| aphrodite's garden volume 2 part 5 - 1985-86 december-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
16 Through the many things happening in the kitchen Frank arrived dressed like someone of importance, soft wools, hat, scarf, gloves. Come for a day and a night visit. The kitchen's my room but it's full of kids doing things, I'm so disfocused I can hardly realize he's there though I hug him, square bone shoulders like mine, my height. Want to get us some coffee, when I take the cups in the bathroom, hold them under the tap in the dark, feel one cup (L), one package of tea with cloves (R). When I hug him again he says it's not for sex he's come, but in the corridor and living room away from the kids he's
holding me hard and puts his fingers into my panties to see if I'm wet, which I am, but not liking it. We were going to go for a walk. I know cafes down the hill to the left but he wants a particular one, Parker. On the sidewalk, I'm walking downhill, left, but he's vanished. Go back and walk right, back and forth, don't see him. But passing our house a tall boy jumping into the vines over a window, my sister inside against the glass. Frank and I come round the corner of the barn. I'm looking at a snaky bank of earth freshly backhoed out of the ditch, we both see the car approaching beside it, a low solid one like a Citroen DS, déesse. He looks as if he knows it. "Your family?" Coming up fast. He leaps vigilantly toward it, grabs the handle of the back door as if he were protecting me from being run down, but actually a fast leap back to them. His wife easy in the front seat with a daughter on her lap, his parents, the minister. Car packed full like a Mennonite excursion of people in Sunday clothes. I just keep walking without looking back, over the stubble field. Come to a building I go into, climb into. Levels, I think it's a grain elevator, bins, nicely finished hardwood. Looking out on a stairway, down into a ramshackle building. Was going to go down that way but there's a crazy woman raving in it, lives there, with the man. Going down a fine widening staircase seeing shoes left by someone who lived there. Very big men's shoes, 2 pair, women's shoes, 1 pair. Then around the wall the next flight of the beautifully joined hardwood steps, I've come to the performer's spot, the focus of the prism, of a small scattered audience. I'll sit down and sing. Settle like an Indian singer cross-legged. Just begin. It's horrible rhetorical singing. I stop and say that's how people used to sing. Now I'm going to sing the way they do now. Voice high thin flanged wired but the shape of the music is good. Stretchy wandering piping hovering sound. A woman some steps down standing on the right, middle-aged, dark hair, against the light so I see her breast through her sweater, is singing with me in an identical voice, the phrases shadowing. An exquisite duet like the Bach for two sopranos. Then he wakes
(beside me) (a small map under the lamp, before dawn) and I have a memory of 2 bars. [sketch] I sing to him in a thick blunt voice. Last night trying with M. Why are you banging away? Because it's not tight. It doesn't matter that it's not tight, you have to get more sensitive, slow down. And so on. The sleeping drug and for a while the apron deep and real, but the way he moves limbs without intelligence, and then fudging because in fact he's gone limp. I sit up and smack his thigh hard, the second time the side of my hand clips his balls and he keels onto the floor. Hard hearted indignant. Baby in the bath this morning kicks the plug, is lying smacking his heels on the drained floor. I turn on the tap to re-fill. Go to put tea in boiling water, come into the bathroom with the cup to wash it. Rowen with his head off the pad, eyes nose mouth in a shrinking circle gazing quietly up.
Patrice and Janet with Misha 17 Laughing with Michael. I'm so embarrassed. The description of Rowen in the water sent his parents. Push-kin! Admiration litany. Philomene. I've been these years magikt away.
The boy is the genital and is that the icon of (sexual) feeling? Baby Mozard. Luke. "I'm towering above you." "You may be towering above me but I can still think fast." Chortles. American football, badminton, weight training, painting little figures, synthesizer, working for ----. "I don't smoke yet and I'm never going to." "Is there dope around?" "Neither Sara nor I have much patience with him. He didn't drink for a month but today he got ----." Inferior self - orphan - derelict house - dead or lost child - competition Strong but secret self - dog - goddess - boy - baby - 'poem' - animals - artist - poet - treeplanter - bird - Miriam The other one as present in daytime is mute, 'handicapped'. The boy my feeling. 19 Yesterday tired from days of sorting. Carmichael, Tony both in red ink. Offer of show for the end of March. This morning at the step of the bus a fine leather glove for the left hand. What's it today. She has such a nice little girl and she's being horrible to her, poking and patronizing. Idealized animus, cynical smile, up in the tree. Where do you have to go to get to the little boy. I'm afraid of feeling that for him. Don't want to be fascinated that way by him, cause he's a derelict. Well I know I'm fascinated by a derelict anyway. Oo wildly gibbering, showing the flighty state. Show you the flighty state. Spoon - the flush - 'nourishing' - caught out, he's caught out. Negative animus. There's always more, you never get to the end. There's a knock, I'm getting ready to say again, Your timing is amazing . - Thin face, "a bad penny." " ... I used to know - I miss her." Weeping and occupying so I have to walk out to get him out. Getting murderous. Bin telling him he doesn't want what he says he wants. Clingy is when you have your attention stuck right up against someone, no space for me to come halfway. Suction. 20
"I'm suspecting that the end of this process is a rebirth not of me but of the world." Fear. 21
Cranberry fool
Mushroom turnovers
22 Walking to M's in the afternoon, young tree leaned against school fence, tinsel, popcorn string, crayon coloured pictures. Take hold of it at the slender waist and carry it by my side through the streets to the hotel. M when he sees it afraid he's expected to feel Christmas spirit. Yesterday Sunday cleaning. Front porch, muddy water gleefully down the walls. In the lane set boxes of presents. Teddy bear, golliwog and dollar bill in Pampers box. Baby clothes and Oma's sheets in colors. Evening comes they're all gone, only the Pampers box empty. 24 Enjoined my love / tying our lives as with the living cord / be strong my bond and my release / stand tall etc. The love you've nourished, though you may not care. Which have, at times, brought comfort to my heart. Michael liked him. Staring discomposed, flicks into my desert dress inside out breasts drag. The card a baby's bum is penis mouth pointing into mother's lap. Was aiming to be hard but so much own crazed feeling. Tailoring Michael's Jimmy Stewart pants, with small buttons making shirt from pyjama, Paul with wood train, little him in the night, fog. So tired now, Michael every day pushing for more, flirty bubble gives out. Dismay. Dark blue iris, perfumed yellow roses. 2 sticks of orchid. This is the way Jam used to be exhausted. So affected by the body, grainy cotton shirt, inside the suspender pants tantalizing sinuosities. Mesmerized. Exhausted holding off. Distracting him when he clings. A battle. I can't sleep with his looks. Offended as soon as there's a kiss, I can't stand
what's revealed. 25 The van? Side door crash and motor, anguish, violence, fog. Michael this morning red and wet like the inside of a throat bellows You're murdering me. Yeah I am but I yell too, Every day you're sucking me for more. Soon as I get loud he's smiling. That's the way. At Leah's counter, red and red and white and white and white, beating and folding. A rattle in the hall, greetings, and then, past the door - huh! It's pale Michael and the bay-be in his brown toque and blue snowsuit. Michael you're a mother, the way you picked food off him and put it in your mouth. [Leah says.] Being bawdy beyond right, desperate too, here talking after, the distance between the loud outer and silent inner. I said shame, he said anxiety. Dismay maybe. Upstairs alone with the baby tucking him into Tara's unmade bed. Later M went up in the dark to get him, listening to his breath and patting bumps. 28 Realizing by seeing an image of it, black and white rising up through the bone horizon line, I'm ovulating at the top of my head. Coming back to Saturna. Twin girl children don't want me there, the way I talk to them I notice is false pleasant and outright hostile. Cast down in despair to lose her magic writing, panic to have only him instead. That's the place in all the record that still feels. Playing frontier, not as ourselves but as those 2, if I keep my eyes closed and just touch. When he wants to kiss, oh don't spoil it now. We've got this far but then though it was straight and hard it's gone. Work at stuffing it in. No denying. Disgusted the way he's pressing corners to try to give it presence. This time I'm not going to be mean because I've cottoned on - Michael's weak look, what I see askance in him, what I run away from, is his impotence. He makes excuses. This one thing he doesn't want to know. It seems I'll go on trying. He doesn't defend his strength.
Judgment: kills the false personality and sense of separateness, extended consciousness, opposites neutralized. Self consciousness is passive, subc reaches for influence of angel, child the reborn. At this stage realizes separate existence is A relation of self-c and sub-c and that these modes are not personal but universal modes, thus personality not separate. 4-d experiences. - Anne's book is born, her enemy dies. 31st Kiku's baby Pharaoh. Bike taken away from the Sun stand outside Princess Café. Little boy in red and white sleeper with big white feet awake after nightfall sleep, sitting on my lap tipping his face back to watch beets go into my mouth, has a green bean in his hand. 2nd January 1986 What's this distress. The letter I didn't look at. But saw. Nepal.
Thursday. So much pain. Dark weather for 2 weeks, the little's gums waking him often, cry suck cry. Go to sleep baby it's nighttime. Cry cry. Take him next to me, cover'm up. He lifts his head to look. Puts thumb in mouth. We sleep. But it's deep night always when he wakes for the day. Bath. Juices grind. Orange juice and pablum. This morning he fell off the table, soft bump at my heel on the rug. Cheryl. The underworld you led me into. Such consequences these ten years. It was Jam who finally did me in, sold me to buy her way in with death and the devil (my neighbours). That had to do with something that happened before I arrived. Amazing the uses this place had for a hurtable stranger. I'm more bitter than I'm conveying. What I'm doing with Michael is balancing an equation, x is to y as y is to z. He gets the baby. In my dreams the baby's name is Luke. At Joyce's last week talking to a chair with(out) my father in it. She said, Tell him you have a right to be there. I was shaking and paralyzed, couldn't speak. What I said was, I'd like to kick your head in. And more. And then burst into crying, rubbing my eye like a 2 year old. I'm aware these 3 paragraphs are superimposable. What I want to know with you is what becomes of what we were after, what we were there for -
mind. The mind so close it can see in and the gate that opens. Michael is true and sane and has the most beautiful bum in the whole of the animal kingdom, but what I do with him is what could do when I was sixteen. I'm furious that it was still, again and endlessly, the desperation for mind companion that gets me slaughtered, first by you guys and then by Jam. Her fabulous book that has my eight years in it. Why wasn't I working for myself. No. Why wasn't she working for me as much as I was for her. Why didn't she need it? Because she had it. Why did she have it? It's not true there's enough for everybody. Anybody can have a lover but a companion maybe not. Anyone can do work recognizable in Canada maybe. But the context that will support the bravest realest least ingratiating of what we like to do, very few of us have got. And we kill for it. Are killed trying for it. Stop trying in order not to die. Die in order not to die. I've got part of what I need, and to get it I've got none of what I need. I like Michael and Rowen and am fat, do no work, read novels all day and go to bed often before 8. On moon-stressed days I bang doors knock heavy things onto the floor play AM radio in the room above someone trying to paint her way to New York and at times let the sink overflow. Mostly I can't sleep with M: heterosexuality seems perverse to me. Embarrasses me. No that isn't it: what it is, is I want something else: depth. And am making do with adulation. And besides that he's impotent. Your images (mine) don't seem harsh to me. The truth of uncertain welcome. "How did this happen?" It came of four years of suffering so fruitless so intense that I did the only thing I could to break out. I wish I could have simply left. That baby grew in an unwelcoming body was dumped out before he was ready came into the arms of 2 demolished berserk people and has been gradually rescued by Michael. He's almost alright now but he has 15 months of torture in his foundation.
This naming is not an attack on your friendship for me or mine for you. Sophomore David Huang is into the higher numbers of higher education. After racking up a first-year average of 3.7 at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, he has a course load this semester of 16 hours of organic chemistry, biology, calculus and microcomputer graphics. The only small number Huang is concerned with is his age. He is nine years old. "I want to be a doctor, a surgeon," he says, "but I'll probably have to wait until I'm 21 before they'll let me practice." The only child of Thai immigrants, he was reading at age two (before he could talk), at four scored 159 on an IQ test (140 is generally considered genius level), also at four taught his chemical engineer father BASIC computer language (are you keeping up with all this?) and finished high school at eight. His mother, who started reading to him Bundle to pick up, not very alarmed. M thinks I'll have accidents. By the time he gets here, frantic, shut up to the killer whine. Mistaking the little card. Crying crying cold sitting left side Stretch it? Sigh. Go and moan and cry at 3 o'clock. He takes advantage. I cry because it's the gross way all gross people do it and the fairyland isn't here. 3rd Show. They say. If you don't do it, it will take you to hiero participation, fertility. If you do, to C's sort of power ability. I want it for: aim and push, to make a nice body, 'cause it may lead to some money and people. Worried it's furthering a false track, I might not be able to open up wide. Did before. My rule in open time was to show what's now, can I do that? "Do you know the correct time?"
Persona - ideal - "as he outwardly plays strong man he becomes inwardly a woman, ie the anima." But the inward is dark so it's projected. She has power and "becomes inferior." W/o persona - 'Canadian' - soulful bores - appealing children - blind dreamers. Identifying with animus - an assembly of fathers - weakness for difficult and unfamiliar words - by holding opinions in suspension "penetrates more deeply into the background" where primordial images "a creative and procreative being"
Resistance to mother: knows what she doesn't want but not what she does - instincts stop at resistance and don't build - husband like mother - can't like marriage - don't like family, convention, clan etc - intellect to go where she isn't and to break her power, to get past - have to take on altogether what's been held off - because it's uncon it starts to dominate -
4 In the bath looking at cyclamen stalks and leaves reflected on the dark glass band - shadow? Reflection and shadow coincide? Answers thinking in the bath. Shadow and anima, did I shift position so shadow is somewhere else now. Shadow is the area that's not lit because you are it. Soul is the part of yourself you see when you look east - I'd say. Shadow and reflection
coincide when you're looking east and the sun's behind you as in full moon. I hated mothers with seedy men, thinking I'm not one. Now I hate free women. Thinking I am one. - Where is she. With the falcon. Guess Kashmir or Afghanistan. 5 Sunday. Can I just work to recover her. What if I do that instead?
Looking at the letter to Jam. Dark today, crying out after you, the you you aren't. So much that would be released if I could write confident of your preference. Interfering. A you says write more elegantly, you will be
scorned. Another you, that I can imagine stepping out of a long tunnel - the tunnel there is too - such big suitcases for the taximan - or will Akbar meet you. In old letters the guessed you is always empty, the you terminal where if my crying could lock
in, I'd pour - the you actual who won't accept the call. It's like a dark rainbow sent to get a foothold on the first land the otherside of the ocean. If it's refused there it dissolves and goes out. The rainbow is the image of the cord. My writing refused. Not it, but the
arch of feeling - is life that can't begin. Throat, diaphragm. It, body, this foot of the bridge, clamped. On the road. Dark confusion, concrete underpasses, large machines colliding, really gigantic as if roadbuilding equipment. I'm scrambling up the embankment to get out of the possibility of explosion. At the top, in afternoon daylight, camping or picnicking on blankets on knolls, young men snuggling. Beyond them I find I'm strolling back through a Mediterranean town, evening, quiet, looking inside at spotless housekeeping, many people at leisure, vines over balconies, yellow stone, glasses of wine. At the knolls again, but not to thread through the bodies. They're gone, the blankets are gone. Trails down. Two I think of on the left, like footpaths in Greece. The one is a toilet paper alley, the other covered with poles. A shit pit, young gay man to illustrate, sitting beside it pissing in. I go over on the right, two wires to cross the wide slow river, vast estuary. Am I to walk on the one and hold onto the upper. I can. But ready, someone ahead, pedaling. I'm pulled by some unknown relation, whizzing across. Then he below. A wide wing galleon. I'm still sailing on my wire. Rowen wakes me. Earlier, somewhere with Judy.
6 Morning has waning crescent, turquoise green eastern rim. Holding the baby at the bathroom window to see it before I turn on the light and the crashing of bathwater. A high daytime excited with LM. The third room to set up the record player and put on Barbra. Rowen jumps. His second day in child clothes, overalls, shirt and socks, mashing bread crust in his gums. Holding onto telling Joyce. Today Maggie and early c. 7
Cunning, secretive, knowing my secrets. (They're universal secrets, how could I know one key would do for all.)
Then: Maggie. [Yeats' antithetical] Actual father is a fascist
moving against
Actual mother is socialist.
moving toward
Know: c and unc, to make harmony between them is to have clear unmixed desires. Do: death, change from personal to 'universal' Learn: vigilant acute subtle active youth Wednesday 8 Giving Tara necklaces. Tara and Judy. Putting on my black lace dress I know from another time, open down the front, tight at the breasts, then the penis is coming in, deliciously, o-oh! It's coming in more. Waking in surprising pleasure. My father's going to sleep with them, one of us will have to leave home, I will. Putting on boots, going outside. He comes out after me. Well sure. I will. Oddly spongy mouth of the old man. When we go in having to confront my mother in the kitchen. Don't remember what we say. At the sitting last night, from anguish in the day, wrestling with Michael. This is no good, what you
have to do is hold me very tight and I have to break out. Begins soft sounds. Later the hard print of my voice saying to Diana, "because of the way she's fooling around with Trudy and Rhoda." The woman whose voice is always grabbing. Wants to know everyone she says. Angrily, "Isn't that knowing implicit?" Louise saying the compassion meditation beautifully. I could find a way in it, to myself. Say it as 'you,' then say it to J, then come soft heart in front of the old man and say, May you lose your ignorance, may you lose your greed and fear, may you be enlightened. Harsh tears stinging and dropping.
Mum-mum, ein-nah. [Rowen says.] 9 Splitting Multiples: "My core personality went out, my host personality took over." Usually core, a child, and a compulsive. Different EEG, hemispheric dominance, cerebral bloodflow patterns, voiceprint, allergies, skills, foreign languages, handwriting, accent, vocabulary, body language, clothes, hair, fears.
Each personality was born from a crisis. She was sexual revenge, feminine anger, siren. "When I got angry I'd let go and George would take over: that wasn't my role. George was about anger, destruction, protection, firmness." A volume control on the pain - off and then turn up.
Last night on the street hearing a man behind me talking Italian. It's completely dark, I cover my bum and legs with a blanket or towel because he's seeming to be talking about me. Cross the street soundlessly by memory. Find myself in the women's house. A lot of them there, Edith too, grown up. Wondered what she'd look like. They're coming and going talking to me. Something about shit on a blanket. Folding it getting it on my hands. Something about opera. Patrice. I saw your baby on television. Very old and worn out.
Lion nothing kept in reserve, nothing disguised, nothing wasted 10 Michael freaks quite far and realizes why. Realizes about Beverly. We talk about looking. Karen Horney and conflicts Hopelessness is about impossibility of being whole-hearted. Parts eclipsed by suppressing part of a conflict Ideal image Inverted sadism Unconscious rage - faintness - that violent impulses might get out of control Projected on An unconscious fear of being found out Through the eclipse of large areas by repression and inhibition, idealization projection. Becomes a shadow and others opinions' too much. Turning into the rejected self, being like everybody else.
"Self control when the conflict is acknowledged but feeling the parts isn't."
A truck cab I've hung some clothes in, set in the garage drive. I've left the key in. Thinking will it roll, no reason it should, but then it does. Out on the road. I chase after. Snowy roads. In the little village. Did it take the other fork. My road's through the corridor of - I guess - a Catholic girl's school. The door behind me, behind it voices talking about Jesus. Go on through a dining room fresh lovely girls' faces, their young teachers, talking gladly together. Look at me with their fresh eyes. I go speeding on. Before that what was it - glove compartment I take things out of, gets deeper in, right through. A bath? Some relation of truck to hospital. 11 Inverted sadistic.
Detachment: looking on at self and it
Sadism: hopelessness
There's a strong ideal, a total failure, a giving up, externalizing self anger Self contempt grows more - external vindictiveness grows more - they've spoiled his life, why should he give them anything. Anxiety, fear of retaliation Repression of sadistic - because of self-contempt and anxiety - lived out without knowing - numbing of feeling for self and others Or inverted, bending over backward, refusing to lead, influence, wish, rebel against abuse, being careful to guard their ego, self blame, not being attractive.
|