Dexys

It’s ten p.m. and I've just about recovered from the excesses of last night. Barry, Lindsey, Susie, Stu, Guy, Ade and Gareth and I—Gareth back after a couple of week’s seclusion through illness—went as usual to Masquerades. For once, Masquerades was crowded and I got drunk and took four small yellow pills—dexys—which Gareth got for six of us for 35p each from a couple of contacts of his.

We got back home at about two-thirty in the morning and one of those classic ‘peak’ experiences ensued. The effects of the pills had taken hold in a very subtle and undramatic way, but perhaps this was only because I was drunk when I took them.

We settled in Barry’s room and the talking began. Conversations raged at blistering pace on all sides, or rather monologues, for we directed long streams of words at one another, only shutting them long enough to let the other person speak, waiting until they stopped so we could begin the stream again. Guy and I talked at each other for four or five hours in an inspired way about school and family—Guy said he was “ecstatically happy,” and I was going through a great ‘Yea-saying’ explosion of optimism and excitement and felt so full of potential that I could only be happy. A delusion, but a good delusion to have nonetheless. Oh to feel so full and intense every minute of every day. Maybe I was glimpsing a higher plane of existence?

I kept going at a relentless pace all through the night. We carried on drinking too, constantly passing around a bottle of whisky Mo bought us as her contribution towards rent. Pete got up and joined us but eventually, after he’d slipped away back to bed, and as the grey unwelcome light of another day and Responsibility glared weakly through the curtains, the talking stuttered, and finally died all together.

And now we paid for our night of rare delights. Stu crept into my room to rest and the others slid into mumbling weariness. I wasn’t feeling too bad and neither was Guy, but Barry and Stu were suffering “utter hell.” Ade collapsed onto the sofa in the back room—Barry said he couldn’t move. We were almost delirious, cracking weak one-liners and saying ridiculous things, laughing weakly and stumbling into verbal dead ends and illogic. I had a tutorial at 11.30 too, so mid-morning, leaving the others lying down and spent, Guy and I emerged into sunlight like new men.

The world looked different, we were different, separate, removed from the people who had just got up and filled the quiet streets and shops. We were different by virtue of what we’d just gone through. Our secret knowledge set us apart. My stomach felt hollow, my eyes ached and my whole body felt weak. I felt a curious sensation of expectancy, almost like anticipation, as though ‘something’ was about to happen to me. Perhaps because I hadn’t slept the night before lent some significance to the new day, as if the Act of staying awake had been rewarded with a glimpse of a sense of PURPOSE. I walked slightly unsteadily down the road to the hitching spot opposite The Cat and Lizard willing something to happen and Be different, filled with that old yearning for more depth and meaning.

It was chaos getting into Uni. because of a strike by BR men over a sacking. A dozen people were trying to get lifts and the buses sailing past packed full. I got to the tutorial room just in time. There are just two people in my Romanticism tutorial and it seems aimless and without a point. I left thoroughly dissatisfied. Our ‘discussions’ take place in a listless atmosphere. The things we say and the things we do don’t seem to be getting us anywhere or even near to approaching the core of Wordsworth’s experiences and feelings.

There has to be more to the study of Wordsworth than this, I told myself—I know there must be. Still, I couldn’t shake off the hopeless insight that perhaps there wasn’t anything other than what I’d just gone through, just second-hand, abstract intellectualising. I suppose I want to FEEL the emotions and sensations as Wordworth felt them in the raw, but then I suppose too this is just the “idealism of a bourgeois escapist mind” at work and is a fruitless point to make.

I met Susie outside the library and sat in the coffee bar with her. My words spilled out in a haste of enthusiastic talk, and after she had gone I even wandered around the library looking for someone else to talk to. I came home and feel utterly washed out, and so to bed.