Part Two Book Five Epic and Autobiographical (A Versified Finale)

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

 

The origins of An Actor Arrives

Lie in the barest elements

Of a story started but never finished

In early 1980,

While I was working at the Bristol Old Vic

Playing the minute part

Of Mustardseed the Fairy

In a much praised production

Of Shakespeare's celebrated

A Midsummer Night's Dream.

 

It was originally rescued in 2006,

From a battered notebook in which I habitually scribbled

During spare moments offstage

While clad in my costume

And covered in blue body make-up

And silvery glitter. And while doing so,

Some of the glitter was transferred from the pages

With which the were stained

More than a quarter of a century previously

Onto my hands...an eerie experience indeed.

 

An Actor Arrives (at the Bristol Old Vic)

 

I remember the grey slithers of rain,

The jocular driver

As I boarded the bus

At Temple Meads,

And the friendly lady who told me

When we had arrived at the city centre.

I remember the little pub on King Street,

With its quiet maritime atmosphere.

 

I remember tramping

Along Park Street,

Whiteladies Road and Blackboy Hill,

My arms and hands aching from my bags,

To the little cottage where I had decided to stay

And relax between rehearsals,

Reading, writing, listening to music.

I remember my landlady, tall, timid and beautiful.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

Nineteen Eighty Tell Me

Has been reproduced more or less

As it was originally scrawled

In a red Silvine memo book

In the very summer of 1980,

Almost certainly as I was waiting

To go on as Mustardseed the Fairy

During the London run of a much-praised

Bristol Old Vic production

Of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Nineteen Eighty Tell Me

 

Nineteen Eighty, tell me,

Where are you?

What are you trying to be?

This week, you're 1963

And there's even

Talk of a rebirth of '67

But that's next week.

Nineteen Eighty, tell me,

When will you be mine?

A little bit '59,

I'll not share you with a Beatnik

Take a rest after the exertions,

Punk revolutions,

Before our old friend,

Sweet nostalgia,

Goes round the bend.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

1.

Thanks to the large quantity

Of notes I committed to paper

While at Leftfield College, London,

My beloved college can live again

Through sundry writings

Painstakingly forged out of them,

Such as the poetic pieces that follow,

Which is to say, Some Sad Dark Secret,

Sabrina's Solar Plexus,

She Dear One that Followed Me,

And I Hate Those Long, Long Spaces.

And as in the case of all

My memoir-based writings,

The names of people and institutions

Have been changed

In the solemn name of privacy.

2.

Some Sad Dark Secret was inspired

By words once spoken to me

By a former tutor and mentor

Of mine at Leftfield in around 1982 or '83.

And which then ended up

As informal diary notes

On a piece of scrap paper,

Consisting of both

The words themselves,

And my own perhaps

Partly fantastical

Reflections on them.

Some quarter of a century later,

They were edited and versified,

And then the process was repeated

A half decade or so after that.

3.

I Hate Those Long, Long Spaces

Was recently conceived

From thoughts confided to a notebook

Sometime between 1981 and '83

While I was a student

At the University of London.

 

As I see it, they betoken

An undiagnosed depressive condition

Which ultimately led to my contracting

A serious drinking problem,

And ultimately some kind of crack-up,

From which I emerged while not unscathed

 

Another man entirely,

And while I'm still the victim

Of a depressive condition, it's not as it was,

Which is to say, one alleviated

By spells of great elation,

And yet fundamentally rooted in desperation.

 

Today, it's seen by its sufferer as long term

Yet temporal, to be dispelled,

Once he comes into a new glorious body,

Which is his hope and his prayer,

So all the sicknesses of the old,

Will be a thing of the past, never to return again.

Some Sad Dark Secret

"Temper your enthusiasm,"

She said,

"The extremes of your reactions;

You should have

A more conventional frame

On which to hang

Your unconventionality."

"Don't push people,"

She said,

"You make yourself vulnerable."

She told me not to rhapsodise,

That it would be difficult,

Impossible, perhaps,

For me to harness my dynamism.

The tone of my work,

She said,

Is often a little dubious.

She said

She thought

That there was something wrong.

That I'm hiding

Some sad

Dark secret from the world.

"Temper your enthusiasm,"

She said,

"The extremes of your reactions;

You should have

A more conventional frame

On which to hang

Your unconventionality."

Sabrina's Solar Plexus

 

"You were frightening, sinister,

You put everything into it

I took a step back

You get better every time

How good can you get?"

 

People are scared of fish eyes

They confuse, stun, fascinate

Coldly indifferent

Fish eyes

Sucked dry of life fish eyes...

 

Sabrina was unselfish,

Unselfconscious,

Devoted, unabashed,

Spontaneous,

A purring lioness:

"Yes," she said,

"I can imagine people

Wanting to possess you."

 

People are scared of fish eyes;

They confuse, stun, fascinate;

Coldly indifferent

Fish eyes;

Sucked dry of life fish eyes...

 

Sabrina said: "I'm sorry;

I'm just possessive

I'm frightened of my feelings

You'll miss me a little,

Won't you?

You should read Lenz.

I'm sure you'd

Identify

With the main character."

 

People are scared of fish eyes;

They confuse, stun, fascinate;

Coldly indifferent

Fish eyes;

Sucked dry of life fish eyes.

 

Have I written about the

Crack-up?

When I came home

Empty-handed

And I just couldn't

Articulate

For latent tears.

But am I so repelled

By intimacy?

When will someone

Get me there (the solar

Plexus) as Sabrina said.

 

People are scared of fish eyes;

They confuse, stun, fascinate;

Coldly indifferent

Fish eyes;

Sucked dry of life fish eyes.

   

"You look beautiful;

I wish you didn't,

Malignant

Flim Flam Man."

"I like it when you really feel

Something;

But then it's so rare."

 

People are scared of fish eyes;

They confuse, stun, fascinate;

Coldly indifferent

Fish eyes;

Sucked dry of life fish eyes.

 

She Dear One Who Followed Me

It was she, bless her,

who followed me...

she'd been crying...

she's too good for me,

that's for sure...

"Your friends

are too good to you...

it makes me sick

to see them...

you don't really give...

you indulge in conversation,

but your mind

is always elsewhere,

ticking over.

You could hurt me,

you know...

You are a Don Juan,

so much.

Like him, you have

no desires...

I think you have

deep fears...

There's something so...so...

in your look.

It's not that

you're empty...

but that there is

an omnipresent sadness

about you, a fatality..."

I Hate Those Long Long Spaces

I hate those long, long spaces

Between meals and drinks

Specifically the afternoon

And after midnight.

 

I hate mornings too

Until I can smell the bacon

And coffee. I cheer up

Towards the end of the afternoon,

 

But my euphoria stops short

Of my final cup of tea.

I sink into another state of gloom

Until my second favourite time of the day.

 

My favourite is that of my

First drink and cigarette.

I hate those long, long spaces,

Specifically the afternoon and after midnight.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

 

Verses for Tragic Lovers

Adolphe and Ellenore

Is based on an essay I wrote

Around 1983

For a former mentor at university,

Who sadly died in 2008,

And who features

As Dr Elizabeth Lang

In various autobiographical

Writings of mine.

 

It concerns the protagonist

Of French writer Benjamin Constant's

1816 novel Adolphe,

(Which its author emphatically insisted

Was not autobiographical;

Nor a roman a clef),

Who is a prototypal victim

Of what has been termed

Le Mal du siecle,

Or the sickness of the century...

 

Which, born in the wake of the Revolution,

And arising from a variety of causes,

Political, social, and spiritual,

Depending on the sufferer in question,

Produced such qualities as

Melancholy and acedia,

And a perpetual sense of exile,

Of alienation,

That found special favour within

The great Romantic movement in the arts.

 

Although as a phenomenon,

Weltschmerz was hardly a novel one,

For after all, does the Word of God not say

That there is nothing new

Under the sun?

But it was possibly unprecedented

In terms of pervasiveness and intensity

At the height of Romanticism

And I'd have no hesitation

In labelling it tragic as a result.

 

In terms of my own pre-Christian self,

It was almost overwhelmingly powerful,

And so believer that I am, I feel compelled

To expose it as potentially ruinous,

For after all, is it not still with us

In one way or another,

Having been passed on by the Romantics

To kindred movements coming in their wake,

From the Spirit of Decadence

To the Rock Revolution?

 

And could it not also be said

That the peculiar notion

Fostered by Romanticism

Of the artist as a spirit

Set apart for some special purpose,

Of which pain is so often an essential part

Is also still among us?

Of course it could,

And I'd have no hesitation

In labelling it tragic as a result.

 

This Mal du siecle

Is surely especially melancholy

In the case of tragic lovers,

Adolphe and Ellenore,

For it results in Adolphe effectively

Drifting into a romance

With another man's mistress,

A young mother, Ellenore,

Who sacrifices everything for him

Only to discover he no longer loves her.

For Adolphe is in some respects

A work within the tradition

Of the libertine novel

Of the Age of Enlightenment,

And yet at the same time,

By no means an endorsement of libertinage.

Is rather perhaps, in many respects,

A powerful indictment of this tendency,

And thence as much a reproach

To the tradition; as a late addition to it.

 

And the forlorn figure of Adolphe

Was ultimately to prove influential,

Notably in Mother Russia,

Where he allegedly served in part

As model to Pushkin's fatal dandy,

The Byronic Eugene Onegin,

And if Tolstoy's Count Vronsky

Was also partially based on Adolphe,

Then there is of course a marked kinship

Between Ellenore and Anna Karenina.

 

In the end, though, one can only weep,

At the tragedy these eminently romantic

And sympathetic figures

Made of their lives. And I speak as one

Who was once in thrall to the tragic worldview,

But who came to view life

As something infinitely valuable,

To be lived fully under the guidance of God,

And not sacrificed like some beautiful bauble

For the bitter-sweet pleasures of the world.

 

Verses for Tragic Lovers Adolphe and Ellenore

 

Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances

But after a great deal of persuasion,

Agrees to see him on a regular basis,

And soon falls in love.

 

We know little of the physical appearance

Of Adolphe, but in all probability

He possesses the youthfully seductive charm

Of Romantic heroes,

Werther, Rene and Julien Sorel.

 

Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances

But after a great deal of persuasion,

Agrees to see him on a regular basis,

And soon falls in love.

 

Adolphe is preoccupied with himself

In the classic manner

Of the contemplative, melancholy,

Faintly yearning, hypersensitive,

Isolated, perceptive Romantic hero.

 

Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances

But after a great deal of persuasion,

Agrees to see him on a regular basis,

And soon falls in love.

 

Perhaps he is somebody who believes

That self-interest is the foundation

Of all morality, but then, he announces:

"While I was only interested in myself,

I was but feebly interested for all that."

 

Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances

But after a great deal of persuasion,

Agrees to see him on a regular basis,

And soon falls in love.

 

There is much genuine goodness

In Adolphe,

But much of it is subconscious,

Surfacing only

At the sight of obvious grief.

 

Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances

But after a great deal of persuasion,

Agrees to see him on a regular basis,

And soon falls in love.

 

The cause of this inability to feel

Spontaneously, is very probably the result

Of the complex interaction

Between a hypersensitive nature

And a brilliant if indecisive mind.

 

Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances

But after a great deal of persuasion,

Agrees to see him on a regular basis,

And soon falls in love.

 

By reflecting on his surroundings

To an exaggerated degree,

Adolphe feels a sort of numbness,

A premature world-weariness

Lucid thoughts and intense emotions confused.

 

Ellenore initially resists Adolphe's advances

But after a great deal of persuasion,

Agrees to see him on a regular basis,

And soon falls in love.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

 

Thanks to the large quantity

Of notes I committed

To paper while at Leftfield,

My beloved college can live again

Through writings

Painstakingly forged out of them,

Such as the poetic piece below,

Based on several conversations

I had with my good friend Jez,

A tough but tender Scouser

With slicked back rockabilly hair,

Who'd played guitar in a band

At Liverpool's legendary Eric's

Back in the early eighties,

When Liverpool post-Punk

Was enjoying a golden age.

These took place at Scorpio's,

A Greek restaurant situated in

North West London

Following a performance at college

Of Lorca's Blood Wedding

In which I'd played the Bridegroom.

 

One of the Greats Who Never Was

 

"I think you should be

One of the greats,

But you've given up

And that's sad.

 

You drink too much,

You think, ____ it

And you go out and get _____,

When I'm 27 I'd be happy

To be like you.

 

In your writing,

Make sure you've got

Something really

Unbeatable...

Then say...'Here, you _______!'

 

You've got the spark of genius

At sixteen, you knew

You were a genius,

At nineteen, you thought

What's a genius anyway?"

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

In the autumn of 1983,

I took residence

In a room on the grounds

Of a Lycee Technique

In Bretigny-sur-Orge,

A commune in the southern

Suburbs of Paris

Some sixteen miles

South of the city centre.

And for those first few months,

I was happy, blissfully happy

to be a flaneur in the city

which had inspired

so many great poets

to write classics

of the art of urban idling,

And the following versified

Refugee from

At the Tail End

Of the Goldhawk Road

Briefly touches on this phase.

Paris What an

Artist's Paradise (as Juliette Once Wrote Me)

...my paris begins with those early days as as a conscious flaneur i recall the couple seated opposite me on the metro

when i was still innocent of its labyrinthine complexity slim pretty white girl clad head to toe in denim smiling wistfully while her muscular black beau stared through me with fathomless orbs and one of them spoke almost in a whisper, qu'est-ce-que t'en pense and it dawned on me yes the slender young parisienne with the distant desirous eyes was no less male than me dismal movies in the forum des halles and beyond being screamed at in pigalle and then howled at again by some kind of madman or vagrant who told me to go to the bois de boulogne to meet what he saw as my destiny menaced by a sinister skinhead for trying on tessa's wide-brimmed hat getting soused in les halles with sara who'd just seen dillon as rusty james and was walking in a daze sara again with jade at the caveau de la huchette jazz cellar the cafe de flore with milan who asked for a menu for me and then disappeared back to bretigny cash squandered on a gold tootbrush two tone shoes from close by to the place d'italie portrait sketched at the place du tertre paperback books by symbolist poets such as villiers de l'isle adam but second hand volumes by trakl and deleve

and a leather jacket from the marche aux puces porte de clignancourt losing cary's address scrawled on a page of musset's confession walking the length and breadth of the rue st denis, what an artists (sic) paradise (as juliette once wrote me)...

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

A Cambridge Lamentation

Centres on my brief stay at Coverton,

A teaching training college

Contained within the University of Cambridge,

With its campus at Hills Road

Just outside the city centre.

A fusion of previously published pieces,

It was primarily adapted

From an unfinished and unsent letter

Penned just before Christmas 1986,

And conveys some of the fatal restlessness

Which ultimately resulted

In my quitting Coverton early in 1987.

In its initial form, it had been forged

By extracting selected sentences

From the original script,

And then melding them together

In a newly edited and versified state,

Before publishing them at the Blogster weblog

On the 10th of June 2006.

 

A Cambridge Lamentation

 

This place is always a little lonely

At the weekends...no noise and life,

I like solitude,

But not in places

Where's there's recently been

A lot of people.

Reclusiveness protects you

From nostalgia,

And you can be as nostalgic

In relation to what happened

Half an hour ago

As half a century ago, in fact more so.

 

I went to the Xmas party.

I danced,

And generally lived it up.

I went to bed sad though.

Discos exacerbate

my sense of solitude.

My capacity for social warmth,

Excessive social dependence

And romantic zeal

Can be practically deranging;

It's no wonder I feel the need

To escape...

 

Escape from my own

Drastic social emotivity

And devastating capacity

For loneliness.

I feel trapped here,

There's no

Outlet for my talents.

 

In such a state as this

I could fall in love with anyone.

The night before last

I went to the ball,

Couples filing out,

I wanted to be half of every one,

But I didn't want to lose her.

I'll get over how I feel now,

And very soon.

Gradually I'll freeze again,

Even assuming an extra layer of snow.

I have to get out of here.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

 

Both The Destructive Disease of the Soul

And The Compensatory Man Par Excellence

Possess as their starting points

A novel written at an estimate around 1987,

With one Francis Phoenix as chief protagonist.

 

Its fate remains a mystery,

But it may well be it was completed,

Only to be purged soon after

I became a born again Christian in 1993,

With only a handful of scraps remaining.

 

The versified pieces below

Were forged out of these scraps

In September 2011, although initially,

They'd taken shape as prose pieces,

Only to be edited and versified at a later date.

 

The Destructive Disease of the Soul

 

No amount of thought

Could negate

Suffering in the mind

Of Francis Phoenix.

 

That much he had always believed,

That humanity is a sad, lost

And suffering race.

Sometimes he felt it so strongly

That the worship of a Saviour seemed

To be the only sane act on earth,

And then it passed.

It was not increasing callousness,

But an increase in the number of moments

He felt quite intoxicated with compassion

That had soured Frank's outlook.

 

During those moments, he wept

For all those he'd ever been cruel to.

He could be so hard on people,

So terribly hard.

To whom could he ask forgiveness?

 

It was his sensitivity

That bred those moments of Christlike love,

When he cared so little for himself,

For his body, even for his soul

When it was the soul of his father,

The soul of his mother,

The souls of his friends and relatives

And everyone he'd ever known

That he cared about.

 

That was truth, that was reality,

That was the purpose of all human life,

That love, that benevolence,

That absolute forgiveness.

Otherworldly love is painful,

But it is the only true freedom known to Man.

Too much thought eventually produces the conviction

That nothing is worth doing.

Thought is a destructive disease of the soul.

 

The Compensatory Man Par Excellence

 

I seldom indulge in letter writing

Because I consider it

To be a cold and illusory

Means of communication.

I will only send someone a letter

If I'm certain it's going to serve

A definite functional purpose,

Such as that which I'm

Scrupulously concocting at present

Indisputably does.

It's not that I incline

Towards excessive premeditation;

Its rather that I have to subject

My thoughts and emotions

To quasi-military discipline,

As pandemonium is the sole alternative.

I'm the compensatory man par excellence.

 

Deliberation, in my case,

Is a means to an end,

But scarcely by any means,

An end in itself.

This letter possesses not one,

But two, designs.

On one hand, its aim is edification.

Besides that, I plan to include it

In the literary project upon which

I'm presently engaged,

With your permission of course.

Contrary to what you have suspected

In the past,

I never intend to trivialise intimacy

By distilling it into art.

On the contrary, I seek

To apotheosise the same.

 

You see...I lack the necessary

Emotional vitality to do justice

To people and events

That are precious to me;

I am forced, therefore,

To at a later date call

On emotive reserves

Contained within my unconscious

In order to transform

The aforesaid into literary monuments.

You once said that my feelings

Had been interred under six feet

Of lifeless abstractions;

As true as this might be,

The abstractions in question

Come from without

Rather than within me:

 

My youthful spontaneity

Many mistrustfully identified

With self-satisfied inconsiderateness

(A standard case of fallacious reasoning),

And I was consequently

The frequent victim

Of somewhat draconic cerebrations.

I tremble now

In the face of hyperconsciousness.

I've manufactured a mentality,

Riddled with deliberation,

Cankerous with irony;

Still, in its fragility,

Not to say, artificiality,

It can, with supreme facility,

Be wrenched aside to expose

The touch-paper tenderness within.

 

With characteristic extremism,

I've taken ratiocination

To its very limits,

But I've acquainted myself with,

Nay, embraced my antagonist

Only in order to more effectively throttle him.

Being a survivor of the protracted passage

Through the morass of nihilism,

Found deep within

"the hell of my inner being,"

I am more than qualified to say this:

There is no way out

Of the prison of ceaseless sophistry.

There are many things I have left to say,

But I shall only have begun to exist in earnest

When these are far behind me,

In fact, so far as to be all but imperceptible.

 

I long for the time

When I shall have compensated to my satisfaction.

I never desired intellectuality; it was thrust upon me.

Everything I ever dreaded being, I've become

Everything I ever desired to be, I've become.

I'm the sum total of a lifetime's

Fears and fantasies,

Both wish-fulfillment

And dread-consummation incarnate.

I long for the time

When I shall have compensated to my satisfaction.

I never desired intellectuality; it was thrust upon me.

I'm the sum total of a lifetime's

Fears and fantasies,

Both wish-fulfillment

And dread-consummation incarnate.

I'm the compensatory man par excellence.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

 

An Aphoristic Self-Portrait

Was expeditiously versified

In September 2011,

Using a series of teeming

Informal diary entries

Made in various

Receptacles in the late 1980s.

And as such may provide

Some kind of indication

As to my psychological

And spiritual condition

Some half a dozen

Or so years prior to my

Damascene conversion.

An Aphoristic Self-Portrait

 

As a writer, people are my vocation.

As for humanity, men, women

And other abstractions,

Their interests constitute little more

Than my hobby; I can only deal in people.

As soon as I start dealing in sects

And sections, I am either an insider

Or an outsider, and I feel lost as either

And as soon as I feel lost,

I make no attempt to find myself,

But simply retrace my steps

And return to the people.

You can call me detached if you like,

But you see, the only way

I can remain sane as a person

With such an all-consuming instinct

For attachment, is to be detached

The world of subjectivity

Holds no sway over me,

Because it is paradoxically impersonal,

Being affiliated to partisanship,

Sentimental causes and other such abstractions.

I couldn't possibly belong

To a school of orthodox thought

That accepted me as a member.

I don't believe in myself

Other than as a crystal clear container

For the freshest cream of human individualism.

When I was younger,

I ached to be famous for the sake of it,

But now it occurs to me

That anyone can be famous

Provided they are sufficiently audacious

And thick-skinned, and I desire fame

Not so much for the vain satisfaction

Of being seen and known and heard,

But in order to guide others

Towards a happier way of being,

The only precept for celebrity,

Indeed for being in general, as far as I can see.

Adversity seems to be my fate,

As well as fortune.

The meek ones gravitate to me.

I'm the prince of the hurt ones,

The damaged ones.

I resent all success and authority.

I'm so affectionate one moment,

So icy and evasive the next.

I'm in love with many people at present.

I over accentuate my individuality,

Because sometimes I look at myself

In the mirror and I say:

"Who's that pathetic wreck?"

The more complex you are,

The less you like yourself,

Because you frighten yourself.

The more I find myself liking someone,

The more I doubt us both.

Liking someone negates them for me.

 

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

 

Strange Coldness Perplexing was forged

Using notes scrawled

Onto seven sides of an ancient

Now coverless notebook,

Possibly late at night

Following an evenings carousal

And in a state of serene intoxication.

 

The original notes were based

On experiences I underwent

While serving as a teacher

In a highly successful

Central London school of English,

Which I did between the spring,

Or summer, of '88 and the summer of 1990.

It gives some indication

Of my emotional condition at the time,

Including a tendency, as I see it,

To wildly veer between

The conscious effusive affectionateness

I aspired to, and sudden irrational

Involuntary lapses of affect.

 

It also bespeaks the intense devotion

I manifested towards my favourite students

And which was reciprocated by them with interest.

All punctuation was removed around 2007,

And extracts tacked together,

Not randomly as in the so-called cut up technique

But selectively and all but sequentially.

 

Strange Coldness Perplexing

 

the catholic nurse

all sensitive

caring noticing

everything

what can she think

of my hot/cold torment

always near blowing it

living in the fast lane

so friendly kind

the girls

dewy eyed

wanda abandoned me

bolton is in my hands

and yet my coldness

hurts

the more emotional

they stay

trying to find a reason

for my ice-like suspicion

fish eyes

coldly indifferent eyes

suspect everything that moves

socialising just to be loud

compensate for cold

lack of essential trust

warmth

i love them

despite myself

my desire to love

is unconscious and gigantesque

i never know

when i'm going to miss someone

strange coldness perplexing

i've got to work to get devotion

but once i get it

i really get people on my side

there are my people

who can survive

my shark-like coldness

and there are those

who want something

more personal

i can be very devoted to those

who can stay the course

my soul is aching

for an impartial love of people

i'm at war with myself