This essay was published in Revelations.
My friend Ben Trainin died thirteen years ago of a heart attack, brought on by an asthma attack, brought on by the complications of a compressed, involuted life: a decoction of existence. He and his girlfriend were living in a shoe box-shaped flat just off the Commercial Road in Whitechapel. The bed – where he died – was crammed under a window, from which you could see the plasticwrapped schmutter in the windows across the road. Ben was twenty-eight.
He was not a simple soul – he was complex. He came from a convoluted family with connections both bohemian and East End. He'd gone up to Nottingham University to read history, but after doing too much amphetamine he was found giving an extempore, al fresco sermon, from the pulpit of the roof of his digs.
He served drinks at the Colony Room club in Soho for the next couple of years, courtesy of his – self-styled – 'godfather' Ian Board. Then he took the Oxford general entrance paper and scored an unprecedented result. Interviewed by Christopher Hill – then still Master of Balliol – Ben was offered a place to read history. That's how we met.
Ben was fucking complex. Part of his act was to feign simplicity. Gap-toothed, tousle-haired, slack-jawed, he would gawp at me and intone 'Amazing!', 'No!', 'Really?' and 'Will!', before gurgling with giggles like an idiot. He walked with knees half bent, as if he were continually going downhill.
Ben was a giver of unexpected presents. I would be sitting in my room reading and Ben would silently tiptoe down on in. He'd deposit a book of Basho's poems, or a manual of Ch'an Zen teaching, then – still without speaking – he'd depart. From Ben I first heard the expression 'random acts of senseless generosity'.
He was brilliant and confused. One time he found me having a bad acid trip, prostrate on my bed, ensnared by a vision of an illimitable cathedral comprised entirely of screaming mouths. 'Bad trip,' he stated on seeing the state I was in. 'You need wine.' He poured two bottles of Burgundy down me, employing a furled magazine as a funnel. An hour later I was dancing to Edwin Starr's Eye to Eye Contact, at the Law Society disco.
Ben's maxim as far as drugs were concerned was 'little but often'. He constantly smoked tiny nuggets of hashish and snorted less than nugatory lines of amphetamine. With some like-minded souls we formed a rhythm and blues band. Ben loved Robert Johnson and might well have brokered a deal on his own soul in return for guitar-picking skill. Together we composed unlikely ditties. I loved him very much.
In the imbroglio of acid, speed, heroin, hashish, cocaine, philosophy, youth, literature, political protest, sex, friendship and dancing, Ben's mind frayed. The dissolution of our peer group seemed congruent with his own mind. When we left the university, Ben began to take day-returns from his own sanity. Then awaydays became bargain weekends. We pitched up in Brixton, squatting, in 1982. A very raw, very ragged time – especially for one who was frayed. One night Ben brandished a U-bend bicycle lock in my face and dared me to kill us both, batter us both to death. For someone who practised random acts of senseless generosity, the world had become a screaming, tight fist.
I saw Ben sporadically after that. He moved back to Kennington, a village a few miles outside Oxford. Initially he lived with a bizarre, obese character who was the local 'wise woman'. This was for real – I remember visiting him there and witnessing a sheepish young couple, who had come to consult her on the matter of fecundity. She was so fat she had a reinforced commode with an armchair of a seat. Ben said it was provided by the social services.
Then he moved in with a gay couple who were priests. They seemed caring men when I visited, and genuinely concerned for Ben's health and welfare, but there were nagging undertones – and even overtones – suggesting a less disinterested involvement on their part.
I was living in a borrowed flat in the Gloucester Road area during the hot, early summer of 1985. I had no money and expensive habits. One day Ben called and said he was coming over to see me for the first time in many months. In truth, I had begun to avoid him. The joint suicide attempt had been bad enough, but since then Ben had increasingly taken to interpreting the world through the dark glass of The Revelation of St. John the Divine.
He carried a pocket bible – leather-bound as I recall – with him wherever he went. In the midst of always turbulent, disconnected discourses, he would wrench the tome out and brandishing it cite the applicable prophecy and provide his own piece of exegesis, which constituted impossibly spidery marginalia. Disturbingly his references were always correct – the last piece of mental viability left to him. Montaigne said: 'In my part of the country we call a man who has no memory "stupid".' Ben was never stupid. He spoke of the sharp two-edged sword (1:16), and the utility of communion with he who has 'the keys of hell and of death' (1:18).
Like many people who are teetering on the edge of psychosis – one foot rammed hard in the door of perception lest it slam shut forever – Ben found in Revelation an awful, immanent level of identification; an apparently fixed point around which his own frail psyche
could orbit and then fission. Ben didn't subscribe to any, one view of the meaning of Revelation – he subscribed to them all.
I'm not certain that Ben's illness was ever adequately diagnosed. I do know that he was receiving some kind of help or treatment at the time of his death, but I don't think they'd yet managed to hammer this beautifully rounded persona into a square hole of psychopathology. My hunch is that he was manic-depressive. Perhaps now, with improved drugs, better cognitive approaches, Ben might have been saved – but I doubt it.
For there was an anguished level of insight in this man's disintegration. Even as he ran over – for the nth time – the precise equations that decoded the numerological content of Revelation – four beasts times seven seals, times twelve tribes of twelve thousand – he would still find himself hectored by the furies of his own reason, and pulling himself up short expostulate 'Of course, it's all a load of superstitious bollocks really.'
So Ben paced around the spacious, unpaid-for flat on this hot, early summer day. He wanted us to do this together, and to go there. He thought we ought to
consider becoming such-and-such, or dedicating ourselves to this particular cause. And all of it was derived from Revelation, all of it was coextensive with – and tantamount to – the determined, ordained, god-directed universe.
He wanted me to go to the Natural History Museum with him, but I wouldn't. He scared me. When someone you love is veering in and out of sanity it's straightforwardly terrifying. They may have their foot rammed in the door, but if they let go the draught could suck you out of rationality along with them; expel you into a screaming void of the id.
Ben said goodbye to me, or rather he said he had come to say goodbye to me. He pocketed the small book of no calm and he left. He died a week later.
He wouldn't have – didn't – want to be in the condition he was. I believe he willed himself to death. On the despairing grapevine that sprang sand roots in the long hours immediately after his death, time and again I heard from other friends and lovers that Ben had been by that preceding week; that he had cropped up for the first time in months; that he had said he was coming to say goodbye – not simply said 'goodbye'.
A few months later I was ordering a takeaway in a fried chicken joint on Haverstock Hill when elements of a familiar litany came floating to me: an anti-prayerful, desperate incantation. It was the hulking man standing next to me in the queue, frayed jeans sagging open at the fly to reveal NHS issue pyjama bottoms underneath. We were – I internally acknowledged – within the crazily paved precincts of the Royal Free Hospital, that ziggurat of social hygiene. The man – who, non-pejoratively was clearly suffering from an array of schizoid symptoms – was speaking of that woman: 'And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.'
His speech was Roman, then italicised, then capitalised. It was his own, private revelation.
I became, if not exactly fixated, at any rate intrigued by this seam of perverse Biblical exegesis, which was being squeezed out from the minds of the insane like variegated toothpaste ejected from a tube. I would lend an ear to any inapposite mutterer or street ranter I chanced upon, confident that in at least one out of three hits, there would be revelatory pay dirt.
I read The Book of Revelation once – I never wanted to read it again. I found it a sick text. Perhaps it's the occlusion of judgmental types, and the congruent occlusion of psyches, but there's something not quite right about Revelation. I feel it as an insemination of older, more primal verities into an as yet fresh dough of syncretism – the NeoPlatonists still kneading at the stuff of the messiah. The riot of violent, imagistic occurrences; the cabalistic emphasis on numbers; the visceral repulsion expressed towards the bodily, the sensual and the sexual. It deranges in and of itself, and sets the parameters, marshals the props, for all the excessive playlets to come. In its vile obscurantism is its baneful effect; the original language may have welded the metaphoric with the signified, the logos with the flesh, but in the King James version the text is a guignol of tedium, a portentous horror film.
I have read the exegetical texts on Revelation and I have read the book itself several more times. I feel no closer to understanding what it is about. Not in the obvious senses – I appreciate the status of Hebraic and early Christian prophecy as pure revelation, decoupled from the mere temporal causality, spatial contiguity – but in the sense that I cannot empathise with this piece of writing, I cannot feel what it might be like to feel it.
Last night I plugged into the internet and went looking for Revelation. Funny how the dead get deader. Ben was dead from the moment he died, but five years after his death he was deader, and now he's deader still. I know this because of the anachronistic quality of my vision of him: if he were to be resurrected now, he would look out of place next to my full colour VDU screen, with its weary emphasis that what you see is what you get.
I keyed it into a not especially vigorous search engine, keyed in the bald awfulness of it: The Book of Revelation. Hit the return key and waited. The screen departed as a scroll when it is rolled together and I was offered a choice of 2,666,896 web sites. And these were by no means all 'Top 10 Revelations in Marcia Clark's New Book'. Oh no, if only. No, they were the real McCoy: the apocalyptic visions visited on the wired generation in the here and now of Christian-defined 1998. They no longer have to mutter in fast food outlets, they no longer have to address themselves to bare precincts, their only witnesses scurrying fast in the opposite direction. Now they can make the screen depart as a scroll when it is rolled together.
Our sense of the apocalypse is steeped in the language of Revelation. In this century the star called Wormwood has fallen, and the sea has become as black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon has become as blood. We have heard the silence – about the space of half an hour – that accompanied the opening of the seventh seal, yet still we are here.
I have no truck with personal immortality – it is the dross of the opium of the people. I have no time for the conception of humans as born in sin, screaming for redemption. If Revelation conjures up one single feeling in me, as we stand on the cusp of a new millennium, awaiting television retrospectives that will occupy the space of many hours, it is one of superstitious awe, 'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair'. To think this ancient text has survived to be the very stuff of modern, psychotic nightmare.
Not only the good die young – but some do.
In memory of Benjamin Gregor Trainin, 1957–85
