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.

Blood and guts

I went into Easterby this morning and bought Kathy Acker’s Blood & Guts in High School and my coach ticket back to Watermouth.

Andrew arrived in the evening and brought a few book covers he has designed with him to show us. He’s pleased he's getting a raise in June.

Floating

I spent £21 on a new coat and new shoes, an extravagance which made me feel a little guilty. The sun was again glaring down as I sweated my way around town, walking all the way along Leckenby Road to see the empty mills of Southampton Woolbrokers Ltd which Lee had said was worth a visit.

I called in on Nanna P. She had a “turn” on Monday and thought she was dying. “I felt like my head was separate from my body and was floating around the room.” She still looked ill although she was vocal enough and trotted out the expected tedious stories of Uncle Kenneth and Shirley and “ar’ Nicola.” Her wheelchair stood in the hallway, folded and awaiting use. . . . She says she gets a pain in her head which sounds to me like a potential cerebral haemorrhage.

Her Mum and Dad died of these.

I came home, had tea and watched TV all evening. Old routines. My mind has frozen up as I try to write this, evidently because the torpour of my existence the last few days has allowed it to fall into a dull, forgettable state. How slowly I write—how slowly the thought processes are clumsily parodied by word formation. The Acker-inspired torrent of Sunday night is the least self-conscious thing I’ve written since I came home.

John Turney rang at 11.30 p.m. to remind me to bring him a biography of Stalin I’d promised him.

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 . . .