September 1966
[undated journal scrap]
Beamsville, Ontario
Art's room at the Neufeld's, small, at the top of the stairs.
Something of the slow bright sad swirl of life manages to reach me tonight
as I look around my books, at Thomas Wolfe and Durrell and Mauriac, and
as I think about Father and Judy, Jerry, Olivia, Paul; this tiny trashy
room at Neufelds', my mind stumbling against the reality of Wolfe's time
and Durrell's love and Mauriac's death ("les drapeaux"). Worried
about whether Judy will be lost or unhappy. Wondering whether Paul will
be lost, Mother, Father, Rudy, Jerry and Frank - Indra! Janeen. I cherish
enough people, "I have a fine life," but I see that they will
die and be lost, how can I be gay with them? It's as it was with Mitchell,
the poignancy of his face paralyzed me and I could no longer see past the
skull, the "bright yolk" moving. Olivia's passion for the present
makes us love her; it saves Don from existential despair as well.
[undated letter]
Your ragged note from the hopper came yesterday - its creases and grime
conveyed perfectly your haste and your great determination to write those
daughters who (you think) have escaped from Drockezeit forever (but little
do you know! how I've managed to sell myself to 14 hours per day of it again,
its Ontario variety and voluntarily). (But back to school next week.) I
can see you, Mother, nose covered with fine black dust, baggy pants and
blue eyes - I've longed to come and see you but there seems no way.
It's Sunday and I'm home alone at the Neufeld's, listening to Radio Canada
and piano, happy, thinking about people I like, looking at maps, writing
ol' Jerry, reading a book called "The Meaning of Death." A while
ago Judy phoned from Toronto, and I read her your letter. She's excited
and seems happy.
Last weekend: I hit the road with my thumb, as it were, right after work,
and arrived in Toronto just as Uncle was finishing telling a Whisper Story
to Marie and Toozie on the living room carpet. (Whisper is a horse.) As
I arrived over the neighbourhood lawns, I could see Judy through the window.
When I got to the door, she was there. My impression - "She's fatter!"
Hers - "She's skinnier!"
Olivia has found an apartment - all I know is that it has a balcony,
a fireplace, and a stained glass window ("The ugliest stained glass
window I've ever seen," says Olivia) and my address now is 179 Division
Street. (Yes, school has started, it's been two weeks now.)
[undated letter]
The aforesaid Dycks will be coming to Beamsville on Saturday afternoon,
with Judy, to come and fetch me back to Toronto, where I will spend two
or three days shopping and then hike on to Kingston to begin classes - at
last. (I've earned about $250.00, nearly enough to pay back the airplane
debt - but when I've given Judy the $100 I still owe her, which she needs
now, and bought some shoes - the sneakers Barberousse found for me in a
corner of a basement have worn out - and some material for a winter coat,
and books, there won't be a very large percentage left. I have a few tricks
up my sleeve but the more-than-five-and-a-half hundred dollars owing to
Father and the bank are sitting pretty heavy. (Well - look who went to Europe
- I've no right to complain and I'm not complaining, but I'm frustrated
at not being able to pay you promptly, that's all, so I can go again.) I'll
try to get some part-time work, but I've hardly any time to spare from studying
because I have six courses this year rather than the usual five, and one
or two of them - for example Philosophy 264 Rationalism and Empiricism -
will be very, very difficult. Also, since I've had my results from the last
year I was at Queen's and found that my average is still an A, even if meagerly
so after that chaotic year, I'm determined to graduate summa cum laude,
with highest honours, that is with a straight-A average in the last two
years. That means work to an inhuman extent almost like grade 12, hum?
This is going to be a relatively - to the last one - tranquil and studious
year - I've come back from Europe much more sure of myself - not socially
this time, but philosophically - ie I know what kind of life suits me and
what I can expect to be and do - in relationship to all the conflicting
ideas other people have of what I should do and be ... wind, breath! so,
as I was saying, I'm likely to be a rock of determination this year, a paragon
of spinsterly perfections, a steel girded stoic scholar untempted by frivolity
and untouched by frenzy. How bored you'll all be, and how you'll wish I
could fall in love or do something that might upset me.
The Neufelds and the fruit tramps and Portuguese with whom I work are
characters from a Mennonite Dickens, and as I pack wet potatoes into baskets
or sort apples I write their descriptions to you in my mind, but every evening
when I sit down after finishing work at nine, as you see, the words have
fled. Next letter will be on the familiar typewriter; perhaps it will bring
back the flow. But it's as if I'm still in mourning for the lost journal.
The joy of words is feeble and they have lost their snap. Maybe the typewriter
can bring them back.
[undated journal]
"Hung up on men" - that is still there Jerry, and I'm glad
for it. At the Bitter Grounds tonight with Norman, there was a sharp charm
to the floodlit profiles of the boy and girl singing, isolated and intimate
with their songs, the boy's face beside and a little above the girl's in
careful precise counterpoint just as their voices - careful and precise
- ran on beside each other, his a little above hers, or hers above his,
always effortlessly spaced.
To Ricky Johnston's face as he leaned against the doorpost, muffled to
his chin, with Bonnie's profile beside him covered by her blond hair. He
leaned his chin backwards and the bones of his face were softened so that
he looked very young - I wondered if he understood the composition of their
faces, angles, one backwards and one forwards. I think he did.
- To the thin long lines of boys' bodies, their legs in bluejeans, the
backs of their necks, and the shadows around their faces as they leaned
forward over candles.
Thanksgiving Day, Monday [10 Oct]
[letter]
And now I'll begin to write again because I have a room and a desk for
my typewriter and an address for you to put on envelopes. Judy has just been here for
the weekend, helping to paint and clean, steeped in a briny three-day solution
of all my most eccentric friends, including Olivia and Don and Danny Noffke
and Mark and Peter. She will tell you about them herself, and about me I
suppose. (Last weekend when I was shopping in Toronto I stayed with Judy
one night on the floor in her residence room - what a kind unEppish person
Judy is!)
Walter Epp was here on Saturday, on his way back to Vancouver from a
holiday in Quebec with Rosemary. He strolled in as we were on stepladders
painting Olivia's room, and made a date to take us all to dinner that night.
Rosemary was sick and couldn't come, but Olivia came with us and we had
a wonderful dinner with excellent company - Walter is a real person, and
with our always increasing confidence we aren't as uneasy with him as we
were. Olivia was as charmed as we were. He is beautiful too, although he
looks much older since last summer - he's lean and elegant and he is beginning
to look wise and distinguished - I wonder if he has as much character as
his face shows? His eyes especially have become blacker and his face has
become stronger because of it. All four of the Epp siblings have faces that
are terribly moving - they are all alike too, sharp and expressive. Walter
is the handsomest, but father has the most powerful face. Lily's is pretty
but too sharp and strong to be traditionally feminine (like mine! although
mine is not so finely made).
Tuesday
[undated letter]
Imagine a room 10x10 square, white ceiling, white walls, white door and
window frames and baseboard, gleaming hardwood floor. The window is large
and tall, and the bottom half of it is divided into six panels of stained glass:
the two outer panes on each side are red, and the middle ones blue, with
designs on them in white. To the left of the window and tacked up about
two feet from the floor, is a photograph of Jean-Jacques, Alain, and Jean-Pierre
among the rocks at Delphi in Greece. Beside it, against the next wall, is
a very low very narrow cot painted blue and covered with a blue bedspread.
On this wall there is only a small homemade postcard from Jerry, moss green,
just a little higher than my pillow! The rest of the wall is bare because,
when the early sun shines through the window, it throws a brilliant pattern
of red and sapphire on the wall.
The wall opposite the window, a stark desert landscape in blue tones
and a map of the world with pictures and postcards pinned onto it (Andy
from Rome is pinned into the Atlantic Ocean halfway between Rumania and
Minnesota). Beside the right hand wall is the door that leads to Olivia's
room. This wall is covered with a ceiling-height row of cupboards - my red
hitchhiking cap is hanging dejectedly from one of the top door handles.
On a level with it is Klee's print of magic fishes in a black ocean. On
the window wall again, to the right of the window this time, there is a
'letter' from Jerry, about 16" x 12" of white construction paper
with tiny writing and squares of orange and red in a pattern. The desk with
the typewriter is a long narrow table that butts out into the middle of
the room from beside the window. No other furniture. The effect of the whole
room is one of starkness and precision - a cell, but a cell full of light.
Wednesday
First went to classes today, a brilliant typical Kingston day with Lower
Campus blazing in reds and golds, wind sifting through the leaves there
are left, a strange leaf-rot smell almost like bananas. Courses? First this
morning was a course I have with Olivia, a philosophy course that talks
about how we know what we know and so on. Dr Estall is
a small neat man with a huge head and a large loose-skinned face that twists
itself because of his hairy expressive eyebrows. He speaks slowly and absently
and pedantically, but there is a hint of suppressed wryness that makes him
interesting.
Afternoon - course in English Romantic poets with Doctor Walley. He sits
at one end of the long lecture table and I am at the other end, and that
thin distinguished face confronts me so directly that it frightens me, and
those humorous tragic eyes dig me out of my stupor, and that controlled
beautiful voice goes on saying incredible things that I understand with
excitement, but that no one has ever said to me before!
Don is here every night to eat with us. We take turns cooking and washing
up. Olivia is a good cook, with ingenious ideas for cheap meals and a generous
hand with spices. In this way we eat very well and cheaply - meat and potatoes
and all, for a dollar a day divided into three meals. I'll even learn to
cook. Oh - I canned some peaches and pears at Neufelds', with slices of
lemon and very little sugar in the syrup, different but very good. And some
peach jam that is glorious. Experimenting with Italian things, and Chinese.
Difficult to concentrate. Restlessness. Good weather and wild leaves
.
Got a letter from Frank. Fall always makes him sad.
Academic Saturday
Color and warmth, a walk downtown shopping with Olivia, munching fresh
butter buns, a tour of Cooke's food store (you remember that it is the old
country store with the exotic foods and old Mr Cooke personally welcoming
the clients - we bought some cheese and some wine! And best of all, we went
down to visit Hutch and Nelly and got a skinny gleaming black kitten, our
Peter-cat, who is down in the kitchen now cowering under a chair as Olivia
cooks supper. I look in the fridge, and it's full! I look in my room and
it's beautiful! I have a season ticket to the foreign movies! I have an
English course which is wonderful and an English course with a wonderful
professor! Equals = security!
There is a little round table in the hallway that mail is put into, but
there never is any for me.
Please send some recipes for how you make pigs-in-blankets, Mother, and
macaroni-cheese-corn casserole.
If you send Judy stuff please enclose my huge Webster's dictionary and
my Psychology 2 essays if you can find them. They should be in a black folder.
Cooking is not so bad - I made those Mennonite things with apples in
long rolls of pie crust.
18 October
[journal]
The trees in Lower Campus, when you come up Queen's Crescent from the
English Annex, arrange themselves in overlapping bands of color fusing and
streaking with the violence of sideways motion, but at the same time delicate
and pointillist (the Seurat tree Jerry showed me on the hill across from
the Colosseum) and hard as enamel.
I wore red shoes, yellow stockings, short navy skirt and long navy sweater,
the hitchhiking bag over my shoulder and the red cap. People who met me
smiled - I don't know if from approval or amusement.
DH Lawrence is one of the best poets I've read. The Cumulative Biography
absorbs me; I feel that he himself absorbs me because he is me, but all
that I am is extended in him, pushed out indefinitely further than my own
ego amoebic cell walls. Saddening but exhilerating.
Loneliness. There's Olivia as a foil for it, the soreness of a friend
who is not a friend (like Mitchell, but not yet so acute). She's not interested
in me, and since her relationship with Don has become secure, beyond an
ear for her talking-to-herself and the economic convenience of a roommate,
she no longer needs me either so is in the bargaining position.
I won't bargain - of course - and so act rather childish. When I begin
to say something, she nearly always cuts it off, and I'm left resentful
with my half-story, a half-sentence, half-image. She manages to make me
feel an inept and basically uninteresting 'roommate'-domestic. Conflict
- I realize the pettiness of resenting her basic indifference (superficial
and habitual interest is still there, "When your face is in repose
you look miserable") because it is God-knows-how-normal in almost everyone
toward everyone, and she certainly doesn't owe it to anyone but herself
to be interested. (But it makes me sad!) And I'm irritated to see how ego-centric
I am, how oversensitive and - needy. It embarrasses me to be needy, even
when I realize that it's not the fact of need but dependency in handling
it that is humiliating. I don't trust Olivia and I won't talk to her because
I'm vulnerable now; there is nothing in my relationship with her now that
makes me feel the ice is thick enough to walk onto and I certainly won't
creep!
And when I'm disgusted with myself the dialogue says "but it's your
fault because you're as ego-centric as she is, and if you'd make some effort
with her perhaps the relationship would improve.
Me: "But it is she who's holding the trump cards so you'll be sure
it's not I who'll make the effort."
D: "So it's your loss and don't sulk."
Me: "It's my loss, but it's her loss too, whether it makes any difference
to her or not."
D: "Idiot boy. You think there are such interesting things in what
you know and are, that she'll miss something because of your silence - because
she can't appreciate what she doesn't know?"
Me: "Yes."
D: distain.
Me: wrinkled forehead, light off, window shut.
Good night D and O! And Peter.
[undated letter]
It is Sunday afternoon, I'm listening to a record I got (irresponsibly)
on Saturday - it is the complete Creation by Haydn. It is gentler than the
Messiah, but you'll remember the "Heavens are Telling" chorus.
I'm hearing it on Greg's - Don's roommate - stereo, and so get all the
bass and horn nuances that are missed out when we hear it on our tinny little
monaural player at home.
179 Division is home and haven. My room is filling slowly with books
and pictures - sometimes, rarely, people - letters, coffee cups and apple
cores, a sculpted bit of porous brick picked up on the seashore, and our
Peter cat who loves to slide across the floor in a frenzy of chasing bits
of kleenex.
It's home because it is full of warmth - Petercat is the best of friends
- he plays with us when we're sad, and when we're quiet he walks over our
chests to sniff our chins questioningly. If we pet him his purr turns into
a roar of joy - when we sleep he lies down just over our ears and we fall
asleep hearing his purr slide away into catsleep. He seems to realize that
our faces are the focus of us - if we tilt them at him, he tilts his too
- in short, the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most affectionate
kitten ever born.
Olivia too - there was an estrangement, strangeness at first but we found
our contact again, with more tolerance than before, but as much confidence.
Friends, a friend, a contact, are indescribably good for the human isolate
- as you know. The relationship when it is good makes the 'me' more 'me,'
and more articulately confidently 'me, and the 'you' more 'you.' Work is
better, relationships with other people are better - one seems to have more
resources for warmth when one has more practice in giving and getting of
it.
Don too - with his intelligence, humour, unpredictability, complexity,
gift of bringing people out.
The relationship between them - a vital, tense, often stormy thing, full
of conflict because they want so much and are determined not to compromise
either in what they want or in what they're unwilling to give up. The process,
the struggle, intrigues me - and when they're in accord, the house is all
the better for it.
A few other people come - not many, Greg sometimes - he's casual but
warm in an unemotional way. Mark, Ray - they always come one at a time or
a few at a time and there's no strain or artificiality.
More about the apartment: Olivia's room next to mine has on the middle
of the long verandah wall, a white marble fireplace with a black wrought-iron
grate. On the mantle piece two blue candleholders and a rose Don gave her.
On the end wall, another tall window with brilliant turquoise curtains.
On the long inside wall, a piece of printed fabric in blues that match the
candlesticks and curtains. Her bed, a mattress on the floor opposite the
fireplace. Books, printed bedspread, stuff lying around, Peter asleep on
the tall back of a red frayed armchair, Olivia in glasses, slippers, long
blue shirt reading at the desk, turning to look when I come in with her
hair in long wisps flying around her face, expression of friendly curiosity,
surrounded by pages of essay and coffee cups and cigarette butts - our two
different rooms express us well.
There is a sliding door into the hall, which other people in the upstairs
apartments use and which connects to the front door. This corner of the
front hall is wonderful because the outside door has a transom panel in
red glass, and the red light falls through the webby curtains of the inner
door to create a red glow around a dim mirror on the side wall - beside
the mirror is the little round table where somebody lays out our letters
every morning.
The hall also connects to our area downstairs, where we have a bathtub
on legs, draped with towels and without a plug, and a box for Peter, and
an icy-cold storage room with potatoes and apples and my peach jam and mysterious
boxes and locked cupboards belonging to other people.
The kitchen is a large room with a window looking at the legs of people
passing along Division Street, with a wide window ledge for the record player,
with a long red lawn chair and a small yellow one for conversations, a table
beside the water heater, a pantry, a deep closet for irons and garbage and
stuff, a long cupboard with sink, always covered with paraphernalia, grocery
slips, books, spoons, breakfast dishes, tea bags, our wine bottle rolling
pin.
And now we have a pumpkin, a tall thin one so it can have two faces,
one for each of us.
Every Saturday morning I go down to Kingston Market and buy a bag full
of good cheap stuff, looking at all the colors of pumpkins and squash and
red or green peppers and jars of honey and baskets of apples . There's always
a wind and it is usually cold, the farmers selling their produce are friendly,
and it always exhilerates me so that I irresponsibly buy records to celebrate
Saturday or - but this is a good irresponsibility - a ticket to the National
Ballet which is coming to Kingston next Monday night! I'll wear the opera
dress!
Tuesday
All last week was magnificent for mail. Monday - letter from Judy and
one enclosed from you. Postcard from Grandma and Grandpa in Jamaica. Tuesday
- letter from you. Wednesday - from Bill Volk, with a paperback book he
liked. (Thank you for sending on the postcard from Lellie and Lucia in Athens
- did you conclude they were my two afternoon kids?) Thursday - Jerry. Friday
- Peter Dyck. Saturday - Barberousse in Paris. And Monday, yesterday, the
letter from the Canadian Consulate in Athens, telling me that the purse
I lost there last April has been found and would I like it?! The money was
still in it! If only someone would find my packsack.
The working conditions are not and were never as bad as you pictured
them, Mother - simply because none of the classes had done very much work.
I work, but not excessively - sleep a lot - eat well - and have just been
given a $200.00 extra bursary from Miss Royce, from the kindness of her
all-kindness heart.
Winter is beginning - cold wind (makes the red lining of my cape flap)
- and rain. Leaves in layers melting together in the mud.
Rationalism and Empiricism, by the way, is the course in 17th century
philosophy beginning with Descartes.
I haven't been to Sunnyside yet, only by it (there was a small boy on
a bicycle driving in the wind), but I'm told there is a new director.
- Have just been interrupted by Don's roommate Greg who - for two hours!
two hours! - told me about his psychological problems! Why do men always
seem so self-absorbed, so uninterested in personalities outside themselves?
I know a few exceptions - needless to say the ones I prefer - but hardly
any. Do you think this is unfair? Women seem to take it for granted and
accepted; it makes me rage! But men do it because they're needy. (Aren't
women? Why don't men worry about them?)
It's late - I'm going to Toronto tomorrow - Friday - to see Judy and
hopefully Mitchell and the Dycks.
[undated letter, probably Oct 23]
Sunday night in Toronto, up among Harvey's books in the upstairs bedroom,
looking out onto a maple-shaded street where the green lawns wash right
down to the street and the moon comes up over brick chimneys - a street
that is like Dick and Jane's street and all the pretty city streets in most
of the books since then. I love it for its typicalness - it is like the
myth illustrated, perfect to every detail of the flowering shrubs and casual
attractive people. The Dycks have a red brick house like all the rest on
the street, a white front door with a knocker, a row of front-room windows
curving out over the bushes on the front lawn, a peaked roof over the upstairs
windows, a narrow pretty sidewalk. In the back yard, there is a cherry tree
with a swing and one thrilling branch that knocks against Maria's upstairs
window. Harvey is a little more potty; sometimes he asks important, perceptive
questions and neglects to listen to the answer, but when he plays with his
children or when he makes his gentle, wry jokes he is warm and likeable.
Anne is wonderful! I often think of you when I see her, Mother, because
of an expression, a slant of her face, and the rare sweetness you both have.
Maria is five and a half, explosive, full of jealousies and enthusiasms
and rages and needs and physical energy - tall and beautifully made with
long curly hair and a stubborn strong face. She seems to have chosen me
as her friend in the adult world, like an aunt but really only a cousin.
"You aren't a lady, you are a student. Mommy is a lady." Toozie-Elizabeth
has chosen Judy, and the choosing is mutual because Judy sees a great deal
of the sweet shy Toopa-one in Tooz'. And Toozie is very appealing, just
far enough into consciousness to be delighted with everything she experiences
but baby enough not to be rocked by all the complexities that throw Maria
onto the kitchen floor in howling frustration. So Toozie is the pet of most
outsiders and Maria feels it - I like this Maria and I'm going to watch
her grow up! Alexander, Ander, staggers all over the house, a solid sensible
baby with a sturdy big face that looks like Harvey's - the little Alexander
that I loved so much last fall in New York is lost and vanished - but it's
silly to hold it against him.
Saturday October 29
[journal]
Unterrecker's book on Yeats excites me. A poem growing from an image
which has an emotional intensity that makes it a symbol, not clearly understood
but felt to be more important than it is possible to know. The image insists,
it comes back, it asserts itself at moments when tension needs a pattern
for concentration.
... the image of waking one morning in Athens, waking only half, and
of turning to Jean-Jacques with complete freedom, and putting my arms around
him as he half-turned to me with a response as free, light, dim, as mine.
The moment crystalizes and recrystalizes in my mind, always at the exact
instant of turning, coming out of unconsciousness to a turning without
antecedent and with no remembered continuity.
Now the moment has incorporated the tension of all the times when it
has come back, and it grows into a symbol. I think this is what Yeats makes
into poems or poem segments.
la multiplication des seuls
- Valéry
[undated letter]
Mother writes about Saturday baking, today Olivia is baking a raisin
pie and it makes me think of home.
So you think that we are on the extreme end of a scale with Mrs Christiansen
smiling her tiny inscrutable smile at the other end, Mother.
Thank you for the recipes - I'm using them, especially the holuptsi.
We have another boarder now - Greg eats with us every evening too and puts
his five dollars per week into the kettle - also he and Don do the dishes,
so not only do we have more money but we do less work. When we go across
the street to the Dominion store, where the boys in white aprons know us
well, the pinchings and questions of "What is ..?" and "Where
is ..?", on the Friday nights to do shopping we have a cart full enough
to feed a family of eight children. Greg and Don eat like mammoths. Dinners
are fun - they are both witty and we're all in a state of grace this year
(maybe it is youth), and close. They also are intelligent enough to compliment
our cooking.
It is five o'clock, dark outside, with a wind that is pushing the waves
diagonally toward the rocks and gulls at the lake: I'm playing an album
of songs by Claude Leveillée, one of the albums that was playing
constantly in the third floor back office at AMI during the nights when
I worked late with Barberousse or waited, stomach knotted, for Jean-Jacques
to come back up the long flights of dirty stairs with the latest bad news.
This white-walled room pulls together the long colored threads of so many
times and places - I can't live in the present alone, there must always
be some tangible past in the space I shape around myself, that I can put
a hand on: losing those things, like the skull and the books and
the journal, brings a strange panic. Tacked up beside the world map on the
wall now is a self-portrait Maria did of herself, outlined in purple, standing
on the tips of tall fat spikes of grass with her head holding up one of
the thick rays of a green sun. She is wearing a patterned green dress and
her red hair is drawn long as the dress. It's a beautiful picture! Another
new picture is a black and white sketch of Yeats, the poet that I love better
than anyone perhaps, an Irishman as arrogant and elegant as an Irishman
can be - you'll hear more about him because I'm doing an essay on him and
DH Lawrence.
About last weekend in Toronto - on Friday immediately after classes I
hitchhiked to the highway and started off toward Toronto. There was a blizzard
wind full of threat of snow, and I was soon frozen through, and there were
few cars. But also hitchhiking west was a blond first year boy in a long
furry lined army surplus coat who wrapped half the coat around me and made
me happy just because of his friendliness.
Soon a ride right into Toronto, with a two-mile walk when I got lost
trying to find York University. Finally I found the right bus and arrived
at its gate. There is a long walk over lawns where the wind is cruelly direct
and cold, then the low brick and concrete university buildings with a new
residence rising high above the others. A red-bearded boy had gotten off
the same bus, and when I got into the well lit courtyard of Founder's College
he helped me to open the doors and find Judy - he said he didn't know her.
She was in her room shortening my opera dress and taking it in a little
- we went out to supper and I saw her friend Joanne, who is very vivacious
and intelligent. Then her friend Ron came over with some of his friends
and we went down to the folk singing clubroom where I met her friend Peter
who is Jamaican and sounds just like Basil, Rasheed's friend. After a while
we went up to a party in the room of a friend of Ron, a boy called Orestes
- and it was the red bearded boy!
There was a candle on the floor and Orestes was playing records. I liked
the fact that he had decorated his room, that he listened to music with
concentration, and that things flickered over his face as he thought them.
We sat on the carpet talking until five a.m. - and then slept until after
noon (roommate Karen wasn't home so I had a bed) and then ate all her chocolates
and then I left her studying and went downtown to Anne and Harvey's where
Maria had been waiting since morning. Anne is thin, looks worn, but is happy
and funny. Harvey is collecting a folder of reviews done of his book. Magoo
is getting tall and thin.
After supper I went to a play with Mitchell Bornstein (you remember him
from Strasbourg - he is back in Toronto getting his last year for a BA and
wants a fellowship to the University of London next year. I'd written him
to tell him I was coming, expecting to spend a reminiscing evening at the
Dyck's, but when I phoned him he had two tickets to see Ibsen's The Wild
Duck! Have you read it Mother? You'll remember Doll's House. The play was
at the famous Royal Alexandria Theatre, Toronto's gilt-and-crimson baroque
old-fashioned theatre which was nearly torn down to make way for a parking
lot, but which was saved by a wealthy Jewish bargain-and-discount store
owner. It was all very glamorous, beautiful gowns and furs. Mitchell twice
as handsome as I remember him, with his hair grown long, and twice as charming
too. When we went to find a cappucino afterwards in memory of Rome, we found
four of his Forest Hill upper-class-Jewish-intelligencia friends who were
very witty and very pleasant. We all drove downtown to see the fantastic
city hall lit up, with its new Henry Moore sculpture and the skating rink
in the plaza and the trees all lit from below, and the clock face in the
old town hall's clock tower shining like the moon.
On Sunday morning I was awoken by Maria and Toozie singing God Save the
Queen very loudly upstairs - it was seven thirty a.m. Floods of sun through
their big front room windows, the quiet street gleaming with peace and prosperity.
Maria and Toozie and Magoo and I danced to classical music on the carpet,
read hundreds of story books, and then took Anne with us for a walk along
the railway tracks. Anne had one of her special dinners, with artichokes
in lemon-butter sauce. The kids are all sophisticated about artichokes,
and Maria had to show me how to eat them. After dinner the Dycks all together
took me back to see Judy and then went off to explore the new Scarborough
university campus - they had an expedition or exploration every Sunday.
I went home on the late train and learned Italian most of the way - I
love this pattern of coming back, time after time, to the Kingston railway
station at night and taking a taxi with all the other students who've come
back on the same train.
Monday night was the ballet. I wore the opera dress and Olivia wore a
beautiful turquoise dress she has and Don came too, and it poured rain so
that the reflected lights ran along the streets, and the ballet was beautiful.
Sad and lonely.
It rains every day, but today, Sunday, is beautiful.
Olivia - you needn't have any apprehensions this year - is the ideal
roommate, hard working, considerate, stable, warm and funny. This year is
turning out so well that I keep touching wood, it is too good to be true.
Miss Royce - did I tell you? - has found a two hundred dollar additional
bursary for me.
[new journal front pages]
"On ne peut jamais se connaître, mais seulment se raconter."
S d B
"We do not truly possess our humanity and culture as long as we
live only in the present, in our own accidental environment!" Kaufmann
on Hegel
"At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy, most commonly
when at hazard I have opened some book of verse .... Perhaps I am sitting
in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement
having over-brimmed the page. I look at strangers near as if I had known
them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them; everything
fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears or any needs; I do not
even remember that this happy mood must come to an end." Yeats
"Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness."
"Part of my sense of solitude was that I felt I would never know
that supreme experience of life - that I think possible to the young - to
share profoundly and then to touch. I have come out of that darkness a man
you have never known - a man of genius, more gay, more miserable."
"The return is the essence of the whole movement as well as its
final cause." Toynbee
"Negative capability - the ability to live without despair or creedal
commitment in the ambiguities, the mysteries, the dusty answers and inconsistencies
... the open mind of the lover" Stauffer
Odos Chameleontos
"After the Rhine Journey come the poems of struggle for a living
adjustment. The ceremonial glory of the sacrament passes from the forefront
of consciousness and the period of adjustment to the background of life
begins." Rexroth on Lawrence
"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard marks. But in each
event - in the living act, the undoubled deed - there, some unknown but
still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind
the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can
the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me,
the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's
naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous
strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing
is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale
principal, I will wreak that hate upon him." Ahab in The Quarter Deck,
Ch XXXVI of Moby Dick
"We had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness
and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us any
thing." Durrell, Bitter Lemons
"The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many
cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of clarity and
even reason itself seem ready to perish, that I have come to suspect that
the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all, I would fondly believe that
its object is purely spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration,
or hate, if you like, but in this view alone - never for despair! These
visions are a moral end in themselves! The rest is our affair - the laughter,
the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquility of a steeled
heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind - that's our affair! And
the unwearied self forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe
reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth -
a task in which fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us except of conscience,
gifted with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder,
the haunting terror, the infinite passions, and the illimitable serenity;
to the supreme law and abiding mystery of the supreme spectacle." Joseph
Conrad, Personal Record - Freund says "not a facile romanticism,
but a difficult and ironic one."
14 November
[journal]
Greg
- tenderness that I never dreamed - on Sunday morning the slow slanting
of his hand from breast to rib to abdomen and back, light of a cold bright
sun at the curtains, Rouault's Joan of Arc riding her black outlined horse
with her head thrown back. My head thrown back onto his shoulder, gay and
mad for the tenderness of him and the exact, tense watchfulness of my skin,
the tense exact movement of limb over limb and along ... celebration of
body, celebration of the other, celebration of separateness - separateness
fired, intent, focused! Saturday night studying Descartes in his chair,
listening to jazz, excited because of the new freedom to touch him. "Why
don't you stay?" "I think I will stay."
Natural and happy to turn off lights with him and sit on his bed - it's
nearly on the floor, wide, covered with a blue-patterned blanket - until
he turned off the reading lamp too, undressed in the dark. And we went immediately
to sleep together. It was late when we stopped talking. At nine we woke,
stirred, turned - leg along leg - stretched together - and his hands moving
over skin, gently; the bone hard against my thigh, his breath becoming rapid
at my ear. I was wild toward him: happy with arms and long back and flat
bottom, neck, thighs, prick, hands, all there and moving with me toward
me because of me as I moved with, toward, because of him.
It was warm and I took off my sweater and bra, and he had reached for
my back before I could turn - I was arched as a harp and he played the length
of my breasts and ribs until I could hardly stand it.
We could turn when we were too happy or too wrung and clutch each other
as a refuge from each other. Long and quiet; his face in repose and his
mouth held carefully; his hair brassy blond at the top where it is thin,
face like a child, like a child. I'm against his shoulder like a child and
he is large, he's very strong. I'm strong as well and we celebrate body
and each other. What else - everything we love, focused on, radiant from,
the broad blue bed on the floor and this life close against my life warming
it warming the bed, the room.
Tonight again, in my room, we lay together on the bed held as close as
we can hold, and talked, and when he went home I could only smile idiot
delight to Olivia.
15 Nov
Pink rose on the desk, bottom petals dropping, leaned toward the room,
stiff delicate branches of fern horizontal around it like branches of a
Japanese evergreen, the cut glass crystal wine bottle full of lines of light
and the long stem slanting down - on the dark wood desk - and there, the
chair upright, romantic. The wall of closets with Botticelli on the doors
- the girl with flowers dropping from her mouth, the blue gowned Mary of
the annunciation and the blown Angel. Jerry's composition of orange
and red on white; and the brick ashtray with my winged dragon on the radiator.
Form and love - Elie Faure and Kazanzakis' Report to Greco.
"Greg told us once that he has so much affection and no one to give
it to," Olivia told me. He's happy, he's certain!
Sunday November 20
[journal]
There has been no journal since the yellow covered book was stolen in
Paris (all the loose pages with their tiny square writing in pencil and
thick blue pen, headings in Strasbourg and Rome and Greece, all of it lost
now, words of conversations, portraits of moments, mosaic of what was important;
minutes that I remember because I wrote about them then, and that fill me
with desperation now because they were saved and are lost) and there has
been no impulse to write.
But this year is happy in many ways and joy comes back from time to time.
I'll try again - another bundle of letters saved from the fire or saved
by a refugee from time - saved, but not safe yet.
Cahiers - notes.
Crise de solitude last night with Greg. ("This is not all, but enough?")
Always the same sharp pain that rises from the knotted stomach until my
eyes fill with tears that have to be laughed at, hidden, mocked for weakness.
I remember a morning with Jean-Jacques, and I remember that in the evening
he crossed the room when I came home and held me for a long time as he never
did. With Mitchell the loneliness was amplified because he understood it
and it grew until we fled from each other. Frank could always take it away
by holding me and somehow absorbing it until it was he who was sad. It made
me telephone Charles in a fury one afternoon to tell him I didn't want to
ever see him again.
Greg doesn't understand and won't, but he held me helplessly until I
forgot. This Sunday was not like last Sunday morning's peace and excitement.
I'm backing away from him because he never knows how to touch something
important in me or to surprise me into realizing him. It is sad to see the
shutting up and moving away, because he is warm and childish. He seems to
be hollow - but I feel as though I might help him if this could last. I
need to be so tough. Last night he lay with his fuzzy head along my side
and nursed - I was moved, but annoyed to find a child where I want a man.
I want a man? I want somebody with a penetration and impatience and intelligence
to like me for what I am proud of and to tolerate only ungraciously what
I am not proud of. Somebody who'll question and laugh as well as assent,
so that assent will be real.
Jerry writes that he's coming!
Greg has no joy in his past - there is nothing he cherishes and would
want to go back to; I can't understand how it is possible. He floats; I
float as well, but like a sea plant with thousands of roots hanging down
full of earth, always catching more earth.
22 November
When my mind jumped ahead to a thought of myself doing graduate work
somewhere in Europe, five years from now, twenty six years old, there was
a strange spark and I felt myself sitting in this long white nightgown (having
forgotten the blue dots on it and the blue cover of Versfeld's Metaphysics
of Descartes reflecting dust motes of light from the varnished surface)
five years older, as old as Mother, not myself and yet myself. The paradox
of time and the paradigm of identity - constant and vanishing.
I bought Olivia a journal exactly like this one, but front-face forward,
with an inscription of "Olivia - journal for the out-turned toe."
She rushed into the room tonight with her strange characteristic little
head-shake of delight, and said, "I just wanted to thank you again
for that journal, I've been writing pages and it really is out-turned!"
She has begun to be more like me in that she's begun cherishing forms rather
than only action and movement - she's written in her journal about the colors
in her room and the wonderful balance of objects over her fireplace, even
the exact relation of philodendron to dried rose in the brown bottle. Tonight
she surprised me by saying that she wanted to write past things too as she
remembered them.
This year is like the Sunday on the rocks below
the Acropolis when Alain and I lay in the sun feeling all the relationships
and forms of our lives falling into pattern. We had eaten little during
the week, and on Sunday we had only enough money to buy a tin of spiced
sardines and a loaf of bread - enough for two pieces each, dipped in the
oil. Alain was carving the Esquidieu, talking about St Exupéry and
the sacrament of eating sardines with bread. The grass was full of poppies
and I wore a few in the rubberband of a pigtail. We lay back on the rock
or climbed to look down to the Stoa and the city; sun warm on my bare midriff
and over our bare feet. The Acropolis was dazzling above us - we were waiting
at the foot, in preparation for visiting it later in the afternoon. (I remember
the American boy Lellie and I picked up when he was camped on the square
beside the cathedral saying that he had waited for weeks before he was ready
to climb up to the Acropolis. He had sat on my bluff looking across to it.)
While the sun was still hot and we still at peace among the brilliant
poppies I felt all my past - Father, Olivia, Mother, Frank, Jerry, Peter
and Mitchell, La Glace and Sexsmith and Kingston and Clearbrook and Europe
- all precisely, miraculously and wonderfully held together with this afternoon
and these rocks and Alain. (The tea-colored eyes that squinted without his
glasses, the hollow cheeks and the tuft of goat-beard that tried to hide
the way he held his mouth - always carefully as if it would begin to tremble
with the terrible sensitivity of his feelings. I was his "Indienne,"
the wild brown girl who seemed free and arrogant tho' not free of the 'crabe.'
We sat one evening on the hostel steps at Odos Didotou and he said "J'ai
un peu le crabe." "Pourquoi?" "C'est à cause
de toi." When he had gone to Israel he wrote from a shack near the
beach at Eilat, "Qu'est-ce qu'on a pu etre heureux, nous deux!"
He becomes confused in my mind with Jean-Jacques. With both, I walked always
with one arm across their back and their arm around my shoulder, miles of
streets in Athens; we fell into position naturally, always just as we turned
the corner from the hostel going down toward Kyrie Simo's café. I
always wore bluejeans and Jerry's yellow teeshirt, the corduroy jacket and
usually the furry brown sweater tied around my neck like Hercules' lion
skin on the stamp. Fernando -
5 December
Greg: change into a relation that has so much sweetness and closeness
that I am touched and surprised now. We make love and lie interwrapped,
terribly happy, skins stretched tight with tenderness, never isolated. He
has a gift of warmth I could never have guessed. And he's terribly happy
too: he says his friends don't recognize him. I think he is becoming more
sure, more arrogant. Yesterday we wrestled and he spanked me: he is strong
and I'm pleased. There is a bit of the myth-man-and-woman in our relationship,
and I find myself basking in it. But the real and serious contempt of women
that I've found so often, that Kazanzakis explained as [?] does not exist
in Greg and I never have to back off from him anymore. I want to see how
he has been so well made, without malice and pettiness!
Hard bits of snow rattle against the window, in one of the square panes
two branches of a black oak sway dropping slowly as seaweed in grey water.
Professor Estall is talking about natural law and statute law becoming one
in the concept of God as creator. We lay last night under the blue and white
blanket and the wind howled outside the blue black square of the window.
The room was cold, we were warm where our backs touched, and we slept.
Grant Hall was changed last night into an abbey church with tall yellow
paned windows, high squat colonnades under the eaves, stone tower and arched
door, neither Gothic nor Romanesque, but romantic in the blue moon-like
street lamp, with candles moving inside and music coming faintly from the
inside. Olivia and I went to the carol service, but those around us sang
badly, the carols were badly presented on the screen, long unknown stanzas
were dragged out endlessly, the pitch was too high, the choir leader was
a silly woman in a sheath and high heels and the carols themselves seemed
feeble, ridiculous. We left entirely disappointed wondering if Christmas
is already ruined for us.
People in the class are consistently ugly; Olivia is pretty; Don with
his large oval-shaped Byzantine eyes - blue not black - and red hair springing
up from the triangular face is beautiful; Greg when he takes off his glasses
and his hair stands out sideways on his head has a face that moves me; but
all these faces are full of dullness and passivity; these ugly clothes and
these sloshing walks.
Friday afternoon - cruelly cold air; art books at Smith's on the corner;
shelves of jars on the side wall of Cooke's; candles at Domus, colored paper;
a book for Rudy; hair ribbons, feeling of material richness of a town, feeling
of winter and Christmas.
-
When I look at the penciled passage [above] I see that the language is
brittle, the form is hollow, and the ideas are without signification. I
have not grown or understood for a long time - I wonder whether I can continue
very much longer on the momentum of the one year's fury and beauty, under
the pink eaves in Sexsmith's brown house.
Nights in bed with Greg are full of a new comfortable tenderness but
the painful wonder of summer's slight touching with Frank had more vitality.
Moments exist in long plastic series, indistinguishable, where they were
once sharply separate mosaic splinters - moments now are willingly and wearily
forgotten, but the minutes of fourteen's Christmas were hoarded. Visual
form hasn't changed but I see less and feel less and tho' I work more skillfully
with what I am, there is little to work with. Strange wonderful time between
baby borrowed fairytales and those fairytales conceptualized - and that
I understand this seems to push me even further from the richness of direct
response. I write little because I have little to write and not the heart
or the spirit or the insincerity to write what does not exist. Not now -
no return to borrowed fairytales like voluptuous women in black lace and
crimson roses but the immobile moonlight and shadow of that cold night,
the dirt road going up the hills with its two tracks shining dimly, the
shadows in the bush to the side of the road, the small hill beside the garden
where there were stones buried in the dirt, the hawk that swooped over with
only the sound of wind and a blurred shadow, my longing for a body at that
moment vaporized to phantasy of a meeting on the culvert, words wonderfully
expressing everything that had never been expressed. Al coming down the
hill to see and understand suddenly and - to feel the bursting tenderness
that Greg felt with me on Saturday night, but unarticulated until a sudden
chaste shy kiss that was like a star and like a tear on the petal of a rose
"like black velvet," like the impetus of a story written on the
metal edge of the bed next morning.
When I lay with my head in the crook of his arm and my thigh along the
side of his thigh, he said "I lay in this bed for years, as far back
as I remember, wanting to be like this."
Professor Walley talks about the movement of the mind in psychic space,
especially in Wordsworth and The Solitary Reaper; what happened here
was a movement in which the mind came from a mood and the images of the
mood to an opposite of the mood and to perhaps the strongest image possible
for that new mood, and then circled logically - logical logic and emotional
logic - back to the original mood, with a small clarification of life. Could
it be a poem?
The stamp is a picture of moonlight and the two-track shining road with
a sky whorled as Van Gogh's Starry Night all in blue and lighter
blue. It is a poem, too, because of its strong horizontal lines and the
curves upward and downward that seem to hold space rather than divide it.
My mind is full of poetry; Lawrence's Blue Gentians among all the stack
of loose jawed poems in his collection, is shockingly beautiful, image of
the petals of the dark blue flowers blown to flame points by the white draught
of sunlight; the flowers on their tall stalks are torches giving off the
dark light in Pluto's underworld where Lawrence will be descending - prepared
with a flower for a torch - the stairway with Persephone in "slow,
sad Michaelmas." Most men do not follow Persephone until December:
most do not have tall stiff flowers smoking dark light, light dark before
they descend.
- The stream of my life in darkness
- deathward set
goes on quietly as minute-by-minute Yeats' stream below the tower goes
on. Michaelmas, Christmas, Candlemas. I am sad today because work isn't
going well (a zero in statistics) and I'm tired: consequently not even Olivia
and Greg are real.
Sunday
[undated journal]
After breakfast with Greg: episode in bed this morning: woke thinking
of exams, itchy in my skin, and Greg made some remark about my losing twenty
pounds - I shriveled up into misery and tried to get out of bed, but he
threw me down. I put my feet against the wall and pushed suddenly out so
that I flew over him onto the floor. Got dressed and started for the door
- he pulled me away, skirmish, and I'd almost gotten to the door knob when
he jerked me backwards violently onto the bed and my head crashed against
the wall. My eyes were full of tears and I was desolate - he let me go.
When I came out of the bathroom he was sitting on the steps looking woebegone.
We had breakfast. And I've come home to work.
Several things: psychological need for rigidity. Greg is right: if you
think you're fat either do something about it or shut up and accept yourself
as fat. If you think you're not doing enough work, either do more or except
mediocre marks and shut up.
Distressfulness of self image vulnerabilities. The very subtle and intense
effects of any threat. A chink to be repaired.
To a large extent I have stopped thinking of myself as self made, and
I rationalize that it is because I'm socialized, but the excuse isn't good
enough.
Being socialized - accepting the relevance of someone else's opinion
of yourself - is even much more a reason for rigidity.
No charts this time, no signed resolves, just an orange peel, which doesn't
mean a list of projects: only one project: acceptance of the illusion of
freedom to become. There's something on G's wall that says "The price
we pay for honesty is constant self-evaluation."
- Greg is real, good, solid: I'm glad with what I find in him.
December 17
Not always. It is unkind to say to him, "I'm lonely," because
what it means is "You're not enough." He isn't enough and there
are times when I don't want his rough neck or his ears or his rather ugly
profile or his smell or even his large affectionate body. Yet, when the
light shines into his eyes at an angle, the color is like the water of the
sea at Patras with lines of light cast on the bottom, flickers of yellow-green,
a diffused rim of lilac around the pupils. Mouth sometimes petulant but
always kind. I fluctuate with him, sometimes I'm moved by his lack of judgmental
pettiness and his warmth: last Thursday night after we had made love we
lay naked together with our arms around each other and were full of joy
in each other, "I'm pleased with you." Relationships weigh heavily;
I'm sometimes bored with his jazz, bored with his affection, bored with
his amorphous acceptance of me. Tonight I don't like him and I've stayed
home to read Bitter Lemons - Olivia is reading Esprit de Corps
sent by Bill this morning.
In the afternoon Rasheed was here looking very thin, with his face looking
hollower than ever under his long sparse tufts of black hair. He's warm
and didn't seem to need his old bluster: Cathy's baby is to be born on the
27th. "I love her in a different way; I guess a better way. I don't
think you ever do stop loving anyone" he said - strange for Rasheed
to talk about loving. But I remember the letter he wrote me from the train
- 32 pages long, drunken, full of the agony of loneliness, confronted by
the dawn-break spruce of northern Ontario.
I still love Rasheed too, as I never will love Greg. Rasheed lives with
his teeth barred, and I love his violence and his gentleness. (His gentleness
after all the fighting that spring when he would say "Then why don't
you come?") He may be a crafty compassionate old man someday. In a
way, I want him. A lot of women do. He has a vitality that sweeps him far
past the need for objectivity and existential good faith; we love him even
as we know he is manipulating us. Mother does too - she wrote him about
how she loves him and misses him, and how she misses her girls: "With
Ellie, I blame her more than I do you, but with Judy I hold you responsible
for violating our hospitality."
Rasheed will run scot-free all his life because life is so important
to him and we forgive anyone who gives it so much importance for himself.
Talking about the baby and Cathy and himself and the possibility of his
mother dying of cancer, he said "Everybody intellectualizes and gives
you advice and a lot of objective nonsense, but when it is your life that
you have to pattern, none of it is worth a fucking damn and you are alone."
Any child who was his child would be lucky - he will love it insanely, he'd
die for it, marry for it - it will be beautiful - black eyes I suppose,
as bewildered and furry as his when he takes off his glasses for a minute,
a boy I hope, a beautiful child! Trinidadian, a dancer as spontaneous and
expert, knowing-hipped as Rasheed dancing on the gravel pile. As generous
and deceptive.
The hand over the side of the bed in the dark, holding a cigarette lightly
in the long fingers.
Furies of jealousy, furies of incomprehension, tenderness as to a child,
beside the oven on the kitchen floor, furies of reassurance and finally
furies of tenderness. Frank, Rasheed, Jerry, Jean-Jacques - Greg makes me
impatient! He is my warm hearth and I long for the wet bed of bushes in
a corner of the Bulgarian orchard; he's my wine and peanuts when I long
for Greek bread torn in chunks! And he is the low bed with the blue blanket,
the light on the wall on Sunday morning, Rouault's Jeanne d'Arc hanging
crooked on one tack now; hard tall body, hands transformed on contact with
my body to something wonderful as light; him sobbing with his orgasm because
I have pleased him so intensely and both of us full of a devouring affection
for each other as we lie quiet together, friends.
Christmas holidays have begun, I'm lonely for snowy dawns of the Peace
River Country, I'm terribly lonely for somebody. Maybe for the home-house
with the white door and a wreath above the knocker, the mirror in the hall,
the candles and flowers, the grey-haired mother and the pipe-smoking father
from the Good Housekeeping fiction I loved when I was ten; and the handsome
curly-haired young man standing at the door in his topcoat, a betrothed
with whom I am about to begin a thrilling, ordered, careful, stylized life
in another white-doored house where I would have an eleven year old freckled
boy and a five year old Markie boy, and an intense crop-haired teenage girl
in a miniskirt I suppose, coming home from college when the eleven year
old boy is a football-playing drama club actor in his senior year in high
school, and she has a handsome humorous young man whom I beam up
at and adore. Strange fragments of dreams. The ten year old me in love with
everything beautiful and careful couldn't have synthesized Rasheed, and
Mitchell swearing in the rain outside Firenze, or Greg's blue-blanketed
bed either for that matter. Certainly not the cold dawn in Istanbul with
my bluejeans drying beside a roaring fire and the little Turkish student
begging me to let him sleep with me, certainly not the night sleeping under
the hedge at the hostel in Munich cowering when the young boys prowled about
the grounds, certainly not the terror of Jean-Jacques changing day by day
and the stupidity of Ferdinand's pleas not to leave him. I'm still in love
with graciousness and I can't have it; I give it up for roads and chance
and faces in youth hostels and the "two companions, loneliness and
time, without whom no journey can yield us anything." How is Peter,
Barberousse? Isabelle and Henry and the baby? How will Rasheed always be?
Jerry?
I want both - I long for the white-doored home with intense loneliness,
where all is arranged and perfect and warm and controlled. But I grind my
teeth for summer and woods and tins of sardines and the red cap! My life
will fall between the two like a coin into a crack. Swiftly!
I want to write a letter - but to whom shall I write it?
Peter cat is asleep against my brass dragon, on the dark table beside
the glass vase - luxurious Peter, the stiff wings, the cut glass and the
red candle, all on the rich brown grain of the table. Yeats on my wall,
flamboyant. Maria's happy green-dress girl. George de la Tour's red-dress
madonna holding the child on her lap, and Elizabeth shading the light of
its head as you would shelter a candle.
part 2
- raw forming volume 6: september 1966 - july 1967
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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