Sensuous

21 February — Sunday

No entry since Thursday. Sat down prepared to write and made a mistake. Read through what I had written so far.

Embarrassment at my own words. Not shame. No shame for either the self-revelation or the occasionally forbidden words. Nothing on these pages I haven’t previously shaped in thought.

What I felt was not shame but exposure. Arlene sprawled naked on the neatly typed page. Thighs wide apart, holding her labia open for the camera of her own inner vision.

Felt a great urge to destroy these pages. Like selling the store and fleeing Brooklyn. Running from the past. Satchel Paige — “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.” Don’t even think back lest you sense the pursuer’s presence in your wake.

Think this verbal diarrhea may be important. Read one of a series of articles in tonight’s Post on group therapy and encounter sessions. Read something last week on Women’s Lib and their consciousness-raising sessions. Couldn’t handle any of that. If I were invisible, if I could watch and listen, but not to function in that context, not me, never.

Think this may be serving a similar purpose for me, and safe because it is between me and me, with the typewriter as silent permissive nondirective therapist.

I block even now. Wrote nothing yesterday, and so resolved to place each entry where it will be safe not merely from intruders but from my own eyes The radiator has a cover with a hinged top. Beneath the top is a tray, slightly coated with rust, which one may fill with water to raise the humidity on arid winter nights. I’ve turned off that radiator, turned it off when I moved in. The one in the bathroom is enough to heat this little place. Yesterday I put my dozen pages of typescript in that tray, face down, and closed the hinged top. When I finish this, these pages will be added to the stack.

I wish I had written something yesterday. If only a line, a description of the weather, anything. I’ll try to do something every day from now on. It irks me, having missed the 19th of February.

Did today’s Double-Crostic in less than an hour. They’re so much more gratifying to solve than the usual puzzles. It’s a matter of cracking a code, of using the definitions to get words in the text and vice versa, until there is a sudden breakthrough with everything falling together, revealing itself. At the end it becomes a matter of filling in the last blanks as quickly as one can move the pencil. I always finish them, though.

I’m very good at them. I’m a clever person, logical and intuitive, with a quick mind. Though no one knows it.

And I am still not writing about Screw. It’s funny that I still can’t.