Therapy

had to stuff a knuckle in my mouth to stop myself laughing aloud. The kid’s remark was completely innocent of sexual meaning, of course. But for me it summed up the whole business. The world is full of desirable women and you’re not allowed to pull their knickers down — unless you’re married to them, and then there’s no fun in it. But sometimes we get lucky and they let us. It’s always the same, under the knickers, of course. The same old hole, I mean. But it’s always different, too, because of the knickers. “You’re not allowed to pull our knickers down.” Says it all. (JAKE drains glass.)
     
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    Friday evening 5th March. To the Wellbeing this afternoon for acupuncture. (Sings, to the opening bars of “Jealousy”: “ Therapy! Nothing but therapy! It’s never-ending, Not to mention what I’m spending ... ”) Actually I feel more positive this evening than I have lately, but I don’t know whether this is because of the acupuncture or because I haven’t had anything to drink. Miss Wu did her stuff with heat today instead of the usual needles. She puts little granules of what looks like incense on my skin at the pressure points, and applies a lighted taper to them, one at a time. They glow red-hot like cinders, and give off wisps of faintly perfumed smoke. I feel like a human joss-stick. The idea is that as the granules burn down, the heat increases and produces an effect like the stimulus of a needle, but she has to whip them off with a pair of tweezers before they actually burn me. I have to tell her precisely when the sensation of heat becomes painful, otherwise the smell of singed flesh mingles with the smell of incense. It’s quite exciting.
    Miss Wu asked me about the family. I was slightly abashed to discover that I had nothing new to report since my last visit. I have a vague memory that Sally spoke to Jane on the phone a few days ago, and relayed some news to me, but I didn’t take it in at the time, and I was too embarrassed to ask Sally later what it was, because she’s still pissed off with me for letting her down over the Websters. I’m afraid I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately. I’ve been reading a lot of Kierkegaard, and a biography of him by Walter Lowrie. Writing this journal takes up a lot of time, too. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep it going at this rate — I’m amazed by how much printout I’ve got already. Kierkegaard’s journals in their complete, unedited form run to 10,000 pages apparently. I picked up a paperback selection of them in Charing Cross Road. There’s a passage early on about him going to see his doctor which made me sit up. Kierkegaard asked the doctor if he thought his melancholy could be overcome by willpower. The doctor said he doubted it, and that it might be dangerous even to try. Kierkegaard resigned himself to living with his depression:
     
From that instant my choice was made. That grievous malformation with its attendant sufferings (which undoubtedly would have caused most others to commit suicide, if they had enough spirit left to grasp the utter misery of that torture) is what I have regarded as the thorn in the flesh, my limitation, my cross...
     
    The thorn in the flesh! How about that?
     
    Søren Kierkegaard. Just the name on the tide page has a peculiar, arresting effect. It’s so strange, so extravagantly foreign-looking to an English eye — almost extra-terrestrial. That weird o with the slash through it, like the zero sign on a computer screen — it might belong to some synthetic language invented by a sci-fi writer. And the double aa in the surname is almost as exotic. There are no native English words with two consecutive a’s, I think, and not many loan-words either. I’ve always been irritated by the nerds who put small ads in newspapers beginning with a meaningless row of A’s , just to be sure of getting pole position in the column, like: “AAAA Escort for sale, D Reg., 50,000 miles, £3000 o.n.o.” It’s cheating. There ought to be a rule against it, then people would have to use a bit of ingenuity. I just looked at the first page in the dictionary: aa, aardvark, Aarhus,... Aa is a Hawaiian word for a certain kind of volcanic rock, and an aardvark is a nocturnal mammal that eats termites — the name comes from obsolete Afrikaans, it says. “Aardvark-grey Escort for sale” would make an eye-catching ad. (I presume by night all aardvarks are grey.)
    Once