| london volume 7 part 7 - 1974 june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[probably June] Naomi's party [Wolf]: the table, with its umbrella, the balloons I blew, which hurt her, because of her operation, the streamers blowing sadly sideways in the shadows; she sitting on the patio divan under the umbrella, in her tight white dress open to show her bulging bra, stomach stuck out as far as it, hair in a middle-aged chignon, talk detached floating - her cake in its large silver box, two kinds of ice cream and cassata, punch with champagne brandy and cider in it, and some floating green grapes that gathered little bubbles at the bottom of the glass. Nobody came. I gave her a rose and a geranium cutting that was just taking. She's shaped like Mrs Hattori, rambling and flattering - false like Mrs Hattori. Then Mr Gustav Born, biologist, of Cambridge, whose eyes at the gate lit up when he saw me, and his Dr Faith Born wife, thin, haggard, younger than he, polite and tense. His head of grey fuzzy hair, kindly attention, something weird and exaggerated about him, the way he drew me out into a very uneasy and self-doubting self-importance, showing us his garden, down the scented passage into a silent rectangle walled up high with shrubs, and a yellow rose pruned so that its long-stemmed brilliant yellow roses grew in high spikes straight up against the sky, out of reach, above the wall. The garden made by his stiff and haggard wife. Naomi said, of Roy, "If you aren't straight you lose your style". - Sad sad bitterness, Tony, I can't tell what's me and what's him, this morning I was angry, my fantasies were fighting with dragons, at James Leahy, and so I knew I was ready to fight with Tony. But called him and was smarmy and cheerful and then - something - without having to ask for it myself, always - he said - "How am I going to say this without upsetting you?" and I was quick to say "I can guess" and was wrong, "Yes I am paranoid," and then struggling to deal with his news didn't realize how devasted and angry I was - he waffled about whether to come - I got sad at the core, felt it was to do with something deep and superstitious, men feeling that the cunt is dirty (what he said about "respectable") and will infect them - "I think I know what it's about, but I don't really want to tell you" - "Why won't you tell me?" he says - "Because it will make me too sad" - "I'm sorry I've made you sad," he said, "I'll see you when I do," and he hung up - I felt so murdered! I had to ring him right back, he took a while to decide whether to answer and then said hello very gently - and I said what I'd rehearsed, "You're so mean, it isn't believable" and hung up too. - Said to Gustav Born, in my head, "It's a gamble with loneliness". - Feel I must decide never to see him again; just because we've reached the moment where the fact that he doesn't look for me spoils everything, makes me angry and defensive and unsure of myself even when my perception is correct. I've been so close to him, I've been so happy coming from him, that morning lying in his bed, the day looking out the window. Lost time. The horses and the pigeons. - Raging / raging love without answer / fury / insult / manic thought about human condition / boils into slaps on Luke's bare legs, turns to remorseful kisses. "You aren't playing my game" he nags - "What game?" - "We put our bums together and taste our tongues" - "Taste our own tongues?" - "No we taste the other's tongue" - so I put my self up against his bottom, and touch his tongue with my tongue and then he goes on to do something else. - Can't decide whether to take this painful rupture with Tony seriously or not - if I took it seriously it would just end up in the usual despair about relationships, warped, sad and sick unready deluded creatures. I need - I need - because my body shines when I have it - I need - erotic play - I look around for rescue - oh, when I have a body, tactful and thin, next to me, just one night and one morning, once a week, once every two weeks, that's enough - if I had another body, yours would love me - the moralizers in me, stabilizers, shock absorbers, say 1. if you want it, work out how to get it 2. stay true, stay clear, stay open to your pain so you can be open to joy 3. you've got to resolve it all in yourself, by yourself 4. don't let anybody grind you down, don't dance for anyone who won't dance for you. But really: the best thing is to find the thrilling imaginative hilarious way to dissolve the paranoia and the ambivalence. No heroes or villains, oh Epp yr an idiot. That's all 4 contradictories subsumed - but for that - ah! serious imagination (and can you will you meet me, you?) (always you - always the same you). - Stevie Smith: accused of not being a life that's added up into clarity, like this eccentric woman in short skirts doing readings at schools and being loved, and difficult. Died at 69 of cancer of the brain - all her hair had been shaved off, a sort of turban - her last poem was Come death. "I felt rather yellow-bellied not doing it, huh-ha," bringing all her sleeping pills from her house. "She looked incredibly beautiful, rilly. Her death was, in the event, mercifully painless." [undated letter] Here's a note, written to the sound of Verdi's last judgment, in the last daylight of a miraculous happy day, a feast of a day. Woke up with a friend in my bed, jumped up and played Praise God from whom all Blessings Flow on the piano, and then had good coffee and two letters from old longlost friends - Susie Ksinan, and Jerry - and then had another old friend come to use my hot water - and then had breakfast with friend #1 and went to a bookshop leapfrogging in new sneakers and then went to sit by the canal [Regents Canal] and picnic and expand in the absolute joy of sharing my eyes with somebody else who knows how to look - light - light - light - and now I've come home alone to prime myself on Verdi before working a little. Oh dear M, how can you worry about me: it's true I live dangerously and pay in uncertainty and loneliness, but what moments, what abundant life! - Luke's a tall brown boy in little shorts and striped tee-shirts and sandals, determined and unrelenting and tender and new and plump and shining-eyed. Truthful and nobody's fool: may nothing spoil him, and he stay that way. Films going well, the one about Mafalda will be finished by the 6th of July, I'm going to show it at a women and media conference. [Didn't.] Good, strenuous days, poetry abounding. I'm writing several hours per day, a good discipline, exercises in research into past time. Finding books that TEACH me to know what I know.
[undated journal] These meetings with you: we're so rich, it's that I have to note in case it's the last time in my life. Nesting. The bed. Singing. Skin. I stroke and stroke him while we talk. This morning the Dies Irae and it continued in our heads while we went to Compendium. Oh I love him when his body clamps up to me fucking involuntarily, tail tucking in; and I love it when we whisper inside each other voluntarily, and I loved it this morning when we lay and talked for a long time and took a kiss that was like opening a door and then just rolled in, all tenderness. Then sitting at the canal [Camden Lock], everything around gradually became itself, brilliant and particular, and I was happy as I can be because I could share my eyes, quietly, without exaggeration; the warehouse wall white and 'illusionistic' with the blue sky, the nets of light on the pirate boat's hull, the ducks sitting quietly as rocks on a ledge, on the right upstream the double arch of railway bridge and round arched roadway bridge, an area of intermediate shadow. [sketch] Also as I walked home after waving him goodbye - I got caught in the reflection of a corrugated wall where each bar twisted and fractured into an amazing bitty movement with a hard edge onto blue. Blessings - when I leap out of bed this morning - Tony says "You'll stick to the piano stool" - I play Praise God from whom all Blessings Flow. The man's intelligence and kindness. How quickly he notices my little shifts when we're spiked together face to face, to follow them. How beautiful and neat in his jeans and jeans shirt and black belt and new blue sneakers that made him leapfrog over traffic control posts. The story of the snails, their delicate white sexes torn apart, a long filament, their gentle joining for hours, so that our gateway kiss was like two snails. The story of Naomi's birthday party, the streamers, and balloons she couldn't blow up because her stomach still hurt after her operation to remove a cyst from her ovary - "I'm prone to them" she said - we moved through the terrace on the rickety chairs to stay in sun - the cake, the punch, Hugh, who was going to marry her and make her rich, for whom she sold her cameras, her naivete and cunning - "Leonard Bernstein said Gertrude Stein and I were the two best living writers, but Gertrude Stein is dead so I guess that means I'm the best living writer" - her voice inverting, with her eyes, like snails' eyes, her hill: five parts - The Periphery, The Grass. Discussion with Tony about detail vs total picture. Games like imagining it in a different light. Imagining seeing ourselves from a train passing. He:
We turned the helicopter into a tiddler. - Everything healed when - even before - no, gradually, ending when we lay quietly head to head on the bed - there he was on the doorstep, long as a shadow, and because he reported John Frick saying he ought to be living with me. [notebook]
Gombrowicz - I don't believe in a non-erotic philosophy. I don't trust desexualized thought. It is obviously difficult to believe that Hegel's Logic or the Critique of Pure Reason could have been conceived unless their authors had distanced themselves from their bodies. But pure consciousness, no sooner realized, must be reimmersed in the body, in sex, in Eros; the artist must steep philosophy in enchantment, charm, grace. - from the French preface to Pornographia. An effort to rediscover an eroticism corresponding to our [Polish] fate and recent history - made of rape, slavery, a descent towards the obscure confines of consciousness and the body. Durrell in an interview: "... a real couple, where the man doesn't have to abdicate his stupid insolence and the woman doesn't have to abdicate her vicious intelligence." - Joinery shop All Saints Road Bits of cut wood stacked in one corner, the white awning across the road reflected billowing slightly, it is like boards piled at the far wall behind the window when it is still - do a little series of pictures in which the picture, still, looks like one thing and only when it breaks into movement does it reveal its illusion/poetry. re flexion The pretty man wolf-eyed in the window, I look at him and he says hello and grimaces a smile, I smile back encouragingly. But there's something in his smile that shames me. His boyfriend(s) join him. Eyes crackling at me all afternoon; the man outside the pub whose eyes lit when I looked at him, didn't quite decide to try him and was carried past, and he didn't quite decide to follow. Mari, door closing on Nigel, she says "It isn't working out at all," never seen her so sad. Describing meeting with her [birth] mother. She knocks at the door, her mother comes, looking "really rough." She says "I'm Mari." Her mother smiles without understanding. She says "I'm Mari." "Oh - Mari. Come in!" A house almost without furniture. She stands at the mantle hands behind her back warming at the (gas?) fire. Her mother says "Yes, you are just like your father." Her mother Irish and in service in Maida Vale; her father, contrary to her fantasy ("When I couldn't have been more than six, there was a meeting with a woman who impressed me very much, it was very vague, she was quite masculine, and I gathered she was French. I suppose in my imagination I substituted her for my father"), was also Irish and a labourer. She was given away at two and a half; her father, who came and went (she was conceived during a brief reconciliation, her sister during another, three years later) battered her; her sister was retarded; they were together in a home until Mari was nine. Mari, fine delicate clear lucid steady and straight lady, her body intelligent in every line. A cuckoo. The tiny cat lying on her arm staring up into her eyes. - JoAnn: very intimate connection between the picture itself and language because the image and the word are identical or because they occur simultaneously and are complementary, or, in a more general sense, because the image is meant, like the word, to render or bind an experience, that is, to name it. The imaging consciousness, in opening out on an isolated image Work based on a fruitful image - I could write something about the old woman derelict - c/f Member of the Wedding Delve into "psychology of wonder from the phenomenological point of view" Clues for my phenom method for writing about Nathalie Granger Goal of all phenom is to situate awareness in the present Intentionality - opening of consciousness Consciousness is in itself an act, a human act. It is a lively, full act. Consciousness-as-act, in the realm of language. Adding to language, creating from language, stabilizing and loving language. Language is often spontaneous creation, and as dreams are, musical improvisation. Reveries The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness. - Poetics of Reverie continued Rêverie, rêves, songes Summarize his career ... situate it under contradictory signs, male and female, of the concept and the image ... no synthesis ... develop on two, divergent planes of the spiritual life. Need to write something about his use of male and female. Woman the sun, die Sonne, der Mond I think there's something in what he says about the polarity; most people's rationalism is infested with dream images - imagery may likewise be invested with reasonable connections The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie. the masculine and feminine poles of the Psyche. I understood that too late. Too late, I came to know the clear conscience in work alternating between images and concepts, two clear consciences A clear consciousness. - Film two slow zooms. A man and a woman are speaking in the solitude of our being. And in free reverie, they speak in order to admit their desires, in the tranquility of a well harmonized double nature .... If this intimate man and woman preserve a trace of rivalry, it is because we are dreaming badly, because we are putting everyday names on the creatures of reverie .... The farther one descends into the depths of the speaking being, the more simply the essential otherness of any speaking being designates itself as the otherness of the masculine and the feminine. But why do we make it two at all? It comes from the gender thing to begin with. He's juxtaposing projects and ambitions: absence / silence and reverie : presence. So let us talk about that. Whoever is marked by water remains faithful to his (!) anima. I have to sort out this boring painful anima-animus confusion. The anima is not a weakness. One does not find it in a syncope of the animus. It has its own forces. It is the interior principle of our repose. Anima: "It is soft substance, harmonious substance which wishes to enjoy its harmonious being slowly, softly. We shall live more surely in anima by deepening reverie, by loving reverie, above all the reverie of water .... Reverie before still waters gives us that experience of a permanent psychic consistency which is the possession of the anima." Self sufficiency. Both animus and anima on the defensive because they're gender-identified. Animus - need for royalty, superiority and domination. Love: "the woman projects upon the man she loves all the values which her own animus would like to conquer." People love each other in complete ideality; each charges his partner with the task of realizing the ideality as he has dreamed it. The animus and anima quests Periods of living the dream, Roy, Frank. [undated journal] Sunday a week later - sad lonely struggles with the Acmade at the Co-op, no splicer, no spacing knobs, have to borrow a split reel from David who is blithe surrounded by fans with his wife cooking them all dinner, I have to stop, part of the mag film chewed to pieces, to get Luke. The flitting quality of Jonathan and Annabel; Tony Hill and his frame, my gritted flabby will today; in panic in front of the Acmade, afraid to ask anyone for anything (that plump kid eventually helping me most, and kindly), detesting myself, my tone with Luke - mothery, false, keeping us cool to get us home without fury or collapse, he was tired. Running along with it was a decision that I have to think out some problems about work and how to live: that I need a homier home, more cooking done by someone else, more affection, days not so thin and mean, more hugging and more fucking; some basic learning how to do difficult things without panic, how to break the complexity down to simple decisions and how to locate exactly what the problems are, what the alternatives are. The skills I'm demanding of myself, to acquire instantly; my doubts about the reasons I'm wanting them, the dreams of 'success,' and the lonely desperate feeling that 'success' is the only thing that could give me free loving contact with a working community. Feel so marginal at the Co-op. The commune and how rich it is for Luke, houses and garden, Mossy and Isabel, a bowl of black olives standing on the counter, tomatoes in a warm corner of the garden, peaches on the tree in the greenhouse, hollyhocks in self-seeded clumps around the bomb shelter. The woman question plaguing me with unease, sour anger, all day; look how I'm not pretty; if I roll on the hoop it's making a point, if I ask Tony for help it is felt as feminine fear of machinery, am I panic struck by machinery because I'm female or is that everyone's first experience with an Acmade. - Miss Tugwell sitting on the stairs telling me about the rockets circling before they dropped - airplanes nudging them back to Germany. - Dreamed the convent - sat between Margaret and a teenage boy, German, something fascinating about him, Gottlieb, slowly was attracted to him and flashed Margaret a look to say so when somehow I was swung between the two of them, let go into erotic frisson. - Just note it in case it happens. Convent school on Highgate Road. - I loved, I loved, I swung open, swung on my open gate It's impossible to Bad love wrong man sick baby cowardly little man Loved too much he grew malicious on it, waxed so full with it, spoiled on it Spoiled it Neither forget. Ah I'm so ashamed Why should I be so ashamed of my best love true best clear and sweet Nor remember. Makes me old weak want tears for What's too good and too bad to ever have or want to have again And three years later he moves my piano to see whether I sleep with someone! [Actually it was to get Luke's passport.] - Dream of the gypsy man - on posters she's shown with a golden effulgence from his almost invisible pale eyes. In his presence he attracts me. Looks at me with very strong presence, I sense he's trying to seduce me and that turns me into the somewhat coy, evasive person I became with eg Abdul yesterday. There is a whole family and a meal is being prepared. They put something into it, a herb or drug and I sense that's an aid to seduction (hash yesterday) and try to feed me the whole of it, but I share it out equally. There's a very pretty daughter, a woman my age who I discover is doing a degree, or has been, in Switzerland, at the Institute of Psychology (?). An interval when I dance in the corridor. Come back and sense he's lost interest. - Pre-period desperation, four days of it and what I see is reason in the service of prejudice. Anastasia and Margaret fighting, both sulky, evasive, and Anastasia more than Margaret. Ambivalence everywhere, and around me too. The old woman standing milky eyed defiant. The old man and woman having a loud, lubricious conversation in Peter's café. I so grateful for the pleasantness, professional, of Peter and his brother. Tony refusing. Gustav's courtly fantasy of an affair I won't agree to. Abdul growing restless when it was clear I wouldn't stay the night, his foreign language and my gifts lost. Sat yesterday in the green armchair that had been dumped on the traffic island at Prince of Wales Crescent. I'm paranoid, isolated, too green to ask for company, warring with Roy and Catherine. Feel it could easily turn into high - if somebody were loving and attentive and came to bed with me. Feel a desolate loss of my privacy, try to remember all the years I've lived alone and not minded. Not so often. Other times so lonely I've gone to bed in the afternoon. Quick sympathetic Tony where are you and why's it all the same to you. Mari saying how she's determined to learn to work even when she's low, through anything. Waiting for a letter. Watching myself flap and wither in my bitterness, always imagine it being worse every year. Then give myself credit for looking for a hard life, then take it back, knowing there's been no choice, then encourage myself therefore to live like a warrior fully knowing the dangers and acting to survive them, and then not feeling like doing anything, and putting it off, and hoping for salvation, and ringing Tony who isn't at home. It's a night to burn down. Feel so limited. Have - Andy's freckled back white and smooth in a curve like a narrow scooped shell, for the side of my head, just for a fraction of a second I felt a real tenderness. Otherwise a sort of patience, determined privacy. - Sarah giddy, she gets boisterous like me. Tired. Jud. Sally in her piece sitting blazing in her chair, rigid, electric lady, then snapping open the sandwiches, at the end finding the key, and the flash of her hand offering it. Construction of the piece, she relaxes people at first, with the piano business, and the song, and then when she flashes in silent: she burns outward. Arranges them black around her. I'm envious of learning to move. I could dance. I could dance. [Sally Potter 1974 Who is Sylvia, Three Clues performed at The Place] They just do something and don't say what they're doing. Emtigone. I see a white room melting. Should work through that so it becomes actually something.
- "A good body, very strong and supple." - Friday. Garden, something on the record player, '35 blues and rainy vibes, listening, the first rain (bin?), cats coming and going. - Imagination and its connection with loving; how I refuse both. How at bottom sad that makes me. Monika standing across the wall; telling me with passion about her three new outfits, a coat, a dress, a fine wool suit, all "really elegant," that she'd got on sale. Taking off her reading glasses and showing her milky eyes, she seemed mad, she scared me so much I thought I'd be fixed standing there next to Susie's nasturtiums, looking at my feet, backing off with her chrysanthemums, allium, and forget-me-not. It was her usual manner out of control. I remember very vividly the little plants at my feet. How she scared me, having turned old overnight. Have you always been an old woman said Andy. What sweetness Tony Nesbit has. [Don't know where this goes but this is a short page so I'll put it here] The prince and the princess, when she looked at him she saw herself, when he looked at her he felt in his whole body the certainty that she was his sister, his lady, himself. In time they had nine children, first a daughter, then two sons, then three daughters, then a son and a daughter, and then two sons. The children as they grew came to be more and more alike, when they were eighteen they could have stood in for one another. They all had either gold-red or black hair, brown eyes or sea-grey eyes that shone blue, green or vioelt with the changes of light and season. But each child from the day it was born felt in itself a direction and a gift, as clear as a lens, that focused them in and out, coming and going. Each looked at the other without envy or jealousy. Each saw themselves: all were tall, very tall, and the daughters were as tall as the sons, long limbed, strong and fine. Yet each in her gift, in his gift, was certain, unique and had no thought to be any other. The first daughter from her birth was an astronomer, she became an astrophysicist, astrologer, astronomist and a musician. Her name was Isak the Star. When she was three years old, nearly four, her mother just twenty five, twins were born, Sant and Mor. Sant the grey-eyed was a dancer; his brother Mor became a songmaker and when he was still in his cradle had made a song that he sang until he learned to walk; from that moment songs came from him not regularly but perhaps one a month. A year later three daughters were born: Marit the black eyed Suzal the green eyed Ishmael with eyes the color of ice or a mirror Marit was clearly an architect and a builder; Suzal a poet, a storyteller; Ishmael the ice-eyed a clairvoyant, a healer, a philosopher, a wise-woman. Six years later, a son and a daughter: Em and Lusa, both wheat-haired and brown eyed, both travelers and telepaths, mute by choice, solitary and mad, jokers, mystics. And at the end, a year later: first one son - Zed - and a half year later the last child, a hermaphrodite of such exceptional beauty that the prince and princess felt their family was at last complete. Zed was a sculptor and a carpenter. The last child until he was seven was nameless, and thereafter called himself/herself by a name he/she had chosen for herself: Just. The house was full of their gifts: all could sing, all were in some degree telepathic, all were as inventive as angels. From their original identity each in adulthood following the gift; shaped by the gift, they became distinct and dissimilar so that the similarity remaining was one of light rather than feature. When Just was born, Ishak was twelve years old, and so they rode, sang in a tribe for the ten years of their childhood. Each found the teachers it needed, each learned as if in its sleep, spending the days inventing pasts and futures, shouting, invading, living in privacy in its tribe so that mother and father except for their begetting were hardly necessary. In the house were the village people who came to help with the cooking and cleaning. There were few official meals, things were available in the airy kitchen half outdoors, sometimes the children cooked. There were no bedrooms: the children slept where they fell on the brilliant rugs throughout the house, sometimes on the roof, the last awake, usually Ishak waiting for the clearest starlight of three in the morning, covered them with embroidered blankets, which they piled into chests when they woke. They laughed constantly but they spoke very little. They had no need. And so they educated each other, studying privately when they felt the need, they never went to school, their days were clear and simple, each was welcomed for its light - they eventually, after their most rapid growth, slept little, five or six hours a night, they were beginning to stir just before dawn, and in summer their vitality had them into the sea in a splashing tribe before the sun had risen. They swam miles along the coast, the little ones in the midst to be cared for in case of strong currents. Each learned to work when it could walk. There were vast gardens, there was cooking, storing, old people to visit. Before she was twelve, Lusa was delivering children in difficult labour. Marit herself planned and directed the building of a long separate room that became the children's house, and of the pavilions that grew in hidden parts of the forest. Visitors came: the children looked for whomever they needed and they were brought. Some stayed in the village, which became a refuge for the [?] talented. The children unified the territory within a day's walk, and then within a day's ride, nothing could touch them, ultimately. Even envy could not touch them for they were another race, they were light-benders, and they shared what they were so that spending half an hour with them gave one something of one's own beauty, and for life. Only Ishmael the Ice-Eyed was apart from this. She spent much time on the cliff looking at sky, on the edge of the pond looking at water. She was often sad and apart, but with a clear sadness that muddied no one. She saw too much in her childhood, sometimes her anger grew until she was driven to smashing stones against each other on the beach. Then she grew calmer and went to an old man to learn the sciences: first mathematics, then physics, then chemistry, then biology and zoology. Her spirit cleared. She began to laugh. Her childhood was over. - Began with a story for Luke: a country, a beautiful hill sloped with forest, a cliff on one side, beach below, a house on the clear glassy place at the top, old and strange house, at the top a clear large room where lived the young woman princess. Deep windows with a few flowering plants, a brilliant rug, no bed, but a drawing table, a loom, a door to an outside staircase onto the roof where there's a large flat tiled place. Windows stood open almost all the time except when there were storms, for it was a warm and scented country. There is a prince in the story who is tall, fine, strong, fiery and tender. He and the lady hardly ever see the children. They travel a great deal. Her mother lives somewhere nearby with a little private man like Grandpa Epp to whom she is not married; they have rituals as if of a lifetime. The mother lady comes in and sees to the household, sometimes takes babies home with her. None married, none had any need to marry, none had children or any need
for children. They lived a long time and died in the reverse order of their
births so Ishak survived Just by twelve years.
london volume 8
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