Synopsis of The Diary of a Curious Man by Patrick Black:
It is impossible to write a synopsis of this book in terms of plot and themes. This is because it is a diary in form and, although cohesive, it has a myriad of themes. It is written over a period of twenty-six years and is set in six countries principally:
It is a story, though not a novel in the conventional sense of the word. The work is music-like in structure, with motifs reappearing both overtly and subtly. It is a work of philosophy, psychology, literary and art criticism, political and social commentary, and much more.
The book is humourous too, and because all diarists take themselves somewhat seriously, some of the humour is not Patrick Black's intention.
Edited with a Foreword by Leo de Freyne.
The book is approx 79,500 words, 218 pages.
Having read the first part,
The Diary of a Curious Man by Patrick Black, edited with a Foreword by Leo de Freyne, can be purchased via this link:
http://www.lulu.com/content/392939
It can also be purchased from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders.
What follows is the Foreword by Leo de Freyne and Part 1 (Ireland):
FOREWORD
When the painter Patrick Black was killed in a car accident in October 2005 at the age of fifty-three, he was on the verge of receiving the recognition which he felt his art deserved. It is not my intention to comment upon his ability as a painter, nor enter into the details of his life which he himself recounts in his diary, but there is one point on which I feel I should come clean.
During the last year of his life he began to edit the many volumes of his diary into what he hoped would be, as he says in his entry for 18 Nov 2004, "a publishable manuscript". The first title he chose for the manuscript was The Diary of a Curious Man (see 19 May 2005). However, he soon realised that he was faced with a fundamental problem regarding the manner in which he could bring his manuscript to the marketplace. He writes:
16 June 2005. Peace with M this morning. She realises that life must go on. But I’ve decided to change the title of the manuscript, to bring it closer to fiction. Besides, I think you can only publish a diary if the author is alive and famous (and thus the public are already interested) or if the author (famous or not) is dead and has become part of history. I’m going to call it The Diary of Joseph Renks (or some such name) and present it with a foreword by me purporting that Joseph Renks is dead. (Maybe I should sign the foreword with a pseudonym also.)
The Diary of Joseph Renks was rejected by a publisher in July 2005 and by a literary agency in September 2005. At the time of his death, he was revising the manuscript and adding a seventh section. No trace of the foreword he speaks of remains, so it is with a strange sense of destiny I find myself writing this. How he proposed to conclude The Diary of Joseph Renks, we’ll never know. With somewhat chilling irony, he does refer in one entry (19 Oct 1994) to a diary being “a novel that ends with the death of its author”.
When his widow courageously showed me the manuscript, it seemed to me that the diary now conformed to its author’s comments above and that it was no longer necessary to add the layer of disguise which he describes. Thus, I am certain – and his widow agrees – that he would approve of my changing the name Joseph back to Patrick throughout, and of my presenting it to the public under its original title.
My only other alterations have been to occasionally add an italicised parenthesis at the beginning of an entry which clarifies the place to which he is referring, and to correct very rare spelling errors.
Leo de Freyne,
For Muriel
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19 July 1979. We are all hypnotised and hypnotising.
20 July 1981. Now is not now, nor now now.
13 Feb 1982. Silence aspires to speech, speech aspires to poetry, poetry aspires to music, music aspires to silence.
16 Feb 1982. The Universe began or it didn’t, and will expand forever or it won’t, it’ll contract and disappear into a hole, a hole in nothing, or it won’t.
15 March 1982. It takes a long time to write something short.
2 April 1982. To think oneself a failure is as vain as to think oneself a success.
13 May 1983. (
24 May 1983. (
26 May 1983. She, she struggles, she struggles in, she struggles in his, she struggles in his arms. How long may he hold her without breaking the law? Arms, his arms, in his arms, struggles in his arms, she struggles in his arms. Does she want to struggle free? Or does she like the struggle? This may not be a dramatic performance. He tries to kiss, she turns her head away – she pulls back, he clasps her to him, they stand motionless. Through the open window comes the sound of shouting birds. Though he begs, promises anything, she says it’s no good. He tries to cry but begins to smile, crying is so hackneyed. Like her, like everyone, he finds it difficult to feel on cue. Next, the coldness of fear comes over him because she may be serious, is this serious? Will she really leave? And never return? Once again, they endeavour to find out. First, she says she’ll stay to finish her drink. She drinks. He drinks. The sky pinks. Then she says she’ll stay for a last evening. It is a summer’s evening. The park will be open light. They go to the park. She won’t hold his hand. They see the rhododendrons have bloomed. They see the ducklings have grown. They swing on children’s swings. At times they chatter matter-of-factly. One says: look at the colour of those leaves. One says: look at the curled up tail feathers on that duck. He is touched by her stories of when she was young, seventeen, with her first love in this very same park, sitting with her cat while he played football with the boys.
Exhausted, we sleep.
12 June 1983. I hear on the radio that starfish can grow replacement legs if they lose them, and a starfish can grow from a living leg.
15 June 1983. Saw a young white-headed blackbird with an older white-headed blackbird in St Stephen’s Green while on way to collect the dole at the Labour Exchange (someone was shot dead outside the Labour Exchange yesterday).
19 June 1983. M’s asleep abed. Twilight. A candle burns on the table near where I sit. I belch not forcefully. I consider relighting my cigar which rests on an ashtray. I feel fairly good, my mouth feels good. My mouth feels creamy. I may pour more cider into my glass, relight my cigar, but which one first, which one second? I am looking at her and she wakes up and says she dreamt she was on a bus and wanted to have a bath and the driver sank the bus in mud.
“You’re still wearing your tee-shirt,” I say.
She sits up and peels off her tee-shirt.
“Breasts,” I say.
She goes back to sleep. The glass of cider I poured for her is going flat. The candle burns. I’m finishing a cigarette. The cigar awaits. It grows darker. It is on the night side of twilight. I start to sip my cider and then drink it deeply. I sit slouched in my chair, my belly supported by the rest of my body. Starving children eat mice in
21 June 1983. One hand comforts the other.
28 June 1983. Can love itself be remembered or will there be only the knowledge that there was love?
3 July 1983. What’s the worst thing that can happen? You die. What’s the best thing that can happen? You die.
12 July 1983. During the night, M said in her sleep:
“Tell the fairies to bring an ironing-board.”
“What?”
“Tell the fairies to bring an ironing-board.”
I’ve never heard her speak of ‘fairies’ before, asleep or awake. Nor have I spoken of them. We are serious people, not schmaltzy people. The strangest aspect was that her eyes were open while she spoke, then she closed her eyes and continued to be asleep.
12 August 1983. Deer move among shadows between trees among trees between deer among shadows.
10 Sept 1983. H.P. Lovecraft said that the mind’s most merciful attribute is that it cannot correlate all its information.
22 Sept 1983. It’s easy to be honest, very difficult to be truthful. Or is it the other way around?
13 Oct 1983. No one gets the last laugh.
15 Oct 1983. Often the opinion one is most adamant about is the opinion one is closest to changing. I’m not the first to say that.
24 Oct 1983. The waiter brings the orders to the table in the restaurant:
“Snots on Toast?”
“That’s me.”
“Turdburger?”
“Over here.”
“Maggot Omelette?”
“Ah.”
“Tramp’s Puke?”
“Looks great.”
“And the Scabs.”
“Thank you.”
19 Nov 1983. A room full of faceful strangers.
26 Nov 1983. The dark has got the upper hand, the day can’t lift a finger.
1 Dec 1983. The once-black shoe covered in green moss among the fallen oak leaves.
18 Dec 1983. Imaginative people should get a disability allowance.
18 Dec 1983. What every good artist needs is a good businessman.
13 Jan 1984. As the daffodils wither, accordingly my finished watercolours of them improve.
4 Feb 1984. A briskly striding man becomes a running man to catch the sheet of paper sailing on the breeze, circumvents lumpish woman waddling in the same direction, swerves to catch it eludes his outstretched fingers – it smashes to the ground, scurs along the ground, he persists, puts his foot down fails down succeeds, keeps his foot down, there, enjoys his victory before reaching, grasps, has the sheet of paper in his hand, briskly striding back, he nods and laughs while re-circumventing lumpish woman, she nods and laughs, he’s coming towards me, he’s getting bigger, she’s getting smaller, he holds out the sheet of paper, I take it.
“Thank you, thank you very much.” That’s my voice.
“No trouble, a pleasure,” he replies. That’s him circumventing the lumpish woman (makes thrice). They’ll both be soon out of sight.
I hold the sheet of paper in my hand, it’s blank.
11 April 1984. Writers are usually alone (after the event) when they write, therefore they are less inclined to write of joy or enthusiasm, which are more transitory than pain.
23 May 1984. M has had another letter from HW, this time from
1 July 1984. Calary,
1 Sept 1984. I heard the clock stop ticking in the lightless darkness, it was the only sound.
5 Sept 1984. There are two women in red. The first woman in red’s fighting aloud with her man at the end of the room: “Go on, embarrass yourself,” he says. The second woman in red’s talking about Shakespeare. She’s sitting on a stool at the bar, she’s not middle-class, she’s thin, she’s angular, she’s plump in the right places, she’s beautiful, she said: “I love Shakespeare and things like that.” This second woman in red’s talking to an old man. You are a young man behind the old man’s shoulder. You are not with the fighting-aloud woman at the end of the room nor with Her Redness at the bar, you are with another woman (sans red) who’s sitting at a table waiting for you to return with the drink. There are other women in the pub, and men, and a screen showing moving-pictures you can glance at – the hero jumps from the burning ship – while waiting for the pint of stout and the glass of stout to finish being pulled.
13 Sept 1984. Wasp and dragonfly locked together rolling on pavement beside the
30 Sept 1984. Last night, M and I discussed the idea of me moving up to live in Calary fulltime in March, when she goes to
1 Nov 1984. What is the name of that insect legging along the wall? Hair-like legs waving, checking the terrain like a seven-caned blind-man.
28 Nov 1984. A philosopher who hasn’t studied astronomy (and doesn’t continue to do so) is like a doctor practicing medicine without knowledge of anatomy.
29 Nov 1984. Calary. Cattle sheltering under trees beside M’s cottage, a glistening eye in the light from the kitchen-window.
29 Nov 1984. Again my attention fixes on the vegetable marrow, its self-completeness. Length of a small thigh, width of a knee. Yellow ochre stripes across deep green. For stuffing, cooking, eating the day after tomorrow. I sit by the stove, meaning to think, while this odalisque reclines on the red table.
8 Dec 1984. “Good morning good morning I suppose it must be afternoon by now it is it’s after a quarter past one it was a lovely morning wasn’t it it was.”
14 Dec 1984. Artists want to be products?
19 Dec 1984. Dog doing dung on road stops traffic, dog’s posture silhouetted by car head-lights.
3 Jan 1985. Calary. The frost is like snow and the sheep are moonlit and the constellation Leo is standing on its tail. A golden-headed insect is journeying across the table and the cat’s fur is warm as she gently places her head under my chin.
5 Jan 1985. It’s funny being the living, isn’t it?
17 Jan 1985. Speaking of luck, I was passing a trash-can yesterday when I noticed a book sticking out of it – this book was Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence. I was thinking the other day that I didn’t have a copy.
29 Jan 1985. There’s always time for suicide, even half an hour before you die.
3 Feb 1985. On Ravel’s Bolero:
M: “I wouldn’t like it to be any longer.”
Me: “Would you like it to be any shorter?”
M: “No.”
15 March 1985. Today I burnt an old violin.
5 April 1985. Well, she hasn’t left me for a new lover, but for an old lover. My ego remains intact.
6 April 1985. I won’t throw the woodlouse into the stove, its ancient legs wriggling, I’ll throw it out the door, to the moon.
30 May 1985. He would be in a field contemplating sheep. He would be at a window contemplating sheep. Sheep through the rain. Sheep through the mist. Moonlit sheep (sheep almost asleep). Shorn sheep. Dead sheep. Sheep with lambs, sheep without lambs. Ewes with rams, ewes without rams. His was a cottage surrounded by fields, fields full of sheep. He didn’t like to think about his past much. He didn’t like to think about his future much either. Best of all, he liked contemplating sheep. One day his girlfriend returned from
31 May 1985. Nothing could be further from the truth: “The age of the individual has passed.”
9 June 1985. I can play a musical instrument. I can play my hands. I’m very good at applauding. Few people can applaud properly. Each of my claps is sharp and resonates. I seldom play, the opportunity rarely arises.
22 June 1985. Snail sailing on window-pane, watched from below surface.
29 June 1985. I am a black and white cat. My name is Tazzy. I sit on a doorstep, on a mat. If you think about me too hard I’ll go away. My ears swivel, my eyes are greyey. My nose is alive. There is a man sitting beside me. He writes my thoughts down for me. He writes in his way because cats do not use words. Indeed, he does not really believe that it is I who tell him what to write. The night is young.
7 July 1985. Cats catching moths like people at parties taking enticing titbits from small trays proffered by smiling strangers.
11 July 1985. Some amusing things happen between life and death, such as the bullock with forelegs over the fence and hindlegs not over the fence, unable to go one way or the other, but feeling calm and reaching up to eat from a tree like a giraffe.
14 July 1985. If a language is lost, its poetry is lost. Hence the struggles of the peoples of The Earth.
21 July 1985. The Great Nebula can be seen with the unaided eye.
27 July 1985. Maybe I should stop talking about the weather and talk, instead, of Stalin’s
24 August 1985. I rolled over a large rock, discovered a big fat frog and a small fat frog, they sitting there, and now fleeing, squealing, squeaking, like discovered lovers, illicit lovers clutching bedclothes to their breasts, jumping, fleeing in opposite directions…Sorry, sorry, I thought.
19 Sept 1985. Sometimes when it rains the colours of the rainbow are swept across the green or stubbly fields by the wind.
23 Sept 1985. Sheep kicks over sheep’s skull, stumbles, runs. The grass is blue, the cold air opens, last or first drops of rain. My face not wearing any clothes. Westerners have big noses compared with the Chinese.
28 Sept 1985. Night walk through fields on ridge opposite front door. Full moon, honey-pale as in Yeats’s poem. Windless night, feet scrunching the moonlit barley-stubble. Me and my moon-shadow.
29 Sept 1985. The first half of one’s life is spent saying hello (hello star, hello cloud, hello cow), and the second half saying goodbye (goodbye child, goodbye mountain, goodbye star).
17 Oct 1985. The dirty dishes beside the sink. “Who else is here?” I think. Bunch of jammy knives, a tally of hours. And the way those mugs are parked, as if I am being gently ragged by an invisible alter ego.
19 Oct 1985. ‘Obeying’ is a close relative of ‘trusting’. Many Jews trusted – it is said – their escorts on the trains.
19 Oct 1985. ‘All things in moderation’ they say. Does ‘all things’ include moderation?
23 Oct 1985. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard wasn’t written in a country churchyard.
11 Nov 1985. I’ve moved binoculars over the constellation Taurus, so, unless I’m mistaken, I’ve seen Halley’s Comet, though as yet I can’t distinguish which dot, blot, blob or smudge it is. It is said to be 200 million miles distant. Aldebaran and the Pleiades much more interesting. The value of Halley’s Comet is that it spurs one to look more.
23 Nov 1985. Once a picture is framed, it’s finished. If it isn’t sold, that makes no difference, it exists where it is, a finished product. But something written needs to be published for it to be finished, for it to be a product, for it to have a chance to survive.
5 Dec 1985. Is M hinting, in her latest letter from
6 Jan 1986. It’s lovely to put my feet into a basin of hot ouch water auw, it’s a treat to put my feet and sit with the hot water softening hard skin for a while beside the stove, finger-nailing skin off after using the nailbrush and soap, applying the pumice stone, gathering the foot into a towel like a new-born baby, drying carefully not forgetting between the toes and shaking hands with my toes and rubbing in peppermint lotion.
11 Jan 1986. I like to maintain a balance between cynicism and sentimentalism. Do you now, Patrick?
23 Jan 1986. The neighbours’ dog, Honey, whined outside the door. I opened the half-door, it was cold outside, the sky was black-blue. Sirius was twinkling red, blue. Honey had come to say hello. Or now that I think about it, she probably couldn’t get into her own cottage and wanted to come into the warmth. She wagged her tail and was a dog. Her eyes were black, reflecting back the light behind me as I leaned over the half-door. I spoke to Honey and she listened and wagged and waggled. I spoke a long time, knowing I was letting the cold in, but being as polite as she was. And then I said goodnight and I closed the door and I turned around and I told the cat that Honey came to visit us and the cat stopped washing herself and the cat started washing herself.
9 Feb 1986. One is composed of different characters, each of which is trying to conquer the others.
6 March 1986. We can only know our dying. Other people know our death.
18 March 1986. The first row since M’s return from
2 April 1986. Stones are always falling down, they don’t care what happens to them, their hearts are protected by stone. Throw, shift, roll them anywhere – anywhere, they are at home.
23 April 1986. (Co Wicklow.) Bray. We walked along the promenade. Sunshine, glittering sea. In a cove at the base of Bray Head – people could have come along at any minute, canoeists could have passed – she sat on my lap, put me into her and she moved and she rocked…Gasps of pleasure and laughter.
27 April 1986. We both agree that we’ll be too much together in this small cottage, that we both need to be alone a lot. The neighbours are moving from the other cottage beside this one, so maybe I could rent it.
21 May 1986. Perhaps an aphorism: Woman seeks a man who is different from all other men, man seeks a woman who has the qualities of all women.
17 Nov 1986. I now hope to continue this diary. J and L, the neighbours, moved out around mid-September. KR, the landlord, is now renting it to me. For the past two months, I’ve been working hard on the cottage, which is next door to M. So here we are in separate cottages, side by side, and the nearest neighbour half a mile away. I suppose we’re very lucky really.
1 Dec 1986. The worm wriggling out of the burning log.
26 Dec 1986. I let the fire find its way out. A last, glowing finger bids me follow.
12 Jan 1987. In the afternoon, the Social Insurance Officer arrived, as announced by letter. A girl. Went well. Over quickly. The usual questions, the usual lies. Hope there’s no problem about the dole. I’d hidden my new bread-toaster and the fermenting wine. Absurd. She breezed in and out without looking around. A blond, a small yellow car.
12 Jan 1987. Wonder of the gold sun behind a snow-shower.
26 Jan 1987. Another reason the past hurts is because we can now see that the future need not have been feared.
10 Feb 1987. This is my empire of firewood. I am Alexander the Grate.
1 March 1987. Woke in JPM’s, very hungover. Had breakfast then puked it into the lavatory bowl. While on all fours over bowl, waiting to throw up more, I think “Is this what I polished my shoes for? Is this what I washed my hair for?”
2 March 1987. After singing, the skylark drops like a stone. Plummets to the nest. It is then easiest to sight (as it falls).
7 March 1987. Such hypocrisy! It is perfectly normal to pollute the rivers and seas, drive other animals to extinction, etc, but do not interfere with the precious human foetus!
21 April 1987. The sheep graze among sheep-bones.
5 May 1987. As in the evening of a day we look forward to the next day, so, naturally, people look forward to a next life, especially when they become elderly.
10 May 1987. What colour is the yellow, orange, gamboge, golden gorse?
16 May 1987. Save the silence.
9 June 1987. This evening is one of those miserable evenings of childhood, a grey evening like scum on top of a grey day, a thrush repeating absently. A lamb sounds the same as on a sunny evening but I think of death instead of something vague.
8 July 1987. The bus approaching, the sun came out and shone through the broom-pods, I could see the seeds inside like the passengers. A moment gone.
28 July 1987. I fit my life into the glove of another day.
1 August 1987.
16 Sept 1987. That is the planet Jupiter, not a raindrop on the black window.
21 Sept 1987. The undulating road straightens in memory.
25 Oct 1987. You know it’s winter when you point out a daisy to your companion.
31 Oct 1987. I looked through a slit in the shed door and the turkeys came to the door. They filled my eyes with the dancing black dots of their eyes.
3 Nov 1987. You are taking clothes in from the clothes-line, the orange sun beside your hand, your hand hopping along like a bird removing the clothes-pegs. I look again and you are gone and the line is bare and there is no sun.
11 Nov 1987. Supposing a terrorist came and took my love away and people went on shopping and the sports-results were on the radio and when I looked into the policeman’s eye it was merely an eye.
23 Nov 1987. This bowl of cherries will be turned into stalks and stones, so eat them quickly.
23 Nov 1987. The little birds skip, skip in the clear, early air.
23 Nov 1987. Often it’s lunchtime before I become involved in the
29 Nov 1987. M’s shadow passes my cottage, dragging its slave behind it.
30 Dec 1987. M tells me that her mother remarked “Aren’t there terrible things happening in Utopia?” She meant
5 Jan 1988. Colours are ‘beautiful’ because each one supplies what the others lack.
13 Jan 1988. M said the other night that I could describe myself as a non-practicing psychopath.
17 Jan 1988. Passing the house of the piano-teacher I had twenty-five years ago, I look in the window. She is looking out, the piano still in the same place behind her.
26 Jan 1988. Childhood. Football in the waiting-room after the patients have gone, half-time. “Tell your mother I’ll come to see her as soon as she signs The Deed of Separation.”
31 Jan 1988. We were having our lunch of rye bread and interesting cheeses (Danish blue, Ballintubber, Stilton, Swiss Emmanthal, Milleens, Burren Gold, Cream cheese with chives, Dutch Gouda; we’ve finished the Gorgonzola and Campanzola we had last week) when we heard gunshots and dead and dying crows fell out of the sky close to the two cottages. We went out and met the yuppie gunman with cocker spaniel and child. M, upset, asked him not to shoot as it is disturbing and he acquiesced. I walked up to him and stared at him questioningly, but said nothing.
1 Feb 1988. I will not be taken over by conviction or lack of conviction.
1 Feb 1988. Less light, a bird whistles and the sheep round up at the sound.
1 Feb 1988. The recognition of beauty causes release from ego.
1 Feb 1988. People who wear peaked caps are usually stupid people, they point into the future as if there was no past: that is, they have nothing behind them. “And what about people who wear peaked caps back to front?” asks my critical reader. I’ll get back to you on that.
10 Feb 1988. A poem springs from a feeling, but is composed by aesthetic judgement. Many would-be poets have the former but are not capable of the latter and vice versa.
14 Feb 1988. We gathered a huge log from the ridge, a week’s supply of firewood, carried it home in the wet, like poachers with an elephant’s tusk.
21 Feb 1988. I am far away, in a corner, in a very corner, far, far away, in a cottage with an impermanent roof and an inexhaustible supply of woodlice.
2 March 1988. I have no drink. You have drink in your cottage but will give me none. Your black cat, Teazzy, is in my house warming itself by my fire, but you are sitting by a black hearth, too miserable to move, with your coat and scarf on ever since we arrived home and had a row about
15 March 1988. It is raining less and less, less and less and less, less and less and less and less, less and less and less and less and less…
18 March 1988. When you see a hearse, you glance in the back.
19 March 1988. This is a good corner, this is a genuine corner. There are two kinds of corners: corners you go around and corners you are in; this is the latter.
21 March 1988. Marvellous colours, yellow red green stars on a gate, flashing. Surely I’ve seen before the extraordinary colours of raindrops, more marvellous than stars, when the sun shines after a shower, it’s worth waiting for. Even if I can’t paint or write, this is better than painting or writing, sitting here, all those beautiful jewels hanging winking on the gate. Release from ego brings peace.
27 March 1988. The best moment is when the tips of snowdrop-shoots are discovered under the dead leaves.
3 April 1988. The way tears run into one’s ears and go cold.
6 April 1988. The long, cruel evenings have begun, the lonely light is on the increase. I will soon be lighting no more fires.
10 April 1988. M’s head grown into her palm, no line between cheek and palm, the eyes reflecting the fire.
17 April 1988. Imagine Franz Kafka arriving at the office, lifting his hat and impaling it on a wooden protrusion, pushing back his shoulders so as to doff more easily his coat, like an insect its cocoon, and hanging the coat under the hat so that coat and hat recall a hanged man; then turning around and speaking to his colleagues about the weather, or about some frightfully important piece of that day’s business.