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 . . ..