Nadir

I got up at half-nine this morning and Mum, Dad and Andrew had gone into the Dales. I wouldn’t have minded going myself, but I declined because “I have too much work to do.”

I made notes on Reconstruction, 1877-1901 (“The Nadir”) in the latter part of the afternoon, then watched TV for a while and mooched about inside. Outside it was bright and sunny with a clear sky.

They returned at seven-thirty, tired and tanned. I wished I’d gone. Time is slipping away, the holiday’s winding down. . . .

More than that

Robert, Andrew, Dad and I went to Cardigan Park to see the clash between Athletic and Astlow Town, who are near the bottom. We'd at least expected a victory from Easterby and when we saw the ball glancing off Newlands’s brute head and bulleting into the net after just three minutes, we felt sure we were going to see three or four goals.

But as the game progressed and half-time came and went, Easterby started playing structure-less football and seemed to hang back pathetically, almost as if they were waiting for Astlow to score. And soon enough they did! Someone handled the ball in the area, and the referee threw out an avenging finger toward the spot. Ackroyd dived the right way but the penalty went in. 1-1.

And that was that. No more Athletic attempts to reclaim the lead. A handful of the Astlow fans kept making ape noises and gestures whenever Keith Scarborough touched the ball and I got so angry I felt as if I could’ve killed some of them.

When the whistle went we streamed out in despair. I was sickened. Robert tried to be philosophical about the match but I couldn’t throw off all my feelings just like that. I feel for the team when standing there watching a game; it can be heart-breaking seeing them go down, and sometimes when I hear a bad result it spoils my day. It’s stupid. . . .

Mum had a big dinner waiting for us.

In the afternoon Dad, Carol, Robert and I went to Dengates to get moss for the newts and frogs. It was blowy and bright, everything fresh and damp, but somehow I still felt a bit down—I just couldn’t shake off an air of “heaviness,” a claustrophobic feeling almost that had its roots in my reaction to Athletic’s performance but now was now more that. . . .

Robert said he felt the same and called it “sadness,” but over what I don’t know, and he wandered slowly along, hardly speaking. I do occasionally get these days when I feel leaden, like there’s an unenthusiastic atmosphere hanging around me. The only thing I can liken it to is that mood I used to get in on the Sundays before school at the end of a holiday.

As we walked back on the canal bank Robert told me he tried to tell Andrew about his meditations on death and felt that Andrew thought the whole thing was “a bit corny.” We paused awhile in the sun on the swing-bridge across the canal & Dad tried to catch some fish we could see huddled nervously in a shoal near the bottom. Robert said sometimes he feels as though he just wants to go off and live on his own, away from Carol even.

Robert & Carol left at teatime and shortly after Mum & Dad took Nanna P. back, giving me a lift up to Jeremy’s on the way. We went out for a drink at a couple of pubs in Kerforth, eventually relaxing into laughter and crude conversations.

I left his house at midnight and it took me an hour to walk home through Farnshaw & Moxthorpe. In Moxthorpe I was accosted by an ex-Egley friend of Steve Brown’s – I didn’t remember his name – who was pissed and kept insisting that I sleep at his house as I had such a long way to go home: “Yoew! Yer can kip at ahr ‘ouse”. . .

When I finally got back home everything was dark and quiet.

What's the matter?

It was a typical Sunday. Mum, Dad and Nanna P. went out for a ride round in the car and came back late afternoon.

I'd been planning to do some work but when they got back I was watching a hippy-influenced dramatization of the life of St. Francis of Assissi by Franco Zeffirelli, which had some interesting bits, despite being on the sugary side: the future St. Francis hurls his fine fabrics out the window to the scrambling crowds below, imploring them to renounce their material possessions; he's dragged before the fat earthy bishop and jeering townspeople, silences them by calmly telling them what he believes; strips off completely naked and walks out of town back to his ruined retreat.

He found a way out. I’ve picked up The Outsider by Colin Wilson and I read it this evening. It's really an interesting book.

Tolstoy . . . cites an Eastern fable of a man who clings to a shrub on the side of a pit to escape an enraged beast at the top and a dragon at the bottom. Two mice gnaw at the roots of his shrub. Yet while hanging, waiting for death, he notices some drops of honey on the leaves of the shrub, and reaches out and licks them. This is man, suspended between the possibilities of violent accidental death & inevitable natural death, diseases accelerating them, yet still eating, drinking, laughing at Fernandel in the cinema. This is the man who calls the Outsider morbid because he lacks appetite for the honey!

I'm not advancing myself as an ‘Outsider,’ but I think that anyone who spends just a little time dwelling on what’s behind existence must necessarily tend toward this category, if not in actions, then certainly in mentality. The majority of people don’t think about these things, preferring instead to live out lives in a blind and battling slog.

And for what? “These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider . . . has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape.”

My “semi-mania” and “half-belief” in myself is motivated by this desire to escape, a desire to throw myself wholeheartedly into something which I know to be right and true, because I drift without rhyme nor reason through life. I need some act needed that shows me that I too have “power over my doubts and self-questionings.”

I don’t know . . . What do I do? At the present time I just don’t have the courage or the conviction to act on undefined beliefs (so undefined I can’t even grasp ‘em myself) and to change. Going to Uni. has shown me that changing surroundings and friends doesn’t do a thing. This I knew already, although I tried—half-romantically—to convince myself that it wouldn’t be so. . . .

The change has got to come from inside, be in me as a person, but I don’t know how or what I have to do and be to change. I sometimes think that perhaps the answer lies in books, literature etc., but I can see a lifetime spent in searching, searching and, at the end of it, still just finding emptiness and confusion.

What I said the other day about living on a plane of intensity utterly removed from the meaningless half-boredom of everyday life is put into sharper focus when I read about the need for a “definitive act.” Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov found that act in a murder, and from then on moved with “a firm purpose.” Says Wilson, “Extremes of crime or extremes of asceticism, murder or renunciation, both have the same effect. Both free the Outsider from his fundamental indecision, so that the problem is carried to a higher stage.”

Zeffirelli’s St. Francis finds his spiritual ‘feet’ after returning, nearly destroyed, from a war. “’Pure will’ without the troubles and perplexities of ‘intellect.’” I need something that's worth doing, really worth doing, but the more I write the more these questions slip frustratingly out of focus in my mind. I really can’t get anything clear in my head . . . confusion . . . lack of purpose.

All the time these insoluble questions possess my mind my work goes untouched and neglected. I've a fortnight left at home and what have I achieved since I’ve been back? Two books read, notes made on one . . . What am I at University for . . .? I'd hoped to find so many answers through living and in books during my course but the reality is nowhere near what I’d dreamed, and really I suppose, what did I expect. . .?

Jeremy rang around nine this evening. He told me that Colin Baron’s Dad died at Christmas of a “massive heart attack.” It was quite a shock to hear this.

Dad told me about his recent bad dream. He was lying in bed alone; everyone else was downstairs and he could hear the “racket” of my music. He felt there was something indescribably evil outside his bedroom window, something nameless, faceless, but terrible all the same, and it was trying to get in to harm him. He didn’t know what it was and he was totally isolated, unable to contact anyone. Whatever it was finally burst through the window and that’s when he woke up to Mum’s anxious “what’s the matter?”

She told him he’d been tossing and moaning in his sleep.

Keep silence

Another dream, also very strange and vivid. I had Helen Vaughan’s decomposing head in a plastic carrier bag, which for some unexplained reason I was carrying around with me. I forget now the insane logic behind everything. Even though I daredn't look, I knew it was her by the hard ridge of her Roman nose imprinting itself through the plastic. It kept banging accidentally against obstacles as I walked. I saw a huge reddish spider-crab type creature which crashed aimlessly through the undergrowth and scared me as it rushed this way and that.

Andrew was up early and off to Robert’s and Nanna P. was brought by Mum and Dad. In the afternoon I finished making notes on Up From Slavery and listened to Athletic lose 2-3 at Cumberhead on Radio North. Outside an unpredictable mix of sun and snow.

I fancied getting drunk in the evening so I called Grant, but he wasn’t yet back yet from his job at the El Dorado. I kept ringing but no answer. The thought of staying in made me feel bleak, bored and frustrated.

No one else to call, Lee a hermit by choice. Paranoid thoughts. “Keep Silence, like the point of a compass / For the King has erased thy name from the book of speech.”

Sinners

The weird dreams continue. I and several others were performing in front of an assembly in Egley Grammar School dining hall. For some reason we were dressed in skin-tight black body-stockings that also covered our entire heads. Inexplicably, I was then fighting a fire on a Task Force aircraft carrier, squirming and clambering quickly in a narrow claustrophobic space between wooden decks.

I watched an interesting TV programme about Hieronymus Bosch. One critic advanced the theory that Bosch’s obscure symbolism and bizarre figures are easily explained if they're looked at as Biblical episodes. Bosch was pious and “obsessed with sin” and so (the theory goes) his canvases are filled with sin and sinners depicted in loving detail. Perhaps he’s frustrated would-be sinner enacting his fantasies in paint? Maybe I’m being cynical (sin-ical)?

I was supposed to be making notes on Booker T., but I instead lazed about and watched footage of the 40,000 or more CND demonstrators who formed a 14-mile long human chain at Greenham Common. This enraged Dad who came out with some pretty bitter and bigoted comments, much to Mum’s annoyance; she's greatly impressed by the CNDers commitment.

Britten’s War Requiem provoked further friction, and as usual nowadays, I was left feeling lost as to a personal response to this sort of issue. I don't think CND’s peaceful thousands will achieve anything. Perhaps if they stormed the airbase and smashed it up. . . . But then down would come the scandalised cries from the nation’s righteous millions and the hypocrites in Parliament. Stripping a capitalist country of its armaments is like taking a knife away from a psychopath; either cure the psychosis or he'll simply find another weapon.

Dad’s hypocrisy (over Easter this time) again irritated Andrew and I. While Radio 3 hosted a programme full of bland sentiment about Easter’s Christian message, Dad sat conspicuously on a stool in the middle of the floor, hanging in rapt attention on the churchman’s every word. Andrew said it’s as if he does it for our benefit.

He uses these sporadic displays of zeal to prove to we his sons that he’s a committed Christian. Yet he still comes out with thoroughly unchristian tirades against the things he detests, denouncing Labour politicians as “pigs” etc. If he’s so full of Christian fervour why doesn’t he go to Church?

In the evening Andrew, Mum and I watched Woody Allen’s Love & Death, which we found really funny.