Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

My Corner of the Web

First published on Opera, Tues 23rd Mar 2004


Well, I am quite excited, but also quite nervous about this. How long will the excitement last, I wonder? I also keep a paper and pen diary, and every time I start a new diary, I want to write the kind of perfect prose entires in it that do not spoil the wonderful blank pages. It's impossible. I always spoil the blankness with my words. Diaries are embarrasing things, really. Nonetheless, I am going to attempt to use this as a diary and see what happens. I shall start by transcribing an entry from my real diary. The entry is that for the 23rd of February, 2004. Here goes:

It must be almost two months since I finished my last diary. That would have been around New Year. That period of hiatus in my diary writing has been perhaps one of the most eventful periods of my life, if only in terms of emotional and psychological event. I believe that Mad World topped the charts at Christmas, and did it, in fact, bring us into the New Year? If it did, it seems very appropriate. What could be more timely? The whole world seems to have gone mad. At the most personal level, too, I felt as if things had gone through a pivotal change from very early on in January. Stated briefly, there were two things which brought this about: One, my growing awareness of the ecological disaster that threatens to engulf us, and in particular reports to do with the collapse of the Gulf Stream and the predicted extinction of millions of species of animals. And two, L---'s advice to me in early January to make finishing my novel a priority over finding work, coupled with the prospect of earning money by writing an English textbook with Mr. T---.

These two factors working in concert have brought about a mood in me that I can only describe as extremely fey. I feel very much as if I'm living in the Bowie song Five Years. Everything has become unreal. Why should I look for a job when the future has been abolished, especially when there is the chance, the growing likelihood, even, that I can make my way through life as some sort of freelance writer?

And so, life recently has been very full of event, and really quite emotional, and I have been occupied with so many things that I have not recorded any of it in this diary. I fear that all I can manage now is the simplest of post facto accounts. What a strange, fragile web of emotion I now feel myself to be stuck upon! I might borrow Jim Morrisson's words and say, "THis must be the strangest life that I have ever known." And yet, this wondrous, vibrating web, strung with the dew of co-incidence, seems to be in danger of collapsing utterly, of being swept away by disaster, as if it really were of no more importance that a single spider's web.

I think it was the article in The Observer, which I found a link to in Momus' online journal, that reminded me of the crushing feelings of doom and despair I experienced earlier this year, and which put me in the mood at last to take up my diary again and wonder what the point of writing a diary is, or the point of anything at all. But let me see if I can trace some of the threads of the web now threatened with destruction and pointlessness.

There was L---'s advice and his suggestion that he'd be able to support me to some extent. Then there was my visit to Mr. T---, soon afterwards, at his home in S---, when we discussed his translation of Takekurabe, for which I have written the introduction, and when he proposed that we make some money by writing the English textbook together. I have been thinking about that intermittently ever since, though I have not started work on it, and I get that Pet Shop Boys song going round in my head - I've go the brains, you've got the brawn, let's make lots of money. There was J--- B--- taking me to the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank to see a string quartet, and the piece they played that gave me an idea for my story Zugzwang. It was on that occasion, as I looked around the bookshop there waiting for J---, that I discovered a pack, or a book, of postcards of the zoological artwork of Ernst Haeckel, and bought them on the spot, deciding later that they could be helpful for me as inspiration for my novel, The Sex Life of Worms. Consulting the pamphlet I picked up at the Royal Festival Hall, I find that to have been Monday the 2nd of February. Having written that, I now remember that on the weekend beginning, I believe, on Friday the 23rd of January, I visited P--- L--- in Wales, where we went to see a male voice choir, went along to a lock-in at a local pub with some of them afterwards, and the next day walked along rivers and waterfalls for about seven miles. On that occasion I was given some legal Mexican mushrooms by E---, which I consumed half-way through the concert, and which undoubtedly made the evening even more interesting. My interest in hallucinogens thus renewed, I began to experiment again. I wanted to use them in conjunction with the Ernst Haeckel postcards to get inspiration for my flagging novel, The Sex Life of Worms. That inspiration remains, as yet, larely elusive. But during one of my mushroom sessions, on Sunday the eighth of February, I ended up sending a number of lunatic e-mails to Momus, who I had been trying to pin down for an interview. At the time the experience was extremely disturbing for me, showing me just how I can lose my grip on reality, but, thankfully, it seems to have had a positive result in the end, as I am now in the middle of conduction that interview for Terror Tales website.

M--- M--- is going to, in fact, as I write, is in Japan on holiday. He came round here on Saturday the seventh for a briefing on the best things to see and do in Japan, and for linguistic pointers. Together we drank green tea and sake.

My Tartarus collection - Morbid Tales - was first reported delayed, but, on Thursday the nineteenth, I think, I received an e-mail (or was it before that?) saying that they are now ready to go ahead with it. But the line-up of stories was minus the best work, The Haunted Bicycle. I felt frustrated and disappointed. I complained of this to the man in the bookshop. Somehow the conversation turned to musical heroes. I mentioned that I was conducting an interview with one of mine. "Who?" "He's called Momus." "Momus?!" he returned in surprised recognition. Apparently, just days before, he had been talking about Momus to someone...

I had leant him - J--- in the bookshop - a copy of Strange Tales, containing my story Cousin X, to read. When, some days later, I popped in to talk to him again, he was busy in the backroom. I looked around the bookshop and saw a book entitled, In the Beginning was the Worm - I bought it is the hope it would give me inspiration foy my novel, The Sex Life of Worms.

On Friday I went to the launch of the new journal Strange Attractor. The editor, M--- P---, said that Momus had spent some time sleeping rough on the couch in the house of a friend of his. At the party I also spoke to E--- A---, proprietor of F--- C--- bookshop. He kindly offered to hold the launch party of Morbid Tales at F--- C---. I went back to Archway with M---- and A----, and we had a private William Blake party,
since A--- was unable to persuade us to shift our exhausted carcasses to the official William Blake party elsewhere in Highgate.

And so on.

And today I read Momus' journal and found there the link to the Observer article about the Pentagon's report outlining catastrophic climate changes expected to take place within twenty years.

Is this strange, intricate network really to be destroyed