| dames rocket 4 part 1 - september 1976 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[On the front leaves:
[undated letter to my mom] Hello M, what a lovely picture of you smiling like few cynical graduates smile these days, I think it's the nicest picture of you I've seen, Luke's book doesn't have any pictures of you, otherwise it's wonderful. You are a good maker. Today was Luke's first day at school, we had an unaccustomed rush out of the house, poor Luke I'm going to give him an alarm clock and neither of us like the idea of it: when we got there we had to wait so long to be registered that we wished we had stayed home and had breakfast; but sitting in the auditorium looking at all the little new children holding onto father or mother's hand, big round eyes, and the parents with some beautiful touching dignity in them, it made me cry: I kept getting tears in my eyes looking at them walk past to their assigned classrooms, a father of maybe forty-five, bald, whiskered, with humble blue eyes, leading by the hand a nine year old blond boy with the same eyes, the two of them one person at two different times, and both of them looking so lost, but the father more than the son. Most of the fathers and mothers and children are Chinese, rows of shiny black heads. Luke unusually quiet and staying close by me. There was a beautiful woman with a small boy waiting to be registered for grade two: we looked and looked, and then after a while we smiled, and I tried to make Luke go over and strike an acquaintance, but he was shy too, and finally I did it, and they were who I thought they were (who else could they have been in this neighbourhood where all the white people are either drunks or artists), Daphne Marlatt the poet and her son Kit. For months people have been saying "You should get Luke together with Kit Marlatt, he's just moved into your neighbourhood." One of Luke's other friends, Mathew [Little] from his last two daycares, turns out to be another local poet's son. Luke is getting to the age of special friends; I wonder who he'll find. Well, I lied about our address (changed a few numbers, one block in fact) and got Luke into a superb school with an open plan classroom where they teach reading by key words: he has a young man teacher in a group of seven each of grades one, two and three. They are in a huge room with three other such groups. The older ones are going to teach the younger ones. No desks in rows. It is a block from here and has a beautiful library where children circulate books they make themselves. I'm writing in the kitchen, while the washer shudders next to me: getting Luke some clean clothes for his new life. I remember the day you took me to grade one: the same picture of mothers (all mothers?) with little children by the hand, and the old one room school with a strong smell of oiled floors. - Later: we celebrated Luke's day by buying him new shoes, that old first day of school ritual; and an alarm clock; and then going for lunch to his favorite restaurant where the waiters flatter him and there is a red truck in the lobby and a piano that plays by itself [Breadline restaurant]. Nellie sez hello. Dear Nellie, she has really taught me to drive! And she takes Luke to hockey games. I love Nellie, for all that she has no imagination and thinks I'm mad. Luke loves her even more than I do.
It is not true that nothing is gained: whatever their level of evolution, these women are not slaves. They are silly and unfinished but they do not make me sick like the men's women whose every gesture and tone betrays the need to placate and please. Unreality! Lots of it. But not that horrible self-betrayal that builds itself right into the knit and frame of a woman's body, so that she can't speak without a little nervous laugh, and hardly knows what she feels about anything. Dedication and responsibility: that is perhaps the only kind of relationship you value, but what I value is not necessarily something in such a family line: free people meeting playfully or inventively, not necessarily responsably, but truthfully. Truthfully. The people I love and am faithful to, in the sense that I hold them in my imagination, are the people who can take my truth and are willing to give me theirs - Luke, Carmichael, Tony Nesbit, Paul Kinsella, Nellie, Cheryl, Sarah. People who aren't afraid to know. You are afraid to know. You're afraid of me. You're afraid for me. I've always told you anyway, but there hasn't been a time since I was eighteen that you haven't been afraid for me. That is not useful to me. It separates me from you. Also I'm bored with it. We've had times long ago when you had confidence in me, but that was before I was moving too fast for you to keep up with. It isn't that I'm disinterested in anything beyond my present world: I am rivetted by anything that seems to be truly beyond my present world. But your world and my old world is not beyond, it is behind. I don't mean that you aren't a fine and special person; but I do mean that what I have to learn from you and it I've already learned, and my future is among people who live very differently than you. I look for models all the time. Who has been where I'm going? You haven't. How could you have. And don't you know, that it is precisely because of the freedom and attention you have given me in the past that I can take and survive the risks that I do take and survive. But I can't take you with me even out of gratitude. You have your own risks to take. I do feel on another side of a river from you. That is sad: but maybe it is not so sad. I don't need a mother anymore: maybe you don't really need a daughter anymore? I'm sorry your Hutterite school was cancelled. Are you at the college? I am feeling much better and lighter for having shared my anger with Father. Should have done it long ago. That is what my dreams were saying: pay your debts. Luke is waiting for me to write Roy. And after supper a woman is coming to sing with me. [Ferron] We are practicing, and if I work out all right I can sing in her band! Imagine, she writes the songs and they are good. The great pleasure of music. End of scroll - love from us. - [journal] I live as if my parents were already dead. The mutation, L muto to change, casting off into another modality, L modus, fashion, measure, than childhood and its work of structuring a self. The sensation of ungluing, slipping into a spirit world casually, edge on like a paper falling behind a table. She looks at the black window glass with its surface like black ice, and she sees - she looks at - an embodied woman raise her hand, pull a string, turn off the light that makes both the embodiment and what she sees disappear. The vertigo of movement in a corridor. It is a staggering of the head like bad hand-held. But no: yes, it is dangerous: no, I will not panic, and no, I won't stop yet. The parents whose deaths I so dangerously (forgive me!) and wickedly assume (yes it scares me) gave me complementary gifts. Muscle and innocence; flexibility, vulgarity; pride, pride, and pride. Judy Epp, I need you to remember me. The child, the left hand, which shapechanges in unescapable honesty. Why does it matter what happens to that child? The truth is that I hope to guide Ellie Epp through Xios to Ellie Epp, blindly. Tater. Tâter. Will the 'old woman' (awe) be as unreflexive as the child? Without fog of broken/unreliable pictures? How long are they giving us? What am I going to do about desire and loneliness? What about history and this 'community' and its possibilities? It is madness only if no one will share it. Shall I trust you with the evidence, tell you all I know and ask for your stories? Let us assume nothing. Let us go back to the beginning. Let us risk this story with the private prosecutor. Afterwards we can embrace and restore ourselves. We can rely on love! Extraordinary. Not too big and not too small, tact in naming - and you have it, if you will. - The contradictories in play, the game when it's good. What I learned in 12. Trudy says: I don't feel anything. Cheryl says: I don't feel anything. I say: I don't feel anything. That goes on. I try to leave early and am kept back. It is culture shock: these people, this people, greets and meets differently. I am goy to them. The birthday party [Cheryl's], Trudy wan and almost ugly with fatigue, Cherly suave, bright and undamaged, brown, always in upright tension, hands sending choked messages. Don - he was the senior male there, petted and graceful - a musician who can't keep a tune, as it happened during Happy birthday - he looked as if to see. He was the only one. Carol spoke to me in the very spirit that she stayed in the kitchen to tidy up in. Children. Luke was hysterical with loneliness, I couldn't stop him. Zoe smiles when she doesn't hear what you say. She's under high tension too. It comes out in her breaking laugh. Martha, Renee, Cheryl, Don, Trudy. A tribe. Penny, Carol and Bruce and I not in the tribe. Money, cleanliness, and emotion comes off them. Reason and Passion in my bed, that connection which was none. Except when Trudy and I snuggled together to go to sleep. Yes, Cheryl is greedy. Yes Cheryl is lugubrious. Cheryl is absurd. Cheryl has the privileged edge in her that Paul finds in me. She's bred for brain but all nerve, touch her and she starts to breathe hard. Her work is dancing separation and reconciliation with her family lover, over and over again. But she ignites. It has got through (me) to me that - I don't have a sexual connection with Cheryl, when she touches my cunt nothing happens, it seemed to vanish, I left it to try to make her come because that's what she seemed to want, but I was angry she didn't notice. Trudy and I touch better, and I dreamed of holding her. I have never been able to dream eros with Cheryl. Trudy and I separate and separate before at last we can touch, and when we do it's a good tenderness. I haven't been able to touch Cheryl. I haven't been able - I could hold her flat body, the lean back, the shoulder blades like shutters, I could touch her parts, for a long time. I love her nerviness. Her thin neck, burning face - yes it does. From fierce to instant smile. She's a lovely artifact, but she's mannered. Trudy's mannered too but she tries to keep the record clean and balanced. She's conscious and conscientious. "It's so much ---." I don't like Cheryl. We had a good courtship but she's exaggerated and self-exploitive. Her lovely movies. - [I take on painting a 3-story house in Kits.] Painting the big house brown, eaves, under eaves, behind eaves, long ladders that shake with fright. Lambswool rollers. Coworker Skai of the limpid eyes. Stroke stroke stroke stab stab. Karen big broad, cactus, Spanish furniture, heavy things. We are making her a big dark house, dense and shiny, heavy on its lot. We're giving it more weight. - I dream maybe too much of houses, and could enlarge my dreams - surely they belong to the old work of self as home, and can be left, to travel to the Deep North. The constant nag of provinciality - it is too late and too long to be chewing this old fat ego slow middling; it is time for everything to be revised on the way of obvious connections I fail to make. Time for questions to be answered. Nellie says "I'm afraid if I go too far there'll be nobody else there." It is time to work more seriously and with priority. My life offers me so many ways. Sight and sound. The world I see is fat ego too. In what way? Is this old age coming on, the third stage in a hurry? Less fantasy, less décor. - In morning dreams, a 'second' child who may also have been Luke, but an old child, soft wrinkles, a sad old man (I was looking at Paul's wrinkles) (he took off the humble caretaker, "underneath there is a seething volcano of resentment, that the world hasn't recognized him"). - There was a psychiatrist rushed in to deal with another woman who was desperate about the demands of her child; I kept hanging about hoping for recognition of my desperation too, but I was not the payer and therefore not recognized. Luke's daycare teacher (a little like Menja but made-up) kissing my ear - I ask if it is a trick they learned in social work school. Cheryl speaking fast and poetically, the "narrow marrow." I said "I'm not going to sleep with you again, you know that don't you" as I held her shoulders. It was a drug. Grossinger - Anton York finds himself in the final chapter in another universe with alternative laws. He has crossed the divide between what is provincial and the truly cosmic. [Eando Binder 1965 Anton York, Immortal Belmont Books]
Watch what happens. Miriam does what Surfacing reneges on. She does it. She sleeps with the old woman, dry skin, she's an old intensity, met only once. Ah it isn't romance now, it's an edge I truly want. Her old dry skin. Transferring her eros out of the stockbrokers. -
- I'm angry with you, Reason and Passion, because you dope yourselves constantly, because you are glued together like unborn baby to womb. Because you are mannered. Because you don't adventure. You, Cheryl, because the magnificent restraint of our courtship came simply from possession relations with Trudy. But oh what a sight, what a picture for a novel, the woman at her birthday party, sitting on a stool as if on a platform, her friends ranged along the other three sides of the room. She is wearing her black canvas baseball shoes with white rubber soles; patched jeans (one patch at the anus, on the left side); a cotton cowboy shirt. Her hair lies smooth around her pierced ear, she wears little earrings. Her hands are immobile on her thighs, only the fingers move, twisting, constantly. Her face is bitten, it is contracted to its finest point on the spectrum of faces she has (Nero is on the other end) - she is there smiling among very long acquaintances, family: she is a society woman, as I suddenly see her. (Taking dope and doing yoga and meditating and provoking infantile possession crises to keep herself awake in a life that takes so few chances.) But magnificent too, overbred, not of the world. Oh stone. Trudy so faded at that gathering. Yet I am carrying her this week, a constant tenderness. Her body comforts me, when I get to it. In her wars with Cheryl she has a New York homosexual whine - that's her mannerism. Her physical delicacy, a give in her waist. Her upper lip tucked up so now I can tell her mouth. - There once was a woman, an ichthyologist, a lonely and self made woman. She finds by accident an old prospector woman in a place I've already described - the woman who fishes to eat. (The child on a seiner or gillnetter.) Connection needn't be clear. She is simply seduced by the old woman, who in this way sets her free. Not entirely, she has a horror of the old body - but the question is what happens afterward, what can she possibly do.
The use of love as a teacher drug - not good sex, but marveling. At Ferron's - music, Diane, Kitty, the beauties of their confident music - me with a white sheet of paper in my hand, attention glued to the melodic line, feeling out a relation to it - Candy and her soft feels. Paul's dream of an old Oriental child. That's twice I've dreamed with someone else's habitual image. - Could I make a book out of what I've learned in a certain given time? There's a starling on the top of the next door chimney, very blue sky, mountains throwing off clouds, saw blade on its edge catching blue reflections from the sky, house husbandry today, cleaning out the corridor full of boards, repotting plants, pulling weeds and finding parsley; painting Luke's table. Laundry wavering on lines in the back balconies. The windmill squeaking. - 13, and who is this, we're ready to abjure, and because of it we are allowed to allow ourselves passion for the first time, and in it the first peacefulness, and what is the debt, for that? I feel shy to write how it was. Late, tired, got into my bed, in my clothes. Madame has always known how to climb the stairs in the dark. Eyes are easy but there's a dizziness in them. I called it, the white fog, the silence - you send in your picadors first, to bleed the bull and weaken it a little, and then you'll be real. It is your method. We stood at the entrance to my room and looked at the open bed in candlelight, unclear images on the floor (black and 2) and I tell the story of Miriam and Helen. What does she do when she's set free - she finds somebody her own age, says C. Passion. I don't think so, I say, I can't imagine it. Or I can sometimes imagine, but not in any detail. The old woman is death, says C. Well of course, and there is the Paz quotation already in the other journal. "Everybody is an erotic metaphor and the meaning of all those metaphors is always the same: death." - Oh trouble, I'm bad, Luke and I struggling, Luke so angry with me and not forgiving me, rude, shouting, demanding; and I'm furious, distraught, brutal. I smack him and he wails. He rocks with grief. He exaggerates a little. But he drives me crazy. Where is the sunny baby Luke was? Is his life really going to be too hard for him? I'm scared. He's so lucid. You make yourself an invisible car and you smash me! he says. That's why I tell you I wish I could live somewhere else! And I scream the unfairest thing - Well, then, why don't you go and live somewhere else! And he screams, chokes, coughs, sways. I have finished my fury and frustration and come to sit on the end of his bed and say, Now stop, listen, I don't mean that I want you to live somewhere else. But we are having a hard time these days. I'm going crazy. He sits upright blazing anger, eyes wet, defending himself so accurately I was in awe. You make my mind turn off for a thousand years! But your mind isn't turned off, it's working. It is turned off! My heart tells me it is, and Jesus is in my heart and he tells me. Jesus gives us what we need, but he doesn't! I wish you didn't know about Jesus, because most of it isn't true anyway, I mutter. I made him a whole celebration for his first day of school, but he's been so aggravating and is always talking about missing his daddy, and wanting to live somewhere else; it is hard, painting, to organize his wants and have him out of the way and prevent too much irritation at Karen's house, and not scream at him. Now school and all that, he's out at 2:30 every day and 1:50 on Wednesdays and it's 7:45 every morning to get him ready. It seems I'll have to accept him as a lover and let him in and take him seriously. Luke is a soul. Cheryl: carefully balanced connections. Luke's weird persona with strange people like the milkman. He has his voice. But he's very alone. Says C. To me she says, I want to see you shine. I shine already. But you're sad. You're sad too. I know. His vitality. I have to recognize him. It's so much more likely if he goes away more often. Luke born so expansive lucid and happy. He became unhappy suddenly, in England, when we began to have custody wars. Tell Roy I don't like Canada, he dictates. I refuse to. But he means it. I rage because Roy would be horrid to him too, if he had to make a life for him on his own. "You used to not be so cross," I argue, "you would come into the room and say 'Good morning Ellie!'" "That was a long time ago when I was younger and didn't know so much." Candy comes in with crème de cacao and cream and says "It's good that he's losing all that now and just can realize that it's hard." Nellie says "He certainly is bitter." We think maybe about Jud's letter and my news about Roy no longer living with Sarah and his 'brother', and that idyll - I think of Elias and his strong tie to his father, and I think Candy is wrong - her childhood was not good enough and so she renounces good childhood. Look at you, your face flying in different directions. - Luke's rules to have less trouble: 1. share 2. don't start fights 3. everybody do for oneself what one can do. Mine: 1. remember not to make fusses noises bashes right nearby me cause it drives me crazy 2. have talks about what is happening. ("Yes, an' work it out.") - Billy Little - the hidden but developed function, he lets out one [interesting, I'm assuming] word per conversation. Daphne Marlatt. Looking down from the ladder and seeing C radiant in blue, with silver at her neck, wavering on a bicycle. She set herself up instantly as resistance. (She silenced me for about six months said T.) (Still does.) Going away significantly to 'let' Trudy and I arrange something when T moved to sit at the tree trunk. Gestures understood and acted on. Phrases misunderstood, the new version accepted as true by the originator of the misunderstood phrase. I am angry with her because I'm immobilized on account of T-C and feel both my and her approaches to each other as poisoned with power balancing (eg T wants something to do with me because it is necessary to keep in balance with C. Eg I want to hold her because I want to make right my interference in her dependency - no call it her symbiosis.) (No call it transparent friendship.) Tree. Intense blue clear sky, yellow and green leaves in the acacia. Hot and cold. They brought an attentiveness to the moment, pigeons and dog and cat, blue, nice puffs of the elegant pipe. What comes after they learn to speak so well to each other ("You do it good! You do it good!"). - The two of them elegant like wire, polished, willed, mean: meet Nellie, acting the genial friend of everybody. Nellie looking haggard as she never has, puffy in her tight clothes, walking away hunched, arms dangling, a hockey posture and something so beaten in it. I was ashamed of her. Did she know? At her house she talked only about Lorine, it was nothing, and I was telling her one lie after another that she didn't stop. T said "Do you want to see me?" Learn. - [top of page: cashmere socks, 14 birthday party] - 15. Starting Friday night, going through Saturday, awkwardly, into lovely Sunday, and smoke, and losing all the house and C hugging me publicly, and the light feel of my body seeming to be hers - how she's polishing T - Trudy dancing with an air of having a long high-necked gown on - basketball, she said, and she was good but stopped because girls watched, but sometimes she would play; Cheryl ran, won at her school and sometimes in the city - saw it today. A magnificent passion. Passion is a word allowed. Carole Itter came to see. We were all there. Miserable in bed. Long story. Tired. Remember kissing her like scaled down intensity of diamond cutting. Oh mouth in yr snail travel. Janeen's letter - "I wasn't popular" - "That isn't true here" - on Friday, it was they who made the connection that someone had to make before any of us could sleep. And I fell asleep on their strong breath - they woke me up to see if I was all right. When T and I kiss sometimes Cheryl watches and tells us how beautiful it is. Woke sad from that night, expelled from real possibility and left with repression - and then there was the whole sad Saturday but Luke and Zoe buoyant, drawing - C on the carpet doing yoga, Trudy restless, and me too. Pilgrimmed on to my house. I always have to touch Trudy goodbye because that seems to be where it's possible. There have been times when my face has contracted like that. At home, C giving me embraces I couldn't believe, best of it the family life, Zoe not wanting to stay, making a bed for her, Luke with other people to talk to - best the story time, C reading Lord Rex the Lion to them in her supple voice, and then I got out the animal book and we marveled (me most of all) at their names and faces - Zoe with me in that - (next morning I brought the leopards to show T). When she walked naked out the door, I saw a strange construction at the broad hip, like that pelvis is a rectangle, with long legs stretching underneath. Let's help Trudy ask for a grant. A qualitative leap. "The success stories you've paraded in front of me." In the morning, table again, coffee and almond cookies. Sin-ger. The bone-face, pulled back. The body gasping and shaking, making fine decisions. - Paul said "There was a tremour in you, a shaking, which I could never find again. That was the greatest pain of the whole time." I told him about Jean [Mallinson] quoting me the Thompson poem about angels - turn but a stone and start a wing - in the library next to the card file. Had a startle of tears in my eyes.
These days he wears a good leather jacket and a blue wool touque (mine). These people who come to see me on bicycles. She - I say it again and again - she is so fine - wearing my Guatemalan shirt, her small head on top of it. Skull always present in both their heads.
- Many dreams. - 16. What is happening to her since I know her? Lately, in just the last weeks she is so beautiful she is blinding, she is pretty which she never was in photographs. She is so light and tight a finger could swivel her, and does, but so strong with all my heft I have to struggle to keep her from throwing me. T was so easy. Basketball? Trudy, you're fading, you're so dim and blurred, you're the sad one and I'll do whatever I can for you. That thin face, thin little cropped head, narrow narrow, hair in tufts, something blurred in the eyes. Baby, lovely, what makes you fly? C is too hard on you. The drafting table and I did it. My mail order bride, her furry eyes that she looks sideways out of, her mouth is loose, and it's soft. Wearing her face, I feel dim, vague, but she is not - she's something so special I cast her in costumes to tell her - gambling woman in red gown, child bride with Berber tattoos. She sat in an orange imitation leather chair in the vast beer parlour of the Austin Hotel on Granville, holding her head like someone so delicate - with that look of veiled sex on her face - ("Everything that's happening is very beautiful"). I watched to see if anyone was seeing her. There was a man who looked from one to the other of us. Boring Dylan on television (Chairman Mao postered on mailboxes and hoardings, with a statement about the Party). Waking dismayed and strange and coming out of it into confidences and joys and burnings, breakfast at the big worktable, brilliant blue sky and a façade she feels for. She brought me, through and past the place where I have to stop, stayed with me and breathed me into a breaking through I didn't will - it missed three times and when it broke I rang for ten minutes, my hands from the wrists on all outward needles - now I'm aching thinking of it - confiding the story of my birth and asking hers - a Brooklyn hospital she never saw. Then when I touched her I was already wrung out and could not go with her and it made me feel cold and failed toward her and so we slept and woke and couldn't believe, and then believed. Sent Candy with the drafting table, knew Trudy would see her, and Candy would look at the xerox and spin her head around to keep her eyes private. ("They brought me so much that I gave them a lot.") Josie Cooke and Sibhion and Brad, children for Luke to family. [Josie moves in downstairs when Karen and Lillith move out.] - What I learned, having them to myself separately, is that they are as moved by me as I by them, and I begin to understand why. - Compare skeletons, 5 foot four and a half, shoulders higher and very narrow, back unarticulated, white, little hips - both she and she are more defined in clothes. T is like the girl of the 50s, a tight skirt sweater girl; but she needs muscle, she needs hope. Her body is sad. (Mine is not.) Catch up Trudy, you're doing it already. Get her some money. - A joy day, fog this morning, whitening at all the windows, then hot sun when I left the house, and the light on the corner, hesitation, and Penny smiling and smiling at the top of the stairs, and C rising from her pillows with wet hair (straight). "I'm glad to see you" she says straightforward and Penny disappears and she shuts the door and now we're not brand new anymore she can hold me - this undershirt with silky shoulders in, smelling too perfume from bath stuff - silk silk under the hands - but I'm somewhere else - "I'm going crazy" she says, "I can tell when I'm having a nervous breakdown by the way my body stops" - your body? I don't believe you, you're blooming. "You're in my life, you're going to make it beautiful." "I'm doing that already." But I'm detached, there's a level of emotion here coming from somewhere else, not between us. The rest of the day on the back roof among apples and pears, a tree in several gardens down had red berries but no leaves. The season is beautiful, cold and hot, slowly the house gets its paint, and I dream about my friends and our new ways and tell Skai that what is happening is what I've waited for in anguish for ten years - except, more than that (and been happy meantime). - Can't keep up, apprehension, fantasy, I'm angry because Trudy won't meet me, right away she's so sharp, grownup and odd in her turban, and sparring with Penny and Martha, and I can't keep up to any of it, the litter and Cheryl Queen of all Hearts, and Martha such a child and all of them so niggling and not taking on a size, except for C; and me resigning and Dylan idolatry, but oh I liked having the machine in my hand, but I lied: I wanted to show the seasick chaos of the table, and I wanted to worship C; family life, kindness - pistachios, record player. [a session at Western Front where we pass around a video recorder] I don't keep up, I'm dim and scowling, none of this interests me, except the machine, and C. Trudy is no one I know, the tender creature when she gives in. C is consistent, alert, alert, alert, alert, getting what she wants from me, which is herself transformed. Transformed. Refined. ("A place is vacant that used to be so full.") Consumption, boredom, this is the kitchen table and its game, nothing to talk about, litter of shells and cores (my table has to be clear), what a blindness there is around that table, I don't like it, I don't like them and all their petty emotionality, I don't like the way they look around it, Trudy so nowhere, ironic, oblique, Tia Maria, Cinzano, Coke, hash, cigarettes, nuts, raisins. Trudy was refusing. - But the machine! It lay under my arm and was no weight, easy to touch the controls, and then using it to vacuum up pictures of what I wasn't looking at - I saw little relationships of parts of bodies - I lied - I looked where I didn't want to see, at Martha and at Penny. I wanted to make love to C - I touched her neck with it, I touched her breast briefly, felt, groped for it, but at the end when I turned down the aperture and got just dim light, there was C's face with hard lights at eye and tooth - swimming. C kept feeling her way back to Trudy, it was Trudy she felt and felt and felt for - Penny looked for Cheryl ("I want to do you") and I was in the back holding my mouth over my hand. - Trudy: you have to work to keep up with it, you are not using it, you're mourning, you're fading. Ooh it is she, in the plaid shirt, who comes and stands at the bottom of the long ladder, and witnesses and walks to cafes and won't hold my eyes. And works through the afternoon and comes on the bus, and waits on the grass and comes at the last moment and doubts in the rushhour bus, and picks up my two red peppers when they fall out of the bottom of the bag, and looks at my pictures ("How can you have all that space in you"). Thinks about a Kodak machine on the sidewalk and cooks spinach and learns to use the coffeepot, and notices the bugs. She pulls away and I miss her and she feels that I miss her and she makes me cry about Luke's pinworms and cockroaches and Cheryl taking the garbage out last night ("I feel there are these two clean people who come to visit me and feel slimy in my house") and for an hour she has trouble leaving because we have made it through to the simple place - on the street, light, slight as she is, straight, cropped, hands in her pockets - she puts her arm through mine, awkwardly, it's not the right length, and we go into the little forest to wait for the bus [on Venables]. Sit on the ground, smell it, look through pine trees for the bus. She has beautiful shadows tattooed on her. She's sitting between my knees, and I'm touching her freely as if she were my girlhood friend, and she says she feels young ("You make me feel young") and she is young, and I want to transform her away from that drawling coldness, her disappointment, her James Dean sulk, I want to see her flash. Gentleness, her younger sister give. (I dreamed I was with two young girls who were friends, they were playing with each other's breasts and I was wanting them, and we eventually got deeper into it, I was rubbing one of the girls' clitoris with my fist.) The car lights go by, we are both tattooed on our faces, her flannel shirt and she in it, feel so good, we're on a little hill, in the underbrush, the streetlights making an intensity like sunlight, the pine giving off a little smell (we've rubbed needles between our hands). ("You have to work it out between you because otherwise I will have to leave, and even now I feel I have to have my bag packed and be ready to go, and that's hard.") ("There are many things I can't tell you.") The little cedar soil mountain, its vantage of a river of lights, people at a little distance standing beside the bus post letter box. Field beyond, dark, open. We're vigilant and snatch kisses, a maquis. ("I can't be more free so I guess I'll just be more bound.") ("We both want to be more separate but I'm the voice of it.") Reason and Passion. ("But Cheryl is getting so strong.") In our meetings we take a thing and turn it, and turn it, and we give ourselves many of the possible positions. Cheryly, can't you be patient. ("I want to talk to you. I'm going crazy.") Cheryl is very unstable says Hal. "I wanted to tell you I cried when I got home." - Mrs Choy rapped on the glass, took me by the hand, pointing her little flashlight, down the steps, around the corner to the garden, where she bent down and showed me three little plants, staked up, the Chinese herb I've wanted [rue]. I kissed her and said "Good, thank you, thank you" and she caressed Luke instead of me, and then she took my hand again and led me firmly, with the flashlight, to the foot of my steps. - An alien day with Cheryl, inevitably we miss whoever is absent, inevitably nothing happens when we are all together, C the far distant intensity, sucking cigarettes, coke, dope, kisses; Communist Youth at 13 she says, and anger, there must be a place past this suburban life; Don, when Zoe was new, slept with numbers of women and lied about it (Dawne took her home, and told her, and kept her all night). There were moments tonight when she was an old man with whiskers, so rapid, inchoate, on fire, unmoored. ("We are both unmoored. How do you manage being unmoored?") - Trudy called. "When you feel me in you, in any way - call me." - I love how they are with children - like Roy - loving, present, complex, funny. Loose. Not wasting their time. They touch them. Not in flight. Martha, Penny, C and T and Rhoda and Renee, the girls' dorm in explosion, lovely creatures stalking, bathroom shrines. Zoe this morning flirting about her dress, so pretty, accepting that I was there. Last night she was furious. The blue sheet; oh something was missing even in the best of it, I felt lost. I felt how Cheryl felt lost, feeling Trudy let herself a little into me. That wasn't how it was meant. Although she was brave. Cheryl is brave. But she was scared. I longed to sleep and she wouldn't let me, and I kept floating, but it was because she wasn't there, no trembling attention this time, and she made almost careless talk and sucked cigarettes and called in friends, Martha and Penny and left me out in their presence, I felt bad not being there but it was the way I feel with Nellie when she's covering something - panic, wanting to be away. Something wrong. What. Paralysis. Hysterics. Travel stories but without addressing them to me. Panic. Where's Trudy she thought. And she wasn't paying attention to my body either. - Do whales travel by celestial navigation? Cheryl afraid I'd made a choice: because she had? - For a movie, the touching sight, a corner flash, of a white bicycle wheel rolling slowly out of sight along the alley. Nellie - good moments which we milked a little too much. She shone - when I praised her language she blushed. She wanted to talk about Lorine - tell about "she sleeps with other people" so we could laugh, confess: boredom, irritation love unable to give up ("There's a woman there who's lovely, when she comes out. And usually it's been just some piece of shit this big." Showing 2" between thumb and finger.) T: "When you want me, you just call me." I will I said. But I won't. Cockroaches' sudden increase. The lesbian body. Wittig Monique 1973 The lesbian body trans. David Le Vay Beacon Press On the roof, heat, the tricky ladder - learning to be easy on the high secret parts of the house. Choice is not relevant. I've chosen the hard part of not choosing and anyway it suits me. ("You won't call soon enough for me.") Do you only challenge when it's easy? ("I care for her very much but there is a part of me that has always been angry with her.") That energy is very seldom. An elastic that has to pull out just the right amount, to gather its spring. I am going along with what I should resist. Too slow. Do it right. C running toward the bus, the door opens when she arrives, pretty in the blue shirt. Racer. The whole bus witnessed and I drove off holding The lesbian body up in front of me like a placard. See how extraordinary we are. Yes, I notice you've noticed. My silver boots. Do you see the wild hair? Do you see this 31-year-old, and did you see the other, scorching in blue? (Ha, she left the man sitting next to her and she ran to show him I was worth running for.) Then you ran back, your left arm waved from the elbow. Barefoot. Mythos undiminished, our responsibility. Mythos, in mythos the actual intimacy of real persons. Beware, pay attention to the tension. A tension exactly gauged. Expertise in the play. Your problem. My cunt hurts and does it need tenderness or antibiotic. Remember Roy in - Roy? she too? - the rotation of attention (I have no choice) and raving (Mafalda, Luke, hysterics of fatigue) mutters - "I hate you - no I don't - I don' like you - I don' wan' to like you" - mutter - mutter - I do my best not to listen - the presence and the absence - I know a way to do this and she won't let me do it - wants me to be like the family - fight fight cold cold worse than Paul they are, complaining, complaint. Olivia. Know better, help, so lost. - Morning, bed, confront, mad, cry, leave, Paul, pictures (squatting on sidewalk: pictures of an old man, his hat and shadow next to a wall), light on boots and breakfastless, house, street, Broadway paint store, good clothes and gallon of paint and bookstore, odd standing looking into books by T and C's friends, diddun like Kiyooka Cosmic Ego (look at me looking), decided to go home to write, thoughts like asterisks, suddenly starred revelations about the meaning of not being diminished any more (oh and I'm free to ...), Penny's stories. - Remember knee to knee, candle past them so they were profiles like helmets to me, profiles cut sharp as visors - the exactness of each identity, Trudy's long thin sharp, Cheryl's a beaked weight, not pretty women, splendid, black on gold, Trudy saying "I am at war with you, I'm never going to stop fighting you, Cheryl." - Infectious smiling battles, there's a joy comes into T along with her irony, her eyes shine when she gets her coldness up. Can she play like that when she isn't at war. My soul shines. T has a gentleness that she pays for at such a high price that it is credible. C is a brilliant presence. These are our reasons for choosing to believe we love. I am not interested in whether we love. When I feel loved all it means (and I rejoice) is that I am to be allowed to witness and learn, I can stay where I do not have to shrink. ("Now it's your turn to complain that you are not important enough.") I explain many times, that my joy is not perverse, that it is on account of marveling at what I see. Page, page, stroke down over its ribs - lovely page - geranium petal smell like a variant of earth smell, subtle smell of nasturtiums, Raf, Luke, playing war games ("I want to play war") in the sweet light seven o'clock in the corridor. This was a brilliant day, we made the sun shine over night, how do we do it, struggle in language, like old times, C correcting my perceptions and me listening and believing but fighting and fainting (I faint, I go into a faint - feint says Penny) - we kiss and touch a little and then we go to sleep. When we wake up, the mothering before school, and then she is dressed too, fragmented she says, no dope (the few stocks are giving off their night scent). I'm saying when I want them straight, I walk round her to gather her, find a tension that wants her, but have to stop to tell her I feel she feels it has to happen before she goes home (because of scoring) and then she's mad because I've brought 'your friend' into it and stopped her skin fix, and then I'm clear and she's going up my skirt and I get to do a beautiful thing, take off her jeans and look at this slight freckled thing in silky underpants, and put my hand around the elastic at the cunt and find her so wet and slippery, and go right in like it was a slide. Heats me to remember it. And I just want to do her, and I forget myself in her hands and find a way to make her electric. This responsive creature inspires me to remember all the ways. This compact body I can find no fault at all with, inspires me also to find out what my own perfection could be like. But the meetings I can have with it - ashamed ever to touch in less intelligence than that. In physics a moment, says my oracular book, is (in phys the moment or importance of a force around a point is) the product of the magnitude of the force into the perpendicular distance of the point from its line of action. The moment of a couple is the product of either force into the arm. We got to touch by wrestling, and hard, until it turned to kissing. The wrestling undid my refusal, and I found myself loving to move the watchfulness of wrestling, the force, into making love, which by then it was. We found it, as these folks say. Argument in the dark: do stones have passion? The story of Rasheed and the boulder at Webber's turned into a nice story. Sense of stories. Mythology she said. Oh yes I've found out about mythology. They've brought Gertrude alive. I dove my hand into the place between her shoulder blades and I was so wrapped in joy of white love I could tell her "You have these hard wings so far apart and between them there's a meadow, a field with flowers and grass, warm." Confidences. There in peace at last, we have things to tell each other from our mutual story. "You kept on trying to ask me about that, in the early meetings, you wanted to know if I'd be faithful." I touched as much as I could reach and she said and I said, but it was me that rang, and she went girlish, softer even more in her voice, making jokes. Something so hard with something so soft on top. Absolute beauty of Trudy at the bus stop, C the afternoon of the fire and today. I see this utter woman throwing her head back, small neck small head, thong she doesn't take off, breasts' little points close together. ("You've liberated these 'cause I like yours so much.") Look how my writing is full of praise, thinking about you and you. When C and I looked at each other in the mirror I felt her density as an indictment. I was ashamed to see the face so big and loose. Open they call it. "Do you have an incandescence in you?" "Sometimes, not always." "Because I do." My beauty, I called her. Your beauty, she said. There are no diamonds in the mine, I sang, in the kitchen, before there were again. Wrestling on the steps of the Chinese café. The art school at lunch looking up entranced when we came in together. Her, me, or us? My shoulders felt so far back, walking with her. An incongruous grace of the cripple. Alight. Does everybody see her when she walks alone. Her eyes have white all the way around them.
- I was embarrassed to sing that there are no diamonds in the mine, because in some regressive? unreconstructed way, we still believe we can make absolute denials or acceptances, without knowing it. Unreconstructed. Found a word. Singing A-a-a-men found a huge rich voice - thought, yes, no point trying to shrink, my muscularity is there to stay and has something for them too. Although it is natural in loving them so much to want to become them. "When I looked down at my thighs I thought I was you." "Yes, and my body has you in it now, it has changed completely since I met you." Paul. It hurts me that we waste it. When we're together we can shine a light on anything we like. But I could have that stretched look too because she gets it from her underlying broadness. Leonard Cohen 1971 There are no diamonds in the mine in Songs of love and hate - When Trudy went away and came back, came in diffident and mockingbird, C immediately reaction, I could see that something else could happen if we took her into the point C and I had reached in her absence, I said we have to touch her all over and smell to see if she comes from our species and bring her in and make her feel she's welcome, and found myself with my head laid on her shoulder looking at C who then began to object because she thought she saw a configuration. They like this, but they have to learn some ways, that I see better. - What alive pictures ("I have a picture I carry around with me"), bodies into which to extend ourselves, paper dolls, life size. Superimpose. Hands sometimes 1 sometimes 2. I become three, then? C's piece, xerox in greens of 5 ways of separation, winter hats. It's about dissolves. F in ---- f out / ---- ---- / ---- ---- Details also, so that we can't be sure. The Egyptian pose. One to three and then? Un de trois, et alors? 3 backs. -
A Dervish period of 12 years, beginning now. - Nausea. Newspaper (bought for Africa), strawberry shortcake (to compensate Luke for refusing him all day as I prepared for) the ego-fix of the poetry reading. Nellie McClung, Maggie, Carolyn [illegible - Z-something], Beth Jankola, Cathy Ford, Jean Mallinson (so much more confident!)(so charming in her poems)("bubbling out of her eyes and mouth", cancer the tree in her mother) and Miranda Mallinson and Brig with her tedious divorce poems. I had to do the thing in my way, on the floor, to feel I was doing the show in my own way. Unease of exposing badly. Still feeling the cunt invocation has power of its own. Beth and Ingrid [Klassen] saying they liked the cunt poems. Maggie's ease (she was going to sing). Nellie McClung - what is this woman? A bulk of her so carelessly laid down on the seats. She approaches me and I pursue instead the glamorous Doukhoubour who spurns me although it is my eyes she hangs by when she reads. But she grows on me during the time at the Lotus when Maggie is holding me down in desperation to have some contact with me. Turns her sweater and shows a [joined woman symbols] button, lavender, that Mo sent from England. Harassed by Maggie. We can't do anything real and I can't stand what we do instead. Judith Sandiford, a blushing attention, I like her. Crossing from the other world, "I saw your table at Trudy's house." Presences. Cathy and Carolyn so professional in their swaying delivery. Beth hard and straight under her black glasses, and then this lovely dyke freedom begins to appear. She likes the cunt poem she says and looks into my eyes. So does she says Ingrid and asks for a copy! (I give a copy of other poems to Coco, who has sung her new song sitting on the street in Gastown.) Grandma ready to laugh. "I've been praying for you every day, that you'll come see me!" she says. Chuckles. Tomorrow! With Nellie. - Deficiencies of consciousness. Poetry - not being right there. Again and again, I'm ashamed of the sleep. Okay, well. What they do, that is different, is: when in doubt they're hard rather than polite. They make unease work, to give it a content. Make a contrast so we're relieved when we can tender ourselves. - They make me feel I'm the emotional raw material they practice their poise on - sometimes it prevails and they see my 'soul' shine. Their mannerism is attack. Mine is - ? But I am not an organism (yet) that can tell lies - going blank in front of the mic - it imposes such an honesty.
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