Bookish

This morning PC Essex, the arresting officer from the Great October LSD Caper called at Maynard Gardens to tell Lee that all charges against him had been dropped and that Stu and I’s files were on the Superintendent’s desk; he’s now deciding what to do with us.

So I called at the police station on Michael Street and saw PC Essex who told me that, in his opinion, I’ll be lucky to get off with a caution and will probably go to court on the charge of possession. He thinks the charge of supply will be dropped because “you’re obviously not a pusher.” He never mentioned Stu, so perhaps he’ll escape punishment.

I haven’t worried much about the pending charges, and it’s only over the last week that I’ve been assailed by bad dreams, and as I stood listening with nodding head and a fixed expression of gloom I was told not to let it ruin the rest of my term. I got the impression that PC Essex had every sympathy with me—as he should if my story were true.

It is difficult to pick up the pieces of shattered continuity. There’s always the “I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ll do it tomorrow” and never the actual process of sitting still and writing. It’ll be difficult to attain past levels.

I’ve noticed an element of self-consciousness and fear creeping into my thoughts when I direct them towards these pages, as if I’m unsure of how to write, or scared of speaking ‘unnaturally’ or ‘falsely’.

I’ve led myself into the trap of allowing bookish pretensions to dominate the content of what is written.

Worse than useless

Narrative description or introspective monologue? I need to choose.

Del has been back in Watermouth the last few days and stayed here at Westdorgan Road last night, sharing a double bed with Stu. He’s all but recovered from his phobic anxiety depersonalization disorder of last summer and seems now to enjoy talking about it to anyone who’ll listen.

It was interesting discussing my LSD panic attack with him and he thinks I was suffering from a perfect case of temporary depersonalization, hence the unreality, deadness and isolation I felt then and then the other week, when under LSD again.

Lee called round here briefly to see if I was going to go with him to the crypt down Smith Square, this after we discovered the other day that one of the large wooden gates was unpadlocked. He seemed distant and left after a little while . . . 

Tonight Del drove Stu, Lindsey and I down into town and we picked up Turney on our way to the Lancaster. Enemies of the State throbbed away upstairs but we didn’t see Barry once and were loathe to fork out £1.50 just for the privilege. Del managed to see him and Barry promised to be down in five minutes to see us all, but we waited twenty minutes and were finally thrown out at closing time and still he hadn’t shown up.

I am finding little success in my attempts to overcome this great block in the way of work, writing and thinking. Instead of fighting it I’m content to swan about lazily, watch TV and sit in the kitchen doing nothing.

No books read, nothing worthy recorded or even in my mind. I feel completely ordinary at this moment in my life, a feeling worse than uselessness.

Everything and nothing

Yesterday evening  I took the train into town to Lee’s and took LSD with he and Ian: collective wildness, hysteria, uncontrollable laughter at the television, mystification over the plots of two films, the last of which a sordid tale of a man who wants to murder his family, which he later does but only after numerous sexual encounters, five in a bed, etc., sex on the N. York metro...

We tried an after-image experiment with Lee’s camera flash unit and the results were different than what we’d expected. Because LSD increases the image retention capability of the retina, we’d assumed that the illuminated scene glimpsed during the flash would remain imprinted on our retinas, gradually fusing and changing. Instead we found that even in complete darkness everything was a riot of mind-generated colours, lights, and blossoming shapes, so much so that I couldn’t even see to move about and so ended up spreadeagled on the floor in my pleasure, much to Ian and Lee’s amusement.

I was a bit anxious lest I think myself into the same state of panic as a couple of weeks ago, with the same thought receding back into the very centre of my brain until all that remained was a black nothing. I had intimations that loss of control was imminent, and I had to fight these off to such an extent that at one point I was struggling to keep calm, at which point I persuaded Ian and Lee to tramp purposefully with me round the deserted sludgy streets of Watermouth, to King’s Road and back through the town centre. We passed an undertaker’s, the coffins piled up as we passed, surreal but real. Everything seemed very sordid. 

Back at Lee's we were endlessly fascinated by books of Escher prints, a book on the history of the Nazis and one on skinheads, but as the drug wore off we became less active and sank into long periods of subdued silence, lying on the bed or on the floor, our minds alive with “everything and nothing,” as Lee put it.

Coming down is a depressing and disillusioning experience; life seems hopeless.

Everything looks cheap and shabby. I felt very isolated and empty inside, utterly remote and alone in that black place inside my skull, and therein lies the panic and the fear. At these moments, my mind turns into a simple receptor unable to filter the unceasing bombardment of sights and sounds and information for even a second, and so it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, like a drowning man must feel when he slips beneath the surface for the final time.

Not even shutting my eyes brought respite, for my brain was working at light speed and the thoughts and ideas crackled on and on, seemingly forever. It was quite an unpleasant sensation. To maintain an even keel and to keep my mind pinned down until the danger of it flying off at a tangent was passed, I pushed myself into single minded tasks, looking at pictures, reading books and talking about specific events or memories.

I went to bed at five thirty and woke up at half four this afternoon feeling wasted, but I have a tutorial with Dr. Harrison tomorrow and we're discussing Kafka’s The Trial, so I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening reading the book in bed.

The dangers of LSD are manifest and I feel uncertain about taking it in the future. I’m sure the fears I expressed above will never be far away, always lurking in some corner of my mind, ready to terrorise me.

“You can’t beat a good strong dose of normality,” said Lee when we’d woken up, and in a way he’s right.

Flush

At lunchtime yesterday we were on campus sitting in the Cellar and we caught a glimpse of the headline in the Herald—“BRIGHTON BOMBING!” A picture showed the Grand Hotel, where the Conservative Party Conference is being held, its elegant façade ripped open.

So as Gareth has his Mum’s car, we decided to drive all the way over to Brighton to join the silent gawping crowds thronging the police barriers. The beach was cordoned off in a hundred yard stretch in front of the Hotel and so we got as close as we could and took photographs with Gareth’s camera, posed smiling before the ruins.

When we got back to Watermouth, Stu and Lindsey and I went into town for a drink at Blair’s Wine Bar and then the Blue Cap.

A near fight broke out at the latter between the affronted frump-faced bar owner and a whisky sodden oldster, a small pissed Polack whose threats sounded ridiculous from so lightweight a frame. “Drink up and get out!” yelled the stone-faced owner repeatedly, his eyes darting and hard.

Lee’s Mum has written a letter to Mrs. Coldwater-Hicks’ son telling him of the unspeakable conditions at the Grey House. “It’s like a squat” she writes with great (ironic) perceptiveness, ignorant of the true situation. . . Lee says he’d been telling Jeremy about hatchets thru’ walls, etc. at the Grey House, and Ma Hoy overheard him and basically made Lee agree to her writing the letter. Not thinking too much of it he meekly signed it too, but realised with horror later the possible consequences: i.e., Coldwater-Hicks visits, sees the shaven-headed squalor of the ground floor and basement, kicks everyone out, and when Gav subsequently discovers it was Lee who spilled the beans he comes after him with a shotgun, etc.

But luckily for Lee, other events have now rendered this unlikely, for Mrs. Coldwater-Hicks has now died and C-H Jnr. wants to get control of her estate and sell the house, which will take months. So Lee is planning on moving into Sutton Road knowing it’s for real this time, which gives the scheme a fair chance of success. When he had Maynard Gardens to fall back on his heart was never in it.

He's also bought four tabs of LSD from Gav, each with a cat’s face printed on the front, part (Gav says) of a consignment of a thousand posted from Amsterdam. I’m apprehensive after what happened, but a little curious too; I wonder how my mind will react this time.

Will the same thing happen again?

I’m no longer seized by enthusiasm for the tasks at hand and I recall with nostalgia the pacing and tingling excitement at the implications of a train of thought or an idea. I’m scared that such things have passed in the flush of ‘adolescence.’

No drama anymore.

Kaleidoscope of dolls

Last night I went to a party on Broad Street where ‘Z.’ and Oscar live.

It was a predictable hippy gathering, which Lee, Stu, and I disrupted with our loud, strident behaviour. Lee continued his record of causing damage at every party he’s invited to by inadvertently kicking holes in the plasterboard walls during a Freddie Starr impression and then running around screaming. Later, four or five heavies gate crashed the party  one of them—Lonsdale sweatshirt, moustache—forced himself on a girl there (“I want to taste your lips,” etc)., which she politely but insistently refused. But when she went to the bathroom he forced his way in and shut the door, but Lee kept his foot in the way. I thought a fight was bound to happen.

I left about two or three and caught a taxi home alone.

On LSD the mind is an organ that vividly records prevailing sense impressions with great intensity. I’ve never had great revelations on acid (although last week came close, before things turned rotten). Instead the acid experience has always revealed itself in mundane ways; in the ‘fun’ of seeing perspectives distorted and disturbed; in people transformed into grotesques; faces into masks by turns ugly, amusing, or disgusting; a kaleidoscope of dolls and scuttling, rapacious insect-people; TV images fluidly melting from one frozen mind’s eye-instant to the next.

Big blue duvet

Objective view: trouble with the cops. Last night, about ten-thirty, I dropped 2½ tabs of acid with Lee and Stu. Basically I fucked up. . . .

To begin with it was wonderful. I knelt on the floor before Stu’s hi-fi, hands extended in front of me like some new apostle as the music caressed me into near orgasm. Paroxysms of delight, unbearable ecstasy, sounds becoming shapes and coloured lights melting away in my mind—real revelatory stuff. I thought I’d found the answer, found ‘It.’ It was just so easy I couldn’t come to terms with it and I kept asking S. and L., how have we been mistaken into deceiving ourselves that this isn’t the way ahead? Just swallow a piece of paper and there it was, heaven on earth.

I knew at that moment that I’d tasted the ultimate in sensory pleasure and I could have died fulfilled right then, knowing I had had it all. I knew everything. 


But as I was lying on Stu’s bed on his big blue duvet, a seed of doubt grew in the very core of my being which I ruthlessly tried to suppress until I couldn’t. Already I was a long, long way from Stu and Lee, so I sat up and spoke.

“I am going to die.”

Lee tittered—it must have sounded so ridiculous. But the more I tried to fight it the worse it got, and the line of thought raced away into the infinite until I was holding on for dear life. I knew if I let go, that would be it . . . I can only indicate all of this in a very obtuse manner . . . I couldn’t sense my body at all. I felt for my pulse. There was nothing there.

I was as good as dead!

This was now a hellish nightmare that kept on and on and on. If I stopped breathing then my heart would stop. I started to panic and throw things, and screamed in my misery and by now Lindsey and her brother Ed (who was down for the weekend) were hovering on the stairs. I insisted they drive me to the hospital.

“I must hold on, I must hold on” I kept telling myself as I lay on my back in the car, my head in Lindsey’s lap, everything fragmented—I can only remember the journey through foreign and unfamiliar streets as a series of suffocating images. Stopped at traffic lights, Ed asking, scared now, if he should run them, me in the back shouting “Yes! YES!” and bracing my feet against the window.

About to expire. 


We found Watermouth General but it was deserted at this hour and I ran around in a panic, tearing off my shirt in, pounding at my chest in fear, trying to restart my heart. The caretaker called the police. On the way to Wessex County we got lost and stopped to phone for directions, and here the police picked us up.

At the hospital I remember a freezing walk across the car park in stocking-feet, naked to the waist, my baggy purple shirt hanging open, buttons gone. A kaleidoscopic of images: a hospital foyer with nurses, wheelchairs, geriatrics. I crawled across the floor, lost, then recovered sufficiently to be led meekly to a white windowless room. There I lay on a mattress on one corner until help arrived.

A cursory examination pronounced me saved and I again entered the world of the living. In the car I’d been convinced that normal life for me was at an end; at worst I would die, at best I'd be permanently incarcerated in an asylum—white gowns, strait-jackets, the lot. But now I began the slow descent to ‘normal’ thinking. 


Back at Westdorgan Road the police made a search of my room and grilled Stu, Lee and Lindsey. Lee, having handed over the one remaining tab at the hospital, was taken to the cells and spent a night locked up on acid, yet still stuck to his story that he was clean and an innocent bystander. He escaped charges on “statutory defence.”

I was OK within half-an-hour and spent an unreal night staring at the wall and feeling dirty. 


Oi!

We went to Masquerades last night: I called round to Maynard Gardens to tell Lee and then we met everyone else—plus Barry, Raven and Elaine, his two-flatmates-to-be—at the Green Man on Philip Street.

Stu and co. all got quite drunk, drinking 9-10 pints each, and afterwards we visited the crypt. I scaled the fence first, then Dave, then Lee. He went back over to see why no one else seemed to be appearing and unbeknownst to us was immediately apprehended by the police.

Two more of Stu’s friends, Paul and Clive, started to climb over to join us and as the latter balanced precariously on the very top of the wooden fence I heard someone shout “Oi!” Clive half fell, half jumped off the fence and we all ran across the wasteland to the opposite fence to be greeted by another voice saying “we know you’re in there . . .” so we sprinted back the way we’d come until a warning that “we’ll send the dogs in” finally subdued us.

We climbed passively out to face our telling off. The policeman was dogless and swore at us when we appeared. Clive refused to divulge his name, and eventually we were allowed to go. We got a cab back.

This afternoon Stu, Clive, Dave and Alan and I met Shawn Bennett on the pier for a drink. Stan and Paul left in the afternoon; Stan’s arm was in a sling because he’d fallen off the fence too and sprained it. Later in the evening Barry and Stu and I took some acid and we all watched Alien. The acid was quite strong, coloured lights wherever I looked, Barry laid on Stu’s bed listening to Hendrix with a huge inane grin fixed to his face . . . I got to bed at 3.30 a.m.

The end of every fork

A morning and early afternoon spent fulfilling necessary obligations on campus. The last day of term meant handing in Conflict and Consensus extended essay titles (on the Beat Generation), putting in travel claims and seeing my personal tutor to collect my report.

This was quite poor—a 4 from Pugh and Gilbert, and a 3/4 from Colin Pasmore (“he has not fulfilled his promise,” etc.). Don Carwardine expressed doubts about my unorthodox style of accommodation, and said he fears the inherent instability of most squats is likely to disrupt my final year, but I placated him by promising to get rented single accommodation after the summer.

After getting back from campus, Pete and Lee and I took the LSD in the toilets of the Art College. It was Lee’s first ‘trip’ so I was curious to see how he’d receive it. We had a prematch meal of bacon, eggs, and sausage at a café at the bottom of Hatfield Street, a buzz of expectation within us as we ate. I went for a shit in the College (anxious not to crap out the drug) while Lee and Pete waited for me beneath a tree. . . .

We walked to the seafront and wandered aimlessly along the beach, watching seagulls wheel and turn in the sun which streamed in ghostly shards through the gaps in the bright yellow and grey cloud, dappling the sea. We could feel the first, tentative effects of the drug in our nervous systems, a slight alteration of observed reality, the beginnings of hallucinated awareness. I think we all felt the same way, anxious lest the trip failed to produce.

We met Lindsey on the now chilly and wind-bitten pebbles outside the Admiral. She was on her way to work behind the bar there and she railed at us about her “shitty job” and “exploitation” and we were sheepish, aware of the first fluttering sensations of drug-awkwardness and wooden paranoia. I could sense Lee fighting it, unwilling to admit that anything was happening; later, almost overwhelmed, he admitted he simply “had to compromise” himself to the inescapable acid distortion of time-space. We ventured briefly into the amusement arcades on the promenade where Lee was overcome with yawns, watering eyes and excessive salivation.

He was literally foaming at the mouth.

Then TV at the Grey House, a pop programme hosted by Mike Read, a Queen video—monstrous faces distorting rapidly—and "Uptown Girl” with Billy Joel, an ugly strutting circus dwarf, the girl in the video tempting us almost beyond endurance, melting inside, transfixed before the screen. Lee’s room appeared enormous, the doorway a vast distance from where I sat in the opposite corner, Lee and Pete perched gingerly on the bed as though there were on beams of wood high in the air.

We clambered up through the loft and onto the roof, Pete and I having a momentary dread in case Lee hurled himself to his death. What is it that happens? Blotches, marks, smudges on walls, floors and skin, are all joined in a delicate softly shifting tracery of patterns, the carpet a two-dimensional mechanical pattern, vibrating gently, my own face in the mirror blemished asnd red, overlaid by shimmering networks of lines and swirls.

We walked through the grounds of the Cathedral, the summer crowds thick around us. Lee and I had the simultaneous impression that we were being propelled forward, as though we were high up on a scaffold which was being pushed along on wheels, the crowd at our backs awaiting a public crucifixion. We couldn’t help ourselves for laughing.

In the Pembroke we tried to play chess, which was an impossible task, as if the entire dead-weight machinery of the universe blocked every move. The pieces were like lead, the infinite permutations and juxtapositions of possible moves an impossible-to-unravel complexity and mystery. We stared hard and our brains beat themselves uselessly against the brick walls of illogic. Upstairs in the toilets the flowery-pattern wallpaper swirled and blossomed and Lee saw a black-gloved hand tearing away the wallpaper as he took a piss.

Back downstairs, more fun with spatial distortions, and we perched miles high at the bar, the trough of the booths far below. Everything was either vast, or small, or a puzzling, fascinating mixture of both. Landlord Joe watched us with a bewildered and wry look as we gulped fizzy lemonade. A couple behind Lee’s shoulder took on the guise of insects, crustaceous, furtive, crawly as they talked, the man trying to pick up the woman, his high speed bug-eyed, square-jawed insistence striking me as particularly insect-like. Joe became a sphinx and we crouched in our seats as he looked down on us with sly elongate Arab-eyes.

The next moment Lee said he couldn’t move and so he sat there in a dread paralysis, telling us where to move his chess pieces. He said that his left arm felt as if it no longer belonged to him and he could feel his own arm moving inside the mechanical outer skin. Then, as we packed the chess set away, his arms completely lost their connection with the rest of his body and for a moment we all three saw them as belonging to someone else. I held my own hand up before my face and realised it was possible to coolly and cleanly slice away each successive layer of matter with my eyes, cutting through outer dermis, muscle, tendon, the sub-skin muscle pulsing with life, until at last I reached the stark, out-splayed skeletal fingers.

We decided to go to the Bat and Ball, a dim idea in our minds to meet Stu, Gareth and Barry; we seemed to walk for a long time and cover no distance at all, but if we glanced away and glanced back, the scenery directly in front of us had leaped yards closer. It was a strange, strange sensation walking each one of us alone together past people with hawk faces and spindly spider legs. Each person we passed presented a physique and facial appearance more laughable and pitifully deformed than the last, and we laughed so loudly and immediately that I feared we were about to get beaten up.

Finally, after what seemed an interminable length of time and an endless cavalcade of freaks and grotesqueries, we reached the vast road junctions next to the Bat and Ball, great deserts of tarmac which we ran across feeling conspicuous and anxious. I went into a ‘phone box to ring Barry and Stu, but almost suffocated on the thick piss smell. They weren’t answering.

We went in the pub’ briefly but couldn’t bear the hostile cartoon faces and so walked out to the grass, walking through green rubber trees with cauliflower leaves into a great amphitheatre. A pregnant woman walked towards us, her blue dress stretched tight over her protuberant belly, and we were disgusted when we saw the domed head and the line of spine of the curled up foetus inside her. Lee said everything looked like a cheap ‘60s ciné film. He seemed uncomprehending and confused but eventually came to terms with the things he saw. As we sat on the grass I chewed a root but had to spit it out when it turned into a worm.

We wandered back to the seafront, our movements now fluid, now mechanical, our bodies not our own. We ate burgers and drank lemonade and dropped in at the Admiral to see Lindsey behind the bar being leered at by disgusting old alchies. At a loss now. Pete looked bored, so we ended up back home at Maynard Gardens watching TV. We could see through it all, plumb the blatant advertising come-ons and the cheap pretences with a weary ease.

Lee and I rounded things off by going to an all-night café for a plateful of semi-cold leftovers and a look at the freaks, funsters and derelicts, which at this time and in our state was a terrible place.

Next to Lee a bleary-eyed drunk slumped over a plate of congealed baked beans, his cigarette burning down in the ashtray as he tried to pick up an unresponsive and cold faced girl who sneered and smile-snarled at his pathetic stories and chat-up routines, humouring him, just passing the time of night—with a flash of recognition, we could see what is “on the end of every fork,” cleave through these poses, acts, charades, masks and fancy costumes and reveal the chittering human organism beneath, squirming naked in its unlovely insect gore, see humanity and all of human life as it really is—harsh foul-mouthed laughter, black fingernails, feeble dirty hands, grubby sweat-bright faces, the smear of cheap lipstick amid the greasy plates, all the contemptible vanities of fashion and hairstyles transfixed by the eye of understanding.

We left feeling tarnished and unclean, the town alive with racing police cars.

A slow wearying comedown . . . bed soon . . . it’s almost three.

Possibilities

Very frustrating.

Today was the day we’d planned our mass-ingestion of LSD but I wasn’t able to get in touch with anyone at Westdorgan Road. I rang them numerous times throughout the afternoon and early evening but no one answered the ‘phone, and Lee, Pete and I began to consider the bitter possibility that they’d all taken it without us. This was not the case, we found later; the telephone wasn’t working properly.

So the day progressed to a disappointing, frustrating conclusion, the only highlight being the games of chess we played at the Pembroke.

Deflation

The day has slid by, fulfilling its glaring summery promise. No surprises.

Stu and I bought more LSD from Kevin Yettram in Gaunt’s Hill View, two tabs each for ourselves and three tabs for Pete and Lee between them. We met Gareth in the Three Tuns and walked into town for a few late games of pool at the Bat and Ball on Wickbourne Road.

Gareth goes home on Saturday. I couldn’t evade the tedious, deflating end of term feel about everything, noticing it in his bored slouching in his chair and lack of interest in the promise of our mass-‘trip’ at the end of the week.

Lindsey and Susie both got jobs working behind the bar at the Admiral on the seafront. . . .

Hallucinated viewpoint

Round at Westdorgan Road in the afternoon with Gareth, Stu, Ade and Barry, smoking oil that Stu had pestered Ade to buy. Stu seems bad-tempered and cynical these days. Gareth made himself sick with a combination of sulphate, alcohol and oil: his room is used as the communal space by everyone else and it’s where TV is watched, drugs taken (orally, nasally), food eaten and plates left . . ..

When I move in I’m moving the TV into the kitchen.

Lindsey, Susie and I went up to the Westdorgan and fell to drunken enthusiasms on the subject of LSD. We’re having a mass ‘trip’ next week, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, which will include me, Gareth, Stu, and Pete for definite, and perhaps Lindsey, Barry, Susie and Lee. LSD and sulphate are the two drugs I feel least opposed to/uneasy about, the latter for its constructive application, the former for the sheer hedonistic novelty of the hallucinated viewpoint and the resultant humour and chaos.

Reverberations

I didn’t wake up until two o’clock this afternoon.

Went to a party last night at, 44A, our old place. Stu, Gareth, Penny, Lindsey, Susie and Ade came along too. Stu and I left soon after arriving to try buy some more acid from Kevin Yettram but no one was in. Back at the party, Gareth drunkenly chatted up Anita, one of Susie’s friends, crushing himself close. Jason, Barry and Stu and I went back to Ade’s: we chased a couple of dragons (man) and I got back to the Grey House for three a.m.

I’m closeted in my bathroom hunched over this script. The house is quiet. Instead of spending the time writing about what I’ve done, I should write about what I’ve thought or wondered. I must apply myself to a couple of hours writing each day to become practiced at the art. My essay on Burroughs remains unstarted. I have to hand it in next Wednesday.

I haven’t been too well the last three or four days and I’ve got a bad cold, catarrh, pains in the head. It’s so hard to apply myself to anything constructive living like this. I spoke to Dad on the ‘phone, wished him a happy Father’s Day, and things fell into a sort of order as the breath of stability blew through me.

I’m strangely unaffected by the news about Lindsey and Jason, and instead I'm curiously but pleasingly free of all mental tremors and reverberations.

Anything at all

I went to my Conflict and Consensus tutorial for the first time since 21st May. I was weary and bored.

In the evening, at Westdorgan Road, Stu persuaded me to take a tab of acid. It was the the early hours of the morning by this time, and I eventually fell asleep but woke up a couple of hours later feeling very odd. I couldn’t bear to sit still for above a couple of minutes at a time and my legs tingled and I felt restless. I was filled with a warm sensation.

Both Stu and I were in the same boat, and this led us to believe that one tab wasn’t quite enough to start us tripping. We remained in this half-and-half state for several hours before going to sleep at about seven.

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.

Bleak time

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world stands complete

Robert and Carol called round this morning on their way for a week at Conishead Priory. Robert was looking forward to it a lot, but Carol seemed subdued; she's just had two teeth pulled at the hospital and is suffering with a swollen face.

They were soon off leaving me to an afternoon of idleness. Mum went to the hairdressers and Dad went on one of his much-grumbled-about trips to see Nanna B. The weather was hot and sunny once more.

At four I got a call from Grant . . . I held my breath . . . a fail in Economic and Social History, a fail too in Communications Studies, but a ‘B’ for English Lit. He couldn’t believe it and was ringing me in an inebriated glow of enthusiasm after going out for celebratory drinks with RJ and Jackie. “I haven’t felt this good in a long time,” he told me, and really did sound full of excitement and just general happiness.

I couldn’t help the cynical thought that flashed through my head: it’ll be no different for him when he goes to Gloucester. It wasn’t—and isn’t—for me. I can’t help thinking that, like me, he’s one of those people who cart the source of their own misery around with them, like a prisoner his chains. But, time for celebration; more than anything he’s relieved to finally have an escape route from the trap of his domestic situation. “What have you been doing?” he asks, and I truthfully answer “nothing.”

I got a second letter from Susie and felt ashamed at her comment on my comments about boredom in my previous letter. Seeing it written in black and white puts my own situation in sobering perspective. Fool!

Twelve days until September.

I read some war poetry by Sassoon and Graves, etc. I felt yet more shame that I can so blithely talk of ‘misery’ and ‘suffering’ when I know nothing of true anguish. In a perverse way I would be curious to see how war would alter me as a person, but thrown into the cauldron, I'd no doubt be mewing pathetically for “mummy” and “home.” It was bad enough for me enduring the first few days at University, so God knows what new depths of self-pity I’d plumb if I was in a war.

I was really affected by Sassoon.

I thought of age, and loneliness, and change,
I thought how strange we grow when we’re alone
And how unlike the selves that meet and talk,
And blow the candles out and say good night.
Alone . . . The word is life endured and known.

I find it incredible to think that anyone can write a poem like “Before Action” by W. N. Hodgson, incredible that anyone can marshal and rationalise their thoughts so clearly in the face of so immediate and awful a death. He asks for strength to be able to bear the prospect of losing all earth’s “delights and glories” and does so in such a calm manner; surely there must’ve been tears and despair at the thought of becoming yet another member of “the unheroic Dead who fed the guns”?

I suppose that we ‘rise to the occasion’ in such circumstances. . . .

In the evening I watched a screen adaptation of The Magus, a book I’d intended reading over summer (but left my copy in Watermouth). It left me itching to read the book and I got an inkling of how big an impression the book had made on Patrick and why he felt as though he’d been ‘dunked in a bath of cold water.’ If the novel is anywhere near as thought-provoking as the film then it must be excellent. I must read it.

Patrick read it and drew parallels with his own situation, and then he acted. He quit the RCP. It was a big step when you consider his utter involvement with them. I remember how he struggled to convey his shattered complacency to us when we did LSD, and I could see it too, in a way, but gripped as I was by my LSD-self-consciousness and natural awkwardness, I couldn’t span the gulf which separated us. I couldn’t tell him that I understood too.

Out of the film’s symbolism, allusion, analogy and pantomime I drew out the ‘message’ that there's no message. Exploration brings you back to where you started and it’s all about looking at what there is to hand in a different way. The things around us are all there is, there’s nothing more, no ancient gods to be petitioned (gods who never replied anyway). No Yahweh, no Allah, no Horus or Isis or Zeus, just frightened people filling the Void with their reassuring figments to block out the emptiness and push it from the mind. There is no other way. These lives are all we have.

And when Mum says she spent a lifetime always planning for tomorrow and now that tomorrow is here, she feels desperately uncertain, unsure, and cheated somehow, I begin to understand why the world immerses itself in the commonplace and the known: “I have suddenly awoken in midst of this dream but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I have to go on dreaming in order not to be destroyed: as the sleepwalker has to go on dreaming in order not to fall.”

Mum puts her recent strangeness down to this realisation and says that “Sometimes I just want to scream at everyone and everything.” The other day she said she felt like putting on her coat and going: where is unimportant; it’s the act of going that matters. “It’s easier to philosophize at 19 than at 49” she says. It’s hard to accept that our lives have been built on sand and perhaps harder still to realise that this will go on and on and that I—helpless, unable to do any different—will also despairingly participate in this, knowing full well that the time will come when I too will be in Mum’s position.

Is my interpretation right, I wonder, or am I on the wrong track completely? Reading the book will get me deeper and tell me if I’m right and more of what Fowles really is getting at. Are we really “men moving in a mist”? I'm nineteen and I’ve ‘solved’ everything?

“The world stands complete and has achieved its end in every single moment.”

X-ray frogs

My carefully laid plans to write an essay dissolved when Barry, Patrick and Mike came into my room. “Shall we do the acid?” Barry asked me, and for an instant I was seized with an agony of indecision, a straight choice between my responsible, essay writing self and the pleasure seeking, idle self.

But the tiny snips of card were there lined up on the chair arm, a half each for Barry and the others, a whole tab for me, which I’ve been religiously saving for a day like this. I threw myself over the edge and swallowed the tab along with everyone else.

I lay on my bed reading Invisible Man and waited for the effects to take hold. Barry and co. disappeared outside to play football and as I waited, I tried to objectively assess what was happening to me. It was an odd sensation, almost like I was losing awareness of specific details of the walls of the room and the bed on which I lay. Instead, I felt an odd, blurry vibrancy and awareness of the things around me.

The threesome returned, sweaty and out of breath but in a sort of hysterical frame of mind: within minutes the room had dissolved into shuddering laughter, our faces smeared with tears as we rolled helplessly about. We just couldn’t help ourselves. Total pandemonium as we flopped about in my room, crumbling into bouts of laughter as we found an election leaflet featuring the toad-like visage of Reg Castle, Labour candidate for Watermouth and New Lycroft.

Everything and anything was enough to bring on fresh fits of helpless laughter, much to the bemusement of Shawn, Shelley, Pete and Mo who, on separate occasions, came and stood watching or sat with us. I was intensely aware of Pete’s awkwardness and forced-smile embarrassment.  I sat dumbly shaking at the ridiculous hilarity the world had suddenly assumed. My room seemed to be dissolving into a giant heap of blankets, books and litter. Occasionally a lull would descend, and we wiped our eyes and let out a sigh, before some other trivial but intensely funny thing would strike us and we’d erupt once more. Breathlessly we whirled into Barry’s room; I wanted to shut out the rest of the corridor, the rest of the world, so that nothing would intrude. We decided to go outside and play football.

Outside the mania still held us in its grip but not so firmly. Almost reluctantly we walked off the path and out onto the grass. It felt as though the whole world’s eyes were focusing in on we four. The space, the wideness, my smallness in the midst of this great green expanse made me feel awkward and supremely self-conscious. We stood half-heartedly amidst the grass, painfully conscious of everyone and everything around us, flapping our arms and feeling small, or hopping awkwardly from one foot to the other.

We mechanically kicked the ball without any enthusiasm. I went through the motions for a little while but soon retreated up into the trees on the slope overlooking Wollstonecraft Hall, where I hung about amidst the leaves, a big awkward figure dressed all in black, towering amid the low branches. The others joined me and we sprawled in the grass beneath the leaves and summery skies, huddling close to one another.

This was a really noticeable effect. Patrick said that every time he does acid he begins to feel alienated, and I could see why, for our little band felt isolated from everyone else as we sat there in the greenery, gazing down on campus. Them and Us. At one point we were hunched so close we were almost touching one another.

“Good X-ray frog weather” said Patrick, and sure enough, as I lay on my back and looked up, the clouds rolled over us, dissolving and reforming in crisscrossed lattices of white, as though a delicate grid had been superimposed over my field of vision. We watched each cloud blow over, the leading edge of the cloud extended forward in fingers, the main body billowing after, remarking on particularly good 3D specimens, some subtly shaded and tinged with colour as they folded and rolled into ever new shapes. I also noticed more colour on the trees, and when Patrick pointed it out to us we could all see the way the leaves seemed to heap over in green shimmering mounds of light and shade, away from the wind.

Patrick talked and talked, a long, bitter, disgusted monologue—I looked and saw and agreed—about how this campus of picturesque valley views still leaves we students bored. “Bring some kid down from the Brixton ghetto and he’d think it was paradise, but all you lot can do is lounge about complaining. It’s all so passé. It stinks.”

Several times he had me squirming awkwardly on his hook and I remembered the paranoia from the acid trip Pete and I took a few weeks ago. Several times I ground to a swollen-tongued halt as I attempted casual conversation. “Why do you always wear black?” Patrick asked me. “It only shows up your dandruff.”

He also reduced Barry to a defensive silence, broken only by grunts and murmurs of assent, as he told us why he couldn’t go on with the RCP and talked about books and painting and the difficulty and delicacy of the latter. The Magus by John Fowles was “like a bath of cold water” and accounted for much of his present bitterness and disillusionment: “You have no hope after reading that book; it strips away everything.”

Mike shivered and said it was the worst acid he’d ever done; “I don’t know why; it’s this place,” he said, looking around at the trees and the rows of windows. Occasionally he too would grind to an excruciating halt in dry-lipped embarrassment as he was misunderstood or misheard.

The evening breeze was mounting and the cold began to cut us—I noticed the goose pimples on Patrick’s arm. We all wore thin shirts and so we went back inside. It was eight p.m.; the day had rushed by. We began to call the trip “it,” referring to it as an entity as though something great had just passed. Mike still seemed uneasy.

We met up with Guy, who’d just returned from London and set off for the Town and Gown to spend an evening drinking. I left them all at a party over in Rousseau and came back before everyone else. Patrick had vanished with Yvonne Ellis: Barry and Mike were engrossed in conversation. I left in a gloom and went to bed, my mind full of Patrick, the way the discoloured smudges of dirt on my wall blurred into large purple indefinable letters, the way our arms left behind a visual trail and afterimage when waved, the clouds, the colours, but also the intense paranoia and self-consciousness.

It was a day to be experienced rather than enjoyed.