| london volume 3 part 2 - 1971 march-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[journal] March NFT program - in Le retour a woman refugee holds her small boy over the river, washing his face - she turns and smiles. Refugees with their cardboard suitcases - I thought of cardboard suitcases at home, wrecked by us - I used one of the last ones on my trip to Edmonton and then to BC when I was sixteen. Objects don't die at their prime either, we children wreck them. Tonight I look old and persecuted - ground away. Roy looks the same, red-eyed, a pimple on his nose, haggard, and, in that beard, no longer the puppy with everything possible. Luke's on his way - I'm in love with him already and so much begin to be careful. Daily war, we're fighting with some of the weariness of already knowing its outcome but waiting for a miracle. I don't dare to need you, that frantic lecturing gesture irritates me, I distrust your perception of yourself. Something is happening that I don't understand. Mistrust and resentment, but nothing new to say. Farrebique: chestnut fists opening, bean sprouts writhing out of the ground like heavy-headed baby dragons, ferns swaying evenly as they grow, a root feeling its way downwards, hedgehog rolling away under a wall, light taking the valley like a floor, bat creeping up the wall in winter. There is film poetry to be made - these fragments of powerful images - the instant the hedgehog turns to run under the hedge, like a determined wall rolling, also like a tank turning - the smile of the woman holding her child to the rippling light above the river - the haunchy walk of the freckled girl - the walls and sky swaying above our own body on the death cart - Bergman's wall flickering with fire - images are magic and celebration - we live on moments, we live very privately - Vitti's face on the dockside saying "I must come to realize that everything that happens to me is part of my life." I think by juxtaposition anyway, must call up and test my instances, whenever we all talk generalizations, I want to illustrate and annoy Roy by standing stubbornly holding back his stream with my eager realizations in concrete form. But that's good for something, I insist! R setting the table last night, red candles at the corners, for the venison, glorious beautiful table on the floor. "I'm condemned to be a revolutionary holy idiot." [letter] It's my birthday, I'm twenty six and here beside me is Luke, my first born, my son, sleeping, with his mouth closed tight and his hands in loose fists, shiny eyelids - he looks like a Buddhist monk in his yellow sweater and almost bald head - he's fast asleep and if I wake him to hug him - but I won't. I wanted to give you a picture of him, a link with your years-ago miracle - me! I still thank you for it and wonder if Luke, when he's twenty six (and I'm over fifty) will be as happy that he was made. I lean over to smell him in his dim rectangle of warm sleepy waxy baby smell, and then I jump up and down and run to tell R - R skinny, bearded, fierce, loving (today!). We've been fighting for over a month, but today we had truce: strawberries and whipped cream, a big book of color photographs of Canada (such space!), Canadian salmon, Canadian corn (creamed! ugh), passionfruit juice, applesauce, a red candle, Bach, peace, and going to bed early! The flat empty for the first time in months, big clouds stamping westward, snow flurrying through the sunshine, a hyacinth filling my room with the smell of spring; two carnations, red and white (because they're Luke's flower) and a long skinny rose (Roy's) and a spider chrysanthemum (mine?) from Roy. Most of last year lying forgotten in a litter, but a few images holding themselves clear: you, M, standing watching for us outside the bus depot at Grande Prairie, and you, Father Epp, coming to invite us to tea the last night we were there with you, so gracefully and kindly. I hate for any of it to be forgotten. I love you both. And then there's now - red tips on the branches, London looking like fairyland from our treehouse, plans for new and better-fitting ways to live, crisis and peace, Luke lying so pink, healthy and BIG, Luke planted into my life irrevocably, forever - hurrah! The world and the universe spinning out of today into tomorrow, next year, into all our deaths and even Luke's - it fills me with wonder. And Poppy Epp Chisholm somewhere waiting to be begotten - not quite yet. Here's R urging me to come back from Alberta or wherever I am, to talk to him. So good night you on the other side of the world, happy birthday. [journal] 7 March It's happening to me! I phone Brenda and humbly tell Roy that it's hard to wait, hard to wait, that I can't sleep and it's so hard to wait. "I know" he says kindly. I'm selfish, hysterical, stupid; I'm mistaken; and I'm humiliated again and again. 10 March Warmest day of the spring, a cherry tree blooming across the street, Luke crowing shyly when we woke, and we've done it. I want a long wake, a long joyful mourning; but I find that I've already done most of my mourning, and now it's hello, hurray - again.
And a good look-out for booby traps. Cataloguing, lived life. [notebook] [Roy and I, David Cooper and others I've forgotten take the VW van to Amsterdam for a week, I end up escaping and taking Luke home on the train] 14 March Clues - I come into the ship's bar, Roy and Jos are along the side, in a heavy kiss behind the hat. We make plans to go to an Indonesian restaurant; when we get to the Kabouters, Roy tells Jos he's too tired to go. He hangs around, refusing food, remote and bitchy. Eventually he says he wants to sleep in the van and be alone; I say fine. There's some problem about beds, I say we can all go sleep in the van. He says no, it's too cold for the baby, I should stay inside. He'll come in if it gets too cold. He goes off to see David, doesn't say goodnight, doesn't come back; Don says he asked for some Dutch guilders. I go to sleep; wake up suddenly with a knot in my stomach and know he's gone to sleep with Jos and won't be back until this afternoon, while we all wait. So how do I feel? My half of his strategy to nag himself stiffens with determination to get rid of him finally forever. But do I want a good husband - Sunday morning I open DH Lawrence's poems and find the poem about his hunger for women; what many women could not do, one woman can. Who is Roy? I've lived his life for a year - 'suffered' oftener than since I was a child - grown into his past - gone blindly from one break of faith to another, always surprised - struggled to learn what I thought he knows - struggled to know him, been battered by lies and evasions. Yet, when I now look around among my surprised feelings I find that I'm not really outraged. My sense of justice - and strategy - sends me flying off in a taxi to bump poor Luke over the cobbled streets, be propositioned by mournful North Africans in the rain, and now to try to sleep in this hotel full of the smell of frying. But I've no conviction of being through with the bastard; I'm ashamed to be so hopeful. And although my stomach [page missing] 18 March Silly local train leaving small town station at ---. Luke in his green box on the seat, sun on industrial villages, rather phony anger and - what? Quiet sense of having gotten away at last, my limbs relaxing a little. I hung onto Roy's boast of "seven times" to reinforce my anger (so it was a lie - and the lie that he wasn't lying to me anymore - and he asked Susie to marry him and have a child with him [while I was in the hospital after Luke was born] - and Olivia - and his drunken lucidity in the van driving through Belgian countryside: "Luke is the truth between us;" "David keeps telling me how wonderful she is and we want to have the community so Luke can be the first child ever to have a childhood, but it's my feeling that Ellie and I can't make it." I said "I'm never going to let you into me again, never, never, never, never." He seized me and lay on top of me so I nearly suffocated, cried "It's not true!" in his real pain and then began to sob. I said bitterly "That's a crocodile if I ever saw one" and he looked up at me with a face full of tears, "It's not, it's not!" and then began to beat my arm so I was afraid he'd break it. (David: "If that's a crocodile it's a real one from the mouth of the Nile.") When he stopped he lay curled like a child and sobbed and sobbed - I sat quite cold and empty and watched him. When he stopped he said in a baby voice "I'm in love with Welmoed and she's back in Amsterdam." David said "That doesn't sound real to me." - We feel our way so blindly, through treachery and violence, tenderness, childish love. Again and again I've only got that to say. 31 March Dream, after Christmas, before all this - a small boy and I, at a seaside resort, at night in the moonlight, go over the deep dune to the beach and lie sliding on the ice, so that we can see many people on the hillside beside the beach - dark blue night, lying in peace, the hillside coming into sight like a revelation. Several nights ago, a dream of going to a wide white beach, again at night, and lying on the (grass green) waves serenely, rising, shifting, floating over their crests as they fell under me. Cooper downstairs crying out with drunk pain and loneliness, Roy coldly gone to bed in his room, I coldly in mine. Took Luke to the cemetery today, damp smell of new plants, steamy air, like my pottery class full of kindly dead women (and many dead children) - Luke smiling, crying, earnestly talking with his whole body straining, kicking with his pants off, intently sucking juice out of a section of orange, asleep with his head turned toward one fist; awake at seven this morning and insisting on it; friendly. Ah baby Luke. Roy shouting to David and Henry: "You shut up! If you wake the fucking baby I'll hit you so hard!" "I'm the candyman. You're the little girl who waits for me to come 'round." 3rd of April Luke's sleeping head like a young bird's, snuffling through his cold. Grey, windy, flat, cold, empty Saturday - Roy in Maidenhead, I pacing compulsively drinking coffee and grinding carrots with my sharp teeth, pacing, empty; reading. I wish I had all of since-Christmas recorded here. The night Roy stayed at Brenda's, my scream after he'd telephoned - Coppett's Wood and each angry afternoon (but he came) - my hand on Mafalda's wet cunt to keep him out of it, and my shriek of rage when I couldn't (ah - but that stopped his plunging) - Jos - Welmoed - and his kingly self coming like Neptune, naked (I thought he was David, hoped) out of Claudia's room (Henry saying pathetically "I ceded to Roy," but reasonably) - Dee, attempted. Susie - attempted Barbie (when I was in hospital with Luke!), Sylvie, Mafalda, some dame called Sally (one he didn't tell me about, David mentioned it), Dee's sister-in-law (her husband sent the police looking for her) and Olivia, of course her letter was a lie (I remember the bus to Paris where I suddenly realized it) and whatever else - now how to disentangle my real hurt and rage from my sense of outraged pride - what's the issue? Does he love me? Yes and no. Does he love me as much as I love him? No. But am I less treacherous, more faithful, in my heart? No. Am I strong enough to continue to cherish him, as Mafalda does? Yes, maybe. Will I? Maybe. And do I think revengeful thoughts of taking Luke and Poppy suddenly, no word, surprise, dear bastard, to Vancouver - (where's Poppy?) - like day before yesterday morning when he came upstairs after me, I was trying to write, and flinty-furious - he began "I love you" and I cut him off with some nag - he had to start again, "I love you, and it's finished," good, I thought, and sincerely couldn't have cared less. (Like last time it was finished; he came back upstairs and was soon giggling with David; I didn't mention it until later.) So he came back up and talked about something else. I realize that he's really roused me - spitting to David that we don't want each other at all - yelling that he's a pathetic construction of other people's opinions ("But that's changing very fast" he said quietly) and that his only talent is conning people - kicking murderously at his balls and missing him with wild swings of my fist. I feel much better for having said the worst I think about him. Bird squeaking on the tree outside, my hand throws so grey a shadow I can hardly see what I write, the corner of the house scrapes the wind, the sky's grey but luminous; my life is me. Who are you. I'm full of wonder, although my nose itches, I like my life. I like you. Nobody, nobody's like you. On the telephone - later - his sulky voice complaining that he feels like dying. Am I really just stupid with him. ("You're a proud, arrogant, woman" he told me through his teeth, the last morning he was here.) I wanted to hug him, but he hung up in frustration because I couldn't - when I tried to call back he was on the telephone to Mrs Piano, and now it's too late and I hope he's sleeping. Sunday R made love to me more lovingly than - hands around my head, body wrapped around; we were so rarely like that. Luke fell asleep holding the string of colored beads (that Roy wore on his hat) in one hand; lay straining talking toward Roy. Only sometimes I realize how ingenuous and how innocent R is. (As he only sometimes is, crying this afternoon when I held him, resisting, from behind.) Good Friday Mafalda has been here making pots - domestic drama (my cheeks still stinging), two policemen saying "You'll have to come to some agreement between you" (but one of them saying to Roy "I know we all have our irritations, and between men but myself, I don't believe in hitting little babies, or women"), me yelling down the stairs after him that of all the men I know he's the most white-livered (can't remember what else); Mafalda attacking him with the telephone but the cord too short, and then breaking a milk bottle in the kitchen and Roy running away out of the door; Dee offering tea while I paced with Luke; then Luke falling asleep crooked in my arm while Mafalda cried and R sat with his hand on her head (then gathered up his striped coat and said "I must go now because David is in a very bad state and and I promised him I'd be home soon," politely, kindly). Last night, drunk on almost a whole bottle of Haig, his prick limp as a wiener; this morning the wind chimes like a drift of hovering one-winged one-eyed smoky butterflies against the sky, beside the daffodils (I felt I could see and say them only to him - it isn't true). What is it? Psychotic breakdown, but what is psychotic? A whirl like clothes in the spin drier, true and false, malice and tenderness, kindness and fury, stupidity and cunning, generosity and greed, envy and contempt and compassion, treachery and loyalty. It has little to do with me: Luke and David, between them, freak him out. It's David - how? What is it about? Become David, he hates. What does that mean? (But drunk he's himself? We were close and warm last night after many tears; I felt drunk myself and hardly remember it.) Only laughter. Confusion - we are now sometimes much closer to what I dreamed and expected.
[R's notes to himself] A spectacle - I become hard and bored. Saturday morning I wake at 6 to feed Luke, am frightened and appalled, thinking how my life is mined with violence - everything I own is threatened by destruction - how will I live this summer? Because of Roy I have no security. Saturday night Mafalda and I working companionably, building pots, painting Luke's new bed, making a quilt cover, speaking our minds intermittently, drinking bowls of coffee, eating bread and cheese; James Taylor's sad songs, the living room a busy workroom, and suddenly sun after a week of dead grey weatherless sky - I was in the garden putting out sides of [?] the blue bed when I felt the May-warmth; dug out the back garden, roof tiles for the border, a red-breasted small bird sang in the sycamore and ran along Monica's wall; Luke sat in his bed and looked around slumping into his blankets, funny wounded baby with bandages on his cheek and forehead; R on my mind but quietly far away, after last night's brutality (and the drunken voice on the telephone saying "It's so hard here" in his look-after-me baby voice). Good day. Neighbourliness work, sun, plans. The living room full of projects, warm, strewn, smelling of paint. In my room two eight-foot branches are coming into curly leaf. My blue wall-painting (Roy described as "the kernel, and a line around it thicker in some places and thinner in others, and then all the rays, and two tears") - he exclaimed tenderly about the goodness of my kernel and decried my character armour - all night tried to rouse me, how he worried about the way I'd stop being tender in the morning (I did - enraged about Claudia, told him I'd never forgive him - he got up, went and bought Scottish raspberries with a taste like a perfume for breakfast - later dumped on his head in revenge for spilling coffee on the rug downstairs). Luke squeaking in his sleep like a kitten! Sunday Aimless loneliness of the shabby Easter Festival for Life at the Alexander Palace, missing Roy, sitting on the concrete with Luke in his buggy, looking at the men and looking at the girls with Roy's fantasies, good warm sunlight, spotty motley people - such sadness grew in me and I kept feeling myself the awkward anxious castoff of someone too imperious to please. R's authority is mainly fraudulent, taken by his violence, treachery and madness - but some of it is real - with all the abstract borrowed whirling rubbish in his repertoire is spontaneous playful ambitious fantastic dancing intelligence, he has a kernel too, all uncultivated but more marvelous than all - pity, reproach, kindliness, pride and a catch in my stomach when he left again without saying goodnight. Last night dreamed the corner of a Grandpa Epp farm, pigpen fence holding out a swamp, sinking in the black mud, but saving myself from drowning in it by cold determination and strength - then turning the incident into a possibly-untrue story in a popular hero's (Dylan?) biography. A house with the shed roof raised and glass between it and the walls - a new unfinished house nearby, my father's, and my scorn at his impractical and ordinary project. A little baby girl with a nose hooked like Henry's. Tuesday Katrin [Zaugg] described Roy's smile on the staircase, while we talked to the policeman, as the smile of a naughty little boy who is delighted with himself for his own badness - after clubbing both me and Mafalda really brutally. (Buddy talks about worms at the center.) I had a horrified vision of brutality, basic cruelty, psychopathy, something ready to kill me while I sleep. So masculine, desperate and so in control even when out of control. R sat on the carpet while drunk enough to be almost truthful and said "I can be anyone but I can switch it off any time" - I had a cold still vision at that moment too: the flying Dutchman without a soul, desperate to feign one, and borrowing whatever he can find of others'. Ah, you don't have to - ? Maybe - now he's living in Cooper's world. Katrin saying she'd had a vision, for an instant, of me turned into a source of light just at heart level - the moment when my heart dropped seeing R so evil, losing hope (my mind jumped to the memory of ourselves shopping for fruit in Saskatchewan supermarket while the Greyhound cooled in its dock, hot sun, a kind of gaiety and hurry, Main Street and staring locals. Oh, we've been close - I've been close, but where were you? Nothing I say about you is quite true. Come to get records and to say "I wanted to wish you a Happy Easter because we had such a nice one last year" in the City Church with his mother, not especially nice; did we go on the motorcycle? She bought us lunch later. The slow learning to question everything he says. Easter morning on the Heath. Took Luke, wore a hat with the long blue scarf and a bunch of daffodils and narcissus, and my long skirt rippling, and my red boots; the gypsies' enclosure, red, white and blue balloons making a corrall, jets of smoke, red, white; music; the grass glowing in bare curves as far as the hilly horizon; willows greening by the duckpond, with a scent like new grass; kites and jet planes; a totem at the top of the hill and a gathering of hippies (boy with ripped green velvet pants, acne, scars on his quite beautiful body - he'd stripped and been scolded by a mounted policemen); balloons stuck into the ground beside Luke's bed; Luke talking and looking with his beautiful loving earnestness. I felt beautiful, blessed, free; I was ecstatic; the hillside was full of beautiful people also finding me beautiful; I smiled and strutted; the gypsy singer growled, shook her teeth at her musicians; red caravan-stage; a crowd of pale-eyed brownies around Luke. Henry and Buddy, bilberry wine and potato cakes, Kartoffel Puffen with Katrin. Tonight as it grew dark I dug useful seeds into the garden and the birds sang. Of course you're still with me and lie on all my days like a dust. I'm so faithful; far more than you can imagine, even when, on my first totally joyful day in such a long time, I'm glad you're absent and it is my own. I'm ashamed to be as limited as I am. I fail us. You April 15 Just sad and lonely again, here with Luke, cold, desolated. Last night from three to seven we whined at each other as it got light, bent to the whole frustrating and trivial exchange of our grievances. Oddly it broke me and made me hope again; so I've left again! 16 Watching telly tonight - of Albrecht Dürer they said, on his thirteen year old's self-portrait, that "to the question he asked himself, "Who am I?" he never found a clear answer. Reason and imagination had led him through a labyrinth of exquisite design." 17 Talking to Mafalda last night I found a complicated peaceful sense of how painful a life is settling into me - of its immediate, personal, but real drama - some new pain, some new freedom, some new battering of my pride; battles, cycles, symbols! We sat on the floor, M showed me a poem, I showed her one. I'd sneaked into the kitchen wanting to cry with loneliness and strangeness and she followed me after a while, but so tactfully and kindly, and talked so generously about her own pain and loneliness that we both began to feel endlessly courageous and ready to go into endless even more bitter battles - ah Roy Chisholm. 27 Letter from Carmichael, a thrilling little electric reminder of his liveliness and lovingness. 28 Agee on Beethoven's 7th, "Nothing can equal the rape it does on death; nothing except anything, anything in existence or dream, perceived anywhere remotely toward its true dimensions." Agee talking about the loneliness of families, "drawn upon itself as tramps are drawn around a fire in the cruelest weather; and thus and in such loneliness it exists among other families, each of which is no less lonely." Neil Middleton [of Penguin] suddenly coming alive to speak to me out of his plump nondescript silence: timbre of intelligence and sympathy - I was publicly fighting with Roy in front of the Sunday Times man (Michael Bateman) and him - Roy eventually and miraculously cowed! The exhilaration of speaking another kind of language that is my own - the warmth of that respectful presence making me tingle with my own intelligence - a half hour's love affair - I said, of my jealousy of David and R's intimacy, "One is lonely, and imagines that others are less lonely." [The men were at the flat interviewing Cooper for a story about the death of the family.] I'm learning brutality as respect for my own life. Memory of a wide field of weeds Greg and I came upon, in the Triumph, when we'd lost our way on a dirt road - ugly, dusty, flat. Why do I remember it? Hey, this is my life, Luke and Roy are in it forever. "He who understands my music can never know unhappiness again," said Beethoven. May 1 The conciliation in my voice when R is in a bad mood and abusing me. Wants warmth but scolds and nags. Poor maverick steer. [in Roy's hand, LIE] Quoting David again, things David said to me earlier about "fear of paranoia, not paranoia," and accusing me of the capitalism David ascribed to him! In the same words. In the same words. I wonder if it scares him that I see so much of the straw man in him now. Or if he realizes that I do, or if, because he's been defending himself against my finding him out - at the same time as giving himself away - he's no more scared than he ever was. He says it's a terrible thing that I wrote about learning brutality to protect my life - why? - when I learn it from him. It's my own brutality, that's true. He's a moral baby, a caterpillar, but a crafty - tho' not systematically! - one. Mafalda saying [to him] "You're not an intellectual. You're lots of nice things, but you aren't that." Honour - winning people by making them the gift of your tamed ambivalence. So I asked Mafalda what it is that he has - and she says tenderness. At the May Day carnival today, a little wiry terrier curled up on my lap in a warm triangle between my legs - a wonderful hard round body under his fur and such a shaggy modest manner, I loved him. Also a big galloping sheep dog. The towers of London City blue and dim, quite beautiful, spaced all around the southern horizon. Green space so vast, a brilliant kite, escaped balloons flying southwest over the trees at the bottom of the fields. A patch of blossom and new leaf - yellow, white, pale green and branchy poised like a flower arrangement. Thin sun, Luke a fat-faced caterpillar, Luke who's there faithfully every morning. Missa Solemnis playing under my bed every night and morning. A thrilling bunch of wallflower (deepscented velvety red), narcissus with the orange-rimmed horn, wild carrot and thick-stalked fern-weed from the cemetery, stolen in half-playful terror last night. The gleam of red wall downstairs, and a blue stripe. Alexander: "He takes on the character of whoever he's with to such an extent." Such a finely tuned sympathy that one feels known for the first time. It is by skill; by consciousness, by innocence, by intelligence, by love, by magic we shall win and only thus whereas this other: his death, his destroying, it is quiet, subtle, continuous, very slow, in quite great part deluded, in some part the doing of most tenderly intended love. R: this is for you, whenever you find it. I wonder how you can read this journal and not love me and not make me some kind of true, trusted, partner for the looking, thinking feeling exploring. Can't I be your one exception? A real female equal worthy friendly other; and not a bitter crafty opponent as I am today. You know my vanity (like everyone else's): I think I deserve to be your one. May 4 I'm back, I'm back! My own life is coming back to me. May 5 I've been full of grace tonight, a kind of crazy love. Although I was sad because Roy's 'in love' with Rosalynd [de Lanerolle] and useless and drunk and wouldn't/couldn't/didn't care to share my joy. And I was glad because I could use it with my love letters, and with Mafalda; but she took most of it with her and I was left with just my mourning for wasted love, die-hard hopes, the belly-writhings of unrequited tenderness - R's too self-absorbed even to answer letters. He's such a coward; won't declare himself. What does he think would happen if he said to me "I'm in love with Rosalynd at the moment and my life is hovering around her - I can't be with you because of it." Does he think he'd lose his power, like Sampson? Because no, he'd gain it. I think I loved him most, since last spring, when he first dared to declare himself (circa Brenda) - (and it would free me too, I wish I could declare myself all the time) - he'd be magnificent if he had only the courage to simply be who he is, without gentle let-downs, David's kind of 'kind' lazy lies, deceit, 'protection,' and plain cheap avoiding the inconvenience of being who he is. But I'm not going to nag him anymore. ("Take me as I am or let me go," Dylan, this afternoon made me cry because what he is, as he is, can't have a whole relationship with me, can't, can't, because there's me too, real and hungry, wanting trust, faith, respect, companionship, even hard truths which are honest and ambitious. R is ambitious but only for himself. He'd have to want for me what he wants for himself: that would be the minimum beginning. And instead we wrangle and he looks for the perfect woman - which I am, except for some physical details, if he had the skill to find/bring me out. Is he the perfect man, had I the skill? Perfect enough except for the fear of his own unstandard feelings - who does he think he should be? Too little conscience and too much. Too bad - and good, because I can be contemptuous of that gentleness, it frees me - but oh, makes me so sad. "There are for each man realities which are his alone, and the strength with which he clings to them marks all that is prideful and noble about him." Bluem after a boring book about documentary. 11th May Dark late evening, stood holding R's shoulders through the window of his van, lit up with a little happy meeting - in my long jungle red dress and red boots and black shawl, felt his naked shoulder through the split in his jacket - he's ready for the summer, has his dancer's body back, drunk and silly earlier, then pulled together again. Remember Greek dinner date, giddy with rain, flirting, dizzy, wine, the black Trinidad boy next to me, Roy and I playful like last year, but bragging of Luke at home - then crossed the wet street, excited, went home to bed, screwed, landmark: I 'came,' like an unexpected little rose blossoming-opening slowly deep in my body. 13 May Guilt and disgust with banality, boredom in my life, D and O as couple, Dee; especially irritation with everything half-alive and unalive (like this sentence) in my life, restless, impatient, on this sunny unsuitable day. R fucking around downstairs (Dee? or Anne?) and later protesting that I want to stop him dead when all he's doing is being his alive self. But: well, now that I'm learning to fight dirty myself I seem almost able to afford to let him be alive as he wants; hope; I can also be alive as I want, slowly I relearn that. I'm grateful for privacy, excitement, just the chance he pushes me into of being myself. I'm learning very fast. 22 May While I was babysitting at Rosalynd's, Roy phoned me, very drunk; I could hardly understand what he was saying - then not at all - then just heavy breathing and then light, sleeping, breathing. When I realized he was asleep I sang him James Taylor's lullaby, like Mouchette singing to Arsène:
(The tape I played to Luke again and again in Coppett's Wood.) Then I held the receiver listening to his sleep - I tried to hang up, but the telephone didn't disconnect, so I just held it for a long time with the receiver on my shoulder while I read Marker's script for Si j'avais quatre dromadaires. The moment this morning when I just braced myself against (toward) his wonderful bucking come - he shouts and his body moves like a dance of a spasm, so fierce and graceful, like a tree whipping. That moment is like a climax for me, I love him for it, in it. Whipping ecstatic body; silly boy gratuitously drunk; respectful man courteously bringing me. We think by feeling / what is there to know: no conclusion. Luke lies asleep next to me; I touch his open palms to see if they're warm. Mafalda has lent me one of her dyed-paper Japanese landscapes in a plain black frame: black iron mountain, grey hill, cloud? Brown-grey dust, cloud? Faint blue and white sky, evening after rain, morning? A road, temple, pylon? [undated loose sheet] Loss, loss, lack. Something new, something completely new, leave this life empty, the mirror on the back of the door, the red sign flashing in my tea bowl, study the blue face next to the mirror, reflections and moments, glints. Life is worth living because of death. The moment that flares out - because of this moment. Luke. Roy and such an emptiness of failure, loss and lack, something new, weariness. Typing that thesis with such hate in my raw fingertips. All myself was caught in that instant of possibility - I served it and what followed. But we - served it out, where's the end? Far from true, go away old friends, unbearable crowing, don't declare yourself, what do you mean? What's this? What now? Quiet small shout. Don't disappoint me. Ah, what now. I see that - Something new, make me safe, make me skillful, let joy in, find me, chase me, dream me, tell me what's possible, thank you, that's all you can have.
End of May Dream: I walked along a seaside. The ocean perfectly clear, clear as glass, perfectly still, coming motionlessly onto the white beach, small fine white pebbles - a sunny yellow perfectly clear light. There on the beach, cast up, were boxes and old suitcases tied with string, with presents inside (like the white Sunday shoes in my size that we found on the Salton Sea beach): in one shabby suitcase were three new playsuits for Luke, on hangers - I took them off the hangers and threw them to Luke who was sitting just uphill from me. Roy said goodbye to David and has vanished. Has he died? Has he leapt into a new life completely? All day I'm uneasy and his absence grows. I'm writing well, it's four in the morning, birds sing and the clouds are running in the wind, like foam, bits tearing off, the currents of wind in the house scare me, Roy are you listening to this morning? [bit of a letter] Luke: on the floor beside my worktable in his green bed, wearing a red sleeper, making fists out of his big hands, smiling and wriggling, singing joy because it's morning, so excited to see me, struggling to swim up into the air and move about like big people, gnawing his thumb, grabbing my finger; his eyes are still deep blue-grey and shining. Everyone says he's big for his age; and I, absurdly, take it as a compliment and feel proud. He's already so sensitive to the most powerful way of being touched - being looked at. When I look away from him to tell you about him he cries, but when I turn to speak to him he writhes with delight. Frank had a son last 5th of March. [Thesis, Dreams and documents: ambitions of documentary] [From this point the journal has been ripped across by Roy in a fit of jealousy.] [undated journal, early June I think] Cartreff, Dan-y-Coed, Wales [I was at Ida and Ifor Davies' rental cabin. Roy had brought me to Wales with Luke and then driven back to London.] This valley, narrow bare 'mountains' running fern, lichen, pink hollyhocks with their tips Beech and holly; wild yellow iris in the stream, brown clear water, frothing with rain today, the neighbour's boy fishing for trout, a beautiful stone bridge that is built continuously with the meadow walls, a manor house hidden up the hill, and a chapel hidden behind its sweet-smelling flower beds. Abraham and Martha Feetham, loving couple, so many children died in infancy. A strange characteristic sort of memorial, silver artificial flowers under a plastic cake-cover, under a wire cage, planted on the grave. Long grass, only twenty graves or so, but two ancient stone markers with barely visible Celtic crosses carved on them. Oh Luke, sleeping so delicately and sweetly with your curled hands thrown up! - At the top of the hill, a wall shaved smooth by the cows - loud breathing I could hear on the other side - a rock, and beyond it all the hills of fields until the pale yellow clearing down the valley by the sea - a triangle of cloudless sky that could be water or sky. The sunlit clearing pushing back up the valley, blue and grey washes of longitudinal cloud above the hills. Stone walls and all their self-sufficient age and beauty. The valley and its centuries of human life so well expressed in common creations like walls, bridges, shaped fields and hedges, roads - everything human so carefully responsive to the ways of the plants, the shapes of hills and paths of water. My red corrugated shack is intrusive but modest and beautiful. Inside, now, it hums with silence. I have ferns spilling over the bed, under the window, in what, last night, was a car on the Trans-Siberian, a long journey, the porter passing through every morning with a rattling cart of caviar and vodka, heavy wardrobes, Luke asleep on his bed, and an extra bed waiting for him to be grown into it. Earl Grey tea, two-barred electric fire, smell of scorching wood, sideboard symmetrically decorated with china and ugly souvenirs; a picture of Westminster Abbey worked in mother-of-pearl holds the matches beside the calorgas cooker. My towels and leather jacket hang on nails above the washstand. Pink wallpaper with stripes of pink, and blue roses alternating with silver stripes of leaves. A blue wall and a pink ceiling. A scarred kitchen table is planted solid and low under the window - I've yellow buttercups, pink and white wildflowers, grasses, in a milk bottle, wild double roses. My tight, tired face is beginning to soften and grow comfortable on me. The sky is clear, brilliant stars, the big dipper clear almost directly over me. Saturday Dreams full of pushing confusion, Victoria tall and dark, pushing past me, I first ignoring her and then shouting at her but unable to shout aloud; then her face in the operating room, covered with sores, a kind of hairy black beard or muzzle around her mouth. I've lain in bed, sick, reading The Welcome 1888, a serial called John Winter: a Story of Harvests - an evangelical Middlemarch, with a woman called Isobel Douglas, tall, sweet, strong, eccentric, resolute, straight and true, longing for a man to be her moral match. John Winter repents but because his life has been full of weakness and evil, may not win her and she goes off to die among the lepers. I lay half-asleep in my sleeping bag identifying with Isobel Douglas and thinking how much of my life I've lost to a cad! A weak selfish fickle callow youth, debauched, drunk, lost. I was thinking of Carmichael's moral hunger - last time I saw him he said "What has happened to Ellie Epp who wanted to be a martyr?" I said I wasn't going to die just for any cause. But that wasn't what he meant. Sunday Ida telling me of the morning in the hospital at Fishguard, 3 a.m., they came to tell her that her two month premature baby daughter had died - did she want to see it? - couldn't it wait until morning? - no, for it had to be taken to the mortuary. "It was like a little doll." And she's often thought of it since, high blood pressure and ayeroplanes passing in her head, hair on her face that isn't there, the kettle boiling when it's not on the stove, lovely square-faced woman; and she's never had another baby. But Bessie: she's a stupid and nasty nosy lady busy doing good and dead to the world. Walked far up the road tonight listening and smelling - sat in the old church looking at the delicate light, found strawberries, waded through nettles and fern to find the old graves, found pink wild carrot, bachelor buttons, wild forget-me-not, wine-pink grasses, foxglove, ivy and fat little ferns in the ruins, blue herbal spikes, wild roses - smells rising in their local patches, like the wildflowers, like the sudden roar of little brooks. At Bessie's, old Mrs Howells with her hair in a braid and a broad intelligent smile, far brighter than Bessie, poised and forward like a little girl, eighty one, lovely thin legs in grey cotton stockings, gnarled stained arms, peace and curiosity, such graciousness. Several resolves emerging in my quiet full of bitter whispers: some kind of new growth from my own roots, some sort of renewed hope from my old heart's desires (in the van shouting defiantly at Roy: "I've seen what happens to women who consent to become second fiddle, or second string. They can't recognize their heart's desire, they can never say what they want, they can never say their heart's desire. And they die of it.") Last week I showed my slides to David and Sylvia, Katrin, Priscilla and Judy - I performed, I built my own emotion so that when I came to the last, I flashed my pictures, building up some kind of tension with my heart's beating, until the last two slides from the Kootenays: "They're what I know about joy." I had silenced myself, and went out to the Heath still silent and beating with excitement - felt in my pocket - suddenly thought - an idea really grown out of my pride and excitement - I'll do it, I can do it, it's right, it's time. [Threw Roy's opal ring in the pond.] I had realized how powerful I am, how much of me is wasted and held down, how my face grows old in my despair with Roy. So I won't do it any more. He said, "At least we both know where it is" and "You could have pawned it for sixty pounds." - [Katrin came to see me in Wales] Last night at Cartreff - long triangle of sky down valley is sun colors, after sunset. The bridge with its two stone arches over the guaan [?], a heron flapping up as I came to it to sit on it. My headful of bitter and lonely thoughts refuses to look around - such a tyranny of humiliation and anger, I'm ashamed. I want freedom - all hatred driven hence - radical innocence. And what else, what's this? Tenderness, such a longing for Somebody, like when I was fourteen - the young creature longing to love somebody, longing for that ecstatic meeting. Well, now my head is full of memories, arguments, accusations. I long for the ecstatic meeting and/but know my own treachery. Who is there in all the world? I almost say who else. But doubtless he'll do something tomorrow to close me up again. Ida Davies' pictures of herself as a young girl with black curls, and then as a beautiful young woman. Now she's fifty six, broad red face, blisters like fungus on her elbows, swollen black-bruised knotty legs. I put on her pinny while the sun dried Luke's pee from my skirt and felt tiny-waisted as her young self in it, even Ifor admired it - I felt the years crowding behind her, or squashed away into her big round self. Luke so small, about to be grown up. Poppy - My own life seems just balancing so anxiously between hopelessness and hopefulness, it seems about to vanish and I seem about to be old. But my plans, daydreams, scenes are there; funny things like dirty flagstones at Ida's, the mucky yard, her twin calves, the waterfall, the green silences under the trees and Ida waving like a fairy in her brushed orlon stained glass dress - her Welsh accent, her English, the young girl and young woman packed into her, twenty-some years of marriage and the "little baby" that's dead; the valley is packed so full of death, remembered and potential, everyone's death seems to hang so personally and intimately on them; is this my intoxication with mortality? That loving-sharing-giving-making that I long for - where's it? Who is there in the world? As betrayed as I've been - is it reversible, is that innocence recoverable? Ida and Ifor, Bessie and Glyndyrr, Maggie and Tom, the children, Earos and his handsome father, Jean looking so sixteen and sexy, fat what's-her-name - last night, talking to Tom and Maggie in their living room I felt so at home and keen - where'm I?
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