Angst

And there are the days where a sort of empty feeling of loneliness consumes you and makes you bored and unhappy and wanting to spend your last money in a café or bar, just so you can feel that there are people around you, talking and laughing and not being dead. You sit in your room, staring at something you've written or drawn, wondering if it's any good - if it's got worth - wondering if it'll ever be any good, and what kind of price you'll have to pay to get there. Reading Van Gogh's letters, mostly to his kind brother Theo, feeling his loneliness like you feel your own, looking at his sombre, earthy drawings from when he was about 30 and living God knows where - certainly not Arles. Always of poor people, people handling potatoes and peas and sitting on ragged chairs being tired. A man of the people, then.

There's no energy when you start feeling sad. You don't want to be miserable, and you certainly don't want to feel sorry for yourself, but it's still there, refusing to go anywhere but stay right here and now. You draw a self-portrait in the mirror. It's not very good, though better than your last, and even there your eyes and your mouth come out sad and tired, looking like you might cry any second now.

The noises in the street, the long seemingly never ending Boulevard Raspail, scare you. Are they looking for you? Do they remember you - and, did you in some crazy second give them your address, just so you could escape into the night? Not likely. The fear, the worldfear one might say, is never rational, never well founded and thought through. And you think someone has bitten you in the arm and given you some virus - even though the wound is too small, and would be only upper or lower teeth, not both. Who manages to pierce your flesh with only one of those two? You don't know, but your mind doesn't follow normal lines at this moment. It's got the fear in it now, and all you can do is ride it out, jousting with the windmills like our dear old Don Quixote of La Mancha (if only you had a Sancho Panza!).

You want a drink when it's like this, but you can't have one because then you'll have two - and once you've had two, you start feeling safe and warm and fuzzy and a third really can't hurt. Then the world is looking bright and funny, a good place to be, friendly and alive. Pretty soon the bottle is empty and you've ruined not only your chance at working well today, but probably tomorrow too. So you let that bottle of wine sit there, looking sullen and tempting like a naked girl who pretends she won't give you any even though you both know that's a lie.

She said she knew we'd have good sex that night as soon as we started discussing art. God knows why I started talking about art, I have nothing to say about it. Maybe my subconscious mind knew about the good sex but didn't bother telling me, as I'd screw it up if I knew. We fought about it. Battled it out like two alley cats. Certainly as drunk as a couple of alley dwellers. Atleast I was, but I always am when I'm feeling nervous. She was looking beautiful with that fuzzy black hair of hers and those cool grayish blue eyes. Not to mention the rest of her, of course. At some point I was screaming something or other, and I startled myself, because I don't talk about art. It's something I think about, to the point of obsession, but what is there to say about it? It is a tool with which I can communicate loneliness and fear without talking out loud, because no one ever understands what you're trying to say, Wittgenstein and all that.

And then you start writing something - a note in a makeshift diary perhaps to chase the fears, and for a good while it's working, letting you feel good about your words and the world. You can't draw when you're like this, because drawing is too slow and when you stop to be exact, you start thinking again, and then it all goes to hell and your drawings start to look bad. Trying to read some silly american crime novel doesn't work, but it gets you thinking: "what will I do when I've run out of both money and books?" You see yourself sitting in a chair staring at the wall, looking like a dunce - but then a new thought pops into that ever vigilant mind: "Why - I'll have to write more!" - and you laugh out loud, the sound echoing under the ceiling and leaving you a little happier.