Originally Posted Friday, July 18, 2014
Do you love Virginia Woolf as I do? I love her writing, her sensibility, and I love her portraits. I've read that she wasn't as pretty as the pictures, tall and gangly, maybe close to six feet, but if the pictures do not lie, I would have begged and pleaded for her hand. She might have loved me, too, for I am a romantic sort. Not, perhaps. like the Bloomsbury crowd, but I reject the bourgeoisie and embrace art. I swear I do. No, the young V.W. may have fallen madly for me. But it would have been bad. She would never have written anything but love notes to me. I would have distracted her from all the great literature that she needed to write. That is the way of things, isn't it? You need to suffer and to be alone to produce great works of art. Art is not communal and it is not democratic. It lends itself only to the selfish and willful or the extremely wounded. Normal people need not apply.
Any takers?
Love kept me uncreative for many, many years. For the past few, I have gotten to be a madman, an obsessive. But things change. They always do. We'll take peace and comfort in place of the frantic madness of creation, no? Almost every time.
We'll see how normal I can get. We'll see what sort of zeal I can maintain. The very thing that made you attractive is the very thing that must be caged and killed if you are to be "normal." That is what they do in the madhouse of life. They give you salts to keep you sane. They tranquilize you so that you may be loved. But in the end, who loves the tranquil thing?
The old joke. Every woman wants to marry Abel, but they all turn to look when Cain walks through the door.
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