Shadowed night

I called in on Lee at the squat.

He seemed glad to see me—it’s been six days since we last had contact. He’s nearly finished writing up his essay in rough. He showed me mirror writing à la Leonardo and said he’s been spending hours practicing, getting very bored at nights and walking to the Marina in the early hours of the morning with nothing but moths and lacewings for company.

Earlier I bought my coach ticket and joined Watermouth Public Library. I only intended dropping in on Lee so he could cut my hair, but I ended up staying all night, kipping on the floor for a couple of hours while he worked.

We walked to the Marina, which is a part of Watermouth I’ve never visited before. It was stark and concrete in the shadowed night, the foot level lights throwing up enormous shadows as we walked. The sea was illuminated by spot lamps and took on a turquoise radiance, a featureless liquid blue fog in which seagulls bobbed incongruously.

We went to the very tip of one of the Marina’s encircling concrete ‘arms’ and sat at the foot of its red flashing lamp, gazing out to sea and talking about how good it would be to own a boat. We were moved on by two security men. Lee took a picture of me standing beneath the glare of a sodium street lamp. We wandered back and paused at the all-night café for breakfast.

Hot under my skin

My condemnation of Gav and Alex and their ilk seems, on reflection, a little like the pot calling the kettle black.

In the white heat of contempt I don’t pause to look at my own failed bargains with myself. I promise myself so much and reward myself with so little. At least Gav uses every free moment he’s got. I don’t.

I paid the rent today, which was five days late. The landlord phoned us up in case we’d forgotten. So after handing over our money at Botham Street, I walked into town via White Deer Park. On Midden Road I saw a large blue-green dragonfly. This surprised me because to my knowledge, there aren’t any stretches of open water nearby and the area is quite urban.

Then, as I walked along Queen’s Road, a young woman rushed from a house across the street ringing her hands and in a state of agitation, shouting about “the dirty revolting working classes, they make me hot under my skin.” She passed me and ran off down a side road still shouting, beginning a tirade against “dirty fat women” which was lost to me as she disappeared from view.

No one seemed to take much notice.

Watermouth seems to have a large population of grotesques, derelicts and just plain nutters. You see them occasionally in the Cathedral grounds or pacing the pavements around Maynard Gardens.

When Jeremy was down I remember this: as he, Lee and I walked back from the pier, a young woman ahead of us with black hair, her face a ghastly orange beneath the street lamps, and carrying two heavily laden plastic bags, started shouting and cursing (“fucking-this,” “fucking-that,” etc.) at the passing cars and people. The last we saw of her she was squatting on her haunches on the traffic island at the bottom of Andrew St. with her trousers round her knees, calmly taking a shit, oblivious to all but herself.

Then there’s the young long-haired man in trench coat, woolly cap and kickers who’s always deeply engrossed in conversation with himself or some invisible friend, gesticulating with his arms, jabbing a finger to emphasise a point, and speaking in a rapid nasal voice so unintelligible that it sounds like complete gibberish. Sometimes he carries a newspaper and unfolds it, holding it up to show his nonexistent companion some feature of interest or importance.

Or there’s the old lady on the pavement near the Pembroke, she of the muscular, active outdoor variety with a bird like urgency of gait and bright gleaming eyes. The other day I saw her standing at the side of the road with a piece of pink toilet paper in her hand, thrusting it at the approaching traffic with a look of insolent determination on her face and going through the motions of wiping her arse.

The house has been empty most of the day; Lindsey’s at work, at the Admiral. Susie has gone out this evening with Conrad and the rest of Atom Dance Eight. I’ve been watching TV all day.

I was disturbed late on by a blazing row next door between husband and wife, she screaming that “you can’t tell me what to fuckin’ do!” while the kids sobbed and shouted for them to stop.

Self remembering

This afternoon I moved all the armchairs but one, the TV, the sofa and a sideboard out into the kitchen or Barry’s garage-bedroom. He seemed quite satisfied with the TV down there. Lindsey got home from the Admiral late this evening and we talked about nihilism and thoughtlessness and she said she isn’t keen on the idea of staying here another year, especially after Susie leaves for Germany in the summer.

I warmed to the idea of my stay here over the afternoon, especially after I’d got my things sorted out and some degree of order imposed on the chaos of half-unpacked boxes and suitcases. But doubts remain, and I foresee difficulties in carving out a track for myself in this environment. The physical separation from the Grey House is mirrored in the mental sphere, in forgetfulness and self-doubt.

Jason called in briefly at quarter past nine and stayed half-an-hour or so. It’s 1.20 a.m. and Barry and Stu are still up, listening to music—The Doors at this moment, “Not To Touch The Earth,” is loud from the garage beneath.

I’m drawing to the end of another untidy journal and my thoughts naturally look beyond. My dissatisfaction with this form is a fairly constant and ever-growing preoccupation at the moment, and this is something that will get worse, not better, as time progresses. Progress—a word to be conjured with, implicit in which is the idea of evolution and steady improvement. All I see is the same endless limping from one month to the next, one year to the next . . . Words dissemble, words not quick, words lie on the page to taunt with their stark inaccuracy and brute second-handedness, life itself glimpsed and experienced but gone, gone, never to be captured in all its glitter and crackle and drear on the white angularities of a two-dimensional page—not by a biro-driven chronological narrative anyway, not in its present form.

Perhaps if I expanded this account to record my days in all their minute eternities from dawn to dusk, each tiny sensation and flow of idea mirrored and translated into a fluid flow of words. The hissing breath of time rushing by.

“Purple Haze” pounds through the floor now and it is 1.31 a.m. Monday morning and I write write write for the sheer pleasure of writing and wish it could always be so. Too often of late I’ve found my mind in the dread grip of torpor and lethargy, unable or unwilling to pierce the dreary fog of lazy thinking and the crudity of reality-approximating words. I finish each entry for the day or week with the dead weight of frustration and uninspired fatigue inside. I find it genuinely difficult to write about each day as it comes, especially if the day is routine.

I find it hard to separate out the surface fabric of my did-so-and-so-at-such-and-such-a-time life from the richer inner patternings and textures which mark me out as distinct and separate from friends and other people. I half-plan to continue on the typewriter, which I think would be a good idea and would give me a clean start. Read between the lines and see what is there, pierce the surface drudge of descriptive language and finite vocabularies to see what the words mean, see how they fit the intuitions, events, places, and moods I attached them to.

This text must change, must expand, must grow to fit all the things I want it to be, to realise the potential of Words and Mind moving together, so I can become a writer in the truest sense. This requires selfishness, self-motivation, self-remembering, and above all observation. I must look, see and learn at all times, until it becomes a habit, and see in new ways too, not the cobwebbed ways of the past.

Pry open the hidden texts, images, sounds.

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.

Beginning → Middle → End

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

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

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

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

Fabric of the everyday

I’m planning an essay on William Carlos Williams and his relationship with the Modernist artists of the early 20th C; I want to compare Duchamp’s ready-mades and Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow” (from Spring and All) etc. . . . I’ve done a little reading today in the library and I think I can produce a decent piece of work, as it’s very interesting—in fact so much so that I could hardly keep my mind focused on the specific problem long enough and so had to come home, intending to utilise this momentum in a much needed attempt to write something here a bit more worthy than the usual pap.

Instead I got enmeshed in the fabric of the everyday—conversations, extraneous thoughts, the fruitless chat and chaff of humdrum living—and I forgot my resolve.

Sometimes I find living in a communal household fairly difficult, and I’m reduced to a state of edgy irritation and needless ranting. Tonight I was as fractious as ever, and it produced exactly nothing. My natural disposition is towards the solitary and self-contained and I think there’s a lot to look forward to in living alone (as Barry, Lee and I all intend doing after June 30th). We’re going to start looking soon.

Lee faces an assessment on March 14th he says he knew nothing about, and he’s a bit alarmed as he feels he’s done nothing really apart from his photogram box, which he’s now going to build into a full-size room, complete with glass-paneled door. He and I removed one from the vicarage up Albany Mount tonight and struggled with it back to the Art College.

Now Ade is here, waiting vainly for Barry to turn up. Plans for the as yet unnamed band still fly back and forth, with drummers to be contacted, portable recording studios to be booked, tapes to be made etc. Five months has produced nothing but plans, plans and more plans. Barry’s out more evenings than not; potential girl friend Tina has stood him up several times and fobs him off with excuses. He’s also been after a Swedish friend of Inga’s he met recently at the Broadway and, scarce able to conceal his jubilant swagger, announced to Lee and Pete and I that he was spending the night at her place. Turned out he, Inga and the girl slept in the same room on separate mattresses, and her Swedish boyfriend turned up the next morning.