The middle of the night. Jung on Nietzsche, speaking of the problem of creativity and how one falls into inflation – as soon as you look back at what you've done with pompous satisfaction – I am the one who did that! – and so the creative moment dies and you fall into a false self.
Especially so familiar as the entire balance between what I've been for decades, between creativity and being versus looking back on creativity or being, is so heavily tilted toward the latter: as I'm such a tiresome case of someone who has been briefly touched at moments by fire, then has spent years after thinking about it. No wonder I am so angry at others who seem to be doing things wrong, so despairing at the point of doing anything at all.
It is like living in the house of myself: but there have been so many storms, such wreckage – the place is so damaged, so ruined; it is ridiculous to spend time picking things up and wiping them off, as walls creak and corners rot, windows crack, wind and rain blow through the hallway. Like dusting a table in a hurricane, trying to ignore the impossibility of ever fixing the crumbling, rotting, rusting mess of it.
I would be so happy to simply open the door and walk out – in some sort of Zen abnegation: but I don't know what to walk out into, and I remain so tied to myself, so unwilling to have the sheer guts to walk into nothing. Even though I can see what is here, I'm not fooled: I can see that there's nothing at all here that I really need, or care about – the collected detritus of what I have been for more than fifty years is not even worth dragging down to a charity shop, it should just be left behind.
But I can't just walk out the door, I don't know how –
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