I
Dear Adam*,
You refer to our standing at the brink of life, with the key unused in our inhibited palm – too true. And who will thank us, who listen, who care, who understand when aged sixty or whatever we consider the lost opportunities, when we contemplate the immense harm our passivity has wrought.
“The strength of a nation lies in its youth.”
As I see things it’s a question of spirit. Unfettered by the hassles of life: illness, conventions, duty, family, age, personal inhibitions, systematatised employment, selfishness, and lack of honesty and frankness, the human spirit would climb to unbelievable heights, creating actualisations of our most potent visions of utopia. For would you agree, can you imagine the impossible?
Given what we’ve got, and within our assets’ scope, we can create the perfect world for a perfect living. A human’s desires are simple: Food, shelter, drink, love and fraternity, stimulation of personal interests (reading, sport, whatever).
Everyone would do the job they were best at and this would be what they wanted to do. All would ensure that other people found the perfect post. None would be alone.
Mysteriousness, darkness, morbidity, selfishness, anxiety would vanish since discussion would be radically open.
Nobody would harbour secrets, yet privacy would be retained and purified. All would recognise that life is “shared”. Nothing would stand to cause dread in the hearts of men.
There would be no hunger since people would appreciate the gorgeous nourishment and authentic satisfaction derived from sustaining others.
People would realise that when your neighbour suffers, you suffer, since existence is a shared phenomenon.
Individuality would flourish, since nobody would have to be anything other than what they are. The diversity that would grow would be authentic and therefore spectacular.
Such a world, the real object of our hearts desire, would reflect and embody our innate potentialities. This is the world that haunts me.
We consider ourselves “individuals”, not part of the whole. We don’t care about those many whose love has not invaded our hearts (in fact, for convenience sake, we’d quite like to abolish love and replace it with “mutual respect”). We hate those we don’t understand (they disturb the placidity of our ego’s). We claim as much of the world for our own as we possibly can. We scoff at profundity and debase life. We are small minded and hopelessly self-conscious.
You think you’re sick. I know I’m mad but in ways one has to be.
Why do we remain cluttered old wrecks begging the eternal footman to strike us down a little sooner and spare us this pain?
II
I stand adrift from reality. I do not stop to dwell. Hanging on through people blooming with life in a time of year that affirms the wonder of creation. Yet I rot with angst and tremble with dread over a “failure” that would write off any such claim I have done, do or might proffer for my vindication. I can’t fall…I can’t..so I work and I work, I waste the dawn and neglect the smiling beauty that teases me. Liberation, the spreading of wings, a summer meadow, sweet, luxurious liquid air inflates my spirit. But what shall I do now the sun has risen? The days march forth, the potency lingers, yet it fails, it dwindles and normality irritates my high aspirations for a life of liberated spirit, youth, peace and joy.
An existential consciousness was aroused. I became through her words and in her flat, an entity beyond thought, something real.
III
The choices of life are simple and clear:
I choose to affirm life
I choose to negate life.
Don’t talk of justice, fairness, equality
The weight of matter twists our ideals.
Don’t think you know that which you don’t
The colour of this painted world is grey.
Just think of light on a black surface
Lighter than white, brighter than the sun.
The infinite soul is joyful
Our freedom so real and forgotten
Every day our minds walk the corridors of heaven
The thick, incandescent blood of our crucified Lord
alightens our perception and opens our door.
IV
To understand modernity one must appreciate that everything is upside down and back to front.
Why is the past re-enacted, the spoken folly re-said
The sin repeated, the truth unheld. Why does nothing change?
I do not feel poetic today…I want to expand and aspire…I am frustrated…and if I kick…I shall cut my leg on this bed, this blue bed.
It is we, not nature, not God, not fate
Our sufferings as a species springs directly from the hopelessly redundant, and shockingly incorrect belief, common these days that there is not a life after this one, that this realm is not merely a transient springboard into the life hereafter.
Cerebral Nobility. Thought is universe. The ardour of light.
The noumenon is my fascination; the thing, the preoccupation, the entity…. life in- itself.
V
I am young, I am alone, I am vain, I am tortured. Life is empty of meaning, sterile, parched, incoherent, unfulfilling, desperate, frustrating, bankrupt and boring; tiresome, essentially futile. This situation is an outrage. For individuals at specific occasions salvation descends in the form of love. It is seldom earnt and strikes arbitrarily. Just as it appears, as it were, out of the blue, so it disappears again without warning, tending no explanation. The suffering laid on the individual is horrendous and violent.
The inner void and swelling feelings of resignation characteristic of the outsider. The outsider- he, she, beyond, barred on the outside from the circle of intimate, sexual love. His anguish is so overpowering that ideas of death, violence and chaos flourish and dictate physical action. The deep personal awareness that within the human race enormous emotional injustices bar a certain specimen (and who knows who that specimen is, or why that specimen is) from sharing and delighting in the very real potency flaunted by physically engaged lovers, compels intense anger, intense outrage, intense bitterness, intense jealousy, (often finding expression through a hatred of humanity and the world), though, in the last analysis, intense longing for this as yet unlived life.
What is at the root of this frustration? Does the outsider torture himself in this way merely because he “wants” something for himself? It may appear so. Does he, therefore, view the “life” radiated by lovers in the same light as any other, more material, less animate object of desire?
Is the will to love similar or the same as the will to succeed in business, or to obtain a Golf G.T.I. or to purchase greater and greater stockpiless of clothing, tapes and modern conveniences? Would the acquisition of love, when attained, be contemplated with the same feelings of cool satisfaction and pride as applyies when further material mansions are added to the stockpilestockpiles? DoesIs love, in the last analysis, in so far as it consists of an entity to desire, deserveing of to being categorized alongside all other desired entities, as just one other? with other entities under a universal, all composite heading, desired?
Of course not. The will to love is the will to know God. The need, real and total need to experience totality- in- being. The will to love is dynamic, combustious, and equally present in all. Desiring love is desiring wholeness. When love is denied, (on account most probably of some aspect of socially reared and radiated pride) wholeness is denied - and man flounders in the rocky crags of particularism. He rebels and feels abandoned. In jealousy and envy, fostering pride, he learns how to hate. This is our agony, our burden. We must share the burden of our reality. How can man love? By loving wholeness. Everybody, not somebody, everything good, not something good.
The love of love raises, it heals and glorifies. The love of power debases, tortures and destroys.
The love of power is the love of the serpent, the devil who deceives us all.
Dear Adam*,
You refer to our standing at the brink of life, with the key unused in our inhibited palm – too true. And who will thank us, who listen, who care, who understand when aged sixty or whatever we consider the lost opportunities, when we contemplate the immense harm our passivity has wrought.
“The strength of a nation lies in its youth.”
As I see things it’s a question of spirit. Unfettered by the hassles of life: illness, conventions, duty, family, age, personal inhibitions, systematatised employment, selfishness, and lack of honesty and frankness, the human spirit would climb to unbelievable heights, creating actualisations of our most potent visions of utopia. For would you agree, can you imagine the impossible?
Given what we’ve got, and within our assets’ scope, we can create the perfect world for a perfect living. A human’s desires are simple: Food, shelter, drink, love and fraternity, stimulation of personal interests (reading, sport, whatever).
Everyone would do the job they were best at and this would be what they wanted to do. All would ensure that other people found the perfect post. None would be alone.
Mysteriousness, darkness, morbidity, selfishness, anxiety would vanish since discussion would be radically open.
Nobody would harbour secrets, yet privacy would be retained and purified. All would recognise that life is “shared”. Nothing would stand to cause dread in the hearts of men.
There would be no hunger since people would appreciate the gorgeous nourishment and authentic satisfaction derived from sustaining others.
People would realise that when your neighbour suffers, you suffer, since existence is a shared phenomenon.
Individuality would flourish, since nobody would have to be anything other than what they are. The diversity that would grow would be authentic and therefore spectacular.
Such a world, the real object of our hearts desire, would reflect and embody our innate potentialities. This is the world that haunts me.
We consider ourselves “individuals”, not part of the whole. We don’t care about those many whose love has not invaded our hearts (in fact, for convenience sake, we’d quite like to abolish love and replace it with “mutual respect”). We hate those we don’t understand (they disturb the placidity of our ego’s). We claim as much of the world for our own as we possibly can. We scoff at profundity and debase life. We are small minded and hopelessly self-conscious.
You think you’re sick. I know I’m mad but in ways one has to be.
Why do we remain cluttered old wrecks begging the eternal footman to strike us down a little sooner and spare us this pain?
II
I stand adrift from reality. I do not stop to dwell. Hanging on through people blooming with life in a time of year that affirms the wonder of creation. Yet I rot with angst and tremble with dread over a “failure” that would write off any such claim I have done, do or might proffer for my vindication. I can’t fall…I can’t..so I work and I work, I waste the dawn and neglect the smiling beauty that teases me. Liberation, the spreading of wings, a summer meadow, sweet, luxurious liquid air inflates my spirit. But what shall I do now the sun has risen? The days march forth, the potency lingers, yet it fails, it dwindles and normality irritates my high aspirations for a life of liberated spirit, youth, peace and joy.
An existential consciousness was aroused. I became through her words and in her flat, an entity beyond thought, something real.
III
The choices of life are simple and clear:
I choose to affirm life
I choose to negate life.
Don’t talk of justice, fairness, equality
The weight of matter twists our ideals.
Don’t think you know that which you don’t
The colour of this painted world is grey.
Just think of light on a black surface
Lighter than white, brighter than the sun.
The infinite soul is joyful
Our freedom so real and forgotten
Every day our minds walk the corridors of heaven
The thick, incandescent blood of our crucified Lord
alightens our perception and opens our door.
IV
To understand modernity one must appreciate that everything is upside down and back to front.
Why is the past re-enacted, the spoken folly re-said
The sin repeated, the truth unheld. Why does nothing change?
I do not feel poetic today…I want to expand and aspire…I am frustrated…and if I kick…I shall cut my leg on this bed, this blue bed.
It is we, not nature, not God, not fate
Our sufferings as a species springs directly from the hopelessly redundant, and shockingly incorrect belief, common these days that there is not a life after this one, that this realm is not merely a transient springboard into the life hereafter.
Cerebral Nobility. Thought is universe. The ardour of light.
The noumenon is my fascination; the thing, the preoccupation, the entity…. life in- itself.
V
I am young, I am alone, I am vain, I am tortured. Life is empty of meaning, sterile, parched, incoherent, unfulfilling, desperate, frustrating, bankrupt and boring; tiresome, essentially futile. This situation is an outrage. For individuals at specific occasions salvation descends in the form of love. It is seldom earnt and strikes arbitrarily. Just as it appears, as it were, out of the blue, so it disappears again without warning, tending no explanation. The suffering laid on the individual is horrendous and violent.
The inner void and swelling feelings of resignation characteristic of the outsider. The outsider- he, she, beyond, barred on the outside from the circle of intimate, sexual love. His anguish is so overpowering that ideas of death, violence and chaos flourish and dictate physical action. The deep personal awareness that within the human race enormous emotional injustices bar a certain specimen (and who knows who that specimen is, or why that specimen is) from sharing and delighting in the very real potency flaunted by physically engaged lovers, compels intense anger, intense outrage, intense bitterness, intense jealousy, (often finding expression through a hatred of humanity and the world), though, in the last analysis, intense longing for this as yet unlived life.
What is at the root of this frustration? Does the outsider torture himself in this way merely because he “wants” something for himself? It may appear so. Does he, therefore, view the “life” radiated by lovers in the same light as any other, more material, less animate object of desire?
Is the will to love similar or the same as the will to succeed in business, or to obtain a Golf G.T.I. or to purchase greater and greater stockpiless of clothing, tapes and modern conveniences? Would the acquisition of love, when attained, be contemplated with the same feelings of cool satisfaction and pride as applyies when further material mansions are added to the stockpilestockpiles? DoesIs love, in the last analysis, in so far as it consists of an entity to desire, deserveing of to being categorized alongside all other desired entities, as just one other? with other entities under a universal, all composite heading, desired?
Of course not. The will to love is the will to know God. The need, real and total need to experience totality- in- being. The will to love is dynamic, combustious, and equally present in all. Desiring love is desiring wholeness. When love is denied, (on account most probably of some aspect of socially reared and radiated pride) wholeness is denied - and man flounders in the rocky crags of particularism. He rebels and feels abandoned. In jealousy and envy, fostering pride, he learns how to hate. This is our agony, our burden. We must share the burden of our reality. How can man love? By loving wholeness. Everybody, not somebody, everything good, not something good.
The love of love raises, it heals and glorifies. The love of power debases, tortures and destroys.
The love of power is the love of the serpent, the devil who deceives us all.
VI
Amidst the endless deluge of humanity, fragments exist which clutch. I am myself, but I am also you, all of you, and you are me and each of you each other. I am the small clerk, the high executive, the vagrant lost under the tide, the miner, the murderer, the headmaster, the bizarre, the inexplicable, the obvious, the wonderful and the weak. I am the Queen, I am the tyrant and the saint. They are me and I am you, all of you, and we are each other. We are ourselves and you are me and I am us. Only in perception is the truth upturned.
VII
Inadequacies of expression quell minds desperate for outrage.
A place wide with people. Surfeit of will in deficiency of knowledge, prompting vanity and blind stubborn optimism in air exhausted of meaning. Nothing coheres. Sight. Taste. Smell. Touch. Sound. Patronising sense-no closer to insight. No rapture, no joy, no fulfillment, no faith, but, perhaps worst of all... no anger, or if anger, anger at the wrong things.
If we do not watch out- young pretty English girls burning in Auschwitz.
VIII
Letter to Rebecca
Essence: narrative expounding and detailing intense emotion. Uninfluenced by objective rationalism, freed offrom pretentious glorification. Love as it relates to longing, to transcendence, to metaphysics, to meaning. Love as it attacks the condition of the individual and opens doors to horizons otherwise undetected.
Aims: to smash, dessicate and destroy all and everything that clutters up and distorts correct appreciation of the eternal- now. To purge the passages to the heart - of death. To annihilate them.
Nature: monologue, in the form of a letter which by its very nature could never be sent.
Scope: as far and as wide as possible.
Motivation: Aan awareness of the agony. Frustration at the sight of life’s unnecessary impotence.
IX
Life is glorious, uplifting light. Splendour like a thousand stars bursting, like ecstasy out of control.
The tragedy is real. Only the individual can rectify the crime.
X
My thoughts are crazed. They race and each day is different. A Christian? A Smiths freak? A power hungry yuppie? A country tree planter? A hippie?
I see great things in the mundane and nothing in the important. The greatest security is death.
My life is so irrelevant and yet I am moved, selfishly I suppose, to write all this nonsense. The 1990’s - can anybodybody bear the weight?
Ecstasia. Life, substance and joy. The Fall approaches.
Our ends entice, demanding attention. Stay with me awhile.
We, you, me and him, are the embodiment of a whimsical gift. Jim Morrison is in contact with an extraordinary beauty.
Morrison and Eliot are colleagues. They pursue the same theme, the galvanisation of human existence, from opposing ends of a convergent spectrum.
XI
I should love so much to sit here all day and each hour be visited by wonderful people and moments from my past. Beams of light and utter marvel. Reproductive ecstasy.
Scan the horizon for light and move towards it. Scan the horizon for darkness and illuminate.
If my life improves nothing and builds nothing. If it helps nobody and is devoid of significance and implies a void....
Maybe we’ll never accept as fact the miraculous fact of our existence.
There I am, sitting still, ordinary, on a stool in a coffee bar. Distal, vacant, listless. I have made a habit of gazing into my dull eyes. Life, as usual, is flat, bland and sterile. Then he comes to me.
XII
Am I evading and neglecting my anger? Will it explode out of me with terrific force? Do you suppose the splendour of the universe is built upon an assurance of the ego? Do you feel tiny and expendable, by any chance? Yes, I know. B, beauty makes it easier for the soul.
People live in hell all the time. Here, there, where you least expect to find them, hellish apparitions surround us. In the underground, at the dinner party, in the office, on the television, in the restaurant, under the bridge, between the oaks, in the courtroom, in the university.
Heaven is real and the light radiant.
XIII
The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock
What is Eliot after in this poem? What answers to what questions does he assert? What is his hope? From where and from what derives his central idea? For what does he yearn so inconsummabblly? Can anything as delicate and precipitious as this be endured? What is the agony, the humble destruction, the defeated terror and exhaustion, the cosmic confusion, the angst, the intense yet torturously suppressed love that this man has for life? AlthThough sexual in image and insinuation, the poem is principally spiritual drama.
XIV
To suffer is to live....until the dawning of his Kingdom.
Here I am writing all this self-centred nonsense when millions starve to death and thousands are homeless.
I am alone. The forces of the universe are pitted against me. I want to love. I am the same as everybody else. I cannot escape the riddle.
Love-to intensify the moment. Constant experimentation until the end of time. At the risk of shock, of alienation.
Women clutch onto things to stay sane, men their pride.
Is there a secret buried inside, or is this all I am? I am ready to die in South America. Yet my ambition? To say the un-sayable, to achieve the impossible, to obtain the unobtainable.
I cannot believe I have endured 18 years to arrive at this state. I exist and the world, despite its confusion, its shortcomings and its shadows, is a wonderful place after all.
XV
The sensitive mind, in adversity, responds to pain with either intensity and a certain nobility of reserve or with moaning and complaint. The mind of Morrissey does both.
Morrissey is firmly absorbed in his ego yet for some strange and surely frightening reason he is in touch with a power that is wholly spirit.
A mythic, primordial, beautiful spring of intimate communing, like espionage, a surreptitious invasion. Noticed by those, whoever.
I perceive life as an uphill struggle though I know it is easy and straightforward.
The Smiths are healthy because they mercilessly thrust the true everyday postures of darkness in front of our eyes, for our faith and love to appreciate, absorb, understand, lament and finally surmount. In the process we grow and how massive we become. How great is our humility.
Morrissey, I admit, can seem an idiot but how idiotic is our world and how perfect is he a précis of it.
What is music but a whip? To goad and punish, invigorate and torture.
God, the irresistible force. Irresistible and yet I resist.
It is invigorating to conceive of the Smiths as an utterly positive group of musicians.
XVI
What can I write? I know very little but I know about time and about life and about waste. The enemy is difficult to name. It is satisfaction, indifference, fear and apathy. Yet it is more than and none of these.
The condition of 1989 is my condition. That is my fate, our fate, the fate. The span of consciousness is seventy years, and eighteen of those have vanished. What is eighteen was eleven, was six and what is eighteen will be twenty eight and forty two, is twenty eight and forty two. I see a pattern. The thread is of a similar line and length but alters its dimensions in time from person to person. The intensity innate to that thread is focused toward the end of life in exceptional instances and more commonly on the point of or after death. This is the problem. The intensity should be focused now, for everyone now.
What can one do but be honest? It gets you to heaven certainly. Honesty, sincerity and truth. Not romanticised ideals but real means to an actual end. They are ageless values, as sturdy and unshakeable as the hills.
He who can see the world for what it is, who eats its food for what it is, who enjoys its fruits for what they are, and not for what they might pretend to be, is he who may be honest to himself and to others. He is the way.
XVII
People smile and laugh all about me. They enjoy the moment, talking of particular matters, present ambitions and past regrets. For these life does not hang delicately, tauntingly. For them it is pleasant, it is now and there is nothing more to say.
I’m interested in fantasy worlds, aspiring castles, violet skies, vast plains, creatures.
There is life and there is society, the earth and the world. Largely irreconcilable.
I have been excised from my friends and projected into a bizarre land of dreams. Abstract speculations, monetary ambition, creativity-nothing is of greater value than friendship. Friends put a damper on the will.
The days march on, issueless.
Live for the present and project it into the future. Collaborate with the past but keep it at a distance. Do not live to invent in your life a proud past, for the proud past is but wind and air.
The search for meaning is man’s only noble passion- all others constitute a superfluous waste of space.
I want to illuminate the souls of man, to show my fellow men what they really are-to expose the truth.
I have never met anyone like me in my entire life. Never once have I looked into someone’s eyes and seen myself. I am very strange, different from everybody else.
XVIII
Things fade, change and merge into something else. Words dry up and rot, music must take over. All is real. Evil, fear, hatred, suffering. The whole experience of humanity is groaning and all has happened. We are dying, we are vain and misled. We are as dogs in a cage.
Tragically, to become happy, man must yearn for something beyond his reach.
From all his years of thought and action man has learnt one thing: to love, cherish and guard the things in life that do not belong to him, and to neglect and depreciate the things that do.
I would not be surprised if, at the moment of my death, my only visualisations were of the grace and magnificence of young women, my thoughts those of outrage and disgust, at my life-its ignorance, its depravity and its waste. The unclenched reality.
XIX
Hanging from a knife edge, life falls into its components, transfixing its subject. Suddenly everything is clear, vivid, potent and translucent. The cobwebs, the veils, the pedantic distractions, the vanity - the consuming vanity; everything that stands to distort tour de force awareness of being is annihilated. The universe is shocked into simplicity as the subject is blasted with the consequences of his condition. For he is alive, but how near he has come to death? How precious is this thing called life, this being pulsed by air, enlivened by blood. He is perhaps able for the moment, if the universe condescends, to know it all, to know it all, to taste the other realm, that sphere towards which all questions, tribulations and sufferings aspire. For a second he is the truth. Yet it cannot last. Either swallowed up by death to return to dusty origins, or lost again in the oblivion of mortal clay, his theistic experience passes and is forgotten.
When I’m asleep the world feels nice. I’m lonely, but so are you.
XX
Humility, love, grace, humility, love, grace-unfolding, eternal repetition. Every man, woman and child awakens every morning to wash, to clean, to work, is trapped in an unbreakable love contract with life. Our prisoner is our own unknown, the beyond conscious impulse to activity, both mental and physical.
I want to undergo the worst of human suffering, to experience the numbness of horror, so my eyes on return be reverted from the darkness back to the eternal light.
I wish a thousand dawns into every moment.
XXI
This moment is sad due to the persisting difficulties of the writer in enduring existence in its layered bafflement and twisting dread, its cunningly suppressed energy and joy, its betrayal of memory. People mean so much. I love them all. The impossibilities of judgement. The inadequacy of relative analysis as a way to conclusion. These people are more a part of me than are parts of myself. I have lived for and through them more than can be understood.
Is it sentimentality or a grasping onto life?
I see great things in the mundane and nothing in the important. The greatest security is death.
My life is so irrelevant and yet I am moved, selfishly I suppose, to write all this nonsense. The 1990’s - can anybodybody bear the weight?
Ecstasia. Life, substance and joy. The Fall approaches.
Our ends entice, demanding attention. Stay with me awhile.
We, you, me and him, are the embodiment of a whimsical gift. Jim Morrison is in contact with an extraordinary beauty.
Morrison and Eliot are colleagues. They pursue the same theme, the galvanisation of human existence, from opposing ends of a convergent spectrum.
XI
I should love so much to sit here all day and each hour be visited by wonderful people and moments from my past. Beams of light and utter marvel. Reproductive ecstasy.
Scan the horizon for light and move towards it. Scan the horizon for darkness and illuminate.
If my life improves nothing and builds nothing. If it helps nobody and is devoid of significance and implies a void....
Maybe we’ll never accept as fact the miraculous fact of our existence.
There I am, sitting still, ordinary, on a stool in a coffee bar. Distal, vacant, listless. I have made a habit of gazing into my dull eyes. Life, as usual, is flat, bland and sterile. Then he comes to me.
XII
Am I evading and neglecting my anger? Will it explode out of me with terrific force? Do you suppose the splendour of the universe is built upon an assurance of the ego? Do you feel tiny and expendable, by any chance? Yes, I know. B, beauty makes it easier for the soul.
People live in hell all the time. Here, there, where you least expect to find them, hellish apparitions surround us. In the underground, at the dinner party, in the office, on the television, in the restaurant, under the bridge, between the oaks, in the courtroom, in the university.
Heaven is real and the light radiant.
XIII
The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock
What is Eliot after in this poem? What answers to what questions does he assert? What is his hope? From where and from what derives his central idea? For what does he yearn so inconsummabblly? Can anything as delicate and precipitious as this be endured? What is the agony, the humble destruction, the defeated terror and exhaustion, the cosmic confusion, the angst, the intense yet torturously suppressed love that this man has for life? AlthThough sexual in image and insinuation, the poem is principally spiritual drama.
XIV
To suffer is to live....until the dawning of his Kingdom.
Here I am writing all this self-centred nonsense when millions starve to death and thousands are homeless.
I am alone. The forces of the universe are pitted against me. I want to love. I am the same as everybody else. I cannot escape the riddle.
Love-to intensify the moment. Constant experimentation until the end of time. At the risk of shock, of alienation.
Women clutch onto things to stay sane, men their pride.
Is there a secret buried inside, or is this all I am? I am ready to die in South America. Yet my ambition? To say the un-sayable, to achieve the impossible, to obtain the unobtainable.
I cannot believe I have endured 18 years to arrive at this state. I exist and the world, despite its confusion, its shortcomings and its shadows, is a wonderful place after all.
XV
The sensitive mind, in adversity, responds to pain with either intensity and a certain nobility of reserve or with moaning and complaint. The mind of Morrissey does both.
Morrissey is firmly absorbed in his ego yet for some strange and surely frightening reason he is in touch with a power that is wholly spirit.
A mythic, primordial, beautiful spring of intimate communing, like espionage, a surreptitious invasion. Noticed by those, whoever.
I perceive life as an uphill struggle though I know it is easy and straightforward.
The Smiths are healthy because they mercilessly thrust the true everyday postures of darkness in front of our eyes, for our faith and love to appreciate, absorb, understand, lament and finally surmount. In the process we grow and how massive we become. How great is our humility.
Morrissey, I admit, can seem an idiot but how idiotic is our world and how perfect is he a précis of it.
What is music but a whip? To goad and punish, invigorate and torture.
God, the irresistible force. Irresistible and yet I resist.
It is invigorating to conceive of the Smiths as an utterly positive group of musicians.
XVI
What can I write? I know very little but I know about time and about life and about waste. The enemy is difficult to name. It is satisfaction, indifference, fear and apathy. Yet it is more than and none of these.
The condition of 1989 is my condition. That is my fate, our fate, the fate. The span of consciousness is seventy years, and eighteen of those have vanished. What is eighteen was eleven, was six and what is eighteen will be twenty eight and forty two, is twenty eight and forty two. I see a pattern. The thread is of a similar line and length but alters its dimensions in time from person to person. The intensity innate to that thread is focused toward the end of life in exceptional instances and more commonly on the point of or after death. This is the problem. The intensity should be focused now, for everyone now.
What can one do but be honest? It gets you to heaven certainly. Honesty, sincerity and truth. Not romanticised ideals but real means to an actual end. They are ageless values, as sturdy and unshakeable as the hills.
He who can see the world for what it is, who eats its food for what it is, who enjoys its fruits for what they are, and not for what they might pretend to be, is he who may be honest to himself and to others. He is the way.
XVII
People smile and laugh all about me. They enjoy the moment, talking of particular matters, present ambitions and past regrets. For these life does not hang delicately, tauntingly. For them it is pleasant, it is now and there is nothing more to say.
I’m interested in fantasy worlds, aspiring castles, violet skies, vast plains, creatures.
There is life and there is society, the earth and the world. Largely irreconcilable.
I have been excised from my friends and projected into a bizarre land of dreams. Abstract speculations, monetary ambition, creativity-nothing is of greater value than friendship. Friends put a damper on the will.
The days march on, issueless.
Live for the present and project it into the future. Collaborate with the past but keep it at a distance. Do not live to invent in your life a proud past, for the proud past is but wind and air.
The search for meaning is man’s only noble passion- all others constitute a superfluous waste of space.
I want to illuminate the souls of man, to show my fellow men what they really are-to expose the truth.
I have never met anyone like me in my entire life. Never once have I looked into someone’s eyes and seen myself. I am very strange, different from everybody else.
XVIII
Things fade, change and merge into something else. Words dry up and rot, music must take over. All is real. Evil, fear, hatred, suffering. The whole experience of humanity is groaning and all has happened. We are dying, we are vain and misled. We are as dogs in a cage.
Tragically, to become happy, man must yearn for something beyond his reach.
From all his years of thought and action man has learnt one thing: to love, cherish and guard the things in life that do not belong to him, and to neglect and depreciate the things that do.
I would not be surprised if, at the moment of my death, my only visualisations were of the grace and magnificence of young women, my thoughts those of outrage and disgust, at my life-its ignorance, its depravity and its waste. The unclenched reality.
XIX
Hanging from a knife edge, life falls into its components, transfixing its subject. Suddenly everything is clear, vivid, potent and translucent. The cobwebs, the veils, the pedantic distractions, the vanity - the consuming vanity; everything that stands to distort tour de force awareness of being is annihilated. The universe is shocked into simplicity as the subject is blasted with the consequences of his condition. For he is alive, but how near he has come to death? How precious is this thing called life, this being pulsed by air, enlivened by blood. He is perhaps able for the moment, if the universe condescends, to know it all, to know it all, to taste the other realm, that sphere towards which all questions, tribulations and sufferings aspire. For a second he is the truth. Yet it cannot last. Either swallowed up by death to return to dusty origins, or lost again in the oblivion of mortal clay, his theistic experience passes and is forgotten.
When I’m asleep the world feels nice. I’m lonely, but so are you.
XX
Humility, love, grace, humility, love, grace-unfolding, eternal repetition. Every man, woman and child awakens every morning to wash, to clean, to work, is trapped in an unbreakable love contract with life. Our prisoner is our own unknown, the beyond conscious impulse to activity, both mental and physical.
I want to undergo the worst of human suffering, to experience the numbness of horror, so my eyes on return be reverted from the darkness back to the eternal light.
I wish a thousand dawns into every moment.
XXI
This moment is sad due to the persisting difficulties of the writer in enduring existence in its layered bafflement and twisting dread, its cunningly suppressed energy and joy, its betrayal of memory. People mean so much. I love them all. The impossibilities of judgement. The inadequacy of relative analysis as a way to conclusion. These people are more a part of me than are parts of myself. I have lived for and through them more than can be understood.
Is it sentimentality or a grasping onto life?
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Notes
* Adam Lidster, my friend, the only person with whom I discussed my ideas. Or at least the only person who seemed to listen. This extract taken from a letter to him.
All theses writings (which are only a selection) were written in the latter half of 1989 from the time just before the end of my A-levels, during the first half of my ‘Gap year’. During this time, in the ‘real world’ of events and actions, as opposed to that of my mind and imagination, things were pretty good. We had not yet moved from Barton Road in Cambridge and I spent the early summer going to various dinner parties with school friends, usually in the Tin Machine (see earlier post); then I went walking in the Lake District for three weeks before spending time working in a pub (the Granta in Cambridge) and for the Cambridge Evening News, before going to Israel with friends to visit a friend who was working there in a hospital.
The divisions I’ve made in Roman numerals is pretty arbitrary, though I was following a kind of ill-defined logic of coherence as I edited. The point is two-fold. Firstly, that what I wrote in 1989 was written as it was written, in bursts and starts, according to no plan or conscious structure. Secondly, that it now seems easier on the eye and brain, to me at least, if it can be broken up into segments retrospectively. No doubt I have moved certain utterances around from their original configuration, and while I have tried to maintain chronological integrity, no doubt this has faltered. I have also left out quite a lot, usually that which I deemed just too cringe-worthy.
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