Where the Halling Valley River Lies, Carl Halling [urban books to read txt] 📗

his compassion would soon suffer, a process that would prove excruciating to him.
That’s not to say he ever fully stopped being a caring person, because he certainly didn’t, and he continued to be repelled to the core by those artistic revolutionaries who advocated actual physical violence. At the same time, he slavishly certain favoured artists who sought the total demolition of the established order, a consequence that inexorably results in increased crime and violence….not that this occurred to him at the time.
This nihilistic love of destruction kept uneasy company with a high and mighty dudgeon towards what he perceived as social injustice, and among its chief targets were dictators on the right wing of the political spectrum - in fact, the political right as a whole - and while he also opposed left-wing oppression, he reserved his real animus for the right.
The 1980s was a decade of protest and riot in the UK, and all through its years of raging discontent, David allied myself with one radical lobby after the other, including Greenpeace, CND, Animal Aid, Amnesty, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, which published one of his characteristically apoplectic letters of protest.
And he marched against the looming nuclear threat in London and Paris, and was a remorseless disseminator of rants, pamphlets, tracts, postcards, and whatever else was at hand as a means of spreading a message of social revolution.
He would ultimately contend that his was the self-righteous fury that is rooted in a false notion of the perfectibility of Man, that fails to recognise that oppression stems from the sin we all share, and that has no real satisfying motive other than its own existence. But at the time, he knew nothing of any of this.

In the summer, a faction from Leftfield, culled mostly from the Drama department, took Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” to the internationally famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in their production, Shakespeare's Illyria was transformed into a Hippie paradise, with David playing Feste as a Dylanesque minstrel strumming dirge-like folk songs with a voice like sand and glue.
Most of the Leftfield players’ male contingent couldn't have deviated more from the politely liberal norm found nightly at the Fringe Club on Chambers Street if they’d tried. Among the wildest were Vinny, a dashing Britalian of passionately held humanitarian convictions who played Sir Toby Belch, David, the anarchic product of multiple social and educational influences, and Jez, a tough but tender Scouser with slicked back rockabilly hair, who played Malvolio in a mesmerisingly understated manner.
Jez was a fascinating, charismatic guy with a hilariously dark sense of humour who may have been in a band in the early ‘80s at the legendary Liverpool Post-Punk club, Eric’s. He and his girlfriend Gill, who'd designed the flowing Hippie costumes, and was also a very dear friend of David’s, never stopped encouraging him nor believing in him:
“I think you should be one of the greats, David,” he once told him, “but you've given up and that's sad. When I'm 27, I'd be happy to be like you. In your writing, make sure you've got something really unbeatable...then say...
'here…!'”
Yet, while he was complimented by many at Leftfield, others betrayed their disquiet with their words, as if he had the power to remind them of the true tragic essence of sed non satiata:
“You give to everyone, but are incapable of giving in particular.”
“I’m afraid…you’re inscrutable. You’re not just blasé, are you?”
“I’m afraid there’s something really troubling you, that you don’t want to tell anyone.”
“There’s a mystery about you…you change.”
“I like it when you really feel something, but then it’s so rare.”
“Don’t go away so long like that, David, it worries me.”
“Disabused.”
“Blind, deaf, indifferent.”
David’s relationship with Leftfield was one of the great passions of his life…and one destined to haunt him for the remainder of his days, as if he knew he’d never know such depth of intimacy again…and be increasingly prey to the torment of fading affect.
Then the following year…his second at Leftfield…he lived in an upper floor apartment in Golders Green with his close friends from the French department, Seb, a former Sedbergh School alumnus, and fellow northerner Stephen, whose alma mater was Sedbergh’s age-old rival, Ampleforth, a Catholic college largely run by Benedictine monks.
Steve was an incredibly gifted pianist and guitarist who despite a misleadingly serious demeanour was a warm, affectionate, witty, eccentric character who endlessly buzzed with the nervous energy of near-genius. He might not have wanted to ape the way his flatmates dressed and behaved, but he was fiercely protective of them despite their social butterfly ways.
And David was determined to live like an aesthete, even if it meant doing so on a shoestring in a cramped little flat in suburban north London, which was hardly the city of dreaming spires, and to this end he organised what he optimistically termed a salon, which although well-attended didn't survive beyond a single meeting, for as aesthetes, David and co. fell pathetically short of the new Brideshead generation that was thriving at Oxford in the wake of the TV series.
But David couldn’t have cared less…for self-doubt simply wasn't an issue for him in the early eighties and he was a truly happy person; in fact so much so that he may have exaggerated his capacity for depth and melancholia as a means of making himself more interesting to others.
In the final analysis though, what possible reason was there for him to be discontented, given that his first two Leftfield years were fabulous...an unceasing cycle of plays, shows, concerts, discos, parties set in one of the most beautiful and bucolic areas of London?

After the second year ended in the summer of 1983, David had a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant at a Lycée Technique in the suburb of Bretigny-sur-Orge in Essonne.
This spelled his exile from the old drama clique, and he'd not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must surely have affected him. He was, after all, severing himself from a vast network of gifted friends of whom he was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. He could have opted for just a few weeks in France, but did he really want to be deprived of the chance of spending more than six months in the city he’d long worshipped as the only true home of an artist?
Earlier in the year, his close friend Madeleine, a brilliant dynamic woman of North African Jewish ancestry had told him something to the effect that while many were drawn to him, it wasn’t just in consequence of any magnetic attractiveness he might have possessed:
“They sense death in you,” she chillingly opined.
Cognizant as she was of the intellectual worldview of the great psychologist Sigmund Freud, who identified a death drive subsequently dubbed “thanatos”, she may have divined some kind of will to destruction within him…or rather, self-destruction.
As things turned out, she was right in doing so, although this was barely embryonic in the early '80s, if it existed at all, but he would ultimately attribute its existence to a cocktail of intoxicants, namely, alcohol, the occult, and intellectualism, and to be of the belief that each exerted a terribly negative effect on his development as a human being.
It was not, he would contend, that intellectualism is evil in itself, but that intellectuals are more tempted than most by pride, rebellion and sensuality, and that the same could be said of those blessed with great wealth, great beauty, and great talent. He’d see intellectuals as among the most powerful men and women in history, and the Modern World as having been significantly shaped by the wildly inspired views of men such as Rousseau, Darwin, Nietzsche, and especially Marx and Freud.
To the man he’d become, their theories fanned the flames of a largely bloodless revolution in the 1960s, and rather than fade once the latter had been largely quenched, set about infiltrating the cultural mainstream where they became more extreme than ever, and so to enter the realm of the Post-Modern, while remaining the ultimate consequence of centuries of Modernist influence on the Judaeo-Christian fabric of Western civilisation.
However, David was never a true scholar like Madeleine, so much as someone who was both troubled and fascinated by the idea of hyper-intellectuality. Reading Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" in the early '80s, he especially identified with those intellectuals who were tortured by their own excesses of consciousness such as T.E. Lawrence, who wrote of his nature as being “thought-riddled”.
As a child he’d been extrovert to the point of hyperactivity, but by the time of his late adolescence, found himself subject to rival drives of equal intensity, one towards seclusion and introspection, the other, attention and approbation.
In his quest for the latter, he subjected his body, the creation he tendered so lovingly at times, to a ruthless almost derisive work ethic, and to stimulate this, he consumed a variety of intoxicants, not just because he enjoyed doing so, but because they enabled the constant socialising that brought him the affirmation he so craved…what could be termed a narcissistic supply. How else to explain the sheer demented fervour of his endless self-exaltation?
That’s not to say that he wasn't a loving person, because he was; but precisely what kind of love was it that he spread so generously about himself? One thing it wasn’t was agape, the perfect, selfless love described in 1 Corinthians 13.
He was hardly less heartless towards his mind than his body, treating it as an object of research and experimentation. Little wonder then that he turned to drink as a means of pacifying it, although alcohol still wasn't a serious problem for him in the early '80s, when his exhausting daily regimen tended to be fuelled instead by massive quantities of caffeine tablets. That said, Madeleine didn't like it when he drank to excess, as if she'd already singled him out as someone who'd go on to develop a drink problem. In this as in other things she showed remarkable insight.
"Your friends are too good to you…it makes me sick to see them...you don't really give...you indulge in conversation, but your mind is always elsewhere, ticking over. You could hurt me, you know...you are a Don Juan, so much. Like him, you have no desires...I think you have deep fears...it's not that you're empty...but that there is an omnipresent sadness about you, a fatality..."

In the autumn of 1983, David took residence in a room on the grounds of his allotted Lycée in Brétigny-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris some sixteen miles south of the city centre.
It was during those early days in Paris that he became infected by a serious sense of self-disillusion, as a new darkness spread over his mind.
This sea-change marked the onset of a real drink problem that went way beyond the usual student booze-ups into the murky realm of drinking alone by day, and which David would ultimately attribute to a conscience that was starting to become calloused through repeated defilement. His well-being, however, remained relatively unaffected, in fact, for those first few months, he was happy, blissfully happy to be a flâneur in the city which had inspired so many great poets to write classics of the art of urban idling. He wrote of his own experiences, usually late at night, in