3 March 1985

It is 10:10 a.m. as I start these lines. The day is gray, chilly, rainy, and lightly windy. The evergreens on the high bank that slopes down to the lawn outside my window—its still lawn to me, not sward—are full of darkness and movement. A rook—or a crow—sits on a shattered branch at the top of a centuries old cedar-like tree. The sodden terrace and the muddy path above it, carpeted with dead leaves and beech¬nut hulls, are bare of the squirrels, woodpeckers, blackbirds, and wood pigeons often busy there, under the watchful eye of Robert Denton's glossy black cat.
     The Abbey is soundless, only two of the two dozen or so students not away for the weekend having wakened for breakfast. Those two came into the cafeteria at approximately 8:45, as I was finishing the poached egg, bacon, toast, honey, and coffee that I ate alone until Colin Marsh, the second cook, or "sous chef," sat down for a cup of tea just before the two women entered.
     The Games Room, I saw as I reentered the Abbey through the basement door heavy with massive boards and thick, iron-strap hinges two feet long, has a morning-after look. Pingpong paddles and darts are scattered on the floor among puffs of popcorn and a litter of beer bottles, soda cans, candy wrappers, cigarette ashes and crumpled cigarette packs. Most of the chair cushions lie on the floor or crookedly between the chairs' arms, where the students tossed them after using them for pads in the crowded video room, the scene of a showing of Excalibur till about 2:00 a.m.
     Told by Karin Jones, who rented the cassette, that the film was "really great though a little dirty at the beginning," I watched a few minutes of it myself, sitting on a wooden ledge at the side of the small crowded room. Karin's "a little dirty" part, I decided, must have been the scene in which Uther, transformed by Merlin into the likeness of a rival warrior whom Uther kills, rapes his rival's widow—apparently without removing any of his suit of armor.
     Much more offensive, by my reckoning, were the other scenes that finally drove me out, and to the telly room, where I watched Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape. In one, the pre-Arthurian knights are titillated by a dancing girl certainly trained in a harem. In another the young Arthur reels through an English tropical jungle a squirm with anacondas, saurian tree beasts, and arm long millipedes.
     I look out into the rain as I hear the bells of All Saints begin to call the villagers to morning service, and I look back, as well, upon the surrealistically incoherent imagery not only of Excalibur but of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and An American Werewolf in London, two other rented films almost incessantly attended by the students during the last few days. Recollections of the films' disorderly jumble of high spirited thriller narrative, defensively ironic allusion, and conspiratorial citation came to me as the bells of the church spun through the last of their changes, followed by the eleven slow and solemn final gongs that deepened the melancholy with which I turned to this entry. Unable to breathe through my nose, badly congested for many days, I dropped my pen, flattened my palms on my writing table top, and drew a quick, forced breath, like a gasp, through my teeth.
     I felt suddenly much disturbed by my memory of what I had seen of these last two films. The sequence of each came back to me as a nightmarish tumbling of kaleidescopic wedges and flakes, spilling into acute and abruptly shifting polychromatic shards. The violently pulsing psychedelic hues were mixed, in my mind's eye, with occasional frames of ghostly black and white: a black garter belt against a transvestite's hairy but talcumed thigh, black lipstick and rice powder on the face of a henna hooded lesbian, the werewolf's fang bright in the tomb darkness of a London alley.
     I confess that the films frightened me, not with any Hitchcockian suspense or horror, but with their strainingly sophisticated irreverence toward their own creation of fantasy and their half hearted impulse to invite and yield to a suspension of disbelief. Thus they seemed compelled to trivialize the rhetoric, to paint graffiti upon the pentimento iconography of the childhood matinee memories of the audience. Worse, they kept giving encouraging nudges and winks to their viewers, little insiders' signals authenticating, placing a public stamp of approval upon, an affirmation of faith and trust devoid of any embarrassing revelation of fervor or commitment. The regular showings of Rocky Horror..., in particular, seem to me a form of "gray mass"—not a black one—for The Cool, for a Rastafarian ritual slaughter of wind up chickens and stuffed puppies.
     My eyes drifting over to the tilted, lichen covered post by the steps in the paved walkway to the church, I thought again, also, of Robert's cat. It squatted on that mushroom shaped pillar cap when I wakened one morning last week. Its head moved slowly back and forth, cobra-like, as it searched for possible prey. Close to an hour later, after I had come back from breakfast, it had spotted its possible victim and was beginning its stalk. I watched it for five or ten minutes, detecting its continuous but imperceptible movement only by sighting upon a large bright leaf behind it. Gradually, very, very gradually, the distance between the leaf and the cat's bunched haunches increased. A forepaw would rise, float forward, and come to rest, and I could not see it move.
     I was determined to actually record its motion, the way as a child I would try, sometimes, to catch a mantel clock's minute hand moving. I had no more success with the cat's paws than I had had with the clock hand. And so I walked away. But I returned to the window every now and again during the next hour or so. At the end of that time, the cat had moved about a hundred and fifty feet, in the direction of the largest oak on the Abbey's front lawn—or "sward" as it is called here. I didn't know what the cat saw there. Whatever it was, it was as invisible to me as the individual movements of the cat, a fact that now, even more noticeably than on that other morning, made the scene somehow quietly terrifying: death drifting inexorably closer, its approach ignored, or denied, by the illusion of permanence that sustains mortality.
     I lean back from the writing of that last line and hear the sound of it in my head: "...the illusion of permanence that sustains mortality." A quiet, staring pensiveness takes charge of my thoughts. I think about the sound of the words. For the moment, at least, it pleases me. The rhythm feels right without being an imitation of poetry. The possible ambiguity of sustains (as "supporting" but also "receiving the force of") and mortality (as "life," "being alive" but also "susceptibility to extinction") could, in a larger context of a better writer than I—a more artistic one—possess significance. For a moment, I have to admit, it did for me. It and an element perhaps a dozen sentences back ("a Rastafarian ritual slaughter of wind up chickens and stuffed puppies") fill me, for just a pico second or a bit more, with contentment, with a comforting awareness of having accomplished something, of having established a type of personal authority over the course of events by having established authority over the course of words. That self sufficiency is important to me right now.
     On this dark, still, and solitary Sunday, images of entropy seem, temporarily, symbolic of an inhering force's destructive operation upon the elements and matter of life. I press my forefinger lightly against the right side of my nose and try, unsuccessfully, to blow air through my clogged left nostril. The mildly painful pressure against my eyeball and the wet rasp and bubbling noise in my sinuses confirm me in my Presbyterian's gloomy Sabbath awareness of the ending of days and time. In this spirit of resignation, I go looking through the record of recent days for additional signs of possibly catastrophic influences and powers.
     I think, first of all, of the constipation and flatulence which have, of late, been so chronically a part of my consciousness that "chronically" seems inappropriate. Its denoting "long duration" or "frequent recurrence" implies a beginning point and a specific—if long-delayed—termination . The first goes beyond my powers of recollection. The second I now regard as inconceivable. "Regular," in the sense of "normal," "usual," "according to established rule," looks to me to be a more accurate and, thus, preferable term. And, I am meanly delighted by the inversion of order the use of the term implies. It agrees with my mood.
     Responding to what a psychologist might call an "anal trait"—and many psychologists typified by those who have anal-ized Swift would, I feel uncomfortably sure, call it so even in this context—I am impelled to pause over my windiness. It may be the result of the College's solid, fatty English food. It may originate in a visceral dislocation caused by an airborne fungus as mysterious as the cause of AIDS. (The latter speculation is not wholly without justification. When I was at Wroxton in 1968, I developed on my tongue a moss like growth the color and texture of sheared beaver. Dr. Long, then the attending physician at Banbury's West Bar Surgery, diagnosed the furry cover as a fungal infection which is, he said, "just in the air.")
     Whatever its source, it has lately been my constant companion. Internally and externally, I mutter, growl, rumble and pop. Lengthy series of crepitations crackle and rustle behind me as I walk or, as is frequently the case, run away from anyone in my vicinity. If the hissing, humming, whistling emissions and ripping, rattling explosions were not so rude and so full of chastening reminders of the crumbling clay of which I am formed, they might, in the virtuousity and variety of their tones, timbre, and tempo, fill me with sensations of admiring wonder. As it is, I live with them as with a roommate clumsily practicing the first rudiments of drumming.
     Again I interrupt my writing to look back over what has happened under my pen in the latest passages. As I was the last time I reread sections of this day's comments, I am made thoughtful by what I find. Thoughtful, this time, but not, as earlier, pleased by the sound of the words, contented. Instead, I feel an instant distancing from that self who supplied the words I see. For the most part, the incipient scatology of the discussion bothers me. It is not very good scatology, not nearly robust or exuberant enough. It found its way into that writing self's text, perhaps, because, subliminally, Swift, Tom Sharpe, and Rabelais have been on my mind ever since I finished Sharpe's The Throwback.
     That rampaging novel is full of accounts like this one, describing the efforts of Lockhart Flawse, the protagonist, to drive an unwanted tenant out of the house owned by Flawse's wife, Jessica. Flawse decides to capitalize upon the illicit assignations of the tenant, Col. Finch Potter:

"...for the next week Lockhart sat in a darkened room that overlooked Number 10 and watched from seven till midnight. It was on the Friday that he saw the Colonel's ancient Humber drive up and a woman step out and enter the house with him...Ten minutes later a light shone in the Colonel's bedroom...the Colonel drew the curtains...the woman came into the category his grandfather had described as Scarlet Women...Lockhart was still sitting [in the garden] at midnight when...the couple came out...Lockhart noted the time and made his plans...he travelled to London...and managed to buy what he had come to look for. He came home with several tiny tablets in his pocket and hid them...Then he waited until the following Wednesday before making his next move...Lockhart slipped next door into Number 10 carrying a tin of oven cleaner. The label on the tin advised the use of rubber gloves. Lockhart wore them. For two reasons; [sic] one that he had no intention of leaving fingerprints in the house...; two because what he had come to do had nothing whatsoever to do with oven cleaning...[He] went upstairs to the Colonel's bedroom and through the drawers of his dressing table until Lockhart found what he was after...What was in the French letter that Colonel Finch Potter nudged over his penis at half past eight the following night had certainly kept. He was vaguely aware that the contraceptive felt more slippery than usual when he took it out of the box but the full effect of the oven cleaner made itself felt when he had got it three quarters on and was nursing the rubber ring right down to achieve maximum protection from syphilis. The next moment all fear of that contagious disease had fled his mind and far from trying to get the thing on he was struggling to get the fucking thing off as quickly as possible and before irremediable damage had been done. He was unsuccessful. Not only was the contraceptive slippery but the oven cleaner was living up to its maker's claim to be able to remove grease baked on to the interior of a stove like lightning. With a scream of agony Colonel Finch Potter gave up his manual efforts to get the contraceptive off before what felt like gal¬loping leprosy took its fearful toll and dashed towards the bath¬room in search of a pair of scissors. Behind him the Scarlet Woman watched with growing apprehension and when, after demonically hurling the contents of the medicine cabinet onto the floor, the Colonel still screaming found his nail scissors she intervened.
     `No, no, you mustn't,' she cried in the mistaken belief that the Colonel's guilt had got the better of him and that he was about to castrate himself, `for my sake you mustn't.' She dragged the scissors from his hand while the Colonel, had he been able to speak, would have explained that for her sake he must. Instead, gyrating like some demented dervish, he dragged at the contraceptive and its contents with a mania that suggested he was trying to disembowel himself. Next door but one the Pettigrews, now quite accustomed to things that went bump in the night, ignored his pleas for help before he burst...the car [of the police at the end of the road] screeched to a halt outside Number 10 and [the police] were met by the [Colonel's] bull terrier. It was not the amiable beast it had been previously; it was not even the ferocious beast that had bitten Mr. O'Brien and clung to him up his lattice work; it was an entirely new species of beast, one filled to the brim with LSD by Lockhart and harbouring psychedelic visions of primeval ferocity in which policemen were panthers and even fence posts held a menace. Certainly the bull terrier did. Gnashing its teeth, it bit the first three police¬men out of the Panda car before they could get back into it, then the gatepost, broke a tooth on the Colonel's Humber, sank its fangs into the police car's front radial tyre to such effect that it was knocked off its own feet by the blow out while simultaneously rendering their escape impossible, and went snarling off into the night in search of      It found them aplenty. Mr. and Mrs. Lowry had taken to sleep¬ing downstairs since the explosion of Mr. O'Brien's Bauhaus next door and the new explosion of the blown out tyre brought them into the garden. Colonel Finch Potter's illuminated bull terrier found them there and, having bitten them both to the bone and driven them back into the house, had severed three bushes at the stem with total disregard for their thorns. If anything it felt provoked by creatures that bit back and was in no mood to trifle when the ambulance summoned...finally arrived. The bull terrier had once travelled in that ambulance with Mr. O'Brien and residual memories flickered in its flaming head. It regarded that ambulance as an offence against nature and with all the impulsion of a dwarf rhinoceros put its head down and charged across the road. In the mistaken belief that it was the Pettigrews at Number 6 who needed their attention the ambulance men had stopped outside their house. They didn't stop long. The pink eyed creature that knocked the first attendant over, bit the second and hurled itself at the throat of the third, fortunately missing and disappearing over the man's shoulder, drove them to take shelter in their vehicle, and ignoring the plight of Mr. and Mrs. Lowry, three policemen and the Colonel whose screams had somewhat sub¬sided as he slashed at his penis with a bread knife in the kitch¬en, the ambulance men drove themselves as rapidly as possible to hospital...For the next twenty minutes Colonel Finch Potter's bull terrier ravaged the Pettigrew house...Acting with impeccable good taste and unbelievable savagery it tore its way through...furnishings and dug holes in a Persian rug in search of some psychedelic bone...Finally it leapt at its own reflection in the french windows and crashed through into the night...Colonel Finch Potter's howls had long since ceased. He lay on the kitchen floor with a cheese grater and worked assiduously and with consummate courage on the thing that had been his penis. That the corrosive contraceptive had long since disintegrated under the striations of the bread knife he neither knew or cared. It was sufficient to know that the rubber ring remained and that his penis had swollen to three times its normal size. It was in an insane effort to grate it down from a phallic gargoyle to something more precise that the Colonel worked. And besides, the pain of the cheese grater was positively homeopathic compared to the oven cleaner and came as something of a relief albeit a minor one. Behind him garnished in suspender belt and bra the Scarlet Woman had hysterics in a kitchen chair and it was her shrieks that finally drove the three policemen in the patrol car to their duty. Bloody and bowed, they broke the front door down in a wild rush provoked as much by fear of the bull terrier as by any desire to enter the house. Once in, they were in half a dozen minds whether to stay or go. The sight of a puce faced old gentleman sitting naked on the kitchen floor using a cheese grater on what looked like a pumpkin with high blood pressure while a woman wearing only a suspender belt shrieked and gibbered and in be¬tween whiles helped herself to a bottle of neat brandy, was not one to reassure them as to anyone's sanity. Finally to add to the pandemonium and panic the lights failed and the house was plunged into darkness..." [The excerpt is taken from Tom Sharpe, The Throwback (Pan Books, London, 1980), pp. 129 134]

If you are going to deal with questionable material, that sort of passage reminds me, you should pull out all the stops. Circumspection, taste, and timidity have no place in bawdry, pornography, or scatology. Unfortunately, I have more than my share of two of these three characteristics, much less than I should have of the other.