My friend happened to show me this video he had made of Ormus Plutonium today, and I instantly burst into tears.
Why? Is it because Wolfe is like totally cool and I don’t measure up to it? No, I cannot honestly say I have ever felt like that directly.
Is it because I am too hopeless? No.
Is it because I was never good enough in the first place? Yes, but not for the obvious reasons.
Having met him, I can honestly say that none of my self beatings have been justified from his reaction to me at all. He has never been the issue.
Looking at Ormus Plutonium, I see it is crude, I see it is experimental, I see that I chose the colours extremely carefully to send a very complicated message that I am not sure I can verbalise even now. Those three Ormus bags took over a year of thought. They decorated the walls of my room for months whilst I thought about the engineering, and I am pleased that I achieved what I wanted to achieve with them, although I can do much better.
The point of all the Wolfe work was development. I would never have invested that much time in myself if I had not been repairing a lot of damage that I would never have gone anywhere near if it wasn’t for meeting him. How he managed this in a very limited amount of time – I think perhaps an hour and a half in total over nearly a decade, is a mystery, but I guess shit happens.
One of the earlier pieces, Saxophone, took five weeks of enraged lust after meeting Nelson, a musician that played vaguely Islamic saxophone jazz thirteen years earlier. Here it is, on the cover of Best Sex Scandal Ever, which is a fun book about a period of amusement I indulged in at some point in the past (I do not remember exactly when)
I can see that this represents the cool and hot sounds of a saxophone. I can see exactly what I was doing and why, although actually doing it required no thought whatsoever. It just required intense emotional rage. Nelson, coincidentally, was basically a blonde Wolfe visually with an irritating tendency towards anarchy and communes. Very pretty but no interesting content.
So, we know from this that I have some specific superficialities. I am very fond of curly hair, for example. Nelson, however, lost his appeal in the five weeks it took me to make Saxophone. Wolfe has thus far taken nine years for me to get to an emotional starting point.
I appreciate that readers will wonder why somebody who sells nutribullets and healthfood would be such an all-consuming interest, beyond his adorable nose?
The answer is in the philosophy underpinning the work that Wolfe likes to insert as filler. Wolfe’s filler is a lot more interesting than even he is aware of, and it is there that I found the material that I am still wary of working on because it dwarfs any other intellectual work I could be doing. As I have said, the complexities of running a country are light work in comparison. Philosophically, he has brought up a lot of huge issues that I would otherwise have not bothered to dig up, because I would have been too busy raking around in the shallows and probably remaining very cynical about humanity generally.
I am still not good enough for Wolfe, not in a human sense, but because I have not produced the piece of work I have been preparing for. I have another year or two of preparation work to do before I am sufficiently arrogant to return to it, and I have some artwork that I need to do before I approach the serious writing.
As someone with a very serious approach to mental development, it is important that the three dimensional work comes before the two dimensional work, because that is how to get the best out of my brain. I have to have the time to put into it, and I have to have the confidence. This ain’t about shagging.
It doesn’t make it hurt any less, and it doesn’t mean that there is any point in my having relationships when I would be wasting everybody’s time. Whether you are lucky in love or not, the trip is the trip. This one is huge, frightening and needs to be as refined as I can make it, because it is more important than anything else I could do with my life.
That is about as close as I can get to describing it.