like being a vampire now. It is all part of my brilliant Frankenstein creativity; I create things so I can feed on them.

13th June 1998

I make my own rules, and live by them; they don't like it, they are jealous because they wouldn't have the courage to live outside the rules, they hate my beauty, and bravery.

12th June 1998

I am impish, and mischievous. I make my own rules, that is my genius.

11th June 1998

"Others behave as though they are in a strong position when in fact the reverse is true. Once you find the chinks in their armour, victory is inevitable."

"Like Williams Orton was gay, working class and a great diarist; unlike Williams Orton revelled in his sexuality. He sought sexual adventure at every opportunity. but Orton wanted Williams to do more than take vicarious pleasure in his exploits; as his diary reveals, he urged Kenneth  to shed his inhibitions and become more like him: 'I'm basically guilty at being homosexual, you see' he said. Well, then, you shouldn't be, I said. Get yourself fucked if you want to, get yourself anything you like. Reject all the values of society, and enjoy sex. When you're dead, you'll regret not having fun with your genital organs."

"Orton had failed to revive Williams's stage career, but he did transform his private world. In the summer of 1960, Orton and Halliwell took Williams on holiday to a place that would change his life. Tangier in the 1960s was a haven for gay men, drawn there by the availability of sexual partners in a society tolerant of unconventional lifestyles. Typically Williams approached the Tangier experience with more restraint. But while the temptations Tangier offered unsettled him, Williams couldn't resist completely. In Tangier, Williams could skirt the fringes of all that both repelled and fascinated him; it offered an escape from his unhappy life at home, and, as these previously unpublished paragraphs reveal, somewhere that he could relax and feel PART of life. 'On all the occasions I've fled to Morocco because of some inner despair. There wasn't one really successful visit, in the sense of spiritual replenishment, but they all worked after a fashion because new rhythms were created, and the PENDULUM MUST SWING. It is when the pendulum is motionless, or barely moving at all, THAT is the time of suicidal despair."

The more challenges I'm presented with, the more I'm excited. Just to get drunk, and go wild and go to Boulevard for a change, that's all right.

10th June 1998

I play my own game, and they don't like it because they don't understand it.

5th June 1998

I love going into the underground of Soho, under the black thundery clouds, like last year to Soho Cinema and Boulevard and Astral.

Another cold rainy start to June like last year; but last year it served my need for vampirism -- now? Things are quite calm and cool in Phnom Penh, writing my book, that is the strong need now.

I am triumphant, I am rampant, I continue to do what I want. I am Joe Orton.

3rd June 1998

The world is a rich fantasy, like The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. By seeing it as a fantasy is the only way I can get through it e.g. Zelda Fitzgerald. It is my devil. That is my brilliance. So I choose not to be too friendly, that is my choice.

Therapy was very enjoyable today: I was able to talk about my greatness, how I should be worshipped, bowed down to, I felt powerful; being able to talk about these things. Unless you devote everything to making you rich, you won't create anything beautiful or special. I'm extreme, she didn't want me to be extreme, because that would prevent closure in 16 weeks.

2nd June 1998

1st June 1998

You've got to realise how blessed you are!

Sexual freedom is the key. Where am I going to get money from? I must think of something new. "Reject all the values of society, and enjoy sex. When you're dead you'll regret neglecting your genitals." Kenneth Williams in Tangiers. F.G.Lorca in Havana. Me in Soho. The pendulum must swing, that is the thing. Be wild like Joe Orton. I must really bother them, with my continued serene existence. And the pleasures I enjoy: the cinema, the opera, the football, Soho Cinema and Sunset Strip, the books, the writing, Upton.

31st May 1998

What people reproach you for, cultivate.

30th May 1998

The pleasure those films give me! Sybaritism. A new Europe Symphony. 

I play by my own rules, in my own world, to my own set of standards, and that makes me untouchable to them.

What if I don't do anything on the book today, or tomorrow? What's the hurry? I've got all the time in the world, I am the king in my own kingdom. I am Emperor in my 1848 Marxworld. I take their attention of me as a great compliment. Their smallness is drawn to my greatness, like iron filings to a magnet.

I only take up things when they've become eroticised for me, too. I feel I am to become something great, a great philosopher, a great psychologist, a great writer: I am just now starting on that journey, that archaeological quest, that 1930s Indiana Jones of the mind adventure. I love my brain so much now, my thoughts excite me so much. I feel I have moved beyond people forever. Truly, I am: Master of the universe. This is the day (Tuesday, May 30th, 1995) when I realised black bob had gone. Now I live for pure thought, I also live for pure masturbation. My last visit to Sunset before the Chelsea-Vicenza game, I allowed myself to disengage and enjoy it in the realm of pure thought, pure masturbation: nearly to leopardskin JF and red swimsuit sister, but then really to voluptuous S D--.

29th May 1998

I am a law unto myself. I do what I have to do, for my purposes. I am so powerful I can strike wherever I like. I am someone who is completely unrepentant. Whatever you do you must do it to the nth degree. You must go all the way. It is very hot again today. Yesterday probably was the last chance for me. I've been investigating the wilder shores of my sexuality.

Jemma was in station, this time with jacket over white blouse. Got off Charing Cross and walked up to Quintos etc, bought Steiner's Tour by Philip O'Connor, which seemed interesting and mentioned Dean Street, but I resisted buying A Man Without Qualities Volume III but I may go back for it. Murder Inc had the new Fu Manchu omnibus, volume 1 and 2, yellow and red, and very nice they looked, too; plus the hardback Brides of Fu Manchu from before.

From there I walked back to ENO but the girl said the balcony was closed tonight! They had upper circle for £2.50 but none in convenient position so I left it and just went to pub for 2½ pints before going to The Soho Cinema. I stayed for six hours. The films were extraordinary. Virgin on the Run, Tantric Sex, Glimpses, Red Riding Hood, Sunday Sport advert, Boulevard advert, Secrets. They were fantastic, I went further than ever before. At the end Virgin on the Run was starting again and I suddenly felt like I was going to be sick with all the smoke and left. As I came out black girl and man were looking in and I passed them confidently, helped by seeing it was pouring with rain outside, AND it was dark night-time of course, that did make it easier.

People who live in the night do live more on the wild edge of their perversions. Brown bob girl in black jacket and trousers, voluptuous tubby little thing, passed me in Shaftesbury Avenue. Screams of crowds outside Planet Hollywood and people rushing by me from all angles to get there, leaving a deserted neon-lit Leicester Square for me to cross in the absolutely torrential pouring rain--it was bliss!

To cross Leicester Square looking up at all the neon in the pouring rain, all by myself, was so gorgeous, one of my most sublime moments, I was just sorry that it had been preceded by something tacky; but that will always be the case; if I'd gone to the pictures or opera I would have felt dissatisfied and unfulfilled by my day out; that's the way it is.

27th May 1998

I just want to live for yellow now, Sunset Strip and Soho Cinema. Make them my life. Remember that huge voluptuous brown-haired 18-year-old student back in -- days, January-May 1996? I'd totally forgotten her.

Purple fingernails was in --. Very black and rainy-looking again today, really cold.

"I like whipping up a bit of controversy."

25th May 1998

I DO WHAT I WANT! BEHAVE DISGUSTINGLY! This is the fuel I need.

23rd May 1998

"It's all I can do to suck blood. And for that they hound me! Perfidious!"

I am a vampire, and I want MORE.

Those Soho Cinema films were FANTASTIC on Thursday! I will make it my second home now. Things are just getting better and better, and richer and richer: money till October!, writing improving, the option of Upton on Wednesdays, Soho Cinema and Sunset Strip to go to, Manon/Carmen/Dr Ox.

A dark-skied steamy day that is very fresh: perfect day for being in London.

It's nice that people are constantly thinking about me; I am always on their mind.

Thursday evening was magnificent; that is what I shall be doing for the rest of the year (while I'm writing); it made me question whether I need Upton on Wednesdays now. I've lost interest in talking and trying; I just want Soho Cinema and my writing, and enjoying being Dracula in Piccadilly.

21st May 1998

Grey, steamy, drizzly looking day; but warm.

Got off the train in the grey, steamy, fresh weather and went to Wild Things which was OK, I suppose. Then Chandos 2 pints (nearly), by this time it was very sunny as I left Wild Things and remained so for rest of day. Got to Soho Cinema for start of Girls Only (the blonde on bed with polaroids I've seen before), then Evil Temptations 1 (Oliva big tits and blonde in blue see through pvc, fantastic), Boulevard advert, then start of Nurses Know Best, then The Caper (gorgeous blonde secretary), then start of Shameless, which looked the best of the lot but I had to leave for ENO. I could spend every day there, my front row end seat was wonderful, no interruption at all. I so much wanted room. Summer's here now, this must wait till September.

Will I return to ------? It feels so empty and pointless.

20th May 1998

An intruder! Running screaming from my catacombs, his face a mask of frozen horror, screaming "The riches! The riches!", and disappeared out of the castle and was never seen again.

19th May 1998

16th May 1998

"The Princess or: Machiavelli for Women, shows how the princessa becomes the artist of her anger and desire. The goal is the acquisition of 'micro-power'--the power to act in small, tight, dangerous spaces. To achieve this, the princessa is always ready to increase the level of creative tension in any situation--the degree to which a princessa is co-operative must always be balanced by the degree to which she is disruptive.

What are the tactics she uses to accomplish these goals? She acts passionately but thinks straight. She will always make a task seem larger than possible, because that awakens people's heroic instincts. She never responds directly to taunts or attacks--revenge only strengthens the enemy. She shocks her adversary by adopting his position and weaponry. She is disarmingly honest, for telling people what you think they want to hear lets them know that you are a coward at heart.

Above all, the princessa cherishes the power to end the battle whenever she chooses. But the end of the battle is not peace, for the princessa finds her 'wild peace' in the very heart of the onslaught--just as a candle burns brightest in the dark."

15th May 1998

11th May 1998

I was thinking I must humiliate them with my beauty and my intelligence, and my genius, and my power. I'm so powerful I can do what I want. Leave them open-mouthed with awe and admiration at my nerve and audaciousness. The heat really arrived today. Three months to go now.

8th May 1998

6th May 1998

5th May 1998

3rd May 1998

Yes, I like Shannon Tweed films, and, yes, I will continue to go to Soho Cinema films (and Sunset Strip). You've got to live your life. You've got to lose yourself in the spell, and be really prepared to blanket yourself in it, and be totally absorbed in it. Put yourself into that trance-like state.

30th April 1998 Walpurgis Night

There's nothing to do, -----; just type up what's there! It tells the story itself, the way it is. I'm the mad, feverish creator, like Beethoven, Frankenstein. I'm Dr Hoffmann with his infernal desire machine. I am Karl Kraus, CHOOSING to be against everyone in Vienna. The more forward momentum you have, the less sideways falling there is; keep up a good speed. I haven't been able to because I've been so muddled, and mired. Sarah helped, but didn't finish the job.
I live for the sublime, which threatens the slime.
Quite clearly, she wasn't carrying me with her in her argument; but instead of recognising this and backing off, she became more and more stern and insistent. I wanted to be opened up, after -- years that requires a lot of archaeology; but she wanted to carry out this opening and bring it to closure all in 16 weeks, she wanted it opened and stitched up again in 16 weeks, which is a completely artificial timeframe. Fair enough you’ve only got 16 weeks to give me, but you can’t expect to carry out an effective opening and closure in 16 weeks, and to try to do so is just going to make things worse and cause more damage; there wouldn’t have been a 16 week limit on opening and closing King Tutankhamun’s tomb. To do the job properly you need as long as you need. Better to open up one small bit and analyse it instead, at least you’ve done some good then. This sense that he was being rushed and railroaded, made him tense and pressured. After -- years, I’ve just got 16 weeks. She’s not fully grasped the nature of the beast, and doesn’t want to, because the beast cannot be contained in 16 weeks. You get into the story and then find the author is tying up all the loose ends and bringing it to a close, before even developing the story beyond its opening paragraphs.

28th April 1998

Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep; that is why I go to Soho Cinema. Julia Ormond at the BAFTAs.

---- has just brought me eight opera tapes, including Tosca and Carmen; how extraordinary.

27th April 1998

It is a sign of my brilliance. I do what I want. I am Sexton Blake, always scheming. The stupid people are paying me a compliment; I am Karl Kraus. This is who I CHOOSE to be. I'm DESPERATE for their opposition. My insouciance infuriates them. I am invincible to them. Stand tall & prominent, the taller and more prominently I stand the better I feel.

It is all going according to plan; they are playing into my hands.

I may be funny to them, but I do things differently, that is my glory, and I choose to continue that way, rampantly, deliberately, PROVOKINGLY. Do everything you can do to sensationally provoke them. Provoke them so I can infuriate them again.

26th April 1998

I am Sexton Blake, I need them to write about. I am Dracula, I need to suck their blood.

The more the stupid people work themselves up into a spiteful hysteria, the more I enjoy serenely, deliciously defeating them. I love it all, I laugh at them all, it is all part of the Game, they don't understand. The theatricality of my life, life is a fiction we are living in every day, every day is another page of the story, I need them as characters, I need them to provide me with the electricity I need to create, and write.

The two days at Sunset Strip and Soho Cinema were such great, necessary relief, after that terrible long pressure I'd been through. Now I'm relaxed and perhaps can enjoy exploring myself seriously now. "I'm doing it, I'm doing it." Leopardskin bra, what an incredible pitch of feeling.

They will slaughter me, if they haven't done so already; and don't I enjoy that!

23rd April 1998

I am always triumphant over them, because I am beautiful, and intelligent, I am tall, like Dracula. I am going to enjoy this summer. They are losing the battle more & more every day. They can't stand the way I'm still so gleefully happy and serene about the world. I love Soho Cinema completely now, it is my favourite place in London.Its smallness seems in its favour now, more erotic.

We have now entered a new yellow period in my life; perhaps the most intense ever, with Soho Cinema becoming more of a centre than anything before. I spend my money in Soho Cinema, and at the pictures.

I am making great strides; I hope to be able to put pen to paper one of these days.

22nd April 1998

I'm addicted to yellow, like E.A.Poe was addicted to opium. Chinese rickshaws, Soho Cinema is my opium den.

"She suggests that Freud's theories such as the Oedipus Complex (which maintains that all infant children have instinctive sexual fantasies about their parents) were shaped by his addiction to cocaine. The question of addiction is highly controversial, but at an early stage Freud was certainly a self confessed user and in 1885 he wrote an academic paper on cocaine which he referred to as 'a song of praise for this magical substance.'"

"Whether or not psychoanalysis has any scientific basis, Freud certainly saw it as the world's third intellectual revolution: Copernicus showed us that man was not the centre of the universe, Darwin that man was not a unique creation, and Freud that man, being at the mercy of dark unconscious forces, was not the master of his own mind."

21st April 1998

Yellow is important part of my psyche: it must be cultivated like any other. Everyone needs to get highs: different people get them in different ways; their fix.

Black-haired Mary Plazas in La Boheme. Voluptuous big tits Elizabeth Woollett as Musetta. It was so much better with the glasses! Soho Cinema must become my Cafe Momus: I'm afraid it was very good, Kelly 18, Redeem advert, Topless Brain Surgeons, then the film of the Boulevard girls, then Raunch IV. I didn't want to leave, except to go straight to room. I was very high. I decided in Deconstructing Harry I definitely WOULD go to Stockholm, for the vicarious thrill, by coach because I like long journeys where I can see my surroundings passing me; but in Soho Cinema I decided no, all my money must go in Soho Cinema and Sunset Strip.

20th April 1998

Visual image is everything! I've got the greatest excitement in the world, my brain. I'm a dignified noble person, and look at them.

It is like trying to get Dracula to stop sucking blood: he doesn't choose to be like that, he hated himself for being like that, but he is cursed with it. You should stop trying to get him to stop sucking blood, and admit that is not the best form of help you can offer him. Help him cope with his cursed life as it is. He is as much a victim of his personal drives as his victims are.

I am unconventional! That is my glory. I am the wild one, on fire, destructive. Volatile and spontaneous. That is my genius. Revel in the sexual desire people have for me.

I've got my secret hideaways which will always defeat them, and allow me to perpetuate; like Dracula.

19th April 1998

I’m too interested in the archaeology of my own brain, being a 1930s Indiana Jones of the mind. I’m too thrilled by the infinity of self-analysis opening up in front of me; I felt the group was wasting my time so much it made me want to scream; like sitting at my desk in work makes me want to scream: this is taking me in completely the opposite direction from the one in which I need to go.

18th April 1998

17th April 1998

I defeat them by refusing to BE embarrassed. Be wild man, on fire, in my writing.

Their grass isn't greener. Carnival Strip closed last April, and now the Astral Cinema has closed! It meant I had to go to Sunset Strip.

Chelsea 3, Vicenza 1. We ARE going to Stockholm.

Sunset was packed when I went in, like it's not been since black bob's day; blonde bob Sophie Dahl (lookalike) is definitely the new star performer. Listen to Sneaker Pimps, Placebo. Read Fu Manchu. Return to the Chinese rickshaws. It is 1890, reading the Yellow Book, Aubrey Beardsley. He was polymorphously perverse, blackly erotic sex-obsessed, and me too.

16th April 1998

Sarah Douglas in The People That Time Forgot, she's not got a bra on, in that tight straight white shirt, and tight breeches. THAT is why I go to Astral Cinema and Sunset Strip, and will continue to do so as much as I want: I want something else to defy them about. It is my way of showing my invincibility.

I got all I needed. Yellow is pleasurable so I will do it. To show my rejection of their values, with a serene smile.

15th April 1998

I've never got any pleasure from being with other people, always such huge deep pleasure from being alone: doesn't this tell you something? Feel sorry for them that they've really got such a low opinion of themselves, sorry they really feel that bad about themselves. Abuse comes out of self-hatred.

They punish me for being brave enough to follow my own path, into deep frightening jungle. They fear discovery too much otherwise they'd do it. We are the brave ones, the fearless adventurers.

I'm operating moves on levels they can't comprehend, never even knew existed.

14th April 1998

Astral Cinema and Sunset Strip: a pleasant way of passing a couple of hours.

13th April 1998

Anything which serves my writing has to be done: I make no apologies. It is my glory. My speciality. I pity them for only having the mundane real world to make do with. I revel in my invincibility, in winding them up.

I love being the centre of attention. Those poor little insects, they can't get near me.

"But he was also at a distance, more determined, for himself, for himself."

"I rise above it, frankly love it, and all because I'm mad about the boy."

The abuse has INCREASED in the last two years: but amused by their stupidity, I take glee from strolling serenely by them, like blood from a loose tooth, it is the sweetest taste. To quote Noel Coward "I rise above it; frankly love it." I take pleasure from being against everyone; I enjoy annoying the stupid people. Like Karl Kraus in prewar Vienna, on the lip of the volcano.

"Nothing will convince the bigots, but it will discourage the blackmailers." Hypocritical slime, how it annoys them that everything they do plays into my hands.

"Freud, then, long remained hospitable to the pleasures of the senses. He expressed some sympathy for Horace's dictum carpe diem--'seize the day'--a philosophical defence of grasping the pleasure of the moment that appeals to 'the uncertainty of life and the unfruitfulness of virtuous renunciation.' After all, he confessed, 'each of us has had hours and times in which he admitted that this philosophy of life is right,' At such moments, we are apt to criticise the pitiless severity of moral teachings: 'They only understand how to make demands without offering compensations.' Stern moralist though he was, Freud did not deny pleasure its innings."

"In a delightful little essay on transience, written, it is important to observe, during the senseless carnage that was the First World War, Freud argued that while all beauty 'is doomed to decay', this truth entails neither some mystical immortality nor mournful gloom: 'If there is a flower that blooms only for one single night, its bloom does not appear to us on that account any less splendid,' What matters is the emotion that beauty and perfection arouse at the very moment they do so."

The flower of pleasure that bloomed in Astral Cinema for one night only.

12th April 1998

The central question: will I indulge my yellow fever or not?

It's the same as with anything: if you just dip into pornography it won't be any good; you must totally give yourself up to it, immerse yourself in it, wrap its blanket around you. Whatever you do, do it to the nth degree. I haven't got the energy, time, money or inclination to immerse myself in it anymore; but still I can't resist dipping into it, tormentedly, and getting nothing out of such tortured half-heartedness.

10th April 1998

My refusal to be cowed, my refusal to apologise, my refusal to be embarrassed: BRAZENNESS! As long as I’m doing what I want to do, I’m happy, and regret nothing. You’ve got to be a brazen hussy, show you enjoy what you do. Then they can’t touch you. If you’re embarrassed, then they will kill you forever, because they’ve found the thing that makes you hide your head. You must show you really enjoy what you do, and will do so again, torment them with the pleasure you are getting and they are not! Their laughter is really to hide their envy and hatred because you’re getting such a kick and an adrenalin rush which is denied to them, because of their caution. 

Smile apologetically, sorry, it was research! Sorry old chap! And totally defeat them, taken the stick out of their hands and reused it for yourself, to continue to beat them with. It is all a sign of your superiority, that you are a human being, put here by God, to be yourself to the nth degree, with triumphant glee. 

It is the stupid parasites marched up to the castle, then try to burn it down, because I am a genius! I am creating life itself! If you refuse to apologise, refuse to be embarrassed, no one can touch you, they do their worst and see that it hasn’t even scratched you, you are still smiling serenely, happily, and you let them dash themselves to pieces against you. You must be brazen from the first second: face your enemy, embrace your enemy with smiles and love, how lovely to see you here, what are you doing here, come in and have a cup of tea, and defeat them forever. 

I am the king of -------. I have the power to grant or withhold my interest.

Dracula, cornered in Piccadilly, turns on his pursuers and snarls “Revenge will be mine. Time is on my side.” Van Gogh didn’t die or fail because he held onto this beliefs till the end, Karl Marx didn’t die because he held on to his beliefs till the end. Who remembers the names of those who threw abuse at Van Gogh? I am a vampire. I sit in corners and suck whatever I can get out of people that is useful to me, and for that I am hated and reviled!; so be it: they can never defeat me.

9th April 1998

Always go into the middle of the enemy, always walk towards the thing you fear; by the very act of walking TOWARDS it you feel thrilled by your courage and daring; embrace your insecurities tightly, with love! Demonstrating your moral courage, and their moral cowardice. I LIKE to be against everyone in Moloch! It's the position I would choose to be in. You force them to shame themselves, you force them to pile more and more up on their slate.

I love winding people up. Standing in the Charing Cross Road under the completely black skies, yellow shops all lit up, people staring out with trepidation, I suddenly thought isn't life wonderful, the joys of spontaneity & madness & doing brilliant crazy things! You just gloss over my problems, because they might make things complicated for you, but I still have to live with them.

They are so STUPID. I am wild and spontaneous, like a firefly.

The secret is brazenness. Make a virtue of it, wear it like a success. The sublime and ridiculous world of Francis Bacon. I want to see some nudity again.

8th April 1998

I LIKE to be against everyone, in --! That's the position I would choose to be in.

I'm amused watching these pygmies trying to lay a glove on me. I like Sunset & Astral & Soho Cinema because it's sleazy. Be an observer of minute details. I've set the experiment up and now I'm watching it take its course.

This need to hurt me is very ugly, and very strange: you'd think they would want to make themselves look more beautiful in order to hurt me, yet they desperately make themselves look more ugly and reveal themselves to be so bothered by me: they defeat themselves.

Poor things; everything they do plays into my hands!

3rd April 1998

I've lanced another boil, and I feel much better for it again! Use everything to my advantage, so they can't get at it.
I came through everything they threw at me! They became smaller and more diminished in the process, and I've become bigger and more beautiful and more supreme, and more dominant. The more in the wrong they become, the more in the right I become! The more dominant I become and the more they weaken their own position. 

2nd April 1998

Force them to embarrass themselves, so I can study it. Dracula, hunted, hounded, "You think you have left me with no place to rest--but I have more. My revenge has only just begun." Always walk towards whatever is frightening you, get as near to it as you can at all times, love it, love the thing you fear.
I carry on: I'm working on a complicated scientific scheme they couldn't begin to comprehend, indeed it is still hard to comprehend even to me! But I sense it is there.
I am a social anthropologist, of my own brain, my own autistic relationships with no-one.
They think I am a glutton for punishment: I am a scientist.
I am consumed by my mission: by my own  brilliance; the importance of my task. They punish me because I'm  beautiful and intelligent, while they are ugly and stupid. Beauty and intelligence is a threatening combination to people like them. Make a virtue out of what is hurting you. The meaningless of my life has become my very area of study, thereby with one twist giving intense meaning to my life!
I need money to fund my continued exploration at the coalface of Astral, Sunset Strip, Boulevard, Chelsea, ENO.

1st April 1998

They're not honest: they try to make me feel inferior when it is because THEY feel inferior. A honest man would admit he felt inferior and try to improve himself but they just try to bring me down to try to feel superior: I must, alas, disappoint them! I feel stronger than ever; I have discovered my transcendental powers.

31st March 1998, Serpent's Egg Day

"Ain't nobody, loves me better": lovely in summer to go and see dancing girls in Sunset Strip, coming out in the sticky heat: it is part of London bohemian life like any other, same as Foyles bookshop, ENO, Chandos, Chelsea, everything. Coco Jambu. So summery today, all lawnmowers out. Last night Berlin & Berliners was on BBC 2 Open University, this day last year was purple Sam Jessop picture, "The Serpent's Egg". A Question of Identity: Berlin & Berliners.
-- is a nest of vipers and I'm the biggest viper of them all, taste the sweet poison in my two fangs;  because I'm the most intelligent, I'm ingenious.

30th March 1998

I'm warm and safe and content, and Summer is coming! -- is a nest of vipers, but I'm the biggest and most viperous of them all. I look back on the Raven period, that hot hot slow summer, with such fondness and excitement and nostalgia, don't I? I want Raven again, I want Sunset Strip again, like that first September in black spits of rain and wind--"My name is Tallulah".

29th March 1998

28th March 1998

"A stunning alliance between the Sun in Aries and Pluto in your sign is an indicator that you're not just surviving recent changes, but beginning to revel in a whole new life. Life is a process of continual development and stagnation is death."
"A wonderful, delectable period opens up for you now. It's the most creative period of your whole year. The birth of something from a child to an idea will alter your life in the most delightful way. It's out with the dismal old and in with the dazzling new."
"You are at a crossroads and realising that a super-human is required to sort things out. You do possess the necessary courage and wit to work through and after the initial hard work is over you'll be able to enjoy some kind of new lifestyle."
"You have talents and skills which you have underused or have been underestimated. During April, do some brainstorming with those you care for most. Try to come up with new ways you can better your world by utilising your abilities far more."

27th March 1998

The fact is my science IS at Chelsea. It is a vital place I can study my visceral pleasure in detachment. It is my life's subject. It is my green laboratory. I am a photographic plate. That is who I am. Keep trying to force me to talk to people is to ignore who I am, and I think that is rude, that is why we always seem to be talking at cross-purposes. I am weird, so that makes life hard, so help me find a way to make a niche for myself despite this problem. I was very surprised to hear you say acceptance is an important job therapy can do. I'd not felt that to be the case for me. You were stripping me of my arms and legs and angel wings and trying to squeeze me into a little box. It is the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
"Potent planetary influences indicate that what has gone before is of little consequence compared with what lies ahead. And it is Pluto's presence especially that makes you see the true potential of your gifts. Don't worry about what must be forfeited--your strength lies in what remains."
"After recent ups and downs it may seem unfair that you are facing another battle. This time, however, the advantages are all yours and the fact that you are fighting on home ground guarantees success. A decisive aspect between Pluto and Jupiter empowers you to assume your rightful place."

23rd March 1998

I live in a delightful, beautiful world of hothouse flowers, and Charing Cross bohemia. My life is beautiful in every second. I am Aubrey Beardsley. I am Philip Larkin. As long as I've got some money in my bank account, life is enjoyable.

22nd March 1998

I'll do anything for my book. I'm an individual: I do exactly what I want. There are no consequences, because I am dominant, because I have my big fat penis between my legs; crossing the Strand, by Oscar Wilde's statue, in the Chandos pub, crossing Leicester Square, in the Strand restaurant, turning down Villiers Street. 

“Do not compare yourself with someone else: ‘Let each one prove what his own worth is, and then he will have cause for exaltation in regard to himself alone, and not in comparison with the other person.’ Yes, God does not make unfavourable comparison, demanding more than our individual circumstances allow. He accepts our gifts and sacrifices ‘according to what he have, not according to what we do not have.'” 

I am proving my worth by being a recorder from the edge, a recorder of an autistic bohemia. 
Lead a smutty, vital life, like Hogarth, Orton, Wilde, Larkin. Egon Schiele went to the sex dancing girls for inspiration for his paintings. Manet had nude models for his paintings. I as a writer need them too.

21st March 1998

Push yourself to the edges of human experience, to hang there on the edge of the singularity in a moth's web, to record it, before you have to snap back. I am a recorder, an observer, I sit on the edge in semi-detachment and absorb: like a photographic plate recording the pyramids with Adam Hart Jones. This is important moment: this line I've just written.

16th March 1998

14th March 1998

I thrive on opposition. It is the electricity I need to turn things on, get the machinery moving, the retorts & flasks & burners, and dynamos, to power the stories. Let myself go in Soho again, back to normal.

13th March 1998

I am rampant. I love it. They play into my hands. I'm unconventional, I'm an artist. I luxuriate in my eccentricity.

11th March 1998

I am Oscar Wilde. Dandy, laughed at, reviled, but triumphant, forever above them all. It is no insult to be laughed at by the stupid people. They are just seethingly jealous of your intelligence, your beauty, and the amount of delicious dirty sex you are enjoying.

"Decadence and disintegration, still fails to set up the nightmarish intensity of Hoffmann's world."

I want their desperate laughter, and you do see them getting ever more desperate; I crave it; it is the morphine I need to inject. Be rampant, smiling, provoking. Their terror is that the more they laugh the more I go on indulging my delicious, voluptuous pleasures. The more I flaunt it in their desperate, seething faces. Carry on.

6th March 1998

Every thing I want to write has remained unwritten. I've been in too much pain and fear. I need a state of grace. I don't know if such a thing is possible. Everything I've learnt in life, I've learnt as a by-product of my obsessions: I gain so much from each one. I act coldly, and calculatedly. I have my reasons. I do things in my own special way, and pride myself upon it. 

2nd March 1998

My real priorities: I want my room to stay protected, and I want me to stay protected.

Friday 27th February 1998

Thursday 26th February 1998

Use fear like drink, an intoxicant. Smile sillily like your drunk, ride with it, use it: use your fear as a powerful weapon, a powerful monster, it is yours, so it is your weapon, no one else's. Fear, thou art smaller than me. Fear, thou art the silver invincibility in my veins. Ride with it, on the bubbles, become intoxicated with it. Take deep whiffs of it. Pain is pleasure, fear is power. I'm a man, I've got penis and bollocks between my legs. I'm a giant. I am Nietzschean superman. I am Wagner.

Wednesday 25th February 1998 

 "No one can doubt that you've had your share of rude awakenings and hard knocks. In fact, you are in a better position than you have been for some while. Pluto's influence will soon reveal ways in which you can change course with regard to earning and spending money. And so much will be explained around the time of Thursday's solar eclipse, you'll feel you need never be in the dark again. You are witnessing the beginning of a wonderful process of recovery, discovery and joy. It's up to you to decide which elements of the past to hold on to and which to ignore." 

Lots of ferns, lots of Radio 3 turned up loud, lots of baths.

Tuesday 24th February 1998

Accept, -----. I am a monk, living in the monastery. Tranquility, peace, serenity. Let all desires go. Sherlock Holmes & Dr Watson. Sherlock Holmes did without it. You will have a period of sadness, then you will get over it. Sadness is good, it is the morphine I inject. Just accept it, ------, and sadly go on with life.

Sunday 22nd February 1998

Friday 20th February 1998

Monday 16th February 1998

Last Wednesday in Astral was the greatest sexual experience of my life, let's be honest. It was.

Sunday 15th February 1998

Follow the road to inner harmony: A person with an 'autotelic self' is someone who is good at translating potential threats into enjoyable challenges. In so doing, he or she is able to maintain their inner harmony, and so is never bored, seldom anxious, and spends most waking hours experiencing flow.

Monday 9th February 1998 

Picasso, Barnard, Manet, they all painted with their pricks. I write with mine.

Friday 6th February 1998

It is so exciting going up to cinema, knowing I can go to Sunset Strip afterwards.
I'm entering a new golden age. Entering a new golden age, of Francis Bacon self indulgence, and of Francis Bacon's works and period of creation now.

Thursday 5th February 1998

Schadenfreude! They have played into my hands. To suffer the abuse, and not to be crushed by it, but triumph to confound them. To confound! To draw power from abuse, take it in, convert it and use it back at them to confound and distress them, make them see themselves for the small people they are.
Be the mysterious Machiavellian black figure. I'm Orson Welles. I'm Hugh Grant. I've got a thriving personal industry here! My own private publishing company.
Their silly self-humiliation is the sweet air I need to breathe. Schadenfreude. This attempted pain is what gives me pleasure. I inject their abuse like Sherlock Holmes injects cocaine. I will have my Baker Street rooms. It strengthens me, and thrills me, and becomes my dearest companion.
Pleasure in pain!

Wednesday 4th February 1998

I did feel like Francis Bacon in Astral today and coming out afterwards, and it did really help. I have grotesque shameful desires like Francis Bacon, I walk the streets of Soho looking for sexual adventures of a sado-masochistic kind. The sublime and ridiculous world of Francis Bacon. The double life. Wittgenstein’s rough trade: it will always be there. I will always need it. I will return soon to Sunset, I will return to Astral and Soho Cinema.

Tuesday 3rd February 1998

Be silent and polite, mysterious, enigmatic, beautiful & sexy. Dark blue & black. Be Garbo wrapped in black fur. Be Francis Bacon, tormented. No one will deflect me from my path, to my Swiss bank vaults. Enjoy the schadenfreude! It is the opium that Sherlock Holmes injects into himself in his Baker Street rooms!

Monday 2nd February 1998

It is a powerful feeling in Astral, and I am no longer apologetic about it.

World Service programme last night: Francis Bacon sitting in the Colony Room drinking champagne with Muriel Belcher sitting by door holding court, then he'd be off into the Soho streets looking for fun, or gay sexual adventures, usually of the sado-masochistic kind. This is me, drinking in the Chandos, then heading into the Soho streets looking for sexual adventures, usually of the masturbatory kind.

I needed Sarah's help to keep me leaning at a precarious angle without falling, not to put me straight; that is missing the point. I have to be helped to create, that is to function better as a writer, be more productive as a writer, because that is what I am, but I'm being prevented from being it by my conflicts and feeling of falling.

Sunday 1st February 1998

I am not drifting through life: I am sternly, firmly, passionately doing exactly what I want.
I think she should have helped me come to terms with who I am, not made me ashamed for being who I am. I get that off of everybody else. You help people accept something that they don’t like about themselves, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa saying quick, this is an emergency, I really need you now, and Sara came up and says all right then, and gives it that last shove to send it crashing to the ground; I want some temporary support to right myself a bit. Prop me up once and for all, so I’d be safe forever. The tower is one of the wonders of the world; so am I.
I don't want you to send me crashing to the ground and build a new one, because the new one would have an interest of 0% when the old precarious one has an interest value of 100%. Make it safe forever so it can be one of the wonders of the world forever; it must still lean, because it wouldn't have any interest if it didn't lean.
What interests me about myself is the dangerous lean in me, so you have to very carefully prop me up so I'm safely leaning forever. The bit of madness in me is what makes my life worth living.
So we ended our 16 weeks still disagreeing about what to do next, but she had saved the tower for the time being, and subsequently I was able to put some permanent solutions into place, but then I needed some help with them, that's what coming back is for. Just to finish the job of making the repair permanent, and make the tower lean safely forever.
I haven't been able to do anything all these years because of fears about the tower collapsing, I never felt safe. Now that I have come to some permanent solutions, I need support in implementing them; I want to become more productive and function better. I'm starting to feel safer now, the lean is fixed steadily in its place I want it to be. Coming back is part of the permanent solution. To keep me feeling safe, to enable me to write.

Friday 30th January 1998

There was no one there with anything special: no special dancers, no special bodies, no special stage presence, no other world, not like Belly Josephine, Bat Girl, black feathers, black bob, black vamp, etc, etc. I suppose they come and go. I did enjoy going back to pub, then on to Sunset. It's so hard to get turned on at Sunset, Astral is best.

Wednesday 28th January 1998

I tried to get into that Thursday afternoon feeling, smoke jazz ferns, Mrs Parker & the Vicious Circle, Algonquin Hotel, Charing Cross round table, 1920s black bob & cloche hats, Mata Harian, Dixian, Fu Manchu girls, but it was very hard, it feels so empty now. Before it was so electric and meaningful. It was the cauldron of all meaning in my life, it became the crucible. But that milieu is comprehensively dead. I mourn it.