| london volume 4 part 4 - 1972 july-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated journal] Carolee Schneeman in the NFT lobby, tall, shapely, shaped, clothes not new and a little crumpled but colours exactly right moving from russet stockings just over her knees through russet and yellow back to russet in her hair - not young, but slim, pointed breasts, self conscious mannered face - down on the floor writing in a book - in the theatre holding a posy of flowers someone'd given her. When her film had been on for a few minutes she got up and bolted with what sounded like a sob - when it was over she scrabbled down the aisle in the dark and gathered up her things and bolted again. At the end of the program emerged from the toilet to shine in the lobby, where I hung about overlistening and pretending not to stare. A finger comes out and writes on a steamed window pane: PLUMB LINE by Carolee Schneeman 1971/2. A man's profile with a plumb swinging against it. Colours very strong, images full of color splinters. Screen divided in four: the same image in each quarter, repeated in mirror movement to make vortices in the centre, images always in jittery movement, some are repeated later, sense of strangeness, on a square, almost white light, a woman comes toward the camera bleached out, plain - later, less bleached, it's her; glamorous in a halter dress - a man's face, goodlooking man, photographs, obsessional feeling, sense it's a man she's crazy about (just then she bolts*), scenes where they're together in different places, flicker, cut very fast, repeat, some sudden slow and fill the whole image, tiger roars. A sick young male voice drones about a plate of 'food' set in front of him, grisly images of food transformed into bizarre alien lumps - "Please eat some of it because it will make you strong" - the kissing scenes burn from the edges, the smiling man's face burns, the hand comes again to write on the window, then flashes out to rub it off and make a streak of gleaming water out of the window pane. *Roy says he o.d.'d himself to death not long ago. - Saturday Went to see Sarah and make my proposal [to do co-counseling, which quickly became friendship]. Monday Escalating potency is how it feels; and then there's The Dialectic of Sex. [Shulamuth Firestone 1970 The dialectic of sex: the case for feminist revolution] - Manuel says "You write me?" "You like me?" I say "Don't fight with me." The last night I was in Portugal I got into my sleeping bag to be alone and sleep; he gathered up all the blankets and went to the couch. In the morning he came back (two hours later?), dug me out and my irritation had gone; we locked together and came into one another - early morning room full of shadows from the cypress hedge, Luke shifting in his bed about to wake up. - In the library the tall young Greek priest, in black, with his fine, blazing face. My body goes "hmmm". WL meeting. Hilary back. Too much gossip? Too much talk? Baffling day full of gossip - other people getting such excitement and pleasure out of their own and others' problems. I want either sweet talk or analysis at the moment and get neither. Have decided not to sleep with husbands any more because of loyalty to wives, but that doesn't prevent mutual sparkles with rubbery-mouthed canny Charles. Thursday Tired - how desperately social this week is - Catherine - Luke - Roy - WL - Christie Sarah Jane and tomorrow another meeting. Christie's a good soul, kind companionship, tall woman with her two naked little girls and her skinny man. I realize that if I'm friending her I have to friend her marriage too. [Art historian Christie *, her husband Peter, son Danny, daughters Georgie and Lottie lived around the corner from the commune on Southgate Rd.] Georgie running after me crying this morning, wanting to come. Friday Tired and wondering whether my 'political' phase has already run out - thought today about trying to write a novel to bring together the lot of new thoughts that haven't got a friend. The radio next door. Also Sprach Zarathustra - the night before Kaliel was born Mafalda, Rob and I sat up drinking wine concentrating on the baby so that it wouldn't have to be induced in the morning - then we went to bed and I lay in the dark quiet trying to pray for the birth - and suddenly, bam bam! The first bars of the 2001 music, like a shock from my toes up, wonderful excitement - Rob trying to bring the baby on. Then he closed the hall door and the music was fainter and I eventually fell asleep straining to hear it. Now it's music down the street, one of Roy's songs, "Tuesday morning / Please be gone I'm tired of you." "Will you come see me / Thursdays and Saturdays / What have you got to lose." - Looking down from Roy's window, which he's trying to close: Christie looking dejected walking away. The conversations I'm having in my mind, "... and that openness I get it where I can - man woman child - when I can." Roy was complaining - thrashed all night - that I'm secretive, don't share my life and friends with him - I am too, try not to brag, and as for the rest it bores him - he says I come to him once a week for a fuck like a prostitute, and that's how I'd like it to be, if it were a good truthful talk and a good dramatic fuck and a good Turkish dinner like yesterday. And I'm good too: I listen well, I touch him carefully and I'm as truthful as I can be and I'm playful. He says I'm not open to him, I control him: I evade him, don't give myself away. And then I say that I don't believe it's possible anymore - but what I mean is that I don't want Love and jealousy - but skilful affection and watchful good care, and for that miraculous openness, I, like he, get it where I can, give it where I can. And when I went home it was because I was angry at his egotism in always presuming that he deserves to get what he can't give, and boredom with his confusion and jealousy. But I continue to argue in my own head, and I'm grateful for what he said during the night: "I want to be one." "I want to be known." "That's why I cry sometimes," I say, and he says fervently "I want to know you so well." We're both confused. We grope it out. - Then we're bored and glad to separate, although if I suggest that he go - yesterday, shirt tied up around my ribs, I fought the brushfire from the railway track which threatened to engulf the Pauls' house [where Luke's grandmother was housekeeper], Luke, Roy and the old mother sleeping upstairs; Lauderick and Roy went into the house to watch television. Greg's mother has, or has had, some kind of cancer. - A thought I had, intoxicated with The Dialectic of Sex last week, was that I think too much of losing my integrity and too little of finding it, becoming less unconscious of myself in the world, the meanings of my actions - ah the laughing competent woman curled up inside me, budding - then with Roy I feel myself shrivel after a while, I get tired. Remember. But I need lovers, who'll call me on the phone and come knocking and me so magnificent too, full of life and bright and talented. I'm full of joy when the small thoughts in my head take on names. - Janis Joplin has a tattoo on her arm - is there a symbol for "liberated territory"? - New wardrobe, I'll go crazy. - Why does R brag to me about his would-be and actual lovers. - Asked R for money for Luke, spent £1.37 of it on our WL meeting for wine. We sat in the garden as it got dark - Luke sat with us for a while, playing a shy game with hands over his eyes then pelted Hilary with grass. Hilary, the American girl, Sarah, Angela, Maggie, me: I felt as if we'd got back to our core, except for Gail and Leslie and Claire: what I feel is - love. Angela on the doorstep saying "It's nice to see you again" and I so briskly, stupidly, "It's nice to see you again." Looking at her in the dark and trying to imagine her touchable, tastable. When she's there, I think, it's easier for me to say who I am, what I mean. And Christie - Georgie; something vulnerable in me, embarrassed to actually need them, proud to be able to, hopeful, kind - all these books talk about sexuality, and I'm shy, and yet when I think of the men I know it's unreal, except for Roy and Colin who're already in. Dream last night about being with the usual uneasy sort of man who let go of nothing; we were away at his home for a weekend, but as we prepared to go back there was his brother, short silent man, very present, watching me and seeming to wait - showed me drawings of flowers, when I looked closely there were patterns from which the drawings emerged, beautiful and exciting, Escher-like, movement in the patterns and the brother as extension of the pictures, began to dance, tight shiny bare torso, leapt to touch the ceiling - I said "When Houdini did that, he drew out blue lightning," feeling his electric reserve, something like secret love. Luke woke me as I was writing out my address for him to tell him who I was, couldn't make the writing plain and had to keep crossing blotted words out and rewriting them. - Woman is ready enough to play at working, but she does not work; believing in the magic virtues of passivity, she confuses incantations and acts, symbolic gestures and effective behavior. de Beauvoir Turning over vague stories in her mind, woman enjoys the easy pretence that she is a writer. - I've come into a growing season. - When I'm excited I sweat. Manuel's objections. - Image: my tiny orange tree, having dried up and withered, I picked off some of the leaves - suddenly now it has a dense crown of pointed new leaves, many more than before, signaling new branches in all directions. - Sarah's recurring dream: she goes through a door in a strange building, or a tree, finds room after room full of things, sometimes people, seems never ending - she says it's a pleasant dream, and associates (not formally) with it the problem of doing things - says she has trouble beginning - I ask her whether she wants to get lost in something - she says not constantly, but, like an orgasm, sometimes. Listens intently to my tale of Carmichael and myself, and what I feel is Olivia's destruction, and then stands up to leave and crackles with excited indignation at the nonsense of relationships and wives and abdication, swears loudly in the stairwell (Mrs Holloway's ears aprickle) and goes off shouting her thank you. She has a beautiful old fashioned face, eyes very wide apart, clear grey, large nose with deep nostrils (like Margaret's and like mine again), small mouth, giving her the look of a young Rebecca in pigtails or a Victorian young woman with hair up and a cameo at the throat - very broad face, but focused to a point by the smallness of her mouth - that wide intelligent brow and look of steady 'candid' character; and she holds her face high on her neck, tilts it a little forward at the chin. - Drawing is so subconscious: my line cartoons when I was lusting for Manuel, the way, when I drew Sarah just now, my line outlining her hair unconsciously covered her ear. - Pritchard on Lawrence: Lawrence's crucial problem: what is the nature of the suppressed passional being? Does self-fulfillment necessarily involve savagery and cruelty, or is this only the quality of the oppressed and hence somewhat perverted being? [Prichard on] L's essay on The Spring Corn Dance: The men and women two complementary principles, of the sexes, or of sky and earth; and between them are "the hopping Koshare, the jesters, the Delight-Makers, not belonging to either .... Extraordinarily painted pure spirit, essential beings, outsider artist-priests like himself, dancing between the great opposites, calling forth life. I long for the energy that could transform my dissatisfaction into that hopping flashy dance (Roy's dance - Madeleine), ruthless single excitement, inflaming people and jumping away again. P: Lawrence's confusion between power as potency, life-energy and fulfillment, and power as 'conquest','masculine harshness and domination. [Probably RE Prichard 1971 DH Lawrence: body of darkness University of Pittsburgh] - And under all that - rage and despair - I called Roy to ask "if he's better" after his illness, and plugged into him by that line, feel rising inside - sobs, hatred, panic - diffuse resentment of Luke and the way he anchors me to my single place, frantically washing, planting, trying to get what joy I can from my prison. Pent up, and Roy free to do whatever he likes, stay high and flashy. I've been wishing all day for some tenderness with a sweet man, and even that, I've no possibility of it, because I can't move to find him, 'accidentally' as it must be: last night's dream, where I lay with my head on Paul's stomach, wrapped along him, and he said "If you weren't my sister I would marry you." - Istanbul: ever deeper into human life. The beautiful girl at Roy and Sue's party, Adele - her man, who sat talking to Christie - committed suicide; Harry, not long ago, in New York. I can hear an airplane passing overhead, bombers? Roy uneasy on the telephone. Maggots boiling in my pot, their smell as repulsive as the sudden struggling of their sluggish bodies when I put in the hot water. My mother's letter - her bit of Paul's letter talking about needing country - Judy "serene", "loving and diligent" - Sue at Scrubbs Bottom being loving and emotional, Luke and my gay morning when the pressure was gone at last and I had a rising high of invention in me - the Irish boy, sixteen, keen to die for a good cause (IRA), on the train from Stroud. Sunday night: listen, I wonder: if I didn't play the flirtation game, if I were clear from the beginning, about my envious rages and my contempt, if I didn't play seductive girl - would there be any joy in it, would anyone want me? Is there anyone who'd be free and gay with me in that, ah, not take advantage of it, join me? I'm lonely for a chance to open myself - now I sound like my mother. There's my mourning, long mourning for Roy and my dilated terrified clear self. Back underground. I can only repeat it; I'm wounded. (And he's never been like that at all?) (What did it mean, anything? When he sobbed "I wanted to be one.") Why didn't we talk when we were at the Scrubbs, is it too soon? I'm lonely. I was in bed - Roy knocked, came in with the television, Janis Joplin, the radio, his briefcase with apples, drinking chocolate. We plugged in the television, lit candles, sat in bed watching a stupid American drama, ate green apples in the dark, fucked and went to sleep, but I couldn't and went back to my sleeping bag upstairs with Luke, masturbated, came three times on the tension in my belly. In the morning we went to the Scrubbs - Luke went to sleep in his chair in the back - while Roy was buying yogourt and pills (garlic, kelp, acerola) in the health food store I laid him on the back seat and he slept until Oxford buried under his blankets and the big eiderdown like a thick cloud, to protect him from the wind through the open roof. When he was ready the heap stirred and he came up pink and smiling to be on the road. - For that clear good open relationship I have to 'love' someone I trust, but also with whom I trust myself to be 'good,' ie guiltless, unambivalent, ie worshipful. BAH. - At the army surplus store in Kentish Town, looking through the window at rucksacks, eating a kebab: tall thin man with reddish stiff hair almost shaved, clear bristly face, clear eyes, bent over, flapped over, to look at the gas cooker - "Nice - I could cook in a room - you're nice too," gives me a hug. I trying in the following conversation to take him in: purple patch stitched onto his shirt, a plaid bag with "Johnson" on it, says there's laundry in it - new completely white sneakers badly laced, sports jacket, abrupt, says he drinks, says he's high most of the time ("On what?" I say. "Oh nothing, meditation"), gives me a kiss, says "Want to live with me? And the gas cooker? "And a kid?" I say. "I'd have to think about it, I'm slow" he says, "I might not want to do it." "I wouldn't at all, I don't like to live with people," I say. He's relieved, "Neither do I. Can I have a bite of your sandwich?" I wonder whether that's what he wants - but no, it has meat in it. He tells me where he lives - Marsden Road, or near it. Squatting. Says I can come see him. Abruptly leaves, leaving me feeling abandoned and judged, very curious and pleased by him. No stupidity in his features; an eyelash singed off. Disjointed conversation, like Don Tugh's parodies of conversations, but no stupidity in it either. I like the crazies in Kentish Town, wonder whether I could be one or play one, learn the manners of the crazies to make it easier to get in contact. - When Manuel, drunk, crashed into the back of another Mini at the junction, he got out of the car to speak to the other people. Maria fumed in the back seat; he, wearing the red pullover he lent me, leaned one elbow on the car's roof above the driver's head, smiled whimsically, told them in Portuguese "I only ran into you because I wanted to ask you, have you got a cigarette?" They passed him one, he lit it with a puff and amicably lit theirs. During the session with Sarah this morning, she said "But you do mind," about the non-real non-solid sad evasive nature of my 'love' life with Roy; and I nearly cried. What did she call it during one of the group meetings: hollow. Christie going on and on about Peter and fighting: aggrieved, resentful. I don't want to talk to her about it, but would like to distract her - that seems the only thing worth doing. Wish for magic - we had a picnic on the floor, after a while the sun came. She and Danny are alike in a way I don't imagine with Luke. Body loneliness grows; I can tell by the way I have conversations with Colin and Manuel. We're looking and looking for ways to live. I need inspired energy, to spark us out of our tiredness, habit, hopelessness. - Manuel embarrassed when I looked at his little prick the morning before leaving, holding his hand over it. We were wrestling, I was laughing loudly: Mafalda came in furious that Luke had escaped and broken her lamp glass. We were humiliated - Manuel by his nakedness, I by my shrill laugh - I went back and shouted at her but wanted to weep. Details are endless. - Learn discretion. - Rosalynde making me welcome, as she does. Her ritual coffee and an argument with her friend. I feel in touch with her. Remember Christie's image of a woman sitting just inside the window, in a pub; the light coming from directly behind her, she's a black form in profile. She raises her glass and "the amber liquid slipped into that black form." She moves her arm tipping the remembered glass slowly up - I can see it emptying into black, slipping in like jelly. - I'm distorted with loneliness. - Roy says he isn't well - seems so changed. Has he lost his tenderness, or only with me? - Violence, "internalized our fear of invoking male anger, and that we carry around within us - this powerlessness ... internally we're debilitated." Driving with Roy, watching him look at women, the long intense look particularly at dolly birds, sees them far ahead and follows them falling back in his mirror - I found myself irritated and aggrieved, and I said "God, but you're greedy for women." He was defensive and supercilious until I shouted, swore, pleaded, insisted, explained, trying to find my own sense and feelings: I'm flooded with anxiety, I'm irritated and furious, when he looks at a particular kind of young self-advertising woman with that mechanical greed - stupid conventional sexuality that leaves me out, denies me all rights to physical response, denies me my ambitions for my fractious self - evokes the grief of my half-spoiled sexual identity - frustrates me, what is this idiocy, even in your educated self? In my educated self, where I still want to be that walking symbol of false potency, of triviality. When I see a carefully got up man, I'm embarrassed and contemptuous. When I see an older woman with liveliness and character in her face I want to stare in admiration and pride, relief. When I look at myself reflected in shop windows my face goes stiff, and I can't tell whether there's liveliness or character in it, only that there's anxiety, city gullies under my eyes, and none of the smooth confidence of the young girl. All this is a little phony. - Luke's journal: woke up this Monday morning in Roy's dark next-door room, found his bottle and segments of an orange next to his sheep-skins bed, talked to himself until Roy went next door and got him, came jumping on the big bed, got cookies and a hard-boiled egg and milk for breakfast, lay back on Roy's arm, then mine, to drink his bottle. Got dressed in his red shoes, bell-bottom pants, striped blue and white teeshirt, had a wipe of facewash, looked long-legged and almost thin in those pants, was bourn away to the car and strapped into his seat - got to school and didn't want to let go of me but was dumped next to the plasticine and one of the nursery nurses being welcoming. After his day was fetched out of the garden - I called him and he came running, dodging the nurse who was going to bring him. Carried him out of the yard - he calls "Bye-da" - sees the blue car from far away and shouts "Huh-luh!", I put him down and let him run to Roy, with a chatty detour toward the green VW parked in front of us. We go to Caenwood, he's out on the good-smelling newly cut grass, forced into the pushchair until we get past the entrance, runs away with the pushchair, towed after it down a hill. I lie down and roll down the slope. Luke's found the coffee shop entrance, goes in and through and we find him balancing along the edge of a parapet higher than he is. Runs away again. We sit on the grass bank and watch him, laugh at the way he runs after the empty Pepsi tin, and when he catches it, tilts it back so far that he falls over onto his bottom. He tries to steal another pushchair and is chased by a mother - her purse is hanging on it. We set him onto the bigger lawn space beyond the fence and laugh at the way he runs, red shoes clipping along, a running totter, unsteady looking, but quick. A couple sitting on the grass look at him, smiling; the woman holds her head sideways, picture of sentiment. They're like fond grandparents. Makes us feel young-attractive-couple, Roy in his jeans jacket and I in my purple smock. Red kite, not interested. In the woods he begins to sing a guttural song like pigeons' coos as we push him (and stretched out his legs, squeezed his hands in concentration, as if he thought he was a car. What was he thinking?) along the leaf-moldy path smelling of wet beeches. Ducks in the shallow pond, pushing through the lily leaves (ruffled like sails) like ice-breaking ships, without ripples. Luke sat still on Roy's lap looking at them and watching a little girl; but wanting really to put his feet in. Let loose among the wet leaves he ran, tripped over a hidden branch, fell face-first into them and howled. Roy rescued him; we put him back into the chair. Outside the woods he found a single-wire fence and shook it, over and over, to watch it shine, see it jiggle all down the way, listen to it rattle. "He's tired" said Roy and a woman who'd just caught up with us said "Me too - is this the way to Caenwood House at last?" Seeing the two mobile toilets parked in a field, Luke cried "Ti! Ti!" (train) and had to go see them for himself. When I went back for him he was enchanted with one of the wheels - I dragged him off, and pushed him over the hill to find the sound of the hill's heart beat - a longhair playing his bongo drum, two people lying on their backs playing with a baby. Back into his seat - Roy and I shouting - Marine Ices, vanilla and raspberry, he got most of both - home, he tried to climb into his bed; woke up out of his daydreams when I came in to collect library books, he got excited and wouldn't sleep until after more milk, cheese bits; and then wanted me until I sat with him, held his hand (he held mine against his chest for a while) and sang him Joni Mitchell's old French song until I was breathless - then he held his blanket and went to sleep. - WL: again the rising high - talk - myself as a noisy self-confident child - shouting with Sarah about computers, how we think, pushed - talking about what sort of bodies we want - Leslie beginning to talk, when asked, about lack of confidence, her new feeling of being compromised by her clothes - how we feel when we're working well. - S d B in an interview saying she thinks her biggest success is Sartre! - Another dream a few nights ago: lying with an old woman, grey short hair, beginning carefully to touch her body, I was getting high and roused - woke up. - Such experiences as sitting on the lap, being rocked, having spontaneous fun, and receiving an unexpected gift may be associated only with the father. What is that tightness and meanness about? - Luke jumping with joy about his new plastic tractor and trailer - R took him to Woolworths to get it - he wouldn't let it go all the way out the long Ws corridors. Also a Levi's jean jacket! [notebook from two-week trip to a farmhouse in Trets in the south of France to see Madeleine Murray when her son Orlando was born.] Arriving: the porch in a cavern of vine-shade. Eugene suspicious; the big bed in the midst of the high-raftered long back room - opening shutters and windows, yellow jackets crawling inside the hinges. Outside, stubble fields, another house shuttered and isolated on the hill opposite, long, with a barn door and a dove cote. The houses face south and are closed most of the time, have strips over the kitchen door when they're inhabited. [sketch] - Hope: I find my own hope, see it again and again in what I find: Bleibtrau, Roethke, my line drawings, Madeleine, vervein in Trets, the black sky I followed with Daniel in his camion tout neuf, Orlando lying dressed in monkish bright saffron on his green blanket under knitted patchwork. Confounding what I meant by hope with what I'm simply glad for. This house, unexplored fields around it, Trets along the road: how reticent I am, can't leech myself onto them; take sidelong looks and try to remember everything. I'm shy to say that I'm glad for Madeleine; and Eugene, those two, and my native land spread like a carpet for me. Speech is allowed. I'm barely here. Dill in a row, fenouille, eight feet high, scented when crushed, lizards disappearing over the edge of the roof. Mistral insisting around the house, in the morning, the flock of dirty shorn sheet flows past the house chuckling like a stream. Orange 2CV vans, side picture windows - je m'en acheterai une, pour ma grande tente noire. The white gravel around the house, beyond it, along the ditch tall bamboo stalks with leaves like eloquent eyebrows. The cricri's; a single pine tree full of wind as a forested hilltop. Blackberries. Mulberries? Eugene saying "Those in whom magic resides." - This country is full of butterflies, that bumble into me when I'm walking; or I bumble into them. - Newborn babies do look alike - narrow eyes, swollen mouths, squinting McGooish patience. - Oh but I'm still so ashamed of myself. - Like to think that my body is colonies of cells corralled into structures by other colonies of cells, spermatozoa and egg cells are free single cells moving through highways in the configurations, leaving and entering to form other colonies that will emigrate. "When I am undone, when I am no-one." - Irish music. Cats in Trets, long-necked spotted young cats sleeping in the streets. Orlando's long thin legs. - Fairytales: we're always princess and prince. Eugene uprooting a many-branched dry plant with yellow spiked flowers, hanging it roots upward from the beam above the manorial table to be a starry-sky chandelier. Shading the lamp with branches of locust that catch light upwards. Madeleine in lilac dress, pink and gold scarf, holding Orlando in his purple jumpsuit. The box we made him, wrapping green chenille around a slatted tomato box, tucking the landau pillow into it to make a hotdog bun of it - he in it and covered with patchwork. At Puyloublier, seen in a snatch while backing up to turn round, a tall stucco house painted weathered orange frames around the windows, painted there in yellow, green shutters folded back past a maidenhair fern - like a burning bush that house. Coming home just after dark, Peynier with white lights on the hill like Provencal stars. Yesterday, a subtle, oily pizza Mad brought wrapped in white paper, tasting of thyme and pine, especially pine. Today, a jeweled Sunday afternoon fruit tart: pineapple in the centre, cherries and apricots, glazed. Orlando holding my finger, asleep. M and E propped together now listening to music on the couch. I try not to think of the terror and discord between myself and Roy the January after Luke was born, or of Mafalda coming out with her black eyes in the mornings and going back desperately again and again to wait on her daughter. - How can I carry that magic carpet home? Persian fairy stories (The Melon Child), Irish music, perfumed melons; natural graciousness. M's melon breast and Orlando's round head fuzzy like a peach. - Eugene: "I rather liked that tableau": M asleep in the white hospital gown Orlando was born in, Orlando asleep beside her, E sitting next or standing in a Goya posture playing the flute. - Waking at night: still dark but part of the sky pale blue, a brilliant star; an alarming whistle and then an increasing roar - incomprehensible - oh yes, must be a train - but it wasn't the efficient rising-falling sound of a train - a sudden roar suddenly fading - Orlando waking and crying - lonesome thoughts of myself at eighteen, remembering how little generous recognition I could get even then - waking, longing for ignition into this morning and half expecting it. My last day here. The black bagnolle crouching under châtaigniers. From the front of the house, dill's yellow flowers - beyond, morning pale blue, hills, a bank of clouds, like bloom on grape leaves. - St Flour - medieval city on a high table of rock, coming to a peak with the cathedral tower(s), walled in by the long high cliff-faces of old houses. [undated journal Poxy Luke, I stare at him whenever I undress him, plump white smooth skin, with puss-y red eruptions scattered on his back, between his thighs, on his chest, around his nose and under his eye, at the hairline - all his tenderest places. When he came to the door after I hadn't seen him for two weeks I saw: a long fat child, hair over his eyes, the silly jean jacket with tights, and his red sneakers, pale, spotty, looking at me carefully and coolly - he didn't make any sign of realizing I'd been gone, but later, and still, he was full of impulsive hugs and kisses. Roy taught him new words: "bike," and "cat." Looking for his bottle, he sings "bockle, bockle;" attacking the window, he shouts "Go way! Go way!" He says "get up," "get down"; shouts "mommy!" when he's looking for either of us. Roy bought him toys when I was away, seems to be entering Luke's childhood with little cars, a chopper tricycle with monkey bars! The plastic tractor and cart; the posting box. Delights in showing them off and defends them irritably. I love that in him. Teasing me when I was naked in the bath Luke touched my shoulder, my knee, and said "Py." What's that? In the public library he found a nursery school friend and went running and shrieking with him until we both got chased out. 29 August Nearly fucking winter again - misery - can't stop fighting with Roy - misery of being unfinished, hardly begun, floue; needing to be midwifed into life and confidence again, lonely and full of bitter love; angry, hating my body and finding it unforgivably ugly, because no one's loving it. Myself unformed, because no one's seeing and loving me. Also the misery of vacillation between puritanism and experiment. - Next day: some days I think I've come into a time of my life where suddenly I can do things: play piano for example. Eugene with his flute saying how he didn't used to believe he could do anything. - Sarah and I decided that, resolved in ourselves, that one of the reasons we're miserable in our 'ugly' bodies is no one acting toward us as bodies; no one mentions us, touches, admires, knows: we feel unappreciated. Strong advice to me: look, touch, talk, taste, give people the bodily existence they give us, give back the bodily existence they can't help giving us. My dream of walking beside Michael and fitting my shoulder under his arm, my arm up along his backbone, like two parts of something snapping together: in my dream I saw his face foxy thin and pointed. When I saw him this morning I should have stood him up and tried it. - Lying here leaning on my elbow, a heavy vibration in my body like a ship quivering. - Lying in bed remembering with anger the way Frances (at the table last night) in a crossfire conversation listened me out, then, smiling her slippery-labia smile, turned so much too quickly to Roy to ask, "What were you saying, Roy?" - Irritations: 1. little physical pains, puzzlement, what do they bode? 2. not writing like Updike (Bech: a Book). - Another day with high fast clouds. R came and took us to Caenwood slope again. Luke runs away down the hill. Stops, looks at us, we wave, turns and runs again, stops, runs - sits and meditates for a while, follows a jet with his eyes, leans backwards as it roars toward the City. Roy goes to get a peach from the car, invites him to come along. He takes my hand and invites me along too, when I don't come, he sits on me and watches Roy go - then tries to follow him, but is too far behind, and Roy disappears. He comes back and then sets out again down the path. At last Roy appears and he runs forward - in the distance I see him making a fuss until he gets what he wants, the peach. By the time he's ready to share it there's nothing left but the stone. 30 August [letter] To write you more regular letters, I've set up an office, table and chair on a bit of green carpet in a corner, a light and a picture of Saint Agee to remind me only to write well, this in the room Luke doesn't sleep in so that when he's falling asleep and I have to clear out, I'm driven to write, or else to play the piano which forms the back wall of this new office. Was in Provence, staying with Madeleine and her Irishman and her newborn little Orlando Furioso schnou-fou, cooking and eating together, drinking wine after supper and in the shady afternoons, singing with Eugene's jazz records, being the glowing expert on new babbies and saving them from all panic and disaster by my wise presence, getting loved little by little and getting loving, talking and talking with two people who are interested in everything, fellowship; London is lonely without them. When I got back, eager to see Luke, he arrive at the door like a strange child, long, fat, hair over his bushy eyebrows, poxy, looking at me coolly over the jacket of his funny Levi's jacket. No sign of being glad to see me, but since then, for days now, he comes often to give me hugs and kisses, fleet and sweet, he likes me better for knowing that I'm not part of him. Me too, I like him better. Full of new words; bike, cat, dog, look, book, bockle, get out, door, get up, get down, get in, get out. And go way, go way! which he murmurs to himself when he thinks of something bad. Full of humor, very subtle, makes jokes with his eyes. He calls both Roy and me Mummy, we'll both do. Roy's well, sane, sober, capable, moderately good tempered, working on his rooms at the commune (one of them is Luke's, white, purple, green and yellow with a window over the garden and the Hackney chimneypots), and intermittently learning carpentry from Pooh. We're trying to wean ourselves of each other, with much confusion and some very nice backsliding, like this morning when R came to take us for coffee and croissants to the Heath. I'm finding it ironic that people who try to stay together seem to succeed in separating much better than we do. When I say I'm grateful for Luke, and you say to whom am I grateful, sounds like a Fatherly question mined with a moral conclusion of your own. To whom? To my own good sense and bad sense and energy, which is to say, partly to you. To Roy's tenderness and foolishness which is to say partly to Catherine. To the British state for National Health Service and nursery schools, to the Canadian Federation of University Women without whose kind assistance this baby would never have been possible, to the streams of molecular energy the world lent me for making his babyshape, yes, yes, and to the mysterious order that flowing through and around us creates and sustains us and gives us excitement. No, I haven't lost the impulse to be grateful, to praise, and sometimes I embarrassedly say prayers that begin "Dear Cosmos, thank you for ... and bless ... and and help me to be more wonderful than I am." It seems a good impulse to me. Satisfied? Good you told me about Judy and Akasha and Michael, Michael in his way seems to be a good patriarchal father, husband I meant to say, to her, and she's good at loving kindness, diligence. I like to think of that, and contrary to what she thinks, I do think of them very faithfully. I think she's found her way. I want you to see my house and meet my friends too. My white sparkling house full of primary colors, my bean climbing the length of my front windows and now going on up to the second storey, blossoming orange blossoms at the top and bearing five inch beans at the bottom. My plants expanding with green good spirits, and in the garden, nasturtiums herbs strawberries self-seeded tomatoes and welcome weeds are making beautiful patterns. The beautiful rugs I brought from Portugal, the piles of books I'm working on all at once, Luke asleep in his blue bed, among his climbing boxes, his jumping mats, his tractors and his telephone, his two rabbits, dog, teddybear, three hedgehogs and one flowering hippo Olivia made him, and my beautiful sewing machine and the antique sewing basket given me by the upstairs neighbour when she was going to throw it out, and my pots, and the green bottles and rust-sculptures, and all and all. I'm happy here and Luke's happy here, and when we're not we jump on the bicycle and go to the Heath to look at dogs, ducks and kites. Winter go way! Do you like this new system with the office? I'm learning to play piano out of the old Mennonite hymn book, floods of memories. Did I tell you about my friend Polly who, when I was at her house doing photographs of her sculptures, said "I think you're the other person I know who likes their mother"? 5 September [letter] You always sound as if you think the young Ellie was something special and the aging twenty seven year old a disappointing betrayal of promise - I didn't set out to say that, because I was going to say that it was nice to have you revive her - but it slipped out because I liked her too and sometimes betray myself into comparison with her; but in the end that is a sentimental indulgence, because she was no more promising than I am, and if I'm disappointing it is because of her limitations as much as mine, the ingenuous little farm girl that she was ... maybe I'm really a big improvement on her, and maybe it's her accessibility to you, consequently your preference for her, that makes me sometimes doubt my present me where instead I should much more confidently pursue my - and her - direction, bent. And thereby, inevitably, become even less accessible to you. The Puritan and the taster in me, the ingenue and the brassy experienced
worldly woman, sometimes the conflict feels like a conflict with you - this
is obscure, I know, something I was beginning to feel my way into understanding
while talking with my friend Sarah the other day when we had a session.
Nevertheless, yes, it's good to keep the conflict and the ingenue even though
one of the reasons I don't sometimes like to write to you is that I don't
like the silly tone of ingenuous voice I used to adopt with you. What it
would take for us to become friends enough to write (ie for me to write)
spontaneous and eager letters ah, maybe some painful fighting. I don't begin
to know. Anyway, here's a kiss on the back of your neck and an icky one
from Luke and a naughty twinkle from Roy, and aren't you glad, really, somewhere,
that you don't have us in yr pocket doing what everybody's children do predictably
as rain.
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