Fripp's rules for Bill Bruford, 1981

 

When I said monastery I meant of his ten month course in Sherborne. He wrote about his experience:

 

 Fripp gave one of his accounts of his Sherborne year when Stephe Pritchard, during the 1981 Recorder Three interview, asked him, "In what ways do you think Gurdjieff has influenced you?" Fripp answered, "Well, I probably wouldn't be here now, certainly not in this form, if I hadn't come across that." Fripp described how, during the ten-month course at Sherborne, students were allowed to leave the premises only one day every three weeks. "We lost three people to the asylum in my year and overall twenty per cent [of the students] left ... It was very, very hard work; it was the difference between working on the inside and the outside, that if you're feeling a bit pissed off you can go to the pictures or watch television or get drunk or do whatever. But in Sherborne you had to sit there and find a way of dealing with it - the expression would be working with it - not easy. The woman I was living with left me while I was there which was awful for me - I was pretty suicidal - it was not easy. But, on the other hand, that was certainly the beginning of my life, if you like." Fripp went on to describe the day's regimen, which began with rising at six in the morning (at four-thirty if one had kitchen duty). Morning psychological exercises were conducted at quarter to seven, followed by breakfast at seven thirty. At eight-thirty began the day's work with practical skills, including metal work, stonemasonry, carpentry, and so on. "In addition to practical work we had cosmological lectures, there were remarkable Gurdjieff movements, sacred kinesis; but essentially it was very practical, the school wasn't primarily theoretical." Many issues that came up during the year "confounded the mind," proving unamenable to rational analysis. The living quarters were cold, uncomfortable, and lacked privacy (Fripp shared a dorm room with five other men). Psychologically provocative situations constantly arose among the residents. And to top it off, Fripp even came to believe the house was haunted.