Watkins 369 [Kingston General Hospital], January 18
1969 [journal]
A train at night, the first leap from this hospital to that first one
that I remembered with such nostalgia until I went away to university at
last. The bed isn't as high, the walls are old, pale orange colored, a little
greasy. I'm different, my candle, my hyacinths, my carnation, Peter on the
telephone, Nesta really beginning to talk when Blair had gone, Blair singing
to himself when he was bored, Maria yesterday saying over the payphone at
Morrison's Café (where the men liked my cape) (a waiter!), "I
really am sorry, because you are the first person in Kingston who is warm."
Ah - my windchimes. Some of the glamour is lost, but I've moved from that
place to another place that is a place, and that is a place I like,
I think. My guitar is against the desk, beside the carnation. Greg and Arnold,
Peter, Maria.
Nesta, when she talked about Blair, became really involved in the conversation.
Even then it was no interaction, but I was the catalyst that allowed her
to talk, about their quarrels, their meeting and breakups, about Blair,
who is handsome in a sleepy, sexy Byronic way. He dances in front of a mirror
naked, they do strip teases for each other, he stops her as she is dressing
and says "Hold that," and looks at the light on her back or the
angle of her breast. "He is very sensual" she says, making it
sound delightful, in her chocolate-cream Jamaican accent. Sen-sua-al. At
my party he looked at my navel; he was the only person to notice
my navel. Something happened that I remember affectionately. As he passed
he put his hand on my stomach. Spontaneously I reached my hand toward him,
and he turned back and reached his hand toward me so that we stood for a
moment holding hands, looking at each other in surprise. When I told Nesta
she said it was Blair, perfectly. And his Anglican services and Baroque
music; his white suit this summer.
I'm envious; I've never had a man who found me beautiful in the way I
have found men beautiful. Greg least of all! There was Jean-Jacques, to
whom I was enslaved by his sheer physical grace, and years, years ago as
a nine year old I was in love with Kenneth Driedeger, because he was so
beautiful (but he betrayed my elaborate daydreams by marrying a frumpy creature
with too-red lipstick). So Blair married Nesta and has her tall narrow brown
body, her elegant legs and high tight breasts, her squared chin and long
pointed eyes. I'm envious! Of a man who would really see, feel, explore
me and like it all, have me for dessert in his life. Well. And at the same
time I can't do without a man who is beautiful himself, the curve of Arnold
Desser's hipbone, the little subtle shoulder bone of Jean-Jacques. I couldn't
look at Greg's fat middle, as I can't look at Peter's, but like Greg's legs
and his bottom, and I liked Peter's feet, and I want a whole body.
Afternoon. Peter was here since 3:30, sat in a chair next to the bed,
wasn't turned on, but looked beautiful, with his smooth skin focused around
his eyes, eyes, not mouth. He pointed out to me the red branches in the
sun, other nearer trees in shadow, blue. I found myself waiting to see him
today. When he came I was discomposed, I clicked but there he was and I
respond to him because he's funny and because he's (my hand is writing automatically
today) like Updike, so knowing, personal, transparent-opaque that most other
people seem dead, most novelists seem dead. The wind chimes, birds. But
the moment that summed it up, when he was withdrawing and I knew he was
going to leave, my sadness at sharing losing never trusting him concentrated
in confusion and silence as he made jokes to leave me smiling. "You've
gone sad. Are you alright? You know the moveable feast? That terrible part
about the Fitzgeralds where he talks about watching Zelda's face go dead
as her soul leaves. Joan does that too. I think her soul goes up to bed
at 9:30 every night. But you're like that sometimes." "It isn't
me doing it myself though, it's the interaction." "I know it is,
and it makes me feel guilty, coupable." And other things, he being
cheerful and escaping and I sullenly refusing to play his cheerful parting.
Like Desser's one man funny show.
Before when I said about Maria "She's a survivor" he said "You're
a lovely chick." I don't trust his articulate broad affection, but
still I like him and know he's the one extraordinary man (excluding Don)
in my life. That sadness when he left was the sadness I begin to feel when
some man becomes more important to me than I am to him, scratched pride
and unconfidence. He talks about leaping over cliffs, says Joan won't, feels
he's living in a fog and diffuses himself into a fog around his family.
[undated journal]
It's past ten, and as I was fiddling with chords waiting to get into
the bathtub the woman across the hall came out and faced me. Her face is
creased like a paper bag, and has a red radiology line on the cheek like
a trademark, and her hair stands around it in a pinwheel of grey feathers
that opens up around the flat place where her head touches the pillow. She
often comes to her door, manoeuvers around it slowly, holding onto the edge.
Then she looks at me and I look at her, neither of us smiles or speaks.
She shuffles up the hall, turns and comes back, and her thin knotted legs
disappear around her door (always open only far enough to sidle through).
This time she looked across the hall petulantly, like a tall skinny child
in her white hospital gown, with her hair tousled up like a child just woken,
and she said primly "I've just taken a sleeping pill and I'd like to
get the benefit of it." I found myself answering her with a short nod.
When she began to turn, she pronounced the second of the lines she must
have rehearsed as she lay indignant listening to my effort to get a good
F, "Banjos and hospitals don't go together." As she shuffled through
her door her back and buttocks moved serenely naked under the split back
of the nightgown, hung creased and marbled as if carelessly pegged to her
bones in only a few places.
21 January [letter]
M, which is both Mother and Mary, it's embarrassing to discover that
I have to be put into a hospital to find energy and time to write, even
with all my fleeting good intentions. I'm sorry if you've been worried or
disappointed, but I know you are busy yourself and probably don't miss letters
very much, or at least as much as you would have before.
Why I didn't write, even at Christmas, I'm not sure. All of Christmas
seemed unreal, came closer every day, arrived, passed, along with New Year
was gone, and the rhythm of working reappeared as if it had never been interrupted.
Working regular hours changes the whole feeling of time. Mornings are always
difficult, because it's necessary to get up, usually with just slightly
too little sleep, and get on a bus and go to the office to face a day of
doing boring work or finding only half-honest ways to avoid it. Noon hours
are for piano practice, then at five o'clock exhaustion and hunger drain
away two hours. And then there is an important film that can't be missed,
or more piano practice, or dinner at Harcourts' or a film review broadcast
to prepare, or papers to mark. Weekends are little explosions, two precious
days, sometimes in Toronto or Montreal but mostly in Kingston happily cleaning
and playing with cats, or doing nothing. I haven't written other people
either, and can't explain why, any more than I can to you, except that they
and you seem unreal. I'm both too selfish and too lazy to write without
a strong impulse, and in this relentlessly even movement of time imposed
by the job, the impulse is seldom strong enough. This isn't a very good
apology is it?
Here I am explaining again. I thought our roles had reversed firmly enough
so that now it is you who explains discoveries and turns polemical
instead of descriptive-lyrical. Sometimes your letters make me think of
mine in second and third year. But you can't shock me, no,
I don't disapprove, and even if the loving touch therapy were to be slightly
more electric than soothing, I still approve! But, but, but Mary,
Mary, you must go on in school so that all your processes of changing can
go through their whole movement and not leave you hovering like a spiritual
immigrant between two sensibilities. You must stay long enough in your new
world so that you are really self-possessed in it and don't still feel that
maybe humble undeserving little Miss Konrad does not belong in such a splendid
world of sophisticated confident wonders. Hmm? When I ask about next year
you evade. Why? Why can't you stay at U? (You'd earn more money etc, tell
him that.) I'm insisting on this mainly because I know that it has
taken me until this year (and hasn't yet really quite happened) to
shake the straw out of my hair and see my two worlds clearly separate and
yet related as they are. That's a big topic, but it's summed up for me by
the way Father always insisted that we stay out of everyone's way when we
went to town, because we were country kids and he didn't want to be embarrassed
by us. I've continued to react in my new world as if I should be careful
not to get in the way of the well-dressed townspeople, knowing all the while
that I am one of the townspeople and even in a way (to be modest) one of
their aristocrats! That is something to be settled, I think you need
to know you're townspeople too.
The hospital. I have something unpainful and unserious called thrombophlebitis,
and am here mainly to make sure I stay put in bed. I'm in a private room
that looks out over the University sledding hill with its oaks and elms
turned red-branched because of the warm rain, and looking like a Pizarro
because the window glass is slightly rippled. I have my guitar, hyacinths,
a carnation, books, a telephone, a bud-green nightgown, visitors, an inch
and a half square of Desser's face cut out of a photograph, my camera, and
am happy at home.
Sounds in the corridor remind me of the Edmonton hospital,
the juice cart rattling, the heavy squeak of the food wagon, sixteen-year-old
boys mopping lazily (coming in and mopping one spot conscientiously for
ten minutes while they talk about my guitar and Gordon Lightfoot), the clear
clean English accent of the Hampshire girl who's my nurse, orderlies slowing
down to peek in my door as they pass, rapid footsteps, shuffling footsteps
of old people ("I'm takin' a walk, nurse, t'keep up my strength"),
visitor's footsteps hesitating as they read room numbers, the red haired
nurse's aid with no hips calling back "Very welcome at any time"
to some patient who's thanked her for flouncing in with a change of water
for the flowers. It isn't exactly as I remember it, my capacity for finding
glamour in everything has died a little I think, or its direction changed.
But I still love the busyness and self importance of it all, and some of
the glamour is still here because of the memories, echoes, it stirs up.
It's like coming home, because I find myself existing in a doubly rich place
which is both new present and reanimated past, so that everything is sharp
and lively, and I can leisurely measure myself as I am against myself as
I was, all in the well-looked-after well being that combined with the excitement
becomes a state of grace, have you made it safely to the end of this sentence?
Greg has left for England, last Tuesday, a week today. His thesis had
dragged on longer and longer but finally it's done, typed, examined, corrected,
approved, and he's popped out of Canada like a caragana seed flying out
of its high-tension catapult-pods. The late night plane from Montreal, with
his record player, his cowboy boots, a new blue denim jean jacket, his Australian
sheepherder's hat, off to London, well-tailored small-scale tidy England,
where he'll surely seem very colonial with his big hands and feet and his
flamboyant colors (brassy blond at the top of his head, bright red beard),
like one of the Indians brought back by explorers to exhibit to the king.
He'll live at first in a residence called London House, which is also where
Desser lives!
The letter you never got was a long lyric about Desser, which I can't
rewrite because I can't remember the exact emotion it bloomed on, but it
was to tell you that I had broken up with Greg and that I had discovered
new sorts of capacities in myself with this Desser.
His first name is Arnold, which explains why I use his surname. He of
all the people I know is most like Uncle Bill, small boned, skinny but wiry
and so not actually bony, full of energy and opinions, abrupt, funny, emotional,
ambitious to be somebody although not sure exactly who to be, gregarious,
intermittently conscience-stricken about selfishness. He's, to be factual,
Winnipeg Jewish (secularized), an almost-MA in English, black-bearded and
black eyed and rather ugly although in his way physically charming, in London
learning to make films at the London School of Film Technique while partially
supporting himself with photography. He has already made one film, a documentary
for the province of Manitoba, which he wrote and directed, wrote music for
and played music for. Plays piano, violin, sax, improvises and composes.
Must be handled with an intuitive shifting between roughness and gentleness
that I've far from mastered. Has ulcers and other nervous ailments. Is,
in spite of his explosiveness and bile, fiercely loving and dangerously
vulnerable. Cooks well, imitates accents, turns African student, Liverpool
professor, haggling Jewish grandmother. He lives mercurially, and anyone
living with him whips up and down his moods with him.
Your question is, what do I want with a creature like this, when civilized,
patient, ironical, big, healthy Greg (who's a good lover to boot) is the
alternative? I'm not sure, it's something to do with wanting to be challenged.
Not as a rational decision, of course. Desser just moved me as I hadn't
ever been moved since I've been an adult, confused me, challenged me, changed
me, tested me, sometimes fought me, forced me at times to pursue and pacify
him rather than always being pursued and pacified myself, pushed me to see
what new things I'm capable of and what sort of relationship I really want.
I don't know, even now. We didn't have long enough to find out how good
or bad we'd be together. There are problems that might be nearly insoluble,
or soluble only at a cost I can't or won't afford. The worst for me is his
half buried irrational Jewish feeling about what his woman should be, the
Mother, the gentler, the peace maker, the balance-weight of orthodoxy and
stability that would allow him to lean over precipices and create great
movies. I seem to need the same, Greg was all that for me. At the same time
he wants his woman to be ambitious, independent, difficult, his intellectual
and emotional equal, and despises a little all the embodiments of his secret
standards, all the compliant females. So I'm both all-right and all-wrong,
just as he's both all-right and all-wrong for me. If we grew up enough,
and wanted it enough, and were wise and canny enough, we might make it and
have something whose very precariousness made it energetic and growing.
Or else - disaster. Needless to say he reminds me of Father, just as Greg
reminds me of you. And I've often wondered whether Father, if he hadn't
been so wrecked to begin with, and if he'd found himself in time, and if
he'd married a fighter instead of a peacemaker, couldn't have been an extraordinary
person. Maybe not; maybe the loving-unloving joyous-unjoyous cleft is made
in people very early, long before they marry, so that they should marry
someone who'll nourish the wreckage rather than hope to force growth. You
must have been over this question many times, and although you've never
seen me in any of my men-situations and don't know, although you surely
guess, my limitations and (yes there are some!) gifts, you must have some
opinions. What are they?
Anyway, it's very clear that men are (and have been since very young)
extremely important to me and that all the really important unsolved questions
(whether I'll lapse into Father's indifference with my own children, whether
I'll settle for a man who mothers me but bores me a little, whether I'll
decide to be solitary and eventually bitter, whether I'll work very hard
to be really good at something, whether my unreliable but still real affections
can be good for somebody) turn on what happens to me with men. There's
femininity, it's that recognition of the importance of the male-female polarity,
even if I don't see the poles in the orthodox way. Look, M, I'm polemicizing
again! No, it's a conversation, or would be if you'd interrupt. You know
all about this, because you're polarized too, and that's why Mrs Block and
Mrs Whilms never had quite what the misters did. Will this get to your English
prof? I don't mind if it does.
Mine, Harcourt, came to see me on Sunday. He's an extraordinary man,
perverse, often full of rage and evil spirits, restless, gossipy, treacherous
- the most sensually intelligent man I've ever encountered ("sensually
intelligent" is hard to explain, 'sensual' is roughly aware of the
world in terms of sensation, color, scent, pattern etc, and 'intelligent'
in the context of 'sensual' is something like being articulate about what
is sensed so intensely, but also like having a broad area of reference,
associations both remembered and imagined, that can support, color, identify,
and enlarge sensuality(. The writer who has it, or a writer who has
it, is John Updike (I don't know if your American lit course gets you as
far as Updike because he's writing his best things now), who I've discovered
through the Harcourts and have been reading delightedly in here. And Peter's
also one of the few few few men I know who is funny and surprising. He likes
me; I think he loves me a little, as he loves a number of other people,
and I certainly love him a little although I'm not sure I trust him. Still,
it's easier to become someone because he's so perceptive and generous. When
he says I'm a lovely chick, I know what he means. I'm glad he thinks so,
because he usually likes things in people that I also like but haven't enough
experience to have convictions about. He makes me more myself. That's a
gift I think you have for people too, but his way of doing it is different.
You do it by listening and approving, and he by looking very hard, seeing
usually shrewdly and stating very definitely, thereby giving you a very
clear image of yourself that you then agree with or protest, approve or
dislike. He'd like you and you'd like him although he'd make you nervous.
I've just now had my whole bottom shaved and look bald, like a gross
little girl. Tomorrow they're cutting open a little abscess in the groin.
It seems I haven't really got thrombophlebitis at all, just some infection.
In the meantime I'm getting lots of guitar practice, and as you see, have
written you.
Yesterday one of the young doctors I sometimes go to concerts with (a
psychiatrist working on a different floor) dropped in on a social visit.
When he mentioned needing a haircut I offered to do it for him so he went
out and asked the charge nurse for a scissors, which she respectfully gave
him ("Dr Junek"). He put up the "busy" sign until I'd
given him a very elegant trim, and then gave back the scissors with the
air of someone who's just made a very intelligent diagnosis. If the nurse
knew what they had been used for, they'd have lost respect forever. Hospitals
are still fun.
Michael Bopp telephoned today to say that he and Judy want to come for
the weekend [first mention of the man who would become my brother-in-law].
I've a new friend, Marytka, who's late forties, very pretty, very intelligent
and alive, very funny with her splintered English full of images and metaphors
- I like older women who've survived. And here's an I-me letter for one
at last.
Wednesday [journal]
The anesthetist, a handsome hooked nose and curling grey temples, leaning
over his needle in my arm beginning to waver as I repeated the name of the
sleeping drug: phenol? Pental?
Emergence from a dream, knowing almost immediately where I was, a man
beside me still asleep, an Indian orderly looking at me, a blond nurse.
"You're awake, do you know where you are?" "In the recovery
room." Speech a struggle to appear steady, the determination I have
when I'm getting drunk. Being wheeled dizzy down the corridor, around corners,
up the elevator, childishly proud of having come back to myself so quickly
and surely, pain in my groin, a new room with a window toward the lake.
This afternoon beautiful Joanna with an orange rosebud that I've put
in the brandy bottle. This evening she brought Jean Chabot, the lion who
crows, the garlic charm. Black birds on the branches I see even when lying
flat, like huge buds set up straight toward the sun. My wind chimes installed,
and a silk-haired old lady with wrinkles around her mouth radiating out
like fine spines on a fish. I'm sorry about the red Pizarro branches though.
Thursday
Since Peter was here I find myself wanting to write about my soul. My
soul lost its state of grace today, because I could walk the halls, because
I'm not alone in the room, because Peter Duffy stayed until I was talked
out, because Judy and Michael brought their own preoccupations, because
Wade came when they were here and Mike and Peter were here together. (Peter
Duffy is from Winnipeg. We share Zane Grey, springs, rafts, Wild strawberries.
He's ingenuous, kind, sometimes surprising with his untamed choice of words
- like me when I'm good, uses words that have a new taste, like words in
French.)
Next to me is Mrs Simmons, soft rounded body with breasts sliding prettily
down her chest wall as an extension of her abdomen - a round, high bottom.
In her pink and green flannel robe she sits reading, whispering the words
(from Woman's Circle, the TV Guide) to herself. I liked her
yesterday for rearranging the ugly gladioli from Mike. She has the healthy-mindedness
to want to hear me play the guitar! I've found the sunroom upstairs, clean
tile floor, two large plants, and a tall table in the corner, with a mirror
that shows me narrow waisted and romantic in green velvet and light green,
pretty again, standing holding the guitar under my arm.
Judy and Michael brought Rabbit, run, none of the grace of Couples
or The music room, a nausea in my --- soul, shaken eventually by
sitting in the half dark sunroom practicing choked chords hopefully quiet
enough to escape the moribund complainers at the end of the hall on this
floor.
Monday, 27 January [journal]
"... private letter existed to reinforce the
configuration of the role in which the writer wished his correspondent to
cast him."
"Wilst du dich deines Wertes freuen / So musst
der Welt da Wert verleihen," ie why I have trouble writing Olivia.
Both taken from a section in Morse Peckham's book discussing the collapse
of the Enlightenment, and the clue toward a new "orientation"
in Kant and Goethe. He also says that after Byron "the
primary symbolic figure of the post-Enlightenment negation is the wanderer."
Ha! One of the figures in my stock, "[for]
the man who is no longer comfortable in the web of social circumstances,
no longer able to play a socially structured role identity has become a
burden. Yet they endure."
[undated letter]
Since I wrote I've come out of the hospital and am back at work. It's
Sunday and I feel more than usually happy because Greg wrote me an extremely
happy letter from London, where he is living with, guess who, my Desser.
I'm amused and glad that my two men are in a position to look after each
other. Desser will get the benefit of Greg's record player and records,
Greg gets the benefit of Desser's (good) cooking and stimulating moodiness.
And I get the benefit of hearing about them from one more source.
Unfortunately they are also in a position to read each other's mail (Greg
wouldn't, he's too lazy, Desser would be conscience-stricken, but he would),
or at least to notice when the other gets mail and I'll have to be either
diplomatic or pseudonaively undiplomatic.
I'm going through my stuff (a little prematurely) thinking about what
to pack and what to take along on my travels next year. (My application
for the French government scholarship has gotten past the first board and
now has to go past a second one before I know whether I've got it.) I don't
know what to do with some of it, mainly the books, I'll send most of them
to you, if I may, because I can't take them and you might enjoy just having
them around. As for my housekeeping things, the few there are, maybe I'll
take them. But the miscellaneous important junk, I don't know. You and Father
will probably be moving so your place isn't really safe. I don't know when
or if I'll come back to Canada (but I think I will).
[undated letter]
Some of our wet February days have been like Chinook days or like the
first softening of very early spring and have reminded me of (what I still
tend to call) home. The landscape is still home, that much is true.
On the second of March I will be going into Kingston General Hospital
for two months of winter holiday. I haven't told you about the development
of this plan because I'm beginning to have your suspicion of announcing
plans that may not, MAY not, come off. A very serious minded young Scot
called Dr [Charles] Sorbie is going to open my hip and do something magical.
It turns out that my right leg is not an inch and a half shorter than the
left but only a little under half an inch shorter. The limp is due more
to something else, a dislocation. My leg bone slips up out of its socket
when I walk. Sorbie's magic tinkering consists of cutting through the bottom
part of the pelvic bone and tilting it so that the leg bone cannot slip
out as easily, then grafting everything into solidity with a little wedge
of bone. Two months in a body cast. I go to the OR probably on the 4th of
March and am really rather worried, horrified at having a scar on that particularly
nice bit of hip skin and afraid it might become worse not better, but I
have to risk it because I think the wear on the hip joint is beginning to
cause arthritis that could disable me if I continue to let it go.
Greg in London seems very happy, writes quite often but less often than
at first, so I suppose he's finding patterns for himself there. Olivia writes.
She's changed, I'm not sure I like her sounding mature and responsible.
She's seen Greg. She and Desser took an instant dislike to each other.
I have a new friend [Ron Matheson], a high school teacher (English and
creative drama) who by some accident is almost perfect by my carping standards
of masculine beauty, very tall and lithe, a runner, with huge beautiful
hands, very fine grained skin, a long head covered with black very curly
hair, heavy lidded black Byzantine eyes, a strong hooked nose, a very thin
mean mouth, a head like an Etruscan or a mythological Zeus on a Greek vase,
nothing pretty, but all very clear sharp lines animated by a sensual-seeming
energy and vitality. He's sentimental, has a BD in theology and intended
to be a minister until he stopped being a Christian! - But manages not to
be silly because of his unexpected idiosyncratic imaginative whip-flicks
of humor. I think he's probably a good teacher, genuineness seems to come
so easily to him and he has the emotional energy to carry his kids into
what he's learning along with him. He's a bit like Peter Dyck, probably,
a bit of a rooster, but really more self aware and much kinder I think.
Have you met Peter [Dyck]'s Christine? I think she'd like you. Peter
wrote a long letter, then handed the pen to Christine to let her tell me
about the baby. She wrote a really extraordinary letter, very honest and
moving, about what it is like to have a new kid. She wrote: "The
mission Peter has given me horrifies me a little, because it's so difficult
to talk about something that from outside seems so normal and so eternal
and above all something that, when it touches us, ourselves, becomes so
important and modifies so much the way we look at life ... It would be useless
to tell you that we're not proud, and it's so wonderful to feel that this
little warm moving thing needs everything from us, even though we have to
admit that we don't really make her grow. She's already become 'somebody
else'. I think I knew that the day we were married would bind me closer
to Peter exactly because one far-away abstract-seeming day we would look
together at the same child and say: "It's ours." Yet I have to
admit that we feel her cries as an intrusion in our life and in some way
they will harrow it. At the beginning it isn't easy to get used to this
responsibility, even more for the woman who feels she is still young ...
I especially hope that the day our daughter finds herself troubled by what
is around her, by all the problems facing her, it will be possible for us
to remember our own response at this time in our life and even later ...
You'll be telling yourself that I'm looking too far ahead already and that
in the meantime there's a little baby who's already asking for love and
who can feel love around her. I realize that all this has made me sentimental,
but I'm not sorry." My translation.
February 28 [journal]
I realize that I'm panicking, Olivia's letter eating into the firmness
and orderliness of myself, my house and cats given to Rick and Diane for
the next two months, this evening to pass in the shifting territory of Ron's
house where exultation is replaced by fatigue and something else I haven't
been able to name. The story of the man who had operation after operation
on his hip only to die of a collapse (Ron saying ingenuously "But his
mind was so alive") of everything at once ("died within a week"),
the Times picture of Simone de Beauvoir's face sixty one and fat
as a bean, writing about a literary lady of sixty who wonders whether she
can still write and who will not appear in a bathing suit because an old
woman's body is even uglier than the body of the old man who has taken the
place of her husband (oh Maria! And oh Bill Volk). Doris Heffron's report
that Desser is "over-rated, emotionally sensitive and lonely, but not
much more" (my god). The office party and the silver mug I didn't say
thank you for. Ron's preoccupation with Pam's self-presentation and Pam's
own uncharacteristic glassy-eyedness. The poignancy suddenly taken on by
Eric, Lana, Diane, Rick, Carol, Tanya, even Pam.
March 2
It's several weeks that I've known Ron and he's someone I've allowed
to swim in and out of focus without giving him the importance of putting
him into the journal. I think he is emotionally disturbed. I think he's
physically beautiful. I think he's probably a good teacher because he's
half naïve himself. I feel a need to have power over him because I
mistrust him. He admits to pretending. He tells me he loves me and equivocates
about other things. He says I'm the only person he has ever said that he
loved. He likes my resistance and certainty when I'm able to muster them.
He appears, like Richard and Ruben, to magnify me without seeing me. He
asks questions with the tone of polite phony interest that made Judy tell
him smiling that she felt she was being interviewed. His avowals of emotion
seem posed. He's endearing when he makes surprising offside imaginative
funny remarks (four adjectives and one noun too many) or when he lies back
with his legs in the air kicking. He needs grass, beer. There's a core of
fatigue in him as there is in me, but I think without the sincerity I have.
He mixes the trivial and the sublime without seeming to know the difference,
he has all sorts of bizarre theology-student reverences, I'm not sure whether
he's tasteless or just clear sighted. I think it will be as it was with
de Chazal, my basic lack of respect close to my lack of trust makes itself
understood, makes him falter and lose his certainty of having chosen me.
March 3 [letter]
I'm sorry Mrs Mann is having to have cobalt treatment. Is she going to
be alright? I hate to think of Mr Mann without her.
Men, Maria said to me "But men without them I would die!" And
I realize that I would die too, without them, although I need holidays from
them by myself, getting back my equilibrium because they always shake me
up, or if they don't I'm shaken up by wanting them to shake me up. More
and more I realize how wise and experienced women have to be, because men
themselves are not wise and experienced enough. It's seldom enough just
to be oneself. Lately my men have been getting more and more difficult and
I want them to be more and more difficult, but I know what you mean when
you say you feel smashed. I also know what you mean when you say you grieve
the loss of Greg because of my need for stability. The odd thing was that
in spite of his reliableness and loving care I was becoming desperate with
him, and became selfish, bitchy and thoroughly Father-like in my rage at
his not giving me something I needed and couldn't name exactly. Maybe pain?
The thing with Ron is acknowledgedly temporary, and, I'm sure, doomed,
because he's thoroughly unreliable, a cricket like Rasheed, who doesn't
know himself and lives in a dust storm of contradictory emotions, fairy
stories, axioms, impressions, straws that make up helterskelter a rat's
nest self-identity. None of this denies his obvious charm and power. It
must be nice to be beautiful.
Judy's Michael is funny, aggressive, rather ugly, kind I think, bright,
unconventional, ingenious, creative but not tremendously talented. I like
him better than any of her previous men and I think she's beginning to find
her place.
It's Monday, I'm in the hospital (write me c/o Kingston General Hospital,
Victory I, Victory is the name of the floor) and am booked for the OR tomorrow,
so by the time you hear about it it will be over. (I planned that, you don't
need to worry about it because I'm able to do enough worrying myself. Do
you remember one Children's Day when they gave me a ditty called "Why
worry?" that started "Why worry if skies are not always bright
blue ..." to recite. I thought they'd given me that particular poem
because it was pointed at me.) I telephoned Anne while we were in
Toronto. On the telephone she's shy, but we had a long and warm talk in
spite of the flock pushing around her looking for Sunday morning attentions.
Alexander sent a smacking kiss, Maria lamented having to give away kittens,
Toozie said goodbye goodbye goodbye.
I don't know how much I've told you about Marytka. She's only been in
the office since after Christmas. One day a woman appeared at the door looking
little and self possessed in a black fur hat, with side curls, blonde, green-eyed.
We asked if she was looking for a secretarial job. In broken English she
said no, a research assistant's. She turned out to be Polish, an MA in philosophy
and art history, I don't know how old, I think about forty. She's a knock-out:
blond, transparent skin, delicate high arched feet, pretty legs, a dancer's
duck-walk. A pretty body getting a little plump. She wears fascinating things,
French shoes, jewelry she makes herself, crocheted dresses. Her father's
family was aristocratic, she's shown me a photograph of the fierce young
man holding his horse's head with princely arrogance, and her mother's,
wealthy bourgeois. Now she has priceless carpets, paintings, statues, but
no money because everything in both families has been confiscated over and
over by various regimes that have hit Poland. Her husband is a population
expert who's teaching at Queen's and has worked for UNESCO. Next year they'll
be in Edmonton. Somehow she and I have become friends. She likes all the
right things about me and likes in a way that's feminine in its objectivity
and lack of mystification, mythification. And I like her partly because
she and Peter Harcourt are the only two people I know that I want to be
like.
We eat lunch together nearly every day and she tells me some of the stories
in her bottomless story bag, stories from Poland, from her student days
in Paris, from Berkeley where they were last year, or stories about her
dog Tiffany who absorbs her motherly emotions with great satisfaction and
contentedness. Her husband Leschek absorbs her sense of the surreal and
her rebellious young girl self. It seems a good marriage although she hints
about difficult times for it in the past. She likes me most, I think, because
I understand her English. She makes a motion with her fingers when she loses
the word she wants and I can almost invariably supply it. Her English is
very peculiar, full of exotic difficult English words but almost completely
without the ordinary essential ones. She's learned it by osmosis, just living
in Canada and the US. She refuses any systematic effort to learn it and
as a result her language is pure Marytka and contains only what's essential
to her, no clichés, no language habits, nothing but poetry. (Like
when she said "I smell her like a wardrobe" and meant "She's
dull and set in her ways, there's something mildewed about her.") At
the same time she has a very firm intuitive set of opinions, never conservative,
usually surprising, but always definite. Her house is full of things
from her travels, small statues, a fourteenth century rug, a seventeenth
century Russian icon, vases of dry grass she collects. For my birthday she's
given me a big brass ring given her by a Tibetan craftsman. He gave it to
her for good luck because she gave him good luck.
4 March [journal]
In half an hour I'm going down ("up") to OR to have the geography,
the whole structure, of my body changed, my pelvis cut and raised, so that
my flanks will feel different to anyone who puts his hand on them. There
will be an elegant red curve of scar on the fine pebbly skin of that hip.
I've nostalgically looked my last at it. It's partly a horrible adventure
in passivity, I don't know what they intend to do or whether it will leave
me lopsided or whether it will save me from arthritis or whether fucking
will hurt or whether I'll lurch less when I walk. I lie back in my bed and
am moved slowly through the corridors, believing that I'll move back through
them in a new carapace, first layer, pain; outer layer, plaster, twisted
like the Pompeian dog, heavy but floating, like a submerged log ramming
and bumping among objects mossy and vague, sounds also mossy and vague.
At the operating table I'll see the anesthetist's face sway once, like a
face reflected on water, and ---. Passivity to the point of unconsciousness.
Sorbie all earnest but perhaps not sure-fingered this morning, he doesn't
really know what will happen either. [Orthopedic surgeon Charles Sorbie
was trying a procedure never performed on an adult.]
My yellow freesias in their green bottles, my wind chimes, O'Keefe's
sexy black iris, Ron's lesbian cat card remain here, the window I've chosen
in order to have sky from where I'm lying.
Image to take, the two old people in long blades on the Toronto City
Hall rink on Sunday's sunny morning, swaying together like one sheet of
crumpled newspaper blown across the ice. Old-fashioned, gracious, arm in
arm, bending and dipping together, he with his muffler and she in her hat,
maroon socks showing above her black skate boots.
11 March
A pile of mail this morning, all of it special. Paul in Guadeloupe, "Ellie, something you probably know and I hope you
like, is that for me, you are always a good thought." "When I
first came, they gave me a blanket to sleep with. It was the most pure white
interwoven embroidered silken blanket I've ever seen. God's gift to the
Virgin Mary or some such thing." Don, "Right
now I'm riding a manic phase of profound philosophical and personal insight."
"Somewhere deep down the transcendental thread and drive of my life
has sat up, yawned, rubbed its sleepy eyes and looks in baffled wonderment
at all the darkness it has dreamed as real." "A lot of old ideas
have simply collapsed, eg I don't much care about politics or Canada, and
any hang-up I once had over you has dissipated in the dissolution of the
need for reified self-identity mediated by others. Now I simply think you
extremely interesting."
16 March
Witold Gombrowicz's Pornographia: "An
adult hates adults! Nothing more disgusting for a man than another man -
I mean, of course, elderly men with their life history written on their
faces - and that I should repel him in my deterioration simply increased
my animosity ... An adult can only be bearable for another adult as a renunciation,
when he renounces himself to incarnate something else - horror, virtue,
the people, the fight ... But a man who is nothing but a man - how ghastly!"
From the Preface: "Man, as we know
aims at the Absolute, at total maturity ... To seize everything, to realize
himself entirely - this is his imperative ... another of man's aims appears,
a more secret one, undoubtedly, one which is in some way illegal: his need
for the unfinished, for imperfection, for inferiority, for youth ..."
About Ferdydurke: "Man is an opaque and neutral
being who has to express himself by certain means of behavior and therefore
becomes, from outside - for others - far more definite and precise than
he is for himself. Hence a tragic disproportion between his secret immaturity
and the mask he assumes when he deals with other people. All he can do is
adapt himself internally to his mask ..."
men create each other by imposing forms on each
other
Created by form he is created from outside,
in other words inauthentic and deformed. To be a man means never to be oneself.
He is also a constant producer of form: he secrets
form tirelessly, just as the bee secretes honey.
And he is also at odds with his own form ...
struggle of man with his own expression, torture of humanity in the Procrustean
bed of form.
Immaturity is not always innate or imposed by
others. There is also an immaturity which culture batters us against when
it submerges us and we do not manage to hoist ourselves up to its level.
We are infantilized by all 'higher' forms. Man, tortured by his mask, fabricates
secretly, for his own usage, a sort of subculture: a world made out of the
refuse of a higher world of culture, a domain of trash, immature myths,
inadmissable passions ... a secondary domain of compensation. This is where
a certain shameful poetry is born, a certain compromising beauty...
Are we not close to Pornographia?
a sensually metaphysical novel. What a disgrace!
I do not trust any desexualized idea.
the artist must plunge the philosopher in enchantment,
charm and grace.
17 March
It's necessary to make a little revision about Ron Matheson, grasshopper,
"Hop". Wow! He's powerful, he grows from silliness to something
bigger than I am. Perfectly matched, his grasshopper body with its springy
long legs and short rectangular body, his huge hands, his hooked nose, the
white skin, black beard (cut off square, into a solid ungoatish goatee around
his treacherous mouth), round flat coins of eyes under the wide pointed
round lids, dull black hair in tight wool, white streaks.
He comes in, demands the guitar, begins to sing in that voice of his,
over rather sleepy chords, hops to telling about an explosion at a party
where he and friends danced together to horrify. The high and the excitement
of breaking into a boy who finally lost his fear and slept, while Ron stayed
up until seven writing his Yeats essay for him. A torrent about personal
mythology, his own mythology (Christian), Yeats' mythology in Leda and
the Swan, Did she put on his knowledge and his power / Before the indifferent
beak could let her drop? [It's with his power.] Listening to him
reading page after page of free association homiletics, wondering if he
knows how close he comes to mastering me, or whether he is ever mastered
himself? The childishness in him from being undefeated? Or the reason he
is undefeated, because there's no critic in him? His mother on the telephone
talking about how he is always late, how he is unreliable. Madeleine can
do as she likes, she's a young grand duchess. Whether or not Ron Hop is
a prince I haven't decided. I can't master him. But I want to, it's
come to the importance of struggle for power in order to survive. I don't
think I have the power. Power of resistance is the wrong kind of power,
I have to be somebody more than I am, I have to be free with him while grappling
with his confusing dazzling treacherous magnificence that's close to being
an idiot-savant magnificence. But how close? Exactly the struggle I wanted,
I'm ignorant and naive and don't know where to begin to unpack myself with
such dangers (such desperate dangers, contempt and love, opposite, both
possible) all around.
[letter to Desser]
You can stop thinking of me as lying wanly under a bottle of saline solution
smelling the green walls (pink walls) and choking down tuna casserole between
exhausted attempts to scratch my right knee, I'm in a rehab ward full of
sunlight listening to Shostakovich, smelling daffodils, eating Nec Plus
Ultra from Cooke's, going out to Harcourts for Sunday dinners, sweeping
around (yes, walking) in a green velvet hostess skirt (yes, green velvet),
watching spring arrive in Captain Kidd's flower garden behind the lombardy
poplars outside my window, épat-ing all the bougeois who work here
with jokes about sex and drugs especially drugs. Lonely a little and sometimes
a lot. You are right about my not being much of a future thinker, but this
particular (pleasant) suspension (like a long train trip) in nowhere at
no time is turning more and more into a meditation on how I want to live.
I'm surprised too. It's coming very clear (it won't stay that way) how I
do want to live, not what I want to do precisely, but the framework I want
to do it in, or need to do it in.
Listen, and I have my hand on you to say this, because it's important,
don't be spooked by Greg's telling you about me. In a way I wish he wouldn't,
because he still after two years has some things wrong and some partial
(obviously), and because I'd rather you found them out yourself in your
own way. What you say about not knowing my world of the journal and the
Peace River Country is true, I would have told you, but it comes out very
slowly and very carefully, and there wasn't time. I can't 'present' myself,
'project,' whatever, haven't learned, can't, don't want to. There is
somebody there, and if you understand my touching, you understand more than
most about her.
...
I'm like a beached mermaid, a half-girl half-rhinoceros centaur, lots
of time to think of similes. Most of all I look like one of the Minoan snake
goddesses: because my doctor, out of playfulness I think, gave me a plaster
wasp-waist and plaster hips broad and round enough to have mothered the
earth. [sketch]
29 March [journal]
There's the Shostakovich cello and piano sonata, my favorite piece of
music at the moment. At my best I'm like it.
On Wednesday, there was a moment. Ron came when I was wearing my new,
short, jersey flower-colored dress and knew I looked good. I was angry enough
at him to speak my mind exactly, to sit on the bed opposite him and to refuse
his "You're afraid of being loved" ploy with "I'm not afraid
of being loved! I'm afraid of being lied to."
He lay on his bed with his legs spread wide apart on the table, beautiful
as Zeus although I tried not to look at him, raging on about his discoveries
and decisions, his triangular orgy with Sandy and Victor, his new too-broad
concept of love. His omnisexuality sparkling in self conscious proud display
in everything he said and in every change of posture. He was charming. So
was I, angry at his fuzzy stupid exaggerations and what seemed to be ingenuously
confident outright lies.
After a while he got up and came toward me. I assumed he wanted his coat,
which I had been sitting on, so I got up and leaned on my crutches. Instead
of reaching for his coat he put his arms around me and cried in smiling
mock desperation, "But do you love me?" I smiled and repressed
my loud "No!" as if to say "If I did, I wouldn't tell you,"
and he dived down at my face with his same whimsical mock seriousness. "Only
for a second, as you're being carried away on a cloud and look back and
smile." He pushed his face against mine, with his hands around our
two chins. I had a perfect moment when my resistance and my tenderness could
wear the same movement and the same sensation. The strong push of my chin
against him and the dry cool pressure of his chin on my mouth.
As he left I said "Now let's see if you can leave without saying
you love me" and he smiled ingenuously again, "Oh yes,
you've made me feel so ...!" - I've forgotten what it was I made him
feel and he disappeared only to reappear for another grin around the corner.
It had been as it should be: my sitting on the bed with his red-white-blue
knit scarf wrapped around my neck scrapping with him but admiring him at
the same time. I should remember the pleasure of that scrapping tension
between disapproval and "enchantment, charm and grace".
After he was gone I listened to the Shostakovich, lying on my bed with
the candlelight that reached me from behind the green glass bottle (that
holds my tulips) by shining through it, turning it into a smooth self radiant
emerald with the tulip stems as flows or fossils - the tulips on the ends
of their long bowed stems freakishly open into the blue-centred red stars
sweeping around the bottle like the swinging chairs of a carrousel.
Privacy. Today is Saturday and I've had the door shut again. The Shostakovich
is me thinking about Ron, and Desser whose doubting letter has made my mood
today, and about Peter, who was here sitting on the edge of my bed stroking
my breasts in his preoccupied massaging way, alternately quiet and caught
up with his stories, always quick to guess my mood. I showed him Steppenwolf
and said I wouldn't give it to him because I'd be hurt if he didn't like
it. "That's all right" he said. "No, because," and I
was confused trying to say why, "I've underlined so many things in
it!" He laughed, surprised: "You're splendid you know, I think
you're really splendid!" "I think you're splendid too," and
when I said it he flipped into a question about my rhinoceroses.
Paul was here, brown skin, ironical soft-spoken voice, pink shirt and
beads, black leather jacket, perfectly judged observations, enthusiasms
for microbuses and island sugar-cane mills, serene assumption of friendship,
his whimsy and his seriousness which is so like my own. I really loved him.
We sat in the sunroom, in my room, downstairs in a dusty room no one uses,
he ate parts of my lunches and dinners, we talked about Riders of the
purple sage, Father, Ron (whom he saw irreverently), my photographs,
having children, drugs, Judy and Michael. We were so sure of each other,
so sure where the other was, that our talking was almost transparent, as
happens so seldom. I remember us sitting in the corner of the sunroom where
the two windows meet and the sunlight crosses, we were invisible somewhere
in that crossing of light.
I've surrounded myself with Life magazines, because of the photographs.
Mustangs, Aran Islands, Elizabeth Taylor with the Krupp diamond, O'Keefe's
iris-labia in grey and red watercolor. Also the husky Botticelli girl with
flowers streaming out of her mouth, Indra's sleeping child green Christmas
card, the tiny Gauguin card with the redheaded girl and the boy on the horse,
Toozie's self portrait of blonde girl with house, tree, sky impaled on the
roof, sun skewered on the edge of the picture.
" ... you, love, were never much of a future thinker or was/am I
wrong here too" says Desser in his letter. But I do think about the
future, vaguely, as pictures that celebrate the spectacle, as children who
are not rooted in a single place but can move with me, as no husband but
lovers I can return to, still in some way as an ability to work on the edge
of myself where I can feel the edge and be afraid or joyous.
part 3
- raw forming volume 8: september 1968 - july 1969
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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