aphrodite's garden volume 10 part 2 - 1989 february-march

work & days: a lifetime journal project

9th February 1989 Weds Want to still be in this book - 1. what if I became a professor of mind 2. the way they asked if I was Native 3. if meditation could keep me true in the midst of its wrongness 4. maybe on the prairies 1. what if I wrote an imagined story about being up north 2. and published it with the imagined person's photographs 10th It was trying assumptions - 1. what if I don't know myself but there's a self 'I' can know by clues 2. what if everything that happens can be read like a dream 3. what if every detail is crucial 11th Days again with very little to do. Thinking I don't have a structure for. The garden frozen solid.   Rowen's obstructions when he's here put me into frenzy. Rob's uncomprehended withholdings.   No company all day long unless I go dangle in cafés. - I'll take a run at reading about dreaming. 12 This morning diaphragm clamped again when I woke. Farting, TV, newspapers, sex misery, caffeine, cafés, all come from not having anything to do. I don't have work at home anymore, reading and writing aren't working. candle in their and my heart circulation of the light touching with turquoise blue heart beat mirror eye relaxation a protective image alternate emotions 13 Lonchenpa and Trungpa Chaos Eskimo Meditation Cambridge phil of mind Hegel Berkeley imagining Wittgenstein La Glace dreaming Tibet modeling computing It's the crisis come back to - this time I will be able. 'A reading of Tibetan Nyingma text in light of' etc. By evening, nothing of this. 14 Rob's dream after his grandfather died. He's at his mum's house and his grandfather's there. He realizes he must be dreaming, looks at his hands like they say to. Now what. He walks through a wall but he's not on the other side. He's nowhere and has no body. He thinks, if he just backs up . Yes but he's not where he left from, he's in his aunt's house. Regrets he didn't ask his grandfather questions. How it's going. Sat this morning. When it got painful finally remembered to get into the pain. Panic at times not knowing what to do. Haunted by 'Rob', specifically by not seeing him. Dreamed Mafalda's Rob blames me for coming on to him. There's a tone of Judy's Michael, I say he is in it too, just as much. Taking on the system would be a fall. It seems to be talking from a hypothesis - what if - and is contradictory. I really want to know (how to)(how I do) live in world and language knowing the net doesn't join. A context that was inviting and forbidding. Self nearness. I right away am processing it in more than one sort of question. What do they mean by their terms. Translation. Eric in flakes talking very slowly. The institute teaching seen from another angle. Prenatal and other. Fantasy read-through. Own farthest-out times still needing to be understood. Position. Trying to see it in a cooperative literal way, 'as they see it.' Seeing the whole system as a practical hypothesis. With exercises, try this.   Ie myself in their systems, 'them' in mine, it as me.   Logical possibility or not. Metaphors and image system.   That a different way of talking is needed. Being uncomfortable with, not being able to read.   Wanting a text-body outside theirs, to stand in. Wanting a whole system, to stand outside of. February 15 The remoteness. I inwardly stand away noticing only that, that I don't like the way of talking, but I am going along with it. The way my heart/belly opened when he talked about his dream was different. Closed sex - after, I have nothing to say about it. It doesn't write. Yet, I slept and could go on sleeping in the morning, because I'd been banged to the point of strange chill (but without images) and then very stilly as he fell asleep brought myself through to a fluorescent flash from the middle of the abdomen. - Yes I saw that. And dreamed I was again friendly with Paul. His room was full of interesting things he was making. I was in a transparency with somewhere a space. He said I could have it, sure, but it was an overlay of two. Reading the paper, I thought of how Paul wd've been ardently entertaining me with live talk. 16 Little touches from the past. Once last night, once this morning. It's the thrilling whole of a time in a second. No what's thrilling is that the whole of that time can be in this one - no it's it, the touch of it, the return of its medium, and I can't say anything about either of the returns, can't remember the time they were of. Why. Because the muscle of astonishment pulled tight. Oh what is it today. A kind of jumpy joy cavorting elsewhere than in the text. It's like a feeling of can-do, I can do this stuff. If wanting to know and wanting to be well are sometimes but not always congruent. There is a suspicious overlap between wanting to know and someone else's interests. Something wrong with their moralizing tone about impure and ego. Ego could be called death-fear caution. The sense of shifting perspectives. Sorting the what-it's-saying from the at least equally useable what-I-hope-it's-saying. Along with a fairytale culture. 17 Refuge. The sense of saying yes: becoming whatever human can be is what I'm about. Taking refuge in the notion of a comprehensive state. The strange logic dependences of reincarnation. Assume they're talking about an experience you know. Assume they're talking about an experience you don't - imagine what it might be. Chiropractor working on right upper back. 18 A kind of philosophy with dance, imagery. 19 What Guenther says about visualizing a god - when you do that you're being a god - imagining is itself a god state. He says it's an instance of signifier-signified being the same thing. What does that mean. "Word is a word." 20 These things arrived together, Eric's dream and its film, Nyingma letter saying will I come back in July, film congress date May early June. 21 Hegel my friend. Goethe, the Greeks, Schiller's letters, Hölderlin. "Iphigenia becomes a goddess and trusts the truth in herself, in the human heart," "the sister, the divine image, and the protection of the house." Aufheben - cancel, preserve, lift up Somethings coming from two sides to make one Is it hunger or overflow which has here become creative? The living spirit that dwells in a philosophy demands, in order to reveal itself, to be born by a kindred spirit. The true peculiarity of a philosophy is the interesting individuality in which reason has organized a form for itself out of the building materials of a particular age. In this the individual, speculative reason finds spirit of its own spirit, flesh of its own flesh; it beholds itself in this as one and the same and as another living being. Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality ... when we consider more closely the particular form that a philosophy bears, we see how it springs on the one hand from the living originality of the spirit who in it has restored through himself the rent harmony and given form to it through his own deed; on the other hand, from the particular form of the bifurcation from which the system issues. 1801 Gk skepticism vs senses Hume takes empirical, feeling, intelligence as basic vs generalization A core is enveloped, and enveloped once more and again, until it scarcely peeks out, bashful and curious - as 'young women peek out of their veils,' to speak with the old woman-hater, Aeschylus, but this core is a witty, often saucy idea about the most intellectual matters, a subtle and daring connection of words. Nietzsche History of philosophic consciousness as such A journey like Dante Wishing to re(experience) The embryology of consciousness a kind of novel [UBC] Philos department. There was a man met me at the entrance and looked carefully. On the second floor I stood looking at closed doors, Hebrew and Muslim. A man came from the Hebrew door. "This isn't the floor for philosophy is it." "It's the next one up" he said with so bright eyed amused a look. The office girl was just leaving. In the student's room a notice about a Wittgenstein seminar. Then Moura's class. [spoke to Moura Quail's landscape architecture class about the garden] Then with hesitation but not doubt I go look for Rob's place. Get off at the right stop though I think it's one too soon. 2023, there it really is. Knocking no answer. The door as he says is open. Which of two doors at the top is his. That one. Knock no answer but a radio voice. Open the door look in. Messy like he said. A lair. Curtained. Formal cat bed. It's thrilling to creep in looking for a light. Lamp not plugged in. Radio lying on the bed, which is made and not dirty. Chinese drawings. Wrinkled apples. I was nowhere near imagining it, so small like a child apartment, but filled up with ongoing life, him. Sexual ache remembering standing there. A piece of paper with a phone message. I sit down and write on it. Here I am and so are you sort of. Like the most erotic thing I've done with him or, no - it's that it is his privacy, the original pull, the real unforeseeable other, beyond me, totally, so the sight of my book by his bed is like an interpolation from an alien belief. Ovulating I think. 22 Awake at 4:15 hands numb, speedy, diaphragm tight, blowing nose all day. (It's back to rain.) Something about the way I live here. Did Fenna's routine, sat. Past backlog to some fire in perineum and up. Felt like iron after. Read Longchenpa's core of practices. Lay down. Three times came up with a knocking at the heart. Don't be afraid of it. Lay still through a strong steady beat as if under the / / / / / / . Dreamed: Rowen a small naked baby climbs to the top of the wall on ladder rungs. My mother's supposed to look after him. Next thing I see her as another naked baby. Up there just at his heels. She puts up some grips like curtain rings for him to hold. They come down by slipping slowly. Hit the floor and vanish. I go to find her and tell her. Ed interrupts. I say he won't like it. He's talking about ---'s legs. Therapist who lives downstairs has her back to us ironing, something brown. Where's Rowen? She says there's a pool outside. You let him go on the streets by himself? Look out the window. They're folding the pool. He's not there. Lying down at 7:30 came easily into images. I'm on a train looking out the window. The woman with the baby has just got off. Have I been sleeping? Meditating. I haven't seen anything for a long time. Now I can sit by the window. It's Saskatchewan probably. Not much snow. Frozen grass, old railway buildings, barns, dark red, a bright light. I'm saying it's the home stretch, it's clarity. Now I'm awake, it's like being on the train from Edmonton. But I'm not sure I'm really being it. In Edmonton asking Roy if he wants to stay overnight in a hotel. Mary's wanting the therapist to work with her. I say what I think. Your body is too ----, burled and knotted, you've got too much blocked all over it. It's no use you'll never be any different. Sent question. Body what do you need to live better. Another from earlier, what is it with Rowen, when he woke crying the claw of anxiety at brow and belly. 23 Resnick. Oh the image of the academic, several strings of hair greased down blindly over his head, overfine synthetic plaid coat, very thick glasses, rolling cultivated voice. "I've got nothing to lose." "And what do I have to lose." "I can flunk you." You can patronize me is what it is. So go ahead, we'll see how the feathers are lying when the air clears. 24 White embroidered mukluks. I can have them for the taking but I don't look good or walk well in them. 26 My mother from behind. What pretty shoulders and arms, she never was like that before. She's pregnant again though she recently had a baby. He's painted the barn! Glossy dark brown. I look again. The door has been painted white. My underpants are not in my drawer, these drawers are all full of other people's clothes. I am walking toward Sieburts' place outside La Glace, and it isn't there. It seems that from now on nothing will be where it was before, I am going to be departed from the safety of relation to the past. These were after a passionate night and the condom like a sock lost down at the foot of the bed. My friend was awake this time, howcome, kissing hard, thinking to touch my nipple when it would double me into indescribable. For a long time I was fucking him like a rabbit, it's not pleasure as I knew it, it's a driving on, and then later slowing down, but still not opiate. I meet him in his style is how it feels. That's how it is with us. This morning he was soft blue and blurry blond and so many worrying moles. Flatsided spear hunting and tracking in the air, he's protesting and pulling up the covers. Don't forget what describing is, just a trace on top of a completely full something. Now I'm going down for the morning-after pill though the pendulum says I don't need it. No brilliant engineer girl will be born. - Michael righteous pigheaded and a dead weight has a little set of stories. I start conciliatory and he acts worse until I insult him back. Conciliating seems to be a mistake though he gets better after he says his formations. He's mad at me about money though he won't earn any or go to welfare. He's been swallowed by Rowen, IS Rowen, possessive, protective, afraid that if something happens to Rowen he'll be done for. Gnawing on the thought of other children, what might have happened with Caroline. And really interested too in Rowen's bizarre inventions. As if I don't spend my time thinking of things to blame him for, but should be ready with some, otherwise I stand to think I am what he says. 27 As if because I'm letting him be and not reflecting him, he's reflecting himself on me. 28 Fear because when he hasn't got money he freaks and starts to talk about murder. I'm here in my house drawing plans realizing I'm frightened / which maybe means I must think about it. So if I gave him money? I balk. He's not doing anything, he doesn't do anything, he wants me to be the money drudge. He's the childcare drudge. So is he looking after my child or his? I'm afraid it will go on. I support him in his ugly idleness and he keeps asking for more. I have to decide whether I am going to go on knowing Rowen. If I pay child support I have a say. If I do that how does it affect? How much does he have - $450? + $100. If I gave him $100 per month that brings him to $650, which after rent is $400. $700 is for 7 months to 1st May. $350 is extra. So I have to give him $350. I then have $2700 left for 2 months? March and April ($1300 for bank) but check tax. Summer will be narrow. 1st March Daphne to say Women's Press sent her a contract for Ana Historic, HA. Wittgenstein. What's he trying to see? I don't think he sees it. Reading it I'm feeling he knows and I don't. "Reading the Philosophical Investigations." Language belongs to object-contexts and cannot deal with Being taken as such. Pain and mental images are here representing Being, but he's saying that as long as we're talking about them we're contexting them wrongly. Working on this I keep imagining I'm impressing the guy - no that's not good enough - at what do I imagine it. Writing it [the paper] manic like Jam seeing smart touches. But it has got a lucid foundation. Resnick's a particularly closed one. I don't think he sees what I'd want to see, it's important to him to feel clever and sharp and more so. I'm comparing myself with the girl Estall liked. Why. It's still worry about whether silence was smarter. - This worried sound is what. 2nd With Witt they talk a lot about what philosophy is. I'd like to say experiential thinking. Eric's amazing story. A wolf tore out some of the back pages of Revelations. A poem about the young woman he called up from another level whose eyes for a few hours after had rainbows in the iris. Photos of two girls and a dopey looking little brother. [Eric's children] Next photo the girls are terrific, the boy by then died of a 6-month disease, undiagnosable, causing lung tissue to break down to mush. He coughed throughout. Previous to all, the sisters, whose story he says he'll tell later, Cauldron and Taming Power of the Great, dumb one and smart one. "When she did look at me, I should make this point that in the first I don't know if it's hours and hours after these djinns come up from the other level of existence, the irises of their eyes are like rainbows all different colors that blend into each other, fantastically beautiful." Sunday 5th Two nights with Row, by Saturday morning screaming to get him off me, midnight he's still coming up the hall, there's been singing, story read, snack, lights left on, lying down with. I fall asleep with him still awake, and then at night he hauls me up with crying, and in the morning crying again "because I miss my dad." And on with falling over a root and crying, bumping and crying. And the mess made, stuff through the whole house. Is there anything to learn - 1. Both crying and disorder are unbearable pain and fear. Anything to make it stop. I don't feel for him unless it's a certain kind of sobbing with tears when he holds out his arms to me. 2. I get like Oma with bad nerves, screaming with bad nerves. I erupt like Ed though not so formally. Row when I won't listen has learned to do what I do, clench his teeth and growl. - Mary has perpetuated a good joke. I think the fight has sweetened. It was a white cyclamen in a mauve glazed straw hat. Rob. We lay in the chair squirming kissing stroking etc while it got dark and then when I mentioned a movie it seemed to be possible to go out together, he in his worn-through steel toe boots that make him walk as if he's on stilts, unjointed at the foot. Dirty cords, very ugly ski hat he knew to take off as soon as we got under a roof. He was a shabby extraterrestrial insect I was overjoyed to be out with. Actually on the bus together, actually on Georgia looking up, actually in the back row of a theatre and passing through crowds together and paying ten dollars for a pizza. Joyfully in love, laughing, seeing myself more beautiful than Susan Sontag in the theatre washroom though not in the pizza mall. We walked home past the stadium, viaduct, Main. Stopped at the relay station to look at what he should almost be able to understand. He knows more about plants than I want to but I like it that he does. His suggestions about the shed were right and I took them and the new shed's good and possible, economical and articulated. Then we go to bed. I put on music and am confident of being fucked. He gets kissing me hard and I'm so happy thinking of other people's frightened mouths that I burst out You're so wonderful, you're really so wonderful it's amazing. And then I'm frightened to have said it and start wanting him to reassure me even by just putting back his arm and getting a safe. It's something all over again. I wait and he doesn't and I get more desolate and clam up and there's nothing he knows how to do. I put on my pyjamas and go to the other room and come and then I begin to think what happens is chemical like a chemical overshoot into despair. An oddly helpless state. I saturate in femininity and wait for him to love my givenness, understand it and be inspired, and he doesn't. That's where he starts to fall asleep. Then I'm really abandoned, completely sad, though there's something theatrical too. It's very painful but it's not deep. He goes into a 'meditative state,' "I just like to be with you." "You wouldn't mind if we never did it?" He doesn't think so. I don't know what to make of that. It's not that he doesn't want to, he's ready any time - that's true - but he doesn't mind if he doesn't. I show [him a picture of] a beautiful body and say I feel like it would be different if I was that. He says no he doesn't think so, it's just how he is. I believe him. But how does he do it, how does he cut it off? Then this morning it's not what it would have been. So different if I come, it makes a clean finish, I don't brood. What does he mean, 'meditative'? Well, it's the relaxation he learned. He relaxes and finds himself there? No it's mental too. In engineering he learned to focus about 3' ahead and keep the whole area going. It has something to do with the back of his tongue. He feels thoughts circulating. What about the grain? It's more he feels it than he sees it. He knows he was gone but he doesn't know how long. I deserve somebody who sees me better than he does. I don't like his coyness. He can't say what needs to be said the way Tony used to. He uses a foolish voice to say some kinds of things. He's still goonish. "You just have to remember I love you." What I say is I love you oddly, I love you because I sleep with you. 6th Traveling in 'Paris.' We're south of the river, south of the old town I used to like to eat and walk in, I'm in the top storey of a bus with a rusted frame but no windows. We're on a road through a marsh, seems like estuary, what's a city bus doing plunging through these sheets of water on the road. I go sit in the front seat and hold onto the frame on both sides. Where can we be going. A collapsing woodframe house on the left. Black silty muck and reeds. (- Here I'm taking a dizzy tour, marsh, bush, where my new self is in the garden, the way it isn't the self it was, but smaller, less open. I'm worried about thickening the boundary with the wild area, put skilled people on it, keep out the rogue. Thinking what Joyce said, I'm the garden, Joann, I'm the spirit of the garden, the whole garden. And then to the flash of implication, the way all of it is structured like a dream. That's the dizziness, as if everything to be known in that seeing. Wanting to talk to Joyce.) - But then the bus is on pavement again, in fact on the esplanade with the parliament houses, monumental stone, across the water. I seem to remember yes there was a bog reserve in the middle of the South Side. Trying to get back to the hotel where I leave my stuff, up the right arm of the city, looking for my landmark, the steeple of the church San Suplice, maybe not that. I see a steeple and get off too soon. Am at the foot of a hill and not knowing where I am. It's night now. a bus load of army reserves etc. Get up into the room and find my suitcase open and my things confused with somebody else's. Flat folded paper in the clothing, my money is still there but it's only £20 not enough to pay my hotel bill even. This hotel room - I hardly stay there but I leave things in it and go back from time to time. Even when I'm in this city I usually stay somewhere else. I've been in the city such a long time and I haven't seen Luke - that often comes up. Is this the grid that makes the real? Something other, and over it the dream structures that are own. The dizziness is from asking whether anything is other. The garden is very dream because I'm shaping it. The film community for instance, is it less? - Eric's concept of glomping-on. If a man and woman are attracted they'll give off ghosts which will go toward each other on another plane. If they have sex everything is fine. If the man retreats the woman will glomp onto him, meaning she'll possess him. It doesn't mean she gets something out of it, but for him it means a kind of life-wrecking. He'll be part of the soldier clan, impotent, hanging onto the company of men who refuse to give importance to sex. You can rescue yourself from your possessor by challenging her. There are nonsexual kinds of glomping. "You go into union." Glomeration. He was rescued he said by regard for a woman. He allowed himself to imagine her sexually and from that he got contact with the Taming Power of the Great, who is female and advises and teaches him mainly through the coins but also in vision. I glomped onto him he says a couple of times in early days, but he freed himself by humiliating me when he nagged me into storing the wheelbarrow. It's true I remember the kiddish anger of giving in to his nag. "Have you got five dollars you could lend me 'til next time I see you?" "Not for booze Eric." As he was leaving. Another dream about swimming in a canal with Rowen. I see an outline floating, lift it out, it's a little translucent plastic hand. Something floating nearby I can tell would be a foot. Root clumps piled together on a paper covered trunk, burning I believe. The men say they can't be but I reckon to know more than they do. But looking at it I also think they'll set the trunk on fire, take them somewhere else and they may not be able to burn. Does the morning after pill program a miscarriage later? Bath water maybe, as if amniotic fluid seeping. Rowen with M's choppy hair cutting, a lovely deep back of he head and ears that face front. Could hear myself on the phone with M talking as if all the presence I have is put to effective phrases. That scares me. I wasn't like that all day though - often on the phone even to Bob Wong it jumps out direct and live. Giving somebody money in a dream is giving them power. Giving M $700 did seem to. Why I don't want Mary giving me money any more. Why I don't give Luke money though many other people do. Why people give kids money. Why I won't give Eric money for booze. Why Jam wouldn't lend me. Why Rob doesn't pay half. Why Laiwan won't lend her own but only other people's. Why Muggs lending me money really helped me and makes me loyal. Why Ed wdn't give money. Why Joyce costs so much and is worth it. Why it's okay for Anne to give me money. Why Roy stole from me. Potlatch. Why money to welfare is disputed. 8 Einstein substituted events for particles. Each event had to each other a relation called interval which could be analyzed in various arbitrary ways into time-element and space-element. No physical facts correspond to these conventions.   Quantum theory adds that events can be discontinuous. - A little burning woman writing vision she says. Evelyn Fox Keller with her legs twisted under the table, smudges under her eyes, a hawk profile and strangely large earrings swinging. "Erotic science." "A voice in a margin." Speaks smiling as women like to. The opacity of reproduction. She saw me when she came to begin and kept seeing me and said 'erotic science' to what she saw - I think. Susan Wendell in the interval said find someone you want to study under and contact them. And how can it be Keller's at Berkeley? In the Department of Rhetoric, Women's Studies and the History of Science. 9 How can we make scientists more interested in being bodies? I asked. The burning woman is Antoinette Winkelman. Unborn children knocking at our eyes let me see let me see And charm, value, ethic, tactic - "I understand every word of this." She's beautiful - Kore's green branch is supposed to be left at the entrance, it's the goddess, which is god's light. She saw spring-alive baby holding out five fingers of each hand. Last night I saw - the animals gathered toward me on the porch - the bull stood up on his hind legs. I quickly closed the door and pushed it tight to hear it latch. What he did was sit down in the armchair. Going in to a party carrying a Christmas drink, jelled bright green with red cherry. What about the C on my paper. I blushed with anger. He does not see what I'm doing and needs to assume I'm incompetent. But it's true I don't know where he's coming from. I don't think he understands Wittgenstein. So who's he working from? His explanation is unintelligible to me. He is not intelligent. He's the chair. He drives a BMW. Is he the bull in the armchair? Last night I had a real understanding, "the meaning is the use" is not what he believes. The whole book is saying unglue yourself from equations. You're living in the open. Arguments prove nothing. 10th Waking - being given a reading list - no making a reading list - Quine Russell Frege - then something, I speak to it - "You're doing this because I ask you but you'd rather be doing something else" - a pause where I'm not waiting for an answer and then a deep sigh yes. Forgot to say. Weeks ago bringing in the first paper, stomach actually knotted, stomach not solar plex. I thought to talk to it, you're afraid, we'll talk about it later. Deep sigh yes. - [meeting with Evelyn Fox Keller] I said anything straight out and she too. "I want to change science." A moment when she looked at me with her full force, so deep dark awesome an intelligence. I felt safe with her on account of it. She laughed when she came to the penis knocking, and then she kept on laughing. "You're a serious loner aren't you. You would have liked the McLintock book for that." We were in Daphne's office with Cheryl's poster on the wall. 11 "I love being with you but there is something missing. You see me better than anybody does and yet you don't see me." "There's not a hope in hell that you'll ever be able to see me but I don't expect it. I'm timidly quite happy with you. I'm very grateful for what there is. To be able to feel for somebody. If you don't feel as if you're felt for then it's all nothing. I've had connections with people who could see me, and they could kill me, and they did. I'm real glad you can't do that. And I can't kill you either. I feel like I'm starting small and building instead of starting big and crashing which is what I usually do. I like you. And also there are things about you I don't like, and they're not small things either. I don't like the way you don't say things and keep back to yourself. It makes a deadness where there could be more of a liveness." What does it mean to be 'hurt.' Coming back to a situation, being preoccupied. Tight in sp and forehead. Going over what to do. Revenge thoughts. Trying to see ahead, anxious questions. As if it's following the same line as Jam, at the beginning when she'd say she didn't want to. I'm going to demand he get it clear or I won't go on. I'm not willing to hear about this lack again. So I'm saying, next time you get cranky it has to be about something else. 13 You try to keep me in the position where I am the one who has to defend the connection and nourish it. What makes it possible for you to get away with it? I wait to see if you'll take equal responsibility. This feels to you like being tested. What is intriguing about a dream is not its causal connection but rather that it functions as part of a story the remainder of which is in the dark. Witt. There is a tentacle feeling very gently and not unhappily in the direction of your house. 14 Something like a direction. I go for a credential, investigate the opposition. Keep working in perception, take a position able to make direct perception more interesting. 15 - whether the Sterling people want to dominate us [local Sterling Institute group offers to bring us 300 volunteers over a weekend] - whether the shed cd or shd be pushed for now - whether it's worth going to the Park Board - whether it's worth going to City Council - whether RM and I are discoupled - whether I can write this paper on a priori in Witt - whether to push the Freemasons for a fence - whether we can find or fund for most of these jobs Being set to do something that can't be done yet. Being set to do something and not knowing how to proceed. Being blocked some other way. Wheels racing but not in gear. 16 "It might be better than B+ but I am not sure and I want to give you an incentive for writing my way." He was also cuter and less suspicious. The way these papers are all at sea until some late but not frantic half hour. I have to thank you dear body or whatever you are. Sweet lover looking for someone who knows how. Lucid formidable woman, 44, beautiful and ugly, offers talent in exchange for nerve and curiosity. Handwritten propositions to Box ---. So happy to come home. 17 A place we or they are working on. Here around the back shallow water planted with new grass. They have in mind to harbour big ships, there beside the high line of Lombardy poplars, maybe they'll dredge a canal. We're walking inland to go work on something. I'm with a tall young man. We want to go that way up a road to the right - it's like a tree planting clearing partly - but a young child has followed us screaming. I stop, yell that he (she - I'm not sure) can't come, has to stay behind. Righteous. But when I've woken I see it's part of me, how unkind I am to myself, automatically. Body sighs yes. It's connected to having felt the tenderness of that myself, fear and stress with the Wittgenstein class. With relief at maybe working toward money, loving to be able to go into a restaurant and eat a six dollar salad. NO / MORE / HUNGER AND THIRST / BUT FIRST / BE A PERSON WHO NEEDS / PE PUL. Singing at SFU. 18 Sterling meeting at the garden. Safety pin says it's over with RM. Anxious not to let control go to the men they've got (we don't have anything like that). Looking at Rob with involuntary love but speaking without the platform of free life I've had in the garden, forcing authority it felt. But then happy there's a guy measuring up for paths who knows what to do. Really sorry sore sorey. Is it going back to starving and dreaming. Rowen attacked the closet door this morning. I very mildly scolded. "I'll never ever do it again," crying. I took him on my lap and told him about Luke and got the file out, showed him pictures, Luke as a little boy and a grown boy, his rocket. Oh Luke. That's a great cry. Rowen with his hacked hair, the boy look, in the bathtub offering to sit on my stomach, crying in his bed, "I miss my dad." Looking at Luke I see my respect and admiration, depth of heart. I look at Rowen like a stranger. Parts of my living are going ahead but when I look at Michael and Rowen it's still a fainting caving slump of shame. Michael is not less than Roy, if Rowen had had my respect the way Luke did he might interest me too. I wasn't fooled by Michael, I wasn't brutalized, so what's to be so ashamed of. His impotence. Does it go that deep. (3w) it says. Because I can control him? Yes. 19 Sorry longing. Am I feeling bad because I'm not saying what I mean. Oh body. What's the truth between us     illusion So should I just weather it     no What am I supposed to do with the pain     empress Should I find someone else to love     so-so Am I just supposed to love myself     no Am I supposed to love Rob     no Do you mean I'm supposed to love someone who's generous         Like addiction I saw. And - what to do with it is love and beauty-making. Then comes territory and company. [book lists] [Opposite: notes on cornus stolonifera, corylus cornuta, rosa woodsii, salix reticulata, rubus spectabilis, vaccinium parvifolium, salal, asarum caudatum, trillium ovatum] 22nd Writing papers. So this time it's an acknowledged A. Does that mean I'm going for the doctorate. 24 Goodbye creature. He cried. I said I marveled. He said he did too. Then we were confused. Did he say 'foolish.' I had to back him up, ask point by point, and then I found he was saying whenever he was foolish and babbling it was covered marvel. "When you're being you." Alcohol distance. I hope it's not at my expense but he's looking manly and beautiful. "You don't know what you've got." Stress of the silences. I talked. He was saying it's too much. For him it is. 25 "It is the greatest of privileges for me to see how you live when you live as you wish." He is a being in another life and I'm the only one of my kind. I keep asking is that the end of the lovers, is no one going to be in my arms any more, will I be just looking and hungry. The alien's beauty always forbidden. No. What I made last night is that I can say it to him. I can be heart because he is damaged - I saw one half his body cut away - but he's not sadistic. As if I have to bring myself again to the speaking pain where I am this which I imagine is realer and more beautiful. Though really power and joy are beautiful. And go on being myself much more alien than I have, but truer. But wasn't my glee with Michael truer than sadness. Sleeping at the camp just wrapped in clothes though it's cold. Andy has been years away from his wife and children and he's not going back. Waving a tall tree over my head. Holding it up I'm on a flat pad with Josie behind me. Flashing up the road to the East Place. The plume above me somehow steers, we slip fast over the snow. Pass a car snowed into the ditch, it's falling evening, either at Peter Epp's place where I see the lights of the artist's renovated places, or at the old place inhabited by strange new owners. We'll find someplace to sleep, firewood. The home place with its huge house, they've changed the landscape so I'm not sure where we are. First I speak to their children, which they are, eccentric. I keep watching to see which of these adults are the parents, the master farmers. I want them to invite us to stay but they try to understand us as wanting the master farm tour, which they don't want to bother to give. The tissue of the dream is not here between the lines they want us to go. There are two empty new houses to the west, with a (the) creek behind. And then I see all beyond them it's new tract housing the whole road developed. Their jester coming toward us. I have his hat, break off the twigs. Did it absent-mindedly but maybe they were his antenna, though dead. He's the one to ask where we can sleep, he's our kind but he's not willing to break into those new houses. What do I know. Nature doesn't talk. When I say everything, that is the new houses filling all my origin with cultural construction. At the garden I rail at the trash hoarded by my trashy inept poor people. I fight to order them. I can't do it alone. Irish Mike drags back what I throw out. The edge of the wild area so frayed and compromised. The further depth so thorny. Rob decides for the orchard, which is us standing together. Muggs is quick to establish a simple workable shape. Oh the connecting paths so ruined. We're a disarray. What's it like in the solar cave. Longing to be comforted. Reality is the assignment. I use the pendulum to test superstitions. Super-stare to be paralyzed. If you were to cast a pebble, new waves, a thousandth the strength of the old, would run out to sea and the waves there would feel them. So do future things make themselves known in the past. A child who will someday be wise is a wise child. I feel his feelings, but not, it says, because he doesn't. I had seen the star, and seeing it - immensely remote though it was - had known it a region of myself, absurd as the baby's foot, mysterious as his genius is to one who has only just discovered it. "existence at two points" [notes: Augustine imagining something that can't cause agony of loss. The self cannot be torn by the pang of separation from what it loves, for, knowing the truth, it can never confuse its substance with the substance of some other mortal being. It will preserve this selfhood as a unity, which only by belonging to god can remain properly itself. Extrication of an ideal self out of the empirical or contingent self through a steady contemplation of the ideal object. The fear of object loss is at bottom fear of growing tension due to need. But if the ego succeeds in protecting itself through such processes as projection and repression, it creates a gap. The repressed is now an outlaw. Anxiety is the fear of the otherness of the self. The death we can know is the death of the other. Thus the anxiety which we figure as the fear of death is a constant feature of the relation to otherness. This heterogeneous structure contains irreducible tensions.] [Opposite: notes on betula papyrifera, amelanchier, crataegus lavellei, cratagus douglasii, malus, clethra alnifolia, sambucus, vaccinium corymbosum, alnus rubra] 27 Monday, still in pain. I haven't decided to cut it. Was copying through the story, amazed at the size of the hunger. I was and am wracked. He gave me six months of freedom and now am I in for it again. I still don't want to tell him the truth of my own ambivalence. Wanted to give him all the parts of the journal about him, as if he could be with me after all, could want to be, reading it. The record before he came into my bed is very desperate. Afterwards sometimes contemptuous. Now I see about the horse I'm just hanging onto. She was right, it would be better to ride it well. It looks as if none of it could matter. He's fastened to the engineer girl because he didn't court her properly. [Wittgenstein paper notes untranscribed] part 3 aphrodite's garden volume 10: 1989-1990 january-february work & days: a lifetime journal project