| volume 7 of dames rocket: june-october 1977 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Like earlier volumes in Dames rocket this volume is quite crazed - stoned, distressed, all in bits, trying to rebuild myself from the inside. There are few real-world markers mentioned, so I'm not able to date most of these entries. In part 1 while Luke is in London visiting Roy. I take the bus north to La Glace to begin to prepare a Canada Council application to make a film about my country. I don't have my driver's license yet, but borrow my dad's Chrysler while he and my mother are traveling. Set up a tent on the land where our house used to be, on land since sold to a Grande Prairie lawyer. Jam flies up to visit for a few days. In part 2 I tape talks with my mother and a dinner table conversation with my mom and dad. Some of the entries for this time up north are from letters written to Jam. In parts 1 and 2, a number of slides later used in the Notes in origin show. When I'm back in Vancouver Roy shows up late one night with Luke. I fight for a longer break. When Roy takes Luke back to London with him, though I don't know it yet, he is not going to send him back. In part 3 another shock when Jam tells me she believes she is a man. From that, much struggle and grief in coming years. The last half of part 4 is a journal section I can't place elsewhere, that seems to include passages from several years, starting with 1976. reading notes: Idries Shah The Sufis, William Raban's notes for Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film, Morton White The age of analysis: 20th century philosophers, Farley Mowatt People of the deer, Anne Konrad The blue jar, Edith Hamilton Mythology, Georgia O'Keefe, pueblo Koshari, Jam Ismail "News of the universe" in Agenda, Nancy Graves, Vera Frankel, Michael Snow, Gertrude Stein The making of Americans, Daphne Marlatt Zocalo, Oldenburg, Ezra Pound, National Geographic. mentioned: Jam Ismail, Ezra the poodle, Mary Epp, Ed Epp, Rudy Epp, Rudy Wiebe, Cheryl S, Luke, Roy Chisholm, Daphne Marlatt. |
[June 1977] [Written at a lunch stop on the bus ride north to the Peace River Country] The arm that was between white sleeve and the stick shift. It is so fine and small, fat on the wrist, plump, smooth. I feel oh little woman's lovely unimagined arm. See it on the body driving, that manly-minded driving, and have a shock of love and desire that I tell by hesitating and touching the underside of the arm almost not. Daydreaming in the bus / different than it was. The beauty of grass fields, all the colors there were, pink brome, green blue violet the perfect extent, fields among trees, like ponds. The brown river with all colors reflected from rock. It isn't for memory, but to call, the white, black and brown, sleeping without a shirt, the back winding, sleeping with spectacles set on your chest. Oh the way I don't have thoughts. On Luke's bed, Ezra quiet toenails the two white people. Oh friend. She smiling talking to the bunshop waitress our guardian leans on the partition, gai mai bau. A slim sleek. The face against thigh, hair in that cleaver curve. Oh Gabriel. At night walking through the tracks the light coming into the chest wave after wave off water, squares from the square lamps, combed lights from across. Silence. The cliff and fruit hoppers comforting ladders of windows. Lying under it your white knee next and stroking the bridge over the tracks. The factory beautiful glasshouse every section endearing itself. J tells how the ancient Chinese, finding a stone they liked, would sign it. Going home she ... She's not arrogant she's as if saintly kneeling at the tub washing dishes and gets into the bed and falls asleep on my shoulder, oh. Driver says "What's that ol' sow you got there?" of [other driver's] bus. The village of our alley, color piercing gently. - [with my parents at La Glace Alberta ] Getting a sense of the pain in all their voices. Comes to me with the grimace of fear on her face which she can't recall as fear. Why are they all so wrong. They are veiled by a system that warps their presence. It has been hard to hate speaking people so much. They don't say what they are. - The rattle of poplar leaves, the way they twinkle. A certain smell of grass. Sweet clover diving past on the edge of the asphalt. She explains everything. He finds a wit. They speak to each other in persona, how can they bear it for so long. Grass makes moving shadows in between still fence post shadows. Of my shadow the sleeve edges flutter. Midges. The leaves rattling more and less. This church site has unmarked ruins of a barn, wooden sidewalks, the first church with its swarming new congregation come from so far, gradually filling out with people who may have been unknown to each other. The young children. Those people had been unmade and remade. On the south of the cemetery is thick small bush, willow, water poplar, raspberry, wild rose, strawberry. - I don't know and don't like them. Staring at her last night was challenging. There was silent pink lightning far away. [have phoned J] "You're in a spot of great power and vulnerability. So much so that you want only one aspect of it." "You don't want to open yourself to any of that." I am in such a state of stupidity, not being able to encompass, so far on the other side. I could hardly speak to you unable to trust a sentence. I want to give them up. - [I take acid at my parents' house while they are away and go out into a pasture field with cattle and a dugout] The window into ground. Creatures making paths were here, a track around. I run it, three times clockwise not slipping. Hear my breath as if below in the chest. The tracks over the mound, all of the hill is marked into grey hard fur. The paths with their clear reasons, coming from the ends of the fields. Shadows into water show brown. My skeletonned carcass, aboriginal, not a civilized body, I am not a young animal, the sections of the body separate. Thin leg as my pole. The pole put into water. Three stones and one set under water, a platform. The stream when it runs has cut a path also, banks, soft earth falling out of the cut banks below grass roof. Stones thrown into this draw. It makes a grove, holes, stones thrown, small trees and larger, polished brown by rubbing backs. Climbed a tree, strong round plant ladder. Sat in a fork at the top, round leaves flashing. Hurried home to burn my pictures, sacrifice something of theirs. Still refusing the ugly letters I wrote them as part of them. Hurried back to the slope of the hill, thinking of loose earth, grass comes up around it, those silvery plants, feathery ones. Pale blue and pink sky, the moon on the left and sun going down on the right. Indian hill, Indian bones. - [unsent letter to Luke's grandmother] Dear Catherine, Thank you for your kindly letter; I don't know what to say. I miss Luke. It scares me to think of not having him back in a little while. All the same I am in such a state of fright and confusion in myself I don't think I can be ready to have him back by the middle of August. People seem such phantoms to me and I feel a phantom myself, as if everything was and is a dream. It is hard to believe the world exists. Most human activity seems insane although the quiet plants are alright I think. But also I don't trust my own thoughts. This must seem strange self indulgence to you but I think whatever it is, clarity or madness, I'm going to have to go into it and maybe through it. Oh Luke. He will be alright with you but I feel I'm abandoning him. - In the tent at night, waking feeling how close to the edge how thin the tent. Alders flicker, clap. Taking it on: finding out what it would mean. I think that when I begin to see, I can either refuse to see, that is, choose bewilderment, or else see as well as I can, while refusing to be martyred. The life testing and looking meantime. Staying in adolescence until there's a real way out. - The owl has a grainy hiss with a barb at the end. Also a call. Chut chut chut chut. Crow to the left caw caw caw caw ragged wings. Now the wonderful light. Granaries stand little houses. Some bird has a little sharp cry. They took me for Paul. "It's Paul? Ellie?" The bush at the foot of the near pasture has no cow paths and is dense with nettles. I suppose the violets aren't there now. Something has pushed through recently.
- [Jam flies up to visit for a week] We had been silent. I complained of drowning and complained that she didn't care. She'd gone to her journal. (This fine fireplace with a mirror. But I'm scared too, the bull and footsteps.) We walked across the cropped pasture, it's high there, on the crest we had hill's curve and twilight, sunset a sort of grey blue all around, carrying a few things, two in boots. Not right together. She said, It's like a dream. We came downhill to where the tent was next to the rectangle window. It was full of clouds, blue and grey. We gathered wood, threw it where the bank was cut down as a bench, gathered stones for a circle. I'd brought a white stone from the field where it had shone. Set the water's post upright. Silence. Made the fire. I gave her the matches. She lit it. I rolled a joint. We stood and passed it back and forth. She was walking around. It made my head tingle and I knew I'd crossed over. We stood looking at the water, which had one duck and earlier one of those long legged birds come to it. I wanted to be quietly in it. But then we heard a stampede, the herd of cattle running toward us. We stood on the other side of the fire separate not knowing each other's thoughts. I was frightened because I felt that in the vulnerability of the stone I could be run over. She said later that she was frightened but felt that, in the dream where she was, they couldn't hurt her. When they came close I couldn't tell the bull from the steers, didn't know which beast presence to watch. She was standing forward in her sweater red in firelight , went to tend the fire, down on the fire's level, closer to them. They stood and looked at us with such massed presence, some of them drank at the mirror window. I waited for them to drink and go away. They stood and looked. We were in the light, they were dark and moved a little. So big such weight on their four legs. Their place, their paths, their water hole I'd come to for their presence. I told her quietly to back slowly toward the fence. She didn't hear and stood by the fire. After a while I was too afraid, backed to the fence, slid under on my belly, long grass bent. On the other side we spoke to them. I asked them respectfully to go away. She spoke to them authoritatively in her Colonial accent. They didn't go away but crowded near the fire, standing in a half circle - those who were near, none of them drinking any more, all of them oriented toward it, those next to it putting their heads down toward it, curiously. A young one went too close and jumped back a little comically like a child. "They're curious," I said. "They're starting to like it, the warmth. They're going to stay all night." I shouted at them. They jumped and scrambled back not more than ten feet. Those on the other side of the window had joined the rest. They had to push each other in the narrow space between the tent and the water. My shoes were in there in the firelight. They stood at a little distance outside the light like a band of warriors. We went under the wire to get the tent. (Shouted as frighteningly as I could but they backed off only a little way. More stood against the skylight watching as we pulled up the metal tentpegs. Couldn't get one of them out. Watched my hands digging at it. Observed that I could be practical even in this dream. We pulled own the posts, threw them on the collapsed tent, pulled the big rectangle under the bottom barbed wire, set it upright on the other side - two tracks of the road, clover plumping up between. The tent comically flabby because its sides were high up. Sleeping bags and pillows inside. Had set the mosquito coil on a post where it finished burning during the night. We found ourselves lucid for the first time on the outside of the wire while we stood and looked at them. Took hold of her and kissed her so fully, was she looking at the fire? Ran to poke it. Talking. Wanting to climb into my body, kissed and kissed her. We found ourselves far into animal fuck. Jiggling her hands all over me. Oh, I thought, we're here, now we can - But we faded out of it. It was being without control and then guarded again. I thought I'd commit heresy and touched myself and she did as I asked, and I came though only remotely and was peaceful in my body but sad. She said, How do you feel about that? Awful. She said, So have we lost each other? I was lighthearted, I realized, said all the worst I could think, and then we went to sleep. The little clock, a soft bed but not warm. I looked for her to get warm, an open night with wakings, but when the steer bellowed I jumped up looked out the window saw 4 big steers in a row looking and coming closer. It was 7, the alarm hadn't gone. We scrambled up wide awake gathered her things and crossed under the wire hurrying over the hill. Drove fast and sleek to the airport. She was old and sad under the headband but soft at the mouth. The same road we'd come on. We sat close in the car, watched the CP jet come down. I had coffee in a paper cup (from the machine) on the dash. She had Coke. I had my arm around her and was happy. She said when we were driving "Do you still want me..." "I guess so," light hearted. Staring at her strangeness unreadable face. Tired. She went into the plane in a file of people, I stayed at the fence looking at the little activities of the pilot behind his window, a baggage man wheeling a cart. She came back down the steps and kissed me under the pilot's eyes, a strange look on her face after she'd done it, smug? Ugly. Went back in. White jacket, boots. - I keep hearing traffic miles away. - I need you to help me work out the worlds. That is to compare. When I said what I wanted that was all I wanted. There's an aluminum light out there and the rain is almost one sound. It's hardly leaking here, just a faint spray that comes through the canvas. You're at your casement and it's raining, you have your foot on the sill and your Chinese pants on. In private you have expressions on your face that no one has ever seen. I used to write firm prose. The familiar horizon. A documentary about this place also about enchantment/understanding. Does it supercede all. That airport kiss was an idea you like to have of yourself.
Those signs of being on the right track. [from letters to Jam] I'm encamped facing SE we never said how it looks like a pavilion red towel hung on its porch posts in front of it is a desk like at home, one plank for hand writing, one at an angle for typewriting in front of that is an iron wheel on stones, fireplace there was a jet line this morning going from SE to NW just now I noticed a different white line drawing itself NW to SE in the same place the grass is luminous, makes the tent green look dead what it is about grass is how exquisite the detail is on every stalk of it, so a field of it is like a perfect intelligence [1975] when I came to this place I stood in grass watched it come toward me in waves, and thought about description that was because as I came up a gully where the driveway had been, and passed the caragana hedge, I felt she's here! (the child) and then, in a happiness I'm her and then I came to the place where the houses had stood [1944], found grass over it, some of the trees having died in the fire, fireweed and a changed ecology in the bush that had been behind the houses I was glad, hadn't expected the liberation it was to see the place without ruined buildings that's where I took my clothes off and lay down and in my near sleep understood that there actually is work for me here and other things the child who lived here liked to describe and had many secret connections, was always a pagan making ceremonies I keep finding her love and thrill in the features of this place the pump is still here and still works, it's surrounded by grass there were several clouds of gnats at a spot on the edge of the bush here when I went to look at them they came around my head curiously like the cows do you know the sensation of a happy pounce of the mind? heard voices talking and singing, they must have come miles the hawk's curious about the airplane, follows it a ways
- tuesday morning. my old letters make me sick they're so false I can hear someone hammering two miles away rain streaks from the north clouds, this angle / a few drops now the sun is directly behind me, almost NW and still far from setting the bush where the house was - on my right - is rattling suddenly, a breeze this morning I tried to describe the sounds it makes the breeze getting to the grass first, and then the tops or bottoms of the poplars closer by, mosquitos and flies making lines closer and futher I can see a lot of kinds of weather there's one owl that comes and goes where the corrall was are you interested in these things/ - it's night, two candles in the green tent with the blue floor I can see you at the refrigerator, one leg against its door, your left elbow up pouring. now you're carrying your glass to your bed, setting it on the windowsill. now you are picking up the book. put the book down, turn off the light, goodnight ezra. goodnight miss this afternoon a hawk and an owl were arguing in a nearby air - they had to keep circling as they spoke the hawk said eeeeeee, the owl something similar but in a different tone I found the hawk's nest in a woods near here, the one where the wild gooseberries grow every one of the bluffs around this site has a different character and I remember the feel of each of them the one with the hawk's nest has a nice magic, also queen, big white queen, fell down and died there. june was hitched onto a wagon with her at the time later she was brought back and hitched onto queen to drag her away [journal again] a scattering growth of popples In another life, I as I was walking in a vivid and velvety world, water, dust in the air, the colors very rich, more furry than in Vancouver even. (Here they are more glasslike.) I was talking to myself about how dreamlike it was, how I couldn't tell the difference anymore, and wondered if it was from drugs. Swimming, floating on my stomach with my head to the side as in a bed. - A filmstock with direct translation into fairytale. The difference between a sound and the memory of a sound. - Stoned, immediately urgent to think about thinking. Thinking of C's way of finding me - sometimes just a sensation - she would be there when I got there and quietly say something to let me know she saw me. Then we would stare at each other and be empty together, she filling my sight, outside me, and I filling hers, by the vacuum in me. The room. The conscience she woke. We used each other to discover another form of love. Misunderstood. We were brothers. These women of my imagination. A story. Not a history. Jam will you. I here to recruit her. The whistling of the ducks' wings and the squeaking of the fire. - Watching how she's like a guilty slave when the men come in, anticipating their needs in a loud voice, "The water's hot. Shall I make some Tang?" And he hangs around trying to help her with the apricots. She doesn't want him there, tries to tell him that her kitchen's too small. She tries to put me off the scent then by talking about how two women in a kitchen would be two too many. I assumed she was telling me not to notice his weakness and I let it go. - [letter to Jam] last night dreamed myself at vogue magazine headquarters in new york realized just now that when I used to live on this site I was more in touch with new york than I am now, ie from close reading of good housekeeping, mccalls, saturday evening post and then toward the end vogue and harpers I read the advertizements, every one, I read the stories sometimes twice and sent for booklets on how to use carnation milk in 20 ways - back in sexsmith, the pie is better here and she heated it before she put the ice cream on the laughter in this place is nice, it's coffeetime and people are being friendly, the waitress pulls it all together, they laugh like those poplars clapping i-i-i-i-i old man kokovsky he puts a cup of coffee per pot, you drink that you see china a strange day, this morning the sky was cloudless, hot, but dark smoke, it seems from alaska where there are fires - it's thundering the tractor stopped, it rained now the birds are writing sound small birds faint script can you describe thunder the look of black clouds is like it big raindrops on the tent, it's like the clapping leaves but bigger the thunder breaks and it travels, moves fast can be in two locations at once it's a dark sound every thunder is different the last one seemed to have a spine in it like a quill the storm weather is a broad stripe down the centre of the sky, it's light to N and S of it - there are holes between thoughts when I think close it's a sensation like standing on a webbing and having nothing between the lines there's a light on the tent, faint most of the sun is covered, and a puffy wind comes in and blows out the sides it's moving all the time around its pole, it's lively last night when it had stopped raining I made a fire and turned over my desk and sat on it warming my legs and thinking I would go so intensely into my thoughts that when I came back to rearrange the fire it seemed a marvel and a joke to find it there, and the whole of the horizon, which was a ring of different colors of sky, exquisitely combined and this place which, if I want, is just an extraordinary place with grass and bird and cloud events etc going on all the time or else if I want becomes another time, with historiesof other kinds of time too but I can, I can, see it through her eyes I can't and don't want to stay in them, but she's here now I'm going to see my mother and ask her how it happened that her husband didn't talk to her children - what happened with my mother was that when I arrived she was angry at me like I have never seen her shook, stared and shouted, tentatively, but an explosion in her experience that was because I'd burned my pictures and had no right, they were hers, I had no idea what they mean to her I was happy and asked questions he was in the bathroom listening carefully, shaving they'd intended to go to the fair, she said she was too upset, she plainly wanted to stay and have it out he said I think you should come with me in a lover's voice, this is no place for you, you'll be sick I think you should come with me he was beside himself but could do nothing but plead I was delighted, it had gone straight to the original tableau and there was nothing he could do she placated him, made up a dozen reasons, and stayed we then picked peas, shelled them, she canned apricots and we talked about how it has always been she and the children together, having secrets while he was in the world struggling to be important I forgot to tell you that when we were all three arguing she saw my jackknife on the table and handed it to him, saying is this yours? she keeps telling me how the nasturtiums are thriving so much they're taking over the whole flowerbed - I'm cross-legged at my desk, naked the sun's hot this is thursday there are big fluffs of cumulous, above them streaks of haze one kind of weather from shore to shore this time last night as it darkened up there it was exciting the way a single star and then another extended the space there while earthspace went dark there were some clouds lit at an angle by the moon that was just at the horizon something in the way they were shaped made me feel the sky as the real planet, my vantage on it from somewhere in dark space as on a satellite the clouds shifting made different constellations every minute, blotting some stars and not others there are flowers and butterflies, wind, flies solar wind, sun coming and going is like a breeze hot, not cold, lighter darker in the high sky vapour trails crossing each other birds are coming closer to the green pavilion, this morning there was one flut flut at the door [journal again]
Then she showed herself the goddess manifest, Beauty breathed about her and a lovely fragrance; light shone from her so that the great house was filled with brightness. My mind just took everything down and worked everything out for me the first time, without having to go through it more than once. After a while everything I was experiencing got to where it meant something to me in some way.
Imagining a professor of philosophy coming in on different days stoned on various things. The philosophy of alteration (travel). Filmmaking in lessons, one each of pharmaesthetics. - [back in Vancouver]
What I'm thinking about
- O'Keefe I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew - to strip away what I had been taught - to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. He had no courage and I believe that to create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage. - We were beside ourselves and frightened but I more than you. I felt you excluding me by a narrow margin. Oh chasing you deep into the kiss. The rhythm that comes into me, slow pulse. What do you think of archetypes. Reservoirs of enthusiasm "I'm so wonderful, I think I must be wonderful because you're so wonderful." "I know." I felt I had been preparing for you for years, gathering material. Brave words we have for each other but when I see your face on the pillow looking that indescribable look I'm not brave, I'm gallant but I protect my injury and lie low and divert you with jokes. It isn't only your beauty, it's that you're there then an impermeable, through my eyes I can't have you. These days I've been willing to come into your creation world because you don't want to leave it but you're so beautiful there, in your central city, that I'll have to bring you out into the country again, for my beauty to feel you seeing it. Stiffness instead of the flying balances and laughing of the days before I became you. Luke was protecting him. He protects me too. Green plums and figs sliced in milk and cereal, with wine. The danger of having your gestures and voice slowly sink into me, faces, bodies, they come slowly but when they're there they are shrapnel and go off. His restless cough next door. [Luke - just after I got back to town Roy arrived with him.] Ideas in night park. Stars could be filmed by single framing with long exposures. The backstop and stars. I saw the stars sifting down through a very pale grid. Gasping on account of the talk. Because for me fucking has been dancing, very aesthetical. As childbirth was. It would do you no harm to find out you're beautiful. Concept. I see an armature, she sees a radiation - Cried because she didn't understand me. - A time when people would habitually read art and everything else as consciousness. The names of god, the modes of consciousness. Monotheistic. [going to Diana's cabin on Saltspring with Luke and Roy] A bit of foam formed on the edge of a wave just as it falls. Some of the water falls several inches into the water, the line blooms into the shape, falls down the slope of the obliquely moving wave. The back of it, that it comes from, dissolves. One after another these things open and fall. At the cutting edge of the ferry's side foam moving out and back, out as it slides off the edge, which as it drops back dissolves into foam, a lace very fine meshed, crochet. Backing, the thrill of seeing foamy water, deep with hissing bubbles, move along the side of dark green water. Slanted sunlight making ribbons as if shadows, streaks through water.
Behind, in the wake, a long boil of deep beaten water. Crows with the white gulls. - Birthday gathering, C, her knee faithful to me all night. Watching Trudy watch Don staring. There was something he couldn't understand. Jami huffing and stamping, declaring, bluffing, insisting. I said you let yourself be a version that interests you less. I was outraged J had let me dislike her. She was pompous, and still, in that, we found a while she was so close crying little cries. Crows flying away. But then she wanted to make me come. That's what I didn't like us for. Kerosene lamplight throwing partially colored light moving on graph paper. It's my heartbeat or writing that makes it flicker. -
It has to be less sentimental. Sound of a voice pleasing itself with its membership in an approved feeling. -
I had you more exactly in the letters. When I was with you I kept wanting you to arrive in the person I wrote to. - About Roy and Luke. Luke from the moment he got here in deep shock, acting. Unavailable except for a few moments. I know he'd be better here. But Roy talks to him? They went around together, Luke asking questions in his false voice, skipping, climbing, R tired but attentive. Walking to the ferry Luke traveling with Roy, a child who's not mine now. Waving. "I lost that kind of language" he said. "When I came to Johannesburg and I suddenly realized I didn't have to stay in South Africa, and I left." "Except for the other kind of dead, not growing anymore." When I was telling him that I died last winter he said this. [Luke goes back to London with Roy on the agreement that it will be for six months. Roy later gets back together with Sara and decides he won't send him back. This visit in retrospect becomes an appalling parting.] - In the stone I see understandings but they're instantly gone. The difference of sense of grasp. The secret crimes of consciousness, by conscience.
Being an artist is a reasonable employment while following and watching the life - I think of wonder, marvel, as the holiest mind (revision - best), the one to steer toward. - Imagine if there's a natural selection of mentality, that in every encounter one of the minds wins (if they are close enough to be able to see one another). One of the persons goes into the other, has a practice in it, and returns home so that those with the most interesting mentality When this book is done read it. Write a summary of what's to know. Ear massage by eyebrows The model I'm in when I'm stoned. Make questions in one mind to answer in another. Find questions in this mind to supercede those in the other. Gertrude Stein writes as legends are written, exactly, not telling the ways a person is described (body, clothing, vision) but only the essence of their message or meaning as variant. - Gertrude Stein 1925 The making of Americans Contact Press We are always young adults to ourselves. It takes time to make queer people, and to have others who can know it. They loved and admired and respected each other very much this daughter and her father. They understood very well both of them how to please while they were combatting with each other. He had all the emotion and the important feeling, it was just like religion. the mixing of people in marriage Nor could she know what they needed inside of them. But they were never very loving to her inside them. They had it too strongly in them to win their own freedom. from his strong love of starting and the uncertain things he had inside him the important feeling he had always inside him from his continual thinking and in a different way from that in which all the other people around him were thinking Her children were to her like well to do living, not important to her feeling. - Came out of The making of Americans with a dismay, feeling of oh Luke, the death card. I watched him play with the cards. He was interested in the swords, the knights, and the death card. I watched shocked while he pointed it out. "And that's a funny one, what's that skeleton doing in armour" in his false English voice of his alienation, oh Luke I'm not providing for you. When he came I wanted to welcome him and asked him. He said carefully "What do you want me to do?" "I need a longer rest." "Then I want you to have a longer rest." And lovely Roy, I wouldn't give him more than I thought he gave. It didn't come to me to feel them and now it comes to me to grieve that I couldn't, they are my family, the record of my joy. All the deep places have so much grief in them, is that what you mean, C? I'm sleeping, go away. Crossly. I'm working, I can't talk to you now. You died in me. As long as you don't die in you I can let you go, but does your life need me to want you? And if it does, is this a tragedy? - In every family of them some of them had an uncertain something in them but perhaps the rest understood it about them Anna had then beauty in her and was important then to everyone who knew her. the sense of bigness as all the world around them. Some have such a sense in them only when a new thing begins in them, soon they lose it out of them. There are some who have such a feeling in them when they are first beginning their individual being. In some of such ones of them it comes in their later living to be only impatient feeling. when they are old and weakening they have not any success in them and it needs others then to make them feel again inside them. That the nature in him would not carry him to the last end of fighting which is winning. when his wife was no longer in him as a tender feeling - From a distance watch a naked crippled woman at a tent. Dwoskin. Gertrude wouldn't be shy to talk of crippled. - Going to the river, next to the hospital. Both of us dressed as teenagers, anxiously. I was in knit hot pants and garters. The man who wanted us to pay, a gross dumb lascivious patriarch, J with two big copper tuppence going to phone for permission. On the bleachers, back, we want to --- in but (stones on the bottom) we have to make the bed first, wide bed, difficult to make because there's a little girl in it lonely in a hospital bed with her treasures (the gifts of experience), a locket exactly like my mother's but with different brown pictures in it. I sat with her to look at the brown photographs. Woke very wide and recalled dream, of course understood it and then went right to understanding why Trapline is exactly erotic, very excited and inspired J. Much mental energy. In the fucking was overwhelmed with how much I have, and afraid of not having a lack only fullness and exhaustion. - Asked tarot about the helping problem. My voice got very low down talking about it because it's global. I said that when I found my way I would stop art and do that.
I must keep doing art until I find all my range and companionship. - Being afraid that our competence to follow each other will fail when it matters most. I said at least we will then find ourselves alone at the edge of our known territory. Sky. What it means to find it again and again. On the road noticing rebuilding a second story on Grandpa Peter Epp's house. Walking through it said this is a dream, I can be perfectly free to see and do what I want. On the road there had been an urchin girl. Daphne. [Had lent me Zocalo in manuscript.] Why the dream section is so much more powerfully written as if it happened differently. Is the power of description of a moment an indication of the nearness to 'centre' of the mode it was in. Daphne Marlatt 1977 Zocalo Coach House She will not be tricked, she will stay where the world is and they are all together. so that she enters an inner room made of his smell She must not step into that house again. -
What are we here for? To be trained in travel. What are we being trained for, if there are no acts. -
- Dream a birthday party, mine, people kept arriving from the ends of my life, Greg looking tight and beautiful, found. I noticed they didn't bring presents. Two strangers came in, very tall, with black hats like Mormons. I knew they were evangelizing, confronted them, told them to go away, knocked on the stomach of one, was irate, shouting "This is a birthday party, go away." He said looking down from very high up "Don't do that" gently. Next thing I knew they were sitting down talking to one of the men, I was so cross they'd done that familiar thing I shouted "This is not the man of the house, I am the man of the house, at this moment, and I want you to go away!" They quietly went but I was left feeling I'd been out of control and silly, and when I turned back to the birthday party, it had dispersed, the room was full of strangers doing different things, as the common room at University College. Daphne's dream. She comes, at night, with Roy and a friend, to a piazza with a dark façade as if destroyed, ivy growing on it. She sees a light in one of the windows, intense, shining through a stained glass screen very blue, William Morris with flying birds. The friend says "Oh look the door is open." She goes in and the light - it is daylight, as if the door leads to the other side - falls on her blond face. She says "It's beautiful, come in, come in." Roy says to Daphne, "No don't go there, come away, she won't be able to come back." Daphne says "But the door is there." Roy takes her away, they don't turn to look when they hear her scream, they know the screen has moved over the door. -
- In this life, as one revelation follows another, carried forward by the miracle of inward becoming truthfully outward. By necessity, crying for the breakthrough, battering each other in the ugly necessity of finding somewhere else to be together, offering each other symbolic gifts, whatever is in us is true and must be given and taken, the accurate aim we are, I am and in my movement see you being. The avocado seed in which a cunt and a clit are secretly together. You left them open to eyes, me I hurried to close them together and you didn't fail to notice. I was stronger and could go into the degradation and disgrace without refusing it. Yes I'm a woman yes you're a man yes I desire you in that secret dark that will make you shine, yes I think of having a baby in me by you orgiastic pleasure of full solar plexus burning woman right in the animal soul where satisfaction is. Fully. I looked at you and became a cavity, you watched me sink into shock, I saw my life with flares going up next to Roy, Mother, Luke, Paul. Yes I was saying I am that, I will be that, why are you looking at me with such a coldness, don't you love this wedding, how can you tell me you're a man and not ask me to marry you. "You're looking at me as if you're afraid of me." At the mercy of the man. At your mercy. Going alone to cry. You've led me here, without wanting me here. What is it, I'm wondering, is it ... The degradation of the woman has a secret power of presence with the world. Pain. You don't really want to marry a woman. "You were right, I let you go into it completely alone. (This will be very good for your work.)" "I was completely cold and hard." There was once a woman, who spoiled as a woman, looked among the spoiled men and found a woman. That woman was furious and had become a man, ie became in soul what she was not in body, so that she was inaccessible in body. Your beauty when you come to yourself, I worked to bring you to it, and now that you are here you don't want it. Your man will want to destroy my power of woman. If I'm a woman who loves men, and you're a man without a man's body, that's a chute that sends me straight out of you. We looked at that in a pain of loss and you coldly. Yes. Saw the full contradiction I'd shut out of me, that what I am happily in full instinctive pleasure what I am in heart and centre is a woman who loves men, and that to express that I would have to lose everything else, because as a woman I am not complete (because spoiled and therefore unconfident) (a hole, a gash) and therefore cannot resist the part of the man that wants to destroy me. Oh here I am, you've put me back in jail, you scorn me because as a woman I am feeble and frightened. It was dismay, dismay.
-
Are we jealous of one another as women? I think there is a reality and we are here to find it. We know nothing about sexuality. Whatever that place is, where we went,
you have more power there, you want to be in gender with me because there
you are stronger, and you want to be there in that raving sexual necessity
that unnerves me. We are locked into combat, I feel tired already. You said you feel tired. We are set to degrade one another as well as to strive for each other's souls. The hate. I wanted to upgrade you spiritually! To have a companion. That project is what buffets me with surprises because sometimes you're ahead and sometimes you're devil. Temptations and what are they. Enchantment. Messenger. The work we're doing is work enough. - The dismay of you rolypoly drunk pouting fond of your tears, awkward, wanting me to come into that with you, the ugliness of the face. Daphne about writing. The weight of sentences in a paragraph. The technical ease ("I've been doing it so long"). Lately I've been playing friendship in a more interesting way, trying to give away more of the secrets. It becomes a different less profound more articulate connection. Speaking about the oldfashioned spirituality of art, wanting it to celebrate creation. I said "But I have to keep mistrusting that, to enlarge my idea of what spirituality might be." Daphne about Luke: it has begun to be written about that moment when the child has a moment of mastery and intercepts the glance of the mother. Written on his doorpost
- A few loving words, for the sweet wind that isn't always there, you, lurking, inside your fat belly and round breasts, white and veined, your bland little hands, this face you look out of. Oh fat crying drunk husband. Oh yes, you. We're seeking and finding or missing throughout these generous days, why do you look so tired. We do, want each other. Why did you look so tired, and I -
We need to talk about our past events because we aren't fast enough to be in our present events. We go into flurries in order to come out aligned, and then we can go to the world seeing the same things. Okay, seeing things together is what we've been working toward. When I look at you we are alone. - When I see your writing on the wall and I can't penetrate it I am frightened.
- There's trouble I can't find. Many things too fast to have, again, had. Looking around in the richness. In the secret room everything turns into treasure. Following you into the kiss. Do you know, in there, it's the ocean; your teeth, the warm soft under your tongue, mine pulled at the root, the lips lapping, all that can be done with two the same, but it's diving among the coral. The breath making round trips on my skin between nose and lip. It was a way for our persons to fuck as musically as they know how, here there can be exact knowledge. Called so far out, that sleeping was mathematics, no it was better than that, it was diagrams on translucent. Something has changed; yes but it's real here, there are so many things that don't need thoughts any more. - What I'm always asking about the connection is do we make as good a thing as alone. I rave, I go so many places charmingly.
Are you the angel assigned to me after my death When I visit you Mother it is the visit of a ghost in a dream. I took the pictures off your wall to tell you I had died. There's excitement and regret. Will I ever see Luke again. Oh Luke am I dead in your world. I made no wrong choices but it happened that I've been calling for death, I had it sweetly given to me, I'm here in the next life, talking.
- To sacrifice to a spirit not one's own is flattery. To think how to be sincere is the way of the human.
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