sortes Helen Garner

The combination of things i’ve been reading, books about Nero, and a novella, The Princess of 72nd street (which I will write about on my ‘novella substack’) about an artist woman in the 1970s experiencing psychosis, have put me in a wacky mood. I keep having dreams about a sentient balloon version of Nero, who performs on a stage as Nero liked to do, and also waking up convinced my enemies are demonic snail aliens, a thought which lasts until I go outside and see another human. I’ve been swimming as much as I can before my gym pass which I had to cancel ends, and eating odd combinations which one does when the terror of the end of the month comes along ( if I could sacrifice a bull and read its intestines, the intestines would say ‘beware and prepare for the end of the month when all your bills are due’ ) Sardines, year old coffee jellies, carrots, the dreaded bag of kasha found at the back of the cupboard. ( Kasha is tasty, until you are forced to eat it) I’ve also been reading Hercule Poirot novels for the first time. When I was staying in a nunnery in Ireland, I watched Poirot and an 80s version of Sherlock Holmes (lots of toupees) every night in a stupor instead of writing the novel I wanted to write as I was suffering from a bone chilling insomnia which made me convinced of the supernatural for the first time in my life. ( I had a vision of a woman with a rotted jaw, then discovered there was a child with a rotted jaw buried in the yard of a nearby magdalene laundry named Ellen Organ. It gave me the horrid thought that ghosts age too )

I love when Agatha Christie writes lines like ‘But I’ll warn you Elsa Greer. If I do paint you, I shall probably make love to you.’

I’ve been flipping through Helen Garner’s How to End a Story, her collected diaries at random, kind of like the ‘Sortes Vergilianae’ game, I think this is the best way to read it.

‘Today I’ll get up, have a shower, see how my period’s going; make my bed, wear something clean and comfortable; go to the last day of the festival; maybe walk across the river and look at the water; and come home.”

On the page beside it:

‘Constant struggle between money and time: will I waste an hour going into town to Bell’s Discounts to get the skin cream cheap, or will I waste a couple of extra dollars at the corner chemist and save the hour?’

Sometimes it’s interesting to think about Roman wax tablets which they wrote on, and constantly erased (its fun when you are reading Ovid or whatever and they refer to writing on a tablet) and think our internet will become an artefact like that too, erased with only dark hunks of screen left. (The National Gallery of Scotland has a good example of a Roman tablet, in the Egypt section not the British Roman one, but you know I don’t take photographs in the Ancient Egyptian sections of any museums out of superstition, so to go see it yourself if you live here. )When one has this thought, diary keeping seems like a good idea, and if you keep one on the premise that the internet will disappear, you end up writing about the weather, culture or politics to inform the future reader. The next Samuel Pepys!! This doesn’t make sense to do though if you live somewhere very damp and wet, as it will not be preserved by time, you must move somewhere dry first, if you live somewhere wet you can just write cathartic narcissistic drivel about how depressed you are. Things should ideally go in the diary first before anywhere else. Sometimes, I write things to my friends which should go into the diary, and if I sent it to my friends already, it seems tiresome to write it out again in a diary, or even if I post things here. I’ve had the same thick yellow diary for three years now, I clearly don’t write in it everyday, and I think that puts me off to, it's like putting on the same dirty shirt everyday, all my past yuckiness and lamentations are in it. The only thing I enjoy reading in my past diaries are my night dreams. (daydreams are too embarrassing, though I think at its most vulgar level, art is transforming your daydreams from something unbearably embarrassing to something palatable and tense.) The main real point of a diary I think however is just to practice good sentences and when suffering grand delusions, imagining it in the British library collections where all your musings on who is a demonic snail and who isn’t will be read after your death