| Volume 19 of Aphrodite's Garden: 1994 January-March | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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An intensely psychological volume. Louie leaves for South Africa to work on the elections, I take a job cleaning houses, between times try to fix what's wrong with me in relation to men. A lot of bookwork. Notes: 1986-1988 journal summaries, Marianne Williamson A woman's worth, Gillian Hanscombe The art of life: Dorothy Richardson and the development of feminist consciousness, notes on lameness, notes on will, Tarthang Tulku, Kathleen Hurley What's my type?: use the Enneagram system of nine personality types to find your best self, notes on love, Eva Pierrakos The pathwork of self-transformation, bookwork about grain/Orpheus film, Buddhist notes about Vajrasattva diamond being. Mentioned: Louie E, Ken Sallit, Joyce Frazee, Dave Carter, Leah Rosling. 824 E Pender St, Strathcona Community Garden, the Calabria, Praxis, Cineworks, La Glace School, Josphine's off Commercial, CISR. Emily of New Moon, Laxdaelasaga, Richard Davis Cold Front, The long day closes, Jane Campion, Donna Williams, John Stoltenberg. |
3rd January 1994 Williamson is saying: women can use the power of the soppy. They are archetypally aligned to be able to. The way when I sat in the bath in the dark singing the love-lilt under cover of pouring water he came straightaway, it had reached him, who likes to be listening in one room while I am in another. And more: we and they adore to be in the power of the soppy. It' a bliss that floods our cells with you, with youth. Getting there and getting away from there, that's a power worth having. It's religion, Louie. Neither staying out or staying in. Known paths. What I've been working at in these piles of years. Now can I do it to show? A lame woman. What she is from outside. What she is from inside. What she is earlier, before she is lame or a woman. What she is to an impotent man. The love in a child and how it is defeated. 5th Dear you, I'm speaking to you and will write it. I was mean to you and you minded. It was because I needed to see you oftener than I did, only that, and resented being in pain in ways it seemed you could fix if you wished. And it may have been right, because though I missed you I enjoyed missing you, once I didn't have to resent anything. But I am sorry to have been mean, tho' I'm glad you minded. I'll be friends if you will. Now that there's a safe distance. You were an intervention in my story, which I honor and think about and keep wanting to tell you about. There you sat in that department library amidst those closed men saying you wanted to talk about love and friendship. That was courageous. And I want to say this - I hope you laugh - I was lying when I said I didn't believe in love. There's nothing I believe in more. When heart stands up for itself and says I love, that's when I'm a soul. It's the most myself I can be. Always, ever, in any direction. But what you said is not quite that - what you said is that you believe you can find a true love, a person. That one is so painful it makes me gasp. I want to disown it. Like this: well maybe you can but I can't. I'm disqualified. Anyway the price is too high. Etc. It's extraordinary how hard it is to stand up for that wish unless there are circumstances that make it safe, ie unless it's impossible. Or else unless it has already come true. 10 Something frightened me just now. It was a fear I just glimpsed and lost again, but know has to do with identity. As if I remembered being unmoored. What it has to do with Louie. I say no I will not anchor you when you go. A firm no I can't justify, only that I must be away from you. I say it has to do with identity. That's what I know. I have to be able to change, back or forward I don't know which. I take your pressure stoically. You say then it's goodbye forever - is it? I don't think so. But if it is, it's still necessary. It's early before cleaning work. Sad and slow. Last night at her table I said, You worked all the way around it. It's a hole in my life, something happened to identity there. She said, Now I understand everything. I thought - you could, but you don't. You could understand why I mistrust. You haven't wanted to work with the core where I could have been released. You wanted to be released yourself, and you have been. That's all. My keys you haven't touched. You have evaded. What I'd told her was a gift. She said it was a blame. Oh you are evading now, not to see that even if it blames it says here is something I want. I was speaking in a retracted person - as it felt - thin, slow, remote, pained, nearly silent, like an old man rubbing his calluses. I do blame you. Alternately I fall into a blank. You claimed generous love but you did not care to see what it was I was longing for. You made yourself its enemy when it crossed your dream. In the school of women artists there are these, I want to say, crucifixions - if I mend the other, she will surpass me. I want to mend the other because she is myself, because she makes my common wealth. But if I am surpassed I have betrayed myself it seems finally, and I fall out of the school and am left at random among those who are barely persons to me. 18 It said, Imagine you've never known this person, and you're never going to see them again. A face on the pillow I'd never seen - as if a Martian or an angel had embodied there and was studying my face out of some ancient and impartial and completely unknown being. Her face looked stable but melted as if its embodiment were incomplete. I felt: nervous, young, mystified, blank in the way of thinking something might be expected of me I had no clue of. 14th February Is 'writing' code for feeling and intelligence together. 15 What I want is the widest map I can make, and then to locate my academic and film positions in it. 16 Going into it agape below - what it has to do with the pink dress girl - her consciousness - when she was sent away, she gaped, maybe - she became that face showing through - yes she became a spirit who was in herself, there - she looks like someone who dilates inwardly, has a door to the otherworld inside her body - that consciousness, is that what it says find? She has it instead of her confidence. Is it death because it's not in the world. Yes. 20 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.
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I felt music, I felt grey root 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. 24 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. 26 It is fantastic tension, working this way. Is this tension my child self?
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.
4th Has anyone ever written about the child listening to language it doesn't like. A native Ellie. The other ethic never taught - that, later, people will recognize each other by, but that the child has to feel an unescapable unhappiness. 6th Mary's call. I fight with her in a whiney voice. She fights back in - what's that voice, obstinate - a resigned, obstinate voice - wants me to "be a daughter," family loyalty - she who had not the necessary loyalty to a two-year-old, and doesn't know what family loyalty is. It's alright if we live in a desert and there's a scarcity of grubs, I say. She says we do live in a desert. That is a good answer and yet family loyalty is no help in my desert. What she doesn't know is loyalty to a spirit. And I am not loyal to spirits either - but there is such a thing. I have always believed. Joyce is. Loyal to the good in someone, loyal to the real in someone. Mary's culture is not loyal to women - not loyal to individuals it says - family loyalty a refuge of the mediocre - cultural loyalty a refuge of the even lesser. Is it that she is stupider than I thought? Yes. What is implied by that? I need to know about her to know about love woman, because love woman is structured by her. Love woman is kind of stupid. My mother is a version of love woman, a stupid version. Stupid but has a lot of energy. That is where control comes in. But it is not ego that is to be in control. Ego comes into existence because children are not protected. The larger self is love woman grown up. 9th The dream of looking from the window with my father, seeing the pasture trees have trees among them in white blossom. The window frame itself surrounded with a blooming branch. We are looking south and I say I never remember that sight without feeling completely at home. I don't remember exactly. The feeling was that I was acknowledging somewhere I am that he is too, and that it goes on, and that it is a perfect place, a place I center myself around, a core. Something silent. 12 I want to say, Oh, what is the matter with me. I am devoured by desire for what it seems I can't have. Devoured, devoured, by a desire to be married. Is that what I have to call it or what I want to call it. A madness, so painful an imbalance. At fifty, and with other things to do, so out of peace, raging. Lions and tigers. What is it. Is it the revenge of instinct, is it the rising of some revenge. Is it what happens if I give myself time, is it what I have controlled when I do control. Is there any end of it, the looking for. Everywhere. As if looking for the hero of an English novel, the arms of a man tall enough, well made enough, wellspoken, individual, kindly, of good family, of acceptable fortune, high spirit, principle and justice. 13th March It is Monday morning, I come from Rob's house, where a tall man with light arms fed me, held me, kissed me, fucked me, listened to me, loved to lie with me. I come away haunted, hurt, puzzled, sad, lost, because you aren't claiming me. I lie next to him seeing your hand and your chest, which are ways of feeling you, feeling the you in you. I am so sorry you don't come for me. Don't answer my letter. Don't lay down your useless struggle. Sit raging alone in your false tower. Don't begin. |