England 1–1 Republic of Ireland
10:30 another surreal Czech lesson. Diane cringingly good. Brief discussion with Milena. Coffee with Tim. Virginia Woolf’s The Flight of the Mind1 back to the library2 unread, unreadable. Instead a Structuralism Reader. Letters to Martin, Stephen Spender, James Merrill, Mark, Luke pending.
Worked, for Milena and myself, during the day. I haven’t described Milena yet. Small, pink, a large nose on either side of which you expect to find whiskers, a little hairless mouse — doesn’t twitch or sniff, though. A drugged mouse. She smiles, her eyes widen and you think of yourself as a piece of cheese. But she only stops herself from eating because it is so large and the indigestion of eating it would kill her. Clothes do not hang on her, rather like the folds a towel is betrayed into by a radiator. Horrible legs. When she turns on the charm one can hear the switch click.
In the evening two parcels arrived — to save my life. Two tapes from Paddy. Some cuttings, a letter. Letters to Olga by Havel and a letter from home. Wrote out the odd lines of poetry that have occurred to me in Prague. It was a mistake not to bring my drafts and bad poems and half-thoughts here in a file. The future is bedded in the past. Completion, rewriting, tampering all contribute to feeling oneself a poet and therefore encourage one to work more. Am having to invent or at least re-imagine a past. 12:15 and I now have fifteen things I want to do. Why is it that I get out of the bath, sopping from head to foot, and ask myself, wonderingly, ‘Shall I wash my hair?’ Or after finishing a meal. ‘It’s time I had something to eat.’
From Paddy’s letter:
Carl3 recently bought a poetry mag in London because he was attracted by a poem about going bald4 and found when he got home that it was by a T.Litt living in Glasgow – He is very impressed (and also going very bald).
By Thomas C. Caramagno, not V. Woolf.
With relief.
Carl Miller, playwright. ‘Emil and the Detectives’ and many more.
Francesco Clemente
As my hair falls out, with no gained glory,
I, to my great disappointment, do not
come to resemble Francesco Clemente.
I imagine and flesh his worked body,
the lucific eyes, the subbled, well-lipped face
of a man aging into his best beauty
from this quaggy soup of bones, badly
bagged, in which I have been sealed.