Mecca

I worked at my essay most of the day in the Art College Library while Lee built hardboard models of his photographic room.

We came home at eight and at eleven, Pete, L. and I, tooled up with crowbar, screwdriver, torch and bags, caught the bus into town. At dinnertime as we’d wandered near Prince’s Way by the seafront, we’d spotted several boarded up buildings, one that looked like a hotel seeming to offer the greatest possibilities. So while most of Watermouth streamed out of the pubs at closing time we three were clambering over walls and tiptoeing furtively through the shadows.

We gained entry to the Mecca, an empty pub in the downstairs of the building, by squeezing through a window while balancing precariously on spiked railings. Both L. and I ripped our trousers, and it took me much longer than the other two to maneuver myself through the gap. I’m as agile as an elephant, and made a corresponding amount of noise. There was nothing worth removing in the pub, part of which seemed to have been used by skinheads as a glue-sniffing hide-out, so we left. After half-an-hour of hoarse whispering and flitting to and fro on the roof of the pub, we finally figured out a way of getting into the building above, the windows of which overlooked the roof, by managing to force open a toilet window and sliding through.

We found ourselves in the empty offices of the Watermouth Planning Department, every room of which was full of celluloid maps, photographs of road junctions, houses, building sites, pile upon pile of files, and also a couple of scale models of proposed redevelopment schemes. It took us two hours or so to cover the entire building and we finished up in the basement searching for the dark rooms.

Lee was overjoyed when we discovered boxes and rolls of unused photographic paper and also a ciné film developer and film trimmer, all of which he estimated was worth about £300 and will do for his photographic room and also means he won’t have to buy any more paper from college.

It was three o’clock when we finally left, walking casually down the exterior fire escape and catching a taxi.

Bleak time

I felt exhausted when I finally got to bed. I woke up at one. Lee was still whooping and singing over the haul of photographic stuff that he says we can all use whenever we want. Pete has been pressing him to sell it.

In the evening Lee and I planned to go to the wrestling match with Ian; L. went to College at two and didn’t return, and I didn’t set off on my own for fear of missing him on the way, and anyway didn’t know what time it started. He returned at eleven and hadn’t, as I’d angrily suspected, gone to the wrestling without me, but had instead returned to the offices of the Planning Department with Gav Heppell and Alex and found a locked cupboard which we missed last night and which contained (L. estimates) £5000 worth of photographic paper.

The tentative plan, more fantasy at this stage than anything else, is to squat the place. The idea had—briefly, improbably—occurred to me as we explored yesterday, and we reckon we could muster around five or six people from our immediate circle at University (Barry, Pete, Gareth, Stu) and Lee says Gav, Alex (and Mick?), Ian and possibly George are all in on the idea. We were very enthusiastic as we discussed the plan but being a realist, I don’t hold out many concrete expectations, although I hope it does work out!

A group of people are meeting tomorrow in 313 at the Art College and are going down to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau to find out about the legal side of things. The possibilities are almost too good to contemplate. At the very top of the building, near the fire escape, is a walled-in patio from which you can see the sea, very near, and a cluttered panorama of roofs—in fact a view across the whole of Watermouth; the Oculus Bancorp building, squat and brightly lit, dominating landward, the pier stretching out into the sea and the sea sweeping away and away toward the horizon and France. It’s an exciting prospect, living on the top floor in the row of adjacent ‘studios’ which face out onto the beach, leaving the rest of the offices below empty and barricaded.

Pete has gone up to 12 Westdorgan Rd to drop acid with Stu. Barry returned mid-evening after spending the night away; he didn't say where. He's been trying to work, trying to keep the tutors at bay. The other day he received a short terse note telling him that “attendance at University courses is compulsory” and that if he doesn’t start working soon he will be excluded from the Finals and awarded an ‘F’. It hasn’t worried him; he’s a little like me in that he can’t muster up any reaction, good or bad, to the course work, just a general sensation of indifference

The last couple of months have been a bleak time for me.

Wisdom of the ages

A day of tutorials: one was cancelled, the other bluffed through as I hadn’t looked at the reading. Despite this I managed to sound as though I’d worked at least a little. Lindsey asked me if I wanted to go to a SWSO meeting on Ireland but I declined, knowing that to do so would be a gross deception on my part. I doubt I’d have made the slightest effort to go on my own. I met Stu in the library and came home.

Lee said his tutorial went well, and that his tutor declared the spray-paint plaster experiment “phenomenal” (!). Lee was very pleased, and in a boisterous mood all night. I must find another means of expression apart from this turgid litany, which is already three-and-two-thirds years old. Attaching the word ‘diary’ to this endless verbiage makes it seem insignificant, and it pricks me to hear Lee and Pete and Barry say “Oh, he’s writing in his diary,” as though I pass my time with “Today it rained,” “I had chips for dinner,” etc. I harbour greater aspirations, but ‘journal’ sounds too formal, although (regrettably!) it’s perfectly applicable to this thing in its present state. I am very self-conscious here.

I feel horrible sometimes, horrified at the thoughts of slinking through life, storm clouds of doubt, indecision, futile hopeless doubts forever in my head. A face at the window, forever staring out/in at things that are not to be, at other means and other schemes which seem to fit friends and people so much better than my haphazard, heartless struggling.

I don’t intend getting a job after Uni., nor all the badges Mum and Dad would have me earn, a decision that will bring a lot of upset. ‘Responsibility’, ‘Duty’, ‘Obligation’, ‘Maturity’: they’ll heap those words on me, and they’ll sting; my armour isn’t thick enough to prevent that yet, but I’ll recover no doubt. I keep intending to collect suitable aphoristic quotations to throw in their direction: ‘wisdom of the ages’, ‘history on my side,’ etc., etc.

Ready-made

A seven thirty a.m. start, and I spent the whole morning attempting to write my essay on Williams, Duchamp and early Modernist aesthetics. I never really got started and gave up in the afternoon. There’s a huge amount of information to collate and order before I can begin to write, and in the evening I felt myself sliding once more into chaos and a hapless, disorganised frame of mind.

Desperation!

Lee did a bit of work for College, obliquely spraying pieces of plaster he’d cut from the ceiling of the abandoned pub down the road with aerosol paint, so that the indentations and relief features such as cracks, hairs, etc., were highlighted by the fall of the paint. These corresponded fairly exactly to the visual appearance of rubbed photogrammes and made the plaster surface look more three-dimensional. Barry and I criticised them as haphazard and unplanned and Lee leaped to their defence, saying he was just exploring another aspect of his interest in light on surfaces etc. . . .

Duchamp’s ready-mades spelled the death of Art. There’s nothing more to be said, just the eternal reiteration of the death of Art and the death of all Gods. There’s nothing to say apart from ‘There’s nothing to say,’ and all that has been gone over time and again by minds far worthier than mine.

Inexplicable

I was in bed until four p.m. today, and got dressed just in time to see the footie results. Easterby beat Whitstall Park 3-1 away and had to come from behind to do it too.

I’ve been feeling misanthropic of late. I prefer not to go out to the pubs and clubs with the others. I can’t see the point anymore, and the increase in consumption of money, alcohol and drugs wouldn’t see a proportionate increase in my peace of mind. I’m perfectly happy to stay in at night, or if I do venture out, to avoid the public watering holes as much as possible.

Barry has finally found the elusive fuck which he’s been striving for since September, with one of the first year girls he hangs around with. Lee heard him telling Del how “ace” it was, but he’s refused to let us in on the details. Ade congratulated him in typically tedious fashion: “you finally got nobbed. Well done!” blah blah. Off he’s been going nearly every night, stinking of aftershave and destined for the same endless round of pub, club and party, pursuing girls and whatever else it is he’s after. He does even less with his time here than I do and has yet to write an essay in his second year at University.

I never did make that new beginning that I felt was so imperative. I suppose it will take a fairly important event or set of circumstances to dislocate my life’s continuity, because I lack the necessary will power to change independent of external causal events. I must withdraw. I must DO something.

I think Lindsey is a little contemptuous of us here at Jervis Terrace, as though already her increasing involvement with the RCP is giving her that brittle veneer of superiority which all members of that organisation seem to possess. It isn’t very noticeable but I detect it already. All people are judged by virtue of their political commitments, and thus we who mess about and scream and do rash, inexplicable things, are looked at with the merest hint of sneering disregard. Perhaps this mantle of superiority is a necessary part of the RCP psychology?

Pete has received some preliminary forms about his trip to Amerika next year, and he has to write a short essay explaining why he wants to go and why he feels it will be worthwhile.

Today Lee mentioned the long-neglected Grey Triangle film project for the first time in months. He’s abandoned the projected video we were going to make here at 44A. He’s been searching for some message to invest in the scenes and action, instead of vice versa, and so its symbolism lacked an underlying ordering scheme. So he’s now concentrating on the more technical and serious photographic experiments that have preoccupied him since his Foundation course in Easterby. He’s planning a full-sized version of the miniature room he built that had walls of photosensitive paper and cut out windows that allowed the shadows of interior objects to register in negative. He wants to build it with brick walls and have the light come in through a partly ajar door instead of windows.

I can’t make my mind up about my work. Should I stay up all night and work on another essay or should I go to bed and get up early? If I stayed up until seven a.m. I would only have been awake for a normal span of time but (conditioning!), I feel tired already.

Some people want stars in eyes

Today I helped out Lee at the Art College. Fear of expulsion has motivated him the last few days, and he and I went back to the vicarage of Church of the Sacred Heart on Albany Mount, took a bit of cine film and pulled up several floorboards for use in his photogramme-room.

The top floor of the vicarage would be an ideal site for a squat. One of the rooms in particular is the Perfect Room, with low sloping ceilings, recessed windows and an alcove containing a fireplace and shelves, ideal for cooking, plus a small room off to one side that’s just big enough for a bed.

We came out through the front door and had a difficult time getting the floorboards over the wall without being seen. It was risky too as the route back to the Art College leads directly past the police station. Lee needs the planks and door as evidence that he is doing something with his time, and when pressed says he can’t think of many concrete things he’s achieved since he started his course: the video, the flame photographs, a few photogramme experiments early on in the first term and not much else.

Ian, Gav and George (or Crowley, Rev, and The Spectre as we prefer) have done nothing either apart from their musical experimentations and performances (such as “Performance for Two Pianos and Two Tape Recorders”).

Fabric of the everyday

I’m planning an essay on William Carlos Williams and his relationship with the Modernist artists of the early 20th C; I want to compare Duchamp’s ready-mades and Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow” (from Spring and All) etc. . . . I’ve done a little reading today in the library and I think I can produce a decent piece of work, as it’s very interesting—in fact so much so that I could hardly keep my mind focused on the specific problem long enough and so had to come home, intending to utilise this momentum in a much needed attempt to write something here a bit more worthy than the usual pap.

Instead I got enmeshed in the fabric of the everyday—conversations, extraneous thoughts, the fruitless chat and chaff of humdrum living—and I forgot my resolve.

Sometimes I find living in a communal household fairly difficult, and I’m reduced to a state of edgy irritation and needless ranting. Tonight I was as fractious as ever, and it produced exactly nothing. My natural disposition is towards the solitary and self-contained and I think there’s a lot to look forward to in living alone (as Barry, Lee and I all intend doing after June 30th). We’re going to start looking soon.

Lee faces an assessment on March 14th he says he knew nothing about, and he’s a bit alarmed as he feels he’s done nothing really apart from his photogram box, which he’s now going to build into a full-size room, complete with glass-paneled door. He and I removed one from the vicarage up Albany Mount tonight and struggled with it back to the Art College.

Now Ade is here, waiting vainly for Barry to turn up. Plans for the as yet unnamed band still fly back and forth, with drummers to be contacted, portable recording studios to be booked, tapes to be made etc. Five months has produced nothing but plans, plans and more plans. Barry’s out more evenings than not; potential girl friend Tina has stood him up several times and fobs him off with excuses. He’s also been after a Swedish friend of Inga’s he met recently at the Broadway and, scarce able to conceal his jubilant swagger, announced to Lee and Pete and I that he was spending the night at her place. Turned out he, Inga and the girl slept in the same room on separate mattresses, and her Swedish boyfriend turned up the next morning.

No little feel for an image

I got to bed at four p.m. yesterday, arose briefly at midnight and was asleep until early afternoon today.

On campus, I made my apologies to Ian Pugh and he gave me back an essay, which he said was written with “verve, wit, and no little feel for an image.” It’s the comments on form which bother me the most, for the content can be improved simply by putting more effort into research and reading.

Surreptitious

I started my essay on the Federal Writer’s Project of the ‘thirties at midnight and finished at eleven this morning with eight-and-a-half sides written. I gave it to Stu to hand in. I broke off at three in the morning when Lee called round and we got in to the Westdorgan pub—Lee had broken the lock on the toilet window earlier and we got in by sliding up the sash window. It was raining heavily and the sounds of dripping water masked our surreptitious creepings, but the window must’ve been discovered because the toilet door was locked.

As the morning progressed I wilted and the words came without thought, every sentence a great effort. I came back to Jervis Terrace, walked into Watermouth to the bank, and felt completely at a loss. So I wandered through the streets, buttoned up against the rain.

Records to listen to—Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, Ligerty, Varese, Boulez. At Watermouth library all people browsing among the few books available made me wonder about the uselessness of all book learning—perhaps it was my sleepless mood.

True conviction

I tried to stay awake last night, but the night inevitably degenerated into weary time wasting, throwing darts at one another. Lee was a necessary distraction. I ended up going to bed at five.

My fast lasted less than twenty four hours. I had no commitment and I wasn’t possessed enough. The chaos and mess all around affected me mentally and I climbed into bed defeated and miserable. Glimpses of true conviction come weakly, if they come at all.

So today I had no recourse but to miss my tutorial again. Now we are all in trouble: I haven’t been to Ian Pugh’s seminar since 30th January and Barry and Pete are in the same boat as I am. It’s now after dark, and I’m going up to Stu’s to write that essay.

Communist society

Inga and her friend called round, and then Ade gave Lindsey and I a lift onto campus where I helped her put Revolutionary Communist Society posters advertising a talk on the Irish War around campus. I also took out library books for a Conflict and Consensus essay about the Federal Writer’s Project due tomorrow before hitching back.

I’m going to try and stay awake all night and write the essay for the morning.

Fast company

Tonight we were all invited round to Liddy’s for a meal. We got there at about eight, and the food was very good. I ate a huge amount, as tomorrow I’m planning on inaugurating a week-long fast. Liddy was in a drunken, giddy mood after a mere two glasses of cheapo wine: we left her collapsed on the bed and drove back into Watermouth to the Frigate and then Castle Mount Court to see Mo before coming home.

Careening

The chaos of the flat got to me a little, for I was very ratty and short-tempered, and I felt as though I was careening headlong through the day with no control at all.

Ha ha ha

Lee returned from College yesterday teatime and said, in all seriousness, that his tutorial had gone badly, the tutors had “torn into” him and said he was not doing enough work. He made out that his position on the course was in jeopardy, and as Barry and I responded accordingly he suddenly said, “Naw, I’m lying . . . It went really well.”

Ha ha ha. He says he regrets this habit of telling pointless lies.

Lee and I spent the early afternoon speculating about passport fraud to be achieved by sending off for birth certificates of deceased persons, opening bank accounts under these false identities and amassing large and virtually untraceable overdrafts. Our speculation knows no bounds, and after an hour or so discussing the scheme we’d already planned holidays in Tibet . . . It was quite an optimistic day.

I went off to University at three in as good a mood as I’ve been all term. A subtle change in mood transforms how you interpret the world, and I seemed to suddenly find my immediate prospects a cause for optimism, more proof of how we intentionalise our perceptions. If I’m in a good frame of mind I perceive the good things. It’s a change to feel this.

At the University library I took out Gone With The Wind and immediately realised I had no intention whatsoever of reading it. It might be a significant book, but I am past caring. This entire degree course is one long charade, an exercise in self-deception.

In the evening Lee and I had the same thought, simultaneously and yet separately, that we should go and stage some flame photographs down in the crypts on Smith Square. So we screwed a lift out of Ade, went briefly to the Devonshire Arms near Sutton Road, and set out on our task, but the large wooden gates at the entrance to the site were freshly padlocked and topped with spiked railings and barbed wire so we were thwarted.

Autohagiography

Andropov is dead and buried, to be succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko; the Princess of Wales is expecting another baby; Torvill and Dean win gold at Sarajevo.

Life goes on, and the headlines have even less relevance to me here than they do at home. Lee went to College early by his standards, making quite a fuss over filling his flask etc., etc., and Pete was up and gone when I got up. I’ve passed the hours of daylight reading Aleister Crowley’s Autohagiography. I’ve been sleeping a lot lately: twelve hours a day is usual, and by the time I’m dressed and ready for the day the sun is already slipping from the sky and the wind growing chillier.

I’ve been having a lot of vivid dreams just lately, dreams that are impossible to capture accurately in words. One this morning was about my childhood; I was watching myself as a kid of about five or six, and nothing in particular happened, but the mood of the dream was very sad and this carried over to my frame of mind when I woke up.

I’ve found sufficient interest in the poems of William Carlos Williams to opt for him as choice for my American Studies Special Subject. My two hour tutorials are fatuous and weary, and seem of no importance whatsoever and make me believe I’m wasting my time. By Monday I have to have read Gone With The Wind and hand in a second essay for Mr. Pugh: I can’t think of a more worthless or fruitless book to read but, as I keep telling myself, there’s nothing I can do. I am in this until May 1985, another fifteen months at least.

I worry that when that time comes my problems will really start, for I’ll be cut loose and forced to rely on my own resources without even the façade of a degree course to shelter behind. The true nature of my problems will be revealed and I predict a desperate search that leads to bitter confusion and self-deceit. But I have a pessimistic tendency to project rash assumptions about myself far into the future without so much as an effort to prove them wrong. I don’t know what it is I’m after but I know I’m on my way.

Soup

I wandered round Watermouth with Lee.

He bought a 1951 vacuum flask for £1.50 and since then has been transported into ecstasies over said item. He enthusiastically talks about making soup and filling the flask with said soup (it seems more about the flask than the soup). I bought the smallest iron I’ve ever seen, which comes in a box a little over five inches long and attaches into a light fixture. If I make a supreme effort of will I think I can actually end the term £70 in the black, saving £320 over last term.

Tonight Barry’s going to a party in Neville Cliffs, miles along the seafront in the opposite direction from New Lycroft. He’s been invited by Tina, the seventeen-year old secretary he met at the Cellar last Tuesday. She’s invited him to stay the night and he has high hopes; he’s been shy and serious about it all week. He invited Lee and I but we declined. From Barry’s description, her friends seem like a bunch of teenage hippies.

Monday

We called in at Lindsey and Susie’s and went to the Westdorgan.

Mad planet

Last night Lee and I watched a TV programme about the films of Bunuel. From Spain sprang Bunuel, Picasso, Dali . . . Apart from Roland Penrose, England could only muster a half-hearted response to Dada and the Surrealists. English art seems sedate in comparison. Perhaps stability of habits and customs and a lack of wartime turmoil as occurred in Germany and Spain in the '20s and '30s gives English art a complacent air.

I‘ve been reading poetry by Stevens and Williams but my heart hasn’t been in it. Sadly enough I can’t summon up the necessary motivation to concentrate.

In the last two weeks I’ve spent £11. We went down to the pub at ten and had a few games of Mad Planets, the latest video game we’re all very much into. The pub was packed with rockabillies who jived inexpertly between the tables to the sounds of “Rockin’ Bill,” a middle-aged DJ, who left his youth behind in the ‘fifties along with all his records.

Slates and slags

I got back to bed in the early hours of this morning after attending the ‘Can’ party held illegally in an old disused warehouse on Reynolds Crescent, off Astlow Street. It was reputed to be staying open until six in the morning and everyone was there: Lee, Guy, Barry, Del, Lindsey, Susie and John Turney. John was in manic form, thrashing about loudly, much to the amusement of everyone else.

We met up in the Frigate beforehand and took taxis to Reynolds Crescent. Half of young and trendy Watermouth seemed to be there—the flat-top shaved back-and-sides check shirt crew who dominate the club scene, queueing several deep and arriving by the car load. We were allowed in in groups of three or four and had to pay £1.50.

The whole thing was a good idea. The warehouse was large and cavernous, sawdust covered floor, an old Mercedes Benz car parked in one corner. The DJs who sheltered behind a barricade of tires and took speed to stay awake. Large banners hung from the ceiling bearing the letters C and A, and there were the usual lighting and smoke effects. Cans of lager 50p in a side room, other rooms full of silent and dusty machinery being used as toilets.

Everyone had a good time, although Lee and I stood apart watching the seething crowd of funsters and indulging in “petit-bourgeois obscurantism” according to Del. The music was mainly funk and soul from the 50s and 60s. As the revelling reached its collective climax, the sweat of hundreds of bodies condensed on the cold ceiling and started to drip like rain onto the writhing mass below.

I sat on the roof of the Merc and talked with Rowan. She told that she's tried to change since her days as a “fucking slag” (expletive pronounced with leisurely emphasis): she said evil feelings were pent up inside her, so I told her she should “relieve them,” which she promptly did by walking over to former boyfriend Danny and slapping him hard across the face twice.

Del cruised around the crowd sending up the whole thing by warming his hands in near proximity to girls’ arses or drooling conspicuously over their bare shoulders and backs. Poor Inga was totally psyched out by his hip-thrust parody come-ons, looks and clapping. She hadn’t a clue what to do and it was hilarious to watch.

J. Turney chatted up countless girls, Guy got completely pissed and I was just bored. Petit-bourgeois obscurantism won the day.

Dad's sent me a letter that included one from the police about the hitching incident of New Year declaring “it has been decided not to institute proceedings on this occasion” and reminding me of my “obligation to comply with the law.” Dad asked for “ a slight readaption to conformity, at least in the method of your traveling habits!” I felt guilty that I hadn’t told them about this, so I’ve written back to apologise.

“I don’t care much about anything at the moment,” is what I told Rowan, which is an exaggeration, but not untrue.

Do androids dream?

I slept with the fumes of the still-drying paint in my unventilated room and perhaps this contributed to the succession of vivid and coherent dreams I had. I was in bed for 11.30 pm yet still slept twelve hours.

Today has been another of those days that seem a complete waste of time. I live through the hours and minutes like a robot, hardly feeling or experiencing anything. I went onto campus with Barry and Ade and walked to the library, leaving them setting up their equipment for a jam in Taylor Hall. I withdrew books of poetry by Wallace Stevens and W.C. Williams and hitched back to the NatWest bank on Wickbourne Road to try and sort out a new account. “It will be ready in a day or two” I was told, and so I’ll scrounge and go without for another weekend at least.

Lee has bought two wooden candlesticks and he’s placed them at the head of his bed, adding a further sepulchral tone to his already gloomy room. The main light fitting conveniently fell apart this morning. With this accumulation of religious icons and symbolic items it’s hard to avoid the cornier aspects of ‘Troppism’—the building of altars for the worship of nothing more than other peoples’ conceptions of the “mystical” and the “weird.”

White

I spent all day painting my room white. I began at quarter past nine and have just now finished, twelve hours later. Some people may find painting therapeutic, but it's only succeeded in making me feel bored, messy and ill-tempered.

Hexen hour

I went into the Art College with Lee again today. He developed the photos from Monday evening, which were not what I’d expected; hanging around the Art College with him doesn’t do me any good in the long run. As we walked home today I came to feel my helplessness: sitting on a wall waiting for him while he was in a newsagent’s nearby, watching the traffic speed past, growing gloomier by the minute. The answers will always elude me. The effort seems just too much for me to face at moments like this.

Thought may negate life, but life must be lived and the empty conversations endured – We must “settle for half,” because most of us just exist, without purpose. Barry says he wishes he could unquestioningly and naturally link his future with some single, fulfilling idea. “If I was born in the six counties and saw the beatings and repression by the British and Loyalist forces, that would make the Republican struggle my life.”

Our degree courses occupy us as obligations, not as anything greater. Since Easter of last year I’ve been at an impasse which blocks the way ahead. For ten months now I’ve known what’s needed, but I’m as far away from it as at the beginning.

The dilemma with this diary is the following: do I mention the tiny things that make up the substance of my life from day to day? Examples: Guy’s new girlfriend Dawn; our nicknames for Ade; Lee’s constant pranks and tricks . . . or do I instead reserve these pages for other thoughts?

T(here) i(s) n(o) a(lternative)

Today Lindsey, Liddy and the founder members of the embryonic Revolutionary Communist Society (aided by Carl Cotton, Barry, John Turney and Del) showed the RCP’s Irish Freedom Movement video on campus and held a discussion afterwards. Both went very well and sixty or so people attended, most of who signed up for ‘further information.” SWSO apparently feel that their position as the largest left-wing party on campus is being threatened—rightly so—and talk with sneering bravado about the uselessness of showing “Channel 4 videos.”

Barry and Pete came back pissed after celebrating this success at the Cellar, Barry jubilant as he had a girl’s telephone number, a seventeen-year old blonde secretary called Tina. They were both noisy and this made me feel morose: if I contemplate having a drink I feel guilty, as though I’m transgressing sacred vows blah blah and I feel as if my self-restraint and self-denial is being pursued to no end.

This has become a vacuous stance and I’m hopelessly confused at times. I know that the answer lies within my own mind and if I could isolate the “creating, willing, valuing I that is the measure and the value of all things,” then all things past, present and future would be resolved. “The actor is free to improvise his own part.”

If I fail I’ll disappoint no one but myself.

Boats against the current

I stayed up all night reading The Great Gatsby.

The day began well enough: Lee and I took the bus into Attlee Square and walked along the seafront to Blenheim Place. The sea was wind-whipped and ferocious, the weak sun casting a sheen of dull unpolished metal on the brown waves, which raced shore wards and expended themselves on the beach in much thunder and mud coloured foam. The entire promenade was shrouded in a mist of wind driven spray.

Ian was out, so we waited unsuccessfully in the gloomy hallway for his return. We walked back to the Art College and hung about doing nothing. I missed my morning tutorial but decided to attend Colin Pasmore’s afternoon session. I had to wait half-an-hour in the bitter rain for a bus. The usual feelings of frustration, sensing the uselessness and limits of what I do.

In the evening Del dropped round, and after enduring his relentless piss-takes we helped Lee with his flame-photographs. I held the camera, Barry held the matches and Del switched the lights on and off. We took a dozen or so pictures of Lee, hand held up, palm forwards, hand cloaked in blue and yellow flame or with burning brass cross or flaming hat. I set my cheek alight. I felt very weary and negative so I came to bed. Lee has many plans for a video and a live ‘light’ performance.

Not in ten thousand years

Parties are a waste of time, and last night’s shambles re-emphasised that.

Today has been unproductive and mindless enough. I took the bus into University at teatime to read up about American poet Muriel Rukeyser, but I’ll miss tomorrow’s tutorial anyway. Ian left a message on Lee’s desk saying he’d found a big old derelict mansion, so I will go and investigate that with ‘Crowley’ and co. instead.

I read poetry in the library and missed Yorkshire. Today, Lee said that he thinks I’ll end up settling back in Easterby after University. I love that part of the world in a way I can’t muster over anything else.

I feel that the only thing holding me at University is Mum and Dad’s innocent crushable 1930s-bred faith in me as their son. They work and strive and want me to go to college and better myself and get a job and have money and a wife and all the trappings of success and ‘contentment.’ But I want none of it . . . I used to have a burning conviction and passion to awaken to the world and all of life but it’s been quenched since ’81, ’82, when a drunken trip to London was a Great Adventure, worthy of page after page of fervently scribbled prose effort. Events have marched over me since and I’ve lost that feeling. Is it ‘part of growing up,’ gone forever?

The other day I told Andrew in a letter that I wished I’d gone to Art College instead of here and felt guilty as I penned the offending sentiment. I’ve even toyed with the idea of going to see my Personal Tutor, but what’d be the point? I’ve got to go through with the remaining four-and-a-half-terms of my course, and anyway, I’m not overtly unhappy.

Dice Man

We went to a dull party tonight at Penny and Shawn’s, on Jubilee Street. Most of the people there were in togas, a wacky lot, getting drunk and stoned. I drank a little wine and felt quite light headed but spent the rest of the evening shunning the talk. Barry rushed to and fro engaging people in inane and insincere conversation, so much so that Lee and I nicknamed him Dice Man on account of his many faces.

I talked briefly with Shelley: I’m not the same person of Wollstonecraft Hall, a lifetime ago. It seems a million years. So I held back and felt reserved and uncommunicative. It’s like we have nothing in common anymore.

I walked home and it’s four a.m. and I’m going to bed!

Disjointed

I haven’t been out or done anything in the last few days except work and sleep and fool about with Lee and Barry. I wrote another essay today, and so am tolerably pleased with myself. Tonight’s effort was written at the library during the afternoon and copied up this evening when everyone else had gone to the Frigate. Even Lee went along. I really haven’t felt the urge to go out. The will isn’t there and I can’t see any reason to force into being what doesn’t exist in the first place. The social pleasures will call me back; I won’t be reclusive for ever.

Breathing space is what I need, although disinterest seems my lot. I’ve spent £1.40 since Sunday, and today I got a cheque from Mum and Dad. Dad included a copy of The Spinners Review in which was printed Robert’s article "Why I bother with Easterby Athletic."

I’ve been sleeping ten and eleven hours a night. I go to bed at eleven-thirty and wake at one. I go to bed at three and still wake at one.

This is very disjointed as ideas spring into my mind haphazardly. I’ve written to Grant and invited him down whenever he cares to come. I look forward to the idea of him here.

This has been a depressing effort.

Bread and jam

This evening we had a brief scare when someone noticed a police car with lights on parked across the road outside Pouncey's. The Great Weekend Heist had been discovered, and Lee said that he'd seen the Indian owner speaking with a policeman. We sweated it out for a while, but eventually police car and policemen were gone, leaving us safe and undiscovered.

I’ve hardly touched my food since I got it, eating only bread and jam, nuts and chocolate because I’ve rarely felt hungry.

Cult of prosperity

I typed up my essay, “The Cult of Prosperity in 1920s America” today, finishing at ten-thirty this evening.

Tonight, as Lee and I slaved at the sink in the now-always filthy kitchen we had an idea for a video/film project. We’d been experimenting with lighter fuel, dowsing unlikely objects with it, igniting it and enjoying the novelty of seeing vigorous flames on a pork pie hat of Barry’s, on mirrors, in the toilet bowl, and even on the foam in the sink. Lee got very very enthusiastic and claimed the idea had taken hold of him in a way nothing had done since the photogram days of May last year.

The idea is to create an air of decay and neglect through long lingering static camera shots, as though of hot summer days in smothered rooms (like the Jacques Tati Hulot films), and into this brooding setting flames will rise serene from the sink of an empty kitchen cluttered with pans and cans of food, caught by the camera as part of the incidental scenery.

This is in almost-conscious reaction against the urban excesses of Ian and co whose imagery pursues well worn channels and stimulates nothing more than fidgets and ill-concealed glazed looks. There’s no conception of the film ‘meaning’ anything, no silent narrative of great philosophic import . . . Love leads to nothing but love, fun to nothing beyond fun: “Love the earth, for there is nothing beyond.”