Candor, or cited

"The End," Oct. 9, 1991, p. 294

Prayer: May we be relieved of knowing (too much or too little) about the sins of others?

If I don't get back to life immediately I'll die. My throat is aching, just like the woman in the dream. They're killing me. Maybe a man's throat somewhere is aching. Our thwarted destinies. Romance is a romance. We repel one another. Union is brief, inconsistent. Peace is highly desirable. Bear your knowledge. If you can bear your knowledge, you are a plant. Men's greater physicality protects him from other men and from women. He remembers being overpowered and abandoned by a woman. His woman, his mother, left him. He's hurt. He must get over it. He mistreats women, who are peaceful by nature; he tempts her, too. What is sinister in us must be handled, melted, dwelt in, balanced. As I have always done, faithfully. How else could I tell the story I have told? I was supposed to be not only a suicide but a lesbian, to bear my knowledge by not knowing that women, terrible, destroy. Women do destroy. Freud was (right about everything except one thing) wrong. Are we locked in this coupling? Are we amenable? I need a vegetarian man, a thinker, a logician. Not what I'd had in mind the first time. I'd wanted the other kind, (a real) one to subdue me. I still do. He can know I won't use my power to blast him. He will be respectful, not fearful, because he has gone to the core of his knowledge and seen what men are and has re-formed. This re-breaking of myself, this giving myself (social) cancer (candor) in search of the truth, like Marie Curie, in sacred territory. Handle with care.

(repeated): from the Christopher Isherwood Diaries (July, 1940):

Prayer for writers: 'Oh source of my inspiration, teach me to extend toward all living that fascinated, unsentimental, loving and all-pardoning interest which I feel for the characters I create. May I become identified with all humanity, as I identify myself with these imaginary persons. May my life become my art and my art my life.'