| dames rocket 1 part 5 - summer 1975 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
I've been dreaming a very white film, rich whites, perhaps it is related to angels, I'm seeing folds in the white, overexposure, the rich look of feathers, turquoise, washed wood, peonies, maybe an untextured sky, superimposition, tone-poem, I'm thinking of Georgia O'Keefe, maybe I could start with slides, need money quick. The white horses. Live white horses with moist eyes, the cat's feet. Shades of sky. I think this is the white period, something should come out of it. White music. Magazine pictures. - Most of the science fiction that has seriously interested me recently has been concerned with time or concepts of time. - This morning's meeting at Lynn [Hughes] and Ralf's studio, the pigeons' feet on their spattered panes, with another window above, the click of their feet, and a coo; the Cobalt Café in the Cobalt Hotel on Main Street, everything that went past, fire engines, trucks, a weird touring bus with triple-story portholes. Coffee, bacon and eggs and toast and hashbrowns. Ralf strange and twitchy, too twitchy and yet in his twitches full of response, overresponse and maybe pleasure. Lynn's brown slim face and intensely blue-green pointed eyes; her lovely breasts; our U-shaped table the Chinese boy entered to pour coffee again and again. Paul leaning forward, he and Ralf the ends of the magnet, gradually. Lynn and I feeling balanced and right next to each other. At the fountain, our movie that we liked because we were acting freely. Until we made ourselves blood brothers with a safety pin, and I was uneasy because I wanted it to be less sentimental. And feel it later, maybe, unwatched. He said "I am full of squiggles, I think you have less squiggles in you." Interference. The relation to children. "I know you so well. That's what I miss most." "I've been holding back wanting you and trying to find out whether I like your personality." "Do you?" "No, not really." Said so straight, I liked it. We can be scientific and I like that best of all. The feelings oh yes must be surprises. - "Myth is at the beginning of literature and also at its end." Borges about Cervantes and Don Quixote - A good thought got away. Last night's dream was a long dream about going to see a crippled woman, the detail of the high ceilinged room with cupboards, servants, plastic doily plates. - Jong "a creature built around an inner darkness" The problem of having many identities, many names my temptation. - Trusting one's own experience - children do, but "in cultural creation they evoke the norm." When you begin to open up your own sense of vulnerabiltiy and make poetry of it, you are on your way. Then "maybe we will not have to worry about women understanding their own self hatred as a prerequisite to authentic creative work." - Clear ones, white peony like parrots' feathers, a little entry of sun's light onto a clearing on the tablecloth, three bindweed flowers having their day down among the bindweed leaves on the fence, Jo calling with a message and stopping to talk about movies and encounter groups, Paul's blond head in the lane taking Luke down my path to school, the smell of peonies. [Paul and tea box] [Paul pleased] My friends with their gifts, the women of the Western Conference. For a while last night Paul was a little priest face shining hands folded against his long black skirt. Then he journeyed away and told me about Ivanna, the night they spent in Dublin and the family tableau that ensued, I was wanting to listen - We amuse each other, when we talked about our little fantasies - "I don't flesh it out" - of living the rest of our lives together, "I have a fantasy of knowing you for a long time" is how I say it - what was best, was saying why we do not believe it really. Oh Paul don't you see that clarity is light and makes (inventing someone I could be, would be inventing the person I am, as if I were not afraid and bound to the frightened level everyone else, nearly -) right, and the rest is Cosmopolitan Magazine lies and lies. -
The girl with the will at the Colosseum waiting for Alice Cooper, platform sandals, and rump cut blue jeans over pantihose that showed a double weight starting two or three inches below the edge of the jeans, beautiful classical legs, glitter on her eyes. The men going to the races, the slim children going to Alice Cooper; the streets are full of them here - this neighbourhood fills and empties. - Amusing each other - as little as it means - as much. It's a kind of intensity, we are in a way all there, but it fluctuates, Paul hasn't got my conscience about it. He doesn't understand the connection between his 'optimism' and seduction. Yet he helps me too: but the deep happiness, the body contentment, the matedness, of a few weekends with Tony Nesbit, was something else, and more. He tells me the things which have disgusted him as if they have not: this morning when I woke too early I had the sleepy stink of rotting bodies on my flesh and breath - he said it had not displeased him, to make it so. On Thursday when he came behind me on the way to The shaman's cure, he said, with my bathrobe coat bellying out behind me, I had looked squat and wide as a barn door and he had thought "just a minute!" but then he had caught up and I had looked alright, he said - well, but I could never tell him the moments his flesh or face put me off, I feel he has a precarious construction of his image, and women have protected and flattered him. Well and men have protected and flattered me too. (Thinking of Andy I wrote 'flattered' in his hand.) - Christina and Elias, happy summer to you, you are the hub of a wheel turning somewhere, just to greet you from another mysterous distance and say well I remember you sometimes and put you into my irregular prayers from time to time, and hope and expect that you and your babies are well and shining as usual. No, I can't say a true letter because I'm composing one to be sent. Try again: Beautiful Elias I'd like to know you're still there, I'd like you to think of me as a remote star for your days but in your arrogance, the natural flattery that attends you, I think you may never have quite taken me seriously. Beautiful Elias, the tarot cards you are, the best sort, the spiritual king, the grown man. And you slight Christina, you could grow ... Ways and games, I miss the Khanka community and haven't yet found or formed the replacement which will combine the Khanka's tenderness with real understanding of women's politics. -
- The peony opening in this way: five large outer petals, white with a smudge of red on one, have folded all the way back. The rest of the large outer petals are folded around the bud in a square shape like a Japanese parcel, holding in tight the flung frills of the centre, which are white too but hold a yellow light down in amongst themselves. Waking so anxious and black this morning, this vulnerable body losing its spring, cooling - oh no I rebel - A microscoping closeup of the peony, bits fading and superimposing, still life. - Cathy Sopko across the table in the Aristocratic Café on Broadway, telling me "When I left the other day I felt so happy in a way I hadn't felt for a long time," her eyes were wet and she looked at the napkin container. I said "Well there's more of the same" rather shyly and wanted to hug her: she's a lucky find. Another present: Stephanie Judy on the telephone liking to talk to me. And another in Paul telling me "When I left on Monday I was feeling very righteous, and when I went to my journal that's what I intended to say, but what I found myself writing about was the ways you talk to me, the way you tell me things. I was so grateful and moved my eyes were wet." Really!?! "derives, by aphesis, from ..." - I need - I think it's safe - to reexperience my love for Roy, my hope, my bride days: to go past the reaction. - Not wanting to be implicated in things
CBC Borges. Scopenhauer, Ribertson, Croce, Leibnitz Sophistry, scepticism Enjoys imagining philosophical positions opposite to his "aye-thigh-eest" try to speak the root word destroy superficial positions God could go out of control, the heartless centre of the universe, the white whale. When he came to, his perceptions were almost unbearably rich. Each visual memory was linked to a physical sensation. the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake intolerably precise world To think is to forget details. - What you find in his literature is a mood, of being lost in the world Cultural creation is a labyrinthine dream, a repetition of the universe. It is strange to be, to be in any circumstance. [Luke's drawings on facing journal pages] - Every photograph of a house interior is a metaphor of spirit, which is to say reminds us of a posture in ourselves, that is, an unexpressed posture in our body, which is a relation to a thing, which is spirit. - My tyrannical color sense. I like it. - Stephanie pale in her nightgown and a plaid shirt. Her house with writing pasted throughout it. She seemed less solid and smaller in her dark cellar looking onto a burnt-out church in a garden neighbourhood downtown. Bottles of pills, the girl who wants to go out to pubs, reading The history of musical thought, and a tarot book, and a Latin book, who gave her adolescence to the violin and in the air drew the bow's motion wonderfully - "doing a gig" of classical string quartet at the Governor's house at tea. The lover "so curiously slight." Other lovers - never takes a lover she hasn't known for a long time. The moment I felt I had been foolish and uncentred, I came with good will, curiosity, but we were nervous and it was hard at first and then later we were relieved and lost our presence. She reassured me that you can indeed be friends with men while not sleeping with them, I asked how do you get an intimacy then, she says "Well I just demand it after a certain time, if I'm going to see them there has to be substance." "When we've tried to live together and make it last, it's been really brutal." I'm trying to learn toward women the tenderness I would feel toward circumstantial lovers. The desperate lovers' attention I can feel toward some women without pretending or learning. No one I know electrifies me, no one, including Paul, really interests me, comradeship and sympathy. The sunny afternoon downtown, I bought restaurant crockery, sat waiting for the bus on Powell opposite Newton Rooms, eating cherries, spitting seeds into my hand, a band of young slight Chinese adolescents, speaking Chinese. A drunk. "I don' understand your lingo, nicht versteh -." - The strength, the exuberance that came into me when I said "I think we might be a little bored with each other" - like having spoken an important truth against all the conventions. Even falling asleep and tired how healthy it feels. - Dream: I am mouth-kissing 'Father', and it's a tasteless flabby kiss. I stop, back off and tell him I don't care to go on because he's a flabby feeble kisser. He raises his fist, a little impotently, petulantly, and I tell him not to be silly, because I am going to tell him something that will be useful to him. I then lecture to him about something puerile like the value of weakness (don't remember what) while looking at him in a mirror; most of the time, though, I am looking at myself as I speak. I notice that the crotch of my bluejeans is patched, and then see that there is a large (old) bloodstain there too. A worm's nest of a dream. More dreams about a forest? Something lovely. - [after a hitchhiking trip to take Luke to stay with my folks in Alberta] How the Carmichaels say goodbye, occasional verse
1. The hills north of Calgary, bare, round. Luke at the edge of the highway in his low-hung khaki shorts and white teeshirt, two cars in one pocket. Put his arm back too far so it pointed toward me, was gallant about jumping up when a car came, paid attention, I was nervous and cross after disliking myself among Herman and Candy; it was very hot, we rode in three pickup trucks. 2. Edmonton, hot, the bus ride through the little city to 84th and 103rd. Luke glad to be going to a child, little house back from two bigger ones, bikes on the lawn and porch, note for me in the mailbox. Walking into the little place dirty dark littered stinking humid like a burrow, curtains closed everywhere, ugly sentimental decoration, nothing for the eye, but the dirtiness seemed honest and a good sign of their survival. I was anxious to look pretty but didn't really even in the jersey pyjama. Telephone rang when I'd been there a while resting and trying to prepare myself to pay attention and not judge, to be like Judy with them. Olivia. Came down the street with a tiny white child in long shorts like Luke, moving awkwardly, narrow shoulders, wider hips, toes turned a little out, thin mouth and big light thoughtful eyes. Sharp face, light body, pale blue with redbrown hair. She's blowsy, big loose breasts, big round hips, sometimes her small features get the grey sharp look of a very old Welsh grandmother - she's messy as she always was, bad skin, sallow, and nervous and tired. Sits down drinks murky tea and chain smokes while Luke and Michael fight over bikes, drive them up and down the sidewalk. Hair is damp and looks greasy. - The truck slamming to a stop at Jasper. Looked at the man, fat and piggy, with yellow eyebrows meeting across the top of his nose, thought of him as having a sloping forehead. A tattooed fat arm, bare chest, dirty truck. I wondered whether he was too torpid to be dangerous. Tried to set up a neutral area where I would be pleasant and sexless, appealing to his sense of my respectability, social position, etc. Made much of my 'husband,' child, job, education - spoke nicely to him, paid for my milk. I wanted to be silent, said eventually "I hope you don't mind that I'm not very talkative" with a silly smile. He said "I'm not talkative myself" but he was. His truck besides being dirty was extremely uncomfortable, with an engine that screamed and a hard narrow seat that made my back hurt. I kept my bags as near as I could to my feet and the door, wanting to sleep but not trusting the man. He suggested I sleep in the bunk, I said I was afraid to, it was such a cave. He said I could have the light on. Didn't tell him I was afraid to be trapped, it was such a hole. But did get in, to get away from more hours on the hard seat, lay wrapped in my coat with instructions to the sleep computer to wake me if he ever stopped. Trusted it. Slept, woke sometimes to check, and then past Kamloops when he pulled into a viewpoint parking area was instantly alert and cheerful. When he stopped I crawled out - he had his arm ready to stop me but - I think - I kept it back by force of my determination to risk him and win. He got in back, I made a bed across the seats. Other trailor trucks passing shook our truck. Terrible silence. I wouldn't move, wanting him to fall asleep and forget me. He made a sudden move in the back. "Dear I'd feel safer if you'd come back here, if you fell asleep and knocked the gear lever the maxi-brake might expode and we'd roll downhill." "I'd feel safer if I didn't." I said I would move to my old crouched position on the floor, far away from the gear lever. Silence, I like the silence, checking my symptoms for fear or confidence. He stirs again, says he has to drive on for another place that's more level, he's nervous about the slope and it's keeping him awake. We move half a mile down the road to another viewpoint, I'm glad there are more trucks and a lot of campers and cars here. We go nose to nose with another truck, making such a noise, passing a pickup with feet pressed against the side window. Outside, stars, shapes of pines on hills. He gets in back. I lie across the seats covered with my coat, if I want to shift my weight or adjust the coat I wait so the noise is covered by a passing truck. He lies quiet too. - (Paul says Yes, because if you move it might start a current of movement. I say yes, I had to keep still to keep him still.) When the engine was shut off I could hear a humming at the centre of my forebrain. After a time, a whine, a shrill hum, started up so I couldn't tell if it was a truck coming. The noise increased. I realized it was in the cab - an explosion, then silence. (Remembered what he'd said about his airbrakes exploding.) My stomach relaxed, I listened to his breathing (mine was noiseless) and thought he might be sleeping. But he stirred, some zippers unzipped. I had my back to him, and couldn't have told anyway whether it was his sleeping bag or his pants, maybe both, because the sound that followed was like skin being beaten lightly, not heavily, but heavy skin - ah, I thought, maybe that will put him to sleep. Was far from asleep myself. Silence again. I imagined leaving the truck but it was too dark to go back onto the road and I thought it might be cold. I had no sleeping bag and was no longer tired. My stomach went icy. I thought - ah, he's thinking now. In a while I relaxed again, I wondered whether my stomach was accurately charting his thoughts. It was icy again when he reached his fat arm out of the hole and grasped my arm. "I think you should come back here with me." "No" I said, sat up and put my hand on the door handle. "I think you should come back here" he said again, in the same tone, holding my arm with the same, not violent, pressure. "No" I said again in the same tone, opened the door and slid out of it feet first, bringing my coat and my bags out with me. Closed the door. Walked past the parked campers, only slightly shaking. When I'd got out of sight I turned uphill, followed a path through some slight grass and desert smells, found the air warm and dry. At the top, where I could see anyone who might follow, saw a lake. Checked to make sure my outline couldn't be seen from the transport truck I could just make out (a white trailer) at the end of the parking places below, felt the ground, which was nearly dry, and lay down on my back with my head on my bag. Twenty miles away a town's lights, an infrequent light moved toward me marking a winding road I suppose we had come on. The hills were pale, round, sparsely marked with low dark trees. I had my elbow on a silver plant that gave off a pungent herbal smell. Mosquitoes came infrequently enough so that I could kill them one by one as they arrived, they were large and seemed juicy as berries, I imagined them squashed on my face leaving stains. I lay for a while in the same state of trusting but alert rest, imagining the truck driver relieved to have me gone, and asleep now. A truck started its engine and pulled out, but it wasn't his. I often looked at a white head of dry grass that was beautiful next to me, leaning sensitive to air's movement. After a while it was light, I came down from the hill and stood next to the exit. An old man came by, looked hard and stopped. The clock in the café where we stopped a few miles further on said it was five o'clock. The old man was taking cherries to 100 Mile House. He was not interested in me, though cheerful. Said to the waitress, You're the nicest thing I've seen today. We had two cups of coffee, toast and jam. - Carmichael I wish that was you on the back porch four little houses over. My lovely anarchic garden, my dirty lovely anarchic house. Bill Volk's sweet boyish clear profile resting inside the old man's soft fat resting face. His hips are round below his belt, his hands have finely shaped fingernails. He is no longer masculine, his garden is Versailles, his house a small Colonial house with four sets of two pillars, his key winds the clock every seven days. Formal, we agreed. Books and the umbrella stand. [The chemical engineer from Princeton I met when I was working at the Hotel Sofitel in Strasbourg drove up from a conference in Seattle to see me.] Traveling with Olivia up and then down the long swath of green grass-lined highway cut through forest and farmland all like my childhood landscape. Small trees, round green coins of poplar (aspen) leaf, moving, fluttering like wings, like flags, making the sky large and still, white clouds scattered like wooded clumps above and below, the same spaces and roundnesses. The country here shines, is radiant, like no other country, it's far north - the green northern light at midnight, the even hot unbelievabe apricot blaze, even all across the north, that woke me like the sound of fire, that I registered in one second's shutter blink and slept again on the floor east-west broadside to it all. Saturday night we walked to the bridge, we sat on the edge frightened by cars, listening to the creek, looking down at willows. I didn't say how I'd gone there with Roy on the first night; with Rasheed before. In the forest there were bluebells, dewberries, wild stawberries (three). In the grass there were yarrow, tiger lilies, fireweed. The old barn when we went into it was open on one side and in places through the roof. It had always been a black wet place, now it is dry, warm, bright, raspberry plants growing in horse stalls. The tongue and groove had been diagonal, two barn doors still close tight, and on the field side too. Now it is a magical place where harness hangs on dry wood, the calves' pen is sound, there's an old burrow opening into it, some animal's courtyard, a gopher? On the floor a dry black grit, compost. At the back door a field where the mucky pasture was. It stretches to the wood where prairie grass humped up into ants' hives like swellings, there had been starflowers and a small tribe of fairies in that damp woods. But Olivia was chilled by the dark house - the paper suitcase I lay in when an infant was there on a workbench, full of magazines. Floor down to ground? No, oily from tractor parts. The attic empty. I looked in all the attics, I wanted to grab things. We got away with a little.
(The fool, the panicky old man, is afraid not to know the value of what he has scorned all his life - she should buy it he said of the buggy seat that was mine by right of old claim and use in the pighouse playhouse.) Then the seed box, steep-sided triangle. It is waist high now, once I stood on my toes to see into it!
- In Paul's garden a beast came, round ears, a tired lion, who spoke like this: "Slow no like fast, slow, slow." Thoughtfully, with beast concentration while I held my head on his shoulder and listened respectfully. Talking about poetry later in the evening I said "You know I can only ever write pathetic fallacy poetry, but also what my poems always say is 'There you are.'" He said "Yes your poems always say 'There you are.'" This morning he told me how it was when Akiko was moving toward her carpenter, he had been away thinking for two weeks and had decided to marry her, because their two and a half years were more important than his hunger for intellectual kin. Talking about Keats, pathetic fallacy, and hunger for kin. "In a sense Don and I really long for each other; and yet I feel what there is between Olivia and him is (I push his elbow) 'We've been together such a long time you ol' bag, I'll be with you until we die.'" - We are born into the world, and there is something within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts for its likeness ... We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. Not only the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is composed; a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness; a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise ... To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or correspond with it. The discovery of its antitype; the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own; an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret; with a frame whose nerves vibrate with the vibrations of our own; and of a combination of all these in such proportion as the type within demands; this is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends; and to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that, without the possession of which there is no rest or respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, and the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. Shelley "On Love" - I'm loving your quickness, the way you incline your face into an argument, your sometimes blond justice. "You know we really are both liars," I say. "Yes and we are liars because we are both so willing, to try ..." Learning the repetitive details of his early life, the vanished accidents that our same forms wore, our various loves, poets, teachers, landscapes. This morning he said "'Twas lovely to find you in my bed, my bed really needed someone these days." In my unhappiness about not making it into our making love, ie not making love, making discontent (Why is he doing everything wrong? Why did he stop? Why did he come? Why won't he do what would bring me into his circle? Why does he refuse to?), and when I'd expressed my bind, my box about depending on him to take me with him and yet not being able to tell him what brings me because if I tell him he won't do it because it will seem mechanical to him, we both felt excised, wiped out of the morning, but he made me a gracious breakfast anyway. What is it about the romantic relation that encourages lying when truth telling leadss to such pleasures. It is a warp that enters, a sleep too, we were making love in sleep, I had no leverage on myself or the time, could only register dimly. Don on the porch in the dark: defending the woman Olivia accused of indulging herself as a one-man woman, waiting until the man would come back. "Maybe she is right, maybe she is a one-man woman. You judge her because you're afraid you might be one too." My sense of chill. "If you are, what a terrible fate." I liked the way he was setting himself to say what he thought: "I'm glad I'm still young enough to be turned on by you." The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively. The messages I get for my hunger for - something - are from Don - remember me - satisfy yourself that you've asked the questions. Startled, I look around me - it's true I want to hate and hurt my father, it's true I want to be Roy's victim, it's true I want to make great credit and revelations out of both. Is there a real tragedy in him - what I should do is wear his head over mine and feel him, and not be satisfied to flee, or to accuse indirectly - loathesomeness, I'm frightened at the thought that there might be a reconciliation, that is what I seem really to shrink from, but what love, there, could be dangerous to me? I want him as my enemy, ugly enemy your place is to teach me, there are beings with no being, there are evils and devils, Evil Epp. Devil egg. - I'm frightened of the Cenci play, lonely without Luke, frightened by my two jobs, legal insecurities, felt unwelcomed by Paul (and anyway ...), idle, broke, weird in my body, waking from anxious dreams - Waking in Paul's house came up heavily out of my dreams with an image of a shop closing for the night, putting things away; "Yesterday morning when I was strugging up out of heavy sleep the last dream image I had was of a shop in which things were being put away for closing time." - "One of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another." Beatrice Cenci - What the unacknowledged legislator said about women:
Shelley 1819 The Cenci: a tragedy in five acts - When Olivia makes me dream of marriage I support myself imagining her dreaming of my singleness. - Between Paul and me an experimental hardness, which made us this morning softer, more real - "growling like young lions" - "and then fucking like snakes." "Oh love, oh love, oh love." "You lovely lady, oh you lovely lady." Paul liking me this morning for a good reason, because I said "I'd like to know where you pitch your intimacies with other people." "You've just called me all the worst things I think about myself." ("You're such a gossip, you're a real society lady aren't you.") - The first meeting [of the Women's Interart Co op group], Anna [Buchan], Leslie, Lee, Jean [Mallinson], Madeleine [Duff], Susie, Penny, Brownie. - The second: Anna, Leslie, Jeanie [Kamins], Madeleine, Penny, Cathy [Sopko], Dorie, and ... - My dear, my dear anydear, Townsend-sur-mer had its burnt salty selfconscious fighting delighted king and queen for three days, recording each other as experiments. [Paul was on his way to check out San Francisco and I see him off with a hitch-hiking weekend in Port Townsend in Washington State.] - I should record your ardent battering - "You don't love me! You don't love me!" and "You're cold, you're empty" and me cool and happy like the wren balancing tail into the wind saying "Why should I? No I don't! But I like you! I can't lose you, we know each other, don't be silly" but later feeling a little of your same fright. What if it's you sustaining my cairn of pebbles, my shell altarpieces on the log's shelves, my relation to the worn brick side of the building and the water running two ways at once? What if they left, with you? Then I leaned against you without speaking (not too sad to play good pool) and you liked it, our beast with four eyes. Field with sedge-like grass waist high, a hollow with blackberry vines? It was dark and on the other side of the hill a dog knew about us and might follow. Tall trees on either side of the narrow meadow, maybe aspens one side; fir? on the other. The dry grass matted down to hold our hot roll of a bed (two sleeping bags zipped) in its own sort of basket - Paul peed in one direction and I in the other (he said like wolves making a territory without other dangerous animals), the grass or something hidden in it had a medicinal pungeance where we crushed it, there were birds early and later crows, whose calls in my near-sleep made shapes like this [sketch of circles of different sizes], larger blots, circular, if closer by. When we packed and left in the morning we pushed through the narrow meadow to the clearing where a James Stewart man picked raspberries for his breakfast into a rusty tin on a string round his neck. He smiled when he saw us, spoke nicely but with a forgetfulness of us that seemed gentle madness. He had a grey face with 3-day beard, was very thin and a little stooped although tall. He spoke about getting cucumber plants from his parents like a young man; when he told his project, peeling logs to build a covered bridge, he said "if I don't die before then" like an old man. Paul thought he was sick; I thought he was a real American loony hermit and was taken with him, impressed and touched. Maybe a James Stewart with cancer but maybe too fragile ever to have been other than he is now. Paul said he reminded him of Wain and made him impatient in the same way. Fucking, Paul says "Oh, my lovely sweetie." What were we fighting about? Paul was protesting my traveling separateness, feeling himself like Arlene and punished for being mean to her. I was getting bored with his hysterics but trying not to humor him. It wasn't until after a long time that I suddenly felt his pain, the sore person behind his arguments, that I softened and kissed him. He was suspicious: was I conciliating him to shut him up? (Not-at-tall.) Gave him a lovely journal partly to pay him off, he gave it back formally, laid it next to me and announced he wanted to be free. I said he was a silly man and had been free all along and should go ahead and try to sleep with other people but it would do him no good and I didn't think I could lose him anyway. We were really locked for a while, although it's hard to remember now, when we said goodbye so sweetly, he on the wharf wearing Andy's shirt and my blue silk scarf as lady's favour, waving the scarf to me wearing the blue and white teeshirt, my wire glasses and the red cotton scarf I found on the street the night before. The kind of fantasy I have sometime is that after a long time we would look at each other one day and say we'd had a very good marriage hadn't we. He talked about commitment. I talked about my relation to my one only life on this one only earth, he liked that and we liked each other again. I'm in love with myself at the moment, summer has made the lines of my body contract themselves a little, so I enjoy my wrists etc, and the sun's made my face brown and shiny, cleared my eyes. My waist is smaller again and my haunches when I wrap my arms around my back feel solid as a bear's under my wrapskirt. Even my fingernails are thriving and silvery. It's the summer bliss, it has arrived. The easy life, the beautiful broad smooth women's backs in shoestring-strap dresses (the girl in the fountain yesterday). Bodies have been impressing me again. I've been impressionable like long ago. The faces of the women coming into the Towne Taverne as I left it for the last time. Our eyes said Howdy you magnificent lady to each other. I do feel an amazon, and it's partly what Paul gives me. [ferry] - The shoreline, striped spinnakers on monochrome seaward (this overcast day) (sun came out red half behind a mountain just before it left) (with an effect like the red neon Groceries sign on McGill in this blue twilight as I'm in Judy's room listening to The magic flute.) [my sister and her little son staying with me while her husband is away] - What is it to travel through experiences, times, places (they are seeming to be 'manifestations,' I mean seen obliquely somehow, in this blissful summer state, as last year, they seem not to be solid, I'm seeing them in the blurred run of them) as Ellie Epp. - I'm wondering these days, because I'm so pleased with myself and 'my' rich life, whether I need any longer to pay attention to the my-ness of what I see and hear and think. I'm having trouble saying this; sometimes Paul and I feel so inspired by each other's understanding that our old impulse to write down every lovely thing 'we' say and do seems miserly and out of date, no need to hoard, it's endless. Similarly no need to hoard my history or those of other people who're inside my circle - a long knot in matter, a long (short) eddy. It should just fly like clouds shapechanging. But it's been in my nature to try to cohere around my name, the I. The one eye; and is it perverse to try not to? Or is there an age when the I has gathered enough, sucked in enough, and can reverse the movement - everything I'm saying is heavy as a lead pipe, what I mean was a thought seen just at the edge of the flying field, several times lately. - Notes on Grandpa and Grandma. Gm takes charge of the conversation as if it belongs to her - question after question - then tells a story about the time they hitchhiked, she and Lillian, from Sumas where they'd been to the doctor. Her pita face, brown spots, the floury look. We set up a humorous tolerant affection like I have in Judy. Gpa in his illness, eyes sunk and foot poisoned fat from a little wound under the toenail, is ungracious and in pain. Du! Höhr' mal. When he has his teeth out, his mouth recedes, shelves in under his nose which looks unnaturally long. Foot wrapped in a pink towel tied up with what looks like gift ribbon. They're watching television, Gma explains the serial to him. Sie hat ehr Gesicht zerbrochen - ehr Gesicht zerbrochen - Gesicht! Das Kind war zehn Tage weg - Zehn Tage. Grandma is alert, round, soft, hears everything and has no politics. Let's watch and see who she is now. - Now they are praying aloud, first she, then he, both in small childish voices; I'd like to listen to them; now he's finished and they are discussing whether all is put to bed properly. It's lovely to think of them every night speaking their prayers aloud in each other's presence (do they have secret prayers?), every night of their fifty-six year marriage. Gute Nacht, schlaf' gut, she says. He doesn't reply. ("Du, Peter, hörst du mich?") I'd like to note their German a little (I said erfarlich for gefährlich today, very accurate): they have a way of forming their sentences that's a child construction. "Tust du etwas machen? Tust du morgen fischen fahren?" The flattening of their ei, so mein is mayn. Aunt Annie Braun with a sweet face and fluffy faded hair, the shape of her cheeks when she smiles is girlish, it isn't hard to make a bee-line for her childhood. Gpa telling the construction of their Russian house at Masljanovna, butter-village (ein Dorf), Birkbäume set at 2 yard intervals in the ground, 3 cross poles, and then saplings woven for a basket wall, plastered with mudstraw, under a sod roof, no ceiling, an earth floor polished with buttermilk or Kuhmist, small windows, 85 by 28, about ... He remembered, was animated and forgot his foot; then sank into his illness again. Gma flatters and cajoles him; he protests that he'll ask for what he needs. When I sit next to her on the couch Gma takes my hand and puts it on her thigh (Sie sind warm und rund, I say. "Ja, warm und rund"), or lays hers on mine. I think she likes my intransigence after all. Grandpa has sometimes looked at me today with an unsmiling expression that says "see how it is." His eyes are paler and a little milky, he's looking as if appealingly. Lucy and Candy make a hideous fuss about how helpful they are. They are noisy, Grandma is trying to continue it with me, I'm finding my own silence and will hold it. Spirituality: for want of a better word the attitude of tenderness, interest in the unnamed, reliance on joy. Our spirituality is not based on our ability to launch new lives. 'Spirituality' is also intelligence, art, elaboration imagination. "We are in the process of re-evaluating power, and recognizing the many kinds of power that exist." Cultural feminism - "There is a buried subconscious inherently female capable of great power and understanding which women artists are expressing ..." Both political and cultural at once. Heightened use of the reason, plus use of, tact with, the (as yet) irrational forces. - My soul is my name, my name which both separates and connects, which makes absolutely distinct and yet gives a place to the whole. Gradually I am learning that I am the Source, I am one physical manifestation, one of the many versions of the Source experiencing Itself in time and space. illusions of duality, illusions of hierarchy We do not 'have' awareness in various quantities, we tap into it. Each of us is responsible for regulating the amount of power we allow another to assume in relation to us. New Visions of Spiritual Power Dorothy Riddle - At breakfast Opa passed me the cheese - I think I gave him a little wry smile to say, good, you're not going to play the petulant invalid 100%. Three trees stand across the front lawn, red (ie green/russet) maples, making a hedge on 3 stilts - one has a wire skirt on to keep cats from a nest. The threshing of the washing machine. Grandma before breakfast - I asked if she still dreams, she said "Na, ich träum' nicht mehr von die Schule." "Ich wolte so zehr lehrnen, und ich konte nicht. Mein Vater wörde schon, aber die Mutter, die Mutter wolte nicht - ich solte arbeiten." "Wir sind alle gleich, Mama und sie und ich, wir wollen alle lernen." I'm always touching her when I speak to her. The Begines - Germany, France, Low Countries - Strasbourg. a whole section of town inhabited mainly by women who shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their roommates, or provided for the selection of other Beguines as tenants ... 10 or 12% of the city .... Some houses had reputations for spiritual enthusiasm and austerity ... Greatgrandma, her beauty; like no one's in the family, her utter fineness. Grandma makes an altar to her in the bedroom, between the two beds, I was photographing her and couldn't help being out of focus at that light and distance, so that my outline, head and hand, with the silver circle at the end of the lens, was overlaid on her brown dim features. The regulation of this household, all the little things, which all have their place, the anxiety for some strange cleanness - I like it, all the fresh sheets and pillows, the dill staked with a rag under the little pear tree, hums and drones, no sharp noises (just then the handle on a neighbour's galvanized pail fell); a row of old spruce marks the edge of an old farm, now the back of this garden - we are all alert for little deviations from the proper order, and yet I've noticed that Grandma like Mother is too smart to do things in an exactly orthodox way; she makes little practical shortcuts, her rice in a bowl warming over the boiling potatoes, and she tastes things straight our of the mixing bowl with the stirring spoon. How the cabbages hold themselves! Opaque/translucent making exact statements about the relation of every part of them to the sun / to each other - the ribs/veins are little orderly lightning, each leaf is an explosion and the whole explodes, what determination! The rim of my hand's shadow on my thigh is red/brown and a little translucent, a distinct outline. No no I won't look at the beans! Grandma says her mother died when she was eight - she had Magenkrebs, her husband took her from Ufa to a hospital in the south, 4 days on the train - waving her finger in front of her forehead she said, "She stood on the platform and waved to us with a rose, I can see that picture exactly as it was, it's still all there ..." Since I've been noting their turns of phrase I'm realizing Grandma has lovely speech. - Okay, now my dream: last night my camera broke, like sandstone falling apart; that was on some sort of journey through a forest. I talked with some young boys, one of them had a thin sharp dark face, very particular. He spoke to me with an aggression of curiosity, passion I guess (about facts and things) that I was humorous toward; but later in the dream he and a wife (he was older and very beautiful) lived unhappily in an old, interesting house (there was more about that, was it vacant?). His wife was very beautiful too, but remote and perhaps ill - I came upon them in a car and surprised him by leaning down through the window and kissing him tenderly; he looked up touched, no, more than that, disarmed, bewildered, opened out, defenseless: his face was concave and I shone into it.
Stalking through this house in bare feet and the long red dress I feel soundless, light, supple, brown, and brightfaced as a maiden, I am eighteen. What I see in the mirror is a matronly body with a small swarthy head on it, a gypsy, somebody unowned. The old people move lightly too, in their spindle-shaped bodies, Gpa whispers through the house with his walking frame, but very slowly. Grandma has a gleeful balance in her relation with her children that I recognize as the wellfed female smugness I feel if men have been flattering me: but Gpa speaks abruptly to her; he lets her be queenbee but not with him. When he asks for things he doesn't say please. I think about the patriarchy but he has no real power at his age. I may be wrong; I noticed there's a certain nervousness in me when he's around, that's the nervousness I learned from Mother was appropriate toward Father. Master/dog attentiveness that makes us clumsy. Why's her intelligence better preserved? Is there a law that says 'masculinity,' maintenance of power, intelligence used for such, burns you out faster? (Will Don burn out? But he's like Russell - maybe - and could just go on and on hovering like the hawk he is.) - The Christliche radio programs, and even worse the television; I'm trying to listen to the tone of them and read something, and it sounds like lies, the television worst of all. But the old radio programs, exactly the same voices, the same tones, and they're weird, the childish songs, do these people function with authority in their family and work lives because there's something in them that can always be infantile? "I've got a great big wonderful God." "You've got a place in God's plan." "Eisig' dich." Yet the Old Testament is glorious language, and it's tough. The Bible stories. "Daniel went right up to the baddest lion, put his head on him and went fast asleep."
Oral Roberts and his family in the style of Nixon, expensive sincerity, women in long polyester crepe dresses and confected hair. - "Kappes war reich begabt mit Gedächtnis und Beredsamkeit, Phantasie und Witz, ein guter Sänger." Die Überfröhlichen, Überfreude I've been reading about a brief heresy in the early days of the MB in Russia, a group of young people led by the above Kappes, "richly gifted in consciousness, speech, fantasy and wit" who took literally the church's teachings about grace, and about being joyful before the Lord. They danced! And sang loudly - there's a lovely letter quoted, "Dienstag abend vor Pfingsten war W.Bartel bie uns (in Rudnerweide), und wir sangen drausen vor der Tür und dankten und jauchzten miteinander. Und die Welt jauchzte uns entgegen ... Am Gassenraum kam die 'Welt' zusammen und horchte) - and gave each other holy kisses (brothers and sisters) because all were in Christ, male and female alike. By this manner a brother and two sisters fell into sin and were excommunicated! "Wer nun nicht fröhlich im Glauben war und nicht recht 'frei,' da heis es, wer nicht frie gemacht sei, lebe pharisaisch und gesetzlich, lebe noch im Fleisch - sei fleischlich usw." Grandma told me about this with admonitions about how wrong it had been, and how dancing is not good and leads to sin. Their concept of Flesh (meat in German) is uncompromising: Fleisch and Geist are totally opposed. "Das Fleisch des Menschen versucht, die geistlichen Wahrheiten zu misdeuten oder misbrauchen." Why was the teaching so body-repressive? Only for the necessities of social control? The family unit, the church community defending itself against the world, same story of individual giving up knowledge and potency to the group. In Grandpa's narrative he tells how he was saved at the age of seven, but "Nach paar Jaren da die Versuchungen immer schwerer wurden gab ich den Kampf auf u. lebte nach meinen Gutdenken." A neighbour came in with the church paper for Grandma and they both stood in the doorway regarding me and my half-inch strip of brown belly with fascinated furtive little eyes At lunch Gma asking again about Catherine, then a little about Roy ("Sie lebt aber jetzt nicht mit andere Männer!"), and I made my little speech about how I wasn't made to be a wife, and how I'm not in the least ashamed etc ("Ich hab' gemacht gerade so wie ich geglaubt, gedact' und gewolt' habe"). They say I must have been taught wrongly, I say I was taught exactly like everyone else. They say, oh it was because you hated your father. I nod. Well they've enfolded it all into their doctrine and there are no left-hand paths. Grandpa told a story about martyrdom, Grandma tried to get away, I'm not sure why, I think there is something double in her piety like in Mother's, she has too elastic a mind to quite insist. But then Gpa fixed me with his blue cloudy eyes, red in the rims, filling gradually with tears as his false teeth barred in his blueish, old, whiskery face (I felt a little horrified by that face, it was the grimace of the broken patriarch - I said that too easily - I should say, it was a grimace that seemed wicked to me, not saintly, but perhaps in pain - and he said "Horch' mal" and told me about how God made everything (I agreed) and Satan works against it, how grace covers a multitude of sins if you are sorry for them. He exhorted me, and under his eyes - sometimes I looked at Gma for relief (she was looking at a book across the room, staying out of it) - I felt a little afraid - I couldn't begin to contradict him when he talked about choosing heaven or hell - knew it's his tribal duty to plead with me to come back to my father's ways, and in his earnestness I can feel how he thinks of his own death and hopes for heaven. Can't argue with that. But facing their conviction, their prayers, I'm frightened that the Christian bog with its net of rationalizations will reach out and grab me at some weak or frightened moment. So when I faced him across the corner of the table I was defiant and felt like a rebellious child thinking my protection spell: no no it will never get me, that mediocrity, no no it will never get me. At breakfast I read them Bible passages of my own choice, this morning I read the first chapter of Genesis, and it is really beautiful My energy's sinking, I'm less alert. I want to say to them, look at me truthfully, what do you see? It's not sin and error, surely my testimony is visible to you... It's sad. With Gma I feel such a physical warmth. ("Ich werd' auch solch' eine runde Oma sein") that connects with my mother but is easier. "Ich bin nicht wirklich eine Lehrerin," I said to Gma, "Ich bin Kunstler." "Die Kunst," said Grandpa, "wirt alles nur gestraft werden." "Die Kunst is lernen, sehen, hören, verstehen," I say. "Lernen ist nicht leben" he says. Piety. What is it - it's an elementary caution, elaborated into a mythology, reiterated endlessly in every cultural form, reinforced by everyone. The repetitiveness I've been wondering about (I asked Gma if they don't get bored hearing the same things for sixty years, she said no no it's always new) makes me feel how potent they've made their Satan: my strip of skin, a dress hung on the line Sunday morning (bring it in, the neighbours will think we're doing a washing), an unpainted chair brought to the front lawn. Neglect, fucking ("like cattle, who don't know who their children belong to"). But when you've lived righteously all your life, you are still plagued with disease, pain, the ungodly world, change; this elaborate householding is going to cost a lot of consciousness to maintain as old Grandpa and Grandma can't work for themselves any more. Their peace of mind already costs us lots of lies. It's a system where energy makes small circles. Oh my teachers how did you ever break them - My new intimacy with their old bodies, they are like children again insofar as we grownups can see them undress; Gpa is a little modest still, and she holds her nighty shut across her big soft breasts (it doesn't button) but I make free with their feet (cutting her toenails, hard and thick as horn, she says when you get old they get that way; I could hardly hack them off with scissors, had to pare them down little by little) and can look at them in their underwear. Old photographs - the piles of old photographs I saw today, brown people in grim faces ("Lachen war dan nicht die Mode") holding very still, while the little irrepressible children are blurs of light. Seemed a lovely true image. The old picture of Oma, my mother holding a tousle-headed baby, Opa with another, and two little boys, two little girls in front of Helen's coffin, outside the cabin (photography being what it was) with desolate dead little trees to the right. They're praying again, he toothless, lying on his back, two pillows under his head, a folded blanket under his foot, a satin coverlet over; she on her side in a turquoise brushed nylon nightgown, uncovered, on three pillows, her pigtail down her back; do they have prayers made formal over their long years? Do they have new needs after so long, anything new to be thankful for? Her chronicle, and her story this afternoon about her two friends, the Kleiblatter, cloverleafs, because they were three. They were going to be unmarried, and teachers (as ambitious as a woman could be). They were Susie, Maria and Luise. Susie was lovely, a beautiful patrician girl who, says Grandma, did teach for twenty years and didn't marry but was crippled with rheumatism and suffered a long time. The other friend, who stayed in Russia, married first and ran an orphanage with her husband. "Ich hatte solche gute Freude, die beste die es gibt" she said. "Solche hab' ich auch." When she was a girl she kept a Tagebuch, and had it for years, but when they emigrated she threw it into the fire because it might incriminate them with die Rote and have them sent back. "Hattest du auch Gedanken aufgeschrieben?" Then she was embarrassed. "Welche Gedanken?" Grandpa was telling me their Marichen could talk when 7 months old, in sentences. Long before she had teeth. When Peter was very sick (pneumonia) the Jewish doctor who came to attend him put his hand on her head and said "Diese hat ein' kluges Kopf" (in Russian). She could memorize recitations in two readings. But when they called her up front they called Maria Peter Konrad to distinguish her from Abram Konrad's Mary. "Ich bin kein Peter nicht!" she'd protest. Mt Baker startles me appearing suddenly and so nearby in the clearer evening air when the late sun shines horizontally onto it. Their history is interesting me less than it did; what interests me now, why is it? is their language, living fossil, imprint of everything they've been, but it's not that, it's the vividness of this language I find myself speaking with ease, but without habit, so it's all picture language. I am a new person who was born able to speak this archaic domestic pious German and who examines the gift as it appears word by word.
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. Dived into Stevenson for relief, and so am feeling 1. learning to write would be almost worth doing 2. it's a sad defect, hating the culture of my childhood - isn't there a way to love it without sentiment? I love it sentimentally when I've been away long enough, but there's no one and nothing in this family with any distinction of any kind. I'm ashamed and frightened, the mannerisms passed from Gma to Mom, what if I too speak my absentminded thoughts aloud like that, and move my mouth like that, and gobble from my spoon like that? The best of them, Anne and Mom, got caught too, with all the intelligence and spirit they had. Time to have an exorcism when I get back to Vancouver. Rilke's idea of reinventing a childhood worthy of a poet. Miriam could have one. (Gma just came in, peering over my shoulder, I showed her RLS's picture and said wasn't he a nicelooking man. She said, Na, such dich nur die schöne Menschen aus, die gute Bucher sind mir auch sehr wichtig gewesen. I asked whenever she'd had time to read; she said, Ich hab' die gestolen, and laughed when she told how her father would come to tell her to blow out the lamp, she would turn it down and when he was gone turn it up again. She mimed with her short yellow fingers, her claws; we were both lit by our joke and I had to remember how both she and M get their simpledminded mannerisms from the necessities of marriage. Ouch.) (In the living room the dialogue's like Beckett. If I had it on television it would be hilarious, the same words, the same gestures, telling the same two dramas of his and her most recent medical crisis, again and again to the same and to different people, and then again on the telephone too. I get called in to unwrap the foot for everyone to examine.) RLS: and no doubt her heart was touched to see her cousin so unjustly used. That night she was never in her bed. I was just writing down that little passage and still thrilled by it when the three guests came from the living room to say goodnight, a crowd of old children (in my sandals I was 6" taller than they) looking up timidly or brightly to say Goodnight, God bless you, thank you for looking after Unkel Peter, their little lined heads with the hair shorn close to it or pulled back tightly around it, their firm or weak handshakes - it was thrilling by its contact with Stevenson before it. Oh, The master of Ballantrae!
|