JOURNAL - 1977 - OCTOBER

Sunday 3 October

In the Abbey in Bath. How amazing is religion - so cold. I sit in a great mansion of grey stone - with enormous grey pillars where some man tried to reach the sky with painting his drawing on His building. Some man tried to reach god with his excellence, his splendour, his money. The roof of the church is high away with a concrete pattern of spiderwebs. It is all grey, except for the colour on the windows, the beautiful windows, which are exquisite and grand and multicoloured, all made for the His glory, and yet are still cold. A man plays on the organ, music by Haydn who spent years writing music to the glory of god. A priest reads the bible with a cold voice. The congregation sit and stand and sing and breathe without emotion. The choir sing because they like singing I suppose. It is frigid. The whole fucking thing is so frigid.

Monday 4 October

Well October is autumn. M returns closer and warmer. We are like children learning everything there is, learning to be free and to play.

I am bored with my movement class. We are told to play games with our feet and communicate - such lovely feet you have Anne, such a lovely spine you have Pauline - but they are the games we play with our lovers any way.

Tuesday 5 October

I am here at 64 Carlton Hill with M and though we don't disturb much it is too much - two bodies grunting through the night, the whispering walls, the toilet flushes - so we have to find somewhere this week or the friction, the ugliness will be upon me.

13 October

THE IMPERIAL LIGHTHOUSE SERVICE

In its heyday, the Imperial Lighthouse Service proudly owned 17 lighthouses in different parts of the grand British Commonwealth. The lighthouse keepers were solitary men returning once only every six months to homeland England. But those days have passed with the fading of our great empire. Just two are left, one off the Falkland Islands and the other somewhere in the Caribbean. They are maintained by the only four employees of the Imperial Lighthouse Service left in the world today. They are directed by the marine division of the Ministry of Trade in High Holborn. Some 69 men, though, are still receiving pensions from the Service. I would like to sing 'seventeen lighthouses of the Imperial Lighthouse Service' to the tune of ten green bottles, but it doesn't go very well.

The Military and Orchestral Musical Instrumental Makers Trade Society has 160 members. The Amalgamated Association of Beamers, Twisters and Drawers has over 1,000 members.

14 October

I am sitting on M's bed looking out of our window watching the sun through the dense mass of leaves. It is like a pulsating star, as the eyes move ever so slightly so the sun flashes through a new aperture in the leaves. Around where the point sun shines brilliantly, the leaves are black, but further away from the point so the leaves become greener.

17 October

Days, words and feelings seem to get left behind at this time. Only by a conscious effort have I remembered some things from last night for instance. Without really knowing why I found myself at a concert given by Van de Graaf Generator. At the end of the concert, this long-haired freak started really shrieking his head around which was wonderful, a cool fresh breeze brushed by my own clammy heated head.

M and I have moved into room 14, the Oakley Holiday Apartments, 93 Oakley St. tel no: 352 9970. Last night, for the first time in my life, I came home from work to find my woman in the kitchen making dinner. And for the first time in her life, she found herself waiting for her man to come home from work to eat dinner. M has problems with work as always, maybe she will take a job in a restaurant, and then we will never see each other.

Jean-Christophe is a mixture of Italian, French, Swiss and English. He has been studying Reich body techniques, growth therapy, and is looking to start professional work in London. He came to me in Battersea Park when I was playing the recorder. He has a guru and meditates and is a vegetarian.

19 October

M and I were invited to dinner by Dad and his mistress.

I played football in the park and kicked Stewart's ball into the lake. The ball floated around going here and there, but refusing to come to the side. Stewart and Martin watched and pleaded with the wind to blow it to the side. I tried to find a gardener and thought of the problem as an initiative test. Then Peter turned up with a man with wellingtons that reached to his breast. It was something I had not thought of - such gigantic wellingtons, it was very funny.

I went to dinner with Peter and Tony - they are up and leaving to Germany to live in Bernau and maybe, maybe I can have their flat which is fantastic. There is a garden, a large front room, a bathroom, a kitchen, another little room and the living room - wow - let's wait and see.

M said she would return after work, but, as yet, hasn't appeared.

A beautiful letter arrives from N.

21 October

I cried some tears this morning because I realised what I had done, I had been hard, hard and cold, continually till M found herself weeping. I cried because I felt satisfied with that. Maybe it's good, I wonder now, maybe that is how it should be for M.

I met a man named David, sitting alone writing a book on philosophy - on the essence of consciousness or some such thing. I suggested he step outside his work occasionally and look objectively at what he is doing, to think about the fact that some problems could stem from our mental language, and to read de Bono's 'Mechanisms of the Mind'. At least, for an hour or so, he stopped the gritty circulars in my head about the relationship with M.

I am helping out a bit with the Latin America Festival.

22 October

Last night I saw a Bergmann film, 'The Silence'. It was about two sisters. One, called Esther, is dying and the other has a small boy. Esther is a writer, she is the quieter, more sedate, the passive, the thinker, and is in love with her sister, who is much more interested in a good time, making herself look good, going out, finding men. She is self-assured and hard. The latter was once very dependant on Esther but now finds herself completely independent of her and almost despising her. Esther is caught spying on her sister whilst making love with a stranger, and, in the ensuing argument, the sister accuses Esther: 'you're so damn full of self-importance'.

I wonder if I identify with Esther. I tried to tie in this self-importance with the arrogance Mum accuses me of, and the totally different mental worlds M and I live in. I am always aware of what she might be doing, and very careful not to let her down, but she is blase, doing exactly what she wants even if it means I am put out somehow. But maybe what I have to understand is that she has no mental image in her mind that says I must go now or else I will be late and keep someone waiting, because she doesn't think of herself as that important. Here is my self-importance - the way I look at it, is that I am so important that everybody is thinking in terms of me, and that therefore I can't let anyone down.

There's an organisation called The Screw, Nut, Bolt and Rivet Union.

26 October

Autumn is at its most beautiful. It is radiant in its colours, proud in its metamorphosis and high with the wind and change. Amersham found me sailing in a wood, breaking sticks, skipping, trying to play like a child but finding my playmate more interested in poisonous mushrooms. There was a tiger in the forest, a very dangerous tiger. I looked for it and killed it. And then I raced home to London, running from train to train, hating cities and communications and mixing it all with reading Genet and his beauteous pricks and brothel sex.

'You see,' Jean said, 'there is a living force that connects everything, we are all energy and vibrations and there are forces that connect us. What you believe is that we have a computer brain and that we are all generic programmes.' 'Yes,' me speaking, 'absolutely birth and copulation and death, if we start talking about deeper levels and deeper feelings and contact with our centres etc. etc. could we just as easily say they are all programmes as well, programmes can be very complicated or very simple. On the other hand if we start talking about forces outside of us and something that isn't programmable within us then we must ask ourselves, maybe the all powerful Christian judging god can exist - if he can exist then we ought to do something about it.'

M tells me now the Work was not going well when she left. I suggested maybe the Work was to blame, as I with Christianity. I always, but always, thought I was to blame for my lack of closeness to and understanding of god, but it wasn't, it was god's fault because he wasn't there. How could I tell that to M, that maybe she had overtaken the Work - had seen through it.

Sometimes the moon can be seen through the trees from our window.

On Saturday night I went to a party at Andre's house, I nearly didn't go, but M had been cold and I was a little bored. Anyway, at this party, was a girl called Judy Gardner. We'd met before, in New Zealand, when she picked me up hitchhiking. As a result of that meeting, she went on to take my job at Sandoz. So we spent half the night talking about Otago doctors! The other half I danced, smiling at some drama people and watching their little games as they interacted with mine.

I was supposed to be organising one night of the theatre at the Oval but it turned out to be a full farce, with quarrels over timing and lights. The Chilean mime was very good, it was just two people, but with one woman doing 90% of the work. She really was excellent.

It was good with M this week. I took everything as it came, and did my own thing, but M went sour on me still and we came back from the Yes concert in our tiny little shells until finally she talked of things that disturbed her calm.

I am reading less, I am writing less, I am feeling definitely less, and I am smoking too much. It really is time to stop again, blah.

'I have the key to happiness: remember, be profoundly profoundly, totally conscious that you are. I myself, sorry to say, hardly ever use this key. I keep losing it.' Eugene Ionesco.

Paul K Lyons

November 1977

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