Five of Chalices: 'Disappointment...... loss, but something remains over....... flaw....... the fire has gone out but the raven has not forgotten beauty....'

Part One

There were issues in the commune for sure. There were Mottie issues, for example: woman issues, sex issues; or lack-of-sex issues. This had become a deepening preoccupation for Mottie. At the age of nineteen, he needed to get it on. There was a young lassie he worked with, who he was moderately infatuated with. They spent time together but ..... nothing happened. Mottie was a friendly, good-natured guy, but the combination of lack of confidence and gentlemanly decency prevented events from going further. He was worse than me in this respect.

The situation was starting to drive him crazy; I sensed he was getting unhinged. His inner turmoil brought to the surface his Irish blood, which manifested in the form of rather large quantities of Guinness disappearing down his throat. He would return home in the late evening from a pub or a party, put Free or Bad Company on the record player, and listen on headphones. He played the music so loud that the rest of us could hear the bands playing clearly. This wouldn't have been so bad, except that we weren't even in the same room. The music came through the living room walls into the kitchen, and I became convinced that he was doing serious damage to his eardrums.

Inevitably, the Guinness expenditure was compromising Mottie's contributions to the commune's farm-in-the-country fund. They were nowhere near so compromised as those of Liberty Fox, however. He, too, had issues - in my eyes, at least. He had long ago seemed to abandon any notion of finding paid employment and making any meaningful financial contribution to the commune. He was a great guy, a brilliant friend, and I wouldn't have come through without him. But he stayed home all day studying runes and Egyptian hieroglyphs while I was out in the cold and rain delivering letters to the residents of north Oxford. It really began to get to me.

One noonday I returned home from another seven weary hours of letters and parcels to find Liberty Fox still curled up in bed. "Time to get up, lazybones" I quipped lightheartedly as I whipped the bedclothes off his sleeping body. Immediately he leapt up and was standing next to his mattress. "Give them back to me" he snarled. "Time to get up" I persisted. "Give them back." 

I looked at him. Jaw set, eyes ablaze with fury, he was prepared to hit me very hard if need be. "There you go" I sighed, realising the gravity of the situation. I trudged upstairs wearily to make myself a cheese sandwich. Meanwhile, Liberty Fox rearranged his bedclothes and continued his Rip Van Winkle studies.

Part Two

This illustration of Liberty issues leads neatly into the next topic: my own issues. After a year of fifty-or-sixty-hour working weeks, I was feeling the strain. Although the days of long overtime hours were over, and I was working basic shifts only, this still entailed attendance at the coal face at 4.30 or 5.00 am six days a week. I felt that I had dedicated myself fully to the communal cause. That others, from my perspective, weren't doing the same was leading to a growing creeping resentment.

From early childhood I had been capable of embracing a vision, readily making personal sacrifices if that was required for the fulfilment of the dream. That's fine while everything is hunky dory. But if things begin to wobble....

Months back, during the heat of midsummer, Liberty and Dave had gone down to Liberty's allotment that he kept going in Surrey. They returned with a big sackful of parsnips, which needed eating, and soon. Immediately, I was gobbling down parsnips twice a day. It was one morning at four o'clock, when I was shovelling down a large plateful before work, that the revulsion hit me. There's only so many parsnips you can eat before you begin to hate them. Nobody else had adopted the parsnip diet; why should I? It was the acting out of my own personal vision, nothing more. A couple of weeks later the compost heap had a field day. 

I was replaying an old habit: over-responsibility, over-compensation, for perceived shortcomings of the world around me. The complex had played itself out dramatically when I manifested as the starving vegan; and I had watched it with barely-concealed alarm at Larling two years ago, when Richard was to be seen slaving away in the fields while everyone else went off to play. And here I was, living it out all over again.

And Dave? Unlike the rest of us, he didn't seem, to me at any rate, to have any special issues. He just got on with things: making porridge, driving his van, complaining about work colleagues over lunch, digging the allotment, playing Dylan on his guitar in the evenings. That, as I saw it, was the life of Dave. 

Actually, there was an issue; it was interpersonal. We saw the commune in different ways. For him it was a socio-political thing; for me, it was more of an experiment in consciousness. These differences played out in how we viewed one another. At times I found him narrow, reductionist, morose, almost 'straight'. And for Dave I could be flighty, dangerous even, a half-demented uncontrollable mystic. The rift had appeared in the 'numb-or-detached?' incident at Windsor, and it increasingly caused tension between us as time passed.

We were both, in our own way, right. It was the lack of respect for the other's viewpoint which led to the friction which emerged on a regular basis. Things never got properly confronted or discussed. 

Repercussions remain. I was a decent photographer, but I decided to disdain taking pictures. It was the Zen thing: live in the Here and Now. And the Here and Now has no need for morbid records of the past. Pictures are for spiritual pansies. Dave, of course, had a camera, and took plenty of photographs. Whether they were any good, I have no idea. But the result is an almost total absence of personal pictures from the period.... 

Part Three  

Meanwhile, downstairs things were going awry. From being a cheerful and helpful landlady who was genuinely interested in our commune project, D was steadily morphing into a gaunt, pale figure carrying a busload of personal cares and worries on her Canadian shoulders. Mention of her over dinner was increasingly evoking words like 'irritating', 'neurotic', and 'depression'.

She would hear our footsteps coming down the stairs of our flat, then emerge to accost us with tales of woe as we were attempting to get to work, the allotment, wherever. Just getting out of home began to become a bit of an issue. Liberty Fox, in particular, took exception to having his energy sucked dry without his permission. We increasingly felt ourselves to be living above a transatlantic vampire.

Liberty, Mottie, and Dave all devised complex strategies of escape and avoidance, leaving - surprise surprise - big softie me to bear the brunt of these vampiric attacks. I clearly presented as a more suitable dumping ground for D's many cares and worries.

Then Michael moved in. Michael was D's son. He sported a young Abraham Lincoln lookalike beard, though there the resemblance came to an end. He wore a faint yet constant smile on his face; I knew to be wary of people with faint yet constant smiles.

One day D's daughter turned up on the doorstep, complete with newborn baby. She left soon after, leaving Michael and D literally holding the baby. No-one ever received a proper explanation, but it was a truly bizarre situation - a baby with surrogate parents consisting of grannie and mummy's brother.

Very soon a host of more rigorous standards were informally required by the household below. Michael took on a new role - doing D's dirty work for her. He would supervise the work-for-rent gardening sessions, increasingly rare until abandoned completely as relations deteriorated. 

More importantly, he became noise control manager. 'Could you keep the noise down? Could you turn the music down? The baby can't get to sleep' became the words most typically issuing quietly from his lips. If we failed to hear his ghostly taps on our front door, he would just let himself in, appearing unannounced as we ate dinner or listened to music.

On one such evening he knocked on the living room door and entered, to find Liberty dancing in complete abandon to some symphony by Vaughan Williams. 'Can you turn the music down, please?' Piss off. Except we were too polite to voice our feelings. He returned downstairs, where conversation undoubtedly centred on the noisy, unruly, decadent bunch of hippies they had mistakenly allowed to move into their flat. 

Part Four

As if things weren't bad enough already, Spacey Dave Cummins moved in. We were eager for fresh blood, but Spacey Dave wasn't quite what I had in mind.   

He had had an argument with his landlady, or got thrown out, or been behind with his rent, or something. So there he was with us. Liberty and Dave seemed to get on famously with him, but I just didn't click. In terms of the four physical elements, Spacey Dave was 100% air. He spoke in hushed, whispered tones, and would lope around the flat silently like a visitation from the Realm of the Deathless. I would be in the kitchen when he padded ethereally up the stairs in his Jesus sandals, to materialise in the kitchen and scare me to death.

I seemed to perversely get on better with people who had an edge to them - even sometimes unpleasant folk like Gus Boater from the Black and Decker days. I liked Lou Reed, Jim Morrison. No. Spacey Dave was not my type. And in addition, I suppose I perceived him as another drifter, a hanger-on, another burden on the commune's resources.

One day, Spacey Dave decided to make a contribution: he would cook evening meal. It was actually delicious, a wok-stirred medley of vegetables flavoured with mixed herbs. "Do you like my cooking with herbs?" he asked quietly. "Oh yes" we replied in unison. Big mistake. From then on, every evening it would be cooking with herbs. Potatoes with herbs, parsnips with herbs, pasta in herbs, herbs with more herbs. I'd have preferred to die a long painful death from inadequate nutrition than put up with another herb-laced offering.

Then, one day without warning, Spacey Dave left. I paid no attention to how, where, and why. I didn't care. But I shed no tears. 

Image: 5 of Chalices (Cups): Witches Tarot

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