Self-sabotaged my plans to paint all day by going out to try a coffee shop down the road. Came for the coffee, stayed for the high incidence of pretty girls. Left severely over-caffeinated and consequently unable to focus for hours.
Stuffed myself with pastry-based delight, played Tetris, finally forced myself to make some attempts at painting.
Started listening to Middlemarch. Very engaging, excellently well characterised, amusing. The authorial insistence on showing off her reading, knowledge, proving that what men can do she can do, is a little too intrusive.
Last night in Paris.
All this reading is going in one ear and out the other. Finished Germinal. Enjoyed the devouring pit, the filthy brutality of existence, the sex, the bourgeois brioche.
Painted, napped, gorged on goodies from the bakery. Consciously slipped in and out of my own stream of consciousness, which may or may not be something akin to meditation, or madness.
“Bread! bread! bread!”
Then he grew angry and shouted furiously in the tumult:
“Bread! is that enough, idiots!”
He could eat, and all the same he was groaning with torment. His desolate household, his whole wounded life, choked him at the throat like a death agony. Things were not all for the best because one had bread. Who was the fool who placed earthly happiness in the partition of wealth? These revolutionary dreamers might demolish society and rebuild another society; they would not add one joy to humanity, they would not take away one pain, by cutting bread-and-butter for everybody. They would even enlarge the unhappiness of the earth; they would one day make the very dogs howl with despair when they had taken them out of the tranquil satisfaction of instinct, to raise them to the unappeasable suffering of passion. No, the one good thing was not to exist, and if one existed, to be a tree, a stone, less still, a grain of sand, which cannot bleed beneath the heels of the passer-by. Émile Zola - Germinal
Painting, sunny streetside cafe, excruciatingly expensive hipster grocery, dreams of opening a café.
I left the apartment feeling very pleased with my day's work, felt like the restarted portrait went well. Come home to see it in the true lignt of unrecognizable ugliness! A sad come-down.
I haven't been to the Louvre or any galleries or exhibitions this time because I'm not emotionally robust enough to deal with looking at good art.
Nice afternoon playing pétanque by the canal though. Walked through an extremely dodgy area on the way, saw a pursuit of some muggers and a woman and some other guys and a getaway car. Didn't see a single middle class person for about ten whole minutes, most unusual. Sensitized to poverty and grim desperation by spending 5 hours with Zola down the pit of Germinal today.
Highly agreeable dinner of Chinese ravioli with my lovely companion.
Lazy cafe. Booked three weeks in America in order to run away from: not having a job, not having a house, not having a girlfriend, not being content with not having these things. Enforced nap. Failed to draw the portrait, again. Listening to Germinal.
Too knowledgable to be happy, but too ignorant to be content. I don't agree with all that the statement implies, but it has elements of truth about it. Sometimes it seems best to become a human insect, to be a man-cattle and live without thought or past or future. It occasionally happens to me that my mind is blank, that I am too tired to think, or, historically, that I am too drunk to be a me, and in those moments there is no happy or sad, there is just the incomprehensible but not-asking-to-be-comprehended unfolding of the moment. And that, all in all, is quite bearable. More so than the constant striving, the horrid desiring devouring want of existence as I find it.
My wretched conservatism, backward-looking intransigence is a barrier to ever being an artist. I don't create anything new! I try to do something old, and do it badly! Grotesque squandering of time. Towering arrogance of the luxurious feeling of guilt at wasting time -- at the conceit of thinking that my time is at all valuable and that only circumstance prevent me from rendering a great service and marvellous gift unto the world! What dung, and how miserable that people can be found who feed that notion. Better those who see through it and call it out for what it is, delusional self-love; they are who I seek.
O youth, youth! little dost thou care for anything; thou art master, as it were, of all the treasures of the universe — even sorrow gives thee pleasure, even grief thou canst turn to thy profit; thou art self-confident and insolent; thou sayest, ‘I alone am living — look you!’— but thy days fly by all the while, and vanish without trace or reckoning; and everything in thee vanishes, like wax in the sun, like snow. . . . And, perhaps, the whole secret of thy charm lies, not in being able to do anything, but in being able to think thou wilt do anything; lies just in thy throwing to the winds, forces which thou couldst not make other use of; in each of us gravely regarding himself as a prodigal, gravely supposing that he is justified in saying, ‘Oh, what might I not have done if I had not wasted my time!’ Ivan Turgenev, First Love
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool Shakespeare, As You Like it
Painted in the morning, listened to Turgenev's First Love, which was a masterpiece. Springtime love.
Sun, banks of the Seine, cafe at the crossroads watching the Parisians do their thing, house party. Enjoyed dispassionately bewitching girls.
Spent the morning deciding whether to go back to the UK or extend my stay. Exhausted a surprising amount of energy making a decision; I really suffer under any kind of cognitive load. Elected at last to stay.
Went out for another turn in the cemetery (pros: no people playing ball games, no loud music, everyone is quiet), saw Proust's grave. Busied myself on non-painting related tasks to decompress from it all. Worn out from being limbo about so many things: waiting to hear back about job applications, about where I am wanted in the UK and when for family stuff, about whether I should book a non-refundable cheaper ticket or not... a corrosive stream of toxic trivial crap that eats away at my ability to get anything done.
Trying to get myself to stick to one thing is like trying to channel a waterfall through a hosepipe. It's driving me mad!
Breakfast in a concept fashion store, day painting a new attempt, cooked for a friend. No idea why I am here or why I have to leave soon; it feels like home now.
Due to my incompetence the fucking portrait is now unrecognisable from who it is supposed to be. This is torture! It feels too much like a waste of time, and my mental health is suffering from all of the vacillating back and forth about what I should be doing with my life.
I went around Père Lachaise in the afternoon sun. Magnolia, Forsythia, daffodils, weeping willow.