| london volume 5 part 1 - 1972-73 december-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[Boots diary] 29 December Friday [We] land in Tangier, dark, desert, woman in a sheet caught in headlights, Medina, Pension Kasbah. 30 Saturday Le grand et le petit souk, the charcoal market and cemetery, train, Marrakech Express?, sunset, transfer to branch line, third class wagon to Meknes, Hotel Regina. The song from the minaret. [small travel notebook] A white dog sitting quietly on the edge of a planted eucalyptus forest. Train sounds like a storm, howling wind over beating of wheels. Get the train flash ahead to silhouette of man holding donkey elegantly by a halter, pan falling back with it. - Silver, leafless trees, planted two by two over the stream that pours down hills' contours between red fields. [Boots diary] 31st Sunday Meknes, moved to neighbouring hotel. The market. Habiba and the medicine man. The royal golf course, gazelles, orange grove, high mud walls. 1st January 1973 Meknes. Back to the medicine man. Kenifra, red mud village. Walking through muddy streets, Christmas trees, cold hotel, heads next to the corridor. 2nd Tuesday 5 a.m. bus from Kenifra to Beni Mellal, over Moyen Atlas. Black sky with stars to the ground, sickle moon. Couldn't look at J. Bus from Beni Mellel 10 a.m.? to Marrakech, red walls. Hotel de France. Lunch in balcony. Sank into the souk for the first time. Got a little casserole. Wooden spoons. Sunrise outside walls. Met Mustafa, walked into souk streets and came to carpets, beautiful little one on the corner, Jouti Mohammed and the carpet from Taznakt gold, purple, green. [notebook] Everything in this relationship is brought together by the carpet story - all the signs - full of superstition - touching you raw - everything in Morocco, everything we feebly are in relation to in the unknown people who made it.
We came across, threw down one I didn't like, then he opened up one, Mafastu began to open the end. I said "Look, look at this one, look," and it opened, faded yellow soiyeux ancien Berbère. Women from Taznakt - "C'est pas la jaune, c'est plutôt la combinaison jaune-orange" - sat on it, felt the silky wool - a pattern in light green almost gone - medallions and belts and ceinture, le cadre, un mauve foncé, des jaunes, des oranges - the intelligence and passion of Jouti Mohammed talking about why there's no prix fixe - "une question de contact, on s'assoit, on boit du thé sur le tapis pour apporter le bonheur, on discute le prix, on se renseigne sur le sens du dessin, on dit, c'est beau, celui-là; il n'est pas mauvais; il est un peu usagé. On parle de la région d'ou il est et des gens qui l'ont fait. Je voudrais connaitre ces gens, mais c'est impossible, ils sont tous morts."
He [John] politely says explain it to him, it's important for him to know. I say "Si on boit un peu du thé?" Everybody laughs, he goes and calls to someone, later the metal holder with four clean glasses of green mint tea, a wooden table is set out, he gives himself and John a folded carpet to sit on, he says I'm alright as I am? with a laugh. Sitting next to a pillar, a wonder, Mafistu sitting with the carpet up to his knees drinking his mint tea slowly as he drank his café au lait. Making the deal: I say I'm tout timide, je ne veux pas faire des bêtises à coté de ce tapis. [John and I both wanted the exquisite tapis soiyeux de Taznakt so we flipped for it and I won.] [Boots diary] 4th Thursday Violent dreams: the blood suckers, the car, the house. Marché de la Porte Rouge with Mustafa, bought pots, herbs. Shouted with J outside the post office. Sat on red hill looking at city and mountains. Mustafa's beautiful gesture saying goodbye to John. 5th Friday Dream about mother and her lover. Bus to Ghmat, long walk. Breakfast petit pain. River. Village, bread and oil, eggs. Djellabas. Les ânes qui faisent l'amour. The olive grove, light, man with a tangerine. Buying prunes, high among vegetables: "Je crois que le boneur a fait des belles coleurs." 6th Saturday Woke to a dream about Roy. Back to find John a carpet, the carpet sellers across the road. Mustafa revealed and hurt. Lunch. Funeral. Women and children washing clothes. Buying prunes and ambers. Last sickle moon by minaret. 7 Sunday Sunrise in open place. Airport. Casa Blanca. Tangier. Malaga. Madrid. 8 Monday Sleep in airport. Peter. Foam of clouds. Luke ill. 9 Tuesday Dream about wandering through overgrown house = Grandma's and our old one - church, cypress on hillside. Waking with J, indifference settling between us, I ordering my house, plants with pebbles and water to see if they'll recover. Moroccan coffee very strong, spicy. The balls of amber, and the beautiful big one was for me! Wearing awkward layers in bright colors. Luke spotty but happy playing with John; back to sleep early, John sitting writing recollections, looking good in blue jeans, denim shirt, my furry vest, hair curly, eyes sparkling, chin thin; cooked lunch late, silently ate, sent home by mutual agreement / the ecstatic letter to Rosemary opening interesting doors - read whole book on Moroccan history, love my fire, rugs, Luke, plants, pots set up, home / alone. [journal] A dead chameleon lay on the road, squashed by a passing car. The skin was exactly the colour of the road, making the little creature look like an unevenness in the road surface. Robin Bryans in Morocco their sacred blood dance was powerful in driving djinns away ... manifested themselves in any form, as a stone or a river, as a storm or an animal ... powerful in women and caused many female diseases. - J: energy in that taproot body; yesterday his face shone and took on the shape of a young boy's, so that when he turned his face and his chin folded together I was surprised to remember begin to notice how he builds my dependence little by little - sexual pleasure, the pleasure in my own play with him, the level exchanges we have, words that are allowed, all his bright unsolicited flatteries, his quick feelings, tears, leaps, flattering laughter. When we lay on the bed in Marrakech and he exploded into sobs because, he said, he loved me. I can touch him, that's dangerous for me, that's what I'll miss; what broke me down with Roy was his imperviousness, long indifference. John you lizard, quick little bull. Tells me fantasies as if I'd really been there: my nipples far apart and my legs spread wide wide apart, "somehow I got my hand up inside your long skirt and you didn't have anything on underneath." In his fantasies I don't take charge of him. [daily diary] Jan 10 Wednesday Luke still speckled, sleeping a lot. Ordered my house some more, evoked friends like Marytka; Catherine came and sat near the fire, said "It's good if you're interested in a man again, it gives you something to live for," talked about the kind of man she'd like. "The trouble is, I wouldn't want an old man fifties I guess he could be sixty if he was young at heart." Good kind upright lady. Got a book about Morocco and wrote excited notes; remembering it is another kind of adventure. Roy's subdued little voice on the telephone asking about Luke. Sent Jouti Mohammed his money. [letter] January probably Talking to Greg's lady on the telephone just now, I learned that his father's just had a heart attack that nearly killed him, and his mother is fighting a form of bone cancer - scary, such vulnerability in the mothers and fathers who were young within the span of our memory. I'm glad you're well; I think of you as nearly indestuctible and expect you to get very old, like the grandparents; but how I wish we weren't all getting so much older so quickly. Greg is thirty now. Luke: small body in which time moves slowly and brilliantly, a new generation of joy that we, I, hopefully hatched into the world, and that he continues to hatch on his own, new delights like the conquest of pee so miraculously, accurately dribbled into his yellow potty. The beginning of embarrassment and resentment; he's two, and learning his separateness. Now he's asleep, two hands laid open next to his warm face with his fingers spread like leaves. Next to him, three special blankets that were his baby blankets and are accompanying him through his nights and naps just because he loves them; also his tubby-bah teddy bear; and at the foot of his bed, a big red truck with the cab lost, a little trailer truck, five tiny cars, a tiny green bus and a tiny green truck, a fire engine and a train. His fantasy world as he gives it away in his songs and stories is full of "coming, train"s and howling fire engines, elephants and his friend Mossy from the commune, cars and cranes. There's almost nothing he can't say now. I need him at least as much as he needs me. Roy, struggling with his own anarchy and wilderness, tenderness, confusion. We're hard and defended with each other most of the time now, but sometimes there's a leak and a burst, and all is warm again: as on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, which was good. The defenses are usually necessary, on my part because he so dominates and confuses me if I let him, that I can't do anything else. Necessary for him because - I don't know, but I guess he's far more fragile than I would ever allow myself to know, when that knowledge would have meant having to give too much of my self away. He's got a new lady; a very good, tough, humorous girl in the commune, to torment; and I've got a good new man; but we still - do - a little - love each other and that's good, and I feel it will be so for a long time; a lump of old magic too potent to live with but radiating a little life and warmth from just the right distance. Dear Roy, what a time I've had with that impossible man. What a lovely child we made. Haven't told you about Morocco: my nine days of light, warmth, color, of time slowed and heightened to Luke's kind of time. Ah! One morning, when Roy said he'd like Luke for a week, John and I said to each other, "What if ?" That was at 11 a.m. By 3:30 p.m. we were on an Air Maroc 727 Boeing taking off toward the south coast of England, a green and blue sunset that we trailed across a corner of France, all of Spain and the Straits of Gibraltar to the airstrip outside Tangier, utter black night, palm trees and taxi drivers in long hooded djellabas like Ku-Klux-Klansmen. The black road into Tangier, headlights sometimes picking up a veiled woman, a hooded man on a donkey. Another land, what joy. We were let off outside the walls of the old town, the Medina, whose streets are too narrow for cars. Walking into the tangled space, we never knew where we were, shyly making circles through the narrow streets, up and down hills, feeling so free and so new - a large square hotel, a little cheap room with a sagging bed, a wash basin, a barred window looking onto the ancient, forty foot mud wall of the Kasbah, fortress. Having a room, we could go out again, eat, spend our first money in our first exchange with the life of that place, buy oranges and come abruptly to an edge below which, far below, was the sea - Early in the cold morning, long before light, the long wail of the mouddhins, crying "There is one god ," the beautiful chant we were to hear, full of mystery and joy, every early morning lying almost asleep in all our sagging beds in all our little hotels. A morning walking in the souks, the markets, amazed at the colors and glories of oranges, radishes, carrots, dates, olives fishes the Berber women in brilliant rags and plastic sandals wearing the latest fashion in salmon-colored fringed bath towels as shawls and veils pots donkeys blankets rugs coppers amber jewels. The train south, through curved sleek country where the sunset red would suddenly outline a sheep, a man holding his donkey's head, a group of children, standng on the railway embankment; marshes covered like intricate constellations with the hoofmarks of grazing sheep. A young eucalyptus forest with a white dog lying waiting on the edge of it like a dog in an ancient story. Then brilliant clear dark, with a near star, perhaps a planet, blazing red and blue in a starscape completely unfamiliar, above a completely unfamiliar continent. Africa! When we were tired, we stopped. It happened to be Meknes. Another little hotel room, another early morning. Sunday. We had a French breakfast, café au lait and little breads with butter, sitting just inside the shadowy edge of a café whose front was open to the early traffic of Arabs, Berbers, asses, mules, horses, bicycles, mopeds, carts, buses like the Mexican buses full of people and heaped with baggage. Amazement. Elation. Sun coming in over an ancient wall. Such a breakfast. A veiled girl came in, talked to the café proprietor. Beautiful eyes, a beautiful shape under her brown djellabah - I spoke to her, she invited us to her house later in the day. We went out and sat on a warm wall with hooded old men, beautiful faces, beautiful hands, watching a letterer, a young boy, casually paint exquisite Arabic characters onto a painted licence plate on a car. Again the flow of people into the markets. We went in too, ritually bought oranges and prunes, to give ourselves an interaction with all that life. Another interaction: a young girl, maybe nine, with a baby on her back and a little brother tagging along, followed me through the market patiently waiting while I stopped to stare or to bargain. When we came out into the sun again, she was still there; I secretly gave them a bag of prunes, which they ate, still standing, smiling if I caught them with my smile, and then followed us quietly on up the street until we were into our hotel. A garden. So large, so royal, we went in as timidly as if it had been forbidden. A narrow gate with a guard, a path curving down past a screen of banana trees, then - three tiny gazelles advancing on their fragile legs, walking so delicately, and such beautiful creatures - and beyond them half a mile of green grass and flowers, with orange groves here and there inside ancient mud walls so high, so massive, that no world existed beyond them, and we seemed to be advancing timidly into paradise. A pool, flowers, a grove of mimosa with unopened buds thick as clouds, the orange trees hung with oranges, a subterranean trickle of water, and no one there but us, in that vast still place, with bird song and a herd of gazelles running beyond the path into the orange trees. We had such a sense of awe we were almost afraid. I was afraid, it was like the forbidden garden of a stern god. Since I've been back I've discovered that the garden was made by Moulay Ismail, who fed his favorite dog nothing but the best scraps of flesh cut from the buttocks of living women. The veiled girl took us to her home, took off her veil, and was very plain, but full of life and curiosity, unable to begin to live her own life because the only way she can escape the law of her father and the chaperonage of her brothers is to marry. We were very merry when I tried on the veil and djellaba and didn't look quite right. Then she took us for a long walk through the nighttime souk, through tunnelled streets with heavy doors and tiny barred windows. The mouddin crying in the minaret towering above the stalls. Nighttime, very scary. A stall on its own on a side street, narrow, only a door's width, hung with sheeps' skulls, dried porcupine skins, a dried chameleon, giant bulbs beginning to sprout, jars of herbs, silver hands to wear as talismans against the evil eye. A magic shop (although the young who are ashamed of Morocco's medievalism call it a medicine shop). Inside it, a man sitting, far back in the shadows, with a hooded face so sinister I couldn't look at him directly. New Year's Eve. We walked with Habiba for a long time, she beautiful again in the veil and djellaba, animated by befriending each other; finally said goodbye under Moulay Ismail's beautiful gate. New Year's Day, a bus to catch, but first one quick dip into the souk to confront that magic shop and all our terror and superstition. We wanted to believe it was dangerous even to look at it, we did believe it was dangerous; and so I had to confront that diabolical face, buy something from it, one of the bulbs, something to grow: I went to bargain with the sorcerer, and when he came forward out of the shadows it was with a dull and foolish grin that was missing a lot of teeth. I bought the largest of the bulbs, after much barter; as big as a turnip, with a solid green nub of new growth beginning at the top. (It's planted now, but I don't know what it is: maybe a kind of squill called Pharoah's Onion, but even that leaves it completely mysterious. And since I brought it home it's grown at least an inch and a half. The things it could be like Tom Thumb, perhaps a flower containing an Arabic baby girl. I'd like that.) [It was a pink amaryllis.] The sorcerer lost all magic when he opened his mouth, but he reached into the shadows and brought out, holding it by the narrow spine, a real evil spirit: a chameleon, cunning two-toed feet, body whose enraged breathing alternately blew it up round and collapsed it hissing to the bare width of his bones: it crawled blindly back toward the shadow, but when I touched its tail it turned its hood-eyed gilled fork-tongued malevolent little face toward me, opened its mouth and hissed at the back of its throat. What a curse. Beautiful animal, one of my strongest pictures. The bus. A sign says it's best to be early because it's likely to leave whenever it's full. We find separate seats in the back. There's a Berber woman sitting across from me, with a beautifully shaped wild face, a mouth full of silver teeth and two delicate featured little girls with orange hair the color of spirng willow twigs. We do set out when the bus is full, and begin to climb from the plains to the height of the Middle Atlas mountains. Cold, then snow: we stopped, turned back, because the road ahead was blocked with snow. Turned into a track across the fields, a shortcut. I was very cold, huddled up with my feet as close to my warm bum as I could get them, but even in that state of numb misery saw the strange world, the high road along the spine of the mountain, small farms, just square clay enclosures with a small hut to live in, and nothing beyond but rock and scrub grass, and hedges made from thorny tumbleweed bundled into a kind of wall. Snow, and at the same time a mist in the air, white mist: everything in the landscape turned black and white, with black lines following the contours of ploughed furrows. Groups of shepherds standing motionless in their black, brown or white djellabas, showing hardly any skin, hands deep in their pockets and face sheltered in a hood, or sometimes two. Black, white and brown sheep. Sometimes a black goatskin tent of the Bedouin with a rough thorn enclosure around it and steam rising from its wet spine. Beautiful wild place, so reduced to black and white outlines that it was like traveling in a photograph, and in a photograph much enlarged to give that vague grainy high contrast image. In the end we came down again, to the main road with towns and orchards and fields where the precious streams are lined with a curving row of little poplar trees, planted two by two one on each side, following the stream back to its source? Roots hanging onto the water. By sundown, the snow turns to driving rain, and we come into Kenifrah; there's just light enough to make out red mud walls spread around a very small town, everything constructed in clay that's deep orange, pink, fox red, and all the shades between. In the rain, already frozen, we look for a hotel. Find mattress-makers stuffing and sewing beautiful striped mattresses under an awning, then find a hotel, cheaper than ever, 75¢ each! Then climb a high set of steps into a café where we look through the cooking pots and choose lentil soup with bread, warm and good, given to us with wooden spoons. Warmer, we go out again, follow a road out of the town until it turns into a muddy track: there's a tiny village, mud so crumbling it seems to melt in the rain. It's past sunset and there's hardly any light but we find ourselves just at the edge of the walled village looking down over the lip of a hill to another such village, built like a crude citadel, a melting honeycomb of interlocking rectangles, an intricate sand castle on the summit of another hill. Beyond it, a dip, mist-filled valley, and beyond that, the snowy High Atlas Mountains. Kenifra seemed to be built on a low broad mound with a dip, like a moat, all around it, and then, completely encircling it, the mountains. The dusk was so blue, the air so full of white vapour, that the village below us - we stood for nearly half an hour looking at it motionlessly, with the shouts and songs of children loud behind us and less loud from the village across the valley - seemed gradually to dissolve away, colour washing out so quickly we could almost see it disappear, except for one orange wall, which seemed mysteriously to grow brighter. When it was gone we turned back through curious children and their fathers coming home for supper. Nervous greetings: we felt we'd trespassed, and yet we were full of wonder, full of joy. We went home to our sagging bed, having asked for more blankets. Across the corridor were the only other guests, two Spanish medical students from Barcelona. All night the two young hoteliers and their friends stamped and shouted in the corridor just beyond our heads, we suffered it with a mixture of irritation and resignation - it was part of the country. And then at four in the morning we had to get up - our bus left at five; maybe earlier, they said, it might leave when it was full. We were sitting in it by four thirty, the streets pitch black, but the bus full of people and the cafés as well, no one inconvenienced at all by the hour or the cold. There were four seats along the front of the bus, placed sideways facing the driver - we got next to the front windshield, with the two Spaniards next, squeezing together for warmth. This took until quarter to two this morning and now it's Monday, work and Luke to take to classes. Let's hope for another installment. [daily diary] 11 Thursday Good time with Sarah making a ceremony with Moroccan coffee, croissants, tangerines and the Kurdish carpet - the amber for her, pots and other treasures, talking about guilt and about writing. Telling her the story of the tapis de Taznakt. Got back some pots while John babysat, the dolomite vase and bottle with subtle blues, greens, pinks, mauves, browns coming through. 12th Friday Gertrud with David [Davies - from the Slade], cooking omelette and drinking a lot of wine in front of the electric fire becoming ironical old camarades, I felt I'd become a laughing older woman with some admitted scars that hurt sometimes but an equality with the fates; David when he'd come to kiss me goodnight stopping by the door and the wall in a strip of light saying "You're a good woman," and a little confusedly, "I don't know if I should tell people when I like them." His story about the girl in Germany who rode back 60 miles on the bicycle to beg his address "because she decided she was in love with me." And then learned English and they wrote each other once a week, lately twice, for the 15 years since. Feel I'm getting a naturalness, learning a naturalness. David saying, about when he was twelve, "I was so full of sperm, all I could think about was how to get the girl Georgine from down the road to go riding with me and how I could get her to come into the stable." 13th Saturday Portobello Road Saturday morning, David like a civil war veteran. At breakfast talking about his wife, almost with a break in his voice: "I grieved for three years." John spent his morning grieving (if he can be believed) and when we came together in front of the fire it was to feel close and soft. So went to the big house in Farnham [his married sister's] for the black tie party, did anxious sociology together in a corner but were really full of laughter and began to kindle people (when they were a little lit up already), especially Madonna Louisa and a pigeon-breasted giddy lady. Jane Austen land. 14 Sunday In Highgate Forest Luke's eyes got a grey fanatical gleam and he with a near-deadpan tumbled over boom, like playing dead, in the sodden leaves. When we'd had tea at Caenwood House, two blond little girls chased John leaping like Jack in the Box John across the grass and over the gate, finally jailing him in the kitchen garden. I had Luke on my shoulders and he picked me up and we made a dizzy totem pole. Catherine entertained John with coffee and conversation and then we went to bed and thumped ourselves out of our minds, and went to sleep amazed. Afternoon's excitement talking about education. [journal] Simple fucking, for once in my life it's my body simply clamped onto the pleasure of his prick's smallest movement, still, stopped and listening, my own rapt breathing coming from far away, good concentration noises, a rasp in the intake of breath, he probes me and I let him do what he likes, it's just good and I'm safe with him. And we both know that since I've begun to come with him I always will, and from now on we can spin precisely as tops into any configuration we like, a constellation every night. Daring, perfectly sure. Tactful in secrets and disclosures, trusting time. [daily diary] 15 Monday Rain and spending another day with Luke; go to see Rosalynd while he's sleeping and talk about Morocco and swing from Ayisha's bars; cook omelette and sausage for him and eat across the little table from him. Look at the animal book with him; he doesn't concentrate much except on trains; he's beautiful these days but when I sat across from him at supper his eyes had a canny madness in them that scared me. I got a dolomite ridgy bowl back that looks good with oranges, days are quick and empty again, Miss Julie on the radio, misery by osmosis. Madeleine telephoned / found a head louse. 16 Tuesday By late afternoon twanging with the frustration of being home all these days doing nothing, had to smack Luke's thigh to feel better, then got high on Hollis Frampton and Brakhage and my fantasies of future - deft accurate dream scraps; juxtapositions; chameleon stones; a playful sky full of depths and edifaces today, moving fast; wanted to knock a hole in a high brick wall to make a window especially for that. Luke full of murmurs daydreams about continuous arrival of trains, "Coming, train." Sun making orange thin light light. About red, Hollis Frampton "You're talking about what the apple has no use for, as though that were the apple." [journal] Developments in still photograph, Brakhage, "rendering visible the illumination of bodily heat," heat waves, air pressures. Brak: My wife and I have both experienced a number of more successful eye adventures. Brakhage's words, word-plays, excitement about discovering mysterious correspondences, himself as source of mysterious knowledge; search for intensity of vision, for directions to research, determination to inflame his life: marriage, children, by celebrating-researching them / romanticizes himself. About Europe: "grave yard all involvement with symbol." I wanted Prelude to be a created dream for the work that follows rather than Surrealism which takes its inspiration from dream; I stayed close to practical usage of dream material, in terms of learning and studying, for a while before editing. Once I had wanted very much to make a film, called Freudfilm, that would illustrate the process of dream development and would show how a dream evolves out of the parts we don't remember to those we do. Importance of dreams is the flare of light they throw on each other and the rest of our lives. Image of that Arab shepherd's hand reaching out with change in it, match held between his fingers, handful of flaring orange light. [sketch] Image of those high round hills, before dawn, with stars come down to the black ground out of the blue/black sky, the moon illuminated by sun about to rise, with its real cresecent thin brilliant. The stop on the road, a Berber woman with a child on her back, she lets the child down, he follows an old man into the bus, her husband kisses her cheek - she touches his hand, puts her finger to her lip, touches his hand again, puts her finger to her lip. He climbs in. She stands with her hands tight against her abdomen. I could evoke these images verbally, with something else on the screen. It's not that I can't love any more, that free clear movement to embrace Jean-Jacques when I woke, to touch Roy's indifferent body (John touching me before light this morning) bent in tenderness about, along, him. But I don't. It's the steady pilot light waiting to be lit again. I have fits of affection but I don't give myself away. [daily diary] 17 Wednesday Woke from a dream of Olivia at the commune, stranded in a high room when the stairs fell down - again a reference to looking for a room in that hillside building I've dreamed twice before - and I preparing to send up eggs in a cavalry boot on a pulley. Roy come to get Luke, thin, pale, grey sweater. John went upstairs to be brave, I made tea, Rosalynd came; I continued haunted by Roy's shape and face and silence, my old passion, my lack of that old passion. Reading Brakhage. Made a good sleek pot and two other bashed ones, big strong pot pots, getting Barbara high talking about Doris Lessing. Wearing my djellaba to the Film Co-op. Calling John, absently called 249-2353 and Jud answered. Want to work and be disciplined a little. [journal] My pregnancy film, an older child, because it's partly to repeat the first time, and photographs of that first time. Feel strongly about need for great clarity of visual detail. My body is hatching images to tell me simply that I miss Roy: in Marrakech, having half-asleep pushed John away, I dreamed Roy, looking into his face with candour and kindliness of his own, and said "I'm sorry I did that, I thought it was John." One of my waking dreams this morning [ie dreams just before waking]: I'm lying on top of Roy, facing his feet, warm and comfortable, just waking, and I began to lick the top of his crotch, which is like a woman's with folds of round flesh that I follow down to the rough skin at the opening - and at the other end, between my legs, he's stirring - but someone is asleep in the same room - maybe John, but taking the name of Paul - who could object to our continuing - he gets up to look, finds him awake, begins putting on his clothes to leave, looks over his shoulder to say secretly to me - "Okay?" - and is gone. Margaret, on the top bunk nearby, is, I'm told, indignant that he's left me in heat. - Anxious dreams. - There are moments when I fall down a shaft into my childhood, an instant, that I can't grasp afterwards, when I remember exactly how it was. [daily diary] 18 Thursday Luke away, woke at 11, note from J from the mail, feeling of need for ceremonial breakfast, went to work at BFI, feverishly reading mysterious things in Afterimage and Cinema Rising, then went to buy worse, Althusser For Marx, reading it in the cheesecake café [on Tottenham Court Road], encounter with an unshaven unsure man called Francis King (mumbles his name) who writes books about ritual magic and dropped Kenny Anger's name, a strange babyish man carrying on a bizarre conversation with an elegantly dressed (orange and white laminated baseball jacket) pimply black boy. Came home full of worked-out fever, need conversation but John's not there and - Beautiful girl at Kentish Town library. 19 Friday On the tube, Tufnell Park station: poster of large man laiden with brushes, tins of paint, rollers, etc, and scribbled in magic marker balloon above his head "The common man is burdened with consumer fetishes." At avant garde class, Jordan Belsen films and a lovely American from Northwestern. Invited David to ritual supper at Jimmy's, wine and dolmades, then we went to another decadent Fellini full of grotesques taking poses, an exuberant boor. Come home to my empty house and want to do something holy; long dream this morning about a jewelry shop. [journal] Dreams: Saturday morning, long dreams from Fellini about a group of fat whores / girls coming and causing at first a shy excitement / then dream includes David giving me a checkup, telling me details about colourless patches on my skin, I'm afraid of cancer, and he says my body's alright, only 40% damaged, and then drops the subject I so anxiously want to continue when a fat blond girl naked and wet climbs out of the water onto the porch and they begin to laugh ingratiatingly, courtship begun. It's like a summer camp, small outhouses, these girls everywhere, Roy eventually appears and I know where he's been, he sits down to eat, there's a small chair empty, I put food into a little bowl, two kinds of black beans, small and large, Roy says "Did you celebrate his birthday?" I, bitterly, "I was waiting for you to get home" and begin to beat him on the head. - The night before, dreamed coming into a small shop, a pretty girl who is a jeweler shows me beautiful things she's made: a watch with a brilliant band made of mosaic, fragile turquoise tubes from an animal's shell joined together with black accordion sections between them; hearts cut out of emerald. It seems that she's hiring me as an assistant. Luke is with me and I see that his hernia has grown large and soft, with rainbow colors ringing it and spreading to the rest of his body. There seems another child, also with rainbow colors on its abdomen. I feel Luke is very ill, want to take him to the hospital, am outside in the snow and call to Roy, but he walks away along a track that swings wide out through snowy fields, there are people moving on it and I look for him, men on donkeys, groups of people; then finally see him moving far away on a shortcut, I suppose he's going to Jud. I struggle in the other direction carrying Luke in my arms, with another child on my back who is so light and still in his black coat that he is like a shell and I suppose he may be dead / I cannot find a hospital but at last come into the living room of an old woman and her spectacled husband who I feel will help me. Another dream about finding a room: a large house with big rooms, wide windows on the top floor. [daily diary] 20 Saturday J took Luke riding to the library and to his house while I wept and pleaded with Roy on the phone, because when he brought Luke, Luke had said he didn't want to come. I broke down. Went to John's house and got fed eggs and sausages and mash. The Swiss Cottage library at night. Luke, let into Compendium, delighted the merry salespeople by picking up the Little Red Schoolbook. Bought A Separate Reality and my own copy of Myths, Dreams and Religion. [journal] And yet another such dream, a large Victorian boarding house on a campus, I go from room to room hoping there will be one free, reach to turn on a light and there is someone in the bed. Another dream, myself thinking about Roy, taking him home that first summer. Jan 21 Sunday John and I not wanting to be together, separated and he - he says - went into Phase II. 22 Monday Afternoon, Los Olvidados, Jaibo, Ochitos, some beautiful moments. In the morning took Luke to the commune, crumbled away in face of that lively present, Jud and Roy so affectionate, sad to leave Luke, sad in all my old scars. Cleaned. 23 Tuesday Took John to see L'Atalante, more brides, after seeing La jetée in the morning. Beautiful hovering above sleep in the chair at Flaxman Terrace. Woman's meeting, talked about masturbation. Hazel's irritating, Gail's smarmy. In misery. Missing Luke. [journal] La jetée and all my thoughts about how I'm fixed at that moment in the past, that man I really loved, perhaps, that man I married in spite of myself, my first marriage. Broken. I hang by that moment, holding him that morning, in my nightgown Witnessed by my family's ceremonious watching around the breakfast table
Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, dreamed I was at school, some large gathering of people. I announced that in support of Angela Davis' trial I was going to die at noon - drifting, talking to people about it. "It's nice knowing when you're going to die," outside, a vast place with mountains. People, some who were like school friends, were curious and animated, no one was sorry. I was clear and resigned. I waited until nearly twelve o'clock and then I went out and sat on the sidewalk. Three experimental cages with hairy gorillas in them. One was open, one was closed - the other some other variable. Another hairy animal came and ran over me, a car nearly did. I got up and went to the commune, Roy was at work and I talked to Jud who was kind and complacent. I told her that I had been going to die but had changed my mind. Talking about Roy she said "But sometimes he pushes me away and says 'There are times I want you to be at a little distance, and afraid, like my wife was.'" I cry out in anguish at this and shout to her, "If you were pregnant and had nowhere else to live and had no money and had no friends you wouldn't be so strong with him either." I go downstairs, past a lunch table spread with food, like a banquet, and find Roy sitting alone. I sit with him on the floor and begin to tell him what anguish I am in, my memories, my broken bride, but then the room fills with people and Sue sits next to us, after throwing a heap of strawy coleslaw on my plate, and I can't say any more, and I wake with a pain in my stomach, next to tears. I come upstairs, sit by the fire and phone Roy, because I must, not because he has much to do with my present grieving, but because by some mysterious paradox he was there too, in the time I grieve for. I tell him that I ask my dreams for a way out of mourning and they only send me further in, I find my mythology to be much deeper than I thought. "You're having a problem with rejection?" he says. "Yes, but I feel it's more than that, it feels like I'm in grief for a broken marriage." - Anxious terrible moments with John this morning when I thought he was going to tell me he'd lost his feeling for me: "I'm worried about this second phase of yours" I say. "Me too" he says, striking me fearful, and himself too, so that we can't say anything until we're nearly at Gower Street, and then it comes out, gulp, when we can't bear it any more, and we kiss each other with traffic held up behind, very softly, and fly separate. Am I dying? [daily diary] 24 Wednesday Pots all day, worked on one of my crooked American pots, and pinched a little universe in a mold, lunch with Sarah telling her about what I'm learning about - woke in anguish to a dream about dying and Roy. I sat with him trying to break through his defiance and my depression - did. My poem! Came home after work waited for Luke and Roy to come for a tea party, but they didn't and all my bones began to ache. Went to bed and when John came tried to tell him about my broken marriage, made him miserable, and me. Went to sleep separate. Catherine phoned. 25 Thursday Artists of the Big Top - Disoriented. Elated about Leni Piekert, her bestiary, the film's collage of speculations. Went with David to have supper at Schmidt's, played the Chinese Garden game, drank beer and felt close, and thrilled by his 20 acres, 20 wooded acres, in Washington, talking about Roethke who I've been reading in the tub, "She'd more sides than a seal." Morning, Sarah. Evening - come home to John's ten red roses propped up in the red box. Prepared the bedroom with roses, candles, pot, plants, magic carpet and covered light. Then we drank jasmine tea and touched each other's chests. Then we faught hysterically until late and went to sleep. 26 Friday Morning - friends, we stumped a waltz in the living room and went to work. Worried about the lump in my stomach, little discomforts that make me wonder whether my engine's getting unreliable. Whitney's Yantra with beginnings and ends like old lace made of light, beautiful movements deep into space, shimmering fiery mandalas. Rushed home to get LUKE! Stamped home through every puddle, listened to water roaring in the sewers, looked at the big sky, big big lorries, mini-buses, mo'cycles. Waited a long time for a train. When John came on his way to Dee, put a coat over Luke's sleepsuit and saw kittens! I went back for one along the Heath, small black half-Siamese. Luke's sleepy face slowly lighting into a big smile when he woke and saw it. In the afternoon, dreamed Roy had torn up my journals. 27 Saturday To see Jacob and Denise this morning, then Luke and I slept all afternoon, then Sarah came but we couldn't rise, put Luke to bed and walked with her down to the edge of the Heath, and in the walk along the railway, the signal box with its open gate, a train that went by followed by flashes of lights in windows opposite. The signal, two arms held horizontal with red cat's eyes, the pool throwing light, the row of poplars which spell Roy, wet small, the world opening. Thought about, at my birthday, inaugurating a year in which I do not allow myself to remember. 28 Sunday Woke to a little sun, the little cat sleeps either on me or on the mantle. Luke to school through a good light, frost on the railway tracks, white, our breath coming in slow streams of white out of our mouths. Luke's going to school in underpants [as opposed to diapers], orange trousers, he looks so tall, slim and good. Took Luke onto the Heath in the morning, then up the hill on the bus, and carrying him up Highgate Hill on my shoulders to see Margaret, at first he and Shoshanna fought but then they hurled themselves after each other into a corner, ate ice cream, he sprayed pee on the floor in a half-circle like a lawn sprinkler. Cooked for Margaret. Went home and got sad thinking of J not coming back with chrysanthemums. 29 Monday Phoned John to see if he was there - then went to see him - scared he'd changed his feeling, so was he, went to doctor who reassured me, told me it was parasympathetic nervous system gone a little wild, went home to read about dreams, got high on some American poetry, Randall Jarrell; went for dinner after pottery to Cellier du Mini, Veau de la Chevalière with sour cream and chopped onion, in a slightly intoxicated lucidity lectured John on the triviality and falsity of love and about how Roy is Luke's real daddy and I don't look for substitutes and how there'll always be new substitutes all the time; he seemed to enjoy it so we went home to bed. The sunset over London that Luke and I ran to watch from a parapet at the Estate, he with his feet dangling over all London and a fiery airplane in a green lane above. 30 Tuesday Am playing a game with myself, inventing an angel. Cleaned, moved Luke's bed into the next room and put up new pictures, totem animals for him, Roy brought Mossy to see Luke, but he was dead to me and that made me sad but when I reproached him he put his cheek to my head and said "Don't be so hard with me." Women's meeting, walked there through unknown neighbourhood behind new Gospel Oak estates, good dark streets, low houses; talked about jealousy, Hazel telling us simply of her old pain for a woman she's in love with; Veronica; Leslie so haltingly. 31 Wednesday Hattori showed slides of paintings, some lovely things like two Bonnard with frames painted in, a girl and a very Japanese vase of yellow flowers. Kept colliding with Barbara Quart in discussions of Updike, Hattori's philistine, ignorant art lesson. Roth: realized that the Jewish family pattern doesn't mean anything to me and therefore neither does Roth, Richler, etc. The way Barbara says "deeply moves," she's 38. Getting Luke, Dr MacIntosh in the window with his baby; my heart beat and I couldn't look at him, pretended not to see him, but we stared at each other when I came over the bridge. Hurried back, but the light was on and there was his wife. Cyrano with J, playful - a little drunk, fell asleep in front of fire. Crème brûlée. A menhir of Barbara Hepworth, black stone with a glorious fossil in it; also the chisel marks in the insides of her wood shapes, greasy with hand marks.
|