| edged out 9 part 3 - 1984 july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
15 July 1984 A man come to see my house I'm thinking to share for the rent. I speak to him so he feels I'm attracted, he indicates his blind wife a sleeping bulk. They're silent aside. I say to my mom "Did you think of George Block?" My mom says too loud "She's a blind one." The blind wife turns on her. the man's been promoted in film bureaucracy, he's a BBC chief maybe.
Kiyooka's thick eye shields. Traveling in a school bus sitting with and talking to two mistress jumps up, can't stand it. He pushes her down. I rub the young boy's thumb. He tells me he likes touching some, only slightly, he isn't ready for more. I teach him how to feel the magnetic hand. My big ship will reach Australia the sailor says in fourteen hours. What's this, an air mattress? It will be warm water there. The ship I'm floating by suddenly looms and zooms up out of the water: springs, will it jump on me. Safe but left behind. Before, floating alongside would keep up. I'm left in the ocean. Life preserver? All night in cold water? But a launch has come up behind me. Says he can't catch me up. "Can you radio?" But I am caught up. Walk in levelly, looking for dinner maybe. A classroom? The button that fell out of my skirt. A little girl crying. I offer her the button, "It's a very nice button," clear blue like ice, clear cut. She doesn't want it but stops crying. Ladye bright in skirt of grass-green silk Luke's letter. He wrote on my love-night. Gave the time - it was whilst. Some of the letter directed to Mary, who's due. "I often daydream about the animals wandering free, and meeting them." Imagining Roy a breed unsuitably confined - whiskey, fast rides, chief, mischief - and Lady Catherine.
A Stuart adherent, Jacobite. Charlie's for some reason a prenatal value - and that one warring too, you'd be lovely in a kilt - and didn't Roy? - "What highlands are you in?" - and Greenhat probably was - it's the limbs? I like to marry. The fool I've been not to know my subjects. 17 The man teaching another young man to read a language I don't understand. The father in the middle. I am the young woman listening with my cheek against the teacher's thigh. They read in unison, 3, the man learning reads as he can single words and then at the end of the sentence a three-word burst. Looks up with pride. We laugh. When I leave, I bend over at the door, Miguel will follow, I think. Is there, grinding his knuckles into my right glut max. I'll reply by biting his thumb or hand. Now that we're agreed to marry he strides ahead, I have to walk very fast or drop back because he won't turn. He stops at a shop. I'm on the street feeling my prettiness, lovely round bum - smile at a man passing. My one gesturing from the doorway. No, no, I sign. He wants to borrow money to pay his rent. Is a bride in white dress. (I don't notice the shift.) We'll live in my place, then walking toward it from the Kentish Town tube station she stops at an off-license to talk to a woman she knows, comes out with a child. Her friend's in difficulty. It's a very heavy baby. We're walking over a ramp with deep sand floor. Heavy going. How to carry this baby. I want to set him onto my shoulders but can't lift him all the way hanging from the ends of my arms - is he crying or shouting with pleasure? I have to lay him down to look. She's gone ahead around the corner with the other child. Is she waiting somewhere? She doesn't know where my place is. Or will she be going on alone past where I could still find her. Looking down at the faces of the children playing in the sand thinking of Luke years ago. The calculations have come to this: I should go back to UC in London with a program using the Tavistock, the Co-op, Laura Mulvey, Annabel and Scotland, I should live in Bloomsbury with an aircleaner and a bicycle, audit physics and embryology, write on the prenate, write (with J) on Dorothy, write on grain, and make two and a half minute songs; bring the location work. Keep Oxford and MIT in mind. The sci-fi U. This year I should audit with Kaja - learn all that theoretical stuff - Donna - get writing out.
[transcription of conversation with Jam]
- The threatened self That I have to accept it as where I see
No father can no father may. Father-starved He's anxious to know other men desire me. Mr Mann said I could win. He said in public: "You all know how I feel about Elfreda."
Soreness of class. He father-hungry too. Couldn't win it. Not the father? The father-hunger. I found good fathers I throve with. And a bad one. And brothers. "Who needs the father's admiration before she can feel she exists." Who he'd admire. The neat, the fine, the classy one (not really), the image of. Celtic Aeolic Bon-Po Hopi / Navajo (Beaver) One injury caused the next.
Is there a way to think through it, language, physical damage, sexual damage, social damage, and the relation to gifts. 18 Flash - by the table, reaching a plate, the lower back of a white shirt, tight bum in dress pants, grey. He passes behind my back - ha - we pretend not to look - but our skin is looking. Is it that - I see him cut the corner of - and am hearing - the sensation is like my attention sweeping right-left with him as if eyes, what I'm wondering is whether something's felt too - it's spatial, it's reversal from where I'm pretending to look - do I see at the same time - I'm not in depth watching what it's like when it happens - that's what my notes say!
When he looks at me and I don't look, I present an appearance Dear Aphrodite: make me brave These days the fear of starving - a much poorer time - afraid of being made ungenerous opportunistic grim [upside down] "a message in a bottle" the ideas of inner and outer space in what way the growing body knows from registering - A book on the ideas of space - embryology - metaphysics - the Buddhists - Wheeler and Pribram - new physics - language - geometry - emotion clearing - math - phenomenology - drugs. Scale - nat force diff value on diff scale - e-m replaces gravity - and where friction and surface tension and molecular vibration grow to overwhelming Here in the upper microscopic surfaces get to be the major structural members - both inner and outer surfaces, which are intense zones of energy Eg waves and ripples move more and more slowly as they diminish in size down to three-quarters of an inch but below that relative power of their surface forces begins to move them faster The surface of a great tree, by contrast, is quite relaxed in its widespread leaves. That gives exaggerated strength to any interface Colloids between mags of bacteria and viruses Space-time differentials Metabolism inverse to magnitude Velocity varies directly as square root of linear dimension but rhythm and tempo of limbs and organs, inversely At some degree of smallness the things must pass from the known to the unknown, then from the knowable to the unknowable, mayhap even from the concrete into the abstract - yet not - heaven preserve our reason - quite from the something into the nothing. Leucippos of Thrace, also Democritos, "the Greek atomic school" After a crystal unit's first set-up other molecules attach in the keyed way by bits blown, seeded. "Nuclear seeds." Obsequious - of really falling - or taking a wrong solidity. I ate what I had - slowly - old rice and hard popcorn - I haven't salt even - mint tea - then I was panicked - trying to phone - taking the tape recorder down - a young man's kindness and then the other as he passes, from a glance, says "We don't want that" - a tear jumped - I'm ashamed to be trying to cover my hurt - period came today, is that or the fear of hunger, the softness that made me feel it so harsh. I had doubted they'd take it, very heavy hanging from my shoulder on the bike - at MacLeod's five good books gone for $5 - the man from the art gallery - I'm looking at men that way again - is it a reflex of poverty and what will it go on to. The $5 got cherries and a nectarine, a loaf, butter, two fishcakes. I ate and then was stupefied and slept. Hungry now, had forgotten there's still bread and butter. John at Carnegie offering his tickets. We both refuse. He leaves them on the table. After a while the other tutor asks if I want coffee, splits the 6. 2 coffees I can think some. "I thought you had left," had it ready to say - his crookeder look in the different hat and smiling. When he leaves I see he's carrying his beautiful frame drooping. I let too long go by before I decide to - The sound of the fiddle bow on the guitar. Sono Nis' offer of 15% discount to Robert MacLean's relatives and friends! "Bringing it down to $5.06." And bluecoat J coming up the last steps as I'm standing by them. Smiling smiling civil to Rho and mean to you. When I sat - the washed bright rug - I thought to ask of the voice insisting - who. 19 In the house already I hear them approach talking about me, my mom saying something about 'lame' - they're coming through or past the small trees. (Looking at this garden and beyond to a construction from great lopped tree trunk - like a wall - big furry plant growing high on the wall, 'foxglove'.) I take it up with them - thinking I'll wear the sandals at school but for the walk struggling into three pairs of damp socks, and the big overshoes, whose, not mine. He's telling about the day, they were trying to do something and the truck or tractor kept getting stuck, bad weather, aggravation, misery - I decide to make him see - I say yes but on other days when you meet new people you can feel you're perfectly attractive. We're walking through snow toward the schoolbus - the road that's been snowplowed turns through the fields just after the house - it's rather twilight - someone yells about Bernice the bull - run! - they run, I can't, heavy feet - haven't seen her, where's she coming from - "I can't run!" - they stop too, we'll lie down behind a drift - not there, here, more to the west - she comes immediately, sniffs me, goes on to ? and him, but only stops in curiosity at Jam - kneeling beside her, touching her hand, turning it over - I'm thinking she's like Oriental to the next power, a tiny bright naked woman in gold-rimmed spectacles, the fairy doctor - I've come close to hear her - she wants to say what she thinks about J's condition - not sure she's talking English, something like "romance" - is she saying J's in love? J hugging me saying she is. I wake happy. The fairy doctor! 20 I want beautiful imagined suggestive pictures and I want movement to go into the computer that's accurate. 'crystal intervals' as if synonymous
[National Geographic images of physical notations] "computer controlled projectors" In blue - deep blue - the gold lines house
metamorphoseis shed-skin The semimicroscopic fairy-fly only 1 mm, nothing but a few hairs that whip the sticky molecules of air like eggbeaters in syrup. His weight so slight in proportion to surface "he must fly through a kind of dust storm of swirling nitrogen and oxygen granules. And the invisible blizzard if he grew smaller would turn flying into swimming and swimming ultimately into digging."
an engine journal rotates in bearing "The great Scottish biomathematician" What is the prenatal perspective Hegel is the only developmental epistemology "for its space-time relationship is so different from -" "hypothesize mind in -"
Logarithms - the power to which a fixed number, called the base, must be raised in order to produce a given number "a simple logarithmic spectrum" - Another frightened man, another man willing to be afraid. Small eyes fixed. When the boss was harsh, cried. Brahms in a room. Those thin hands with near blood, clawnails. 'Sensitive' is what - 'meditative states' - a weak voice - with him conducting conversation, stale smoke in his clothes, he's staring at something, "I drew you," obedient, but what else - unattached - permeable - telling the sound of the crows through cold air amidst frozen wood, from far off, wings dancing something - he can have his face close - Dutch redness - The card player [*van Gogh]- "My father was looking very bad" - "It's not light for me" - felt tip on napkins. Missing John. 21 !Exaggeration and importance! The woman in the fruit shop, plain woman, carrying a baby tied in front of her, the girl baby has arms and legs free, reaching, a small baby in a pink sleeper, an alert girl. How Norman looked carrying the dark baby in just a diaper. Father hands. Two main absorption / opacity longer infra-red heat, AND short ultraviolet to longer ultraviolet transparency in three zones, low-frequency radio (except metals), high-frequency x and gamma, intermediate visible Newton: "until we come to the very first cause" Both discrete entity and continuous field Is already in the world of reference A question of how tightly bound, how closely branched and cross-linked The energy of surfaces, powders, explosions in grain elevators Jeans - that light waves as such do not really exist - only as "waves of knowledge"
Field area units like the Sumerian 'little acre' or se - named for the bagful of seed it took to sow it. The ether as the space of numbers Leucippos imagined space as having a porous structure Aides the unseen nature, which seems almost brimming with as if her objective were to baffle our minds, or perhaps, as I think more and more, to spark our spirits The discourse coinage world 22 I said to him not knowing "You can sit here if you ever want to. It is a kind of park. People don't use it much, I don't know why. I took the fence down. I had a fence around it but I took it down." Leaving the Carnegie seeing the French girl in the library, a hard look. She's leaving after me. Why shouldn't I speak with her. Getting my bike, looking after her, her plain body and shoes, not seeing that as she reaches the opposite curb, she is going to arrive at him: she bows, he bows, they go somewhere together. At the next corner I'm bent over the handlebars a long time away, the Chinese pedestrians, I'm absorbing, shall I drive past them, I wanted to, myself and Jerry, a hurt, did she use my leaving to know when, follow my track and then coast past me to my meeting - or was I there sick enduring the man's smell, because my detector was onto her arrangement. A worry about medicine power. -
- Water incompressable, unstretchable, pulls like a cable: the hydrogen bond The most constant time value a shuttling of electrons in a hydrogen atom A sort of absolute frame of reference. It must itself be integral and stationary.
years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion this huge world that exists independently of us human beings he decided motion is never observable as with respect to space, ie no absolute motion Zeno that time is not continuous but grainy. There are times when a flying arrow is neither in motion nor at rest. The way everything diminishes in size - area inverse square of distance. To the observer the smaller thing is what seems to be moving. Absolute space is the inferred. 'Mapped.'
Its constancy is that it's highest relative velocity of transmission of influence That interval is the only objective relation between events Not a force but an effect of geometry The state of falling is the free state Inertia as the universal aspect of gravity, gravity as the local aspect of inertia The gradient of the gradient Drifting along a geodesic - line of least resistance - which also - Lorentz transformations is the track where its time flows fastest - ie the track that takes longest Evacuating the mouth and feeding the anus The precessing rosette orbit of the electron -
and the apparently sourceless light in her works The idea that nature presents the mind with a number of symbolic expressions of an inner reality; that these various forms are related to one another; and that between them all and that inner essence a clear correspondence exists. "Something in color I then called the condition of light" - all objects in nature. Arthur Dove the path of the plasm that over millennia formed itself into the fern 23 I never refused his image but why can't I find the earlier one - up to the moment he spoke - last night in my chair the tufted claw, older, a real life - though I can't feel him in his presence, that's the difference - I'm wondering - from passionate John - it's the hospital! At the music, Oppenheimer Park, coming with the bike to the bandstand, dancers on the ball diamond dust, Tony [Gordon-Wilson] with a train of kids - he's a dancer! - there's the French girl, there's green hat jerking in a way I don't like - the catalpa with white flowers in only its top leaves - setting light on the cottonwood - sitting against the wire fence - when I walk I like knowing he sees - a long circle, suddenly met, a dance saying do you want to go on? do you want to stay? Sitting on the slope quite far from the music, I didn't say: "I enjoy your shape." His wool sock feet in Chinese slippers - neat feet. The way I showed mine, in sandals, Charlie walking - what's this, I was asking - it was J penguin. Sitting dancing - rolling so well. Tony's jiving with Laurel! Oh! Oh! Tony giving his arm to the spastic man to cross the dancing ground, gives them a look of high play-acting together. The small girl playing soccer with two men who tease her. Michael who again looks different, given that name. Stops by my porch to look. Likes the mint tea in honey jars. Sits closeby on the step. I tell the story of Rabbit when Hésus strolls upstairs. He tells his story of the shabby room in Toronto, two broken-down people, she was in bad shape, I was drinking too but not as much as she was. She was a stripper. The baby was the one he missed most. She'd put on everything, even the lampshade, and come out parading for them (Morning Glory). She didn't learn in school but she knew things. She'd suddenly jump up and say something about one of the paintings. "Love grabbed me." How did he look then. Young. Composed. And now: wildly broken open, more pink and blue. A kind of midair walker, yes. My neighbourhood: the philosopher sentry without his shirt, gathering with others at Koo's, to look at the red car's engine, touches another man on the arm. A white woman unseen in the shade by an upstairs window, has been noticing him for years. His body is rounder-fleshed since he came from there. Very slowly he is no longer in shock. And she. That's literary. It's a way of voicing aloud while writing. The hunger poem since I showed it to J says what: time poured. Wanting to sleep from. The father hand. Raspberries. Someone I don't know. Is day, dei. A blue mouse. Mouth. Ache in the throat. Tongue. The tight cap. You see. And those I want to show it to. He saw me look at kids. Loneliness is the womb capped. 1. Am I only afraid of anything as a word? The meanings came as sensations I found words for. 2. Ie what is the relation of sensation and language. "Raspberry." 3. Is craving a language of sensation? What's coffee? "Good coffee." I say "Isn't white wine delicious?" He says yes he loves it but he can't drink since it brings back his drug experiences, "bad ones." Barthes. I crave 'signifiers' - that is, irradiated names. 4. Mickey Mouse - the ears, nose - why animal people? "Our mice." "'Cause it goes in holes." Mighty.
I've been assuming unconscious is 'natural' but is this showing I've got father-right inscribed in it? "Someone whose opinions are the opposite of mine." And do men only come into the estate by being fathers? How Roy enforced authority on the unborn one by terrorizing me. Similarly I suppose M. Day = (sun) = fathers = withheld = desire = capture
Night is for seeing further Time poured from the sky the sun and room 24
Down the basement where Carmichael is, hugging him. He says "You still have a hungry smell." (Become the parent) What else. A house. Digging through rich stuff. Last night walking on the 800 block at night, seeing. Haven't done that and knew it wasn't registering, it seemed pleasure but unreal. Thinking: why haven't I been looking at the front of this street. The dream I don't remember. Something like complicated - ah! Was going to say ceramics with glazes, and then just in 'complicated' it came - J and I at the YW in London - we're going to live - she's got the room - an upstairs back one, old-fashioned dark dresser and curtains, big old bed facing south - two beds - we gradually see it's in a garden - surrounded by market gardens, in the distance silver domes of a beautiful Disneyland - in the room, that we've found more rooms of, things left behind by the woman and her friends before, seeing more detail all the time, teas, a hippy country feeling - I find the lower room, kitchen, but with the bathtub - get very interested in cleaning and sorting, a high closet, curtained, in two sides, full of stuff - taking out a box with dense layers of papers, filo, different weights, wrapping something she'd kept, a dress, maybe, a wedding dress - ceramic the feeling from the women's art book - I noticed J and the others had gone off somewhere while I was in my sorting/cleaning mania. - Writing this feeling a voice I don't like, American, that book. 'Wanting' - hankering - to be with the young men; either. Last night - asked Paul for coffee - he brought raspberries too. Candle fire on the white tile on the green ground, underlining the daisies. Excited. Someone come. Knowing no one could come into that excited wait. How many possible directions - write about the hospital - get ready to go to America - go into the north work again - polish anything - get ready to have a child in five years - get ready to go to England - start movies - start doing anything from where I am - black and white photos - why I won't make myself a writer - the dreams say: I'm sorting. Do they always say that. [upside down] The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. Proust Something deeply hidden had to be behind things. Einstein when he first saw a compass. The natural history museum, where so many women in this book told me they spent hours, walls painted with the descent of all forms of life, models of crystals and plants. 25 At dawn he kissed me goodbye and left: I dreamed sleeping on a plateau looking down out of the window seeing the black and white hat person crossing through the white under the streetlight wandering. The fasting gentleness. Rootbeer. Coming to the kitchen door in sleeping clothes. Hard hug. He says "You're someone else! You're fourteen." We arrive on the corner of Hastings and Main, he pushing the back of his hat with his stick. I in my pink and white tarred on the rear. I see across to the bike ramp John in his clean blues taking a long time strapping something on the back of his bike. We saw an animal head drift by. When we were invisible under the pilings it was suddenly launched by us with sails and styrofoam crowsnests. The shoulder. That warm shape. "I wanted to touch you." "Where?" "Anywhere. I don't know. Your shoulder. Your neck." "I was so afraid of this." I'm not at all. I'm quite remote. Head asleep against the doorframe. The way he just wants to hold it against me (is this account for you) vibrating either it or from strain in his legs, his hard kind of body, "your skin;" that sends a disc-shaped thrill up through the belly-space. Swift wing. "A magnetic rise of birds." And a doubt. When I see the bony head looking adoring. ("Is that how I look?") You shouldn't have to look like that. Your wrongful injury. "I think you're brave." "You're really shy." "Shy and bold." Over the railway tracks. Am I making a funnel pointing toward me - I think so - curving the space so you'll slide in. Eventually. and then what - is it for work. Or
T: "You're allowing yourself." The entire balance adjusting every day - uneasy too, I'm cautiously overstepping. And is it really that -
26 Sitting on his legs. Hat. Pyjama shirt with one button. Chest fur. Rayon pants. With his long claws on his lap beautifully smoking in white light from Rhoda's porch. And. Tucking me in. Many little tucks, remembering how to push into the little boy's side and lean her arm over his chest. I steal a kiss. He catches one on the bound. It's real. I gasp. He falls off the bed. "A conscious kiss." "I haven't had one of those in a --- --- ---." "Come here again." I cry out. He cries. That's after we've said our prayers. This morning I say the rich girl is the girl whose father ---. They don't talk about it. "Your big finger." My innards quite butter. Yesterday Julie about films. The woman drawing my head at the Carnegie. Being able so easily to say "Do you pay" to the stubborn man. "I'm going to do a bad thing." Being with him in his ranging freedom and incongruous humbleness, myself seen really from somewhere else, the way I stare. "I'll learn to talk like you veryfastthroughmynose." The little boy who without waking and with a fierce fire in his head runs through the upstairs of the farmhouse screaming and is afraid to sleep. - Keefer Rooms. Opening the stair door into the third floor sky-lit white. In an undershirt, with a razor in his hand, old man I mean to say, embarrassed. I have much to see and want to be there to see it. Canvas jacket on the back of the door: your winter. The way the blanket is squared on the bed. The unforeseen paintings' colors. An imp in the corner. Seeing the new long face looking toward them saying "color study." This distinguished mobile face. The way the upper lip pulls back grinning, I want to flee, it's Roy, he is too beautiful and will be mean - his embarrassment is because he's flattering - I rattle in the door fleeing - but on Robson and in the library faces 'with freedom,' I see, or they, seeing mine. Cheryl's face as we stand by her prints, contracts, the Auschwitz design in the night sky, souls' escape. Small spirit in burning wind. Is. "She gives us her blessing."
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