Imagination and memory

I went on a walk over Oaklass Moors with Mum and Dad. We set out very early, and were donning our boots and thick socks in Oaklass car park at ten o’clock.

Our route was a familiar one that we’ve done at least a couple of times before so I knew every part of it well. We walked through Oaklass to the waterfall, which is very popular this time of year, filled with lots of tents and cars and families. We struggled up the steep path to the ‘pavement’ of scree at the back of the waterfall and then through the desolate landscape beyond, leaving all the people behind. Oaklass Pond was soon opening up before us, its wooded borders contrasting with the high limestone scarred fells beyond.

We ate our dinner at the water’s edge.

The rest of the walk was a gradual climb beyond the Pond, following a tarmac road some of the way before cutting across the boggy moors to Ewedar Edge. I clambered into Albert Cave and briefly relived my potholing days as I crawled on my belly between boulders to emerge thirty yards away, much to Dad’s amusement. It was warm as we slogged along the foot of Ewedar Edge, the unchanging limestone precipices gleaming remote and glittering in the sun, the call of curlews and the lone silhouette of a hawk high above the rocky skyline.

Dad reminisced about a day out he had had as a fifteen year old, pushing his bicycle up past Ewedar, and the high crags and rock faces had never seemed so awesome and alone to him as then, and he’d wished he’d someone to share the feeling with. . . .

Soon the sun was swallowed up by grey rafts of cloud and we were climbing again, past Cartdale Hall in its bowl of black forbidding hills, overlooked by the dark granite peak of Coneyford Haw. Spots of rain began to fall but we trudged on and on, up and up, past herds of cattle and young calves, through limestone boulders breaking through the turf, up to the very head of the pass and a sweeping panorama back down to Oaklass Pond and beyond to Ainderdale.

In the plains towards Sandhow and Parson’s Moss, a grey pall of rain blotted out all but the faint whaleback outline of hills and threw the distinctive twin peaks of Owl and Black Crag into sharp, dark relief against the all-consuming grey. The rain still spat, and although we were still shadowed by a black cloud bottom its fringes were bright, and we could glimpse placid skies with towering yellow cumuli far away on the horizon.

It was late afternoon by the time we had descended once more to Oaklass for tea and toasted teacakes at Braystone Lodge. The journey home took fifty minutes and those vistas I can never capture in words were relegated once more to the land of imagination and memory.

The country is in the grip of what some would call a crisis. The miners have been on strike for seventeen weeks and the dockers are out now too, tightening their grip with today’s announcement that all lorries are banned from ferry services. Dad is convinced the two strikes are part of a larger plot by “subversives” and “left-wing types” to overthrow the established order.

I find it hard to understand when the leaders of the striking dock-workers are quick to deny there are any political aspects to their strike and that it’s purely economic. I suppose on one hand it’s easy to see why: The union leadership is scared of losing its stake, scared of destroying their bourgeois respectability—scared of making plain what they know deep down to be true. Instead of shrinking from the truth, the union leadership should broadcast it.

No doubt the workers themselves know it.

Striking is obviously political because economic relations dictates political power in the country—employees and employers, workers and state. When scenes of police clad in riot gear battling with stone throwing miners appear on our TVs who can deny that the strike isn’t for purely economic reasons? The miners and the dockers are engaged in a fight with the police, the judiciary and the media—all the apparatus of the State. I doubt they can win—indeed, in most peoples’ eyes they are the villains of the piece anyway.

A compromise, in famous British tradition, will end the dispute and life will again return to normal . . . . I hope I’m wrong.

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.

Happy memories leave a bitter taste

Robert and Carol came today and stayed into the evening, back from a week in Stakedale with kids from school which they said they enjoyed, save for the drunken excesses of the rest of the staff.

As twilight deepened into night, the five of us talked about the tragic nature of time and life, the existential nature of perception, the grasping ego, and how we return to the places we love time after time because in pursuit of an illusion and an anticipated reality that hardly ever conforms to the ‘actual’ reality. Happy memories spur us on, but we never find what we’re looking for. The best we can hope for is that we stumble across some new moments of insight and enjoyment . . ..

We can’t process the moment of harmony, the moment whose essence escapes us the more we stand back and intellectualise it. For one brief moment we realise and we can see.

There were moments in Calverdale when I felt I couldn’t say exactly what it was I wanted in going back there, but at others—such as the time on Half Stile Hill watching the eclipse, the river Calver beneath us bathed in golden green light—the pulse of certainty was strong and I knew: ‘This is it . . .’ Our fixed mental conceptions of a particular place, event or person victimize us and we find time and time again that the reality of now—the present moment—fails to live up our expectations, and we’re surprised and disappointed.

I’m reminded of the story I read somewhere of a man who went back to the house where he’d grown up and where, as a boy, he’d helped his father plant a seedling. In the intervening years, the seedling had grown vividly in his mind into a mighty tree, yet when he returned to the house he found out that the sapling had been cut down not long after his family had moved. What then was the greater reality for that man? The treeless garden of the present, or the sturdy spreading tree of his mental landscape?

Most people would say the former, yet for the man, the mental tree was real for many years. We’re the incurable victims of our preconceptions and fantasies. We can’t be freed, for these tendencies are linked inextricably with our hopes and desires. Where lies freedom from the cycle of conditioned responses and action . . .? We spend lifetimes pursuing our illusions while here and now reality slips through our fingers even as we see it, feel it, hear it . . ..

Robert and Carol left for Dearnelow at ten-thirty. They’ve booked a fortnight in the caravan in Calverdale for August.

Swallowed up in time

Drove back home today instead of tomorrow as planned. Dad was ill with a cold and the weather deteriorated overnight so we cut the holiday short. We came back through Low End, Marpeth Nook, Kit Bank Bottom, over the Stonewath Pass to Ainderdale and got back at two-thirty.

The past six days at Friar Beck have been enjoyable and Calverdale has become one of my favourite places. The things I declared would be, ARE.

My perceptions of the holiday strengthen as its actuality is swallowed up in time.

Old delights

Colin Wilson regards the onset of Christianity as a disaster for ‘magical’ man. “Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because human beings are gullible and superstitious” (p. 272). The doctrinaire and ruthless nature of Christianity fitted well with the savagery of the world into which it sprang, hence its success.

I was in Easterby during the afternoon, the day hot and sunny more akin to high summer than the stutterings of early spring. Town was packed, but for once I quite enjoyed the jostle and throng and had a contented day; I bought a couple of books, a pair of plimsolls and had a curry at the Bahawal . . . the old delights.

I took leave of the city centre and wandered aimlessly through the mills and warehouses and near-empty streets between Leckenby Road and the Polytechnic, full of thoughts of Lee and Grant. How is it that Easterby seems unreal? Even when I walk in it I can’t grasp it; it’s as though I’m blinded by my image of the town, a conception that’s grown from all my memories and the past lives I’ve lived here, from Lee, Grant, from Ashburn, Lodgehill and Hainsworth Hall, the derelict mills and houses . . . If I try to rationalise the point it merely makes it all the more diffuse and difficult to grasp.

My mental Easterby is as real as the Easterby of actuality. It’s only when we’re distanced from the places we take for granted that we appreciate them, stepping back from unthinking involvement with environments and realising them for the first time.

Flux

Bitterly cold. It was the coldness which woke me up and, eventually, forced me out of bed. Everyone was scurrying about, cursing the freezing temperatures and trying to warm themselves on our electric fires.

Quite an idle day; little doing.

In the afternoon, Del took Barry, Pete and I out to in his car for something to eat in Watermouth. He treated us each to a meal of mixed grill and prawn cocktail with ice cream and fruit salad to finish . . . He owes the bank £400 and has been told he must not, on any account, write out another cheque. So between the four of us we totted up a £13 bill and Del wrote out another cheque . . . There was some hassle over the money and the ageing Greek waitress’s servile smiles vanished suddenly. So much for Christmas spirit. More and more I smell the stench of hypocrisy and greed at Christmas. It’s just one huge capitalist con trick.

We left feeling full, piled into Del’s Hillman Imp and he took us on a tour of Knoyldon and Woodside, where he spent the first nine years of his life. Knoyldon’s narrow winding streets and picture book facades look worthy of exploration; there’s a squat ancient church that, says Del, is linked with witchcraft at certain times of the year. It was a journey back through time for him as he was seeing these streets and schools of childhood and infancy for the first time in fourteen years. He got very quiet and sober and we could tell that the nostalgia of the moment had got to him.

As we drove he pointed out features he particularly remembered. “It’s odd how the salient memories are those concerned with death and tragedy” . . . The turn-off where Cilla Black’s niece was knocked down and killed . . . the stretch of road where a hunchback Hell’s Angel and companion collided head on with a car while overtaking a bus . . . the Ryvita factory on the hill in which a man was beheaded on his very first morning of work as he scooped to clean out a machine . . . These incidents, like marks in a book, have mapped out and particularised Del’s memories of his childhood, just as similar such events mark all our lives out as unique and special and individual to us.

There was something magical about that drive, the deepening dusk, the blue and pale world “fluxed in declining light,” something about the succession of street corners and pavements streaming past the car window, unthought of places next to lampposts and shop windows, all terribly alone and separate somehow, fragments of lives forgotten and never mattering to anyone, anywhere. So much desolation and striving. Words are just marks on a page. These things dwarf me. I’m lost for descriptions and none of it can ever be fully conveyed or captured by these cold constructions in ink. I don’t think in words and find it difficult to make them yield their meaning. But whatever their inaccuracy and shortcomings: I have to try, and have tried. These pages bear witness to the effort.

The car journey with its sudden confluence of so much memory and experience left me feeling thoughtful, thinking that maybe Nietszche is right and that history is one long retreat into nihilism, into unbelief and into blind struggle, that maybe we have to save ourselves from these numbing conclusions and useless thinking, but not by becoming blind again but by some other step maybe, into acceptance. But for me right now these are just so many words, and I feel them in the abstract if I feel them at all. One day perhaps . . ?

Pete wonders if when we’re old we’ll look back and hate ourselves because of how little we achieve. Maybe we’ll wake up in our late-‘40s, married with children and a home maybe, a lifetime of memories behind us . . . As soon as we got back Lee was walking up the road to greet us, in unrestrained and festive mood, and I plunged back into the present.

We played stud poker (for money) most of the evening and Barry and I ended the game heavily in debt, but were genially forgiven. Late we embarked on another reckless robbery attempt. We drove through steady rain to a boarded up house on Wickboure Road being used as a storehouse for Debenhams. While Del and I acted as look-outs, Lee and Barry whittled away at the putty around one of the windows with a penknife, getting most of the glass out but finding a wooden board beyond that was too much of a match, so we gave up.

Time bandit

I woke up today feeling fairly rough. My throat has been swollen at one side for a couple of days now and it’s painful for me to swallow, so I stayed here at the caravan all day while Mum, Dad and Andrew went for a walk from Owlands along Ansett Scar. They said it was still and very hot, and quite tough going, and I was glad I’d decided to stay behind.

Rob and Carol went for a walk along Blea Gate after the others had left, returned to pack their tent and finally set off home at one o’clock, leaving only a flattened patch of grass at the back of the caravan to say they were ever here.

All day the wind roared fiercely through the treetops and battered the caravan and it was brilliantly sunny.

I fell asleep in the afternoon and woke up when Mum and Dad came back, by which time the sun was casting long shadows. Langbole Hill directly opposite, framed in the caravan window, was furrowed with light that picked at the ditches and mounds which corrugate its surface. The valley here is narrow and the slopes opposite looked sharp and near, green against the pale sky, striped with dark shadows of trees and walls.

We took a last customary stroll along Blea Gate and were rewarded with a sighting of the female deer, which spotted us immediately and bounded away into the open fields past unconcerned cattle and grazing sheep. We’ve seen deer every night since we arrived, and we’ve decided they must lie up during the day in a large patch of deep meadowsweet which clings to the slope that drops into the fields from Blea Gate.

As we walked back I caught myself wondering how much I’ll go through before I’m walking along this path again. I’ll be sad to be leaving Calverdale; I’ve enjoyed this week. It's flown by.

How swiftly time robs us, leaving only memories and wistful final evenings of sun and shadows. I wonder if the Honeycotts take this place for granted. I suppose they must, for unlike us, they’ll have nothing with which to compare it.

Really here in name only

A thoroughly lazy day. I spent it either listening to records, watching television, or looking at books. McEnroe pasted Lewis 6-2, 6-2, 6-2 in the Wimbledon final and then I saw John Lloyd become the first Brit since 1936 to win a Wimbledon title when he won in the mixed doubles.

Rob played a few of his hundred of records, most of which date from the early- to mid-‘70s, and he waxed nostalgic about the era he was my age (1973). A new brand of cynicism is abroad now and those laid-back easy days seem to have gone forever, but still live on in Rob’s records, on songs that sound woefully out of sync with the mood at large, especially among young people.

Some of his records make me nostalgic, and remind me of his student days at Valley Shore College and my visits there. One image in particular imprints itself on my memory: a figure sitting at a desk in a room that Rob wanted to show me because he said it was haunted; as we opened the door the light streamed in white and dazzling behind the person at the desk. I also remember sitting in the audience at a play or something, and in the seats in front of me was a man with a huge ugly football-like growth on the back of his neck, which showed through the strands of white hair draped over his collar.

In the afternoon Carol, having politely ignored the issue since I arrived, couldn’t help jeering at my accent, which is tinged now with a southern twang. “You sound very middle-class and well-cultured,” she said. Me!? Cultured and middle-class!? That’s horrible!

Just as my northern tones used to reveal themselves on the vowel sound ‘o,’ now these self-same vowel sounds betray a traitorous tongue.

I went to bed early after watching a TV play, Rhino, about a 14 year-old black truant called Angie. The portrayal of the apathy of the school staff and the pointless insistence on doing things which teach fuck-all of practical use in the world at large was all-too accurate and got us fired up and angry. The whole education system is rotten to the core.

Of course it takes a TV programme to spur me into indignation. I wish I could maintain this sense of urgency and anger all the time!