Summit

We took the riverside path via Syke House Farm to Stonesdale and from there, a walled track onto the moor beyond.

The weather was hot and sweaty but I insisted that we conquer Pinshaw’s summit: I have a fascination for the high, remote places, the lone outcrops of limestone that stand bare at the sky’s edge. So we plunged off the path and trudged uphill, the hillside looking steeper than it actually was. We paused behind a wall to eat dinner.

Near the summit we passed large rabbit warrens, the springy and park-short grass littered with droppings, the summit plateau itself a windswept platform of shale and limestone. We added to the summit cairn and spelled out our initials with rocks like others had done before us, and I picked up a piece of shale as a memento. We didn’t stay for long as the wind whipped fiercely and it was very cold.

On the way down we struck off through heather until the danger of crushing a grouse’s nest forced us to find clearer routes. Our descent towards Acorn Clough was gradual, and we stopped at a remote limekiln and quarry and a spot where the road fords a stream that was thick with trippers who fed and photographed the sheep.

From there it was a short walk along the road—verges alive with tadpoles—towards Kearshaw and Acorn Clough itself. The ruined and forlorn Acorn Smelt Mill was more evidence of Calverdale’s industrial past. It was a leisurely trip back down the road to Kearshaw and Friar Beck.

Cernunnos

We embarked on a mammoth trek across Greetsdale, Anvil Hill and Half Stile Hill, finishing up at Morton Castle Earthwork overlooking Thwaitegarth, a walk that was a pleasure from beginning to end.

We began late—about twelve—and took the track straight up Stileside beside Cow Pasture Wood to a shooting hut which stands overlooking the valley, padlocked and forgotten. It was a hard slog in the sun and we stopped frequently for rests as Pinshaw Hill, majestic against the sky, rose across the green huddle of the Calver.

From the shooting hut, we took a broad green track across the moor towards Currackdale, climbing up through a small grassy valley rent with black peaty fissures and bright yellow green sphagnum. As we climbed to the very top of the moor the heather became less abundant, and we walked through a desolate and barren landscape of deserted mine workings that stretched to the horizon on every side. This was the highest point of the walk, 2400 feet above sea level, a fence marking parish boundaries winding from one brown horizon to the other. Currackdale ahead, hazy and miles away.

We paused to eat at the side of a bell pit filled with water in whose shallow fringes congregated hundreds of tadpoles. In the deeper water we caught glimpses of dark newts, and Dad captured one, a large male in full breeding colours, but I made a comment about him upsetting the balance of the pond’s population which caused him to throw it back with a resigned, irritated look. We passed the place we had stopped to have our dinner last summer and then dropped down into Greetsdale, a narrow isolated flat-bottomed valley about half a mile long. It was very warm here, very remote, very haunted, with nothing but silence, the wind, the calls of sheep or the burble of a curlew or lapwing. Occasionally, an RAF Jaguar on some low level exercise would streak overhead, soon to be lost below the horizon, a dull rumble reverberating in its wake around the lonely sky.

We trudged down through limestone crags that glittered white in the sun, and I explored a small gorge that retreated into the hillside to the dark mouth of a cave. A dead sheep lay near the gorge entrance, its skull picked clean and white. We met a stout red-faced man on a motorcycle, who was a member of a mine research group searching for “Yew Level,” his greased back grey hair smelling of oil. He was abrupt and humorless and I showed him the cave, but he said it wasn’t what he was looking for, in fact was “toss all.” We left him scanning a map.

Greetsdale is a balmy spot amid the sweep of forbidding moorland, populated only by sheep and rabbits; the most perfect of places . . .. A clear stream runs through it into a man-made dam and then down the valley towards a ramshackle collection of sheep pens and a stone shooting hut. I found myself imagining I lived here in this remote valley with the rabbits and the sheep, nothing but sky and moor as far as the eye can see.

We stopped again at the end of the valley by the sheep pens before turning left and climbing back up the moor to its summit, Anvil Hill, before dropping gradually down towards a thin thread of tarmac road which runs from Forefield to Owlands. We followed this for a way until we reached a track which branched off across the moors for a couple of miles to Half Stile Hill, overlooking Calverdale.

For days now I’ve been looking forward to a partial eclipse of the sun visible for two hours at six, and although it was cloudy most of the day, soon a gap appeared in the darkness above and a shaft of sunlight played across the valley below, throwing fields, walls and trees into sharp relief, the dark ramparts of hills and moors giving way to a luminous light, a vision of verdant glowing green . . ..

“Paradise,” declared Dad.

We sat high above the limestone scar of Half Stile Hill, on the very edge of the moor, and milky shafts of light crept towards us, the glare of the sun’s disc filtered by ragged rafts of dark cloud; we could see a large semi-circular bite missing from the lower limb of the sun’s disc. I tried projecting the image onto the back of a map with binoculars but this experiment was a dismal failure and finally the clouds closed up again, the wind grew chillier, and we cut down through limestone crags and heather clad hillsides until we were overlooking the prehistoric fort of Morton Castle.

The fort is approximately ninety yards wide by one hundred and forty yards long and a ditch, that in places is 10-15 feet deep, runs all the way around beneath a raised rampart. At the western side the rampart and ditch give way to an opening, the remains of two roughly circular buildings and two long avenues of grey limestone that run west towards an associated barrow. We walked around the heather-choked rampart, very impressed at the scale and extent of this site that gets none of the publicity meted out to its grander cousins in Wiltshire yet which is, in its own way, just as spectacular. It was fascinating to see surviving sections of walling buried beneath heather and grass. A legend says that gold lies buried beneath the lonely and desolate barrow, a silent witness beneath empty skies. If only stones could speak.

We walked slowly back along the tarmac road, affected by the mood of the evening, a peculiarly perfect harmonisation of mood, time and situation. As we approached the bridge by the caravan a clattering of hooves on tarmac made us look up just in time to see the grey-brown form of a roe deer bounding away among the junipers and heather and up onto the moor.

Maze

We walked to Forefield and back along the road which passes our field, a trip of twelve miles altogether over the high moors between Calverdale and Currackdale.

We stopped at the highest point of our journey, nearly 2300 feet above sea level—1400 feet above the valley bottom—and had our sandwiches and coffee. The somber brown moors of Hurstdale Clough, Fair Moss, and Lockwith stretched away beneath bright clouds. There were no sheep and few birds at this height, but the weather was a little warmer than yesterday, so much so that on the outward leg I had to hide my face from the sun for fear of getting burned.

As we made the steep descent into Forefield the round mound of Birk Fell rose up against the sky from the surrounding hills. We paused in Forefield and Mum and Dad had tea at a café while I sat on a bench near the village cross before we set off back. It was a killing climb beneath glowering skies and a few heavy spots of rain, but I raced ahead and waited at our previous stopping place. We got back to the caravan after five and I quite enjoyed the return leg which had me thinking “this is what I traveled 300 miles for,” a thought I’ve tried hard to pin on one particular aspect or moment of this holiday but have so far failed to do so. I can only conclude that the greatest pleasure lies in anticipation of the future, but at the moment that future becomes actuality the essence of the pleasure slips away leaving a disappointed and let down feeling.

When I’m in Watermouth next week this holiday will seem full of meanings and poignancies. I’m a victim of nostalgia and sentimentality and I’ve been brought up to perceive the world in certain ways at certain times: I’m victimised by these perceptions, trapped in a cycle of conditioned thoughts as effectively as if I was a rat in a laboratory maze.

Rub out the word

Still grey today but the biting cold has gone. We set off along Blea Gate and walked to Gilsey, returning along the path which runs high along the edge of the moor, through Fordings and Birkslape to Shake Bridge and a rough track that dropped down from a lonely farm, squat against the grey sky, through wind tossed conifers to Thwaitegarth.

We walked back along the river, the sweet scented air full of summer balm, and I felt happy for once.

There’s sense of history in this area that’s impossible to capture in words. The owner of this caravan, Mrs. Metcalfe, comes from a family who’ve lived in this district for years and the tombstones at Barras Gill and Owlands are filled with the names of Metcalfes, Redmires, Wortons and Grimdens. These families must feel such a linear linkage with their past. Mum and Dad went out for a walk this evening and were accosted at the gate of our field by an old salt, a Redmire who was married to a Grimden of the Grimdens of Yealeth Hall, the Grimdens who, with their own private army of 400 men on white horses, turned out to support Edward in his campaign against the Scots in the early 14th century.

This caravan is quite comfortable and it’s equipped with a Calor Gas heater, stove and wall lamps, and we’re wrapped in a hissing glow warm against the grey scene outside the windows. I sleep on a mattress on the floor in a sleeping bag. I’ve brought quite a bit of work with me: The Victim and Herzog to read, a presentation on the former to prepare for Monday next, and Eric Mottram to make notes on.

I’m thinking of collecting together my Burroughs photocopies and beginning a scrapbook/ideas book to experiment with words, a place I can be free of the constraints of grammatical sense and typographical convention and where sentence and word structures can’t foul ideas at their source. There I can be less hampered by my attachment to the final text/bookish form of this journal. It’s an attachment that’s difficult to be rid of . . ..

What did I mean by my comment the other night about needing to take sides? The Burroughs tutorial set me off reading Mottram’s Critical Appraisals and looking closely at the cut-up technique, and I feel enthusiastic about these ideas. They’ve touched a chord somewhere inside and I think of my own struggles to resolve certain questions here.

Rub Out The Word.

This text terrorizes my need—my longing—to catch all things at once and in their truest form and in their very essence. “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was God.” All these different moments forced into the same unremitting form. Literature is decades behind the other arts because it doesn’t rely as much on the immediate consciousness of the reader. The word isn’t sacred, but a means to an end, nothing more. Why should texts operate only on the one level of time-space, running a narrative plot in a narrow, strictly chronological and sequential way? Literature must depart from its rigid narrative beginning-middle-end style, just as film has done. Film’s editing, intercutting, and juxtaposition appears to operate uneasily in language. New forms demand a hearing and demand time for their exploration.

The Gysin-Burroughs cut-up technique seems to be one way to combat the tyranny of the Holy Word: “The cut-up method brings to writers the collage which has been used by painters for 50 yrs. And used by the moving and still camera. YOU CANNOT WILL SPONTANEITY. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.” Words/texts/language all a complex, well-entrenched and cohesive system of control to limit and delineate the boundaries of ‘the reasonable’ and the ‘only-to-be-expected.’ Cut-up, verbal collage and juxtaposition attacks the power-system of language (by power-system I mean an entrenched control system firmly regulating mind & thought).

Burroughs: “Capitalism is a system of dependences, which run from within to without, from without to within, from above to below, from below to above. All is dependent, all stands in chains. Capitalism is a condition of the soul and of the world . . .”

From birth our eyes and ears are not our own. Parents and the state implant meanings in the subconscious mind, an (unintentional?) act of programming and perpetuation we can intellectually reject, but this material resurfaces unwilled and unannounced like images from a nightmare suddenly remembered the following day. We are unconscious victims of a subtle form of mass control and mass conditioning, minds influenced by TV, by radio, the insidious banter of advertisements, the “condition of the soul.”

No man, no woman is free. We can only be partially free from this. For Burroughs, freedom is freedom from the “cycle of conditioned action,” and conditioning makes freedom near impossible to attain.

Caravan

Heavy rain today prevents us from setting out on a planned hike from Gilsey to Birkslape. There seems little point in going out just to get wet.

So we're marooned in the caravan while the grey skies close down over the fells behind the farm and the rain batters and the wind blows. There's nothing to do but sit and read Saul Bellow’s The Victim. Mum and Dad walked in the rain to Owlands and called at Stonesdale on the way back.

Dad returned feeling ill with diarrhea and an upset stomach and Mum even talked about going home on Tuesday if the weather hasn't improved. We stayed inside all evening where it was at least warm and snug, and Mum and Dad listened to Billy Graham on the radio and I read my book.

English eerie

I am writing this in the dim gas-light flicker of the Metcalfe’s caravan in the field at Friar Beck Farm, Calverdale. I got here at two this afternoon after a leisurely three-hour journey via Gillrigg and Washgram . . ..

We walked along Blea Gate and passed two men with shotguns cradled on their arms, their peculiar clothes ill-fitting and old-fashioned. Origins uncertain. I didn't look at their faces as we passed and somehow they appeared faceless anyway. Men with guns. We wondered if they were poachers and the encounter filled us with disquiet.

The countryside is full of hidden meanings, hidden menace. I thought of Flannery O’Connor. I imagined we three staring down the barrel of a gun, being taken into the woods . . . bang bang bang . . . Messy, grotesque, senseless . . . but the walls and fields stretch to the sky and there's no meaning there save that which we, in our fearful shrinking from emptiness, put into things.

Shades of Captain Oates

All yesterday I carried my secret knowledge with me through evenings out and trips to campus . . . Why such melodramatic secrecy?

I left Watermouth in the early hours, leaving a little note that said “I may be gone some time . . ..” Shades of Captain Oates. I didn’t say where I’d gone or when exactly I’d be back, and I had a terrible time creeping from my room down the four flights of creaking uncarpeted stairs to the front door—only Alex was up. I padded down the hallway in my stocking feet, shoes under my arm, and unlatched the front door.

I felt like such a fraud.

I caught the five a.m. coach to Gatwick, arriving at 7.20, then a coach via Wolverhampton, Derby and Whincliffe to Easterby. Just Mum was in when I got back; Dad was at work . . ..

Sides

A lot of important changes should stem from the week just gone by, both inwardly and outwardly. I think I’ve come to a point where I must take sides.

Realisations

I was up at seven-thirty and in University for my nine a.m. meeting with the Dean. My intermit-scheme was treated with the expected skepticism and I heard with sinking heart that the Student Planning Committee was “99.9% certain” not to grant me the year out.

I came away having bitterly accepted defeat—I felt sick—and decided not to bother applying to the SPC at all. So that is it—finals next May, all the dread trauma of revision, examinations, the A-levels all over again.

Today’s tutorial on Burroughs reminds me of many things I’ve felt in the past—loose ends tied up, connections made. Realisations I’m too tired to write about at the moment.

Pick up your soft typewriter and walk

I saw Colin Pasmore, Don Carwardine (briefly), and then Ned Ammons, all about my scheme to intermit. Pasmore raised the sort of objections that have been thrown at me already—intermitting interrupts the continuity of my academic study, etc.—but Carwardine briefly filled me with hope by saying he’d “have a word” with Ned Ammons. When I saw Ammons himself, he was again skeptical, and wondered if in fact I wasn’t regretting my decision about the year abroad. He advised me to go see the Dean and to present my request in writing, which he will read out at a meeting of the Student Planning Committee on July 2nd.

I left his office with mixed feelings, both about my prospects and about the desire to intermit itself . . ..

Later I read and photocopied Burroughs’ “The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith,” an exposition about the cut-up/fold in techniques he does with Gysin, his attitude about the would-be writer, his methods of material acquisition / recording of reality. This filled me with enthusiasm and I think made me realise how these Words and THIS FORMAT exercise a kind of tyranny over me.

I must dispense with them entirely, or at least dispense with them as the sole means of communicating my ideas or exploring literary techniques . . . EXPAND!

Geist

I slept at Westdorgan Road last night, getting to bed after three, after a long discussion between Lindsey, Susie, Stu and I on the merits/demerits of learning a foreign language.

Lindsey and Susie opposed Stu and I who argued that learning another language is a waste of time. Susie said that learning other languages was necessary because there are just some concepts/ideas whose singular essence can’t be translated into English—she quoted the German ‘geist’ as an example. In ideal circumstances, I would have to agree with her, but practically speaking, we face more important tasks. We don’t have the time. We need to build upwards, towards knowledge, towards understanding, from a narrower linguistic base than those who are learning a foreign language. Susie’s German degree is giving her a broader base from which to attack the problem.

But why waste the time acquiring even more tools if you never have a chance to use them?

We also talked about how there’s no real provision for the stimulation of the imagination at University. Degree courses don’t take Creativity into account. It’s like going over old ground—there’s no room for true expression, and generally University is a factory unconcerned with the mental well-being or advancement of its inmates. It’s there to train them for jobs in the material world.

I got back to the Vicarage to find my electric fire gone, Alex wearing my clothes, and my records scattered about. I have to get away from here.

Alex and Gav sit in the former’s room with the ‘Aw What?’ types, watching television. I stay upstairs in my room. Ben has vanished again after a brief, one night sojourn in the Jervis ward of Watermouth General Hospital’s psychiatric unit and we haven’t seen nor heard sign of him in the last few days.

This morning I also attended my first Conflict and Consensus tutorial this term and I don’t know why I bothered. I simply sat glassy-eyed listening to the endless hyperbole around the subject of the 1948 Presidential Election, and reflecting on the unexpected knowledge (imparted by a fellow tutee) that Ian Pugh and Julian Banner hate one another’s guts. In my bag I had a letter to Mum and Dad that I’d written the night before at Westdorgan Road telling them I wanted to go to Calverdale with them next week.

Although the amount of work I have to do in the near future fills me with doubt about the wisdom of vanishing for a week, a little reshuffling of appointments makes it so that I can take that week without missing one tutorial. By the time I walked back through the evening streets of Watermouth hearing the lone cry of a gull so much like the call of curlews high in the hills, I was filled with a sudden and overwhelming pang of longing to be away, which just for a moment or two possessed me completely, like a passing shadow, but was gone when I turned my conscious mind to it.

Lee and I enjoy normalization of relations once more. Past incidents, if not quite forgotten, are never alluded to and we again behave as though nothing was ever wrong.

∆

This morning I dreamed I moved into another squat only to discover it was like my room at home, but at the same time, it wasn’t my room. The implications are too obvious to be commented on. I also dreamed I was grabbing big clumps of hair in my hands and cutting it crudely with scissors. Grant was there; we walked through a park that both was and wasn’t Woodhead Park . . ..

I finally wrote my vacation essay, lifting parts of it directly from an essay I wrote for my Black Americans tutorial last autumn. I cranked out all the familiar platitudes, glib clichés and ‘essayese’ phrases. I’m at Westdorgan Road and Stu is at his desk working on an essay about John Stuart Mill. Gareth watches Badlands downstairs in his room. Lindsey and Susie are out at the pub.

I’ve been here since two and it’s taken me four hours or so to spin out an essay that's seven sides long. God, I’m sick of the platitudes I use here, the dry dog-tired diary format!

Gav’s in Cambridge with Mandy and has been since mid-week. Alex—head freshly shaved save for a triangle of hair at the back (∆)—is scarcely ever at the Vicarage nowadays and is in London at the moment. Sarah and Barbara are never there either, although Sarah is a bit more than the other one. They’ve written ‘Lesbians Unite’ on the wall in Alex’s room and Animal Liberation leaflets litter Barbara’s room.

They’re all such stereotypes.

Impaired vision

Gareth and Stu stayed over after the party. Spent the day in front of the TV watching the Cup Final. Everton beat Watford 2-0 in a mind dulling few hours of “entertainment.”

Lee wants to try for another squat but I’m sick of the hippy crapheads the word squat attracts...:

“Hey man, I’m so WRECKED. What did I do yesterday? Aw what!!? I can’t remember what happened yesterday.”

I saw Alex Margolin in the Frigate last night, back from Peru unchanged save for a haircut. He’s one of the few hippies whose company doesn’t nauseate me.

Ben showed up in the Pembroke with a cold greasy chip pinned by a safety pin to his shoulder and asked, for the nth time, “Do you want an education, yeah?” He talked about anarchy and about opening up the Church so he can spread his message, “for this town, for the people, who knows? For the world?”  He'd been busking in Attlee Square all day and said to me that The Clash and Peter & The Test Tube Babies were coming to Watermouth to help him prove the validity of busking as performance art. Occasionally he talks somewhat obliquely of “leaving this town” and going to Amsterdam with Alex and Sarah in a few weeks time.

I’ve missed many of his performances because I spend a fair amount of time away from the Vicarage, either at University or at Stu and Gareth’s. This was a deliberate ploy at first, to avoid Lee, (but now things seem to be healing between us a little, although there’s still a slight strain) but is mainly to avoid the austerity of the Vicarage. I am at Stu and Gareth’s now.

Morris turned up late last night too and said that Oculus have agreed to talk about the future of the Vicarage. Their request for planning permission was refused the other day and on the 16th of May an article in the Herald said that Oculus would now “decide what to do about the squatters.” Morris is again convinced that “we’ve got ‘em,” but no one takes any heed of his impaired visions anymore.

City of words

I should have been spent the day working on the vacation essay for Conflict and Consensus, but instead I sat in the library and read through the Times Literary Supplement for 1963 and 1964 (“Ugh”—a review of Naked Lunch—plus the spate of subsequent letters, including one from Burroughs himself about the review, the book itself, and the pros and cons of publishing such material). I photocopied all this and the famous Burroughs Paris Review interview from 1965, read through another interview with Kerouac (who by then was an alcoholic fiercely guarded by Stella, his wife of one year) and also the chapter “Rub Out The Word” on Burroughs in Tony Tanner’s City of Words.

All this cost me £3 altogether, but was enjoyable. I read some sceptical reviews of Wilson’s The Outsider and The Occult which left me wondering about the absence of any critical faculties in my mind when I read them.

When I got back from campus, I came across Ben Beresford in The Pembroke, talking loudly, insistently, and very obscurely about his messianic destiny. Since Tuesday, he's begun to exhibit all the manifestations of madness. At a nearby table, Ian and George sat drinking, silent and watchful.

Alex kept asking, “Do you want an education?” to anyone who would listen, and said he has secret knowledge that he’ll give to us once we’ve earned it. He sat at the bar talking to everyone and to no one. The landlord—who we’ve got to know—came over to the other bar and demanded to know what Ben was “on’—“Look at his pupils! They’re huge!” But as far as we know, he’s not ‘on’ anything at the moment. Gav thinks he’s having an acid flashback (Ben said the floor was shimmering as though it was moving), but then Gav changed his mind and decided Ben had gone totally mad. Ben talks with a direct, unblinking and earnest stare, yet seems emotionless.

“Do you want an education?”

We rushed from the pub certain of his insanity, and when we neared the Vicarage we could see people stopping and staring across at the Church opposite. We knew immediately that he’d done something dramatic. Across the gleaming white façade of the Church, Ben—we immediately assumed it was him—had spray-painted in large, painfully conspicuous red letters across the base of the crucified Christ:

CRASS So what if Jesus died on the cross what about the fuck-up I don’t give a Toss
On the gate of the Vicarage, he’d pinned a Learner driver symbol and in his room was another 'L', pinned to the window and facing the Oculus building. Pete and I hung about helplessly. Alex’s hippy friends—they of the ‘I’m really wrecked’ glazed appearance, one bearded, one with Mohican and anxious face—turned up but seemed blasé about the whole situation. We suspected them of collusion with the graffiti opposite.

A little later we heard that Ben had sprayed the word “ANNIE” (for Annie Anxiety of Crass we assume) on the Post Office building and showed up there, delivering his spiel to alarmed pedestrians who, frightened for their kids, phoned the police who then came round to the Vicarage asking questions. They discovered that the Church had been broken into, which betrays a clear link with us, because ‘The Means’ keeps going on about opening up the church to the public.

Later, we all went to Inga and Ebbe’s party at Castle Mount Court which was a quiet affair, so we left after an hour or so for another party at 28 Essex Circle. Stu, Gareth and I ended up at the all night café near the Art College.

Vito

I went out to Vito’s (Italian restaurant on Astlow Street) with Lindsey and Susie and co. to celebrate Lindsey’s birthday.

Sub-dean

I went to see the Sub-Dean Ned Ammons about intermitting.

I think I knew as soon as I walked in the door what he was going to say, which was, “no, not for the reasons you’ve given.” These reasons were admittedly vague and ill-expressed. But now I’ve regrouped and worked out another line of attack. I do believe I have a strong case and I’m now determined to get the year out.

I’ve yet to tell Mum and Dad of my intentions.

Intermit

This morning we found two sides of a fervent Ben Beresford biro-scribble writ large on the back of the court order and pinned to his door.

In this he writes of time being short and communication needing to be sorted and how, in the early hours of this morning, he’d climbed in through the basement windows (having forgotten his key) and had some kind of revelation or flash of insight. He didn’t elaborate, but from what we could gather, he’d detected the presence of something he felt was trying to contact him. This had answered a lot of questions. "Call them kundalini spirits, call them what you like . . . Maybe one day I’ll tell you.”

When Stu read the note later he said there wasn’t anything in it to convey anything unusual, other than his comment about the “things I have seen, heard and categorically FELT!,” and about Lee’s ‘hex’ (a small lead triangle with a 1901 silver coin at its centre that Lee has fastened to his door): “Lee, I respect you, but your hex . . .. Do you know what you are doing?”

Ben implies that this is somehow related to his own experience. The whole ramble is filled with coherent sentences but its overall meaning is obscure. He signs it ‘The MEANS.’

R. D. Laing: “The unrealness of perceptions and the falsity and meaningless of all activity are the necessary consequences of perception and activity being in the command of a false self.”

Our modern human condition is one of general division and schizophrenia. In other words, the ‘sane’ majority are merely those better equipped, biologically, psychologically, to cope with, mask and diffuse their feelings of self division and submerge their schizoid tendencies beneath a ‘reasonable’ commonsense and conditioned way of perception.

At the party on Friday, Mo put the idea of intermitting for a year into my head, and I’ve seized on this like a drowning man a rope. I have to go see the Sub-Dean and discuss it with him. It’s been one of my main topics of conversation for the last few days and I try to reassure myself that a year out would be a good thing. Mum and Dad will probably not approve and will fear my degree will be disrupted etc., but if I argue it persuasively enough then I think they will be OK.

At the present moment, this intermit-scheme is a way of forestalling internal criticism of my own appallingly empty life. There’s nothing here at present, and I feel like I exist in other peoples’ eyes rather than for myself.

Lee and I are still ‘cool’ towards one another . . ..

Sort of gloom

This morning, Lee showed off the things he and Pete got last night from a demolished building near the Vicarage, and I was reticent, going out to campus with scarcely a word in goodbye, and going over to Stu and Gareth’s, where I'm spending the night.

Barry, Ade and Jason had a jam downstairs in the garage for part of the evening, while John Turney talked with Lindsey in the kitchen, went to the pub with her, back to the kitchen and then either off home or to her room—I couldn’t tell which and firmly crushed all inner speculation.

I missed yet another tutorial for Confllct and Consensus this morning too, my second . . .. Instead I sat in the library basement in a sort of gloom, waiting to see people I knew.

Escapist

Wednesday’s dispute still marks my relationship with Lee, and we haven’t been as open or as friendly as usual since it happened. We’ve tolerated each other, living side by side in an uneasy normality. When we do speak there’s a sourness and an abruptness just beneath the surface; I’m sure I over-reacted to a nothing incident and this is perhaps what holds him back.

It’s so farcical.

Lee and Gav are keen on squatting the place we found last night, but I’m not so sure. To begin with it is very old and the electrics might be beyond repair. Plus, I don’t know whether I can face all the hassle, all the uncertainty, all the involvement, which feels like it’s drawing me steadily away from things that are more important. At the moment I feel the need for Order and a place on my own would be ideal.

Lee disappeared with Pete during the latter half of the afternoon returning at teatime, and at seven thirty he came up to my room. “Can I borrow your bag?”

Me (pridefully refusing to do anything other than lie on my bed, feigning indifference): “Where are you going?”

L.: “Downstairs,”—then, sensing my reaction—“an obvious lie.”

As I watched he and Pete saunter down Albany Mount to visit the old building from last night I had to get away, both from this house and from myself, so I went down to the Pembroke and phoned Stu—he and Gareth, Lindsey, Susie and Barry turned up an hour later and I passed the evening playing pool and video games, and afterwards at the all-night café, and being deliberately escapist.

Life-locked

I’ve been to two parties, the first one at Castle Mount Court last night with Lee, Pete, Mo, Barry, and Stu where I ended up drunk, asleep on Mo’s bed. Mindless. On my way home I was sick and woke up this morning with a terrible hangover and was sick again. I went round to Stu and Gareth’s during the day and collected the mail from Jervis Terrace. Our electricity bill up to April 30th was £119.

Another party tonight at Hurst Road (off Cotham Avenue) that was no better and consisted on the whole of the usual crowd, sitting about silently.

After the party a group of us (me, Alex, Lee, Gav, Pete and Mandy) set out with torches and a crowbar to take a look at a derelict building near the Cathedral that Gav had told us about and which sounded worthy of exploration. Lee and Gav scaled the locked gate topped by barbed wire while the rest of us hung about outside, expecting them to open the gate from the inside; we were eventually moved on by a pub landlord.

Finally, I scaled the wall myself, and I was eventually directed to a second story window that could only be reached via a tall fence and drainpipe. Inevitably, my lumbering efforts to squeeze through the opening caused havoc and sent glass from the window showering down into the yard below. Lee cursed and I told him to “fuck off,” angry more at my own ineptitude than at him.

Inside the building was quite sound, a narrow three or four stories that didn’t seem to have been touched since the 1930s; there was a dumbwaiter, fully fitted bathroom, and even a chemistry lab in the cellar. A large front room had bay windows that faced onto Maynard Gardens and the Cathedral. We got out via an attic skylight (I broke more glass), ducking over roofs, clambering down three fire escape ladders and back over the barbed wire.

Life-locked, I strode back to the Vicarage, painfully aware of my distance from Lee who seemed very remote as he enthusiastically discussed the house we’d just been into with Gav . . ..

Don't think, ask him

Time has rushed by, and as Lee’s had tutorials and appointments to keep all week, the onus has been thrust on me to make a decision about the money we took out of the bank.

I’ve been in a daze of indecision and, at two this afternoon, I stood on the steps outside the Art College in the sun, desperately trying to make up my mind what to do. As the world passed me by, its preoccupations seemed remote, as though I had the mark of Cain.

I went up Gaunt’s Hill Rd still in a daze, not knowing what to do. Alex was (irritatingly) certain that we were safe and was a bit contemptuous of what he saw as my moral wobbling. Mo thought the opposite, Pete kept changing his mind, and Lee seemed diffident, arguing for keeping the cash more through a wish to avoid any effort than from any real conviction either way—or so it felt to me.

I wandered up to the abattoir—no blood, “come back on Monday”—and so found myself back on Wickbourne Road & in my bank, drawing out £97.50. I hurried sweating into town, running the last few yards to William and Glyn’s as three thirty and closing time approached. I filled in a deposit slip, paid in the money, and came out as though a weight had been lifted from the world and from me.

Lee seemed glad that a decision had at last been made and said it was for the better, and later came back from College with scare stories from George Spallinger about Watermouth police’s thoroughness in pursuing such offences. I was thankful I’d made up my mind. No doubt Carl Cotton and the RCP would regard my moral qualms as weakness. Barry felt that taking the money back was necessary to avoid detection but sided with Alex on the moral question.

I suppose it was a bit hypocritical. We did the fraud more for the thrill of getting something for nothing rather than from a desire for money.

“Don’t think, ask him.”

28 days later

We were in court at ten-thirty.

Morris slept the night in Ben’s room and was up early, waking us all and marshalling us to clear the black plastic bags full of rubbish which choked the front garden. We donned suits, and in some cases ties (even Alex was forced into a suit) and walked the few hundred yards to Michael Street and the Court House.

We were in a very jocular mood, joking and shouting our way past Oculus Bancorp. Mo and Mandy (Gav’s girlfriend) came with us; Keith Perry of the Watermouth Housing Association was there, as were a couple of councilors and even a local resident. On Monday evening Lee and I had delivered 55 copies of the WHA's letter to Oculus round the neighbourhood.

Inside the court we stood around confusedly for a few minutes before we filed in and sat at the back of the courtroom while the absurd legal conventions were pursued to their bitter end. We were spectators at our own court case, and Morris, who sat in front of us, looked round angrily every time someone laughed or spoke. The case was heard, and my affidavit with attached letters from the council and churchmen was read by the judge. Oculus wanted us out in two weeks but the barrister and Morris agreed that if they gave us twice that length of time to leave then we’d vacate the Vicarage without them having to call in the bailiffs.

We’d expected more than this, but the judge gave us twenty eight days to leave—until June 7th.

Morris clearly thought this a victory and forced us across the road for a ‘celebration’ drink. Alex was bitterly disappointed and constantly argued with Morris and picked him up on petty points. Why had he misled us? All his “we’ve got em now,” “they don’t know what’s hit them,” and “they’re reeling under the pressure” etc.—and all we get is twenty eight days! “It’s looking good” he’d told me, clenched fist raised to salute impending victory, so we’d at least expected a climb-down, or a sale of building.

So we felt angry with Morris—after all, to him this whole business is nothing but publicity for the WHA, while to us it’s the difference between having a place to live and not. He sees twenty eight days as a major climb-down and concession by Oculus, a recognition by them of the respectability of the squatting movement. No doubt it is, but we don’t care about that. All we want is somewhere to live, and while Morris tries to hitch us to his causes and publicity campaigns we feel growing resentment. He now wants us to hold a garden fete for local residents and to invite Oculus along to embarrass them.

Does he honestly think that they’ll care? Well, he can forget about any more active support from us for his cause.

Hate and love

“All men are deprived of individuality in the machine age.”

Invisibility—like Nausea—is a symbol for the loss of self, the submersion of self by and in society.

“Men are different . . . all life is divided and [it is] only in division [that there] is true health . . . diversity is the word . . . the world in which we live is without boundaries. A vast seething hot world of fluidity. Freedom is the recognition not only of necessity but of possibility."

Approach life through division: “. . . too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.” Oppose systematisation—like I said, I want to revel in inconsistency, for diversity is living – orthodoxy is the stifling of life.

I've just now had a row with Lee which came to blows; he attempted to batter down my door with a broom handle and I resisted until, angry at the bang-bang-bang, I flung open the door and he struck at me with the broom, his face black with anger. This came after I’d thrown a torch at him in petty but enjoyable retaliation for the other night when he'd cornered me on the beach and stoned me with pebbles, hitting me in the knee and chest and run off, taunting . . ..

After sparring briefly with me he retreated downstairs calling me a “bastard." Heartfelt anger. This whole dispute is a petty, meaningless aggravation.

I find it hard to stomach.

What might have been

This afternoon Lee and I pulled off a fraud, withdrawing £97.50 in lots of £50 & £47.50 from Williams and Glyn’s Bank on Hampton Street.

Months ago we found temporary cheques at Jervis Terrace and today we simply walked into the bank and withdrew the money. We couldn’t get over the simplicity of the scheme, and ran into the street screaming our jubilation at bewildered passersby. Lee immediately bought an elaborate Swiss army knife and I blew money on a meal at Theatre Pizza House for Alex and I.

But as the day has worn on our doubts have begun to surface and we’ve begun to realise the hazardous nature of our enterprise. We’ve been assailed by fear of detection and moral qualms and the day has grown very unpleasant. We’ve both felt very gloomy, aware that the bank might call in the police and perhaps trace the cheques back to Jervis Terrace, and from there to here.

I also feel bad because I’m not desperate for money. We’ve always justified our heists as victimless in our minds. Theft from the corporate might of a supermarket like Tesco didn’t seem like theft at all (especially as they’d cover any losses via their insurance), and taking things from empty and forgotten buildings had no moral uncertainties attached to it.

But this feels personal, and the full weight of eighteen years of moral indoctrination presses heavily on my conscience. Lee is hesitating, and says that as with Tesco, insurance will cover the bank’s loss. All afternoon our dilemma has raged and we’ve argued the point out endlessly. I dropped my moral considerations after the first hour or so and concentrated only on our chances of evading detection, and the more I’ve thought about this, the more certain a knock at the door spelling disaster seems.

Imagine the recriminations if we do get caught, the endless ‘if onlys’ and what-might-have-beens?

All of this hangs in the back of my mind like a restless shadow, or a trip to the dentists that can’t be avoided. We’ve decided that we have until the end of the week to make up our minds about what to do.

Bolt

Another day of blazing sun, countered by a chilly wind. The sea sparkled this morning, clear right to the sharp horizon, a demaraction between shades. I sat in my chair in the window reading and watching the sea and sky.

I went out for Gav’s birthday; he’s 23 and set out to spend the entire day drunk and out of his head. I met him, Alex, I. Tropp and a group of Alex’s punk-hippie friends in The Underground on Maynard Gardens, then to the Seven Sisters where we met a rambling old man whose mind was still in the world of 1940s wartime England. He kept looking at me and saying “Bomber Command.”

Ian full of contempt and ridicule.

As the day wore on, dissension grew between Ian and Alex/Gav, and it broke into an open argument as we gravitated to the beach, which was hot and glaring and full of holiday makers. I dragged along in their wake, never saying much and lay in the pebbles hiding my face from the sun and listening to their interminable bitching over how much Ian did or didn’t know about Buddhism.

Both Gav and Alex attacked him for his “egoism and pretentiousness,” Alex getting quite angry with him, while Ian kept on with his quiet yet insistently urgent defence: “Pretentious was a word I forgot about years ago” . . .. etc.

Then he left for home, so G., A. and I went to a sex shop where Gav bought a tiny silver bottle of Bolt—amyl nitrate—which we all sniffed. It made me feel as though my head was bursting. My vision began to speckle and I got yellow spots before my eyes and as these faded, they were replaced by a dull pain deep inside my head. It was hardly a pleasant sensation, and one that felt decidedly harmful, so after several snorts of the stuff I declined and stuck to the cider and wine. But I couldn’t shake off a semi-drunken mood of seedy self-neglect all afternoon, which is a mood I always fall into during daylight drinking bouts.

By early evening the brightness had slipped away and the sea looked blue and huge and still, with none of the dappled patches of shade and light I’d noticed earlier.

Sensory deprivation

Gav has been keeping himself to himself the last few days and has just returned from a trip home with Mandy, the new girl in his life, with whom he seems very cosy, holding hands, all smiles and cheeriness.

Lee and I are full of grey cynicism about this.

Last night, he and she went out in a foursome with Ian not-so-weird Tropp and his girl Mary. Ian complained later about the chore of having to go out in a foursome and seemed to betray a desire to preserve his ‘aura.’ In between complaints he told us about his sensory deprivation room beneath the stairs at Blenheim Place which also doubles as a “vice room,” and about doing ‘primal scream therapy’ with some researcher who advertised for subjects in the Herald. All this was recounted in his soft warm voice, in a vaguely benevolent tone, hints of wry amusement at his predicament.

We’ve seen nothing of Barry since the day he collected the rest of his things. Ben is again absent, and has been gone for days. The two girls, Barbara and Sarah, went off to a lesbian disco the other day and stayed away quite a while, although they were here yesterday. Alex pursues his own path, going off to meet people and buy drugs. Morris is worried about Alex’s consumption of smack and when he was round last, quizzed Pete about it.

My dissatisfaction with my University course has been blunted somewhat by the reading list for my major for the term. It contains some good stuff, & I have no excuse for not immersing myself in the texts. My other reading, my other concerns, have fallen by the wayside. I’ve been too involved with others and with living a sort of life to take heed of the lessons I’ve uncovered in the past. I’m making the very same mistake I warned myself against over Easter. There’s no time for Expansion.

Lee has just come in and says he thinks it will be worthwhile trying for another squat if we have to leave the Vicarage.

Men only

Lee and I went back to the derelict Basley's Radio shop on Ledwell St. last night to systematically root through the piles of clothes and suitcases in case we’d missed anything on our first trip.

The place still got us with its forensic photo atmosphere and the eerie clutter of the rooms. Someone had been back since our first visit and rummaged around in one of the front bedrooms, taking a few copies of the Men Only and 'sixties Playboys that were scattered about. We hoped he would return—very definitely a ‘he,’ because only men seem to indulge in this form of nighttime entertainment—so we could hide and leap out on him. Lee got a leather suitcase and a 1937 book on photography.

Morale here is better than it was on Thursday, when we reached our lowest point with everyone directing their anger at one another and turning it inwards. I’m now quite looking forward to the experience of Thursday’s court case, never having been in court before. If we get an agreement it will happen outside the courtroom and the actual hearing itself should only take a few minutes. A few people will be coming along to lend moral support, and the press and TV are expected to be there.

This afternoon, Lee, Alex and I visited the abattoir off Gaunt’s Hill Road to collect blood for Lee’s photographs. It was deserted save for two men, one of whom told us to come back on Tuesday morning and also said that they have lots of work if we want it.

After they were out of sight we wandered round the place, which was quite deserted and had an uncared for air, broken doors swinging in the wind. We walked into the killing plant with its rooms of metal and blood, a giant electric power saw hanging from the ceiling, the saw-teeth flecked with fur and blood, the killing bays just metal partitions with electric stunners. A dark unfriendly place to die. Across from these a contraption in which cows are beheaded, a steel box which shuts around the animal leaving only the head protruding, then swings 180˚ degrees upside down so the unfortunate beast can be decapitated. The blood drains away into a trough in the stone floor.

What effect would daily exposure to all this have on me if I worked there? Would it encourage Dachau tendencies, lack of feeling, narrowed senses, and numbed concentration on set tasks? Alex says he will apply if I will.

Almighty god

I had another appointment at the solicitors at twelve.

On my way there I bumped into Morris; he gave me a clenched fist salute as he saw me and said “she’s looking good,” presumably referring to the case. At the solicitors I had to sign an affidavit which has been made up in my name on behalf of everyone at the Vicarage. I was taken across the road to the offices of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short, Commissioner of Oaths, where I signed and swore “by Almighty God” (with Bible in my right hand) that I was who I said I was and that the information in the affidavit was correct.

I went onto campus after that and sat about in the library basement listening to Lucy and her SWP friends talking about the power of LSD to awaken consciousness to revolutionary viewpoints. The usual perfumed liberal torturings and postures. Pete told me that I seem to have a static image of people fixed in my mind that’s remained unchanged since I came to University. When I asked him to elaborate he either couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Ironically enough my work this term appears quite interesting, and we’re reading William Burroughs, John Barthes, Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon and Kathy Acker. Last Monday’s tutorial was ‘on’ USA by John Dos Passos which we were all supposed to have read over the Easter break. Needless to say I hadn’t, but I still managed to inject comments into the conversation which made it seem as though I knew what I was talking about. I tried to find Ian Pugh today to apologise for my absence on Monday but had to make do with a note in which I claimed I had an appointment with the solicitor instead.

I got a letter from Mum today and she says that Nanna P. has had another attack of head pains and has at long last consented to see a doctor, who’s given her blood tests, etc. She’s afraid that the doctor will discover she’s is in a poor state of health. I wrote back to Mum and Dad while on campus, a typically lifeless and hackneyed letter, every word a real effort.

How is that you’re only able to say the least to those you love the most? I find the better I know a person the harder it is to write a free and easy letter. It’s frustrating.

Tonight Lee and I are going to visit the empty shop up Ledwell Street again to pick over it at our leisure.

etceteraetcetera

In the morning Morris, Pete and I went to see Robert Seymour LL.B., in his office at King’s Place and signed forms entitling us to Legal Aid.

RS acted the careful stone-faced solicitor with us which didn’t make us feel very hopeful. He constantly corrected Morris’s legal inaccuracies and once I caught him staring hard—objectively—at Morris’s massive browed and dirt-ingrained Neanderthal features. When we got outside, Morris told us that Mr. Seymour was a completely different man when away from his desk, and “wears tattered jeans” and—pushing his heavy face close to mine and whispering hoarsely—“even blows the ganja.”

One of the more annoying aspects of this whole business is having to come into close and regular contact with Morris who I get the impression is not really as well-liked by his many council ‘friends’ and contacts as he claims. Despite this, he’s done a great deal to help us.

I walked back from the solicitor’s in a gloomy mood. Our biggest hope now seems to be that the pressure we’re exerting (what with letters of support “etceteraetcetera”—to quote Morris) can force Citibank into selling the Vicarage, because Morris claims they’re unlikely to get planning permission to convert it from residential status into staff training facilities. He makes much of the “rumours” he keeps hearing from inside Oculus that they’re “reeling” under the pressure.

I hope he’s heard right. Significantly though, his unbridled optimism of a few days ago has become more reserved of late and he acts as though a month’s stay of execution will be a victory. After all, to him it’s just another case to fight and represents good publicity for Watermouth Housing Association. What has he got to lose? We really will be homeless if we’re evicted.

Alex packed his job in today because he can’t motivate himself to get up in the mornings. Ben Beresford —we call him ‘Mother Trout’—is hardly ever here, and stays at various friends’ houses. He hasn’t paid a penny towards the communal kitty for things like bills and owes us £38.

I helped Barry move the rest of his things in Ade’s car to his dank and dingy garage-room in Westdorgan Road today too. On the way back to the Vicarage he answered some of my criticisms, saying he’d moved out now to save doing so later and that he considered our staying on to the bitter end to “a captain staying with his sinking ship.” He says he needs order to be able to get himself organised. I refrained from pointing out that the ‘stability’ of having a place at Jervis Terrace failed to excite similar results. We called round there to pick up a few things we’d forgotten—Miles Beattie has moved in and has painted the entire place, and taken up the carpets, so now it’s airy and bright.

Although I’ve been railing at Alex for lumbering us with with a couple of ‘dirty hippies,’ I found the girls themselves OK having met them properly for the first time. Barbara, the most talkative of the two, seems open and friendly and anxious not to offend. The other girl Sarah is staying temporarily and has moved into the basement despite the lack of lighting down there.

Today’s been dismal, the weather cool and grey for a change, perfectly complementing my mood. Our tails are down and we’re all waiting for the final blow to fall. Barry’s moving out is symbolic of the disintegration of our hope. In the evening we hit the bottom of our trough of anger and bitterness and Pete and I bickered with each other; he inferred that I’d end up in Easterby poncing off my parents again this summer, so I made some equally stinging dig about him and staying at Mo’s flat. But things bucked up a bit later.

Generally though, our expectations are low and we now seem to be living each day as it comes and not thinking too far ahead.

Sooner than later

Barry has moved out. He left for the University last Thursday and in the intervening time has spent just one night here (he slept in Alex’s room because his room has mice).

We’ve been hearing rumours that he wanted to move out, unsubstantiated at first but finally confirmed today by Barry himself. He’d “rather do it sooner than later,” but we’ve been kept in the dark until the eleventh hour and we were angry with him when he eventually turned up. His new abode is the garage at 12 Westdorgan Road for which he’s expecting to pay £5.00 a week. He says all his enthusiasm for the Vicarage evaporated yesterday when the court orders arrived, but he’s never discussed it with us and we first heard about his plan through Mo and Lindsey. 


So he moved his stereo and a box of stuff out of his room, and within hours (and with minimal consultation), Alex had invited a couple of ‘friends’ of his in to live. More annoyance. Two girls with cropped hair and baggy jumpers, plus a gangly black Afghan dog: “Greenham Common types,” says Lee, in a blast aimed at Alex.

Alex seems to know a lot of people like this who he picks up at parties and on nights out. One of the girls is crocheting a jumper for the other, the most vocal of the two, who is busy moving the TV from Barry’s room to Alex’s—he’s living in the communal room now after he’d taken over my anteroom while I was away and I kicked him out when I got back. His original room is a complete mess. 


Lee’s also vowed not to do another ‘blag.’ We’ve both been feeling mean about our kleptomaniac excesses. Sooner or later our luck is bound to fail and it’s been getting to the stage where we’re taking things just for the sake of it, just because they’re free.

We seven

A court order arrived today—Devonshire Holdings Inc. vs. we seven—and the case is to be heard in court a week on Thursday.

The best we can hope for is a decision that leaves the possession order outstanding and hopefully Oculus will be reasonable. Morris has been all optimism and blasé assumptions from the start and tries to have us believe that, at the worst, we have twenty eight days from May 10th. At the very worst we could be out the Monday following the court case.

Up until now we’ve really had no reason to be overly pessimistic or doomy and none of us really believed an eviction could or would take place. But now morale is low.