| volume 6 of dames rocket: april-june 1977 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Late spring and early summer of 1977. I'm 32, Luke is 6 and in kindergarten in Strathcona School. In part 1 notes on space and light, planning my slide show for a Sunday afternoon salon. Visit Janeen in Yarrow, and then my grandparents in Clearbrook. In part 2 a desperate leap from stressed exclusion with C and T into a new love affair, which will go on for eight years and end badly. Jam Ismail is an English professor at SFU, a Pound scholar still working on her thesis. She is five years older than I am and raised wealthy in a Hong Kong Indo-Chinese Muslim community. Unlike my scruffy artist friends on welfare she owns a house in Kitsilano and lives in a third floor apartment with a view of Stanley Park. She is smart, oblivious, affects big city butch mannerisms, drives a cream-colored MG, and walks around with a cream-colored, unclipped standard poodle named Ezra. Parts 3-5 thinking, thinking about this relation.There's very little world in this volume, it's nearly all mentation, some of it stoned. reading notes: maps and geodesy, physics, Einstein biography, scrying, clairvoyance, Shah The sufis, shamanism, Menno Simons, optics, Al Razutis on holography, lucid dreaming, JoAnn Kaplan's movie Dracula, Bram Stokes Dracula, Dorothy Richardson Pilgrimage, Mathew Flinders, navigation, Castenada *, gnosticism, microscopy, mathematics. mentioned: Luke, Jamila Ismail, Peter and Luisa Konrad, Janeen vanden Berg, Trudy R, Cheryl S, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Tony Reif, Daphne Marlatt, Sandy Rodin, Josie Cook, Olivia Howell. 820A East Pender, Yarrow and Clearbrook in the Fraser Valley, Lenity Cafe. |
Seeing the exact point of boggle and stop Scholars of audacious spirit and fine instinct
It would be all nothing or all something Newton Opticks Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition? The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations. I entered Einstein's room. He was calmly philosophic, with one hand rocking the bassinet in which there was a child. In his mouth Einstein had a bad, a very bad, cigar, and in the other hand was an open book. The stove was smoking horribly. - The beauty of a circumstance, that at certain times in science and in music, there have been precise things to work on. Is there such a thing in movies now? That this insecure and contradictory foundation was sufficient to enable a man of Bohr's unique instinct and tact to discover the major laws of the spectral lines and of the electron shells of the atoms together with their significance for chemistry, appeared to me like a miracle - and appears to me as a miracle even today. This is the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought. After he came up with the General Theory he said "For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is." Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life. Gravity not a force but a characteristic of space itself. Space is not merely a background for events but possesses an autonomous structure. Gravity was a function of matter itself, its effects transmitted through continguous portions of spacetime. In fact he seems always to have worked around the idea of light, trying to see it. - For a long time I have suspected that the indirections of art are intuitions of 'physical' and experiential structures. Law of inertia not a property of empty space but an effect of the total system of stars. Light primary to religion not historically but in every individual. The candour of letters to colleagues. "Not often in life has a man given me such happiness by his mere presence as you have done." A shadow, in that it is part of the changed area that a thing is, is also the thing - the whole of the shadow - and how far down the shadow goes into the ground. The snail on the sidewalk come to eat a little orange peel in the low streetlight (down the street) had a big shadow on the texture of the concrete / those three parts had a clear outline and one nature. In the park I was thinking how this neighbourhood has only certain paths for me. I smoked and found another path along the baseball area to the freight sheds and further. Moonlight the shock of memory of moon from a farm yard - stepping out - wonderful - to pee. Outside weather / light existing / clouds running / that cold thrilling shock of full moon. Space, I thought. In childhood it's sometimes so real, jumping out of the car and straight into the trees, up the hill. What I have to do in my life is something so I'll travel, I'll use my hard brain, feel forms so I'll connect things in all direction. It has to feel like very real work with actual particular challenges. - The slide show Obey the instructions of each slide Every slide has a space around it Where exactly does it put me A slide is an orienter. You're standing here, facing this way Aim the projector from the eye like a camera Space is my oldest love Revolve the thoughts to make them more real as paths, the delicate antlers. The way snow runs in front of a drift. Luke and I a winter in La Glace. The subtlety. Of Trudy. Laughing. When Roy would hit me so hard on the side of the head I couldn't believe someone would want to damage my brain, but he did. - Crisis about indeterminacy in the subatomic world. I don't know why he should mind if it's so. Art actually like physics in following attractions toward structures and the deep happiness of that. Einstein 'saw' into physics directly refusing to bow but taking the music score, then bending it forward so it was Schubert who acknowledged the applause. He had no sense of direction. - Bergson once said of him that he had made discoveries at a greater distance from the ordinary organs of human knowledge than any other man in history. When a man after long years of searching chances upon a thought which discloses something of the beauty of this mysterious universe he should not therefore be personally be celebrated. He is already sufficiently repaid by his experience of seeking and finding. I am at last beginning to understand that nature's formation of me is more interesting than what I have thought was my own; although of course that thought was also nature's, and my pleasure in being free of it is nature's too. What I want to know in everything ultimately seems to be the structure, it could be math but more likely a diagram with few lines - in my early life I knew no one was like me, Janeen and I both, together, trying to make ourselves citizens in another world. Josie made me imagine how crazy I am by other folks' standards, Einstein book was comforting. Now I wonder if I was always crazy - the kitchen in my house has become an empty room - stove and refrigerator, and my lightshow apparatus! It makes me laugh when I think of Daphne's sane house and other people's kitchens. Where I could go if someone would look after me! Several times a week, not every week, someone tells me I'm beautiful. Stoned, I can look at these pictures and feel possibility of understanding them. I remember the free life, beautiful Luke, but it isn't long until he goes and then I can be myself without medicine. Thinking about music, the finest - music is not for instruction but for joy, what madness doubts it - must be when the composer is most faithful to ecstasy in the most structurally developed way (ie intelligent) - "He had musically and technically such beautiful ideas." What they call beauty - it looks like that to me too - is just a visible call for friends of my own mind, I haven't understood that I deserve to know those who are beautiful by simply having seen their beauty.
Marriages can only happen between two realized people. The other kind that's real is two innocent souls becoming versions of one soul. Everything else has to be pain. Gradually they learned the pleasure of fewer and fewer words. They made no mistakes, they always knew where to find each other. Thus marriage revealed them to themselves and the world had no more lacks for them. Se faire/constituer une personnalité entierement de ce qu'on aime Hallucinogens, as telescopes. Some people do not need them. Galileo turned his telescope on the stars. That is: 1609. Just provide the ships, or suitable sails for the air of the heavens, and there surely will be men without fear of the horrible void. Let us therefore devise an astronomy for the courageous travelers as if they were already at the door, I, that of the moon, you Galileo, that of Jupiter. Kepler to Galileo The corona of the sun - these marvelous tales - extremely thin gas around the sun, that reaches sometimes beyond the earth's orbit. We then move in the veils of the corona's outermost margins. Solar plasma. Tales of explorers and visionaries that I'm seeking out simply to tell me not to be afraid. To ride my joy as close as I can. And that be the life. The ethereal firm ament firm because all those parts are held together as close as atoms. - Thunder is electronic music. - Grief and loneliness, fatigue and desolation. When she came in I wanted to smash her head, so trim and tidy oh break her head for how it refuses me her body, and all I need of it is to hold it and she refuses that, to make me pain and that's all. What's taken me so far into humiliation, the power of the body, is all, I don't want her oblivion arrogance greed stiffness. She's never once known how to touch me. The blind wise utter need to have her body close. It went so deep and made me so infantile and so close to my hungers and these are such lonely times. One demon lover deserving another. Does it have to be that? Accepting the violence the sibling rivalry catastrophe. - Make something beautiful, the glass box and she comes and lies with me in it, strong sound Artemis lies in the glass box, she likes me strokes my arm looks in my eyes we go down into some warm bright water, we can hear its sighs. - Sunday [my show with Josie at Rhoda's salon in Kits]. The worse of it the zombies. All the phantoms unsettled everyone of them a secret soul, all impersonating people and all feeling ashamed to do it, and I was desperate, except that Jam mentioned the Neoplatonists and out of that I made up that she'd said I was one, so I could feel I'd been seen, and other people said things and I took it as a pain and Tony got friendly, but so blandly, and Paul said it was the most invigorating thing that had happened to him in a long time, in a lying voice; and Rhoda said it was brave and I looked hard at her to see if she knew what she meant; and Tony saw. And Jam said she saw my face: she saw something for sure. And Daphne laughed when she saw the electric kettle; and Josie had a good presence but was somehow evasive and collusive with me along with the kindness; and Janeen was oblivious and absent, stunned and lovely saying everything is beautiful. And my two skinny friends that I love so much and miss so much and am in so much grief about my separation from, and no one is them or satisfies me, no one is real for me as they are, and I can't get close to them anymore it seems and my life is a pain to me on account of that. Zoe gave me flowers. Because I can't imagine who'd recognize me, and it has to be that. I am ashamed for them, I am ashamed to be in that with them. The world is only real when I am with this one. To shine my light. It takes so much fight, to cut through. Jam said They're all about what light does. I am all about what my light does and doesn't. How stupid I am. - The dreams I had. Trying to sell myself, first to a man, then a woman. I wouldn't have him because he was too sick and I wouldn't have her because she fancied cripples. She is easy in her skin in a way they're not [Daphne], I didn't know to expect it. I guess I know she thinks of it as a trip to the bank. Both versions were true, the sick man with bad breath, and the fear of the anemic cripple-lover. With Roy the herald dream was pure good. o scarlet pimpernel o scarlet scarlet my lover the poppy jump out of ambush there is only the beautiful present these lives jumping up inside minutes this being to ride lynx weasel snake (too) to hold the face of kiss kiss more and more high wind I'm calling What do you keep in the bank? Your disguises. Maybe not. Maybe that's where you keep the schoolgirl laughing handovermouth girl light into wellwater girl She likes response. Josie likes response. What is so beautiful about refusal. The white house with lace on the washline. The dyke; that's me, takin' off my jacket on the freeway to use my nipples to stop a schoolteacher - The dyke in Yarrow, willow flowers mud gravel stones water flat boiling such shades of brown and blue, thinking about the movie work and how to see that place, all the invisible parts ie just that willow poplar fireweed and all the common things mud with tracks in it. The smell. What is it like to be there, the being there. And Janeen. The secret inside of Janeen is a hunger to be worshipped as a goddess of beauty. "My life is quickly sailing away from what I liked best. In Los Angeles it was really thrilling, the men would stare right through you." When she was a child five men surrounded and adored , the brothers of the man who married late, an ugly woman, and out of her made exquisite Janeen. She is hidden and strikes out suddenly. She looks just the same, she is just the same. In her art a perfect narcissism. But she remembers the free girl Norma Bakstaad whose parents moved so she wouldn't have to walk a long way to the bus - they had black pebbles and white pebbles, they were horses and when they galloped those pebbles, Janeen said, she was on a horse on the edge of a canyon in Wyoming. Norma half an Indian and in trouble with the school, came home humiliated by her teacher, stuffed a pillow under her high school sweater and imitated Mrs Maple. "Oh look at Norma, she can really do that." And Janeen, sick, in the little house on our land, Mrs Bakstead gave her True Story magazines and movie magazines, "Here's another one for you." The man who pulled up said "I'm going to Clearbrook." He had something that gave me such a merriment, "That's a good idea" I said, and laughed and got in and said "I'll go see my grandma" and he drove me - wanted to - right into the driveway, and Oma came around the corner (is it going possibly - to be - ?) and laughed too and hugged me a lot and started putting pots on the stove. (I think I could work with her, she has a good hard - ) (But so manly, is she oblivious?) We sat at the table and laughed round open laughing he as much as she; I flirted with her, they told stories of Margaret Janzen working for the Postman boys. She walked home one summer evening, she wanted to talk to them about something, Peter and Luise were there at the time, and she couldn't speak, so she walked home and it began to rain and she caught Nahrenenzindung, brain fever I think, and went to the hospital shrieking and screaming with the pain. The boys took her and telephoned to Larsen's store, and Peter Konrad on his way home, he'd been there at the time, met the Janzen father and told him, "Go to ---- and get him to take you in his auto, she's very sick, be sure to take your wife, because she's very sick." He emphasized, "I told him, be sure to take your wife. Das ist die Mama." So the wife went and sat with the girl and she found her way in the end. "Sie hatte den Weg ein bischen gelassen aber sie ist zurecht Heim gegangen." "Ja" says Opa, "sie hat' Friede gefunden." And from there to the story of Helen and how no one was with her and she prayed in delirium until she died. We had tears in our eyes and yet at the next moment Oma was telling a funny story and stroking my hand. And Oma's pleasure in Anne's writing. And how the children had a hard time because they lernten so gut, and I said we'd had a hard time too, and she said "Ja, ich weis das." Sitting at the table just the three. They took me to the parking lot where the bus stops and I leaned over the back seat and kissed her on the mouth and him on the cheek and her palm - sudden coquette - on the back of the seat and got out and waved very much and they went to church and I waited with my rose for the bus. Grandma looked in here and I caught her and she said "Ich konnte nichts verstehen." She said it enough times so I suspected she'd understood something. Her manner is like a petted child with me, confident that she's loved. -
- George Postman on a horse, burnt trees behind. A little house covered with vines, such a lot of bare space around it. There was a wedding picture, some grey tone quite faded, an awkward man with a cigarette in his hand, a broadjawed woman looking unhappy, in the upper corner like a prophecy a corner of a window with a child's face in it very dim. Janeen had never seen it. The woman died of complications. She was George Postman's sister. When George and Pauline married they took the surviving little boy with them on the honeymoon. On a streak of whitewash in the shed George in his European handwriting wrote "We left here [date] When we'll be back who knows?" It was a custom among the brothers. To get to that country I have to go past the Mennonites who held out separate. As they my beauties do. This world is not my home I'm only passing through. Pauline's bitterness at cooking and washing for the big family of brothers who loved each other foremost. Uncle Henk, Uncle Albert after a while married and moved. The photograph of Janeen hands in the suds, the men looking on, Pauline barbering Henk Bennink. "I asked Marlys to take it because I wanted to be in a picture with him." She has a beautiful look on her face. Janeen's style has stuck on the time in her early marriage. You haven't changed at all her friends say. But she has a fine unexpected forthright humor that her looks say nothing of. Her face has got hollow in the jaws while her body is filled out back to its original shape, heavy in the haunch. - Finding one's way. Here I am inside me, traveling. Somehow reluctant to take myself on and yet knowing it's the only way to have actually been here. And sick in my belly with fear and pain.
- [Jam and I get together]
The sight of myself, stoned, comforts me as it didn't just earlier. O the breakage that it makes in the sense of being somebody. It wasn't happiness it was oblivion consent and the oblivion around the fear of that consent. Who are you and your sleepless nights I didn't want to hear about. Compassion for those who imagine me. She thought - why are you telling me this - does it mean you're serious. This time all the wrong times being afraid to wait. I just wanted you to know the feel of this big hand. A confusion. Who are you. What if it could settle into place as in tales. The way to make it is only to remember to stay in it. "That I didn't notice what was there." What was it yesterday that was really happening. I was thinking who's this person what am I feeling what shall I do in this time flying into the conversation stopping myself with jokes drinking wine desperately and unconsciously. Watching you."I'm drinking fast" to see whether you are willing to sentimentalize yourself or whether you are able not to or whether it's important to you not to. What I always scrutinize people for is the sense of whether they're lying. What I am disliking myself for is my sense of how plowing ahead in my semioblivious unstoned encounters I do lie. And those lies are my stupidity which is certainly a mode. But why does it come and what takes it off. Bewilderment is its sign. This is one of the minds that feels it is able not to lie. If it can get the strength to say anything. Or keep up. I kissed her and held her and touched her back out of curiosity to see what the quality of it was. Shopping. Not really assenting. I'm teaching myself not to say we. What's frightening about knowing it's a dream. - What being in love is, is taking someone into the imagination. It's a political act, it confers power. It is real work suddenly taken on: I'll be present to this person. But not to romanticize it ,what I'm trying to tell myself, it's not a marvel that gives existence to the life, it is not a fictional moment. The damage of stories! Being in love is also travel, the exotic. Chinese dictionary. It is also a sense of work. Everything depending on / a chance for / lucidity. To build yourself in another. She wanted to know more than she wanted to show. Showing off is when you're bored and closed. "You ask questions," says Trudy, "that's good." The blindness or fatigue is losing the sense of interest in how things work and are. The best of a stone is curiosity. - The next door garden. Pea flowers and four white moths. - Always in meetings, art, I'm trying to judge the quality of the consciousness in what I meet. Always watch the language. She's interested in consciousness. The anxiety is secondary. Daphne's writing when she reads it is hesitant. I've just seen her - she thinks of herself as hesitant and that's the weakness in her face. Under that the energy and vitality of her. She's masked is all. It means something the way the jaw pulls in. I'd like to spring her jaw. - I'll let the fantasy make itself. In that tower the Chinese Arab girl and a version of myself go into another time in another culture Arab Chinese and she steps out of the banker she is in the world when she gets home. She's her own harem girl sits up laughing in the sheets her Fay Dunaway mouth. The idyllic freedom of friends at all times of flowing day to meet in her house or mine! Or elsewhere. When I wrote something she wouldn't say that's very good, she would say how it was for her. The confusions of these meetings are that both are partly in hiding. Gently. We're not giraffes. But it seems so close to being translucent. - Wanting to make/see lace of the universe. That's music. There was a confusion trying to find her level. What about my own. The level has something to do with loneliness accepted. There's the long old scare, that's the root but what's its - that I'll love somebody who is ahead and won't see me. - The structure of my meetings. The difference from Genaro and his heroism is when I meet the phantoms I peer and peer at them to try to see who they are. The psychic message book says you feel into yourself and find them there. - "You were just gamely carrying on" "I came with a pain" "And I ignored it" "I ignored it too"
"Because we're going to we feel like we already have" Seeing is a kind of feeling: feeling how a body is flowing inside. - "Only fear is lost, which the person mistakenly thinks is himself." "Fantasy is a quality of energy comparable to helplessness." "It was not remotely connected with hatred or with sex. It was fantasy energy." Won't release until the person realizes its quality. - She dreamed of a marriage her mother didn't disapprove. Last night of forests and I of a city, record productions, underground parking, elevators. - [Luke]
When I find myself acting like a woman with a man, explaining, interpreting his feelings I should be able to tell something. That there's a diversion going on. It's a way to be patronizing because of not taking the direct power of the anger at that moment. That helplessness is a false feeling, it is to do with rejecting women's lowliness. What is it about the way my writing fragments these days, the long sentences used to ride on top of thoughts it organized very fast. This mind doesn't trust itself to make any but simple connections one at a time. Actually it is probably more accurate the more it trusts itself to speed. - As Newton found his work frequently interrupted and knew that he could not complete his experiments, he wrote the third book as a series of 30 numbered questions. I shall conclude here with proposing only some queries, in order that a further search be made by others. - - C: a warm iron on the moon. - The idea of getting to the frontiers of the form as fast and accurately as possible. To set up a question without parti pris. Writing this stuff is like making sure I've really done the thoughts I had. - With Josie, the clairvoyance I get. Her eyes are so clear. Everything is confessed. "I knew you were seeing me. I felt awful, the only thing I could have done was move." I was scared of her piece.
If I take on the clairvoyance of these meetings I'm also going to have to take on a clairvoyance of evil,
- Brad's birthday, the tough cake, Luke not speaking, Tim expanding joking, Siobhan silent or ironic, Josie and I left with the wine laughing. When I told Trudy about our visions of malevolence she said "That's just your fear of being new." "What did I teach you?" "To know what I know." Then we flew. Every word in a telephone conversation telling. -
At first all that happens is that the surface of the mirror gradually moves out of focus - 'the tickling of the ant' - tight band around forehead. The curious trick of holding the mind poised and yet relaxed. Two kinds of visions, the literal and the symbolic. "Symbolic seems to be associated with a positive questioning attitude of your mind." "In some cases it may be due to the action of other minds which are passing a message through your inner self into your waking self in this way." An image without emotion or an image with a knowledge of its meaning "almost invariably correct." That crow in the park, its beautiful feathers, but its nature as I looked at it came clearer, it was not harmless, but like a small mean mood. It was hostile, an angry tame animal, some kind of frustrated being like a Sunnyside child. - We don't really know anything, who's in this other, what we're doing saying 'together.' Whether to have faith. The rest is moment by moment do I like it here? It's I want to compare notes, I want it to be in the objective. All the speculation comes to this, that we may go into fear and have to stay there, matched, or break. Or else, if we go straight to a work we can please and teach each other in - - Faust? How does he lose his soul? I keep forgetting the primacy of Christian childhood. It was that story more than the structure of mother and father, even? That you have a soul, that by an act of decision you can win or lose it, the central anxiety planted in the thoughts about being, as inner an anxiety as can be. My central anxiety is that I'll meet someone whose mind can hold me in such a way that they can see where I stop and past it, and I won't be able to know what they know, and they won't teach me because they'll see that I am too stupid and then all my life I'll have to know there are places I can't go. I was thinking 'in some way I don't realize' what is happening, that I went through the panic/silence/awe with Cheryl and Trudy and that now I can't give it that, but only struggle to believe that I won't be seen through only into. Everything I do these days is making support for this effort to make myself someone who is not left behind. All day I ask myself, do you have a good being, good enough? Comfort is knowing you have the best in the room.
If you know more than I do you'll leave me and not teach me what you know. I have to have something to teach so you'll stay and teach me because I want to be equal, what I want most is to be equal known confident colleague so there'll be two in the world. Already I miss you and can't call you to come, because I've recognized the fear. I don't want you to be in love because that means you're not taking it on in the same way. It is more important to know. -
You don't decide you're hip it's just a fact of life. I sweeten my voice for her. What is that. Fear. -
- Her eyes are strange, opaque and without light. They stop me. Josie in the park when we were so happy could see me without her glasses. - They were indeed truehearted and greathearted, bearing themselves to one another and to their various fortunes with judgment and humbleness. a sudden surprising recognition of love so rare and high the heart seems to sprout wings
Faithfulness in association with others is an essential of this task. By identification with the processes of continuous creation, are themselves fashioners of other complete men. was based upon love, operated through a dynamic of love, had its manifestation through ordinary human life, poetry and work. - What I was thinking was - she's wrong about something but it's not what she thinks it is, so what is it. The smoke was to try to get inside and see what I saw. "It was human. When it's human you can't just close the lab door." "But I woke instantly, couldn't you see that?" Wake to you standing like Gabriel with a scratch foot dog. What a clear waking for me. But what are you full of. Dismay and silence. You can't tell me what's at stake. At 1 you woke up and went to write and couldn't recall what I'd said. "Had a little smoke." At 3:15 asked me to call and I didn't. Then came. "I was wrong." But here you are and everything I'm saying is nowhere to you. But there are the mountains getting light. It's just after 5. You say goodbye. I tell you to stay. You're gone and Ezra doesn't think you're going until you start down the steps. The sound of a windmill in the city making open grass around itself. When you're wrong you have to see what's there, is all. I'm understanding that you wait and listen for knowledge and then you act to make the knowledge visible and put it into memory. And there are leadings. Obedience. Luke putting a chain on his little dog. 'Veiling,' conditioning. a science, an art, a knowledge, a Way, a tribe learning how to swim, in the words of our fable When I said you had to clean up your language I only meant I want you to come out. The dead language is always a cover.
"Something has closed!" I'm shouting with frustration. Technology of friendship:
Metaphor a way of being allowed to say what you see rather than 'know.' Obedience - everything that happens has to be gone through. Everything that comes has to be taken all the way in. With that writing I was afraid they'd see more. Therefore I knew it wasn't good. Telling is knowing. When I described a dream to you I saw it better than I ever had. - "I can hear you thinking. The rhythm although not the content." - Luke's brilliant way of acting out a story rather than telling it. With Luke the boredom and brilliance. I said "Why don't you fuck off you're just wanting me to pity you." From upstairs he shouted, hurt, "And I don't want to fuck you either." - The last salon was the showdown, would the forces of them or the forces of me. They bled me before it, as if deliberately. It was using acid to see my work that made it possible to break out. - Three of us looking at Luke's fine drawings. Luke singing and Ezra the good dog wagging all its body. Gently "I want to continue to be attentive to you." "And I'll try not to be sentimental and not to hold onto things." That little creature with its naked underside, curling up so only two ends were touching the log, letting itself down, lifting its skirts and dancing. Mottled slug. This is the fire of love which purifies, which is different whenever it occurs, which sears the marrow and makes incandescent the kernel. The ore separates from the matrix, and the Perfected Man emerges, altered in such a way that every aspect of his life is ennobled. He is not changed in the sense of being different, but he is completed, and this makes him considered powerful of men. Every fiber has been purified, raised to a higher state, vibrates to a higher tone, gives out a more direct more penetrating note, attracts the affinity in man and woman, is loved more and hated more, partakes of a destiny, a portion, infinitely assured and recognized, indifferent to the things which affected him while he pursued the mere shadow of which this is the substance, however sublime that former experience may have been. The wall is the host of the light. The net which is your mind, says Rumi, is delicate. Shut your mouth against food, that you gain the food of the mouth. After a period of abstinence from wine or bread, the detachment from attachment, this force which is a form of Opening comes about. The need to spin, to work on one's materials. If I want the work of obedience and directness I have to be very exact with it and also I have to remember that people will be furious/contemptuous and more. The sincere are too slow to both reply according to calculation and know for themselves separately. Falling in love a lot means that the instinct is wrong or more likely that the person has a trauma that forces them to abandon what they saw. The structure I don't understand is that I fear to find someone is more intelligent than I am (that's the basic structure) and I long to find someone as intelligent as I am. Listen, do you know what happens. Am I talking to you. I am between times, fallen, I know a sense of right being that I don't usually have. When I find myself out of it I grieve until I have it back. The beloved. I met you in that place I like, the transparency. And then I met you outside it. Being lovers is a work, a personal work. I am only starting to become someone who can be with. Always a careful context. Yes. Protected. To see the released person is blinding and terrifying unless you're there too, ie equality. That terror drives you to stop. Work shows level. I challenged you. Do you want to do that or not. If not say so. You said you would like to but you didn't think you could. You don't know if that's fear. I was crazy with cold and grief because you said no. If I take it on - if I take it on - I can't lose because I am in the mode that doesn't lose me - what I take on is the knowledge that we saw each other and showed each other and that you were frightened and I was frightened. Did you form an opinion in those times that I was less than you or was it a fullness - both happened. But when I see you less than me I know you are at another place. There are different minds and each of them will have a different version. Listening in memory to hear the quality of the voice.
"I assume that when you're hidden from me you're also hidden from yourself." "Just a minute, you can't assume that." Concentration and detachment in other fields of thought and essence. Their students of science were quite commonly poets and musicians.
All of them have to do with willingness not to preconceive, and attentiveness
- By the end of Dracula they're there. The vision of evil visited at night, at a table. There were three, who turned to look at me and I closed out their memory. On account of these days. If I try to take all experience seriously there's this fear and interest in power. The distress of not knowing whether the interest in power is the thing that loses the soul. Long anguish of being unborn and unseen. The bewilderment of being born and wondering what for It touches the fear of being annihilated by the power of whoever we love. The stranger whose erotic touch outside social contracts breaks our hearts with desire to have that power always. The power given seen and desired. A strange mirroring. - another seated on a wall and intently making lace Was dreaming Jam, a freedom in her, one extension of a gull's wing, that was a thought dancing. Woke, it seemed on the other side of a border, to someplace I had seen, falling asleep, the clock radio had piano notes making flight-shapes, a gentle Beethoven thinking in me until it was time to struggle up. I sleep easily beside you, your body doesn't interfere, it's a quiet body, was a tall thin girl and is a small slight sleek you. When you sit up there's a flat plane down your back, the hair curves in blades around your neck. On the pillow you have the face of the child with the mother, the sweet mouth, little no-nose. The eyes still stop me. - J is boring me, she's not showing me anything, I suppose what she is is underground, and we're both despairing in the social, nicely communicating our despair.
What was that time when I came on acid and she seemed to be ahead of me, I was in a fright that she'd decide I was too stupid, it seemed already decided. My speed speeded her and she was magnificent there. It. Thinking. For that pleasure you are hidden from yourself. We flounder in stupidity, I have to stay real, testing the concepts on her, sugaring the voice, what is it in this exercise that exhausts me. Her bourgeoise. Our connected being is in shock. - Talking into the space ahead, not to you. Is it you who went or me. It's not what I thought, the speaking out what's there. Doing that just means the false self takes up more space. At the same time stroking your arm and remembering it, because that is you. Oh the touching is as good as Oh it's one thing after another there. This? Yes this. This. Not the past, that's the wrong way. I won't find you in your history, you are not a history. Writing makes a slow self. - It gets stopped in the movement by little hitches, something is evaded misunderstood blanked. - A sweet evening. Swallow dived. Mouskouri making Greece of the rose light on the far town, the wooded hill. The sky is such a vivid paleness. It is summer night. Luke is somewhere near cutting paper, little scratchings. I woke happy. The sky even more intense. A flock twinkling. Our houses across town, near parks. T The face you had on then frowning not frowning thinking about some task. On the phone to Joyce you're intimate but put your tight pants on they're a little damp inside but not like mine. When you're on the pillow you have a smile that takes in all your face. The dressed smile is never that. The problem residing in these days is to find a way to see act and describe according to the understanding that outside and inside are one thing. Experience. That is, to bring it all inside make it meet halfway. The inside is not private, you see how we interpenetrate still cry amazement when we find it so, but learn to act on it, knowing about you from inside me. I know you from how I am with you. It has never been thus. I have had descriptions. I see you and have no description. Wanting to live according to the seamless knowledge of inner/outer, tides, music, the lovely present which at last becomes eternal. Nothing more interesting than obedience. Traveling in obedience. Traveling ready to leave you at any moment and wanting you to travel in the same way. "A discourse on kissing." "Oh, because it is very exact. And it's heads." Being caught in a lie, by the slip. Another pleasure. The uncontrolled. Ah that's an inside-outside thing, accepting as inside the outsideness of the slip, ie outside intention, a consented more accurate intention. Is this a night to be awake. Grass moonlit heads. A startle ah I can kiss this person exactly and willfully to move a motion from me into her. Another startle you're there grasping as fast as it comes. There's time for silence. Her warmwet gush suddenly. We separate as if by fatigue.
Dorothy Richardson's world of interest. Moment by moment mental sensory energy to watch what it is to be in this moment. Luke on the sidewalk with Ezra sitting holding the leash wailing. When I asked why, jabbing his finger toward the house. The door was locked. Oh C, telephoning and feeling a gasp and hanging up and calling again and then shining me such a friend's love. Oh. I would like to see them. Of the poems. And giving me warmth in the pit. With all her surface being sound asleep, her essential self looking forth upon its own. She had parted company with that self with whom she had gone about ever since leaving home, and joined company with the self she had known long ago. - Not to describe it but to see it: how your face is when you're that child. To exist with it I have to speak and that's what's wrong. On the floor looking at your Marco Polo about the girls with hard bodies who dance to encourage the god and goddess to have what he calls intercourse. They put their legs higher than their necks. She was there on my neck and I was eaten up with eating. Ah the spine crying out for the concentration of kiss and bite closer and farther. The nipples making a space between, then they're nails. Dorothy: The light lace curtains lifted towards her as she opened her door. Subsiding as the door closed, lying passive on either side of the framed landscape towards which she hastened. - The bible reading in his monotone quite priestly without kindliness and then he would talk to god in formal phrases saying nothing of himself. Functionary. - It is called love, and love comes into it sometimes but in fact it is not love it is a sort of moral work. I'm trying to see it so that I don't fall into emptiness inside the shock of it. - I can't find her in talk. Kissing doesn't find itself. What I tell she doesn't hear or feel. Meeting is such precise work among us specialized people. This morning her sheer arrival filled me with love. Her clothes headband glasses and the way she sat on the bed and took them off. I wanted to know her forever but as soon as we began to talk I no longer knew her and the intent in my body died. And I began to lie.
I haven't kept up there's a thing in her I have to open because she can't find it, a shock; it isn't what she thought. She doesn't thrill and evade me like Cheryl or find her way into me like Trudy, and what she has is that we are two unprepared and maybe willing similar earnest confused people looking for paradise and a mate and looking at each other speculating whether - And what can be made of that, which we mistrust Under this is my doubt of myself. Accepting the terror and pain of my separation from 'the world' which by the metaphysics I haven't really worked out is myself.
I seem to want to go to the furthest out imagination of outside and the furthest in imagination of inside. But what a strange epistemology grows in these days. Days? I have days.
- - computer graphics visualizing functions in three dimensions formulate problems in a new language. "Not just programming language," he says, "but conceptual language where the student is thinking in terms of procedures and sub-procedures and loops and branches and all of these complex ideas that are very powerful." idea of a system evolving, step-by-step, from an initial condition through a series of neighbouring states. "You can actually watch the progress of the algorithm trying to find the top of the surface. For instance, if the test function is a curved valley, you can watch certain methods get hung up and just not move. And you can watch other methods come in very quickly, or rapidly diverge if they're not very stable." A mathematician's mathematician may be at work without chalk or pencil while walking, eating or talking seeks analogies between analogies. Such a person lives by this inner search and by the aid and the appraisal of a small set of peers. - When I'm here working on my wall putting concepts next to each other accidentally and deliberately isolating questions answering them or not being able to, seeing a place to exist which is wholly mine and which is like no idea I have had of myself. The place I remember when I'm not in it, crave and call. It feels like bursting and I'm afraid. Stop myself. Eat. - Oh presence, Jami, silence, eyes, headband, gaze, chuting down darkness following the red lights meeting white lights on the left it's quiet, it's quiet sings us full, gear catches, motion's good. Slip of a boy/girl. Light on your feet. Sometimes a dazzle. Calling us out so gradually. The joy just underneath. Cautious on its account. Is it true? She drew an arrow. The body was trained for nothing. Hair sweeping my back its each tip's tingle. Sleek. It's a dry slippery dry warm over the skull and in there the trained mind. She was obedient and hid out, cached the soul, used a little of it. Made her direct. She grew an inch. The little hands broadened, a little who. Who. Search into the fictional pasts for a real one. The other, the rest, oh. "In my core I'm lonely, I'm waiting for you to find me." - They taught that the self isn't consciousness, and the freedom and confusion of that. Did they also teach the freedom. What would that be. The pleasure of not defending consciousness necessarily. Can I trust what I think at this moment. More likely what I do. Confusion because what I feel is the best indication of what you're doing, which is not what either of us think we're doing. The method is because we want a bigger space for being in. The uncertainty forces alertness which is like the birth of the self into consciousness. In fact the sensation of alertness sudden pounces acknowledged is the greatest pleasure. Model is lost knowledge. We can come to it because something in us recognizes and verifies. The spider webs made by spider on caffeine, other drugs. LSD was more perfect than straight but not much. Caffeine very erratic and crooked. - "I dream I am in a new world with you, and you dream I am trying to cure an old wound." "No, that isn't how it is, the way it is ..." - I'm looking somewhere else - "is that I dream that I am in a new world with you, and I fear that I am trying to cure an old wound." And she cried, that was late in the night on the floor. "I stopped being your friend about an hour ago." The tests. When we meet we set tests where are you and do I want to be there. Woke from a dream and realized that in the dream I had been myself as I had not been it, uneasy with you. - The dream where you're a scout. You see: it's only notes to record the satisfaction of talking to you from this floor and the happy jazz, and moving from my sad raft your cold belly to the place where you're a quiet-footed scout and I am building tables with Cheryl, and the story of spring and jumping slowly. How patiently you ask questions. Last night unstoned we slowly climbed into the absorption of flying. When we left we had already come partly down exactly. We do that. Oh we do that. Oh that's what it's about: it's better than that. And so. During that first year in college I felt myself losing the right soul, I remember dismay walking in Kingston thinking it was more and more rare to emerge out of the dullness. Spirituality is precisely a conscience about consciousness. Lessing. As if she were with someone although her stories say she isn't. Intimacy. She is intimate somewhere. It's possible only her writing? I guess that's it, the art form is as if the intimate friend that keeps you tuned, satisfied so you don't have to climb down on account of wrong attempts. It is to do with whose mind becomes the marriage, she lost herself in you, if either you or I have lost each other in the other how would we know at this stage. - Every work: is this a mind I want to be in. - "I'd like to be a slob with you." You're saying you feel a pressure as Nellie did: I can't stay there. Is that what's happening? Only at that moment when it was your turn to be afraid you couldn't sustain it. Hey have faith. - Absent. I was in shock again, from the overnight? We have to deal with the dreams that are in us when we wake. What happened to her this morning, we didn't get into anything, I was asking for what she knew of the natural laws of fairies, Demeter, her mother's intelligence. She didn't want to go into any of these. But the fishermen saving to go to university, jumping from the wardrobe to bed. Touching me she sometimes found it and sometimes not, if she'd done the same thing for a longer time I would have flown away, as it was she hit the little stones of intense pleasure. She needs to bring me and to have me bring her, hurry up. What does it mean to her. This morning and last night it was a conventional affair, what changes it is the shared curiosity more than bond. - Before we started to touch there was a complete release for me, I was soft and instant, in that my flesh could sigh well. But you wanted me to come. No by then you weren't quite there. This was a meeting in which we generated our homework. Is it as good for you anywhere else? Well then. - Not wanting to make love when it's possible is always a sign of absence/occlusion. - Look at you, because I do, at the refrigerator legs apart, one holding the door open, light strong on that side of the body, she has her elbows raised holding the glass and pouring from the big tin, a naked moment that is repeated very exactly from night to night hair thick falling as if heavy.
Kisses are gift and information about attention. - Don't you know it's more important for me to be rightly alone than falsely married, and don't I know that about you? You're testing it, me too. - Looking in the mirror saw a face I didn't want, concentrated on seeing the face that wrote Antlers with me. - Face this morning, the way face's skin turns into lips and they with all their colors, the eyes that have a deep slick wetness on them. The things we know. We keep explaining them to each other, as if ducking under water to speak. The strange sense we have obscurely and secretly, of being in another life, that's mine from this winter but she seems both to understand it and not to - Talked at that lovely dusk on Kits Beach about the parents having thoughts forbidden to them. We'd gladly think any thought if we could only find it Get tired. Bewildered among the senses of words a word has too many meanings to trust writing. How tired is got. Tiredness is. I am tiredness. We tire, it is tired around me - It means not having thoughts. I imagine a time when writing was fast light nuanced the analysis I do now written into branched sentences. Sitting down in sentences as chairs, Josie's style, Diana's, what is an exercise to make it run. How it was all around, went away, the music came in, in the morning there was such subtle color of light on the white wall and ceiling. I get a sense of disorder when I try to record these times, no longer have literary experience - "Nothing for show. Just inner, inner, inner, inner." "We want to do justice to the music." Old musicians talking thrilled, in love, about Mahler. "All his life he was sticking to his inner flows, his affinitives." - Bruce [Davis] and analysis of Korean music, I couldn't concentrate on his explanations because I was on the trails of my own ideas, it was a sensation of watching myself prefer my own company. Watching to see whether he knows what he means, judging something like the complexity of his person, not always knowing if he's faster or slower. That is to say wanting not to go into his. The pliability that can, has to, analyze after. Imagine not deriding this culture but working with it. Imagine not hating it but just seeing. That apartment building. Taking the same attitude to waking as we have learned to do with dreaming. Confidence that it has structure, and is visible/comprehensible but has to be found. - - Zoe's story, how we went into it to tell each other the heart of our love for each other had been refound, by the help and hindrance of two people and the indifferent fisher youth. She thought to rebury it just as I was thinking it. How I told it to Jam and how closely she listened. And then how she reminded me of it this morning, we looked at it again and I cried to feel what had happened.
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