| london volume 7 part 6 - 1974 may-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated journal] Coming from Tony this morning. A glisten of sex on my face, made everyone take notice and stare. Anastasia talking to me about writing, as we broke up lumps under the tree, after moving Margaret's cherry tree. Bridget sitting in the sun, Margaret kindly bringing me tea, a beaker of it, a little Denby pot of hot water, a gold-covered sugar bowl, a cream jug, a plate with delicious cake, all on a metal tray. Hot space between trees, hot skin, hard dug sweat. What a happy day this seems. Yesterday, Tony's façade. Bleak moments, he says - "Your eyebrows are way up, that's always a sign." I can't speak for fear of either telling the truth or lying. I just leave it. The rug is hypnotizing me. The way he turns his face to the side of mine, on the pillow. He's not young, his face is often wrecked, his eyes hurt him, his bum is getting stringy, under his thin chin a tight fold forms, his hairline is very high. Sweet Tony's chilly small hands, the mouth of his penis, the soft underskin on it thin over fruity flesh full of blood like a lined womb. Like the transparent skin around an organ. I had on the radio in the kitchen, something modern, he leapt up smiling in the doorway, "What's that it's wonderful." Your loyal women. "You don't do anything wrong" he says. [undated notebook] [Arica evening exercises] - Dream - sleeping under piles of things in the attic - street scenes, London, all the churches are being bombed, there are soldiers and police shooting indiscriminately - we're afraid to be near churches, gatherings of people, there seems to be no way to get across the midline of London (roughly Tottenham Court Road) so we get to the railway track - dare we walk up the tracks - we'd be conspicuous and shot - but we do walk up the tracks in the dark - a feeling of triumph. We're in an auditorium, I'm dancing with a woman, see my reflection, breasts shaking in a bra, we dance close - I feel her up (have no impression of her) - then we dance apart. We're part of a spiritual underground, we gather in a students' lecture hall for shelter, the professor comes in and says "I've never seen any of you before." The ceiling lights up, it's a lecture on stars. The young professor is clued in - in the seats people are talking about their reasons for being underground, a girl says "I was alright until I had a baby," I have two friends (dim) - there's a moment when I sense the doors at the back of the auditorium about to burst open - dive down under the desks, and as the machine guns begin to flash I slide on my stomach down under the desks to a hole in the sewer - notice the professor's eyes noticing - in the sewer, confused impression of will there be a way thorough the S bends, will they follow us in this revolting place - no they won't, they'll wait at the exit. I'm at the beginning of the sewer in a room with a lot of chairs, all of 'them' are sitting there, they're old professors, and the young one is among them - I'm afraid to be seen by them. Tell myself I'm only there in imagination. We're outside somehow - I'm looking for shelter, have found a tent in the snow, against a cliff, snowed over - am safe for a while - then hear people being abandoned outside and have to let them in, two women, that allows me to be discovered by two young men who purport to be organizers on the side of the underground, they give me two metal stakes tied by a string saying "Here are some tools for you" but one of the girls is suspicious and says "What are they for?" In my mind during the dream I'm thinking it's like a book whose plot I've heard described somewhere - but did I dream it? Later - the sense of the book has disappeared. - Dream - several nights after this one - long adventure dream, a sort of exploration trip - Mackenzie River? Old time - mining? Villages in the forest, ruins with miners or bad men or similar, I'm with a partner (which I? no idea) who is separated from me at one point - I go downriver and hope he catches up with me. There's a time when I'm in the river, debating whether to flow with the current up a twisting rapids - I tell myself that as it's a dream I could find out how it feels, with no danger. - [pages of sketches of a railway guardhouse designed to live in] That stable in Surrey, very fine narrow finish around covers, roof, doors, windows. - There was once a woman who built a house on a rise in a cedar forest - the sea was just visible from the top story, from the ground floor only forest could be seen, a gravel path set with flat stones leads into the forest to a garden laid just out of sight on the south slope - a walled garden. Such was her solitude in this house where every detail in wood was perfect, that her work dimmed and seemed worthless. Who could neighbour her? Someone began to build, half a mile away on another rise. He built a wide, flat, open structure with a domed glass roof. Man with a beard, a man whose solitude was such that he could only arrive early one evening, asking to borrow a hacksaw, or was it a rip saw. Waiting, his jaw set itself forward, shyly. She asked him for tea. They sat on the kitchen table until it was nearly dark on that level. Then they went outside and sat on the balcony railing, they talked with dim excitement until it was completely dark. When they parted, smiles pulled their faces open. It was hard to part and yet each wanted an empty room to contain excitement and fear. Several evenings later she went for the hacksaw. It was as before, they sat on his wide step, chins on elbows, hugging themselves. So it went on. He came in an early afternoon with fresh bread. They ate it with cheese sitting on a log in the walled garden. There were more shared meals: early broadbeans; a fish; soy flour cookies; a visitor's gift of oranges she shared half and half. Once, after a lunch, he reappeared suddenly at ten o'clock with fudge; he wouldn't stay for coffee; indeed she couldn't ask him, he was so eager to run, and she was absent in a dream; perhaps her face hadn't welcomed him. For a week after that he didn't come, and she packed early in the morning, walked to the shore and took a boat, to the city, where she walked frantically and sometimes blindly, sometimes with a brilliance of vision that she'd never experienced since she was eighteen. She wrote everyone she loved, she gathered her life around her. Her tenderness toward her friends was immense, but she could not stay with them longer than half an hour, she had to bolt. She wept one night, her face flooded and swollen, she packed again and took the evening steamer. It was very late when she arrived. There was no light in his house, which she passed on the way, her footsteps slowed as she passed it. She unlatched her door, lit a candle, went to bed. She woke in bright sun, she woke in the midst of turning away from the light, her eyes stung with fatigue, and she'd slept in her clothes. He was sitting beside the bed looking at her with a face as blind and fatigued as hers, he could not turn his face away when she opened her eyes, he had been crying. She was suddenly awake, she sat up, her face broke again and they sobbed until they gasped with laughter. He opened the cubbyhole with towels; she could see he knew where to find it, he did not apologize, she had never brought him upstairs. He wiped her face, she wiped his, it was the first time they had touched each other except for once, accidentally, when the sides of their arms brushed past each other in the walled garden and they had jumped away from each other. She moved to one side. He came and lay next to her. They held hands, their hands shook. When the shaking stopped they were asleep. They slept through the day. Their hands never separated, they woke facing each other on either side their hands, their eyes opened simultaneously. She had dreamed - They lay in silence as the room darkened, they smiled, they smiled, at last they whispered. Neither ever said what had happened for them during that week. He said only, "I saw you come in on the steamer last night." She said "Why didn't you come and tell me you were there?" "I saw you hesitate at my path, then I was like an idiot, I was happy, I ran back to the boat, I walked, I came back and wrote all my friends, I was happy; then I became afraid and so I came." He went home, she understood that they could not sleep alone again; at dawn she found him working. She stood at the far window and watched his face in the reflection as she took off her shirt. She opened his bed, uninvited, she turned her face to the wall, he sat in his chair, swiveled toward her, hands between his knees. She turned toward him and he took off his shirt and came near her. They slept with their arms around each other, only their chests and feet bare. In the evening when they woke, they had not eaten for forty eight hours - they cooked, sang, they ate. Then, wide awake, they went back to bed. - [notes on Le petit soldat and Bruce Conner] The woman on Euston Road, little, made up orange and pink face, a pale blue scarf around her white hair, a red plastic rose pinned to her shoulder. The old soldier at Euston standing to guard me from rush hour legs, said "There you are my darling, you can write your novel in peace." - When she arrived at the party he was gay and playing host. She got at him, provoked him with questions, couldn't tell who he was. He began incoherently to praise, flatter, declare love to the man next to her, she turned her face away, her intoxication vanished, that was that. Rage. Nobody here who speaks my language, nobody anywhere. The face she'd come with was wasted. Visions of Flying down to Rio, the great final waltz, walking home miles through London to a bare room somewhere. A joy. The reflection of the train's interior, blue seats, floor, polished black shoes of the gentlemen, slide along the pipes, wires in the black tunnel, wonderful image which is true because it is only by a collusion of ourselves and those solid seats, wooden floor, that we and they are solid. We are light, we are reflections, we travel through solid dark and light. - Peter talking about not being able to make love with people any more, "anti-illusionist sex," I kept insisting on my own tale of happiness, "but there's something else, I think he likes women." He says "I think there's something in that. I'm discovering in myself a real resentment of women's bodies. That started with you I guess." I don't think it started with me: I think through me you found out about it. Because my body was trying to learn. It's revolution, its rightful revolution.
How stupid I am on this level. Not writing with words: There's a pause while I consider, listen to, a sort of tension somewhere in my body, perhaps in my brain (which is not a muscle - c/f attention thought of as tensing the brain but actually tensing the forehead maybe)(maybe there is a kind of tension which is somehow neural, that would be a gestalt), and then the word slips out. When I write flabbily, it isn't that the words fail to come, it's that (I fail to listen to that area of silent tension - why is 'listening' better than 'feeling' in describing it, something kinesthetic or ? neural.) [notes on La femme mariée] Speed, texture, complexity, it zings so that the glorious moments of affirmation aren't suspect, that's cunning. Exasperatingly doesn't develop linearly, he has great daring. I seem to be able to impersonate daring from time to time. [notes on David Rimmer's films] [undated journal] Walking home from Kings Cross after Wayne's party, with Tony gone home, with a little head-on conflict with Keith past, our brown eyes poignarding into each other, silly man; there was a fat drunk with greasy hair in little curls following me, lisped at me, petulant, something about knickers, an infuriating baby. I shouted at him, he followed after muttering "Ththatsh rubbishsh" - I asked the young policeman to keep an eye on him, as he was there anyway, squatting in his little car; he got out and strode fat-assed after the man saying "Hey, there!" The petulant baby - the baby-faced policeman - gathered his offended daddy manner up, said "This young lady says you've been accosting her" - the man all sulky staring reproachfully at me sheltering behind the big policeman - I could hardly stop myself grinning with triumph - it didn't seem fair, also the policeman might think I'd trumped up my complaint. "What were you saying to her?" Long hesitation, he stares at me. "I was saying 'Good night,' I was saying 'Good night.'" "That's not what she says." The man pouts. "Where do you live?" "Holloway. I'm just trying to get a taxi." "Well you go home now. If I see you near any more women I'll book you." "For what?" "I'll think of that when the time comes." "You mean you'll just make something up?" He's whining about how he pays the policeman's salary, "Ten pounds a week I pay, and I pay her too, all the studentsh, I pay taxes." "Go home! Go home now! Go home!" The policeman is shouting as if to a dog and the man's said his little bravado, which I've liked him for; the both of them so silly I've been grinning in the shadow behind the policeman's back. Finally the man sidles off the pavement and up the road, the policeman gives me a lift as far as the edge of his territory. "Nothing I hate more than people who tell me they're paying my salary." I thank him politely and apologize conventionally: I'll play my little part with pleasure. He says "That's what I'm here for," and I get home happy and quite light, clear and sober, pleased about Tony's decisiveness. Wake to see just a thread of cloud lit up pink in a white sky. Keep waking from five o'clock forward, at last sleep lightly in the sun that's reached the bed, wake happy to be alone, happy. Call Tony to ask if he's ready to be friends yet. "I'm friends" he says. I just explain that it opened a chasm, to have him say he'd gone home from the Co-op because I was wearing my hair Edwardianly, "too big for your body, prim." I was shocked into silence, just wanted nothing to do with him. "Should I have crawled on the floor for you?" But no I'm pleased he just slipped away leaving me to it. The last dream I had, of trying to clean up piles of shit, of trying to wipe myself and being distressed to find no end of it. Memory dream? Woke and decided it meant I had to clean up my confusion with Tony and that was easy to do. - Peter fat, self pitying, belligerent. Pam gentle and questioning. Jud in her garden, thin, legs very hairy, refusing to shave them or tidy her eyebrows ("I was pretty, I had blond hair and these brown eyes, and my nose wasn't big yet"), thin, breasts thin. I feel such a strong physical tenderness for her. (No the illusion of personality has nothing to do with love.) Think maybe I shd mistrust it, but since last weekend I've just wanted to hug her, as if Roy made a bridge between our bodies. Want to give her things and caress her and tell her how pretty she is. Be as honest as I can be. Fat Luke brown and naked, in his red boots - Mossy and Isabel so gracious to me - all of them were happy! - me too! - everything in these days needs noting - I'm revived, I'm alive! Magic is alive! Luke went to bed saying "I'll just have a little sleep, you can call me when my supper is ready." We don't have rituals anymore, he goes to bed so suddenly, face with chocolate. On the lift the French girl said "Quel mignon!" as Luke dizzied himself looking at her / and for me, both at once. Such richness I have, I can cast away the little tricks of poverty, eking-out, survival. How he hugged me when I came, asked for my arm around him on the tube. And yesterday morning I got up to put out the fighting tomcats, and heard water in the coal cellar. It had been a lagged leak, now it's a loud spring, a still oily pool in the black coal cellar, but best of all the wild frightening sound of it pouring out. I check the level with my forefinger. Can I afford to leave it until Monday, will it flood us? The broken floor, it's maybe earth anyway, soaks it back, among the pipes. It's so strong won't it fill the cellar, won't it float the house away, just lift it - scares me, really secretly delights me, do I have to repair it, will it breed mosquitoes, will it seep upward in the walls and melt them away, crumble them like coffee rising in a sugar cube - - Oh yes it's seeping up in the kitchen, it's saturated down there now, will it reach the lawn? it will be chill weeks before it dries - Luke's asleep upstairs, it will run out the door before it gets to him. Water at loose, water escaping, filling the house like a tub, porosity revealed osmosis, patches on the floor lifting it like locks, like ladders. Hemorrhage. [undated notebook] Bachelard 1884-1962 Phenomenological "As has often been said, it is our first universe," tonality of memories of home. I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. well-tempered matter attain to the plane of the daydreams that we used to have in the places identified with our solitude... . Was the room a large one? How was it lighted? This space identified with [her] solitude is creative. all the places of intimacy .... Their being is well-being. All I ought to say about my childhood home is just barely enough to place me, myself, in an oneiric situation, to set me on the threshold of a daydream in which I shall find repose in the past. Minkowski? the house we were born in .... It is a group of organic habits. Centres of boredom, centres of solitude, centres of daydream group together to constitute the oneiric house which is more lasting than the scattered memories of our birthplace. Verticality/centrality
Books "give our daydreams countless dwelling places". We always go down the one that leads to the cellar, and it is this going down that we remember, that characterizes its oneirism. my gentle mania for always believing that I am the subject of what I am thinking. early riser, this image helps me to wake up gently and naturally. However, any image is a good one, provided we know how to use it. Strong and detailed teacher: daydream accumulates. Beyond positive recollections return to the field of the primitive images that had perhaps been centres of fixation for recollections left in our memories. concentration of the joy of inhabiting The houses I invented, what are they like. hut dream legendary images of primitive houses How many dwelling places there would be, fitted into one another, if we were to realize in detail, and in their hierarchical order, all of the images by means of which we live our daydreams of intimacy. How many scattered values we should succeed in concentrating, if we lived the images of our daydreams in all sincerity. Hut vs monastery. Hospital. Hut - engraved by imagination - valorization of a centre of concentrated solitude. It is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond the history that is fixed in our memories. Dream house. Tout ce qui brille voit. From Bosco: "sounds lend color to space, and confer a sort of sound body upon it". There is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimited space. The house attacked, Psycho, The Birds. Our chimney fires and winds. I wrote what I did about this cellar being a root, and lo! here it is in Bosco. My grandparents' lives seen completely from the outside, I remember very little interaction, and not on the level of images. phenomenology of the imagination demands that images be lived directly, that they be taken as sudden events in life. When the image is new, the world is new. - What to think of this. Says the House is actually very geometrical, "the plumbline having marked it". C/f what I wrote about laying bricks, but how then so close to psyche and body?
Jean Bourdeillette Jean Laroche: "This peony is an empty house." Attraction of opposites, lends dynamism to the great archetypes. Malte Brigge: As I see it now, the way it appeared to my child's eye, it is not a building, but is quite dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor which, however, does not connect the two rooms, but is conserved in me in fragmentary form. Thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me, the rooms, the stairs that descended with such ceremonious slowness, others, narrow cages that mounted in a spiral movement, in the darkness of which we advanced like the blood in our veins. The childhood house comes to life in us. For before us it was quite anonymous. It was a place that was lost in the world. I must have a house some where. A house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts serious, sad thoughts - and not to dreams. - But what are the uses of such hungers satisfied? Family Herald story about old bachelor's house. The anecdote about the poet Ducis (did Bachelard make it up?) Reading has given us countless inhabited places, we know how to let the dialectics of cottage and manor sound inside us. A poet called Sait-Pol Roux built an 8-towered mansion with a fisherman's cottage at its head. The house in Ireland. University stacks looking for houses. Supervielle - les amis inconnus.
To have an active day, I keep saying to myself, "Every morning I must give a thought to Saint Robinson". (Crusoe) Rilke writing about polishing the piano - Even today, I must confess that, while everything about me grew brighter and the immense black surface of my work table, which dominated its surroundings became newly aware, somehow, of the size of the room, reflecting it more and more clearly, pale grey and almost square ..., well, yes, I felt moved, as though something were happening, something, to tell the truth, which was not purely superficial but immense .... Lettre à une musicienne De Van Gogh et Seurat aux dessins d'enfants, illustrated catalogue of exhibit at Musee Pedagogique 1949 Paris - article on houses of children. drawers and chests, all the other hiding-places in which human beings, great dreamers of locks, keep or hide their secrets. Metaphors and images: "A metaphor gives concrete substance to an impression that is difficult to express .... An image owes its entire being to the imagination ... we can devote our reading being to an image, since it confers being upon us also ... one of the specific phenomena of the speaking creature." unusual weakness in the function of inhabiting. In the wardrobe there exists a centre of order that protects the entire house against uncurbed disorder. To make small locked boxes Homology - isomorphism His word and mine The technique of reflecting - ie stopping and looking around, letting the currents feel up and down and around in the brain to make a rooted star around the moment. How do we know when to stop. I am afraid that this setting bird will realize that I am a man, a being that has lost the confidence in birds. It is in books that we enjoy the surprise of 'discovering a nest'. The fairy houses in roots, toadstools. so sensitive to these simple images that it hears all the resonances in a harmonic reading. pages that think and dream at the same time Joubert - "if the forms that birds give their nests, without ever having seen a nest, have not some analogy with their own inner constitutions". Bird shapes nest inside by pressing with her body. the atmosphere of happiness that always surrounds big trees Remark to Auntie Lucy about nest. arrested in his flight toward dream values by the geometrical reality of the forms .... Here it is nature that imagines. Mollusk extrudes its shell little by little. Is it possible for a creature to remain alive inside stone ...? In the imagination, to go in and to come out are never symmetrical images. Like all important verbs, to emerge from would demand considerable research ... concrete examples collect the hardly perceptible movements of certain abstractions. complex of fear and curiosity that accompanies all initial action of the world. We want to see and yet we are afraid to see. This is the perceptible threshold of all knowledge, the threshold upon which interest wavers, falters, then returns. Comparison of slow motion, flower opening and snail appearing! Value given to the life of the imagination! Method: collecting daydreams. Could collect daydreams about film. How do snail shells grow? Dominant images tend to combine. Often when we think we are describing we merely imagine ... false genre overlies an entire literature ... correspond to a childish, superficial, diffuse type of wonderment. However, a psychology of the imagination must take note of everything ... rejects images that are too naïve ... hackneyed ... fact remains that it is a primal image as well as an indestructible one .... Images that are too clear become generalities .... So we must find a particular image in order to restore life to the general image. - Reading astronomy, exercising the imagination, letting it out to pasture. Bernard Palissy, Recepte veritable - 16th c; potter, enamelist, scholar. His snail-fortress village. Landscape gardener, architect. His dream houses, outside. ("Chambres") rough uncut stones, inside enamelled and then a big fire built, "the inside of the chamber would seem to be made of one piece and would be so highly polished that the lizards and earthworms that come in there would see themselves as in a mirror." "He wanted to live in the heart of a rock." Game: tell the tale of the turtle and the wolf: "to differentiate and measure people's views ... depth of their participation in hunger dramas." By solving small problems, we teach ourselves to solve large ones ... the human psyche contains nothing that is insignificant. By my 17 years image of myself as ameba: a different thing from a corner. Says world philosophical systems are adjectives - find the adjective. Words as houses - with attics and cellars "losing oneself in the distant corridors of obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves -." The imagination can make things small and that condenses and enriches them. Photographs of windows and doors. The house by the woods. The vast dreams, the endless dreams, of my houses. His lesson, anything that attracts you, or maybe anything else: just meditate on it, unfold, unpack, play with it, magic. In the presence of an image that dreams, it must be taken as an invitation to continue the daydream that created it. Some images are post-ideated, ie they summarize "existing thoughts", others are "self accomplishing", "prepared by thought". would have been more cautious had he had to describe an object with ordinary dimensions. But he entered into a miniature world and right away images began to abound, then grow, then escape. The man with the magnifying glass takes the world as though it were quite new to him ... discovery of the world, or entry into the world, would be more than just a worn-out word .... He is a fresh eye before a new object. The botanist's magnifying glass is youth recaptured. Thus the miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. One of your cells to the place where - through that gate, to the country where - atoms open, stars spin down. WOW The dangers of dreaming, eg the great man dream, bibliographers giving their lives to the dream of someone else's great life. The egg in the landscape. "Cysts in the glass," here the poet makes images surge up on all sides. I'm indignant to have my great private dream broken into and used, better than I've done. This is really a fantasy on Riemann's curved space ... one step further and we see the centre that imagines. Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception? A sort of drug - "with an exaggerated image we are sure to be in the direct line of an autonomous imagination". Here the imagination is both vigilant and content. Describing a novel, writing about dramatic events and stopping to describe a miniature. Following the text closely, it is as though something human gained in delicacy in this effort to see this delicate forest set in the forest of big trees. But a pine will never be a bit of moss. The imagination does not function with the same conviction in both directions. In the domain of tininess, animalized oneirism is less developed than vegetal oneirism. He has a very exact sense of whether an image works for him, is truthful and careful, or else fanciful (? his word) - too easy - what other categories? I have come to doubt all psychological causality of the poetic image .... Poetry, in its paradoxes, may be counter-causal ... we can say that it is a-causal. In order to receive directly the virtues of an isolated image - and an image in isolation has all its virtue - phenomenology - requires us to assume this image ourselves in its direct reverie aspect. The central lamp or fire How distance miniaturizes, horizon pictures Belfries: dreams of high solitude "The problems of experienced space" daydreaming .... We do not see it start yet it always starts in the same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere. Immensity is the movement of the motionless man. Immensity is within ourselves. Since immensity is not an object, a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. Works of art are the by-products of this imagining being ... daydreams of immensity, the real product is consciousness of enlargement. We feel that we have been promoted to the dignity of the admiring being. depth, immensity, as immediate, determined on the spot - mysteriously Forests as sacred - Some kind of film in which an ordinary scene is animated by closeups - just a day like today, one place, several times, sneak into close up and closer up - need great delicacy, maybe 35mm and long good lenses, like a jigsaw puzzle, it gradually clears like a fog dispersing into wonderment and intoxication. Sound track. - Mysteries of how words have secret meanings, the same as their overt meanings - but differently arrived at? - Ancestral forest: If there exists a phenomenological problem with regard to this image, it is to find out for what actual reason, by virtue of what active value of the imagination, such an image charms and speaks to us ... for myself, I feel obliged to establish the actuality of archetypes. Milosz L'amoureuse initiation As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space, I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! A spectacle complex in which pride of seeing is the core of the consciousness of a being ... in contemplation I should like to liquidate, as it were, the spectacle complex, which could harden certain values of poetic contemplation. - Snails - helix - sex glands are high up in the shell in the past steps of the staircase, sperm travels either up or down a complex system of channels, and fertilized eggs come down. Edible Roman snail: releases a dagger of chalky material which is driven into the body of its mate, a wound, sometimes deadly if driven into lung or abdominal wall. They get as close as they can, to penetrate as deeply as possible - orgasm - then they lie motionless for a while. Vagina, dart cavity, penis all open into one atrium, the flagellum I think is separate. Belly of snail is mouth and labia. Grey and mucous (adj). The oddness of languages. Are the same new discoveries being made separately - in every language, like parallel species evolving on separate and isolate continents? The writing me, educated to more authority than the speaker. Words to the second power, vaste3. Baudelaire. Depth of life in certain almost supernatural states, is revealed and symbolized in whatever is before us. poetic sensibility enjoys countless variations on the theme of 'correspondences,' we must acknowledge that the theme itself is also eminently enjoyable. (Baudelaire: at such moments the sense of existence is immensely increased.) Baudelaire and the word vaste which doesn't describe but does something else - indicated the line of sight, a state of mind maybe state of vision. Extension, expansion, and ecstasy. The delightful state of a man in the grip of a long daydream, in absolute solitude, but a solitude with an immense horizon and widely diffused light; in other words, immensity with no other setting than itself. The voice: "a sixth sense quivers at the merest movement of metaphor, it permits human thought to sing". "Everything that contributes to giving poetry its decisive psychic action should be included in a philosophy of the dynamic imagination." Sometimes, the most varied, most delicate perceptive values relay one another, in order to dynamize and expand a poem research correspondence of each sense with the spoken word. Tree poems: Rilke -
A sort of criticism which does not give an account, but strikes a relation to - vs sheer description - why not both. the coexistence of things in a space to which we add consciousness of our own existence .... Leibnitz's theme of space as a place inhabited by coexistents has found its poet in Rilke. each new contact with the cosmos renews our inner being, and that every new cosmos is open to us when we have freed ourselves from the ties of a former sensitivity. - Film: my city eyes. Instant when an airplane's shadow is on a window. - Diolé on desert and deep sea: "the city is growing in me, making me delight in my silence of reflections". sincerity of imagination transports us to the elsewhere of another world. He does this by means of a psychological machinery that brings into play the surest, the most powerful psychological laws ... only resources are the great, lasting realities that correspond to fundamental material images; those that are at the basis of all imagination. Nothing, in other words, that is either chimerical or illusory. D'Annunzio. Le feu: "Wants to give all the degrees of growing contemplation ... all the instants of the image." Beautiful piece of writing about a hare. "At this moment, it is a sacred animal, one that should be worshipped." The poet has the hare as a contemplative go-between. I live in the tranquility of leaves. Chestnut tree yoga. L'eau et les reves - Bachelard - pond the eye of the landscape. We can even begin by admiring. Then, later, we shall see whether or not it will be necessary to organize our disappointment through criticism and reduction. Notation "The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes." Rilke letter to Clara. I only know how to work with a philosophy of detail. Then, on the surface of being, in that region, where being wants to be both visible and hidden, the movements of opening and closing are so numerous, so frequently inverted, and so charged with hesitation, that we could conclude on the following formula: man is half-open being. Doors and windows! Phenomenologist - "takes the image just as it is, just as the poet created it, and tries to make it his own, to feed on this rare fruit ... tries to repeat its creation for himself and continue its exaggeration". Images - given in our days, we gratefully meditate and shape. Thus the snail and the cellar, the barn, the tree. General images (not generality), which we enter, individualize, right away. Rilke: Oh night without objects. Oh window muffled on the outside, oh, doors carefully closed, customs that have come down from times long past, transmitted, verified, never entirely understood. Oh silence in the stairwell, silence in the adjoining rooms, silence up there, on the ceiling. Oh mother, oh one and only you, who faced all this silence, when I was a child.
Anacoluthon - sentence without grammatical (structure) sequence Music - tonality - an adjective Roundness - "primitivity of certain images of being ... images of full roundness help us collect ourselves, permit us to confer an initial constitution on ourselves, and to confirm our being intimately, inside. For when it is experienced from the inside devoid of all exterior features, being cannot be otherwise than round." "an image that is worked over loses its initial virtues" Rilke - "knows that when a thing becomes isolated, it becomes round, assumes a figure of being that is concentrated upon itself." [undated journal] Telephone. It's Roy in tears, drunk, weeping that he loves me and I'm beautiful, I'm sitting grinning with silly pop on the radio being sympathetic - "What's happening for you Chisholm," phony, gleeful - he complains I don't see the clouds - I say it's not interesting for me either - he says why don't I hang up then - I say that's his move, which I'm expecting any minute, he feels better if he does it himself - he says he misses Luke - I say he could see him more often - he says what about our relation, which I deny completely, but that's my problem - I say no, that's not my problem, it's my solution - fuck me, he says, then - I say, "You were talking about Luke, you could of course see him more" - "To see him I have to negotiate either with you or with the fucking commune" he says and hangs up. Leaves me proud to have been so cool, ashamed to be so cooled, practiced in indifference: to be moved would be too cheap. (He says he's been looking at the photograph of me at Alexandria Palace, with battered Luke, the Festival of Life. I say "What were you looking at that for?" "Nostalgia." "Don't be nostalgic for that it was a terrible time.") To be unmoved is cheap too. No right relation to Starbaby Flash Gordon Superlamp. Luke's not speaking of him worries me, has he forgotten or is he learning not to want people when they're not there? Still a cry of pleasure when Roy comes to the door, or when I come to get him at the commune - but the polarity with the commune is broken, he doesn't ask to go there, and Roy isn't a home so he doesn't ask to go there. - Telephone. Roy angry. "You're a cunt you really are." Starts with "my personal hell" - gets there by way of "I'll never see ...," etc, "and it will be your responsibility." I hang up. A cat calling, like a blood-curdled baby crying, in the garden. Telephone. Roy friendly. "I was just going to say that's the highest compliment I can pay you." He hangs up. That one frightened me, made my heart shake. In the garden, the corner behind the slate gate, the forsythia and mock orange roofed with the rose brambles, opens wide into a little room that I've made a room by hanging the mirror at the end of it, putting a bedroom chair in it, opposite the brick wall where is set the pot, lid fused down, as if on a shelf. A skylight with mock orange lit white on the roof, whipping branches of it much higher like feathers on a roosting bird's tail in stormy weather. The sound of the telephone is like a siren, it's a horrible alarm. When I go upstairs I look for him behind the door, like a bogey. The mirror under the bushes is frightening too, its hardness, brightness,
brilliance in that indistinct place.
|