From A Journal of Artifice, Entry 1

February 3, 1995

I christen thee, Fair Journal, the landmark upon which all of my woes and joys shall be recorded.

My name is Toni Lynanne Elliott, and I am twenty-one years old.

I approach the weekend by heating tamales and musing upon my freedom for three days to read, think, play the piano, watch La Ronde, and worry over Sutton, my dear, mad, alcoholic poet.

I worry over the respect of my teachers, especially Dr. Bunch. He told me today he had a daughter in college, and I thought of him as a good and wonderful father. I am too aware of my want to be his protegee, his daughter-figure. When I speak to him I wish to use only perfect and intelligent English, thought at times, like today, I slip and use slang or do not enunciate my words correctly. This is madness, true, yet I ache for him to find me special.

*

I sit with Penny at our newly-rebuilt American diner, Denny’s, which I transcend mentally into a French cafe.

I am happily isolative now, still keeping with friends occasionally but for the most part throwing myself into my work and artistic contemplation. I live for my education now, am thoroughly absorbed in school and classes and practicing. I am able to sit at the piano for three hours, though the technicalities of precise pedaling, lifting from a phrase, and accentuation appear often intimidating and unattainable. Yet I continue to try, to concentrate, to tell myself I have the talent, capability, and intelligence to grasp these concepts. In truth I do not believe I have musical talent.

My emotions have become stabilized. Often I become angry because of the fear I am losing artistic expression with the gradual loss of my neurosis. I become angry because I want to become both an Alban Berg and an Anais, to have both musical and literary talent. I believe I have not enough literary ability to become the writer, or journalist, as I desire to, yet with this dream I also continue to try and expand my expression through mastery of language and lyricism. I must always attempt, if not wholly succeed at, my dreams and goals.

I continue to long for a French, or what I perceive to be, method of living, of appreciating sensuality. Of gentle and graceful facades. Smoking in bed, the mysteries of love and sex. Beautiful practices and tools for all actions of the day: washstands, toilette water, tea sets, combs, dressing gowns. The French trends appeal to me of stealing time away for secret and unorthodox amorous adventures, private dining suites, artistic and precise dinners; though I do not believe I would care for more than one lover, at least in this time of my female, idealistic youth! I have pondered upon creating a short film of nothing but a day in the life of a past French citizen and their ritual practices of washing, eating, dressing, caring for themselves - a film I would find total fascination in. At times it seems a pity that our modern American culture has lost many of these practices. Perhaps I am longing for ritual in a spiritual sense through the antique customs of my perceptions of old Europe. I have to be honest - I feel somewhat put off by my friends’ paganist beliefs. I respect them completely, but their rituals do not seem to touch my inner core of faith; the overtones contain an abstract force or divinity which I do not feel close to. I desire a faith which practices reverence to humanity, to the human mind and experience, not to what I feel is some unattainable force in the cosmos. A faith more sophisticated, personal, scientific. Amusingly, I could create rites comprised of worship towards the spirits of knowledge and wisdom, scientific growth, artistic expression, the spirit of psychology and the divinatory power of human minds. And I, a believer in science and medicine, partly believing I shall not die from chain-smoking due to the power of my will to live! But perhaps the power of desire is scientific in itself, that mind over matter is simply another medicinal procedure. And within all my thoughts and speculations, I am still so afraid of dying, possibly due much to Mother’s subtle hypochondria and adamant nagging against all forms of self-destruction.

A word to remember: effluence. And another: idyllic. Petite amie.

*

My head aches from reading, yet I am happy because I am approaching the event where Philip meets Mildred in Of Human Bondage. Perhaps when I arrive home I shall practice my Chopin, Bach, and scales since the multitude of coffee I have consumed shall not permit me to retire. I have that familiar satisfaction from reading Maugham’s words, whom I am gradually perceiving as a demigod and falling in idol-like love with, especially from the analysis of art and its seemingly self-destructive path of life (though I worship, or believe I do, all of art’s components and offspring) that Philip has arrived at in the novel, or this conclusion he has arrived at. His sense and direction have enhanced a positive feeling within me. What a brilliant end to Philip’s encounter with art, or rather, understanding, Maugham has written.