View UTT Books 61lf flipbook.
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD ROMY
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD Written by ROMY Copyright © 2024 by ROMY All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans- mitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles. Quick Fast and Dirty Press This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This free novel template was downloaded from: https://usedtotech.com For enquiries, write to us at: admin@usedtotech.com
ROMY 3 Dear Lucian Freud Sometimes one has to write to save their life and I think that may be now. Of course you might say that when you are a writer this is always the o‘clock but I'm feeling it more, presently. This is a gentle and loving invitation to meet all my wounds. Wash everything with compassion. Wash your hair with compassion wash each other‘s. Wash your feet with compassion. Undisown! Squirming thing. Child. Foetus. It's ok. It is not true everyone can be broken. Some people can't be broken. And they are gener- ally unpleasant, hard, inaccessible people, precisely because they cannot be broken. Sometimes I laugh at how easy it is. You give the world a blueprint but they are too thick to do it, perhaps because doing it would inherently take them out of the mood (to do it). If they were forced to track re- trace your steps they would also have to un- derstand you, like I did my Dad when I was reading his novel. To be efficiently hunted you have to be understood first. If you want to strike me, don't, it will do close to nothing, strike at the words and at the paintings. The weakest spot is the strongest one. The hole in the chest, the hole in the heart, the hole in the sky opens. You are a conduit. You are a product of perpetual self renewal in a vintage lacy negligee. You are feeling rare and precious congruence. The only per-
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 4 son capable of striking you is an intimate partner. The only person capable of striking you is yourself. I feel like I am little and Frank is some, I don’t know, my favourite uncle Frank. I feel like I did in Slovakia and in Italy and back here back then. I spend time with Frank and I feel those sensations back. I miss my aunt and my dog and all the dogs I knew, the dogs I was, the dogs I am. I am bitches. I feel like when I was a child waiting for visitors to come those few lucky, happy times they did. I loved when my parents had guests. I was always exceptionally good. I was already a bestseller the bestest most well brought up child and/but I was also really unpre- dictably affectionate with everyone and eve- rything. Now I don't like most people. I only like a few, only have capacity for a few I guess. Most of them are in the past but every once in a while it happens. This is my life: it is good and clean but I am often wistful. I cannot wait to grow up. I see it as a miracle, it seems impossible. Time is impossibly long as well. Desperate, despairing communion. Now I don’t know what to write, and in what language. I am feeling irrelevance. Ostblock and western Europe are the same shit, only with Western Europe it’s harder to tell. (Ost block a zapadna europa su rovnaka sracka, len na zapadnej europe to tazsie poznat.) (Later on I arrive to conclusion that actually this is not true, on the in- side Eastern Europe is better. It has got heart.)
ROMY 5 I am realizing the following: I want to do figurative painting, because I love painting, with a narrative line/narrative outgrowths. It is the case of painting in exile ('apoth- eoses of groundlessness' – FIRST DIASPORIST MANIFESTO - Kitaj). The question is whether painting in exile, living in exile for that matter, is more meaningfully done abroad or at home, and what is the criterium here of either. I live in a pleasant town in the North of the Netherlands. Life here is pleasant. A little bit less pleasant since 2020 (?) when a friend here killed herself by blowing herself up with a little help from the po- lice (2nd film of the trilogy - 'Metamorpho- sis' deals with this topic failure of socie- ty etc) but I am not complaining. A thing that makes me the happiest is that I have a pleasant relationship with my 3 cool teachers, so 3 pleasant relationships actually, and a thing that makes me less than happy is when I hit the limitations of these relationships. But on the other hand when I hit relationship limit I go and paint so I guess alles goed. There are many types of supermarkets here with many but really many types of foods even though by now in Slovakia it is exactly the same, and everything else here is also very pleasant. When I was in Slovakia then it wasn’t at all pleasant it was more psychiatry. But even so, feelings of irrelevance are stalking me in- creasingly, those furies, mainly because, my dark suspicions are turning verifiable?, my cool teachers cannot give me what I need. I don’t know how it would be translatable to
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 6 Slovak that I declared love to Frank yester- day, (would I say, ľúbiť, or, milovať? There are at least 4 direct translations: ľúbim ťa, ľúbim vás, milujem ťa, milujem vás. Out of these ľúbim vás Frank would be realistically sayable. It would be uncomfortably earnest and thus a bit jarring but not all that in- appropriate in the context. All love is erotic but this is not really sexual this is what could be said between friends or what a parent could say to a child or a child to a parent, minus the honorific. Indeed this is probably how a child would address a beloved parent very early on in the last century when parents were still addressed formally to apply it to a beloved teacher is not really an inconceivable stretch. To say milujem vás on the other hand is very des- perate also very sexually desperate so I don’t think I would say that it really gives erotomanic mental hospital patient vibes. Ľúbim ťa and milujem ťa both presume a close relationship that here I don’t think is present enough for me to forego the plu- ral vous (in Slovak it’s vás), unless the person in the position of authority insists on being addressed informally sometimes it happens.) This is a pretty dumb thought process probably possibly in Slovakia I wouldn’t be declaring no love to no one but since this happened, so since yesterday, I again feel like a little girl and this is a different feeling than pleasant, in fact in its own way unpleasant, it is as though I had a lump in my throat etc. but it is beautiful. I like to listen to Petr Hapka. Petr Hapka and Richard Muller are the best, they are my thing. So now we are in the stage ‚two down, one to go‘, only I am afraid that with teacher nr.3
ROMY 7 it is more likely to go somewhere (crucially, he doesn’t have a wife and children) and this makes me less eager. Also, he teaches theory so that’s a different kinda vibe com- pared to Frank who is a figurative painter, it‘s just a different kind of sensibility. His main recognizable feature is that he wears doc martens and Sonic Youth TShirt. Also, I forgot. I am moving. My own house is kicking me out, so I am thinking whether this applies to the whole country, or. A thing is happening to me, all places and times are beginning to come alive in me at once. Not so very much, or not so very al- ways, am I suffering unbelonging. That is nice. I have good, understanding interlocutors. Is it possible to write a text someone besides my teachers will understand? Dear Lucian Freud People refuse to be awed at you. We pretend everything is as good as anything else. Sometimes I do self critically and realisti- cally admit that my paintings as of now may be, well, not lousy, because that is a dif- ferent thing altogether, but at an all in all early stage of their potential develop- ments - of course this also has its perks, at this stage of the journey everything is exciting and multifold because it's a challenge, though hopefully this will al- ways be the case - but my taste I believe to be top notch. My heart refuses to refuse to be awed. When I was new here I didn't know who I was, I was just going assimilationism all the way. Any mark of difference scared me. I thought
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 8 I could be something akin to a nice Dutch girl, find myself a nice Dutch boyfriend (ha!) The first boyfriend I had in the Netherlands (back in 2016) was a fellow outcast, from Indonesia..... I just got together with him because it was convenient to have a someone. It is very ugly to say this and it is even more ugly how I treated the man who, it seems to me now, was a good man. I have come a long way now in the enterprise of growing into my strangeness. I live in chic and sophisticated wholesome misery- pleasantness. Especially artistically speak- ing my heritage is a treasure because West- ern European art is as of now, and please forgive me for saying this but that is just what I think, on the whole unpleasantly clinical, frigid and flat (I have a mind canon, maybe totally wrong, about this hav- ing to do with the fact that figurative drawing, modeldrawing, is not properly taught anymore or considered as important as it in fact is, though it’s hard to say which is the cause and which is the consequence here it seems to me it’s just very oddly and horrifyingly de-corpo-realized mind-set.) I am making some kind of almost peace with living on two banks, one foot on each. This is my position in everything. Half over- ground and half underground (in the mythic realm, very much like the one described by C C Jung), a child of two cultures (Slovak and Hungarian) presently situated between East- ern Europe and Western Europe (Bratislava is technically in the middle of Europe, 60km from Vienna, and the geographical center of Europe lies in Slovakia) between two centu- ries (born in 1997) two generations etc. I
ROMY 9 cannot for the life of me choose a discipline, it is not possible for me to choose between mediums. What do you mean I have to choose? This is like being set be- tween mother and father again and being told, choose which parent you love more. I cannot choose right or left leg, left or right arm (though I am, in fact, right handed). If I cannot do theatre I cannot paint, something like that. In a strange position of an ongo- ing refusal to make a tradeoff I just bal- ance, on a semi-submerged (permanently sink- ing) sailboat me in a long summer dress si- siphean, stubbornly refusing to throw any- thing overboard. As a result I have to keep throwing water out 24/7 (sharks cannot stop swimming, ever, an unexpected coming in handy of my father’s ichtyological under- standing), and of course there is no desti- nation no 'winning end' either. It is a ra- ther absurd picture but one can begin to find dignity in it if one lets the salty air hit the face, or else one can cry and gaze at the starry sky in a way of consolation. This isn't really a waiting position either at this point it is a way of being like wak- ing up one summer morning deciding to go camp in front of an embassy to express dis- sent cue 20 years later the camping has by the mean of sheer stubborness and obstinacy become some form of a – albeit most likely roofless- house. For a few years my amphibianism was a source of a self-horror but eventually as one lives longer most everything in human life reveals its essential qualities though these may be transient, like the stages of water or a plant in the seasons. I am (like all of us) the water, the air, the earth, the fire. My exboyfriend, the Italian one, said it: you
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 10 are like the sky, you are like the weather. There is no point trying to change this fun- damental constitution, I think, may as well live on/in the nexus in which I was born. I don't think it's wrong to live in this way so long as one views human life as what it is, an entire ecosystem. Probably more than anything I am a child of divorce. One of my favourite books is Sophie's Choice though as a child I had bad nightmares about this story. I guess my aim is to arrive at a total work of art as a kind of dialectic and synthesis- ing. To go a long enough road dilligently enough with each of my disciplines so that they may meet, say as friends or star crossed lovers or old enemies who have come to respect each other thru the ages of de- liberate frowning disguising a rather chip- pery annoyingly vital heartbeat in the chest though thus far they, as in, my disciplines, have just been glancing at each other from across the table and pretending not to no- tice the intensity. In this sense it is a cosmogony though compressed. In poems I wrote when I was 13-14 years old everything was already there, something prophesied, a vision entire glowing with all the upcom- ing spontaneities comprehending them all but in an immaterial form (of poetry, duh) miss- ing meat to the skeleton and missing convic- tion (or sobering out of conviction) of life to give it meaning albeit cruelly so, a beauty coming from limitation which may of course be perceived as a mutilation but may also be perceived as its opposite, a curvature of expression, a life-giving, a single perishable life given at the ex-
ROMY 11 pense of all the fantasy ones that fell away. I think I think there is no free will, eve- rything is premeditated, but there is will to embrace or to not embrace. Free will, seems to me, does not consist of choosing between futures like between cars from a catalogue but from the courage to freely embrace that which must be. Only one self of any particular being is its real Self and this must be found and unearthed or else the whole potentiality of Real Life is thwarted and this to me seems the most real tragedy. Life is only one possible life and there is no choice in that regard but there is choice between life and anti-life and choices of this kind, scorning of life in one place, impact all, thus it is a question of Becom- ing of the only possibility or scorning it, something like that. Or to put it simply you either live 1 life or 0 so either you make choice of embracing this limitation or you end up wasting the 1 life you otherwise could have been living (all along). I wrote those absurdly erotically/sexually charged poems when I was 13. Then I spent I guess the rest of time, am spending the rest of time , chasing this mystery. Now I am 26 (turned 27 since) I have had re- lationships etc blah blah and to be sure I am grateful for this I generally tend to ap- preciate life experience so long it gives me something even if it's unpleasant at the time but it's a blessing, to have been touched by life is much better than the con- trary, but I guess at this point I don't re- ally feel different or even more sexually autonomous or something from that 13 year old. When I walk around in the world I for the most part feel like a bewildered child. (This is an exciting and beautiful new de-
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 12 velopment, note, because it means I am me. I used to not feel like anything.) Then I do something autonomous, live life in a decid- edly autonomous way and remember, ah yes I am definitely an adult. But the base feeling is and remains one and the same. Fundamentally 13 year old Romy has in her far seeing of children, idealism of longing and stubborness erected her own myth, or ra- ther outlined mythical paths out of and in- to-the maze. I'm trying, doing my best to follow the intuition -path to the best of my ability, finding a speck of light here a speck of light there to see for the next little bit, to make it more viable. And may I read what you wrote, borrow your flash- light? I wasn't always like this I tried to disown 13 year old Romy send her away (if not kill her), actually I definitely killed her, when I was 14 years old I died internally, I am still trying to figure that out. It made me useless and false, and made Romy sick and sad. I live in communion with Romy now, and when in doubt we go to 70 something Romy for counsel. We are in no rush to be 70 but - should we be so lucky - we will get there eventually, so in this sense we already are, same as we also are the 13 year old Romy or the 16 year old one straining to understand social mechanisms and conventions or the 5 year old Romy with her own developmental battles. But as an artist the 13 year old is vital because you need the virgin energy (virgin not in the sense of virgo intacta but in the sense of for example Joan of Arc energy) because otherwise it is very easy to descend in everything into compromise and filth and you will have wasted yourself. But 13 year old Romy said she does not want
ROMY 13 to let this happen because she has ideals about love and beauty and empathy and kind- ness and mercy and things like that so in a substantial way she is the spine of the whole operation she is just a very quivering voice that needs a lot a lot of assurance and support, so this is where everything else comes in and I must be ruthless and must be the dragon and the big daddy and the knight and the soldier and the slave getting dirty to build a castle for this pure maiden, again, purity not in the sense of being par- ticularly sexually pure (as I used to think, and sometimes still do, and then I feel sad, because I don’t feel sexually pure, I feel sexually tarnished and I am not even fully sure why) but purity of idea(l)s. (A few months later: all of this is nice but is also bullshit because as much as this is metaphorically true coming to Life means un- derstanding that there is just one aging Me, and past is irreversible.) I wonder. Is that when I did my self protec- tory schizoid psyche cicatrice depositing of all that's most tender and important of me, literally folkloristically etc speaking my Soul, into The Art, aged 13 or so? If so I don't think I regret it I Commune with my soul (and occasionally living beings!) quite effectively at this moment - I think - (at least I feel myself in a dialogue) but it does raise an eyebrow. Probably I did this on some level consciously, I must have. I mean, look around yourself. The world is what it is. What else is a sensitive percep- tive (female, though I really don't think it makes a difference) teenager to do?
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 14 But I have rescued it (and not just at 13 either but as a very little baby peeing and pooping herself), her. I have rescued Romy, or rather she has come to me and has inces- santly, by scratching at the door, scraping, imploring, being unspeakably annoying and insistent probably strangely pedantically so, howling and God knows what else rescued her- self, like she is now coming to you, dear Lucian, dear You, scratching and insisting and crying and generally annoying until I opened the door. And there she is. And I am glad you are here. I suspect that the meeting place where I am inviting, dragging really or trying to drag I don‘t know if I am succeeding, you now is very much the same poetic sensibility vision of love of my 13 year old self but with ma- terial substance beyond it. Certainly cer- tain things will have been contradicted etc. but even contradiction is a part of a dia- logue beyond the spanish wall at the end of the day boiling down to a friendly (or rep- rimanding) voice, quiet whisper of a human, and not much else necessarily, but maybe this is enough. Well I know it is not enough I know that I am lonely and wish not to be but it is like with any Life to become it has to be made from inside and from the out- side both, it has to be cracked from without and from within so it’s not that I am happy about being narcissistic I am trying very hard to overcome the narcissistic shield of falsity and reclusiveness it is that writing a text is within and in itself cannot be ‚without‘ only when I hand it over to you dear World dear Lucian Freud. Probably everything I have ever made, artis-
ROMY 15 tically, comes from a single flux of feeling in love, this was always there even when I was 5 and then became increasingly mir- rored in the world in my teenage years, then followed my process of falling in love with people like Henry Miller or you dear Lucian Freud for that matter or you generally speaking Dear Male Artist, artists I still commute with and admire. (I love female art- ists in a very similar admirational respect- ful and sometimes uncomfortably close way as well not much difference there but sometimes it's special to have a contrasexual tension). This process of psychosexual mirrorring dia- logue with a male figure – the animus - is the genesis of my art flux and it’s probably useless to look for anything else there (and then that is where the diasporist painting comes in the dispersed unrequited Eros or Eros driven underground rather than being allowed to operate legitimately, though may- be it doesn’t want to either way, operate legitimately I mean – yes I do!) One of the developments that frighten me is the really vicious and strange wave of 're- contextualizing' traditionally great artists on all kinds of moral failings and charac- terial squabbles, of course now they are dead and can't defend themselves. I find this cowardly. If we are willing to judge people on the worst of them we also need to be willing to judge them on the best of them. Just because someone is an asshole or egois- tic doesn't mean the best of them doesn't have substantial and beautiful redeeming qualities. Every creature is egoistic, or rather every creature is at some point ego- istic and it is a lot of work growing up. It also seems to me rather misguided to punish people on the grounds of or for their bio-
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 16 logical imperatives even if these are, may God have pity on the poor sinners‘ souls, human men. In my opinion morality and especially sexual morality has got nothing to do in the world of arts. Shaming biological imperatives is ugly. Of course no man is greater than any other man of course no man is greater than any other animal and of course human men are quite stupid, but for all that is dear let them try it makes them happy so! Let them go let them run let them shout let them play let them fluff up their feathers let them butt heads against concrete like Gustav the Goat do not deny them the great joy of expe- riencing first hand great strivings‘ futili- ty! (Also because, what is the alternative? No really what is the alternative?) To be sure I am only talking about the pla- tonic realm of artistic production I would implore women of this world not to be some man‘s secretary mother helpmeet interpreter assistant blah blah blah but focus on their original labor in real life all bets are off, and we have millenia of horrible energetic lack of balance to fix. I am a big fan of doing 0 uncompensated unreciprocated emo- tional organizational reproductive care etc etc labor!! But for fuck‘s sake do not po- lice on an artistic plane. If someone is doing an enquiry on a platonic plane into human consciousness all forms of this must be supported if we are artists. There are dark and uncomfortable things that inevitably arise but the point is precisely to work this out as gracefully and compas- sionately as possible so that no beings are
ROMY 17 harmed not to repress and then have it inev- itably seep thru to life anyway! Do not, I beg of you, touch the symbolism, spit on it, seek to imprison castrate wipe off align. To posit art in context like this: It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Han- nah Gadsby June 2–September 24, 2023 #Picas- soCelebration Now featured on Bloomberg Con- nects Picasso said, “You can have all the perspectives at once!” What a hero. But tell me, are any of those perspectives a woman’s? Well, then I’m not interested, I can't be- lieve I even have to say this, is a petty embarrassment. You are cheapening yourself, and then embarking on a campaign of shaming and discrediting. I don’t know, honestly it feels very small minded to me. Please, please do not turn expanding of con- sciousness and screams for liberation into throwing out all the world's bathwater till there's no babies left. This really is an unbearable flattening. You are an idiot. You are turning into an idiot. Dear Lucian Freud I think I may actually try to translate my father’s book into English, he has (delu- sionally) asked me when I was 12 and I feel like now I probably could because I have since learned English. It will be my way of healing this family (boy oh boy I wish that was the only thing it took to heal this fam- ily) though I have not talked to my father for years and I hate his guts. For me it’s very simple and comes down to what Voltaire said, kind of. I don't care if I personally hate you I will support thru my teeth your artistic work so long as it has got merit, regardless of my
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 18 personal taste etc. and PROTECT it from shame, PROTECT it in its sovereignity, be- cause this is a positioning in regards to common enterprise of humanity understanding itself. To view shortcomings of a person as discrediting of ideas they are tackling or a ground for censorship I do not like. I realized this when I realized my father's book is dear to me. It is ravings of a horrible narcissistic man but it has got value 1) as a diagnostic tool 2) as a sincere attempt at contributing to the great lake we call Literature (Jean Rhys). So for me it is very healing to love this book for all that it constitutes, an effort at healing himself and our family by an il- lumination of sickness, so what that it failed? regardless of the kind of a man my father is, or has become. Sharon Olds talks about something like this in Stag's Leap: When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, I am half on the side of the leaver. Sylvia Plath notes in bitterness, but com- petitive bitterness of a colleague-rival be- sides that of a suffering human animal, how good Ted Hughes' poems for another woman, Assia Wevill, are. (I love Sylvia Plath so much for this but not only that, this remark is where I most LIKE Sylvia Plath, maybe the only or the main place where I do.) (Ted Hughes pays Plath the compliment back once she’s dead - here read this, he laments to a friend upon reading Bell Jar, how many men can say they killed a genius? To which I would respond as a little inse- cure but rightfully indignated vocino from the future: far too many, Ted Hughes, far
ROMY 19 far far too many.) I think we must respect each other and re- spect EVERYONE (who makes a sincere effort that is) artistically even as we wage wars or find one another antipathic or even dis- gusting on personal plane because the moment you lose respect for anyone‘s art it is strike against Art and against elaboration of human consciousness, more so than attack on a specific person. It is like cutting off your nose to spite your face, and it is hor- rible and can only ever lead to impoverish- ment of all. Also to resist the urge to cut those in some way greater (or happier, or luckier) than us to size is maybe the truest achievement of human spirit. I struggle with this, as in, with envy, everyday with much toil and resentment and unhappiness but I do struggle and am determined to keep strug- gling because to do otherwise is to maim your own self with your left hand while you point with the right. (Dear dad – dear Lucian Freud – dear Man - It is twice that we meet - once in the em- bodied cycle of, among other things, circum- stances and biological imperatives, but also on the plane of consciousness (that is eve- rything) as mutual unraveling of the same consciousness. And I don't care how bad things get between us on on the personal plane this will not make me stop fangirling about the consciousness unfolding, coming into its own.) I guess this, then, is the resolving of my (irresolvable) relationship with my father, with men as such. I reserve for myself the right not to resolve it, to talk happily and angrily about the lack of resolution. It gives me levity. I resolve the irresolvable
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 20 or the hardly resolvable by saying: OK thank you for this whatever this is, now I reserve for myself the right to not resolve it. But if we lose this nuance, if we do throw away the baby on the accord of the compli- cated and shameful circumstance of its birth (“The lotus comes from the murkiest water but grows into the purest thing.” – Nita Am- bani) then we have got nothing, will be left with nothing, will have self-annihilated, self cleansed for nothing. Perfecting and rendering things clean and correct and uncontestable and comfortable and supposedly beyond reprimand. Is this the path we wish to take? Art don't be ashamed to reveal yourself! I say. Show the faults, show the claws, show the scars. And you shall be loved for it if by no one else then by - me. Give me your huddled shabby images. They will find the refuge here and consolation to their howls, unconditionally, immaculately, a little-big spiritual garden my heart will be their home home of lost stolen degenerate looted dissident oriental violent macabre kitchy anguished vain vulgar pornographic heartbreaking heretic images, all of them into a cradle, into an outstretched arm along with these sentences, finally some re- union (welcome welcome) finally a restoration-restitution or something very close to it a fondling not a mauling or if a mauling then non lethal done in love ((car- rying of the skin-wart pearl like a tiger cub in my mouth)) finally a refuge in my bed in my room in my library in the park like in the forest in my open gates, welcome my hor- rible loves welcome home. Give it to me - I want it! I exclaim as a child pressing the image to my chest
ROMY 21 greedily, fearfully. That which is mine of yours is mine now that which is yours of mine is yours but – in the same unlikely slightly terrified breath – that which is mine of yours is yours to be, and that which is yours of mine is mine. Dear Lucian Freud! I think I no longer seek to exile or extin- guish my daemons I rather like coming home to them. Much like at the end of the day, why not say it, I like coming home to you, Lucian Freud. Any new sadness, unsatisfactory outcome, debt, embarrassment, embezzlement, failure, unrequited love situation, uncomfortable psychosexual commotion, amazing bring it on! Yes it is a gift! A proof of my aliveness – of my horribly undeserved luck - a stretch- ing out of my heart! See how far, how deep it can go? What a joy! I love you Barthold I love you Frank Lisser! I love you dad I hate you dad! I miss you I maim you I mail I mope and maul and maunder and moan and masturbate and mourn! I love you Johan Anthony everyone I have ever loved I love you still I love you go fuck yourselves I love you to hell with you all! Aliveness bite into me! Alive- ness don't let me go! Powered by resentment and anger or powered by sheer spite and what a good fuel it is too! Boom boom breaking of the prisons boom boom total psychic libera- tion! OK Lucian Freud I will give you this I overuse adjectives and am on the whole a little bit womanly dumb but if you are good at being alive - hear me out - if you are good at being alive who the fuck cares if you are pretty tidy reasonable uncrazy de- pendable sociable pleasant agreeable SMART?
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 22 Watch me be alive, you suckers! Here, shoot at this, Lucian Freud! Shoot at the hand shoot at the heart heck shoot at the paint- ing of course we both know that's where the soul is, shoot at my tongue, shoot at this text! Go on shoot tear it to shreds rip it open further be a good boy, dog, spare me not! I love you and it doesn't harm me one bit! You refused to love because you are a coward, ok, but I love you Lucian Freud and surrender deeply to this horrible ever gripping love I feel for you in every darkest corner of my flooded or just finally properly irrigated soul-soil (dripping-gripping) I love and yet I am unharmed, I am dying and remain un- harmed, I have died and remained unharmed even then in my schoolgirl‘s messy hair in a clip and my suspenders I love you Lucian Freud and yet remain unharmed (fear a thing that can love you and remain unharmed ! I will tell you that) I love you and remain unharmed and tomorrow I will EAT YOU because such is the nature of Life!!! Do you see it now, Lucian Freud? Do you see? I love you and remain unharmed (un/h/armed) and tomor- row I will eat you! Ah what a glorious day is this life what a glorious day to live! To fuck! To love! To anger! To cry! To birth! To pain! To paint! To drink! To die! And then to do it all over again Lucian Freud and - hear me out, I know that this is what scares you the most - all for YOU! To love wholly, and remain one's own wholly, is a near impossibility but at least one creature can bear it and it is a living hu- man woman (and tomorrow she will eat you). Quiver before the living human woman Lucian Freud! Quiver for I love you!
ROMY 23 Your paintings are safe with me, so very safe, unless I eat them out of love! Ah! Lu- cian Freud! For centuries my love made my heart heavy but now all that's made it heavy has consumed itself and all that remains is better than aeroplanes greater than ash and it is the same unteachable love. I strike pray me harder! Paint for I want to touch it! You frustrate me, make me work for my money, and I do really love being given a good run for my money and being sent on one. Your ex- istence both as a and the man and a well nourished myth makes me paint, well, better than I would otherwise, though of course that's a small consolation compared to the vigor of the genius. But then, and would you believe such luck! I make you paint well as well though your I be not a me but what dif- ference does that make? A woman is a woman is a debutante is a man is a body is meat is the rat - like glance of my eyes without a trace of kohl is the charming musculature of a horse, or maybe the horse is not a horse at all maybe it is the debutante I have no way of knowing Lucian Freud I'm just asking okay. I'm just asking. The dinner is singing. Tick tock! Like introducing a tiger into a pack of ga- zelles you keep me lithe alert astute and in a great shape. Every single cell of my body given an opportunity to stretch its wings by the whip of your love, and isn't it grand, Lucian Freud! You could almost be my father! You are the half-crooked lion on the rock sunny side up, I am a pack of insane ga- zelles. At Mowgli the boy‘s rived bed (he is also a product of colonial English imagina- tion-education just like you) or in Brixton, we fuck on asphalt. Lucian Freud! Rejoice! (Angels) Behold our communion!
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 24 I love you so much I even know about your basic fault, because I studied the paintings. Don't worry Bluebeard dearest I won't tell the world where your soul is, your secret is safe with me I won‘t tell a soul. I got it here in my purse, I mean the secret, silly! Psssssht. We are of the same kind you and I... You too built yourself a Rapunzel‘s tower schoolboy style like an apartment to spend the nights breathing in the dragon‘s toxic fumes and then, shovel by shovel a cataclysmic abyss like that of the clever Heidegger. From the time of that first death (you vaguely remember and only nerves in your fingertips remind you it happened) ad aleluia, you give yourself a slap and go on living. But you did give them a good run for their money didn't you, as It did you. Per- haps that is the only thing to ask. Now I am quite happy in the waves and though my fidelity is far from factual or guaran- teed or in fact existent I no longer seek need nor want an escape from our entangle- ment. Let it stretch - from here into infin- ity - and let it birth and generate - let it stretch deliciously and painfully from here into where Eros himself ventures not merely sends his arrow a heartvalve contraction spasm the prayer a mater Dolorosa like the church door our two bodies form both the abyss and the bridge, like being tickled on the heart with a fallen eyelash of God. (Neither of us is god not you nor I Lucian Freud but we can go to It together conjoined horribly and sweetly to supplicate.) I write to you this letter not thru coun- tries (yes that and) and years- decades (yes that and) but aeons and apparent eternities! You shot that painting - you shot that arrow, set up a po box in the middle of the desert-
ROMY 25 millenia after - responses keep coming (back) Unless - wait for it - a heretic thought - are we merely writing to the same central that redirects us, are we via His (or Her to be fair. Praise be) absence writing to each other ?! Ah ! Lucian! Sweet boy! You didn't have to! How nice of you, you old curmudgeon you alte Hund you, to have painted all those pictures only for me. What good sacrosanct tears they are! I got to know my tears and thru knowing them dis- covered their goodness this is why I say, strike me harder! What is there to be afraid of, that I will like it? That I won't? My own brain? My own body? My own heart? Nah! If it comes it comes - I love all of it! My fear was eating eating eating my love horri- bly so, till it was too much and it vomited itself out and then at once my love snatched and pacified my fear I don't know how it happened. Oh but how good it feels to be able to say it! Goddamn it I love you man, Lucian Freud! Your death can't keep us apart and neither can mine because we have got the fucking painting. My defeat is the same as your victory - bit- ter and beautiful. These creative types always have to believe themselves soooooo special. They are so full of themselves but in a way they have to be otherwise the creativity doesn't survive. Daemons are demanding, inconvenient, vocif- erous animals. Dear Lucian
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 26 - do you mind if I call you Lucian? - if I may - I rather feel our sense of collegial- ity. Biological imperatives are interesting but for fucks‘ sake. Go deeper, crack the egg open. FEEL the cruelty. To hide things and fluff it up is repulsive and a lie. Let it be what it is. You do this very well, I see, and after this point try as I may I see nothing ugly about any of it. It is only the denial of decay, deception and lies and fear, or fear of fear, that breed ugliness but ad- mission of it makes it beautiful again. It is like taking off a corset and taking a breath. This is the difference (to me) be- tween painting well and, well, painting not so well, painting shabbily. Let us not lie to each other, Lucian Freud. Compassion is compassion but pity is cruelty, now not in the Artaud sense in the colloqui- al one. Our biological imperatives are con- trary and irreconcilable. But once the hurdle of mutual honesty has been passed it becomes impossible to see an- ything ugly about any of it, at least for me. The maker and the viewer say: let us agree not to lie to each other. This, then, is the negotiation space, but art can't be spoon fed nor can we drag a person into the space it has to be entered willingly, and with mindfulness of the old caveat emptor. I think I can say it, you shook me to the core, Lucian Freud. That is why I don't like to sell my stuff, or push it down people's throats like they are geese. Let’s meet at mine or at yours or
ROMY 27 let us meet on a field but I was not born to force-feed anyone. I guess being picky about viewers sounds counterproductive but I dunno. It is your one life, you can afford to be demanding, or rather, can you afford to not be? I certain- ly don't want for it to be easy. People I would really want to encounter are the really desperate viewers ones who have gone miles on their knees wreaking their heads needing understanding or a contribution to self-understanding, an af- firmation of an inner process, from the mouth of another a confirmation of (an as- pect of) their self, people who can in fact be served by particular mythological trans- lations. If I had had at my most dispossed my art I wouldn't have been so very dispos- sessed. But I think to receive you should always have to ask. I think it is the least one can do, formulating the intent or the question. Besides which, I am starting to think, re- straint is also a beautiful form of polite- ness, so that people aren’t molested by un- solicited content. (Am I molesting you? If so please put this text down. Please don’t let me molest you. If I did I apologize.) A state of wanting is the best state to be receptive to art and then it truly does feel like a drop of water and works magic. If you are not in this state then what is even the point? It is no good to eat when one is not hungry and we are all very visually oversat- urated. Medicine has its purposes it isn't candy and isn't offered to people, just be- cause. Desperate people, please, come have a look, see if you see something here that makes you
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 28 less sad and alone or that makes any sense at all. Otherwise no point giving invita- tions because it will sound like gibberish anyway but the one great blessing of symbol- ic language is that language itself is self selective only intelligible to those who comprehend, the first part of which of course is recognition that there is some- thing to comprehend to begin with. Supposedly charges against Kitaj were that he is dense and apparently there were cri- tiques about impenetrability or snobbishness etc. but when I saw a picture of a painting of his on the cracked screen of a mobile phone I started crying. (Admittedly it was one of his late Los Angeles paintings of aged him with his dead wife.) It does not often happen to me that images make me cry, words more often make me cry I guess or mu- sic. But this did. This makes one wonder about validity of any criticism of anything at all because you can say painting is a language which people ei- ther understand (on a basis of commonality) or don't but if you don't understand it then what point is there of critique, and if you do understand then critique isn't critique is it, but a meaningful dialogue, the expe- rience of talking if functional to me isn’t criticizable. If information is successfully communicated then what is there to criticize? A little bit more about Kitaj. I didn't know anything about this whole diasporist situa- tion and I am a young woman who knows liter- ally nothing about Judaism I just became very interested in him because I saw some paintings that spoke to me so strongly and resolved to see if there were books in the
ROMY 29 library and then struck upon the diasporist manifesto etc. which expressed a connection I ALREADY FELT! , and saw someone has writ- ten about me for me in a man‘s voice. And I was like ah yes this is me. I guess in general people don't understand or care about what appears hermetic And to be sure this is fine because it is probably not made for them. But we have to remember that reference itself refers to something so the primordial meaning of things is there and/but also at a certain point empiric ex- perience is a lot, and at a certain point we have to ask ourselves is this really badly executed and criticism worthy or is the mes- sage, a truthfully communicated corner of reality in fact, not to our liking? To put it more pompously, are we justified in bitching about the mirror when maybe it is the image itself we are not comprehending? Maybe the mirror is not distorted maybe the mirror is accurate maybe our pre-conceptions are no good. For example I am probably making my art for people who had outsider experiences. The origin of my painting lies in incompre- hensibility so I do think the incomprehensi- bility is its defining condition. But at the same time I do not find it to be incomprehensible and I do not think others do either I think it is mutually intelligi- ble with people who understand the journey. Why, well in my opinion because the refer- ence itself, if it is a good accurate dili- gent one, refers to truth and if it is used well accurately and diligently (& consensu- ally accepted by a willing and open audience) on some level the truth will be perceived
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 30 even if the reference isn‘t consciously un- derstood, on some level the truth will be understood even if the reference isn‘t. Nobody except author (and even then - time passes. You don‘t see the things the same etc.) will understand every level but that still leaves us with many ways of under- standing that ARE possible and Joy above all joys, some that not even the autor thought of! It is not so common that artists, or people, use wrong words in my opinion (incl. ones I personally don’t understand or don’t ‚like‘) in my opinion it more commonly hap- pens that people don’t know and thus cannot recognize that which is being described. For example, we had a small school exhibi- tion (called ‚Maydays‘) where I had exhibit- ed one painting. It was a strange and kitchy one, my paintings are usually kitchy to be fair but this one was really kitchy, it was a girl (a cartoonish self portrait let’s say) in a Snow White TShirt with a bruised neck reaching towards a pink dildo, a really strange, jarring painting. Even as I was taking it to the exhibition space I was al- ready not very happy with it or convinced about my choice I thought the painting was nothing much, and thought man I may have missed this time, and everyone else I talked to seemed to also think the painting was nothing much with the exception of a single person, this boy who came to talk to me in person saying that 'something similar hap- pened to him', I think he literally said ‚you made that painting? Then I wanted to talk to you, I wanted to talk to the author of that painting. It happened to me as well‘ and we talked about unpleasantness of
ROMY 31 the painting‘s stuckness frozen-ness, he said it’s been years and he's still not over it and that's how he still feels he feels the frozenness and it’s driving him crazy how hard to explain the frozenness is but he saw it in the painting (and that’s what I put in the painting, that’s why it is so strange, aborted, disjoined, why it doesn’t quite work). So to me when you get such an unequivocal response then how could you be not on the right path? The painting is doing its work, it is communicating. But maybe for the evening (or forever) its audience is just that one person. I made a whole cycle about sexual awakening or rather restoration. (Meaningfully the trauma doesn’t only come from a single occa- sion trauma, such as rape, but from centu- ries of ancestral and colonial violence done to the feminine.) They are moments (?) of being in different points in a cycle of ges- tation since expanded as parts of life death cycle. The hand obscuring genitalia in the A train painting moves away in ‚Even if I Could Turn It Off I Wouldn’t‘ ... the great blob from ‚Agamemnon the Great 1‘ is becoming untangled... They are slow but very much there motions. Thus images in their se- quencing become moving. Here comes an obligatory self diss or rather reasonable and constructive introspection. I think that my weakest link (in painting) is the handling of paint in itself. Though I do love painterly ways of painting and am ob- sessed with painters and, well, painting, and am a huge nerd, I am just not a very good painter. Two days ago some guy comes to my studio to meet Shiva who also is in this studio and
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 32 apparently he knows about painting and works as a teacher etc., and as I am crouching and painting I am using white and black straight from the tubes, and this guy starts talking to Shiva about her paintings and potential improvements etc. and it just so happens that one of things he points out is that she has used unmixed white and black, didn’t you? Shiva nods indeed she did, so then he asks if he can borrow my burnt umber and ultrama- rine blue and titanium white and starts demonstrating how one can mix beautiful blacks and greys by which point, though he at no point remarks on me in any way, I am feeling so bad and flustered and overtaken by a violent impulse of frustration that I stop making my black outlines and straight up pick up a piece of charcoal and start drawing in my painting with the charcoal. (In interest of giving a measured self- assesment in general compared to painting I am probably a bit better with drawing, not excellent or anything but sometimes I make really nice lines, and I am in my opinion generally good at composing and structuring because that is probably what I do in each of my mediums so it carries thru but this is a skill that has little to do with beauty and depth of painting per se the way you do it, Lucian, or other painters who are, well, painters.) So this anecdote I think says a lot, for the rest of the day I was grumpy and angry because I know, suspect but also know, that this and many of the things about technical deficiencies and how they derail one’s work unnecessarily that the man has said are true, but I was so angry and mean and contrarian (on the inside of my head. Fuck me if black was good enough for Manet I’ll be damned if it ain’t good enough for
ROMY 33 me! But then of course Manet was Manet, and most likely he has mixed his blacks himself and beautifully, I don’t know.) Anyways considering I am such a lousy paint- er and apparently so contrarian and unwill- ing to become a capable one, komu niet rady tomu niet pomoci we say in Slovakia, (‚he who can’t be adviced can’t be helped‘) maybe it is strange that I cling so much to this medium and don’t for example reclassify my- self as say image maker but it is an abso- lute necessity (for me). I am not fully sure why but I just KNOW it has to be painted no other medium will work to substitute for reasons that are strange to me. So far the best explanation I have is that I like hard things, and then something about getting lost in it gives me a high maybe I’m just sniffing too much turpentine. Anyways for all my love and respect for painting I do not put it on a pedestal or something like that. Barthold said I abuse paint. If so, then I probably also abuse for example references, or my content, which is to say, I abuse painting period. And maybe I feel sorry about this and put painting on a pedestal all the same, but then I use the scale the size and the historical validity and imposing-ness and just straight up po- tential for beauty of this medium to make myself emerge out of it with my uncouth, un- skilled obscurity. This clash is jarring, I do not necessarily like it, it is like speaking a broken lan- guage, but I have realized that I empathi- cally don’t wanna get rid of my painting ac- cent even if it is a logopedical problem (is it?) because for me how I am now brokenness is inevitably the point. Hopefully it won’t be forever, for example maybe when I learn
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 34 to love and have the grace of being loved and accepted and embraced then it won’t be. But for now it is because it is and to pre- tend anything else would be a lie. I al- so love grammar, as in, formal rules of lan- guages are amazingly interesting to me, but I am stuck in the stage of intensely dislik- ing perscriptivism, and what I really love is to be able to trace things to origin so it helps when traces and paths are there and Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs lead to something empirically real, say, a life event. I like to be consequential in everything and em- brace the origins and my origins aren’t a classically trained painter they are a sad girl from Eastern Europe who has spent a lot of time in her formative period say in 2010s (I was 13 in 2010) looking at pictures on the internet. I think this is also the reason for dishar- monic content, and not just content but ten- sion, in my paintings. These are paintings made by a child that has been inadequately nurtured. And she will not stop smearing it (the paint) in your face. Maybe this is connected, if loosely: my least favourite thing that boils my kidneys the most is that a woman I felt I couldn‘t fully participate in life unless I was pret- ty. “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is eve- rything run by male fantasies? Up on a ped- estal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretend- ing you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair uncon-
ROMY 35 scious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur,” wrote Mar- garet Atwood. I often felt bitter because if I was a man, or so I thought, I would have been suffi- ciently good looking for participation in public life because, at the end of the day, I am a perfectly adequate looking human ani- mal. But I wasn't seeing it like this I was com- paring myself with the desired looks of wom- an in the artistic sphere and here we are talking a whole different category and a whole different threshold of what is ac- ceptable and what is not. A man can be per- fectly average looking and loveable a girl in aesthetic canon cannot be this. An ugly man may well be charming and well loved by community an ugly woman is a monster, an abomination. In a patriarchal society in ad- dition to whatever she may be doing woman has to be a sex kitten and has to be a muse otherwise her sexuality is grotesque and ri- diculous, not a valid cultural product. A woman has to be all that and Pretty. And it is scarsely possible to do good work when one has to be pretty. (I think it is absolutely possible to do great artistic work that is pretty and it is possible to do great artistic work while being pretty but it is not possible in my opinion to do great artistic work that obliges it). Ergo, I hate prettiness. Prettiness is my enemy and I kill it any what way I can..... Because the alternative is, it killing me. Maybe fortunately (?) by the time I was 21 I have been heartbroken and sexually ex-
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 36 ploited enough to be done with bland pretti- ness. Now I turn my (sad disgraced doing- what-I-can with my Goddess given, praise be, natural looks) glamour (?) on, and turn it off. But I think my experience of being a human woman, especially one raised in Eastern Europe and with very exacting beauty standards I could just about barely hit but more often missed, leads to me having a love hate relationship with beauty, as in visual beauty, in general. I want beauty love beau- ty believe in beauty etc. but not if it’s for consumption. It has to go beyond, and it cannot be death. And it cannot be insincere, and it cannot be disguise of pain, and it cannot be product, and it cannot be marketed, and it cannot be, why not say it, colonial. I see myself as this girl in a tattered dress. I have got nothing (but I do have my story). My father, bless him, was so critical of me that I froze and couldn't do anything any- more. It was the most severe ongoing criti- cism in every aspect of life. Eventually I shut down. I was so beyond shut that I couldn't do any- thing, couldn't talk live breathe etc. I had 0 self esteem and couldn't perform simple functions because I would start shaking. Sometimes when washing dishes I would drop and break 2 or 3 items in a row because of how nervous I was. My vocal chords were frozen, my movements were frozen, everything about me was frozen. It was horrible and counterproductive. There was some coherence to my father's criticisms but not so much. He was so bad that even his own mother, my grandma, who is
ROMY 37 the most severe person I know, told him he must not be 'so hard' with the girl. My fa- ther did say he loved me but I don’t see how is it love if you want me to not be me but be something completely else? I started questioning relatively recently, later than I actually started painting, lat- er than I started taking painting seriously, even, my inner voice about painting not be- ing for me. I literally thought as a kid that women couldn’t be artists because art was painting and there were no paintings by women in ‚Famous Paintings – 50 most im- portant paintings of the art history‘ by Rolf H. Johannsen, which was the only book about paintings I possessed. My whole life is best described as an ongoing culture shock. On the other hand Donna Tartt’s Rich- ard (?) in Secret History said it‘s better to know one book well than a hundred super- ficially so in terms of books on painting who knows maybe reading ‚50 famous paint- ings‘ over and over instead of diversifying was good for my early interest. I once said in front of Barthold that ‚I guess I view painting as a male thing‘ and he said ‚who told you?‘ and I said, millenia of Western art history told me, to be fair I studied art history in Italy for a while and during the 2 years of lessons the amount of artworks by women we covered was 0, and I don’t remember what did Barthold say to that maybe nothing, but the question itself was already a revelation. I started applying this remark (‚Who told you?‘) to other self- doubting processes in my psyche. The incred- ible thing is, once it is said and admitted it loses its power. Obviously my dad thought it was a waste of
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 38 time that I paint, he didn’t say I couldn’t do it and one time he even bought me art supplies from LIDL when he went to buy gro- ceries which was actually, I see now, very nice of him, but when I wanted to go to art school at 13 he said I couldn’t because of employment prospects but also, not to be mean, I just don’t think you have that much talent. You have some talent, a little bit of talent, but not that much you know? I just don’t think it would be worth it. She can paint in her free time. And for me, correctly or not, this was like being spat on. I think I would have preferred if he was mean about it. The only thing he ever expressed that was unequivocally positive in my regard was that he liked my writing, scrap that he loved my writing. He never liked anything else I did out of my own initiative but go figure I write probably solid 10 hours a day (I am writing this on my phone while walking on the street right now the crossection of Vio- lenstraat and Nieuwe Boteringestraat) and suffer (joyfully so) from severe graphomania it is the only part of my being that is not repressed and the only channel that WORKS (because my Dad sanctioned it, or maybe the other way around, maybe it was working so well not even he could deny this, or maybe it was because he wanted to be a writer him- self and read a lot, I don’t know). On my end I think I'm not sure I see value of what is called criticism. I don't think constructive criticism exists. If it's con- structive I wouldn't call it criticism I would call it something else. I think what is commonly called constructive criticism for sure exists in terms of hitting targets say ‚the anatomy of this live drawing has
ROMY 39 problems in places x, y, z‘ is potentially very helpful or even something like ‚I find this drawing superficial‘ I think potential- ly works but I don’t see how constructive criticism exists if what the voice is criti- cally conveying is, your vision is useless and it is best that you stop or only do it on Sundays. Maybe the difference is that constructive criticism, even if rough direct harsh etc., is aimed at growth and expansion and depth and truth and has the best inter- est of the work at heart and loves the work inside, vs criticism aimed at extinguishment (or diminishing) of an activity or a trait maybe this is the inner difference. But from my experience it is comparatively rare to come across criticism that has the works‘ best interest in heart as opposed to criticism that has its own agenda. Everyone and their dog likes to flex about how they love and can handle 'constructive criticism' and I'm like what in the maso- chistic insanity?! Over here we most defi- nitely can't handle anything. I could only do the kind of BDSM where the guy says 'good girl' over and over again because if I had to do the kind that entails degradation and humiliation I would throw up and cry. (Actu- ally I could not do any kind of BDSM I do not like it at all.) Not gonna lie I am grateful to my dad though. I am hurt and annoyed and ain't gonna talk to him but it was a good immunization. I am a people pleaser but not in my art and not where it matters. I fucking fought for it and the flux had to be very very strong to make it out and without the pressure the outcome probably – certainly - would have been prettier but wouldn’t have been as good
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 40 or as vital because I think in painting the painfulness, or the overcoming of an obsta- cle, is an added value. Of course it’s too early to say early development and all that but I am optimistic. It just needs time but give it another 10 years or so and then we will see. What is there is autonomous, and rock hard. I have reached the broken bridge. I never had a good relationship with a man because I avoid men I like or could like. I don’t even know who I like and don’t like. Only thing I know, I am/was so terrified of men lol. That’s why I pretended not to like you so much Lucian Freud even though in re- ality you make me swoon (probably you also have a narcissistic personality disorder). You must forgive me this dishonesty. Recently my psychosexual wasteland has changed. I have developed positive relation- ships with Barthold and Frank Lisser who I do in fact respect. Neither of them wants to have much to do with me but I think this is actually a positive direction somewhat, at least earlier I thought so now I am not sure. I spent a long time trying to understand why on Earth do I always feel so alone etc. and why do I, besides of course sexual attrac- tion which is idiosyncratic etc., absolutely do not consider most people as potential partners and/or instrumental in resolving my loneliness or alleviating it in the core of my personality, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly my problem is and I think I have cracked it. It‘s be- cause I always question myself, probably un- necessarily and sometimes self-sabotagingly so, on the grounds of being a mammal with
ROMY 41 biological imperatives which govern me, but then I become uncomfortable with people who are easy going and due to social structures historical structures cognitive structures etc. to fall back on lack this kind of self- punishing introspection based on awareness of mortality and consciousness of one’s bio- logical etc. motivations fears triggers needs wants etc. I think I don’t mind any character failings so much but I dislike when something appears to me like lack of awareness about one’s character failings. I expect everyone to spend most of their waking time in morbid introspection because I do. I feel like this is strange because I thought I liked men who are rich powerful geniuses or something like that, but appears to me the first step is they have to be mor- bidly existentialist, and of course your paintings are nothing if not morbidly exis- tentialist dear Lucian Freud, gleefully so! This is thus far my conclusion. And I think the reason why I became so at- tached (?) to Frank is that we talked about mortality etc. and that made me develop these strong loving feelings. On the other hand when someone pushes death away, or seeks for example cognitively pro- tection from it, that makes me scared and lonely, because then I can’t share my own terror at death which is great, and I hate having to comfort others or pretend not to see death in my own terror, and I cannot join in on these enterprises because it feels uneasy. And I think that while for sure my interest - which is sizeable, possibly outsized – in you, dear Lucian Freud, stems from admira- tion of genius etc though I don‘t much like
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 42 this word, I think it more so stems from your beautiful morbid existentialism, and then the genius itself is how aesthetically well and with what bravado and machismo etc. and with what degree of indifferent arro- gance that has all the terror of the earth‘s worms in it you face? affront? the death, your (previously upcoming by now arrived) death, it is all decaying yes we can all see that, but it is also a ‚not today, death, not today‘ and it is always (until it isn’t) a ‚not today‘ because, though you already did, it appears there is hardly such a thing as a convenient day to die! Dear Lucian Freud The biggest tragedy, no, the biggest error, ergo the biggest tragedy?, is mistaking hu- man male biological imperative (incl. its/his inherent terror of death – to be sure this is not gendered (?), but it is hu- man) for some superior degree of conscious- ness. I don't know how brainwashed you have to be to think you are a superior lifeform to everything else just because you, like, can count or whatever. Like, bees can inter- pretative dance. Who gives a fuck. Mind you I don't hate despise or criticize you, Lucian Freud, for having and following your biological imperatives you do what any tiger or any other primate would do. It is your full right to bed as many girls and make as many paintings as you possibly can you would be stupid not to. The only thing that disgusts me and makes me hold human men in insane contempt is them thinking their interests are somehow more sacred or better and enshrining them and making them into re- ligions and constitutions.
ROMY 43 Just because you wanna eat or fuck someone doesn't make that creature have less worth and value than you it just crosses your bio- logical imperatives sometimes unfortunately so. If pigs had a god it would be a pig god and if unbrainwashed women had a god it would be a Goddess, nay when unbrainwashed women have a god she is a Goddess, praise be. It makes fuckall difference. I don't know what does it take for human men everywhere to realise that all ecosystems everywhere can't serve and are not meant to serve human male biological imperative. It's completely obscene. It's not even that I forbid you to follow your imperatives be a selfish dick for all I care just let us not be stupid or dishonest enough to mix up the categories! I like your paintings because they are self aware. You are not stupid and insincere enough to exempt yourself from a decaying or to be decaying matter a girl is meat is dog is a Lucian Freud. You betray it and your paintings betray you. My paintings of course betray me. Paintings always betray this is their gorgeousness. This is the same as what Vali Myers said: let it all be animal. (“Let it all be animal, my life and death, hard and clean like that, anything but human… a lot I care, me with my red heart in the dark earth and my tattooed feet following the animal ways.” – Vali My- ers‘ Diary entry, 1963) This is the sensibility I look for in art. At his best even my father is like this in the sense of having this encompassing under- standing for natural cycles even as he fights them, with his sharks and his desper-
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 44 ate and sometimes ill fated or impossible attempts to understand biological cycles and surrender to them instead they drag him in- side like a terrifying vortex but then, it seems to me, not towards pity or wishes of transcendence etc. but towards the unfolding of this great love of what could be called samsara, but could also be called something else, and his strangeness. At his worst, forget it. My dad was for sure the biggest love of my life even though it went to shit I mourn him every day. I resent him for forcing me to estrange myself from him he pushed and pushed and left me with no choice. I still love him more than most anyone else. I said to Frank, nobody ever understood me, by which I probably meant, my father didn‘t un- derstand me, but that is not fully true. My father did understand me, or had the capaci- ty to understand me should he choose to use it (although, did he?), he just betrayed me. I am past all stages of grief, as in, I am familiar with them, done the carousel multi- ple times. The betrayal was in every single thing. My dad and I, are embarrassingly similar in pretty much every way in terms of charac- terial constitution. In general about pretty much everything I did, dad would say gloomi- ly, ah, I used to do this. And then he would punish me and go insane. It is very very ob- vious that his punishing etc. of me is an extension of self punishing and hate of me is an extension of self hate but that is not my problem! Really stupid things as well, for example,
ROMY 45 way of dressing. I loved my father so, so much, beyond. I was also totally in love with him, not in a sex- ual way ew but in the way you can be in love with people and things. Of course the par- ent-child relationship is also a sexual re- lationship, the sexual relationship you could say, I am outcome of my dad’s sexual reproduction, just in a completely different way. And of course children are generally pro- grammed to love their parents it is a bio- logical imperative. And now, all of it in the shitter. I don’t even know if I have the right to forgive him. I have the right to forgive him for what he did to me, but can I forgive what he did to my mother and my brother and other people and nature? It is unbelievably bitter. The amount of heartache I have experienced in this relationship is very hard to explain and to image. How a person you love and trust can from one day to the next start yelling at you that you are a dirty whore for ‚not having cleaned the bathroom proper- ly‘ or start saying and doing other really insane things and accusing you of things you wouldn’t even conceive or slap you or threaten you with an axe or talk about anni- hilating the whole family or say ‚I don’t need this you’re not my daughter any- more‘ and hand you back your own photograph. He took out his wallet took my photograph out of it, it was one of me in the year I was graduating high school, and he tossed it on the table like I was a dog, actually I’m not fully sure he would treat a dog like that, actually I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t,
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 46 but he did me. The slow progression of how it was just getting worse over a period of couple years and there was nothing I could do but bear it was a fucking massacre. By the time I was 18 I was genuinely suicidal because of the abuse and because of how sad my life was. Of course unlike what self help books say and what I tried to believe unfortunately abuse doesn't mean there is no love. It would be easy if that was the case. But it is the love that hurts. I don't remember exactly when did I give up on my dad, I think it was the axe incident. I realized he was insane. These days it is called 'narcissistic personality disorder ' but I prefer good old fashioned 'insanity' because it rings more truthful. And when father is insane we cannot love him or rather we have to split out heart in two. Often I feel like I see my dad's insanity everywhere in a world overtaken by ego run amok. In fact probably the issue is not 'his' he has just caught a widespread sick- ness. The indigenous (according to Paul Levy) call it 'wetiko' (what we would call 'nar- cissistic personality disorder') and it is the basic principle of our civilization, of colonization. Do you also have this disease, Lucian Freud? The assimilated tissue is dead . Cure, like in Hans Christian Andersen, lies in a warm human tear. Swan – like, Gerda- like and finally crocodile-like, I cried many, many, many. I also love my mother. Of course. And I do not love her any less than him. (If I could save one parent out of a burning building I would save my mom). But it isn't the same
ROMY 47 as loving daddy whose distance and assholery leaves all this space to exist. Mom just sort of as of now doesn't force me to stretch my wings or invent them so much be- cause she just, as of now, well, sort of is, and can be sort of reasoned with, or talked with. But with Daddy my love has to become great supernatural and resourceful to reach him... My love has to become so so very big to get there, to reach all the way into the convulted darkness, all the way into the un- known. It is a Simone Weil esque (“God cre- ated through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no oth- er could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made ac- cursed.” – Simone Weil: Waiting for God) feat of imagination. But even so, I am not convinced that it helps. Maybe I would have to become superhu- man maybe indeed god-like, for the love to exist all the way in those alternative /alternate plains where he sits by himself very sad. (?) Do you think I don‘t know, dad? Do you think I don't know, Lucian Freud? You are very much a hurt person. And I think this is ok, I just wish you would stop being ashamed of it. Dear Lucian Freud
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 48 Oh I am so tired. I am so tired of waiting Beloved He didn't even take time to dump me he just went away forever I always think, eh maybe this one won't get up and leave me forever when he sees me (like Frank) but then off they go. I don't care so much or possibly at all if there is sex or not I just want for one per- son to stay you know? Or, if they leave, for it to be out of some normal humanely con- structive reason but not after seeing me for the reason of seeing me. What's so wrong about saying 'i love you' that it should render further communication impossible? This is exactly what happened with Johan you could just see and feel the tremor and the terror in his body. What is the point of existing if one can't be oneself and relate with and to people who are also themselves? I want to go on a strike from being roles. I just no longer care about anything, Bar- thold, I mean Lucian Freud, I mean whatever. Why do I feel so recognized by you as me (I didn't even recognise in myself?)? It's not fair. Will you, too, turn your face away from me? Will you do it tomorrow? Will you do it yes- terday? Are you doing it now? There is really no point trying to make peo- ple like us who do not like or cannot stand my essence, and my essence is a puppy. I hope this makes sense. Understand this bigly, well sometimes I also think monogamy is a bit of an idiocy person- ally (probably I am superficial in under- standing to think this) but that's besides the point What about me terrifies? I don't mean to be
ROMY 49 terrifying but I just am (terrifying) be- cause I am. Is it the (need of) love that terrifies? Is it the humanity? Is it the neediness? What is it? My desperate howling scares everyone away. Dear Barthold! Barthold I am very sorry I don't think I can do this my emotions/feelings for you are back. I am not doing it on purpose. I tried so hard to be mature etc. but I can't control my feelings. You know that I love you. (Note: I have read Erich Fromm as recommended, and I have also read Fantasy Bond – Robert Firestone, thus, a in-all-fairness-amendment-disclaimer, ac- cording to Erich Fromm I do in fact also love you insofar as I know you as a human person but here in this letter I am speaking from emotional hunger and those are two dis- tinct states, as I have found out recently. I even made a little diagram. So it is very strange that I use them interchangably. We very much need an expression for this, some- thing to say instead of ‚I love you‘ when we say ‚I love you‘ but really we mean ‚love me‘.) You know this not from my words now but you know it from how my art has developed, or the fact that it has developed at all. There is only one way to make art and that is out of love ((in face of death)). I was so barren until I met you...... You were the first person..... Who understood. (Introspection: I do, in fact, say this to literally everyone (who -according to me- understands). I have said to more than one person they are the first person who under-
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 50 stood and y‘all can‘t all be the first so something about my perceptions is probably off.) What else do I want to say in this letter? I must be very careful to write it properly for there is just one letter. Everything flooded me and came back. If you don't love me please don't make me perform these charades. I will go on and live the rest of my life very well and very bravely but I cannot live it so barren, fro- zen, as is expected of me. I love you Bar- thold. I love you Barthold. I love you Barthold. I love you Barthold. I love you Barthold. I love you Barthold. I love you Barthold. I love you Barthold. I love you Barthold. I love you Barthold. I love you Barthold. I love you. I love you Barthold. I love you so much. And I love you. I love you. Please do not make me perform these charades of being a student and stuff like that. This world is very very sick and I cannot bear it. I can tell you right now, it is not my fault that I developed these feelings. I did want to develop feelings of love and was (pleas- antly) surprised to be alive when I did but I didn't want to develop them for you. I am trying. I am struggling. I am not a bad per- son but I am a person one that for better or for worse loves you in an erotic way. Maybe I am mistaken when I think you respond to me also. I think I see you see me, or hear you hear me, since the time I made my shitty video about my shitty exbf (the Ted Hughes one) I feel comprehended... I could- n't make art otherwise. But please don't make me lie about what it is. Absolutely no merits I don't think you are better than other people or something like that... It is not a meritocracy it just hap-
ROMY 51 pens sometimes. I did everything well, did everything ma- turely. I painted psychotherapized sublimat- ed got distance but not too much distance I look at things with humour blah blah blah I just cannot. It is not going anywhere. I thought it would go away when I said my piece certainly but it's totally useless I am sitting here look- ing at Dorothy Iannone crying. I know it is not your fault how are you sup- posed to know all of this? You say Dorothy Iannone you mean no wrong. You don't know the precise spots where it intersects my se- cret mythologies. And it's like that with every reference. Everything you say nearly cuts me profoundly, I would say in half but we have already es- tablished I am cut in half at the beginning of this text but it does cut me or maybe it is mending and it just feels like cutting but I am scared and I feel like the world is dark and I don‘t really know and I am a slug and this pours salt in, on me endlessly, on my sluggish skin I cannot actually take off exposing the organs underneath even if maybe sometimes I would like to. I am good at keeping it in check good at seeing you as a human person it comes and goes sometimes months pass without me having an erotomania flare-up. But it is just there in the background. Because it is so applicable, in a world where nothing is ever applicable. And I genuinely did try to stay away. My 3rd year, I didn't know you were gonna be my teacher and I thought, oh my god. But I decided not to run away because that's what I did wrong the first time. The 4th year, ok. I feel like I gave you
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 52 many outs, honestly. Now it's just shit. I want to hold you so badly, at least touch your hand with gentleness, anything. My ovaries ache. I love you. I want your hands so very, very much. I was running away I elaborated I did every- thing well and maturely: I painted. Try to control the crush have you actually tried to control it? You haven't have you boo At first I avoided you and it was you who was sort of trying to talk to me, all very politely of course, well of course he was dummy he had to he was your teacher. Remem- ber? Well I was avoiding you because I knew or suspected this was going to happen be- cause I felt the air cackle. I was avoiding you until I could avoid no more because I felt the warmth everywhere in my body, against myself, a living life, and I knew against myself that it was good. Or maybe I am just imagining the air cackling. No matter what happens I will not disown my- self. No matter what happens I am and will remain a grown woman. I am like Vali Myers or Dorothy Iannone (thanks) and if I am per- secuted executed spat on etc etc for my whorishness of (sex but also) affect, emo- tion, then I must bravely with head held hight and the reddest of dresses go to the shearing of the hair of the martyrized whores. I will think of you all throughout and will be happy and peaceful because I love you Barthold. And if you don't love me and don't want me I will still do it and people will say that an insane and vain per- son insanely and vainly went to her death that I did it for nothing (knowing I did it for nothing) but I will and I will be happy
ROMY 53 and peaceful though everything in me strug- gles horribly because I know it is not for nothing but for everything it is for my love that I die (and live) not for a specific man but for the right to express it as a pulsat- ing center of what it means to be a human woman, and today (it is not tonight yet) I am for you. I love you Barthold goddamn it let me write! I love obscene things (?) absolutely nothing obscene about things I want to do with for to you. I will iron shirts ... If I have to (and I promised I never would!) (but you make me want to). Happily and proudly, I will kneel. When Lien asked, who here is an adult? I thought - I am. And it is the truth. In the past my love (of my heart) has cost me a lot and I am ready to pay it again (and more). I will pay every time. Yes my heart I will honor you over every- thing yes I will my good pure true wild beautiful cruel merciful pragmatic heart. And who doesn't understand what I am saying, will, when this strange weakness that really is strength descends too onto their heavy bones. This whole civilization is dying and we are insanely sick because it is forcing us to live against, and without, our heart. Please do not you force me as well! When I am like this I love every creature so profoundly... this is why I am vegan I became vegan be- cause I had sex, and fell in love, and then I realized animals also feel love and we are truly stealing their milk, because I am an animal, and do not want to have my milk sto- len. Everything else becomes immaterial... Thoughts become almost quiet.
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 54 Do not you force me as well! I am crying. Have I ever been not crying? I am not sorry I love you I am quite happy about it. I am exquisitely happy to be a re- al good-for-something human being even if/though it hurts like shit. Please walk into the valley or thru the val- ley with me Please walk thru the valley with me Do not be afraid. One must not be afraid. The civilization is all wrong and is crum- bling... What a heartbreaking Honor to be born at the tail of it. Living on the tail born on the coccyx bone. Maybe come our/the end we will slide down the tail. Why is it so unacceptable to write about love? I sincerely do not understand is the purpose of art not to express love? Is there any other purpose? This is the progression of my inner develop- ments since I knew you (a lot of this hap- pens while I am masturbating but honestly we may as well call it active imagination be- cause that is what it is) I only want to love and be loved and tell the truth about my life as I live it, the latter being a prerequisite of the former. I was thinking about you during the summer but then I thought, you will probably not see him this year so calm down. When I walked into the room and you were there I thought, uh oh. But I decided to just try to be human and normal and see what happens and then, Frank was also there. I liked Frank immediately very much and developed a really good relationship that took a lot of the tension away, and then I started dating
ROMY 55 someone, and that was a nice relationship.... I thought it meant that I was splitting my Jungian figure you know that the senex fig- ure and the lover figure are differentiating because I had probably had them fused. I no longer think so much about Jungian figures (also Jung was a racist and it is indivisi- ble from his work I had read an article on this) I think I like you, as a person, and also biologically. It is not something that makes so much sense to analyse and talk about. One main thing comforts me: knowing I am in a good company. Think about the shit Ko- koschka pulled. Honestly I am much less creepy than that. Ta daaa! Adios. Are you still here? Will you still be here tomorrow? Are you preparing to make your hasty politically correct socially construc- tive and morally advisable departure leaving my little insane consciousness unembraced? Go. Just go! God knows they always go, god knows they all went. Just go. I alone to pick up the pieces, a deluge. Withdraw and extricate yourself from me with a renewed fear and shame. Say you never saw me. Say you never saw my face. Nobody will scorn you etc. Nobody will suspect a thing your unseeing- ness of me is a believable (and correct! You aren't supposed to see me in a certain way, or too much!!) proposition. Change your name to Peter, become a saint, including in the legal documents. Deny. Deny. Dear Peter! I am reduced to this, and I am glad for it. I wouldn't prefer being something else right
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 56 now. I think the cosmic pattern of my love seems unrequited because my love for my dad has been unrequited and this is my basic emo- tional blueprint experience of love that is unalterable (in the past) and seems un- transcendable (in the present). I'm trying so hard to break out of this pat- tern! And certainly it is possible to be loved by man certainly it is not written in stone that I must be fundamentally unloved it is just very hard to break the pattern (and sometimes, like paradise, hard to even envi- sion, when envisioning is the crucial first step). I am sure there are everyday women that hap- pen to be loved. Granted I don't know how many, patriarchal men are not good at loving the odds are not for me. But surely it is not an ontological impossibility? It is just so hard so very hard to see it, this, any- thing past this heavy coat of darkness and shame. I do not like it. It must be possible to correct the axis. Vychyl to kurva! This rejecting unrequited version of love is fake north. Correct it! Correct it! I would like to ask my dad, why did you put me in this predicament? But he didn't put us anywhere we were already born on this junc- ture... Maybe he tried. Or maybe it really just was J. that set this blueprint I don't know and investigating terrifies me. It was so beyond beautiful (for me) and he saw nothing insisted there was nothing and left the town slutshame me for example this
ROMY 57 is what happened: And this is what happened to Anna: And this is why women die. It happened a few years after. Barthold you will be my interlocutor for this and you will sit and listen. It is just like the Bible. The shit Adam pulled was the first recorded instance of slutshaming. The world began with slutshaming. So I know this is very stupid but that/this is why I'm fucked up and why I can't make spiritual paintings etc. I genuinely did love this man and was waiting for him to come. He didn't take away my belief in one man he took away my belief in the whole fabric of the world. It is so painful I can hardly bear to write about it. I want to say, I can't believe that I bit myself out of this shame etc. by myself... But I didn't. It took the consenting of this man to view me (more as a) human being. Anna died, this shifted my priorities and view of life. I started reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes, this helped me a lot. I stopped being so terrified. Eventually I got over it. But I guess now that I think of it the pain of those earlier times still lingers when I doubted the fabric of my own reality because of another's void. They were such extremities of pain. Now I was reminded of it in a smaller measure. It is very easy for me to dissociate how real and all consuming the pain was and very hard to remember, especially the dullness of it, the suspended waiting for something that just ain't coming.
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 58 I think it is in this total utter abandon- ment that I have to learn to love myself. Revisit those places and hold my own hand like Amy Winehouse says. Say, we already survived this, honey. The dark path ends. You reach air water earth comprehension civ- ilization... We did it on foot etc but we did it, we made it out... now let us revisit. It may be the case that I have to break it off with Barthold. The positives of my situation: many things are shifting in my psyche, things are grow- ing and becoming clear, I am figuring things out. It's normal that you had a little flare up of affection when you saw Barthold again. Anyways there is no right or wrong in this situation. There may be 'wrong' if it's dis- honest or unkind but so long as it's honest and kind there aren't really prescriptions on how to handle this kind of a thing. Don't pour any more time energy whatnot into Barthold it's not gonna happen he is be- reaved. It's not gonna happen. If he loved me in that way I would know. It is hard for me keeping this in perspec- tive but I think it's doable. It's a vio- lence towards little humble things forcing them to be big and all important and fill the shoes of ghosts. Let this be little and humble if that's what it is. We need congruence, we need things that match reality (consensual reality, in a con- sensus you create with another person). I will still write my letter, I guess, be- cause I also care about writing for the sake of writing and I refuse to see this as shameful. If writing is a part of a continu-
ROMY 59 um of human yearning for love etc. so be it. I think I also need to give myself wings to envision sometimes and is it so wrong if thru you my imagination, I really don't want to say my soul though it sometimes feels like it, envisions, even if it doesn't (ful- ly or at all) match consensual reality? We need to be able to imagine do we not? It is not true, it is a fundamentally un- artistic position (and also humanely wrong) to say that adjustment to reality is unilat- eral or to insist on therapy and on us be- coming 'well adjusted'. Artist is someone who refuses to be adjusted to consensual reality but does his or her little part to adjust consensual reality to something better truerer more tolerable. Probably the general aim of all art (and art as such) is human (and non human? Yes) lib- eration. Adjustment to reality is a bilateral adjust- ment. We adjust to reality to not become de- lusional and untethered but we also have the power, albeit each of us humanely limited, to adjust reality to us. To horrible unfeel- ing castrating versions of reality, in my opinion, we can refuse consent. Not everything has to be taken literally. I do mean it literally but I'm not offended if you don't. I think texts have value also as texts, or I hope so, besides being for their one intended recipient (I think). Poetry is the antropological destiny of humanity, said Brodsky. I guess in this sense poetry (lit- erature) is something like dialoguing with God. There is a spring There is a house
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 60 Wings to envision possibilities You are not the only man I feel like this about I will say. For example I also felt quite in love with Frank. (Am using past tense out of respect to Frank he expressed his wish to terminate our communication, OK, no pursuing this further.) Clearly this in itself says something about the nature of the longing. Father figures for sure but al- so, I am unconvinced that it is about fa- therliness. I think the art aspect is at least as important as the father aspect and I think more so. I think it is a longing about wanting to bridge the gap between the platonic making it material after all this is what art is, something that grips on the sprouting shooting Eros in flight like those spring buds sprouting with unbelievable force of all the universe and yet how tender and slow it seems – ‚You can’t insure against the future, except by really believ- ing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.‘ – D. H. Lawrence - grounding it horribly and beautifully, a parallel to how I paint though clumsily and probably will start making sculptures soon because I have to make my poetry material. Despite this insane text, - I know! -, it is in my opinion a mistake to think I am endan- gering and devouring I am putting a lot of time and effort into learning to restraint. For obvious reasons I do not insist on any form of relationship with anyone ever. But I do insist of totally full expression, even of really dark deep and desperate or au con- traire pristine, angelic, longings. The fulfillment okay I can be pressed by circumstance or otherwise to go without and still be healthy and vital and happy and an-
ROMY 61 noyed, trudging on. But I must not and will not self censore my heart (or other parts of my anatomy but I do believe the heart is actually involved here also) from expressing the wish. You may re- fuse me the answer one way or another or it may take a really long time to arrive (how much longer, Beloved?) but you may not pro- hibit me to sing else I whither and die for – maybe this is incorrect, probably a yoga textbook would say so - I excrete how I breathe, sometimes with my mouth. But it is important, all of it, our breath is nour- ishment for the plants. I want to be free. I am. Sometimes I think of some shit I did and think, I can't be- lieve I pulled it off. But I did. (Though sometimes it hurt like hell). And I am here. I truly do believe love in all and every it- eration and regardless of the outcome is the way or the arrow pointing us out of prison. Well and then though it's quite presumptuous and even vulgar to explain (?) the specific- ities of this and though it is not necessary per se, love can well exist without sex, I hope to one day find a man who will want to explore this with me erotically I guess is all I can say. Because beyond a certain point, you just don't know. We will cross that bridge when we get there. This is the way it must be, for there is no other way. I am making my peace... I am making my peace with the inherent limitations of this rela- tionship, but also with inherent limitations of things like having a bodily form etc. For example, I am realizing: I don't care to fuck you, I would for sure do it if you also wanted to I think it would be nice/amazing I don’t know, but that is not the issue, the
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 62 issue is I just don't want you to leave Bar- thold and if you don't fuck me, if I don't fuck you, it doesn't leave me with any rea- son whatsoever to ask you not to leave me alone in the darkness. I didn't know this was never about sex but it wasn't. The sex was a rouse of appearing grown up in a des- perate attempt to have at least something going for her but the baby is very little, probably pre-verbal. Without sex I have ab- solutely no hope of you being in my life, no way to escape abandonment. The upcoming abandonment is total. The child has no hope of picking up a caregiver, nobody wants to caregive, obviously... The adolescent does have a weapon and the weapon is sex, which is weaponized to gain care. I have absolutely no claim on Barthold... he WILL be abandoning me eventually... there is no reason not to... No reason for him to take care of me, absolutely none..... I have to trick people especially men into taking care of me and I do this by being pretty and sexual..... Then someone cares because I pay them for it by sex. I was thinking: the reason Daddy doesn't love me is because I'm not pretty, the rea- son Daddy doesn't love Mommy is because she is not pretty. I have to be a very seductive child for Daddy to care for and about me. He will certainly not be moved by an impetus of his heart. The truth is: Daddy doesn't care because he's not capable of caring, does not love because he is not capable of loving. What is taken for love is a strange image. The only way of arousing compassion and love in a human man seems to be thru sex. I did- n't realise I held this belief but my father has told me it repeatedly after all: feed ´em and fuck ´em. A man’s heart does respond
ROMY 63 to one thing and that is sex. That is the only thing his heart responds to. Those but- tons have to be pressed to receive the mini- mum of care. But not thru having the sex but by arousing in his subconscious mind the idea that you are a viable path subcon- sciously, viable sex -love object. Then and only then will he care, whereupon you will forever distrust him detest him and even hate him (for having fallen for your rouse). Sex is everything which is why you must not have it. It's like you have eaten the riches before even being born now look how darkly they shine! Every moment of your every day of your whole life must be spent on this word- less (worldless, Freudian slip) seduction. And the brighter it burns in you the less you must concede to give it. And when you age out of being new or being very interesting for sex you have got noth- ing then, but also once you give the actual sex you have nothing then also. (They get what they want then they never want it again, sings Courtney Love.) You must pos- sess desire like eating catnip or whatever and when the lights in your ovaries burn out and you lose your last egg you are done for and will be tossed to the trash. But if you play your cards right you will not be tossed to trash before then and if you play them even righter you will even get a retirement. Do you want cancer of your reproductive sys- tem? Because this is how you get a cancer of reproductive system. But you should have known better though or been born better I don't really know. Figure it out, in the next lifetime or some- thing- in this one it's probably - already too late -
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 64 You are colonizable yet confusingly you also speak. That you want it doesn't appear an absurd proposition, doesn't even appear ab- surd to you. I am trying to help you goddamn it. Stupid slave! She coulda been serving gentlemen at the big table in the big house how do you like it sweetie? Cmon the toilet won't (scrubbing noises) scrub itself. Don't be a bad slave be like Romanka here see she is doing such a good job and enjoy- ing it too aren't you sugar ah of course daddy of course. (retch) I love you Barthold I just wanna run across the field with you or sit on a bench and talk (I remember when I was reading the Mar- cuse in Noorderplantsoen) and not have sex. Dear Lucian Freud! These are the artists I like: You, Henry Miller, Vali Myers, the person who wrote In Front Of Grand Central Station, Elizabeth Smart? The poet person what's her name? She did some pretty unhinged things, respectable. ((Note: I meant Elizabeth Smart of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept)) These are the kind of artists I like, this is the kind of thing I know. Me being only what and who I am, for now, I can't know any other thing. Dear Barthold! I felt a surge of love once and I wonder if it was related to you. In my head it was, but it might have not have been.
ROMY 65 I don't think you are shitty Barthold I think you are a real human being. I think you understand the pattern of Life in a way that seems kind of similar to how I do and do your best to uphold pattern of Life against unaliveness. But it is difficult. This thing that Frank did, it made me feel like Carrie (from Stephen King), like having something taken from underneath me like he has been joking or lying this whole time when he said I am not a burden. But I must understand that Frank has got his own reasons, triggers, boundaries etc. so it is useless to presume malicious intent or see conjectures. Probably when Frank said I am not a burden, he really felt like this, and meant it in a more generalized sense, that I am not a bur- den on Earth, or inherent burden in the fact of my existence. And when he shut me out and said he doesn't want to talk to me ever again he probably meant it like I, Frank Lisser, cannot take the existential burden for your life, and besides this I do not have space in my life for a personal relationship with you, and right now I feel attacked, unsafe, and prob- ably am regretting my former self disclosure. Does not mean there was any malicious intent at any point Frank is not a malicious person. He is being self protective in a reasonably humanely self protective way. Which still sucks, but. But it's also a wider pattern of my life in childhood. It's not that anyone was ever be- ing malicious towards me I just sort of was- n't taken into account, ever, by anyone, and
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 66 this too can trigger a pretty deep fundamen- tal sense of anguish. I feel like I am shouting, and no one hears. Are you even reading this word vomit? Are you disgusted by me yet? Indifference should be easier enough to chew than evil, but it isn't necessarily. In my life, it seems like indifference is the evil, pretty much. Why can't I be important, even a little bit? Why can't I be heard? Why can't I be em- braced? Why can't I be loved? I am being treated decently and politely but without a profound fundamental warmth, I am being treated decently out of obligation. I do not like this. I wish to be delighted in. Quiet, Romy! Why does everyone tell me to be quiet? My little body is in anguish and no one par- ticularly cares and somehow no one knows (I guess?) which I don’t even understand how is possible but I guess it is. I have to put absolutely everything I have into not let- ting my strong emotions show, and being a good little girl. This works for 18 years (no matter how bad things get). Then, I fall completely apart. I keep the façade. I actually did. I really, really did! It was sisiphean but somehow, out of sheer fear I guess, I managed. For eighteen years, and only the last 4 of those 18 were spent drinking alcohol! I don't want to be treated as a basket case for a psychiater and I don't even think there is anything wrong with me. I don't think I am sick I think I am really healthy actually (besides a minor but really annoy- ing tinnitus I've developed last year, it happens occasionally) I just want to explain what is wrong.
ROMY 67 Why is nobody listening? All of this is completely wrong, all of this. It is the contrary, it is the contrary not of good, because that is a moral quandry largely subjective, but of right. We are killing humans, we are killing animals, we are killing the earth, we are killing our- selves. Why is nobody listening? This is what is wrong in my family. This is what is, in my opinion, wrong at Mi- nerva. This is, besides entirely normal and under- standable biological human motivation, why I developed this crush. Why is nobody listening? Why is nobody ever listening? Has everyone gone insane, or are we all deaf? I am not crazy it is just wrong! Why would you put yourself in this machin- ery?! It will kill you! I don't understand how can humans, so smart etc., not understand what any non-insane an- imal would immediately sniff out. Why are we so insane? What is wrong with us? There is not so much with me even though Frank finds me creepy I will tell you that, wanting to cuddle etc. is a non-wrong hu- manely comprehensible motivation. But what is wrong with US? It's like the the grass feels my foot thru which I listen. The grass wet and fragrant, it speaks. And indeed the water, the blades of grass, every single animal is begging me: You are human, right? Ah finally one of them is non insane, or rather not-as-much-insane, one that can perceive us. Please, tell your insane father the following message. Tell your insane father he doesn't own us, and
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 68 that his delusion of owning us is literally destroying the earth, italics he will kill everything italics. And the only thing I can say to the blades of grass the sky the water the animals etc is this: But I cannot! I cannot tell him! Why cannot you tell him? I don't know! Because of the fear! But it’s not just that. He will not listen! He has enslaved me! Last time I tried to tell him he slapped me! There is no way my voice will ever get to him! About anything! He is so far gone! I guess, go and kill him, or I don't know, because I don't know what to do! He is just gone! He is just too far gone! I actually tried. This is how the final fall out with my father happened (I am proud of this). And I understand that if I don’t convince my father to stop enslaving and killing every- one I will be destroyed too, and I guess I deserve it, but this doesn’t mean I can convince so I guess go and kill him, kill me with him I know I deserve it for my complic- ity and I am sorry, but I guess kill us all because I don’t know what to do! I can’t bear to watch anything about the ongoing genocide or political situation because I know all these behaviors in micro and from what I have seen of it when a man is insane that is that, and I know that as a human be- ing in the global north I should be a better ambasador for Life which is also my life, without which I have no other life, for Voice which is also my voice, without which I have no other voice, but I literally don’t know how to do it because the man is insane and nobody is listening at all it’s like
ROMY 69 their eyes or ears or sensory apparatus have been already acidified and there is no get- ting thru to my insane father and I guess this is my forever hell under the circum- stance of which I am forever on a desperate lookout for a man that is not too far gone. It actually is a pretty desperate lookout... The odds do not appear good... many of us have given up. I don't know, Barthold, can you understand what I am saying? I am not asking that you fuck me, I am not asking that you leave your family, god for- bid that you bring harm to your children. (I know that your daughter is 14 and that was the exact age I was when I started thinking about suicide so I have strong per- sonal reasons for wanting all 14 year old girls to be safe healthy happy and free.) But can you understand what I am saying? And what the fuck am I supposed to do? I was very heartened by your recommendation of Dorothy especially this part (quoting Dorothy): “my work was removed on the morn- ing of the opening and, in protest, the next day Dieter Roth removed his entire contribu- tion to the exhibition. After Bern, the show was scheduled to open in the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle. Dieter held fast to his stand and would agree to participate only if my works were returned to the exhibition. After many agonising discussions among the partic- ipants, Karl Ruhrberg, the director at Düs- seldorf, bravely decided in favour of an un- censored show.” This is what it looks like when a man is- n't spineless. I have never encountered this behaviour in real life.
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 70 No man has ever stood up for me (or any wom- an I am personally acquainted with that I am aware of) in such a meaningful way, ever. No man has ever stood up for me, period! I think that this is the fundamental feeling of hurt accompanying me throughout my whole life. I am completely undefended in this world and, thru no fault of one's own, this kind of a betrayal (?) seems to stick and condition life afterwards. Brick by brick I fall apart. I am already weathered. What is there is turning into sand. They will not touch you, they will not be there, they will not stand up for you and they do not love you, this is the main re- current lesson of my life. I really hope I am wrong but at this point has anyone ever given me any reason to think otherwise? As evidenced by this desperate letter the best I have in my life in this regard (in the men regard) is you. This is not much. But it's the best I have for my man shaped hole. Pretty tragic lol. Where am I supposed to go? There is no place and no one that wants me is the thing. For me it just does not get better. In my heart is a cicatrice caused by my dad and by my extension by human men, or The Hu- man Man (such as yourself, strange but you are one). And I try so desperately hard to see past the cicatrice but everywhere I look, the cicatrice is all that there is. I know the cicatrice to be in my eye. I do not have a clear vision is the thing. Dear Absent Male Figure Why are you absent? Where have you gone?
ROMY 71 What are you doing there? Why do you not love me? I love you and want you to love me. Why do you not? It's called patriarchy but where are the men actually? Patriarchy is an absent man. Presumably they have gone to fight wars, or who knows where they have gone. I don't know where they have gone. Nobody seems to know where they have gone, who knows if they themselves know it. I call. They do not hear. Absent father/father wound. I have never been able to even imagine a loving father. Evil is dissociation, evil is a disjoined particle. Absent male figures. Love is a dog from hell. Dear Lucian Freud I have been abandoned by you so long ago, it began to seem as an axiom. I am trying to raise my consciousness but there is seemingly nothing to grasp, to hold on to. They want to do other things with their time besides care for the children, but so do I. Why are you such a shitty father, Lucian Freud? I don't care if you like to fuck pretty girls this seems to me a humanely comprehensible imperative I am not going to shame you for it. But why are you such a shitty father do you not see that you too have been a little baby once? Now who's go- ing to take care of the little baby yous? One may fuck pretty girls with vigor and gusto and society may happily continue to exist. But if one doesn't care for babies we are all doomed.
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 72 The last time we talked (which was also the second time we talked if I remember correct- ly) Miška, who was at the time, I hope for her she isn’t anymore, my dad’s girlfriend, asked me, and is it true that your father fought in a foreign legion? and is it true that he has those folds on his head because he got mauled by a tiger?! and when I looked at her and said something to the effect of, what do you think, Miška? one could just see the little fires in her eyes go out and her mouth corners go down. You must think I‘m so stupid, don‘t you. I empathically DON‘T think Miška is stupid but I do think it is fascinating that you can be a random guy in his fifties (my dad) and go to this clearly intelligent well educated woman and tell her, yeah, so I fought in foreign legion and got mauled by a tiger. My exwife is a bitch by the way and the young woman is going to be like, ok, perfect everything checks out, I'm going to date this man now, no further questions. The hunger for a father figure in women of the world is something completely sub - rational and clearly goes below above and beyond just about anything else. In my opinion it's because it hits this deep primal spot in the young woman in question. Ah why wait a second. My dad abandoned the family maybe he does love me very much but he also went to a foreign legion and got mauled by a tiger that's what they ALL do poor things! And to think us womankind are so uncompre- hending of their sorrowful misadventures! Well it‘s a good thing I am different than mymother-hisexwife the uncomprehending peas- ant because I am not only pretty but that, yes, but also special and empathetic. I will
ROMY 73 cure this one, and reform him. Then the guy pulls the same shit that led to the breakdown of his previous marriage(s) because that's his behavior pattern, because THAT'S HOW HE IS, and the girl blinks her pretty big eyes and goes surprised Pikachu, except at this point either pregnant or dragging around a stroller, and the cycle continues. Instead of a living man the enti- ty that haunts our collective imagination of the rotten girlhood is a spectre, is a ghost, is a myth. And, because why not this is a part of it, a military campaign. Sometimes I really sincerely think Man has invented Military Campaign so that he wouldn‘t have to take care of his own damn children. (I mean that‘s kinda true. A man has invented military campaign probably be- cause of the possibility of increasing his reproductive success exponentially (more land more territory more resources but also, more sexual access to more women) which log- ically decreases his necessity to invest in the wellbeing of the individual or pre- existent offspring.) Well, I guess my dad did do his best at the end of the day. Can't say he didn't warn me. At this point I don't hate men that much, same as I don't hate pickpockets and petty crooks, as my mother says kto chce kam pomôžme mu tam (who wants to go where, let us help him get there) I‘m just sceptical and try to avoid them when possible. God knows everyone has their reasons. Nobody likes working, or dragging around a toddler, people gotta eat and people have biological imperatives, and I think I have a novelist‘s good compassion for common human wretched- ness besides sometimes getting the ugly urge
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 74 to laugh at yet another dumb tourist who fell for the Chinese tea scam but all the same, the circus never did stop being sad- dening and distasteful. It is rather tragic and a little bit offensive not gonna lie. But of course at the end of the day you get exactly what you want. You want a fairytale that's precisely what you will get, a fair- ytale. Because there are men in the world who are honest, have a spine and won't prom- ise you impossible shit, but that's exactly the point, they won't promise you impossible shit. And if what you fundamentally want is impossible shit, well, whose fault is that, besides a human primate's heart? Nobody can ever promise anything else than the not even really constant because that's not possible either but under a good circum- stance regular and quite abundant shared presence of their own sometimes annoying, doubting, ailing, aging, frail, needy in odd and particular idiosyncratic ways and very limited self. Nothing more is there on offer or has there ever been or will there ever be but it seems to me this is really, really enough, and it is useless and really quite sad to dream about endless empires while spitting in the fellow human face, and ours. Nobody can honestly deliver impossible shit. Either you want possible shit that can be honestly delivered or you live in a strange misery, dear Miška. You seem like a really nice young woman and I sincerely liked you regardless of what my father deduced or didn’t, but, you see, I hope you have dumped him because that’s just what it is, and it just isn‘t going to get better because it isn’t, for it to get better he would have to voyage into his heart, and of course every-
ROMY 75 one can see the necessity of old Lucians of this world voyaging into their hearts be- cause clearly they are fucking it up for everyone else duh, but what you are over- looking and avoiding is the fact that you also have to voyage into your own. Let eve- ryone voyage into their own heart not mi- cromanage or try to micromanage other hearts. Take your responsibility for your part of shared human consciousness don‘t make tradeoffs in this way, if you have to fix something fix you... Not that you had to be fixed but the concept that you have to be fixed is actually what has to be fixed so in that sense you do need to be fixed. Ah. It‘s complicated. All lotuses grow from mud: paragraphs upon paragraphs. Writing is the possibility of bridging ter- rible distances between countries centuries sometimes millenia between life and death between worlds (and this is my voice from beyond if you’re reading me postmortally.) Consider then, Dad, what great distance be- tween us if this is the only way to reach you! I have been perfecting my voice in the deaf, blind silence, the deafening darkness. Look how beautiful I have become! An orna- ment, a pearl. I give you no annoyance what- soever. My resentment kills me, drowns me from the inside: here the ancestral origins of the straining in my voice. Barthold once said, I like your voice. Here the ancestral origins of my kinda pitiful crush. Do men even know what work goes into caring for children? All of this energy is energy unspent caring for babies. I think the only evolutionary hope human animal has is human men loving nurturing and caring for their children in
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 76 every aspect. How would you let someone else rather than yourself care for your children? Anyways dear Romy may as well write to you now because why the heck not. The following is my main contribution to humanity as of now so you would do well to listen. At some point there will come a time when you will be abandoned and this is going to be a beginning because that is how the story starts. If you have found yourself abandoned and are reading this that means whatever they have done to you before they have done and now they have left you for dead. There is absolutely no use blaming yourself. The abandonment if anything is a proof of your reality virtuousness beauty and strenght because it is an ontological truth of present consumptive, colonizing society, that the Goddess has been desecrated and supposedly killed (little do they know, the Goddess never dies for good – how many times have you tried to kill me, Lucian Freud? I always come back to haunt you – to haunt you with Life) because otherwise none of the pitiful childish mistakes that have been committed would have been possible, that is point number one. If you weren‘t worthy you would have not been abandoned. This is not a proof of your defunctness but the contrary, a confirmation of the richness of your life. Because it is life itself that has been in this colonizing etc system, in imposition of slavery, abandoned. If you had been false or ugly or willing to go along with falsity and ugliness you wouldn’t have been abandoned by this machinery make no mistake about it. So long as you are willing to go along and be a good little mutilated whatever you are
ROMY 77 pseudo safe it is when you become beautiful real and free that the pain of abandonment begins, in a society this lying decreipt empty and squalid ugliness and stupidity never ever lead to abandonment and never will it is exactly the contrary. Point number two, none of this is a reflection on you. If someone is blinded by the light and thus fearful of it this on- ly means they are fearful of the life in themselves. If someone fears truth, they fear their own truth. If someone fears love, they fear their own life, and if someone fears beauty, they fear their own beauty. If a man scorns life, love, truth, beauty, it is his own life, love, truth, beauty, that he scorns. A man who scorns life, love, truth and beauty is a man who scorns himself. By having been abandoned you have merely caught up to the ontological state of this mixed up, rather pitiful way of things, and have gained a chance at separation from the Machine. And this is why I am writing to you and ad- vising you to listen, because the continued survival and existence of everything depends on how well you can remember these things/factors and on the ability to live from the heart which contains the truth – connects with the interdimensional truth – reverberating and which is always, always the true north so to speak, though even this phrase is a construction, under any circum- stance. So remember this as you remember and re-live the cessation of the nothing steps all the same dialing back to the entirety of the abandonment. There is darkness and filth .... everything is barren .... there is nothing- ness... you have been left for dead or so
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 78 they think. The uttermost task here is to keep loving oneself and living, and staying alive, irregardless of the withdrawal of the false love. They never loved you never cared about your wellbeing only cared about what you can do for them... had the opposite of your inter- ests in their mind. To be rid of such a false love truthfully is a blessing be- cause it is to be rid of hate. But dear Romy, dear everyone, I need you and not just me-me but Life loves you and needs you. Insofar as you are a part of it and you are, you are absolutely structurally indis- pensable... though you may not realize it yet your absence should your light go out will only generate further and further rip- ples of emptiness because Life needs each and every one of its creatures to uphold it against falsity in annihilation, death in life. Thus should you, -and you will- in darkness filth and shame crawl, crawl to the door in near blindness, know with absolute certainty that there will be a friendly face and there will be a love to uphold you and there will be friendship and joy but not until you get rid of this false voice that tells you fal- sities about the innermost nature of your being which has never been anything else than Real and Beautiful. And you will rejoin life where you have always belonged as life rejoins you, and this is a task, and not on- ly is it a task but it is a possibility, and I speak it because psychologically, I have lived it. And then once the self rescue mission is done (though of course it is an ongoing mis- sion) comes the healing and healing again is nothing else than stripping away of falsi-
ROMY 79 ties and shedding of burdens. And you will discard of every single untruthful thing that has been said about your character and nature, every single made up term used to taunt you by those who fail to understand their own life (whore! Witch! Shrew! Bitch! Nag! ... ) and you will see the utter futil- ity of trying to earn love by disguising that which is real about you because of course it is the contrary, that which is re- al about you can’t help but be loved because it is love. And then you will embrace every single one of your parts that has been broken or in- justly violently broken into, mend EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR WOUNDS absolutely unhid- den and stripped bare and exposed to the healing flux of love yes but also to the sun, the wind, the nature, the breeze, there is a cure for everything it is just about matching the cure to the sickness, finding cure for every single one of your wounds, and then you will be ready to not only love yourself but love others from a real place, and live a good, real, full and truthful hu- man life. So thank you for abandoning me Lucian Freud because you opened door to things you don’t even understand, and I didn’t understand them either and would have never gone look- ing for them had you not, in your idiocy it must be said but what useful idiocy it is sometimes, thrust me into it, thrust me into this truly rather unpleasant experience. I cut my hair super short: 12 milimeters. I don’t know if it was THE scariest thing I have done but definitely up there, for it reflected my biggest personal fear: fear of ugliness. In a determination to look at this
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 80 ugliness, however, all that I have discov- ered is/was humanity and beauty to the point that I now find prettification ugly and not the contrary. A few days back I went for dinner with a dear friend of mine who I really love and appreciate deeply. I met her while washing dishes in a place she was also working at and she is a yoga instructor and she invited another friend and we talked about Judith Herman – Trauma and Recovery. It was nice. For a long time I was so painfully alienated from life... I couldn‘t even imagine any- thing else though -at the same time- imagi- nation was all there was. Life was so un- bearably horrible, cruel, polluting, dirty etc. it did not even appear a posibility to live a life other than a fantasy. But I have started slowly carrying a speck here a whatever there of my own isolated platonic plane into the consensual reality and vice versa the consensual reality or more like ACTUAL REALITY, actual reality seeps thru consensual reality and they both seep into my platonic plane. Back when I was living in the fantasy I sincerely thought that was all there is. My friend Kristina and I who to a sizeable extent shared platonic planes knew there was something „wrong“ with us and would in fact talk about this often. If you HAD to choose. If you HAD to. Would you choose writing or living? We would ask each other and ourselves. Eventually I said something to the effect that I would choose living, if only I could live well, then I wouldn‘t need writing! (I think she was unconvinced and remained quite steadfast in her prioritization of writing above all cur- rently she’s doing her PhD in literature
ROMY 81 bless her.) But as much as this was a sincere impulse, I imagine akin to an im- pulse that makes grass grow, a very sincere desire to live, it kind of sounded fake to my own ears. An artist is someone who deals in pictures and images... or a writer deals in words, same difference really. The fact of the mat- ter is both of these are (at least for me) dissociative processes and in my opinion this explains the high incidence of suicid- ality in writers (I read somewhere that writers esp. poets have the greatest rates of suicidality of pretty much all profes- sions, ever) and artists, in artists this is a bit lower though not by much and I think I understand why, working with material oth- er than the literal beautiful NOTHING of po- etry already makes one a little bit more grounded. This was my reasoning for pursuing art not JUST writing honestly. As depressive and solitary as painting is, and it is, painters as a class are not exactly the jol- liest bunch temperamentally to be honest, to work materially with a paintbrush, smell turpentine etc. is a RELIEF compared to writing which is much like carving into nothingness. Art is already more practical, more rooted in real world... There is some- thing to SHOW. ((In this way I would relate poetry, incl. Brodsky‘s conception of it as antropological destiny of humanity, to gnos- ticism, which is the scrounge of the Earth, but this is absolutely not to trash on Brod- sky who I really deeply respect and poetry which is a survival mechanism without which I don‘t think I would be alive at any capac- ity whatsoever by now emotionally spiritual- ly sexually mentally OR physically!!)) But the fact of the matter is, these are
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 82 dissociative processes, and dissociative processes if unchecked, univocal, unilateral, result in death. So what is then there to make of art? I don‘t know and don‘t pretend to have an- swer to this age old question but I would say well then that goes to say – let us take care that the process isn‘t unilateral. Once it is ready it needs to be EXPOSED to life, to the elements, and let life then be EX- POSED to the idealism as well. Let us arrive at moments of unity between worlds. Let art not be untruthful in this way of reality de- nial. I don’t usually write when I am happy (and I write soooooooooooo much go figure. Maybe this is something to be rectified) but I am so happy right now and I WILL write because fuck it. It is bittersweet of course but for now life goes on (and maybe this is some- thing that can be almost close to not a happy ending necessarily but a happy be- ginning). My self is getting quite used to being in me (I am getting quite used to be- ing in me) and I am quite happy and calm and tranquil. Turns out I am not a ‚diseased whore‘ as I was fond of saying (to myself) but a real living human being, a real living woman in all her forms, and at least occa- sionally quite close to or fully in the state Marianne Faithful sings about, ‚she walks in beauty‘. For all these years I have been so obsessed with beauty but where I made a mistake (?) that has been mauling me all this time was that I have been trying to project it on my- self like a screen, incorporate it in myself, subsume it or be it - all the world’s beauty only in ME ME ME! And I never noticed as
ROMY 83 I did this but the world grew grey to me be- cause I have attempted to pick all its col- ors, and in doing this I have near annihi- lated my own two eyes. I have now - as though by accident? And yet so obviously - given up on my screen like enterprise and the veil has fallen and beauty is now with- out and within. It is OK to love beauty but I will now never ever have to prettify myself or seek to steal the world‘s beauty and stuff it in me, in my mouth or paint it on my face or on my miserable little painting... I will never seek to imprison beauty again or to inscribe it within the narrow and pitiful outline of vanity and force it to remain there. (Of course this is not to say manifestations of beauty shouldn‘t exist they are absolutely fundamental for keeping this little big world in order including in oneself! I do intend to keep on painting!!) There is beauty in forms, in colors, in movement of the wind on my skull (!), in in- habiting my own gaze... What else shall it befall on and what beauty is to be discov- ered there, what figures? I am, for a human, a fast learner often but I make among other this crucial fateful mis- take of getting sucked into my own fastness (like the death race of ants) which leads me to repeat circles sometimes with insuffi- cient attention, or move in the world thoughtlessly as I rush thru it. I do not ruin things out of malvolence that I know but I do out of rushing and insufficiency of noticing and due to being ‚in my head‘, probably because that is where my frightened spirit was pushed upon being forced to fly or trying to fly from my body... where scary thoughts, kind of what Hanna Arendt called
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 84 totalitarian ways of thinking, started to proliferate but there is nothing wrong with my mind it was just being cornered, fearful, it has been caged and for sure since it is (insofar as mind can be gendered which is of course a very special and subtle proposition which I would like to read as metaphorical not in worldly sense political) fe- male/feminine mind, millenia of patriarchal conditioning certainly did not do service or justice to its soaring. I used to live life ‚as if‘ because I was introjected. The thought pattern will take longer than cutting off the hair to work through of course but inhabiting one’s eyes is possible. I am no longer and truthfully never have been under obligation of being pretty. Beauty Is. One of my favourite writers is Jean Rhys and purpotedly (?) this is what she said as she was dying: If only I could do it again and choose again! (“If I could choose I would rather be happy than write.”) I wasn‘t understanding it for a long time and it was bugging me – what could POSSIBLY be better than writing? I thought sadly – and I‘m not fully sure I do now, but I‘m starting to get it, I think. I view this as a memento. We may have a discussion about whether artistic practice is an imperfect approximation of the process of life (a gen- erative ability that, for the most part, a man in purpoting himself to be a genius and backed up in this conviction by the whole community, stole from woman while she was doing his dishes etc) that however for all its beauty etc. is more or less barren, or whether it is actually something more than this, a life that is not an approxima- tion or an image-of but a real living foun-
ROMY 85 tain, a real living thing of actual healing flux the exposure to which may heal same as its creation does (I would like to think this and to a large extent I do) but no mat- ter which is the answer it is clear that art on its own does not stand because should it stand on its own it quickly becomes a palace of deadness, in other words an execution grounds. So here is to not dying from beauty and here is to living not for it but with it and also in it, and should we need art to survive (and we do) allright but let it not stay there as the Sunday dress too precious to ever be worn but let us get dirty. For me this is a commitment to life. So I say goodbye to you at this juncture, Lucian Freud, and take that which can be made new from a symbol that never exhausts itself, and, though with a heavy heart, leave the glamour of cemetery along with the rest of it to you for there is a work to be done among the living. There is at the end of the day and the night behind the village the place where four wil- lows stand one of which is yours. This is where things meet and we do too. I kiss your eyelids, tired perhaps (we all on this plan- et at this stage are), your hair your nose and your mouth (and your hand) and in this sense and this spirit send, too, my letter there, to the same place where it was con- ceived, as a spring of eternal renewal but now truly made new, no longer a self devour- ing ouroboric nightmare because it has at least begun to comprehend the mystery, opened itself to the mystery, embraced being open to the mystery, embraced openness to the mystery of the world, and of the Other, and the utmost but also innermost necessity
I LOVE YOU LUCIAN FREUD 86 of this Other ((I need the other the other is there and not only do I need the other the other needs me (and I am there!). I am very important because we are very important to each other)) and accepted it with grati- tude that may yet one day endow us with further grace. You know what, Lucian Freud? This is how I grew up. Dear Lucian Freud (to finish this thing off) Give me your huddled shabby images. They will find the refuge here and consolation to their howls, unconditional, immaculate, a little-big spiritual garden my heart will be their home home of lost stolen degenerate looted dissident oriental violent macabre kitchy anguished vain vulgar pornographic heartbreaking heretic images, all of them into a cradle, into an outstretched arm along with these sentences, finally some re- union (welcome welcome) finally a restoration-restitution or something very close to it a fondling not a mauling or if a mauling then non lethal done in love ((car- rying of the skin-wart pearl like a tiger cub in my mouth)) finally a refuge in my bed in my room in my library in the park like in the forest in my open gates, welcome my hor- rible loves welcome home. Give it to me - I want it! I exclaim as a child pressing the image to my chest greedily, fearfully. That which is mine of yours is mine now that which is yours of mine is yours but – in the same unlikely slightly terrified breath – that which is mine of yours is yours to be, and that which is yours of mine is mine.
ROMY 87 Dear Sir/Madam, I am realizing the following: I want to do figurative painting, because I love painting, with a narrative line/narrative outgrowths. It is the case of painting in exile ('apoth- eoses of groundlessness' – FIRST DIASPORIST MANIFESTO - Kitaj). It is, however, also the case of painting (my)self out of exile. Dearest Barthold Sometimes there is time when one has to write to save their life and I think that time is/may be now. Of course you might say that when you are a writer that's always the issue but I'm feeling it more presently. Dear Lucian Freud I guess this letter would be impossible to write if you weren‘t dead Lucian Freud Sincerely Yours Romy (me) March – November 2024 Groningen