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March 4 1972 [journal] I'm getting desperate for my old sense of being certain of my own skill and luck, my unique life finding its way one right step after another. I seem to be stopped, caught, looking for ways just to get along not too uncomfortably, thinking about money: clothes, travel, a house; feeling how bound back I am by Luke, because I need at least an adventure so badly and don't know what to do with him while I have it. - And it's so limited because I can't take him far, or be gone long. (He's sleeping on his knees, little child-form, with the plastic feet of his blue-green sleeper pointed up calmly - the room's cold and he's pushed away the blanket, but he's warm. He runs all day: this morning, the hello-goodbye game with the bedroom door; and to show him the use and importance of his red shoes that he wore today for the first time, I opened the door and let him run into the garden, run all the way around the corner, and run back. He was wearing his red-and-blue jumper with his red leotard-overalls and the little red shoes, and he's so pretty; his eyes flash! And his seven teeth! Mafalda told Maria's little girl that everyone is magic, but some people are more magic than others, and their magic is how they do things well. Mafalda's gone; taking the boat to Portugal tomorrow, looking for someplace to have her baby, in May or June, soon! Hard thin belly, the roundness risen since she came, almost to her ribs now. I've been brisk and absent with her; wish I'd played more. Hey Mafalda, be my friend, you're my friend, you can talk to me. But I'm so repressed and even with Luke and it makes me afraid I'll lose him to Roy. Something closes me and turns me away when I'm near to being close - only sometimes, in new excursions, with Colin, I could bend myself forward alert and sharp and all there - oh, so it's fright, it's that stupid female vacancy; I dreamed that my mother when she was speaking to me, over a table, say, would blank out for a while and whimper like a little puppy, and then recover without realizing she'd been gone. Is that me - only rarely able to take charge of that interchange with other people that has always seemed as given and independent of me as weather and news. Lots of impotence in myself I hate, and I fear how I might age into anxious mediocrity; yet it isn't my mother I hate, it's my father, and it's in him too, the closing stiffening vacancy. I'll be twenty seven on Monday; seems serious to me; I need a retreat, fasting and praying, my metaphors become religious these days, because it is that kind of hunger for assurance of salvation, my call - refinement of spirit - I'm so caught in forms and conventions and my stuggle's only superficial, and I want to be every day in everything someone new and young without all these human idiocies of language and gesture. I want to be so fresh; it isn't my father who shrews me in all these dreams, it's myself, and for good reasons; my life is at stake, it's so near to being nearly over! Seven years since I was twenty in Europe; I'm involved in a desperate search, but not even that, desperate need for a way to search. Roy's my kin in this but we don't know how to be useful to each other in our hungers and evasions. Declare peace. Declare seriousness between us? I'd like to. But I'm still here at the edge treading so carefully around the edges with this square writing pen; it's a pleasure, each crossed t. But - oh - something to work at. Pottery. Discipline. But something else too, writing and images, something to follow along to find my way: someway to live more fluently, with Luke too, less repetitively and heavily, energy, magic, oh Ellie Epp come back and don't ever give up, fight and get lit up again, I'm a bomb, I'm a light, I've always been lucky and I have a good life, now where? Let it come, work itself here, that next thing I need so much. None of this is good enough, we're so busy with useless incantations. - Myths: like buried treasure, emotional resources to find and exploit; and key illusions to mistrust most because they're most seductive. Examples: romantic love, monastic life, gardens and farms, babies, travel, music. We set out early for the morning and went to a distant place where the hills although not very high were most impressive and spoke intimately to me. Tosen had brought a flute and seemed to pierce them with its notes. The river water was deep and shoals of fish swam there. It was a painter's landscape. We spent a night in the hills at Gozaemon's house and the air was full of autumn. We ate softly boiled mountain potatoes and felt so very happy. In that little house we sat by the hearth above which hung, polished by smoke and much rubbing, a wooden fish-shaped crook for the kettle. I drew it. Then Tosen wrote these lines . Kenzan diaries. I explained that between Heaven and Earth, enduring peace of mind was man's desire - water so still it would reflect a single hair of one's head - ground so firm that any structure on it would stand secure. Bernard Leach 1966 Kenzan and his Tradition Faber The Japanese making copies of each other's work if they liked it. Always writing little poems. Send each other accounts of something they've done together, to remember? Adopt each other's children.
Kenzan's death poem. On the way back the hills were covered with wild ripe grapes, rather odd, so early. We gathered some as presents. they say that a man's heart is reflected in the blade [of his sword], and that to polish it perfectly requires an attitude similar to Zen enlightenment. Change their family name with changes of circumstance.
On the anniversary of Hokkyu Matsumura's death Tosen Sudo and others gathered and held a service in his room. Several of those present spoke about Hokkyu. Snow fell unceasingly. I thought of how often I had received letters from the dead man asking me to come out to Sano. Had I done so I would have met him. Looking at the sketches he made for my guidance I am aware of how much he wanted me to come. I have therefore made four incense burners now burning here, in the hope that Hokkyu's son may be my friend, instead of his father. 1737 written on the back of the dish. Kenzan's diaries, painting and writing are like one another, painting is larger and freer writing. Sunday March 5 Woke up, Luke crying, hard to wake, when Roy finally stirred, I jump up guiltily, Luke holds up his arms, smiling. Take him upstairs, make fire in the solid fuel stove and paraffin heater, feed Luke muesli, take tea and honey bread down to Roy, he gets up and brings them upstairs. I go out into the rain to get the papers, we sit and read them, Luke's very quiet; I look and he has his fist in the honey jar, sitting on the floor with honey on his fists, knees, and thick on his face. When I go for something to clean him up - so far I'm laughing - he goes to the plant and has dirt spread thick and black on top of the honey like a beard - I put him into the bathtub and something Roy says explodes open the irritation and silence and emptiness between us - I'm shouting back, Luke gets out of the bath, tipping water deep on the carpet, I shout to Roy to fuck off, I don't want him here, he's too much to cope with. He sits and watches while I catch Luke and dress him, brush his hair, set him firmly into the high chair, wipe up his muddy pee and soil by the plant, wipe up the honey, wring out towels, sop up the carpet - and so on, grievingly angrily cleaning the room. He's been reading my journal and is offended; asks for his key back; I give it to him, set it outside on the step. He goes, knocks, raps on the window, says he wants his radio. I give it to him, with the Zen record and his Merton. He leaves. Knocks, raps on the window. Says he wants to talk. Comes in and complains, says he will take Luke because he doesn't mean to bring him into this. I clean. He dresses Luke and calls a taxi. Luke goes off with a bottle, train and a change of clothes. (No no no no he says.) While Roy waits for the taxi he goes on at me; I weep and scrub. When they're gone I sit down to finish my work for Chris [typing the manuscript] and feel much better. Rain sliding on the slate roof into the gutter, my garden glowing, splashy big snowflakes. Then sit and sink into Japan, using Kenzan to try to feel my way into where I am, what's wrong, what's next. Sit in front of the coal fire in a chair found downstairs, liking my house, the accident of a green box stood on end under the window with my new zinnia plant on it: red, green, paler red (pot), paler green (box) all against white. Mafalda's crooked red goblet clumped with my rusty tin. The rusty things hung on the south wall, four red and yellow tulips in a line with springy long branches of forsythia about to bloom; the stiff curl of orange peel with rusty bed spring coils; the African necklace black-and-white next to a rusty pair of shears inverting its triangle [sketch]. My oxide and violin-varnish tea bowl, anemones in a clump with red and orange stumps of candles. The avocado carpet with unpainted wood, black and white and that old brass waste basket. Then Roy on the telephone says Luke's cough is very bad: "I at least care about him," and "I don't think he should go to school," "Anyone can tell he has a bad case of bronchitis, I know about these things and it's nervous too." I'm struck fearful and guilty as he means me to be - why aren't I being a proper mother and looking after him myself - he has bronchitis because I leave him in that cold bedroom without heat, because I abandon him at nursery school, because I can't stay home cheerfully cooking and cleaning with him like real mothers of toddlers (Hattori scaring me with: "It doesn't matter if you beat them, so long as they know you're there") (why's she scaring me, am I getting good?), because I fight with Roy in front of him. Oh, because I want so desperately to get away from Roy sometimes without guilt and without explanations. The week of keeping Luke at Roy's place, where we virtually lived together, was too much for both of us - we've gone silent, guilty, hateful, defensive and I've gone hysterical and antisexual. He hands on - says "I'm trying very hard to stop the destructive things and I'm getting very little help from you." Issues - my going away, my not being interested in fucking, my asking him to look after Luke. It's me, I'm guilty, nasty, destructive, and at the moment I just want to get away form our evasive old-married nice cohabitation. Last night, with old rock on Radio Luxembourg, I thought of the summer when I went to Paris with this kind of wildness in me and he wrote a letter, in his sunny messy front bedroom, saying "You are my morning light." I ached for that loving innocence between us. But it was hell then too - yet - Greg: two happy years and then I couldn't touch him any more. Peter: a month? What it is: heavy fatigue when I'm with him, guilt, impatience, self-dislike, sullen reflection in me of his sullen silence. "I'm just so tired" (as he said last year when I was in Coppett's Wood), leave me alone for a while. March 16 Woman at the Institute - "It's a change in perspective really. Whereas before you were always looking forward, now you look both ways." The feeling I had when I walked out with Luke for the first time - he in his red shoes; and I was a child's mother following after. My birthday shoes from Roy, red and blue striped soles, cream-colored uppers with blue binding, red eyes and white laces, Pierre d'Alby written in a half circle around the ankle bone. - Ideal of Hinduism: "freed in life, desireless, compassionate, and wise," "with the heart concentrated by yoga, viewing all things with equal regard" The great tea masters were concerned to make of the divine wonder an experienced moment. ease signifies that the hero is a superior man, a born king The system of ten thousand worlds was like a banquet of flowers sent whirling through the air, or like a thick carpet of flowers. - something Hindu Christmas tree - "World Axis in its wish-fulfilling fruitful aspect" I wrote my mother that Luke was "wild as crows." When I'm high I write so well.
[Here I switch from a 7"x9" hard-cover lined notebook to the 8"x12 3/4" lined book that will take me to the end of my time in London. Both volumes are written in pen, usually ballpoint.] [Front page assortment of notes] photographs called landscapes: the underside of Greek bread desert, runoff estuaries photographs of children's houses strike the something mythological the quarry film - garden - stone - house little film on heroes: This will to be oneself is heroism little films like Artists of the Big Top - Disoriented homologous structures / morphology [undated journal, March] The irritation of chatter, seelish pollution, unlocated remarks about other people's cars and dinners (Catherine), this and that - Roy and I. Does it poison him as much as it does me? I think he likes it sometimes, as I do - but only when I forget what it's like really to leech onto my moments and magnify them. Shiny slate roof outside the south window when it rains, reflects new leaves on the plane tree, light brown brick walls, four storeys, roofed chimney pots in lines of four, the philadelphus at the end of the garden full of fat birds hiding in its thicket of fine branches. Letter from Bill that brought tears into my eyes as I was standing beside my bicycle at the nursery: "Don't worry that you've had to let go some of your dreams. Failure is not a fault. Nor is change of goal." I'm composing angry replies: "But I'm still as wild as then, wilder, the only difference is that I'm older and no longer fit that romantic shape you made for me when I was twenty." I knew even then that it was my youth you wanted. What I want is the good father you were, somebody believing in me, knowing my rebellious heart and loving it in me. You wanted me to be Joan of Arc and I wanted you to love the Joan of Arc in me. But I am still Joan of Arc - Joan as an aging woman, who was she? Say, she crowned the Dauphin, wouldn't go back to Domrémy, so did she stay in Orléans? No she went to Paris. Had no money, wasn't about to become a wife or mistress, became obscure - wouldn't and couldn't enter a convent, got knocked up by a soldier, had a child, became cunning, did little business deals, had anther child, because she'd got to like having them, then another, lived in a little house on the Left Bank, knew some of the intellectuals, looked back on her youth; in her dreams she rode her horse, in men's clothing of course, she was never older than 16 or 18, struggled with young boys. Lost interest in sex. In bed last night I hung onto Roy and made love with him not because of any warming of my body but from loneliness, and in his kindly indifference felt my mouth stretched wide and square with grief and loneliness, and sobbed for a long time clinging to him as he squeezed himself out, hurriedly, into me. In a dream I see myself, seventeen, in the blue sweater, at Grandpa Epp's - I look at myself and say something like, see how you used to be. And last night, another dream, of finding flats for myself and Roy, university students (the dream referred to flats in another dream): I had a little basement room somewhere in the city and Roy had a log cabin on an island, past a drama department with chairs being painted black for sets, and earthenware pots made by archeology or art history students - his little house in a BC spruce forest, with plants in old barrels outside. To get to it we had to pass an ocean, grey clear water running in glassy small waves - we could get to the bridge by swimming but I was out of my depth and had to go around while Roy went directly. On Monday I'm going to do nude modeling for an art class: because I'm afraid, and because perhaps I can then stop tormenting myself with the ugliness of my body. Somebody called John said "I don't want to draw how all bodies are the same but how all bodies are different." I said "I think I'd better do it." A few nights ago, a dream of looking through Grandpa Epp's things and finding drawings of leaves, detailed fine pencil, with moth's wings discovered in the leaf's veins. Roy's in Cornwall with Kevin and ? Indifferent and kindly parting this morning left me sad all today, I gathered all my scribbles from out of his drawer, found a couple of letters from Sheila and one from Maryvonne thanking him for his lovely letter in which he enquired about how soon he could see her! As we went to Sheila's at Christmas he lay sobbing on the sidewalk saying "It's you I love!" Is it on purpose that you bring me to the edge of feeling you're really my man and then vanish into your courteous evasion? Is it somehow on purpose to untie our neurotic knot that my body despairs with you? Ah, talk to me, I'm not the enemy; be brave, if you can. I can't bear the indifference I make out in you - talk to me, give us a chance. Who're you? My fear: because of you - my face betrays the strain and humiliation I have with you, and I'm marked so that no man looks at me, because you've marked me, you've failed me. - Underground film - "Violence is silent." A peach - fishing hooks reach, reach, grab, seize it. Many more; suddenly they all pull apart and the red flesh shatters, lies still with the stone in the centre. What comes back sometimes: Roy sobbing at the beginning of our time, but always alone and not telling me about it. He's all I need but I can't get to him, can't believe him, and lose him. Those rare blackmail-bought moments when he talked with me! Oh don't you know how strong talking is, you who manipulate it so cunningly to win us. When you speak from your belly I'm won, gained, opened. Or when I do; I'm grateful. Your showers of flowers - your 'flux.' To be taken into your confidence. Stupid to quarrel, beseech, plead, when you're not here. Monday Silver muscular tree in the school driveway, daffodils and narcissus in spread squares, bobbing, smelling of modest wallflowers among them. In the office: "Are you the model?" and I nod one short pleased nod. Upstairs, John's not there. Comes in, small, muscley face - not the tall long-faced man I was looking for. Nervous. Immediately our telephone postures are turned: he's impressionable. He takes control, stamps back and forth all earnestly talking about what art is. He's kindly, he's Rumplestiltskin. He's no Zen master. He's a quick sketch: "Don't try to do the possible. The impossible." "This is like the impersonation of a sensitive person's drawing" [he said to his wife, who was in the class]. "Not another time, another drawing. You make love, it's another time you make love. You go to see your best friend, it's another time you go to see your best friend. You make another drawing." - Pot. Yes, good. I'm standing nodding - aha, yes. I'm not just the model, won't be, will not. John prances in a war dance of a lecture: "You shouldn't be able to tell what your drawing will be like, or you're just recording your preconceptions, it should be completely new to you, then you're learning something." I sit on the furs with one arm up - see eyes screwed up holding chalks out to measure me. Concentrated measuring, spacing, ah, I'm a body in the world, legs, breasts, neck, even my sliding face: still life, natural life, no one's choosing me, no one's rejecting me, or yes - that flowing girl is sure to think that her husband won't be mistaken - "except for the head the neck hands, maybe." And he - those brown eyes above his moustache - I like his look, I like him. John puts his arm over his shoulder and then tears the paper away to try for himself; "No! It's no good, it's virtuosity again." Woman standing stiff and stout, legs apart, torso thrust out, tightly held together by her smock, her mouth pulled down tight with effort. She'd stab me with that chalk. Frail old man making Cezanne-tinted studies. Weak eager boy doing good accurate drawings: "I enjoyed drawing you you didn't move a lot." Writing's like drawing. Start with something you know, try not to labour it, not to be literal with it. Take a stab, get an area, make a connection, highlights and the shape of an experience, ah, something coming that you didn't know, your hand moves faster, good moment, could live for those, here's something again that's obvious, oh, slowing down, running out. It's partly recording what you remember seeing - but not too much of that; you resee it. Like good talk. Scraping the neck of the bottle this morning, I quickened when I found a relationship coming inside the lip, outer lip and the skin underneath, a dip - and rapidly, without thought, carving out the foot with the vegetable parer; there it stood, with that foot, stepping up ("impersonating a sensitive person") light and strong where before it had dug down hard. [sketch] The tall dark haired girl standing so definitely in her brown tight pants, big breasts pushing way out under her sweater - sitting on stool legs wide apart thighs making a tight strong determined double form. [sketch] She made me monkey faced and angry, like an angry Gauguin. John's pink cheeked wife made me black lined and angular; I liked that slim self; that's how she sees me because she's plump? The boys make good strong lots of pubic hair, or do I imagine it? One breast - and that one larger than mine. At first - the one flat thigh. But no one allows himself to study that. Will they? Tell me: how does it feel studying - past individuality - deformity? I look down and see white slightly cold-mottled slightly shivering flesh. To be so neutralized. Generous. It's somehow ritual, I feel I'm taking part in a psychodrama-myth. Who's the artist's model? French Lieutenant's woman. Renoir (I wore my Renoir hair). Ladies sitting naked on the grass. The awkward drawings they make - good, I'll read them for facts, as I do now; then maybe for their selves. I'll sketch them. He lied when he said his left arm was four sizes smaller. I dreamed: two men called me to their table, asked me if I'd join them on Sunday. I understood them to mean a sexual invitation. I didn't have to reply, they simply told me the railway station to get off at. I discovered one of the men, small, ugly, old fashioned man, thirty or thirty five, pitted sensual face in glasses, looked like a graduate student, was the author of a novel called When Eagles Speak with Men set in Yugoslavia, where we were. Next scene: on a balcony, there's a slight earthquake and I pitch myself at the author, put my head on his knee and look at his formerly unattractive face with my belly full of tenderness. He says gently, "What made you change your mind?" I say without understanding that it was in the earthquake I could suddenly know how I felt. He said yes, he knew, when we are shaken by fear sexual feelings emerge in us clear and true and we can recognize them. Because he knew me, I simply loved him, felt he was mine, felt already joined to him in a simple trusting recognition. In retrospective I could recognize that in the earthquake my gut and my cunt had been burning for him (as they begin to do as I write this). Next scene: we're naked and he's in me, but stops and gets off to say "I can't take on another man's child." Next scene: it's raining, I'm riding the bicycle, Luke is on the back, a big yellow truck is approaching in the distance as I cross the road, but I can't move quickly enough and the truck is almost onto us - but it stops to deliver a toy car for Luke who's going into the hospital - and so on. Luke wakes me. -
[page of notes on things I can do with Luke] - Monday They draw me very badly, don't get me at all, make approximate female bodies - but I feel my bones clearly when I sit there, and nobody draws them. I'm a good model! That sleek girl drew me with a bush in my hands like a bunch of radishes. There's a very battered bright girl with a good strong body, circles under her eyes. Moustache brown eyes smiled to see me smiling at that gauche bunch of radishes. My little pleasures, and a fright-thrill reading about the organization of a cell, I'm a colony of unthinkably precise molecular patterns, and beyond that of atoms, of frequencies, but nothing nothing random. I depend on Luke to share that with me. Lapse into angry and very frightened speeches trying to convince Roy to leave me absolutely alone; I waver with qualifications, and then push myself right. And then all the little bursts of hope, little seeps of pleasure at my gifts. Below in the gym six (?) dressed up couples do complicated dance steps, light and stiff as music box dancers. Luke! little bud - wow! I need him. And he - he's a scavenger starving child. Sue yesterday arriving with Moss. My Sunday afternoon - I began to write my mother a divorce letter and realized it's only two years ago I wrote her that I'd found someone who brought all my pieces together, and that everything was possible. So I went to the kitchen and sobbed, had to get Luke down too, he was sobbing from having been left, or bumped, and then he took the bits of cheese I'd cut to comfort him and put them in my mouth, one after another, and made me laugh so that I stopped crying and began to scrub out the toilet bowl for my new clean life. Then Sue came and found my face spottled from crying, and talked about a good day with Boo, and liked my Bizen tea bowl enough to take it home. - Sylvia Ashton-Warner: I like unpredictability and variation; I like drama and I like gaiety; I like peace in the world and I like interesting people, and all this means that I like life in its organic shape and that's just what you get in an infant room where the creativity vent widens. For this is where style is born in both writing and art, for art is the way you do a thing and an education based on art at once flashes out style. They've got to listen to me when I speak and obey what I speak ... I don't often speak ... I carefully weigh what I do speak. Whatever his own imagination does supply will be something in character with his own needs. rogues people can't classify When I teach people I marry them .... Integration . Married to the life about you... grating, discord, even hatred. ... When love turns away, now, I don't follow it. I sit and suffer, unprotesting, until I feel the tread of another step. Conversation, teaching: the ability to draw out and preserve another's line of thought. Reading, I still circle around Luke, Roy. He: my thought settles around two places: we were wrong to continue so long with what we knew didn't fit us - bitterness, hatred, betrayals I'll never forget; and then, it was him, he failed to cherish me when I still cared for him with all my self, he betrayed me until I hated him past being able to regain - he refused to recognize what he was - that was the second pole. I was wrong - it hurts me where I'm easiest hurt - in being too lifeless, too puritanical, too flat. But was I? Or was that his turning away from me for his own reasons? He was wrong to be cowardly and to lie. He wasn't wrong to philander, drink, steal, spy, seduce; but he was wrong to LIE. - So out of it, I recognize that / yes / I did want a / marriage. Friday Drawn to Roy's place this morning, because I woke and took Luke to school so sad I could hardly stop myself crying. Climbed the stairs, knocked, knocked again on the top door, heart sore, my voice curt and angry saying Roy! His, almost unrecognizable - went down until he dressed and came down to let me in, sat on the stair and tears began to flow down my face. He came out, put his arms around me. I simply cried and grew emptier. He said very absently "Please be my friend. I won't fight any more; but I suppose there aren't any relationships without fighting" and I was irritated and alienated because it was so vague, hypocritical and insulting; he hadn't understood that I'd meant what I'd written. He said "Come in and I'll make you some tea." I said "I shouldn't have come. I just came to say something angry to you. When I woke up I hurt so much, I thought it would help." He said "I too," leaned against my knee and cried a little. I leaned against the stair's railing, quietened, and then said my angry say in a rush: "Next time you get involved with somebody at least know what you're doing. You do an incredible amount of damage." "You too." "No. You're just greedy. You just seduce people. You don't care what you do to them. You do anything to get that kind of power. It's really you who want to control everything." "That's a part of me, but I'm learning." "No you're not learning." Then he was irritated and got up and said "Let me know when you change your mind," and I went down the stairs; we were both hardened. I realized I'd gone through the meeting without looking at him, like a battle in my mind, something that didn't happen. I rush to DH Lawrence for company, but all these lively people accuse me of not being Roy, of losing Roy by my own lifelessness. Saturday morning, 6:15 [letter] Luke has decided to get up, so here we are, breakfast finished, looking for adventure. Luke's playing out his new drama of yes and no. Yogourt on the table, a coconut cookie, he says s-s-s-s-s-s. (When his grandma comes he stands looking at her bag saying s-s-s-s, and if she's slow, "ta," "TA!", "TA!") But 'no' is his real obsession at the moment. I've never said it to him before a month ago, when I started using a kerosene heater he's supposed to be afraid of. When he came near touching it I would roar "NO!" and he'd jump back, look at me, begin to howl. But now he touches it with one finger and says, looking at me, "No?" "No?" "No?" Throughout the day I hear him singing it to himself: "no-no-no-no-no." Monday is the second anniversary of his conception! He loves music - waves his arms and dances, tries to sing. - Picasso said about Matisse: he has a sun in his belly. My woman's lib. drawing. - What's it about? my repetition of this war between irresponsible vitality and ceremonious cherishing careful beautiful order. [undated letter - April] Paskas - I went straight to my cookbook to look for egg breads but didn't find any; you sent me the recipe but where is it? I'll make Luke something baked in a tincan and iced for Easter. Your Easter is really better timed than ours, to coincide with the crack of spring. Here it's too late, the daffodils have been blooming for weeks. We've had over a week of hot potent sun; one of my shrubs is throwing out long shoots covered with sun-yellow flowers so that when I look out the window at night there seems to be a light on. A parsnip top I've floated in a jar of water on the south window sill has grown three plumy green leaves, and a carrot top has a whole delicate crown of them. Everything is growing so that I can see the difference from one day to the next. (Tomorrow I'll plant lots of nasturtiums, some climbing beans that have red flowers, spring onion (I've stuck some garlic cloves into the ground to see what happens), blue sweetpeas for the west-facing wall, parsley, stock, morning glory, marigold, basil, dill, chives, thyme. For all that, I haven't enough space, so at night I'm out with Luke's pushchair to drag home bags of soil and leafmold from under the hedges of houses being demolished - I told you about that. Now I've made a bed about 5' square by filling in a corner that had been concreted over - for a herb bed. Luke and I are so pleased to flow from the kitchen directly out into the warm yellow shining garden that exists where a month ago there was a sodden sour place full of old boards and rubble! We're very happy these days - Luke and I travel like the wind on my bicycle - sometimes he sings, sometimes, like this afternoon going to Roy's, he leans back and drinks his bottle like a businessman in a Rolls Royce. I have new boots that Roy and you gave me for my birthday, ecstatically beautiful boots in blue and cream suede with red eyelets and white laces - ah, they make me eighteen, they and the bicycle, which now I'm twenty seven is a blessing I need. Somehow I don't think I've grown up yet, but, still, twenty seven And that moment when Luke first walked out the door, onto the street, in his new red shoes, ahead of me, like a person. When I get him from nursery school and strap him into his bicycle seat he feels very important, all his friends in the yard come to stare through the fence at him and he generously sticks through his fingers and pokes them one by one saying "ta," "ta." When it's nice we go to St Alban's Road, very near, ring the bicycle bell to tell Roy to come down, and then we go onto the Heath and look at the ducks or eat lollipops or find the birds in the hedgerow or watch tennis. Luke tries to make friends with dogs and old men sitting by themselves: one old man sat down eating an ice cream cone - you can imagine Luke's face as he stood in front of the old man and just looked at it. Then we go home and have supper and I put Chopin's Nocturnes on to say it's bedtime and he's so glad that he usually can't stand to wait while I change him and put him into his funny space suit. And some news - you'll laugh. I've just got another scholarship, $3000 for next year, to do a PhD on "The Film as Dream." Am I not the luckiest person you've ever heard of? Hey, it's Judy Collins, not Joan Baez, and yes, when I hear any of those songs it's baby Luke in his carrycot being put to sleep. Your beautiful dream! I can't tell you what it means, but it's very strong. A duck: like an angel; red: very vivid against blue sky; flying: freedom, quest, ease; high: faraway, unreachable, longing; three calls: traditional fairytale number; abdomen: womb, sex, strong feelings; soft feathers: excitement, tickle in the tummy, warm, friendly; neck and head: sex; couldn't open your eyes: blind feelings, fear of mystery, not wanting to know, not being able to understand, missing your moment of clarity. Those are my associations, what are yours? Tell me some more dreams. I had one last week about walking through Grandpa Konrad's old house, but it had been turned into a chicken coop, full of roosts, feathers, dark, dirty and rotting. I often dream about Father - sometimes, quite often, they're dreams in which I shout at him. Three or four times since he was here I've killed him. In one very dramatic dream he came to me in the church basement and nagged at me because I'd taken three apples, two of them for my brothers. I quietly put my hands around his neck and squeezed until he was dead. He turned into a dead spider which I put on a rock and fastened onto an envelope with an elastic band, but some of the legs fell off. I felt completely untroubled. Roy and I were talking the night before your letter came about the abscess of my bitterness - you ask when I'll puncture it. If I knew how I'd do it because I know very well how it wastes my time and steals my confidence to hate him as fiercely as I do. Finally it has nothing to do with him as he is now; whom I hate is really the whining voice in my head everlastingly complaining that I'm not wonderful enough, not a real woman in fact but some kind of unnatural man-woman; and everlastingly reminding me of my own hatred, lifelessness, decaying body and bitter death. How he's managed to become all that for me I don't know - it's an absurd magnification of somebody who's more-or-less human, but the hatred is real and huge [undated journal] Yesterday, came to Luke's school early and spied through the crack of his green door, he was sitting on a chair at a little table with Chrissy at the end of it, holding a glass of milk in his hands and looking sideways at his hostess following what she was saying. I sneaked out to the cemetery, the sun came out when I'd reached a wild area somewhere in the south middle, where you can see no paths, only flat grave slabs and markers, and the wild carrot growing up high between them, with young trees. Stillness, grey sunlight, strange completely alien territory, birdsong very loud, and that grey yellow light - hot when the sun came out. I sat carefully down beside an especially nice clump of yellow polyanthus and had to wait before pinching one because a girl with her boy was sitting looking at me with such interest. Found some forget-me-nots, in with the parsley now. Further up, nearer the fence, a strong-scented tulip with the yellow-green-black centre, stole just one, with a stem like this [sketch] that looked beautiful in Sheila's green bottle until Luke took it apart this morning. The polyanthus - the nicest bunch I had to give to Lynda's mom because she refused babysitting money - in another green bottle, the latest from my garden dug out where the iris Katrin and I scavenged is now. The two together mute-beautiful. Stocks coming up, thick green tiny sprouts, and sweet pea heads beginning to shake off soil. Moments of panic this morning when I realized I was scrambling to get through an evening, pass time. Oh! Greg in the café at Dean Street, long and dark blue, in denim, with his hair and beard pointing down sleek. Tics, anxieties, kindliness - he said, when I asked him when he'd been really happy in his life, those trips down south that he'd taken with me! Hurrying to add that of course it had all depended on his forgetting about his unsatisfactory work situation - kind Daddy will be thirty next January! Saturday The Heath in the rain this morning radiating new wet green out of each blade of grass - and this evening, coming slowly across it with Roy's mother, white silver underbelly along the top of the Heath, furrows of grey misty clouds moving through that soft uncanny unearthly silver north sky. Roy thrashing drunk on the floor, even as he twisted theatrically there was that tight body, that bit of spine and waist, beautiful, under his sweater pushed up, perfect body that knows so many secrets: because I was laughing at him he said, laughing but sly: "You didn't know how many times I slept with Rosalynd, did you?" I said "Of course I did" (I didn't!). He said, "But you always denied it." "It was you who denied it." And Judd got up and walked out of the room, he scrambled after; when I went out she was gone and he was calling after her. Now I feel ashamed because I went out of spite to catch him out; and I hurt her and confused her with my own ugliness, good Judd. [Judd Pratt was Roy's new steady.] When I confronted him he was humorous and confused casting around for a charming way out - "It's true, I want everybody to love me." But when he talked about a television program about drug addiction called Gale is Dead he got drunken-fierce, "Of course I know it's me I'm talking about." ("She's dead - she's dead - she's dead.") So a new secret's come out, he's afraid he's an alcoholic. He was outside bowing to his mother, hair in soft raining curls, eyes flat childlike and silly, he looked like Ophelia, his face was so young and washed clean. Came up the stairs howling, Tony [his roommate] and I came out, the door locked behind us. Luke began to scream, banged his head against the door. Tony had no key, but sat Roy down and found one in his pockets, and I pushed in to find Luke sitting in the dark screaming. I held him to quiet him but his body stayed stiff and he wouldn't stop. Roy came upstairs - I said "Gently, Luke's frightened" and he came and put his arms around us both, but Luke screamed, pushed him away, hit out at him. Tony came and got down with him and I took Luke downstairs where his grandma was making him a little milk. When Roy came down, Luke went stiff and began to scream again. Roy was howling "I've had enough of that baby," and I escaped downstairs and brought him home to bed. Phonecall from Roy's mother saying he's vanished. Phonecall from Roy, pretending to call me but actually looking for Judd. But Luke, at home, went easily to sleep and I'm reading Sons and Lovers retired back in my bed. - Is it only feeling guilty that makes him so evil? When I'm feeling guilty he's a nuisance but not so demonic. Or is it a cycle? Every April? - Contempt that's glad he's making himself foolish. My anger's avenged by it. But then - pity; what he doesn't admit about himself is so much stronger and sharper than what I sometimes do admit - I experience again, like last spring when I gave him up with all my might, how he treads quicksand in the dark of his own blind guilt-stricken pride and bottomless self-doubt. - Days are precious, there's excitement in my belly, flashes of panicked loneliness, stabs of sentimentality; Luke's dear to me - Colin, Ian, even Tony, and Roy - that sly sweetness of his when he began to crawl toward me and said "I think I feel like coming over there." I felt loved. Luke on the windy Heath with me this afternoon coming down Parliament Hill pushing the bicycle, so he thought, down the hill through the grass along the path squeaking satisfaction; taking a run down the path and flopping hard on his belly, his legs flapped up and his nose smashed into the tarmac on the rebound. Sometimes when he rides behind me I feel little hands touching my waist. Such a love for Roy. The little [cowboy] boots from the Kootenays. How, when we were in Canada, I would go up to him, pregnant, in the white nightgown in the mornings to put my arms around him proudly in front of everyone. Bits of our travels. The evening very recently when I invited him to come visit me, Sunday, when I had the fire made and the room dark and we sat in front of the fire to talk. - Tuesday Meeting at Savernake Road: a circle of faces shining, some anxious, but we're excited - flashes of something loving, ah, you're good and you're bright, you're loyal, hello. That screeching bodyful of loneliness that I went out with, fed and quiet, with fish and chips and that roomful of women crying "Goodnight!" after me so kindly. [First meeting of my local consciousness raising group.] Wednesday Today it's Roy who calls at 8:30 saying he's hurting and will I meet him for breakfast - ends in a fight, he's angry because I'm not melting before him; I'm muddled and sad and can't pot; and since the sun's shining as bright as another country I fly on my bicycle down the long North London spines: Tufnell Park Road, straight down to the bottom, the Holloway Road dangerously puffing with traffic, St Paul's Road, Ball's Pond Road, to Pooh's garden - lorry drivers and workers saying hello because I'm wearing the purple peasant shirt and have my hair down - Pooh tense and stiff, beginning to talk just when Roy masked in black glasses and Kevin alert and smiling come back. I have my womanly half hour, Roy's fuming, he gets up and kicks my teacup out of my hand - "That's called controlled folly" - they want to know what it's about and I tell them: "Well, because the only issue between us is sexual jealousy, I said to him, if there's no sex, there's no jealousy. I'm perfectly happy to be platonic friends with him, but somehow that seems to make him cross." From the way Pooh looked at him and said "What does make you cross?" and from my own simple satisfying rise of glee, I knew I'd scored a recovery after that doubleness with Judd. When he took me home he said sulkily, "If I can't be your lover I'm never going to see you again." And that's all right. And his skin had his sappy spring smell today, alcohol and sun? [undated letter to Mafalda] I was worried that maybe you were too sad to write; I worry about you because it's lonely being just a womb room without a somebody around to lie next to - I remember. Wish I could see you. Make sure somebody takes some pictures. Oh I wish I could come! I would, I'd come like a good fairy godmother to the birth, if, if I had some money - sea, pine trees, pots and a little little baby - oh WHERE WILL I GET THE MONEY? It's warmer, I could come with Luke on the train, if I had even a little. I'll really try. Maybe somebody rich will offer me £100 to sleep with him, hmm? I'd do it. Is it expensive to live there? How much would I need to live three weeks? When Rob's there will you still want anyone else? I wish I had so much money I could buy you that house and everyone could always come and the [potter's] wheel could stay there. It's nice here too: in my garden the bushes are completely leafy and make a tunnel at the end. I've cleared it all out and even cut the grass. There's a bench to sit and drink wine and listen to the birds in the evening. Tiny sprouts where my seeds are coming up very slowly because the sun only shines sometimes. I let the weeds grow to see how they are, even the nettles. Your Portuguese herb is coming up. Today it's raining and the tiles out the back window - on the bedroom roof - are shiny. Lilacs out next door. The avocado in your pot has begun to grow again. The tall plant that was growing up the front window - it's at the back window now - has got a red flower and many buds [abutilon]. My house is nice. A lot of flowers stolen from the cemetery. - Stupid pen, inhibits me, it's so scratchy. There's a rising feeling in London at the moment, a lot of things beginning that we thought about during the winter. Roy's commune has begun, at Pooh's house where you came for supper. They've bought the next door house, which means that now they have three houses and three gardens in a row. Roy, Kevin and Pooh are busy building and fixing. Roy works. They say he saws very good, straight lines. At the moment he's very happy there because everybody likes him and he had a happy ten-day affair with one of the girls, who's gone to Greece for a couple of months. (What did I tell you?) Anyway, I've told him that I won't be his lover any more (and I mean it, I think) but I will be his friend, and if that works it will be good. We feel close and fond at the moment. I need friends of my own, and I'm going to a photography class (looking for men!) and a woman's lib group that's bright and good. And modeling at the night class - they make awful drawings of me, and I catch cold, but the teacher's an evening's entertainment, and besides, there's this nice man with brown eyes and a moustache I get aching lonely sometimes, feel isolated, like you, but then somehow London's rising convinces me too and I'm hopeful. I dream of people who like each other having each of them that one place where people can move in and out, come and go. I've had an inspiration too: near where my parents live now, and the other place where I grew up, there's a log house my grandfather built on the edge of a creek. I've hinted to my grandfather to will it to me and my brothers and sister, and it could be one refuge in the network - ah, and if you had one in Portugal then people could really flow as they need to, everybody contributing to the place they find, building and planting, leaving their children to stay with each other. It would be like having relatives, but better. It's for the next stage, when we're grownups, not so interested in just laying each other. Then we wouldn't be so dependent on our untrue lovers and could be easier with our children. Yes? [journal] He telephones two days later and says he's too passionate and will be friends with me. I say I'll come build, because I've always wanted to be one of the boys. He says there are no boys here, except for Mossy. Are we going into an age where we no longer need to lay each other, and can work to build things together? All of us. - The stupidity of trying to make it with Ian last night, lonely isolated bruising of bodies, I couldn't grasp him at all, it was out of focus, hurried; he seemed to be laying me out like a table - and wine, and coffee, and his effort to control it all, what was that, it was all symbolic and useless - except for the moment when he laid my hand on the carpet, spread the fingers, and licked the spaces between - inspiration. But the body I remembered seems more amorphous, he's thin and his face is sunken, but his waist has no tightness (the fish-spring of Roy's waist), and I couldn't know that body, couldn't grasp it. - At Roy's community, everyone milling, the same confusion, Roy's married to everyone, and we really are neutralized and done for. - He walks, in those moccasins, like a moonman with a tenth of his weight, he's all frame. - Harassed sad Sunday, Luke with gummy red eyes, not enough sun, I couldn't wake up and look after him, Roy phoned to say he'd come for him, then to say he wouldn't, then to say he would, he wouldn't. I called him back with a tearful speech about how I take the responsibility alone while he's free to cartwheel his adventurous way through the world; he says he has difficulties too. Finding some more nasturtiums come up, sprung up, still pale from being underground a day ago, cheered me up; then, bought by lunch, obligingly kept Roy's mother company while she 'had' Luke. Came home to put the crying mite to bed and read newspapers to stun myself, and to look for possibilities, yes, other places, a ship up the Norwegian coast . Now it's past nine and I'm in bed again and not liking this becalmed isolation in my life. Where's my courage and my womanly ingenuity, making a way is so slow, time's fast. But the Newsreel films at the Co-op yesterday: the Woman's Film, the Pollution Film, and the Vietnam veterans, wearing their uniforms with hair, headbands, berets, their ceremonial colours, each coming to the microphone to say his name and make his own stylish protest. "The next purple heart I'll get fighting for the other side," "More shit," "All power to the people," and that beautiful masculine heave from the shoulder, purple hearts, bronze crosses, honorable discharges, into a trash box, seemingly at the Capital. Beautiful, intoxicating moment. Women's Liberation. Women's movement for Liberation. I'm looking forward
to the Tuesday meeting, suddenly felt it could be someplace to welcome myself.
Ah! to mobilize myself, to project, to elaborate.
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