I’m walking somewhere maybe a park on my way to something, a date with O., and I see a man, a father, with his child, a girl, and the father’s struggling to carry something that has to do with his work and his child’s welfare. So I help him by carrying one side of it — like a car hood or counter — I carry it on my shoulder and the child is in the middle between us and he and I do all the work. Then we have to run and I’m afraid I’m going to drop my side. Daddy REX.
I am reminded of OEDIPUS WRECKS, written on the piece of paper I found in her room.
Picked up J at CBGB’s — the Dolls — the usual/Told J he could follow me all night if he wanted and he did, all night, followed me everywhere, and he was there in the morning. And it was weird. Told him, lying the way I can, told him I was in a theater class and studying to he a great actress and I was trying to be someone else just for an experiment, to see if I could. Like the Method. I’m not really like this I said. He got really really FREAKED, it was funny and he tried to act like he knew what was happening. Just felt like it.
Was this “J” our John? If so, their relationship had a rocky beginning. Why would she want to experiment in that way? One cannot understand why he would have followed her here, if he did, based upon this piece of evidence. But one must never forget, or underestimate, how perverse we humans are. A quote from Rainer Maria Rilke follows, from the Duino Elegies, I believe.
But what are they doing here, these acrobats, a little more fugitive even than us? Who are they trying to please? What sadistic will compels them from earliest childhood to perform such violent contonions? Rilke
Helen has marked his name only, which, as I proceed through the diary, or scrapbook, is, I see, her usual mode, though occasionally she does state the source. I am rather surprised by her liking Rilke; but I remember that when I was young he appealed to me, too. I haven’t read him in ages.
Headlines or captions dot almost every other page; I suppose this kind of thing is popular in her group. For instance, on the page just mentioned, at its top, is inscribed “Perpetual Out-patient.”
I’m going to blow up and explode and die a thousand times. Every day. Silting on a nuclear bomb. What’s the point, everything is so stupid such bullshit it makes me sick.
There follows, after this outburst, a series of phrases:
Courage between legs
Spaced out
Walking the dog
live evil
Kill for Peace
outsider insider
fuck the sixties
fuck prohibitions
These are not written in her hand but appear to have been clipped from newspapers or magazines. They are accompanied by matchbook covers that have also been cut up. The phrases may represent and be typical of graffiti; Gwen has mentioned in passing its popularity. A headline similar to anyone of these phrases sits at the top of pages dense with Helen’s intense, vertical script and functions. I believe, as a title for a dream or story, though it is often difficult to distinguish one from the other.
Looked more second avenue than any 20 year old should, skin on ankles actually drying up ALREADY so I bought socks and later I told him and he said he would have given me a pair, they would’ve been too big anyway. His arms, no arms could keep me warm enough, couldn’t hold me long hard tight enough.
This is titled: “Trouble is Love.” I wonder if the “he” was John or another. Like most teenagers, Helen is concerned with love.
There are several lists scattered over the pages — things to do, buy, chores — and these are interrupted by quotes and headlines of the type already noted. I turn the page and find a lurid paperback cover, for a novel by — of all people — Colette. It depicts a scantily clad young woman with a long-haired black cat at her feet. She, the coquette, wears hot-pink stiletto heels. “Colette’s Claudine. Shocking and Delightful. Part woman, part child. Ruthless and sensual as a young cat.” It is an Avon Book, and at the time it was published — I would guess the late fifties — cost only thirty-five cents. I can well remember when paperbacks cost that little. Those times are gone.
Next, there is a sequence of doodles, all geometric shapes: squares, rectangles and intersecting triangles; above these, EMOTIONAL SLAVES DON’T TALK. More magazine clippings of images from films, including one from Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. Below it, Helen has printed in bold letters: “Make a movie NOW everything’s a movie.” The Leone image is pasted beside a news clipping about a man born with two heads, and beneath this collage is an item about the Watergate burglars as well as one entitled “Some Who Believe in a No-Work State.” On the next page a photograph of Helen and another young woman — her sister? Helen is holding a camera. Her sister is frowning.
There follow a few clippings about the plight of Patty Hearst that detail her kidnapping by, and her professed allegiance to, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Helen has inserted two pictures of Hearst — indeed the infamous bank — robbery image itself. Helen might identify with her, in some way.
On the opposing page, in carefully rendered block letters:
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. Plath, The Bell Jar
I remember that terrible day. I remember it as if, were I to walk through the door, I would discover myself in a bar in Cambridge, with my friends, arguing about treason and the death penalty. How poignant and odd that Helen, who wasn’t born then, should have chosen this particular line. Just below it is a telephone number painted in what I take to be nail polish, a repugnant orange. Perhaps the number indicates the person who gave Helen the Plath novel, as a present, though from what I know of it, the book is depressing, not her best work. I have not read it. I believe the book is a roman à clef and has to do with the suicide attempt of a young college woman, which of course might have reference to Helen’s sister. But who turned Helen onto, as John would say, Plath?
Amelia Earhart. Dupe. First lady of the skies.
She had no guy holding her down.
No one could clip her wings.
She was no bird in the hand.
She is no living thing now.
Patti Smith
Helen has underlined “no living thing now.” John might be one of the many guys who would hold her down and clip her wings. But why is Earhart a dupe?
Script: He and I on the street. He does something I don’t like. I kick him. He holds me. I laugh. He picks me up. I wrap my legs around his waist.
The title for this fragment is “slap kiss I kiss tell.”
Next, two postcards of the harbor here, as well as some addresses of friends who are scattered around the States — California, New York, Arizona. There is a scrap of a page torn from a book: Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough.
Linda looked thoughtful. ‘I agree. There must be some conversation before you leap into bed. And when a man invites you to his apartment, it’s for just one thing. Somehow it’s different if you invite him up for a nightcap to your apartment. You’re in control…’