| london volume 1 part 2 - 1969 august-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
August 23 [journal] In terms of sculpture, an art which in any case involves formal concentration, this meant for Brancusi a reduction of the object to its organic essentials. The egg became, as it were, the formal archetype of organic life, and in carving a human head, or a bird, or a fish, Brancusi strove to find the irreducible organic form, the shape that signified the subjects' mode of being, its essential reality. Dream of Judy in a barbed wire vehicle having floated through a culvert at the East Place [sketch], spring flood, muddy cold water, we thought she was stuck in the culvert and drowning but could not dive to find her; but then we saw her in the south field, lying serenely sideways in the wire tube, in a white dress, resting lightly in the muddy stubble field with her yellow hair smooth and her eyes turned toward us with the posed gravity of an artist's model. Read on Arp: His work reveals those essential modulations of matter due to secret action of natural forces: as water smooths a stone ... as the pear swells to one kind of perfection and the crystal to another, so Arp has carved and modeled his faultless creations: art, as he has himself said, is a fruit born of man. Breton quoted by Read as example of surrealism as romanticism: Among the many disgraces we inherit, we should do well to recognize that the greatest freedom of spirit is left to us .... To reduce the imagination to slavery, even when it might lead to what one crudely calls happiness, is to evade whatever one finds, in the depth of the self, of supreme justice. Imagination alone tells me what can be, and that is enough to lift for a little the terrible interdict - enough also to allow me to abandon myself to this freedom without fear of self-deception. Does he mean that the freedom of spirit is a great enough gain to risk self deception? Or that in the freedom of possibility, potentiality, self deception does not exist? 24 August Elie Faure on Chaplin: that marvelous art of his, with its mingling of deep melancholy and fantasy, an art that races, increases, decreases and then starts off like a flame again, carrying the very essence of the spiritual light of the world, that mysterious light through which we half perceive that our laughter is a triumph over our pitiless insight, that our joy is the feeling of a sure eternity imposed by ourselves upon nothingness, that an elf, a gnome, a gnome dancing in a landscape of Corot, into which the privilege of reverie precipitates him who suffers, bears God himself in his heart. promise of that collective spectacle which will take the place of the religious dance that is dead, and of the philosophic tragedy that is dead, and of the mystery play that is dead - indeed of all the great dead things around which the multitude once assembled in order to commune together in the joy that had been brought to birth in the hearts of people by the mastery over pessimism achieved by the poets and the dancers. Warshaw: women who have come to understand in a more practical way how love can be an irrelevance ... therefore 'fallen' women. Honour is more than these things [virtue, justice, courage]; it is a style, concerned with harmonious appearances as much as with desirable consequences, and tending therefore toward the denial of life in favour of art. The Westerner at his best exhibits a moral ambiguity which darkens his image and saves him from absurdity; this ambiguity arises from the fact that, whatever his justifications, he is a killer of men. This mature sense of the limitation and unavoidable guilt is what gives the Westerner a "right" to his melancholy. - Have just discovered three of my letters in a wastebasket with cigarette ashes and other people's letters in Desser's room; am quite bitter; have taken back the two books I gave him. August 25 Kokoschka's life-size rag doll. And as I can bear no living people but am often delivered to despair when alone then will all the delicate and intimate gifts of nature displayed in the female body be recalled to me in some desperate hour by the symbolic hieroglyph or sign with which you have secretly endowed that bundle of rags. For the creative man the problem is, first, to identify and define what darkens men's intellect; secondly, to set the mind free. Read's summary in Concise History of Modern Painting - the modern experience of painting must be conceived as an immense effort to rid the mind of that corruption which, whether it has taken the form of fantasy-building or repression, sentimentality or dogmatism, constitutes a false witness to sensation or experience. art has always been the primary means of forming clear ideas of feelings and sensations. awareness of the problems of our age to present a clear and distinct visual image of sensuous experience. Monday August 25 [letter] While this has lain around waiting to be posted nothing has happened, I haven't seen the college about a job, and although I've half-heartedly looked for a room, I haven't decided on one, or whether to live in a room at all. 30 August What comes and goes and comes back most often these days is a sense of readiness to do something, specifically to seriously take on the Hornsey job if I only can get it. When I look at books in the BFI or the Westminster Reference Library, I begin to have a sense of valid function - here's something I can do, a short-term necessity, think out a course that will convince Mr Ian Simpson of my authority - need for authority, little anxious thoughts about clothes and my shape, style, silly-femaleness, thoughts of young confident art students and the attention or lack of attention shown by David or Leslie: things which minimize me (bless Chris). I've no idea whether I'm naturally authoritative or not; usually I think not. With Greg I am, so he thinks I am. Peter thought I was; but how? Desser talks about my frightening people. Exhilaration on Friday in the library because of a maverick book by Tarmo Pasto, a Finn who talks about space-frame perception in art, the secret of great and serenity-giving art. Makes us feel comfortable because we perceive with our whole body (and we are entirely body) - ridiculous theory, but why do I arbitrarily take to some sculpture, building, drawing, furniture very strongly and completely refuse others? It has something to do with balance and solidity, I know that. Vase shapes, pot shapes - what is it about my little Japanese pot? All the stuff I listed on the page from Cornwall? The certainty and safety on my encounters with some objects? Something I've begun to lose but need desperately. The possibility of working in that certainty, quite arbitrary certainty, makes me feel ready to work. Something is right, I'm on to something. I mistrust the intellectual program in the visual arts, detest surrealism and op and pop, love 'organic' shapes like rocks, am not interested in transcendental aspirations but only on the feel of what's to hand. That's something; it may be pigheaded and wrong, but it is a conviction that has grown out of my childself as a continuous strong long muscle of my self identity. Maybe it's good for something. Peter - when I invoke him often, think of his approval or disapproval of my plans, revisualize some scene at the Academy Hotel, vividly remember the moods of those times whose details I've begun to forget. Blue and brown and silent at the airport; I love him as I remember him. Don't knock it; it's all right to. What a beautiful man he was when I wasn't refusing to look at him. Now when I snarl at Desser's happiness with Ann because I want my dearest him to appear and enthrall me, I wonder why that crazy intelligent perverse man didn't convince me, Peter - irremediable loss or narrow escape? I wonder if he disapproves of me now as much as I disapprove of Desser? Who is a silly bastard, a dear conman, a story teller, a slippery ghost, a pretentious intolerant vain little ugly man like DH Lawrence's ugly little men who bewitch strong women into their warm dark caverns of irrationality where they are relieved to find their own impulses toward submission, collapse, valued religiously - I did love him; I was at his mercy, or rather completely taken over by the struggle not to be at his mercy. I loved finding myself so willing to try. I half-believed in that magic and might have staked my life on it. Easy to explain what he was: the gift of seeming to touch me with every nerve in his body bent toward me listening; and the Jewish accent jokes; and the ceremonial food and sex. That was it; that was enough. If Peter had been the same, if I'd mustered that idiotic faith in blood-magic or whatever Lawrence means - but my irrational body did not strain toward Peter as it did toward Arnold. (And it does not strain toward Greg.) Obviously it doesn't know what it's up to. I'm like a committee in which the controlling vote, the heaviest shareholder, is a six year old child who moreover does not speak any language shared by the other adult voting members. What danger. September 1 [letter] Have the enervating feeling of being between two lives, the last one a pile of confusion that is no comfort or direction, and the next one still weeks of waiting away. There are good days of working at the British Film Institute library or the Westminster Reference Library's upstairs art section, some exciting reading about modern art and films, some good films gone to, some fast windy night rides on the red bike, some good talks with Greg - but lots of sad thoughts of Peter, and of other friends and of friends I don't have but want. And as usual, of things I want to be but am not. The National Film Board film I have one line in (the one Chris was editing - did I tell you about Chris in Montreal?) has gone to the Venice Film Festival and is getting good reviews - the first and only big film I've actually seen work on - I feel all proprietary about it. This is the end of the paper and I'll mail it tomorrow. I keep saying I'll write oftener - maybe I will. In the meantime, address c/o Greg. September 3 [journal] Woke this morning after a dream in which Madeleine and I arrived in front of a laundromat. As we had previously arranged, she distracted the two men we were with and I grabbed her few favorite belongings, her grey coat, some books and boxes, and ran into the laundromat. We were going to rescue her from the confusion of her past life, and let her begin clean and new on the other side, so I threw her things into a washer and dived in after them, up a short rolling belt and out the other side, born through a small rubber opening into a laundry basket. As I collected myself it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps Madeleine had saved herself from me. Chabrol's La femme infidèle, the last scene in which the dull methodical little man stands looking back at his wife and son in the garden. We see him turned looking back at them, with a detective behind either shoulder. Then we see them - there's a slow slight backwards zoom which turns into a sideways pan and confusingly, without noticing the transition, begins to zoom forward again while it continues to pan sideways to the edge of the drive and a tree whose branches darken the screen and blot out the woman and the child. Chabrol's smooth subtle understated way of using the camera to say the man's goodbye to his wife and son. September 5 BBC, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and then The Other Side, interviews with Bishop Pike whose son and secretary committed suicide after poltergeist occurrences, and who is now thought to have died while lost on the Israeli desert. Mrs O'Hare's bed and breakfast place at 68 Marquis Street, my big dim back room with its grey wallpaper covered with red and pink and yellow roses, its two wardrobes drawn up flat against the wall, its big grey chairs drawn up to the electric fire in the fireplace, green checked cloths on the round bed tables - my bunch of yellow chrysanthemums that I brought with me the Saturday night I came - red plush cloth on the table between the wardrobes, with a bouquet of plastic flowers, red and yellow roses. A blue chenille bed, and my low pink one next to the window. The triptych dresser with its odd woven scarf, ashtrays with my lemon soap and cosmetics in them, low bowl of plastic spring flowers and a little toy model, very detailed, of a yellow-skirted blue-faced witch with her cauldron, coming toward it with an eager lunatic look. The large grey carpet with red and blue Persian flowers. On top of it, a square of brown carpet with pink and yellow roses at opposite corners. On the window side of my bed a speckled black linoleum. Red topped table at the window. And the window! As long as the wall, covered with white nylon, surrounded by a greenish grey painted frame and long red curtains. Through it I can see a crooked line of roofs and chimneys, and at night, people's lit back windows, rectangles behind red curtains. When I lie in bed I can see myself in the dresser mirror. Fireplace, false, constructed out of false and ugly yellowish stone. Above it on the wall a Madonna standing in the sky unsupported. The electric meter at the head of my bed, with Anna Karenina opened out on it. The blue vase full of tangled weedy yellow flowers I discovered on the table when I came home late last night. In the morning the door opens usually a minute after I've woken, and Mrs O'Hare comes in in her housecoat and arranges breakfast at my elbow on the little table. Tea pot, hot water, sugar, milk, honey, and thick slices of bread and butter. It's like Madame Degen's in Strasbourg; I read La force de l'age in her narrow bed under the roof while eating her breakfasts; now I read Anna Karenina. I'm very happy in this house, in this area on the edge of the brick factories north of King's Cross - I can see Saint Pancras spire from the doorstep. I came last Saturday after running away from Greg's place in misery and despair. I'm shot through in a vital part, unmanned, weak as I never have been, I'm completely unsure of myself - I watch other people slyly to lap up their more confident lives. I'm riddled: full of holes, full of puzzles. The first night I lay awake and struggled against certainty that my life was finished - I had lost my nerve, or seemed to. Being dead seemed little different from being alive. I seemed, and still seem, to be doomed to want what I cannot, cannot have: a man, a job, a child, a place. Movement is a problem - I can no longer jump up and walk across a room freely, in one flying motion. I must struggle to move smoothly, because I am often stiff or painful. Often I look very old and yellow. I've reached and slid past my peak - already! I suppose that should comfort me - but no, I'm not sure of that either. I thrash about certain that there was a key, a principle, a simple way of looking at my life that would make everything right, make me less paranoid and self conscious, less lethargic, less disdainful - more eager and more free, more at home, give me back the courage and excitement I had when I was eighteen. And here at Mrs O'Hare's, I am more courageous and more at home. I no longer begin my mornings by falling back again into a stupor to put off the empty frightening day. I don't have to strain to hear the conversations between Ann and Desser next door, happy cooking clatter; don't have to suppress fights with Greg in shame at the sadness and limitation of our frustrated-tender feeling for one another. Greg - I like him, I run out to hug him, he makes sense of my resentfulnesses by taking the emotion out of them. I cling to him, pitch myself at him sometimes in my need to hold onto him. But I criticize him for not loving me passionately and ceremoniously. "I love you as much as you let me" he says, and it's true. But I can't stay with him - we infect each other with lethargy. I always want more than he is and resent him for my wanting as though it were his fault. And the drama - I haven't seen Desser since then and want to drop out of his life completely - partly because it makes me miserable and partly because I want to see if he misses me - I want to punish him, make him feel guilty, want him to MISS me. I don't think he has! The two books I gave him are here with me - I wonder if he'll miss them? And yet he was like this and has found his way to save himself at least for the moment: I'll have to do the same. It's leveling, such riddling - it makes me equal with what I condemn in other people, weakness, dependency, despair, the frightened little self lurking in my eyes. [sketch] 17 September Someone called Meinhard Rüdenauer picked me up yesterday in the Tate, a young, plump, completely unremarkable-looking man who says he's a composer. We arranged to meet for the Contemporary Dance performance at 8 today. Our talk in the Matisse room yesterday, and even more our shiftless evening today, sharpen the feelings of strangeness of meeting a new person - because he is as aware as I am of the self conscious moments when I feel my mouth setting itself into the unnatural self conscious position and then sliding into another. The tension of image received and offered; or questioned; my stares into space, my ridiculous final "Well"s, like sentences by themselves, but pointless; his flurried accounts of his work, in which his mouth moves so little that the words are mashed between his lips - his pointed smile, with his teeth set edge to edge like Uncle Harvey's, his sudden undermining shifts into humour, which collapse my little false structures like a pile of sand. His good humoured insistence on holding the back of my neck - my silly and coy posturings and his ability to see past them to my sincerity. The straightforwardness and honesty and modesty he has are endearing. "Ich bin ein Komponist" yesterday, but said very modestly. And today, his remark about his painting, when he was a child, being sent to the UNESCO exhibition. His ballet about Kafka, in eight "Puncts". He wanted to call it "K" but thinks that may be too vulgar. "Terrible music, depressing." An idea for another ballet, music basically modern, atonal I suppose, but played to a rock beat, in which one girl separates herself from a group - danced and sung. He begins to be unintelligible when he talks about things that are related to his main interest but not central, about a television show he did, and groups of artists he knows. One of the things he doesn't like about having become a composer rather than an artist or an actor (because he can't do anything "gescheit") is that to work well he would have to spend his best few hours a day working; and he would rather spend them with people. He does not like to work alone. After a struggle on the step, I said "You aren't taking me seriously." I had to shout it again - often we do not understand each other - "You aren't taking me seriously!" He beautifully, unexpectedly, said, in German, "You know, lately I don't know what I take seriously and what I don't. I don't know myself. And so -" and there he became unintelligible again. This as he was sitting on a step beside the bus stop, and I had just pushed him away, because he had sat with his heavy arm across my shoulder and his hand on my neck. 18 September Finished Anna Karenina this morning, Levin's surrender to faith, like the enlistment of the "men who have lost caste, a restless crew who are ready for anything," like Anna's death under the train, and Karenin's fall into evangelical Protestantism. Evening - in the mornings I telephone from the laundromat, wait for the bus beside a factory as truck drivers wink at me (purple shirt, eye makeup, the high-heeled boots), catch the red doubledeckers to cross the railway bridge and seep into the central area down past King's Cross and the Saint Pancras station. This morning I jumped off the bus opposite the Saint Pancras church caryatids and bought a stall ticket for 20s, the Sunday dance matinee. South, past Yeats' house on a cobbled mews, to Dillons University Bookstore, where I pledged myself to stay in London by buying The Possessed to read at breakfast, and Penelope Mortimer's My Friend Says it's Bullet-Proof because it's about a woman who has lost something sexually important, and Sylvia Plath's Ariel because I'm going to live alone, and the Secret Marriages pamphlet of poems whose vague prickly images had stayed in my mind wanting to clarify themselves. [Michael Longley 1968 Secret marriages: nine short poems Phoenix Pamphlet Poet Press] In the elaborate stationer's I bought a drawing pencil, and a pencil sharpener, and finally, with a careless reckless throw of my today's impulse to give myself presents, a thick, tough blue notebook with both lined and unlined pages that are meant for carbons but ideal for all the notes and sketches, learning, seeing, thinking, making I'm going to do in this free year in London, maybe. [first of many Challenge duplicate or triplicate books] And then I found Heal's, huge displays of rich colored furniture, blankets, red dishes. A white paper area, white paper lampshades hung on long white cords, floating in clumps of fern set on the floor. White chests, drawers, tables, beds, desks, in interlocking units, completely simple. I was dazzled as I used to be in Eatons catalogues and the Hudson's Bay furniture department, full of tense belief in the lovely house I will make for myself - gave my impulse to give presents to other people a chance as well, and bought postcards: a rich red icon of George and the dragon for Olivia (really St Nikolas chastizing the devil), a sarcophagus cover of Psusennes I, with the goddess Nut with her arms stretched out protectingly for Marytka; the Egyptian King Phiops I, his copper face and chest encrusted with rust, like a diseased potato, his headdress gone and his slight, intelligent smile scabbed over, but his eyes still clear and direct, a man stripped and weathered but surviving. I'll send one to Don and one to Peter. (Yes I think of Don too, and wonder how he lives, whether we could be close; I'd like to see him. In Oxford he had the same physical claim to me; he's aged well, and looks as though he's stretched his face with efforts to control, fight, amuse, make order, cheat mundanity.) Then I took a new route - there are always new routes - to the BFI, and bought a membership, another clink of commitment to London, and immediately was brought into the bad-toothed smiling circle of Using One's Influence (today it was John Gillett) to Get What One Wants. Stupid, boring, repulsive uneasy John Gillett trying to help and at the same time show his importance. Graham Passmore become a real acquaintance; yesterday it was lunch at Jimmy's and the day before it was the straightforward and simple way he stopped at my shoulder before going home and said "Will you be working here again tomorrow?" The beautiful man, bearded, with large direct intense eyes that I caught in embarrassment, young face, rather broad plump body that I couldn't keep my eyes off. (Since Chris plump men haven't put me off - I love to remember the warm fit of my body and Chris's together under the sleeping bag - I remember Chris a lot too, very affectionately. I often miss him. He didn't go to Venice. "There was no hairy person that I noticed" said John Gillett.) I continued to stare at this man, was really delighted and disturbed by him, wanted to have my arms around him, wanted to accost him. Eventually he left, and I couldn't stay and concentrate - what this has to say about my decision that sex is an overrated troublesome convention I hate to think, and don't think, and pretend they're compatible, but catch myself beginning to wonder -. The little Italian café just off the sidewalk, up the street from the BFI, the usual hot milk and something exotic, like raisin bread pudding in slabs. The Westminster Public Reference Library, the long table in the back of the art section, a thin young man in an old fashioned suit writing in a manuscript book, stopping to watch the birds start up from Nelson's column and scatter across the window and the greying afternoon sky above the National Gallery like flies; then the moment when I looked up to see that the Gallery skylight was lit from below and all the colors had lightened, become white, almost silvery. Made notes on pictures in my new book. At eight was chased out by the library's closing, smiled at the thin man by the window and emerged into Leichester Square's Friday evening. The long Picadilly escalator, wood, and fast, and too long to walk down. At David and Leslie's, found myself gay and myself - Jean Rouch's funny loving Moi, un Noir which was like Ferdinand of Côte d'Ivoire, in his laughter, feeling sorry for himself, daydreams, toughness, childlikeness. (Greg said "I thought of Ferdinand immediately" and I was surprised again at how he knows my life and remembers it like his own, dear Greg.) On the tube, coming to Caledonian Road (another new way home), a man who gave up his seat for a tall girl in a white theatre suit caught my eye and smiled. Continued to smile, at a pair of long-nosed lovers, the girl chattering enthusiastically, the boy looking merely long-nosed. Caught my eye and smiled again, black-eyed, knowing, humorous and alive. As I got off and saw him looking at me as I knew he would, I waved, and he waved. When the bearded boy at the BFI turned to close the door behind him I looked up and stared at him as he stared at me behind the closing door. The dramas of subways and libraries - I love that feeling of potentiality. Someday, in the subway or at the back table beside the window in the Art Library, I may meet someone who will know how to evoke my magic, and I will be caught up in wanting to understand his. Sex is conventional, overrated, mystified, distorting, sad, but I'm on the make. And, finding Market Road, the new way home, I found a strange desolate stretch of blue night-lit industrial landscape. On the right, an iron fence; behind it a cobbled stretch of bare grass and weeds, with an unsupported brick tower in the middle of it at the far side. On the left another iron fence beyond the road, a railroad yard, a jagged row of roofs, the unpopulated brick railway and factory area with another thin brick tower rising out of it. Ink blue sky and clear stars, pink-grey bits of cloud floating like settling cream around the near tower, which suddenly began to toll, invisible bells belonging to no church, almost a de Chirico landscape. Then the serrated horizon of York Way and my own street, my clean front door, my room waiting impersonal and perfect, the books in my bag to unpack and thus dedicate, this account to be written, wash up downstairs, with the geranium plant on the wall, Grandmother's smell of concrete, the roof patches behind the garden. Tomorrow morning a waking to Mrs O'Hare's tea and toast, some gay exchange we always manage, and which I manage naturally and happily. I told her this morning "I don't know why it is, but this house makes you feel so good." September 19 [letter] [sketch] There's my skyline that I can see from my window. It's like Madame Degen again, only this time it's Mrs O'Hare on Marquis Road and not Madame Degen on Rue des Hirondelles who brings me breakfast in my room. And this time it's Anna Karenina and not Simone de Beauvoir that I read while eating my breakfast (tea, not café au lait; but the same bread and butter) in bed. I wake up very happy here - something I haven't done for a long time. Last night when I came in I found that Mrs O'Hare had put a vase of yellow daisies out on the red table. When I come in she laughs, when she brings me breakfast she laughs; when I arrived on her immaculate doorstep last Saturday she laughed at me because I had bought a two-shilling bunch of asters from a street vender and had been going from one bed and breakfast to another with them looking for a room. She is Irish and very clean and good-hearted. Last week I went out every day looking for a cheaper, permanent room somewhere in the area, and found a dreadful, cold ugly room in a dirty house far into the colorless outer edges of London. When I told Mrs O'Hare about it (rather piteously), she broke down and said business was slack and she'd let me stay in the room for a cheaper weekly rate for a month or until I'd gotten settled and found something I liked. I hugged her and have woken up happy ever since. It reminds me of Grandmother's house on Clearbrook Road, with its clean smell of concrete. When I leave in the morning she comes right in and dusts and tugs a tiny wrinkle out of the bedspread and moves the water glass into its exact position beside the artificial roses. When I come home in the evening she brings me tea and a current bun, and I tell her elaborately how nice she is and how wonderful her room is. It's like Strasbourg also because I have no job and not much money and am not sure what will become of me. Only Strasbourg was colder and wetter, and I had a kidney infection besides. Now I only have occasional stiffnesses and old woman aches when I walk too much. (Oh yes, and I did have a strange little infestation of vermin, tiny crab-looking creatures that bit. I think they may have been lice! I can't imagine where I got them, certainly not from Mrs O'Hare's house.) Also I didn't have Greg in Strasbourg to jet me through the city like magic. In subways here there are very long escalators that rise or drop very fast. If you walk on them while they're moving you feel as if you're taking huge steps effortlessly. Driving on the motorcycle is like that, or like sitting on air and flashing out between cars and taxis without the necessity of wheels. Today (Monday) I must go out looking for jobs, as I think I very badly wrecked up the Art College interview. I have some odd plans for giving myself an education in film, so I could teach if necessary. The French scholarship people seem to have forgotten me; it's probably just as well. Reading Anna Karenina makes me think of your farm quite a lot - I particularly remember the autumns, the pale yellow color of the stubble, poplars, chaff, and the fire-red bushes along the creeks. I've been very miserable, inert, irritable, panicky, bitter, envious, all my worst sins at once, and a really pathetic fearful creature, but I think I'm coming out of it. I THINK I may be coming out of it a little more tolerant of other people's limitations - and to my surprise this little new toleration doesn't seem to have made me any less alive. But don't count on it, it may not last. I've also been reading Margaret Mead's Male and Female. I'd recommend it if I thought you had time. 19 September [journal] Saturday morning - reading Penelope Mortimer this morning, the section where he tells her not to wear the brassiere, "I prefer you as I am" [I wrote] and she is suddenly overwhelmed with happiness, charged, gay, strong as a flame from a blowtorch - my own sudden thought, perhaps there is something about this leg that is positive, a particularization as Peter said, something that could increase the mystery, intensity, electricity between myself and that yesterday's boy with the eyes and beard for instance. (There's no mystery and no electricity with Greg, and there wasn't with Peter because I had to make everything cold and clear to save myself - for this time now I want to draw, photograph, write poems, write a novel. Sex is a convention - as a form of physical pleasure it is sad and unsatisfactory - only the charge of the unspoken can make it ritual and fascinating, for how long and with what careful management? And only with this blowtorch strength I have from living alone?) At the end of the book Robert has asked her to stay in America and marry him, and write in the shack by the lake, be safe and strong with him. She says yes. When she telephones to cancel the flight, she confirms it instead. She packs, he throws in the brassiere with her clothes, so that she won't wear it. "She gave in, clinging to him as though she were drowning; but after a moment he detached himself and made her stand alone. He was crying." I don't remember Peter ever crying (but Greg does), only at the beginning when he was in love with me and excited he used to say "I feel all weepy." Their silence at the airport. "'Why? Why am I going?' 'Because' he said, 'it is your nature.'" Exactly. I wish Peter had understood that. Francis Flaherty on elephants' training: As he is marched up and down and up and down between them they chant to him; they praise his fine long tusks; they tell of the big jemadar who caught him, of the rich man who will buy him .... Elephants that are born and reared in captivity I am told, never make the 'good' elephants who work and obey and become the devoted life companions of their keepers that these wild ones do. For the essence of the relationship between the man and the animal is that the wild spirit has been broken - like a broken thing this strange, great heart in the queer great body clings for life to the only thing that is now left to it, its only security, this human who has taken it and made it his own. Earlier the elephant is tethered, front and hind legs, stretched between two trees. Men approach him with burning torches, stand chanting around him while one man thrusts the torch in front of his eyes, others gently rub his legs and sides with sticks. He sways and almost collapses; they stop until he stands again, shout, prod him, then start again. It seems to exhaust him. 21 September, Sunday William Walsh in the Yeats chapter of Use of Imagination: major dramatic characters - distance between the tragic character and his universe is lengthened, not shortened, the tension between them becomes more not less acute, the original opposition quickens to a violence of rejection ... not sports or aberrations; they are the symbols of a richer humanity, and we respond to them as we do because of our conviction that they perform an essential human office, the preservation of man's strangeness and his solitariness, his status as an alien. Says Yeats' personnae are not partial representation, but "true expressions, charged with the full energy of the complete person," "total deployment of forces on both sides which makes the conflict intense and enduring, the long-drawn-out genesis of the firmness and vitality of character that Yeats loved and celebrated," "sees character as self-creating." The existence of my journal from when I was twelve is evidence of my belief that I can make myself, and that what I am is strong enough and subtle enough to become something whose evolution is interesting. At its earliest, the journal was an angry assertion of my value, necessary because Father denied it. It became an expression of love and energy, fascination with boys, Janeen, the creek, fields, night, songs, times; delight in my own cleverness with those early poems in the manner of LM Montgomery. Love, delight, exuberance, successes that made me confident - I no longer wrote out of unhappiness. The climax of the year in Sexsmith, letters and journal often indistinguishable, except for the coyness and playfulness of the letters. Then I began to yield to the necessity of including sadness, defeat - although I will still not willing record my mundanity, my days when I wake knowing I am not very marvelous, bless Chris. Now, as the latest development, I've begun to include arguments. I've barely begun - although still in exceptional circumstances - to have opinions. I've never really wanted to have opinions; I'm suspicious of people who have opinions, worried, uneasy, sometimes jealous. Even DH Lawrence is irritating, with all his opinions. I don't want to be a critic, because being a critic is having opinions professionally, is being a person who has opinions. Now - is it better, does it mean I'm becoming a formed person, does it mean I've lost something and am becoming a robot? - I sometimes have opinions. But not consistent opinions. I believe in self-formed character, but I'm a behaviorist. I value the lyrical realist stream of art, but distrust loving exploration of methods or principles in art. I think of myself as intelligent, but am shamed and envious in intelligent conversations. I believe myself to be unique and valuable, but stared in fascination and envy at everyone at the ballet this afternoon. I believe in the preservation of my strangeness and solitariness; at the same time I'm not sure that the sort of preservation I can manage does not depend exactly on what I do not want - pride, jealousy, intolerance, desperate preservation of self definition through rejection of other people (like Desser). When I make cheerful conversation with Mrs O'Hare in the mornings, I decrease my solitude, I affirm her, I like her, I feel whole and generous and full of energy. When I avoided the stupid conversations of Miss Davis in the hospital I felt guilty, childish, uneasy, malicious, but right, because she was dead, and it would have been a waste of time. Obviously my self must be good for something, a sensitive complex excellent instrument for something. Obviously? My appearance out of two parents at a precise place and a precise time, one fact; also my vague arrival, like silt settling, to become a self which I still am not, in no precise place and time, with either no parents or innumerable parents, another fact. And then a disappearance, precise, exact, the fact which is known but never believed. The stretch in between, the silting in, before the whirlpool spreads what has settled and leaves a bare corner of rock - no reason why it shouldn't exist for itself, the marvelous but unimportant gathering together of what will suddenly (or gradually) be dispersed. No need for anything to grow in it, even what grows is silt and will be dispersed - nothing can grow in silt which is not silt? But plants are made of an interaction between silt and other elements, and a seed. Plants are silt's way of digesting everything else. So what? What is trapped and digested doesn't become another element - it soon breaks down and silt is silt making silt again. Mind is mind making mind, and mind is unstable. If I write my bit about lyrical realism in the documentary cinema, it means something (perhaps, if it's good, it means something) but it means nothing. It makes me, it gives me something to do, it gives other people something with which to make themselves (I believe in works) and something to do, it uses air and water to make something out of silt, which is made through air and water, dialectic which has no final-cause synthesis but is precarious and doesn't move in a straight line - carbon dioxide cycle, here I am but not for long, and I believe in making myself. Maybe an energy criterion of morality - it is good to be and do what I am and do when I am strongest, most exuberant, feel most myself. Easily reduced to absurdity by examples of other people. But for myself it works - because when I am healthiest and most full of energy I am most capable of doing what I believe right? I'm not sure that's it. What I am at my best is what I measure myself against; when I recover my state of grace I'm capable of believing strongly in what at other times I'm uncertain about - eg whether one should be self sufficiently alone. 27 September Paul's birthday, an extraordinary dream I've just remembered. Carrying a very precious little dog, accompanied by a young boy I think, maybe Rudy, standing either in or above a city on a pinnacle, surrounded by a green sea that was really ice, for naked brown-skinned boys were walking on it, clouds, green ice-sea, but breaking into waves mixed with clouds, very beautiful - I think I said in my dreams that it was the highest peak of the Himalayas. We saw that the water was rising around it, and so clambered down, breaking into deep holes if we stepped on the wrong place, a young man who lived there guiding us. More - spearing salmon in a paper bag, a lovely small pink dappled fish that hid between two pages of a magazine, but I shook him out. A school, now full of residential children, a bedroom with rows of high beds, Tom Hathaway coming to meet me in the corridor (I think La Glace School mixed with Sunnyside) and my delight in him. Is Judy really married? [No, she was lying to my parents.] 28 September Spent yesterday with Don, the best parts of it drinking lime lager in the corner pub and watching ducks on St James Park pond. This morning I had a fantasy about sleeping with him once in my life and secretly conceiving - I'd be glad to have his child, but it would have to be secretly because I wouldn't want him interfering with its upbringing! I'm still held silent and tense by his body, lightness, bones, catwalk across a street - he looked younger this time, the Bernard Williams sophistication around his mouth seemed gone. When he bent to look into a slot I found myself staring tenderly at the top of his head, wondering what would happen if he caught me at it. In the park where we had tea he sat with a lime-yellow leaf in his hair like a feather, and we leaned forward. His trick of staring into people's eyes - I catch him at it and our eyes catch, flash, hurriedly unhook. We could never be friends before; there was a mutual idealization that was too important. Now we spend time together still very tensely and self consciously, but with a feeling that something may come of it. I'm sorry it's so asexual - I feel tough and dry, in spite of my little fits of tenderness for him, partly because sometimes I do not understand him, and partly because I'm clever with him. I find myself immediately expressing little hesitancies that come up in me - I think, to disarm him; and it works; he no longer intimidates me. We've changed. I tried to share my happiness about London with him - sometimes my role of pointing things out goes mechanical on me, when I'm with him, and gets boring. That makes me feel dry and tough too. Dry and tough is probably what I'm going to be - but it may work. He still remembers Indra, and Peggy. Friday October 10 Smell of geraniums. Geranium leaves held up against light, semi-transparent stems. "It's foggy this morning," Mrs O'Hare with the breakfast, the window completely blank and white, soft - fog. I took the camera to the garden - colors jumping out of the white air, the two brooms leaned against the wall, glorious light, every plane sinking back to the next, objects have different dimensions, a new risky perspective, things come out like arms, round things are rounder, angles are sharper. The street was transformed, simplified, walls stood out by themselves, a man sitting on a box in his warehouse, another man on a truck ("Too foggy for that"), a black man coming out the door between boxes of shavings, cigarette in his hand, stopped by my "May I?", caught looking diffident - my smile of excitement looking sideways at a woman on her knees cleaning a window, then the corner building being demolished, fire, crumbling battered shell, tall crane, chain looped across the fire, two waving workmen in blue shirts, the fire seen through a hole in the brick wall. [a bombed facade] The bus, the world full of things, weight of the camera in my hand, myself full of joy and excitement feeling solidly myself, a day that has continued extraordinary, full of excitement and talk; 10,000 Suns again this afternoon, in a nearly empty theatre. The long black skirt, my red sweater and the red ceramic necklace as a belt. [Brewery Road] 34 1/2-26-373/8 Friday 17 October Telephoned Greg this afternoon, because it had become brilliant and I
was restless - "Did you ever get home last night?" "No."
"Where were you?" "With a friend." "Anyone I know?"
"Yes. Someone from Kingston." "Do I like her?" "I
don't know." "Brenda?" "Yes." "Was it nice?"
"Yes," pleased with himself. I'm in the Leicester Square red telephone
booth, feel sad in the pit of my stomach, envious and afraid. He comes downtown
and we sit on a bench in the sun, with the sun on the back of our necks.
I want to know what it was like. He's vague - does he remember? Did he notice?
I like to spy - his connection to the secret responses and slopes of another
woman's body makes him interesting to me and I neck with him a little. We
both laugh at how gullible I am. I feel rather sexy. We go to see Z
and are soon absorbed. When we come out I'm full of a feeling of how much
incomprehensible evil there is in the world, as I was after The Fixer.
We go to a pub near Picadilly for a half pint of bitter - I'm full of talk,
about movies and about how we must be political. Greg eventually says he's
sleepy - he has been quiet; he got little sleep. He sees me to the barrier
in the underground. I've been taken by my old loneliness as we come down
the stairs. I stride toward the barrier, meaning just to disappear dramatically,
but he reaches for my elbow and catches me. We stand with our heads together
for a moment. "What are you feeling?" he says. "Lonely."
"How come?" "I'm lonely for my own true love who'll come
with his white horse." "Oh," he says, completely without
bitterness or even sadness. I turn through the barrier and have my ticket
punched without saying goodbye to him. He walks off to the right toward
his motorcycle, and doesn't turn although I stop at the head of the escalator
to look after him.
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