| london volume 7 part 3 - 1974 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated notebook] I was dozing in my sleeping bag, Luke pulled his foam mattress over me crossways and said "I've made you into a butterfly, a bird! Would you like to be able to fly with wings, to Canada? I will come too, I will have wings that I put on, with glue." Today he's been so full of joy and invention that I am joyful and inventive with him. Is he glad not to be bound to Roy, somehow? Why is he so pink-cheeked and pretty just now? "If you are my slide, you won't be my mummy. Nadine will be my mummy, I have lots of mummies, and Frances, and Sue." Lay down beside me in the afternoon, went to sleep. Last night, came in cold, went to sleep in my sleeping bag warming his legs against mine. - Two dreams - no, no qualification of dreams: some scraps. Horses - with black leather underbelly covers that fit around their legs. Riding one neck like a dragon. A flat with two men in it, a young thin blond man - who has one room with a mat on the floor - I embrace him affectionately, feel the deep groove down his back. He goes off. In the next room is another older man asleep in his big bed. I am at one end of the sunny room, wearing a white towel, playing with Luke. I turn and see that he is awake, leaning on one elbow, looking at me with a clear blue-eyed gaze that makes me feel my bare back, my hair up. I turn away from him and wait for him: in deep silence. - Coming home - gangsters - spies trying to get me - at some times in my escape I think of the scene from a crane shot and work out the next step. A road becomes a corridor, women waiting to bathe their children. - The pressure in private writing to make it public - explain, detail, over-note. The pressure in thought. We take language learned socially and try to turn it inside out. * If it isn't written in public words I'm not sure I know what I mean. - Need £10 for Slade?, £5 for BFI, £12 for coal. Boots? Fabric for wide green trousers. Do s.th. with silk blouse. - Robert's white well-made sneakers with blue backs - - [notes on a Slade session on Brecht] (Has one the right to offer others a dish that one has already eaten oneself?) Why am I so lazy in not expecting anything from these sessions. With video: if the audience doesn't like it you can redo it using them - would be fun - Coup pour coup used video in its making. The people in this class begin to look good: Pam doing nice 'responsible' things, self conscious. But in this seminar nothing is happening. Device and function of the device Because for me it is always a situation where I'm meant to catch up with other people's preoccupations - it's always lending myself to other people - c/f the Goddard weekend. Also they are very tiring because a lot of unspoken things are happening. They batter. The exhausting business of turning off to protect oneself from pointless confusion. My own indefensibility. Why we are doing it. Kari "why one is performing any activity" 'Problematic' Intervention - Peter's example of Eliot knowing precisely what kind of intervention he was making in his criticism. [outline sketch of my two hands across both pages] - [notes from an experimental film class] Barry's stammerings and blunderings. Deke's expostulations are noticeably making me flinch today. Questions about Tung, it embarrasses Deke and we don't know what he's saying if it isn't the obvious. - Film a white room with a black window and a black roof, preferably a glass roof at night, superimpose with various things so the room becomes a dream, there's a person - dark clothes so only face is transparent, looking out, hands white as well - trees move through the face - the woman secretary with her blond hair - possibly makes some masks. Or a child. [sketch] [Etc.] - Surrealists - collage, automatic writing, frottage. Try free assoc to picture seen just now, find out what you've seen that you don't know you've seen. Masson - "Painting of lyrical abstraction contains all the phantasms of a more beautiful life, intimacy with nature. ... I would like to paint the private parts of nature." Reproduce Eluard's love poem Galton "The ideas that lie at any moment within my full consciousness seem to attract, of their own accord, the most appropriate out of a number of other ideas that are lying close at hand, but imperfectly within the range of my consciousness." - Since the electron waves are much shorter in length they make it possible to photograph a magnified image of things which are so small that the larger light waves simply wriggle past without noticing them, like a long snake threading its way through the stems of a wheat-field. One cannot measure both the position and the velocity of a fundamental particle with complete accuracy. If we measure the position absolutely precisely, then our measure of velocity cannot be completely accurate, and we have to accept a considerable margin of error in it, or vice versa. Another and, as it turns out, equivalent way of expressing the same situation is to point out that if we are dealing with two or more particles they do not necessarily retain their identities. Carbon molecule: soft-edged cloud of electrons in the middle of which there nestle two atomic nuclei, thinner in density near the surface and thickens toward the centre. The synthesis of technical means, spectrograph - birdsong, 'sound spectra'. Third Science is subtle and flowing, as computer-made maps can be. Sound-spectra look like water patterns. [notes on holograms] - History of art makes it seem a history of argument. - A women's house with a number of children, works on the week-on week-off basis, has auxiliary studios etc. Mathematics keeps opening up some new types of logical structure for exploration. - Cannot think what this means. Waddington on a Pollock: "You can explore it in a search for whatever you may bring with you to find". 45-50 when new style of painting got going. Motherwell - I believe that painters' judgments of painting are first ethical, than esthetic, esthetic judgments flowing from an ethical content. Venturesomeness is only one of the ethical values respected ... integrity, sensuality, sensitivity, knowingness, passion, dedication, sincerity, taken all together represent the ethical background of judgment. Frank Wilson - highly energetic structures ... great verve ... continuous destruction to prevent the crystallization of the image ... big work is the real test and challenge ... if the drive is not genuine and integrating, there are all the risks of fall-back into some sort of static figuration, either derived from nature or from within the mind, ... archetypal, anthropomorphic ... very many painters don't quite make the grade to a synthetic figuration. De Stael reached a near autonomy but fell back to a weak figuration. Waddington - Any recognizable allusion to natural appearances becomes too easily a way of avoiding the difficult task of performing with complete personal integrity. Wilson "The line now symbolizes energy and is entirely calligraphic." Baha'i - unity under appearance Tobey and Zen Mathiew - painting needs 1. Speed in execution - no second thoughts 2. No premeditation, either in form or movement 3. Subliminal state of concentration, "keep the head alert but empty" Meditation, alcohol Aleopley - physiologist, "the setting of lines crystallized into signs. They correspond to certain thoughts which I can only express in the movements of these lines." Hartnung - "If these things penetrate into your spirit, if they take part in the formation of your thought, well and good," but not sit down to paint them. Sam Francis - What we want is to make something that utterly fills the sight, and can't be used to make life only bearable; if painting till now was a way of making bearable the sight of the unbearable, the visible sumptuous, then let's now strip away all that. Dubuffet - The forms living matter has a liking for are everywhere the same ... quite tiny objects or great geographical formations. I got the idea that there might be shared rhythms, identical systems of movement, between the forms and the appearances which physical matter presents to our eyes and the mental dances which set themselves going in the human mind ... a kind of kinetics of thought processes in general ... call them Mental Landscapes. Len Lye - structures: "wands of spring steel shaken at the base by electrical motors so they oscillate in the various wavelengths characteristic of their form, and so produce a series of virtual volumes which can be controlled and sequenced by monitoring the motors." Giacometti - The thing that interests me in all paintings is resemblance, that is to say, what seems to me resemblance - what makes me discover a little about the external world. Perspective in drawing - the question of representing what is muscular and total Lens - a single viewpoint, fixed eyelevel Space - enclosure - separation from what we love - extension of ourselves Painter is involved in showing feelings conveyed by space - being a separate body in a world of other bodies. Also color, qualities of vision - eg that manila colored round box. The twigs with dead and living green leaves. Then the precision of red and white lamp. What the eye likes. Intelligence of the eye. Composition - different ways bodies are together. "Why was it so difficult to feel about, as well as think about, the separateness or togetherness of objects." "Freedom of the line" from the necessity to hold an object in its place. In my writing the habit of justice which tries hard to separate my thoughts from those of others by this fence: "...". Now I can't be so sure who owns a thought. Perception enslaved to Babylon, notes on color impressions and line impressions. That is what a picture should give us, a warm harmony, an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a colored state of grace. All these tones circulate in the blood, don't they? One is revivified, born into the real world, one finds oneself, one becomes the painting .... Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colors, be steeped in the light of them. Cezanne But a finely constituted being is sensitive to its deepest affinities .... Yet what the soul desires is nothing arbitrary. Life is no objectless dream. Everything that satisfies at all, even if partially and for an instant, justifies aspiration and rewards it .... The ideal is accordingly significant, perpetual - as constant as the nature it expresses: but it can never itself exist, nor can its particular embodiments endure. Is one of the secrets of powerful making of power objects - the stance of oppositeness, loving what one hates and hating what one loves - the second is harder to imagine. Gesture Mind as sort of laser grid of parallel waves that interact with chaotic waves from objects - result is perception. Or the unconscious is the grid which goes out to meet - "The uncommitted cortex is the part of the human brain that makes humans teachable and thus lifts them above all other species." Penfield [undated journal] The only means we have of even fantasizing free women is the projection of male fears. Such women reach our consciousness masculinized by the male imagination. - Vera Lynn upstairs on the radio. Tony telephones me and says "Listen" - he bought a 3-record set of Bartok. - Luke's back, three spots on his cheek, fatter. Roy came, bringing some of the rubbish that he used to carry with him from one messy room to another, the photography annuals, his schoolboy atlas, Now We Are Six, a school geography book, a stack of cassettes, his frying pan (that frying pan he got with green shield stamps his mother pasted): it was like the dream I had a long time ago, coming upon a box of rubbish I recognized right away, with a sad shock, thrill, as Roy's. He's dividing his goods because he's leaving the commune for the next part of his life. The Tibetan place and beyond that impossible to imagine. He's spooky, thin, stands a little bent, his face is terribly old, I look at him and feel, but Roy mustn't ever get old, his body must always have a sappy spring and his face shine with ill-got gains. (The way I'm getting fat, although it suits my face. I think - does my body have a built-in mechanism that makes me dumpy at 29, like making my wisdom tooth begin to grow?) He's all eyes, his cheeks are flat and lined, he's grey, his smile is peculiar and stiff, his eyes don't soften. When he came with all those things I felt he was announcing a little death. "My family" he called us. He said to Luke, "Luke I'm not going to live at the commune any more, I'm going on holiday, I'm never never going to the commune any more." "Which commune" says Mossy. Luke's face pouts up. "I want Jud" he says. "Who?" says Roy. "I want you and me and Jud." "That's finished forever" says Roy, I feel too brutally. Luke leans his head on Roy's knee. "But I'm going to find a new home, and you can come." Roy in his black plastic sheepskin coat which I like because it's like Elias's. Tibetan belt around his skinny torso, black sweater, black trousers. Waif. Standing with his torso sagging forward. He's lost his address book. How painfully he mirrors me my homelessness. Mari is getting married in a month. "We thought we'd have some kids." Mari the last time I saw her, dressing for Nigel, shocking little black panties, suspended stockings, little necklaces tight up around her neck. - "C is for castle and cat and cry." "What is cry?" "You know what crying is, it's tears, it's likkle tears." "And it's how to call mommies. Then they come and say 'What is it?'" - Nabokov's butterflies; I retreat to a star map, make a daydream about knowing all those stars, knowing and having seen in my imagination all of the earth's history before man appeared. The hippapotamuses in the Thames. Pleiades is really 200. Leibnitz mountains on the moon. - Sadness and confusion, going to see Rosalynde, how she is friendly to all come-knockers. Want to stay and am ashamed of myself, feel I hang about there, am too proud to do it easily. Luke's whining, I've been shouting, my body's quick to mean little shoves, smacks, then I'm ashamed. It began well at the ca-fé, where we had sunny breakfast with toast. Spent myself cleaning. Dee making me heavier, Anna and Luke screeching, thought of Margaret and Shoshanna so much richer. Andy talking about staying a child, when I told him about the hospital he said "I'd like to write a book about that little girl in the hospital." Kind people like I'm not. Kind people I resent because they're kind to everyone. - Member of the Wedding - past the awkwardness of the beginning into the good bits. The Holy Lord God John Henry West. The Holy Lord God Berenice Sadie Brown. The Holy Lord God Frankie Addams. Thought about going through it again looking at her structures, then thought that it's the 'structures' that are the falseness. John Henry's death, moving house. The beautiful afternoon - their conversations outside the conventions - the moment when she names Berenice's in-love shiver. "Well, this is mighty remarkable," said Berenice. "This is a thing been happening to me all my life. Yet just now is the first time I ever heard it put into words." She was 29 when she wrote it; died at fifty, wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when she was twenty three. Find out about Carson McCullers. - Reading it I've been close to weedy Andy. When he was here the other night I felt close as a sister, wanted to stroke his hair, was moved by his near-sighted clear eyes with their wide bottomless pupils, he was full of inventions; only now months later I find out that I was right after all, he's quite loveable, making up pictures in my prints, playing cat language. Luke's room. Clear reds. The wall papered green with a snake, a bobcat, a wild cow, a fawn in a forest, water, fishies in procession, a line of green roofs, a liana in a rain forest, a boy running through grass. Next to the orange cupboard I've put some Breughels for the red: a peasant scene and next to that the castle, underneath, Rockwell's gold-syrup-colored newspaper office picture. They're meant to be Luke's dreamland, teaching him waking and sleeping that the warrior must hang onto the wonder of things. How we are, slippery animals and borrowing light from everything around us, color the most important thing, color feeding into us the most constant joy we can have. Joe come see me. - The Joe [Eno] in my childhood, from Ohio, Idaho? when I was thirteen sitting in the pickup truck with Paul, Judy and Rudy around, evening street, I'd have to make it up, it was somewhere next to a vacant lot? in Twenty Nine Palms. How little I remember, sense of flirtation, that - how to be true in it - excited feeling of dangerous power, always in doubt. The event, time and place, circled with bluff and uncertainty in memory, blindness to who I was then. She, thirteen, brown arms, plump, faded red cotton jacket, colored silk scarves in her hair, tight skirts, green sweaters, long thick hair, ponytail, fifty foot crinoline and wide skirt, a circle skirt, a white peasant blouse with a pleasant smell, white bobby socks and penny loafers, saddle shoes (later, at Salton Sea, a pair of white strap shoes), just try to be exact, fat small breasts, not a pretty shape, but a fine alert face (M, do you remember when you said "You are not pretty, but your face is very alive") (Andy saying "It was your face I couldn't take my eyes off") (Jud saying "I've always thought you were a match for him in every way"). - Wondering where McCullers writes from, whether she just writes or whether there's actually "a great prose writer's sense of construction and character," five years between it and the previous one. Remembering is a service too, is real service, in some way, as much as attention to the present is, conviction that we serve best by being conscious. I could so easily learn to be truthful. It's the most important first thing. What a difference it could make, it would be participation. - All this morning and afternoon [at Oakhill House in Hampstead], digging into the compost pile, moving earth, finding seams of sand, glass, flowerpots, leafmold? clumped with roots. A worm I picked out to look at, shiny smooth skin and its poking blind movement reminded me of Tony, it is made of something that the soil doesn't stick to, on one side of it (top?) was a crooked fine red vein [sketch], liquid mud oozed out of its anus. I had to hide it in a pile of earth, felt responsible for it, expected it to disappear into the loose earth but it seemed that it has to swallow its way in. The robins sang and raided, I found iridescent glass. Pleasure in watching the soil crumble off the fork; sometimes, not more than three times, a very brief whiff of sweet earth smell. The change of temperature on my skin when the sun came out, almost out, for three minutes, twice. When I looked in the mirror my cheeks were very pink and plump and my eyes clear: a fine deep line around my mouth. Luke this morning: both of us for a minute were foxes inside the damp burrow of my sleeping bag, with its airless dark: he curled beside me, said "I am very tired." On the way home from school the bag's strap came undone and it smashed down: broke the 35p bottle of apple and black current juice, which slowly leaked out of the bag. He told Miss Tugwell about it and then Jane [Downey] while she tried to tell me how thrilling is the constitutional crisis. I've been stupefying myself with novels until my eyes hurt (which they've just begun to do) (childhood warnings: if you read by that light you'll hurt your eyes). Ada - sickening; Member of the Wedding - enlivening; The Fountain Overflows - good at the beginning; The Well of Loneliness - false, but a bit touching. The novels that have really electrified me have made me remember my own childhood by their detailed truthfulness. The other two were - I'm writing like Mike. - March 6 Birthday evening, aching tooth, tired and dull from cleaning that flat this morning, cooking at Margaret's, organizing. Nothing has been very good today except for some joking with Luke this morning, and the cake I made myself, chocolate layer with 29 white and blue candles making a white blaze out of whipped cream and melted Bourneville, with red, blue, purple and pink anemones around it. Little Tom pushing it into his mouth with both hands, flat fat-fingered little hands, alternating. Shoshanna and Luke's rising excitement when the cake was being prepared in the kitchen, the nice moment when we sat and looked at it - Luke had blown out the candles on one side before we could stop him - and then all blew it out. And then tired at home, having to finish little worries like coal and rubbish, talking to Sarah [Black] and feeling myself for the first time. With Anastasia this morning, remembering all the lines to "My candle burns at both ends," realizing that her not having children and my not being married are parallel and both of us faintly judge the other by our generation's mythology. [undated letter - March] The film's going well, mostly shot now, mostly processed, will have to start editing and hustling for money (Arts Council etc) to make the final print. I have part-time work gardening now - for processing money - the robins love me as I dig and sift. Grandma K sent a nice letter and now a five dollar birthday bill. We often look at your beautiful photographs which we've put into the Faraway in Canada book. Found a nice book: Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows. 7 March Here's your letter almost for my birthday, day after. All your protests: and just because I didn't mail the letter I wrote a month ago. Don't know where I was during that month; I think I'd gone a bit blank, a midwinter blankness. Today the air was cold but had a lightness - don't know how else to describe it - that was spring. I make plans as if summer began next week, but in fact - This notebook is a birthday present from Margaret, who knows me. I gave myself a birthday party last night for Margaret and me and Luke and Margaret's Shoshanna: I decided that mummies never have birthday cakes and therefore must be unimportant, so I made myself the most beautiful birthday cake I really have ever seen, two layer chocolate with whipped cream on top, melted chocolate poured over, pink, red, blue and purple anemones stuck alongside and a white blaze of 29 blue and white candles. The kids were highly excited and very impressed: the older you are the more candles you get. Impressing them was the best of it: after Luke blew out half the candles I convinced him to just stop and look at it for a moment, and then we all blew it out together. Little Tom 18 mo whose mum is away having an abortion and who ordinarily isn't allowed sweet things, pressed cake into his mouth hand over hand, fingers spread, and when he couldn't eat any more he gudged up what was left into a well loved chocolate mud. Sarah has given me a Herstory calendar, feminist notes on Canadian women's history, makes me want to come home, as I do periodically when I don't remember the density and humorlessness of Canadians. If Canada Council gives me a grant after this film, I will. It's a long time until you're coming. Do these new arrangements mean that you won't have any time here on your own? How has that happened? What can we do about it? You know I don't intend to entertain Father in his manner; and my manner won't entertain him*. Is that clear to him? There's no point his coming if he's going to sulk or be a brave stoic. If he can entertain himself without spoiling your fun - oh, what a bother it is when people are married and must travel around in pairs. I have so many friends that I lose or can't get at because I don't like their husbands! Maybe when we're all middle aged I can see them again. In the meantime there's nothing to do but wait, because these irritating women daren't rock their boats and upset their men. Luke's had an unusually happy two weeks, he jumps out of the bed in the morning and brings me an apple, then sits on his blanket in front of the fire to eat his, while I wake up slowly or finish my dream. I can't really tell you how he is, short of transcribing his conversation. He's happy and full of invention, affection, forgiveness of my limits, adventure, news, memories, especially stories. He's blooming. Nobody could be such good company. Be sure to let us know your flight so Luke and I can come to the airport; he'd feel cheated if he couldn't. *Disregard all this, I was having a grumpy day. Will be glad to see you both. Luke's talking all the time about his grandpa coming in an airplane. [undated notebook] Whole question of interiorization - if that's so, must I do something thrusting? Nevillson, Judy Chicago - central core imagery, circles. Art in its existence, oppressive of those who are not artists. Art in its social existence reinforcing ideologies. - Make photographs and poems from them remembering photographs. Woman painting her nails - legs statuesque, what does a man extrapolate upwards from those strong legs, strong shoes, the hands and neck are another color, white, with a wedding ring, the color of earring, what are ears ringed for. Squinting, look around, brown nylons cutting her legs out sharp from the steps, sharper than worn lines on the sidewalk, sharper boundary between legs and the rest of us, steps, pavement, but maybe sharp like tyres of the velo resting on one wheel and two arms. Restless and waiting she's like a crazy woman because her mouth moves. Hemline just above the knee. Morning noon and night: make a film 300' of the façade across the way: maybe superimpose old times ghosts - like horses and pigeons, or no cut, abrupt. Technically - tripod in one place, sunny day, how early in morning just before sun comes up - maybe 150' or 9 min. - [notes on Mafalda film] [notes on Co-op show with Carolee and McCall] McCall's piece with projector - elegant simple idea - uncertainty about what it was, then replaced by anticipation - the surprising and pleasant physical qualities of the thing - interaction with it - smoke - fingers, shadows, PLAY, heads, postures - its interaction with the size of the room etc. - Imagine a future or parallel earth with a revised language, old words revived, new coined, different languages. - Timepiece - how to tell time by a wall - 14 hours - preferably day with sun/clouds/rain. Sometimes wind shakes windows. I could go out and walk past. Or else get very close, want drastic changes. - Lorne Eiseley The Invisible Pyramid If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must seek refuge there. If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager .... When he was a little boy his father held him up to see Halley's Comet. He said "If you live to be an old man, you will see it again. It will come back in 75 years. Remember. I will be gone but you will see it." There was a time 1804 when Clark and Meriwether Lewis went into the unknown West! William Clark's diary. Also writing of Alexis de Tocqueville. Hughlings Jackson - brain as an organ whose primary parts had been laid down successively in evolutionary time, a little like the fossil stata. The pentadactyl patterns of our extremities. The dire wolves - extinguished with mastodons, mammoths, sloths, long-horned bison. And plants, it just happens, are the primary road to a settled life. White blood cells: "Its universe would be centred on a great arborescent tree of sprouting blood." I saw the first faint galaxy of a billion suns race like a silverfish across the night and vanish. The pharaohs, by contrast, dreamed of traversing the sky after death in solar boats which they prepared after the fashion of Mediterranean seacraft. The Old Kingdom pharaohs, however, were entranced by a pole-star conception of their final voyage. The Mendelian pathways are prisons of no return. Advances are made but always a door swings shut behind the evolving organism. It can no longer mate with its one-time progenitors. If man was so ubiquitous, why had two great continental laboratories, Australia and South America failed to produce him? Tantalizing thought of other highly evolved creatures. Story about a rockhound. Story about a stow-away on a space ship. What is an experience, a vision, worth dying to have? My fruit salad. That dawn with Tony. Sidereal time. The fall of Lucretius's atoms, that the outpouring of obscure torrents had created the world. Really, we create nothing. We merely plagiarize nature. Jean Bataillon. Bacon: the hourglass of one man's life. Beginning on some winter night the snow will fall steadily for a thousand years and hush in its falling the spore cities whose seed has flown. The delicate traceries of the frost will slowly dim the glass in the observatories and all will be as it had become before the virus wakened. The long trail of Halley's Comet, once more returning, will pass like a ghostly matchflame .... Biogeography, biogeology. technological and psychological commitment to space Spore carriers - machines, launched into space, carrying refrigerated eggs, to hatch, educate, raise, when they find a habitable planet. launching a final spore flight of cyborgs ... a flight such as life itself has always engaged in The zero, invented twice in the mists of prehistory, once by the Hindus and once by the Maya, lies at the root of all complicated mathematics .... In our time that necessary zero leaps instantaneously through the circuits of computers. Our information about the frontiers of the universe is a billion years out of date. Are they coming back? The space program costs such money - we are willing to pay for it, why? What unconscious symbolism? Societies invest in "some human dream, some lost philosophy, some inner drive beyond the satisfaction of the needs of the body" - a Mendelian gateway too. The savage mind deepens its knowledge with the help of imagines mundi - form of discourse. The axial period The impulse to scrap history On a planet where snow falls, the light changes, and when the light changes, all is changed, including life. I in this wintry clime under the shifting of the Bear, would no more be able to enter the mythology of that world of vertical time than to confront whatever eye might roam the dust clouds at this obscure corner of the galaxy. His method of telling little stories that are electifying sometimes, like meeting his professor. He has read his way into the future by firelight and by moonlight ... night was the time for thinking .... The stars traveled, men noted, and therefore they were given hunters' names. Comets or firedrakes - "In the ancient years, when humankind wandered through briars and along windy precipices, it was thought well, when encountering comets or firedrakes, 'to pronounce the name of God with a clear voice'." His great sensitivity to words, the little dislocations of / relocations of / vision. Often don't trust him, lapses of taste. - Where are the girl sopranos. - [notes on garden job fixing concrete steps] Digging up dandelions - the young red worms departing over the grass. Thought of Ray talking about how he had slow worms when he was a child - both their movement as they ran like red water wet and shiny - and the name. Phyllis [Altman] - her big, lined, heavy face - and on her left temple, a birthmark? A scar? A coin? A porthole? A door? Round brown dug down like a flowerbed in a lawn - smooth. Because she's a novelist, talking about the fair copy of the book she's writing - set in the East Transvaal, and she quoted, "ancient and mysterious land"; she was thinking about something pleasant, she stared at the flowerbed and her mouth opened and closed very slightly, like gills (and her eyes, "her ancient, glittering eyes"), a self centred movement of satisfaction and pleasure. "Writing really is fantasy. If it isn't it doesn't sell" she said. "Ah - but it's a sort of research into fantasy, isn't it, that's the thing about it" - announced the gardener, barefoot in bib-and-brace, hair up in a lump, skin-tight in a long-sleeved purple shirt. My fantasy of writers - that they are people in whom experience actually emerges as a sort of multitude of berries - round around a core of seeds - they are fruitful people themselves, the interior articulates because of work on the outside. [undated journal] Seeing Keith at the seminar today, powerful awareness of his physical presence, I was ashamed and lonely in it, and yet it is clear that he has some kind of tension in relation to me. I'm convinced that I mayn't make any moves; but can see he's lonely; but find myself planning little friendlinesses, everything he says or does is so distorted for me now, that I can't trust myself to read him at all. Yet my mouth, all the skin around my mouth, longed for him. In the dark we seemed to be looking at each other. I came into that seminar with the dream of the blue-eyed man still echoing in me. - David Larcher's two vans put back-to-back [parked at the Film Co-op], the small room smelling of pine smoke from the little heater, and the one candle lighting a white-haired baby and blond Elizabeth plump after childbirth. Talking about Turkey. - With Tony on the telephone accusing because I hadn't come this evening - I was dismayed - had counted on his not caring whether I come or not until I'm there - was false and weird, began inventing excuses for not wanting to come, so I couldn't tell why it really was. Now I'm irritated and don't want to go even more. Have to be careful not to be pacifying or I'll spoil everything for myself. - Dreamed I had two other children, a boy and then a girl, Wiesny dull little kids with spectacles. I'd never really paid any attention to them and couldn't remember their births, went to one of them to put a shelter over her head but was revolted and false, and stopped. Heard the little boy say to her "Our mother has never loved us". I assumed they were conceived after Roy had begun to drink, and so were genetically spoiled, but I was ashamed not to love them. Other dreams of trying to get rid of various men, Andy and Roy. Name for a son or daughter: Xios - "Xios be taken to an altogether different country, name to be changed, features artistically mutilated, people of the new country were to create a new past for him, a new family, talents very different to his own. If he chanced to recall anything of his former life, they refuted him, told him he was mad, everything and everybody told him that he was who he was not." Valéry Histoires brisées 1950 Sex: the miraculous secret adults carry in them, so secret that they forget themselves, between sacraments (like communion once a month) the slippery bliss they are capable of. - There's a story in the overnight train journey when I was - ? Lesser Slave Lake. - Tony talking about the reams of paper in his art supplies shop, making a rattle with his mouth and drawing the motion with his thumb in the air. Tony this morning in the washed blue t-shirt: "I kept it on so you could grope me if you wanted." It slides off his neck and in the dark warm of his back there was a smell like earth. Strangeness with each other. What doesn't he want me to know? - Christie's fancyman, Danny's father, was killed in the DC10 crash near Paris, they only found his passport. Before, she dreamed that Danny was in an airplane crash; she looked through the wreckage but never found him. - Brief lit-up moments talking to Tony; then lapsing into (his) absence suddenly like a chair falling. - David's Rumanian rushes: a tractor with two trailers is rattling horizontally along a dirt field road, he pans with the tractor, loses the front and back, continues to follow them, they wave, three riders on the first tractor, they're moving out, he hangs onto the dust they throw, watches it settle in round clouds between four round trees, then moves after the trailer and catches up with some dust, follows the dust for a while, catches up with the tractor and overtakes the tractor settling along - at the same pace - another row of round undusty trees ahead. "This is the best shot of my life" he says joking. Another shot - looking down on wriggly things for a while, comes down and it's tadpoles, very close, watch them plop and jerk, move along the ground to other tadpoles, after a while a little frog leaps across the frame, it's just there and the camera moves on to an area where flies are eating dead tadpoles. Both these sections were processed by the Rumanians and are covered with blotches, scratches, seeming holes. All of it shot with one magazine on the Éclair. - Have a feeling that my relations with the Co-op are going to be like living with a man - all except Annabel they are men - fighting for my life in the face of their contempt, which they'll never recognize, and clubishness. Feel it needs good strategies and the most careful preparation, doses of protein, mystery, etc. - African stories - The Old Chief's Country. Intelligence: she's what it means, I'm envious, sickened, encouraged; the ambition I have for myself stirs, I want to know my own past in that way, but despair because it is not her past; feel vaguely that she must have a method I could learn. The strongest impression she makes is moral: she is a willful lady who enjoys her disciplines and yet in her discipline she is tender to very slight sights and memories. What is the discipline of writing stories. What is the moral discipline of writing. What rules she must have for herself. But the gaps between wishing for strong impulses and actually simply having them, and their energy, seems - I'm helpless beside it. I want
Universe, I am often ashamed, because in my day I've been absent, empty, wasted, idle, bored, impatient, unreal, indecisive; I know the flash of truth and presence; I want always to burn; yet I fumble ineffectually to find my way, I am ashamed of my ineffectuality. Every day I am in contempt of others' mediocrity, torpor. Doris Lessing reminds me. I believe that I must save my life, serve the universe, by consciousness and radiance. I fail in my days because I do not worship constantly. Universe send me the messages I need, universe help me to know my way, to transform my lumpy flesh into lively focused flesh, to blaze through my habitual conventional stupidity. Roy; the life who tried, also - bless him, let me remember who I loved so that I don't despise myself. Let me be steady in the way I wanted him to be. Let me remember where my real feelings, which liberate me, can be found, let me loosen myself from what I despise in myself, the apology, the grimace of submission. Let me recover my pain with Roy. Forgive me my absence, strengthen in me the necessity, the famine, for truthfulness, nakedness, play, that provokes me every day of my life. Make it useful, push me, push me, let me understand how strong I am, the will and refusal in me. Amen. [undated notebook]
List of underground films to study - Mare's Tale and lots more - get from America - go to America? Amsterdam, Vienna - talk to Co-op. - Riding the bicycle at night: the two willows across from John's sway out heavy ropes of leaves, the sound like a snatch of river brought by high wind. Television program: a vigilant pike waiting, sliding down toward a stickleback, still long watchful face - the stupid stickleback hanging about - snap! We both jumped, beautiful moment in cinem-a! Then, looking down the pike's slit mouth and seeing the stickleback's two eyes peering out. BBC2 program on filming nature docs. A frog's egg developing then suddenly exploding, white clouds coming out of the ruptured egg. Daphnia, transparent creatures, with eggs visible in the adult's body, then babies in the eggs, then the babies freely swimming inside, the pushing their way seemingly right through the skin of the mother's belly, into the water. Swimming freely inside - On the stickleback's eyes, a cloudy color of parasites, hundreds of them that have traveled through the body to get there. Female stickleback blown out pregnant, with a tapeworm inside as big, heavy, as she. At Dillon's, a book about bones; pictures of a syphilitic skull with holes eaten through it, raw-edged, around one eye and across the temple. An arthritic hand, joints corroded and extended in gritty curls. A grotesque little fact - Ovarian cysts have been found in which were grown, in the egg's lonely attempt to make a baby, one hundred and fifty eight teeth, some bones, some skin and sebacious matter. An Italian woman without ever knowing herself to be pregnant carried, for thirty six years, a dead baby, which gradually was fossilized and eventually born as a stone baby. Material for my pregnancy film. [notes on avant garde French films] - At fourteen, fantasy of running down steps from embankment to river valley with Reiner, in a floating yellow dress. - [many pages of notes on Jane Arden's The Other Side of Underneath] Problem on first seeing it, simply of reading it. Problem in construction, of the valid dream elements - Godiva mounting on horse holding fat girl's hands, scream of confusion - and those meant to link. Two feelings, the highly charged image and the random notes. Here and there. It's too long to grasp seeing it once, twice, need to be read again and again with concordance. Do list of takes. - Eliot's intro to Pound: one point: that a poet's work may proceed along two lines in an imaginary graph; one of these lines being his conscious and continuous effort in technical excellence, that is, in continually developing his medium for the moment when he really has something to say. The other line is just his normal human development, his accumulation and digestion of experience (experience is not sought for, it is merely accepted in consequence of what we really want to do), and by experience I mean the results of reading and reflection, varied interests of all sorts, contacts and acquaintances. It may be only once in five or ten years that experience accumulates to form a new whole and finds its appropriate expression ... the development of experience is largely unconscious, subterranian, so that we cannot gauge its progress except once in five or ten years, but in the meantime the poet must be working ... good workmanship on a level possible for some hour's work every week of his life. No one is competent to judge poetry until he recognizes that poetry is nearer to 'verse' than it is to prose poetry. [notes on Anger's films] - Agnes Martin grid paintings My paintings have neither objects, nor space, nor time, not anything - no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. Titles - Night Sea, Starlight, Leaf, Milk River, Orange Grove, Tundra - "choice of 'natural' images for her titles simply suggests a belief that what may be experienced through her paintings is something that exists in nature - a quasi-Platonic something whose particular element is the alert and wide-open psyche." Ann Wilson - Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia - catalogue - a piece called The Untroubled Mind. modesty and transparency of tone, the absence of rhetoric. The strength of her conviction is both moving and awesome. She is not out to persuade anyone, including herself, of anything. She is not bedeviled by history, because she has taken her stand, without any great fuss, outside it, in a realm where only eternal things count. a dignified journey with no trouble and no goal on and on - Transformative Myth on the right - prohibition, conservation - Question of narrative and myth Question of bourgeois - 'they' see it as self-questioning - there are
bourgeois [positions] I have already questioned because I am not
bourgeois.
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