Oh yeah, there’s always outside – but there’s nothing about outside that appeals to me – not in this rain and cold and grey – save the occasional shop for dates and Burgen’s and cheese: that’s about an hour a week. What else is there? Besides my football and squash? So instead I stay in bed and play old school computer games from my youth and, you know what? I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing. And that’s what I mean by having gone a little weird. But, thing is, everything else I contemplate – all the things the rest of the world is up to, like working their little office jobs or sitting at a cash register or making babies or filling out paperwork – it all seems much of a muchness, all the same as what I’m doing here. Play a game, sit in a field, write a book, think about poetry – who cares what we do with our time? I’m having a laugh! Everything’s gone strange and glorious.
I keep thinking this process of living that I’m doing – that I call life – is really just a semi-desperate scramble to try and find things to divert from something meaningful and scary, like finding God. And so I play with women and drugs and hobbies and sports and jobs and different kinds of jobs and get bored of everything and then say, wait! this new thing – that’s where it’s at! and then get bored of that too. All the things I’ve been through – all the dreams and discoveries and new wantings. Fixing on something and working my way towards it and believing that’ll be the thing. And then finding it’s not. And the last six months or so it really feels like I’m running out of things to pick up on – and even the things that thrill me, that hook me for their timebeing, there’s a sense of knowledge that they too are just passing temporary excitements. Once they also pass…what will be left for me?
I was thinking this yesterday and then I had an urge to skip right to the end of Richard Linklater’s movie ‘Waking Life’ and to the one thought in the whole thing that I found provoking when I first watched it a year or so back. And not that I could remember the thought but there it was: Linklater’s animated form saying something about how the whole thing is just a process of God saying, “so, do you want the infinite?” and we’re kind of saying, “yeah but…not right now, I’ve got a few other things I want to try in the meantime.” Weird how I should feel drawn to re-watching that one moment in the midst of thinking about my current stage and how well it gelled with what I’d been reflecting on. Of course, one gets excited by the possibilities that throws up – what genuinely running out of things to do and distract with would mean – but then I have to wonder if that’s not just fantasy talk and me slipping back into some old weird way of being which, when I think about it, far-fetched though it sometimes seems was actually pretty awesome and difficult to discount as anything other than genuine. Once there was a time when magic filled my life and all my needs were provided for out of thin air; when strangers channelled the answers to my every question; when angels and healings were an everyday part of life; and when miraculous, life-changing meetings happened in gas stations and supermarkets on a regular basis and it really was a groovy, groovy time. But now…well, all those things happened in America
Running out of things to try. Or maybe just falling down a deep dark hole. It’s weird to feel so happy and content and excited by life when taking such a small interest in it, beyond myself, this bed, and a squash court. But, really, what need to get dressed? To go among others? To see the world? To do anything other than what I’m doing right now? If there’s something better out there I’d like to hear about it. Answers on a postcard please…
Dizzy. Treasure Island Dizzy. Chuckie Egg. Wonderboy III…
Another thing I came to the end of was The Beats. Man, I read much on them dudes for some weird reason, and for a long time thought that’s what I would write my assignment on. Question: where have all the flowers gone? Answer: they grew up; they integrated; they realised booze and drugs was lame; they cleaned up their act; there was nothing left to rebel against; everyone got into surrealism and weirdism and hedonism and funky tunes; The Mighty Boosh is mainstream TV; our parents dress in trainers and ripped jeans; and the quieter pursuits, as favoured by Richard Alpert, for example, of yoga and meditation and the whole California Rainbow Family thing – it’s less newsworthy, less noisy and flamboyant and antisocial – and when it comes to reporting movements, that’s what we want to read about. In a nutshell: sure the hippy revolution succeeded: but only in the way that orange cordial succeeds in transforming a glass of water. One is diluted, the other is sweetened. What did you think? That you’d be drinking that juice neat? No sir, that’s not how the flavouring works…
Anyway, that’s not the point I wanted to make – the point that I came to – the point that I realised when I realised I wanted nothing more to do with those damn Beats – not even in my assignment – because ultimately it came down to this: they were all a bunch of lunatics and losers and I don’t even want to spend another second giving my energy to their works ‘cos that would be like saying their minds had something to offer when their minds were dirt. Kerouac the alky and Cassady the speed-freak sado-rapist and Ginsberg the dirty old smoking homo perv. Drugs and booze and mad words just spilling out and meaning nothing ‘cept every so often hitting on a line of beautiful poetry or rhythm – though if truth be told it was only ever really On The Road that did it for me in that whole grand thing – and maybe Corso’s poem Marriage – but the rest of it you can shove. Ever listen to Ginsberg actually reading Howl? Christ, what a voice! Sort of like a sorrowful, dribbling turd. And Cassady’s speed-fuelled madnesses as captured in Magic Trip. And all their children as screwed up as they were, Kerouac’s daughter dead from booze and Burroughs’ son a junky like his dad: Burroughs whose every third word was “cock” – and some young boy’s cock at that – and I’ve no idea why anyone digs any of his stuff except to say most of the world is dumb and mad too. Everyone’s insane.
My university professors: insane. Daniel Sussman with his little mad eyes, his skin all crusted up, his mind like some biting dog, nothing but repressed anger and spitting vitriol, all dressed up and hidden under theories and the words of long dead Frenchmen who were all mad too. A young man fleshes out his proposed project on Derrida and deconstructionism – but all I hear are reams of words and no more sense in them than in the nonsense shit I write – except at least some rhythm and perhaps hidden meanings in that, not just strings of academic speak masquerading as intelligence. He finishes his talk and looks as confused as everyone else, as though a part of him – his subconscious, as expressed through his face – knows full well he’s talking empty bullshit – but still he ploughs on. How to admit that all your cherished theories and intellectual games are flimsy as balloons, empty and bubble-like and prone to floating away? But maybe that’s just me: and not so much the boy pointing out the Emperor’s nudity as the boy lost and confused adrift in a world that refuses to conform to his little man’s ego desires and –
Everything’s me. Enter Academia and have a listen and look deep into these lunatic professor’s eyes and smell the nicotine on their breath and see the dishevelment of their minds and then say, wait! but stop! all the things you’re talking are mad and you’re going all wrong and you’re leading others wrong and you must desist! And of course no one listens – and can’t – and you get frustrated and angry and want to cry your hair out and spit – but that’s not the point, you’ve got to leave them well alone. They’ve got their games and you’ve got yours. Why worry about changing the minds of others when you’ve enough trying to work with your own? It’s all just a sign on you.
The drunks argue in the street. The mothers smoke on their babies and think it fine. The politicians obsess on money and chop down trees. The young run mental in fancy dress and puke. The shopkeepers keep importing from China
I have gone wrong in wrangling with professors and their world. I simply shouldn’t be in it. Or, at least, I should turn my eye blind when I am. Play the game. The best minds always drop out. Get my letters after maybe two weeks’ worth of work and, for whatever reason, move on. Is it about being able to say, “I’m Rory Miller, MA” or is it about the sport, which I love? This refereeing, this coaching scholarship? Or just ticking boxes – boxes I didn’t even know existed? “I should have done a Writing MA” was what I was saying a year ago – and after this I will have done it and dwell on it no more. “I’ve been thinking of getting into coaching,” I said last autumn – and now I’m getting into it and I’ll see what it tastes like for real. Want it in truth? Or just another fleeting fancy? How many fancies to go? How much more before giving in to this supposed invitation, the last grand “yes”? Must all desires be fulfilled or let go of? It’s sort of getting tiring knowing they’re all just empty anyways. This is what it feels like: that all the threads of life are resting in my hand and an unseen force is slowly pulling them from me while I watch them go. I hold them so loose you could never call it a grip. The whole thing’s happening automatically...
Last Friday Nicky and I accepted an invitation to go to this weird avant-garde sort of thing down at The Templeworks in Holbeck. Ho hum: we got there and it was just probably talented musicians making some awful discordant racket – the sort of thing I sometimes do on my guitar when I want to go mad; fun to play, but bloody horrible to listen to – and then some contrived arsehole dude with a pretentious moustache putting a silly paper mask on his head and dropping a piano from a hook as though it meant something and was art. And other people had paid money for this thing. Well, it was a friend that I like who had put us on the guest list and I figured we’d at least honour that by staying twenty minutes. But then he said we were scheduled for some other thing – to go “upstairs” – and so we ended up hanging around another twenty minutes which was only slightly torturous and made easier by a woman pole-dancing in a mouse costume. Pretty sexy moves – and all the sexier for the giant mouse head, I thought – but ultimately disappointing in that she only got down to her mouseskin and we didn’t get to see her human bits. Anyways, then we went upstairs.
Upstairs was kind of weird. Some girl gave us to another girl and this other girl took us through a big door and then through all these old rooms and then gave us to a guy who said to sit down and wait for some other guy in a room that had been pretentiously decorated with weird, random, out there objects – the wacky artsters! – and so we waited. I had this feeling like…oh wow, everything I’ve ever done has led to this moment and now here we are in the unknown, totally surrounded by mental cases and I wouldn’t be surprised if…if the gates of reality finally dropped off. If someone walked in and said, welcome Rory, we’ve been expecting you, we weren’t sure you were going to make it for a while there. If they were actually aliens and I was too. Like a real life unveiling of ‘This Is Your Life’. And Nicky and my friend and everyone I’ve ever met and known – right back to Australian Simon and my teachers from when I was a kid – comes walking in and shakes my hand and reveals the great grand put-on that was my whole existence. Or some kind of dimension-hopping enlightenment. Or someone to take my hand and say, everything you’ve lived till now, you’re leaving behind – Leeds and uni and football and the material world – we’ve heard your prayers, we’ve seen your intent, we’re taking you somewhere new. Or maybe just a knife in the back and mad, cackling clowns. None of that would have surprised me. I was expecting it. It was kind of exciting.
In the event, though, what it was was some guy putting a pair of video goggles on my head, and some headphones, and then being put in a chair and wheeled through some rooms – quite thrilling – and then watching a movie with some nonsense-talking clowns which was kind of grating and pretentious though I still wouldn’t have been surprised if reality came crashing down. It didn’t – but it’s kind of revealing of the state of my mind when that’s what I thought from their little interactive art piece (I suppose it was). Is that what other people thought? Or was it supposed to be more scary than that? Reality is hanging by a thread. It reminded me of when I read Steppenwolf and I immediately thought I was the guy: the book that had landed mysteriously into my hand: the answers to so many questions even as they occurred. Maybe I should read that again. Herman Hesse: now there was a writer who knew how to write something interesting.
But has he just scrambled my eggs and led me deeper into some delusional fantasy? Or is there truth at the end of all these tunnels? Is it real, I want to know, or are we all just whacked? Amma whacked? Buddha whacked? John Milton whacked? Myself just whacked? I really just don’t know.
I’ll take myself away one day and have a real go at finding out. If I went alone into the mountains and ate nothing and wanted nothing and just sat there and said, fuck it, I’m here, show me something true or let me dessicate and die, would it come then? Is that saying “yes” to infinity or is it just being whacked? Does anybody know? Does anybody I know know? Only JM, perhaps – and he’s probably a little bit whacked too.
Eve is whacked, that’s for sure. Didn’t she serve as a warning to what would happen if one didn’t sort themselves out and ground? But still, I can hardly be anything other than the thing I so blatantly am. It seems, for example, impossible to imagine that I would one day take seriously work and mortgages and life. Fuck! I don’t even know if any of this is real! Seriously: that’s how whacked I am. I hide it well but…well, I’ve glimpsed enough beyond reality to know that reality’s not as solid as it seems. Nothing makes sense. Very hard to get into other people when one’s not even convinced they exist.
If only those clowns had taken me away. Sort of disappointing to realise it was just a show by studenty avant-garde ‘artists’ and not some supernatural beam-me-up from another galaxy and race. Would have been much better, I feel. But instead, for now, I remain.
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