Doomed

The thought of the term ahead still fills me with weariness, and this is because I now realise wrong choices and past mistakes, and know that it won’t go away for as long as I’m at the University.

I missed my first tutorial of the term today (Conflict and Community with Ian Pugh), but feel remorse only when I think of Mum and Dad’s naïve trust that I’m pursuing my “studies” with a vigour and reward I know I can never muster. I also feel sad that I’m squandering their money—£400 already this year. Doomed.

I promised to go to Calverdale for a week with them in May. At times of mental crisis and EMPTINESS like this I discover a kind of solace in the pleasures of the past.

I went to see Marc Riley and The Creepers with Stu at the Lancaster. They were supported by UT—talentless thrash—and they played aggressive hard Fall-type songs. Riley himself sang and reminded me a great deal of Barry’s friend Patrick—he has the same youthful face and dry Manchester accent.

Purge

We had a real purge on the vicarage and swept and cleaned it.

We fixed up a light in the basement toilet by running an extension cable from the ground floor landing down the basement stairs, and Lee and I cleaned out one of the toilets which someone—Susie we think—had shat in, with the result that shit and paper hung from the broken pipe in the wall. The smell was awful and I was nearly sick.

I’ve also rigged my room up with electricity, using the yards of cable we stole from The Regency pub near the Planning Department offices.

Various times

Lee and I recently found an empty shop up Ledwell Street, so in the evening he, Gav and I went and took a look.

We had a bad time getting in, crashing through dry twigs and rusty barbed wire and stumbling over walls, but eventually we discovered an open back door. Upstairs, the shop’s living quarters remained in some sort of early ‘70s time warp, each room a dingy nightmare of strewn boxes, suitcases, cheap fur coats and panties, a tawdry pink fan slipped behind a mirror, piles of things flung about in the nasty, dark and seedy little rooms . . ..

I was genuinely afraid of uncovering something decomposed as we poked our way around. We picked up a few pieces of stuff; I got two nice leather cases and a leather dustman’s jerkin. Lee wants to redo the ‘corpse photos’ in the shop with Alex as the corpse, which should be excellent. 


Covert

“A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.”

This phrase (from Invisible Man) captures my soul searching of the last year and my realisation that ‘hibernation’ is necessary in order to learn. The overt action is, at this stage, something loosely defined and not really fully grasped.



Blurred and obscured

Alex left his workbook out in the kitchen—MISSION OF DEAD SOULS stenciled on the cover—which is full of scribbles in coloured chalk and crayon and ink sketches of skulls. Words randomly litter the pages—snatches of Fall lyrics, McGonagelesque parodies, ‘kill,’ ‘torture,’ ‘maim,’ and ‘death’ predominating. Lee altered the cover title to read MISSION OF DEAD IDEAS.

Gav keeps his work to himself. He types a lot—he has an alliterative fixation with words beginning with the letter ‘e’—and has been painting in water colours. Lee is still working on his pinhole ciné film and surface texture investigations.

He says that many of the Combined Arts students have arrived at similar ideas simultaneously and independently, their work embracing common themes; he rues the lack of a critical attitude at the Art College which he says differs from his experience at Easterby College. Anything goes here, with the result that any real standards of merit or worth are blurred and obscured.