New drugs + toys - surrender = lovely, kinder, warmer, chocolatey

“Our lives are as enhanced or as limited as our own desires” - Polly Meltzer, pub near Clapton

“New Day. So, ah love, let's feed our need for illusion.” - Unknown, NI number AX55970E

Art and writing is a dialogue of learning. Learning about the world. Lacking conversation, we need an other to challenge, bounce and unfold our impressions against, our conversation folding them into more elaborate forms. Without dialogue, these bright and quickly-burnt impressions on the retina fade as quickly as these days do, therefore the written artistic product gives some mad hope for stretching out our lives.

Love is the key. One effect of absurd love fantasies is the purpose and interest in life it ignites. Sex is life and in our human society of names, history and righteous reverence, legacy and posterity become equal drives for longer life. Through the fantasy you daydream endless dialgoues, gentle conversations which (in the sublimation of a base and illegal lust) become filled with talk of death, the meaning of happiness, what could fulfil us – you know, that shite. The love-fantasy object becomes the new other for dialogue, the new audience for the stories, the stoic soliloquies that emerge. It serves a brilliant artistic purpose then, a sneaky but effective tool for the creative mind. Otherwise these stupid dreams drown in their own narcissistic and masochistic ends, detailed by “Venus in Furs” and the Romantic poets.

Look back on this life: its followed similar paths to so many others. I think of Billy Childish but without much of the intensity, the defiance of authory. I've tramped along following the accepted paths and established modes, scriptures and lifestyle norms, any resistance wastefully spent with a poor cynicism that carries out the order first before mocking it quietly after. Pitiful perhaps, but all it is is me. This is the little Me of us all, the weakened I that is nothing until it perhaps joins some We of revolutionary Anarchist association. But I believe that we develop and change as individuals, we grow and grow, of course soemtimes slower, of course sometimes uglier, but even if we get very older we – I hope – become more calm, settled, natural in that way implied by Laozi.

And this development is not marked by dates but by emotions. By different circumstances which have forced us again and again into the anxious bright uncertain world of the new, from new jobs or new loves to new homes, new countries. That newness which I think marked so much of childhood, which gives it that intense weight and shape in the formation of our personalities and nature. Therefore new loves and new dialogues could make us grow, open us to the touch, ready to receive the divine new, restirring the emotions that make us grow and change, develop further. I know that even when I lose this text, lose these words, somewhere this sudden urge to speak will stay with me, may filter out in another form in some conversations where I hope it will spark some new thought for someone else.

Our thoughts require the sunlight of expression: our thoughts must be viral or they will not be at all. I wish my words could hum and burn with the intensity of Van Gogh's Arles landscapes. That'd be my ideal. Words with passion, but beyond this current nihilistic self-absorption that's marked most of what I've done to date. Words that ache and struggle but ultimately sing with the passion of the sower, the life-giver of colour in the post-man's wife, or of desire itself, wander in the wonder may-be's and a sad long heart-thwarted summer night sticky with sexuality in “Starry Sky”.