I’m depressed. I came back from a working holiday, an educational trip to Venice and Florence yesterday and today I’ve been going over old writings from the time I had to come back from Prague one summer when I had been hoping to stay and write. I had come back because my laptop had broken and that depressed me more than missing people and missing home. I had come back then to go on aspergic chat forums on the internet, working myself into tears.
On the trip I had almost a religious experience, seeing the inspiration of christianity for the first time in years and almost feeling that I could build up a relationship with Christ. One of the other guys on the trip, a house parent, is a christian, and a lovely guy - I couldn’t imagine meeting anyone nicer. And I got on with everyone on the trip, and really enjoyed being in their company. They liked me too. One of the reasons I might be crying now is that one women on the trip, with whom I had a deep conversation one night, told me how she found me very laidback and good with the students. She kissed my hand when I offered it, in my reserved way, when getting off the bus. On the trip I saw another side of myself I rarely get to express, getting on with people I see eye to eye with and have something in common with.
I am rewriting this now since I lost my first post when I enabled scripts in my browser, but when I was first writing it I had a reverie of losing it, of hitting doors and smashing up tables and the like at work. I lost it, and then, perhaps as I tried to work out what it was that was so upsetting me, and scrambled around for ideas, the reverie developed and one of the big cheeses at work accused me of being inadequately spiritually developed. It started around the time I was writing about my spiritual experience there.
I had thought of an additional structure to Family Fortunes some time back, throwing in Lord of the Flies, that novel I was writing when my screen broke up on my laptop, into the mix. And I have been looking over that today. Well, it is too much, and that is no doubt part of my depression, since this is what happens to my novels every time. They grow unmanageable. And remembering how things were in Prague is also depressing. And how my life repeats itself. How I am always living in my stories, but that they are always inchoate on paper, just full and deep and atmospheric in my head. They prevent me living but never progress.
I made some notes today and tried to draw this narrator that I have borrowed from Lord of the flies. It is rich this way, but there are many thematic contradictions. Lord of the Flies is behind me, and I have forgotten its inception. I should leave it behind me.
I can’t afford for this novel to die on me.
I am not good at moving from one thing to another. Perhaps that is all it is. Or maybe it is nothing to do with my writing at all, but more to do with coming back to my life and seeing how little i have in common with people here, when I could have so much. And seeing too the lifestyle on the continent, watching people so alive in the many piazzos. While I was there I so wanted to move again. I get stale so quickly.
I’ve got a lot in any case to think about.