Same again really: lots of sport and sport so dominating that I can think not of other things, such as the degree I’m doing and the increasingly strange idea that I’m supposed to be creating myself as some kind of writer. Sport which brings pleasure in the here and now. Sport which fills me with satisfaction and the longing for more sport. Monday evening – despite crying “rest!” – I trained and had a game with the university football team. Tuesday, squash. Wednesday, reffed one and then played one, for Law Soc in the Intramural League (scored last goal in a 5-3 win). Thursday, lots more squash and then the two hour sesh with the grown-ups in which I ran my ass off. Friday off, though coulda had a game except girlfriend had invited folks over for dinner. Saturday, reffed. And then Sunday, reffed the morning in Wakefield
Sport. Lots of sport. I make that sixteen games of football reffed and played in the last twelve days. Plus four elongated sessions of squash in the midst. Never done so much in my life. And not even aching.
Funny what life becomes.
But today we’ve got a class, and so I turn my mind to uni projects. Two pieces to go, and then I’m a master. Though master of what, I’ve no idea. Master of fulfilling the minimum requirement, perhaps? Master of playing the system?
Something like that.
Two projects, both of my own devising. One, it seems, will be to write a fictionalised account of ‘Discovering Beautiful’. The other, I’m thinking of a project centred around the hippy and beat writers and this idea I have that they represent the culmination of a long lineage that stretches unbroken right back to the first eighteenth century bohemians, in both influence and connection. Such as Walt Whitman, sure, they all dug him – but did you know that he apparently slept with a guy who slept with a guy who slept with a guy who slept with a guy who slept with Allen Ginsberg? And Ginsberg slept with Cassady, and Kerouac slept with Cassady’s wife, and so even by bodily fluid they’re connected. And then Cassady reappeared when Kesey was doing all his Merry Prankster stuff and the hippies got born – connections there to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert and The Grateful Dead and the whole San Fran acid summer of love thing – but then the whole thing just sort of disappeared. At least, that’s my idea. Where hippy and beat writers now? Where bohemian movements, etcetera? Well I guess one answer is, sure, you can’t see movements so much when you’re in the midst of them – or can you? – but more than that I think they got done. And so one might suggest the flowers have died, or they went underground – were bulbs – hibernating till the time comes once more. But what I’m thinking is actually the whole lineage just changed into something that’s quite difficult to see, precisely because it looks once more like the normal world. The bohemians started off with a yearning to be different. They despised the bourgeoisie and yahooed them in restaurants and did mad weird things to piss them off. They got naked and drank absinthe and defined themselves by what they didn’t want to be. A lot of it was a reaction and a fight with the status quo – but perhaps now people have realised that there’s no need for that, that any fight you have is really a fight within yourself, and that peace and harmony with all is the higher path at the end of the day. All the hedonism and drugs and drink and free love too were perhaps realised as being of a ‘lower path’, something juvenile and driven by psychological imbalance and unhappiness, and maybe what people came to crave rather than mad expression and ideas of freedom that didn’t really work was balance and maturity and happiness. Even in the living persons of Ken Kesey and Richard Alpert this was perhaps embodied by one going off to be a peaceful family farmer man and the other embracing spirituality and personal growth and clean living. Perhaps that is where the lineage ended – and perhaps it does continue, in the land-loving, meditating, yoga ashram rainbow gathering connected do-gooding happy and healthy young hippies of today. Sure, people still get whacked – but it’s hard to look up to it in the way that they did back then. Poor old Kerouac with his alcoholism and cirrhosis all bitter and mean and old before his time. Cassady speed freaked and talking non-stop gibberish dead in his mid-forties. Who wants to end like that? So was the path fulfilled in the bodies of people who realised there was nothing left to rebel against? Who broke through into the experience of spirit that K and C so frequently talked about and occasionally dabbled with? Who saw that poverty and struggle weren’t actually necessary, and that one could have material comfort and things without being a slave to them, nor a purely materially-driven creature? Who placed being nice and well-rounded above shaking the system and pissing people off? Is that what happened, as I’ve come to think? Or is it something else?
And in pure terms of literature, did this imagined lineage of Chesterton and Rimbaud and Beaudelaire and Flaubert and Joyce and Pound and Huxley and Whitman and Thoreau and Ginsberg and Kerouac and Burroughs really end with Ken Kesey saying, man, people don’t talk the way they do in books, writing’s sort of pointless? Or did that too continue and change into something difficult to recognise because it looks mostly the same as everything else, on the outside, only the inner is different? Perhaps the spirit of it entering into the mainstream, infusing it, and succeeding finally where the yahoos and antiestablishmentarians failed.
I should look into that.
What thinks you?
My second idea, by the way, I’m not sure I can get away with: it’s the idea that fiction is generally pointless and only exists so that people can fill their brains with words that distract them from their own thoughts. That people read, and they don’t care what they read, so long as the words are not their own. Sitting on the beach lapping up Dan Brown, Maeve Binchy, any old thing – and just repeating in their head a long list of words formatted into paragraphs and therefore no need to actually think. Distraction, of course, is the great preoccupation of our society. Very few people, it seems, have gone beyond it. It’s scary, I guess – terrifying, even. I know. I went there. And perhaps that’s why I am able to have ideas like this – and why when I sit on a train and see people reading newspapers, and read them myself, I believe that all we’re all doing is distracting. Flicking open pages of yesterday’s Metro. Reading the celebrity gossip stories. Somebody’s lost weight. Kerry Katona said this. None of it means anything, it’s again just a selection of words alternate to our own thoughts. Even the so-called important news stories are basically the same. And fiction too.
What purpose? What point? That feeling I had of finishing Salman Rushdie’s Booker of Booker’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ and thinking it ‘meh’. Nothing but a filler of time. And poor old James Joyce’s Ulysses, the ultimate distraction for a large number of eggheads, always only ever going to be a representation of the mind that produced it – and from what I know of Joyce, not a mind one should want to aspire to. Opium mind. Base-level mind. Clever, literary mind, sure. But no real depth.
Oh, how clever to be literary and able to symbolise Indian Independence in the persons of some magic realism youngsters, and to chinwag it all over weird toxin-containing cocktails with other brainy shysters in art galleries and London
But if I want to know about Indian Independence, I’ll read history. And if I want to know about life, I’ll live it, and explore it, and maybe read the words of others who have done likewise. Personal experience is where it’s at as far as I’m concerned. Personal experience has value.
But fiction? Made-up stories that may or may not contain truth? Not really. Not much. And yet we trumpet it, and the man who stands in a place where the trumpets blare the loudest – academia – is hardly likely to find much support for his perhaps silly ideas.
But I sees what I sees. And what I’m realising is, the problem here is that among our forty thousand students and staff there probably aren’t that many who have seen the beyond, who have sat for days and weeks in the company of their own soul, and who have looked at life with a little bit of depth. Of course, I know I’m still shallow – but I hope you know what I mean. It just sort of dawns on me that it’s no wonder I feel unusual and weird when I think things like that, and look bewildered on the smoking and shopping and getting drunk masses. Much as I think of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, I’m remarkably adept at forgetting it too.
Anyway. Fiction. Pointless. Perhaps possibly. Or not. But an idea.
And the question: why don’t enlightened people write? Why not Buddha nor Jesus nor Amma nor Mother Meera hardly interested at all in their own words when us mere plebs find them so fascinating and trumpetable?
Something in that too. Something revealing.
So those are my ideas. And a third one that springs to mind – to write this second piece – Individual Project, it’s called – as a gonzo piece all about writing ‘Individual Project’. To wrestle and wrangle with the tutors. To play the system the way I want to play it and to report on that. And to reveal the student experience from inside the machine, where all our courses are dressed up as ‘research’ – cos that’s where the funding and validation is – when really it’s just writing and egg-headed academia and it don’t mean much at all. Where the creative writers that these creative writing courses are producing? What the tutors and teachers actually doing? And could Rory get away with that? Indeed, would it be perhaps seen as innovative and literary and clever to do something that sets out to be the opposite, and even perhaps trumpeted itself?
I dunno. I just wanna play football. And get these letters after my name and complete my education. Walk this interesting path right to its end – the path that says, ha! you don’t actually want to be a published writer after all. The path that has seen me chasing agents and getting frustrated and jealous and dreaming dreams and coming to this MA and thinking that would be the start of something – and then seeing week by week that it’s perhaps the end of something, that what I really like is living and typing about it here and caring not a hoot for the destination of these words, just the pure expression. And caring not a hoot, neither, for the making of my living through the painful crafting of words, just dreams of never working at a rubbish job ever again. Getting back to something pure. Not being hung up on making it and trapped and stuck in this material England
The MA is killing my writing dreams. My writing dreams are dying in the doing of this MA. I wanted this to be a breakthrough and I think I’ve got it. Not in the way that I previously imagined or hoped for, but perhaps in an even greater way. Freedom from the longing and the wanting not in fulfilment but in the true release of desires. I couldn’t ask for more.
And either I’ve typed that paragraph before or I just had a massive déjà vu.
Déjà vu, to me, means you’re in the right place doing the right thing. It’s a sign, and a sign you get, perhaps, when you’re really wondering whether you’re doing the right thing at all. Reassurance. Like finding a black glove or a piece of chocolate used to be for me (you’ll have your own thing). Momma said something about déjà vu but I can’t remember what. Something about it being the…no, it doesn’t click.
But I do believe it’s meaningful. Like they say so in The Matrix. Which I watched this week – watched the whole trilogy – and was pleased to note that I no longer was filled with the fever of thinking, yes! I could be The One too! the way it also used to do, just instead noted the plot holes and the lack of cohesion and focus on action in the latter two films. Though the first, of course, is still excellent and full of what I imagine to be truth (maya and the illusion and the power of the mind and the need to believe and then know and then experience and then be).
But look at me, trumpeting fiction. What irony!
Well, life sure ain’t no consistent and constant and non-contradictory thing.
And maybe given that t’old Matrix has mostly filled me with madness when I’ve watched it before perhaps it isn’t contradictory at all.
Real life, where art thou? Sitting alone on a mountain in Colorado
The other thing I did this week was eat some weird supposedly-psychedelic seeds. It was after squash and me and Simon went walking down past Hyde Park right by where my dad’s first guitar shop was all of twenty-three years ago for fish and chips and then we got talking about things like acid and he was saying his roommate had some coming in the post. My ears usually perk when I hear of LSD, thinking of times I’d read about Richard Alpert’s experiments with it – sounded interesting – and also my own experience all them years ago. Plus, mainly, what it would be like to sit with it and observe it and see if maybe it could be used as a tool or exploring spiritual worlds and doing something useful rather than just giggling and tripping one’s nuts off and seeing weird coloured things. But I hesitate ‘cos it also seems like it might be a step backwards and John always frowned on such things and, anyway, I don’t really feel any sort of attraction for the people that do things like that, they’re not where I want to be but –
I tell Simon about my Wembley trip, when I necked five, and he’s interested in that and shares some of his previous experiences and then also tells me about these seeds he’s got called Hawaiian Baby Woodrose. He says they’re a bit like acid but not quite. He says he’ll give me some if I want and I think, why the hell not? It’s good when people give you stuff – when the things come to you – and that’s how I’d always figured it should be with me if it ever came to acid or peyote or ayuahasca or whatever. Although I did of course buy the iboga (sort of). Anyway…
I go back to his place. Rap some with his roommate who I’ve met a few times (played squash with) and it’s kind of cool to be socialising, and hanging with some young ones who by now have learned a bit of me and think I’m crazy and mad, the things I’ve done – the hitchhiking, the walking through deserts, the beliefs they pick up on ‘cos they just can’t help but notice it, I guess. Something different for the normal hermit recluse that I am. And maybe I could get into that: Leeds, it occurs to me, is beginning to grow on me, and get into me, and guys I’m meeting through sport and bonding with in that way and being sort of the weird older yet still young person on campus and –
Yes, Leeds is beginning to grow on me. And makes me think, what need to go gadding about the world yearning after strangers when true relationship and connection to people and places comes from being there, right?
Anyway, he gives me the seeds. He says standard dose is five but gives me fifteen ‘cos I’ve told him probably standard dose ain’t enough for me. I have this idea that I’m a bit too high already for standard dose. Based on Alpert giving Neem Karoli Baba – Maharaji – a whole shitload of acid and it having no effect on him. And my own dabbles in acid where one tab really just wasn’t enough, plus the iboga too. The idea is that when you’re on the ground these things help you stick your head above the clouds – but what if you’re already above the clouds? Maybe they don’t then do anything? At least, that’s what Alpert found with his Maharaji. And that’s what I found too with these seeds.
The plan was to eat all fifteen one morning when I had a day of not doing anything and then experience them and then fall asleep at night and feel right as rain the next day. No attraction in that whole popping them late at night and staying up wired and then feeling like shit. Except that’s what I ended up doing. Friday night we had dinner and then Ali went out with her friends and I went to bed with a book and thought I’d get some rest. But as I lay there being mellow the thought of the seeds got in my head and it felt like the right time to have a dabble. It was half past nine. I soaked them and scraped off the husk and then ate five. Something nice and easy. Had refereeing the next day, didn’t want to be a basket case.
I ate them. The taste reminded me of some liquor I’d once had but couldn’t quite name. Then I settled back down into bed. My biggest fear was that I’d go mad on them and start running around like a five year old, look for something stupid and crazy to get into on the streets, perhaps naked. It takes a bit of effort to rein these things in when I get giddy. And the whole reason for this, for me, was to maybe try and experience something spiritual, something mystical, and something real and useful and long-lasting. No other purpose besides. Maybe my Wembley acid trip did actually do that for me – as Alpert’s seem to have done for him – or maybe they’re all just symptomatic of a deeper and eventually-satisfied longing for something more, something beyond consensus reality and the standard understanding of the mind and didn’t actually help bring it at all.
In any case, that was what was in my mind, and so I resolved to ignore the external – the bells and whistles and colours and shapes, man – and lie in the dark with my breath and my observations and make the whole thing an internal experience.
But, in the event, my idea of my already being above the clouds and therefore cloud-raising substances wouldn’t work on me proved true. I waited two hours. I felt nothing except mildly queasy. I gave it up and tried to go to sleep, though sleep was fitful. And I didn’t feel exactly good the next day. A big part of me figured I’d just give Simon the other ten seeds back. Another part of me thinks maybe eating the ten seeds now or even getting another five and doing a triple dose could be useful. But given the queasiness, and the sluggishness of the next day, and the very slight ways in which I felt my mind had been altered – nothing useful – I’m not sure there’s much point. That’s the crux, really: that I want my mind to be altered in a useful way. Iboga, I believe, truly did that. But I’m not sure these seeds could. Nor acid, for that matter. Who cares about seeing trippy things, having hallucinations? It’s all just short-term frippery and fun.
I dunno. I guess I’ll give ‘em back. Hard to imagine them doing anything except making me feel slightly sick. Although I do quite enjoy that feeling: it does give the mind a rest, and makes lying in bed in the daytime most pleasurable.
But…sickness is not really what I’m after. Just something trippy in a truly wonderful way. Like the way it was back in Mexico ’99. Natural and happy and good.
Isn’t that what we all want in the end?
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