Therapy

Psychotherapy & Pornography in End of the Century Vienna (1996-98) by ERNST GRAF

CHAPTER I

1996

EMBRACE YOUR FEAR, WEAR YOUR FEAR, BE YOUR FEAR, LOVE YOUR FEAR.

“If you spend your whole life alone it's not surprising you become bitter and resentful of people who have wronged you. That is why coming here is so special for me, the only place I feel warm feelings directed at me. The street feels a hostile place to me. I realise I cannot come here forever, but for this short time it's just such a sanctuary.”

There is some humanity in my brain, and Seraphina grabs hold of it and pulls it out so I can be human and warm in that lush fern-fronded room on the chaise-longue where many of the finest and most troubled minds of Vienna had lain for more than a century spilling out their troubles, spilling out their neuroses, spilling out their sperm; but outside it drifts off again somewhere inside my brain and I can't find it and be inside it. I go back to being a block of ice again.

I also happened to be in love with Seraphina.

When Seraphina was saying, “You've got three options, you can come back to see Dr A—, you can think about it for a few months, or you can do nothing. But I would suggest you don't choose the third option because nothing is going to improve for you” maybe she was really talking about the sex then. You can go and do something about it, you can think about it for a few weeks or months before doing something about it, or you can just do nothing, shunt it to back of brain and try to forget it, deny it, deny the sexual urge like I denied M, but then nothing would improve. And at the end: “I hope you do something”, a very meaningful and deliberate choice of words, looking me in the eye, hand on shoulder.

*

So it’s over for good then. I will not see Seraphina again. The first real relationship of my life is over. I feel desolate. Alone in a wintry Vienna. I’ve got a headache, tired and emotional. My emotions are all shaken up. I said “I feel attracted to you and had warm feelings so it’s hard to stop dead after sixteen weeks, and be then left with nothing.” But she stopped me; “You weren't left with nothing—you had the experience of us being together.” “It didn’t feel like that at the time.” “But did it later?” “Yes, it does now.”

She said she had spoken to Dr A—, who's the psychologist for this district, and told him she thinks I could benefit from further therapy, and he agreed that would be a good thing. But it wouldn’t be with her, because she doesn’t work for him anymore, but it would be here, with someone else. I said it would be hard seeing someone else, here; “I’d feel jealous seeing you go in the room with someone else.” “I’m not in that room anymore,” she interrupted. “No, the room doesn’t matter. It’s that I can only continue therapy with someone else.” She said “I’m not your mother.” “No, but you’re my doctor and you help me.” “You don’t need help, you’re a fully grown man. You have power. You can do what you want.” She says it’s better to come for help when you’re not in crisis, you can make more progress then. Instead of firing on two cylinders, better to come on all six cylinders.

She said it’s to my credit that I came here to seek help, wrote a letter and came back to see her again. To my credit in the month & a half waiting for her to write, I found alternative ways of coping with the blackness and getting out of it. She asked if I was in any relationships now. “No, of course not.” “Like with the girl in the club or girl at the station?” “No, no relationships like that.” “I wasn’t criticising,” she said. “I didn’t mean it to sound like I’m criticising.” Perhaps this will give me strength, this rapprochement, in unforeseeable ways. I feel relieved to have patched things up. I talked about my Swiss gold, copper pennies. She says “I know what a massive amount of gold you’ve got inside. In our discussions when you let me inside, I felt your gold. I found our conversations so interesting, they were important to me.”

“Scrooge seems so hateful,” I said “but I’m not nasty to other people”—she interrupted “Well, perhaps not with words, but actions speak louder than words.” I agreed. “I was weird as a baby.” She interrupted me, “But that’s making yourself out to be very special isn’t it.” I smiled, and she did too, and I laughed. When I spoke about copper pennies, she said “There you go then. You can build on that.” I said “No, I can’t do more.” “Well, you don’t have to do more immediately. You have the Swiss gold in you, and you have the power to give it. But if you let someone into your gold, so many good things could happen.”

At the end, we stood up, I picked up my coat and bag, she held out her hand and wished me luck, she put her hand on my shoulder and said “I hope you do something. Take care of yourself” or something like that, what was it? A strange phrase “I hope you do something”: what did it mean? In life, with my book, or just writing to Dr A—? She said she hoped I would come back for more therapy. She followed me to the door, and said kindly “See you.” “See you,” I said, glancing back, too briefly, leaving, the door clicking shut behind me. Stepping out into the icy cold November fog of the Ringstraße, complete despair and grief engulfed me. I was back to nothing again. Scared.

“You never think people are going to be nice to you, do you?” “No, I certainly don’t!” “No,” she had echoed quietly. “If you are going to continue with therapy, I don’t think you can continue to build the walls around yourself. You always come up with 101 reasons for not doing something.”

Seraphina urged me to continue with therapy: she wanted me to.

“You've arranged a life for yourself where no one can touch you.”

“Thank you very much.”

Seraphina was saying if I’d passed her in the street, I wouldn’t have looked twice at her.

CHAPTER II

1997

“It’s sexy to take risks,” I said to my new therapist, Lucrezia. “It feels so sexy to go into a whore’s room and strip absolutely nude and be rampant in there, waiting for her to come in. That’s the good part, when you give her the money and she tells you to strip while she goes out for a moment. If the Aphrodite films had been better Friday I might very nearly have been tempted. To be in that warm room stark naked, waiting for her to come back in. I've got an intense resentment of people, and I want them to prove me right. That's a relief. Lets me off the hook. They can say these things they do but I'm never going to submit to that. They're never going to take away what's special about me. I have to put up with so much nastiness in my life, but I will rise above, and remain beautiful, like F.G.Lorca. People are always trying to look you in the eye, demanding something of you, and that's very tiring.”

“People who throw abuse at you, that says more about them than it does about me. That's their problem, if they really feel that insecure. I don't want to waste my time talking about their problems. I don't recognise these people as being my superiors. If I see something admirable in someone, then fine, I might try to incorporate it into my personality somehow, but that's my choice. But the sight of these people making snide remarks to me, I find a very vile and ugly sight, they repulse me; I find it mind-boggling they really think they've got the right to drop hints I should change to become like them. They won’t leave you alone. They can’t just leave you alone. They think they have to keep chipping away at you every day, making polite hints that you should change to become just like them every day.”

“In my brain there is an edge of the world. No one will listen to me and understand that. I feel like the sailors who screamed at Columbus because they were going to fall off the edge of the world. You keep insisting over and over (and so does everyone else) the world is round, and I feel so frustrated and angry trying to make you see there is an edge which you are pushing me over. Because the world is complete and is round, your brain is complete and is round, everybody's brain I've met is complete and is round, my brain was never completed because my mother ignored me from the moment I was born, there is an edge I always fall over which is not there for other people so they can't understand. And I want to hit my head trying to explain to them, why won't they listen? Autistic people have an edge they fall over, it is very upsetting for them. They wish their brain was whole. But you can't make it so. Because it is irreparable.”

“Dreaming my daydreams, writing my stories, without hurting anybody else, and without trying to disturb anybody else. It's amazing how much abuse that attracts. That's all right. I pretend I am Oscar Wilde, F.G.Lorca. Until I have achievements of my own, I wear theirs like an overcoat. To get abuse thrown at you in the street, you'd think that you must really have hurt someone, but it's not so. It's good. If I am annoying the stupid people, I'm doing the right thing. That's all right. To deliberately try to hurt another human being surely you must be completely obsessed by them? The majority of people are of low intelligence and pretty ugly personalities. When they find someone intelligent and beautiful and pure and serene in their midst, they don't like it. They try to crush you, goad you into being ugly back. I take great pleasure in defying them. I like to remain intelligent and beautiful and pure and serene. So it will continue to eat away at them. Because they know I'm better than them. You know F.G. Lorca was better than them. Jealousy. They obviously feel very inferior to me, so they try to crush me. I enjoy strolling past and letting them know they've failed and will always fail.”

“I've realised now quite happily that a vampire is all I can be, the question is whether you can bear it or find it unbearable. All my life it was on the edge of being unbearable, then after — for 9 months it became unbearable, and my life stopped. Seraphina made it bearable again, and downright enjoyable. I enjoy being a vampire now, I like the freedom of it. I had a crisis of faith and Seraphina was my priest who helped me through it. Seraphina was my priest, she talked it over with me for the few months of the therapy, and helped me through. I've gone back to my faith, with great joy and happiness now. I'm a vampire, it's no good trying to make me a normal social person. I can only be what I am. I will never find happiness trying to be something I'm not.”

Going around the Ring I felt like Oscar Wilde, Stephen Fry. Beautiful and ugly at once. I am fascinated by this expedition into my interior. It sounds quite pornographic.

“I'm like black, I take everything in and use it but radiate nothing back. It absorbs light and heat, and radiates nothing back off again. It becomes a closed hothouse system inside the black.”

An exotic Oscar Wildean, Victorian, vampiric world.

“It requires a leap of faith I cannot make. It's over the black horizon: I can't see it. You say move towards it and you eventually will, the new world, but I say you are just sending me closer to the edge where I will fall into black space, it is increasingly less safe the further I move towards it. I stay dead in the centre of all the centrifugal forces and will never get pulled out to the edge, like a marble on a gramophone record. I don't want some bland empty new world, I want to stay and make a better job of the old world, start to mine all these cultural and moral riches that have always been here untapped. Now I can start to make use of them. When you've given me the ability to mine all the riches that have always been here, why would I want to travel to some new world there? I wanted to go, when everything felt dead here, I was not living in a treasure chest, it had become a suffocating coffin. Lorca wanted to go to New York, which he knew he'd hate, because he had to escape the deadness of Spain. It is saying Seraphina helped me to be more myself.”

“I took a six-month holiday to the New World, and came away more Andalusian than ever. Lorca came to New York feeling dead and feeling Spain was dead, but though New York was so loud and noisy, he came away feeling in comparison he was more alive and Spain was more alive.”

“I'm sure there's a flaw in this plan,” Lucrezia smiled, her blood-red curls falling around her young face. She had similar hair but I found her even more desirable than I had the older Seraphina. I got an erection the moment I first met her and she introduced herself to me and shook my hand. Her bosoms were enormous and strained against a soft cream silk blouse with deep valley of her cleavage very much exposed. She couldn’t have been more than 26 years old. I wanted to fuck her very much.

“Ah, that's the clever bit. You've got to adjust your thinking. I am different. I'm not like you. Most brains are like a globe, but some are like a gramophone record. This is genuinely how I see the world. You describe a world I don't recognise. You describe a world you inhabit, but you've no experience of my world. It is a flat gramophone record. That lack of stimulation at birth prevented the two dimensional gramophone record from mutating into a round globe. Every so often you meet someone who makes you wish you were a globe. You've been waiting 26 years to mine the gramophone record, all the incredibly complicated recorded treasures in every groove, with no start in sight, then you meet someone like — and the gramophone record suddenly wants to be a globe, otherwise it can't bear life anymore. You try to make it happen, get me over the edge to the New World, but like elastic after six months I snap back again. With relief, to be a gramophone record again! The riches! And now you find the gems and jewels are starting to come to the surface. You can start mining now. Your eyes are suddenly filled with the riches, you cry with joy and pleasure. Why would you ever consider leaving now? Seraphina has given me the ability to mine the riches now.”

“It was the desire of a gramophone record to become a globe. Then after six months of elasticated stay in the new world, it snaps back, and now the desire of a gramophone record to be a gramophone record!”

“For a while I wanted to be someone else, which I believe is impossible, then after a brief six months glimpse of what it would mean to be someone else, I with relief wanted to be myself again. All I know about is what's inside me. Seraphina has opened up my interior to me, for my exploration. Like the Amazon was inaccessible and unexplored before the first explorers started to break into it and find amazing unbelievable things.”

“People who attack me are envious, because they know I've got more riches than them.”

“You're saying if I just let myself go, take the safety catch off. I'm saying there's nothing there.”

“You tried to stop me being a vampire, and I am grateful, but it's no good, it's all I can be, but before I was tormented and ashamed by it, now I feel relaxed and content about it. I don't feel particularly good about myself at times, but I know I never try to hurt another human being, I know I never try to diminish another human being, and as long as I never have anything to reproach myself for, I can feel contentment and acceptance of myself. I have no bitterness for them. If you cannot think positive thoughts, it's best not to think them at all. I prefer to fill my mind with beautiful, intelligent, kind people who I admire and respect and look up to. The ugly people I just politely remove from my memory banks. I only want the admirable people in my memory banks. I feel sorry for the others, because they are only hurting themselves. Hatred does more harm to the possessor than the object, etc. It will be on their conscience not mine. They are storing up an awful lot of trouble for themselves. I think Seraphina was ignoring the reality of my condition.”

“My vocation in life is to be an introspective person. Pressure from you will not change that. Inside is all that feels right. Other people put pressure on me to be just like them, but then I read Lorca and Van Gogh, and that calms me down again, it's all right to be like that too. If your head's full of paintings you should paint and if that repulses people, well that's a shame. You can only be yourself. I don't want to be with another person. Why would I do what I don't like? Why would I do what makes my life unbearable? I'm going to have a good time this summer, going to theatre, cinema, opera, wherever I want, then I'll be happy to go back to work in September.”

“I never say anything more than necessary. Doesn't that make you think that is just who I am, and to try to force me against that is going to make things worse? If you know me, you've got to accept I'm silent. My family did. I'm a silent person. I get pressure off of everybody to be just like them. It would be nice to have one person saying you don't have to be. Don't you think it's likely I will never be able to have a relationship? Can't we talk about it? The more pressure you put on someone the harder you make it for them, I think she should see that. I cannot function under that pressure, that's a fact. You've got to put your foot down with these people: they think they can make judgements on you and then you've got to change to suit them. I reject their lies completely. Behind their laughter I see their fear, their jealousy, their loathing: that I have all the things they cannot have.”

“There is no substitute for a real relationship.”

“I want to have a real relationship, but I don't think it's very good pretending I'm someone I'm not, it's better to accept the reality of who I am, and the limitations. Stop trying to bend me to fit in with your idea of what I should become. I like being me, but I also don't really want to be alone forever but realise I probably will be. I like being me, and I think I have worth being me. I don't want you to destroy me. Seraphina was trying to destroy me, the same way everyone else does.”

“What people reproach you for, cultivate. They're jealous, of my riches. I am powerful, secure, safe in my black fortress. Abuse is the best thing, because it sparks your spark of originality into life. It makes you see what valuable riches you have got. Makes you cultivate your riches more, and get more out of them. They've got no inner riches, so throw abuse is all they can do. I like pushing the edges of the pocket; pushing people to the edge. I get what I want from them, bouncers which I can leave alone, with relief. I manipulate them into hostility which leaves me untouched. But I have to remain alert all the time, lest someone creeps up on me unawares and is nice to me, then I am beaten.”

“No one will comprehend that it just goes against my nature to be with other people, no amount of pushing and pressure will change that. I think you should just acknowledge it is my nature, and to try to force someone against their nature can never help anyone. To say the abuse and sneering snide remarks someone gets is their fault and they should change to fit in with the people sneering is wrong. You should encourage them to cultivate themselves, feel pride in themselves. It's my biology. Isn't it better to just accept that? It would be a relief. Trying to artificially bend me into something I'm not brought no relief or contentment. You made me unhappier and more unstable. It's like a doctor's note to excuse me from games, I'd like a doctor's note to excuse me from talking. Can you understand what a relief that would be? Do you see how your previous tactics made everything worse? You just seemed to be confirming their view that I am simply a pathetic human being, who deserves to be sneered at unless he changes—to be just like them! Honestly! Do these people ever look at themselves in the mirror? Do they have no self-awareness whatsoever?”

CHAPTER III

1998

I can’t wait for the sex to begin. Now I’m going to keep on doing it without stopping. The double life of Franz Schubert. I am an autistic, private person, normal love is impossible for me. The rampancy of my double life will give me the spark to go to work and earn lots of money and get on with girls there. I am haunted by sexual desires. Seraphina isn’t, she’s got a boyfriend, a partner and a home. People who have no relationships are haunted by sexual desires.

Federico Garcia Lorca led a necessarily double life. Franz Schubert led a necessarily double life. Kafka, Van Gogh. All repressed people do, people for whom relationships are not possible: these people must all lead a double life. The thrill of the porn films: there’s nothing to match it, is there! The excitement gripping my chest of the first film before Christmas, the Urania clinic, the nervous erotic anticipation! I am addicted. As addicted to the morphine as ever.

Seraphina would say: “You’ve got to bite the bullet some day. Or you don’t have to, and then you’ll be alone and unhappy all your life. You can’t keep carrying out relationships at this romantic abstract level, you must at some time talk to people if you want to have a proper relationship.”

I’m doing with my life what I want to do with my life: spending all my time in the porn cinemas.

CHAPTER IV

FEBRUARY 1998

“I am not drifting through life: I am sternly, firmly, passionately doing exactly what I want. I think Seraphina should have helped me come to terms with who I am, not made me ashamed for being who I am. I get that off of everybody else. You should help people accept something that they don’t like about themselves, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa saying quick, this is an emergency, I really need you now, and Seraphina comes up and says all right then, and gives it that last shove to send it crashing to the ground; I want some temporary support to right myself a bit. Prop me up once and for all, so I’ll be safe forever. The tower is one of the wonders of the world; so am I. I don't want you to send me crashing to the ground and build a new one, because the new one would have an interest of 0% when the old precarious one has an interest value of 100%. Make it safe forever so it can be one of the wonders of the world forever; it must still lean, because it wouldn't have any interest if it didn't lean. No one would go to Pisa if the Leaning Tower didn’t lean. No one would love the Venus de Milo if she had two arms. What interests me about myself is the lean in me, so you have to very carefully prop me up so I'm safely leaning forever. The bit of madness in me is what makes my life worth living. So we ended our sixteen weeks still disagreeing about what to do next, but she had saved the tower for the time being, and subsequently I was able to put some permanent solutions into place, but then I needed some help with them, that's what coming here is. Just to finish the job of making the repair permanent, and make the tower lean safely forever.”

“I haven't been able to do anything all these years because of fears about the tower collapsing, I never felt safe. Now that I have come to some permanent solutions, I need support in implementing them; I want to become more productive and function better. I'm starting to feel safer now, the lean is fixed steadily in its place I want it to be. Coming here is part of the permanent solution. To keep me feeling safe, to enable me to write.”

“I needed Seraphina's help to keep me leaning at a precarious angle without falling, not to put me straight; that is missing the point. I have to be helped to create, that is to function better as a writer, be more productive as a writer, because that is what I am, but I'm being prevented from being it by my conflicts and feeling of falling.”

CHAPTER V

MARCH 1998

I am Oscar Wilde. Dandy, laughed at, reviled, but triumphant, forever above them all. It is no insult to be laughed at by the stupid people. They are just seethingly jealous of your intelligence, your beauty, and the amount of delicious dirty sex you are enjoying. "Decadence and disintegration still fails to set up the nightmarish intensity of Hoffmann's world." I want their desperate laughter, and you do see them getting ever more desperate; I crave it; it is the morphine I need to inject. Be rampant, smiling, provoking. Their terror is that the more they laugh the more I go on indulging my delicious, voluptuous pleasures. The more I flaunt it in their desperate, seething faces. Carry on.

I am rampant. I love it. They play into my hands. I'm unconventional, I'm an artist. I luxuriate in my eccentricity.

I thrive on opposition. It is the electricity I need to turn things on, get the machinery moving, the retorts & flasks & burners, and dynamos, to power the stories. Let myself go in Vienna again, back to normal.

I live in a delightful, beautiful world of hothouse flowers, and Vienna bohemia. My Babylonia. My life is beautiful in every second. I am Aubrey Beardsley. I am Philip Larkin. As long as I've got some money in my bank account, life is enjoyable.

Vienna is a nest of vipers and I'm the biggest viper of them all, taste the sweet poison in my two fangs; because I'm the most intelligent, I'm ingenious.

CHAPTER VI

APRIL 1998

“They're not honest: they try to make me feel inferior when it is because THEY feel inferior. A honest man would admit he felt inferior and try to improve himself but they just try to bring me down to try to feel superior: I must, alas, disappoint them! I feel stronger than ever; I have discovered my transcendental powers.”

Force them to embarrass themselves, so I can study it. Like Dracula in Piccadilly, hunted, hounded, “You think you have left me with no place to rest—but I have more! My revenge has only just begun!” Always walk towards whatever is frightening you, get as near to it as you can at all times, love it, love the thing you fear.

“I carry on: I'm working on a complicated scientific scheme they couldn't begin to comprehend, indeed it is still hard to comprehend even to me! But I sense it is there. I am a social anthropologist, of my own brain, my own autistic relationships with no-one. They think I am a glutton for punishment: I am a scientist. I am consumed by my mission: by my own brilliance; the importance of my task. They punish me because I'm beautiful and intelligent, while they are ugly and stupid. Beauty and intelligence is a threatening combination to people like them. Make a virtue out of what is hurting you. The meaningless of my life has become my very area of study, thereby with one twist giving intense meaning to my life!”

“I came through everything they threw at me! They became smaller and more diminished in the process, and I’ve become bigger and more beautiful and more supreme, and more dominant. The more in the wrong they become, the more in the right I become! The more dominant I become and the more they weaken their own position.”

“I don't know if God plays dice, but I do.”

“I LIKE to be against everyone in Vienna! That's the position I would choose to be in. I'm amused watching these pygmies trying to lay a glove on me. I like Babylon & Aphrodite because it's sleazy. I've set the experiment up and now I'm watching it take its course. This need to hurt me is very ugly, and very strange: you'd think they would want to make themselves look more beautiful in order to hurt me, yet they desperately make themselves look more ugly and reveal themselves to be so bothered by me: they defeat themselves. Poor things; everything they do plays into my hands!”

“Dracula, cornered in Piccadilly, turns on his pursuers and snarls ‘Revenge will be mine. Time is on my side.’ Van Gogh didn’t die or fail because he held onto his beliefs till the end, Karl Marx didn’t die because he held on to his beliefs till the end. Who remembers the names of those who threw abuse at Van Gogh? I am a vampire. I sit in corners and suck whatever I can get out of people that is useful to me, and for that I am hated and reviled!; so be it: they can never defeat me.”

The central question: will I indulge my yellow fever or not?

It's the same as with anything: if you just dip into pornography it won't be any good; you must totally give yourself up to it, immerse yourself in it, wrap its blanket around you. Whatever you do, do it to the nth degree.

“Anything which serves my writing has to be done: I make no apologies. It is my glory. My speciality. I pity them for only having the mundane real world to make do with. I revel in my invincibility, in winding them up. I love being the centre of attention. Those poor little insects, they can't get near me.”

“The abuse has INCREASED in the last two years: but amused by their stupidity, I take glee from strolling serenely by them, like blood from a loose tooth, it is the sweetest taste. To quote Noel Coward ‘I rise above it; frankly love it.’ I take pleasure from being against everyone; I enjoy annoying the stupid people. Like Karl Kraus in prewar Vienna, on the lip of the volcano. I've never got any pleasure from being with other people, always such huge deep pleasure from being alone: doesn't this tell you something? Feel sorry for them that they've really got such a low opinion of themselves, sorry they really feel that bad about themselves. Abuse comes out of self-hatred. They punish me for being brave enough to follow my own path, into deep frightening jungle. They fear discovery too much otherwise they'd do it. We are the brave ones, the fearless adventurers. I'm operating moves on levels they can't comprehend, never even knew existed.”

“Visual image is everything! I've got the greatest excitement in the world, my brain. I'm a dignified noble person, and look at them. It is like trying to get Dracula to stop sucking blood: he doesn't choose to be like that, he hated himself for being like that, but he is cursed with it. You should stop trying to get him to stop sucking blood, and admit that is not the best form of help you can offer him. Help him cope with his cursed life as it is. He is as much a victim of his personal drives as his victims are. I am unconventional! That is my glory. I am the wild one, on fire, destructive. Volatile and spontaneous. That is my genius. Revelling in the sexual desire people have for me. I've got my secret hideaways which will always defeat them, and allow me to perpetuate; like Dracula.”

“Yellow is an important part of my psyche: it must be cultivated like any other. Everyone needs to get highs: different people get them in different ways; their fix.”

I'm addicted to yellow (pornography), like E.A.Poe was addicted to opium. Chinese rickshaws going around the foggy Ring, Aphrodite is my opium den. Fu Manchu somewhere in the fog, controlling everything. The evil mastermind. The daughter of Fu Manchu who is meant to kill me but who has fallen in love with me and is fucking me. Where is she?

“I'm the mad, feverish creator, like Beethoven, Frankenstein. I'm Dr Hoffmann with his infernal desire machine. I am Karl Kraus, CHOOSING to be against everyone in Vienna. The more forward momentum you have, the less sideways falling there is; keep up a good speed. I haven't been able to because I've been so muddled, and mired. Seraphina helped, but didn't finish the job. I live for the sublime, which threatens the slime. Quite clearly, Seraphina wasn't carrying me with her in her argument; but instead of recognising this and backing off, she became more and more stern and insistent. I wanted to be opened up, and after 26 years that requires a lot of archaeology; but she wanted to carry out this opening and bring it to closure all in sixteen weeks; she wanted it opened and stitched up again in sixteen weeks, which is a completely artificial timeframe. Fair enough if you’ve only got sixteen weeks to give me, but you can’t expect to carry out an effective opening and closure in sixteen weeks, and to try to do so is just going to make things worse and cause more damage; there wouldn’t have been a sixteen-week limit on opening and closing Tutankhamun’s tomb. To do the job properly you need as long as you need.”

“I think you have mummy issues,” said Lucrezia, biting her lip.

Only now did I notice all the Egyptian statuettes in her study, Oriental rugs, Nubian carvings, a bust of Nefertiti. “What a beautiful bust.”

“Thank you,” said Lucrezia, glancing down at her bosoms, blushing. “I’m afraid I’ve always had rather large breasts.”

“Your body is my paradise,” I intoned, reading an inscription. “My fatal ancestral paradise.”

“Thank you,” said Lucrezia, “but fucking me is not going to help you, is it. We can discuss those kinds of things if you wish, but not do them. That is why it is called the talking cure, not the fucking cure.”

“Pornography is how I will realise myself. It is through pornography that I will bloom & blossom, fill with blood, and explode into the wonderful lush life that is waiting for me, that only I am capable of living. The world is waiting for a special person and that is to be me.”

Stroking my huge exposed Tool as I spoke, I accidentally ejaculated all over Lucrezia’s lush ferns, her lamps, her chaise-longue, her beautiful bust.

“Oh I do apologise!” I cried. “I don’t know what came over me!”

CHAPTER VII

MAY 1998

“I was thinking I must humiliate them with my beauty and my intelligence, and my genius, and my power,” I mused. “I'm so powerful I can do what I want. Leave them open-mouthed with awe and admiration at my nerve and audaciousness. I am a law unto myself. I do what I have to do, for my purposes. I am so powerful I can strike wherever I like. I am someone who is completely unrepentant. Whatever you do you must do it to the nth degree. You must go all the way. I've been investigating the wilder shores of my sexuality.”

From Lucrezia I walked back to the Opera House but the girl said the balcony was closed tonight! They had upper circle for 2.50 but none in a convenient spot (“I have my favourite position,” I explained; “So do I!” winked the ticket girl, little hussy) so I left it and just went to the Café Imperial for 2½ pints before going to Aphrodite. I stayed for six hours. The films were extraordinary. Virgin on the Run, Tantric Sex, Glimpses, Red Riding Hood, Babylon advert, Secrets. They were fantastic, I went further than ever before. At the end Virgin on the Run was starting again and I suddenly felt like I was going to be sick with all the smoke and left. As I came out black girl and man were looking in and I passed them confidently, helped by seeing it was pouring with rain outside, AND it was dark night-time of course, that did make it easier. People who live in the night do live more on the wild edge of their perversions. Screams of crowds outside Planet Hollywood and people rushing by me from all angles to get there, leaving a deserted neon-lit Ring for me to cross in the absolutely torrential pouring rain—it was bliss!

To go around the Ring looking up at all the neon in the pouring rain, all by myself, was so gorgeous, one of my most sublime moments, I was just sorry that it had been preceded by something tacky; but that will always be the case; if I'd gone to the pictures or opera I would have felt dissatisfied and unfulfilled by my day out; that's the way it is.

Getting back to the dark lobby of my hotel, I stripped off my soaking wet clothes and sat there stark naked, hidden from view of the reception desk by pillars and huge ferns, and masturbated to an exquisite orgasm, ejaculating in white floods into one of the ferns, before gathering up my clothes and climbing the marble staircase to my rooms still stark naked. It had been the greatest night of my life.

“The pleasure those films give me! Sybaritism! A new Europe Symphony! I play by my own rules, in my own world, to my own set of standards, and that makes me untouchable to them. What if I don't do anything on the book today, or tomorrow? What's the hurry? I've got all the time in the world, I am the king in my own kingdom. I am Emperor in my yellow Babylonia. I take their attention of me as a great compliment. Their smallness is drawn to my greatness, like iron filings to a magnet.”

“I only take up things when they've become eroticised for me, too. I feel I am to become something great, a great philosopher, a great psychologist, a great writer: I am just now starting on that journey, that archaeological quest, that 1930s Indiana Jones of the mind adventure. I love my brain so much now, my thoughts excite me so much. I feel I have moved beyond people forever. Truly, I am: Master of the universe.”

“What people reproach you for, cultivate.”

CHAPTER VIII

JUNE 1998

“You've got to realise how blessed you are!”

Sexual freedom is the key. Where am I going to get money from? I must think of something new. "Reject all the values of society, and enjoy sex. When you're dead you'll regret neglecting your genitals." Kenneth Williams in Tangier. F.G.Lorca in Havana. Me in Vienna. The pendulum must swing, that is the thing. Be wild like Joe Orton. I must really bother them, with my continued serene existence. And the pleasures I enjoy: the cinema, the opera, Aphrodite Cinema and Babylon Strip, the books, the writing, Urania.

Therapy was very enjoyable today: I was able to talk about my greatness, how I should be worshipped, bowed down to, I felt powerful; being able to talk about these things.

“Unless you devote everything to making you rich, you won't create anything beautiful or special. I'm extreme, Seraphina didn't want me to be extreme, because that would prevent closure in 16 weeks.”

“I play my own game, and they don't like it because they don't understand it.”

“I am impish, and mischievous. I make my own rules, that is my genius.”

“I make my own rules, and live by them; they don't like it, they are jealous because they wouldn't have the courage to live outside the rules; they hate my beauty, and bravery.”

“I am creative, and inventive. It is all part of the game. The abuse they attempt to heap on me gives me the electricity I need. I go to Aphrodite, delightedly, rampantly, I revel in it, I exult in defying them and frustrating them again. I need them to fill me up with power, with their electricity, so the monster can LIVE. I have caught them in my trap. I do everything for my greater glory; everything is to make me more powerful. Now I've set myself this challenge: phase 1 is completed, everyone is against me, I've got the starting conditions set up perfectly: now I start to make my achievements using this electricity, this material, in the teeth of this storm. Hold your line, no matter what; despite all the knockers and their bitter hatred and spitefulness; hold to your line, keep your nerve. They only attack so fiercely because they are terrified, because they know you have found the right line, which will elude them forever. The knockers is always what it was about. I am nothing without the knockers. Knockers are my everything.”

Lucrezia’s massive knockers in her white sweater were the elephant in the room with us. I asked her if she would raise her sweater to show them to me and, though hesitant at first, she did so. I carried on talking while stroking my tool.

“I live on a different level, because I MAKE my own level. I am playing a trick on them. I am working an elaborate scheme on them.”

“I WANT to take all they throw at me; they don't throw enough. I have my passing fancies.”

CHAPTER IX

JULY 1998

“They think I'm the victim, but I'm the master criminal. I'm the Fantomas leaning over Paris pulling all the strings, including theirs. Let them carry on thinking I'm the victim; that's how us criminal masterminds get away with it. I am superior and triumphant, and they are worsening their position all the time. Let them wonder; as I happily continue along my merry little way. Great people do attract the abuse of the stupid people, they feel afraid of me. Oscar Wilde had it, Van Gogh had it; they recognise I am great and are terrified of me. It is interesting; what material they give me. I am showing them how to live life on the edge. I am refining my rough genius, making it more pointed and sophisticated and deadly.”

I love the abandon and Dionysian negation of Babylonia.

I love their opposition. How their opposition thrills me. What electricity they give to my life. What sexual power. Completely immerse myself in that sleazy yellow Babylonia; it is MY world; it is where I know myself best, it is where I belong. I thrive and flourish and bloom on whatever energy they can give me; whatever blood they let me suck. I am in the position I would choose to be in.

I TAKE WHAT I NEED FOR MY BOOK.

“They're jealous because they can't touch my riches, they are out of reach, I move in realms & opera houses & cinemas & pubs & restaurants & clubs they don't understand, that are barred to them forever. They can't stand not being able to move in my circles. How I kill myself laughing at them; how pathetic they make themselves look. This is my fix. They are providing me with my fix. They don't understand how I am using them, sucking them vampirically. Give me more! I am rapacious. I'm forever out of their reach, and that's all they can do.”

“I feel like a butterfly, and you’ve pinned me to the board; every time I flutter my wings a bit you hit the pin in even further. I want to find my own way to live, I don’t like it if you think you’ve already got the answer. The patient is likely to fall back inside themselves again. I think if you won’t admit the problem you can’t help soften it. I am Dracula, I am tall and dark and mysterious, and brilliant, and intelligent, and genius, and rich: what more could I possibly want? I take their unending squeals of abuse as a compliment, and as such are warmed by them. You think I should change to fit in with your dogma, when surely your dogma should change to encompass my extremes?”

“I’m suffering from an addiction I don’t want to be cured of. Pornography is experiencing life at second hand. First hand is not possible, I can’t get excited about something I’ve never known. The Dionysian frenzy of it. The thrill of doing something illicit, the thrill of burying your whole life in illicitness.”

Very brief but heavy shower, and one burst of thunder.

The daytime skies pitch black outside Lucrezia’s Urania study windows. Her sitting topless, her massive knockers on full display in the light of her lamps, in just a short skirt and black stockings.

“That’s what I like to do, and they can’t stop me. I am the way I want to be, and they don’t like it, they don’t like my brilliance, my intelligence, my beauty, my serenity, my grace—they are my pawns. They are playing into my hands, they are falling into their parts in my experiment without realising they are giving me the research I need. Don’t they think perhaps it is a sign of their own insecurity? Do they not think they are giving the game away a little? Don’t dim your light for anyone. You can never have enough enemies. I will enjoy taking them on. Do whatever you know people are going to reproach you for; dare them; wind them up.”

CHAPTER X

AUGUST 1998

“They attack because they're powerless, and frustrated; seething with jealousy and envy: the green-eyed monster. I love the freedom of being unattached, I love the power of being on the fringe and not privy to any responsibilities; I love the Baudelairian perspective this gives me. Frankly, my position is delicious, and very precious. This is just what I've always wanted, the life of the flâneur, the sybaritic pleasures. I've got my life already, like Francis Bacon; I have got my gilded gutter life, my sleazy double life. Everything is in place, and I mean everything.”

“Society cannot stand anyone who won't play by their rules, so they gleefully try to destroy that person, President Clinton, Oscar Wilde, Beethoven, but then when that person won't even play along in being destroyed, they get enraged and infuriated, and it is very hard for them. How dare you refuse to let us destroy you! When you resort to abuse it is a revealing sign that you have lost the argument, and in fact you never had a valid argument in the first place; abuse is the unintelligent's substitute; a very blunt and ineffective weapon. How easy it is to play such people like a piano; to run rings around them; to tease them until you have driven them mad. They cannot stand it because they know I will always triumph over them; my intelligence will never go away, my beauty will never go away, my power will never go away—they are all INCREASING. Every time I force them into abuse is a victory for me, and another defeat for them. It just proves I am annoying them, it just proves they have let me get under their skin. I have nothing to be embarrassed about, because I'm not the one throwing abuse at other human beings; they have got a lot to feel uncomfortable about. I LIKE IT that they are so obsessed with me, it is very pleasantly flattering. They have made a serious and fatal tactical error. THE POWER THEY HAVE GIVEN ME. I will reap the bounty of it now. Psychologically, to abuse others is a sign you hate yourself. To attack others is the moment you defeat yourself. They thought I would become weak, and I have become stronger. It must be very infuriating for them. How they boost my ego. It is sign that they are frightened of me. I'M SORRY, YOU PEOPLE, BUT I'M GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH. I'm sorry that it infuriates you so. I'm strange, and I like it, and I'm hanging onto it. The wildness, the spontaneity, the rampancy, the freedom of my life. How they must be infuriated that they STILL cannot get to me.”

“They slather and boil in my wake, and I sail on serenely. They feed me a little bit MORE electricity. The little people will try all they can, but never dent me, never scratch me, never slow me, they can only speed my progress more, put more solar wind in my sails, more electricity in me. They feed my deep sense of romantic hero-hood, they feed my megalomania, they feed my deep sense of joy, and sybaritic pleasure, they make the blood in my mouth sweeter and sweeter. I LIKE turning people against me. I like listening out for their obsession with me. I thrive on alienation, laughter, abuse, attacks; it powers me; it multiplies my deep sybaritic pleasures. It enriches my experience of life, pleasure in pain. How they are DEFEATED. I let them dash themselves to pieces against me, because I am immovable brilliance, genius, power, sybaritism. I LIKE MY POSITION. I am in a very safe place here, on a scented sea of bosoms. The romantic hero loves the sybaritic pleasures of pain. Can you imagine their petty, boring, ordinary little lives?”

“They don't like me because I've got courage not to be a sheep, desperately fit in. I'm too busy living my own life, and enjoying my life, my sybaritic pleasures. How that annoys them. The outsider likes opposition, like Camus. I've got them on the run. Laughing at other people, with deliberate spiteful intent, they damn themselves; and I am drawing them into it. How I love winding people up. How I love the sounds of the jungle. How the stupid people hate me; what a compliment that is. How they torment themselves to try to get my attention. This is the effect great people like me have on the little people.”

“I am collecting the material they give me; how they feed me with electricity. How I love annoying people with my beauty, and intelligence, and genius. What a brilliant story it is; what a brilliant seam I've mischievously tapped into. To get anywhere in what I'm trying to do, I have to go further & further out to the black edges of consciousness; I have to go to MORE extreme places. That can only increase the hostility and the green-eyed jealousy of the ignorant & unintelligent who slather in my wake, foaming & frothing at the mouth in their impotent fury. The richness, the rich mixture! How I like it when people try to get at me. All they can do is try to harm me, because they are powerless to take my riches away from me. I haven't exploded yet, haven't published, I am preparing, throughout my 20s I am preparing, waiting for the moment when I explode, when I bloom & blossom, when I emerge from my chrysalis.”

Lucrezia’s big window still open, but grey and very cool and fresh.

“They feel inferior to me. It is important to remember that. My intelligence, my place in the world of poetry, the realms of High Art I move in; my beauty, my genius. My tangent. I just don't like being with other people; does this mean that I've got no value and worth? ‘Adjust your sights accordingly and focus on life's more profitable encounters.’ The joke is on them; I play them like a piano. I've suffered this all my life, and I've stayed beautiful, while they have grown more ugly & more angry. I have my brilliance that won't go away. I'm attracted to a certain type, I love it. It is the blood I gorge on. I love that sleazy world, it's so comforting. Enjoy living randomly, spontaneously. I am the random wild card, I strike when & where I want. How I love winding the stupid people up. I didn't think they were very intelligent at nursery, and I haven't changed my view one bit. I have remained true to myself, to my own line, and kept my conscience clear, lured them into further uglifying and stupidifying themselves. I loom over them like a GIANT, an intellectual & beautiful colossus. I've put myself in a fascinating, intense position, so I can study myself and my surroundings, and the reaction of others to me, from this position. I seek the tangent, the ellipse. I'm not going to repress my Eros just so as not to alert other people to it. I am WILD.”

“If they take me on, they give me power; they cannot win. With my specialness, my wildness, I show my complete POWER over them, my complete invincibility to their pondlife stupidity. I am afraid I'm going to have to keep frustrating them by continuing to enjoy my sybaritic pleasures. It was always my natural road, but I tried to fight my natural road, because I was horrified by its implications. Like a vampire, or a homosexual. How delicious my insouciance is. I am more alive than them. I ride on a scented sea of bosoms. They cannot get their hands on my secret treasure. I love the thrill of the chase, the excitement they give me. They laugh because they hate their own inadequacies. Wherever they go, they will be treated to my SUPREME CONFIDENCE; my calm happy unflinching TAOIST SMILE. I yearn for everyone to be against me, they are playing into my hands. My implacable TAOIST SMILE, and my SUPREME CONFIDENCE, will face them wherever they go. They will never get away from it, like Nayland Smith can never get away from Fu Manchu.”

“Poor them. Where do I get my supreme confidence from? What is my well-spring? It must infuriate them. Like where is the source of the Nile? The world's great river, the world's great civilisation. I used to be in denial. Now I’m in de Danube.”

“We must beware of letting arrogance seep into our behaviour patterns,” Lucrezia said delicately.

“I don’t think you’re arrogant,” I said, puzzled. “I am gilding my cage. I am lining my rut with fur. I devote my life to nothing but pleasure, while at the same time writing about it.”

“I've had a difficult, and unusual road, but I believe it is for a purpose: to be my unique person, write my unique reportage, to exploit myself to the nth degree. It's hard for someone with a normal social brain to understand what it's like for someone with borderline autism. I'm reluctant to give myself with people, because I know I need to give myself to my writing. How does an autistic person live his life? That is a very specialised problem; it is not done by forcing them to talk to people they really don't want to talk to. The purpose of life is to dream. To enjoy all the sybaritic pleasures you can, and write about it. The purpose of life is to gild one's cage as much as one can. To line one's rut with fur.”

“I am a monster, I am rapacious, I eat them all up for breakfast. ‘Oh dear, are you jealous?’ The secret is rampancy; they don't know how powerful I am; I will shock & terrify them. I live in a world of fantasy, and sybaritic pleasure. If they want to pick a fight with me, then I shall take pleasure in running rings around them.”

“I love the pleasure in pain. If they can provide me with more opposition they will provide me with more pleasure. I just smile. ‘Well, I'm sorry if I'm giving you a hard time. And does that make you insanely jealous?’ I thrive on opposition, it fills me up with power like connecting Frankenstein's monster to the electricity. Now they're getting scared, because they're making their position worse & worse, and getting no result from it.”

I am brilliant because I get great material out of it. How I emerge with fresh inspiration and reborn energy; like a snake sloughing off its skin at periodic intervals. It is all a game to me, you stupid people. Don't you realise, I am playing you like a violin, you are playing your parts without realising it.

“It's like the shaming of the Swiss, I put up with it for too long; now it's gone too far. I'm not putting up with it anymore. Society tries to make you feel ashamed for being anti-social, and therapy joins in with this conspiracy. ‘The fact is you HAVE to be sociable.’ No, you don't. You're trying to force this line on me. But I won't buy that line, and that makes me too difficult apparently.”

“I like disturbing them, unsettling them, constantly ruffling their feathers. They deserve everything they're now getting. ‘The frisson of being close to corruption’”.

CHAPTER XI

SEPTEMBER 1998

“They can't understand why I haven't been destroyed yet. In fact they just give me more power & strength. I like doing it because it annoys them. What a compliment to me; how threatened they must be by me, beautiful intelligent man, how jealous they must be. THE TAOIST SMILE. I like doing it so I am going to continue to do what I like. Like a Freud, Brendel, Zweig in Vienna. I set them up so I can write about it. Like actors putting on weight or a wig to play a part. I've got so many interests which they cannot reach into, and cannot lay a glove on.”

“I love the rough & tumble of it; I love the sounds of the jungle. I'm ravenous and rapacious in making things happen for my book. They don't understand they are being played. This is me dedicating myself to freedom; it is a necessary part of it. The jealousy & the raging bitterness of those left behind; those trying to clutch hold of your coat-tails.”

Now I've decided to keep my Nazi gold! There was a brief window when they could have had some of it, but they lost their chance. I LOOM OVER THEM, LIKE FANTOMAS OVER PARIS, PULLING THEIR STRINGS; AND THEY CANNOT ESCAPE ME. I CAN SEE INTO EVERY ROOM AT NIGHT, I CAN REACH DOWN EVERY CHIMNEY, EVERY TUBE TUNNEL, EVERY TELEPHONE LINE, EVERY CABLE. I have wormed my way into their small minds, and they take me home with them, obsessively wondering wondering WHAT I am getting up to. The attacks have become bigger, I've had to loom up bigger & bigger to continue to be above them all. But the more they attack, the more I bloom & blossom. The more I shoot up and tower and flower above them, leaving them withering in my shadow. Anything that involves pretence is not the right solution.

“They can't tell what my secret source is, and that enrages them.”

“You've got to hold to your own line, at all times. I am very sorry for them, but I have to tell them that those with brains will always win in the end. All the good things in my life; all the riches. I threaten them so much. I am collecting such rich material from them. Everything they do gives me energy. How I have trapped them. This has probably been the year of worst attacks, and it has been the year of most wisdom, and power, and growth, and strength. Life is hard, are we not allowed to find our own best way through it? Or must we just do as the majority says? I frustrate them with my impregnability, and imperturbability. The gap is widening, I won't give them the victory they want, and this makes them edgy & scared, and then more vicious, and so more frustrated. They are on a losing spiral all the way. Have sympathy, for they are trying to cope as best they can, with the lack of intelligence and lack of beauty which makes the world a very scary place for them. I have sympathy for them, like they were my own children.”

“I am powerful, and striding around Vienna, invincible now; they have made me powerful. I shall say ‘Thank you, for handing me complete victory. Thank you for multiplying the depth & richness & power & pleasure of my life.’”

“I move on a higher level, through a different medium.”

“They hate me because they realise they've been lured into starting a battle they cannot win, and their position is just getting worse. They are faced with a dilemma now: the more they attack the more power they give me. It is a terrible position they have got themselves into.”

“What is your goal now?”

“Obsessively document my life in my books.”

CHAPTER XII

OCTOBER 1998

“It is a complicated game I am playing on them, and they are yet to divine it. One day a week to indulge in dangerous excess, and let myself go completely; that's not been done so far. That is what is needed. I miss the opera! Listening to The Flying Dutchman makes me want to go back and see it now. I create my own drama! My own sturm & drang.”

“You make a lot of enemies.”

“I must be doing something right then. Lynch mobs are almost always wrong; that is the characteristic feature of them.”

Hugo Wolf songs playing quietly on Lucrezia’s gramophone, its great golden horn protruding between two huge ferns; I read the sleeve notes—"Hugo Wolf produced some of the most intense & expressive songs ever written. But this was achieved at the cost of mental stability. Periods of intense creativity were followed by times of desolation & despair & exacerbated by the effects of syphilis acquired in Viennese brothels." I wondered if she was hinting at something by her choice of music. I now spent every session laying stark naked on the chaise-longue, my huge tool in my hand the whole time. It appeared this was not at all unwelcome to Lucrezia while she sat topless. Sometimes I stood in front of her, masturbating, and she let me ejaculate in white floods over her face and breasts.

“I roll amongst them like a hand grenade with the pin pulled out.”

“Have love & respect in your heart at all times, how that infuriates them! And defeats them! They are powerless to do anything to dent me at all. They are trying to increase the tension, thereby playing straight into my hands. Tension is what I've been trying to generate for the last six years.”

“I'm young; by the time I'm 48 I might just be hitting my stride, coming into my power.”

“Jealousy's a terrible thing.”

“Anything that's useful I will make use of.”

“Let them come to see how ruthless I am in quite heartlessly picking off my targets.”

“They are nothing, I can take or leave them as I please. The disadvantaged find it very hard to cope; they have no intelligence, and no prospects. I let the monkeys do what they want down in their little world.”

“I have achieved LIBERATION. It is a positive step, like volcanic eruptions. I do exactly what I want, and I ENJOY it, that's what they cannot stand.”

I was quite ruthlessly autistic with Lucrezia. I came out feeling like a dark autistic prince. I am going to more & more extreme places, but what else is there? I am sure next week will be the last. I have gone past the point of no return. As a baby I was left to observe what was happening around me, so that is what I've become. It is not her area of expertise. I am in the Autistic spectrum, but finally to be in a position where I can observe it, and write about it, this luscious opulent dark kingdom.

“Seraphina wants me to wear a corset, hold everything in; be ashamed of all my bumps & curves. But I want to be a real human being, and let it all hang out, as nature intended. I thought if I wanted to talk about autism, at last, I'm in the right place! How wrong could I be?”

“It’s like a conspiracy, if someone keeps trying to cover something up, you immediately start to think what have they got to hide? Jealousy is like gangrene, it spreads and spreads. And I’m not going away. I’m going to spread through them a bit more. This is just the beginning. I put myself in the middle of the situation, where I can patiently politely pick them apart. With my ability to operate in small, tight, dangerous places. ‘Enemy, thy name is jealousy. And I’ve got you in my pocket. I let you plan your armies, and gather your troops, and you don’t realise it is all taking place in my pocket, I’m watching your secret plotting with tears of hilarity rolling down my cheeks.’ They’ve bitten off a bit more than they can chew in taking me on. Damaged people can be dangerous, because they cannot be hurt.”

“You like being provocative?”

“No. I don’t pick the fights. But if people WANT to attack, then I shall take deep pleasure in running rings around them. Enemies are the best thing you can have. It proves you must be doing something right. Look at Clinton. (Beethoven. Oscar Wilde. Etc). Do the viciousness of the attacks on him come solely from the crime he committed? I think we all know the answer is no.”

“I have achieved LIBERATION. I am in harmony with nature now. I am spontaneous. I live in my sybaritic pleasures. I want to put myself at the heart of it. Wherever my enemies are gathering, I want to suddenly appear in the heart of them. I seek their enmity. It is the mark of approval I need to reassure me. It makes things interesting, does it not?”

“I wanted it to be an open discussion, with nothing ruled in and nothing ruled out. Just to talk amidst the destruction and see what naturally emerged. Let the river take its natural course. But I felt Seraphina was dictating the course too much, she was trying to shunt this river down one particular siding, to mix metaphors, a siding which denied my rich imagination, my rich inner world. She was trying to influence the outcome too much, she was loading the dice, and that bothered me: I wanted to talk to someone and thereby come to a solution myself. It was too directed. You see it as being fossilised. I see it as being rich and fabulous.”

I live on a sea of scented bosoms. HOW THEY HATE ME FOR MY RAMPANCY! HOW THEY ENVY ME FOR MY SYBARITISM! HOW THEY BEGRUDGE ME FOR MY SCENTED SEA OF BOSOMS! This is my natural environment. It is what I feel most at home in, and most thrilled by. I admire the way I take everyone on. Sybaritism requires opposition. To provide the frisson of rich pleasurable excitement. They hate it, because they are thick, backward, not very intelligent, disadvantaged, with no prospects. They hate me for my RAMPANCY. My SYBARITISM. My SCENTED SEA OF BOSOMS.

“You will never win,” they spat.

I smiled calmly. “You make it more certain with every word you say. Let me see if I've got this right: your life is so dull you need me to provide some excitement for you?”

“This is their absolute terror: that I am gaining from it, the whole time.”

“Why would I want it to stop?! Jealousy is the supreme compliment, and it is giving me such great rich material! I have successfully wound them up, haven't I. It spreads like gangrene, that's what it does. It spreads like a virus, throughout any group of people who regularly mix and spend time together, until they are all infected by it. I infected them with it, I stuck my great big hypodermic needle right into the heart of them. And squeezed. So my white fluids splashed into them, and now they are swimming in it and drowning in it. Drowning in my English sperm, in my immaculate ejaculate. They thought they could peep through my keyhole, and destroy me with what they had seen; they are about to get one hell of a shock. Stand back, little people, as I throw open the door and splash myself in your faces.”

“My private world is MAGNIFICENT.” My Eros was getting better & better. My body had become liquid. Liquid pleasure. I lived for Eros. My decisions were magnificent. “They're not coping well with me, are they! This is, is it not, a failure on their part. The higher the tension, the better I perform.”

“I enjoy a nice life of SHEER PLEASURE.”

CHAPTER XIII

NOVEMBER 1998

“I am RANDOM. I am a WILD CARD. Opposition just makes it more enjoyable to continue doing the things you want to do. I needed to lure my enemies out into the open, like Elizabeth, so I could pick them off once and for all, to ruthlessly put the Catholic plotters to death, so I could start my reign safe, and unrivalled. They've tried this before, and it never worked before, and they just embarrassed themselves; and now they're trying the same thing again, so dim light bulb-less are they. They do it because they are FRIGHTENED to approach me directly. I am the dark prince they are FRIGHTENED of. It is a more difficult route, but it is one I had to take; it is what I wanted; now I'm starting to reap the rewards. You've got to realise how blessed you are. Put yourself at the centre of them. Where they are terrified. I AM INK ON THE PAGE.”

“I love this exciting position I'm in now. So what am I going to do here? ELEGANCE. Whatever they try to throw at me, I have the ability to ride the crest of it and not be buried under it. A flowering inferno. I am WILD, and RAMPANT, and they can do nothing to stop me. They think they will crush me with DESPAIR. My greatest danger is HUBRIS. Their crude contempt seems to me to prove my superiority, and thus fills me with POWER, and PLEASURE. Their punishment: I become just more glorious.”

“I need this, I need to be pushed to this extreme place, where I have no distractions. EVERYTHING BRINGS PROGRESS. Stick to your line. My grinning rampancy infuriates them. They raise the tension, and I rise in power with it, and rise in pleasure. I was in limbo for – years, then I took the path that was waiting for me the whole time. I do exactly what I want at every second of the day. They hate it because they can't stop me, because I am invincible to them.”

“I’m like a lighthouse, I let them dash themselves to pieces against me, with ever rising fury they bash their brains out. Like a moth hitting the blazing bulb, they are too stupid to have any understanding of where they are going wrong; while I blaze on! Burning forever with my constant supply of inner fuel which they can find no way to cut off. I love it that I have wound people up that much: I will not take moral judgement from people who throw abuse at me in the street: with that they betray their moral inferiority to me. All their huffing and puffing, I still sail blithely on! You don't need to get revenge against people who are embarrassing themselves. When they abuse me they please me. ‘Good God, thank goodness I am not like you!’ They're the ones with problems, because they've got no beauty or intellect. I love being against everybody: what a thrill it gives me. PERSONAL LIBERTY. I have no obligation to follow the conventional social norms. I am free of that because I was never taught. I AM KASPAR HAUSER. YOU SAD PEOPLE: I do exactly what I want. How they hate me for it. I am a Nietzschean ‘superior man’: that is what they hate, because they cannot lay a glove on me. BECAUSE I DO EXACTLY WHAT I WANT: HOW THEY HATE IT. I DEFY ALL CONVENTIONAL SOCIAL NORMS. How their minds must boggle about what I get up to! It must be eating them away, secretly they must be so envious. Pure life of the mind. We intellectuals know no moral bounds, we übermensch, we superior men!”

“We upper classes!”

“It is a sign they don't like me doing what I want to do; what a terrible admiring, what a wonderful compliment, what a fantastic hold over them this gives me! My mind is too powerful, they are too small, they are too far below me. A man does not worry if the ants beneath the sole of his boot approved of him. I was prepared to be with them, but then when I saw repeatedly the quality of what they were offering me was so poor, a watery gruel at best, but more usually quite determined and vicious poison, I saw I was right in my instinct to rely on my own rich nourishment with no regard to them. I cannot help it if my tastes are more refined than theirs.”

*

Finally I decided to leave Vienna and return to Moloch. It was time to emerge from my long hibernation. My long fugue. Time to turn the tables. Flip the tables. Raise the stakes. Time to land in the midst of them splashing them with my white waves. I had discovered my power.

I returned to Lucrezia’s Urania study for one last time to say goodbye to her and thank her for everything. I took her a gift of perfume. She opened the door in a yellow jumper tight over her huge bosoms and obviously no bra. She had on black stockings and a tiny black mini-skirt that barely covered her bottom. This time instead of shaking my hand she took my hand and put it on her breast. Instead of sitting in her chair beside the chaise-longue, she took all her clothes off and laid back on the chaise-longue stark naked, her body looking alabaster white in the moonlight coming through her windows.

“After tonight we will never see each other again,” said Lucrezia. “I hope you do something.”