Satan Wants Me (34 page)

Once I came down from speed, I put my diary away, thinking that I never wanted to see its hateful black volumes again. The strain of keeping such a record had been a massive drag. For me, writing down what I had done every day was a counter-instinctual thing, rather like trying to remember my dreams in the morning. As I say, these things just do not want to be remembered. I never sat down to write my diary without feelings of dread and aversion rising within me – except, that is, for when I was on speed, of course. It seemed to me that it was as if I was trying to support two people within one weak and skinny body. There was the Peter who did things and there was the other Peter who wrote about what was done and told lies about it. Nevertheless, in the last few days I have had to consult my diaries in order to supplement my research notes. Looking at old diaries is rather fascinating. It is like the unstopping of so many bottles of time past. Anyway, it is getting a bit boring here. So I have decided to resume diary-writing, but this time my book will not be any kind of Satanist’s logbook. Instead I am going to use the diary, as Thoreau did, in order to get in close touch with nature. I am going to train myself to open my eyes to the world around me. Henry Thoreau, the American anarchist, lived like a hermit in the wilderness and wrote a two-million-word diary in thirty-seven notebooks and when he had no diary to hand he wrote on birch bark. That kind of diary-keeping will purge me of the urban sickness and of the evil memories of Horapollo House. A spirit of the wild, I will fade into the Surrey woods. It is easy to be good in the country.

This place could be any place. The Beatles might have described Farnham,

‘On the corner is a banker with a motor car … dum de dum.

There beneath the blue suburban skies … dum de dum de dum

      
A pretty nurse is … ’

‘A pretty nurse is’ doing something or other. The trouble is I cannot remember the lyrics properly. ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ are just two of the casualties of my flight from London. It will take me years to replace all the records I had to abandon in Horapollo House. Sally got Patsy to send on her record-player and other stuff by rail. Everything arrived OK – this despite Patsy reporting that Sally’s room had been done over. Nothing seems to have been taken however. Also, talking to Dad on the phone, I learn that some odd people have been lurking about his house in Cambridge, pretending to be census takers, gas-board officials or whatever. Anyway, there is no way that the Black Book Lodge is going to suss out where we are shacked up, and, to get back to the main point, for the time being I am pretty much restricted to Sally’s music which means an exceedingly heavy diet of Donovan. So far, the only records I have bought are the Pink Floyd’s ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and a replacement copy of ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ by Jefferson Airplane.

We are deep in commuter-land here. Going up West Street I rub shoulders with sharp-suited young men whose greatest ambition in life is to be admitted to the local Junior Chamber of Commerce and there are women in scarves, and there are dog-walkers, market-gardeners and the odd yob who has not heard that the days of the rocker are over. Sally and I get our highs from reading the Farnham Herald. Yet the town is not quite as straight as I thought it was at first. I spotted a couple of heads trying to buy records in W.H. Smith a few days ago, but they were so obviously stoned and giggling so much that they could not quite manage the transaction and had to leave empty-handed. We sort of smiled at each other as we passed in the door. From Farnham to Findhorn, from Formentara to Katmandu, the hippy brotherhood constitutes an international freemasonry, a brotherhood of heads across the sea.

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.