| dames rocket 5 part 1 - january - february 1977 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[Front leaf] This is all one story. [London visit January 1-25. Photos: [undated letter to my mom] Hello M, Luke and I were glad for your letter yesterday. I won't be able to tell you much about England, already it is a long time ago - it was strange and lovely to find myself in London as if I had never left, and yet everyone I knew tells me I'm very different. Christie said a nice thing, she said "I used to look for you two inches behind your face and now you seem to be two inches in front of it." Friends. - I've got the Missa Solemnis on downstairs, on Josie's record player, and it is fine, thin lines of music cutting so delicately - coffee pot, morning - Roy and I didn't see each other much but we felt like old friends, I haven't got any anger for him anymore. Luke stayed mostly with him although he has a job now that South Africa isn't letting money out of itself. Catherine fussed and fed, was good to me although she secretly wants me out of the way so she can have Luke all to herself, Jill and Sean keep telling her that I'm doing a good job but she finds what she can to worry about. None of that stops her from being extremely kind to me. I can't help liking her, she is so transparent. Roy is not any different, still getting drunk and going through a lot of women, shiftless, and envious (he wouldn't come to see my film), he seems to have got stuck in being a naughty boy; still I can't help feeling how he manages to stay such a tender creature in it. He telephones us laughing and crying to say he loves us, and so he does. Luke seems happier for having seen a lot of him, he talks less about wanting to live in England, and he was glad to come back. Josie has her children with her oftener, Sibhion and Brad, Luke carouses with them and it makes a family house. My friend Sarah [Black] (you met her, she was interested to be the same astrological sign as you) where I stayed, is thriving wonderfully, has printed a book of poems and hardly stops writing day or night, she is always reaching for her notebook to read me something pertinent, she is so distinctly herself now, so pretty and so entertaining, and so on the track of her particular kind of brilliance. Another person I rediscovered a good friend in, was Rosalynd [de Lanerolle], who you also met onetime. She has such a gift for friendship. I showed my film (the English premiere!) at the Co-op one night and all my friends came, it was like a birthday party, most of them didn't know each other, and to have a room full of people happy to see something that you've made, and liking it, ooo. I lived off the movie while I was in England, took it to art schools and got paid: isn't that something? Even here it sends me money now and again. I'm just rereading your earlier letter in which you're replying to my criticism of your life, I'm sorry you're under pressure from so many sources, it maybe means that a lot of people trust you enough at least to say what they hold against you. I think Paul and I are also frustrated at being cut off from our home place and you in it, by how impossible Father is for us. We fantasize about getting him out of your life so that we could be in it more, but I expect we'll have to be resigned. He is a sort of security for you that I'm sure no one else would be willing to provide at this moment and maybe it is too late in your life for you to step out. That's your decision but it is frustrating. Judie and Michael seem to be able to manage. How do they deal with him? What are Judie and Michael up to? Judie hasn't answered my letters. This seems a disjointed letter. Maybe I'm not talking about what's current in me, well yes, that's it of course. What I've really got in me these days is Cheryl and Trudy, we find ways to get very close, sometimes they are war envy jealously insecurity and sometimes they are generosity hugging and kissing adventures playing ball making drawings showing each other work making each other cry. I love them so much I want to know them forever they see me so well and I can't help seeing as much as I can because they're so big in me. When I look at Cheryl sometimes I have a shocked recognition as if seeing a member of my family that I never knew before (she'd be an Epp), or a version of myself that I used to know in mirrors and no longer see. She is fierce proud brilliant defensive arrogant passionate a rebel from early and she has dreams that match mine. We know each other somewhere deep although half the time we need help knowing what's up between us. We don't know each other very well at the less deep places. She has a beautiful beautiful sense of language like me at my best and I've been lonely for that and I love to watch how delicately she chooses words. She's a fine writer although she doesn't know it yet. Passion and precision together. Her background is science, she did biology, McGill I think. She too lit out for Europe by herself and hitched around, before she went to college. She has a seven year old, no eight now, daughter and she works these days in photography and video. There's some very strong magic between us and we're scared of it too but gradually we're learning what we can do with it. Oo it's nice to love somebody so much. She had a long secret rage in her against woman's condition, and I know her in that, and both of us live in gratitude and amazement to have found our way to a place where we can come out of it and stop hating the girl in us. Trudy is in some way Cheryl's opposite, same size and sort of same shape but completely different texture and color. Trudy is cool and blue where Cheryl is red hot. Trudy has always liked herself, she knows how to see into people, she's easy, funny, extraordinarily intelligent about daily life and friends, has always known how to live and is so alert that I get a contact high just being with her, find myself more penetrating than is normal to me. Penetrating - that's really what she is, she knows exactly how to get inside things and people, find the essence of them. You can tell these two are legendary in me and coming home to their way of being is my promised land that I seem to have been looking for since childhood. It seems time to heal some secret wounds, the dark places (like your blank for the age of 5-7). Trudy has been working on me to bring out of myself all the taboo and grief about my leg. Oh she's wise. And beautiful. Both of them are so beautiful, their strong souls are very visible. It scares people to see them. When we sit together around a table we look like witches, I'm told, people with secret helpers. It's because of them that I feel it's time to go back to childhood and bring the little girl into the present both for my sake and for hers. I want to use every way I can to get her here, hypnosis, psychochemicals, writing, whatever I can. Also next summer when Luke is in England I want to come to the Peace River Country with a car and travel around writing and photographing, developing a script for a film. Do you know your plans yet? I will have to try to get money from Canada Council for this thing, but if I don't I will find a way to do it anyway. Want to be in a movie? I love my work these days, such a sense of growing fast and coming into my right places. Vancouver is good to us. What a life. There you see it gets less disjointed when it's more here and now. I love you too. Nellie wrote from Mexico City on the way to Guatemala. - January 30 Open air for sailplane fliers. Dark patch with air rising in a wide invisible column - a thermal. She calls me again and does it again, frightened, keeping it moving at a distance. Something to do with loyalty, but she didn't want it, she's thinning it down. Daphne and that woman Susan [Reid], from Scotland, Kwakiutl, saying she wants to work on the detail not the romantic generalizations. Still I said some of the things - confusedly - good! - about how many different rooms and state specific memory and each level/drug/tropism having its own associates - oh yes that's from here. Snakes and ladders. She doesn't understand me the way both these women did. Each part of the world having a mythology ready to spring into us. -
Our spirits leaped, hosannas of destruction - I can understand how one can become stupefied with the spectacle of their obstinate dance, of that endless word which they write against the window pane. But the evil vanishes as soon as I touch the snakes and take hold of them. Colette in Creatures great and small The ribs rowing majestically Mambas love brilliant foliage of mango and lie all day in the warmth of the top branches, swaying. The night adders, the rosy boa Viperine in form but have prehensile tails and keeled scales For up to 40 minutes the severed heads would bite sticks and discharge venom, heart went on beating up to 59 hours A California suicide broke into a cage of rattlesnakes and got 83 bites Male and female entwine together and open their anal scale plates. It is possible that grass snakes also have a habit of twining together in clusters of three. Rollinat who observed the mating of smooth snakes found that penetration was very deep and that one pair of snakes remained coupled for 15 hours. Nassenes - Christ as serpent Each one kisses the serpent on its mouth, for the animal has been tamed by incantation. Thus the Supper consists in making the Logos present in the serpent's body. Gnostic gems and amulets The young girl makes connection with snake kisses Pliny it is said taught us snakes move by means of fiery spirit [snake notes became a snake poem, green mambas / black mambas] - To yield to a half-realized love whose acceptance can change the whole course of a life It is taboo to see more than other people The meaning of repression - drawing a blank on a number of things - being a blank - C says you don't have use of your mind because it's stuck on something In the stone, the sense of fullness of erotic turn-on, the balance, a humorous centre, something rich and confident Your life, I know you somewhere, your fate - "They used to call me Circus" - there's a satisfaction that exists, there's a loose speaking Each one has a nature which strives for love and relationship and also there is embedded in everyone the necessity to strive for emotional truth. The unconscious cannot lie, she says. Is it true? Mythlike dreams show up in people who are undeveloped, and also those who have worked their way through personal problems to a wider viewpoint. "achieved a satisfactory personal life" "an individual life apart from the collective stream of inner images". Susan talking about what everybody feels versus "trailing clouds of glory" ie the artist a personal relation to the world I saw glimmers in Susan of the idea of a wider relation. It is in that wider relation that I can talk to Daphne. Why can't I talk to T and C - the wipe-out is more than personal. It is that something there doesn't have a possibility of me.
Erotic gods and vegetative gods How is it actually possible to know what they felt, what their stories actually were? Seeing people out of the right time, when not on their tuning band. Apart from all dogma and protest. I look to see how people are doing. Moon babies, who have a great destiny. Susan said the Adam-Eve-serpent story occurs in every possible variation. Eros she says is the principle of psychic relatedness. Eros, arrows, the thought or impulse of love which strikes from a distance and compels you to try to get close The distortions of protest, me with T, T with C. Eros has nothing to do with sentiment she says - to be related to it means being related to a non-personal value. Logos is a similarly religious relation to non-personal truth redeemed from desire for personal power. But Don Juan? The unreligious - of Sontag. Knowing things about something. Being willing/able to say what we know. Yoni - Old Woman name for moon - the stone the original sign of moon goddess - gradually became a statue. The stone / the pot. The fields of lostness The sensation of a self He mirrored me enthusiasm, vast discoveries Virgin Mary "One fat bum and one thin one, great brawny arms" I imagined a security which he immediately refused Being lost Is there a home? Ellie is home for you said Donna All the signs can support anything you like The texture of repression is, when you look back, noticing a blankness in a certain spot. I'm physically monumental just now. M Esther Harding 1970 Women's mysteries: ancient and modern Putnam (or it may have been 1933 The way of all women Longmans, Green) Two other elements of feminine nature winged creatures and the serpent. Diana, Artemis, wings sometimes or bird's head Some stories, the serpent gives humans the virtue of soma drink Shrine of Apollo in Sireus - sacred snake fed by naked virgin Demeter at Eleusis attended by a snake as mysteries of the Great Mother Attract 'serpent love' when menstruating Fear of becoming pregnant by a snake "Sometimes the snake in these beliefs is replaced by a fish" Harding doesn't understand these two, which she says also exist along with the mother-implicated animals - hound, bear, cow, lioness, boar, goat - having to do with fierce and protective mothering. Snake and bird have to do with woman helping herself to a man 'Heat' as menstruation - (ie infertile) - a protection against overwhelming desire A thing invested with mana: "When the value represented by the symbol has been entirely explored and made conscious its power leaves it and the object which held the power of symbol becomes only a natural object once more." The unknown adversary out in the open
Centring: to be centred in one's destiny The soma: food of the gods' knowledge Atman - self - free of pairs of opposites, free of authority, immoveable and homeless In the ritual of soma to give oneself up to be filled by the god. Mind would become the playground of strange thoughts, boon of renewal of life. She talks about a faith in an ultimate reality being found in the unconscious. Lady Wisdom, Sophia. Moon goddesses were considered the source of knowledge and wisdom. Soma is manas, mind Only when the Understanding of its own motion forms ideas within itself can it be called Mind. The Veil. To raise it. The Veil of Isis. Removing the site from ego to flying Apocryphal Gospel to the Egyptians, Christ and Salome Death will prevail as long as women bear children When ye trample the garment of shame: when the Two become One, and the Male with Female neither male nor female
It is one of the places. Triune goddesses of the moon Our own goddesses of fate and fortune The threefold woman 3 holy virgins Mohammed's daughters "She was the black stone which is still venerated ..." Wine for communion Winds, floods, fire, these are the symbols of emotion which is essentially a movement of energy (art of fascism) Eruption of emotional not necessarily fertile. Also disorienting. Too much. Submit to the laws of one's being it says, the individuality crystallizes. It is always possible actually to die or crack up when letting go. Temple prostitutes. In the initiatory vs personal relation what happens is going to the limits. They however seem to live together in their limits. Hieros gamos. An experience of woman's actual instinct and rage of desire without commitment.
The realm of the full moon. Has knowledge of the unconscious. As source of power in the present, insight into the future. We make things, not so that they'll exist but so that we can make them, which is our nature. The need to sacrifice the child: sacrifice the instinctual material. - Getting stoned tonight with them, it stayed real and easy. A balance with transparency and without panic because they were speaking to me and letting me speak to them.
"I think you're still working on things you took on a long time ago. Validating in that way." "It's that you're not sure you've worked everything through yet." Turns in a flash, "Yes, that's it, Cheryl." Question of mistrusting the mythological because it's everybody's private wheel, energy and servitude. But don't deny it, do it and then something else.
- The big visceral thrill in the imagination of having a baby in me again, the depth of the fuck imagining a join in the mind which would set itself around me in my life, seal my body's leaks, make me smile on my central axis. Then the labyrinth and displeasure of actual Paul, the ickiness. T and C: it doesn't make me like you when you do that. She lives in a The rapid - Tony says "You talk faster than you used to" - the eccentric talk I have when I'm stoned, Susan so excited by it. The photographs. The pink one Trudy exclaimed at - "Ah that's so beautiful" - Bruce said "Take it away, it was so intense I wanted to jump on you" and in fact when he liked a photograph he reached to touch the shoulder. The sphinx's breast with a line of light, a rectangle of mirror. The pink photograph another mirror. The bridge with people. [bridge series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] In these pictures there's a vision. Fireplace. Sarah sphinx. Sarah squares. Window grid. What I see when I see is fragmentation like the inch mirrors - the many minds - learn them - the multiplicity - is there a right mind Mind in all this? A lost feeling but maybe it is simply the wrong looking-for orientation toward the old self. Blind home based. Who's home base. People as pleasure machines - one arm bandits - fruit machines slot machines put in and take away - then you fly - that's what they like people for - the gamble pleasant occupation playing with minds it's constant go. Seeing constellations and moving to show you've seen them. The pictures. They're good. I am making visions, I am making, the work is making. I'm fat and ugly but my work has sex appeal - Bruce said slightly shyly that the movie seemed very erotic to him. My back has got suddenly alive as in London the winter I was shooting. Shoulder blade right and spine halfway up at the waist. Sap rising. A magnetic pull. Technology of the worlds / only one technology, knowing where you are. It is [distorted handwriting] tightrope walker on a vapour trail -
concept of technology in relation to whatever is sacred traveling to places looking for minds (look for tricks devices of the trapped person) a unity. make a constant or key and measure things against it let's do theatre to take something on art of getting in not [sketch of funnels pointing right and left] the compound poem, made more so - as form of [sketch of funnels pointing at each other] performance structure - putting it together so spectator is stretched just as much as can be space research. place writing a work in language the relation of that work to personal preoccupations the relation of language to film making experience ways of testing one mind against another in yourself (and assuming similar locatability) others gratitude to the soma Mia Kalavinka rocks/stones. the stone a density journeys Mia Kalavinka and Cecilio Garcia-Camarillo Dec-Jan 1973-1974 Stones, bones and skin in Artscanada 30 #5-6 -
I'm a factory This person has no relation to any of the historical persons except this one, of wondering whether it has a relation. Conscious maneuver of viewpoint - except yes it can look back into the file to find the moments like itself. I used to see gestures as substructures to my thoughts. Comforting and doubting talk, spend a lot of time being responsible and taking charge of viewpoints, possibilities. Still feel there's a home base different from this place and I have to see what I see also in that mode, to be able to remember it. Exploring the place.
Robert Sinclair - inflected white rough paper sharp pencil lines various depths / colors of white paint - white water color [probably in Artscanada 30 #1 Feb-Mar 1973-1974 review by En Wilkin] Possibility of working with children The Sankyo - 35mm slides - get a macro titler Superimposition techniques - Why is this secret always used/losed secrets being regularly lost in the west I am trying to send messages back into other times to satisfy my ghosts so that they will all know and not continue to want/alone Do they in any way exist - cast them off A ceremonial for doing that - point of light - a crystal To consolidate it - learn its ways - live with its artifacts - every artifact a key - keys-in Choosing where to locate the message Not working in the suburbs of the self - Make gentle love of the deep withheld person
Use it to solve the practical problems Techniques of presence
CC grant for dope and Southern Comfort Knowing the essential Penny Chalmers blueberry story
It is time we revealed more of the process The dream last night was lost baggage (Olivia who couldn't remember objects because her brain was drug-ruined), found baggage apartments being moved out of ways to get 'home' - travel - homelessness - a bus and getting off at the farm, no only the thought of it. Breasts those covered eyes - catching a look sometimes sideways through the shirt's crack.
Need a stone dish for burning messages The three cooking together was alchemy in various houses Various powers - the real thing - they have to get close - muses
Pick it up and ask what mind is in here T is landscape artist History - this week she is doing diagrams/graphs/charts A thing is cooking in her Do I pursue things when they are on someone else's mind
I get enthusiastic - what does it mean? Watch it as a false person - it means going away and trying to force your absence on people Is Trudy the pink satin dress? Yes. It's sexuality, it's the girl sexually offered. I have knowledge of her. Maybe you don't? Piled up packed the soft offered dance dress breasts. Ooof!
Talk. Make the private social give it away / strengthen it / expose it I can't separate persons and languages these days Can't make up my mind what is my relation to the past minds - whether to jettison them and walk free or whether to have some responsibility to them and keep them up to date. Seeing the meaning of the Mexican crystal skull
The way Trudy speaks when she's on: a solid rush from a firm place. She's nearly always right about facts. "Your mother writes like you." Moving to the time when there'll be no more bluff Cheryl's story of the woman who knows how to get out of words and understand the thoughts of animals. The woman paralyzed with stroke. "She had kept her yes and no" and she said Yes! Yes! Yes! when the woman told her mind aloud. T when she's lying looks embarrassing. Fat. Corrupt. C when she's frightened is sometimes stiff at the upper jaw, I think, there Carmichael Try T on comparisons - as a sort of subtype of symbol
Complexity - "I've been trying not to be that but I can't help it, it's what I am." (C) The delicacy of this encounter, she always gets bored and goes It always feels like a graceful excuse me as I do to Paul I always mirror it as that They are curt business meetings - I use them to try out how I'm doing Learn another way Fighting it out with C: something in suspense A forcing if possible I'm fighting to learn 'their' forebrain language because I need to and have been (lately) imprisoned in unformulated intimations 'unconscious' unformulated intimidations What I'm leaving aside is the sometimes very complete immersion in the world which grounds and enjoys me Keep them, that's the yin yang and my yang was always there but valued as feminine yes so it's yin working now and I'm displaying it in costume. They only have one costume and are not working on their yang. Where are their women in them. Very forbidden. They saw it in me and it moved them a rich immersion anima, but I wanted not to be that for them. That's why they think I'm becoming them. They have each other for the brethren. At the first I played to them still do. Coming to see you disguised as a woman. The aboriginal girl Re-spect What the magician can find to do / to open them I did
Reading, studying. It is me holding onto the edge Skating Opposites She looks the way it looked like I was going to look Something occult from early childhood before I went womanly T "Cheryl on the street must look like someone from outer space." War. Techne! Techne! Is it important for her to patronize me? - Dreams. Breaking out of a mental hospital. Signals, gathering up, Luke not able to find shoes, running outside a group thinning down to two other women and me, one other woman? A beach and into farmland, well away, we can live here (discuss whether the area will have news of our escape). I look back and see a gunman, guard in uniform following. Luke raises his rifle but can't hold it up. Another woman raises hers and misses. I raise mine and after first confusion hold it very steady and aim well through the viewfinder, good focus, pull trigger and it's accurate I hit what I see - a big stone woman - try to get her through the mouth - the bullets hurt but don't kill her - she doesn't hurt us - there is a garden. 'She' is somehow the anchor who can penetrate all the places - for instance remember dreams. Integration is right. Bringing back gifts. Swimming in a private pool. That one comes often. It emptied. It was dark and shallow. I usually always swim in these places alone. There, attached to the fence a plexiglass window box with plants in, various dome houses standing around - when I wake I think she meant no harm but wanted to be with us. She was a sort of pitted sandstone. Reminds me - re-minds me of - a dream of living in a village in the countryside going out in the dark to a house where we were fed (Luke and I?) - complex sense of the interior - like a place in Turkey, a remote village café in a house. We waited as supper was made for us. It comes from the same land. Another long-ago land - dream of a sort of Transylvanian inn. "Cheryl tells stories, they make you say 'and then what happened -?'". Aristotle. For when the soul is alone in sleep, then it takes its real nature.
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