| volume 2 of dames rocket: 1975-76 september-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Volume 2 begins with an initiatory moment, where for a first time I put my hand on another woman's sex. In part 1 Maggie moves in and takes me to Saturna Island. I am reading Jung on the fearsome Great Mother archetype and when I find a pile of Life magazines in an alley I use them to make mythological collages. Parts 2 and 3 editing what becomes Trapline. Part 3 Christmas and New Years with Luke and Paul. At the end of part 4 we are evicted from our house, Luke is sent to England to visit his dad and grandmother, and I take the train to Los Angeles to see my old friend Jerry Reznick, who drives me to San Felipe on the Sea of Cortez for a weekend. Hitchhike back home through San Francisco. reading notes: Jung Memories, dreams, reflections, Neumann The origins and history of consciousness, Owen Barfield Poetic diction, script of Duras Nathalie Granger, tsunami book, Anne Hébert Les chambres de bois and The silent room, HD Helen in Egypt, Lessing The golden notebook, Theodore Roszak The making of a counter culture, Sense and sensibility, Anais Nin, Frank O'Connor The backward look, Out of Africa, Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Traherne, Esther Harding The way of all women, The cloud of unknowing, Rumi. mentioned: Luke, Margaret Shore, Paul Kinsella, Al Razutis, Gordon Kidd, Abby Schwartz, David Rimmer, David Tompkins, Wain Ewing, Roy Chisholm, Sara Chisholm, Jim Bridges, Stephanie Judy, Judith Berlin, Ann Bishop, Mafalda Reis, Leah Rosling, Nora Blanck, Jerry Reznick, Don Carmichael, Tara Rosling, Kathy Ross. The Cambie Hotel, the Classical Joint, Rogers Sugar factory, Save On Market, the VCC cafeteria, Burrardview Park, Saturna Island, Riv-Tow Tugs, Emily Carr College of Art, Water Street, Stanley Park, the Wonder Hotel, the Powell Street bus, the Western Front, the Only Cafe, Women's Interart Co-op studio at 163 W.Pender. Updike, Pippi Longstocking, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke, Noel Burch, Elizabeth Sargent, Deep End, Dore O, Louise Nevelson, Rossini Messe Solonelle, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Marjorie Morningstar, Ms magazine, Forster Room with a view, Robin Morgan, Deborah Homsher, Glenda Jackson, Weibe Peace shall destroy many. |
- When he wet his bed last night Luke cried so much that I shouted at him, he banged, I shouted again, he only cried more. At last I went upstairs. He was in a misery huddle on the side of the bed, choking his voice. I said why was he crying so much. He said he was lonely and wanted a real person to sleep with him, somebody what is real. I asked what sort of person he wanted. He said he wanted me. I said I wanted him to be able to learn to be by himself without me; and that when he was grown he would have friends in his bed as I do, to hug. He said his body can do everything my body can do. I said I didn't understand exactly what he means. He said he couldn't tell me all the things, it would take more than a day. - Margaret you are a samuri. "You lesbian," she says (laughing), "do you want to fuck me?" - Maggie when she is in bed and has her glasses off is beautiful in a way that affects me to my simple core, she makes me think of a suffering Greek heroine, Penelope maybe, her profile is so fragile, her eyes and mouth worn into such sensual intelligence. She is a little tragic, she is ages old, her voice has a timbre that's thirteen. I sometimes glimpse a girl in pigtails.
When I stopped in despair of my clumsiness, I said, You have to teach me some things, I feel like a eunuch. Oh Maggie your hands and your face holding me between them. - Maggie don't look in here I want to make notes about you. I want not to be shy here. - I love your bandy Amazon, I love the rainbow of genders in you, I love your giggle (one note hgnng). I love your flat soft hair. I love your flat pale brown eyes. I love your narrow nose with its notch. I love your small mouth set at no comment ("Why should I respond for you"). I love the way you leap into bed, breasts swinging, like an old Chinese mountain man letching a maiden. I love your back and its strong hunch. I love your fine-fleshedness, none of your back is loose. I love your narrow cunt like an abrupt little mountain with a tunnel into it. I love your jade ring. I love your nicks, cuts, your dirty fingernails. I love your cackle when you talk to Marnie. - The fresh clouds just off the cold high mountainside, blowing up, snow white, from new snow-fields. - This morning, stopping in the kitchen, corridor, bedroom, to get lost in an embrace, briefly; it's our real form of love-making. M says my sexuality seems to be growing, that my touch has a depth it didn't at first. I know what she means. It happens that I feel my body in a slow whipping oscillation when I touch or kiss her. Like a pulse. It has to do with being all there. - When I took Ammon home I saw: To the west, a bar of pink under the darkness of the rest of the sky, and in the foreground, surrounded by dark in an alley, faintly lit from an invisible source, the side of a pink garage in the same tone. Six slim women emerging from a house onto the street, in single file, with glittering shoes and glittering saris whose colors are visible as they come under the influence of the street lamp. A pillar of white smoke rising from the sidewalk where it obscured an entire corner. Then, another snorting cloud rising from the opposite corner, behind a mailbox that it isolated in red and white. - For a while this noon standing at a crossing of doors - basement, bedroom, kitchen - when I had my hand on Maggie's breast some perfect form of love's body became me: my torso was like an axe bade with which I seemed to have cut into her in most gentle but honed and dazzling penetration. - She says "You're afraid these will incriminate you" and she smiles. At the top is a photograph of the glass ceiling, white at parts. There were clouds passing overhead; each pane with its angle took a different color from the cloud. This picture is here. This is what it hides. The airplane I didn't get. The birds too quick to catch. I am afraid there will be nothing there. I am afraid people will find nothing there. These will incriminate you, because they will say you are a simple mind, not of this century, not urban. Well, she said, that is your version of it. What message do you have, from your long walks from school? Two young boys are sitting in a rectangle lit wonderfully in its upper corners. They do not look at the camera. Offside a blue curtain rustles as another person behind the blue curtain fidgets. The boys are serene, hold their hands up to an invisible warm rain. The colors are clear blue and yellow. The ceiling. Our movement here is a very subtle rising movement, plus a flow past - white, blue, orange, maybe boring for many, although lovely in itself. A small patch of water randomly entered and exited by swimmers, impression of a net. The idea of setting a rectangular trap and a time trap and seeing what comes into it. The film as a trapline: I set out some rectangles and see what comes into them. The dark is a rectangle too. I make that apparent by repeating a sound area as a block. Traps set in a light palace, traps set in a temple for light. - A woman with a broad hunched back, soft thighs, standing with her back to us taking off a sweater, revealing a sharp backbone. She has on underpants that are cut to leave out the sideways pad of upper thigh. She bends over, her body is so strong on its widely planted legs, we marvel at its privacy. Such bodies are never offered to our eyes. She gets a nightgown from under her pillow, puts it on, gets into bed and becomes before our eyes a virgin missionary vulnerable on the pillow, small delicate face and shoulders, all hunched strength under the covers. Her mouth makes a mousey pout. She looks at us through glasses that are circles of white reflection. The camera moves sideways, then down. The camera jerks aside to let a woman, the back of her head, drop onto the bed next to her, we see the back of her head only, while the missionary, who is a little drunk, plays with the faceless woman. Is dismissed. We draw back enough to see the woman's face as she gets up to leave. Miz Missionary puts a stern face into a magazine. The other person is followed into the room adjacent where she's seen writing in a book. Pan the room, hear a train, rainy street noises. Heap of clothes on the floor. Simone Weil and piled papers on the bed. Turns her head sideways as the pan reaches her again, and her gaze refers us to a kitchen doorway. Cut upstairs to dark view of child sleeping in a littered room. A bathroom, a livingroom, a basement. Single views of - glances at. - This is a hard time. The fourteen year old in the journal was sometimes pretty, thought about being pretty all the time, but was sure she could write, and did, with all assurance and invention. Inside a tradition. I am a-cultured now, I am straying between cultures. I meet Maggie with unloving resistence: that is part of my trouble. I am ashamed to be out of love, ah, I'm ashamed and grieved, under me the river weeps all day. Being in love, erotically, with her, was my virility, I knew my body was alive. Unloving, the trapdoor has slammed shut, I cannot find the brown, muscular roots, again. There are too many people I don't feel for. I feel Luke sometimes, but hold back hold back - I don't know how to live otherwise! It may be that I don't need confession and reparation as much as I need to be convinced that living outside the law is arduous, wearing, an admirable experiment that needs the best health and physical conditioning and psychic debts paid by generosity. Honesty when it's real. Paying my way in small ways. - On the bus the other day I understood 'persona' for the first time: it is not the self conscious acting that aims to impress or ingratiate, as I thought it was; it is what we are all the time except for flashes. - I am looking toward my unstoned state and seeing it as a stoned state, a level - the fish held tight against the aquarium glass by the photographer's second sheet of glass - a slice - a slice that is so self-referenced opaque it thinks it is It. the standard, the control tower.What's happening is that I'm seeing the thoughts I have and don't use, they don't come into my faction - action - fiction, for instance this handwriting could be my habitual one, if something loosened. Persona is deep - it is a personality - it is not a mask, it is a whole actor. - The difference of degree between us and the drunk Indians, the old housewives, is the difference just the sort of words we have in our heads? Those words make us look different - they make gravity treat us differently. The point is that this body is capable of all sorts of styles. Is there any it needs or should it pick one it thinks will represent it shrewdly and get attention, honour and company. This creature. I can't say how fluid she is and how little necessity there seems for her to be anyone. - At Frank's table, with my coat on for the cold, Paul catty-corner making jokes about catching my tears for making a potion, I found out what really is concerning me, by what makes me cry. "Miriam is lonely" he said. "You have too much power and that sets you apart from people. You're a power-tripper, but that isn't obvious right away, and people don't realize it until it is a little too late for them to take a careful distance. You get the power, but it isn't what you want either, and that makes you sad." When he said I was lonely I cried. When I said I felt like a bad person, because I had first involved someone and then thrown them away, I cried too. He is sad about not writing. He took beautiful pictures, in San Francisco, of intense light in his hotel mirror, on a skylight, on a wave reflecting sunset, a mirror shop with GLASS in red neon on two colors of sky, one blue, one yellow. - This Christmas, perhaps because of my crisis and Paul's talk, and the swami book, I felt let out onto a certain terrace of lucidity, that I sometimes reached in crisis with Roy, where I knew what doesn't matter, was fearless, and had composure. Nothing at all superficial: a vantage point, like a stone, which makes me see as if really from outside, the social mind that muddles me when it catches me and I identify with powerlessness, paranoia. - The man on Pender, across the intersection, who scattered something onto the street from a plate. It turned out to be spare ribs. He took the plate back into a restaurant and came out again, furious and crazy. - I realized today that my gesture in having a child on my own was not even useful to the world, because there were lots of women making the same gesture. And - in order for it to be useful to the world I have to be happy in it. I am not even managing on the simplest level of physical maintenance. Luke is actually neglected, and I am often brutal emotionally. Maggie is thriving since I told her she must leave: I am even more reduced, and there's a dependent child in me who wants to hang about listening to her talk. - [From the corridor-end window of the Cambie Hotel in Gastown] Pigeons reflected in red puddles on roofs of boxcars. Pigeons congregating like Greek men after church, in grey, black, brown, white and blue. A filtered brightness on the mountain slopes. Blue grey water lit like opal, boiling or running, in strips, always fastest near shore. Mountains furred and whiskered, contours like animals'. What's so lovely about the diving birds, the shoals of birds. One morning when the Powell Street bus was held up at the railway crossing we had a display of pigeons on the Roger's Sugar terminal, orange sun, pigeons alighting, walking on sills, pushing off all together, circling to a new place, walking on other sills or the edge of the roof, leaving again and circling in the free air in front of the big sunning wall with its windows regular in all directions Sweeping sounds. The thing about a water plane's engine noise when it takes off, is that it traces a line. Corridor decorated with felt triangles from Kamloops. "Somebody's welding over on the North Shore." Thin white-haired man whistles when he comes out his door. Dirty red engine puts up blue smoke. Hey good lookin' / what you got cookin' / how about cookin' / something up with me? - She says the self is a vehicle. I say no no no the self is a place on the water where everything flows and flows through, or a little patch of sky, the self is cloudy, or else it's a mirror moving about through the world. It's just a location. She's silent as if I've clobbered her. I say I'm always having this argument with people. Once there was a man who blackened my eye because of it. She gets up to have a bath. It's safer to be upstairs, like having a sentinel or a drawbridge. - The scene last night - Maggie crowding me into a corner till I bit her, she backed off at last and I cried "Why do you force it!" and she got up and stalked downstairs, and I lay back again with my heart banging - was afraid and got out the jackknife. I was surprised how her hands were like wire coming after me; cold wire traps. - When I asked my mother about my own birth she said she couldn't remember much. When I asked Roy's mother about his birth, she said she couldn't remember anything. When I asked my grandmother about my mother's birth, she laughed and said "Ach, du fragst mir alles" and talked about something else. - Rain dripping off my hair down my neck, unpleasantly - the velvet shirt today, red necklace, jeans - Save On to buy food for Luke's supper - red Mac apples, small oranges, carrots, a cucumber, 3 bananas - Luke's daycare - Sarah says she's coming home with us and I call Sylvia to arrange it - it's my day to clean [the daycare], Leslie makes me coffee, Sara, Ali, Sarah and Luke shriek and tumble, I slowly vacuum, Leslie goes home. Sarah and Luke sit on the table absorbed in their boat captain story, we go home, wet our hair, Luke his shirt, Sarah her long trousers. My head is soaked. I'm carrying the red bag with its broken strap, groceries, film equipment, in my arms against my stomach. Make supper. Luke shows off his cat. Sarah is shy and seems too well-mannered, she is following the rules of her own household. Luke takes off his shirt and trousers and shows off his penis. I cook, trying to make sure Sarah feels at home. She won't eat her cucumbers and grated carrot until the rice is ready and we sit down properly. She puts soy sauce on her rice and mixes it up responsibly. She says "May I please be excused" and takes her plate to the sink. Maggie comes in with her head soaked and I bring her a towel and hang up her coat. Her wet head seems small and her glasses large, covered with water drops. I'm happy to see her, give her rice. She says "Do you know why you're so happy today?" I feel like teasing her. - Talking to M about how sometimes the only thing you can do is rebel: "Not that, and not that, and not that, and not that -." Taking so long because of having so far to come. - Noticed in Updike too, how he's leaving out commas as much as possible. - Friday. Woke in M's bed [M was away] with worries about my movie and our eviction - dark, with her ugly curtains up - happy to see the blue light outside, powdery. Heard Luke's door open but he didn't come down. Got up, turned on the heater. Luke's voice came down "Good morning Ellie." I went up and didn't find him in his bed, but slotted in with Paul under the red and green washed sleeping bag, two naked boys on the pillow like paper dolls in an envelope. I got in too. Paul stoked my knee. We went to breakfast, which I made while Luke dressed and Paul washed. There was some sun, we had buttered toast and tea, Luke and Paul had porridge. Paul took Luke to school because he had promised, Luke looked extremely nice in his red teeshirt and blue dungarees. Paul came back and sat across the table in his black shirt and trousers, with the shirt buttons open, and we had the blue plates, the bare wood of the table, and the avocado in its Tiger Brand pink olive oil tin, between us. I read some Traherne - the First Centuries passage about the Gentleman's house - and we marveled together. I was happy at how Paul listened, as he always does listen wonderfully. Then I was assembled to go out to work and errands, and Paul was offended that I wasn't lingering with him, and I felt his sadness all morning anyway; he hurried off because I hadn't slept with him, I guess. But I walked to the Bank of BC corner and took a bus and marveled at the human beings on it, and got my check and went to VCC and had lunch. Ray from yesterday sat with me and talked about lithographs and etchings. Derrick let me into the cutting room. Looked at the beginning of the film, found it so dirty I was in despair of cleaning it, worried about destroying it with the chemical cleaner. I was going to pack it up defeated and take it to the lab dirty, when the slight young-looking boy called Gordon [Kidd] appeared to ask how it was going. I told him I had run out of courage, he thudded my shoulder and said "Don't run out of courage!" and seemed to like staying and talking. So I asked him about picking the lights and he helped me with tail leader - and he showed me how to clean it - and invited me to his studio - and said he had a rowboat - and I was encouraged. We invented a way to set a brake on the rewinds with a coat sleeve. He recommended scratch removing. All the difficulties became little manageable tasks. We both in the end overplayed our roles a little, I was too grateful and he went embarrassed smarmy and a little pious, wanted to patronize me a little, but when I'd stared at his childish profile as he expertly touched all the little bits - tape, matte knife, rewinds, end of film, gloves - that I am so shy of, I felt a real loving gratitude to his willingness. Cleaned by myself - except for a few pinholes and long scratches it was working - 'til 5 o'clock, had to stop, rush home on a Renfrew bus to get to the bank before fetching Luke; then buying yogourt fruit milk olives orange juice. Got home to find M eating chicken livers cottage cheese and sweet potatoes. M cross and tired because of her job. Bath, Luke was there too, washed him and his hair in my rinse water (bathwater too hot and deep for him), read maimed first chapter of Pippi, discussed rent coolly with M, who went to bed at 9 while I read Traherne with the cat. - This is for history. Shouting at M because, when we are talking about the concept of a feminist art support community, she doesn't understand what I am saying. I let out my frustration and she's admirable and shouts back and throws water on me and tells me how can I try to set up a women's art co-op if I'm too intolerant to share my knowledge. And she is right. I am too intolerant to want to teach, because I want to learn, I want thrilling exchanges with evolved peers - by which I can expand to my true largest own expansion. And why is Stephanie not interested in me? - In the mushrooms rooms air and space, entertainment. Always the big screen self-curiously connected, as by convention, to a still body with occasional orgastic waves through the head, visions all interesting but leaving before they've stayed their welcome out, all with comment on the nature of life and consciousness, a happy perspective contemptuous of everyday mind which seems to be a shellacked papier-maché set where things are kept compulsively in existence even when not needed - the tree falling in an uninhabited forest our responsibility - in the mush rooms it was ... not mushy, but flou like dry clear light diaphanous things - the dream world, but brought a little nearer to the outward body so I could come and go between them. Paul was there - I appeared too smiling, below, I thought shall I be this person? There seemed many other people I could be, I considered whether this smiling female person with a lot of hair was a soul worth inhabiting. The beauty of the mushrooms, and they're always philosophic with me, is that the show goes on as if I weren't looking at it, and yet I can look at it as much as I like, and think about it. With me it has always been thought that is repressed - pressures of unexpressed thought - I am learning to speak. The secret resources that write are also there for speech. - [Take Amtrack south to visit Jerry Reznick in Santa Monica. We drive to San Felipe in the Baja for the weekend. Am in LA very sick with the flu' for a week. Hitchhike back to Vancouver. Photos: the beach at San Felipe, copal tree like a woman washing her hair, copal knees.] He was young, dim, and going home to his eighteen year old wife and their two children. Off and on for six hours he had been telling me they were happy and loved each other and the babies. She'd been angry he hadn't taken her with him to Monterray, and to make peace with her (she'd thrown a bottle after him when he left) he was bringing her a slow-cooker like she'd wanted ever since she saw it on television, the best brand. At a café in one of the redwood forests, he bought her another present, one-fifty out of his last ten dollars, a redwood pot with a seed planted in it that in three months would spring up as a little tree. When the Oregon border was posted he blew it a kiss. He had a little head and no flesh on him, hair cut close to his skull, and a look so weedy, childish, inconsequential and malnourished, that his macho confidence ("I bring in the money around there, and that makes me the head of the household. There was a while it seemed like she wanted to be the boss, but I set her right") (she and the children were on welfare, and he was on unemployment) seemed a bizarre triumph I could hardly resent. He was twenty three, I am thirty one; but he patronized me. It was his car, and it was clear to him that I was there to listen to his remarkably self-absorbed banalities. I was there to provide him with a sense of himself. I complied. Twice during the trip he stopped to buy a Coke, and poured whiskey into it looking around paranoically. Said he was an alcoholic, and it steadied him. Otherwise he'd have to take the nerve pills. Did it scare me? he asked. I said I hoped he knew what he was doing. His driving was fine, he drank slowly and made the Coke last an hour, held between his knees while he drove. At Coos Bay, where he turned off, he let me out somewhere halfway through the town. Boats and a railway track in the dark on the left. I walk out of town to the bridge he told me about. Friday night. They're partying in Coos Bay. I start walking between the tracks and a man hails me. Offers me a ride out of town. "I don't like to think of a chick sleeping out there in the bush," he said, and thought and thought about where I could stay. "You could come back to my house, but my old lady wouldn't like it, she wouldn't say anything, but she wouldn't like it." Let me off on a corner where he turned up the road. Dark, although there was a red flasher to mark the junction. On the side of 101 opposite the road he'd turned down, was a dirt road. A few lights around. Maybe a barn? A wooden bridge underfoot, and suddenly a hole I almost stumbled into. Good, I thought, it's best if cars can't make it up this way. Picked my way past the holes, and found a lot of water on the road just beyond it. Good, barriers on both sides, and a little square room in the bushes. Spread my coat, untied my sleeping bag, took off my shoes and put them into the pack, set my shoulder bag for a pillow, and got into bed. Ah, lovely bed, lovely horizontal. Cold spots underneath. Rearrange, push the lumpy camera in my pillow over to the side, put a sleeve under the kidneys, snuggle the pack up against my side to cover a thin place in the down. Listen. Cars, twenty feet away, one a minute. A roar that came on little by little. Train? I imagined a flood. To be lifted, a bundle, by cold water, and pressed against the tops of the bushes. Ah smell of the bushes, like poplar, a sap smell. Began to close down my listening attention. Head under the bag, and a little rift for fresh air, set up so I could breathe out into my little room, steam heating. Cold coming in only from the ground, and only in a few places. Suddenly awake. A car's headlights very nearby. A radio, voices. Instantly alert to make it out. Car doors slamming. Men's voices. They're on the bridge. I'm low to the ground, and the lights are pointing off to the left. Consultation going on. A clanking sound. Metallic clanking like hammering. A jack. Good, they've hit the hole, it has defended me nicely. More clanking. Will they retreat. Will they decide to walk? Shadows fanning through the bushes. Two of them are walking toward the place where I'm lying low holding my breath. They go back. The clanking stops. Engine starts, rrrrrrrm. A clank as the jack falls over, but they are out of the hole. Three more doors slam, and the car backs away, and its engine fades out on the highway. I'm dreaming that I'm walking in my sleeping bag, moving fast, flowing. Pass a row of windows, in one of them there is a white Greek column, fluted, wide as a redwood. I am lying with my feet next to the pillar, and in my sleeping bag with me is my sister. I wake. The dreams have been very thin, very close to waking. It is raining. It is barely raining, a drop at a time, hitting the nylon on my sleeping bag with a dry pop like little stones. It rains more, still spitting, but I can tell the water is gathering on top of me. After a while it begins to flow in through the zipper. I'm rested, wide awake, and getting bored. I'm happy. I'm so bored I get up, put on my shoes and my wet coat, tie up the pack, gather the wet sleeping bag, and get back onto the road. The red light is still flashing, but my eyes are good now and I can see in the dark. There is the wind. I wrap the sleeping bag around me and wait. When a car is coming I can see the light on the telephone poles a mile away. Put my thumb out when it spits past. Another car passes the other way, does a U-turn and pulls up next to me. A young man in a pickup. He's just going twelve miles down the road, but he doesn't like to see a chick out in the rain. Want a butterhorn? He has a plastic bagful. Want some chocolate milk? I have some of each. "Been partying?" I ask him. "Yeah, I sure been partying, I'm so stoned ..." He drives well, I say. It's his job, he drives truck, has to get up in the morning and work on his rig. We get to his turn-off. He says, I'll just stop here a bit and let you get warm. We sit and talk. I'm bored. "Alright, I'll get back on the road now, thanks for your help" I say. More wind, but the rain has quit. The next car stops. A man with glasses and a moustache, can't tell his age, he seems middle-aged to me. Says he's going noplace, just can't sleep, so he'll take me up the road a ways. I'm a little nervous of him, he's hungry, it seems to me. He decides to take me over to Interstate 5, hitching will be better there. I've no objection. After a while I ask him how far it is. Hundred and twenty miles, he says. Well, I'd better be prepared to be sympathetic. It is raining hard, his windshield wipers don't work well, there is wax on the glass. After a while we are talking about politics, Nixon, "That man is so crooked."
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