2:35 AM 2 Jan 69 - Pewter Hill
Need someone to love me to sleep at night or I don’t sleep. Went to see Wild Strawberries with Devon, when we came back we were locked out. Sat in the car waiting for Genevieve to come home. Talked and talked about everything. He is anti-drug and pro physical culture. I tell him I would take up acting if I could get over my stage fright (cold turkey shyness cure) and he talks about fear of failure in sports. (He teaches tennis too.) Everyone has it at some point or other. I told him he gave me the courage to sign up for modern dance. God knows what idiocies I uttered. I remember telling him Wallace Stevens could not decide which was more beautiful – the blackbird’s song or the silence after – he reacted to this like Holy Writ. I gawped at his magnificent profile and wished so hard he would kiss me. I know I can’t kiss him first – he is exactly like that wildcat I adopted in Morocco – he had to think that everything was his own idea. He never kissed me. Take that, ego. I was looking especially beautiful, too. (He told me I am the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. “Bone structure is the most important part of your face”. Because he’s an artist, too…) Reading Colette’s Vagabond and wondering if I could make a living as a professional letter writer I like writing letters so much. Or a diarist! 5 Jan 69 Wonder if my difficult Dad has made me afraid of older men. Whenever one displays interest (Mr. Carnahan) I start acting like a baby. Devon flatters me to DEATH. (Told me without a doubt I am the most beautiful person he’s ever SEEN.) People just don’t give enough so they do, they dazzle. I guess it’s the “never give anything for nothing” mentality that’s ruining modern relationships. (See “Le Viol” with Bibi Andersson.) 12:01 6 Jan 69 “Night of the Salamander” (Symbol of art to Osbert Sitwell.) Such depthless loneliness that last night I had to sleep in my sister’s room. Mom gave me a copy of John Lehmann’s Sitwell study, Nest of Tigers. How did she know? Fabulous, fabulous book. Shouting with recognition as I salute long-lost friends in the mad Sitwellian world. Their sense of themselves as artists rescued them from the prison of their times. Full to bursting with plans, ides & crazy intensities. Also a desire to please and a too-thorough knowledge of my own faults that keep mocking my ideals and exaggerating my failures. Trying to rid myself of a morality based on The Most Efficient Middle Class Consumption Unit. Snow across the park, all the way to the lights of my century, my city. We are hosting a Russian schoolteacher – humiliated myself when she was describing the “lost, over-privileged generation” by running weeping from the room. I am not fit company. I am the rat within the cage. Now I have to convince myself I’m sane so I can go on.
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Alysse Aallyn
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