The Universe Of Geoffrey Brown

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1993

Label: Humbug

Tracks 15 & 16 are printed on the cover in the reverse order than they actually appear.

Full text of the letter from Geoffrey Brown, as printed in the CD booklet, where (as the images demonstrate) it is in places very difficult to read:

-----

SCRAMBLED?
Yes, maybe I’m scrambled.

FRIED?
Could be.

-----

THE slate-grey Cornish sea wakes us early and the fire's still smouldering and Lizzie, the cheerful young madwoman whose kisses taste of cigarettes, runs down the empty beach. And over behind us, some young convoy ravers are gazing out to sea as the house beat subsides and electric guitars are on the wind. They told me last night, as they fiddled with their crystals that a super intelligence from somewhere out there had made contact. They spoke of crop circles and flying saucers and stone circles and celts and mixed them all up. Like trying to make a picture out of pieces from several different jig-saws.
Muddled up kids waiting for something to happen. With their raggedy dogs on bits of thin nylon rope. Mutants who don't belong anywhere. Trying to get back to some place they've never been. And if I was to tell them that there was something. That I'd found it. They'd probably be disappointed when I told them that it was only a repeated message from a long-dead civilisation. A marker-buoy blinking on and off in space as a warning. No close encounters. No star-wars. Just a super- hi-tech Belisha Beacon which says…If-your-civilisation-continues-to-progess-down-this-road-and-at-this-speed…without-regard-for-the-psychological, philosophical-and-spiritual-needs-of-your-peoples,then-your-civilisation-is-doomed. Message ends. Then repeats. Like a message on a gravestone.
"As you are now, I once was. As I am now, so will you be."

And would these kids believe me? No. In the end they'd think the same as the people in the life I left behind. Scrambled. Fried. And how do you like your brains? No. I won't tell them. I'll just be Lizzie's quiet and genial older boyfriend who knowns a bit about astronomy. I won't tell them about the Ministry. I won't tell them about the car that nearly killed me when I refused to shut up. I won't tell them about the Sunday Paper journalist watching my house for weeks and weeks. I won't tell them that the people in Whitehall knew about the message and had me quietly shoved away in the basement dealing with archives. Because they won't believe me. I'm not even sure I believe it myself anymore. It seems such a long time ago.
And I am boiling a Billy-can of tea on this fire and a Jimi Hendrix song comes back to me. You know I couldn't have thought of that song for years and then the whole song is in my head…Merman I should turn to be. No headroom for Hendrix in the Ministry. I don't miss my wooden wife. But I miss my telescope. I boxed it up and put it in the garage. For years…all through the selfish greedy eighties, this was my routine. Get up. Cycle to work. Work. Cycle home from work. Wait for Sandra to come back late from work. Sit and reason with her over an anaemic, microwaved meal as she berated me for my lack of ambition. Listen to her slam out to go to her business classes/affair with some android she met. And then my favourite part of the day. Sit up in the back bedroom on a clear night and gaze at the stars through my telescope.

-----

IT was a good telescope. I had the money for a car. But I spent it on the telescope. No contest. Sandra went mad. Then she bought her own car. Then she had her first affair…I mean Business Studies course.

I became more and more obsessed with space. On cloudy nights I'd be depressed at first. And then 1 learned a process which I call deep-space visualisation - a kind of free-ranging astral projection. I’d do that for hours. Travel light years and never leave my chair. Sandra came home from her Business Studies Affair early one night and found me sitting up there in the dark. Eyes open and completely blank. And then there was more shouting. And it all hinged on the fact that men never grow up.
According to her, if I'd grown up, we could have been a three-car household by now. We could have had that holiday in Florida. I tried to reason with her. Offered to take her to Cornwall. She just looked at me in disbelief.

-----

BUT I’M HAPPY. Not contented but happy. I lie in the middle of a sonic sandwich, caught between the driftwood firecrackle and the distant swash of the autumn sea. And I watch the stars burn holes in the black velvet sky over Tintagel in September. And I think…Yes, maybe I am scrambled. And I don’t ever want to go back. Not back to the Ministry. Not back to my love-dead marriage with Sandra. Not back to my slotted-into-the-system colleagues. Not back to my fourwalls house in Sterile Avenue. Not back ever.
They wouldn’t recognise me now. My hair’s as long as it was when I started college in ’68. I feel younger. Springy-stepped dancing fields away younger. Younger than when I first started work as a junior at the mouldy Ministry in 1975.
They make you middle-aged you know. They load the burden of responsibility onto you until you become that sag-backed donkey which they call maturity. Mediocrity is rewarded and conformity is applauded, and their society is a grey, grey city surrounded on all sides by the slag heaps of men and women’s crushed imaginations. Until, having been processed by school, programmed by college and sucked dry by work, you are free. Free in your sixth decade to sun yourself in that astro-turf garden which they call retirement.
Lizzie has changed too. The way that months off firelight, moonlight, sunlight and sea-sound can change someone. Her punk-black hair has grown out wild and witchy and is tangled in gypsy-red ribbons. Her dress is raggy and she forgets to put her boots on, or sometimes to speak, for hours. And there is an understanding between us. Because we escaped together, and we belong together. On Earth, as we do in space. Forever and ever…Ah women.
And we travel on bicycles by night and sleep in the day. And if there is a soundtrack for simple love, it certainly isn’t sloppy violins or wishy-washy torchsongs. But it might well be the high-whirring song of two bicycles going down a country lane on a windless day, softly as dandelion parachutes. And sometimes at night, if a slightly colder wind skims me, I remember the first message I decided that day at the misery Ministry.

-----

SUCH A SIMPLE MESSAGE.
SUCH A SIMPLE IDEA.
AND SUCH A SIMPLE TRUTH.

Nights and nights of late back from the office Nights and nights of complication. Of calculation. Of computation. To discover what? To discover that there is no profit in truth.
To discover that it is the job of those with power to perpetually keep those without power from discovering the truth.

-----

And Sandra. How she changed over fifteen years. I thought I’d married a revolutionary. They said at Uni. that she could recite the Communist Manifesto in the same time it took her to break into the Vice Chancellor's office and ransack the students’ personal files. She took my virginity by candle-light with Che Guevara looking down on us from the poster above her mattress. How she changed with her power-dressing and plastic hairstyles. From soapbox to soap-opera in fifteen vacuous instalments. Sharp tongue on her mind you. Growing up. Everything with her was growing up. Grow-up Geoffrey. We've all grown up now Geoffrey. That's the trouble with men. They never
grow up. If growing up meant having two cars, a hi-tech kitchen of glass and chrome and an affair with a showroom I never wanted to grow up.

But Lizzie. Nearly twenty years younger. Little punk girl on a bicycle. She reminded me of something. Reminded me of something I used to want to be. Like when you gaze down a railway track and it stretches out into the distance and you think…if I walked and never stopped I could. And I lost that thing after a few years at the Ministry. And Lizzie had that thing bubbling out of her. And eventually I drank it. And I'm still drinking it and it never runs dry. And how they laughed. And how Sandra laughed. And Simpson and the others making their flaccid little jokes in the staff bar as they anaesthetised themselves after work. But we rode bicycles and talked about space. And sex was much later…like being so absorbed in something then suddenly realising you were hungry and walking into a mysterious banquet.

-----

ANYWAY, my telescope is boxed up in the garage. I wonder if I’ll ever see it again. When the scandal broke in The Sunday Papers I overheard two of my colleagues talking about me in the toilet. They were saying I must have been looking down the wrong telescope to have Sandra go off like that. But I didn't care anymore. I got so sick of their cynicism because I think that if humanity has painted itself into a corner, then we may as well sing and dance and paint graffiti on the wall while we wait for Doomsday.

And all the time I’ve been writing, the trade winds are blowing up from the west. And they’re blowing winter closer towards us and I wonder vaguely what Lizzie and I will do. They were glad to get my resignation at the Ministry and they put some sort of a...not golden but maybe wooden handshake in my bank account.
Maybe I'll buy a caravan or something - if I can find my bank book. Lizzie thinks she might be pregnant. She told me not to worry just laughed in that mad way she has when she's been drinking rough cider and dancing stoned in the sea.

In every generation there are free spirits who have to fight and fight to stay free of conformity's restraints. Periodically a youth movement surfaces in support of that freedom, because hope seeds more easily in new ground. But in the end, Time and Tiredness overcome all but the strongest spirits and the movements fade away after a brief flowering. These free spirits have more in common with each other than with anyone else in their immediate surroundings. So that when two people like Lizzie and myself meet, after years of fighting along, our empathy is stronger than family ties, working partners, social class, generation span or peer groups.

And always out there in the rock-strewn night there are the shining stars. The distant burning suns of yesterday whose light still reaches us now. As it reached all the other free spirits down through all the years. As it reached all the lonely, defiant creatures across the centuries who were curious enough to simply look up and wonder.

-----

And this beach is colder now and smells of sea spray. And the seagulls sound like the lonely wives of missing mariners. And the Ministry and all the past editions of me are farther away than ever. And somewhere in the red-brick suburbs some solitary bespectacled teenage boy is unpacking a telescope or playing with a computer. Or some unhappy puzzled girl is looking up at the sky and worrying about her physics exam. Hope they find what they're looking for.
And I hope they break out. And I hope…full stop. But then I would. Because I'm scrambled.

Geoffrey Brown
Somewhere near Tintagel, England
Late Twentieth Century.

[Geoff’s letter, the only communication since his disappearance, was kindly passed to Mr. Newell by Reg Gilchrist, a relative of one of Geoff’s former colleagues.]