I gave up painting freehand and cheated, tracing off contours from the photo and effacing as many drawing errors as I could in a fit of pique. I scrubbed it away and attacked it again, sloppily. I have to give the model a painting before I leave next week and both of these attempts are perfectly hideous. Woke up very early to get on with this fruitless task.
Spent the rest of the sun-soaked day flitting between coffee, gelato, l'herb with the not-entirely-disagreeable accompaniment of springtime-made-human, my 21 year-old friend of youth.
Dreams this morning; childhood home, but discovered that a busy, bustling world could be seen by standing on the roof. Not the secluded retreat hermetically sealed from outsiders, but a part of a bigger scene. There is always a world going on beyond what you see. There is a loft above, a space unthought of, unknown, but there all the time, its own history unfolding. There are the spaces in the walls and floors where generations of vermin have risen and fallen. There is the entirety of the universe, it really is there. Stars and the gaps between them. My Great Auntie's heart still beats after one hundred and one years, my grandparents are all dead, my grandchildren are unborn. And humans have had these thoughts and dreams now and in the past and in the future. What else can there be but religion in the face of such awesome unknowable complexity?
One of the privileges of this fine city of Paris is that you can be born, live and die here without anyone paying the blindest bit of notice to you. Let us therefore reap the benefits of civilization. There were sixty other deaths today: why don't you go and weep over the hecatomb of all Paris? Honoré de Balzac, Old Man Goriot
When I was a child I said prayers every night. There is still the persistent feeling that I have someone looking over my shoulder, and that I should constantly be striving for something. I should be striving for happiness and goodness, but I'm making myself ill striving to be someone I'm not: conscientious, diligent, original.
I read through some of my old tweets. There is no room in my personality for others, everything revolves around me, my esoteric interests. I need to warm up back to humanity before long, I'm alienating myself too much.
Enervated by a boulder of stress, lay around in bed all day. Went out to a vernissage of drawings, stayed for drinks afterwards. Lonely in company. Shattered dreams! My own timorous lack of ambition repugnant, my jealousy of success overpowering, my own work so meaningless, talentless, and yet so fucking earnest!
The smallest distraction throws me off course. Had work come in, lost a few hours to that. Sun came out, lost time wandering around. Took the afternoon off for shopping, gelato, dinner. Made myself palpably closer to death with salt and caffeine.
Feverishly scheming a potential trip to the states next month.
I'm getting attached to my little routines of painting, bakery, market, indolence. Started a new portrait, and ploughed through the hideousness for six hours. Started listening to The Three Musketeers, another romp. Might be time for something a little more edifying soon.
This is getting embarrassing. Another six hours of painting this deplorably hideous effigy. I'm appalled and ashamed to give up but I can't possibly gift this to my friend, so rotten a representation is it. What folly.
Applied to a job. Finished Monte Cristo.
Watched Ibsen's A Doll's House on YouTube this morning then went off to life drawing, fitting in superbly with the motley crew of anglophones from the upper middle crust of self-satisfaction.
Traipsed around looking for somewhere to lunch with the art dealer, collapsed near the canal. Little energy to do anything other than let the world roll on and hand over more money than I earn.
Took the palette knife to the rotten portrait and spent half an hour scraping off layer after layer of useless accretions.
Ingested so much fiction, been so solitary for so long, my head is full of dreams. Tired. The painting is doing me in.
Dumas has unlocked the treasure of my childhood imagination, untouched for many years, tarnished. Very nice to give in to an onward rush of adventure.
Loving Balzac; so richly textured and self-possessed, a marvellous contrast to the icy precision of Turgenev.
Four hours of painting with the Dumas audiobook, the market, café with the art dealer, English bookshop for Balzac, with whom I have enjoyed a raucous Friday night.
Beetled through the streets and saw other earnest young men, pleased with themselves and no doubt brimming with noble thoughts, pinned and noted as such, full of warm reflections of how good it is to be a fine fellow in such a splendid capital city, gleefully thinking forth what ripe material all of this will provide for a glorious chapter of their future biographies to captivate wide-eyed and adoring followers, soon to be found.
Saw the shambling beggar man on the bridge, identical to the limping, crooked old derelict in Florence, saw the homeless refugees, just like in Greece, saw the loud American tourists, the dressed-up look-at-me beaux, the eager students, all legible, replaceable, ignorable, neglible. But perhaps they are not stock-characters, archetypes, interchangeable blobs, but are truly other mes, other stories that find themselves to be centres of universes! Grotesque too-many-sided garnet of humanity!
"Oh, what is man!" d'Avrigny muttered. "The most egoistical of all animals, the most personal of all creatures, who cannot believe otherwise than that the earth revolves, the sun shines and death reaps for him alone—an ant, cursing God from the summit of a blade of grass" Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo