aphrodite's garden volume 9 part 3 - 1988 october-november

work & days: a lifetime journal project

22 October 1988 Hello alone. [Lis Rhodes workshop at Cineworks] Do I know anything about this day? I spoke. The room stopped. All afternoon the women exchanged pieties. Lis went along with them. I scowled. What is there to say about the visual track. Vision remains in silence. Language has problems. 23 Where's Luke? Is he dead? His younger brother Rudy turns his head to the wall. He was killed in a Viet Grenadier of all things, a clumsy monster of armoured aircraft. Is Megan in his room? Yes. The stout little English girl with a matron's voice. Where are his things? Didn't you get them, we sent them to you. Yest a tiny garden Joyce had planted, as if seeded with a comb. Dog-nose and a tiny grass. Dog nose because wet smooth and cold like a jade plant leaf. Dian chasing after me tho' I've invited someone else, we're on the dancefloor by ourselves, she's rocking her hips, I catch on, a wide rock. See my long plait of black hair in the whole wall mirror. She gets me down on my back. I'm willing. She's all-over drenched with sweat, touches into me for a moment, bumps her beard up against me twice and comes. The pig woman in rings chains and bracelets. Maria's repulsive little hands padded and hooked. Lenore whitened to a wraith, "I feel like I haven't stopped crying since I left the womb." Meg basically right. Eliz Murray too, helped by her nose. - My mind became very still and I started experiencing a different dimension, as if I could see people's souls and I could see the words literally vibrating across the room. It was like being in a different dimension. Often when a person asks a question they are asking to experience a new part of themselves. They want to see something they are unable to see. 24 "You must remember that you know as much as any of the people you are going to assume know more than you." The time in London when Luke was young and I was young. I'll never be it again. Keening in my sleep. She not wanting to talk about 'seeing' because it can be recuperated. "I notice you cover your tracks in your work." "Yes because it's a strategy." Standing firm in front of Don MacLeod [MacLeod's Books] yesterday as he was standing firm too, having a conversation. "How are you these days?" "How are you?" Blown inward by the light on his face. He's looking beautiful. I must be looking beautiful too. Seeing him with the sense of how he has come beautifully through his years. Then I was on the street with a little light in the clit. Trying to explain to Lis how pornography for me is bad sex, signifier sex. 'Seeing' the breath, soon seeing other things. - More, in the evening. She looks and sounds harder than me. But I feel, comparing, more savage and intolerant, the way Maria gives me the creeps, her bulked femininity. And Lis's too disciplined to speak ill tho' sometimes if I do - . A look easy to set into a high-necked dress in an oval frame. Talking about Marilyn [Bruce Baillie] a drawn-up drawn-back affronted look, a missionary maybe, god-fearing, sharp, kind, principled and loving to laugh. Force of character it's called. And what am I that's different than that. Very different. No principle could override the gaping wonder at seeing Marilyn naked. I take wild chances. Yet the unkosher mixes of my household are made in free adaptations of comprehended laws. [with Joyce] "Did you survive?" "No I don't think so." Someone else more shattered and off-center. "You thought energy and will would make it alright, but it wasn't alright. It isn't alright for anybody." That was a shocking thing to have her say. Then in the market Anna said Jam has seemed harder since, less warm. I suspect Lis's kindness is a maturity, being on the other side of finding out it isn't alright for anybody, and I suspect my intolerance keeps me closer to health and sex. I'm stating that cautiously as if it's noting a superstition. 25 [Ursula Le Guin speaking at the writer's festival] A stooped, slightly stooped, grandmother body in black jersey dress, gold chain, lipstick, Cuban heels. Strong silver hair, really silver, perfectly smooth and moving over itself in skins when she jerks her head, speaking out of her big fishmouth complacently, patiently. Whatever Shevek would have done, she's accommodating people like the librarian who said [of her best] "Nice little books but they're not Earthsea," something pleasant to say to all of them in the autograph line. Stooping sympathetically toward their three minute press of confession. At Alpha Cine and CFDW trying to get right prints. Suddenly a light streaked across the page, how, water glass grabbing the candle. What kind of day, that queasy illness. Why'm I at odds with people in the art business. 27th Reading abt Foucault and seeing, the philosopher and her sense of aim, Berkeley, Cambridge, her easy lead in that pleasing department in Kingston, nicer people, what else, a poise I have from right back then, that I found in myself at the beginning of thinking, and which the child Luke has too. An at-homeness I don't feel in art. J-M when she was on the mountain stung on the lip, dissolving into a golden dust. Globules backlit with blue. She'd stood up suddenly into the hornet's path. Fiona on her left was telling her to keep breathing. She was dying, finding it wonderful, thinking how to make it in film, saying to herself it was lucky she had drug experience so she wdn't panic at where she found herself. Josie says she had her first moment of seeing when she was twelve, looking at sand, looking in her palm. In both films Lis worries about being certified insane. Josie saying it was a time when she was always wanting to die. She burnt the journals that might catch her back into then. He played the flute with such passion she chased all over town after him. 28 On either side of the breakfast table. I was telling Lis the story of going to see [channeler] Aurorra, so delighting in the telling, singing to demonstrate, "Ju-ust / as / I a-am / with / ou-out / one / plea / but tha-at" (at just that pace) "your blood / was shed / for me." "If I'd sung it all the way through you might've got saved and then we'd see how Lis Rhodes' work would change!" We were in sobs of laughter. And about the woman creeping up the aisle during the meditation peering carefully into each face in a row with green Kleenex in her hand. Singing it I was sounding an oboe like never before - fascinated hearing it, inspired in the skill of my listener. 1st November The warm foothills under my hands. Monday morning in rain. Lis finds his big grassy gumboots at the foot of the stairs. We have nothing to say but my palms are magnetized to the shapes of his back. I love the heat in his hands. When we start fucking I'm crazy with joy, not for pleasure, we aren't there, or not in the tissues of color, but it is like starvation satisfied. I'm crazy for tail it seems. The solidity of what he puts into me. Slowly I say. Otherwise it will hurt. Not forgetting what I know is missing. I know he was closed though he said not. He brought me and then couldn't come. 2nd A church service. Platform full of men, Dutchmen, one with a large head at the pulpit. I am in the back preaching a countersermon. Loud and clear I say the real church is when people work together for something and come to love each other in that way. I see in the mirror I have nicer breasts. I'm in white knee socks, straight short skirt, sweater, a slim-legged girl. I go out into the congregation and up to the bed where a dying man is lying under a sheet. I find myself sitting by him. His head like a black man's. I'm in a tenderness for him because he's dying. It's also as if he is another kind of man. I have found myself close to him. "I preached through the sermon." "I heard you." But he's not listening when I say what it was about. He says something I don't remember exactly, but as if he's saying, Funny how spontaneous and unexpected the heart is. The way I found myself by him. He sits up. I'm looking under the bed for his urinal but he seems to have it built into his underwear. There's a complex feeling about all this. I've come to him in a spasm of trust. He's as if a preacher himself, with wife and children and picket fence. I beam at him. You're better aren't you. Meaning I've made him better. Standing he's my height. When I embrace him tho', he backs off from the pain in his midriff. We're outside. He's like a Jewish young man. Fine face and curly hair. I remember I should question him. When were you born. Über-something. Überrat? Übermal? In the dream I get it wrong the first time, ask him again. He tells me an image of willows. There are people going by who seem to have brought another image and I'm not sure now which this one is. A square field with willows in some of the corners? And pallets or parts or edges of some flat square thing piled. I know willows and tell him we're all born near willows. We're at the corner of a building. Paul K has arrived. You're wearing Gretchen's hat [the man] says to Paul. White with a black ribbon. I feel it's at an end. "I have to go." And woke. Falling asleep thinking of the hurricane coming. "I'm not afraid of it." An image of a phosphorescent white explosion on the horizon. Nuclear. A flash of fear. I remembered another sequence about - ? Dying every minute. Holding onto a self. What wd it mean not to do that. What they mean by dying every moment. There was something about a Lis Rhodes scholarship in film. - McAra Gk makar blessed, makaria blessedness The grain also focuses. Can be an underlayer of grain focusing and unfocusing, at breath speed. It goes from 35mm to 16 to 8 and back. A ten year old's voice. I went with my sister to the back pasture at my Grandpa's place in BC. I was looking for a frog because I wanted to kill it to see its long tongue. We found a big dark grey toad and I hit it with a stick. It didn't die but it was hurt. I thought I had to keep hitting it until it died, because I had already hurt it. I had to hit it so many times before it died and its tongue came out. Something of the quality of the shaft of light through a slamming door. 3rd What would be so, if the lover/you is the image of the uncon. It would mean the uncon changes. I'm wanting to say: from a loose keen impotent beautiful image-maker to a starved duty-bound timid but wonderfully potent gardener. From an experienced educated ferocious powerful but lame executive to a young cute willing sweetbodied sturdy but unimpressive girl artist. I take on the qualities of whoever I'm with, along with an oppositeness of position. None of this seems to hold up. 4 Eric when he was desk clerk at the Canadian Hotel was planning to fumigate the cockroaches. He saw in a vision a lot of slender women and children with brown sort of pointed bodies, and took it as an appeal for mercy. But he went ahead and decimated them anyway. Next day he had an auditory vision of someone saying they'd be back. He went to the west end to a bootlegger he knew, a big tough woman like a man with her hair straight back. She showed him her bankbooks with $90,000 savings, she could treat a man right who knew how to treat her right she said. He'd better have a few beers to take home he said. She wrapped them in newspaper. When he unwrapped them in his room four cockroaches scattered from between the sheets. A mouse used to come out into the room to look at him. He thought it would be nice to tame it, feed it enough to keep it out of his food. Some time later he felt it cross his bed in the dark. The next night it ran lightly over his hand. He was nearly asleep and his years of conditioning overcame him. He grabbed it and flung it on the floor and killed it. He still feels shame he says, because it had come in reply to his invitation. There was another cockroach who'd sit on the edge of the dresser observing him. One night it drank with him from a spilt drop on the table. - What am I hunted by? Soul death. Is good being depending on harm to other being? Or help to another being, or both? What is the relation of appearance to being? Same, different or both? [Opposite: Naáchi Dunne-za Relations between the living and the dead   "gaining the ability to communicate with god and the dead through dreams" "soul or shadow" the light inside a stone "a full quiver" a candle in a cave "leaves its body" is not referring to its location or circumstance, is out of relation   ma yine learnt control of non-body experience 'song' experience death's separation and yet retain a body to return to naáchene yine songs that connect the living and the dead A hunter would want to calculate ahead and doesn't want interference from the past, especially from the bleeding woman, ie childbirth. contact with giant destructive powers   "hunted by a giant animal of mythic times"   What was I hunted by? Soul-death was hunting and still hunts. Does the adolescent decide to kill rather than die, is that the loss of innocence? In one way it's just realizing that anyone does want to kill you. They'll play dead rather than realize someone's trying to kill them. This is connected with being born.   The power gained in adolescents is silent and latent until the adult has her work. In young adulthood the dreams would go back to the giant animal and come back with songs, abilities, a medicine bundle. The bull comes into it.   The song of the giant animal. The bull's prayer.   She limps, black dress.   The power gift comes with taboos that prevent it from harming, 'avoidances'. Proved competence.   The song signifies competent travel and return. To integrate present into an 'imaginary' frame of past and future, modeling. Intersection ahead to a work that will benefit.   "Represent the power and competence of a whole community."   Ahead to the land of the dead, having to go through the death ahead. By intense concentration on the turns of the song. A swan's down for the part of the journey where earth trail ends. "Can go to heaven without dying."   Going north for the winter, migratory. People of long dark and inner eye   A heavy spirit from being responsible for bad actions makes you dangerous also to children whose spirits are light.   A place is respected as the literal body of the self.   Quartz is the only power object that appears the same in normal and trance states. This tells me what it is - the part that is sober when I'm drunk, that in acid was noting relative space.   Elements 1. amnion 2. space and sight 3. 'seeing' 4. nexus, as of these or any meanings 5. entity, the stone 6. attention 7. stability 8. greed and envy 9. dazzle, fascination, unknowing] 7 Park Board tonight. 8 In this the artist who lays out the work, and devises a garment for a piece of ground, has the delight of seeing his work live and grow hour by hour, and, while growing, she is able to polish, cut and carve, to fill up here and there, to hope and to love. Joyce. Remembering during the last day of the sitting, first the cap of pressure, stretched neck. Then the back opening like a book. No, first the great heat of the solar plex, and nausea. Power center she said, "And then the Park Board decision comes to you." I have to ask, "Do you mean by a synchronicity?" "Yes." "You are the one who does it" she said. "How do you know that?" "When I ... a kind of psychic ability, I don't know, I see it." What is Paul? A talent evaded. What evaded talent is wearing the garden activist's hat? The man who lay there dying. When I was him: oh I don't feel good, I feel very sick, I feel very weak. But still he's contemptuous of the girl. She's looking under the bed for some reason. And that makes you laugh? I/he was liking to laugh. She's too serious, she thinks it means something but I didn't see it. She's taken off but I'm still here on the corner glad I'm not sick any more. Forty isn't when I was born, it's how old I am. Uber, über, over the rainbow, übermal, time it was over. Admiring my invention, admiring my lightheartedness, my escape. What's the pain? It's surgery, it's a knife wound, the stitches are still there. "I didn't like seeing them together and that's when I split." He's nasty, fairly nasty, something of Luke and Ed, contempt. I'm seeing something, am I, about idealized animus and what he's really like. 9 Mary's letter - I don't know if it - but v. slight memories of how I used to feel her - what can I say about it - something that was unnoticed whenever I'd write about her though I would write from it - a feeling of what I took to be her transparency, the tint of it. The intruding question. Talking to Michael about it this morning. How is the man wounded? I've been kind of barking up the wrong tree, he thought, it's your body that got hurt. So if coming-on isn't boyness, what is? I'm doing a lot of boy things so I assume the boy part is okay. Sounds good but then what is a man? He can't say. Penetrating like the sun - what does that mean? 10 A length - say ten - something that change continuously - sky color shot with grain - something that pulses gold specks - the mask almost in pieces. Something that crosses from the back to front. A wall. - An empty day with many parts. I was sleeping, he was the one to wake and want to know if it's morning. He screwed and smiled and kept his hands doing on my breasts - oo what's happened to you - with the little balloon of the wrong kind of condom clamped halfway up it. Not a night we could kiss, a tigerish night, with that clean happiness of holding. I get up with him at 6:30, half hour in the kitchen while daylight whitens outside and we sit by the big chair to feel it. Pleasure of saying goodbye without having had enough. Paige wd say Ver-ry well done Rob. I pick up an East Ender outside Rhoda's door to see my name in it. "If you want to kill the gardens, a two-year lease is the way to do it, Epp said." Fumiko brings into Cineworks an AGO catalog. Cheryl's photo that I see has a spook face in it, spoke it said, that I love to look at. And then the text, what does it mean to have these things said. "The closer and more attentive to her films one becomes, the purer and more intricate they are." Noticing what he doesn't see, and what I didn't too, that 9 and 10 are inside/outside. But this other inclusion in sentences like "exfoliates aspects of cinematic representation," "so only its trace appears and it 'becomes' an absence." Its company chosen, Snow, Elder, should I wonder what death is the cost of that kind of mention? Bart Testa 1988 Recent Work from the Canadian Avant-Garde, Jonasson & Shedden eds, Art Gallery of Ontario. Daph last night saying tessera is out but got returned from this address. [charm, value, ethic, tactic and gender, in writing published in tessera 6 , Contemporary Verse 2 (11), Toronto.] And then Fumiko, someway antipathetic, what - her gloss and beauty but something in the work too self-cossetting, whiny, she's mad at Scott, in a welter of anxiety, things she's learned, "it's playing off the image of - ." I hate that playing off they learn in film school, don't play off a corrupt thing, do away with it, don't get yr gloss off alluding to your bondage. I don't like her smile that lifts stiffly in two separate halves, or her readiness to bore, that prettiness allows. Worst is the way she doesn't bring a penetration, alright is that what you mean, she doesn't bring that pressure of scrutiny to herself. The battle I had with beauty, that made trapline more than beautiful. Okay I've got it, 'the man' is that. A library book. Girl's father mutilated sets himself aside. Girl cracks into vision, comprehension, and responsibility. He becomes an artist, she brings him back by candour. She his equal in fame is a therapist. Mr Rochester. Ken's sickness. Then Eric. The way sometimes I hear him with pleasure, and other times suspecting he's trying to kill me. I don't like to tell the story even. Former lives are wells, we're not nourishing them but they go on living and working without us. Cancer he says is when a well likes the miracle of making cells divide. I suspected he was working with an esoteric law about the uncon not recognizing not and was trying to sneak a cancer program into me. I started yelling to counter it if so. A crazy writer-man, happy juvenile garden-man, separated image-man gets the kid, cut-off origin-man. 11 I wrapped it around your backbone with my sense of humor, said Eric as I woke. 14 Doing it badly. Fall asleep in sweet memory, wake at night turning together ready and then not going on and then nattering too long. Makes this day empty. Makes me see him ugly. Straining to make him exist. A cold, exhaustion, indifference to anything I could read or think. Worry about it being mid-November and no work or plan or will - especially that, no edge. Even the garden bores me, herb plants, enough. He plays dead. He looks like someone who is shrunk away from his own edges into the safest core. Doesn't travel. Once at week to his mom's. Family worship of alcohol. So meager a bachelor with dirty mat and thin blanket, supper of baked potatoes falling asleep in front of a TV movie. Without the pressure of Rowen I'm not dreaming of Cambridge or MIT or any suitable lover or friends or pleasures. 15 Forget film, assemble something about 'seeing.' Find out where the gaps are, find out what I've been making and what I want it for. Maybe it's not a long work. The queasiness as soon as I go into it. 17 tessera. Her tiny love story about Michael, my 4 pages of bold clear type, are what I like. $70! 19 So what of that hurt my feelings. [Opposite: scry, descry, scribe, scrive My daughter saw in the stone in her bracelet. of examining objects in the crystal with a magnifying glass This glasse perspective Roger Bacon 1214-94 "The stone" John Dee 1527-1608 "a flat black stone of very close texture," obsidian look at the shadows in pools of water black earthenware vessel filled with water zaztun or divining stone a polished sandstone steel mirror of Shinto Scot on a child's hand the cup that mirroureth the world or blade of a sword a spot of ink - If I do the grain work: Stay here for now Experiment with moiré Optical printer Outline what's philosophy, what's experimental, what it has to do with meditation Coué also said that when imagination (the subconscious) and the will (the conscious mind) are in conflict, imagination wins. Found she could contact 7 different zones of the 'other' from the devil or id to a superconscious. Self protection, memory, body.] 20 On the Chinese Catholic Church corner, under the streetlight, their orange plastic paint over his shoulder, Rowen wandering to the steps he likes, wet nylon parka, Michael screaming You're a baby, you look ridiculous, everybody can see what you're doing. What it's like this week is - rain - rein - not having anything to do - waking to a closed ceiling - like this, mind so slow I sit holding the pencil pushing sludge. Lonely. No movie I could stand. I go to Carnegie and there's music and dancing, Michael and Rowen. Rowen kisses me on the nose the mouth the elbow top of the head. The twostep cowboy asks me to dance. You're shaking, he says. Sure enough my left hand on his shoulder is jumping a half inch. Henry behind the drums sings Dreaming. Dave, the man I found in the sleeping bag at the foot of an ash sapling, is playing a diamond point electric guitar. Michael dances with Rowen. 21 What to do? The grain work. Where to start. With the grain. A hotel in London, a quite good hotel, but there's the memory of the other cheaper hotel I stayed at in other dreams. From my room I can see the café quarter I used to like tho' I haven't visited it this time. Taking on Dewdney - bike - camera repair - an inhibition, I don't want to - house repair. 22 [with Joyce] She said, Make an image for it. A stone. What's that like? It's just hhuh ... set. It's screaming. From here. What's it screaming? Just screaming. It twists around. What would it take to make it a seed? (Silence.) (But I really get it.) It would have to be alive inside. I've been wishing for drugs again, just to have a sense of being alive inside. Before you do that, do it yourself. Sit. Yes. Do you think it was very early you were made reactive? (That's a lot to admit, am I going to take it? In a way that's not reactive?) The whole culture was like that I think. - I have so much trouble with action. (With a squeeze of tear.) I do understand! From myself as well. But at the garden it's been so easy to act. I was thinking farm work was the one thing we were allowed to do. It has immediate rewards too. Yes. - She said the photo [in the AGO catalog] was not of me - wary, sharp, knowing. It's witchy. Yes witchy, why not? I want to be complex and interesting too. You are complex and interesting. There's a sensitivity and subtlety I don't see here. I didn't have a picture of that. Nobody's going to mess with her. - This is lovely, it's a true portrait. - Just like that, she didn't have trouble with charm, value, ethic tactic. FIGHT! Following me into the corridor. 24 What the pendulum says. 25 The Athenian youth ran after them because they offered a new kind of contest and new weapon in the struggle for power. who had always opposed the arbitrary rule of momentary majorities and who had always pleaded for a government of the best the question whether political law accords with or counters universal law / divine law through the Logos, through dialogue the plastic eye of the Greeks We first find in him the "eye of the soul". In an underworld of dancing points, a shade just disappears. Put them into an atmosphere. one whose inner eye had seen the eternal forms If it was an eidos then a person became just when looking at justice. Kantian sense of a necessary concept of reason for which there is no corresponding object of sense makes me think of machine language Only after his eyes had been opened to the eidos did he turn the energy of his being with enormous intensity in this one direction. - Does he mean something like state? The beautiful itself, the beautiful-as-being. Or does he mean something like a model. Or he means science. Had had much too powerful an experience of the other human being, of the eros who leads one person to another and both to the Idea. Daimonion forces of resistance If this demonic participates helpfully in the relationship, the companions immediately find themselves on the path to As corks floating above the net, a daimon is the point of reception without senses, penetrating all - the element that is constant. demons who have divided all living beings into species and herds The original teachers are still conscious of the insoluble core. critic of the current conventional mores and conventional confusions 27th I was going from the Academy straight to the Lyceum, intending to take the outer road, which is close under the wall. The figure of the philosopher - its value seems to be separate from the value/uselessness of what's argued. I'm sitting in a poplar grove in Alberta and take on Socrates and Plato on the question of body and soul. 'Soul' seems to mean 'what we like and want to be.' A man in brown with a brown horse is coming through the streets of the East End singing aloud as if he's a vendor. Cockles and mussels maybe, but he doesn't have anything but himself to sell. I'm seeing him as if from above going into a by-street or alley. Then I'm in the alley and hear him saying to his horse, You haven't made love in a long time. Ahead of me from another alley on the right I see a black horse with a rider dressed in black. The horse is antsy, pitching. The rider is hung round his neck dodging his front hooves, but confident and unshakeable. I think - here's the horse for the brown horse to make love with. Looking at the rider thinking it's a girl. The brown and black persons are talking, along with others like them. The one I thought a girl has a jaw black with stubble. They're all homosexuals. I hear her voice, she's a girl, but no the jaw is still bearded. The brown man was a neat small sleek one like boot leather. I said something to him about his cock and muscles. The 'god' said to Eric "You have to remember Ellie is not a single woman." Sniffing in Plato for a template of something, maybe of mystification. There's the figure of the philosopher, and there's x the unknown that operates in a system maybe the way a negative root does? It evokes my own mysteries and the point of mystery in other systems. Evokes also, love, light, beauty, seeing and 'seeing', open sky color. Eye fixation of some kind identification, imprint, punishment conflict, organ language, motivation And thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself when she takes leave of the body but is aspiring after true being Absolute justice, beauty and good and an absolute essence of all things But with the very light of the mind in her own clearness searches into the very truth of each Who has got rid, as far as he can, of eyes and ears and, so to speak, of the whole body And having thus got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and know ourselves in the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth. Is not the separation and release of the soul from the body their especial study? Studying to live as nearly as they can in a state of death He equates 'the body', 'money' and 'power' O my blessed Simmias, is there not one true coin for which all things ought to be exchanged? - And that is wisdom. Our souls must have had prior existence - As language - ie our souls are implicit in the particulars of language - and vice versa? Universal grammar - there's a process of unpacking both - in each case. Do I have access to a mind that knows more than I do     Is it a god or disembodied being     Is it a mind that lives in my body     Could it live as the I of my body     no Is it what's called the unconscious     Is that what other people mean by god     no Are other people really in contact with a or the real god     no Is the universe itself the real god     (stops) Does more than one person live in my body     More than two     no Is it true to say one is a man and one is a child     no Do either of them have a real gender     no Is it true to say one is a child and one is my personal age     no Is one of them a child     no Are they generally in conflict with each other     Is one of them the self of the body     no Is everyone designed to have two personalities     no Are the personalities we're talking about myself and you     no Is the unconscious something other than a personality     Is the unc a point of view     no Is life in some way the same as a dream     no Are people real others, as we think of them     Are both my selves or minds present in my usual consciousness     (?) Is one of them imagination and one more to do with explaining and understanding     Does it have to do with L and R hemispheres     (stops) Assertion and attention     Are assertion and attention in conflict by the nature of things     (silence) Is this kind of question worth asking     (?) Am I ever going to understand all this stuff     Is the brown horse to do with explanation etc     Is the black horse to do with the unc     Does the rider have to do with the dreaming mind     no Imagination?     (diagonal motion) When you say that do you mean not exactly     Do you mean c or attention     NO Art or work     (circular motion) Do you mean trance or hypnotic state     (stops) Did you like how I was when I was with T and C     no Was I in some way more myself     Does the soul Plato means have anything to do with the way I was then     Is the one I am now the one I am meant to be     Is the black horse to do with sex and health     no Family     no When I have a woman lover does it make me a man     no Is being a spirit a higher state     no Is being attentive to the other as real things a higher state     no Are there basically more states than those two     no Is the one state the unconscious of the other state    (stops) Are you the soul     (stops) Are you frightened of these questions     no Is the black horse death     Is the rider also death     Essential connection between death and imagination     no Does the dream mean some part of me is going to meet death     (circles) Was the dream in any way a warning     no Do they both represent things other than me     Is the sensation in the s.p. something useful to do with power     Is it also to do with being hurt in the past     no Is there some particular way I should be in relation to it     no Do you like it when I will     (stops) Do you prefer it when I do what I feel like doing     no Would you like me to be more disciplined about work     Is there a reason why I'm not     Did somebody else do something to me     no I decided myself that it was stiff and ugly     Can I be thrilling and charming as well as having a strong will     To get a strong will again does it take just a decision     no Does it take practice in small events often    (?) Is it something I did at the time of Roy     no Was Roy jealous of my will     Did I stop because he said it wasn't interesting     Has Roy damaged Luke's will     no Can I make a strong will and still be flexible and in touch with the unc       Do I really want or need more will     (stops) Are will and doing the same thing     Is power always at somebody else's expense     no Does willing make me more beautiful     Intelligent     Healthy     Can I discover what to do     Did Jam intend to damage my will     Can I find a green landcruiser at a good price     Do you like Don Juan     no Castenada's books     no Do you like drugs     Did Jam only want to harm me     Did she also wish me well     (stops) Did Jam seriously damage me     Am I recovered     Did I seriously damage Jam     no Has anybody     no Did T seriously damage me     no Did I her     no Am I going to damage Rob     Did I damage Michael     Am I damaging Rowen     no Did I damage Luke     no Judy     no Paul     no Mary    (stops) Ed     Did Ed intend to harm me     Did Mary intend to harm me     no Did Roy     Did I harm Roy     no Does Joyce intend to harm     no Is Michael okay all the same       When you say Jam harmed me do you mean she made me cruel     no Confused     Did having Rowen harm me     no Did being with M harm me     no   Is my best talent: Images     no Gardening     no Something to do with writing     Something to do with clarity and thinking     Am I supposed to be a synthesist or theorist     no Teacher     Is Jam a better writer than I am     Is Rhoda better at visual making than I am     no Is notes in origin a good film     no Is trapline     no Do I have it in me to make one that is good     Am I on the track of one that is     Is there a value in making good work     no   Are men superior to women mentally     no Are women     no Are women superior to men morally     Are they put down because they are     no Is there going to be a time when women are really socially equal     no Are they put down because they are not as driven to dominate     no Do they keep themselves down because they prefer it     Is power an inferior state     no Are women more in touch with nature     no That the soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intellectual, and uniform, and indissoluable, and unchangeable; and that the body is in the very likeness of the human, and mortal, and unintellectual, and multiform, and dissoluble, and changeable. But the soul which is the companion and servant of the body always, and is in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth only exists in a bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste, and use for the purposes of his lusts - the soul I mean accustomed to hate and fear and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy. Knowledge of x, that is, of true being mud of Hades An allusion is made to the Orphic symbol of the mud in which the mind's eye is buried, the imagination is caught in images of hollowness and cave. aidon - invisible soul arrives at a noble, pure, invisible place invisible realm akin to itself 4th gospel: "and the light shineth in darkness" We must believe we have beheld the truth when the soul is suddenly seized by illumination says Plotinus. visions innocent, simple, calm and blessed part 4 aphrodite's garden volume 9: 1988-1989 august-january work & days: a lifetime journal project