| aphrodite's garden volume 14 part 2 - 1992 march-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
19 March Days in the herb garden. The little leaves in their kinds. Self-seed babies. Columbines. Bit of cleaning up old stalks, weeding. Perennial clumps in nice dark dirt holding up their leaves burning with light. 22nd Friday night. There's an awkwardness about Francois' letter, she's coy about the pictures. I go sit in the big chair quite blank. What'd you want to do tonight. Some while later the thought arrives I immediately say yes to. I'd like to go see Rob. She has something to say. She's figured out what it was about the letter. When she says only part of it there's still a snarl. She says the whole of it and there's that instant lightening of the air that gives us into inspired intimacy. We look at his letter together. The first time through I have inklings. They're just markers, something here about rope, an awkward repetition marking something here, this paragraph is about birth, I'll read back in the light of that. I say, second time through, as I'm approaching that para, He's not getting close to his birthday is he? Yes, why. I'll tell you in a minute. And then I show her the clues. But what's this guy doing in the womb with him before he's born - a guy with safari shorts long socks and brown shoes, who shows him to the place in the basement where the tiger has eaten the man. Oh!!! That's the man his mother was having an affair with, he's a minister, who'd dress like that too. And then I light candles, turn off the overhead, invite her to the big chair and tell her the story of the avocado seed. And what do I see, telling it. It's in the light of the man being held down, and why animal soul in a woman would have the image of a man. Are babies addicted to their father before they're born? A pre-oedipal father. And then: yesterday we work all day at the garden. I make a date with Rob for tonight. We come home eat Vietnamese beef soup have a fight. I say I'm done for the day, meaning go home Louie please. She says she's turned on. No kidding. I've been digging your plot for hours and now you want - She's thinking I'm saving it for Rob. That annoys me so much I'm going to spell things out for her. You don't want to know the structure. And really she's fighting like a kid. She's a stupid fighter. She won't take a cold look at her situation. Rather than that she'll take it into personal injury. She keeps bending it back to the voice of hurt feelings. Louie! Don't take it personally, take it as a fact. You have to want to know the facts because they'll free you. I get eloquent, rational and instructive. I entertain myself because she won't entertain me. The price of fighting with people who give me a guaranteed win is that I'm cold with the absence of joy of respect - when've I last had that - what'd I have to do to get it again - there's the direction - that is, what would I have to do to be able to bear it if I had it again. It's not just that she's a little wagging mooing lamb and I'm the tail-lashing wolf. She's wolf in lamb's clothing. "The stubbornness of bottoms is legendary." Passive-aggressive classic. A greedy thing, won't believe what a pusher she is, dressed in sweet deference. And at the end I see I've fallen for it again, I've fallen for saying all the bad things. What should you do instead? Wait till you're willing to say them yourself. It leaves me very revved up, embroiled, still fighting. Energy, say the cards. [Krishnamurti notes: 'the other' who gets through "I know this because I have marvelous dreams all the time - not dreams but whatever happens" what you have missed - that vast emptiness that immense energy, immense intelligence I have lived with death all my life. I have never carried any memories. especially in his meditations at night That benediction, that strength, that otherness came with gentle clarity, it filled the room and remained the boy's vacant mind Mind isn't involved in thought, which is what brain does The students can have conflict but you cannot ... You have to listen to them not react to it from your background ... You can be aware of the background and not let it react ... the unifying factor (in an organization) should be intelligence, to be free in the real sense and that freedom is intelligence ... freedom implies love, consideration. attention, cooperation, compassion brain cells and conflict we are each of us actually the rest of us death means the ending of attachments. with all your vitality, energy, intellectual capacity and with great feeling, and at the same time, for certain conclusions, certain idiosyncrasies, experiences, attachments, hurts, to die awakening in the night with that peculiar meditation watchful of thought making a memory of these meditations so each has a quality of something new and fresh in it. ... there is a sense of accumulating drive ... pain in the head ... vast emptiness with fathomless energy ... the movement had reached the source of all energy ... the whole universe was in it ... vastness and immense beauty observation substitute for thinking ... the act of attention. To look. Freedom is pure observation. Don't escape from sorrow. What takes place? Watch. The mind is very clear, sharp. It is faced with the fact. Suffering transformed into passion. From that arises a mind that can never be hurt. Can't you feel it in the room? I woke at three with a sense of extraordinary power, light burning in the mind. There was no observer. The testing was from the outside but the observer didn't exist. There was only that and nothing else. I sat up and it lasted three hours. In the very center of his brain there was a vast space in which was unimaginable energy Most unexpectedly that benediction, that otherness came with gentle clarity; it filled the room and remained. It is here as this is being written. clear, strong, impenetrable, and unapproachable ... whose intensity was fire which left no ash. With it was bliss. The past and the unknown do not meet at any point. The two have never met and will never meet. that face has been very carefully worked out not to allow his body to be touched third person 'the body' All that poverty in India ... this body too ... all that dirt ... he is so clean Death is always there, very close to you, to protect you. You are the world as the world is yourself while living to enter the house of death looking not with eyes only but with a thousand centuries the body ... the brain seemed to plunge into depths ... into states of incredible sensitivity and beauty 'the process' ... pain in head and spine, pressure ... ecstasy and joy ... being tanked up ... my face will be different tomorrow I do not know whether I returned ... they have burnt me so there can be more emptiness. They want to see how much of him can come The being left behind to bear the body's pain ... I am so tired but he is like a bird It is the child that gives it life That pain makes my body like steel and oh so flexible, so pliant, without a thought. It is like a polishing, an examining Continual dissipation of that consciousness which creates power, greed, envy, possessive care, vanity, fear and passion lost his memory of the past almost completely a bubbling joy, a living silence, an intense awareness like a living flame you can form other orders and expect someone else For you will not understand who is the beloved until you are able to see it in every animal, every blade of grass, in every individual. Telegu which he can't speak anymore a four year old child "the physical elemental" mistook Rosalind for his dead mother, died when he was 10 "I wish I could have seen it" came up my spine up to the nape of my neck then separated in two, right and left until they met between the two eyes just above my nose He is a boy not much older than I am. When he smiles it is like sunlight. He is strong like the sea, so that nothing can stand against him, and yet he is nothing but love, so that I could not be the least afraid of him.] Monday 23rd What kind of day is this. Flattish. Want the Belzberg [library] to be open at seven. It's open at ten. With Rob last night antsy and not getting to it. Don't know what to do. Working with Wittgenstein. The push and its anxiety. Thinking in other work too. I need to have a way to get into it and push. 24th A story I'm reading tho' the page is flaming. Boy who's left his things with someone and gone on to a new family. He phones when he's grown. Only his end of the conversation is heard. (The things are gone.) The writing shows me how I can write too. It's what I've needed to go ahead. There's something about character. David Helwig. I hang onto having found this writing. In the dream I'm thinking it's something about style but looking at it here I see the story. 25th Packing for Anne. Newspaper sheets, plates. Going farther. Packing albums. Two kids at a microphone using free time to practice. Black girl and smaller white boy. Going further on the plane, a group of four, same pattern. I'm singing going toward the records. Pop inflections. I know how to do it. But seeing the land stretching out bare as we've cleared stuff out, I want to sing differently. An African language coming out of my mouth. Someone looks at me. No I want to sing in relation to this beautiful clean distance of cultivated earth. Taken by feeling. It's quickly getting very big. Feeling into a way of singing and it grows almost instantly into an astonishing power. Origination. Surprising I can sing so loud, without forcing. Emotion wakes me. 26th At Joyce's house. I see from outside two upstairs windows with an oblique buttress between them so mine looked inland and hers toward the sea-light. Between them in a planter something large with a lot of dead leaves left on, rust brown. My way as a gardener would be to pick them off. Her side is like a big bathtub projecting into daylight with a screen of maybe bamboo growing at its foot. Inside after a session swinging on a long swing. Sitting at her dressing table looking at the stuff. A tray of something like acupuncture pins that are for the heart. Does she need heart medicine? I know I'm supposed to be leaving but I'm childishly hanging on. Earlier. Making a bed in the drier part of the house bush, farther from the toilet. Was it with Louie maybe. The blond man - my neighbour - comes with a look of wanting. You want one of us, it's her isn't it. But it's me. "I look at you all the time with such longing." I feel how it's been for him. I accept him in some way. But when he claims me with his arm in public I'm outraged. Trays and pots in an angular style, tarnished metal. I pick out the ones that belong together to take away, because they're good. A poet who's lived in this little house caretaking. - [Joyce] "How are you dangerous to men?" "I'm dangerous to their sense of being the boss - the most intelligent." "That's a fragile position." "They don't have any right to have that position - I should feel sorry for them?!" Her bathtub in light and air. The derelict sewer tub. Her dressing table and my mother's despised neglected femininity. A can of Johnson's baby powder, a table, a cedar chest, his strangulating string tie. His hatred of feminine self, ethereal golden girl-image. The ground floor derelict, the middle floor (she says) our common illusion about success, the upper floor inaccessible and unknown. It seems maybe he owns it. Saturday 28th Thinking about cleaning up emotional foundations. 30th Monday morning calm. Rowen brought to school, Louie gone home last night early (offside for yelling at Rob and Catherine)(a sexual leftover). What happened this weekend. Saturday morning I'm working on Cantor, Louie at the door, the cards have said I need to be alone, I'm suspicious when she wants to touch me, she'll siphon off my pitched intelligence. Later at the garden I arrive freaked about Choy and his boys banging on the porch, installing penitentiary spotlights. I don't feel it's fair to say so. It cracks out in something else. She disappears in a rage. The sort of dispute where I'm clamped forward over my solar plex or have my hand clamped over my eyes speaking from black solitude. Obviously I am impossible. The way I turn off and on. Obviously I control. They say it's bad and I think it's bad but it's better to control than to not be able to be with people at all. This in the greenhouse because the breeze is cold. What happens then. She says it's enough. I'll help dig her square. Run home because I'm going to a movie with Luke. Luke's forgotten it's Saturday. Rush back to the garden, it's dark now, but her jacket still moving there in the far middle. She's reverted tho', she's in that exhausted beleidicht mind where I'm simply altogether wrong. I won't stay for this. Then she runs after. The frogs sounding in a mass as big as the pond. Stand waiting beside the car. "I'm out of it now" she says. "I pulled a plate up in my abdomen. It was wobbling before." We're in her room sitting on the carpet. I'm very strung out, how is she. Okay now. Something fixes me. (What?) We go to Riff-raff. I know she'll like it. It will be a pleasure to show her Loach. What a good screenplay. Every one of the players. Perfect timing. Just how long a shot needs to be. Riff-raff 1990 dir Ken Loach, written by Bill Jesse Then is it lying in bed talking about enemies. The movie has fixed us both. An enemy is someone who wants to kill your talent, who doesn't care that it's decreasing the sum of intelligence in the world. I say Rhoda is an enemy because she tried to kill my work. I gave up on Trudy when she said (I said of Cheryl, you have to make a distinction between the person and their work, you can refuse the person but you have to support the work) "I don't see why." And Jam. "I never felt an objectivity in her, that she wanted other people's talent to exist." "That's my morality, I want there to be more talent in the world." When I say that I have a spark of tears. I want other people to want my talent like that. And here is what I left out: my enemies without wanting it or caring did raise my talent. Weds 1st April The round tank from here - north bench one step up - is a table of water. It overruns on the south edge and has no rim. The inflow valve in its buried valve box is on accidentally just enough so it brims constantly without sign or sound. The little plants in its shadow bed are established and pretty. Five o'clock these bright afternoons light strikes the tops of the geums, all there x4, right, left, inverted, across the water when you arrive from under the vines. It's not tuned yet. (Who am I talking to?) I don't know it yet. The greens are miscellaneous. A robin drops into the gravel quite large beside small plant humps. Writing awkwardly. An uncomfortable voice, maybe Mary Lutyens'. Yesterday in the library hungry to read, plunging through the life and death of Krishnamurti, what kind of life is this, can I see into it, especially what were the night meditations and are my solar plex wakings anything like them. This morning saying don't wander into talk, stay with the feeling, not able to stay with it, saying to myself it's because I'm not sitting these days. When I was with it feeling it as stress and pain. Remembering what it became in the bed at Nyingma. Reading starved for vindication of - what to call it - my saint times and ways - of intense privacy. 2 Working. The long struggle of sequency and simultaneity. In the Middle Ages they struggled to name, he says. And did they thereby earn the Renaissance when they had space again? In the Industrial Revolution the logic of difference engines prepared. And in the thrilling twenties my saints had space again, they had the space of experience. And in this digitizing time can I think there'll be a time of constitution I'm anticipation of? Is there a homeland I'm faithful to (the Romantics prepared the 20s), and do I have to struggle with the difference engine to win it? 3 The city of Is - Indo-European patriarchy - who made his leap to dry land - she stayed behind - the women's world of the underwater city. See, as through a glass / each twisty turn, each crossing pass / of threaded vein and artery / from heart to throat, from mouth to eye. [A.S. Byatt notes
an egg, a perfect O, a living stone Melusine a field of contest, marshy, where he struggles toward the castle the kick galvanic in deserts, in forests, in ruins and tombs, in empty vaults, and by the shores of the sea without rational souls in fantastic bodies, nourished by the mere elements unless they be married to a man an unnatural Monster and a most proud and loving and handy woman hearth foundress and destroying Demon Beloved Pan and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outward and inward be as one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as only a temperate one can bear.] Antonia Byatt, whose own story is about writing sisters, enfolding things I know alone with many things for other people. In her voice could I say anything accurately. Her tone is an opulent social machine. She could say that in it. It accepts far too much. Her photo looks porky. She's fat against pain, where Le Guin is dry and clean. Another woman tho' getting her size by imagining a man. Dorothy didn't (but Gordimer too) (and Lessing didn't). Byatt isn't in their league, and why? 'Sensuality.' It means she has no genuine ache of wish for other peoples' souls. No politics. She looks like an oiled frog. The reflections in oil. Love letters I'd imagine would be. I do know the ache the clarity the heart-speed of two notes to Robert MacLean - that no real love story. A.S. Byatt 1990 Possession Random House Driving toward lunch - where can I eat - the Hong Kong finally - thinking of the stories I know - newer stories than any of the writers tell. 4 Oh the work I could make. I list the titles. I write for it. See into a moment of beautiful image. As if I could begin anywhere and there'd be no end of beautiful work, no end of work's life. I feel as if I could tell Joyce this is what I want, help me do it. The difference of having an aim. 5 The Sunday Mary was here. Louie Luke Rowen. What can I begin to say. Rob in the vinewalk crouched on the gravel weeding in the cold wind with his hat squeezed on. Mary with Rowen and Louie up ahead on the herb garden sill. I didn't want to walk past him with her. Circled back to the greenhouse and then stopped and talked. She must have walked around the other side. "I didn't want to walk past him." Rowen's song with his black pants flying from a chopstick: O Pantsada our home and native pants. 6 Uncle John's house on Sennock Crescent. Louie with me seeing the space it deploys, the painted plates, carpets, art books, studio portraits, grossly accreted walls, thickly miscellaneously figured windows and floors. "Do you have relatives with houses like this?" "Yes I have relatives with houses like this." "Do they make you desperate to get out of them?" "Ellie is rather mean sometimes," says my mum. A house like that is a machine for fixing consciousness. "We're rich, we're a family" it says all day long (we're a royal family say the double front door, audience chamber and towering stair). And something else - this is difficult to say - the house is engineered to be a net of crossing lines that fix the people in it - I see steel wires coming off the painted plates - it's like a trap with death rays - I'm hesitating between saying something I think I know and discovering something more interesting. I'm not sure of more than the intense desire to escape. The perceptual stupidity of a painting of a young girl with flowers. The ignorance of the garden where no plant is chosen for its quality though he feels himself a loving gardener. What do I know about the consciousness of those who live there. What is it Louie and Michael know, and Rob knows in plants, and they're blind in. I'm thinking of it as a loss they couldn't resist but it might be a sense they were born without. It's a long mystery to me. What about Mary. I could hardly look at her face, I did it with such fearful deliberation. A white thick dry flabby face, the areas around her very weakly colored eyes magnified under glass. Thick white and creased like chapattis. I seem to always feel her hatred though she's agreeable and lively. Her hands shake more. Her appalling tight small claws she wears with oval fingernails now. The way she moves them. The way she gripped my shoulder rejoicing to hope my health is bad. The way she gripped Luke's arm (the way he looked over her head at a video screen when she hugged him goodbye). - I have a perception vs I perceive: "nominalizing transformation of a verb." 8 A condo to get old and die in. He's seventy. [My parents buy a condo in Abbotsford] If it were telling me I'm supposed to write, not joy but fear. Write what. Work for people's experience. Tell the lives I've known. 12 Today I don't know what to be. Sent out of the pleasure of Louie's company by a bad mood that made us fight. Having been with her for a day and night I missed Rob, did I? Something unsatisfied and sad. Or I missed something else. Wanted to be made real. And what's my work? Old in the mirror, shocked to be. Sore joints. Sore ankle. 15 David. What it is about him. When I see him I want something. The way looking at him is secretive. Oh he's beautiful. What is it I want. I want him to like me. Is that all of it? It's something like I want to incorporate him. I want to stare all the time. 17 I'd like to present a paper on feminist philosophy before I leave, with bibliography, inviting women from other departments. Margaret Whitford, Martha Nussbaum, Mary Tiles on Bachelard. 'Seeing' on the cover of a book. - Hypatia, who wrote on Diophantine algebra, conics, head of Neoplatonic school of Alexandria 416 AD, torn from her chariot, dragged to the Christian Caesareum, stripped naked, slashed to death with oyster shells and finally burned piecemeal. 18 Die Stillen im Lande. A lovely title. The chamber choir couldn't begin to get it right. A "modest string quintet accompaniment devised by Jon Washburn." I could've gone home then. The thin studied sound. Mennonite music was a surrounding mass of plain strong sound - the layers of interval perfectly firm moving inside its dark body - no edges of individual voices - heard from the balcony in the Clearbrook MB church in 1963, 1964. Opa and Oma's congregation, John Suderman's ecstatic choir. The Lutheran chorale and then 18th c English hymns it says. The Mennonites did not compose. Did not study vision, language, motion, character. But their music was democratic - Reformation music - every soul in it kind, at its level, skilled and able in building the temple of the moment. The temple is not internal, it is collective and physical but at the same time it is not material. The church is plain, the music inside it is a passionate mobile architecture in which each soul can know itself divine, divine because its longing is so beautiful. What else. The music kept earlier times alive, Johann Franck 1653, Georg Fickert 1758, Anne Steel 1760, Julie Hausmann 1825. Weide, Lamm, Bräutigam, Strome der Wonne, Herzen's Tür, Hirt, Au. Anne Rice's pornography in the bookstore before the show - Beauty's longing for the master. It's very direct, inflammation at the thought of mastery. The astonishing depth of real sex. How cautiously it's skirted. The way they look. The way they dress. The way they sat through the hideous concerto without protest. Their thickness. The rigidity of their hair. The affable familiar Germanish greetings amongst themselves. Prosperous clothes on the old women, shoulder pads. An audience of people my folks' age. I see that amongst them my mom would look quick and elastic. In the light of Anne Rice the hymns are looking remarkable. Long my heart hath panted / Till it well-nigh fainted / thirsting after thee. Gottes Lamm, mein Bräutigam. So pain gladly bear / From the Lord's tender care / Streams of bliss and renewal are flowing. O kindle, Lord, most holy / Thy lamp within my breast / To thee in spirit lowly / All that may please thee best. So nimm denn meine Hände / Und fuhre mich - that one was really beautiful, it was Oma, I was crying - Bis an mein' selig Ende / Und ewiglich / Ich kann allein nicht gehen / Nicht einen Schritt / Wo Du wirst gehn und stehen / Da nimm mich mit. The love in that, like a married love. And the one about the rifted rock, Now I'm resting, sweetly resting / In the cleft once made for me. Unter deinem sanften fittich / Find' ich frieden, trost und ruh / Denn du schirmest mich so freundlich / Schützest mich und deckst mich zu. 19 What is there more to know about being a child in a culture that spiritualized sado-masochism. Are the kids more eroticized. Is power eroticized. Is sex set in a form it wouldn't have otherwise. Or is there a form given to something that would be there, but derelict, otherwise. Reading Anne Rice with Louie in mind too. Is she a bottom because she hasn't seen through the nature of her own sexuality and so can't see mine? Am I fighting her to sophisticate her or to ruin her? Should we take it further. "The ego is literally a fearful thought." Sez a Christian book. When does fear know best. In Anne Rice there is a symmetry in the game, it's not gender segregated or class segregated, slaves are princes, masters can be fucked, whippings alternate with tenderly equal kisses, townspeople can for 15 cents ass-fuck a girl who in six months' time will be a queen, sexual vulnerability is all-day naked in the streets, pain and humiliation, coldness and willfulness are not forbidden but mined, the utterest vulnerability the most valued resource. And what this has to do with my times with T and J (on one hand) and C and L. And am I on the devil's side when I see their Christian passion as infant eroticism? (Jesus would see it too -) Is there a way to be saved away from its fixations into knowledge of the existing universe, other than going into it observantly? Anne Rice writes it as spiritual adventure, which I also know it to be. My question is whether having let myself go all the way into being a bottom I can be willing to let myself go all the way into being a top. And what's that. It's being willing to take responsibility for taking her as far as she can go. It's Easter Sunday. The way sado-masochism is institutionalized there, its style. 22nd A roof I have to cross, a barn roof, wide shallow peak, largely open. I'm creeping across and I see the plank I take hold of slip on its rafter. At the corner when I've reached it I see the strong black trunks of a tree offering a road down to the patch of gritty ground. - This is the dream that stayed with me today. These beautiful days working. It doesn't rain long, the sun comes out, I take an hour in the garden, congee in the Golden Horse, and sit with my sheets feeling sometimes a mind finely enough partitioned so I can see thru' from area to area. Happy. 23 Tuesday at the garden I found Rob trimming espaliered apple shoots. Knowing it was 3:30 and Louie could be showing up, took him to see the bower under the pyracantha and found myself without thinking reaching for his hand. Instant goodness. Nervous at the fuss she'd feel if she saw us. He leans forward, uncharacteristically puts his head on my knee, like one of those moments of physical memory. I'm annoyed to be guilty and uneasy with him, angry at her for that. This morning's dream somewhere in North Van. A film by Rob's cousin, an arts scene, T and R mixed with people in his community and theirs, howcome. In the corner one of his brothers who can't walk. I visit him in bed and come out with a camisole. It's dark, I feel a hard flat nylon lace. As if also from a corner I'm hanging onto the back of a sailboat and it rises. A man in the sky above it. Dream self is not amazed as it rises evenly a long way above the water. Hanging by my hands off the stern I say to the man in the sky, Is it alright if I get in? Getting legs up is maybe not possible. It sinks but isn't falling, sinks like a balloon. Friday 24 If it is suddenly ended, how does it feel. Sore. Imagining how it will feel when it's past. The way I'll be able to love the small signs of her and want to write her letters. 25 Woke often clenched in the middle. Louie's ditched me because of how I am. We won't drive across Saskatchewan. She's done what she said, stayed with me one summer and one winter. Has she taken the happiness out of my work, has she taken the balance out of my other connection. Have I had a year without pain because she was having it for me. Do I have to give my brain to processing the loss, and then my paper won't be good. If I sleep with Rob tonight will I like it. How long I've felt this coming, how long I've not been able to have confidence that she could bear herself with me. That brings tears. That's the spot. Was in the long experimental program often mourning, talking to her, imagining writing it - how the films would be more seen with her, how we'd expostulate about the pretentious one. Then Luke dropped me at the garden and she was digging in her yellow shirt. Should I walk around, will she avoid looking at me. One stare as I'm leaving. White face stiff with hate. Trapline at the end of the program. So noisy, such bad random sound. Sunday 26 Imagining if she killed herself, because she's staked so much on wanting it. What points toward it. Meeting Nina today. The cards have never frightened me so much. The anarchist girl on Denman. Betty's son maybe. I blurt it to Michael, "It's as if somebody's died, I'm thinking of all the things we'll never do again." (Michael is calculating, should he take advantage of this opening. I consider him. Well she can try it.) Rowen and I make a pink cake, I'm better enough. Where was I when I was staring at catastrophe. Is it where she is. Fear. 27 Monday. Going to begin the paper now but lingering mourning and reviewing. Oh Louie. you live bright one. I'm so sad feeling my real love was no help to you. [Opposite page, notes on Cantor and transfinite number theory] 29 Day 5. I dreamed Luke sitting on the floor while I'm working at something. You've been visiting Trudy?! I say. "I like it there." I throw cold water on him. Do it again. Have to go into the other room to scream. Screaming again and again so I can't get my breath, gasping. Wake terrorized in the solar. It's in the house on the farm. He's in the kitchen and I go into the living room. She's to the north the way she is here. (What of you would I like to keep with me.) The sense of unfinished stories. She'll have it too. What she could tell me when we look at people. The looseness and love of her photos. What do I want, sitting frightened shocked sore. Wednesday at the end of April, raining. The oven hissing. What's the truth. Louie had a ride on my sensibility, I had a ride on her compliance. Louie had to attach me so she could enact leaving me. This is not nearly as bad as breaking up with Jam. The dream (they say) says my mothering has been visiting defeat and rejection. It's true, my talented lively daughter has used me to break out of childhood. I dared ask where she'll go, and I'll be able to bear it too. 30 Taxes Visa Amex tuition telephone bill rent. It's physical pain and has five places, belly solar heart throat forehead. There all the time. Shifts. As soon as I'm idle it's singing so nimm den meine hände / und führe mich / ich kann allein nicht gehen / nicht einen shritt / wo du wirst gehen und stehen / da nimm mich mit. Under dei-nen sampften fittich / find ich frieden trost und ruh - don't like that last one, sampften fittich a damp quilt. (As if writing here is useless, pours into dead void, because you'll never read it.) The first one makes me think of when my mother went away and I couldn't walk - oh Louie it is unjust that you could so entirely believe you wanted to be with me and yet never figure out what I'm like, how to have it. Michael's cure is to tell me I'm a classic beauty, amazing how that lightened it. Okay now Tiles. 1st May What else lightened it (some) - touching myself - had a fast fine lingering cut - that doesn't say what it was - sweet lick of fire in the midst of endurance I don't know how to describe - old endurance. When she phoned me I had my head laid on its side on the floor, filled up with the silence of shock. "Where are you?" "I've been in such a death ..." (She was brisk compared.) A death zone. Just to have been reminded what it's like there. "There has to be another thing." I couldn't think what that would be but I saw or felt a thinner transparent spirit as if in our chests. "It's quieter - yes." 2nd What if I knew I could dissolve pain anytime, what if she weren't hostage either. Body sets the limits. Is it anything more than addictions. "I feel lonely when there is no elephant by my side. when an elephant comes to me I feel happy, happy like anything." A logging mahout. Is it addiction wanting to have you see exactly her quality, telling at least? For traveling, any kind of personal quality, places, food, weather. What else, writing, politics. And what, essentially, not? Power balance, scholarship, abstraction, lightness, strangeness, (height), equanimity. Saturday 9th A week later. The paper's done. Andrew gave it an A, Ray presumably's put me in for the fellowship. I've wiped Tietz off the record. The summer, oh the glittering summer, standing all around the streets. I was driving fast and sharp to UBC, to SFU. The herb garden from one day to another burgeoned. I won't sort the colors. Colors that by themselves I don't like, bright pink magenta of the spice rose, dark pink magenta of Zephérine Drouhin on the pole, combined in the tumble and from a distance are just riches. Louie - a face more far and individual - talking about what she knows in work. She sees a road she can take into distinction. She's distinguished when she sees it. "There is another teacher I like. She has studied Marxism. She has studied Taoism. She is the first Westerner I have met with whom I can feel myself. If she were a man I would fall in love with her." Library anxiety and how naming it reached Della so she would tell the whole story of what it does to the spirit to be a bottom. (A bottom is addicted to pleasure - a top is addicted to the control of pain.) And then the frivolity of confessing she fancies Michael, thinks she could fuck him. Well yes she could, he's fuckable doubtless, but what's she doing wanting to take a man away from me, it's an infant's progress, and if she does it where will she be, will she be ready to work? As I was. Well there cd be some good sex in it I can see that. She wdn't turn him into a fumbler. And Michael would have a win. And Rowen? Would have reasons to shift his loyalty, she has courted him with great energy. What should be my way. I should say what I want to say anyway. I don't want to be lovers with her, I've never wanted to. 10th These days starlings with mouths full of hay. 11th Monday morning at the Golden Horse. Rowen yesterday gave me a Mother's Day pincushion he made at school, broadcloth and nylon lace fixed onto a supermarket styrofoam plate. Pins lying loose at the bottom of my sewing basket he sat sticking into it. Also he sat patiently slicing all the fruit for the fruit salad while Michael stayed on and tried to suss how it's going with Louie. I had a present for Rowen too, that he loved, a brown polyethylene bomber jacket with airforce patches. Airforce Intelligence Miami. "Miami! The Golden Girls!" How the negotiations went. Saturday in the car off the Stanley Park road, floods of rain on the windshield bulging the black maple trunks, laying straight tracks of running distortion down through the tree from top to hem, rubberizing the downward arms of leaves. Harsh negotiations. I said, We see each other once a week as friends or once every two weeks as lovers, that's what I need to feel safe. Yesterday in the greenhouse. She wants me in her life forever. I say I want that too. I'll do whatever would assure her, I'll adopt her, but I want to be able to find a serious relation with a man too, I mean a serious relation. I say that listening to myself, what am I declaring. Want a man? she says. Yes. She plants her square. Later when I'm in the h.g. with Ro, weeding, she comes back for her roses (Louie! yells Ro running up the vinewalk), she's decided. She'll take the two weeks. I think that's wise. It's kinky. It lets me fool with my boy in peace. It lets her spread round having a life away. It gives us bedtime stories with Rowen. It lets us write letters. It could un-addict. 12 Blue bike. - Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more. Blake in 1788 The primary form of mathematical communication is not description, but injunction. In this respect it is comparable with practical art forms like cookery ... It is not out of order for mathematicians, each having obeyed a given set of injunctions, to describe to each other and to discuss amongst themselves, what they have seen and to write papers and textbooks describing it. But in each case, the description is dependent upon, and secondary to, the set of injunctions having been obeyed first. Spencer Brown 77-8 17 Paul Grant, Ros tells me, shortly after I last saw him, headaches, brain tumor, surgery, near death, his left side paralyzed, speech slow but seems to have his memory, asks about me. What I suspect instantly is that it's because he allowed himself to feel me [my work] that he crashed. This weekend hanging suspended, not wanting to do. For Rob it has to be this weekend or next, and can't be next, and so. Rowen tonight. Louie so undefended she's hearing her students' cries for help. (On the phone yesterday crying. She heard a voice saying Phone me. Her student, when she did phone finally, weeping with physical pain.) I know this writing is bad, I'm thinking about something else, partly in the tone of Henry James' Wings of the dove. Why I'd think I captured Paul Grant and wrecked him. The puzzle I go on unendingly with, is, what is the relation between 'openness' and death, and 'closedness' and prosperity? I was thinking last night, there's nothing I want from anyone now. I have connections more than ever before? And they are none of them connections to me. What else I have (that I didn't), a car, a credit card, a stainless steel cooking pot, a rose garden. A handsome son. And what would I like? (A grieved naggy feeling.) In my unsleeping night (it was a glass of strong tea I swallowed with Vietnamese soup) I dreamed I waited at a crossroads all night with the lights on, and in the morning the battery was dead. (Who was I waiting for - two people - Louie maybe - Luke or Rowen.) A sense it's my fault, it's my fault there's nothing happening. I chose away from bewilderment and fear and this is the price, a self I came to. There was a self I came to - here first and then up north - and when did it stop? When Jam betrayed me with them? I need to know exactly this. When Trudy moved in and started policing me? I'm living in such a way that they've succeeded in driving me out of it, keeping me out of it, and they live there keeping me out of it. Feeling how Joyce is useless in this. How did I come to it before. Over a while. Really hunting it. Into femininity and out through being taken for a man. Rigorously. Writing. - There the phone rings. Rob and I talking about the garden. Sulfur for blackspot. Rowen's birthday party. We'll be having birthday parties and weddings, good place for a wedding, the vine walk and herb garden, put the orchestra on the crossing path, wedding party stands around the water. He says, "I was going to ask you, not whether you'd marry me, but whether you would marry me." "Why would you want to ask me that?" "Because I like you. And there are so many strange people out there." 19th Corner of the table taken with 20 kinds of roses. Tuesday after the holiday - yes I wanted it and got it - fucked him last night. We get in bed, I'm very sleepy I say, he puts my hand on his thing which is hard and confined pointing down. Thinking of it now, the indented ring under the head, the ridge, immediately the sensation around my mouth I was having then, a swelling prickle. In the aft, thinking of it I was imagining a soft creep but it wasn't that. This time will be for him and I can look down on his head laid on its side, frowning. Then he sees me looking and he comes. He turns off his growlight and pokes his cassette player. Courage of Lassie, Laiwan! Young Laiwan acute and fine tapping percussion in the West End garden summer night, under his ceiling star-chips. We fall asleep leaned together at the head. No - he falls asleep, I bring myself, but not nearly all of it. This morning the bumped corridor so ready I was on the edge from the first. He won't fail me I know, tho' it hangs offshore. Oh my goodness. Want to say something too about Rowen on Sunday night. He phones wanting to stay over. I'll take him out somewhere - MacDonald's drive-thru - then west on Second Ave till (I think it will) it takes us to the beach west of town, Locarno. Holiday weekend, six o'clock ivory light from sun already northwest and veiled. The city down the bay in the other direction, towers at the river's mouth. Freighters. Mountain ridges sorted backwards, paler as they're higher. Luke up there among them. Rowen making a fort, "Help me make this, come on, come on," busy ecstatic by the sea. First a square of wall with a door toward the tide, then a moat scribed around. I'll give plants and a seaweed banner ("What's a banner?"). Now we have to get wood for the walls, they're to reinforce the next packing of sand. A dog is chasing sticks, Rowen too, he's putting a square of long boards around the whole fort. The wet dog dashes through and scoops one away. It's because the tide is rising he's added the stockade. Then he wants to run up the shore. By now he's taken off his shoes. Will you roll up my pants? He's looking for a log to ride, that he can hook in with his stick. So absorbed he doesn't know he's joyful. By the time I say we're turning back he's in the water to his waist, paddling with his stick, just the alternating dip, just the forward glide, of a kayak.
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