May 5-6 midnight, 180 Stuart Street [journal]
Today I had to buy a new journal book, and went across the campus to
Technical Supplies with Miranda to look for one. This one has the right
kind of lines, but was so advertising ugly on the cover that I didn't look
at it. But I bought it and have put images from the past journal's years,
from November 1966 to May 1969, on the back covers, Botticelli's raw girl
spitting flowers, the rhinoceros photographs from Life that hung above the
hospital bed, a sliver of Tate postcard from Greg, the green letter
from Jerry, and Paul at Madeleine's. O'Keefe's black iris, sexuality and
beauty pushing out the soft watercolors, iris made into her image. Journals,
record of my life made into my image. The world 'journal' isn't right any
more, I find myself saying 'my book' instead. The conception is no longer
quite right either, my book should be a workbook, gristmill, full of images
and arguments. I'm so lazy.
Patricia came home from London and I had to tell her about Peter. She
says that he's wrong to want to jump into life with me to change him, that
he should change first as evidence of his good faith, and that I should
go on and we could come back together later if it is real, good, true and
lasting. And I should not think of him as challenging and bullying me into
intellectual vitality, but I should first establish my intelligence as something
already at work. And Peter's answer would be that change and decision aren't
pure, that we need each other to build each other. Patricia's sensible intelligence
proposes all the problems of bad faith and unreality, and I agree that she
is right. Then I argue, partly against myself, that risk is necessary and
even dubious motivation a source of energy. Now I need to talk to him. I
am wary but ignorant. I suppose I should test what he says somehow, and
I must think, rehearse what he proposes to do until I understand
it and can decide. The book has already become partly workbook in the last
book, more boring and shapeless but more useful.
Chestnut branches in the house, buds beginning to open, hairy forks of
the new leaf beginning to uncurl like fiddleheads, knobby seedy central
flowers. (No they spread open like fingers extending.)
My potential for mediocrity is astonishing, as I realize on the rare
times when I'm not flirting with my vague potentials for some vague excellence.
Does Peter see me at all? Our tests must be real tests in which I am myself
as I must be.
Character reflexes - Patricia has them but I do not.
May 6
The two-acre Greek landscape at Fort Henry, washed light, we bargaining
and haggling about whether we'll love each other. I'm wrong to reason and
haggle because Peter is Peter and he's worth quite a lot. I'm willing only
to take small risks, hitchhiking to Labrador, but not large ones like taking
on Peter Harcourt. Other, lesser, women wouldn't hesitate, and from his
point of view they are right. But they're more generous and I'm not sure
what I can give up. It's Desser, that fearful, courageous physical passion
based on so unreliable a kinship in self-consciousness, and my self-made
mythical-lonely-woman-traveling-in-a-bleak-spring-landscape image of myself.
It's nonsense and Desser is impossible, but Peter himself believes in being
quixotic. And attributes to it his vitality and lovability. At least he's
discovered that I'm fearful and not a queer-bodied Amazon, only queer-bodied.
I like him so well and it's ungenerous not to find a heedless full-hatched
passion willing to take the world on, somewhere in the debris of my pros
and cons, jumping up and down saying yes! Yes!
Telephoned to say so, Joan's little voice saying "Sorry, he's not
here, he's at the office." What does that mean.
It means he's probably at Truly McLeod's! Since he's not at the office.
I went happily across the physics building parking lot with an apple in
my nightgown presumably warming for him, thinking of warm night and whistling
up at the fourth floor windows with for once something to give instead of
my ungenerosity. When I realize the fact that he may not mean it, I'm freer
to jump in with him. But at the same time my uncertainty destroys my freedom
too, because I can no longer assume that he really does see or want me.
Joan isn't free because he accepts and rejects her both in one breath, and
demands her to accept and reject him both in one breath. But he's
Peter. He was so distant and bitter this afternoon when I gave him Patricia's
arguments.
If I stay with him I must be completely blunt with him, even if it is
destructive, I must always risk everything to gain everything, or else it
will not work. First the leap of faith, his leap of faith based so stubbornly
on "All I know is that as I went to visit you in the hospital, those
visits became the centre of my day, and then in Ottawa I felt that we were
so close, until on the way home you ..." and on what Patricia calls
a fascination she doesn't trust. Today he was tired of arguing. If I stayed
with him I would need to be Scheherezade, with either a different story
or even better an interpretation of his stories every day. I want to see
him so badly. But of course we must jockey for terms, or else it's Joan
again. I may not have a choice, having been too young at the right time
again, I suppose I could even afford a little unhappiness, an exercise in
cool. But I want to see him!
we might detect as well a fear of deep human
involvement, of imaginative commitment - a fear of the uncertainty and pain
that passionate personal relationships can inflict .... As Renoir creates
him for us, the genial Captain Georges is really a man who uses the love
experiences for his own aesthetic ends ... the complete solipsist who is
never fully aware of the particularity of another person .... All experiences
either flatter or distress his own sensibility.
- In his words, from the Renoir manuscript.
Renoir wants to be able to accept all people
and all actions simply for what they are, as part of Nature's richness and
variety.
Inescapably a part of such a philosophy of acceptance
is an amoral fatalism that leads to passivity when faced with situations
that call for decision.
This split in Renoir results in a kind of richness,
a complexity of point-of-view which remains perpetually intriguing, as if
because it has not been fully understood.
The very formlessness becomes part of the strength.
The salient point for Renoir in Legrand's attitude
to his work is the total absence of intellectual interest in his own ability,
lack of interest in relating to any decision-making powers of his mind.
If I lived with him could I live improvising ways to express love and
ambivalence and insistence on my own value in one, funny, gesture?
Quoting Renoir, "It's a serious thing, this
world where one cannot remain ingenuous." About Renoir's father,
that he asked his children only one thing, to be gay. "Need
to take a stand in this shitty world even at the risk of destroying yourself."
"Film depicts the failure of youthful promise to find fulfillment in
life, to find any means of sustaining the exquisite oneness with all living
creatures." "Constructive action, action which in turn might set
a man free." "The Corporal must go on escaping."
describes himself as un
raté - a failure, a man who loved heroes but was himself a coward,
a little man of no particular gifts. "I'm a washout so I retired into
my pride." His life, it appears, has been a constant self-deception.
greatness ability to contain their own confusion,
to find a form that, while apparently saying one thing, encourages us to
feel another.
Sitting in the car talking about going to meet Truly for a drink and
be all gay and happy, looking up dramatically, "But I hate it, I hate
it," bitterly. Does he?
If only he does and can hold on. He's worth something even if it's the
chronicling of Darly who kept Justine labyrinthine as he knew her, and did
her the honour of really trying to see her. Over after a year, years' confusion
and pain to repair, board up, decorate.
Aber ich bin ich, und durch mich selbst / geworden was ich bin.
That too, or it won't work. Did he dare me? Something like that.
8 May, Thursday
It rained all day, the wind blew in the trees toward the lake, and the
lake was rough, dull green and overrun by lines of whitecaps. The garden
was like a jungle in a greenhouse, a clean jungle, and the house full of
steam.
Peter was a little sick and a little stubborn, not liking something but
not talking about it. Except about Joan, usually he likes to talk about
her. Today as he talked about her parasitism he said "I don't like
this conversation." Last night he mutilated her picture with blue magic
marker and pins! Jenny went screeching out to discover why. Joan, "Actually
I think it was Daddy who did it." Why. "I think he might have
been cross with me." "Actually I loathe her." "I talked
to her a bit about that. I can't respect her."
He's angry because he was guilty. After Modern times he was going
to take me home, but Joan and Hugh and the kids had to come and they had
to sit in the back because I take up so much room with the cast. A young
man leaned down and closed the door and I thanked him graciously. Joan was
directly behind me with Jenny on her back complaining. It was perverse and
yet I felt no outrage or really even discomfort, Peter has made me feel
so much that I belong in the front seat of his car. Then he drove to his
house first and pulled up along the curb. Jenny, "Why are we stopping
here?" "Because you live here," hearty. I couldn't get up
and let them out. I could have but didn't try, really a little paralyzed,
squeezed between my feeling of habit and right, and the conviction of injustice
and presumption. Jenny jumped out over the side of the car and Joan waited
awkwardly for a moment and then jumped herself, and went up the sidewalk
between the two children, with her head down and shoulders forward. This
morning I told myself that guilt is superfluous and usually conventional
and that I therefore wouldn't have any of it, but that I would remember
the picture of her, so that I'll know what I'm doing.
Joan says that I will leave him in a year when I've finished playing
with him.
That picture and the little shame I feel at my own smugness I suppose
is the same as guilt. I know I can live without him, but I don't know if
she can. He says there is something sick about her passivity, tiredness,
sadness, that when he is nice to her she is animated, that she likes their
morning cuddles. I have to feel out everything he says about her to try
to understand what she really means. I think she is lovely enough to be
accepted and celebrated as she is, even protected, not judged for her lack
of aggression and moral posture. I love the way she wants to protect him
from my leaving him sad and foolish. I wish I could give him back to her,
and I would, but she has to take him back, I think. I could talk to her,
and she'd graciously make me feel foolish by showing me that he doesn't
really care about me.
I've been telling myself that I can stay with him next year because he
will lose interest and we will not be able to hold together, so that I can
move on as I want to, not too bad an investment, a year or two in exchange
for what he'll teach me and what he'll stretch my mind to. How really grim
this is, my bargaining self again. This is part of what he means by having
pictures? He wants me to give him something too, his old passions back.
I understand what he wants from her and why he wants it, but at his age,
I think, can't he be generous enough to keep and love and animate and protect
her so that they can keep even a broken circle of marriage. But I want for
him what I want for myself.
This afternoon when he came to look for me in the sewing room he looked
at me sideways and I was blinded shy by how beautiful he was. When I told
him he was embarrassed.
All of tonight he seemed so sad and uncertain that, remembering it, I
feel I was crass, smug, without imagination or love, self-preoccupied. When
I talk about Desser and about how I haven't really given him up, I found
myself explaining why he's important to me. His truculence made me discover
generosity in myself and I liked that, he was so unsure that I was good
enough for him that I knew I hadn't conquered him, and I liked that. Everything
seemed completely self-interested and hard when I explained it to him. And
what he wants and what I want from him. It was also that Desser's intensity
struck through me and I had such a feeling of someone alive reaching for
me. But that's Peter too, his blinding face and his jokes, his way of reaching
for everyone around him, his real affection for the people in his life,
his determination to be lucid, his sexiness and all his courage, his passion,
his despair ("I felt two lives crumbling"), his destructiveness
and blindness, his delight, his women, his indifference, his intolerance.
When I think about him I want to try. He wants to make it our life. That,
and also I want to give Joan him back happy. I can't successfully want both.
So there it is bare again, the either/or. Dear Peter, I wonder how difficult
he'll make it for me to love him freely and if I'll begin to go under like
Joan and so have to escape.
9 May Friday
Had to call him this afternoon, wanting to see him. "Want me to
come now?" "Well, soon." "I'll come now." Blue-checked
shirt, my nipples under it waiting to be bared and touched. Fluctuations.
A friendship in which we share the same assumption that I'll stay. He admires
me and I smile, but I bristle a little. Then I look at him and I snap back
to being surprised how beautiful and how loving he is. He assumes we should
stay together for a long time, we both think we might be good. But then
I think of all the other magnificent men there must be in the world and
I hesitate. I wish he were thin, but can he become thin without losing his
face.
Went to the Humanities Building to see La chienne, came up the
sidewalk skirt wet and dragging, crutch collapsing, rubber thong pulling
apart, umbrella posted in my breast pocket and falling forward over my knees
when I moved my shoulders too energetically. Peter stood on the steps and
laughed. Later walked me home in the rain, his grey plastic raincoat and
plaid fishing hat (Connemara cloth), face in the streetlight looking seventeen.
Then he ran home.
10 May
What nonsense I've been writing in using the book to talk to myself.
Peckham: "How hard it is to feel what you do indeed feel." Except
that feelings are created in going along with situations that presume the
feeling. My main, real, feelings of tenderness are usually half repentance
at having wounded somebody, I don't know whether it is guilt pleased with
itself or really a spontaneous response to the evidence of someone else's
vulnerability to me. And the obsessed passion comes only when I'm being
ignored! More and more I discover that my emotions in the love-complex of
relationships are petty at least in origin, sometimes not in expression.
We enjoy being together shopping, that's something else, the way we feel
enchanted or at least blessed when salespeople smile at us and people on
the street look amused.
Saw The fixer again in the cold Odeon, we tried to warm each other's
hands through all the long jail sequences.
Monday night, May 12
Nightfall, gravel side road out past the airport, backlit apple tree
on the hillside, an old white frame house with bushes and scraggly trees,
the red slanted light coloring new leaves on the old orchard trees, grass
charged by the redness of the light to an almost day-glow green, and the
lake green-grey moving heavily, the point behind us, with its small white
house and half-stripped tall evergreens, branches flowing backward, all
lit to incandescence against the one solid color of sky and water.
Peter was sad and afraid and both of us are tired of analyzing ourselves
into my indecision. He feels unmanned because I am not passionately in love
with him as I was with Desser. He feels helpless to do anything with that
fact. I don't know whether I want to take Desser to its inevitable (no that's
dishonest) end. I'm remembering the things I distrusted about him and didn't
respect and I remember how impossible it was to talk to him, how he choked
me. I need to begin to work, and I think I could with Peter. I need to discipline
my intelligence, and I am intelligent, to do something. I think with excitement
about the things that I'll do with him. I cannot think of staying with him
forever, but I'm beginning to be able to accept that I can be responsible
for staying with him until I stop growing and must go on. We are friends
in some ways, perhaps only because he can talk to me about whatever is at
the outside least-structured edges of my personality. I feel that we are
kindred spirits. I respect his intellectual search and I love his moods.
He's my first really intelligent man, and I love his intelligence.
Yesterday I couldn't stand his particularity, his definiteness, his shape
and the repeated, parallel swing of his sentences. I wanted to be transparent
and I wanted him to be transparent. Our conversation about passion and Desser
depressed us both, especially when he talked about orgasm and manipulation
so coldly, and I felt as though I would be judged as half a woman when I
come out of the cast. Then he was uneasy with Judy and Paul and J Michael
at their place. Then we saw Shame and felt ourselves part of Bergman's
despairing world. Then we went to see his family, both father and mother
feeble and sister fat and superficial, in their spindly-antique furnished
twelfth floor apartment. The old doctor with his scimitar-profile curved
over his tea table, gasping for breath. The mother in a sleeveless blouse
hobbling to the kitchen, legs and arms brown and freckled like Peter's skin,
but lying in dry creases like tissue paper - blue eyes pointed like Peter's,
but milky and opaque. Her querying blind look at me and Peter, her fluttering
explanation of why we weren't going to be invited to dinner and her mechanical
assertion that of all the men she knows she'd keep her John. Peter was uncomfortable
and graceless with them. We drove quite wordlessly out of Toronto; I thought
of the two old people and thought "I can't do it," thinking of
Peter moving toward that death in ugliness and stupidity. (My own grandparents
too, Grandma Epp anyway.)
At the lake tonight, feeling our friendship, I said "But I really
do love you" and later "I'm beginning to want to live with you."
Having said it, I felt happy, but something still makes me panic.
In the last scene of Shame, Eva and her husband have floated through
the dead bodies and have woken, their faces making a Picasso two-faced face.
She wakes from a dream and tells him about their house, a park, a stream,
her baby daughter, the bombers dropping bombs on the roses. "The roses
were burning but I didn't mind, it wasn't horrible, because they were so
beautiful. But I remembered that someone had said something; I knew it was
important but I couldn't remember what it was."
Peter asked me as we drove home, "What about the shame? What is
it?" I said that I feel ashamed when my important emotions and important
relationships are ambivalent: "I feel ashamed that I can't even muster
a good clear unambivalent emotion."
Eva had said "I feel as though I am in a dream,
but it isn't my dream. It's somebody else's dream, and what will happen
when that person wakes up and is ashamed?"
Opening, dark, morning, two bodies under quilts, lamps hanging, alarm
clock. Eva eventually gets up and comes toward us with her breasts open
under her pyjama top. He tells her his dream as she strips at the wash basin,
holds her hair up to wash the back of her neck. The dream manages to tell
us they're musicians who no longer play.
Breakfast, getting berries from the greenhouse, a scene as they are about
to leave, Jan listening to the church bells, goes into the house and cries;
she says "I can't stand your emotionalism," and later, "I
can't stand your escapism." But there are moments when he appeals to
her and she responds with tenderness, at the breakfast table and in the
car. They stop at the fishing stream to buy a fish - she loosens her hair
as she runs back from the fisherman. He has been watching her with his face
weak and pale, but smiling. "I was in love with her, just then."
In town, tanks go by, they deliver the berries and go to buy wine. The
antique seller in an old courtyard brings them wine and gives them each
a glass, which they drink as though it were holy. The wine seller looks
like an older Richard Swindon, fatter, rather sweet and helpless. He has
been called up and needs money for his housekeeper. She comes once a week
to clean, "then we have tea and make love".
A scene on the ferry when they meet the mayor and speak to him with a
hurried bustling friendliness.
When they are back at the farm, airplanes shoot over, jets in pairs,
a few paratroopers fall, one of them into a tree - Eva runs to help him
after fighting with Jan, who flurries about looking for his shotgun. They
are surrounded by troops who interview them, spotlight and ask questions.
Finally they are left alone and they go to bed.
Next morning, in a store, they're taken away and questioned by their
own side, pushed around in a school, shown a faked interview, the editor
of the newspaper is dead because he welcomed the interview, they are sent
home by the mayor, who is gentle with them.
Later. They are digging potatoes, she is furiously contemptuous of him,
they are covered with mud, they yank the blackened plants out of the earth,
bang their pails down. It ends in tenderness. "As long as the war was
on we could get along, but now -."
The mayor has become their friend but it embarrasses them that he is
so good to them. He comes one afternoon, kisses Eva and slides down into
her lap as Jan looks frozen in his pyjama top. He is drunk and goes to sleep.
The mayor gives her his savings. She goes with him into the greenhouse.
Jan wakes with a headache and finds the money, goes out to find her, sees
them through the greenhouse glass, sits on the stairs as they come to the
door. Eva gets his walking stick and the mayor stands by the door. But then
the house is surrounded by men, who take the mayor, who asks for the money
back to ransom himself. Jan says he doesn't know where it is. He clumsily
shoots the mayor himself and the job has to be finished by someone else.
They go into the greenhouse, their house is exploded. He has the money in
his back pocket and gives it to her. They go out and look for their old
furniture.
A boy comes after them holding a gun - they are kind to him, offer him
food and water - he falls asleep on her lap, enrages Jan who grabs the gun
and yanks the boy up - takes him away and shoots him.
Comes back and says there's a boat leaving for Hammer. She says she won't
go with him. He says that would be easier. She: "We must take some
food."
The beach. She sits against a rock. The boat arrives and people come
from all over the beach with belongings. "You must pay" says the
boatman. Jan gives him the whole roll of the mayor's money. The boat full
of people, adrift. They eat, drain the water can, sleep. A man slides off
into the water. They are bumped and surrounded by a school of floating dead
soldiers, they try to push themselves off and finally leave it behind. Then
she tells her dream.
The scene when they've come home with the wine and are happy, make plans
and make love under the table, her eyes caress him and she's wearing a red
print blouse and looks beautiful.
Tuesday May 13 [letter]
Next week I'm going to Toronto to look after Anne's kids and on Saturday
I come out of the cast. I saw Judy and Paul on Sunday in Toronto, having
gone down with Peter for the day, to see a film.
My plans are a little scrambled at the moment, because I'm going with
Peter to England on 8 July for six weeks as his film department research
assistant and then probably putting off the France thing for a year to come
back to Kingston to work with him next year.
I'm apprehensive but glad that the cast is coming off, knowing that it
will be all a shriveled, wasted, wrinkled scaly white and grey pole dangling
on my right side. Ugh. But I've lost the clip from a ball point pen inside
it somewhere, can't get it out and it's pinching me!
14 May [journal]
Have used the Snoopy "Stupid moth!" cartoon to tell G and O
that I'm coming to England with Peter H and going back to Kingston with
him, and that I'm both happy and sorry. Addressed it jointly! And I can't
mail it.
15 May
I've shifted like a sandhill through so many shapes of mood that my 'decision'
seems accidental. I will go along to England in summer and I will come back
next year; we will live in David Helwig's stone house in Portsmouth and
maybe we will make films together. We'll see if we 'knit' - his word. Today
in the midst of packing he seemed sore and unsure, and I dip into panic,
not deep, like falling off a curb, again and again. Both of us stepping
off our roads this way makes us afraid - he is trying to circle back, and
that's alright, Hegel would expect it. I am feeling out a road that at least
for a little distance seems clearly defined although it lies at an angle
to the direction I thought I needed to take. I often long for Greg, his
simplicity and candour, our physical friendship also simple and candid.
Losing oneself - I sometimes believe, and am nearly always expected to
believe, that I must not be anxious to keep myself, and that in risking
myself to adventures which are not myself I will gain myself again. But
people do lose themselves, and not by hanging onto themselves. Ron sat across
the room in the rocking chair, talked about a woman in Montreal who is so
free no one wants to own her; she directs them outward. He thinks I could
be that, if I remain free. He thinks that if I stay with Peter I will settle
for being less than I can be and am now. I went on about how we must know
our uncertainties and plow them back into ourselves; he must not protect
my decision, and I must not either. So it's true, I'm afraid I'll lose myself
and my direction. I repeat to myself that it will only be a little while,
a year. But being myself, not being lost, what is it more than having the
taste of my own integrity constantly in my mouth, the taste of my resistance?
On Victoria Day Monday, in Toronto, Peter drove me to Anne's house. We
were at the Walker House Hotel beside the train station, another taupe hotel
room, very hot, with a radiator on either side of the closet and a window
beside both radiators, a white-tiled bath. I was desolate and he felt superfluous
to me. My leg was swollen and sore, quite hideous and completely useless.
I shut him out of my desolation because part of it was "I can't do
it, I can't do it."
Thursday
I finally found the image for my indecision yesterday; it's the strong
bewildered conviction that something is terribly wrong with this idea of
Peter's and that I must discover what it is before it's too late. I stall
him in the meantime - just a minute while I think about it some more, I've
almost got it, everything will be alright when I understand, and then throw
out some arguments which are peripheral, which I know are peripheral, but
which I scrutinize anxiously because the key might be contained in them.
They seem to circle around the 'something' which is wrong. "I don't
love you" isn't right, and it doesn't mean anything. "I must have
the physical passion" isn't right because the passion is something
evoked by my own perversity - partly. "I don't want to be provided
for" - "All you ever talk about is money!" he yells, "Why
don't you talk about whether we can be together and what we can do!"
Then at nearly three o'clock he picked up the book and walked out with
it in humiliation. I felt as though we were in a swamp, trying to push our
way out of a morass, numb and blind, numbed and blinded by our own language,
and not only our language but also our thoughts themselves, our arguments
opaque in their own guile. He went to the kitchen and I went outside; when
he came back I came in and saw him putting on his coat, said "Please
don't go," but in his humiliation he couldn't stay. He said "Perhaps
I have been pushing you and don't realize it. It's true that there's an
element of menopausal panic, and that's a neurotic element, but I think
we could separate it out." I could only blubber, "I want to be
full of imp imp impulses for you" against his chest; he said "I
think you do like me a little." When he went out he said "You're
not against a wall. You can come away from the wall." I went into the
living room and turned off the light, then thought of him in the driveway
and fumbled to turn it on again. In bed, the damp hot three o'clock, began
a sob and choked it off with "This is silly."
-
So: what he says is true, my indecision is cruel and destructive, it
destroys him. The ambivalence is me; I cannot kill it and I needn't be guilty
about it, although I am, but I must not torment him with it. We must not
falsify it but I must not use it to destroy. I could play with it with Greg,
but I must learn something new with Peter. I need him, because he's usually
right about me, and because he's Peter; and I need to fight him, because
he isn't always right, because I am something valuable myself, because he
needs me to oppose him, as I need him to oppose me.
Something isn't working. Something blocks me, and it isn't only my fault,
my perversity, my bitchiness ("The way you talk about your men, like
possessions, parts of your mythology, and that's alright, we all do it,
but ...."), my nay-saying. He says I'm free, but I'm not free because
he's left himself so open to humiliation that I'm pushed by his sadness
and disappointment into yelling back, "I won't! I can't! I didn't ask
you to!" It's a double message that stuns me. I'm not free to plan
and improvise on my impulses toward him, I must first agree with him. The
total commitment he wants, I can't decide to have it, I can only find myself
in it. His pleading with me to have it makes it impossible. If I do not
feel free I cannot feel at all, it seems. And his incubation period in which
we are one flesh - I can't do it, it makes everything impossible, if we
can't work it out to make my freedom possible at the same time, it's impossible.
I can promise to try to be responsible with my freedom and not use
it in ways that waste myself, but I must have it - and then I can try to
make something of our friendship, the one we used to have! My terms - they're
essential, surely we can learn to let me alone without humiliating him or
contradicting myself. Take the pressure off so I can plan to make things
with him too, and not be backing off all the time.
Sunday June 1st
With my determination to plan for as much resistance as I need, I was
strong and full of impulses for Peter, as I'd wanted to be. I listened all
day; at late dusk I heard the characteristic whir of his car's fan, rising
louder just before it dies. I liked him but he was chary and sore. I explained
about my token freedoms, my tent in Ontario Park, and he was hurt and undecided.
We went to sit where it was warmer. He couldn't really warm to me. (The
night before, he'd said "I can't touch you, I couldn't possibly touch
you," he was so humiliated. "What it comes to is that I'm giving
you arguments for why you should love me," and he looked away as he
always does when he's been scraped raw, leaving me just the side of his
face. For some reason I love him when I think of it.) Finally he put his
head on my pussy and said "Should we go to bed now?", but tired,
uncertain.
Friday was beautiful all day, we lay upstairs on my bed with the door
closed listening to children yelling on the street, delivery vans stopping
and passing. I was still bodily keen from the night before and wanted him
to stay inside me. Even then he wasn't really there, he said, he needed
to collect himself, go away and work, and I suppose think about whether
he still likes me. He came back happy from Monterray pop, with a
Bach for me. As he sat at the piano, I cooked in the kitchen, happy. I came
out once and fitted my body around his, curved over the keyboard. He put
IJ and Toozie to bed beautifully, Paul came and was giggly with beer and
(he said) yoga, sitting in the garden under the cherry tree. We celebrated
my convocation with my dinner, good steak and very odd failed tarte aux
fraises, strawberry pie.
On Saturday morning he left, wouldn't stay, was distant. (The night before
he had really withdrawn but wouldn't say so, wouldn't declare his ambivalence,
and I went up angry to put my nightgown on, but came back down and lay beside
him until I was nearly asleep. At breakfast he talked affectionately about
Elizabeth Heinz who treated him badly and whom he loved as a consequence,
I insisted. After my day of being happy with him he withdrew. I drew my
conclusion. He says it isn't because I liked him that he must leave. "I
hated you, I really hated you." So now I'm in the category of women
he hates. And betrays. He said casually, "Last time, I went to see
Rosemary. She was very good about it, at least I went home with my loins
relieved. She was great." I froze, in that deck chair. He seemed not
to notice. At the moment I had my offering to make, my idea of how I could
love him, and I left it, but today when I think about it I am angry and
humiliated.
From letter: "you said 'At least I went home with my loins relieved.'That
makes the pit of my stomach fall out, because it means that, like Joan,
I must be supplemented. And it means that you're still perfectly able to
use other people to relieve your loins. That to me seems treacherous to
them and to me. But I've always known that you're treacherous and have no
reason for thinking you no longer are, except that you say so. I'm destructive,
that's true, but I'm not treacherous! Even when I'm most uncertain about
whether we can get along I don't HATE you! And if my loins must be relieved
I do it myself! This is no longer anger, but it's protest. I'm humiliated
when you seem to overrate me, as you're humiliated when I seem to underrate
you. At the moment I feel as bruised as you do, big deal, I know. Oh Peter."
I've bought a sleeping bag, a professional one for people who take sleeping
outside seriously, a down-filled, hooded dirty khaki colored ugly mummy
bag, very light and compact, Army surplus. Am very proud of it. If it were
blue nylon with flannelette lining printed in mallards and reeds, it would
be no fit token. Nothing compromising about this bag.
Paul and I had a good Saturday. He showed me a favorite part of Toronto,
south of Queen and east of Yonge, new artisan's shops and boutiques among
the flophouses, many pretty churches and a feeling of space created mainly
by vacant grown-over lots. The Victor Martin Home for Older Men. A violin-maker's
shop front with a dramatic studio portrait of a wild-haired violinist and
beside it the face of the violinist, twenty years older, ravaged, picking
his nose. A small antique shop with an armchair in front of it among other
items of furniture for sale - on the chair a note "Rest ye a while,"
on a small table an ashtray, the proprietor running out in leotards and
a skirt ripped to the waist, a hair net, to see whether Paul was sitting
on her frail petunias and to give him a half-hostile half-playful lecture,
"If you don't stop smoking you'll never own a house." Paul was
authoritative and easy at Hercules Surplus and Thrifty Sportswear. I liked
him there.
Monday
The Basques reserve the family table as sacred for the family's use.
After a Basque wedding the couple goes to the graveyard to look at the place
where they will lie side by side. Women are respected but serve in security.
Insults are never forgiven, therefore one is careful with them. Anyone who
does not do his duty is excluded. Pride. But people sing unselfconsciously,
alone and in groups, everywhere. There is a dance in which the beautiful
and the good challenge the ugly and the bad, the Dance of the Zamalzain.
Its outcome is ominous.
7 June
Reading the Simmons biography of Tolstoy, notion of art and class. Also
Portnoy's complaint, again notion of minority and making it with
the WASP middle class - I read it finding out about Desser and found quite
a lot of small black-haired Mennonite Ellie in it.
The aim of an artist is not to resolve a question
irrefutably, but to compel one to love life in all its manifestations, and
these are inexhaustible.
Tolstoy, when he was writing his long novels.
20 June
I am homeless. That is part of tonight's desolation. Peter pretended
to go to park his car and has gone away to let me brood; is somewhere drinking?
The long struggle of Tolstoy and his wife depressed me; it seems to have
begun with us. Get the mood; steer it into companionship; don't argue, we
are so alienated by it; don't analyze this desolation, it is futile and
causes hate; but don't snap out in your irritation, it might be irrevocable.
Isn't there ever a long peace between people? Only such little flourishes
of taking advantage of the high energy of good days to create something
that will count as evidence for rather than against?
We drove toward home on Sherbrooke; I stared ahead; he reached for my
chin and squeezed it. I said "That was like a punch" and demonstrated
a fist. He said "It was meant to be affectionate." I: "It
wasn't." He, "Are you quite sure?" I: "Positive."
He: "Well you're wrong." Walked me up the stairs, unlocked the
door, stayed to turn on the bed light, and left.
[Two photos from the interim: hairbrush, Peter's nymph]
Beaver Lake
No more of this nonsense, the pain in my stomach, the battle to see clearly,
obscure failure every day, unshared joy settling heavily somewhere in the
space between us. Joan saying to me, "He doesn't want me to be what
I am" and now my beginning to believe as he does that it's mostly my
fault. With him I am sexually homeless as well, because he accuses me of
being male, in my will and opposition. He has them as well, but they are
masculine and the implication to both of us is that I dislocate our
sexuality and even god knows our humanity. He feels challenged and unable
to meet the challenge because I'm a castrating bitch. And my femininity
- the way I can love a day or a sky, pictures, his hand on my nipples and
his prick simply lying inside me, sensuality and lyricism, don't count,
aren't important, somehow lie at a tangent and aren't remembered. So, end
of good and bad, dearest him, treacherous bastard, end of Desser too, end
of more than I am able to think of without panic, I'm going to France.
Sunday
Peter this morning looking so beautiful and so new-born. He said this
morning "I think I've begun to understand the injunction against adultery.
You need all of your life to be with one person."
Yesterday I was desolate; we were defeated. This morning he said "You'll
get over the hump, but I'm not sure I'll be there to see it." He sometimes
says "I'm so afraid of you" and "I don't know whether I'll
be strong enough for you." He said "I really am still in love
with you" last night. In the afternoon he said "It's a moral thing;
you can't leave your children for something that doesn't transform you."
On Friday when I came in from my afternoon's excitement about Montreal,
the brown-suited black brass rock group glittering in glittering Place Ville-Marie,
he was sad, he had been sad all day; he had missed Jenny.
I don't make him feel free or young as he was sure I would, therefore
he isn't in love with me any more. What I was to him was something I couldn't
see and didn't believe and now I can't be it again. When I'm with him and
love him and am happy it seems irrelevant to him and he doesn't remember
it. We struggle very bitterly, not bitter against one another, but seriously.
He is my brother. In Steppenwolf, am I the girl whose picture hangs
in his room, who visits him only to have yelling fights and leave suddenly?
Or Hermine, the brother, bisexual and Siamese, bound in flesh, joined along
arm and thigh too closely to join sexually? I wonder if I can disappear
into his mythology without leaving a lump? I want to be indigestible, and
I want to be his brother. Still I love his hand on me. If I could be passionately
certain and full of intelligence I could make him feel himself as he often
makes me feel myself. He wants me to be his miracle and I want to be his
miracle, but on my terms? I can't be decided to be his miracle. But if I'm
not, he's lost and homeless. It has to be something accidental, my emanations?
We are two agnostics, we believe in the limited earth as a structure we
can move in.
Then we became important. Is equality important enough? Is pain important?
My frontier war is important. Could I be Peter's angel? Can Theseus' Amazon
be his angel? Could I be both Amazon and angel? I was angel in the hospital,
as little Amazon as is possible for me. What do I need to learn to give.
How can I give without contempt. How can I believe without flattery. I could
believe in essence as potential.
If I made a film about us it would begin here, not at the beginning.
In the middle of a conversation, sentence, word. Everything that is in question
for me I put into question for him again. Chris: "When you've been
involved with someone you always want to know about them. You're involved
in their death." It makes Chris sad, he says, that I don't believe
I've lived before. He's a Platonic idealist! And he thinks something is
going to make a reckoning of his life, think of the poor servant who thought
the best thing was to bury his talent and keep it safe. I said that if there
was a reckoning, one of the most important things would be having been joyful
over what there is to be joyful about. He said "You can't have been
joyful very much. Your face has concern on it."
We had moved from room to room in his house, talking as he stirred soya
beans, baby gerkins, catsup, oregano, thyme, scrambled eggs, orange cheddar,
worchestershire sauce, onions, tomatoes into his brown rice. "When
we go out into the street we minimize ourselves," hunching his shoulders
in.
With his silver blue eyes, his perfect teeth and his long hair he looks
like a sturdy happy six year old girl - but then his hairy broad arched
feet like clubs or springs, his big stomach, his beard like solid porous
bone. He says he thinks that what we must do is search for the rest of ourselves,
we are part of a walnut or acorn shattered into many pieces, we look for
the piece next to our own, a perfect fit who exists somewhere. ("Madeleine
is part of my acorn but she isn't the piece next to mine."). In this
life we are two, but in the next we are one. He said my this-worldliness
sounds like a justification. I said his Platonic idealism sounds like a
justification. He said yes, we had each other, my way justifies doing something,
his justifies not doing something. (Yet he has a job and a child.)
Raining Monday
Wet cold nose and feet, Chris's room cold and windy, the cupboard bunk
beds with a weathered door as lid to Chris's sleeping box. Ragged geranium
on the windowsill, long working surface, spinning wheel. In the kitchen
Let's Cook it Right on a shelf above the chopper block table, blue
cupboards, cats, an infrared refrigerator, door onto dirty pigeons and a
backyard too full of firewood for grass, everything ingenious. Front room
in red light, magic machine hung on the wall like an old fashioned telephone.
Balcony with three pots of more ragged plants, and a red chair. A smell
of cats and age, exactly like my room in Athens. Dirty orderliness. The
toilet running in bursts, very loudly, so that sitting above it is like
having a stream under the house.
Breakfast, one of the big oranges I brought. (Peter has such a strong
sense of providing for, "Take an orange, take both, and I'll save one
for myself.") Lunch in Margaret's Restaurant, in a narrow booth, coffee
from Margaret and two pastries (Patisserie Belge) in a paper bag. Dinner
lemon-tasting chicken rice soup, artichokes to which the Greek added sauce
from the lamb and a baked potato in the Acropolis Restaurant. The Greek
is bald on the top of his head with fine curling grey-powdered black hair
on the sides, glasses, a very white apron, a look of serene intelligence.
This morning bookshops, read Louise Bogan's Woman sitting on the
floor in the Academic Bookshop behind towers of books listening to the clicking
German-accented talk of the owner and his wife. Thought constantly of Peter
and of things Chris and I spoke about yesterday, and have written a jumble,
but like sitting in these cold restaurants and writing. I must decide everything,
I think, I must become what I am, firmly, with no more longing to be everything
at once. It's most important to keep the border war Chris says. Twice today
he telephoned, the gentleness and good taste of that voice of his, which
made me want to come and see him when I called Madeleine and found only
him.
- Just before he climbed up into the top of his bed he smoked a half
pipe of grass, which made him suddenly feel that everything I said was astute
and graceful! He hung over the edge of his bed looking down like a Norse
god in a winged helmet, his fist foreshortened huge, boneless and solid.
"Take off your black shirt so I can see your breasts, and then I'll
know you." I said "Okay" but waited, podded down in my sleeping
bag to see if he really was interested. He forgot, but remembered later,
so I rolled the leotard down to my waist and lay back across the bunk with
my head over the edge and let him look, which led to my being asked to stand
up so he could kiss me, shaking on the edge of the side-bunk board, which
led to my being asked upstairs to lie beside him. I said I did not want
him to make love to me. He said that was fine, he didn't want to make love
to me. He doesn't believe in sex. Kisses and body-long caresses, one body
follows another into its own hollows and then breathes out and is followed
back along the hollows of the other's body, like foam following the wave
that seeps back down the beach. The gestalt precise but always moving, a
figure-ground reversal that has no pure attack, no pure resistance. Kisses
are like two trees, rubbed raw in one spot where they might begin to grow
together. (Screwing is too. Peter lying inside me the last night in Bennett's
Lodge was as if we had already fused, like two colors of hot wax pooling
and mixing by its own movement.) (For the rest of the night, when he touched
me my complete body jumped into focus, waiting again for the lord.)
Chris large, soft, warm, easy to curve oneself around, kissing long kisses
with little squeaks of pleasure, exploring, warming, and his prick jumping
against my thigh. Well. It was conversation, and good conversation like
our talk yesterday, but I missed Peter and couldn't quite follow him into
his seeming absorption, and eventually went downstairs to sleep.
"You should embroider yourself more."
The morning and casually through the day, kisses and meals, a bath he
ran me very deep in the dark bathroom, a candle and an incense stick, ceiling
black like a grotto, the Missa Creola like voices through the cracks,
steam, blueberry soap, the fact that it had been laid out by Chris as a
ritual.
Teorema. Christian love if taken seriously has interesting consequences?
Sex and good are closely linked, piety and catatonia are similar? We live
in a desert, cloud shadows and wind? The beautiful young man kindly and
gently opens everyone to that desert?
-
Tolstoy, "Awareness that the spirit of man
is always at the mercy of the actual and trivial, his passionate sense that
the actual and trivial are of the greatest importance, his certainty that
they are not of final importance .... To comprehend unconditioned spirit
is not so very hard, but there is no knowledge rarer than the understanding
of spirit as it exists in the inescapable conditions which the actual and
trivial make for it."
Friday, last day of June in 1969
I've been at 82 St Norbert St since Sunday. Peter brought me and looked
around at the house, talking to himself about the cat smell. Christopher
was in the kitchen, barefoot with his feet curved like claws, bluejeans
with a strip of red print cotton sewed around the bottoms of the legs, a
red striped baggy shirt. He seems to stand back on his heels because his
reservoir-of-chocolate-bar stomach is carried high and his shoulders held
far back. Dull light brown hair uncombed, hanging to his shoulders; precisely
trimmed beard shaped around his face like whalebone, solid and porous. The
skin on his forehead and cheeks so pink and unwrinkled, the benevolence
of his silver blue eyes, something childish about his mouth, make him look
like a grave but happy six year old girl. His big body carried so lightly
makes him seem a benevolent angel, and like angels he has no hips at all.
He showed Peter his house, talking on vaguely about the Film Board and
how he doesn't think Robin's film [Robin Spry Prologue 1969] can
really justify its existence and his work on it. Then Peter and I went to
see If. Again the moment when the gymnast dropped out of the corner
of the screen took my breath. We sat outside on a block of concrete when
it was finished, strong sunlight that had come late in the afternoon. I
said "I love you so much today" and he seemed not to notice. (At
breakfast he'd said "I think we're the same, happy and sad at the same
time." I think he didn't trust me. But we'd come out of such a Saturday
of devastation. He lay and read Colossus of Marousi lying on a slope
at Beaver Lake, while I sat slightly further down the slope and cried. A
red kite and a blue one, swallow-shaped, swam very high above the other,
lower, galloping kites and running children, and the Krishna singers pink
and Canadian making monotonous music below our slope. When I went away,
wandered over the empty stretch of weeds at the top of the Mountain and
watched the kites, I could wind myself in, pull down the swimming desolation
of the morning, the night before, the hopelessness of Peter's unhappiness
and my own insufficiency. Well. I'm going to France, I wrote in my journal.)
Then I left Peter across from his parking lot and came back here. Two
little boys with glassy marble-green eyes demanded to know why I wear a
cap. I said I was bald underneath it, the sun hurts the bald spot. Christopher
came out on his balcony with the red rocking chair and smiled down. He went
on. We felt a little estranged because of my agnosticism, but after the
brown rice and after his pipe, he lay in his bed and said "Don't go
out to sleep on the balcony yet. I'd feel better if you came here for a
while." I sat beside him on the floor for a while, then crawled into
the sleeping bag and went to sleep next to him.
Last night, Friday night, I crawled into the top bunk and put my hand
down to him. Then he stood up to kiss me. Then he asked if I would come
down, and I did, kissing and screwing, a dance with concentration and precision,
my only kind of dancing. Perhaps that's what I'm dreaming of when I dream
of skating and dancing. He is graceful in both, as I am. He knows I'm graceful.
We butted together and I tried to catch him. Finally he sat back crosslegged,
took my knees across his legs, put his hands on my breasts and came into
me that way I've always wanted to. I sat up too and we swayed with our arms
around each other, hinged intimately, the strange sexual friendship in which
the join, the solder, is the sensitive radiant thing which belongs to both,
which is both, in which both become one thing at their inner edge.
It is a lovely thing, and with it we have lovely talk. I hardly think about
Peter. I'll leave Christopher happy that I've known him and no longer feeling
crippled and sexually perverse.
But I haven't told about the rest of last night. On Thursday night squint-faced
Nash of the beautiful smooth freckled back sat on the step playing his guitar.
The children from upstairs, Linda, Pinky, sat and sang. Finally they called
me down to them and we sang while the neighbours came out on their stoops
with bottles of beer. When I went upstairs, leaving Nash playing his steel-string
blues, Christopher was almost asleep with grass. I went out to sleep on
the balcony, between the rocker and the geraniums, with a squashed orange
moon between the poles of the railing, and the neighbour woman casting a
last indignant look at the street. Grey opaque sky, police cruisers, someone
screaming upstairs, quarrels on a stoop downstairs, everything becoming
more silent each time I woke, then morning delivery trucks sliding through
the convent entrance smoothly as toothpaste from a tube, no room to spare,
skill and many mornings the same. Then I woke suddenly to see Christopher
smiling down on me. It was time to go to work, he gathered me up for a public
kiss and went off as I waved through the railings. He told me how I looked
asleep and how the strings controlling my face all tightened in an instant.
And last night. We went to get wine and a watermelon, Nash, Chris and
I all barefoot, tiptoed out of the Greek store holding the watermelon like
an unhatched baby and were pursued by the cashier. Came home and put them
in the refrigerator. Chris got into one of his deep baths in the dark bathroom.
I came in and sat on the toilet seat to talk to him. Nash talked from the
kitchen, in shorts and beautiful, with the pink tip of his prick dipping
innocently out along his bare leg. Suddenly a siren began, an air raid siren
swinging around like an airport's searchlight, sweeping past very strong,
fading, reappearing. At the same time it was raining, water crashing off
the porch roof, people beginning to run in all the streets visible from
our high balcony, thunder and long pulsating cracks of lightning. We all
ran to the doorway. There was a strong light over the buildings toward the
east, which seemed to be growing larger and more intense. We weren't sure.
We all had the same thought, it's not so bad if we die now, we're all together,
eating watermelon in the thunderstorm, feeling so close to each other. We
all thought of the people we weren't with, but as Nash said, "all together
in a clump." The city spread out from that gritty second floor verandah,
the mattress factory, the police station in steps downward, then the slum
clearance high rises, then the real skyscrapers and the dock elevators,
the streets and the park, like a backdrop shining and almost colorless,
astonishingly serene, and even more because of the siren and the thunderstorm.
We sat down in the doorway, letting the moment ebb itself out, drinking
the Mateus from shared glasses and eating pizza and watermelon. Later Christopher's
beard smelled of cooked cheese. This morning when he brought me tea it still
did.
Nash has gone to Maine now. We'll miss him, gay, good-humored and beautiful
as he is, with his scrambled tight little face and stiff brush of black
hair. His laugh makes us all feel gay, he's unextraordinary, well brought
up, confident, young, frivolous and intelligent in a way that's been arrived
at by no sort of struggle, garbled rapid way of speaking, American accent
and insouciance, a grin that seems to go all the way to his backbone, it
consumes him, he's it and nothing else at that moment. He brings out Christopher's
charm, they elaborate one another.
Part of Christopher's charm is the way he tells me about myself. "You're
like an acorn," "You feel like a baby camel," "When
you came in and I saw the leather cap, the jacket, I thought 'There's a
unit,' you know how to extend yourself." "Look at you on the chair,
the way you've arranged yourself with the plate." "The way you
hold your shoulders." Marytka talking about how I move - I didn't know.
Do I have an elegance I don't know about?
"The second before you woke you were quite different, when you woke
all the strings tightened." "You don't embroider yourself enough.
You could be more remarkable than you are."
And other things he said, "Some days I know I'm not very marvelous
and I want to go away and be by myself." "That was very good what
you said about trees rubbing together, but I'll try not to say it to anyone"
with a white-toothed smile.
"Your debutant knows what you need, but I know what you want."
That's Dylan.
"I had a doctor when I was a child, who didn't have any instruments
at all. He felt your hair and looked at your tongue and said 'You're all
right, nothing wrong with you.'"
"We're too far from the causes of things. It was yesterday I said
I didn't think that any more?"
The week had been Dylan (I didn't mean to make you so sad ... sooner
or later one of us must know ... that I really did try to get close to you),
cherries, and the repeated absorption in talk that I wish I could remember,
because it was always ingenious, vivid, full of pictures. He often says
things extravagantly, as Mad does, in the same shape of sentence!
London index
- raw forming volume 8: september 1968 - july 1969
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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