CHAPTER 1
City
"Who am I in the night"
Shepherd's Bush, London—April to July 1972 The Room
The following day I moved again to London. This was a new flat in a tenement building in Richmond Way, Shepherd's Bush.
My room was on the corner of the building and I liked that room more than any I had lived in before. A small corner wall gave it a pentagonal shape. There was lots of light and enough room in which to move about. I made a couple of desks from old pieces of wood, one for myself and one for Caroline. I did not do much at that desk, and Caroline showed no interest at all.
I had no direction anymore. Nothing I read seemed to have any meaning. Nothing I wrote could be of any use. And I found that I could hardly talk to my flatmates.
As of a new day
Outer faces change.
Who am I
In the night?
Rock is breaking
Within the isolated,
Whirling head.
Dry sounds,
Gone off the ground,
Bang that old best drum
Under threat of attack.
Noises are everywhere,
The children cry.
Who am I
In the night?
Only midnight could know
The glowing eye
And moving light
Of this new one.
Where is
That uncrowned
Self?
Who am I
In the night?
Work Abandoned
I returned to the streets between Kensington and Notting Hill where I had formerly built up successful and enjoyable self-employment through gardening, car-cleaning, and other odd jobs. My clients from the previous year seemed delighted to see me again. The early summer should have been a fine time to get this side of my life going again.
However, I found that I simply could not concentrate. The tasks I worked at were not as they had been. Nothing was automatic any more. Cleaning a car became a strange and complex job. When I started to clip a bush, I could not decide which twig to clip next. In front of me was a confused mass of foliage, within me a growing sense of discomfort, apprehension, and confusion.
The more that I tried to work out what order to do things in, the more confused became my view of what I was trying to do. This was work I had previously taken great pride in. I had built up from scratch my clientele and took on diverse tasks. Now the source of my pride became a source of fear. I could not explain what was going on to my clients. Although they did not comment, I still began to feel too terrified to return to the streets and houses where I had been so fulfilled the previous year.
Claire and Caroline were worried about me. They wanted to help me find something on which I could concentrate. Our meditation group needed to raise funds, and so they came up with the idea that I should organise the jumble sale. However, by this point I was not capable of organising anything ...
There was a break-in. Several items of clothing were stolen from the basement where they were being stored and these included an expensive velvet suit donated by the manager of a well-known pop group. To me, this seemed to be a terrible occurrence for which I was responsible; I blamed myself for everything that had gone wrong.
I made a final attempt to get my jobs going again by ringing Mrs Dobson and arranging to clean her paintwork. It was only afterwards that I realised I had fixed this up for the same afternoon as the jumble sale.
As soon as I realised this, I also knew that I was unable to decide which commitment I should honour. It did not occur to me that I could have rearranged the time I had fixed with Mrs Dobson.
I simply waited as the day grew nearer, worrying about what I should do.
On the day of the sale, I lay on my bed unable to decide which course of action to take. As time passed by, it became more and more impossible for me to go to either place. Eventually, it was too late to do anything. I felt twisted with regret for my failure to make a choice. And I knew that I could neither return to my work or to the meditation group.
Silent days
Tread leanly on
With faces
Of the dusk.
A face too long
And raw with disbelief—
Thoughts sink.
The mind is moaning.
Wood beat him once,
Coercing him to work.
Ignored
He enters through the door,
Hefty, booted, bored,
While others whistle
At their work,
Even though
The purpose is not there,
Or else go on with greed,
Separate
From seed time,
Still silent days
Tread leanly on
With faces of the dusk.
Will long maces
Pierce his mind
Outstretched
To feel again
A resurrection?
I gave up the idea of organising my own work. Desperate for some security, I followed up with a job I had seen advertised locally. I went to the phone box on the corner of our street and talked to the hospital domestic manageress about the work, which was cleaning floors in the wards.
I asked if I might have some contact with the patients and she said that she would attempt to arrange this. I accepted the post.
Then came the doubts ... and the fears. I thought of the heavy equipment which I would be using and feared that I would not be capable; and in my mind, I saw a huge wilderness of green linoleum.
Feeling that I had made the wrong decision, I rang the Manageress and informed her that I did not want the job after all. Then, five minutes later, I changed my mind again. This was my chance, my opportunity to organise my life again. I rang up again. I was told that they had given the job to somebody else.
I was racked with remorse that I had lost the opportunity provided by this person who had been so considerate to me at first and then lost patience with me for very good reasons. I did not feel I could possibly ever have another chance like this again.
Indecision
Strangles my uncertainty.
I wander
In streets of a grey dust.
The old men are standing
In times of disquietude,
In times of change after change.
Minutes streaking onwards towards the end
Of the road,
We look through lace curtains.
Time is an empty lattice,
Spaces in the night air.
Under the bare boards
Is a scurrying.
People are running through,
Over to the other side of the road,
Signalling life to stop
And be done with it.
I will have to decide.
So split between different ways
That I cannot move.
The chance of love in my being
Leaves me frail of mind,
Always waiting,
For it to be made up for me.
Thoughts Broken
And so I lay on my bed on the floor worrying ... worrying about what I would do next, worrying about where the rent would come from, and worrying about myself. And yet I could not draw together my concerns and make any decisions.
I became more and more frightened that I was becoming incapable of doing anything anymore. It was this fear which made me lie there. Day followed day, stretching towards the empty future.
Finally, one day, I made myself sit up at my makeshift desk and attempt to type out my thoughts. I began to write a very long paragraph informing myself of all the things which I would have to do in order to rescue myself from this terrifying existence.
Suddenly, I allowed the lines I was writing to break up and I was typing:
"me baby
want eat
want sleep
want thought flow words ..."
Never again did I try to write out my plan or self-consciously examine my direction. Nor did I ever sit at that desk again. It seemed that every attempt which I made to get organised simply served to prove how incapable I was of achieving anything ...
And so, during these summer days of inner blackness, I lay there in that room with the rasp of cars and lorries grating on my mind. From my window nothing living could be seen. The only trace of green was a garish stripe, slanting up the edge of the raised car park on the further side of the street. I loathed this desolation.
And yet, I let its emptiness enter my spirit.
Failure to hold to
Correction reached in the mean of my heart;
When the light of perfection dawned within,
It did not strengthen.
Sleep might turn the heart another way
To face tomorrow with a certainty,
Stray towards the blows of men
And have them look at me as well.
To be with strength among the streets again,
Old words hanging in the sky,
The sight of bonfires in a shifting breeze,
A search to reach unentered regions now.
Friendships Broken
There were more of my friends in that flat than in any place I had ever lived before. But most of the time, I did not have any idea what to say to them. I was afraid to let them see me the way I was. And so, all day I would stay in my room lying on my bed, and facing the wall.
At first, during the evenings, everything was different. Suddenly, I would feel fine, so I would come out and meet the others in Mike's room. I knew that there was nothing more I should have been doing on that particular day. I did not allow myself to think about the desolation that would surely lie before me the following morning. It was as if this was a different world, and I was a normal cheerful person every evening with hardly a worry in the world.
Occasionally, during the long and empty days, I would get up from my mattress on the floor, sit on that dark grey carpet and begin to write down words on an old bent-over, lined foolscap pad. No longer did I make any attempt to control or even think about what I was writing. It was not that I believed the fragmented images and thoughts to be any good anymore, it was just that I needed to do something to try to justify my very existence to myself.
One afternoon I was startled and surprised by a knock on the door. Nick and John came in. They were standing there playing their guitars and laughing, seemingly having a bit of fun at my expense. I was the thing in a cage. They had come to have a poke at it. We exchanged words. But we did not communicate. As I looked up from my mattress, they seemed to be within a bubble; I was outside that bubble; I was not part of their company.
From that point, I ceased to come out at night and join the company of the others; my friends had become strangers.
You—the new day,
Love in a flower.
I -that taut bough
Broken by the lashing gale.
Why am I lying
Street-stained
And thrown away?
Til some feeling
Begins to sound my vein;
I wish I could be with you
On a salt sand,
And our hands twined,
Yet have I left to fall
The constantly offered hand.
Songs of the street bird
Are nearer to you than me.
What have I done?
Jarring at life
With all its gifts singing to me,
My selfish sky closed in,
Clouded by the glimmer.
We were free sun-children
Now,
Why am I a despairing end
Of street after street
Away, further and further?
I want to hack
Through the nightmare
Back to the true sand centre
Of our forest glade.
One night I managed to leave the house and go over to see Caroline in her flat in Notting Hill. Despite the fall off of our relationship and the broken promises, she was still open to me, but I found that I could not reciprocate. I felt that I should not have gone to visit her. It was wrong for me to be there at all. And as I searched for words to explain, I either could not find words, or the words which I found did not reach my lips. Instead, I found some paper and began to write down the stream of desolate imagery which poured into my mind.
One Friend
David was different. He was himself alone within the flat, living mostly at night in a small thin room, writing poetry, and studying things that the other people in the flat neither understood nor asked about. His face was unhealthily pale and his hair unfashionably short. David had lived for years within a state of mind which he described as "the void", a state empty of the meanings and feelings of ordinary, everyday existence.
From this vantage point, we started to talk about my state of mind. Though I did not believe him at the time, he told me that what I was writing was important. And he helped me to look differently at what was happening within me.
David believed that anything I managed to achieve within the emptiness could later be magnified in its effects a hundred times—that in this state of mind, any small achievement, even making a cup of tea, had great potential. He also suggested a very different way of making decisions from how I had been trying to make them. He advised me to stop trying to work everything out beforehand, just to start to do things in an intuitive way.
I took notice of David, because the words he spoke came from a depth of experience which related closely to my own situation.
It was apparent to me that the person who was least accepted by the others in the flat knew how to communicate with me even when I was in the depths of desolation and beyond human contact from any other person.
A Journey
In June I made a journey to Hampshire, which would certainly not have been possible for me before I had spoken to David about these matters. I had been offered a lift by John, another friend from Hampshire, who owned an old post office van.
John lived in Battersea but, by then, the prospect of making my way across London offered a daunting, virtually impossible task full of terrifying decisions which I would be unable to make.
David suggested I simply leave when I felt like it and go off to the bus stop at the Green; the right bus might simply come along. Deciding to give a try to this approach, I began my journey.
As I stepped past the raised car park, I passed Mike and Johnny and said a passing "hello" to them, something I had been unable to do for a number of weeks. And when I reached Shepherd's Bush Green, the bus to Battersea was waiting. Despite my earlier terror, I reached my destination without difficulty.
When I arrived in Hampshire, I concealed everything that was happening from my mother. At least, I thought I was doing so. When I was in the kitchen with her, she talked with me about mental breakdowns. For the first time, it occurred to me that I might be experiencing something which also happened to other people, and which had been given a name.
Although I told her nothing, my mother had a clear idea that something was amiss. She had an idea what might be happening because she had, herself, experienced mental breakdowns.
Infringed Light
I did not manage to consolidate the strength I gained from my successful journey. I now believed that my mind was breaking up because I had not been using it properly; and, connected to this, I began to feel guilty that I had thrown away all the opportunities my parents had given to me.
In desperation, I decided I should try for a `proper job', which, in my mind, meant non-manual work. So, one day I told David that I was going to the Brook Street Bureau. He answered, without hesitation, that he would come with me.
Together, we travelled by tube from Shepherd's Bush to Notting Hill Gate, and there, with David beside me, I registered my name with the agency. The assistant told me that they would ring me if any office work came up.
As soon as I left, I realised that I would be unable to do any job they offered me. David tried again to reassure me. I could not believe that there was any job I would be able to do, I also felt that I must have known this all along and that I had been using David by allowing him to accompany me on this fruitless journey.
Dry leaves
Fell
Lost the join.
Blowing away and away,
The air forbids him.
Stark is the loss of a friend
Carried by fate on the wind.
Rough,
The midnight ground
Round him, petals fall,
Old men gaze, appalled.
Eyes that have seen sense
Dissolve in an orange end.
Long ago
The separation of despair—
Slowly
New names appear
On the bark.
Old
Running over the ground,
Slow sounds.
It was then, as we walked back down the steps into the underground in Notting Hill Gate, that I cut off from David in my mind. My decision was instantaneous, although no one else knew of it. To me, it seemed permanent. David had been the only person with whom I could still communicate and I had infringed the light within him.
