September 21, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I have become a woman of many selves who in search of her-self arrives home either too early or too late, but never in time. Too early when I do not know what the questions are that hover around my mind, and too late when I find that they have already been answered for me. How wonderful it would be when I am at that stage when I can ask my own questions and provide my own answers. And yet, how would I know that they are mine? And not that someone has subtly, unknown to myself, inserted them into my soul?

I must therefore perform the impossible task of erasing whatever I am writing.

To grasp the splintered fragments of my being and bind them together around a unitary centre, ah the effort is so tiring, so frustrating, so riddled with our anxieties, hopes and fears! Even now as I write these very words I can feel myself inflicting a great violence on myself, trying to make them sound coherent to myself, when I know only too well that just below the surface there lies sleeping a desire to attempt the final dissolution of all words, all significance, and all meaning. But in having thus understood my intense wish, have I not defeated my claim that I do not comprehend my inner essence? Ah the conundrums of our existence!
How I remember Uncle Timothy at these times. Yes, he should have been living at this hour in my damp room in the hills of Simla. I would perhaps have sat down beside him, not to speak anything, for I have nothing left to say but to gaze on his gentle face as he smoked his pipe beside the window looking down into the valley. Never has a man taught me so much in my life precisely by adamantly refusing to accept that he had anything to teach me.
Someday I must also write to you about my other Uncle Aaron, God rest his soul, who committed suicide five years ago. Looking back at those times when I spent a month at his decrepit house in Cheltenham, I can

[Editor's note : 'I' has left an absence in between these paragraphs. It is not known whether this silence is deliberate.]
[Meta-Editor's note : [The Editor cannot conceal an impish delight in interpolating these parabolic inscriptions.]]
The older I grow I become convinced that it was the presence of men like Uncle Timothy and Aaron around me when I was a child that injected into the very core of my being a most profound melancholy and at the same time gave me a vision into things that are denied to most men and women around me.

I had a most beautiful dream last night, and the more I think about it the heavier that my heart grows with an inexplicable terror. Oh, am I really growing insane? Was James right after all?
I dreamt that I was on the banks of a lake just before dawn as the early birds were beginning to whisper. The waters were shrouded in semi-darkness as I spotted a mass of white floating in front of me. As I strained my eyes I saw a white swan swimming away from me towards the distant mountains. Slowly and slowly she sank deeper into the darkness until she became a tiny dot on the horizon.
From a great distance the

[Editor's note : 'I' breaks off suddenly at this point.]

[Meta-Editor's note : [The Editor is inflicting a sinister violence on a woman's text by pretending to understand her presences and absences.]]

Suddenly the sun rose into the blue sky, and a ray of warm light came shooting through the distance and pierced the very heart of the white swan. With a cry of the most fearful agony, the swan flapped its wings, rose into the air once, and then collapsed into the waters. I felt that it was not the swan but my own bosom that the ray had shattered into a thousand pieces.

Oh, the horror of the dream! Perhaps I have been listening too much to Sibelius and his Swan of Tuonela. Yes, that must be it.

I need Uncle Timothy today. Only he can understand me, these dilemmas that my pour twisted soul is racked with. Seek nothing else but the highest form of perfection, he once told me, but never forget for one moment that this seeking itself is the greatest futility any man can attempt.

My thoughts are becoming so tortuous every morning. In this agony, perhaps lies my liberation. And yet perhaps the memory of Uncle Aaron tells me that I am damned to be free.

My words are like an asymptotic curve that, at best, never reaches the limiting point it so passionately desires, and, at worst, a degenerate exercise in ironic narcissism. I have no occupation but my preoccupation with myself, and yet it is precisely this act of sinking into myself that, by reminding me of my utter finitude, drags me outwards.

On Monday mornings, I am an atheist despising the masses who bow down to the idols of the marketplace and yet in the evenings, I become a devout Anglican who piously kneels before her Lord, the Redeemer and the Saviour. On Tuesday evenings, I am a great lover of Beethoven and all the French, the Flemish and the Dutch masters, but on Wednesday mornings I wake up to find myself pouring scorn on all lovers of such high art. I spend the Thursdays poring over dusty volumes under whose weight the shelves of my living room groan, and Fridays laughing at the futility of the task I have attempted. Saturdays I sneer at those tiny little people cooped up in their narrow homes drinking tea and honey, but on Sundays I rebuke myself for such cynicism and want to run away to my dear Mama.

Oh, who shall deliver me from this body of contradictions? The truth that I seek I do not will, but the one that I scorn, I find myself running towards.

Let this diary be a record of my growing insanity.

Of my painful realisation that self-reflexivity is the highest blessing and the greatest curse.

Of my nostalgia for an age of unfragmented humanity where perhaps human beings used to live with all their inner tensions reconciled into a most wholesome harmony with the order of Mother Nature.

And above all, above all, a record of how powerful a tool language is, dissolving itself in the very moment of producing itself, embodying a most painful tension that only death can resolve.

And if this be insanity, ah for its blissful torments!