| aphrodite's garden volume 10 part 4 - 1989 may-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Toronto 27th May 1989 [staying at my Aunt Anne's house while I'm at the Experimental Film Congress] First thing I need to say - rubble - accummulation of goods - what is it saying. At the door when I arrive a whimsey face in a burnt out earth, a bloated whimsey face. The surfaces of most things they have are ingratiating, they say judge not that you be not judged. I realized also these objects are operators of family memory. The house keeps getting fuller, a hallucinogenic uncleanness, as I feel it. What am I comparing it to. It's not just objects, it's unseen color and a fatness in shapes. Is it different from Michael's house? Not in principle though Michael has delightful colours. I sometimes like talking with Anne but when she goes into animation she speaks and moves like Mary and I wonder whether the family cell does that with age. Left Vancouver in cold rain, Rob saw me to the bus stop and I liked that. "Wd you like me to come over?" I would love you to. Hello legs and arms. He has a bath and cringes in, bearing his oddness the way I do. I love him all night. Grateful. We're just wanking but I take it blissfully. When he knows he's going to come he stops and listens and makes no conquest of it. What I want most is the kissing. He's reticent in that. He's getting bolder with his hand. There's enough sex between us to grow for years. Will I be sorry I said that. Years of unimproving talk. But I don't doubt the truth of the joy. It's what makes painted china unnecessary. Is that true? It's not magic medicine, my face is water-fat and unkeen and my body tho' it's okay in frame is hanging in detail. Flying: over the wide middlewest. I like the way cultivation is visibly just a skin, the venation shows through, it wd be possible to know a piece of land very well seeing it that way. Looking at Anne and Harv thinking twelve years ahead, what am I going to be doing with them. To make sure I am close to true. Haven't said I'm afraid of nerve illness, feet and hands go to sleep, my balance goes when my eyes aren't holding it. Those things seem to be saying: fight now. 28 "We're not worth meeting." That was true but if I were worth meeting I'd have had a zap to meet it. What is it that's wrong. My hair, my old grey period face. This is the Sterling hero cringing here. The Congress, not being invited to it? As the game is mastered metabolic rate decreases except in the visual cortex, "processes visual imagery" metabolic rate increases. More inf processing, more time experienced. Being in the zone, you don't think. - Waking. Not logic but fitting a piece into a jigsaw. 30th Tues Concentrate on color contrast for coding purposes. Noll Brinckman - Fuji "a cursory survey of the field ... uh ... has been increasing ... uh ... exponentially. The tremendous prodigiousness with which ... uh ... sexually explicit material ... I'd like ... uh t... o spend the first ... uh ... three or four minutes ... the body is ... uh ... an instrument" It's a city. I don't remember how to talk to myself. About Abraham first, about community first. Patiently looking at what people make, putting out a hand and saying my name. They've heard of me. (Not the Americans.) About Abraham [Ravett]. It dissolved last night didn't it. He seemed to have forgotten. The best with him was on the sidewalk - his voice - have I still got it - his lip - he came in warm and close with his ironic American voice. And last night when at the threshold he got on one knee to tie his lace and said "So do you think this was a fated meeting we have been having you and I?" was the time I should have said "Abraham if you mean do I fancy you, yes." In there Bruce with his sore smiling face stopped at the fence. With Stan and wives. But this was Bruce beaming inquiringly, the last one I meet and presumably because I don't tolerate him, don't watch his desperate films, laugh when he maunders about Schopenhauer, malign him to the young. David Curtis kissed my cheek goodbye. Martin, Deke. Barbara wasn't there today - Barbara later. Jim Otis stopped in a car. David Curtis kissing me was like a recognition of shared fate, what he gave me when he funded Trapline [in London in 1973]. Michael O'Pray whispering in Moira Sweeney's ear, Moira the new right goddess, long and strong, the way her eyes shine, the way she moves her hands and the way she speaks, "imagin'ry" in her tough Irish way - barelegged barefaced dancing with a bumpy grind articulated in more places than usually. Carolee the old goddess shaped like what is it the physical teleology of breeding. Strange that Jim Otis (I said his clean white lines doing something that makes sense) called Fuses dirt. It matters, that we can't be, or be with, perfection. Maybe it matters so much to him, that he'll never fuck her or anyone like her. But goodness doing it with my scrawny friend is like that just like that. She is intelligent like I am, I was maybe meant to be more of a goddess than this, and so I am some but not all the Hecate of the conference. Oliver got the last word of praise. Fred Camper the black gorilla said Oliver's film made him more fully human. I was wanting to do the most taboo film I could, which would be to stare at a drunk Indian woman. It is called Compared with this and is a self portrait and has my deformed foot. I forgot to see they were all self-portraits. David liked the one where a plane crashes, a woman screams on and on. Abraham was angry with the bondage film. It was lucid, I was lucid, it was where my lucidity could be seen. (I don't impersonate it, I'm loyal to it, I go to the baseline and don't assume it. But there were people thanking me and I was reassured of it.) - Started to say: for all his intimacy he wasn't ready to think with me there. Hitler and Jesus are the icons. "We get to Hitler and we stop thinking." I could say things to him in forms I liked, he'd surprise me with boldness. Elsewhere through the conference there he was a brush of hair four inches taller than the crowd, but, and, his boldness is a method, he's a good family boy and his mind isn't a brave one. Tiananmen Square busted and the Khomheini dead. A girl of very live body and maiden hair spoke urgently waving her hands a lot not able to hold attention in what she says because it is not herself, but pulling and holding my eyes by the life of her breasts. Half-sister. The women looked intelligently steadily at him through the lens. I said I saw women's pain. "It's all our pain!" He was angry. "I don't mean that you are not in person what I saw in them, because you are, but you showed it as theirs." I grabbed his arm and looked to the side when I said it, in the instinctive way of giving privacy at the same time as comfort. And exploiting the form to invade him. His half-sister was taken. Maybe I'm her. I know I was meant to touch him. I know I saw him from the first, though it had to do with looking like Andy. But then like other clues a resemblance can be the form given a blinder recognition. I want to see: breath coming into the side of a frame, right to left. Pink into blue. Hesperis matronalis. The smell and a mirror. This in very sharp grain, maybe 35mm. It's lit behind, between flower and silver. The silver Dame's rocket is the story of women initiating each other. "That brother or sister dies in cataclysmic blood to give life." (The placenta.) I saw it was my community and I had an assignment in it. I mean I believe they could see me and I could see them. Katarina said "We got used to each other, at first we found each other strange." The very odd mass of a man with closecut head, who clapped loud as a machine for every film, is a teacher at Sheridan who books Trapline. Black Bart [Testa] like a lonely Epp. Joyce [Wieland] and Vera the senior women both in flows of drapes, padded shoulders, undulating bulks of fame. But Joyce was pretty and sweet-looking in a way she wasn't ten years ago, and Vera Frankel on the panel was gracefully subversive. A charming anachronism she called the all-male panel. Brakhage whined. Abraham complained she was provocative. I promised him it is more horrible for us to have to complain than for him to have to hear it. "An easy rallying point" he says. He doesn't see they have their easy rallying points built in. Barbara [Hammer]. A well-cut image as first. Hair well-cut, very, zigzag earrings, black and white. I'm fifty, she said. Thick glasses, almost colorless eyes, gullies across the back of her neck, creases around her mouth, a bright delight that keeps her moving. "Are you a lesbian?" - Like Lis she moves by cleaving with curiosity and sympathy to the one in front of her. I can see how she looks at us: smiles with her teeth meeting and crinkled eyes like a surviving kid. I'm guessing her work is too sociable. "These days I guess I'm chasing young tail, are you still speaking to me?" [I told her about Jam] "A stone dyke. You poor child." The greasiness of lack of sleep. I'll fly three hours of five o'clock, get home by seven, see the garden, have a bath, set up the part of the assignment I can do, go to bed, get up early to go to school.
Moira crying she said through Faust 4 because of its perfection, that I didn't see. They - Barbara Sternberg and the other teachers - were reading and writing images in a way I won't learn. Does the perfection I couldn't feel have to do with that? Or lack of attention in my own terms. Valerie Tereszko with luminous eyes and points on her mouth speaking with a blur of the deaf, telling how she reads not lips but cheeks, eyes, the space to the side of the mouth - how the Germans, French, Chinese, Japanese, Americans ("are very schloppy") work their faces. Brigit beside her like a bucktoothed porker. I saw Valerie's differentness was numinous, like they say, only because she's also perfectly beautiful. Mike [Hoolboom] coming out of the show said "Are you limping?" "I always do." "Why?" I was sore from some other excludedness and said "physical deficiency." "No." Quite flatly. "Or social deficiency probably I should say." He turned to somebody on his other side and said something. He'd dropped me. What it was earlier was the same with Martin. "Are you limping?" I sat down and explained polio to him but he was shocked and wouldn't take an interest. I assumed it was the shock of having me fall from one category to another in an instant. Then I saw the [Lynda Barry's ] Pook's Comeek saying "I liked this boy because he was equal with me in defectiveness. But he liked --- who is monumentally stacked and that's minus five defectiveness points. So I should go with boys more defective than me? Which I will no way do." The word was 'lame.' Originally it was seeing Jill [McGreal] who does that to me in bad conscience. On Saturday night when Abe ran to hold the streetcar for me I tried to run and fell in front of three ranks of cars. The light changed. "I invite you to say." It might be he was shocked realizing he'd hurt me. Moira said imagin'ry meant intuitive. Vancouver Sunday June 11th Three days resisting logic stress. Friday night Rob. I fell asleep on his shoulder. Yesterday and today setting rocks in my garden, working the way I do, silent - out of the stream of people, nothing to say. At home, avoiding, TV, magazines, blanked. It's hot. The journal in the last while is dead boring. What is it, is it the decision? Somewhere with his tape recorder taping a conversation with my mother (she isn't there), the machine very ingenious, a folding radio. Looking for how to rewind the tape, something I do makes a ---- open into a lens like a black eye, that swells fast into a flashbulb and pops. He'll find a picture of the far side of the room. I don't have permission to use his machine. I think I'll just eject the cassette without rewinding. It comes out with ripples of wrinkled tape. Spoiled. Gauze swabs with it. Opening the back of the truck an assortment of packages of supplies. That's the whole organization of the inside. Like the inside of a Kotex dispenser. 13 Barbara's letter asking to know what I meant - and Mike - "Hope to hear from you soon." At school in living purple with the sand pink silk jacket not as remarked as significant. That means it was like testing a change. Got Carolee's book and a Pat Steir one. Wondered whether a later personality can agree to become known for compromised work so the early clean work will continue to be available to the marginal ones who need it (that is not about Pat Steir). 15 In a twist yesterday about the proof exam today. When Jennings said "How are you" I stared at him in distress and blurted "I seem to have forgotten my natural gift for logic and it's coming back very slowly." I do the thing and don't remember it, when I see it again I'm lost again. If thinking stops somewhere in the calculation I'm staring at a meaningless thing and have to start again from the beginning. Sometimes can't get my mind to move. This morning an hour before class I thought to go into the bush. That way, again that way (east), until there is a trail, a trickle of water. Sit down and focus. I said I would do something about the worry of how to pay fees in fall. Realized about this dressing, the purple is the feeling one, the jacket is bluff-capability. They balance visibly and it walks on strong subtle boots the right color, that go work in the garden after. Etc. The process of clearing: listen to body's worry, breath to the throat, messages and sighs when they're accepted. Suddenly I hear the water as if it turns on from nil. When I've got to feeling the relation of the sides of the head, imagine the exam and instruct for it. The grey-haired woman-voiced man speaks to me the way he does out of my worries. Hardest course he's ever taken. He talks to people all the time, tries to get the overall picture. The questions all seemed right. Annette's workshop. Judy Radul. 16 "Lying down on the freebie bench with your legs apart." "But it wasn't for you Eric." I rush away down the path realizing simultaneously what it's like for him when he flees, that my face is hot. What it was about that scene that's brought it back to me half a dozen times, and that I am going to fight back as far as I have to. "Who then?" "Who were you sitting with?" "Leo?" "Never." I turn around and come back. "Paul?" Surely he can only be so blind to what he knows? "Eric I've been sleeping with someone for nearly a year." "I don't believe you." "Eric I told you last summer I had a lover." "Why do I never see you with anyone. At Carnegie, on the street, you're always alone." "Just because I'm not with anybody in the places you see me doesn't mean I'm never with anybody. And when you come to my house you don't always come in, in fact sometimes there's a bicycle there you could recognize if you wanted." "Then why doesn't he garden with you." "He does garden with me." "I never see anybody working with you." "He has his own garden, why should he work on mine? His garden's twenty steps from mine, Eric, why are you being so obtuse?" "Not wimpy Rob?" "Yes Rob and he's not at all wimpy where it counts." Reconstructing this exchange shows me the faults of recall and also I'm embarrassed by the standardness of my own lines. In duress a prig. If I opened a novel to this page I'd close it. Yesterday he said he was changing his life and leaving the garden. We stood yelling on the gravel with old Michael sitting at a distance turning his ear. He said I deceived him. I said he deceived himself. What I'd done was proven he's not clairvoyant and can be wrong. I used the yelling state to dig another strip of the bottom half and then talked to the cards and then went to see him. A little softening but ending hard: "So much of what I told you on the tapes seemed to go over your head." He uses provocation to get my truth out of me, it seems, though he doesn't want to hear it. "It doesn't go over my head, I don't agree with it." "I wanted a clever person to share my discoveries." "You found a clever person and she doesn't believe your discoveries." I protest that he isn't interested in my discoveries, etc. He pulls up his skinny height, draws in his chin and says with his touching transparent resolution, "Your discoveries are immaterial." "Eric we have the same opinion of each other, do you know that?" But today I'm disgusted with him. And so frightened of the logic, ill with fear and dislike. I asked Sheila if she wrote in her nice downstairs set-up. She said she'd lived twenty-five years with Lobsang Rampa! What about logic. I have to memorize definitions all day. Why does it so much repel me. What is it about the relation of these things and language - it's something about that. 17 What Sheila said about computer babies. What Jennings is doing is making philosophy computer-friendly, that's the defeat. It's that or else obsolescence. 18 So much I won't re-see: setting out with a child in front of me on the saddle. The baby was babbling, Michael didn't hear words but just now I'd heard whole sentences, slurred the way they are by someone with a cleft lip. (There a whole run of thoughts I didn't notice.) We come into an orange light. I can't see what I saw in it! I realized I should look carefully at the objects in it. Because of the camel, probably, it seemed an Arabian blood-orange sandy desert. The things I saw in their saturated colour were on the left. There were men of the culture I was traveling toward, Arabs I assumed, ahead. Then arriving at the place and being brought into an old empty building. Rooms leading onto other rooms, like a hotel for old men, with stained mattresses and an old suit jacket hung in the closet. I'm looking for a room for us, the child probably is already asleep in one of the first rooms. Later it's as though in another neighbourhood. I'm looking back at a version of that house. A mother is yelling from the porch, I guess which of the little girls she means and go tell her. It used to be Moodies' house. At the garden which is where this was, they've torn all the grapes off the vines to make jelly. Earlier I'm in a truck going west on tracks, I'm getting a ride to some party, talking to the engineer, looking up the tracks, which narrow and widen. We're watching them and feeling the truck stretch and narrow to accommodate them. the track widens too much. The engineer grunts. "Are we going over?" We fall easily into a grassy verge. It's dark blue-ish night. We're in the dark and silence waiting to be picked up. A bird shape whispers above us. An eagle, says the engineer. On the right where I think is the beginning of the forest there is a mirror wall. I may see people moving behind it. it's the sort of darkened one-way glass. I seem to be alone. Wake very frightened in the solar plex, though why? I'd noticed the light there too, like blue moonlight without a moon, day-for-night maybe. Could I make a defense of beauty that spoke straight to the repressions. Black white and red, opening in 35mm in front of a diffused white light. 21st This is what's here - logic exam I might've got a fifty in - have to get to the reading course, charm and argument I think - Rob last night fourth night of period, night and morning. We don't intend to but we go into a fucking state with little reserve, we just go. It's not erotic, there isn't the lag for resonance, it is other people doing what they do, alike. In it I feel like praising and loving him, more than I can account for, is it being at a loss maybe? I mean: I don't especially like his physical mind or my own with him, the way I did Tony's. He doesn't put space and time into it, I don't feel sentient and willful space in his motion, but I like something. I like the sense that we're steadily making a sane wildness together. It's a particular way I haven't said yet. Is it more like gardening than art? Yes. If I say so. Looking from the bathroom I saw him at this end of the hall naked like nobody I've seen naked. He's physically weird like one of the strange species, logical in his own terms. He and the way we are in my bed, are alike in being themselves without the image ideal. 22
23 Annette tells her business methods. I stick a slide in front of the 35mm gate and move around in the branches. "Art is as important as trees." "No, art is not as important as trees." 25 Bliss Sunday. Did Sheila's cobbles yesterday with Rob, earned him $100. Gave her my 32 stones so we could finish it right, that I'd found in all the ends of the garden. Am I regretting - when I think what they were, now she has them, I'm regretting that she gave us both a bonus instead of paying me for them. Came home and read Plato's early dialectic usefully for two hours. He came when I said I'd be through, phoned for the pizza. Had a bath. Fireworks banging over the city, Mexican music at the Ukrainian hall. We ate on the porch in the dark, walked barefoot feeling the warmth in the pavement, lay under the tree canopy in the park, came home, went to bed, all of this banally. "I'm not going to molest you." "If you aren't going to molest me what am I doing here." He puts his arm around me and I'm out, we're out. Brought awake by a surrounding crash that became a motorcycle engine. And out again. I didn't think I'd begin in the morning, banal still, but then it was a slightly thrilling precision of the fit of my breasts on his back and my arm stretched forward so our palms touched and his foot against my shin like a careful application of electrodes etc. And then he let me take pictures over the breakfast table, he liked it and invented the way to make it good by staring through the lens to see my eye, which he could do only when I stared at his. When we were working I set and he worked around me doing all the other things. I ask his opinion when I make form decisions. Am saying so because it's remarkable to me. And take his advice. It is as if I am developing him in my perception. It is like a peak in the year though solstice was Wednesday. Three parties I could go to, two films, it's very hot. - Imagining a film about seeing that talks about seeing. "Shaping spirit," I tho't it's the one in me whose forms I wait to be given. My body drew breath to say yes. - As if with R confidence grows - trust does. 26 A near siren woke me at night. I fell asleep and dreamed I was listening for whether people were worried about the siren. T and R and others coming to their doors. The siren seems to have been the real thing, someone has heard the Arabs have six missiles pointed at ----. The crazy Arab men. Today an unusual hard wind. One of those sleepy blank weights came into my head. Is it the weather change? Sigh yes. What can I want to know in Plato? 28 25% in the midterm. What I can want to know. When I'm reading Plato I'm interested in what it's like to read him - who he is - what the charm parts are saying - how the argument parts move and what's wrong with them, what the whole thing is like in its relations, what he speaks against that is himself, what is current and what it moves, what concerns. How polarity works, how they used it, discontinuities, how it set them wrong. How analogy works, how they use it, how it sets them wrong. Use of cases in argument by epagoge, inference. Explanation, illustration, image, icon. Definition: what is X? How concepts are formed. Polarity and analogy are questions about how models and categories are formed. He's sympathetic to analogy more than I was, saying in effect that it's a primitive way of looking for a law. GER Lloyd 1966 Polarity and analogy : two types of argumentation in early Greek thought Cambridge 30 Yesterday: Eric's letter on the floor when I was leaving, tussle with Jennings, finding Antoinette Winkelman on the bus, and then when I got home a polite begging letter from Abraham. Wrote that far at the kitchen table with Rowen eating beans for breakfast. I go Thursday at five staying out of Janis's way and she, now, out of mine. Rowen shouts Mummy! and runs into my arms. We cross the street, I'm steering the bike with one hand and feeling his small dry hand in the other. It's a shock I forget, it happened twice the same way, which is why I registered it - shock is not what it was - for a second I double back on having felt his hand - it's like: I'm with my child, though I don't go as far as that. Letters. To Eric I said, You could support and defend for these real reasons and if you were doing it for that unreal one you're a creep. Hard line 'til he's willing to come some part of the way. Sent Abraham the notes from Toronto with quite a flat note that said, If it's not clear with your wife don't write back. Even riskier, sent the journal to Barbara. Why. I was happy doing it. Is it experimental risk or am I thinking there'll be forms of me in them to be me with me. I think there's illusion and does that mean it will have to bring harm. With Abraham I worried about enchanting him, with Barbara I worried it will mystify me too much. Its bare self-concern. What. The dream, on the outskirts of town, on an upper level gravel road, running over stubble land hoping to get to the garage where the bus stops before it gets there, carrying things. Twilight. Antoinette yesterday - I'll write this tomorrow - the photos of Rob, that I was imagining glamorous and most of them are ugly. Not exactly. I keep seeing them differently. What about how he looks like Judy. Tupa-one. He looks uncomfortable. Small narrow head is a type. Mr Mann was. Which is the worst? The left side of his face is a remote intelligent man much older, the right side comforts me and is with me. The discomfort in his face is the strong difference. The way he wears his hair dramatizes it. Which one fucks me. See, I find him ugly in them but I'm stirred. The one on the right is the gawk, obliging. He has a fatter lip. Jennings wanted me to argue "that Thrasymachus was right," anyone's moral principles come to them by force of something. This seemed so hopelessly wrong to me I started stacking my books. Alright, I'm here to learn to see what is wrong in what is wrong. It was Jenning's little argument - his pleasure in it and lack of attention to the one in front of him ("arty") - that he was wanting to decide it by that little argument. That was Resnick too. I'm going to see much more of it. Cleaning up philosophy. Let's not spend too much time on it. Realizing GER Lloyd might well be female, and that's why no thanks to a wife, three initials, and speedy joyful reading. July 3 Patched walls with the Choy boys. I stopped asking whether we could do more, just measured the wood and cut out the plaster, and one of them came behind me with the power tools. Choy had to laugh at how I'd got round his meanness but then he left me with the cleaning up to even it out. Clean flat wood where there was scarified and scabbed plaster and open wounds. From the time I got up, practice proofs in predicate calculus. A sort of mind where I'm feeling in space. It collapses time. From the garden with the bike like a hay wagon loaded and drooping with green fennel stalks. New stuff enough for delicious supper, carrots turnip marrow chard beets. Eric with a blue envelope. Oh no! Here we go again. He wrote my name on it with his own royal E. "Anyway, the Cauldron will write the book. I think it will live forever in literature and that I will will the copyright to you, to make up for some of the disturbances I've brought into your life, Ellie Epp." "You have so pleased me by taking the time and trouble to write that 64-page letter." Eric you perennial you have rescued yourself into a new megalomania. "Delta really loved her daddy, but then he let her down by going away into death " Whose story is it? "The book of sorrows." And what land of substitutions am I living in? To RM displaced passion. From EE paternal care and enjoyment. 4 Streets before seven to the optical printer. Pender St empty, bright fresh air. Quietly alone with the noisy machine looking at my beautiful slides. Efficient. Why am I writing and having to erase these business words. 'Consultation.' I meant meeting with Jennings. Class and tutorial and Annette, Valerie. Looking at briefcase daypacks. Home to the garden, then meeting, then Rob, and now proofs. And then early again. 6 Hesiod has Mitis ("Prudence") conceiving Athena and then being swallowed by Zeus before she can bring out the child. Cornford - chaos - "chasm" - "yawning gap" - original separation of earth and sky - not the gap itself but the separating of them. [Francis Cornford, may have been From religion to philosophy: a study in the origins of western speculation] 8 Why do I still feel 'Cambridge' as if I'm going to be there? Is it only that so much of what I read is written there? My briefcase is made in China, green canvas, has a paper-slit with top zipper, expanding inside for books, 2 snap pouches for small stuff, came with a metal-edged wood ruler in a long slip, newspaper pocket, and two clear plastic rectangles for pictures. REVERSIBLE I just discovered. The alternative was a high-tech yuppie thing in repulsive plastic-glazed material, black, but with backpack straps and 2 nice long 3-sided zippers. Galloping through Ryle seeing how not to believe the legend. Ryle G 1949 The concept of mind Hutchinson and Co - Where do I go, that moment before sleeping. Who do I become. Myself in movable spirit, myself recognizing myself as spirit. I can do better. A total sense, a quality of sense of space, because it's one space remembering another. It's like one space remembering another. Here I'm - coffee - imagining short films beautiful and wise where I talk about for instance this sort of moment. I tho't - a film a year - on 35mm. Also - the way the garden is spoiled by the bulk of the building. People don't flock to see the evening sky. I thought we need a corner where we can't see it, and that's the herb garden and I could start funding it. I've realized why I won't study ethics. It's a well of fury and I don't know whether to say it. It's the sight of 25 centuries of men complacently discussing the principles of justice while they blindly enjoy and enforce and perpetuate patriarchal privilege. A dazzling Sunday, all the leaves alertly spread to gobble light. I'm in panic about the Plato paper. Panic means when I can't process anymore because you're pushing it for speed. What is it - What do I want from it - what I'm really thinking about is whether feminism is going to disable me in this enterprise. Whether my brain won't work as it did. What do I want out of it - hoping to learn - in philosophy - whether argument is wrong or particular forms - I keep shying at actually analyzing the arguments - from Robinson and Lloyd there's a structure. They're too long, have too many small bits. 11th Then on the last day I just wrote it and was done in time to make the left lung in the garden and a beautiful arrowed breastbone in deeply planted granite. Slightly flying today, so much liking the way Ray said "my Mary" and praised her sensitivity to the English language. A curious shy moment for both of us talking about KD Keene. "I used to chum around with." I didn't understand the shyness, he is so forthright normally, until I realized slow as usual that he was telling me he knew I was a lesbian. And so he told me about his Mary. And said he hoped I didn't want him to put an A or a B or any such thing on the paper, and I sort of said that a job for Mary wd be a job for me. 12 Q. Why do men have dicks. A. To give women a reason to talk to them. 14 A dirty dishwater smell, maybe a mouse dead under the floor. Little mouse staggered out from under the door, tottered, their legs are quite long, staggered like a little thing on thin mechanical legs, dropped onto its belly - why do they come out into the open to die? - when the whole of their lives that's they place they don't linger - crouched there with its eyes staring and a spot on its flank pumping. I could see a creature, I could see myself, absorbed in dying. I put out my finger to see if it was so far out of it that it would let me. It lifted itself on its thin legs and staggered a few steps forward. I had needed to say to it that someday it will get me too. There have been three, the other two were flat on the floor in the morning, stuck to it at the belly. Rowen is across the table in hockey pyjamas. Eggs and toast on a red glass plate. The Sophist is up, Nichomachean ethics on deck. Youth Corps application for Joanne, newsletter notes for Ian, Rob tonight to try again. Maybe. Being moved by what I can put into The Sophist. Boxes of Gertrude Stein's plays, philosophy papers. We're shifting them in a room, thinking to clear them out. I argue they could be worth something as manuscripts. Night before: on a hillside, partly ruined remnants of earlier culture, like Victorian railway guardhouses, made of panels of glass. I just noticed this translation is like Stein. "Whether all of them fit together with each other or they don't at all, or whether some are willing and some are not." It seems there was some ancient and uncomprehending idleness among those earlier in regard to the division of the genera by species, so that no one even tried to divide. [probably Plato's sophist 1990 trans William S. Cobb with an introduction and endnotes Rowan & Littlefield] Sunday 16th Persistent intention to get his thing into me, abundant joy to have made him gold-red with being loved. Nobody will make him so beautiful. "There's that grin again." It turned out he meant it overwhelmed him. "You aren't ever going to forget me." "I'm not ever going to forget your THING!" with a whoop of laughter. Knowing it includes Jennings, for whom I'm going to do the Sophist paper my own way. On the bike, "hap-penis, hap-penis." Then I heard it.
17 The way when we were in bed, talking about his mouth or mine, it's joining him in himself. Excited. The way it was fun talking to the secretary in the philosophy department at Queen's. That Estall is still alive! That people seem to like me when I show myself! 18 The sight of Bill's shoulder at Trudy's table - does what - he's down there in love with her and making her famous - while Rhoda's away - I see suddenly their craziness about theft of work - and why. Tuesday night, summer night, problems for Thursday not started, how're things. Take a breath. The anguish of writing, every time. Last night, midnight, it's gone as far as it can, stopped where he refutes all the philosophers before him. I'm writing about the pain of writing, acknowledging that I read him as me, in the shattered atmosphere of the sophist, feeling all the smarty doublings, of trying to say it right and trying to look smart. This morning I woke before the alarm, quarter past five, dreaming I was writing. Got up and knew how to get past what I couldn't do, honestly. And knew at the end how to say what had happened in the shape of the end of the dialogue, that the philosopher had escaped the net. The dialogue amazed me. I really had had a life to know it. I came in worn out and frightened and had forgotten who I was going to greet. "I thought I'd leave this and run." He was right there, "Why are you running," smiling. I don't know whether I show pleasure those moments or being sorry not to have been there to meet it and say, You'll see. So is Jennings the figure of the philosopher now? Am I going to be an academic? I do like the clear way he deals with people, close and clean at the same time. I'd like to know how to do that. But I'm not a logician. I'm more inductive than deductive. The way I find words is like induction - is it? Epagoge from particular to general. "She who sees to the center." I can nose into what it is about something. It could be induction-deduction but it's not. It's isolating a quality not abstractly but nonverbally and bringing a word swiftly from the other side. 21st Friday all day unwilling to bend to Aristotle. Aristo. Talking to Jennings this summer is. Thursday handfeeding for the [Logic 210] assignment. "I feel like a calf that has to be fed from the bucket." He shows with his hand getting it to suck, "Then you have to go down to the Co-op and get one of those big teats." Suck suck. We're both bold and free. I was going to say he more than I but it's his establishment. And we keep moving it fast to a kind of pained flash of being ourselves. That is how it is for me. He gives himself a good time everywhere. Thursday going to class, in the elevator I look him in the eye, he has been joking with his colleagues about aggravated leering while I sit at the end of my stamina petrified staring at a proof, I look him in the eye unconsciously dimly and say somebody told me Tietz is the only one in the department who's willing to learn. He goes up like a flamethrower, the man who says he has no ego. "There's not enough time in a lifetime to learn everything and if they say that they probably mean you won't learn what they want to teach you." "Well, quite," I say thinking of Antoinette the burning woman and how they would see her. He starts talking to Dominick and I go ahead. Dominick the human calculator they'll get into Princeton. The dead boys they're promoting to stock departments with worse than their like. Sunday evening, day in full blaze. "These days are kind of halcyon, don't you think?" on her deck in the morning. She was thinking about a spell when father and father-in-law were both in AA. I was thinking about Chris last night when we were around the fire, R and I in each other's arms under blankets on the aluminum chaise, Carol asleep. They were some drunk probably. Chris said ---- controls it, it's alright, you just have to see how it works and then you can work with it. He said it twice. She said twice, Tell me something positive. He said twice, Look around you, meaning look at your children, in this house, bedded around the fire, we're all here with you, we're with stars, we're marvels and you have us. What they are is mortal I think, edgy. Chris is so beautiful I can't speak to him. Tasha in lime green sneakers, very hairy legs, a peach muslin dress with breasts in it saying boing to all our eyes, glossy brown hair and Yugoslavian dog face speeded up to play with the boys like for ten years already. They were playing darts on stage, toking, drinking and rushing with a line each of coke. Bodies took turns being seen, the chorus yearned, big chunks of ember, Cassiopea arranged into other lines. Moon stone rose two-thirds full from tops of black forest remnant. That when it was late into the night. "This is your mother speaking." She came on stage and said that and then she went to bed. Carol with mouth open in a deck chair. Tash and Kerr in the kitchen murmuring for the audience, "I'm still sexually attracted to you." "I know." We made our bed on the leather sofa. Christmas lights they never turn off. "Lit." In the morning the dazzle streamers throwing colors onto the white soffits. Always the ghost. "Rob was the only one there when he died." He never turns away when he can have his arms around me. The ghost is in their glasses and at all the parties is my guess. "Did you look under the rock?" "No I just go and say hello how are you doing." Seeds in paper packages percuss as they're set down. He uncaps a pen to write on the label. Holds the cap in his mouth. His foot isn't twitching now. A fly's loud line in the center of the room. Packages being folded together into crackled plastic. We rushed up the mountain and down. At the top was a stream in rocks. Boy bike stories. I let them run. Tash after supper made me feel not body enough for the boys. I walked around the block on the road, rich houses sitting in yellow light. Then something marvelous, a flight of concrete steps with a kind of fairy daylight streetlight on standing weeds in their lacy spaces. Foxglove. Herb Robert probably. That was one side of a square. The next was a dark slope past a party. When I got back my one had missed me and put his arm around me. Now he's gone I can say how it was when we got back here. "This is what it's like when we've been simmering twentyfour hours." I want to say, "I can't say how ..." much he's delighting me. What do I mean. He's gotten to like touching my breasts. He so much likes having his penis petted, I so much like doing it, my hand gets a squirrely kink, it's alright if he takes his time learning to pet me, when he opens my shirt it's expecting and then getting perfect bliss. "Do you want to get a thing?" This one doesn't roll back on itself. Beautiful tight greased thing. I lay my thighs over his lap. It finds in. That feels like having made it at last. And so on. I can't say all the in's and out's and how much for some reason I like them. What it's like being with him in that, the unspeaking one. Motion decision better than before. Free to speak like never before. Want to say the giant. A woman came in [to the party] who turned out to be Tash's mother. Behind her was a man with a head so large I wanted to stare to see whether he's this side or the far side of relatively human. No, he's a giant, like a child's giant, sandy red hair very fine and silky over his forehead, small lonely eyes, a fuzzy beard. He sat with the old mother over a crossword puzzle. When he came outside he smoked a cigarette on stage in the firelight. His presence was another of the free marvels of the place. As I was too; and that I did and didn't like to feel. I looked in the morning and found Geoff asleep in his armchair on a table near the ceiling, with the door open. That's how he sleeps. Pat's TV voices with us all night. What else. Pat saying, Get out of here. I'll drive you anywhere you want to go. You guys, it's as if you're glued together. For Aristotle: something like Susan Griffin. Halcyon is not the fire days, it's the days without wind when voyages can be made, each side of winter solstice. 24th Monday He has a sweet way, when he's far enough in, of tugging my shirt down over my shoulder. I know when he does that he's in the trance. I so much become what I see. And then what does it mean that their places are so razzle-dazzle? And mine so plain. 25 Imprint. These days preparing translation, still processing not only the visit but him. So when I saw him in the garden it was as if not him. We'd unmagicked in real time and wanted to stay that way. This morning in fear of the quiz I was afraid of them too. 26 People at the garden who are or have been mad at me: Mike, Yarrow, Karmella, Aiden, Paul, Anne Maxwell, Peter Imm, Mike Levinston, Eric, Ellen's friend. People who aren't: everybody else. 28 I like having a reason to cut people off, why, if I didn't like them anyway or didn't like the way I felt with them. It might be something they are toward me because of my leg, or because of something else. - Descriptive philosophy "frequent way of solving problems by making distinctions." 29 Last Sunday late afternoon waking from our little sleep together the sort of base clarity of fear I have had alone, not that I am going to die but that as a consequence of what we had been intent to do I might have to kill a child or else abort my small gains. This week Thursday my breasts prickled. Last night, woke at night to pee. We sat down to Thirty something and it started with someone pregnant. He made a joke at the table I wasn't sure was a joke, about thinking maybe I'd come to change my mind about six little feet and maybe his mom had a grandchild nobody knows about, and thinking of his mom saying You're stuck together. I imagined his fingernail on the condom. Been dreaming heavily, anxiously. Looking for a place in the art building that I keep finding in different dreams. Two people are moving but the spaces have been done up, a thousand dollars a month. A woman projecting on a screen, she's an artist doing well, shadows of cardboard fingers waving from stands on two tables. Last night a hard sad wrangle with the woman of the philosophy department. She's saying I'm unsuitable. I say I've read Hegel cover to cover. She says nonetheless I haven't got it right. I say style has to be revised as much as content. Having to go back home, no money, to Mary's. They're going to be away. She says, Will you just give us a week, meaning stay away from them for a week. I don't want to be at their place at all. Trying to buy a Grande Prairie paper to look for a job for a month, to buy a car, so I can go back to the shack in the poplar woods, where I saw new leaves one year. It says I'm not pregnant but I'm worried about money. - James March's paper on bounded rationality, that gives me what I need to set against Aristotle, a kind of paper I'd like to do, that has range, human experience, points in rows, different kinds of states. 1st August What about the Aristotle paper? (Wrote it -) 2nd That essay is ignorant but I sat in my bed after a day with many parts and got the last section all but a crit of rationality as too slow, that came this morning in three coherent paras. First draft. Then get to the bank, hour on the bus, arrive at the home department, hand it to him. He has a nice joke about thank you so much for this nice Aristotle essay I have to mark, and a carrot: "Why don't you write about whether Aristotle's logic is a formal logic? That's the sort of thing we could get published." Yikes I say, sitting on Aristotle and imagination. Go to class. Quick, check out translation and what I don't understand about universal and existential. Be there for tutorial with the boys. Scramble without dignity like I've successfully-er learned to do. Go to libe and up and down logic shelves. Kind of happy. What else. On the bus home, start seeing my sweetie's head. Buy a pizza. Did I just do what I'm blushing for. Why not. 3rd Dreaming Rob as a different sort of man I'd marry. Don't know how to describe what was different about him. In twilight waking I was saying to him, It's that you haven't got your depth, if you had your depth I'd marry you. Two papers given back folded like letters. as I watch he writes grades on them. The first one [dotted line diagram] C the next one slowly E for excellent I hope. Safety pin says he doesn't like any of them because they're profitless, ie unpublishable he thinks. Is he right? It says not. Two days in a row ugly old Jam in disguise as her grandmother, in her neighbourhood. Ah I'm so old and tired. Six days to the final. Woke at night sweating. Was doting on Rowen. "Rowen I love it that you're four." "I know a lot of things now." He sits in front of cartoons with his mouth open. He's so pretty with his deeply indented little neck and bright eyes. Walking to the garden or daycare he runs fast through roundabout side loops like a happy puppy. I showed him how best blackberries are accumulated just at his reach near the ground. - [untranscribed notes on Dreamtime] The way on the mountain I'm sometimes caught by the shape-beings of the hemlocks. It's a ready trance. From the library window ten in a row like people. The way it holds out a pointed branch, a weighted float. Or the way the tree's surface of leaves is stirring all over. The alder wall. - She wears a green dress with bare shoulders that buttons down the front. On a Sunday morning he invites her with him for a walk. They stop at the café. Her small glass of wine is spiked with a drug that brings her to herself as every stirring of a blade and vanishing of a cloud. He touches her arm or neck or waist in a way she feels as a slowly traveling heat. They come to the grove where all the men are waiting. He is her sponsor in the ritual way. He says, My daughter is very beautiful. I bring her to show you and to begin her delight. He stands behind her and unbuttons her dress to the waist. He shows her breasts and how to touch them. He turns her by the shoulder and drags her skirt up slowly past her waist. Etc. She is made to bend forward onto a stand. He is offered a jar of spiced grease. He greases his penis and parts her bum. This is done so all the men can stand close and see her face. With his hands on her nipples he sinks in. Then they both stand so he is backing her and all can see his hands stroking her skin. He reaches into her bush and strokes her. She has her head back on his shoulder and her eyes closed. He stops if she is near coming. (I come usually by this point.) Then the ceremony. He sits down on a kind of throne bringing her with him onto his lap. He opens her legs back against his chest and straps them there. he keeps his hands on her breasts. He tells her how the ceremony goes. One by one she looks into the eyes of every male there. It's their invitation. They come in front of the dais, each holds her right shoulder with his left hand and with his other sinks a finger into her. They must stay connected by the eyes while this happens. There are little boys and old men too. What is happening is that she is exchanging her sexual privacy for a powerful and fearless existence in the community. Her father exchanges one violation of taboo for a free sponsorship of her power. When everyone has greeted her she is to signal with her eyes anyone she wants and he comes with his post and sets it in front of her. This is the first time she kisses anyone. He has both hands on her shoulders and she has hers on his shoulders and he butts carefully through her virginity. So her first lover and her father get to delight her together. Then everyone goes home to find someone to lie down with. After that she has one or many lovers as she likes; it is too late for jealousy. And she has a voice on council. I have been making this story since being at school and wonder whether it is (and the story of David McAra, which is I was going to say defunct but it's happening someways and increasingly with Rob as if it was an advance patterning) the story of whatever's going on with male principle in general. What I'm wondering is whether going back to father fucking is backwards after brother-equal, or whether this way integrates the whole clan of men. The point is that I have an out relation with Jennings and he is offering to sponsor me though for the wrong thing, and the impossibility of an out relation is what kept me away from this and that. [postcard from Louie mailed from Zimbabwe]
|