mhuzzell | Like Icarus ascending... on beautiful, foolish arms

On Wednesday/Thursday I went to help blockade at Faslane nuclear base. It's a long story, a story of failure. I'll edit later to tell it.

ETA, as promised: On Wednesday afternoon we made our varied and secreted way to a place near Faslane. We were planning to blockade Coulport, which is where they launch the nuclear submarines. Coulport has three gates, two of which were to be blocked by tripods with people balanced atop them, the other by people locking their arms together through tubes and lying down in the road. See, the police aren't allowed to hurt people unnecessarily, so the blockades rely on people putting themselves into positions--in the middle of the road--where the police can't move them without hurting them. It is a beautiful and striking contrast to other non-violent actions of years past.

Our group was to do the tubes blockade, since the others had been training with their tripods for quite some time. I had come to support, not actively blockade, so while the others practised with the tubes, Corinne and I were shown the long, complicated route through the woods to the gate we were to blockade.

That evening, after dark, one of the organisers decided that since the tubes were so heavy--and the route so rough and boggy--it would be best to stash the tubes near the gate ahead of time. So he, I and another guy drove to a place near the gate to stash the tubes. The access road to the gate was pretty long, so he said there was no need to be right on it to blockade--and we stashed the tubes in a place along the road that was not even in sight of it. Then he led us back through the woods, but via a completely different route than the one I had learned before.

So in the morning, when I tried to lead people to the stash so they could blockade, we couldn't find them, and neither could the other guy who'd helped stash them. We got lost trying to look for them. I eventually got my bearings from my daylight tour the day before, but was still unable to find the place where we'd hidden the tubes. But I could find the gate, so I led us up towards it, thinking that the tubes could not be that far away from it. But by this point it was late in the morning, the other two blockades had gone up, and the cops and their dogs were swarming around the gate. We were spotted (or smelled) and escorted back to the public road.

Worse, because our blockade never went up, the two tripod blockades were essentially ineffective--a mere nuisance, not a barrier--since they could just direct traffic through the unblocked gate we were supposed to be at. And though I was apparently absolved by the others in our group--after all, I was trying to take us up an extremely complicated route which I had seen once, backwards, in the dark, and the other guy couldn't find it either--but I still can't help but feel responsible. I was supposed to know the way, and I couldn't remember it, and that fucked up the whole operation.

Failure is the theme of the week. Right now I need to finish an essay. An essay that was due on Friday--though my tutor has kindly granted me a last minute extension until Monday. Unfortunately, I still have no idea how to write it. I thought it was something I was interested in--the role of gender in historical writing--but unfortunately merely being interested in something does not entail being able to successfully analyse it. I'm starting to re-think my desire to 'dip-across' to take the Social Anthropology course on Sex and Gender next year. If I can't handle this essay, in a subject I have studied extensively, how am I going to manage a whole course in a whole new department?

Maybe it's just my weird mental state at the moment. I can't seem to concentrate on anything. Every time I sit down to try to work, I just slip away into a half-dream. Like tonight, I came in after the garden party fully intending to sit down and pound out a few pages of this essay... and instead I've just sat here, checking and re-checking the same websites over and over, listening to Joni Mitchell's 'Amelia' (2002 Orchestral Version) on repeat. I feel like my brain is under six feet of loose soil.

I need to get my head straight. That would help clear things up. I'd been wondering whether my recent insomnia was causing my messed up mental state, or whether the messed up mental state was causing the insomnia. Now that semi-regular sleep has been restored (with the aid of sleeping pills), it's becoming quite clear that it was the latter. I don't know what's wrong with me lately. Or maybe I know exactly what's wrong--and if so, that scares me even more.