| up north 4 part 1 - 1980 january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[early January in the Edmonton YWCA, where I've gone to look for work] What silence it was stormed blanked was telling me what to feel? One day it looked at her photograph and said "I would have been her friend." On the bench behind the stove head on shoulder suspicious 'working together' but struggle. Is this psychology work. More like what is it. Articulation. Several times the shock of going from meeting the system in our work to looking at her face. That day sitting silent barely crying baffled, being caught in lies, I don't know why I'm going, but it's alright because I'm going, I don't have to stay in this, When I brought the story, "don't know why I'm bringing this down", you're listening carefully to know my intent, I have a small sensation as if being flattered. (Regret: I can't make the vertical connection now, doubts, why won't I make it now.) When she wrote me, pencil going fast, that writing moved faster, seemed true, "the companion in this is the world," "one of the elements I've been able to find only in books," "someone who so it seems has been with me a long time." Working so in detail to find. Walking to the library? When would matter? Sensation before, he wouldn't be at this library, turn, two paces away paperback one look though his head was down, and in the big coat, no pause I'm past the two paces on my heels beside him speaking before he looks up, pouring voice at him: "I knew this would happen, but I didn't think you'd be in this library, I didn't know it would happen, but -." I've forgotten, he was looking up, I can't recall his look, that means I wasn't studying like last year, but boxing, staying with a jumping readiness to punch. Moving fast. The story of Michael and the pictures with it. "This is embarrassing." I had embarrassing books too, liked that. "'Laid back,' the word I learned" and 'wired.' Oddness that comes. What was he offering. Pitching a hobble: what could it mean? Why're you being cute? And then, in the next sentence, the cute voice saying "where the kids open their Christmas presents and I want to play with them," an appeal that left me so cold I said "That's nice," stopped there. Second puzzle, why did men start to look at me, they hadn't, when I sat with him? Suspected myself of posture or voice, but could it be their way of looking at him? A single movement from the right of bad breath. "Could we have an affair," was that his or mine. "One of the ways you need Olivia, to be alone with." "But you've never in your grown up life lived alone except briefly, that time when you were waking up and asking yourself whether to feel sorry for yourself." "You've remembered that?" "Yuh." "What I was thinking was, this was all going on at once, we've known each other for a long time, and we've known each other's movements, but she's completely wrong about this - and then I looked at it and you're right." Would I come for supper? No. Never again. "Get pissed outta my tree." "Threw him into the air and after that he was fine." Made sure he knew who was bigger. - Since leaving and I think before, I've been dim and in a dim way bewildered, haven't wanted to form thoughts about why I'm away from you, the think-think we go through sometimes before separating, last year, went on without you, but I seemed to try to hold the formations up, not let them come down into written words. In the intensity some visions. My envy of your body, something like a hovering envy of any of your skills, an intimation of what it might be like to let out my love of them. Which held back is envy. If I admire you, you'll think you're better than me, I would add power to power etc. Did you hear what I said, that love held back seems to be envy? Or it can be turned that way. I've had your body with me, not the way you said, but lying alongside holding your hand like going in the ditch, quite loving. What was the fading out with you. We were starting to learn something. Who was with me at night. Cheryl and Trudy. I spoke up, after Bernice, to say Don spoke in a way, to all women, that made his talking to any woman useless. Everyone vanished. In open times, going to sit next to the one I love, disregarding. I've suspected I'm away because you 'sent' me: because I don't know where to go. Yes, to Vancouver. But money and film and what scares me again. And what would it be like if you met him. Gentle diplomat disarming and studying. Impress him with your civilization. His magnifying glasses. Why - what he seems not to see. "I know sometimes she was fatter than other times, but I don't really know which of those times was which." "What made you change your hair." On the stairs, big haunch pumping me up (underwear). He thinks I'm less butch! "What direction do you think it's gone?" "I think it was shorter last year, up to your ears." Don't bother to reply. - Was saying to 'him,' I so often think of death, suddenly (flashed) that it's a presence (like his, theirs, the others of my entity) that sometimes makes meetings. "Thinking of it means it's due soon." - What is extraordinary about the meeting, is that I've been waiting for it, without being willing to make it. He said at New Years he thought about who - forget what. Within feet, I was standing at a rack, holding three paperbacks, he was sitting on his heels, must have come as I stood between racks, but I was the one who saw. When I think of it it's as if I were translated. Reading St Teresa fast, voiceless, bored, started again and heard a voice, like an actress, giving it at some level a 'meaning' which was not available to me because I was creating/allowing/following the dramatic voice. The difficulty seems to be when I get away from you I can imagine the disciplines to let me stay smart when we go into trouble. When I am with you I sink into reflex. Unbuilt skill in. [Reading Jane Roberts' Seth material] You get what you concentrate on. There is no other main rule. What would it shatter you to learn. Born into flesh to materialize as best you can. The great joy and spontaneity of your nature. (Acceleration) Information. Connected with it is the consciousness of all those who understand, perceive, 'originate' it. The war appeared, fire, on the 'brow' of the home hill, east boundary, moving toward us, it's war and it's there. Explosions, shapes of fire growing up, indistinct, there. Black and orange on the rim of the east hill, knew it was coming toward home, in a movement like a wild fire. It would sweep over. Try to survive when it crosses, people in a long room, lines, stay out of any of the lines, pumphouse. Did survive its crossing, are the others gone, now it's time to walk west, after it, in a cleared territory, a big black coat, sense of charred and reduced surroundings as if nothing above waist height left. A house, looking through it somebody else. Picking out things as if for a new household. Small pearl-handled exacto knife (Maggie's) was what I thought I'd found but the handle was different. Walking south around a corner east - on graded dirt road - pass good chairs like my kitchen chair laid on their sides on the verge. When we come back we can pick them up. We're opening cans of paint, white, there must be red, " We can paint the outside of the house."
The new one is aware of the conditions of its birth The world will never be trusted in quite the same way The trusted allies of memory association and its organization An earlier dream, the women and men are at war across a canyon, I'm with a few others, there are almost no women left. We want to escape. Picture of rubbled rooms and sense of the exchanges I can't remember. Did they throw rocks. Young boys. Being satisfied, or not, with referring, or getting it all down. Same difficulty as in the headlong talk with Carmichael. A dart - unfinished - into speculation - ungraspable after. - Essay on the slow twin. Has the work been done if not recalled? Impatience. This working, mulling, whose? Sifting choosing ordering. Obviously I'm working for - them? it means it's useless or irrelevant or not my work, when I doubt in this way? Why I won't read anyone as system, only to pick out what rings. And in that procedure I doubt whether unless I work to see the system I can judge what I pick out. It's building a scavenger. Having to know where everything came from (it isn't hard). Often marvel, with Ezra, people, how they know where they are, a difficult thing, how are they all intelligent enough. Watching myself use the tone / phrase packages they know. Does the surprise show. - When voice phones from there speak to her as if she's a relative. She protests that it's not intimate, last year I was longing, now I'm away. Image of my face big dull and thick little body haunting alone. Y mirrors. Opaque, Konrad (it's your fault I'm so ugly) and will stay so if I don't catch up to a fire. [de Chardin Le milieu divin] this active light which penetrates into us human monads, each their aura the progressive information of the universe in the circle of which he is the centre Everything x does on earth is ordered to the spiritualization of the universe. a hostile component that slowly grows more dominant, and will reverse the direction toward detachment It has hardly arrived at the heart of things before it is ready to escape from them - possessed by an intense need to die to itself. that he is dying, under the compelling power of a communion oscillation, growth and period of suffering and detachment, which stabilizes at a higher level of less egocentrism the new world that is being formed around x the natural joy it cannot do without, of again belonging to a universe a centre, one of place, through anything, whose unique centre, dispersed through all things, is the prime matter Everything represents the modifications of one thing and every monad looking into itself can find that one thing as the initial point at which all things make contact in their inmost. The work of external organization that it carries out through individuals, with a special internal involution through which there emerges in the heart of matter an increasingly more conscious order. Story in some way writing person's - that's all - can recover and it may not be that. toward some more efficiently knit nervous system where thought will be able to reflect upon itself instantly, and unerringly Evolution 'a world' pictured - changing but one, in which creatures metamorphose - building an image, what can be known about the image. One painting stood for it - unrealized I was glad to accept the place I had been given but the time and the people in it were always wrong. I was made in such a way that I was glad to accept the place I was made in, but could not belong to the people who lived there or to their ways.
their affinities with spheres of matter that are not my sphere (cells) my life is not my own subjection to the tasks not on my scale and then all my sensibility became alert, as though at the approach of a god of easy-won happiness unable to imagine that the true could fail to coincide with the enchantment of the senses isolation seeking to cut down the work every being must produce to be 'himself,' a diminution of personality that life is never mistaken, either about its road or its destination higher degrees of being are to be attained by concentration, purification and maximum effort I went completely astray when I yielded to the temptation of matter and relaxed the inner tension of my being in an attempt to enter limitlessly and unquestioningly into the universe. by fighting our way, with the currents, toward some term still to come left home in search of the absolute element in the universe integrating into one of the necessities of soul and universe Sometimes what speaks is a cell, and if cell, then body, and if speaks, then of larger godly body, whatever one wants to call it. Somewhere there must be a standpoint from which x and the earth can be situated in relation to one another so that one cannot be with one without being with the other. Suffering is primarily a consequence of a work development. Everything that evolves commits its own faults. uses objects to learn how to choose and love Now I am coming again to see the possibility of allowing myself to follow my first impulse without danger of diminishing my personality or of finding that what I am grasping is a phantom.
- The way I've been seeing faces in wood grain, the ceiling (at home). -
Orgasm the seeding or gathering a yellow light - clothed in the world as in a garment whether I am contemplating you or whether I am suffering seek with creatures that attract you, not by going directly to them but by converging with them on x, sought in and through them Less material, he says, to get closer. perception of x present in anything, an energy for the real to give things their highest possible degree of reality the divine milieu Knowing what makes the bubble clear. Open heart, obedience absorbed in the idea of being in it. there is a universal substratum, refined and tenuous multiplicity lives on it a unique and absolute soil when it perceives that reality has become not merely transparent but solidly enduring the transparent consistence in which I am held to build up in himself (for x) the structure of a love countless numbers of beings surround me, I like to feel them formerly, a throng incoherent and obtrusive from this released by a vision of presence Everything became not simply warm and diaphanous but wholly transparent. At the same time that transparency penetrated depths in me whose existence I hadn't suspected. dissolved the plurality of my being the unbelievable relief that another existed, and through him all things, in me I can pass through them without emerging from the medium that unites them. The etherial forces should be thought of as functioning in planes or surfaces and originating not from the centre outward, but in the vast periphery. The foundation of such a space is in fact the plane at infinity of earth space. Planar surfaces move in from all sides of the universe toward the earth working plastically on forms on the surface of the earth. related to etheric formative body in it all is in a state of interpenetration - Two houses in the country, was one hers, one mine? Or was it only one house. He heard an airplane going over (south), I opened the door, a large robin floated down through it, settled to walk in the room beyond, I said his googling eyes were David Cooper. Trying to sew on the lawn, someone didn't notice the things on the tabletop, someone else's very small many sewing things. Had been traveling, it was time to go back to the city, one of them (a taste of watermelon, sick, Melita in the supermarket) showed it to me, not where I thought it was, shining, Paris, across the plain, quite near. He knew the way, a candle up steps with wax drippings in piles on the concrete, candles lost or melted. At the door had said goodbye, kissed the one, my companion wouldn't, I knocked their heads at the forehead, explained we'd never got to know the two of them, because the third was dominant, a short man, stocky, bald. When the candles were gone, daylight on the steps going down, soon to jump off into the city. Walking out finding it spring, feeling a great strength having come into the landscape, thinking it a strength of fire. May Day, Beltene, shining fire A little too loud is that cry, for the sky is above us, the earth beneath us, and the sea all around us, but unless the sky with its plumes of stars fall upon the surface of the earth or unless the ground burst open in an earthquake, or unless the fish abounding, blue bordered sea come over the surface of the earth, I shall bring back every cow to its byre and enclosure, every woman to her own abode and dwelling, after victory in battle and combat and contest. a poet, expert in traditional learning, as well as divination and prophecy. Reading mythology, in speed and cold sweating, sense of my own valour and magic, yes I'm right to stay out of social organization. 18 January Somebody who wasn't there: I rotated to ask her questions about building: something so wrong, bleating laugh, licentious about food, couldn't look at her, would try, thinking what in this face made it unbearable, the first look was alright, "How do you like your army shirt?" "Men come in all sexes," experimentally. [Weekend job looking after a mentally disabled girl] Waiting for the girl, she came up the path before me, rang the doorbell. Holding a distance to see what she'll do if I don't go false. Clear pink face. Talking isn't useful. She's there in disobeying. I was afraid of disliking her, also privately obsessed with being ugly, she looked at me in the bath so I felt the look. I miss emotion. That's what seems robot. Head first down slides, through culverts, forceps injury? Imagining knowing something. Into death for money, into debt to get out of life. Her long pretty feet. 19th Pressure of hatred for the houses, television voices, magazines, myself the servant here, people with stupid books, money but cheap food, Updike the happy man, How to grow orchids, the awful streets, awful park dirty sky over the city, dawn as anywhere, but the house encloses so nastily, is the air dead that I feel so dead here, this girl I'm working for, I can treat her as I want, doubtingly don't fight to be fine, one absent moment she seemed to see a joke, I said why in her voice, unable to marvelously penetrate, wanting to understand her in a way these stupids won't, a revelation I know I'm not aligned to, by cowardice, wrong place, paying for having failed. Yesterday reading Beaver [anthropology] feeling film possible (that there's been work toward -) but these slides are nothing. Difficulty of medium currents / pulses relative freezes Pulsation: on/off sparks The soup: bits come and go how's that they're motes 'posited' but impossible substance not as having the texture of a liquid, but as the unimaginable state of some centre that is indefinitely extended in space The identity - at what level - can an experience go there - is level too platform - what could replace it Their houses are wrong. The way they eat and sleep is wrong. The way they speak and laugh is wrong. -
a presence with whom there is no possibility of lying or being misunderstood Notes: cosmology, being instruction, language grace (evocation, multiplicity), thought method strikes her with a rod and changes her into a body of water. The water turns into a worm, and the worm into a purple fly of great size and radiant beauty that fills the air with music and fragrance The woman swallowed her and in due time she was reborn as a daughter. when asked his wish says simply "my arms around Édain and a kiss from her." foretales his birth tale hero's encounter with three adversaries The battle ardour: hair stands up stiff, one eye very large. Warrior's light rises from the crown of his head. Absolute prohibitions. If violated, disaster. - Suddenly the magnetic field associated with the group will be transformed to kinetic energy: an explosion of vapour. Expanding shock front (beginning of a storm in earth's atmosphere) 21 [Month-long live-in job looking after Pat the 90-year old railway man and his three teenage grandsons while the parents go to Hawaii] Hair stiffening up already. Less ugly because this is the right house, courtesy, black tiles in the bathroom, to work. Letter on the first day. The acuteness of shy. He works to keep up in a way that only comes to me with the book. Concepts: ground truth. Windows. Adding to program list and starting a work method. Imagine moving among new informations. The house tunes in to babble in many rooms. 22 Afternoon rapid branching thought between picture book and de C. 23 Morning fast work. Jupiter. Fantasy child, Carmichael, thinking of the Jupiter movie. Dream a thin boyfriend asks what I think of Jews and wants to go to bed, I'm holding out because of a previous, gravel pit, some site, my car, my big man who crashes ahead, I realize, without himself in him; David Larcher's child, a man I think is him, hoisting material for his isolated mountain home by pulley up into what looks like the ovoid mouth of a cement mixer. Close up, he doesn't recognize me because it isn't him, it's an anxious perhaps dying blond painter. Night recall Greg, realize it's the feeling of this house, turned on the light to write him, was pleased with the voice. Remembering his pleasure when something was well written. 24 Yeats. Meditation on symbol. "When I had been moved by ritual, formed plans for deeds." Imagination for the long run. 25 Library faintness. -
-
the extreme sensitiveness of reactions deeply penetrative power of their introspection Life appeared and develops as a function of the whole universe. There is indeed an absolute better-being, progress in consciousness, in freedom and in moral sense. Moreover these higher degrees of being are to be attained by concentration, purification and maximum effort. I was less part of society when I recognized that symptom [intoxication with isolation]. I suspected I was becoming less of a person. -
In a working net, in a stream
can be found in the monad by looking in interaction by reason of and at the level of an identity Can parts be thought of as the medium of each other?
-
-
24th Driving toward the West End, car is scaring me, cautiously, it may not be slowing down when I try to slow it, seems to go into skids although the road is dry, my vision may be going, I try to rub it up, in this way slowly to the opticians or a restaurant. Do I need change. From there find myself in Cheryl's house. She's dressed entirely in white. I look at her yearbook. Someone with a large face, her calves showing. I doubt it's her. Trudy at the table in black, peaceful warm light through the window, a morning. I'm sitting on a bed looking at a book, my head is near her, without looking at her I feel we're sitting there to be together quietly. She pushes my head up, further from her. I wonder if it's because she knew what I was thinking. Across the room in front of her father's liquor cabinet. I've poured gin into a glass, the men are in a small room on the right, comment on my drunkenness. I say I wasn't drinking it, pour, try to pour it back through a lace doily. My mother's voice behind. "The lesbians are all going." "I guess I'm going too." Down the stairs I put my feet on the ground again, see that the one I took to be Trudy was the little stout dark man, all of them seem to be far ahead on the sidewalk. I try to follow, where's my car. Trudy and others sitting along the wall, a tear down her cheek, her face goes pink. No money. Quarter for the bus? Along the sidewalk a man stops me. I want the bread pan for my missing left shoe, he either wants it or to follow me, I'm drunk. Walking home, see on the left a plowed field with intense yellow, dandelions and light, feel it as the first heat of spring. Beyond is the sea, go on, am too far west, cut through a fence, some cattle beyond, is there a bull, crawl through the fence, over the fence is another grassy field. - Yearbook, a pretty queen and short fat dark king J's thrill We'd never got to know the two of them because the third was dominant, a short man, stocky, bald. I'm beyond the bull, still don't know what it was.
|