| aphrodite's garden volume 2 part 3 - 1985 september-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
21 September Yesterday at UBC. Evening freakout. Looking in those university rooms and seeing my family. Bewildering. That man standing nice and slight with the baby, his head, is he a moron or a fine one. She in flapping colors, dumpy. The baby drooping in his dirty bag. Frantic in the stacks. Books in Russian. Nothing but
history and economics on every floor. At night I say let's try again. I don't think so, I'm very dry. (What's behind is fear, if I fall into Jamila again.) He for once thinks to prepare, and then when we're talking we're saying it's nice. Downstairs she's painting. Poke poke poke. Stopped by pain that I'm betraying the women, who are the real ones, the hungry and impeccable careful ones, not like this slovenly talker. A professor overhearing us going to stand somewhere else. Agony. Stopped in sadness. He begins a little. See amazed that I'm near coming. The glow getting darker. And how it is, what I have: something I don't know from before: strong easy and possible attraction in balance with deep shame. I say to myself, I used to be able in wrong romance, I only got to the good stuff through it, why is it so hard now - oh because of the fairyland I was in with you.
22 Sunday noon. Anguish gut. It's about work. Standing, stuckness. Shadow "affect where adaptation is weakest", therefore a degree of inferiority shown by blame, criticism, revenge, love, admiration, envy, hate. Mickle? Little voice from the bathroom. He's in the kitchen in darkness looking out at twilight. The woman's face and hand in the darkness of the bean leaves. A good father to me. Flash yesterday as I was ironing purple collar - the silence with people I like, looking but not speaking, keeping presence with a barrier, is the way I was with my father. And what's the reason for it. Unforgiveness - "to be betrayed by an enemy not a friend." Was when I was thinking of Joyce. The babies who learn to hold themselves, fidget when you try to hold them, because it reminds them of when they cried and cried. You have to hold them anyway, let them scream 'til it comes through. 24 Yesterday Dorothy all day. Today - Michael's hurt. Greenham women on Ideas, oh the beautiful way she speaks. The way all of them say 'women'.
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Jam saying the special people are the only ones who hear the buzz. I say, I heard a fly buzz when I died. She suddenly speaking past my right shoulder, She wasn't at your show in 1955. With a smile. Hurt to see it's Trudy standing behind me. Wake, I think it's a reply to T's paranoia about influence. Circling a big circle onto the back of the east place hill, 2 cars, lesbian couples, the plain kind, get out at the farmhouse door (been there before), unpack a lot of food. Farm courtyard, looking at the couples. Jam's there alone, is she, moving the way she does, restless. I seem to stay somewhere in relation to her. When it's time to go, looking for my wellington boots, "Maybe someone's got them on." I get into the car, centre of the seat next to J, the woman on the left side jumps over me to separate us, J says thanks. Getting on the ship for the return trip, about half the party are on (J isn't). I see the ship's in speed, in the current, a lot of children, where's the steering wheel, they say under the inside hull. Have to squeeze through very narrow opening, it's at the front of the car deck, but the ship's careening in such a narrow channel, jerking like a streetcar at the turns. Without hesitating today buying a new Castaneda. "You are going to be left behind by yourself to reorganize everything on your own, everything we are doing to you now."
My benefactor told me that my father and mother had lived and died just to have me and that their own parents had done the same for them. Warriors were different in that they shift their focus enough to realize the tremendous price that has been paid for their lives. This shift gives them the respect and awe their parents never felt for life in general or for being alive in particular. Carlos Castaneda 1984 The fire from within Simon and Schuster
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To get rid of self importance, strategy. Impeccability is proper use of energy. Strategic inventory to see what can be done without. To free the energy of self importance to use it to face the unknown. What we do in relation to other people, like stalking, control, discipline, forbearance, timing and will. Using tyrants, the different kinds, by creating unbearable apprehension through deviousness. Control and discipline have to do with self observation. You use it to make you strong but also for flair and delight. Strategy and freedom from self importance. What usually exhausts us is pride. Control is to tune the spirit while someone's trampling you. Map the tyrant. Forbearance is a simple joyful holding back of what is due. Defeat is to join the tyrant. The warrior of naked heart gives up everything that separates from others. The Toltecs have no use for sex.
28 Back to England with a baby, go the other way. Full of hate.
Dear Michael. Thank you for the baby. Thank you for play and care and true tears. How can I be the lover of someone who doesn't inspire me. You're a turnip head. Slow on the uptake. I don't like to kiss you. Balloon penis. Collapsed. Little and weak head and thing. Pale baby. Go to bed early. Lying crucified. What is this. Sleep. When baby wakes the painting light still on, R in her slot with a look on her face so I think she's with Jam. Sweet. A bite of cake. Tea poured. [I move to the middle room.] Through the middle window, slice of her face. Jam's looking at pages. R's look of trust. Bright moonlight.
When this morning tired from waking all night and the baby very often I'm lying down and the motor's there in the alley again, jumping up so heart-shocked. The two of them on the steps sitting together, oh caged, turning, running through the rooms not able to find the mop, caged in pain. I phone her, almost silenced or shocked. She's loving and wants to meet. Is willing to mend. I say I don't understand the strength of the pain. She says, Of course, it's the bond. What's this, the way it's rivalry, the key anyone can turn to demolish me. How much I've lost by it. The unwarranted force of it. Later while M's gone for curry beef I see the pointed finger spearing into her belly. The fist in Judy's belly! The mystery of why I had sibling rivalry so bad. And this baby like that one conceived in September to be born in June. And why the two of them could kill me. And Judy's coming when I'd just begun to unloose. And this baby's brown eyes fair skin. And my sister being my sex, what's that. And why there was a freak about the baby. 30 Leaning together out the window in evening light, enamel green and red. "The pain is gone, I can hear the birds." This morning again, you're the most evil - October 1 Last night in the bath hearing Rhoda's little voice shouting in the telephone THE WORK IS FANTASTIC. Through my side window I see she's set the canvases along the wall, or are they sheets of cardboard. A table with food, corn on the cob. People arriving in my place leaving their coats. I want to shout them out but then I'm dumb. Was in bed with the baby, can't get sound through my throat.
There are more of them, an insolent man I threaten with a knife. Keep pressing them out, This isn't the party. Women on my porch roof hanging something from it. Sitting there to look at the singer, old black man. Some of the young people might be familiar from Laiwan's. Go on pushing them out, downstairs trying to lock the door. Lock seems broken in half. And is this a door, there are more, go locking them all. Which is her room mine opens into - more rooms, basement, more doors. The paintings. Pale colors. A mountain. A beach with four small rose trees. Two women's bodies like opposite mountain peaks, sitting parallel. Brilliant light where their heads would be. Two women lying parallel. [sketches]
2 October [with Joyce] "They're playing their games, you can be sure they're playing their games, and some of them seem to be evil ones." Last night pleased with a new job in a company I notice is all women. Black woman red dress work boots. They say she's an engineer. Looking in the long --- of shoes for the ones that'll be mine in the search for work. Wanting mine to turn out to be those dark green Turkish slippers (but they're the clumpy strapped shoes). J a film director. In session. Raining. This time not alert, agitated. Tell the story of pain and rivalry, stomach, Judy. Where she picks it up is Guilty? Reverse it. "Your existence has made it impossible for me to be strong, impressive and creative." Then what happens is shuddering, from the back. I feel the shoulder blades differently. Only lumpy waves of energy. Back at the left temple. Solid dark crunched. "Something about the left eye." "Maybe that I shouldn't see something." "Open your left eye - keep your eyes closed but imagine you're opening it - and tell me what you see." "A door and a man. Some kind of minister." Gesture of scorn. "Who should it have been?" "It should have been Mary Konrad rather than Abe Konrad." Left side of the face jumps, twists. Hand over left side of the solar plexus.
"Who is Jamila to you?" "My bloody brilliance!" Angry, why. "Someone else too." "She's another wounded child." "Yes she's another wounded child but ..." Then I think of leaving her in Valhalla that January to go to Edmonton. Both ill. Then alone in a strange place. Then relief. Coming to the coast with forehead somewhat opened. Turkish slippers. 18 Nov 1980. Six months is May, is when I went planting? "Sense of her has become admiration since I'm back." I thought she was with Daphne. "Your project" - ?
4th By the river. A tugboat cut to the shape of its bow wave. Heavy and light airplanes alighting from east and west. Something traveling, like a thumbprint, collecting to black in a turn, elastically stretched almost invisible. Many birds. Looking away from her to the poplars. A short one, then a line of taller. I kept wanting the next two cut off to the height of the first. Left sound like sight. She behind the wheel with legs stretched apart bowed into the dashboard. Arriving: in her ugliest voice demanding HOW WAS IT? Driving away, "Ezra has died." I pronounce, "15 years of childcare for you is like using a Rolls Royce to haul rocks." So quick to agree, "The ways you're on my side."
But going on repelled. The sickening texture of talk. What in it. The stance. Possession and derogation elaborately lame-ducked. Best was telling her detection with Joyce. 6 Saturday. This week since Monday blood seems to've been a period. Since Wednesday ill, v sore throat, head cold. I wash and mend M's green hat. He finds a green toque. I insist it's the baby's. Parcel from his mom is pale green sweater. He then finds a wonderful green sweater for himself. Seeing them on the street, elves. 7 M and I separating. His lame talk and he says mine too (not flowing). Because I stopped him clinging. The van. Pouring water through the floor on T. Trying to phone. Still miserable. When I get through, friendly. "I think we are violently in love with each other." The news that first makes me cry for her then lightens me months ahead, Tuesday. [ie that Jam was leaving for Hong Kong]
Tuesday 8th But she didn't want to hug me in sight of R's window! Mistakes. She saw the quilt as bridal. I say crudely home made, chicken feathers in it, brown chickens and white chickens, big feathers. Chasing her up the hall. It's another fine day. The baby's most ordered night. Woke once and the next time in daylight. House was clean. She came in to tea made, toast ready, baby himself in the water. Crying, her father had told his friends. When I said I'd torn up the photos, "We looked out to lunch," she said "We weren't always out to lunch." "I was happy because I thought maybe I could send you writing." "Like last time?" "No, maybe for the first time." "Oh! I'm beginning to understand." And then she unpacks the envelope of writing. "Your fringe senses." "A recognition in it." I still don't know of what. Going out today, these days, in sun and color. So released, as if my creativity will come back now. Was it so much oppression. M says a glow. Oh you're going - oh you're going - there. She dreamed she I and the baby were in Hong Kong, I in a flowered dress, too dressed. Go with the menfolk, she with the baby in left arm, her mother on her right. Coming to a step, the baby shrinking and getting flatter. Needing two hands for her old blind mother. The baby flat on a board. It's back to the drawing board for the baby. And then the phone call. Departed on schedule at 2:15. But I heard her voice downstairs.
Optics and embryology, aether, meditation. Painful now. Heart. Frightened because I think she may have seen them later. Coming together from Joe's talking, at noon. Happiness was because I thought she saw me last. Whenever she's with me the under-urgency of competition making me value her too much. Anxious. There's no one to write to! Sobbing. How do you bear it that I'm crying so much about Jamila? I don't care who you cry about, I only care that you're crying to me. 10 The morning of her goodbye Jam at the top of the stairs seeing the baby in the tub. Wet eyes. The comedy of tryin' to hug her when she's already in the van, and she on her knees inside worried about Rhoda's window maybe. After I'd dumped sink water on T, maybe next day, coming past the garbage cans, a split moment seeing her eyes like the end of binoculars, black and forward from her face, shot at me. 11 His days of hchhhhhh and sucking fists or blanket, stroking his skull behind the ear. M in the morning with wet yellow leaf in breast pocket.
Sat 12th By interviewing from the big chair, in his European coat and sweater sitting neatly as it gets dark. I can't sleep with someone whose talk makes me yawn. But he's steadily by logic getting me to unroll resistance. The turn at the moment when I say the reason it has to be exceptional is that it has to be strong enough to get past the taboo. "We should do it every night to wear out the taboo." Interested. But then getting there still seems impossible. Sitting in the dark in the wonderful flannel pyjamas. Could we just lie down together and not do anything. But when we are lying down together, his back in my arms, it's certainly desire. But odd, it doesn't wet. He's all afumble with the thrill of getting into the pyjamas. Unpleasant dumb hands open the dry book. "It's too dry!" But he's got his confidence now. Yes - well - we got by the crux - and then some confused doing. "How are you?" "I'm not complaining." "It's true! For the first time you're not complaining." Saying he was overwhelmed with pictures. Green, yellow green. (Oh Jam When he's dressed to go home is when it starts to take. What's different is the palms are live and he in the lamplight opening again the flannel of a mother with black braid whose head is laid sideways on the pillow. An open spacey somewhere, I don't know it, a 17th century bed, a man in shirt and breeches, wanton delight, but in a future space thin silver and wide. Open one eye and see him with his sins forgiven, craven forehead gone, this is the favored son. 13 At times a good dry interest he has. I watch myself for willingness. Giving heavy mind to explaining what she'd, anyone wd, know, what I adored her for knowing. Panic, how has this mind got hobbled to this one. Humiliation more than welfare, strain like nearly breaking, Incomprehension, why my equals aren't glad of me. 14 Hating.
15 His smaller eye. 'Cardiac.' Remember it waking, it might mean unevenness of ventricles. 16 [with Joyce] Billy Budd. "There's a reason she moved into your house." She wants to destroy what she can never be. "I think she is it now more than I am." Wholeness. "What they call the shadow. It's going to be very hard for you to own all that." "What was the lie in it?" What comes to me is lesbianism, not that it's a lie exactly, but it was something we were trying to make so. "Oh ..." - I think I know how to come at it from another way - "they were goddesses to me, I saw a supernatural intimacy, that was the lie." She's nodding. Morning - oh this morning! Looking out at gold. Destroying by training me to be like her. Helping J move. She'd bought back W 6th, now is moving out again. Red lacquer writing desk very light, ink bottle spilling, little brushes and slabs. Shall we take it downstairs. Am I too careless getting it ready. Two older women like her aunts sitting looking at her stuff, unfolding a flap, showing a chair covered with yellow silk. 17 Aiie shadow, how much of that was mine. Pogrom. "Your self pity." What do you want from her, why'd you move into her house? My father's sneer. Church fights. Jibbering hatred. Ed Martens' adam's apple. 18 Our meeting in his bed broken off. On a boat with Don's penis in my hand - that's it - throw it over - watch it on shore turn into an old boot and fall
over. Then the delighting wit, four tiny goats, and something else, run out. In a shed with my many kids, we'll just settle here, live on what's around. A landscape, a man on the road, bogs not here but in another part of the country where we came from. We'll assume we can live here. 19 Her show [Trudy's] quickly. Groups, beautiful gel color, but the smeared heads. People somewhere dead in slash space. "Deranged." "No it made me stop being afraid, it made me more feel sorry for her."
21 [My mom visits.] Yesterday he was crying, this morning here and prepared in good pants when she came early to me in pyjamas ironing. M and the kid in the kitchen. Tremoury seeing them meet, and not seeing, running away. Heavy, walking under molasses. Feed her, make tea, something wearing me out. She's frisky. Feeling behind it, what's the indifference in this, I can't be anyone I like. And she doesn't rest, pushing on in the social keeping-going, tirelessly mindless until I go silent. The way she speaks with weights. 22 Meantime Michael at Carnegie waltzing with the baby. In the bath finding the breasts are the space in front of the south windows of the house, spring break up, bare land in water and light. Further south is the bush. Then the lake. "I have to get away from Paul and his journalism." So then he quit. He says.
24 A long story. The small island with hospital at the foot of a mountain on a torrent. A crossing not easy. This city of embarcation. A forest of pillars, stone or concrete, the real city perhaps underneath. In the water an electric net, a round net of sparks guarding some exit, maybe the underwater one. I and the other, with a package, to get down the wall. Steps for a bit then seem to stop. I say I can't do it but seeing two travelers stand where the ferry is coming in, I just jump. And she in evening gown after me. Rush to the two who turn out to be a lesbian pair I have to charm quickly, we can only get across with them. White marble buildings nearer. (Lately another ferry, crossing with children and country hippies.) 25 Mary in her mother's dress, shoes, stockings with runs. The moment of senility when she was starting to get onto a city bus [instead of the Pacific Stages], hauled back by coat sleeve. This morning walking the bike up Granville a musician makes electric zither clouds, wood on wire. A Limerick fiddler who when he played hwo hwoo-oo brought a kiddish bridling smile.
"taken from among the Gentiles and ceremonially slain so that not a drop of blood is lost" Then in those joys crossing the path the tiny woman, the little pretty girl head, I used to see on 4th Avenue, 3' high swinging on crutches, showing a strained cheek now. Walking on up Hastings thinking of telling M. But when he's sitting there in the big chair, saying things against a resistance. He says there's nothing but I can't stand him, reading an alpha power book and want to go on in it. I'd been thinking it's the impersonality letting me have moments alive the way I want. He panics. I can't stand to stay and be attacked (as it feels though I see his starving tears). And later don't want to talk to him the way I do. 26 Standing, walking, patting himself, "calm down," beside himself. He's lost his interior freedom by fear. "Turbulence and pain." He says he has to know the baby has what he needs. "For that, every day we have to be intimate?" Frantic with my heartlessness. I hate the way he's pushing me. Occupying. And I don't believe that every disliking thing I say isn't being stored somewhere to turn into violence another day. What it's actually like these last days - don't have a reason why - Mary's visit? - and what she must have seen, his narrow forehead. I praise and deny him. I'm frantic. His parents' stupid letters. I've married beneath me, and not for love, in dereliction. Gibbering in fear. 27 Working with lines and their felt connections, felt lines and combinations at times coming into religious love. Seeing something, coming into a concept space, that is loved as if creation found. This morning in M's chair leaning back, closed eyes, wracked head. Small spill, forehead twisting. He invisible support at my wrist. Opening my eyes - it wasn't
neutral. This one won't skip out. At night when I wake with breasts sore, hear Ro awake. Turn back his covers, the cotton plaid from Oma, the blue and white from Diana. Lift him out in the two last, slightly damp, wobbling face down. Turn him over and tug the edges around to keep him warm. He squalls 'til I've swiftly unbuttoned and got the tit to his mouth. Abruptly silent. I start with the left that has less, listening to the white gulps, looking at naked head and precise little face like a monk, eyes closed, cheeks drawn intelligently down. His hand rubs across my breasts or strokes behind his ear, or if it's cold I hold it in my palm and the other under my holding arm. Pick up the bundle, turn it around, bring his mouth to the right breast big round and hard. Satisfying, he goes to sleep before it's gone. Like to hold him and look at his face. Room cold, windows dark, Rhoda's, the Liu's. The gay boys' kitchen light always on, in pink, below. New family in the apartment building leaves a night light, maybe a shrine bulb. He squirms, not romantic. I put him down so his hands are free (or he'll wake me). Pat on the layers. Cover the whole crib with the down bag. Go back to the pleasure of sleep. Glass of milk with yeast to feed the breasts. If he wakes again leave him to cry, find his thumb, quiet himself. Maybe toward morning there has to be another quick lutch of what he left, so he'll sleep 'til daylight. Black rain this Sunday. Writing notes, there's first impulse to sluff. So delight in any exact description but forget I can. Mental energy. "By ordered thanks."
Coming into the space of knowing. 29
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30 Jean Waite said complete darkness feels pleasant on the eyeball. Last night Rhoda at her table with a sheet of paper holding her chin tilting her head pausing. Is she writing Jam. She has a paragraph, a third of a page. But but Joyce saying I think love is admiration but it's actually acceptance. Saying in a small little voice to Mary in the chair: I don't make a living. I'm not making much of a name. I'm getting visibly more decrepit from poverty and loneliness. I'm not able to have a mate of my own class. "I want her to notice that I'm different than I was,
so I can notice it." What it has to do with ambition, striving, making something wonderful (of oneself). "All that sneering you have to love." Even when no one else does. "I know very good work done by people who are the most destroyed." 31st [fighting with T] Watery. Conflict first. The red scarf unfolding. Over the banshees against outrage against shaking and scrupulous doubt insisting: I don't make way in this. Struggling to make it from simulated audibly weak through to the seeing itself making strength. And then silence. M's table in the centre of the room. Pants being ironed on them. The baby the baby. He dresses in his best. I look at him walking in the small room, bed light. He holding the baby, I waving my arms different ways to make his eyes roll. I tell this story: "Last night looking in Rhoda's window I saw arms in little black sleeves washing dishes, and the cat sitting on the table. Then I saw a pink sweater come over and pick up the cat and hold it like this" - I rock it - "then sit down in the chair with it" - he's sympathetically nodding and mm-ing - "and then Trudy in the black sweater came over and took the cat and threw him on the floor." And the letter home of the Tofteland boy. "I knew you'd cry," kissing him on the whiskers. And the seven foot woman letter carrier in Woodwards, the unrepressed smile, as if saying, Aren't you something. The loving insulation of his downbag - Hallowe'en chicken curry with fingers - lying with heads together, televisions across. Something last night in Sexsmith, a back yard dug as visitor.
1st November From a delighted joke waking to pleasure of having been sleeping in a soft body on its back. 2 [with Joyce] Last sessions since I brought in the Two have been confused not released. She disapproves them as if they're real and she's run into them before, and she says they're shadow and I have to learn to love it. When she disapproves I begin to defend - is that it - from their viewpoint. Is that what shadow is. She seems to be speaking against ambition and striving and for saint-dilation. I imagined: she's taking a position to press me into the other. And when I see it I'm already shifted. A dissolved landscape - anguish - Jam. Wet darknesses after time change. I go to the hotel. Baby and boy, yellow light in the corner, dark picture wall. The old men in cells 3-deep across the street. Graceful Michael. Lo bak, sin choy pork and brown rice cooked in one pot. We pass the baby and the wood spoon across the table. He isn't cringing now when I stew in his appearance. Lying on the bed toward the lamp, holding the baby on my stomach, stroking his head. "Duck fuzz duck fuzz fuck d- ..." And yet: in bed, it's my period, I'll try for -. I laugh at his bland
trying. He pinches the nearest nipple and twists the other. I do gasp (have I ever), it's the keenest flare. But later when I open my eyes the look of his face, uch - close them quick - Pinch the tips! It makes so much difference - in an annoyed voice. This morning he comes from good dreams and drawings and I'm cross. Looking of good health. Friendly crossings. Going away from death, maybe. But as if life is assembled in the skin, nothing happening in the dark. I dreamed Joyce brought me to a young man doctor, on his desk a bandage for my period maybe. He's patronizing, smarty. When he lays hands on me I start to yell, get out of there. Drive some big thing down the lane. Evading Joyce too. A being is the whole of itself in four dimensions. Every entity its full epoch. In combination with other events, past, present and future, it becomes part of the entity of a still larger event.
I thought this afternoon, I'm making something invisible. Anguish (throat) in science notes. So much I can't do. 3 Sunday Star messenger - light the traveler - wide gaze of that space - you, spark - visionary - nonspatial realms - sub tela - eye loves blueviolet. In this mountain are the names of a billion and a half people who have walked this earth since the beginning of the 16th century. Human species perhaps not more than 10,000 generations old - main geographical races diverged 1,500 years ago. No human can be less closely related to any other than about 50th cousin. The trees all merge by then. One person traveling between Europe and Asia could do it. We're both direct descendents of Muhammed, Krishna, Confusius, Abraham, Buddha (and Jesus).
Close to 5 billion people are alive today. 69-110 billion before, depending when you start thinking they're human. 5 He dreamed he's cleaning a little ditch on the side of the road, baby playing beside and ahead, the playful me up forward he throws vegetables at, but misses, and hits or nearly the two venerable ancestors, white haired, behind me. Serious women. Most beautiful bum. What to do with it. Grope it thoroughly. Sweetest live soft round boobs. In the rainy aft for a break climbed through the rain to read him Artaud. Magnetic rise of birds. He mottled. These evenings since I go there he feeds me. We play 'til the baby gets to his limit. Then I saddle up and ride home through the pour. This night dreamed watching M closed circuit wanking. Putt putt putt putt, muttering piss shit fuck and so on. Eyes shut. A squirt of piss, a little white stuff. Beating on. A feeling something like asymmetry, I'm the only one seeing it. Sweet times but my dreams don't like him. Sweet Cherubim and Reach Clinic. Faint.
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