Hidden circuits

The history of England is filled with ruthlessness and brutality to other peoples and to our own, traditions and institutions bathed in blood—the Highland Clearances for example, that systematically destroyed the tribal society of the Scottish Highlands so that the English and anglicized Scottish gentry could have their grouse moors and estates.

No doubt Devolution has always been a dead duck as far as Westminster is concerned because the English government wants the money from North Sea oil and Scottish businesses have actively campaigned against a separate assembly for Scotland because they know that such an assembly would be returned with a Labour majority. Class interests transcended ones of nationalism in that case.

People have been exploited, oppressed, misled and slaughtered and yet they still flock around politicians and, like Dad, hoot and wave the flag and say that Britain is great.

Manifold errors

Jeremy and I went into town late morning and returned four hours later with several books from the library.

He isn’t looking forward to the festive season because with his Dad’s remarriage he feels like a stranger in his own home. He described to me the “constant edge” which exists between him and the rest of the ‘family,’ particularly with his step-brother and step-sister who have the usual tap-room derision for all forms of further education. I don’t envy him his situation.

Constant rain today, very heavy at times, but it’s still quite warm. Dad was annoyed at today’s TUC Congress; he said that their decision to give full support to the striking miners was “shocking” and “disgusting,” and declared it to be a “turning point in this country.” TV shots of the miners demonstrating outside the Congress elicited the usual “Look at that lot! You can’t tell whether they’re men or women” etc. “Look at that face—a shocking man,” he said when McGahey appeared, and he emphasised this last point with muttering and sighs.

Ever the reasoned polemicist.

I suppose I’m just as bad, flying into an internal fury on catching sight of the vision of baldness Alex’s friends uniformly present. They’re so utterly predictable, and this is what irritates me, but I never stay around to find out what they’re actually like as people; maybe this is unreasonable but I feel I’ve got the measure of them. Their ‘uniform’ of ‘weirdness’ and dole culture alienates me immediately.

Genesis P. Orridge was on ‘Earsay’ the other day talking about his mixed-media ideas, which I found quite interesting—but why the tired iconography of skulls and shaven-headed mysticism? It’s a tricky path negotiating judging harshly and failing to judge at all; both attitudes lead to manifold errors.

Andrew has been in Denmark since a week last Wednesday. Sten owed him some money from when he worked the festival last time and so paid for his airfare over. He hasn’t been in touch yet.

Newspeak

Lee went back to Watermouth yesterday as the DHSS had promised him his money by Tuesday, but when he got back it hadn’t come.

He phoned me at 6.30 today with some unexpected news: As Alex was in the process of climbing in through a window at the Grey House yesterday, he was stopped by a policeman who searched his room and discovered a skull that someone had taken from the crypts on Smith Square and also the gravestone he’d nicked from a stonemason’s yard when we lived at Jervis Terrace.

Alex was arrested for desecrating a grave along with his friend Tom (who I’ve never met). The latter admitted to smashing a window at Lloyd’s bank and causing £1000 worth of damage. Alex has been charged with acting as an accomplice in this latter crime and he may even serve time. Lee also told me that Sarah has left the squat and is—surprise, surprise—living in Brixton. I felt relieved when I was told all this and from the tone of Lee’s voice I think he was too. Alex will no doubt use the fact that he’s got nicked for desecrating a grave to perpetuate his street cred.

Mum and Dad visited Uncle George’s wife Judy in a Whincliffe hospital tonight. She’s suffering from kidney failure and looks very ill. George naturally is very worried and Judy’s demise won’t lessen his already strange demeanour. For three months he hasn’t missed a day visiting her: he leaves work at five and gets three buses to the hospital, getting home after nine.

The last in the TV series The Paras (complete with jolly whistle-along theme music) made my blood boil but I forced myself to keep my mouth shut. As the programme presenter conceded that the Paras “went a little too far” on Bloody Sunday by shooting 13 unarmed civilians dead, many in the back as they fled, Dad sat there with a blank and unreceptive expression on his face.

His blind glorying in the activities of the British Army sickens and disgusts me and he obviously believes the bilge we are fed on the TV news and in the ‘papers. I know how futile it is to rage and rant but it still frustrates me. “Soldiers are trained to be aggressive ” after all . . .

Likewise with the miner’s strike. Rob says that the miners in Saxton and district are all morons and skivers; he describes his next door neighbor John as a “professional scrounger” who hasn’t worked since Rob and Carol moved there four years ago, but still, in principle I’m on the side of the miners. They’re up against the orchestrated attack of police and media and popular prejudice and it will take a great effort on their part, with much struggle and bitterness, to win this dispute.

When Scargill lets fly accusations of media bias as he did recently at a conference, the individuals who present the news may protest, and I’m sure individually they believe they’re presenting an even handed account of the dispute—The Sun, Express and Daily Mail staff excluded. But this is an organized campaign by a society in which capital holds the reins, a programme by which the state bureaucracy defends what it sees as its interests. It’s reached the situation where these supposed interests don’t even serve other purposes—they’re self-perpetuating and are reinforced by the ideological obedience of the greater mass of people in this country who are inculcated since birth by TV newspeak lies of familycountryworkneverbreakthelaw ethics.

The illusion of free will means that we’re brought up believing we own our own minds when really what we regard as ‘right’ simply serves the interests of the state bureaucracy. The only way to escape is to disbelieve everything you read or hear and to always treat every news item and angle with the utmost cynicism and contempt.

Dictatorship of the proletariat

Lee rang at teatime. He and Pete have made more finds on the derelict-buildings front; a subterranean warehouse cellar, half-filled with water in the centre of Watermouth; they also broke into an office complex and had a narrow escape when alarm bells began to ring.

Lee said Oculus aren’t going to press legal action, and Morris is busy mobilising support—our defenders include sixteen councilors (including leader of the Tory council) and the Bishop of Chichester (!), so it looks—as I suspected it would in the end—as if we’ll be able to stay. “They’re fucked,” said Lee emphatically.

Today I stayed in while Dad set off to work and the sun blazed from a clear sky for the second successive day. I wore only shirtsleeves yet sweated inside by the afternoon and continued reading Wilson’s The Occult.

The miner’s strike is now in its fifth week, and the railway and shipping unions have blocked all movements of coal in support, but Ravenscraig steel workers are angrily demanding that coal be allowed through to keep the furnaces running at two thirds normal output: they fear closing the plant will give BSC the chance it’s looking for to shut it down completely. Scargill is right when he says the strike is now resolving itself in class terms. The Ravenscraig men should take sides now, because keeping the plant open is no guarantee of job security. The interests of Ravenscraig lies with the miners.

Dad declares that Hatton, Scargill and Ben ‘are out to undermine democracy, get rid of the monarchy, and establish a dictatorship,” and he can’t understand why such proven “enemies of Britain” are still at large. Today also, the Greenham Common women were evicted from their plastic and wicker tents by 300 police. “Trash!” spits out Dad. Although I think their ‘non-violent’ protests are futile they inspire me with sneaking sympathy for their methods. I admire their persistence.

Pure and perfect expression of reality

Dad gave me a lift into Easterby at one and I wandered around town, feeling strangely uneasy and self-conscious. I feel more at home in Watermouth anymore. Why should this be? Lee’s not coming back for a fortnight and I rang both Grant and Jeremy but neither were in.

I went to Erikson’s to get a film for the Minolta ciné camera but was irked to discover that no black and white film cartridge for a Minolta XL Sound-84 has been made for a while now. Not only that, but the existing Ektachrome 160 cartridge costs nearly five pounds. So, at a loss after my fruitless disillusioning hours in town, I bought a 12” by Test Department.

Lee called and told me about a method he’s devised for pinhole ciné filming. He’s had to rebuild the insides of an old Standard 8 camera he got for a fiver and he’s made several turrets of differing focal lengths, each with a tiny pinhole at one end. He’s going to have to calibrate the film, frame by frame, exposing ten frames at each exposure time (making each up to ten minutes in length) in order to produce a standard result, and he’ll crank the camera mechanism by hand. So with each frame exposed for ten minutes, it would take twenty days of solid filming to produce the average three minutes of film—that’s sixty days working eight hours a day. '

Lee doesn’t think anyone else has thought of this before and I can’t wait to see what the finished product will look like. It’s taken him several weeks to work out the mechanics of the process: he had to take apart the camera and then put it together again, a feat of practical skill well beyond me. Gav says he always thinks of Lee as a “tank mechanic.”

Later, I was treated to a fatherly tirade against “left-wingers” and homosexuals, which was more amusing than annoying: “We pander to queer people who live queer lives.” I almost burst out laughing at this. Dad’s safe secure world of blindness and gross oversimplifications is being dismantled bit-by-bit.

There are now twelve aquariums in my room, each with various aquatic and semi-aquatic inhabitants such as toads, frog tadpoles, newts, salamanders and hordes of juvenile axolotols, some no longer than a few millimetres but all exhibiting the familiar broad bland facial features in miniature. Dad plans to sell the majority of them to a pet shop for £1 each.

Statement of the problem: Prose as a medium of communication is imperfect. Words dissemble. Self consciousness, no spontaneity, a lack of creativity, a ‘Pure and Perfect expression of Reality’ never achieved by the arbitrary nature of word-sound and word-structure. All words convey idea/sensation/representation in a rudimentary manner.