Strange days. I found myself contorted with emotional pain in the night, the prickling agony of intense despair. In the light of rational day I realised and remembered that I have two personalities; one of pure emotion and one of pure logic, and that in times of crisis or terror, the personality of logic intervenes and saves me. This happened explicitly during my encounter, many years ago, with the white smoked hallucination of the incubus, and at the turn of the millennium at my first great crisis point, my Heiligenstadt moment. The solution in times of distress is always reason. I recall Beethoven's advice: Man, help thyself. No god, no fellow, no force of providence will ever save us.
In the day, I have worked on my book, but, again, spent more time refining my own filing systems.
Yesterday was spent restoring and cataloguing abandoned software projects. I have filed my software with codes for years, but I only filed completed and working projects. Actually, it seems that I had completed some, such as 'Information Installer', an installer/setup program similar to Nsis, and still not filed them. Any unfinished projects or programming experiments went in a folder called Unresolved. Yesterday, I reasoned that I should simply code and file anything there that isn't coded. Either I want to keep this code, and should file it correctly, or I don't and should delete it. Even big projects like The Heart of Aorkhan, were not filed correctly, so I spent yesterday doing this for all of my half-completed programming projects.
Today, I started writing again, and, again, this merely pointed out the illogic of some of my filing systems. I've filed many incomplete artworks in exactly the same way as I have software. Sometimes I've done a lot of work on these. Here, for example, is my MDF underpainting to my large masterpiece, Saint Andrew Punishing The Sinner:
I worked for months on it, with many studies of the different components, but I wasn't happy with the overall composition. The figures look like crude shop dummies to my eyes now, and the spacing is just not good enough. So, I filed it away, but again, in a disorganised folder, and the documentation elsewhere. The painting above, was sawed up and thrown away.
I've spent today sorting through these half-completed artworks. Many are from 2007 and 2008. In my early years it took me so very long to draw anything that I often stopped. I could probably paint up some of these ideas in a flash now. Tightness and obsession can be powerful enemies, crippling disabilities, and there is no answer to it. Sometimes I just want to get a painting done, but it just never seems quite finished enough and time seems to extend logarithmically.
Bless my genius and my immense powers of logic! Emotions are only for social interaction. With no social interaction, they have little purpose (although, of course, we can interact emotionally with art, animals, food, and all sorts of things).
I've written about 6000 words in my book so far, but about 3000 are pointless descriptions of how my computer is organised, which will be of no use or interest to anyone. My writing has, however, been useful to me.
