Cul-de-sac

At dinnertime I made one of my infrequent visits to Grant’s in Lodgehill.

Dad dropped me on Easterby Road and I walked up to Grant’s house. The pavements were covered in hailstones.

Thankfully, Grant was in good spirits and fairly cheerful. After listening to music, we went out for a walk and made our way to Woodhead Park. We were caught in a cloudburst of hail and sleet, so we dashed for cover in Hainsworth Hall. The swirling snow blanked everything out and Grant was genuinely anxious about being in the open when thunder crackled overhead. He ran ahead of me in the storm.

Hainsworth Hall seemed a haven of peace, quiet and musty warmth in the midst of that white gale lashing outside the windows. We drifted from gallery to gallery in an almost disinterested fashion. I enjoyed the timeless tranquility of those silent, echoing, wooden halls, as if the outside world wasn’t really there, just a picture behind the windows. We sat for an hour or two downstairs in the cafeteria drinking the acrid tea and coffee and talking before wandering back to his house.

In the evening we went to the Bridge Inn for a drink and walked back to my house to listen to the new Fall session on John Peel. I remembered three of the four tracks from the concert in Gloucester. By nightfall about a quarter of an inch of snow had settled & it covered the roads and gardens in a pure, unbroken white blanket.

Grant too seems to feel he needs to make some change for the new year, some kind of decisive act. (Perhaps these resolutions are made annually by most people and it’s a sign of our failure to exert any self-control over our lives that we never keep to them?). He keeps talking about having his ears pierced, as though this trivial action will symbolically reaffirm his resolution, just as I toy with the idea of shaving my head to strengthen my determination to change.

In both our lives, there’s a need to seize control. I for one feel as though I’m drifting helplessly through life like a rudderless ship, and that one day I’ll open my eyes and I’ll be thirty, and the years will have slipped by and I’ll be as far from real understanding as I ever was.

I’ve suddenly noticed how I don’t have any conception of what the immediate future will bring, whereas before I went to University I felt that just going there would somehow be a catalyst to trigger happiness. This I felt on some level other than that of simple speculation, imagination, a less than concrete sense of the Possible . . .

Those spring months of 1982 were quite happy and certain ones for me. I knew where I was going and things were good. I felt like I was getting glimpses of another plane, a world separate from and yet sensed through and linked with the ordinary one. Kerouac’s novels pointed to this, and in that respect I defend him strenuously. His writing inspired me, fired me, gave me a breath of the tragic nature of the world. We’re all imprisoned within bodies that are subject to disease, decay and ultimate death, and while we can explore immortality with our minds, we know we’ll be dead within a certain number of years.

Kerouac captured this forlorn sense of melancholy for me, although I see now with the ‘wisdom’ and premature cynicism of my age that the man was a failure, was trapped in the emotional cul-de-sac of what I suppose Colin Wilson would call ‘the old existentialism’. He drank himself to death. But still, he touched a chord in my heart. So I went to University and the reality of that wasn’t what I’d anticipated, and now as we enter 1984, I’m “hanging in the air . . . without help, without fundamental beliefs.”

There’s no dream-vision of what the future should bring.