| edged out 7 part 4 - 1983 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
28 September 1983
In sadness I continue. If light is the grainline (taken as) of space the speed of light which becomes the axis of a deep-going revision of that conception of space which has been impressed on human thinking in its previous period What did you mean "I can hear you thinking, the rhythm though not the content." regards a great number of happenings as a sort of question and answer Multiplicity of meaning Training of control, alertness, in dreaming produces awareness of the 'intermediate dimension.' I haven't remembered the three sitting at a table at night. What they do that evil is. What I closed out. "This fear and interest in power." But you come from nondimension. Close the first shop, open the second. interior ritually purified, emptied of all that was profane by removal of interior partitions and household furniture the spiritual laws that are found by experience Beginning to have a sense of what grandparents are. "What you need people for is just to belong to them through time?" 1st October Her great pile of smart clothes and the foot at the bottom kicked out sideways for us both to see, net socks and high heel. Love and admiration money good buy. How sparkling it was when I said up straight "This is my last session." I was the one who had the brushcut.
The big bukk man trying to get comfortable on the floor. Story he wrote about the curtains he got out of the room of an old woman who got moved to a rest home. After a while he realized they reminded him of his mother. Sitting a distance from him talking to him realizing the comfort in the room, of it, the face's ease. The red man at the bus stop [Richard Tetrault], sunyasi. "I even remember the song you were singing, lips so sweet and tender like petals falling apart." "San Antonio rose - it's a good song," and the sense along in it, that these playings are what I have instead of what I did with her. That a dream can go forward. You start with the image, you give over the energy, you watch. Asking and giving the energy over. By recognizing the nature of the shadow specifically, by coming to know its point of view, because the hidden life is hidden behind it. Facing toward it is hard: guilt, hopelessness, heaviness of spirit. When there's an alliance of weakness and man-mind The weak bad one has to be seen and 'assimilated'. The animus has to be weakened, as for instance wherever I say what I don't quite mean, I say it again. And look at the criticism to see what there is to do, whatever is neglected feeds it. When it speaks it's always important who.
2 T's new coat and building a screen. The play fights. Voice I thought was Nellie's, "Where are you?" "I'm here." "Spot of tea?" How did I not know your voice. Wanting to come in late to Sara Halprin's [Barbara Martineau] films, coming in behind her as she's introducing to a very small audience. Ferron. And then the story going on, from Daycare. Crying for the old man. She went back to school! "The camera when I wasn't supposed to." An old woman, a black woman and this tall body carrying a couple of iron poles up some stairs, who's in a dress later. And then in the next film too, and then I see is sitting next to her. They're touring small places. We talk in the lobby. Gillian Riddington. ("The Japanese woman, or is she Chinese, slender, with hair (gesture), she was at the reading on Friday night, at Arial Books.") And suddenly drama - to everyone else - shattered glass. Sidewalk damp, cold coming through the thin soles. The tall woman doing the man things. She's on the road and they're a company - Wishful Filming - "You've just been suddenly weaned of a lot of equipment." At Peg's [Campbell] the men: ugly and allowing - the boy from north of Yorkton - the architect - the wedding photographer wanting to talk about Jews - the young man not able to hold my interest though wanting to - and then: I want to say - what was this willing talking - throwing myself without care into an arena I don't care about - (did my soul stay with her, has she got my fineness and I her social ableness and is it a desperation I don't know - have I done the silence time - am I past so it doesn't matter how I talk or to whom) - (am I inhabited by Ellen or ---) - and with Diana earlier. And Carolyn - watching there being something common and weightless in how I'm talking - I want to be seen experienced competent - older woman achieved - I want to be in action, just moving. Is it haywire, is there a way to tell, will it make me ugly like them (not Peg). What's the quality. Hyper (is it animus) like other times - tree planting - gropp. The dream (replies): the bearded man energetically teaching in the next room. Waking I'm thinking, does it mean I need to talk to men: that energetic talking. Is that animus. And in this room: sewing! Getting to principles. - The fences we used to crawl through on the route we take have been electrified. The big fat man / the man who can. Means the same thing by different roots. What if it's a big fat blond man and that's just the kind she doesn't want. [dream themes list]
4th Situating. Being humanly desperate and sending a manuscript to (Wiebe) Robert Duncan, raving to D and others. The way in reading Koestler I'm feeling the theories made as if by people still in the womb, "like waves along the time-axis of the space-time continuum." The embryo mind would also be the embryo body able to regenerate. (The tone of the instructions is wrong. Being able to let go the new structure long enough to accomplish it. 'Rest.') I hold myself found in my ideas. the secure partner in front of whom she does everything offering herself to the truth the ethical problem: not to hide what is basic [sketch of cognitive function map] Being is the light in which they are seen. Things are coming to themselves in my perception. I don't know by analogy, I simply see. Feeling exists and mine gives you yours. the love beyond judgment that gives a field in which the other relaxes seeming an athlete whose performance is in reach the whole of it, nothing happening in or around me that hasn't entered a palpable relation to me has to be risking the excitement of the new self one would become in the unknown solution to the Reflexive substitution for out - who do I want to ask, who do I want to make cry. An impulse has left the field. What has replaced it is someone else's wish felt as a victory over oneself. Fixed at mouth, warm skin, dreamy memory. Customs, memories, grudges. Fear of hurting and being hurt. Fear of damage. The oral drive is the vampire. The quantum theory of virtual dimensions Virtual processes - when any physical process first starts it sends out feelers in all directions - feelers in which time may be reversed, unexpected things may happen - but these can go only a very short time and then matters settle down. Under the influence of perturbing potential the system tends to make transitions in all directions at once. Only certain types of transitions, though, can go on indefinitely in the same way, namely those called real. - Which are those that conserve energy. Many physical processes are the result of the so-called virtual transitions. Dobbs - an actual state of an entity surrounded in imaginary time with an array of objective probabilities, which aren't necessarily actualized but which influence so to speak the system trying out all the potentialities out of which one would emerge these virtual potentialities or probability amplitudes A second time dimension - wave front - "objective probabilities" - all the objective probabilities of future outcomes - causes (as if) compresently predisposing. Foreknowledge is knowledge of the probablistic factors - and is conveyed by psitrons with imaginary mass carrying (faster than light) information on both actual and virtual processes - the latter able to include future probabilities. The experience of freedom resulting from processes in the focus of attention the state of precarious balance which characterizes the emergence of experienced freedom is also characteristic of the original instability of organic molecules and other emergent biological levels. [Koestler] A causal principle bringing events - in space concurrent by affinity - in time similarity in series. Pauli's exclusion principle - a symmetry, a formal mathematical characteristic of equations describing matter acts: any energy level in the atom is one-such. Implied in exchange force (which binds) Synchron - a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have similar meaning, a principle of explanation "equal in rank to causality." Certain very highly charged situations. Whitehead misplaced concreteness Nothing exists or happens in the visible sky that is not sensed in some hidden manner by the faculties of earth and nature The natural soul of man is not larger in size than a single point, and on this point the form and character of the entire sky is potentially engraved. [Kepler] Leibnitz monads each - they do not act directly on one another, "They have windows by which anything can go in and out," but each from its own position mirrors in all directions. Schopenhauer - If we visualize each causal chain progressing in time as a meridian on the globe, then we may represent simultaneous events by the parallel circles of latitude. Seriality is the umbilical cord that connects thought, feeling, science and art with the womb of the universe which gave birth to them. cyclic process which propagate themselves (like waves along the time-axis) of the space-time continuum. All the events of a life would accordingly stand in two fundamentally different kinds of connection. First, in the causal connection of the natural process, second, in a subjective connection that relates only to the individual experiencing.
A state of excitement and detachment. Paranormal doing in some self-transcending state.
I noticed that perceiving was more than sighting, it was feeling. The solar constant Space-plasma a very thin electrified gas At the bottom of a gravity well 4000 miles deep Space Studies Institute Superlattices, each layer atoms-thick, 5000 stack thickness of a sheet of paper - with people (reading identification, projection, transference)
balance, states, mobility seeing
weakness, youngness, unwantedness time geometry, location
5th Wanting to know why she - what was it really made it not possible. "She would never be able to trust me." "It was partly racial and partly gender." Olivier in French Chatelaine - le fils who won't engager with his wife because of how hard it was once to break up with his mother - la petite fille who unless her father palpably desires her, is anxious ever after, to know she exists - après six ans le sous-conscient est éffectivement clos. In as much as she desired me, she was mon pere. "After we'd been in some amazing time together, sexual or talking, the next time I saw her she'd have changed again." "She was too sadistic." It's Sandy I explain to - Akbar - someone from her group - "Jam and I have separated. You could try again if you're still interested." I'm in these fantasies oblivious. Showing the father that one is oneself an abstract heroic phallus. "Do something so it will be acknowledged that she loves Rhoda." "I wanted Rhoda to see me lying down in the garden derelict." "She's telling her mother she's unwell because she's slept in the same place too long." "I understand you wish no experience to compete with that one," she said, "even if it means you must live your life sealed away." "I'm worried I'll lose her focus, though it was me who brought it." I don't keep my truth, I take it that's what's meant by split. Dream 11th Oct. A saucepan, a sleeping bag, matches, a hat.
8th Files:
Surely the safety of years is no obstacle, nor the deliverance of proof that in these years abide ways which delineate the future, for each circumstance in the present completes itself with a correct approach. Let us see the nature of now as it connects to the delicacy of breath in the morning hours. First there is a vacuum, a hollow core reminded to you by the black hole in space, and surrounded by space. It is an invisible strength whose density outweighs the world. It is turbulent and consumes itself in its darkness. The neighbouring, visible, shape, brighter than all the stars, is able to co-exist no matter the pull of the invisible space. To one the other holds. Each allows the difference seen by being, by holding and in this correspondence is knowing. To satisfy the color of each motion necessitates will. Yet if each motion is attended to, by being going or being still, a desire held to satisfy is dissolved in space. a place where concern occurs in shapes of light light thus moving sure shows edges to the dark and says to it: myself is here, not there. Such simple showing is magnitude and strength. Excess of sense denied, space by place is filled, color then is born. And inside its invisible center commands are made to occupy the outer edge, till memory of itself extended reaches to just before it breaks, then stops to hold its shape, and in support of motion leaves its body there to continue its invention inside invisible space. Marilyn's Journal 1973 via Jen-Vi.
The sun and the baby in the brain Formally instructed She watches morning breath
Next to it, she says, is day. Brightness eclipses stars, Fills in between the points. It holds itself, it isn't drawn. Why does she say the color of each motion needs to be satisfied. And desire held, to satisfy, is dissolved, in space, when it's attended to. "A place where concern occurs in shapes of light." An edge in the dark: light makes a rim. The edge is hers. It marks where she is. What is moving really: her breath is. It lights the inside of her chest. The baby's first encounter is with daylight - its first other, m'other sun. Such simple showing. Like a strong star.
That she is to occupy the rind until the centre's memory of itself there nearly breaks - bubble -
I can't tell which way she's looking.
Confused nouns
year circumstance present nature now breath morning
space stars world
- 1. Astounded to see the patriarchal design of ideas we work within, metaphysical, scientific, religious, and the deformation undertow in them , by what it leaves out, not so much the matriarchal as the prenatal. The actual original dichotomy which when it's seen does away with the difference between. The direction it comes from Phallic enthrallment My parents in it are on the one side Hegel and on the other Dorothy Richardson, who do the same thing in different ways.
2. Going to home landscape with an artificial project, to make a landscape film which became, in a still artificial way, to find out what place is. what happened actually was the place seen again with possibilities of seeing brought back into it from friends and opponents, books, Riddington, an actual person. Financed through: Mary Epp, Brinkman Reforestation, the Department of Human Resources, Canada Manpower, the Canada Council, Bull Oilfield Catering, Hastings Steam Bath. Lightshow: back-project, sound. -
A spatial model - which does which is awkward in math or words. A TANGENT is always perpendicular to the radius of a circle, represents the path energy would take if the circle let go. Electricity set up to make - the direction it goes to. The field proved a helpful concept. It began as something placed between the source and the magnetic needle in order to describe the acting force. It was thought of as an 'agent' of the current, through which all action of the current was performed but now the agent acts as an interpreter, one who translates the laws into simple, clear, language, easily understood. And then: remembering some esoteric list - of the 'levels' maybe throw out - the level of things; the level of 'forms', structures; ; - Imagined from this, they are levels of description, and they do all describe the same thing but none are more primary. The telepathy book? Electrostatic, magnetostatic fields, and gravity separate. The faster the electrical field changes, the stronger the accompanying magnetic field = the faster a magnetic field changes the stronger the accompanying (current) electrical field change: from the language of fluids to the language of fields. "The field concept became more real," "the concepts of substances were suppressed." - The levels of description I use - things - politics and sex - physics - psyche. If one finds the descriptions have the same structure Sensing feeling thinking intuition - presume - but go on. When either magnetic or electrical field changes the other occurs as redistribution. Maxwell's equations - a new kind of law: because they represent the structure of the field. They allow us to predict what will happen a little further in space and a little later in time, if we know what happens here and now. An oscillating charge, changing electrical, changing magnetic, in an electro-magnetic wave, ie energy radiating at a definite speed through Out A transverse wave at the speed of light (in vacuum) The only difference between electo-magnetic and light is that light waves are shorter. allow us to regain our old concepts from a higher level The point from which we started still exists and can be see though it appears smaller in our broad view. "The only way out seems to be to take for granted that space has the physical property of transmitting e-m waves without bothering about the meaning" - ie not made of particles.
a rigid bar and a good clock Every observer has his own rod which forms his coordinate system, but there is only one clock for them all. - May Sinclair going from "talking about religion was like talking about being born" through a new chapter head, to Locke on innate ideas, "But how did he know? You might have them and only remember them again after you were grown up." He had the effect of creating for both of you a space more real than the space you had just stepped out of. There and not anywhere else these supernaturally clear things had reality, it would last as long as you sat there and would go when you went. If I could remember how you do it. Flat on your back with your eyes shut; not tight shut. You mustn't feel any part of you. You think of nothing; not even think. You keep on not feeling, not thinking, not seeing things till the blackness comes in waves, blacker and blacker. Then the blackness was perfectly still. You couldn't feel your breathing or your heart beating. Let everything go except yourself. But you felt yourself going, going and coming back, gathered together, incredibly free; disentangled from the net of nerves and veins. It didn't move any more with the movement of the net. It was clear and still in the blackness; intensely real. Then it willed. Your self willed. It was free to will. Willing was this. Waves of will, coming on and on, making your will, driving it through empty time. The flashpoint of freedom. This was the awful feeling. Dying must be like this. One thing going after another, something holding down your chest, stopping its beat. Don't think about the feeling. think of the blackness. Not the surrender of your will, but of all the things that confuse it. 13 May Sinclair 1919 Mary Olivier: a life She wrote Charlotte Mew. She and DR reading philosophy and playing piano. The relation of England and Germany. And coming on her anti-semitism - the number of these books that insult - and why they have to have another descent. And in her writing seeing the diminutives R says I use. "Holding back." Feminizations. Without DR's. Why is the verb more reliable. Is the adjective the love one wants to bring oneself. "A discourse marked as imitative or subservient." "You don't like to be seen composing." DR loves it. Where she says she can't play piano. DR's not having brothers and her better education. It was a partial shift in the sense of the relation of inside and outside. I am not sure even now how far this shift can be taken. I imagined bringing inner and outer as if both outside, thoughts and images seen with an equivalent seenness, ie seeing his head in my head is a way of actually being with him, is being with him. That was one sense of it. The other was a reading of the meaning of outside things and happenings in the same way as dreams or fantasies, ie the day he appeared at Grubstake - writing Grubstate - is as much as I know a dreaming formation. "Everything I do these days is making support for this effort to make myself someone who is not left behind." The other way is the clean wanting to see. die andere Schauplatz combination and substitution in the signifier, according to the two aspects that generate the signified, metonymy and metaphor Demand annuls the particularity of everything given by making it proof of love and satisfactions are reduced to being no more than the crushing of the demand for love. It is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that a woman will reject all her attributes in the masquerade. An experience, of love, deprives her of - being it. To determine the forces that are permanently and universally at work in all languages The way she said "the Lieutenant-Governor is here tonight" - that's - something erotic - would a man say it that way - there's a value attachable by (symbolic authority). Speech always implies both an established system and an evolution. Reading Saussure in confidence that what he decided has gone on - that's symbolic authority - it's common ground made. We can easily assimilate their linguistic organisms. The image of the whole word becomes ideograph.
Language always appears as a heritage, it is arbitrary; "inert by nature is a prime conservative force" - but, because the sign is arbitrary it follows no law but tradition. Grades - Stufen Language is radically powerless to defend itself against the forces which from one moment to the next are shifting the relationship between the signified and the signifier. Why when Lacan says signifier it sounds like penis-man. Whatever term is made central in the discourse means 'I'. a system for equating things of different orders
14 Joyce, the Penner woman, Josie, Don, Zoe. [at the opening of Art in Vancouver 1931-1983 in the Vancouver Art Gallery's new space in the former courthouse] Cari Green "Image is so important now," looking at stockings and dresses. Stupidity. Pluming. Din. People who seemed to be crazy, even Joyce or was that Penner's. "I've never been married, I don't believe in marriage": she's 45 and from Saskatchewan. When she was being so stupid just dropping her.
its presence in the mother's body as an internal object Phantasies revealed by Melanie Klein. reconstructing if possible the mother language of each family Two related sides each deriving its values from the other Suddenly rushing to tell Joyce I'd found out that when I was working on going home it was really about going home. She in her bright voice quickly says "I knew it was that." "Did you really?" Her gold dress and belt and old thin neck and pretty face. "You were saying it but you didn't know you were saying it." "I didn't know how far there was to go home." Now writing it I can see she may not have meant what I did: she saying "Everything is said on so many levels, one has to be careful. 'It is written.'" Sitting with Josie among the old paintings. "I paid eighty dollars for them. Fifty dollars wasn't enough." Her tone about Moira, who'll push her now? And I did catch myself and say "I don't know why I'm spiteful. I find myself wanting to say bad things about her to people. I don't like that, I don't know why it's like that, maybe the spite is just because it couldn't go on, it came to its limit and couldn't go past it." "Moira would take up the slack and I imagine Jam did that too." "No she didn't help with money, she's quite tight." "Were you the one who pushed?" "I was the only one who knew how to." "I pushed and I pulled." Seeing in the way she was saying it, that it had been wrong. She and I both at that time - She in her thin body and red dyed hair, magenta clothes, red glasses - imagining how she must be painting now - an assumed ugliness paying for the right to be known. With Don - driving - "Druick" - "Jo" - performing - seeing Zo doing it - in her new confected hair - Don going on mania and she lightly staying with him. Is she courting him, maybe. The moment of my hand on his arm saying "Josie's looking for you," heads at a level. His raincoat. Central Europe man. And what else - the catalogue - La Grace - "Were you the one who wrote I was influenced by Michael Snow?" - the moment of meeting his clarity - "the flattening of perspective in the shot up toward the roof" - "the structure" - "a pure, ideal vision" but he said it to diminish - Jeannie [Kamins] wearing her breasts like quilted fabric above her dress - at the end of the evening, "Embrace" (why did it look like that, bracelet) wanting to touch people with her breasts and fur. The women in painted faces - even Marion painted to shape her fat - they're caught in the visual mind I imagine finding my way back to - and that Trapline is - does that mean Rimmer made his films to bring him women - his red shoes. Das ist mein Schmuck und Ehrenkleid. Something uneasy about how it is with Josie, let's find it - "I stopped seeing her three months ago" - "Did you know Jam and I have broken up?" - the spite - the uneasiness is that when I say it I am saying it as if - but what as if - ie to say we're separated is as objectified as to say we're together - I suppose - we're not separated except that we don't see and speak to each other - I liven up and want to try it, ie sit with my eyes closed - is there a message - "I'm inferior to myself" - that's ambiguous - (do 'you' make me so) in the evening the eases and uneases, conscience painfully remembers, when I spoke wrongly, when I stood well (she gave me) - I think the message shouldn't be tagged as from her, is it - Mary at the party, she'd want to be speaking to the big shots not that Penner - in her ugly dress looking at the fancy ones - did Mary not like how I was dressed - blue shirt, broad shoulders, black pants - "plain" - pouring the champagne past my mouth to my lap - ie it's (Mary) who went and (Jamila) who didn't like how she was - "the path to the light" - and what was I doing - Hegel - I only begin to be when I am consciously remaking their relation. She to him - thinks he's handling it badly - manages him - deceives him, draws his fire, acts clumsy - pretends to love by duty - doesn't manage her fertility accurately, miscarries the children - doesn't speak for herself, is suppressed and rebellious - doesn't assume her equality - doesn't honestly consult him - ("consult the animus") - will not speak admiration - wants to be disillusioned rather than to teach. She prefers being disillusioned to entering the combat that will let him know (what she knows) her. He to her: mocks at her clumsiness, doesn't understand her circumstance, is contemptuous rather than let himself know her difference, brags but without feeling his envy as such, hangs onto the specialness of the repression of his lust, suffers social awkwardness without understanding how he's seen, impatient, violent and guilty, cheated into marrying too young, thinks his potential is actual, failed to make her a good social place, is like a child with her, doesn't see her childishness, can't stand the children, only likes to be where he can charm new people. He prefers being contemptuous to understanding what she is. How to take it further. He - (beautiful) spoiled - body beautiful - contempt - fragility, raving, going out of control - looking for nobility - seeing faces and bodies, nationality, sexuality - animosity, rivalry grievance paranoia obsession - 'wit' without humor - lust - wants to be alone in his religion - philosophizes - won't read - protects his sense of magic infallibility - projects make him frantic - grievance against his father, idealizing his mother without knowing her - music as sex - needing to travel - needing to be thought highly of without learning how to manage what's there - hears others' chat - children don't exist for him - loves deduction/induction - looking at crops on Sundays - irritation - spite, envy, without knowing so - in money liking tension and speculation, preferring to gamble, rather than build solidly - liking to be read to - fine small handwriting though not educated - "There is a physical world and a spiritual world" - conceit - pride - drudgery - farts, neuralgia, eyes spoiled by dust, stiff joints, picky digestion, conservative in food - badly dressed except exceptionally - vain hats - calcium or magnesium for [foot] cramps - 'mental breakdown' at about 30 - bad teeth (all gone) - inferior feeling, superior thinking - beautiful hands - depression, fear - strong intuition - spoke carefully - sense of find language (is language an intuition function I think) - fights for principle. She - plainly good-looking - squat and strong - strong, ugly teeth - ugly hands, awkward in movement - gall bladder, miscarriages, cervical? - toe spur - very strong digestion - constipation, sleeplessness - deafness - strong feeling weak sensing - sexuality relocated in 'trees,' 'literature,' babies, teachers - symbolic - wants body affection, empathy - can become most people, see their point of view - "Why didn't she love me," a helplessness toward her mother and piety toward her father - could take on being entirely alone - is young, wants to be with young affection - fine small hand-writing - bakes well - physically eccentric, unaware - enjoys incongruities, 'human' things - very little sense of abstraction though she is generous and successful with people - speaks carefully - likes language - likes to eat - needs common religion - won't fight for principle - emotional sturdiness - timid, inexperienced.
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