I am Here and it is Now

Our plan to hand in our notice and move out has been met with a demand from Colin, Crown Racing’s minion, that we can leave only on the condition that we find someone else to move in. “You signed a contract until June 30th” etc., etc. I've put a few notices up around campus advertising our hell-hole, but if that fails then we’ll simply leave and, if Crown Racing’s boys complain, we’ll get in the Health and Rent Assessment people.

The icing on the cake, which we first noticed the other day, is the steady plip-plip of water dripping through the hallway ceiling on to the carpet. They must know that in the flat’s present state, they’ll have a hell of a job getting 3 other mugs to accept such squalour and deprivation. I can’t understand the apathy and stagnation that’s let us stay there for as long as we have, with scarcely a word of complaint.

Lee and I’s latest scheme is to buy another cine camera, splicer, reel-to-reel tape machine etc, and make films. But like so many of my intentions, this one will probably never reach full fruition. Like a caterpillar with genetic defects, it will emerge as a butterfly without wings, a thing of potential worth disfigured by an inherent disease. Another year will no doubt find me sadly (and with real regret) adding this plan to the growing list of ‘might have beens.’

I’m the singer without a voice.

I’ve been reading a section in From Blake to Byron on the Romantic diarists and ‘men-of-letters’ that makes me reflect on the pedestrian banality of everything I write here . . . ‘I am here and it is Now’; this “must be central to any worthwhile diary, and it is not an effect achieved by accident, but by an unerring choice of the right words and a rigorous exclusion of unessentials.”

I note this down to remind myself of everything this writing isn’t; there’s too much of “I was” and not enough of “I am.” My trouble is one of perspective: I fail to realise the larger whole because of an obsessive concentration on the unnecessary—and, in future years, boring—minutiae of who met whom, where and when, etc. Pepys wrote out rough drafts of his diary entries, but I’ve never done this because I approach writing this diary with a sloppy frame of mind, and as a result this ‘epic’ struggle is neither one thing nor another; it’s too poorly written and overrun with weary, hackneyed expressions to be anything other than a daily record of my daily movements and immaturities of mind, and it’s too formally composed and constrained by the page and an idea to be truly Spontaneous or the kind of experiential notebook I want it to be.

Sometimes I think I have reached a certain spontaneity (last Easter’s “Outsider” kick, my ‘salad days’ of Kerouackian word-flow crap, etc.), but I think I need to sort out in my mind where I aim to go (if anywhere) with this idea of keeping a diary. The first tiny but necessary step will be to opt for writing on unlined paper; this will help ‘loosen up’ the way I write and think too. I do this not to try craft this into some great Art-work (I won’t ever be great in this sense), but simply to advance into the habit of recording sights, sounds, smells, sensations and the merest flickers of thought that mark out one day from the next, perhaps with a view (god knows how) to using these at some future date. Is this too much to expect?

‘I am here and it is Now.’ It’s approaching eleven o’clock on a dry but bleak and cloudy autumn morning. I’ve set out all my books before me and I have to get a second and final essay for Mr. Carwardine over & done with by evening (on Keats’ Hyperion and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound). Lee snoozes quietly on his bed, although he’s supposed to be writing an essay on the Victorians and death. We’ve talked about a trip to Highgate already, but we’ve yet to put pen to paper.

“Who alive can say,
'Thou art no Poet may'st not tell thy dreams?'
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.”