Modern Nature: February 28
Tuesday 28
Woke to clear blue skies - collected stones on beach, returned and planted the circle of lavender, and the yucca at the back to mark the boundary. Joyful morning.
~
A serpent in the form of a $
Film has twisted itself like a serpent through my life, a rampant dodder pushing out life-sucking tentacles into every nook and cranny - a few days here and I feel it keenly. It has destroyed the golden silence, the idyll I last lived at my warehouse at Bankside nearly eighteen years ago. I dwell again on War Requiem - it gave me no joy, left me empty to face endless chattering interviews in which the work vanished in a deluge of repetitive questions. I steeled myself for the days in Berlin - 30 interviews in two days and more on the horizon.
Is film dying?
Dead?
You announced last year you were dying!
I felt the interviewer’s reproach.
This evening, just alive from Berlin for RAI’s cultural news, the ghost at the banquet.
I’ve spent the afternoons and evenings reading the new biography of Eric Gil who, although eccentric, even silly, attempted to fuse his art and life, throwing his body into the struggle. Whitman, Carpenter, Gill and, nearer in time, Ian Hamilton Finlay and John Berger seem all to have set off on that old straight track, a road pioneered by Mr. and Mrs. William Blake playing Adam and Eve nude in their London garden. Blake and William Morris…all of them look backward over their shoulders - to a Paradise on earth. And all of them at odds with the world around them. I feel this strongly, chose a ‘novelty’ medium - film - in which to search. The reels turn, every foot appropriated by commerce until I am dizzy. I forget where I started…if, of course, I started at all, the path of film so treacherous it was easy to get the signposts mixed - led this way and that, unil led by the nose.
~
My sense of confusion has come to a head, catalysed by my public announcement of the HIV infection. Now I no longer know where the focus is, for myself, or in the minds of my audience. Reaction to me has changed. There is an element of worship, which worries me. Perhaps I courted it.
In any case I had no choice, I’ve always hated secrets, the canker that destroys; better out in the daylight and be done with it. But if only it were that easy - my whole being has changed; my wild nights on the vodka are now only an aggravating memory, an itch before turning in. Two years have passed with a few desultory nights out. Even with safer sex I’ve felt the life of my partner was in my hands. Hardly the cue for a night of abandonment. I’ve come a long way in accepting the restraint. But I dream of an unlikely old age as a hairy satyr.
The lament is not borne out by my state of mind; because apart from the nagging past - film, sex and London - I have never been happier than last week. I look up and see the deep azure sea outside my window in the February sun, and today I saw my first bumble bee. Planted lavender and clumps of red hot poker.
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