by Robert Irwin
The morning after we had arrived in Farnham, Sally and I walked every street in the town. It took about an hour and a half. When we had set out walking from London our plan had been to keep on going until we reached the sea or something, but that morning walking around in Farnham, Sally decided that Fate had washed us up here on the shores of West Surrey. So, thanks to what Sally calls ‘ambulomancy’, here we are marooned in the Green Belt. We were too tired to walk any further anyway. In suburbia I can lose my dark shadow and become invisible. Sally wants us to live like hermits – just like Lancelot and Guinevere did in their closing years of repentance after Arthur and Mordred were killed in the last battle at Camlann. Sally is experimenting with batik. Maybe she can sell the stuff on market days. Also she is hustling for a job at the Castle Theatre.
I told Sally about the hare. She said it was a magical animal and that witches change themselves into hares, so that they can do damage to the farmers’ fields and drain all the milk from the cows. I got pretty angry at this, as I had just thought of the hare on the doorstep as being an example of how close to nature we were in this place. The last thing I wanted to hear was some ominous occult interpretation of what I had seen. Then I said that since we had had a witch at the front door, we had to be packed and out of the place within the hour, because it was obvious that the witch would report straight back to Horapollo House. Then I went into the bedroom and started throwing all Sally’s things into boxes. She was crying, but I was so pissed off with all this occult rubbish that I did not care and she was shouting that the darkness was within and that the real witch was me, not the hare. Finally, I walked out of the cottage and went into town and bought a hare at the butchers. I am going to cook it tonight. Sally was pretty subdued when I came back and she did not object when I told her what we were going to have for dinner.
We have talked more calmly about things now and we are agreed that, idyllic though things are down here, they are also pretty boring. Boredom is the most important thing in life, more important than love, more important than fear of death. It is only boredom which from minute to minute drives me forward through time. It is lovely here. The August sun blazes through the curtains and Sally and I lie in bed listening to the wood pigeons and the rustling leaves and we are bored out of our skulls. Fortunately though I have not exhausted my stock of magic beans. I still have the LSD cubes I scored off the Tibetan type in Abdullah’s Paradise Garden. Tonight we are going to take a rustic trip.
I cut the hare up and cooked the joints in cider with shallots. Sally ate every mouthful without protest. Actually it tasted pretty good, but she has just admitted to me that the reason she ate so deliberately was that, by doing so, she could consume all of the morning’s bad feeling as well as any ill luck which comes from it – plus, at another level, she saw eating the hare as a kind of shamanistic thing – a way of acquiring the wisdom of the hare. I pointed out that if the hare was that wise it would not have allowed itself to be caught and eaten. But it was hopeless. Sally is impossible to deal with as a rational human being. For pudding, I served up just two little sugar cubes soaked in acid. Now Sally is seated in the armchair in the tiny living room. She has carefully surrounded herself with things that are beautiful and things that will focus her on life. She says that it is dangerous to have any thoughts about death or dead people while on a trip.
So anyway another magic bean, a different type this time. Nothing is happening. It is almost an hour since I took the sugar cube, but I am not getting anything. Maybe it’s a bad score. Who needs acid anyway, when the world as it is, is such a blast? I have just gone out into the garden with my notebook and I am sitting on the ground poised to observe what there is to be observed. It now strikes me that there is no need to take acid when the world looks so brilliant anyway. The grass around me glows, ripples and pulsates. Seeds popping, shoots thrusting upward, nature is exploding all around me. We just need to see the world as it is. MEMO TO MYSELF: Every morning I should take my eyeballs out and wash them thoroughly in the sink. Why look at the world through dirty windows? I could sit here forever contemplating the single blade of grass that is in my hand. It is a truly amazingly crafted object. If only I could get everybody just to look at the blade of grass in my hand and see it as it actually is … If only I could see myself as I really am.
Then I have an idea and go inside to fetch the big mirror. This I place in the long grass on the edge of the woods, and, having taken all my clothes off, I am beside it like a hermit gazing into a pool of water and in its reflection I can see the branches writhing and I feel the first of my jungle jingles coming on.
Buddhist Poet on Edge of Jungle writes Home to Mother
An animated seething corpse sitting defenceless in the technicoloured garden. It is alone against the crowds who will pull it to pieces. It sits writing, head bowed, as they come up behind.
With automatic hand
The corpse sits writing
Alone in the gardens of the soul
Then down dropped
The Green and Purple Woman
And sat down a spider
Before him.
What a dainty dish for the Spider!
(Mother will laugh. Ho! Ho!)
The corpse sits writing in the garden
A part of the Spider’s larder
She pops in a word
And comes out a sound
And no one was any the wiser!
(NOTE:“ wiser” ought to rhyme with “ Spider” and with “ garden” )
Try again.
First corpse-poetry in the world folks!
Mother!
Have you ever been
conspicuous as a
purple corpse in a garden?
Buddha watching, waiting
from the flower-beds?
I am just writing to pass the time while I wait for the acid to take effect. On my hands and knees I gaze down into my scrying pool and I perceive that it is indeed the Eye of the World. Beneath its surface of rippling glass, I can dimly make out my mother. She is making her way here, walking all the way from Cambridge, but her progress is necessarily slow. The shroud impedes her movements and clods of earth, as well as gobbets of flesh fall away from her, as she takes her stumbling path along the hard edge of the road. She is blind, for her eyeballs liquefied weeks ago. But now she senses that she is under the scrutiny of the Eye of the World. Alas! Alas! It was a mistake for me to have taken drugs, for my late mother has become a sniffer-corpse and as such she is employed by the Underworld to sniff out druggies. She catches my scent in the air. In time she will find me. Alas! Then, as I gaze on appalled, the witching hare leaps within me and I recoil from the pool with a terrible cry.
It is like the Temptation of St Anthony out here in the gathering dark. The garden is full of bats. At first I thought they were moths. My penis was glowing and pulsating like a lighthouse and they were fluttering round it. Much too big to be moths. Bats then. Dark things moving across the brilliant face of the moon. I fear that they will entangle themselves in my hair. A good night for raising the Devil. I begin to chant the invocation which I have heard on the lips of the Master,
‘Adonai! My Lord. My Secret self beyond Self, Hadith, All Father! Hail, ON, thou Sun, thou Life of Man, thou Fivefold Sword of Flame! Thou Goat exalted upon Earth in Lust, thou Snake extended upon the Earth in Life! Spirit most holy! Seed most wise! Inviolate Maid! Begetter of Being! Word of all Words, come forth most hidden Light! Devour me!’
But there is nobody to hear me and my chant is pointless. Sally has stayed inside the cottage. Jefferson Airplane is on the record player. I can see Grace Slick’s voice coming out through the window as white smoke. The smoke coils and writhes and shapes itself into something like a woman. The undulating arabesques of smoke are so very beautiful that I just have to masturbate before them. As my semen comes jetting out, it mingles with the white smoke, so that its coils gain in substance and clarity and I find that it is Maud who has made herself manifest to me.
Gazing on Maud, naked and white-fleshed under the moon, I now understand that she is indeed beautiful. And in great danger too. She writhes in bondage before me. She is shackled and cuffed and bat-like creatures hang on her nipples and flap limply between her thighs. She opens her mouth and my semen comes trickling out down her chin. Then the words ‘HELP ME’ briefly appear, before melting away like ice-cream.
I have to get in touch with Maud. I have to rescue her. The trouble is I cannot move. I am trapped in a total visual overload. The whole world is spread before me like a great net and the world-net ripples and bulges under the pressure of the endless play of transmutation and permutation. It is all a mighty plenum. If I let my eyes rest on a single section of the cosmic latticework, then it opens up as a funnel, down which my eyes can travel endlessly, taking in oriental scripts, giant insects, housing estates, fields full of totem poles, beached transatlantic liners, pencil shavings, centaurs and glass spheres – and there are yet more worlds within these worlds, and all of them powered by moonshine. It is all too much of a good thing. Having said that, it remains to be noted that too much of a good thing is still actually a pretty good thing.
I have to stop writing.
The rest of this report on the trip is retrospective. For over an hour, I lay there in the deep grass with my eyes fully open, but as if dead. I could not move a muscle, this despite the fact that I knew that Maud was in the very greatest danger and I should do something about that fact. But I just lay there and I only wondered if I could go blind gazing at the moon.
At last I was able to rise from the grass, horribly cold and stiff and made my way into the house. I told Sally that Maud was in danger and asked her what I should do. But Sally was completely out of it. Although her pupils were dilated like saucers, she did not even register my presence. She just sat propped against a wall like a smirking corpse stuffed with straw. (In retrospect, I understand that this was probably the point in her trip where she was about to be raped by Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men.) So, grumbling and feeling very much on my own, I found some coins and then Maud’s phone number and I set out for the phonebox. On my way to the phonebox, I decided it would be more convenient if I could put the coins in my pocket, but I found that I had no pockets, for I was not wearing any clothes for there to be pockets in. This alerted me to the fact that I had not come down from the trip as much as I thought I had. So when I got to the phonebox at the end of the lane, I carefully rehearsed what I was going to say, before I picked up the receiver.
Finally I was word-perfect with, ‘Hallo Maud. It’s me, Peter. Are you in any danger from the Devil or his minions?’ So I picked up the receiver and very carefully dialled Maud’s number. If a demon had answered the phone, I would have just dropped the receiver and run. However, it was Maud who answered, and as soon as she did so, I knew I was right to have rung her. She sounded terrified.
‘Peter? Is that really you? Thank God! I don’t know what to do. Thank God you rang. A horrible man came round to the salon last weekend and asked the strangest questions. And then someone has been leaving dead animals on my doorstep. And I think that I am being followed to and from work. Please, you have to help me.’
‘OK. Keep calm. How am I going to be able to help you?’
‘Can I come to you? Peter, I need you. You got me into this. You have to protect me. You owe me that. I am so very frightened. Let me come to you. Please.’
I thought about this, but not for very long, for it was clear that she was in trouble and, besides it would be cool to have Maud with us in Farnham. So then, mustering all the straight thinking that I was capable of, I gave her careful directions about what to pack and then how to shake off any possible trail. She was to go to Camden Town Tube Station and wait on the platform for a tube. She was to get on the tube and then get out of the carriage at the last possible moment before the doors closed. Then she was to exit the tube station and take a taxi to John Lewis’s department store and walk quickly through the store and out through a door at the rear and then take a second taxi to Waterloo Station. At Waterloo, she was to buy a ticket to Portsmouth, even though she should get off the train at Farnham. I told her that Sally and I would meet her at the station at noon tomorrow. Although tearful, she sounded terribly relieved. I just hope she lasts the night and that the Satanists do not get to her before she has packed and set out on her way. It now occurs to me that I never even got to say the words I had so carefully rehearsed.
Once I was back at the cottage, I put on the radio. A disc jockey on Radio Caroline informed me that it was half past three in the morning. I had no idea. Thinking about it, it was really weird the way Grace Slick’s voice changed into smoke and the smoke into Maud’s brilliant white body. It was like she was one of those dead spirits that get trapped in the grooves of a record’s vinyl, just as in Mr Cosmic’s theory. I put ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ back on the record player, but this time no smoke issues from the record player. Grace Slick’s voice is just a voice, so I deduce from this that I must be coming down. It has been a pretty good trip and I am pleased with myself for having been able to write throughout the first part of the trip until the total overload took over. My writing hand still trembles from the force of the drug racing through its veins. I fancy that this diary of mine has something of the quality of a scientific record. Straights dismiss tripping as just a way for young people to get their kicks. One year it was a fad for skiffle and hula-hoops, the next year it’s LSD, and so on, blah blah, blah. This is not fair. I always take LSD in the spirit of a psychological investigator. Drug-taking is as much serious research as anything that a university has to offer. I have merely slipped one letter back from LSE to LSD. Sally and I are the conquistadors of inner space. We, all of us, exist on the peripheries of our own minds. Without the guidance of drugs we would be dopily unaware of the vast molten core within ourselves. As it is we are at the beginning of Humanity’s greatest adventure yet. I must sleep now.
Monday, August 7th.
Over breakfast, Sally has to tell me about her trip. She is so excited that she cannot sit down, but stands over her cornflakes and rattles away. Sally does not write things down while she is tripping, for she believes that that would spoil the flow of the experience. Nevertheless, she remembers quite a lot of her visionary night-journey. There was the rape by Bill and Ben. She kept asking Ben if he thought she was beautiful and he kept saying no, which was a lie and each time Ben lied his wooden penis grew a bit longer, and, since the penis was inside Sally, the lies of the Flowerpot Man had a definite erotic charge. Then there was more weird sex with Bill, with hundreds of Munchkins and finally with me – except that the fairies had taken away my head and replaced it with the head of a hare. Apparently I liked having my long ears licked. One of the salient features of acid is the way it works on and with one’s sex drive.
Sally was so excited by her long night of imaginary sex, that it was ages before I could get a word in. But then, when I did manage to speak and I explained how Maud was being menaced by the Black Book Lodge and that she needed to take refuge with us and that she would be with us in a matter of hours, Sally was instantly cast down. She reckoned that Maud was making all this voodoo stuff up, simply because she wants to be with me.
‘Peter, can’t you see it? This has got nothing to do with Satanism and everything to do with Maud’s puppy-love for you. She is obsessive. She will eat you up if she can. Besides this place is tiny and she’s pretty tall and hefty for a chick. There is simply no room for her here.’
‘She can sleep on the floor in this room, until she finds a place of her own.’
(We were in what I suppose would be our sitting-room, except that as it has no furniture, only a leaking mattress, so we sprawl about in here and it is therefore more of a lying-room.)
‘I just know that she is going to spoil everything. It’s you I’m thinking of, since she really gets on your nerves. She will drive you mad if you live under the same roof as her for more than a day.’<
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‘Sally, I’m really sorry, but I have got to do this. I am kind of responsible for her. Whether I like it or not, she has become part of my karma.’
I could not persuade Sally to join me in walking down to the station, so I set off alone and arrived there just in time to see Maud step off the train. She was the only one to alight at Farnham. She was so overloaded with stuff that it was hard to understand how she could have shaken off any kind of tail – particularly as she teetered on stilettos and kept tripping over her luggage. Finally she gave up trying to move with all her cases and bags and waited helplessly until I came up to her. She was wearing a white silk blouse with mutton-sleeves, a very mini black mini, black leather gloves and lots of jangly silver bracelets. Her idea of dressing for the country, I suppose. She stood amongst her luggage clutching a handbag and a little umbrella.
I walked up to her, ready to stoop to pick up as many of her cases as I could manage, but then I just stood before her, gazing at her and not knowing what to say. The weird thing was that this morning, once I was sure that I was down from the trip, I had gone out into the garden and picked a blade of grass and gazed at it with full attention and I had seen that it was just a blade of grass. It did not pulsate or anything, nor did gazing at it offer any special help in understanding how the universe worked. That is always the way with trips and it is a real drag – except the really weird thing was that on that same trip last night I had had a vision of Maud as incredibly beautiful and now that I was gazing at Maud in the flesh on the sunny station platform, she still looked incredibly beautiful. It was as if the LSD was continuing to act selectively on my head and heart, so that I was experiencing a hallucinatory vision of the arrival of a mighty sex goddess in this small Surrey town. I wanted to lay her there and then in front of the ticket-office.
