15 February 1983
The novel is the author. Reading the author.
In childhood reading anything, for the locations and something about
how people might talk to each other.
23
Rereading [Jam's letters] - the flame of fear - try to use writing instead
of understanding it - not till I was past it - realizing it was fear - of
what - that she's wrong and doesn't know - then I'm alone - that I've been
wrong and idealizing - wanting to be able to love - then I was burning in
fear - what's fear - being at the edge of a drop - then I have to go away
- but - the agony of before she went - I was it fully again - oh why did
I want her to come back, this is - is this her fear? - (it is I'm sure)
- she's impossible, what she demands, what she can't see through - we'll
never - I must go - her boiling - attacks.
Hope - thinking of being able to (make something).
Afternoon sleeping. Total fear of going on with her. I shouldn't, when
I understand she's sent me fear, not accept also the information it raises.
I'm afraid also of Rhoda and Trudy - there it is, of their intent to be
over me and its meaning, the fact that they can, rather - I have to gratefully
notice equalities.
J bluffs. How do I think she's candid, she is strikingly candid. I accept
to be bluffed and that's how I am shameable.
If I see what the contempt is - do I.
I am more afraid of destroying the object. If I see, I won't be able
to be in good feeling. I saved up somebody to love.
I wrote the forms of my weaknesses thinking - what - she'd answer the
simple appeal simply, would say: yes, what you sense is this.
I'm alone in it. She's not willing to say. That means I'm alone in being
responsible to decide what is happening and whether to stop. What is happening.
Her tears at Rhoda's door. Her holding onto my work.
What do I have to say: that if it's coming to an even choice I can't
on even terms win - careful - am I or aren't I disqualified - I don't know
- that's what's in question - the outlandishness of being a deformed body
- the dilemma of the difference in image - what would happen if I fully
- but - the (heuristic) naïvete of the pretty image - if I hold it
accurate what will I indicate - that I can't afford and know it.
In the pink room in Sexsmith sitting in bed looking across to the wall
with the dresser, mirror, oranges, saying I'm one who will have to live
alone, lucid and hysterical, starving myself, popular, wired, impressive.
26
What the blue pages are
Shift of set, shifting
The principle in the other parts is, this follows in one of different
ways. I try to do it in the way the rest has been done, by feel.
There's a dancing balancing and when I stop I try to resolve something
in meaning whereas in the other the meanings have come up lightly out of
the angles of shift of the transitions in moving.
From an uncontrolled meaning feeling I have to get a controlled one.
In the rest and ambience of suggested meaning. Those are very intimate.
Near. A working mind. Tactile.
-
On the floor, on the red carpet, listening to the radio. A point of arc-weld
blue light ticks in the room. BOOM. Little cat and I jumping up. A roar
of fire - from the kitchen, the stove, from downstairs? From outside? War?
Looking from the hall window, it's all quiet. Open the window. Rain starting
to pour down. It was lightning. Sounded and felt like an explosion in the
house.
Turn off the lights. Put up the umbrella, take the key. Rain on the awning.
Knockknock KNOCK. So briskly coming, no hesitating at the door. "I
thought I'd come and die with you." [I go across the road to T's apartment
on the third floor, corner of Hawks and Keefer] Dim light and spacey music.
Drops on the black glass. Siren, we can hear and see the red light flashing
miles away. The mail truck driving around. Streetlight flashes. We sit in
chairs in the dark. Exquisite brilliant car headlights, color rising on
the slick, the fine grain of white I see in her presence.
Blue-white flares west to east in front of her window. Source moves to
the northeast. We move to the east windows. She brings a jar from the kitchen,
opens it. Do you want a raisin. Sure. The flashes are coming weakly from
one place behind the elevators.
Sitting on either side of the table, in the dark, facing south. Drops
on the windows. Dim red light three rectangles on the ceiling. The space
of the room across to the windows. The space of the neighbourhood blocks
without streetlights. The distant city streets running with small lights.
Sounding sirens. Sirens in the music. The blue white flares into the windows.
Where was that one. It came from there. Eyes and mouths open, not looking
at each other.
1st of March
never willingly abandon a libidinal cathexis
What I was dreaming was that on my birthday Sunday I would go to the
airport and see you come through the doors and sit next to you in the bus
not talking. This shock was: ten more empty days. Behind it the other shock
talking to Sandy when she said "I thought all along this trip was her
preparation for moving back there." I said I had thought that too but
then I couldn't talk to her any more.
Let it be seen he's proof against temptation.
Then she'll feel safe enough to allow all her conditions for loving, all
the fantasies of her sexual desires, all the individual details of her way
of being in love, to come to light, and then will herself open up the way
back from them to the infantile roots of her love.
The greater the resistance the more will action
repetition substitute for recollecting. Prevent the repetitive actions,
work with the impulses.
Everything connected to the situation of the
moment (is love for the other).
Only show interest, clear away certain resistances,
become linked with one of the imagos of those persons from whom he was used
to receive kindness
I was dreaming of going on, going to the airport, being here as the garden
becomes right, working in film, finishing small ones, putting out the small
books. The conference this summer. With the way I've worked in the house
and body, working on gardens with her.
And also that she has been saying that this delay is her instinct breaking
the possibility. "I seem to be telling you by dream and reverie and
commentary and suggestion that you ar behind."
The little cat comes to my bed, strikes at my arm, likes to be nearby
now, sleeps in the middle room, the left eye crying. Her gallop in the hall
when I moved suddenly to blow my nose. She's gone down the hot air vent,
scratching as if it's earth. She's pinto. Out of the corner of my eye her
horse's walk through the room, in the country below my knee. The blue pages
are spoiled by quoting. Last winter's notes that I went through today, when
they're stripped have a beautiful light. There are the Valhalla notes and
this summer's when she sends them. I can see them learning different movements.
The blue pages are the most persistent detection.
Remembering the dream that told me I wouldn't be among the loved but
among those who work. The anguish is the suspense. When it's done could
I be less in misery than now.
If there's finishing to do it's in finding out her limits in writing.
Is that true, do I know them now. What else. I'd like to turn her abuse.
I'd like to find out what I've been too impressed by. Knowing the term I
could be willing to spoil the object. Is that true.
Why so retracted not able to enjoy characters. The answer is success.
I would have to have it recognizably.
-
In wrong-doing what goes wrong is that later I don't see what someone
else is doing because I am preoccupied wondering if the wrongness I feel
is mine.
6th
Candle flame. Steady breath-fed slight probing and falling. Ezra's bit
of bark. I show myself having seen her. Rhoda raises her hand. I raise mine.
She closes her door. I turn back to my bed. Reflection in turning of the
shoulder in the kimono.
She drew Stephen Hawking's ear and wanted to send him a picture.
The length of time learning what I admired was what I imagined from a
reserve they had with me.
- I was going to say, what is worth something is a laughter I find myself
giving in to. I begin it in what I don't know as reserve until I feel a
change of giving in.
Recurring - in bed - a slightness brief sense of something wrong in this
time - I can't refind it now - it isn't the terror of attachments, but I
think it is also in relation to death - it is closer to a sense of trivialness
- "You're going wrong" - or being in dishonesty.
-
This new subject whose theory is to be sought for
today: the friends form a network among themselves and each must be apprehended
there as external/internal, subjected by each conversation to the question,
where am I among my desires, where am I in relation to desire.
10th
Simple-minded in the way she sees me now - who sees me simple - unable
to live carefully - "It's a painful self that wants to be with the
rest of us who move more easily through each other."
Formal word-plays. Uneasy, but it's of the time.
- Where's the construction, rearrangement.
- Where's the concentrated following.
-
- Philosopher, take root.
- My childishness is god.
Is there something there's a need to do.
Fear - the abyss I know is where I feel I do whatever I do next but there
is no necessity. There's the necessity I give myself to, in order not to
be where I am feeling there is no necessity. I live in a machine of thoughts,
in order not to be where I see thoughts are nothing, don't connect.
-
When they speak about or for a man I know they do not mean me, but I
take something from them. That is to say, their work does work for me. Then
in what way am I excluded: I am excluded from their intention. They don't
mean to be useful to me; what I make of using them isn't likely to interest
them, is not their lineage. I am, to them, a blind alley. Pocket. Appendage
joined to or diverging from the axial trunk. Their work is reactive to women,
but unconsciously. Their poetic may be formed as a denial of woman's authority.
But it is what they can't afford to know. To acknowledge defense of patriarchy
is immediately to give it up: opponent is equal.
14
- What am I doing mixing with patriarch's discourse which is coded, deformed
by the keeping of prestige.
- Using patriarch discourse. "Torah bullshit."
16
- Rebecca West died yesterday.
-
- [Jamila back from Hong Kong, I meet her at the airport]
-
- The international waiting room, emotion of families. The-one-who's-coming
won't be what I'm hungry for. I wanted to ride silent on the bus differently
- feeling it's you. What was it instead: confused, she isn't glad
to see me. I am not either, this inert spirit, who set me up so I had to
be closed when I met her. The blooming streets and mountains clear today.
Pink and blue days. Hot.
-
- Then coming home to the garden. Rhoda shifs over, wants to hear, loves
the garden. The story she told about the back yard. "It was about
this size." Broken glass and earth packed down. "I vowed that
when I grew up I would make something beautiful out of it. And here it
is, and I didn't even have anything to do with it."
-
- The pool, lotus tulips, little reds; the smell of hyacinth, poplar;
chionadoxa new-opened.
-
- Red van pulls up. "Look who's here!"
-
- Saying quickly before I leave "I want something to be different,
I want you not to get in the habit again of abusing me" and the hand
going on her shoulder, "You're hunched!" She's fat and ugly and
stinks.
-
- "She's fat?" "Her face is thin, her middle is fat, she
looks quite blank." Their having loving concern makes me wonder if
I'm vicious. I made myself look nice and she isn't liking to see me. She's
fragile.
-
- Not liking the sarcastic way I talk to her: the way she is feeble.
Distressed not being able to look after her, having to be mean so she won't
be, because she would be.
-
- And when I am leaving she begins to be nice though I know what she
needs is to have me lie down by her and let her get to a tit.
17
- Going in to the meeting she's having with R thinking I must look to
see if she looks more real, then being wrung, and not looking, but to R
in the strange stiff force I only knew at the time, as a strange stiff
force, "Was there a big cry?" Hesitation. "No there was
a lot of tail wagging." Looking at Ezra clean and fat by J's chair.
"And heavy breathing." "And heavy breathing."
-
- [At night, the back room window in my house, I can see into Rhoda's
kitchen where Jam is visiting.]
In my house - how to bear it - try to sit and focus - want to go to sleep
- they have come to sit in the kitchen in the light. Is it worse to sit
in agony not watching, or watching - in the kimono sitting on the desk behind
the curtain looking at that one facing me, and that one's back - she in
her stiff face but talking talking, stiff gestures, a pulling of the lip
I don't know, barring her teeth, Rhoda is only listening and smoking, her
smoke goes up in front of J's face - that one I don't know, haven't spoken
to, and am fastened to seeing.
Her new clothes I don't like, the ugliness of her fat and stiff trunk
in the new tight jeans, baby blue and pink, dressed by Sheila, I'm watching
to see if she'll come back, the flexible face - fascinated, in agony, and
cold - she doesn't love me, she does love Rhoda - she smiles, she's thawing,
she's relieved, she's heard, she's releasing - did she ever talk to me like
that - putting her head down on the table - I've talked like that with Trudy.
She didn't answer any of my appeals - she doesn't give me a chance - Rhoda's
head at a different angle, she's in pleasure - I want to go and walk into
the scene, hear the talk, sit at a table with her being released - it will
be bad if I do - do something so it will be acknowledged that she loves
Rhoda - so I won't be holding her hopelessly - that one I don't like. She
didn't care to answer my anger - I could release her too but if I did, she'd
do something hateful, or she'd be over me not knowing I'd released her -
these are quotations - when I've gone and put my clothes on and come back
she is getting up, Rhoda gets up too, the scene is empty, then it's Rhoda
putting things away off the table, pouring the milk from the little jug
back into the box.
- 18
What is back: tremour - there was anguish but not heart tremour - bad
conscience - I wanted R to see me lying down in the garden derelict - solar,
heart, throat, beating.
20
Reading the Helmer story loving her and wanting to go right there, finding
her unloving stiffened again figuring from past error.
22
The little cat putting herself into my arm by lying on the sleeping bag,
down into the space between my arm and my side. Amazing! A magnetic thrill
traveling slowly from my feet up, ridged, I think quite gold. She was lying
still probably asleep.
After a while I tried stroking her through the thin down and nylon, my
hand was getting an exquisite sexual awakeness. The most definite experience
of field.
In J's dream she's telling her mother she's unwell because she's slept
in the same place too long, the foam has worn through.
28
What is this - seeing her mouth twitch - looking in her face a spark
of hate jumps so quietly in the solar - she's in very bad - since I spoke
to her she's - - how do I have to be - make sure of good meals, intrude
nothing from my own badness, quietly make my own judgment and act it without
discussion, have thought out the simplest way for things to be done, suggest
them without seeming competent, get ready to be unseen for a long time,
get ready for there to be no admissions, be willing to see and register
without fantasy of change, keep a separate strength immaculate, don't confuse
it with being married.
1st April
[Go to Clearbrook to see my mom and grandparents]
"Oma! Sie sind charming." Slight nice body. He and she
liking to look at each other. Slight nice body in a print dress, combs in
her hair. Her laughter. Magnified eyes. Went in a taxi to fix her teeth.
Winsome. "Ehre Sprache ist charming." Pleased, bridling, "Na
ich hab' sehr viel gelesen." Cracking me up, and then slanting at me
from her corners.
M in red coat firmly bundling. Her crazy tense hands. The howl in her
talk - pressure - energy in movement and talk too much for its work - phrases
she trumpets - "We-ell ...."
18
Yesterday and this morning her praises - then I got suspicious - "Ezra
has missed you very much, she's wanted to see you" [Jam says to Rhoda]
- can I listen as if it is not at my cost, to know: yes I must. On the bus
the flutter when I said it was a pure hopelessness and she said that's not
how it is with her - very fast - "I know it's not how it is with you,
this is some news I'm telling you," hearing ourselves overheard, feeling
pedantic collusive frantic.
20
Body is sweeter and nearer, womb broke four ways like a solid, across,
across, across, across.
-
"She is always changing jobs," "She's alone," [Angela
says] holding the photograph of a woman's head. "What's her last name?"
"Spinks." "Marilyn?" Was Cox. "Do you know her?"
"Of course I know her," thinking what's the of course people say.
"I used to babysit for her, she was doing a thesis on Doris Lessing."
Sarah and Rachel. "You were in Kingston?" "Yes I was at Queen's."
It's all near and fast, George [Bowering] on the scent, J not far away raking
grass. "Oh, Ellie!" I know what she's just understood. "She's
just put the parts together," to J. "We were at a party and I
read your palm." "I remember you but I don't remember what you
said." I don't remember her, what I remember is the spot by a lamp,
on the west wall, where a blond woman who Peter said was nuts, sat all evening.
The Coxs' pleasure in knowing a poet.
Yesterday as I was planting and fitting toward the last tree and the
house, she sitting on the steps not talking, "Would you like to have
a hand in planting the last tree? Put your other foot there. Do you need
more help?" Him, why's he trying to get in here. "I don't think
there's room." Angela's got her hands dirty.
When we sit on the steps looking down at [the trees] the avenue does
look fine, the decisions have been right - going down to sit next to Angela
with J beside - a clear moment when we're all facing the same way looking
out - I say dispassionately "I've been having doubts about the rose
arch, it would close the avenue. They could be there but instead of meeting
they could open out." Was when she said, to make up for the night before,
"Doesn't Ellie remind you of Lyn?"
Starting to walk home north, takes my arm - fingers inside her palm in
the pocket of the green down vest - the big trees with white flowers, the
real trees now not the flowering ornamentals - great loaded avenue trees
- walking with them on Pleasant Street - to the ice cream parlour. When
we keep walking north we find ourselves in powdery last light coming over
the rim, with the flowering city and the ships in harbour, on the flat below.
"Oh look where we are!" We come down into the lighted shopping
street. At the bus stop three kisses. "Goodbye Pec coucher." [Bouvard
et Pécuchet]
1 May
- In the white light of this room, the green wall, wood of the table
and chair, chalky.
- I don't say.
- I say, but wrongly with force in blindness.
- Saying, having said, but knowing I'm not fully in line with what is
coming of it.
- The small tree's shadows giving us pleasure.
4th
- Yesterday the long walk, the amazed light on the beach, the light on
the stones on the beach, walking looking together at the white light under
storm north, back behind the cottages looking at the old rose's beautiful
lines and buds, embracing her, the colors of sand, pebbles, boulders, concrete,
clay bank in that soft light. Clear. That light really in the surfaces.
"At this point I want you to understand that sometimes you really
are confused" [I say].
-
- That one who returns, when I look sideways at, strange one: I have
done nothing to deserve to be with that one.
11th
Lying down in the white room, lying on my back on the floor, in the afternoon,
in silver light, is when I'm with the marvel and catch of being going to
die.
The little cat on the roof with her head laid back so her whiskers were
horizontal and against the sun looking at the rain slanting toward her.
Her motion, ears moving separately scouting the sounds. She creeps up
the roof slant, lays herself down, instantly moves again, wraps her tail
into sitting pose, moves to follow some thought. "She's so interested
in everything." "So interested!" She thinks in movement.
13th
The starlings fallen - parents' long beaks shouting from wires above
the courtyard - diving at the white cat - Rhoda in the garden saying "There's
been something strange in this day, have you felt that?" - "Something
acute and quite painful."
14
- a large winnowing to get small changes in the piece
- slight reinclusions
- what's learnt for it, what it is:
- from DR interest of any time described - the
- story is just emergence and clarification - episodes -
- elastic syntax - 'thoughts' - showing how it finds itself
- from J from GS piling, pleasure of syl abl.
- from P voices assembled own - light tip.
- fr dreams - unheard of unperson discursion - silly metaphor
- own - logic shift
- from T dialog
17
- Wanting to be with someone in my work. I'd like it to be in a way that's
not falling in love. I want it to be in my work.
-
- Liking to tell about Kepler.
-
- What's pain, what does this pain know. Blames - is a crash - is afraid
the work is no good - differences in what something means - which one,
chemically - in the sportscoat and glasses an ugly man sitting theorizing
- I know this anxiety - throat howl - fear - tea.
-
- What either of us would say
- wouldn't fit, would make the other
- stop, disclaim,
-
- Now the hard work knowing this piece
-
- Them I imagine reading it - I must read it from them - say to them
you can take it further, that's what friends are for -
-
- Revising writing I don't understand completely, the decisions I don't
command. To leave the possibility that there is an order I don't already
know.
-
- Personal attachments to a phrase -
22
- After those days allowing the ardent child, being somewhere not at
home, erratically finishing - not finishing, again choosing my way through
- bad dream of publishing, while working, of the forms possible to show,
of the form being cleared, that there is a form, unfamiliarly.
-
- Worst would be that even now in a depth I don't feel, I am wanting
to be married to a fine man, that it keeps me from heart and fear not to
be able to be and from true suffering not to stay held in the lack.
23
What is the feeling I have of that she. Triumph that so fine an exchange
can be claimed for us, ie we are no longer inferior.
"You want to abandon she! And I want to enlarge it!"
"I censor my woman feelings too. That's one of the things I found
out in smoke. I was able to have feelings I'd never had, of wanting to be
given over. because it isn't safe."
If I called her he I would be seeming to worship them again.
She can't bear it unless I absolutely censor all reference, memory, feeling,
in relation to men.
If I agreed, I would stop feeling love. I would so hate the gratitude.
The childishness of the gratitude.
A mother becomes dull and slow, cannot hold a lover's interest. I have
needed a lover more than I need a child.
You would have got what you want. You don't know how you'd be in that
freedom. You would still hold out.
The body would still disappoint me.
24
What it's like today. More independent generous quite trusting. Yes I'd
like it.
Sitting flying. Clover and headed grass, gorse, heat, lovely meadow.
London 599. 7 days.
- "Where are you miss."
- "Mis'a'lyin."
Her voice was bright, she wanted to go on talking. I could say "I
watch my body going ahead, I'm watching to see what it's up for, I'm delighted
when I see it's up for quite a lot." ("I'm glad to hear that because
I've thought I was alone in it.") "I'm very close behind it."
27
Wanting, fighting, to enlarge understanding. At the same time fighting,
resisting.
"Why are we willing to do this for each other?" she asks.
"There is so much missing, doesn't it distress you too."
29
Yesterday her party. "These four people I'm moved by." When
the pipe was around the feeling of being peripheral there. They're interested
in Jam. And am I - the extraordinary sensation of talking to her in company
- still extraordinary - seeing Rhoda suddenly have a reply for her - across
something - and it being so directly received - how something is seen. I
seemed to be ashamed of her - "not one person I could leave aside"
- "You're right that different ones would be left aside at different
times."
Hours missing. Lately hours of trying. There is so much missing - you
say things in a way so I can't understand them and I say things in a way
that is too easy for you to understand - laborious, distressing.
"I've already got quite a lot of what I wanted, you've been miraculous
to me." Tears on the red shirt shoulder, two places. So have I got
quite a lot of what I wanted, and some I didn't know I wanted.
30
How it looks after Laing's book makes it orthodox - is there anything
left - voice, method - the whole.
The feeling that this is what's found because of the way of looking.
In 'art' - in working with attraction.
-
Secondness - I am your second - I am behind - it means a defeat - the
one is inwardly suspended - I am (holding myself) vacant while you operate,
calculate. The question of who is the placenta / what is its relation to
failure.
In it there's Jam, being afraid it means I must lose her, and being attached
to a time when we were together; and her possible reading;
And the ambition to be seen knowing something others don't.
When I find out the worst of it - a level of precriticism - could I still
put it out - put it out - could I put myself out instead / also.
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