p40 On the day of the Arts Ball I read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
It is impossible to convey the effect of reading that firework-box of statement and contradiction, directness and ambiguity, celebration and subversion, all carried along on a juggernaut of certainty. Line after incandescent line of it could be the object of profitable thought, of meditation. The line I should have focussed on was, “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.” Instead, having read it, my old thoughts being, like Swedenborg’s writings, “the linen clothes folded up,” I declared: ‘Now – I understand!’
For was I not riding, a foot on each, the tyger of wrath and the horse of instruction? And wasn’t Melanie, surely, “Energy” and I “Reason”? And as Reason is “the bound or outward circumference of Energy”, clearly I was there both to circumscribe and protect her, a tower and a wall!
It was all so clear in my head : we would come together at the Ball, and there would come that Perfect Moment. I would give her the expensive necklace I had bought for her, with the card on which I had written “You are Eternal Delight”, and she would understand, and we, the King and Queen of the Ball, would walk together into the future. The Start-rite kids.

As Melanie was one of the organizers, I was to meet her inside:
‘But where will I meet you?’
‘Find me. That’s what it’s about. Finding someone. Maybe even yourself.’

Crazily-dressed, excited figures were converging on the Art School. I had tipped my hat to craziness by painting my plimsolls as feet, hommage à Magritte.
The Victorian Gothic façade of the School had been transformed, with lights flashing in the windows and painted constructions altering its appearance, making it skewed, expressionistic, ambiguous.
I entered under the banner

“Hellzapoppin! The World Turned Up Side Down.”

Through a painted arch:

“Prankster Theatre – Do You Believe In Magic?”

Into an unlit corridor, painted black:

“The Road of Excess – Pay Before You Start.”

I entered, quoting back: “once meek, and in a perilous path, the just man kept his course along the vale of death,” sure of myself. Briefly.

For the floor of the dark corridor was uneven, sprung, covered in foam rubber, and soon I was pitching about in the dark, with squealing figures around me, I was bruised against hard objects, absorbed into softness, disorientated by thudding music, aware of flitting figures: a sweet smell and soft flesh and a whispered, ‘“the nakedness of woman is the work of god,”’ aroused I reached, touched, she was gone with a derisive laugh; an insinuating voice by my ear, ‘“better murder an infant in the cradle than nurse unacted desires.”’ Then an imp in front of me yelled, ‘“purge your mind of all hope! Leap onto joy like a wild animal and throttle it!”’ and pushed me and sent me sprawling; I protested, ‘I say …!’ and my voice was echoed back amplified, ‘I say! I say! I say!’ a mocking comedian.

I staggered through at last, shaken, embarrassed, angry, ready to complain to somebody, and out into the main hall, under yet another banner:

“The Palace of Wisdom
Energy is Evil! Evil is Hell!
Welcome to Hell!”

Before I could catch my breath and look around, I was whirled onto the dance floor by Steffie, wearing green body paint, wisps of gauze, and little else, who squealed ‘Richard! Dance with me!’ and draped herself over me, softly sweating, desirable, does she really fancy me? I felt myself yielding, oh unfelt form, ‘But I have to find Melanie,’ I whispered in her delectable ear. She sprang away from me, hissing, ‘don’t find – be found,’ closed up and drooped like a flower at night. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t …’ I began, and she ran away, laughing mockingly. I felt a flare of anger, then a hand on my shoulder. It was Bruce, in ringmaster’s outfit, complete with moustache, top hat and whip. He led me to a small table, took out two small bottles labelled “Drink Me”, lit a fat joint labelled “Smoke Me”, pulled deeply on it, quoted:
‘“I walked among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of genius, which to angels look like torment and insanity. Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Allow reversal, the contrary.” Enjoy,’ drank down his bottle, took another deep draw on the joint, gave it to me and was gone.

I was puffing quietly on the joint, pleased with the congruence of what I’d been reading with what was happening, wondering where Melanie was, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs, when a gorgon took it from me ‘ta, mate,’ and left with smoke billowing from among his snakes. I began a protesting, ‘I say …!’ suppressed it with a smile, and sipped from the bottle. Would I get bigger, or smaller? The alcohol fumes ballooned pleasantly in my head, the narcotic quicksilver smoke was cool in my veins, and before me the scene pleasantly out there, a Garden of Earthly Delights enacted by enthusiastic children. Should I watch, or join in?

A jab in the back and there was Spence, a devil with a pitchfork:
‘No rest for the wicked! Up, and at ’em! To the Abbey of Liberty with you, Thélème, fais ce que tu voudras, “the only rule: do what you would” – ah, but what would you? When is liberty, temptation …?’
And pushed me into a room densely packed with jostling, dancing bodies, coloured lights flashing, strobing, liquid slide projections rippling over sweating flesh, the floor vibrating, the Velvet Underground, menace and lyricism, leather and silk, pleasure through pain, drugs and sex, run, run, run, shiny, shiny, boots of shiny leather, press of bodies, soft and hard, perfume and sweat, a breathing panting mass, expanding and contracting, engulfing, absorbing, inviting, a man’s soft honest eyes, two girls on either side, touching, pressing, what would you? Let go. Hold on. A mouth pressed against mine, tongue in mouth, I respond, is it Melanie? Do I care? soft, luscious body, dark, no one knows, she made to pull away, I held. Hold on. Let go. She was gone. All at sea, out of my depth, legs kicking, what am I supposed to do, save myself, desperate swim to the shore, heave myself out of the room panting, look back regretfully, self-righteous.
Spence, grinning malevolently, ‘ not sure what you would? Or not sure what you should? Or not sure what Melanie would you would? But where are you in all this? Need to get it together, find yourself? Here’s the room for you – find yourself, find all your selves, face to face.’
Above the door:

“On Reflection – Instant Portraits, by Salome.
Chin up, put your head on the block.”

This room was quiet, unlit, black; just visible were head-high pillars with a small convex metal plate on each. I placed my chin on a plate and my illuminated face appeared brightly in front of me, hanging in the air, very close. I pulled back in shock, and my face disappeared. I tried again. There I was again: pressure on the plate switched on a light; I was seeing my reflection in a mirror.
This was a plane mirror, my face familiar, that I’d drawn obsessively at fifteen, who are you? trying to come to terms with me, then. Now, there, a phantom in the mirror. But where’s me here?
The next fractured my face into a chaos of small fragments; all the parts were there but they made no sense. Was that me when my controlling will wasn’t organizing the parts, making a coherent whole …? Or was it me without a spontaneous, unconscious sense of self …?
In one I had no mouth – my eyes and nose joined directly to my chin: when I cried ‘but I am what I say!’ nothing moved; and I looked at this silenced face and wondered if there was a potential me, silent, who could function in a different way.
Another broke up my face, but this time artfully, as in a cubist painting, as if offering choices of how I might see myself, be myself, how I might possibly make a different me from the parts of me, a glimmer of hope that I was not a given, that my endeavour, since adolescence, to perfect my self (but a self that had been given to me, off the shelf) was not the only way to resolve myself.
The last one, chin on: the light went on, and I was looking at the back of my head. How was that possible? La Reproduction interdit. Had I turned my back on myself? Was I walking away? Or was it an invitation to walk into the future, not looking back, an Orpheus leaving his Eurydice-self behind …?
I lifted my head. All was darkness. I followed myself out of the room, to the bar, catching up with myself just in time for me to buy myself a drink, then bought myself one in return. Cheers.

Where was Melanie? Should I be looking for her? Or throwing myself into this dionysian realm, to emerge where I would? Were these words and events opportunities, even instructions, for liberation? Or temptations to be resisted? Was this a quest, on which I must keep myself untouched to attain my goal? Or an initiation, through which I must pass in order to be transformed …? By my third pint, I realized I wasn’t having thoughts, just shuffling through metaphors.

After my fourth, I was a sentimental drunk, wandering around and observing with a feeling eye the Ensor faces, Le Chien Andalou projected on figures walking through a doorway, slides of Belsen on baroque putti cornices, seeking and not finding, standing and not being found. At last I arrived in a place of solitude, as “World of Pain” then “Little Wing” played, “outside my window, is a tree”, “when I’m sad, she comes to me”, familiarly, safely alone. Knowing that now I was ready. That if she appeared, now, walked towards me, with me opened up emotionally to her in a way I never had been, then it would all be all right.
And she did appear.
And it was all wrong.

As Hendrix faded, books, paintings, records were strewn across the floor and then, to a great fanfare, two strapping young men, in loincloths and with oiled bodies appeared, dragging a chariot across them, crushing them, to great cheers, and cries of ‘“drive your cart and plough over the bones of the dead!”’ There was one person in the chariot. Melanie. In one hand she held a lance with a pennant, “Goddess of Unreason”; in the other a whip with which, Lou Salome, she lashed the men, Nietzsche and Rée, who contorted in exaggerated Cecil B. DeMille agony, and pulled on, heads down. She was laughing, waving, blowing kisses like a Hollywood star, her revealed breasts thrust out like Liberty, throwing up her skirts a sans-culotte, the cheering rabble waving after her, gone.
And then, as the music restarted, “Light My Fire”, the crowd danced with renewed energy, frenzy even, on the broken art, throwing up shards of records and a confetti of pages torn from books, holding hands and circling and twisting in and out, whooping like savages.
I was stunned. In one action she had betrayed my anticipation, my respect for art objects, and the privileged access a lover has to his beloved’s body. Should I be broken, and creep away? Should I be stonily indifferent and dismiss her coldly from my life? No. Shamed (“shame is pride’s cloke”), furious, I went to confront her. 

I found her at last on the balcony, with Sam and the others. They were drunk, stoned, joking and chatting and soaking in each other’s company.
‘Oh, oh, here comes Mr Jones,’ Spence said. ‘Pull up a spike and sit down, Richie boy,’ casually, mockingly, insulting.
Melanie was sprawled exhausted, a dreamy, pleased, almost post-coital smile on her face, drawing on a joint. At least she had covered up.
Lying back, trying to sit up, she held out her arms to me, welcoming me to her arms, ‘Richard! Where’ve you been? ’Ve y’had a good time? Did you see it? Wasn’t it fucking brilliant? ’T’s a fucking riot down there. They’re going to tear the college apart!’ Her voice slurred, she was bright-eyed, high.
Shocked at a girl using the f word, aware of their lounging, watching insolence, unable to let go and descend into her arms, and drunker than I realized, I drew myself up, and turned into that pitiful creature (how well I knew him, how often I’d joined in baiting him), the ineffectual authority figure.
‘You,’ I said, encompassing them, ‘how dare you? You’re art students, for goodness sake, soon to be artists and teachers – how can you destroy art, our heritage, the very thing you live for?’
A cold and unyielding silence, and then individual voices: ‘we believe in art, not art objects’; ‘galleries are built with the stones of commerce’; ‘the past is compost for the present’; ‘they are decorations of the prison, ours is a new beginning.’ I looked at Sam, but he shrugged helplessly at my incomprehension. Either get on the wave or get out of the way.
With nothing in my hand, I raised the stakes, looking directly at Melanie:
‘Melanie? I’m leaving. Are you coming? Please, come. You’ve clearly had more than enough for one evening. Time to get away from these – barbarians,’ and held out my hand, summoning her.
Oohs and mock fear. Then Bruce said, ‘”the barbarians are coming! Prepare the scrolls, gather the costly gifts, assemble in the square, for the barbarians are coming!”’ Steffie, delighted, picked it up, ‘”but, I bring news – there are no barbarians.”’ ‘”No barbarians? But what will become of us? They were, after all, a kind of solution.”’ Cheers and high fives.
Melanie meanwhile was looking at me with a mixture of puzzlement and disgust. She said, ‘for fuck’s sake, Richard, either come over here and join us, or fuck off,’ a last look of appeal from me as she blew a cloud of marijuana smoke in my face. Cheers all round. I turned on my heel, as they say, and walked out.

As soon as I was outside, in the cold night air, suddenly sober, all the light and noise from inside marking my exclusion, I knew I’d made a huge and horrible mistake. I wanted to rush back in, join in, be with them, begin to understand, couldn’t, dragged myself home.

I was amazed when, hours later, she slipped into bed beside me, murmured, ‘fucking prat,’ and fell noisily asleep. I lay awake with her in my arms, longing for this ever to be.

But of course it couldn’t. Something had broken.
I left the necklace out for her, with the note, as she slept on. When I got back from college she’d gone, and left a drawing of herself with the actual necklace round her neck, looped over a nail, hanging her, and a note: “A chain around my neck! Are you trying to garotte me? Enslave me? Rings, bangles, necklaces, enclosing, controlling, restraining … why can’t you give something real – some freedom? But you don’t know how.”

Note : Read the whole of Dionysos’ Island in the drop-down menu MY BOOKS.