| edged out 7 part 7 - 1983 november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
11th November 1983 It's possible to know. Perceiving badly, thinking badly. (the projectionist) Trapline was without knowing. This evening - from clearing in the basement, to Kapleau to imagining winter sitting - saying to them "I don't want Zen Buddhism I just want to sit" - thinking of the concert on Sunday, thinking I'm close to her, we'll walk home, I want to talk to her about going, maybe it will clear us, I want to say to her, will you find out what is your true relation to me - while sitting - trying the posture, looking forward to the morning - during the day thinking to call her, resisting - in what spirit - keeping power, and also, not going back to being slashed - I call her, I have to speak about the concert - the phone sounds as if she's impatiently unhooked - "I've decided, I'm going to Fatima's, I'm working on something quite sore, I have to go now" - god damn - slashed - she's working, I haven't worked since that last phone call, her wrong timing, on Thursday - (why did you bend backwards then?) - this superstition I don't know if is that - what did I do today - wrote the note to Duncan - I'd felt to phone her after Thurs, and didn't - if it's the worst, that she got something - thinking of the ugly psychiatrist - I should - I was here and said I'd forget and was desperate and forgot - excise her - the instant thought, she's taken my two days for her work, she's writing something brilliant - what I got - alright. What was it yesterday - Lucier - Paul - Trudy - The dispossessed - this morning - Dispossessed - hall and basement - Updike - was dreaming Saturna before dreaming sesshin - period begins - "I am in love with my work" - I should program it for the 27th when she's going with them? For black: cemetery, fire, claw, pink field For screen over black: lights on is like a fog in the air For white: little ditch person, snow off - FADE Screen over white: gnats, grass and red trees For fading through Screens: barley, smoke, low cloud, snow particles, flower tissue, stone, tree branches, gnats, earth, frost, snow, water surface, mirror, wall, willows Situation: from both sides, mirrors in beyond, the project-through - don't know what, whether I speak from the midst of them or behind the scene, before and after intermission
Saturna - it was - yesterday! - thinking I could go there the winter, and write the story of T and C, to find out again what I thought I'd found and (her voice hateful though she thinks it's equal and direct) - and walk and be moved - and she'd come and like it - I'd come to town for my check - sit, and do yoga, catch fish - tell company to bring salad vegetables. Harsh mountain - how could I - sell the camera - it seemed easy - not tell them - the sweet sleep - I'd talk about it with her - Buddha's wrist - his body, his look - "What brings you here?" - "I was moved by someone who had been here" - to learn the austere concentration that made him so beautiful. Berkeley, Duncan to whom one will be sent, Wiebe to whom the other, the card not right in happily, asking Nyingma for their winter program. Unfamiliar streets, trees, a room in - And the show, what's in it, can I just intend to get it over, blow it - why it's gone like this - how is it gone - that's where to start all this. I haven't been focusing the murmurs in the days. 12th
The way it is seeming that confused symbolism rules - every description is self-description - the hope of coming out of the tangle - yesterday looking at the hymn book, the falling-away of safe ground seeing the intent or is it stupidity, of the language we sang into our organization - the sense that language is the last to know. Our singing knew the meaning of the hymns - then, what is perceived meaning for - ie it is not consciousness, it's communal hallucination - the sexual information and delight of the singing - (why is my thinking bad) - religion should be/is sex - then why is rock and roll not as good sex, as gospel. Brains made frivolous, in social competition - it has to be guarded - does it have to be guarded from poor knowing. The confusions of aligning - 'it' seems to confuse perception. 13 Music for a long thin wire. 'Long thin.' "What makes it change?" "I don't know." Not sure what was going on in the meeting. [Alvin Lucier at the Western Front] "It is in a very fragile state" he said twice. "I liked singing with it" I said twice. "Are you a singer?" "No I'm not a singer, I'm not anything I'm a filmmaker." "But what makes it change?" "I don't know." (Lech Walensa) But is it groupie reflex - Luc-cier chosen out of the art magazines - remembering Mrs Henry Siebert, saying Ellie was silly - what's silly is to care whether it's also sexual - "beautiful and distinguished" - crying with loneliness, take me with you to New York, ask for my writing, wrap me into some quiet improvisation - Mr East Europe Raincoat - the violin string played by what - "a 7 hertz oscillator interacting with a magnet." - RINGG
That kind of separatedness - really I can't. - The way I love this image isn't visible to you. The hill, which looks further away than it is, is the hill we looked at from the yard, when I was growing up. The house and barn aren't there now. (I was looking through the camera across the place near the bluff on the right where the house and barns used to be.) (Why is there a shadow bird I didn't see.) I think of it as a hawk. There had been a hawk yelling above the tent, but There had been an owl and a hawk yelling in the sky above the tent, on other evenings I didn't ... a hawk I didn't see until some years after I took the picture
14 Want to know about paranoia - the moment speaking to J when I suspected her and at the same time - with Robert's pages, was thinking - he wants me to feed his manuscript just now before it's published - She wrote about her father's pound of genital and didn't see it. Crying with words single - mush brain. "I do need somebody to like me best." Dreaming I see on the floor or in the tub, her hair black and white, the long mane tied near the tip, cut off. I take it or part of it. Am I in her cabin waiting for her to come home, they all come in, her colored group. A swimming pool, a shower, I hold the porridge over it, secretly, someone comes in, stuffing the porridge oatmeal down the drain holes. What would I like again - to say whatever comes into that trustful watching - trustfulness that we're both watching. Figures There was a man called Charlie Reaume we'd see walking on the Wembley Road, or Abe Lowen. [?] Once I remember him stopping on the road home, on the high seat of a democrat. He stopped to offer a ride. People were enlivened by Charlie Reaume stories - Charlie's wife had left him, had sent him to Ponoka. Charlie believed the airplanes as they went overhead, were interfering with his thoughts, crossed and left their chalk lines overhead. He thought he was a radio. I went one evening to see Charlie Reaume's place. The grass was grown up tall around it, full of stinging nettle, mosquitoes rising out of it. Windows open, door ajar, inside, feed sacks, kitchen and bedroom, he'd brought big rocks in from the fields. Pointing his gun at the airplanes, writing in code on the walls. Green light through high brome grass. Hands full of bug juice and stings. An abandoned homestead. Low place among alder poplars. His wife who'd been a teacher, moved away with their children. --- who when there was baptism at the creek did the sensible unheard of thing, walked toward the two preachers standing in the water in his longjohns - so that he would have a dry suit for the church service later. Crazy - Excitement - an iron bedstead, some cardboard, dark wet place. Running out with his gun shooting at the CP flight. Lying in his longjohns at grey night with those big lumps of field rock blocking all of the floor, presences among the presences. I think I know the presence he was designating. The next year when I wintered in a house where there was a room upstairs over the kitchen, sealed off from the stairwell with brown paper - it had the stained yellowish translucent look of a stretched drum head skin - I slit the paper and went into the room - which was empty - which, not insulated, had been sealed for warmth - several brown boards - some old ripped window screens - string washline - and a few shelves. When it began to be cold I brought from outside, and set up in this dark-brown peak-roofed unlined room, the circle of twelve fieldstones I'd had in the grass - why were there twelve - it was an orientation - a clock and compass and calendar - I intended to sit inside the circle but in fact seeing the stones there scared me so much I stayed out - except for the one twilight when I set up a table at the north window, next to the brick chimney coming up from the kitchen - sat with my back warmed at the brick chimney and tried to write as if taking a message from the room and the time. Between planets far from home away, and when I moved in spring, I left them where they were. Pranks, sex and craziness. 15 Diamond ring she was giving Frank - the two children, one ours, one from earlier - the bottle their bottle is filled from, two different substances, the little one nodding when I've told him "You mustn't ever put it to your mouth" - coming to a car I see the two keys, hooks, that have fallen, toss them in again - the matron approves of me, for the marriage, was it exceptional of me to have noticed the paired hooks? What is the relation between the human/written and the optical/fear of the open. Not about but from. A space cleared in the center, in it a spirit appeared (years later).
Fright - that it is not itself - "It's not me driving" - that there's no longer an outside "Because of the way you describe them" anguish going over into - sickness I was at - Everyone as close to death as their art will allow Girl soprano and electronics Lobotomy Pribram Hidden in plane sight Persephone pursuing images down - ego soul and the other one, the free one Underworld refers to psychic perspective Day fire Story of camping at the dugout The bull familiaris soul brother who represents its fear, understands the - Make the screen the size of the image from that distance Information - circumstances, the story - locality, orientation/dream - process of the slides Revelations - the baby/placenta, the outer horizon, lateralization, the haunting - domain of attention, here, there, within, along - living in doubt / it is Eyes - learned to see color in the dark, slides die - black and white changing what's visible and in - a white of another texture / screen in the --- - over star map - hidden spirits, lifting them off Family parts 1. he she daughter son 2. he knows, she (in this instance) doesn't: who's listening 3. grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, child
Reading from 18 Even the bones are continually rebuilt. in a slightly different center of trust Magnetic field, a faint tingling of nose and upper lip Null field Hypothalamus and electromagnetic fields Robert Becker - transistor, semi-conductor, glial cells liquid crystals Earth's magnetic pulse 8-16 per sec, brain 8-12 entrained to regenerate if there were energy enough at the point of amputation bootlegging the project while Consciousness as acupressure
Wakeful hypometabolic Learning in the paralyzed - yogi's relax and regular breath Learning to relax the frontalis muscle - electromyelogram feedback Negative adaptation to stress The mind can alarm the body until the sugar-metabolizing mechanism Control of movement in older, moves from spine to cortex Increase voltage If you inhibit thought you come at length to a region of consciousness below or behind thought. the local self There is no such thing as an inanimate object. As if a rock, crystal, star, some substances broke, shattered, and all these streams, lines, poured up from it.
When a subject stares at a blank visual surface known in psychology as a ganzfeld "he finds himself not-seeing." He doesn't know whether his eyes are open or not. High galvanic skin resistance - relaxation.
"A brief delicate sensation that was pleasanter than the rest," groping for it, like a million volts. The mutual dreaming
Pretending to be hypnotized, etc In the absence of visual input to the cortex, the more excitable visual cortical networks might be producing their own imagery. LSD high arousal, optic nerve traffic Amphetamine as after good news The monkeys who - faint images - bar pressing, shock - pressed bars during REM. this peculiar tandem of states Smoking - 'alerting pattern' - persistent and rather intense - dope alternative to booze "a still and exquisite void," a crystalline core. Peyote "a morphine-like substance"
and then - it was late in the morning - a white clear screen came before my eyes. In front of the screen passed, or rather, floated, simple images - faces, objects. Air chilling and drying the membranes of the lung, the body has weight, bright lights, harsh sounds, all the functions performed by the placenta are taken over by the infant's own organs. A correspondence between the birth sky of the parent and child. Planetary force field. 18 On Tuesday morning I was doubting our Monday talk - going over the signs, the way I was singing before going to Laiwan's show - there never was a doubt I'd go - going to Sisters by instinct - the shock of being spoken to that way - she calls to say why - then Monday - "How did it go" - I hear the story, we imagine starting again - as we're talking the manuscript and letter from Robert - its tone - Tuesday, still in bed, thinking, nothing has changed, did I go through that without being free, what about men, I told Josie and Diana, were they used - Tuesday suppertime I phone her, she says she's sick, hasn't been sleeping - and just go there - the bus stop, the house painted, turning the key, Paul and two person-babies, "They're such turned-on people," looking at them not to look at him, upstairs is dark, coming in is uneasy, uncanny, wrong intimacy, the front room to put down my things, feeling at the same time the habit paths, the change in the rooms, the time implied, and some frightening wrongness about being there. Ezra not barking, dimly wagging only, in the dark the small head is that young one. Lying down touching the young small head. Beautiful round depth in my palms, love-roundness. I will stroke as I like, a moment alone saying I am where I can be as I will, am I? - she about Sandy, I watch her start me off, I, to be relieved of Robert - and test, is it really changed, because if it isn't - old way of yelling - going to bed cross - waking from this dream. (John and Brent) sitting with me, talking about Dorothy Richardson - "She's a Cancer woman, she has her brain in upside down" John says. I say no she was smarted than anyone. He says "What about Rachel?" I'm not sure - dark immoveable Rachel, firmest sanity, Miriam isn't. Making the date for Women in Focus, two days being strong abundant mental generous. The woman with the typewriter - carnations - the beauty of her speech on the phone. These days of pouring water - Rabbit tonight not coming in - last night J phoning, I knew she wanted something, and had it - sentics - another cat coming - buying Le Guin - a story with Miriam, what is this, page back, I saw something earlier in the story, Rachel. And what the story says is: Miriam, the doctor, in a world prototype of Anarres, has a grey-eyed boy Genya, who loves Rachel, who is a painter, sickly, who when he stops taking world-adjustment pills, gets well, makes a painting that in the earth-origin light room, looks beautiful; and then he can have children with Rachel. Miriam is the competent middle-years body, a short grey woman moving at lightning speed. 1976 The eye altering. J phones distressed, doesn't want to say, I took it out to go for the phone, she heard the sex - your nose and ear! - I heard the fear. "A dream where your breasts are bruised and bloody." I know she means hers. "The mirror image was contemporary." Seeing her breasts - the wedding cakes, landscapes, slabs, the Japanese little girl whose parents were gone. The little girl and the mirror were in the house; the green and the cakes, cemetery beyond, outside. She said she felt worse but her voice was relieved. Swollen abdomen. MacLeod's not wanting The little locksmith. Not being able to speak to the woman I gave flowers out of remoteness. 19 Le Guin. I saw a clear signification of - a simple version of the Ungated Affirmation lent itself to the Maluvian mode planning all night long, re-imagining the links and spaces, the feints and pauses, the erratic, unfamiliar and yet beautiful course of the True Run the evolutions in the ninth concatenation, where the 'cloud' theme recurs so strangely transposed into the ancient spiraling motif the last interlude of the Ten Gate Dream, when all the feintways are closed and the dance narrows in and in until it bursts terribly into the vertical The ant, "Long are the tunnels, longer is the untunneled." The penguins who write motion. "This most fluent and lively literature in any group-kinetic text." The art he sought, is a non-communicative art, not a communication, but a reception. Saying about Leonardo, I think of him as having had courage. "They loved her because although they couldn't understand her writing they could see she was writing in her freedom, and that was enough for them." "I can see people are like that with you, they might not understand what you're saying but they can see you are saying it in your freedom." She said Kropotkin, who gave up geology which he loved. The diary of the rose - the 4' screen, scope, and crown and clamp. Psychoscope. The engineer. A rose appeared on the whole Con dimension: a full-blown pink rose, beautifully sensed and visualized, clear and steady, whole. The Uncon went crystal-dark, relief, and the rose darkened and wavered. There was flurry and subverbalization on the Con dimension, and the Uncon faded into grey, suppression. His reaction to a question is intense and complex, each sentence is like a shower of pebbles thrown into a pool, the interlocking rings spread out quick and wide over the Con and into the Uncon, responses rising on all levels. There are two subverbal levels running aside from the spoken words, all sensory-emotive reactions and distortions are vigorous and complex. He 'sees' me, for instance, in at least three different ways. And the Con-Uncon correspondences are so complicated, and the memory traces and current impressions interweave so rapidly, and yet the whole is unified in its complexity. At the same time there was a tune going on the audio, in mental puretone, and in the Uncon lapping over into the interplay areas, a large, dark room seen from a child's height, the window sills very high, evening outside the windows, tree branches darkening, and inside the room a woman's voice, maybe reading aloud. the subliminal proprioceptive input We bring the three dimensions in separately. That was terrible, but it does not come out pain in the end, he has not forgotten or repressed it but it is all changed, by his love for his parents and his sister and for music and for the shape and weight and fit of things and his memory of the lights and weathers of days long past and his mind always working quietly, reaching out, reaching out to be whole. I am Rosa. I am the rose. The rose, I am the rose. The rose with no flower, the rose all thorns, the mind he made, the hand he touched. The winter rose.
Le Guin Ursula 1982 The diary of the rose, in The compass rose: short stories Harper & Row NW2-74-8-W of the 6th meridian The grass comes toward me in waves.
Local and seeing out The little baby in its box The galactic horizon, plane
- To hide / to reveal To sift, to let through / to hold back To reflect / to absorb "At the threshold it falls apart into two"
One provides rock-like stability The other feels every nuance of essentic form The stability is the relation to the stars The nuancing is living time, is attention
The geometrical space of vision
It hangs in bits, rotating, polyhedral Sustained bells granulating horizontal on the air She walks in free space, it rotates around her
- Personification, erotic mention, binary Words "nudge each other into utterance" = language is organized in us, so we can use different access-systems. We can call words by end-sound, first vowel sound, by homophone, meaning-reflex (free association), habit-sequence. There are different associative filings we can use: vocabularies, dictions - oppositeness - logical category - alliteration - assonance - euphony. There's also match-search where something is known outside language and I search partly with and partly without words - for words. Mistake. Looking for the right wrong word.
"As what we sense our way into," a kind of moling The sentence and the life-line Logos in there
"In a crucial sense / we cannot see what we cannot verbalize." We can't see what we do verbalize. We see what we are trying to verbalize. Here we are truly / contained within the body of chafing at these limits
take issue with the given
endlessly repeating and not exactly repeated cycles And 'mutuality'
Intelligent - choosing between Inhabitant of language Language thus speaking relates us. We see connections.
"One dominant sound" - no at least two, and many others - that make location - the sounds of firm location - the sounds of location (the celestial spheres) moved among - the sounds of independent movement. - Admiration suggestors
-
We learn the sounds before we learn what they say. 'Accurately' Gradually we learn how the sounds of our language are active as meaning. Is it maybe not the sounds that are active, but language - a symbiotic - there's flesh with its system, and history implicit, and language with its. It's the father, in the son: I speak as holy ghost.
And then we go on learning for the rest of our lives what the words are actually saying - yes they seem to have more sense than we - how is that - it means - in my use of language I have more sense than I know - more than one thing - there's the run of cliché - the self-betraying diction - 1. shows what she hides 2. an etymological sense 3. the thrilling arrangement of language shows in dictionaries, it is a mysterious cohesion like our bodies and the universe. But. Why do we find it mysterious and have to study it. What is study. Babel. There's knowing -
Meaning moves us deepest the more of the whole field it puts together as what we sense our way into Marlatt Daphne 1984 Musing with mothertongue in Touch to my tongue Longspoon Press -
There were names for the landscape before there were names for the inside of the body. 22 Oma [died] - this afternoon while I was waiting at CFDC - the quietness of those pieces of film - wanting the granddaughters to be pallbearers - J being angry - rose this morning sending kisses, "I think I will try to tell you -," trying to say being puzzled about her moment in behind the theatrical voice - and she, about being alive, breathing, that's the essence of it - a live performance - "Oh yes, I loved that!" - "I hope you got over your stomach ache" - "I didn't have a stomach ache, I sometimes hold onto my solar plexus when it's intense" - J worried about being tired and ill and easily dented - Jan saying how much she needs to be in the country - in purple - Cari saying to Shelly, "your estabishment shoes, and your establishment purple hair" - magenta - And: I bought a blue touque for rain, in the menswear store next to Leo's - warm, soft - but it should be black - in Eaton's going to buy white velvet, a table of touques - I take mine off, to try on a white one - my blue one on the pile has drops of water - putting it back on must look - up the escalator I'm thinking about the white one - on the way back through I leave my blue one on the pile and wear the white one out - but it's wool and itches - The black clothes bought Sprained ankle and split lip. Dreaming / tarot - landscape - the something else that's consulted. Sulcus - groove - consult. Dictionary, consult inwardly - looking somewhere - looking at looking. Dreaming - got into a - Timing the lamp The 100-foots
Dreaming - someplace with a wall - Roy had the children in with him - I get over - someplace - what 'dreaming' is - it's the division of memory, so some can't remember and some can - I remember unconsciously - is that it, the knowledge it's there and not being able to get it. Her beautiful nose with the white hat. 24
25 They liked the strawberries. "She's watching us at this moment." Inasmuch as she is us - Then hoping the page under her knee is found - (or is it hidden in them) - they liked the strawberries as the time when they moved with her - what was she like - it isn't going to be done - "The chin should quiver a little" - her engram is watching in us - the next thing I meant to say, was why don't I have a wide sense of it, in it - no one wanting to talk about how she spoke - some nonsense about the duck's wing - she is our deadness not putting will into the time - seeing her chest move - why don't I have a wide sense - because we are together - "You seemed part of the family and staying available" - (dislocking - disabling the coupler). Anne putting her hands on my face and pulling it back - what was she doing - I was feeling its looseness - Oma's profile - my hand on her side feeling small flab - Ben's dissolution - the rutted faces - Lillian not being glamorous - lying to Louise about her raspberries - Liesbet's green and pink - J when she arrived at the bus depot - the way I feel seeing her dressed like a tubby squire, that flat cap, and the pinching of her waistband with layers of clothes tucked in - plus-fours - I had to be disguised because of it - and then on the bus when she took off hat and glasses seeing the intelligent light face - if that were the face I was with - Anne's body and pearls, shoes, small face - her name. "Now she's with Helen who she's been mourning for 47 years - she mourned her for 47 years" - "trying to help you be a good girl" - Mary with her hair chopped and having helped herself to Oma's blue coat - "I have so many things from her already" - I have her voice on tape - Mary trying to give me her white dress, "I don't mean to wear " - is that immortality - tossed the dollar into the bushes - maybe we can put it in with her - the herbs - what does the body do in a coffin like that, it would be all bacterial, moulder - the herbs means essense sweetening - I'm the women's advocate - wanting Opa to say what she was like when he married her - he looking up when anyone came into the room - "You're the eldest grandchild," meaning (M means) Helen - giving me the coin - "What did I do with that silver dollar?" - really not remembering - "Oh, I threw it into the bushes" - J as we stand under the shop awning beside the shopping center parking lot, black, cold, raining, laughs - "It should have been put on her eyes" - "Or her tongue" - "Or her tongue" - "For the ferryman." I gave her a recommendation - she can offer him a lifesaver. "You're the one whose coming we noticed most, the rest just came" - that's dreaming isn't it - the message is there and a context is found for it - "How's your little grandson" - the roundhead blackhair baby, Rudy must have been holding him when I spoke to him, I could hear squeaks - "Ed was saying why don't you call him Edward" - "OH NO." "What was she like when you married her?" "Strong and healthy." "Did she like to laugh, and talk? Did you talk a lot?" "Erzählen, no, das haben wir nicht getan. Sie war aber so, immer froh, glaub' ich." The poster [for my show] - wrote Campbell - spackle - buses out. 26 Water off the raincoat soaked the back of the legs, itchy hat, protecting the posters. Dreaming the slides going into the oven, cheese
to melt.
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