| london volume 7 part 1 - 1974 january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated notebook, January 1974] Swimming pool Sounds. Silence is so precious here, there's so little of it. Harshness of the voices Holiness of boy in blue trunks, with black stripes, passing the shower, which is empty. The pale blue corner. O light, o birds. I still have no good ceiling footage. If there's a good bit of ceiling could I just repeat it several times. Rain makes spots. A monkey's wedding. The lights come on. O the mauve green.
Beautiful young girls How the water boils up after she has jumped She appears next to the bombing site The transformation of people when they dive under The odd light a mixture of diffuse silvered skylight and false yellow, wet streaks on the panes Actually research the modes of walking on water, 13 views of a blackbird, learning to swim The shivering plaid of artificial lights over tiles wet skin How to isolate sounds when it is so overloud Old man and young woman shampooing nose to nose Whiteness of the white bodies so pronounced - Saturday morning Don't forget the puddle next to the dripping pipe at 9 a.m. It shows the rosy chimney - fancy that on a cloudy day - drips from the ceiling and you can see the brick chimney Clearing need close-up lens? Maybe? Tripod how? Eye level. The ceiling shivered by drips is exquisite This lower angle is better for the roof The roof in the ceiling gutter 13 ways to look at a glass roof Small bubbles Close-up lens for the tiny puddle that has the bowed struts of the ceiling Second cubicle, slight movement makes it belly. Surface tension makes it a very sharp particular lens. When there are many drops on the reflection you really work to construct the roof. Against the light, the cracks are clear, the panes more distinct. That plant and its shadow are very gently moving, the shadow more than the plant. Glistening speckle and cracks. [roof, roof reflection] [letter] January 9, the year's turned, we're under a comet no one can see because it's always overcast, in the garden a snowdrop has bloomed, hyacinths and tulips have their pointed tips two inches above ground, daffodils are pushing up their knife-blades, the skies are high and stormy, January skies. Luke and Roy are stormy too. Fights and their calm lucid times. - JOYLESS WORK CAUSES CANCER USE YOUR BIRTH CERTIFICATE AS A CREDIT CARD DEMOCRACY IS GENETIC SLAVERY - painted on walls around about Notting Hill where I'm - Poem from Ffos Mascal (Wales, last summer)
- Luke calls the photograph album "that book about Far Away in Canada." I've promised him a trip in an airplane soon. Can we come to an airport to meet you? How he'd love that. What he loves best are the tractors and 'combines' and the little boy playing in front of the house. All these things I'm sending you, they aren't poems, they're notes for poems or -? But they haven't yet got the lovely shape I like so much in Seferis and others. So say what you think. Have got back some 'rushes' - ie unedited film, just developed but not cut - from the laboratory. What I've shot is quite nice. So far. So many ideas, it's a good time. - Luke's interested, from the photographs, to discover that he has a grandpa as well as grandmas. That will be an interesting meeting.
Euripides the Athenian by George Seferis [undated notebook] Eyebrows black with peaks. Little man on tube - face wortled like round lumps under skin - sat reading a book - got up and went out, face clamped shut. Leichester Square a tiny man limped up behind me. "Excuse me. I hope you won't think I'm being rude. May I talk to you." I'm still walking, don't say anything. He says "Where are you going now?" Ingratiating pleasant voice. He's little, broad face. "I'm going to a movie." "Oh may I take you then? Would you like to go to that one?" I laugh incredulously - it's Robin Hood. "I am so sick of my own company." I hesitate and say "I'm meeting someone actually." He falls back. I am sorry. Feel I should go back. - Peter - something that happens. When I go to see you, when I go home I feel I've been swaggering and blabbing, don't like myself. You say you've been talking mechanically. Me too, it's a wheel that catches me and grinds us along, get off it, discover we haven't been anywhere inside the wheel. Lack of wit and lack of courage and lack of good faith, come without bringing myself as I could - get frozen with anxiety, make motions, leave out the actual things in my life because I'm ashamed of them. Or don't trust you. Wish for green coat, red necklace, fix and paint shoes, make white shirt, black wrap skirt, red skirt or trousers, red cord, things with necks. A little era of stylishness. [style list] [undated journal] Bought a green silk Afghani coat (japan) today, have decided to be beautiful henceforth in order to make myself feel loved, am going to pay for it with money from the Slade. Straub on Unreconciled when it was shown at an art house, "Not so many of the regular visitors came, but then there came people with bicycles, they were grumbling because the bicycles were lying around." - Send a postcard picture of Tova to Fay Weland: Madame! What a lovely book. - Luke away, I've got a room of my own, the carpet from Taznakt is spread beside my clean blue and white bed - so clean the fur vest looks very brown on it. The green Afghan coat on, bought with a red glass bead necklace, for the money from Slade materials allowance, fees not paid. Living in that sharp rapid world of Down Among the Women for this evening - came home stunned from 6 hours hard cleaning for £3.80, and cleaned [my own house] - the narcissus is beautiful in my little black and brown vase, next to it, burning unnoticed, just there. The almost white steady flame of the candle I bought at the occult book shop. That corner - blue back cushions, blue and white stripes, blue pillow, then the brown chest, the brown fur, the brown on the bottle, white flowers, white wall, blue candle, white flame - but whiter and bluer, and yellower than the rug, not color, something else. Black cats curled nose to haunch in a circle like a yin-yang - not quite, but nice to think so - brown old wood tray with my bowl on it. Bits of the room like altars, they're clearings, they hark - listen - back to the room on the corner of Division Street, that white room with a red and blue stained glass window, rapturous room.
That is, control, power. That is, openness, truthfulness, clarity. Have been realizing through my confusions with Roy - maybe his temporary lucidity helps me - it does - that love is something beneficently possible, that I miss my chances to have gestures with the most worthy opponent I could have found - that my rages are - also - about losing those encounters. What I could learn, keeping my wits while engaging his. Spose that's all there is to say. He's very powerful, as I used to say - meant to write, he's very powerful, as he used to say about me, did he mean it? I think he must have - he lost his wits plenty. The idolatry of spending an hour and a half cleaning that cooker [for Phyllis Altman]. Be ware. Ware - adj (poetic) aware. Ware - v.t. 1. look out for, 2. fight shy of. It was stormy last night, wind rain driving clouds, Jane dreamed a death and I dreamed: standing in a wide, foaming river, on skeletons of trees, whitened roots, giants, with knots like serpent's heads, I found branches still bearing, I thought apples, but when I picked one it was a pinkish green plum - looked out to see a school of matronly ladies from a conference (?) leaping across the river from root to root among the foaming water, and where there were no roots they just pushed through the water in their sensible clothes, driving like dolphins, plunging toward other root-islands, I was proud and amazed: look what women can do when there are no men. (A giant fat woman hurling a broad axe, very sharp.) A dream at the Sufis, a conversation with Fazal, and then later, blandly, with his wife; another dream in which Luke, a girl and other little girls, reappeared with little white flowers plaited closely into their hair, all over their small heads, it was beautiful, some of the flowers were only buds, some were open and like daisies. There was a dream I tried to hang onto yesterday, that was when I'd written Joe a postcard telling him "Hello you worthy opponent" (him too), "I dreamed you were a research scientist in a greenhouse; your shoulder smelled of roses." All I remember is that he and I put our arms around each other and just held each other, hugged each other hard, with relief and inevitability, we'd come together at last. The dream I had before that happened - not exactly - with Roy: he sent me a letter which said "I love you." I asked him yesterday how to seduce people. He said it was very simple. The first thing was that you had to make sure you didn't really care whether it happened or not - "That's something you arrange in yourself. The other thing" - he stood in front of me eye to eye and demonstrated a line between our foreheads - "is 'I love you' passing from there to there. Nobody can resist that." I remembered today, the memory came back, Roy standing and looking at me like that - I think he did it a lot - I can't remember - there's something else - Colin. But what it changes ("I'm still waiting for them to learn things I had already learned before I came") is that I can think of my life's love as a bewitchment by a sorcerer who uses his dry-skin power pretty cheaply. I had no experience; my power was a certain pride - which he derides - and a strength of tenderness, which is a strength of truthfulness, clarity. I'm nearly twenty nine but I'm still alone and what a will I have. Twenty nine is just beginning the hard parts, well, I know that, but - the things there are to learn. Ah I've remembered: in that lucid morning conversation I had with Roy during an apparent truce, we talked about old times. (Who'm I writing this for? It's the novelist clarifying.) I said "I was your lady," he said "You were never that," I said "But you used to use that kind of language," he said "But I never fooled myself." Ha. I did. Just his having said it though seemed to retrospectively right something in those old times, when he'd never tell the truth, just out of terror. Does that mean I can begin to tell him the truth? He or something mesmerizes me into protecting us, and it only comes out as rage, but: it's a task, it's a fate. That's war. Left and right hands? How? The other part, staying open - it's about finding people to love and being able to do it, like Elias' beautiful, unearthly face, like babies (although Luke last week was so petulant I couldn't get near him) (because I don't fight with him?). The baths maybe - baths. The yoga - last night's flush through my head, when I was afraid I'd flush through to another time, and hung on - lost it - but there was a pulsating yellow - really ivory - light. That and the blue spot I pursue like a comet through the domed black infinity behind my eyelids. Beyond them - but it's near, darting away like a fish when I try to catch it, hovering just out of focus. The sensitive prickle up my back, which I can't remember being there before, and which rises sometimes to the back of my head as far as the cerebellum. When it gets to the forebrain -? Am I initiated? A form of Sufism called Uwaysi is those who are on the path - a spiritual link - but are affiliated with no order. Cunning of the serpent and innocence of the dove. Didn't know before. Paul - reverence, the lover, the child, the worshipper, feed that lovely child in pink satin, head on one side, sleek hair, wise smile. Nothing to do with male or female, it's the serpent and the dove, that's all. Lessing. Sarah's ringing bit of Gorki where she gleefully changed 'people' to CATS in red marker. Are cats an opportunity for tenderness? Try outstaring one. Loneliness. Clues - Penelope.
Interchange of sodium and potassium - Sometimes something laborious about the writing, because it needs to be talking. Tara: you seem to be the funnel through which I send books (myself) into the Khanka. Saturday morning, in a dream about Joe that felt as if it completed a cycle, I met him as if on a street, he had an album like a high school yearbook, showed me pictures of himself. I found I was leaning awkwardly on his knee. Told him "In some of these you're thin and big-eyed, but in others you're fat-faced and have all that greasy hair - that's how you were when I met you and I didn't like you at all." His lady arrived - she was thin and pasty with curly brown hair, spoke with me for a while, we turned, he and the friend had gone, I went home sad that my enchantment was finished and feeling I'd no one left to talk to. Roy phoned at 2:15. "I want to come and sleep with you." I waffled him, then said clear, "I don't really feel like it now." Think he was a bit drunk. Both awake - I was thinking of worthy opponents. As I was waking there was a thought, something about the surface, skin, skin being a container - it was a sophisticated thought but belonged to sleep and I couldn't catch it. in the polarity of sympathy and antipathy is the breeding place of prejudice and indifference. Not to be their slave is a portal opening. ... the prophetic artist shall study the laws of polarity and participate in that from which he feels most separated. May we find our natural release ... it is the dream that reproduces itself continuously in the cells of our bodies, it is the dream that realizes itself in a long series of partial acts, a kind of long poem of life gestures, where part after part stands for the whole ... the ideal lives within us. We must hold to that mystery as well as to the mystery of our resistance to it. We are brought to a crisis of conscience through our hunger for union. Why am I under this person's spell? Ah it is my wholeness that I love and here seek. For the loved one is the adversary. He is the Other. When the doctrine of acceptance speaks of doing away with the categories of good and evil, it is not in order to turn everything into good, nor to turn everything into nothing. Rather it is to prepare a meeting between man and phenomena at a level free of category, of evaluation .... Life then takes on its natural colors as natural values ... capacity to experience the reality of another not as if it were one's own, but indeed as another's, a capacity for self-surrender to the reality of another person (this is surrender not of the will, but of the perception). the Now which holds in layers of transparency the past and future, and we see ourselves suspended in emptiness. [Mary Richards Centering] - Listen lovely daughter look at your slim arm resting on pink satin, broad shoulders even there at ten years old, hands linked. Why's your head on its side? Your eyebrows' clear line, your wide smile and long neck. Was it because of your legs that we're all cut off at the knee? Your sleek hair. This child's the child hung inside me, layers of transparency. She was called Elfriede. That body hardly existed for you: it carried you, that's all. Shy and intransigent, loving. You didn't need to belong to anyone except the lover, even then, even then you just called for the lover and a friend; invisible child, who saw you? Is there anyone alive who remembers you? I'm calling you: what day shall I call to bring you? Little girl o little girl what can loyalty find for you? I want to reach my arm blindly back into the box of transparencies, into the wind tunnel, materialize next to you. Sit on the couch beside you. You look at me with that smile. I'm shy because I find you lovely. "Can I talk to you?" I say - no I look at you, I look good because you'll notice everything - I'm pretty, you'll have nothing else, I have a sweet face and have dressed in vivid things, I'll wear this Afghan coat, the red necklace, black dress, red shoes. I'll look back at you and say nothing, but mirror your brown arms, the pink dress, I'll plant in you the knowledge of your radiance, that steady presence. You don't need anything else from me; and then I'll say it in the way you'll understand now, which is to put my arms around you from behind you, an arm over your shoulder, and just stand listening with you to the thrill of it. Will that arm you against the massed confidence of zombies? Is obscurity your secret? Is that what you give me back. Defend yourself, earth defend you, from that father thinking to protect your decency, from that mother teaching you slavery, imprint you with what this photograph sees and what was hidden then until I find it and give it back to you. The scene. Childhood's house in childhood's country. Last week when I woke at five, grieving for Roy, sat up until I was easy, got into bed and found myself in the old kitchen in that square house, standing where I could see across the green shine of linoleum into the far corner of the living room. All the furniture, the colors, the yellow lino on the walls, the canisters on the cupboard, I could open the doors and see the pots and plates, the spaces, open the drawers, open the cupboard where the razor sat with the flat iron. Wood box, litter of chips. Plaster cherries on the pale blue wall, the trapdoor with its iron ring. Bucket, dipper. Their bedroom, blue, the closet, the old gold wedding spread. Dark, the potty with red copious pee. Living room's plastic drapes, radio's clamps on the crusted battery. Big chair beside the wood stove. I could reenter it, but there was no one at home. [undated notebook] Attenuated surface - Tony. Magic of a pyjama top (black and white striped) lying spread on the bottom of the pool - purple pyjamas and their shadow. A light spot on the bottom sending out rainbows the black boy goes through. Oh the eloquence of sunlight! Blinding light reflected, a black boy going through a patch lit for the reflections. The halo around someone on his back swimming through sheer light. The lavender shadow along the legs of the red-headed boy. The white stain that bounds the water hitting the shower floor. Little boys' thin backs and shanks from above, wet hair. Legs in the water pale green. The ladder with legs reflected over it, afternoon, light in corner. Orange pyjamas by the yellow grid, three colors of orange. One strand of intense sunlight on the floor, flashing marvelously, a rather orange light. The sun on the boundary where blue hits, an orange reflection passes. Hanging the curtains over from right side can I catch a reflected patch of light in mirror, something brilliant. The clarity of the bottom when the light is there, left side. subtlety of lines when a swimmer has passed, just below, light traveling over it. The complex reflection in the corner. Beauty of arms and legs. - Work out lap dissolves for that roof. Won't just fade out or in completely, it will fade out slowly fade in fast. Goes dark or light - because of low aperture. Think about this, might not work. Early morning about 2 rolls at least, maybe three. Need an actual section of movement though. Battery. Can I get the moment the sun tips over. - Thursday - bread and butter, bananas, coffee, jam. Not v hungry until noon. Margaret and Shosh, paintings with Luke, collages, sausages in bath with fat man, two kids having a shower in a teacup. [notes on a lamp design] [notes on Laser Light] - de Quincey's dream city of Savannah-la-Mer or Keats' underground and undersea temples in Endymion - lay beneath the surface of the world, huge prisons shut off from natural light ... such structures had connections with the subconscious .... - The last notes of the partita, use it to call the film to attention. Make a magic lot of windows in that corner of the stairs. A ladder, build it out so it has depth and strength, maybe eight inch holes, drawers, mirrors in strange places, colors. Elements. My lovely bits and pieces. - The courtesy of brushing his teeth before he kisses me. Now my hands smell of Tony's soap. Sunday morning - short night, awake often, Tony wrapped around me, heavy, a warm length. The alarm clock, sky far away blue and a touch of heat on the red clay chimney pots. I'm a little shy, couldn't quite slot next to Tony when he came home after his party, and this morning wondered if we were still uneasy. He got out of the blankets and lay like Venus reclining. I gave his penis a stroke and a kiss and said "I'm sorry little man that I'm so ... but wait till next time..." and he began to push his way up. So Tony got dressed with his undercarriage down for landing, I ate him up with my eyes, tucking his shirt into his paint-spotted blue jeans, brushing his funny hair flat - standing bent over in front of the mirror, singing in his Louis Armstrong voice, with his eyes closed. Especially just standing at the sink pushing his shirttail into his jeans, making himself a narrow little waist, hung over, face disarrayed. I brewed in bed, delight, bliss. He went next door, after a while brought back tea and had the partita #2 on loud and clear. The window had begun to shake like a train going over a trestle - John and Elana upstairs. It continued to shake in bursts. Tony came and put his arms around me and I put mine around him so we were afloat carefully and precisely connected. He stroked my breast with his thumb. I just hung on and loved him, that was a bright real moment. So when John Frick (I said "like a brillo pad that's been used once"), beaming John from upstairs, and two more painters came, one in a green velvet jacket, one haggard neat little man, and they all got into the white van, Tony waving through the window to me on the middle of the floor, I felt that everyone was wonderful. Outside in the back yard, among the beautiful cracks, mould, moss and rubbish, organ music is coming from the church, a congregation's thin singing. Last night when we leaned out the window we could hear exotic birds singing in the feed store, a few bright stars in the purplish unclear sky, 3:30. I dreamed a big white kite, flapping wings on the side and fluffy big tail weights, took it outside and it flew up out of my hands, we were flying it at night. Tony said "That's a very phallic dream." Across the road there's a back yard with a grey chestnut and a grey sycamore, a tangle of grey barbed wire, and behind it centred between blind shaded windows is a long-unpruned bush of privet, caught isolated in sun so its leaves burn like light. - My shimmerical joys - Gene Davis - a yellow stripe painting with off shades of green in it, calls it Solar Diary. It looks like a wall - made me want to make a striped wall. It's all different intervals. - Artists earned over 20% less than other professionals. Women were paid 60% of what other professional women got, and their median income was $3,742 compared to $6,350 for male artists. The median income for a woman dancer was $1,780 and the income for women artists did not reach subsistence level in any field. - Art student's "innocence lies in not knowing what he takes for granted or how he is connected, which is why education came to be considered liberating in the first place." - The element of autobiography is stressed rather insistently in the work of most women artists of any interest, in the same way that women writers, though more than capable of dealing with large issues, tend to relate them fairly and squarely to domestic experience, in the largest sense, and to project startling equations between these same large issues and the minutia of commonplace everyday existence or experience which may of course be disguised in terms of personal fantasy. Ilse Getz does this; her work has an underlying seriousness, an intentness of reference, which is at disarming, somewhat deceptive, variance with the apparently casual and lighthearted manner of its presentation. a feminine sense of inviolacy and whatever may threaten it perhaps the most moving feature of women's art is its relentlessly tenacious holding-on to whatever is most consistently experienced - and whatever it is, it must be experienced (or remembered) again and again, and not contrived or manufactured, which only partially explains the depth and the force of its feeling when it becomes imaginatively transformed, even wholly abstracted. But a secondary characteristic which is not usually a feminine attribute: the element of fancy ... atmosphere of highly professional accomplishment and immaculate standards, but also an underlying sense of ease, an almost indolent, but tautly sustained, inviolacy, with an accompanying indifference to fashionable iconography or the stylistic requirements of the marketplace. the search for artistic identity through the usual processes of travel, memory and exorcism. - A double reflection film as in the tube, with eyes matted out and tiny things moving past, external landscapes behind. Moving with joggle - eyes looking at spectator. - Going into the Metropolitan-Circle Line: the ticket collector reaches his hand for my ticket, punches it, looks at me and says "How're you?" "Tired" I say. "Had a hard night? You look very nice actually" in an Irish accent. "Thank you. So do you," and we smile as I almost-curtsey and disappear. Write something on young girl heroines. [undated journal] Went out and gifted myself with the old woman's Devon pitcher, there it is clothed in a swell like a nut. Worn, rubbed, looking four hundred years old. My coat is the colour of tulip leaves. Little hand stitches in the quilting. - Went to see Roy's Madeleine in Kennington, she was thin, very plain and nervous, beautiful hands with long fingers and square fingernails, had a tired grey small face with a big nose and nervous large eyes. Roy sat looking beautiful as the whiskey bleached something from his face, although he got silly. Luke was little Prince leaping on the piled mess in the little room. Derrick just sat, behind red beard, mild eyes and a big soft mouth, mild and patient but seeming without energy. Madeleine laughed a lot, said nothing special, but was responsive. Painfully clear, Roy's mannerisms for gripping their attention: David, little stories like the one I told him this morning about pyramids, bits of paradox, it seems a routine to me, all his bits of Buddhism, decks himself in nonsense - exaggerates the interest of everything he does. Wish he'd always be lucid, what a friend. Odd arriving [at Buckingham Rd] in the rain last night with the black minicab driver from "J" whose long-toothed smile was white and twitchy. I went into the house with my own key, tulip coat and tulip, feeling like a call girl because I'd washed and rubbed East Wind oil on my chest and had on a low necked black sweater. Roy was sitting on his bed quite drunk, in candlelight, with the blow heater and the paraffin stove; I stuck the tulip into his plant pot for lack of water, we drank apple juice and got into bed, his legs were feverish and his chest kept jerking as he coughed. We lay heads toward the door facing his childhood's curtains, red, violet, yellow and blue flowers that used to be lit like glass by the hot African sun in the mornings, the candle shifted to bluer light and we blew it out, went to sleep except that I couldn't sleep, except toward morning, when I woke weak, sore, dull and vulnerable as if I'd given my strength away. Roy felt much better. I don't know why I want to remember that time last night, it was false and sore as usual, Roy was generous and tender. To keep my pride I said "It doesn't matter," but I'm at home so lonely for a body that I'm wishing I had it again, unloving as I was, it seems magical now. I'm in poverty tonight, feel how sad the rest of my life could be, how long it seems; I'm so flat and can't work, am afraid to ask for the camera, afraid every day and putting off the film, missing Luke and feeling how he goes to Roy by preference, even to be taken to the toilet. This morning with Isabel and Mossy and Luke tumbling on the bed, so funny and lovely, their beautiful bare feet, plump legs. Bashing, howling, then forgetting, Roy and I delighting in them together. Oh, I'm sore and lonely! Weeping to Roy on the telephone last week that the loneliness was so hard because I could not imagine it broken, I can't imagine a good new relationship in it. How badly I'm needing a lover. - BAH. Stupid unimaginative. There are alternatives. - Christina Velonis' letter. - Walking along one side of Leichester Square, a very small man limps up behind me, overcoat, large grandfatherly face. I think he wants to ask me the time, except for the painful eagerness on his face. He says, and I'm slow to realize even that he's speaking to me, "Excuse me, I hope you won't think I'm being rude." He continues to walk along slightly behind me, I've at last focused on him and he says "Where are you going now?" "I'm going to the cinema." "Oh! Perhaps I could take you. Would you like to see this one?" We are going past Robin Hood and I make a derisive little laugh and say "No, thank you." "I am so sick of my own company" he says so sweetly and nicely that I'm bewildered. Because me too, hobbling along in the fur hat that suits me so well, and that green silk coat, I am sick of my own company. The first thing into my head is some pun on company; he looks a business man. I'm not quick enough. I say, find myself saying "Actually I'm meeting someone," and he drops back instantly so that I have to turn around to say, my momentum had carried me too far forward, "I am sorry." When I got to the theatre I wanted to rush back to get him, I felt so mistaken and mean. I think he may have been an angel. In The Day of the Dolphin, when Alpha and Beta first meet they simply slide into parallel and rush around the tank together, there's no greeting, just an instant dance, they swoop like birds, rise for air, loop up and under like needles, not looking at each other but every part of their shiny flanks in communication with each other as if welded together. Made me want to weep - I wrote in the tube: why do we have such a hunger for what we have no way to find. - I wonder if I'll ever travel in space? I'm such a traveler. Want to take Luke on travels. I could do that, like an absent father. The world of natural marvels, that's where I could live, but not stopping in it. Need to travel and travel. Diary documentaries. Could I make simply lovely films for everybody, an archivist of beautiful things, lean and lonely, just a shoulder bag with a camera. [undated notebook] [notes on film equipment, notes on ideas for a tea film] Montage of attractions - appears in more or less overt forms 'Revolutionary' cinema - optimism, change, show people revolting There is no such thing as art that stands above classes or art that is detached from or independent of politics ... all classes ... in all class societies invariably put the political criterion first and the artistic criterion second. Mao It is through scientific analysis of the world, in terms of changing it, that a film language will be created which will no longer be that of the dominant class but the only language which the proletariat can be interested in learning: the language of the transformation of the world. G Farnell Put this next to Mallarmé - poet as custodian of the words of the tribe
Custodial on the level of memory and on the level of sensibility in relation to things other than politics. Apotheosis - John and Yoko's film of a balloon ascent. I search for nothing, absolutely nothing .... All I want is to celebrate a few things, a very few beautiful, unique, simple things, be they part of nature or the creations of man's spirit. Mekas There is always a touch of ecstasy in a Leacock film, no matter how down to earth it is. 1. Have a shot of the shower that goes on all day? [sketch] 2. On the corner, use zoom to jerk back and forth on some axis.
- A sheet of plasterboard across a corner, sink those little cupboards into it among flat pictures. - The trespasser Arica exercise. Staring at the left eye's pupil, it dilates, contracts, jerks, blinks a little, the strangeness of the girl's right eye weeping, the left eye dry. Mouth working, my own face still, and, I feel, vacant. Willfully into the black space, watching, eye doubles, the left eye goes blind (I feel from being stared into) - connect to film of David's eye. - Luke's going on Thursday night: he comes with Mossy, doesn't want to come in for fear I'll keep him - announces that he's just come for his clothes and toys. I feel myself following him around, want to give him a hug. He struggles to escape, I'm the despised sad mother trying to get just one last hug out of him, I'm not ready to let him go, haven't managed to get to him this week, except for the first night he was home, don't know - yes I do know what to do, which is to let him go until I have something special to do with him, maybe try to give him up for more than a week, my rebellious mutter: I'll have another child, which can really be my child, and he can go away forever. Wintry existence at moments seems so precarious, ghosts of the future mass; every pain seems to name itself as part of my death. Roy buys him with new toys, makes a flurry around himself. Roy's face is wrinkling around the eyes, has deep lines on either side of his mouth. [undated journal] Said to Peter during our angry sad parting on the steps at Tottenham Court Road, fierce wind blowing us almost onto the road "It's very hard for me because I'm really hermetically sealed in my film, and I can't talk about it and so ..." Realizing now, much later, that my sadness and loneliness is part of the life of this film, I'm feeling that no one will love it or understand it, that I can talk to no one about it, and so I am sealed into a solitude with that bluegreen water and those rectangles that enclose it, boxes, in which there's such a life and all hope of ecstasy, but which can be simply invisible, private, part of my solipsism like a hot water bottle I take into my mummy sleeping bag. Somebody reply to me, Joe, reply to my card and my dream. Katrin, come see me, Mafalda, write. - At the beginning of the film a shout like a shout of joy. The little timid joy when I realized that my sadness and isolation these days has to do with my film and my anxiety and labour, terror of it. Realizing that I must just work on it now, until it's done. Or die - What is it, what is that place, that time's place. - The floor of the ocean and all that happens there. Animals Pollen Japanese pots, 4000 BC Whale vertebrae Consciousness Politics There isn't time for perversions of consciousness, but can we help it? - What's to be done, doing and thinking Occurred to me I could apprentice myself to a scientific film unit. For that need camera skill. - Spirit of a scientific film for baths. It's an animal, a time and place, it's me looking for silent ecstasy of light and currents. - Today - remember last night as Luke slept he reached his arm to keep in touch with my shoulder or my hands. I loved him, felt that this time he has come home. Dreamed Frank, after a time we just held each other and he began to froth with excitement but I didn't mind. The night before, in part of a dream I went out alone at night on a white beach, came to a kind of white dune that rose very high above me, was surrounded by white dark, felt a group of people - they were singing, girl scouts maybe - were camped on the other side. That image has stayed with me - today finding in Arts Canada the lovely piece by Mia ---, felt it defended my possibilities, and this as I was bowing out of my PhD so briskly and gladly. The idea of making shamanistic objects, doing 'art' that takes images from science, old camel bones, moon maps, zoology texts, geology, feathers, bones. [piece on Nancy Graves by Mia Kalavinka Arts Canada May 1973] [other notebook] 38 wire spires with various objects (she had a Shaman piece); cowrie and oyster shells, yellow gauze butterflies, berries, flowers. "But I stopped noting these. It seemed rude, like writing notes on a bear's eyelashes while peering into his face." "Then I ran, and they hung, grew out of me, radiated, streamed, and I turned to willow branches and feathers and laughed!" But she makes the feathers and things herself. Sokova - Romanian spring festival where "children had wands, twigs glued to them, paper flowers starlike at the tips. The man remembering them laughs now at the belief, the insouciance with which he used to run through the street in spring, tapping passersby on the shoulder and, at the price of some little coins, reciting the spring poem. It would make a good spring, full of sunlight, careless-growing flowers." Now Nancy Graves is doing moon maps, "a mound of moon lithographs, archeological, planetary, zoological texts." Shamanistic sculptures she has made in the past, pieces like Totem; Mummy; Bones, Skins, Membranes Overlayered; Shadows Reflecting Sun Discs. The color of Nancy Graves' eyes is turquoise. The Indians save turquoise as a protection against enemies. A woman who can create a form like those camel bones has special enemies. Unusual enemies, brought on by courage .... It is the silence of the loft, as well as the straightforwardness of her eyes, that shows she has amulets .... a picture from a very old Japanese book of maps ... a foreground of rivers, a little island estate, and hulking rocks like wonderful pocked pebbles, for mountains. At the top or 'distance,' the rock mountains are tinier (though no less distinct) .... Little rectangles of script like banners float over the miniature pine forests, rivers, and above all, to name the mountains one by one. (All these inscriptions are about the same size, as if to show the near mountains are no finer than the far, but the far mountains no finer than the near.) I realized that the languid, horizontal lines threaded here and there in the Japanese landscapes were clouds and mist! The sky had to be put in too. And the viewer sees rivers down there, sometimes obscured by clouds in the atmosphere, just as if we could be a flying bird. Because in a good map we almost travel a bit outside the body - we look at it, to get beyond where we are, to explore with the inner eye, to contain that land in us, to have it, and so long as we have the map, to remember it as many times as we wish, as if it was the incarnation of something we had to yearn for .... Are Western artists free to think with their hearts? It seems as if we don't even have the will that Indians did once, to get the blood of imagery from a mother in the earth. And how should we dare? We might hear her as a scream. There are still dedicated artists, like Nancy Graves, absorbed in her planetary landscapes, like Eastern monks, a thousand years ago .... But what is a rock? We get an alien breath or sound, though, when it comes to our dreams. Judith Eglington - a girl photographer who did a show called Earth Visions. Kathleen Raine "the secret religion of European poets" - a language of visual imagery buried in race memory. World as Baudelaire's forest of symbols. Landmark January 1974 free of school forever. (Klee says it's because of the mystery that remains after analysis and synthesis that it's still possible that) "symbols comfort the spirit." His pupils had come to know their 'original state,' but they lacked the long-studied ability which enabled him to pass from intuition into knowledge ... could extract material from the depths of their subconscious or unconscious, but they lacked the ability to connect it with reality ... not only a great innovator who strove to see behind things, he was also an exceptionally gifted observer and realist. That transition - what sort of study is it? If I work my attractions and impressions, is it the process of de(re)fining them and then laying them next to each other that makes a connection with consciousness, 'knowledge'? But if consciousness is just the area of the habitual perception, then 'knowledge' is a minimalizing of the intuitive something - is that why 'knowledge' has to be so tactful and oblique, so that you name and make visible without - these thoughts full of pieties like 'carnal knowledge,' 'categorization' - defusing the magical object. The other desire to defuse the magical object. Be ware of confusing the magic with the ideology - be able to feel carefully for the connection, in the dissection, the little nerve that makes the eye a surface of the brain. Be ware the false ideology erected to satisfy a much simpler hunger economy - what, in that meal, is it I crave. How exciting to be able to go decisively to the one necessary element - that's what essence talk is about? Being fatigued by reflection. - Lovely woman who lives at Cranley, travels from London every day, is a secretary, talked so sweetly and curiously. - Field ion microscope - microscope shows directly the atoms of the specimen - platinum eg - doesn't use lenses - "specimen itself is also the image-forming 'lens' and the imaging ion beams originate at the specimen surface." - The chord wrung by an airplane sometimes at a certain distance. Genes guiding cell differentiation - "It is as though we were watching the development, from a set of axioms like those of Euclid, of a number of elaborated theorems - first, that the square on the longest side of a right angle triangle is and then that the tangent to a circle is and so on and on. The characteristic of processes of this kind is that the information originally contained in the system is becoming expounded into significant expanded complexes." Waddington Mutation as chance A rabbit's egg Heisenberg. "Thus, the objective reality of the elementary particles has been strangely dispersed, not into the fog of some new ill-defined or still unexplained conception of reality, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that no longer describes the behavior of the elementary particles but only our knowledge of this behavior ... chain of man's argument with nature ... modern man on this earth now confronts himself alone ... the object of research is no longer nature itself, but man's investigation of nature." - What is so seductive about this idea? Whitehead "the present is the fringe of memory tinged with anticipation" Do not understand theory of relativity. Every event contains some reference to every other event in the universe. Whitehead You have either got to have consciousness everywhere; or nowhere; it must therefore be everywhere. Therefore, when he wanted a word to refer to the way in which a stone relates to geology, evolution he said that each relation was a 'feeling,' whose intensity and character was determined by the "Subjective Aim" of the stone. The stone drew all the other events together into its own being by processes of "prehension" . Motherwell "Abstraction is a process of emphasis, and emphasis vivifies life." Evolution if taken seriously means that we are able to think things as they 'are'? Also fishes, monkeys, amoebas do. Painting - presentational and causal immediacy. Causal = "the more or less deeply buried symbolic and emotional reverberation of these same physical materials" Education of the subconscious - [notes on gender and language, 'mankind,' 'he,' etc]
- Areas where we need new words and usage. Use of word feminine, female to describe immanence as opposed to transcendence. Test - language use that makes me angry and excludes me and hurts
me.
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