Haunted all winter by a shadow next to my shadow as I walked down the path in the country to the car. Three-year-old Rose there at my side. I never see her; I see only her shadow next to my shadow — in winter.
Feeling a bit odd, altered statey somewhat. Just different than before. Also a bit nauseous, crampy — all the classic signs?
Still trying to finish up Frida. It’s probably hopeless. Why can’t I, even now, entirely give in?
You are in the garden of an inn on the outskirts of Prague.
You feel completely happy a rose is on the table
And instead of writing your story in prose you watch
The rosebug which is sleeping in the heart of the rose.
Defiance: I have taken a certain kind of narrative as far as it will go. I can go no farther with it. I’ve done that now for good. What a relief. Just another way now to be free.
Calm beyond all reason. A day in the country. Doing a bit of gardening. Feeling as if Rose is right here with me. It’s as if she is inside and outside at the same time. I tell her about the flowers. She’s right here.
It is at the edge of a
petal that love waits.
A great concentration and focus moves in. Not unlike the feeling when really writing. But there is no really writing anymore.
A reading from Defiance at Barnes and Noble. Defiance an unusual project for me. Enacting as it does a pain so intense and insistent that it opens up onto something else entirely in the end. Something close to radiance. Is it the accretion? How is the effect achieved? Mysterious to me still.
Weekend (if I make it)
Enter final changes to Frida.
Reread and reorder pieces.
Print out at Louis’s house.
In handwriting enter Dear Cathy pieces and see if they work at all.
Read again.
Include in Frida or no? A series of meditations in the form of letters to my friend, the painter Cathy Murphy, written as part of the Frida études.
Dear Cathy,
A strange recurring daydream — my life in front of me in some sort of visual representation — difficult to explain — there it was before me — an abstract shape — a precious, shimmering thing — and how afraid I was to waste it — in bravado, in drama, a hundred utterly compelling and senseless affairs — which somehow made sense, and yet —
I am pulled in too many directions. Children. To worry it now seems silly. Frida with her fetus in a bottle. Her ardent desire for a child. I am not really like her — my monstrous ambivalence. Helen says we shall be lonely one day. But my fear of having to work my whole life for money. To never get close to the book I know I must write. The vague feeling of this somewhere in some distance.
Do you think of this ever?
A week of teaching in Provincetown. Roses do grow like oceans here. The students so earnest. In the fog horn at night, the births and deaths of angels. I can scarcely sleep. Frida. The way Frida comes and goes. Drawn to the swirling… Love to you, dear friend,
C.
The French waitress at Cafe Milou asking, Would you like strawberries? To bring on labor, she tells me. And also a celebration, non?.
Do you like butter? My mother smiles, passing a buttercup under my chin.
A string of beautiful cool June days. It feels like grace,
Ilene calls.
It’s June 10th, the day I always predicted the baby would come. A full moon. Helen calls all day long.
Rented Angelopoulos’s Ulysses. Haven’t seen it in quite some time. Also a documentary on Gertrude Stein. There she is playing with Basket and waving to the camera for a second.
Defiance — formally conceived as wave after wave of pain. A series of intensities. Do I, in my own way, prepare for childbirth with these meditations?
June 10th comes and goes. No baby yet. Officially due on the 15th. A letter from Amy T. suggests the 21st would be a great, joyous, planetary-aligned-type day to be born. We shall see.
The uses of a journaclass="underline" to have a record of the person I was before she ever existed. In this minute the baby is still unborn, and I am still the person who has never experienced childbirth, and who has never even for one day known her yet. The person I once sounded like — before everything changed irrevocably and forever.
Helen and I indulging in all sorts of magic and rituals — a Peking duck last night, that lucky and happy meal — to welcome the baby. Very spicy eggplant. So where is she? I grow less and more patient. Not sure exactly what I want.
Got myself out in the heat to a few shows in Soho. Felt like a farewell of sorts. For who knew when I would see art ever again? A last glimpse — at the New Museum, Doris Salcedo, her table made of wood, cloth, and human hair — at Sperone Westwater, Wolfgang Laib’s sculptures of pollen. Robert Irwin’s spheres of light…
Roaming around Bloomingdale’s for things we think we must need. A fan. We pick it up, put it back down again, can’t decide on a thing. Very, very distracted. Turning and turning in circles again like a cat.
Ilene and I daydreaming how the baby sucks its house away after its birth. The uterus shrinking. Well worth including somewhere in The Bay of Angels — should I ever get there.
This darling child, never one day of trouble — not even one — it seems hard to believe. Maybe she is waiting for Frida to be finished before arriving.
A spate of the most beautiful days on earth.
A flush, a flood of roses. Rose blush. Helen says the garden in the country is filled with roses. Bring them to me!
Come to me.
O Rose to be.
Rose light
Only roses.
Everything’s coming up roses.
And rain. And I wait.
As if Rose were already out there in the garden with me.
I see you and I whisper to you as a three-year-old by my side: Rose.
Rose in waiting.
A storm of roses.
Will you come then a year from the day Helen prayed so fervently for you over the relics of Saint Clare? She does fast work, that Clare.
Will you come on Bloomsday?
There is a rose by my head while I sleep (out on the fire escape).
Coco and Fauve hanging around a lot now. What do they sense in their animal perfection?
Rented an early Bergman film last night. A real beauty. It took place during the war. Liv Ullman impossibly young. Finished in a crescendo of burning roses: that small, inconspicuous monologue at the end.
The feeling is one of someone who has finally reached the sea. I wake up this morning feeling great relief.