Diary - Chuck Palahniuk

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

Then it was Sedona, Arizona. Aspen, Colorado. Key West, Florida. Lahaina, Maui. All of them crowded with tourists and the natives left
waiting tables. Now it’s Waytansea Island, the perfect escape. For everyone except the people already living there.

According to Plato, we don’t learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know. Our misery. This suppression of our rational mind is the source of inspiration. The muse. Our guardian angel. Suffering takes us out of our rational self-control and lets the divine channel through us.

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness.

Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist.

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.

Art, inspiration, love, they’re all so easy to dissect. To explain away.

We’re betrayed by everything we do. Our art. Our children. But we were here. We are still here.

There is nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics.

Every person has the right to live where they can afford. We’re entitled to pursue happiness wherever we can drive to, fly to, sail to, to hunt it down. Too many people rushing to one place, sure, they ruin it—but that’s the system of checks and balances, the way the market adjusts itself.
This way, wrecking a place is the only way to save it. You have to make it look horrible to the outside world.

ACCORDING TO PLATO, we live chained inside a dark cave. We’re chained so all we can see is the back wall of the cave. All we can see are the shadows that move there. They could be the shadows of something moving outside the cave.
They could be the shadows of people chained next to us.

The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect. Results. Marketable product. We want dedication and discipline to equal recognition and reward. We get on our art school treadmill, our graduate program for a master’s in fine arts, and practice, practice, practice. With all our excellent skills, we have nothing special to document. According to Peter, nothing pisses us off more than when some strung-out drug addict, a lazy bum, or a slobbering pervert creates a masterpiece. As if by accident.

We were here. We are here. We will always be here.

According to split-brain physiology, your brain is divided like a walnut into two halves.”The left half of your brain deals with logic, language, calculation, and reason, he says. This is the half people perceive as their personal identity. This is the conscious, rational, everyday basis of our reality. The right side of your brain, the doctor tells her, is the center of your intuition, emotion, insight, and pattern recognition skills. Your subconscious. “Your left brain is a scientist,” the doctor says. “Your right brain is an artist.”

Angel Delaporte says our natural instinct is to hide. As a species, we claim ground and defend it. Maybe we migrate, to follow the weather or some animal, but we know it takes land to live, and our instinct is to stake our claim.

From famous artists to building contractors, we all want to leave our signature. Our lasting effect. Your life after death.