4 P.M.
The Professor told me a few days ago that if he lived another fifty years, he would still be fascinated and curious about the vagaries and variations of the human mind or soul.
13
7 P.M.
I was five minutes late as Alice Modern had popped in about 4:30. The Professor met me at once, said my story of the picture-writing or the Writing on the Wall, “has made me think very hard.”
I asked him about the dogs; both go away over the weekend. He does not like cats; he finds monkeys are too near. “We have not the satisfaction of their being like us, nor the satisfaction of their being enemies.”
I told him about the little statues or images in the house that Lawrence had first spoken of in Cornwall. He asked me what the images were? I said that there was a painted Osiris on the shelf; seated at the end was a bronze Isis — there was I thought an egg-shaped mummy-owl.
The Professor said, “Come and see if we can find them.”
We went into the other room; he brought out various treasures from behind the glass doors. We spoke of a Sekmet that he showed me. I told the Professor of the cat-headed image in the little temple off the great temple of Karnak. He was amused to hear of the iron grille they had had to place at the temple entrance, because of the hysterical moonlight visitors. I said that the Arabs held the image in special awe, they were terrified to this day of the cat- or lion-headed goddess.
We looked over the images in one of the other cases; there was a winged Greek figure — tanagra? The Professor brought out a wooden Osiris (or Osiris-like image) blackened by time or else deliberately painted, as if with a sort of tar or pitch. There was another green-blue stone Osiris. The Professor said, “They are called the answerers, as their doubles or ka-s come when called.”
We went back to the couch.
I told him of the scenes or pictures that I myself had conjured up or acted out for Bryher, one of our last evenings in the Belle Venise. Bryher had seemed unhappy or remote; her mood frightened and saddened me. To amuse her, really, I began to act out what I called Indian dance-pictures. There was a girl in the mountains, there was a medicine man seeking for plants in the woods, there was another laughing, singing — our old friend Minnehaha; there were others as welclass="underline" a Spanish woman, South-Sea Islanders, a Japanese girl, and a young priest from Tibet. The Professor said, “It was a poem-series the acting was drama, half-motivated by desire to comfort Bryher and neither “delirium” nor “magic” I had suggested that this might be some form of possession.
The Professor repeated, “You see, after all, you are a poet.” He dismissed my suggestion of some connection with the old mysteries, magic or second-sight. But he came back to the Writing on the Wall. The drama, as he called it, he said held no secret from him; but the projected pictures, seen in daylight, puzzled him.
He went on with it, could I now with my eyes closed still see the pictures? I said, “Yes, and with my eyes open.” He said this was possibly a “symptom of importance.” I said that I wished I had asked an artist friend to sketch the series for me, so that I could have shown it to him direct. He said that would have been no use. “There would be value in the pictures only if you yourself drew them.”
9:10
We talked a little of ghosts. I wanted to tell him of the many curious legends of Cornwall and of how I myself had heard the famous “knockers” when I was there in 1918. They were believed by the inhabitants to come out of the disused mine-shafts. They are the exact counterpart, though I did not have time to speak of this, of the gnomes or dwarfs of the old German legends. The “knockers,” however, were not ghostly presences, they knocked forcibly, almost violently, and often.
I did tell the Professor of a great-grandmother who heard her son calling to her. She ran out in the garden to meet him (in Pennsylvania). Her son was in the West Indies. It was some time after that news reached them that her son had died at the exact moment she had rushed into the garden to welcome him home.
March 20, Monday
I spent a happy Sunday at the galleries; I found Tiziano Vec., Jacopa da Strada, 1477–1576, and Palma Gioime, 1544–1628, with statues. . and Giov. Batt. Moroni, 1520–1578. One of the paintings of a fine, intellectually weathered renaissance Italian, standing by a table, with small statues, suggested to me the portrait of Sigmund Freud with his row of little images before him on the table.
14
6:40 P.M.
I went up to Mrs. Burlingham’s apartment at 4:20. She was quiet, slim, and pretty in her art-craft simple consulting room or sitting room that Freud’s architect son had decorated for her. Like the Professor, she had a few Greek treasures. Her little grey Bedlingham scurried under the couch but crawled out later to make friends with me. I met her daughter, my own child’s age, and a boy of seventeen. Another child was having a music lesson in the next room. I was a little disconcerted by Mrs. Burlingham’s reserved, shy manner, and her reminding me that I was due at five, downstairs with the Professor.
Then down to Freud. . I told him of the visit. Then I felt a little lost. Perhaps that was partly because of the dream I had last had. I tried desperately to get back to my flat in Sloane Street, London. The flat is at the top of the house. As I enter the downstairs hall, a man and then a rough boy barred my way to the staircase and seemed to threaten me. I did not dare challenge them. . (I could not tell the Professor that this terror was associated in my mind with news of fresh Nazi atrocities.) As I stood threatened and terrified I call, loudly, “Mother.” I am out on the pavement now. I look up at the window of my flat. It has different curtains or a suggestion of Venetian blinds. A figure is standing there, holding a lighted candle. It is my mother.
I was overpowered with happiness and all trace of terror
vanished.
8:20 P.M.
We talked of Crete. I told him how disappointed I was on the cruise last spring. It was too rough to land. There were dolphins playing about the boat, anchored off the rocky shore; there was a permanent rainbow from the sea spray. We saw the chapel high on the slopes where it was reputed Zeus had been born, or nursed. We spoke of Sir Arthur Evans and his work there. The Professor said that we two met in our love of antiquity. He said his little statues and images helped stabilize the evanescent idea, or keep it from escaping altogether. I asked if he had a Cretan serpent-goddess. He said, “No.” I said that I had known people in London who had had some connection with Crete at one time, and that I might move heaven and earth, and get him a serpent-goddess. He said, “I doubt if even you could do that.”
The Professor speaks of the mother-layer of fixation being the same in girls and boys, but the girl usually transfers her affection or (if it happens) her fixation to her father. Not always. The Crete mother-goddess is associated with the boy or youth in the wall-painting of the crocus fields. We talk of Aegina too. The Professor went on about the growth of psychoanalysis and how mistakes were made in the beginning, as it was not sufficiently understood that the girl did not invariably transfer her emotions to her father.