| aphrodite's garden volume 19 part 4 - 1994 february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
20 February 1994 Leah is who I met instead, when I went looking for him under the piled clouds yesterday afternoon. Commercial Avenue on a Saturday, when there are kids. Leah was far away and had a story. I see her on the street, a small conventionally set-up woman with a pale head, walking in a fog of worries. Greeting her is like striking a match. She'd been to a mandala workshop. We sat at the window table in Josephine's. She said - and I was looking at the herb garden - the bottom half of the mandala is the unconscious, and it is two halves laid across each other, the mother on the left, the father on the right. That upper left quadrant is the one I have trouble with - the one where I choose orange but materialize it very feebly in ground that is robbed by many roots from outside a badly defined border. Why I would want K to help me cut back those blackberries, why I would want and fail to achieve something clearer there. Why the pool is unfinished and why I don't want the cage across it. Why Rob's edge has energy and some gaps. Why people have resisted working in it with me. Why Country Gardens avoided the color symbolisms. Why the upper right quadrant is imagined as sorted primaries and has a dead tree. Why I wanted David to help me with the rim. Alright, now: not speaking to him, but as if before a god, a different god, one who combines truth and generous passion, one who could be trusted to back me up, what would I say, what could I say. There you are. What a beautiful man. I'll stand up with you. I'll sparkle back. And that's the end of what I have to say. After that it would have to be back and forth. What happened when I left, you say. I crashed, I say. What was it like for you? Alright, work. Dear large, since yesterday I have brought into this room many of the ideas I like to be with. I want to make from among them. I look up now and see the beautiful silvered ridges of blistered paint on shiplap across the way.
I'm worried it's dreams of making and not making, divine euphoria that escapes.
There is a wind. Things moving in their ways. (Isn't it strange how no one says anything about Aphrodite at the door -.) [drawing of Aphrodite on a mirror at the front door]. It signifies maybe that I can look on powers they make invisible. That means this beauty is real work. Then what do I know about tension. There is tension in them. If I knew it I could be gentler. Is this right?
That is the tension? That beauty is unbearable to those who can give me what I need to eat? Is this love woman's dilemma?
Could I start by being honorable to beauty in others?
What do I owe beauty?
I just considered his name, its symmetry. Do I owe myself to understand him? I am only satisfied when a god is standing in front of me, and then I'm afraid.
To mediate love and fear. Do you mean that is how he is in it?
One little card hidden around the corner.
What else.
I see writing it very large, enlarging it. But is it safe?
It's dangerous but I have to do it?
Will I be able to work and drive?
Do you mean I'll be able to turn it off?
Do you mean it is always there?
Is fear the missing part of my energy?
What should I do now?
Tense crossings.
I'm wanting to run.
Alright. - In this work I am continually saying, what am I that I can know or feel these things? Will I die without knowing? Must I act without knowing? I was vulnerable to non-European spirits of my country. I have the talent of a medium without the training. I'm trying to train myself. Is that impossible? What happened to me on Rumsey Hill was native to me. I am native to it. I'm very strongly intuitive. Other people have been that. The structure of intuition is similar. 21st My notes for the prosody of an immaterial art. Here are my categories: [list]. These belong together: subtle body, Hades, gods, imagining (by which I mean 'seeing' and intuiting, the immaterial arts). Love and writing belong to them in the sense that they take me into this territory, but in themselves they are also material arts that test bridging. People and money have in my sense of it belonged entirely to the material and have had no interest in the immaterial. The garden can be my constant test because it is where everything worked. It is as if there is a realm of immaterial creation that I have found ways to glimpse - that is its nature, maybe, it doesn't cohere, it is not a world - but it is a there. I know when I'm there, I know some of the textures and motions that belong to it - I know an emotional tone. My imaginings for material arts are imagining of materializing the immaterial. Is that what I should be doing? Is that more important than developing the immaterial? Do I need to go full speed on developing the material base, which is money, people and technology? What can you tell me about that? It's going to come. I could practice that movement. It says, it isn't intuition that's useful in the material, but judgment, which is based in perception, which is based in something like defeat. I'd have to allow myself to be defeated in competition, because that's the only way I can enter into action. I have to go out an look for defeat?
The way I was defeated by them?
I have to be really defeated?
Do you mean ego?
And then I'll have enough judgment to work in the material?
So it's defeat of delusion.
Where will I find this defeat?
In combat with what?
Do you mean like athletes?
So I take on the largest ambition I can?
Where will I find this ambition?
The ambition to be rich beautiful famous and royally married?
Is this a way of enlisting ego's energy?
Isn't that like all the mediocre people?
I've held myself back and holding myself back was itself a form of ambition. Should I allow myself to use other people?
Do you mean I do anyway?
He doesn't want me! That was where I went. Oh larger, does it take me anywhere, that raving? I see the trigger.
I see how often I am wanting to say that. But raving doesn't empty it, does it? I feel there is no way to empty it.
Do you mean it is I who don't want me.
Help me.
What's next.
Cold and as if inwardly quaking.
That was a bit of it, I said help me and no one did.
My body helps me.
Sadness and age. She doesn't want me. A haunted defeated look. Is that it?
Now what.
Who is speaking? Who is the she.
Now I'm stopped. This isn't clear, I think there's something wrong with it
I'm wondering whether it's my mother, it's getting too convoluted. Is there some way I can get through.
This is very laborious, can't I cut through it.
Watch out for 'he doesn't want me.' When it happens see what I don't want of body/feeling. Is that right?
Look for the happiness in bodies. Is that right?
That's puzzling.
Now can I go to the CISR application? What's your reservation?
What?
Pain.
Alright I've got to craving.
Gnawing. I'm hearing voices of instruction. A sort of image. Tension of yes and no. Tension of talk either way.
22 On top of a truck or some machine traveling in a field. Stop for my little girl, who was behind on the road. She is a little bug in a carapace, lying on her back next to the tank catching a drip with her mouth, having a good long drink. She falls off the wagon. I rush to pick her up. She throws herself off again. We are at the edge of the bush. There is some story about gardens, woodlots, forests. I see a cultivated section where the garden is. We're setting out to see a forest of pillars, something like that, the forest as pillars, spaces of forest. My little bug has been hurt in a crack in the ground, she needs lilac bush medicine. We go through doors of rooms of the forest. There is a man with an axe following us very rapidly. It's as if we began with a room of a hut and rushed on through grander rooms, room after room, until the last room is a board shed again and beyond it a sawmill yard - something like that. Singing loudly to the baby. Janeen comes and picks it up. It slept through the singing but wakes with her poking. In the midst of its crying it sees me smile and stops crying and smiles. It's a song whose tune I like but whose words I've made up because I don't know them. I've been rushing thru room after room with an encysted little girl. Forests of culture. Chased by ambition's chop. Sawmill pain. The constellation I should work with - a child, a woman, a mind, a man who's related to the woman. - At Heather Street [Vancouver Dharmadhatu] last night sitting with a group who seemed a group of freaks, and she in the front in a slumping body with the Buddha's teaching gesture. Her basic talk is good, but then she wandered into herself. The bedtime story with loving parents and an afterlife, and a mother's bedtime story tone. What am I doing here among the trolls in a room that tries to engineer glamours for bossmen I don't know. It's that again: the psychic harm I fear from ugly people
When I'm teaching, when I'm directing things in the garden
Is it a good and necessary avoidance? Is it memory?
Because they were lying?
Specifically to my beauty?
Is that still true
They aren't hostile to his beauty
I was too
What should I do when I feel it
As if I'm repressing hostility. It feels hateful I suppose. Then self instructions: you are projecting, it's your own ugliness, etc, then helplessness and wanting to escape. Is it self hate?
Yesterday I was finding them ugly because I was thwarted in desire
Even after I'd dissolved the tensions
Should I be upfront with beauty
And what about ugliness
Do you mean, see whether you can make it beautiful
Is that what you mean by seeing happiness in bodies
You mean see how an ugly body is already happy
Is it my ugly part that makes me not understand this
Will it? I don't know where to listen for it
Should I always take ugliness as a call to intelligence
Is that enough psychic work for today
What else
Call her
Hello you was that a short marriage?
Yes but I was drunk
Are you mad at me?
Are you mad at me?
Even who?
Was that you looking at him with a glad I
I'm delighted you're married to me
You're bubbling, I was expecting trouble
Do you make it
I've loved your work, you're a genius
How do you do it
You want me to say I'm not raiding you.
I've always loved how brilliant you are in your work
Only because I didn't understand that I could find you. I was looking for news of you
Sometimes it broke my heart that I couldn't read it
How do you feel when I cut off one of those guys
Isn't it you who cries?
Can I put my head in your lap
I know you mean I have the head of an ass
Oh but I am, I'm Greg Morrison
Are you really?
You make these guys up so I'll feel you? Did you invent David Carter?
Really?
Come on. Were you in love with him?
I'm afraid to ask about Louie
You're happy. I'm afraid that if you're happy I'll be embroiled with her again
Why couldn't she touch me
Why do I imagine an inner man when it's an inner woman I'm looking for
One more
I'm like this, I tie up ends
Humor me
Soon
Oh we're them! We read each other's minds
Did you like him
He's such a donkey
I'm jealous
Do you want to marry him
But you're married to me!
Was that your tantrum
Why didn't you help me
What you did was outrageous
We'd have to say "we do"
Nice pictures
You're a good executive
Do you want to be an artist
Does that mean I'm not
Worried to know what
Are you smug
One more thing, when I go into this application will you go away
Okay I felt music, I felt grey roots on the roof of the car, I felt the great silver light between two sides of Commercial Street. I felt stressed and worried by desire and uncertainty, I felt affectionately decisive with a telephone salesman, I feel delighted, bubbly, to say I feel these things. 23 Then it sez: I am a man, no, a woman publishing as a man, who writes with shit. I'm in an outhouse feeling my circumstance - a long loop of black shit left on the seat. I flip it down but have to do some wiping. The stuff doesn't now stink but if I carry any of it around on my person I might have a smell. What's the feeling - calm concern. It's as if I publish daily comment, maybe a column. There is a book that has been published as if without my knowing. It is earlier stuff. Somebody is reading me parts I don't much like. If I'm publishing I'd rather publish some of the later journal with better writing. A landscape I stretch over to get something and bring it back, something about lesbians. Wake and go to sleep again. Wake with a tight solar plex and lie there feeling my hands and only after, remember I was dreaming that. - Hello you, you don't just make pretty work
You're sober to help me with the application
I love how volatile you are
Oh sorry. Currents are very firm, firm flex
But home for supper. I just caught your romantic mood last night. Intercepted. But I didn't understand the headache. 'Bye. The stress of the welfare call-up today. Day that opened wide, dark turquoise chop in the bay, that I see from a high place standing on a counter in a rich foolish house. How can people so dumb be so rich. The old man wandering on his four floors gasping with heartburn and fear, the old woman with feathered champagne hair and a slash of red lipstick wants me washing dishes when she has dinner parties. Oh what kind of life is that. The man who jumpstarted my car - I followed the sound of banging through a yard to an alley - had something else. You've got ---- ----, he shouted when my motor started. WHAT? MICE IN YOUR MOTOR! In bed last night thinking of his arms around from head to toe. I said bravely, I'll never have that again, and my body said very deeply, yes. And I am wondering what's given with accepting tension not trying to cut it. Feed me, I say. What if I don't think of it as control, tho' it may be as intentional as if it were, and may even be. Someone tell me what is happening when I feel the stretch of it and start to see his image on the street. Is he stealing from me, is he giving me something, is it nothing to do with him? I know it sets up consent or is a sign of, but to what purpose, and what wants it. There's a part of the body that swells but it gets nothing there. And does get something elsewhere, but it's the resistance that pulls - that look of a flaming banner. Is there somebody else like that and if there is what's he good for - oh, life, liveliness, speed, fire. 24 Dear you - you answered that. And asked it. Bist du bei mir. What I'm singing this morning, before six in the black: fascination / turns to / love. Are you both? A man of energy, a woman of vision; a woman who sees through, a wild rider; two black skies, looming stone and heaven's fire. See there I made them wings of a broadshouldered man who stands between them in another plane. For Orpheus: who is she looking for? - Working today, cheerful. Was it cheerfulness that came with the opening of the sky. There was Mark and Adeena's exquisite baby. Mark as if didn't like that word. Adeena had the new mother's shrunk face and enlarged body, and Mark was, I was saying to myself, so weenie she must have married him for safety. I was vacuuming the laundry room in a tizzy, thinking of what I seem to have discovered I want - beautiful blazing testosterone, nothing less. That one, that kind of guy, the kind that looks like war. No more marriage of minds, marriage is about energy, it's a marriage of energies I was saying. Was I right? There's a brightness I get thinking of it, and it's like his when women like him. Wanted to tell how, yesterday, the tow truck driver who boosted me the second time just turned a battery upside down over my battery. I loved that, like loving the way Dirk could hear gas or water when he shook the can next to his ear, and like ironing wax out of the carpet. - The divided consciousness paper. Someone who, when I was drunk, was sober, when I sob in Joyce's office, is not sobbing. Is that who they are evoking in shamata?
You want me to accept my losses.
(When I see him blaze I am seeing my spirit blazing?)
I have to stop denying, so I can look after myself in it.
I feel that. Trembling.
She feels it and she goes away again.
Its truth limps away sadly.
I'd dress in a way that announced or cherished it.
Am I self hating? Will you show me how?
Will you show me the ways.
In any case I have to do this work.
Not the way Michael did it. Michael was kind of pretending. Has there been anyone who has loved me in the right way? There is so much preaching in this area. It leaves out the heartbreak. -
Hello you - are you still there? I was speeding and forgot.
It has the feel of self importance.
So why was I speeding and obsessing about K?
But what was it? A pure pang.
Is the obsessing denial?
Where should I look?
I was jealous of Mark and Adeena?
Why do I care?
Is it sex?
Only?
Doesn't Rob count? If it's sex shouldn't I find someone with whom I can find sex?
What do you want?
It's longing. Dear larger, dear largest, do you want this longing?
Do you mean, just feel it as longing?
Then what?
(Is obsessing always denial?
How?
Stuck - I'm not smart today, aching. 26 I come home from Rob's, Saturday morning. He feeds me, looks at a foliage garden book with me and lets me turn the pages, is unfrightened and faithful when I talk about K and passion stopping, then fucks me generously and sweetly and inventively. And then I pick up where I left it, fretting about K. Because it's about loss, it says. This morning looking at my wall - these images, writings, here is what I want you to see - here I am not hiding - I want you in this room - you - with an ache of longing. What does that mean? You keep saying the same thing, (KnC).
Remember waking this morning saying "I have to be the one incontrovertibly, and love the other in myself."
Is that really required for transcendence? I want to. For the good of the community. Because it's brave. A suicide of ego. He doesn't want it from me. He does want it from me. Oh I want it from him.
It's at the heart.
Realizing the pain they protect me from. It is giving up hope of being famous. Would I have to go on cleaning for a living.
Is it the polio experience? Everything is gone. There is no storage.
He saw I wasn't her. The second time I was angry that I can't control him. - It is fantastic tension, working this way.
It's the tension of where are they, they're not here. A tension at the heart. What shall I do. I'm obsessed. It keeps talking about him and to him. What shall I do.
The forehead band that seems to open to a gap in the crown. I feel there's some stance I must find. Give in to it, but to what. I'm saying, Tell me what to do. Calling to Joyce. There is a little girl abandoned in anxiety. She has called and cried. Strangers have told her to be quiet. She is so small holding herself alone in a room, so small to be alone. Holding herself with her own little muscles. A small, anxious, one - anxiety is just this worried small feeling of not knowing how to be. She was in relation, there was confiding small feeling and speaking and reply, and now there is no reply. Mama wo bist du. He doesn't hear me, he doesn't come, there's nothing I can do. Here is this worried small courage. Holding itself together. This is as hard as it's been. Dear one - my heart is so sore. That's it. I am alone and frantic in anxiety. I'm alone and frantic in responsibility for myself, to find a way through. I am at an end. My heart is sore and simple. I am dashing back and forth in my cage. Is that too dramatic to say. There is no help, I can only endure myself until it changes. There is nothing I can say to myself that will open the valve.
When I listen I hear myself start to obsess about him and that seems endless and useless, I'm afraid to listen.
I'm afraid you will ask for total sacrifice.
I'm afraid I will hear my own confusion and not be able to recognize it, that I am delusion.
That it won't stop.
That it is unreal.
That mind is unreal, what I say to myself, that I can't rely on my knowing.
I will seem hesitant and mad and lost and be despised.
No one will love me.
I will lose health, pleasure, joy, sanity, and be only loving hunger.
I say, Oh that isn't me, I am smart and goodlooking and capable.
The one I happen to be.
Oh is this the true ground?
Can you tell me what it is?
Should I sleep?
I'm frightened and want to run away.
There is so much instruction rubbish.
I want it to stop but I am afraid of blanking and staying stuck.
Should I look for him tomorrow?
Alright. 25 5 in the morning, black window reflecting, heater fan, hot water bottle under my feet on the floor, tea. A night that couldn't slow down after yesterday's push. #4 bus route on the lower and upper ends of the right side of the city transport map. There is a transport system I've sometimes dreamed, that has a lower level - trains with routes of another kind. I can feel something about their difference but not recall it. I mean I am remembering another time or maybe several other times, thinking about whether to take one of those line in rush hour. Are their routes shorter and faster? As if they are parallel for part of their run, more crowded and more direct maybe, lower class maybe. I went down to the lower level this time, saw an ad for shirts. It was teeshirts but they called them shirts. Three young boys - 69 pence, school shirts - something like that. A room with styrofoam cups set thick on a table, ends of coffee, coke, etc. Table that had dressed up teenagers sitting with their feet on it beside their food. A neat pair of shoes. There was more earlier about a ship very sharply pitching on steep abrupt wave crests. Standing enjoying it. It was a trip we were saying where the adults were sick and out of the way and the kids were all fine and free. Etc. A visit in hospital from a straightfaced big manly woman who brought a present wrapped in newspaper and scrutinized my early journal without asking. She was trying to see through me. 28 Feb Woke at night with heart sore. After, dreamed a decrepit building in a foreign country, rusting, flaking iron in the stairs. A balcony with floor rotted through. I'm stepping from joist to joist thinking how I would have to nail strips on that and that and that beam before I could re-sheet it. A neighbourhood of extreme poverty, people have not been able to look after anything here. No one is around. I come downstairs and can't see the staircase that would take me up again to my decrepit place. When I am thinking that a narrative voice comes in and takes over the rest of the dream as if there isn't time to finish it in pictures but it wants the story told. The man goes upstairs and sees someone asleep on the bed, lying on his stomach. It is himself. More I don't remember. I am visiting decrepitude.
-
Sunday night. Am I dying? A part. The young, sexual part. So painful. It seems a wasteland ahead. I'm hollow-hearted with dread.
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