| london volume 5 part 6 - 1973 july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[journal] 8 July Sense of grey rage and irritation again, mediocrity, fatigue, anger and impatience with Luke, Sarah's idiotic chatter, the two guys who tried to use me to kill time this afternoon, dislike of my days so that I refuse to put them in the Boots Diary, dislike of my dirty mediocre house. Wonder if it's from having closed Roy out so hard that when at Scrumps in the bed upstairs (windows uncurtained) he said "Don't you know I love you, woman, don't you know you're still magic for me," I didn't weep with loss and longing any more, but just tensed some bitter muscle in my head like pulling a blind down, like a cat's eye's narrowing from both sides. - My baby film: carefully made as Afrikareise, wide as Mare's Tail, "I was hatching a new death," the stone baby, water and baby - the one slow heartbeat, the little one grows into it, the big one fades out, hush little baby don't you cry you know your mama's bound to di-ie - becoming my mother - Roy staring out. The little boy and the child. Mafalda my sister - question of truth and effect. - I'm looking for a lost city: a lost country, a walled city under mountains, a house, a garden. When I see or read about a certain depth of windowsill, pitch of roof, angle of street, packing of houses around courtyards and wells, I'm thrilled because I recognize something. The walled cemetery outside Trets. Marrakesh. The red wet country in the Atlas, the jewelry shop near the hotel. Ann's green room with pink cyclamen. I look for the house of my dreams (last night a large house Father was building, a vast white plastered foyer with wooden doors). - Mary Richards: "I sit here every morning at my desk, listening to what is not audible, trying to say what is not sayable." - Tonight Luke woke and cried like a new baby, sighing, singing, crying; he sat up but had lost speech, only howled with his head back and his mouth open, tears on his cheeks; crying like grief but also like poetry, meditative phrasings and shifts, roars, shouts, murmurs. I sat with him, touched his head, sang Hush little baby world is spinning dry / earthworms spinning in the crust. He's still weeping, I quieted him a little when I said O Universe and told his day with Anna and lollies, ducks. [Then] I got angry and said What do you want. I want my daddy he says. Repeats it. What does he mean. Does he mean it? Is it code? It cuts me. Why does he want his daddy? I'm not allowed illusions of omnipotence with him. At Scrubbs - Roy was so tender with him. When he came out of his bed and room in the morning he came to us, smiling and clowning with his blanket over his head, came into bed with us. Sitting on the hillside looking at Snows' farm, sheep, cows, haying wagons and men and bales. He would sit sometimes on Roy's crossed legs and sometimes on mine. Luke: he won't forgive me for having pains and daydreams to hang onto, for being away so much. Roy identifies with him as I don't: buys cars and Lego for his own "deprived" childhood - I try to feed my child self separately from him - she needs to run and run away from where she is, to find the city that welcomes her, where at last she is at home and can look around, quick and brown, really loved, and begin to live where she left off, the loop that catches early and late together. It's anguish I run from, anguish of loneliness, having to pierce it, against such impossible opacity. The man in Athens who told me: Don't read magazines here; be here, it's much more interesting. But here: makes me angry, so I must go away not to risk my spite. And yet, Luke, I love him and am tender with him, laugh, tickle, build lego. It isn't fair: it's Roy's ease in being male and beautiful that lets him be easy with Luke and I'm so afraid of being mother that I cede - and pleasure in watching them together. When John interferes [ie directs him in some way] with Luke I'm shocked. But it's love that undermines me with Roy and so with Luke. How sad that it undermines me. - Tonight at almost the same time, he's woken and crying again, he seems very angry, he can't speak: what he says is so blurred he sounds psychotic - he doesn't want me to pick him up, doesn't want his bottle, doesn't want to be sung to; I've turned the radio on and left him alone. The crying tails away into experimental murmurs, then he slides into a howl again. Yesterday, flying home down Highgate Road, he put his head under my long black cardigan, then completely tented himself in it, smiled out charmingly from behind me - appreciated by two women on a bench waiting for a bus. - Now he was crying too long, and asking for me, so I went up, got my sleeping bag out beside him and said I would sleep next to him for a little while. He sobbed that he wanted his shoes on; I put them on. He said he wanted to get out, but when I offered to take him out he lay down, took his bottle in his mouth, stretched out his hand perhaps to hold mine. So I took his hand and he lay still just murmuring a very little, his eyes fluttering. I listened to the music, strident then pretty, listening through his sleepy resistance. He took his hand away to scratch his nose, then put it back very definitely and held my hand tight until he went to sleep and pulled it up next to his bottle. I sat and then lay feeling how precious he is: thinking about his anger and how, after he'd howled enough he was clearer and could be reached, could speak and just fell into sleep, curled across his bed with his shoes on. Now I've covered him and have come downstairs centred around him, and will go to sleep holding myself around him. - But didn't. - Brown face, black teeshirt: I'm lovely these days; Roy doesn't notice, beauty has never meant anything to him. I admire him so generously with eyes and hands, and I tell him constantly, but he's had me - his loss. But it's important to him if it goes with standing - if it makes somebody important to someone else. There was a moment when John sitting on the bed, Roy sitting on the stool, I on the other end of the bed and Luke dancing like a cockeyed Irishman with his harmonica, seemed a warm circle, laughing at some joke of Roy's: Roy pale grey, beard and soft hair, pale blue eyes, looking alert and handy in his baggy teeshirt, long arms dangling out, making the sort of 'intelligent' conversation he doesn't bother about with me. John's burnt face very vivid with its woolly hair and shine of glasses, readiness to be merry. And then under pressure of Roy's management, domination, I got bored and alien and wanted them all gone, feeling their masculine anxieties and complicity in focusing on each other. - The next entry is the reverse. - Having cried and then swum blind with Roy, I'm returned to J's to get my guitar and the place is full of Susie's things, poems in her hand, a beautiful poem about the wheel, his face on his neck / when he cries. And another beside the bed about love. My picture's buried under some things and so I take it with me and leave the key, remember John looking worried and lean last night while Susie managed: his hands and feet were small strong and beautiful, they were all of him I could look at, for the rest he was hardly there because Susie crowded him out, elastic dark face, something crude and old in it, witchy, with a little black hair on her lip, but so intelligent and strenuous at the same time; long hair to her waist, authority and insistence, she could be a wise woman - sage-femme with uncanny powers, never a wife, but mother? I looked at her and saw myself a little older and a little more aggressive. She had a way of clutching my knee that I didn't like, but she carried on willful as a crow / crowbar / crow woman / and I had to agree with her that she's more impressive than I expected. As for John: I'm sad to see what looks like a rattle of happiness in those loose leaves of poems, her books of poetry on the desk they've made her in the bedroom, the rug there on the floor, her clothes in the closet. The bedclothes strained toward the door like quick rising. Remember how little he was with me in Wales and feel it's all just, wonder about her poetic powers and if so - why he could ever have hesitated. Back to my own sad lonely and unformed unhappy state which hasn't any friends and has hereby lost its last romanticiser.
london volume 6
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