1st April 1989
Got on the UBC bus yesterday with many people. An old woman in widow clothes having to stand. I knew the look on her face, a misery of endurance. Behind her a grey haired man and a Chinese boy. Next to me in a seat a woman looking French, well-dressed, prim like Marie-Paule. Can I speak to her. I seem to act before I decide: "Are you going to let this old old old old woman stand?" "I thought one of the men could offer," but she did get up. "I thought they could offer too but they couldn't." The old woman looked into my eyes for a second as she was going to move, her eyes very magnified by glasses, stiff black hairs above her lip. Her mouth moved. The French woman and I didn't look at each other.
Went to the meeting today in a stew of color, green, peacock, turquoise, red, and held onto the center of their so many people, large strange men, large quite alright men, a lot of thin women looking pale in make-up. I'd taken hold of the - the way this handwriting goes must be the two beers - looking at it feeling how easy to get frightened - of being so forthright and commanding on purpose.
[Preliminary meeting with the Sterling Group who were wanting to bring us 300 volunteers one weekend in May, to build paths and lay irrigation throughout the garden.]
2
Trembling with excitement at the plumbing task. Keep peeling away from Wittgenstein though I was all in it yesterday.
Rob at the meeting dark red as a turkey, having to speak out about the orchard. I can go back to seeing him repulsive, which makes me feel incorrectly that seeing him beautiful was my expensive gift.
A Sterling this morning said "This letter will follow up on a call" should be replaced by "further to our conversation of" and I saw white - it was like a second of blank - not possible to recall - I'd very quickly pictured it as a space of clear [film] leader, not really, but something like that - a space of transparent glass - 'I froze' - but more, 'I flashed.'
5th
Paths, pipes, machines, engineers, Rob trying out again a little sweet pull to discompose me, Wittgenstein on correspondence for tomorrow this time. It's alright to be driven like this as long as it's rain every day, but when it's May mornings oh I hope there'll be alpine meadows, grass movie, sleeping out, Arctic grazing, seeing and seeing.
6
"How are you going to follow this act?" [Resnick] "I'd like to keep going. Can I come and be a graduate student?" "Sure."
The Ukrainian Hall council.
Rowen in his bristle like a historical little boy. We sit in his room. I'm shortening his coat sleeves and watching LA Law. Wondering whether this new aggressive life is him, the way a fine edge in old times seemed to be Luke. There are moments I flare with excitement and he dances ahead. Really when I write best I feel how the word doesn't correspond at all. Then by the time I read it back, it does.
9
My eye found the new moon nearly overhead, a geometrically drawn part rim of a circle. That wasn't important but it was one of the few moments of looking up. My eye was hooked by it before I saw it, pulled over to it. The sky today was open blue. Zinzolin said, The sun is hot, the air is cold. Yes as if we feel it reaching through. How can it do that?
Yesterday and today ditching. Muggs and Bob and their people, Rob, Paul K in a sack of flab, Dusan happy happy to be the boss (I asked him), Jean and her friend and dog. ("Shut up Shadow it's a wheelbarrow.") Sun struck down so I had to go home for the purple handkerchief and wear it with knotted corners. Purple teeshirt. So strong and light a frame I am. Chopping ditch this afternoon all down the line.
Yesterday I found the strike was over. Was goin' past him giving him a little bump alongside. Waiting until Eric left and getting down on my haunches beside him and kissing his cheek and catching his hands so he followed me home. What happened was he made up his mind enough and cried enough. I read him up in a book. He must've dreamed up some sex. I remembered to go away and check about him taking Catherine to the wedding so I didn't stay frozen. Got to tell him David McAra and liked his [imagined] woman, who's a good mom but would know how to take the kids traveling, etc.
There was a thump downstairs as we were wound together in the dark, in the big chair, telling and hearing. Eric, a drunken letter and tape. Tonight when I'd just heard it there was another thump, this tape drunk too but remorseful and hidden in so much machine noise I haven't heard most of it.
Diane in the past year has had her mother die, her sister ill with cancer, her boyfriend murdered, her daughter escape from a runaway truck.
Pretty Gislain. If you want him he's yours, said Rob. I let myself light up.
He let himself go quite wild. He's a wild kisser when he agrees to be. I like how he will hold my hand during. He let me kiss him as much as I wanted, as all over and around and winding and sliding. When I wanted to come he drove on and on. You're a good friend, I said. I came and laughed and held him tight, praised him too much again and then all day was really rid of him, working and quiet.
10
Don't have the Arctic trip. Megan Williams said try next year.
City Council again tonight.
Smell of poplar balsam on my hands. Nahuatl tecomahea, Aztec foetid copal
Eric was told my name is spirit that sees to the center.
11
Then: alders, just 10 for the ten holes, and 5 hawthorns, soft things. Annie [brought them] with her car.
Annabel [Nicholson] coming, and laughing on the phone, and bringing the wildflower book.
Planting in Eric's bed. Dipping buckets in the pool.
And Moonboy at the shed, with my touch on his hair and so clear-spirited a smile hello, possible this time but not always - across the beds. A little time hidden in the broom, in warm air.
Calamity Jane tonight [on TV], Satan her black horse. She stands bowing ironically to bleachers empty in her time but not in ours.
Oo crash again. [Working on the Wittgensten paper.]
So about imagination. What do I want to know. I feel ill with - what - pain - uncertainty.
I want to know whether the visionary sees true. - Here the phone rings, marketing research. "I can't stand these phone calls from people I don't know! It's such an invasion!" A heart cry.
I want to know whether the visionary opens a real life or a deluded one.
- Are seeing and imagining alike more than people think
- Can imagining be a real form of seeing
- Was Wittgenstein interested in the visionary
- Are Eric's visions true for him
- In a more general sense
- Is what I do with the pendulum connected to the visionary no
- What was Wittgenstein's interest in imagining (2s)
- Can imagining be a real form of seeing
16 Sunday
Morning after pill again.
To tell: yesterday he sez, I'm leaving early ... you could come too if you want. Okay I'll come.
And then - I wear the camisole and skirt and big boots with red socks rolled over blue, and go in a car sitting behind an elegant man [Chris Mills] driving elegantly in a car with iridescent stickers on the dash. I see family style, a streaked braid, a much more seasoned dangerous person than my sweet lank one. And then the nest up at the top of Lonsdale, thick cypress hedge nest, place all scattered with stuff, a lot of it Rob's, little pots with maybe something, maybe not, maybe sometime after a few freezes or droughts. Odd placeless women like female dependents, and the squad of vivid men, one of whom I have affectionate claim to and the rest of which I'll get a good look at.
Ann lined up with me though twenty years younger and with beautiful teeth. I find her puzzle pieces with a bit of red edge, she looks at me when there's something we see. We're at the table again somehow, considering pieces, look at each other and burst out laughing.
There's a big dark brother with juicy arms, sleeveless black tee, warm straight energy, curious. And a gawk, like Rudy, more gawk than Rob who can be so lovely too. And the mom, who rules, is tall and impatient, bit brittle, not stupid but wary. I cross swords with her, click. We both know she can see me in one or two ways better than her son can, and I her too. Is she like Sara will be? No, much more contained though the house is cleanly messy. Chris tries on the tie. You look so much like your old man, she says from who knows what memory of love and desire and grief and fear.
I'm curious to see how Rob is configured there. He takes on a clan glamour from Jeff and Chris's style, he's a middle child but he doesn't mind. I'm as if watching to see whether I've got the pick of the lot and if not why not. That's as-if, a sort of role I wd be in if I weren't what I am. In the family bathroom mirror looking an exotic catch, where did he get that dark woman - how - he isn't asking though he could be and others may. It felt natural, he sez in his slightly gobbly lispy way.
He strokes my arm, hanging down bare beside the armchair. We've got a Leonard Cohen concert [on TV], two girl singers in black unmatched modest tight dresses stamping precisely singing his angel choruses rapt up in his poet passion like wife and lover displayed. Very woozy tunes.
The brothers have made themselves together, it's a powerful sight.
17
Joann to Muggs, Have you seen the way they've been looking at each other?
"I seem to have an endless appetite for holding you." He doesn't answer that.
"Elfreda."
His mom, "I thought it was that."
"No you didn't think it was that."
"Come again, especially now we know you like doing puzzles." We're at the card table standing looking down at the one we finished. "I haven't liked doing puzzles for years but I liked it tonight," I say, letting my tongue run ahead of my knowledge (curious to hear what it will say). "That's because you ...," she stops herself and looks off in the distance through the dining room wall. I let it go.
With her husband in museums and the PNE standing still staring at things she saw faster: "I would be standing there fuming - no, I wasn't fuming, I was doing this," compliant grimace.
We step onto gravel in the moonlight. She's seeing us to the car. "The moon was a ghostly galleon," she says. "Tossed upon stormy seas" I say, letting her date me. No need to say thank you goodbye.
Pat and Alan.
18
Jo the trucking company girl drives fast to South Burnaby Flats where a distracted obliging man shows us wood we can have any amount of - a little shed even.
Eric wants me to praise a cure he has found for his weaknesses.
I call a gravel company asking for 50 tons of fill sand, 280 T three-quarter inch clear crushed rock, 60 T roadbase/navvy jack/road mulch/three-eighth inch clear crushed rock. 15 T per truckload.
At Sheila's figuring with Eric to set 4 strips of lathe. Her shadblow like a fairy saskatoon.
In this whole day weary of moving my mouth in business talk. Not with the gravel salesman though, who was to the point.
19
Laiwan's tiny laser-printed on airmail paper letter. First reading impressed. Second I notice the bluffs. Cheryl says Luke and Zoe o really were tearing around town. [London]
20
Waking so early, 3, to have to deal with the physical anguish of this way of using myself. Dealings with very wrong people, Sterlings who can't say hello on the telephone without then saying how are you. Ingrid fat painted tittering squeezed into elastic pants. Their lot and mine having to be led and nobody is leading. I don't think they are doing what they'd have to do to be able to finish anything. I don't think they see their task.
Did I just see it - we break it into sections and make sections responsible for their amount of sand, gravel, pipe? Pickups? Funds?
24 teams - 500 each - 70' sections - a couple of Strath garden teams - each wd have to come up with a wheelbarrow, spades, picks - come up with whatever deficit - Greg instructs them in procedure. We get captains - Ian Rob Eric Li boy Jean Joann John Glenn Joann H Muggs Bob.
Prep day - run through a section with captains - need stakes - somebody to pick them up - string - stones and wood for shoring.
And there's Annabel - house to fix and clean for her. Sheila's garden. MA to set up.
22
In bed last night writhing about not being an artist anymore. My garden. But it's gone. And now I'm taking the long academic road. Just being an executive. My hands are thickening. Though oh I do love the light strength of this body and hope I never stop working in gardens. Was thinking of Rhoda's grains and my well of notes and love. How this entire year I'm giving my freedom to the garden. Where I'm hating the ugly poor who make hideous jumbles of collected rubbish wherever they settle.
Last night I was picking at somebody's heap on Malkin when a trailer door opened and out stepped that fat longhaired French Canadian man who goes through the garden in summer nipping vegetables into a plastic bag. "Oh it's ugly old you," I say belligerently. "What did I ever do to you?" "You've bored me for hours on end."
I yell at old Mike who every day comes to his land. I'm screaming at him for cutting down the tansy edge, he's standing with a string of snot stretched round by the wind. At his bench he has a bathroom rug dirty pale yellow and days' chicken bones not well cleaned.
Mrs Hsu's piles of little boards. I relentlessly got rid of her Safeway carts.
And there's my dump of dirt boards wounded plants in pots rocks bricks ditches concrete plastic buckets with little stones.
And the whole garden without its space, like a shanty graveyard. Marsh messed up.
When I've spoken to Rob on the phone I've bin transacting as fast as I can and getting off, trying to get the receiver away before I have to hear him say baa-a . Well, hah he says when I answer.
[Opposite, Korzybski notes:
inadequacy for human orientation of the S-P form of representation [subject-predicate]
training in delusion
errors: not indexing time and place therefore overgeneralizing, splitting what cannot be separated, for instance mind-body, space-time, emotion-thought
multiordinal terms - on different levels or orders of abstraction they may have different meanings
tendency to learn systems without asking if they're accurate because learning them is easy, checking v difficult
Korzybski A 1933 Science and sanity Institute of General Semantics]
23
Yesterday running around supervising. Ellie! they yell from the other side of the field.
After they go home RM and I throw lumber off the truck. He's wiser with it than I. "Watch your chin, yeah, that," as the ends of long 2x6's fly up.
Brian the logger in suspenders pale sapphire eyes dirty curls tobacco fingers and a flatbed truck. I like to squat down with him and survey the scene. Jo the trucker girl drives the truck, gauges the job and hugs me against her lovely hoisted boobs.
Rob Mills stalks up with his bike, the two light frames. He's very brown from the march [peace march] and his eyes are high lidded. After the day of running I want to put my head on his boot. He presses his thumb between my eyebrows. I see the sheen of the sky for the first time. Oh such open spaces so interestingly formed. A much higher skin of cloud becomes visible as it brightens in pink.
We wrangle about food neurosis which is really about how he obeys Catherine. It is not a fight, it's just tired bad temper. It's probably the first time - it is - I've bin lying down with him and not after his tail. I just want to hold hold hold onto him. But he's hungry. Yeah. No kissing because of his sore throat, but he really wants to make me.
In the night when I wake up he's friendly, he'll wake to be with me if I like. I had to have milk and crackers to be able to sleep again.
In the bath just lying quiet. He strokes my stomach as if he's got someone of his in it. I'm so quiet he takes a turn to praise. He looks closely at my arm. You have nice pores, he says. What do you mean nice? They're definite, they're nice and even, they're deep.
I walk with my hand in his pocket for the first time, in Sunday's Chinatown.
24
Waking at night with the solar screaming.
25
Somewhere behind a wall crouching as the explosion begins to heat up. We don't know whether the heating will stop.
I wake very hot under the two covers. Turn to body and see I'm wrung with anguish. What is it, sweetheart? It sighs and relaxes.
This way of saying it is so neutral I'm wondering who writes. It was burning sky (R) brightening every instant. I was behind a low wall waiting to know whether it would burn me up. It was perfectly an experience of the beginning of holocaust. I woke physically in anguish but dissociated like this.
26
I don't like the [SFU] philosophers so far - except Dennis - what about them - they're cold - they mince words. They don't like me either.
Woke in first grey dawn thinking of how I must be alert and careful going into the realm of these sharp untrue men. I vow to keep clear of their power language. I want to tune my own. Even yesterday I began to but I will to slip through them to my own direct and clear wise passionate form.
Beaver [native] terms for north-country plants.
The shapes of trees this year. First fine leaf-break makes me see how they hold their branches.
Seminar on polarity and analogy, category.
Ancients, logic, language - image - grain.
27
Fight at City Hall Finance Committee. We got fifteen thousand because I thought to run out and intercept Libby. First time they voted yes - Taylor, Owen, Campbell, Wilkins. There sat sweet young Michael Gordon. Harry Rankin stared at me.
John's baby Isaac a beautiful little being stretching both hands toward my two stems of johnny-jump-up.
Waking early reading Lakoff.
Mabel [Richards] thin and heavy trying to stroke her hand back to life after it suddenly went numb.
The New Zealand bristle girl said when she sees me on the street with a wheelbarrow it comforts her like the sound of sheep.
[Hesiod notes, Works and days:
the golden generations of mortal people
at the end of the world in the islands of the blessed by the deep swirling stream of the ocean
for here now is the age of iron
but when men issue straight decisions to their own people and to strangers and do not step at all off the road of rightness, their city flourishes, and the people blossom inside it
- the earth gives them great livelihood
- on the mountains the oaks
- bear acorns for them in their crowns
- and bees in their middles
- he who gives way to shameless greed and takes
- from another,
- even though the thing he takes is small,
- yet it stiffens his heart
- on the mountains the oaks
the star Seirios
Arcturus first begins to rise and shine at the edges of the evening
but whenever house-on-back the snail crawls from the ground up the plants, escaping the Pleiades
when the artichoke is in flower then is when goats are at their fattest, when the wine tastes best, women are most lascivious, but the men's strength fails them most, for the star Seirios shrivels them, knees and heads alive, and the skin is all dried out in the heat
when you first make out on the topmost branches of the fig tree, a leaf as big as the print that a crow makes when he walks, at that time the sea is navigable
I declare justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger
Do not, when you come back from an ill-omened burial, beget children, but when you come from a feast of the immortals. Never wade through the pretty ripples f perpetually flowing rivers, until you have looked at their lovely waters, and prayed to them, and washed your hands in the pale enchanting water.
That one is fortunate and blessed who knowing all these matters goes on working, innocent toward the immortals, watching all the bird signs and keeping clear of transgression.
sang that earth and heaven and sea formerly were fitted together into one form, and separated through destructive Hate, and that there are, as a perpetual sign in the aether, the stars, the moon and the paths of the sun; and how the mountains rose, and how the singing rivers with their nymphs and all things that move were created.
Cronos and Rhea for a while ruled while Zeus was still young, still thinking as a child, and was dwelling in the ---- cave, and ---- had not yet strengthened him with bolt, thunder and lightning, which give glory to Zeus.
you will find a spring on the left of the halls of Hades, and beside it a white cypress growing. Do not even go near this spring. And you will find another, from the lake of memory, flowing forth with cold water. In front of it are guards. You must say "I am the child of Gê and of starry Ouranos, this you yourselves also know. I am dry with thirst and am perishing. Come, give me at once cold water flowing forth from the lake of memory." And they themselves will give you to drink from the divine spring, and then thereafter you will reign with the other heroes.
- I come pure from the pure, queen of the underworld. For I too claim to be of your race. And I have paid the penalty for unjust deeds.
- I come pure from the pure, queen of the underworld,
- have this gift of memory prized by men.
but wherever a soul leaves the light of the sun - enter on the right where one must if one has kept all well and truly. This you have never before experienced: you have become a god instead of a man. You have fallen as a kid into milk. Hail as you travel on the right, through the holy meadow and groves of Persephone.
- o sun, fire, you went through all the towns
- o fire, lead me to the mother, if the fast can endure,
- to fast for seven nights and days
- o fire, lead me to the mother, if the fast can endure,
-
- olympian Zeus and all-seeing sun
- Aphrodite time for seed sowing
- seed threaded
- the toys of dionysus top, rattle, dice-bones, mirror
- below it (earth) is a path, dreadful, hollow, muddy; this is the best path to lead one to the lovely grove of much-revered Aphrodite]
- olympian Zeus and all-seeing sun
1st May
- Annabel will be somewhere in the city tonight.
- I cleaned house.
- Michael doesn't speak to me. He looks twitty.
- At home he's painting fast and well.
- I cleaned house.
3rd
At the gravel yard yesterday looking at three-quarter clear crushed rock, road mulch, rock dust, limestone, three-quarter drain rock.
I come home for a hat at noon, Janis from daycare phones and blows up our system. Would we come for a meeting immediately? Can it be next week? No, immediately. Is it about Rowen's health? No his behaviour. Presumably his sexual behaviour. Yes, inappropriate touching. Staff or kids? Both. He's grabbing breasts? And putting his hand under skirts, and the way he strokes an arm or a leg is sexual in an adult way. Can you tell the difference between when a child is being molested and when he's imitating? We're trained to, we've been making notes for several months, he does it as if he thinks there's nothing wrong with it.
5th
[production of Prometheus bound at UBC] Humans lived underground like ants until Prometheus gave them fire, from which came tillage, writing, etc. Fire was daylight. A figure bound in a public place. "Creative or life-bringing." What in birth is scapegoated? Memory is. Ten writhing women testifying to pain. Those who testify and are judged from the bound position - Zeus, Hephaistos, Okeanos, Io, Hermes. Daylight binds memory. Its figments are will-power, cowed woman, archaic god, wire technology, one-sided doing.
The production obscured any of this. I couldn't read the play in the presence of so much posing flesh. My intelligence was what was bound. Whose dream was it - it was directed by the fat bull who played Prometheus, the most tedious ranter who got a standing ovation from the Greek community.
Wd there be an intelligent way - deadpan. It couldn't be more boring than it was.
But I got the other thing I wanted which was to put my hand and cheek up against Rob somewhere.
There was a clumpy canopy of Japanese cherry floated over a round hillside. He put my hand on him, behind his and my drawn-up knees, such a gleeful face, a kiddish fantasy.
He made phone calls in the swimming pool lobby. I saw water level with the floor rippling to the edge and dropping through a grid.
8th
Work days.
9
It's Tuesday night of the first day at school again. I saw: similacea, the lovely canopied Indian plum, salmonberry's precision of serrated leaf and red wire stalk, ground elder? Vegetative juiciness of first year growth in the shape of a years' old tree. Some little thing I'd never seen. There'll be a reason why the forest likes white flowers - the May rowan.
Wealth it feels - I own the campus now - it has wild bush - Robinson's introduction to early Greek philosophy. This book on English music. Phil Hanson cute and sharp.
10
Seminar an ordeal. I can't stand the slowness and uselessness of doing it with other people. Just give me books and I'll rip through making it real. Missing Resnick because I could fight with him.
11
One of the tenants has moved out, I have the upper floor, the back apartment where Josie used to be has a long flat deck extended over real fields where just now I see men clearing a ditch. There's a little wing I hadn't known about, I see into a room from outside, like a right ear, go in and check for a door, hear behind it a professor talking to a colleague about maybe a biology conference. Walls of books. "Herbarium." A woman in a wheelchair who obstructs, pins on a cover on the floor. The other tenants speaks to me about her, I give her notice, a month and a half, she meets me with the same date.
I loved the moment of claiming the new space. It was as if the back but it faced south and was the brow too, the back because it opened on pure countryside, European, small chequered fields, a flat watered silt with many labourers in dark clothes.
When I turn to go back inside I see the cottage garden and a wall of books and a grey tree in pink flower.
There was a space on the left unfinished as if an eaves attic had been ripped into but not finished.
12
Jennings has hard white rings in his blue eyes. What does he like about me? (8w) the lines of force. "A square mile of wheat moving." He said moiré. We began to like each other at the last moment when he said You mean it literally with real interest. [about what will we know]
Maybe I'll find people who have come to see what I see without having to stay out in the wild and lose their teeth. Then will I be bitter. Only about the last years. But I am going to really be measured.
A small cross-stitched pocket from North India, Gudjurat, bought for seven dollars from a red-haired man squatting in the AQ corridor.
In the logic lecture I didn't understand a single move. (Logic 210.)
13
Bringing my bike down Hastings in the wheelbarrow.
Day in Sheila's well.
Last night sleeping with RM the round love of touching him anywhere. I was pacing it not to get sad without nook.
14
Bin wanting to say, twice in the last few days, when I've been standing in the alley garden [at 824 East Pender] looking for plants for Sheila, there has risen around me a particular sensation of magic, very strong and other. Wondered whether it's Rhoda's, because she has been seen putting and taking little bits. But it could also be the sumac surrounding itself with feathered stalks I had to push through.
What exactly is a sensation of magic. It was the first time I'd met it in that form but I knew what it was. It's a curve in the air, a flavoured tension, like any time has but unnoticed. I noticed it because it was a space in space, like a block of glass.
Anguish at the thought of raiding, but also wanting to disrupt Rhoda. Want her to have to remember I can crash her anytime.
15
From early at the garden to be there an hour before the boys and get edgeboard in. Long day. The crash of shingle. "Dover Beach," I said to Paul when he tipped a load [of gravel]. "And more," he said neatly.
I got to hold Bill Fisher and Joann. The ones I like like me too though they [the Sterling group] have a platoon of ideological huggers. "I wasn't as fussy as you, slap my hand," he held out his wrist and I stroked it. Does everybody like the same people I do?
Was sitting with Eric in the evening. Trudy and Rhoda came in at the gate. "Eric, those two people who just came in, will you have a look at them and tell me what you see." What I am noticing about Trudy is her oddly high-cut legs and the way she's wearing her hair, her pallor. About R, stepping carefully in sandals she hasn't worn out in twelve years, I notice her hair almost completely silver, chin hanging in a tanned valance.
Eric meantime crossed his eyes and saw "a smothered fire." "A smothered fire?" "Yes and a clay bank, and a rather dry valley."
I got to put up my north edge and repair the west one, set the hyssop and red-eye pinks, plant out squash, bring home leeks.
18
The last Sterling meeting. Sinking into the sofa. Muggs pink and straight showing her qualities different from mine. She's warm and when she isn't she fakes it. "I go full tilt from 6:30 to 10 and from 10 to 6:30 I have to go under. Full tilt." Sometime I should write Muggs, who's the most responsible unleashed woman I've known but offends sometimes with opportunistic glibness and cannot keep her mouth shut ever when there is a group to dominate.
She's bringing up Joann to reinforce her leadership in relation to me. "It's all politics, they have to learn that." It's instinctive movement and I know how, too, but last night really I was soggy. From that sogginess realizing how vigilant and pointed I've been in these two months of dealings, and how exhausted it's left me.
19
Frightened (reading V Woolf) that I'll go under to irrelevant slog and leave aside my real gifts and delight. Then it says: but you weren't making anything of those gifts, you were sick with idleness, maybe if you're pushing in an alien form you'll force the real life to shoot out prolifically from under the wall.
But I'm working hours at logic calculations and feel I'm grasping the ends of the fringes of a cloth being whisked past again and again. It's a paisley cloth, very intricate, and Jennings whisks it, standing solidly planted setting transparent sheets out of the binder onto the projector, on to the other projector, off back into the binder.
He's Canadian improved by England, has a firm civilized voice and the English way of dressing. Glasses on a cord, far-sighted, he looks over them at us. Small narrow mouth just a slit in a redbrown Naval bristle, square dome with a soft little fuzz flaming up by itself from the crown. I like the way he's so brisk and fair and thought-out. "Now I'm going to be irritated with you for a minute because you weren't listening, and then we'll be friends again" he says to a pushing boy.
The pre-Socratics when there's time. The earlier they are, the more I have to bring them. I so readily dilate with them into the thrill of land and sex. "You will find a spring on the left of the halls of Hades and beside it a white cypress growing ... You must say 'I am the child of Ge and of starry Ouranos." I see it all, white cypress and the earth-roofed land.
But when they begin to believe in argument how repelled, as by aluminum pans. And yet I assume that dead metal is what has made us able to branch into the proliferation we are, and V Woolf and the rest of those who've brought calculation's net to strengthening the landscape of perception.
I labour at figuring out the procedures for these proofs, hoping to get through to the right answer but blind to the sense as it rattles past. But I can see Jennings is in the midst of something that makes a variety of kinds of sense to him.
What else - time. There's the end of the hours I have energy for it, and then what, how will I keep up. How did I use to.
Film of what will we know - voice track with sand sedimentation, one shot 15 minutes no cuts, stretch, back, etc.
I'm reading along, Sophists, Democritus, etc, feeling how close to our system they are, how much of the debate is current, etc. How to say this. Feeling it as a confirmation of the questions, how perennial they are. Then I get a shock and turn myself around, say, naturally they're like us, we are them, what it indicates is how we're stuck repeating. As if seeing through them would be seeing a different possibility of category. Following tracks but not to the source, only to the source of the track. What would be there would be (I envision) an open space.
20
Went this morning to speak to Eric, found him with a red swollen face. "You really got plowed last night didn't you, you look dreadful, what's going on." He didn't tell me then but this afternoon he came crying on the porch. First that he thinks he has AIDS, street drugs some years ago, then that a bachelor farmer invited him to help with the haying and introduced him to various sexual practices. He was coming to the conclusion he's a repressed homosexual, thought coming to the conclusion wasn't enough, went out and picked up two young men who it happens were being tailed by policemen under suspicion of murder. And so Eric got busted and thinks he'll go to jail. I was brisk and hard with him and laughed, thinking it would be what would lighten him. It did but then he wanted money for three beers that would make him able to eat. I said absolutely not, never in any circumstance.
And am haunted a bit.
[Opposite page, notes from conversation with Eric:
I drink because I like drinking.
the Clinging a tall thin chap always without female company
these thoughts, they really swept over me
real confused state
a springtime feeling that I would be free of compulsion to drink, the next moment I would be drinking with both hands
the Clinging is a parallel reality
Beast that rises out of the Sea, the sea being the dream symbol of masculinity
Book of Revelation, the Beast that was and is not and yet is
the Clinging is actually homophobic
I was fragmenting this monolithic force
craving was getting so weak
"freed of compulsion" and still have liking
every alcoholic is now free of compulsion
mountain of fire cast into the sea
Intifada, homosexual fantasies, uprising started
in my vision I could listen to the Intifada, all the shooting, shouts
Law the Israeli army
gay fantasies, all the students swarmed into Tiennamen Square, new freedom in my thoughts
the Ayatollah died, linked that to the destruction of the Clinging
major splitting apart of the Cauldron
Iran's religious drunkenness was related to the god/goddess of drunkenness]
21st
"In six months you'll say, thank you Spanish Woman." She was so much the picture of the Gypsy fortune teller, greasy braids, blouse cut to show the long tops of big breasts with a pendant immobilized between them when she'd lean forward holding two hands in her two palms, brown face with small brown eyes. She sang her speech, stayed in character though I tried to invite her out of it.
"There is somebody who doesn't want you to succeed in love and romance - do you know who it is?" "Yes I know." "I can sell you a charm to take off the curse from you." "In the next six months you will find marriage and happiness. It will be a small family but there will be happiness. You are a woman you have had pain and misfortune, you are a woman in the last years you have lost someone from your house ..." "You mean they've died?" "You have lost them from your house, not died - but now you will have success and happiness."
"You know what I really need to know, I can never decide what kind of work to do." "I said already, you are the sort of person you can't do the same kind of work, you always have to change your work, but the kind of work you will do now, you will have success."
As she spoke touching my palm here here and here with her forefinger though she wasn't looking at it and I don't think ever did look at it. When she meant the reading to be over she brought the hands in her hands closed like a book.
[Opposite page, Plato:
purging the city clean again
consider what are the rhythms of a manly and orderly life
good speaking then, and good concord, and good gracefulness and good rhythm, each follow good spirit - not the good nature which we mildly call complicity when it is really silliness, but the mind really well and truly constructed in its character
compel them to implant the image of good spirit
fed on images of vice
we must search for those craftsmen who by good natural powers can track out the nature of the beautiful and the graceful
but the ugly things he would blame with true taste
we cannot be musical ourselves until we can recognize the shapes of self control and courage and generosity and loftiness and all things akin to these
until we can perceive them and know their images
beautiful manners in the soul, and in the bodily form what agrees and concords with these and is of the same type
music ought to end in the love of the beautiful]
Monday 22nd
I found Row and Michael upstairs, M on a ladder smearing the ceiling with a wet rag, Row looking beautiful in the baggy green pants with red suspenders and a blue and white plaid flannel shirt. It's my mum! he shouts and runs to the top of the stairs. Do you know it's your birthday today? I thought it must be around that says M.
He was so beautiful and pink and keen I brought him back to Annabel and the garden. Even walking back and then on through the afternoon frenzy took me. Can I use the saw to saw some wood? Can I use the saw to saw some wood? He makes the phrase and then lays it out again and again in the same tone.
What happens - I want to be working - even his presence gads me - he wants to help - it's a good thing about him - but there's his senseless little body in many kinds of danger having to be watched and his bossy little will refusing to help - like working with a handicap, thirty pounds on the right shoulder making every move a dragging effort. Some days after I've had him overnight I haven't the strength to speak a sentence to people at the garden.
He was beautifully asleep sitting backwards on M's thigh and drooping forward onto his shoulder. The Carnegie kitchen men brought in the cake lathered with whipped cream, 4 candles like table legs stuck in the air. M didn't want to wake him but there we were, M, Steven, Annabel and I and the candles burning. M shifted him around so his eyes would open on the fires. Rowen your birthday cake is here, Ro-wen. Singing got him to keep his eyes open.
White forks stuck in each piece, bent back like grass in a breeze. That was the part they liked. Then we took it out into the corridor and R stood by it like the host saying, Do you want to have some of my birthday? Two days to Welfare Day and a line formed, more old men and young Indians arriving like starlings to rice 'til there was only one piece left. It took about seven minutes with patient delays waiting for more foam plastic plates.
M sat back a ways and watched R. We'd had a yelling fight about me buying that cake but he liked it tonight, some. It was uneasy seeing the crew of ugly poor who came to grab food - what was odd was to be giving and despising at the same time.
Two strange things about Annabel - a taboo from childhood about eating "lumpy" vegetables like broccoli or asparagus; and amnesia about things in the last ten years, like my having stayed in her flat.
It's happened a couple of times that I've got instantly angry at some scrupulous refusal of hers. Yesterday when she changed her mind three times about whether she was coming or staying, about which would be "more special," I tore off knowing why men leave her. Tonight about placenta and birthday cake: I didn't like my finding disputed, but also I could feel she didn't want the slant it would put on "special things" in general if they should turn out to be connected with a bloody raw organ of one's own, and making a shared meal of it.
And: she brought out a tea-strainer so she could have a weak cup of tea made in the right order, by pouring water over tea leaves not tea leaves into water.
And while I'm sneering uneasily I'll mention the blue terry slippers and flannel nighty.
Is it stupid not to be looking impeccably for best use of this time? Yes. But maybe there's a natural timing there isn't time for. I'm not seeing her, nor is she seeing me.
24th
Mawkish. False or feeble sentimentality; lacking in strength or vigor, obs. mawk, mathkr, maggot. Remembering with pleasure Lis's big ugly squawk of laughter. Annabel is monotonous - going on unvarying in her precious charming tone of a little girl pleasing as such. The light in her face is very pretty, but when I've gone away to bed both these evenings I've been swamped with fear. And I don't tell her any of what interests me in work because I feel there's no muscle in her to grasp it, she's off hiding in the tight weave of baskets. And the way she eats with prim fuss (I know I eat like a savage).
Now I'm going away through the rain to the mountain to feel my way through the mazes of logical proof. Stage after stage, I come to a halt, and then another time I'll have grasped what had stopped me, and go on to the next halt. It is very slow learning. Verbal explanation is useless. It's only the maze itself that can teach me.
I hide the journal in the filing cabinet [because she's in the house].
-
Then: evening comes. I do my homework, perfect finally, I think. Just the right amount of time to sweep out, boil noodles, wash salad with flecks of linum petal. Remember the whiskey. Her mother calls her Anna. "Anna always had to have her own way. I realized very early that I had to at least let her think she was getting her own way, two and a half I think."
Thick legs planted side by side like posts in oxfords. "You're the bright one." Three years in the War Ministry. The way she held her head talking about it I could see she was thought beautiful then.
The whiskey made me stand up and tell a story. It was alright. The old one moved me with her pretty hair and comb and the story of her next-down sister's death at 21 of a 6-year illness. "I had a sort of double life. I saw everything for both of us."
25th
At the round table in the cafeteria reading my story. I always like the writing.
Happy today. The bus ride wasn't long. A bit in a dwalm.
From the bus windows I see plants. Think of getting out and making photographs of plants.
In cave paintings few plants.
Each village has a sacred enclosure which is as far as possible planted with an example of every sort of bush and flower that grows in Ika country, so that it symbolizes the world.
- aphrodite's garden volume 10: 1989-1990 january-february
- work & days: a lifetime journal project