| london volume 4 part 6 - 1972 november-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated journal] [John is in Ireland on business and flies me there for a weekend.] In Ireland the light always changing, wind, sun, hail, cold rain, rainbows, snow whirling out of tunnels in the headlights, for almost three days we were together, what can I catch. Going to the airport in the BEA bus, just after sunset high on elevated motorways, past railways, terraces (those studios with high front windows), theatres, in a front seat on the top of the bus, leaning forward to look at sky and skyline - shapes, listening to two Irish businessmen across the aisle talking about the Company. Extraordinary trip - like visuals and soundtrack of an underground film, soft nearly ecstatic counterpoint. Being driven rapidly and unhesitatingly through the labyrinths of Heathrow to arrive next to the little Trident we were to fly - The moment the airplane turns and crouches, and then springs forward, leaps into the air, everything falls away, wonderful geometric root-systems traced in blue, orange, yellow lights, beautiful patterns like cell structures, like branches; cities, towns, roundabouts as plants or skeletons of dead leaves or - Pressed against the small window with my coat over my head to keep out reflections on the glass I tried to throw myself into the sky beside the airlock lightlock airplane - sit motionless with the stars, and the lights below running past and down the earth's sloping shoulder like constellations in a far galaxy. Liverpool at the edge of the universe, complex border, the dockland into black invisibility - clouds brown black and velvety like soot - soon Belfast airport - John in blue brocade tie and suave raincoat, hair flattened but smiling - I'm free to jump up and down and say "Ooo I didn't want to come down." We have a car - head west in the cold - as if we've arranged to give each other a lift on our way to a business meeting - talk about work, drive in silence. Come to Enniskillen and stop at a hotel, where our luggage - my frayed canvas bag - is searched by a bellboy in the foyer. Green carpets, unreality of bad food in a pretentious dining room, tea and coffee we didn't really want brought into the room - he lies on top of me and says "You look as if you're thinking what am I doing in this hotel." "And with a businessman lying on top of me." Dances up and down tearing his clothes off, there's his strangely proportioned strong spotty body, only his feet are narrow and elegant, otherwise he's a bull with a low centre of gravity, made for pushing and pulling - inevitably, guiltily, I think of Roy, light on his stilt legs as if his long bones are hollow; his weightless step and his strange square hands. We get into bed - I stop him and turn away and then have to explain. He says "I'm beginning to understand, you like to control things," and I guiltily insist that if I go on when I am not ready I fly far away and am lost and full of desolation, so I must begin again. "Talk to me." The bath that smells of peat, brown water. Driving, sun's there, we stop, walk down a path, there's a reservoir, canal, some square pool overhung by a chestnut with some yellow leaves still on it, shining orange and yellow into the depths of the pool, beautiful. John dances down to greet the muddy tea-colored rapids of a flooding river, I find a double avenue of spruce trees sheltering a path through to the abbey. I love the formality of the place, trees leading me through a still place beside the river, like a long gateway to the slight rise and then the ruined Franciscan abbey, a wonder of details, marvels at every scale, new graves in the green grass inside the walls, a holy priest's grave disturbed by people coming to dig a little of its healing clay and leaving spoons, a tangle of rusting rosaries, toys, a Dispirin bottle half-full of holy water. Along one of the cloister walls I find a capital with the light vein-markings on the stone of a now-disappeared stem of ivy, the most wonderful thing there. I love the abbey, the rain and sun mixed, the amateurish crooked stone window frames like rough forms that never meant to have glass, the woman's head rainspout, her crying mouth open in her little knobby head, towers, stairs, stones whose cutting marks remain, wonderful presence as a ruin - two rough carvings inside one of the cloister arches, he's in a pulpit like a laundry basket preaching to birds sitting in formal alternation on pegs stuck into a pole. The ground level is so high inside the cloister walls that it seems the monks were Pictish people only four feet tall - there's a cloister aisle, high wall on one side, row of arches on the other, with a set of steps and a low wall visible at the end, all carpeted in tidy green wet grass, all the stones shining with wet, made me think of the palace at Knossos, something undescribably old - ancient - formally perfect, thrilling about it. An aisle, a wall, steps, space formed in a shallow pattern under rainy windy sunny sky, all completely clean, sparkling wet - what is it? Didn't want to leave. Went on in silence through sky getting dark - shopping in Sligo, an old delicatessen with a slingshot system of overhead wiring for sending cash to the cashier and change back to the counter - a house at the end of a lane we turned into, colours very wintry orange black and white, late afternoon a low black cloud with the sun blowing through it, one dim spotlight, turned everything black and white, me crying "I've never seen anything like it!" In Sligo a cake shop with crudely decorated revolting but touchingly homemade cakes, thick coloured icing and crooked trimming. Colours: blue, black, white barn. At Enniskillen, at the border, humps on the roadway, the Sunflower Dance Hall with a hole blown through the roof. A tank blocking one of the roads coming off a bridge. Somewhere in the south, painted on a wall, "God bless the IRA." Green turf, when we get further west, choosing to go to the sea first north and then south of Sligo, snow on the round mountains. At the sea, a dock, gulls screeching over a stream coming in from the land - tall thick waves; I found stones - the sea changed colour, green, grey, mauve. We ate bread and cheese - drove some more - I can't watch it all, it's faded like dreams - a coast road - sometimes I disappeared, stupefied by the car. It grew dark, we looked for a hotel, followed a road to the well-lit big house beside a lake and found a convent school. At Clifden, found another convent school, shadow of a tall Virgin in the upstairs window; and an empty resort hotel with a peat fire, a narrow bed where we fell asleep in each other's arms with all our clothes on. In the morning we couldn't resist each other, my body was hungry, and when they called us to breakfast at 10 Mr and Mrs Rowley were still luxuriating in their pleasant bed - Not far out of Clifden - the Sky Road - and on the next road looping up to the sea and back, many small houses on rock and turf running with rainwater, no trees. I saw a long shed first, three sheds joined with a yellow thatch on the middle section: white, black, yellow and blue-grey sky; then the house, same long low battered white sort of building, but with a good slate roof, three chimneys, three windows covered with dirty rags, and a green door peeled to uncover beautiful complexities of flaking greens. Grass shaved completely neat and flat white outcrops of rock, this beautiful house broadside to the road beyond a stone wall, a flooding stream crossed by a wall. A rectangle of moist black bits where the peat had been stacked; empty house. I ran across and danced on the rock shelves behind - two more small windows - stepping down gently, with grass terraces, down to the sea and a small curve of sandy beach. Stone walls, the shed and the house and grass - literally all there was to the place, other than two bent shrubs and a few old kettles thrown out the door. Perfect clean bare holy place, I felt that I already owned it. We stood on the rocks and called Luke, against the window, to come in and eat - that boy, out in his boat again - we peered through windows, saw a teacup, a hearth, a bench and a chair, rattled the door, latched only with a nail but firmly shut, and walking away I saw my reflection on the glass, no, a man scratching his head. Someone. We stared, eventually he crossed the window again. We were ashamed and disappointed, got into the car and drove away after a long time. I kept on wanting to turn around and limply look at it some more, it was my house, Londoners Buying out the Peasantry - but I lost it and almost disliked John because he was driving me away. "Give me a kiss" he said. "No, I want to kiss the house." Drove through the Twelve Bens, orange grass, loughs, round snowy mountains, turf veins in the peat hillsides, black shiny walls 5 spades deep and the shining piles with expertly rounded roofs. Donkeys by the road. Cold and rain. Going back toward Belfast. Lunch beside a calm sea, a broken square tower, froth like jelly pudding, rain, we ate and then in spite of the cold sat knee to knee and talked about not making contact very often. (On the way from the airport, when I was stroking his neck, in the dark, above his stiff collar, he said "You've almost made me cry." We're careful with each other still.) Got dark early, he drove very fast, sometimes I held his thigh, sometimes kept my hand on his shoulder bone feeling the round muscle move under his silky sweater, loving that. Got to his hotel up a narrow road to a shelf above the sea, the old house and we in the bridal suite, confetti under the bed, that might have been the nanny's room, going to bed with stars outside the long windows, beautiful warm strong fucking and going to sleep both softened and laid out together, our two sets of satisfied bones peaceful with each other, sinking into - morning - and in the long window, like a scroll, sky and sea, only two bands of variegated colour, silver blue mauve grey white pure simple morning scroll, sunlight from the end. Driving north, in the next village, a bridge over a weir, a long fortified wall with chestnuts hanging over it, ravens and smaller birds black in their black branches; opposite, gardens coming down to a low wall, a clear cold sunlight, a man with his pipe smoking, a bonfire smoking a few gardens down, and chimneys smoking beyond that, smoke all blown at the same near horizontal angle. Bliss. Again I didn't want to go. John went and sat in the car. His lime burner's house at the end of a valley. The airport, eating farewell lunch with him, sharing one meal won from the waitress by laughter. My bag full of stones, bottle of wine in my pocket. John in his disguise again but slightly less with the black sweater under the suit. Icy white cloud towers lined in gleaming ridges along our flight path - clouds scattered over the sky like ice in an Arctic landscape, clear brilliant world we skated through, 640 mph, at 25,000 feet - Irish youth coming into London for the first time, looking at the terraced squares, "You could commit a morder and I don't know how they'd find you in there." When I'd gone to sleep, John on the telephone saying he'd been good for nothing but thinking of me all that day, I freezing and asleep unable to speak. - Today - strange strong pots ripped up out of soft clay [sketches] and one with a rippled neck, two pouring spout handles. Speaking to Sarah about Dee, and realizing my excuse that's hers: not to grapple with her because she needs a man - avoid her, choosing to let her avoid, ignore me. Revelation. Rosalynde after her operation, big eyes, thin thin arms, full of cheerful life. Realize that I've got friends who're glad of me, when I want. Jessica's earrings she's made me. - "A shudder which ran from the roots of my hair to the marrow of my bones;" listening, me too: I haven't enough time in my life for all there is. "Philip Chandos" in The Letter of Lord Chandos, Hugo von Hofmanstall, read on BBC, Boulez concert intermission Nov 16. - This awful Sunday, sitting bored together in bed farting reading newspapers until I couldn't bear to look at him, standing there in his clothes, double chin, shaped like a grotesque clothed fish in stupefied misery, me filled with impatience, hypocrisy, even now with hatred and rage that was only dissolved by working for a while, and has now come back with the telephone call I made to see if I could make peace. I get filled with loathing for his body, his language, his farting false torpor and his obsequiousness. I'm acid and I nag - familiar guiltstricken ashamed hatred, contempt, pressed hard down so that I don't feel what I feel until recollecting it. I'm ashamed. I was ashamed of that hard stupid fuck this morning and all the impatient hanging about later. Maybe I did realize that I could kill it for myself by not sending him away. Confessing to him how much I'd hated the day and his saying the same wasn't absolution because I couldn't say enough, what I said above, I can't say the worst and that means I can't be clear - hate the way he says "fucking hell," hate hate his double chin, despise the way he mirrors me his mediocrity. Roy hovers as he did with Colin, evoking the free body and lithe comings and goings and aristocratic severity that make ordinary people seem lumps of shit; what is this huge anger? - Does Roy have such fits of nausea at people he's involved? Is this how he felt about me? I search for that parallel, try to be and not to be Roy, try to make good my old sad gift of myself. Remember feeling this way with my mother, with Katrin; hard to accept contempt, let it go - but impossible to choke it down. Luke - at least you. But I think of Doris Lessing's tone with her son. - And following from that, telephoning Roy wanting a good word with him feeling all this has something to do with him; love. He says "I think we could get on very well, maybe in a year's time; we have the wrong games between us ... yours are very different from mine; mine are aloof and vigilant, and that's not fun for me." I was talking about rage at their mediocrity and mine. He said "When I'm not being rational, it's my mediocrity, and when I'm being rational, it's their's." I say, "But you were rather a special case." He quickly says "I'm not such a special ..." and I say "For me, you were rather a special case, are a special case." "I guess you were for me too." We talk a little more and when he says "All right I'll ..." and we hang up I want to cry, and now I'm glad and feel I've done something I needed to do. How important he is to me because I could never despise him bodily - picking his anus, farting, soaked in the bathtub, drunk and silly, somebody royal - his childhood, or the mythos of his childhood, hovering with mine. He's Roy, and given time yes I still want him, something with him. His existence still makes me feel I'd have to catch up, but not overtake - totally other that he is. - Turned out the light last night to a fantasy about a film I could make, from now through the next three or four years, about pregnancy, but not underground-ecstatic, much more bitter and lonely, with Luke in it: stealing a child, stolen child. The stone babies, the ovarian cysts, the cutting a head off (obstetrics text page), old wive's tales, its heartbeat, hatching a little death, the daphnia with babies swimming in, my slides with suspenders, notes on development - about half hour or longer if I can get money, get the birth, the quiet preceding it, details of the newborn body, other women's talk (Ida about her little baby), the baby growing - work out a sequence where it gets up, speculations on my own beginning; mysteries, decrepit bodies. Collage, with the continuous secret growth as theme. Ethnographic museum's embryos lighting up. Cell theory, get a picture of fertilization from stock-shots if poss. Some dreams, the smiling wise child like star child. Text, spoken and handwritten, read from books, my mother's young face, wearing apron high. - Hattori on Tuesday bursting out "I'm not pleased with your pots, I'm very disappointed with your pots." My hands fluttered to pick up my one pot I like so much, I carried it out of the room and then went desolately down to the toilet, a few tears, angry words about never coming back to her class, smashing all my pots; went upstairs and couldn't go into her room, aimlessly circled to the sink, Doreen kindly said "Is this yours? It's very nice" (plate), and tearful again I couldn't say anything, stowed the plate in my locker, went back down to the toilet, cried some more. Hattori came in, paused at the door to look at me, said "Oh, you shouldn't be so upset," folded me against her warm soft nice smelling big body, said "I'm very sorry I spoke so sharply to you, I'm in a lot of pain with my sinuses this morning, you shouldn't be so upset," and I hugged her back embarrassed and glad, the anger and paralysis gone. But something - realizing my amateurishness with pots, Paul's presence reminding me. [My brother Paul and his pregnant wife Mimi visiting on their way home from Sweden where he'd been apprenticed to a noted wood craftsman.] Luke on his way to school: at the railway bridge we stop and I sit on the top step, he sits on my lap, patiently we wait for a train; when it comes I toss him up onto my shoulders and he cries out in delight to see the engine appear. I set him to look in my pocket; when he saw the brown grocer's bag there he was enchanted. I'm loving him so much. Haunting evocation of Father's half-finished sloppy projects: the idea is enough. "His mother fancied him." - Good things: my magic carpet [an embroidered Kurdish rug, pinks and reds] and the fire [a new silver Pither coal stove], candles, pots, flowers, tea and cake, the morning Saturday spent making bread and chicken soup, cleaning, playing with Luke, washing my hair and ironing my [orange] dungarees, preparing for this evening's celebration with Greg, John, Paul and Mimi. Luke: today for the first time he said "I love you" after me - I sat holding him bare-bummed on my lap this morning, in front of the fire; he took my hand and pressed it back against his thigh. Clear feelings. With Paul he plays shrieking monster games; with John he snuggles and flirts. Me he protects - when I didn't want soup he insisted to Paul "Is Mummy" to say I'd been left out; Paul says laconically, "Will you explain to him that you don't want any." Mimi's other-landish clear face. Paul's chair. John silent and watchful on my carpet; I just wanted to touch him. Greg's delighted giggles and "ridiculous intensity". At Mary's party, news of Marilyn: in Toronto working for pollution control, going to Kingston to clean and bake on weekends, not really making it with David. Joan better, editing with David Helwig. Jenny fifteen; John fatter than ever, wittier and brighter, not going to school much! On the way home across the Heath - gritty whisper of bicycle tires on asphalt; a few bright stars and sweeps of high cloud; black clear horizon line with a few trees along it; pickets sliding along each other on rows of fences, sharp lines of yellow light on the pond. Facades simplified in orange light past Highgate Road, and the steeple of St Anne's standing up white; black large space, the monolith clear on its brow of hill: all sorts of magical elements: the monolith, the lit face of a white house just beyond the second pond, that spine of the Fields with its clear curves, the holy grove around the mound, the bum perhaps sleeping under a bench, the obscure round cornered paths crossing and dividing the Heath, a glimmer of white goalposts, the redness of the lower sky, the scarcity of stars,
the high terraces reduced to so small, the village at the hill's foot all reduced to so small - and from the other direction, the leaf-muffled rolling whistling descent into the city from the top of the hill, sinking toward the lights, crossing through the no man's flatland around the Lido, and into curbs, cars, quickly home - Luke's disarranged, was he crying? I continue to think about the stern discipline I need to invent for parties. Mary thin-faced and stooped, her three daughters, her husband stooped as well, flat-assed, hairy with old eyes: Joan's friend Tony. Standing in Mary's kitchen, after talking to Robin Wood's lady, I felt: Luke should be protected from this edgy world of unhappy marriages, nervous desperate groupings. Partly he protects himself, but I'll have to feel out well the kind of custom and ceremony I can make, being a good mother and father, staying straight, feeling real to him. - Mimi's clear flushed skin, smoky hair, incongruous matronly shape below the delicacy of that face. Paul sitting on the edge of my bed, legs stretched out in their new Spanish boots, hair slightly parted and eyes, smile, bright with - beer in the pub? He's entered the man's world of contacts among those who share work identities, the men's club - Mimi swarms herself at him. Madeleine - about whom I can't say much because she's likely - or, I feel her likely - to find me out; guested under the dream-world creatures of my Kurdish rug; bangles, rings, jingly belt laid like propitiations on the desk; a slight perfume when I come into the room, seeps out of her clothes when we're out. We evoke Marianne, enters my mythology as well. She gives herself always a carefully female shape; I make myself shapeless, say little, go away. She fills her space with idle words, irritating, flabby, playful loose and baroque, strokes of imagination like cats' paws, ffffuttt - "I hate austerity" - and all unsuspected austerities ("I hate that word 'masturbate,' that's the first time I've ever used it") among the flatteries and faux naivetés. I sound like Peter self consciously writing about me: there's my absolution, easy. No. Always one step back. Pottery - throwing together recklessly thrown soft mucky pots to make a funny cell-creature, a man-eater with many mouths. The trouble in thrown pots is that the soft mucky voluptuous look of a fresh wet pot is all wrong when it's made stone - is that why the Chinese invented shiny deep liquid glazes, but it isn't the same: what would be? Sand blast velvet finish? - And John in the dark: I'm not v romantic any more, but that old connection that still seems so rare, surprising: bawdy tickle of his prick after he'd come, slow and nice, silky. - Roy calls on the telephone to say that his eye where Jud scratched him when he tried to break down the door was dark when the doctor took off the bandages; I say "It must be terrifying because your eye is so much where you are," I'm distracted for a moment and come back to hear him weeping. Madeleine reading Time Out feeling life coming full of possibilities again flickers over to kiss my neck. Bach: Jauchzet Gott in Allen Ländern. Katrin's coming tomorrow. Balancing: I'm both young and old; fluid and shy; potent and keen; relaxed and cool. Absent-minded: forgot my bicycle outside the post office and cried to everyone that it had been stolen. John's mouth smelled of crap last night, or his moustache. - Soundtrack: in this front room, sound of car motors and the fearful roar of fire in the stove, perhaps the chimney, confounding themselves. - Proposal to the Canada Council [for a PhD fellowship]: what my research interest is / why I'm interested / what original contribution to knowledge / what stage I've reached / what I'll do next / and then: I'm interested in research. My self is attracted to, collects, gathers together, concepts that strike me, ring me; my way of finding them is haphazard by academic standards but faithfully organic by my own - it trusts to my own structure to seek out what is relevant to myself. What happens then is this: I lay them next to each other, like a montage of attractions, hoping that they illuminate each other, and they do. That's the poetic approach. The poetics of research. By illuminate I mean: they excite me; by excite me I mean ---? What happens after that? Where I study around for a discipline, which could be letting them argue with each other, supplement - I cast into my mind for my own metaphors, families of images which 'are' meanings, which are knowledge and original - ie originating from the union of my real researched-out self and the world's history of thinking and perception. Keep in correspondences, so that it can be something new and lively to whoever reads it. Another discipline, of faithfully questioning my own and others' romanticism, finding it out, justifying it. Stages of attraction, elaboration, connection, criticisms, reaffirmation. Other discipline - remembering the Western etc context of all this by setting against it Marxist, 'Eastern', and? In film studying my particular interest is not historical, not critical particularly, not social criticism or sociology, not semiological in the sense of pure grammar, but more or less poetic - ie I'm interested in magic moments, ecstasy, joy and how they are conveyed. Also simply in their existence. Interested in the process of the world giving itself meaning through me. Interested in metaphor, 'subtle interrelatedness,' the kinds of perception which have been called poetic, the sorts of poetry (poesis), working, that film makes possible in its multidimensionality. The three areas that have clumped: dreams, poems, and the consciousness metaphor - don't know what I could call them all in one title. Got to do with illuminating things, putting a spotlight on them, watching them by comparing them; got to do with theoretical excitement about film's being able to do this in another way, got to do with slightly mistrusting this excitement as bad faith and overhopefulness. Two levels, theory and practice. Interested because it fits my multidisciplinary temperament and background; excites me; it corresponds to my interests in real life, it's part of my continuing thoughts about what I make for myself, speculations on the process of making and of educating myself. I think I can teach, I think a teacher needs a sense of the relevance of what she does to her own and other's only lives. I'm trying to become somebody; that's original. In your terms however, I'm looking into a field of film that's been a specialized area of propagandist journalism (Film Culture in New York for instance), film studies has usually been approached from dramatic and novelistic conventions of criticism while trying to stay very aware of the difference in medium. I've done some of the groundwork during diploma days, finding out what I was interested in - can't stop being inhabited by the voice selected so conventionally for that application form - finding an approach and voice style of my own in regard to the study of films. More specifically: am engaged this year, in . Next year, want to continue detailed reading of French, American, British experimental films, discussions, possibly conducting a seminar for other film and painting students at the Slade. After that, want to bring it all together. - Impossible to be other than the official language they ask for. What do I really want - to learn to be inventive and funny from moment to moment, unliteral, present; to keep Luke full of bubbles (Mad to Luke in the bathtub, "All those bubbles, it's like sitting in a wine glass") and unsocialized; to create a little infrequent good true kind bond, line, with Roy, for all our lives; to be skilled and admired; to know how to be skillfully intimate (smell of Christmas tree - went out with Katrin last night in the dark to the street corner where the greengrocer's light shone on the van whose doors were open to let out Christmas trees - we held them at arm's length by their tips to see how they were - one, next to the van, short and very thick spreading skirts like wings, I put it on Luke's crocheted blanket and spread oranges and tangerines, Luke's hippo, teddy bear, rabbit, dog, hedgehog underneath it, his tractors, lorries and cars in a row, and my Irish stones. The white spine bone on its long tip stretching tall and alone out of its bushy body, four pink chrysanthemums blooming out of the lower branches. Paul, Mimi, Katrin and I sat at intervals around the fire, I read the Winter Animals section from Walden; Paul read Memories of a Welsh Christmas, Thomas. I was Mother reading aloud to us. Bought Luke a London Transport postcard of a train, red antique tube train; he has shown it to everyone; has it in bed. The fireplace, white. Brick arch, tin chimney-stop, silver stove, orange fire, white and black diamond tiles, yellow border, black border, white floor, red, white, blue rugs. I love my house; Luke ardent little person, "Gim'me SOME;" this morning I loved seedy grey-faced unshaven soft-eyed Roy. His wildness like death the insecurity that makes life happy and urgent. Mostly what I love in my house is colors. There's the red Japanese bamboo wind chime hung together with the two brass sheep bells and the white shell chimes. There's the avocado and the fern on white next to the square of blue on the wall. - Trouble with Roy these days - I said, about to say: trouble with John these days - guilty and stupefied I no longer post my excitement to him through the letterbox. On Sunday we made love on Philip's bed, awkwardly - he's lost confidence too - I touched myself instead of his doing it, and that felt wrong and in the end didn't work, and I got up to finish it in the bathroom, then came back and got dressed, sat not wanting to kill an hour and a half with him before the film began, wanting to go away, reached for the Roethke and opened it, could only find bits about grieving love, began to cry, for "Roy," and got up, went home, and felt lighter and honester free out on the bicycle. Don't love him; remember how I loved Greg for two years and found him wonderful, and wasn't choked by my ambivalences as I am now (the shape of J's mouth kissing me revolted me); can't tell whether my revolt is defensive or simple aesthetic scruple: I'm lonely and know that in him there's someone who, disarmed, is a true tasty person. I taste myself as Roy, lonely and affectionate but not disarmed enough, not gathered together in willing steady love. John's all right, he's proud. And kind. - But: thinking about skill and work, thinking about the lonely shrinking of ego that needs a confidence, had better soon start my life's work, as if I hadn't - but need to sharpen myself on something difficult. Winter, not wanting to go out at night, shutting down, becoming silent when I work with my pots. - Authority, quiet; centred, but what? Reduced to so plain. Wanting very little of John, wanting him little. Guilty, doubtful. Feeling for work. Feeling changes in time, feeling my maturity. Now. It's time. Thinking of the kinds of alert energy I've lost: vanity? Hunger for a man. Self consciousness. Luke's coughs explode him. - Last night in paid [?] from Jud displaying her power with Roy, fished out John to go to dinner, quickly drank a bottle of Nuit St Georges, moaned about how if Roy were five foot four and plump he'd be nobody; back to John's orange bed to quickly lie down, crisp, defiantly black, cold and laughing, a little drunk. In the morning we got into the car and drove through bleached damp England, 24th of December, to the Cotswolds where for the first time something - a stone barn, a valley with a faint church tower - made me happy so that I felt a little alive again, and then John's square farmhouse penned in by dripping shrubs, back door into red-tiled kitchen that smelled of childhood kitchens, big bare space and a freckled setter that looked like a questing beast thumping itself joyfully across the floor. Father with a square bald bright face, black eyes, and [writing interrupted] Some old news. [undated letter] The new handsome tall stove that warms our long upstairs room where Luke sleeps now, and makes a firelit cave of it when we turn the lights off. Filling it with coal, taking out ashes, tending the fire, they all make me feel I'm the mummy-daddy in this house, I'm grown up now. Luke and I sit, I on a cushion and he in the armchair made by my legs, looking at his books; and in the morning he has his bathtub set up in front of it to wash off the night's pee; delicately boned little smooth body that I so much like looking at. When he's asleep I, or I and friends, lie in front of it reading or talking, or necking. When Paul and Mimi were here they came up in the morning from the cold big bed downstairs, sat in front of it and drank hot milk in front of it; at night we assembled there again, when we'd all come back from our excursions into the City. Paul and I talking about pots and wood were watched over by the beautiful stool he made in Sweden, like a sculpture and full of authority. Paul looks good, handsome, strong and very elegant. Has hope in his work. Mimi is good to him. Her thin white face and ringed pale eyes on her stalk of a neck: and under that her matronly broad body like a tulip bulb - Christmas began when they came; my friend Madeleine came with her little baby Orlando, stayed upstairs with me; then Katrin came from Switzerland and stayed between the stove and the tree - a beautiful wide sweeping tree with a strong smell of pine. Then it was Luke's birthday and he had a party at Roy's commune - lots of children and Lauderick. And then it was Christmas, and then it was late presents - a month of presents for Luke. From you he got a pair of orange bell-bottomed pants and a little train. From his Grandma a warm coat.
london volume 5
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