| london volume 3 part 1 - 1970-1971 december-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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University College Hospital, 17 December 4 a.m.? Luke Chisholm is born, came this morning at quarter to two, with Roy watching, very fast. He sucked at me like a tiger and went to sleep contented, little blue hands with narrow fingernails, a wide nose and a big mouth, wrinkled shanks, fuzzy soft hair, big milky eyes that seemed to look for me behind their swollen eyelids without lashes. He looks avid and intelligent. I don't know what kind of day it is; I hardly noticed yesterday, saw only the eclipsed afternoon in Kentish Town through smoked ambulance windows, nine hours of labour with only one uneasy hour at the end, lay peaceful between pains with Roy silent in the chair beside me, wanting to be left alone, everything working calmly to give birth, I'm proud of myself, it's a good omen; it isn't Poppy: it's Luke Chisholm this time, come in his own time, no help from anyone! - Afternoon - he has cool silky hands and feet. I remember last night that when they put him to my breast I could just feel a bare foot against the inside of my forearm, a thrilling bit of flesh. This morning during all the pitch black hours between four and nine I lay awake feeling proud of myself because we'd given such a perfect birth. Such timing, such a perfect rising curve! Roy came just when I wanted to phone him because the pains were beginning to be potent. It grew darker outside, and then silent in the corridor when I began really to struggle. We were so still together. I remember spaces between pains that were perfectly peaceful, all my body rounded up and soft as cream. Roy was exactly right, just present, resting and watching, stroking my back. He has a cleft in his chin, big ears, fuzz on his cheeks, white spots on his nose, and stiff eyelashes, after all. And frown lines on his forehead. - Evening - dusty smell of mimosa to evoke Roy and last spring, Roy came feeling strange and guilty about something, I feel today running out much thinner than it began this morning when I sat in the nursery staring at my funny little baby. I'm reluctant to let it go - - Three sixpences and we're at peace. He's home looking at the sky from my bed. "I'm feeling most poetic," "I love, love, love him." Goodnight Roy and Luke. 18 December He has gone to sleep lying against me with his hands folded over each other - it puts me to sleep, we gentle each other. When I took him to the nursery I wanted to find Roy and gentle him, but he's disappeared with Dee's money for party booze! The mimosa, the iris opening out like a birth passage, Luke's orange and gold flowers, long stemmed red little roses, and Greg's scruffy chrysanthemums from Russell Street Tube! I felt so fond of Greg when he kept going back to stand at the foot of the crib and look - leather fringes, hair stiff like a dry dandelion, shining goodwill; I was glad to have him come and bring our old loving times with him. Most of the time I forget he was ever my lover, and now Luke reminds me. Roy says he wants to send cards to make peace with all the people he's lost too. Luke lying asleep - Today he learned to reach up with his arms, full stretch, hands angled from the wrists like a Burmese dancer - Roy quotes Laing talking about the continuous dervish-dance of newborn babies. - Oh little Luke, I am in love with you. I'm crazy about your big feet. I'm delighted with the way you hold your legs crossed up against your belly with your feet folded around your sides like a yogi laid on his side. Wow, I love you when you stretch your arm in your sleep and when you fold your hands under your chin while you're eating me! You bump your hand against your mouth and it opens wide - you suck your finger, but it isn't quite right. You make a face and push your head off the sheet; you're waking up. I love this place, brick building that allowed me in only when I was ready, made me progress from room to room until, in the dark and silence, I came to this long ward and the bed in the far left corner. Here's my cell-shrine with candles and flowers at the foot of the bed, the smell of mimosa, and ceremonial meetings with new Luke. Other people coming to pay tribute and bring offerings, all the virgins meeting at the center to discuss their rites, all their secular lives left outside. I realized today that I hardly remember what happened even last Sunday. We gracefully meet and welcome new women. Last night, they brought up a suitcase and I sat up to watch, all stiff with interest. And when I saw the girl wheeled to the edge of her bed I began to cry because she looked so pale and delicate, with her hair still damp around her face, shy from her miracle. I cried because I remembered my own arrival. Greeting the creature, that big mouth, that bare silky foot. The dark, the letter for Roy, and another wonder, the pigeons' cool bubbling in the eaves over my black window. Babies crying at the far end of the corridor, voices, footsteps, traffic, my own excitement of pride and confidence, a physical tingle of joy. A short vigil, I wish I could remember it exactly and have it again - and then morning, and I got out of bed to go sit shyly beside Luke's cot and look at him, learn him, make friends with him. - My nipples prickle when I look at him now. New Years Eve He's asleep in the carrycot on the green Japanese box, at home, has one loose fist against his chin, mouth open, face plumper, less newborn, he's two weeks old today; we ate pancakes with the cranberry sauce that announced him, drank sherry and talked about our austerity program. Remember this Christmas: coming home on the 23rd to the flat clean, green, grass-smelling, full of anemones, freesia, mimosa, and orange and gold chrysanthemums on the blue-topped table; Roy had prepared it for us. Joy near tears all day and the next. On Christmas Eve, fighting, crying, hitting each other in bed, and on Christmas Day the sadness of it still left. Christmas night, Roy's turn for joy. This week, familiar thinness, remoteness, impatience, worry, secret touch-wood doubts, fatigue, jealousy. Nostalgia for the time I was in labour - physical nostalgia for that blissful sleepiness and concentration. Monday 4th of January 1971 A new life. New chapter, new kind of engrossing relationship - I hadn't decided that everything was to be new, but every day I find myself different in some way. [letter] It's after New Years and we haven't heard from you. Didn't you get the card about Luke Epp Chisholm? Are you snowed in? Sick? Not speaking to me? I look for a letter every morning. Luke is asleep in his green bed (it's the top half of a baby-buggy, ie a pram in this country) after his first visit at the clinic next door, where he was weighed, poked, distracted with noises and colored objects, and pronounced remarkable - I suppose they tell all mothers that their newborns are remarkable. He was little and skinny when he was born, 6-10 with lots of loose skin, but now in two and a half weeks he's 8-6 and plump, very strong and hungry. He refuses to focus on an orange blob swung in front of his eyes but he focuses on a face and will follow it with his eyes. He peed on the doctor four times in five minutes! He can support his own weight on his feet - etc. We've begun a tape for you - do you have a cassette recorder available? Because that's what we're recording on. We didn't record the birth - it was impossible to pay attention to pressing buttons and holding mics, we were too excited and it happened too fast anyway. But there's a bit done in the hospital and some more done here. Ah, but let me tell you - he's got a little fuzzy light brown hair that parts itself into a triangle from the crown of his head. A big Epp narrow forehead (in certain expressions he looks like Uncle Willie). Grey-blue newborn eyes that get bigger every day. Still hardly any eyelashes. Big nose with big noseholes. [a family joke] My upper lip and Roy's lower, says Mafalda. A point of chin with a cleft such as never was in our family but that looks like R as a little boy. It was a delicate thin little face last week, but it's getting plump and his chin is doubling. Long arms and legs, long fingers and feet, a big swollen tummy. Ever since he was born he's been a beautiful color, a kind of olive and peach, more ivory when he's asleep, more pink when he's awake. He nurses hard and often especially at night, doesn't like to sleep in the afternoon. Roy sings him Christmas carols, washes diapers before I can get to them, tears off to get anything he thinks might be useful, has learned to bathe him and change him, wishes he could breast feed, selects radio programs that won't offend him, checks up on me to make sure I'm conscientious enough. I didn't know my little finger was crooked until I looked at his! Where does that come from? Your blue blanket brought him home from the hospital, M, and he's used it ever since, equally shared with Roy's mother's blue blanket (Catherine Chisholm in her last letter said "I long to hold him. Not being able to is almost a physical pain. I expect Ellie's mother feels the same.") Something I've discovered, M: before Luke was born, during the last month, I sometimes felt my face and hands turning into your face and hands - you know how it feels, when you find someone else's expression in the tensions of your own face? But after he was born, especially the first week, I felt my hands, feet, face, whole body, turning into Luke's hands, feet, whole expressive little body. And now when I burp him I inevitably burp big burps myself. Enclosed: a slide of Luke taken in hospital, three days old. It's raining and warm today, BC weather. I took the bicycle to pottery classes, rode through puddles and glittered along with the whole glittering watery street. I'm learning to use the potter's wheel to make real things, plates and bowls - When I got home Roy had put the creature into our bed to sleep [sketch] under 5'x7' of featherbed and surrounded by a small field of blue sheeting, but he lay spread out serenely, like this, and seemed to prefer it to his own bed. [stick figure sketch] [letter] Saturday Here's word from you at last. The letter took a long time to arrive because you forgot the NW5 in the address, very important, this is the biggest city in the world. Also, M, my name is not Ellie comma (and Roy Chisholm) - you should know what it is. So stop cheating my conscientious objections! I'm imagining Christmas Eve's afternoon blue dark and cold, Father coming in puffing steam with the pile of mail (and the package!) and puffing out again (to do chores?) and you getting into the mail the minute he turned his back, with Rudy as accomplice. And then you all excited announcing the news to Father, and his cool quip about sleeping with a grandmother. You don't say anything about the name; do you find it strange? We're both pleased with it, pleased with ourselves for finding it and being so perfectly agreed on it - to me it sounds masculine, unfashionable, courageous, intelligent - something square, direct and honest about it, like an American cowboy in a Zane Grey story. His second name is Epp. Greg imagined the following scene: Luke is at school, one of his friends says "What does the E stand for?" Luke, looking stalwart and embarrassed, "Won't tell!" This morning I'm in bed with him and my cold (he thinks he has two volcanoes for parents - sometimes my cough wrenches the nipple out of his mouth). His hair looks almost red in this light. What skin! What a mouth! What dancing hands! What squeaks, meows, sneezes, clicks, hums of satisfaction! What an ear, growing flat against his head like a perfect lichen! What fragile blue veins and shadows on his bumpy skull. [undated journal] January Yellow jaundice [was infected with hepatitis B by Roy] World turns fast underfoot, I hardly realize how much ground I lose ("find myself different"). Consciousness itchy. Ah, January skies, pond gulls catching sun, falling and yelling. Baby Luke's intelligent stare, humorous grin. Alternately, bloated, dissolute, jowly vacancy. Don't touch, don't talk. Familiar states, something new coming, something dissolving away into terror, tension like a vast starry cold sky in my stomach, tenderness that forgives everything, peace; recollection "begins with loss, hence it is secure, for it has nothing to lose."
Kindly and thrashing with fury; like myself, when I must do two things at once, wait patiently and defend myself from being taken for granted, overlooked, overtaken. Half smile - "You aren't going to leave me are you?" My blind grief nods. The January skies have begun, rain at night, beautiful desolation.
Coppett's Wood Isolation Hospital, Oh, I'm going to dance and sing and much such a room to live in, and I'm never going to get married, and Luke will be as impossible as his father but I'll love him a lot, and Poppy will come from somewhere, and I'll take ecstatic pictures and maybe movies, and I'll make just enough money to live well and buy red cut-glass goblets for festivals, and Roy will drop in when adventure permits and give us all religious instruction, even when we're in BC picking apples and snuffing cedar. Never you mind the practical details my dear, I'll look after them in style. Save your energy for joy and instruction. I can do it all at once and have joy left over, as long as I belong to myself. As for relationships, don't talk to me about them. Life is too short, and I have a few friends who'll write letters and come see me. Angry defiant plans, but good ones, real ones, starting soon. And there's Luke muttering and fussing before he sleeps - I'll go see. Several nights ago, after vicious war all day, touching R in bed with my bum and going to sleep utterly comforted. The night after, skinny body coming and going all night to talk to me through my exhaustion. "I just wanted to make one thing clear ." Quarrelsome, but this time I see it's affectionate; skinny boy, it's nice, this holiday from you. Good night and fuck you! January 31 Roy conned me into giving him my last thirty pounds, coolly lied to me - said he had no money, when he had over 400 pounds. I won't forgive him. When I was at home, feeding Luke every three or four hours all night and beginning to be sick he offered to take him for one night because I was hysterical with fatigue. Next morning he said he was exhausted and took off for the rest of the day - there was a wild speech about how I don't acknowledge that there's a difference between men's work and women's work. Everything he does for Luke he does as if it's a favor to me, not as if it's his share of responsibility for him. He nags me, he complains endlessly about how much he does for me, he's full of fury and hatred toward me. At the end I thought angrily that I'd do everything myself rather than have to bleed so much for any help he gives me or Luke. And it was clear that we couldn't stay together another day; we were both cracking, so I came into the hospital. And now he says he's lonely and wants us to come home soon! He's possessed, I don't know why he's so angry. And why doesn't he listen to me when I talk? I'm so hurt? Why can't we speak to each other now without ending in hurt angry deadlock - why can't we come through? He keeps telling me what I am and what I should do ("That's what I do when I'm bored"), he refuses to play good daddy ever, but I need a good daddy so badly - he won't put himself out at all. So I've come to feel I can't depend on him even when things are desperate. February, Friday Luke's in danger, sick, maybe jaundice. He lies and smiles at me so beautifully, yesterday he learned to talk - a crow of pleasure that goes with the smile. He vomits a stream that shoots across my bed, puckers his mouth, looks dismayed; and my stomach jumps with fear. Beautiful pointed-chinned baby, get better! Saturday Sad grownup journal, so alien. My face is sad and grownup too, bony, with big spaces around the eyes. The moments of being so confidently beautiful will become fewer and fewer. There were so few! But I was grateful for them. I dreamed about Janeen. She was just as she always was, beautiful and laughing, freckles, pink skin, she knew she was perfect. Luke - yes, he has shining eyes and his mouth makes beautiful shapes I've no words for. All his touching noises, the frantic sucking on his dummy when I think he's asleep, his squeaks. Roy - almost too remote to think; a thin new-bearded man comes in with books and gifts, I'm afraid of anger and can hardly think him since last week's fights. He's always tired and has nothing for me, and we wonder what the connection is. He says he thinks of me and misses me. But that has no reality for me at all. Who is he? Sunday The whole world spread around, and sometimes I can't conceive it; there's no one in it who knows me and cherishes me. I'm lonely and a little dead. I'm hungry for letters - mail strike. I'm hungry for the world, I want my private relation to it back. I fall into Rome five Februaries back, think of flat-foot silent Jerry, sitting on a wall with his head on my lap watching the sisters go by, bread and butter and oranges and a few hours of sun in the afternoon hoarded up and teased out. The garbage smell of my house on Via San Giovanni in Laterano and the old woman with her daughter leaning against her asleep over their rubbish supper. My room so narrow I could touch the wall from my bed. I'm hungry for my own life, my own life, my own thoughts, privacy, movement. That moment when someone likes me and I like them; it comes so hard for me but I long for it. Private moments when I'm chasing ecstasy with my camera or a word. I know how privately I want to live; I can hardly think of myself because I don't know how to have that privacy, I don't know what to do next, I'm really in flight from myself, I'm cornered, so I shut my eyes. Of course I'm not really cornered. Where's my courage? Where, where's my courage? And Roy is lonely
I came at the beginning of February, with Mitchell, who was mad at me and gave me bad dreams because he wouldn't tell me why. (He found a room and disappeared to the Goethe Institute every day in a clean shirt, so I was rid of him once we got to Rome. But imagine going through the St Gottard tunnel, mile after mile in total dark and silence with someone who's hating you.) The youth hostel was damp and literally rotting and the Sicilian family who ran it stole everything they could find in the luggage, but outside on the street was a palm tree. At dinner time Americans played their guitars, Candy Man and all the folk songs everyone knew the words to. A boy with long sideburns like the young Mendelssohn came and sat with me because he liked my look, which in those days was hobo gypsy with gold earrings and shoes full of holes. Said he'd help me take my things to my new room I'd found next morning. Had seen a small sign, room for rent cheap, in Italian - found a solid old woman on the first floor landing of a grand, wide marble stairway. Ten dollars a month, a room just the width of a narrow bed and a narrow table. A dim yellow bulb, a picture of the Virgin, the last tenant's stale bread, and a tiny barred window onto the hall. She told me that the last tenant had sat and scribbled all day at that table. I was full of joy - sat on a café terrace shivering in sun, cappucino and big sugared doughnuts for breakfast every morning. Jerry went on to Naples, leaving his bag hanging on my door knob for me to keep, but someone took it. There was a park full of ruins across the road - I went to buy balloons and tease the high school boys, who gave me rides on their Vespas and praised Mussolini (and thought I was crazy). Sicilian Antonio gave me a pair of shoes, his old white tennis shoes that made a clown of me. I went to the market and bought a brown paper cone of carrots and big prunes that were delicious but made my teeth black, almonds and olives; I learned to shout back at the stall keepers in Italian. In the afternoons I went up the street and sat reading in the sun in the top galleries of the Roman Colosseum, with hundreds of wild cats. The guards tried to seduce me into the depths with promises that they'd show me the model, full reconstruction. Another sun trap was the Spanish Steps where I could sit with the ragamuffin boys and watch the blond princesses in their Valentino dresses, elegant knees going by at our eye level. All of Rome built at sharp angles, and on hills. You find yourself suddenly at a place you thought was miles away. Everything is in walking distance. Everything is close. A shortcut, and suddenly there's the empty church with Michelangelo's Moses sitting fiercely inside. Jerry came back from Naples with a blanket for me, stolen from the youth hostel, and a green ring from Capri. Every evening we found Mitchell and had dinner in a special cheap restaurant where they began to know us - cheap white wine, good coffee, good sour salad, roast chicken (pollo arosto), apples - and went out into the street quite tipsy; one night we stayed out all night walking from fountain to fountain and bar to bar, very cold, and then went to sleep in the Sistine Chapel when it opened, because it was Sunday and free on Sundays. Usually we said goodnight and pretended to go home, but actually scattered. I found a low spot in the fence around the Roman Forum ruins and would crawl over, late at night when the patrols had stopped - always terrifying, because the Colosseum across the road was full of queers, and because the grounds were vast, full of cats, completely unlighted except for spotlights that might betray you and get you arrested, and full of ruins with deep black shadows that might have anything in them. One night, at midnight when I turned twenty one, I sat for a long time on the mosaics of some Roman emperor's villa, looking across the city (very dark, no street lights) and made solemn vows sitting on that precarious boundary between an unimaginably long past and a future about to suck me in. Ate a bitter wild orange from the emperor's tree to seal the vows and kept the peel to mark them. Next day we three went to the Lido, the nearest sea beach, deserted and cold. Mitchell charged the sea with his pants rolled up and his legs skinny as a heron's. I found a bleached dog's skull with perfect canine teeth. We took pictures in a booth in the train station and ate pizza behind the plastic streamers in a beach café. When I walked all over Rome in my clown's clothes, Antonio's shoes, patched jeans, Bill's corduroy shirt, Jerry's cigarette-smelling yellow t-shirt, and gold earrings, I felt sometimes humiliated, mostly wonderfully, arrogantly, free. Even the gigalos wouldn't look at me. But I picked up the Self-Made Man, Tony [Andy] from Rumania, carefully learning American English to get to America, exploiting everyone especially the American Embassy and any chick who'd buy him a meal; fourteen. Antonio had to go into the army; he forgot his jealousy and invited us to dinner, his mother made Sicilian pizza, mostly dough and tomato sauce and rosemary; then he kissed us all, even Jerry, and cried and cried. Ugly dear crooked-toothed Antonio. One Sunday morning we walked down the Via Appia Antica, old Roman road with bits of stone paving that show chariot wheel tracks. Overhead low flying beautiful jets. Rome: jets and wild cats. Waking in the morning and listening - noise from the street meant it was raining, hiss of wheels on San Giovanni in Laterano. Stolen daffodils from the street running along the Forum, stolen roses from the shrine of the Electric Virgin (insert 100 lira and the lights go on). Thursday From a letter of Blake: "As to Myself, about whom you are so kindly interested, I live by Miracle." Wow I'm angry. At this moment he arrives. Fifteen minutes he's gone again. He was bitching about how much the place depresses him, "For fuck's sake get yourself out of here!" The anger in his voice saying "It's you who depress me and I'm fed up coming faithfully to see you." Absentmindedly because I was feeding Luke I replied to the voice rather than the words, "If it makes you so fed up to come here then don't come to see me anymore." He untied his strings and went home and I'm even angrier. The truth is I don't want to go home to more anger, fights; to moving; to thesis; to strangeness, fatigue, fury, worry. I feel stranded in this country. I haven't any work, my life is running out. I'm Ellie Epp and I'm going to waste. How can it be possible? Ellie Epp in the mirror, oh Ellie Epp don't get lost. Every day is lost, I am lost, where has my love gone? - (I crawled out the window to telephone him and he arrived just as I'd crawled back in.) [sometime in February, from Greg's house?] Tuesday If passion is a breakthrough, and habit its antithesis, then can we deliberately cultivate the break after the impulse is gone? Love as our clutching at what we ourselves want to be - I've always known that. But it's pure admiration too, jealousy entangled from the beginning. When I let myself know how strange Roy is to me, how estranged we are, my stomach knots with fear. I have nothing certain in my life, everything is in question. Luke is certain, but he's no certainty for me - he, like me, stands facing nothing but uncertainty; he's not a comfort, he doubles my uncertainty and un-comfort. He is; I hardly realize how definitely; he is, as I am. I'm so frightened to go home, because we won't have any peace either until we've fled away form each other or else come through everything we don't want to say; sexual indifference, contempt, vast fear, rebellion, lovelessness. I've nothing but faith in past recurrences to make me believe I've got any love left - sometimes it's possible to make an explosion that blasts love free and makes me a trusting, loving, hoping little girl. And the mysterious visits of sexual joy and peace that let me know what it's like not to be frozen. It's all there. And Roy's all there. But where? When he came in today he lay on my bed exhausted - sick and tired. How am I to believe it's not me he's so constantly sick and tired of? What does it mean when he says he loves me, when he doesn't even like me, as I know perfectly by the constriction I feel in myself when I'm with him? Whatever is he trying to do? What's he afraid of? What does he want with me? My Puritan and organizing self says, either commit yourself, or else separate. But the deliberate action is not there yet. And what would it mean, committing myself to an attempted marriage at a time of such trouble that the commitment would be almost completely abstract? How do people live? By going where I have to go. And yet, terror and grief. A long tear going from top to bottom of me. Thursday Flight last night because my life was going on without me and I was desperate to get back into it. How to be. I'm pure me plus mother - see where that gets me. I never want to admit that there are things that must not, dare not, be said. Luke, stirring in his sleep. Roy angry, vanished. John [Roy's friend] suddenly giving me a picture of his life: a £3.10.0 broomcloset, a tiny stove for tins of beans, and the knack of making fish and chips last. The girls downstairs with stones in a tobacco tin wrapped in a handkerchief. Priscilla says "There's a lot of sadness going around." But the brink of something new - fear and excitement are almost identical, in the cut. The black nurses at Coppett's Wood haunt me now, that I've left them: the daughter left in Jamaica when she was two, while the parents work here to "make a life for the children," ten years since she's seen her, and she sings in the choir now. The pretty woman who comes with the vacuum, a baby dead at ten months, pneumonia and heart trouble. Trouble - it makes tenderness, makes me loving, strings me out - Friday Happy. From a book about Bergman: polarized his favorite motifs: the maternal 'caring' aspect of the human psyche versus the masculine, life-denying; the role of the sacrificial victim versus that of the redeemed person; the exploited object facing the artist-manipulator; the seeker of god meeting an ambiguous image of attraction and negation. "I'm going through such changes. I don't want to scare you. I have such a call to holiness." [Roy] And I say that I've always understood that, in my belly. I have a call to holiness too - holiness and adventure. He leaned on his elbow and looked at me: his face was dark because the window was behind him, but I felt my face almost stroked, or just felt. I felt felt. And that was like a kiss at the end of a movie. Makes me happy today, full of love and clarity. A film for me begins with something very vague - a chance remark or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable event unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a few bars of music, a shaft of light across the street. There are split-second impressions that disappear as quickly as they come, yet leave behind a mood like pleasant dreams. It is a mental state, not an actual story, but one abounding in fertile associations and images. Most of all, it is a brightly colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious accompanied by vibrations and rhythms, which are very special and unique to each film. The duplicity of the call to holiness - it's real and it is what it says it is; but it's also a call away from actually making bottles, buying paddipads, doing laundry, confronting angry sick real me and other such non-angelic things that have to do with real fathering and friending. In me, it's also always the useful call to abandoning struggles with angry real him and simply leaving. Ha. Uses of journals - Saturday Dawn, exorcism, Dylan's I Once Knew a Girl, Cohen's You Know Who I Am, sunshine. We packed Luke up, asleep, into Roberto's car and took our garbled laughing crying battering singing selves peacefully down to Kentish Town - I thought it was seven o'clock summer morning, smiled and flashed my bum - actually it was ten and the streets were full of Saturday children - Primrose Hill, Luke waking, thrashing away from the sunlight, nursing and smiling - we took Mafalda (her face with its pores still wide open from a moonlit night's sleep in Cooper's room) to Alexander [Roy's friend the ex-priest] who sat puffy and vague in a green robe like a seedy angel (Pasolini) with sexy Harriet-Laura tossing her big head at Roy, red hair and evasive flirtation, and her delicate witty nine year old sister playing on the telephone ("He left her ... don't know") and bugging Luke. House, yellow curtains, tall windows full of park and cloud, Cohen! Simon and Garfunkel, Georges Brassens - feeling my own wan thin new beautifulness like a powerful secret - R whirling Harriet-Laura, new beard making him less and less substantial, he's almost a wraith - I like to think about his freckled back in summer, when he was still made of flesh. Private afternoon's stomping northern clouds and wind. Things curled up ready to bud, me too, ready to burst, just keep poking me, you bastard. February, Saturday - Sunday Keep reminding myself that - R has disappeared, I half hope for good. Dragged the bicycle up the hill on the Heath last night sobbing aloud. I hate him, I'm tired of his constant self-deception and his self-congratulating manic power playing, his selfishness and his panic at any responsibility. There's no room for tenderness with him, it's all turned cunningly into a crow of triumph - he's successfully conned another fool into loving him. Poor plump neurotic boring silly Brenda [Greg's girlfriend]. No more love and no more good faith. [letter] I think and hope that Roy told you we were coming into a postal strike so I haven't had any word from you since what seems to be many weeks and you haven't from us either. The postal strike is still on and there's no end in sight - it's partly a pleasure, being so excused from letter-writing and not being obsessed with the postman's footsteps in the hall every morning - but life without letters! Since I've written you, I've had and recovered from Roy's jaundice, spent three weeks in hospital (isolation - 'fever' hospital) until I went crazy with loneliness and boredom, crawled out the window and telephoned Roy from a pay phone (10 p.m., dark) to ask him to come get me, and ran away home full of the pleasure of real streets, houses and free people - Luke came in with me so I could look after him. I'm thinner (yippee) but otherwise very thoroughly recovered. (While in the hospital I got a recurrence of the kidney infection, with very high temperatures and very strange, often horrible, visions - for the first time I collected some notions of what the subconscious/unconscious is. It was like watching movies, but after a while horrifying.) Luke: he's two months old, fat, very blue-eyed, very good humored and alert and obviously intelligent. He learned a lot of things very fast, all at once, about three weeks ago - to sleep at night (but, perversely, from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. rather than 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. as the books say he should), to smile, to sing, laugh, crow, stare at strangers. When he begins to wake and I lean over the edge of his bed toward him he stops crying and gives me a wide gentle ecstatic smile that I feel all the way into my stomach - his friendliness is irresistible, his radiant responsiveness - we are crazy about him. When I hold him on my lap, sitting with his head under my chin, I smell his waxy warm baby smell and wonder if I smelled like that. What a creature! Roy said, today: "He's a whole lifetime's trip for us." He has almost no hair now, deep creases (full of dried milk) in his jowls and legs, squirmy fists and feet ("my lizard, my lively writher"), a wonderful feely little bottom, pretty eyelashes and a pointed little beautiful mouth that makes shapes I've no words for. He's so loving, already! The bitter cold of Christmas is gone, it's warm and sunny and spring has been here for weeks - yellow crocuses and white snowdrops. We had a lot of troubles all at once - it was cold and wet, Luke was sometimes sick and woke every three hours all night to be fed, both Roy and I were deep in the sloughs of jaundice-depression. Now, magic, all's possible again and we three are all in love with each other and with London. - Ah, yes, we've decided not to emigrate to Canada this summer after all. Roy came home one night and said he knew he wasn't ready to, and neither am I, so I'm happy about the decision and it's good that you're coming here. R is thinking about starting a community house - not a hippy commune - a place where people just live together and try to discover better ways of staying alive and nourishing their gifts and needs. I hope he does. We're been experimenting in our flat, with Roy's best friend, a very radical bushy-bearded psychiatrist called David Cooper (your friend would know him - he's just published a book called The Death of the Family and he's a co-pioneer with someone called RD Laing on the very important British school of radical psychiatry) and a Portuguese girl called Mafalda. I hope the project works because Roy has an outrageous talent for creating good interpersonal explosions that make us grow - he's very hard on me but wow! he does make me stretch myself. Maybe it will be underway before you come. [journal] 23 February David talked about Roy years ago, "shy and diffident," telling proudly how he's opened out. "I'm jealous of that." A quick sideways look, like a punch. "Why did you look at me like that?" "I felt sorry for you, just a wave of feeling." "I feel sorry for myself too, I feel I could really blossom and that it could happen any time, but doesn't quite." "I feel that too." Dee coming in looking terrified, half smiling and giving me a tiny, old, Flemish-painted box lid, with her shaking hand (my hand shakes too, these days), something out of her world as peace offering. I don't like the painting but I like to see her pain and embarrassment. ("It does her good to discover that she has feelings about me, another woman" - but no excuses.) [My downstairs neighbour Dee slept with Roy.] Sunday I think we have killed the fairytale: that ridiculous leap into hope that I took a year ago has run out! I mourn it! Nothing was as powerful for me as that dream of recognizing one another and being recognized by him, being one flesh and one mind, breathing, looking, tumbling into joy all over all of the world. Everything isn't isn't possible. But the lack and the want still tear at my insides; all the loss, all the grief, screams inside me. I'm freer, I'm hopeful, I'm newer, I'm me, but I can't have what I want, not all of it, and neither can you - I am strong and I'm peaceful and I've lots of resources and it's true that I'm very talented but who will know me in all the world who will cherish me, even as I know and cherish. Bitterness anger flight; antagonism with all I meet; cannibalism, lack of loyalty - but something else, something else. I've a good grip. Orgasm - my body blinking (slowly, heavily). February 23rd In David's notebook: "All we in our generation can do is guide young people by the revelation of our agony, our despair and, more simply, our mistakes." Hotel bed: sinking into a mattress like a pillow, featherbed, French-hotel red-flowered spread, angry Roy thin body jumping out to comfort David (who says he wants to sleep with me); "I've lost you but I can't get rid of you." "There's only one thing to fear, and that's the absence of spontaneous 'genius' without which all is lost" - [Roy's] writing in a sentence, on one of those blue cards (with Vick Vaporub!). David - why I'm so monogamous - "You know you've just begun your work with him." I say intellectual dependence, the Amazon queen dream. "The day you look for a love, not a husband, the day you'll look for a father, not a house and a family ." Baby Luke sleeping jug-chinned, waxy, pink, dried milk around his mouth, round-nosed, mouth tight, a fuzz of eyebrow, sunken blue eyelids, one big hand loose on his blanket, asleep like an old man and a chipmunk, closed, loved, sealed up tight (the embryo growing, open along the back), unapproachable - I shyly lean to smell him, feeling that I'm intruding in his warm nimbus of sleepy-smelling private air. Sunday morning when I told Roy I was contemptuous of him, his simple obsessive rampage through women's bodies, his hypocrisy and duplicity and deviousness and cowardice - he shouted "You don't have anything to teach me" and walked out. I came to my door and saw him naked at the door of his room, where Claudia was sleeping - accusing him at the door of the bathroom: "So that was what it was all about; you just had to get into her." He came into my room and said in his most seductive voice: "You're so special to me." Traitor! David running after me into my room pleading with me not to reject him too - to trust him to look after me - "You're two of a kind, same treachery, same sophistries" - "Sophistries?" pleading - yes, sophistries - and such desperation, such pain. Ah Roy, who are you, I'll never know; tenderness in his letters, the corduroy jacket, Neil Young singing "It's o-over," my stomach fuses with loss and tenderness. The house is full of his vitality. And I could never have imagined such treachery, such falsity. Such fury - clubbing my head in the bathroom, frantic - ah Roy, I'll never forgive you - and my young small kernel-me longs back to every good hope I had; the alternatives are horrible. It's me coming to know horrible grief, fear, loneliness. I've just begun. The man lying in the bathtub, soaked hair and beard, squint-eyed and ugly. The shy boy in the ragged brown corduroy jacket, short haired, fat-cheeked - he'll never come back. The jabbing arm, the skinny hard body in blue velvet and Joseph's coat standing hips forward, all anger, nothing but small angry eyes, where's the bowed mouth and the broad neck? Luke - ah baby Luke, I've been mean to you today; I'm distracted and absent, find myself out of touch with you, and ashamed. So I'm reading Winnicott. Think in terms of poverty and richness in the personality Crying for satisfaction, fear, expected pain, anger, grief Watch for the idea that he wants to and can hurt me Sad crying means the idea of responsibility By taking responsibility for what hurts him, he earns the right to keep a good relation to people There is no better feeling in infancy or childhood than that which belongs to true spontaneous recovery from sadness and guilt feelings. Completed experiences Baby's playfulness meets mother's and "blossoms out, and your playing together becomes the best part of the relationship between the two of you." Luke, look what you can do for me! Maybe I can learn to wait for you, to take my time with you, play with you! Live in relationship with you. Adults find it difficult to let themselves go when they are excited about each other, and this causes much misery, and makes for unsuccessful marriages. Knowing just how old your child is at any one moment There is a natural sequence of ruthless love, aggressive attack, guilt feeling, sense of concern, sadness, desire to mend and build and give; this sequence is the essential experience of infancy and early childhood and yet it cannot become a real thing unless the mother is able to live through the phases with the infant, and so make possible the integration of the various elements. Here I was glad and ran to phone Roy, tell him he's wonderful and real. But I wasn't quite right; I missed. He hung up, called back, angry, said goodnight with weary unfinished dissatisfaction. These days, a new kind of dialogue in me, very critical but excited about possibilities - perceptions of my own falsity, absence, conventionality - how I misuse language and this journal too, always have, but what I'm constructing now interests me less than what I constructed when I wrote those more excited more conventional younger journals. Pottery classes - visions of aging women with intelligence and no life - feel my falsity in them. Bless Roy and Luke. - 3 a.m., Roy came in loving, 5 a.m. went away angry, left me again with
the weary sense of impasse, defiant hopelessness that says what the hell.
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