NOVEMBER 15: SUNDAY
Have had a series of bad, sleepless nights. The coming unsettling? As a result, tired, without force, full of a sour lassitude. Late last night made the mistake of having coffee, thinking it would keep me awake for the movie. We didn't go, and I lay in a morbid twit till the hollow dark of the morning, full of evil dreams of dying in childbirth in a strange hospital unable to see Ted, or having a blue baby, or a deformed baby, which they wouldn't let me see.
My one salvation is to enter into other characters in stories: the only three stories I am prepared to see published are all told in first person. The thing is, to develop other first persons. My Beggars story a travesty: sentimental, stiff, without any interest at all. And the horror is that there was danger, interest. Slangy language is one way of breaking my drawingroom inhibitions. Have I learned anything since college writing days? Only in poetry. There I have.
Ted's good story on the caning. Very fine, very difficult. He advances, unencumbered by any fake image of what the world expects of him. Last night, consoling, holding me. Loving made my nerves melt and sleep. I woke drained, as after a terrible emotional crisis. Today am good for little. Submerged in reviews of reviews. How good is it to read other people? Of other people? Read their stories, their poems, not reviews. I am well away from the world of critics and professors. Must root in life itself. Yet Iris Murdoch has a brilliant professorial intellect operating in her work. Mesmerize myself into forgetting the waiting world. The IDEAS kill the little green shoots of the work itself. I have experienced love, sorrow, madness, and if I cannot make these experiences meaningful, no new experience will help me.
A bad day. A bad time. State of mind most important for work. A blithe, itchy eager state where the poem itself, the story itself is supreme.
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