| london volume 8 part 2 - 1974 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated letter] Your Heidi is gone now. She was a good presence, as you knew she would be. I loved your letter, its description of IJC's sale, I could see it and her. And Grandma's diamond. The Pankratz story, and its little miracles among the congregation touched me very much. It begins to seem soon, this move back to the new continent. Roy is due to leave for Vermont any day now. We'll probably get there around Christmas, and so I can leave Luke with Roy while I find a place and a livelihood. A few months to say goodbye to London which gives and teaches me so much but strangles me with damp and dark in winter. No more winters here! Rituals of giving, sorting and packing things; moving house; removing, as they call it here. Removing everything but the essential, like winter. Did Heidi come straight back and tell you what a nice 'boyfriend' (her language, not mine) I have? I think she liked Andy; I guess you would too, he likes to listen to horses chew hay; he plays piano; simple things like smashing watermelons on the pavement make him full of joy like they do me; he likes me as I am; and he has beautiful long blue eyes. All the things he partially and or completely lacks are another list. Dear lady, there is nothing like a new love to make the world sparkle. Such happiness is not normal but it's good for body and soul, like sunshine and fresh honey. I wish you lot would stop worrying about me: unless you think that getting so much more than my share of the world's best joy is not fair? There's no disaster that would happen which could take away what I've had already, or been already. But as for Grandma, she really needs to worry about somebody, like keeping her stove clean, it gives her life a shape. No? Luke is tall and brown, has been to the sea at various places in Wales and Scotland, with Roy and other friends. Forthright and sweet. We have taken to eating in cafés, pleases us both very much, the Empire and the Forum in Kentish Town, and Tony's in Tufnell Park. Stewed steak, chips and peas, delicious, with a view of fire engines and police cars going by. The garden is opulent and beautiful, especially when it rains. Tomato plants heavy with tomatoes. How is yours? What are you doing now, until school starts again? Are you going back to university next year? What is Rudy doing about his land? Is he still working? I was a bit thrilled with Heidi's stories about her family, all those sturdy daughters, proficient at fencing and carpentry, or dreaming on the haying rounds. She showed me pictures of their land, blue and rose in winter, yellow and blue in autumn, brown and blue in spring. Made me homesick. A real father. Their proper independence. I'm also looking forward to sending Luke to stay with you sometime. Will you like that? Maybe? Just a little? The paper's falling out of the typewriter. [undated other notebook] [sketches of clothes] [Trapline rushes - ceiling] [Mafalda film plan]
[editing table plans] Nathalie Granger - a version of the film I saw Marguerite Duras: that film is a beautiful thing for everyday use - a still life which is entered I feel the 'undercurrent' aspect is practically gratuitous - it wasn't in the film I saw - or? Think a pattern around whether it was a tease - expected violence from for instance the salesman or the little girl - phenonmenological - behavioral - Dorothy Richardson Her relation to women - dislike - thrill Backwater - depression The upperclassness: never made a bed Prejudices Anger at people's mediocrities Charm and pretense Grimaces The changeableness The scene with her mother, after the weddings How she's picking things up all the time, the thoughtful presence in all she sees. Thinking about gender - her fantasy too, very clear. Her obscurity is mine: her intelligent observation - those of us who do not exist, given existence, given It is all there - Dent should reissue it in paperback - hallelujah! [Virago issued it in four paperback volumes in 1979.] - The dreamer tears a splinter of wood from the ceiling, he picks a leaf from the top of the tree; he takes an egg from the nest of the crow. To these precise facts are united well-connected reasonings, well-chosen arguments to be given to those who do not know how to fly. Anima happinesses Best memories are new ones State of repressed childhood The little boy is told by his mother that he comes from the well in the garden. The child hangs about next to it. "The well is too strong an image for a dreaming child." Walden. "It seems we only languish during maturity in order to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish from our memory before we were able to learn their language." We write children's stories too easily. To rediscover the language of fables it is necessary to become body and soul an admiring being. Bachelard again: summers of the other century. A parallel century, dreamland. Someone who always has access. The Other House; the Other Childhood. Recover the suppressed dreams of childhood
To understand our attachment to the world, it is necessary to add a childhood . We cannot love water, fire, the tree without . We love them with childhood. Mythologeme of the child: solitary state of the essentially orphan child who in spite of everything is at home in the original world and loved by the gods. The archetype of the child. Part of the film: the divine orphan Annie at a pole with the old woman in her green tights and short nightgown. Every childhood is legendary: tell me, let me into your childhood. The child inside, the body inside our body, which continues to grow. Provenance About the daughter inside who continues to grow, shine from our eyes. If we deepen our reverie toward childhood, we root the tree of our destiny more deeply. Moments - visiting Auntie Annie, the poplar pool spring leaves giving memories their dream atmosphere - Pouring water onto the earth and getting blue reflection in pot. The stream of water running down the sidewalk. The puddle with an airplane in it. - Need energy training - secret sisterhood - Arica 40 day - what else, kundalini - physical intensities - a sort of monastic life Fix blue skirt and leather jacket, make a green dress, fix black blouse, black skirt or blue Heal's chenille brilliant bottle green [sketch of long skirt] - Eskimo's magic hat - antennae and creatures, beads, lines - Cantatas -
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- Mr Andy - a few things to say to you - in all newness of knowing you - Tender creature - why do I have such a hard time being hard on you - because the things I have to say to you could close you up, you're so delicate, or is that my myth? Or yours, is that your cheap trick to make me love you? The only love I value is the love I give. Yeah. But I don't want you to close. I wish you could fuck properly and didn't have a hesitant weedy penis that buckles and has to be shoved in. I wish that we were like Tony and me, so that all through the next day, when I thought of us, I'd shine. I wish you had Tony's touch, his tact, his timing and grace, so I could concentrate and not be rattled about. I wish you could talk properly, so I didn't have to - wish I could get excited when I talk to you - wish you were sharper and brighter with me - feel I have to manage us into fairyland all the time, or we'll droop. I'm having such doubts Mr Andy, and don't know what to say when I see you. Feel I've got into a false relation with you. You don't know how to stay away. Don't know how to keep the balance. When you came back from Wales, and came and lay in my arms and shuddered, I felt too powerful and too mean, because I'd stopped
Don't know if I complain these things because my energy's gone and my life gone grey, or whether my life is grey because I can't say these things to you.
If you've got any good reason, real reason for wanting to stay in touch with me then cool it, watch what you do. Why should I send out instructions for you to make me feel. My tenderness is my problem, I'm a little dead, and must work to come alive again. - Grass and its profile, after rain Film called Walking on Water Start in a puddle. Perhaps mostly puddles. Branch off into skidding over actual canals where the clouds are clearer than in their sky - It would be clear black shadow shining like coal facets under each foot, the trouser leg opening onto it. Practice with a mirror laid flat. Could photograph that and lay it over - could be a white-soled tennis shoe - walk without leaving tracks. Start with the tao of sidewalk with rain on it. Keep walking and get onto sky. - At Cyrano's the young waitress with flushed red face, fine blond ringlets in front of her ears - fine gold Israeli earrings dangling. - Harlem Dance Theatre Classical ballet - something grotesque about the male-female obsession and how falsely it is danced. "A court form." He should not support or carry them unless v.v. too. The ciphers of the dance reveal themselves so clearly - when they are false or crisp. "Old music" is music the performers no longer know how to perform: is that maybe true for the classical ballet? Antique sensibility. I like the crisp rapid halts - it is presence. The politics of ballet. Balanchine 'athletics.' Mannerisms of slaves, court dwarfs. - The only way to write about Roy, first make the 'audience' love him, and then have him betray them. Stay outside. Book of the future: addresses. Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle, The Hermaphrodite Album. "These two poets are about something sacramental, not decorative." Poems not individually signed. "My work is that of a composite being, which happens to be signed." [undated journal] The smells that come in the window are childhood, fresh smells, morning grass and all that. - In my misery yesterday A came to play the piano. His distance made me so angry my eyes shone. When he came out of it to lean on the bed I felt the impulse to curl up with my eyes closed [sketch of child's pose], to stop the panic and paranoia, and out of that stone state, belly covered, "And if you close your eyes people's eyes can't get into you either," I managed to say the true thing that broke the spell. Remembering what Colin said about, when there's a disaster, he feels nothing and says to himself "Oh I'm not bothered" and then the next day it hits him as a terrible pain in the stomach. Then, that when I first come into something with somebody, it's alright, and I say to myself "Oh, it's alright, I feel very free" and then, a week or ten days later, it hits my body with terror and paranoia, a sensitivity so acute it's almost unbearable, completely unfree, such a sensitivity to - your - relative absence or presence, it's the body realizing it's actually caring about somebody. "It's like a nervous breakdown - or like the flu - it's as if you need to think of it like that and eat well, get lots of rest, take vitamin C in large doses, do yoga - maybe you could know in advance that it's coming - what it really needs is just for somebody to be nice to you." "That's what I was feeling on Sunday. You know when I was drinking my coffee I was gritting my teeth to keep from bursting out weeping. I couldn't do that because it seemed to be losing face with an enemy." "I realized that today, and I was sorry I hadn't, but I just felt you'd gone off me, you'd gone away. If both people feel so tender they can't help it." Having said that, eye to eye, I, and he, melted and uncurled and looked at each other's faces as if pulling them into ourselves through our own face, and touched each other's features, we were lying with our mouths open in extremis of tenderness, from that to the tumble, eating each other's mouths, gasping for air, resting. - Thought, Eskimos believe, is everything outside of man, especially natural forces. But thought cannot exist without [woman]. It makes itself known to [woman]: it speaks first and [woman] in turn gives it shape and expression when the Eskimo feels themselves possessed by the hunt, and they give themselves fully to it. Poetry general through the particular. Language is polysynthetic great, tight conglomerates, like twisted knots, fused from an impression forming a unit to the speaker Paul Klee, structuring of space by sound works owed more to Bach and Mozart than to any of the masters of art. He wanted art "to sound like a fairytale," to be a world where "things fall upward" define space more by sound than sight space in flux, creating its own dimensions, moment by moment wrap around complex, many-roomed igloos which have as many dimensions and as much freedom as a cloud landscape changing all the time, white, blue, grey. Aua says "All our customs come from life and turn towards life; we explain nothing, we believe nothing, but in what I have just shown you lies our answer to all you ask." Infanticide of girl children: 4/5. Abandon old people. Take responsibility. Word for thought is the same as for 'the outside.' Can thought exist without [woman]? The answer to this last question is no, for it requires a creative human act for thought, or the universe, to acquire a form that one would call existence universe must speak first telling [woman] [she] is nowhere in particular; emotion wells up at bottom this emotion is a feeling of being alive and at this moment a somewhere, begins to emerge.
- Kathy [Katrin Zaugg visiting from Basel] and her Leonard with his distorted mouth; she so undistorted, with her level eyes. Compendium, only when they've gone, excitement unleashing, about the wood butchers book of own houses; and then to double it, Home Comfort book with its vast dream of brilliant friends with an own farm, the man called Peter who writes like the man I want (to be). In the thrill of that daydream existence I've strode through the rain, limp skirt, stiff wonderful wellingtons that give me presence toward all the city streets! Carrying the watermelon and taking it outside with barefoot Andy to SMASH it. He tossed it up and it came down crack-ed open. The fish only in our palms convulsing. The two postcards the same: Magritte man with a birdcage between his hat and his trousers, the gold goddess lady with one breast like a window open to snow. The man leaning out the window to shake out the towel. Scott Joplin, the girl, Andy's poem offered like a secret my lady he calls me, it shocks me and the words of the poem aren't anything, but when I think he wrote it, when I let myself see him, suspect a connection - even so I couldn't say 'my gentleman,' awyman, out of superstition, because the play/work mate I want - when I let myself think those green eyes, black-holed deep clear eyes they're mine, they're lending themselves to me, then I begin to want to keep them. Slowly. Isn't it always like this. Slowly I am tuned by love, to see, feel what I see, sink into the look of your limbs and your eyes, your lovers, your gifts. I betray myself to it, give myself over, because I want to be given, and so there's another cycle to end in pain, the long scar ripped open again, like a seam. I begin to think: you. Take you into my imagination, under my blanket, remember you, embrace you, embroider you with lights. Baby you hardly deserve it. The gift of my cheap trick on me. Your trick on you, but you don't know it because even more than me you want to think: you. But it's too easy for you, it can't be true if it's so easy. Or who are you? It isn't easy he says, "I have to fight with myself all the time." - Got to go finish the film, or just tape the sound and take it, oooh. Get it done, as evidence and be in Canada in time for the Canada Council. - Two chairs at the piano, little hatchetface has gone to work in my big shiny mac and the blue woolly hat. Outfitted. "My lovely, my parapluie, my leedle cabbage." "My pudding, my schtrudel, my cornbread, my glass eye!" "My leedle wooden leg!" Stiff back and silky hands on the piano, lower lip bowed with concentration, working out the magnetic rag. Andy: I know he likes me because I'm so bright with him. Faces that are rivers. Sense of good fortune and good timing, the chance (like being born, happening to be born, a princess, which has always amazed me) to be thirty at a time when it's possible to be buzzing and blooming with force de l'age. [museum notes] Little box from Haida, Queen Charlotte Islands [sketch of small bentwood box Nootka woven hat, spruce root, West Vancouver Island Lapland drum [sketch] [undated journal] Andy/Sarah had fallen in the polar water (I thought it was him but it was a dirty polar bear) and to get her home we had to climb through a window into a girl's school. I went round by the door, a long shabby room with desks, and in the end section of the room, really another room, rows of pianos, the front right hand one with a fat little boy playing it heavy staccato syntax. All these dream places sometimes seem to exist in a same world, and to refer to each other. Book of the house. - Kathy, round milkmaid bosom and face changed, she has a ducking little girlishness in her mouth when she speaks but her eyes, her intelligence, she's - "a fine lad," "he's a fine man" - careful in her speech, bright and centred, knows where she is - "good times and bad times, but it was a time." - Tony speaking to me on the telephone. Mr Blue Eyes here in big army parka, smiling. Little thin man, all quiet spirit. This morning when I felt so strong horny and fierce like a big wind and couldn't sweep through because I'd woken with him and he wasn't feeling equally big - got a little paralyzed and dumb, tears of confusion, sog, wanted him to really oppose me shoulder to shoulder like dumb beasts. He wouldn't, the thrust of it dragged me forward into near hysteria. It was a little better, and made me smile all day, to pour coffee down his neck, and he poured some on my knee and then I splashed the rest on him and then he threw milk after me and soaked my back. In the kitchen when he wasn't looking I turned the Fairy Liquid on him, down his neck. He blocked me with one hand and got the toothpaste, squeezed it on my breast and arms (I was washing out my dress) - I sloshed the wet dress at him - his lovely smelling sweat-cured white t-shirt! The Burlington Gardens museum [the Museum of Mankind], feeling homesick for the country I could perhaps only begin to see now, want to know about the Indians. The Queen Charlotte Island box. - My eroticism this afternoon wanted a woman. In that calm, intense certainty I could embrace anyone I love, touch their secret parts boldly. Thought of JoAnn, Susie, covetous of their skins, breasts, sexes, spines, bums. Thought of being able tenderly and skillfully to sink two fingers into them and irradiate them with delight and fear wonderfully mixed. Thought of Penelope and wondered who and how will break my other virginity. There's another too: the one I'm breaking with myself, and it's a secret like childish self-fucking, what I did in the broken cab of the truck in the long grass, behind the oilhouse, on the farm. Magic. My plumber's friend. - In the early hours this morning, Andy next to me always pushing to get close, we were in a street, a corridor? We knocked on a door asking the man whether we could come through his room to get to the corridor in the garden. He said we could with pleasure (it was like the Wentworth Mansions garden corridor) but there was a man down at the end who would be very fierce because two Americans had crashed through his garden previously. I remembered that it was me and Roy, in the black raincoats (I've lent A mine; Roy was wearing one like it when I first knew him). I had an image of a bed of bluebells, white wild hyacinth, something like that, wasn't sure what, if anything, we had really done. But we went through and then I was alone, it was like a long corridor onto a boardwalk at the edge of the sea, except that the boardwalk, railed on one side like a high verandah with several corridors reaching onto it as if in an arena, extended to the horizon on the other, a wintry misty blue grey color. As I ventured out onto it I saw teams of horses, and people, a woman in a shawl, as if immigrants, just sitting or walking. Old fashioned scene in monochrome. There had been a corridor boarded up; I guessed it belonged to the man who was fierce; later it disappeared, everything was open to the sea. Rather frozen. When I turned back - I wish I could remember more of my thoughts in that open place - and went down the long ramped corridors, its walls were covered with shining foil and I emerged into waking, with the thought that I must remember what I had seen. - Luke, in bed this morning: "My wiggy is fat, Ellie look, my wiggy is fat." - Also the sense that the wide open place had something, some element about it, that was like the field just behind our farm, its back doorstep (vivid image of the black dirt of its roads, two trucks, holes - the way a farmyard marks its surroundings). - Relieved when A goes for the weekend; there are little lies growing. Some times are straightforward, the "gaze of light at the window," but other times, when we're tired or over exposed to each other - Or? Like last night; I turn away from the way we are not quite open, which means, not open at all. Horrible. I'm away and he's anxious, and that's gratuitous anguish. It's false anxiety of false love. My frustrations, I think of how it is to fuck with Tony, how aesthetically satisfying, so that I remember it with a thrill like listening to the last part of Komm Du Süsse Todesstunde; it isn't a technical problem, nor - as you say, little man, "getting to know your body" - it's tact and intelligence. Leaves it up to me, but I don't want to seize it, and that's because - Tony, when you lead there I can dance because you dance my own right dance, which I'm not certain enough to impose on anyone. Andy's so scattered, wants to scatter, tangle, wrestle - break up his tight narrow body in a sort of gallop, which he hasn't the certainty to impose: and so we have different styles. I want to lie almost still and just gather myself quietly without acting and then kindle. You/he needs to be poked, stroked, tickled - something, which my hands do, dissociating themselves then, from my sex, which gets cold as I wait for the quiet to come. Learning. Has he just not learned yet? If it's a question of teaching how can I do it without giving instructions. The other frustration: when I step out of wed-lock to talk about anything hypothetical: his voice takes on a dogged patience and he spells out to himself the rudiments of a beginning he's no intellectual. Who else is so interested in everything? Who else could write poems at the factory, spending the day imagining Nant Gwytherin. Who else is so loving. But I want I want I WANT talk that makes me surprise myself. Baby you're good, you're very good, you're not marrying good (but Arnold was wrong about me). (So?) Carmichael red wizard where are you. I'm telling myself these things to be sure I don't pretend they don't matter. It's good to share music, books, the garden, the cats, Luke, my odd and lively body; to be easy enough to play McPherson's Farewell. Somebody sweet for a change. We discovered last night, that because our nibble the night before was so nice, we'd both spent the day longing for more: and then it was so awful, and I couldn't get into right relation at all because of my disloyalty. I imagine going to see Tony: throwing it all away. There's a guilty thrill in that. So why don't I. I won't. It would be bad of me. Andy's very gentleness with me coerces my loyalty. And those times when we're really open. But the way the world shone with its quiet white heat, when we came back from Wales, and with Tony sometimes: it isn't doing that now, is it greedy to want it all the time. It's dimming, Andy, time to let go, the man's always working, Luke takes away my bloom. Holidays. But I have to take responsibility not to use it up. It's holy energy, erotic bonfire, and the terrifying opening of somebody's life, it's nothing to do with use and comfort and everyday, or being there at the end of the day. Lightly. Sparing. Crisp: that's the energy of risk, makes it possible. Keep the risk. - I'm tired. Couldn't stand the drone of Huzur, he always sounds false to me, just wanted him gone. Remember how spending entire days with Luke wipes me out, because of my battles with myself and the world. - Your body. Dressed, you're a neat shape, smaller than you were, light on your feet, trousers that fit as men's do, easy and lean, just right. Belt. Shirts tucked in. Standing sometimes with your hard stomach sticking forward. Undressed, you're so little and naked, narrow feet, narrow calves, no special shape, in your whiteness and narrowness you seem brittle, stiff. (Watching you walk ahead, Heidi was there, there was a little prissiness in the way your bum moved that sickened me, I wanted to catch up so as not to look). And you too, you must be thinking of me as I here think of you - you wouldn't - you would - shorthand for the dismay, guilt that attaches to these two thoughts, from my weakened state. (Journal writing, like the cat licking itself.) Try to hold you in my mind. Your hair, your eyes, your eyelids, your narrow face in bed when you woke at seven to go to work, bloodless like the mask of Keats, your crooked lower lip under your moustache, your uncanny ears, like dough ears, cut out and then baked, not articulated like shaped things - your nose, your chin. The way your face can shine or die. "You looked at me just then as if you didn't know me." It's your creatureliness. You're so half born, your life is so unshaped, you're passive; also you're sharp, ironical, you light up with your own delight, you make your room, you are loyal and patient with old friends, loyal and patient with what moves you, Ray Bradbury, picture postcards. You need hardening. Clarifying. Trying to think about you - why - I think about Tony - tired, turn from everything. - Thoreau Natural History of Massachusetts Every tree, shrub and spire of grass, that could raise its head above the snow, was covered with a dense ice-foliage, answering, as it were, leaf to leaf to its summer dress. It struck me that these ghost leaves, and the green ones whose forms they assume, were the creatures of but one law; that in obedience to the same law the vegetative juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf, on the one hand, and the crystalline particles troop to their standards in the same order on the other. As if the material were indifferent, but the law one and invariable . This foliate structure is common to the coral and the plumage of birds, and to how large a part of animate and inanimate nature. He also compares crystalline structure to fields waving with grain, Arctic pines, fissured mud, asbestos and quartz ("the frostwork of a longer night"). Says Thoreau taught himself to be metaphorical. My thrill about tiles' fissures. My thrill toward metaphorical people. Anne. Madeleine! Joe. - The first person I can share my pleasure in museums and museum-books with. The Horniman. - Dream vista of a slough - swimming dreams - brothers and sisters alive, young, in my dream world forever. Luke among them. - Being dead, and then alive. I give great thanks, like steam from a volcano, for the periodic elation of my forceful age: the little girl's stirring, shines and plays; there are stories written and filming done, and even these few seldom things add up to a glisten on my life. (A glisten in his bones, he says, and I'm so grateful I turn him to gold and kiss his kneecaps with my smile. Birdbones, I mean YOU.) These hard times of loneliness, but then what a delirium, steady brilliant delirium, what a caper when I love and you love too. you've got things to tell me about how limited I am; one of these days I'll hear them, but you, your house, and me too, we're big bare trees and the spaces between our branches, which are roots, which are leaves ("the foliate structure"), which are white nerves, red veins, blue arteries, are full of the flow of whatever nests. How we do glisten with white clouds, caterpillar treads, butterflies, and all the degrees and distances of simple sky. A's garden: three levels, river, waterfall, central lake with some smooth banks, shades into wilderness, farm animals, teahouse, millhouse; tells it leaning forward. Tells what is there in a broad way as if drawing a map, the plants are not named. With the house it's the same. "There isn't a key." I want to be as much as I can be. I want him to be as much as I am, in my own way; it's important. -
- Betsy's body in its lively accurate beauty; her high cool and determined assault on me. The strange innuendos of the group, Andy's absence like old history, my [?] and my neck lengthening in pride, resistance; she was such a queen bee, nothing true I could summon to meet it. "She's a very interesting person;" he was riveted on her and she was playing him. I didn't have a beginning of a chance.
Chilled me, chilled me stiff. Relief to go home with Luke so nice in his new jacket. Looking at the Canada books. "My wiggy, shall I show you how it opens?" "What happens when you hold it up?" "Fire comes out." "When does it do that?" "At Christmas." - The things that don't tally: how he shoots off to let her in, leaving me in the middle of a story (Roy coming to sit next to me at the lunch table at Trefeglwys) about when the sky was gold and the windows of the tall building were silver, and there was just the clear stem of a streetlamp also curving into the space. Something between them. She lies down on her back and demands they both pick her up. Steve won't. Andy trots over to her. She tells him he's not strong enough to do it alone. He backs away. My moment. I say I'm sure I can do it, and do, awkwardly. But I've dislocated her game and look at Andy as if to say "There, did you notice that, at least?" and he smiles back but I'm not sure he did. Makes me ashamed. - In a masculine land, the killing of the psychic Father often comes before any confrontation with the psychic Mother; I think it may have to. Fuller What distinguishes the hero is the deliberate conscious exposure of himself to the dangerous influence of the female, and the overcoming of man's immemorial fear of women. We need to make up something other than this psychic dualism, move our conflict patterns somewhere else, think in another way. In telling us that she must grow in animus and he in anima already you/we are telling us/ourselves that what we are already is give us a false beginning which is not our own if we integrate with what we're not we confused ourselves - as I'm confused. I know about hierarchy (hieros?), holy. Hierarchy: each of three divisions of angels, priestly government. I know that in a sense to whoever has is added the gifts of spontaneity. Which is public and social existence of the person. Rather than performance. But as for animus and anima they should not be confused with spontaneity/deliberation. Ding and dong. Nekuia - journey of Odysseus to the underworld. A woman's laughter, her fragrance, the rustling of garments as she crosses her legs, these seem more to be psychic releasers, feminine synecdoches triggering feelings of love with the same force as biological releasers, like the smell of sweat that releases the tick from sometimes years of suspended animation, and moves it to complete the cycle of its life. these icons of the female Icons of the male: arms, hands. Small bottom. The new Io, its piles like my piles of paper in which I seek so slowly to find what I should do, why I am justified in setting myself apart, what it seems to me would have been easier for a man. My gifts! Is it they, or my determination breaking through me that keeps Mari from wanting to see me, and these others not really interested. Elementary doubts, which it seems to me I could have sidestepped years ago, except for this motherish wish not to outshine anyone, in public. How stupid I make myself, so's not to offend Rosie. Make myself stupid for most people. Being strung out: the strange physical uneasiness, like nausea or like hunger, like a metallic taste in the mouth. - I wonder if it's possible for one's 'soul' to be tied to someone else's, so that the inexplicable pains that come and then vanish could be the pulls on that tie: it could be someone you didn't know, or like Dr MacIntosh: across the bridge. When I stood at the top of the bridge he was standing in his doorway, face thinner and older than I remember, holding a little new baby. Stabbed me in the stomach, where I was sore already. Held it in his left arm, against his shoulder. It was bare-legged, not more than three or four months old. He came to the story corner and stood outside. Later his wife was there too, tall snub-nosed girl, wife and mother as she is, I imagine her almost happy at it. When I came across in a while there he was at his window. (In his windbreaker, hands in its pockets, watching figure skating on television.) Couldn't look at him - I do, when I'm level with him, at the top of the bridge - turned up the hill and walked - suddenly and unconsciously swiveled right into his eyes - smash - swiveled away and felt him behind me. Bowed my head sad and shy about that, I don't want to break the spell - he stood alone at my right - then I lost him, he was talking to someone at my far left - all evening I circled looking for him but he'd gone home - what would happen if I trusted that tie. As I don't. - It seems likely that Roy has taken Luke: having done a little of what I can do to stop him - [phoned] Heathrow - I'm left remembering all the times when my body's been raked by the icy wind of his violence, cunning. Andy away. I can only be afraid. In my fear I try to be the warrior who thinks quickly, but in truth I did not think quickly, and it was my unconscious computer that told me, two hours too late, what I think is up: adding together the signs, or, if not this time, then next time. The birth certificate is gone. "Take your airplane. Take your gun to shoot Roy if he gets drunk." Luke walking to the car with pyjama bottoms slung over his shoulder, his little sneakers, green trousers, the light blue sweater. He pounded my head. I said "It's just because you're so in love with me that you're so horrible, you pumpkin." [undated letter] This will be a quick letter because I have to explain something unpleasant and ask for some help. Roy has threatened to take Luke to South Africa, to stop me from taking him to Canada. I've begun legal proceedings to stop him, and so far I've succeeded in having Luke made a ward of court. This means that both Roy and I would have to have permission of the court to leave England with Luke. In order to get permission from the court I have to demonstrate to them that if I go to Canada I will be able to support him. It would be best if I had a Canada Council Junior Artist Fellowship already, but I can't apply for one until my Natural Light film is finished, and I can't finish it until the British Arts Council give me their grant, which they haven't actually done yet. So basically what I need from you is a letter saying that you are willing to support us until either I get a teaching job at the university or else a fellowship. You won't actually have to do so, just say that you're willing and able to. You can write a separate letter, or else just put it into the body of an ordinary letter. You could say something to the effect of: Dear Ellie, yes of course I'm willing to support you and Luke if you come back to Canada, although I expect you'll soon have work, film teaching being in such demand at the moment. That's a suggestion, and a bit silly; if you'd rather not have anything to do with it all, I'd accept that too. Roy's right to see Luke is not in question - I am just trying to stop him taking Luke to South Africa, because once he got there it would be almost impossible to get him back, and that would be the last we'd see of him. If the court rules that I may go to Canada, it will probably suggest that Luke spend his summers with Roy in England, or something of that sort. Also: is it convenient for you both, at the moment, to send the other $250 left from my 'dowry,' so that it could be in the bank if I needed to move quickly? It is all a little ugly, and most of the court battle is still to come. (It isn't costing me anything as I'm eligible for legal aid.) But I have a strong case, because Roy has been so negligent in the past (except for things which the Court can't tabulate, like genuine affection). I think it will be alright. Otherwise we're fine. It's wintry here, we haven't had our usual hot Indian summery September.
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