Mysteries

It’s 12:37 p.m. on a sunny, cold afternoon and in a minute I’ll catch a bus into town and get drunk.

I feel I’ve lost an overall view of things, that sense of a continuous day-and-night, day-and-night life unrolling from each week to month and year. All that feels gone. The void separating Now from Then will always remain unfilled, and the last two months feel full of emptiness and untold things.

It’s a pity I can’t keep up with my idealistic expectations for these words, but in a way their inner silence on the essentials reflect my state of being—I’m rushing into the last months of University. This chapter is coming to an end and I’m eager to be through to the light at the other side. From this vantage point I see next June onwards in the most optimistic terms.

New beginnings, and just a minor hiccup in my strivings and now I’m on my way again.

I rang home to ask Robert if he’d got his record and Mum told me that Sean Barker’s seventeen year old brother Stephen died the other day of some mysterious illness which began innocently as a cold.

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.

Mysteries

Mum and Dad went to Mr. Tillotson’s funeral at Egley Cemetery at one today, and came home at four in understandably morbid frame of mind. Mum said the funeral service had made her think about death, a subject she says she’s “thought deeply about more than most who are fifty.” This she attributes to the death of her sister Mary in 1958 when Mum was twenty four. She was sceptical about the “Joseph-Tillotson-is-now-in-heaven-having-a-wonderful-time” approach of the officiating priest:

“I think you only live after death in the minds of others” . . .

We human beings will always find it difficult to accept the physical reality of death. Joseph lived, and now he doesn’t: his body was incinerated in the Crematorium down in Egley Cemetery, ten minutes walk from his home of fifty years. This passing of people into memory fascinates and appalls me. My journal, my obsession with improving life and searching for meaning, all spring from this passage.

When Dad came home from work last night he gave me three books, two by Colin Wilson (The Occult and its sequel, Mysteries) and a paperback copy of The Golden Bough. The Wilson books look to be interesting. I hadn’t the heart to tell Dad I’d already bought a copy of The Golden Bough.