Desire and Despair -- And the Dream

Tonight I was feeling depressed, so I broke out my flute and calligraphy brush.  It's probably a good way just of making myself feel more depressed, because practicing I was able to hear and see really how rusty I've become.  From time to time, I remind myself of all the things I used to do -- writing, poetry, calligraphy, Greek, Latin, flute, Chinese -- and then eventually lost interest in.  Writing especially reminds me of the past, of all these things that are literally past, because I so rarely do it any more -- but it embodies the spirit that drove me to all of these things -- the spirit of reflection, which becomes the desire to work myself into a point and push that through, a longing for excellence -- and that was the meaning in or of all the things I successively applied myself to.  Why I've abandoned them, in fact -- because it was excellence first that I was after -- excellence and reputation, virtue.  Pure excellence, pure reputation are nothing.  The thing or the act, besides the applause, is too real and exists in a plane apart.  The real performer is bewildered by applause, because it startles him out of the reverie of his performance.  If you see a true artist bow after her solo, you can be assured she is not bowing so much as starting, tripping over herself as she is delivered from beautiful dreams somewhat closer to the earth.

I also wanted to lose myself in the passion for the thing.  I abstracted that away into a pure passion.  All along, apart from any of the things I have applied myself to, is the pure pulsating desire. I am a prince or an emperor of desire.  Desire stretches out into nothingness and imagines the pure, full being of its consummation.  So long as it is steeped in that imagination, it feels itself to be immortal, but reality is a cold wind to extinguish it the moment that, no longer feeling, it opens its eyes and sees.  Then it is alone in a silent room.  The flute has been disassembled and its pieces are strewn about the bed, dampened by the precipitate of haphazard puffing.  There is a paper on the table soiled with its flourishes, a brush in the cup misshapen by its thrusts.  Desire realizes in that moment that it has only itself, and since it is in reality nothing, only being in the imaginary, since it has come to feel the imagined perfection not in terms of its possibility but its absence, it changes into the consciousness that what is, ought not to be, and that what ought not to be, is: it lapses into despair, which is a sort of inverse of itself, the face of wanting when it knows.

I wrote about desire -- my desire, my naked ambition -- and dreams -- what the artist strives for, what applause removes from her.  The difference is in the object.  Desire of the kind I feel stops at the applause.  It is dazzled by the consequences of the action and conceives of that action only in a superficial way.  It knows art only as it is received, not as it is in itself.  The true dreamer wants only to be lost in her dreams and is impatient with everything else.  Finally the whole world to her becomes a distraction from those dreams, a nuisance.  Because she knows in her heart (with her heart) that the dream is more real than the world, and as she becomes closer and closer to the dream. She makes it real -- she becomes its reality.  She is the Hunger Artist -- and would show her audience what true fasting is, if only she weren't obliged to fast for them.