| Volume 4 of Aprhrodite's Garden: 1986 August-December | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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In this volume in a small Challenge notebook written in very tiny pencil I start to design the herb garden, then called the aromatic garden and later the east gate garden or the pagan garden. Regular sitting meditation with Laiwan and Diana, couple of sessions with a Wiccan group. Part1, I devise the last straw in the war with Trudy and go to Saturna with Michael, Rowen and Laiwan. Parts 3 and 4, get into a creative fever imagining an Orpheus grain film. Reading notes: Ursula Le Guin Always coming home, Meryl Streep interview, Philip Dick The divine invasion, plant and calendrical lore, Yeats A vision, I never promised you a rose garden, Ovid Metamorphoses X and other versions of Orpheus, aurora and solar wind, Jung and Toni Wolff, EJH Corner The life of plants, Laiwan's show, Blake The 4 Zoas, Hillman The dream and the underworld, subliminal effects, Eros and Psyche, Varela on vision. Mentioned: Kim Chernin The hungry self, To the lighthouse, Dorothy Richardson, Goddard Hail Mary, Tarkovsky Solaris, For the longest time, Dance of the blessed spirits in Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice. |
14 August Today with head muscles sore and tired from war typing, lying down in this room, putting consciousness into my feet, it setting up gold swarms in the temple muscles. Later, in an image, something moving, and then a rush from a point far right to a flood right here, the right side of the head - voom - fills up with light, empties to space, sensation so intense I have to hold myself still. It as if came out of dream ether into physical head - from far - a light cone. 15 A radio tuned to half static put over the vent. After quite a long time she thinks of the fuse. It disables her painting light too. Found out I can see through [a crack in] the floor. 17 What will make her move is exposure. 18 When I absorb an attack it frightens me. When I do something outrageous it frightens me a while and then relaxes. 21 His gladnesses are any dog, cat, birds he sees. Little children on their own. Running with someone holding his hands and tottering over him. Play with the koala baby. Yesterday the long singing kiss. Hearing Michael come up the stairs. Bottle coming when he needs it. Blueberries. Or red beans (tonight dumped in his bath). Peaches. His miseries are the grass and sun at the garden, confinement, confinement so much, hunger (we don't remember), diaper, stepping in his dung, being left behind in a room again while I do any dumb poisonous thing to get away from him, the war climate in the house, being kept off a lap or chair (he will stampede, not cuddle). - Saturna island in the quiet of overcast and air in equilibrium. I can smell rose leaves in the iodine, the rose-bush and old boards. Shabby blond ground. Orange kinks in the arbutus are luminous big wings and rub in the air. A heavy bird, not so big, raven. All around the shore a chirruping pulse. The ear feels sore. Is the boat bringing my missing ones? It's a fishing machine demanding all the minutes for its engine. The cedars' springy tips, the wake's plumes, the oaks, the apples, the
maple, the chestnut. The mist in the gap, following the slope down. Impulses
on the water like telegraph signals. The apple tree has an outside and a
black inside that shows between laces. The ground is blond everywhere, by
the apple trunks upslope. The complex tree, the complex colors of lace.
A pile of split wood. A crow's caw is dark grey. There is fire steady in
the cedar tips. Something else in the dead boughs, moonlight. There was a song he didn't like. He said NO NO NO NO NO NO. Vancouver 13th First night of winter's black water. Last night our fire feast. Candles and curry. Nasturtiums, yellow flowers. We sat each to be alone first, heard each other breathe [Laiwan, Diana, Cheryl, E]. Ate food with earth pigments in. I dropped some into the candle; myrrh powder and flame yearned into each other. Onion, clove, chile, plum (red and yellow food, papaya, peach, purple grapes), cumin, ginger, tumeric, curry powder, garam masala, cayenne, carraway, raisins, black soy sauce, brown sugar). Talked about a giddiness about powdered stones as pigment. Heard Cheryl speak the way I do also - onanism - she's alone with her play of words, withdrawn into them. The loveliest moment Laiwan rolling to sit straight and tell the story of herself, Shannon and Rowen. Rowen at Michael's house opening and closing the fire door. They say to Rowen, Open the door. He does. Laiwan says to Shannon, Give me something. Shannon picks something out of the air, "It was nothing, it was a nothing," gives it to Laiwan. Laiwan puts it into the stove. They say to Rowen, Close it, close the door. And he does! And then grabs his hands to his chest in excitement (the way he does now, and she did, sitting on her heels with shining face, the hands go clutch, clutch, like a radiant squirrel). Shannon was happy, "We communicated!" Laiwan was like Demeter at the hearth suddenly showing herself bursting. 14 Reading British garden and season lore, noticing the hunger, the leap of interest, in any story from that actual life. What is it to do with me. Hunger for richness and order in the unconscious of a life in space in world. A New England housewife paced her chores with the movement of shadows across the kitchen floor. 17 Indian summer with light like spring. In the garden bare earth again. I bring home sunflowers to stand in the hall. Poppies head down in paper bags. Hollyhocks' and marigolds' seed boxes nipped off other people's plants: generous increase. Yesterday: at the bridge was the meeting with the creek. Harvest home, moon energy, blood energy, war energy. Then we attack the rotten corner [in Michael's kitchen]. I tell my war story and the pleasure spreads even to George. We get floor plywood, and a skilsaw for the aft. That means we can attack deeper, through the wall and into the floor. Michael gets jump-started by three pushers and takes a speed and does the difficult parts. Laiwan is in the cherry yard sandpapering in the dark. Steven makes an electric heater from a toaster and a little fan. George walks with Rowen in the other room. I check M's work mercilessly pushing for a little better. L does it softer but she and George make the difference. In the end we are sitting with mackerel feast she spread on the new surface and we have tea by gift of fire in the cookstove. Little cats come just into the light from the door open onto the step. Rowen baby is sleeping on his stomach, in new overalls, upstairs. L's hair gets perked. M goes around in dancer's cling thrusting his legs against 2x4's. Rowen caught his finger in the stove door crack, and screamed, and when I took him, seemed to sway backwards and fade. I called him, "Baby!" and he came back, and I seemed to have at that moment fallen in love with him. 19 To note that Rowen's at home in a deep bath now, sits down and looks around. The way aggression makes certainty. Until I take action against someone I don't really believe they've done harm. The inner one yesterday even in uncertainty and uneasy collaboration was like a jubilant young person throwing her arms up. An 'inner' joy not the complete dwelling-in joy but a sense of having made someone very happy. A sunniness. 26 The whining music starts downstairs, she's trying it. I'll demonstrate my way - and am in defensive shock. Set the radio going down her vent. It covers her whine but she takes to drumming. I turn up the volume. She's crashing against my vent and I'm immediately pouring water through her ceiling. She flees. I unplug the radio. She comes back and yells for a while. Then there's quiet for the rest of the night and this morning. Body shock goes on, I lie at night woken by Rowen and fulminating mechanically as if it's a white noise set going to keep the other out. And in daytime every day along with returning happiness I have to give time to watching what aggression is and does. The little voice of protest that I speak to the way I speak to Michael: It'll be over after a while. The continuity, who is proud, to whom I say, She defeated you but now I'm defeating her and we'll be able again as we were. I work hard to shore myself. 29 Nina an eagle chick, jewel eyes and blond dishevel. "I could be so easily crushed." Her fireweed slide, fireweed and fire, a sublimely stoned Titania world, brilliant like a parrot. Some dynamism about right and left: a flurring side and a pointed side. The flurring side having a road, two roads overfolded. The center where a flame waves, a flame under a storm column of black smoke, has three cypress trees standing bemused turning their wings. And what's the tree on the right, pointed, peach leaves, more like elder maybe. The plants all alive like after sesshin, that world, the plant world, the elemental, is what eyes that look like hers should be seeing. And after it Cheryl holding out her arms, my old dark warrior with her beauty across the room, beauty and ugliness. My fighter for life comes into my arms, stilly making heat. When it comes into the crotch I start to laugh and back out and rub her cold back. We both heard her loud laugh forget and win. 30 "I've never done it this way before." What the difference is. Feeling a part, where, say on the right, right shoulder blade, right lung. In there, or, in the same relation in the cranium, a part is saying, this isn't right. As I learned with Jam, suspending and carrying on, experimental. It being social. I talk to hide him from myself. He goes along with it. The difficulty of concealing his head, that this is the head I'm with - It can be kissing but I have to be into the animal before I'll traverse refusal, not animal, what - I have to be into the limbs, flesh around a bone. Does it mean, I have to be in the lower body. My body now looking like his. I said, there's a primal satisfaction in it, just the stick going in and out, without it getting to bliss or visions, a basic, not tissue, limb. Flesh on bones, tones of grey, x-ray, and basic because it isn't in the throat, or heart, spreading to wrap him in, or, where is, the joyful liking of the other's timing, the joyful liking of the other, down the center of the brain, standing behind the nose. A while when I was the small twelve year old being safely affectionately
fucked, hah, that was right, lying as if sitting on his lap, the thing not
deep, going regularly in and out, his hand on the clit (teaching), other
on the nipple, mouths little kissing, heads together on the pillow. Black glass, obstinate, glittering off a sealed planet. I remember the annihilation of calling toward that locked surface. Now, I know the lock. It says: I won't consider you but if you can further me toward the ones I will consider I'll take your consideration all. I'm alone. Alright, you're alone. I can speak to that. 2nd The happiness was also that Cheryl had said, I could have had a life with you. - The house these last days sensitive more than ever shakes so much under footsteps that I get dizzy. - Michael arrives as one of them at last on the outside. Coming into a room handsome in a hat, dressed carefully as the image of a man. Sitting in a room with him, if he takes off his hat, down falls his strange dead hair. His skull standing there frightens. His body shows under his clothes like a dog's belly turned over to be scratched. Tight belly, loose little genital. On the street the man in the hat puts his feet down inch by inch feeling the sidewalk through plastic soles of tai chi slippers. Curved lip, tipped nose, green eye, excellent wool suitcoat with its silk lining in shreds, vanity, virginity, pink blood pouring simply into his head a large gush unimpeded from the heart. The queen of swords is conflict, sometimes righteous, sometimes a bid for more space, aggressive. The decision to take space come with banging heart, why should it, and is unpleasant, the body itself punishes it. Conditioned.
4th [war song] Now is my time to win and I do. Inwardly and outwardly I am rested and balanced and keen and fast. Every encounter I win. I win my time and space and energy and confidence and delicacy and delight. I win it all back. I win back everything I gave or lost to you or you or Jam. All of it comes back to me and I keep all I worked to learn. The story of my engagement with these enemies comes gently to an end, with my enemies moved to another place, another life. It comes to an end leaving me in possession of myself inward and outward. Profound, glad, delicate, wide, balanced, open, fearless, experienced, clean, beautiful, exact, loyal, connected, essential. - I'm asking Joyce if there's an archetype of the fine people, 'the gentry.' Why are they tall and blond, long-headed, long-handed, self-absorbed, fragile, north-east European, aristocratic, remote, exiled. Like fairies. What are they to me. Okay - so now I know. They're the well-bodied. The fine people. A sad gallant and necessary giving up of their distinction. The well-bodied are idealized because I didn't fight their disregard. 5th
7th Last night an instruction: there aren't many people required, by the
globe or the human mass, to develop the inward, but many for the outward.
And they're kept busy, diversified into the different religions. Images
of animals, a donkey, in stone. I understood the inward as meaning that
sense of the spirit in its own existence as such. The outward as interest
in the garden of earth and sky. Sitting on Friday night with Diana in this room in the quiet after a while I said, I will do the grain film somehow, now, and I'll write too, and will be like Virginia attentive to how to lead myself, for the sake of using what I've found. It's that lightness - it's the glass with small colors - achieved - what I have to do is make something in that - Titania's glass. How to get constancy in it enough to finish. Here in the blue pages writing sky and glass, oh it endures and catches and is my companion, made with a companion, now in the new time alone. 22 The sun, the moon, annunciations all over, ceremonial basketball, Hail Mary is the love he gives us to feel for the girl's body. Puis-je te voir tout nue? In the genius of confidence. We're in the café, late. I have my head on the table. Laiwan is gold glass, ivory and horsehair. In equilibrium at the back of her head, in distance, courteous, telling me about her instructor who was years researching apocalypse and then showed her work in the form of a map of the world after it changed. "A lot of men came in and told her her world wasn't viable. She had a nervous breakdown and afterwards she was different. Her work was more conventional." What is a nervous breakdown? It's when you lose your confidence in everything you were, so that you have nothing left. He says to them be and loves their being and gives them for once a world they can be graceful in. Sit there in the light. In the midst of the love of the work. Seeing - I can press closer to the actual presence of my vision - the nasturtiums and heart's-ease say it. Want a big clean image implying an other world they can be graceful in. Intuited functional analogies like moon: white dog. Find the limits bright and dark of film response and audient interest. 29 [I tell Joyce] I dream there is a black bear who eats garbage I'm evading. Then I tell a memory that is as if the interpretation of the dream. Judy and Paul and I in the camper looking through a little window at a garbage dump with a black bear our father goes up to. Our father seems bold until we realize she's dead. "Her cubs were still there - somewhere." Joyce says "You got too close to someone and you got shot." "And I'm still dead." "But the cubs are still here." "Where?" Looking around to the right. What was it the dream said. The black bear is death. It's an image of my father's connection with death. "If you wanted you had to not show you wanted. My first journal starts there. Because I wouldn't get anyway and if I showed I'd be ridiculous." "Yes," she says, "but there is another road." 30th I'm in the bathroom cutting the tops off carrots, Rowen is obstructing the lower space, Laiwan is blocking the door. I hear the mushrooms burning. Have to swing my hip over the bathtub to get round the kid, come up against Laiwan, who's running and gets there first. Handle-less pot on the flame. She goes for chopsticks but I have a carrot on either side and lift it off. She doubles up laughing. 6 Sitting last night. First that the processing is alright and when done clears the presence and that's what's meant by watching the thoughts. Second, lying down seeing blue sky. Anguish forehead. I could suddenly bring the sky forward right into the forehead. Was an instant opening. - Telling L her image bit me. She laughed. 7 Today! New air, free light potent air hatching into clean, radiant, fantastically tinted piles of cloud, red splendour on the old hotels, a glorious red marble tower with turquoise glass; enamel hardness, water-brightness around us on Georgia Street (in the block with its south side open), in the block with the fairy lights, slow cars and clotted pedestrians, home time, spilling. A woman was coming toward me, so well dressed; a rippling skirt, over it a rippling cutaway cloak, fine boots, hair like blond feathers. I was thinking of the Mabinogian and looking at her as if she were walking in fairyland, not aware I was visible. There's a little confusion, she has drawn up, I see her face. I'm startled because she was looking at me. Smiling? I dart back to see if it was that, a late grin too, and carry away the look I see then, a smile like teeth barred, a red rectangle, the finish of very expensive well judged fashion, but a face really out of Celtic fable, so fine it looks crazy. 8 Jean Waite telling a story as we stand on the wet ground, the sun gone, full chill come back, of being on the ferry deck in her old toque, perfectly happy, and a man coming by saying it's a fine day or some such. Going on, and then coming back and sitting down. "He was such an interesting man." She liked how he was dressed. They talked all the way to the terminal. "I expect I'll see him again." "It was a Scottish man, from Argyll." "What does he do?" "He's a psychiatrist. He's well aware of these strange things too." Listening back over it as I'm piling Peggy's beds and she dragging buckets of sand, I coveted him and imagined him the beautiful man with a creel. But strange looking, she said. Herself in greenish tweed coat and walking shoes and thick stockings, blue-ish water in her eyelids and eyes with brown veins across them. 10th November He walks around in grey slacks and white shirt a divine body, slight, straight, loose, the most desirable man's body there could be, we sit together in the chair, his arm is perfect, we get in bed, he's rubbing my nipple, it's crude but it's working, pinching them, I'm quite well stoked, it was goin' good, but then he gets lost in licking my nostril, and that because he wanted kissing and I didn't, and I call him off. That breaks his confidence. Slow down there's lots of time I say but he's speeding in fear of going wrong. And then when he's putting himself in he gets the angle wrong and that puts me into contempt, I'm thumping over to get it right, bang my head on the gas pipe, annoyed to have to take charge but enjoying the contempt, then he's humping and pinching and rubbing away but wildly unfocused. After a while I say, Are you afraid? Because you're all uncoordinated. And get off and soon he's crying and I'm far away, far away. Stay far away for the rest of the night, like this, broken thought. In the morning when he's soggy I brighten him by rastling and cuddling looking at the beautiful naked baby. Cook them porridge and clear them out ruthlessly at 9:30. M was in the bathroom looking at himself, such a young boy in a hat, young cried-out sweet face, looking at himself looking sad. What were you thinking? "He's nice but he's useless." I told him how it used to be with Jam when I was in love with her body and wanting to adore it and she'd do something to contempt me and I'd be in an agony of shame at my helplessness. "But in fact it was that for some reason she didn't want me to make love to her. I shouldn't have taken it personally and I should have respected her not wanting it. ... Most of the time I don't know you're there and I don't want to either." He says, You should open your heart. (And Joyce seems to say that.) I say: When I'm in good hands my heart opens. It's simple. I'm visually attracted to you but we don't like each other's choreography. He protests this way and that. He's right to disagree. It would work if I wanted him. I'd love the body because I loved the soul. With him I fancy the body but it disappears in the dark leaving the soul I don't want. The poet's house in a new story. This time it's his house. I got up Saturday morning and wrote it, Rowen ran through the rooms doing his own work. I saw the yard and poplars from the beginning, but was surprised to learn he's an electronic composer. Lying down with him or listening with him, it's my movie. My music. 'His' perhaps for me to make. Jung that evening giving me heart for my heart's insistences on gods and stories. That she in Jung's arms in the field of waves of grain was in god's arms, earth's. Marie-Louise seeming in anguish clenching her hands, that all the plants, that all the animals which have been evolving for billions of years, should be destroyed, by 'us.' Jung's illuminations so astonishingly rich; and that he had a female Jewish guide Toni Wolff who took him by the ear. He and Emma and she in collaboration forty years. Marie-Louise in the tower by herself now. "But then the unconscious comes more." Toni Wolff an austere long nose, eyes, eyes, smoking a long cigarette. "Only the artists seem real." What I'm imagining in film, is it something other than what V Woolf does in a phrase, "Then up in the air across the meadow one sees the handful of grain flung," of what bird she doesn't know. "All crepuscular, but everything bright as fire in a mist." 13th What else, someone telling me, I take it in, people stay waiting at the place where they were abandoned. Waking, thinking of how I go into a party in a covered despair at all these people none of whom are the one I want to see. Comforting myself telling Joyce, I understand, Michael is a good mother for an abandoned two year old, when I'm older I can have a more grownup mate. 18 In a dream traveling with Greg again, a big glassroofed bus etc. What I want to note, a notion, that being with that sort of kindly man is like white threads - lying loose a bit crossed. Yesterday in the Globe a story about two women in an interior cubby of a highrise in New York who from 13 in the Old Country were reweavng holes and rips. The threads are taken from fabric in the hem maybe. Each bit threaded individually into a needle. Invisible they claim. Celebrities come in with their clothes. I saw it New York late afternoon electric lights, people with access to the whole world come out of cold twilight shining from the end of the street, come up the elevator. The old sisters sit in heaps of stuffs. Signed photographs of succeeding egos. Hm I know what they are. The weaver's house. Tistre. Connects levels. Orpheus. Tubules. Melodicule. Bottom's a weaver. With animal's sensitivity to sound. Karen the weaver bleeding herself, why. The danger of the ether. The looms of vegetation. He knits. The lace of the atom. An unregulated love. The calm I'm also feeling in my heaps of stuffs. There being two. The celebrities come for more than their moth holes. In the story. They're side by side. I had to go far into the world to find the song for my partner. "I want to hear it." Moth holes. The little winged things. Oh country. The reeds. In October, in red light, the whole of the air flapping and red. 19 Going into the arena again, I have to remember in enthusiasm I tend to be banal. Looking at the primal love in this work and the imagined: they're the great gods Space or Medium, and Tension or Pattern, that imply each other in Being or Self or Cosmos. Film and projected light, the dream ether, spatial air and sound, body and sensation (atoms and things), imagining working in several mediums -
19 So Orpheus, what's a composer - Music, acoustics, perceptual biology/psychology, mathematics, computers, astronomy and cosmology, physics of electromagnetism, engineering, cellular biology, embryology, optic, "a realization for the ear of Kepler's astronomical data" 21st Hong Kong café blowing my nose in paper napkins at the counter. It's safe here among the talking men, to go any distance away. Crabtree [Crabtree Corner daycare] around the corner with Rowen having his diaper changed. His voice yesterday on the phone, sweet little marks. Remarks. (I want to show how I see sound.) Maybe animus is a word needs replacing. There's Orpheus soul singer. And the other, raving Reason, explanation, is (hierophant). Is there a god for that? I asked, what do you say about Orpheus. It said lovers, the lover. Then (hierophant) is the mask of the lover. Sweet sex and prohibition, together in the father. Orpheus torn up because he doesn't give. Dark at four. What do you suggest? Dorothy so hard a life. Virginia with so much help. Virginia speeds boldly, trusting her soul to come up with true new interesting stuff undercover of the social display. Dorothy tries to be the soul itself with a kind of silent engineer at her elbow cantilevering the logics of exposition. That's a sentence of Virginia's. Dorothy is more depressed Jam would say. Virginia has the foundation of fascinating privilege. She takes us into the exclusive cream - mobile, praised, rising, competent, oily, central, and at the surface of a massive body of history. Dorothy takes us to out of the way dugouts, rowhouse in Finsbury Park, dentist's office, Quaker farm. She has little unshared connections. Rootlets. She doesn't have a chance so she takes the big risk, a revolution, dilating the unsuccessful. Dalloway, Lighthouse and Waves, speeding lights. Waves is heart in mouth glorious fabulation. A work. Dorothy is bidding for a whole life to be seen from outer space and outer time. But the immortals would like Virginia too. A court lady. What this is about is Joyce working to get me more egotistical and ballasted, which seems to mean more social. Not that, differently social. Not acting the aboriginal. 23 Imagination - is the soul - (animus the projectionist) - Orpheus - an inferior Orpheus - a synthetic Orpheus. Okay, where is it. I said to Orpheus I'm sorry, it was very wrong of me to abuse my muse. I'm very frightened of you, not of you, of the voltage and confusion of what I have had to feel toward and for and in you. I can't handle it. I have to fight it off, in me, and outside me, toward you, too. How do I abuse him. I interpret him. I revise him. I comprehend, surround and explain him. I withhold. I bluff. I'm ironic. Suddenly nasty. I don't allow myself to feel the whole of his power. I cut him off and then call him back. I scheme to impress and reduce him. I laugh at him. There's Robert MacLean, and there's Orpheus-Dionysus - Celts and Greeks and Gaels - Antlerman, Turquoise Boy - Nepal Zen Blake Thoreau Christian religion shamanism sunlight plantlife prenatal life - music, animal contact, art, science. 25 [I run into Jam] "I want to make the little grains of the emulsion do things by themselves." "A visible model of what happens already." "An invisible visible model." A delightful fear of the free air. (It's going to come to the door - it says - sometime when I don't expect it.) Emulsion grain is a screen. What I want to do has to be done by interference I think. Quintessential would be five. I say to (soul) I'll go anywhere with you if it's right. We also said, looking out the window at sea water surface pocked all over with speeding rain circles, that it's seeming as if everyone is present in any one. I say the picture of space full of silver Christmas tree ornaments reflecting each other - that's all they are, their position in relation to the others. There's nothing inside them. She kept looking away. Here this afternoon, humming, boiling, potential, with book and table under the lamp, in an order, clean, through clean windows, such a mute pale daylight, park trees stripped, (but a kite), even the grass swept, cars and roofs in color only relative, and in here, pink cyclamen by terra cotta, red frame, green frame, clean wood, colors and black-and-whites and paper strips, and here by my shoulder the photo brought back of Rowen newborn sleeping in scalloped blankets like the bud centre of a rose. 26 Wednesday night under the sound of water. Electric heater and feet on it. Out there the little houses shedding rain. Black and bright, another storm. The fishermen haven't been able to bring anything for two weeks says the fishseller with galvanized trough empty. "Hi, lady!" The estrogen storm I think is passing. Though I marveled at the music synchronicities today, Produce City muzak while I'm pinching papayas, For the longest time, with its key shift like stepping oblique right and back onto a platform. Dance of the blessed spirits, yes in the otherworld Orpheus and Euridice are threading alongside through the gardens of shade hanging in wisteria triangles - in silence, in interest, in the space. The music is the pressure under the diaphragm that's supporting their calm and lightness. They are visible figures; and they are the twining lines of smoke unwinding out of a vortex, parallel, in unremitting tension. Orpheus I adore you. In this world one is at a table holding the tension of a line cast and hooked but unlocated. The other is somewhere in a stranger's life. Unknown in an unknown kitchen. 27 What is a soul. Gives images. In writing and other time whether the relation is faithful. The way VW trusts what's given. A bright outline floats up. That isn't exact but yet it's what's given. No. That shows how it's fluffed; because what was given was the image of a big black area and in it a small, as if medallion, patch of light lines, almost a seal. Like a Chinese stamp in an oval. It's got more defined as I define it. What VW was learning in her journal was to follow very fast but very close the image and also her relation, her reflex. I think that's it. 28 Lying down with a storm wind blowing through my belly. Almost intolerable. Came when I imagined him in an armchair across a room shabby remote gentle and him, himself, that one, that one. 1st December When I want, and invite, oh that's crucial, so different from this free zone where I take what's offered and enjoy easy power that defeats desire. Beauty of the antithetical self, calls for dissolution of the self. ... full faith that I was there, because I saw her grow more beautiful. To discover and reveal a being which exists with extreme effort 4
6th A winter Saturday in the garden with metal clipboard and helpers picking leaves into paper bags. Cloud forming off the ground fogs the sun, chills. At home Rowen has a day in the night rooms. When I get home I am not like yesterday wound to a tremour with M unable to stand the look of his head. He makes me tea. I hold his hand. The kid picks the hands apart, but doesn't insist. Lounges on my knee. Gets the stashed chocolate by watching with the back of his head. Prefers snatching off my plate. Feels himself the best prince. We look at him sitting in socks and diaper on the paper box as if a regular boy on a log, everyday adoration. I didn't write the Sunday in MacLean Park he was walking at his own will for the first time, came with his cold hand to take my finger in a solid grip and lead me back and forth over the grass. Our game on the bike coming home in the dark. He says -- --. I say it. He says it differently. I try to follow into vowels and consonants I haven't had since I was his age. When we come through the front door he goes in his duffle coat hood like a little cone to stand under the light switch. Sunday 7th On TV a native painter makes the old man, the kids, come out into soggy snow, form out of strokes the same for space and head. I tell M; he's sitting on the arm of the chair so quick to understand, scuzzy, grey chin and grey wool undershirt, thin pointed legs like an elf, in his best quiet self so he stands weightless on one foot elfishly tipping his hip. I come put my hands under his diaphragm. He's a warm breather, at the window shown to the street. I'm playing the Dance of the blessed spirits, maybe he smells an absent presence, but the movement of liking was wholly for this boy of his. It's a good story these two meeting. 8th Last night a construction spotlight throwing an intense white light on the wall through the west window showing all the motion of air and in the upper pane the inner crazing of the glass. Thought of running that amount of visual current semi-subliminally through any scene. Then I thought of the acid movie and I cd understand what it was and how to make it. Pribram belongs here too. Mor, what color is the sky? Oh it is and it isn't. The beautiful stew all sectioned like optics in a pearl.
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