| london index | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Saturday November 6 Yesterday, Dee talking about her John [Rowley]: "somebody who's interested in big things, and then in little things too," "such a capacity for containing sadness and ugliness as well," "he's a grown-up man." "He calls me up just to say 'Well, I just want to know, are you all right?" Sunday November 7 The winter: the cold; the twinge in my hip, the cold in my feet and fingers; the bump on my lip (will it stay?); the heavy lines on my face, the black under my eyes; fat (in my isolation here I eat); poverty (£10.50 from social security: rent and heat: £3.75, child minder £3.10, food, paddipads, debts, savings); the future, how to get out of such near misery; Luke's seeming slowness (is it because I dropped him on his head?). Roy breathing whiskey this morning, coming from Rosalynd's (at this moment, they say he's asleep - they say it crossly, ie he's drunk). I gave him a lecture on his lack of courage, "Why don't you have the courage to be alone sometimes, be yourself, instead of always running away into drink or sex or love," I whined at him on the step after fighting about the key to the flat neither of us live in now. How to get to a warm country. How to get a warm house. How to get mobile, with Luke. How to be happier and more playful with my hungry little baby; how to manage Poppy; not having any friends. - This afternoon at the British Museum, Cycladic Early Bronze Age pots, elegant and tight, 2500 BC. Now my little pinched porcelain creatures come out of my fingers bumpy and too thin - I've been rough and unwatchful with them. Roy came DRUNK to get his key: in his old motorcycling black raincoat, with a fold of cold skin under his chin. I'm sore and lonely. Colin's a baby, Roy's a brute. I'm so angry with both of them. Because I've left Roy Colin's terrified that I'll take a rebound off him; more important I might be soft rather than the hard and generous hard-to-get I have been - might be humanly accessible, as he's been, to my pleasure and satisfaction. Fuck him - one-dimensional public man, nowhere man - knows he is and can't afford to let the secret out. - The quotation about the lover loving his own possibility for learning something. such work as I do with brain and heart and her efforts to achieve herself had led her always towards, and not away from him For love we were forced to substitute a wiser but crueller mental tenderness which emphasized loneliness rather than expurgated it. Simply we have something to learn from each other. What is it? that amoral world where curiosity and wonder seem greater than order Spell it backwards call it evol and make it part of 'evolution' or 'revolt.' Never use the world to me. Durrell using Arnauti's book for his book, Justine's, Nessem's writings. the natural traitors are dead and live this life as a sort of limbo. Yet the living can't do without us. We infect them with a desire to experience more, to grow. The anguished curiosity which for me has always been the largest part of sensuality Indulge but refine everything in order to make men's wholeness match the wholeness of the universe. Lovers are never equally matched - do you think? One always overshadows the other and stunts his or her growth so that the overshadowed one must always be tormented by a desire to escape, to be free to grow. Yet how magically she seemed to live - a mistress so full of wit and incantation that one wondered how one had ever managed to love before and be contented in the quality of the loving. "Are people," writes Pursewarden, "continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast that they give the illusion of continuous features - the temporal flicker of old silent film?" I was gradually, inexplicably, becoming more and more deficient in love, yet better and better at self giving - the part of myself which was forever beyond reach, the last painful refuge of which was, for me laughter and friendship ... Justine loved me because I presented to her something which was indestructible - a person already formed who could not be broken. I've always thought of acts as messages, wishes from the past to the future, which invited self-discovery. Was I wrong? We who have traveled much and loved much I will not say suffered for we have always recognized through suffering our own self-sufficiency - only we appreciate the complexities of tenderness and understand how narrowly love and friendship are related. Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time? It seems somehow necessary to find a human being to whom one can be faithful, not in the body but in the culprit mind? the very flavour of his personality. Nothing except the act of physical love tells us this truth about one another. merciless in the pursuit of pleasure and yet arid - all her milk has turned into power-love. Yet she is also like me in that she is tender and kindly and a real man's woman. Poets are not really serious about ideas or people. They regard them as pretty, yes. They are for use. But there is no question of them being true or false, or having souls. In this way the poet preserves his freshness of vision, and finds everything miraculous.
I think that very few people realize that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. The truest form of right attention is of course love. The object of writing is to grow a personality which in the end enables man to transcend art. Carnival, three days everyone's perfect nonentity. We must always defend Plato to Aristotle and vice versa, the dimorphism of the psyche produced them both. the compost of secret pleasures and treacheries which are an inseparable part of every human relation For this strange creature, which we thought would join us to the body of the world, succeeds at last in separating us most thoroughly from it. how to harness time in the cultivation of a style of heart - Durrell: something to learn about that: how to harness time in the cultivation of a style of heart; very little time, Roy at Camden Town tube station laughing with me, next to the ticket machines, I with his anti-poppy long stemmed dark red carnation running like a spine up the front of my fur vest, he in his jeans and Canadian plaid jacket. He weeps when we talk about our separation. In my room this morning, lying on my bed, his face would still itself and then his jaw would begin to tremble, I would rush to hold him and he would cry. When he turned onto his side, I turned him onto his back again to see his face crying, once Luke hit his nose hard and he cried even harder. We look into each other's eyes. At Camden Town tube I cried out "I like you so much!" and we both laughed, but then I was glad to go on and now I'm glad to be alone; yet I'm happy because he's liking me so faithfully these days - not specifically me, it's true; yet he knows me. I mean to work at finding a style of heart, but I don't even begin to tell myself anything I don't know, oh Roy. Luke holding the bars of his bed, standing up, smiling to see Roy, and Roy's smile to him, his sad nose and his stiff smile pushing against it - myself watching them greet each other. - My mailbag full of memories, two years and I don't understand what happened, I can't make any of it out, still! Who else could have confused me for so long. I'm proud that he's in me.
[Elaine Feinstein 1969] Meaning is not a fact but a mood, death is the meaning, no I wouldn't want to be eighteen all my life; my skin becomes rougher, my waist is a little flabby, I'll be glad to be thirty, no, not to be closer to my death, I don't want to wrap myself up like a parcel to be mailed away, but I love this movement in my life and it's this movement that unwinds my body till I die. In Sainsbury's a fat faced girl with gimlet curls checked me out, a living bun, a Dürer, tiny mouth pointed in the corners. In the Capri Grill a small faced man, something very whole and attractive about him, calmly added up our spaghetti Boulognaise and egg and chips. I said "I have a fantasy about getting an instamatic and taking pictures of people like that." Roy's half-flattering quick, "Oh, I have that one too!" We walked up Highgate Road, he looking for a surprise, November poppies - then that spiced carnation, 4 pence, gave him five and we held hands, so delighted with ourselves, never thought about the March day when for the first time we passed through Camden Town together intoxicated, smelling verbena and smiling, looking - I forgot, but what does it mean? That we've come through?! What next, what new misery, jealousy, fatigue? I loved that walk: cold, clear, cold blue and yellow and white morning, afternoon, my cape and furry vest and my face shapely, Roy's legs moving exactly right in his jeans, his swollen mouth smiling his flattering not quite real smile, reaching suddenly to hold my face in his hands, his head tilted a little sideways, Camden Town tube station, the curved tunnel plunging down; his back! Crying in my room about his destructiveness. "I want to give you the flat." Doubt - I'm beginning to trust him but it's a mistake. He stopped me on the street to touch my nose: I knew right away that it was to stop me while a girl went by so he could see her from close. But I felt no malice - this is balance, this afternoon was a rare half hour's maybe unrepeatable balance. Let no unfashionable hope / confuse my mind with images / of --- and antelope / I am by nature none of these /
Next morning "... feed off each other's stupidity. It's nice for you, but it's not good enough," I say aggrieved, because he's come to my house with a story about his friends and how much they all like him and I was squashed black - complained of his indifference and he gracefully accepted my complaints, smiled his fat flattering smile and was glad to go. He's generous with his grief and only nagged when finally I undermined him a little with Colin, and I'm mean and bitter, graceless, hysterical, all so easily, it's in my real posture with him, and not in his with mine. We've lost that balance and seem to be back where we began. I've so little to say sometimes except, now let's at last be truthful, use each other to grow, dryly and unhopefully! Hopefully always. I don't trust him at all. - that magical dark mistress of the past whose every gesture rang with the newly minted splendour of complete generosity. To my surprise I now felt the power to wound her for the first time Nor was there any question of dishonesty, for the picture was colored after the necessities of the love which invented it. Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other. a great honeycomb of faces and gestures A novel should be an act of divination by entrails. At the most I hold in my arms something like a fountain of flesh, continuously playing, and in my mind a rainbow of dust. - Dream last night about smoking an immense fat black cigar, warned that it would be impossibly bad tasting. - I knew that Clea would share everything with me. you know that women instinctively like a man with plenty of female in him, there, they suspect, is the only sort of lover who can sufficiently identify himself with them to deliver them of being just women, catalysts, strops, oil-stones. I realized that precisely what wounded me most as a woman nourished me most as an artist. Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition. Pursewarden wasn't the idea of the individual soul grafted on us by the Greeks in the wild hope that, by its sheer beauty, it would 'take' - Justine, in the pitch black tall room, with only a little waxlight "floating in a saucer," tells the child prostitutes in their long nightgowns a story: "One saw, creeping out like mice, their true souls - creeping out upon these painted masks in little expressions of wonder, suspense and joy." The male penguin collects stones and places them before the lady of his choice when he proposes. Animals, turtles, penguins, monkeys, are like poems about people, exquisite translations. I saw that through his work he had been seeking for the very tenderness of logic itself, of the Way Things Are; not the logic of syllogism or the tide-marks of emotions, but the real essence of fact-finding, the naked truth, the Inkling the whole pointless Joke. Artists: "uninterrupted chain of humans born to explore the inward riches of the solitary life" Pursewarden's blind sister is his love - the blind listening self to whom he spells out all his fantasies and actually creates her life - their blind child dies - she finds a stranger - he must die so that she can live - and suicide transforms his work. When he was absent I had nothing whatever except the darkness and what my memory of him could fill it with. - because he's created her in his sense modality and not her own? - Luke: last night I came to Roy's mother's to get Luke: there he was sprawling on her lap, with a bottle, in dark blue, looking long as a child - seeing me and smiling, struggling across to me and smiling at my knee. Women's lib film workshop weekend: both Saturday and Sunday nights, voices swirling in my head. My own strident pushy voice - speaking up in the old confident way and then scaring me with its echo - I'm fighting to be Somebody, to come in and push straight through, in a place I can handle; I'm strung tight with ambition, excitement, other voices: strategic, impulsive, spontaneous: where's my low-pitched understated reflective reserve and the mysterious respectability it commands? Who's this strident person full of plans, working so hard to be seen and be friended? Suzie sitting on the platform step, stocky pink bundle of smiling energy, all politics, all happiness, innocence: blushing deep red, as I did, when I went to meet her: embarrassed and flustered by my half (yes) superiority and half conspiratorial good will. Hair in two mousy bunches, beautiful clear skin and eyes; she's a little person confiding and unpremeditated in her conference self as a kid, "the movement's made such a difference in my life," "I was looking at my notes and there it all was, so simple, so easy to say." A girl sitting on the floor: skirt and floppy sweater, big low breasts bouncing as she bends to reach for her bag: thick blond hair cut off short and shapelessly, sticking up at the back, a thick deep neck and rising on it with such clarity and dignity a small, pointed face, fine skin flushed clear pink, a fine nose, clear clear eyes, a small mouth: such intelligence and reserve, turning so gracefully above her red stockings, talking so calmly and easily without any self-consciousness, no humour - but a smile she turned on someone who came in - a girl? a brother? Long and unequivocal as a kiss, real calm passion - she's simply clear, with everything held firmly and beautifully in reserve, played out without any deceit or foolishness as it comes - none of my own knots of frantic ambition, skimpy erratic jags of euphoria, muddled hurry and hunger, spots, wisps of vanity, fidgeting; large still quiet body with its burning face, all uncompromisingly herself. Is she lesbian? Is she sexual at all? Completely sexual? I want to know what I was to her. I'm accused. Am I so obviously anxious? Do I feel so smart-aleck because I could play in the debate and be part of it - because I transgressed my role? Or my nature? Or my style? Or my best manner? I feel her as myself: I see her as the centred radiant moments of my life when I was as clear and flushed as that, in Oxford with Roy, Christmas Eve with Luke; ah, have I made her up? Will I see her again? - Colin sitting in the front row at his conference, silly plastic coat, red sweater, brown shoes, blue bell-bottomed linen pants, briefcase. Sitting forward, eager to play. He dispersed quickly and I lost him: when I found him sitting in the pub there was a girl beside him and he was embarrassed and silly. I pretended and he pretended that I wasn't there to see him. I babbled confusedly to a TV person called Andrew, he talked politics with - Ann Stott. Slender dark person, fine slender thighs held like a lady, close together; straight back, hands in her lap, young dark face and hair; calm and sad face, looking at him and smiling. Idiotic grouping around a table. I left with them, got out the door first and was waiting to decide whether to go home when Colin came as if we'd just then met - I turned and caught Ann just turning to look at us as she disappeared into the subway down a long flight of stairs. As I remember, I'm moved more by her than by Colin: ashy, flat, solid, aging, closed, tired, lost, soul. My compassion on Saturday completely lacked any passion. Oh we were so closed against each other, made love longer than we ever have, two minutes maybe! And Colin went straight to sleep. I woke enraged and stamped through the flat down the street thru' the corridors of the tube, up all the escalators without looking back; sat in the clanging trains tired and unable to talk. His tooth at last fell out! And when I said I'd get out at Tottenham Court Road because I wouldn't say goodbye in the tube he involuntarily groaned. Facing each other in the sunlit cold clear Sunday morning I grabbed his face roughly in my hands, viciously said "Never mind" and was about to march away when he pulled me back and viciously kissed me while I politely let him. He said "I'll write you another of my long boring philistine letters" and I said "Will you" in theatrical light disbelief and we were glad to be rid of each other, but I arrived at my conference bad tempered, sour and tired. Why couldn't I simply untangle him on Saturday night and Sunday morning, set him at a distance so we could look at each other with room between us for our half-formulated hate to form and speak? Strange to be tangled in that body's indifferent arms staring at him with a 'mocking' smile that dares him to realize my contempt. I think I know what's happened. I now mistrust him to want to know me when I'm sad or hungry - I should quite simply have been it, but I lost my integrity and with it all tenderness and hopefulness. I think that's true. - How WL works: excitement confirms power - but the fact that we define ourselves still by our position in relation to men rather than serenely easily existing and working. And: this directly means inventing a new life style, because we don't want to be like men - resilience of being in contact with our emotions - David's remark that WL is going to be very important and that what's involved is a new concept of work (used to be: intimacy, our own interiority and intimacy between people). Elements - playfulness, honesty, fearlessness: we'll all want our own characteristics. WL: Hegelian: femininity becoming aware of itself incorporating masculinity and becoming an enlarged self. Historical immediacy of our own lives, desires, conditioned or not: to be conditioned is not necessarily to be unreal. We save ourselves, not only future generations - the political view of Future is the con that puts reform into dogma that alienates both ourselves and the future. Styles of radical femininity. I just wanted to turn the picture off - on the radio - ie? - turn off the substance, content, language so I could tune in again when it 'looked' interesting. Selma James: sitting in a back seat near the end of Sunday afternoon - hair down, that vivid experienced worn lined pouched pointed face - speaking at an American convention, face darting forward out of the screen, very dark and very muscular - candid, complex, ironic, funny - she's the counterpart to the girl in the red stockings; willing to dramatize herself and use herself, shout, but all in it all extend her range and power, not so unitary or so unexploded, but in magnificent periodic (?) explosion. "You lifted the whole end of that film." - It's true that all weekend I felt not only ambition but actual potency-ality, as if I'm opening, and so losing my unexploded mystery (which I always felt to be a little false anyway) - clumsily becoming an explosive power - ie a person, leader, even guru. (But I'm slow: the incident with the skin flic at the Forbidden Films festival; it took me so long to feel my own deep furious humiliation.) And why not think strategically of using myself, staging myself, as long as I keep it possible to use and stage myself with more and more accurate an integrity. I'm so excited! - The Bach cantata for joy in women - Surprise: C on the phone saying he's floundering and needs help - when he's real, snap! "You're not telling me anything I don't know." "Was that a brush-off on Sunday?" "Was it?" "Was it?" "Well was it?" "If I'm waiting for you to say whether it was, and you're waiting for me to say if it was, I guess it wasn't." "I like you a lot Ellie Epp and I don't want to lose contact." That voice. Talking from a coinbox somewhere in Bristol - I imagined a light box, upright rectangle, on a dark street corner in the cold. And there I am, all animated, on the shiny surface of the black window, bedroom lights on upstairs in the terrace across the gardens shining through my face. - Home from the NFT, Roy's gone, Luke's tumbled asleep on top of his covers, there's a crude scribbled note on his un-used laid-out paddi-pad: DOG/GOD BLESS. Roy calls at midnight: he got drunk and left [ie he was babysitting and walked out before I got home].
9 November Roy has sold the beautiful red and white van we went to Europe in. Luke has learned kissing: mouth wide open, very wet, pressed against my cheek; he simply did it one day. I was so touched! Little George Toad: he's getting even prettier, and his sudden radiant smile becomes more and more personal. When he sees Roy he's alight - His shape is changing - when I lift him now I feel a longer chest instead of a solid middle - he's almost slender and his legs are lengthening, his beautiful little bum is more child-shaped - mostly I see it scampering pinkly away from me at top speed when I've just taken off a wet diaper and am trying to get him into a dry one. I have to chase after him and recapture him for every single undershirt, jumper and sweater I try to get onto him. There's a window alongside my platform bed - he stands at it bashing my alarm clock - looking for Jimmy the cat and shouting. But now sometimes - at last - he also sits quietly on my lap with his head leaned against my arm, to look at books or listen to "I gave my love a cherry." You'll be glad to know he's reverted to eating his pencil. My camera's broken, I can't take pictures to send. [Roy threw the Nikon out a window four storeys up.] But you should see him standing holding onto a chair looking over his shoulder at me, twinkling with a joke either he or I have made. He has four new top teeth to smile with. Will he lose that radiant self confidence in his smile? Have you read Durrell's Justine? Roy is my Justine and that book is almost, no, is, the only person who has had anything true to say about my relationship with him. Even now I live with such a mailbag of memories. You did say something true, though, I remember you said "He's a fascinating guy." Jerry Reznick from Los Angeles was here on his way to Bordeaux. He came at the same time as my dear and old friend Madeleine [Murray] from Queen's who, looking around at all these people from the past, including Rick Behrman from Montreal who was renting a room [at Roy's], said "Suddenly a lot of antiquities for you!" Katrin arrived at the door one night smiling and eyes shining - I rushed downstairs and made her a beautiful crown of nasturtiums and big floppy nasturtium leaves, she wore it all evening even when we went out, and looked like glowing Christmas Present. She stayed a week (thanks you very much for The Wind in the Willows) and danced and sparkled the whole time, so happy to see us. When we took her to the station she wanted to dance circles in the waiting room - wow I love her! - I can't keep up with my life these days, can't make resumés, nothing but scraps. We're all well - there's a summary. [journal] Tuesday 23 November Housing association meeting. [first sight of the Buckingham Road Commune in Islington, Pooh is Anthony *, Sue Finch] Pooh's house: smell of wood when I step in the door, the wood-working room up to the ceiling in drying wood, boxes of nails, tins on their side in their own slots, a long narrow window into the kids' room, which has a big French window onto the garden. 'Mos and Isabel red-cheeked runny-nosed narrow-chinned clamouring in the kitchen, calm Sue (is that another baby under her flowered quilted skirt?), Pooh a bit irritated, but coming in grinning with a baby doll made of a piano's legs, an old strut, and another round bit of wood like a mirror frame. [sketch] In the garden, the greenhouse with a small orange lamp on the floor, warming the plants. Margaret's black heater spaced precisely on its platform of black tiles. [a Pither] In Pooh and Sue's room, the Persian rug, the cradle with "Isabel" and "Amos" written on the end, with room underneath. Photographs and a gooseneck lamp, paintings, Pooh's bookshelf up to the ceiling, the mats on the floor and the kids showing me - Isabel sitting on the cradle, Amos staggering about, Luke catching dominos on the floor. November 24 Dream of a pottery exhibit, Hattori showing a lot of pots that had come out of a special firing, deep beautiful red decorations on the sides of earthenware pots, big rich shapes with rich red glazes painted into patterns of fat birds - like the tiny red line under the glaze on Hattori's square bottle - and like the spill of red paint on the pavement outside the door. - Note: matte red, matte blue, painted on raw surface, surface like a wax crayon - could I do it with wax crayon? Inside definite, incised? lines. 2 December Dreams last night: a tall dark buxom girl leaning over a kind of parapet toward me, I embraced her and we made love, I very quickly and fully came to climax. Second dream: walking along the highway toward La Glace with my father, we both began to float in the air, and in our turning upside down, dipping like birds, we coupled - his feet toward my head, very abstract matter of fact link, the head of his penis floating toward me with calm inevitability looking like Roy's. We said that we could only fly because of him as he was the lightness principle. Third dream. I'm sitting in a wooden outhouse on a high balcony feeling horny; Roy comes in.
Yesterday longed for Colin in some unreal but intense, romantic way, something to do with - but no, I can't explain it; I know it's somehow false but I just longed to see and touch him. It's a long time since I have. On Friday he called from a long corridor in BBC Shepherd's Bush confused, very strange and far away, wanted to see me but I couldn't. and yesterday when I called he was brisk and unreachable. [undated letter] I'm supposed to be writing research today to make a liddle money - so I'll put it off, I hate it, by answering your letter. It doesn't occur to me that my life can give you nightmares, I'm sorry it does; but how can I extend you the peaceful voyages of my own dreams? We're well. Luke's well. Roy isn't always well, but sometimes now we're very close and happy again. Last Friday we went to a movie, had supper in a shish-kebab house, walked the streets in Soho digging for useful things in the rubbish bins (cardboard tubes, manufacturer's fabric scraps - toys for Luke) along with the old women looking for food. Roy's different with me than he was a year ago - there used to be something basically evasive in him that seemed always to be doing a lame duck act to fool me away from his real feelings - a very charming act, but so uneasy. Now sometimes we seem to really meet, and for all my mistrust and unforgiven memories, that makes me gay and delighted so I want to skip on the street, and so we do skip and sing. We rode home on the top storey of a bus, ate fish and chips, and went home to overpay the babysitter and go to bed and then wake up together and tumble Luke in with us - that's a treat when it's rare! Hey - I'm not such a wild horse. I do look after Luke and with more privacy now I look after him better. His grandmama loves to have him, buys him things, feeds him and gives him a taste of old-fashioned devotion. He loves Roy. He likes everyone he knows. He really is surrounded by warmth, and he's so friendly and pretty that he gets all the fuss he can use. At Mrs Hickey, where he is in the afternoons, he has a gentle slightly retarded three year old to play with. Roy and I are slowly getting networks of new friends. Some of them have children - we're not so isolated as we were in St Alban's Road. And I do let him be. He plays alone as much as he likes - when he doesn't want company he won't have it. But he is always after books and he loves to chew his pencil, or stab me with it. No new fantastic achievements. He's more skillful on and off his feet, but he won't walk before he's 13 months. He doesn't have any real words yet, except 'da' which is his courteous thank you when anyone gives him something he wants. His body is longer and more child-like; his pot belly is tighter and his chest is longer. I love to feel him up, and when he rides on my hip he feels quite different than he used to. When he wakes me in the morning, I raise my head very slowly over the top of the cover and there he is standing in his cot looking at the exact spot where he knows my head will appear. Then he smiles hello and I go fetch him into bed, but it's not me he wants, it's space, freedom, the window, the alarm clock to bash, breakfast, action, to-day. The Christmas present! This year it's very exciting to have $10 free, because we are poor and it means nice underwear! Or cloth for a beautiful blouse! Or a train ticket somewhere! Or an Instamatic! Or some film! And I won't pay my bills with it. Lots in my life that's exciting: Women's Lib; pottery for a very good strict teacher who says there may be a potter in me; maybe a flat of my own with a tiny garden and a kitten; maybe a fellowship to do a PhD; new friends, women from women's lib; articles to write if I get around to it [for the Oxford Companion to Film edited by Liz Anne Bawden at the Slade]. London's winter season where anything seems possible. Beautiful wintry but not cold days, like your mid-October. Roy's journalist sister has moved to Britain [Jill Chisholm and her husband Sean Stiles] - she's nice and likes me. [journal] Friday 17th December Invited Roy yesterday to come spend the anniversary of Luke's birth, I was faint and grey, we went to bed early, almost with Luke. Fell asleep. All through the night I felt Roy turning resolutely away from me, or turning to hold me, and I fell asleep again. Dreams, in the church basement at La Glace, I'm stealing three apples, one for me, two for my two brothers. My father comes to the concrete steps, comes in, scolds me. I press my hands around his neck and scold him for bothering me. We're outside, surrounded with witnesses I'm glad to have. I see a dial on his fingernail, and the indicator sinks to zero. Dead, he's a dead spider, a daddy long-legs? on a little stone. We fasten the stone and spider to an envelope with an elastic band, but several of the long water-spider-like legs fall off. I wake to hear the bedroom door close, then the upstairs door is slammed shut. I look around, Roy's gone, all his clothes. I run to the door, onto the street, no one there, run back for my cloak and the key, Luke wakes, I hurriedly put him down and run out, down Burghley Road, no one there, only a dwarf coming home from work, walking on the opposite side of the road. A police car turning, I have to slow because I'm barefoot and my hair's bushy, don't want to be picked up. When I get to the corner of Highgate Road I think I see Roy walking away at the pub corner. Yellow street lights, cold pavement, it must be morning because there are several people walking toward me. By the tube, is that Roy? No, too squat and slow, wide - then, ahead, narrow man with a scissors-walk and his hands in his pockets, my chest hurts from running, funny flapping run with my cape held around me and my feet slapping the pavement. He's about to turn, but I'm close enough and I shout. He turns the corner, stops, turns back, sees me, comes slowly to meet me, puts his arms around me, I've tears in my eyes from running and I cry two or three sobs. He says I can put on his boots. So we walk back to Burghley Road and bed, make love, I bring him in my mouth at the end, we talk, make love again. Luke wakes and stands up in his bed crying dazedly. I bring him into bed to sit on my lap for a while. He has his bottle and gets up again, very playful, stinky. Won't go to sleep. While he has a second bottle we have coffee and toast with butter and honey, a lot of it. We make love again and Roy brings me - then Luke shouts and we have to get him up, but it's late, nearly 11:30, have to bake his cake today; the party at Grandma's house with a single candle he reached for but couldn't blow, the furry blond-mink-coloured new parka from Roy, a bunny book from Catherine, a nasty plastic cat from Mrs Hickey; he, in Anna's green corduroy creepers unbuttoning like a long skirt crawling to pull food off the table, eating cocktail sausages, scones, bacon, nibbles, grabbing our teacups, standing toppling, smiling, fluffy toffee-milk hair, busy observant green-rimmed eyes, running on his knees, pink transparent skin. Walked home the path with an iron railing along the magic railway, grasses, the stilted signal house, Lombardy poplar branches. Came home to hear Chris [Day] read Dylan Thomas's Conversation About Christmas with his face transformed into the face of an old Welsh codger and his hand making codger-movements on the quilt. I think about custom and ceremony. Roy this morning. I said, "Remember how we almost went to Canada?" "It wasn't a very near almost I was so scared." I felt something become clear and new with that. I think of custom and ceremony and wonder what kind of customs we could have, I'm glad I know him, I'm proud again, and look for grace to understand and fight and play better, gently, like Karen Blixen, so wisely and joyfully. I could make him gifts, be grateful for his gallantry, recognize much more. He said "I have plots to win you, and then when I see you I forget them." He's letting me be more equal now, I don't feel his mind sliding away in such boredom. - And oh what a tangerine lover, what a wedge-narrow body, what a deep armpit, what two tight folds of belly, what a head of hair, what a mouth. - "I'll tell you the secret, if you like. It's undermining the intellectual conversation ... not sexual ... feel recognized ... not an illusion, I actually do recognize them." Surprise, play, recognize the erotic, tantalize. - Sunday night, Luke staying awake, I go back, light the four little square candles where they light the hyacinth and the gold-ball tree, sit on the floor beside his bed and sing It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Oh Come all Ye Faithful, Noel, While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night. Luke stood up holding his bars, intermittently sang, tramped back and forth along his bed toward and away from me, looking at the lights. Let loose, he scrambled to the candles, reached, found his mirror, pinched a freesia nimbly. I saw myself squatting and singing in the candlelight, still single and a mother, and dark, thin, myself in another strange time, I was comforted by myself, am groping to say that I'm still more interested in myself than in Luke. Rephrased. Letter for M: Sunday before Christmas: night, London. A picture - my very small room, the light turned out, the little square candles burning almost down to the bottom; Luke's 1' tall potted Christmas tree covered with yellow balls like shining fruit, and a hyacinth, in the candle's circle. Luke standing in his bed holding the side railing, tramping sideways closer to where I'm sitting on the floor singing carols to him, intermittently singing himself, staring at the tree, the candles, the shadows on the ceiling, my face, distracted by the darkness at the end of his bed. Big stout belly and two-diaper big stout bottom, a little fat gentleman with eyes opened wide into what? Whom? I imagine many Christmases and look forward to creating this scene again, differently, with Luke, maybe with another child, other children. And it doesn't mean Christ is born; needn't. What does it mean? Secular Christmas exists, we need to discover what it is we celebrate so innocently as children and sometimes so innocently as grown people, so we can continue to celebrate it - and 'celebrate' it as a mass is celebrated, stage it for Luke, Poppy, and us and all, continue to create it, keep it alive! Joy for Christmas. - "When I think of the new order, I think of you as its first inhabitant. Your ways of thinking, instinctively in ways I can't." [Colin] in a restaurant on the way to Guildford. "I'm sorry to way-lay you." Mathew to Felicity: "When I think of you in your wedding dress, my penis goes all fat and prickly." - What? Relief! I'm so happy to be clear, truthful, sharp, unsentimental, thoughtful, playful - and he's so unexploited and young. I was talking of my fear of Roy outshining me. He asked: "And when Roy goes on, are you proud of him?" "Yes. And ashamed." "Your sudden laugh." - Roy as a specialist in sex, in seduction and in chaos, seductive chaos. - Keats A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory ... Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it. Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Santayana in The life of Reason: [Art] so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to prove a disappointment. Its facile cruelty, its narcotic abstraction, can never sweeten the evils we return to at home; it can liberate half the mind only by leaving the other half in abeyance. - The poisonous berry that you are and know yourself to be.
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