| volume 5 of dames rocket: 1976-1977 december - april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Missing from part 1 a London visit 1-25 January. Many stoned passages. In part 2 I take acid for the first time. Long stories of meetings with T and C and others in the art community. In the part 6 month a second time with acid, whose notes then compiled separately onto typewritten sheets from scraps are here linked onto a separate page with photos by my downstairs neighbour Josie. reading/hearing notes: Emily Dickinson, Colette, snakes, Jung Alchemy and the Collective Unconscious, M Esther Harding Women's mysteries: ancient and modern, Mia Kalavinka and Robert Sinclair in Artscanada, Castenada Tales of power, Vancouver New Music Society concert, Vaughn, Valery Briusov The fiery angel, Buckminster Fuller Synergetics, Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Rimbaud, Ricky Nelson, Dorothy Richardson Oberland, Hildegard von Bingen, Simone de Beauvoir The second sex, Emily Dickinson, National Geographic, the B Minor mass, Plato Phaedrus, Gurdjieff and other self improvement sources. mentioned: Luke, Mary Epp, Roy Chisholm, Cathrine Chisholm, Nellie van Leuwan, Daphne Marlatt, Susan Reid, Bruce Davis, Paul Kinsella, Tony Nesbit, JoAnn Kaplan, Sarah Black, Penny Chalmers, Cheryl D, Trudy R, Hilde Westercamp, Josie Cooke and her children Brad and Sibhion, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Renee Rodin, Sandy Rodin, Bill Little, Diana Kemble, Hilda Janzen, Henry Olidam, Wayne Moodie, Janeen vanden Berg, Laurine de Courcey. University College London, Grouse Mountain gondola, New Diamond restaurant. Missa Solemnis, Streisand Lascia qu'io pianga, Nexus with Cathy Moses and John Darling on CBC Music of Today, Wilf Carter The blue Canadian Rockies, Hegel, Robin Blaser. |
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 - 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. - 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.
- 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. "I was interested in all your stories. I found all your stories interesting." They listened. Oh yes, the centre's here tonight.
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. 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 right blade and spine halfway up at the waist. - tightrope walker on a vapour trail -
structure - putting it together so spectator is stretched just as much as can be ways of testing one mind against another in yourself (and assuming similar locatability) others - 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. 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 Techniques of presence
Breasts those covered eyes - catching a look sometimes sideways through the shirt's crack.
Pick it up and ask what mind is in here
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 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." 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. T when she's lying looks embarrassing. Fat. Corrupt. 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 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 Where are their women in them. Very forbidden. They saw it in me and it moved them 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. She looks the way it looked like I was going to look Something occult from early childhood before I went womanly Swimming in a private pool. That one comes often. It emptied. It was dark and shallow. I usually always swim in these places alone. -
- "Dear Lord Jesus, thank you for this day, thank you for our food, thank you for our house, thank you for Mama and Daddy. I'm sorry I fought with Judy and Paul. I'm sorry I shouted at Mama. Please help me be good. Please make the kids at school like me. Bless Mama and Daddy and Paul and Judy. Bless Grandpa and Grandma Epp and Grandpa and Grandma Konrad. Bless Uncle Walter and help him get saved. Bless Billy and Warren and Dewey Stickney. Amen." - It seems to me that I'm seeing the spectrum of minds that are in me and it's making me conscious of making finding choosing a home among them, that would be connected to the first or favorite minds of childhood - retain the distance and also have the quick response of inside-outside. Alchemy indeed. How to be a genius. Se faire une personnalité de ce qu'on aime. - The work of many people a training in just that, focusing closer - but what about the feeling relation. - So. Is it your confusion I have in me, funny friend? Do I go there to be with you? Not looking at you just seeing your hands come forward, not far, and then seeing them quickly go back into the pockets. I like that I knew to ask you. I liked being with our tremour, yours maybe, that tremour, even for a second, you know it satisfied me. I liked that you knew to meet me. Oh it's getting more real. Got a warm steady place in the liver and that's me saying I love you I do love you it's nice I'm glad to love you because there's something there that I'm not ashamed of. In fact it's my pattern to go into worlds without connecting them. How you live is to hold yourself together. Walking about I say to myself I exist, differently than ever before. I exist differently. I exist differently. Turbulence. All that time and a hunger to get out of the human triviality, that made me neglect to see Luke for years. See him. Buy him baked beans, canned peaches and chicken noodle soup. "Now you're being more like a real mother to me." Can't write though. - Unconscious is always conscious, that's what makes it possible to find it The evening in which we didn't feel anything - it was alright no it was everybody closed secretive discontent - Have a look at this body. Is it well? Is this face steady? Then I'm not crazy. Faces and bodies. We collude in their intended expression while hearing dimly their actual one. I have always watched people for something - 'alertness' - my father's task not my mother's. We know who we're talking to by how we talk. The shock of Paul defining something. The shock of not explaining anything, speech so direct it stuns. - When an exchange leads to a blank what's happening -
10 February On the street she walks ahead to the left and T ahead to the right and I behind - watch the little bums primly walking - C's shoulders are pinned back - we all have hands in pockets - she looks stiffened in her top half while her flexible feet in their little boots and her patched bum go carefully. T is loose in her shoulders and toes out comically - my shadow limps between the two, hat, scarf blowing left - da da da da da da. Street smells of public toilets. Walking across the Gastown intersection the Europe Hotel . Find ourselves at the Classical Joint, the little ideal coffeehouse red tablecloths candles coffee machine hip attendant carafe of wine cappuccino nothing to say. I would be glad to keep silence obstinately. T makes up 1955 in New York, painters, she wants to be Kline C wants to be Rauschenberg I am not interested in any of that idolatry and say Georgia O'Keefe for the sake of making a point. What were we actually in '55 - I bring up a crush on the hired man, sitting on Bobby's knee, C says she was a punk in fantasies, "I would be up all night and in the morning the birds would be so loud" - power tripping - motorcycles - "I liked the jackets, I wasn't really into their hairstyles." T not having this kind of story. "It isn't about power" I say, "it's just natural, the self is a queen." C says her kingdom was disordered by incest - she sent out husband and brother to war - "Armies?" - "Yes." I try to imagine her in a city bedroom with dawn grey outside imagining battles. "My kingdom was very peaceful" I say, "I was more interested in making up cultures." - "Were there more than one" asks C There weren't, and I'm uncomfortable feeling I tell this story to present myself in some lying way as a born artist. "Mostly I made up erotic rituals." T is quiet. "Do you know this story already?" We neither of us are willing to get into our stories and give anything but I am interested in C's story. Is this how she feels when she refuses and blanks me. Interest paralyzed not wanting to desire the other's life. The wine makes me drunk but does not give me speech. I go to the toilet and like my thin reflection in the purple crepe which I'm wearing to remind C what she's given up but feel cheap on account of that - she has on a green boy's sleeveless sweater that gives her breasts. The timid bookrat Ed comes to pay curious tribute. C sees him coming and I watch her deal with an inferior - both she and T looking, smiling, asking questions. "You ladies" he calls us three times. What he's said is you are ladies although you look like the mafia and make me uncertain of myself. He looks at me carefully as he leaves. I play to it looking hard. They both get up. "Are you going together?" really alarmed. C consults the man and girl having a late beer after cleaning up after the last clients. When T comes back sends round a joint immediately. We're more willing to talk and start word-playing - "Let's not do that it takes too much energy" say T . We're sent out - "We're homeless tonight, I mean the three of us" says T. "That's why we're here" said I. Out in the streets it's one in the morning walking parallel and closer now at the corner of Pender and Carrall already in Chinese land two on the west side and I with my back to home. "What are you doin'?" "Keeping my toes off the ground" - heels on the pavement . In all this story seems I'm more interested in me than in them and that was what the costume was for. It hurt when Cheryl left last time without holding me. To get close and be denied, have to follow and beg. No wonder this time there was bitter satisfaction in not seeing or caring. Walked home the little stone giving me for the first time to see objectively what my lameness looks like - hat so gallant, scarf so light, one supple leg and one peg used stiff like a prop. What this is for is to catch up with the nearly conscious things that happened then - it's what we want to do together - have in mind the account while it's happening. - I was in my room - the living room made beautiful - with the window open making more connection with outside footsteps. They come up. My door when they close the downstairs one bumps shut from wind. Laugh in the corridor. I intend for them to come and find a tableau. Have to go find them looking for stuff in the kitchen. The ritual occupation of filling the kettle, plugging it in, washing cups. T is pale and wants tampax, says she's 'unwell', combing her hair forward to grow it out. C's face is big. She has such black eyebrows since her hair is short, wearing that green vest she's more covered and not so enticing. I wanted the south position but T took it while I washed cups. Some laughing but I have a grievance. C brings out the blue envelope with a fragment from the spell, looks like a body with a line drawn through, she's anxious that I won't tell . Comes out later why . I demand to know how they decide to come because I don't understand why. C says in various ways that I should just be glad for what I've got, trust the fine meetings; I say that I exist betweentimes and want to know how she carries me around in those times. I tell her she's mean. T as usual tracks it down to the evening when I ran after them to the bus. C set me up for that I say, and T by stringing it out. I say either I have to be closed and nothing can happen, or I am open and it hurts when they go home. I didn't say the most direct thing then or at all, Cheryl you have to touch me sometimes. That time when I was in tears in rage and distraught she did put her hands on me. She's so oblivious! "They don't want us to be close" she pouts. T: "It's always like that with couples, people resent it." C: "We've never talked about it before." She wasn't being direct, I was slow to know what she was saying, that I was one of those outside people trying to put pressure on them. "No! No! It's different than if I'd always been at a certain distance, I've had more than I have now." "That's true" T says jumping in justice. - Meantime there's an easiness between T and me. I can't give a sequential account of all that it seemed a homogeneous mass, me attacking C defending irritably and without much imagination and as a sideshow T and I are having fun. "Those things you give me I don't think they're for me" C says. Well serious question. Let's see if I can answer it. T there supporting right away - "She's being hard on you." When she sees something her vision often isn't heard because T is so much more skilled. So far I've told the things I feel righteous about, but sometimes there is no problem and I see everything very clear and I know what it's about, but for me to stay there I would have to be stronger than I always am.
Oh, what this historian chooses to say, out of grievance - it was also true that I looked at Trudy and loved her plainly. Of course I do but I'm peaceful about it, I feel like I have to break through something with you so it won't be so stiff and weird. - The Greek Islands, retsina, Anna leaning on Cheryl playing with her hair saying "It's too long just here, you want to bring it forward." They are both nice to Anna and the retsina is good but we were stiff and quiet until the second carafe when a good explosion was building in me. Knocking the glass on the table going to the washroom to dance pounding refusing to look at C. The extraordinary moment when two Native girls one short and buxom the other tall and thin in a white suit that cut into her crotch, with their arms along each other's were doing a beautiful gentle Greek dance, knowing the steps, wrapped in silence with each other, concentrating, looking down. I went right into them. The young sailors with long hair, big and stout sailors, glasses smashing. It's another time and place. Trudy takes responsibility for everything in her punky way, "You're a lovely drunk" says C with that poison of wanting to be her. C fawns like a child sometimes. I adore you she says with her gestures and her tone. I adore only you, I want to sacrifice everyone to you (to keep you, you're my soul, you're my way out of the darkness of me. And there's T who somewhere has a clean affection for my being and misses my body a little, feels it curiously, touches the nipple because she knows how, but she's on the other side of C and my hands want to be on the body I'm next to and I feel I'm giving T's head a less attention. There are two hands on my back, one alive and one not. Then she touches Trudy's chest with hands so different curious rapt. But C next to me pushed up against me, I don't put my hands on her for a long time, it's nice and it's a lot, all that person along the front. It's warm there. When I touch her - find the edge of the sweater the collar put my hand inside the sweater - it is so delicately erotic I'd be content with that (have to be) because it pulls all of me into it. Hello little neck. Ah shoulder blade I love you. My hands get so intelligent. T's body soft - she has a tender unformed little body - that's it - I look for something harder in bodies and this is for the softest love not the bite of curiosity. Well Trudy we can't do that again (not for a while) - and treacherous C she was wanting to get into some trouble tongue looking for me oo it was a nice kiss I remember those with her it's always me making the love she's waiting for me to make her . "Let's all go in the living room and feel nice with each other" says little Trudy so nicely drunk. And when we are laid down in that bed whose cover isn't wide enough I will not move toward C and I won't let go only a little it's nice to feel the familiar crying it's just something shaking loose - Then the lie that makes C so uneasy is that T holds herself back - she harps on it - it isn't good enough for her, that T will protect her - she wants the sweetness for her oh eats her up listen turn a little on me - "I don't want to scare this lady," it flies out, "she's no good unless she feels safe" - "She feels safe" says T and kisses her nicely. "Do you just only want passion? Don't you like affection? Do you have enough affection in your life?" I say. "You'd be surprised" C says. "I would be surprised! If you said yes or no even I'd be very surprised." T laughs. "I could go on for hours with nothing happening but I think it must be because I'm not Jewish." C laughs. - This is family life I'm talking about. Luke comes to my bed in the morning and says "Well, how did it go with Cheryl last night?" There was a moment with T - you see one is enough - when we rolled our heads together and then kissed each other dryly like old friends - everyone knew it was fine and greedy Cheryl did her leaving act. We were both cross. "Why'd you do that?" She doesn't like to see how we play. It feels like complicity to her. - It's hard to remember a time when everything in it is so interesting all the instants. - I was so touched to imagine fierce contracted Cheryl a hippy mother, long dress wrapped in a blanket, her husband bringing home crashers, always had music in the house, "I fed a lot of people", the patriarch's womanly woman relating around peace love and making up every moment - "I used to dress Don, I made him flowered pants and a brocade shirt, I went up to --- and got pieces of brocade and put them together, I used to sew in those days." - The ballgame - three samesize female black persons among the trunks of some trees in wet ground. The green ball thrown from one to the other, our eyes and the eyes of two cats on a hot rooftop go with it - there's Trudy so slight in her black clothes, today she's a boy, she moves like a boy kid, the fishing boy of calendars a bashful smile and full ownership of the body direct hard throws not like a girl - "You have to follow through," throws high ones, she varies and invents. She likes herself, what a practical person is Trudy, both of us such shoulders and she can throw four times as far - "You have to become the ball" - (I would too, I could youknow, I have - yes! an athlete in me, it is my shame that stops me, imagine not caring how it looks and doing it to do it). [had shot a naked video of myself at the Western Front] What I saw was this: there is no disguising it, it's really too bad for that - I hear my dad telling me to walk carefully so it wouldn't show so much, to be not so undesirable - I'm a conspicuous cripple all my little moves are disasters wow time to let it show and be a body, there's no bluffing it out. Also the direct passionate moves are better than the selfconscious ones. What she was, was a strange body, the pubic triangle skews very strangely, the body is all there but part of it works just to support the other side during steps. The work I do on everything else - it is bizarre what a dream I've lived in - the whole body is a deformity, as a visible body - as a vehicle it is better than I think it transports me it dances it catches balls when I don't frighten it. It loves to love. Alas. What was it. It was muscle, it was so beefcake, so not like their elegant boybodies so mature in its heaviness, but likeable, not immoral, erect, with its worried head, it was nobody I'd seen before not my mother not my father - she didn't offend me, I dressed her up and took her to Cheryl to love and comfort her - it can clown it can get into things. Trudy. She moves like a child. Trudy is her child in some way, she is so brilliant in her practical ways, so not superstitious, so applied psychology not waiting for help but making it work - that's it Trudy so immensely receptive knows how to regulate it in and out. "She courts your pain," says Cheryl, "you give yourself to her to be cured." The thing it's hard for me to know what to do with is that it should be there, as part of the picture of me for everybody who loves me or sees me. - "I need to go out firm and brave" says Luke at the door. "Why's that?" I shout. "On account of the dogs." - Hey there was something strong in holding her little head. "I want to beat you up" she said. "If I hold you a little I want to hold you more." - After acid - Chinese paintings - the clear outlines and the sense of color like Persian paintings - red blue green pink - birds and feathered flowers - made on brown or beige paper. A few things seen in the clearest light. All these forms show the mind that makes them, some minds more than others have it - art is looking for it coding it remembering it. If it comes from a good mind there's no need to doubt its value. It is value. A thing you do in grace. A thing you do looking for grace. The way Paul looked, a satyr, a hairy Pan, face shining very transformed with eyes boring out very blue - but obstinate obstinate willful presenting himself a head like a penis quite blind in self assertion. When I tried to penetrate with jokes he would stop himself laughing. He was a satyr before the bored women who sat slightly touching around the corner of the table - presenting his case, righteous, 'sincere', but in a completely wrong mind. Making a gesture on one level, thinking of his act as that, and on another crying out. Wasting our time trying to deal with his web. The Change, the transformation, the physical radiance Josie saw (her wet face, a truthful pain it was no longer hard to see, the fearlessness of that right mind, wet but very warm, I love Josie and I know she'll mend, she'll keep the wound clean).
The other thing that made me laugh was Luke's brilliant setup of the blanket, the umbrella and his bed, all his animals brought to be with them. His dream under the table, made up with an exact sense of what a dream is. Voice from under there. Cheryl came light and full of a lovely fantasy. "Manna!" she called into the sky, I flapped my wings. Trudy was her soft girl, very soft mouth very girl, taking Paul on mercifully but without compromise. She liked me. I liked her. Either one I liked to be next to some little part of their bodies. They slept next to me put their heads together little skinny scholarly Amazons. I was in the bath looking at thighs and chest with water on, Paul on the other side of the curtain made me into a goddess. "Do you have jewelry on?" "Only very ... casually." Giggle. He was posturing and I still have it in me, in relation to revenge, to scorn a man when I see through him, and it makes me fat. Seeing the bits of light on a part of the wall, like crystals. There was such a fine vibration in me, a great delicacy, vibrating mostly in the head. I went into it touching myself. It was the orgasm that let me know I was there, it rang in a certain way, echoed. While waiting for them I looked at myself in the mirror and loved the woman I saw, her strong neck. Loved her shoulders and her articulated muscles. The doors opening to Luke and to body and to Josie. The girl on the wall, running, made of plaster and some little paint. There were times the walls buckled. I remembered Trudy. When you come to a strange place you take possession of yourself in it. You look around to see what you can see. You don't indulge in confusion. You choose who to be. You see what calls you and you choose your good self and then you find yourself unafraid and you give what you can. There were layers of clouds their movement stopping and starting, they would move stop move stop beautiful grey patterns. On the wall it was lace, stone lace very fine reforming constantly, colors, very pastel, shifting, a curtain of winged creatures embracing, patterns transforming every moment, grey with colors appearing. What delicate visions I made. The girl running arm up with wings running off it. - Nneww Dduon't don't Conk Mm mm (little car wheels sound) Mieww meeouw How do you like my sword-uh-plane This is how it lands, The wheel things go back like that (etc) . . . . aaaa Look at the size of this car if it was real Mama . . . . if it smashed it would make a huge fire But I know one thing that would make a huger fire (He goes out, a door slams downstairs) Here it is, look at the size of these flamer jets, Ellie Sometimes it goes like this right, this can be a very use landing space, see it comes down softly like this. . . . . You know what? Pretty soon I'm gonna want a bath (fixing lego) yuhh, phooey, yeahhhe puung uhhHH-hh eekt - conk - peuh - eeurk - conk - nyee - eeel (around ashtray on two wheels) You know what Kit calls himself? KIT MARLATT, I thought it was Kit Mahlatt. Emergency breakdown, runaway truck. - Woke from a dream very afraid - I'd had a vision of evil powers, I can't get back the sense of what they were and didn't wake well enough - no it was that I didn't dare think about it. It was a very subtle evil, my first vision of what evil might be - connected it with reading about alchemy. Colors vivid today. The acid made buildings sway. It was an evil of a certain kind of consciousness, some way of thinking. - "We'll still be your friend" says T and shuts me out. But somebody body else? Oh who could match them. Sometimes C can't get her breath, her lungs won't fill I love her so much in her frail scared splendour I say "It all happens in the first half-second, do you know what I mean?" T says "Cheryl, were you hard on her?" "No" says she. "Yes" say I, "it's hard on me when you're so closed." She said "I wasn't a very good friend; what do you think could be?" "Everything could be" I say, "we could be everything we feel, if we didn't have preconceptions about what we have to do with it." "What do you mean? I don't understand what you mean." "Sexuality isn't the point of it, we don't have to do that if that's what makes it hurt." "You don't understand what giving up my sexuality is for me. My sexuality is the only thing I like about me." "Then it's time you gave it up and found something else to like." "I think the only thing for me is to get better at what I do." Trudy: "My sister was a dancer. We would do a dance and then I would do a funny dance, I'd do my act. I loved to make my mother laugh - my mother was beautiful when she laughed." "I like things about you Trudy doesn't like; I like things about you you don't like; I think that's a way to be useful - among others." There was me running down the hill thwap thwap in the moccasins, one hand in jacket pocket other hand in ballglove holding two paperbacks, hair up smiling on account of hugging and kissing with my friends and coming through clear with them, and the clear-eyed woman in flat cap and plaid, going up, looks in my face and smiles. Me I deserved it. "You'll do, we'll take you on the team, will we have her on the team Cheryl?" says T. "I'm on it already" say I. "Is she, Cheryl?" "Yes" [I say] in her ear. Kiss kiss kiss, at eye level, breasts eye to eye full of rocks. How can I have this life how can this life exist sweetheart reaching arms to pull back a ball out of the air, letting body go to it and face telling surprise to find it landed so solidly in the hand, hurling it pushing it out from the end of the arm watching to see where it comes, whether its round flight is this side of the friend or beyond. I threw short to Cheryl, saying closer come a little closer big nose; she threw long to Trudy saying I want to watch you run lover I want to look at you longer. Both of them threw right to me saying you're there don't disturb. Oh babies ladies do you have these surfs of affection toward me sometimes in your day. Ellie in 100' pink crinoline lunges to first base, the farm girls dressed as if city girls but in their own way, paying close attention to each other it is only natural to love each other after the childhood we have together. The acid was familiar to me, was home, because it was the strong peaceful I am of beautiful things exactly seen, and the other I am of curious attitude, what is this life, what is this world, I'm here to know, I, my origin found again, has them both so strong, the active and the passive are not far apart in me and that's the gift I've got. Making it right so I can die, playing catch with them is heaven, making jokes seeing them, giving Cheryl my generosity and Trudy my ease, heaven again a meadow the opening oh praises and I'm willing to try to find everything I can, patiently. Restore my soul, flood your days, give you furniture. - I love my house Luke reading aloud naked in my bed. Feeling his mind grope through the letters under his breath he tries the word out then he commits himself to it. He tells me confidently about playing hookey, draws a map of his and Kit's footsteps, the table the back door the front door the junk place in the alley. Having found out that my work is, was always, consciousness, how do I do it. Luke with his peers, tall, has a sophistication, sometimes falsity and cunning. Crying again in the Jumping Mouse story, when Jumping Mouse gives away his second eye - "But I don't want him to be an eagle." We fight about food. It's such a sacrifice to me, to do it, he should at least eat it. He refuses. "I don't like the look of it" he says. The chicken has a red crust from baking. Five days a week having to find a lunch. - The Thanksgiving party. Trudy upstairs refusing to be seen with me. Sandy and Don in the other room hearing me tell Cheryl the story of Vaster than empires and more slow. [at this party I meet Jam] - Peaceful house, house with marvelous windows. Coming up the stairs on a brilliant afternoon and finding all the light collected in the hall, and the bathroom a constant pleasure, thank you house you're all I need. Lascia qu'io pianga on Josie's record player in the hall. Brad and Luke sneaking to meet before we wake. Luke, Sibhion and Brad having a war while Josie and I watched. Sibhion making peace at the end. I stared at Luke to make him drop his tough act. "I'm going to kill you while you're sleeping" he said. I have a strong womanly look these days. I'm robust and shine, have wonderful hair, being fat makes me look younger, this hair and this neck and the moccasins and the jacket, eye make-up.
The beauty of Vaughn breaking out into long lines after short lines:
Like the possibility of an exercise - finding out who I am, among peers, in order to find out what I know that nobody else knows. "That was a good hit" said Bill Little, of the slides. In any case I felt vividly as though all the chaos of knowledge and information that I had read in various books and gathered during the changing fortunes of my life - now passing under the clear scrutiny of Renata, by agency either of her severe condemnations, or of her penetrating corrections - was gradually being welded to one enormous, unified mass, as from molten pigs of iron is welded a shapely bell, that can sound far and high. [Valery Briusov, probably The fiery angel] - Remembering, in acid, how demonic Paul was, he locked my eyes across the table as if trying to impale me, and yet it was easy to drop out of it, turn away. He was such a lesser demon, an impotent animal willfully posturing, I challenge him expecting him to acknowledge what he knows, and he persists in what he believes to be himself, the humble suffering lover. I can't believe that he thinks he means what he says, what a crude forgery. Trudy of C. "She just wants to be with me. I love her now in a way I never did before, there was something in me, I never trusted her, I was at war with her, now she's a very deep friend." "It's taken a terrible toll on her, physically and spiritually." - Last night horrible last night: we can't make love to each other any more because we can't hurt each other. I couldn't let go into Trudy because I couldn't bear Cheryl hurting - she couldn't wrap herself around Trudy because I couldn't bear to see how she wants her so much - my confession is how terrible it is, to have seen how people can live so close to each other, sharing. Bright burning beautiful Cheryl. I had to hide my eyes when Trudy unbuttoned Cheryl's shirt, her face when Trudy touched her - And then I saw how it would be to share everything with somebody, the thoughts behind the thoughts. "I've always lived that way" says T. "It's true that it isn't fair to you, to see in the way you did." Olivia said "Don't you ever want to be with somebody forever, even Roy?" I said "I can't imagine that." -
- 1 March Unsatisfied with how people talk - this isn't anything, this is so nobody here - how long I've had that fury. T saying of the evening with photographers at the new gallery, "The way I've worked it out with Cheryl and Rhoda, I took it outside." My whole life is so aswarm with morality, the difficulty of social interchange, being responsible for time. I have to be a saint or else an idiot like everybody. - Artemis observing air Seeing the invisible, looking at what is obscured by attention habits values Precipitating out of fighting with Paul. He finds extraordinary flatteries even when he's trying to be tough, "You are the most loving person in the world, there's something in me that makes sure you won't love me." He said this with tears in his eyes, self pity. I remember his affectionate rushes as if I still need to hear them, "some slides I want your eyes to see," I said, "Oh and I have some slides too I want your lovely eyes to see." He cries out and I say something a little acid because I want him to stay tough and tonic. We fought about his silly dichotomy, he says he thinks I want men either emasculated or violent - that's his Irish dilemma, choosing to be 'emasculated' ie luxuriating in his sense of love - or else breaking into the rage he's scared would be the end. "When I saw your cheap dream it put me right off mine" he said. I lectured on what I'm trying to learn about practical love. It isn't a fable the self that nags to come out, let me explain it to you Paul, the one who is alone and likes it and looks for companions who like it - the tie to eighteen and freedom. Watching the signs mirror, am I conducting this life right? The blunt uncomfortable forthright conversations I have with Miss St Clair of Financial Collection Agency. "Do you plan to look for employment?" Long silences. The child, the child, not able to believe the triviality of the comfortably sociable. Dreaming of peers. There's too much they don't meet - was all the pain before Christmas that - the pain of not fitting - who - my intimations - Josie's song in the bathroom - like a flower when first she grew - humming down the air vent. Artemis walking a plank in confidence the plank goes on ahead and will take her anywhere Artemis the air crystallizing around her just sparkle of the beveled edges a fine shiver paler than water ah she disturbs the air, and it moves with her the air moving downstream along with the stream visible and invisible rivers the glance of Artemis with pale eyes tunes it slower less volatile and there for her to see it hangs in bits rotating polyhedral fragments flashing minutely batting her skin with little shouts of fire Then stops it into a net a honeycomb pale green blues in shapes like tiles Sustained bells horizontal granulating on the air She walks in free space, it rotates around her - Trains shake this house from that distance Heaven - a perfection of the senses / and understanding [March 6] Birthday party: Trudy's party which I borrowed to have mine in, big smile at the door - the salon opened and fine high regard and curiosity. You there, you there. What was it, Rhoda looking beautiful, the thing about Rhoda is seeing her presence she's the solemn pole she's the spiritual authority in it she has it securely in front of her, or seems to; Cheryl across from her and if they were speaking it wasn't possible to break in, but Cheryl quiet very shining with her burnt cheeks and brilliant eyes, I wasn't troubled by us, she saw enough and we were shy filling the pen together, and only once in an involuntary flash we acknowledged something. They were talking about Brando and Schneider, when they saw each other it was fate, he was willing to try it with her, she wasn't ready for that. It as none of those phrases, it was something in there, so quick a meeting but so close to the core. Un ange passe. All through this there's a sense of trying to find it The other sense is ah - this is the place - Think of Paul as I do of Christianity, something with power but toward regression / therefore a horror a powerful partial This is what's hooking me back again and again If the work is spiritual Then the art is it a pretext? No, nor a livelihood It is the material. Then? That's the criterion for real work. But. Father's concept of noble And then the test is empirical. Does it speak of the work does it connect The impatience of not being able to do house and child and relatives and all because something is pressing to be done But what Centrality. Feeling these things are related but they aren't it Does writing things down this way confuse the organic spiral?
-
Trying to reform a platform to work off, the old way was so unconnected, bits, want a cohesive work here - Watch o'er that loose / And empty house / Which I sometimes lived in Sure, there's a tye of Bodyes - - Every book written, it's possible, could be read revealing connections on a plane more interesting than it was written on - ie everything legible on every level What is it like here? Dillard. Innocence is the spirit's unselfconscious state of pure devotion - receptiveness and concentration. - There was one diamond in the cabbage leaves The garage roof steamed gently up its slope rotted shingles with moss on giving off a vapor seeping off rolling up Hey Saturday morning. Sad and lonely do I have to tell the androgeny dance to feel less of that. Cheryl so strangely cut and curled looking more frightened and frightening than ever. Trudy looking across the floor, beautiful Trudy never takes her coat off. I've got something everybody wants she says, I give you a little and then I take it away. I didn't defend my ways very well: I was eager to meet teachers. - To go outside of life in order to love it as it 'should' be loved - "the short room from whose four quarters there streamed, as she moved, a joy so deep that she brought up opposite the window as if on another day of life." Take how are you seriously as a question about that moment Here a vertigo Beginning a certain way into something - a tiny opening gesture and then a disorientation for a moment in the midst of something. leaving the air composed in a light
The mechanics of taking self through the world, riding it How it is the texture of existence - the encounters - Sarah - looking into her face open in gratitude to see her so lovely and delicate and strong, soft Sarah, and then the rest of the evening sometimes uncomfortable in another less intimate meeting, but she came and sat with me, she was there in an element she knows what to do with. through this indescribable air, down slopes from which the landscape flew back and up Almost arrived, almost down in the innermost sphere of happy solitude, drawing the first deep breath of its fresh air that was like air coming across the sea at night, air breathed above the waters of a spring [Dorothy Richardson Oberland] [My mom visits and meets C and T around my kitchen table.] It's her heaviness I can't stand, the 'loving' and 'caring,' the stories of pathetic people we don't know. Talking 'intimately' of 'real' things. To her intimacy is a subject matter and not a way, a focus. I was trying to push her into a free-er mind. Worst is that they'll talk about it without me and I want to be there for that, T will rapidly say what she saw, C will have a more tentative version. T all the more because she was silent. Oh it's her heaviness, she doesn't know how to be silent and find herself, she tries to please. I tried to make her interesting. She was scared of Trudy. It's how opaque she is. She doesn't reflect, she didn't bring anything out of me. She's more self-absorbed than ever. It exhausts me. She was always tuned to Luke's needs. When we were talking about god, she was riveted. Information - how as a three year old coming back, I refused to be their child, and everytime I came back I had a distance on them and wouldn't be their child. Also how at first I complained, "I called and called, why didn't you come." (Luke holding hands on the street.) "Was ist" she said was my first speech. She doesn't talk about what she sees. What is her intelligence. "She's aged beautifully" says T. "I see her clumsiness" say I. "She's so awkward." She leaned forward speaking too earnestly. She's so heavy, I said it to T, to let out T's hostility to her. She saw the impostor. -
- To wrestle for someone's soul, if you know they will, you both will, love your common mind, I love myself with you The thing is: Rhoda, Cheryl, Trudy, myself, at the table, it is a time: if I have the strength I can bring myself there, if I had the strength I could have stopped Trudy's mad raves, but I wanted them kind and Cheryl was - her voice going on, explaining me and defending me, so level - she said "You have to do what makes it right for you" - that was on account of how I wanted by then to lie next to her - but Trudy expanded her brutality to obliterate me by not allowing me to feel for Cheryl, which is where I felt. "Will you hold me round" she said and Cheryl moved so swift glad to do it. The fragmented journal - that's the question I've been asking - (the wall has to be up to date otherwise I lose it) the fragmented journal is not better, a fluent line that moves right, is always best and will come again. What I see, having gone home, is my pleasure in them. Gratitude. - They are my work, mysteriously, as in the old days with Roy, I have to work at love, again, so difficult this time, impossible to dream of mating and so it has to be something else, simply love, losing and not losing. Alright I will. She says she thought of the little baby calling and calling, a pain I never found again, and yet, they say, I have it still in me? Luke's songs
("There!")
[and more] In Luke's printing: to day I went with you The end [drawing of a boy laughing] - Woke at night with the sense of things understood in some new delicate way, I can't at all uncover it now, but a tuning that was new and lovely, and it was Trudy a fullness of somewhere I'd been with her, oh Trudy I thought come all open. - Instructions to these days:
A falsity is a tension - a tense forward out of the ease and safety of the actual natural I know everything I need to know and look around me in a new world where everything speaks its meanings so securely and happily but I am only ghostly there, a voyeur maybe, loving knowledge but passed out of body. If that misery is let alone does it jump me to a lucid place The stone protects itself. If I leave myself messages why do I always forget them or forget to look at them.
because EVERY human is completely plastic and therefore precisely precisely expressive The way we read these things when we aren't afraid is through the posture sense we have Every handwriting also indicates somebody's time-sense precisely. - "You're so feminine" says T to me. "You're so feminine" says C to T. To get to Cheryl you have to dig your way in through a collapsed mineshaft and pick her out. Bone by bone. The darkness in there.
Paul flatters me to stop me getting past him I have to send my most outrageous stuff into the world so it can hold up my next appearances. The I am of the world or the I am of what sees. Every moment ask only questions that are the really interesting questions. Find the part in a poem for which the rest of the poem is written - and write that. - Your double, with whom you speak - you fight as best you can because your life depends on it, it is the only fight worth you. Is there a way to live in the world that way?
We are strangers she and I. Talking eyes closed searching in ourselves for what the other will see as true. Looking for a firm place. It was good kissing you, it was nice telling you Christie standing in her room with her arm over her breasts. "You love to talk" she said. "I'm just learning." "Seeing you born," she said, "it takes me back to the time it was happening for me. Roy and Rhoda, Rhoda and I found it together." She says she wants not to get lost in anyone any more.
Cheryl would have to be pursued into her blackness and found there, and only Trudy can do it, and Trudy likes to do it because only Trudy can do it. But Trudy is having a triumph? No, because she didn't win me away, I gave Cheryl what I had as much as I had without connection, I had to give it and when I could. And then I'm free except for hurt feelings and then I look around and see Trudy interested in making me more real in her and yes I'll take you up in that. Ego boundaries! It's deciding what part of what you're being is your own. I've done that with C, I entered her confusions and met her there now I enter T's landscapes. "They scare me. They make my head buzz," she says, when she's drawing them. Writing in the journal as if to strangers, explaining things. That's instinctive and true.
Oh am I responsible for inventing the world where such pain and loss takes place, oh Trudy you know there is that: when I find the right mind I'll have to help the world, when I understand everything.
Help me: humility means, to speak and act as if someone were watching, who understood everything. To see into what is, to create the world in abundance, abundance, to carry that abundance brightening the world.
Lies are the worst crime, it's as I used to know. Lies brutalize most, every lie brutalizes a situation and everyone in it. Lies make us ugly and make us sick. Look carefully to see who's lying and what it is. Look carefully. Devotion is gratitude and interest, a passionate interest in as much of the whole as possible. When I talk to Trudy there is a different sense of space than when I talk to anyone - it is a sense of an equal horizontal reach; oftentimes I feel that of what I have in me only a small amount is indirectly transmitted. With Trudy my forehead stands open. - I was refusing Luke and he went into his room and attacked his closet door - "I don't want it to lock" he said - splinters on the floor, the wood wrecked - I smack him on the shoulder and yell at him "Don't you see what you're doing? Aren't you looking?" - and he cries - so there is my rage on his door and my weeping in him - and it's about Trudy too, I'm frustrated and trying to ride it, and actually riding it, but raggedly - Riding the maker, without concentration, but seeing? And yelling at him "Now put your clothes on and GO SOMEWHERE." It's the coffee addiction too, there's an evil in me it likes but it comes from - what. - Ho, it's always like that, I get a little something and for it I pay by feeling I've sold myself out. Generosity or weakness, I'll never learn. But wasn't it fine holding her through the night. She was in it, she touched and moved, she was there. No good no good I don't know how to touch you there. I want to invent a new way that would be my own. But how alert she is in her skin. Your funny brilliant bird eyes.
"It isn't fair, when you ask for something I like to give it to you."
"In the beginning she was teaching me amazing things about my mind, it was in my interest to do what she said. Then I just kept doing it."
"I'm never going to know you but I love to hold you. That's all I want from you. It feels like home it feels so good but to get it I have to talk to you." "What a thing to say." - Trudy, acting like a betrayed woman - saying that's it - but I could do it because she wouldn't meet me last time, she wouldn't let me soften. "I always felt" she said "that you and I could have a relationship, one time in the kitchen I asked Martha what she saw, what she thought of it - she said she had never seen me so soft. We shouldn't have made love, but you wanted to make a claim on me." "I want you to find the woman in me." If I gave up the true thing I have for Cheryl, if I refused it, the justice of it, in me, because Trudy was making me an offer - but Trudy made such a guarded offer - I didn't trust it - I don't trust it - I think she's after power. - This brilliant day, red kite horizontal, whitecaps, green sea, out in it yellow brown at the shore. Brighton Beach, boardwalk. Her mother would come to the beach with them, sit reading a book - her best friend lived across the hall, the children would play - 5 storeys up in a brick building a block and a half from the corner shop. The El was there and the front door was like a castle, a coat of arms with moon and stars. She wants me for the parts of her Cheryl won't meet. The moment a man ran around the corner, we caught the red bathrobe flying.
Not afraid to lose my angels, what Rilke did was hold onto art for a resolution of pain.
Apart from the interior tale of how when I think of her being I have a pain in my belly - could I feel her and not have a pain? Wanting more, wanting again. Wanting to get to hold her all night through, only when Trudy abandons her and she thinks all is lost. Trudy dropping me that way means Cheryl drops me too. I'd like to know I could sometimes spend a night. I'm just naming things these days not seeing them here. It is like a bewilderment or lack of energy. The world - this puzzle I have, the relation of being to the world - the world, this pink house, with a cherry tree in knobs soon to bloom in front of it, the garden patch with small plants recently transplanted into rows, a tangle of boards, some tricycles - trying to figure it out, after the revelations I can't sustain, how to be in it . Begriff. The relation of unconscious self-world and conscious self. The work of/as art is to show the inner self and to speak to it, in others.
- The perspective of the whole life is that you can't go away from where your passion so manifestly sends you, but that it isn't a question either of bearing the inequality; you do have to take on the war, that you have to be the club that they want to join, so much yourself, and not get tired, and remember what a war and what a chance it is, and insist on what you see, and get energy for it from wherever you can, and write it and encompass it and be its best warrior. But to stay open in that? I know, it's the same work as anywhere. M said of us "The three of you, you have the same look of going in one direction, not dispersed." - I dreamed swimming again. It was in a living room, the one at home, I couldn't get to a depth to swim, it was mucky and full of rotted furniture, a mattress with its flesh rotted off, only the spring frame came up. I imagined a dugout being made, for clear warm water. Remembered dreams of Grandpa Epp's beaver pool, or the swimming place where the creek widened. - It was simply to watch being, to see being in me and in other things, to take on a human life in that way, learn more from myself than outside, to take on what I know. To stop giving my power to objects. It's true sometimes my sexuality comes on when I feel somebody's vulnerability really. But Tony, it was out of the trust and balance. The vision of what I'm ready for, something where I could see us able to be big enough together. Paul's laugh, I saw it as a veil, he said the little inner being shut down, like a lizard closing its eyes, and then the outer being shut down clunk - as a laugh, or a flattery. I saw it as the moment when the being is lost and has no reply and the exchange must be re-served. The being is anxious and doesn't take time to find itself. He said "For years I went into people's houses and had a silent despair because of their quotations." Josie when I said "What do you know about swimming dreams" said, "Oh, that's amazing," and told a swimming dream. Luke, Sibhion and Mathew with porridge on their plates discussing how they make armies of two different kinds of food - as each kind of food loses a bite it's an army that loses soldiers - "The dessert wins" said Sibhion. - Phaedrus.
To be sure, prophecy, insofar as it is seeing on the prophet's part, is in some sense a spiritual act; but in regard to the light that suddenly is received and is like something passing through (like sunlight in the atmosphere) it resembles suffering. A story dealing with an interplay of human and divine powers. It seems we can ask and be given them from their plane in us. The phenomenon of recollection of a truer being. The soul. "Banqueting with the gods, delights in true Being, colorless, formless." Here and there are those who keep themselves free in a special manner, and therefore have not lost their memory. Love wakens recollection - it's true! - of something that it cannot itself provide. - What's crucial to the stone is interest, it's some sort of energy for interest and response. Paul says he doesn't study the stone because he's ashamed of it. He's worried that if I go into it I'll spend years on false questions. What is it about the stone? Mortals, social beings, are afraid - he said that - it will take them too far from common life - Nellie said, there'll be nobody else there. Cheryl said "When I do yoga I'm too much for my friends." I saw it sometimes. The dizzying mind. Where do you go, I don't know you, I don't know your work. - They are at war. Complicit. "It's how the two of you get close." "That's true." C sober. Lying down to sleep together. "I think Ellie should be in the middle." Big smiling nod. Trudy hugging my back. She didn't deny Cheryl. We went to sleep. C touching my side a very little. In the morning there she is with a pillow over her face blessed Cheryl and Trudy pushing her back against mine and I shaking, finding ways, breathing on her fingers, and when I touch her she replies exquisitely. I love her elbow, I touch her back. She likes me, I can tell by her breath. I am joy and satisfied because she does. I have enough of something to laugh and be free with them, and say goodbye without pain, open, in the day - C is more in her centre again, has views, says "This is at the base of every day for me, attraction and repulsion." T says in one of her eruptions of glee "Sometimes you're in the way and sometimes you're the way."
Little by little, also by my pain and patience, C is finding the alternate in her, who knows me. It's soul, it's the best place. What they have for me is showing me my emptiness. The way long periods in my mind are the blanks of repression, the repression of curiosity and pain. I glimpse the crippling of my brain, the gaps. Trudy by being afraid in the dark can be the gentle invader she is, so light in her bones a genius of play. Not the favorite child.
What stops me still is, I can't believe it. The sense of how can anything so marvelous happen to me. The journal reassures, again and again. Not ideas about or from 'life' but ideas about transforming the self. The influences from outside mechanical life which manage to penetrate mechanical life are always indirect, encoded, except, he says, and Plato says, orally. Yeah. Take quite simply this one instruction: do not identify and see where it takes you. Real Conscience is this taste for quality of being.
It isn't that Luke changes my being; it is that I made my being separate from people except at moments with lovers. Being with him puts me into an anxiety, so I try to get away, it gets into all my time around him. Maybe that's what I have to do now, am doing, work to bring the essence unscared among people life. - This morning. I come home before dawn with the softfaced travelers on the bus, through the city - the lights holding up bridges with buses on, wet shine black brilliant - she left in bed soft little Trudy the way her breasts are a harder feel than her shoulders she was so little and near snuggling pushing we in and out of each other murmuring sighing talking love - in that time she let me slip my forefinger in and out pressing with my tongue, cries and whispers, no no no she says - at last I say and it could go on like that until it's so sharp it hurts and I let it hurt and that lets me through. This morning kissy goodbye and Luke waking as I clump up the steps and make toast turning off the light to see the blue outside light past the plants. Going to bed. Luke awake looking at books - Luke trying to wake me and missing me, Nellie coming up the steps, Cheryl on the phone, Luke refusing to go to school , Josie calling about the thermostat, Luke in a corner on the porch, Luke calling Daphne, Roy irritated, I call Daphne, I call Cheryl back. I tell Nellie the story of how I put on and took off my boots at different times and Trudy's game. "You and Ellie have to lie down and hold each other and tell each other a story. Then it's your turn to direct." Spin the bottle until everybody gets a chance to kiss everyone. Nellie soft and mussy up all night talking in bed with Barb, coffee at the table, reading in uniform, thinner and peaceful. Dreamy. Cher-yl, shapechanger triangle hawk head last night little beak great well-cut eyes, "Plaid shirt has to come back here," gets up puts on her coat. Trudy slapped her face, I looked for her and leaned to her. "My pain is that I need to hold you" said Trudy for us both. "Talking to you, the whole time, there's that pain." - Spicer
Whirls of discourse Are they ghosts, my friends, Japanese demons, I suspect them because they exist too precisely in the shape of my desire. Mentioned to Cheryl about the Intelligence (which is gone now) and she said "And that's only started." Overmind. The Forebrain. The concept of fear and the ordinary mind are one and the same thing Our sensory experience turns out to be a floating condensation on a swarm of the indefinable - [acid pages typewritten - seem to be a compilation of memory and journal written at the time]
josie, I say, are you really into something right now, would you be willing to come in and document what's happening? I am taking things out of all the cubbyholes sweeping them into trays dumping them in the corridor I bring in the orange carpet, bring in the beautiful plants and set them around the carpet under the window, reds strong live greens the carpet brilliant two small mirrors sending solid silver light writing, my hand moves along a distant long space: how large the letters how small the hand writing such a paralysis such a paralysis that was a message to me now but I can't understand it hand moving down such a long slope it is the writing which paralyses the being makes it slow and heavy, that's it the jaw trembles
if I look at the wall the beautiful movie is there but I don't stop to see it I have this moral work to do I was saying to myself, is this me, is this as stripped as I can be it began to be a quest for the essence of I am the jaw trembling still
this is where it starts, the terrible earnestness, haste the ugly things taken out, the beautiful things brought in I set the mirror up and sit on the carpet in front of it josie is clicking in the distance, there's my face among the blazing richness of the plants and glass surfaces all of them together all the right objects sorted in this way so they are alone together with me I love and marvel at them and then I understand that I must leave them because in their wonderful rightness they keep me in them, whenever I see them I am stopped and give myself to them they stop me from knowing who I am not because it is wrong for them to be and to be seen but because, in my house, hoarded, they make me see only the hoarded treasure and not the marvel dazzle change of the world and the neighbourhood
then when I'd had just a moment with the beautiful things, I looked at my face wracked and old really suffering and trembling I had washed the windows before sitting down, that was part of it, scrubbing and gasping with the urgency of cleaning them, mists of window cleaner and all kinds of cloths now I had taken off the costume and was there with hair disheveled in the white cotton shirt, very bare with the beautiful things, shaking, seeing the wall granulate into rainbows but not willing to stop for them no I love you my beautiful clean perfect live made things, and now goodbye carrying the beautiful things into the bedroom there they are all together all carried off, and then the spices cleared out of their pigeon holes the pictures torn off the walls, the writing pried off, thumbtacks pried out the picture of hegel the quotations I take out the sink then I drag out the parts of the counter, they're heavy and I struggle then the chairs and the bench, only the table left I struggle with it can't get it out the door, have to screw off the legs then only the room and the stove and refrigerator and the journal and the mirror I set the mirror up and look at myself in it, in front of the window the window is wide open and there is air pouring in through it here it is me in the mirror my action around me I will stay here and look at this no, goodbye to you too lay down the mirror flat on the floor so it reflects out the window bright the clouds brilliant with little variations in their grey moving with the wind goodbye mirror out into the corridor
this place is responsible to no other place there is a thing in it that feels I could change much more than I am changing, if I let go of the other place and let myself really find out what is this self confident mind that knows so much I love this mind where I am so much myself, and I want in this time to teach myself unmistakably, how I can come back and stay here: what is this here it is huge energy: for thoughts coming so fast it's assurance and it is so full of laughter and delight at what it sees and thinks it moves so fast it is so interested in what it sees it is so light in its body, it is willing to give itself to people and delight with them in the questions of what it is to be a sense of all the questions being false questions
with all this lovely time around me! I cried she knew I was flying saying goodbye I had her in me for a while as a certain expression on her face a vanilla brown translucent smiling playful trudy her fish so flip-flip eyes smiling the whole time I felt like I'd found trudy's essence as the joy of swimming with another fish then I went out in the black dress and the fur vest I went out like a native of another country , I walked along the skirts of the park, marveling at my lightness and how fresh it was, no one there but me, the houses vivid filling me up leaving no memory walk walk slowly along the long side of the park looking at the trees and the blossoms a smell stopped me I looked at a purple bush all its thick of thin branches reaching out around me tiny leaves and smaller buds then I saw a trail going in under the jack pine a children's territory I could go into and sat on the pine's root looking at crows who were briefly among the falling birch branches and the slightness of their new leaves flecks the crow jumps into the air and rows away I stay until I find that I'm gone, and then I go home and as I come to my alley there is daphne, I cross and smile she hasn't recognized me hours later she says I thought you were someone new in the neighbourhood I didn't recognize you until I saw your face and then I thought ellie must be in a strange mood
in the kitchen when we came in the two cameras were there sitting on the shelf looking down she says do they work? do you mean are they in working order? they're in working order but who knows what they're thinking
in the bedroom leaning one on either side of the door frame looking at the piles of things I remembered the good friday in greece she gave me time confusedly to recollect it I was bringing it right there and making it in front of us, the servant girls peasants taking me off and grooming each other, doing my hair laughing and having a good time and all the churches five or six or however many there are in a town all of them with their doors open and music coming out the doors because of the brothers singing, and everyone strolling through the late afternoon and into the evening and at every church going in to look at the epigrammata? looking at her to see if she knows, a full size image of christ, put into a coffin, with glass over it of course, and everyone coming to kiss it epigraphita? the kettle is boiling like a waterfall in the kitchen and we go back there, I take the little wooden box and say, I'll let this come back, it has the tea in I get two little white bowls and make the tea and she and I sit cross-legged on the floor I've taken off my robes I don't get honey or milk we have it plain tea she says in her house there are so many things and mostly she says generated by her unfinished projects letters to answer debts the sense of debts
but this is what she means by death, it is being without memory or responsibility, no debts no projects only consciousness
especially when she talked about reading comics and she said her favorite was sheba queen of the jungle and I saw her so vividly with the leopard skin on swinging through the trees laughing when she'd gone I went into the bath trying to remember what I saw about her but it was moving too fast and then there was my body as the water drained off it and went away altogether, satin satin, beautiful shapes breasts ribs belly hipbones thighs standing up with water pooled on the sternum reflecting around a puddle and it had got almost dark, this body was so extremely beautiful I dried it and took it naked to the bare room and sat there in it for a while
he's tired, I go to lie down with him, I tell him that in his room he can now have it as he wants it I'm full of joy imagining being able to see uniquely him in his room we talk about his ghost, I'm so wonderfully interested in him he says the ghost has eyes and a nose drawing them in the air and a long white dress no pants no mouth he wants to take down the door or paint it I say, if you decide you really don't want the door, we'll take it out and you can look to see if the ghost really is in there he says me and brad looked in there one time and we saw some goblins only maybe they weren't really goblins, maybe they were dressed up like goblins or maybe there were goblins dressed like dressed like dressed like babies he says he has to go to sleep I lie next to him with the light out after a while I think he is asleep and get up to go, my thoughts are back to the house
then stopped writing and went down to ask josie if she was alright and found her having made the picture that is the expression of my desire for a transparent house and sat and talked pouring out thoughts and perceptions looking at the picture and feeling it as the work she's doing, technical problems meaning of colours
I understand sin. It is whatever damages the being; but I still don't know what is sin, it's utterly pragmatic.
The thoughts that come in this half joint are interesting and feel taken out of the anxiety press but it's as if I haven't quite the energy for them. - Trudy and C: talk has not a lot to do with revealing private life, it is a game, volleyball, which generates social life. My faultline with them is the fear they'll decide I'm stupid. - He [Korzybski] proposes that our language, even by its structure, does violence to our nervous system, our being. attaining silence on the objective levels
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