Hundreds and Thousands (21 page)

A dull tea with a dull woman at the dull Empress. The pups, Tantrum and Pout, the only gay things about it and the conservatory a joy of airy, fairy, gay colour, too exquisite and upstairsy to describe in words, like colour stairways of joyousness leading out beyond earth things. My companion a veritable twist of nerves, jerking, jumping, blinking, mouthing, worriting and religious, clinging to life with every atom of her and telling you all the while how ready she is to “pass on.” Oh dear, and me so deaf and straining to hear her muttering and gibberings and not catching things and answering wrong and bringing her home to supper and her swearing she can’t eat a thing but a dry crust and tucking in to a good “square” and smacking her lips. And shovelling her home at last, and glad to get to bed, and thanking God fervently that I don’t have to live with her. Oh
better a million lonelinesses than an uncongenial companion! “Can I see your pictures?” she said and regarded three finished sketches. “Oh, not finished,” she said and made no further remark. I told her about the “Cow Yard.” She was not the least interested. Nobody is interested in anything these days except themselves and their own doings and thoughts. It’s queer; folk used to be interested. Now it seems there is too much of everything in the world. We’re all “overproduced.” Everybody does everything and there is a surfeit of all things and everyone wants to flap out from the flag pole at the tip top and nobody wants to climb the stairs and, step by step, get used to the higher air. The garden has never been so lovely. The lilacs are a dream, their perfume penetrating every corner.

TWO EASELS STAND
in the studio and on each is a paper oil sketch of the beach. Unlike my canvases, they have no dust sheets, and I watch people’s reaction. No one gives them more than a passing glance — some not that. There can be nothing in them. They make no appeal. Yet I am keenly interested and I do feel I put more of myself into them, a great deal more, than a year or so back when I was thinking design and pattern and painted more or less from memory of things I had seen. I am painting on my own vision now, thinking of no one else’s approach, trying to express my own reactions.

Beach fine today. Wide, wide expanse shimmering off further than one could think. Five middle-aged nuns picnicking — enormous quantities of food and books, black draperies flapping, (Oh, how awful to be swathed and wrapped up in that trailing stuffness!) silver crosses dangling and glinting in the sunshine. The nuns had a good time. They were very pernickety in their
selection of a rock to picnic on. Tried three, flapping from one to the other like dishevelled crows. One sat down and dabbled her feet in the sea. She spread out all her black layers like a sitting hen, so that only the mussels and limpets, who apparently have no eyes, could see her bare skin. She did things with a newspaper. Perhaps she wrapped her feet in it when she immersed them so the he-fish should not see. Anyhow she took her time and the others read a whole library of religious books they’d taken along. They then had an enormous feed and everyone had a bottle of queer pop and tipped the bottles up and drank out of them. The pop bottles looked deliciously irreligious, sticking out of their nun’s bonnets.

Two youths sawed logs, stripped to their waists. They oiled the saw a great deal. I guess they enjoyed oiling more than sawing for it was very hot. I brought my thought sketch home and thrilled acutely, putting it on a large sheet. Oh, I hope the brute won’t die tomorrow when I load on more paint and struggle. It seems as if those shimmering seas can scarcely bear a hand’s touch. That which moves across the water is scarcely a happening, hardly even as solid a thing as a thought, for you can follow a thought. It’s more like a breath, involuntary and alive, coming, going, always there but impossible to hang on to. Oh! I want to get that thing. It can’t be done with hands of flesh and pigments. Only spirit can touch this.

What’s the good of trying to write? It’s all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it’s all the unformable things one wants to paint — essence. It’s nearly dawn and I have been awake for a couple of hours. All the birds have started up such a racket. Now they haven’t got any words and don’t want or need any. All they are impelled to do is to toss praise into space
where it mixes up with all the other essences of joy that all the rest of creation is pouring forth, bubbling up and spilling over and amalgamating with other spills-over, and becoming a concrete invisible something of great power. It becomes the something that feeds longing souls food, the something that has burst through its mortal wrappings and is pouring back to its source — God — in praise, a concentrated essence, very strong and very subtle in its strength. Everything is in it: light, perfume, colour, strength, peace, joy, and it has no needs, no special name. A name would weight it and keep it down. It could not have a name of this world because it is of another. One day we will go out and meet it in another world and then we will know its name because we will understand that language. It is a thing that must not be pried and wrenched open but left to unfold. You cannot pry open the dawn. It comes. Day is here now and the birds have come back to the material and are hunting breakfast.

ANOTHER WEEK GONE
and no word from Fred Housser re “Cow Yard.” Shucks, Emily, you old fool, when will you learn to be, as Whitman puts it, “self-balanced for contingencies to confront night-storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents and rebuffs like the trees and animals do” and not diddle round as to what this and that one thinks. Make your own soul your judge. Nobody else cares, so why bother them? Search in your own soul and see if the thing is honest and fits your meaning square as you have the ability to make it plain, then quit and don’t worry. What does this or that little “do” of yours matter anyhow? It’s all for growth. If the soul has gained something by writing or painting it, it is surely worth while.
If
it says something to someone else’s soul,
that’s grand, but our own soul has got to learn the language before it can talk.

A vague artist woman came tonight. She is well-equipped technically and keeps her soul well clamped under and caters to the surface wants of the public, starving her soul that the bodies of herself and family may thrive. She thinks we are here as sort of stop gaps to keep the universe going and sometimes she doubts if there is any afterwards, she says. She asked what set me working this way. I don’t know, any more than a dandelion knows why it’s yellow. It’s just growth, I guess. Lawren’s work influenced me. Not that I ever aspired to paint
like
him but I felt that he was after something that I wanted too. Once I used to think, “How would Lawren express this or that?” Now I don’t think that any more. I say, “Emily, what do
you
make of this or that?” I don’t try to sieve it through his eye, but through mine. She saw many shortcomings but said my sketches stirred her and carried her out. She thought if I
did
find what I was after it would be big. I wonder. I want the big thing but even if it never comes satisfactorily in paint, the trying for it is worth while. There are places that are out-and-out bad in my pictures too.

I have been to Vancouver to be on the judging committee of the Art School Graduates Association for their show, and I have also seen Sophie and I am home again and have kalsomined a large flat, and this all in two days. I thought the work appallingly bad, no meaning to it, no drawing, no nothing except badness. The other judges entertained me at the Georgia with a very poor lunch. However Sophie’s visit was satisfactory and happy. She
was watching at her window, the curtain drawn back, and her one eye and her toothless gums expressed everything they were capable of. I love Sophie’s smile of welcome. It is just as dear, perhaps dearer, now that her countenance is abbreviated by losses.

Movement is the essence of being. When a thing stands still and says, “Finished,” then it dies. There isn’t such a thing as completion in this world, for that would mean Stop! Painting is a striving to express life. If there is no movement in the painting, then it is dead paint.

NOAH’S ARK 1934

And so we’re here. Kalsomining, paint washing, preparing the flat to rent, packing and getting here is all accomplished and past. But weariness is also accomplished and present. A mental, physical and spiritual inertia swamps me. I am ashamed, very tired and ashamed of being so tired right through.

Spring is crisping up a little. I had a good night and my two-day visitor has gone; a nice little person who loves nature ardently but a little strenuous to be teamed with my old bones. I am more like me now and less like an agitated Mrs. Noah. The creatures are all in their own niches, so good and so happy. One is so obviously their God that it ought to make one careful. If one got to Heaven and found God snappy and cross how awful it would be! This living right close to their adored is Heaven to the beasts. It is very Heavenly, this daisy patch. The old Elephant is sitting in millions and millions of these daisies. They are thick under the van, and
growing harder so as to peep out from beneath and are even more lovely, gleaming there palely. The fellows out in the open are straddled out, exultantly staring up at the sun. The others are striving harder, aspiring, working out of the gloom. The dew is still on them though it is noon and it looks like great tears sparkling on their faces. Woo rolls among the daisies with her four hands in the air, playing with her tail. There are immense bushes of sweet briar roses that will be in bloom soon scattered all over my pasture. The sheep come to the far corner under the trees with their lambs. The dogs keep them from coming too close. A beautiful bird with a lemon yellow breast with a jet black brooch in the middle is under one of the rose bushes feeding a youngster that flaps and squawks. The air is full of bird song and the frogs were croaking right in the awning lean-to of the van, which is hemmed in by a nettle patch. From the van window beside my bed I can see the sea and the stars at night as thick as the daisies by day.

The camp is very comfortable now it’s all fixed. The first day was a little awful. We sat out on the pavement outside home waiting for the truck at 7:30 a.m. It did not come until 8:30. The man next door evidently thought I’d been evicted. He kept looking out at the beasts and me sitting round on the deplorable old chairs and at the kettles and the rusty stove pipes and old carpets. We got here around 9 o’clock and I turned out the last year’s stuff and cobwebs. The walls looked bad so Miss Impatient had to get busy and paint them. As soon as the inside of the van was all painted up and messy, down came the rain, so everything had to be rushed into shelter. Gee, how I admired Mrs. Noah as I marshalled all the creatures into the van — Woo and the rat and the four dogs! She had ever so many more varieties and the rain battering on the roof for forty days instead of twenty-four hours. But I bet she did
not have wet-paint walls to contend with. God gave them warning to get their chores done up before the rain came. So we all turned into bed and semi-slept. The rain came through but did not fall and I was glad of that. It let me get up and have a couple of hours straightening in the lean-to next morning and then it did it again, but I turned round and round in the van straightening as I turned so that when it stopped we were quite straight inside. And just as all was in order, my sister and four others came to tea. I was delighted that all was straight and everyone thought it was lovely. They brought me letters and cigarettes and sweet cake, more than I know what to do with, so that I hope some more come to eat it. A man came Sunday morning and offered me green leaf lettuce which I hate and a woman gave me skim milk.

Now let’s see if I am kidding myself about being too tired to work or if it’s just laziness about assembling my stuff and setting out. How life does tear us this way and that — what you ought to do and what you want to do; when you ought to force and when you ought to
sit!
There’s danger in forcing but there is also danger in sitting. Now hens know just when they ought to sit. Hens are very wise.