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Notes
in reply to a correspondent who read the above
and asked for some biographical details:
"My
mother
scrimped and saved to send me to a local private school where
I learned only that the only education is continuous self-education.
I have taught myself everything worth learning except reading
and counting and the basics of biology, grammar, Greek and French.
School
failed miserably to expunge and extinguish my free curiosity
(which is what the education system and the whole nation-state
seems to be set up to do). I was physically abused at school,
of course, but not sexually (if only I had, I might not have
been so in-the-dark for years thereafter!)
Schools
are set up to abuse the brains and minds and hearts of pupils,
which is much worse and more corrosive than mere sexual abuse.
I would have preferred this latter to ten years of compulsory
'sport' which I loathed as I still loathe all competitiveness.
I ran away from school, once and unsuccessfully.
It
wasn't until the age of 25 that I realised that I would have
to dismantle (or at least question) everything that had hitherto
been pushed into me. And so I never was employed or married
or anything mindless like that. But I did not realise that it
would take all the rest of my life - at least 40 years - to
do the job. It is still not finished.
After
some false starts I read philosophy at University - but that
was more of the same, so I spent all nine papers and 27 hours
of my finals attacking the whole system of system-worshipping.
This was before I heard about the Russian Nihilists.
Naturally
I did not get a degree - which made me pretty well (and usefully
for me) unemployable: no 'Qualification', too well-educated,
and continually self-educating.
When
(after leaving home in Belfast)
I had nowhere to live I just went and asked rich people for
a hovel, and got three different, good places. I now live in
a 200 year old farmhouse with original sagging roof and some
damp, for $5 a week - for life. No other house is within view,
and I look out across a rookery and fields and over the Irish
Sea to the Isle of Man; and to the Mountains of Mourne in another
direction. I can't be put out because the landlord tried to
evict me on grounds of immorality (kissing bearded men
in the garden in a country where there is suspicion and dislike
of anything pliant, tender, autonomous, or unconventional),
and lost his case rather badly. There are no mass graves that
I know of.
This
was some years after the pivotal point in my life: my four-month
spell in a traditional panopticon prison (with slop-buckets
and defective heating) - for repeated shoplifting
of kitchenware and food. Through prison I gained a self-esteem
that those who rely on others being mirrors to their conformities
cannot conceive of. I was terrified when I went in; I was proud
when I left. And I wear with pride my crude darns and patches
on the clothes my mother, at various times, knit and made for
me.
I
didn't realise that I was a crinophilous
samesexlover until I was 40 - no hairy, bearded,
interested teachers at school to instruct me (in this or in
much else), I guess. And even if there were, they would not
have told (much less shown) me that 'sex' is at its ('Tantric')
best when it is non-penetrative and non-ejaculatory - that is
to say: when it is not a means of making connection, but a celebratory
journey starting from deep, inexpressible connection.
I
am over sixty and living rather well on a small Social Security
allowance in a house which I never lock, beside a rookery, with
a fine shrub-garden which is especially good in winter and has
plants from all over the planet: Chile, New Zealand, Mexico,
China, Japan, South Africa, the Mediterranean, Morocco and Siberia.
I
have lived off the warmongering and mind-crushing state all
my life: I vowed never to pay tax to finance its malignance,
so being on Welfare Benefit is a neat solution. I have a very
good quality of life. Peace and quiet in a house full of beautiful
stones and paintings, food that I prepare myself, a heartwarming
collection of useful ceramics, good, inexpensive wines - and
music ranging from early Jazz to Indian Classical, from Dufay
to Reich, Tavener and Schnittke, from Albanian polyphonic singing
to the piano quartets of Brahms, and from Georges Brassens to
the ambient electronic compositions of Brian Eno, B.J. Cole
and Klaus Schulze.
Once
every six months (or so) I am visited by my big, hairy, unreliable,
cannabis-head cuddle-buddy Paul
(whose beard is magnificent, leonine) for champagne-enhanced
transcendental affection. Unpenetratively we kiss and entwine:
two streams of being together in one tumesced Tantric flow.
And I bathe in his sweat and his kisses. And then he disappears.
Twice
a week (or so) I visit my nearly-as-hairy possibly-rest-of-my-life-partner
for superb, celibate but sensual dinners in his sylvan wooden
gate-lodge, with wines that I choose and buy, and excellent
non-American films which he records on video for us to watch.
His Divine Grace, Oscar,
stays with each of us in turn for four days or so at a time.
We both make our own yogurt, vinegar, bread and jam. I am one
of the last people in Ireland to boil water in a kettle over
a fire. We cut each other's hair, of course, and grow what food
we can in a very unfavourable climate. We buy whatever we can
secondhand - from shoes to accursed car. Malcolm bakes sugarless
cakes, makes cordials, bakes sugarless biscuits and does most
of our shopping since I loathe supermarkets. One of the reasons
I hope to move to the banks of the French river Aveyron is that
there we can live almost entirely from local produce and craft
almost all the year round close to scrub-forests that have hardly
changed since Neolithic times. And I can escape from dependency
on a car.
Because
I make friends easily I used to have many. But since I find
people all very much the same, limited, normalised kind of dull
(or paranoid), these two men are almost my only friends.
Whereas
Jenny Joseph in her famous poem 'Warning' described the
unconventionality she would enjoy when she would become an old
woman (and wear purple), I enjoyed greater freedom long before
I was sixty, when, without family, TV, microwave, clean windows,
employment or insurance, I stuck out my tongue at unpleasant
people, and called them shit-heads to their face, and pissed
in washbasins and ate good half-price food well past its sell-by
date, and got caught shoplifting, and rarely took a bath and
changed my clothes infrequently. Of course I smell much better
than the fastidious, deodorised and over-washed who get up my
nose.
Unlike
Diogenes,
I don't masturbate in public nor hurl dead poultry in schoolrooms
- but I have kissed stray dogs in the street and would outdo
Lazarus by licking their sores
while the Christians drive by in their cars. I don't yet harangue
people in the street like the religious maniacs who are so many.
I scramble over and under barbed wire. I shall be buried in
my brambly badger-thicket where I have planted beech and oak
and hazel, spindle-tree and guelder-rose, medlar and quince
and bird-cherry and crab-apple, and apple-scented rose, fire-bush
and partridge-berry.
I
have not
disturbed it further, letting the nettles and fireweed grow
and chopping the brambles only so much as to stop them pulling
the young trees down. The birds and the badgers will breed and
the foxes move in, so that on this ravaged, ransacked, pitiable
island one acre at least would remain dense, impenetrable, protected,
free and unmanaged.
Often
I walk over my grave - where already are buried some ashes of
my aunt and some hair of my mother
- who, at the age I am now, began the twenty-year happiest,
most autonomous period of her life.
I,
however, suffer from idiopathic chronic fatigue or an obscure
and mild form of (viral ?) encephalitis.
And I write poems.
How terribly ironic it would be if they were ever to become
part of a Syllabus!
Unlikely
- but in this lunatic world even that is not impossible."
[2003]
Anthony Weir
"My
religion: non-practising Cannibal."
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