dear diary

06.29.2026 London

12:30pm Wallace collection

[redacted]

The denial of your own desire, foolishness, curiosity, self-interest, self-effacement, slimy extrusion, etc is a dull and dulling thing. When you lie to yourself you begin repeating phrases — rehashing spent conversation topics — drawing other people into loops.

The extraction of reassurance from others as a means of cementing one’s own mundane fantasy is unpleasant business for everyone involved. Henry James understood this, which is why so many of his sentences sit out of reach of clearer translations of themselves. When it comes to the construction of fantasy, dialogue might be one of the best architectural devices. It is easy to think of fantasy as internal, something private and cranially bounded, but if there is one thing I’ve learned from God and magicians and other charismatic men it’s that magic is a social tool. When you speak things into being, it’s useful to have an audience — creation is best when relational. It is good to pray out loud every now and then, if only to remind Him of this.

Right now I am at the top of the stairs in the Wallace Collection, surrounded by all of these large-scale oils by François Boucher. Behind and directly beside me, set against striped blue cloth, are seasonal pastorals. In Autumn, a young man and woman — shepherd and shepherdess, presumably, if the flock lounging around them attests to profession — recline before an antique fountain. Its stone is chipped but its water still flows clear. Grapes abound. There are grapes in his basket, his hand, her lap. He reaches out to feed her but her lips remain closed. Boy and girl look into each other’s eyes. It is the diagonal of this gaze, not the horizontal of the proffered grape stem, that anchors the composition. Off to the right, a young boy with drooping eyelids and cherubically plump hands peers at them from the shade of an angled straw hat. At the girl’s feet is a spaniel, who has heard a noise from beyond the edge of the canvas.

Above the stairs, on marbleized yellow walls, are vast swirling nude mythical scenes. The Rape of Europa. Mercury Confiding the Infant Bacchus to the Nymphs. The sun rising and setting over tangled bodies in churning waves. The men are chiseled, the women soft and pale. Their bodies look like mine. Their bodies look like mine.

How strange to be tangled in other people and in water. Miraculous and terrible. A grammatical crisis as much as a physical one. To be caught up as an object in the world of Mercury and Apollo. The sun rises and sets. Apollo enters as the “I” and departs as the “I.” A nude woman, pale and shaded, gazes upwards. Apollo both brings and is the light. She is a body amongst bodies.

[initially written in/for Personal Diary with leaky pen - typing up now at 10:53pm (*on beanbag chair in —‘s flat while — talks w friend on phone*) and ink still on thumbnail]

11:41pm ---'s flat
Gruel is moral. Tofu is moral if plain. Rice is moral if rationed. Bread is neither moral nor immoral but is honest. Cheese can be indulgent but bread and cheese is an honest man's meal.

1:40am (so technically 6.30, but feels like part of same day)
A strange day. A day spent walking and talking. Walked from Marylebone Station to Wallace Collection to LRB Bookstore to British Library to Holborn to St. Paul's to pub. After pub - crossed Millennium Bridge, walked along south bank, crossed Westminster Bridge, walked to St. James Park. In park, stood looking at pelicans. Asked pelicans for blessings. Asked pelicans for guidance. Asked decisions to make themselves for me.

06.10.2026

Running late.

06.04.2026 London

1:28 Wallace collection

It is a shame that I am not included in any monumental paintings of the annunciation. Not hovering in the foreground, lurking in the background, sitting off to the side, or glowing centrally, pierced and illuminated by Divine Light.

It is a good thing that so many museums (ones housing decorative arts, at least) include big mirrors. To find a mirror in a collection is to find yourself in the collection. A mirror is a good thing. Mirrors guarantee diverse one-to-one representation in historically exclusive spaces. Watch me hover over a Louis Seize mantelpiece! Light me fluorescent next to a Louis Seize clock! Put me in conversation with a desk that might or might not have been owned by Marie Antoinette! With a pale-chested woman and her dog! With Venus! With nude bathers!

I have been nude before and might be nude again one day.

Pour me into a vessel. Convert me into a ewer. Visualize me as Diana. Set me in motion. Freeze me in stone. Paint me like one of your French girls. Picture me naked, then drape me in Prussian Blue, white highlights and creased folds informed by the anatomy beneath. Pierce me with divine light. Bathe me in clear water. Surround me with nymphs and cupids, their forms and gestures carefully and geometrically blocked to draw the viewer’s attention to Me. Me!

Time puts inches on you. Swords, if swung, take inches off.

Older man to wife: “It’s time for some jasmine tea to wake us up.”

2:11

"a Morningstar damascened with arabesques and cartouches"

4:33 Huntarian museum

So many lives in jars. I did not expect gore, suspended, to be so white.

10:49 man talking to self on bus

“Charles Dickens must have been so rich to live next to Highgate school. So rich in Victorian times. From writing about poverty.”


> back 2 diary