5/29 JP

It's been raining heavily for a few days, so I've ended up stuck in a hotel in a part of Stockholm called Gamla stan. I feel fairly certain I already wrote about the meaning of "gamla" before. But in short, this neighborhood paved in stone is the old town center. Whenever I look down from the windowsill and see the narrow alleys and their expanse of rounded cobbles, I feel drawn towards them, but with this rain being what it is, putting even one foot out the door is troublesome to say the least, so I've just been in my room, writing songs and lyrics.

I wanted to talk briefly about Henry Darger. In a single room apartment in Chicago, Illinois, he spent 60 years continuously drawing up stories, all by himself. I wonder if you've heard of him. He had never made things with the intent of showing them to anyone, and so it was that the first time any other person laid eyes on them was after he had been committed to an institution, 6 months before his death. 15,145 draft pages of a novel, and a few hundred accompanying illustrations. It remains the world's single longest long-form novel.¹

Really, we creatives ought to all be our own Henry Dargers. Good reviews and renown, money and power, none of those things is supposed to matter at all. But I wonder how many people there are in this world who can truly just make something only for themselves, without any other desires. I'd been thinking it over for a long time. Darger must have found happiness in the very act of making things. The value, so to speak, of happiness varies from person to person, but if that happiness is not even something that can be measured objectively... If it follows then that one's way of living must itself become its own index... Then if that's the case, everything I've done up until now has been just a perversion².

I have no reasons to do this other than wanting to make things that will sell well and be popular, wanting to write works that are better than others', just wanting to be recognized. I whine and complain about how it's only ever other people being appreciated. Envy and jealousy are the forces driving me to continue creating. I wish I could have been satisfied going on without gaining any particular popularity. I needed to just find some sort of job, then write things in my daily life when I had the time, find happiness even in the depths of pain. My approach to music is all wrong. I finally understand that. That's all it ever was. But, say hypothetically that all of that is true, that the way I've lived up until now doesn't come close enough to the "right way" to even brush by it as it passes,

then, wouldn't that be just too fruitless an end? Isn't that too little reward for us, for having lived like this all this time?

Elma... I wonder what you would think.