[undated notebook]
Swimming pool
Sounds. Harshness of the voices
O light, o birds.
I still have no good ceiling footage.
The lights come on. O the mauve green.
The transformation of people when they dive under
Whiteness of the white bodies so pronounced
Saturday morning
The puddle next to the dripping pipe shows the rosy chimney.
The ceiling shivered by drips is exquisite
Against the light, the cracks are clear, the panes more distinct.
That plant and its shadow are very gently moving, the shadow more than
the plant.
[letter]
January 9, the year's turned, we're under a comet no one can see because
it's always overcast.
Have got back some rushes from the laboratory. What I've shot is quite
nice.
[undated notebook]
A light spot on the bottom sending out rainbows the black boy goes through.
The halo around someone on his back swimming through sheer light.
The lavender shadow along the legs of the red-headed boy.
Little boys' thin backs and shanks from above, wet hair. Legs in the
water pale green.
One strand of intense sunlight on the floor, flashing marvelously, a
rather orange light.
Can I catch a reflected patch of light in mirror, something brilliant.
Beauty of arms and legs.
-
The courtesy of brushing his teeth before he kisses me.
Now my hands smell of Tony's soap.
Sunday morning - short night, awake often, Tony wrapped around me, heavy,
a warm length. The alarm clock, sky far away blue and a touch of heat on
the red clay chimney pots. This morning I ate him up with my eyes, tucking
his shirt into his paint-spotted blue jeans, brushing his funny hair flat
- standing bent over in front of the mirror, singing in his Louis Armstrong
voice with his eyes closed. Especially just standing at the sink pushing
his shirttail into his jeans, hung over, face disarrayed. I brewed in bed,
delight, bliss. He went next door, after a while brought back tea and had
the partita #2 on loud . The window had begun to shake like a train going
over a trestle - John and Elana upstairs. It continued to shake in bursts.
Tony came and put his arms around me and I put mine around him so we were
afloat carefully and precisely connected. He stroked my breast with his
thumb. I just hung on and loved him, that was a bright real moment. So when
John Frick (I said "like a brillo pad that's been used once"),
beaming John from upstairs, and two more painters came, one in a green velvet
jacket, one haggard neat little man, and they all got into the white van,
Tony waving through the window to me on the middle of the floor, I felt
that everyone was wonderful.
Outside in the back yard, among the beautiful cracks, mould, moss and
rubbish, organ music is coming from the church, a congregation's thin singing.
Last night when we leaned out the window we could hear exotic birds singing
in the feed store, a few bright stars in the purplish unclear sky, 3:30.
I dreamed a big white kite, flapping wings on the
side and fluffy big tail weights, took it outside and it flew up out of
my hands, we were flying it at night. Tony said "That's a very
phallic dream."
Across the road there's a back yard with a grey chestnut and a grey sycamore,
a tangle of grey barbed wire, and behind it centred between blind shaded
windows is a long-unpruned bush of privet, caught isolated in sun so its
leaves burn like light.
-
Going into the Metropolitan-Circle Line: the ticket collector reaches
his hand for my ticket, punches it, looks at me and says "How're you?"
"Tired" I say. "Had a hard night? You look very nice actually"
in an Irish accent. "Thank you. So do you."
[undated journal]
Said to Peter during our angry sad parting on the steps at Tottenham
Court Road, fierce wind blowing us almost onto the road "It's hard
for me because I'm really hermetically sealed in my film, and I can't talk
about it and so ..." Realizing now, much later, that my sadness and
loneliness is part of the life of this film, I'm feeling that no one will
love it or understand it, that I can talk to no one about it, and so I am
sealed into a solitude with that bluegreen water and those rectangles that
enclose it, boxes, in which there's such a life and all hope of ecstasy,
but which can be simply invisible, private, part of my solipsism. Somebody
reply to me -
The little timid joy when I realized that my sadness and isolation these
days has to do with my film and my anxiety and labour, terror of it. Realizing
that I must just work on it now, until it's done.
What is it, what is that place, that time's place.
-
If I work my attractions and impressions, is it the process of de(re)fining
them and then laying them next to each other that makes a connection with
consciousness, 'knowledge'? But if consciousness is just the area of the
habitual perception, then 'knowledge' is a minimalizing of the intuitive
something - is that why 'knowledge' has to be so tactful and oblique, so
that you name and make visible without - these thoughts full of pieties
like 'carnal knowledge,' 'categorization' - defusing the magical object.
The other desire to defuse the magical object.
Be ware of confusing the magic with the ideology - be able to feel carefully
for the connection, in the dissection, the little nerve that makes the eye
a surface of the brain.
Be ware the false ideology erected to satisfy a much simpler hunger economy
- what, in that meal, is it I crave. How exciting to be able to go decisively
to the one necessary element .
-
Lovely woman who lives at Cranley, travels from London every day, is
a secretary, talked so sweetly and curiously.
-
The chord wrung by an airplane sometimes at a certain distance.
-
Evolution if taken seriously means that we are able to think things as
they 'are'?
Also fishes, monkeys, amoebas do.
Education of the subconscious
-
[notes on gender and language, 'mankind,' 'he,' etc]
- There it is, brothers. The language of exclusion.
- A nose for our own exclusion
- Sensitizes - our militancy increases in all direction.
- Guerilla warfare - in books - change
- Everywhere change language
[undated notebook]
[notes on rushes]
- The fairylight breaks down beautifully, slows down well.
Another effort at booths. Ok exp for mirrors. Get closer.
- Puddle nice but no depth of focus. Mysterious. Dark - brief.
- The stairs - lovely light, splash good.
- Boys in shower - back of shower in focus, they aren't quite, doesn't
matter. use it from the bit after the boy closes the curtain.
[letter, end of January]
Today was a beautiful day after a month of rain. I was in my swimming
pool doing sound recording for my film - it was the first time I had ever
'taken sound' - earphones on, 30' of cables around me, a microphone in my
gloved hand and a neat piece of $1500 recording machinery next to my knee
as I squatted at the water's edge sucking little sounds into my bag: birds
singing under the glass roof, water chuckling along the poolside, the shower
crackling like fire, a single swimmer beating closer and then further, children's
shouts, far away voices, footsteps, someone whistling in the corridor.
Yes, the money came and is mostly spent to buy film. Thank you. Imagine
money turning into light!
- It's been going through a series of titles: for instance, Silchester
Road Public Baths 1878-1974,and Natural Light and Time's
Place.
Anyway, whatever its title, today I showed the rushes that I've shot
so far to my class, with the sound I found yesterday playing in the background:
and, when the lights went off, there it was, a film, with little funny bits
where people laughed - people laughed!
[undated notebook]
Nobody talks much about our physical relation to a film, its colors,
pace, the excitement of shocks, us as bodies reacting.
[undated journal]
Gifts. Peter giving me dinner, his beautifully cooked steak, salad, decaffinated
coffee, Port Salud. When he'd drunk some wine he hugged me in the kitchen
and said "I've only been in love three times in my life and one of
those times was you," made me almost cry; but then when he said "You
never write a letter, or a postcard in which you don't use some word
as no one else would use it" my stomach went on fire with joy and excitement.
Being in bed with Tony, and then on Monday morning making coffee and
looking out the window with him, at the reflections on the façade
opposite, at the two icy white clouds rocketing down toward us, spreading,
deepening, diffusing at the edges, taking on internal shadows and then just
overshooting us. I was happy, full of tenderness: full of talk, ideas for
films.
-
The ways I'm not a warrior, little doubts, guilts, hesitations, like
the window cleaner who got 50p for cleaning my windows, 10 minutes for which
I worked nearly an hour (how mean and resentful I felt) (he asked a pound);
my unwarriorlike body, my confusion with Roy, stupidities with Luke (absent
minded babytalk - but not much - we went through the sea book and he asked
in detail about all the pictures), fatigue, boredom - can't think or gather
myself, like last night when I went to bed at 8. The window cleaner shook
me. I was embarrassed and helpless with him - middle aged man.
-
Rang Tony in tears, Saturday afternoon, "Oh you poor sausage"
he said. Arrived at his house - "Can I come late this evening and sleep
with you?" - and sat in front of his fire until we went to bed; there
his cold velvety hands, ah, we just stroke each other all over, everything
we can reach, tiny pressures to press us together, our stomachs warm, our
skin warms, way down in the bottom of the bed our feet warm, little kisses,
brief and breathless because we both have colds and can't breathe through
our noses. My body's intelligence pleases me, we're graceful and attentive.
His hands like a cat on a picket fence. My hair is soft and springy, he
crushes it with his long hand, I stroke the narrow bit of his back where
the spine cuts in deep, as if pulling him, pressing him into me, what an
adventure, every little movement so interesting and original, his prick
pushes a little, pushes more, I'm coaxing it in, and we collide at the bottom,
at the top, we dance around it, what a top to spin on, what a maypole, we
slide on it, it's not his it's ours, slowly, parting, joining, but simply,
because it's too new for variation. I warm and liquefy, he's uncertain when
he comes, thinks he should have waited, but I'm just right.
When he goes to sleep I bring myself and something happens that just
happens rarely and specially: my clitoris becomes fiery and sharp, sending
warmth to the ends of my fingers, I can feel it radiating. Then I go to
sleep. In the morning wake before Tony, get up and dress, look at the rain,
after a while go back to wake him, he hugs me and we talk as we often do
in mornings, very gay together. He strokes my breast as we talk, then he
begins to stroke my nipple under my sweater, and I'm silenced, he puts his
hand under the sweater and strokes the tip of my breast through the undershirt.
I begin to rock with it so that my bum presses against his penis as he stokes,
rocking. He says "Come to bed," I get my big handkerchief out
of the next room, blow my nose, take off my clothes and roll onto him. The
tip of his penis is wet and slippery, he butts at me, pushes in, pushes
in, long slow strokes, my knees on either side of him, pull me wide open,
he just slides - then we slide back and forth on it end to end. Pressing.
I hold myself strong on the end of the sheet.
Get up, cook breakfast, work hard cleaning his windows, rain streaks
them. Nice moments when he or I are outside, the window shut, rubbing the
glass, the other inside pointing out streaks. Band next door, soft beat,
just right.
He painted his fireplace silver, we played with the aluminum paint in
turpentine, watching explosions and currents: surface tension. When he spit
into it, an eye was created, in which the eyeball spun up to the surface
and down around, steadily narrowing. Little anuses that just sucked shut,
almost taking us with them. The cat nested in a coil of extension cable.
I loved looking at him today, long legs, standing on a chair, expertly
painting the wall, pointed feet, eyes clear, swollen mouth; sitting in a
restaurant with the scarf on, pink shirt, black trousers, jean jacket, Napoleon
coat, bush of dry sparse hair, a joli laid, oh joli lay that you are.
He said that in his childhood Sunday was the day for cleaning and fixing,
he had to clean his dad's shoes and vacuum the stairs and he hated it, but
then there was a special Sunday tea, with jelly and sweets. His fierce grandmother.
What a nice man he is, he says he's never been in love is that why? I'm
easy and funny with him, he likes me, we sing up and down the stairs. In
the morning when we get out of bed I find myself whistling Lord Dismiss
Us with Thy Blessing and he joins in.
-
Recurring suspicion that I'm light-weight, not really trying. Doris Lessing
makes me feel that, especially her.
Authority is lacking. I'm not ambitious enough. It hasn't entered my
head to be. Wonder how that could be planted. Could manage some successes
and ask to be told. Need that. Peter saying I'm a writer, "Don't know
how you're going to find that out; maybe you'll just have to make some bad
films."
-
The pressure in private writing to make it public - explain, detail,
over-note.
The pressure in thought.
-
History of art makes it seem a history of argument.
-
Roy came, bringing some of the rubbish that he used to carry with him
from one messy room to another, the photography annuals, his schoolboy atlas,
Now We Are Six, a school geography book, a stack of cassettes, his
frying pan (that frying pan he got with green shield stamps his mother
pasted): it was like the dream I had a long time ago, coming upon a box
of rubbish I recognized right away, with a sad shock, thrill, as Roy's.
He's dividing his goods because he's leaving the commune for the next part
of his life. He's spooky, thin, stands a little bent, his face is terribly
old, I look at him and feel, but Roy mustn't ever get old, his body
must always have a sappy spring and his face shine with ill-got gains. He's
all eyes, his cheeks are flat and lined, he's grey, his smile is peculiar
and stiff, his eyes don't soften. He said to Luke, "Luke I'm not going
to live at the commune any more, I'm never never going to the commune any
more." Luke's face pouts up. "I want Jud" he says. "Who?"
says Roy. "I want you and me and Jud." "That's finished forever"
says Roy, I feel too brutally. Luke leans his head on Roy's knee.
He's lost his address book.
-
All this morning and afternoon digging into the compost pile, moving
earth, finding seams of sand, glass, flowerpots, leafmold? clumped with
roots. A worm I picked out to look at, shiny smooth skin and its poking
blind movement reminded me of Tony, it is made of something that the soil
doesn't stick to, on one side of it was a crooked fine red vein, liquid
mud oozed out of its anus. I had to hide it in a pile of earth, felt responsible
for it, expected it to disappear into the loose earth but it seemed that
it has to swallow its way in.
The robins sang and raided, I found iridescent glass. Pleasure in watching
the soil crumble off the fork; sometimes, not more than three times, a very
brief whiff of sweet earth smell. The change of temperature on my skin when
the sun came out, almost out, for three minutes, twice.
When I looked in the mirror my cheeks were very pink and plump and my
eyes clear: a fine deep line around my mouth.
Luke this morning: both of us for a minute were foxes inside the damp
burrow of my sleeping bag, with its airless dark: he curled beside me, said
"I am very tired."
On the way home from school the bag's strap came undone and it smashed
down: broke the 35p bottle of apple and black current juice, which slowly
leaked out. He told Miss Tugwell about it and then Jane while she tried
to tell me how thrilling is the constitutional crisis.
[undated letter - March]
The film's going well, mostly shot now, mostly processed, will have to
start editing and hustling for money to make the final print.
I have part-time work gardening now - for processing money.
[undated journal]
Digging up dandelions - the young red worms departing over the grass.
Thought of Ray talking about how he had slow worms when he was a
child - both their movement as they ran like red water wet and shiny - and
the name.
Phyllis [Altman] - her big, lined, heavy face - and on her left temple,
a birthmark? A scar? A coin? A porthole? A door? Round brown dug down like
a flowerbed in a lawn - smooth.
Because she's a novelist, talking about the fair copy of the book
she's writing - set in the East Transvaal, and she quoted, "ancient
and mysterious land." She was thinking about something pleasant, she
stared at the flowerbed and her mouth opened and closed very slightly, like
gills (and her eyes, "her ancient, glittering eyes"), a self centred
movement of satisfaction and pleasure.
"Writing really is fantasy. If it isn't it doesn't sell" she
said. "Ah - but it's a sort of research into fantasy, isn't it, that's
the thing about it" - announced the gardener, barefoot in bib-and-brace,
hair up in a lump, skin-tight in a long-sleeved purple shirt.
My fantasy of writers - that they are people in whom experience actually
emerges as a sort of multitude of berries - round around a core of seeds
- they are fruitful people themselves, the interior articulates because
of work on the outside.
-
David Larcher's two vans put back-to-back [parked at the Film Co-op],
the small room smelling of pine smoke from the little heater, and the one
candle lighting a white-haired baby and blond Elizabeth plump after childbirth.
Talking about Turkey.
-
Tony talking about the reams of paper in his art supplies shop, making
a rattle with his mouth and drawing the motion with his thumb in the air.
Tony this morning in the washed blue t-shirt: "I kept it on so you
could grope me if you wanted." It slides off his neck and in the dark
warm of his back there was a smell like earth.
Strangeness with each other. What doesn't he want me to know?
-
David's Rumanian rushes: a tractor with two trailers is rattling horizontally
along a dirt field road, he pans with the tractor, loses the front and back,
continues to follow them, they wave, three riders on the first tractor,
they're moving out, he hangs onto the dust they throw, watches it settle
in round clouds between four round trees, then moves after the trailer and
catches up with some dust, follows the dust for a while, catches up with
the tractor and overtakes the tractor settling along - at the same pace
- another row of round undusty trees ahead. "This is the best shot
of my life" he says joking.
Both these sections were processed by the Rumanians and are covered with
blotches, scratches, seeming holes. All of it shot with one magazine on
the Éclair.
-
Have a feeling that my relations with the Co-op are going to be like
living with a man - all except Annabel they are men - fighting for my life
in the face of their contempt, which they'll never recognize, and clubishness.
Feel it needs good strategies and the most careful preparation, doses of
protein, mystery, etc.
-
Riding the bicycle at night: the two willows across from John's sway
out heavy ropes of leaves, the sound like a snatch of river brought by high
wind.
Television program: a vigilant pike waiting, sliding down toward a stickleback,
still long watchful face - the stupid stickleback hanging about - snap!
We both jumped, beautiful moment in cinem-a! Then, looking down the pike's
slit mouth and seeing the stickleback's two eyes peering out. BBC2 program
on filming nature docs.
A grotesque little fact -
Ovarian cysts have been found in which were
grown, in the egg's lonely attempt to make a baby, one hundred and fifty
eight teeth, some bones, some skin and sebacious matter.
An Italian woman without ever knowing herself
to be pregnant carried, for thirty six years, a dead baby, which gradually
was fossilized and eventually born as a stone baby.
-
Ladies of Llangolen, their pieties, raptures; I too sound out of date
to myself. Yet they created something and in the end lived as they liked
and were recognized (a little) for it. What they made was domestic: a series
of days with precisely the same rhythm, a sequence of raptures that could
be counted on always to be rapturous, primroses, pinks, moons, storms, cows,
their pride in their own devotion, lovely narrow certain current; in my
imagination I flood - but actually - this pleasant room, its fire and child,
seasons, jokes, inventions, are all biding time until -
It is sad that what's good and true in/for me, my own rural raptures,
are so confused with the class / sentiments / cons / bad faith of the 'culture,'
ie the way they've been exploited and falsified by other people, that I
can't be sure of myself as they were, in their class / sentimentality /
ludicrous bad taste / their weird time.
Historicity - I love other people's histories and my own, but history
I really hate, movements of ideas; ideas do move and infect one another,
people lean in the same direction like blown grass. No doubt. And people
like me who try to step out of it are like a current in the current, thinking
each other's thoughts.
I'm accompanied in my days by - I sometimes remember - scorn for my own
body. Refuse to look at it as I avert my eyes from cripples and fat women;
good manners, rebellion - I will not look at what's ugly. It hasn't really
occurred, happened to me yet, that if I'm not to have to bury myself from
myself, close that connection too, more and more completely as I
get older, I have to choose the other ugly shameful unmentionable alternative
- to preserve myself, really to have my 'self' as a project. I want to forget
I'm a body. But I'm a body. How it restricts constricts me to be ugly.
-
Madge Herron shaking herself in her plastic raincoat hung with a chain
and keys, slapping her thigh, telling me about a line in a poem (she quotes
it, her mouth opens coyly and carefully because it's poetry she's saying),
pigeons (Sappho) falling asleep, darkness flooding in their eyes - she said
that she had to not read it for six months so that it would work again.
Telling me about a simple girl in Donegal, they used to tease for her English
which she "made up as she went along," she said oh no they needn't
walk her up the lane, in the moonlight it was a "fair, white, night."
She herself has been in London thirty four years, came to go into service.
When she was twelve she was in the fields, barefoot, "delving."
Delving for what? Oh potatoes. All the men had gone to Scotland to work.
Her father dead when she was five, her uncle telling them to pull their
skirts down.
She ate all my bread, with thick butter and bits of garlic, demanded
that I go make some more tea, offered me a holiday with her people in Donegal,
invited me to dinner with Fiona and Dr Summerfield, extolled homeopathy.
When she went home offered her cheek to be kissed. Sat here eyes pink, delicate
for all she says about having been rawboned and ugly as a girl.
She sat and rocked and raved about my room, "terrifies me!"
she shouted. "Jesus! There's something monastic in you."
Her tale about an exorcist she visited about the ghost that was making
her dour, and causing her to spill things, especially water.
If we sit on the bench outside the back door, she says, we may see a
ghost; there's one there, who was deprived of life, not killed, but somehow
deprived of life. Maybe. "I wonder if there really are such things?"
she says.
She picks up my Seferis, says "Oh he's good this man."
I look out the window and see that in the two summer afternoons we've
had, an iris has shot up a flower and stalk, and when I went down to check,
I could feel flowers inside the leaf-blades of two more!
-
Not to express experience but to enlarge it.
-
This Bach line that puckers me up like a thread pulled tight, every time
it's repeated; it's in #42, the music that joins recitative to the alto
aria, the duet with Stitch-Randall - Versage Nicht. There's a bit
in the middle like hurdy-gurdy.
-
England! The operator whom I asked for an alarm call said "Sleep
well, love."
-
American Graffiti, it worked out as it should have, saw it sitting
next to Roy at the Hampstead Classic. It delighted me, the shine of streets,
slow gleaming movement of cars across the screen, the hop with a girl in
bobby socks jiving, young fat-faced Elvis on a television screen. The rear
end being jerked from under a police car where it stood, clothes, pincurled
hair, long night that dawned several times, at last opened into a misty
valley with pylons, all shot informatively, unflashily, with real love for
those days; it's a way of thinking about what was most magical for me too,
my periphery participation in the thrilling - something - moment of time,
not at all true for my time and place in La Glace, but something somewhere
that I could sometimes just touch, by radio, Hep Cats magazine, Janeen,
Reiner; talking to Tony last night trying to think why everyone's history
is potentially equal, given intelligent feeling attention and the light
of mortality. It was glamour - always right -
[notebook]
[Beginning of April I hitchhike to Paris for a women's film festival,
am billeted with Dana Sardet.]
Peter and his tractor - red beard, clear green Northern eyes full of
light, hairy crease of his bum when his pale blue corduroy trousers slip,
beer belly, red hammy hands, so attractive that I decide this will be my
first truck driver, if it works. But he's boring, totally male with no tenderness
at all - that's his interest too, he lives in the wild west of TIR buccaneering,
Blackpool to Italy for seven years, the younger men who've been to Afghanistan
and Pakistan, he says, talk only of their motors and are spoiling the fun,
they've never driven an old truck and done England-Milan in two days, and
they wear fancy ski jackets.
His friends Peter and Dennis, Peter a tall broad and flat-hipped ginger-haired
man going white and bald, a steer head on his large belt buckle, Yorkshireman
with blue pale eyes, like Peter's full of light. From his neck down he's
still red from the sunstroke he had in Italy, he's the bottom of the pecking
order, a certain hesitancy.
I am of course proud, because my Peter is at the top, a history of brawling
in cafés, once threw a plate of egg and ham at the waiter etc, but
there's someone, Danny Malin, who's bigger and more dangerous when riled.
A quiet man and a drinker.
Denis is crude, ugly and fat, Borgnine-greasy, but full of determined
gaiety, takes Peter by the chops and jiggles them, "Good to see you
Peter boy," he's senior, but Peter's got luck with women, it's clear
Peter's on top with him as well. They remember old times, it's partly for
me but they're having a good time and we're all laughing like princes.
- The time five of them, some with mates, had an enforced 5-day national
holiday in Italy, "put our motors in a circle on the beach, with washlines
and our smalls hanging on them, next to the cleanest river in Italy - the
only clean river in Italy - every evening all the eye-talians would come
and laugh at the English truck drivers naked in the river having their showers.
All that week I had nothing but steak" (makes a sign a foot square
and three inches deep) "and ale." Once backed a tailor into the
Mediterranean for a diving board.
Peter himself has had idylls, took his son and a cousin, took his eighteen
month old daughter, had two months with a Canadian girl, a while with an
American artist living in Spain. His present girl from the Lake District,
"She's a deep thinker," she says "I can't make out why you
ever got married."
Driving donkeys on Blackpool beach at 5, says he made £10 per week.
His grandfather's potato business, supplying all the boarding houses, the
prams covered and used by urchins to carry bags.
His daughter Lisa, the tomboy. "She's got a thing about you, does
she?" "Oh aye," in his soft accent.
-
Cimetière Montparnasse
City without people, only guardians. Birds loud in one particular tree
with twigs like root hairs. Smell of plum preserve. Green fire of a completely
established colony of iris in a rusty trough on legs, old leaves crumbled
down to orange straw, new shaking stiffly their pointed leaves, flare up
without flowers.
Ceramic wreaths, old purple monumental poppies now air greased black
but in the crevices of the corolla a spit of seeing (blooming?) grass, a
little weed.
Visitors, picking up debris. Young gardeners rubber-necking from the
avenue paths, white tablets, blackened white houses architected as temples,
palaces. In one of them a prayer chair inclines toward an altar with a deformed
cushion on it. One iron door half dissolved into air ajar on newspapers,
flower pots. Another tomb birds love to shit on. Outside against the pale
blue sky is the black tablet at Montparnasse Station. A little pot of pansies
that smell like violets.
A Mediterranean avenue of shaggy cypress.
One-room palaces, moss on the roof, stained glass windows no one looks
through, wall stained in icicles under the eaves.
Birds sound sharp. Other sounds dampened, traffic.
A museum city, no one touches the flowers. I put my hand on a crepe-skinned
head of ---, a diffuse shock, grass fire in another brazier, the gravel
paths are growing only parted single centipedes of grass, but these pots
with their fertile culture of soil catch yellow flowering weeds.
A glass jar, rusty damp sycamore seeds in it.
My rust tree with its eye.
Need some pensées.
White city tulips set as a continuous ceremony on a marble table.
O petit ange, prie pour nous.
The housekeeping gardener comes with a damp broom, they know their way.
Plum jam smell continues. Glistening brushes of an extravagant sort of
jack pine.
Avenues with a walking scale, paths, doors.
Someone made a stained glass greenhouse, over a round-headed white tablet
whose dedications are almost dissolved, bleached out; blue panes, and two
burgundy coloured remaining, through one I can see the orange leg of a crane.
Two pigeons chasing each other like jets, throwing shadows like jets,
and watching them I see a white butterfly struggling on its fabric wings.
[undated journal]
Sitting in the Mercedes cab plowing up the M2, the two drivers in black
silhouette up in front of me, a yellow light and two green on the dash constant,
and disappearing taillights, red. A few approaching headlamps flashing in
adjacent and opposite trajectory, a few circles traced on the dusty windscreen,
the wide-angle wrapped black glass, and first Led Zepplin and then Don McLean
on the stereo on both sides of me. I felt, this is a moment of perfect happiness.
-
Mossy's fantasies about being a likkle mousie, which Luke brings home.
Frances told this story, sitting behind her mask-like face:
Mossy: "You're just RUBBISH."
Luke, upon reflection: "You're just rubbish too."
Mossy: "Yes, we are both just rubbish. Everybody in the world is
just rubbish."
April 14
Easter Sunday 1974, Luke woke me to tell me the sun was shining. That
was after he came crying because he was wet, lying next to me on my pillow
- he turned my face back toward him when I turned away to sleep a little
more, said "I want to see your face."
Sad sad. Bony grey Roy in baggy trousers. Luke running in beech leaves
in Epping Forest.
Beautiful Luke. His quick smile when he's caught in an absurdity.
The pee in the apple juice bottle. "Is it apple juice?" His
eyes shine: shakes his head.
-
The diary form, it's flabby, occasional shapely things but yech no sense
of reserve, makes me ashamed of myself.
-
When I look at Roy I see ashes.
-
Sal [Potter]: compulsive eating means you're the sort of person who has
compulsive energy patterns; all you have to do is do something with it,
or recognize what you really want to be compulsive about. Sense of being
able to talk almost full stretch. Both still swallowing with nervousness,
being truthful because she can tell the difference. A nice crispness which
is friendly without flattery. Insisting on doing the hard things; just what
I need to know.
-
The overlap last night of the sycamore and the reflection of forsythia
branches on the piano. The next door window and below it on the brick wall
my red door. I must work on this world of overlap to find out what it's
about, it never used to be there. London has taught me. The last night one
was about inside being outside. It was also about colors in black. Light
and dark like Wells' two worlds. Last night my white ceiling with its strong
moulding papered with moving privet leaves.
What's the meaning of two worlds - a strong esoteric meaning there -
measured by attraction.
-
Sitting drinking wine, it's still strenuous with Joann [Kaplan], I begin
to feel loud-mouthed and tired, find set phrases and Americanisms running
out of my mouth, is that nervousness? Feels like compulsive American friendliness,
don't like it. Do like Joann. In her body she seems soft as a mollusk, soft
eyes full of light, soft easy mouth, soft hedge of grey-brown hair. At the
tube she gave me such an embrace, firm and decided, I was firm too, but
not so decided, feeling the side of her face with the side of mine and having
a sudden whiff of some wonderful smell.
-
John Hershey's report on Hiroshima: "Hiroshima
was blanketed with flowers. There were cornflowers and gladiolas everywhere,
and morning glories and day lilies that rose again from the ashes with an
extraordinary vigor, quite unheard of for flowers till then."
-
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. He's constantly uncomfortable in
his body, his face looks pained, like secret toothache. Embarrassment.
Coming from the airport in the tube she 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.
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.
-
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.
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."
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.
-
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.
-
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. 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.
-
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
-
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.
-
[I invite my crush to supper] The painful moment, Keith [Jackson] 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. 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.
The shock of your face, how can you inflict such inaccessible beauty
on me.
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.
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. [Carried my bedding up the Highgate Hill and spent
a night on the Heath.] 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. 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.
In the morning 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.
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.
-
This morning lying together in the white room with light sinking down
the wall, when we slept it was in the heat of it.
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.
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 Moved 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.
"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.
-
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. 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.
I had on the radio in the kitchen, something modern, he leapt up smiling
in the doorway, "What's that it's wonderful."
"You don't do anything wrong" he says.
-
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."
-
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).
-
Walking home from Kings Cross after Wayne's party, 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 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. 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.
-
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.
-
Film: my city eyes. Instant when an airplane's shadow is on a window.
-
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 you, 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.
In the garden 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. 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.
[June]
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.
Then sitting at the canal, 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.
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.
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.
He:
- Knows how to lie quiet and listen to someone whistling Liverpool
Lou, hammering, humming, the helicopter with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir, coming to land on the concrete in the next garden, "They'll
come to the window and say 'Oh I see you've got Tony Nesbit with you'"
- Knew he liked the Dies Irae best and recognized the Lachrymosa
- Likes his prick to find me by itself
- Brushes his hair flat then messes it up again
- Has bloodshot eyes, small, tired, green with brown chips like flecks
of blood and a yellow ring around the pupil
- Has bland hands, "Yes, I have to agree with you about that"
- When drunk reeks, is belligerant and self pitying
- Goes to discotheques with John Frick to dance by himself
- Has invented two new pieces he sketched this morning - a cube with
mirrors all facing inward - about interior space - another of six steel
plates forming a cube without edges or corners held together inside by
an invisible explosion of tubes
- Said of Mozart "He must have felt he could expand indefinitely
in his same direction, I wish - that's what I want to feel so much"
- Felt, with me, the drama of my cliff of lights going and coming
- Hates the word 'relationship'!
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.
-
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, her body intelligent
in every line. The tiny cat lying on her arm staring up into her eyes.
-
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.
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.
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