[fragment from the novel “A Psychop’s Notebook” (in Romanian: “Caietul Psihopatului”), Herg Benet Publishers, 2015]
by Ștefan Bolea
translated by Ana-Maria Văduva [MTTLC]
click pentru versiunea română
13th April, 1998 (Cluj)
Cowards, the key to the human spirit is self-loathing!
Six months since I gave up smoking.
I need to expiate for my pain. Death is a backward blooming. A plunge in the exterior, compared with rapture. I can barely write anything. The spade is just reflexive. The others are cancelled through pure pain. It’s just youuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. An abyss. The feeling of existence pulls you towards nothingness. Unbearable. Callous Golgotha. There is nobody else, there is no inferno.
We are like the thieves who used to steal corpses during nighttime, corpses themselves, sneaking like mice.
Today I was an essence, now I am imbibed by its shadow.
I have sworn war against the whole world.
Nothing has enough intensity to satisfy me. It’s weird (or rather dull) that a simple rhinoscopy can cause so much despair. The beauty of the body (contracted & contorted) where there is nothing but remembrance and agony.
Today I left the molehill. Facing the utmost intensity, before the unrepeatable moment – forcing a wretched venom . Which has snuffed itself blind.
Didacticism stinks, from now on I’m writing just for myself.
Nobody to see, nobody to understand
If you read pain backwards, it means paradise
I’m out
I have to go back inside of me
The memory of it frightens me, I almost had a heart attack
Absolute sensitivity is the key
I will not bow to anybody
From now on I’m working at the wall. I feel like a brand new boot. I can feel the Yoke.
My writing is so fake, so conventional. I don’t believe anything that I write. I am haunted, this is indeed, true.
everything is just a perplexed fairytale, something unpredictable and diffuse
They received me at the feast of sorrow . I was incommunicated
I was the worm
overabundant
No, no, no
The moment that precedes death is the Absoluteness. Besides reason. A pure form of ignorance.
Redemption is the second before the end of everything
Death cancels it, erases it, dissolves it, because we couldn’t bear it, it would be too much. I am different because I have reached climax and I have fought back. Death made a retreat.
14th April (Baia Mare)
0 – that’s my symbol.
Since yesterday/ me and life/ form/ a finite couple.
We celebrated our love with the first certificate that states madness. The cistern of existence buries you in formalism and the ridicule seizes the best of you.
Yesterday I experimented with two different forms of language – nocturnal and grey, viable and posthumous- noticing an essence, which could annihilate both of them. A new dimension, which brought me back above the clouds. The acknowledgement of the nothingness as a gigantic contradiction. I was for just one day on the other side. Luckily, your life cannot revolve around the paradise.
I am ready to work and I hate everything that stops me from picking myself up. The night is the answer to your humility, because it hides away your weakness and your worthless citadel.
to mark the darkness with the branding iron
hypocrisy is part of the primordial creation. The world is divided in idiots and hypocrites. As usual, I have to apologize for my outstanding way of being.
Berlioz – a failed demon. The fantastic – a redoubt symphony. With its dirty hands and his mouth filled with food, Berlioz smiles.
Sunday is the day of Boredom. When the counterpoint begins, failure retakes command. The soft-minded nightmare, and then the nausea caused by new beginnings.
consciousness
consciousness
consciousness
Each side of a new feeling must be studied thoroughly. The rays are enclosed in the nucleus until the swirl swallows you. A desert everywhere until you get yourself drunk. The aphrodisiac plastic.
The most common verb – to be.
I am every crucified moment – I sacrifice everything for virtuality.
The nonconformists are the first formalists, because they need to deduce the shape to go further.
Allegretto from the 7th Symphony: the wire-like thorns slice my soul of an executioner.
Beethoven’s 4th Symphony: like Golgotha for an assassin.
Compliments disgust me: a) because I can guess their dishonesty; b) because they don’t correspond to my dark intentions.
15th April 1998
(during an English class)
The programmatic indifference preserves the hypersensitive inquisitorial center enclosed inside you, until the object of attention is voided by means of conscious analysis and the circle of silence can be carved around you.
(Math class)
Virosis – sinusitis. The cause becomes an effect and the effect seduces the origins. A huge vicious circle.
School – these people try to wreck my thoughts. I don’t want to change for the sake of some rats. Yesterday I was the strongest earthling. Today, the same. Tomorrow?
In music, art, and also in time (my time), I choose the intensity of a moment that is already growing. I am careful before the climax, and this is why the ending will always coincide with the climax.
The snake crosses the spider’s web. Consternation is just a side-effect: by analyzing it, we cannot prove anything.
The others are in a lower state, they live in an illusion; my abyss keeps us apart. They cannot climb all the way up to where I am – they cannot reach me. I wonder what is the secret of their stupidity – faulty heredity, humble social instincts … Their particular darkness tries to take over my brain, their puppet-like dumbness wants to be aggressive. Not even a final farewell to the world – all of them are invisible for me. My dissimulation (which is often subliminal) has become worthless; it is nothing but a coquetry with myself. It’s not about the fact that I am superior, because I am completely alone. I cannot see anyone, who might compete for this absent condition – the formal presence of other people doesn’t bother me because it no longer exists, it cannot be named. The others are dead, because this might imply the possibility of their existence: they have never lived.
(French class)
My face tones down my agony.
The others only care about the shape, they don’t see what’s truly important.
The shape is the responsibility – it is the one that denies the enlightenment. A slight inability to understand diversity imposes a certain type of dogmatic irresponsibility. I have surpassed both aspects of convention until I reached a certain amount of indifference towards meaning.
The others are dormant, they don’t reflect on change. They are pale (like my face when I am sick – and the similarities end here), opaque, heavy – are left behind. If they don’t suppose (out of respect or intuition) what they cannot understand, they become boring or melodramatic because of their emotional suspicion (which is the prelude of unfulfilled desperation) that they don’t worth a penny – a suspicion concealed by a prudent aggressiveness.
Shape keeps you out of your own self, makes you waste yourself away by means of a terrifying absurd.
The man of genius doesn’t understand and doesn’t appreciate himself because he is indifferent. He doesn’t react to the disturbing factors from around him, feeling strange in the company of the people with rat-like faces. The man of genius anticipates in a practical and graceful way his perspective. A foolishness that sucks him into an impersonal swamp, gives him a terrible feeling of guilt.
Everything that I have written doesn’t belong to me, it fades away into a dimension that has no time. I remember the creative essence, not the formal perceptions, which compose the abstractionism of alienation. In eight years’ time I am going to punch myself for what I have written in this diary. It is not about progress (positive change is an unverified myth, as obsolete as the victory of good over evil, for that matter) but about turning into a genius. It governs my whole existence – it yells from inside that, for now, there is no knowledge, and that everything around me is a lie, a picture or a fake.
My grandmother – one of the masters of caustic irony. She always assumes that irony as a purpose, doesn’t care about the shape, it lurks around to avoid being cheated on. She uses your hesitations or your imperfections to paralyze you by giving you a rigorous warning that stirs inside you a sacred hypocrisy, doubled by a repressed anger. She draws boundaries and establishes rules. She is similar to a king, we are always part of a burlesque war – but I respect her. Everybody says that I am like her – there is some truth in this.
“Skeptics doubt only for the sake of doubting, and pretend to be always undecided” (Descartes). I don’t believe that this world actually exists + I doubt my own existence too.
The man of genius’ policy: you sacrifice yourself for a depth that denies you, it is denied and the others try to banish your intellect at the bazaar or in the sewers.
The shape is impressive, the essence doesn’t impress you. That unexpressed coldness is death.
If the others believe in shapes, I will stuff them with shapes until they grow tired of it and they avoid me.
Pride and timidity spring from the shape – you can be an idiot or a tout and possess a pride equal to that of Hegel or Breton.
Shape is repulsive, we are happy only when we correct it by cutting into its flesh.
The gurgle bothers you just because you haven’t exhausted its complete analysis, because you haven’t experimented all the way with the disgust caused by an object.
When I say “I have a headache”, I use a certain language (the shape) that tries to reproduce a certain meaning (essence) and which, roughly, means to me a tragedy – the other one can ignore the language, and so miss its significance (miss the shape, miss the essence). Therefore, primo, the shape gives the essence – just as well, it could have produced it. If the other, a skeptic (“a dishonest one”), he will reply “you’re lying”, questioning the essence, he will have a formal reaction. Secundo, the shape has a considerable amount of credibility – when compared to the essence (or the nucleus), which is always fragile and surrounded by shadows. If, instead of beginning the conversation with “I have a headache”, I had sarcastically punched the other one in the face, I would have drawn his attention, because the shape that expresses power influences in a really quick manner. Tertio, pure shape is represented by an animal manifestation – it rigorously transmits the essence, because it frames it into the restrictions of power. Consequently, if you master the shapes, you have nothing else to share with other human beings.
When you are the master of shapes, you automatically become the ruler of reason. If you understand the practice of shape, you unconsciously process your own manner of expression.
Better ain’t perfect.
Apparently, it’s not recommended to become a master, because he has to radically compromise. But these compromises are insignificant, when you gain an axial perspective. The slaves orbit around the Sun.
I discovered a new shape of unbalance: the subjugation of the shapes.
The lack of money produces worrying, care, pain. Economic precariousness would undermine my peace, it would disturb my indifference. To be a god, you must have ants to sacrifice for food. You need the offering of the ordinary ones, who can’t and mustn’t understand you, because they would tarnish you with their blind eyes. A long-term social mediator must be engaged, someone who would facilitate the economical part of my life. Life is not worth living if you don’t have the luxury of humiliating yourself. Until you learn how to do it, you must order from a distance.
After midnight, the shapes disturb the balance. The instincts come to life, gasped vulgarity is a champion. The desire to ejaculate in someone’s eyes, to directly and concretely affirm yourself. Everything changes after midnight. The sub-animal breaks the ice, the conflicting essence is revealed, the last disjunct ego. The crimson night comes to welcome the criminal, to bow before the reptile. You cannot, you don’t want to pull back.
When you carefully examine the past, you observe the fact that the shapes can only sharpen, radicalize your hatred.
When you are self-conscious, nothing can arouse your interest.
The other one is a myth.
To be able to dream, you need trust. I mustn’t forget that dreams wrecks everything.
The mystery, the secret, the hatching are proof that imagination has the tendency of wandering through the conventional, and of collapsing into anodyne things, to be able to continue extracting its own misery.
The ones who don’t agree with me, are doing me a favor. But how can a mouse contradict a snake?
Mozart would be nothing without his creation (therefore formal), Beethoven’s nucleus dictates his thematic circle. The essence delouses itself from the shape, and vomits it to come into being. Mozart – a hedonist, a fine spirit, a sensual one; Beethoven – the dictator, the formal cheater and the monster that can make the ending spring from the center.
When you stand before the glittering temptation, protect your past.
My friendship with M. Rather unrewarding. It reminds me of a certain past, of absurdity, of ridicule, the dictatorship of bad taste, of dogmatic mediocrity. M. has become again boring, an embarrassing X, a hole in the cake. A fake relationship has to be ended at once.
To pull the laurels of my consistency from the black dawn.
There comes a time when you must choose between resentment and virtuality, between extras and direction, between the puppet and the spider. When it comes to a decision, the answer is already a conventional revelation.
The safest way of transcending a dilemma is to use the poison as an antidote.
free Satanism
you are
the voices inside of you
the martyr mold or the time-tampon
inside the dead snake the venom sprouts
when the yellow lid roars
it remains
between threads and scaffoldings
a crippled brilliance
a gloomy hatching
like the plague-striken and blood-red twilight
16th April
We must take a detour and abandon the first thought. Otherwise, the evidence will cuckold us.
You love only what belongs to a lower class than yourself, you like to fall and to crawl. You feed on weakness – you adore your instincts and you start liking the taste of a life spent on a stretcher. Love – a dull form of self-sympathy.
There is a familiar scent in the city. It’s hard to forget about it. A few means of protection against the new rat, the human being. Men of genius at the common graveyard, a measure somewhat pragmatic.
An idea for a novel: a man hates steps (to restrict your walking step by step, to receive your share in a regular manner, to not be able to forget about the bit), it is not too hard to understand why. Anyway, an unconventional athlete decides to melt (?) all the steps into a slope, something that would save the man of his convention, of the duty that he has, to keep in mind the rule of climbing. Something like an absurd nightmare, because he cannot succeed in convincing people that breaking the rules is sometimes useful. The City Hall refuses to give him money to buy his own house (he lived with his parents – it was from them that he inherited his social skepticism), and so the guy refuses to go out of his room, and to touch the sacred steps. People tell him to go out (through the window) and to climb back using a rope (he used to live on the 3rd floor) – but refuses out of pride. His parents try to lure the doctors from the mental hospital, to come and take the son, but he procures some cyanide and threatens them to use it, in case he is surrounded. The situation is insoluble – the parents were rich; they could afford to hire someone to take care of him throughout his life, but they received money as an allowance and they didn’t have enough to build a proper place. Ending: the young man dies, enraged and isolated, angry with his stubborn lucidity.
Evil is a natural thing – the baby bites the nipple, he sucks it dry, and the ritual is accepted and encouraged.
Nietzsche – Jenseits, a short film about the Indians (with Eric Schweitz), an hour from Gombrowicz. At 5 p.m, at the library – by all means Salinger, and secondly Goethe and Byron. I must find something reasonable about Goethe – an overview of his work, with references to his conversations with Eckermann and Goethe’s psychology/ intentions/ German. Byron – here I am interested in the cause of pessimism. Eventually, as a treat, something about Eminescu’s posthumous work.
I was afraid to spit in the clogged toilet because it might lose its identity.
Aldous Huxley believed that work is a way of wiping the life from your hands, a parasitical style in the absence of living. For me, work becomes, more and more, an instrument for asserting myself into cancelling.
You only love what humiliates you.
17th April
Antichrist
I am a complete drunkenness the true separation
God, on all fours, reeks at my feet
Death’s fever and her unbroken desolation facing the sweaty cholera
What gives birth to the man of genius is diluted
Talent is sincere and then stupid
The Vault is the Chaos
The naive ones feed others who are even more naive
The seed strains the waiters force the doors
There is nothing left in the abyss
Nothing nothing nothing