come. Felton also said that, by keeping a diary, I was training myself to think backwards and that is one of the essential skills of the Adept. He did not comment on the mysterious disaster at the Cairo Working, even though I had put that bit in specifically hoping that he would.
Wednesday, May 24
Woke early. Looking back on yesterday, it wasn’t that bad. I wanted to shock myself and I succeeded in doing so. Great. What is bad is that I now have a cold. Having made up a stupid lie about food poisoning, I now find that I genuinely am a bit ill. After breakfast, put Donovan’s Sunshine Superman on the record player to help me think about Sally. All my contemporaries seem to have their own music which is distinctive to them – kind of like a whale’s song. Donovan, ‘the English Dylan’, makes Sally’s music for her. She grooves on its gentleness and dreaminess. (But there is an undercurrent of melancholy in Donovan’s songs which bodes ill for Sally’s future.) Sally likes to dance as much as I do, but her dances are slow and sinuous. This new fashion for sitar music suits her style of dancing perfectly. Whereas, when I dance, it is a high voltage performance and I fantasise that my body is dissolving into waves of energy and light. The dance sets me free from the world’s field of gravity.
There are no hard edges to Sally. It is noticeable that her room is like an extension of herself. One cannot see the floor, ceiling or walls for all the drapes, coloured cloths, beaded curtains, Chinese bells, mattresses and cushions. And, when the candles are not lit, the room is lit by an orange light bulb hidden under a batik cloth. She scrounges a lot of fabrics from the theatres where she works part-time as a dresser and she keeps adding new ones and rearranging them in order to redirect the vibes. Her breath is sweet.
I was disconcerted when Felton pointed out that I was keeping myself and my feelings out of this diary. Do I love Sally? I do not want to be simplistic about this. Maybe I do. (Love is the Law. Love under the Will.) But what does love mean? We are both free spirits. We do not own one another. This business of her trying to order me not to have anything to do with the Lodge is the first time she has ever tried to be authoritarian or possessive about our relationship. It is deeply uncool.
I achieved a major triumph this morning. I took the bus to St Joseph’s and practised the spell of invisibility. Since the conductor never noticed me, I travelled for free. I fancy that the faculty of invisibility could be seriously useful for a sociological observer.
At the end of the first playtime the deputy head came out for a chat. He passed on a few useful observations about patterns in children’s play. Then he wanted to know what I thought I was going to do when I had my PhD. It is the kind of question which is well-calculated to freak me out. I do not want to do anything with my life except dance and maybe play music. The thought of work is cruel. As the Stones put it, ‘What a drag it is getting old.’
I have this horrid feeling that youth is on a holiday and that it is not going to last.1967 will give way to 1968. Sally read me a poem a few weeks back – ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ by W.B. Yeats. It was about
‘The lands of faery
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue;’
But maybe, as I advance along the Path, I will find the answer. There will be a spell to make time stand still for me, so that I dance forever in 1967, while the others plod on through the years that follow and they age with those years.
Sally reads a lot of poetry and she learns it by heart, Yeats, Donne, Blake, also Ginsburg, Corso and Ferlinghetti. She likes shopping for little things. She likes to have me break raw eggs over her body. She’s a kind of metaphysical sociologist in that she likes to suss people out by going around
Wednesday, May 24
Woke early. Looking back on yesterday, it wasn’t that bad. I wanted to shock myself and I succeeded in doing so. Great. What is bad is that I now have a cold. Having made up a stupid lie about food poisoning, I now find that I genuinely am a bit ill. After breakfast, put Donovan’s Sunshine Superman on the record player to help me think about Sally. All my contemporaries seem to have their own music which is distinctive to them – kind of like a whale’s song. Donovan, ‘the English Dylan’, makes Sally’s music for her. She grooves on its gentleness and dreaminess. (But there is an undercurrent of melancholy in Donovan’s songs which bodes ill for Sally’s future.) Sally likes to dance as much as I do, but her dances are slow and sinuous. This new fashion for sitar music suits her style of dancing perfectly. Whereas, when I dance, it is a high voltage performance and I fantasise that my body is dissolving into waves of energy and light. The dance sets me free from the world’s field of gravity.
There are no hard edges to Sally. It is noticeable that her room is like an extension of herself. One cannot see the floor, ceiling or walls for all the drapes, coloured cloths, beaded curtains, Chinese bells, mattresses and cushions. And, when the candles are not lit, the room is lit by an orange light bulb hidden under a batik cloth. She scrounges a lot of fabrics from the theatres where she works part-time as a dresser and she keeps adding new ones and rearranging them in order to redirect the vibes. Her breath is sweet.
I was disconcerted when Felton pointed out that I was keeping myself and my feelings out of this diary. Do I love Sally? I do not want to be simplistic about this. Maybe I do. (Love is the Law. Love under the Will.) But what does love mean? We are both free spirits. We do not own one another. This business of her trying to order me not to have anything to do with the Lodge is the first time she has ever tried to be authoritarian or possessive about our relationship. It is deeply uncool.
I achieved a major triumph this morning. I took the bus to St Joseph’s and practised the spell of invisibility. Since the conductor never noticed me, I travelled for free. I fancy that the faculty of invisibility could be seriously useful for a sociological observer.
At the end of the first playtime the deputy head came out for a chat. He passed on a few useful observations about patterns in children’s play. Then he wanted to know what I thought I was going to do when I had my PhD. It is the kind of question which is well-calculated to freak me out. I do not want to do anything with my life except dance and maybe play music. The thought of work is cruel. As the Stones put it, ‘What a drag it is getting old.’
I have this horrid feeling that youth is on a holiday and that it is not going to last.1967 will give way to 1968. Sally read me a poem a few weeks back – ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ by W.B. Yeats. It was about
‘The lands of faery
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue;’
But maybe, as I advance along the Path, I will find the answer. There will be a spell to make time stand still for me, so that I dance forever in 1967, while the others plod on through the years that follow and they age with those years.
Sally reads a lot of poetry and she learns it by heart, Yeats, Donne, Blake, also Ginsburg, Corso and Ferlinghetti. She likes shopping for little things. She likes to have me break raw eggs over her body. She’s a kind of metaphysical sociologist in that she likes to suss people out by going around
Similar Books
Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators
Jarrett Hallcox, Amy Welch
