We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
It makes me angry sometimes, it’s a visceral thing – how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren’t genuine, but because they are; because you’ve said them so many times, your ‘principles,’ your ‘ideals’ – and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.
But he doesn’t love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love – the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn’t happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another’s faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn’t happen.
You can’t deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the ’perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.
For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination’s caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.
And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.
Dorie herself was not very surprised, because a daydreamer is prepared for most things and in a way she had planned even this, though she had not guessed how it would come about.
Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!