4 April [journal]
A nurse lent me The king must die and The bull from the sea
about Theseus the King. Historical romance, really romance, the bull dancer,
the silver-haired Amazon with grey-silver eyes, destiny, the mother cult
and Apollo of the light, the landscapes of Delphi, Sounion, the hills around
the Acropolis. Ariadne.
I felt like a man who has done what a god willed
for him, free and shining, and full of good luck.
The charm she put on me was very evil, and if you
talk of such things you give them power.
Always drawn between us was a tight-wound lute-string
that neither snapped yet never slackened; and, brushed or breathed upon,
filled the air between us with its secret sound.
Besides, this was not a girl to give half your
mind to. She had that vein of wildness which stirs a man because it lies
so deep, like Hephaistos' fire which only the earthquake loosens from the
mountain. Afterwards she would look at me with still eyes of wonder; then
sink into a milky calm like a full-fed baby's, and fall asleep.
In those years, I had always one ear listening
for the god. Nowadays it would cost me nothing .... He speaks no more to
me.
If it was true the gods spoke to them no longer,
it was strange she should tell of it without weeping.
I knew, as one sometimes may, that I had met a
daimon of my fate. Whether he came for good or ill to me, I could not tell;
nor, it may be, could a god have told me plainly. But good in himself he
was, as a lion is good for beauty and for valour though he eats one's herds.
He roars at spears upon the dyke-top, while the torchlight strikes forth
fire from his golden eyes; and one's heart must love him, whether one will
or no.
From the day I met him, I would have trusted him
with the woman of my heart, or my back in battle; and so would he have trusted
me. But what he loved best in me, I myself had doubts of: and he would charm
it like a bird out of the wood.
We are what we are, love. Let us keep our pride.
It is this, it is this, we are for this, to bring
down the gods as the oak leads down lightning, to lead down God to the earth.
I thought, "I planted this seed of life, yet
from it comes this mystery, a life where I am a stranger."
Fate and will, will and fate, like earth and sky
bringing forth the grain together; and which the bread tastes of, no man
knows.
When Peter came late this afternoon I was dazzled out of conversation
by the painted ships and steep cliffs I'd wanted to see across the glitter
on today's peacock-blue lake. And the Amazons! Hippolyta coming back out
of the forest, naked, brown, tall and narrow, strong, with silver hair loose
around her forehead and a face like Indra's, transparent grey green eyes
full of light, with one arm drawn back holding the bow string. She knew
she was loved and never tested, never asked, never pulled the string to
see whether the other end was loose: "We are what we are, love. Let
us keep our pride." And through the two books, the past three days,
I've been tugged by the Mysteries, by bull-leaping, by the death chosen
as a gift to the gods, by the world full of omens to be read, by the instantly
recognized instantly returned friendship, by love that is half fate half
wonder and a sacrament from the beginning, by religion that's partly my
old feeling of landscape, by contact with seasons and weather, by the notion
of god possession that is in a way still freedom, by honour.
Of course I want to be an Amazon, powerful by right of beauty, like Theseus,
but still able to be his arms companion-lover.
There's nothing in me that would do it, leap to catch his arrow myself.
I've vague wishes and discomforts instead, memories of the rain rituals
I was priestess for, in Mother's old wine-colored polka-dot bathrobe with
its braided, tasseled tie, memories of dancing on wet grass almost feeling
that I had brought down the gods into the earth, my feeling of journey and
pilgrimage, something like destiny in that I think I must leave safety to
choose what is difficult and outside the common, my old anxious unhappy
wanting to be beautiful, my eye out for princes' faces and my helplessness
against the physical perfection in others, my secrecy, this partly phony
journal in which I'm always trying to net something holy -
It's enough, and patterned enough, to make me think I must work something
out for my life around it. Like Thoreau, wait for each day in each season
and study changes of light and air? Pictures. And pictures are a worship,
I know. I need to live worshipping, not serving, celebrating. But
not by deciding, by being found in a state of grace.
I want to have children, because it's a mystery. I'm not sure, maybe
I want to choose my death, because it's a mystery. Desser was a mystery.
Whenever a man enters me, the first second he is completely inside me is
a mystery, and I am always moved.
Something else, another alternative. Mary Renault's language, all concrete,
clear as water when she's telling stories, without abstractions, full of
images that tie Theseus' life as thinking to the seen world. Me, I think
so little, and usually only writing. Would I think more if my language were
less difficult. But I like the leaps I can make with abstractions, false
leaps or not? I like the feeling of leaping.
About Ron and Desser, the Amazon has reached me when she says "We
are what we are, love. Let us keep our pride." It isn't necessarily
Greg, clarity can be complicated?
Maria says Ron's face is like an icon.
Carol looked beautiful, her eyes full of light like the sea in Greece,
saying "We've been married two years, and just last week we got to
something that was essential. It frightens me."
The wild people I love, I still don't want to be Carol although she is
beautiful, Maria and Madeleine, Rasheed, are able to be kind, Peter as well.
I'm fatally undecided about whether I'm wild or not! If I'm not, it is sad
that I'm not kind either. Sometimes, especially with Judy, I feel as though
I'm seen as a sweet charming irresponsible giddy little woman, something
like Mother. With Paul I feel like Father young, erect, stern but a channel
for something beautiful, a guardian of something, without a necessity of
being kind, and so only kind as a favour to the chosen, arrogance and uncertainty
so closely connected that they cannot fluctuate without each dragging the
other along. Steppenwolf.
[Hospital photos: the addict, the kind visitor]
Good Friday
Bruce Stewart was here tonight, with his eyes red, his narrow city clothes
and a job in publicity and promotion. "I live a life of utter frivolity
and I l-l-l-l-love every minute of it." He told me about his life,
a girl who is a "charming, lovely shit" who, when he told her
to, got out of his life. Cocktail parties at which he meets people who might
be very useful. Last summer he nearly married Maggie Hathaway but they had
a marriage-that-wasn't party. ("Seal together in a grave, love that
took and love that gave.") Tom was married and is divorced and is running
an unsuccessful music store in Toronto. Maggie is on speed. Don and Olivia
are having a trial separation. Mike Easton was committed for a marvelous
logical paranoid delusion.
Peter this afternoon was here talking about Joan again, he really wants
her to be his Amazon who loves him in a way that convinces him, consumes
him, and she patiently accepts the worst he tests her with. Marilyn Cox
he says is a nay-sayer ("Don't stir your ice cream") but she has
a ceremonial house and a ceremonial table. We've been friends since I've
been in here, he comes to see me and I've begun to talk to him. He's intelligent.
We've almost become friends enough so he can reach my intelligence too.
After what I've been mulling in the last few days, he said "What I
hate about the way we live in my family is that it's so trivial."
Nesta and Blair, smiling and teasing each other, Nesta polished like
a statue in her yellow coat, Blair leaning back baronially in a leather
jerkin, curly haired and positive that he's lovely, glimmering around at
my records, at the choir on the radio, at remembered and anticipated Easter
masses, at Nesta's back and bottom, a lovely man, difficult, intelligent,
humorous, and at the same time sensual. Where will I ever find a man -
Saturday
Janus the two-faced god put in doorways, one face looking inward, one
outward.
Monday
So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless
world of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of
its nostalgia. But with its first move this world cracks and tumbles: an
infinite number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding.
Camus in An absurd reasoning. In Steppenwolf, Harry Haller
plays a Magic Theatre game with all the pieces of his life, broken bits
of mirror that can reform themselves into completely different lives. I
am bored with my mind, yesterday with Peter during the long sunny Easter
Sunday afternoon I wanted to talk but my perceptions, my memories, even
my cheating standard lines were boring. I tried to cast off and make myself
improvise, but I improvised so badly. I've only begun to be free with Peter,
what a waste of freedom my tediousness is. He values me for something: what?
I depend on his euphoria, all of us do. When he's out of pace, at the table,
there's silence. Impossible to chatter as we would without him. Margaret
said to him once, "You make me feel like nothing." Judy said that
to me once. I'm not myself with her now but I keep hoping she feels
like herself.
Digression. What I meant to write was that all of these last few pages
have had an uneasy feeling of repetition, self-confirmation, that my mind
is a sleepy dog like Patricia's Miranda, sunning and sleeping most of the
day.
Maria and I were coming back from lunch. At the law school door as I
bent to open it, there was a spontaneous minuet: "But I'm too young
not to be a radical because I don't know." "And I'm too old not
to be a radical because I don't know!" Laughter, two half-curtsies,
and we went through the door.
"This ardour or these silences," Camus' juxtaposition of the
two made me shrink with shame? - Shame, and I read it again as I reread
passages about beautiful women to reconfirm my feeling of shame.
"Between the certainty I have of my existence
and the content I try to give that assurance, the gap will never be filled."
C's description of Husserl and phenomenology: "The
spiritual universe becomes incalculably enriched through them ... Thinking
is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness,
it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into
a privileged moment. What justifies thought is its extreme consciousness
... negates the classic method of the reason, disappoints hope, opens to
intuition and to the heart a whole proliferation of the phenomena ... All
that is involved is 'an attitude for understanding' and not a consolation."
"... the absurd man realizes that he was not
really free. To speak clearly, to the extent to which I hope, to which I
worry about a truth that might be individual to me, about a way of being
or creating, to the extent to which I arrange my life and prove thereby
that I accept its having a meaning, I create for myself barriers between
which I confine my life. I do like so many bureaucrats of the mind and heart
who only fill me with disgust and whose only vice, I now see clearly, is
to take man's freedom seriously."
But "When Nietszche writes: 'It clearly
seems that the chief thing in heaven and on earth is to obey at length
and in a single direction: in the long run there results something for which
it is worth the trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue,
art, music, the dance, reason, the mind - something that transfigures, something
delicate, mad or divine,' ... he elucidates the rule of a really distinguished
code of ethics. But he also points the way of the absurd man. Obeying the
flame is both the easiest and the hardest thing to do. However, it is good
for man to judge himself occasionally."
About Don Juan: "Why should it be essential
to love rarely in order to love much?" About Ron: "That
laugh, the conquering insolence, that playfulness and love of the theatre
are all clear and joyous .... He reminds one of those artists who know their
limits, never go beyond them, and in that precarious interval in which they
take their spiritual stand enjoy all the wonderful ease of masters ... If
he leaves a woman it is not absolutely because he has ceased to desire her
.... But he desires another, and no, this is not the same thing ... an ethic
of quantity, whereas the saint, on the contrary, tends toward quality. Not
to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to the absurd man."
This is why, in my thinking in the past weeks of pink walled afternoons,
Ron has stood opposite me in all of his mocking sentimental energy, the
image of the alternative that pushes in at me, as Peter was before we found
our similarities.
"There is no noble love but that which recognizes
itself to be both short-lived and exceptional. All those deaths and all
those rebirths gathered together as in a sheaf make up for Don Juan the
flowering of his life. It is his way of giving and of revivifying. I let
it be decided whether or not one can speak of selfishness."
"... typical of his nobility to have accepted
all the rules of the game. Yet he knows he is right and that there can be
no question of punishment. A fate is not a punishment."
"... actor has much in common with that other
absurd individual, the traveler. Like him, he drains something and is constantly
on the move ... In those three hours he travels the whole course of the
dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover."
"Not everybody can be 'theatrical,' and this unjustly maligned word
covers a whole aesthetic and a whole ethic. Half a man's life is spent in
implying, in turning away, and in keeping silent."
Madeleine: "It is the absurd contradiction
itself, that individual who wants to achieve everything and live everything,
that useless attempt, that ineffectual persistence."
"At the end of a life man notices that he
has spent years becoming sure of a single truth."
Saturday
Ron, here, making a complete conquest and a lovely conquest that left
me myself, kissing me goodbye pretending to be a rough maple-flower against
today's sky, small puckered kisses pretending to be star-shaped. I didn't
want to let him go but he did exactly right. We talked about our ethics
of quantity and quality, he didn't evade me, and I told him that I fought
him because his choice of life is the choice that most strongly opposes
mine in the border-wars that flash out between my alternate selves. We were
perfect today, fighting each other's weaknesses and loving each other's
strengths. I think too slowly: I could have told him that. (I hereby cut
out a turquoise fish with the yin-yang symbol on its back and "Moral:
it is possible to lie alongside and still fight, also vice versa*"
and have mailed it to him, with his address written on the poem he gave
me about "superior realities approached too soon
produce inferiorities / Seen again, intimate intuitions soften former hollow
footsteps" approximately.
*My failed haiku given to him under a sheet of tissue paper:
- Two fish, two
- waterplants, we
- lie alongside in tea-dark water.
Today I was in his hand, standing spread-legged waving my tiny Amazon
arms with my eyes shining battle, hurling teabags and lemon juice at him.
It's partly his theology student vocabulary with its 'love' and 'eternity'
that makes me so furious. I challenge him instead of sneering silently as
I habitually do. Ah - one for my argument, it's my skepticism, my cranky
idealist snobism, that gave me this evening of argument and excitement.
Tonight I loved his diffident expression of fatal disagreement ("Blair
is a prince, he is." "He's no more a prince than anyone else."),
his unusually rational and really superb intelligence. (His weakness is
taste, not stupidity? Hopeless dichotomy. To me taste is intelligence -
and that is why, when he flails around in his meaningless romantico-religious
vocabulary I feel that he must know how absurd it is, since he could never
make such a blunder in taste, given his beautiful passionate Yeats essay
chaotic intelligence. Tonight he said he wasn't going to use the word 'love'
anymore. Evidently he doesn't know, but only guesses at times. Obviously
he hasn't chosen to be ludicrous. How magnificently consistent he is in
it, the whole rejection of critical intelligence!) When Tim was still here,
he fought, clowned, dodged, showed off his new thirteen dollar white tennis
shoes, poured milk on my hair, threw my wet teeshirt at me and then carried
it off to Miss Davis, sucking the lemon I pushed into his face, tried to
get me to play hand games (Tim said "I'm glad you're not going to"
in collusion with my you're-a-charming-child-but-oh-no-you-don't tone).
But when Tim had gone (the hairy rough-featured brown satyr's face above
an Arts jacket) he sat at the end of my bed, fell into quiet and seriousness
which became real when he remembered his friend Cathy last weekend, a fat
and repulsive girl depressed by sex, believing that she was dead. He took
her into a bedroom the York professor loaned them. They smoked some grass
(he lowered his voice to a whisper and looked sideways at the hall) and
talked about art, trying to get back the mood of four years ago. Then he
took off his clothes and stood across the room from her and said "Look
at me. What does this make you feel?" (Very easy to do, if like him,
you are beautiful as a budded maple branch.) Then he came to the bed and
said "Now you undress." She said "You aren't going to like
this," and took her clothes off like an embarrassed little girl, muttering
deprecations about her body as it appeared. Then they lay down together.
She wanted him to make love to her, but he thought he couldn't because it
was too therapeutic. He told her to put her hand on him. "So she put
her hand on my penis and it made me feel like melted butter, not erect,
like water disappearing in the sand, at the beach. But I discovered that
I liked it because it was how she made me feel ... It was cumulative.
When I was with her she said 'Be gentle.' We made her find images in it.
When the images became less than pleasant we rested. I talked to her about
her family, her brother and her mother. We would say, 'This time it's for
him' or 'this time it's for them.' But I made her talk about other things
too. I'd say, 'What if the nuns came in now?' She looked unhappy and finally
she said something like 'disregard.' But I said 'Why would we do that?'
Finally at eight o'clock we went to sleep. We woke at ten." And when
she woke she was the radiant ebullient woman she never had been. She took
the train to Montreal at twelve o'clock. Then she wrote him a letter, which
he could quote. She was happy and whole.
I was captivated by his fairytale, I like the picture of their night
that he created out of images and, important, desperation ("She is
the most beautiful woman I know, if she died, I know that I would have to
die too. I could never love life as much again."), and his prick that
had become loving after years' training in egotism. No one has ever stirred
his limb around in me and said "This is for the pattern of maple branches
we saw today" or "This is for Shostakovich's sonata and for the
light coming through the green bottle" or "This is for Steppenwolf
and Camus" or "This is for Theseus" or "This is for
Peter Harcourt who was here last Sunday" or "This is for my life
until now" or "This is for my death" or even "This is
for you because you want to be a pioneer woman."
And Ron has never been kind to me, but he was to her and I like him much
better because of that true fairytale.
He challenged me to try his life next week. I said "But I'm so oppressed
by all these people and their trivialities!" He said, "They're
not trivialities." "But they are, they're mechanical, they're
completely trivial!" "They're mechanical because they've decided
to be hopeless, they're already sure. You have to take their triviality
more seriously than they do; when they say it's a beautiful day you have
to ask them why they think so. Don't pass this out, because it seems garish
and sentimental, but I think everybody wants to love and be loved."
"But I don't need that from everybody! And to me being understood is
part of being loved. It's impossible with everybody. Your five minutes in
the pub ... if I look into someone's eyes and feel 'contact' it's a false
contact with a false person! It's unreal ghosts having ghostly relationships!
It doesn't mean anything!" And Ron steadily but a little unhappily
insisting that that five minutes is eternal. My rude, "That's nonsense.
Of course it isn't eternal. Nothing is eternal." He said: "Then
I can't talk to you." I had pushed my hand out to touch the top of
his head when I cried out, to tell him that my 'nonsense' did not mean him.
He said "When you touched my head that was eternal." "It
was not eternal. I was just saying something." Unhappily: "You
weren't saying something, you were being something." Well, obviously.
Silence. "Do you think anything is eternal?" "NO." "Well,
then it's just words. We don't disagree." "What do you mean by
eternal, then?" "It's what makes me want to live to the next moment,"
and something else I wish I hadn't forgotten. Whatever it was, I accepted
and we were fitted again.
He said at a different time, "I don't want to possess anyone anymore,
or be possessed. I really feel that contact with everyone. The image I like
best is your couplet: the fish lying alongside in tea-dark water."
What I meant in my image was the night we lay physically melted and emotionally
at peace, just brushing sides, both of us seeming to float in a thick dark
body-temperature pond. But that peace is too rare and difficult, my god!
to have with a stranger across a bar table. My ethics of quality: he proves
again and again that it's vulnerable. MY arguments:
- The impossibility of my sincerely reaching for everybody
- Not needing it from everyone (he's a lovely Messiah)
- Physical repulsion (his irrefutable fairy story)
- Belief in loyalty, wanting to be dependable both to be completely truthful
and to continue to love people in their other selves at other times, to
maximize what - I agree - is so important.
(Patricia last night, "But there's something intelligent and honest
and cosmopolitan and I'd have to say cult-ivated about you.")
(Ron said "You expect too much from other people, you expect them
to be like you.")
- Needing time for my other loves
(I told him about lying on the grass by the lake with Judy, Paul and
Michael, the branches are still bare, although the grass is growing. They
are different colors, and their different shapes form meshes over the sidewalk,
silver-white, yellowish, on stiff pointed branches bristling from the central
stem, and straight overhead, reddish black maple branches, forked like rhunic
writing, not linear, not rounded, with the hard stiff reddening blossoms
on the ends of short sturdy littler branches, all spread onto the even blue
of sky like script on glass, the most beautiful thing I have seen for weeks.
Paul found a piece of scratched green glass that was like a precious stone
full of tiny cracks: we looked at the lake through it. Michael tried to
light his hash pipe but people kept passing so that he'd have to choke it.
Judy lay back in her bluejeans, with her body prettier than ever. Paul said
"Even in a lumberjack's shirt and boots she'd look feminine, and strong."
I winced, because I wanted to have her pretty body, she must know I want
to take it away, no wonder she hedges with me and brings friends to help
hedge her.)
- Believing that people aren't limitlessly free to become free, as he
believes they are, "little diseases in their heads, just tiny mental
diseases, like lichens."
About death, he said "But you go back into the energy exchange."
I said it didn't comfort me at all, but it does, a little.
But disease is anti-life, anti-people he had to admit. He has a humanist
belief in perfectibility, a lazy ignorance of real unexcusable evil, a thoroughly
unexamined belief in will, but his energy, and his dramatic gift and his
only half-recognized power - so beautiful and so perfectly held in his beautiful
body, let him live in bad faith, we absurd men will delight in him.
Fourteen sides left in this book - can I fill them tomorrow?
When he went home I felt for the bits of broken mirror chess men in my
pocket, and felt them come into vague happy life in my fingers. - Ah, partly
the unfinished maple-flower goodbye kiss, partly having held my hand along
his neck. But partly the way he had helped me draw the lines of my border
war a little closer together, the real quiet that grew up again and again
among our serious and earnestly defended differences, partly himself as
an alternative that is, for once, worked out, elaborated, colored, strung
out into implications and pegged down partly in what I already am! My boundaries
all extended, nerve boundaries that once tasting movement, tingle to move
again, or at least slyly think about the possibility while the policy makers
at the frontier debate things in the Journal.
I thought of a biting thing to say about the journal one night and forgot
to write it down, something about it being my organ of self confirmation,
self congratulation, self limitation, conservation, reactionary self preservation,
something like that. Thank god for the d(a)emons who rock me even inside
it, from Olivia to Ron, through Madeleine and Peter and Desser.
Sunday
He also said bitterly "People come to see the man who loves everyone."
Tuesday breakfast
Ron came looking uglier and older with his hair shorter, ran on about
things that have happened to him, Marguerite, he having the crabs. We couldn't
get back our mood of Saturday. We sat upstairs in the ugly waiting room
while the light bleached out to oyster grey. I finally said, "To tell
you the truth, today I don't really want to see you at all." He reacted
like a hurt child. "You're tolerating me! You're condescending!"
Saturday 19 April [?] [journal]
The tone of many of the things I've written seems young. Yes, when I
go back to evaluate, punctuate, admire, and am tempted to deny. (I've been
thinking about my life since the trip, and I've just realized that this
book is the post-Europe book which will probably end with the end of the
Kingston time.) I wondered if it seemed young because I'm reading it for
Peter. Then I wondered how much of it is written in his voice, and I was
relieved to find that some of what sounded like him was written before I
knew him. Some of what I've written about myself is something I didn't know
was true about him until the past week. I wonder if he has saved it, or
whether I've evoked it.
On the way back from Ottawa today he brought up odysseys, his and mine,
and that was something I'd never told him. Last night after he came back
and lay with his head beside my arm, I felt so full of tenderness for him
that I wanted to put my hands around him. Instead my tenderness became sexual,
my skin grabbed for him until I was exhausted. When I woke his hands were
moving around me, motors on the street eleven stories down, horns, grey
light coming in the windows. I couldn't look at him, his sleepy unmade face
making me feel strange because I was so closely watched. His face, the lines
at the corners of his eyes seeming to pull them into points, a soft baffled
expression, hair in soft owlish tufts. I can't look at his fat middle, but
I love his arms and legs and the whole stripling line of his back, and I
love the freckled brown color of his skin, with his reddish moustache. In
the CFI I watched him come out of the office, secretly, from behind bookshelves,
and surprised myself with how beautiful he looked.
He came after lunch and when we got into the car it was raining. He told
me about the kids. Jennie had stood with her arms around his waist. He said
"It's unbearable isn't it, being so in love?" and she had answered
that being in love meant mouth kisses, ugh! Peter shook his head and chattered
as he does when he laughs at something that delights him. He had told his
family (at the breakfast table?) what I said about wanting a child by him,
"my looks and her intelligence," and when Jennie warned him about
my going with him to Ottawa Johnnie said (I can see it, he has an abrupt
punch line like Peter's) "An-and when the little baby comes out it
will have a body cast on." I loved that too, and laughed at it again
when we drove through Kingston in a shy misgiving silence. Rain colors,
red branches, the old rock along the road water polished, full of deep maroons,
oranges, rich graphite greys, birches, white-silver young branches on the
tips of older trees, sky moving in tissue layers, the lake rough green-grey
along the causeway. Black swamp water still as ice, with a fogging mist
on the surface. Ragged 'canaries' - yellow leaves on the aspens (?).
His father sat silent at the table, with his chair turned sideways to
set him apart, then he went to the office to read his paper. His mother
loved and accepted but not really, because she didn't see, question, root
at them. ("And Joan doesn't either," he said, "she couldn't
draw a picture of my balls even now. She doesn't know what I look like.
It's the detailed, precise, attention ...." He means passion. I remember
Greg and Mother too. Maybe we shouldn't ask our mothers to reflect us passionately.
It leaves us freer when we've no defenses against inaccurate reflection.
But lovers can't be true convincing lovers unless they see us well. How
do I know all these things he knows? I began to ask how he knows so much,
but my knowing it is surprising too.)
Barbara worked as a nurse and came home and talked. The two women would
sit and smoke together while he became impatient as he waited to get the
dishes cleaned up. He shouted at his mother for not really listening to
Barbara. He would wash Barbara when they were children, and he continued
when she began to be a woman. At the Hermitage he lusted after her under
the oak trees. And when he had washed her he'd go and jerk off or something.
He didn't read, the public library books carried germs. "When I was
in grade nine, it was the boys in grade thirteen who were the men, and somehow
it's still the boys in grade thirteen who are the men."
I wanted to tell him a flood of things, how I feel it's the narrow-shouldered
big-breasted ones who are the real women, about Janet and the scatological
stories, about the sexy stories I told Judy ("I didn't know what it
was but I created the atmosphere of it"), about the body play in the
old Studebaker truck carcass in the long grass behind the oilhouse, how
I turned off sex entirely then, for all the adolescent years of romanticism.
I began to, but didn't feel him listening and stopped, my old rationing
principle.
But this afternoon as we came back we seemed really to be exploring.
I had been intoxicated by the two days and was still transparent to him.
Sunshine, old log buildings, bits of ragged snow in the tree roots, beautiful
long masses of rounded stone, limestone, and a reddish rock, sparkling,
rock and air without dust, I love this season of spring before the leaves.
He had gradually become more specific and more serious about asking me to
come to England in summer, partly to see if we could live together next
year. His phrase "If we were to establish a foyer." Rail fences,
wire fences I stared at as I thought of how afraid it made me and how impossible
it was. But not impossible, because perhaps we do explore together. He wants
that, exploring, building together. (I can read his manuscript only if I
promise to pay it great attention, I like that.) He had talked about drawing
up a contract; he didn't know exactly how serious he was, but he became
more serious. Still, he had thought about it. It is partly my smells, partly
other things I suppose and partly professional. We could work together.
He said he could do something for me because I'm a fritterer. I think it
was because of something he said that I realized what the frittering is,
a self education to make up for what I didn't learn at home and needed to
make myself one of 'them'.
I'm afraid, and also I'm not sure whether I'll know when any education
has gone far enough so that I need to bend myself to something. The two
confuse what I want to know about and what I am responsible for to Joan,
Jennie, John, and to Peter too.
"I'm so used to believing that what I'm going to do, I have to do
alone."
"She would cook me a lovely meal and she'd have clean sheets on
the bed where I slept by myself, in case I wanted to stay over; not
on our bed." "She must like you." "She likes me all
right, but in another way she can't stand me."
Hotel room in the Beacon Arms, a large square room in the corner, purplish
brown walls and bedspreads, the clean shabby unbeautiful look of a room
in a Toronto boarding house, rusted tin waste paper basket, faded ugly drapes,
an old air conditioner, Gideon Bible in the second drawer down, vibrator
beds that cost a quarter to vibrate! Stained turquoise couch, plastic garbage
bag in the waste basket, hard brown carpet beaten flat by the vacuum cleaner,
the usual thin entrance corridor and chain lock. Peter was like me, opened
windows, looked at the vibrator machine, looked in drawers for hotel stationary,
looked between the office buildings for the views.
We smoked a Gaulois between us, drank a little scotch as if it were brandy,
just tasting it, sitting on the couch together. At the CFI we'd eaten an
apple together and kissed each other afterward, and then gone in. The Archives
building, for La signora di tutti (in Italian with French and Dutch
subtitles)(some images: the hunched woman in her wheelchair throwing a lurching
shadow ahead of her and then crashing down the stairs, the girl's breasts
loose under her jersey, the long droopy bodies that were fashionable, the
Signora's face crude in some angles, but photographing beautiful, the presses
sighing to a stop when she died) and Cat-people. We played with the
Dutch and listened to the Film 020 sarcastic laughter at American naivety.
Went back to the hotel room. All weekend we loved people's laughter and
jokes about my cast.
[undated letter]
I'm out of the hospital although still in the cast, staying in my friend's
house looking after her ten year old and her dog and her plants while she's
in England for two weeks. Her lawn smells like summer at night and is full
of wild violets and foraging robins. Hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, promising
bulbs, last year's stalks being torn away by nesting birds; an aged and
stained wood fence and behind it, two tall spruce, a middling fat pine,
a small cedar and a mesquite shaped bush, standing formally together singing
with light.
I've written my hung-over last philosophy exam and so will have my BA.
Judy, Paul and Michael were to see me three weekends ago - I sent them
to stay with Nesta, a girl from Jamaica who was in the same scholarship
group as Rasheed. They and she all had a good surprising weekend.
I may be looking after the Dyck's kids when/if Anne goes with Harvey
to Europe this spring. They were here Sunday a week ago, all of them, coming
from Ottawa, the three kids in a row of sleeping bags in the back. Anne
looked worn - I hope she can go.
[journal]
He does it for Joan too. The brandy, gin and fruit is for 'us,' he's
begun to think of Patricia's house as ours. "We've got to have you
in this house."
Peter said "When I woke up this morning I was in despair. Jenny
came and got into bed with me, wrapped herself all around me, surrounded
me. I nearly screwed her! And she just said 'Never mind Daddy, it's a sunny
day, and I'm going to see Susan Douglas-Murray,' something like that, intuition
and silliness. What a woman she is!" I had to hug him, but said oops
when I thought of Princess Street.
Patricia's kitchen, the day so beautiful. The men came to take off the
storm windows and put on screens, stood outside in the sun brushing them
off, singing with my radio. The back door and most of the windows were open.
The house felt like a hillside, wide open. And then Peter came! "I
didn't know if you wanted to see me, but when in doubt do so I did."
He's like Rachel Cox, who came toward me wriggling her nose until I was
within distance to kiss her. "Not fickle, generous. A very important
difference" Marilyn said with the choked excitement her voice often
has. Peter knew it meant him. I felt him looking at me sometimes. I felt
so full of love for the day I'd had and all the people at the Coxes, Rachel,
Sarah, David sitting smiling at Peter's comments by the record player as
Peter frothed about the jazz ("That's what he's doing, he's moving
his left hand down, and then wham!", delighted). Marilyn bringing
me Rachel's card to look at, "Good, Mommy is going to finish her exams
today" with a mistake turned into an illumination, and a drawing explained
as "a zebra, except without legs and head." Marilyn in a cotton
blouse with her strong legs and a fragile neck some beautiful shy strange
animal like a llama. And Joan! On the couch with Johnny cuddling unhappily,
rather tight when we met. I came in and said hello to everyone else although
I saw her nearly first, until finally we pulled ourselves up toward each
other and said hello unhappily. But later she talked to me about Lawford's
office and she briskly got the newspaper to show me Johnny's picture. Her
narrow Jennie-like body is so pretty, her tense listening face turned to
Marilyn's brother, her gay remarks to Peter. Her face as she got out of
the back seat of the car after resolutely inviting me to dinner, bent toward
the house looking so gathered up with unhappiness. Her stories about stealing
milk and cheese, breaking bottles when she was five, her tack [?] and her
hair down. She's so beautiful!
During the afternoon, Mozart, sun, Hugh in the back yard with his leg
tied to the tree throwing a javelin and falling flat with his throw. I was
so full of it that I went to the music house to tell Peter. I listened for
a while, the small blue flowers scattered wild on the construction slope
behind! When I went up to see him in the sound room and refound the public
Peter telling Eleanor stories, making her feel beautiful, playing with the
Siemens, exactly as I knew him, except for his long intent looks, I became
horny looking at his bottom squaring off under the baggy black pockets of
his jeans, the way he stands like a kouros disguised as an old teenager.
Tonight in bed he was sad. When I talked about Joan he said "I hated
her tonight," because she says that she understands that he wants to
build a life, that she doesn't really want to, that she really doesn't care
that much, but still, tonight, she was sad and he feels that he's done it
and he resents her not claiming him back, if in fact she does want him to
stay. I didn't really want him to go home but I knew he would and I was
waiting for it. He said "Tonight I don't feel that you want me to go
home, just that you're waiting for me to." Then he went home sad, after
saying, about his marriage, "You must think it's horrible!"
So I rocked back and forth all day, between celebration and ecstasy and
impatience and incredulity. I can't possibly! But Peter. I don't know what
I feel about him, it's ambivalent and I don't know how ambivalent or why,
it isn't just his big stomach, it's the pre-menopausal feeling of his terrible
wistfulness. I love him when he's himself, focused. I love being with him.
But I don't know what to feel about his needing to be rescued. I come back
constantly to thinking about Greg, Desser, Frank, even Don. I often seem
to wait for myself to arrive with him, and I wonder whether I will. Again
I think of packing and fleeing. How can I possibly rescue him. "We
made it, Evy and me" he told me a filmmaker [said] at his conference.
"We could do that."
Sunday
Today a beautiful long day of peace and color, so many things in it that
I need a paragraph of exclamation marks, to compress them all into one exclamation
and show how close and strong they were. Last night's
dream of myself seducing Madeleine in a hotel room, kissing her nipples
and adoring her perfect half champagne glass breasts like Susie's. When
I reached down to touch her sex she went away
The morning-afternoon almost naked in the backyard, smelling daffodils,
with the art book about lines ("perceptual", "expressive",
"heavy"), the crabgrass catching sunlight, violets just under
the first step, Hugh's muttered Jesus! at Mr James' pompous advice.
The chestnut flowers! Sticky and clumsy as radishes. My overflow into "Hurry
and come!" until at last he came and lay beside me on the grass, sitting
up sometimes to exclaim about his life, someone or someplace. I had thought
this morning about how I have to stop double-thinking about Joan, either
I believe he should stay with her and take off myself, or else I believe
I want to stay with him, and love him properly. Today I loved him properly.
"My need is greater than yours." "But that's something that
can easily change, I know."
His face against branches and sky, a faint curdle of cloud flowing in
a perfect broad very quickly moving stream diagonally toward us from the
lake, something wonderful about its speed and the perfect stillness of all
of the whorls and spindles of it in relation to each other. I'm excited
even as I remember it, it was like foam, but every bubble was dried and
powdery, held perfectly still but liquid, not powdery, all so contradictory
and moving with such force toward disappearance. And Peter there with it!
We both of us have the excitement of revolution that makes us feel around
for the edges of our lives, that makes them, our lives, sharp, well defined,
precarious and really beautiful to us.
I thought about showing him this and so have become shy, but there was
more. Supper, my table bouquet! The parsley and blue weeds, lemon, Peter
slicing a green apple, white, blue and green, the garden just past it, lake,
fence, car lights beginning to show red between fence and lake, something
Peter said about the cars and the lights becoming brighter as it gets darker
that made me feel he was as peaceful/excited and open as I felt. That was
important; I have missed having companionship in the moods of joy, not always,
no, because it has happened, but what is most desperately important to me
has nearly always excluded even my men. I don't mind, but Peter tonight
was a bonus.
His stomach feeling like Rachel's, "Every two days you do something
to make me think you may like me a bit," the clocks all out of time
because today was the day for moving them an hour ahead.
The air in the garden feels like summer nights.
Monday morning
Hugh got up this morning so happy that I am sure our loving last night
rolled out from under our bed and permeated him in his sleep.
I'm writing like the weather broadcaster these days, drawing chalk circles
around the day's high pressure areas.
Making and pretending are so closely confusingly related.
Peter said this afternoon "I always want to order things. Joan was
right to fight this in me, because at first it was anal. But I don't do
it any more." I wanted to say, "Then we're brothers again."
In something else. In my misgivings I think he's cheating in getting a second
chance, that there is something immoral in his not knowing his forty year
old place. I don't believe it but I wonder why, if he is or was what he
says he wants to be again, he lost his way, or whether he lost it at all,
perhaps it was a tack taken.
He wants to "settle down," "build a life," do things
again that he used to value (the story about the apple orchard cottage,
he would wake early, chop wood and read poetry, memorize it because he didn't
know how to study, the photograph of the thin faced young man a bit like
Don with the same look of impatient intelligence vexed by someone). My imagination
is going ahead of me with my moods of misgiving among the moods like yesterday's
nirvana. I'm not used to thinking in terms of myself and someone else, no
one has ever showed such impressive entrance qualifications for my holies
of holies. Only brothers allowed. But my imagination surprises me by suggesting
things I like, double mythologies, films of double mythologies, my own oh-lost-and-by-the-wind-grieved-ghost-come-back
struggles made double and therefore maybe less subversive.
The shared effort, of course, the odyssey must be at least briefly parallel
(Peter is throwing out grappling irons, where does he get the courage, he
described working in his room this morning, pacing, peeing, talking aloud
to himself and to me, writing notes on Renais, on a Vaghy Quartet film we
could do, throwing them in different piles, he said there were waves of
panic when he thinks about what he's doing.) I hardly believe that we'll
actually become a couple. Still I think about really seeing him and knowing
him better than anybody (last night in uncharacteristic confusion he said
"I haven't ever loved anyone that much"). I'm reading his manuscript
and I have a little trousseau, like new-role preparation. But my god! with
a man thirteen years older than I am, a gabby womanizer living at conversational
two removes away from his life and unable to remember what he has told people
because he talks to so many, wearing grey baggy pants that ride under his
stomach and beginning to store fat under his chin like a chipmunk? At the
music house we watched Richard Swindon's film and Richard himself with his
bony shoulders and long legs and a stretched fisherman's sweater, and I
thought to myself, "Am I expected to give that up forever? What nerve
you have." And the funny moment when he called me "dear"
at the door like a student. Does he really want to go back to those things
he no longer does?
Because I both showed him my journal entry yesterday and 'ate' him he
said half-jokingly "You'll make a whole man out of me." He is,
more than he thinks, the way he brings his loving stories of Andrée,
Margaret, that Swedish chick, Elizabeth, Shosh ("My best mood is when
I'm in love, but my second best mood is when I'm loving women") into
bed with him, and the way his Renoir chapter is himself, netted in a batch
of films or himself as net straining films and catching clots of them to
make into himself.
I bring my men to bed with me too, I'm lonely for Greg. And give up Desser?
I may not have to.
But Peter moved me when he said "We should become one flesh first.
We could separate later."
Friday
A rocky beach this afternoon, we sat on a strangely eroded rock, square
and cut into smaller squares as if by strings wrapped tightly around a cheese.
The colors of the countryside looked artificially tinted, unreal edgy green
under bare trees, winter colors and the forced green contradicting them.
I love the lines of this time of year, budded branches holding themselves
so delicately and precisely against pale sky. I felt sad and restless, Peter
said eventually (Saturday) "I'm building a cage around you, a big cage
with lots of interesting things to do, but still a cage."
Sunday
Joanna's dark corridor desperate party. I escaped and walked home in
my triangular hobble [sketch] across the wet grass on the ball diamond,
half stunned by the wood alcohol punch. Began to fall asleep and heard the
car door slam. Peter came in and said nothing, took his clothes off and
got into bed on the far side. We put our arms around each other and fell
asleep. I woke with a pain in the foot and disengaged myself to take it
off to the bathroom. Still silence, Peter came back from the bathroom and
wordlessly got onto me and began to screw. I was left out, dry and sore,
desolate but unable simply to say "No I won't be performed upon."
When I became more stiff and more silent he got off and we lay confused,
unable to speak, lonely, miserable. Finally he got dressed and went home.
His clothes always lie ready to put on, the tie still around the shirt collar,
and the shirt buttoned up with the undershirt inside.
At noon on Saturday he came over to talk about the cage and his depressed
thoughts about my point of view. I was beginning to explain that I feel
so frightened because he thinks of us in terms of forever, and if I think
of forever I have to begin to carp about his fatness and his age and because
I still feel I must live my life floating free and committed only to loneliness
or something.
Ron and Wade came, he went home, but we had Truly's happy and gentle
party and then good love-making at night. I love talking to him, feeling
my thought absorbed by him, evaporated into him, when I speak, as my mouth
is absorbed by him, and my self in my mouth, in our long kisses. I'm free
with him to be as much as I can be. When he stops being so in love with
me I don't know whether I will still be as free. But now I really speak
my mind (Peter told Duffy about my accusation of menopausal panic, and Duffy
said "So what did you do then, pick up your balls and go home?")
more than I ever have since Frank, when my mind was younger! I don't know
why I keep thinking of Greg, but I do constantly. My big red man, my little
brown man. Peter when I first saw him at English registration two autumns
ago looked such a soft moustached sexually subversive DH Lawrence brown
man waiting to expose himself. I like his gaiety and his affection for life
and his voluptuous quality of floating half submerged in life, flowing with
the current and pulling back with the undertow, this same voluptuousness
in his thinking and writing.
We had a good Sunday, clarinet concerto this morning, the radio propped
against the kitchen window screen, one of the maples in burnt orange blossom
across the neighbour's yard, the sun hot even by eleven o'clock, smells
and birds, I felt myself wanting to float transparent as a line of melody
unwinding, like a ribbon or like a kite's string looping and bounding. Peter
was reading Sartre's essays in aesthetics and underlined something about
Tintoreto which reminded him of me, "He knew his courage, but not yet
his worth."
He said that he used to go home from the hospital with his balls hanging
down to his knees, and that when we saw The left-handed gun in Victory
192 he was almost blind. It makes me think of that dark narrow dirty room
full of bad air with some nostalgia. Of course it was an adventure, and
I didn't write about it enough. The days after the operation when my back
ached, and I would ask for a shot of Talwin, and then feel the pain dissolving
away into a powdery peacefulness that later became a bodiless state of complete
well-being, with every cell and molecule of my body running soundlessly
and transparently. Like a ghost I lay invisible listening to conversations
that took place beside my bed when there was no one there. I would reach
out my ghostly hand and touch something on the bedside table without moving
my real hand. I wouldn't be disturbed to eat, my dreams were like collages
or multiscreen films, all of them like the persuasive self conscious dreams
of the moment of falling asleep. Hypnagogic imagery.
part 4
- raw forming volume 8: september 1968 - july 1969
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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