| london volume 5 part 5 - 1973 june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1 June Friday [daily diary] Luke came, laid his cheek on the pillow, said "I love you," became irritable and confused this afternoon, said "I want my daddy." Good A Page of Madness this morning in cold basement. Good moments fancying Keith; noisy vulgar and funny with the class - Frampton Artificial Light and Barlett Off-On. Come home to get Luke in sun - go to library for more Angela Carters because they glamorize Moustache (who is a lizard) - supper, frugal cauliflower cheese with Jane on tablecloth, La Collectioneuse on television and a dive up the hill to see if there was a light on. 2 Saturday Began, in sunlight, with the confusion of waking Jane, thinking it was Friday, Luke. Heath to sit in high catwalks of Adventure Playground with eyes on the crippled man, in hot sun. Luke said "I got a wiggy - there," patting himself. Half in Angela Carter land, up to see Margaret and Shoshanna - jambalaya, garden game (she said the key was to the front door - but anyone could go round through the back, which was open) - talking about Peter - she flips her wide sickle of beautiful hair. Moustache present in me as a little astringent joy and the Beethoven, the book, the rain, the warm bed, the chest of drawers: so much life. [undated notebook] [This is a long block of undated and undateable entries from one of several 5x7 Challenge notebooks in 1973] Richard Grossinger b.1944, edits Io - myth, geography and, "common source material of poetry, natural history and physical science" Read between words he's talking about myths and magic as the way we know where we are "in body, in history, and as individual structure in the objective time of the planets." I read it's the way we know we are in body. - Brainwave synthesizer makes beautiful music of alpha waves and heart. The Burke Special several Thursdays ago. - Trip to Wolverhampton - Grand Union Canal - beautifully made brick farm buildings, with black brick mosaic stringcourses and lovely flattened arches in cloister rows [sketch]. Radio transmission towers with guy wires like a complex invisible tent spread over a great distance - some poles very high, others low, many low around the high ones. - A Page of Madness The madwoman eating rice, he brings the key, she just taps it - he takes out of his kimono an artichoke which he breaks open and she eats part of it with delight. The baby's head, cut to a superimposition of a round splash later repeated, just instantaneous - did she throw it in. Careful mystification The young girl and the boy - what relation the two long haired young men in their Victorian living room Lots of states of mysterious emotion. - [untranscribed notes on Frampton's Artificial Light 1969 and Bartlett's On-Off] Pedagogical films - Every vegetable a computer. A new couth appearing in the scene. The 'vegetative' ie animal person who watches, filters. Everything can feed a story, Lessing and Updike work on that. Complications of narrative. Woman's lib: can have other projects - like ecology. - [untranscribed notes on some exp film not named] Roszak's anthology Intellect is a function of the body - but it gives us at moments the useable fantasy that it may stand separate from the body and judge or guide it. McLure our work may be described as the gradual unfolding and cultivation of sensibility, of greater range and delicacy in feeling, which brings about concurrently the awakening and freeing of our innate energies. This we practice through the activity of sensing With the gradual approach to the centre comes a feeling of lightness, freedom and peace incomparable with any other experience ... if one wants to 'keep' a moment of balance which has this exquisite quality before it is lost it has to be allowed from moment to moment anew. Absent-mindedness, shyness, aggressiveness, lingering taboos, meaningless manipulation, restlessness, all become manifest in a touch. Most people immediately want to do something to or for their partner, instead of just being there for him Inner preparation needed for full presence in approaching or leaving another, and the sense of the creative pause in which the after-effects are allowed to take their course Tao - the way, course or flow of nature - finds images for it in water and wind, air and sky, processes of growth. Crystals appearing - like coming into focus - lines of force in a magnetic field - plants growing from inside out - babies. Wu-wei - non-making - ie growing - Chinese for nature is tzu-jan = spontaneity. God is the deepest inside of everything. Because of the inwardness of our life-process we do not know, or rather, cannot tell, how or why we live, even though it is our own inmost selves which are doing the living .... We have learned to identify ourselves only with the narrow and superficial area of the conscious and voluntary. Ie 'we' are really the froth on the water, shaking like jelly. The truly inward source of one's life was never born, but has always remained inside, somewhat as the life remains in the tree, though the fruits may come and go. The apple: red is what it rejects, blue and green is what it absorbs. Now the problem has to be rephrased, "How did something-and-nothing come out of what?" Teaching film: Leacock Pennebaker and Echoes of Silence Zen mistress knocking heads empty of nonsense Li - universal principle of order, but does not mean law, rather markings in jade, grain of wood, fibre in muscle, ie nature of material a complex pattern, rather 'formless'. Kuan to observe silently and openly without looking for something. "Watching thus, the heron is all pool." The sensation of ego is the sensation of a kind of effort of consciousness, of a confusion of nerves with muscles. It is not recognized that there is a contradiction in mental strain as such and in any degree. When young we let our consciousness expand with joy through all its innumerable passages of its nerves, but as time goes on we begin to withdraw. Giving our body back to nourish the world when we die. Giving the world back to nourish what? When it dies. We need to learn about the universe so we can bear to give Earth back to it. Exercise - pretending not to know the consequences. Feelings in themselves not distinguishable, name depends on context. Life has been and looks as if it will be for the most part convulsive and catastrophic, maintaining itself by slaying and eating itself. The problem of suffering will therefore continue to have a kind of awesome holiness so long as life depends in any way upon the pain of even a single creature. The part which society wants us to play - the part of a reliable and predictable Socially problematic spontaneity of little children is as yet uncoordinated and embryonic. We then make the mistake of socializing children, not by developing their spontaneity, but by developing a system of resistances which split the organism into a spontaneous centre and an inhibiting centre ... before spontaneity can control itself it must be able to function. - 'Minimal art' aimed at somebody other than me, don't need it. Theodore Schwenk Sensitive Chaos (Rudolf Steiner Press 1965) which shows how the flow patterns of gases and liquids are basic to every form of life, how shells and bones are sculptures commemorating the forms of liquid
Parthenos - virgin is someone who choses her own partner, not arranged. Can be a mother, is 'unmarried mother' because an unowned person. Karezza. Active intercourse imitates movements that should come of themselves. - Zen: want to call whatever I can accept that: good name. Direct dealings. discipline aiming at reconstruction of character. Our ordinary life lacks depth, sincerity, and does not appeal to the inmost feelings. Attention. Inscrutability of masters, and authority. Satori - new point of view. Mental mechanism which opens with a click. - Mummy - familiar, daddy - strange. Subjectivity - dramas are about kings because their contact with world is less mediated - daddy's language vs private language of some kind. Group vs singleness. Paranoia of those who defend private language. Introject - interrupted excitement. Girl's displacement of feeling onto father etc means loving strange and hated, eroticizing the oppressor. Question of relation to groups - trying to get into in-groups, the energy at the top of the hierarchy - fear of punishment for trying to get at the loved group. Authority figures are charged by us by our projecting an archetype of power. The deviant group, evolutionary potential. Must be careful of ego ideal images which hierarchize those nearest and farthest from it. Amazon Quarterly out of Oakland
Safety in simplicity: hard to be true if you're complex and bitter. The timidity about making the mysterious less so by mastering it. That beautiful candle lamp with its milky eye - film of eye window. Be a bag of tricks agitator for every occasion. Put back what you take out. It could happen if energy were cheap and extraterrestrial. Ecology of new ideas. Eternity is in love with the productions of time. Hans Selye - every important scientific idea comes in hypnagogic state. Irritating book that mirrors worst of my own writing - hangs onto phrases, literalness, a compounded laborious-feeling sincerity. Necessity of unambiguity about wanting something. Ideomotor action - an idea (response) tends to fulfill itself automatically unless blocked by another idea. Sensory deprivation - hallucinations during. Bruner - study of thinking. C/f dreams - "sensory system is in full play, sending appropriate sights, smells, tastes, touches, and so on, as needed by the mind for its reality." And of course movies. Experiments with the influence of dreams, experimentor directs pictures. Rat's rapture centre in midbrain, not cortex. Langer - speech not evolutionary but aesthetic - "dream-like association of ideas." Bruner - essays for the left hand. 1. first stage is detachment from ordinary - commitment. 2. balance of passion/attention and decorum/tact, respect for material. 3. one's overcome by the thing. Jung: unconscious processes continually synthesize. Hypnotism: material can be exchanged subliminally between the two people involved - "unexpressed desires of the hypnotist may affect the subject, who begins to fabricate from the unconscious of both parties." Eg of Yeats' wife producing his imagery in her automatic writing. Techniques of progressive immersion in a venture, so that "The steps taken are those necessary both to clarify the question and bring about the answer." Adopt either viewpoint, invest your life in the sets and expectations involved, and your life will bend to make good the investment .... We knock and the door opens to us. There are an unlimited number of doors. Joseph Pearce Foundations of science are piles driven into swampy land, put down just far enough so that we're satisfied they'll support the structure we have in mind. - Is nuclear energy dangerous because we're guilty and afraid of it? - The fakir, sensing the longing, told the good professor he, too, could walk the fire if he so desired - by holding the fakir's hand. The good man was seized with faith that he could, shed his shoes, and hand-in-hand they walked the fire ecstatic and unharmed. My feeling that I'm likely to get cancer - what kind of wish? Like voodoo. For chaos, wild growth. Get the chaos instead. Quickly. Fire walking MEANS: the cause-effect framework does not hold. - Experiments - why only 20% of people can go into deep trance - those who'd had fantasy play with their parents - "gives a temperament capable of flexible tolerance." Threshold between fantasy and 'reality' is easy to cross. C/f dream training. A trance seizure gives confidence, total recall, and perfect synthesis of material so Bali children of 7 can do the dances perfectly. Autistic modes. He says that after absorbing Jung or vv his dreams and hypnagogic capacity enriched. Aboriginal Dreamtime trance state of clairvoyance and telepathy - knows when totem animal is in his vicinity. Isolated for 16,000 years. Had no houses or clothes, only a few sacred objects and ornaments. A capacity, an ontological function, the twilight crack, the wolfish hour. Bruner: life produces myth and finally imitates it. A mentality, make the whole earth mentality - mind is an open system of synthesis. Unconscious - suggests that "the function runs into a continuum shades smoothly at some point into that organization of energy we call matter." The new psychology, an examination of mind that runs into physics. Hegel dear Hegel. De Chardin The universe is a creative process carried on by man's imagination - capable of becoming "more supple, more fully animate." Langer - Says metanoia is the only way to move mountains because conceptual development loses faith but is necessary for complex mental work. Discover a way by which development of logic does not destroy openings to magic. Stoicism? Failure of nerve. Thesis: materials of the world are "subject to radical reorganization by mind" Two of three gathering together. Not willing to surrender defenses to a group who are less than I want to be. Allegiance to a symbol of openness, really does open things. - In my own mind though, I envisage the greatest use of the computer as a machine to read the mind. By interpreting the brain waves recorded by a device like an electroencephalogram the computers of the future may be able to project images of our thoughts. Perhaps the greatest filmmakers of the future will be the greatest dreamers, whose dreams will be recorded on film and tape with the aid of a computer. Lipton 416 We've been looking in the projections of mind to see if we can discover the laws of mind, we try to stream up the projector beam to discover what is the lens - what is the film, what is the source of the film. Dreams and films we feel vary because we think we know how a film is made but: - Dream film course
Reading list with all sorts of good books on it - Firestone, Borges, Bardo, Berger, The Politics of Experience Q of surrealism, imagism - Ontological mutation
Habits
Voice Steady reviews to do what I think to do Music
Dream thesis and course Write ch 1 on physiology Film
Book for the tree film For baby film Generations - long film Quarry film A freemartin film By next October - one year, mail 4th class special delivery Films
[journal] On the Heath this morning, in the adventure playground I reflected myself back in the form of a young man with a black tumble of hair, a rectangular jaw, unshaven, who, without a shirt on, showing a silky shapely thin broad-shouldered torso, hobbled from catwalk to catwalk playing with his children. He had a subdued flash, a kind of beauty in his face and shoulders, that made me sit and stare. I realized that if I loved him, the hobble and the thin leg I guessed at under his corduroy jeans would be irrelevant, something true and touching. The gliding peace and collection of today, feeling Andy's coldness and absence as something simply radiant with possibility, reality. It's how it is between us; how interesting, how adventurous, how new and how right. - Shoshanna sits across the table, with her face tipped up and her hands making gestures outwards like wings unfolding. She makes up a poem about clouds, sun, unfolding each line with her arms, like a huge page, or a sheet, her mouth opening and closing without any hesitation over each word, a little wider than necessary, showing her little white teeth with rhetorical extravagance. We were petrified. Then Luke constructed wonder machines with two hairpins, a matchstick and a half eaten green pepper. - In my pilot lit joy these days, while I wait to explode into real flame, I notice little corruptions I've picked up: a way of saying things extravagantly and falsely - "And it was so-o-o-o beauootiful," etc - that comes from Roy; a way of twisting my face into grimaces of compliant attention, pleasantness. Also I talk to Luke sometimes with a grotesque absentminded joviality I used to marvel at in Patricia. Also when I lose control out of excitement at the Slade, eg, I can't tell whether I'm being spontaneous and funny or just embarrassingly out of control. 3 June Sunday [daily diary] Joys raging somewhere underneath - come up in tiny squirts, seeps - a good Sunday cold and sunny, while Luke slept I combed and cut the lawn with little scissors - on the bicycle to Sean's house to transact; sat in the dark living room with light only from the one window making his face strong with a silver outline. When I asked him to tell me a garden and a house it went rapt and he produced a shifting geometrical garden with lupins at the pointed corners - a 6 storey house whose 3 bottom floors are empty and boarded; a samovar steaming continuously; a heavily bolted roof door that hasn't been open for a long time, great pleasure in his presence of mind, knowledge, the feeling of cultivation about him and his hard working face - strenuous and faithful person. Home we three ate supper together. Worked at guitar and piano, read Luke The Lorax and lay in the dark feeding myself the Quartet like an agitated forest, fluttering wings-hearts, feeling how happy I am and how just begun I am. In the mirror, the strong wise brown face of the Sunday afternoon I was 18, a beautiful shine to my skin, I'm well. [journal] Sean's hard working perceptions; his reticent gleam; and the eroded face going so austere as he turned his eyelids down and told his garden and his house. 4 June Monday [daily diary] L'immortelle. Piano On Top of Old Smoky and hymn book. Roy's birthday party at Caenwood and Marine Ices, the beautiful child, banana split and chocolate nut sundae and Luke's strawberry cone. Another sad trip back from uphill, carrying Castenada. Sat on the city spine behind the reservoir frightened cold and proud, looking at flat and anywhere city - from Caenwood it was white, ivory, clumps of towers. Luke's conversation with Mossy on the telephone this morning - they screamed back and forth ecstatically - Luke loudly sang happy birthday. 6 Wednesday Hair swishing against bare bare. Peter Gidal Clouds, Hall, Bedroom. 7 Thursday Ruislip Lido, forest, sweat under blanket. Malcolm Le Grice. R came and sat quietly for a while, Jane at women's meeting. [undated journal] This Wednesday when I turn at the corner and spy on his dark window, lift the latch, go through the garden, ring three times and sit on the wall looking at the small daisies covering the lawn, the tangled roses on the bowers, knocking a little but without the joy of last week; go down the road and self consciously peer into the pub, am about to look into the Public when the thin man appeared, flopping and breathless, narrower and waned, with hair chopped off, almost reaches for me, tells me rapidly and without prompting that he's been busy with merciful errands - I don't care as I listen - he's polite, says come back to the flat (I'm in constant tension with him about whether my sense of his total coldness, or his own description of himself, is right). When we get to the top I choose to open the door myself and am quick to turn on the light. The bed's open, his bathrobe's on the floor. I sit down quick and nervous, without flirtation, just careful, careful, vigilant and defensive, tight jokes, waspish cracks. It is he who comes to hold me and I'm still careful not to give too much - just now I'm realizing how much he undermined me by not seeing me for ten days - begins to take my clothes off, but has no conviction, so we sit side by side and he takes his off, sits there on the bed with his arms on his knees - in the dark he looks like Ian - I take mine off and lie back into the bed feeling what a nice bed it is - I say it's good to be in the same bed as him. He says it's beautiful to be in the same bed as me. I want to keep back from the erotic convention, he seems to want to get it over with, hard mouth opening into black nothing. I struggle to find his narrow tongue. There's him, whipping around me, light, hardly engaging; the sex thing seems alien and irrelevant to him; he seems to struggle to involve himself in it; sometimes he does something skillful to me and I freeze at the same time as struggling to engage myself, can't begin to think of pleasing him. We're dim and strange, like Roy and I at first; I can't catch up to him, we see each other struggling, close our eyes and communicate that fright and uncertainty. It seems right to me when his penis refuses to go on; I'm relieved. He seems to think he should talk about it; I'm hurt too, but further down. So I tell him the joke about the English bottle of Guiness and the Irish bottle of Guiness. I say "You're not a lawyer...." He puts on an old Jew's voice, "Sub-zhectif-ly not, but obzhectifly " that provokes me into wild giggles. I want to be brother and sister, never want to face that blind wrestle again. I snuggle my back into him and could sleep. He's relieved as well; we exchange sharp and dry analyses of ourselves. On that level I'm dismayed by his defenses, meanness, dryness. On the other level of my meaty smooth-skinned big body and his light dry tight little one, I'm blissful; he reminds me that we're just two boring people and I snap that he doesn't have to tell me to suspect my own and his motives, because I know that already. He says he knows I know that already. I'm hardly listening because I'm wrapped along his side with my knee over his flank, just happy. He goes to sleep. I try not to read signs in it. Say I'm going home. He exclaims with what seems to be slight dismay, "Oh, did I fall asleep." Pulls me back for a hug when I'm dressed. But says "You'll excuse me if I don't show you out" in a way that lets me onto the street miserable, angry, empty, lonely. I couldn't rest on myself and so I couldn't get into touch with him. And he puts such a quietude onto me, such a nasty cautious fix. 8 June Friday [daily diary] Morning at John's house dancing and singing. Home to sleep, woke ready to write. Sat down, metabolism boiling, and stuck. Fat face Andy. [undated journal] The frustration of these controlled visits to Andy's house, Monday night ringing in vain, rushing to the reservoir to see the flats of NE London in random lights, a council block with a man coming home along the outdoor passage, a woman calling her cat from a doorway. My own cold excitement, almost anguish, on that bare dark spine with the covered reservoir behind me. Andy's house impenetrable. And then proud in my resistance, waiting until today, Friday evening, Luke away, clear soft pastel evening, only to find him with his mother and father, preparing to go on what sounded an expensive weekend with Betsy and her mother in East Anglia. His father, narrow mean face, narrow eyes, moustache, narrow mouth, looking up sharp and stupid from a chair. His mother coming in tall thin elegant an orange skin of makeup over her face, spectacles with pointed rims, an expensive knitted dress smooth over her shapely bosom and skinny hips, at least three glittering rings and a necklace and earrings, an air of total, managing, control of herself, taking negligent control of the conversation. While Andy in his horizontal striped boatneck that made him look a teenager on a family excursion in 1956 sat uneasy and cunning making unbelievable (I am always shocked, and laugh nervously) banal remarks about his shower, his parents' arrival, etc - or like a queer American, so slight and so defensive. Came downstairs with me, and by this time I was so contracted in disappointment, embarrassment, incredulity that I could only be even more sardonic, sitting on the concrete step with him. He said "What's happening? What's happening?" in a vague way. I said "What's happening?" and he went into a vague explanation of how they came down unexpectedly, phoned Betsy etc, and she said, etc, and suddenly he found himself, etc. By this time my eyes were getting narrower still. He says we must go away for a weekend sometime, either in my car or his. I find myself falling into ungenerous complicity. I say "It will have to be in yours" etc. He says he wants to go to Scotland in the summer, maybe I could save two weeks for that. I say maybe I'm going away for the summer, "See you at the end of August." He says he's back Monday night and will come see me early in the week - catches my look of cynicism as I'm away. My face burns with what I don't identify as anger until I'm halfway through the park. Still burning, I climb the railway bridge, carrying the bicycle; a man coming down the other side, attracted, says "Can you manage that?" "Yup" I say and blaze past. - One needs the mood of a warrior for every act. Otherwise one becomes distorted and ugly. - John's scribble about me on a piece of paper, he actually does hold me inside himself like something priceless, he lay all yesterday afternoon with an erection and fluid seeping through his pants, and that really was for me, because of me. He keeps trying, keeps giving, he makes me swell with my own pride, he sleeks me and fattens me. He doesn't let me shrivel him, as I let Andy shrivel me. This morning he sat on his windowsill, one elegant bare foot along the ledge, the other knee up, chest bare, arm on his knee, head back, singing. - Part of my fury: he's [Andy] relatively stupid; apart from his elegant hands he's relatively plain; he's nobody special, an alienated articled clerk with stiff middle-class parents and some few love affairs he remembers with probably more pleasure than they ever game him; what right does he have to be so arrogant and mean with me, who am in a whole different caste of fluid intelligence etc? Feeling, etc? "Ellie's a good friend of mine" he tells his mother. "As it were" I say sharp and quick, quite shocked that he presumes to call me that. I look at him. "As it were," he says. His mother, going to sit down, says "As she were." "As she were" says he. - Now most of the grinding's gone from my stomach I find myself looking forward to the next battle: I'm realizing that whoever he is, however ordinary, he's prepared to battle with me, and I'm ready to take him on, and I look forward to blind little excursions into warm beds, momentary truces, and lots more contracted oppositions (I'm even liking his mother) where we don't know who we are until afterwards. - If I'm going to write - since I'm going to write - I should know why. It's for myself, to research through that sense of impacted surface, boring untrue conventional, to the something past it which is more delightful, shocking, new. My saints are Lessing, Updike and Agee: the cool accurate brain that allows no self deceit; the rising pushing sense of the world and the minute attention to it; the thrilling sense of shape; the intoxication with being, death at just the right (writing) shoulder. Because I'm crusted, scabbed over. Because I'm ashamed of myself. (I'm inert. I'm almost fizzed out - no, that's substance - and it's substance I don't know about; I cherish it because it's myself, my only self.) - John arrived in jeans, a blue and white shirt (strong blue) and a yellow teeshirt showing at the open neck, barefoot, face sunburnt. He's a thin man now. I look at him and think: I did that. His profile still has something of the letcherous old Jew in it ("quelque chose entre la bouche et le nez") but his double chin is gone. - 36-28-38.5 and when I put my head back, a roll of fat at the back of my neck. - The important thing in writing is the thing - push oneself out into it, mental gesture. 13 June Wednesday [daily diary] Wherein I go to see Andy and am dumped on my face. [undated journal] Easy light walking, sneakers, up the hill, the long curve of grand houses, windows, gardens, a rose, clumps of iris, sky so softly maroon, pink, high that I didn't want to arrive, but light behind his wine coloured curtains, and the car out in the side street. When I rang, rose in my teeth, second time, the door was opened by - the girl I remember, great round flat spectacle eyes. She says "I don't think he's asleep yet." I stand bewildered in the corridor, she gets her bag, kindly turns the light on for me, and goes home. We have a moment when with equally kind eyes we look at each other. Then it's she who turns to switch on the light; she's firm and shapely, large low firm breasts. I walk into the black room, smell of sleep, slight Andy on his side of the bed says "You always catch me on my sleepy nights." I collect myself on the edge of the bed. He says "Where's everybody?" I say "She's just left. She let me in." It's ten thirty. He goes into his usual muddle about how funny things have been happening to him - finally with a little pressing he admits that he and Betsy - had got used to being together again, what with her getting pregnant and he having to stay with her and her going to hospital. He got even more muddled and said he didn't want to be a hypocrite, pretend that he had any feelings about me, that would be hypocritical, he'd be a rat, couldn't try to make it with me, casually implied I was hoping for comforting lies, said of course he could lie, he was a good liar, but honesty in relationships etc. Meanwhile I lay in a huddle with my bum against the wall, hugging myself, almost blacked out, quite still and nowhere near desolate enough to cry. He said "Ego - I hope you aren't hurt because you opened yourself." "I didn't even do that much. I don't mostly have that kind of courage." Dry spare voice. Long silence, I held myself and strategically breathed as though I were asleep. Got bored and got up, felt for my shoes on the floor. "Hey" he said. "Hey. I'm sorry I fell asleep." "I didn't even realize you had." It's so like your normal state. Little insincere mutter: "Ellie ..." as I go almost soundlessly through the dark room, with my rose, and out into the corridor, and home, rose back in my teeth and wanting to cry, while he sank back into his dense smell of sleep. C/f this afternoon, John in pink striped shirt with a sheen like parchment, lying with me on the grass beside one of the paths that cross the Fields under a tree rattling its large flat leaves in the gusts of wind that drove a box kite above into struggle. We lay side by side, I with my head under his arm against his side and my hand on his arm, he with his knee bent up to touch mine - he stroked my head, looked at the leaves. I closed myself into the dark immobile silence I need with another body these days and felt my unease slowly shift, as if the vibrations from his warm and lively self were tuning all the molecules of my body to lie still in one direction, giving me a dark and silvery grain. Then I skimmed home on the bicycle, one bare foot trailing on the grass, and he ran home the other way. - Why I'm sad about weak trivial stupid Andy - never speak ill of what you've loved says Don Juan - but what was it called me back up to see him? - now I'm thrown back on Roy and Jud, as I don't want to be, and John, but I can't sleep with him - sadly sadly wanting an adventure, a new body and a new bedroom to wake up in, and I just regret not having been able to satisfy my curiosity about Andy's good and convenient room. The three half-dead palms at the window and the window itself, the music, the eiderdown, his thin shoulder bent over a guitar. I miss him, his hair as it used to be, his squeamishness, his army coat of the winter past, pockets full of books, I've lost another one. - How warm I could have been with him if I could have been. Everything that doesn't add together. "I needed something from someone and it was you that I looked to for it. You weren't available and I was sad about that for a while. Now I'm not available." And now I feel just lonely for him, sad about everything that didn't happen, wanting to put a hand on either side of his face and smooth him, wished I'd just taken my clothes off and stayed with him last night, fast asleep as he was, wish I'd kept my presence and been loving with him instead of as hurt and shrunken as I was. Warmed him a little. Wish I was there now, discussin' it all with him. 14 June Thursday [daily diary] Seminar with Thomas Elsesser the lovely bug-eyed Australian. John. Roy telephones late, midnight. [undated journal] Thursday. It transfers itself to that lovely Australian who says that what interests him in American cinema is naivete. There he sits opposite me, one ankle up on his knee, hair flat, long boned body makin' my spine shiver, writing copious notes - and there's that face: a little bug-eyed, alert behind spectacles with silver frames, squashed nose and sweet mouth, a Seuss creature with such a look of sweet and vulnerable presence. We look at each other. He likes me. He's really there. At the Rising Sun he sits down opposite me, and when I put my foot down not far from him, he notices, he looks under the table at it. When I speak to Thomas Elssaesser he jumps in with his odd squeaky Australian accent, face shining with innocence dedicated to film. He does his best with the conversation. When I go to Euston he comes too and down to the Northern Line platform. A train's in my platform, I want to kiss him, face drawn back to say goodbye so oddly - I awkwardly shout after him "You've got such a nice face!" and he's distorted even more with embarrassment. I tuck myself into the train and watch in case he goes past the next gateway. He does and he looks and I smile and wave and his face is all bunched up with pleasure, confusion. - He was wearing a short sleeved teeshirt and his arms were smooth-skinned, brown and long, writing notes on his knee; beautiful arms, made my stomach crunch when I looked at them; I was like a twelve year old today, all erotic alertness, reading presences, like Carola Moon and the blackeyed hurt-mouthed man with her, in his orange and blue teeshirt, and yearning for touch - and now daydreaming the gentle creature back here into my bed. - John crying, I held him tight around his shudders, he jerked away his tears, says it's because he wants me, and then his face is open and wet and I tell him that he thinks I don't know his value, but I think I do. How can he be so generous in his loving? - Loneliness and rage that give themselves Andy's name, locate themselves on the sidewalk in front of 75 Dartmouth Park Hill looking past the roses at the broad front door. I'm just wanting somebody. Want to be opening myself to somebody, in enough safety to laugh. Want some excitement! Want to be able to play raging blues out of my head. Frustrated curiosity about who he is, what he's like, in close. What he does. Having opened myself a little - as he said - now having to close myself painfully and slowly, there being no other way to do it, on a void. He comes to the door. I open it, say: Close your eyes, I've got something for you. He closes his eyes. I slap his cheek so hard his head wobbles. Now you know how it feels, I say, and close the door. [fantasy] 16 June Saturday [daily diary] Horrible. 17 Sunday Luke feverish and lies in bed until 5 p.m. Roy calls from Scrubbs. Later Luke wants to call him. I work at music theory. Sarah on the telephone makes me much better about A. Jane stays with Luke while I go to see Lady Sing the Blues with Sarah, we have a shared cheesecake before and a shared ice cream after, walk home from Shaftesbury Avenue: the Post Office Tower and a church spire isolated in a turquoise night sky. To Jane: "Ellie sad," nods. "Will you kiss it better?" "Yes," and comes and stretches up to kiss me on the mouth. "Is it better now?" Last night I said "Dear Luke it's getting dark." He said "An' I getting dark, an' you getting dark, an' the turkle getting dark. Yes?" And I said "I promise we'll have a better day tomorrow." Luke said, telling me about his ailment, "I got sand in my tummy." 18 Monday Couldn't wake although Luke just threw up his first milk, slept, and he was tactful, until 9:30 and then got to the paddling pool where all shone on brown little bodies and Luke's eyes were lit by the water bottom, Barbara's joyful little creature, the strong pleasure of having my pants rolled to the knee, orange dungarees, and Jane's silky old tight undervest on, barefoot on the tarmac, and riding the rocking horse to its wildest bucking with two big eyed thin Irish (?) kids; Desolation Angels in the garden while Luke slept, and in the evening too - Luke threw up lemonade green pepper clotted milk and bits of orange - wrote David - loved Luke today beautiful face waterlit little boy, went out in nightgown to get the bicycle in and Prosper Devas smiled hello. I must get thin. A rubber Dolfish. "Sh'll we put cream on it?" "Okay." "Cream, and stlawbellies?" Tuesday [undated letter] The sky for once like a real summer sky, deep blue from horizon to horizon. I'm in the garden leaning against the warm brick wall under the bedroom windows. Beside me the passionflower vine is feeling for a grip on the wall, and a pot full of beans and nasturtiums is soaking down the rare heat. A long ago dead young man's trio for strings. In the neighbour's lilac a bird, wren or blackbird. The other neighbour's sycamore, from below, is so potent with layered greens that if I look at it for too long I become anxious - why? Pissy Cat is chasing flies, but her Siamese elegance is spoiled by her sloppy underbelly that's feeding five kittens. My plants are catching light in all their special ways: thyme on tiny stiff dark leaves, fennel in silky plumes; young beans, three days out of the ground, stiff and brave; nasturtium leaves shrinking and puckering because it's too strong. Ivy and fern calm in the shade. (A biologist in the States discovered that one of his plants distinctly winced when a secretary poured hot water on another plant in the room.) The clematis and jasmine that were dry twigs when I put them in this spring throw leafy shadows now. Parsley, sage, rosemary, marjorum, lavender, saxifrage, strawberries. The iris brought from an abandoned garden has had its first flower. A tiny pine is struggling to survive - I can't tell if it will live, but it seems to have stopped dying. And the rose flinging itself over the mock orange bush with more abandon than ever, has thousands of buds. Geranium, sweet pea, poppy, aster, and three blunt young marrows among them! Soil I brought from the woods is sprouting mysteriously on its own. This garden's me, every morning I come downstairs, put the kettle on, unbolt the door and walk out to survey it - I'm told plants grow mostly at night on the energy they've trapped during the day. But mine seem to grow most when I'm away - I came back from four days in the country and the grass seemed knee high, the rose ready to swallow all the space between it and the house. And when it rains! Everything is plump and glittering. - I haven't written you since John and [aunt] Lillian were here. Suppose you've spoken to them - wonder what Lillian said to you. We had a funny morning together. Luke was on best behavior, very pretty and charming. John took charge of him while Lillian and I sat in deck chairs like old ladies and exchanged what gossip we could. It's strange talking to Lillian. Whenever I said anything that interested me she looked blank and changed the subject. So it really had to be her conversation, very pleasant an' all. John's a lovely man! I got an instant crush on him, he's so gentle, careful, genuine and bright - he liked Luke, and when I discovered that he is just like me with his garden, going out to see it the minute he gets home from work, I just confirmed what I felt from the good face he's grown since I saw him last. Don't you think he's grown a fine wise face? - I can't come to Canada this summer. I didn't get the Canada Council fellowship I'd counted on (because my thesis topic is too romantic?) and so I'm poor again. The amount of money I'd saved up was only half enough to get there (because Luke is expensive now, 50% on charters) and even that I've just spent buying and insuring the car. The car is a little 1964 2CV (one of the little tinny Citroëns you saw in France) I bought from Roy's sister for £40. Of course I have still to get my license, but - It's over a month since I've written you. There was Mother's Day, that barrier I couldn't get over - I am sorry, but consciously and unconsciously it seems I can't make it mean anything to me. It seems completely arbitrary as a day, it could be any day; I could celebrate you any day, and often do, although you don't know it; but I cannot celebrate you on the day I'm dutifully supposed to celebrate you. I know it must seem perverse to you; but I am not am not a good citizen and I will not will not celebrate Mother's Day, Father's Day, National Book Week, New Year's Day, Armistice Day or any other day that my body doesn't celebrate on its own accord (Christmas and Easter are different because they are season celebrations). You haven't had any manifestos for a long time, but there you are. Does that mean I'm not grown up yet? If I were I suppose I'd just do things and not lecture you about them. Dear M, and I do think of you so affectionately, and so respectfully. I think your elasticity and sheer spirit are nearly unique in your generation and pretty rare in mine. Nobody I know has a mother like you; I brag all the time. I'd like you to live around the corner and talk about books. I have fantasies that you'll do that. I'd like Luke to know you. He'd love you even on Mother's Day. I've always wanted to share everything I learn with you. I'd like to learn to stay permeable and pliable from you. You're the brightest mother I could have had. When are you coming over? How are you really? We're well. Luke's tall and happy these days. He's in a flirtatious time and I'm his most jealously guarded mommy: "Not your mommy!" he says, holding onto my leg. When I get him out of his crib in the morning, 6:15 a.m. usually, and go back to bed myself, he comes and lies down next to me; this morning, cheek on my pillow, he said "I love you!" and then he turned it into a song and it became
From the back of the bicycle I hear a little voice saying "I be your friend - yes?" His sense of friendship is well developed, especially with Mossy, Amos the funny-faced humorist of the commune, just nine months older than Luke, with feet about five sizes larger; they have long telephone conversations in which they delight themselves by communicating in exchanges of squeals and giggles. With less intimate friends his telephone conversations are more sophisticated: "Hello Grandma." "What's yo' name?" "I got a tractor." "I think the battery is flat." "I got kittens. Pussy Cat got kittens. I have just a little peek." "I pee in the grass." (grawss) "You see me to-morroh?" "Goodbye." "Grandma all gone." You see what you're missing. He's full of fancies. Leaning against a wall holding his penis - I said "What are you doing?" - he said "I going to pee in the ceiling!" From the back of the bike, whisking through the Heath, he said "I got a lovely likkle pe-nis. I got a wiggy. It's there," patting himself. His vocabulary's very large: recognizes pictures of crocodiles, hippopotamuses, giraffes, frogs, lions, tigers, elephants, zebras, mice and all the usual animals. Knows by heart three or four nursery rhymes - "FeFiFoFum I 'mell a blood of an Englishmun." But still says "I got a blue engine" when he means he has got a new engine, and calls everything red. He says "What's in that?" I say "Nothing." "Which nuffink? Which nuffink?" As for me, apart from Luke and the garden, other joys, these days more joys than I need - a little state of grace in which I play the piano, write, read like a kid, listen to the Beethoven Quartet Andy lent me, enjoy being a little bit in love (hardly matters with whom), walk at night, gossip with Jane who's borrowing the downstairs room; enjoy the thought of my friends, think about films. Look and listen, look forward to more looking and listening. [undated journal] Luke in his bed, sweet Luke, hair pushed off his forehead, in his striped pyjamas, I cover him and sit holding his bars, eyes closed, sing him Hush little baby don't you cry / You know your mama's bound to die-e / Hush little baby hush little child / You know time eats you meek or wild / Hush little baby when you're grown / I'll be an old lady I'll be gone. He coughs, I see his face distort as he gathers it up. I leave him to try to silence the kittens. He whispers "Ellie." I come to look at him. He says "I not close my eyes." Roy came from Scrumps Bottom sunburned redfaced like a farmer. Luke from across the room called to him "Roy - I love you." "What did he say?" Luke stands with his sturdy knees together, feet apart in cotton underpants too big for him, the pyjama tops, composed, and repeats it. This morning we went to the paddling pool at the bottom of the Heath. Naked babies, water, Barbara's bright-eyed daughter touching the water with little shouts and cries, fat rippling baby thighs and the reddish patch where her diaper soaks her, solid round sex firmer than fruit; such joy at the water and its lights, eyes shining. Just now I went upstairs to get a notebook, switched on the light, and Luke sprang up in bed still asleep I think and exclaimed "El-lie!" with a wide pink-cheeked smile on his face. I turned off the light and laid him down again and that was that. 19 June Tuesday [daily diary] Evening at NFT, big black hat to give me power in that dangerous place, did, even on the tube. Soleil O about Africans in Paris, bad, a pretty Egyptian fable The Eloquent Peasant and in the intermission sitting on the floor drinking coffee and zapping people from under the hat - sat on the railing above the river rocking and driving to I'm a good woman and I'm going to waste blues, then a film full of Arab heroes killing Israelis who look exactly like them, stupid, but energizing, and home in warm rain making French poems about couloirs de couleurs, couloirs qui coulent, des fleuves par terre. Over black light-running Hungerford Bridge - trees throwing long leafy shadows on river while it was [?]. 20 Wednesday Luke: whining from earliest morning, Pussy Cat too, rain, I'm suffocated with a cold, have to wake up and give him his Baa Baa Black Sheep book. While Luke is sleeping and I'm practicing piano a long blond brisk girl comes to the door wanting to use the telephone - invented a jeans jacket out of inverted jeans, with smart belly button brown - afternoon Luke to show off to Doreen and Hattori - three good plates crisply glazed DL6, big pot with shiny brown glaze, a lot of colors, some ugly cups - two African films, funny, at NFT, home and disrupted; sad to find no Luke, no man, nobody to visit. Struggle with concept of M7th chords, struggle to breathe. 21 Thursday R, bringing Luke back, stayed to build Lego on the floor, a tractor and a taxi, I suffocated with cold and lonely for skin, R affectionate and approachable and I began to feel quite humorous and nicely 'seduced' while talking about how everybody in London is impotent. While Luke was sleeping, long and slowly, put tomato soup in new white cups; took Luke to Sir Fossett's Circus, tatty, elderly husband in a bathrobe; beautiful tigers, a grotesque bald dromedaire with a long shovel face, a clown squirting tears, elephants like ugly old women, fat-thighed women, two ice creams each, the tent a nice shape, pathetic and grotesque two men playing trumpet duet, one doing a head stand on the other's head. March from Aida I think. 22 Friday Luke whinging, gets packed into bed, where he sings to himself looking at train book, I'm drowning in head fluid, sneezes; Mare's Tale, Beverley's nice, film is wonderful, fans out thoughts, colors, styles, it's an epic catalogue of thoughts and styles, Barry smiling in rolled dungarees and sneakers, afterwards I read in Dillons and have cheesecake and coffee in the Continental and go to Westminster Reference Library where I read Poetry Quarterly and Poetry Review; John telephones drunk, laughing, crying, shouting about how I'm giving him an erection, apologizing, "It's you. I love you." "I don't even come anymore, I have to pretend," which made me grotesque with laughter. Cats are swarming like tadpoles, two red flowers on my maple [abutilon]. 23 Saturday Set out for East Anglia. Steak, wine, banana split, delicious filet, delicious white. Walk on seawall through marshes. The beach with Corsican pines, dunes, curves holding rabbits and birds. Wide far beach with ocean still and melting into land and sky at far corner, styrofoam crates' egg clumps. Sleeping with stars between blots of pine bough, twisted silvery trunks, some fallen; dreaming a man in white pullover leaning over, walking around twice, saying "I'm going to make macaroni of you." 24 Sunday Waking to degrees of light, walked to water, far across sand, distant people extended by mirage to 20' stilt walkers, delicious breakfast on [?] by Wells next to the sea, egg bacon tomatoes toast and coffee, people, boats setting out joking about sailboats - [?] - house with windows full of plants, country, forest commission long forest lane with bracken, horses - tall grey who wouldn't trot, silky field of barley on one side, a lane, trees beyond; dinner turning theatrical, looking for sailboats. 25 Monday Potter Heigham. Breakfast, Richardson boat builder and designer, a beautiful sailboat called Helen with a sail that looked like ancient Egypt, a little wind going upriver past cottages to marshes, a heron, another sailboat with oxblood sails, white sails moving silently through high marshes - a butterfly, a duckling. Evening walk to a church with Norman strong brick and flint tower; brick farmsteads with thatched barns, pea and greens fields bluegreen with mist, tall clumps of pink and mauve poppies. 26 Tuesday Woke next to a haystack under a Constable tree, hung around waiting by bridge at Potter Heigham. Paddy who'd been a mercenary in Congo and in Aden ("only lasted six months, they ran out of money," £250 a week), slept most of the way back to London - Edmonton - Roy brought Luke who looks unwell - all ate cherries. Watched Sam, beautiful scenes with women. 27 Wednesday Home with Luke - morning to Institute, the Leach film and a Yorkshire potter called Button who throws with genius. 28 Thursday 4 plates back ugly brown that the DL6 went. Remember Sufi workcamp. 29 Friday Read The Summer Before the Dark. 30 Saturday Ill. Whitestone pond with pots. 2-6 July Monday-Friday Scrumps [ie Scrubbs Bottom probably with Roy]. [Here the Boots Diary peters out.]
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