In the Dark and Still Moving

Chapter Four
The Smiles in the Eyes of the Wise

To be a university student in 1968 was definitely a lucky break in the karmic lottery. We really never had it so good.
Abortion was now legal. Birth control was free on prescription. With no anxieties about getting pregnant we could make love with even more abandon. The law had yet to catch up with us on other fronts. LSD was not yet illegal, neither were home grown grass and mushrooms. That’s a lot of legal highs. The anti-Vietnam demonstrations were more than protest marches; they were parties. Grosvenor Square was a meeting of the clans, a gathering of the tribe. Random seminal conversations and wonderful plans for collaborative action sprang up all over the place. When they found they had a common enemy, the yippies, hippies who had been hit on the head by police and therefore politicised, linked up with the Black Power guys. The black guys brought black consciousness as well as cool dance moves to the party. The yippies brought the hallucinogens.

Then of course, there was Paris in spring. May 1968, when the dream of the radical student left, that we would one day unite with the workers and bring revolution to the streets, actually materialised. For one month we were euphoric, believing we were witnessing the downfall of western capitalism and the creation of a society based on freedom and love rather than power and wealth. Whatever darkness we had to encounter later, and there were already storm clouds gathering on the horizon, we would always have Paris.
In the north of England too we played our part. Several hundred of us hard-core counter-culturalists in Sheffield organised sit-ins, read-ins, swim-ins, party-ins, smoke-ins, lie-ins, etc. The difference between hanging out, having a good time with friends, and serious underground political action was a fluid one you understand – especially with so many mind altering substances going round. Many an elaborate critique of the cultural dialectics of society flowed into an equally elaborate rambling tale of our last acid trip. In the afternoon we chanted ‘Victory to the NLF’ in Ché Guevara T-shirts and struggled with the existential challenge of being an authentic individual in an inauthentic class-ridden capitalist society. In the evening we’d turn off our minds, relax and float downstream, to where all thought is an illusion, and we let it all be.
I wished I could have had the same philosophical acceptance of the contradictions within myself. I was full of the tensions of opposites with not a dialectical synthesis in sight. I flew upwards and hung out in heaven on the natural highs of dancing and all that loving, as well as of course the grass and LSD, then would crash to Earth, falling into my old despair and nameless dread. In another contradiction I wanted to change the world, turn it on, raise its collective consciousness, on the other hand, I wanted desperately to change myself, turn myself around, and change my own consciousness. That familiar sign of the cross was dividing me still.
For most of 1968, I was sufficiently distracted - there was so much to do. Write articles, hand out leaflets, organise the sit-in so that it didn’t clash with the Grateful Dead concert, spray paint slogans - ‘Paris Today, Sheffield Tomorrow.’ So much to learn – the latest hip talk, where to get the best weed, the latest semiotic deconstruction of culture, how to operate the Gestetner Roneo machine… So much to read every month: Rolling Stone, Oz, New Musical Express, all those hand-duplicated articles. As well as keeping in touch with the music scene, the fashion scene, the intellectual scene, the cosmic consciousness scene. And then of course, all those people to love. How did we do it all?
Well, on a full grant, with no exams on the horizon, no student loans, cheap housing, and no worries other than which kind of high to go for that day, we had all the time in the world.

In November that year the USA halted its bombing of North Vietnam. We thought we had won. I am sure the body bags of dead young Americans being flown back daily, the determination of the Vietcong and many other factors played their part, but we felt flushed with victory. Thousands of young people with no military power and negligible economic power had managed to influence the most powerful nation this Earth has ever known. Another excuse for a party.
I was keen on everyone having the chance to make as much love and freedom as we privileged students and tried to take the partying to the factories. That summer I took a job to earn money for a holiday, plus that Biba outfit I had to have, and worked for six weeks in Boots’ factory in Beeston. D10 was a large hanger with a glass roof, in which forty belts ran continuously day and night. Seven hundred ‘girls’ stood in lines along these belts and repeated a single movement for eight hours – or more with overtime. We bio-machines were allowed two ten-minute tea breaks, an hour lunch break and two five minute pee breaks per day. The breaks were staggered and a roving set of relief girls stood next to you to first pick up the rhythm, then take over your action, like a baton change. The belt must go on. When the machine at the top ran out of labels, there was relief all round. We breathed deeply, flexed our muscles, cracked our stiff fingers and a few minutes later got into position for another interminable run of sorting pills, packing lozenges, sticking cotton wool into bottles, testing vacuum seals on tins, sticking on labels, or packing – whatever was our action for the day.
The sun shone that summer. With the glass roof the temperature rose. Women began to faint. The relief girls were on extra alert not just for breaks but also to take over from anyone who passed out. The belt must not stop; the belt was King. The temperature continued to rise. I knew from my Marxist studies of the class struggle that a copy of the Factory Act had to be displayed somewhere. I could not find it but demanded to see it and told the floor manager that it was illegal not to have it displayed. He frowned. One of those student trouble makers obviously. I brought a thermometer in. Underneath the glass it was over 110F. Everyone was complaining bitterly but did nothing about it. I called a meeting attended by the other students and a few of the more bolshie workers, where we had a wonderful time denouncing the capitalist system and oppressive industrialists and agreed to call a strike that afternoon.
‘I know what you’re up to’ hissed the floor manager to me during my break, ‘and if you persist in your Marxist ways I’ll send you up to Boiling Sweets!’
I knew this was an empty threat however. Only men could work in Boiling Sweets. The temperature there was astronomical even in winter. You worked for only twenty minutes and then had a twenty-minute break to recover. Our gang of fervent revolutionaries, with plans to integrate the workers and the students in Beeston’s version of Paris, having synchronised watches, were just about to blow whistles and shout: ‘Everybody out!’, when there was a fire drill.
We spent the afternoon on benches and the lawn in front of D10 while the maintenance crew whitewashed the roof. This was not the breakdown of western Capitalism with its alienating oppressive economy and class-ridden hierarchies that we had hoped for, but it was a lovely afternoon off and we claimed a victory of sorts. And I learned a good lesson in how adept big business is at protecting its own interests, as well as how ruthless is its revenge.
I was put to work packing Mepacrine, a drug for malaria. On my application form for the job you were required to list any allergies to pharmaceutical products. I had put down quinine, the primary ingredient in Mepacrine. I had to wear rubber gloves, a mask over my mouth and nose, glasses over my eyes and special protective clothing. In that heat. I quit.
But I also got my revenge. On my last day I visited various friends to say goodbye, especially those working on the amphetamine and mandrax belts. I stuffed my pockets with handfuls of speed and mandies and left to enjoy myself far more than any manager of D10 was likely to do that night. They may have won the day battle, but not the fight of the night.

I have often found that the best revenge is a kind of psychic Aikido, to be seen laughing, loving and having such a good time your enemies’ envy turns back on themselves and fills them with jealous rage. (Only much later did I realise that such jealous rage would, of course, then spin back onto me.) The fun I was having in the nights was excellent revenge on the Catholic Church, on the priests and nuns of my childhood, on an economic and class system that had crushed my parents into defeat before they had a chance. Every time I held up a joint and inhaled, it went beyond the pleasure of the moment into a ‘fuck you’ to someone or something. Each time I turned to my lovers and made love, I was turning my back on what I hated and into an even more delicious ‘fuck you’ to the whole show. But underneath all this bravado, a depression lay in wait for me. I could turn away all I liked, but this dark cloud lay on me and in me, and whenever the music stopped, threatened to overwhelm me.
In the darkness of the night I could fly, like a bat using instinctive radar to seek out the places I felt safe. I found friends with some of the same insecurities and nameless dreads that plagued me. Were we products of society or was it our own fault we were so fucked up? Was it the fault of the systems of society or were we to blame? It seemed clear to me every night that the fault lay elsewhere – why on earth would such lovely people as these friends of mine ever be ashamed of themselves? But all that goodness slipped away and evil was with me in the morning.
I lay in bed unable to face what was waiting for me when the harsher light of day showed up the cracks, revealed the flaws, laid bare the truths that could not be argued with - that really there was something dreadfully, shamefully wrong with me, though I hadn’t yet worked out what it was.
I would lie in bed for hours staring at the ceiling, before turning sideways to stare at the wall. That I could not get up was further proof of the terrible wrongness in me. Around the middle of the afternoon, hunger and thirst would drive me into the kitchen to make some tea and toast. Once up, I shrugged off the torments, pulled on my Biba jacket and Levi’s, and went down to the Union, where there would always be someone to gossip with about the doors of perception, the class struggle or the amazing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. And I could forget my own dark side of the moon lying in wait for me tomorrow.
Today I would probably have gone to student counselling and got some help for depression, but there wasn’t so much awareness of these things then. Most of us had always been told ‘never mind’, ‘pull your socks up’, ‘don’t be silly’, and so that’s what we told ourselves. At least I did. Despite writing psychology essays on the nature of learned helplessness as the cause of depression. But that was about rats in cages given random electric shocks and not fed however many levers they pressed, and, surprise, surprise, they felt helpless and depressed.
I also learned, if children must always do as they are told and are punished when they do not, if they are given no power or self determination during their childhood, then they too, like those poor starving rats, learn helplessness and become depressed. But such a pathetic figure was so not my image, no way was I going there. Needy, depressed, helpless, pathetic! No way! Don’t ‘Bogart’ that joint my friend – pass it round!

We filled out a questionnaire in the Clinical Psychology course that was supposed to measure you on a scale of neurosis. I came out completely normal and non-neurotic. But then when asked the question – ‘Are you depressed?’, I had ticked the ‘no’ box – because I never even thought that I might be depressed. That was an illness and not really your fault, whereas what was going on for me was my own shameful fault – mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Perhaps I was so neurotic I could not answer such questions. That made me psychotic didn’t it? I must be so out of touch with my own reality I even invented myself. Laing was right I was divided against myself. On the one hand I was super normal, I think my score was minus two, less than zero neurosis, while on the other hand I was so fucked up I was off their scale completely.
It didn’t help that my favourite revenge tactic was to say ‘fuck you!’ by having such a wild time. All that making love, getting high and dancing required those demons of mine to be well and truly locked away, behind triple deadlocks, chain locks and combination locks where I never wrote down the numbers and so forgot them. Forgot I’d ever done any locking up at all. Sex, drugs and rock and roll released energies imprisoned by rigid bourgeois culture. We all knew that – Article 1 of our new faith. It seemed in my case to also involve, locking away other energies - my fears, despair, insecurities and need. For a time anyway. Somewhere I knew that if I had allowed those genies out the bottle, I would have gone the way of my ancestors and been so completely ruled by my fears and insecurities, I would never have ever done anything at all. Desperate situations require desperate measures. Writing essays about the nature of the unconscious while my own unconscious was so firmly packed away, meant that I at least had an illusion that my mind and its intellectual understanding was greater than the forces of chaos and darkness. And when, as did happen occasionally, those demons escaped during an acid trip, or in some wild unforeseen energetic let-go with a lover, or dancing, or suddenly out the blue, I had no tools to deal with them other than say ‘Hello again!’ and go to bed until they went back to sleep. I had learned so much helplessness that I thought not only could I do nothing with my demons, but that no one else could either. Then another great man arrived in my life to teach me differently and bring me in from this frozen cold.

D. W. Winnicott was a famous Child Psychiatrist whose wisdom and genuine caring for parents and the children he treated, led many to love as well as respect him. I met him when he came to give a seminar at the Psychology Department. He asked to meet some of the radical students to find out for himself what we were about. Three of us were invited to have tea with the great man. We sat around in the common room, drinking cups of coffee in hot plastic cups from the machine. Steve was wearing a home made badge stating ‘You can play with my reality any day!’, and a batik kaftan with ZAPU and ZANU slogans, cause of the week - African freedom fighters. Neal was wearing a maroon and orange striped jacket, which unfortunately clashed horribly with my Biba green silk dress and the purple boots.
‘Are you going to Bickershaw for the Festival?’ I asked, balanced awkwardly on the edge of the chair. Sitting down in a mini dress is an art I should have practiced more. ‘Grateful Dead and Hawkwind are playing.’ ‘Yeah. Sure man’ said Neal. ‘I might write it up for Oz, from like a psychic politics of experience perspective, the music being a collective manifestation of the etheric vibrations of a whole generation. Woodstock meets R. D. Laing meets Ginsberg, know what I mean?’
‘Yeah.’ We all nodded meaningfully.
‘But don’t forget to take wellies and toilet paper’ added Steve, ‘remember the toilets at the Isle of Weight - Aaargh!’ We remembered.

While Steve, Neal and I discussed what the latest Captain Beefheart lyrics might mean, Winnicott chatted with Professor Kay discussing, I am sure, very different topics. Eventually we were invited in to meet the man. We walked in and he stood up to shake our hands. He laughed.
‘Should I say love and peace man?’
He turned first to Neal smiling. ‘How do you do?’
‘Fine thanks’ said Neal.’
Again to Steve, ‘How are you?’
‘Good thanks, how are you?’ said Steve. This man has such good vibes, we are all smiling now. It is my turn.
‘And how are you?’ he said, grasping my hand, holding it rather than shaking it.
He looked into my eyes as he spoke. Just those four words, each one said with a warmth that seeped right into my bones. I could not speak. He smiled into my eyes with, and there is no other way to describe it, pure love. I was shocked, no one had ever looked at me in this way before. This was utterly different from the intrusive eyes of my childhood that had stared into my soul looking for the stains and devils in there. In Winnicott’s eyes I gazed into a soul. And was struck dumb.
Now I am sure if you scraped away at the details of Winnicott’s life on a wet Monday morning in February when he had a cold and couldn’t find his reading glasses then stubbed his toe, Winnicott would look very different from the channel for love and wisdom that I met. But of course. He was human. And it was his very humanity that spoke to me.
He sensed I had been touched somewhere I had never been touched before and held my hand for longer than he needed, gently reassuring me with the pressure of his fingers that he understood.
‘Come sit next to me’ he said, patting the chair to his left.
I sat down and smiled. I dare not speak. Tears were welling up inside me, and if I had spoken I think I could not have restrained my weeping. Ancient ice in my heart was melting. There was nothing to say. He held my hand and talked with the others but I have no memory of what was said. All the communication between us was in silence.

The way in which Winnicott looked at me has stayed with me all my life. He had seen so much suffering. He had seen children in so much pain, confusion and despair they were terrified to do what children do even in the dust of poverty – play, kick a ball, pretend to ride a horse, fight and laugh with friends. He had met children too broken to even move, frozen children, terrified out of any spontaneity into a petrified goodness. He had talked with mothers who were as lost and as anxious as their children, who had hurt their babies as much as they themselves had been hurt. Yet his eyes spoke of something else, something more than all this desolation and pain. Winnicott would say again and again in his books, on the radio, to his clients, to his students, to whoever would listen, that we do not need to be perfect, none of us, all we need is to be ‘good enough’. No one had ever told me that. I had got the message I had to be perfect and, naturally, was failing, left and right, up and down, in all directions of that stalking cross.
That night I didn’t go out to party. I walked home by the longer path through Endcliffe Park. It was a clear night and through the bare branches of oak and beech trees I could see the moon. The hoot of an owl sounded to my left. I walked alone through the empty peace of the night, with just foxes, owls and sleeping birds for company, for the first time hearing the sounds of silence. I pondered what had happened with Winnicott.
You have to suffer a lot before you can look at people in the way Winnicott looked at me. He seemed to know that even in our most terrible failures and despairs, our bitter rages and devastating loss, there is a redemptive love possible that can heal us. And, what’s more, this love can happen between people anywhere. All we have to do is be vulnerable. Yet the word ‘vulnerable’ literally means ‘able to be wounded’ - take off your protective armour and it is likely that you will. The first law of the jungle is ‘eat or be eaten’ after all. Yet if we are not vulnerable to love, what chance have any of us got?
I wandered through the trees by the light of the moon. Winnicott seemed to know both the joys and the heartbreaks of human life, and to have seen through both. I hoped one day I might have such wisdom; then I too could look at someone frozen in fear, and the ice in his or her heart might thaw and melt a little. Perhaps then I could look in the mirror and fulfil an earlier promise to become that for myself. Yet you do not have eyes like Winnicott’s only when you read and observe pain, you have to have suffered yourself. Winnicott must have suffered the truth of all that innocent pain he had worked with. Is that how he knew there were hidden wounds in me? Because he had met pain so often he had developed a sixth sense for it? I had always believed pain should be eradicated, but should suffering also be experienced? So we can learn from it and uncover its meaning?
I sat down on a park bench. My whole life had been dedicated to trying to ease suffering. The suffering in my family, the souls in purgatory, the working class, the Vietnamese peasants, the suffering of the whole world. Even my own suffering came in here somewhere. But are there different kinds of suffering, some to be healed, some to be experienced? Was I wrong to imagine life was about having a good time, being happy, getting high? Is life about something else? If so what?
I reached home and undressed in the dark. I climbed into bed. The rain tapped gently on the window, the only sound as I fell slowly towards the silence of sleep.
In the morning, I woke without my familiar despair. My morning demons were silent. I lay, not plagued by dread and anxiety, but contemplating what had happened with Winnicott. He had shown me how much can happen in silence, without words, without doing. He had not spoken to me, but held my hand and it had all happened; a deep unfolding in my heart had struck me dumb with feeling.
Silence was not something I had met a lot in those days of heady revolutionary talk and intense intellectual dialogue, yet although ‘dumb’ has come to mean stupid, when confronted by the deepest realities of all, there is, quite simply, nothing to say. Communities all over the world, honour victims of terrorism, memories of war, tragedies, and death with silence, because anything said will always be less than what has happened. Yet my friends and I were rarely at a loss for words. There was always so much to discuss and argue about in the excitement of revolutions and cosmic consciousness just around the corner. Things were about to change.

A group of us went to see the first performance of Easy Rider at the Sheffield Odeon. Having heard what a great movie it was, we had planned a party afterwards with that wonderful west coast road music. We did not know the film ended with the death of exactly the same innocent freedom we were so much enjoying.
We walked out the cinema, sixteen of us, devastated. In total silence. Shocked because we already knew in our heart of hearts that the same profound darkness was creeping its way toward us.
March, the year I graduated, U.S. planes bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail in East Laos. In April US troops moved into Cambodia. In May, four student anti war protesters were shot dead at Kent State University, Ohio. In June, the Conservatives won the general election and authorised the first use of rubber bullets on protesters in Northern Ireland. Hell’s Angels killed someone during the Stones concert at Altamont. Jimi Hendrix died on his own vomit in a drug overdose. Sid Barrett from Pink Floyd went crazy. So did Brian Wilson, the genius behind the Beach Boys. Marvin Gaye was shot dead by his father. Deaths and rumours of death from ‘the dark side of the moon’ were arriving.
What the demons lying in our human soul had shown Winnicott, was slowly finding its way through to me. As it does to us all. Perhaps to destroy us. Perhaps to frighten us to death. Or perhaps to teach us we must look so deeply into our human darkness, including our own, we reach the painful wisdom that knows we are not paddling our own canoe as we may have imagined, we are all in the same boat. In which to be or not to be are equally unbearable.

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