A time of illness, a time when we feel low, and hit rock bottom, is always good, because we can strip everything away, and just see what is really important to us. What we want to do, what we want to be, cut away all the superfluous things that have been allowed to encrust themselves to us, and concentrate on the simple essentials: classical music, ferns, the books. Then we can start to bounce back, and climb back out of the blackness, feeling stronger, calmer.
Who is my Helen of Troy now, imprisoned in London? Is it Pamela? Or Melani? Maybe yet Jolanda?
And now the tooth ache returns. So that is two urgent appointments I must now make for next week. Now I am frightened to eat anything as well as wanting to close my eyes all the time.
***
To help deal with the pain I will try to get recordings of Phedre by both Rameau and Britten…and something of Rosa Ponselle. I escape from the misery of my life into opera. From the misery of my eye problems, and my teeth problems. From the misery of the “catastrophes of love”. It is transcendence. It is entering the Kingdom of Death, in love with Princess Mort. It is stepping through the mirror that turns into water, and escaping from the world. I am happiest in the Kingdom of Death, where the skies are always black & there is no sun. The white ruins are lit by a spectral light only. There I can meet the Kaiserin on her marble throne. I can meet Rosa Ponselle and Maria Callas. How can I explain that to people who keep asking if I am “all right”, because I seem “very quiet”? Just all go away and leave me alone, please. It is floating on my back on a lake in a steaming palmhouse, amid the palm fronds and giant lilypads, listening to Herodiade Fragments on the ancient gramophone. Somewhere in the steam my odalisques wander, and stroll, and lounge, and fuck. Suffering makes us soulful, suffering makes us spiritual. We grow lovely out of our longing, wrote Henriette Hardenberg. Longing for freedom makes us beautiful. I lie still and fearless as you enter.
Search for the Ponselle James A Drake biography in Foyles and the Charing Cross Road second hand places.
Remember those incredible dramatic hours spent watching Jolanda dancing to Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand or the Ding-Ding-Dong song?! That is when sex dancing becomes magical, up there with Anita Berber or Mata Hari or Josephine Baker. Pink touched these heights, too, as did Janet [Material Girl! Objection!] at the Scotsman, and Sylvia. Sex dancers who create a real drama, a real sense of menace almost, erotic menace, when they are on the stage. When you suddenly feel you are sheltering from a thunderstorm and lashes of lightning outside and this primal moment watching this woman on this stage is the most important moment of your life, and when it finishes nothing will ever be the same again. My eyes are always going to wear out from time to time as I spend so much of my time, and money, gazing. The sex dancers and whores who have burned themselves onto my retina! The Tallulahs and Esmeraldas who my eyes will never forget.
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