| london volume 8 part 4 - 1974 november-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[undated journal] The Mother and the Whore - full of thoughts. Veronica, and how she spoke her thoughts - her long silence and then her beautiful drunken speech - tears, she turned her head back and forth between the man and Marie - "histoires de culs" - "Baizer, je m'en fiche, je baize n'importe qui, baizer, c'est de la poussière, sauf quand les gens le font parce qu'ils s'aiment et veulent faire un enfant qui leur ressemble ." Marie making histrionic gestures, everyone speaking their minds, it was a style to imitate. Madeleine said on the telephone this morning that Eugene had beaten her and she had broken his head with a flower pot, "All the nice straight people in this high rise hotel are telling me I'm doing the right thing and that makes me think I must not be doing the right thing at all." When I told Andy he said "There isn't much love around these days is there." How I feel about people. When I'm irritated I think of the quotation I painted over with white paint - "People must never serve a preordained purpose - play with colors as they will, they are all black." Betsy, says A, gets along with nobody, they always disappoint in her in the end. Her story of Pete, who told her she was too ordinary for him. My story of still never deciding whether I'm mediocre or especially gifted. The obvious answer - it's up to me to decide. But for a while it has to be a drastic decision. Until it becomes a habit - back there, the two clues stocked for later: choose danger, and give myself the role of the active person: play the warrior. Bought a harmonica. The mountain fiddle: want it because of the way it sweeps out sideways, it swings free; the guitar has always seemed cramped to me, hunched, narrow, confined in verticals and horizontals, not that it had occurred to me before. -
- Telling Luke a story to calm myself: back to the queen with twelve children, living in a castle on a round meadow surrounded by thick forest: the children run down the path singly, they flash through, they come to the light; round stones, and then sand, and then the ocean stirring itself like a shiver on a cow's hide: they swim, the eldest teaching the youngest. In the afternoon six grannies come to visit. They are given soup. ("What do they make with Lego?") Everyone lies quietly in the grass and listens to tiny sounds - the whisper of butterfly wings, the breath of tiny animals, the faraway sound of waves on tiny pebbles. They bring paints, and for the grandmothers. They run down through the forest, slowly, to let the grannies keep up, they row them up along the shoreline and see two panthers staring out to sea. Seagulls sit motionless on the boats' rims, listening to their conversation, to learn human speech. They turn and are brought back with the tide, it is blue evening, they mount the path slowly, and it is very dark in the woods. Their mother the queen has made them pie and they eat at the kitchen table, next to the hearth. When they have eaten they sing songs; they drink a little hot wine and go to their room, bring blankets out from the cupboards, spread them over each other on the furry warm rug, sleep in firelight. Usually, in the mornings, they work on their concerto, words, music, many instruments. Their mother the queen plays flute on the rooftop. In the forest, in the darker side, is the wise woman who teaches them. - Do other people have such a paralyzing sense of wronging other people by simply not choosing them equivocally, ie not loving them. If I don't love you with all my heart, nothing you get from me is worth having: all I give you is bad for you. This barren time, what could it grow - try to think of dangers to anima-te it. The photographs, but how to extend that. The generation film. Writing, Keith. Honesty. Sal. Mari. Sheila. People who move me to love because of the sharpness of their isolation, and if they are beautiful too. - Roy's child's hands - make me think of an old mongoloid's. Tony: try to find a summary for that encounter. 1. the authority and sensitivity in his bland-looking hands, I can fall into them with perfect safety. 2. his determination which I can trust in the same way. "You can repeat yourself about that," he says, "because I sense you are looking at the thing and not the story." About this winter, he said "There is no sheen, or lustre, in anything." [letter - December] Is the doctor able to help your menopausal troubles? I'm having a change-of-life twinges too, slightly different, having to do with being nearly 30 and finding on my face all the little signs of not being a young woman any more. I'm hoping to get the distress over with before my birthday and thereafter not have to think about it any more. In some ways I feel the prime of life is beginning, I'm ready to join the life of the world and make things. But it was always such a useful prop to be an attractive young woman, I've got to learn to get along without that now; one doesn't know how much depended on it until faced with having to do without it. At least my friends are all getting older too, that makes it easier. I think I'll resolve, after thirty, never to speak about it again. Judy's written to say we're welcome. Lots of people are writing me letters, as if they know I need them. [undated journal] No one has written about the phenomenology of being a parent. All the thoughts it makes. - To the far side of the Nahanni, on the inner flank of the river's hinge, the way was barred by the high standing wave which reached from the cliff to the further of the two whirlpools. For the heat waves of an advancing fire move far ahead of it, until the brush is tinder dry. Then, all of a sudden, the undergrowth will reach a flashpoint of heat and ignite far in advance of the main fire. Sometimes, too, burning branches and showers of sparks are blown miles ahead of the conflagration, often over the heads of the firefighters and unbeknown to them. One such spark is sufficient to detonate a heat flashpoint, whereupon an explosion occurs which may burn up the entire length of a tree. This is known as a timber torch or crown candle. Once the fire has reached the ceiling of the forest it spreads with incredible speed from tree to tree. Fiennes - Dreamed the following night: I visit Penelope, to say goodbye (her place is my childhood house); against my intentions my parents are there as well; she seems to retreat from the lot of us, I hear her practice an instrument in the bedroom. I decide to leave, go to tell her, and up telling her that I can't stay because (putting these words down is like putting down planks to cross spring runoff mud) I have the horrors, indicate my mother lying dead in the mud, in a wedding dress, while I can at the same time see her standing alive at a distance, but a tall blond woman. Something more of the same. Then Penelope is walking partway with me, I am going to Vancouver. There's a road we cross, obstacles, sun. Obscure sense of all of these. In the corner I stop, put my hands in the sides of her dungarees and hold her around her firm middle, my arms crossing her back. Hold her for a long time, warm and peaceful. Then I am in Vancouver on my own, I'm anxious not to lose my money and papers, I go through a series of cafes and see how cheap the Chinese (not quite) food is. Walk outside, around a large square, see large parks full of trees covered with autumn leaves. Don't want to leave this dream, hang onto it until 12:30. At the beginning of the dream it seems Penelope is like a parent, she's there in my mother's bedroom. There's a connection with last night, Andy pitching himself at me and just hanging onto me with wordless loneliness, it was like the moment my mother folded me against her and I could only wait for her to finish because it left me completely cold, recognizing her intensity but having to be true to its inability to touch me. That's sad. Later in the dream Penelope - this is full of cross reference - when I hold her is the antithesis of my mother holding me, she's balanced, and I am. *Sad but also angry that they are unable to touch me when I want to be touched and that I must, as well as that disappointment, accept that I am bad for not being touched. Begins to remind me of deadlock with Peter, though that doesn't make me much wiser. "My instincts are against it." Lack of coincidence of fantasy. When I try to think of why I accept or reject fundamentally, the reasons I tell myself founder (if I compare how I am with people for instance) and it seems to come down to some sort of unconscious posture toward or away from. Is that 'vibrations'? Or what? I can think people are good, true, intelligent, pretty, but the things, qualities, that are important to me seem to be post factum. Long ago when A lived up the hill, the quality that seemed to turn me was - self possession full of secrets. But it isn't the secrets that are essential - it is the possibility that they might be - that calm behind the eyes, which smiles right through - which will smile right through my being because it knows me, is neither less nor more, fundamentally, so meets me, as I meet it, with terror and composure. - Dee talking about the Snow Queen. Then we read it. Jud telling Wilde's tale about the nightingale and the rose, all night the nightingale sang about summer, the grass, the wind, and its blood flowed through the thorn into the rose, which became pink, and then red, and at dawn the nightingale died. The young man plucked it and quickly took it to the woman, but she had received a diamond necklace and would not have it. He threw it away, and a wagon wheel crushed it. "I didn't care anyway" said the young man. "I don't know why it always makes me want to cry" says Jud. - Voyage to Venus (Perelandra) And it went through me from chest to groin like the thrill that goes through you when you think you have lost your hold while climbing a cliff. Natvilcius: (De Aethereo et aerio Corpore, Basel 1927, II.xii) liquet simplicem flammen sensibilus nostris subjectam non esse corpus proprie dictum angeli vel daemonus, sed potius aut illius corporis sensorium aut superficiem corporis in coelesti dispositione locorum supra cogitationes humanas existentis. Lewis's happy imagination of paradise - rare man, he should be in charge of it. Imagining worlds of pleasure, ie pleasures of intelligent senses. Sensations. Difference between pronouncing and thinking - ie tâter, palpate. a naked man and a wise dragon A naked woman and a wise dragon - a woman cd never write that, she would have to say a naked being, human - ie language of gender colonized and shamed. To be the figure that he was in this unearthly pattern appeared sufficient. The extraordinary experience of dipping his mouth in a sea that was higher than the shore. Carpets of land floating, 30 acres, on mountainous seas. Invent a mate. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of the good you had got. Double gestures - research, elaborate, invent, build, the true picture of what you desire: and from that turn gladly to what you find; sustaining both at once and compromising neither, and without pain or division? - It's complete black night on Venus: "Here it is not all black. The heavens had vanished, and the surface of the sea; but far, far below him in the heart of the vacancy through which he appeared to be traveling, strange bursting star shells and writhing streaks of a bluish-green luminosity appeared." The shock of the moment when he suggests obliquely, or I do, the matted island as a placenta. "The cord of longing which drew him to the invisible isle." things which made me feel like a tree whose branches are growing wider and wider apart This creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. It regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon, which I had no more wish to employ in its off-duty hours than . The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. - The truth then be thy dower, Lear to Cordelia. Edmond the base shall triumph o'er the legitimate The fool-licensed madness Shakespeare - language - strain; roots. Wrench. - Or like when the singing beast leaves the dumb dam who suckled him. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spar, but the hands of the other were open, with palms toward him the real meaning of gender . Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. - When I pray it's to marry my warrior and little girl. That is not sex or gender, that's a great need to be everything, prove that one doesn't have to choose one or the other. But? A says I'm narrow and will be narrower. Still it's what I say in my narrowness that he'll remember - that will still speak to him, and he'll say - oh, that's what she meant - when I'm long past. My sweetness such as it is - will vanish; although his own, he'll remember as I do mine with Roy. Conciliation and apology are nothing. Having the strength of your perception means nearly everyone resents you, except those who equally have the strength of their own. No question of not trying to be a warrior. It's like wanting to be skilled at what you do, or wanting to be and to feel skilled. It's balancing, like surfing. No question of not wishing to be the little girl again, because she transformed the world into itself, made it vivid with love and clarity. It isn't clear to me whether I do in any sense have a choice. The question's with me constantly. I'm saying that in a humble quiet little voice. [undated notebook] [sketch of dresses] - Felixstowe Ferry: The red, white sailed boat, high masts, worn blue, low body, very beautiful lines, turning in the almost iron grey sea; silver light on it, air dense (Mossy says it's like paper, you can make a hole in it), pebbles brown grey. Metallic light on water and beach, also sky, but metal with a patina, the salty moisture of the air. The house, solidly surrounded by a brown fence, painted shiny red with a certain blue on the upper verandah railings, on doors, windows, lower dormers. Slate roof. [sketch] Luke with his underpants full of stones running around us in circles shrieking. All day wanting to go home to his Lego house. Waking this morning as I carried him out, immediately alert, saying "Where are we going?" "To the sea." Now in bed before falling asleep he said "Can you see Andy? He said he would stay a week." - Write about Mary first coming to the granary with its fire: "the beginnings, before its dry-eyed acceptance, of womanly tragedy; the loss of self in the procession of unfamiliar unwanted things. In the company of a partner already re-immersed in his own family life." [DR] - Peter's book "attempt to place surrealism" Doing the proper thing - historical analysis. Because of the inescapably real nature of the cinematic image, the form of the film is less like a dream than like a memory of a dream. maintains a real gentleness his dissatisfactions are inflicted upon himself. The Shame - "For all their surface astringency a feeling of hysteria which is inseparable from a failure of thought." Anna's passion for the certainty of truth [list of women poets, presumably for the poetry class] [Barbara Meter's address in Amsterdam] [notes on Jane Clark's water films] [list of things to deal with: pack or get rid of] [list of work hours] Dreamed, next to Andy, being hidden at the top of a dark staircase and seeing receding in the distance, brightly lit in a narrow track like a circus corridor, a single tiger, walking ahead of a swaying cage covered with jasmine vines. Last night among frustrated dreams of BC: a meeting with Frank, who was waiting for a bus to leave. He didn't recognize me, I just looked into his face steadily, until he said "It is really you." Saw both of us from outside. There were rooms, houses? one beside a river, old boots in it, a garden? Four pairs of wellingtons. Judy: touching her nipples, I simply came. Judy, wherever you are. The story of how your body grew under my eyes. That's a story for AQ [Amazon Quarterly]. Those last nights of dreams have had a quality that seems distinctive, as if a new person is dreaming them. How dreams seem a drawer jammed shut, so we can only put our hand in and feel for the end nearest us. Not even see in. I'm asking for wisdom: what to do with Luke and my life, to make it safe and good, to spare Luke the seduction of Roy. It seems clear what I must do; but how to sustain it! Fear bursting in. How to do it right. Feeling Andy as a loop back to before Roy, back to Frank in some ways. You could axe me little man but you couldn't hurt me more than what I have been. What I didn't say about you in your journal, because I didn't feel close enough to you. Luke yesterday striking me in the face again and again; did it to Jud too. "The mineral body decays." - Luke romping in the downstairs sitting room, in his tights, faded yellow brown room, said "Ellie you know what is the problem, I'm going to die for ever and ever, because my tummy hurts." I huggled him and said "No no you aren't going to die at all, you're just liddul, you're only liddle." The car wash, the wasteland, the Borg dock with the river brown and the land and air grey, two colors in the mist, a beautiful boat opposite, green, moored at a warehouse, the slow barge and rapid hovercraft. The gasworks, the scaffolded chimney. Andy's wet dream: I'm touching him very lightly all over his body, it takes a long time, at last I touch him there and he comes, so gently it's like an extension of the touch. Radiant women: LM Montgomery, Ashton-Warner, Mary Richards, Rebecca West. - The very East, the Farthest East In the Dawntreader, just at the end of the book Lucy is looking over the side of the ship, they were sailing East; they found they needed less sleep nor to eat much, nor even to talk except in low voices. Too much light, the sun twice, three times, its usual size, white birds streaming overhead and vanishing astern. A little later they came flying back and vanished into the east . "How beautifully clear the water is!" Lucy sees the black object "about the size of a shoe" traveling along at the same speed as the ship - suddenly got bigger - flicked back to normal size - she remembered railway carriage shadow. This makes her actually see the bottom, puts it into scale and she watches it rise, zigzagging up - the shoal of fish and their hunting fish. She looks at them. The King looked proudly and fiercely into Lucy's face and shook a speak. The brave rat goes over and discovers the water's sweet - they get a bucket. The King sips, drinks, not only his eyes but everything about him seemed to be brighter. It's strong. It's like light. It strengthened their eyes to bear the great light. The deck and the sail and their faces and bodies became brighter and brighter and every rope shone. And next morning when the sun rose, now five or six times its old size, they stared hard into it and could see the very feathers of the birds that came flying from it. Without wind, the ship sails hard East. No one ate or slept. Everyone grew younger. They drew buckets of dazzling water from the sea. Everyone on board was filled with joy and excitement. The further they sailed the less they spoke, and then almost in a whisper. The stillness of that last sea laid hold on them. Ahead - "Sire, I see whiteness." They brake, with the oars, not to crash into it. Smooth as water and on a level with it. Put the helm hard over and turned the Dawntreader so she was broadside. A boat was lowered and pushed right into the whiteness. "Lilies, your majesty." They advanced. Very soon the open sea was only a thin run of blue on the Western horizon. Whiteness, shot with faintest color of gold, except, just astern where their passage had left an open lane of water that shone like green glass. A smell, a fresh wild lonely smell that made you feel you could run up mountains. Several days later, when they sounded, it goes shallower and shallower. There was no need to row, they neither ate nor slept, in the third dawn they saw a wonder ahead, a green trembling wall, three [?] high. The sun rose, at first they saw it through the wall, and it turned into wonderful rainbow colors. Then they knew that the wall was really a long, tall, wave, a wave endlessly fixed in one place as you may often see at the edge of a waterfall. The current was gliding them swiftly toward it. Now they saw something not only behind the wave but behind the sun. A range of mountains, warm green full of forests and waterfalls however high you looked. A breeze from the east, ruffling the top of the wave, brought a sound and a smell. "Sad!! No," said Lucy. Boat ran aground. Reepicheep in his coracle, current caught it, through the lilies and up the smooth green slope. As the sun rose the sight of those mountains beyond the world faded away. Only blue sky. Children waded along the wall. The water was warm and got shallower, they waded. Never felt tired, dry sand, then on grass, very fine and almost level with the Silver Sea. Here at last the sky really did come down and meet the earth. The lamb grilling fish, who is Aslan the Lion. The feel of Aslan's mane and a Lion's kiss on their foreheads and then - the back bedroom. - 1. You buy Luke's affection with expensive toys so that he learns that things mean love; also you don't encourage him to learn to use and enjoy what's around. You teach him materialism and competition. 2. Your drunkenness is ugly and frightening. You inflict it on him without control. 3. You take him into a string of women's lives, let them do the work, and then decamp, having used them to child care for your pleasure - without consideration for them or for Luke, who makes ties which you then break, often violently, with Luke watching: you teach him to despise women. 4. In your own life you lie, cheat and steal without discrimination or understanding of what you're doing; you teach him by example, to do the same, at an age when he most needs to learn how to be firm in himself and to distinguish between what he really feels and what he doesn't. 5. You betray Luke's love by being erratic and unreliable, so that he must feel you as the loved absence. You buy his affection in this way. 6. You intimidate and distress me, with your dishonesty and violence; I can't have anything to do with you without being involved in insecurity, fear, bitterness, all of which disturb my relationship with Luke. 7. You are only thinking about yourself in your present demands, otherwise you wouldn't demand that Luke break off his long and trusted association with the commune - which you set up, insisted on originally. Your plans having changed you demand that everyone else's do also. Luke is in fact very fond of Mossy, he trusts the commune, and was happy and secure in commuting between his two houses. Because you feel vindictive to the commune, because they asked you to leave, you can't bear the thought that they should see Luke: pure selfishness. 8. You tell Luke, or tell me in his presence, that I don't care about him, which even if it were true would be self-indulgent. And as it is not true, is inexcusable. - The Italian Gardens, Luke running between the pools, fountains, brief sun on all the yellow leaves. A trying to teach me to waltz, to whistle with two fingers. A in donkey jacket pushing me into the mud. Luke finding a real chestnut. Luke in the red, blue, grey big sweater. In the Viennese café, a lovely girl comforting a man crying in the corner. Waiting at the Natural History Museum; rain, crowds of people, dreaming food. "I wish you were a side of venison turning over a fire, with roast potatoes." "I wish you were a raspberry pie with ice cream, I wish you were a roast of pork." "I wish you were a bacon and egg pie, I wish you were mashed potatoes and gray, fried chicken like my mother used to make." It took a long time, rained more. The guard got out his key and ostentatiously watched the second hand going around. Then we ran and got into the great front hall like paradise with its trees named in Latin worked in mosaic on the ceiling. Hyde Park, bright trees; our varying moods. We are both cold in the morning. Last night. The skin around my mouth burns like ice. Minutes looking at your face it isn't seeing it is as if touching or eating. - John Rowley at the movies. Thin stooped man, a sweetness he's wearing now. Seems taller. - Thinking about lingam: the shape of it, soft tool, it rakes, dredges - there's not a clear channel, it finds one, it's arrowhead, fishhook. This morning for a while I was pushing it, small movements, scraping, and so spreading its cap, poking, compacting, and then I received it (becoming near my centre, withdrawing an inch, that long inch), watching its will. - As we sat in the bath and talked about when Luke is a grown-up man and he'll have babies, but not in his own tummy - "or it would have to come out of my wiggy and it is too small" - Luke said he would have a baby with Frances at Buckingham Road - and pointed at me and said "An' I will give you a baby, it will be a gel." "Do you think I should have another baby, besides you?" "Yes, and it should be a gel, or a boy - it could be twins - two babies, but there wouldn't be room in my tummy." "You know daddies can't have babies in their tummy." "Yes but I will be the daddy of your baby." When he talks about sex he's coy anyway. - Man in the station, "That one's all there isn't he." - Luke sometimes seems too sophisticated. He remembers whatever I teach him and wants more. His new 'football' jersey like a space suit. - Penelope's house, in the sense of activities. They try hard. A sense of cooking and music. Fluctuate between feeling Andy's at my house, that's a little community, and feeling my rooms invaded, panic. I've no home left. The stretch of canal with a round-arched brick bridge, yellow trees from Victoria Park blowing leaves on the towpath and water. Pleasure of walking to Penelope's, finding her exact front door through a path of streets I've never heard of: Globe Road, Bethnall Green, Cambridge Gardens, St Andrew's Road, the bake shop on the corner of Pownall. A school just beyond Penelope's on Brougham. Arriving, felt my own emptiness of poetic energy. Leaving, was ashamed that somehow Andy's about to be living with me, against my judgment. As usual I've said "See what happens" and then looked for the good reasons. - Watts: Yoga a method of correcting immediate experience, not a philosophy with beliefs. Maya - the illusion is not the world but the world of name-forms - based on 'to measure' - mental silence vs only symbols being real. A sadhana - a practice. A purification of the senses from bondage to concepts. Concentration - attention absorbed in something other than thoughts. Important to relax thinking tensions in tongue, eyes, forehead. Karma yoga - of action, eg archery, dancing, brush painting - ie without regard for its products, Zen no doer. Bhakti yoga - of intense love or devotion. Jnana yoga - a sort of self Socratism using thought to destroy thoughts - making them void. Mantra yoga - Tantric yoga - forbidden - wine, fish, meat, grain, sex. "prolonged contemplation of erotic tension," a complex and elegant ritual. Male and female allow their mutual reactions to be aroused during the preliminary ritual of adorning each other with necklaces and garlands and offering incense and wine. Facing each other legs crossed, feet soles upward. When the man is fully aroused the woman embraces him by sitting on his lap with her legs folded around his waist. With her arms about his neck and his hands supporting her back, they look straight into each other's eyes from then on nothing in consciousness but the wordless sensations of body, genital, eye, and mutual rhythm of breathing, embrace without motion - allow intensity to be without striving to come or to please. Transcend personality and become the primordial pair. In Hindu imagery the female is the shakti or active principle and the male the passive, he the witnessing Self and she the natural world, he the Self of the Universe and she Maya the cosmic illusion, which is also creative power. In Buddhist imagery the male is active and the female passive, he is active compassion and she is clear wisdom, he form and she the void, he the lightning diamond and she the lotus. Each is both and seeing their eyes reflected they realize that there is one Self looking out through them both. exist Tibetan bronzes which when separated disclose the male with the vulva and the female with the phallus. When both productive organs are in contact, the outward vulva encircles the penis, and the inward gnostic small and secret nerve of the vagina is inserted into the urethra. Such a double embrace of the productive organs allows the wisdom and energy of the male and female to pass through each other. The couple would do a special rhythm of breathing accompanied by a feeling that sexual energy is being sucked up through the spinal column toward the brain. Chakra: wheels: plexi of the subtle body. Kundalini or (Buddh) bodhicitta, awakened awareness. Axel and hub. Tantric art. Everything is sound, a pulse of energy broken by our senses like a prism. -
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- Uses of will perceptions of the poets follow the natural laws of the universe as organism The poet may be born more and more into life, rather than feel it weaken and thin out. Finding ways for our person to live in society as it is, poet and citizen. Ability to act as one really loyally believes. Polarities - "acceptance and initiative. They are counterparts, and interact in the health of the person as do other polarities that map our being: feminine and masculine, child and adult, birth and death." - Ros's letter referencing me to Suzanne - little money and great ingenuity, serenity, calm, intelligence, imagination, self-discipline. I felt a con; but warm and nice. Then Mohan in the duplicator service office. I laid my half eaten banana on the counter and didn't say hello, only smiled. - River with blue silver lighter than the sky - shades up from blue to pink through green white to a stronger blue in which is a white half moon. Trees moving, they have plane tree balls swinging on them. Gulls rising and falling through the graph-squares of the trees. Smoke from the Southward Power Station, brown heavy sideways, steam white at the dark brick mouth goes blue, then as it disperses, mauve, through the masts. A red, low-lying tug slowly upstream just above line of terrace railing. White and ivory wall faces, suggested cubes, squares getting smaller. View of river stops at blue/green railing of bridge. A gull rising and falling in relation to smoke. I'm hitching up my jeans and feeling my abdomen, a very black-faced man with broken teeth came, "In a holiday mood are you?" Kept up his chat in spite of my brevity, in the end said shrewdly, "New life is it? All the best to you." - Luke at his party - blue sweater, brown overalls tearing presents open, preoccupied. Screaming with frustration, getting up and throwing himself across the room to the corner behind my cutting table when his Lego train came off its tracks. Again, when we tried to play cat and mouse, he and Mossy not wanting to, when he didn't understand what to do as mouse he hurled himself out of the circle crying and Andy went after him. But when all the children were collected around his upturned bed, and Luke was there waiting in the centre place of honour and Andy turned the lights out, and I brought in the cake that had four fat red candles like blazing table legs, and Andy began to sing Happy Birthday to You - Sarah was in the lighted fringe - his face was more full of joy than I've ever seen it. For the rest, he was as if someone else's child, never referred to me, was fished up for comfort by Andy, fed presents by Roy; raved about with Mossy, Stef and Anna. [letter] December 18th Think I'll put on some Bach and wish you a happy Christmas. Luke has had his birthday party. Before I tell you about it I should say that Roy's back from South Africa in a completely new mood, reasonable, affectionate, calm and chastened. He has taken Luke off his passport as a sign of good will, and so Luke and I are out of hiding (also he will not contest at court, which will make everything simpler) and Luke's spending time with Roy again. On Friday evening Luke went to stay with his grandma Catherine - Roy brought a big Christmas tree, a beautiful one with wide shapely limbs placed like spokes about the stem at regular intervals. It fits into my front window which you'll remember has a front panel and two wings like an altar screen. There it is, standing on a round green table, huge with turquoise paper streamers, my jewelry, some white bones and shells, a dried-out pomegranate and the star of David Andy made for his first Christmas tree. Andy and I put up paper streamers in Luke's room so it looks like the underside of a mushroom - red, green and blue. Quietly, with piano music. Cleaned everything. When it was very late decorated the tree. Got up in the morning, early, to make cookies and the cake - it was lovely, spending the morning in the kitchen peacefully but with great efficiency, baking and listening to the radio. And then put on my best long dress as my costume for Luke's little ceremony. And then everyone came - what a mix of past and present for all of us - Mossy and Isabel (Luke's commune friends), Jud (Roy's pen-pen-ultimate ex), Roy, Lauderick, my solicitor and her lover!, Sarah, Andy, Dee and Anna (you remember - from St Alban's Road), and some other large and small friends, who ate all the cookies (two batches) in such a trice that I got none, and drank wine and lemonade and refused to play cat and mouse. Lauderick and Roy shored themselves up in a corner with Luke's new 'lectric train. When it got dark we tipped Luke's bed upside down for a table, collected all the children around it, and Luke waiting in the centre place of honour. Andy turned the lights out and I brought in the 3-layer chocolate cake with four fat red candles on it like blazing table legs, and when we began to sing Happy Birthday to You Luke's face had a look of delight on it that I've never seen before - pure brilliant incredulous happiness. Good days to you in your cold world. Thank you for the birthday and Christmas money. I haven't spent it yet. Luke got such a heap of presents I thought I'd wait until he needs one, for leaving, maybe.
My abridged version of a translation of Seferis' "Interval of Joy" And here's one I wrote Andy:
[undated journal] Beautiful Elias in a red 2CV. What a vision. - Christmas night, touring the Heath, moonlight, black tree shadows, distant light windows like regularity of traffic sounds, at a spaced fringe around the black park, touring Luke's infancy, and all my five London years. With Andy, whose presence was both comforting and irritating - his little family - adapted noises. The paddling pool. The signal house. Strong presence of familiar things in their silhouettes, houses across the tracks, new, tall lights for the racetrack scattered in an oval. The supple flying spine of the Hill itself. Mud. Families inferred from windows. House with the Japanese garden. Scots pine in an overgrown back garden, one of the gates open. Two people talking on the top of the hill. Clarity of stars. Railings' diagonal shadows on the path. Hoofprints. Branches of the path. A dark passage with a birch wood, flaking Caenwood. The first pond with its wooded slope Luke, Roy and I would rush down several springtimes. Frost underfoot making the grass crisp and resistant. Stream's sudden sounds, easily lost. Fair curve of the city, a pinkish cloud. Irritated thoughts about silence and why he doesn't know about it. My hand smelling like bottled orange juice when I take it out of my pocket. Ear getting cold where the silver pulls frost into it - I take the earring off, it slides onto my key ring. Very quiet footsteps. Think at first about the future, then as we complete the orbit down the east side of the central darkness, about the past. The convent visible by its lights - like a palace having a ball. A motor nearly frightening us on the last path. British Rail employees, plastic hats on, chatting on the pavement at the end of College Lane. Women in narrow long skirts. Streets nearly empty. This London won't be here to come back to. A says "English people are still like foreigners to you aren't they." - Moostach: unthinkable how vast you are, your moment's face like a door behind which are so many days! If I lay down quietly and looked through the eyes - for a long time - we dream of windows because of eyes? - your photograph of me through the house's eye, inside the village's round garden eye - and you inferred, with your double eye - I'd have to love you no matter who you are. - Rosalynd's party - Being oblivious and being watchful. Kevin [Sullivan] is present like an Irish warlock singing She Came Through the Fair. Ruth [First] sitting with me in the big chair, Ethel, Kevin, talking about irises, blue flower gardens, aubretia. Ethel, later, drunker, saying poetry, reciting lengths of poetry saying Henry II was her favorite. Hans sitting hanging onto the lovely girl who knew all the songs, her father had them on a record, Woody Guthrie, all the Union songs, The Red Flag. Ros and Kevin sitting face to face. I leaned forward and said "You two are the best looking people in this room" because they were except for the girl who came later. Dancing. Kevin said "Are you taking us all off?" "I'm just playing. I'll give you a hug." Skittering - the girl, Kevin and me dancing and smiling. Joe [Slovo], as we sat in a large circle at the end, going into something
of a routine singing South African party songs, in Swahili? Africans - the
pass protest song, Indra drumming, Joe starting again at the door.
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