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suzannnemillerhistoryandresearch · 9 months

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Suzanne Miller, poetic/therapy/diary writing, pt 1

CARTATIDS

As the creamy room was lifted everywhere with soft lamps and huge bouquets of mock orange and blue iris were placed about on the polished dables and the champagne was liberally gliding in the midair trays under the caryatids of 5 or six butlers Andre surveyed with a pleased eye his gathering of eminent guests and their equally eminent wives, a dazzling array of the not vulgarity often, but (pri ily? check compared to other handwriting) caught midst their noble doings in photographs, the scripted haven of science and the arts. The atmosphere being charged as it was with unutterable emotions capped off by the edges of ecstasy caused by the lady in the wheelchair somewhere near the center of the room, his wife and chiefest glory among all the glories life had handed him. A glimpse of her could be sacraficially postponed as he greeted the still arriving aristocracy of many cultures. They knew why they were summoned, were well informed as to the whole rare drama of the past year. Rarer since life seldom contributes a tragedy so poignant in beauty and nobility. The death of a great musician whether song-bird or instrumentalist is afterall a fate shared by all and can not approach the sensate anguish of the silencing of a living artist perfectly secure upon one of art's highest ledges. Many of the now gathered today honored had been in that translucent room before, on oither occasions, in smaller numbers, wasted out of their usual minds by the most equisite hands since Chopin's, effortlessly transforming intricate notations into god-like feelings; a pair of hands known to scratch the golden head when puzzled. They had come then for the priviledge of being in the presence of visual and aural beauty simultaneously for they all owned and played her recordings, reclaiming in the privacy of their homes those sluicy moments in her presence, which with oinly a substanceless after image in some connosseurs could cause a sudden heart leap. Neither male nor female was immune to the (concavitations?) of this darling, this darling darling, this stricken angel who one day a year ago had collapsed in hrehersal of one of the more heart-rending concertos, had been carried off and never seen to walk another step again. The grand pianos all of the world seemed to slam shut on that day and the cognescenti everywhere, cried as they were to daily broad-casted horros were treated to a new variety in nature's subtler bag of tricks. O, they were aghast all right and as sefishly mindful of their own loss as if the Taj Mahal had been blown to bits.

As for the work of Art herself, Erica, for Erisha as she was called by a select few, was contemporairly concerned with mastering the art of getting from bed to wheel chair smoothly without spraiining her, granted, piano trained wrists, had before the recent demise of her music began to find fame a burden, and a distraction from the plain joy of expression itself. The occasion opened upon here, spied upon admittedly, was soley her husband's idea, an understandably posessive man (What's it ever like to be married to such a beautiful woman!") yet not stupid or dauntless enough to claim perfect selfishness where his duty was clearly shown to share her somewhat with the world. He would have liked to have kept it down to occasional glimpses the way a certain Swede we all know manages to do so for herself. But Erica herself was not really reserved, toward her fellow humans. She radiated a generous luminosity that invited egalitarian contact. After all it was she, as the legend clearly records, when a mere girl played in the gorged underground in wartime London on a decrepid baby grand that has hauled from station to station by devoted and grateful citizens. She played everything from music hall tunes to the stately utterances of Bach with the mood discerning manipulations of the now time disc jockeys in their disco expertise. If it's true, and who really cares, that all males have a bad conscience, the veyr honorable and trustworthy Andre, had one only in the ulteriot wish that he be along with her in this universe, a wish amply demonstrated when in the wings of numerous concert halls he shawled her shoulders from immemorial drafts and firmly angled her out the door, through the crowd of wigglings hands and stupified faces into the stand-by limo where sequestered with her in the plush he breathed a sigh of relief and consented to a slightly safer party always given by a local host or hostess without the comforting assumption that the Golden One would turn up. For Andre was known to refuse on the grounds that she was tired or should be in his view.

At this moment in time he was beamingly glad though he did not let his countenance actually beam, the eyes did dance a bit, to share his wife's recovery, the full return of her spectacular beauty if not for the restoration of her original destiny with a world that had these many months rooted for her. This he plainly saw when they left the hospital in that crazy little victory parade down corridors and out the doors with people in various stages of illness throwing their flowers out at the windows and cheering for her paralyzed but otherwise liberated condition. "Hope you never come back!"

This austere crowd's enjoyment confirmed his notion of a general coming out being called for and it only remained to register Erica's response. When a couple near her parted and he was in full view of her, enthroned in her chair in a most Queenly way, no huddled enfeebled invalid but an irredescent lady who made a chromium wheelchair seem like the choicest place to sit. She was as slender as before, they all noted, and all that thick golden hair had not fallen out as could sometimes happen in great ordeals, her soft rose colored gown covered the legs that they dared not glance at, though the mystery of their immobility popped into more than one mind. But the hands could be observed, they had been photographed as artifcacts almost and their long fingered grace and sensitive strength were bercifully intact. The eyes were a clear warm blue tonight, the eyes that sometime went all the way to grey, to green and back to a dense blue depending on what she wore. They showed not a trace of pain, though to the perceptive, more than a trace of having passed through the extremes of it. He hoped some absent-minded egghead wouldn't forget and ask her to play the piano.

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I must explain that I am not a writer either by profession or inclination so why should I have, for me, this pestering clanging and banging in my head to tell my tale is something I can't explain other than it seems it might be an alternative to drinking a bottle of scotch each day. If I drink, sippingly of (unclear), each day, the fearful nag to write a paeon to my legendary mother is quieted but my liver is not. If I refrain from the dulling brew, you, my poor chance reader, will surely protest of having stumbled on so unpromising a style just when you want to settle in for a good time. So I've decided I shall refrain from drink and sing to myself, because along as I am in these frightening spaces I need the comfort of memory, the evocation in words of my radiant mother to quell my horror of the unplacable nature of physical matter. The planet Jupiter rolls through my mind, uninhabitable, hideous in its immensity, and beyond all that glacial inky space that some can contemplate with such calm respect but which conjures up for me a loneliness without end. That I was borin in these times, to know these cosmic facts, these comfort shattering laws, is torture is enough. but my nature abhors mystery, while my mind is surrounded by nothing but mystery, is downright intolerable. Anyway, me and my miserable complaints are not the subject, not the subject at all.

She is easy to call forth in all her scenes. Tall, blonde. My mother at her piano, lost to us. My mother oin her dangerous black horse, Cossack, called by my father, Dangerous Dan MaGrew. My mother in pale silk, holding roses reaching toward the hands of the audience that press around the stage. My mother in her sports car, hair flying, or corssing the manicured lawn balancing a tea cup. There she is at a turn in the garden waving to me and I run on little legs to jump on her not mindful of her white summer dreath her her har dropped on the path. I cling to her like a Kola bear and this close to her face, her Grecian nose, her luminous eyes, her whole visage, she is my Parthenon, my Athena, my Seqoia, my one hundred to the 10th power. But I musn't rush so. There is plenty of time to....... My father. "The first time I saw your mother I was a boy of twelve with nothing very soecial about me except for a love of "beautiful things" as they were revealed to me by that volitle, dark-eyed, cultured frenchwoman, my mother. Being well off and well cared for she spent the richness of her endless free time tripping all over Paris, London, the Italian cities, seeking out paintings, sculpture, music, architecture taking me with her everywhere she went. Tugging me along she would dash up some majestical marble steps, tear about up + down halls, pulling my small self after her, then suddenly stopping dead in front of something, a painting or statue, all her feverish energy terminating in a trance, her hand lying lightly on the back of my neck. After a time she would speak and we would "see" together, whatever she was worshiping before us. Like any boy, I lover my soccer, my swimming, my various dirty games with dirty companions, but my chief pleasure were those passionate excursions with my treasure seeking mother. Aside from all the visual arts she loved music the most, so it was not unusual that afternoon we were going to a concert. What was unusual was what and whom we were hearing. Our seats were well up front, in the keyboard side so we had a perfect view of the little creature who approached the huge instrument with such ease and confidence. The prodigy was Erica Rostovna, a Russian wunderkind, dressed in the style of the times, a well-brought up young lady in white organdy frock, with a dark Burgundy taffeta tash tash and a matching one tied as a bow around a baroque cascade of blonde hair. Did I ever see her eyes? As she played I fell into an abyss of love. Then she disappeared as magically as she came and I wasn't to see her again until she reappeared in a soldier's uniform, bloody, frightened, with the filth of the battlefield on her.

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She faltered for a moment at the fifth step, her hand gripped to the banister, her knees bent. She was about to fall. She had refused his assistance and a moment before he followed behind and swiftly caught her just at the moment of falter, swept her up and carried her upstairs.

It was precisely because she wouldn't admit

My mother's father was appointed concert master of the Warsaw symphony at a time when he was eager to remove his family from his beloved Russia. He was not a Tzarist by any means, but he knew what was coming could only be disruptive to the tranquility of his family life which alongside music itself was his greatest passion. He devoted some time away from these two absorbtions fo scan the political scene of Europse but he did not grasp it as fully as he did the ferment brewing in his native land, which he sensed with the nose of a fox, so that when he appointment was offered he saw it as an oppurtunity to remove them from the inevitable.

POLYTROPUS - up to anything (likely to be)

UNTITLED (noted as being "Originally in red sketchbook" by J. Friebert)

She knew every day that she only had one life. That nothing could tell her what was the right move. She could only go by two certainties: which felt like certainties, which felt like insights because there was a peace and calm about them: that she must find a way to be internally free, and that she must find a way of expression. She seemed hinge on the first. So be it.

Women must stop worshiping their sons (as a little bit of Mary's baby.) It's in the unconscious. He grows up; he becomes, in our case, a capitalist. He thinks the world is his for the taking and he takes it, growing richer and richer on the labor of others. He not only promotes his evil system, capitalism, he promotes its equally evil system, communism. This worshiping of the son, if it could be eradicated, might set the whole world free, or at the very least .... if only ....

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The despair connected to pretty things

People whose lives had silence and jesting and no beauty Don't we live in a profound peace? Who will cut our throats?

There is no war under these people. No.

Walk among the contented twos and threes.

Live has four seasons, one moon, one sun and a blackness pierced with stars. What else?

It seemed my mouth had closed for my whole life and nothing could pass in it again.

My childhood hurt in my breast bones.

Don't worry when the streets are full of goods. The people are planning for holidays and money is put aside for growing

Why should the pavements trouble you? Can a city be of colored glass? And we have not touched a mountain with rivets. Trees live.

My soul is too old, that's all.

Ah, you dramatize, dramatize. Trajedy is breathing, so what?

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Do I live in the center of a pearl? I am so taken with this

iridescent night. It is all the city, and no sign of fertility that gives my work the look for grotesque enchantment. Who denies these taverns and shops are a technicolor of delirium? Where else do skies of indigo roll over like waves? And starts promise the sight of other starts? Frozen festivitie of foaming lights at the end of every avenue and end they do, in a white mist of the earth's immense curve, effortless I cannot decide to half anywhere. My walking is the obsession of despair. My vision is the slumber of kinetic life. And the metropolitan panorama stands still for my broken descriptions. So dive, dive into the carbon depths, but before you plunge let me warn you .. any dream is this implacable machine is the wing of death. You, too, will not survive the pure objectivity of your spells and your trances. Small as you are, you are the galaxies only giant, its sole heroic feeling, its single way of knowing itself Behold - I am adrift of any other being. Thus, I am always the hour of your deepest loneliness. It is my pain and my greatest pleasure to be the very flowering of your blood as you pass in and out of your more compromised life. Justified journey through this atrocious beauty! The melodious nerves of Asia are inferred in the setting. Freely I see their blooming carpets through all the electric windows of the West. On every side is an Ocean and an endless, beginning and a breakless circumference. For you, bearded witches, shapeless beggars, drunken businessmen, expectorating mannequins, I see

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I write it. These pigeons, a man whose eyes are still blue, who told me one lung was gone, quietly goes on with a tedious dying. A newspaper is slapped against the fence - the wind however means nothing by it. A young man with a tattoo on his arm, the emblem of a shield, sits alone with his elbows on his knees, his hands folded, his head completely bowed, not moving. A car door slams behind us, and the thicket that serves for an illusion of a park. A white dove comes. No one sees its flight. Those old women didn't because they are talking rapidly, glancing at the sky with jerks of their head as through someone where always offering them cakes. Rain-water, drying, had made black ribs on the pavements, the window came as always to drink of it.

A woman joins the man. Her red mouth moves, something oddly connected with him as made her happy. What more? I see in the flesh of these aging people, the method Death uses to prepare them for grimmer horrors, rather gradually. Their decomposition is almost imperceptible - except to me. The couple now, one watching the weaving of pigeons in their soundless supper. I think they are universed in a dangerous dream which suspends them, it becomes apparent they have no children. She is contented now. She will never have beauty. She wears her hair down, a wedding band, and sandals on her soiled feel - then she's gone, they're both gone. Who has come meanwhile. A man with fingers cut off, who has taught himself to smoke another way. A fat man sits with his wife and stroking the dog on his lap and being fat speaks his thoughts with the whole body, both lungs, whole mouth.

What calms me is the sudden appearance of, in any form, the color yellow. Then I remember the entire life of the city with its thousand connecting links.

What a wonderful gesture that woman makes! As within the house, I see her told. She can describe mountains on her living room walls. You, in your mouses gathered, festive, don't look! I am a car, I peer, but gently, walk gently through your souls.

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I see his face. He suspects me of something? Mother what does he think I have done? Mother, what does he think I will do? Mother, what have I done?

His face is slightly red when I see him now. And his pupils jammed into the corners of the white balls of his eyes. He looks to the side and down at me. He seems to be sly and on the watchout.

I have been taken into the mouth of a dreadful night. Lifted to its lips, forced between its jaws. I am breathing its exhaled breathe. I no longer have any breath of my own.

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I will speak to her when I have drunk enough. I will tell her of the two worlds, logic and love, though I have spoken to God. She will achieve me, since I cannot. I have walked the city, and I have spoken to the river, night after night prayerless but full of the Poem, yet I am the same bastard and I shall ask her to hurl me from her frightening tower. I see myself in the future in rags on a winter bench, glorified by my trajedy. I have both burnt and drunk my own blood. And since in this Age there are no Angels, I shall anoint myself with Death, kneel down to Death and ascend toward Death amid the blackest clouds. I am a waste. Though I was born from Eve incomprehensible to the blunt and intellectual Adam. Who is the unyielding ice of the ages to come, dry as his masculine frame. I am the child of the shells and the river goddess. The sky is an immense blue dress behind which I conceal myself, trembling. I quench my shame and my impotence in white liquids, I crawl through the dark seeking my mother Eve, I wake on a violet beach watched over by the (illegible) of the sea and sky. I bathe among relaxed women their forms and faces emptied of all but love The sand is pink leading to our hut, the flowers ring out. She picks something, the look she flings behind her is full of yellow and sea foam. I will come out of this a water lily.

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I feel a certain intestinal terror as I attempt to write him down. And when I remember how we met, (illegible) introduced in an automobile, how I felt something soft and very deep behind me in back sea, and how with out clearly seeing him in the night air, I was aware of his contours of greatness, I realize all that is gone. And even though dreadful heights of skies, their ages marked by metallic stars, are not endurable to me and solitudes snatch me back for their own, as though I were a child, a family comes to claim after visits even though I have surrendered: I still tremble at his name.

I realized immediately that he was surrounded with vapours. A head full of seraphic clouds, eyes that were ruined by the terrible distances of heaven. He contacted me from the side as though we were blind-folded, as though I were a Eurydice whom he was forbidden to gaze on. He reminded me I had not yet come out of hell.

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Then we moved into a true house. An upstairs, a downstairs, and a basement. We took our meals in a dining-room. I peeled the potatoes everynight. If I looked out of the windows too much, I lost track of the potatoes and he would should at me or knock me with his large knuckles. I had to be ready for what walks behind. At meals he disliked the way I softened my potatoes with a little milk, so he threw all the dishes on the floor with a sweep of his hand. Meals ended this way.

Usually you were silent during this or you agreed with him.

When I was upstairs in my room with rose-colored walls and three windows, I took out the volumes I was collecting and sometimes I took out my drawings. I never soiled the bed of that new room because it was to be the big change. The other mattress had been rotted through, the inner springs were rusty from urine and the rest all dyed with yellow stains. I had been sleeping and dreaming in the stench since I was ten. I remember you once decided as a cure, to come into my room in the middle of the night and get me up. I remember the light going on suddenly, and you being somehow present in an amazing new way. And taking my hand and guiding me through branches, on an enchanted journey. You came into the darkness but you never came again. Even though it had worked, you would have been too weary to ever come again.

I remember you were while we are asleep night he's awake watching and attacking everything with darkness present in an amazing new way.

I fell asleep other nights praying not to do it. Always with its discovery which I had to wrap up and hide in a closet, and quickly scrub off my body with hot water and soap before meeting my class and entering the school. Always, always, shaking my head, sinking further into the rot feeling with my (illegible) the cold wet rising, hiding, scrubbing. Always, always, O god! If you are behind one of those stars .......... give me a purer sleep. Or take me to live with other people who as yet don't know my greatest fear. Or take me to live where you are, in dazzling fields or in the affluent blue air. Death can only be an exquisite lack of terror. Death can only be rich as the sun, or as a terrace over-whelmed by flowers, or convulsions of snows, clouds, flames, seas. O what becomes of my ability to remain here with them. Must I be so useful to their torment? I shall steal away towards some horizontal line marking the commencement of the infinitive. Just as I shall walk off the end of the world.

These were my eye-thoughts taking flight out of the embrasure. My face, my body, my breath in the dark become

Poets are taken for saints now

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On the stage of this theatre one merely sees things being done to people. The level of language is no longer reached for an a strange malady is germinating. Speech is suspected of all the lies of man. And so here events take place without words, hence without thoughts or images. O God, I am afraid. I am in touch with it.

[ note: Those who feel only the emptiness of an outer void, despair because all paths inward are closed of and the soul is wholly turned upon itself. Those who feel the great void outside and their own center inside, these are the released ones ]

Winter still has not come, although we have been expecting it. Tonight the sky void of any (illegible) of light layers of colors, like a cave with ledges and indigo channels of water. One star for a long time spoke out. Then later a spontaneous out-break of stares to be (discifered ?) all over again. This is the way it is each clear night. There are times when one is accepted by the sky. And there are times when one deserts everything and mistakes it for the sky's retreat.

Whatever they do to you when you are in their care, with that you will afterwards carry on. Although you could become someone else quite entirely, yo will remain with what they have given you. This usually happens, even without ones realizing, and even if you realizes, it may still go on happening.

It was said of her that she didn't exist. That was held because she showed no interest in the common place which in reality anchored and kept equalized the others, but which made them feel less intriguing than she. She baffled.

One day she went to the apartment of a great actress. Her intention was to re-write a poem in the poisonous and opulent atmosphere which had first conceived it beginning at 10:00 in the white rinse of morning, while the old woman dressed before her twenty mirrors, and ending at 2:00 the next morning when the actress returned from a party, she sat under the glass candelier moaning and obeying the prismatic obsession. At the return of the woman who so absent and so beloved to her, her release, head dropped to the desk. The ribbon breaks across the breast of the winning runner. When she lifted it after a moment she couldn't see much through the frozen waste of her vision, just the flash of the golden threaded dress and the sound of these words. "No! Not in my house. You are not going to kill yourself in my house!" And the anguish of her made-up evening face. The girl says "You think I'm sick don't you?" "No." comes from the queenly period-woman, her arms leaning on the table in toward the girl whose packing up her sheets of mysterious paper "No, but you are eccentric. You have no sense of time." Breath. "And you don't realize you are beautiful." Another breath. No reply. "You know - life is not just tearing talent, it's also seeing friends, washing clothes. "Well, maybe your smarter than me, killing yourself!" Anyway, you're an artist.

The girl finally awoke, "No. I am a doctor!"

What is this, a poem? You're throwing everything into this now?

"Yes. It makes up for a mother and a father's love."

"O! That!" She scorns with apparent secret knowledge. Well, maybe, etc ...."

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I visited the boy's room today. A series of stenches wait for you on the landings and halls. Old, turn up linoleum everywhere, impossible to scrub any longer. Rooms that are cubicles rented to married men for bringing girls down on a bare, stripped mattress. But the boy's room with it's bureau, bed and chair was a disorder of the elements of his life; a few ill fitting clothes, a pile of books and manuscripts, bottles for grooming himself, a shadless lamp, a phonograph with four records and a string hung across the ceiling for hanging washed garments. The room of a homeless artist, young and only recently learning to be hopeful. His history is something to write. He has told me its details and yet only the impression stays with me, of too much strange forms of inner suffering, too much death, and too much insanity. Without the understanding of a doctor, he would not be alive or he would be interned in an asylum and it would have been the world's fault - the fault of every individual he had encountered and been subjected to, downfall at twenty years old. What is the world? And half his work with the doctor consists of helping him to forgive all those who unwittingly ruined him. He learns, yes, and he is obtaining a self.

He played the music he said he used for writing his novel, sentimental and (ramatic?) in tone. While we talked a long hand reached around the frame of the open door and knocked inside. This gesture in the bright gap of the hall gave me the impression of a nightmare, and even more so when the man, himself appeared. Tall, emaciated, alcoholic red, shaken through and through, a whole life time, collapsed and yet somehow appearing to stand before us. He never looked at me, only at the boy, and reported something about someone who had visited in his absence. The man didn't linger but was glad to have contacted the boy even in this slight, perfunctory way.

Afterward I was told an incident. The man had o called the boy out of bed one night on pretext of being unable to turn his key. Then he cornered him into the room and kissed him. The boy backed away and weeping said "Don't you ever come near me again! Never again!" the man later wrote many letters of apology. One thing: I noticed his clothes were clean.

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I see the supper table and I see him filling the space almost to the ceiling. I see my two brothers and I feel that I am there. But you are only a white silence Then quite suddenly then, he sweeps his hand across the table so that all the dishes smash against the wall. And still, you are only a white silence.

I can never see you. The doctor says I must try to see you again. But this is not difficult for me, it is simply impossible. And only last night I lay awake in the midst of a tremendous darkness, somewhere, I don't know, at the bottom of lonesomeness deep and narrow, and lying there I suddenly saw all of us at our little supper table, he was there bigger than anyone else. And you were a white silence.

Somewhere in the region of this head I carry about, you still live. Together with the things you said, the violences you committed, and the tears you wept over things having nothing to do with me. Yet last night even though you were a silence I could not bear you up, I could not contain you. Nor the man you brought to be our father, sweeping his hand and smashing things. Yet when I saw that much again, after having lived throughout (?) in that past so dreadful and so full of quality of someone else's life or one's own (?) nightmare, I felt a blinding flash and then found myself hurling myself against the wall.

And, my god, one must learn not to do that, and not to cry out, and not to appear to be dying. Not that any off them become excited. No. But they put strong, indifferent hands on you. They take you for themselves then, and you lose yourself and can never have yourself back again. In their superior grip you feel your last stone giving way in a rush of white water, their dresses and the whites of their eyes. Which I have taken much trouble to search out and which leave me convinced they have accepted their job for no other reason than the power it gives them, the marble it fills into their bones, so that they alone seem upright in the world, we make for them a splendid contrast with which to feel alive.

I sense that I am grieving and I believe I grieve for my psyche. Not that I am in any way important. I merely take root in eons of time, in uncountable cosmic bodies, in explosions and whole heavens full of fear. For I fear the universe. And I marvel at the American poet who carried it intact in his notebook, in his palm, in his breast, and the east's Buddha with his hand pointing up to the sky and the other down toward the earth. But I bash myself about and feel constantly under it, I fling myself upon my cage as though the universe has buried me.

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You said it was necessary for us to have a father so you started asking him into the house. At first he brought ice cream and appeared to be smiling. One would have thought he was an orphan and glad to have found a home. I felt relieved. Later he moved in with his clothes, a revolver from the war and package of pictures. Later I was to discover those pictures in a drawer.

And the gun would go of later too.

You said it was necessary for us to have a father. And one afternoon I found you in the bed with him, under a sheet, both turned on your sides facing each other. You shouted to me to "get out... close the door." I remember obeying with a quickness unknown to me. Then is when the scene eclipsed the real world.

You said afterward, "I wanted the best for you kids. I thought you should have a father." You said that so often after it was all over.

The man you brought to live in our house had a broad leather strap. He grabbed me by my wrist. His hand was large as another man's hand. His face became deep red as he lowered and raised his arm to strike the blows. These blows which never ended and which eclipsed the real world were rhythmic as in a ritual. My eyes were open but the objects in the room and the walls, and floor collapsed into a mae (?) of dark. I felt the way I could burn in a fire. The way you fastened onto a place and then done away with.

One day I slipped out of his grip and ran into my room. I fell across the red and down to the floor. When I looked up he was over me, red, grimacing, slamming something down again and again. Afterwards I was left alone. That was part of it, to then leave me alone. I lay inside my legs, and buttocks and back, trying to pull out of the flesh. Where was I exactly? Does anyone know?

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She was an old woman who had once been radiant. She asked me strange things. "You don't feel you've lost anything by having reality?" No I answered reality is everything. I feel joy now, a sense of well being while I had never luck to feel before. Joy gets me out of bed and drives me out into the street to contact life. "You feel a sense of well-being" she replied, almost to herself as one was memorizing a text. Yes, and it comes from not rejecting. You see I rejected almost everything. You reject far less than I did but perhaps you still reject.

She didn't answer, she was coating her face with paint and making lines. She was still exceptional looking.

On another day, she came into a certain tea room, she was alone and looked on the verge of tears. I was so hypnotized by her forlorn aspect and so I forgot to cross the room to greet her. Then I saw several women go to her table and she herself become animated by a whole series of false gestures. I saw a scene from across a room.

Here is an imaginary life.

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and even if it were by mistake, what reprieve could give me back my soul? O, what an immense reprieve it would be! I dream of it on the severest days, overcast days, day without genius, and I think of taking the first step toward its attainment. For I have been told that everything depends on me and I believe it even though I am unable to experience that me. I believe everything they say. They are right. I have been wrong and I continue to be wrong. I remain savagely important to myself despite not being able to find myself, if only for the fact that I can extinguish myself. And I can obtain revenge upon the elusive soul that will not come birth in me. And I can annihilate the superior strength of the outside. And this knowledge accompanies my hope to take the first step. I lie at the bottom of dark night. I am outwardly and inwardly confined to absence of Soul and condemned to a sentence of rot. Yet I can prevent this. I can, if I know for the sake of what? Since I have no self, I can not find a self to work for a self. Yet I can say "I" using the letter which denotes Self, which was created and is used by all those whose blessing it is to sense this invisible force in the core of their body.

It happened that last night I felt how soft and how like a mother death is. My first tenderness came out of the dark and spoke gently to me. I believe I may have even answered it's call, "come, come little one, come with me". "Yes, whatever you say, I have long been waiting to trust something." "Do you promise me anything." "Yes, you shall see." or "No, absolutely nothing."

Either way would be acceptable, so long as one could finally cry out and finally yield.

Days run into days like dyes in a cloth. Only I don't know how they do this: i sleep, I waken and end another day without any face at all has come to be. I believe those days belong to others. In fact, I know they do, for I observe them doing things with a chain of magical activity linking one to the other. So that their days do wear an aspect, an expression, a splendor of human time. Nights they use for renewal. And night never mystifies them the way it does me. It never halts whatever they set into motion. But my plans are like little pieces of paper in a glass bottle, set unto a vast overwhelming sea. Cold uninhabitable ocean, islandless and heavy. Too heavy to remove even from the blockage of the mind. O the ocean of my future with a mouth full of teeth at the horizon, a grim fist, and a great conflagration in a corner under the north star. Who will ever read the message. Who will find me?

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Jody was naked except for a pale blue garment he called "surf pants." I could see his torso, he was strong and full of sensual muscles, although he was only a little taller than myself. I could also see his feet for the first time. And they were beautiful, finer than any I had seen. I saw them for the first and last time. His fine boned feet, the square angle of his leg and heel, his small delicate toes when he placed one foot on a stool, letting his knee turn in, his hands deep somewhere in the pockets of his surf pants, pulling them below his navel; he was addressing me. I was seeing his extraordinary feet for the first time.

He gazed at me through invisible bars, obstructions of all kinds, perhaps at times a glass door, he gazed and tried but there were obstructions. I sat helplessly on the other side. Looking into him as into a kaleidoscope.

Jody poured me two inches of wine. Water filled with gold and sprinkled with beads. He poured it and I couldn't quite look at him. Then as he swiftly bare-footed to the kitchen, I looked at him. I looked through him and beyond to the emptiness where he was about to disappear and about to fill. I wanted for what he would do next. In a peculiar way he resigned between particular walls. These rooms of my friend whom I didn't know. He joined me at the round wicker table, where I was looking into the wine. He began by speaking to my friend.

In a restaurant we ate a pudding. I picked out the cherry and said, this is Suzanne. Then Ron came back and while we were talking he ate the cherry. We cried out, "You just ate Suzanne!" Then we laughed and laughed and forgave him.

Jody was speaking and he had spoken that day - my name. And now my name was forever given a glory, almost a destiny, anyway weight was added that previously my name and my whole life had needed. Made now pronounceable! I laughed now as if I had been there and only now was allowed to join in. I laughed on the soft green carpet, I turned over wanting Jody to spring down to me. Beckoning him with my laugh. He smiled far away, perhaps already from another life. Perhaps that simply happened and yet never added. Perhaps after all I was mistaken and we were not moving forward together into an Into. I was only in that afternoon. And his sphere duration was unknown. He was irredeemable in the vagueness of timelessness. He was in the timelessness. Could I enter there? Could he take anyone with him into there? Hadn't I too much body to pass through to the other side? He floated in his waste. I sensed I was watching a luminous being in an aquarium. Or else what was his element?

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As long as the tortured of this world people and the animals do not cry out, I can bear it. If I should hear these just for one moment, in a world out-break, I would lose my sanity, or I would die immediately after.

The man with the shabby clothes is still alive in a day after day way. When will he die? I am only asking this because I never take care of him. They won't let him out either and his life on earth means nothing. Only that he left me to die here. Does that mean anything? Or, could I make it?

The Buddha has a mouth slightly lifted at the corners, like the roofs of their temples. That is because of his great joy. I must remember not to bang at the door of that joy. Nothing must be forced. He himself knew that.

I wish that Christ would vanish. I cannot bear him any longer. The desert of his land hurts me. I want to forget him, his generosity makes me ashamed, his miracles belittle me forever and he never liked a woman. As for his other world as his Father which it contains, they do not teach me, myself.

O without myself I cannot continue the other one. It is afterall, I who keep it up every day. It only works a little. Mostly it leaves me ditched somewhere. Or rather I see that they have thrown me in a ditch and covered me with mire. And then I hear a moan from my throat (my response to them, for I love them and we agree in a certain way to this way of life) I look in a mirror and with both my hands I stretch my face till it becomes a mask, perhaps one of those Egyptian faces that stare forever into the soul of Eternity. It is then, when nothing else remains for me, that I fall in love with / I adore my grief. Intransigent - means uncompromising

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Imaginings, his visions as he had once been used to seeing his mind was only a well for the night. Anyone could look down into it and see exactly the scene before them. A reflection of rain, and wind and warnings. He had plunged his body through the streets and the (????) crowds. He had made himself go on and not stopped for any of the lost things around him. Now and then he turned towards a cry disguised as laughter but there never was any use. He only possessed his own courage. And it rose as over and underpinning of things my very dreadful that

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You will be my wife gathering flowers on a Spanish shore, he told her. He knew everything else about the vision. But things resulted otherwise.

An infant cries below, a cry already of terror and anxiety. Such cries are not heard in the more blessed homes. Only here, where everything despairs, even the walls of the rooms.

Ellen said, sometimes when people speak to me my thoughts start to race inside and I am like a child in a classroom, always with his arm up whom the teacher never calls on to speak.

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My paranoiac

scrawl

And so he was alive, loving, drinking, smoking, strengthening everyone. His body leaped radiantly over a thousand women.

This was power. And they all laughed with ecstasy.

His ambition was to love courageously, everyone possible.

Today he was alone, he had journeyed into the autumn. Only absent in the tremendous pines which thrust their green look through the winter. The pine was his kind of tree. The pine, the pine ... before the misty river ... O the pine! And there no single detail remained, infinity had come to drown the store. And the bright grey river only revealed itself in three dark ripples. All else ... was mystery. E(?)tiness, impenetrable made the scene happen with joy. He walked and all of it went before him, sure of being beautiful. The leave especially touched him, like little fishes.

He wondered where he was among the others that he should count all this nothing - silence as a happening and no other there to confirm him. He wanted above all to leave their domain again. They were right - the world. Always and always he had been wrong. For otherwise catastrophe could not have occurred. O now he would love them, give in to their needs, be ready always to be taught, and above all be wiser, O more open than their death, than Death itself.

He would possess nothing but their lives, living in him, making him enormous with life, like a woman who's conceived.

He remembers as he writes how he said to her. "I want to drink then talk to you. We will need two hours. One for drink and the other for telling everything. Soul talk, but I couldn't do it sober."

He thinks how he will meditate all winter with the azure is closed over and the rigid city turns to stone, colder than the air.

He will remember his heart beating from the summer moon. The long grass he entrusted to his body. The moon crossing a vast heaven, traveling in infinity out of his sight. He awoke beneath the figurations of the stars and it came to him how they were forever. Voices of the sky. Could it be he was seeing music? Terribly vast the depth - vanishing quilt of night. And terribly auspicious, the dawn when someone sits up for it. O time which was the stars, not alters for the sun. More time is born, colored waters glow in the east, he tastes the sugared expanse. He no longer requires a childhood in order to love. Enough has come his way for eternity, for cycles of lives.

After drying his cold feet, having had too much of the rain filled night, he sat before a book of sensations. The author praised the terrible land of the Desert. He wrote all kinds of water, and fruits. Really his whole work was full of fragrances and love. Summer showers, mimosa and exotic cities. The author remembered so much of his wandering life and sudden loves. he read to keep out the dreadful expanse of the night. As though everyone he ever knew had moved to different countries and somehow he only had been asked to stay and wait alone. No, he was still not gifted with the heart for this solitude. True he was within it, but it had gripped him and spread him out in a strange way. Making his body diffuse over the streets and far away to the cloaked horizon. And he feared to turn to his bed for release, for sleep might not return him again to the table, the lamp, and more real thoughts. At least there were no

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You know something was accomplished (although you denied my progress) because I had ceased feeling that failure each day, that long drawn out catastrophe. Of course I hated you. You were forcing me to life when I did not want my life. Nonetheless I felt the good that you were doing me. And sometime when I am fully aware of the fact of really having my life, I will feel grateful to you and I will love you. All this you know, of course. But I very much want you to know that I owe you my life as it is now, even the delight I can take in the simplest things. I made certain crucial decisions, but it was mostly you and the important things I learned in our session about myself and about the world.

I cannot pretend, like Michael, that I candle everything myself. No, indeed. A whole great part of me did not want to end our sessions. I never thought I would do it despite the repressed hostility toward you. Your parting works "Good luck" speak significantly of last resort. Since I know you put no store in my "luck", and rightly so. Perhaps that is all that is left of me. I don't want that. I want to stay with reality and to remember. Yes, remember with insight, the entire past.

Even our session on obscenity reminded me that it's after all their obscenity I was seeking to escape. You seemed to be aiding them in dragging me down to that level. A level I know I didn't experience with Jody. Yet's, of course, have no talk about angels with Jody, not even fallen angels, he's simply stuck in the way of a fine apple rotting to the core. A fruit at once going to ruin and yet retaining the marvelous promise of the orchard's best. And I will not be thinking of him in any other way again. As for the promise these words of lust, I heard them at home, I hear them all over the neighborhood, and in the city streets. I shall try to face up to them. To accept them as part of life. This will give me strength. Fortify me against anymore obscene shocks. And I understand that I must come to terms with their lust (my mother + stepfather) and the primitive way it expressed itself. So that I no longer want to kill them for revealing their perversions, and their guilty copulation to me. As for myself I feel guilty from that homosexual experience, consisting and expressing itself only in a limited and puerile masturbation; and that letting Anthony abuse me with his urgent demands and lack of sensitivity. Perhaps it is expressive of my masochism with Jody. Perhaps since that ecstatic feeling we shared (and a man can turn, if he's sick, from a deep experience with a woman - love can threaten and he used to say I was scary to him because of the feelings I evoked out of him. Perhaps this has nothing to with marriage. It may be that a certain lust has no more to do with marriage than rapture. These are things I do not know. I would have hoped to discover them in our world - but I ended out of revolt against your interpretation, and now I shall forgo the insights that would have come. You see I do believe in the work we were doing. I know my reaction was over-sensitive, I begged you, in my mind, for a retraction and when I arrived and was in the session I knew you intended to stand by your vulgar statement. And even if it were said to jolt me rather than to speak the truth, I could accept it easier; I needed something to break his spell over me. Yet it is so useless to go into it again, since I lost you on that statement for the first time - crucially. I have no feelings at all of the kind you are corrupt or absence, or a poor doctor, or insane, or unaware of reality; you just saw my experience in that way.

And you wanted me to see it and him that way. That was as big as a lie as pretending it had never happened, by repressing it and, because he was not good for me - blocking him out. Such things needn't be done, not need one lower something in order to get rid of it so much as refuse to the mind.

It is strange, but it crosses my mind, maybe Maria will call me, or come and visit me and I will no longer care that she called me such a name. I will just be glad for whatever is there in the way a good analytic rapport and forgive what is not. But that is idle. You cannot afford to extend yourself anymore than you have with someone so apparently rigid as myself. You have reached out very far already and I appreciate that, in so far as I am able to love the world. When I left the first doctor I knew nothing about my condition. Now I know certain warnings signs of withdrawal. I will watch carefully when I begin to reject my surroundings. I will dissipate suffering instead of nourishing the masochistic vice. And I will be responsible for myself. I stand a small chance of making it, small perhaps but probably I will never find, nor never believe in another doctor after you. And if I am snagged on some inner hook and reeled in by death, then so much the worse for me.

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Today I am living a religious life again. I am no longer insane. The days are fitting together as perfectly as well calculated stone, the intensities are scarcely there so that now, neither man nor animals nor objects nor the whole of earth escape it's (?) walls.

Bird announcing the Equinox

The ascent of the Fish to the surface of a stream

Flowering reefs bloomed with deep secrets from below ground

The rainbow, appeared again and again

The earth: thousand (pests?) and treasures arose.

All the air trembled in the Becoming

O (?) would rend the land still

Much of the grass in elegant fringes would be upheaved

But the measure of the Earth is as healer of her own wounds There were the rocks pointed like breasts, as though a giantess were rousing from sleep in the dreamless depths of the earth. The trees interlaced a bewildering masterpiece of green forms wilderness sky of fragile leaves, and forming the setting for the pure gem of the winter the the season.

And sat underneath the night, amidst its (hydraulic?) hum, it's pain lost time whole heaven be but machinery grinding out a product of Time, smoothly and circumscribed without the (shame?) with all the indifference of the factory. In this little hour of great diversion, when even sleep becomes and alien and freezes over the bed as a hanging bough of ice, no, nothing then can uphold itself. And trust, that attribute of the blessed, never supports one against what one had for many years, for all the past of ones life, been fighting off what had first occurred long ago - now was coming. Invading the privacy of ones soul with all its vengeance. Everyday it grows. Grows into a universe that, O god, we we do not ever know and seeks some way to vomit one out into nothingness. My own sobbing had become like the convulsions of a stomach, infested with green poison. I was dry and exhausted. Wholly discharged into the room, an amorphous substance. Expended and used up.

All this great trouble which is taking my head returns on its hand making a mallet to pound out the same persistent hopes.

When my voice has disappeared in the immense body of my suffering, I sit here my face formed over by a strange glaze. I feel my mouth unable to close any more, distended and (?) with murmurs and animal whimpering. The time has come when my familiar loneliness revealed its true and dreadful nature, everywhere, inside and out, has magnified into a crushing void, more terrible now for its occult (guist?) and merciless reality. With cruel fingers it bored into the body through all the orifices and through the skin, the senses are diminished as though by ether and this way the paralyzed body can observe the horror of it's own operation in the clinical environs of the whole world.

Beauty that threatens

Tears in the form of opals

(?)

Exogamy

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I am capable of hearing anything now. Immediately, the tip of Africa breaths. Haunt the stars if you will, but do not be greedy to acquire powers. You have them all. Your crime is stubbornness and a leaky metaphysics.

Seem to cease plundering spring, summer, autumn, winter

The four seasons are in His Far from thieves

All of you - cease writing. Live in the vaults. When you re-open the door, the side of unmortal death will break into your soul.

I dreamed of a figure. Walking toward me it suddenly burst into flowers and beautiful colored lights.

When I have written loneliness away in swallows of flying ink, I will hear water again.

It is a torment to bite into a flame.

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No one would guess from my appearances, softly dressed, white skin, clear head of flowing hair that I come from such days and nights. The last time I began eating my own flesh. At first it was but my teeth tearing then it was an explosion of great stars in a fire, hair swirled like the tips of trees in a wind, and on an island, beside the mouth of a cave a desperate and innocent savage was eating the brilliant torso of a nymph, a horrid child he had caught in the tall grass; leaving the fangs, the azure eyes and the rosente nails left on the sand.

Calm again, breathing against blocks of sharp ice, he stares far away. Humor has not been discovered yet, nor the (revealed) spirit. but creepingly, his lips part, his jaw opens and the first moans come from his rank but pure crevice. He does not know yet what he is doing, nor can he guess the whole miracle of who he is.

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embowered melodious

efflux

(therus?) skulking waffed deferred varying contingencies

Poems during madness

Notebook of an Insane Child

Notebook of a Mad Boy

The poems of others are filled with things of reality, earth experienced

Yours are mad, abstract, artificial for the realist - is what should've

Yours are mad because you compose them of words, not the impressions of life

Yours are mad because you lack the ecstatic rythms which give the rise and fall of passionate life - you are death, cramped, artificial, turgid

All characteristics not of poets but of mad-woman

The true poet sings forth visions. Words ride his crested tide and dash on the shore of the reader's soul.

The true poet stores treasure of detail, sound, smell, color, form, objects, use, faces, hands, whole being. things things things - of nature of City

He must be a voyager and a traveler. He must

What strong arms, what lovely hour will give me back that region whence come my slumbers and my slightest movements?

Sun, Sun, and still the sun!

So this is a city beneath me? How can it be that all this takes place and I've no speech to describe the rotted fire? Yet my presence is in everything upon this astral promontory. The three is myself, the flower has my eyes, the animals, by their tracks, I see take after me, I am love down there below among the troubled couples. I am the perfum of their longing. The light breaks open and I read myself, a sound occurs and I am speaking. At long last having found the rightness of this ardor, here in the lion roar of the sun I come to myself, amazed and amazed and more amazed.

Ah, who takes my head, seizes my limbs, draws forth my tongue, starts my eyes, who offers me light?

Emerging from my life in the mundane town I wander to a terrace above the river. One end is already lifted in some mecurial light for the hour is come and the other end runs toward an eternity of blue celestial mist. I have happened upon an ancient revelation. I feel its watery surface with my eyes. O you are Something and I can have speech with you. You ripple with all the answers, your shores are your hand-maidens dressed up. Your being does not mingle with the arth but keeps the mystery of its person. You float unattatched in your radiant balms, not even a wind could hold you. You have no singer as yet, none human enough, though because of gracious reflections I am suddenly mild. Breath with grass. because of the terror of the commonplace, the ruin of childhood, the puerile despairs, the hunted down years (have?) I come to your pure source.

Ambition, scatter like toads! Hypocracy slide down whole monstrous wrath, break your mirrors! Endowed, and nothing but light loves us!

UNTITLED

Now I think of the terrible Then

I sing to your shattered brain and to your power

I sing as it breaks over my clothes, my hands, my face

I sing of your isolated throat, your drugged arms I can not catch you as you rise and spill and drain away But it is you. All of that.

-----------------------------------

The New God

Your rambling monolouges (raced?) from room to room

Move with the torpid night hallucinated and immense

A thousand drops of blood sprayed, like thoughts

Into your skull dulled by infinity

Stand you on your feet on your exiled terrace

Where formations of the Earth take place

Beneath you, and beside you and above

-----------------------------------

How well I can be myself!

And I take up a broom and sweep the floor.

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I had to lock myself in the top storey, in the highest and most forgotten tower of the church. No matter the hour or the season outside I live in this blackness, my blackness, self-choosen and yet..... There is a crack in one of the walls that was reinforced with heavy timbers and by that crack I still see the golden leaves waving, the moonlight, and at the equinox a single unnamed star showing through the narrow way. So my last thread with the immense out-side is kept unbroken. Yes, I still see these things though I don't dwell upon them, they scarcely touch me. So large is my own universe within. It diminishes the leaf, the moon, the star and sets up a singular race and cosmos that uses them only as guides for a denser, amazingly more intricate forms. And all on a infinite back-ground of black, like your world, the once-upon-a-time actual world.

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I sleep beneath my tartan. I dream of a dear one far away who studies and writes admist his heaped up books. Perhaps this night remarkable thoughts will all at once occur to him. Perhaps he will rise as from a vision and new creations will spring out of his soul from which a new world will take form. A whole new Everything radiating new light, new effulgence. O for the future of unheard and so far unrecorded achivements! O for the great darers! Daring all for a new being: flinging away the safe and previous outlooks of their soul! Playing joyfully with the most fearful inner undertakings. O for the real over-comers. Beings, beings All and ever!

I dance upon the hurricaine. I sleep on the Demon. I sit and glow amidst chaos. I experience the polar star. The walk of a woman on the streets, the gesture of a child, the evil of a moving mouth. I experience the whole poem of evil that cataracts beneath me. Where are these beautiful babes hurled? Over ledges, against walls, dashed to floors; the infants of this world crucified upon disease. I experience the fallen leaves still fresh beneath the pools, the distracted youths dropped down from unsupporting clouds to these granite curbs. The old faces hurrying away without reception of the world ever to wring out their fear. Unmissed and neglected hearts convinced of singular loneliness. O the street of Man.

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O, the day the city was buried! It was the hands of calamity which choked us with the ferocious claw of its heat.

He and I were together after a long absence. I recall mostly his blond hair and his pure body in summer cloth. It was frightful in the west with the (our) sun fleeing like a violator. The whole East stood still and darkened with black and putrid fog, through which the last lights shone, yellow, funeral. We held hands and he followed trustingly my eyes that searched the arrival of the end in the glass buildings, gutters, decomposing shops, the fine merchandise illuminated around like pyres. The populace had almost all deserted.

We were one immense fear. While above our heads the sky that had consumed us for days, was blowing azure gas upon its creatures. He regained presence enough to smile.

Everything truly was ending; many believed it. And I would go knowing still no more of the key to action. I was a pin-point in the demonic soul of the world-ship. Skull and cosmos. Skull without flower or song. Will it soon be over? Will there be many years of rainfall after this great heat? O I lift a destroyed heart over the curbstones, I stay beside he who is more poised. We two may awaken amidst the second creation, when a new sphere mounts the starry distance gifted with force and green spirit. We who can be nothing but death here, and always to blame, may preserve our paradise beyond error.

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Hollander - I think the trees are terrified and the little birds tremble with dew

This moisture on us is the sweat of the moon, and even the dust

Look, it hides itself in the crickets who are stunned

The night is awake with Terror and only we are growing every hour larger

Denser with light, Hollander, your skin is glowing in the Fear

O, little France, for thousands of hours I nourished you and you made me strong

Ups and down, knees in the land, hands kneeding you

Grow as abundant and golden as my Solitude I would say

And always that other land, the more fragile soil of cloud and

Blue

High as it was, after long hours looking in the brown night

Suddenly raise my hand to be embraced by sky overtaking the (boulders?) of Clouds!

And, Hollander, we are great because we are the whole land and some of the visible stars and when we see the Sea, we shall be that too, and roll toward God

You would not think it but when I left the fields I lost my name And am now just as this wind is, everywhere.

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I walked along the huddled men, breathing in the perspiring fires

Thrown so at random into the open palm of a land in (sight?)

Men (?) and sweat and fire and fire

We must take nourishment for this is a Beginning like no other

And the body craves to keep up with a vigorous soul For we burn of God! Tomorrow the (banners or barriers?), the winding up of our vision

And no road like this vision, to Orleans!

No surety like God, no perfect work in a disturbed time.

As this hard riding to the plains and restoration of the cathedral My soliders, my poets of France, not your mothers were as sure of you as I

And your fathers count them so as boys that you are such men Feel your breast glow great as a rose? That rose is victory, no other

Why France is a Rose, God is a Rose, the sweetened sword is a

Rose

We, the smell fire of its birth

Grow to pure vast fire, brawny ones, sharp hide necks, (von?) heads

And cross the bridge first when you see me and the banner Shoot into open space, let you slay on the high mountain of the tight

Like meteors at midnight

Watch the white horse and catch its dash through (imaginary) enemy

There is but one Holy slaughter

Sow the plains with your on-coming it shall spring up greenness

And the blood be a harvest of wheat

Be never afraid of the inspired encounter with evil

And let them see your serene blow through their fierce lunge

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It fell to me today to envy everything. Even the rocks that had burst through the ground shrouded in purple light as though it had been a glorious death down below. Birds who seemed so nible within the centers of their tiny brains, while I, disappearing into Nature and into Spirit, because of my terrible muteness, my depths that (disolve?) me, became a perch for them, and a dead thing over which they flew, whisking and sure that I would never move. They were right, for I was envying the stream of water and the stream of time; both looked to be a vast plate of glass upon which the image of the world was thrown, still wearing and trembling from its arrival. And later, O, my God, the people, their loneliness and deformities, what other splendors to envy! What else could I acheive? Anything less would be sure death. A disgraceful death. A woman's prejudiced death only half thought threw and wretched for not knowing enough. So it fell to me to envy, to be in awe and to desire greater tasks. To give up my old sufferings, thread-bare, shop-worn, amorphous and with an irradicable ordor of sweat. For these the (robes?) of the new, tender as a sky full of the last Sun, and I would be one with the wounded of all kinds. A woman, carrying rags, and dressed in rags, rubbing an imaginary window sill or floor board to make it clean. I listened shyly to her termagant of hatred. She and I in the gentle summer air of indifference. We were allowed our fill of bitterness. It was twilight - the (painted? fairest?) hour. There were many other (nameless? homeless? lineless?) and

scared, some without a brain, just a skull filled with dry ice. The proud in (change the agure?) into the midst of their corruption, full of plumes and with the (liquer?) of their own beauty. (I sea?) of night did not pause to ask myself if they suffered, they were thus that seemed enough. A procession of the despised, a street full of people praying to idols which I alone perceived ceasing to pray now lending their own selves for a sacrifice, no longer (commiting? counting?) themselves, I walked as the world's interpreter only because I had voulteered to try to love (few over my head?). Hating all good they want (?rediera) their blood on a divine (entablature?). O, loosen the net! O sku looking down and city looking up and this in between this, its rage lost in the noise of living. O you sky of clouds like dinosaur bones, signs unreadable to the unworthy why is it that any all these created things could be forsaken? Then let me also be forsaken. Throw me away, use me up, invent a form of dying for the use of the living. Take me into an avenging gods hands, (fabulous?) for a destiny, heave me over the crowds like a tyrant. Somewhere, in the (universe? nearly illegible) jars of the street choking with many (trifles?) of the people who live here, gorge too with necessity up to the hilt of its horizontal throat, I saw a blind man stand all day long on the burning cement and beside him his black dog, who seemed burnt (far after ? to because the man) this great blackness. These two figures, the one (looking) by a kind of singing, flat and sickly, and the other, his shadow, the great waiter, I call him. Close to the leg, almost linked to all ready (much?) diminished in human capacity, mutalated as though by plan, set up in the square like an angel made by a naive and fearful craftsman nonetheless beside him, more visible than with us, stood in his own Death in the shape of his guide, his (illegable) support and unfailing One.

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Now, I have been vouchsafed to understand at all. And I am amazed how alive I still seem to be. This darkness reserved for my days as well as my nights has finally yeilded all the strange fruits of dread at once - Swollen with an unforseeable suspense, I sat upright in the all pervading bell tower amidst the reflections and slices of moonlight that live with me. There are ten or so Strange, but I now know they may cast a spell over me, or one of these (linerar?) meams might leap up as a knife to kill me. Much may be lurking about in the shape ravens or hands. I dare not

get up. I may be treading on the human flesh or on a thousand mysterious parasites that have been kept secret by the dark, all seeing. I felt the thing which guided me and it was dread. Peace and dread. What lay beyond me as the remaining room I imagined would be gone if I stepped forth. Or if the room is still here perhaps it would be a soft mass of walls and floors into which I would fall and sink choking on its implacable airless substance. The All was black and vast now, perhaps it was the cause of this peace which severed me from my body as if forever. I can not keep from praying. O may everything still not desert me. For what lay beyond, oh beyond, that was unspeakable. No worse than all the horrors of a continent in deep Abyss. Containing those who have stared for years out of their own starvation, those who falt no more upon the hundreth murder they had witnessed, O all the witnesses! All together; and those who remember the color of their executioners eyes. Those who will not be able to rise from their bed tomorrow. Those who will feel themselves falter: who will not make it to the stairs, the street, or to God. Those who will suddenly stand still in the midst of everything. Those who will turn themselves in, those who will be commited by others. Those who will begin to die by a long series of evil transformations. Those who are escaping this that enfolds me tonight that holds the world tight against me as something staring back. I am within it, the Black Flower, (I? The word may be crossed out) and all the world. This drifting aimless Space and has not the slightest warmth yet there it is not cold. And out of it all my wonder will be born. I can already tell that. And the simple things will no longer elude me, nor will the greater torture me anymore. I can be alone. Can it be? Yes now it can and future, that too seems as if it will be after all. O yes, future definitely has broken through out of the immensity of this Dread. When my body returns I may leave this place, (swim?) forth into the light of Time. Be, oh god, Be!

UNTITLED

The (titles?) of (embryonic?) races scaling their first dynasty.

As if my heart were a drum roll and when it ceased I would make a spectacular leap into the arena flames.

Vaginal murders, the (woods?), the night, the car, the double deed, the orgasm of Hell, and old (illegable) bleeding of Negro

Anger. Anger jaunts against the soft white bones, anger

(pierces?) its ramrod entry and then its precision of choking. Who is to blame for Negro rage? Myself. I am not safe in being myself. Held accountable, woody, silent forest ("woody silent forest" may have been intended for above lines), it is not easy to find Gods in this life. The violent are bored. Women awaken bruised and men grope through the doors out of the disrobed shame they leave behind. Women see the characature of their mates make fast toward the night. Stumbling the sun rises and sets over a great united country whose tides eb away and whose honor dissolves among other races.

sheaf teredo

flail

mallows tread lactation salt-crystalled

gills

penegrine acid acidity urns guardians emissaries absolve avowal ebbing grapes bulls novelty chequered snakes bruises (severed?) ports (quickline?) roses ravisher (in?)submission (emminence?) plenary discord alliance unforseeable incorporeal Solstice conciator mediator federaters (boundens?) sculptors purveyor acsessors regicide extradited goatherds cowherd (poting?) assemblars cutlers commbutators

annalist barker travellers captains magistrates mobleaders heroine judge

pontiffs

horsemen

fruits scales scabs fauna servant stallion doe

basalt slate-colored vulva crests entrails congregation lengthily modulated avers tissues recitation strophes epode

affluence hostages actors ploughing claws

exit straits orb threshhold

pilot (anointing?) mound

lustral mobile oriented confluence numbers innumerable

(homes? nomes?) ennumeration divergence lapse provinces migration seasonal figurations tributary hordes fusion portent presence evaded periodic idiom submerged Immensity gates growling ulcerations faltering natal adornments Irreconciable bays shores roadsteads

Citadel depravation Uterine

Poignant Consanguineous ancestry perishable irrepudiable plenary conciliated

Noon famine year waters effacement weal peninsulas forges quartz (ochre?) fawn chalk Usurper and the very great love of poetry with which we clothe ourselves.

UNTITLED Caesura

agile releasing diversity cooings oppressor harpooned chastised assaults blended rests horde sleek bulb controversey recoil assail harrow flares strident reprieve (develled?) summon

brazier frequented conversed glade uninhabitable intrusion

(ascorted?)

The night coils around the buildings and stars

To reverse the inhuman Christianity and bend to Hell To frequent the psychic shores of unchastised Death Nights when the Poet is raped by an assailing city bright with steel plumes and agile mysteries

Then his gladitorial return when overthrows all who make a sweetness of suffering. When, in his recorded youth, he dares to proclaimate a Happiness. O, splendid overthrower, he who illuminates the dark half of the moon. Western (remains?), trajic

Western wealth

O, wealth of collisions! Western soul ever leaving the planes of its space, rending its boundries and diminishing its center. O, poor poverty of Christ. His people, ridiculous, to whom he is the great asexual judge and Thrice holy wounded one Thorn and nail and lance The weapons of a century n your flesh, supplier of perpetual martyrdoms. Divine, feet on the (uninhibited?) earth, Liasons of east bound clouds overtake him. His genius fully awake he does not even know the key to his own greatness and yet is great. Night softly guarded him, a very chill veyr pure night. O then the leaves of his mind no more supplicants to the ever absent, the ever present azure find below at the spine of the tree their home. Laying his brow against the storm, sleeping in the torrential winds, he launches hi sdelvierance. Who is this Nomad between invisible races? The measure of their mighty divergences. Who is the stand-bearer of all the beautiful Religions and on what fine hair does he stand his (looming? wooing?) life?

O, teacher of these crying Plains, propet of the sea, rolling itself from coastal (getion?) to (caper? word crossed out is 'coastal') silence to pool of death O Raptured one loved in God, your greatest sculptor made you a sleeping youth chained in its marble dreams, your greatest poet spelt out with his own (consumate?) your awesome fire and the universe and over-jousous dead eclipsed him. This was an ill time and later they remembered you because of his (irreplicable?

irrepairable?) darkness and that ended you, (singer?) of crosses.

O, now what escorts our womanly planet? What loves us in the expanding heavans? What spaces are being created that we know nothing of? Aren't our own eyes turned outward and also looking at us? Aren't we the projection on the horizon? This giant issue of divinity, the sole lustre of the strident west? We who are becoming (inaccurate?) in blood and tormented with the burden of our lyricism. The prey to predatory violence, parading a hopless art and the same diseased philosophies. O, beautiful and wretched philosophies!

Soul of the eon, the poet with a cosmic glance strong and (beaming), his depths of sadness into the Eastern wind, walks mid-air on the currents of night, anchored well in solidary awe, the (penifer?) of his being enfolding his white robes around the honey colored wind. He is all (shrod?) in green and sniffing the greatness of the mauve abyss, he bows before all prisoners and herdmen. UNTITLED

oblivion rye

Having nothing to absorb their cries in the bare-walled masses of clay children and numb poverty, I recieve the rays of this tormented beast growling in the Earth groin.

And I am nothing but the sizemograph of orgiastic rains ending in a cosmic silence of Absence.

I feel all those who might have allied themselves deserting the cosmos.

Torn and flying into the vastest death they could scale.

And I have risen above my worthless voice to make great sounds against advancing chaos.

By what could I rise, dark as I am and more low than any (unenlightened?) diving out of the sealed stench of blood and smothering (mucous), my breached mother now, to be a flow full river, sworn + true to its confines, carrying the reflection of all that builds upon its shores.

I glow irradecent beside my mighty childish cities and feelings of the coming great terror. The infant flames of the whole world are perverted into spread. I deposit the ways of my people into the fathers of the unknown to the last instant, even in the midst of indescribable Burst I will offer my waters as though they were perpetual.

Pretense of rivers! The great art. Eternity, created by Earth's most powerful-souled.

O, you created thing, upon which all the artisans worked, thing that ever united them in their various and splendid ways. By every means they shaped you and blew you into the invisible and believed and fashioned with their own ardor the geometry and the explosion of Belief.

From oblivion to oblivion you are the arch of their jubliation.

Nor does it matter that they often immolated themselves for you.

Or that pride over-coming them they became strutting poets and arrogant as psessing a gifted courtesan

Their are crude lovers who have come to you

But let us remember the ones whose minds were avalanched by your double nature

Over-lighted with lucidity they who submitted themselves to yoru white abyss.

And highest of the great laughers, the ones whose souls became fields of rye, and at once the unfiltered spelndor of skies, and still yet a tumid of moonlight.

They are the anemone-eyed, among all the evil beings that commerce and laze upon the earth, they in the divine power of their capacity for nothingness they, in the flory of their centrered and awakened forms, those whom we are unable to describe so bewildered and enfeebled is our tongue before their shine, are to be the horizon of all (journeyies) undertaken by poets and workers.

This we have learned in our twentieth age.

I write with the (lubrication?) of my body. These are the instruments for the birth of the poem.

Endings and beginnings unadmitted.

Apocolypses and all yearnings toward the cosmos. The

(messes?) yielding to love Great lovers crossing the threshold of the beloved's body. The entering of canyons, the ascending of mountians.

UNTITLED

The descents of superior souls and the descents of sub beings.

Bile-(brain?) rivers and golden women rivers

The poem swells like a lover in his white gown when the sunset of his object impercetpably transforms the walls of heaven Towards all that gives him his pinions, ever gave him the relief of wings the poem he memorized on its journey (thru?) days and (contients) and gives back its whole child.

The poem grows happy with surrender and more powerful than ever, its blood at the pearl-surface, draws the naked things of earth into its radiant interior.

May it awaken the millions half slaughtered in the perfect-region of their sex

May it restore their original ripeness, unchain their obsessions

Make man the happy thing of nature

Flower forms and demonic purges both of the new poem keeping back the great waters of despair, the obscene violations of every fine wrought soul

Their aberrated beauty, extravagant whines of infancy, their immense and trajic love.

Poem, passivity of golden action.

Humble temble of small and great gods, offer all objects to its sancturary, lay down even the men and msot terrible of all banalities, the factory soul of rising countries, the wretched spill of revolutions, the giant porthole of the future.

UNTITLED

Note: large portions of this document are illegible, both due to blurring of the photograph, faint pencil writing in some areas and areas where water ran over ink. In the interest of preserving Suzanne Miller's poetry I have attempted to transcribe what is comprehensible.

Spain America France England Russia China

That which shines out

And that which has patience

The inner acheivment

The humble surrenter I love

O, surrender, how many times

Have I given you my whole name

And for a span (illegible) made almost and a poet

Beyond my self that falls on low sick ground

How often again must I yield the whole of my blood

O, god of the Real, to regain the lost stars

That over my head there be not a blank again

Those two, the strange sexes that willed me

What do you know of the this dubious line inked in the white where stop

And I walk there

O, there, O so vastly alone in great arms

Who, with perilous desire outstretched to you

Even as I now stretch an arm

To objects that they might lift veils to let me there.

Not fear this but anchor me when I wholly give myself away

And not with (flinging?)

No, but eforesence, luster and ebb

I approach as a flowing stream

That the world receiving may make two gathering shores

As they never count who often handled me

Long before (in?) a crimson womb of child-world

There are wishes of the night

In a time of trembling, encounter a pure hour of youth And only a heart's beat from the whole image of Love as world, as the beloved

What even now spreads over the Earth in the spirit

Of all emulating light

So does the (illegible) of the Earth

Gleam as a vision this night as perfect as a Star

And multiple glimpses come of her children

The thousand lives, that appear unique at last to me

Surrounded in space like works of art

Honored with (possibly "these") miracles

That in the hearts of (illegible) had found their (permant?) repose

Or can they know what monsters

Stomp the sort within me

Raise up (illegible) hand and each day pluck flesh from my entrails

From the (illegible)

And release the little precious (illegible)

That hold blood

O, beautiful blood

Running down The foul mouth of the world

The other world the terrible (reside? beside?)

The dear

Its battle mate and opposite

Poor, child parents

Play (illegible)aterated the house

The games that end in rage

My heart is full of pity That yours is not potent (despair of m illegible)

UNTITLED

I began my life with madness. What, that before would have been God - what can possibly reach down to me? So there bliss anywhere? On the ancient sphere — one light? , one frame of bliss?

One day at the beginning of a week, I began my study of death. Have I the strength to go on with it? Indeed, can I even remember from day to day what I have discovered. One day is a year and I rise to raise up the whole task again and never seem to be like a builder. I have not done well, since at first I fell into the old death, Europe's death, the pitchy horror, the decomposition, the stench of the misunderstood. I lost everything in the investigation, day after day, despite my rare strength, it sucked out far more than joy: the very foundations of flesh passed away like a delta dissolved in a massive torrent, the mud clogged movement of this over-rushing Death. Starvation and a thousand chimeras. So great was my error. Shall I outlive these Monsters? What interest could you take in them? You with your well sorted reality, haven't you rid yourself of mystery? Even made God a kind of truant officer, just in order to be finally free of the ineffable that has persued your generations all over Europe and across the fearful sea to uncut America, the land that has still to be discovered? Why should I ruin your so carefully worked out retreat with my darkness? Even great darkness you can drive to the starts by the defense of your wonders — electricity. There comes one with a symbol of evil for the others around him and who dares listen, or if one did what could he do? CHange his life? Follow the foot tracks of a mad failure, a soul so doomed no one has the key for speaking plainly to him anymore? For that very absurdity he will tell it all, even babble it. He will later come to tell of very recent embraces with something hovering near like the first breath of that death he was seeking wholly new to him, the true death; then perhaps redeem himself from the destruction his horrors may cause to the one who gives himself to listening.

UNTITLED

The bitter aloe of this heat and the soul of weakness. All past summers have (heap? leap?) up and become this monstrous day discharging more memories than there is courage to sort. I am at rest amidst all the common world. My neighbors are incalcuable and extend into Great Distances. Yet I feel them all in the (ILLEGIBLE) around me. The (?)ence of the whole active afternoon is burning in the streets. Commerce and Ambitions!

Only the one with the green veins floats two feet above the nervous populace. He sees both up and down, both the top of their multiplied heads and the divergences of their over-heated souls. He is omnipresent as Space and common as the dust they crush with their war-like marching. No one gueses the miracle of his spontaneious heart, nor that his lucid gaity gathers up the terrors of the west and keeps it from them. Whole nights, wide as infinity, appear and assend, yet no one guesses. The twilight fills his lungs, makes him more visible in his robe-like, windy love. He is a star. Responsible for light and warmth. He dispenses this love everywhere, he gleams like marble before them. A few are receptive to the meditative joy, they hear an uncanny music that blinds them. He tampers with their knowledge and whole (contreviences) systems are overthrown, (thus? them?) he introduces them to the birds and the antelope. O, few! If he were more lofty or more miraculous, he might have been slain. But he brought with him the whole of the Awakened Earth and was so joyful noone could lay hands on him. O return us also our original being. Bring us home.

UNTITLED

The mother of us all ; high up against the eyes of her windows the farewell panoramas of winter and summer sunsets, high up, 90 years overlooking the city and the farthest worlds, dreaming on the fate of each of her children. Spendthrift nourisher, 90 years invaded by war parades. She mourns in the elegance she still traces for our pleasure. What are these in our hands but her breasts overhanging the air in the divine intimacy of the roses of her vast rooms. She and we. The great flower of her sacred flesh opens our soul and we bow and remember with shame the prodigious summers in her company, before our present suicide, when trees by her presence made our days more sensitive than silken webs. Long before the wars we adorized China and India, could speak with awe of Africa and Russe. Art made us citizens, peaceful, uncalamatious. She dwelled everywhere, in the armature of the winds, in the lands of the sky. We welcomed all the diversity of Chinates, our interst roamed the green Earth and could not exhaust itself at the bottom of the hoary Sea. We were posessed by joy the color of transparent azure. Radiances come from our temples and our eyes, where we tred, flowers and tender worms sprung, the earth grew richer towards the helpless seed. And we revealed Death by the serene gestures of our hands. O, there were no (posses? posessers?). All was we, and we were All.

As children we posed beside chairs in altitudes of the great masters painting the noble family, ourselves. We were fixed forever, as noble. No one could dissuade us, not our grimest errors. We later drank rank waters, crawled from wall to wall, slept in the horrors of our human wit, shared crimes we needn't have because we grew profligate in our sacrifice, died and again died. For our Logic overwhelmed us. We were both great and nothing. But what, O what was the unending about? Till our splendid fall into the Abyss, our letting go, in all the world, so thin and simple a phrase for such happening. And after the multiple images which would have caused panic forever, flying by came home to our vision and our understanding. O everything is image. The Reprieve and we are with (illegible).

UNTITLED - 301 - ISSUES WITH DOCUMENT - BLURRY, STAINS, PENCIL WRITING - REVISIT IN TIME

UNTITLED

Yet in the beginning, without strain, I was to say something simple. Being unknown I can wander like this into thoughts which bridge by invisible cables word after word. And I enjoy. No one is against me but noone can come near me. Or talking, I will reveal my foolishness to myself, while in this petrifying silence I can memorize lists of words, and pretend to the importance of a future. What they at home expect of me I think I know. How little their hopes can climb. While mine, speed even while joining myself to the complete end of my life. Writing is making me sleepy and forgetfulness of these impossible intimations will come. As the head weighs more, constellations appear and are not answered. Opening the windows before lying down, I open to the concaving patterns and their admittance into my dream. They will come even in the vicious ones when everything becomes frankly violent and I murder my repressed enemy. Even then, in those dreams of utterly painless destruction and rage, starsmimperiously gleam.

So much has burned away.

Childhood, a temple of worship and renewal of the tender heroism of the childhood. Western world must reach around in wide circumfrance, gathering fragments from a whole meadow.

But I have stopped, still, in the center of my room.

UNTITLED

A grey apprehensive sky. But if our life ends with its individual span then that too may be understood. Today though, I saw a crowd of the most wretched mingling around in a filthy street. Spectres of misery. Worn fiberless and slow shapeless sacks of bird bones. Flesh clogged with dirt. Mouths unable to close, unkissed, unblessed with happiness or love or children, burned by toxins of alcohol and finished, spent all over. When I floated among these swarms of crooked shoes and alloyed eyes, I wondered that humans had a soul at all or that it must be that theirs will gaze again another time. Or I too will be sucked into their ignominious holes by merely viewing them. I had a wish so absurd that the sight of me so white, pitying and new might heal them where they stood. But worse than night comes on and they go forth with their logical dying and I stand stunned by my permissable life.

In the background, high up, a sinister dream city. In the foreground, a collision of enormous vehicles. I am alive and the azure is my temptation. If I am upward falling the reason is a field of other spheres. Fires burn in the shrinking air. I ride a bright string and see to my side blown earth with holes that syphon off the seas. Above not a looking glass of stars but Terror that includes the moon. O, but there is a star and a possible void. I pass on.

UNTITLED

My mother's life was shattered by my father's illness. She was depressed and deeply angry.

***

I dream Marjorie embraces me, holds me in her arms.

***

My mother once hired a babysitter, a teenage neighbrohood boy. I was still in a crib, perhaps two or three years old. He touched my genitals. I back away into the corner of the crib. He frightened me. I had a sensation of blinding light.

***

My absence of a sense of myself. I need a sense of myself.

***

Mother, you were so depressed. You sat in your red wool robe staring out of the window, cheek in hand, world's away, cruising in the orbit of your grief.

I'm going to have a new life. Daphne says so. You expected me to be able to take care of myself. You leaned on me and counted on me. You leaned on my frail child's strength. To this day I give the impression of being strong. Marjorie can't understand why I need therapy, why my sense of myself is so damaged. She is herself so intact, she can't feel what it's like to feel fragmented and frightened inside. I've had to be brave and courageous and grown-up. I've not been a child, ever.

***

Nov. 30. Drove Marjorie to LAX. We embraced. We kissed. And when the luggage was checked she blew me a kiss. I blew her a kiss. I got into the Oldsmobile, pulled out into the broad airport avenue and began to cry. How many miles did I cry? All the wak to Sherman Oakes.

***

Daphne says I'm not to worry, that I will make it. I'm to write an unsent letter to my mother. I'm always lashing out at myself.

NOTE: ABOVE DOCUMENT AS LISTED AS PAGE TWO COMBINE WITH EARLIER DATED WRITINGS FROM THIS SERIES

My first assignment from DAPHNE IS to write about my mother. THE subject is my mother. We have surely failed each other, she and I. O, YES. And isn't that human and isn't that real.

You were hardly there for me. I'll try not to censor what I know is coming. Those shameful, humiliating nights. As a child, wetting the bed was my great secret, just as drinking is my secret now.

There's the one, here's the other. Cut of the same cloth.

I remembe the smell, the awful smell, the stained sheets and the matress rotting, rotting year after year. Having to bath and wash them out in the shivering cold of Ohio winters. How coyld you let me live like that? How could you let me live like that? Doing noithing about it. Doing nothing. Yes, there was one visit to a doctor. A BLADDER examination in which the doctor, probably not intending to, sexually aroused me with his probing fingers. He prounced nothing physically was wrong with me. Then we had that beautiful walk home together. You he;ld my hand, something you rarely if ever did. I was saturated with joy. It was Indian Summer, the leaves had turned their glorious colors and we were lying all about on the sidewalks and lawns. We walked together and you held my hand. I felt wonderfully small. I felt I had a mother, a protector. The doctor may have suggested it, that you wake me up in the middle of the night and take me to the bathroom. I remember that wonderful night when I was awakened by you, how you accompanied me and lead me back to bed. And it worked, it worked and you never did it again! Why, why was that? I'm afraid to ask you because I'm always protecting your pain. Why did you never come to me again? The answer hardly matters.

***

I envision a beautiful woman in a fur boa and hat. I love that woman, whoever she may be. I want to look like her. I want to feel that assurance, security, power of that woman. I want to shake off the waif image.

NOTE: ABOVE DOCUMENT NUMBERED 1 UNTITLED 1985 DIARIES

mainly about not writing. Daphne says I'm not writing about what I need to write about, Mother, Father and me.

***

Dec. 1, morning

Daphne's assignment:

Write a sentence on my location when I wake up.

Write what I'll have for breakfast.

Write what I'm going to do today.

Write what I'm angry about.

Write what I need today.

Daphne writes in my book: Your new schedule:

Bed at 11:00

Up at 7:00

Morning: Read/write

Afternoon: Go swimming

After this, write about my life as a lush story.

Evening: tea and reading or friends. Continue writing about your mother --

with love, Suzanne,

Daphne

***

Dec. 4

I'm in Marjorie's bed. The news is on TV. I'll have some toast and juice and an egg. When Morey returns the car, I'm going out to do errands. A bureau for Fred who is living in my studio. I'm always taking care of my mother's children! I'm sick of these heat flashes. Keep waking up in the night perspiring my head hurts. A drink will not help. Afternoon swimming at the Y is no good because there is a young people's class. I'm angry because I'm alone. I don't want to swim alone. I want a companion. If I save Morey's job, I don't get to drive Marjorie. He's after all her driver. I only ge to cook and clean which I don't like. I always like to drive. Yet I promised her I take him to AA meetings, if I can get him to go. When I need today is to be free of this anxiety that my mother won't help with a little sum each month for therapy. I'm angry that I need therapy. But I love having Daphne's attention. I need to have myself. I'm crying. I'm angry with Fred. He takes no initiative regarding the house or my circumstances. I'm sick of him and his taste for football. I want him out of my studio and on his own. But then I will be alone again and I drink when I'm alone but then I drink when I'm not alone. I drink!

Dec. 5

I'm in Marjorie's bed. The news is on. Some young actor. I wonder what happened to my career. I worked so hard at Stella Adler's studio. I have to call Marjorie in London. I wonder what she wants. I'm angry she wants to take Morey to AA. I can't even get myself there! I've hidden my drinking from her but Morey dosen't bother to. He fell in the shower. I feel crazy with concern. I want to call Daphne but know she'll be in session with someone. Rachel Welsh is on TV. She looks so all of a piece, I don't . I'm going to drink. I'm angry with Marjorie because I asked her not to call me about Morry. That I promised to do my best.

But she's a woman of action. Everyone notices this.

***

She has already called Morry and told him she's finished with him if he doesn't stop drinking.

***

Picking up where I left off...I need for my mother to acknowledge all I did for her as a kid, like "I appreciate what you contributed to the house and looking after your two brothers." When my brother Frankie was in constant trouble with the law and header for a jail career, I brought him to New York, gave him some guidance so he could have a life. Frankie dead at the age of 40. Dead of a defective heart. My mother never tells me how she feels about me. I'm the last to know. I want it from HER. When other friends, people who care about me express confidence in me, I want to immediately fuck it up.

***

My life as a lush. God, I need a drink, I'm so full of pain.

***

Your own mother said you were a spoiled child, mother. You could have spoiled me just a little instead of leaving me alone all the time to write and draw and read in my little room in the back of the house.

On the grounds where my father was kept, there was a golf course and ponds which would freeze over in the winter. I used to go skating with my friends and never, never tell them my father was kept inside one of those buildings. My life as a thief. Hoping to get INSIDE. So he won't feel alone in there, so I won't feel alone out here. I was on one hand terrified to be committed to a hospital, but I was stealing. Some part of me wanted to get inside, to be looked after. Even in jail you are looked after. You are no longer responsible for your own life.

Can you hear me! Can anyone hear me? I'm deeply

ashamed of not being normal. Mother, if you wanted me to be normal, why didn't you give me a normal life to live? I'm drinking Bourbon of all things.

I'm angry with Fred because he thinks it's manly to withhold his feelings. He's got lots of them. I love Paolo because although he dosen't talk out his feelings it's because he's a poet and is writing about them. He talks to me with his eyes, and smokes.

It's 8:15 in the evening and I've not gotten past my anger to feel what I need. I need to hear my mother say yes she would be glad to help me, she would be honored to help me because I will be such a prize in her pocket. When I'm well will she love me?

***

Dec6.

In Marjorie's bed. Could not sleep last night. I'll have an egg. Today I'm going to tend to the house. I want to get organized so I can write, so I can live in my house. I'm angry that I have to go to this meeting tonight. But I promised Marjorie. What about me? Am I doing it for myself as wlel? I need to get through this day and tomorow. Then I'm going home. I need to garden and to have a swim.

***

Dec. 7.

In Marjoe's bed having spearmint tea. My stomach is very, very nervous and tense. Can't manage breakfast. I'm going to tidy up the house and then go to my house for the weekend. I'm too alone here and could start drinking again. I feel very weak from last night's effort. The AA meeting, the hunt for the meeting place in the pouring chilly rain. I have to be honest and say I do not want Morry's job even though I'm helping him keep it. I need the money and I love driving around places with Marjorie. I need to get calm today.

***

Dec. 8.

I'm in my own bed. It feels good to be home. I'm going to make some cafe au lait, then some cereal and bannana. I'm going to play with my house. I get angry about every Sunday going to football for Fred. I want to stay feeling good for awhile.

***

Dec. 9.

I'm in my own bed with my two cats and Goldie in her chair. It's raining. I'll have coffee and coissant. Today I want to organize my closet and run some errands if the rain stops. I don't feel angry today! Not yet. That hot, opressive, explosive feeling is absent. I don't feel emotional. Can't express what I need today. No, wait, I need to start writing about my drinking. More than writing about it, taking a good, hard look.

***

Dec 10.

Woke in my bed. I'm having a coffee and watching the news. Today I see Daphne, then I'll shop, tend to the house and tonight go to an AA meeting with Morry. Can't find a source of anger today. Rather, I'm greatly relieved to feel a fine spray of hope....I need.....why don't I know what I need?

***

Dec 11.

I'm in Marjorie's bed having a coffee and toast. It's the 6th day without a drink. Today I will write the unsent letter to my mother. I'm not feeling anger this morning. I'm feeling energetic. What do I need today? I need someone to hold me and love me. There's no one around.

Dec. 12.

Woke in Marjorie's bed. Having coffee. I'm here because I have to take her birds to be boarded at the pet shop. I've promised my mother to come to Toledo for Christmas. I dread going to Toledo. I resent all the money she has given Fred over the years. He owes her about $6,000. I never borrowed anything from her in all those years. I was sometimes desparately ill during those years, but I made my own way. Basta! I'll call Morry to drag him to another AA meeting. Then I've got to direct my anger at mother, feel it through.

Dec. 14.

Woke in Marjorie's bed. My head hurts which is jut the pain drinking takes away. Think I'll go back to sleep instead.

***

Woke again later in the morning. Jeanne wake up every morning at 5:00 but for me those wee hours bring intense memories of my childhood cold and fear and isolation. I'm going to wrap things up here, take Goldie and go home. I'm not angry at the moment, it lies ssleeping like a panther.

Dec 15.

Woke in my own bed. I awoke with a sensation I've had after drinking all night. Only this time I haven't been drinking. Still I woke up feeling toxic and was relieved that my body must be throwing off past effects of alcohol. When I think of my anger yesterday I think I was including my whole family, my childhood friend Margaret and whole town of Toledo itself! I was indicting the whole town for my griefs. This morning I feel so free of anger that I find it amusing I should charge a whole town with crimes, against me. I'm reminded of something Maria once said when I was in therapy with her in my twenties. "Suzanne, when your hatred of the world turns to love, it will be tremendous. Call London today.

Dec. 16.

I'm in my own bed having coffee, looking out the window at the chilly, windy, bright blue day and the tall poinsettia framed in the glass, its red flowers waving. Don't be afraid. When I finally discharged all that anger, the memories came flying. I never realized what anxieties drinking created all of its own. Just as alcohol irritates all the cells of the body, so it aggravates every terror, every wound, every grief one once experienced in a pure form. I don't have to wrestle alcohol to the ground, I have let go of it. Thank you, Daphne.

***

Called Gladi in New York. Expressed my anger toward her.

Dec 17.

Back in Marjorie's hosue. Morry called to invite me and Fred for breakfast....Morry ordered a martini for breakfast but only took a swallow and left the rest. This means nothing as he is constantly drinking. He even goes to meeting smashed. In the past, I would have drunk his martini but it seemed like poison to me. I didn't even want the alcohol soaked olive. I need to figure out why I was so angry with Gladys who loves me.

Dec. 18.

I'm in bed having coffee. I see Daphne today and go to an AA meeting with Morry. I feel it isn't going to work with Morry. His wife tells me there is no change in his drinking. I keep going over in my mind what my flare-up with Gladi was about. Of course it is about my drinking. But it's as though she wantws Marjorie to be informed of my problems. She doesn't want me to get away with anything. I hate her probing questions, her right to my life. At the same time I know Gladi is thoroughly on my side. She wants to see me free of this crippling problem. I run up against my fear of group experiences, to expose myself to strangers. I need to keep concealed the fact that I drink the way I needed to conceal the fact that I wet the bed and that my father was in the looney bin. It's all the same thing. Gladys is pressuring me to join AA but in AA you have to stand up and tell all these strangers these horrible things about your life, to share them with strangers and I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that even with Daphne beside me. Even though she has offered to go with me.

Dec. 19.

I woke up feeling sad about Morry. He hasn't reached bottom yet. What will be the bottom for him? I find him repulsive sometimes but mostly it's his incredible feebleness that hurts. It's my father. Trying to save my father. I recall the fantasies I used to have about savying my father, getting him out of that dreadful place. Of course, I had no conception of his real condition, I just felt so devastated with my pain whenever I had to visit him. Marjorie doesn't know that by asking me to do this for her and for Morry she is bringing up all this heartbreak of my father.

Dec. 20.

Woke in Marjorie's bed. Will have an egg for breakfast. I'm going to Solvang and buy my mother one of anggels with candles. She loves that kind of thing. Like a child. Fred is experiencing his same old money problems, relying on the word of other people, his incredibly complicated way of borrowing and paying back tricks He has such a hard time growing up. He has the opposite problem from mine because he had a stable, doting father and happy mother, my mother who was finally happy in her third marriage. I got nothing, they gave him everything. He is nevertheless, a sensitive and kind person.

Dec. 21.

Woke in my bed. Woke at 5:30 and needed no more sleep. Fred is still upset about not getting his money. Telephone calls in which he speaks in this muffled tone very rapidly. He hides what he's really doing from me. I don't feel angry today but there is the old pressure in my head, the kind that drinking used to relieve. I feel annoyed that with Christmas so close, I can't celebrate drink on the holiday. I don't want the miseries of drink but the temptation to celebrate is there still in me. To celebrate like a "normal" person. All my life, I've wanted to be "normal." I'm still not convinced as I need to be that I can't drink at all. I need to talk to Daphne about my sugar addiction which started in my childhood. Movies and candy were my pain killers for the first 15 years or so of my life.

Dec. 22

Woke in my bed. Today Fred and Me fly to Toledo...........

On the plane, lunch and one martini.

Dinner and two martinis. I'm not feeling like I want more, more, more. I don't feel I have to start a round of drinking. I am discovering a new channel for my anger. Is this an illusion?

Dec 23.

Woke up in Fred's former bedroom in Toledo. It's cold and clear outside, with a northern wind blowing. Daphne said to be detatched and observant. I became angry three times yesterday. Once when Bob didn't meet us at the right place or time at the airport, another time when I lost my gloves, and still another with the sleeping arrangements here. It was hinted that I should sleep with my mother so Fred could have his bed. I was not about to do that!

The memories of having to share a bed with her all through high school would be too much for me to handle. I lost having my own bed and my own room because she married that terrible man.

Because it has been so many years since I've been in this city of my childhood, I've obtained a map and in my mother's Oldsmobile, comfortable and warm on this winter day I drive to the sec tion of town I grew up in. I'm very near my high school and Highland Park where I swam all summer, each summer in the public pool and in its creek running through the park land where I nearly drowned. My heart is beating more quickly. When I come to my high school and the surrounding houses, I can hardly believe my eyes. It has become a slum, everywhere I look is delapidated neglect, and poverty. The school, the neighborhood has completely given up and given into impoverishment. The big red brick building with its grey stone trim is now a monster of ruin. The lawn in front completely sprouting all along them. It all looks like nothing could inhabit it again with its splitered windows and coal stained walls. Across the street are houses in even more dismal shape because they are wooden and rotting and falling apart at the seams.

I'm seeing where I came from, what I once knew, what I once was, a brave little girl, unconscious of the kind of circumstances I was handed. What you are given is not all you know. I always knew there was something else. That kept me alive. It's winter here. My mother is now frail and dying. The gruesome look of it. Her body shunden. The skin hanging on her little bones clothed in a grey and tourquoise jogging suit, her bald head in a soft white turban. The overall effect is macabre chic. Her eyebrows and lashes are gone. She cannot face the mirror. But she is not afraid of dying because she has her god, the one in whose power she has placed herself thereby relieving me of the distress of having to give her life meaning or express feelings I don't have in order to comfort her.

Dec. 24. Woke in Fred's room. Going out again to visit my neighborhood.

****

My neighborhood is diminutive. Small houses, a tiny square piece of lawn in front of each one. Narrow streets, narrow bands of cracked sidewalk. As with all children, for me it was enormous. And what astonishes me most, I thought it was beautiful! It isn't the least beautiful. Wherever did I come by my sense of beauty?

My home was ugly, my family life full of pain. My surroundings trashy and shabby. So from whence?

It's the wrong end of a telescope.

A frank talk with my mother. She began it her mother never told her she loved her, never taught her anything as she (and she in turn never taught me anything.) but she was loyal and supportive as things went wrong. My mOTHER then told me she said this with great firmness of honesty (her outstanding virtue. I have always cringed before honesty.) that she leaned on me too much. She said I was always independant and strong and she could talk to me. She said I was her bulwark.

Two scenes:

She wasn't home the night my father tore up the house, brokeall the furniture, threw the coffee table out the front window. The leg of the Duncan Fife dining room table, broken, pierced through my child toy, a map of the world game. I was alone in the house with a madman. Then she came home and he beat her up. I saw him strangling her as he held her down on the couch.

She escaped and got me in the car along with little Bobby andlittle Frankie (my now dead brother) He jumped in and beat her up some more, pulling her hair. I have blanked out on how we escaped, but we did and drove to my grandmother's house. There she cried in my gm's kitchen leaving me on the floor playing with my gm's fake ivory animals, stunned and in shock with no one for me. Why am I not dead yet?

***

My mother is shrinking. Fred is in a state of numbness. Some drug too no doubt. He is afraid of me. He has felt my sharp tongue. He sucks off T.V. Yet he is the opposite of a dullard. His mind is quick, he is aware.

A cold night. The very best way to let my mother go. Let those ruined expectations go. Let go of what I needed her to be, let go of it forever. You are never going to get what you didn't get.

***

On my trip to my childhood environs, I looked at the creek where I almost drowned. Robert from his perch high in the tree, dove down into the water and pulled me out by my long black hair. My brothers were standing helpless and frightened on the bank of the creek. I enjoyed drowning, a blissful womblike peace came over me. Then jerk, like my birth, I was yanked out. Oh, sweet cruel repetition!! So here we are; she leaned on me as I couldn't grow. She stunted me. A final note: there is no such thing as a final note. My mother is a deeply fair person. She is forgiving rather than vindictive regarding my father. Encore note: Christmas Eve. A light blanket of snow fell on the town of my past. In the distance, I hear the train exactly as I heard it long ago, and winter wind. Now I am charmed by the electric blanket I am under, whereas then I slept in a hole made by my own urine.

I'll never be a good artist until I gain some serenity. I continue. It's 1:30 in the morning. Fred is driving mother's car. The roads are icy. She asked him to return at a "decent hour." He's a real shit sometimes.

December 25.

Woke in Toledo. Coffee and cigarettes. I must get up and wash my hair. Need more cigarettes. Is anything open? Have a headache from clogged sinuses, smoking and unfelt feelings. The sun is shining on the cover of snow from the night before. Fred got in just fine at 2:30 after a good visit with his father's family. He looks so attractive in his better clothes and a fresh hair cut. He is very committed to his American ways -- jeans, sneakers, hamburgers, rum and coke, football. As soon as he awakens the TV will be turned on.

UNTITLED - LOOKS SIMILAR TO ABOVE DEC 85 ENTRIES PLACE AFTER THEM IN DOCUMENT

In the streets I find myself afraid of the spirit of trouble. Even so, here a man calmly washes a bank window, there a woman laughs and loses herself in a traffic light.

To myself I am.

***

The Sybils with their savage intelligences! What great books they alone unseal. What terrible countenances stare down into our tiny souls.

Happy is he who sheds his clown'suit. Who ginds the body to contain his dreams.

I sit fearless on the ledge of a gread depth. I form myself into that other shore.

Is it possible to see the final tail of language vanish down a hole all words jump the path, slip out the door and ideas too shot down from the sky?

My mind is a delicate and sober camera snapping ecstasy. My blood appears at the synopse of a buried nerve. Then, straightway, as I wish, I become the ample woman and caress myself, small and swooning. I am trajic as I arouse my recollected love. I am occupied with phantoms as I flow into myself weeping.

UNTITLED

You'd think once you'd hit on a truth a bell would ring, little fruits would line up, cow's would spew forth from a metal mouth instead of this unyielding silence and the stubborn faithfulness of a dilemma to its own existence. No angle from which it was approached would turn up a (reversal?), I remained unable to type even a single page a day. The hand-written pages piled up on the white desk, white as white which made the black calligraphy spanning and stirating (styrating? possible attempt at writing same word twice) the pages looked from my passing by glances like sketches

UNTITLED

It's gloomy in this part of the coast. Cloud cover goes on for months. We soon forget what the sun is like and turn into hertics ready to cut our hearts out if the sun would only not desert us. But we don't do that kind of thing anymore and we go on. Myself I drink, not all the time just every year or so and the odd thing is someone always catches me at it. I still care about that and wish they wouldn't. But they do usually on the telephone which I can't seem to leave alone probably because of the cloud cover and the need for the (illegible - spend time with this one) with a human voice. The thing rings and I pick it up but the person on the other end is disappointed and can't understand why I would want to do such an ugly thing.

Yesterday, I spent sipping bourbon all the day tidying up a week of household neglect, you know the kind of thing, papers, unsleeved record albums, video tapes to label, stockings on the dressing room floor, putting out fresh towels. I didn't notice that I was going to end up sick. I'd eaten, not much but enough. When I reach my limit, I lose my eyesight, my hearing becomes painful. I can't concentrate, my handwriting is uncontrolled. Before that began to happen I went to an appliance store and bought a beautiful Sony Triniton TV. I played with it most of the evening. The use of the remote control cut little green numbers up in the right hand corner responding to my slight touches. Turning down the volume (as my alcoholic hearing became hypersensitive) showed this in the left hand corner - VOLUME |||||||| each of these lines representing a notch in the lowering. The evening (joined?) itself to early morning when I began to feel sick with nausea. My stomach was empty and very angry with me. I turned from side to side unable to become unconscious. I also prayed a good many times but felt ashamed since I did it to myself. A movie came on, Moulin Rouge, an attempt to do Toulouse Lautrec's life. The actor seemed to play him with one note, and pompously too. In my view he must have been a playful spirit despite his shorn legs. Around 6:00 I drank some milk which stayed where I put it unstead of spinning back up. At 8:30 I went out and bought some vodka. I am hopeless. I try to surrender my will. I do it too, but something is wrong with my endorphans - they don't work. They don't keep me calm, stressless, balanced. How are yours? OK, I'll bet. So you'd probably be angry with me too as some are getting to be with me. Fed up is the best way to describe how they feel. They don't know what it's like to be me. I don't even know it though I live it.

UNTITLED

I see his face. He suspects me of something? Mother, what does he think I have done? Mother, what does he think I will do?

Mother, what have I done?

His face is slightly red when I see him now. And his pupils are jammed into the corners of the white balls of his eyes. He looks to the side and down at me. He seems to be sly and on the watchout.

MY PROBLEM

12/20/1990

It was one of those billion dawns

In the Earth's rotation

When I took my problem Out for a walk

Long had it been with me

Like an aggrevating relative

You long to strangle But are stuck with

Holding it up to the prismatic ray

My ugly evil problem

Was a cut gem

Dazzling the waters of the bay