Op. 04
FIXED LIMITS
(Excerpts from a Journal by Michael Savage that forms a sort of
literary sequel to the novel CHANGING WORLDS)
Long Prose
Copyright © 2013 John O'Loughlin
______________
CONTENTS
1.
Friday 17th September
2.
Saturday 18th September
3.
Saturday Evening
4.
Sunday 19th September
5.
Sunday Evening
6.
Monday 20th September
7.
Monday Evening
8.
Tuesday 21st September
9.
Tuesday Evening
10.
Monday 27th September
11.
Tuesday 28th September
12.
Wednesday 29th September
13.
Late Wednesday Evening
14.
Thursday 30th September
15.
Friday 1st October
_____________
FRIDAY 17th SEPTEMBER
It has just
gone
God, these cigarettes are ghastly! They burn down far too quickly. No sooner have you begun inhaling them than
the wretched things disappear in a cloud of smoke and fire of creeping
ash! You wonder why you bothered in the
first place. Actually now I come to
think of it, they are virtually the cheapest brand available, so I guess that
was the guiding factor in my buying them.
But I couldn't really afford to buy any dearer brand at present because,
being a poverty-stricken writer with a limited income, I simply don't have the
money to spare on luxuries.
These cigarettes are marked MIDDLE TAR,
though it wouldn't really bother me if they were something worse. I guess I'm secretly indulging in a form of
self-punishment as well. At the
beginning of the year I made what I now perceive to have been a foolish New
Year's resolution. I said to myself:
"You've been smoking like a chimney for well over six months (a slight
exaggeration on both counts, but never mind), your health isn't very good
anyway, and you're bored with cigarettes and dying for a change. Make this year somehow different!" So I stopped buying cigarettes and started
buying confectionery instead. For a
while I felt like a saint or, at any rate, like someone saved. Then to consolidate my change of heart with a
change of health, I began doing press-ups, no more than twenty at a time,
because my arms weren't strong enough to support me initially, but just enough
to make it worthwhile, to mark a beginning.
Well, that resolution lasted about three
months and almost killed me. In
retrospect it surprises me that I could have persevered so persistently, taken
it all so seriously, considering that I didn't really feel much better
afterwards. But, strangely, it never
once occurred to me to think objectively about what I was doing; I just
acted. When I staggered out of bed in
the morning the first thing I did was attend to the press-ups. I acted like a robot. And before I climbed back into bed last thing
at night it would be the same thing: more damn press-ups. It must have been like somebody saying his
prayers and paying his worldly dues at the same time. Yes, but at least I might have profited a
little from these exertions; for it seemed to me that every attempt I made at
becoming stronger only succeeded, eventually, in making me weaker, in removing
my ability to extend the number of press-ups.
By the time I got to the twentieth one I was a physical wreck. My nerves twitched as though they had just
received an electric shock, my tongue shot out backwards and forwards like a
jack-in-the-box, my breathing became hoarse, and my arms felt like putty. They became noticeably weaker for all the
exercise I gave them!
Well, so much for all that! These days I am back to smoking again. Indeed, I might even be fatuous or outrageous
enough to regard it as a form of slow suicide, a sort of long-term investment
policy with death. It doesn't feel very
much like pleasure, anyway. There is
nothing particularly sensational about it - not, that is, unless you are
prepared to regard a pair of constricted lungs as something of a
sensation. But I would be deluded, all
the same, to assume that my life could be done away with so easily. It might take another thirty to forty years,
during which time I would probably continue to drift in and out of tobacconists
with the residue of an insane resolution in my head: to do away with myself at
any cost! No, I don't really feel I
possess that amount of patience or resolve, least of all at the moment. It certainly takes a lot to kill a man. If we could all be disposed
of that easily, there wouldn't be many of us left here now. In relation to life we are as stubborn as
mules - absolutely fanatic! It would
definitely take more than a few thousand cheap cigarettes to finish me off,
money or no money. So there is evidently
little consolation to be had there!
This ashtray amuses me. Indeed, I don't think it was actually
intended as an ashtray at all, since it is too pretty. In actual fact, it is an Italian souvenir marked
À PAVO, evidently its place of origin. I don't even remember where I got it, but
somebody must have made me a present of it some years ago, because it's not the
kind of thing I would buy myself. I
absolutely detest its formality!
To begin with, it is a piece of oblong
plastic measuring some 6" x 4".
The edges are curved slightly upwards, no more than half-an-inch (as
might be expected from an ashtray or tiny fruit bowl), and the interior, if
such it can be called, contains the reproduction of a colourful painting which
depicts five medieval knights who are seemingly paying court to someone in
front of and slightly above their gazes, though to whom, exactly, I haven't a
clue because he/she doesn't form part of the picture - at least not as it stands
here. Perhaps the title of the original
painting would enlighten me on this score?
But I don't possess an encyclopaedia of Italian art and really don't
wish to put myself to the trouble of finding out. I mean, there isn't actually all that much to
get excited about when you think of it, is there? These five gentlemen are evidently the
cynosure of the work. However, if by
some miracle they knew that someone was using them for an ashtray they probably
wouldn't look so proud of themselves.
They would more than likely take offence and unsheathe their swords
specifically with a view to reigning blows and imprecations upon the
offender. Indeed, they might even get
hostile with the manufacturer for putting them on a souvenir which could be
used for such base purposes.
But all this speculation is obviously of
small account. I don't even know whether
or not they were originally painted from real life, though they look plausible
enough anyway. What particularly amuses
me, however, is that the fellow at the rear of the group - a man, incidentally,
who looks somehow wiser and more experienced in courtly protocol than his
companions - is staring rather higher than the others, much as though he were
at a private audition, while the third one from the front, a rather
effeminate-looking character in headgear, is wearing a sort of peeved
expression on his face which stares directly at the painter, or where one
imagines the painter should be, instead of straight ahead of himself like all
the others. You get the impression that
he considers himself a cut above the rest and that the tedium of having his
portrait painted is gradually becoming too much of a strain, in consequence of
which he would like the painter to damn-well hurry up and finish the job as
quickly as possible. Well, that may or
may not be the actual case, but it is essentially to him, and in part to a more
manly-looking fellow to his left, that I owe the privilege of a few irreverent
diversions.
In mentioning all this, I took the
precaution of wiping away the accumulated ash of an evening's bum smoking from
them. But now that I have lit myself
another cigarette and am consequently obliged to deposit fresh ash somewhere, I
am gratifying my sadistic impulses by carefully depositing some of it on the
effeminate one's face, rather like those fiendish little delinquents who take a
perverse pleasure in effacing the more salient contents of billboards, public
notices, and anything else suitably vulnerable to derogatory amendment. What surprises me, however, is that I
actually experience a sense of fulfilment from
crowning his little naked and vaguely arrogant chin with a bustling outgrowth
of beard-like ash. It is almost as
though I had actually achieved something by so altering his
demeanour. Why, with this funny little
beard, he could almost pass for Ezra Pound, even with those doleful eyes! At least you would never take him for a woman
now - not, that is, unless you noticed his bright red tunic.
As for the sharp-nosed fellow nearest to
the painter, who appears to be kneeling on the ground and resting his hand on
the arm of the chair or couch upon which the foremost of his four companions is
seated, it's not so much his face that
concerns me as the overly centrifugal nature of his striped dress which,
reaching to the ground, suggests a strongly autocratic disposition. With two swift dabs I'm able to obliterate it
and lend him a more knightly appearance which, however ragged the ensuing
armour, seems to do his sheathed sword slightly more justice.
Aggravated by the childishness of it all, I
stub-out the remains of my cigarette on the front one's neck and disgustedly
push the 'ashtray' to one side. It has
ceased to amuse me. In fact, it might be
better employed, in future, as a soap dish, so that I can obliterate its
courtly contents in a cleaner and less hazardous fashion. From now on I'm going to do something more constructive with my
time!
At the moment, it is raining heavily. I can hear rainwater spurting down the drain
outside my french windows. There are also regular dull thuds against the
panes, though I can't see anything because the curtains are drawn. Nevertheless it reassures me to hear such
sounds. I am reminded that there are
other things than people in the world.
On these wet days I like to think that people are too diverted by the
weather to have much interest in anything else, least of all in individuals
like me. Its inclemency acts as a kind
of shelter against humanity, a refuge for sick and outcast souls. Things become more subdued, the streets
appear to withdraw into themselves as though in a silent conspiracy against
nature. They remind me somehow of a dog
that doesn't want to be washed.
Now this torrential rain will certainly
make the ground easier to dig next week.
I was beginning to despair at the prospect of how much additional
back-breaking labour I might be in for, by digging over the back garden on the
landlord's behalf. Admittedly, I only
managed to do about half-an-hour's digging there each day last week, but that
was quite enough! At times it seemed as
though the fork would break from all the pressure I was obliged to put it
under, in view of the stony nature of the ground. After this, I only hope it doesn't rain all
week. My room becomes frightfully depressing
after a few days of solitary confinement.
For the time being this stillness is
agreeable to me; I don't want to ruin it.
If I were to practise blues runs on my acoustic guitar or play some rock
albums on my stereo, the neighbours would more than likely take offence and
quickly find some means of retaliating or, at the very least, defending
themselves. They would regard my
activity as a sort of infringement of their rights, the rights to a given
quantity of silence, to a couple of hour's tedious repose in a bath of
somnolence, to a little mutual vegetation.
Quite frankly, I don't wish to bring that kind of vindictive tribunal to
bear upon myself this evening; I have already suffered quite enough noise for one
day. If I were now to stretch my self-indulgent
pleasures beyond a certain low-key level, the neighbours would probably think
me barbarous and summarily accuse me of behaving like an adolescent. It would definitely be wiser to share in the
half-life of the community for a while.
Then they can testify to my self-restraint.
If my eyes didn't hurt so much from reading
I would read a little longer this evening.
But I have had enough of it and, besides, you can only do so much of a
given thing. Beyond a certain point you
come to feel that the world is too narrow, that the sanest thing to do would be
to take a week's holiday or have a few days’ break just to make a change. If variety is really the spice of life, then
mine must be pretty tasteless! Sometimes
I get the impression that I'm actually suffocating from culture, since the
stereo only leads to the bookcase, the bookcase to the notebook, the notebook
to the typewriter, the typewriter to the guitar, and the guitar to the radio
... in a vicious circle of enforced intellectuality. When you feel like that, you might as well
destroy everything, since the world has evidently become too narrow. However, as far as today is concerned, I'm
most definitely suffering from an overdose of culture. I badly need an antidote. Ideally, the best thing would be to get drunk
and chase after women. But I haven't got
the money for it and, besides, there aren't that many women around here whom I
would consider it worth my while to chase after. In the end, I would only humiliate and
disgust myself. Well, the next best
thing - other, of course, than to smash furniture or to burn books - would be
to turn-in for the night. But as I won't
be able to sleep for at least another two hours, and it is now only 10.45pm, I
may as well persevere with things a while longer.
I abandon the writing table (scarcely a
desk) and shuffle over to the bookcase.
There is an 8" Venus statuette on the top shelf which immediately
catches my attention. Actually I think
it's an Aphrodite statuette because, although the shopkeeper I bought it from
said "Venus", the hairstyle is of that slightly erratic nature
especially favoured by the ancient Greeks.
Why, it's almost a mess! But that
is precisely why I like it so much; this goddess is approachable.
Like a good many other such symbols she has
taken the trouble to turn her head to one side, so that one gets an enchanting
view of her fine brow and long nose.
Surprisingly, her mouth is exquisitely beautiful in its refined
sensuality, and farther down, in the exact spot where her nose seems to be
pointing, we discover the indisputable cynosure of this mythological effigy to
be an exposed left breast, the very breast which the questionable modesty of
her raiment has permitted her to reveal to us humble mortals in order,
presumably, that we might have a sufficiently cogent criterion by which to
acclaim her sexual prestige as the goddess of love.
The aesthetics of the thing momentarily
overwhelm me. For an instant the insane
desire to smash it possesses me, and I grab her in my left hand as though to
dash her against the opposite wall. But
something checks me; the act would only bring me remorse later, particularly if
the nearest neighbours decided to take offence.
No, I have destroyed enough things for one day as it is! And quietly. My diaries are in shreds in the wastepaper
bin, and so, too, is my latest notebook.
I don't see that I shall benefit myself all that much by also destroying
this harmless statuette. I replace it on
the top shelf of my bookcase. The
eternal woman is re-enthroned, her sexual sovereignty inviolable. When she has gathered enough dust I shall
wipe her clean and place her in a different position - for instance, rump
foremost. Actually I'm not at all
convinced that she shouldn't be viewed from the rear anyway; you see more of
her body then. Until now I have been
fairly content with a frontal view. It
didn't occur to me that she might benefit from a contrary perspective. I ought to have swivelled her around a bit.
I abandon the goddess of love and automatically
fish out a rather cryptic-looking booklet from the bottom shelf of my
bookcase. It has a black cover and
measures about 8" x 12".
Strangely, you wouldn't know which was the front and which the back just
by looking at its cover. In fact, you
wouldn't know whether it was upside down or not either. The most significant thing you can say about
this enigmatic cover is that it's incredibly scratched. Its surface literally glistens with tiny
silver threads which criss-cross it in all directions, lending it the vague
appearance of a relief map. If I really
wanted to know exactly where I stood with this cover, I would have to study the
scratches and count the dots. But so
much attention applied to such an insignificant item strikes me as crazy, the
sort of behaviour one might expect from a lunatic, and I certainly don't regard
myself in that light - at least not at present.
So I immediately stifle the idea, since my life has quite enough crazy
little idiosyncrasies and obsessions already.
I have thrown the booklet onto the bed and
am now sitting down beside it. As a
matter of interest, it is a souvenir from a Grateful Dead concert of several
years ago. Officials were giving them
away free and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to
collect one. You couldn't ask for
more. There are about thirty glossy
pages in this memento, a majority of which are dedicated to close-ups of each
of the musicians, a few group photos, and a number of facts and
quotations. These days I don't remember
all that much about the concert, but I can certainly recall that it took place
at London's Lyceum, off the Strand, in May 1972. Anyway, as this booklet is quite large, it
serves as an ideal place to deposit photos, and that is precisely why I have
opened it this evening.
At present, there are some ten photos in
it, photos or, rather, photographic reproductions of young female models which
I carefully selected and cut out from various men's magazines several months
ago. Now these photographic reproductions,
which are in colour, are all different sizes.
Whenever I take the trouble to look at them, these days, it is purely
from boredom or for some ostensibly aesthetic and even poetic reason. The initial erotic quality which some of them
once possessed for me has long since faded away; I am much too familiar with
them. However, the most significant
thing which now strikes me about these models is that they are mostly wearing
some form of clothing, even if only a pair of nylon stockings or the briefest
of briefs. There are only two of them
who are completely nude, but they look silly to me, since all you can see, in
each case, is a bare rump. There is
nothing particularly individualistic about them - not, that is, unless you were
prepared to utilize a magnifying lens in order to study the minutiae of their
respective behinds. Of the rest, a few
are pretending to indulge in what my little
Well, whatever the case, their
self-indulgence leaves me cold. I much
prefer those models that have opened their legs a little and are lying back on
the bed, as though waiting for a lover to approach them. Somehow they strike me as being a more
agreeable and less narcissistic type of female; they haven't turned their back
on men. However, as for those who are
purely aesthetic, whose casual postures seem to suggest the utmost complacency,
affluence, and restraint, I have to confess that they generally leave me cold,
too. It is as though, already well
fixed-up sexually, one could afford to pay merely for the sight of naked back,
breasts, or thighs, anything more revealing being considered infra dignum or, at the very least, quite unnecessary.
I have had enough of photos for one
evening. After a while they all look the
same. You might as well tear them up,
for all the good they do you. Naturally,
when you see them for the first time in any given magazine it is a kind of
novelty, you are visibly surprised. You
secretly hope to discover someone really worth looking at, someone who
transcends the fully-dressed conservatism of the majority of neighbourhood
women, granting you a degree of voyeuristic intimacy. If you're lucky, you may even encounter the
spectacle of a model who truly appeals to you, gives you a momentary thrill as
she seduces you into admiring her. After
which you might cut her out, as though to distinguish her from the ruck of other models, and pin her up somewhere or, failing
that, hide her away in a large black booklet for future reference. But if there is no-one who particularly
appeals to your aesthetic sense, you might end-up throwing the entire magazine
in the dustbin. I suppose that depends
on your temperament and idiosyncratic bent.
Though if you're like me (and I can't be all that unique) you probably
avoid reading anything. You may consider
it too 'feuilletonistic', too much of an imposition
to wade through the sordid facts of somebody else's sex life, too perverse
because, in reality, there is nothing in it for you and, anyway, you would know
the kinds of things to expect, so what matter?
Everyone according to his tastes and insights! The dustmen may reap a gratuitous reward,
assuming they don't automatically consider such magazines a waste of frigging
time and consequently set about having them disposed of, in the usual fashion,
as quickly as possible.
I return the booklet and its extraneous
contents to their allocated place on the bottom shelf of my hard-pressed
bookcase, squashed in-between a couple of large hardbacks, one of which just happens
to be a largely pictorial biography of Henry Miller. That, it seems to me, is quite enough
pleasure for one evening! If I suddenly
had the good fortune to experience knowledge of a greater pleasure, I would
probably end-up feeling sorry for myself.
"Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," said the
poet Gray somewhere, though I can hardly regard my condition as blissful.
All of a sudden I begin chuckling to
myself. The sight of some old LPs
reminds me of the fact that I once sold someone a record without realizing I
had left about fifteen similarly erotic photos between the inner sleeves of its
cover. It was one of those single albums
that open out like a double, and in the spare section, as it were, of the cover
(which had somehow come unstuck along the outer edge) I had previously secreted
what I imagined to be a quintessential distillation of choice erotica. What amazes me is that the photos remained
hidden away during the transaction. For
the shop assistant made a careful inspection of both the disc and cover without
in the least suspecting anything. I am
only too glad that I didn't remember about them at the time, otherwise I would
almost certainly have become quite visibly embarrassed! He considered the album worth a quid anyway,
so I didn't quibble with him. Indeed, it
wouldn't have surprised me if he subsequently discovered that he had acquired a
special bargain. Nothing but those
photos could have elevated the album to a higher plane!
SATURDAY 18th SEPTEMBER
This morning
I didn't feel like getting up. It seemed
much safer under the covers. For one
thing, I hadn't decided what to do with myself, and, for another, I could sense
the approach of autumn. The effort
required to stagger out of bed and eventually sit at my writing-table-cum-desk
seemed immense. I wondered whether I
hadn't turned into a fairy overnight or gone mad, or something. Admittedly, there were voices, footsteps, and
radio noises impinging upon me from other parts of the house, but that didn't
exactly encourage me. On the contrary, I
felt as though I had been subjugated by a world of indolence. Indeed, as though I might even have left the
human world altogether and possibly become a polyp,
irrespective of the fact that the cold air on my arms indicated that I still resembled a human
being, even if I didn't exactly feel like
one. It was as though my life had
inexplicably become divorced from those all-too-human noises and it annoyed me
to think that I would inevitably be forced to do something similar in due
course, to act like a marionette dangling from the ends of bedsitter-conditioned
strings for another twelve or more hours. I honestly didn't want that to happen, since
things seemed better off as they were - without any interruptions.
To begin with, I wasn't annoying anybody by
just lying still; for, in all probability, the neighbours would have been quite
oblivious of my prone proximity to them.
But if I were to clamber out of bed and start scratching around,
brushing my teeth, hunting for clothes, etc., and then endeavour settling down
to record, on my electric typewriter, some new ideas for my forthcoming novel,
the chances were pretty high that the upstairs tenant would begin making more
noise than I could tolerate, that she would begin to distract me by dropping
things on the floor, shoving armchairs about, rubbing the water heater's rubber
pipe against the metallic tap of her sink unit, stamping backwards and forwards
as though doing the highland fling or suffering from St Vitus's
dance. If possible, I wanted to avoid
that sort of friction today. It
disconcerted me to think that I should be the butt of such flagrant abuse.
What exactly it was about me that annoyed
her, I couldn't imagine. But it seemed
all too evident that she didn't like men of my sort. True, she couldn't have read any of my
writings, since none of them had been published. But that wouldn't necessarily prevent her
from sizing me up, as it were, from my appearance (both sartorial and
physiognomic), from the kind of music I usually listen to, from the fact that I
don't have a girlfriend, never speak to her, am studiously preoccupied, and so
on. Perhaps she imagines I spend a lot
of time busily plotting the future downfall of some worthy institution or,
worse still, writing critically about her for being so boorish, philistine, and
heavy-handed. I don't honestly know,
though, being the sort of person she is, I wouldn't even put it past her to
become annoyed with me because she can't use me, because I possess a sort of innate
obduracy and social aloofness which prevent anyone from getting close to me
without my express permission.
However, a couple of days ago she was
making even more noise than usual, which was more than I could reasonably be
expected to endure. She used as many
resources as she could find - those I have already mentioned and some
additional ones besides - and she persisted so indefatigably and with so much
inane vindictiveness ... that I felt compelled, on at least three occasions, to
hurl a leather boot up at the ceiling.
In fact, I can still discern the indentations looming above me now,
scarring the soft ceiling with ghastly one-inch cracks. Indeed, there is also a rather nasty black
mark above the fireplace, where the boot struck the wall after ricocheting off
of the ceiling. I tried to rub it off
with the aid of as much elbow grease as could be mustered, but it still
persists in existing, and with as much stubbornness as a permanent fixture, as
though the wallpaper needs it there. The
most sensible thing for me to do now would be to put a large poster over it,
perhaps something surrealist. But that
would inevitably mean staring at a poster instead which, despite certain
aesthetic predilections on my part, doesn't really appeal to me in view of the
fact that there are already four small posters on the walls anyway, posters
which I have no desire to either move or remove. I certainly don't feel I could possibly
tolerate the sight of another one, no matter how small. For it would undoubtedly make this room
appear too much like an art gallery, and a rather eccentric one at that! Still, one has to look at something
attractive. Too many blank walls are
depressing.
As I was saying earlier, I didn't feel like
staggering out of bed and subsequently throwing myself into a noisy scene
again, granted that there were quite enough little disturbances going on
already. I would have preferred to
remain mummified between the twisted sheets of my bedding, temporarily innocuous. To be sure, my contribution to domestic
goodwill hadn't amounted to anything very impressive over the past few
weeks. But, even so, I certainly had no
intention of reducing or negating it this morning. So far as I'm concerned, domestic antagonisms
ought to slacken off a little on Saturday, enabling the house to assume a sort
of semi-relaxed atmosphere freed from the bonds of weekday pressures. Yet when you are dealing, as here, with
somebody who evidently finds one day pretty much like another, who doesn't
appear to look forward to the weekend, who is naturally heavy-handed and
thick-skinned to boot, and who bears you an unshakeable grudge, then those
sorts of concerns are completely gratuitous and only succeed in making you feel
foolish. You might as well try appealing
to the moon, for all the good it would do!
Anyway, when I finally succeeded in forcing
myself to get up, at 10.30 this morning, it was partly on account of an empty
stomach and partly on account of my mind which, in accordance with
well-established tradition, was beginning to exasperate me. When you mostly let yourself go like that,
when you just lie there and think about nothing in particular, the chances are
pretty high that your mind will take the law into its own hands, as it were,
and proceed to wander off at an intellectual tangent. You would never believe that this mind was
yours; that, freed from the vigilance of the ego, it would be capable of such
arbitrary decisions and/or aberrations.
For one thing, it is almost unintelligible, it babbles on like an over-active
brook, and, for another, it doesn't appear to lead anywhere, but follows a kind
of wayward course through uncharted psychic territory.
If you were to attempt plotting this
course, you would soon find yourself lost in the middle of nowhere and probably
have to dispatch all the common sense at your disposal in order to bring
yourself back from the brink of insanity to the everyday world of concrete
phenomena. When, for example, I began
listening-in to it this morning, the impression I got was of someone who had
forgotten to switch off the motor, in consequence of which my mind would burn
itself out and either leave me with a shattered brain or, failing that, a
severe headache if I didn't soon take serious measures to rectify the problem. So I clambered out of bed in a panic, got
washed and dressed as quickly as possible, pulled back the curtains, discovered
it was still raining, and thankfully felt my equilibrium return. The sight of so many external objects had
evidently given my mind something with which to preoccupy itself, for it went
straight from one extreme to another.
Now when that happens and I am pondering over what to write, I usually
find myself wondering whether I've got a brain at all, because it seems a
devil-of-a-job to drag anything worthwhile from it, to cultivate anything like
a positive or imaginative response to things.
Of course, I'm well aware that my life isn't particularly exciting, that
a man as solitary as myself, who hasn't had as much as half-an-hour's
intelligent conversation with anyone in over five years and who hasn't even so
much as kissed a woman in nearly six, can't reasonably be expected to bubble
with intellectual enthusiasm, like an ambitious college student. But, then again, I would at least like the
consolation of some intellectual preoccupation, however attenuated.
So I sit at my desk, waiting patiently for
something to click, for a penny to drop, as they say, only to discover that my
brain prefers to lie low as though waiting for a divine signal, a special cue,
an incentive to spring into action like a rabid predator and tear the page
apart in a fury of raging intent. Though
what the requisite signal, cue, or incentive ought to be on such occasions I
haven't the foggiest, because I might sit there with an empty head for over an
hour sometimes. The week before last,
for example, was a fairly typical occasion.
I had only a short while before finished typing-up my first novel, an
innovative little project which leaned heavily on interior monologue, as
befitting a writer as solitary and introverted, not to say Joycean,
as myself, and was now stuck with the problem of how to proceed with the next
one. At the height of my incertitude in
this matter, I realized that I would either have to come up with a solution to
the problem pretty fast or seriously consider finding myself a clerical job
instead. Now since the latter
alternative didn't particularly appeal to me, in view of my preference for
literary work and knowledge that there were precious few clerical jobs to which
a person of my restricted experience and dubious expertise could reasonably
apply with any hope of tangible success, I quickly dismissed it as unwise and
straightaway set about amassing notes for my next novel, whatever it would
eventually be. For the best part of two
weeks I sat in psychic darkness, so to speak, scribbling out as many notes as I
thought fit to include in a character's conversation or reflections - the sort
of ideas one might loosely associate with metaphysical speculation, humorous
hypotheses, ideological fantasies, intuitive perspicacities,
and religious controversies: in short, a rough-and-ready Mon Coeur Mis a Nu, which would
hopefully serve as a repository of significant ideas into which I could dip my
languishing imagination as the need arose, thereby drawing the relevant
inspiration for my forthcoming themes.
Well, by the end of that time I had amassed
something like 150 medium-sized pages of these notes, incorporating everything
from a supposition that old people could often understand young people better
than their parents did because, being old, they reminisced more, to my mounting
distrust of women who, for reasons best known to themselves, habitually hid
their legs behind long skirts or dresses; from a fantasy concerning Oscar
Wilde, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Baudelaire, the
author of the above-mentioned journal, seated together in a café and conversing
animatedly in French about the relationship between politics and religion, to
my recollection of the humorous and almost surreal incongruity established by
certain unlikely juxtapositions of shops, viz. a Scripture Press shop wedged
in-between an antique dealers and a turf accountants on the one hand, and an
undertakers wedged in-between a butchers and a tobacconists on the other; and
from my opinion concerning the baseness of conversationalists who only use
their interlocutor as an excuse to talk of themselves, to reflections upon a
moth that happened to turn acutely narcissistic, one evening, on encountering
its reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Now in compiling these and other such
notes, my imaginative faculty eventually tired of the immense spiritual effort
required to plumb the intellectual depths, so to speak, and retrieve such
buried treasure as was down there, so that the final attempts I made to exploit
it overwhelmingly led me to the conclusion that I had brought as much
intellectual treasure to the surface as could reasonably be obtained for the
time being, and that the feeling of an empty hole or shell which I now
experienced would only be good for receiving such self-contempt as I might fall
prey to if, in proceeding with my prospective novel, it gradually dawned on me
that I hadn't compiled enough of the right sort of notes, but too many
irrelevant and largely undesirable ones!
However, not being as ardent a masochist as
I had formerly supposed, I was able to mitigate the psychological anguish of
this worry by consoling myself in the knowledge that such deep mental
excavations weren't to be treated flippantly, since one couldn't raise too many
profound thoughts to the surface of one's mind in such a short space of time
when thoughts of that nature were more often the product of a gradual awareness
or momentary intuition than the result of systematic burrowing. If I had formerly regarded literary
creativity as fairly spontaneous, I had at least been corrected in my rather
naive and false regard. I had also learnt
that one can't be creative without first being uncreative or reflective, without
sitting in the psychic dark every so often in order to check one's spiritual
compass and simultaneously allow for the build-up of fresh material, fresh
experience. If the mental dam suddenly
burst, one day, so much the better! But
it wouldn't burst from an empty vessel.
This quiet, mysterious, and almost imperceptible build-up of material
under the surface, in the murky depths of the psyche, was the price one
ordinarily paid for feeling bored on or above it. If I had lost patience or confidence in
myself and subsequently abandoned the wait, there might not have been another
chance. I would have misunderstood the
terms of engagement, or so I presumed.
By this time next week I shall be on my way
to visiting an old friend in Merstham,
Tomorrow, however, I know from experience
what I will probably do, but I'm not absolutely sure how I may feel about
it. That will depend on my mood. Yet I know for a fact that I will get up at
Last week, taking the arts review into
account, I must have read at least a quarter of all the printed material. Now that was a sort of record in itself, considering that I rarely get beyond the
headlines. Indeed, sometimes I don't
even read them; I merely look at the pictures.
I flick through the pages with a sort of fanatical determination at the
back of my mind not to be taken-in by anything, and whenever I encounter what I
can only regard as misguided or overly impartial information on a subject about
which I have highly partial views, something inside me clams-up and I hear a
little voice, the voice of my ideological conscience, caution me against making
a fool of myself by reading things which will only mislead or confound me -
political opinions, economic forecasts, literary criticisms, and social commentaries
that I might just as well do without.
Now this happens virtually every time I buy
a newspaper, which is to say, every Sunday morning. So I observe the pictures, scan the main
headlines, and discard those kinds of articles which won't necessarily make me
a more enlightened person or, for that matter, a better citizen (though I am
officially an Irish, not a British, citizen), but will more than likely
frustrate and irritate me by taking me for a ride that either contrasts with my
better judgement of the situation or has to do with subjects about which I
haven't the slightest interest or sympathy, in any case.
If there is one kind of intellectual I
detest above all others, it's the person who has to know something about
everything as though his very existence depended upon it. The one who always appears to know exactly
what is going-on in the world even though he is no less powerless than the rest
of us to do anything about it, and who exudes, in consequence of this obscene
curiosity, a sort of childlike enthusiasm for facts and figures quite divorced
from the pain and emotional anguish which usually accompany them, about which,
in any case, he has only a limited capacity for experience. Indeed, the very justification for this
childlike enthusiasm applied so indiscriminately to a variety of unrelated
contexts is highly questionable. You get
the impression that such a person is either duped by facts, victimized by his
brain, mad, or all three together.
What-on-earth, you wonder, can he possibly gain from so indiscriminate a
perusal? Is it that it gives him
something extra to talk about, to satisfy his egotistical gluttony and thereby
accord him an intellectual advantage over his less well-informed fellows? If that were the case, I shouldn't wish to
listen to him! It would remind me of
what one of my aunts used to say about the importance of reading the papers
every day in order to always have something in common with others, to be able
to talk about the latest news.
Admittedly, one usually learns the latest news from someone or somewhere
anyway. But to actually make a point of
it, to actually suppose that you can win friends or influence through it -
well, I would rather leave such an ambition to her!
Yet if that was hard to stomach, what she
said to me about general knowledge was virtually unpalatable - namely, that a
person who spent lots of time wading through various encyclopaedias,
dictionaries, reference books, etc., in order to acquire greater knowledge was
obviously very clever and on the road to enlightenment. People on quiz programmes, for example, were
obviously very clever because they seemed to know so much, could answer so many
difficult questions, questions undoubtedly beyond the reach of most ordinary
people.... Now although I was prepared to believe that some people on quiz
programmes were indeed very clever, I felt absolutely no compulsion, in spite
of my good aunt's persistent admonitions, to follow suit, to bend my head over
an encyclopaedia or whatever every day, as if that constituted the only
criterion of enlightenment or confirmation of cleverness! Quite frankly, it didn't matter in the least
to me whether the highest mountain in the world, the longest river, or the
biggest lake were to be found in Asia, Africa, or South America. It didn't interest me in the slightest to
know the number of American presidents or English monarchs to-date, and how
this compared with the ancient dynasties of
In fact, now that I consider the matter, it
was exactly the same story at school. I
didn't make the top grade because I could never force myself to take an
interest in anything I disliked or considered superfluous, and there was plenty
of that. If I encountered a subject that
left me cold, I did what I could to pass muster but no more. However, whenever I encountered something I
liked or in which I could believe, I set about doing my best in it and usually
came top or near top of the class.
Besides certain aspects of history, music, and English (in that order),
I was also pretty good at geography and did fairly well at examination time in
those aspects of any particular subject which seemed meaningful to me. But when it came to subjects like technical
drawing, physics, woodwork, metalwork, and engineering science, I was a
failure, a rebel, and a wastrel all rolled into one. I saw absolutely no reason to exert myself. Indeed, it seemed as though the school
authorities were primarily interested in churning out a given number of
duplicated achievers every year, in making most of their pupils so
intellectually generalized and malleable that they would not only all think
alike but be able to adapt themselves to just about any task, irrespective of
whatever preferences or innate predilections for one subject over another
individual pupils may have had.
Well, idealist that I was (and still am,
for that matter), I did what interested me and left school with fewer
qualifications than those whose academic commitments extended right across the
board, in a sort of balanced respect for the general curriculum. I don't in the least regret the fact!
Just as I am writing all this down in my
journal, the girl upstairs has come down and is speaking to someone at the
front door. I can't make out exactly
what the other person, evidently a man, is saying, but he has apparently come
to the wrong address, since she has such a reassuring air with strangers. You would think she was the most serious person
on earth. She is telling him that
someone who used to live here has had all his mail forwarded-on, and that there
is absolutely no-one by name of Erickson living here at present. Her composed, authoritative, and slightly
imperious tone-of-voice puts everything into place straightaway. There is absolutely no possibility of a
mistake!
I cease listening to her because she annoys
me. I have heard all this nonsense
before anyway. It is too theatrical to
be worth taking seriously. She changes her
mask when and where it suits her - at a moment's notice. However, earlier this week she was anything
but the composed, authoritative, and slightly imperious citizen you could
easily take her for today. She was like
a little schoolgirl at the awkward age.
Indeed, you would have thought, by the amount of noise coming from her
room, that there was a kindergarten upstairs.
Yes, and her current boyfriend - a rather
unassuming and reserved type of bloke who nevertheless usually acknowledges me
whenever I encounter him in the hall - is more or less terrorized by her most
evenings. She calls him every damn name
under the sun just for an excuse, I suppose, to calm her highly-strung nervous
system down a bit, to ease her psychic tensions by revelling in the power of
her belligerent and somewhat strained voice.
I don't know how he takes it all, but he still manages to give her a
damn good lay from what I can judge by the absurdly
violent way their mattress creaks at night.
Maybe sex provides him with the only opportunity he gets to dominate
her? Though even that is by no means
certain!
Whether or not he enjoys being made to feel
a fool, I haven't a clue. But he keeps
coming back for more punishment all the same.
Why, they are virtually a pair of sadomasochists! In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he
is secretly afraid of her. At least that
would seem a reasonable supposition when you bear in mind what he has to go
through most nights. She wouldn't get
away with so much verbal abuse if she were dealing with one of my sort,
though. Yet the chances of a man like me
getting involved with a cow like that are pretty slim; I am far too sensible.
Anyway I think that, generally speaking,
most women have this advantage over us; morality or, perhaps I should say, sexual deference
prevents us from thrashing them.
Now whenever I bump into her companion on the stairs or in the hall we
remain fairly cordial, not simply because we don't particularly dislike each
other but almost as though we were also subliminally aware of the physical
violence we could inflict upon each other in the event of either or both of us
losing our temper for some reason. But
where she is concerned, nothing in the world could prevent her from being
abusive if she felt confident that her gender protected her from retaliatory
violence. This, I believe, is the crux
of the matter. She exploits male
deference in her desire to dominate her boyfriend, and comes out top dog nine
times out of ten. He evidently tolerates
being abused, presumably for some ulterior motive.
However, although that is how it appears to
me at present, I wouldn't stake my life on it, by any means! They only concern me insofar as the noise
level is concerned and if that were kept down to a bare minimum, I wouldn't
blink a speculative eyelid.
Now I think it's time for me to take a
stroll around town and get myself a bite to eat. Enough writing for the time being!
SATURDAY EVENING
Since it
was still raining I didn't go to the
How shall I explain? Well, it all started last Thursday, when I
received some money through the post from my long-suffering aunt. Considering that I hadn't even remotely
expected anything of the kind, I was momentarily placed in a state-of-mind
bordering on euphoria; I could have kissed somebody, even the upstairs
neighbour. Since there was nobody around
to kiss, however, I thanked my lucky stars and quickly got ready to go
out. For some weeks I had been living on
the borderline, resigned, in the absence of literary recognition, to having
just enough money on which to scrape by.
But this little surprise - evidently in response to the letter I had
earlier written my aunt informing her of my dire financial straits - would now
enable me to buy myself a record or even a new shirt, depending how I felt.
Since I already had enough shirts in the
wardrobe, I opted for some music and duly headed towards the local record shop
which had the widest selection of the sort of music I had in mind. My contribution to the proprietor's financial
well-being would undoubtedly meet with a favourable response. He would welcome the money as though his very
survival depended on it. After all, I would
only be doing my bit to keep the economy turning, to put money into circulation
instead of hoarding it like a miser, hiding it under the mattress or
somewhere. It was bound to favour
somebody.
When I eventually got to the shop, which
happens to be in Muswell Hill, I straightaway
proceeded to hunt among the hundreds of classical sleeves on display, having
previously acquired a taste for French piano music, especially that of Ravel
and Debussy. However, there were so many
records from which to choose, so many I didn't want, and so many I hadn't heard
before that, in my increasingly perplexed state-of-mind, I eventually settled
for an album of piano sonatas by Scriabin, that
little-known and rarely-played Russian composer. For one thing, it was piano music and, for
another, its dignified cover readily appealed to me. Besides which, I was beginning to feel a
trifle dizzy, a shade uncomfortable about hunting around from one pile of
sleeves to another without actually getting anywhere. I even felt slightly intimidated by the
proprietor's suspicious glances, by his occasional optical stabs in my
direction, which seemed to suggest that I was taking an awfully long time in
deciding what to buy and that, if I wasn't an outright crank or a roguish and
possibly none-too-experienced schemer who just might be a danger to the
condition of his record sleeves, I could well be something worse. It seemed that my presence there was
beginning to annoy him. Even so, that
shouldn't have bothered me. Ordinarily I
am anything but an easy customer to satisfy.
I must have walked in and out of this particular shop on at least five
previous occasions without having bought anything. Shopping annoys me, not least of all when it
comes to music. Why, I'm virtually
paranoid! About half the total records -
and more than half the cassettes - I ever buy always end up either being sold
to someone or, failing that, thrown in the dustbin. They fail to please me.
Well, I continued to nose through his
selections, pulling out sleeves all over the place, looking at the pictures (if
any), biting my lower lip, and generally making a fool of myself and perhaps
also, unwittingly, of him. I had moved
from the piano section to the concerto section, from the concerto section to
the symphony section, from the symphony section to the organ section, from the
organ section back to the piano section, from there to the vocal section and
even, bizarrely, to the film section. It
seemed as though I would never make up my mind, that I would gradually become a
sort of permanent fixture, albeit one that was capable of a limited degree of
autonomy. Strangely, it didn't appeal to
me in the least to ask the proprietor to play something, because the chances
were that I wouldn't like it, would tell him to take if off and play something
else, only to discover, much to my disgust, that I didn't like that either.
To be sure, there had already been enough
problems in my life with rock and jazz albums, without the necessity of my now
adding so-called classical music to it as well.
That would have been the last thing I wanted! So I shuffled back from the film section to
the piano section, impulsively fished out the Scriabin,
and rather self-consciously slapped the sleeve down on the proprietor's
counter.
Something about the look the elderly man
gave me, however, indicated that things weren't quite shaping up to his
expectations. I wondered, for a moment,
whether I hadn't made a mistake, whether it wouldn't be wiser to suddenly
change my mind, fish out a cheaper or better one, though, to be honest, I didn't
think it would be too expensive and was more concerned about the nature of the
music. But before I could do or suggest
anything of the kind, before I could even move my lips, he had picked up the
sleeve and begun searching for its record.
As on other such occasions, he gave the disc, once found, what appeared
to be a thorough inspection, taking due account of the grooves on both sides
and even going so far as to take a measured vertical view of it, doubtless to
ensure that it wasn't warped and therefore wouldn't start bouncing up and down
on my turntable when I eventually got round to playing it. No, that condition was reserved for me, when
he informed me, in his customarily suave tone-of-voice, that it would cost
£4.99p. I almost fainted! I had unwittingly let myself in for one of
the more expensive recordings. My former
rather too optimistic expectations were rapidly deflated. I had naively imagined that the price would
be somewhere in the region of £2.99p, like the previous record I had bought in
his shop - a selection of Ravel's piano music, and a
by-no-means bad selection either! But
this record was obviously quite another story, and one
that I could ill-afford, even with ten quid to-hand. Had he not made such a show of checking it,
the crafty old devil, I would have informed him it was too expensive or, at any
rate, musically unsuitable and that I would therefore have no option but to
select something else. But his
unassuming politeness had lulled me into a false sense of complacency, so I
reluctantly fished out the note from my pocket and nervously handed it across
the counter to his outstretched hand.
After all, I had only myself to blame!
Well, as can be imagined, I beat a
demoralized retreat and headed straight back home, oblivious of the book and
wine shops which would otherwise have arrested my attention and possibly even
secured my humble patronage. Somehow, I
knew from the moment I bought this cursed record that I had made a dreadful
mistake; the rest of the afternoon was against me. Even the leather bag in which I had hidden it
wasn't really protective enough. Every
glance from other people would inevitably condemn me. I walked back rather hurriedly with my head
bowed most of the way; for I didn't want to see or to be seen by anyone, least
of all anyone whose face was familiar to me.
But when I got indoors and tentatively, nervously, almost reluctantly
placed the disc on the turntable, turned-up the volume, put on my headphones,
and sat down in my creaky armchair, everything was gradually revealed to me; I had made a
dreadful mistake! Never in my life had I
encountered such an appalling row, never before experienced music so far
removed from my tastes.
When I came to my senses I was in a fit of
rage; I could have smashed something - the Venus statuette, for instance. The room became as lugubrious as the music,
the clouds pressed heavily against the window panes, and I cursed to myself, as
though complaining to an imaginary audience: "To think that there are
so-called cultured people who are actually impressed by this sort of
noise! They're all mad, absolutely
mad!" So saying, I stamped my foot
on the floor in Hamsunesque vein and then
exasperatedly threw myself onto the bed.
Yes, I had certainly put money into circulation all right, but, for
once, I had duped myself in the process.
Things were looking awfully down that afternoon!
Largely on account of my financial
constraints, I don't buy records or cassettes all that often these days. But, whenever I do, I'm usually fortunate
enough to be able to appreciate the greater part of what I hear, particularly
the classical music which, for reasons of economy, I almost invariably buy on
disc. On Thursday, however, the law of
averages was against me. I certainly
couldn't appreciate the greater part of what I heard then! It was far too disjointed and atonal. Everything about the music only served to
make me feel more depressed and dissatisfied.
There didn't seem to be one worthwhile melody on the entire record, not
one! For the most part, there were just
notes, notes which weren't particularly interesting and which didn't seem to
lead to any logical resolution. It was
the sort of thing that you instinctively know you've heard before: fairly
nondescript 'serious' music - absolutely characterless! To think that there were people who regularly
allowed themselves to be taken-in by this kind of
stuff, I said to myself! They read the
blurb as quickly as possible, if in fact they read anything at all, and
immediately their minds are made up for them; they see the calibre of the music
even before they hear it. They go along
to the concert hall and sit through several hours of barbarous insanity, sheer
cacophony, an anarchic degeneration euphemistically marketed in terms of modern
experimentalism but the product, more usually, of cultural reaction, and rather
than appear unappreciative, and hence naive, ignorant, superficial,
presumptuous, conservative, philistine, impatient, ignoble, etc., they behave
like a flock of sheep being led to the slaughter and clap as loudly and enthusiastically
as possible, as though the cacophony, however unintelligible, was actually
well-worth listening to and paying for, since something that constituted
musical progress. Some of them would
doubtless continue clapping until their hands sprouted blisters if they had to,
the mugs, or even until their hands were blood raw!
Well, at least I have the consolation of
knowing that I haven't fallen so low, that I'm not so easily satisfied. My musical eclecticism usually saves me from
succumbing to such self-deceptions by preventing me from going too far in any
given direction, by fixing definite limits to my respective predilections. I am evidently a member of that breed of
culturally conservative souls who feel much safer with certain of the
established classics, compositions known to possess a discernible quantity of
agreeable musicality; piano concertos, for example, like Brahms' 2nd,
Prokofiev's 3rd, or the Grieg and Dvorák
ones. Where many of these so-called
avant-garde works are concerned, however, I remain unflinchingly sceptical, if
not downright contemptuous!
Well, so much for all that! I wouldn't have taken the trouble to write
about this affair with the Scriabin had I not gone
out feeling like a fool today. I knew
that I would pass the record shop and I also knew that I wouldn't be able to
force myself to look through its plate-glass window into the brightly lit
interior, at least not for the time being.
That shop was strictly taboo!
For, when I eventually walked past the place, it was half in the
assumption that the proprietor would recognize me and classify me as a fool,
and half in the assumption that I really was one, with little or no musical
taste. Therefore it was only natural
that I should prefer to retain a low profile, so to speak.
Of course, in all likelihood the proprietor
wouldn't have recognized me even if, by some remote chance, he'd had time to
see me. And even if he were to
recognize me, I wouldn't have been any the worse for it physically. Nonetheless, such a perfectly rational
consideration wasn't sufficient to prevent me from feeling acutely
self-conscious. Quite the contrary, I
hurried past like a guilty thief.
However, now that I have recorded my
impressions, like a little schoolgirl, I feel slightly better. I had to get them off my chest somehow and,
since I don't have anyone with whom to discuss my
affairs, writing them down in this journal is the only solution. But I ought to have learnt my lesson by
now. I oughtn't to make that sort of
mistake again!
So the day has passed,
the rain has stopped, and I am sitting in my little box-like room as usual. I don't feel such a fool now and, besides,
things are beginning to look up this evening, an outcome I hardly dared
anticipate in the morning, and not only because I feared that I would turn into
a marionette dangling from unenviable domestic strings, a boot thrower, a
directionless wanderer, or something even worse, but also because, for some
time now, Saturday evenings have been the most depressing of the entire week.
Now I know that may seem an incredibly
strange statement to make but, all the same, it is rooted in indelible
experience. More precisely, on Saturday
evening you would like to socialize a little, to enjoy yourself with a
woman. That is all it really boils down
to, I'm afraid. For Saturdays and
Sundays are pretty much alike in this respect: they each have their fixed
limits. On Saturday evenings you imagine
that people are having a good time and letting themselves go, and on Sunday
mornings you imagine that they are lying in bed with a hangover and recovering
from their 'sins' of the previous night, just taking things easy and slowly
preparing themselves, confessions or no confessions, for Monday, because
Mondays also have their fixed limits. Yet
this is precisely what bothers me about it.
My Saturday evenings are too much like any other evening to be
particularly enjoyable; they usually amount to so many wasted hours.
Sounds penetrate my eardrums from other
parts of the house. I hear radios mumbling,
televisions screeching, neighbours chattering, bedsprings jingling, children
crying (the people in the next-door flat are a family), telephones ringing,
footsteps clumping across the upstairs floor, tap water running, the front door
slamming, and, in addition to all these routine disturbances, a medley of
fairly nondescript sounds which I can't even begin to
fathom. Now if I wanted to assert my presence,
to become a part of the Saturday-evening atmosphere and add to the general
hubbub, I could do no more than play a few over-familiar records on my stereo
and/or make a rather bluesy sound on an old acoustic guitar. But I don't always feel in the mood, alas,
for such little cultural diversions which, in any case, only succeed in
depressing me after a while or, worse still, engendering a feeling of merciless
self-contempt. Saturday evenings should
be dedicated to better things than self-contempt!
For example, romance. A beautiful woman lies on my bed and stares
me unashamedly in the face. I don't know
where I stumbled across her and I don't really care either, though it must have
been somewhere quite interesting, and she must have been interested in me to
attract my attention so openly, because I noticed, from the moment I clapped
eyes on her, that she wasn't the usual glum-looking sort of woman but seemed
possessed of an engaging generosity of spirit.
Indeed, her entire appearance, the intelligence and charm with which she
conducted herself, suggested the likelihood of a person utilizing life to her
own advantage rather than being submerged or crushed by it.
But what matter? She is here and I recognize her for herself,
as also for the transformation she has wrought in me. She is at one with her personality, confident
of herself though by no means haughty or intimidating. We are accomplices who understand each other
and, as such, we are prepared to show patience with each other, to make
allowances, to revel in our respective idiosyncrasies. We know, too, that we are going to revel in
each other's bodies in another hour, two hours - what matter? Time is immaterial because time is no longer
the governing factor. Our conversation
is spontaneous, frank, absorbing. We
read each other too well to be interested in playing silly little games, in
stalling for the 'perfect' moment, in creating little 'theatrical'
effects. Our mutual sex-appeal is too
obviously evident to allow us to be side-tracked by considerations of
mechanical etiquette or petty convention.
We didn't even go to the cinema; there was nothing either of us
particularly wanted to see. No, and we
certainly didn't make gastronomic fools of ourselves in some expensive
restaurant; that would have been completely out-of-the-question! But a moment will come when, lying on her
back, she will feel me run the fingers of my tender hands over her dark-stockinged thighs and up under her close-fitting miniskirt
to the contours of her groin, where, advancing under the gusset of her panties,
they will contentedly nestle in the dark mass of pubic hair which crowns her
sex. This is an evening that won't be
wasted!
I awake from these tender reflections with
a painful start and the concomitant realization that I have achieved nothing
more than a gratuitous erection. There
isn't even a blue stocking to be seen.
I'm an idle dreamer!
It is almost half-twelve, so I am going to
bed. There doesn't seem to be much point
in staying up any longer.
SUNDAY 19th SEPTEMBER
As usual
the local café was fairly crowded when I pushed open its rickety glass door earlier
this morning. The owner depends almost
entirely on weekend custom, whereas during the week things simmer down to a
virtual standstill. Apart from the odd
occasion, I am his only customer between
If it wasn't for the fact
that he's a Cypriot (Greek, so far as I can tell), I might be able to strike up
the rudiments of a decent conversation with him. Unfortunately, however, his knowledge of
English is somewhat too rudimentary, being confined to words like 'coffee',
'tea', 'burger', 'egg', 'milk', and 'chips' (which he pronounces 'cheeps'), so
that anything beyond the rather narrow confines of his business needs would
hardly be accessible to conversation, even supposing you could overcome his
thick accent and faulty pronunciation which, when combined, render him
virtually unintelligible. I still
haven't got around to finding out his name, though I suppose that is neither
here nor there, so far as our worldly relations are concerned. To him, I am just a regular customer who
happens to order the same food every morning and, to me, he is just the
anonymous old guy who happens to fry it.
In the interests of efficiency and inter-ethnic harmony, things are
better left as they are.
Anyway, to return to what I was first
saying, whenever I drift in here during the week he is usually looking at his
paper or smoking a cigarette and gazing through his plate-glass window out onto
the street, gazing with semi-hypnotized eyes at a milk float, a parked car, a
dog cocking its hind leg against the nearest lamppost, an overcast sky, a
mother dutifully wheeling her pram past, the few shops across the road, etc.,
and, after offering him a friendly glance, I am compelled to bury my rebellious
head in one of the pop stations blaring from his radio at the rear of the
premises. But all this changes at the
weekend, especially on Sunday mornings.
For he looks like a man run off his feet, the sweat glistens on his
deeply furrowed brow, and his assistants - either his two daughters or his
eldest daughter and somebody else (usually a dark-complexioned young man or,
occasionally, a rather plump and sad-eyed fellow with a limp) - look pretty
much as run off their feet as him.
Today the eldest daughter is assisted by
the dark-complexioned young man. There
are only twelve tables for them to wait on but, to judge from the noise and
general hustle-and-bustle, you'd think there were at
least fifty. One of the reasons for this
is that the owner, who also happens to be the chief cook, can only attend to
one customer at a time on his small stove, so that he is always obliged to
limit his service to methodically working through each of the twelve or more
other customers, which, fortunately for us, he does as quickly as possible,
albeit occasionally dropping or smashing something in the rush. Instead of looking forward to Sunday as a day
of rest, this man must condition himself to working doubly hard! Only after he has closed the café and
switched off its neon lights at
Fortunately, there are only a couple of
customers ahead of me in the frying queue today, so I won't have to wait too
long. Since I am sitting near the rear
of the premises I can see most of what goes on in here, though, naturally,
there isn't much worth seeing. Things
come and go more or less according to plan.
That daughter of his worries me slightly;
she looks so sad most of the time. In
actual fact, I'm a bit uncertain whether there isn't something wrong or whether
that is her natural appearance, though it wouldn't surprise me if there was
more to it than met the eye ... like she lacked access to a regular lay or
something. Even so, working flat-out in
a steamy café all Sunday isn't exactly a thing to be overjoyed about, is
it? A girl of her age ought to be released
from such obligations now and then. She
can't have anything much to look forward to at the weekends.
Yes, but there is something more to it as
well. I think she suffers a lot on
account of her face, which is tarnished by a mass of sores, spots, and
boils. Every time she serves me I notice
the same thing, and it appears to be getting worse. It would be enough to give me an insuperable
inferiority complex, having to contend with a burden like that every day! Yet for an adolescent female it must be especially
burdensome, what with so many young men to wait on all day. If I were in her shoes, I don't think I'd
have the nerve to appear in public, let alone work in a café!
Whether it's wholly attributable to her
youth, to blood trouble and pubic upheavals, I don't pretend to know. But, whatever the case, she evidently eats a
lot of fried stuff, and that can't help.
Why, there is hardly anything on the menu that isn't fried. You have to have chips with everything: egg
and chips, bacon and chips, pie and chips, sausage and chips, spam and
chips.... Indeed, it is pretty much the same story, or menu, in most cafés;
their customers eat nothing which hasn't been liberally soaked in grease! Yet when I consider how circumscribed most
people's diets must be in here, I feel like getting up. It seems a plausible enough reason why they always
look so washed-out and discontented most of the time.
In a minute the eldest daughter will hand
me the menu and I, for my part, will pretend not to notice or be offended by
her facial condition. I won't bother to
look at the menu either, because I know in advance what to order. Then she will give me two sugar cubes or,
more precisely, four sugar cubes wrapped in two pieces of red paper which,
because I never take sugar with tea, will remain on the edge of my saucer. It has been going on like this for at least
three months now, but, no matter who is serving, I still get the superfluous
cubes, even though I occasionally draw attention to my abstemious
predilection. Still, there is always the
possibility that I will change my mind one day and ... ah! here
she comes now.
"Yes?"
"Er,
egg-bacon-chips-beans and a tea, please."
"Right."
God, she's so thin! In fact, I was going to mention that earlier
but, what with her facial problems, I completely overlooked it. If she gets any thinner she will turn into a
living skeleton. Why, her waist is
almost as thin as her neck! It must be
difficult for her to find skirts that fit tightly enough. How-on-earth she manages to carry such heavy
plates all day, I can't even begin to imagine ...
"The way they were playin'
yesterday, mate, they don't stand a fuckin' chance of
winning the championship. It's a drag to
waste yer fuckin' money on
that sort of bleedin' game, I can tell yer."
"They 'ad 'alf
the fuckin' team injured anyway."
"I don't know what-the-fuck was the
matter with 'em, but if I have to watch any more of
that sort of crap, I'm going to demand a refund from the fuckin'
cunt at the gate."
"Look at this bastard 'ere."
I have neither the courage nor the desire to
turn around, since I can hear all I need to without moving my head. The three of them were seated there when I
arrived here earlier this morning. They
weren't there last week, but they were certainly there the week before! As it happens, the most I can hope for will
be a little silence while they stuff their big dirty mouths with chips and
cynically browse through the tabloids, where the 'bastard' is evidently to be
found. Unfortunately, the more querulous
one is highly predictable - he never talks, he shouts, and in the most
blatantly expletive sort of way. Of
course, I can always take refuge from them in the radio, but I don't feel
particularly enthusiastic about what it is playing at the moment. It doesn't sound too ennobling, either.
When I got here yesterday morning, I
managed to find a seat behind the fridge over to my right. There are usually a few tabloids lying on top
of it and, if the mood takes me, I occasionally fish one of them off and begin
wearily and somewhat tentatively to glance through its photo-rich pages. Well, the only offering there yesterday
morning was The Sun, and, as I never read that, I couldn't force myself to
pick it up. I wanted to escape from the
radio at the time but, there you are, I was left pretty defenceless; I couldn't
force myself to stretch out a hand and take what is, after all, a relatively
harmless item between my fingers, even though there were only about
half-a-dozen other customers in the café and they all seemed perfectly
unassuming. I was simply trapped in my
habits. Indeed, I was almost afraid of
feeling uncomfortable about it, afraid that somebody would notice my
embarrassment or that the chef would suddenly come to a halt in front of me
with his fat mouth hanging open and his dark eyes well-nigh popping out of his
somnambulistic head, as though I had just committed a social indiscretion -
pulled down my jeans, say, and started to masturbate into a tabloid or
something. Now some people might think
it snobbish that I should display such intellectual fastidiousness with regard
to so trivial an item, but I don't pride myself on being a snob. In fact, I can't see that snobbery really has
anything to do with it. On the contrary,
it was more a question of taste. For
when it comes to matters of taste, I know perfectly well how to differentiate
between what strikes me as congenial and what doesn't, and no fool on earth
could convince me otherwise! That paper
simply wasn't for me. Yet my immobility
before it struck me as highly significant at the time; I was made freshly
conscious of my limits.
Now when I pushed open the café door, a
short while ago, I had just escaped from similar reflections concerning my
relationship to the upstairs tenant.
That, too, was essentially a question of limits, and one which has added
yet another link to the chain of constraints made from a consciousness of how
much my freedom as an individual is hemmed-in by limitations either imposed
upon me by society or by myself in relation to that which is other than me. In fact, I'm fast beginning to wonder how
many more such links I can add to the chain before it begins to weigh too
heavily upon me, and I feel morosely imprisoned beneath a crippling weight of
these limits. If I'm not completely
free, if I choose to impose certain restrictions upon myself, it must be
because I have gradually come to the conclusion that, beyond a certain point,
freedom isn't good for me; that too great an emphasis on it would only lead to
my being exposed to further constraints of a more burdensome or onerous
nature. Obviously, I don't want to
become the slave of freedom. If I am
relatively free, then it must be on my own terms. Thus these limits can be seen as a guideline
to that restricted freedom, in which case I shouldn't allow them to become too
cumbersome. Yet I can't permit myself to
become overly complacent about them either, to treat them matter-of-factly,
because they occasionally burst out of their chain and present or represent
themselves for trial, obliging me to formulate fresh convictions about them.
That affair with the boot, for example, may
have been relatively insignificant in itself, but it somehow threw the entire
justification for such a retaliatory procedure into question last night, when
the upstairs tenant began to make a lot of additional noise after I had gone to
bed. I couldn't have been in bed longer
than five minutes when she, and possibly her masochistic boyfriend as well,
began dropping things on the floor, shoving their armchair about, opening and
slamming cupboard doors, and generally making a hell of a noise. For the life of me, I couldn't understand
exactly why this was going on since, as far as I could tell, I had done nothing
to particularly arouse their hostility during the evening.
To be sure, I didn't want to get worked-up
into a rage just then; for I am only too aware that rages are disagreeable
impositions which one is generally much better off without. But after about fifteen minutes of these
continual disturbances I felt anything but complacent and perceived, clearly enough, that I was steadily expanding with negative energy:
anger, hate, resentment, and the urge to retaliate. Unable to restrain myself any longer, I
sprang out of bed, fumbled around in the dark for my monkey boots and, on locating
them, flung each one as vehemently as I could against the ceiling, while
subconsciously hoping that I wouldn't smash the light bulb or damage them in
the process. Unfortunately for me, the
boots made more noise when they fell to the floor, sole downwards, but in the
moral blindness of my fury it didn't occur to me that the downstairs neighbours
would be disturbed. I was infuriated to
the point of oblivion, and when, after the first assault on the ceiling, I
flung my boots up two, three, four more times, scrambling around for them as
before, I was shaking in the agony of my rage.
I didn't feel like going upstairs and making a verbal scene as well,
because I was in the nude and, under the circumstances, dressing would have proved
too difficult. Besides, I was virtually
speechless. But it seemed that my
aggression had left its mark, for the house quickly fell into a sullen silence.
Switching on the light, however, I
discovered, to my utmost dismay, that the ceiling was now scarred by a mass of
ugly black streaks where the boot polish had come off, as well as more
seriously disfigured by one or two additional indentations. It was evident that I would subsequently have
the unenviable task of attempting to scrub it clean and patch-up, as best I
could, the more damaging effects of my anger.
When I finished the job, early this morning, I realized that the ceiling
would henceforth be coated in dull grey patches, as though suffering from the
effects of damp rot, and this fact really chastened me. Such 'retaliatory' measures as I had rashly
seen fit to indulge in, during the night, are clearly impracticable. I had acquired a new limit.
There is a middle-aged couple seated at the
table to my right who come in here from time to time and occasionally cast
furtive glances in my direction. I can
hardly ever make out what they are saying, because they almost invariably speak
in Greek. But every ten minutes or so
the woman throws a kind of nervous fit which temporarily interrupts their
conversation. I don't know whether she
has just thrown the fit, because I have been unduly preoccupied with my
thoughts. But I am half-expecting it to
happen any moment now, since I can see them quite well out of the corner of my
right eye. When the woman involuntarily
nods her head, says nothing, stops eating, and looks abstracted, you can bet
your life it is about to happen. At
present, this affliction is welling-up in her, she is
entirely defenceless against it, though the man, presumably her long-suffering
husband, is still talking away in his usual restless manner. I can feel a kind of restlessness growing in
myself too, a distinct feeling of tense expectancy, but I have no wish to
appear intrusive or overly curious.
Neither do I wish to burst out laughing at the sudden thought of waiting
for something pathetic to happen. They
... ah! suddenly her head swivels sharply to the right, her right elbow juts
out and wobbles backwards and forwards a few times, her mouth opens into a wide
yawn, her neck cranks violently upwards, her torso is thrown forwards against
the table, and ... just as suddenly it is all over and she resumes her former
posture to both her own and her husband's gratified relief. Even I am released from my pent-up expectancy
into a sort of mild catharsis.
"There you are, dear."
"Ah, thanks!" Now I am free to eat my breakfast with a
modicum of complacency.
SUNDAY EVENING
This has
proved to be an unusually productive Sunday.
When I consider the number of words written yesterday and the no-less
impressive number written today, I wonder whether I haven't gone mad or
something. And I wonder what kind of
cerebral repercussions lie in store for me, if I can
manage to produce somewhere in the region of twenty pages a day! If last week was a case of verbal
constipation, this week is certainly shaping up to being a classic case of
verbal diarrhoea!
But to return to the
facts. As it started raining
again this afternoon I didn't take my customary Sunday stroll but remained
indoors. There wasn't anything of
particular interest in the paper and, for once, I decided to abstain from
reading literature or philosophy. So
with little else to do, I sought refuge in the idea of revising the one-scene playlet I had been working on earlier in the year. Here, then, is the result. It is almost
Now if someone were to inquire of me why I
then had to transcribe it to this journal, I would reply: "Because it
ties-up with what has been going on today and prevents me from doing anything
worse." I should imagine that that
would be a sufficiently cogent answer!
The small surgery
of Dr Martin Stanmore, the supreme exponent of 'Emotional Hypnosis', where a
young and semi-delirious victim of unrequited love, a Mr James Hamilton, is
endeavouring to explain certain aspects of his crisis to both the doctor and
the doctor's female assistant, Nurse Pamela Barnes. He is seated in front of Dr Stanmore's
paper-strewn desk, while the good doctor himself - a tall, dark-bearded man -
is slowly pacing the floor backwards and forwards behind him. Nurse Barnes, who is seated immediately to Mr
Hamilton's left, is clasping a large surgical casebook in which she has been
taking particulars and recording general impressions with regard to the
clinical nature of the patient's psychological condition. The scene opens towards the climax of Mr Hamilton's
confessions.
MR HAMILTON:
(In a state of nervous excitement) I'll buy five minutes of her time, four
minutes, two minutes!
Just a glance then, a touch, a word!
I'll follow her everywhere, anywhere, what matter! I have only to set eyes on her for a second
and my heart beats like a drum, my Adam's apple rises up to choke me, and my
concentration goes positively haywire! I
can't even eat without thinking about her.
I get indigestion every time anyone mentions her goddamned name, that
terribly beautiful name which haunts me all through the night. Her gestures, voice, smile, hair, eyes,
limbs, buttocks, breasts, clothes, scents, opinions - everything about her
completely enslaves me! For two pins I'd
get down on my knees and start worshipping her.
What else can I do? She has only
to appear in my presence for a few seconds and I'm a nervous wreck.
DR STANMORE:
(Aside to Nurse Barnes) He needs immediate attention. Grade A.
This case is already serious. His
state-of-mind may deteriorate still further unless we apply the emergency
antidote at once. We'll have to put him
under for several hours.
MR HAMILTON:
(Jumps to conclusions) You're not intending to
interfere with the workings of my brain, are you? I'd rather not experience anything more painful
than what I'm already suffering from, if you don't mind. A sedative is all very well, but if it's only
the start of a process that ...
NURSE BARNES:
(Her hand on the patient's nearest arm) Now don't be afraid, James! You won't feel a thing. We've treated literally hundreds of young
people, both male and female, since this clinic first opened, and the vast
majority of them have profited enormously from our service, as can be verified
by the many letters of thanks and acknowledgement in the cabinet to your right.
(She vaguely points in the aforesaid direction)
We have every confidence that your welfare will be safeguarded with the
utmost care, and that you'll be successfully returned to the pre-love condition
without experiencing any psychical or physical repercussions whatsoever. Indeed, we even undertake to offer you a
six-month's guarantee which ensures you free service, should today's
application of hypnotic expertise by one of the world's top emotional hypnotists
prove insufficiently therapeutic; though we've had few complaints or
rejections, I can assure you. This
emotional insanity from which you're currently suffering ... is injurious both
to yourself, as victim, and to the community at large, which is to say, to
those whom you infect throughout the course of your daily routine - people who
inevitably become victimized and, to a certain extent, influenced by your
reduced efficiency, intermittent emotional aberrations, intellectual
instability, and general melancholia.
MR HAMILTON:
(On the defensive) But I didn't mean to fall in love, honest! I couldn't help it. Her continuous presence gradually overwhelmed
me, despite the fact that she was attached to somebody else at the time and
wouldn't have anything to do with me sexually.
By the time I sought to evade her, it was too damned late. I had succumbed to the malady.
DR STANMORE:
(Extends a reassuring hand to the patient's right shoulder) Nobody
can help falling in
love, my friend. It's beyond our
control, since ordained by nature. If it
happens it happens, and you must suffer the consequences, whether positively
or, as in your case, negatively. If she
refused you, then she is to blame. You
have every right to the woman of your choice.
If she was otherwise engaged, I rather doubt that she told you all that
much about it, not, at any rate, unless you pressed her to, since the object of
this engagement would then have constituted a reason for her excluding you
which, regardless of human convention, isn't in accordance with nature's will.
MR HAMILTON: As
a matter of fact, she claimed to be engaged with church activities every night.
DR STANMORE:
(Raises his brows in surprise) Then you're very unfortunate, my young
friend. For the Church is usually in
opposition to nature. You've suffered, it seems to me, on account of someone's habitual
bigotry. But don't worry! The new administration is seeing to the
removal of outmoded institutions and we, for our part, will certainly do what
we can to prevent this misfortune from incapacitating you further. It remains to be said, however, that the
final solution rests with you personally.
So you must be determined!
MR HAMILTON:
(Frowns) But even if you do hypnotize me, or put me under, I'll still be in
love, won't I? I mean, you can't cold
turkey my emotions.
NURSE BARNES:
(Slightly irritated, in spite of her show of good humour) We
have absolutely no intention of "cold turkeying"
you, James. We can only hypnotize you
into forgetting her.
DR STANMORE:
(Sits at his desk and then leans forward with fingers crossed, his demeanour
stern) Some people call it brainwashing. They believe it to be an outrage against
nature, another very conspicuous example of the inhumanity of modern science, a
ruse they're constantly exploiting as a means to furthering their own ends
which, as we've already seen, are more often against nature. Now some individuals even go so far as to
assert that the interruption and subsequent termination of this pestiferous
ailment actually robs its victim of a meaningful and emotionally enriching
experience. As though such
a condition as unrequited love were more of a pleasure than a pain, and
therefore shouldn't be tampered with in the name of science! They fail to establish the difference between
the requited and unrequited kinds of love, thereby regarding them as equal
when, as anyone saddled with the latter will know, they're virtually as far
apart as heaven and hell! Indeed, I
should be most surprised to discover a person whose love had been requited duly
applying for immediate hypnotic alleviation.
As a rule, such a person is perfectly at one with himself.
MR HAMILTON:
(Still feels sceptical) But will I really forget all about my emotional
attachment to her? I mean, isn't that a
trifle farfetched?
NURSE BARNES:
(Unable to restrain her impatience) Mr Hamilton, you are a difficult man to
convince! Anyone would think you didn't
want to be cured, that you'd rather remain in the painful clutches of a disease
which has virtually deranged your mind!
Why-on-earth did you come along here in the first place, if you only
wanted to persist in playing hard to get?
Admittedly, many things appear a trifle farfetched to begin with, but
that's certainly no reason why they should be thought impossible. Whoever would have supposed man capable of
travelling to the moon, let alone flying to
MR HAMILTON:
Yes, but what if, in leaving here, I encounter her within the next few days -
as I'm almost bound to do - and subsequently run the risk of falling in love
with her all over again? Surely I won't
be immune from that?
DR STANMORE:
(Exercises his customary aplomb and paternal encouragement) Oh yes you
will! For we assure you, during the
course of your treatment, that she'll have absolutely no further emotional hold
over you until such time as, given a change of circumstances, you may
specifically request otherwise. If you
shortly encounter her again, there'll be absolutely no possibility of
unrequited love. You'll be completely
free of her. However, should she
subsequently become accessible to your attentions through either a change in
her romantic or possibly even ideological circumstances, then you'll be
perfectly free to become re-acquainted with her without running any risk of
falling in love. You may even decide to
return to us in order to be re-hypnotized into falling in love with her again;
though such a decision will be entirely up to you, and obviously subject to the
precondition that a mutually satisfactory arrangement can be reached next time.
NURSE BARNES:
Unrequited love is a thing of the past, a kind of virulent psychic disease, or
insanity of the soul, from which your parents' generation and all the
generations prior to them constantly suffered.
They had absolutely no protection against it, and consequently succumbed
in their millions. Now if venereal
disease was the chief physical manifestation of sexual hardship, then
unrequited love was its chief psychical manifestation, against which it was
extremely difficult to prevail. Clinics
for alleviating the directly physical aspects of the problem were established
quite some time before medical experts and politicians got round to taking its
psychical aspects more seriously, and this traditional disequilibrium of
attention - so often resulting in more cases of rape, juvenile delinquency,
neurosis, severe depression, chronic perversion, and sexual hatred, i.e. the
so-called 'war of the sexes' - was partly a consequence of the political
establishment's inability and/or disinclination to link such social
transgressions with sexual repressions, and partly a consequence of the
prevailing misconception with regard to the nature of a healthy soul, the
principal criterion for assessing the health of which should have been its
social wellbeing and emotional integrity, rather than the psychological
shackles with which the antinatural morality of the
state metaphysics chose to enslave it!
However, the recent enlightenment schemes and re-education programmes
which the new authorities have introduced, including a much wider and more
liberal sex-education scheme; the possibility of regular sex in one of the many
aesthetically-advanced 'Sex Centres', where one can privately, comfortably, and
economically enjoy access to the most advanced films and sex gadgets/dolls; the
widespread recognition of manic depression as the punishment inflicted by
nature upon those who, whether through force of circumstances or in consequence
of arbitrary decisions, have deviated from it to any appreciable extent, and
the concomitant acceptance of the organic necessity of some form of regular
sex; the systematic elimination of certain superstitions and anachronisms, and
the establishment of the league against sexual puritanism,
etc., coupled to the remarkable advances in modern technology - about which,
incidentally, I need say no more - have entirely revolutionized the
situation. And not only by the
legitimatization of various theoretical antidotes to
the old way of life but, more importantly, by the legitimatization of a variety
of practical antidotes to
it which are far superior to any old women's formulae or imaginable drugs, and
certainly much less harmful. We no
longer suffer from so many physical diseases, so why should we suffer from
mental or emotional ones instead? What
would it gain you to remain perpetually melancholic?
DR STANMORE:
(Ironically) You're not a writer, by any chance, are
you?
MR HAMILTON:
(Without really appreciating the doctor's subtle irony) No, I'm not actually.
DR STANMORE:
Well then, what have you got to lose, apart from a humiliating obsession which
you're unable to control, a situation which is driving you crazy, a gratuitous
attachment? The days of emotional
slavery are over! There is absolutely no
need for you to follow this young woman, this epitome of physical vanity,
around on an imaginary lead, as though you were a craven dog whose very
survival depended on it! Renounce this
servility! Have done with her! Embrace your independence!
MR HAMILTON:
(Smiles for the first time) Maybe I'll be luckier next time, assuming there'll
be a next time?
DR STANMORE:
(In a conciliatory and overly reassuring tone-of-voice) Of course there'll be a
next time! A handsome
and smartly-dressed young chap like you?
Don't underestimate yourself! Why
waste precious time worrying yourself sick over some young prude who foolishly
ignores you, when you can walk out of here, later today, and approach the first
attractive girl your eyes light upon?
Now don't take me literally, but that's the possibility. Too many young men waste months and even
years in consequence of unrequited love when, given the right opportunity,
plenty of other pretty females would ordinarily attract them.
NURSE BARNES:
And that's precisely why we're here, complete with soft lighting.
MR HAMILTON: (Blushes
slightly) Then please get to work on me, people. I have to walk out of here a new man!
MONDAY 20th SEPTEMBER
Whenever I
experience a nightmare these days, like earlier this morning, I am in the habit
of turning violent. I refuse to be
intimidated. Usually, a sudden uprush of retaliatory anger has the effect of obliterating
the nightmare, and I lie awake feeling slightly
annoyed that I was obliged to resort to something which had the effect of
waking me up prematurely. If I can't
force myself back to sleep as quickly as possible, I lie there fantasizing or,
alternatively, thinking over the chain of events which led up to the crisis.
Now from what I can remember about this
particular chain of events, a man in a raincoat and trilby, whom I had never
seen before, stepped through my french windows and
tried to strangle me whilst I lay in bed.
When I realized what he was up to, I struggled free and yelled, at what
seemed like the top of my voice: 'Piss off, you stupid sod!' and began to lash
out at him with my fists. Then I
suddenly woke up with a start and discovered that I was in an empty room. The mysterious stranger had evidently beat a hasty retreat!
So far as I can now recall, most of my
nightmares over the past few years have assumed a similar pattern; retaliatory
abuse of the most expletive kind serves to dispel the impending calamity, and
the assailant, whether human or otherwise, suddenly finds himself confronted by
more opposition than he had evidently bargained for. However, as a child my nightmares were very
different, both in substance and outcome, and often took the form of a
chase. I would almost invariably
encounter a hairy monster, a sort of large ape-like beast who frequented
derelict houses at night and who may well have been a sort of perverted
father-figure come to steal me away from my mother. How or why I got to these houses I shall
never know, but I was usually alone and, like most young children, highly
inquisitive. Now at sight of the
monster, which either appeared on the scene from around a corner or out of a
dark hole in the ground, I would beat a hasty retreat. But, as it was night, everywhere was dark and
forbidding, which caused me to experience considerable difficulty in finding my
way home. At the same time I somehow
sensed that the monster was hot-on-my-heels, though I could never force myself
to look back in order to acquire concrete verification. The initial glimpse of him had evidently been
enough!
What really troubled me, however, was that
I couldn't escape quickly enough; for my efforts to evade his pursuit were
gradually becoming harder and harder, and I felt my legs overcome by an
incredibly overpowering heaviness, as though I were wearing deep-sea diver's
boots or the ground possessed a powerful magnetic quality which inhibited
movement. Now while this was going on,
and I was desperately struggling to quicken my pace, it occurred to me that the
monster was steadily gaining ground, that he need only stretch out a large
hairy claw and I would be done for, torn limb-from-limb or eaten alive. Terror-stricken, I turned to face my pursuer,
who by this time had borne down on me, in order to experience the worst. But my last-moment panic invariably woke me
up, and I would lie drenched in sweat with my head ducked under the blankets
and my heart pounding away like it was about to explode. Fortunately for me the explosion had already
taken place, since the nightmare was blown to pieces! All that remained to do then was to prevent
my imagination from going back over the sordid details of the chase and digging
up fresh evidence against me, fresh horrors from the dungeon of my petrified
soul. Had I been able to get quickly
back to sleep, this problem would never have arisen. But my imagination usually had ideas of its
own, and the more I struggled against it, to avoid a recapitulation of the
dream sequence, the more dedicated it became to frustrating my struggles until,
an hour or so later, my soul was a hideous prison of mortal fears!
As it happens, I don't experience such
ghastly nightmares these days, probably because I'm old enough to look after
myself and am more psychically evolved, in any case. But I still hide most of my head under the
bedding, as though to shield it from the proximity of invisible powers who only come out, as it were, at night. That is undoubtedly a legacy from childhood,
as is an occasional tendency of mine to discern the outlines of faces, masks,
profiles, disguises, etc., in a variety of small patterns and/or nondescript
shapes, doubtless because I still have an active imagination. At the age of five or six I was often
frightened by the many projections cast by shadows, by the 'bogeymen' who
inhabited the curtains, appeared behind lampshades, paraffin heaters, clothes
hangers, and other domestic objects, hugging the walls with their ominous
silhouettes. I almost expected to see
one of these silent projections move and slowly turn towards me, in order to
petrify me with a pair of piercing eyes which, until then, had remained firmly
closed, and thus hidden from view. It
must have been similar to the suspense I subsequently felt at the cinema during
the introduction to those old Edgar Wallace thrillers (I think!), when a
metallic man slowly swivelled around in his chair and you waited breathlessly
for a full view of his authoritative face, that apparently omniscient gaze
which encompassed everyone and everything, and from which you knew there was no
escape. Long before I was regularly
taken to the cinema I must have attributed similar powers to the shadows which
haunted my room, because I could never force myself to sleep unless the light
was left on, so that things remained
exactly as and where they were. Then I
knew what I was up against, that the shadows had fixed limits. Once the light was turned off, however, there
would be no limit to what they could get up to; they might feel protected
against detection and multiply in the dark, like frenzied ghosts.
Well, whatever they did, I no longer worry
about them at all. Yet I can still
detect the outlines of strange faces, masks, etc., if I choose to stare at my
flowery wastepaper bin or crazy-patterned lino some evenings. There is nothing particularly frightening
about this propensity, which would hardly be worth calling hallucinatory. Nevertheless, the fact remains that I can
occasionally construct an imaginary face or two if I really focus my attention
on doing so, if I allow my adult imagination to wander a little in the
direction of Salvador Dali's 'paranoiac critical' methodology.
However, when I awoke from this morning's
nightmare I didn't in the least imagine that 'bogeymen' were lurking in the
shadows. But, all the same, I couldn't
get back to sleep as quickly as I'd have liked to
either, nor did I fancy the idea of allowing the night air to caress my
ears. So I must have been dozing for
quite some time before I entered the next dream (of which I now retain only the
vaguest of recollections), though a dream or two later I was dancing with an
attractive dark-haired girl who also permitted me to fondle her breasts. Naturally, I would have preferred this
episode of my dream life to continue much longer than it did; for when I
squeezed her tits, she thanked me warmly and cried: "Oh, do it
again!" over and over, as though she hadn't been toyed with in ages and my
service was consequently of especial significance to her. So I made every effort to be of further
assistance and when, all-too-soon and for some unaccountable reason, I woke up
... I felt bitterly disappointed that the dream in question hadn't permitted me
a few additional and, as it were, deeper intimacies besides.
But there you are! I experienced both heaven and hell in one
night. My dream life had once again
become more important to me than my waking one.
Indeed, so much so that, when I eventually crawled out of bed this
morning, it was with the ominous feeling that my next round of dreams would
have to be paid for at the high cost of a day's intensive labour. My new literary venture was awaiting me, in
consequence of which I would be compelled to mould something from the various
notes made during the past two weeks.
Of course, if things became too onerous I
could always read for a couple of hours, visit a museum or art gallery, take a
lengthy stroll, or even go to the cinema.
Yes, why not? My last visit to
the cinema had been several months ago and, as far as I could now recall, it
had amounted to an extremely memorable experience. I had seen an adaptation of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, with Max Von Sydow in the title role, and it had made such a profound
impression on me that, for an entire week, I could think of nothing else. In fact I re-read the novel (for about the
fifth time), and then went and saw the same film at a different cinema the
following week! For films like Steppenwolf
and, for that matter, Siddhartha (another Hesse
adaptation) are comparatively rare, in fact so rare that, when you see them,
you're aware of experiencing an important film event, the sort of event that
probably won't occur too many times in your life, particularly when you reflect
on the crassly violent nature of the countless commercial films which
continuously swamp the market with their mass-produced inanities and
vulgarities.
However, in returning to the present, I'm
not really anticipating any such important event, filmic or otherwise,
today. It will probably be one of those
lukewarm days that drag along in a rather monotonous fashion - the sort of day
with which the ailing Harry Haller was apparently well acquainted!
MONDAY EVENING
When I
eventually settled down to doing some writing this morning, it had gone
However, at the moment I am in the process
of recording some fresh thoughts, particularly about the money in my pocket.
Admittedly, there is nothing remarkably strange or unusual about it. But what does strike me
as a little odd is the fact that it only fully dawned on me today, whilst I was
handing some silver across the counter at The Cornerstop
Café (a different place, incidentally, from the one I invariably have breakfast
in), that it wasn't really mine, since it had undoubtedly passed through many
thousands of hands before me and had probably collected as much unspeakable
filth, in the process, as one either cared or dared to imagine. I was fiddling with the coins in my pocket,
feeling their edges, weighing them on my fingers, caressing their obverses and
reverses absentmindedly, when suddenly, as though from a stunning flash of
insight, I realized that this money was essentially communist, that it belonged
to everybody ... from the richest of the rich to the poorest of the poor. I almost threw the silver I was holding into
the greasy, outstretched hand of the plump waitress, in order to be rid of it
as quickly as possible and thus 'decontaminate' myself. It would have been far too demoralizing for
me to have thrown up my lunch there and then on account of a handful of dirty
coins!
Yesterday, the day before yesterday, and
any number of days prior to that, I wouldn't have given the matter as much as a
single thought. My chief concerns were
(a) to have enough money to get by on; (b) to make sure I didn't lose any; and
(c) to ensure that I kept a constant check on my spending. Today, however, I acquired an additional
concern: I wanted to wash the rest of my coins under the tap in order to
sterilize them! I somehow feared that my
hands, and possibly even my mouth, had already become 'contaminated', in which
case it was too late for me to rectify anything; my skin would be swarming with
thousands upon thousands of ugly germs which had been transferred from the
dull, greasy, piss-smeared coins in my pocket.
Indeed, my mouth was at that very moment probably seething with
countless microbes which had no business being there. It would be justice to smoke them out with
the aid of the worst imaginable cigarettes, to rid myself of these pestiferous
little monsters that thrive on dirty coins!
What really amazes me, however, is that I
hadn't thought about this problem before, but had treated my money somewhat matter-of-factly
(as people usually do when they've never been accustomed to real bellyaching
poverty), without in the least suspecting that it could have had a most
unhygienic history; that, for example, somebody could have dropped a 10p coin
on the dirty pavement or not washed his hands after going to the lavatory; that
a disease-ridden prostitute could have reached into somebody's sweaty pocket to
extract a few crumpled bank notes and a little loose change, or pushed a 50p
coin across an ash-stained, beer-stained, sweat-stained, spew-stained counter
in some dingy neighbourhood pub.
Everybody and anybody, from a king to a beggar, could have nonchalantly,
unwittingly, playfully fingered these coins in exactly the same way as me,
without in the least suspecting the true extent of their filth. Even the local health inspector wouldn't have
known exactly what he was dealing with.
For this really is a case of 'Where ignorance is bliss ...'
Anyway, I'm not going to let all this
bother me too much, since I don't value my life that highly, even though I find
it difficult to be flippant about it. In
fact, the most seemly thing to do now would be to make a point of only touching
money - notes as well as coins - when I have to, in order to minimize the risk
of infection.
These wretched flies! I am sure they have a mind of their own. No sooner have I begun to eat a peanut-butter
sandwich and to shoo the filthy insects away than they turn spiteful and
converge on me from all directions, like kamikaze pilots. I ought to do the job properly and swat them
all to death, knock the stale air out of their filthy lungs, but I don't
possess a fly-swat, nor even a newspaper today. You would think, though, that the little
wretches would leave you alone when you've given-up struggling with them, that
they would take the hint and become reasonable.
No such luck! One of the little
buggers seems particularly bent on revenge.
He is even going so far as to wander around the rim of my mug until he
arrives at the place against which I normally put my mouth and, doubtless
encouraged by the obnoxious residue of stale tea, has now begun to rub his
front legs together as though to gleefully deposit something unspeakably
despicable upon it, the dirty little shit!
Absolutely no sense of decency!
Right now the only thing that concerns him is how best to irritate me.
Yes, but if by ill-luck he gets out of here
alive he will settle on the first piece of tempting filth his big wild eyes
lead him to, quite as though I had never existed. Indeed, he will probably become part of a
colony of fellow shit-mongers. And if he
then encounters a member of the opposite sex with whom he fancies some kind of
coital arrangement is feasible, he will leap upon her and do everything in his
power to breed more flies. The only
thing that really matters to him is to revel in as much sex, filth,
spitefulness, and flying as his comparatively short and highly precarious
existence will permit, to die after a full, adventurous, and productive
life. That is doubtless why he refuses
to waste any more time over a slightly humiliated human being like me, but
continues to do exactly as he pleases, despite my obstinate protestations. He absolutely refuses to acknowledge my moral
superiority over him, the egotistical little pig!
Still, I shouldn't allow myself to become
so upset over this relatively trivial intrusion. I haven't fallen so low. If I were a scientist, however, I could quite
understand it. Flies, rats, spiders,
skunks, frogs, lizards, worms, lice, and snakes are often the very
justification of a scientist's existence, his raison d'être. He can rattle off a hundred-page thesis on
genetic anomalies in rats without batting an eyelid. He has compiled immense volumes of highly
erudite material concerning the lower animals, and sometimes concerning things
far below them - for example, microbes.
From these and similar investigations he has instigated remarkable
breakthroughs in the world of organic knowledge. His distinguished colleagues clap vehemently
and spontaneously in unanimous appreciation of his important findings, and from
laboratory to laboratory, lecture hall to lecture hall, country to country, his
knowledge of rats, spiders, flies, and other such lowly creatures has steadily
increased his authority and overwhelming prestige. The age of rats is on the wane; they will
soon be virtually extinct. When
Professor Ratcatcher has completed his studies and is
satisfied with his findings, there will be little reason for their continued
existence. After all, it's mainly
through such studies that, thanks in large measure to the professor's
perseverance and unshakeable optimism, man will be able to aspire towards his
noblest achievements to-date, that he'll embrace the future with fresh hope
and, above all, as strong a desire to eliminate flies and spiders as he
previously showed with regard to the more accessible vermin. So be it!
I leave Professor Ratcatcher to his worthy
task, and just hope that he doesn't treat the coins in his pocket with the same
insouciance as most of us now treat flies!
Now it is time for a short nocturnal
stroll. If I don't get a change of air
soon, there'll be a strong possibility of my suffocating to death and being
metamorphosed into a fly or something equally disagreeable, like one of Kafka's
enigmatic characters.
TUESDAY 21st SEPTEMBER
Yes, there
are basically two types of young lonely women: those who bear you a grudge
because your reticence in making their acquaintance only serves to emphasize
their plainness and, conversely, those who bear you a grudge because your
reticence in making their acquaintance only serves to undermine their
beauty. In passing judgement on
themselves, such women almost invariably fit into one or other of these
categories. Of course, there are also two
ways of looking at them; either as their slave or as their tyrant.
Now if, for example, a young man considers
himself a slave of such women, he may feel disinclined to stare at female
strangers because he imagines himself to be a perpetual victim of their
attractiveness and consequently imprisoned by the desire or need to make
love. Such a man might well imagine
himself subsequently sweating away for them like a phallic puppet on a vaginal
string. A female stranger who smiled to
herself when he noticed her for the first time might well suggest something
despicable - for instance, a personal vanity concerning her looks from which he
can derive no consolation, since there is nothing in it which would indicate
direct interest in him.
If, in public, this young man prefers not to stare at women, you may be
fairly confident that he is busy safeguarding his dignity and independence;
that he prefers to avoid compromising himself, to making a fool of himself in
the presence of largely indifferent or even potentially hostile strangers. Naturally, there is always the possibility
that a fair percentage of the young women he encounters will leave him cold, in
consequence of which he would never think of taking a second look at them. But even if he happens to encounter somebody
highly attractive or, more accurately, somebody who corresponds to his ideal,
the chances are pretty high that he will prefer not to tantalize himself, to
commit himself to the conspicuously vulnerable category of 'men without women.'
As far as the tyrant is concerned, however,
the roles are completely reversed. He
wishes to exploit women, to descend upon them like a beast of prey and utilize
them for his own predatory ends. A young
woman who smiled to herself when he first
noticed her would indicate that he had influence, that
he pleased her and, consequently, that further developments were not
inconceivable. In short, he accepts
appearances on a more optimistic, not to say self-aggrandizing, basis, without
ambiguity or paradox. Ideas concerning
the tragedy of sex are if not downright repugnant to him then, at any rate,
mostly alien. After all, as he sees it,
the female exists to mollify and divert the male and therefore his natural
optimism, in this regard, will lead him to dominate and subjugate her for her
own good as much as for his, or so the story goes.
Now these two contradictory points of view,
taken together, constitute the essential difference between the sexual
attitudes of Baudelaire and de Sade, to take two
convenient examples from the archives of prominent literary figures. The former considered man, and by implication
himself, to be 'a slave of a slave', while the latter, spurred on by his
strange perversions, sought to dominate and subjugate women to his own sadistic
ends. It depends, I suppose, whether you
possess an inferiority complex or a superiority complex, whether you consider
yourself a slave or a tyrant in this respect, and to some extent whether you
happen to be in a pessimistic or an optimistic frame-of-mind at the time.
Without going into unnecessary details, one
can surmise that Baudelaire's syphilis played some part in shaping his general
attitude towards women, in developing what could be seen as an effort to avoid
normal sexual relations, in view of the fact that such a highly contagious and
virulent disease would inevitably turn a man of Baudelaire's sensitivity into a
kind of island and thus prohibit the natural fulfilment of his amorous desires,
particularly with regard to those types of women who, for cultural and social
reasons as well as looks, would ordinarily have appealed to him. But, of course, that is quite another matter,
scarcely one to which I need dedicate any more time here, in this humble
journal. Baudelaire and de Sade only concern me insofar as their respective attitudes
to women and, by implication, sex are concerned, which
is why I drew attention to them in the first place. A majority of men probably oscillate between
these two extremes, depending on their mood.
Indeed, you could almost use your attitude
towards women, at any given time, as a sort of barometer or guide to the nature
of your prevailing mood. I mean if, like
me, you went out feeling rather glum, the chances are pretty high that you
wouldn't want to look too closely at anybody, that you would rather drift past
others undetected, without any verbal or visual commitments. You might even have got the impression that
people were closing-in on you, knew all about you, and were only too aware that
the slightest slip on your part would give the whole game away: they could
classify you as a victim or even as a pervert.
Yes, they would know that you had taken to
the streets because your room had become too constrictive and depressing. They would see, from the sullen expression on
your face, that things weren't quite running according to plan, that something
was seriously amiss, that you didn't have any female company and were only out
in the vain hope of encountering somebody worth getting to know.
Yes, you might well imagine it like that,
depending, as I say, on your prevailing mood.
Still, the chances are that people won't consider any of those things at
all but will just brush past your arm as stranger to stranger, not even
bothering or daring to look you in the eye.
For all they knew, you might be a madman, a potential rapist, a thief, a
simpleton, an atheist, an ignoramus, a syphilitic, a homosexual, or one of the
legions of the unemployed and, worse still, unemployable. You might be 'on the make' and, as such, the
most sensible thing that an innocent young woman could do, in the
circumstances, would be to mind her own business in case you transpired to
being someone it was difficult to get along with, someone who approximated to
one or more of the above categories and therefore wouldn't make life any easier
for her. Besides, if she really wanted
to take a closer look at you she could always do it on the sly, when you
weren't looking, were side-by-side, or had hurried past each other in a rush to
avoid mutual embarrassment. Once off
stage, so to speak, she could afford to relax again. She needn't feel constrained to make your
acquaintance; she would be out of harm's reach and able, in consequence, to
assess you at leisure. But if you
suddenly glanced back at her, as though to imply knowledge of her little
subterfuge, she would instinctively look away.
You would know that it should be regarded as idle curiosity on her part,
the sort of mindless trap into which a young lady of curious disposition
occasionally falls. Needless to say,
strangers can be awfully suspicious of one another!
So you continue on your way, inhaling the
obnoxious odour of whatever happens to pervade your nostrils, whether it be the accumulated residue of a day's traffic pollution or
the acrid stench of somebody's alcoholic breath. You walk down one street and up another,
following a familiar route rather than one which might lead you astray and
cause you to scratch your head in puzzlement as to where exactly you were. Between the couples and the groups of people
who occasionally brush past your arm you detect the odd solitary wanderer like
yourself, but you don't stare too closely.
You realize that it wouldn't do you any good, since you would only feel
humiliated by the sight of your social reflection. Now if, by any chance, this solitary wanderer
were to mumble something as you drew near him, you wouldn't allow yourself to
become intrigued, embarrassed, or annoyed by the fact; on the contrary, you
would simply ignore him. You would know
from experience that such mumblings were usually negative, the derogatory
implications of which engendered guilty feelings. So if you didn't want to become a martyr to
your own guilt, and weren't particularly paranoid, you would have to relegate
the person concerned to the maniac level, the irresponsible level, the
disturbed level, or, more effectively still from your standpoint, the bum
level. That would certainly be one way
to defend yourself from such extraneous intrusions!
And so you continue to walk along the
pavement as though nothing had happened, nothing was wrong with the world or
with your life, and you were only enjoying the harmless pleasure, after all, of
a leisurely neighbourhood stroll. You
pass thousands of monotonous brick-leaden houses which have been strung
together in the name of urban civilization: empty houses, brightly-lit houses,
old houses, dark houses, new houses, small houses, derelict houses, large
houses, renovated houses, even a few blocks of flats, where the inhabitants (if
any) are almost invariably locked away in their separate rooms and nestling in
nocturnal somnolence, watching TV or listening to the radio, knitting winter
clothes or reading the daily paper, washing their hair or complaining about the
weather, dozing by the fire or eating their evening meal, and your glum mood
goes out to these houses, incorporates them into its silent diatribe, dismisses
them as so many residential eyesores, and defensively curls-up, like a
threatened hedgehog, in order to retreat into its lone chamber of psychic
despair.
Yes, you may well wonder, in this negative
frame-of-mind, how it is that these wretched houses don't suddenly disgorge
people in a furious riot, or why their inhabitants don't suddenly break out in
one ultimate revolt against the overwhelming narrowness of things, as though in
defiance of the claustrophobic atmosphere of their tepid lives! If you had a lethal weapon in your hands, at
this juncture, you would almost be capable of using it, of doing somebody a
favour by ridding him of his daily humiliations, freeing him, once and for all,
from the implacable clutches of his glorified nest, routine chores, nagging
wife, importunate kids, numerous disappointments, frustrations, worries,
obsessions, depressions, and physical ailments. Of course, you would almost certainly be
considered a criminal and be trodden underfoot.
But what else could you reasonably expect from people who are so
accustomed to domestic deprivation that they inevitably become resigned to it
and end-up regarding their perseverance as a sort of moral triumph? Nevertheless, you would have more sense than
to cause a neighbourhood scandal, to give vent to your transient spleen in such
a barbarous fashion! You would sooner
beat a hasty retreat back to your single room, lock yourself in, like everybody
else, and then pretend that consolation can be found in a few cheap cigarettes
which, after a while, might even lead to an illusion of pleasure.
Without too great a stretch of the
imagination, one can quite understand how certain traditional religious beliefs
came to have such a lasting influence, how people were gradually seduced into
regarding their life as a penitence, an atonement for that indiscretion of
indiscretions - original sin! When one
is trapped in such a depressing world, it seems only too logical that certain
people should attribute a form of Divine Retribution to the problems with which
humanity are daily confronted. They may
be inclined to associate the world's shortcomings with a continuous punishment
(for original sin) simply because the essential nature of things seems too
disconcerting to be wholly attributable to anything else, least of all a
Supreme Being.
Yes, but when you realize, in light of original
sin, that these shortcomings are partly attributable to yourself and partly to
the world in general, to those people you often come into contact with, then
you have nothing to fall back on but yourself,
nothing to do but stare yourself in the face and admit to your mirrored
reflection that no traditional deity, whether now or in a thousand years' time,
is going to tell you what to do, since that is largely if not entirely your own
responsibility. If you 'wimp out' and
convince yourself that life would be intolerable without some form of
conventional religious faith, a faith built upon the foundation of certain
extraterrestrial beliefs which necessarily presuppose the existence of a
Supreme Being behind all Creation, then you can either do away
with yourself or, alternatively, seek consolation in the relative knowledge
that a traditional religious faith is better than no faith, with the
implication, willy-nilly, that you would rather go to the grave superstitious
and deluded than face up to the reality of living in a purely humanized world,
a world where it is up to you personally.
There is no alternative. Either
you seek the delusive consolations of conventional religious faith at the
expense of your self-determination, or you refuse to be so consoled. Anything else is presumptuous.
Indeed, it's as presumptuous or, more
correctly, deceitful as was some religious lecturer who once informed me (I had
been foolish enough to allow myself to be dragged along to a lecture by some
Christian organization one Saturday afternoon) that many young people were
going through life with a terrible depression weighing upon their minds simply
because they refused to allow Jesus Christ into their lives, a Christ Who would
purify and redeem them as long as they put their trust in Him, a Christ Who
would stand by them in times of need, etc.
Well, much as there was some truth in what I heard that afternoon, I
walked out just before the lecture had finished and the collection box come all the way around.
I walked out and didn't look back, and not simply because I was
privately disgusted with the limitations of the lecturer's argument but, more
importantly, because I had previously arranged to meet a friend at another part
of town and had been assured, when first accosted with intent to being driven
to the lecture, that I would be returned to my pick-up point in good time in
order to be able to keep my rendezvous.
As it happened, that didn't transpire, since they probably thought I was
bluffing in the first place and had no control over the lecturer's timing, in
any case. Someone informed me whilst I
was on my way down the steps of the building, already over fifteen minutes late
for the rendezvous, that no transport facilities had been provided for the return journey and that I
would therefore, and much to their regret, have to make my own way back to the
centre of town. That did it! Not only had I been tricked into attending a
superfluous lecture but, to cap it all, I had been cheated out of the return
journey, to boot! I was furious with
myself for not having had more sense in the first place, for not having
forbidden myself to be seduced into attending such a thing simply because some
of them were French, and I had foolishly succumbed to their charm and language
at a time when my admiration for all things French was probably at or near its
peak.
However that may be, I eventually found my
own way back to the centre of town. Though I wasn't exactly in a state of euphoria about it, despite
the far-from insignificant consideration that I had managed to get away from
the place before things there became unduly oppressive and, as far as I was
concerned, repressive. On the
way, I turned the essential substance of the lecture over and over in my mind
and, in doing so, I realized how tactfully, craftily, perhaps even unwittingly,
its perpetrator was deceiving people.
Oh yes, many youths and, for that matter,
adults were going through modern life with a terrible depression on their minds
all right, of that I knew only too well!
For I was suffering from just such a depression myself, one doubtless
born of loneliness and an inability to meet anyone with whom I could merge or,
rather, submerge myself and possibly re-emerge a new man a few hours or even
days later.
Oh yes, I knew all about social loneliness
and sexual frustration, ostracism and rejection, the plight of the intelligent
individual in the urban wilderness, ethnic exile in an alien environment, an
environment at loggerheads with my natural and cultural instincts. I knew about as much as a young person could
know about such things without going completely crazy and attempting to do away
with himself or, failing that, with certain others.
Oh yes, absolutely! But that didn't alter anything, that wasn't
enough to erase the years of depression overnight. And neither were those flagrant lies about
Jesus Christ! Whatever simple or
conservative people might think, it wasn't Christ who would make war on
depression or, for that matter, on the numerous other afflictions, misfortunes,
disasters, and diseases with which modern man was confronted. It wasn't Christ who would stand by you in
times of need, even if some of his teachings did. Christ was dead, crucified, finished! Killed once by the ancient world and killed
again by the modern one, with its rampant barbarism and concomitant disregard
for inner truth, its heathen idolatry before a plethora of superhuman 'stars'
... from film and pop to sport and glamour.
Christ was simply the pretext certain people needed for getting
together, forming a sort of social club where it was assumed, for purposes of
convenience, that he or, rather, He (with a capital 'H') was still alive.
No doubt, such people required an ulterior
motive to drag their humiliated bodies and souls together once or twice a week,
in order to perform special ceremonies for one another. And when they had performed their various
religious duties, sung Christ's praises, listened to the same old sermon as
though it were totally new to them, made a donation to the church coffers, and
received the clergyman's dutiful blessing, they could rub shoulders on a more
down-to-earth and mutually acceptable basis.
They could ease their minds by discussing Mozart's piano sonatas, the history
of French Impressionism, the immorality of contemporary cinema, the joys of a
country picnic, the fallacies of Nietzsche's philosophy, the irreverence of
Bertrand Russell, the latest African famine, the inferiority of other so-called
World Religions, or the futility of atheism.
But if these and other such subjects began to wear thin or to lose their
cutting edge, they could always let themselves go in a lengthy bout of
unrestrained hymn-singing, or even take it upon themselves to wander about
preaching the Good News to people.
Yes, they could tell all those poor
ignorant souls, the legions of unbelieving atheists, about the great advantage
of belief in Christ, His ability to transform souls, to erase depression, give
one new strength, hope, life, etc. And
if that didn't work, they could always resort to someone great, like Napoleon:
'The Bible is no mere book but a living power that conquers all who oppose
it.' Indeed, they could even resort to
Queen Victoria who, on being questioned, one day, as to the secret of
So the church-goers have their weekly
get-together which allows them to bolster one another up and even gives some of
them an opportunity to meet somebody of the opposite sex who may subsequently
prove more beneficial than anything else - a woman, say, who may give the
interested man access to a pleasure that will fill his soul with well-being and
thereby enable him to travel around the world condemning alcoholics, smokers,
drug addicts, and atheists with a new ardour in his veins, born of the
conviction that love is all it takes.
But it's not Jesus Christ who can work the miracle,
it's not Christ who can authorize their social and/or sex lives (though even if
he could one
would have to accept the possibility that he also helps unbelievers too, since
they often have successful social and/or sex lives as well). No, Christ doesn't know of their existence,
and even if, by some incredibly remote chance, he did, he would probably feel
indifferent towards them or downright upset that they were using his name to
further their own ungodly ends. For
whatever they've achieved, by way of social and/or sexual advancement, they
have authorized by themselves, granting themselves a social life which is built
upon the foundations of a few expedient delusions without wishing, for obvious
reasons, to accept or admit to the fact that they are actually deluded. After all, a fair number of them would have
to face-up to the fact that they are really pharisees
who had opted to make a deal with religion out of ignorance or fear or some
private ulterior motive as often as not connected with sex.
Yet such a confrontation with the self,
such an admission of moral weakness, would doubtless prove undesirable, if not
downright unbearable, to most of them.
It would raise too many awkward questions, questions which were better
left not only unanswered but safely buried beneath a mass of lies and expedient
delusions. For whether or not one is
consciously aware of the fact, it is an implicit law of nature that whatever
one does, over an extended period of time, one must acquiesce in it
wholeheartedly, else risk going insane.
Even a thief, an embezzler, a liar, or a pervert must fully acquiesce in
what he is doing if he wishes to maintain his psychic equilibrium. Otherwise he will sooner or later make a
mistake, give himself away, become paranoid, nervous, unstable, and thereby
turn his life into a neurotic hell-on-earth in no time. There is no alternative.
So a man who refuses to join what he
regards as a glorified social club simply because he believes that it is
fundamentally a self-deluding lie, has no real option but to shun it. He is either compelled to acknowledge God in
his own fashion and on his own evolutionary terms or, alternatively, to remain
agnostic or even atheistic. Naturally,
if he wishes to remain intellectually even-handed, he may opt for
agnosticism. But if he is goaded-on by a
fierce hatred of the world's injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy, prejudice,
narrow-mindedness, and deceit, then he'll probably opt for atheism.
A philosopher who can't disprove the
assumed divinity of Christ or, for that matter, concepts like the Immaculate
Conception and the Resurrection, because he concedes to the irrelevance of
logic in dealing with such concepts, is by no means intellectually
defeated. On the contrary, such a
concession would be intellectually positive, an assertion, in complete honesty,
that a given proposition of, say, 2 x 2 = 4 cannot be altered to 5 or 6, no
matter what one might personally prefer.
In fact, it would be an indication of intellectual integrity derived
from a given premise: namely, the claims of the Scriptures taken at face-value
and with due regard to the validity of faith.
Naturally, I'm not concerned, in this journal, with the evolution of the
Scriptures under the aegis of medieval scholasticism. I am not contending that various parts of the
Scriptures were carefully revised or reinterpreted in order to strengthen the
foundations of otherworldly supremacy and simultaneously safeguard the
authoritarian power of the Church; though I'm well aware that such a procedure
may have been in accordance with theological requirement. No, the point is that certain aspects of the
Scriptures prompt one to say either 'Yes' or 'No', not to disprove them. And we also know that some of the more subtly
transcendental doctrines of the Church are completely meaningless before a man
who 'lacks the faith', since he can't acquire religious faith once he assumes
that it is only the faith itself which works the transformation in people and
not the possibility of there being anything tangible behind it - a living deity
to whom it should directly relate.
Indeed, any aspiration which religions like
Christianity might make towards universal supremacy is both illogical and
unjust. Yet the more theological gaps
one can expose in them, the greater is the possibility of their sinking into
the vast realm of long-accepted myth, along with the Nordic, Celtic, Roman, Greek, Chinese, Indian, and Persian myths of
old. That must surely be the fate of an
official religion whose devotees and doctrines prove insufficiently convincing
to attract the huge numbers of disillusioned unbelievers who remain firmly
anchored to the world of the faithless, and whose need for a more relevant and
credible religion remains sadly neglected.
When ordinary people treat the established
Church lightly, when they see the duplicity and hypocrisy of its principal
upholders all too clearly, then its end is surely in sight. Needless to say, it will be a true Day of
Judgement when the people democratically cast off this anachronistic burden and
thereby relegate it to the subterranean archives of old-world mythology. Until then, those who are unable to
prostitute themselves upon the altar of expedient superstition must continue to
avert their eyes from the sordid cobwebs of their age, depressions or not!
TUESDAY EVENING
I have
allowed my pen to wander on at some length on this vexed subject of religion
and, since I still haven't exhausted what I wish to say, I shall now allow it
to wander on a little further. To begin
with, I am going to remind myself that I was indoctrinated so persistently,
rigorously, and methodically with Christianity that, for several years, I
almost saw it coming out of my eyes. As
a Roman Catholic, I was brought up, until my tenth year, in regular service of
the Church. I attended Holy Communion
and Confession unfailingly every week. I
was well-versed in the Catechism and other teachings before I really acquired
so much as the faintest notion of what it was all about. There were always so many words to memorize that
one hardly had time to reflect on exactly why one was memorizing them in the
first place. One just took it all for
granted.
Anyway, at the age of eight or nine I
became an altar boy at St Joseph's in Aldershot and proceeded to assist the
priest with the tasks usually associated with such a position, viz. praying at
Holy Communion, opening and closing the altar gates, carrying a large Bible,
swinging the censer, kneeling before the altar, holding the Cross, and so
on. I even wore the obligatory black-and-white
frocks which, as I recall, were invariably too long for me and usually tripped
me up whenever I got up off my knees or walked around. In truth, I was mortally afraid of
disappointing the Blessed Virgin, that mother-substitute on these occasions. Everything would go against me if I had the
misfortune to drop something, to fart, cough, or sneeze during prayers or,
worse still, stumble down the altar steps onto the rails below. It was of the utmost importance to remain
composed, in order to prevent oneself from doing anything unseemly in front of
the congregation, especially once they had flocked to the rails with their
mouths open and their tongues lolling out to receive the blessed sacrament,
when an indiscretion on one's part could have been so costly to priest and
communicant alike!
Now this ordeal lasted, as I said, until my
tenth year when, following the death of my maternal grandmother, with whom I
had always been pretty close, my mother summarily dispatched me to a Protestant
Children's Home in Surrey, doubtless grateful for the opportunity to get me out
of the way at last and start again with someone else, a new husband whom the
existence of her mother had previously denied her. From then on it was a question of Baptist
inculcation, the rites of which were so different from all that I had already
learnt, since the Blessed Virgin scarcely figured at all and, by way of
contrast, the baptismal font was of supreme importance. In actual fact, it wasn't a font at all, in
the Catholic sense, so much as a rectangular trough in which an adult could be
totally submerged whenever there was the prospect of a new and sincere
declaration of loyalty to Christ. The
'convert', already effectively a practising Christian, was simply formalizing
his declaration so that, through a sort of symbolic rebirth, people would come
to know of his earnestness. Whenever
this happened, and the vicar had just lowered someone into the water backwards,
you realized that the Baptists had acquired a staunch supporter and that
nothing would deter the person concerned from following in Christ's hallowed
footsteps. It was an extremely important
occasion in Baptist ritual.
Well, I remained Baptist property, if
unwillingly and unofficially so, until I left high school at seventeen. There was no possibility of my avoiding the
Sunday services - absolutely none! As a
rule, you attended church once in the morning, followed by Sunday school, and,
assuming you didn't go to Crusaders that afternoon, once in the evening,
followed by coffee and relaxation in the adjacent Youth Club. However, if you wanted to play football in
the local park, as I usually did on Sunday afternoons, you had to smuggle your
boots out of the house and wear such kit as could be mustered for the occasion
under your Sunday best. There could be
no question of getting too dirty anyway.
For indiscretions of that crass order were strictly taboo and, in the
unfortunate event of being discovered, would have met with severe
repercussions, including the possibility of a sound thrashing, coupled to a
cold bath. Now if you wanted to watch
TV, as I occasionally did in the evening, you were severely admonished and
absolutely forbidden to do any such thing.
Sunday was the Lord's day and nothing
else. The most you could hope for -
other, that is, than a succulent roast lunch and the sight of some pretty girls
in church - was a game of chess, draughts, ludo, or
snakes and ladders; though it was also permissible to play the piano, provided
you didn't play for too long and only kept to the more conservative, and hence
religiously-orientated, pieces.
Absolutely no jazz or boogie-woogie!
Well, as far as the rest of the week was
concerned (and excluding the compulsory religious education acquired at school,
which, I guess, was more Anglican than Baptist), the most you could be thankful
for was the fact that you didn't have to go to church. Early-morning prayer meetings were held,
without fail, at 7.15 and usually lasted between fifteen and twenty
minutes. They generally consisted of
Bible readings interspersed with routine prayers, though occasionally the Bible
was dropped in favour of anti-drug reports, crime surveys, The
Pilgrim's Progress, or missionary stories.
But never for very long, since it was always regarded by the house
parents as the real cynosure of such meetings, their veritable raison
d'être.
Before and after these prayer meetings,
however, you did some housework, which included hoovering
the numerous carpets and/or dusting the even more numerous items of furniture
to be found throughout the spacious old semidetached house (the house parents'
private living quarters on the second floor excepted), and when the time came
for breakfast - as, indeed, for lunch and tea - you knew in advance that nothing could
be eaten before someone had said grace.
A boy who refused to say grace when his turn came would be refused any food, it was as simple as that. You had to be grateful for everything, even
the badly cooked stuff! Naturally, my
appreciation of the food was somewhat compromised by the unflagging persistence
of this mechanical routine, this "For what we are about to receive ...", which made a religion out of gratitude and elevated
food to the status of a benediction.
So at the end of the day, when you were
weighed down by homework and there seemed to be nothing under the sun to be
really grateful for, you said your prayers in an equally mechanical fashion,
before climbing wearily into bed. Then
it was that, with the withdrawal of one or other of the house parents from the
dormitory, you grabbed a pornographic magazine from whichever of your fellow
sufferers had managed to secure anything from school-friends that day, ducked
under the blankets with a diminutive torch, and began to scrutinize its erotic
contents with a lively if nervous curiosity.
Oddly enough, this little clandestine episode was the most you could
expect in the world of sexual experience since, if by some remote chance you
had managed to find a girlfriend in the outside world, it was strictly against
the house regulations to bring her into the dormitory or into any other room
where there was no houseparent on duty to keep a protective eye on things. She would have to sit downstairs in the crowded
living-room, where the possibility of sex of any description was virtually nil. The house
parents provided little incentive for the indulgence of appetites which ran
contrary to the Lord's will and, consequently, such appetites were starved and
perverted, in true puritanical fashion!
Well, if that kind of upbringing wasn't
designed to turn any reasonably intelligent person off Christianity for life, I
wonder what would! If its persistence
wasn't guaranteed to produce a negative effect on anyone over an extended
period of time I can only regard the person concerned as either mad or stupid,
and perhaps even a born saint. Indeed,
if there is one episode that stands out in my memory above all others, in
connection with my life at that time, it has to do with the day Dr Spovey, the Home's legal inspector, having got nowhere in
an attempt to make me see the error of my ungodly ways, called the male
houseparent aside and informed him that I "will be a tough nut to
crack". Imagine it! They wanted to subjugate me, to brainwash me
into becoming an obedient slave of the Baptist faith in order, presumably, to
continue exploiting me both emotionally and financially in years to come. The mugs!
If there's one thing they'll regret, it's that they never cracked
me. And I hope they fucking-well choke on
the fact!
So there you are. I have described some of the influences which
helped me on the way to my current position, turning me against Christianity,
particularly its Baptist manifestation, which was, after all, the thing I was
really in rebellion against; though I didn't fully realize that fact at the
time and, even if I had, I doubt very much that, after so many years of
anti-Baptist revolt, I would have walked straight back into the arms of the
Catholic Church again, as though nothing had happened in the meantime, no
modification of knowledge or awareness taken place in consequence of my
enforced sojourn in the enemy camp. Time
cannot be reversed, and therefore I could no more return to my Catholic roots
than to my childhood in
For the next link in the chain of my
anti-Christian progress, however, I had to wait until, as a humble
drudge-ridden clerk in a prestigious West End office, I made the mistake of
falling in love with a beautiful young woman who confessed, one fine day, to
having been a practising Christian before she took up with or, rather,
gravitated to some kind of Buddhist commitment to Transcendental Meditation
instead. For me, who had only loved her
from a distance and idealized her beyond all imaginings, that
was like a slap in the face. A practising Christian?
What-on-earth could she mean, I wondered. Though I was presently to get an idea when,
making the most of the opportunity circumstances now provided me with, I
finally got round to asking her out, only to be informed that she was engaged
all week and, given the nature of her social commitments, would probably remain
engaged for some time to come. Not only
was she regularly practising TM in the evenings but, as I now learnt to my
utter amazement, she was still associated with her church, her father being a
vicar, and would consequently be singing in the choir, learning new hymns for
the forthcoming services, helping him prepare his sermon, etc., so that there
was hardly any time to spare on more earthly matters.
Well, that certainly stumped me! I had waited patiently for a young woman who
not only effectively kept me chained to an uncongenial office job for several
years but made it extremely difficult for me to get to know anything much about
her, on account of the fact that, with the exception of periodic visits to
London at the end of each university term, she spent most of the year
elsewhere. It was fairly evident that
these private commitments - this Transcendental Meditation, the hymns she was
learning, etc. - were of more importance to her than the love of a
self-confessed admirer; that the singing of esoteric verses was of greater
importance than putting an end to someone's unrequited love; that the
mechanical rituals associated with the worship of a divinity who only existed
in the mind of certain people was more important than the amorous desires of
somebody whose existence was all-too-physically manifest. The fact that she had dedicated her spare
time to TM and the Church, in that order, meant that certain other persons
would have to suffer the consequences.
For her attentions were evidently focused on things of greater import
than the all-too-mundane desires of some rash and impudent male who had
unfortunately fallen victim to sexual ambitions beyond his station!
To be sure, it would be much wiser for a
young woman like her to dedicate herself more exclusively to people within the
confines of the religious clique than to allow herself to be senselessly drawn
over to the service of outsiders. One
can imagine the voice of her conscience or, rather, conscience-substitute
(guru?) saying: "He was obviously deluded.
One just cannot be too sure of the uninitiated; they're full of
faults. It's wiser to avoid such
people. Yes, it's wiser to establish an
esoteric morality, a morality in direct opposition to nature. It's wiser to avoid all those who question
us, who doubt us, for the simple reason that if they're not with us, they must
be against us! We must fortify ourselves
against the monotonous encroachments of the outside world. Be civil, not servile! Be brave, not grave! If you can win fresh devotees to the path, particularly
young ones, so much the better! Bring
them along! Introduce them! We can use their help to further our
interests. Transcendental Meditation is
now practised in over seven-hundred major cities throughout the world by about
one percent of their respective populations.
As a result of this remarkable breakthrough, the crime rate in these
cities has fallen by approximately the same percentage...." From which remarkable coincidence we should
deduce that the people formerly responsible for one percent of the crime have
now turned to TM instead!
So some sanctimonious guru with a Cosmic
obsession with the astral plane is gradually worming his way into the hearts
and minds of his devotees, is slowly but surely remoulding their views
according to the dictates of his personal whim, intimating to them that private
opinions are superfluous to one who is striving towards the Clear Light. Meantime, in another part of town, a minister
is informing someone that he can have Eternal Life if only he gives his heart
to the Lord and refrains from sinful habits.
Whilst in yet another part of town a young woman is selling introductory
magazines which advertise her sect. She
is quite pretty as well as disarmingly charming, and whenever she stops a young
man (as frequently happens) and makes a sale, she calmly informs him, albeit
with a degree of pride faintly mingled with condescension, that she loves him,
even though nothing could literally be further from the truth. "I love you," she says again,
staring into his rather startled eyes with all the professional candour she can
muster. Yet if, by some remote chance,
one of these young men should thereupon reply: "If that's the case, why
don't you come home with me and prove it, then?",
she would probably blush and scuttle away like a panic-stricken crab. She would wonder who-the-devil he thought he
was!
Yes, quite so! But life goes on pretty much as before,
despite all the apparent and relatively superficial changes in evidence. Eminent clergymen invoke the rain during a
period of severe drought. No, they don't
do a rain dance, for that would be pagan.
They simply recite certain prayers in the hope that God will hear them
and make the rain fall!
However, in returning to the subject of
that girl I fell in love with, a girl who, in her own words, had been a
practising Christian, I can't pretend that I now hate her for having spurned my
advances and harboured certain unsympathetic delusions about me. Hate would be too strong a word and, besides,
how can you seriously hate someone with whom you were or had been in love? With a clergyman father, that girl couldn't
avoid being indoctrinated in Christian, and more specifically Protestant,
beliefs. She was bound to be deeply
influenced by the various religious practices and theories of her church and,
as such, she can even be regarded as a victim, one of many hundreds of
thousands, if not millions, of victims who, even in adulthood, are rarely more
than someone else's mouthpiece, a sort of puppet galvanized into action by some
worshipful autocrat who looks like purity personified but mentally rapes the
sexier of his female followers and actually succeeds with one or two of them
every so often, forcing her legs wide apart and pumping away like a dog in
heat.
Yes, she would probably think that he was
being kind to her, that they were fulfilling part of their daily devotions to
The Almighty by regularly making direct contact with the life force. All the same, she wouldn't have the nerve to
look into his big wild eyes too often; she would be concentrating on the
numbing effects of his blood-engorged penis, on his sexual assault which almost
seemed to be rupturing the walls of her vagina as he manipulated her with
savage intent, as though he wanted to carve her in two, putting an end to both
of them in one long orgasmic passion of sexual oblivion. But when he had lapped up her juices, like a
grateful dog, and left her to stagger into what remained of her clothing, she
would never attribute cruel or brutal motives to this 'man of God', this
'leader and teacher'. How could
she? They had only been making love,
after all, and that was sufficiently self-explanatory. She, too, could afford to avoid proposals
from the outside world!
MONDAY 27th SEPTEMBER
Although it
is Monday today I feel relatively encouraged, not to say relieved; I am able to
write again. Not since last Tuesday,
following the completion of the above entry in this journal, have I so much as
written a word. I have spent most of the
intervening time in bed, unable to sleep, unable to read, and virtually unable
to think. Not only did I swindle myself
out of a trip to
On Tuesday afternoon I felt fine or, more
precisely, I had no premonition of an impending calamity. If there had been a friend or two with whom
to talk, some wine to drink, or a woman to fuck after finishing my stint of
writing that afternoon, none of this would probably have happened, and I would
have continued recording ideas and impressions in my journal on Wednesday
afternoon.
With no immediate or even prospective
recourse to such relaxing diversions, however, it soon became clear to me that
I would either have to pass the time in my usual solitary fashion or, if the
prospect of that proved somewhat daunting (as it evidently did on this
occasion), persevere with my writing for an extra hour or two. I had passed literally hundreds of evenings
in exactly the same fashion, without ever talking to anyone, without ever
seeing anyone, without ever making love to anyone, and so I had little doubt
that I would somehow manage to get through this one as well, even if it did
mean a little extra work for once. The
last thing you wanted, in such circumstances, were doubts about anything! It was of the utmost importance to stay
relatively cool, to pass the time in as sensible a fashion as possible, to
adjust to your circumstances with the minimum of friction, because if you
didn't, if you began to worry about the possibility of overtaxing your brain,
the apparent narrowness of things, the extent of your sexual frustrations, or
the absence of companionship, wine, and laughter, you were already on the way
to a lunatic asylum or, failing that, to a church congregation! The one imperative rule of life demanded that
you adjust to your circumstances whatever they happened to be, and I,
for one, knew exactly what mine were.
What I didn't know, however, I was soon to
learn as, driving myself beyond my cerebral limits, I sustained a head-on
collision with my will and subsequently wound-up on the brink of a nervous
breakdown. If it wasn't for the fact
that I don't normally worry too much or look the breakdown type, I might have
gone completely over the brink and plunged into an abyss of self-destruction. But it seems that, for the time being, I have
been spared such a catastrophe. My
cerebral horizon is now clearly mapped out and all it requires of me is to
remain within its boundaries and not go dotty, like an overworked
pointillist. Be thyself, by all
means. But know thyself
as well! This is also required of us.
Well, now that I can actually think again
without fear that my brain will blow apart, that it is too heavy to carry, that
a hideous pain will dart through it at the slightest intellectual provocation,
or that the clicking noises which accompanied my crisis for a few days will
return to click louder and more intensively than before, I consider it
expedient, for the sake of a little self-respect, to continue from more or less
where I left off last Tuesday. At least
I shall be slightly wiser now. I shall
have learnt something else about the fixity of my limits!
TUESDAY 28th SEPTEMBER
It is
Tuesday afternoon and I have just returned from The Cornerstop
Café where, as usual, I had lunch. Unlike
the place to which I go for breakfast, this café is situated on the brow of one
of the steepest hills in
Anyway when, somewhat out-of-breath, I
eventually arrived at The Cornerstop Café at
about one-thirty today, the place was jam-packed. Indeed, I had never seen it so full. At first I considered turning around, taking
an extended walk or, preferably, visiting the nearby public library in order to
kill time while most of the customers gradually paid up and left. Just as I was about to opt for the latter
solution, however, I caught sight of an empty chair in front of a table at
which an old man was laboriously churning some nondescript stuff over and over
in his mouth, as though he were a cement mixer.
I could plainly discern some of it sliding around between his
teeth. Nevertheless, without wishing to
disturb his ruminations, and scarcely bothering to reflect on the obvious
inconvenience of the situation from my point of view, I hastily sat down
opposite him and took hold of the menu, as though to balance myself. I could tell by the peeved expression on the
old bastard's haggard face that he wasn't particularly pleased at the prospect
of having a young stranger seated opposite him, but I couldn't help that. After all, one has to sit somewhere and,
besides, the sight of his thoroughly masticated food being churned around in
his big mouth wasn't the best thing that could have happened to me,
either. Quite the contrary!
Well, I duly ordered a tea and some
shepherds pie with chips from the plump waitress, and then sat there pretending
not to notice him; though I must have looked fairly apologetic or
self-conscious from his point of view.
However, my attention was soon diverted by a young man at a table to my
left who probably entered the café not long before me, since he had just
finished his soup and was now speaking in a rather loud and passably
middle-class voice which sounded at loggerheads with the generally informal
tone of the place. He was dressed like
an office worker, possibly an insurance clerk or estate agent, and his manner
of speaking suggested someone both effeminate and moronic. It apparently didn't occur to him that his
loud and ponderous manner of speech was attracting attention from virtually all
corners of the café. Evidently, he was
oblivious of everything save his determination to get some message across. Indeed, the fluffy haired girl, to whom his
words appeared to be addressed, was staring incredulously at him whilst he
spoke, her mouth hanging open like she hadn't in the least expected his words
to be directed at her, even though she was the only other person at his table. It must have been all she could do to refrain
from laughing in his face, the way she was now looking at him. However, the waitress appeared outwardly
calmer as she approached him, bill-pad in hand, with intent to taking his order
- a thing to which he didn't initially respond in view of his verbal
preoccupations.
"Er, I think
I'll have a steak-and-kidney pie, if you don't mind," he eventually
decided.
"I'm sorry, sir, but we're only doing
shepherds pie today - unless you'd prefer fish or a roast?"
"Oh, I see. In that case, I'll have shepherds pie,
then."
"With boiled potatoes, roast potatoes,
or chips?"
"Er, boiled
potatoes, if you please."
"Peas or
carrots?" By now it was
beginning to sound like an interrogation.
"Er, peas, I
think. Thank you so much."
"Tea or
coffee?"
"Oh, yes."
"Which?"
"Just a tea, please. But make it weak."
"Thank you, sir."
I am trying my hardest to remain coolly
detached and to mind my own business, but he speaks so loudly and slowly that
it's virtually impossible. Noticing the
attention of the girl opposite upon him, he suddenly launches into renewed
conversation with: "I say, it's just as well that we've had so much rain
recently, what with all that horrible drought, isn't
it? I was beginning to lose hope, you
know."
Somewhat to my surprise the fluffy haired
female replies: "Yes, it was a bit worrying."
"Still, we mustn't allow ourselves to
become overly complacent about it," he remarks. "According to the latest weather
reports, there's still a serious water shortage throughout the country."
"Is that a fact?" the girl
exclaims with apparent unconcern.
"Oh yes. It'll be some time before the normal
facilities are completely restored. In
point of fact, the water authorities will have to process all this recent
rainwater so that it'll be fit for consumption, won't they? Otherwise it would taste ghastly and might
even do some mischief.... I say, you aren't waiting for the menu by any chance,
are you?"
"No, not at
all."
"Oh good. I just thought you might be. I didn't mean to hold on to it like
that."
The girl seems on the point of giggling or
blushing, but remains silent.
"I say, it is busy in here today,
isn't it?" he resumes. "D'you know, I've never seen so
many customers in here at the same time before. Let me see now ... Why, there must be all of
thirty people, you know!"
The waitress suddenly serves me my dinner
and tea. The old man opposite has just
finished eating and is now picking his false teeth - for that is what they
plainly are - with the grubby index finger of his right hand. There is a little pile of spat-out gristle on
the side of his plate. Every few
seconds, despite the general noise in this far from quiet place, I can hear his
guts rumbling, and he belches quite vehemently - evidently in response to the
post-prandial exigencies of his digestive
system! Now the old devil is going to
roll himself a cigarette.
I turn back to my dinner but, as can be
imagined, I don't really feel too enthusiastic about eating anything. Besides, I have a painful suspicion that the
old devil's eyes are following the progress of my loaded fork out of idle
curiosity. I intensely dislike this
suspicion because it usually makes me feel uncomfortably self-conscious, and I
can also feel my nerves beginning to shake a bit. The chances are pretty high that some of the
peas will roll off the edge of my fork when next I endeavour to lift it towards
my mouth. I ought to reassure myself by re-entering
the whirl of events. Then I shall at
least have the consolation of being an accomplice instead of simply a hapless
victim of some potentially cynical appraisal.
Sure enough, he was watching me! For his reflexes were predictably slow, his
eyes remaining fixed on my fork for a second or two.
"Excuse me, d'you
think I might borrow your saltcellar for a moment? There doesn't happen to be one on my
table."
"Sure, go ahead," I respond,
scarcely bothering to look-up from my dinner.
The young man reaches across the table and,
as a bony hand clasps the saltcellar, I can distinctly smell some sweetish
aftershave lotion from his face and neck.
"Thank you so much. I won't be a minute!"
Good God, what's he getting all apologetic
about? Anyone would think I was doing
him an immense favour!
The fluffy haired girl opposite him throws
me a conspiratorial glance, the implication of which is clearly derogatory, but
I don't commit myself to a response of any kind, primarily because I am too
busy thinking about my generosity. Also
I can see out of the corner of my left eye that he is virtually swamping his
dinner with salt. He shakes the
saltcellar much too vigorously, it seems to me, though its hole might well have
become partially blocked. Now he is coming
back again.
"There you are." He repositions the saltcellar with the utmost
care, as though afraid it might break or that something might get knocked over
in the process, and then, noticing the pepper pot, says: "Sorry to be such
a nuisance again, but d'you think I might borrow the
pepper as well?"
This time I say nothing, since it seems
unnecessary to answer such a question, particularly in view of the fact that
the pepper pot doesn't belong to me personally and I am hardly in a position to
refuse him, even
if he wasn't already in a position to take it.
Once more I get a whiff of aftershave lotion from him which
mingles violently with the savoury smell of my shepherds pie and the acrid
aroma of the old man's tobacco. Looking
up, I notice that the young man, on reaching his table, gives the pepper pot
almost as vigorous a shaking as the saltcellar, but for what reason I can't
fathom, since there appears to be no obstacle in the way of the pepper as it
cascades down upon his shepherds pie in cloud-like prodigality, a prodigality
which has the not-entirely-unpredictable effect of causing him to sneeze, and
to sneeze so vehemently that a large globule of snot shoots out from one of his
nostrils and lands smack in the middle of his dinner. I abruptly look away in disgust. This really is the limit!
But I'm not saved from my disgust, however,
because the old man has just started coughing, probably on account of his
evil-smelling cigarette, and without having the decency or presence of mind to
cover his mouth, so that I can plainly see his false teeth joggling about.
"There's your pepper back. I shan't be needing
anything else. Thank you so much."
The girl throws me another conspiratorial
glance, the sort of glance I had been half-fearing she might throw, but this
time its derogatory implication is so brazenly unequivocal that it completely
ignites me and I burst-out laughing to myself without the least
compunction. I laugh so loud, long, and
convulsively that I am more afraid of choking and possibly throwing-up my
dinner than of disturbing anybody else.
I get the impression that everybody is now staring at me, in any case,
but it doesn't bother me in the slightest; in fact, it only serves to rekindle
my amusement. For all they knew, I might
be about to do a dance on the table or to verbally insult them all. Indeed, my amusement changes up a gear, with
this further consideration, into a wonderful gutsy laughter that completely
obliterates everything, the sort of humorously cathartic experience I haven't
had in years, which seems to release all my pent-up emotion, all the repressed
humour of my lonely existence. Then, all
of a sudden, without my in the least willing it, the convulsions cease and I
quickly calm down again, remorsefully recollective of
the fact that I was only laughing at some trivial incident sparked off by a half-wit
to my left.
For a moment I feel almost penitential; I
should like to apologize to someone - possibly the target of my outburst. But, strangely enough, there doesn't appear
to be anyone I could directly apologize to, since all the nearest customers,
with the notable exception of the old man, have resumed their eating or talking
as though nothing had happened. Even the
pompous poofter to my left is now shovelling what I
can only presume to be snot-coated shepherd’s pie into his big wide mouth
without the slightest sign of embarrassment.
Being the kind of prat he is, he probably
hasn't realized why I was laughing.
Unlike the fluffy haired bitch opposite him who, despite the slightly
flushed look on her face, has returned to something approximating civility. The old man has stopped coughing and is now
observing me with a resentfully stubborn expression. He probably imagines I was laughing at him,
the old bugger! Well, what of it? Isn't that a good enough reason to laugh?
I stop eating for a moment and observe him
with a sort of detached amazement. There
is some damp tobacco on his protruding lower lip and also on his double
chin. His face is a mass of lines, of
deep wrinkles which run in every direction, reminiscent in a way of my Grateful
Dead brochure, whilst his hairy nostrils project upwards in an unabashedly retroussé nose.
There isn't much hair on top of his head, but what little he still
possesses is of a distinctly greasy texture, streaked with bits of off-yellow
that blend-in with the preponderating greyness in a way strongly suggestive of
a compost heap. His ears are big and
lumpy, as is his nose. His eyes,
diminished by two incredibly thick lenses which must weigh a ton, appear dull
and lifeless - virtually dead. In fact,
they look more like the eyes of a fish than of a man and are also slightly
bloodshot, with an appearance of instability in their sockets; one gets the
impression that he blinks to keep them in place or perhaps even to stop them
from tumbling out.
Since I don't wish to continue my
observation of his ugly features, nor to run the risk
of having to enter into conversation with him, I look away in some disgust and
address the puddle of tea which has slowly formed in my saucer. I have more or less finished eating without
really having enjoyed anything. It was a
wonder to me that I didn't throw up. But
this ugly old fart who now wears a vacant expression on his face, as though he
had withdrawn from the world into a private chamber of the mind which is closer
to death than to life, has started me thinking along other lines, and I am
wondering whether I wasn't correct in my assessment of old people the other
day, after all.
As far as I can now recall, it began when I
visited the local grocer's and noticed a hideous-looking old crone seated near
the till and talking to the man behind it.
I had noticed her there on several previous occasions, always seated in
the same place and either talking to the grocer or to herself if he was busy,
but I hadn't paid her much attention, probably because she seemed so perfectly
ordinary and unassuming. On the occasion
I'm thinking of, however, I could tell that the grocer - ordinarily an
extremely polite man - was at some pains to remain patient with her, that her
presence and continuous chatter had become an oppressive burden on him, and
that he would have preferred to be left in peace to serve his other customers,
including me. So when, in a pretence of listening to what she was saying, I took a
good look at her, I perceived that she wasn't as innocuous-looking as I had
previously imagined. On the contrary,
she seemed positively wicked, in fact so conspicuously wicked that, had she
been wearing a high conical hat and holding a broomstick instead of a walking
stick, you would have had no difficulty in taking her for a witch.
Well, that was what started me thinking
more seriously about old people in general and, if I'm not sadly mistaken, this enfeebled specimen of organic degeneration in
front of me has corroborated my suspicions.
Admittedly, what can be seen on the outside isn't nearly enough; there
is much more to him than meets the eye!
But I know for a fact that this man is decadence personified. He has fallen so low that it would be
virtually impossible for a young person like me to ascertain the true extent of
his decadence. In order to get anywhere
near a realistic assessment of his condition, it would be necessary to examine
the workings and/or not-workings of his mind as well as his body, to plumb the
depths of his subconscious in search of buried material - for instance,
remnants of former selves. Needless to
say, we are unlikely to achieve very much in that regard. But we can at least hazard an intelligent
guess as to the efficacy of his cunning and perseverance in dealing with the
many problems, frustrations, shortcomings, etc., which life has hitherto
afflicted upon him, a guess which might indicate that his lengthy existence on
earth has taught him as many dodges as he needs to know in order to survive,
and that his experience in dealing with people has often obliged him to be
shamelessly wicked, ruthless, immoral, treacherous, cantankerous, callous,
deceitful, and a hundred-and-one other disagreeable things to boot, so that,
through force of habit, he has become quite an adept in dealing with the
manifold demands of life.
Indeed, the older one becomes the further
into sin one plunges, ever deeper and deeper, as Hermann Hesse
puts it, into life until, as an enfeebled old sod, one is compelled to pay
one's dues, as it were, and one's ultimate moral and physical dissolution is
wholly justified. From a tot reared on Jack and
Jill to a sot besotted with Ulysses or Tropic of Cancer to a
dot who doesn't read at all ... is just a matter of time. As the personification of innocence, a baby
is generally worshipped by its parents, especially its mother, whereas an
elderly person, say, a grandparent, receives no worship at all. In fact, he/she is hardly even noticed!
Of course, if you were to put a fresh young
sunflower beside a wilted old sunflower, one approaching its demise, you would
see clearly enough that the former was superior to the latter, since it was
healthy rather than sick, decadent, or an eyesore. There could be absolutely no doubt in your
mind concerning the relative merits of the two sunflowers - not, that is,
unless you were stupid or blind or, worse still, possessed by a mad belief in
the existence of a sunflower afterlife.
For, whatever the analogue you choose to adopt in this context, you come
back to the same conclusion every time: once one has passed one's prime, one
effectively becomes a second-class citizen.
One takes a back seat in life, and whether or not he likes it, whether
or not he realizes it, this old creature chewing strands of stale tobacco and staring
fixedly at the blatantly unattractive legs of the chubby waitress, is inferior
to me in almost every respect. He is
wrinkled, short-sighted, thick-eared, double-chinned, stunted, hunchbacked,
pot-bellied, bronchial, grey-haired, bald-headed, flabby-skinned, smelly,
uncouth, toothless (despite or perhaps because of his false teeth),
feebleminded, forgetful, vulgar, and a lot of other unfortunate things which I
can't ascertain simply from being seated at the same table. But, in the event of an argument on this
matter, he will doubtless turn accusative, maintain that old age is wiser than
youth, disagree with me on as many issues as he can, condemn my attitude to old
people, remind me of 'the good old days', and, to cap it all, intimate that his
experiences in life have earned him considerable influence, in consequence of
which he has a right to be consulted on matters of importance, to have the
final word on things - even to be venerated for his wisdom. To wit, he will even go so far as to inform
me that a wilted sunflower is inherently superior to a fresh one! He will conjure up every conceivable ruse
that he can think of to daunt me, to dissuade me from exposing him and putting
my finger on the painfully unchristian truth.
Maybe at this very moment his mind is full of memories, erotic or
otherwise, and the older he gets the more important these memories become, the
more they remind him of what he used to be,
of what he could do about forty years ago, before the torments of
a decaying body affected his mind and persecuted his soul. At times he is little more than a walking
dream, and those are comparatively fortunate times!
I stoically and perhaps even rudely
undertake another penetrating observation of him, but I don't encounter
anything new. One would think he was
wearing a death mask, to judge by the lifeless expression on his face at
present. There is hardly anything about
it which would fail to suggest that the seeds of death aren't already sprouting
from his pores and slowly draining the life out of him. Admittedly, it's not really his fault if he
looks so abominably cadaverous; that was bound to happen eventually. But, all the same, he is a fact, a walking
fact, and the least society can do for such people is to treat them with a
certain amount of civility, to ensure, as far as possible, that they're not
suffering overmuch, and to guarantee the majority of them that when they die,
other routes to salvation being blocked, their corpses will be destroyed in a
time-saving, money-saving, space-saving, work-saving, health-saving, and
superstition-saving manner, freed from the traditional obligation of
organically continuing the vicious life-cycle by indirectly breeding millions
of superfluous, pestilential vermin, as what passes for heaven degenerates into
hell!
No, I don't hate this old man. But I am nowhere near admiring him,
either. He simply leaves me cold. Time is steadily rotting him away; he will
soon cease to exist. If, by any chance,
he happens to be buried, he will eventually be metamorphosed into a seething
mass of worms and maggots. The worms
will burrow into his entrails, his molecular structure will slowly
disintegrate, and the air above his grave will become permeated with the sickly
odour of death and decay. Once the life
has gone from his body, it will be too late for him to consider moral
reparations. He will be completely
submerged in a bath of icy darkness from which there is no escape. He won't even have time to regret that he had
often been duped by certain things or people whilst alive. Regret, like remorse, is a privilege of the
living!
But let us just suppose, for the sake of
argument, that a priest has blessed him and sped him on his way to Heaven,
encouraging him to have faith in God when, after a life of unmitigated
profligacy, profanity, indifference, and ignorance, he had just received the
Last Sacraments and thereupon made his peace with the Church. Our old man is granted a good conscience
through having been absolved from his earthly iniquities and formally prepared
for the inevitable meeting with his Maker.
At the very worst he need only fear a short stay in Purgatory, while St
Peter's angels deal with his moral particulars.
For when he's finally admitted to Heaven, he will wallow in everlasting
peace and be permitted, so the priest benignly informs him, to converse with as
many former great men as he pleases or, if he prefers (since to judge by the
old man's blank expression there is no way that intellectual conversation could
possibly appeal to someone of his type), follow any number of beautiful maidens
to their resting places, where they will subsequently please him to his heart's
content, etc.
To be sure, the priest may soon divine,
after a short sermon of this seductive import, that,
in his impatience to cross into a better world, the old man can't die quickly
enough. Perhaps, who knows? But all his hopes will be to no avail when he
eventually stops breathing and is absolutely powerless to determine whether he
is in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory simply because there will be no consciousness
of anything.
Now if, by some remote chance, he were to
return from the dead just as he was being buried, before the first spadeful of earth had thumped against the coffin lid,
before the mourners (assuming there were any) had finished mourning or
pretending to mourn, and immediately began pounding on the coffin, to be
quickly hauled back to the surface and rescued from suffocation, he would
probably wonder what-the-devil was going on, why-on-earth they had buried him
when his heart was still functioning normally and he had only a short while
before received divine absolution. Yet
if, to crown it all, the godly flock of mourners then proceeded to question him
about life after death, he would more than likely stare at them incredulously,
as though they were idiots or lunatics to expect him to know anything about
such a thing when he hadn't gone anywhere.
What was time when you were dead?
Could he seriously be expected to even know that he had died? He certainly hadn't been asleep, at any
rate. For when you sleep the mind is
still alive, blood is being pumped around the body, you almost invariably dream
of something and retain, in consequence, a vague notion of time or, more
specifically, of the sequence of events within the dream. But he couldn't remember anything. There had been no dreams because, assuming he
had in fact died, no blood was being pumped around the body to
keep the mind alive. You can't dream
with a dead mind. Therefore, as far as
he was concerned, nothing had happened.
One moment he was whispering penitentially in
the priest's ear, the next moment he was pounding on the coffin lid from the
wrong side of the grave. There had been
no transition.
"What?" the priest cries out, in
horrified amazement. "You weren't
taken to meet our Heavenly Father by one of His angels?"
"No," the old man replies,
dumbfounded. "I didn't go
anywhere."
For a moment the priest is nonplussed. "Oh, my God!" he groans and, speedily
recovering some composure, turns to the flabbergasted mourners by the grave and
screams: "This man has been dead almost a week and his soul hasn't gone
anywhere!" There is an ominous
pause before he continues conclusively: "That can only mean one thing. This man is a child of Satan!" And immediately, before the old man can say
anything, before he can even attempt to climb out of his coffin and defend
himself, the priest grabs the spade and begins furiously beating him over the
head in an attempt to return him to the everlasting sleep from which he had so
unexpectedly awoken, as though from a nightmare.
Suddenly I come-to with a shuddering
start! I haven't gone anywhere,
either. The old man is still opposite me
and the loudmouthed moron is still to my left.
The waitress is staring at me with suspicious eyes, as though to reprove
me for having withdrawn into myself at her expense. There is quite a hubbub throughout the rest
of the café. Indeed, you would never
think, listening to it, that people could possibly be communicating with and
understanding one another. It is much
too uproarious to be intelligible.
Anyway, for the time being, I have no further business here. I need only pay the bill.
Just as I get up from my chair I become
unpleasantly conscious of the fact that someone, presumably the old man, has
farted. A rising quantity of rectal gas
lodges in my nostrils and sharply disgusts me.
It must have been a very soft fart because, irrespective of the general
hubbub, I didn't hear anything. But
whilst I am pushing my chair in, I can distinctly hear a loud one followed,
almost immediately afterwards, by a barrage of softer ones which explode in
quick succession. A mature woman seated
behind him has turned around and is now regarding him with unmitigated
disdain. She has evidently found him
guilty of a serious breech of propriety!
He should have done his best to hold on to his post-prandial
flatulence until he got outside, the dirty brute, or at least have allowed her
to finish her meal! Not knowing of the
woman's proximity, however, the old man appears completely unconcerned about
this minor metaphysical indiscretion, which he probably didn't hear or smell in
any case, and continues chewing his tobacco as though nothing had
happened. A privilege of the senile,
after all!
While the plump waitress reads my bill, I
take a final look at the over-polite moron with the loud voice. He has finished his shepherd’s pie,
presumably snot and all, and is now scrutinizing the menu with intent, I suppose,
to selecting a dessert. The girl nearby
still appears to be staring at him, though from where I stand I can't see the
expression on her face. For all I know
she is probably laughing at him under her breath - either that or holding her
nose because of the old man. As they
say, one good meal a day is quite enough!
WEDNESDAY 29th SEPTEMBER
By the time
I had finished recording my impressions, yesterday, it was well into the
evening and I didn't fancy doing anything else.
For one thing, my eyes ached and, for another, so did my brain. I wondered whether I hadn't overdone it
again, or was suffering from a relapse and would consequently be obliged to
spend the rest of the week in bed.
Largely because this prospect seemed more daunting than the actual pain
itself, however, I quickly set about finding a method of suppressing it, and
accordingly decided on a bath. It was
just the right kind of evening for a bath anyway, quite apart from the fact
that I hadn't had one in over a week and was beginning to smell a trifle
malodorous.
Naturally, an overtaxed brain could always
relax with a woman if its master were fortunate enough to possess one, since a
little hanky-panky between the sheets or anywhere else, for that matter, would
certainly serve to make your personal world less narrow, as well as divert you
from the consequences of too much literary endeavour and simultaneously prevent
you from falling into the trap of headache-provoking erotic fantasies or, worse
still, following in Nietzsche's tragic footsteps and sustaining an
irrecoverable nervous breakdown. You
would have the consolation of knowing that you were relatively normal, were
obeying the voice of nature, concocting a potent medicine, and looking after the
health of both your body and your soul.
That was undoubtedly another good reason to indulge your sexual
appetites, provided, of course, that you weren't misogynistic. But, whoever and whatever you were, you would
certainly require diversions of some sort, and the more the better! Well, the most I could hope for, on this
occasion, was a bath which, providing the water was hot and soapy, would be
something of a tonic, after all. It
would at least kill an hour or two.
Since it was only nine-thirty and I had
approximately an hour-and-a-half to kill before going to bed, I needed no
further encouragement yesterday evening but hastened to my immediate salvation,
like a man desperately endeavouring to extinguish burning clothes. Trivial though it may seem to record, I also
took the opportunity of visiting the lavatory while the tap was running, not
simply because I wanted a shit at the time (though ordinarily I always evacuate
my bowels at a specific time of the evening rather than simply leave it to
nature's prompting), but also because I fancied that the noise from the
adjacent bathroom would drown out the sound of my excretory endeavours, since
it was precisely those farts, groans, plops, and wipings
which most disconcerted me and caused me, somewhat childishly perhaps, to feel
overly self-conscious vis-à-vis the nearest neighbours, two of whom lived
immediately under the lavatory in a small room from which the sound of talking
and muffled movements could even now be overheard. Once they got wind of my motions, so to
speak, there was little prospect of my not arousing at least some cynical
curiosity on their part. For it seemed
to me that one loud, ill-timed fart or rapid burst of gun-like flatulence would
ignite an emotional explosion, on their part, nothing short of hysterical. You could almost swear they were counting the
plops sometimes, the way the house seemed to become curiously silent all of a
sudden. But neighbours or no neighbours, going to the
toilet in this place was usually a somewhat unnerving experience anyway,
especially in view of the likelihood of a piss-splashed sphincter from
relieving one's bowels either too eagerly or crudely, as the case might be, in
the wake of other, less explosive voidings. It was just as well to take a bath
afterwards, thereby purging oneself, bidet-like, of these external impurities!
As a consequence of habit, I had taken my
radio into the bathroom in order to listen-in to the
Good God, at the thought of that I felt the
desire to laugh, to laugh as in The Cornerstop
Café at lunch time - with real gutsy uninhibitedness! Yet, on second thoughts, I considered it
inappropriate to let myself go again; for such ill-mannered flippancy would have
sounded too much at variance with the generally grave tenor of the news, and I
would subsequently have reproached myself for acquiring a sort of spurious
amusement at the expense not only of other people but also of my moral limits.
Naturally, it wasn't very pleasant that
people were being blown to pieces in some godforsaken urban wilderness, that a
coach full of children had crashed with devastating consequences on the
Continent, a passenger jet gone down over the Atlantic killing all on board, a
cruise liner sunk in the Indian Ocean with considerable loss of life, a volcano
erupted to spew molten lava upon unsuspecting villagers on a godforsaken island
in the South Pacific, an earthquake claimed the lives of tens-of-thousands of
hard-working and law-abiding citizens in some unfortunate Third World country,
or a state of emergency been declared in one of the richest and most
exploitative countries on earth. No, it
was far from pleasant! But such
accidents and events were by no means uncommon; they had an all-too-familiar
ring to them. You could usually
anticipate the kinds of calamities, both natural and artificial, to which
people on earth were sometimes exposed, not to mention the kinds of diseases to
which they sometimes succumbed. You had
learnt to live with that fact by first accepting it and then, as far as
possible, doing your level best to either ignore or
forget it. You had gradually come to the
conclusion that the world was a place where such misfortunes were an integral
part of life and that neither worries nor regrets would have any effect on
whether or not they continued to happen, since it was largely beyond the power
of the individual to appreciably alter anything.
Of course, if you had hardened your heart
to such misfortunes, ignored or weathered the presumptuous slander of others,
bravely persevered under the strain of unrequited love, learnt that extremities
were equally fatal from a human point-of-view, that too much pleasure was no
less unbearable than too much pain, then you could hardly be expected to show
much concern over the deaths, say, of a few dozen people in some far-off land
whose names meant absolutely nothing to you and whose minds were now
effectively non-existent. If, however, you
did feel some genuine concern, then the chances were that it was
because the misfortune or tragedy had special implications for you personally,
because you had empathic feelings at stake, and consequently didn't really have
any choice in the matter. But to pretend to feel
concern, to force your emotions in order to appear sympathetic,
mature, humane, responsible, etc., as people often did when in the company of
others, wasn't only downright unreasonable but plainly hypocritical, to boot!
For a woman - yes, there may well be times
when a woman feels she ought to express a degree of impersonal concern over
some disaster, when she feels that her credibility as a woman to some
extent depends on it, since she can give release to certain pent-up emotions
which not only has the effect of temporarily purging her highly strung nervous
system of tensions, but enables her to express a general concern for the
well-being or wrongdoing of life at the same time. Naturally, destruction of whatever sort,
whether man-made or otherwise, doesn't have all that much appeal to women. In a sense, they are more fixed than men, they have certain very definite limits which a man is
scarcely aware of - at least in relation to himself. A pregnant woman is forced by nature onto a
sort of conveyor-belt process of gestation from which, short of abortion and/or
miscarriage, there is no real escape.
She can only create and, ultimately, at a high cost to herself both
physically and emotionally. So it should
be fairly obvious that a woman who has gone to considerable pains to produce,
rear, and assist in the development of her offspring won't be greatly thrilled
at the prospect of seeing such offspring and, by some curious maternal empathy,
those of other women either killed or injured through some impersonal
misfortune beyond her control.
Imagine, for example, how Salvador Dali
would probably have felt if, following months of intensive labour on, say, The
Ecumenical Council, some religious maniac secretly got wind of what he was
doing and, not approving of it, broke into his studio one night and thereupon
proceeded to slash the painting to shreds.
Even that analogue, though
tragically poignant, is ultimately inadequate, and for the simple reason
that although Dali has produced many indisputably ingenious, not to say inimitable,
paintings, he was originally produced, as it were, by someone else - namely,
his mother. Thus it is quite
understandable if a woman often instinctively reacts to the news of disasters
and misfortunes involving human life as though they shouldn't have happened and
the world was consequently at fault, whereas a man, assuming he reacts at all,
will be more likely to take a fatalistic view of such things because, unlike a
woman, he isn't so much concerned with the amount of hard labour for nothing
(although there is evidently more to a woman's concern than that) as with an
understanding of the facts or reasons behind their occurrence, in
order to justify them in the light of preceding events, ulterior motives,
scientific laws, the law of averages, human nature, mechanical failures, and so
on. Therefore when I switched on the
news it wasn't that I imagined myself being shocked by anything, that the news
would suddenly take a turn for the better and my personal feelings about it one
for the worse, or vice versa. Au
contraire, I merely wanted to hear if any new disaster or outbreak of
violence had occurred in the world and, if so, where and for what reasons.
Well, I certainly succeeded in obtaining
what I wanted, but, as already noted, it wasn't so much the news that
interested me, after a while, as the way in which the human voice was being
utilized, the way it adapted to the changing circumstances and contexts with
apparent ease, which began to intrigue and even, I regret to say, to perversely
amuse me. The news god had suddenly and
quite unexpectedly come crashing down from his high objective pedestal, and for
once, beneath an outer shell of measured seriousness, sanctimonious aloofness,
and apparent concern, I perceived that he was virtually hollow, devoid of a
heart, unsympathetically dispassionate.
I climbed out of the bath feeling like an iconoclast!
LATE WEDNESDAY EVENING
Occasionally,
when the fancy takes me, I abandon the local milieu for an evening in
the
Sometimes, after the cumulative effects of
walking aimlessly around the West End have begun to take their psychological
toll on me, I get so frustrated and annoyed by the apparent futility of
everything that I could grab hold of somebody and begin shaking him, as though
to force some life, energy, and sense into him!
I suddenly feel the desire to liven things up a bit, to stand somebody
on his head or hurl a few large stones through the nearest shop window, to put
my hand up somebody's skirt or run rampant through one of the large department
stores, pushing over clothes-racks and pinching things from counters. Even the few people who appear engaged in the
search for pleasure hardly seem to be enjoying themselves. In fact, you would think that most of them
were going to a funeral, to judge by the sullen expressions on their tired
faces! You would doubt that people could
possibly enjoy themselves in circumstances where Rimbaud's plea for Noel sur la terre is continuously
swallowed-up by the noise of swarming taxis, ambulance/police/fire-engine
sirens, overcrowded pavements, cynical films, raucous street theatre, and
half-baked pop music, to name but a handful of things. When you encounter people with the appearance
of happiness in those circumstances, you begin to wonder whether
they're not sick or retarded, whether there isn't a screw loose somewhere which
allows them to enjoy themselves in spite of everything, simply because they
can't look reality squarely in the face and see it for the competitive hell it
has become these days.
In this perplexed state-of-mind you walk
down one street and up another, as the saying goes, without particularly caring
where they lead and scarcely bothering to look where you're going. Naturally, you can't permit yourself to stare
at people, so you glance at shop windows, noting things which happen to
momentarily arrest your attention: advertisements, price-tags, shop names,
window dummies, etc., which only succeed in further irritating you because you
can't help feeling that you should have known better than to allow your attention
to wander in such a seemingly haphazard fashion, without cause or purpose. But when, beyond the casual glance, you
actually notice products in some of these flashy shops, when you finally notice
all the silly 'in' shoes, hats, suits, coats, shirts, ties, handbags, skirts,
dresses, ornaments, jewellery, cosmetics, perfumes, and countless other
products which evidently appeal to those with plenty of money to spend, you are
almost grateful that you're not in a position to squander any money on such things
yourself. Indeed, it is only too
evident, by this time, that the world has closed-in upon you again and thereby
assumed the proportions of a gigantic predatory prison, a maze of web-like
entanglements, if your thoughts can be so narrowly confined to the streets and
its sullenly pretentious denizens, as you follow a familiar route for the
umpteenth time and privately air your anti-commercial grievances with all the
futile persistency of a religious fanatic!
Is it possible, then, that your only refuge is the single room from
which you had earlier fled, that you are partly compensated for its nocturnal
boredom by the absence of superfluous bric-a-brac or superficial luxuries?
No, it was absolutely imperative to take a
break from that room! Too much of a
given thing can be lethal, no matter how acceptable or even congenial it may
ordinarily seem for a time. You are not
an old crone or a young student ... that you need remain confined to your
solitary room every day. At least you
possess the residue of a rebellious tendency which drives you out into the
street every so often, causing you to heap mental derision upon the demon of
boredom, upon a life which seems, at times, to possess as much variety as a
sewer rat's!
Yes, you went out fuming over the absence
of variety, pleasure, enthusiasm, money, women, company, etc. You have given-up smoking again, because you
decided that it was profoundly boring and didn't amount to anything
particularly pleasurable at all, especially against the attendant realizations
that the nicotine poison in your blood was beginning to encourage the growth of
a few-too-many unseemly boils on your hard-pressed face, that your lungs were
beginning to function within the constrictive confines of an invisible clamp,
while your throat was dry and unpleasantly sore to a degree which suggested the
possibility of a lasting sore throat as the next logical degeneration, so that
these and other physical drawbacks duly sufficed to convince you of the wisdom
of returning to your formerly abstemious habits at the expense of your current
folly.
Well, that was a brave decision, you wise
man! so be brave enough to seek temporary refuge
within the chaos of these busy
If I occasionally blame myself for
participating in such a boring existence, if from time to time I get angry over
the apparent uneventfulness of my life, over the way
things 'do or don't happen in the modern world', then I must also remember that
these self-imposed limits are partly responsible for it, even when they have
hidden themselves away in the murky depths of my subconscious and I become
forgetful of their existence or of why they are there in the first place. So I end-up making verbal war on this
apparent uneventfulness without fully appreciating
the extent of my personal contribution to it, and thus mistakenly accuse the
city and, by implication, other people of being in the wrong.
Yes, that is doubtless partly true. Although there's absolutely no reason for me
to pretend that the city is all righteousness either - far from it! I can hardly become overjoyed at the prospect
of seeing the same streets every week, a majority of whose shops are so often
crammed with the sorts of superficial and superfluous items to which I have
already alluded. No, if I am to become
overjoyed or at least thankful about anything, it should be with regard to my
fundamental disinclination to really transgress these self-imposed limits: to
stand a newspaper vendor on his head, to put my hand up some unsuspecting
female's skirt, to pull faces at a young shop assistant, or to throw stones
through the window of any shop with a conspicuously predatory facade - simply
because I have decided to safeguard my personal interests in pursuance of a
certain dignified restraint.
If, however, I were to knock a fat
bourgeois' bowler hat off his head and then start jumping up and down on it
with a view to reducing its bulbous pretensions to a shapeless mess, he would
almost inevitably take offence, lash out at me with his spiked umbrella, and
quickly draw the attention of other people, perhaps even other dickheads like himself,
so that I would become the unfortunate cynosure of much verbal abuse, optical
curiosity, social embarrassment, and general disorder. As can be imagined, I have no desire to get
drawn into that kind of ugly scene! It
would be quite gratuitous. Besides
which, it would also be too petty and superficial for me to jeopardize my
self-respect and social freedom over so trivial a matter as the destiny of some
stockbroker's bowler hat!
Likewise to throw stones through a shop
window, run my hand up a pretty stranger's dark-stockinged
legs, daub political graffiti across a cinema hoarding, or make a rude gesture
at someone on the pavement would undoubtedly amount to an unprecedented event
bordering on an adventure for me. But
would it really be worth the effort if, in having committed such antisocial
indiscretions, I suddenly found myself surrounded by an angry crowd of
gesticulating people who thereupon proceeded to turn a molehill into a mountain
and denounce me as a vandal, rapist, communist, clown, or anything else which
might serve to highlight my impertinence and bring me to summary justice?
Assuming I had decided on a wandering hand,
the young woman involved would probably appear deeply offended, she would be
having difficulty steadying her nerves, calming herself down again. And if she hadn't been caressed or touched-up
for some time, the tone of her confession to the nearest police officer might
well be as much a result of secret disappointment that nothing more had
happened as of outraged innocence at what had!
But she would inevitably be induced by the hostility of the pressing
crowd into taking a condemnatory view of the incident in question, into siding
with the dutifully outraged persons who crowd around me with threats of
violence and accusations of perversion.
Her feminine insecurity, sensitivity, and common sense would compel her
to side with the stronger party, those morally vindictive males who prevent me
from edging away on the sly, who condemn me in the name of decency for having
had the unmitigated audacity to step beyond the conventional bounds of social
etiquette in pursuance of patently selfish ends! I would be branded a black sheep and a danger
to morals, and would probably have to pay for my crime via some form of
incarceration intended to deter me from molesting young women in future,
especially since this one, having recovered from her initial shock, might
subsequently be at pains to forget that she had once been physically assaulted
in such-and-such a street on a Wednesday evening in September by a handsome
young madman who looked intellectual and confessed to being manic depressive.
So I restrain the foolish impulse to step
out-of-line and instigate a scandal; I play the game. I wander around the city with hands limply in
pockets like a lost sheep in search of his rightful flock, an outsider who is
protected from getting into trouble with the society in which he happens to
find himself by his self-imposed limits rather than by any genuine concern or
respect for that society itself.
Obviously, I am not afraid of death. I have neither hope nor fear of an afterlife
of either eternal bliss or torment. On
the contrary, I can often advance tenable reasons why it would be preferable to
die than to live right now, even if, following a change of mood or
circumstance, I later contradict those reasons by convincing myself that my
presence in the world might not be without some significance, and that I ought
therefore to persevere with life until such time as perseverance turns into triumph,
and the significance of my existence becomes fully apparent. But I don't want to squander my time on
trivialities or to excite the anger and envy of petty minds. If by some chance beyond my present
imaginings I had just the minute before detonated certain pompous-looking
buildings in which a variety of oppressively powerful people were engaged in
devising more watertight schemes for oppressing the poor, I would doubtless
consider the repercussions more acceptable and even justifiable than had I merely
hurled a brick through somebody's plate-glass window in the manner of a common
vandal, or knocked a fat businessman's hat off his balding head for no deeper
motive than a desire to liven things up a bit!
Indeed, it would be almost a pleasure being pursued by an angry mob,
knowing that you had done something above the common run and left a significant
imprint on society in consequence.
Well, so much for the speculation! All the same, it won't do me any good to
give-in to something petty, to transgress the laws of that god of limits who is
both my usual source of frustration and of
salvation. If he protects me from the
violence of the common herd, I must continue to be his hard-pressed servant and
wander around within the strict confines of certain predetermined rules. I must never, not even for a moment, step
out-of-line at the expense of my freedom.
That, after all, would be an unpardonable indiscretion!
THURSDAY 30th SEPTEMBER
I had
almost forgotten that today was my birthday.
It caught me so totally unawares that it seems I have crossed the
threshold into adulthood and a certain indifference to, if not ironic
detachment from, the whole idea of celebrating one's birthday. When one is a child one looks forward to such
an occasion with an air of enraptured expectancy, as though something
near-miraculous were about to happen - not exactly a rebirth so much as the
receiving of the most wonderful presents in an atmosphere of love and joy. Today, however, my birthday
means scarcely anything to me, having the empty and superficially ironic ring
of the single card which, received from my mother (as might be expected),
blandly reads: 'Have a wonderful day!'
If my birthday contains any particular significance - aside, that is,
from its numerical value and my mental registration of the fact that I am now
officially a year older than yesterday - it can only be in the sense that, on
account of the residue of a few sentimental connotations remaining from
previous birthdays, I would like the day to pass without too many disturbances,
shortcomings, or indiscretions on the part of both me and my neighbours. As it happens, I am almost afraid that it
will be spoilt by a few idiotic and puerile grievances between us. (Strangely enough, I'm reminded of the
seemingly futile efforts made by various sections of the industrial
working-class to consistently enjoy themselves when, during the course of a
three-week summer vacation, they are obliged to make an attempt at doing so, else
die of boredom. Somehow, one can never
quite elude the impression that they're fighting a losing battle in the face of
the overwhelming odds of a hard-working past stacked so unmercifully against
them. Perhaps I am in a similar fix
vis-à-vis my neighbours?)
Be that as it may, it rather looks as
though I shall have to get along with the day's events, come
what may. This time next week I'll
probably be accustomed to thinking of myself as a year older and be a lot less prickly
about how fate treats me in consequence.
I expect my mother is even now pricklier about it than myself. Either that or she doesn't really give a toss
any longer!
So twenty-four years' existence has led me,
Michael James Savage, to this room, this journal, these thoughts, together with
certain acquired facts and experiences, a few of which I now contemplate with a
distinctly ambivalent frame-of-mind. In
attempting to placate her propagative impulses my
mother was ultimately compelled to thrust me head-first into a doctor's gloved
hands, and no sooner had I woken up to the realization that I no longer had a
womb to protect and nourish me than I commenced hollering. Thus life began for me, as for everyone else,
from the strictly autocratic point-of-view.
Henceforth, I would be obliged to accept and respect my parents. My childhood would be one long orgy of
gratitude and dependence.
For a moment, I endeavour to contemplate
the notion of my father having his way with a fairly intelligent, though fundamentally
lascivious, woman who subsequently became my mother. Coming from a Catholic background, my
progenitors were strictly forbidden the use of contraceptives, so it was
evident that they would either have to produce offspring or drive each other mad
from perversion. As might be expected,
they chose the former course, and that is how I came into being. Despite his Bible and rosary beads, good
manners and ideals, aesthetic predilections and intellectual preoccupations, my
male progenitor was the possessor of a circumcised penis which, as the
focal-point of the 'will to life' (in the philosophical sense somewhat narrowly
espoused by Schopenhauer), ejaculated semen into my mother's womb, and the
long-term consequence of one such ejaculation - probably one of hundreds and
not necessarily the first either - was a tiny male baby who thereafter grew to
be the young man of twenty four who sits here today sadly contemplating his
birthday.
Of course, there is reason enough why it
would be almost justifiable for me to heap accusation after accusation upon my
progenitors, to criticize them for their apparent lack of foresight, to condemn
their delusions, weaknesses, fears, and conventions in the self-righteous name
of my current dissatisfactions. But I
know only too well that such a procedure wouldn't get me anywhere, seeing that
I would only further torture myself in their absence. For, when all's said and done, one is
essentially alone in this life and the best one can do, short of seeking asylum
in some political or religious organization, is to persevere with it without
unduly and foolishly torturing oneself with misgivings, at the risk, needless
to say, of regular psychological crises.
To be sure, any criticism of one's parents'
apparent inability to restrain themselves from committing the 'supreme folly'
(as I think Sartre not unreasonably called it) of propagation can, with equal
justice, be levelled against one's grandparents, great-grandparents,
great-great-grandparents, and so on, until one eventually approaches the source
of modern life by discovering, in one's most distant ancestors, the morally
irresponsible imbeciles whose origins were evidently more ape-like than
human! No doubt, they all acted in good
faith, realizing that any satisfactory sexual pleasure to be obtained through
their respective partners would inevitably lead to propagation, and that they
would consequently have no choice but to tag along with it and obey nature's
dictates, since there weren't any serious alternatives in a primitive
community, and one, moreover, where concepts like birth control, celibacy, and
solitude would have met with ridicule in view of the way wild beasts and enemy
tribes preyed upon one another with intent to advancing their own interests at
the expense of those weaker or stupider or less ruthless than themselves. But I don't want to go into the history of
the world or, indeed, of evolution on my birthday, since it is a thorny subject
at the best of times, without the necessity of my dragging it into this literary
journal because of a need to do something constructive and even courageous
(reckless?) today no less than on previous days. Still, this subject of propagation intrigues
me, so, despite my superficial qualms and regrets over how best to tackle it, I
think I'll persevere with it a while longer.
To begin with, there is my own life, a not
particularly eventful life (as we have seen) but a life of sorts all the same,
and then there are the lives of others, a great many of whom are undoubtedly
suffering in the most appalling conditions, whether here in England or, more
usually, far away in less-temperate parts of the world. Whenever I think in terms of world
population, I invariably shudder with fright.
For, regardless of the fact that the globe is fast becoming an
increasingly overcrowded place, the population of a majority of countries
continues to rise, as though nothing were happening and there was little reason
to take birth control seriously.
Naturally, the chief powers are now building better armies, navies, and
air forces than ever before. But all
that is somehow relative to the apparent need of modern man to destroy en masse
and universally, rather than on a restricted scale corresponding, say, to the
Battle of Hastings. There is something
evolutionary about it which makes it unlikely that the process could be
dramatically reversed. Neither can
alliances be made, armaments be sold, manoeuvres be carried out, or forces be
maintained, if not increased, unless one is guaranteed an enemy or, at the very
least, a potential enemy, so that the world, or a substantial portion of it,
can be divided into two or more hostile camps which then fly competing flags in
the names of freedom, democracy, communism, fascism, capitalism, equality,
nationalism, industrialism, religion, ecology, fundamentalism, liberalism, or
whatever. The interrelativity
of things is inescapable, and no successful armaments manufacturer can avoid
being effectively indebted to the enemy, or potential enemy, for supplying the
continual need of defence.
At this very moment, throughout virtually
every corner of the world, soldiers, sailors, and pilots are earnestly
undergoing preparations for another major war by perfecting the art of martial
aggression, whether defensively or offensively or even some paradoxical
combination of the two; by learning new combat techniques which will enable
them to keep ahead of the enemy; by acquiring new military hardware which is
superior to anything the other side may possess and which, when combined with
everything else, will ensure that they'll be on the victorious side if and when
another war is declared and they suddenly find themselves being rushed into
action, called upon by society to justify the expenditure incurred in both
training and equipping them, to utilize their martial skills, defend their
country, sovereign, principles, rights, freedoms, and so on - a veritable host
of magnificent ideals!
Were Hermann Hesse
alive today he could doubtless be relied upon to offer a credible prognosis concerning
the future course of world events with the same eloquence and perspicacity as
if he were talking of Germany in the 1920s and '30s. Since then, however, the world has pressed on
again, re-drawn its frontiers, and crowned its evolutionary aspirations with
wider-ranging ideological incentives which now require new warnings, analogues,
criticisms, and prognostications.
It may seem strange, but a majority of
those who daily live under the threat of nuclear or biological extinction are
still capable of being reasonably responsible.
They sense the war god towering above their teeming populations, leering
down at them, mocking their attempts at reform, yelling at the top of his
cynical voice: "No life without death, no peace without war, no love
without hate, no light without darkness, no right without wrong, no human being
without human nature!" and they huddle closer together into various
philanthropic organizations, consider compromises, suggest
propagation-amendment laws which forbid families from having more than two
children; suggest compulsory euthanasia for seriously malformed children,
congenital lunatics, dangerous criminals, victims of painfully incurable
diseases, geriatric invalids, etc.; suggest state-controlled abortion,
state-run contraception, compulsory vasectomy, artificial insemination, and
whatever else comes desperately to mind.
But well-intentioned though some of these schemes may be, their
implementation would probably spark off a violent revolution and thereby defeat
their objectives. The existing
governments of a majority of countries would be unable or unwilling to
authorize such measures, being obliged, instead, to watch the war god looming
over the masses in a threatening posture, to let the masses propagate at
random, to bludgeon one another in the name of freedom, and eventually to thin
one another out by the conventional method of mass extermination - another
major war!
No, euthanasia, state-controlled abortion,
propagation-amendment laws, and the like are all very well theoretically. But their literal implementation would
ultimately conflict with pro-life teachings of the Church and thereby place the
entire democratic system in jeopardy. If
the worst comes to the worst, another world war will curb the current
population of the globe quite adequately.
In fact, there'll hardly be need for a plague afterwards, the war will have ...
Damn it! I'm not going to torment myself
with any more of that kind of idle speculation.
It seems likely, after all, that the world's population will continue to
rise for some time to come. There will
undoubtedly be more screaming brats and overcrowded flats, more social
frustrations and national inflations, more congested pavements and homeless
vagrants, more social handouts and moral cop-outs, more long-term unemployment
and military deployment. In the main,
however, people will continue to take things more or less for granted. Indeed, some of them will even kid themselves
that the world is becoming an increasingly better place to live in, that
today's youths have far greater opportunities for 'getting on' in life than any
previous generation ever had, that the standard of living has improved beyond
recognition in recent years, and that the one definitive all-knowing God of the
New Testament, not to mention His all-powerful Old Testament progenitor who in some countries counts for a great deal
more, is both protecting and guiding the world towards a still brighter future,
while simultaneously restraining the impulse to personally intervene, in order
that His followers may faithfully continue to work in His name until, ever
mindful of the Last Judgement, they die in a condition of optimistic
resignation rather than pessimistic foreboding!
Throughout the coming decades, the average
man will continue to be so habitually deprived, both materially and
spiritually, though especially spiritually, that he will be unable to
comprehend or objectify the extent of his deprivation. So much will it have become a part of his
daily routine ... that he'll have no real option but to take it for granted. He may even
go so far as to consider himself relatively fortunate that habit and
insensitivity have largely blinded him to the extent of his personal
misfortune, and that he is still 'better off' than certain other categories of
people - the mentally retarded, for instance, or the incurably insane. He will get up early, every weekday, feeling
utterly dejected at the prospect of having to go to an underpaid and overworked
job for some seven or eight hours. He
will struggle through the day like a man at the end of his psycho-physical
tether, and when he eventually arrives home again to an equally tired,
humiliated, and short-tempered working wife, he'll automatically turn to the
TV, sprawl in front of it for the rest of the evening, take the most part of
what he sees for granted, no matter how vulgar or violent it may happen to be,
and, finally, clamber into bed with a filmic hangover, absolutely dying to
submerge himself in the inky darkness of world-defying night!
Indeed, he will have become so accustomed
to his personal hardships that if a man were suddenly to faint in front of him
in the street, one day, he would walk over his prostrate body as though it
didn't really exist. He will see
millions of cars, buses, taxis, vans, trucks, and lorries,
but he won't worry too much about the extent of their combined exhaust fumes or
the degree to which they daily pollute the atmosphere. Neither will he wonder where all the new
vehicles are going, those being regularly churned-out of their factories on a
conveyor-belt process which, once sold, will make the roads an even noisier,
busier, dirtier, smellier, and more sickening experience than they already are
at present. Oh no! He will have to turn what is commonly known
as a 'blind eye'. For once the
industrial cogs have started turning (and turning with increasingly desperate
momentum as time goes by), you can't just stop them overnight and make millions
of men redundant, even if their labour does contribute
to making the world a worse place to live in, an increasingly hazardous
arena. He will simply have to accept so
many absurdities, imbecilities, misfortunes, tragedies, and other regrettable
facts of contemporary life ... that any genuine self-respect, personal dignity,
or individualistic principles to which he might still lay some sort of
attenuated claim will be brought into utter ridicule as an affectation of
vainglorious egocentricity - the sort of delusions of antiquated grandeur an
easily dispensable and relatively insignificant social pawn shouldn't have any
recourse to, no matter who he happens to think he is! Social pawns should be seen and not heard,
used and not touched, bought and not sold!
No sooner have I written the above than it
occurs to me that, in society's impersonal eyes, I am also an easily
dispensable and relatively insignificant social pawn, to be pushed around the
glorified chessboard of the marketplace by those who have a vested interest in
securing a few extra points for themselves at the expense of all those less
well-placed pawns. Admittedly, I'm not
being pushed around it very much at the moment, especially with a recession
biting the hands of the pushers. But,
all the same, I don't have any real say in things and I'm certainly not asked
for an opinion as to how best the game should be played, so that, for once, the
pawns, and not the pawn-pushers, might be the ones to profit from it. Even if I do
occasionally hit upon a solution to a given problem with a conviction that puts
alternative considerations beyond doubt, it is a completely gratuitous event so
far as the world in general is concerned, something that isn't guaranteed to
appeal to the pawn-pushers, and something that, transferred to paper, may well
lose much of the cutting-edge of conviction as it undergoes literary
transmutation and becomes diluted with fictional lies in the interests of a
more commercial presentation, a presentation which even then might prove too
unadulterated for the liking of those people whose preference is rather more
for blissful ignorance than the painful truth!
Yes, but I have to do something too! I have to dispel time's cruel tyranny as best
I can, no matter what the outcome. There
is a fair possibility that, even with the vagaries of fate to consider, I may
have to live through another fifty or so birthdays before I die and pass beyond
their reach to an eternity of self-oblivion the other side of mortal
death. During the intervening time, I
will doubtless have to keep myself reasonably preoccupied: to write, think,
read, listen to music, watch TV, etc., as well as to eat, drink, sleep, walk,
talk, etc., in accordance with human necessity.
But I know for a fact that I am by no means resigned to the possibility
of ever being partly responsible, as a parent, for condemning another human
being to 70-odd years experience, whether directly or indirectly, permanently
or temporarily, constantly or intermittently, of such places as Crouch End or Muswell Hill, and to such things as constipation, diarrhoea,
glandular fever, bronchitis, appendicitis, tonsillitis, peritonitis,
tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza, coryza, colds in
general, stomach aches, earaches, toothaches, headaches, migraine, eye strain,
myopia, insomnia, growing pains, cramps, B.O., nausea, vertigo, mumps, measles,
chickenpox, V.D., schizophrenia, cancer, sciatica, halitosis, dandruff, boils,
pimples, warts, moles, cysts, sties, blisters, mouth ulcers, stomach ulcers,
alcoholism, tobacco addiction, drug addiction, destitution, nightmares,
boredom, worry, mental strain, nervous breakdowns, frustration, regret,
despair, guilt, fear, hate, suspicion, humiliation, anger, manic depression,
depressions in general, neurosis, psychosis, loneliness, unrequited love,
anachronistic institutions, graveyards, derelict houses, excessive pollution,
traffic congestion, traffic noise, traffic accidents, accidents in general,
overcrowded pavements, smelly money, inflation, economic recession, commercial
exploitation, cacophonous music, predatory advertisements, political
incompetence, noisy neighbours, noisy neighbourhoods, hammerings, drillings, sawings, barkings, dogs' shit on
pavements, dogs' piss on walls, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes,
plagues, wars, famines, droughts, thefts, rapes, murders, perversions,
suicides, lies, purges, putches, riots, tanks, bombs,
warships, warplanes, nuclear submarines, revolutions, racism, jingoism, deluded
philosophers, deluded philosophies, prisons, lunatic asylums, mines, factories,
courts, offices, barracks, etc., etc., ad nauseam!
No, I have no pressing desire to propel any
prospective child of mine into that kind of
world, however tempting it may sometimes be in the light of social and/or
sexual pressures. Yet, despite that, I
just can't imagine myself being so selfish or weak or besotted as to alleviate
my boredom, depression, loneliness, tension, desire, or whatever, at the
expense, effectively, of a poor naive young child who wouldn't understand what
sort of a world it had been born into until it was too damn late.
Yes, the truth, it seems, is rarely
flattering to our egos! Yet for some
considerable period of time now it has been the policy of society to coat
certain aspects of the bitter truth in sweet lies, in order to propagate
universal delusion and thereby mitigate the harsh reality of having to swallow
a pill which would otherwise prove unpalatable to all but the most fearlessly
honest.
People who are philosophically conscious of
striving after the truth, however, have little stomach for the lies with which
the pill of factual reality is normally coated, since such things go against
their philosophical grain and may even lead to a type of mental indigestion or
blockage which would be far more damaging to their souls than ever the truth could
be. Such people must look into the
various things with which they are concerned as honestly as possible, examine
them closely, and then endeavour to formulate rational judgements about them
which may lead to a discovery of their true worth.
Thus when I considered what I regard as
some of the more unfortunate consequences of propagation, a short while ago, I
was attempting to do just that, and I must confess it deeply troubled me to
think that, in a moment of mental weakness or under the tyranny of love, of
possessive emotional obsession with another person, I too might be forced to
follow my parent's example and wind-up condemning an innocent child to a
lifetime's sentence in the prison of contemporary reality!
Of course, I know something about love or,
at any rate, unrequited love, so I'm aware that, under its pressing influence,
a person may commit a child to life without appreciating the true nature of
what he has done - indeed, that he may be so powerless to resist the sway of
his beloved that anything short of propagation would appear unrealistic, if not
downright foolish and self-defeating!
But I'm also aware that one day his love will disappear as suddenly as
it came, leaving him, in later years, with two or three wretched adolescents on
his hands who will probably despise him for having plagued them with modern
life. Furthermore, I'm well aware that
there are plenty of young women in this paradoxical world whose principal
justification for marrying would be the experience of raising children and
thereby securing for themselves an acceptable degree of maternal preoccupation,
without which their lives, ever subject to menstrual pressures, would doubtless
become quite intolerable, since they wouldn't know how else to justify
themselves to themselves, and the justification for living with a man would
sooner or later be called into question, if not completely invalidated.
To be sure, even today, in this age of
female liberation, there are many such women in the world, women who seek in
marriage the experience of raising a family not simply as a means of both
justifying their natural obligations and exploring their maternal potential in
all its ramifications, spiritual as well as physical, but of justifying and
cementing their relationship to a man, forcing them to tolerate the
vicissitudes of marital life for the sake of their children, with the possible
eventuality that, having grown up and left home, these same children will do
them proud in later years, and perhaps even protect or support them, not to
mention honour their place of burial - assuming they're not cremated - through
the posthumous commemoration of their 'deathday' in
the fragrant afterlife of floral tributes?
Once these children have grown up and left
home, however, the parents may still decide to remain together, in order to be
of some consolation to each other during their remaining years. It may even transpire that they will then
find time to look back over their earlier years together, to reflect on the
nature of life in general, to formulate little prohibitions which may be of
some help to their grandchildren, and to frown upon the promiscuous trends of
modern society, with its polygamous decadence where some are concerned and
polygamous barbarism where others are concerned, neither of which categories
would greatly appeal to the monogamous conservatism of our imaginary
couple!
Naturally, they'll have the recollection of
a full and varied life to console them in the face of the manifold iniquities
of contemporary youth, satisfying themselves that they did their matrimonial
duty, and that their deaths will accordingly summon the blessed full-stop to a
well-executed sentence of living. In
their declining years they'll also learn how to preoccupy themselves without the
help of children (occasional contacts with grandchildren notwithstanding), much
less the panacea of casual sex. But that
bridge will have to be crossed when they get to it, and not a moment before!
Meanwhile the world's population will
continue to rise and the standard of living to fall, as the cost of survival
becomes steadily higher and the prospect of paying it correspondingly lower!
FRIDAY 1st OCTOBER
I am
feeling much better this morning than I did yesterday at a corresponding
time. In fact, you would hardly think
that I was the same person. All that
worry about population, propagation, disease, and the like, is as far from my
mind today as the bad weather which accompanied it. My birthday, thank goodness, has passed! Though I dare say that my
mother is still very much alive and capable, in consequence, of inflicting
further birthday cards upon me for the foreseeable future, indirectly
flattering herself in the process.
However, with the exhaustion of what I had
to say on the above-mentioned subjects yesterday, the benefit of a decent
night's sleep, and the sight of so much blue sky this morning, I feel as though
yesterday's pessimism was nothing more than a hangover from the previous night,
when I didn't get much sleep on account of the upstairs neighbour again. She was making even more noise than before,
but making it, I today learn, at the expense of her boyfriend and with a view
to moving to a new address - hopefully one as far away from Crouch End as
possible! Now that she has packed her
bags and emptied the cupboards and drawers of all her belongings, it seems safe
to say that, from this evening, things will be a good deal less noisy and I may
even be able to treat my ceiling with more respect. I hope so anyway, since there are quite
enough blotchy patches on it already!
Well, I am seated in the local café again,
waiting for the chef to serve me some breakfast. Since I never order anything but an egg
burger, a tea, and a pancake with syrup, all he requires of me is information
to the effect that I want "The usual". Sometimes I don't even have to say that; he
anticipates it for me, smiling in recognition as I enter the café and going
straight to the freezer for the burger meat.
Despite some good luck the other day, however, I know in advance that
I'll get my allotted quota of sugar cubes as well. In certain respects, this man's memory is
like a sieve!
Since there aren't any other customers in
here at present and the music on the radio bores me, I have taken the liberty
of scribbling these humble lines 'on the spot' - something, incidentally, I
don't do very often - rather than at home.
Usually I rely on memory as much as possible, embellishing it here and
there with a dash of pure invention in deference to my imagination and its
respect for a certain 'literary licence'.
In the final analysis, one always returns to literature, even in a
journal, and, to the best of my recollection, most of the writers whose names
mean anything to me are guilty or, depending on your standpoint, enamoured of
exactly the same thing. I need only cite
the extraordinary length of Molly Bloom's interior monologue in the final
chapter of Ulysses, to draw attention to what I mean. Frankly, you couldn't expect anyone to
actually maintain a thought-monologue of that length and
intensity all night, least of all a woman, and for me that constitutes a
significant aspect of the literary licence, if you will, of Joyce's ostensible
realism: his ability, inclination, necessity, or whatever, to mix probability
with improbability, truth with illusion, fact with fiction, and dialogue with
monologue.
Indeed, whenever I leaf through his and
other major authors' works, I often encounter the same tendency in different
guises; a fact, after all, which is of the essence of modern literature, with
its willingness to bend everyday reality towards an illusory nirvana, to mould
life according to its idealistic whim or, more correctly, the imaginative bent
of its practitioner at the expense of crass realism and any concomitant
enslavement to representational objectivity, for which, in any case, the cinema
is far more adept, given its pictorial bias.
It is as though serious modern literature has become an introverted
hedgehog which, like abstract painting vis-à-vis photography, has been obliged
to curl-up inside itself under threat of destruction from film, and this
curled-up condition is now its only defence against a world which increasingly
shuns subjectivity in pursuance of an ever-more intensive objectivity the
end-product of which can only be a cataclysmic upheaval of apocalyptic
proportions!
Well, even I am guilty
or enamoured, in my moralistic introversion, of occasionally twisting things to
suit the overall continuity; of recalling conversation and the sequence of events
associated with a given scene as though I had taken notes 'on the spot' and
thus knew every last detail; of stepping out of the form I originally set
myself in order to follow inspiration, add new dimensions to my work, and,
above all, make it more subjectively interesting! For without a strongly subjective streak,
literature is no more than an amoral representation of objective reality, a
shell without a kernel, a lens without a soul, an extrapolation from journalistic
impartiality, and thus effectively a living death - as, unfortunately, all too
much modern stuff actually tends to be.
Ah, here comes my burger! I could see the chef casting a sly glance at
my notebook and then at me, as though to link the two, but I don't think its
presence particularly offends or embarrasses him. After all, I didn't bring it in here in order
to humiliate him or, worse still, draw condemnatory attention upon myself! Quite the contrary, this is the first
opportunity he has been given to see me working, so he'll probably require a
couple of days to get used to it.
As a matter of interest, I simply
considered a little literary diplomacy expedient in the circumstances of my
regular presence here at this relatively unusual time of day. Now he can see that I am not just a mouth
that chews his food at a time when most other people are busy doing sums or
checking invoices, but a writer as well, and that, by a short stretch of the
imagination (presuming he still has the semblance of one tucked away in that
ageing head somewhere), such writings also take place outside the café, behind closed
doors, on a table, between meals. This knowledge should be enough, if he
arrives at it, to convince him that I'm not just an out-and-out wastrel with a
lazy disposition, but essentially a culturally responsible and hard-working
person with a sense of purpose! It may
even help to sustain the cordiality of our simple relationship here.
Before I tackle the syrup pancake, which
always follows the egg burger onto my table (and sometimes before I've finished
eating the damn thing), I'm obliged to remove the sugar cubes from my
saucer. Somehow, I knew he wouldn't
disappoint me ... Good God! I hadn't noticed it earlier, but this glass cup is
filthy, especially on that part of the rim from which one drinks. Why, there are horrible brown rust-like
stains there which smell positively revolting!
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the entire place was contaminated! These knives, forks, spoons, cups, saucers,
plates, etc., have been used literally tens-of-thousands of times by now, and
most of them are probably contaminated with equally-revolting malodorous
stains. I need only dwell on this
particular cup a while longer, in such fashion, and my disgust will trigger off
a nauseous convulsion which will precipitate the half-digested pulp of my egg
burger all over the table, to the immense satisfaction of the resident
flies. But this is terrible! One oughtn't to think like this at such a
time. That bloody notebook!
In many respects, these past few weeks have
definitely been ill-fated for me.
Indeed, I can hardly forget that I was feeling almost exactly the same
way about the change in my pocket while paying my bill at The Cornerstop Café the Monday before last. If I had previously and rather too matter-of-factly
regarded it as my money, then that little realization painfully disillusioned
me! Of course, I had often been told
that money was the root of all evil, that money stank,
etc., but it hadn't occurred to me to take such notions literally until then,
when I was virtually overcome by the stench.
Come to think of it, I haven't smelt the notes yet, have I? It was only the change that time.... Yes, I
have to pay the chef in a minute anyway, so I'll take a quick sniff at them
before he can see me and wonder what-on-earth I'm doing, or dismiss me in
Pidgin English as a crazy lunatic. After
all, it wouldn't do to throw all this hard-earned diplomacy away on account of
a few crumpled bank notes - a tenner and two fivers.
Frigging hell, what a foul stench! It's as though all the sewers in London had
converged on these hapless notes. Now I
know that, much as I've never felt too enthusiastic about money, I shall never
feel the same way about it again. From
this day onwards, it will have to be quarantined in a small cloth wallet, and
whenever I exchange it for something else, whenever I'm obliged to use it, I
shall have to take the additional precaution of holding my breath and/or
wearing a pair of soft leather gloves in order to avoid the risk of further
contamination. Needless to say, that
really will be the limit!
