| london volume 6 part 2 - 1973 september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated letter, September] Okay, here's an air letter, one of a batch bought for YOU, to send whether there's anything to say or not. Luke has a cold and has been home today, grizzly, hot, wheezing and unhappy. I was worried this morning but he was a little better this afternoon and has gone sweetly to bed. Roy came for tea with Mossy and Isabel, the commune children and we all loved each other up and shared two pieces of cake. It is cold, very cold, but wonderfully sunny. When Luke gave me a chance I practiced music - breathing exercises Hafisa gave me at the Sufi farm, and exercises for learning to sight read. Have to learn music cause I NEED it a lot and cause it helps for making films. We've lit the coal fire for the first time this autumn and the handsome cats have been sleeping in the coal scuttle or in the sun on the rush mat. In the garden the bean vines are still letting down long bean pods and the strawberries are beginning suddenly to bear. I've had nice thoughts of Frank, autumn was his time of year, and building reminded me of him as well. What a good and true relationship we had. Did it seem that way to you? Did it worry you? ("Er is trauherzig" said Grandma Epp.) Thought of you a lot two weeks ago when I had an unrequited crush on a Canadian filmmaker who ran away more the more (discretely) I pursued him. The reason I thought of you was that I felt in myself the same baffled and trauherzig impulse to give myself honestly that you are so often left with. I think men are simply cowards and babies. Oh why do I want to be one? I'm getting wonderfully light and strong from doing yoga. Shall I send you the book afterwards? When I've learned it. [Richard Hittleman's Yoga 28-day exercise plan] [undated notebook] There is no transcendence until the human faculties - intelligence, will, human love - have come up against a limit, and the human being waits at this threshold, which [she] can make no move to cross, without turning away and without knowing what [she] wants, with fixed, unwavering attention. Simone Weil - Adams - structural vs formal - "recurrences, antitheses, and overall rhythms are the elements of the formal; in essence, films whose contents are, at root, myths. Gidal and attempt to deal with material objectivity in a dialectical manner rather than in a model-oriented one = Marxist aesthetic. Process of awareness of consciousness of actuality. Describing a Crosswaite film, "This results in a mental activation paralleling and attempting to decipher the formal change-processes. The total feel of a structure is no less strong for the inherent impossibility of being deciphered." Art and Artists December 1972 p14. A Roger Hammond: "Structures are thus set up and broken down, forcing a non-hierarchical mental activity ..., a non-atomistic, non-positivistic attitude. The films become philosophical statements ...." Conceptually and humanly more important than the underground film is the structural film, wherein the shape of the film and the feeling of that shape, the attempt to analyze it, is more important than any specific construct ... viewer ultimately not dictated to. Inherent manipulatory devices exposed. Mass education forced re-education. Structural - the captivity consists of the subculture - necessity of slogging through to ingroup maybe. - Elsaesser - cathecting to the form of the discourse. - Sitting with A, forcing a stare at his face on him, felt right to me, he took hold of my head and pushed it down; very decisive. She's all there; but he tapped me in my weakest place, that dearest him who lives alas away. Don Juan has something in common with Justine and Lâle, but Castaneda can let him live and be what he seems; men to women cannot? No matter what he does, he must know first why he is doing it, and then he must proceed with his actions without having doubts or remorse. - Psychic Research in the USSR Ostrander and Schroeder A leaf torn from a tree when placed in a field of high frequency current, revealed a world of myriad dots of energy. Around the edges of the leaf there were turquoise and reddish yellow patterns of flares coming out of specific channels of the leaf. A human finger placed in the high frequency field and photographed, showed up like a complex topographical map. There were lines, points, craters of light and flares. Some parts of the finger looked like a carved jack-o'-lantern with a glowing light inside. - [I take Luke with me on another visit to the Khankah] Piran speaking - getting high, exhorts: "Sweethearts!" Seductive but then that look of being about to weep. Lovely moments. Vascillating presence - real to seductive. Don't know what to trust. Makes you work. I held David's face in my hands, mumbling up his neck, kissing his eyelids. Felt my arms wanting to rise and embrace whoever was beside me - Louisa and Angela as it happened. Refused my attraction to Piran because he can speak. Turning my face away, refusing to look at him, refusing to be seduced, began, holding David like an icon, to write the story. Making a one-night stand. When she was eight a family moved into their church community. There were two daughters younger than herself, and two sons older. The eldest son was in high school; he must have been sixteen. She loved him from the moment she saw him, and continued to love him throughout the rest of her childhood. Loving him was a long dedication to a contemplation of what she knew about him. Fantasies. Snooping. Who was she for him? He couldn't have been imaginative enough to guess. When he spoke to her Walking in the woods with her mother. Who's your true love? Yes you have good taste. Mother plump in rolled trousers. Then meeting the man - dark-haired, slender - and falling in love with him. The dream. How it is when you're grown up. Will you come for a walk? The hesitations and faithfulness and weakness the same. The man I want to be. From the Bengali - Levertov
From Spenser, Like a Huntsman after Weary Chase
Carol - John Short
- Is it part of man-animal to make and need stories of important and strange things. - Mysticism - senses fusing - color and sound "are known as aspects of the same thing." - Neruda's died. - [technical notes from Mike Dunford's filmmaking class at the Camden Institute] One of his films - a Dulux can riding the waves, prow of windowsill, flapping curtain sail. - What if philosophy like Hegel were written like automatic writing straight from some cell-imprint or brain print or - ? And the study of 'philosophy' were tracing just the topography of what is thrown together. Writing at my best, in that feverish state, I've felt some extra knowledge coming from the side. 'Knowledge' suddenly opening up, things acquiring shadows, several and colored shadows. Childhood words: chiffonier. [undated notebook] Williams' poem about the sheep "peacefully continuing in his verse forever". The strange little car in Greece. Man confused not dangerous. Descending into valley with horses wheeling like birds. Rising again into night, running, crying. Half a year later the bag come back. Also the bag in Rome. It is one story with horses in the middle. - With all my baggage rolled in my sleeping bag and that strapped onto my shoulder with my scarf I feel light, a young girl with an old face, feel I'll be able to travel as light as this as long as I like. Arriving at Holyhead just after dark. The British Rail station where boats and trains dock alongside and [there is] a clock tower with four lit clock faces, enclosed little cobbled square with station's internal exterior rising like elegant hotel, crates stacked against ballroom windows. Long stem of a road, high brick walls on either side, turn down into town, egg and chips. In the Ladies' Waiting Room stuffed in my sleeping bag reading the first poem in the book:
[letter] Ireland - September From Dublin this time, "Mornin'" says the old man, "Beautiful mornin'" and breaks into an Irish song as he begins to take his clothes off, putting as much vibrato as he's got into the last syllable of every line. He keeps his straw hat on until the last. On the way down to the sea I took a path through wild land. There were two gypsy caravans, elaborately painted, with round canvas roofs like the covered wagons. Inside the open door of one I could see a litter of furniture, and a long mirror broken in three places. Now the old man has his ankles in the water, still singing, vibrato interrupted with bubble-shivers. It's cold, long past summer. Beautiful rounded sandstone boulders along the coast, half submerged in water. Five miles down the coast is grey Dublin, not The children at the caravans were red haired, white-skinned. "Mornin'" they said. Madeleine is not home, but her friend Felix the musician let me in, gave me a key and went off himself, leaving me among the grand staircases, bits of satin and the stained glass of Madeleine's place - and Orlando's, whom I went to France to welcome last year when he was born, if you remember. I wear Madeleine's pink nightgown and feel I'm dreaming. I came on impulse. Thursday morning, Luke at Roy's until Tuesday. A few things rolled in the sleeping bag, and that tied up with my wool scarf, and I hit the road. Respectful truck drivers. Up the motorway toward The North, then across the top of Wales, mountains, to the town of Holyhead, a land's-end which is really an island connected to and by a long causeway like a stem. There on another blind high-walled stem is the station where boats and trains dock side by side. I arrived at this mysterious place just after dark, and the ferry to Ireland not due until eleven, walked out to find a little hill town where the waitress who served my egg and chips spoke English like a foreign language, her natural language being Welsh. Sat in the Ladies' Waiting Room reading William Carlos Williams and when the ferry came went to sleep under the ropes at the far end of a deck. Woke in Dublin's grey harbour at 6:30 a.m. full of magic and prepared for more. I thought Dublin would be full of young poets but have found only Felix the musician and Joe the filmmaker. "I guess I'm an underground filmmaker" I said to one of the truck drivers. "Underworld films?" said he, "I hear there's a lot of money in that." [travel notebook] Joe's [Comerford] house, back window looks down on a long garden, grass, rhubarb, cold frame open and scrapped, a path leading to a brick little house with light from the open door and fan window and two little upstairs rooms, like a smithy, something mysterious, a man in an orange teeshirt walks down the crooked path and stands consulting, just his legs visible. [notebook sketches: chimney pots, corner pieces on ferry deck, pots and other artifacts from the National Museum, Dublin] Pinch pot very groggy clay, rather fingernail looking scallops, passage grave Carrow Keel Sligo, Megalithic. Very moving stones 2000 BC, New Grange, County Meath. Most beautiful granite from Lockstow: "stood beside the trackway traditionally known as St Kevin's Road through the Wicklow Mountains." Stone-lined grave (cist) with cremated remains and a food vessel, covered by a flat stone the underside of which has four sets of concentric circles "pecked into the surface of the stone." 1500 BC Co Meath Neolithic food vessels from graves - what attracts is that shape, wide at the belly, narrow foot. "from a bog" Lovely pins, others with double springs like safety pins. Iron spearhead rusted thin at the sides. Other iron spearheads turned into lace. Enlarging prism in museum, makes colors leak outward like magnetized iron filings. Reflection on a 1930 Irish wine bottle, dark green - ribbed ceiling reflected square-circle lights. Neck torque and is slightly veined, feels like tension pulling neck out of squashed belly. Pale green bottleglass bowl with rim turned over, light on convex bottom uneven, bubbles in it. Magritte, Suzi Gablik His life had been a solitary posture of immense effort. If one has been trapped by the mystery of an image which refuses all explanation, a moment of panic will sometimes occur ... privileged moments, because they transcend mediocrity. I don't paint ideas. I describe, insofar as I can, by means of painted images, objects and the coming together of objects, in such a light as to prevent any of our ideas or feelings from adhering to them. It is essential not to confuse or compare these objects, these connections or encounters between objects, with any 'expressions' or 'illustrations' or 'compositions'. The latter would dissipate all mystery, whereas the description that I paint does not reveal to the mind what it is that might cause objects to appear, or what might connect them or make them fall in with each other. If dreams are concerned in this context, they are very different from those we have while sleeping. It is a question rather of self-willed 'dreams', in which nothing is as vague as those feelings one has when escaping in dreams .... 'Dreams' which are not intended to make you sleep but to wake you up. The appearance of a figure rediscovers its mysterious virtue when it is accompanied by its reflection. In effect, a figure appearing does not evoke its own mystery except at the appearance of its appearance. Wittgenstein bewitchment of intelligence by language - propositions that "took the form of the nonsensical to be used as steps on a ladder which would be thrown away once it was climbed." - Joe's garden You come into the garden and go up some steps, there's a kind of lodge from which you have to press through underbrush, overgrown, to get to a place where it opens up a little, there's something like a path which is a dried streambed that gets wider as you go along, you can't tell where it comes from, there are some trees, very tall and straight trees well spaced out. You go along and come to a bridge that crosses the streambed, which is full of leaves, this deep in leaves (foot and a half), one of those small bridges that is shorter than it is wide, you stoop to go under it. I don't know the names of many plants, but - beeches, and birches; I like silver birches. The roots stick out into the streambed, and people have carved their names on them, but so long ago that sometimes you can't tell they were names, you know how it is, when the tree grows outward around the writing and you don't understand right away that it was a name? At the end of the garden it's very overgrown again, there are a number of ways to get out but they're all very hard to find. When you do get out you're very high up, on a cliff, the garden was on a slope going up. I forgot - at the beginning of the garden there are a lot of rhododendrons, but they aren't in bloom. Is there a house in the garden? No. Well, describe a house, any house, maybe it's beside the garden. Where the bridge is, there must be a path that crosses the streambed. Along one of these (was it to the left, I think) is a small house with an old slate roof, it's got very little in it. Is it a traditional house, one of those with a door in the middle and a window on each side, and a chimney on either end? No only a chimney on one end, like those little houses but much longer, very long. There's a fire at one end, a place for cooking and a bed at the other, and there's a curtain you can draw in the middle. Is there a table? No, maybe something small by the fire. A chair? No. (Asked afterwards why it was long, he said it was because his rooms had always been too square to project in, and the curtain was for that purpose too. But then he said that his drawings had always been elongated too, there must be some other reason. The key - a big key, longer than a hand, it has an elaborate curly bit at the end so you can hold it well. The part that actually unlocks is very complicated. It's a kind of grey, dark grey (gun metal). I guess it's too heavy to carry around with me. I must leave it in one of the sheds. It was immediately taken for granted that it unlocked the front door. - While telling the garden more animated than I'd seen him, and when I explained laughed with excitement. - The cobbled road along the river, a high heavy sliding door to go through leading the two bicycles like horses, tethering them and walking down into the weedy ruin, staircases and beams standing, lying. Staircases - "I feel compelled to climb them" said Joe. Wooden roof curved slightly, held up by latticed woodwork. One aged handrail was beautifully finished, sanded off round, like wear. Smashed chemical bottles, one the piece of glass with neck attached seemed an ambiguous window, delighted me - I was seeing surreally with Joe, a pair of shoes, pointed men's shoes, and a lot of dresses, coats, laid on the seawall as if crowds of people had left them there and stepped into the sea. Unraveled blond string underwater beside a wreck on its side, like a giantess's death. Beautiful black tanks in an arrangement with grey gravel between them and a border of brilliant green grass. In the Fertilizer ruin, rich green mosses perhaps fertilized by dust. A factory with smoke and steam, Joe said it must be full of steam which was not pushed out but leaked through every seam. Strenuous work being with him because he didn't love or flatter me, nor I him, although I watched him and he didn't watch me. We were both watching hard. Bicycles. My hat and scarf, the red faced workmen leaning from the curbs to call to us. The long sea road to the lighthouse, stones some sunk down, moss with tiny pink flowers. Seagulls pushing around a place where sewerage boiled up from underwater. The red lighthouse. A treehouse on barnacled piles, platform on which I sat, he leaned on the rail. When he dropped orange peels he saw an immediate little oil slick and then I saw it too, a quick blue light around the peel before it floated quickly away. When he dropped the match he saw that it made the sea surface visible to him, black shapes swinging gravely toward our bridge, like hands of a clock. Gradually the lighthouse's reflection shot with green among the shaking red, showed a lavender-mauve that was reflected from nowhere. Said Skammen was the first fil-lum he ever saw. "We are so confused, sentimental, false that we don't see what we see, we aren't trained to know what we feel, but somehow there must be a way to find the keys, and that's what film is for me." "When you put it so simply it seems very clear, but it isn't always so clear." Face is thin, ungenerous, small eyes, sharp nose, small sharp mouth, familiar almost invisible face, I can't remember it. Good dark jacket, small tight body, small long hands, very fine, big knuckles but pointed at the ends, little fingernails, the whole hand points from a broad base and each finger points. Three whorls on right hand. Hands symmetrical. Just turned 26. Donegal, father old engineer, uncle a farmer, education biased toward profession. Art school. Four months in NY. Withdrawal at the beginning seems forced and false, then at the end seems accomplished. Didn't want to be sympathetic at the beginning. [description of the film] Looked at Madeleine's triptych mirror and saw a wise queen without defeat. Will and humor. Decided to remember that I wear that face. Big nose, plain and level eyes, thin line from eyelid to chin which is my beauty. This is a real woman who should allow nobody to make her smaller. It's the autumn inspection like when I was eighteen and equally satisfied, with a face that shone with energy, but promised this uncompromising boniness, ten years ago. - Yes, he is wiser that shelters his longing from such surfeit. Yes, he is wiser that knows the shadow makes lovely the substance, wisely regarding the ways of that irresponsible shadow which, if you grasp at it, flees, and, when you avoid it, will follow, gilding all life with its glory and keeping always one woman young and most fair and most wise, and unwon; and keeping you always never contented, but armed with a self respect .... Love is an instant's fusing of shadow and substance, fused for that instant only, whereafter the lover may harvest pleasure from either alone, but hardly from these two united. Miramon, Figures of Earth Queen - cwen Fairies whose gate into and out of the world is fire. When the moon is powerless. - The opaque woman guarding the Ladies' Waiting Room. I find myself making strange declamations to her. "You can't sleep in here." "Can I, if I don't appear to sleep?" "You can't sleep in here. The police come in. You can sleep across the way or next door." "I'll go across the way then." "You can sit in here." "I think if I sat in here I might tend to fall asleep." But while I'm sussing out the waiting rooms she consults the two young bobbies and then fetches me. They agree I can sleep there. "You look a decent sort." This journey has been full of marvels, all strange like being a different person, a little mad maybe but I like it, it's lucid and sensitive to omens. The first night back: dreamed a large building, the words bible school come into my mind, full of holes between levels. There's a stove on a top floor we make a fire in. I think Mother does. Sense of making it. It's habitable. Going to be a school, or else it has been, a sacred or special school of some kind. Trapdoors? There's a section of floor like a raft. I make an aircraft of it, fly it up and around, steer it by leaning forward and sideways, bring it gently back again and land it as part of the floor - a sort of balcony. In the next section I seem to discover that this previous part is a story I wrote when I was ten - it's there printed in a magazine. Written with lovely confidence, imagined spontaneously and just set down. I'm proud of it and feel that I was very gifted. When I'm going to show it to Janeen I can't find it, only a collection of photographs I made of almost naked women dressed in real sequins etc. Can't understand their connection with the story. Also find notes I made about various kinds of cult. In making dream films mustn't let people ever know where they are, by always being in a different part of some structure. Berger To 'have eyes for' something. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to a mystification of the past. In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can in retrospect justify the role of the ruling classes. Sometimes in an early Renaissance church or chapel one has the feeling that the images on the walls are records of the building's interior life, that together they make up the building's memory - so much are they part of the particularity of the building. Paintings with words attached: "The words have quoted the paintings to confirm their own verbal authority." Reproductions: "Such authority as it retains, is distributed over the whole context in which it appears ... still used to bolster the illusion that art, with its unique undiminished authority, justifies most other forms of authority ...." People's boards: "... because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room's inhabitant should replace museums." specialized experts who are clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline Vision of how artists are used by art. That young girl dissolve out to woman's head. The experience of art was set apart from the rest of life - precisely in order to be able to exercise power over it. If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate ... also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past ... people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history. This is why - and this is the only reason why - the entire art of the past has now become a political issue. A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. A woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can or cannot be done to her. A woman must continually watch herself. The surveyor of woman in herself is male, the surveyed female. Women are depicted in quite a different way from men - not because the feminine is different from the masculine - but because the 'ideal' spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. Suggests imaginatively turning a portrayed woman into a man. When I admire myself in the mirror the look I wear is young Durer - self conscious, highly present - and closed. Levi-Strauss desire to possess the thing for the owner (or spectator's) benefit - original feature of Western civilization. Blake trying to make people substanceless didn't use oil. Classic reference - "spectator-owner hoped to see the classic face of his own passion or grief or generosity." Advertisements - envy - glamour. Depends on not envying People "look out over the looks of envy which sustain them"." People in half-way democracy, wanting more but feeling powerless are "continually subject to envy ... dissolve into daydreams". Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. - September 26, Sunday, Khankah Heaviness, hunger, fatigue growing until sitting in the dining room after a lot of food that didn't satisfy me, sitting and waiting, Huzur looked at me from the kitchen and my face turned sharply to the wall and began to break. I hadn't known I wanted to cry. Then my throat ached. In the path behind the hedgerow, we came to the top of the rise, where two oak trees grew, and lay down under crisp grass stems huge just over my eyes - a fine rose stem that began underneath me - white vapor clouds with sharp light edges - Luke fell asleep lying on me, light little body, legs between mine, head on my hard chest, small hands - spread? The block printed corduroy trousers, and his black-brown-white sweater from Grandma tucked under the straps. We lay together maybe three quarters of an hour, sun spells and cold spells. A bird struggled once in the bushes. Blackberries hung down along the path among ferns and nettles. When he woke too soon I carried him home as far as the road, and then he cried until we saw Tod sawing. Putting him to sleep: asked him to stroke my sore tummy, he did; stuffed him into the sleeping bag to stop his dawdling. Made up a song he wanted about the yellow house, changed it to his directions: "Not green roof, green door." Sang him over and over the Kum By Aw stanza about someone's sleeping - "I like that song." When I thought he was sleeping he rolled over and said, holding his arms out to me, "I'm your friend" before rolling over again. Sang him In a wagon bound for market / dona dona dona / do-ona. "I like that song." Then breathed him slowly - at the end watched his eyelids flickering hesitating closing. A film of him falling asleep and waking. Maybe he says something wordlessly. Leonard Cohen Energy of Slaves
September 27
Happiness pulling long rusty nails out of creosoted beams for the barn - hammer and torn split gloves, feeling light and tight - also taking the B&D electric saw, finding it light and easy - also sitting on the beams already up, dangling legs, in the sun, high over barn and valley, talking to John about how crude people are, sleeping people, in the maternity ward where he is a porter. A poem about sleeping people awake. Film. Luke very tired went into angry fits, demanding and refusing, I lugged him upstairs and quieted him with a story about Luke calling and calling for his mummy and getting no answer because she was picking blackberries. He said "I don't want you to go in the forest again." I promised that next time I would take him too. He ate his muesli sitting feet in his sleeping bag, then lay down and listened to In a Wagon Bound for Market and Dona Nobis Pacem. Then when I stopped his eyelids sank. These evenings and afternoons when I put him to sleep - put him to sleep. - Elias seducing us with how hard it's going to be this year. The film - shock of seeing myself from behind, right hip dragging, broad shoulders coming out of the overall straps grotesquely out of proportion to the short legs. Laying bricks, the light deft hands and then those broad strange upper arms and a queer pot belly that was never there before. Near the end of the film Elias has me seen through the arms passing stones - hair back in a pony tail, gloves, teeshirt, I'm catching and throwing stones - accurately, in good rhythm. On my unfamiliar face is an expression of - gentleness and sweetness - and my hands make an unfamiliar gesture tugging up my gloves. - Two crows flying together wings beating alternately - just that moment - use it for something. [house sketch]
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