Diary of an unborn writer #1

Day began with an account of Ernest Dowson, friend of Oscar Wilde, who drank himself into oblivion on absinthe and whiskey. A paragon of charm and wit until drunk when he became obscene, picking fights. A slight man, who from pictures, barely fitted into his body. He died as the the violent century took off at the age if 32.

What sensitivity does to the unready soul! The most sublime experience and readiness to understand. The potential to seize and replicate in the most varied song the humdrum of everyday. It is the acknowledgement of everyday that keeps these boys dreaming. Unreadiness to experience it to its coarse tip. And ironically know its coarsest flavour.

The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormword and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things
Dregs ~ Ernest Dowson

Dowson was perpetually infatuated with young girls. A trait his friends saw as a sign of his purity of heart.

To me it's as though he couldn't stop dreaming.

Absinthe - the splendid hallucinogen - is symptomatic of those that dare to dream but are desperate not to fall. Young, beautiful men that grow not old even as they that are left grow old. In old age they yearn for simplicity and retreat into childish fancy or else abhor worldly stench while simultaneously revelling in it.

The delight of those that would reference it plum-mouthed and giddy at the romanticism of the green fairy without daring to even peek beneath the veils that these romeos tried to lift.

That they saw was perhaps too much for those - as we've said - who are unready.

The dens of Dowson, Wilde and co. were the fowlest, most sublime you'd ever meet. The troughs of Lautrec, Van Gogh, Verlaine - spilling nectar of broken hearts. They that knew how fine things could be, and saw how desperate they were.

And now are, though we cloak it in ceremonial self-reference, digitised and anaesthetised. How many of us can say we've lived even a speck of these fin-de-siecle adventurers.

Too responsible. Too afraid. Too dead.

Dear boys what is the world to do with you, but celebrate your inspiration and spit on your misery. Probably spit on both.

They is no use for the grand observers, simply because they refuse to disguise or use disguises so grotesque they remind the others of their own false dreaming - the strategy to cut off inspiration for the pain of falling.

Dear men.

I've found Dowson's story as inspiration to find some stability. To experience drudgery to its very tip, and pray that inspiration finds me well on the other side. I've no wish to wash up dead, however romantically.

But to recall what might have been - that is a luxury I can ill-afford to lose.

Retrospective dreaming. Anticipative wistfulness.

Solidad - nostalgia for a time that has not yet passed.

Or couldn't, even.