Memoir Mondays: Ft. Jack Sargeant
Early Derangements
Dear Reader,
I’m very lucky to present to you a memoir by British writer Jack Sargeant, a friend who I used to run a monthly event called The Decadent Society with. We mostly looked at all things bizarre, indulgent, shocking, outrageous and taboo through artists, poets, performers, scholars and priests even! It was a very eclectic group.
For a reading of Alister Crowley’s Leah Sublime, I arranged for a model as a living art installation to be nude, covered in fruits for the guests to eat from like a scene from one of Salvador Dali’s surrealist dinner parties, while we served chocolate mud cake and passed around a bag of white wine, that made that “wshhing” noise. If you read the poem you’ll understand. Anyway, I was a wild teenage punk then and Jack was my transgressive resource and cheerleader!
Some of his books include Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression and Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. He has contributed to numerous books on subjects ranging from Andy Warhol movies to road rage and car crash songs (my personal favourite). Enjoy!
Early Derangements
Memories are always unreliable, and some of the geography here may be incorrect, yet I resist any urge to check.
I’m in the street, my breath makes mist in the chill November air. The road is lined with shops, above which are small flats, for a few months when I was eight I lived in one, but that was in the past. The road rises up a steep hill towards the war memorial, the centre of the small town, now shrouded in night. Burning wooden torches litter the gutters, pushed by Bonfire Boys into small piles where they smoulder in the night alongside broken glass and beer cans, the smoke rising from embers pungent with creosote. In the distance I can hear marching bands and the cacophonous rattle of drums. Sometimes a drunk will walk past and kick the torches, then they explode into a shower of unruly sparks. More torches are dropped still smoking into the gutters as people walk towards distant hillside bonfires or overcrowded pubs or parties in people’s homes.
Somewhere in the flickering orange darkness behind me, my family and their friends are drinking beers and talking. But I am nine or ten and more interested in the flaming torches. My urban childhood explorations have encountered little to compare to these midnight streets and the chaotic eruptions that have driven the dark winter evening. Distant blasts punctuate the sky with silver, red and green showers of chemical fuelled light, the explosive percussions vibrating the narrow streets and twittens.
Picking up the remains of a flaming torch from the street their construction becomes clear, some kind of material is wrapped around the end of a wooden stave, often the fires have been reduced to a smouldering yellow glow, but picked up and held aloft even a faint gasp of air can be enough to rekindle the flame into a brief dance. Those that are piled can return to momentary life when kicked with my boots. The flames briefly sparking. Sometimes an adult will tell the small groups of children or teenagers to stop, but more often they walk passed huddled in the excitement of the cold smoke-filled night.
Later, but not on this night, I will see a flaming barrel pulled and rolled down the narrow streets, the clatter of the tarred wood against the road, the roar of the crowd, the cheers of Bonfire Boys and the exultations of the small but determined mob echoing through the air. I will follow the procession of drunken revellers onto the near-cliff walls that form the pit in which a massive bonfire that radiates scorching heat burns. I will stand supported by the sheer mass of the people as smaller rockets are fired across the bonfire and exploding terrifyingly close to us, as we cheer and bay for the annihilation of all rationality.
Now, these youthful brief moments seem definitive.
They were not the first times I felt the possibilities and potentials of chaos, but they were the first time I could recall being so energized by it, responding not simply to the excitement but the awareness that such a derangement could become a source for something more than the experience itself. An awareness that beneath the everyday there was a potential for a gleeful destruction of order.
This was something that I would chase again and again, not even aware that I was doing so until decades later, but sure in the knowledge that deep within these moments something could be experienced that exceeded the familiar and commonplace. Through loud music, performance, flickering images in cinemas, pornographic imaginings, Dionysian explorations, an endless quest for moments of psychic-detournement, seeking the moment beyond thinking, searching through all momentary derangements and on-going obsessions. Journeys through neglected psychic routes and imagined maps creating psychic pathways into new terrains that would once more unite me with a familiar sense of chaos.
Informal Notes:
I lived in Lewes for a few months, but through a variety of routes I would spend longer there over the years.
The town’s Bonfire Night has grown in size to become a major tourist attraction, the streets heaving with revellers anxious to witness the parades of various bonfire societies that march through the streets, but in the late seventies it was still comparatively unknown.
Bonfire night marks the Gunpowder Plot (1605), in Lewes it also commemorates the seventeen protestant martyrs who were burned at the stake in the town in the 16th Century. Historically there was an anti-papal theme present in some parts of the event, although this has decreased over the decades. Ultimately the event has something of a sense of anarchy to it and the giant effigies that are burned are often targets of contemporary ridicule and contempt, this frequently includes political figures.
Of note, Tom Paine lived in Lewes in the 18th Century.
There are seven bonfire societies in Lewes, each coming from a different neighbourhood. The Bonfire Boys are the participants in the bonfire societies, while some are in fancy dress many wear stripped jerseys, woollen hats and bulky trousers, traditionally this would have formed a generic smuggler’s disguise.
Twittens are small lanes that run criss-cross the town, flowing behind the roads. The term twitten is a Sussex term for a narrow path.
Links: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gallery/2018/nov/05/lewes-bonfire-night-parade-in-pictures