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Four years on from June 8th 1980 → FORWARD →

Pete and I called in at Westdorgan Road last night and were both struck by the atmosphere of boredom, ill-temper and cynicism. We were glad to leave and I began to rue my decision to move in at the end of the month. I put my foot in it yet again when Ade uncharacteristically refused the oil as it was passed to him. I bluntly commented “perhaps you should try reading a book,” and he left shortly after scarcely saying another word.

Since Monday the weather has been consistently hot, not a cloud in the sky. This morning at ten the thermometer in my east-facing bathroom registered nearly 80°F. I’m finding it impossible to work and apply myself to the task in hand. I struggled all morning with the writing of an extended essay on Burroughs for Colin Pasmore, an essay that should have been written and handed in on Wednesday, but by mid-afternoon I’d failed even to make a start and so missed another tutorial (on Alice Walker), which is my second for this course this term. I can hardly look forward to a very encouraging report. I managed two-and-a-half sides and then spent four hours looking at books on photography and film, Rodchenko’s 1924 portraits of Mayakovsky, etc.

I finally managed to write eight sides in rough, and copied up 2½ sides, and at ten-thirty, Pete and I went to the Lancaster to see Jeff Fowler and Miles Beattie’s band That Whole Panic! The music was fast funk, Jeff’s girlfriend Laura on keyboards, M. Beattie all arms and legs, pouting, on vocals (“Trees and sky, no reason why . . .”), JF an excellent bassist. Lindsey, Barry, Stu and Susie were there too, Lindsey and Barry in particular quite drunk.

Our LSD extravaganza is set for the end of next week and the number of participants is now some half-a-dozen. I sat there watching the sparse crowd and wishing I had the wherewithal to perform ‘live.’

Rub out the word

Still grey today but the biting cold has gone. We set off along Blea Gate and walked to Gilsey, returning along the path which runs high along the edge of the moor, through Fordings and Birkslape to Shake Bridge and a rough track that dropped down from a lonely farm, squat against the grey sky, through wind tossed conifers to Thwaitegarth.

We walked back along the river, the sweet scented air full of summer balm, and I felt happy for once.

There’s sense of history in this area that’s impossible to capture in words. The owner of this caravan, Mrs. Metcalfe, comes from a family who’ve lived in this district for years and the tombstones at Barras Gill and Owlands are filled with the names of Metcalfes, Redmires, Wortons and Grimdens. These families must feel such a linear linkage with their past. Mum and Dad went out for a walk this evening and were accosted at the gate of our field by an old salt, a Redmire who was married to a Grimden of the Grimdens of Yealeth Hall, the Grimdens who, with their own private army of 400 men on white horses, turned out to support Edward in his campaign against the Scots in the early 14th century.

This caravan is quite comfortable and it’s equipped with a Calor Gas heater, stove and wall lamps, and we’re wrapped in a hissing glow warm against the grey scene outside the windows. I sleep on a mattress on the floor in a sleeping bag. I’ve brought quite a bit of work with me: The Victim and Herzog to read, a presentation on the former to prepare for Monday next, and Eric Mottram to make notes on.

I’m thinking of collecting together my Burroughs photocopies and beginning a scrapbook/ideas book to experiment with words, a place I can be free of the constraints of grammatical sense and typographical convention and where sentence and word structures can’t foul ideas at their source. There I can be less hampered by my attachment to the final text/bookish form of this journal. It’s an attachment that’s difficult to be rid of . . ..

What did I mean by my comment the other night about needing to take sides? The Burroughs tutorial set me off reading Mottram’s Critical Appraisals and looking closely at the cut-up technique, and I feel enthusiastic about these ideas. They’ve touched a chord somewhere inside and I think of my own struggles to resolve certain questions here.

Rub Out The Word.

This text terrorizes my need—my longing—to catch all things at once and in their truest form and in their very essence. “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was God.” All these different moments forced into the same unremitting form. Literature is decades behind the other arts because it doesn’t rely as much on the immediate consciousness of the reader. The word isn’t sacred, but a means to an end, nothing more. Why should texts operate only on the one level of time-space, running a narrative plot in a narrow, strictly chronological and sequential way? Literature must depart from its rigid narrative beginning-middle-end style, just as film has done. Film’s editing, intercutting, and juxtaposition appears to operate uneasily in language. New forms demand a hearing and demand time for their exploration.

The Gysin-Burroughs cut-up technique seems to be one way to combat the tyranny of the Holy Word: “The cut-up method brings to writers the collage which has been used by painters for 50 yrs. And used by the moving and still camera. YOU CANNOT WILL SPONTANEITY. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.” Words/texts/language all a complex, well-entrenched and cohesive system of control to limit and delineate the boundaries of ‘the reasonable’ and the ‘only-to-be-expected.’ Cut-up, verbal collage and juxtaposition attacks the power-system of language (by power-system I mean an entrenched control system firmly regulating mind & thought).

Burroughs: “Capitalism is a system of dependences, which run from within to without, from without to within, from above to below, from below to above. All is dependent, all stands in chains. Capitalism is a condition of the soul and of the world . . .”

From birth our eyes and ears are not our own. Parents and the state implant meanings in the subconscious mind, an (unintentional?) act of programming and perpetuation we can intellectually reject, but this material resurfaces unwilled and unannounced like images from a nightmare suddenly remembered the following day. We are unconscious victims of a subtle form of mass control and mass conditioning, minds influenced by TV, by radio, the insidious banter of advertisements, the “condition of the soul.”

No man, no woman is free. We can only be partially free from this. For Burroughs, freedom is freedom from the “cycle of conditioned action,” and conditioning makes freedom near impossible to attain.

Realisations

I was up at seven-thirty and in University for my nine a.m. meeting with the Dean. My intermit-scheme was treated with the expected skepticism and I heard with sinking heart that the Student Planning Committee was “99.9% certain” not to grant me the year out.

I came away having bitterly accepted defeat—I felt sick—and decided not to bother applying to the SPC at all. So that is it—finals next May, all the dread trauma of revision, examinations, the A-levels all over again.

Today’s tutorial on Burroughs reminds me of many things I’ve felt in the past—loose ends tied up, connections made. Realisations I’m too tired to write about at the moment.

Pick up your soft typewriter and walk

I saw Colin Pasmore, Don Carwardine (briefly), and then Ned Ammons, all about my scheme to intermit. Pasmore raised the sort of objections that have been thrown at me already—intermitting interrupts the continuity of my academic study, etc.—but Carwardine briefly filled me with hope by saying he’d “have a word” with Ned Ammons. When I saw Ammons himself, he was again skeptical, and wondered if in fact I wasn’t regretting my decision about the year abroad. He advised me to go see the Dean and to present my request in writing, which he will read out at a meeting of the Student Planning Committee on July 2nd.

I left his office with mixed feelings, both about my prospects and about the desire to intermit itself . . ..

Later I read and photocopied Burroughs’ “The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith,” an exposition about the cut-up/fold in techniques he does with Gysin, his attitude about the would-be writer, his methods of material acquisition / recording of reality. This filled me with enthusiasm and I think made me realise how these Words and THIS FORMAT exercise a kind of tyranny over me.

I must dispense with them entirely, or at least dispense with them as the sole means of communicating my ideas or exploring literary techniques . . . EXPAND!

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.