Studying Hunger Journals, page 37
Now I am going to sleep. There is no way to get this house in order. Like L’s stupid questions, it has a certain planned duration. How will Kathy get to the airport, food and fame. I can fit none of this together except sleep. Sleep and planned exercise, as, the language must get precise. There is too much of everyone’s ideas. There is no time to be in the kitchen planning for someone, random, coming, and someone would come, planned. A visitor. She was a visitor. I have no sense of my own divisibility invisibility, farming out. Some theory. Its obsolescence. You you and you all know you’re right. I know nothing and want nothing.
I must’ve dreamed of the hieroglyphs. I must’ve dreamed of Raskolnikov. It’s a little better anyhow (warming up in the morning), what work do I do? He says he doesn’t want to be famous but I give him to fame. Ultra Violet Gentian Violet, little nicknames. Moving moving moving moving moving, titles are predicting. Memory, studying…or, listen: date real stories, they investigate the private parts. I withhold withdraw rage repression depression, the sound of someone coming in…close the legs. Mounting fame. I said always being given. Other people who have had the flu have stayed inside. Anton Webern did not. Rhys stayed in for four days and let drift. I know I need something to make me forget it. I have an investment in continuing on, either way. It’s chronic. Jackson’s just going to feed his children and then come down. I have an investment in having it. Ironying: the food we prepared or bought was oatmeal bread, soft and ravenous, and blueberry bread at the store with butter laid out on it and the car goes up and down without (with total) control and someone is taking the car, Cadillac, somewhere in March. I am on heroin like a donkey.
February 21
Offense is predominating against defense. I’d rather watch movies on t.v., never record being sick. The journals reconstitute themselves with structure. I am hurt. Look up humor. The humors of the words body and mind, I was hurt. I have this work to do, now I play not to take it seriously, my syntax becomes formal, my clothes take my own shape, recording: device (I go on working anyway): “Without knowing why, he may perceive that he finds difficulty in discharging his ordinary tasks,…one day he is afflicted, whence he does not know, with a painful attack of feelings of anxiety and from then on it needs a struggle with himself before he can cross a street alone or go in a train; he may even have to give up doing so altogether.”
Crime and punishment. What’s important? Or a method to precede. I wonder how scared a person can get without sublimating love. (Belial and the bubblegum proposal, Paris with the Lewises, the PSAT scores.)
March 11
Bus Marxism: The dreams came before this and there is no drawing. The plot: I forgot that it cost something so I developed serendipitous tendencies: I found money on the street; people, storeowners began to give me things for free. Notes, shorthand can never be read. Collaboration. As a group. Free. Free. Dream work. The poetry workshops at the church are free and art and science (when you do work, it’s necessary to have a place to go with it, and after that, somewhere to go), how the others live, get involved in the kind of activity that keeps us in the center of things but without double existences, or a commitment to writing, even on a bus, can be shared even if they can’t be solved, who do you write to or for, etc. Some people are slicker than I am. Naming and anonymous, I’m going to give a speech about this, belief that your work exists, startling naming. Only a place existing also for hesitation, there’s no money in it. So, me and the black man open the window on the bus on a cold day and look out, the end, 30th Street. Everybody would like to live the life of everyone else, except maybe when you get home, but it looks good. But what do you mean, etc.
March 16
Dear Belial belittled and Fern, decoration: or Dear Fern first: whichever it is, there’s no time difference here (and for you here, neither of you is famous at all so don’t worry) in Detroit or Ann Arbor (with an “E” and fruit, if you want) so, justify your margins, all expensive magazines for poets here. No images please, like far fucking out or farm fucking out cause outta sight is out of state so, the eminence of any position here relies most strongly on the dictionary and on washing. Wash yourselves…or, don’t wash yourselves depending, relying, coherence, distortion, does anybody know what entropy is? In the room? Tell us. (Pause.)
There are certain elementary things, even more so much more so than sex, which must be known in a political (use the word?) way, by all Us Artists and Writers. I am here to help you find the words that need definition (I am desperate). Look em up. Look me up. Did I say elementary, I mean defined, denoted, denotative, like what time is it? And what is the time difference, if any? You stirring up any dust here? Didn’t Gertrude Stein did when she was here. So I write small and fast: we wrote and you write and we write and we change the advantageous position (and if anybody knows what entropy is by now…) position of the world in state. So far, this is not a personal letter, it’s another speech. From now on, it is. Expect something, expect everything. You will find it out. Any questions so far?
Don’t we have to go to bed? Aren’t we obliged to go to bed? Didn’t we eat a big dinner? Aren’t we still so hungry? Why? And fuck, so fuck. There was a man in New York who was involved in the New Music who couldn’t stand that a woman (and that was me) said, had said the word fuck and I will read you what I said, the end of it, see (a triangle) and it says, I am not saying look me up. Please use the dictionary (Spider is keeping a jealousy journal and if you could get him to read that, you would find it more than interesting, literary no! A clue or a sourcebook for after the murder perhaps).
Early April
I am trying to do something good, I haven’t had anything to eat so I’ll use this chance to warm myself, I hope, Spider is asleep and I am addressing this to him and to all those who do faulty detective work in lines. So, pages and pages of them, I am secure, it’s a strange kin to security when you forget how to write letters, A to Z, and knowledge all of it defeats it all, I am leading to… Who’s this for? I must feel (a whistle) it could be for anyone for transference, whatever that is, and yet I don’t know if I’ll be ready tomorrow, dogs go out in the woods, they do every day, keep on working every day. When I was six, no, in the sixth grade (6B), when I began to wear a sad face (you keep my notebook, what’s written, detective), the key in the door, the leaving and coming back, maybe…when I was—No! You said, “Loss, separation, maternal and I am not in this.”
When I was ten (years old) and my mother had her first, yes then. My father, while she was…(and “they” didn’t “know”) took me and T. on his knee, I rotated and protested, and he wanted but I refused. Knee, lap, mother or father? I wasn’t old enough to object to his whiskers making my face red then. I wouldn’t sit on his knee or lap. Now tell me, if there are two sisters, is it a knee or a lap? When I was three he drew for me (calling Belial, it says, “No message, thank you very much.”).
Please be clear: “Loss, separation, obsession, maternal:” so, first I felt myself feeling my breast (I had dreamed of an organ I had to chew for it to grow back, grow back and I had dreamed before, “It was grown,” not a nightgown, up and down, just a part of the parent I could not comprehend to be missing, this is just too gruesome, I’ll skip along to the phrase, “A breach of trust?”). I would not kiss the old old man, can you comprehend escape at all, this is all too gruesome, his whiskers were all too scratchy, who ever wants to put on paper what can be so easily construed even in pictures by the mind that doesn’t really will to share it, that kind of thing. In 6A, a friend of mine named Susan Schmitt wrote in her composition, “I was drinking in the beauties of nature,” and then the teacher said, “Metaphor, that’s where it’s at,” or something to that effect and I said, “No, no, no.” So, I made sad faces, first I did them at home. To imitate my dreary teacher and my girlfriend’s drunken face, she was who was too neat anyway. In seventh grade I was accelerated and Sister Roseanna made it easy for me but she tells me to join the convent, “It’s the easy life,” but later she tells me she finds out all about sex and just wants to have babies but it’s too late but can she stay at my house when she leaves the convent. “Sure,” I say. In 8B I get the 6A teacher back and she has a grudge against me and throws me out of the “Boy Saviour Movement” which is like an army where you have to mark your scorecard green for every day you were good and red for the bad days, and then you can get to be a fascist like everybody else. So there’s no use going further into the sexual etiology of the child, at this late date, so late in the book, this book is nearly done, and if I have to get gruesome that means the book must end soon, that means the plot is fatter, maybe too fat, more than pleasantly plump, maybe even still gorgeous, but florid and past maturity, with new folds. A description that leads me to understand that finally I can begin to simplify.
April 2
Keep it to yourself it says. Work under the worst conditions now, it says, salvage the thought that under the thought contains, fear of movement (his not mine), fear of curtains, a divine one, fear of divine anarchy too, the spare the time to write while, the spare the time to be whimsical or to speculate on breath or breathing or sleep or articulate or Beatrice’s words or endless sleep or magic, you know, knew how to make me an endless sleep and articulate the artifice of the transference, found. H. Bogart is on the witness stand, what to do with this? Journals, writing, work, which. Hiding. Jane Austen hid her writing but kept her plot in mind. Where to sleep, couch. Thought, why… April 2. Felt responsible, who do you talk to. Not that, who. The interminable suffering of my diary, your fault, waiting, got fat. Who am I speaking to? Spider got me fat. Belial says Spider is not exploitative and then, whose ideas (him, her) die so hard as this one. I can hardly see. Grow up Alice, grow up less Fern. A love affair, Fern and Belial. K likes intrigues of any kind, the totally unkind letter. You know I am writing anyway. Covered the dead bird. Am scared. Of sleeping, anyway of creeping into bed. Would could have sent the anonymous pamphlet with all possibilities crossed out. For you and for me. Birds flying up in the sky. Fight high blood pressure. P could appreciate that. Sorry for so what. And so. It doesn’t prevent you from reading and writing, who’s in town. K is. Dinner. Buys it. S took some pills and went to bed. Privacy, his. I should take one pill and go to bed but I won’t. Covered the dead bird. To sleep. I wish to sleep no more. Wednesday Thursday Friday I wrote this before. Someone says get some sleep. Caste. Caste? Chaste, chaste? Coffee, beer, a knish, chicken salad, beer, drink, soup, drink, beer, drink, hide me. I don’t wanna have to be rescued especially when there’s the possibility of this, I have to close one eye to see, I wanna be there. Steal. I steal. Stores of stories, eat funny stories. Don’t wanna give up the last cigarette, the end, like a hanging or electrocution. I dreamed my vitamins were radioactive, had radiation in them, are dangerous. B-complex, insoluble liver fraction—250 mg. Maybe I’ll be on the radio again, or, maybe my mother, oh no. Difference? Not now. Fern where are you? I wish we could all grow up and be in pictures. What about men? What men? No more men. He thrills only to the fantasy of a mother again. Line? What’s the difference, I already cut myself twice and am bleeding. Shores, where. And now he suspects me again. Quickly and secretly, I must leave this place.
April 6
I have to get drunk again tomorrow because I have to take a plane, the window seat. I open the window and fly out holding onto the top and catching my foot in a part of the plane that’s broken. We land in Chicago, it was supposed to be a direct flight. Before I had ordered mashed potatoes and a beer. In Chicago we’re herded into a room, flights 3 and 23, waiting. Before I am sitting in a rocking chair, some lights come up and I am on the edge of a high building then, rocking right off. I ask Kathy to pull me back. She hesitates and does. The cloud columns, like Monument Valley, from the plane. Sand clouds. Clouds of the candles in the restaurant, John’s.
Waiting, they won’t sell me beer or food, because they say “Someone pretty high up in Chicago must’ve taken a dislike to you.” Now Spider is missing and they’re calling for the flight. I can feel everything but I can’t see or hear. Fairlines, a separate plane, takes the baggage, “Otherwise it would never get there.” Windows open for the women, too wide or low. Taxi. There is some distrust of the captain, “Otherwise he wouldn’t have landed in Chicago…” (Captain Belial). Looking for Spider and trying to gather up his and my things. Everyone’s disapproval. I’ll leave his on the table, he’ll have to come back. I find out something, someone helps me, I decide to take another flight. We are made comfortable. “No I’m not going to sleep.” Before: “Oh you want to show me the beer I can’t have.” (The police.)
Then George Wallace and the Blitz and now there are two airplane rides: loss of consciousness and Lexington Avenue in the ice (landing, money).
April 8
Belial is not neutral. Like Wuthering Heights:
He walked into the room, stared, and could tell what was being said.
“That would give me great pleasure,” he said, “I can tell what was being said.”
“It’s like a dream,” she said, I’m sorry I had a dream.
The man in grey. A different culture. An English poet. He moved his chair. A squire. An English garden. I had predicted it.
She held her hands over her ears. We visualize this but we have no feelings. It wasn’t like us, as readers, to hear that romantic music, someone says, it’s deranged.
Something about a brother and sister. The music’s all wrong.
“You do it.”
“No you do it.” (They are no longer having tea, they are having sex.)
She said something about being back there today. Someone is calling now. Someone is calling for privacy. Someone is out for a drive. All dialogue.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
The noise of carriage. The noise of stream. The two of them left her behind.
“Let’s go away.” He told her he had to work.
An English pub. He was the eldest of his family. (Lord Peter Whimsey was another story.) All readers know how Wuthering Heights ends.
All crows are black but… There are intermissions. Where had he been? The tea was cold. Someone was complaining.
Two women argue.
“He’s kind at least,” she said.
She couldn’t remember what she had said. They were listening at the door.
And in the English garden the maids were watching.
“Leave Isabella alone.”
All words about suffering.
“Take Isabella, hurt Edgar, destroy me.”
He was thrown out.
And the country is really no different from when he left it, he said. He goes mad, gets shot at, kisses Isabella and rides off on a horse.
Hours go by—their dreams.
Sex was the main strategy at Wuthering Heights.
She said there was no note.
Something about music and death.
She said her parents left no money.
“I’ll be in the orchard,” he said.
A shared weakness, incest, several many stories between two, in one.
How do you set the scene? How do you feel most comfortable. The book opens flat. The sentences in columns. The library.
Maybe she will, it says, narrative writing.
So at this point the thing left to do is to terrify you. Finally. With noise.
I once saw him do this, that is, he would sit in front of an object and scream. He would cry out. He would trance himself beyond death. He would sing. He would restore. He would try to time himself and he would stifle any reaction. And in the hills, there is a driver and a crowd. And a burial.
As if to resist becoming another person, as if to leave out the digging up of the grave, beyond death, the dialogue, the necrophilia. He said he wanted more but she became a wraith. He saw her and could never get free.
He was shot, recorded word for word. And so pressed together as if the bottom halves of their bodies could be graven in one, as if incest lives this way when a man floats in the water and walks to his own grave, as his own fantasy.
