From A Journal of Artifice, Entry 2

February 4, 1995

I copy passages from Anais’ “A Journal of Love” (for Sutton) of her descriptions of Antonin Artaud, since Sutton sent me a quote from him. Upon my contact with these passages I see terrible similarities between Sutton and I and Anais and Artaud, Sutton being an emotional and physical apparition of living death, his air one of crypts and mausoleums and charnel houses. And, as Anais was towards Artaud, I am compelled by the pain and suffering of Sutton, yet I do not think I would care to touch him physically.

*

Monet has affected me: tonight I am a vision in pure pink, a little girl in mismatched clothes and rosy, rouged cheeks. The only black upon me is the black of my dance shoes. I am color!

*

A lonely Saturday night, solitary. I view a music video from an alternative band named Bush, “Everything Zen,” and the lead singer is so agonizingly sexually attractive that I am hurtled into familiar dreams of fame and attention, my loneliness magnified by stirring male beauty and the absence of it in my life. Yet I am adamant to remain patient and satisfied alone, ensorcelled and enraptured in the world of Philip Carey, Chopin’s Valse in b minor, my own thoughts.

*

Madness and death. I am an opium corpse. I go dancing alone, torture myself by the beauty of the effeminate boys. One in particular drives me to the car where I put on the Cocteau Twins’ “Musette and Drums” and wail, shriek, cry inhumanly. A terrifying scream utters from me of pure hopelessness. I drive back and forth manically to and from the club, my face a wasteland, my eyes dead from tears. The pain of all my life uttered in a car so terribly, the wail of utter remorse and despair caused by the presence of unattainable male beauty.

I will die from all the clove cigarettes I have smoked, a whole pack tonight. I am not an artist. I have nothing. And man has no immortality. There is no reincarnation. We are a machine, and when the plug is pulled, we are dead. In joy and madness, the chemicals we consist of bubble and cause us to feel significant, that we have souls, a purpose, mystical qualities. We are too ignorant to understand the simplicity, that all we shall ever accomplish is existence. The ultimate finis.

No matter how much I convince myself otherwise, I yearn for pity from the world.

The death-cry contained the pain at the want of attention from Dr. Bunch, the loss of and my own indifference to Peggy, the fact I am enraptured by the unearthly music of the club and hate to practice Chopin, the doubt of my creativity, the loss of my father, the pain that I could not hold onto Richard. And most of all, the emotional and sexual longing for male beauty, seemingly eternally forbidden to me. The familiar decadence and lust of the club with its Bacchanalian overtones familiar of the 20s. My lovely boy with the jet black hair, grasping another man. Just like Richard. No, not hatred I feel, never that, for what they feel is as natural and profound as what I feel. But jealousy and hurt. So much hurt.