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21 August Monday Grande Prairie
Dream the fence I can't get under or through, woven
with wire net and charred sticks, and so I face the bull, a charred hulk
himself, and turn him.
22nd, Olson house northwest of Valhalla Centre
A farmhouse, the yard, the creek. Meeting the landlord and instantly
feeling his fantasies working on my aloneness. Can the leer be filmed.
23
Carry things from the car, by evening it's becoming a centre, table,
shelves, and a stove coming. The surprise of faces when a door opens. Two
old people.
During the day I'm thinking about events, how one is connected to another.
'Destiny.' Everything that comes. The whole tissue. What connection of dreams.
The café in Hythe, ugly, and the woman, and the painting. Laundromat.
The water, when it starts to smell sulfur stronger, it means a storm.
24
In the morning, cold, waiting for the stove.
Don't know where to start working.
Ducks' and squirrels' voices.
Want to register these meetings with men and stop mistrusting myself
in them if it's possible.
-
Remaking. What's lost identity? She wasn't good enough, I had to change
her.
When he comes with the fitting for the pipe he's brought another neighbour,
another bachelor. This time he asks whether I drink and whether I've ever
been married, goodlooking woman like you. They fit on the stovepipe. "Bring
it down tenderly," Nordhagen says. The tension in the room because
I'm a woman alone in a house in the country. I push against them in the
undercurrent of everything I say. In there was a moment when I tried to
look him in the eye and see behind, but what stops me is when I don't like
to see.
Another pickup, younger man, an offer of wood. There's more space around
this one, a catskinner, tells me about the fight he had with his brother
Billy, broke his little finger. "He broke my jaw and I broke a rib
on him."
-
The clouds piled up. A pretty blindness with the sun low. Driving hard
singing, not minding the crackles on the radio, and then the engine starting
to tap. Trying to get it home regardless, foolish. Evening cooling, seeing
mist set in certain lower parts of the road.
Today's bad, is it the crazy dark of the moon.
25
Cold clear. Many stars.
Restless horse moving fast around its post, on a white rope, in the strong
wind that took the steeple off their barn.
-
- correcting the computer
- not knowing how
- every method is a prison
don't know what it's set for, long life, children
-
- Fright of the drugs, what can I know about it.
- Somebody's there, funny, in their presence your imagination relaxes
and plays, and you feel yourself.
-
- Hardly any of my heroes have been without it.
- It needs courage and quality.
-
The fire has a strong draft and sounds in the stovepipe. The air waves
next to it. Outside, a tree with its own strong wind and I think that's
a crow riding it. The sound of water beginning to hiss in the pot.
Last night a pickup drove onto the yard and one of my neighbours stumbled
through the lights. The men, this one's a catskinner, brutalized and lonely.
They work and drink.
In notes from two years ago I found "dreamed just now a bit of old
wire screen which if folded over once and held up to the light would have
instead of a moiré a picture, often head and shoulders, of a man
with some detailed background. I showed other people and exclaimed, refolded,
showed. They were indifferent and I shouted that it was a wonderful thing,
exactly like the mechanism of dreaming, that is, seeing pictures out of
grid on grid." I found the note this morning. Last night working with
the xeroxes of last winter I discovered that one of the xeroxes of old screen
had a face in it. I don't understand how any of these things work.
Sometimes love is the navigator and then it puts me out of my depth and
I call in doubt, resistance.
It's love that works. It's seeming to me that the doubt is the same in
person and work love.
26
Looser lighter and easier - sitting to the xeroxes in love with black and white - a few things
finding themselves, the underspirit is working and finding again - writing
J, then Flatens come to help with the car. Coffee, writing an hour and then
walking out and finding the spruce place, meeting the owl, the smells and
small coloured leaves making child's year, Arden and Donnie drinking Canadian
sherry telling stories, the time lightning hit Donnie's house, took the
heads right off the nails so the boards fell down after a while; split the
aerial tamarack post, bust the radio apart. They were all out for a while,
my dad got burns on his legs, the legs always get it worst. Don't ever piss
on an electric fence, and then electric fence stories, the time --- wrapped
fence wire around a board and put it down the outhouse, they were having
a Ladies Aide meeting, old Mrs ---, she's big, she's so fat she can hardly
get ---, she took a piss and turned on the charge. She came out saying Ooch,
ooch, she thought she'd had a heart attack.
When I was putting wood on the fire once more I thought an Eton Street
upstairs dream had arrived.
-
The way ideas come in to the side, a little darting sideways indication,
fragile. The first part of a sentence, stops, considered, without words
/ yes or no, and then on.
Thought about thinking and then it was lost.
The way the unconscious works, finding its accuracies and speed, and
errors. Watching to see what its calculations leave me free to feel or -
Reading frees up the lateral for single conclusions.
the hard work of silently discovering near things
afresh
The warrior of contemplation.
Go to the causal zones and fight the child-errors of local culture.
Simple longings set themselves up and after them the complex things referring
to them - marrying, the companions - so that what happens outrages the initial
power/longing but is in itself interesting, forcing.
Oh J - back there was a time when I imagined surrendering, and the way
my flesh fired and you could get far in, and then for a while you were a
'man' and I was beautiful and helpless and in that was vulnerable to nature
in a way you can't protect me from, and struggled out, but having to leave
you and become once more a man in myself.
the condition of flying within the greatest
impulse that can come from the unknown
27
Into stoned revelation writing, I was learning or working on seeing air
- images before sleeping - a log in a woodstove grate, embers and a blue
flame coming up. Sleeping outside with aurora and woodsmoke. Not quite here.
Second image a pair of transparent wings.
First one, right one, I'm going to find you and live in you.
28
Found a TV speaker for record player.
Walked across fields to Valhalla, white stone set up against a tree.
-
in the early stages of their slow re-orientation
The desire to know
In childhood looking at people thinking they're lost or not.
- Writing being.
- How exactly was it.
Closest to the top of my mind are the defenses, to get away from them.
The contest of minds.
- This one wants to know experiences
- but it was in some way false.
I have a disconnection between question and answering.
29
Reading Richardson and cooking supper, cleaning, washing windows. Turned
off the light and Mendelssohn.
30
Go to the stone circle, still thinking. Sit in the middle of it where
the grass is pressed down. Already the circle has a strong presence especially
stepping into it. Sit there, thinking maybe I'll concentrate, but the rain.
Which direction. North. Think about the new person and her absentmindedness.
Think maybe I can trust her. Suspend it as possible, not decided. Think
of the movie. Slight selfconscious prayers to invent something lovely that
is true in both worlds or as many as I live in.
On my left the stand of taller black poplars making a sound both clapping
and clicking with rain and see the darker shapes of the branches against
the dark grey sky, moving and clotting with the sound, nearing and passing
each other, with all those pointed leaf-shapes on them. Thinking about a
movie with sections, different kinds of play and understanding in two and
a half minutes. 24 chapters.
Falling asleep the wandering and a sudden stop like a dark door, a black
rectangle in my way.
Felt the expression of Paul in my photo of him writing
in his journal.
-
Thinking about 'obedience' and permeability.
- Going along trying to invent a person who does well.
- The lies that come from refusing to admit what we use people for.
Memory - when I remember in the way that is 'me' I remember a feel, with
sense - it's complete - a time, without words - I could go back into it
and look around.
Stoned it comes with meanings, oh that's what -
When I get to a fineness, by bold refusals, I feel a panic of having
to 'work' when it's impossible - because I don't know what's worth doing.
Also their methods have taken over in me so I don't know what mine used
to be, and I know I didn't fight for them well enough to know if they're
well lost, the navigating ideas.
Is there something wrong with deliberate creation? I used to belong in
life and made in passing, now I feel responsible for the world's soul.
Clarity, oh move in.
What my imagination loves
Imagining the full void
Finely divided sight and sound, concentration
In the beginning I wanted to be one who is awake - an artist - one who
isn't afraid to see or feel - energy - and does not waste
A sense of suspension over void when I think of finite lives.
In the sorrow with Roy, or all the big sorrows, what mattered was keeping
a clear knowledge without comfort.
Waxing moon intoxication, 'discovery of strength.' It means faster and
looser. Today had a freedom from the beginning, walking first, liking the
wind and to be out.
To make something, what is it. It's working to refine / find / show what's
good in the world and means something or refers to the unsocial parts of
the person. Today I justified it as practical magic, to study it, work with
the different parts of me and therefore world. Reconnecting to practical
magic in body's world.
Excitability, enjoying thought, had much fantasy about praise, not so
much thought. Self praise. Looking at the grasses I was more intense in
loving them while I thought there was film in the camera, but loved them.
The light on the stove, the air shaking over it. Putting the tripod up,
what the zoom could see. Imagining a more grandiose long movie - aerial,
satellite, meeting experts and funny people, being able to do more, bigger,
other parts of the world impressing friends, taking a bigger field for action
but not losing modesty or navigation sense. It wasn't a religious or sweet
one - full of ambition.
Making the stone circle was self important too. I was self conscious
(Gurjieff) about the quality of the energy and about thinking how to use
it, the speediness, indecision and how I moved fast from one thing to another.
In the circle, trusting the first impulse. He says when you get more conscious
you have to be conscious about everything you do. Ie intoxication was full
of fantasy. Bragging, swagger.
31
J on phone. The way I was in touch with you was in brief messages that
came formed and quite certain, about touch penetrating, respect/work, that
our good persons are married but not all the rest.
The form is: focus on the voice to find the other person before anything
can be made. Preoccupations sometimes have to be expressed.
Wrote in journal and went to bed outside, slight sharp rain.
September 1
Where have I been all these years, in my attention. The other world is
also this world.
Studying calendar, wind came up, excited but couldn't focus. Afternoon
intent on calendar into night.
2
On the road, the horse, the beautiful detailed mouth, hairs. It smelled
me intently, jacket, arm, and something with its nose, a quick rub upward
of the skin, some other kind of sensing. This morning the weasel, its light
long jumps, its legs start far back on its body. The way the neck went down
and quickly up on the other side).
With the horse, the sense of heaven being lived, a connection with beasts
that isn't brutal/sentimental.
Hitchhiking easily to La Glace to see my folks, climbing into trucks.
The man who clears leases.
Vegetables, at the barn waiting for the rain to end, why she talks interrupted
and slow and is she thinking? At supper a fatigue I break with the electric
fence stories. I track carefully, Do you understand that? directly into
his face, as if to a person, the faded eyes. A faintness when I look at
that face, it takes all his courage to use his eyes. My weeping came up
from a delicate shuddering. Afterwards I was cold and exhausted but the
fields and sky gave themselves.
Oh Jammer. Oh boy Homer. [Ed says]
[from a letter to Jam]
Color must be food.
When I walk and see how fast it's changing I don't want you to be missing
it.
This quiet house. The fire breathes, continuous inhale with particle
crackles.
Today when the landlord stopped by and saw my blankets on the outside
bed he said 'Aren't you afraid somebody will r-r-rob you'.
Today's fine concentration. I used part of it to hitchhike to La Glace
and after supper I set my spine vertical and led him, instead of away from,
toward his crazy vortices. It takes such - no it makes such - a sense of
brave balance for me to look into his eyes. He and I have never looked in
each other's faces except very fast on the way to somewhere else. And I
hold him, now, sometimes for almost a second before he veers right, and
down. It's a kind of concentration where my speech comes up from below and
I have to rely on what comes. It feels like sheer risk, because it goes
so against the long practice in guerrilla warfare. And she's holding her
breath, her long practice in distraction. She can hardly bear it. Sometimes
I have to head her off or cut her off. And he dodges into his old safe hideouts
and I rout him out, I move fast because if I didn't I'd lose my nerve.
When I was in it I didn't know at all where it would go, that utter relying
on the moment. I liked it too, it took me out onto a limb. I wanted to tell
him something I had held against him. He was out of his chair and to the
door and I kept him there until it came to a showdown, I said I needed information
and that I wanted to be relieved of it. He couldn't let me tell him.
When we'd got to that bald ground we were in an electric silence, both
returned to ourselves, held so still, and then I felt a very delicate shudder
and realized I was going to cry, and that I would have to cry out in the
open. It was such precise crying. He was on one side of the room and she
was sitting opposite me and we could all hear the little tick, right and
left and right and left, of the tears hitting the table. Then he went out
the door (but not 'til I'd stopped) and she made a desperate flurry to get
him back. She didn't understand how it was working or how strong I was at
that moment, but I stopped her and he left and then she I was cold and exhausted
and I realized she was feeling so left out and wasn't understanding. She
needed comforting and I didn't have any left. So she took me home. He came
too. She tried to talk but I wanted to be out in the wide west and long
shadows. My eyes were happy.
3
Today I had the backlash, the voices in me were muttering and quarrelling
with him most of the day.
I felt my friends in me during that meeting. I was there steady because
I'd come from you.
-
Evening I went through the woods, a thick damp place, scared me, pushed
through and sat on the blanket. A smell from childhood, the strong swamp
smell. I had to sniff for it and found a small mint-like plant. The smell
was more important than anything in the day, it was the smell of privacy
and rapture. These smells make it seem that I exist as myself still.
When I smoked I found many things to think about but gave up because
my mind wouldn't make connections.
One morning, I think it was Saturday, I woke from seeing light lines
making geometrical thoughts. I hit the wall and said that's it.
A different evening I was thinking about thinking and remembered - I've
forgotten since before Sexsmith - what it is to feel I'm lost.
4
From waking inside, spent the day feeding the fire and reading movie
mags, women's mags and comics, the old drug. It insulated me from the fight
with him, and now, evening, this uniform given-up day, thirsty, sore tongue,
I'd like to work.
Being in mags and comics having very simple familiar experience in an
unchanged pattern.
How many of the middle year memories have me in them from outside, the
young ones are inside.
Moth crawled on my naked body, over my lips, when I was naked in the
dark soaking my foot.
Still looking for attitudes
5
I still think about cancer slightly every day.
6
From Flatens' coffee nervous and hammering, junk-language people-thought,
walking along the creek. A poplar yellow right to its middle but more on
the outside away from trees, the white/cream/beige/maroon straw colors and
less smell.
Scare thinking of black bull death.
7
Laundry to Hythe.
J flat-voiced in her public and family no-hope.
The old couple, Röhnes, who timed themselves by accident to take
me home. She was scared of the hitchhiker.
The wide sky with all its ink/water blues.
Rain in the morning, waking dreamless in full gossip.
Herd of black bulls at Lees', white rings in their faces, that stood
up when I went nervously by with postbag hung from shoulder.
8
Set out to mail, walked the two miles looking at colors.
Evening the orange horizontal light. I went out along the road, looking
at the summerfallow with long shadows, the poplars with orange round bits
held up intense with a dark blue sky far behind them. Then as the sun lowered
a curdling in the sky where no cloud had been, of wavy pink vapour.
The fine showy west. I crouched in the reeds close to the slough to look
at ducks, I could hear them, but instead saw thousands of light-colored
moths jumping and fluttering out of and among the bent reeds, all around
me, and especially in the near dark between me and the dark red in the west.
-
When I wake I lie in my bedroll on the floor thinking and this morning
I thought that what I'm working on is hiatus, making emptiness for sorting.
This place is not the present, in a day many times circulate.
9
Luke, and a bull that chased us up a high spiraling
ramp. We hung by a cable when he chased us off the edge. I carried him in
my arms in a hospital, telling him we'd soon be together again. A city,
that city I'm sometimes in, a stranger.
Working with journal, then outside with the camera. Stones and shadows.
When I'm shooting the force of decision makes me learn and see more than
speculation, and it seems to be more my way.
I want impeccable focus for all the grain of rock and shadow and color
- the fine color in the ditches. Lichen. Every rock with its color and story.
Fill the frame, with a drop-off into shadow. Plants and rock interlife.
Still far from the concentration I can imagine. And oh the sound. Wind creating
trees. [rock photo] [ditch colour]
Chuck describing the sound of plastic at the windows telling the quality
of the wind, and how a mosquito sounds different when it's inside the mosquito
net.
-
What does it mean that my vision is all color, what this person looks
for and is satisfied by, is colors in things. There was that lilac grey
stubble field with darker stripes converging toward a blue ridge. Right
in front, the yellow-green, headed, moving, particular, open-edged, grass.
Any area of color, not to analyze or even reproduce, although I took
pictures. It's immersion in love and I don't take it apart. It has grown.
Language is getting more careless, it moves along with sudden eccentricities
of concentration.
Eyes less secure but more for themselves, touch moves into them.
Touch gets a pleased surprise feeling something alive in the pocket,
cool and wrinkling, leaf, leather. It likes to put itself into my hair.
-
Any event maybe fatal, or a message.
Many things can be safely ignored, they'll call.
Compassion, is it the alternative to wisdom.
What kind of work can this time make.
In the times when I'm in pain of not ever being able to know everything
it's really not being able to know at all.
The centre of experience shifting
Direction having gone over to an unknown centre
Free of the spell of the parents
10
Lethargy, and reading Readers Digests, hatred and despair, the
caged, loneliness, that F wouldn't come through, Nordhagen's eyes going
to my crotch and me smiling, laughing, heading him off. The heavy sky, all
the desperations in this world, cheap tricks, little dodges, expensive safeties
and the alternative desperation of the void. Nowhere near it, this is the
old ugly self-hating pain of implication in cheap cheap.
Last night with the water bottle going to sleep outside, gently, looking
at mossy stars and thinking of Lellie and Lucia and how well they liked
me and I them.
11
From sawing wood to finding the revision writing and liking it, to Valhalla
mostly walked, quite blind (I was lonely and didn't know). Across the road,
a ring and a half, I was brought to listening, twice while she talked away
into something I found myself listening glad to hear her say anything. She
started from Sheila and gradually came to me, it was after we were both
nearly crying, I in my phonebox and she in her apron.
And down the road, the big surround, slight red among the alternately
dark and light grey rape swaths, in the ditch the brown spots from clover
heads among green and other colors. The love color puts into me. My eyes
after J said she wanted to be with me and was, every night, were better.
The tank truck and the American I started to like, for his curiosity,
just before he pulled up at the driveway.
With Ed I revenged myself for last time by praising Roy's tenderness
and good looks, and then he offered me an After Eight. She dreamed Arta
was dying and she was very sad, didn't know why she was so sad.
The wood. Sunset started and I went - the willow bushes, weed in cream-colored
grass and the grey underworld water.
12
The first thing was blue sky over there.
In the pasture, have the rectangle. The abstraction, a small shaded channel
of brown creek, some light into the bottom. Dimly, I like
what I make, there's something everywhere, it isn't a drive, it's a sort
of casual finding I then try to be conscientious about.
Work on the religion papers, Don Juan and the Corbin and Shah. Frustration
thinking of writing or any making. Trying to justify it first is my hobble,
not knowing how to believe it's real work. I'm frightened of finding I've
been sorted out of the ones with a chance and yet have fantasies of good
work separated from the local -
Walk to Dolemos - Bernice and Helmer - the smell of this country road
- the jubilating sight of bright moonlight on the way home.
The owl circling at the ring site. Lying on my back with 360 degree grass
and it going around low.
13
Fasting. Was reading Jung.
Lay down feet toward fire and drifted, 'thinking' if she were the wrong
branch, at first I'd feel a strong tension and then later it would be less.
And then there was a slip as if into another zone, and I saw the thought
- here it isn't clear - and as if the wrongness of its method - the path
of the path - and then I had a sense of enlargement and exploring. And then
it was comical, as if a slipping (I was nearly asleep), I kept repeating
if she were the wrong branch .
Mouse in the water pail this morning. Its head was dry, fluffy, with
whiskers standing up out of the water curved forward. The rest of its body
was partly submerged, midsection tufted; and completely underwater, the
legs stretched out stiff and thin with the long tail between them. Little
white feet, the delicate shanks. Five mouse turds floating near it, expanded.
Flies and their fine shadows.
15
This morning pent, too wild to work, onto the road, fast, Moodie and
his easy way.
And the letter, it let out a crying and then I sat raving to her most
of the day and went into Hegel because she sent me, and there was guilty
of irrelevance although it was an exercise - now it isn't to outwit existence
- maybe to meet some of it.
Wind.
Helpless, speaking to her knowing myself stupid, but it's how I feel
stupid with her and always will, that I have to eventually somehow resolve.
[2006]
-
Full of wildness and desperation, got onto the road, in the wind, and
at the post office put my key into the little door raging. Found the yellow
envelope, saved it 'til I got home.
When I read your pages I cried pounded the wall and had the inner screaming
that goes with the sense of being exiled with such ugly people here because
I'm bred and taught in that ugliness and therefore can't make it with the
ones I love.
Sometimes I feel an establishing faith - I've never believed in faith
but now it seems there's no alternative, I have to believe this life.
-
[Hegel 1807 Phenomenology of Mind]
Philosophy is about experience as such.
Contradictory descriptions are not really contradictions,
but moments of a development.
The beginning of the struggle to get out of
the immediate experience has to be made by general ideas, which are supported
or not by a sense of what they refer to. This is overtaken again by the
experience of life in detail, and the general ideas used to penetrate it.
Truth only exists in ideas, our consciousness
isn't in security of immediate sense of reality, it has lost concreteness
and knows it's lost. What it wants from philosophy is concreteness back.
Frivolity and boredom say something new is coming.
The newness has begun but only as a direction
in a few individuals, it isn't worked out in detail.
Understanding is thinking, activity of experience
in general.
Everything depends on expressing the truth not
as substance but as subject as well.
It is the process of its own becoming
the suffering and labour of the negative
the process
The truth is the whole.
16
Went early into Jung, wrote intensely, version of Golden Flower
and in the afternoon The cloud of unknowing. I'm not near to myself.
Night, the brown sky and the moon thrilling, pulling outside, but I wasn't
free for it.
Touched the sore breasts, I'm haunted by what's wrong with them.
Washed and sat in front of the fire, with my back to the draught, 'meditating.'
Mantram but really letting it run, all the characters, J T C R him and her.
The light-off washing is my lovely ritual. Every day the contact with
fire, all day.
Cutting the vegetables, putting them in the black pot, letting it turn
into stew.
-
Cultivate the ability to resist the glamour!
- The wind blows where it leans.
- So is everyone born as a spirit.
The gods blow through me and I'm here alone.
-
[From The secret of the golden flower]
Tao is like air: it is the element of experience.
The work of circulation depends on reversing
the flow of thought. In the place of thought is emptiness and life.
Light is what lives there, if you circulate
it the energies of the whole body will pass through, each doing its work.
Heaven is the place where physical life is born
as creative.
The method for changing consciousness is very
fluid and needs extreme clarity to know how to apply it, and complete absorption
and quietness to hold fast to it.
If the thoughts are quiet the source can be
seen, that is human nature and life. Having seen it, one doesn't hang around
in the opposites.
- for concentrated work April May June
- removed from human interference
- clean conscience
- coincidence with high energy in the year
- right livelihood
[from The cloud of unknowing]
You must do whatever will help you forget everything
but what you call god. Forces will simplify your work; other forces will
work against it. Other humans will be helped by your work in ways you don't
know.
At first you find only obscurity, you don't
understand and you don't love, so be prepared to stay hungry in darkness
for as long as must be.
It is best to aim for the naked being of the
source, to praise and love it without attribute.
You are to try to pierce that darkness with
longing love, and not retreat no matter what happens.
It is because love may reach the source, but
not knowledge. Our body tends to put fantasy into our understanding of things.
What will clear it is a strong and profound
sorrow.
One way or another you should always be working.
The work needs a great calmness, an integrated and clean disposition, so
take care of yourself.
The sounds and sweetnesses that come through
the windows of the senses, if you are astonished by them in the early stages
- for they are quite out of the ordinary - it will be a benefit for you.
Hold your heart firmly and verify.
Who does this work right becomes attractive
to everyone, has a correct judgment, is in harmony with all, wise and useful
in speech.
Those who censure others too soon, and are obsessed
with their errors, have only one nostril.
There are many who come this far forward, into
the pain of wrong being accumulated, who because the pain they feel is so
great, and because they miss their pleasures, let their attention return
to physical concerns.
Whoever continues eventually feels some pleasure
and expects some success because he sees many errors corrected. He continues
to feel pain but it becomes less.
If you think that nothing else you do satisfies
your conscience unless this secret little love pressing on the cloud of
unknowing is present, then you are called.
18
Morning end of a sequence, the last wood setting the order for leaving.
Cold. Sweat and cold wind. Past Flatens' change arms and keep on. Sit on
bag at mile sign, cold. Pickup that stops and a fine man, complete, fascinating.
Between us an incomplete one.
[I stay overnight with my mother's friend Heide Holst and her husband
on the way back to Vancouver to see Jam.]
And then another sort of time, he makes it, pulling his eyes forward
and down, the white over the pupil. Slowly setting down the reservations
- as if speech counts - he's inside - making it so interesting - she's cooking
- it's strenuous, I'm watching to see if it's competitive, why doesn't she
talk more. When I wash dishes he interrupts Heide and I stop him - he goes
into a spin - I don't understand his intensity - am silent and wait for
it to mature, it's fine. Go to the bathroom and look at myself. Come back
and say "What happened?" "What happened? Okay what happened."
Goes on to the story, "My mother wore the pants." Struggling,
I have to be silent because I believe he needs it actually. Listening intently
to his quality. "This human creature " - pointing thumb over his
shoulder - "... is my slave" - and finger to his head, shaking
it, "... and I'm the slave of a guy called Jesus Christ. One derelict,
one bum met another bum. In you you have something that wants to destroy
that order, that will kill you. And he told me to tell you he's put that
in men's hearts everywhere." "I found it in women's hearts too."
"Yuh," nods.
"I'm a man crucified." She comes and holds him from the back.
He's gone silent into himself. "He's let me up," looks up, smiling,
darts, "it's over, it's gone," and plays with the cat.
"This human creature," pointing thumb, "that's a beast,
and a beast is a mystery."
part 3
- up north volume 1: 1978-1979 june-january
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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