July 19 1981
- We're getting ready to go to our separate homes.
- Already? Isn't it too soon? Will we have anything to do when we get
there?
-
- At the steam bath several times a slight waver, is it me I'm in, and
going home through the streets, is this my place? Alleged.
-
White shirt jeans bare feet brown arms movement in the house.
Sometimes I'm so hungry to see myself -
orphos orthos
dionys dionysus orthos
through passages dark and steep, in silence
24
Fracas in the bank. "I'm not going to give it back. I have
to have it." The hundred dollars and spoiled check. They shooed me
out. These last days repeated stops about money.
Then at the library 4 books, 10 dollars owing on them. The girl said
"Today's the 24th." I said hem, pointed to 24 JUN. She
said "Today's the 24th, go 'way." Thank you! I had only
twenty until ?
That was after getting film back on Robson, sitting on the sidewalk,
downtown full of naked people, in white shirt blue beads, looking into boxes
of slides from Slave Lake and that one from Edson. They're full of colors
instinctively framed, brilliant and have my loves in them. Robert's face
again. Graham, Bunny, Jabez, Jean, Gene. Wanting to show Robert to J: isn't
he beautiful do you see what I mean.
Waiting to find out why I have this time easily left J. Wondering what
dreadful regret I might be in for and yet it's firm.
16 August
Luke came. On the bus, Victoria to Marine Drive, Midway Connector. The
heat at the bus stop.
New red canvas strap shoes. Red across the lines of fine toe tendons.
Sitting on the rail, crowd pressed up near it extending into most of the
room, the children peering between the doors in their sun clothes, crowds
in costume, Sunday afternoon festival bodies and clothes. Everyone coming
through the door into the focus.
He came in his striped colored teeshirt, I jumped off the rail, skipped,
leapt, lifted him off the ground. Did the steward say My handing
over the flight bag. We sat on the sidewalk against the airport city wall
looking across to town, haze, waiting for the bus. Riding in.
6 September
On the grass with the new bike.
Yelling bringing myself and him to the beginning of tears. "Do you
want to just be in that family? Are you sure?"
Feeling: oh, I didn't know it would have to be me too, to be angry and
hurt.
The market and the blue bicycle, this peacetime Sunday, white dog Ezra,
Chinese bunshop, noticing I was seeing differently, the little house and
Strathcona schoolyard, broad pitch, poplar path, grass beside gravel through
the fence, walking into fishscale shadow lines.
Hymn in the broadside church, Josie on Diana's porch, the little girls
in the philosopher's garden, the little spruce, balsam poplars calmly turning
their big leaves, blankets, making the house, Anna's white underpants, "'tend
we got shoes for Christmas and we don't wear them very much."
-
- I liked the way your belly was fluttering. It was
- a sheet in a breath of air. Complex.
-
- "Like Gertrude Stein said, it's peaceful and exiding."
- She was talking about pairus.
-
Luke in his bed reading from the Junior Voices. William Morris.
Reading it in a higher voice perfectly in measure perfectly inflected as
I would, in little turns and edges, lightly. Naked on the bed, leg crossed
over at the knee, reading Walt Whitman Excelsior.
11
Morning was clouded, later when Luke had gone to school, blue reflected
on the skin of the side of her face, under her eye. From the dreams, I said,
a remaining sense, what was it of, it made me remember, autumn at the Olson
house, the clear sky, small colors, a yellow willow leaf, the stretch of
rubbled smooth grey fields on the way to Grande Prairie, the house, green
sweater, being in it looking at the family's things.
Now: I'm trying to recall the slight deep soft memory and signification,
slight, excited, a story, without its own detail, exactly how did Nordhagen
speak.
Walking to the bus, two middleaged women who see themselves and each
other as young, one in neat black jacket, the other in long black dress
and red Chinese shoes, walk laughing through the park-like streets to the
bus stop, with the white curly old pup. Three boy women pass them on the
sidewalk. One stares, it was she made me see this picture.
- "You describe with detail but when you want to swing out, you're
in the habit of thinking you can't."
- "I'm afraid of saying something that isn't true."
-
[J and I sleeping on the porch] Wake, she's woken first, Ezra maybe barked,
thin crying, it's Luke. She jumps up, I jump after her, "I'll get it,"
Ezra she and I arrive in Luke's room, head under the cover, thin crying,
a baby's wail, I lie down next to him, "What is it Luke," rubbing
his belly through the sleeping bag, hard thin belly, "What was it."
"A gypsy lady put a curse on me." "What was the curse."
"It made evil spirits come." "How did you know they were
here." "I felt one touch my toe." "It wasn't Ezra?"
"No." "How did it feel." "It was sharp and hot,
they came out of there, where the friendly ghost comes out."
I was lying marveling thinking this is one of the moments when the extraordinary
is here.
"I called and called for you but you didn't come." "I
didn't hear you because the door was closed. I closed it because I thought
it would make the house warmer for you."
- "Was the gypsy old or young."
- "She was young."
- "How did she look."
- "She looked a bit like a nun."
- "You mean she had on something like a hood?"
- "Yes."
- "Why did she curse you."
- "Because I worked for a company that had banished her parents."
- "What did her parents do."
- "I don't know what you mean."
- "Did the company make things, or what was their work."
- "They manufactured things like --- and motors, all sorts of things."
"She got used to it, she went to work to buy a caravan." The
sound of the word caravan.
-
What's absent, I've been wanting to locate and say it, is the sense of
fight for, integrity, urgency about the right way, is that sort of death
slow, the opposite voices say you've lost the sense of fight because you've
won it, you've lost it some while back but the decay doesn't show obviously
right away, you've become ordinary.
The devil of course isn't a person either, what is it, it would be the
force of lapsing. Robert was an image of someone still in the beauty of
separatedness.
-
- '... built by the extremely delicate decisions of conscience'
woke with it
-
Friday. Since Sunday slightly starving, milk and fruit, stealing 50 cents
from the steambath, risking the welfare cheque to pay telephone and rent.
The two small stories I was working on these two days are nearly as good
as their material can be, but they are nothing, I can judge writing and
it makes me think I can write. Starving because of the awful feel of fat
bum in tight pants. There are little things in writing I like but most of
them are like the Cosmo stories evocations of glamour which I think
are worth less than finding intelligent relations and even that I thought
next to the shampoo bottles is just decoration. I make pretty things and
don't trust them. I make clear stories that have the shape of stories and
so are junk. You Dorothy Richardson. Money is silly, owe, again,
a thousand and a half.
Camera and tape recorder I don't use, it is a life in disorder because
it can't decide how to be, it produces small undistributed images, keeps
no connections, and that's true, but what does it do instead.
No library card!
There was something I changed for, I hoped to give up the partial successes
to win a new mind and I did sometimes arrive in it, but what is this, the
old mind in worse drudgery than it ever would accept, and thinking of crimes
to enliven itself again. My honesties seem to have made me heavy
Carole's birthday. Her face at the door is beautiful, I notice when I
can. Al in the chair in hat and cold and medals. I'm here to eat French
bread and egg salad, wine, sit down next to the food, ignore A, watch her
when we're speaking across each other focus on him.
- "I want to go to bed with Carole" he says, 'you're forty-two
and you're like a teenager."
- The way he staggers, thin legs, big glasses.
- What's the secret, how does she bear, she does love him, like the pretty
mother of a retarded child she lets fuck her because he wants to.
-
- Come home and can't sleep, the food is burning.
-
The nice-looking man I put into #6. Over the counter, "Can I take
you to lunch tomorrow?" His smile, fused teeth, is all pain. "Your
face fascinates me." "There are times I like it too ... you look
like a nice man but I'm gay." Deep lines, he has to walk out in front
of my scrutiny: he's limping! Narrow shoulders, wasted, caved frame. Putting
on his windbreaker, going around the other side of the van. I said no but
checked carefully whether there was something other than pain.
October
It's not poetry although I want the use of multiple language, back-shifts,
inclusions, dictionary, dislocations, whole-body dancing, image magic, ambience
memory, small lyric, access by the other, free glamorous invention, any
language, sound pleasure, language intuition.
I also want minute record, exact description, complete reliability, coherence
by accuracy, acutely sensitive process.
Structural pleasure of implication, shapeshift.
I think I can use them all if each is and knows what it is, and the others
are also there.
What I don't know is what about misery of other persons, starvation,
political horrors. Is our peaceful time paid for in El Salvador. Is my skill
paid for somewhere. Does it work like that.
The boy on the porch polishing first a crowbar
and now an axehead.
And even if it doesn't -
I'm making heaven esoterically, for everyone.
I'm working on a head that will be used instead of the one that makes
horrors.
My love and skill are paid for in horrible ways I don't know, but my
place is to balance them, that's how it works.
My time and skill are purely parasitical maybe on a scale I don't conceive.
I accept the gift and risk punishment if there's justice. Or get away with
it at the cost of there not being justice.
My time and skill are parasitical but only immediately on people in my
experience, the rest are in another system perhaps imaginary, and yet have
to be accounted for.
What I do is useless but is training for something that will be useful.
I can't know until the gamble's over.
What I'm doing is or isn't parasitical but it is useless and there is
something that can be done about the other, and I could find it and do it.
Useless but there is nothing on any scale I can do.
Useless, and there is something very small I could do.
There is something very small I can do but what I do already is more
use in some way.
What I do already is some use but there might be something else fairly
wide that I could do, if I put everything into trying to find it. I might
never find it, would be likely never to.
I should continue learning what I am learning but at the same time should
inform myself globally. I have to learn the meaning of the parts I work
with now but the other knowledge has to begin.
To do it I have to use whatever I know of reading through given information
- that feels a fire rise - and in-countering situation.
-
Today cutting pictures in Nat Geog. Collage thought and delight. The
wrecked boat and green and black bits that have been together near Luke's
door. Been eyeing that. Pictures made of very small amounts.
Simultaneous grids: that is, minds of reference.
- Chelsea's inspiring body
- She is thin in a wide frame
- Right eye wide left eye narrow blue
- Feathers' lie around the thigh
- Wrist and hand forgotten in a beautiful shape*
- Your mountain legs
- The shape I liked best to feel, all the meat's inside the bones
- Wide feet wide shoulders thin joint to
the arm
Getting to the truth of this visit taking photographs of Chelsea's body.
The way the truth of my existence in most times with people is visual.
You see me looking, you see me thinking with my sight.
-
[dream sentence written without turning on the light] He
says, even after he is married, it, my work, is my soul.
Relation of a cream colored room and a piece of paper.
Listening to Terry Riley, a garbled it seems antagonistic conversation
with Luke that then I realize is asking to be informed. Then he forms the
picture and tells it, and I can partly join him, and then I realize that
was what I was waiting for, and he invites me to lie next to him in the
narrow space between him and the hard edge of the marble table, briefly.
Water falling and outlook over palm trees.
He's paying careful attention to war politics.
His face shines when his bicycle's fixed.
He drinks a cup of coffee and we talk about god. He doesn't hold onto
an idea, there's a lot to be discussed.
At 6 in the dark. Stars in clearly drawn emblems. Frozen grass. Toward
full moon. Grass slightly scoured. The named emblems. Orion with more stars
in some areas, a fuller organism, the added stars faint but clear. The quality
of the sky, black and clear so the figures were there without background
sprinkle. When I looked I'd see more but the figures themselves seemed clearly
signs.
11
Visiting old Konrads with Luke, Zoe and Cheryl, back seat of Pacific
Stages with a young man reading Time magazine in the centre seat.
"I loved seeing you and Luke from the bus arriving at the same outrageously
last moment."
Two very small old people greeting two small women and two children,
Grandpa's long hugging Luke, in his presence I'm not celebrated.
C's silence, Zoe's eyes, Zoe's colored face appealing to Cheryl, Oma's
hand on Zoe's thigh.
"How old are you now, thirty six, my mother was 38 when she died,
and she had nine children."
"Such bright eyes for someone of any age." Wanting her to meet
them so that when they die she'll know who they were. I trying to recreate
Clearbrook Road and succeeding. The plants in heaven, apple plum cherry
grape! Red current black current cedar acacia (Akazie) dogwood maple strawberry
bracken fern hazelnut walnut. Ernie's house, Nick Brauns', the railway roadbank,
Clara Thiessen. Ditches with bramble and that pinkflowered bush [thimbleberry,
salmonberry]. I was missing J, longing for the sense of Frank's familiarity
and love going up the back hill with me, his voice's ironic love.
Wanting to be joined in the little girl. J doesn't comply, C did. I used
to love to see origins - how Trudy would see it differently more belly expanded
less bird's-eye. Frank in an affectionate knowledge of foible and community
process. J holding her impressive integrity operating with them out of held
distance demonstrated comprehension.
The high streaks are pink, summer's stupidity is over.
"Ellie," twisted stretch out of sleep, bum underpants, "what
countries would be hurt if a waiter dropped a tray on Thanksgiving."
It's light outside. In the room the orange electric light. "Turkey,
and Canberra? Brussels?" "It would be the downfall of Turkey and
the end of China."
13 Oct
Wake thinking in the dark at 5. Turn on the light. Write here with tea.
Luke wakes at 7:30 when it's pink. He's going to Woodwards. I phone J. Woodwards
basement cafeteria young waitress with strange curls. "That woman comes
in here every morning, first thing in the morning she talks about war. It's
enough to make a person upset." The old welfare bodies coffee and a
doughnut for breakfast. Pender Street waiting for the 11 bus. Luke's bag
with space Lego and 2 Star Wars figures preoccupies him. Stanley Park, J's
territory, a longing. Red leaves walking fast upslope stiff leg past tourists.
He's in red pants and blue jacket. I'm in red shoes green socks jeans green
sweater plaid shirt; tight things. Aquarium looking for her uneasy she won't
come. Thinface person khaki clothes a daddy's wool and leather jacket. I
am so moved to see her, love her so intensely without permission to say
so, feel her fragility, feel sorry, have to stay in the truth of the distance,
- Lunch she has to pay for.
- "Ezra you're going to miss Luke."
The turtle's beak-mouth, dog nostrils open, eyes in creased turrets,
flippers plane rowing pivoting wings, flat body kept flat by interminable
rowing. It knocked its face against the glass in front of my face. Let me
out let me out. Confinement without even a weed, in artificial light.
Jellyfish swelling, squeezing, the finest fringe streams out, the inner
ruffles built to a tower. It moves forward like a smoke ring.
- Planetarium. How T looks in bright hair and coat. Lying back with Luke
showing off between clouds and music. Being excited to be there together.
The movement of microscopic life in jumps of the whole colony.
Bus, going home kids, streets, stars in murk, cocoa, candle, she sits
on the chair, depression and war, having to work at jobs.
15 Oct
Goodbye brightface. [Luke flies back to London]
-
"These are the car keys, these are the sac'rity keys, don't tell
the bishop about me eh." [Priest handing me his pocket contents before
he goes downstairs in the bathhouse]
-
There's a sill raised an inch. Beyond the window
an autumn sky saturated blue. In front of it the outside branches of a bundle
of leaves whose gold yellow is giving off a glow beyond its edges. At the
bottom edge some square of a brilliant white curtain.
It went on and I was out in the snow seeing tracks
beside me, hearing the written voice commentary. And then a light creature
running from the left across the trail - a cat - cat-size long-legged body
lighter than a cat. I look at its tracks, each pawpress has pushed up beside
it a little snow wafer formed exactly like a leaf, a small tip-pointed maple.
That's its particular mark.
Sorry I'm awake and can't read on.
17 Oct
Have transplanted two poplars. One I can see from
across the precinct - arena - has died, a support built around it, nails
driven into the trunk. Someone else built the support for the other so it
was buffered. The small temple of Ephesus falls over near them. There are
men with bull masks running at and overturning other men. Before it was
a barn, the rich farmer let the bull roam in the stalls. I was thinking
the temple had tipped because it was made inside the larger temple and magnetic
field of the god antagonistic to its god. The poplars were also of Ephesus.
-
[Diana Davidson's party] Looking through the party marveling at the distaste
I could feel for the look of her, companion delight that should have been
good for a long time. The one who'll last for her - t's how it is, how odd
that intelligent contact could be so ephemeral - is Sandy. And if that is
so we were a long time falsely together. But that isn't so either. We were
together as we wanted in another country but it wasn't family.
Rhoda's cigarette, bare arms at the drum.
The man at the table looking at Cheryl dancing.
Once liking the music. By the rivers of Ba-bee-lon. The sense of the
power of the sight of the 3, once more briefly shown.
Why nearly all the time except for a clapping and drumming that was taking
me up on my toes, it was resigned, without inner existence, slaved to the
room. Because I hate the music. The amount of food and drink bought by the
woman who won't do legal aid. And I went to eat. She was there a big smiling
mother accurately jiggling speaking in a little girl voice. And I smiled
too when we praised her party, because I'd eaten. She married a very live
young man who dances and drums. Delicious fatty ham piled on little plates.
Her fat children being given conspicuity.
Thinking of it now it was the embarrassment that was wrong
-
She uses passionate observation like what's usual to love affairs, for
any sort of moment. [Richardson]
The tall one goes out the door into the spotlight, holding it with her
trailing left arm, for the shorter and older one, who has just said "I
feel as if I'm ten pounds lighter," and who now, passing into the bright
light, with her face held back toward me as her shoulders go on forward
through the door, is saying goodnight. I am standing at the top of the two
steps heading the corridor, and when I turn to the laundry room door, I
am seeing, the first midway down the corridor and the second near its distant
dark end, two bands of light that signal rooms emptied and needing to be
done up. This sequence as I pause to consider the look of the corridor,
and to wonder if I am also remembering it seems familiar, even, as if a
dream I've recalled and wondered at: I'm working in a steambath, two East
Indian women leave by the street door, the one leaving last looks at me,
intent pained face, and says "Good night." I see the corridor
with two bands of light thrown across it, one halfway down, the other near
the end.
Or is the familiarity and sense of repetition from the sequence of two,
the nearer more intense, followed by another two of the same structure.
was real to her on a level just short of reaching
down to the forces of her nature, was pathetically, or culpably, a stranded
man; subsisting.
There was no cessation in her way of being,
no dependence, none of the tricks of appeal and demand.
She allows herself to saturate into her own past time but she arranges
into it little recognitions for the reader. Information catches up. She's
very good at doing more things at once. Teases.
Grateful when she sets out a situation and shows its turn, accepted.
20
This afternoon the shock after talking to J, I was still in when T came,
the way one toke made me want to be alone. She went to look for something
to collect me, came back with the piece. I was watching the sense of when
we understood each other and when not.
Saying she doesn't want anyone to come to her house. I said I didn't
want either at my house or theirs. People are too much. She said "I've
never felt it as strong as this."
Walking back among the maples - walking there the red maple lit from
behind and then from the front, her leather leaf's red. Walking back looking
at houses.
-
Looking at first summer photographs finding them innocent mysterious
and accurately conveying, and love gifts to the place, satisfying.
I did go far into disintegration to get them.
Now they stood distinct in a light that was
dark and bitter and cold.
at just this moment to warn her, to give her
the courage of herself as she was, isolated and virginal.
"He greases City Hall. 'Look,' he says, 'gotta go down town anyway,
will you drive me.' He wants me to stop at City Hall. 'You gotta grease
a few of the boys eh.' He had'a stop at the bank first. 'Oh Emilio told
you about that' he says."
The way she stood on the steps complaining, "You have to come."
Seeing the oddness of the act. What can make her play that one. I say "I
can't, it's alright," holding. Thinking, this transparency can be with
anyone, is the same anywhere. She's Trudy but it doesn't matter. Afterwards
remembering I hadn't been held at her body. "But you made a fool of
me." "You weren't foolish, I could see you were just pretending
to be foolish." Said with laughing confidence. After that one toke
feeling shifts in the head first one into solitary and then engaging with
her playing at reading the piece, again.
Does DR feel in the space what could be felt in the body
The classical shifts of light.
A personal answer and assurance somewhere within
the deeps of the living air. It was a touch. It conveyed the touch of a
living, conscious being.
Talking. The smoke line streaking past out the window and around the
bend. Face turning to follow it, laughing, it's like a train.
The way each fan-shaped shallow spread slowly forward and ate with its bubbled
edge a little further into the snow.
looking, away to the right, into a far-off pearly-blue
distance, that held her eyes, seeming to be in motion within itself: an
intense crystalline vibration that seemed to be aware of being enchantedly
observed, and even to be amused and to be saying, Yes, this is my reality.
the flood of her voyaging love
She also presents what she knows and leaves it at that.
What was it about those vibrating particles
of light that made them so familiar and reassuring.
certainty in that endless brief moment, that
ages hence they would once more be there, only all about her instead of
far away.
and the color was fading from his voice
her conviction of the inner vastness of space
a space that opened before her in the air between
herself and her surroundings
-
Is this another way to say keeping or not keeping an other. What I remember
- changing by pressing as if watched - always to the most essential - trusting
and being afraid - being self-vulnerable - loveable - without navigation
from outside - navigation from seeing the widest, survival.
When I haven't had the fight to take something through, and have it still
suspended.
Work in a quarter, sitting in the kitchen. Afternoon sun. Deep net of
triangles on hand's back. Anguish today not ease. Anguish do your work.
The emptiness of waiting.
What I'm hoping for, to be made strong enough to be able to know and
show.
What the dangers, losing the heart.
The sense of a more broken understanding than I remember. In the smoke
one can look anywhere and see something and if you accept to follow it it's
a trail. But what I was feeling was how I couldn't believe whatever I saw.
That was the sense of unusual judder.
27th
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."
"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.
"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."
to risk detaching themselves and their visions
from life
Silver light. I went out. House front and rectangle of earth with plants,
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.
"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.
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?
29
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.
Without J my quality will fall.
Am I willing to go on without.
What wants him. Health.
- Jealousy envy nonbeing
- because I'm not what I am.
So I will be what I am. But I am also
I want to touch his chest.
What I hope, it will be just clean and a source without discussion.
I thought it would be right if we could see it together.
- What is the necessity - the way my breasts feel if I think of pregnancy.
She's driven into anyone's arms, someone will be born.
- That must be a program and what it will cost me.
I can resist and if I do I go on in dryness.
30-31st
- [I consider sleeping with a Korean man I meet at the steambath.] Undid
himself to show me his scar from under the arm around to near the midback
through the ribs slit. "Maybe I am almost die."
- Life live alive. Death die dead.
- Eyes opaque. Looking in all the rooms.
- "When I am open."
- "I use to be very strong."
- Laincoat.
-
- How partings devastate you.
- How it strains me to have something to lose.
-
"I know what it takes to get to you when you're like that, and I
can't imagine her doing it."
- Telling: Patrique Déchenet. "He's a grown man and he still
thinks of you." "Yes I'm sure he does."
- My heart is sore.
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]
- "But Jam saw it right away. She found the word: tenderness."
- "But Jam is so fast, she's wonderful at that."
-
- "That's the pleasure of it, if one person somewhere -."
- "But the terrible sadness of not getting it."
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.
"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. "Can we be quiet for a while."
"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 its quality - 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."
-
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.
- My friends in their beautiful pregnancies.
- The midwife is a trainer.
- The children born.
-
- "Call me when you're fertilized."
- You don't make meaning you meet it.
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.
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.
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.
- At our best how we've been.
- It's true we can't keep each other open.
8
- Eye caught head lifted by mouse
- Eye caught head lifted by
mouse
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 gnawing with Daphne and Jam of not being an authoritative, trained
writer. And knowing I don't quite bring focus to anything as they do.
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.
"Why do you think I want a child." "Because you won't
be one."
-
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. She's the voice of the cerebral other divided
to despise me.
The information I need to be fearless.
To go on as a line.
Discourse with the beloved is the poetry I would like.
17
Pain. Might be the day's darkness. Three times the phone rings and it's
nothing. Headache.
The underlayer is that J isn't calling me.
I'm putting my hand to the receiver. It rings.
Her child anger voice so lovely to have a reason for.
Long bus journey. At #4 bus stop cold.
Almost sleet and wind. An old thin woman in knitted cap, blue eyes, smiling
at the chill, raised her red umbrella over her lap. An old man with fine
face blue eyes thin blue-veined hands held still not in pockets or covering
themselves. She studied him. The young man bad teeth long ape body singing
jerk guitar dance talks for us all.
Young girl keeps her head down. Business coat man stands behind shelter.
I pace. It's a long time.
To Boca where C is pleasant, T is grumpy, C wins through by waiting and
asking.
R second reading. Then I'm at home and my past and future are more at
home because I can tell I've given out something that was taken up.
And she comes round in a big car and likes me. When she passes alone
in the big rich car I feel for her loss of me. Red lights swerving off right
up Clark going where? "I was making an a-llusion."
Want to go home and work. Here sleepy head on arm on book, Stevens, on
counter, feet between stacks of towels. The silent man spelled SHEET, could
not write easily either. Big. Does he see me loving his silence. Lays down
a dollar bill. Moves his mouth [in dotted letters] THIS IS FOR YOU. Thank
you.
"I won't tell you who the person was, but we were lying down together,
night, dark. We were holding hands. We were in perfect comfort. There was
no antagonism."
Rain on the hand to wash the face. In the crying is the wonder, is this
me, is it the
"That there'll be a tragic failure of perception, of faith."
I'm glad she says it. "Of energy."
Now will I be my own subtlety.
Refinding how to stay quiet and tell the truth.
"You were having a marriage by yourself. You know that. But what
was missing was the particle of recognition."
We haven't been in the willingness to know. We have neither been clinging
to the true - that's my difficult hope - and tragic - where possibility
returns after impossibility is felt. That was the only place we could return
from.
"I have such lovely plans for the house. I'm afraid you'll spoil
it." For where the weakness and richness is. It will be very delicate
for a while.
Still have people I look up to - that's what has to go - there'd be no
one to admire - a crucial travel - I must have an ally - but that deprives
me of charm of appeal - will I do without that? Yes I think I must.
You want to re-enter ideality. It runs its course.
Can I do it without. That is their authority and my collapse.
The collapse that sweetens all. The collapse is alright but has to be
balanced in a demonstrated genius.
Sore and exhausted. It was a five o'clock morning again. dozing. Taken
in between the bare thighs and then not felt or wanting to either.
This is to transfer the imprint and when it's done I should
- What's the most that could happen - I could feel what was in front
of me not when it's gone and then what, I could marry. Is that right?
- The bare sad fame of work.
But the contact with earth life.
Contact o belly
There is that openness that frightens me so much.
- My emotion force will be lost. No.
- I won't now work with force not understood. It is the risk I'll take.
Now I'm telling her I did right with Luke but I lost Jam and tears are
in eyes.
-
Crying and crying but this is the crying and crying all worried words.
Howling.
What's the use to be myself if never with.
- What is the howling.
-
- Oh your not understanding!
-
- What is happening.
- Is it a threshold. Pressure. Intense.
Was in the corridor interested in watching myself howl. Es wah-ren zwei
Konig's kin-der / Die hatten ein' a-ander so lieb. Square mouth and breaking
on the second line reliably for as many times as I wanted to repeat it,
singing, howling and sobbing. Still in pain nearly crying and with a sensation
slightly dispossessed calling Mr Cohen [steambathe employer], not furious
about his cheapness, rather grateful, in pain, straight, without obligation.
Having stolen seemed to make us even but having quit I could complain about
his secrecy about Fred's wage. I was unable to make enough to eat.
-
"Trudy wants to move her table and bed to Jam's, do you feel alright
about that?" "Sure." Carrying things through rain. Awkward
fitting decisions. At J's house coming like that - dark house, one light
- dog begins - porchlight comes on - grey socks, hair bound, studying-clothes.
She's glad to see T, will hardly look at me. I'm thinking is this
conspiracy, is she in danger. Those boots through her house is she going
to feel the invasion by this wet furniture. A leaf in the corridor I pick
up. On the steps Zoe saying to C "I love the -," C's nudge, she
speaks clearface from her level to J, "I love your house." "Thank
you." T about the back yard. "I will take my coffee to the back
steps."
C and I on the couch under a blanket legs alongside, heads either end,
we talk about politics. "The people over the years who've been used
up. The houses that have been used for a time. If that is the centre and
it exists for those egos, if Jam's house is going to be used like that I'm
not going to be there very much." "They were more developed than
everybody else, they didn't choose their equals. If there is a vampirism,
an unconsciousness in the name of superconsciousness." The analysis
I came to at the outside. She is saying it's not right, I'm saying if it's
control how is it done, how can it be told from anyone's own desire and
development.
"I don't know how Ingrid is only she seems thin to me. She used
to be a spunky playful - I don't see any of that anymore."
- "If there is a pattern surely they must see it."
- "They absolutely don't."
It was making me worried for J, had I been instrumental herding her /
is she going to have her ginger eaten / do I eat it already.
- "They aren't going to fall in love with her."
- I'm not sure. I'm going to wait and see.
"Rhoda was thinking of something else, she was saying 'I might even
get married.' That was just before I came on the scene. I was Trudy's move.
Now they keep that connection with each other through a third person."
"But when you did it, you were the limb of the attraction. I
don't like the way people drop out of each other's lives. There's something
to me wonderful about the way their unconsciousnesses have been willing
to do anything to keep them together."
"What I don't understand is the way in every connection I've had
that has really had vitality in it, there's been a large amount of evil.
I don't understand how evil works. I know the good people who won't have
anything to do with evil can't be trusted to be able to -."
"There's a loosening. I don't know whether we could even be talking
like this if there hadn't been." Oh what does she mean.
The tricky. "I like that kind of job where I'm thrown into something
and have to learn fast." The many tricky parts.
And her too, her preparations. "She's afraid I'll spoil it."
"If she feels that she must have fantasies." "She does have
fantasies." "Then she's in for trouble." "Yes she is
in for trouble." Is she catching up a circuit of smaller minds.
C: it was at the end when she said "Everybody has a different reality
don't you think, that there really is a different truth for everyone?"
"Do you think Carole's view of Al is true?" That I saw her tired
and suddenly threw my arms around her and kissed her b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b
(it is you always watching the writing) both cheeks. "It has been that
we needed each other for something."
Waiting for the bus, cold, head aches. Finally walk walk walk limping
heavily boots bridge overpass the neighbourhood, slowing to look at asters,
the watery sink into park turf, house gratefully 3:15. Paul will phone at
4:30. And post office, weak and ill in pressed bodies. Parcels. $4.75 [an
hour] midnight shift.
- Here a screaming child screaming in a tone different from Luke but
I know the feeling. Go to the window and see a little one, Chinese. Hesitating
looking around. Screaming. I feel her as Jam screaming with injured self-love.
Open the kitchen window to follow her down the alley. She's moving oddly
lifting her feet. It's because she's lost her shoe on one foot. The other
foot's just her sock. The wet gravelly tarmac. She's going for the end of
the alley. I put on clothes fast and will rescue her. Not catching up till
she gets to Campbell. There are grown men standing near a car, another car
goes by. They aren't glancing at this screaming 2 or 3 year old, very small.
I catch up, holding out my arms. She runs away screaming. I sit on my heels
holding my arms out saying Come here. She has stopped further up.
I must catch her. Do, she's fighting, screaming maybe Chinese. I hold on
and say I won't hurt you, we'll find somebody who knows you. Go to the store.
In the light she's quieted and has her arm firmly around my neck. I can
feel tears pressing. To the grandmother at the counter: "Do you know
this little girl?" "No. Is Chinese girl?" "I think so."
She speaks. The girl has her lower lip pushed forward. "No talk."
"We'll go to the other store and ask."
We go up, I think I'll go back up, the alley. Around the corner comes
a small stout grandmother holding up a green umbrella, pressing her heart
through grey cloth. She's speaking the whole time. I say I'll carry the
girl. Like my arm pressing her little fat bum but she's a weight. At the
corner, which way. She folds, points the umbrella, the first house. I stand
on the porch holding the girl while her grandmother hunts for the key -
or is she just the babysitter - set her on the mat - watching the first
moment to see whether she wants to run away. She doesn't.
C and I think that if we persist in danger we'll find out what a person
is.
- The community and cannibalism.
- Sense of working on a new understanding.
She was talking about a service industry and I was remembering my recent
impulses to bring things to Rhoda, information, and gifts, and to get something
from her freely.
HH Price "that many of our everyday thoughts
and emotions are telepathic in origin."
Lying down after the post office the sight of a mountain range at a distance,
with horizontal light. I jumped realizing it was there and it jumped and
split. Then I was still seeing it but differently as a held image no longer
what I was in the presence of. Thinking you love the little psychic pictures,
both you and I will do things to have interesting psychic events. But we
want it to signify.
-
The way a part of a sentence is assented to, and it makes a confused
assent to the rest.
Writers who leave it at bringing up interesting stuff.
- I want it not to be symbolic, compensating, I want the intuitions read.
- To be able to cut loose in the dark imagination
- A brave circular presence
- That delighted inquiring
- Discourse with the seeing beloved
- Bearing true witness against wrong form
- Why wasn't I fighting. Crying instead.
- Because I was thinking of fighting as resistance not exactness.
-
- No one to admire and no self admiration either.
- What do I admire. A crucial travel.
-
- That being more exacting of the moment
- which is perception-action identity -
- makes more susceptible to control
- which is against memory identity.
26
"I think it's great, I'm not without my own pain in it but I think
it's great" - seeing the curtains and preparations, feeling her longing,
its sweetness and falseness - their eagerness to take over the silent tower
- she was so happy to have the toaster. "It was last year in November
I came to live in this house" - and when did you leave - "February,
beginning of March." Renee: "It's the community centre we always
wanted!" - T: "Stop that Renee."
The light is intense and weak - wintry light - "I never knew Chinatown
had so much red in it!" - indeed the color - pink - henna - brick,
green frames, blue gone between them - we seemed in an open car - the mountains
today - all those days it was pouring down here it was quietly snowing up
there, but we couldn't see it - what's the crying for - that I don't have
an intimate -
28
To R "That moment when you begin to make sentences that are no longer
yours" - "They could be -," what exactly did she say - "The
feeling is like your own and the voice is like yours" - hearing the
quiet voice - "But the sentences are made in a way you could never
make them" - "It's as if you're somewhere else" - "It's
as if you're somewhere else in another world" - "It's as if you're
somewhere else in another world in another person" - "Yes."
Suddenly this fall my skin is old, arms and thighs dry - when it's pushed
it goes into those slightly silvery - is it that the skin surface is less
deeply attached - it seems.
After looking at the slides lying satisfied not sleeping. Orpheus went
back for the songs.
- A brilliant point wandered this far down the page.
- Sp arc.
What is the doublet of the satisfaction of being able: take care, the
world you're able in is the size of the world you'll be pinned in. That's
saying it remotely, when it happens, and has, maybe three times in these
two days, it is the same emotional movement I think - my impression is -
left to right, pleasure to warning.
Walking down stairs into dark: whether, when I walk downstairs, I am
speaking in this way to whatever it is speaks to me in the pictures.
29
Arms around - there's skin between the strands of hair on neck, this
warm, more than warm, this colored sheath of back, accidentally the breast
and its shape taken away with the hand. Instantly oo, bigger than I thought,
it, unseen its image, I want you forward there, and do it, and it is gladly
rightaway warm juice. No I don't want to borrow a raincoat. (I'm going!)
December
The terrors of having to (smoke) risk so much to be wanted by this other
kind of people, disintegration but toward - walking in the streets/rain
without interest.
That the mountains have snow again.
Phone. East Indian, "Is that Miriam? I am selling life insurance."
"WHAT? Oh please do not tell me you are dead, because I find you to
be a very lively wo-man."
"She writes as though she's a spirit and her experience is coming
toward her like a spirit river. She's immersed. The world I write is more
solid. It is writing more like sculpture. My people are more physical."
"You want to be more of a spirit?" "Yes - I do want to be
more of a spirit, but there's something of the solidness of that time I
don't want to give up."
"It's your old demon, envy, again." "Yes I keep thinking
someday I'll learn something so I'll be more interesting." "That's
the same thing." "I know!"
"Her being more spiritual is what makes her publishable. My being
so ordinary is what makes me not publishable. It's how she had that confidence
in her perception. And ambition, that kind of ambition." "How
did you lose your confidence?" "I don't know."
See again. In that journal I find myself so vivid in, imagining it being
typed, myself after it were 'published,' the excitement of a sense of something
I've wanted in intervals and made the first tries.
I thought of publishing it, the times showing it to Ros, Katrin, J, wanting
them to say publish it. I find it so alive.
-
The table. First using it to get the stories of their meetings. How was
anyone, I don't assume I know who anyone is. Only gradual to the possibility
of seeing it. At the same time talking on to myself about longtime things.
Listening to anyone, seeing a picture of what she's saying. The sorts
of systems that were listening: do I comprehend, is she out of my possibility
- in the social, what does this express, what's she saying - what is her
picture, where is she: who - what's being done to my position, revenges,
am I guarding myself - what's the difference and meaning of these differences
- how is this different from my other times - I don't like the way her hair
is high on the top - look at that small face the lines that cut the mouth
- the way Sandy and I are having our eyes meet like clicks on the wall light-switch
height, she has a white face I don't often like to look at but I like the
way she speaks to me
Smiling at each other. That's new strangeness. Behind the smile the sense
of disjunction and blur, why'm I smiling.
Hope I'm beautiful like that.
When J was after first smoking talking to T about her instrument, I left,
there was my own situating I wanted to do. Could feel myself in the remarkable
presence of the look of absence, thinking, parallel to those thoughts, frightened,
I could look now and see how they are together, and how she is with Sandy:
and she can see how they are, how does she look. She looked collapsed. I
didn't want to. I should know everything that can be known. Why aren't I,
because I have something of my own. It sent me back to the day I was in
before going there.
What a lot of mirrors, near the floor, they do make space, I didn't mean
- and my arm without looking goes around. Quietly. Accepted. The something
to flatten. It holds just still. Yes that was alright. Three shaped rooms
made pretty. It likes it here looking out the window with a plant arm around
it. Photograph. The leaves have fallen more. They're living in it. I can
go in any room, yours too, and read if I want. And to make love in philosophical
discourse. Do I feel that. Yes but it's not how I want to be spoken about.
- This wouldn't be possible if we were still.
- The possibility to turn anywhere.
Glass of water, coat, hands under the warm water stream sink filling
she's alarmed how it looks, doesn't know the sink, "Do you want to
take a bath?" "Yes I do want warm water."
I'm battling and not being overwhelmed but what am I not seeing - what
on account of this sturdiness - it is moving in spite of their difference
or not comprehending, because wherever they are I am somewhere too. The
other waiting and listening is when I have to gather up to be impressive.
But it's to be more in this way, blinding setting forth in my own time.
Seeing its maneuvers and not refusing.
"Will you come tomorrow? Two o'clock?" Off the bus, is that
Sandy, walking and dressed like a middle-aged man. My mighty boots and split
sailing Chinese umbrella. Clump clump up the sidewalk. It seemed a shyness.
The way this morning I have been Rhoda, as if wearing her head. See a
jackal.
Using their methods on them, noticing phrases used.
Noticing the intonations. What intonation does. That was a command. A
large person was speaking from a tall movement forward watching errors,
give-aways, falling back, on the left below, keeps moving.
On the bus: it's always what is a spirit, making a spirit, working to
make an experience, that's the kind I am, everyone isn't, "the uncreated
conscience," conscious, using odd parts unmethodically come by, to
be this kind who does that.
What he made wasn't conscience it was unbinding language forms. She made
something accompanying what other people might live, it is conscience, she
stuck to identity because she was grateful to have (been given) it.
All along: what it was like before.
The way when someone would say something I would try to see into the
scene behind that remark.
The series of unfinished barely begun glimpsed guessed structures mistakes
disjunct readings the image differently read the other interpolated hit
missed and in a stream of work.
-
"Max said Daphne could see her structures. Imagine somebody being
able to meet you in the place of your work."
4
J's thinking revealed: madness of the house schemes, how she dreamed
them communal, she only wants to talk about it. That she's dreaming of replacing
me with T and doesn't know it, romanticizing both, smoking as they do, orbital,
prurient about whether I'm hurt and whether they are going to "bring
anyone home." "Have you been very solitary." Easily impressed
by my refusals. I was watching her face's instability. What does it mean.
The beauty and the ugly seem to be there at once in different parts of her
face.
Sleeping head on pillows in front of the fine yellow corner light, body
forward toward the door under the pink cover. Footsteps. Is it Paul, he'll
see me sleeping. Open my eyes to Kuan Park at the top of the stairs. Seeing
what he sees, a woman in bed. Fold back the cover, jeans and shirt come
out. "Why are you sleeping?" Standing in the corridor looking
at each other. His hair seems curlier. He has on the green pants and a Cowichan
sweater. We're the same height. He's interested in the $1.20 Paul left on
the step. Is going to go down to get it. "It's alright." The hand
swift to his arm. The way it's oddly staring at each other. "You look
tired. Here." Touching under his eye. That staring: it's his face quite
old and brown. The eyes are from within, it seems, a neutral level and true
existence.
I heard, speaking to Cheryl, and Paul heard, someone else's speech in
mine ("It is not Jamila"). "It wasn't the vocabulary, it
was the vigor of the rhythm." "I've been listening to Bach."
Something blind and runaway. When I thought to write these stories they
seemed stories of chaos unusual.
12
- "Little things strung out in the air."
- "There's almost nothing I'd rather talk about than that."
-
- "I'm not the one you wanted to lie down with."
- "That is not yet so."
- "Yes it is so."
There is no special relation between us.
15
In the days I love my clothes. The shapely boots. Look at that boot.
Black tread. The tall black tread. Long ankle. The lace stiff. Its foot
is forward. Thick hide leather, white stitches, one row, two, on the toe
four. It's called Gorilla. Under the jean rolled hem they are big confident
feet, heavy but not. The other one's already deformed at the ankle. It's
a silly foot. But the left foot, the strength, the pushing up from the sole.
The jeans are an exact fit when I am.
That silk jacket, navy blue, brilliant peacock and the yellow raincoat.
Split Chinese umbrella.
I love my clothes and no lover, and am desperate to eat, and looking
at the thigh's aged hang. But light inside the skin.
18-19
[Jam's birthday] Midnight of the day and of the year. I was sad and wanted
to cry, the sun was fading quickly silver grey darkening. We were in her
bed. She held the book toward the window and read out Traherne's funny poem
about the underworld. Chink that ox and horse may drink. She was looking
out I think not long at me but without glasses, telling that in the "I
saw eternity the other night / like a great ring of pure and endless Light"
she had felt the presence of another rhythm that came out at the end with
the whisper. I couldn't see what she meant and when she was reading it I
was distracted, I was listening, in the voice there was pompousness, that
is, stupidity, next to intelligence, it was there to read but I was blazing
an image, that was her face as it had been for an instant and my frightened
and challenged knowing I was there with that one and could rise to it, it
was the first room and how we were in it, I got it like a memory of what
I want, and why I had been faithfully waiting for a mean stiff person. It
wasn't her but the emergence. She said eternity and I said yes. I could
describe it firmly. She said "You must go down now." I said yes
abjectly but I knew that downstairs I'd be starting again not like that.
At the table feeling that with that knowledge I would like to be alone.
Seeing the jokes obscure and break the thought, and in others the fine double
statement. Full or empty jokes. Conversation from newspapers. Stupid discussion
of what no one knows.
Lying with her body lighted and pulling. She jumped as if she'd woken.
"Did you fall? What was it?" "I saw Percy's cock lifting
toward Ashrafbi." Delight. They can all come.
Here at the end she was lying looking up, a small face on the pillow
so abruptly changed I felt it was a test I unfairly couldn't meet, it wanted
me, it, she, the pretty girl, humorous, wanted me, perhaps wanted me to,
what? I couldn't know, looked suspicious. "What were you thinking?"
"I don't have to say everything." I meant, I couldn't have, it
was the spirit being tested.
Across the table Trudy's live, conscious hair. Rhoda's.
- "Was it true that you only love that one?"
- "If I'm at all taken in by any of the others I have less chance
of ever seeing that one again."
- I've worked with the others, I've waited.
Love and trusting it, living in it. that own love of the best ground
if I could live by it.
When we see each other we still know each other.
"That gathering had moments of terror for me. I was feeling what
the last 31 years had made me forget. Ineptnesses. I used to know a lot."
She seemed to be crying behind the stair rail.
"The three of you."
The moment looking at J with R, seeing that her romanticism, family kink,
made us equivalent in her. R looks at me and says "Stereo." I'm
a minute looking and then believe maybe she means what I see, then the little
smile, whose quality -
Disregarding what she says.
"It isn't that I want to know, it's that I want you to be willing
to know. I don't want to be your unconscious knowledge."
-
Talking to R in the afternoon. "There have been times I have been
supported by the way you look. There was one time when I was - I felt Jam
and Trudy - I could do it because I could feel their vision of it."
The suspension in my chest a slate of perception, wracked waiting. I was
feeling it waiting for whether J would come through. And when I was telling
Rhoda how it was trying to read against his resistance: "I could hardly
bring out the words. It was only because I knew Jam could hear (all of it)
that I could keep going until my voice was stronger." "That's
amazing."
-
The tainted being. The continuous quest.
The kernel that someone would be willing to be the lower order memory
and organizer, in order to be with your quality of higher order language.
What it was like tonight. Someone not very well seen. There's the gusting
changes of direction, who're you with, why aren't I listening.
In Loong Foong the young girl come from a dance class, singing, jerking
her neck, flicking into the hand positions. Her mother seeing my look. A
nervy body. She went on thinking and talking about it, taken up, technically
preoccupied with her work.
"But I don't want any more of the multiplication of instances! Someone
else I haven't known in their earlier time, and it gets worse all the time.
I don't want any new people, I want something different with the old people."
"You'll find yourself in a mythology whose story you don't already
know." "I don't believe it! I don't believe there's a mythology
whose story I don't already know."
What would I like. Somebody sexually free.
The way it moves. I say, she really is a finer perception and manner,
and then, but how much more crude and boring in -
The quality. What I see when I look at what I want. "Oh no it isn't
somebody looking at me with love, not at all! That's what I wanted, I needed
it so much. Now that isn't how they're looking, they're looking full. It
isn't fire and passion, not at all. I don't want fire and passion, I hate
fire and passion. It's a look of lucidity. It's not having to be bothered
with a whole range of things. It's being in heaven."
What I see when I look at the image I held. I may have seen, I saw a
look. "It was when you were telling me what you'd heard in the poem.
Climbing up into the company of your perception."
It is your senses and their language.
When you're with anyone it's impossible to know what it is, it's just
a marvel, (you enter a world). Better said I saw a turbulence. Yes.
I don't love your whole person I only love your genius. That was the
look of your genius.
When I see that person I don't believe she can't see without glasses.
I took that image as a center.
24
In these days the presence of once-loved. That means I'm near my historic
stem. Oh the old skin on the back of the hand. Andy. Roy and Sara and the
children. Catherine. Having taken prints of those many/few existences, that
are still alive.
And though I don't say so, and in the midst of fullness of loves, and
though it feels like it might be years, I know I'm waiting for (you), what
I thought might come to the door tonight. Where are you. Is the tenderness
of the eve the only form I'll hold of you.
27
Wake thinking whether Rhoda's prettiness is from staying in the feminine,
what would that be, the kind of action and decision there is in what's called
the inward, that could be called the fluid or spatial. She walked into the
river her pockets weighted with stones. In love with voices, waves, lights,
colors, blue, green.
"You don't know that." She wanted to say that. "It's too
soon." That means I do know something and it's about what she's suffering
of, her desire for Rhoda. "Is more desirable than I am," calmly.
And more than you are.
"There is someone in her who interests me more than anyone in the
world," I think that one may be in everyone, "the other ones of
her don't interest me very much because they seem to be made up out of mistakes."
Blind.
What's the dif / feeling afterlife and not: the one who feels afterlife
doesn't believe, I mean myself, the existence of the present life - that
present surrounded by collective inference, materialized within collective
inference, history, a materialized area within a receding unmaterialized
one.
When I think of this life as spirit I can imagine a walking into the
river with stones in pockets - leaving the body - finding oneself in a new
conditions - what is that 'this life as spirit'.
In the previous life the (spirit is given to the) organizing and holding
full of the world picture and in it intelligent decisions and observations.
Many of them fall. There were persons and books I accepted being drawn toward,
that said, loosen it.
-
What I've been trying to do in her way hasn't really been interesting
even when I'm close, why, when I transcribe I don't, I still don't, see
through. I saw through more in young (it's the morning of 29th, rent due)
writing. I long to be 'a writer,' the slides are true but I don't stop with
them because I insist I have to become conscious, in her, it's the conscious,
Lessing, registering, oh, how she could remember. She learnt: to
remember and see through the remembered. Le Guin dreams. I want the technologies
and familiarity, more than to be any artist, I want more than one, and to
know how, and yet it doesn't work to only randomly be able to travel, the
story is
- 30
What I want that you say I'm going to get, I don't understand why you
say it that way, what I want is for it to come out true, and it is, but
you don't seem to know that when it has come out true, you in your own loves
and I in mine, we will still be in each other's. There is something true
for me in you, amazingly it is not what you think you want, amazingly you
don't know how faithful I've been to it or how lonely in that faithfulness.
When I'm with you I'm paralyzed by your refusal. I can hardly find a
speakable thought. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY YOU'RE SO ENDLESSLY UNFORGIVING
of my distresses and so oblivious of how much isolation and misery I've
been put into by yours.
Everytime you cut off rather than fight what are you choosing. Resistance
is your tank you roll away in. Once you begin there's no way to stop you.
I don't understand how I'm not worth fighting with, I am, or no one is.
I did want you to know me and you did give me time and you were watchful
and generous and now you're angry it didn't get you what you wanted. You
didn't notice what it did get you, I only can feel hopeless because you
didn't love what I could give.
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