Self-Revelations

SELF-REVELATIONS (1983)

Writing a journal is really a sort of madness, though it isn't generally recognized as such - unlike, for instance, a person who talks to himself. The writer of journals, notebooks, diaries, etc., also talks to himself, but on the higher level, as it were, of recorded thought. Often the journal is kept or written without concern for immediate publication; though most famous writers who keep journals doubtless do so with respect to eventual, if posthumous, publication. Thus Baudelaire, Gide, Camus, Nietzsche, amongst others. Had they not also been recognized men-of-letters, with various publications to their names, it is doubtful that any of them would have kept journals.

Although, from another point of view, it could also be said that a man addicted to writing will be glad of the opportunity a journal affords to continue writing, if in a relatively relaxed, lazy, and informal kind of way. When he has nothing else to do, or is unwilling to take on a difficult professional task, he can always take refuge in a journal, passing the time in a lukewarm though, on the whole, intellectually-gratifying, egotistical sort of way.

But if talking to oneself is a sort of madness, then writing to oneself cannot be much else, even if it corresponds, as a rule, to a more intelligent mind!

I have never much liked the proletariat, especially the lumpen proletariat, of which description the Borough of Haringey and, in particular, the area of Hornsey would appear to be well stocked. The man who lives in the room next to mine is a vulgar boor, who can never close a door without slamming it. He wretches and coughs in a disgusting manner, and very often mimics 'ahems' for my dubious benefit; though I am so used to such tepid sarcasm by now, after nine years of bedsitter accommodation in north London, that I tend not to be offended by it. What I most suffer from, where this middle-aged proletarian is concerned, is the volume of his television, which penetrates the thin wall separating our respective rooms on a nightly basis, obliging me, when I can't bring myself to complain, to seek refuge in wax earplugs. Sometimes one can hear his television blaring away during the afternoon as well, though he is generally more considerate then than at other times, possibly because he is slightly ashamed to be indoors all day (he is unemployed) and doesn't wish to distract me from my writing or, more likely, because the TV is simply less interesting then.

But I dislike the man intensely, not only because he is a layabout, but because of his bad language, ugly proletarian looks, cultural philistinism, and tendency to slam his door. Once or twice I thought of asking him to close it quietly; but, on reflection, I supposed that I would merely appear in a humiliating light, as a gentleman prepared to live with, or being obliged to live with, a rough prole! Then again, how can one expect someone who is so patently not a gentleman to behave like one? It would be quite illogical of me to require gentle behaviour of a lumpen brute. I have no option, short of changing address, but to persevere with him!

It was not so long ago that I began to form a distinction, in my mind, between children and kids. Ordinarily, educated people would take the latter term for a vulgar equivalent to the former, a lower-class way, as it were, of referring to children. This is of course the way I see it on one level; though on another level, peculiarly my own, I prefer to regard kids as lower-class children, as creatures for whom the term 'children' would be inappropriate, because suggesting something delicate, well-behaved, pretty, gentle, quiet, well-spoken, shy, respectful, and intellectually curious. These 'kids', on the other hand, are foul-mouthed, dirty, brutish, destructive, and ugly, being, in Ezra Pound's concise phrase, the 'offspring of the very poor'.

Living in a room which overlooks an alley, I have heard and seen these 'kids' playing there often enough to know that, by no stretch of the poetic imagination, could one reasonably apply the word 'children' to them! One or two of them are notably fiendish, and will doubtless become vandals and thugs in years to come. A 'kid' is not someone one would wish to pat on the head for being a good boy. On the contrary, he is somebody to avoid contact with, from fear that one might be tempted to knock him on the head for being a brute!

It would be difficult to imagine a greater musical distinction than that which exists between the two violin concertos on a Supraphon record I recently had the privilege of borrowing from Hornsey Central Library, and that despite the extraordinary fact of both concertos having been composed or published in the same year (1939), and being performed, on this record, by the same orchestra, viz. the Czech Philharmonic, under the same conductor, viz. Karel Ancerl, with the same violinist, viz. André Gertler.

These two quite remarkable concertos are the Hindemith and the Hartmann, and whereas the former is the epitome of Neo-Classicism, the latter comes straight out of mid-nineteenth-century Romanticism, and therefore isn't even late-Romantic, like, say, the Berg Violin Concerto, but anachronistically Romantic, reminiscent of Liszt. This in part doubtless explains why we’re not more familiar with Hartmann’s name!

Nevertheless, a considerable work in its own right, demanding passionate incisiveness from the soloist over long stretches of the third movement, the allegro di molto, which contrasts with the generally lugubrious tone, de profundis, of the preceding and succeeding movements, the work itself having been dubbed Concerto Funebre. But, typical of Romanticism of this type, one is dragged into the emotional vortex and obliged to identify with the composer's and performers' passion, particularly in the third and longest movement.

How different from the Hindemith, which keeps one outside, a spectator, as it were, of its cool classical poise, sparsely orchestrated with the finest of solo tones, the violin for the most part in the highest register - clear, clean, precise, a dispassionate, though not indifferent, performance. I would have preferred the Romantic work on side one and the Neo-Classical on side two, so that, having plumbed the depths, one could soar to the heights of dispassionate contemplation. Beginning with the latter and ending with the former, however, suggests a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation on the part of orchestra and soloist alike. Nevertheless, a great record!

After several years in Hornsey, north London, I am still alone, devoid of friends and acquaintances alike. All I have is my mother and stepfather, whom I visit in Finsbury Park on Friday evenings, but whose company I do not relish. My mother is too plebeian and philistine in mentality; my stepfather, a West Indian by origin, too taciturn and lethargic, more inclined to moroseness than good humour. Otherwise, an old woman whom I occasionally visit in Palmers Green, an acquaintance of one of my Galway aunts, whose conversation both bores and oppresses me, particularly when on the subject of Catholicism, about which, like so many older people of Southern Irish origin, she is well-nigh fanatic.

As regards friends or acquaintances of my own generation - not a thing! And it has been like this for so long now that, despite the depression from which I suffer in consequence of living where and how I do, I tend to take it all for granted. Even take my celibacy for granted, resigned to the fact that I shall never find myself a suitable female companion so long as I remain in Hornsey, isolated from my kind.

At thirty, I am still a virgin, and have not so much as kissed a woman in over ten years. Neither have I been to a party since 1974, the last one, oddly enough, being with some student friends in Newcastle. I have no prospects of sex or socialization at present; for, without a publisher, I shall remain confined to the dole and the narrow environment in which I languish, like a prisoner, among the proles.

Of all environments, the one I most dream of living in is rural or provincial, like the one in Merstham, Surrey, I was obliged to move out of in December 1973, having spent but two years in it with the family of a school friend, Chris. Somewhere, in short, where one could live in a house of one's own without the constant threat and actual inconvenience of neighbour disturbances, such as uncouth pop or rock music issuing from some fool's over-loud stereo speakers. For it would only be by moving from one extreme to another that I could quicken my recovery from depression and acquire such sensuality, both natural and sexual, as I have lacked these past nine years of urban exile.

In this desired environment I would have peace in which to write and read, and would gradually recover from my enforced celibacy with the assistance of a beautiful, intelligent, cultured and pleasant female. No doubt, I would also take regular country walks, and perhaps drink and smoke a little (sherry in preference to wine or beer, cigars in preference to cigarettes).

Interesting how beauty is mostly confined to the bourgeois and aristocratic classes. There is really no such thing as a beautiful proletarian, at least I have never noticed one during all these years of Hornsey life. Women of the people can be attractive, and some of them are even very attractive. But beautiful, no! That demands culture, intelligence, character, careful breeding, and, above all, soul. It conforms, one might say, to an earlier phase of human evolution, before life becomes exclusively transcendental and thereupon orientated towards truth.

The aristocratic and bourgeois classes stem from the beauty of nature. The proletariat spring-up in the city, at an artificial remove from nature, and consequently have no real contact with beauty. Paradoxical though it may seem, beauty would not become them. They do not require it.

But I, a man of lower-middle-class origin on my father's side, both appreciate and need beauty, and would not settle for a woman who was less than beautiful but ... either attractive or plain. I have no desire, either, to repeat my late-father's mistake and opt for an attractive proletarian. For I know the consequences of their separation only too well ... to wish to inflict, or run the risk of inflicting, something similar on anyone else. Better, if one cannot find an appropriate partner, to remain solitary.

There was one person whom I particularly coveted, though I was in love with someone else at the time, and she was both very beautiful and highly intelligent, a rare being of no mean cultural achievement either. This was back in the early 1970s, and I undoubtedly went to Newcastle, early in 1974, with a view to deepening my acquaintance with her. But nothing came of my visit and that was the last I saw of her, ashamed and disappointed, as I was, by circumstances seemingly beyond my control.

Nevertheless, I still think of her from time to time, and have used a variation on her in one or two of my novels. She was, in my estimation, the complete woman.

I masturbate but infrequently, no more than once a month, and do so not simply for the pleasure - there is little enough of that! - but, more importantly, to preclude my experiencing a wet-dream during the night, with all the attendant inconvenience of being woken up, having to clamber out of bed in the dark to mop up the mess on sheets, thighs, stomach, or wherever, with the aid of paper tissues. This disgusts me so much that I prefer to masturbate every once in a while, in an effort to pre-empt nature's tyranny and so save myself worse inconvenience later on!

Generally, I would say that the more one masturbates the less one suffers from wet-dreams. A minimum of once a month is therefore advisable! Naturally, I dislike masturbation from a personal point-of-view, but I don't suffer so much regret these days as I used to, chiefly because I look upon masturbation over pornography not as a form of perversion, which is what it must seem to the more naturalistic males, whether bourgeois or proletarian, but as a higher level of sexuality, part of evolutionary progress, one might say, towards the supersession of sexual activity in what I like to think of as a post-human millennium, when human brains will be artificially supported and sustained in communal contexts.

Neither do I associate masturbation with fears of self-abuse, the life-force being turned-in upon itself, as it were, in negation of a two-way give-and-take synchronicity or reciprocity. I have no Lawrentian or Reichian fears, in response to a strongly atomic imagination. I look at masturbation impartially, objectively, and come to the conclusion that the ejaculation of semen brought about by the friction of palm rubbing against penis will not differ, to any marked extent, from an ejaculation brought about by the friction of penis rubbing against vagina. In both cases, there is a friction and an ejaculation. That is all! But there is less flesh involved with masturbation than with atomic sex. It would not appeal to an average sensualist, but only to an extreme ascetic type.

In one sense, I suppose I have had a variety of girlfriends since moving to north London. For I have admired a number of pin-ups, such as one finds in men's magazines like Penthouse and Oui. Usually, there is at least one model in each month's Penthouse in whom I can take some pleasure, and generally I cut one or two of the more appealing photos out of the magazine and either pin them to the wall - having taken care to remove previous ones - or put them in a drawer that I especially reserve for a variety of clippings, photos, postcards, letters, Christmas cards, and other paper mementos, to extract the relevant photos when I feel like admiring the model anew.

Thus, in a sublimated kind of way, these models become my girlfriends, though on a relatively short-term basis, insofar as one may find a different model to admire every month. Is this madness or simply an extreme form of sexual relationship? The private person in me suggests the former, but the philosopher, the man with a sense of evolutionary perspective derived from the cumulative development of so much serious thinking, upholds the latter.

As a professional, I have to admit to the validity of evolutionary continuity in the realm of sex. As a displaced and therefore perverted individual, on the other hand, I long for the day when I shall be able to return to something like an atomic norm, and be able to have literal, concrete sex with a woman. For my depression, the sufferings of the private person, won't get any better so long as I remain confined, against my wishes, to an urban environment, and am accordingly obliged to seek sexual pleasure and relief with the help of men's magazines!

As one who listens to quite a lot of modern jazz, I tend to divide guitarists into three categories: those who are exceptionally proficient on both acoustic and electric guitars; those who are fairly proficient on both acoustic and electric guitars; and those who are fairly or exceptionally proficient only on electric guitars. This is really the equivalent of distinguishing between, in the first category, guitarists more bourgeois than proletarian in bias; in the second category, guitarists more proletarian than bourgeois in bias; and, in the third category, proletarian guitarists. A distinction, one could argue, between dualists at one end of the modern-jazz spectrum, and post-dualists at the other end of it.

Examples from each class will, in my opinion, include the following: John McLaughlin, Al Dimeola, John Abercrombie, Larry Coryell, Bill Connors, Philip Catherine, Allan Holdsworth, John Ethridge, Darryl Stuermer, and Jan Akkerman in the first category; Frank Zappa, John Scofield, Steve Khan, Gary Moore, Terji Rypdal, Gary Boyle, and Lee Ritenour in the second; Jeff Beck, Carlos Santana, Raymond Gomez, Tommy Bolin, George Benson, Clem Clempson, and Harvey Mandel in the third. This is, I believe, a relevant categorization from a class point-of-view, and, as a private individual, I tend to prefer those in the first category to those in the third, regarding them as superior guitarists.

The professional philosopher will now advance a rethink on the above-mentioned guitarists, however, and contend that, objectively considered, those in the third category are superior to the ones in the first and second categories, because not only relatively post-egocentric, that is to say, less inclined to complexity and virtuoso embellishment, but consistently electric, and thus transcendental instead of partly naturalistic, i.e. given to acoustic indulgence. This, by contrast, would be the evolutionary point-of-view, and one can only suppose that it would be a view more likely to win support in proletarian circles than among those who cling to naturalism from scruples of bourgeois conscience.

Clearly, I am a man very much divided against himself, a perverted provincial who suffers, through depression, stomach ulcers, solitude, sleeplessness, celibacy, neighbour incompatibility, etc., from his environmental displacement, and, at the same time, a philosopher who gains in strength, meaning, insight, profundity, vision, objectivity, etc., at the expense of the private person. This latter side of me, the objective side, has gone so far ahead of the personal, subjective side, that there is scarcely a link between them, no common ground on which they can meet and exchange views. For whatever suits the latter is detrimental to the former. Whatever the former needs to recover mental and bodily health would obstruct the further progress of the latter. If I return to nature, to a provincial environment, I will shortly cease being a transcendentalist. If I continue expanding my professional life, my private one can only get steadily worse. One day I will be so depressed and ulcer-ridden that I won't be able to work. Then the private life will have defeated the public, professional one. Either way, I must cease, at some future time, from being a transcendentalist. Which means that I must die to the spirit in order to be reborn in the flesh, and preferably before my depression gets any worse!

The fact that I make so much of my private life public, by revealing it on these pages, would not please a bourgeois. For the dualist is ever divided between the private and the public domain, and knows how to distinguish between them and keep the former to himself. On the other hand, evolution being a struggle from the private to the public sphere, the proletarian is supposed not to have a private life, for everything is officially interpreted in terms of the public one, the herd life, against which individualism is perceived as a threat and anachronism appertaining to the bourgeoisie. It is perhaps a reflection of my status as a perverted provincial that I should seek to make my private life public, to acquiesce, in a kind of transitional manner, in the Sartrean doctrine of opening the self to others (though Sartre never practised what he preached to anything like the same extent as, say, Henry Miller).

How paradoxical and hypocritical the British are! They speak of private medicine and public schools, when both are manifestations of the same elitist, discriminatory system! They ought rather to speak of private schools, as opposed to state schools, which are the truly public ones. Also the British are very secretive, in that everyone seems to be hiding something, psychologically speaking, from everyone else, as though fearful of the leak of some underhand deal at another's expense. I confess that in some twenty-eight years of living in England, I haven't become British. Rather, it is often brought home to me just how ineradicably Irish I am in so many ways, not least of all in the tendencies to be frank, extreme, outspoken, and rigorously logical. Probably my solitude, these past nine years, has something to do with being Irish in origin, not because the Irish are necessarily solitary, but rather because, more often than not, even when long resident or brought-up in England, they can't abide the British, particularly the English, whom they regard as hopeless materialists and philistines!

A Devil's Irishman is as much the exception to the rule as a God's Englishman, using the term 'God' in the most spiritual sense. At least that used to be the case, before people of English descent began to populate Ireland with politicians and soldiers, and, conversely, people of Irish descent began to populate England with priests and writers. These days God's Englishmen are more likely to be of Irish descent than Anglo-Saxon. (Similarly, one could argue that Devil's Irishmen are more likely to be of English descent than Gaelic.)

Considerations of ethnicity do enter into my estimation of females, for I seem to recall that the young woman I mentioned earlier, in connection with my visit to Newcastle, was of Irish descent, being blue-eyed, dark-haired, slender, Catholic, and a keen student of Joyce (she possessed both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). I have often thought that I wouldn't marry anyone who wasn't Irish or at least partly Irish or of Irish descent. Conversely, I have often imagined, when snubbed by British women, particularly English ones, that considerations of ethnicity entered into their decision - the fear, perhaps, of having to adopt an Irish name in the event of marriage, or of being at loggerheads with one over political, religious, cultural, social, and sporting ties, or even of being roped-in to the Catholic Church!

Once I met an Irish girl and obtained her address, which was outside London. But although I wrote to her on a number of occasions, she refrained from reciprocating. Now I'm not implying that this was because she didn't want to involve herself with an Irishman, since, as I said, she too was Irish - second-generation Irish, as she described herself to me. I am simply underlining my determination to mate only with an Irishwoman; for how else to explain the futile persistency with which I wrote to a person who had no desire or intention of reciprocating my letters?

Perhaps this has something to do with my mother, who once informed me that, had she not been obliged, following the death of her Britain-based father, to accompany her homesick mother back to Ireland, she would never have married an Irishman, meaning my father. Thus I may well be rebelling, if unconsciously, against my mother's anti-Irishness when I insist on pursuing an endogamous course. Doubtless, I tend to equate my parent's incompatibility and subsequent separation with an underlying ethnic antagonism, my mother being superficially Catholic but fundamentally the daughter of an Ulster or Donegal Protestant on her father's side.

In me, the middle class and the working class meet in a classless compromise favouring the latter. My father was a failure by the professional standards of his parents and brothers, and sank into the non-professional rank of a buyer for Corbett's furniture store in Galway. My mother, on the other hand, came from a working-class family who, through the progress of her father from private to regimental sergeant-major in the British army, gravitated towards the lower middle-class.

Thus, theoretically, they both met, my parents, on approximately the same class level. But, in practice, they had arrived at it from opposite directions - my father down and my mother up. Fundamentally, one is what one was born as, not what one becomes. My father was always the son of country-dwelling professional folk, my mother the daughter of city-dwelling proletarians, and, not surprisingly, their marriage quickly broke up, my mother not being prepared to persevere with a husband who spent more time out, in the company of friends, than in, with his less than culturally- or intellectually-stimulating wife who, having been brought up in Britain, probably lacked deference and/or humility.

Thus, in a certain sense, I see myself as the reverse of D.H. Lawrence, who had a middle-class mother and a working-class father. He was mostly biased towards the middle classes in his petty-bourgeois constitution.

On the subject of D.H. Lawrence, it is perhaps worth mentioning and correcting a remark he once made, to the effect that any man who strives to become more than a man inevitably ends-up being less than one. He was, of course, referring to spiritual excess, to excessive intellectuality and lack of sex, to a kind of Shavian or Huxleyite lopsidedness, which ought, in his opinion, to be avoided because it could only be detrimental to human wholeness, in loyalty to a dualistic integrity.

And, to be sure, there is some truth in that statement, as I can personally attest from having to spend time, each day, dozing on my bed in an effort to reduce or relax the tension in my head which would otherwise prevent me from working. When, after an hour-and-a-half's scribbling in the afternoon, I retire to bed for an hour, I indulge in a form of sensual cannibalism by plunging, to a limited extent, into my subconscious, in an attempt to restore my head to something approaching normal psychic functioning.

Now one could argue that during this period of time I lead more of a dog's life than a man's, and thus vindicate Lawrence's contention. This is true. Yet what Lawrence didn't admit, but which I have proved by the unparalleled profundity of various of my works, is precisely that at other periods of time, while for instance one is writing, one can become more than a man, and all because one is not living within the narrow confines of a bourgeois lifestyle but oscillating between one extreme position and another in a way that, during the work-periods, enables one to approximate to superhuman levels of thought and creative insight. Were it not for this extreme lifestyle, oscillating between dog-like dozing and god-like mental alertness, I would never have arrived at 'the truth', but might well have remained confined to dualistic thinking, an atomic level that I would probably have mistaken, like the vast majority of its upholders, for the Ideal!

Of course, this is not to say that everyone should follow my example and adopt an extreme lifestyle. Very few people could, and, besides, the Truth doesn't require a legion of searchers but can be grasped and conveyed to paper by one resolute searcher alone, who functions in the role of messiah. I did not go in search of this extreme lifestyle, but had it thrust upon me by circumstances beyond my control (as, for example, in being obliged to move from Surrey to London), and somehow I have managed to come to terms with it and exploit it for what good can be derived from it, in the interests of truth. Previously I had taken dualism for the Truth, for that was compatible with my suburban background ... torn between nature and civilization, and I saw no reason to doubt it.

But after I had been confined, like a prisoner, in one of the most built-up areas of north London for several years, I began to doubt the eternal validity of dualism and, instead, started to evolve towards a post-dualistic position which, now that I have worked it out in some detail, I perceive as the logical step beyond dualism and means to the Truth. Thereafter I could no longer take dualists like D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, J.B. Priestley, and Hermann Hesse seriously, but turned, via transitional writers like Henry Miller and Christopher Isherwood, to my own truth, which I am convinced will one day be recognized as the Truth by all who care for progress in intellectual/spiritual matters because, not for the least of good reasons, they live in the right kind of environment to be able to appreciate and relate to it!

In mentioning Hermann Hesse, I should remark that, of all writers, he was the one in whom I recognized a marked temperamental and creative affinity with myself. Even given the fact that he remained a dualist, and therefore in many respects typically bourgeois, I have to name Hesse among my early mentors and principal influences. Probably I would have preferred to take a number of his books to a desert island with me than anyone else's, if obliged to make a definitive choice between various authors, including Huxley, Sartre, Camus, and Henry Miller. Not so much because of the level of thought, which is limited to atomic criteria, as because of the tone, style, temperamental bias, eclecticism (ranging from philosophical essays and novels to short stories and lyric poems), such as I pursue in my own work, as much from creative propulsion as from moral compulsion.

Was Hesse first and foremost a poet, like Hölderlin, or a philosopher, like Nietzsche? I have to confess that I see him first and foremost as a philosopher (not so much a lover of words as a seeker after truth), a petty-bourgeois and therefore creatively eclectic philosopher, like Huxley, but one who dabbled in poetry, often covering philosophical speculation in a thin veneer of verse, and who mistook himself for a poet in consequence. Not that he was unpoetical. But he was arguably less of a poet than, say, D.H. Lawrence.

Lawrence, as we all know, was a great womanizer; he extolled Woman while generally being critical of women. There is a streak of that vein in me too, because I can admire Woman in the abstract, without becoming particularly enamoured of women in general. Now one of the main reasons why I remain cool towards most women, besides the obvious one that they fail to correspond to my ideal, is that all too often, especially in the winter, they are veritable germ traps - the best catchers, carriers, and transmitters of colds on two legs!

Apart from the obvious reason of their being physically weaker than men, this is partly because they normally spend more time in the company of children (the most germ-prone category of all) than men and partly, too, because they are generally more naturalistic and therefore inclined to spend more time out-of-doors with, in all probability, less clothing on; and that because, for a variety of reasons, they often prefer to show off their bodies, regardless of the risks involved to health. This of course mainly applies to young women, especially to very young ones. But although older women may be more circumspect about the weather and mindful of the appropriate clothing to wear, they also suffer from colds more frequently and fiercely, as a rule, than men.

Thus whenever I enter a public place, for example a library, I take good care not to sit too closely to women, from fear that they may be suffering a cold and that I might, in consequence, become contaminated! From time to time, however, sexual instinct intervenes to cause me to sit closer to a woman, particularly when she is both good-looking and young. But, often enough, my initial pleasure in her proximity is strangled, all too soon, by the realization that she is snivelling badly and could well contaminate me if I don't watch out. I turn away in disgust, or find some pretext to exempt myself from her proximity.

Perhaps this may strike some people as unduly alarmist and pessimistic. But I have caught a sufficient number of bad colds from strange women, in the past, not to be overly optimistic or complacent in their presence! I suffer, you might say, from a kind of 'Death in Venice' complex, anxious lest my work be interfered with, for 2-3 weeks, in consequence of my being 'laid-up' by some intellectual nonentity.

Only against this background would it be possible for a person to understand the thoroughness with which I customarily arm myself against colds and flu! In winter I am never to be seen without a hooded-jacket, and never would I think of venturing out, even on a dry day, without a scarf underneath, a pair of leather gloves on my hands, and a good pair of leather boots on my feet.

Another motivation for taking such thorough precautions against colds is that, living alone, I am obliged to fetch medicines, stagger out to restaurants, stores, chemists, etc., regardless of my health. Knowing from bitter experience what this means, I prefer to do everything within my power to preclude contagion or exposure to germs. Indeed, I sometimes think that I suffer more, on balance, from worrying about catching a cold than I actually do from having caught one!

One thing I most certainly suffer too much from is neighbour noise, of which blaring records, radios, and televisions must be accounted the leading examples! Even at this very moment I am desperately struggling, despite the precaution of having inserted malleable wax-earplugs in both ears, against one such noise in the form of an over-loud stereo in the parallel room of a neighbour from the house next door. She is a rather callous person with simple tastes and, although she may not consciously mean any harm, she makes one's professional life a very uphill struggle!

Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that most of my writing has been done in competition with such a background of noise, against which even wax earplugs are but a partial defence. Thus I have sound reason to be all the more proud of what I have achieved, given the vulgar obstacles so consistently placed in my way! But as Wilde once said: 'No artist can live with the people', and what applies to artists, meaning in Wilde's case dramatists and poets, applies no less, in my opinion, to philosophers and writers generally, irrespective of whether or not they have an option.

Curiously, when I worked in what I regarded as a relatively inconsequential way, as a humble clerk, the environment in which I was working gave me every conceivable incentive, including the threat of supervisory reprimand, to get on with my work. But ever since I began to work in what I regard as a more consequential way, as a creative writer, the environments in which I have worked, both now and previously, have seemingly done everything possible to prevent me from working ... by impeding my concentration at every turn. What a strange paradox! And yet how diabolically typical of this life, this battleground betwixt Hell and Heaven, in which 'the good' struggle on, like Bunyan's Pilgrim, irrespective of what evil or stupidity comes their way.

But if I revealed my true feelings about neighbour noise without revealing what I feel about the large shaggy-coated mountain dog that, from the vantage-point of its 'guard post' the other side of the adjacent alley, tyrannizes over the immediate environment with its loud and persistent barking, I would indeed be conveying but a partial and misleadingly one-sided perspective to the reader! For that dog, more than any other single beast in the neighbourhood, is responsible for almost as much suffering, over the years, as all the noise of my immediate neighbours put together!

Not only does it bark when people venture along the alley, it barks when the mood takes it, and barks in such a raspingly gruff, aggressive, malicious sort of way ... as to seem the most evil creature on four legs! More than once has the analogy with Lawrence's harrowing description of the disembowelment of an old horse by a bull, in the first chapter of The Plumed Serpent, come to mind when, after a period of 10-15 minutes, this persistent barking begins to penetrate one's mind, like a psychic horn, and slowly tear it apart. And so powerful are the coarse vibrations emitted by this beast, that earplugs and headphones combined are inadequate to prevent them from penetrating one's mind and setting up sinister analogies there!

No, I don't like this animal, which was meant for somewhere like the Pyrenees, and I am at a loss to understand why it is rarely if ever cautioned by its owners for making such a foul noise. Probably they are either too insensitive or too far removed from its kennel to be particularly disturbed by it, and are only too aware, in any case, of their limitations in controlling it. Certainly, they would never have restrained the beast in the past had I not vigorously complained about it on a number of torrid occasions. But I grew weary of complaining when I realized that my protestations weren't achieving any positive results. An intelligent writer living amongst noise-loving proletarians has no right to expect the environment to conform to his wishes. I discovered that fact some time ago!

Yet it still strikes me as rather odd, on occasion, that such a vicious beast should be living in one of the world's largest cities, in what purports to be one of the most civilized, if not the most civilized, countries in the world, in this twentieth century [at the original time of writing] after Christ. When there were neighbours a few doors down the road who took-in strays, the combined noise of conflicting barks to left and right of me was, at times, so intense and persistent as to suggest not late twentieth-century civilization but, rather, some return to primeval barbarity, in which beasts dominated the sordid scene! And it was this disgracefully barbarous noise that got me seriously thinking about the eventual liquidation of dogs, the prospect of dogs eventually being destroyed on principle. For it is inconceivable to me that man should always be either an accomplice to or a victim of such animals.

In an atomic civilization, where the pagan root is intact, there is of course no possibility of dogs being liquidated, since that would be anachronistic in a futuristic kind of way. But in a post-atomic civilization, such as must some day arise, the retention of dogs, not to mention other animals of a noisy or violent disposition, would be inconceivable, because the pagan root would have been extirpated. I look forward to such an age. For as long as I live, I shall be haunted by the memory of what it means to be a victim of excessively ferocious and regular barking!

There are times, however, when, providing they aren't too loud or persistent, neither neighbour nor dog noises annoy me, times when I can rise above emotional commitment and reaction to vulgar disturbances, and usually they are in the evening when, having paid my professional dues to the temporal world, I can afford to spend some time indifferent to pleasure and pain alike, not concerned with survival or reputation or truth or duty or morality, but free from all that in the absorption of a meditation state, at one with the upper part of my conscious mind, the superconscious, in blessed tranquillity; in the clear, so to speak, from emotional disturbances.

I experienced such a rewarding state-of-mind last night, January 11th 1983, between listening to each side of a Martinu record, and must attribute my ripeness for such beatitude in part to the regular breaks from reading, writing, listening to music, etc., that tension forces upon me, and in part to the gradual evolution of my psyche towards a level of intellectual/spiritual achievement where it is possible to experience the meditation state without too much struggle and almost entirely free of emotional intrusions, because one can separate the higher part of the conscious mind from the lower part virtually as a matter of course.

I hadn't fully realized, until recently, just how elitist meditation actually is; for unless one's psyche has reached a certain pitch of superconsciously-biased development, one will be too influenced by one's emotions to be capable of properly, easily, and consistently detaching oneself from them.

Nevertheless it's to be hoped that, one day, society will be organized in such a way as to make attainment to this level of psychic development possible for the great majority of people (a minority possibly not being involved to the same extent because they have technological or political roles to fulfil), who will then detach themselves from the subconscious as they acclimatize themselves to the highest human level of spiritual fulfilment in the superconscious. This should be possible in the transcendental civilization, when meditation will become the appropriate religious commitment on a communal and universal basis.

As for my own individual meditating experiences, I'm glad if, during the 15-20 minutes I spend exclusively in the company of my superconscious, I don't have to pass critical comment, in response to my emotions, on whatever noise may be audible to me. Last night, for instance, the sound of someone's coughing and wretching in the alley had no adverse effect upon me at all because I heard it in a completely objective, non-evaluating kind of way, simply as a sound among sounds, each sound being very distinct but, at the same time, not something to despise or condemn, and thus sounding pretty equal, paradoxically, to an emotion-free conscious mind.

Incidentally, it was brought home to me, on this occasion, just how mistaken the image of the smiling Buddha is, which strikes me as but a rococo perversion, as it were, of the original Buddhist ideal. For to be indifferent to pleasure and pain alike, one must be above the subconscious in supra-emotional tranquillity. The image of the smiling Buddha, on the contrary, reflects enslavement to emotional commitment. He is but a positive egotist!

Concerning the subconscious, there are two things that I am paradoxically proud of: the first of which being the difficulty with which I get to sleep, i.e. the protracted time it takes me to slide down into subconscious enslavement from a superconsciously-biased psyche, and the second of which being my inability, on waking, to remember more than a fraction of my dream-life, which testifies, I should think, to the relatively shallow grip my subconscious must have on me. Animals may be able to get to sleep easily and quickly, but the more sophisticated or intelligent men find getting to sleep rather difficult, and primarily because they have further to fall than those who, whether animal or human, are never very far from subconscious or emotional indulgence anyway.

Indeed, could one not argue that the more intelligent the man, the harder he will find it to get to sleep? Certainly the autobiographies of many intelligent men - Hermann Hesse's among them - provide ample evidence to the fact that sleep rarely came easily to them, and we may believe that this was primarily because their intellect was too highly-charged, too keyed-up, as it were, to enable them to relapse into subconscious dominion with animal-like ease.

Usually it takes me from between an hour and two hours to get to sleep, and when I do eventually succeed, my sleep is relatively shallow and intermittent. My dreams do not hold any great interest for me, on waking, and quickly disappear from memory, leaving but a few disconnected fragments. I would not be of much use to a dream psychologist, like Jung, and have never taken Freud's theories of dream interpretation very seriously. I am convinced that, in the future, people will not only take less interest in the subconscious, they will sleep less as well!

Since it is more usual for a man to swing from one extreme to another if, in the first place, he is an extremist and if, in the second place, he is capable of swinging, than to stop at a halfway stage, we need not doubt that sinners have occasionally become saints and, conversely, saints become sinners. The idea that unless a man was formerly a sinner, and in a big way, he is unlikely to become a saint, has to be seen against this background, it seems to me, of swinging from one extreme to another. Of course, not all saints have previously been sinners, although it has become possible for certain writers to canonize lay saints on the basis of what the man has endured or suffered over the years, regardless of his background.

Thus Sartre saw justification to elevate Jean Genet to the lay sainthood, since this man could not, as a long-term prisoner, lead anything approaching an average sensual, sexual, comfortable existence. Likewise, on a similar basis, I would like to suggest the name of Rudolf Hess. For regardless of whatever war crimes he may or may not have committed, Hess led such an ascetic life, over the decades of his incarceration in Spandau, that it would be unrealistic to regard him as a sinner. Thus, as far as I am concerned, 'Saint Hess'!

As for myself, I too may be on the verge, if not already there, of sainthood, since various circumstances, financial as well as environmental, have forced a consistent pattern of asceticism in celibacy and solitude upon me, during the past nine years of my residence in north London. Yet I would hesitate to regard myself as a saint, and for the simple reason that I do not relate to the Christian tradition but, in turning away from it, have dedicated so much of my creative energies towards outlining a future course, both human and post-human, of religious development.

Yes, it is as an outsider in the Christian civilization that I see myself, a messiah for whom the Christian Church, whether Catholic or Protestant, holds little or no interest; a man who relates, on the strength of both theory and race, to revolutionary opposition to dualistic civilization, though more from a transcendentalist than a communist point-of-view, bearing in mind his allegiance to Ireland and thus to spiritual values generally.

Not therefore a man who sees himself being set-up as a Western hero, a champion of Christian values, but, more likely, outlawed as a threat to the level of civilization generally prevailing there. One whose truth concerning, amongst other things, the concept of a post-human millennium ... would prove embarrassing to a civilization dedicated to upholding the beliefs of the Church with regard, for example, to life after death, the survival of the spirit in posthumous salvation.

Yes, I am the man who is poor and ascetic not because he is beneath the society in which he lives but because, intellectually considered, he has the capacity to tower over it, like an intellectual colossus. I look down on priests from the vantage-point of my atheistic transcendentalism. Just so did Christ look down on the priests, the scribes and pharisees, of his own day, as one who appertained to a higher development. But I appertain to a still higher development than Christ, and so I cannot admire his latter-day followers, nor allow myself to accept honours from them.

There are men who are without women, but not all men who are alone are without women. There are also men who are beyond women, considered from a literal, palpable point-of-view. These men - and I would appear to be one of them - are akin to free-electron equivalents, who intimate, by their freedom from atomic constraint, of the ultimate freedom (from sensual ties) of the future free-electron absolute, the heavenly Beyond as the goal of evolutionary striving. A man who is beyond women, in this way, is not 'bent', as the ignorant tend to suppose, but morally superior, freer, living on a higher plane of evolutionary development. A man who is without a woman, and who regretfully recognizes this fact in himself, is simply an unwilling free-electron equivalent, perhaps even a neutron equivalent, unhappy in his solitude, and hoping that, through whatever efforts he may make to find a suitable woman, he will one day become a lover, a partner in heterosexual dualism. Unbeknown to himself, he wishes to establish an atomic integrity by becoming the slave of a proton equivalent who, if he marries her, will function as his 'better half'.

The post-atomic man, on the other hand, does not wish to be dominated by proton equivalents. He may opt for a relationship, embracing sex, with what I like to call a quasi-electron equivalent, a liberated female, but this relationship will not involve marriage. He may, if homosexual, enter into pseudo-electron (transmuted neutron) relationships with men on his own level. Or he may prefer, being obliged by circumstances, to remain alone and to establish some kind of free-electron relationship, on a sexual basis, with pornography, or such pornographic models from a variety of men's magazines or whatever as appeal to his sexual tastes. This is the post-atomic relationship that I have been obliged to uphold, though the private individual in me longs dearly for the first, a relationship, outside marriage, with a liberated female. I refer to Sartre's relationship with Simone de Beauvoir as a good example of this kind of post-atomic arrangement.

I cannot bring myself to read a female author unless she is both beautiful and sophisticated. For when she is both, I can enter into a kind of quasi-romantic relationship with her. My ideal, therefore, is a beautiful philosopher, and I think I find this ideal in Simone de Beauvoir, whom I will not hesitate from considering beautiful, referring, of course, to the years before age diminished her looks, if not her charm.

A sophisticated woman who, like Irish Murdoch, is not beautiful, on the other hand, I take little interest in. Neither can I bring myself to read a beautiful woman who is not sophisticated, like Edna O'Brien, though I can continue to admire her beauty. But, on the whole, I avoid female authors, because I do not like to be intellectually instructed or talked down to by a woman.

For a similar reason, I would not care to receive a sermon, were I a church-goer, from a woman priest (priestess?). The situation would strike me as slightly grotesque and hypocritical. But that is only because I am one of the most intellectually sophisticated of men, for whom equals would be hard enough to find even among my own sex!

There are different types of philosopher, though all philosophers may be divided into two main categories, depending on whether they speak to the Few, the rulers, or to the Many, the masses. If the former, then they are serious philosophers. If the latter, they are more likely to be popular philosophers. To speak to the rulers, or to those who are destined to become future rulers, is to reveal intellect, or what one regards as an important progression in intellectual matters, to the Few, that it may be acted upon in due course. To speak to the Many, by contrast, is to offer them tips as to how best to conduct their lives in straightened or reduced circumstances if they are to attain to happiness or love or success or power or freedom or whatever.

A good example of the first type of philosopher is Nietzsche. By contrast, John Cowper Powys affords us a worthy example of the second. And Bertrand Russell is one of those hybrid, serious/popular philosophers who seem to come somewhere in-between the two extremes.

In my case, I like to think of myself as a serious philosopher, not one for the masses but one whose truth might influence the course of history and thus ameliorate the lives of the masses in due time.

Things can always be looked at from two ways, a subjective and an objective way, which is equivalent to saying a negative and a positive way. I can view my life in north London from the private, individual angle or, if I prefer, from the public, professional angle. In the first case, I shall be seeing it subjectively, in the second case - objectively.

In this day and age it is more customary to identify with the objective, professional side than with the other, because the public is increasingly coming to supplant the private and to drive it out-of-bounds. It is better to be positive than negative and, for that reason, I should think first and foremost of what I have achieved as a philosopher ... rather than what I've suffered, or been obliged to endure, as a private individual. Then I will appear to myself in a messianic light, not simply as an unfortunate wretch, as certain of these pages could lead one to suppose.