| london volume 7 part 4 - 1974 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated journal] Ladies of Llangolen, their pieties, raptures; I too sound out of date to myself. Yet they created something and in the end lived as they liked and were recognized (a little) for it. What they made was domestic: a series of days with precisely the same rhythm, a sequence of raptures that could be counted on always to be rapturous, primroses, pinks, moons, storms, cows, their pride in their own devotion, lovely narrow certain current; in my imagination I flood - but actually - this pleasant room, its fire and child, seasons, jokes, inventions, are all biding time until - It is sad that what's good and true in/for me, my own rural raptures, are so confused with the class / sentiments / cons / bad faith of the 'culture,' ie the way they've been exploited and falsified by other people, that I can't be sure of myself as they were, in their class / sentimentality / ludicrous bad taste / their weird time. Historicity - I love other people's histories and my own, but history I really hate, movements of ideas; ideas do move and infect one another, people lean in the same direction like blown grass. No doubt. And people like me who try to step out of it are like a current in the current, thinking each other's thoughts. I'm accompanied in my days by - I sometimes remember - scorn for my own body. Refuse to look at it as I avert my eyes from cripples and fat women; good manners, rebellion - I will not look at what's ugly. It hasn't really occurred, happened to me yet, that if I'm not to have to bury myself from myself, close that connection too, more and more completely as I get older, I have to choose the other ugly shameful unmentionable alternative - to preserve myself, really to have my'self' as a project. I want to forget I'm a body. But I'm a body. How it restricts constricts me to be ugly. Keith. Even Tony. - Reading Potter's New Cyclopaedia, realized with a shock - in my habitual paranoia about food - that many plants and foods exist which are good for us. Jane chiding me about the commune and Luke, and then weeping so I knew she was talking about what I'd said to her about leaving; her face swimming as it does these days. - Gesture. The form of the discourse. What I have against Jane - Olivia - Mother - Levertov*: the literal-mindedness, the mushy self-absorption (I see an inside soundproofed with something mucky, like a womb I spose) that doesn't allow sympathetic vibration, reverberation, a clean hollow sound on the border of falsity, but true. As I am a subject. *No it is not true that it's feminine. C/f Williams, Seferis. Mystery rings in them. Madge Herron shaking herself in her plastic raincoat hung with a chain and keys, slapping her thigh, telling me about a line in a poem (she quotes it, her mouth opens coyly and carefully because it's poetry she's saying), pigeons (Sappho) falling asleep, darkness flooding in their eyes - she said that she had to not read it for six months so that it would work again. Telling me about a simple girl in Donegal, they used to tease for her English which she "made up as she went along," she said oh no they needn't walk her up the line, in the moonlight it was a "fair, white, night." She herself has been in London thirty four years, came to go into service. When she was twelve she was in the fields, barefoot, "delving." Delving for what? Oh potatoes. All the men had gone to Scotland to work. Her father dead when she was five, her uncle telling them to pull their skirts down. She ate all my bread, with thick butter and bits of garlic, demanded that I go make some more tea, offered me a holiday with her people in Donegal, invited me to dinner with Fiona and Dr Summerfield, extolled homeopathy. When she went home offered her cheek to be kissed. Sat here eyes pink, delicate for all she says about having been rawboned and ugly as a girl. She sat and rocked and raved about my room, "terrifies me!" she shouted. "Jesus! There's something monastic in you." Her tale about an exorcist she visited about the ghost that was making her dour, and causing her to spill things, especially water. If we sit on the bench outside the back door, she says, we may see a ghost; there's one there, who was deprived of life, not killed, but somehow deprived of life. Maybe. "I wonder if there really are such things?" she says. She looks at Seferis, says "Oh he's good this man." Joy! I look out the window and see that in the two summer afternoons we've had, an iris has shot up a flower and stalk, and when I went down to check, I could feel flowers inside the leaf-blades of two more! - Not to express experience but to enlarge it. Not paranoia but - metanoia. - A note in some book, about a man for a moment feeling himself to be a woman, "My balance, the set of my body was different." Wonder if I try to feel - I wonder if the balance that I try to feel in my body, the body I try to feel myself into - is a man's body. - This Bach line that puckers me up like a thread pulled tight, every time it's repeated; it's in #42, the music that joins recitative to the alto aria, the duet with Stitch-Randall - Versage Nicht. There's a bit in the middle like hurdy-gurdy. "I'm always a sucker for duets" I said to John, and gave him the fairytale to read. John on the telephone crying when I rang him by accident. His face that looks about to cry. His cheek smelled of Susie's perfume? Strong body holding me very firm; he's almost my height. I'm having to leave Tony alone, he's not hungry any more. I'm sad about that. When I told John that I remembered our fights best of all he said "But there's always something painful about remembering those fights, for me. I was always saying 'WHY won't you love me?'" "And I was always saying 'Because. Because. Because. Because.'" Swiveling my head proudly on my neck. - England! The operator whom I asked for an alarm call said "Sleep well, love". - But I cannot derive such cheerfulness from these grey days. - Margaret talking about my lascivious cake. The moment talking to Margaret about Annie's being ill, when she said "I think when you're ill you have to love yourself," or did she begin to say it and I finish it? And then we both said in exact perfect unison, "... and lavish yourself a little." We looked at one another. She hurried on to say something else, as if not noticing, and when she'd finished I said "But Margaret, how did that happen just now?" "I don't know" she said as if not wanting to think about it. [undated notebook]
[undated journal] Unfinished thoughts, not believing themselves enough to complete themselves. Anger this morning by a roundabout way settling on a letter to Don, which was true for a while and then got interested in itself, the poem for revising, its own shape, but came out freakishly happy, "Stay alive, baby, and write me, or I'll come and kiss you." Mailed immediately. Before it could stop being pleased with myself. It was odd to begin in my old elegaic style always effective with Carmichael and lose it, to discover that urbane friendliness. Does it mean I don't take seriously my own hunger for a brother, any more? It was for the first little bit, but then it was as if I'd had my one necessary kiss and could let myself out to play. Grey mornings, furious boredom, guilty malice; finds its way nervously, wisely, by way of what it needs - yesterday's poem, Philosophical Investigations brought upstairs the night before last, a letter's imaginary conversation and fantasies, to this afternoon's lovely inventions with Luke (the Amazon book) and tonight's further clue to the structure of Silchester Road. Self-conscious self-dislike, glimmers of happiness, what to think about the way my little days rock with a kind of fluency, phony me, like that poem ... I can't tell whether it's good, but there it is, and a couple of others; the performances that amaze me, with other people's friends, who's this noisy woman - nothing new. It's the girl-child reappearing, I'd forgotten she was like Luke. - The suave Welsh policeman. American Graffiti, it worked out as it should have, saw it sitting next to Roy at the Hampstead Classic. It delighted me, the shine of streets, slow gleaming movement of cars across the screen, the hop with a girl in bobby socks jiving, young fat-faced Elvis on a television screen. The rear end being jerked from under a police car where it stood, clothes, pincurled hair, long night that dawned several times, at last opened into a misty valley with pylons, all shot informatively, unflashily, with real love for those days; it's a way of thinking about what was most magical for me too, my periphery participation in the thrilling - something - moment of time, not at all true for my time and place in La Glace, but something somewhere that I could sometimes just touch, by radio, Hep Cats magazine, Janeen, Reiner; talking to Tony last night trying to think why everyone's history is potentially equal, given intelligent feeling attention and the light of mortality. It was glamour - always right - [notebook] [Beginning of April I hitchhike to Paris for a women's film festival, am billeted with Dana Sardet.] [from the ferry ] films To get a rain of white light, a loose plastic sheet or a glass pane at angle to running water (bateau mouche) (smoked glass drifts down like rain machine water). Seagulls holding above back of ferry riding the steady air, the boiling froth of the wake like clouds - do seagulls, make matte, matte out on cloud wake, superimpose then superimpose again at another point, makes seagulls in a magical space. A foggy day bright from above, the whistle sounds very loudly - it's answered from the fog by a muffled sound like a gong dying, probably the same whistle on another Townsend Thorsen ferry - from the right. - Peter and his tractor - red beard, clear green Northern eyes full of light, hairy crease of his bum when his pale blue corduroy trousers slip, beer belly, red hammy hands, so attractive that I decide this will be my first truck driver, if it works. But he's boring, totally male with no tenderness at all - that's his interest too, he lives in the wild west of TIR buccaneering, Blackpool to Italy for seven years, the younger men who've been to Afghanistan and Pakistan, talk only of their motors and are spoiling the fun, they've never driven an old truck and done England-Milan in two days and wear fancy ski jackets. His friends Peter and Dennis, Peter a tall broad and flat-hipped ginger-haired man going white and bald, a steer head on his large belt buckle, Yorkshireman with blue pale eyes, like Peter's full of light. From his neck down he's still red from the sunstroke he had in Italy, he's the bottom of the pecking order, a certain hesitancy. I am of course proud, because my Peter is at the top, a history of brawling in cafés, once threw a plate of egg and ham at the waiter etc, but there's someone, Danny Malin, who's bigger and more dangerous when riled. A quiet man and a drinker. Denis is crude, ugly and fat, Borgnine-greasy, but full of determined gaiety, takes Peter by the chops and jiggles them, "Good to see you Peter boy," he's senior, but Peter's got luck with women, it's clear Peter's on top with him as well. They remember old times, it's partly for me but they're having a good time and we're all laughing like princes. - The time five of them, some with mates, had an enforced 5-day national holiday in Italy, "put our motors in a circle on the beach, with washlines and our smalls hanging on them, next to the cleanest river in Italy - the only clean river in Italy - every evening all the eye-talians would come and laugh at the English truck drivers naked in the river having their showers. All that week I had nothing but steak" (makes a sign a foot square and three inches deep) "and ale." Once backed a tailor into the Mediterranean for a diving board. Peter himself has had idylls, took his son and a cousin, took his eighteen month old daughter, had two months with a Canadian girl, a while with an American artist living in Spain. His present girl from the Lake District, "She's a deep thinker," says "I can't make out why you ever got married." Driving donkeys on Blackpool beach at 5, says he made £10 per week. His grandfather's potato business, supplying all the boarding houses, the prams covered and used by urchins to carry bags. His daughter Lisa, the tomboy. "She's got a thing about you, does she?" "Oh aye," in his soft accent. - Cimetière Montparnasse City without people, only guardians. Birds loud in one particular tree with twigs like root hairs. Smell of plum preserve. Green fire of a completely established colony of iris in a rusty trough on legs, old leaves crumbled down to orange straw, new shaking stiffly their pointed leaves, flares up without flowers. Ceramic wreaths, old purple monumental poppies now air greased black but in the crevices of the corolla a spit of seeing (blooming?) grass, a little weed. Visitors, picking up debris. Young gardeners rubber necking from the avenue paths, white tablets, blackened white houses architected as temples, palaces. In one of them a prayer chair inclines toward an altar with a deformed cushion on it. One iron door half dissolved into air ajar on newspapers, flower pots. Another tomb birds love to shit on. Outside against the pale blue sky is the black tablet at Montparnasse Station. A little pot of pansies that smell like violets. A Mediterranean avenue of shaggy cypress. One-room palaces, moss on the roof, stained glass windows no one looks through, wall stained in icicles under the eaves. Birds sound sharp. Other sounds dampened, traffic. A museum city, no one touches the flowers. I put my hand on a crepe-skinned head of ---, a diffuse shock, grass fire in another brazier, the gravel paths are growing only parted single centipedes of grass, but these pots with their fertile culture of soil catch yellow flowering weeds. A glass jar I must go back for, rusty damp sycamore seeds in it. My rust tree with its eye. Need some pensées. White city tulips set as a continuous ceremony on a marble table. O petit ange, prie pour nous. The housekeeping gardener comes with a damp broom, they know their way. Plum jam smell continues. Glistening brushes of an extravagant sort of jack pine. Avenues with a walking scale, paths, doors. Someone made a stained glass greenhouse, over a round-headed white tablet whose dedications are almost dissolved, bleached out; blue panes, and two burgundy coloured remaining, through one I can see the orange leg of a crane. Shepherd's purse. Slabs peeling. Two pigeons chasing each other like jets, throwing shadows like jets, and watching them I see a white butterfly struggling on its fabric wings. - Dracula, a Family Romance [JoAnn Kaplan's address in her handwriting] I am 5'4", strong and broad-shouldered, muscular arms and thighs. Have never been able to catch a ball. - Volleyball and the (Feminist) Politics of Creation [these are written in the dark, watching a film] spiking to give someone a hearing, to listen the listeners we need to make something for oneself charring Hollis Frampton make oneself ridiculous distortions of fame privacy and obscurity companionship and valuing scale of equipment, scale of viewing rooms, rescale but PRIVACY festivals: body and dress size - scale to not be not smaller than eye to eye, children and the small man loving these bodies brass tacks on music floor the red light of wine glass eye level being tall walking across a street call the group Xios - from Borges deformity women's faces, child Madge, the sound deformity, snatched then the clarity that becomes older and safer for Jean Morrison, Jane Howell, and Mary Konrad Epp Mama, Madge, Angela, Isabel, that secretary, Joan? Dissolves Tell the myth from --- telling us who we are, write it in my own way, she came to a city, at the end she smiles slowly, her eyes bloom blaze, rain light [more notes imagining films] [pages of notes on Natalie Granger] Their action is like a new pattern for human behavior; they are present - with the salesman - tell him the truth. Brother Carl - silence also - provocation - "Il est lourd" she says with a smile. - [evening back in London] Julie's face, Dana's, JoAnn's. This morning the sunny windows, birds on the piano, vivid room I remember so well I could be there asleep waiting for Julie. Funny bread in the kitchen. Touching Julie's solid waist and our awkward hug. "Both Dana and I feel it was destiny that you got here first." Last night's talk in bed, when I began to spin out joyfully my hospital days, feeling love for her as I had from the first morning when she used a word well and let me use some well also. Wanted to hold her properly and not shyly. The lovely book she gave me. Sitting in the Mercedes cab plowing up the M2, the two drivers in black silhouette up in front of me, a yellow light and two green on the dash constant, and disappearing taillights, red. A few approaching headlamps flashing in adjacent and opposite trajectory, a few circles traced on the dusty windscreen, the wide-angle wrapped black glass, and first Led Zepplin and then Don McLean on the stereo on both sides of me. I felt, this is a moment of perfect happiness. [undated journal] Try to remember Paris. The sense of the flat before anyone was there, the corridor too dark to find even the toilet. Undifferentiated closed doors. How vivid the place is to me. The tinkling of an unknown person's jewelry, Julie coming to turn on the light. How Julie looked in her Finnish nightgown, big, with her furry upper lip and blue eyes, in shawls like a "voluptuous Russian beauty" said Dana the morning (Sunday) we sat translating in the sun, Place Maubert / Mutualité. Croissants and grandes crèmes. The hesitations, shyness, sudden expansions, of the state of being new. With Julie the first morning, shyly imposing myself into her breakfast table with Dana so pretty in her long maroon housecoat (in which she walks always as though she is fording a stream up to her knees, Dana Sardet as was Rosen, fine freckled face, a real burning exquisite face). I'm always looking for people to be more wonderful than me and that makes me shy, but then I have these uncalculated moments when I expand, and afterwards am ashamed of my greed, feeling that they've been more generous than I have. Constant self criticism for banality, egotism, unreality, mechanicalness. Julie and Dana gradually letting me know my position with them is not what I thought (their middleclassness, Bryn Mawr and all, Julie's friendship with Marcuse etc): bursts of fanatical talk with Julie whom I was loving in all shyness. Glad to see her in the morning, when we didn't speak until we met at the table; that one night waking to listen for her. Sneaking looks at her white solid back that is narrow to the waist and then shelves way out. Taffy hair. Big legs under the nightgown. Clinking silver laid out on the table at night. Joann [Kaplan] warm from the beginning. The moment when she said "Are you into getting letters?" and her calm even presence, eyes, grey teeth, smile, hand on my shoulder. Talk about privacy. Dacia's warm eyes when I raved about the falsity and stupidity one involves oneself in with people. Barbara's [Halprin Martineau] shining red face, gleaming spectacles, same girlish unironic face. My own history of courage beginning with the end of my Christianity and ending in my impasse with the Slade. - Mossy's fantasies about being a likkle mousie, which Luke brings home. Frances told this story, sitting behind her mask-like face: Mossy: "You're just RUBBISH." Luke, upon reflection: "You're just rubbish too." Mossy: "Yes, we are both just rubbish. Everybody in the world is just rubbish." The two of them coming in this morning, Luke cooing with pleasure, and Mossy just as delighted. Isabel's hospitality. Then Luke got into my sleeping bag with his cold feet and we whispered to each other. Pretended Mossy had a little bear in his wheaties. - Image of the train sleeper. The child in a bed above the city, level with the window, steam rising from the hospital's laundry, the streetcar's blue crackle in the dark. - Journeys. - The woman's familiarity with inside, insistence on staying inside and at ground level, meaning thought in its well worn tracks. 'Gestures' we recognize resemblances by, body-prints, but - banality - poetry's same root the wrinkled many-storied cowpasture-brain - cowpasture extended in depth and height and diagonally. - [age 12-14] Poverty of my doodles, Janeen's skillful hand drawing and redrawing the comic strip pretty girl. My less harmonious hand drew 1. costumes 2. houses 3. countries 4. pretty girls 5. Judy, Paul, Rudy, Uncle Willy. (Conversation. To M: I was a very talented child. How was it you never noticed?) Gesture: "Afterward it came to me that instead of any special lyrical or epical or literary attempt, the sea-shore should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me, in my composition. (Let me give a hint here to young writers ... other powers besides sea and shores - avoiding them as too big for formal handling - quite satisfied if I could indirectly show that we have met and fused, even if only once, but enough - that we have really absorbed each other and understood each other.)" - Because You saturated Sight - - Four precepts: to break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one's genius. Hawthorne The American Notebooks An 'image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional 'complex' in an instant of time. It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits, that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. Pound Literary Essays, "A Few Don'ts" Baudelaire: correspondences. Stevens: resemblances. Symbolist, imagist. Visualization. Metamorphosis. Meta-phor change-bearer. The atoms, protons and electrons of modern physics are now perhaps more generally regarded, not as particles, but as notational models or symbols of an unknown supersensible or subsensible base. Owen Barfield Saving the Appearances 1968 Fuller's image of the knot. Things are cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots - Fenellosa: Some hundred tons of solids, liquids and gases serving to render a single person corporeal during [her] lifetime, a knot through which pass the swift strands of recycling transformations of solar energy. Xios - the snapshot name, the Sufi name Ellie Epp - the name of a history Terrifying division All I know about her is that she is not what they have said she is. - Strictly speaking, what one life sees, no other can. Whitehead Every correspondence we observe in mind and matter suggests a substance older and deeper than either of these old nobilities. Emerson April 14 Easter Sunday 1974, Luke woke me to tell me the sun was shining, that was after he came crying because he was wet, lying next to me on my pillow - he turned my face back toward him when I turned away to sleep a little more, said "I want to see your face." Sad sad. Bony grey Roy in baggy trousers. Luke running in beech leaves in Epping Forest. Sadness of Roy's insistence on Madeleine's brilliance, originality. I without the presence of mind to stop him. But in the forest I kept my gaiety with Luke and so had no need of his. The duck we found in a tree trunk, one brilliant eye in the head laid back sideways on her soft speckled back which continued into the down feathers lining the nest. Luke looked a long time. I said "Goodbye duck, goodbye ducklings." Luke bent down again, crouched at the tree trunk's little window, said "Goodbye ducklings." Beautiful Luke. His quick smile when he's caught in an absurdity. The pee in the apple juice bottle. "Is it apple juice?" His eyes shine: shakes his head. Sat on the quai looking at children's paddleboat and petrol barrel canoes. Luke says "Say the color yellow." "Yellow." "Kiss the fellow." I do. Giggles. "Say red." "Red." "Bye bye you're dead." The dead beech sprung like a rainbow. We walked up it and sat high in the sun, Luke singing "Way up high," when I got down and caught Luke, I made a pitch for Roy to jump - he was afraid to! A long stick to remove leaves from R's back. We love, play around, Luke. Cannot play with each other. Middle age - I tell myself it's his. I wonder who I loved. The Kentucky fried chicken. I found a white flint chip with sharp edges. - Luke says: "Read me a story out of your head." Dreams: a slim pretty Indian man loves me, maybe, we share a bed in a dormitory, he rubs himself against me and ecstacizes "Now I'm almost there!" as if it were good news for me. An image of a woman wrapped in darkness with lines in it [sketch], it acts as a word, ie I use it as a counter. It means something like 'sensuality' with connotations of richness, throwing oneself into something deep, bottomless almost, and black, velvety. Sitting in the West Place house looking at living room walls, talking about it as if it had been there for generations. Paul says it should have been overhauled, I say no, look how other it is, I could never have made it like that, let it stay as it is, with that funny calendar picture on the wall. The Journal people. My funeral, arranged at my convenience. Dreams coming from a wistfulness about Margaret saying how David is moving in with her because separations only make them more in love. [undated notebook] [notes on teaching reading, ideas for things to do with Luke] [notes on film stocks, work list] Anthropology of a place. Chamber film. Watch out. Detail very small. [plan for light table] Denise Levertov 1971 To Stay Alive New Directions When she evokes real things I want to know more, like her sister Olga - novelwise. The diary form, it's flabby, occasional shapely things but yech no sense of reserve, makes me ashamed of myself. Mary Webb Swallows
Charlotte Mew 1869-1928 One of the saddest figures in literary history, Charlotte Mew fought a losing struggle with poverty, nursed and lost a loved invalid sister and did what she could for 'fallen women'. She was a small indomitable woman, something of an eccentric, appearing in clothes of mannish cut with a stern umbrella at Harold Munro's Poetry Bookshop where poets foregathered. She was eventually granted a small Civil List pension but ended her own life at the age of 59. Her output is small but extraordinary. - Not many years ago there lived in Bloomsbury a woman who had a squarish hand, like a sensitive man's, rather square shoulders, a thin mouth in which was no hardness, hair that was always blowing about, and light-colored eyes that startled you by being so startled; and she chose to wear a man's overcoat; and though she was educated, she had no traffic with the schools, and though she was poor, she kept her rapt particular faith in an obscure but existent good; and this woman, though few people knew it then or know it now, was a great poet. Shy and sometimes silent, in congenial company she was the best of talkers. Like some other melancholy natures, she could keep a table convulsed with laughter, her wit being as sharp as were her powers of observation. Sidney Cockerell, the Times obituary 29 March 1928 Lived at 9 Gordon St WC1 "Nothing is true that is not good." "This is not a real place; perhaps, by and by I shall awake." -
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Ruth Pitter - Vision of the Cuckoo
[Not sure I've got the punctuation right.] Pound Credo Rhythm: I believe in 'absolute rhythm' ... corresponds exactly to the shade of emotion to be expressed ... uncounterfeitable. Symbols: I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object ... symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, ... and the poetic quality is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such. Technique: I believe in technique as the test of sincerity; in law when it is ascertainable, in the trampling down of every convention that impedes or obscures the determination of the law, or the precise rendering of the impulse. Form: I think there is a 'fluid' as well as a 'solid' content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase .... The mastery of any art is the work of a lifetime. Emilia Stuart Lorimer - Anger Song
Introverted female poets whose works captured Munro's imagination: "raw and inevitable product of personality, or nothing. Sometimes it may seem almost ingenuous through the sheer force of its sincerity". Anna Wickham [list of Mew's books] Charlotte Mew swallowed a bottle of disinfectant. [undated journal] Luke says "Why are you saying stupid words to Roy?" "Because I'm angry with him, because I'm fighting with him." "But I like him. Why don't you." - In the dreams I didn't want to leave this morning, a garden with two birdbaths, white, full of blue roses growing on single stems of equal height like asters. A note to the gardener which I interpreted as saying that they must be cut down, because I wanted to have some of them. I cut those in one of the bowls and chose the least wilted for myself; walked into the house with them, and in one of the rooms, or on a stair?, met a black couple with fine unnegroid faces, very white eyes, both very beautiful with articulate strong hands and feet, who welcomed me graciously. It seems a curious precognitive chime. Tony. I was so glad to be about to see him and when I laid my head on the top of his head over the back of the chair it was a good wavy warmth, but I went away sad and lonely because I'm too hungry and he's not hungry at all. - When I look at Roy I see ashes. - Good day in Epping Forest. This morning lying in bed two little heads on one long pillow talking in the bright white shadowless light in Tony's room. He sulked a little because I cried last night. Maggie and Richard. Maggie looking lovely with her bush of blond hair and baggy blue eyes, jutting nose, smile. The passage in the forest where it was all craters and bumps, new beech leaves horizontal in layers. My hollow tree, Tony running ahead skillful and light, not so shapely as Richard but more adroit, doing his airplane run through the low branches. Best was feeling the moss warm and alive, dry, under our hands, the banks of black saplings with new leaves, the hollow under high beech trees where 1. Tony traced an X through the leaves 2. I climbed into a tree and got near the strange space between branches and spongy white sky with rifts of blue sky very sparse 3. Richard and Maggie eventually sat down and shut up 4. Tony lay on his back looking and was eventually buried in leaves by Richard 5. I lay down in the hollow next to Tony and watched the tiny movements of the angular beech branches and tips, one tree in the centre and others around it leaning inward almost symmetrically, 6. like fisheye mandala. The varying depths of branch, the ambiguous space beyond the branches' tips, the movement of bright spots and blue spots very smooth, shaking of the whole tree in the wind, occasional dramatic swoop of a pair of birds. Tony's voice very small next door talking to me about it felt very loving. We shut our eyes and tried to locate sounds. Jet plane and biplane, the wallpaper pattern of a couple of birds' dialogue monotonously from right and left, highway roar. 7. We got up and played four-person volleyball in the soft bit among the leaves. 8. Richard and Tony had a last exchange while we waited. 10. We found our way home. Sad political things happening because of the two-couple setup. It's much easier for Tony than for me, it flatters him and disturbs me, makes me defensive and tight. Leaves him free. [undated notebook] Dream - painting a floor, broad floorboards with cracks, aluminum paint, I'm jumping on it, jump ten feet and hover, strike ballet postures, seen in a mirror I am bare from the waist down, I experiment and stay up, moving upright, not flying, pass men on the ground, Arabs, hover, squat above them, and flash my cunt at them. Meet a tall white-haired woman in glasses who says it would be good to ---. I say, "But we can't" - she says "It's all right, I have one" and slides it gently into me, we sway lightly as if on a breeze, it's exquisite. - Sal [Potter]: compulsive eating means you're the sort of person who has compulsive energy patterns; all you have to do is do something with it, or recognize what you really want to be compulsive about. (Work? Sex? Love?) Mouth. Sense of being able to talk almost full stretch. Both still swallowing with nervousness, being truthful because she can tell the difference. A nice crispness which is friendly without flattery. Insisting on doing the hard things; just what I need to know. - The overlap last night of a bit of brick wall, a black shadow in which was my white wall. The sycamore and the reflection of forsythia branches on the piano. The next door window and below it on the brick wall my red door. My bookshelf full of books fitting into what seemed a recess next to their sewer pipe. I must work on this world of overlap to find out what it's about, it never used to be there. London has taught me. The last night one was about inside being outside. It was also about colors in black. Light and dark like Wells' two worlds. The drawing of a leafy room. Last night my white ceiling with its strong molding papered with moving privet leaves. What's the meaning of two worlds - a strong esoteric meaning there - measured by attraction. -
- [sketch of stoneware teapot by Norman Schulman] Jean [Morrison] has died, "Jean died last spring." Manna [restaurant]. Colin [Thomas], the way it took a second to recognize him, peeping at the brown-haired girl he was with. Sitting drinking wine, it's still strenuous with JoAnn [Kaplan], she is too - she doesn't compete with me, I begin to feel loud-mouthed and tired, find set phrases and Americanisms running out of my mouth, is that nervousness? Feels like compulsive American friendliness, don't like it. Like JoAnn. In her body she seems soft as a mollusk, soft eyes full of light, soft easy mouth, soft hedge of grey-brown hair. At the tube she gave me such an embrace, firm and decided, I was firm too, but not so decided, feeling the side of her face with the side of mine and having a sudden whiff of some wonderful smell. Her shoulders and ribs so narrow. [notes on fabrics in Habitat and Heals, sketches of clothes] [notes on pelargonium cuttings] [notes on kundalini yoga sequences] [notes on Mafalda film] [list of Duras' works] John Hershey's report on Hiroshima: "Hiroshima
was blanketed with flowers. There were cornflowers and gladiolas everywhere,
and morning glories and day lilies that rose again from the ashes with an
extraordinary vigor, quite unheard of for flowers till then."
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