Day 0324

I can feel the self-indulgent pomposity of this project becoming quite overpowering, even to me. Haven't the inclination to think of anything else to draw or write, so the downwards spiral into myself continues.

Frustratingly weak drawing tonight, which I completely scrubbed out in anger several times. Feel like a bratty child when my drawings go wrong, feel like shouting and swearing and throwing it all against the wall. Miserable lack of artistic and emotional control, and yet the delusions of grandeur persist, I can't drown the feeling that I ought to be one of the extraordinary, floating on the sea of the ordinary.

I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub-divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that's their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood — that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment