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Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, going up to it very careful, heart-in-mouth as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance.
Butterfly collector, serious
I thought, I can’t ever get to know her in the ordinary way, but if she’s with me, she’ll see my good points, she’ll understand. There was always the idea she would understand.
That’s the thing about money. There are no obstacles.
I’ve always hated to be found out, I don’t know why, I’ve always tried to explain, I mean invent stories to explain.
They all said she was pretty. There were photos. If she was ugly it would all have been two lines on the back page.
Of course, I didn’t want to break her down as the Gestapo wanted to break their prisoners down. But I thought it would be better if she was cut off from the outside world, she’d have to think about me more.
“I hate scientists,” she said. “I hate people who collect things, and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art.
“I’m not egocentric enough. I’m a woman. I have to lean on something.”
“What I fear in you is something you don’t know is in you.”
“We all want things we can’t have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”
Of course, she made me feel all clumsy and awkward. I had the same feeling I did when I had watched an imago emerge, and then to have to kill it. I mean, the beauty confuses you, you don’t know what you want to do any more, what you should do.
What she never understood was that with me it was having. Having her was enough. Nothing needed doing. I just wanted to have her, and safe at last.
It was not my fault. How was I to know she was iller than she looked. She just looked like she had a cold.
He said, this is the first wicked thing I’ve ever done. It probably is. But he’s been saving up.
I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch. I remember (the very first time I met him) G.P. saying that collectors were the worst animals of all.
The hateful tyranny of weak people. G.P. said it once. The ordinary man is the curse of civilization. But he’s so ordinary that he’s extraordinary.
She has no idea about real evil.
It’s the very opposite of drawing. You draw a line and you know at once whether it’s a good or a bad line. But you write a line and it seems true and then you read it again later.
The way people talk and talk about tachism and cubism and this ism and that ism and all the long words they use—great smeary clots of words and phrases. All to hide the fact that either you can paint or you can’t.
It’s despair that there’s so much brutality and callousness in the world. It’s despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they’ve won a lot of money. And then do what you’ve done to me.
The money didn't make him evil.. It just let him enact it.
He doesn’t care what I say or how I feel—my feelings are meaningless to him—it’s the fact that he’s got me.
He’s a collector. That’s the great dead thing in him.
Not the day when the H-bombs drop, but the “day of the great fry-up.” “When the great fry-up takes place.”
That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.
I am one in a row of specimens. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
He showed me one day what he called his killing-bottle. I’m imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it’s all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.
Foreshadowing?
But sometimes it is frightening, thinking of the struggle life is if one takes it seriously.
Probably I shall meet someone and fall in love with him and marry him and things will seem to change and I shan’t care any more. I shall become a Little Woman. One of the enemy.
With Caliban it’s as if somebody made him drink a whole bottle of whisky. He can’t take it. The only thing that kept him decent before was being poor. Being stuck to one place and one job.
He enjoys being hopelessly in love with me. I expect Dante was the same. Mooning around knowing it was all quite hopeless and getting lots of good creative material from the experience.
I keep on having thoughts today. One was: uncreative men plus opportunity-to-create equals evil men.
People won’t admit it, they’re too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can’t see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there’s always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness.
