Started my drawing in the morning to make it a priority. Really pleased with myself for waking up at reasonable times and sticking to a productive schedule. Have been working hard.
Work and driving. Have a more socially acceptable sleeping pattern than I've had years.
Phoned my last remaining aged relative, sad to hear her unwell and confused. I can call at any time and hear her say "Hello my dear", but do it so rarely. Very sad.
Will re-start this drawing tomorrow. Embrace failure.
Working for clients who don't understand the problem domain means I never get any feedback about whether I'm doing a good job or not. I need some praise! And to work for businesses (not small charities) who understand the value I deliver.
All three of my ex-girlfriends have been in touch. Like rings in a tree trunk they chart my life. All know different iterations of me. Been listening to my old music.
Breakfasted in Greenwich like a yuppie. Assembled some IKEA furniture, communed with the kitten. Felt actual affection for an animal for more or less the first time. What possible identity do they have? Do they miss what they do not know?
Stress from mum, long journey home. Music. Early to bed to work well tomorrow.
Got up early and started drawing, made another attempt at the Rosso Fiorentino study with a clearer mind. London for lunch. Behaved like a good capitalist and spent money with reckless abandon.
Cats trapped in flats, surely mad with boredom and frustration. A world visible from windows and smells blown in on breezes, life on hold until someone comes home.
Woke up thinking of locked in syndrome. Feeling that we are all locked in to our ways and bounded by our circuitry and circumstance. We must be extremely predictable, but not to ourselves.
Consciousness such a thin sparking, fragile layer on top of a completely unknown mass, making it intelligible to itself. How strange it can flicker out and the body still tick over.
Useless doing art when so tired. Found some of my drawings from in New York, much better than current stuff. This is all counterproductive.
Forgot how tiring, self-effacing and all-consuming the stress and pressure of too much work is. No energy or identity, just an external weight. The uncontemplative life. Driving too; something difficult that I have to work at. Fills entire mind, which blanks under pressure.
Working hard again. Walk around the periphery of Clare in the summer sun. Just a few minutes at the end of the day to do some experiments with watercolour, which I am very far from figuring out. No time to think or be present.
Stressful early start, productive day working hard. Driving lesson, walk in the gloaming. Watercolour from photo, memory, artistic lazy-license.
Breakfast, walk along the Cam, retreat back to Suffolk. Mounting anxiety about the work still undone and the tempers I have roused recently.
Pontificated about deep pragmatism, defending the need for drone strikes and arguing that because most people care less about evidence than arguments that support what they already believe that it is both expedient and justifiable to ignore evidence. Do I even believe this? So rapidly find myself entrenched in a position in an argument simply because I want to hear the sound of my own voice, then retroactively have to fabricate reasons to support the side I find myself on.
Very quick and joyously undisciplined Turner copy, then a pleasant evening with Montaigne, who has the strength of character to talk about sex, farts, impotence, incest frankly and unblushingly. I wish I wasn't such a prude when I'm writing. He's great, immensely self aware, practical, part of the real world.
In truth, the care and expense of our fathers aims only at furnishing our heads with knowledge; of judgment and virtue, little news. Exclaim to our people about a passer-by, “Oh, what a learned man!” and about another, “Oh, what a good man!” They will not fail to turn their eyes and respect toward the first. There should be a third exclamation: “Oh, what blockheads!” We are eager to inquire: “Does he know Greek or Latin? Does he write in verse or in prose?” But whether he has become better or wiser — which would be the main thing — that is left out. We should have asked who is better learned, not who is more learned.
We labor only to fill our memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience empty. Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and carry it in their beak without tasting it to give a beakful to their little ones, so our pedants go pillaging knowledge in books and lodge it only on the end of their lips, in order merely to disgorge it and scatter it to the winds.
It is wonderful how appropriately this folly fits my case. Isn’t it the same thing, what I do in most of this composition? I go about cadging from books here and there the sayings that please me, not to keep them, for I have no storehouses, but to transport them into this one, in which, to tell the truth, they are no more mine than in their original place. We are, I believe, learned only with present knowledge, not with past, any more than with future.
Michel de Montaigne - Essays