the incommunicable joy. The writing makes one poorer and
poorer: no one likes it. It gets worse and worse, over years,
that is the hard part, over years, day by day, for years. One
absorbs that too, endures it, getting dead and mutilated inside:
one endures the continuing, worsening poverty and the public
disgrace: strangers despise you, for what you think or what you
write, or no one knows you. And you put writing, solitude, this
failure, first, before him: and his way of loving you is not to take
offense: not to point out the arrogant stupidity of the choice:
but to stay, to let you leave him out, far away, in the chill region
because you have a cold and awful heart. He is for human times.
But writing is cold and alone. It makes you monstrous, hard, icy,
colder and more barren, more ruthless, than the Arctic Sea.
*
Each book makes you poorer: not just blood: money, food,
shelter: the more time you use writing but not making money,
the poorer you are. Each book makes you poorer. You are
awash in pain, the physical poverty, the inner desolation. You
get deader and deader inside. The blood still stains the stone, a
delicate pink, tiny drops rubbed into signs and gestures. The
glacier moves slowly over the fertile plain, killing. Everything
around you begins to die.
*
Solitude is your refuge and your tomb, where you are buried
alive. Writing is your slowr, inexorable suicide. Poverty is the
day grinding into night, night hurling you back without mercy
to day: day is teeth grinding to the exposed, raw nerves, slow,
a torture of enduring. There are no human witnesses, only the
lost boy asleep. He is tangled in knots of helpless rage. He
thought life was fairer. He sleeps like a lost child. You are in a
fever of creation, waiting to die, hurrying to finish first. There
is more to do.
*
Solitude is a shroud, the creature inside it still alive; writing
resistance to being bound up and thrown in a hole in the
ground; poverty the wild weeds growing over the hard, lonely
earth. The lost boy sleeps, breathes, suffers: fingernails
scratching against the looking glass trying to get through, he
can’t bring Alice back.
*
115
Solitude is revenge. Writing is revenge. Poverty is your wild
pride, open sores, matted hair, gorgon, rags, hairshirt, filth
and smell: arrogant saint nailed to a tired old cross. He tells
you he hates your pride. He does hate it.
*
