Let’s say: written in Los Angeles

I am slowly but surely – well, no longer slowly but lightning-fast – coming to realize that I have nothing to do here. Thinking is good for humanities students, but they don’t know that humanness is only a sort of guideline for so called human society. I understand cannibals just as much as Nazis and communists, Catholics and athletes and I could not care less. And I also don’t care about what’s going on here now and I’m not ready to tear out my heart and eat it because of all that’s going on.
A while ago I told my friend A that I really don’t need anything anymore, not even so-called inhibitions or anything else concerning those inhibitions, that is morality. I don’t give a damn about morality because it’s just a dream. When I know it, something inside me hurts terribly – or not that terribly, but in fact it is much worse: it has hurt all my life.
To be honest, as they say, it cost me a lot of my strength. Pondering upon it, it was only the effect of books that I read and that offered me the difficult task of finding my own moral law. What I am writing here is more remote for me than a star in the sky. That star at least does exist. My moral principles would be only a burden for me. I can’t understand how I could have fallen for such stupidity.
Yet my faith in God remains the same. I cannot remember anyone telling me who God is and what that notion means. I am convinced that he knows what I am writing about here without tears.
For some time I have been feeling like I’m good for nothing. I came to the conclusion that it’s probably a crisis. A crisis that came just like diarrhea. And I decided that that stupid word was only a part of the bars behind which I have been striving all my life. Crisis. Mental crisis. She is tired. She is overworked. She has lately been going from one mess to another. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that once the totalitarian regime was replaced by a democratic one, I just stopped defending myself. Totality is great as it endows every stupidity with meaning. I won’t have to do that anymore.
My advanced liver cirrhosis, as I have read in the report, is pure beauty. Advanced cirrhosis. A sweet secret between the doctors and my body. I don’t care. A disease like that is a great advantage. There’s no way out of it except to avoid drinking, take long rests, read only comforting books. They are mostly marvellous books, that idiot Verne for example says: …it was swarming with sharks, one shark next to another, BECAUSE they are dangerous. What a revelation, I’d thought they weren’t dangerous.
The Mysteries of London, Robin Hood, magnificent works. It’s a relief that I’m not the only idiot alive, except that I’m not that rich and nobody will want my sharks. I don’t care.
Yesterday, an exhibition opening – Milena Jesenská.¹ Intellect next to intellect standing crammed in flocks, intellect adorned by intellect – immediately I started puking quietly and was about to disappear when Mr. President got out of the car and walked in just after I had walked out. On the pavement cops in short athletic jackets were hanging around, old cream that’s gone off, a cop swaying behind Mr. President’s guide. Then they probably spoke about Milena but I was already sitting in a cab with an unpleasant hairy-looking driver and at home I flung myself into bed.
Now I can finally do what I want to. I can live without giving a shit as I have always done when I rode a motorcycle as if I were mad and didn’t give a damn whether I would kill myself or not.
Once I spent three days at the wedding of a young woman who was getting married to a homosexual man. They both profited from it. It was intoxicating. Hash poison. Furious dancing couples. Me, amused and tired. Terribly tired and always waiting, whether I shouldn’t end it all at such a merry party. A young man, completely pale from hash, looked at me with his small pupils and cried pathetically: –Where’s David?! Go to see David and tell him I’m here.” I didn’t go anywhere but I held him for a while in my arms, full of sympathy, until the extraordinary sight of the wedding photographer caught my eye: he was sitting downstairs in the hall on a chair holding his camera and who suddenly, soundlessly, tumbled down. It was all very invigorating. I was laughing like drunkards do and smoking grass. None of that concerned me. This ship of fools was a ship I belonged to. Several sober and stiff-looking Vietnamese were helping the fallen ones, quietly, without any comments. The photographer was still there, lying where he fell down. Nobody paid any attention. They stepped over him, danced around him. It was the TRUTH. It was not a party where anyone could be bored. That hash boy was later arrested and imprisoned as a carrier of Aids. And then he died – I think somebody told me in a completely detached manner that he had committed suicide.
Raw unprocessed, unprepared meat. True human language.
Now I’m ok. On the one hand I’m going through a crisis, and on the other I’m making faces, and on the other other I’m happy. I can do anything now. I don’t want to be here too long. I would get bored. Even now I feel sometimes bored to death. Of course I should have died much earlier. It was useless to be here. I’ve known what I know now since I was about fifteen. Sperm and ferocity used to give me great pleasure, the reason why I also used to be happy – always within limits.
I’ll do everything I can not to be here too long, that is about a year, two, or three. I’m not planning to go to a retirement home. I wouldn’t even be interested in the former syphilitics, if they were able to grow old, survive, and tremble with fear they might die. Ugh.
We’ll try to replace alcohol with something different, something light, something pleasing. That will also be harmful. Just as well. Alcohol has always been my heart’s favorite. We’ll see. I think it’s useless to drink. It’s tiring and exhausting. Now I want my freedom, my anarchy, and my mockery in the face of whatever.
I got tired of film work. Almost universally it’s practiced by silly fools. They want money, they want to be provided for. They can kiss my ass.
I may be attracted by talent – but I’m not sure. Maybe. But what then? To beg and implore idiots to have a film become a film? Talent is the worst aptitude I know. That is, artistic talent. I know talents for business, for connections, for anything at all. They make me sick. Should I be supporting young talented men to help them persevere? Anyway, they’re all on benders. They will never succeed.
A few days ago I looked at the sketches of my planned pictures. Some of them are completely stupid, some only moderately so. All of them emanate the industriousness of ants. Why I should continue in this, I really don’t know. So much tension and fear about what to do with myself, what I’m doing, what does it lead to, what does the poet want to say.
It has only one advantage: it’s doping. I wake up in the middle of the night and I know what it should be like. The colors are in my dreams and the outlines of ideas are close at hand. But – just now I’m writing as if I were Leonardo – I am not a painter. I do what I enjoy. And that somewhat worries me. I’m afraid that one day it will seize me again and I’ll be forced to use and suck my own blood, my existence, about which I know just as much as I don’t know. I succumb to it just like to alcoholic intoxication. I can’t tear away from it just like when I am writing something I am interested in. Interested. I am interested in one zone – and I still don’t know what to do with it.
A. says I have to hire a manager, that someone has to know how to sell me. Yes. She’s probably right. But what to do with victory, even an imaginary one? Just thinking about it I see only money, the only value of which is personal freedom and the opportunity to indulge in vices I want to indulge in. I would like to send them away with the wind and be well, that is to have what I want to have. But I don’t even know what I want to have.
The crisis in Los Angeles is quite difficult. Even though it is suffocatingly hot there, exactly as I love it.
“Und draussen buntes Leben”, Paul Klee painted it. I don’t even feel the pain I used to feel in the past.
Some time ago I wrote two slogans:
THE RIVER LETHE, SUITABLE EVEN FOR NON-SWIMMERS!
And the other one:
NOBODY HAS YET DROWNED IN THE RIVER LETHE!
I don’t know which is better. We’ll see. Maybe we’ll have a drink with that Charon.
We’ll see – just no more dreams. Just no dreams. Only one: to leave quietly and without pain.

¹A Czech author and journalist who participated in the underground resistance against the Nazis before being captured and dying in a concentration camp in 1944.