Kingston
[letter to parents]
I'm not writing at length this time - just telling you that I've arrived
and still have my whole capital, including the apple!
I got to Toronto at 11 a.m. Sunday - you can see that I had a very fast
trip indeed. Some adventures and a generally exciting time. It's good to
see Greg again - we're not talked out yet. His new roommate, Michel de Salabery,
is going to be companionable. I'm staying at their place for the rest of
the summer. I'm sending Rudy's sleeping bag back when the Irish store mistress
next door gets me a box tomorrow morning. Kingston is beautifully warm and
green - purple flowered trumpet vines and large-leaved climbing plants on
the verandahs of Clergy Street.
I'm glad I could see the Rockies again this trip, and the stretch of
Hinton cut-off that gave us the wide, long view of the mountains was beautiful
- thank you for taking me along. If I was quiet it was not that I was unhappy
but because I felt unwell - rather energyless and headachey and dull - period,
and not eating enough, and lack of sleep.
You'll be getting a longer letter plus cheque a little later when I'm
organized.
I hope you've had rain.
July 25
[letter]
I'm sorry you were bothered by my going away without waving - it was
sheer dramatics and characteristic of the childish selfishness you saw so
much of while I was at home. It is true that I was glad to leave - the visit
was a strain for everybody. I still have nightmares about arguments with
Father, and I'm sad to think that the visit really gave you nothing either.
When I remember it, it seems that I contributed no gaiety or spontaneity
or light - nothing but polemics. On the other hand, I don't know how it
could have been avoided, because there is even less tolerance for Father
than ever in my make-up and vice versa. I was nerve-strung by the situation
really from the morning I arrived, and couldn't pull myself together long
enough to act like a big kid instead of a little kid. I really enjoyed Rudy
and the landscape but I didn't really enjoy you, no, because I felt guilty
for causing you distress, complicating your already none-too-joyful life,
and not being able to act as tho' we aren't on opposite sides of a fence
in spite of your efforts to pretend the fence isn't there.
The red dress with the sleeping bag is from Victoria, who was given it
by her mother and who gave it away because she doesn't like the associations;
and I in turn am giving it to you because it seems more your style than
mine and will look good at college if you shorten it a little.
I've been given a scholarship of $140.00 for having the highest marks
in Honours Philosophy last year, including all students in second, third,
and final year. The amount isn't great - but the distinction is. I'm extremely
pleased.
Enclosed is a long account of the trip - you see how fast it was, and
how preferable to the train!
I'm going to send Father only one hundred dollars this time, plus money
he gave me for shipping my stuff and for buying my pills - I hope what he
said about not needing the two hundred is true because Puringer's bill took
more than I'd counted on and I'd probably be short before registration if
I send the other hundred - please do figure out the rest of that account,
exactly how much you sent me, and exchange into American, etc! I need to
know how much to apply to the gov't for this fall.
-
It's Sunday night, July 30 - G and I have spent the day at the lake,
swimming in swells and reading in the grass.
Something I wanted to talk to you about but didn't is (don't be offended)
that I think you should convince Father to soundproof your bedroom because
in both Rudy's and our room it is much too easy to hear the sounds of your
making love. I found it very disturbing, and I don't think Rudy should be
subjected to it. I don't understand why you haven't realized this. Don't
be embarrassed - but please do something.
Greg seems to have thrown over Victoria for me, thanks to your pumpkin
cake. Please send me the recipe in case there's another emergency! Also
please send a recipe for your buns, and tell me how you make your wonderful
bread pudding.
I've lost fifteen pounds and the bluejeans, the ignoble patchéd
wonderful bluejeans, are - Father will be glad to hear - really too large
now to wear. The bridesmaid dress is too large around the top again, but
you're not here to fix it!
Tell me your impression of the visit and how you are.
The trip
The oil truck you saw stopping for me was driven by a young-looking cowboy
from Nanton, driving oil in order to finish paying for his ranch - good
looking and amiable. We drove through the pass from Banff to Calgary and
then watched the mountains falling back - in an Indian reservation, a full-color
costumed Indian chief sat waiting for people to pay him 50¢ to be photographed.
Jack was only going into Calgary but he drove me through to the other side.
200 yards downroad from me stood two other hitchhikers, teenie-boppers with
long hair and identical polka-dotted shirts. They walked up to talk to me
- going to Winnipeg from Calgary, to look for work. A swarthy small dark
boy and a tall dirty-blond haired boy with strangely slanted blue eyes.
They went back to their post and were soon picked up. Immediately afterwards
I was picked up too, but by a man who was cutting off the road toward Drumheller
after five miles. The turnoff was in the country near a caragana hedge,
and I thought of sleeping, but there was still a little light so I waited.
In the back seat of a passing car I saw the blond hitchhiker and I waved.
The '59 Dodge turned slowly like a heavily loaded boat and came back - it
looked packed but they said there was room.
Three high school boys from Ponoka, traveling to Medicine Hat to find
work, with a few clothes and some blankets and not more than seven dollars
among them. Plus the two hitchhikers. A gay lot, full of stories about exploits.
It was soon dark but we were packed in close, warm, and happy. The blond
hitchhiker told about how, during his childhood in Montreal, he had learned
to jump moving boxcars, climb on top, go down the hatch, bring up a watermelon,
toss it to friends stationed in the ditch, and get out and off before the
train stopped. He was a forlorn kid: said his parents don't care about him
and haven't seen him for four months; obviously undernourished, but really
likeable, full of sudden enthusiasms but relapsing into shyness.
The other boys were excellent company; we passed around Ritz crackers
and chocolate chip cookies. I was allowed to be 'girl-grub' rather than
lady, and so didn't inhibit them. We drove along joking as it grew darker.
All the way to Medicine Hat the eastern sky was lit with sudden flashes
and sheets of lightning, but it rained only enough to wet the grass. It
was 1 a.m. when we arrived and before finding a place to sleep, we drove
around smelling out the quietness of the town - a train crossing, a trestle,
a cruising police car. Our spying found us a park with a large World War
II tank set on a concrete platform - idea! - if we drove the car in front
of the tank, the underside of it, the space between treads, was hidden from
the street. A dry place to sleep. The blankets were shared out and we slept
in two rows under the tank - I fell asleep immediately and slept very well.
But a voice woke me suddenly and I turned my head to see a stripe on a pair
of blue pants - the mountie was full of questions - he woke the others,
asked for identification, and asked me if I was sure I wasn't running
away from home. The birthdate marked on my passport convinced him, and he
went away. But as we were thoroughly awake, we washed our faces in the drinking
fountain, and got out on the highway again by 6 a.m. after wishing the job
hunters luck.
Before I had time to put my thumb out a truck stopped for me, and I drove
with a silent blond young man through a brilliant hot morning of Saskatchewan
flats and basket-of-eggs country. Riding high up, with one arm outside the
window, enjoying the rhythmic shifts in engine roar - the way to travel.
Many tourist cars and trailers and campers passed us. Shortly after noon
I was on the road again at Regina, but again had no time to put my thumb
out before an Allied Van pulled over. By late afternoon we had reached the
Manitoba border - the driver had to make a loading stop in a small town,
and he wanted me to help him pack dishes but I told him it was my policy
to stay on the road, so he flagged down a friend of his, working for the
rival North American Van Lines, who had been following him closely, and
I was transferred to his van.
The driver was delightful - a quiet, sharp-eyed, kindly Ukranian who
adjusted his mirror so that we could both see the orange-yellow flamingo
pile of sunset clouds on fire behind us. Near Borden we stopped for coffee
at a small isolated gas station and I recognized it immediately: on the
trip two years ago, Rasheed and I had slept under a tree across the road
from it, and when the rain woke us early in the morning we ran over to this
café - but the owner growled that it wasn't yet open and looked suspicious
when I used his washroom to wash my face.
I was left on the road at the Winnipeg bypass when my driver went on
into town, but a Mustang stopped and the young couple inside offered to
take me through the city as it was Friday night and they couldn't get into
the movie they'd wanted to see. A tour with cryptic comments about how suddenly
the city had been beautified now that the Pan Am Games were about to begin.
Coming out of Winnipeg on the other side, past the Shell Refinery and the
stockyards with their competing reeks, the boy noticed a livestock truck
heading for the highway as well - he passed it in order to have me on the
highway before the truck got there, and then he pulled back off the road
to see whether the truck would stop - it did.
Inside the cab were two drivers from BC, behind it were two trailers
full of shifting, heavy, steers and bulls bound for Montreal. The driver
at the wheel soon asked, when he found I was interested in child psychology,
what I thought of Baden-Powell as a child psychologist. It turned out that
he was a scout master in Kamloops. The other driver was fat, and silly -
laughed at everything. I sat between the two of them on the motor, with
lots of room on either side as the cab was as large as a small room. The
scoutmaster soon went to sleep in the berth, while the fat laugher drove
and I slept in the other seat - but an uneasy sleep, broken by stops for
poking the animals who had been stupid enough to lie down.
Just before dawn, when we were well into the Ontario bush at a fishing
town called Dryden, the truck stopped for some reason and I decided, since
it was too mosquito-y to sleep, to continue.
Just when the mosquitoes seemed really to have won a car stopped for
me - a warm car with an exceptional driver - intelligent, original, funny,
and handsome, well-mannered, and full of stories about his kids and his
boyhood, and the good secret fishing lakes still to be found in the area.
He was on his way to Port Arthur to pick up his wife and two children to
take them out to one of these lakes and spend the rest of the summer camping
with them. His insight and interest in his children was fascinating, and
the time it took to get to the Lakehead was very short - a route through
evergreens and lakes.
On the other side of Port Arthur, a truck driver stopped for me and asked
whether I'd wait while he changed and washed at a truck stop - I used the
time to find wild strawberries and get badly bitten on the cheek by a horsefly.
Then the driver insisted on feeding me bacon and eggs while he stuffed his
already-very-large gut, and we continued as far as a turnoff. He was going
to Montreal, but wanted to take the northern route in order to avoid the
tourist traffic. I remembered how beautiful the southern Lake Superior route
was and decided to take it.
At the turnoff, I was idly reading messages scratched on a signboard
by previous hitchhikers (in French or English they all said the same thing,
"Stranded," "Hung up here for four days," and so on)
when a car stopped and I was moving. Again, a brilliant day. This time the
driver was a French Canadian, and although he spoke excellent English we
switched to French by preference. He was a lumberjack, unemployed four months
due to a foot injury, apprehensive about the sort of future a laid-up faller
can have, indignant at compensation board stupidity, and lonely. At a small
lakeside town we had a glass of (terrible) sherry and he bought a few groceries.
While he drove I made him sandwiches and listened. You know the road - wide
and hilly, next to the lake at least part of the time, beautiful.
Just after dusk and another batch of sandwiches, he turned off into a
small resort town where Saturday night was in noisy progress at the hotel
- he pressed my hand emotionally and said "Goodbye my little sister!"
Another faded sunset, lakewater lapping on a beach near the road. It
was too close to the hotel to sleep, so again I decided to try my luck at
getting another truck. I was now past the 'Soo', ie Sioux Ste Marie, and
several hours from Sudbury. A long time went by without a ride (half an
hour) but the evening was beautiful and not cold yet. Then a dark car stopped
- when I opened the front door the driver said "Oh" rather surprisedly
but it wasn't until later that he told me he hadn't seen I was a girl until
I appeared at the door. I was sleepy but he wanted to talk - so he talked
and I listened. I didn't like him at first; he seemed noisy, conventional,
banal, and a little silly. But I began to like him more and more. He was
a railroad engineer going back to Hamilton, a rather ugly, large man with
twin eighteen year old daughters. I lay back and dozed between his descriptions.
Sudbury arrived - fire from the smelters flaring into the sky, but quiet
otherwise, 1 a.m. The engineer decided to sleep over at a motel so I walked
through the town and found a shed just at the outskirts, in which I slept
very well until 7:30 Sunday morning. [This was a lie; the engineer let me
sleep in the other bed in his motel room, but at this point that didn't
seem to be something to tell my mom.]
A ride with a wiener delivery truck through the choked-up resort area
along Georgian Bay, through farming country, and through the still slightly-flooded
Holland Flats truck farming area. Finally onto 401 teeming with traffic,
and onto the Montreal-bound belt of traffic at Toronto. The wiener truck
was going to St Catherines, but took me through the complex series of loops
onto my road before disappearing down a ramp.
Freeway belts in large cities are the most difficult and dangerous part
of hitchhiking. On this stretch of 401 especially, there was a mass of speeding
cars three lanes deep. It took half an hour before anyone stopped - and
I was surprised even so. It was a slight, sunglassed young man in a new
cream-colored Camaro, going to Trois Rivières in Québec and
therefore past Kingston. Almost immediately he asked "Tu parles français?"
and we switched into French.
Once out of Toronto, he turned onto the slower, prettier Highway #2 which
passes through the lakeside old Ontario small towns. Again, a brilliant
day - early afternoon sun shining, wind. Ivan drove slowly and enjoyed himself,
I slept on the back seat for an hour or so, blanket smelling of mothballs,
pillow very clean, and then kept Ivan company again. I had to strain to
understand his French Canadian accent, but he was funny and pleasant. Stopped
for an ice cream cone. Stopped again for a Coke. Took pictures of each other
with his Brownie, took pictures of the lake, rubbernecked in the towns.
At Brockville [Belleville] we noticed a Centennial Caravan and stopped
to see it - the area all around was full of music, with merry-go-rounds
and a bandstand, and two white-hatted chefs making flapjacks. Just out of
another small town, Ivan didn't see the speed zone and was caught by a motor
cop - he pretended not to speak English, which amused us all - the cop too
- and he was let off with an "Okay" and a grin. By 5 p.m. I was
in Kingston.
[journal]
Clergy St, August 9
I am going to fix this pattern of eating. Forever. I'm size 9/10.
[undated journal]
When an offspring comes home from school, parents ought to be curious,
full of direct and indirect questions, full of assessments and comments,
not hostile and passive or stuffed with underconfident self-aggrandizations.
Children should be something wonderful and strange, not quite subject to
the judgment for judging others. Like Maria, watched, questioned, smiled
on, and insistently miraculous. Then, like Maria, gay, sharp, inventive,
direct, full of things to say - children should be.
Irritation that makes me want to shrug my skin loosely, like a rhinoceros:
Greg trivial, my half grapefruit eaten by Michel, Olivia also trivial but
enthusiastically; large tree-masses like clouds, light around the edges,
Chalmers Church vestry steps.
[undated journal]
Jerry was suddenly at the kitchen door on Friday morning when I was reading
newspapers in my nightgown. I looked up to see him leaning on the door,
I was shocked; for a moment I didn't recognize him because he was so tanned.
But I shrieked and leapt toward him - the wrong thing to do. His friend
Howard was with him, in the background, smiling his childlike direct smile.
Jerry - here! Incomprehensible and mute in this context. I was eager to
find him again, but eventually he seemed so absent that I was lost and terribly
lonely.
We went to MacDonald Park for part of the afternoon, sat on a bench for
a while, and later on a grass bank beside the yacht club, watching the regatta
and brigantine. Squirrels, a spider web, a dog, grasshoppers' high buzzing
in the trees. After a while he took my hand - I felt a sharp warmth in my
stomach, a kick - but then it was natural.
He talked about how his work kills him, about how the other person who
was happy stopped being happy, about his house with its lemon trees and
raccoons. He said that he didn't write because most of the time it was forced
and not true, but that he often wondered what I was doing. We felt ourselves
almost back in the old intimacy but every contact was felt to be a triumph
- oh it was strained.
I made dinner and tried to avoid the living room where he was mixed with
Olivia and Don, Howard and Greg - because I lost him whenever there were
other people. We had dinner. I was happy to have so many people together
that I liked altho' Olivia was restless. (I was particularly happy to see
Don - I have so much new freedom with him now, that I'm delighted to be
with him - he makes me gay, almost giddy, because he's as beautiful as before
and because now I can speak to him.)
Then we listened to music, Greg in the large chair, Howard and Jerry
under reading lights. Faces. I put "Good Day Sunshine" on the
phonograph - Howard smiled at Jerry and said "This is your song,"
and when it came on we seemed to share delight at the song and at our recognition
of it as Jerry's song. I liked Howard after this: I liked his black eyelashes
too, his way of squinting through them when he smiles.
Greg - amazingly - understood Jerry immediately. His word was new tho'
- 'authority.' Because Jerry doesn't play at presenting himself to anyone.
He sits, smiles, smokes, and waits. "With someone like him you know
that you just have to wait it out," Greg said. 'Authority' surprises
me, but I understand when I remember Greg's own way of trying to become
easy with people very quickly, at the cost of this same authority. Or integrity
- another word Greg used. (Last night Jerry noticed part of G's draft thesis
on the desk and said, "It sounds like a textbook. 'Consider the factors.'
He talks like that too.")
In the morning we went to Montreal, I in my blue nylon jacket hood, sitting
in the windy back, flashing through flashing trees and islands. Jerry took
a motion picture, the islands across the road, looping into the sky and
following the clouds, cutting back to my face smiling and past into the
sky again. When I sat in the front later I had to spread my arms behind
the seats and could lay one along his shoulder as he drove. Then he would
slide his hand down the wheel so that his forearm was along my thigh, and
we would both smile into the mirror. I was very happy - it was beautiful
and I was exhilerated by the physical, actual, contact.
The two days at Expo, sometimes exciting, sometimes aimless, dominated
by visual impressions of roof forms, sculptures, and bodies. Sunset over
Montreal from the top of the Canadian pavilion. The white starburst of Mexico,
the perfection of Greece's white blocks and bare rock, a United Nations
film called To Be Alive. The tent, spruce, rocks, and deadwood fountain
of the Ontario pavilion.
But somewhere, loss of contact. Sunday night was worst. Richard woke
me and told me again that he doesn't think I can make films - he seemed
to feel he should warn me. He was, as he always is, projecting himself aggressively.
This time I was more depressed than usual by it. He overruns me and I resent
being overrun and at the same time I know I don't want to play games on
his terms - 'intoxicating' hardly. I'd be sullen before long.
Jerry sat across the table and looked ahead of him and said, "Are
you happy?" "No, I'm not." "Why." "Because
yesterday all day I felt as tho' we didn't know each other." I was
close to crying and I had my arm up along the side of my face so he wouldn't
see. I couldn't understand what he said about it being his fault, not liking
himself when he walked around. He said, "I may not seem to, but I do.
I think you may be wrong." My head dropped sideways to the table -
I felt despair and panic, and I got up and went out and sat looking at Richard's
books.
The day was a nightmare of running away, pushing back tears, running
ahead on the street very fast, commenting on things in windows but remaining
radically silent. I wouldn't let him take my hand or help me over things
because I resented the vacancy of such touching. Finally we went to the
park where Peter [Dyck] and I had sat years ago. My stomach was twisted
with loneliness and I ran away again, but was always aware of the exact
position of his body - I thought, if he can make one move to show that he
is here .... But he didn't and we sat several hours without speaking. Howard
came and we went back to Kingston, still without speaking.
Only once there was a halt in the traffic and the car in front of us
braked slowly in red tail-light. I put my hand on the back of his neck -
in the mirror I could see his face tighten and he closed his eyes. I felt
- triumph. I had reached him. He said nothing then, but later, when I said
"It has been funny to have you come suddenly from nothing," he
smiled quickly, "It has been funny to find you; I didn't know if I
would but this time it won't be such a dramatic goodbye as beside the boat,
with the Greek music." And he reached for my hand and held it up against
his neck very warmly.
When we came back to Kingston he sat on the chair near where I was reading,
he seemed to realize at last that I was there. But I had already had enough
- grief, it was grief for failure, for time, for death of consciousness
- and I was abrupt. Finally they left and I ran away from the pleasantries
and came upstairs and cried - again - and was desolate until Greg had distracted
me and listened to me. I'm still desolate - I don't like the mental image
I have of him with his round-backed nose and open mouth lopsided under his
teeth. His strange green eyes closing sideways when he smiles. He's an odd
boy. I miss him, he always was a child and we were happy children but there
was something very good that is not there now. I'm confused.
Will I write him? In the park where I sat looking over the traffic, aware
of him although my back was turned, I told myself that I would not write,
but would forget him and remember only the time in Rome, but I won't - this
is a whole and I need to see the rest of it.
Then I found the note earlier in the journal that said unreality follows
joy, as it has. I'll write him and tell him.
9 August
I did write him today. I told him about the tension of his days here
("Monday was terribly, unbearably, lonely") ("on Saturday,
when you were wonderfully real and present") and about my resolve to
lock him in that one moment of time that I was comfortable in. But it is
true that because I cherish what he was I necessarily cherish what he is
now and am desolate when I do not recognize him. The past two days have
been full of him, scenes and comments both from Rome and from the three
days here. I even have a sentimental feeling about the sheets upstairs that
he slept in.
I must remember the moment during Olivia's wedding reception when Don
replied to a toast. The living room and dining room were full of people
in new dresses talking to each other with champagne glasses in their hands.
Don had had to respond warmly to many steamy faces. Paul from next door
made a gay and appropriately sarcastic speech in toasting the bride. Then
Don was to reply - he was speechless; I could tell that he was refusing
this time to play sophistication and I knew it was because he was being
asked to deny Olivia - in effect - by selling his feelings for her to the
steamy faces' laughter. He stood awkwardly and said that Olivia was a wonderful
woman and that he hoped to make her happy as she deserved. I was embarrassed
for him, and so stung by his desperate vulnerability that I ran away to
cry a little in the bathroom, but was caught on the stairs and brought back
to be toasted. Later as we were driving to Myrna's, I did begin to cry and
Greg knew it was about Don, so he stopped among the neon puddles off Yonge
Street and held me anxiously.
Something has happened with Greg - Greg is so much a part of me now that
I am eager to tell him about Jerry, about Don, Rasheed, Frank. Things that
are important to me seem to need sharing with him; he is a kind of hub with
my self, and I cannot any longer exclude him jealously from what touches
me. He's central, not peripheral - he's not the Other but he is - not another
self, not an extension of myself - this is difficult to describe - something
like what Mitchell described: someone who stands back to back with me to
see the other half of this 'terrible' world: ie he too is central and perceiving
rather than perceived, but at the same time I can look at and touch him
and not feel myself looked at or touched. What it is is nothing romantic
- 'unity' of lovers etc - but simply the fact that I'm safe enough with
him not to filter my responses or feel a need of self-presentation-preservation,
yet at the same time am pleased or annoyed with him as an object, touchable,
whiskery (he's growing a stiff red beard that makes his eyes beautiful),
smelling of body and Right Guard, wet under the armpits when he makes love
strenuously, hairy legged (he thinks Jerry is the only other person with
feet as large as his), large-handed; he walks with his feet straight ahead
of each other, like a tightrope walker, but loosely. It makes him seen pigeon
toed. He wears a pair of white denim shorts fringed above the knees, with
a patch on the inside right thigh - usually he is barefoot or in sandals;
he wears an assortment of baggy shirts or turtle-necked jerseys stretched
out at the bottom. He has a beautiful childlike mouth; a large solid wide-boned
frame.
The confusion about touching Jerry reminds me of my famous (to me only)
promiscuity: when my friends are men I want to sleep with them, at least
put my arms around them.
I wondered what Mitchell would say now if I confronted him with my view
that we should have slept together. It isn't lust, it is just clearing away
room for clear response, unambiguity. I think now I could handle it with
Mitchell.
It worked with Frank, with Rasheed, with Jerry, most successfully of
all with Greg. I expect it to work again - and I expect to tell Greg about
it. I'm full of confidence and plans tonight.
I decided several weeks ago, suddenly, in the periodicals library that
I am going to become a film-maker.
Reik in The Third Ear quotes Freud on making decisions: "In
the important decisions of our personal life - in vital matters such as
the choice of a mate or a profession - we should be governed, I think, by
the deep inner needs of our nature."
I want to make films because it is a work that can involve personal life
completely - there need be no boundary or punch out time because everything
I would see, hear, feel, could be ordered and transformed in the borders
of the film screen. My love of peripheral knowledge would be indulged, my
fascination with the visual expressed and intensified. I would not need
to secrete academic bile toward a PhD in experimental psychology - which
I see as a continuation of Weisman's Psych 211 and which I feel as a slow
accumulation of brackishness in even my personal divorced-from-work life
- I have to be a craftsman.
I've wanted to be a child psychologist because I think this is also life-involved
self-involved work that demands sensitivity, growth, love. But I don't know
if I could be a good one - my personal relations are shifty and anxious
at best, I'm good only with exceptional children like Lellie, Maria, and
Carol - others tend to bore me. I wonder if I could really love kids, like
Spinster, respond to them consistently with joy. If I could find
a way this possibility is not closed yet.
But to have a craft, like pottery in that it has a volume, like sculpture
in balance of masses, like painting in sharpening or blurring of lines;
like psychology in responding to, eliciting response from, an audience;
like philosophy in effort to understand; like drama in effort to present
complexity only slightly simplified; involving words and music, colors,
texture, suggestion and metaphor, synesthesia, movement, faces, bodies!
I'm afraid of this decision because I have no certainty of its succeeding.
I feel a little as I did when I thought I would have a baby: excited, terrified
at moments, giddy at the possibility of proving myself, ambiguously happy
and fearful. I never did decide to write because I didn't have the resolution,
courage to say "I will write." There are already many good writers.
Ha - there are already many good cinéastes but I've dared, I've vowed!
I've told people; my life has shifted; I've decided something in
one swift moment (I phoned Greg from the library to tell him) and I've committed
myself. We walked through the park to the lake in bare feet to celebrate;
I felt liberated.)
A cineaste is more difficult to be even than a writer and this complicates
things even more because I have to work with other people. I'll have
to work, plan, scrape, agonize, and I'm delighted.
The cahiers may become working notes, as they always have been, furtively.
Le Devoir clipping, Chagall n'aime pas les 'ismes':
Les 'ismes', c'est très mauvais pour l'artiste. Je déteste
fauvisme et cubisme, parce qu'au fond c'est toujours du réalisme.
Ce à quoi il faut croire, c'est à la couleur.
11 August
The other thing about films is that, like reality or like consciousness,
they move in a stream. A photograph or a painting is an arrest; the film
has with it the awareness of loneliness and time ("those two companions
without whom no journey can yield us anything"). Like Jules et Jim
for example (which Devoir's morality column calls nihilistic!) negative
capability celebrated!
Freud: "... no mortal can keep a secret. If the lips are silent,
he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
And thus the task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind
is one which it is quite possible to accomplish." - NB for film as
well as the Other.
18 August
"A return to understanding by simply looking" from "Look
or the Keys to Art." Does "expression of the human spirit"
mean object of human love?
"Like the other arts, literature has the power to enrich the imagination
and to clarify thought and feeling." What was Walley's comment
about Olivia's essay? It struck me as the most precisely relevant criticism
possible for any writing: it involved the necessity for clarity of feeling.
Can a film have clarity of feeling? If so, the clarity would be that
of the director's feeling, not the audience's, but the clarity would result
in a clarity of production and so perhaps to an intensity of audience feeling,
if not a clarity?
20 August
[letter]
Sunday night: Greg has the Brahms violin concerto on, we've closed the
curtains, lit the lamps. I'm in bed warming my feet. The music is like the
feeling of well-being, especially this first movement of the second side.
We had Don here to dinner (meatloaf and corn on the cob) because Olivia
is in Toronto recovering from graduate student's wife's disease (what her
doctor calls it - depression from lack of attention) while Don finishes
his Masters thesis, after a blind long mole-hidden summer of overwork. Don
came in depressed and looking like a ghost - white and thin. I felt proud
both of the cooking and the atmosphere of friendliness that had him quite
a bit happier when he left.
I called Judy on the telephone too. She sounded like herself, not strained
as she does sometimes. I was happy after talking to her, partly because
she knows the sort of family difficulties we have and partly because she
always seems to have grown more confident and less anxious. She's managed
to become what she always wanted to be: Judy Epp, separate.
I've had a constant sense of fullness of life for the past several weeks:
so much to read, look at, listen to, talk to friends about, think about
- and three other specific things; my new room, Jerry's visit, and new vocational
plans. More about these later. Meanwhile the sun shines day after day, or
it rains and the air is suddenly lighter, full of scents.
I'm busy - the three courses, Gregory, Don and Olivia, also Tony and
Andrea, letters to Bill; and I'm sewing for school, a tailored pant suit
(how much I wish you were helping) in purple wool. (While I think of it,
could I have that tweed skirt you made from the remnants of my tweed-orange-brown
suit, since I've lost my skirt? I'll send you another elegant outfit of
Victoria's in exchange.) I clean my room, and rearrange it, moving things
into it gradually. It's pretty.
Books: picture books from the library, on Mexican architecture, ceramics,
art, Québec, photographs color.
I've splurged on a book of letters by the painter Van Gogh - he was a
lonely neurotic person and a very great artist. Among letters written to
his brother when he was still a young man and hadn't found his work, I discovered
this passage:
"Involuntarily, I have become more or less a kind of impossible
and suspect personage in the family, at least somebody whom they do not
trust, so how could I in any way be of any use to anybody? Therefore, above
all, I think the best and most reasonable thing for me to do is to go away
and keep at a convenient distance, so that I cease to exist for you all."
I needn't really add anything since the feeling of the last sentence
is often exactly mine. At the same time you insist that I am less "impossible
and suspect" to you, and you don't seem to intend to let me cease to
exist! Also, the family in this case would mean only Father - ironically,
since he has always been outside it.
There's a need for some kind of resolution: I continue to have dreams
of desperate argument, persuasion, explanation, and shouting in an effort
toward reconciliation that is always frustrated, broken off by waking. The
failure of understanding, my own glaring failure at compassion, still discourage
me.
I've come to a few understandings (understandings rather than an understanding,
because everything is complex, emotions sometimes are there and sometimes
not, explanations sometimes are true and sometimes are not) of why I had
even less tolerance for Father than before: I've always been able to see
him as a kind of tragic hero, full of feelings he can't express, full of
ideals whose failure hurts him but which he is still aware of, tortured
by a kind of demon-possession of rages against his will, thwarted by life,
stunted, etc. I couldn't see that this time - I saw, not a thwarted high
idealism, but a lot of petty conventional morality built up into a prop
for self esteem, no real concern for what is real and true and better than
what others have, only a blind and rigid application of this petty moralism
against everyone, in order to protect his unreasoned and largely contradictory
network of legalisms.
26 August
[journal]
Henry Murray spent four years as a history major, four as a medical student,
a year getting an MA in biology, was a physiology instructor at Harvard,
interned for an MD, was embryology assistant researcher for two years, got
a PhD in biochemistry from Cambridge, and then became interested in a possible
correlation of personality and concept-preference. Took courses in philosophy
from Broad and Morris Cohen. "But it was Jung's book, Psychological
Types, which, by providing a partial answer to my question, started
me in earnest toward psychology. There were besides this, another book,
a woman, some German music and several other fructifying influences that
made me feel and think at once, instead of separately." He visited
Jung, instructed psychology at Harvard, became director of the Psychological
Clinic, trained in psychoanalysis: over a span of 24 years. Fifteen years
later - war work and testing.
The relevant in this is the possibility of movement in response to feeling
and thinking - what I do next year won't after all, be final! Neither with
any degree or work - and I could be many things, as I want to be: I should
compile a list. Graduate degrees in psychology, philosophy, and English;
seven languages (the ritual number, but I can't think past Greek yet); ceramics
and fashion; films; poems; short stories; children; red-headed and/or Jewish
friends; a book of photographs; a self-made house; a small sailboat; style;
and other friends; some touch with home in the Peace River Country; more
traveling years, more loneliness, more rooms - a long enough life and more
energy.
15 Sydenham Street, 27 August
A teacher with isolation pay, working at Igloolik in a one-room school?
The yellow bed and cushion in this room are beautiful with deep blue
- my bathrobe draped over the chair back or fallen across the bed. Yellow
flowers from the Queen's flowerbeds spreading horizontally into the mirror.
Small pictures on the window wall like very small windows - one looking
over the Toits Rouges, one framing the curly-bearded mailman standing in
a rain of flowers, one looking onto Bonnard's red room looking out a door
and a window to a garden Botticelli's young blue gown Mary separated from
the announcing angel by a space of white wall. Chagall's green girl and
her green cow (donkey?) holding a red bouquet into the sky will go behind
me above the bed or between the two doors. The dragon needs a yellow candle.
September 1
[letter]
Rasheed and Lucette have gotten married, while I was at home (no she
isn't pregnant), in the university chapel. Three days afterward he cut the
first two fingers of his right hand off in a lawn mower, but only at the
first joint, so he is learning to write again. He's cheerful about it: it
hasn't touched his old buoyancy. When he got out of the hospital they took
their new car (she works) to Gaspé to visit the French Canadian Grandmama
and Grandpapa for two weeks: now he's been coast to coast. He's looking
well, seems happy and is delighted to be married: his address is 30 William
Street. They have a pretty apartment in an old stone house: she's a clever
decorator and a good cook. I think she's exactly what he needs and
I'm delighted he's been so lucky.
Don and Olivia leave for Oxford by boat on the 5th of September, four
days from now. (Petercat is living with Greg.) We'll miss them terribly
but they are glad to be changing landscapes after these four years here.
Of course their packing is chaotic. Olivia really hasn't had time to reply
to your letter.
Greg is still pounding out this thesis but he's started a letter to you.
He has a beard now - it's very curly and a dark auburn red, very thick:
in contrast to the hair on the top of his head which is straight, bleached
blond, and rather thin - but it looks good, it brings his eyes out, and
they're nice eyes. He's a lovely man - extraordinarily good humor and quite
a lot of funny humor. Victoria has moved to Toronto, by the way, with a
deposit of 36 thousand dollars in her bank and much much more to come.
My room: a white, small room with a high ceiling and one large window
overlooking the back yard where neighbourhood kids play under the eye of
their beautiful very young mother in her exquisite saris (their father is
a graduate student, I think). I have a low bed covered with a brilliant
yellow felt bedspread, a wicker armchair with a cushion in it the same color,
a tall narrow desk and chair, a stove and refrigerator, and a dresser which
is the most elegant I've ever seen. It is low, with a surface about thigh-high,
and suspended above it is a huge mirror with a snakey elegant curved wooden
border. Yellow flowers, my brass dragon, the food cupboard full of books,
and a human skull in the closet left behind by somebody with an interest
in archeology. The house, on Sydenham Street, is across from a small stone
castle I've told you about, and two houses up from the corner of MacDonald
Park. The entry way smells of Grandma Epp's house - my room is one of five
on the second floor - the house is a real boarding house (without board):
the smell, the bare hallways, the closets full of belongings left behind,
the list of rules posted in the hall. It's clean and quiet, and there'll
be more students in fall. And the walk to campus is thru' the park and past
the courthouse; the street will be beautiful in a month because it is lined
with elms.
A large bit of news is a result of some vocational self-examination.
Here I am in forth year having the sorts of uncertainties most people have
in their first year. I don't think I'll make a good psychologist: partly
because of temperament (how'm I to improve other people when I can't take
something like Father? I'm not good with people, besides) and partly because
I dislike the experimental approach usually taught intensely. It's alright
in undergraduate work, because it is possible to escape into interesting
courses, but in graduate school one is up against it! 5 years of it horrifies
me: I think it would tend to kill any sort of natural ability I have. So
perhaps I don't want a PhD after all.
What do I want? You'll be shocked, probably sorry - I want to make films
as a director, perhaps for the National Film Board or perhaps non-documentaries
for a company. I love movies; they're a completely effective and modern
art form, they're demanding, absorbing, and they can do almost anything.
I've always lived with my eyes; perhaps I could work with them. I'd be able
to use what writing ability I have as well; everything I know could be useful,
everything I can do. I think I could be good at it. There are many problems
- film school is expensive and hard to get into, the field is tough and
ruthlessly competitive; worst of all I'd have to learn to deal with other
people. But I think I can do it. If I haven't enough money for next year
I could work, pay my debts, and save up enough money for a year after. Or
perhaps I could do an MA in English as preparation. It may take a long time
but eventually I'll manage. Wow!
The purple pants-suit jacket is coming well - you'd be astonished at
how slowly and painstakingly I am working and how I measure and baste and
redo seams. I've actually made tailored buttonholes - they're not great
however; one is rather wall-eyed, one is skinny, but the third is nearly
perfect. (If you look at it from a distance.) The purple will be very romantic.
Oh, and I got the curved side seams eased in exactly, perfectly: I iron
everything the minute it is sewn, you wouldn't believe it was me.
Fall in the Peace River Country, all seasons are beautiful - the country
will begin to seem a myth to me because I love it but I feel exiled from
it.
I'm going out into the rain to get pumpkin and raisins for pumpkin bread
- Greg will lick the bowl. This is celebration - thank you for the recipe.
10 September
[journal]
About La nausée, "the true protagonist, nausea itself,
is (in one of its manifestations) the reflexive experience of the discrepancy
between the necessary structure of the story as told (as a work of art)
and the sense of the contingency - of the indeterminacy of the future -
which is the experience of the sloppiness of living one's life that one
seeks to alleviate by telling the story about it. This discrepancy, which
self consciousness obscures by its loquacity, is preserved in Nausée."
(As well as Proust and the literary tradition.)
Sartre's discussion of movies: music is the structure, there is no contingency,
everything is known ahead of time. But visual imagery of the movie undermines
the real world's structure - phenomenologists think of the real world as
cinematic.
24 September
Woke on Sunday morning, drops of rain on the top panes of the window,
very little light to read the Notebooks of Hesse-Briggs by, as Greg
slept. When he woke he moved to put one arm around me and his head against
the side of mine so that when I looked sideways I could see only the delicate
white skin around his eyes, an eyelid and the beginning of his red beard
(separate curling hairs distinct along the cheek profile). His arm across
me isn't heavy; it gathers me up in a friendly, certain way; it is a long
well-made arm and this Sunday morning I feel wide awake, warm, happy under
it. Later he wakes up and we get excited quietly. Being with him is good
all day.
Because it is very cold tonight, he wears his leather jacket for the
first time this year. He smells like last year's autumn and the evenings
in my bright room after dinner when we lay on my bed with our arms around
each other.
September 28
[letter]
Last night your three eldest were reunited - in a way. Judy was on the
upstairs extension and I on the downstairs at 40 Clergy East talking to
Paul, who was at Anne's in Toronto having just celebrated his birthday.
He's looking for work.
Yes, Judy has been here since Tuesday night, day before yesterday. Yesterday
she came to a film class, saw Rasheed, listened to Greg's records, watched
the Conservative convention rerun on TV (Greg's roommate Michel de Salabery
was Stanfield's French Canadian aide and traveled cross country with him
on the campaign tour - so we were more interested than otherwise); I think
she is staying until Saturday morning and taking the train back to see Paul.
Don't worry about her injury - she seems to be alright although rather unlucky.
She's wearing an elastic harness to keep her shoulders back - it gives her
military posture and a tremendous chest. [Hit by a car, broken collarbone.]
I'm still finishing summer work, have an essay to get in before going
to Ottawa for Thanksgiving weekend (Jean is getting me an appointment to
see someone on the Canada Council staff about whether they'd give me money
to do an MA in film).
Have five new, wonderful courses and am frustrated at not being able
to get at them. One is psychology of learning - irrelevant but compulsory
and not as bad as the statistics course last year. Two philosophy courses
- German 19th century philosophers and existentialism. Two English courses
- Victorian literature and hopefully a film course altho' it may be Renaissance
tragedy instead. I've taken on movie-reviewing for the Queen's Journal and
have a student seminar with some other people on existentialism too. Many
new books; and red, yellow leaf-meal on the ground - I wish I could get
at it. Stupid to have left it so long. Gregory is still doing summer work
too, and hating it. I've already many essay topics, seminar papers, talks
to give etc. There are new professors to describe, piles of paperback reference
books to read; I want to go to Montreal for one last look at Expo and some
shopping! To Toronto to see Paul and the Dycks!
10 October
[journal]
"Mais il faut choisir: vivre ou raconter."
C'est bien pour ça que j'écrive si peu? Ou peut-être
qu'il n'y a rien ni a raconter ni a vivre. Weekend in Ottawa at Jean and
Neil's. Distress at the distance between my life and theirs. Neil is engaged
in reforming the B & B Commission Report, campaigning, pleased with
his daring and intelligence and uniqueness. I'm not sympathetic. Jean is
pleasant and poised, poised and pleasant and gracious; where does she keep
the small involuntary cries and startles she must surely still have? Lucidity
and patience or lucidity and intellectual enthusiasm, roles. Do I
nag Greg? Are they impatient with his stories as they are of Nana's? Do
they find me silent, obstinate, gauche? Do they watch me walk when I don't
notice?
I can't 'handle' people: I've never wanted to handle them, only something
else, vague. Have them tell me suddenly and joyously what their life is
like, as has happened once or twice. Or strike a sudden mutual humor with
me, even an irony or an admiring battle (Al Lalier, the Englishman in the
Aston-Healey) - as long as somehow we two recognize each other and explore,
guess, pry, laugh and do not hand back and forth silently our cards.
I've no patience with formules de politesse, I've always been so irritated
by them. When Don went away I went home so I wouldn't have to say goodbye
to him, and good luck and you'll never write but he came to my room to get
a book and we said it anyway.
At the boat they stood by the gangplank and Olivia said some things until
I turned - not as instantaneously as my 'beau moment' demanded - and climbed
the tinny ramp to cross the foyer and the square and the empty streets to
the Gare Centrale.
My 100 watt bulb is surrounded by sleeping moths, soft brown stenciled
wings.
From the top of the Gatineau Escarpment at Mountain Road, farmhouses,
sumac and maple on the slopes and between fields, a copse of trees along
the creek in all shades of orange, pink, yellow, red. Elegant tall grasses
in the marsh at the foot of the hill; sails on the broad Outtuais River,
and three ridges rising beyond it. We are on an outcropping of granite;
Greg is smiling; the valley is framed for us by the branches of a small
pine whose needles crushed under us give their pine scent into the air.
The face of the woman at the end of the hall when she came in to ask
me for help this morning: hair down and disordered, face flat, dry, loose;
mouth bleeding slightly. Her body seemed small as a child's, but the skin
around her waist and her breasts was loose when I felt it when I lifted
her onto my bed. She lay back in the chair with her knees bent and her legs
up, separated, as if she was offering her round pussy; I was shocked, unsure
what was the matter with her and what she wanted. In her room I found three
wine bottles in a paper bag. I put her into bed quite sternly; she said
"That guy downstairs sure did use me. Please help me please help me."
part 2
- raw forming volume 7: august 1967 - september 1968
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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