Imagining the tiny blob of growing cells; trying not to. I saw Hubert Selby Jnr once, at a big public event. He was asked about self-censorship, given how extreme his novels were. He said, and immediately became a saint of mine: ‘If-it-comes-in-the-brain-it-goes-on-the-page.’ No question, no hesitation. Have I lived up to Hubert? What don’t I normally write? What don’t I put down because I imagine someday it’ll destroy whatever reputation I have? (The idea there will be literary reputations when people are knifing one another for half a mouldy turnip…) (It’s always turnips for dinner in my climate collapse dystopia.) I suppose I don’t write unfaithfulness. Unfaithfulness of mind. When I betray myself, and Leigh, by thinking of other women. And also hate – hatefulness. I try not to record my flashes of disgust at other people. (The annals of my self-disgust are multi-volume.) I don’t know why it is, but my first reaction – person! – is often fear and loathing before I coach myself to peace, love and understanding. Where I was brought up, people didn’t look like the people I see in London. The mathematician Paul Erdös referred to TIF – The Inner Fascist. He recognized that he had one (despite being Jewish), that we all have one. And so, I suppose, I don’t put down – and I still won’t put down – what my Inner Fascist thinks and feels and shouts and screams. It’s not necessary for me to write it because you too, whoever you are, you think it (Dear Literary Executor) when you are impatient, tired, exhausted, angry. And I can’t argue that this isn’t the real me – perhaps the inner of inner is the cave: tribal mistrust. I’d prefer to think that it’s the Outer Fascist, and that when you go beneath the crust, we’re all less crusty. If we were accepted and loved as we should have been, by good enough mothers, surely there’s acceptance and love beneath surprise that someone looks or behaves or smells as they do.
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