It is interesting to see how he loosened these shining lines from a long dull confession in The Garden section of the original manuscript of My Life in Art. It is the summer of 1975:
I rebelled against my situation. I rebelled against her skin. The nettles gave me a nasty sting on my way out here. A calm day, modest day, no sun, but no menace in the overcast. All the colours have surrendered, like one of Anthony’s paintings. I rebelled against my sentence in the garden. I was on a hundred planes out of here. There is a snail on a leafy weed. The bumblebee tries to loosen a bud’s tight aperture. It tries twice. I cut my foot on something sharp on the beach of Monica’s freckles.
Yesterday my dark companion told me to come quickly and quietly, but I missed what she tried to save for me: two sparrows mating in the eaves. “Have you ever seen them fuck?” She used her fingers to evoke the shuddering tail feathers. Her green cotton dress was pulled up. “I’m sunning my bum. I don’t know why it’s bumpy.”
I rebelled against Domestic Conversation. All is calm now. I chained myself to the stone floor for an hour and a half. No butterflies, not that I care. Ants have emerged. I haven’t seen them yawn. The sun comes through weakly. There’s a butterfly, a small white one, too white. I am grumpy because I cannot indicate the vastness of my heart.
It was a terrible rebellion. I hated the daisies. I punished myself with a holiday. I took a ghost to bed and caught the seed in the palm of my hand. It’s suddenly noisy with the sweet strains of bird, wind, and radio. I tried to crush her into some confession I cannot even imagine, an unconditional apology for making a wound and making a nest in the wound. I forgot I was meant to marry her in Jerusalem. This is supposed to be the reward of the spirit. I am furious. I’ll sell a million copies. The bumblebee, or one resembling it, has succeeded in prying open the bud. I thought I was speaking to you from a plateau of resignation but I notice that my eyes have become slits and I am gritting my teeth. This damn case fits right over me, this iron spirit maiden.
As the daisies grow higher an untidy aspect of the garden is revealed, things fallen, crushed, dried, tangled…
He cleared the garden, perfumed his anger, established her sexual beauty, raised the graven image of a spiritual worker among the daisies, and began to worship it.