| london volume 7 part 5 - 1974 april-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated notebook] Dream of breaking into a sealed room in a large building, it was furnished variously - in one room two couches set head to head at the corner, ugly comfortable furniture, a window looking across into a beautiful light room full of plants, which was there but not visible from the other parts of the house. It was Judy, Paul and me I think. Trying to remember how we got into it - wrenching up a window and stepping over a gap? Dream came back to me when I was reading the script. Nevers - "No it's not by chance. (Pause.) You have to tell me why approximately." But I'm not sure. Reminds me of a long ago dream of the room in my first house, like a bird cage. Full of beauties and marvels. All my dreams that die with me. I'm very sad, wanting to love somebody. - Plath: And while she was trying to free herself from the traumas of her past by discharging them into the forms of her art, she and her husband "devised exercises of meditation and invocation" to help her "break down the tyranny, the fixed focus and the public persona which descriptive and discursive poems take as a norm." Duras: What makes him attractive should be immediately apparent to everyone as being that quality found in [women] who have reached maturity without succumbing prematurely to fatigue, without having resorted to subterfuge. But love throws this woman's soul into greater confusion than it does with most women, because she is more in love with love itself than most women are. To give oneself, body and soul, it's that. She gives this Japanese - at Hiroshima - her most precious possession: herself as she now is, her survival after the death of her love at Nevers. b. 1914 in South Vietnam of math teacher and schoolteacher, lived there until 18, with a few visits to Lot-et-Garonne. Once when a child, once when 16. University. Law, math, sciences po'. Married Dionys Mascolo, communist who wrote about communism. A child. Left him but continues to be friends. Micha says: elements of brother displaced by a stranger; of time reconstituting one person in another. Moderato Cantabile - young woman takes young son to piano lesson - she identifies a dead woman with herself, talks about it to a man who is identified with the killer. Cette incessante intérrogation, cette espèce de communication tellement éssentielle ... qu'on devient l'autre, qu'on se donne tout entier à l'autre et l'autre se donne tout entier à vous pour finalement ensemble ressusciter un autre couple. Détruire, dit-elle - "I can't read novels at all anymore. Because of the sentences." What is the camera in Nathalie Granger? "This watching function can also be called identification with the character." There is a gliding from one character to another. Why? I think it's because they're all the same. These three characters, I believe, are completely interchangeable. Rivette or Narbonni - "It is a film in which the spectator is obliged to pay close attention to the way in which the camera behaves toward the characters." Many people have said that the characters in Destroy, She Said are mutants ... I more or less agree. I was very frightened while I was writing it. I was fear itself. This film is not psychological in any way. We are not in the realm of psychology. We're rather, in the realm of the tactile. Yes, that suits me fine... . Jacques Rivette and Jean Narbonni 1970 Destroy, She Said: an interview with Marguerite Duras Grove Press - Steve Reich: Writings about Music Art and Artists June 1974 Wants music and dance to create a focused consciousness like yoga; not improvisation, which is the opposite. Jennifer Oille piece on nongallery work - good. A lot of quotations interspersed with information. It's a triple equation of one's personal sense of beauty with one's beliefs as a socially conscious person .. with the constructive process as a public activity ... I'm not concerned with the heritage but with developing my dreams and illusions within the public context .... It's okay to construct an idea but it must lead to something. We must leave something behind, not the object but people who can perpetuate the process. Liz sculpts child-size puppets, their adult manipulators visible, for children. - [kundalini yoga class sequence] - The electric line from this room to the next, like holding hands all night, so intimate I'm jealous. Black-eyed blonde. - Clump of yellow flowers on top of portico crumbling opposite. - [notes on diet] - Re adolescence. Being resigned to the mediocrity of conventional life is senile ie a product of loss of vitality. - One of the black-framed Euston Rd public hall windows with two red buses in lower squares - they are lit - it [?] shadow white/black/red, from top of red bus. - Conversation with Luke, putting him to bed, telling him how we're going to go to the airport and the voice will say "Flight 483, now arriving at Gate 14" and Grandma Mary will say "Oh isn't Luke big," and Grandpa will have something in his bag, and so on - we talk about the farm, three tractors, with real hooks - "And I will ask him to show me, the hooks" - his eyes shine when I say that someday he can go stay on the farm. He says "An' that will be very funny an' in-ter-esting for me." - "I have a rocket-shoe" - his rubber thong - "Now I'm attached underneath it, wouldn't that be good, like with Grandpa's airplane." [undated journal] Dancing on graves. [My parents, now 50 and 53, visit on their way to Israel.] The look of them, just come through the arrivals gate, faces so lost and frightened, looking around for us; their age covering their real remembered faces with its strange plumping softening distortion; little wrinkles on his fatter face like little wrinkles on soft apples, like skin on milk. Makes my neck lengthen, makes me brag, "I won't, I won't, I won't, I won't;" scares me foolish, maybe I will, in one way or another I will, inevitably. Luke was even more than me, his eyes shone and his cheeks were pink and he was generous, hospitable and charming, he'll dance on mine. Constantly irritated by my dad, the heaviness of his presence, his sulkiness, dependency; feel for him too, imagine he must want everything to be just the bit more wonderful than it is; but I give him that. He thinks about ---? Paranoid fantasies I suppose; he's constantly uncomfortable in his body, his face looks pained, like secret toothache. Embarrassment. She sits down in the tube and talks too loud, her voice is tight, she bends herself toward us all, her consciousness is always warped by his dependency even when he isn't there, or is it warped by other fears now? How flat it makes her, how underground she is; but present. He compels us all to pay attention to his misery. Even Luke said to him (he removed Luke's sticky hand from his knee) "Grandpa are you tired?" My habits and pity make me want to comfort him; but my contempt, anger, make me want to discipline him like a sulky baby, by ignoring him, his self pity's too big to be helped, it would take all we've got. I got rattled, like her: lost my cool and babbled, listening curiously to myself. But remembered myself a few times: said "You could go to bed without her if you like, I'll show you where to get the warm water." And put on the Bach duet. Both are broader, better dressed. The Pentax. The [toy] tractor and its symbolic exchange. I want her to be like I want to be, steady, turning on herself so her voice is lower and she can make cool jokes instead of straining to listen to three things in herself at the same time - him; the rest and me and herself. So do I exploit her. Conversation: "I know what that expression means." "What does it mean?" "Men are all a pack of humbugs." I've infringed the law. "Maybe that's too strong." "Yes, I think that's too strong." "How about, I'll believe it when I see it." His chronic cramp of anxiety, and hers. His a cramp and hers a sort of tic. Luke said "Grandpa it's nice to see you." Then he came and whispered the same to her. He [my dad] said "He said 'Grandpa, it's nice to see you,'" and she didn't let on he'd said the same to her. The intelligence of slaves is real intelligence and the stupidity of masters is pathetic, but nonetheless it's he who acts himself out as if he were someone and she who lurks behind as if she were no one. Went to bed feeling all that is nothing new, I've thought it before, haven't seen anything new. Today, of a photograph she said "It looks as if the winter has been taking bites out of him," and of another, "The reflection has put baubles in the trees." Next to the cemetery she began lifting her knees as if she were marching. I said "Why are you walking like that?" She said "I just feel like it." No, "Oooh - I just feel like it!" in her odd self-deprecatory rhythmical way. But then she gets boring too. I get tired. I'm tired. - She stood in front of me in her black sweater and red pants and frowned up her face and said "I guess we're just condemned to not being able to say what we want to say." "When Darrell used to hold me I would feel no need to say anything. There was a picture that would come into my mind, not a dream, just a picture, of a boat in a wide sunny harbour." She came and stood in front of me and bravely held my head against her breast so I could hear the solid beating of her heart, I couldn't hold her back. I couldn't hold her, back. The thought of full frontal embrace with her horrifies me; I can hardly look at him. The revulsion and fascination of their two bodies. I live so backwards and forwards when they're here that it wears me out, pitying my future self when Luke's no longer the easy loving baby he is now. Hating the man he used to be with all my determination to win our war to the death. The presence of their deaths. Their awful coupleness: "What was the name of that man on the airplane?" It made me tired, preventing myself simultaneously from kicking his head in and from making tea when I knew he'd like it. Colin - gets along with his father because there's only one of them. - My father standing at the door saying "Are you coming Mother?" I look at him with unconcealed-for-once irritation and say "Why can't she come to bed on her own?" Feel brutal and exaggerated about that; only realize, with anger, when they've gone, that my cruelty was almost totally confined to myself, and he enjoyed himself, was catered to, and finally with Peter drawn out to a self confidence I find unbearable in him. I'm still incredulous when I remember how in his bragging tone of voice he pronounced that he knows what he thinks about Simone de Beauvoir. I remember how I got conned into having him here at all; he was never welcome but in the end I felt sorry for him. What a creep he is. And even she - her one trickling tear when she talked of how Mrs McKeeman gets flooded with Mother's Day cards, how she feels her investment in us children hasn't paid off in its own way, says she knows it's silly but and then when leaving says "It's hard to believe you'll be alright." Nothing but votes of no confidence. Needing to be measured and seen by them, needing their pride or accurate criticism, getting their ungenerous anxiety - is it envy? Curious how ungracious you-lot are. Useless. Tied in knots. I'm realizing it was easier when Roy was with me not to be sunk by their weight. Doris Lessing as antidote to the heavy fleshiness of her face - we need another mother when we're grown - and her body and voice warped with caution and slavery. There's someone there who continues to exist in spite of the calamity of her marriage, but she's a coward too, and seems more cowardly than she was. She's a coward and he's a braggard creep and I hate them in myself, and have to strive to kill them both and at the same time have to let myself be them because I always will be. Her sagging chin. Squashed between the generations. Luke becomes my child self, running ahead, eyes shining. [undated letter] What a day it is, hot Sunday morning, Bach leaning out the windows of the room where you slept, the tomato plants just beginning to bloom. I'm sleeping downstairs now and wake each morning to bright sun on the red bedspread. Now you know where it is. Your sad letter from the airport. I was sad and angry too. The fatal time-twists that make our parents so hard on us. And children. I want and expect you to be proud of me and my experiments in my life; instead you are fearful, untrusting, blind to my achievements. You want and expect me to be affectionate and grateful, instead I set you up, still, as the dangerous enemies of my will and my growth. That's how it is between parents and children; I'm annoyed to be caught in so commonplace a trap. There are a lot of parts and elements in it, I'm sure you've been thinking about them too. I didn't send you a Mother's Day card and was sorry I'd said I would. (Catherine, by the way, said no one had ever sent her a Mother's Day card, she doesn't know when it is. Very sensible.) It isn't me. I somehow don't believe it's you either. Listen, I think we mustn't be discouraged by the difficulties of this last meeting. We're living in a very changing time and have to take responsibility for our changes. What we must do is think out more carefully what sort of meetings can work, and then be firm and clever about using them. Why have you so little confidence in me? Why can't you see that my struggles to liberate myself from marriage and all it means, is a sort of path-finding for the new ways of life we shall all have to find? Why, simply why, do you not recognize what other people can, that I in my way am a special person, with great and good gifts, real talents, that I'm responsible for? Why do you so be-little me in your own minds? Why do parents want us to stop growing when we've caught up with them? Why is your concern for my life so corrupt with self-secret envy and resentment? Is that really necessary? Must I choose for the parents of my adult life, other people, who have enough faith in their own life to give me their real blessing for mine? That's my anger. I've tried to speak it plainly. If you speak yours will they meet? Luke is well and looks forward to meeting you again. I'm well also, bloodstream moving more quickly in this Maytime warmth. Waking me up. Ready for adventures. Write and let us know you're home safe. Were the slides okay? [undated journal] Erasing personal history - I'm learning - I hang on to all that, as if I could lose it, when in fact 1. I can't lose it, it's all retrievable if I want it 2. It weighs me down more than I know. "One day I found out that personal history was no longer necessary for me and I dropped it." Only when someone else knows it does it become personal history. Erase personal history to free us of the thoughts of other people, creating a fog around ourselves. Creating a fog around other people, so they can be as exciting as when they're all potential. When nothing is for sure we remain alert. Easy to say I'll just jettison the pair of them, but they seem to have attracted to what has seemed their two poles, the whole spectrum of dichotomies I dance between. Except that this time I've noticed how alike they really are in their marriage collusion, their ignorance and anxiety. Back of my mind some notion that my defensive struggles with them, Roy, Jane, Olivia, the Slade, Peter, have had to do with feeling a promise of something extraordinary in me that they want to level out. Questions - is it realistic struggle - ie 1. can they level it out. And 2. is it "something extraordinary", and 3. do they actually want to level it out? and 4. in all these cases is it a question of envy? Most important question is the first, because if they can't actually then I can stop struggling because the struggle bores me and wears me out. But also it does gather around itself questions whose liveliness keeps me from jelling - also keeps me from acting and from feeling good about myself. Suspect there's a simple answer to all this. I feel it's such a banal situation, which entraps nearly everyone, and I resent falling into it when it should be possible just to leap over it like a warrior. It is in the nature of our relationship that you try to bind me, stifle my growth. That your concern for my life is corrupt with envy and fear. Now my real parents are - others. Uncommonsense. Suggestion somewhere that, loving one parent, we always have to hate the other. Sibling rivalry. A small green insect with long wings, dark green dots on its back, elegant antennae that are like eyelashes, pale brown legs, walks up the steep slope of my book, the sunlight that is slanting down on it at nearly its own angle, gives it a long shadow that walks behind it on fine, long legs, its wings throw semitransparent shadows - a reversal of the wings - no a print of them in a very slightly different color - or turning into color what is nearly colorless. I thought how beautiful and interesting as it slipped up the ladder of lines of type. When it got to the top I thought I must see it again and set my pen under it to catch it - failed, but saw that it was limping, and I had taken off a leg from the knee joint, slight as a strawberry whisker. The elegant creature was hobbling and it had been so easily done. It hid on the back of the page and when I was writing it, it suddenly flew away out the window. Ideal of intellectual tithing - if you give away ideas without exchanging them for reputation, do you get more tenfold? "Two bodies, the real body and the imaginative, whimsical, adventurous astral self." Artist's astral body - "artist pulls hers in, and sets her to work. At one moment she may have to be a jug, at another a bunch of carrots." My whole relationship with other people as well as objects, works of art, nature, music, could depend on what I did with this imaginative body rather than with my concentrated intellectual mind. And the main thing about this capacity seemed that, although obviously an aspect of the mind, it did feel like a body, in that its essential quality was this sense of extension in space. It always had a more or less spatial shape, even when to do with music. - Luke lay on top of me, on his back, on the sleeping bag, while I told him a story about two green dragons who ate flowers which, if not quite ripe they would string and wear like long collars all the way up their long necks - daisies and poppies - they came to a river, the first they'd ever seen, in which was a green island. Having no experience with water, they stepped into it, very experimentally at first, and kept walking even when past their depth, so the slow movement of their short legs under their buoyant wide bellies brought them swimming to the island and up onto it with no change of movement, like a tank's treads grinding forward. Some of their flowers had floated downstream, when they shook themselves on the opposite shore more of them sparkled off flung like water. On the island was a grove of trees to which they went in order to find - a grotto, dry and warm, with a narrow entrance like a gothic arch, a white sand floor, and several high narrow windows through which the sun poured. A long narrow passage from the first round light room led them into a deeper larger round room, with a greater depth of white sand on its soft floor; warmer, with less light from fewer farther windows. Here they lay down to sleep. That was the end of the story. Luke, I'd thought him asleep, said "Is that the end?" and gave me a kiss and went off to his own bed. - Quiet beasts, animal lives, our pathos. And monsters, "angry tearing impulses against the parent figures, in their role of frustrating authority, having striven to believe oneself a 'good' child, the angry feelings are then felt to be coming at one from outside." Milner How is the hatred of parents (legitimate) when accepted and expressed still to be seen as hatred for oneself? I'm confused about why, knowing I hate them (him), I am torn in bits about it - beyond the fact that I must suppress the rage. Ah. Why do I suppress the rage? So thoroughly. Can't look at him for fear of hurting him / him hurting me. She says when we make imaginative contact with people we always put ourselves in danger from the monsters we project into them, in order to be tender with outside we must have tamed the monsters wherever they come from. - In this order: the pale high sky full of light tender infinity beyond the Capital Radio tower. Sal. Shock of her appearance. Head so sharp shrewd and vivid red and white and browns, dressed in white. Embarrassment and shyness. Falling in and out of step lurching through Trafalgar Square's traffic patterns, the blue and yellow of the National Gallery's façade as day and night changed over. St James Park, marching through talking about angels. She says they are about eight feet tall and shine with light. They have very wide wingspan and fly slowly like swans or herons, can fly noiselessly or with a very slight rustle so's not to startle people. Do they reproduce by laying eggs? No each one must find its own method of reproduction, perhaps by embracing its shadow. Then the new angel grows perhaps in the sense of moving from two dimensions to three, over a period of a day. I suggest that the angel then is formed according to what is around about it, not reproduced, but only set into motion by its parent, like a little cyclone set loose. I say I like the idea of tiny white eggs like snowdrops, very fragile, the angel cyclone would have to break out of. Angels have very beautiful smiles and they are both sexes, strong like men, but tender in outline like women. Do they have breasts? Perhaps, depending on the occasion. Told me about her guardian angel that led her around her room when it was haunted. She said it was dark, very pleasant, a sort of darkness, and a voice. It was one, but seemed divided in two, one behind each shoulder. Asylum - the man called David talking - seduction of that lot of people because they're allowed to be experimental in their talk and movement. Giving ourselves license to be experimental and expansive instead of minimal. Without turning it into solitary performance. She talks about performance - busking in a sort of drag. Her garden - ten miles long and three inches wide, hedged on both sides with hedges carved into the shape of very delicate things, like ferns, a lot of water. Stream crisscrossing it, at the middle a very rich lawn, a tree with a platform three miles long at right angles to the path "where people go to sunbathe." There are bridges made of very light wood. Visible at one end a vast Georgian house, pale grey, French windows open onto lawn, Beethoven quartets sounding endlessly. At the attic window a little girl is the only person visible. From the house you can see the long garden and on either side of it, symmetrical, with two sunsets, a vast wilderness. At the end of the path there's a ladder climbing to another more fertile plain. I have to push to find out about the house ("I didn't want to talk about the house, had to force myself") from inside: in the parlour the music ("Nobody can ever know") is made by records on a big horn gramophone like the one on which her father listened to Beethoven quartets, playing ceaselessly over and over again. There's a kitchen, blue and white striped china, delicious smells of baking, one is allowed to sit at the table and smell it but very seldom if ever can one eat anything because the cook likes to eat everything herself. A flagstone pantry, cold, bare, with, on flagstone shelves, a few single vegetables. Upstairs many rooms locked because - she thinks - they aren't ready to be used. A very bare clean sunny room with nothing in it, no, except for a table on which, neatly folded is a bloody sheet. Another bedroom full of all kinds of beds and the slightly musty smell of a lot of sleep; cozy, warm soft lights. Attic the little girl looking out the window, all around her many books and papers, projects half completed. A low white table with some supper on it. A piano. Key - there are a lot of keys, mostly false, a lot of stereotype ornate keys, which are false, and a very seductive little gold key, which is false. The real key is made of grey stone, very beautifully hand-crafted, carved in the shape of a swan. Opens up the whole front of the house like a doll's house. - [*double photo of Roy] I had not fully realized that the restraint of one's will opposed by authority could at times feel like a threat to one's whole existence, an attempt to separate one from the very source of one's creative relation to the world; and that to give in to this imposed restraint could at times feel like the deepest cowardice and betrayal of one's whole identity ... more to do with the danger of losing one's whole belief in any goodness anywhere ... he cannot bear to look at them and face the jealousy and rage and fury they arouse. Milner One central hypothesis: that there might be some acute and critical moments in the history of one's power to accept, emotionally as well as intellectually, the distinction between subjective and objective, self and other, wish and what happens. explain the quite unreasonable fears that a painting would be 'no good,' ... evidently in one part of one's mind they were felt to be life-and-death issues .... It seemed then that one could attempt to avoid the sorrow of change and separation and loss by spiritually enveloping what one loved and taking it inside oneself, but that this did not really solve the problem; for there was still the fear that by having it inside one might have destroyed it ... might seem much safer to make the spirit firmly keep itself to itself and not venture out on any enveloping expeditions ... guilt and remorse could perhaps be very nearly intolerable .... If this were true then one of the functions of painting was surely to restore and re-create externally what one had loved and internally hurt or destroyed ... goes deeper in its roots than restoring to immortal life one's lost loves, it goes right back to the stage before one had found a love to lose ... facilitating the acceptance of both illusion and disillusion, and thus making possible a richer relation to the real world. facts to do with the primitive hating that results from the inescapable discrepancy between subjective and objective, between the unlimited possibilities of one's dreams and what the real world actually offers us; and also to do with the way the lunatic, the lover and the poet try to transcend this hate and either succeed or fail ... traditional educational procedure tends to perpetuate the hate by concentrating so much on intellectual knowing, in which subject and object have perforce to be kept separate. - When my mother said the world would only be destroyed if god willed it, and that relieved me, was it because I'd felt responsible myself for its preservation? - The way Luke can see letters upside down. Do we in our various sorts of recognitions and creations make things meant to be read upside down, a universe of discourse which we never get a hang of because we're so determined to stay on our feet? Could that be a simple way of hiding important secrets where they can easily be found? - At the Co-op tonight, a moment dancing in the widened hall, Mike, Annabel, looking out the window at the pale tender summer evening street life, backyard sycamore, singing my phrase from Bach (versage nicht zu verstören) felt light and happy. Mike, Roger, Jonathan playing Japanese wrestling, Jonathan's friendly moves. Tony looking so old last night, I wanted to cry, this morning on the train when I watched his face secretly in the reflection and he looked so sad. I really loved him. But this afternoon springing down Prince of Wales Crescent beside me in his ripped paint-spotted jeans he was so pretty and I could only be jealous, pretty like a stoat (what's the meaning of this word so), some long slender animal with a long neck and small alert head. Painful to see the wreckage in his face and Mike's too, they're old before they're thirty - but their lithe bodies dancing, springing, like adolescent boy bodies, snappy and slight. Odd disjunction with Tony last night, in the end I was mad because he didn't take any trouble and that left me to just serve him; my own fault partly, because I'm not honest. Sarah saying about May Swenson's poem, the restored egos and legs walk away leaving the rocking horse stalled where it was before, it's about sex, that's exactly how it is, isn't it. When I read back over this I marvel at the rightness of words I sometimes pluck out of the air and set down recklessly, the rocking horse stalled; the line from Neruda (los cerezos) planted. - Rosalynde [I asked her about this journal]: "There is a theme, it's liberation. You should write about that." Take someone, at the same stage as me, rock her between perceptions and actions, let her find her way out. Madeleine. Take the small daughter of the same. She has a state of grace and what happens in it. She's done some sums. Question of doing what I know. Meets ordinary banalities with unordinary truthfulness. I would have said liberation and the pleasure of vision, therefore the form is of her presence to the world. Write the generation film. Or utopian film about the whorehouse warehouse. - Soft evening sky, I went cruising on my flat tired bicycle and found the carnival on Dale Road, stood round painfully wanting to dance, at last did, and then didn't stop until it was over and everyone went home. - And it's not only me, the whole culture needs to be a culture of warriors, the burden of information which can only stop being a burden if we can take it for ourselves, endless creation - recovery - or rediscovery. Speech is the twin of my vision it is unequal to measure itself. Miraculous how something foreign at first, imperceptible, next time is perceptible and wonderful. A secret process that happens of itself to let us grow. - [I invite my crush to supper] The painful moment, Keith arrived and stood across the table looking at me with a look so beautiful - my heart contracted with fear - love and fear - I said something sharp and after that he plunged away into the talk he needs about images - he didn't see me, the whole evening, I had no existence and just battled on, banging plates, throwing toys, feeling alienated from Luke by his diffidence and irritation. But his brown eyes, his smile, the line from his waist, so painful not to be able to put my hand on that waist - his huge ugly nose, the radiance of that smile. - Conrad - somewhere - "in the destructive element immerse". - Right. Look at you. The shock of your face, how can you inflict such inaccessible beauty on me, who can you be, inside such a face. When I look at him I love him. Unfair! The obtusity of him, bragging, refusing to look at me. His antigravity machine, you are an antigravity machine. Immersing a text in a text. I'm a world you can have no knowledge of. Go to sleep, so I can get near you, look at you without shame. I wish I could keep that image of the man, just come in, standing at the table; body so slight and sweet, and turning toward me - me turning toward - his face so terrifyingly sweet and direct - annihilates and paralyzes me. I dreamed, again, a search through a long train. A search through a large family, the Konrads; childish. - The classic disaster: I am unnerved by my love and its fear. Luke is awful. I throw the plates onto the table. The teapot's handle comes off in my hand. I don't listen to his theories and let myself compete with him and in the end don't go with him to the door and have spent all of the rest of the week thinking about him. - Women's bathing pool. Thought of it troubled by lack of sleep, irritation. At the end of the meadow a chestnut tree held its branches almost down to the ground. Towers of flowers. In the dark under the tree I seemed to be at the edge of a large room, a large interior. Noises, sounds, intense listening for footsteps. A man, couldn't locate him because of the nature of the sound, whistling one phrase from Air on a G String again and again. Kids in the darkness of the Heath. A small animal approaching, a weird animal that seemed to scuffle like a mouse and yet moved from one place to another without connection. I listened for the man with the dog; that was my enemy, evil. Ducks very quiet. I'm oppressed by not being allowed to be excited about anybody. Often during the night, looking inward to the chestnut tree and its great shingled roof of leaves, hands, beams and rafters. Sometimes a shiver would pass through, the leaves would rattle as if it was raining a little. Then everything would stop. I had a lot of covers and was warm and tired. The man from the men's pool, jogging past, had said "You've got a lump, better see what it is." Pat dressed in beads, freckled decolletage like a rich woman, sitting in her cabin at the edge of the pool all year round, clearing a small garden, watching for the fox. Herta, once an artist, "but she seems to be going to pot," hunched into herself (she demonstrates) as she gets older. My Madge Herron on Kentish Town Road last night, with her three dogs, the new one, she's called her Sally, thin as a herringbone on a string, pulling ahead ("I've been pouring potatoes and butter into her"), fine smart little head, triangular ridge of teats under the tight arch of her whippet ribcage, tail's curl pulled in close. Madge tells me the story of her toad, she bought him from a boy who'd raised him in a jamjar, meaning to free him on the hill, but someone told her that, raised in captivity, he wouldn't know to hide himself from the birds. So she kept him, fed him bugs from the fish supplies shop, a cocoa tin a day, it cost more to keep him than the cats, fourteen shillings a week. Then the third winter, when he went into hibernation, he didn't wake. She wrote a poem for him, that ended with a wrinkle in the sun. The way she recites her poems, looking straight ahead of herself. - These life-companion metaphors: astronomy and biology. - Sequence, this morning lying together in the white room with light sinking down the wall, when we slept it was in the heat of it. Now Tony's drunken call about just fucking him about. - Arriving late on Wednesday after sitting with Sal in the Ladies' Bar, drinking port ('white wine' and 'red wine') and smoking cigarillos, beginning to laugh: she went to the counter bravely with her face streaked from crying. Snow White and Rose Red in the waiting room, two dead-faced thin ladies opposite, with their glasses on the counter, making them last. Another one comes in and greets them, has a wilted red rose on her collar, addresses us all, "Excuse me, I want to talk to --- here," sullen-faced Indian young man, sitting beside a pint of lager. She brings out a greasy bag and shows him or offers him - I guess - two nice lamb chops and some chips and peas; Sal reckons maybe it's the shit of two lamp chops etc; her brother says old people who're a little crazy often carry their shit to show people. Get to Tony's with my stuff. Sit on the floor and talk about ---. Go to bed. Can't remember much of that until the last day beginning at 3:30 a.m. Thursday, get him yogourt, wake him and lie with him until slowly as slowly - remember ease and invention - him in his apron cutting bits of that piece, John Frick witty ("I hear you've been a broad") with his sad face, in the pub in the sun, the bottle of white wine and salad and then we lay side by side in the moving box of light on the rug and dozed until the sun had shifted, and then we had the strawberries and cream and then I went to the library and yoga class and then I came home and Tony was mean with the supper I wasn't hungry for anyway and I went to bed early and in the morning quietly went to work, croissants from Louie's Hungarian Patisserie with delicious vanilla flavour, bananas to work on; the fat blackbird skimming downhill and landing with a rustle in the bed I'd dug, finding worms (not near the top anymore, but curled in tight holes in the underside of clods). Yellow beak. The upstairs woman's "You're a very good gardener aren't you. I was watching you and you know what you're doing." Delighted me. Going back to the Hill for class and then sitting looking out the window and going to bed early knowing Tony was out with John Frick playing snooker. At 3:30 the light goes on and Tony snaps in happy to see me, so I'm wide awake and we lie and talk - I remember again the fragile feel of his small skull under his odd dry hair. His moustache, his eyelashes. His big firm mouth with that strange muscle under the lower lip. His flecked red eyes. Shudder when I stroke his hip. That miraculous time when the light grew and the first train passed - so simply, basically, what more could be needed, perfect concentration. The window frame, dust and the yellow light passing from the top of the frame to the bottom, the light on the wall mottled as if by fine leaves, the two levels sinking toward us lying in the bed, the room filling from top to bottom with the fine light, turning to look - look: the light has reached all of the window frame, each corner of the ceiling a different density and color of shadow, a jet swimming coolly across the pane, the rattle of the second tube train, perhaps the same as the first. The clock stopped and I didn't notice but Tony did, and smiled at me: "Thought I'd leave it stopped for a while;" at ten past six. When we slept it was only for a few hours, very hot in the sunlight. O Tony. When I was awake he was too, and I bought him a grapefruit and scrambled some eggs and warmed the croissants in a wet bag in the oven. John at work on his man [sculptor roommate], dressed in his blue hat, torn pants, looking so nice. When I came to the bedroom Tony looked at me full of affection and said "You're a wild thing." In that pocket of time early in the morning he'd lain and sung She Walked Through the Fair and a growly old song called Wild Thing. When we lay in that pocket of light early in the morning we looked at our two colours of skins, where I lay, his skin had turned to silver, a repetition of even little bumps on his neck, the amplified texture of his skin, we were so warmed by the sun - when I opened my eyes I looked directly at it, and closed them to see two hard-edged blue suns in the hot red ether under my lids. O Tony. The sound of the first car, people beginning to move. Tony's profile, eyelids closing round around his eye; I'd forgotten how I used to dislike his silly way with his drunk friends. Why doesn't he come to see me even when he's in Kentish Town. "I wish you hadn't gone home. I'll miss you tonight." The three flies and the stretching plane between them. We sat on the windowsill in the sun, his Stones warred with the Beatles across the way, little girls, three dogs running, and when the female dog stopped one of them began to pump himself into her, then the other, larger, a collie, just pushed him aside and took his place. The brick arch. The cracked asphalt. Always the beautiful façade shining back its ambiguous reflections opposite, a bunch of yellow-flowering weed on the portico. The feed man is gone. Therefore so are the horses. So are the pigeons most of the time. It's a real death: little film. We sit on the windowsill, I have both feet outside and am brilliant in the orange silk skirt, with my blouse pulled down my shoulder. Tony has on his green trousers and pink shirt and looks lovely. We're balanced, backed by the music, together and happy, reigning over the street. Old people, fat women, go by underneath us, we're lordly happy and our breakfast tray is on the floor behind us. John goes out to get a bottle of cider. We sit with the glasses in our hands smiling at children. "I'm worried about you sitting like that." "It's okay I have a big fat bum that grips." "I know." "Not like yours that would skid right off." Saturday like Sunday. "The sartorial artist" says the milkman. "Wot's that" says the barber. John's working with his fiberglass mold, has his old radio on. We standing, see a young man coming from the wedding, black suit, carnation, bright red socks, and bovver boots. I'm so delighted. I'm so delighted to kiss Tony my delight. "One last kiss" he says. I want it so much, I could kiss him all night. "Just one more." I could go on kissing you till noon. - The way he sits in his armchair to read a chapter of The Sound and the Fury before he goes to bed, formally, maybe like his father. - Need to just get a way into this filmmaking. Feel so tentative and arbitrary in what I'm doing. Need to invent a way to feel serious about it. Just on the edge of so many ideas, makes me mistrust them. - The familiar, famous face of the man at the festival yesterday, hair dyed red, tight sweater and dungarees, clogs, insisting on dancing. (I jumped down from the stand to dance with him) - what was that face, extraordinary intelligence, something perceptive about his gaze. He looked queer and was with a pretty American boy, sulky and outshone - a long time ago Roy and I met a couple of queers, filmmakers?, in a café, they were more interested in him. Yet he danced nicely with the voluptuous girl clown. And was nice to us. Dreamed about him in the airport crutches dream. Also dream of a visit to Janeen's house asking: "How old is she?" The child. "I don't know. She's been thirty months old for an awfully long time now." - Luke at his swimming lesson shrieking and swimming beautifully. - The moment when the thin voice in its '30s sound came out of the old radio, how Andy and I felt we'd touched a time machine, listened for war news and leaned against the mantle. - The way I caught my posture shaping itself to Mike's. The way, with Andy and the radio, and Tony and the film, I felt almost stricken in my will by their habit of taking charge of the technology: not being able to take charge of my own process or ideas in their presence. - But Tony and I make things together. In that early light we invented a beach and a breakfast, the naval helicopter, a boat. We stood looking up and down a coast which was straight for me, curved for him, but both had a coffee from a smoked, dented percolator, eggs bacon and tomatoes. Watermelon. For lunch salmon sandwiches with thin cucumber slices, packed in the icebox. The air warming steadily, the haze increasing after the pink and blue clarity of five o'clock. - Mary's beautiful face, she's forty, her fine pale brown pointed eyes, pointed nose, fine young pointed mouth. Haggard cheeks, little bunching under her thin chin. Joan, as well as her hysterectomy, has a virus fitfully destroying her nervous system so that one eye doesn't focus, her hearing's partly destroyed, and she has vertigo that throws her down onto her face. Beautiful lady whose nervous system is fading out. Her nervous system and her womb - uses of human beings. - Tenderness for Jud at the conference, she's lean and was black with clogs and a single bead on a leather thong, her hair chopped off and her face carved out so strongly, she's always running; she's kind and responsible, she has a good laugh, we're getting generous, sat having lunch next to each other, talked about Roy as we still must, Christie used to sneak into #49, Margaret knew and Jud didn't. We're blood sisters; and so I'm thrilled to think she'll have a baby on her own, because it will be my other baby, want to be her godmother. [She didn't have a baby.] - Little stab when Luke left to go to Buckingham Road; we're into a rather impersonal period between us; I miss his sweetness of a while ago. He's been very red cheeked and boisterous; I think his sweet and sensitive times have mostly corresponded with mine. He's so independent and fearless; when he's demanding it's a horrible whine. I'm self righteous then and fight with him, is that hardening him? Kiss kiss kiss kiss this morning. We have good inventive moments, we're equals enough. I need to help him with true things to learn, to keep him steady; also I must think about the ways Roy seduces him, and what I can do for that. Other than get rid of Roy; Luke actually talks much less about him now, except this morning he said "When this house is very old and you don't live here any more, I will still live here, with Roy." - Think about films intersecting with the women's movement. - Think a little about Tony. You are so truthful and so simple. I can wake indifferent or loving, next to you. I can go to bed indifferent, and find that in the dark you've become somebody else, courting me courteously because you find you're burning for me. The decision when you lift my hips and lay me across you. What a length of you there is tonight, with a line like the portholes on a phosphorescent eel, raking me, scratching me. Your simplicity, your perpetual inventions: we are walking through Hyde Park, I say - we are among trees - "I could see that as a fountain of single cells." You say that's literary, you show me your game, which is to look at the furthest point while still being aware of the periphery. When I do it, unfocusing, suddenly the area around me changes in color and texture: we see someone in orange, running, cars, the trees in graded space all around. Behind the hedges, cars passing look like waves of hedge. We find the coffee bar and talk about words, speech, how I can't bear unreal speech, Margaret's ideas about talk, it not mattering what you say. 'Literary' or not doesn't matter; it just has to work and still be alive
as a game or magic device - not a token. Here and now games, time games.
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