Verbal masturbation

My Conflict and Consensus tutorial was the usual forlorn tedium.

On The Road and Howl were this week’s topics for for dissection and verbal masturbation, JK especially getting slagged off as pretentious, shallow and sexist. Fair point, but I still think Kerouac an inspiration. For all the ‘intellectual clarity,’ no one began to penetrate the inner heart of the writing, and I left feeling slightly irritated.

I went and got drunk at the newly refurbished Pembroke with Gareth and Stu, the former sun burnt from his weekend at the Glastonbury CND festival. We then went back to their place and we've whiled away the night smoking dope with Jason and Barry and Lindsey. For all my supposed indifference and liberal laissez-faire declarations, I was acutely aware of Jason and Lindsey.

I fully expected them to slink off to bed together. But they didn’t, and L. climbed the stairs alone.

Gareth has gone to bed fairly early too as he’s tired from his eleven-hour journey. I’m sleeping on Stu’s floor.

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.

Cul-de-sac

At dinnertime I made one of my infrequent visits to Grant’s in Lodgehill.

Dad dropped me on Easterby Road and I walked up to Grant’s house. The pavements were covered in hailstones.

Thankfully, Grant was in good spirits and fairly cheerful. After listening to music, we went out for a walk and made our way to Woodhead Park. We were caught in a cloudburst of hail and sleet, so we dashed for cover in Hainsworth Hall. The swirling snow blanked everything out and Grant was genuinely anxious about being in the open when thunder crackled overhead. He ran ahead of me in the storm.

Hainsworth Hall seemed a haven of peace, quiet and musty warmth in the midst of that white gale lashing outside the windows. We drifted from gallery to gallery in an almost disinterested fashion. I enjoyed the timeless tranquility of those silent, echoing, wooden halls, as if the outside world wasn’t really there, just a picture behind the windows. We sat for an hour or two downstairs in the cafeteria drinking the acrid tea and coffee and talking before wandering back to his house.

In the evening we went to the Bridge Inn for a drink and walked back to my house to listen to the new Fall session on John Peel. I remembered three of the four tracks from the concert in Gloucester. By nightfall about a quarter of an inch of snow had settled & it covered the roads and gardens in a pure, unbroken white blanket.

Grant too seems to feel he needs to make some change for the new year, some kind of decisive act. (Perhaps these resolutions are made annually by most people and it’s a sign of our failure to exert any self-control over our lives that we never keep to them?). He keeps talking about having his ears pierced, as though this trivial action will symbolically reaffirm his resolution, just as I toy with the idea of shaving my head to strengthen my determination to change.

In both our lives, there’s a need to seize control. I for one feel as though I’m drifting helplessly through life like a rudderless ship, and that one day I’ll open my eyes and I’ll be thirty, and the years will have slipped by and I’ll be as far from real understanding as I ever was.

I’ve suddenly noticed how I don’t have any conception of what the immediate future will bring, whereas before I went to University I felt that just going there would somehow be a catalyst to trigger happiness. This I felt on some level other than that of simple speculation, imagination, a less than concrete sense of the Possible . . .

Those spring months of 1982 were quite happy and certain ones for me. I knew where I was going and things were good. I felt like I was getting glimpses of another plane, a world separate from and yet sensed through and linked with the ordinary one. Kerouac’s novels pointed to this, and in that respect I defend him strenuously. His writing inspired me, fired me, gave me a breath of the tragic nature of the world. We’re all imprisoned within bodies that are subject to disease, decay and ultimate death, and while we can explore immortality with our minds, we know we’ll be dead within a certain number of years.

Kerouac captured this forlorn sense of melancholy for me, although I see now with the ‘wisdom’ and premature cynicism of my age that the man was a failure, was trapped in the emotional cul-de-sac of what I suppose Colin Wilson would call ‘the old existentialism’. He drank himself to death. But still, he touched a chord in my heart. So I went to University and the reality of that wasn’t what I’d anticipated, and now as we enter 1984, I’m “hanging in the air . . . without help, without fundamental beliefs.”

There’s no dream-vision of what the future should bring.