March 27 2019
From Lessing I've gone to working on the London intros I'd left unfinished.
I'm in L1. My London is twenty years later and my trajectory is different.
She was always working from a Marxist vision of global historical change.
I was dimly intent on, feeling toward, something about bodies in the world.
Is that accurate? I'll have to go on and see. I'm more visual, less social.
28
In search of pure lust - I raced through it dislikingly - partly
not wanting to think of that tense skeleton naked - partly not liking the
relationship-land style, unsensory, generalizing, ready-made, loveless though
always going on about love, by which she means attachment furor - partly
resenting the trust fund that always lets her travel - partly remembering
her slipstreaming intellectual vacuity at Goddard, her social greed - and
in relation to that wondering what it really was with the women she seems
to have demolished - remembering the smothering atmosphere of lesbian groups
- the impureness of the lust always, it seemed - the lack of universe -
the yuckiness of her wealthy family. I was bored by the love affairs, didn't
feel any of the women in them. What can I say in her defense. I got interested
whenever she wrote about meditation. She did try to be honest I think though
she didn't get to the bottom of her wrongness. The reframing work of the
lesbians of the '70s and '80s was important, has diffused. The context got
lesbians into authority in places like Goddard. She accurately describes
the lovelessness of desire in my lesbian defeats starting with Margaret
and on even to Louie.
- Were my agonies about Tom better
YES
- Because I was trying to work for him
yes
I was more conscious in them.
-
- Sex is conventional, overrated, mystified, distorting, sad, but I'm
on the make.
In L1 I'm fed up with myself for the months of blithering self-doubt
with Ian. I was wanting better sex after Peter and he was a pretty boy and
if I'd left it at that who knows, but I was trying not to be a bad person
and so ended up dumping him in the worst possible way. End of October to
end of March.
- Wake up, I think Sunday morning, from a dream about a baby, mine, lying
still looking at me, wise and serene, the most perfectly beautiful baby.
The dream left me very quiet. Roy said "Before you woke I was thinking
about that, your baby."
Even with Roy's deceptions and vagaries the tone is saner. Funny how
I start needing to remember La Glace, which I never did with Ian.
- He claimed that he had not said what I remembered him saying, that
he wanted to marry me and wanted a child with me. I found myself screaming
with grief, because what I remembered as our joyful and mutual leap seemed
to be deformed in his memory into a stupid and gullible mistake I made,
on my own and using him to make it.
-
- As I've been getting thinner and more desperate he's become gayer,
more beautiful, more playful, more confident.
-
- We talked very quietly and were formal but free - speech was coming
into my head very clear and serene - how I've just come out of a strange
and deep adventure, and how I have another one planted in me about to begin.
Is it he who accuses me of ugliness and lifelessness, or is it myself?
- I blame myself for not being stronger and more resistant, but I was
all centred and hopeful in that collision and if I'd been different I would
have betrayed myself.
29
- To begin with - almost no one is ever in the same world.
Late yesterday I was putting together the story of the truck driver that
I've called enceinte de cing mois and it was seeming to me that the
relationship stories are worth nothing and what I do hold to are the stories
of going into the world on my own. In the whole of the Ian time only the
paragraphs talking to his mom and dad in the Edinburgh kitchen.
- I do know the peace and elation and certainty that collect in me when
fear and anguish have been hard on me. Love has nothing to do with kindness
- yes, something.
Roy did make sure he always had wheels, that was something.
- Roy is a mystery and a wonder, I don't know what to do with him. I
feel that he's some part of my life filled out, filled in, fulfilled, a
climax, a meeting.
-
- It's winter now, no snow, but the wonderful swift heavy winter north
skies full of wind and mist. We've had electrical strikes in the last few
days, thrilling stretches when there were no yellow streetlights, no traffic
lights, no shop lights, no heating, no cooking, no TV, just candles flickering
under stars, R and I gleeful under the featherbed listening to carols on
the transistor by lamplight and imagining all the supermarkets with their
frozen food turning into puddles, chaos at every intersection, factories
shut down, thousands of people sitting down to cornflakes for supper.
-
- This morning during all the pitch black hours between four and nine
I lay awake feeling proud of myself because we'd given such a perfect birth.
-
- I never want to admit there are things that must not, dare not, be
said.
-
- "I'm going through such changes. I don't want to scare you. I
have such a call to holiness." And I say that I've always understood
that, in my belly. I have a call to holiness too - holiness and adventure.
He leaned on his elbow and looked at me: his face was dark because the
window was behind him, but I felt my face almost stroked, or just felt.
I felt felt. And that was like a kiss at the end of a movie.
-
- But the duplicity of the call to holiness - it's real and it is what
it says it is; but it's also a call away from actually making bottles,
buying paddipads, doing laundry, confronting angry sick real me and other
such non-angelic things that have to do with real fathering and friending.
In me it's also always the useful call to abandoning struggles with angry
real him and simply leaving.
-
- The house is full of his vitality. And I could never have imagined
such treachery, such falsity. Such fury - clubbing my head in the bathroom,
frantic.
-
- There is a natural sequence of ruthless love,
aggressive attack, guilt feeling, sense of concern, sadness, desire to
mend and build and give; this sequence is the essential experience of infancy
and early childhood and yet it cannot become a real thing unless the mother
is able to live through the phases with the infant, and so make possible
the integration of the various elements.
[Winnicott]
-
- These days, a new kind of dialogue in me, critical but excited about
possibilities - perceptions of my own falsity, absence, conventionality
- how I misuse language and this journal too, always have
-The tone is more objective isn't it.
- gone blindly from one break of faith to another, always surprised -
struggled to learn what I thought he knows - struggled to know him, been
battered by lies and evasions. Yet, when I now look around among my surprised
feelings I find that I'm not really outraged.
What was that? What was the satisfaction in betrayal? Would you say it
was freedom? Peter and Ian guilted me for ambivalence but Roy lived out
his own ambivalence so wildly I was free to feel anything I did feel.
- We feel our way so blindly, through treachery and violence, tenderness,
childish love. Again and again I've only got that to say.
-
- The slow learning to question everything he says.
-
- I asked Mafalda what it is that he has - and she says tenderness. Alexander:
"He takes on the character of whoever he's with to such an extent."
Such a finely tuned sympathy that one feels known for the first time.
-
- It is by skill; by consciousness, by innocence,
by intelligence, by love, by magic we shall win and only thus ... whereas
this other: his death, his destroying, it is quiet, subtle, continuous,
very slow, in quite great part deluded, in some part the doing of most
tenderly intended love. {Agee Let us
now praise famous men]
-
- He'd have to want for me what he wants for himself: that would be the
minimum beginning.
-
- Life is worth living because of death. The moment that flares out -
because of this moment.
-
- quiet full of bitter whispers
-
- I don't want to live with him. Yet we have so many accidental moments,
mostly funny, that I love and feel are irreplaceable. But I wish he'd go
away more often.
-
- Talking to Rosalynde last night about how to move out without scaring
Roy, two a.m. raining and warm, we sat drinking coffee in the kitchen and
were very fluent.
I left in October, how many months did I live with him, March 1970 to
October 1971.
- "My brother knocked me down. Then I knocked my brother down. And
then we went in for tea," he said and went off into the kitchen to
turn off the coffee water.
After life 1998. I saw it then with Tom I think at the Ken and
ddn't remember anything but the premise. He liked it more than I did. Tonight
it was making me think of the way the journal and now the memory pieces
I'm posting try to hold moments of other people in existence too, not only
mine - the truck driver, "there he is on all fours running along the
ditch smelling the plants on the ground". I don't think the piece shows
how wonderful I found him, it became more of a travel tale. It's not one
of my popular pieces maybe because there's French in it - though Violet
liked it because she knows French probably - and I'd think maybe too because
it's in that earlier more external style.
30
Was dreaming I was going to graduate, telling the
women with me that I had my dress and it was the dress I'd made to graduate
from high school, the orange and gold one. I pulled it out of the closet
to show them. It was very short and seemed flabby as if too often washed.
I had realized before that I'd forgotten my white shoes, I only had the
ones I was wearing, street shoes. Now I'd have to explain to them why I
couldn't go to my graduation and that would be painful. I began to say there
was something else. Leslie sitting opposite me said she'd already guessed.
- He stopped me on the street to touch my nose: I knew right away that
it was to halt me while a girl went by so he could see her better. But
I felt no malice - this is balance, this afternoon was a rare half hour's
maybe unrepeatable balance.
-
- Was I wrong to stick with Roy yes
- When I knew what he was I should have left
yes
- I couldn't for practical reasons
YES
- Do you think Luke was worth it YES
A year later the women's liberation film weekend.
- Hegelian: femininity becoming aware of itself incorporating masculinity
and becoming an enlarged self.
-
- It's true that all weekend I felt not only ambition but actual potency-ality,
as if I'm opening and so losing my unexploded mystery - clumsily becoming
an explosive power - ie a person, leader. Why not think strategically of
using myself, staging myself, as long as I keep it possible to use and
stage myself with more and more accurate an integrity.
Already a lesbian dream and Hattori too. How fast it all happened.
- My mom writing that my life was giving her nightmares. I hate that,
right there I'm already hating her for her fear of courage. She lost me
to my own capacity.
-
- I'm proud again, and look for grace to understand and fight and play
better
-
- "I'll tell you the secret, if you like. It's undermining the intellectual
conversation ... not sexual ... feel recognized ... not an illusion, I
actually do recognize them."
I was talking of my fear of Roy outshining me.
What was it training in? I think of Roy now as nothing but psychopathy
but the evidence is
Landlocked January 1972.
- "When I think of the new order, I think of you as its first inhabitant.
Your ways of thinking, instinctively in ways I can't." Colin said.
I was using Roy to learn criminality, is that the way to say it. Theft.
- Various excitements, colored with pleasure,
aggression or pain, energize the organism to make contacts and creative
adjustments in its environment.
I was going whole hog using his instability to release my own range.
I wanted to experience my own strength.
- Writing this with Roy watching from behind my eyes I realize it's a
"fairly limited" way of talking to myself, yet it comforts me
to slowly carefully retaste and form what's given me pleasure.
-
- guilt and that old social envy
I'd been hard on myself for social envy because I wasn't understanding
the way it was reasonable: I didn't understand because I wasn't conscious
in the actual moments of loss of standing because of my leg. I wasn't given
my right place.
- Was the blindness necessary yes
- Was any of Roy's ambivalence because of it
no
- Is Luke ashamed of me for it NO
-
- unconscious selfprotective cynicism of the con-artist
At the same time forming myself in art, which I hadn't done up to then.
- But I'm so repressed and even with Luke and it makes me afraid I'll
lose him to Roy.
It was oppression not repression, he was undermining me by crooked means.
But - oh - something to work at.
- repetition of this war between irresponsible vitality and ceremonious
cherishing careful beautiful order
-
- whom I hate is really the whining voice in my head everlastingly complaining
that I'm not wonderful enough, not a real woman in fact but some kind of
unnatural man-woman; and everlastingly reminding me of my own hatred, lifelessness,
decaying body and bitter death
- To Mary about Ed! But no, it was his attitude to me not mine. I said
I hated him and she didn't say As you should.
- he treads quicksand in the dark of his own blind guilt-stricken pride
and bottomless self-doubt
April-May 1972 Co-op, garden, women's meetings, amazing speed. The writing
wearies me though.
-
Tired. Teeth cleaned, an hour of ordeal. Norgaard's to check on road
mulch. Then brought Joe in the video store a handful of dvds. ATM for cash.
Scolded Fredrick on FB messaging for bailing on me yesterday. Then Tremaine
to get started on garden work, which meant demonstrating it because he's
a kid, grade ten, what is that, sixteen. Weeding the west fence bed as far
as the mirabelle. Consulting Allan and Cody about eavestroughs. Home Hardware
for filter cloth.
More people have arrived by the truck driver story - Freya, Sonja - Cheryl
tonight - and I've just now realized what it's about. I didn't have a fond
dad to bless my pregnancy but the truck driver did that. No one else will
notice that about it, which was what I guess I meant when I said I didn't
think the piece shows how wonderful I found him. - My mom so astonishingly
uncompassionate about the cost to a girl's well-being of the dad Ed was.
31
I like the extracts above but the passages they're from are such an airless
press of raw observation.
Have been thinking all the while of Ben reading these years in 2010.
"Deep and authentic, dark and repetitive, generous and beautiful."
At the time I thought, repetitive? but oh my.
Receptive young person not realizing how much sheer work she was having
to do to balance in overwhelming newness.
- Sarah and I decided that one of the reasons we're miserable in our
'ugly' bodies is no one acting toward us as bodies
-
- When I say I'm grateful for Luke, and you say to whom am I grateful,
sounds like a Fatherly question mined with a moral conclusion of your own.
To whom? To my own good sense and bad sense and energy, which is to say,
partly to you. To Roy's tenderness and foolishness which is to say partly
to Catherine. To the British state for National Health Service and nursery
schools, to the Canadian Federation of University Women without whose kind
assistance this baby would never have been possible, to the streams of
molecular energy the world lent me for making his babyshape, yes, yes,
and to the mysterious order that flowing through and around us creates
and sustains us and gives us excitement.
-
- No, I haven't lost the impulse to be grateful, to praise, and sometimes
I embarrassedly say prayers that begin "Dear Cosmos, thank you for
and bless and and help me to be more wonderful than I am."
-
- And aren't you glad, really, somewhere, that you don't have us in yr
pocket doing what everybody's children do predictably as rain.
-
- Sarah saying "It's not taking your feelings seriously, again."
-
- I wake with my insides hurting, am afraid, remember Laing last night
saying that the insides are where feelings are. I say to myself that my
pain isn't killing me; feelings are what my insides are for.
-
- We went to the Heath and aired ourselves to the cold distance of stars,
cold clarity of moonlight, didn't like each other much.
-
- I guess he's far more fragile than I would ever allow myself to know,
when that knowledge would have meant having to give too much of my self
away.
-
- felt I'd become a laughing older woman with some admitted scars that
hurt sometimes but an equality with the fates
-
- Luke full of murmured daydreams about continuous arrival of trains,
"Coming, train."
Early 1973 reading Brakhage.
April 1
Looking morosely at the garden work I'd be doing if I weren't so feeble
that half a row of weeding makes my chest feel scared.
- Having dinner with David [Davis] he read a poem of Pound's, Thine arms
are as a young sapling under the bark / Thy face is a river with lights.
-
- At Krapp's Last Tape, the moment when I knew I would die, when in my
body I felt the lunge of fear at the moment when I will cease.
2
Rick and Scott rototilled the new rose bed and the melon beds. I bought
three 2x8x12 from Tom at Home Hardware and set two of them up in the rock
trench.
- If he were 5'4" and rather plump how uninteresting he'd be, but
oh prince Roy
-
- If I shout at Luke his lip trembles and he says "Say sorry! Say
sorry!"
-
- Sat on some grass looking about and despising people but not two little
Japanese girls in white kneesocks and clogs
3
Some things happened today. I posted the Handel piece which seemed too
esoteric to be liked. All morning my chest felt scared so I went to the
library and brought home a bad novel. At noon I saw Tremaine walking past
with his girlfriend and ran out to ask him to help after school. We put
the rocks back into the trench I prepped yesterday and then dug the edgeboard
into the new rose bed. While he was digging Donna arrived with my desk chair
and there it is, not as beautiful as I imagined but still. I've been sore
at night but am satisfied to have done what I wanted to do in the front.
4
- I closed myself into the dark immobile silence I need with another
body these days and felt my unease slowly shift, as if the vibrations from
his warm and lively self were tuning all the molecules of my body to lie
still in one direction, giving me a dark and silvery grain. Then I skimmed
home on the bicycle, one bare foot trailing on the grass, and he ran home
the other way.
-
- Last night I said "Dear Luke it's getting dark." He said
"An' I getting dark, an' you getting dark, an' the turkle getting
dark. Yes?"
-
- I will not will not celebrate Mother's Day, Father's Day, National
Book Week, New Year's Day, Armistice Day or any other day my body doesn't
celebrate on its own accord.
-
- He's in a flirtatious time and I'm his most jealously guarded mommy:
"Not your mommy!" he says, holding onto my leg.
-
- From the back of the bike, whisking through the Heath, he said "I
got a lovely likkle pe-nis. I got a wiggy. It's there," patting himself.
-
- He says "What's in that?"
- I say "Nothing."
- "Which nuffink? Which nuffink?"
-
- Luke in his bed, hair pushed off his forehead, in his striped pyjamas.
I cover him and sit holding his bars, eyes closed, sing him Hush little
baby don't you cry / You know your mama's bound to die-e / Hush little
baby hush little child / You know time eats you meek or wild / Hush little
baby when you're grown / I'll be an old lady I'll be gone.
Most of it badly written. Qualifiers I don't need, foolishly too many
commas, clumsy explanation, gushes indicating girlness. I thought an occasional
good word and an ear for conversation were good writing. Where there's a
good story though it's sometimes easy to sharpen because observation is
there. The Boots diary bits are better because they're too brief and swift
for poses.
- I was throwing stones in a sort of bucket brigade at the building site,
and there I was wearing an expression of gentle sweetness I didn't know
I still had.
5
Susan sat with me in the garden yesterday aft and I didn't like her,
why. She said You're limping more, and Do you have Parkinson's and because
of my plaid shirt wondered why I dress like a man. A kind of coldness, involved
with herself in her defects and not actually curious though she throws out
bold remarks.
- Is that correct YES
-
- Do you know why Louie has cut me off
yes
- Can you explain yes
- Is it because I'm weaker and uglier
no
- Did I do something wrong no
- What I said in my note YES
- That she's young when she fights
no
- That I'm her brother YES
- Is it true yes
- And because I said I hadn't forgiven her for competing
with me about men yes
- Does she want to still be cut off
no
6
Not liking people. Giving up on Daphne and now on Susan. Giving up on
David. Impatient with Greg's lack of spark. Having given up on Louie I suppose
enough so she has given up on me. Luke feeling gone. What is that. Nothing
there for me. But what is it there isn't. The liking I don't have for myself
now. I don't like being feeble and sore when I work. I don't like having
to kill time. I don't like running out of focus even when I'm just reading.
I don't like being ugly and uninteresting to people because I'm dull. I
don't like falling. I'm limping heavily now. My hands are clumsier, I drop
things and knock things over more.
- Do you want to say something flow,
patiently in oppression and mourning
- Knowing it will only get worse NO
- How not you will escape, and come
through, into authority, and happiness
-
- I go into the swimming pool's room and sit up on the spectator's balcony,
camera and notebook. Sit and expose myself quietly to the moments that
arrive. The sun comes out and makes a rosy smudge on the skylight - reflection
of a chimney. A white-skinned boy in pumpkin-orange trunks swims tirelessly
back and forth across the blue pool. My lens clouds over because the room
is warm and the camera is still cold. The sun disappears and a rich pool
of reflection vanishes. Through the one missing pane of glass in the skylight
white clouds and deep blue sky run side by side. A bird has entered. A
fat little black girl with yellow plastic bracelets sits for half an hour
with her feet in the water. Two slim children stand motionless under the
warm shower, falling into the postures of resting ballerinas. The sun flashes
through again and writes neon hieroglyphics on the water. The tiled bottom
of the pool writhes. I follow my own thoughts about how to be faithful
to all of this.
7
- A Saturday, November. Luke woke crying. I couldn't comfort him. After
a while he came and sat on me where I was sheltering in the wicker basket.
"Why are you sitting here?" he said. "Because I'm thinking."
"Are you thinking - on - me?" "Yes, I was wondering why
you're so sad." "I'm sad because I need to go to Roy's house."
Oh. After a while I was squatting near the back window beginning to cry.
He came quickly to stand next to me, but only looked, said nothing and
didn't touch me. When I stopped and looked at him he hid his face and then
turned it back with an embarrassed smile and jumped at me. "What did
you do?" "I was crying." "Why?" "Because
I'm sad." "Why are you sad." "Because I don't know
what to do." "I don't know what to do either."
-
- Yesterday morning when he woke before me Luke looking at the countryside
book found the picture of an eagle tearing the entrails out of a fox. He
woke me in distress. "What's he doing?" "The eagle is eating
the fox." He was nearly crying, shouted "The fox is not food!"
He didn't have words for what he wanted to say, "It isn't funny! The
fox wants his daddy. The fox doesn't want to be eaten." When I told
Jane about it later Luke said "I am not the fox."
In November 1973 Luke was just short of three.
I'm wanting to say to Luke that when he forbids me to still feel what
I felt for this child he cuts the root of my relatedness to him.
- Luke woke this morning streaming with energy, jumped out of bed and
got his empire of trucks and cars organized, demanded breakfast, hugged
and teased me awake. There was nothing in the house to eat so we went to
a café for breakfast, very special, eggs on toast, sitting side
by side watching the workmen queue up for their tea and buns. Got on the
bicycle again and rode to daycare with a strong wind sending sycamore leaves
big as plates rattling and scraping up from under our wheels. For one thrilling
moment we were in the midst of them and then they were gone ahead of us
down the road, lifting and skimming in one movement like a flock.
-
- Recurring suspicion that everything I do needs to be pushed further,
everything stops too soon
-
- How many times today have I said something and simply not been heard.
-
- As we walked the stars rolled through branches at our own pace.
-
- These household spirits, what do they mean? They say I'm this and I
want to be that, I have these powers and want those.
-
- skin to skin
- you teach me to swim
- how to glide in embrace
- how to mean it
The way I write my mom in these months. I felt pouring myself out to
her was a good thing to do but now I wonder what those letters could have
been for her, they were so far from what she was. I was wanting to show
her ways she could be too, but could she, didn't they just tell her I was
gone? Did she use 'concern' to cover envy?
- Did she hate me YES
-
Peter's Vipassana story. Intense white pain from his mid-back through
to the front of his chest. After days of it a sensation as if people were
standing around him, legs at the level of his shoulder, "One of them
might have been you". Whoosh the pain left.
8
He had a roommate the rules said he shouldn't speak to or look at. To
know who he was he had to notice things like how he opened a door.
"I had such a crush on you. You were beautiful, you were intelligent.
There was no one else I could talk to." The way I was living in that
house and the house itself. "You didn't care what anybody thought."
"I missed you so much after you left." Almost sixty and loyal
to those months; so fortunate, so beautiful - color in his face, long legs
and young man's triangle of shoulder and hip. I made him lunch. He drank
a lot of coffee. We sat for hours at the kitchen table. My dispiritedness
had fallen away.
9
Was it rain woke me at 1, first rain in this dry spring. Snow on Hamilton
this morning.
- Going into the Metropolitan-Circle Line: the ticket collector reaches
his hand for my ticket, punches it, looks at me and says "How're you?"
"Tired" I say. "Had a hard night? You look very nice actually"
in an Irish accent. "Thank you. So do you."
-
- Realizing now that my sadness and loneliness is part of the life of
this film. I'm feeling that no one will love it or understand it, that
I can talk to no one about it and so am sealed into a solitude with that
blue-green water and those rectangles that enclose it, boxes in which there's
such a life and all hope but which can be simply invisible. Please somebody
reply to me -
Goethe's last days in Rome, March 1887 when he was 38. His so-familiar
spirit, myself as I'd have been if rich and easily important and everywhere
respected. He studies by looking and talking, needs to describe in writing,
is gripped hard by anything beautiful, loves the sun, notices plants, is
casually indifferent to religion, is moody but benevolent and neither lustful
nor misogynous.
Three people are really going to miss me when
I leave here. They will never find again what I have given them and it hurts
me to say goodbye. In Rome I have found myself for the first time. For the
first time I have been in harmony with myself, happy and reasonable, and
it is as such that these three, each differently and to a different degree,
have known me and made me their friend.
One of the friends Angelica Kauffmann who liked to look at pictures with
him.
Italian journey trans. Auden and Mayer.
10
- conviction that we serve best by being conscious.
-
- I could so easily learn to be truthful.
it would be participation.
-
- the gaps between wishing for strong impulses and actually simply having
them and their energy, seems - I'm helpless beside it.
-
- I am often ashamed, because in my day I've been absent, empty, wasted,
idle, bored, impatient, unreal, indecisive; I know the flash of truth and
presence; I want always to burn. Every day I am in contempt of others'
mediocrity, torpor.
-
- let me remember who I loved so that I don't despise myself. Let me
be steady in the way I wanted him to be. Let me loosen myself from what
I despise in myself, the apology, the grimace of submission. strengthen
in me the necessity for truthfulness, nakedness, play. Push me, push me
First Roy's aspiration and then the Sufis' and at that time something
in art too. In the Queen's years I worked to be good at what I was doing
but there wasn't that sense of striving. I was following curricula - I was
catching up.
What came of it. Something did and something didn't. I was striving ignorantly.
The real work, the deep work, the effective work was not till Joyce. But
in the meantime I was building a flashier surface that helped me get into
relevant trouble. I found ways to be more interesting.
The thing about London was that I was looking to make my way among the
best in the capital of the world on nothing but presence of mind.
Comparing Lise's trajectory. I went from feminism to Sufism to art and
art was vast. I had to decide what it was for. No it wasn't that sequence,
they went on together from the beginning but art surged at the end.
What to call the aspirational. 'Spirituality' that hated inaccurate word.
- scorn for my own body how it restricts constricts me to be ugly
What should I think of that. It's complicated. I wasn't ugly but I did
need to know that something should change.
- Was anger because of how I was seen
no
- Because of male dominance yes
- There was pain locked in my body
YES
It's like the self-hatred I didn't understand in my students: it's your
fault body that I don't get what I need.
- Your sad letter from the airport. I was sad and angry too. I want and
expect you to be proud of me and my experiments in my life; instead you
are fearful, untrusting, blind to my achievements. You want and expect
me to be affectionate and grateful, instead I set you up, still, as the
dangerous enemies of my will and my growth.
-
- Why is your concern for my life so corrupt with self-secret envy and
resentment? Is that really necessary? Must I choose for the parents of
my adult life, other people, who have enough faith in their own life to
give me their real blessing for mine?
-
- Lucid and valiant but was it necessary to defend myself
from them YES
- They were the dangerous enemies of my will and
my growth YES
- Would there have been a better way
no
She was only fifty and already moaning about Mother's Day cards. Peter
saying he doesn't visit his 90 year old mom because she's still telling
him what to do. "You should wear your toque," "I don't like
your beard, it makes you look old." She's never wanted to know about
his work or said she's proud of him.
11
When I was going to post blindfolds.doc and thought to look for
the khanka on mapquest I was creeping up High Thicket Road near Dockenfield
peering through fenceline brush at lush damp England. I think I found the
house though I couldn't see it. I wanted to know if the barn is still there.
14
What shd I think about these little stories. There are more and more.
Janet asked am I writing a memoir. I said not exactly but I like the thought
of a memoir made in bits of actual presence not like Lise's dull summaries.
Sonja: "You write in such a way that it makes me feel I am living what
you describe. What I feel I need to read more of."
I work on them over time. One day I'll change a comma to a connective,
I'll see to delete a word, move a phrase; then leave it.
It should have other people's passages too, dated to when I found them,
here Sidney Cockerell's lovely paragraphs on Charlotte Mew.
It 's elegaic. What's it called. Where I was?
- The old soldier at Euston standing to guard me from rush hour legs
said "There you are my darling, you can write your novel in peace."
-
- City eyes. Instant when an airplane's shadow crosses a window.
There are pieces I like just for their particular factuality, exactly
remembered speech - story of the drunk and the bobby - but do they they
need something more.
Miss Tugwell sitting on the stairs telling me about the rockets circling
before they dropped, airplanes nudging them back to Germany.
When I come to Mari as with Michael I feel helpless to register the gallant
pathos of these lives.
- became an elegy later
- as so much does
15
Notre Dame on fire, people who'd gathered in the dark singing a hymn
on the street.
16
Worked hard in the old way yesterday. Tackled the porch platform edge,
pried up large dead roots, shook off their dirt, made space around the iris.
Then did what I should do: took an aspirin, lay in hot water, had a nap
sore all over; later went out and hoed the inside edge of the east fence
bed; and at night did not hurt. This morning two pounds lighter.
Rob's birthday, Frank's. Rob said last night that he sometimes cries
on the skytrain, seeing what people are.
17
- I wish you could fuck properly and didn't have a hesitant weedy penis
that buckles and has to be shoved in. I wish that we were like Tony and
me, so that all through the next day, when I thought of us, I'd shine.
I wish you had Tony's touch, his tact, his timing and grace, so I could
concentrate and not be rattled about.
Impatient in L8, the notes, film thoughts, Andy, washes of what now seem
irrelevant emotion.
- I want to lie almost still and just gather myself quietly without acting
and then kindle. He needs to be poked, stroked, tickled - something - which
my hands do, dissociating themselves from my sex which gets cold as I wait
for the quiet to come.
18
David Mitchell was here since Tuesday, a knock and then a face I knew
though he wasn't sure I would. He dug for me two summers ago was it, said
could I spare a sandwich, left a little sculpture of a ship he'd made from
bits he'd dug up. I said he could sleep in the garage, lent him the camping
pad, fed him breakfasts, took him to A&W for lunch, did a laundry for
him, let him have a bath the first night and then again the second - he
wallowed noisily for half an hour each time - and then when he asked again
before he left this afternoon I offended him by asking him to be quicker
because I wanted to go out. I liked seeing his face because it was so brown
and open and symmetrical and I liked how neatly and intelligently he worked
and I'm happy with how much we got done - he did the concrete edge on his
own and most of the paths are ready and the grass is raked and cut - but
I didn't like that he was full of grievance he's holding hard. I didn't
like his vagrancy either, though I've liked others, because he's deluded
about what it's for, what he called his dream: he'll find a woman with land
and then everything will come right. He won't, though, because he doesn't
understand what goes wrong between him and any possible woman. He's forty-two
but except for grey tufts looks childish and comes on with childishly innocent
appeal. When he was in the bath yesterday he called out to ask me to come
sit with him. I thought what is he up to, does he know what he's up to.
Then I remembered his mom left when he was three, she must have sat by the
bathtub when he was in it. For myself the thought of seeing his brown little
body naked - though I instantly did see it in my head - made me shudder.
Now I suppose he's back on the road with his heavy pack and many pockets
full of bits organized in zip-lock bags. It's starting to rain.
He is angry at his mother for pressing him, tracking him, but the mother
who won't leave him alone is the mother in his structure. I told him what
Joyce said, as long as it's about them you're in their power; as soon as
you make it about you you're out of their power. She was right though at
the time I wanted my grievance heard in its own terms too. I don't think
he is going to be able to find his way and in the meantime it's a hard life
I'm not sure he knows how to survive.
22
I've been making garden notes every day but not writing here, as if the
garden is the only thing I have to say. I step outside and look at color,
dark pink paeony stubs, yellow tulips, yellow primula, white arabis, blue
grape hyacinth, and already quite a lot of young green - iris, chives, garlic
chives, Iceland poppy, little tufts on currant bushes and rugosas. Strong
tufts of maralroot earliest. Rhubarb. The long rectangle of cut grass looks
good between its two definite edges. The Anjou has buds all over and looks
as if it's about to break though there aren't bees yet. Leaf break on the
Cox and the little peach. Evans dotted on all its dishevelled twigs. First
of the moss phloxes showing bits of blue. Johnny-jump-ups blooming anywhere
I let them stay especially along the little ridge next to the tap where
their white faces on thin stalks jerk all together in the wind. They all
descend from the six I bought in the Ashcroft goodwill before I had anywhere
to plant them. They descend in another way too because the first I knew
were those I dug up outside the Wiens's abandoned cabin to plant outside
the lake house. The Wiens cabin before that went back to a Sunday afternoon
visit when I was a child.
Is there anything to say about being dispirited. Dark sky and cold wind
today. I had an appointment to have the jeep's rattle diagnosed but it wasn't
till late afternoon and there was grim nothing nothing nothing to do. Did
liven up to take it through the carwash and vacuum it first so the mechanics
wouldn't despise me. That was something done. Then remembered the headlamp
out. They fixed that but the rattle is the cat not the muffler and that'll
be $600. I don't mind the money, there seems to be enough. It's the idleness
and vacancy and the feeling of being of no interest.
23
Two bodies in California seems to be about ready. What should
I do with it. Test it on my friends? Emilee, Sonja, Janet, Cheryl.
It begins weakly but as it goes on it seems to me to hold and be complex
and internally cross-referencing in an interesting way. Two bodies in mortality
and lust and irritation and more than one kind of love, alike and unalike
in trying to serve the world.
Reading and staring at the sky is too trivial unless I find a
way prune it more and enrich it. I like the title obviously.
Am I okay with Louie dumping me forever? I can see why she'd want to
though I don't understand her not wanting to know. I can feel what is clean
about that sort of break. In the thought of it there's a sense of setting
out into new air; I saw myself as if from the back walking forward into
a fresh world.
Was my letter offensive? I don't think so, but it's a deep summary and
does that make it final?
Olivia's birthday and Shakespeare's.
A photo today. I'd brought in three buds from the tulip stalks that have
kept coming up in the long bed next to the garage path. This morning they
were opening next to me such unexpected things - pointed green-striped petals
that as they open more show faint pink streaks. The green runs down the
midrib and the pink is just a lick below the petal's edge. Those tulips
are buried so deep they didn't show through the grass the first spring and
since the bed has been worked have come up but not bloomed. Their exqusite
arrival this fourth year seems a gift from long-ago Mrs Boom who was only
here for that one year between Flora Gerrard and Robin and Sylvie. - I didn't
find them online but turns out there is a name for their kind, viridifloras.
Planted potatoes and onion sets this aft, spread mushroom manure and
watered.
25
There just arriving was Tom - really Tom? - yes
- got up to look like Hunter Thompson, a tough egotistical look, Hawaiian
shirt, cigar. I went instantly to meet him. What are you doing here? Let's
go somewhere we can talk. Now I saw how shabby he was, shoes down at heel,
pants too short. More about trying to talk and not being able in the confusion
of the street. A skid row hotel where I assumed he was staying, that he
disappeared into while I waited outside.
6:35. The sun has risen into my right eye.
- Are these stories any good no
- Is there something else I should be doing
no
I don't know whether I've told you that when I had polio at almost three
I was sent away to a hospital in the city where I didn't see anyone I knew
for seven months. I as if went out into the wide world on my own and after
that I think understood that I could rely on myself but no one else.
27
Snowing when I woke. [apple blossom] [gooseberry flowers]
[tulips]
volume 8
time remaining volume 7: 2018-2019 july-april
work & days: a lifetime journal project
|