| Volume 20 of Aphrodite's Garden: 1994 March-July | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Still cleaning houses and doing emotional work in the off days, sweet nights with Rob, gradually formulating what will become the doc program. Part 2 a jump in putting emotional work together with connectionist theory, understanding self as structure. Part 3 I go to Read Island for Rowen's 9th birthday. At the end of part 5 I say goodbye forever to Ken. Notes: notes for PhD application on visualization and philosophy of mind, summary of bookwork for this period, massive overview summary of the parts of emotional and theoretical work, Marianne Williamson A woman's worth, Coleridge Notebooks, Wordsworth The prelude, Yeats, Valery, Pound Cavalcanti, Living with the passive-aggressive man, Claude Miller The accompanist, Vincent Brome A last meeting with Dorothy Richardson, Butala The perfection of the morning, Skammen. Mentioned: Natalie Prevost, Ray Jennings, Steven Davis, Dave Carter, Helen Harris, Barry Truax, Leslie Bishko, Chris Mills, Sylvia Scott, Louie E, Rob Mills, Joyce Frazee, Diana Kemble, Kari Green, Muggs Sigurgeirson, David Davies, Kenneth Sallit, Kathy Denikoff, Olga Cameron, Luke, Leah Rosling, Henry Olidam, Richard Tetrault, Danny Tetrault, Laiwan, Ruth Shell, Rowen, Jack East, Joan Meister, Sang Mah, Phil Hanson, Scratchy the cat, Martin Hahn, Kathleen Akins, Michael Voskamp, Chris Welsby, David Carter, Trudy R, Rhoda Rosenfeld. 824 E Pender St, Strathcona Community Garden, Stanley Park, Denman Street, Delany's in the West End, the Pofi Bar, Commercial Drive, the Calabria, Circling Dawn, Mount Seymour parking lot, Napier Street, CISR, the Kootenays, Figaro's Garden on Victoria St, Rubina Indian restaurant, Bino's, Alpha Cine, Yaletown, Britannia Library, Murchie's, the graphics lab in the Centre for Systems Science, the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics, Nyingma, Horseshoe Bay, Read Island, Hjorth Bay, Peace River Bible Institute, Emily Carr College of Art, Simon Fraser University, Rumsy Hill, Riske Creek. Ondaatje The English patient, Pietro Annigoni, Ibuse Waves, AL Kennedy Looking for the possible dance, Joan Skogan Voyages at sea with strangers, Norman Rockwell, Anne Rice Interview with a vampire, Surya Bonaly, Anne Rice Interview with a vampire, CISR, Valse Frontenac, Bruce Baillie Marilyn and All my life, Mary Watkins, Edith Wiens Strauss songs, Bergman Skamen, Blake, Dorothy Richardson Pilgrimage, Palestrina, Leonardo magazine, Silicon Graphics workstations, the Georgia Strait, Maxfield Parrish, Wittgenstein, Beethoven C Minor Variations, Lis Rhodes, David Larcher, Truax Wave edge, Vancouver Canucks, Mary Watkins Waking dreams, Vonda McIntyre Dreamsnake, Edith Wiens Strauss songs, Vanity Fair magazine, LaFarge Concrete. |
14 March 1994 See how much I still have to say to you - I heard your voice this morning. You are perfectly a fairy. How do I know. I knew by the shape of your chin, by your voice, by your step, by the way you would sit on the floor to put on your boots. By the way when I speak to you I am in a world where blackbirds and starlings enter my sentence. I say: oh yes I'm here, in the clean room with a picture book on the side table. It is never that I marry you, it isn't for armchairs, it's for legend, it's for wonder, it's a free air. Am I in denial? Yes, it says, you are denying real happiness can come. But it is coming. It says that, half a page, I come to the table having forgotten, the way I forget these trances - are they? People say when they phone, Were you asleep? I sit in the armchair eating rice and I'm talking to you - so intimately, with such a claim. I'm saying confidently, wondering at the confidence, this is the way it is supposed to feel, I know this about it, I'm not wrong, I'm supposed to be with you, I'm supposed to stand beside you, I'm supposed to be your home. Where am I feeling it - in the womb. Looking at you with warm eyes. Is it a madness? So-so. Not if you act on it. How it has been - oh strong pain - I don't rebel - it goes away and comes back. It seems to come back when I get to the weekend. And then only Tuesday is easier. But still it seems to be enough, it is like waiting in god - I wanted to say even the cleaning. Helen Harris the gentle diffident funny woman with a photo on her desk of a man with false teeth, white hair and a boy's look. Shabby little apartment, a white carpet like a worn-off bearskin. She puts twenty-four dollars on the sideboard so she doesn't have to hand it to us directly, and can see us out as though we were company. Olga Cameron a richer widow in her classic little house. Five pruned camellias coming into bloom across the front, large perennial square out back with a wide patch of oriental poppies come up like thistles, prickly. A walk lined with mauve primulas that could, over so many years, have been divisions of one first clump. She has a story - her accoutrements, the silver, the carpets, the Steinway, the rose books, engravings, glass, pottery - her house is English culture centuries deep, but she has Chinese eyes and the excitable manner of an odd girl. (There is always fresh baking under a glass bell, I am always disappointed not to be asked.) She comes to the door to greet us in a voice so high and small, a tiny frail thing bending back her neck to see us, jerking her hands not with palsy but with excitement. She is like another order of human. A voice so far out of the adult bandwidth she is like a pure emotion. We speak to her as if to some extreme foreigner who is also, whose house is, a satisfying epitome of familiar central culture. There were so many birthday cards on her big lumpy sideboard. I thought to all these unknown people also she is an icon of something she is not. Helen Harris is exactly what she is, no icon, a woman who is a lucid girl, Canadian, reticent, with family joy still fresh, stored in the oak table and in other things we don't recognize. She liked the man who died. In her closet are pink mules with narrow heels. Her back with its thin curve is older than her direct autonomous eyes. I'm saying there are loves in the work days. I take pleasure in working with the houses, beginning to know them well enough so I can see what else I can do. And today we found ourselves slipping down between ranks of pink flowering trees, many blocks, an almost unconscious ecstasy. 19 Say the fine day. We did Grant's strangely conventional house - so conventional, golf magazines, a whole room for his stamp collection, holiday photos in indexed folders - that I feel there must be secret depravities - with clear sky and piles of blue-tinted clouds outside the broken door. Broken door - is that the clue? Then had Alba Rosa's and got lost on the way to Denman. The bay a choppy deep blue - then the mountains a completely different blue - then the sky another completely different blue. Got detoured into Stanley Park, and there were the big weeping willows like embroidered trees, smallest bright yellow-green new leaves in swaying chains, long lines of little stitches, Chinese lines - moving amazingly. And then a coffee house with an alcove outside. Delany's. I was so excited to be having coffee in the West End, that I was quivering and frisking at the counter. Betty in her zippered army coverall and pink hair, elf face. At Alba Rosa's looking together at her fossil fish and then at the Annigone book. She liked the portraits and I had glimpses of mythological landscapes, what I thought of as the Ovid style, that old Roman style with just edges. They paint the highlights. We saw holly trees glittering and I said, Like those, see, they just paint the light. - I lie down, and find my head tight in a vise. I say alright pain I give in to you. I say, if there is someone in me to whom this is not real, let them come and be me. I feel my head as if unwrap in a series of motions. I am lying no longer in pain, passing unconscious into dreams. Now I wake, it is just after midnight, thinking life could be more terrible than I know, there could be terror on terror, I could have cancer and it could be his energy that would have cured me. It could be that I am trusting a helpless guide. The weather has changed again, it is the poisonous low pink of rain cloud over the city. I am seeing the photo of Jane in extremity. Every weekend I go to hell. It could be that generosity is final self betrayal, that guaranteeing Louie through to her gifts has cost me my life or strength finally. - It said 'love' and what I did was put myself into large hands and feel loved as if from outside, and then the elastic bandages slipped and I was peaceful and slept. And woke at seven in fearful pain. Worked with it 'til 11, the way it is, stopped, not understanding, trying to persist, exasperated, incredulous. Is it saying this, is it saying the opposite of what it said? And then stopping and going to the Drive for cleaning stuff, in the supermarket with my heart smothered with pain. And then bringing in a bucket from the trunk, standing on the table and starting to wash the walls. I am sitting in a room where clean books - Ibuse Waves, Pound's Cavalcanti - are lying on a table next to a glass jar with five yellow tulips. A scrubbed table. Cut carrots and apples and walnuts bright with salt and oil in a black bowl with red chopsticks. That is how I used to write in my journal in the first years of having my own things. It is Sunday. 21st
I'm at the Calabria, Frank is opening the window and I'll close it when he isn't looking. He's opened it twice as wide to punish me for having closed it. My heart, away from affection, is immediately sore. Is it sore because it needs to be loving all the time and I am afraid of action - could it be that what I have to do is let it love and not act? It feels so timid, strangled. What is betrayal, what is harm? Someone says I want to be with you, a bright arrival, the other says no I don't want to be with you, I want to be with her. Or there is a safe zone where I know if I want to be with you you will want to be there too, and then she takes that safety away. It is competition for the space to be. It is the fantasy of that space that has brought adoration back into me those days when it comes back. It said - Can you bring it now? Here I am in agony anyway. I might as well go for broke and take on all the loves I strangle out. As if I were dying, or as if pain were unavoidable and it were only a question of leading in joy as well. But I have had good times in this island of eight years of power defended. I have shone and loved and come into good lines of prose description. 23rd Joyce was not consoling. I read her the three pages of the - what - the dilemma - and she didn't say, Oh my dear you are mistaken. She said, This is true, any woman will like to hear it. I am feeling I'd like to send it to him, and to her too, as if to say, I have nothing to lose, and nothing to gain. Would I walk free then? She said, I think what it's about is coming to love the world. A book in her waiting area said, Let longing be a stretch. This morning I feel this tempest is over, as if I had already sent them both the writing and held their hands at the wedding reception: fire animus and love woman. The mountains whited in all their crevices, a day with freedom later. 27 It is Sunday feeling like a Saturday because there was a work party. Light that is yellow and blue, the blue when you look sideways across bare earth in the herb garden, at small perennials coming back in blue-green clumps. Plants in their small compactness, leaves clean. Small bright color: paeonies putting up red forepaws in clumps. Arabis. Little daffodils, violets. Wallflower buds just cracking, I can see which will be yellow or dark red. And otherwise the new green - even the pure greens taking a blue from the light. The space that is here with this light, more like a desert, clumps not overlapped, not run together. I worked the way I do, concentrated. I'm on this half of the strawberries by myself. Down that end five women talking and laughing - that tone, I'm thinking, is the tone you hear when little girls in daycare play store. Social pleasure. They are liking to hear themselves sounding cooperative. I'm glad I don't hear what they say. I like to be speechless weeding with both hands and a trowel, very fast, flinging weeds across the path into the orchard grass. 2nd April Saturday morning. Today I begin to work. A monk's life I guess. It says, Promise what you have always wanted to promise, not to delude or to be deluded. Promise to work for good being. What I have tried to do brutally and promise to do skillfully. I do promise to work for good being. I do promise to become skilful. I trust what wants to teach me is manifold and intelligent. What's wrong with this? The wrong person is promising. Who should make the promise? - That isn't it. It's that you have to pass through difficulties first. 4th Yesterday when I was making my second cup of tea, Easter morning, I phoned Rob to say why don't you invite me for breakfast. He said, I was thinking I'd put the bacon on low and call you and say do you want to go out for breakfast and bring you back here. He cooked for me the way he does, lightly, precisely. Sets something good in front of me. Then said something goofy and took me to bed. A light hand he doesn't have in speaking, but could. I felt sad and lost. Oh why am I here. He did what he does, persisted rationally. I lie in his arm sad and inert and he puts his hand up under all the lengths of my blue sweater. I'm slow to warm, but when I get there, surprisingly sweet and wet. He's close from the first. Slips. We fold back the curtain. It's bright though not sunny. So bright that when we see only a little of it it looks like sun. I say I wish I could have more. You can get it back he says. It's rubbery, I say. Talking about it, pulling lightly over the ridge. This roundness here. That's the place he says. I know. Having it back when I've waited a while is even better. I'm lying in his arm on his right. Have my big left thigh up against his chest. Sometimes he pulls back the knee. Sometimes there's kissing tho' he always has a limit with that. Sometimes my right knee between his knees. He does the work. That's my preference. One-all. We continue but we're done. Let's get up. There's sun now on all his little seed trays on the balcony. - My father. I have been finding him indirectly. When I find him indirectly, I find the soul of the little girl who lived with him. There is a paradox in the life I discover. I must resist him, but where I resist him I tear my gifts away from myself. I must adore him but where I adore him I set myself up to be contempted. "If I'm not mad at big good looking men I'll be a sitting duck." "I know you think that," Joyce says. Then I go into it. Fearsomeness. What should I be doing? I don't know how to work. It reminds me of Medusa - the way I have had to fight him. Seeing him in reflection. What is the danger of looking directly. I'd like to live to fight for something else. 6th I'd want the writing to give me discoveries, that's the first thing, I don't want to be labouring over what I already know. I'd like a sense of winging. I'd like to find a good mind that would continue good when I stopped. I'd like beautiful sentences that make me want to read them again for the way they hold me loved like a baby. I want the sense of setting up an inferential structure whose parts like the flat winnows of a threshing machine shake their material forward to an exit I haven't foreseen. There is a precision inviting me with any image given the way that one was given: I can rush past it or, seeing that I've rushed it, go back and try again. The image was this - winnows in a threshing machine were screens in wood frames. They looked like windows set horizontally and shaken so chaff would cascade from one to the next while grain falls through the screen. It's a separating process. There is a progress through the belly of the machine, and two kinds of exit: the real stuff, the formed, the live stuff, the grain, with its extraordinary sound - the continuous pour of thousands of minute scrapings of seed against tin, a sound like husks - the sound of the skin of the wheat pouring through the chute - a sound that has in it the fullness of individual grains, their tightness, tension, and the slickness of the cuticle that wraps them; and through the other chute, with the blown air that has to carry it since it has no weight, the storm of chopped straw and chaff shot from the blower and drifting down onto the haystack. Satiny gold stuff shot across the blue, not at all worthless: this isn't a moral image. It is a discovery of another ability of things the child knew in what was given to her. What the image, which came, not from nowhere, when I said 'inferential structure,' was suggesting, was that I could want writing to be a shakedown rather than an inferential machine. That there'd need to be some back-and-forth in it, to find the qualities of its materials, and that it isn't a question of what exits where, but of the staging of the sift, which happens anywhere, in the paragraph, the sentence, in the word. 9 Yesterday morning, driving, Betty reading, I was talking to K, remembering what it said about obsession, and made an opening gesture of some kind, felt an extraordinary stretch sideways at the heart, very acute and very subtle at the same time, like a sensation of a non-physical body. It was like being racked, but pleasurably, an excruciating tenuous love. 10 When I was driving home on Commercial I was looking for K's van and among Sunday night foot travelers between restaurants and coffee bars saw a man walking energetically south. It's him. Carrying a book. That's how he walks is it. He was being a stranger near home, walking the way he does in Glasgow or Bremen, energetically, with a book. Sloped forward leading with his nose. A particular glide I recognize even out the tail end of my eye. What I'm puzzled by is this: Joyce says, when you feel attraction walk away, it is all projection. He and I meet on the street or at the garden as if a puppeteer in the sky were arranging our intersection. It is more than a daydream, it is a physical force, and two people are involved. Attractions have been the twisters that bury me in wet snow and also they have been the invitations to the education I have given myself. They have been my curriculum, my family, fuel. And also: if I think of attraction in Louie I see that it was child's hunger, impossible to satisfy, that made her frantic though she was loved. I can see it was child's panic when K went away, that couldn't be comforted by the forms of love that were there: a duvet and a radio promising return. Alright: I crash because there is a specific hope I hold secretly. That hope, it says, has to be abandoned. But somehow the child who holds it must not be abandoned, is that it? When she says abandon the hope I'm afraid she means abandon the child, the life in her. Abandon desire, joy, energy, which have come with the hope. Is there vitality without hope? The hope is this: it is not true that they don't care about me. Secretly they do. If I am good, now, he will love me after all. And all along rebellion had its part: it is because I am difficult that he doesn't love me. I choose it. Otherwise he would. And here is another way: I will love the broken-hearted one in him so I can keep the hope in me and not know I am broken-hearted. Isn't it better to keep the hope and its joy and energy and drive and use it to live rather than die? Even knowing what it is? The alternative is to know I'm broken-hearted. But I am broken-hearted. It is a technical term, she said. It means a function is disabled - secure mutuality - safe withness. Behind this, behind all of this, I am saying - he loves me. And so here is what I don't understand. Feel she says; it says. Live as love woman. But this hope is love woman's feeling, and you seem to be saying suppress it. Feel, but don't feel what you do feel - feel something else. The answer that works through is this. Self responsibility becomes hope's mother. First it informs hope of her losses. Dear one, you have been abandoned. Your parents are not strong enough to be loyal to you. They are not smart enough or honest enough. They have harmed your emotional foundation by their weakness. Your life will be almost wasted because of it. You will live in great pain. You will abandon your own children. You will be compelled to abandon anyone who depends on you. You will be lonely frightened and deluded. I'm here to help you. I am strong enough to name your abandonment. I'm strong enough to name their weakness stupidity and ill-will. I name your desperation loneliness pain fear and delusion because you can be free of them. Free in them. I promise that when you face them I will be with you. I will back you. I will be behind you, holding you. I will not abandon you to them. You will be able to grow up on a true foundation. You will be able to love the world with a true heart. You have lost a lot of time. I can help you with the time you have left. Come into my arms. Will you? And then I take her in my lap and put my hand over her sore heart. She says I called and called but Mama didn't come. The nurse just came and shut the door. When she says that the right response is tears. Oh my sweetie that makes me very sad. My mother would not have cried. I've never seen her cry. A stoicism so blank so hopeless. And what else - anger I think. a heavy cynical tone of heart. Hard. Their two hard masks: her cynicism, his self-admiration. What am I feeling. Moved. I know it is so. 13 You are a person who is full of love. Helplessly so. Bewildered where to give it and giving it in rushes all the time. It took me a while to understand that. I keep hearing how hard I was - fighting in ways I'd learned - fighting for what, to stay free - as anyone maybe should fight when they are in sight of the undoing of their hardness. Love from E. That means something technical you wouldn't like to hear. 19 Leah yesterday. She comes with lipstick and earrings like wind chimes, moons, a conforming woman, small, with her characteristic way of pulling the other in through a gap in the chest and watching worriedly over the too-much coming in. What does it set up in me. A confident pouring-forward of what I know, with its tone carefully rounded not to hurt. But something else happened yesterday. We talked in this order - her work, what it's like for her living with Tara, my personal work, the work on imagining, José's incomprehension and what I think it means. And then the imagining work again, when she had suddenly and I thought completely caught on. It was as if energy poured up through her head, she went bright pink and sat solid up the middle. As if she'd said, yes - I'll put a root into this, I want some of this. A spin-off, why not, I thought. If I'm onto something that would happen. Even the illusion of it would get her started. I saw what she wanted. What was it she saw. She put it together. Maybe more than I have. I said it is suggesting to me that there is a false hope that a certain false tree has built its branches from. That tree has consciousness in some of its branches calling itself I. To remove the hope is to remove the routing of life into that tree. It isn't a matter of giving up hopes in the present, there is no danger in that, they are shot off the ends of branches. Maybe there is another tree, built in the same space, built with some but not all of the same branches. Perhaps its branches have not reached into a certain zone, because there has not been enough life let through. Maybe that is the tree meant by the body present if it were grown true. Maybe it has many contacts with the branches that say I. Maybe it come on when daily fear is asleep, and leaves traces in the I that are there as if they have come by safe channels. Maybe paraperception is the way the tree designs itself in some upper levels, bypassing certain structural habits. Maybe the silent tree does work, recognizes, constructs whole shapes which are looms for possible comprehensions. Maybe loving you with this ardency is a structure building itself from a leader checked when I was three, maybe it is a beginning. What Leah saw was implications of calling minds structures, so that if José does not have the circuits to see what she sees, it is a question of engineering. The contribution of her own that she saw, was the way she can plainly see in people's mandalas the shapes of conscious and unconscious structure relative to one another. (Maybe loving you helps me know how to love the not-false tree, and maybe loving is a technical term for routing life into something.) 26 For Joyce in an hour: I have the world of what I call work, an academic mapping, a hope of mapping, a map of a map to be made. It exists in my relation to certain sheets of notes. On certain days, and today is one, I have skill among these notes, I readily organize, expand, refine. On other days I have had a world I also call work, an emotional sounding, conversation with a feeling state. The first work is my own relation to fields of public discussion. It offers a way to currency, also financial currency, in an arena which is historical too. I can do good and interesting work. I have a contribution. The second work is my relation to love and suffering, my own story of feeling. It could offer a currency if I took it into personal writing. I don't sustain thinking of it as offering money or community, although it could offer a community I might like more than the academic community. What is the relation of these beings? In the work with love and suffering I have an inner mentor as well as an outer one. Are you there for both kinds of work? Yes. Does one interest you more than the other? NO. Do you see them as a unity? Yes. - I take Luke to introduce him to and at the institute. We sit by the sea in his neighbourhood. Below is a small bay whose pattern of small and then larger ripples is just the pattern of ridges on a clam shell. He says being a security guard relaxed him after the scare of ITN where he tried to be older than he was. We are seeing jet boats on English Bay. I say for myself it is wonderful that he is here although I hardly believe it and feel I don't deserve it. He takes me to Angela's apartment. Green carpets and deep dark-varnished windowsills seen as the lift rises. A bay window over maple trees and eye to eye with whatever sky there is in a day. A tower of audio components. He plays music and I close my eyes in an armchair. Whales. The voices that sound and are heard through a thousand miles of salt water, he says. And then shows me the scale of atomic bundle machines, atomic sensors. Two microns: spit on the forefinger, touches it to his thumb and draws out between them a thread finer than a hair. (There - I did it too.) We both stare, feeling the magic of that materialization. I go home. "Give us a hug," he says. I would be too diffident to ask. Complete. Complete. What I should say about my parents is that they made it possible - they helped in ways I don't know - for me to be where I am so glad to be, although they don't know I am there and don't know what they have been to make it possible. I'm struggling here - I know they tried to hinder. But from Russia and complete piety and women circumscribed, to this moment where I sit on the grass with my son and he loves me without condescension in an open world, there was a bridge and it was them. As if they took the brunt of the fear of the transition. Was that it? Do I know now what I can thank them for? 30 Put lube on him this morning and stroked like business, easy, and got on him, which he always likes best, clamped his knees with mine and raked up. "You better stop or I'll come." I don't stop. He comes. Laughs. "Or don't stop." "That's what I reckoned." My turn after. "Can I get you back?" I hold it close to the bottom where it's still lubed. Three-sided. Yes. And then it's for me. We doze together. We moved the curtain and saw wind and sun after rain through the night. 3rd May There is in epistemology a picture of knowing that not only excludes certain kinds of knowing but that also leaves out something that is in any experience of knowing, the feel or sense of it, the experience that one tries to name so the name will evoke it. I like to work between knowing and knowing knowing. Things that happen in a day. Describing them. Reading descriptions to see what I've known. Recognize it. 7 We woke unconnected. "So that was different last night," he said. Instant affection, I'm next to him holding his shoulder with a sweet-feeling palm. What does that mean. "I was a mare. You seemed to want it that way." "I did?" "I let go." "Yeah you let go, I always like that." Saturday morning on the Drive and I'd like it if you showed up. But this missing is getting unconvincing. There's a parade of men and they are irrelevant. They aren't furry or literate or sharp. I'm sad. Could look at the linden leaves hung thick and live like skin and soft like clothes on a line. The voice behind me the kind of voice that only wants to hear itself on top of the conversation. Wrong faces. The way a little mouth in a bloated face snapped shut on the end of a word. The soft lindens leaning and tossing in a breeze from the north. I do still miss you. I'll stop after a while. 15 my starting image like steam a stretching surface visibly made of shining grain an image of what's happening in the brain in a different register the classical figures a woman descending something similar done with sound 'a woman descending' she's just a shell of light suggested the shape of her outline says she lives in muthos sounds of words her outline could be the shape of a sound and what sound does suggests what her image does, dwindles evenly away it is the unification of sight and sound that I am hurrying toward - she is - she is going down into to the lake of mist the sea within a sea that penguins found under an iceberg 17 Hello day - a lidded day. Dark. There's a bird, definitely singing. There are the tipped-up flowers on the chestnuts, sharp waves all over the tree. Pile driver over across the tracks thumps all day. Chinese people taking the park for their half hour, Joan Meister with them in her wheelchair. Anti-clockwise. It's seeing people I know are living in another country. The pile driver is two sounds, an engine and the knocks - what about it - it's like hearing the heart's motor that makes it beat. There is that woman I avert my eyes from. Can I say why. No. She is ordinary and unbearable. 'Complacent mediocrity.' More than that. The word I have is congestion. Maybe it's a cloud of fear. - Now I have to get ready for the associate dean. I lose the sense that there is work I want to do - I lose it remarkably totally. I take it as hearsay. I have to re-hypnotize myself to find it. Does it live in an envelope of fear? Simple being is afraid of being displaced, it says. It's a true fear though not necessary. I hang onto romance because I am simple in it. How would I like to live at school. Would like to work the way I do at the garden, eager, not holding back. Would like to be simple with it, presenting exciting stuff. Talk to people from the centre of the structure of intuition which really is myself. 19 Last night with Rob in my bed. My bed's a prairie. The room extends to its edges and out the windows. There was a breeze he was liking. He'd had a rum and coke at home, hours before, and was still loose so I could see just a bit - he'd say something about the current of air and I'd ask him and he'd be tongue-tied but I'd have a moment to imagine how he feels it. "A wild night of sin" - goofy, he said. Exactly. Like you. We were fucking and I could hear K's bear grass clicking in the kitchen - it is not even in the window but hung under the cubbies, and the wind reached deep into the room so he was speaking to me from far - I loved that. Meanwhile Rob's brother-sister body so light so warm so sweet and friendly. We got there. I'm still there. This morning my skin tuned and he at the beginning of the sequence substantial and reaching so I'm fast. And then frightening him with joy. It's such a switch, he complains. He eats out of my hand. We're successful lovers. We get to passages new to us. (Oh am I going to write somehow.) How am I going to say that one - something about a region, his first four inches and mine - that is physically impossible but it's what I remember, as if the deepest part of the passage and the base of his penis were rooted together. Beyond that it's dim. Something. A transposition. It was simple there. "Why shouldn't I be happy, you gave me something, you put life into me." A little girl and daddy at the next table as I write. That sort of confident affection, except that he's not a dad, he's a kid too. A going away present I said. Something to make sure you come back he says. Now I've been there will I be satisfied and spend the day as I must, business. 21st Yes I was satisfied and ran all day and now it's six on a silvery morning and I'm in the ferry lineup at Horseshoe Bay. Across the divider there are buddleia rooted in cracks of very fractured silver rock. They are stirring like all the trees, like the little fir, no not like the little fir, they have their characteristic motion, the little fir jiggles, the buddleia quests with its weighted branch ends, the larger firs on the sea-side of the road flow north and then spring back. Even that's too general. The fir next to the one I just described was doing something else. Can I remember what. (We've moved half a mile down the hill.) It had shorter branches in a thick bundle. A commotion, contrary motion. I'm writing on the steering wheel. We drive ahead between phrases - just there. Swooped through the empty business core this morning onto the bridge, frightened of the height and speed, the iron walls, more frightened of driving when it's a journey. 26th Being famous. What should I notice about that. People say they like the photo, people say it's a good article, but the significant fact for people seems to be just that I had my picture on the paper. The question is what is fame. The answer in this case is that fame is like being famous, suddenly I'm routed through respect circuits. It is the same phenomenon as being invisible - it is automatism. Then the next question is, is it better to be famous than to be invisible? The answer I had so far is that being invisible is a strain and being famous is the absence of that hardship, but the look on people's faces - imagine seeing that everywhere you go, that would be miserable. But then you're in a position to relieve them. And also you could look across the heads of the people with abject looks on their faces to the people who are looking at you straight. And then there is the test of whether fame otherwise is worth having: are there people looking at you straight who can see you, and who didn't see you before, and if they didn't see you before, why didn't they, if they are people who can see? So I ask the system: what is fame good for? It says love woman likes it. Do you mean the child wants it? Yes. What effect does that have on the whole? It makes you more capable of action. Less inhibited? Yes. Do you want to say more about that? It makes you more sensitive. How so? More intelligent. Do you mean people give you something? Yes. Somehow in the whole you're allowed to be smarter because you've shown that you're working for the whole? YES. They give you something in encounters? Yes. They also give you something psychically? YES. Is there a best way of handling it? Don't take it as directed at the ego. What is it directed at? It's support for the work, it's confirmation of the work. - Arras is good. So-so. What's your criterion? Relation to the unconscious. What does the unconscious want it to be? Conscious and unconscious sharing pleasure like being on a date together. Is being moved a sign of that? No. What is? Being bereft. So pain is the pleasure they share? Yes. You are surprising me. (The lovers) it's a sign that they are in touch rather than split. Pain in the maker is a sign. Yes. Pain in the experiencer too? No. Barry and Goldberg make these things without enough pain. Bruce Baillie was direct and right. Marilyn. It was adoration. These guys are afraid to be seen adoring. They are not responsible to their impulse. They want adoration to be disguised as various kinds of mastery. Precisely they are saying "That's sucking off the tit." The charged, simple voice of adoration. Is it always simple? Bach. Mozart, Beethoven. Skill is built in conflict. - I saw the beauty of the structure and sighed. A tension endlessly fruitful. 8th June Last night sitting I was going to say gently, this is a time when you thoughts should not come for a while, I promise I will do what I can, I am doing what I can, you could let me be for a while. It came to me a different way. I said oh, you thoughts, I see you are a way of being love, yes you can come anytime, I'll love you, you are innocent thoughts. As if my heart had its doors open, its little doors, and there was a warmth inside. That was right. I wonder who is really sane. Do I know anyone, probably many, whose judgment is under attack and steady. Maybe not many. The difficulty of making decisions without support. That is the aerial art of the wire. I want especially in that decision to have it destiny's gift so I'll know it's right. Imagine yourself on a wire and secure. Your passions are not heavy passions. They are storms around your lightness and balance.
You call that putting him out of your mind? You were there all day - what was it like? - I kept wondering what it is for, what's it for? The answer is it's for more than one thing. It's not a conscious spell and it's not a telepathic conversation. It is a way other loves and joys speak. Listen to the tone. Widen the love to love the lover. I have to say that to myself how many times in twenty-four hours. Mrs Harris meeting me in her sewing room says it is twenty years since her husband died. "You lost him quite early" I say, warmly because I love her love for him. "Sixty-three. He was such a hard worker. He couldn't keep still. He built our house." There's a picture behind us, an etched line drawing. "He built this part first. It was going to be a garage, but he'd put so much into it when we were living in it, and materials were hard to get after the war, he moved it and built onto it." A family house, two storeys, a normal house. Porch, basement. "He'd put so much into it." That. She has very pale eyes, I couldn't see water in them but I realized she was crying and wanted to bite my lip. "You were lucky." I say that from where I am as I dust her things. Her jewel box has his picture pinned with a hatpin into the quilted lining of its lid. Malcolm Harris. This was true all winter: I come into her shabby small pale place and take secret shelter in her rectitude. 9 What is it about the word 'marry', it is like 'Mary' tho' also it isn't, homonyms have the same sound irrelevantly because there is as if an inner sound, a feeling. 'Marry' has a sweet-cheeked sound, it is not a sound of sex, it is a sound of innocence - looking at someone in a certain way that says you - it's light. 10 What am I learning when I note dreams these days. As if I'm learning an accuracy in the noting. It can be always more accurate. What aspect is intended. Probably there is a grammar. There are events, the ones where I want to say "suddenly it ', and those are marked as a sort of verb. There are qualities before and after. States. Is it transactions of adjectives? There are features like the gay men that indicate what register we're in. Sorts of information the dream needs to give: paragraph grammar maybe. Some dream objects I think are there to carry qualities - not important in themselves. Then there are the day-ego remarks on the dream that probably have to be disregarded or taken as symptomatic on another level. 14th What have I been doing - I ripped through Leah's piles of books about imagery - hideous professional psychology, or New Age pleasant summaries. What do I want to say there - books written out of books, both types are. Pleasant female mind unreadable because it's textureless like lentil soup, unpleasant male minds in rubber gloves speaking English with the accent of a German machine. Test procedures. "A fifty-five year old female subject with depressive..." 'The image' for both is like a petit objet a, a deified lump. There is no such thing anywhere, why are we putting it on a little cake-stand. Fantasies about magic pictures. There is magic, more than one kind - being able to give ourselves experience. Being able to do it. I want to talk about it in the way of being it. Also to say: this is what we need from a theory of imagining. This is what we've tried to get from it. This is what it has covered. Coleridge and the motion of leaves. Mind as. Today I have this radical idea: since loving is life energy, couldn't I consider it a resource and just enjoy loving and adoring and ardently desiring and dreaming and rehearsing and working toward, and stop being very very afraid that I will love somebody more than they love me, and stop being hurt if they don't. - Is that possible? 21st Look at this day. Leafy evening. I have my elbow on the kitchen windowsill, there's honeysuckle in the air, the little bite of footsteps in the alley. All the other sounds (no, writing there's the pencil - did you hear it? - the scrape of the dash) are quite far away and soft. When I said that a flurring in the right ear, like the sound of a moth. A man walking quickly skirting the park. It isn't you. 27th Skammen. The moment next to the first shot when Liv Ulman comes toward us with her beautiful breasts. Her eyes. The way Jan stops being pathetic when he turns brutal, as if being weak was his only defense against being a killer. He turned his coat. The beautiful black-silver and white, every frame. When I lay in his arms quietened down and not in any need I saw ghosts of the day's little weeds. A catalog of their kinds. That faint silver white in porous black. 29 It was saying, I think, that I'm still wincing off moments with him not following them into the underground, which is black and porous and has him bare and true dissolved in them. Bring him out with me. He is freaked by not being touched for six months - his mouth jerks - he's starved for praise, hungry to hear himself described in any way. I was giving him that but the further thing, the real rescue, is that careful tracking behind, to where he is not presented but watching. Is it like touching? Like touching with the imagination. How did she do it? It's more than love though it is love. 1st July He's building and I climb into his moment by climbing into his task. He was wearing what suits him - yellow boots, strap jeans, working man's thick checked shirt. I wasn't talking for some reason. He'd say anything he thought and I'd say mm cause I hadn't heard it. I was being a helper, feeling the two bodies' relation in the narrow spaces around the truck and on top of it. Yes that's what I was doing with my silence - I was engrossed. Climbing onto the roof of the cab holding the edge of the plywood flush while he nails from the tailgate, opening the cab door and standing with one foot on the seat and one on the armrest, bracing the corner, steadying the frame while he leans under my arm to put in a toenail, I'm looking at the top of his head six inches from my mouth. Did he know it was dancing? It sez he did. - Oh Blake. He conjures what can hardly be seen, and that to him is vision. Gods and battles, nothing smaller than cosmic. Black winds in non-space, caverns, rocks, fire, flood, swift flight, sweet or evil gigantic women, and all these things to be read as something else, but what, if we are not to think of bodies as real? Yeats when he says 'symbol' I think means something different - he was trained in magic, and so symbol for him means power of evocation. Empirical: say this word and something will happen that is an image and much more. Blake's vision is more like proprioception maybe. - As if he's in early prebirth and Yeats is well-born into a world where there are swans and other things. Childhood feeling both preborn and born into happy childhood safe to see world furnished amazingly.
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