| dames rocket 1 part 2 - 1975 february - march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen. The young man with the carnation. As the song is one with the voice that sings it, as the road is one with the goal, as lovers are made one in their embrace, so is man one with his destiny, and he shall love it as himself. Sorrow-Acre. obliquity 942 Winter's tales Putnam - The Sailor-Boy's Tale: It was April, the sky and the sea were so clear that it was difficult to hold one's eyes up against them - salt, infinitely wide, and filled with bird-shrieks - as if somone were incessantly whetting invisible knives, on all sides .... Simon was amazed at the lightness of these April evenings. He knew no geography, and did not assign it to the latitude, but he took it as a sign of an unwonted good-will in the Universe, a favour. Simon had been small for his age all his life, but this last winter he had grown, and had become strong of limb. That good luck, he felt, must spring from the same source as the sweetness of the weather, from a new benevolence in the world. - Luke at Lucy's. Felt as though I was leaving brave Luke to people he's not of a species with. Dear Luke so much more intelligent than anyone in that heated family (and yet, of course, etc), Julie like the receptacle of everything that's either false or true. Trained, she acts the trainer to Luke; in her own bed she masturbates by thrashing with fists between her legs. ("I guess she got a sensation" said Lucy, of Julie when still in her crib, putting her legs between the bars. Lucy in her nightgown seeming the highschool girl she was, squinting her eyes, lisping.) Cold and light hitchhiking. I leave my things, go to look for a telephone, buy a banana to get the change, am bumped by a small man with a bright face rimmed with yellow hair, am intercepted by the man later when I have crossed Hastings and am going to the telephone. (He has bought his two grapefruit.) In what followed, blindness (I felt how blind I was to his face and body - because that vision is for old friends - while speaking, strenuously, maybe at full stretch, my most interesting private thoughts) and congestion - when I compared this encounter with meeting Joe in Dublin, I felt that I was not dancing on a pin in the same way, I was failing and falling, I was a little out of control - or then I thought maybe it was him, and I was sad at the way when we were in his house Paul began to laugh foolishly. Joe hung on impeccably and that left the currents very clear. So I suddenly rushed home to break the thing before it got worse. But then I thought about him drunkenly all night. It was a puzzle. I wanted to lay it out carefully before proceeding. A young Irishman, eldest of seven, leaves Dublin in 1968 at the age of nineteen, and goes to the New World, where he spends many years in Toronto and then a year and a half ago leaves his circle of friends and comes to Vancouver. I leave Kingston in 1968 to go to the Old World where I spend six years forming myself in the shape of London. In 1975, mid-afternoon on a Saturday, I leave my hotel very lonely for someone to talk to, I look through all my addresses, go to telephone Andrea [Maitland]. I have no dime, so stop at the little grocery on Carrall. Buy a banana and as I turn, see through the shop front a man shining with some kind of presence. I just note him and hesitate to read something on the front page of a newspaper. When I straighten up to leave I bump solidly into somebody who is reaching past me into the window. As we both say "excuse me" (or something - we say the same thing) I see it is the same man and my face has a look like "Oh is it you?" Then I leave, cross Hastings, pass one telephone where an old bum is speaking, and then the young man is next to me saying hello. I stop at the next telephone and holding the receiver lean out and say Have you got time to come and have some tea? Taking responsibility. When we are in Lew's, astonishment and matter of fact practical acceptance exist together (that's congestion too): he can talk, he's a literate Irishman (literate is his word). Words come out of his mouth as thoughtfully as out of mine. My fantasies swarm - who's this man, maybe he's a poet, maybe I should marry him, maybe he's as good as can be. I ask him how old he is, his face could be thirty five, he's very manly. He says he's 26 and how old am I; yet when I say what I've been trying to learn and when he says what he's been trying to learn, they match as if we'd got to the same stage in our cross-fertilization of ourselves. So I begin to race, I flash myself, I let myself out. I suppose he does too, so that in our competition we are exhausting ourselves, feeling all the while that something's been left behind: I say to myself, he doesn't flatter me - now I remember I said that about Joe too - what I meant was that the female body in me did not preen itself and was not aware of him. - The fish shop, the slices of salmon with their beautiful grain, long muscles cross-sectioned so that in the slice beautiful whorls are created. The dusty chestnuts in a glass tank. [letter to my mom] Hello Mama, I'm going to have to call you that again you know, because you do ask to have a special status on account of mothering me. My other friends think nothing of it, even the dearest of them, if I don't write them in 6 months and don't remember their birthdays. There's a birthday present for you, by the way, in my trunks, which haven't arrived yet (thought you might like to know). The typewriter has come and it's in nearly fine shape, I'm glad to have it, for both practical and symbolic reasons - I bought it with the money - no I earned as much money from it as I paid for it - writing. Luke likes his little car. It is parked under a tiny asparagus fern on our window sill while he's at Lucy's house for a week. He and Pippi have a good rapport, fight less than Akasha and Luke who were friends and enemies at a 50:50 ratio. I'm happy here. Luke's in daycare. I've a part time tutoring (ie research and marking) job at the university, just enough to live on at the moment. [A lie - we were on welfare.] Our little room has such a view of sea and mountains that I will hate to leave it for something bigger. I like the opening feeling of having all my vacancies still unfilled - house, friends, film work - it makes me feel securely held in the big hand of Destiny, who is slowly and most ingeniously sending me all I need. She has already sent somebody I can talk to (really talk, and at full stretch), which seems an all unexpected blessing at this stage. It took much longer in London. This is a friendly easy city, very tolerant of eccentricity. I think we will blossom here. I've found someone to teach me fiddling too! Bus drivers don't mind if I play the harmonica on their buses! Lots of new films are incubating! Love from us. - The Invincible Slave-Owners: The clear stream, like a luminous column amongst the moss and stones, held its noble outline unaltered through all the hours of day and night. In the midst of it there was a small projecting cascade, each second, new particles of water hurled over the edge, rushing into a precipice and disappearing. It was a flight, a whirl, an incessant catastrophe. Are there, in life, he thought, similar phenomena? Is there a corresponding, paradoxical mode of existing, a poised, classic, static flight and run? In music it exists, and there it is called a Fuga ... - Drumming. The French girl smiling, dancing at the top of the room. The classical young man leaning on the counter, a head made like Isha's, always looking around him. I was sad not to be able to befriend him, I longed for him; but was decent and ashamed to be. I like Paul most when he doesn't smile. Smiling diminishes him, even when it isn't uneasy ingratiating smiling. When he talks about something in earnest to him, his newspaper, his friend Frank, he has a stature that touches me. But when he laughs, plays around, I think yes this is a benign friendly creature, with whom I can feel cozy, a sort of beluga. My areas. Are they always the primary (voice) of my feelings? I can talk, that's like a craft. I can talk to you, and it's as if testing you in my specialty. That's new. Maybe that's a process that has to continue. But it seems to me that my real loving goes toward what I see: as I didn't love Roy - I was intoxicated - until I saw how he walked, his longlegged wiry body when he appeared naked at the door, to display himself. Management: I think if I sleep with him he can begin to cool off and that will make him more interesting for me. His ambivalence, give me a chance to look at him. Also think: why, again do I find myself (if I do) acceding to somebody else's desire. "I find you very beautiful. I'm very attracted to you." When I follow my own desire - you're very beautiful, I want you to come home with me - nobody accedes to it. So I find myself in times and places, I learn from them, but they are not the heart's desire and so maybe, I'm not sure, I'm not learning the most important things. His mouth is nice, his back is broad (but his hands are little), I dreamed I stroked his penis with my hand, through his trousers. I am tempted. I know what I want, and that is to sleep with him when I like, for him to be at his house like a resource.
Being a tough lady, that's another trap, and it's not very interesting. Having a lover is a trap. Being 'seen together' is a trap. Destiny's thrown you up on the beach for me to learn to demand something precise from you, because you can understand what I say. - She became still more heraldic, like a lioness in a coat of arms. In spite of her youthfulness and fragility, to Frederick she seemed, from hour to hour, and even as to her carriage, mien and speech, to grow into the orthodox and ideal figure of a "dame haute et puissante," and an embodiment of ancient France. Dinesen does play certain cards in the pack, and she plays them with such rich abundant detail, such pictures, that they have all thing-rightness, so we aren't ashamed of them. They had been stuck in the snow drifts seven times since leaving Vejle. The parson bore the child in, and set her on the floor by the stove. She was wrapped in a large cloak. As he pulled off her cap her fair, short hair rose with it, like a flame above her head and I recalled the Professor's words of the brand to be snatched from the fire. - She writes in animus - I thought that standing in the bank, and the phrase about women's minds being masculine as men's are feminine, naturally. My own hunger for precision. Quoted in newspaper [James Barber] Anais Nin vol 5- "I write of uncommon characters so that we may become them." In the same column "Simone de Beauvoir's latest All said and done which opens with 'I no longer feel I am moving in the direction of a goal, but that I am slipping inevitably towards my grave'...." - Occurred to me that speaking to Paul I become such an abundance that I will be able to learn to be silent, nearly - or to say only the best rarest funniest most newborn of my thoughts - to write an uncommon character I could become. I'll mull you: in our strenuous muddle last night you kept your balance, and you continued to smile. I know about that. This morning you were a young boy with pink light on your face. When I was sad and said "Tell me something nice" you told me the lombardies and their birds, as if reciting them. When I thumped the bed and said "Doesn't it ever make you lonely when you're new in a strange bed?" you sprang up to hug me - there's something unimpressed about you - and then told me how euphoric you are in strange beds. The doctor's wife, bulbously pregnant. "It was one of the least sordid things that ever happened to me. She lied when she wanted to lie, she stole if she wanted to steal." Feel him stuffed full of marvels like I am. Long story of a taxi chasing the Broadway bus. Could say what a pretty cupid's body you've got and how vain you are of it. You're silly too, you're a playfellow. Your tiny scale: "I worried I might be too light for you" - you worried I might be too heavy for you. Yet you're wide in the hips. A Pict or Celt, some lad from ancient people, with your too-small hands and feet, your big shaggy head with its monkish bushy fringe, little genial eyes, and great longchinned slab of a manly face - a crescent moon sickle of a face, blue, red and yellow. Stanislavsky on 'representational acting': It acts more on your sense of sound and sight than on your soul. Consequently it is more likely to delight than move you. You can receive great impressions through this art. But they will neither warm your soul nor penetrate deeply into it. Their effect is sharp but not lasting. Your astonishment rather than your faith is aroused. The result is a predicament; we are supposed to create under inspiration; only our subconscious gives us inspiration; yet we apparently can use this subconscious only through our consciousness, which kills it .... Our art teaches us first of all to create consciously and rightly, because that will best prepare the way for the blossoming of the subconscious. To play truly means to be right, logical, coherent, to think, to strive, feel and act in unison with your role ... It is only when an actor feels that his inner and outer life on the stage is flowing naturally and normally, in the circumstances that surround him, that the deeper feelings we cannot always analyze (sources of his subconscious gently open, and from them come ...) .... But if you break the laws of normal organic life, and cease to function rightly, then this highly sensitive subconscious becomes alarmed, and withdraws ... In the vast majority of theatres the actors and producers are constantly violating nature in the most shameless manner. - The art which delights but doesn't warm or move: when I play with Paul. But playing with Tony, the quality of clarity and edge, it continues to nourish and warm me - it was delightful then. Andy's deep feelings without great impressions; but didn't move me - I was forced to respect his feelings. The 'delight than move' - seductive but I can't make it work - makes me think of writing, the well prepared essays that took off on final draft - my inspired dance. - The whorled stone loves the leaf. "We have done much if we have found a recognizable sign." A Symons Colette Mes apprentissages Haunted by money to a perilous degree, imprudent and darkly secretive, weakly and plaintive when it served him, disarming when he chose, he never failed to propice me, throughout the years that I made prosperous, with my share of confused pleasure and clearly defined pain. Under this regime I acquired, I developed and shaped within me, the ways and temper of a china-repairer. To endure without happiness and not to droop, not to pine, is a pursuit in itself, you might almost say a profession. How old was I? Twenty-nine, thirty? - The age when life musters and arrays the forces that make for duration, the age that gives strength to resist disease, the age when you can no longer die for anyone, or because of anyone. Thirty already - and already that hardening which I would compare to the crust that lime-springs form ... the daily tests I challenged myself to face. Friendship, which is of its nature a delicate thing, fastidious, slow of growth, is easily checked, will hesitate, demur, recoil where Love comes disguised as a thunderbolt ... Twenty years are not too long to shape a friendship, to ensure its present and its future safety. Dear friends of twenty years and over, of ten years or less, I will not speak of you here ... Take care of yourselves, live longer than I do. Thank you. I used to look out sometimes and watch the beautiful red and gold hair of Princess Bibesco go down the winding staircase like a torch flung down a well. The extraordinary man I had married possessed the gift and practiced the policy of occupying a woman's thoughts, several women's thoughts, at every hour of the day, of tracing, imprinting, maintaining a track that could never be confused with other tracks. Lovely day, taken out of the routine, Luke and I together in our room - I saw the boats on the light later this morning and thought, I will attend this window all day. Now it isn't raining, the sky is clear overhead, although very pale; gulls are wheeling. Long white clouds are low on the side of the mountain. We left our handprints on the sidewalk newly made in front of the new firehall. We came back, washed our hands and had bananas and frozen sliced strawberries on rice pudding. We lay down. Luke lay still for a while with his eyes open. I slept too. Woke rapidly to open the door when Bennie knocked with a parcel. Leaning to look into the room, he pushed his arm against my breast. I jumped back. Closed him out; looked at myself in the mirror, looked lovely, young and pinkcheeked, and fierce like the fierce girl in the photograph. Lay down again, someone else knocked, more softly: a tightly-clothed brawny man I'd not seen before, asking if I want some fish - I follow him down the corridor to his room where he shows me skinned fish grey and white and a little pink, tails still on, in a softened cardboard box. I pick one out, say I can't cook more than that, they put another in my hand (the Frenchman from this morning). The men in the hotel, minding their business. The sense of footsteps passing in the corridor, unrelated to me. Lying half asleep in a calm dreamy state tasting of Le Guin and Dinesen, feeling my life resolve itself. I imagine, also, my body healing and reforming itself. What Colette says about mustering the forces that make for duration. I like Roy's kisses best, said Luke. I know that, I said. And I like yours best, and I like Catherine's best. And I like everybody's and I won't wipe anybody's off. The night Andy questioned me about the little girl. He was a patient questioner. He wanted to know if I loved him. I patiently questioned Roy, wanting to know. Andy downstairs those last evenings, coming upstairs desperately, always awkwardly. Paul doesn't question me and that's why I give him the statements I've prepared here. Everything new. This time, it's not as last time. Yet each time evokes the other times and is that why having lovers is still a lively ritual? Do they all celebrate Frank, and Roy? I wanted to ask Paul - his two years (in his dreams he says to her - this is what he dreamed on the night before I called him? - was it the week before? - "Is it really over?"). He said they were both virgins, he must have been twenty. "You should have a literary cottage and a housekeeper," I joked as we had breakfast. "You don't know how much I want that, that's something I've had to suppress so much it doesn't dare come out any more." - Last night in half sleep after reading Dinesen's story about the girl who wept for the last time, I half-dreamed a message to Roy, with tears in my eyes: how angry I am that, forcing me to learn not to love you, you forced part of me to die. This morning I hurried to Paul's house, found him in bed, solitary, he said, ungathered. I was lonely in his bed: I brought Tony in to comfort me, dancing like a rubber skeleton one late night, caught walking into the swimming pool. Touching his light incomparably wise fingers; his authority. Paul made breakfast, we ate it in near silence and when I looked at his face in its silence, sadness, it became beautiful to me, so I wanted him to think as if I were invisible, I became silent, absorbed him through my own face; he talked about his friends, his men; charting his relationships. What I saw when he was silent was a sad man with great, delicate, dignity. When he laughs he's a clown, he's silly. (It reminded me of Mitchell's two faces.) Then I wanted to be patient to make him brave, so he'd come near. I told him I liked him, but I really shone with love for him. I thought if he trusted me he would be sad with me. He said "I hope that doesn't tempt you" and I said "No, I think what I'm wanting at the moment is to make myself sad." There was a little true connection with me, starting at the moment when he sat there eating his eggs absently and sadly, for the first time. Goodnight hotel room. - Music. Dinesen says it's the story, the only thing with the authority to tell us who we are. First the story; then the hero; then the heroine who is his reward. - First, went with all our things to our new house, feeling like thieves stealing space in somebody's house and so unpacking very slowly and shyly at first, not venturing to put things into the kitchen until a certain time and certain formalities had been passed. All my pots buried in the wooden box, sound. The box in Burghley Road, open, being packed; unpacking it like moving backwards - redistributing things outwards into another white room - a different white room - with a few new things in it, the green framed mirror, the poinsettia, the new little plants. The walls in this room have no hooks; heat comes gently through a patterned square in the floor, how civilized that is. A south window and a west one. Having made it, I leave it and go back to the hotel room, which is as bare as if we'd just come, without baggage. Paul doesn't come. I'm nervous and lonely. Speaking to him on the telephone, he was silly and as if guilty about something. I went away flattened and cross, feeling that I'd better retract my desire to be loving for a change, because once again I've hit on the wrong man. But I want - no no not if he's another treacherous infant boy - it would be so healthy for me if I could get hurt a little, because I'm strangling - no no not for somebody who hurts in that blind old stereotyped pattern - how ingenuous they all are at first - how ingenuous they remain while you continue to refuse them your actual tenderness. How evasive they become if you do not refuse, even when you do not refuse for your own reasons. New room: new room, you're a tall square, I want to pool things in your corners. I want to wake early / do yoga / write fantasies / work hard at the house writing / invent a way to work constantly. Need two chairs, typing table, working lamp / paste, stanley knife, geometry set, pinboard. - [2706 Eton St] Now I'm having to think about how to be more gentle, the creature waking in my bed was shot full of holes - "I can't seem to take your approaches and departures" - I'd have had him depart without reproaching me, because that sent me black into a good day - what's the problem about kissing - again this becomes lab notes - he kisses me like eating me, like grazing insistently - I don't feel it's a rare sacrament but a compulsive munch - don't you compulsively munch me. What was good: lying wrapped together talking, sitting knee to knee debating / him telling me a poem, twice, when we lay in the dark. "Sends me laughing into most days" - is what I find ugly in you the way you repress your sorrow? Despair he said, how much it makes me want to run away. How when I came too late on Friday he decided not to find me beautiful any more. Damn him. He's no right to that power. Listen: you dare to tell me you find me pathetic / I don't tell you how I find you silly / yesterday was revenge day for you and yet it scared you to do it. Devious explanations we make to each other. Feel you sometimes an infinity of judgments against me. Luke crowds me so much when he's anxious: I don't want to have you I whisper [inaudibly], and I plot how I'll send him to Roy. We have four more days in this week / mutter / what loneliness, to have to speak to myself so pathetically. Thinking how it's true, given the first little excuse we fasten ourselves onto the hope of perfect reciprocity, against all the evidence of our bodies' exhaustion, and the nearness of terror. Hardly looking to see who you are. Yet it's possible to let go of that, in the relaxed spaces. Don't crowd me: sort out what's your business and what's mine. You are doing that.
[The old ships James Elroy Flecker
I think we may not be able to bear being lovers, but is there a way we can just halt that and be something else, brothers? 'Love' - call the ritual of being lovers that - being lovers is a sort of psychic violence we're hardly made to endure. It is a physical crisis like typhoid or blood poisoning, it is like a bereavement. It swings us over the black edge of the world to sit on our doubts, all our hesitations. As: lying side by side we were separately on Sunday night, in a dark vagueness - I was like a drugged person - even in the morning. Is that going into shock? - Mothers are pathetic, contemptible, slaves, slugs. So I could go into a day with ideas, she said. My body's thick and spotty, skin loose over dulling layer of fat. Under my eyes there are smudges, every day and not only in the evening. My will which is meant to make me beautiful now, fails to, except sometimes. What can I do with Luke / where can I get the strength to be what men with gifts nearly never have to be Marilyn [Cox] when she was 29, she was slender and elegant I've been going through days on the line: Of those so close beside me, which are you? [letter to my mom] M - could you pack up my little blue wooden chest in a cardboard box (to keep it from getting scratched) and send it on the bus sometime when it's convenient? You could put any of my little furniture (wine glasses, if they still exist, dragon candlestick etc) inside - I'm short of such things. Thanks. (Also the Tagore book! please.) - [letter to my mom] 5th March 1975 Hello M, it was good to get your letter and your characteristic thoughtful card on this sunny eve of my 30 years. You sent roses and money; Roy sent a sunburst and a sleeping gypsy; Luke had four stitches in the centre of his forehead to celebrate his irrepressible mischief and hurry; and a friendly woman said I could join her journal class for nothing. And it isn't the 6th yet. Age. What I don't like is losing the clear lines of my face; I don't like them blurred, I feel betrayed by that. The rest I like. You've got the notice about change of address? Address - Uncle Walter is not in the telephone directory. Where was he last heard from? I know nothing about living on $10,000 a year! I was living on less than $2,000; I have no sympathy for people who fear student garretts! Bourke is crazy to decide against London; it's the only place in England. Sure he can read my thesis but will somebody give me some feedback on it? I got a distinction and then nobody reads it or else if they do they say nothing more - with one exception (my friend JoAnn). No more passive consumption of my thesis! Altho I feel I've passed it in many ways. Make sure he gives it back, I think the other copy is lost. Another birthday present - on Monday walking on Kingsway I saw a sodden rag in the driveway of a service station. Thinking it might be something wonderful I stirred it; and it was something wonderful - a dirty cotton blanket. I took it home. It dripped on the seat in the bus so ladies wouldn't sit next to me. I washed it out and it turned out to be a brilliant red/blue/green/white Indian blanket, which last night became a warm well-softened beautiful coat that I'm still hand-hemming. Last week, in the alleys, Luke and I found: 1. a majestic poinsettia, big as a shrub, and still blooming 2. a fine wooden dynamite case, dovetailed in the corners, with partitions inside and a latch outside, for Luke's lego 3. many branches from pruning, which are blooming and leafing in my room 4. broken bits of rock plant which have abruptly taken root in the poinsettia pot 5. a rubber thing just right to be a wheel on one of Luke's broken cars 6. a metal ring 7. half a white plastic toy boat Last week, other presents: 1. from Judy, a fine Chinese blanket for me 2. from Judy, for Luke, a ceramic ram sprinkled with seeds which will sprout into green cress curly like wool 3. in an old bookstore, for $2.50 marked down from $7.50 a first edition hardback of Isak Dineson's Winter tales which I'd just had to give back to the library, oh my! 4. a free evening, when Luke was at Judy's for the night 5. long letter from Andy when I needed it So you see: more free gifts from destiny. Music - I found this in Simone Weil's notebooks, it's relevant: All of us, even the youngest, are in the situation like Socrates' when he was awaiting death in prison and learning to play the lyre. Slurp the puppy - alas, dear baby dog; Luke wept - was killed because he had distemper. I feel my mortality a lot; other people's as well. You used to seem much older than me, but 21 years becomes less all the time doesn't it. We'll be old ladies together. When you're 91 I'll be 70. Oh time! My new friend is a very small Pict of an Irishman, a newspaper editor, intelligent, careful of his language: Paul Kinsella, with a young boy's body and a big shaggy mature head with blond hair standing up like fire and a ruddy long chin hard as a spud. A bright face. We are about the same density: neither harder nor softer than the other. That gives us a certain intellectual comfort with each other, so we can talk in a way to interest ourselves. That's a précis for you. Goodnight from me. Will you write me as much as you remember of your first pregnancy and my birth? And early childhood. Maybe you could just write things down as they occur to you. [In my mother's handwriting: Ellie's last letter - Do you think she has changed? I feel she's 'settling in' again. She was quite disrupted by the big change from London.] - 5th March 1975 Wreck Beach - water when the sun was low, blue-grey and orange, making an impression of green light through which swam small black birds in single file. Looking around thinking this is a landscape from nowhere in my childhood: a landscape new to me. In front of the moving water with black rocks was a rock pool, still like a mirror: when I told Paul about it I told him about the free and captive plants, and the surface/interface where they met - the privet shadow and the reflected abutilon. It was the same shape of event. The mountains very distant, I've seen that, but not with shuddering light between. The rise of the rock beach around me; what kinds of vision will the coast give me? Paul's description which tickled me "You have that look as if to say 'I'm Ellie Epp, and I hope for the best.' I sense you have a hopefulness, some great capacity for belief, or love." Did he get that out of his journal? "I think I sensed that about you right away." "My father's such a jester. I'm a jester too." "I'm not sure I've ever seen your real jester, except maybe just a minute ago. I think you have a lame duck jester to distract people." His jester, the real one, is an imp, very focused. What is it I don't like about his genial jester? "Last week I was told I'd be a gorgeous old man." "Who told you that?" "I won't say. A beautiful woman." "I'm not sure it's true." "That's the girl! You're very robust aren't you!" Big hug, his face shines. I say "Why are you so smart?" in an interview voice. He tells me a long story about his childhood circumstances, his grandmother and godmother, Auntie Mamie, Irish schools, the black robed fathers in the vast green gardens, the river, 3' wide and about 6" deep, but there were marvels there, water rats in the tunnel where it went under the road, and weasels. The good shape of our little fight this morning: I wake up, he's awake and looking at me without smiling. I move over to snuggle him. He's stiff. Say, What's the matter? No answer. He stumps out, comes back, resists. I say are you cross because I went to sleep. He is but won't talk about it. I reason, that it's his problem - he says he feels his willingness is being exploited. Refuses to speak, feels very righteous. Says he'll just go to sleep. Okay, I say, and turn my back. Lie comfortably feeling out how it is with him, am indignant at his petulance and tell myself I'll refuse to be tilted by it. Just lie and feel that I'm not tilted by it, I'm self possessed and alert. He makes a tiny stir. I jump up put my hands on his shoulders say You know what I think? That you're silly but quite loveable, and that you're about ready to come out of it. I start to laugh, suddenly filled with desire and tenderness, and begin to kiss him, and not much later he begins to kiss me back. Later I ask him - was I right when I felt you were nearly out of it? "I was about to put on my clothes and go home" he says. Doubles our fight about the firemen where he played me out of my petulance. Didn't take him as long? Light collecting: inside eggshells, now thrown up on the undersides of the fence's tilted white boards by the boards below them. Sunrise on the morning of the 5th, through dirty windows onto the wall, making shadows of the hyacinths, into the greasy plastic of the butterdish lid, beautiful and mysterious. It's a little film, sunrise animating little domestic objects. How my eyes are attracted to mother-of-pearl colors, faded rainbows, water-mark reflections. This is the next stage after strong primary colors? - Seems to me being able to cry last night was my body's act of faith. These thoughts all running next to my sense of having to invent - now really needing to invent - another way of speaking and silence. With Andrea too. I speak out parts of my journal, without real poise, because they are my best representations - are Paul and Andrea also speaking their performances of separate collected perceptions? At the same time we look at each other: our faces have stayed true but are becoming very strong. We don't show a warp. But I want to move my concentration more into the moment and not show off in that blind way - we're talking as Weil says, without following our speech into the other person as it leaves us. Not flowing naturally and normally. My hunger interferes - all the things that interfere. Clichés will fill up every empty spot in a role which is not already solid with living feeling. Moreover they often rush in ahead of feeling, and bar the road. Screwing up their nerves ... theatrical hysteria, an unhealthy ecstasy. Beginners like you, if you have talent, can accidentally, and for a short space of time, fill a role very well, but you cannot reproduce it in a sustained artistic form, and therefore you always have recourse to exhibitionism. Stencils - shorthand signs intelligible to everyone, clichés. Third, never allow yourself externally to portray anything that you have not inwardly experienced and which is not even interesting to you. exploiting your art On the stage, there cannot be, under any circumstances, action which is directed immediately at the arousing of a feeling for its own sake. - ie go obliquely for the situation that provokes the feeling and concentrate on it as hard as you can.- Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him. The circumstances which are predicated on if they are taken from sources near to your own feelings, have a powerful influence on the inner life of an actor. Once you have established this contact between your life and your part, you will feel that inner push or stimulus. Work out an entire role in this fashion, and you will create a whole new life. Textbook on love-affairs, teaching - I used in love affairs to throw myself into the role much more exclusively of anything else. - Now, I learned, by a little nestling motion I found myself making, that I trust and respect Paul as I didn't trust or respect Andy or John. We have in common a delight in curiosity. We are ridiculous in similar ways. I needn't want to be him; I am him already. Hence I am relatively fearless. I think he may be exactly the same height as me. When I have on my shoes and he doesn't, I am taller. We have in common great pleasure in being able to be truthful. "My affairs usually don't last very long, but lately I've really liked the people in them" - great pleasure in our adventures. Your adolescent body and your buffalo head. "I did feel it was more your enterprise than mine." "I had a feeling you were afraid you'd lose something if you slept with me." "Not if I slept with you; if I slept with you too often." "I did think of leaving. Not because I was annoyed, I wasn't annoyed at all, but because I thought it would be a nice gesture." (Washing the frying pan) "You scare me with your gestures." This being purely a gallantry. "You say the things I usually say with my primary voice, and therefore I say the things belonging to my secondary voice. It's a very strange sensation." "Are you randy?" "I can't say. It's as if I can be if I want to be." - Lloyd Thomas. Large tired limited person with a lovely face under his big brown hat, man of few words and those mostly lost to his moustache, or not worth straining for. His child's exercise book with childish poems in chidish shaky handwriting. We got on the bus, he reached to hold my hand. How amazed and displeased I was! Made me yawn constantly. His innocent smile sometimes when I 'd ask him something straight, like what prevents him from drinking less than he does. Teeth like false teeeth, a large black overcoat on his wide stooping shoulders. Shabby boots with spat overshoes - toe rubbers - over them. A look of American West, (English origin) the 40s, and Depression. Thirty-four? "Thirty-three and a half, that's an l.p. and if you play me until midnight I'll be two seventeens." These inarticulate Americans, make you listen: they are like Co-op films. - Loving Paul's house, glad to see the street, then the two green houses, one with a bamboo growing in front of it, another an old shingled house - with fierce holly - i found myself very sad, bitterly homeless, looking listlessly at how long it will be before I make a place beautiful - then on 3rd St [Avenue] the old house with its huge yard, blackberry hedges, strewn garbage and wonderful upstairs verandah. Felt exhausted. Wondered superstitiously if it was my stubborn foolish deception (I think I did it to say mind your own business). "I think maybe I'm wanting to open you up very quickly." The Western Front, Susy [Ksinan] beautiful and silly, the other girl in her nightgown, pussy showing thru. Dancing with the monkey, who was the picture of myself, made me lonely for Paul. - Tennyson's Eagle, the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls. - "There were lots of wild women too, but we kept them all across the river."
- Poetry. All sorts of pictures possible, ie physical pictures - focus - color b/w pan cut grammar Wonderful and irritating how I listen to footsteps in the corridor now. The Women's Movement book - notes on political life - The window pane - ie separation of subject from object, sez symbolism book but it is more - the world, which we can no longer believe in as the satisfying material object it was to our grandparents, becomes transfigured with a new light .... it is on the lines of that spiritualizing of the word, that perfecting of form in its capacity for allusion and suggestion, that confidence in the eternal correspondences between the visible and the invisible universe, which Mallarme taught ... that literature must now move, if it is in any sense to move forward. Arthur Symons 1899 Now - both satisfaction of material world and spiritualizing of the sign. Pater on Romanticism - "Its desire is for a beauty born of unlikely elements, by a profound alchemy, by a difficult initiation." In WW Prelude - stone and shell, books - poetry and geometry! Swinburne - Hermaphroditus - sleeping with women. Paul said "I approve of lesbians, I just don't want you to be one." I said, it seems to me quietly (because I'm not sure he heard) - "There's no such thing as a lesbian, or if there are, that's not what I am." So I laughed and flattered him, and when his friends came was first shy and then bored, feeling in a silly old territory, Paul's new lady inspected by his mates. So that everything I did either struggled against it or acquiesced to it. - What to use the journal for - ie what's worth thinking about at the moment - seems to me it's the question of what my work is - Well: - To make vision notes, train my brain to take notice of what really interests my eyes - To follow the little things, words that resonate, pictures, elements in something that attracts me, ie to find my myths, the secret powers - Also to be free of the secret powers when they are used against me - ie to be the ombudsperson for my own way, in defense against cultural ideas of love, enemy - especially to demystify - and that means mostly the love-sex-intimacy thing (Paul's Law: if you talk about something your spoken description turns around and installs itself in you, replacing what was first described -) - To make up stories - To learn to speak - to refine my language - White, silver, aquamarine, turquoise, ivory, glass. Faded wood. Pale grey and brown pebbles. Bridget Riley colors, shimmer, the cover of The symbolist poem. Muslin. Washed colors. Snowy light. Ivory light. Bed with its head toward westlight window. Foamy or feathery plants. Yellow brass handles. Sunsets. Paul's pastel colors too. Present already in the Nant Gwythern pictures. My sexual appetite which is very decisive. - Wonder what it is Paul's looking for in me and not finding, to cause him to be so unwelcoming - uninterested. Makes me feel a lonely jawful of resentment: you don't know and I won't tell you. His story about Beverley: she said "You don't make me feel magnificent." "Her body was really wrecked and all," "I guess I carped." Locked into misery with him, I felt I was being sucked dry - I really felt his meanness and it made me turn my face away. Makes me feel I'll have to either begin to harden or else just simply drop him if it isn't worth hardening. Luke on the seashore, pink in his cheeks, sitting alone on a piece of styrofoam, his boat, "Ellie you know why I want to hug you? Because I came back from a long voyage, I was in the mountains." He voyaged serenely by himself for a while. Paul and Brent found a jellyfish so beautiful I was brought forward by it. Turned belly upwards it was like a sunflower, with curly tendrils coming from its centre. Turned back upwards it was like an eye with a thick cornea-lens, and then the delicate wheel of brown iris buried under it. The boat wash scraped it on rocks.
- I loved: the jellyfish. I'm ashamed to pay this conventional attention to you just because you bed with me. I love the whale, the jellyfish, the wet-tongued goose, I loved you one morning when you left me alone. But the jellyfish. It was the real thing today. If you liberate a person or a landscape from the bonds of motives and their actions, causes and their effects, and from all bonds but the bonds of your love, it will change under your eyes, and become a symbol of an infinite emotion, for we love nothing but the perfect, and our dreams make all things perfect, that we may love them. All sounds, all colours, all forms call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions; and when they in a musical relation evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion, the more perfect it is, and the more various and numerous the elements that have flowed into its perfection, the more powerful will be the god it calls among us continually making and unmaking humankind. Yeats 1898 "Symbolism in painting" - Annie Dillard: I have since only very rarely seen the tree with lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. - I could have said that, why didn't I? I did say it - "I am a true worshipper of something, and when I pursue that in myself it is my right path." Why does it take me so long? She makes a living with writing, she gives, sells, something useful. Yes, that's alright. It is the self advertisement that is wrong. Annie Dillard 1974 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Harper Perennial This week Paul seems blasphemy to me. - And then: well. True speaking. Is it ever blasphemy? I telephone him to say I'm not sulking any more; we compare our days; I read him some Annie Dillard and he reads me an image from Lucretius, the wet garment drying in the sun. Is he able to find me necessary? Snooped in his drawer and found a radiant picture of him holding the hand of a tiny dim Japanese girl - I'll have to get thin now. Surprise you, boy! Putting the chill on somebody The guy in the bright nightgown (WC Fields)
Said, when he found what looked like tears in his journal, he imagined me reading it and weeping because he'd said good things about me and I hadn't trusted him! - Leaving at dawn - high early light - I pretended not to notice - then it rained - new high white clouds blowing through very blue sky. It's Sunday. Oatmeal cooking, bacon. Familiar rage develops. When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you. Hasid quoted by Buber quoted by Dillard
Every minute on a square mile of this land - on the steers and the orchard, on the quarry, the meadow and the creek - one ten thousandths of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. paying the devil's tithe - Zugunruhe - restlessness of birds before migration A kind of nothingness is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek toward that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky's stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing whatever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around with him in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part. I taste salt on my lips in the early morning, I surprise my eyes in the mirror and they are ashes, or fiery sprouts, and I gape appalled, or full of breath. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it. - Without waiting to sit down or unfasten her low-cut bodice, she uses both hands to free from its pressure a swollen breast, blue in color from its generous veins. Leaning over, one foot lifted in the dancer's classical pose, her flared skirts like a luminous wheel around her, she suckles her daughter. Colette in Music-hall sidelights: Bastienne's child - "I want to make you bloom, like someone who's well-loved." Fucking in half sleep it seemed to me there was a tree: each movement inside me a branch. I found myself breathing to a dim chant of twig ... twig ... twig. In last nights dream there was a city - I think the same city as in an earlier dream, the one with high bridges. I was walking around self conscious in a costume; some motorcycle-louts, heavy ape-faces, were filming - I got away from them as fast as I could. Dreaming the queen friendly and intimate. Reading some of her speeches, found animal images like this, "the rabbit, stuffed with the buzzing of bees." Told her I'd send her my book about women's images in films and poems. Earlier, a sort of conference. Aged beatnick women with battered musical instruments, one of them taught us a song I wish I could remember, but even in the dream I hadn't quite got it. The last of the dream first: Penelope came and sat next to me on the bottom step, right next, touching me along her side; she seemed a little sad, very loving. I told her I had two things for her. The woman I'd been with earlier walked past down the stairs - I said "Do you know Esther?" as an introduction. We were all looking at each other. Penelope nodded. That left us alone. We moved just a little closer, I was moved. Luke broke into this dream. Hello Penelope. Earlier: a holiday, like a fair, pavilions of different countries, it was replacing Dominion Day. I roamed, drank - coming back to search my pockets for a harmonica, a man thought I was robbing someone - sharp little exchange I thought witty but can't remember now. Sense of complex social experience, there in all sorts of detail. Songs. Going to La Glace, finding it lined with skyscrapers where Henry Siebert's farm had been. But Mary Siebert showed me a journal, there was a woman in it writing like me, feminist, elliptical, intelligent. A note on my own birth: "Ellie: curious, alert, charming." Something like that. Then on a headland, a sky in sunset colors, flocks of birds very high overhead. I was with the woman later called Esther, a tall woman. I lay on top of her and we sang hum omne padme but I didn't know the tune, which I suspect she was making up. In the end we sang in harmony. Then other women came to sing, I felt cheated of some special intimacy. The place - in the beginning when I found myself there, I thought this is almost the place I was once before - did I remember a dream? It was more a state, like a drug state. I felt not quite refound. - Penelope: you or somebody who goes by your name, you've found your way into my underworld, you're a lively image in my tarot deck: don't know what it means. I was going to sleep just now and thought 'Penelope' and smiled. You come into my dream. You're my imaginary friend I think. Your house, your quiet front room, the sense of your steadiness. I think I'd like to have had my hand on you, well it scares me Penelope, your round breast, your honest eyes, your quiet bum disappearing under the blankets. The night I slept next to you, I longed, dreamed, I touched you. Well. I like your name too. Ah Penelope you're the centre of a circle, you throw a certain light - - And you Paul Kinsella standing at a shop window hands in your pockets smiling at what you see, your face a weather vane held at its right exact angle by something blowing past your neck, oh I make you happy, and this week when I think of you I feel warm. Another room in the old house, log stove, I opened it, found embers, put a log on, radio, record player, pile of records, Judy brought some, happy to be alone with them. A book of sheet music, thought I'd read it listening to music; sense of gifts, somewhere else in the house - Mrs Wold? A sort of idiot who threw up water. Another sort of dream last night. Luke, I'm writing down my dreams. Did you have a dream you can write down? Yes. I went to a real farmyard and there was a woman there who gave me all the keys to all the animals. Was that a dream that really happened or did you make it up? It was a real dream. (I dreamed of a farm too.) - The bumblebee in Paul's garden. - Telepathy, parent-child -
I nearly always know when Paul's going to telephone - I don't know, it just happens I'm thinking of him. - Wundt the Eigenlicht of the retina - Luke interviews people. "Busdriver, what is that for?" "Fireman, what's your name?" "Busdriver, will you wait for me?" "Where are you going?" "I just have to go and do something for a minute." He gets out, pees off the sidewalk, German couple smiling at him out the window. Gets in again, briskly. Paul, "Oh yes, I am Voltairian," when I evoked him in powdered wig, his thin legs in silk stockings, wrist hanging out of a lace ruffle. - Would like to have a time of revising vocabulary, eccentricizing - Chris Massie on a certain dream: when, for some reason, the drug is withheld, and the ego leaps out of time into eternity, like a planet that has lost its sun. Then follows the night of a thousand dreams .... I am a stranger there, until across a drifting twilight came the gentle Presence, the adorable One, who knows me. She turned over the pages of my life, and read them, every one, to the last word. She whom I have sought in sweat and blood! My undiscovered infinity of earth! The sweetness that had made me thirst! The hidden shrine! The altar of my offering to God! The sister-spirit who would cleanse me of sin! Beloved; alas, Beloved! - Sex. I can't manage regular sex - I don't like regular sex - an ugliness that comes into it - I thrive on minima, the tiny, the brief; I need poverty; sex unless it is rare becomes an irk, a confusion, - - The family gathering at Easter, anxiety, false-true friendliness, at the centre of it, immobile the two small old people bones collapsing inward, toward whom our love and need extend from our places within our generations, like guy-wires. - Pat Thom and Joyce someone, the indirect flurry of imprecise planning, there I am young in their elderliness, they aren't assured enough to relax me, I come out of it having muddled - but accurately I think - into a little job that is not, or can it be? truthful. - Paul, when I've thought of him today in such simple hungry affection - on the telephone has a headache, tries to be nice but has to give up. I feel chilled then. - The young man on the bus from Simon Fraser, inviting me for a drink. I said "Are you very lonely?" He said "Mostly I guess I talk at people rather than to them." I said "Are you stoned?" He said "No I'm always like this." "I find them really ingratiating" he said about cars. "You mean you like them?" "No, I don't like them." "You mean they grate on you?" "Yes." Silence. "Did you say ingratiating?" "Yes." - Today there has been a dream country very nearby, the corner of a snowy field, a dip - recalling it I remembered another dream, of hills with big trees - autumn. Is it the same country in another weather? Should I try to reconstruct it? This dream had horses, a house and a landlord, a journey? It seemed to unfold logically, it was a narrative dream. Only that corner of an image, a fence, a white hill dipping down - I catch glimpses - yes! a house I was inheriting from an exlover of Peter's, a strong flashy girl - it was a low oldfashioned charming house. A thin blond. That almost didn't come back. Peter I've often dreamed of him lately - I think he's Paul. [letter to my mom] Hello M - you sound harrassed, rushed, pushed by some little devils behind you. A little absent. The later letter - when you talked about your lily and Monika's visit - was better. Howcome the Holst girls survived their sickening society so well, what was their secret? Was it because they aren't pretty, or because they lived in the bush? Isolated things. I fear for Luke - and Canadian culture in its way is even more plastic than English, more empty, more corrupt. I was interested in your speaking about our society as ill - I don't remember you understanding that, you're so eager to believe the best of everybody. I'm very interested too in the fact that the Holsts grew up without religion, since religion, corrupt as it also is, tends to be the one thing that preserves life and spirit in people. But they grew up spirit-ed beings without it. (Are they all like Heide?) Deprivation - good for people and bad for people. Do you think spirit is genetically linked? (In horses, for instance, it seems to be so.) Why not? Yet, when I was at the Easter gathering of your family, I wondered where did you get yours from? Grandpa and Grandma are the two poles of our association, we love them and need them, we're there because they are, and they are quiet, sometimes they seem to fall sad in the midst of the joking. I wonder if they ever look around and think - where did all this mediocrity come from, these comfortable people getting fatter, these terribly ordinary young people, this embarrassment and lifelessness? The awful false cheerfulness. I'm proud of Judie, she's thin and erect, sits patiently watching, she doesn't say much but she sees a lot, she has good balance in her. Akasha does too. They have lots of spirit in their family. What's troubling you M? What areas? What do you need to talk about? The way you said that made it seem an urgent message. I'll tell you a little about this house - there's a scatter of birdsong now, the pear buds are blowing a little. We have the house to ourselves now, until we find someone to share it. It's a fine old house, full of magic, oldfashioned, with a pantry and deep eaves and closets in the upstairs bedrooms. These sunny spring days since it's become all ours, I've loved it, and loved making my own shapes in it. My room's beautiful, all white, white floor and white curtains catching the sun. My two brilliant rugs are here, the big poinsetta on the floor at the south window, two geraniums at the west window. I've found two pieces of furniture that make it feel like another, fine, gracious, time - a little rocking chair, a beautiful antique; and a low dresser, a long old-fashioned mirror with rainbows around its bevilled edges. I'd like to really work on this house and garden, I could make it something just magical, but - we don't know how long we'll have it, it will be going on sale at some unspecified time. If I had lots of money - maybe there'll be a miracle and I'll find some. My work at the moment doesn't pay on that scale! Luke has a neighbourhood, little friends knocking on the door, kids of all ages swarming the yard, as we have the most interesting yard in this block - there's a construction site two doors away, dirt piles and scrap lumber - they've hauled some of it over here and are building shelves against the garage. Luke's happy. Although he's years younger than most of them he has plenty of bravado with them. There are two good parks nearby. I'm curious to know how I sounded like a displaced person. At the time I didn't think I was unusual, except pleasantly intense as I like to be - but people are telling me I look happier, and my handwriting has relaxed. I hope my angels don't depart with the devils. I'm getting a lot of pleasure out of furnishing and finding, funny old, cheap, things. Paul, my Irish Paul, is a good friend to me, notices me when I need noticing, cries when I cry, laughs when I laugh too, and has a lovely Irish silver tongue. I always wanted a friend who could talk. And then it's springtime too; and there is more money coming in from various little projects. My gifts are in demand. Things on this, these, levels are going to be alright. There are other levels I'm not sure of. (Everyone tells me I look like you, not my features, but in my expression.) -That's where the letter was interrupted and I'll stop with it. Love from us
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