| edged out 1 part 3 - 1981 october-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
27th October Rain second day. Sleeping with towel between my legs. To John and staff: waylaid at Mannville. The message it took so long to complete. The little baby my second child held by my mother. I'm thinking this one is missing the special language I spoke to Luke in. It's tragic this baby won't have beautiful live speaking in his possibility, only social. A man with a fat head in a little red VW pulling over peeping his little horn at me - [ie Jam in a borrowed car] Needing to be loved, wanting to know. "I don't need to know about that." "Everybody's fear." "A pattern that displays exactly that." "Just not being able to make it." "Appeal." "Fears natural to the enterprise." I feel its operation. "Sympathetic but also outraged." "When I'm faced with the evilness of scuttle." What happened. I said "I want you to see something. Will you please look at this." "The people who are best at something are the ones who are loved." "I don't know what this love is but (?)." "It's true that her work makes me feel affection." Il melior fabbró? "Here comes somebody who will increase our loves." Will you please look at this: the possibility that someone will do everything they can, but not come close to the best because their material is not good enough, and not be loved. Then a flurry and wall. She talks about appeal. I marvel, dimly comprehending I've really stumbled onto something. "You want me to go into it." It's either she really thinks I don't have the possibility, and can't stand the pity, as it was also with others. ("When I'm with you why do I feel I should commit suicide?") Or she doesn't want to feel how she .... I'm laying this out not finding it. It was there in one picture. "Dazzled." Do you think I should go to school with Rhoda? "Precise and clean." "Her sense of bits." "Charged particles going by in a tube." Left to right. Left to right of course. "How much she doesn't need." "The big cumbrous machine of my work." "Brilliance is in seeing where her work is. The world is there too." While writing this it's come to me again about slides in schools. [application information] Going into a house I used to visit (Sarah's). It is being renovated or torn down. Speak to someone in passing. (I did remember.) Go up the stairs, come up into the wide land. Open grassland scanned, L a pool with statues. I'm noticing it looks artificial, it isn't what it was when I was there before. The dumpy statues. Horses grazing at a distance. The whole sweep of the landscape is man-made, as if the prairie is growing over a steel shell. to risk detaching themselves and their visions from life Silver light. I went out. House front and rectangle of earth with plants, concrete side, soaked colors, orange in the grass, the shapes and colors of plants, the houses' shapes, the opening of the space around the houses, the lipstick house with red flowers in its parterre. A man holding an infant to look out the window. The way of walking and stopping to look. Cross-quarter days, Easter. I looked but didn't wave back at the infant. Different reds of small oak in front of different colors of house. "You want to be gracious and elegant." "You want to be loved" but the odd fact of being loved when wanting only to know. Risking finding out one is not the one who's loved in that way. When I thought of it now I felt a skip of pleasure. And when one is loved it being nothing. Then is it: wanting not to be loved. The way it frightened me when I had become alone that I was loved. The outwardness with people is as if what keeps the shield. When they love is when they are feeding? (On the music.) Question them as if they were myself. (Sheila.) To risk detaching themselves. The ability to imagine what his painting would look like from a distance is more than a technical achievement, it is the key to his personal vision. I am working constantly and with great joy. 28 A small shirt rolled and nailed over the studio door with its message that I hadn't yet read but feared was eviction. That was the night waker. Painful heartbeat. Talking to that pale red teacher realizing embarrassment is from the slowness. Nothing to do but stare. 29 [Leah Rosling] "What I believed in really does exist, but in a form so different from anything I had imagined." "The strength I used to see is still there but it is as if --- has gone into you quite deep and taken its toll. I see such a tenderness around your eyes." Then I wanted to know - was seeing that she looks like that [too] and it means older and hurt. "The moment of seeing her is already remote and small." Mavis Gallant. "It was 30 years ago but it seems like 5 minutes." The way she talked so fast. Seeing the wear and emergence. And the reach of the smell of her breath, four feet. And then thinking of those who don't look older and a rebellion. The dogma is tenderness but - "He and I have a very deep, odd thing together." The woman called Hope about the man who had killed her fiancé and raped her, then looked after her and her children. What C was reading and how it suggested that she needn't refuse herself. "You use every nerve, every wandering thought."
The inherent religion seems to be quality / risk / distance covered. Experience. Her black and white contraction. That utmost. Her wire will. The steel voice. Her metal. And its skill in dissection. Whether what's lost is the rare beauty of the.... No it refines. But wears.
Not to Jamila, to who it was, I have said yes we have to go on to what we dare not.
Without J my quality will fall. She is angry, Am I willing to go on without. What wants him. Health.
Where you have to go on to. If Being able to speak in some way.
"You aren't strong enough for anything that isn't off-course." Either do or don't. And with you it would go on as rivalry.
It's a crisis I can wait through and then have to get to again maybe endlessly. "You are so dear to me I'll gladly lie to keep you near me."
So I will be what I am. But I am also I want to touch his chest. I stopped going to your relatives because I couldn't be with your allusion in it, go past the pain of the difference. I couldn't bring you and Luke together because I couldn't hold the complex. I let myself be silenced because I was guilty wanting something you don't have. I didn't hold to the confidence of the actual. You also failed me many times and it has made me - What would it take to be stronger to see. What I hope, it will be just clean and a source without discussion. If I wait through and you I think I'm going to make a decision but the decision is made. That sense of it must be where a difference could come. If that necessity is not the guide what is. Roy's tears. I thought it would be right if we could see it together.
I can resist and if I do I go on in dryness. Those who abort for 'mind'.
Alright and then the practical. And why. Because I can keep no connection. November pregnant trying the church, rain night, he's sick, watered leaves. Writing is there any possibility of doing what will stand. If it's true. [a Korean man I meet at the steambath is interested in me and asks for English lessons] An old father. Knuckle. Push against the wall. It isn't euphoria. The look of the hand. It will be interest. If it's apart from you - but it is not. What will happen to the
If the meaning of it is that do I have to do it for you. There are two voices, one says it has to be, the other, wait, there's something wrong.
For the child - who won't know the father and won't have J either.
Before I do I must find out about bruises under eyes. -
Because there was something you wanted. - 30-31st October
You don't have time.
Easter new fire Bavaria Saturday grain field tall cross in straw evening service lanterns raced first fired women can't be close to "We are burning the Judas," men and boys rejoice first to arrive outside church rewarded by women who give him colored eggs at the church door. to keep off the troll and other evil spirits active at this season Materials collected door to door by the young.
Need-fire force-fire wild fire living fire - "I know what it takes to get to you when you're like that, and I can't imagine her doing it."
Lying under the blanket feeling fresh sparkles come into my scalp. Telling the body's sense of demanding to have a child, she said simply "It's heat." I was salved and then telling and hearing the comedy of the story of the burnt raisins and the loaves of bread I asked Fred to run and take out of the oven. [Fred a painter working as a janitor at the steam bath]
The moment of joy understanding that Sandy is being included. The waking at night, I'm talking to people telling them what I really think, things that are hurtful. Waking in agony saying what am I doing. Laing's book of what he and she and the children said. Telling T she should put out accounts of the conversations she has. T talking about Steiglitz. "His language belongs to his family now, but he has that." She forgets where she is. T forgot the frying pan. That they heard about the thesis! And the whole story told tumbling out, of not being heard. Seeing both of them go away too. "Did you fall asleep." "Not quite but I was beginning to dream." The light in one room, traffic outside, early dark, red curtain, under grey blanket. (She told the film. Both such willing travelers.) A small area of print fabric inside a dark cushion cover. "Can we be quiet for a while." "Trying to be intellectual." "Yes." "Emotionally, I seem to need that. I was seeing that she was generous at first, to attach the woman, so that later she can punish." He was there in exactly the same way I was, only what I could do with him that I hadn't been able to before, that I had always needed to do, was to be completely still. He was not operating on me, he was moving as he wished to, but his wish was mine. He was the movement of us both. I was entrusted to his sense of movement, my love was for the quality of it - timing, pace, interval. He said he liked the ways we found our limbs positioned when we came to ourselves in bed. I said he made me happy. He said: "You don't make any mistakes." "I love Rutherford. And Michaelson." This makes me a minority since the majority prefer to play bottom polarized roles and intense sensations a safe word or code action the bottom to enjoy a fantasy that the scene is not consensual The top's pleasure is dependent on the bottom's willingness to play. The stubbornness and aggression of the bottom is legendary. in which she can be helpless her desire to act out a specific sexual fantasy or simply acknowledge shame and guilt and use it to enhance searches ways to get pleasure from the forbidden the exchange of power is more essential to SM than intense sensation, punishment planning and using equipment teaches the bottom to transcend her own limits If you can't play capturer you'll be it. I don't want to live outside of power in my sexuality. I'm willing to give myself over to a woman equal to her amount of wanting. eroticizing her need that I feel in her hands She entrusts me to determine where she'll go sexually. And I honestly feel a power inside me strong enough to heal the deepest wound. I feel a hurt spot and a need and it's there and it's just the tip of it, the tip of that desire and that is what first gets played with, made erotic. I begin to imagine myself being the woman that a woman always wanted. That's what I begin to eroticize. I fantasize myself becoming more and more female in order to comprehend and meet what I feel happening in her body. I want to give up power in response to her need. I begin to eroticize the fantasy that she can't get enough of me. It makes me want to enflame my body. What it feels like is that I'm in my own veins and I'm sending heat up into my thighs. My power is that I know how to read her inside her own passion, I can hear her. With butches you can't insist on them giving up their sexual identity, you have to go through that identity to another place. What I described earlier about seeing my lover's face entrusting me like she did, well, I want her to take me to that place too. Slowly the concentration builds a series of shimmers. happy my cunt shakes them out in small concentric bands Then a snap, tension gone, a breakthrough. One of many. Access and suspense in inner body reasoning. We perform meditation rituals, we work together and wait for the right of passage. There is a feeling of remembrance. A feeling of boundary and threshold. I know something is within my reach. We work each shudder, smoothing it from a lump, a bump, to a lengthening wave. from my middle light and space There's a place I've been. I know it. Knowing it I have to go on. Yes soon. I know I have to be careful. She and I work swiftly. ribbon or colored nylon rappeling line Patterned, patterned over and over again Tensed in slow motion, trying to hear voices I have waited so long to hear. Voices come alive. All of me joined together reaching a place so clean it has a rich, moist growing smell. I stand alone, curious. I settle to the ground thinking of the dimensions of this place. I walk for a while. I wander through the city exhilarated by its beauty. who loved and wanted to nurture the butch strength in other by wearing clothes that symbolized the taking of responsibility the commitment to please each other I heard the call of a woman world-traveler, a brave woman, whose hands challenged every denial laid on a woman's life. [Haven't been able to find who wrote this but it's quoted in Joan Nestle "Butch Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950's," ] the points of the spirit of fire
[Eluard quoted in Bachelard Psychoanalysis of fire] That the very body harbours these monumental loa - is to experience the major blessing with which possession rewards the dedicated. To understand that the self must leave if the loa is to enter, is to understand not being god and human at once. He experiences an overwhelming fear, never have I seen the face of such anguish, ordeal and blind terror as when the loa comes. In the growing control, ordeals and instructions. The structure has evolved a force that compels forward. The leg rooted to the ground. So that, to the body which must walk the earth, is returned the self that is appropriate to such a dimension. Skillfully, rapidly, construct the wave of sound and crash it forward. Beneath all this is always the sense of contract. its whiteness a glory and its darkness terror [Maya Deren Divine horsemen] And this I knew: this is the sound of light. It is a heard light, a beam invisible but bright scanning the voice for substance to fix upon, and to become upon that substance light. -
Belly button locket (soul protector). He can activate them to a greater degree, and he can better direct that energy. Greater mastery and so greater spiritual force. The 'horse'
I have seen the sweat stream and his voice grow hoarse as he laboured to make some contact with the spiritual identity which he might bring forward into the body of the person. The sometimes painful always exhausted aftermath It vitalizing forces "it's ability to induce in them a moment of extraordinary dedication" Guarantee that the burden will be distributed and shared I set myself in brazen competition with all this which would compel me to its authority. Beneath all this is always a sense of contract: whether, in the end, one be victor or victim, it is to be in the terms one has accepted. The pace had slipped down a notch into slow motion. So here I can observe myself. Like a shaft of terror struck through me, that it is no longer myself whom I watch. Yet it is myself, for as that terror strikes, we two are made one again, joined by and upon the point of the left leg which is as if rooted to the earth. I feel the gaps will widen and spread and that I will, myself, be altogether lost in that dead space and that dead time.
- One brilliant man beautiful and experienced captures four and others, provides them white marble rooms, work materials, clean food. His eye penetrates each. He knows everything they've been. When he comes into a room at night there is no choice or delay. When he finds more than one in a bed he will take only one but the other may see. He knows fertility at a glance. He knows infertility. He knows how he wants to breed. He captures a superb midwife. He captures a music teacher. Every inspired thought makes its way to him.
Whether his cows love each other doesn't interest him. Their string quartets sounding through the open windows. Brilliant expanse of snow. It is late afternoon. We have come a mile and a half from the school bus, we are climbing the little hill in front of the house. Bobbie the bull is standing near the road. I have bought an old truck, all my money. I paid too much. It is older than my father's. I get in, turn on the engine. It is blind, windshield covered with mud, but the lights come on and I can feel my way peering through. Its speed is its own. I can keep up. Look at it. Contraptions on the side, thinking of making a room in the box. From the dream world, the look of the other, it seems a dream world whose detail familiarity plays out the meanings of the big structures. Fertility. Looking at trucks parked on the street wondering if it is R's.
A glimpse. A triangular shape opened and then closed as if a curtain fell in front slightly right. A sense of looking from the dream world to the other and seeing its detail familiarity layout familiarity playing out the meanings of the structures, which are the reality of the dreamworld. David Larcher's truck and work. November 6 Wake in slight pain talking to her. Bath. I won't phone. Get out, yes I will. "I woke up talking to you and I wondered if you'd like to come for breakfast." "I told you to call me when you're fertilized." That was enough. Coffee. Sit naked in the east window sun sweat down out of hair writing the bull - men in families aren't bull enough - the real bull subsumes all he's conquered. That makes him a perfect servant of the herd. The calculator. He doesn't mix with affection he breeds. Thought first of my friends and I given a room each, child care, meals, materials, safety as we are but fertile without choice, by wise judgment - hotel palace. He's mostly away. It only works with us when we're in another world at our best. Yes of course I will. You never see my view. Whenever you insult or injure me you never see what you've done. You're never sorry for anything. Instead of knowing yourself angry you wreck the connection by refusing to be direct. I want to see whether I can find someone closer to my own degree. Your gifts aren't my home. I could say I don't know how to love you. I like what you are but I don't know how to bring you near me against the resistance you make. "I like you best," that means I like best the way we are when we're there - is that true.
8 Nov After concert, Rhoda, Ellen, Trudy, Ellie, Ina, Diana, Sandy. It's Sunday. Diana visiting. (Marion Barling) This morning's freedom. I thought this freedom would bring her. Tea, burnt toast. Got to writing about cheating and the unconscious, that took all the time. Ezra crying we didn't know why. My body came on, wanted to put my breasts on her, push head against her arm, and shudder. Then to feel between the arm joint and the breast, what's the depth in, complex white ticks under her breastbone. Looking. Here's the little fat man in the lower part of her face. Her eyes are very bulged, but the forehead and eyes are of her mother. Drawn up, the ruler. "I admired very much the way you were at Diana's party, you came in and sat down at the table and ate." Diana's profile at the wheel, straight up and down. Walking along the park, this was what I wanted to say first, looking at the houses and their small front yards frightened/thrilled by their individuality, how much there is to know. How each house is like a person in its physical expressiveness. I don't believe it isn't a person. Each house is someone. Comic wooden head. The plantings. Two plastic pails, a window frame, a sink.
[sketch of woman working in the white marble room] A porous paper with slick surface where there's detail
When in its run it squeezed down under the door the little instant of its body the little knowledge in my belly I was its lightness The memory of how I was living in the dream and the force of the thup. I must learn how to cross back in.
Trying to find my way into a knowledge. Rotation of line and shadow. That R and I have been in the same person. A country house. Man in bed with me, light and walking shadow push him under the covers. Van with tarp over it, sleepers. Judy's dense German boyfriend. They're getting married. I think it's the boyfriend I slept with the night before. Spit out the loose teeth lower left jaw, all broken bits. Landscape fissured. A simple treatise on optics around the edges of the demonstration only to be found by fouiller on the edges of the frame. The ravishing countryside of a particular place. And whatever else of the felt place.
She's inviting me to her pretty house. "It's always a pleasure." "Yes it's always a pleasure," hoping my tone reminds her how uneasy it always is. The surge is gone. What've I got here. Loneliness. Where does it feel. She's very tense back from Montreal. The book. I'm shouting. She's showing her worst indolence snobbery. Help me. "You work like a dog for -." At the end my neck is stiff. "I don't know any -." And having let herself be captive the whole time. There were two babies, one natural, the other like a shape, 'negative.' They were on a roof? Steeple. I'm inquiring of 'fertility'. The way she would show her loveliness out of reach. We are separated, I see her over the bank. The headband! Energetically talking to a student. No the (big male) student is wearing the headband. She was my age. I didn't get your thesis out. A road. It was at that corner we said goodbye. Who. Maybe Robert. A woman flying fast between struts followed by a line of little girls. There is a sort of witch school. Shown where to sit. You move, mutter, go into a trance. It is just below the rail. I try the first time. The trance is just a physical pressure. I decide to be pushed by it, head left against the wall, I pee. Toilet bowl with strong crystallized pee. Second time finding the mutter cunt cunt cunt cunt see someone I know insert it's alright notice people have gathered in the bleachers. Seems to me trance making should be private. The piercing when I thought I saw her in the red headband. Last voice in sleep Trudy's "It's gotta be soon." Wind on Granville. Tea rose. Move the wrist through the sprayed space. Pink on curls back. Calling her eyes back from the street. Staying cold. Hands under raincoat feeling thin back. It's an Oriental puzzle. I thought that was quite good but her eyes don't wander less. Hot little fairy tale. Well yes I can. "My grandmother had four abortions before she had my mother, and she tried to give her away to a foster home. I only said I wished it was easier to have children. The part of it I know is I wonder what it would be like." "What you would make?" "Did you see the scars on her face?" Cheek on the ice glass. Raise head. "Pillow." Kneeling at the window. The beauty of the movie across the way. "Look at his hands!" "I know that old man, he's always reading or studying something." "And there's a blue! And a red!" "Do you see the card, it's his birthday." It's a child.
When I complained to Fred that in graduate school I hadn't been understood, he, talking about Susan, "I can see that, I've seen it at the art school with some of the less talented students, but Susan is so obviously brilliant." Then my eyes got hard over listening to the rest of the story, while considering if it's true, at the Slade. The gnawing with D[aphne] and J[am] of not being an authoritative, trained writer. And knowing I don't quite bring focus to anything as they do. The foreign older man follows me home. J's car outside. She's in. Go round to the back. The house is waiting for demolition. Mossed apple tree. The back steps have been broken off at the top. Go round to front steps, lock the door after, locking windows down, no sign of her she may be sleeping. Shall I go round to other windows on the ground floor. Grandpa and Grandma have died. We are moving into the house on Clearbrook Road deciding which furniture to move into the bedroom, the bureau. Grandma coming into that basement room carrying a basket of laundry, white kerchief round her head. The Russian table. Tubs under the window looking onto the garden. She lived for 20 years? - 15 - in a house she loved. The picture was of her and the house, and him never living anywhere he wanted, always ceding to the best for his family, and thus keeping in reserve right through in unworn-out desire. Frank. I'm touched by the way, after a time when there's little to eat, and then a meal, it will release a hard little shit. Since Luke left a month and these jeans are moving around my bum when I carry towels up the corridor. "I saw you in the lane, I thought Ellie's really looking thin." In Chinatown trying on clothes. Looking at the brawny body in a leotard, trying on a cheong-sam blouse, it pops the snaps when I expand my breath. The thin new immigrant salesgirls helping with the fastenings, like dressing a female impersonator. The great boots and drained grey face, but over the silk padded jacket it looked like a girl. "These are woman's." "No, I don't like them." I am lownlie without "Why do you think I want a child." "Because you won't be one." "But after some years I'm puzzled because I think there should be a child." [from Swampy Cree trans. Howard Norman]
Sat on Daphne's lap and she rocked me. People at the party had dived singly into a pool. Down - turning - up - up - up - up - how's it so far - endless. "A dark horse will still race but a chestnut, or a roan, something like that, ... they're chicken." "They bought a doberman pinscher, there was nobody in the house all day. One day she came home and the dog was coughing and choking, she couldn't figure it out so she threw the dog in the car and took it to the vet's. The vet didn't know what it was either but she had to go home so she left the dog at the vet's and says let me know as soon as you know what it is. Well she gets in the house and the phone rings. It's the vet and he says are you home alone because if you are go straight next door to the neighbours and call the police. We found three fingers in the dog's throat. The police went in and they found a thirteen year old boy hiding in the basement, he was missing three fingers." - Looking at the rose. Heart pain. She is despising me again for the rough work. Fright at sorting the tangled brambles. The potent and spindly. Painful destroying. The scallops made strength perhaps. Is it information or the barehand tearing's small scratches. Face toxemic. It was happy at noon and then it began to look at the garden's compromises and find them unbearable. It became a mania shifting plants clearing rubbish rip out the section of fence. It invented the stone a setting, making the corner behind the little spruce, star moss and the silver serrated to a south-facing ledge. Cold. Heart tremour. "She is our materialism," in relation to Carole, we grow up into spirits. Sun after two days of storm. Anguish at UBC over record library card, what if I have to lie, all sins and failures, what if I lose what I want most, have I lost it already. Sidewalk steps down garden, underground light shone on sand grain, concrete, dark winter, college age. The feel of silk jacket, color in daylight alarm in falselight is blue. She's the voice of the cerebral other divided to despise me. Odd the direction the reproach comes from this time. The information I need to be fearless. To go on as a line. - Slipping the line forward (from the flute) - [Charles Olson] that the cell as a principle of the structure of the human body is of an order equal to the brain. They go directly to the cells involved. There's a unit in the cell that comes alive, receives and transmits through that eye or ear thing of special existence. Cell research. It resolves the goal. The prime is complex. autonomic system which, as far as I understand, is to preserve our organs from our will: a will of its own, the will of free [function], that which the organ itself requires to be permanently in function within the terms of creation. Would there be intuitions of the whole earth also - stone. The angels of the right side know and order, the angels of the left side obey and act. swarms scribes
Discourse with the beloved is the poetry I would like. All is there for feeling, all does flow. That is the creation, you don't use that for creation. That's like sucking off the tit. You do your own act, which is to separate yourself from that expression of feeling. You put the feeling back on the other side in time. It's an act of both mind and creation itself, on your part.
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