| dames rocket 8 part 3 - november - december 1977 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
At the crown, the root stem - we throw the world out of eyes, ears, fingers (skin), nose, tongue, sex organs. The screen it's thrown on: Prakriti. Waste. Withdraw from experience, what makes it real, and send this up to the root out of head to cleave into the other world and bring down the density of more dimensions.
Time as true dimension - Tone of voice I couldn't say no to
- [with C] "You're saying you haven't got your wellbeing back yet." "You're a devil. You are still always between us." "From January to September we both knew the gods in us." Hooked the ears and laughed. Leather squeaks, the broadness back. Feel the head little head in the palm, I can absorb all your shaking. Pure bird. You're lonely today. We'll talk as if trusting and you're repairing me. "I felt I could be a good friend to you and at the same time I was acting very different." Caught up at the end of the long corridor, she'd turned off the lights and only touched my back bent to find the lock, with her forehead. And I'm willing. I was dim and it wasn't actually her there, her as she is without her friend. Are they weakened, apart. So when she shook and murmured up against me I had patience and something like kindness but it wasn't the home of my dream. And I guess never will be, I'm gone and will you now begin to show, stand behind revealed oh the door you could have been, an arm holds it to hillside. Barleyfield. Heart. Jewel city. Chakra. Red triangle. Throat. Green. Semicircle. Smokelike principle of air. Sound. Their first frequencies. Crown. White circle. Half male half female. Aether blue. Concentration. Right ritual brings the Devata into the object. I liked to see orange? Green? Clear sky above the dark mountains when we'd woken to fuck each other. She said her lips were detaching off her face. The north-facing windows with their shades up. Waking giddier than usual and her father's letter sending her into disgrace and me into sadness for my dream of country invention. She's sleeping. Talking about being appalled made us make love to each other again. - Good karma. Calm compassionate game-playing. Liberation is the nervous system without conceptual activity. The Unborn. Clear Light. It is aware but not conceptually. 'Ego-loss.' The physical reactions. The first radiance knows no self. Secondary Clear Light. Electrical and biological life flow. Tuning into parts of the nervous system. Spine. Today out of distraction grab an icon. Bewilderment. Sit it out peacefully. Visions. All drugs - physical symptoms have to do with emotional holdings. Am I not liking to live in your world. The world of saints shines with a white light / visions of delightful temples and jeweled mansions. Heroes - green light, magical forests and fire images Ordinary human "a yellow light" Animal - blue light, images of caves and deep holes Unsatisfied spirits - red light, desolate plains and forest wastes Hell - smoke-colored light, wailing, black and white houses, black roads along which you have to travel
If you become conscious of maleness, hatred of the father, jealousy
- What is a film maker (writer) - Using only mud, ingenious domed dwellings A separate building houses guests In courtyard gardens irrigated by canals that go under the outer walls, in the fields beyond But when he asks witnesses if they will vouch for her reply it is customary for them to say they have not heard her. The girl must then repeat yes very loudly. The next morning two old women who have been given the duty of ascertaining whether the marriage has been consummated must answer the question "Has the boy become king?" On the great looms unfold silent gardens of the deepest red. Scenes of paradise as described in the Koran Silver, which under Moslem law becomes a woman's property She married her first cousin, considered most desirable for couples The mender of china Trained bird speaks in Persian Manure of cows and donkeys produces excellent heat and is believed to keep mosquitoes away the people of the black Upon the day of his birth the colt is prevented from falling to the ground, for that would destroy his wings. - The bull's curly white face looking at me through the tall garden, baby's breath, I can't leave, he comes right for me. J and I have got bored at the same time as having had that certain kind of good fucking. I think yes I'm getting normal in sex after all this time, maybe I need it, but in talking we were dead and don't interest each other with that horror of a marriage game 'done', as if it could be. Her garden of abstraction doesn't know how to meet my aboriginal and I'm thin in myself, I can't hit the intoxication I had (when I set and carried the mind pleasure) and now we are lapsed on her steadiness and I'm getting furious and going off 'her,' that is, me. Although when I look at her I think oh what a lovely woman to have next to me. But she isn't interesting me nor I her, I imagine hating her family and having to try to 'see' without being seen, she knows how and doesn't have rages or a self-hater and gets along with people, is even popular. The crisis of parents not approving - I'm ahead of you there - and we can't make paradise and I'm off to Afghan to be a beggar woman. The man on Cordova. "How're you doing?" "Terrible. How about you?" "Terrible I'm trying to raise the price of a drink." "I'll see what I've got." Give him fifty cents. "That won't hurt you?" (Safety pin holding coat shut.) "Not right now. At the end of the month it would." Feeling at home there. Well. There's a tall man in brown overcoat, big Indian eyes, looks smart, pointed shoes, smoking Export A in green package at the Princess (a prince), saw him in the library. I am hating myself for not loving my life, wanting to give it away, not happy like Grandpa Epp who was what he was (a man, with a loyal worried wife) and didn't care, romantic, uncivil, happy. Scientology. A device to ring a bell when your body alarms. I don't trust my friend (morally), I think she buys and sells herself, I always thought she doesn't mind. In those days it was clear when she was pompous, now I haven't got the centre myself but I wish I had. She wants the city but does she want it enough. The hand. Reading the hand as magical device to acknowledge what one knows. Our clairvoyance seems to be over. Functioning new. The ego in the service of the divine, not its betrayer. - Maxine Hong Kingston 1975 The woman warrior Vintage There were fathers and mothers selling their daughters, whom they pushed forward and then pulled back again. To buy a little girl She stopped at a girl whose strong heart sounded like thunder within the earth, sending its power into her fingertips. The myth of luck Animalcules somersault about our faces when we breathe. a box of clean ashes beside the birth bed in case the baby was a girl. My mother won in ghost battles because she can eat anything. All heroes are bold toward food. Japanese the only foreigners not considered ghosts by the Chinese. The village crazy lady put on her headdress with the small mirrors, some of them waving quickly on red stalks. In her crazy lady clothes of reds and greens, she greeted the animals and the moving branches as she carried her porcelain cup to the river. Her spirit (her 'attention' she called it). The black mole pulls you forward with its power, a mole at the back of the neck pulls you back. Rainy black night at Hastings. The neon floods over the road, moves as I run across. The car lights stopping for me and another (Chinese) one with an umbrella. Wait for the bus with the umbrella up, there's a puddle in which the streetlight is with splashes, lines going toward it from all around the edges, white three-inch lines of light flash, all pointing toward the round yellow light. Across the street the Woodbine Hotel with rows of windows, it's a smooth-browed place. On the ground floor it's empty with white painted partway up all the front windows. The Astoria and the unwindowed wall where the bar is. The newspaper metal box shut tight, steps going down to the parking lot. Buses. I take the first that stopped. Often the encounter with the driver is a quick aliveness. They look curiously if I have my strange hat on, even when I don't. Take the transfer, let the bus's lurch into traffic send me down to the back, side right back. I look around thinking what to look at to make the bus an ecstasy, the side windows have water on them in small drops, every window a different shape. It swallows a neon and has the color diffused through its whole area. I imagine having eyes to love and study the condensation on bus windows. There are two Asian girls on the back seat, one of them is saying "The last time I wore a skirt to school was in grade six." They talk about shopping. I remember when I used to shop and complain internally about this culture that has nothing worth doing. Get off at the Army Navy and my eyes meet the eyes of a thin East Indian man inside the white fluorescence pushing a waxing machine from his crotch. He seems to be telling me to notice. I walk on to the next stop, a jeweler's, where I try to find a way to lean the umbrella against the wall without putting it down in front of my face, then go into the doorway. Tiles, in the windows silver things, trays, goblets, salt and pepper shakers wrapped in Saranwrap. A man with a beard looks at me, comes into the space but has his back to me looking in the windows. There's something about him I don't savvy. He leaves. A young girl with a pretty face goes by under an umbrella. I watch her thick legs walking stiffly in clogs. She has brown stockings and a divided skirt. The clogs make her bum stiff. She waits. The Davie bus comes. I fold and shake my umbrella as I approach the door, sit down near the front and find a newspaper-wrapped saw between the seat and the wall. Feel its shape, leave it there. - Is it that your family will see the being of the one you bring home and is that because your family is your first wife in a way I can't imagine. Confiding. - Work. The sense of starting a letter 4 times. My mother's cry Oh I want contact. My cry Oh I want right being! (Contact.) His cry Why won't anyone appreciate me. Tell me your m and f axis. Dimming out. That old constant fright = dying. - A kind of drawing between drafting and Chinese painting.
The way - tao Te - the result of action in destiny, indications about fortune, a latent power in an event The superstition about soul. Discovery of conscience.
The soul will not stay in a body it doesn't like. The better people must not form a separate class supported by the labour of others, to become completed at the expense of others' incompleteness. supported themselves by weaving mats People who lived in rocks or in holes in the ground and even if they were offered salaried employments would not accept them. re ligion
Silted soul / cleaning Self hypnosis, stilling the mind to go through the perceived to what perceives At this point language fails. Reaching this point is to get into the birdcage without setting the birds off singing. All the quietists say, from it you get truth, happiness, and power. Siddhi. Te. A power of presence is a hypnotism. Throw open the gates, put self aside, bide in silence, and the radiance of this spirit shall come in and make its home. How to know that? Only by the perfection of this. Art of the mind / art of nurturing ch'i The valiant, the magnanimous, the strong will of those whose ch'i pervades the whole body. Do not let yourself be perturbed - the Accord will come unsought. Every day we use its power. Produced cumulatively by using the moral sense.
-
Imagination can make all qualities relative Looked at from Anywhere it's contradicting and unsafe. From Nowhere it is changeless, uniform, whole, ie identity of opposites. Being willing to give back.
The uncarved block a drawing taking up almost to the edge, [sketch] ie a crystal closeup with its roughness painted or in plan. Mencius - the morally great man is one who has kept through later years the 'infant heart.' The unassertive, the inconspicuous, the lowly, the imperfect, the incomplete. It is as representatives of the imperfect and the incomplete that hunchbacks and cripples play so large a part. Water as pattern and example. Mastery of the crafts by using the likeness (kinship) that their Primal Stuff has with the Primal Stuff of the medium. During the 4th century BC it began to occur to the Chinese that words move in a world of their own, a region connected only in the most casual and precarious way with the world of reality. The way the language was made from a few roots, with meaning extensions and determinatives. Indeed instead of is. Discriminators (sophists) people who looked for why language is dangerous. Custom = conscience becomes custom vs conscience.
Life is not easy, they say again and again. A philosophy must not be made on desire or on the experience of exceptional people. A ruler is practical and knows how things work. Those who reward themselves must have the lowest social position. They thought indeed that anyone who was not helping all people under heaven had far better be dead. Te of poetry to intoxicate us so we are reckless and do difficult steps easily. Father likes abstract morality too. The te of the Tao Te Ching to master the complex questions by reducing them to alternative states of unity and simplicity. Physical technique, breath control and 'sexual regime' Kuan - what is seen in an abnormal state. Allusiveness of literature of the elite. - What happened today: I was going to the library thinking about calendars and blueprints, Jam in her car stopping fast. I'm in the back seat with packages in the front saying I didn't expect to see her so soon. She talks about fixing Diana's washer. Upstairs I'm aware that I'm angry with her. I tell her I am. She says she'd noticed, and why. Tells me a dream in a pretold chant I don't listen to. I listen to the second dream more. (The first one is us on a boat, she falls overboard, shouts at me not to come toward her, thinks of it as my nearly killing her by trying to help her.) I remember that I'm angry with her because I need sharp talk - she said she wouldn't be able to be there for a year. Try to show her my work / she doesn't feel it though she looks at it. Silence. I begin to tell her my dream, it seems unreceived as I tell it. Then she leans over and pours milk in my tea. "Mind your own business" I say. Silence. "I don't like you today." Silence. I feel sad and my eyes start to fill with tears. She stares and I stare back feeling the water rising in my eyes. "Don't watch" I say. "Why not" she says. Silence. She packs up her tea and says "You're right, it isn't long enough" and goes downstairs. I'm pouring the tealeaves out before she's at the top of the stairs. I go out. She calls me from the porch. I keep going (to the library). Ezra's following me. I tell her to stay. My angry point lands on J who comes around the corner just then. I keep going. Ezra starts after me again. J around the corner. I notice her blueness, headband, shirt, jeans, vest, sweater, and stop for her and look at her. She says "I'm back now, I wasn't there but I am now." I look at her and see that it's true and everything is righted. We go in and sit on the stairs and we can't talk yet. The talking comes from somewhere not in the middle but when I touch her, although I am still thinking of going away, I can find the concentration. She puts her head on my shoulder and that makes me full of peace. We are peaceful on the steps. She reads Mary's letter. She'd said she was full of fear because it would often be that she couldn't come, because of working. I am not frightened, only pleased that my feelings were simple and articulate and stopped her and focused us after days. I loved her for the way she came and bespoke me. All evening I've had a love pleasure about how we did that. (All evening means now and before, again.) C on the telephone frightened and indirect / why. Strange health. Dry mouth (or wet), sore tongue. Little pains in the diaphragm area, but inner. The dim headaches. - The Anne Holmes dinner, some people in their lives, going in and out of intelligence. Sometimes when I was 'with' them I was ashamed. Sometimes I stayed out and judged their beings. Sometimes I tried to entertain myself telling stories or talking inside their worlds. A thin person called Russell had a partial presence but would elude, I'd hoped for more from him than I would get. Made a face at one of the guests as if to say what a pantomime this is. That was the silent one. I felt guilty because of Bruce listening and hearing my tricks. The way when I was telling a story a silence would arrive around it. The Greece stories. Telling a good story. People memorizing stories. The pleasure that is there even in it. A predictable turn. The women offended me, talking about their dogs and going off on the woman plateau together. The man I was most generous with (I liked his pots) explained to me what a baffle is, and I, instead of using the word atavism to him made an awkward paraphrase. The healthiest and roundest man had a piggy woman for wife. Her face offended me - she noticed me looking around the table and knew to pass me the nutcracker. I remembered the man whose foot I touched through the hole in his shoe / Pender bookstore / first winter. - "That gave me a hot drench at the heart." (That Mary asked.)
Retreat - various arts - design and make a cabin - - What is to know about J. Work, my inspiration. Oh my friend / and that's not true exactly / I think that when I'm with you best I could work best. You were telling about Euripides' Helen story, she was sent away (your lovely sense of narrative) to a country where no one was warring for her, they had a column of air. You were telling me your enchantment with the possibility but we don't go as far. Of course we do, we go far.
Oh my friend / that's a dream, that friending, and yet we are setting ourselves to make it / as if. Yes, the days we spend. Could they ever make us meet closer to home than we've met already / no. The peace. Now I want to know more about hell. The kinds of time when it's locked out of everything but the sensation of needing to escape. I called it disliking myself but it's more like physical restraint. Is it old, I've got to get out of here, I'm dying in me, I have to get more space into me, and interest and free coming and going in thoughts and things and their thoughts. That desperation looks for religion, it wants a way out, not like a mummy but like a wide strong expansion stopped. What are we together. It is what am I in existence and what can I do in existence with you. A 'you' but specifically. It is abstract for us. The dream of the author of The woman warrior. Domesticated comfortable disinterested I went away. In a valley I saw Birdseye her sister. At the post office (to speak) to ask for her address (she's there). She comes out of the shadows and I talk with her. She's free and warm and we like each other and she puts onto me a cape she's making, wide, embroidered? Many colors and parts (on a circle probably, very wide). (Now, as of yesterday, I want to do circle calendars as magic presents.) Then the first woman is there and seeing me with her sister she likes me and wants to attend me. - Your polite laugh. Who are you when you work. "I've got so used to layered speech / she only talks on one level." Of Esther (scared me). The retreat. It would make me more accessible to her.
"... a silver grid in my skull. They call it a blanket." I'm going inside. What was happening last night. Trudy couldn't go as deep as C, C and I can meet as we are safe to only in her presence, I was in deep touch (I thought) and had a feltshape (inscape) of how every soul is like every other soul, if there is more than one. Watching the meanings find their way into each other and not. The love supper where they eat and drink the holy food and go into another world with each other, there speak into, and then come out. Judy Ritter. We talked about Jewishness and my father's glamour for it. Cheryl's pictures so beautiful, I joyed I could see them now. A person dies (is 'shot'), goes through a dream place, 'wakes', tells a story different from the story before, the other person who 'dies' is in it differently. Distort the field of that grid. Detection. It's possible by using hypnotism to get at the commands other hypnotists have put there. I'm going to put you back into deep trance and let you search for the commands yourself. You will die rather than remember. You will, you must, sense only those things which you have been commanded to sense, I --- command it. Do you remember me? Yes. Who am I? the voice asked. You are death. The story of Mandrake the magician - we hypnotize each other all the time - that's enough for you to work on. The creature has been commanded to mate with another of its kind who is more stringently under our control. Talking about not being unwilling to make another baby. What it feels like for you to like two people with the same birthday. All emotion is response to stimulation by harmonic movement, by oscillation. - [letter to my mother] Hello M, this is going to be an interesting letter - you spoke yourself in yours and now I'm challenged to speak myself. I told Jam you said to tell you about her. She said "That gives me a hot drench at the heart." That begins to tell you about her. Drench. It isn't so much about her as about us. What I can see about her is eyes, nose, mouth, black slippery hair, a short person with a tall person's voice, very small hands and feet that are centuries, maybe a lot of centuries, off the farm. Round staring spectacles. A stomping walk. Her habits are careful housekeeping, alert cooking, many books and papers being worked out/on at the same time, pieces of paper pinned to the wall with thoughts on them (these make up a two-dimensional thesis). You can see I've got interested in telling about her. Next month I'm going to an Oriental city to find out whether a rich family who are not only rich but also smart will approve of my being. They are people who say what they think, unlike us. At the same time I'll have to be in a strange place on an errand of my own, because if I don't find an errand for myself I'll have no being to be approved. At the same time I'll have to be watching carefully to see who my friend is in the place she comes from (for curiosity and strategic knowledge). So it would have to be a different sort of description that you got through my two eyes, which now ask different sorts of questions than they did when I used to write you long stories. A relationship that's simple, with love on both sides and little joys going deep. Oh you name it so nicely. It sounds like marriage that lovely dream. About us: we dream marriage, we imagining ourselves doing as is done in mythology (but in the myths marrying means marrying oneself), we are fired by the idea. Sometimes with each other we have had the sensation of being two clear beings in a wide open space. Then other times we are separated and can't recognize each other except as another impermeable presence we don't know what to do with. So no matter what we do we can only be married when we are. I've been very absorbed in it and we both hope for it to go quietly and peacefully into the background so that we can get on with our work. It's a sense of meeting like I haven't had, this person is often ahead of me. When I'm ahead of her I get impatient and fuss. The same, when I'm behind and can't catch up. So we look for each other and that's been work. How strange it's been for me to do this, which I haven't been able to do before and may not be able to do now, for fright. It's queer the way you married, so young and so finally. I wonder whether you think about how it was then and when you were first married. And since. Every marriage is such a story. We need good wishes. I realized that those when you send them will have to be based on what you see. Luke's address: 2A Downshire Hill, London NW3. I posted his letter. Do you need the $200 now? (How about after Christmas). I wasn't sure what you were saying, if that's it please say. If you want to visit after Christmas, I have a real bed with a real mattress now. I am struggling to come to a conception of the movie and this time is always hard and puts everything in question and is lonely. And I miss Luke's cheerful voice on the stairs. But on the 2nd of December we're going to jump into the sky and be in it 14 hours (maybe stopping in Tokyo) and come down on Kai Tak Airport, which because there's no room on Fragrant Habour (= Hong Kong) is built into the sea. It's the dry bright season there. Jam's pretty mother goes to the races every day. Her sister is a fashion buyer! Her father is a retired banker who used his brain to be a millionaire. And there I will be, shabby and staring, trying to hang onto my wits and remember that a poor, unemployed filmmaker can see as well as anyone, and trying also to see for my scholarly friend who's Chinese and therefore afraid to see anything that would make her feel unfilial. - At the tip of each hair is a universe. When composers, conductors, talk about music.
Blueprint turns into plan, plan turns into elevation. Ann Kipling 7B pencil marks to her on the paper. Black and white. There's color there. So devoted to a single path. Rembrandt etchings. I want more space around me. As she is when she isn't wearing her grump: the zero clear detective. 'Disturbed.' Those who know circuitry. There's a special sonar crystal set for depth sounding in submarine detection. Saw the two people in a relationship to himself, a catalyst. What it is about sci fi - Dune for eg - is that it speaks very directly. Take the spell off me - the creased brow - prison. - This was a fine day, bright, waking after coming to sleep late, long cold way home from C's house and the way it worked last night. They let me into parts I like and not in confusion this time, an exact view of what was understood or not, my voice getting lower through the evening. Sometimes with J it is high and I know I'm scared (by her man?). And the language I could find with C. I and T born in March, C born Sept 1st, C and I go to Europe, both study psychology, both don't stop studying until we're in graduate school, have one child each, are betrayed in the same way. "Did Jam ask you?" "I think I probably told her before she had a chance to." Meet in the street, twice, three times, etc. This morning it was fruit breakfast - the Frank Herbert stories - J come in greys and whites, leaves Ez and comes back later and I think to go to the glass bubble [MacMillan Bloedel Conservatory] to see plants, the good air like earth in it, a nice man standing quiet watching birds, a birdboy playing flute, light on the web of struts, condensation making light mesh on bubbles. The birds, palms moving in the little winds, orchids? Smell (closeup), the cactus, the grit, light ownbody. J in those neat white pants going quietly around. I wanted to sit close to her, in simple love with her, she not quite with me, a fraction of a kiss in the car made us both gasp. Ezra going crazy and attacking her, the sky that was spread for us when we came out. What do you look at when you come out? I'm not quite keeping up to myself with her, these days; it's C that sets me up for it when we've had a transfuse. Imagined setting a crystal or glass rectangle into a painted landscape and seeing through to something else. Sitting in the bowl when the sky was lit like love of sky at home. Something was wrong with J but I was happy and didn't care- - Now it's time to see again, Roy's [Kiyooka] face frightening me with its tight lines, I kept forgetting who I was with and speaking the false speech with them, as with Josie, I am not awake. FOCUS FOCUS Not being able to find it with J. - [Upside down page - don't know whether it's out of order. The slides Grandfather's table prayer and a picture of him Each of the ancestors as children, young child and old voice (photographs). The picture stops the speech goes on. At the beginning a face speaks and speech sight goes into sound. The film also has a family section in the front. What an artist is and does, making as well as possible, is what to be / consciousness immersed in ferrying between worlds. That is why it's more than religion. Love and thought made into thing, the sense of responsibility, which is not initiating acts, but which makes a different life, by predilection / then. Put an almost invisible thing in the focal point (hiding eggs), ripples in white. A near imbalance, The knowledge of places - house, copse The white one where trees emerge - As a presence to some, as a flame of light to some others Some part of the being must always have its attention pointed towards fulfillment of this quest. Visualize a flame in the cave of the heart and direct all the faculties of the mind to flow within - prayer to see - movement of going inward must gather force, flow of consciousness on the theme of the quest. Mantra sinking into the cells and musing on the index thought it holds. Meets the deeper listening of his soul - The process of working out in detail the decision to surrender to a higher power is called consecration. Sincerity unification of the whole being around one purpose. - The Ground / the sky / water and shadow - It's all apart and dead and you don't care and when you kissed at me I was gently revolted and remembered earlier revolts that I hadn't recognized / and Sandy's calling you by refusing you / and nobody can find you the way she can / and anyway you can't find me / and anyway we're giving up / and anyway I don't want to go to Hong Kong and all that's premature and we talked about marrying to keep ourselves interested and now that's done and you've made me come (however abstractly) and is it you're disappointed that I did (without you) and you can't talk to me about work and change the subject when I do and what were we flying on that we can't find now (open heaven) hope. Being fed-up with having our beings directed at each other, that's boredom, yet they are directed nonetheless, and that in anxiety. Should we separate we both suggest and can't say. Having a relationship that strange enslavement, human beings are not anxious about their relations. The smiling woman of your pleasure when you're pleased. I haven't seen her lately. That relief of coming together when a person comes into the room. Oh you we've got ourselves into an affair. What I know is this. I'm feeling that my being is fallen and therefore can't interest you, or my being is fallen because I don't interest you. I'm terrorized. In the competition I'm not winning. I'm not actually interested in you. Sometimes I think, oh she is interesting or pretty, but you don't interest my imagination. I don't get reflections from you, my voice goes high. I'm angry because you aren't interested in me. "What was going through your mind just then." "I was having one of those minutes where you are looking at the separation in the future and feeling both the pleasure and the pain of it." The last time when I threatened to move out it was when you were called by S and then you asked me at a time when I'd say yes. Now S is calling again to see if she can stop us and now it's my turn to threaten to move out. When I first came in she was irritated by my simplicity. The fact that you don't want to hear my work. No longer talk about equality. Being marginal to the culture. Or not. What do you really think about it. Are you really marginal these days or are you holding out on me. There are no confessions. There are things (judgments) you're holding and that is making it so - that's one of your ways. Loneliness isn't a danger of a lie. I didn't want a love affair I said, I just want to know what's so, and have a companion in that, I thought you had a passion for clarity, and you don't, you love it but don't know how with a person. - She does things with me she wouldn't do with Sandy, and that's my use. - I want to be out of your will. Not knowing each other is not knowing whether the other is lying. -
The Manchu claim descent from a girl and a red fruit. Parthenogenesis the origin valued by all who would excel. Everywhere is full of souls waiting their chance to slip into a bodily mother. A sunbeam, or a breath of wind. Snake whispers to the baby Nothing new is being created. The whole thing remains a question of abodes, to be settled between spirit and woman. Children never die deeply, after a very shallow death course they slide upward again. Yes she prepares food for the all-consuming time, nothing else. A suicide also she folds herself in leaves with a poison in her mouth She reenters the dark mother The dead are called Demetrians, squatting in embryo in earth, area of Demeter.
The cosmos changes, from the sidereal tent to the smallest gesture
- Brother Paul Epp, tonight I met a woman called Marion Penner who is a photographer. I partly liked her, I liked her big competent energy. She was only half Mennonite. Her father, who's 64 now, went to university in a city in the Crimea: he played Schubert on the violin when she was young. (He was not a believer, he survived.) We looked at each other and were amazed. I am far from home but still sometimes it seems I become more and more Mennonite. Is it time to review what they taught, we are people apart from the world, we hold ourselves apart from the worldly because Oh Jam I think I'm in shock, all evening I've been preoccupied remembering how we think we're in trouble, both with stiff gestures, I've seen you that way sometimes since I've known you. You were wild thinking I wanted out and miserable. No / this was Zoe's evening, Things to know - we were talking about R! That low tide. There was a sense The Mennonite tale Rhoda's 'so fine' and quick. - It opens and closes like a door in the wind. Desire. Will. He replied that it was not the fear of dying, but rather the fear of losing my soul, a fear common among men who do not have unbending intent. Respect for oneself as Unknown Facing fear. Fear clarity power old age. - My dear I don't know whether you're in shock because I'm going away or I'm in shock because you've left. But you are in shock. You're delicate and tough and we wish each other well, just don't want to die ourselves. Mesmerized writing. Do you know the sensation of looking then writing. The mood of helplessness Slowness Split: trying to preserve self separate from interaction. Anger and refusal of world / resistance. Unpleasure in how it is. Work of the country world and soul. The strain of continuous 'relating'. The PRC movie. Resistance is not sure of itself because it hasn't eaten the other. The Answerer. Curiosity repressed. Fantasy satisfaction. Ego being servant of the divine: direct satisfaction in experience. When there is life in the writing. The way other people hardly exist for me.
Sacrifice daydreams. Right reverie. Enslaved attention and what it does to energy. Takes. The separated awareness / the sense of two. - Imagining technologies of soul. Screen memory.
'Objective.' Resist the hypnotism of words. They told me. - C says it's writing to eat in the future. I think a long time and agree that I do store it. Interpreting waking life, if dreams, by the same rules. Ie is moon written mon. Man changes the direction of it and tilt. 'Taking responsibility.' I'm wondering whether 'being in a relationship' depletes me. C was saying both my positions. You're testing, at this stage. Know if you don't want it. But is it that the things I'm thinking don't come into it. Chess, is it played visually or. T learned and had thought it was logic. I was shouting that it could be played the logic way and tried to describe the sensation of logic. You like the sensation of responsibility, it feels perky. C saying every moment is a chance to know as much as you can. I was saying I think not every sort of mild (mood) mind is morally and that to go into something 'outside' is not wrong. We were defining positions. I to defend myself and she also. Ghost and dream are names for the same sensation. Always about fear of being a ghost - unconnected, lost. Saw C look a witch and wanted to know if she is scared of the thought of knowing. The look of a witch is the look of a woman who doesn't hide herself she said. Yes, but doesn't it still scare you. It's being scared to look like seeing. Also being scared of seeing what? Anything that has feeling. How do you feel it? Strongly. At least now you're talking about what you were always afraid of. Yes. A sensation of seeing. A witch is being afraid. She knows what you want to know but the sensation of being a witch is being scared of seeing what's forbidden. During the conversation cunt and breasts suddenly alive. What let it in. It was the pleasure of speaking out loose. With Don [Carmichael] the comfort and tenderness, when he said he couldn't (love) music after Bach, believe in it and I said that I sometimes think writing stopped with 'Vaughn', that imaginary time. Having trouble with modernism. Agnes Martin letting (making) me cry. Crying last night after helping the girl carry a shopping bag. The loveliness of the encounter of helping touched loneliness. They lend me articulation. - R said You're not in love. I said I'm not but I will be. Finding things. T says she doesn't, C says she is. Lofts - T dreaming of physical neighbourhood, D saying how she works in the country, I imagining the sense of undomestic space. Find it where it isn't obvious. You have to pretend you're strange to the city. Studio - going out to work. 'Warehouse.' Money. UIC. I love abstraction! The exercise of trying to say. T read Roy's letter in an unmatching voice. It seemed bitchy. C said Luke wouldn't be able to decode it. I realized it's contemptuous, as he says. T at her home in Brooklyn looking at her name carved. D saying she draws sounds, voices. C understood that she drew what they said. I told the story of being a word on the blackboard. T noticed I keep putting myself back in school. C said at 14 she couldn't stand to do these things but nobody dropped out, everybody went to university. I exclaimed about those who stopped in grade 9 - how I felt about them - that they'd stopped - she wouldn't say which classification she was in in school. I'm close to school because of J - mother and grandmother. Dreams - not being able to leave home. A year, no years. Which is home. It's career, leave home to become something, choose a life. At home it's potential. Anxiety about really getting out and where to go. (It was easy then to decide.)
Frank's farm - letter. Of the voices that can be in me, which is mine. I look at the feel of experience and try to articulate it and have a private language and was speaking it. The self experience of not being understood and speaking anyway. - Jam I think marrying is a distraction, what I want is to learn how to be with you as we can be. And your going away is darkening me. And you too. As testing: do you really mean it?
What I'm hearing is that you're a man between us and if I go into my right self and love you will you love me back, as you do. I want to go back to the time when I came to give myself to you and you didn't want. I want to know, is all. It isn't seduction, it's real, it's what I said to you and you to me. I haven't been in love because I haven't dared, I would shine. You haven't been showing yorself. Why've you been boring me. Sandy did a potent zap. I didn't realize how strong. When did J tell S. R too: I won't die. - There are no issues: only not being able to meet. I said and then thought. There is an issue and it's whether we want to meet or stay out of. Testing out how weak you're allowed to be said C. When J speaks and I don't understand her I wonder if it's that she can't know or imagine where I am or whether she can't be bothered.
Whether you trust yourself. Yellow face, red spots, sore on tip of tongue. Dry moth. Teeth falling apart. Eyes dark under and red in corners. Cracked lower lip. Then the back broke into burns. - It is hardly believing the dimness of what I could know say think with you. Is that what you mean? Keep having a dizzy sense I'm not remembering what can - thought just now I could stop kicking myself and remember that - Ah I have to learn the language. We could remake the valley in - Heal yourself by stopping all ego-centred activities Vocation the quest only To make art is Watch the connection of
Is life Jesus If life is the work -
I wanted you to help me stay awake. The way they do. - Beta, alpha Key to autogenic training is passive awareness. Use of imagination, not will. Increase alpha, control body temp, and relax muscles Going into deep delta and seeming to be asleep, yet recalling Induction - see a meter (marked), choose where you are. Deep breath. Hold for 5, exhale slowly. Heaviness. Right arm. Left. Rest. Abdomen warm and relaxed. Chest lungs neck jaw face. Weight of head. Breath - each goes deeper. Count back 25 each number tell yourself you're completely relaxing. "I am insensitive to bodily feelings." Down at 25. A suggestion. - Xerox transformations of photographs by
Publishing commitment Memory instruction Later can think of alpha 25 and be there. Can do things by one-word instructions. "Dilate." - the mythological I've been saying to her You and all the thinking about you - Definitions are a way of practicing writing. The activity of abstracting = intelligence. The pleasure of seasons Does the emptiness of those days come from having a split Going into Artscanada and finding the shamanic site/landscape pieces by Harriet Feigelbaum, Tim Whiten, Abraham Anghik, Charles Simmonds, the Poiriers, I was hot and cold and thrilled. But whenever I think of taking on letting myself into the powers I get scared and guilty. The guilt is as if I'm lying. I'm guilty also about unfinished work, Lynn's house and the garage roof. (Goodness?) My dreams of work like to be vague dreams, to go into a material is too long. My good work is casual, a moment's direct careless construction. Jamila I'm mad at you for not wanting me in research assistance any more. Jamila I'm mad about/with/for you. I didn't dream about you often. And couldn't remember most of what we did and said. You don't come in early morning. You want to decide privately whether I'm with you and you won't fight me to teach me how to be with you. Time is troubling me, too much present and little future, past in lovely fullness sometimes as remembering Frank tonight. "It was a splurge of time." Wellbeing is. Invention more than research. J makes me feel stupid for wanting to feel things rather than only refer to them. She has a range I envy anyway and we don't laugh. Last time at her house we said we should separate (scheiden) because we can't find our high country. I came to her shoulder and cried a few tears, so did she. Then I went home and was fine. Some nights later (3) she telephoned pretending something but wanting me to help her. She was slow and had sulking gestures. I was full of wild force, wanted to fuck somebody and she was my allowed. But she couldn't gather herself except later a little. I was mad and sent her home refusing to discuss it, because it hadn't been love. I don't know you. - I liked to imagine the PRC film, massive silence, the violence of the man Rhoda said she saw. They talked about plants, I remembered how it was to have the presence of plants.
The movie director's work Mary. I was so hard on her trying to give her a hard reflection of the distortion I thought I saw. Stopping The little patterns and big ones. Having a range. [In Hong Kong with Jam Dec 4-18] engagement presents carried through the streets with music a family that had an advanced scholar would advertize its honour by setting a double flagpole up in front of its door land ownership and learning, book learn's prestige on account of Confucian values for social policing maintaining an orderly empire - Bone method, that is, the proper use of the brush Wing Bone-setting - drew the officials of the Water Palace with crabs and fishes hanging from their belts because spontaneity, the force of life, was supposed to ensure a good long life to be, or become a hsien, mountain man who lived out his several hundred years on the earth, moving on, above, or inside it with perfect freedom. Hsien were superlatively light. Mi Yu-jen at age eighty showed no fading of his bright soul The Tao art of painting is to hold the whole universe in your hand. There will be nothing before your eyes which is not filled with life. It went to our heads a little, thronging the shadows about us with wings of scarlet and darkness. dark clouds Pao sat on the edge of the table, ruddy and golden in his dark red pullover. bright emerald wheat and blue-green bean fields pain at the mouth of the heart the not-yet-wedded husband or wife feather rain the namers "Ga-fe." "Oh, ga-fé-a!" act of birthgiving itself considered degrading afterward ceremonies of cleansing, burning cedar twigs, lighting incense and firecrackers, 30 days of taboos until the cyle of the moon is complete, the woman may not cross a threshold of door or gate, lest ill luck - Circle Lo. Jockey Club. "Are you suffering from polio?" [Artist I met on the street. He took a photo with my camera.] [Cirlcle Lo clipping] [website] - The Islamic cemetery, grandmother's grave. We sat on the next one. Confessed our dismay (easy) and then saw a green grasshopper with minute markings, one leg, long antenna. It jumped into the air and flew down. Some birds seemed to unsettle when it would have been near them. In the grit snail shells, small and large, a bone (from a finger?), two tile squares, rosewater bottles. A dug grave without a person, but a piece of cotton that made her uneasy. We both thought of falling in. Went to look for the small white flowers with yellow centers [she called fried egg flowers], that grow on those trees (like this) with big leaves. I found one from the description, she carried it, smelled it and left it here. They unwind from the center. Baby graves with rice for birds. Small seeds, seedcases, going into my pocket. She likes me finding things. I like her coming back when she thinks to. Hold her round the leg when the watchman and one woman go past up the stairs. I'm sitting beside a broken balustrade opposite ringed palms looking uphill. Magic place. All the stone beds: brick, marble, made up, some in a little wall with tiled top. The interest comes into things. We look and smile, those are the best. The shadow we walked into at the quarry, it moved, we saw it was a dog's head. Quarry, road into a place, sides of rock piled with sorted iron and floodlit, a magic matter-match. Dogs barking. Walking on powder good-smelling dust with blasted granite. I wonder if we looked like lovers the way I walk so related to her. Schoolgirls who saw us looking and made a festival. I found a path through tropical vegetation (dry at night) downhill to dinner, she said she should have found it herself but I was glad to give my specialty. Oh Jamie Jampa. We are not wonderfully intelligent, but generous and loving, satisfied. The ammya and the little girl niece. Waking, a dream of a movie, a man (read the synopsis in a movie magazine, saw pictures) with a place he liked to go - I'm parking a car in an alley - certain psychic movements he likes to perform in it - four girls in the same teeshirt - he tries out one by one, the last is right, I park and let a man out, go down the street until (hope he is away, go back along the other side of the street, push through a restaurant where a man starts up interested saying There's the chick from San Francisco (I understand prostitute), he sez to me Uuhh, i say dryly as i pass Uuhh and the assembly laughs at him. At the health food store, a bread man [?] deny it to from the movie. A printing work - four etched round plates (quality of sundial) mounted on a machine, with a hand as a clock hand sweeping them, and a mist, as frost or chemical, on part of them. The man loves and studies them. (This body, nuanced territory, the parts making messages to me. A lump Jam found with her physician fingers, when we were in the hotel bed.) (Every day it's still there.) When I woke from the dream before I considered it I said it's about you leaving me.
Watching the movie found myself with my nipple near my mouth. A girl on the left was sucking her thumb, we were like an audience of sleepers. I have my experience so dimly in memory, not remembering what I want to know. The story is interesting now and I can no longer recover it with the accurate ease I think I had. I wonder whether I can write. We are not experiencing deep structure as in the summer (sacrament). We're together in detail, the way the taxi driver hummed. Daphne I'm with you. He hummed a phrase, J consulted about where he'd take us, then he hummed it again. We laughed. [Staying in the YMCA] Last night coming in, the desk watchman when I said 305 smiled and repeated the number to learn to read it. 05 was easy, had to go back to 3.
At the dinner the good spirits. E's going into a sensibleness. He veers into fantasy and was full of charm. She gives coded directions for us all to be nice. Looking at me as if to enlist me away from the fun. Doing dishes together. When she put the apron around. I make confidences that amount to saying what kind of woman I am. A mutual appeal. The moment saying goodbye, when the gesture hesitated and completed itself / there are real things happening. Dreamed a long distance call to Sara, pleading to have Luke back. He couldn't come to the phone because he was in the closet. What i realized was that she will have staked a claim of her own. -
- Lan Wei the gentleness of stone I'm singing It's love it's love it's love alone / cause King Edward to leave the throne. Whosoever shall seek their soul shall lose it. Dreamed, earlier, a small house like Burghley Rd, almost a cav e. I was working the garden, the trees were uprooted under the soil / I piled on good compost. Another house, I think Don and Olivia had been in it, I wasn't sure what to do, whether I could live in rooms with carpets, and twigs on the walls (hooks). Found two huge rooms in the back, they were studios, bare with pipes, white, I planned moving my bits of stuff in, there was an artist named Miriam? who was moving, with children, taking her whole Canada goose series. Outside was landscape, it seemed I was back in Sexsmith but with Luke. The house had more and more rooms for more and more children. I left Luke (he was younger) at Lakewood House and did a beautiful dance with Nora, came home, there'd been a fire in the kitchen, someone had been frying four meatballs. Landscape with low rocky mountains. Oh Jami for you / with you here I am in the world again. No more clairvoyance, not dead and not alive, babbling (not so much as sometimes) sticking close close to my friend's body. - The story of the excursion to Lin Po Monastry, first we have to lie down together, is it pure automatic, for me to forget it all? She complains I've made her uneasy in her company, she weeps a few tears and that makes me happy. Reggie was fat, she told him "about you," meaning that to be a clearing, but he turned it into something else, "He didn't see me in it, I told him I was happy and that was a problem." We went out, walked through the botanical garden into the market streets looking for lunch, not making up our minds, in a back room she said Tell me about stones, what do you know about stones? (The pleasure of finding a whole pot intact buried in the ground.) They used to put stones in the ground for fertility, they used to take stones out of the ground for fertility. They are about gravity, they are planetary, I like to imagine clouds as stones (the cloud stone pillars of the gate), lithos, megalith, all the poems about stones. The word stone. The word rock. Then we got on the ferry and stood all the way at the window, saw islands, one with flat caves. J said "Look at the deep entries."
It is the elusive marvel of good homecoming, but not that, rest. They are resting, the rocks broken apart by a line but not fallen open. The good rest of you. I wonder whether in the mysteries there are, you have taken me in to rest me, as I asked you to, because of all you know. And I must die because it's a filling of the hunger that drove me. But you, do you have one, is it to reconcile a lover with a family and so make a complete circle. That would mean you don't fail me but I fail you. I wonder if he'll see you before you go. I don't like him and so I don't call him out of his misconception. She knows I don't like him (E). Individual liking, showing what I have (beyond rebellion). The submission is because of the force of the hatred, except that on the night when the dinner party was good we supported him and he was flying. Your obedience. You won't leave the dead to bury themselves and you won't fight them to wake them, what's your way, you keep them company as much as you can affectionately. What does it do for you, keep you undivided. The grasshopper I smashed in my window and now I found a brown one on the stairs. The feet stung on my finger. I carried it out to the grass but what was it doing on the steps. I imagined it there for me to restore, to repay the debt of the one I killed against my conscience. But this one was too easy. The night after the dinner party Jami so roused because I'd been alright but it was wrong for me because it had cost me too much. I'd been a woman in it. You knew about the stone. "What is it about stones, that are split apart but still standing together." "I imagine it's just that." Getting into the taxi, "The three girls can go in the back, Jami, you and I will go in the front." - On the bus the working women talking loud and how it was to laugh with them, gold teeth in brown faces. We did it behind J's back and it was fun to have her find it already made. Road, and how the sky's power. The mountain that had red light on it, a path showing, a sort of division down the height of it, we were among yellow stones and roadsides, the sun turned red just above mountains behind, when we turned it would have changed. Climbing, speaking. The sky's cut where it came down to the edges. My voice went clownish not knowing how to say how lovely, but it was true clowning in glory. A jeep came up the hill. I said "If it offers us a ride we won't have it." J said "It won't offer, they never do here." It stopped and offered. When we came to the steepest part, a curve, the sun had halved itself, the bottom half although it hadn't yet reached the mountain, was cut across by dark blue. We struggled, I went into the climbing breath and it took me very fast bent over forward. Meantime I had enough to see that the light had turned deep amber, like I've never seen it. Grass color on the grass, the roadside falling off on the right. J had fallen back and I was carried on the lovely impulsion of will. When I got to the top, not far, I stopped and sat on a tuft and saw that it was night and there was the first line of new moon lying flat on her back, just above where the sun had gone down, and J came up and sat with me. I said "Did you see." She said "Yes, she's new." Then we got up and passed the gate on the mountainside, opening in the sunset direction, and went past stalls with electric lights, and down an avenue in the dark and heard a fountain and came to an absurd new gate towering in concrete and so to the monastery. All the dreams of that night are gone, white gauze room, tent. We're head to head and heard by the other one down at the end. Mosquitoes sing outside, each a bite on the wrist, your warm little hand. (If I had your body I'd be lifting piannas for all the girls.) Night. White gauze like moonlight, the house of sleep. Green light from the window. She crashes in her bed. Our heads have iron bedheads between. The distinct dreams in which we were not together, but then you are in the last one, the three young ones who want to catch you up - "You're the kind who has tight ears, aren't you." "But they can hear small sounds." A baby has crept up, they didn't hear. Cheryl was in that night for a while. -
- A path on the side of the mountain, yellow. From it seeing down into a farm on the two sides of a ravine, the ravine dark green down through honey grass. Beds for green vegetables, thriving color, concrete reservoirs full and reflecting, walled like fields. The house has a vine over its roof. Two persons in the rows squatting under bamboo hats. The terraces wider and narrower up behind the house too. A bush with many purple flowers, bougainvillea. Next to the house an aisle with orange dahlias. Chickens in a grove. A concrete sidewalk bridging over the ravine. One of the fields with yellow-green choy has the tops of a few boulders left in the green. Japanese garden. There's the blond dry grass around. The hilltop boulders break through. The sea and a white beach below the farm. The path circles round the back of it and on, it's rocky, turns into a sidewalk and comes down to the beach. On the other side of the beach the sidewalk begins again and goes through fields. Choy, celery, carrots, wonderful finished plants, persons watering them by buckets with spouts hung from a pole across the shoulder. Handmade farms, new houses. The sidewalk, fields on both sides of it. The sea. A woman under a hat encounters me. I say hello. She has a thin face and freckles of the country woman. She says hello in what sounds like an ironical voice and says something else after me. The first awninged café but I can't see any food. Where I buy grapes the woman smiles after I pay. Then it turns into a town with plastics manufacture, parts of dolls in sacks outside a room with family around a table. A boy cutting tiles to fit an angle. Children with white bread rolled up. The grandfather calls one back to give him his plastic pistol. I'm thinking of Luke and have collected things for Daphne. In the low land, banana tree split ears, papayas hung down in a long bunch. I stop to figure out what they are. Imagining J and I scholars with a white dog and maybe a boy, in this town, on the top floor of a new house, looking at the alluvial vegetables in their peaceful intensity. I liked the path through it becoming the path to other villages and beaches. There was a dish overturned near the path on a height, some mushed paper and other broken crockery on it. Under it a jar nearly buried. I took off the lid. White skull on other white bones, eye sockets turned up. I had time to see leg bones up against the side before I shut it quickly in case I was watched. Other jars further up nearly to the neck in rock and soil, but just next to the path with their covers sometimes weighted with a stone. Time to go to the ferry. - [letter to my mom on three airgrams with Luk Kwok Hotel return addresses] Hello Mary Epp, and [?] happy Christmas too. Today I bought your present, and it was my present too, being able to buy it, a pleasure - corner store, things in piles, black, all the same color, corner dust, and an indifferent girl knitting. I don't look as if I'll buy and a long time later there I am with my pile, and I have to nearly knock on her shoulder, she adds it all up and I (having learned earlier today) tell her I'll give her 20% less, she tells me a price just above mine and I say okay nearly shouting with glee, then they begin wrapping in newspaper, putting in plastic bags and I go away full, then I turn around, deciding on the other direction, and catch sight of the two of them [?] their wrists with pleasure at their unexpected earning. So I have a brass plate with a Chinese inscription on it for your parents, they can put candy on it and say where it's from, and a bashed lovely brass teapot for me, a present for you that I won't tell you about because you wouldn't understand without seeing it (but it's curious and wonderful, very beautiful and also useful and old, and Chinese, you will never have seen anything like it although you may want to use it differently than it is named) (I won't mail it from here, costs too much). Luke's present I mailed last week, a Japanese warrior robot that turns into a spaceship, well, he'll like it. I got Jamila a birthday present too, her birthday is Luke's: an old plate, cratered like a moon. I'm in a room at the YW, Jami's parents are too bourgeois for me, he's a spoiled froggy patriarch and she butters him up as is the habit of kept women; she's fine and alert (Esther), curious and motherly, and J is very fond of her and so the two of them are always taking care of Percy so he won't feel how he isn't the favorite parent. Same old corruption. The rest of the relatives are, like relatives. The women see, the men are important. I have stopped going to all the dinners, but because J is filial and loves them all in her way I go to some. Meantime they find me weird for not being fashionable or interested in money. J keeps swimming in her two worlds less troubled than I get by that effort. We are happy conspirators meeting to cry and laugh. I'm the first of J's friends to see where she comes from. The relatives are called Farouk, Abdul Kader, Roheema, although there's also Henry, Alice, Fannie. We sat next to her grandmother's grave for a while on Sunday, in the Islamic cemetery. A green grasshopper, rice on the baby graves, birds, ringed palms. There are many butterflies here, and they are big. There are 70 orchids in my room not counting the buds, wide as yawns, blood pink with stripes on the flowers - it's just inside the tropics, everyday cloudless all day with some soft clouds from the south, morning and evening the verge of melting but still form. One day we got on a ferry, rode nearly an hour, landed on an island, took a bus round through fields where there were buffalo and buffalo calves, like Java. A few rice fields. The bus climbed up and we looked at a thrilling mountain with red light of sunset on. Working women, brown face, shining gold teeth in their honest faces, showing happy to be going home laughing at our looks (are we boys or girls? Are we [?] Jam has a hippy headband and I wear a coolie jacket. We laugh too. The bus lets us off, we walk [?], the road's wide as a sidewalk, there are way shrines, we can see the red mountain still, I'm clowning with joy at being in the country. Oh the silence! And the sun's getting nearly to the mountains behind us, then it turns red and its lower half turns blue, the whole China Sea is black there where it's going down, the road is so steep now I go into my yoga poer breath, that takes me faster and faster, J falls back, the grass is glazed with a deep amber coloured light I can just see through my concentration on getting to the top, when, at the top, I turn and sit on a tuft - the sun is gone and where she was, there is a sliver moon lying on its back. Did you see, I say to Jam when she comes up. Yes, she's new. Then we both sit in silence. After a while we walk the rest of the way, an avenue of trees, kiosks with electric light, the sound of a fountain, a preposterous new concrete gateway, two stone lions, another avenue, another fountain, gold roofs, a woman banging a pan on the second story of a temple, J shouts in Chinese and gets directions, we go through a courtyard and are asked to write down name sex age profession home nation address and then are taken to a dormitory to pick beds, any one we want in a room for 100. We sit outside and look at stars, we're under the Milky Way and the constellations are different, the dogs bark, a shaved headed nun in grey coat and grey pans tucked into grey leggings goes past and nods. They're looking for us for dinner. The last buses came and they'd closed the kitchen and now they have to open it for us. They grumble but they're impressed that we walked. Lin Po Monastery. Prospering. Gold and red temples, the buddhas have piles of oranges in front of them. Vegetarian supper, they believe animals are sentient. After supper we walk a little but the dogs bark and we assume it's time to go to bed, the lights are going out, the moon has set, although it's no later than seven. So we go to bed. We want to cuddle but there's a guardian and we don't want to offend her so we make up beds head to head in adjacent upper bunks. Our guardian speaks so freely her Chinese seems set to a tune. She says we are not allowed to sleep on our quilts because they'll get hard. We have to sleep on the grass mat. Yes, yes, a hard bed. She likes to sleep with the light on but she'll turn it off for us. She gets up at three she says but we don't have to. When she's turned off the light she pads down the rows and tucks in our mosquito netting, she and J go on shouting affectionately as she settles into her upper bunk. J and I find a route under the net for one hand each, and each get a mosquito bite on our wrist. Then we lie the three of us each in our white gauze tent, in rows of empty tents, as if on shelves. It's too early to sleep and too hard for J's luxurious bones, we lie awake much of the night, in between waking we have elaborate dreams whose details we lie and remember, but we are not unhappy; on the contrary we seem to be lying in peace and very close to each other although alone (and we know that in the morning all the stories can be told). Sometime during the night bells and gongs. In our half waking the gong is so distinct we can hear the fine tuning of the air's waves. There is a kind of drumming also, we listen carefully to the drummer's timing. It's complete music and must tune the sleepers' traveling so all dance the same before they wake. Our guardian got up and J crawled in with me to say hello and then got back into her own bed. When it was light we were both up and off on different paths. From the garden I could see her on the scaffolding. The courts, with wells, pots of flowers, lines of mosquito netting hung to dry, smoke from cooking fires, vegetable gardens, reservoirs, paths, orange trees, bamboo, steps, round moongates. The ostentatious temples not as interesting as the courtyards, washing tubs, cooking pots (I took pictures). Some old nuns had black caps on their baldness. After breakfast (rice gruel and noodles) we went away on different paths again, yet the paths kept crossing. I saw her running down a path and then running up again with her journal. She said See my house - there were steps, a turn, and a walled place with a ruin, two stone tables, round, each with four square stone stools, there's Jam with her sweater on a branch scowling and writing, a big squash growing next to her pumpkin coloured boot, and there I am with my journal at the other table, and prowling with my camera in the ruins, which are of a temple. Oh happy house. Hot sun, orange flower smell (do you know that smell?), garlic growing hung down from a roof. Somebody's kettle and bed in the ruin. After lunch we go down the hill and miss a ferry and catch one, and each go to our own home. That's part of the story but isn't it a nice one? How strange this whole story is. On the ferry we look at rocks and clouds and have a very satisfactory discussion about stones. We're back on Sunday. I hope this gets to you for Christmas. Love. Real China is 18 crow miles north of here. - elements wood fire earth metal water
- Woke. Eyes out the window, the clouds were small and pink. When I lifted my head I realized I was dizzy, and then quietly imagining being ill and what to do in it. And then quietly thought and tried ways to stop the faltering. And then got up to see whether it could be ignored. And Jamila had removed herself and just now I'm imagining how if I were alone and didn't give myself away, I could accumulate a hot quiet inner life and not need to be seen and so see. The place on the path where bushes made bright and dark walls high up on either side, the strong smell of cinnamon, dusty. Traced it to dull flowers. Need to know the plants in detail and by name, in order to be able to create the country by calling them. The pink ----, the red ----, the fuschia. A tiled room, green and white, window with an iron grill, an outside ledge with one row garden, a propeller for hot summer. Chung Nam Café. Goodbye Hong Kong. The cooking pot with its perfect handles. A moon for you. It isn't perfect, I vacillate in my love for it. It has cratered stoniness. - [Jam and her mother and I have visited a fortune teller.] Luke - he will stand out in what he does, after 18 - will be tall and there will be a lot of women, he'll marry and have a family - it will be easy to bring him up if I don't cross him - he may become mischievous and get into bad ways if he isn't educated - he prefers his mother and needs to live with her, it may take a few years to get him back - he's intelligent and not like a child. [About me] Takes risks, courage like a man, restless, but will come through them, have a long life, should not marry young (it won't work). The first marriage was not a real marriage, will marry two or three times more but they won't last, independent, like a monkey, others when they look at you may think you have everything but inside you're empty. After 35 you'll have more success and stability, you should try artistic because you have a talent. If you're thinking of something particular just before or after Christmas is good. You're poor and never will have money, even when you get it it just goes, friendship and personal relation is more important to you than money. You're ambitious, everything in your life so far has been like floating but now it will change. It has been ... false (no detachment). Adventurous, conflicts. J - Thyroid saved you from worse, you were disappointed in love and now you're ashes in the heart, you're better to be alone. You'll never say, this is my husband, this is my child. You're best on your own but you should adopt a child, the sooner the better because it will save you from undirected thoughts. You'll be neither outstanding nor mediocre in your career, but you'll always be able to get money, after 40 you'll be rich. You're independent, you always know how to help people. (Her mother pats her arm.) Marriage and money / success, who cares but that it will take me years to get him back. And education I know, it's the specialing for who he is. Maybe you'll go there. And then thank you J for the lift out of hell and on. Who won't know but is always faithful to the first love [ie for her mother] and that's as it should be. Your doubleness wants to please and doesn't say no and is popular greasy. [At the dinner table that night Esther says "The fortune teller says Jam will get married two or three times.] J help me keep what we know, said. - [Back in Vancouver] Back in my house the life after death is here again. There I was years back and meeting you in another time. Alone here the razor is back, not stoned but thinking of making and materials. I've built something into this house that's mine but obliquely. And you and I are our lay analysts. Parts of the body agents for themselves not the 'I,' is it possible? Physical preparations for the afterlife. The mementos, amulets, texts, things household and magical. Bones in the pot. The Copts obliterated parts of carvings, or carried the Coptic cross over. - Pictures of mating animals A crack tick in the air nothing around it Shadows begin to interest me. Large covered jars, sidewalk markings. Bandaging prayers Statues for work. Answerers. Voices for writing. - A voice comes with certain thoughts, a solemn one as when I thought pictures of mating animals. That's the artist's voice and I don't like it. Concentration on the problem of life after death brought into being a group of people who studied the sun and moon (and movements of stars). -
The way it is with them, the eyes are speaking The sweetness of writing when it feels like discovery J helps me keep what we know said Public, eventually art has to work and if not now after a while, survival of the fittest. -
Superstition. Self reference. Connected to interestingness of gesture, event Omen - Daphne - only when it strikes me Silent night holy night all is calm all is bright Christmas Eve 1977 Charlie Chaplin died of old age, 88. [Phoned Luke] Luke got an electric racetrack, a bar of soap shaped like a ---, a new jumper in many colors red blue dark blue green. Shouting at Jake, and Jake talking sweetly. "Ezra wouldn't. He wouldn't recognize my voice, it's been so long since he heard it." "My feet were hurting so I couldn't sleep." It took a long time, stiff English child. He whistles a tune at the door and Jake goes mad. "When I went to my new school I wasn't at all shy and when I wrote a story in my writing book everybody crowded round." "I'm not so interested in war any more." I said I felt strange. He said "And I feel a little sad." "I would like to be magic and come to see you without it costing money and be able to be here and see you." "My eyes are a little watery." "Mine too" I said though they weren't, but - "I love you" I said. He said "Me too." His silvery cough and I knew it was time to go. We said goodbye and neither of us went. After a while he began to sing and I laughed and said "I'm still here too." I said "Send me a kiss and I'll send you one too and then I'll hang up." "Is Nellie back yet?" -
With Jamila I feel we've made ourselves impossible and want to have to leave each other and so does she and under that both of us feel attached, at peace and safe. We want to feel unsafe and be alone to concentrate. We are alive in two kinds of time and always aware. Doing it directly or indirectly. She is refining her work. I've been in resistance. We can tell by whether we're interested in our work. - In deep anxiety, we've gone under.
Nakedness and art. Erotic. -
We make each other laugh sometimes really why do you not give me exact information. She isn't going to be able to concentrate. - Josie was here. We didn't miss every chance to make it more interesting. How she looked, refined and steady. Last night at Trudy's I was far away and incongruous but it went on without me and I knew when I needed my own world more. The slides of us looking at each other were like mirrors. When they look at me they looked pulled into themselves. I looked frightened. C at chess looked a vertical spear. R said to Josie, You've had a breakdown haven't you. What breaks down. Is it the separation of inner and outer. Experience which used to be called the soul.
She doubts my stamina in making life together, I her courage to do what she knows. - When we were fucking I went down to a cold and dark place. Ed Epp. He thinks about things but they don't talk about what they think about.
|