Saturna Island 18 December 1983
The images before sleep, ripples, a hand.
19
Snow twilight mornings.
"The abyss is next to us." Then she saw it.
- What do I think I've done - I've come to a sense of the mistake in
the way things are conceptualized.
- It is the way it's a bid to pass all the men, that makes me nervous.
-
- Was the awkwardness of the show to cancel its ambition.
- I want the men to see I've passed them, I want them to say so. Anyone
who does isn't a man. I don't want to use the authority mannerisms though
I do use the intelligence ones.
-
- Reading with a feeling of separating the parts of a concoction into
sources, glamours, tensions.
-
- 20
-
- Wake in the cold, am really awake, when I shift my head, see through
the skylight the dazzling rider at zenith, it is mid-night woke me, very
cold, open the window for smoke, cower under, candles, one lamp in the
kitchen, candles on the bed-head.
-
- The day quite springing, more than yet, shouting to the ocean in commotion,
You're full up. There was premorning then morning and bright midday, from
the window seeing gulls and ducks excited on the choppy sea flowing south,
the black ducks which as they're watched duck under. Speaking to the pasture,
walking on the north edge of it to be in sun, yellow raincoat cracking,
sucking rosehips, walking until the handful is gone, gathering more - stretching
down the bramble. The blue is very intense.
-
- The loved housekeeping, finding where to keep kitchen tools. Wood sorted
on the porch. Finding things and bringing them.
-
- This morning going into the forest, nervous, finding myself in its
dry brown enclosure, angular litter of rocks, branches, what little can
I see, holes going in under roots, but litter in them. A heavy creak in
the unvisible tops, meager cedar. Something heavy falls.
-
- Wanting to garden the slope. Prune.
-
- 21
-
- "Isn't it amazingly cold?" "It is amazingly cold."
- Liking, excited, the moon risen far back it seemed, over the cliff.
In the short grass meadow walking on frozen ground, brittle structure like
clinker, particles of crust risen up. On that surface fine grass pillia,
a moon surface, very black compact shadow companion. And yet not seeing
distinctly into the trees, like a clear blindness, standing in pale grass,
the cloud that came up white single definite fish-shape after the moon,
rising and growing like a sign, or apparition, then stretched, and seemed
to begin to dissolve in the different air above this shelf.
-
- An amazing retraction of the sea showing spurs and bones bare, I was
rushing among them to see the foundation of the parts of the shore I'll
know, nervous expecting it to flood back suddenly, it seemed a held breath.
Seaweed on rocks felt frozen under gumboot soles.
-
- "It felt like the sea had gone away."
-
- Now I hear it flummocking in.
-
- "Murres and murrelets." Common murre, cormorants drying off
on the bullet-holed cliff face.
-
- As it gets later the fire has less power as if darkness penetrates
the room.
-
- Tides: it is full moon and solstice.
26
- titania
- agitated, fleeing among persons, what am I doing
- excited in these bushes
ashamed intently
-
- 2 January 1984
-
- Little crying. Now my hands can love you.
- Why is this the only time I see the sweet one.
- And when touched even at the ledge it takes you out of sight.
- Sweet round arms, sweet round (in my) arms
- lying alone
- At CFDC are they looking at someone whose show was a failure. "Failure"
says my father's hand.
- "What they say is 'Poor Ellie'". [my cousin Roseanne says
my relatives say]
- I was mad at myself for having protected them.
-
- 5
- today the air white the fields running
- clean grass bent over in the current, freshet
- red mists in the twigs, water
- afloat higher up, on the cliff, in the firs
- it's trodden black under the juniper,
- sheep pills, blue berries
- -
"There was the garden on New Years Eve, Rhoda and I put a candle
in it, on the table." [T]
6
In ship language feeling what it might mean, the unconscious being language
- the expliciting of another context in tackle sloop main wale with
the sense of how much of it was already in use but silent - how - "shapes
that were standing by the word / sounded" - the ancestors - that colorless
shell sense - the place in the field, the air was interfered - the field
was changed - a fovea - small pit - a singularity - converge to more than
one focus, imperfect vision or images - a sigm - why is that exciting -
a fire a ripple - a freely floating possibility - an intensity of the fluid
- the sea concentrated into - alive - it's me excited.
How soft a day, hearing an inhale so loud is it a big whale, running
out in socks - sandstone colored heads sinking, followed by the body flowing
through a diving loop - sea lions, two, then another, swimming together
upchannel. Looking from them suddenly across the water, !, how evenly lovely
the blue, no shore, evenly paper-ink a darker blue band. In the soft water-air
things bright and clean, lichened rocks. I came over the crest at the point,
and saw a brown head swimming toward shore, didn't flash away, kept coming.
As I got down squatting to be less seen, the length of sleek brown body,
a tail, yes it's an otter. Dives, tail whips, the rolling-under of the body
as if over a bolster. Then it swam up the coast but not hurrying, making
away but not wanting to seem to. Joined by another and then further out
there were three.
It was in the softest time mid-afternoon low tide almost not a gurgle.
The surroundedness. Surface of the water without any sharp light. A foghorn
sounding from a direction it couldn't be. The ship came into sight after
quite a long while, monstrously large voice speaking Japanese on its quarterdeck,
rust-red hull without bow-wave in unvarying dark engine smudge through the
clear space between whited-out shores. Yes the sense of the soft clarity
of water, obliteration of all land but where I am on real shore. Logs broadside
with cormorants and their reflections in a row like pins, a long way out.
Rice paper. Water/color.
That squawk is the beautiful heron disturbed from her tree.
Sitting still on the rock seeing and hearing it's all in soft alert,
around, it's around me, soft metal, aluminum dust, velvety water, velvety
air and rock.
The way the water from that white reflected surface opens down just next
to the rocks I'm sitting on, into darkness under - maybe I see something
- and the softness of air breathed, what it has in it, dissolved plants,
goodness, pull it in delight.
7
- He makes wrong systems,
- in them are right parts
-
- 8
-
- Yesterday fog dried off, the uphill pasture when I'd stepped - sparkling
- I couldn't see it, but water in the short grass - everywhere sucked -
standing looking at the cliff - the sound of water falling, or is it trees
- a stag lying under a tree on the brow, motionless for days holding up
his rack - eagles - more - six - level - sunning - why was the cliff more
present that day? it was warm - does it radiate down, warm wall - the eagles
lying on air rising beside it - I liked to stand still well back from it
- open perimeter.
-
- Today's loud breathing was orcas, fins raked back and then forward,
slow rocking progression south - six or seven - they sounded for a fishboat
but then I saw them again - from the porch - beyond the point - heard,
then saw, and ran out in gumboots, in pleasure.
-
- 9
-
- If I reread my feeling for him will I know what he needs (to know)
- the idea of psychic mending - viewing the damage from inside, coming
to understand it, then starting a movement that will fill in.
-
- I'm seeing an actual lesion - patching a circuit - branching around
- is it my nerves to patch?
-
- "Latents to transition by reading them" - what I thought
Trudy did - feeling myself applying them to him - is that how I take it
for myself.
-
- Homophone code - speaking the truth writing lies - feeling what word
the false context is hiding - brushy - twiggy - a nest or platform in one
sense, with a direct saying in another -
-
- Thinking of it as battle - as mending work - long engagement - I've
been in some unclear way with you, for three years - archetypal - this
relation is what it is.
-
- That the stages in this work are once for all, the later depends completely
on the accuracy of the earlier.
-
- Can I think of it as ballet. Teaching it to flow and also to stop and
pull.
-
The amazing and nervous echo of sea sounds down from the overhangs, the
stone gives it a dry quality? coming from stone like light - marks - no
just like the sounds are light - talking - babbling - 'a radio, a Japanese
sailor' - seeing the roundness of his skin - saying it to him.
11
- "A large animal that stays warm in the sea has to eat." Said
in a tone something like petulant, that instantly could be linked to the
look he sometimes has, of being experienced in brothels.
-
- - Wanting to talk about the massive brows of the sea lions - and I
insisting on the beautiful otter.
-
- And the interesting way the meeting went. I headed out late, but sure
of not being caught by the dark; and then met the tractor on the woodlot
road, black and white, not hearing it before I could see its red and the
dog came barking. "Oh sorry!" having driven me through the rose
whips. "That's all right!" Thinking, I understand his tone, but
what was mine. Light-hearted, pleased.
-
"'Mooring anchor' does not mean an old engine block."
- -
-
- To work with the air
-
- For most visual involvement many points, randomness and complex structure
-
- mass structures - individual particles subordinated
to phenomena of many particles moving together and assuming larger shapes
-
- within a cloud of events gradual formations in
continuous change, like the spiraling of smoke
-
- among sound masses, densities and volumes of
sound, surfaces and planes, but on the ground of discontinuities, granularity
-
- dense clouds of sound atoms spread across all
registers in all modalities
-
- the arts of vision could likewise formalize themselves
anew
-
- a prismatic setting-out of tiny pitched notes
-
- a child soprano transformed - almost like birdsong
- whole choruses - 'crystalline music'
-
- bell effects, a maze of shadows
-
- electronic sounds placed to left and right of
the instruments, also behind them, to give a shadow illusion
-
- 12
-
- Xenakis - electronic music - whether it can go to color. Two things
1. learning to hear 2. working with the ideas I return to 3. daring to
see.
-
- On the rocks looking at the water quiet in the radiation redirected
from water seeing that if I look it is water moving in a certain way with
quite a lot of black, but if I see it is an amazing wrinkled surface, blue,
like aluminum foil. Another way was the sense of a light light, like snow
drifting, blown across both the tidal wavelets perpendicular down-sound,
and the circumferal arcs outward from points of rock. The sense of blue,
blown, as if gas, was firm, possibly there was wind that way. Then it was
movements in many directions crossing through each other. I don't understand
the blue or its quality of drift, I couldn't see it to know it, looking
was a point focus, seeing was wider. I was noticing myself anchoring in
the possibility of describing, as if I could really see what I didn't already
know.
-
- The idea of taking specks of a medium, applying an elementary math
to it and then seeing it fork (organize).
-
- Seeing the clouds charging over the escarpment edge - evaporate.
-
- Orion a great broad rising beyond this near sheer all the time bathtub.
13
After sunset the intensity of yellow, rose incandescence, round zone
- turning away from it to shore, the arbutus, dead branches and red skin,
very bright, green leaves distinct - leaving it, the distinctness of the
lichens, ultraviolet maybe - "a good lichens" - infrared? - small
moss seeming to be seen to grow facing the horizontal light.
The light seems an incandescence of substance in that zone of relation
to the sun - just there a circular (moreness) of molecules.
30
Lying in bed trying to stay awake to feel myself fall asleep - sensations
up through the head - startled by a small voice, a woman's, from a distance,
but a foot from my left ear - I jump awake, look at that place above the
bed clothes.
The sensations in that change, of having come somewhere I've been before
- rarely - was it when I used to smoke - abstracter, obliquer, drier, authoritative,
and some place-time flavour.
-
When I began to think I would be a writer I meant that I wanted to move
freely, have unusual experience, and grasp my experience more than the people
around me seemed able to.
I was ten or eleven when I began to write, outside of school. The earliest
writing I still have, is a fantasy of myself as a Hallowe'en witch; and
then a science fiction of my wedding ceremony as the ruler of Venus.
When I was twelve I wrote an analysis of my father's unfairness, that
began the journal writing. I wrote letters to a lot of penpals, had begun
to write poetry, and at thirteen had organized three other people into a
collaborative novel and a handwritten magazine. This was probably also the
period when I was telling my sister daily installments of the beginnings
- the characters and settings, I wasn't interested in plot - of mystery
stories. I was given a five-year diary and wrote in it from 12 to 17. There
was an earlier collaborative magazine, 11 and 12? 10 and 11? with my sister,
her friend, my friend - it was always two older, two younger - about our
loves. Again I was the organizer. We gave ourselves initials and were each
in some way dedicated to one of the high school boys. I think I organized
the other's loves, it was my own love for Kenneth Driediger that I wanted
a court for.
The earliest writing, then, was about: sex, friendship, ceremony, place,
anger and sadness, to record and expand; and was usually collaborative,
or shared. I wanted it to be seen, and it was other girls I gave it to.
31
- The sea we rush into. Rusted metal.
- I am in the mind of that time. Summer early morning.
1st February
Standing on the pasture slope looking at the copse - in a south-facing
recess of the douglas fir deciduous trees standing in color - it's their
bloom-time, pink, orange, a dust hanging in the branches - that stand crossed
- white - the trees and shrubs dark at the base lightening to milk-blue
at the tips - these trees with their weave - straight whips - the scatter
of color with concentrations - I begin to see - and more of the color -
a yellow lower - feel myself thinking of writing it - ah, is it fear - does
seeing frighten.
The man kneeling to make fire over a root, new jeans with a red tool-strap.
The horses standing among the great bare fir pillars. "They all have
halters on." His long patient replies.
Following him into the house. He fetches the lamb from behind the stove.
It's so lean and thin, even the lambskin is thin, long legs wide and black
at the hooves - narrow light thing coming to us to smell.
Going through the gates to the lambing house - pens under the big firs,
clean dirt, ewes with triplets in a smaller one, a lamb basking between
roots - two curled on a board - cats or rabbits - the ewes that haven't
lambed with their human vulvas, brown-purple, presenting - lambs in them
one each side like saddlebags - the greenyellow thick milk in a bottle -
he kneels on the straw explaining - "Do you know seconds pudding?"
- "albumen."
He goes through gates, I step through, he closes them - his hands shake,
his breathlessness - the dog killing a fir branch - praised - we walk on
firm mud tracks, in the even heat. "We have a lot of lambs," "four
this morning." A ewe with bloody cord hanging. "I was three quarters
of an hour delivering this one, this morning."
What I wanted to note about the water - on the wharf looking - how hard
it is to see - something that looks like a combing of shadows running back
from the advance of this riplet, after peering, begins to seem a turned
flank of a contour - but is it.
The surface of the water like a metal skin - plated one molecule thick
- patina - supple over the water's beast.
The motions of water crossing - I thought three axes - two at ninety
degrees and one at 45 to the main - that was my fancy - like a plaid - thinking
of the Scots at sea.
Can I see fear.
Afraid in 'writing.'
You have no idea of the anguish of making, of abandoning,
something of oneself to be judged and to be incapable of judging oneself,
incapable of knowing what one is. For one more or less free bar, there are
twenty which suffocate under the weight of a tradition whose hypocritical
and base influence, in spite of my efforts, I keep encountering.
Wrote Debussey in 1911.
In the dark, feet and arms hunting the outhouse, what is that fear, I
hear something stir maybe in the arbutus, that way. Uncertain where the
ground falls away, into the water. Is there something I don't know -
It could change suddenly - what I know could be gone - there could be
something I don't know, come out of somewhere - those I trust could be waiting
to harm me, I may believe wrongly, there may be beings I don't know about,
who can interfere with me, there may be meanings I live, everything I register
may be an outcome of acts and intentions I don't suspect.
That I am attacked, and attack.
That I desire anyone.
I'm afraid of dying any minute.
That I'm afraid of abandoning myself.
The sweet safeness of telling the day past. I went in the afternoon,
to work on the bathhut, coming past the dock seeing the boat gone. It's
warm but not bright. Flotsam, unusual, is it a high tide setting it loose,
sometime during the early hours. Sawing near the ground, with the wood held
over the edge of a plum box, flabby saw, handle wrapped with string. Picking
nails out of the rusted scatter on a plank. I trip on a root. The saw slips
against my index finger, I suck it to clean out the tetanus. "Scrounge
carpentry is what I'm used to" (I tell him). Replaced slats different
greys, browns, the thing is neat, grey old lichened boards underneath, a
silver glow as it's getting dark - I see it again, when I bring the cedar
for the door slab.
3
The raven yelling PILOT! PILOT! PILOTPILOTPILOT.
- I have almost established her.
- Is it true I'm going on toward him, I seem to think so, but as heart
only, heart's home and the rest lost again.
- When it's distanced like that
4
- What she means by ideological habit.
- Choosing out of the dream, some part.
The bright mist running by the red flowering tips of the alders on the
other side of the lake.
This aft going over the mountain - the sky's Mediterranean - in the gap
a standing tongue of cloud - it's hot on the trail - just beyond the rim
I put on my hat, the chill attacks the middle ears - down the road to the
shore it's a different day - the cut full of wet slash, a long fall to the
stream, I don't like that passage, it's next to a bad accident or a body
disposed - the air's raw and grey - they say, when they come into the store,
It's cold today.
Going home, climbing between the mud ruts, watching for how the boundary
will show - it's at the reservoir - where the road comes next to the water,
opposite, across the lake, the sight of the alders bright and the dark air
evaporated to that thin brightness flowing past them - and then the southern
day - the hot trail - watery pasture - then cold among the trees - the sea
slate grey and choppy under fog running low through the sound - as I inspect
the shore for roofing boards - beautiful cleanness of wood washed up.
I can hear whales. It's dark, windy, in commotion. I know they're there,
something,
- huge gasp close
- crash I see water
- broke blind
- on a rock
-
- How she is here: writing. Her metal head
- says pressure.
-
- 5
-
- Some way to present the body of work and get promoted.
-
- What people 'like,' what they want to read, what they want someone
to write, what they want to write, what in writing they want valued and
recognized - differences - and then the politics.
-
- What is it today - a haunt by the bad contact - complaining we're in
false relation, she undermines me - she praises me for what isn't my strength
- it confuses me the way I can't want to touch her and then suddenly she'll
show up lovely but not for me - I'm separated from desire certainty - I
am so often in visual recoil and then lying down with someone I have to
separate from the visible - the sag of going on in hopeless ambivalence
- the porky carrier of the fine ones - and then all I have with the fine
ones is the privilege of being there seeing them: they haven't come to
be with me.
-
- And then: howcome I can be killed like that instantly by feeling her
not wanting me to be - apprehension phoning, don't know who'll be there;
if it's the warm voice the sigh of relief - the apprehension not less after
years - moments when I feel it has come into the real - by a freedom -
and then it's gone - her big circle of intimates and the fantasy of my
position in it, we both labour to hold.
-
- What I'd like - love-making where I love to see the body - somebody
I can often be with who is firmer not keeping me uneasy - her possibility
of language - heart life.
-
- Dorothy Richardson battling in the politics of perception, for what's
to be noticed and how, whose nervous system, whose endocrine balance, whose
senses, whose upbringing will feel at home in
-
- primarily the social world
- and then the whole of the rest of anyone's world.
10
The child didn't want to be like him. His voice vaunted itself. He didn't
hear what everyone else could hear. He was alone enjoying an ugly mistake.
His voice arched alone.
13
Centered is not going somewhere to where the center is. It's taking this
oddness as it. Not where it was before.
We were parting the right way this time, both with tears.
15
The moment when the sun is low, and its warmth is felt coming finely
concentrated upward from the water. The gentle sounds.
where cross seas set up an uncomfortable jabble
in commotion, not long waves, but a real sea-jabble
Seeing our difference: she identifying herself with self-respect and
I with desire - I seeing suddenly that desire as much as other motions,
could be invasion by something of someone else.
16
The well at the world's end. "What did she expect to find in the
well?" "Knowledge and poetry."
17
Love and best thistles
19
"You're weak, when someone speaks against you you'll always suspect
they know something you don't" - I'm not ready for attack when I haven't
made a hefty shift into hostile encounter - Trudy saying "My friends
are my enemies" - instant blaze - exactly what happens - I'm stricken
and act quickly to cover it - but I'm in confusion not knowing whether it
was a blow, ie not knowing whether the other intended it as a blow - I don't
want to show I can be hurt but the cost is that I am hurt, the battle is
lost because I've been shifted into defense - the cost of Trudy's ever-alert
is imagining attack; and maybe beyond that, small range, she can't be where
she daren't blaze.
Rage is jet fuel - chemical speed - I opt for grief.
The answer is - I opt into grief rather than anger because - maybe -
I hang around near revelation.
I should never identify myself with a vision that hasn't seen me.
21
- I commit myself in one frame of attention: the record at another time
will be coherent in another frame.
- I describe what I was dreaming; I read back maybe a description of
my relation to x.
- I write the halting track of some thought; what I read back is in another
rhythm, is jointed sometimes differently.
As if: I write from the back and read from the front. No. As if I write
somewhere and read somewhere else. I just did it. The words are suggested,
I write them meaning by them something different than they also say. I accept
the read given, too, because it seems - they seem to find it more impressive,
interesting. They is sometimes the idea of Jam or the idea of Rhoda.
Fineness what do you see. Soul who is watching you.
Concentration commitment
I don't like the way she's in me looking for cleverness.
25
You're a scrawny chill. You're an old tin.
You're a puff-belly hog socialite time-killer fantasist miser.
I understand that I'm at the time when I don't leave but I begin to make
myself strong by holding to my own in everything.
And not to dream of new work because now the old work has to bring the
new time.
28
She is 38 and thinks she could go to a college somewhere and become a
philosophy professor. Where. A women's college. Walking the river flats,
a Sunday afternoon, Oxford, was where other walkers seemed to see her.
Is she a philosopher? She says Dorothy Richardson took the German philosophers
in her own way; ideas aren't things, they pass in a person, in time and
space. She could say her work for the last seven years has been locality.
"I can never really be an artist, an artist has to just make something.
I was always having to know what it meant."
She has to begin, she says, to know what philosophy is; elaboration of
mistake. Could she be wise in society?
A small broad-shouldered woman in black, with a Canadian accent and a
limp, a comic name, distinguished head. She's been an artist; she's going
to show us her film when we interview her.
How. Theory and the fantasia of origin. It doesn't matter what philosophy
was. We should see and think.
March 2
What could be the worst - being arrivist artist - without apprenticeship
but adeptly absorbing the essence of work they've evolved labouring in simplicity,
and using it to get what by their rigor they won't have for years.
The difference between appreciating and imprinting. Is it that appreciating
is about appreciation triggers.
I learned a perception with them, and was mistaken thinking they knew
it - but the one who does know it is J - then what is my relation to 'them'
- the feeling of this is brightening - false too - do we know who's knowing.
Forgetting there's a madness and using it, so I'll have tribute, who
is most desperate. "Less despised and more hated."
5
- I trust her to tell me what I know she can't.
- What I know today is to stop believing what anyone tells me.
My pencils say Venus Venus
The smell of violets again.
6
An Bonefoot sez: everything I write is written by a crippled woman.
- It's hope that's my enemy.
-
- But I'm ugly thinking so.
-
14
- In this dead time in Vancouver the odd new experience of watching her
theorize and refusing to go along - seeing I understand nothing - on the
bus thinking I could know it's dying and be with its dying - realizing
with love that's what she's doing - am I in this blank because I've been
so long with a system that doesn't know anything about me.
-
- The journal - I was a woman, trying to be a woman, trying not to be
a woman - helpless with my material, I can't graduate, I can't write my
ain folk, I don't know them - really to write as the crippled woman, is
it to go back to beauty - I wonder if there's something you're not telling
me, because you aren't noticing there's something I'm not telling you .
About the kitchen she saying I use it so she doesn't recognize it - disregard
different uses of knives - sticky drips - that I don't like how she's wanting
to write - I say if I were really to be there I'd be so offended I couldn't
be there - she arguing that little nice men are best - she fought to get
me to see her the way she thinks her mother saw her father - and on my side,
if she wants that she has to look like my father - otherwise thought is
divided / from touch and sight - dear one it isn't political.
"Listening, that debauchery that ages the face," says Colette.
Often having to read backward, can't stand the ordering meant to make
it easy. [ie reading from the back of the book forward]
The baby in the carrycot, lifted into the bus - the baby propped on the
pillow - I'm speaking to him - "You were on a bus with your baby. You
were speaking to him" a woman on a march says. "I've seen you
before. I remember you because you were speaking to him."
The baby older, a two year old, 3, 4, 5. I love the child's speech. I
love what we say to each other. Write it in my journal, I love the child
in language. In writing I want to perpetuate what we said to each other
in love, in intimacy.
The child at school. I can't stand the other girls' speech, I sit alone
in my desk at recess, reading.
He wants us to speak German. We resist instinctively. Why. English. It's
ours. German. They want us caught in their old people's deadness, irrelevance.
German is a language of disease, scabs. It's scaly, it's thick skin without
pores. It kills us. We have no German but theirs. English is air. Ich will
nicht. I don't want to. I have the world to choose my language in. When
I see Hitler on film: yes - I know the sound. Visiting preachers screaming.
"What are my categories of advantage and disadvantage"
"Words I am not going to use because I experience them as membership
words."
16
Tears coming when I think yes I'm in mourning of my love of her.
- Last night the tidal roar and wind, moonlight slashing the wall and
bed.
- The night-waking anguishes now.
"Sitting there on the wood box day after day in deep despair. For
many years we didn't go anywhere or see anyone." [my mom about my dad's
depression]
"That you're a nothing, that you're not a worthwhile person."
[my mom's confession of worst fear]
- Having come through the past hours working,
-
- writing loosely feeling it possible to say,
- it's fast like a person, what person -
- colloquial female frank unimpressed tart practical oily phrasemaking
strong
19
It's been years of squeezing cognitions trying to get into another league.
20
Cheryl - looser than mercury, piling north - magnetic dust - fall - the
hyacinth blue - I can choose - fire - hearing the cracks, like glaze - safe
breath continuous - the sea
A square of scatter - graphed - lines sail - barometer rising over the
stove - rice unlocked - I'm going back to St Alban's Road, up the steps,
all seedlings, poppy, a density - and then the slope is long - grey plants
- what house last night.
- My wheel is in the dark!
- I cannot see a spoke
-
- My story has a moral
- I have a missing friend
-
- Burglar! Banker - Father!
What about - the way she tacks every syllable - equity - sharp tongue
- tucks - of dainty interspersion - in the - like dotted dot -
- Can she - be as near - as that -
- Side fall -
- Withdraw -
Sewing in ether acre
- Emily - I am sending -
- Life time - exchange -
-
- Who is to blame? The weaver?
- Ah the bewildering thread!
27
I'd like a friend where I laughed at home.
that we achieve, if we do achieve, in little
sedentary stitches as though we were making lace
- Emily's cladding and Emily's body
- Strongly voiced: notation
- How she is so characteristic - weighting single words - sounding
-
- Not taking responsibility for a viewpoint that isn't mine
The sensation of refusing a writer I've seen - I won't be impressioned
by that one - enemies in femininity - that isn't it - toward the stranger
- someone who hasn't taken on enough pain.
They don't dive - what's writing - it's useable minds - working rhythms
and speeds - evidence of themselves.
his salt greene streames
She's Shakespearian -
matched in mouth like bells, each under each,
a cry more tuneable
Tucks - of dainty interspersion - like a dotted
dot
Wild flowers - kindle in the woods - the brooks
slam - all the day
I watched the moon around the house until upon
a pane
27
the sense of inferiority from not having pleasure
April 1
Translucent - orchids - I took - Titania's - perfume - with round-grass
- cabin ground sill - deep moss on a barrow
Taking the lamp to the kitchen - alright kids, I've done my beauty.
5
The coming being as if already there so that when I relaxed I sat down
in it and it came up over my breasts like a bathing suit.
13
I'm glad we've been living here again - the East
Place - my mom says she's worried about me - my hair is dead from the roots
- she feels my waist - Judie does - my shoulders are so big, I'm so thick
and short - I used to be beautiful - my father inserts that she isn't saying
what she means, they think it's because I'm with women - I don't disagree,
maybe I'm not beautiful anymore because I'm not with men, but - I tell him
passionately - it's women who've been brilliant companions, the men don't
understand anything, they're so stupid, they don't see me, it's impossible
with them. Even a few years ago there was a man I liked but he couldn't
see me at all.
15
[Jam visiting the island for the last time] Then for the afternoon she's
condescending about her recent wisdoms and how she's going to help me now,
I yell about Rhoda and people not liking my writing, in a mushy abortive
way, doesn't grip, teary, exhausted, the mush is self pity and blaming,
I'm going on about that piece, what [Rhoda] said, how wrong it was.
We dig clams, she goes on, little awkward shovel bites, I get out the
piece. She reads it and is angry after two pages about, she says, the spacing.
I lie outside, intense fire in the solar, laid out and then starting to
feel I'm going to find out whether she can read it or not, I'll know if
her complaint is the true one, I'm freer already, I've had to be whining
because of her holding out on this, she's been holding out there because
she knows that's what disables, hopeful too, maybe I've written something
she can't read, maybe I've got ahead of her.
She has to have a nap - outside with the sun sloped onto us as we're
lying under the red cover, she falls asleep, I fade to the interim - in
the fadedness do I get to be her - seeing the smoke particles in convecting
tissue, falling lightly through the light. An eagle of the boughs. Two wings
behind her back.
Want to know more, she's snooty, thinks it's enough and then goes on
about spacing so insistently I think it's doing something else, but still
I'm remembering my own love of it the first time in the presence of someone.
Then she's insisting on my lack of self faith - "Why are you talking
about my lack of self faith just when I'm feeling quite a lot of faith?"
- That's covering something too, interesting. Then she makes a joke about
my cologue and I top it inspiredly, and then she makes a very bad joke as
if having to win something back - ha, you're showing your hand and it's
not less competitive than mine.
Then going to sleep - I wake at 4 from the spirit world - she dreams
too - I'm angry and have to do some firm hollering - we find out what is
worrying her most in the manuscript.
And I too, see how much of its charm comes from her. "You want to
take its magnificence for your image."
And then thinking what it means - her use of my country - we both doing
the same, I knew, and she called it something else - a knot of harpies -
working to be honoured in culture.
And then to think here as if not still in wrangle.
20
Exhausting self pity, mush.
21
With C in a night room, we see through the window
the waning crescent. C says "Look there is another." It's frightening
as if we're in a spirit world. Then as if a white owl or eagle wing-spread
outside the pane holding a round moon. It's again two of one. Then C and
I floating from a pivot at her elbow, our heads are passing back and forth
across each other's view, hers is bald, we are as if imitating the moons.
She wants to continue but I see something else come against the window holding
something. I want her to shine the light toward it, a small as if bird body,
with fine gold chains, in the brief small light it shows skin pattern, green
cell outlines, red dot enclosed, a round-bellied tiny body female-shaped
like a harpy.
It was equinox, Good Friday.
The phosphorescence. Blue light threading off mussels in the black under
the wharf. Submerged flares as off a minnow's turn. Could be stars.
To go on about persistently - to foul or seize food, carry away souls
of the dead.
Rapacious predatory person.
22
I am being skewed by envy of the way your writing is received and your
popularity, also with my friends.
You've earned your authority in writing, it is true authority. I am sorry
not to have it but I haven't given it what you have.
I would like to come out of the position of envy spoken as blame.
I suppose that means taking on envy as simple agony.
Also I must stop having time to help you in your muddles, and work for
my own authority.
The writing you saw - yes it's using your interestingness - and also
my 'love' which is to say attention - what I've been in writing has been
that 'love' - what you call dilation - making the other exist -
Possibly it is a parasitism I must see through - I've been suspecting
something like that - but the other thing of making demos of psychic mobility
- ostensive combat - I don't seem equipped for - that's on-going.
You not less than me and the others are a harpy working for cultural
honour and nothing else.
The use of you that's in that writing, I have earned and take.
It's sore to be without.
Slurs. Fluid mud. All I said was you're as competitive as the rest of
us.
I have to stop grounding it, stabilizing and correcting. I have to be
seeing for myself if it's sense to me.
I have to set myself on my own ground.
Until you know something about your own operations in rivalry you aren't
reconstituted. I think you've had a false dismemberment. Powerpacking your
new match.
If I'm not also in love I don't have enough fuel.
Gender is your confusor, what it covers is rivalry.
What attacks me is your obliviousness. |