| london volume 8 part 3 - 1974 october-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated journal] Gardening - remember "The garden breeds a longing for the wild; the wild a homesickness for the garden. Is there no way of life where the two can meet?" Aware of convictions and points of view, personal feelings. Everything that made one's own intimate vision of life, shelved; receding and falling as if shamed, into the loneliest background of consciousness. Richardson - Peter's book dead and dreamless; Home Comfort in all its baroque ideolect alive and full of nourishing dreams. - Hey: one day I'll be dead, one day perhaps I'll be old, fat and "her beauty was lost." But tonight, five minutes to twelve, Sunday, September 22, I am: not dead, not old, not ugly, not quite fat. Rich hair, a certain drawn thirty-years look, but I went to the movies by myself, peacefully, and was elegant in my long black dress and the green coat with a geranium pinned on it, hair up, and my elegance gave me authority to push the two big red drunks out of the lift when they were frightening the lift woman. I ordered them out and then I pushed them out, and knew they couldn't hurt me; all the other passengers had vanished; "Chilly cunt" he muttered. He was the one with the little girlfriend crippled just barely worse than me. Furcht Essen Seele Auf. Ferdinand of Côte d'Ivoire and I hardly remember anything except that I bled because his prick was so wide, that I could understand hardly anything he said, and the gleam on the cement gutter outside his window, Sunday afternoon when it had rained and was sunny again. Cinzano Rosso in his bed cabinet, the dirty sheets. I said to him "Je crois que je peux t'aimer un peu" and his childlike way of crying. I was moved that my impulsive gift - he accepted it. He was very firm, and broad, worked in a garage, was studying something scientific. His friends in the student café. My silly hat. And then I don't know what happened - - The whole question of eroticizing the oppressor: I'm telling Penelope [Brown] that that's just the point of being heterosexual - how it strengthens me to be able to get into close combat with somebody who is friend/enemy, to have ideology personified and so to come and go with it intimately in detail, trying and testing: the knowledge it gives. Properly erotic also because it is the oppressor, whom I equally oppress in this intimacy. - Important to win. The open clarity / and then also the gay crisp essentially closed but bright and strong clarity of combat love. - Just discovered what it is that is making me look old: the beginning of a jowl: a little soft pad along the upper jaw, that pleats back when I smile and that make the high line of my cheekbone seem to slip or double - anyway thickens it. - The Planets. I'm dancing in my clogs in the kitchen because I'm happy because: "I left my mother to draw forth from oblivion her beloved dead, while I remained dreaming of a scent and a picture that she had evoked: the smell of the soft bricks of chocolate, and the hollow flowers that bloomed beneath the paws of the vagrant cat." Colette b. 1873-1954 Sido, ou les points cardinaux: "the mariner's chart, or rose, of the neighbouring gardens." Roger Senhouse La femme cachée: the secret woman. - My mortality lives with me more and more intimately: the lump on my finger, the ache in my right ankle bone, the tiny ache in my hip. Realize how the body is weakened. Hepatitis and polio, planting my death and my ugliness. I have a gift for joy, long ago it was natural and every day, now it comes sometimes, and is an intoxication that makes me unsteady too. I feel so close to dying; survival I can't take for granted, where's my confidence in this body, which is supple and resilient? My most secret thoughts, which I don't mention, are to do with dying slowly, cancer, blood poisoning, thrombosis, and not having the whole of my life. Simply that: being cheated of my right time. Don Juan saying remember your death. I remember too much. Also because I'm afraid that thinking it will make it. It takes away my confidence and spontaneity. There are a lot of deaths. I feel it's important to be old, to last. People have crises, Colette's illness, from which she was recreated. Grandma Konrad's hard sick middle years. The body also wants to live, it shapes itself around illnesses, reinforces itself. Sometimes it takes years. It's important to survive the late youth years, it seems to me; that hardens you to survive until your sixties, and from there. It was Roy who's planted this death, and I will not be cured of it until I am cured of him. Educated, yes, I can keep that, but let me learn what it is. - The fuss about Roy's threat to kidnap Luke; my own spring into Taglichkeit, smarmy to lawyers and policemen because that's 'how you do it.' Smarmy even with Andy: it's a little disgusting. I'm genuinely afraid and am genuinely glad for his presence, but I feel there's a little corruption in the way I'm allowing myself this softness because I think it will make him feel good, and to the Heathrow sergeant and the articled clerk, and the emergency solicitor. Yeah. It does work. But in the end it damages the world. [undated letter] Thanks for your quick help, the application to the Court is underway, slow and certain. I'm almost sure to get permission to come to Canada. [My parents have sold their home quarter on the Valhalla Road.] I hope very much that whoseever it is now, the old log house can stay where it is. I still think it should be made into a guesthouse where we could take our kids to recreate the old times that, by the time they're big, will be visible nowhere else. I read today that by the time they're our age beef will be something people eat in 1" squares only on very special occasions! Does Rudy understand about not cutting down trees? Have the farmers in the Peace got the message about water tables and the value of bush conservation etc? It's cold here, the snails have dug very deep this year, which 'they' say means a hard winter. I believe it. Sappy easy green summer seems so long ago. I'm saying goodbye to my garden, giving houseplants to people I think will love them, handing my house over gradually, with cats, to Andy, who loves it already. Finding trunks. Thinking about the three or so people I'd like to take along - Sarah's one. I'll be brief, haven't many strong words in me at the moment. Luke is well. I think of you as I cut up my worn out jeans to make him lovely new overalls. Have also learned to crochet, while I wait. Brilliant yellow leaves flying these last days. [undated journal] It occurred to me that my rages of frustration are really vitality in search of its work: they make me truthful. Also silly. How uneasy I felt with Luke when he came today, grimaces of shame. Why. Because I wanted to hold him. Because I was withholding something from him: I mustn't. - Gurjieff 4th way method - self observation of physical/emotional/mental: take notes. Think up something active to do. Cast yourself in the role of a conscious human being. Act this role in public and in private . Give play only to those ideas and emotions which are unassociated with 'personality.' This will counteract repetition. Live a life of friction. Let yourself be disturbed as much as possible, but observe. To LOOK is active. You are at a disadvantage with a person who repulses or attracts you. 'Spiritual' is bad use of the world 'spirited.' The emotional body makes the spiritedness of a person. Influencing people: magnetization, competition, example. New 'gland life' of being in love. - There was no moon, except Venus on my left. Dazzlement. Instinctive love - in its manifestations of attraction, repulsion, sacrifice, courage, crime, etc, its mechanical and chemical combinations that we call love, courtship, marriage, children, family . To be in a state of instinctive love is to be in a state of danger, and to be dangerous - to oneself or to the other, or both. Because we are polarized to a great force, it is only fortune that keeps us from damaging someone. Love without knowledge is demoniac. And to lament, suffer, explain, justify - all of this is to show lack of knowledge, lack of strength . It is insanity to speak of beings as if they were capable of acting consciously; and if one does act consciously, who is there to understand such action? - Perilous dearness of Luke: I was standing inside the Centre's kitchen [community centre], the rolling wall drawn down to a foot from the floor, looking in sad derision at all the anxious mothers havin' a meeting, when Luke rolled under the floor. He'd recognized my shoes. Stood near me; there's a lot of sadness in him now. He isn't the bright brisk boy he was last spring, that's true, and whether it's because Roy isn't at the commune or because he's shared around a lot all this summer, he is sad and clings to me. Why did he never talk about Prue? He doesn't complain even about Roy shouting at me. Oh Luke. (Putting crayons into their box) "Went to sleep, another went to sleep, another," etc, "then came the other one to bomb them kchchchch." "One fell up one fell down" "These got up and played." "But then one got back. One went to sleep that was too little. One went to sleep that was all right. One went to sleep that was all right. One went to sleep that was too little. One went to sleep that was alright." "The green bomb. Oooh. Oooh." "Ellie look at all the ways this can be." (Flies the box.) "Flew away, because they were tired of this place." - A sez: running out of my stock of emotions. When I go on, saying what shall I do what shall I do, he just wants me to weep because I'm leaving him. What's he on about. I say I don't know what it's got to do with me, don't know who I am for him - so he is kind, and that's valuable, but to whom - and I hold out, convinced that we aren't loved when we are not met - same drama. - Monday, rain, Rosalynd [de Lanerolle], the best thing today Ekbal so pretty, saying [about her affair with the Khankha's leader Fazal] "Because there is still contact," "Not love, not hate, maybe, something else completely." "Now it is war; then it was just that I would not cooperate, but now it is war." Fazal's two wives with pins in their noses. She's like Elias, the same voice, same strong cheeks. Her blond and pink baby. Luke's little clothes. Rosalynd's garden. My jokes so 'well' taken at the meeting. Mafalda, lady, teacher, where are you. Saturday's bed next to the firelight, the moon passing from one edge of the window to the other. Currents running strong and direct to make good jokes, good fucking. Your hands Moustache, your face, full and empty, the red cuffs loose around your wrists, the scar stiffening your lip like a seam, we talk about the daughter we won't have, you're full of tears. At first. It's hard to be so lonely. Who are you. For the first time I could almost dream it too; I could dream it. - Madeleine so smug [Roy's latest] on the wire, she silenced Roy, "Why don't you call him by his Christian name?" Strong but odd, inconsistent, "I've been a teacher," a high-handed ec-centric buzz - is she a maniac, what's a maniac. "I hate you for it, and I'm willing to stand up and say so to any court in the land." "A very sensitive man," "You're very lucky; many another father, especially if he's not married, would have gone off to Timbuctu the day after the child was born, or the day before, for that matter." "Why do you keep saying 'I'm so weak, I need help.'" "I've raised three children myself. The children come first." How mad we all are. How near is the bottomless pit. Legs and arms like planks, stiff with fear. You're useless, have no mothering arts. - Painting, alone in the cold house [a job painting for Ros, her new house in Hampstead], coming so near to - fear making my hand shake, feeling how Roy is the wound in my life, the hole through which pours all violence, crime, uncertainty, panic. Separates me from Luke, makes me tight and closed, careful and resentful. They unnerve me, they are trying to unnerve me. What happened to Patrick Scofield [Roy's Madeleine's ex who killed himself]? Necrophilia because she murdered him? They seem to live on the other side of the border, where anything and even murder can happen. There are too many of them. They unnerve me. I have to keep my nerve. It's a strong test. Luke the pawn, certainly hers. Roy feels for him but can't untangle him from himself. - Tony: two stories from New York. Long drunken evening in gay bars, about 4 a.m. he and John head for home, he suddenly says see you and runs as fast as he can, away, until he can't run any more. He is in a narrow street with no lights. A white Cadillac stops and a black girl in a white 'silk' (satin?) trouser suit gets out the passenger side. They arrive at the back of the car at the same moment. She's beautiful, smiles at him, says do you mind if I ? Takes down her white trousers, squats down and pees, still smiling up at him. Then pulls them up again and gets back into the car. Another morning goes to bed at six and wakes at eight, very clear-headed. Goes into a state he describes as a conversation between the various people he is, among them his essential self. It is not exactly a conversation, he can't be clearer than that. The essential self is present, it seems, when the other characters are saying things which are untrue, mistakes or lies. The essential self is only there when they are recognized as untrue. He falls asleep and there is a loud buzzing in his ears. He can't wake up, but eventually does. He's frightened but decides to risk going to sleep again. Same thing happens. It is even more difficult to waken and when at last he forces himself out he stays awake for a while. Calls it his vision. Its use, he says, is that he feels he can call it up again. Something to discipline himself toward. Holland Park, being alone as it became dark. The yellow trees on its edge spotlit. Having to get out over a fence. The bar, in which I could create the Farthest East. Sarah at the [Steiner] bookshop, in her animation releasing the shy woman who employs her. She's a dervish like me when she's let to be. Pizza. Something a little off-centre in the talk, it was a little forced, maybe by sitting opposite, but in it the bottom sense of here's Sarah with whom I could associate - no guff. Bursting with crossness, laughter. The exchange with our dry waitress: "White or black?" "Dark brown." "Dark brown." Sense of secure mutual choice. How she says only half sentences. You're a great night-classer. - Mark the little ways in which I am closing a circle: once again wearing the black shoelace [as a necklace], leather jacket. Being about to start sewing a skirt. Ian. Ie encysting. - John Rowley sitting in front of me with tears dropping down from his glasses. "It's you who're the bone fire. I got so much heat from you! Don't you know what you are, to everybody who knows you?" - With both Tony and Sarah, feeling that half, more than half, in fact almost all of the exchange is formal and unnecessary, like morons speaking in imitation of ourselves; Charlie MacCarthys, whose manipulators could communicate economically in quite another way. Least said; we're still impersonating idiots. Eg the commune. - Kneeling, head bent down under A's arm, flash: image of sitting on a raft looking down at water gliding very muscularly and quietly - it was illustrating the thought that I wait sometimes patiently, sometimes not, to see what my feelings say: it pleased me to feel so warmed and given when I put my face against A's plaid soap-smelling shoulder - because they are my permission to act - or my withheld permission. It seemed curious: I am as if obedient to orders coming from somewhere else, although the orders can please or displease me. The curiousness, the paradox, is that I stake my honesty, integrity, my rightness, on acting in relation to what I feel, while relating to those feelings as if they came from outside me. And also those feelings being completely liquid, unrelated to logic or reasons: they are prior to logic. It's an obedience to the body and all that implies of obedience to weather, season, stars, etc. Very paradoxical. Yet seems fine. Opposed to it is all my argument about managing one's relationship, knowing one's own circles: it isn't contradictory but it is the question of will to obedience. Also double-edged balance. Amn't saying anything new but the image was good and grew precisely out of my posture at the time I was having the thought. Like theories of dream genesis. - Atwood: Seferis. Yoga class: pleasure, dim and obscure, of 'saying' the vertebrae of the spine. Reaching the brain and holding it like a warm unbaked loaf in both hands: it was giving yellow light. The strange difficulty of imagining the spine in its real position: I seemed to hold it projected in front of me and then take it around the side and try to press it into my back. Couldn't hold it there. Odd experience of a room full of alert attractive people. - Dreams: again the family brawl. A dark house, chasing through it. Defending Mother against raving Father. Judy with me, we tried to do battle. As I hid outside I heard them playing games inside, Father with Judy on his side, arranging to win. Afterwards, trying to sneak away with Judy. She giggled, I couldn't hush her, realized that she was drunk and that she wanted to be caught. Left her to it. Wood like behind the old house. Two things: sexual rivalry with Father for Judy. The same hit and run tactics I still use with Roy. In the television play last night, a brown box. Looking inside, there nested in crushed newspaper, a brown egg. Ooo we both said. - Kew: real cutting air. Ice palace house frosted inside with banana trees' breath. Most wonderful of all, the jets rising from the southeast and struck by sun at an angle that made their fins seem transparent at the edges, like the fish in the aquarium on the way. (There was a tank full of marble angels who hung, mostly facing the same way, inside the mirrored black sides of their tank, lit from a hidden spot and suspended like a constellation.) - A tribe in Brazil have a festival - men whittle birds from sticks and put them onto poles through holes in their bellies - wrap stick with bark underneath to keep them at intervals, two or three to a pole. Then the poles - very narrow - are stuck into the ground in a rough circle at the centre of the huts. One morning the chief takes them out and sets them up one by one among the trees of the piqui orchard, meanwhile scolding the gods. Mehinacu, Xingu National Park, central Brazil. - Steph's father has just left, Steph asks Luke "Do you know where your daddy is?" "I don't know, at the moment. He isn't kind you know. He fights with my mum. She fights him too. They fight each other." He wore A's top hat to Tony's Café for breakfast. Tonight (chips keeping warm in my armpit, cold hands) when we bought grapes at the Greek shop the counter girl said "Where's your hat?" Luke pronounced "It isn't mine you know, it belongs to someone who's living with us and he's going to live there for ever." Rosie kindly teaching me what she knows about the guitar. Standing at the sink bending awkwardly - "My muscles were stolen, maybe when I was at school." Sometimes her language is good. - The notion hatching of trying to keep a book of everyday observations, the sums that arrive in my head, or the questions, because they seem to be hooks - no the something, the speck on which to crystallize. That, and to catch Luke. Again and again think how it wears me out to be idle. The things that need to be made visible. Newton: "To myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." [undated letter] [Luke and I were hiding from Roy in Jane Downey's squat in East London.] I've thought of you today - sitting in a very decayed back parlour, feet on the fender in front of a blazing coal fire, with a book found in the cupboard - an old book, paper very yellow and brittle, printed in double columns like the Bible, between emerald green paper covers: [sketch] DAVID COPPERFIELD BY CHARLES DICKENS VOL. 1 Printed in 1866 by Virtue & Co, Printers, of City Road (two miles from here) and published by Chapman and Hall of 193 Piccadilly. Steerforth lived with his mother in Highgate - you've gone up and down Highgate Road many times, and once actually stopped in Highgate, I think, to buy fish and chips. And in Camden Town, where David found Traddles lodged with Mr and Mrs Micawber: I found that the street was not as desirable a one as I could have wished it to be, for the sake of Traddles. The inhabitants seemed to have a propensity to throw any little trifles they were not in want of, into the road: which not only made it rank and sloppy, but untidy too, on account of the cabbage leaves. David was articled near Lincoln's Inn Fields, where my solicitor was articled! (A lovely girl she is.) Blackfriars, where Murdstone's wine business was, is just upriver from Jane's house (East India Docks) where we are. Also thought of you because of a sharp attack of some gynecological trouble I haven't had since one of the last times I was at La Glace - when you said I looked very green - and the grass when I looked at it seemed unusually green as well. [It was likely toxic shock syndrome from tampax.] Luke's been especially kind, patting my head, "It's all right, Ellie," and kissing me many times. There he is now, naked and running in circles by himself, very sturdy brown body. Now he's on his back, rolling, singing to himself "Every little soul must shine, shine ." Dickens - I've been feeling I'd like to write about my own troubles the way he writes about David's. Such affection he has for naivete and mistake-making, if I had such affection for my own foolishness and fatedness I could have more affection for other people's intolerable limitedness. Is that for my old age? I've been living with Martha Quest again - have you found any Doris Lessing yet? Something she said in Four-Gated City made me think of you - it was about grown-ups in relation to children: that grown-ups feel they must take various positions, remonstrances, nags, worries, that they have no actual feelings about, or which they may even mistrust themselves, because they have their roles to play - that of Older and Wiser, or Mother or Grandfather. Sometimes I think your protests to me are of that kind, and that my liberties, if you allowed yourself to be pleased, would please you, even if they didn't please Older and Wiser. - All's well - our hearing is on Friday - it may have to be adjourned and so take longer but maybe it will soon be over. I'm longing for my new lived and to be able to work again. I strangle myself with my own energy when I can't work. [undated journal] Luke's story about Eskimos: "But I really saw an Eskimo house." "You haven't ever -." "Yes, when you wasn't there, in Wales with Jud, an' I went far away by myself, except there was a tiny thing with me." "What kind of tiny thing?" "A tiny thing like a bee." "So you went far away by yourself?" "No, me and the tiny thing: the Eskimo house had a hundred Eskimos -." "Eskimo houses are very little." "This was an Eskimo house what you never saw, what has sixteen stories. I'll show you, one, two, three, four, five, six, eight ." "Seven." "Seven, eighteen ." "Eight." "Eight, eleventeen ." "Nine." "Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, sixteen ." "Thirteen." "Thirteen, eleventeen ." (Etc.) "And what happened when you got there?" "The Eskimos said come inside and I went inside and I went upstairs and looked at their beds." "Did you have anything to eat?" "Yes, I had a biscuit and a cheese sandwich and some milk. And some orange what you never saw." - morainic ridges, drumlins, and long sinuous eskers of sand and gravel People of the Deer. Taiga. - Out of the Silent Planet
It was not, like fading light upon the Earth, mixed with the increasing moisture and phantom colours of the air. You might halve its intensity, Ransome perceived, and the remaining half would still be what the whole had been - merely less, not other. They were falling out of the heaven, into a world. Nothing in Ransome's adventures bit so deeply into Ransome's mind as this. He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty that never after deserted him, he saw the planets - the 'earths' he called them in his thought - as mere holes or gaps in the living heavens - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from the surrounding brightness. And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends. Is that the real void, the real death? Unless he groped for the idea unless visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of something else. Something that is to the bright unchanging heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths . He saw a pale blue sky - a fine winter-morning sky as it would have been on Earth - a great billowing cumular mass of rose-colour lower down a bright, pale world - a water-colour world. Lewis' method of using vision to tell things - ie he sees his first sorns by their reflections on the pale blue soda-water, white streaks. "Fully imagined," something like that. Word 'beast.' the shy, ineluctable attraction of unlike for unlike The parallel track here is my own science fiction, the play house, into which can go parallel things: Sarah and Mafalda and Doris Lessing. True thoughts. DL who is godmother to many of these thoughts. Children. Patriarchy. Rescue for Olivia. To actually think. Another school. Sal [Potter]. Bildungsroman politics of experience. (Whoever you vote for, the government will be elected.) Mother. Language re-forms. A cultural communism of reference, praise "to each according to her need." A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing into something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. The hnakra is our enemy, but he is also our beloved. had heard of the hunted man's irrational instinct to give himself up - indeed, he had felt it himself in dreams. Body is movement. If it is at one speed, you smell something; if at another, you hear a sound; if at another, you see a sight; if at another, you neither see nor hear nor smell, nor know the body in any way. But mark this, Small One, that the two ends meet . If the movement is faster, then that which moves is more nearly in two places at once in the end the moving thing would be in all places at once. Start from where we are, Small One. The swiftest thing that touches our senses is light. We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge - the last thing we know before things become too swift for us. But the body of an eldil is a movement swift as light; you may say its body is made of light, but not of that which is light for the eldil. His 'light' is a swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can touch and bathe in - even a dark thing which is not illumined by the swifter. recurrent human tradition of bright elusive people sometimes appearing on earth They have not the patience to make easy things however useful they would be. stone cauliflowers the size of cathedrals and the colour of pale rose appeared hard as stone in substance, but puffed above and stalked beneath like vegetation They are above the atmospheric limit and were once inhabited, in warmer days. an almost circular lake - a sapphire twelve miles in diameter set in a border of purple forest. Amidst the lake there rose an island of pale red, smooth to the summit, and on the summit a grove of such trees as man had never seen. Their smooth columns had the gentle swell of the noblest beech trees: but these were taller than a cathedral spire on earth, and at their tops they broke rather into flower than foliage, into golden flower bright as tulip, still as rock, and huge as summer cloud. - Dreams, last two nights: 1. a flat, a room where I was going to live with Luke, a dormer window, wallpaper. Downstairs a landlady with various objects, and a story of the history of her house or ancestors. Looking out the upstairs window to see lilacs on bare branches, told me what time of year it was. Judy? Someone else, rugs. The landlady and her things seem obscurely familiar - although now I can't remember what they were. 2. Kinderwater's house, a farm we took over, a barn with great loose spaces between rafters, we wanted to use it, young people, enthusiasm for Father's having bought it, other-dream connected movement in Grandfather's meadow area, spaces; in the house a closet with things in it, old clothes hanging up, boxes. Some things that delighted me, which I claimed, a brilliant flowered silk dress, mid-calf length, tied at the waist, loose sleeves. Another silk dress. My dream-thoughts referred me out to the black dress I found at Buster's house. Dreams that are detailed, expanding, full of the sense of adventure and pleasure, haven't had such in a long time. These are the two old strong patterns, 1. house-hunting, careful perception of rooms as in childhood, 2. finding hidden (old) treasures and appropriating them. Luke today lying asleep by the fire, in little cotton pants and vest, his beautiful limbs, his beautiful face. Full of inventions he is. His shit going sixty miles an hour. Sixty miles, that's as far as the Sufi farm, in one hour, as from 6 o'clock to 7 o'clock I say. "Then my shit will go to the Sufi farm, and it will stay there for ever." "No, maybe it will come to the door," I say, "and knock 'Plop! Plop!' and say 'I'm back!' and then I will say ugck! and slam the door." "The toilet would have to be like its door" sez Luke. This as he's balanced on the toilet seat, knickers holding his knees together, feet back on either side the bowl. How silly and didactic I am with John and Andy. Luke and I as if in love these days, grace gets to us at the same time. This morning as I slept he sat bare-bum in my bed looking at his Richard Scary book, feet under my quilt. Later when I wouldn't read it to him his face screwed up and he wept in frustration saying "But I can't read! I want to and I can't!" but then collected his wits to find a way round: "But do you like my nursery rhyme book?" Analogues. The quest of this special classical beauty, the sense of harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. Poincaré and the subliminal self which selects mathematical solutions on the basis of mathematical beauty. Arete: Mafalda's magic. The word that hung on in me from Philosophy 100, Dean Duncan on the platform in Ellis Hall. Being good at what you do. Phaedrus wolf. Phaedra? [undated letter] Can't remember if I've told you that our hearing has been postponed until after Christmas, because Roy decided to go to South Africa for a holiday just after this date was set. I suspect he's gone to get money from his sugar daddy for his defense. Anyway. So we have to stay between lives for another two months, and that seems very hard. In a conference with my solicitor we decided that we should probably have another letter from you, giving more detail. [More about what to say.] It's raining, we're restless and counting the days. I'm comforting myself with that very old pastime of mine, drawing houses. Luke is building wonderful things out of lego and wood. I've got books out of the library about Canada and we spend hours looking at the books of photographs (Canada Year of the Land) so we have something to dream on. Andy is teaching me to play the harmonica, and the tunes I find coming out of it are Father's old tunes: Wir gehen, wir gehen, wir gehen zum / Hause Gottes hin / und woll-en . You have snow by now. What a long time since we've seen snow. Wish it was possible to have blue-shadowed snow, clear sunlit white/black/blue spaces without paralyzing cold. Through our front window it is rainy summer; the big privet hedge keeps its leaves on, and green. Through the back window it's winter, bare sticks held out stiffly on dry poles, lines of water drops hanging on them. Inside, geraniums doing well, getting ready for their winter blooming. The coal fire breathing heavily. The cats fighting, coming and going through the hole in the window pane, their door. Don't worry, I'm sure we'll be allowed to come, if we prepare our case as well as we can and if everybody prays. (Although I suspect Catherine will be praying for the other side; what happens then?) [undated journal] The thought that's behind the thought I think I'm thinking. Once I caught a window in a frame [sketch]. Once a sort of parallel track [sketch]. It was as if I could see the physical form of the thought. As if I give myself thoughts in the modes of House. All the thoughts I have, anchored in House. Vivid day on the scaffolding. Balanced on carefully chosen points like yoga, paying single attention to the line where dark indigo met white - Rosalynd in the next room, her robust laugh, sense of friendly tolerance going on constantly, on the telephone, to people stopping by; her kind careful attention to whoever is there, food, warmth, seasoned judgment, children accommodated, her own conversation without ---? Offered in child manner as something interesting, information. She was relaxing me. That, and my work, having something to do there; I think I've never liked her so much as today. And she looked pretty, mass of hair, and a bit flushed. - b. 1931. Bridgit Riley catalogue: concerned consistently with the physical expression of states of psychic ease, tension, repose, or disequilibrium revelatory disruptions of ordered progression. above all in releasing dormant or perilously invisible energies from colour and light . 4-part fugal interplay between colour, movement-direction, speed and shape care for structure, counterpoint, pitch, tonal modulations and harmonies also intent upon climax, but as crescendo: with slow, fast, or abrupt colour transitions as contributory movement; with changes of tempo; drastic convergence or divergence, and other near-organic issues release formal and harmonic energies in the toughest and most radical, certainly the least ingratiating way David Thompson television film on Fall (1963). Check it out, teaching purposes. The basis of my paintings is this: that in each of them a particular situation is stated. Certain elements within that situation remain constant. Others precipitate the destruction of themselves by themselves. Recurrently, as a result of the cyclic movement of repose, disturbance and repose, the original situation is re-stated. Other polarities which find an echo in the depths of our psychic being are those of static and active, fast and slow, or warm and cold. Repetition, contrast, calculated reversal and counterpoint also parallel the basis of our emotional structure. Visual speed? a sequence of colours or forms which control an optical speed The sense of a 'work' that is orderly investigation, which leaves beautiful, fruitful evidence of itself, and which adds up to a life. The flow of vitality through the work is constant, unswerving, and consistently eliminates the toxic qualities from whatever she reveals so that the tonic energies, in exactly calculated quantity and degree, survive unscathed in pristine force each painting in impact is a joyous celebration of truth: these paintings are optimistic affirmations of what an alert, fluid relationship between the eye and the imagination can release. She has, as an artist, the strength of her convictions to an unusual degree and these spring from a heightened awareness of life in all its intricacies. This was her first contact with an appropriately stimulating intellectual level of thought and conjecture. She was then 27. When she was 29 "her first characteristic studies and paintings." - Mafalda says "I feel it in me like crazy." I'm saying it's a hopeful time - Sheila looking so solid and physical - but am scared. Thinking about Jud, all her anxieties. Luke refusing to come with me. The other night with A talking about my little girl, being interviewed about her and finding her clear. She's half my imaginary doctor in fact. There's an edge off my mind tonight. Maybe it's the panic, that absence. My generation of women. It's part of the film what's there to find. I think I'm frightened of it because I'm not quite truthful. Sarah's such a sister. [notes on etymology of gen- words] Time to say something about 'men' - reflected back off my reflections
on Penelope. She: her good shapely air force jacket, and the white scarf
like a wartime flier, her big black boots ("These are men's" said
the woman at the baths, "No they're mine" she said). Bearlike
and with nothing graceful about her, except the points of her breasts when
we exchanged nakedness, putting on swimming costumes above the heads of
our four little people. (I expect her to fancy me. I wore the plaid shirt
on purpose.) But graceful all the same, round. When I imagine her as the
kind of other I could touch - it's as if she's of the third sex, like me.
it wouldn't be the sort of mythological other the man is: tenderness evoked
by shirts that smell good, head on shoulder etc (I was surprised to see
Andy nearly as tall as Roy, as if it were a measure of my experience) nor
the sort of being Jud suggests, fragile at the shoulders, creaturish. Her
face with its round curve of lower lip and its level eyes, look of authority
like a friar. Did she feel her body in its wet bathing costume compact itself
with consciousness when I looked at her? Right. She has taste, she tastes
what she wears, her house, room, what she cooks. "'Elope is my mummy"
says Georgia, and I believe it; Elope is mother enough for Georgie, who's
a roaring girl - green eyepaint, smiling, punching, straightforward. Luke
with those children seems too sophisticated; he sat in the wing chair with
a book; red and blue, for a moment composed and calm - Leni opened the door
to say "And look what he became!" when I showed Eleanor his picture.
He seems already indirect, not devious but too complex to be singly true.
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