Doomed

The thought of the term ahead still fills me with weariness, and this is because I now realise wrong choices and past mistakes, and know that it won’t go away for as long as I’m at the University.

I missed my first tutorial of the term today (Conflict and Community with Ian Pugh), but feel remorse only when I think of Mum and Dad’s naïve trust that I’m pursuing my “studies” with a vigour and reward I know I can never muster. I also feel sad that I’m squandering their money—£400 already this year. Doomed.

I promised to go to Calverdale for a week with them in May. At times of mental crisis and EMPTINESS like this I discover a kind of solace in the pleasures of the past.

I went to see Marc Riley and The Creepers with Stu at the Lancaster. They were supported by UT—talentless thrash—and they played aggressive hard Fall-type songs. Riley himself sang and reminded me a great deal of Barry’s friend Patrick—he has the same youthful face and dry Manchester accent.

Purge

We had a real purge on the vicarage and swept and cleaned it.

We fixed up a light in the basement toilet by running an extension cable from the ground floor landing down the basement stairs, and Lee and I cleaned out one of the toilets which someone—Susie we think—had shat in, with the result that shit and paper hung from the broken pipe in the wall. The smell was awful and I was nearly sick.

I’ve also rigged my room up with electricity, using the yards of cable we stole from The Regency pub near the Planning Department offices.

Various times

Lee and I recently found an empty shop up Ledwell Street, so in the evening he, Gav and I went and took a look.

We had a bad time getting in, crashing through dry twigs and rusty barbed wire and stumbling over walls, but eventually we discovered an open back door. Upstairs, the shop’s living quarters remained in some sort of early ‘70s time warp, each room a dingy nightmare of strewn boxes, suitcases, cheap fur coats and panties, a tawdry pink fan slipped behind a mirror, piles of things flung about in the nasty, dark and seedy little rooms . . ..

I was genuinely afraid of uncovering something decomposed as we poked our way around. We picked up a few pieces of stuff; I got two nice leather cases and a leather dustman’s jerkin. Lee wants to redo the ‘corpse photos’ in the shop with Alex as the corpse, which should be excellent. 


Covert

“A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”

This phrase (from Invisible Man) captures my soul searching of the last year and my realisation that ‘hibernation’ is necessary in order to learn. The overt action is, at this stage, something loosely defined and not really fully grasped.



Blurred and obscured

Alex left his workbook out in the kitchen—MISSION OF DEAD SOULS stenciled on the cover—which is full of scribbles in coloured chalk and crayon and ink sketches of skulls. Words randomly litter the pages—snatches of Fall lyrics, McGonagelesque parodies, ‘kill,’ ‘torture,’ ‘maim,’ and ‘death’ predominating. Lee altered the cover title to read MISSION OF DEAD IDEAS.

Gav keeps his work to himself. He types a lot—he has an alliterative fixation with words beginning with the letter ‘e’—and has been painting in water colours. Lee is still working on his pinhole ciné film and surface texture investigations.

He says that many of the Combined Arts students have arrived at similar ideas simultaneously and independently, their work embracing common themes; he rues the lack of a critical attitude at the Art College which he says differs from his experience at Easterby College. Anything goes here, with the result that any real standards of merit or worth are blurred and obscured.

Feign to look

Each day follows the same burnished, burning pattern of cloudless skies, oppressively flat sea and dusty city streets.

I hate it, and so skulk in the shade or hurry through the glare complaining of the heat while the young and old alike feign to look light and cool. 


Camera obscura

Another day dominated by the weather, which is of the unremittingly sunny and hot variety.

Lee and I have transformed my top floor anteroom into a camera obscura. We boarded up the window so the room is utterly black except for one small pinhole, which reveals the church and parked cars opposite spread out in distorted perspective across the room.

It’s eerie to watch larger-than-life people and cars as they walk and drive up the walls and over the ceiling.

Summery

The Bank Holiday, and Watermouth was packed to choking point with sweating, summery crowds. The old ladies dust off their summery hats of decades vintage and wear them with a weary nonchalance as they totter in the shade.

I wrote yesterday’s entry in a turmoil of frustration and sad, negative emotion, some of which still stands.

Miserable half-truths

I arrived back in Watermouth at five thirty p.m. I had the usual and by now expected pangs as my security was momentarily shattered again and I shifted into another mold, but my spirits rose as the coach sailed south.

Yet as soon as I staggered in, breathless and sweating, my heart sank and my good mood with it. The house was a pigsty: in the corner, half-filled bottles of urine, sour milk, dirty cups and stale ash trays, Barry lounging apathetically amid the chaos, and not even a working toilet, nor a tap. Alex, Gav and Barry seem content to let the situation stand and drugs rule: scag, speed and hash are the dominant influences.

I felt utterly forlorn and could only think longingly of the ORDER at home and wished I’d stayed a few more days. This was the catalyst for other thoughts and I felt weary, at a loss, and on the brink of desperation, as though I could just throw in the towel. The wearying inevitability of doubt, self-condemnation, the great gnawing tide of dissatisfaction and miserable half-truths and misunderstandings will soon sweep me up, suffocating my mind and making me sad, desperately sad . . .

I’ve written this, and haven’t written it well, but this had to be said and I’ve at least done that.

Self-remembering

Eight a.m. . . . still drowsy and shocked from the suddenness of waking up. Robert rocks and intones mantras in the back garden beneath the willow tree while I sit inside, blasted and heavy-eyed, feeling thoroughly stuck in the here and now.

“Don’t go out there, Robert’s doing his meditations,” says Dad, with a simple acceptance of what R. is doing—Robert’s just been rudely interrupted by the cheerful trivialities of the milk woman—and right now I too feel a need for some sort of ritualistic affirmation of a vow to myself. I tend to have a gut distrust of ritual ‘magic,’ but it’s necessary, a private proces . . .. This is a revival of the old ‘shaved head’ ideal, something that has to be done if I’m to ‘save’ myself.

Maybe the ‘power’ of Jesus is a symbolic form of self-salvation, a “reaffirmation to the self,” just as the demons and devils of the mediaeval mind were symbols—though real enough—of the evils of ‘spiritual neglect’? I need heuristic mental discipline—self analysis, self awareness, self documentation—like Gurdjieff’s ‘self-remembering.’ The arrow points in as well as out. I need to realise intentionality.

I’ve been intending to keep a record of dreams to see if any pattern emerges, and I also want to cull through the pages of this journal from the very beginning to discover everyday ‘peak experiences’ and to see if their frequency has increased. A direct mental influence of mind over an intentionality of perception is probably only possible by grasping the process/problem with every faculty of the mind and by living every aspect. I am so self-forgetful. It takes seeing Robert to make me remember. SELF-REMEMBER ←----→

This faltering thread of words is the only testament to my past life. “Are you still keeping that up? What are you going to do with it?” asks Robert, seeing me writing.

What am I going to do with it??

Positive hindrance

Robert and Carol showed up in the afternoon and went for a walk with Andrew before tea. The rest of the day has passed favourably enough, playing chess with Robert. I'm thinking of joining Watermouth chess club next term.

I don't like using the University terms as reference points in time because it makes my degree course an important regulating factor in my life which I don't want it to be. My work there's as important to me as taking a shit – occasionally pleasurable, but more often than not just a necessary function.

No, this is wrong; it's a positive hindrance.

Blood and guts

I went into Easterby this morning and bought Kathy Acker’s Blood & Guts in High School and my coach ticket back to Watermouth.

Andrew arrived in the evening and brought a few book covers he has designed with him to show us. He’s pleased he's getting a raise in June.

Two of a kind

Lee and I watched the second and concluding part of a documentary on mass-killer Kenneth Bianchi. After arrest, he invented the symptoms of multiple personality disorder, and under hypnosis faked the emergence of an evil alter ego, ‘Steve Walker.’ He deceived numerous psychiatrists, which alone was incredible enough—but the extent to which he must have planned the deception is unbelievable. How far can you go in calling him ‘evil’? He was eventually certified as ‘knowing the difference between right and wrong’ and therefore sane and gave evidence to convict his cousin, Angelo Bono, of some of the murders.

The idea of these two psychos cruising around the night time streets in a van so spooked Lee that he decided not to risk the long walk home.

Yesterday morning a WPC was gunned down in London when someone fired a machine gun from a window at the Libyan Embassy at a group of dissident Libyan demonstrators. Eleven demonstrators were wounded and a siege is now in full swing, the Embassy surrounded by armed policemen. There seems to be little chance of a resolution in the near future.

Grey

Lüscher colour test: Grey, the colour of detachment, non-involvement, and of standing outside and above, of transcending everyday life and the concerns of humanity. A detached observer, the colour of philosophers, priests, magicians. Grey is the colour of Hermes, the “god of Magic.”

W.B. Yeats: “Whatever the great poets had affirmed in their finest moments was the nearest we could come to an authoritative religion.”

Lee arrived at two-thirty this afternoon. We’ve played chess a lot of the time; he’s beat me every game save one.

I am terrible.

Insubstantial life

I really can’t muster the energy to write with any form of inspiration at the moment. Insubstantial life. Time slips by. I should be getting back to Watermouth soon, but I will stay another few days yet.

Dad installed a pond today. He lost seven of the fifteen white axolotls; they were left in direct sunlight. Mum has not let the matter of my appearance rest and she grows quite desperate at times, adopting a whining, imploring tone of despair, as though she’s in great distress. She accuses me of going round “looking like a tramp” and when I bumped into her unexpectedly in town the other day, she wouldn’t let me wander round with her, even though she refused with a laughy face. She says it upsets her to think that I’ve been brought up to regard “being smart” a prime virtue and now to see me dressing as I do. I reply that what matters is how I am inside.

Mum and Dad are very much into the Zefferelli dramatization of Jesus’ life at the moment, and Christ’s message not to judge by appearances has shut Mum up for a while. She sighs and says, “I suppose you’re right.” It’s such a tiresome, trivial complaint.

Apart from this, and a teatime dispute with Dad about fox hunting, my time at home isn’t unpleasant. Dad’s stance on fox hunting is predictable enough, but I’m irritated by the glaring inconsistency and hypocrisy of his position. He professes to love nature and yet where fox hunting is concerned he has an infuriating blind spot. “That lot would have us in a grey world,” he mutters about animal-rights protestors. I can’t understand how he reconciles these two parts of his character, and he in turn can’t understand why I don’t thrill to the sound of the hunting horn and the sight of a hunt in full cry.

At these moments I detest political, moral and religious—even grammatical—orthodoxy, a hatred of being forced into the same written conventions time after time which, in my case, redirects my anger away from the actual cause of 'uninspired' prose—the self.

We’re all blind where personal vanities are concerned.

Secret nocturnal initiations

At three p.m. I called at Grant’s. We played records and went to the Print Biennale at Hainsworth Hall. We came across Grant’s friend RJ, who is still living with girl friend Jackie in Lockley. He’s applied to do Politics at UEA. The Print Biennale was very well attended but bored us stiff, save for three prints, “Death Kiss" I & II and "The Poet Searches for her Muse."

We went back to Grant’s briefly and then out for a drink at the Moon Inn in Farnshaw centre. The streets were virtually deserted.

Grant came back home with me and stayed to watch the second part of Channel 4’s Jesus: The Evidence which has raised a storm of protest for its “irreligious bias” and appraisal of the theory that Jesus may not have existed. Tonight’s episode has us laughing at its visuals, which seemed deliberately over the top, and advanced Professor Morton Smith’s “intriguing speculation” that Jesus practiced “secret nocturnal initiations” (hypnotism?) that showed initiates the reality of the Kingdom of God. Professor Smith inferred this from a recently discovered letter from Clement of Alexandria he found in the end-papers of a seventeenth-century book.

Maybe the earliest version of Christianity (practiced by Jesus himself) and the ‘occult’ traditions of the Kabbalah might not be too different in terms of their end result—a mystical state of union with a ‘principle of God’ that confers the feeling that Heaven can be reached on Earth.

This idea is reminiscent of those proposed by Colin Wilson.

Saturday nite tap room

At nine in the morning, I went with Lee and his mum to an antiques flea-market in Royden. I bought an old book on the tactics of chess and a wax seal with the figure of a king holding orb and scepter in relief on one side. Back at Lee’s we played chess (lost twice) and I caught the bus home.

In the evening, I met Lee, Michael Pugh and Jeremy—back from Bristol for the weekend—in Easterby. Our intention was to break into the empty block of buildings near the cenotaph that once held Elmet Baths, but it was far too open. We tried a few other possibilities but the Saturday nite tap room crowd rendered them impractical. We wandered through the drunken hordes looking very suspicious with bags and aimless gait, full of contempt.

We ended up at the Four Pigeons pub.

Both barrels

I met Lee in Vernon Terrace, and we walked up to Cooper’s, an empty pub and disco at the bottom of Croft Road, overlooking Buckley Park and The Croft pub. I’d noticed it was empty on one of my trips to Whincliffe, and we figured out a way in through wooden cellar doors that were unlocked.

We were soon inside and exploring by torch light. All the rooms were empty except for the cellars, and we found an old tool kit in a cobwebby-cupboard. Needless to say we filled our bags, getting screwdrivers, chisels, hammers and an old electric drill.

We carried the stuff back to Lee’s where his Mum was embroiled in a shouting match with people from the community centre next door. She stormed out and gave them both barrels: she’s a fearsome woman when aroused and I freely confess to being frightened of her.

Is there anybody there?

I went to Lee’s and arrived at eleven to find his mother cutting his hair in the back yard. Jonasz Wiechec was there, prattling on excitedly about the Ouija board he’d brought along. Lee appeared thoroughly bored, subdued and gloomy. We went upstairs, Jonas brought out the board and we proceeded to ‘conjure spirits.’ J. says he’s contacted a spirit known as ‘Sebastian’ and another named ‘Sam’, and he believes implicitly in his power to speak with the dead.

When he began with his “Is there anyone there?” routine I could hardly stifle my laughter, and although nothing happened for half an hour, we persisted. Soon the pointer was sliding around the board spelling out “Hecate,” “Hell,” “Six Times Three,” “Setback” and—quite insistently—“Four” over and over again. We also got the beginnings of “Uxbridge,” which J. claims to have had before in connection with Sebastian.

Although I wasn’t physically moving the pointer I was responsible for the numerous diabolical references, although this was more a case of suggestion—I’d think of the word and sure enough said word was spelled out, which was either a case of me putting the words into each of their minds, or my own unconscious pressure exerted through my fingertips. Lee and I later agreed that the ouija board isn’t in any way a bridge into the ‘world beyond’ and is more a testament to the power of suggestion. Jonasz’s blind belief in the messages we ‘received’ convinces me of this, although I did worry Lee at times!

We grew bored of the ‘séance’ and wandered up Lodgehill Road to the antique shop. Jonasz tagged along but the shop was closed, so he left to go home. Lee and I crossed the road into the park and had tea in Hainsworth Hall. The Print Biennale was being staged (again) and we looked round and even thought of ‘liberating’ a piece of art, but couldn’t find any worth the effort.

We met again at six in Vernon Terrace and went to look round Emsley Cemetery which is being restored after years of dereliction. It’s an amazing place. The monuments to Easterby’s nineteenth century ruling class—various overblown examples of Victorian funerary architecture, neo-Egyptian crypts, and morbid sepulchres—stand blackened and defaced amid the weeds.

We interrupted three teenage girls as they chalked something on a tomb and they sniggered at us as we passed. Lee wanted to find and break into crypts and take photographs but we found just two, already opened: one was empty and the other contained brick sarcophagi.

Godstone

Lee phoned at twelve and gave me a garbled account of why he hadn’t turned up, something about “hedging all morning,”and of Michael Pugh visiting in the afternoon. He was going to the library to take out books on the ‘psychic photographs’ of Ted Serios, who claims to be able to use the power of his mind to register images on photographic paper. Wilson mentions him in The Occult and regards his claims with agnosticism.

I began reading the sequel to The Occult.

Robert turned up at two p.m. for the evening match as he wasn’t at school because of NAS/UWT strike action. He’s reading T.H. White’s The Godstone and the Blackymore, about White’s search for the godstone, an early Christian relic which the people of Inishkea Islands in Western Eire dressed up in clothes and worshipped, right up until the 1920s. It was reputed to have magical properties and the ability to influence rainfall etc., but was smashed up and thrown into the sea by a priest. The islands were evacuated in 1927.

Robert insisted on reading various passages from the book out loud to me. He and Carol are planning to go there in the summer.

Easterby Athletic lost to Portleigh at Cardigan Park. They went ahead but typically eased up and let Portleigh get two goals.

Dead skin

Dissatisfaction, restlessness . . . I itch to do something but I don’t know what to do.

Lee rang at teatime from home and he’s calling here tomorrow at eleven. I went to Whincliffe today and at last worked out my way to the Cartbeck Army Surplus shop. I bought a pair of leather Luftwaffe gloves, a German military shirt and a great coat—a German one naturally—all for £19.99.

When I got home Dad had just got in, and in the evening we cleaned out the tank housing the young axolotls and separated them into two groups of equal sizes, twenty five darker (and stronger) specimens, and fifteen of their smaller, paler brethren: forty of the original fifty seven survive. . . .

I want to capture things here but feel stifled by the form. It’s as if I let mimetic responsibilities smother my spirit and push me to stagnation. Why do I feel so low? I sense the drawing to an end of my time at home. I don’t think it’s depression, just claustrophobia.

It’s so frustrating.

I’ve begun to read (in a very half-hearted sort of way) Standish D. Lawlor’s The Cubist Cinema, and I even made a listless and contrived attempt to take notes as I read but gave up disgustedly and tore up what I had written. This is a thoroughly frustrating mood to be in. I don’t know what I’m after, and I can’t help my itchy mind, which jumps like a monkey from tree to tree. Too bad my fruit seems to be rotten when I bite into it! I want to write and write as a cathartic, healing process, but my mind freezes and my hand cramps to a devastating standstill. These mundane words are my only product.

I’m at a point of decision with regards to this journal. I can choose various ways to go in this search for fulfillment (and thence satisfaction) through words. I need to slough off the dead skin of those ‘mimetic responsibilities’ and not adhere to this tedious narrative formula just for the sake of it. I’m going through the motions, and it gets me nowhere.

Perhaps I don’t TRY hard enough at any one thing and let my mind shoot off in all different directions at once, its energies dissipating, my interest spread thinly.

←expansive→

Lee rang, and is hitching back tomorrow: he expects to be in Easterby by five p.m. I will probably return South at the end of the week. I’m looking forward to going back. I must make a start on something.

If I’m to achieve anything it will be through the word (the word here) rather than by any other means . . . but what do I mean by ‘achieve’? Not fame and fortune, but the contentment of knowing real progress and advancement towards a creative goal. I need to dispense with the bookish form that’s two dimensional and far removed from the single passing moment, the Now of Reality. I’m a prisoner of this text and my fear eliminates experiment and rigidifies my form of expression.

I need different things at different times, to make this ←--------expansive--------→ rather than reductive. At the moment I try and squeeze different times into the same ‘thing,’ hence the unwillingness and heavy brain/hand. My fear of transgressing the ‘laws’ of prose logic and narrative ‘readability’ means I string words together into colourless, formal phrases, subject to the ‘and’s, the commas, the tyranny of grammar.

This shouldn’t be a dissertation or essay but a space of release.

Transitions

I finished off reading The Occult. It’s a good book. I should write down some notes as in six months time it’ll be as if I haven’t read it.

I also watched Part II of Zefferelli’s Jesus of Nazareth and, in the evening, Jesus - The Evidence, which raised the interesting possibility—unthinkable to Dad—that Jesus might never even have existed. He could be an invention of Paul of Tarsus, a convenient embodiment of Old Testament myths and propaganda for the new faith.

Today the IRA shot and seriously injured a magistrate as he left church with his family. His 22-year old daughter was killed. There’s a conflict and a paradox to be resolved here, because I have a gut revulsion at such killings but . . . but . . . I support the IRA because I do believe their cause to be a just one—the British Army is an army of occupation and is supported by the prejudiced apparatus of the six county Loyalist state. But, as Grant said last night, the sloppy frame of mind that regards the deaths of innocents as an unfortunate but unavoidable side-effect of war is to be hated. He’s right. Those who supposedly abhor Reagan’s machinations in Central America and Thatcher’s Falklands campaign yet cheer and clap when the IRA explode a bomb and people die are hypocrites.

But would anyone have shed a tear for Heydrich when he was killed? This is an uncomfortable point for me to think about. The anger and bitterness of the magistrate’s family can’t be avoided. Does one innocent death negate justice of a cause? How would I feel?

I’m trying to resolve this point, and there’s no resolution . . . I have sympathy for the Republican cause, but often I feel IRA killings can’t be justified by this or any argument.

This is terribly written. I can’t free my mind from preconceptions. This transitional period has existed for a year now and gives no hint of a way forward or up. . . .

Minions of the state

Robert drove over from Dearnelow and he, Dad and I went to see Athletic play Hatherseats. The kick off was delayed fifteen minutes to allow the crowds to get into the ground. Hatherseats were easily the better team in the first half and outplayed Easterby completely: Ben Tester scored from a deflected long-range shot three minutes before half-time.

The seats in the Three Locks Road side were filled with Hatherseats fans and when Tester scored they erupted into cheers and clapping; as they did, the half-dozen Athletic thugs in front of us snarled with rage and swore and shouted at them, pointing at selected victims with clenched fists, telling them that they were “dead” afterwards. They spent the remainder of the game infiltrating the stand and drawing closer and closer to one unfortunate, their faces black with anger, their eyes blazing with murderous intent.

I felt separate from them.

It seemed certain that Easterby were going to lose, but after halftime they came out and took Hatherseats apart. Four goals in the last twenty minutes silenced the massed ranks of red on the Kop and I was glad.

Grant rang later and said he had just got back that teatime, so I arranged to meet him in the Woodhead Hotel at Lockley. He spent a lot of time telling me about a play he took part in last term at Gloucester in which he played the role of Moors Murderer Ian Brady. It involved a lot of direct interplay between audience and cast, and he said the former were transfixed in their seats, not daring to move. I should think he made a good Ian Brady.

We walked up to the Magpie and I felt oddly weary amd unable to pursue lines of conversation with any thoroughness. I couldn’t reach across the gulf between us with my words. I told him everything was the same since this time last year and I didn’t know what path to pursue, and he admits to being in a similar position to me. We talked about political violence as an escape from the numb passivity of life, the IRA . . . He said they are after power: “In a role reversal they’d act just like minions of the State. They all desire Power.”

I sensed the gulf between us once more.

We left the pub, bought a curry, then I caught the bus home, my head full of all the old things.

What-must-I-do? . . . what-have-I-done?

I exchanged my shoes and took the bus into Whincliffe to go to the army surplus shop in Cartbeck. I got to Whincliffe OK but suddenly found I couldn’t remember in which direction the shop was. Result: I trailed around the rain-swept streets for an hour feeling foolish.

This evening I watched a good play on television, Keep on Running by Andrew Armitage. It was set in July 1967 and the protagonist was a sixth former named Alan whose rebellious ways get him into trouble, but he finds a ‘friend’ in the headmaster, who is disillusioned with teaching and with growing old. The night of a school disco, Alan blunders into the headmaster’s study with a girl and is shocked to find the headmaster still sat at his desk. To cut a long story short, the headmaster tells Alan about all the people he sees who “end-up” and never do anything with themselves, and impresses upon him the need to “be outrageous, to show your arse,” to “write a novel or something, but do.”

Alan gets angry at the headmaster presuming he has anything to impart; the usual misunderstanding between generations etc., and storms off back to the disco. He stands at the door and, as he sees the smooching couples and the stifling mediocrity of everything, realises that the headmaster was right. So he rushes to the turntable, takes off the schmaltzy chart hit, and instead plays “Purple Haze,” shouting that “This is the music, this is it!”

He receives the slow hand-clap from the unimpressed couples so runs out with the record, back to the headmaster’s study, where he finds that the headmaster has hanged himself from the chandelier, a ‘Teach Yourself Italian’ record intoning away mindlessly in the background . . . “What-must-I-do?”, . . . “What-have-I-done?”

I thought it was quite impressive, and I think Mum did too, but Dad just frowned and looked bewildered.

Floating

I spent £21 on a new coat and new shoes, an extravagance which made me feel a little guilty. The sun was again glaring down as I sweated my way around town, walking all the way along Leckenby Road to see the empty mills of Southampton Woolbrokers Ltd which Lee had said was worth a visit.

I called in on Nanna P. She had a “turn” on Monday and thought she was dying. “I felt like my head was separate from my body and was floating around the room.” She still looked ill although she was vocal enough and trotted out the expected tedious stories of Uncle Kenneth and Shirley and “ar’ Nicola.” Her wheelchair stood in the hallway, folded and awaiting use. . . . She says she gets a pain in her head which sounds to me like a potential cerebral haemorrhage.

Her Mum and Dad died of these.

I came home, had tea and watched TV all evening. Old routines. My mind has frozen up as I try to write this, evidently because the torpour of my existence the last few days has allowed it to fall into a dull, forgettable state. How slowly I write—how slowly the thought processes are clumsily parodied by word formation. The Acker-inspired torrent of Sunday night is the least self-conscious thing I’ve written since I came home.

John Turney rang at 11.30 p.m. to remind me to bring him a biography of Stalin I’d promised him.

Dictatorship of the proletariat

Lee rang at teatime. He and Pete have made more finds on the derelict-buildings front; a subterranean warehouse cellar, half-filled with water in the centre of Watermouth; they also broke into an office complex and had a narrow escape when alarm bells began to ring.

Lee said Oculus aren’t going to press legal action, and Morris is busy mobilising support—our defenders include sixteen councilors (including leader of the Tory council) and the Bishop of Chichester (!), so it looks—as I suspected it would in the end—as if we’ll be able to stay. “They’re fucked,” said Lee emphatically.

Today I stayed in while Dad set off to work and the sun blazed from a clear sky for the second successive day. I wore only shirtsleeves yet sweated inside by the afternoon and continued reading Wilson’s The Occult.

The miner’s strike is now in its fifth week, and the railway and shipping unions have blocked all movements of coal in support, but Ravenscraig steel workers are angrily demanding that coal be allowed through to keep the furnaces running at two thirds normal output: they fear closing the plant will give BSC the chance it’s looking for to shut it down completely. Scargill is right when he says the strike is now resolving itself in class terms. The Ravenscraig men should take sides now, because keeping the plant open is no guarantee of job security. The interests of Ravenscraig lies with the miners.

Dad declares that Hatton, Scargill and Ben ‘are out to undermine democracy, get rid of the monarchy, and establish a dictatorship,” and he can’t understand why such proven “enemies of Britain” are still at large. Today also, the Greenham Common women were evicted from their plastic and wicker tents by 300 police. “Trash!” spits out Dad. Although I think their ‘non-violent’ protests are futile they inspire me with sneaking sympathy for their methods. I admire their persistence.

Old delights

Colin Wilson regards the onset of Christianity as a disaster for ‘magical’ man. “Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because human beings are gullible and superstitious” (p. 272). The doctrinaire and ruthless nature of Christianity fitted well with the savagery of the world into which it sprang, hence its success.

I was in Easterby during the afternoon, the day hot and sunny more akin to high summer than the stutterings of early spring. Town was packed, but for once I quite enjoyed the jostle and throng and had a contented day; I bought a couple of books, a pair of plimsolls and had a curry at the Bahawal . . . the old delights.

I took leave of the city centre and wandered aimlessly through the mills and warehouses and near-empty streets between Leckenby Road and the Polytechnic, full of thoughts of Lee and Grant. How is it that Easterby seems unreal? Even when I walk in it I can’t grasp it; it’s as though I’m blinded by my image of the town, a conception that’s grown from all my memories and the past lives I’ve lived here, from Lee, Grant, from Ashburn, Lodgehill and Hainsworth Hall, the derelict mills and houses . . . If I try to rationalise the point it merely makes it all the more diffuse and difficult to grasp.

My mental Easterby is as real as the Easterby of actuality. It’s only when we’re distanced from the places we take for granted that we appreciate them, stepping back from unthinking involvement with environments and realising them for the first time.

Echoes

I postponed a trip into town in the afternoon, and the old lack of direction seems to be reasserting itself, as if, now I am beyond Watermouth’s influence, I’ve sunk back into my isolate life. There’s nothing for me here but echoes and the skeletons of past ways. I haven’t been out of the house since Friday.

Dad responds to anything new with, “That is horrible! . . . This is shocking! . . . How can anyone like that? . . .”

All the old familiar reactions.

Beginning → Middle → End

I watched a programme on TV about Kathy Acker, who I haven’t heard of before and who writes from and about NYC (worked in sex stores when poor in NYC 47th St.). She draws on the Beats and fuses poetry and prose; writes to put ‘meanings in flux,’ seeing no adequate literary form able to describe the reality of contemporary Amerika. Writers like Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth and early Norman Mailer she derides as ‘19th century tradition’ and has devised a style she calls ‘plagiarism,’ directly incorporating Jean Genet, Shakespeare, Keats etc., into her writing and juxtaposing historical and present day characters.

She’d probably regard my obession with the ‘occult’ and hidden moments of affirmation as romantic and slightly old fashioned. . . .

The blank page is before me, but I’m inhibited, as though something crushes me in its torpid grip, and I'm unable to break these bonds and just write . . . write . . . I'm in quicksand; I'm writing not to reach new knowledge but to write the form as an end in itself. It's a nineteenth-century process in microcosm. I write not for what writing confers but for what it becomes. This plodding prose logic further removes me from the Moment, the Now of reality & of experience. . . .

I’m imprisoned by this fear of the rigid form, just a dry, reductive perspective that turns moments into used up written husks like artifacts behind glass. I write and write, and don’t look again at this poor man’s epic that mirrors in two-dimensional form the actual process of my living out my life on one continuum of time and space, on the plane of Beginning → Middle → End . . .