The Marquis de Vaccine: 1999

19th October 1999 Munich

We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for tension. If not for the tension of sexual congress between your mother and father resulting in the climactic explosion, we would not be here. Without the tension there would be no orgasmic explosion. It is the tension that produces the explosion. There would be no universe if not for the tension. The Big Bang would not have happened without the tension. I need the tension. Sturm und drang. Storm and stress. That is what Goethe is symbol of to me. That is what Weimar is symbol of. Lou Salomé seemed to help a lot of them increase that tension, Rilke, Nietzsche, but they had to release it in the explosion of their work. That is what Semele does for me. An extraordinary, intelligent, beautiful young woman, she inspires so much work I’ve produced, but the only explosion she will allow me is in my work. They are spiritual masturbators, but only spiritual. That is the only service they will provide. Weimar, the capital of storm and stress. Goethe, its figurehead. I am always looking for things that will put me into the trance I need that will enable me to shut people out successfully. They hate me because I have got my own personal style; when they have got no style at all, they are herd animals; they are sheep, concerned only with fitting in. Like Kaspar Hauser had his own style, like King Ludwig II had his own style. I am proud of having my own personal style, which so few people do. Now I am poisoning and polluting the people of München—that is good. Sehr gut. I just feel excited now; I just feel stimulated. I am flaunting my Kaspar Hauserness in their faces.

18th October 1999 Munich

This is where I have been today, Neuschwanstein, home of Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, one of my greatest heroes. He was a compulsive masturbator and fantasist, who spent millions making his fantasies real. The castle took seventeen years to build, and then he lived in it for just six months, before the Bavarian government sent troops to arrest him in his bedroom because they said he was suffering from a mental illness (but really because he was spending all of Bavaria’s money). They took him to another castle where the next morning he was found drowned in a lake. King Ludwig’s favourite animal was a swan, and there are pictures of swans throughout the castle, even the door-handles to all the rooms are in the shape of swans’ heads, and that is where the castle’s name comes from. Wagner was Ludwig’s greatest hero, and the walls of all his rooms are covered from floor to ceiling with paintings depicting scenes from Wagner operas. The walls of Ludwig’s bedroom are covered with scenes from Tristan und Isolde. It was very moving for me to be standing in the room where King Ludwig used to sleep, walking the same gloomy corridors he walked, leaning out the windows looking into the wall of white mist that he would have done. This is the place I would most like to live in all the world.

Leaving the castle, I headed up the steep path through the forest which suddenly comes to the Marienbrücke, a little rickety wooden bridge suspended over a very narrow and very deep gorge. When you get to the middle of the bridge all you see over the railings on either side of you is a solid wall of white mist, and beneath you a tiny little waterfall and stream. It was very scary but very breathtaking. I thought I was going to pass out, or that someone was going to come up behind me and tip me over the icy railing. I live in permanent fear of assassination attempts from people trying to finish me off, like they did to poor King Ludwig, and like they did to poor Kaspar Hauser, who I’m going to Nuremberg to make pilgrimage to tomorrow.

16th October 1999

15th October 1999

I’ve cured the twitch in my cheek anyway! All I feel for Semele now is resentment. I imagine seeing her again when I return, and I’m sitting by the window as she’s coming towards me at 9 o’clock, with bitterness. The rightful heir to the throne of Baden. Whit Monday, 1828. Nuremberg. “He is taken up by this eccentric English aristocrat, Lord Stanhope, and he seems to have conceived also some sort of passion for Kaspar in which the dynastic and the sexual seems to be uneasily mixed. He seems to have had ideas, as people have had since, that this child was some sort of potential messiah. His effect on Kaspar in the end was wholly detrimental. He seems to have taken him up, offered him adoption, corrupted him in that sense, given him ideas of a grand status, and then to have dropped him. And whilst it can’t be said that he occasions the murder, he certainly does nothing to prevent it. He leaves him adrift.” “And he is murdered in the end?” “He is, indeed, then murdered after only five and a half years or so, in the daylight.” What I did was violent with Semele. I will be more violent on my own in Europe. I will write her violent postcards. Sarcastic, violent postcards. Because I like writing. I want things to become more violent, more revolutionary. Because there is no further I can move in the other direction: I cannot become more normal, more a respected, liked member of society, more warmed by a real relationship. So stop hovering around waiting for it. I need passion and drive to my life again. I need to be powered along the hanging track by my instincts. It will get me into trouble but at least it will get me somewhere. Trouble is better than nothing. Trouble is better than waiting at Semele’s door to be patted on the head, for being a good boy.

14th October 1999

I am going to the country of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Kaspar Hauser. “Marx, weary of Committees and Societies and Leagues, retreated into the British Museum reading room, ten minutes’ walk from Dean Street, and applied himself to the ambitious task of political economy—the monumental project that was to become Capital…Marx needed to keep himself in a state of seething fury—whether at the endless domestic disasters that beset him, at his wretched ill-health or at the half-wits who dared to challenge his superior wisdom. While writing Capital, he vowed that the bourgeois would have good reason to remember the frequent carbuncles which caused him such pain and kept his temper foul. His living conditions might have been expressly designed to keep him from lapsing into contentment…In a graveside oration, Engels described him as a revolutionary genius who had become the most hated and calumniated man of his time, predicting that ‘his name and work will endure through the ages’”. My wildness is my strength; if they tame me they have won. I have places, and artistic heroes, who mean a lot to me. Semele has real friends who mean a lot to her. We are different creatures. I must relish my wildness. Rhinemaidens. In mini-dresses made of little Deutsche Marks, like Ginger Rogers at the start of The Gold Diggers of 1933. I am going to the town of Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, Egon Schiele, Karl Kraus, Richard Gerstl, Georg Trakl and Sigmund Freud.

I am changing. I am evolving. I have become disillusioned with Chelsea. Cinema. Soho. I have fallen back on just the book. Semele is stunned that she cannot find any sign of life in me. She hadn’t expected it to be this bad. I need to push myself to a very extreme place. Then I would change and become the monster that I need to be. I will reach that extreme point I need to reach. The moment I met the most desirable Queen of my life was the moment I completed my journey to monsterhood. I had nothing to write about, so I wrote about the gutter, the only place that was accessible to me. I am disillusioned with it all. I need a woman to restore my faith in life. Semele alone fitted the bill, but such a thing has never been possible for me. I seek solitude. I don’t care for people at all. Semele is the only person I can feel anything for. She tries to get to know me but finds there is nothing to get to know. That nothingness is the essential me. This makes me feel so useless that I could cry. How to accept what is me? I am as unhappy as Sarah Kane. These black words are all that keep me alive. These black words are all that exist of me in this world.

“You will be buried alive. You will have the flesh torn from your bones. You will be tortured in many horrible and primitive ways. But you will realise that genius which you sometimes have suspected you possess.”—German explorer Voss.

On the train home, I practiced for being on the train across Germany by watching the passing scenery and letting my despair over Semele flood into my eyes. It produced a quality of despair hitherto unknown to me; a new shade had been added to my spectrum of misery. I will go to the Black Forest. I will go to Nuremberg. I will take the Romantic Road. This is my Creation of New Ideals, my Revaluation of all Values. Immorality is worthless, and love is impossible. I want to spend lots of time in Germany, probing my morbid romanticism, before going to Stockholm. I will take the Romantic Road, fuelled by my rejection by Semele.

13th October 1999

12th October 1999

How can there be any end to this pain? When will this pain in the chest ever end? Stockholm will not cure it. NO SALVATION IN BERLIN FOR SCHRÖDER. Only she can cure it but that is the ridiculous hope that causes the pain. I am a closed person. A silent person. A recessive person. A non-existent person. That is what my books are about; non-existence. Sarah Kane will understand the pain I am feeling now in my chest. LULU. SEEDS OF THE POPE. SEMELE. I must try to bear this pain, while tasting the poison in my mouth, to write the books. I have no social life that she has, I have a book life. I have a fearsome book life: I am giving my whole existence over to it. It is a black hole swallowing me up until there is nothing more to be seen of me. Even the soles of my boots have disappeared from Semele’s view now. I have given myself totally over to non-existence. The emptiness of my life previously was filled with the pornography and prostitution of Soho, feasting with panthers, but now that is no longer desirable by me, there is just the emptiness remaining. The sadness at my emptiness. The devastating sense of inadequacy with Semele beside her incredible fullness, her unbelievably busy and packed social life. The constant pain in my chest. Am I really as non-existent as I feel when I am beside her? I have got the books. I will make them everything. I have made them everything. There is just nothing else. I want to…what? Be with Semele? Be inside Semele? Merge myself out of existence with her, so that I don’t have to feel this anymore? Always Semele or not Semele; but a principle: a light in the darkness. That is what she has been: a light in the dark, but not somebody warm and real that I could ever be a partner with, just a light, that relieved the darkness certainly, but not something that I could hold and possess.

“There is a funny side to what you face. There is also a serious factor to be taken into account. Can you laugh and frown at the same time? Can you see what’s so pathetically hilarious, yet also so desperately unacceptable? Can you apply firm treatment with a light touch? Can you be amused, yet outraged? You need to take action, but you also need to take a certain threat or problem with a pinch of salt. Neither be too good-humoured, nor too furious today. Just be effective and clear.”

10th October 1999

9th October 1999

8th October 1999

6th October 1999

4th October 1999

2nd October 1999

1st October 1999

28th September 1999

24th September 1999

22nd September 1999

"Still waters run deep, as you are to prove. Over the next four weeks there'll be times when you want to retreat from the crowd and withdraw into your shell. This will help you to recharge your batteries. It will also offer you the opportunity to take stock of everything that has happened to you over the last year."

21st September 1999

"Play your cards right and you will soon have people eating out of your hand. That's especially likely if they have authority over you. Something that happens now puts a spring in your step and gives your ego a boost. It seems someone is impressed with your abilities and they want to pat you on the back."