| aphrodite's garden volume 10 part 6 - 1989 november-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
21st November 1989 The difference between what's seen and what's known distracts, she says. The centre of the model, no the space-frame of the model, isn't the space-frame I'm in the centre of. The separation is like being wall-eyed, one of the eyes turns off. The mind can superimpose and sustain simultaneity Light binds space and time into a continuity. She suggests the sun as the button of the two orders. OF boton bud. If there is inability to experience the new concept of the universe The real picture is formulated in the mind through the image which makes cognition possible Thinking and logic can secure a physical position in the world of material reality, but can't account for what feeling and intuition sense about the unknowable and irrational. When vision and light are on the same plane in the physical space of the object, there is no way of illuminating the substance of the thing perceived. Space is coextensive - everything - flawless. Physical and conceptual space are analogical but different, we could say. 'Ideal space.' Orientation. We are in our own bodies by analogy with. 23 Monteverdi in the cathedral. When Linda Perillo stepped forward and sang the Deus Canticum Novum, which is Alessandro Grandi not Monteverdi, I stared at her so unblinkingly that my vision changed and I had the whole cathedral as a field, mostly dark with here and there a flare of white, she in a small focused spot, the brass flashing, songbooks brilliant white, edges separated off, dizziness and marvel. Here I see it's generalizing description not standing in it. Wondering whether her high notes were doing it. A thrilling sound, the most thrilling possible (I could hear how brass had human voice in it), but I left it to try the vision changes, which didn't come with the same intensity later, which might be to say I wouldn't go as far with them. It was like being in heaven, seeing a host, but I was frightened too as if I might faint or die. "I'm getting ready to die" I thought. Body sighed. An inhibited man. "Do you never think of saying nice things to me or do you think of them but not say them?" He says them to himself and then it seems they are old. He wouldn't have told me his eyes unfocused too and he saw the songbooks folding and opening like a rise of birds. "I would never have known, doesn't that seem a loss?" "In a way you don't know now either." [He made] A wonderfully cooked breakfast. I wouldn't say. You have to show yourself more. Then, at the garden, I fought with him about taking responsibility for his project and not leaving me to supervise the posts. I said I wouldn't praise him any more. That will be uneasy for me as if there can be no connection without my generosity. I always want to tell things. Dame's rocket he thought was his. "Noble piece prize." Maybe I'm getting ready to find somebody who talks. And then the sex won't be as good. Is it good now? He doesn't take responsibility. I go out and touch him in willing serving ways and he won't learn to touch me, so in the fucking, which is for us both, I feel as if I am being given my turn. He has the effect of leveling me. I have my little evidences that I'm distinguished elsewhere but with him, because I'm with him, I'm any middle-aged woman lucky to have a young lover. And a lame woman lucky to have a lover at all, but that's at a remove, it's less the question presumably because the other is more the question. Meantime I don't have other offers. I know when I get toward the end of the week and need him I'll ask for him and get him. There's nothing like holding him and there's nothing like fucking him. But it doesn't cost him anything and still I have to feel grateful. Because he doesn't thank. Dreaming - a shop with hundreds of symbolic ornaments. Brass sunflowers is what I remember. As if for ships or cars. But also urns or vases with the same thing in glaze. A shelf of maybe tea bottles, large ornamental things, antique dining car urns. Going into a sinister park or garden toward some particular spot of mine. It's into a railway carriage where a woman has hung her laundry on the wall, many pairs of gloves. Talking to an old woman about her past. "I used to do everything differently," patting the 2x4's above a door, a young woman. "I used to " she shapes something with her hands I don't quite understand. She's distracted by something invisible on the lawn slope. "I have to talk to my father for a moment." Her father is dead. She takes off a wooden ring, ringed, that communicates with him through its rings. (Mabel Richards may be dead.) It is winter though still colored. I am in winter illness. A Kant paper and many essays. On weekends I think I should work but I don't. Mondays yes. What else. At the garden furious with the incursions of the builders. They're parking on us again. I whined to Henry [building supervisior], he was impatient, all the while at the garden I was inner whining complaint, wanting a kind word from R. Away from the place it's alright but I'm realizing how much of what I have and can do these days depends on 'good humor.' The whining mind can't fight, that's the point. It's helpless. Fighting needs resolve and doesn't say much. It would just stop praising and see what happens, but resolutely. Even discovering I'm cranky helps. - Plodding at school without a sense of what it's for, other than salary. Alright what could it be for. The exercise of writing papers. I'm disheartened by not getting A's. Does Tietz know enough to..., I'm not inspired by the possibility of his knowing something. What could be the challenge in it. I love making gardens. Why isn't that enough? I'm capable of something more impressive. I love the color and motion of plants. As if I need philosophy to fight against men's prestige and tricks. 25th Yesterday morning before Eric came to paint the ceiling patches (I was depending on his alarm clock and it didn't go off - was late for the 8:30 tutorial) dreamed I was in his room sitting at the head end of the bed. The bull came in and lay on his bed toward the foot end, and with his hoof firmly indolently pushed me. I said I'd leave. Eric seemed distressed. I got out and felt my pockets, glad to find my key. But I didn't go straight home, was on the esplanade walking in the night etc. From the dream gathered I shouldn't leave Eric my key, so left the door open and rushed away in most beautiful unabsorbed morning light. Last night a letter from Eric says, You can always know, Dear Ellie, when the forces that are laying a dream on you are lying, because they either have their back to you or else they are languishing on a couch lying. Lying and bull? Last night another bull, the other kind, the real sinister bulk with little cold eyes. Being red a target. I thought of myself as red if anything, a red girl, red ski-jacket. The bull is red too. What am I trying to see. What the bull represents. Why I was frightened when they weren't. The bull said I, I, I in a low voice staring without seeing. The bull might see a red patch but it doesn't see the little girl. It can't form a sentence. "And the Cauldron has shown me herself with her leg tied to the leg of the Yin." Half of it elsewhere. But it's true the Union of Men is astoundingly fading out of the Russian empire which always seemed most repulsive because of its monotonous masculinity, which looks like grey suits. Getting onto the other side could mean in a two-chambered mind, which has to be a metaphor, but with what limit. I think [Phil] Hanson is who I'll work with - he loves his daughter - and is in the right areas - and I think is not a mod star man. And then smack on the floor of two letters - the lower one in brown envelope, English handwriting, Scotland. It's Luke I say aloud. Hello, It's me, the tall dark one in the distance. A while ago it occurred to me that for years I had done so many things without being aware of my reasons for doing or even thinking them; yet I always managed to seem methodical and secure when looking inward. It comes as a revelation to find myself the opposite. I have spent a lot of time in these last months thinking, feeling, and arguing about you and with myself. It is a relief to no longer think of writing because I have to. Now I need, and want to. I miss you a lot, though I can't know you very well anymore. There is a lot I want to talk about with you. When we spoke last on the phone I was very hurt at our lack of communication. How did you feel? Hello, it's me, the tall dark one in the distance. I wake right up. I'm struck deep. This is the one where he claims himself in me. He's out the door and on his own and he finds himself free to say what he wasn't free to say. A small Dickensian room overlooking a wall. I think I know it well. I said, It isn't true, I don't think, that you can't know me very well anymore. You can know me as well as you want to - you can if anyone can. Sat 28th Kant. "I got a letter from your big brother." "Why did he write you a letter?" "Because I'm his mother." "And am I his father?" says the little being in red beret. Marking essays and exams. Barbara zips - I spotted her among 160 - it is worrying to see how large the difference between her grip and their fog - I mean for me [having been a good student] to see what it means to be a good student. The day it hailed in the city, cold black water standing in sheets across the road, green and yellow cut shapes beaten off the trees lying heaped among white, at the garden partly pulped green, the whole so beautifully live and bright, walking in the clean freezing untimely air, huge banks of discharged cloud reflecting pink light - pink-white light so intense - the pond flooded, up around the poplars, seeping over the dyke even, standing in the orchard. In the laundromat today, a man smoking. I asked more or less civilly, explained etc. He was an East End drinker, puffy dignity, not large. Bulged his eyes in what he thought was an intimidating stare. In the end I whipped the cigarette out of his mouth and threw it in the street. I couldn't have done it so neatly if I hadn't known something - it was so satisfyingly sudden and right. Then I had to do some yelling, Vietnamese people standing listening to white people fight. "I'll remember you, douche-bag" - this as he's leaving however. "I'll have no reason to remember you." I go on being sick in my stomach. 9 November
"Knowledge is for that which moves by that which moves." 12 Burghley Road. In the city looking at dates, under April 4 in someone else's writing maybe Cath's is a quotation I gave him. March R on a building seen from between buildings, from the back, from a distance. A wrecked area. Will March T be the apartment behind it? I see the chapel glass of the neighbour's beautiful window, but not colored glass, clear white - so that in between will be Burghley Road. I drop in - last time it was empty waiting for demolition, this time again it's inhabited, by a simple woman? And her mother? Two women who as I speak with them come to seem more quirky - she says to me "You looked bohemian" - I think she's disapproving - "and gleeful" - oh sees the freedom - she's dressed as if for office work, the place is a bit done up, still temporary. "They intended to sell it but it wouldn't sell?" They don't know about the place on the other side of the wall, which I know from other dreams. Rowen/Luke is with me, rolled down the steps with a touque over his face. Pretends to faint, but might really be - I see the two of them who I now think are lovers riding horses to the back acres, Rowen with them on one of the saddles. Should I be concerned? I watch from a high-up window. There's his red hat in the grasses, he's between me and them. I'll call him and run and intercept him so he's not lost. Running fast toward the track, I jump a single wire maybe 3' off the ground. There was a moment as I was clearing it, I wondered if I should try jumping it, but that was when I was already over, an easy sail. Then there's the little boy in red jacket not hat. It seems both of them work in film, one with images from Japanese? experimental genre, the other in some aspect, maybe shipping or such. 13 As if the air grew naturally around us in a circle; for in this case it would be by a single faculty that we would be held to perceive sound, color, and smell, and sight, hearing and smell would be a single sense. [Aristotle De Anima probably] 16 Process - have to do something different with early prep - what happens - I jib at the welter of inconsistent description - there's a culture I don't want to master - it's a sucking bog - I think its masters are dead folk I wouldn't want to be like - I don't want to assimilate to them. Balance in the midst of change, it says. Okay. I'm sailing close to the line - I wanted to say - they will put me on probation for a term likely. Defer my grade and take next term with other people - apply for Explorations [grant] - do the herb garden - summer film - UIC. That I am unwanted in a community that pets beer boys like Dominick and promotes poor wrecks like Todd disgusts me but what would break my heart wd be my students thinking I'm a fool, and I have to be prepared for that. Childishness, it said. I wept. It means, not looking around and calculating. What I used to do. An intense irritability in relation to male stupidity in conjunction with power - its symbolisms - tones - pleasure when intelligence is in power, as Ray or Dirk [Brinkman]. 19 Nellie walks in, grey hair, face uniformly red, like an old post, cautious and resentful. "Life is good" she says in her old Nellie tone, yet there's something miserably stuck in her. As she's leaving she says, You look quite a lot older too. Is that a class blow, or was she resenting the old assessment in my eye? She walks away, I stare after her studying the dwindling shape of her walk, it isn't a hunch but maybe it's the raised shoulders, yes it's that, of a buzzard. The block of Hastings before where the bus stops, wet cement, years' familiar alien shopfronts, a lift of happiness to be coming home to once a week love. Will he be asleep in my bed? He's at the TV table in Rowen's room reading. I only want to get close up to him. Put my whole palms onto the love his body's made of. His remarkable sweet life. He leans his head onto mine, he doesn't refuse, he puts both hands on me too. I'm not hot, I'm quiet, let's just cuddle. Remarkable sweet life - I mean something by that. The quality of his chest or shoulder thin light flesh over light firm bone. It can't be good health because he's often sick, but it is as if perfectly even clean bright health. Like daylight. He's rested. He comes after me. We turn off the TV and the light and he fucks me. I'm folded so my knees are over his hip, or at times I have the sole of my left foot standing on it to open me more. We have our arms close around each other and sometimes kiss. I hold his head in my hand when I can to feel his warm hair. I stroke his so fine-grained tongue standing brightly in water. He folds the strap down off my shoulder and pulls my breast, and meantime fucks me the way he moves leaves, steadily, watchfully a good worker who doesn't spill accidentally but still sees the sky as he goes (I said that to make you laugh). Oh my. Dreaming a hotel $50 a night. They resent it, I say it's very good for Paris. About philosophy. I think there is going to be a shift and I want to help make it. Michael Fox took a step. Hanson is on an environmental panel. It isn't just 'environment,' it has to do with giving credit to bodies. Now I have to look for allies and go more discretely and perceptively. 20 Standing with beautiful Mike [Kaiser] in the mud. I've put the string where I want the path. He resists politely. I know I'm the boss but the way I'm going to get it is by keeping him standing there discussing it until he agrees. It is hard to be certain if I stand back in the orchard and look at the land's fall. I'll risk taking the level. We hold a board against the string [and set the level onto it]. I feel him thinking I can't know better. I have to push his will with mine, and at the same time pet his pride. We discover his board is two inches low at this end. "Funny, it was level before." So he'll just raise that one two inches too. No, by the time it gets over there it will be more than two inches, I say. Go by the string. It will be a lot of fill, a foot and a half by that end. He doesn't want to do it. I coo about how wonderful the drainage will be. And so on. Last night at the last Invisible Colours show, Louie tells me Jam is in Hong Kong again but before she went she invited Louie down to discuss house business. Offered her a joint and brought out visual work that, Louie said, she didn't like. But it had "an amazing amount of energy," surprising warmth. I heard this stricken with fear and envy. She's still being them. I said so. Louie told how she'd ridden with them after a party. It was maybe a setup, recruitment. They asked such stupid questions she gave stupid answers. I touched her shoulder. She jumped out from under my hand - don't you think you've recruited me either. That was desolating. 21 I come from school to the garden and find the herb garden paths making, an actual level across top and bottom, so much good labour done not by me. 23 Wake in the dark. Before school I have to go down check this and that with Mike. It's raining hard. If I go in school clothes I'll be cold all day. So on. Their last day tomorrow. I've bin lying awake seeing the herb garden, made this week. 6" cedar holding up the corner. First perimeter path and all the ears. Posts! Their beautiful selves, Rohan and Jenn working seriously getting edgeboard right. Mike so entirely lovely, high dome and girl's pretty hair, stubborn and diffident. I love them for making my garden. Morning and evening I come look and that's all, I come and marvel. Cedar and blue drain rock, rubble under the paths. There are steps. A stretched step at the top of the arcade. Here Mike phones, he's got an extra day and an extra crew, he wants to finish. I run out to Muggs, is she asleep, no, reading up for her brother. Her tone sometimes, evidently false. There's a reason but I don't know it. Environment colloquium this aft. What do I want to know. Why people are bored if I talk about the garden - the way unleashed I do also brag and bore like Ed. 24 Today I knew what to do abt Tietz. Asked to see examples of best MA writing, said no I wdn't write about anything that interests me, no I won't write creatively, no I won't do one third commentators, yes I understand it's a community that wants people to join a discourse already established, and are there any women's theses? No if they're not the best ones I won't read them. I've been so hard line he's backing up: maybe you don't want to learn it? he sez. I'd like to do it deliberately, I say, Then I can still do it the other way. Meantime Hanson is listening and I assume reading the conversation correctly. (He goes through his files and finds me a "first-rate" woman Kantian.) [Patricia Kitcher] Then instead of going to Tietz's seminar I take the two hrs for Robson St and delivering film to Customcolor and drinking coffee at Starbucks, shopping, and in the dark, hurriedly, hoping not to be late at daycare, having a look at today's herb garden work, the middle beds. Some dirt to the outside edge. We're working toward the core. The thing is so subtler than it was, twelves and elevens. Sunday 26th Day like granite, granite-colored. Speckling rain, dull tapping. I'm supposed to mark papers and am in the dark unpleasant pressure of should, yesterday all day gnawing wrong food too idle to feed myself properly and then in rebellion watching bad TV rather than bend to the task, which actually I don't mind. The garden's dead plants like rotting fur unpleasantly plastered onto drownd earth. Ducks a-sail on very wide untidy pond. There are few birds I said morosely. Next moment up rose two hundred starlings from the orchard floor. Have soft flab folding over my belt, and a fat ass. The unnecessary Aristotle pending, and cynical Kant for useless Tietz. (What have I never liked about Tietz? His color. Gravy brown, shit brown. I mean, that he's opaque, frightened, dully egotistical and holed up in the 1800s.) Alright, what's it about. 27th Coming, last week of classes. 28th 5 in the morning. From dreaming a film. I saw Paul Kinsella at M-P's door standing with T and presumably R, matted hair, both of them, thick wooly hair, I guess maybe from swimming. I'm watching a video it says Paul made for his friend. A little chair with lights on that spell Z. It's amateur but not too bad, the chrome shows when the lights come on and I recognize a little chair of his that I know. Then a real film in black and white I'm watching agape, saying to myself, what is it about this. The heads and buildings are as if real size - I look away and check - but there is something beautiful and interesting in the proportions. It travels fluently through interesting space, at the end a lagging pan after the back of a truck, a pan whose lag is right, ie it swivels to follow the truck but it goes slowly as if to see the seeing, as it goes. The sort of seeing is photographic of a certain kind, volumes - I'm seeing the squarish shape of a head. (Haven't said Philip's river film that had me agape this way, by filming continuously from a boat let to drift in a slaggy stretch, sometimes bumping. The boat drifted, the camera decided to see. I was full of joy in every disclosure the way I was in Lis's film. David Larcher's. "Phil that was absolutely wonderful." Coming to the projection room door at CFDW.) It was probably somewhat fisheye. Philip Hoffman (1979-1989) river 16mm, 15 min At school, will I tell them what I think? Will we have a real session this week again? About paradox - paradoxos 'incredible' - paraplegic - disordered thinking or opinion - parathinking - With students sometimes, the love. 29 Wednesday, at home I thought, working on de Anima. And then, no, I will not. In some pain because RM cut me last weekend and I don't know why. So I go to Van Dusen to have some life away from the gnaw. Go along talking rudely to ugly plants. "You're ugly." And after expensive lunch joyful in the Western North America section juniper uva ursi and then beautiful manzanita in all its stems. 30 Anne to say Opa died last night, did I know? No. I don't care. He wasn't alive for me. Anne was quite deep-struck, she was holding him and he gradually stopped breathing. "He was such a fighter." I don't forget he was a patriarch who saw me as one of the class of higher domestic animals. Times he stood praying in a portentious voice as if we were praying to him and his big red pitted noses. A genial twinkle, sure. Louie phones. I tell her abt this man outliving his life by ten years, absorbing the time of fine middleaged women. And about not wanting to go to his funeral where they will talk about heaven. She giggled and then I did too. Fine time talking to Ingrid [Harris]. "I'm so glad you're going to work on that, it's fascinating." Seeing and 'seeing.' Last class. The heavy Fridays until the last twenty minutes. Wade says he wishes we'd talked about god. I have them talk about god. It was the best goodbye, getting to see each in their beautiful selves. 2nd December A woman and man sunk in having things to show - a house - a mountain - carpets - candlesticks - Sepik River masks - linen nightgowns - stories and explanations about all these things. [department Christmas party at Larry Resnik's house] Ray came and stood in front of us, Hello chaps. Letting himself be boldly embarrassed. His Mary made me sad, not what I thought, someone so boneless and fine-drawn I daren't speak to her. An ironical mouth I didn't want to risk. Phil's wife too pretty and too fortunate, a mean girl. 3rd With Sue Wendell and Ingrid on a couch, talking about Audrey McLaughlin who somehow in spite of her social lies, fixed jaw, jerked nods, and unringing platitudes about this great Canada of ours is elected NDP leader. Sue said when she gives students an F she asks them to come see her and tries to figure out what's keeping them. Some of them are very scrambled, I say. There's usually a reason, she says. They can't afford to think clearly, for the time being. Joyce speaking, I realize now. Helen like that. Standing being shown things by her I was in the blanked discomfort of unacknowledged harm. What do her fabrics say - "I've never worn this. Larry doesn't like it. He says it looks like an old bag. I like clothes that don't have seams." The house is in the top rank of the British Properties financed by Wittgenstein's refused fortune. Mary in the corridor asked about the household god. I went and lifted the skirt. There was a square pubis with a genuine crack - I mean the wood had cracked it seemed on its own. Then Helen between us explaining blindly and both of us melted away. Touching the crack. "Ray is threatening to carve a god." "Is there a resurgence of paganism among the philosophers?" "I hope so." So what does it mean that they lay flowers under this New Guinea figure whose stool is supported by a much smaller replica. They have approximately female bodies but long elaborate bearded heads. Helen's head looking back at it is quite sagged pleated and genderless in its frame of female hair. When the magic goes out of the figures they're thrown into the forest to rot, white people find them and take them away and sell them and buy them. Letting myself be patient, dull, obedient, an unregistering mirror. How cd it be different - what wd I've liked - to be dilated behind the eyes, more space inside without being opaque to the outside. I guess it takes more speed and more slowness. Don't know. The way Ray came and stood in front of us, ready to crack jokes and seeing kindly too. Sunday, rain. Kant paper. 5th [Helmer Dolemo's obituary notice from the Grande Prairie Herald Tribune] Mary's [my mother] horrible body, unleashed bulge of tit and belly unsuitably dressed in bulging crochet. Somebody said that sort of female body makes us see female powerlessness. I don't know why it should except that it's a used look. Fucked out. Her hands shook tilting the soup bowl. I hardly looked at her face. Pushed her on the bus, 'Bye. She brought Rowen a book called How God gives us Chocolate.
How does the lie survive, that masculinity gives us what physical universe gives in fact? And equatorial people for foreign exchange for landowners and the women beaten by the men who get drunk on their wages. Angry, yes. "Your wife will be like the fruitful vine and your children will stand about you like olives." A psalm Opa claims to have been given before he married. And lo it came to pass. A covenant between men is what it is, a covenant men make with masculinity. Serve the masculine principle and you'll live at ease everywhere confirmed in your own opinion. The masculine principle is the devil and Jesus may have refused it or maybe not but still he's part of the plot because women and children's identifying with him is what gets them into the ideology that's used to fix them. Did the C from Tietz collapse my potency? Yes. Trying to fuck Sunday night eventually disgusted. What's this monkey thing going in and out of my far end. If I haven't the joy to carry myself he's collapsed in my sight, to the resourceless lover he is on his own. "You have to tell me," he whines. Why don't you just investigate for yourself! "I can't tell." No in fact you can't but you could if you weren't too scared to pay attention. [untranscribed Kant notes] 7 Two nights ago Trudy at the curb in very short pants, very high boots, hooking I assumed. Last night looking from above I see R has changed the house garden, put bricks across on the oblique, many, and granite setts. Changed the plants. I don't like what she's done and think I'll take all the bricks away since they're mine (here Mike and his bricks). Then the garden in the basement. They've moved stuff in, having to move it out of somewhere else. Covered the bricks with a brush to hide it. Seeing the garden changed was very convincing, had a moment just now believing it again. I go up to a corridor where the second door should be Robert MacLean's. He turns around. Grey tweed jacket. Says his name was Alan, Alain, and will be again. [allein] 8th
9 Falling asleep: the physical universe is the soul being made - if I'm making soul that's where I have to make it. This morning still in bed: ( lost it). If I hadn't been lame I wdn't've spent so much time in backwaters, where I still am. I haven't been taken up. Thinking this after reading a determinism paper I wrote for Estall [undergrad]. I didn't know it was exceptional to lay things out like that. All along a strangely damped reception. 11 Over the East place flying on a sawhorse - people arriving, R and two women, and others, who don't see me, I'm very high - to the Konrad family's old house southeast of the church, sort of at Friesen's. A little house with something rich and orderly in it. Rich colors glazed over to protect them, interesting old objects well preserved. A little room with a west window beyond this one, which has a window into it. The grandchildren come here, a lot of little boots in the cellar. Why when I was looking for a place west of Valhalla didn't they tell me about this one? Which is so sound and good, and still surrounded by grass right to the doorstep. "I think we have to understand how virulent and malevolent sexist feelings can be," he said in a telephone interview. "Whenever a social group rejects its subservience, as women everywhere have been doing, it threatens those in power." 12 Roberto smiling in his vacant friendly way comes to speak to me where I'm working with a pick digging the rose bed. "It's very hard work for a woman." I watch his smile straighten out quite slowly while I blow. I blow, I don't have a moment knowing I'm going to. Yelling is not hard but it still takes a push to say 'woman.' He kept saying he didn't mean it like that, he was admiring me. That was it - the queasiness of being admired for what's normal - having unendingly put myself in the position where I feel myself to be falsely exceptional. Dusan came afterwards, I don't know whether reassuringly, to talk about the shed lock. He wants to be working on the grand projects too. He offered to complete the drain ditch at the foot of the herb garden's south-east corner. - I have a sore throat from yelling. A blast of, not rage, wrath maybe. It wasn't Ed's sort of snarling rage, it was harmless (I think) but flashy. An oughtpour - outpour - meaning: don't do it any more. 13 Days in Kant, yesterday in his logic trying to feel him out. [Kant notes] 15th Working on Kant six days straight, I have more and more piles of paper and still don't know what to say and am in fear, seeing myself cut down. What is it - tears - pungent cold sweat - what fear - that Tietz was right in his C+, that I've been rationalizing inability - either that I used to be able but now am broken or wrecked, or that I was only ever able up to a point. Here I want to tear out the page - What should I do. Shd I stop for the weekend. 16 What I did was clear off my desk. Freaking at the task of, in scattered hours over three months, getting into the model of someone in another language, in another century, well enough to be able to produce a version of it which 1) makes it coherent where it is not; 2) considers objections of specialized minds working in a different century from within a tradition whose terms of reference I also don't know but suspect to be irrelevant; 3) is comprehensible and pleasing to someone whose judgment is consequential although not interesting to me; 4) while making sure this mind stays optional. 18 On Friday aft I was in the bathtub sobbing, cracking, feeling the children in school contempting me. I was smart and after many years I made them know I could do what they couldn't - but cracking, I felt I wasn't smart anymore. I fought for seven days. Haven't seen Rowen in two weeks, hadn't seen Rob, lost, overwhelmed, Saturday night I realized I could do a reading of just one passage, I wouldn't have to synthesize impossibility, I could do what I'm good at, close reading and subtle paraphrase. Then Sunday I wrote until I saw what had been holding me: the god Kant is willing to posit is his god in fact: systematizing intelligence is his subject, his method, his aim and his drive. He's stuck in a reverb, and that's the superimposition he's trying to separate. When I wrote that I said, Okay, that's it, and went looking for Rowen. Had cabbage soup at Carnegie in a zonked state saying to myself this taste is taking a long time getting from my body to my soul. And then went to the garden and saw Rob sitting quiet in his garden with his hair backlit. Joyful smiles. Zonked leaning. Do you want to come to my house for a cuddle? "That's what I came down for, not to work." It's always, nearly always, awkward getting it in, but much happiness when it's all the way there. I keep having to marvel that that should be so. My heart springs open and I hold him tight. It is not him in the way he is when I see him. It's very level. Like two beings of the same kind. Am I in him then? I seem to remember his darkness, the flavour of it, unsayable particularity. - Sunday early, 2:30, before the alarm rang I seemed to hear a different alarm. Dialed Luke [in London] and turned the light off again. Two hours, I'd thought maybe one, with his voice and the other voices in his house. Roy's quiet blunt South African sound shouting at Josh, Josh protesting. Jedd or Ezra singing at the table. Illy says goodbye. The ocean's floor crackles with starry silence. Little beep voices of some computer starfish. Undersea and outer space, night all the way though he's in Sunday morning. The disquieting tone of some insincerity. He's trying but he's off. He collapsed in Edinburgh, "I couldn't sustain it." Yet we had a burst when I told him about Roy's room to let card. "So it was carefully chosen language that brought you into existence." "I don't think my friends notice this, but I'm quite careful with my choice of words." "I've noticed that. You were always like that even when you were a little boy." 19 Dreams. Last week, new houses at the upper level, I climb to see the farthest. It is not a new house - quite an old house, about to be demolished. The garage? Boarded up, I could get in the upstairs window off its roof perhaps. Inside it's dim, interesting, quite orderly but empty, with candle flames sending a quiet searching light over the far sides of the room. I'm just leaving when I think to look in the other room. Under the side table there's the still bulk of a corpse wrapped in a white sheet. This one has stayed with me through days holed away in Kant's network. It was like a hippy squatter's house. Two more I don't remember. 22 Abt seeing Joyce yesterday. Rowen to school, take the bus down, half hour in the market, buy a bundle of mimosa, yellow tulips, red and white striped tulips, freezia, meet KD Keene on the way out, Mills College and that Ray plays harpsichord. Three things to show Joyce. The herb garden design, "This is wonderful." Yeah. James Quandt's review, and this one she takes further, her face steams up, amazingly, more as she gets to the end. Then she reads me the best parts. "He really sees you, 'bracing, resolute intelligence,' that's true." And more, to excess, I didn't understand why she was thanking me for showing it to her. And then a page of xeroxed gobbledegook from Don Brown's course. She laughs, I laugh. That's right. Long silence. She lets it be. I come up with what I need to ask. "When I said I was doing this, you said it was wonderful. I don't understand why it's wonderful to do this nonsense if I could be doing this other." "It is wonderful," she says. "It is the steel girders that make something float. It's your struggle with your father, that you have to make something of. If you don't make something from it, it harms you." "It seems to me to be a spiritual danger," I say. "It's the contrary," she says. "You mean, just for the exercise?" "Yes."
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