Wasted a lot of time today, unable to commit to painting nor to relaxing and enjoying myself. Forlornly waiting for the world to decide my actions rather than making moves myself. Every hour spent on one task is an hour robbed from another; paralysis of multipotentiality. If painting was all I felt I was any good at, it'd be much easier to chain myself to it. But there is writing, philosophy, science, programming, business all asking for focus and diligent study. Too many options, I end up smoldering in my chair staring blankly out the window or lying in bed thinking of nothing waiting for something to make decisions for me.
Can't fix the painting.
A perfectly cloudless, quiet prelude to spring. Deer in the garden, birds in the nest boxes, ice in the puddles.
Dad praised my painting. Pursuing this kind of art offers no rewards. No answers.
The day swallowed by an important, uncomfortable business meeting in London; yet another testing ground where my delusions of competency meet the granite face of reality. Long, slow, forehead-clutching, package-sandwich dinner inducing, transmission-engine failure of a commute home.
The first thing I did this morning was listen to some poetry. I realise that I have been thirsting for some well-wrought words after suffering through hours and hours of Ayn Rand's laboured vernacular, where everything is 'superlative' or 'insolent' and where everyone 'laughs silently'.
Took a walk around the frosty fields, enjoyed hearing the skylarks. Researched competitors for an app idea that will not make me any money and yet I allow to occupy my thoughts and take up my time. Imperceptible four hours of painting absorbed by the day.
The process and not the product is important in my art. The process bends my mind away from the bottomless terror of existential dread, and instead gives me gratifyingly trivial real-world miseries to grapple with.
Got back to work and painted for the whole day, listening to a dreadful narrator reading Atlas Shrugged. Every character is so clearly a shard of her own personality, much less differentiated than other authors. Slightly too transparent an insight into her own predilections, biases and fantasies for my complete satisfaction. It is practically identical to The Fountainhead, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I don't like that my art consists of me essentially copying a photo; it reveals the gap between my pretensions and my ability. If I were a true artist I feel like I would have a vision clearly before me in my mind that I could put straight to the canvas. I feel like I would have some clear and bold style of my own, not the lifeless, forgettable blandness that I have unconsciously made my own. I toil with plodding incompetence to badly render an inaccurate copy of a poor photo, revealing a masochistic desire to foreclose possibilities of my own repose, happiness, contentment whilst I instead push myself through an arbitrarily arduous task for the punishment of the process and the craven desire -- in fact the expectation and the right -- for adulation at the end. I hold my suffering (insofar as forcing myself to pick up some paintbrushes can be regarded as suffering -- it is more accurately just wearisome and draining) as my secret right to feel better than those who lead pleasant-by-default lives, even though I am wracked by envy of the unselfconsciously unselfish ease with which they bob through life without having to make themselves do things they don't want to do.
Too proud and stubborn to do things that I know would be good for me. Getting a middling job, moving to a modest apartment, finding an adequately pleasant girlfriend, doing moderate amounts of art and reading now and then would almost certainly give me more moments of joy than the self-imposed monotony I've settled on. But that would offend my image of myself as a tortured soul, the unrecognized talent. A more honest reading would be a constant need to be a victim, a passive and undignified moan for attention and support, and pathetically blatant at that. What exhausting garbage!
Daring and indulgent and undeserved second day off from painting. I will have to force myself to make up for it tomorrow. Worked speculatively to try desperately to secure a bit of work I need.
Day off from painting to attend to a client and have an informal interview in London; the warning bells of degenerate mediocrity ringing loudly. Pleasant to be busy though.
Plodding on with the painting. Took a walk and was encumbered by a member of the public endeavouring to employ me to make some blighted website for a horse stud and fix a database, failing to read any of the signs of courteous refusal I was giving. Horrid, trivial, little, tawdry, horse-racing rot. Too much of Ayn Rand's love for a single purpose, the idea of devoting a life to an ideal, to be brought back to earth by this undignified clamour for my time! And tomorrow there will be more. To what towering heights of self-importance, conceited pride and disdainful arrogance I have ascended in my secluded life! Glorious delusion, paper-thin but enough to obscure temporarily the grey smudge of my own banality from myself.
... she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or enemy with a mind better than her own.Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one's own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name - fear - need - dependence - hatred?
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
The life of the wastrel; failed to leave bed before midday, yet still spent the day in exhausted stupor. Walk in the pre-spring ever so slightly hazy pastel sun. Goldfinch, thrush, puddles, contractors in their vans.
Started Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which is more of the same. Too patently an autobiographical fantasy, too clear in its artifice and inelegant in its style to be as great as it thinks it is. I will enjoy and learn from it nonetheless. Reading as mining, extracting and appropriating ideas and modes of thought for free.
Another night on a sofa. Relaxed on the bus home because it is one of the few times when I am physically constrained to do precisely nothing for a definite period of time, and there's no guilt about it. At home I should be working.
Finished The Fountainhead, which has been moving, compelling, thoughtful, wrong, motivational. It has influenced my dreams. I would like to meet my nemesis and marry her. I would like to believe in integrity and the importance of the self.
Bared my soul to my sister, starting with the bottomless pit of misery that is depression and how it is different in kind from regular sadness. She told me off for my arrogance, wrong use of words, (I say 'everyone' when I should say 'a statistically significant number of people from a representative sample'), for thinking I know people, for not trying to be happy, for shunning life experiences and thinking I know it all from the comfort of a house in the middle of nowhere that I never leave. All valid.
A reason I don't bare my soul to her but restrict our relationship to juvenile banter and hyperbolic nonsense is that I feel that if I share the reasoning behind the misery I so often feel and the futility I apprehend around me then it will taint her and make her unhappy. I don't want that and would rather people don't ask themselves the continual, merciless stream of 'but why do I think that? questions if there is any chance they will arrive at the same unhelpful, disabling conclusions that I am approaching; and with my sister I think there is that risk. I think to a very real extent ignorance is bliss. Just this morning my friend said he consciously doesn't answer certain questions to himself because he is scared of the answers. That is healthy and sensible so far as I can see, though self-delusion can of course lead to atrocities when the conditions are wrong.