| aphrodite's garden volume 10 part 5 - 1989 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
8th September 1989 Followed Eric to the courthouse this morning, he trembling with fear in his best clean but stained clothes quite beautiful and dignified as always. Sat with him in the coffee shop. "You like to help women, if they need help - why couldn't you have an emotional relation with women and a physical relation with men?" "A woman would want sex too." "If you didn't own her it wouldn't matter, Eric." He slightly cracked at that. "I want to have a complete intense relationship with someone." Mutual devotion he means. selflessly looking after the other's welfare. I said I thought that sounded idealized still. 11th Learning flashcards the last two days I kept seeing Judy's handwriting. Have a loose pad of flab on the belly from not working outside this summer. 12 The empty well is full of water so clear they think it isn't there - the well at the world's end - does he know what it is? "A rosy wrinkled face like some memoried moony fruit, and the white cap that fringed it had corrugations round the edge like the ghost of a mutch." "A neatly built circular well of stone" "dividing at the grain kiln on which they stood" "a coffin being called a kist." "Then as the horizon held her, too, she saw it as the silver edge of a well." "What did she expect to find in the well? Knowledge and poetry." "And the well surges." Gunn Neal 1951 The well at the world's end Souvenir Press - Dear One, what is my work? - I wanted to disregard what it said, I don't know whether it's convention. And who did I ask? It said, Make a man out of Rob. I said, whining, Then he'll get to be a man and I won't. It said, Then you'll get to be a woman. It meant something like, the wise power of non-power, a background like god. This is Neil Gunn maybe. It is happening anyway, he is more the man of the garden. His patch like an all-over form coming up slowly without containers but able to show its self because of the path edges and water and drains I provided, the way I gave the board its names and functions. Oh garden I haven't been looking after you. Only there were people I should have phoned about the open house. 13 I've bin writing nonsense, why, like a lost stagnant eddy. Just now at the garden anguished and left out, oddly furious about Zinzolin's ugly tower, yesterday hurt feelings about Eric not listening. In bed with R oddly heartless, he too, the surprising sweet heart is vanished, we hump away. Is it the fault of the logic course? I'm afraid of it and of being committed to a deadly route - cranky, touchy, lightless. 14th Then thinking of writing something, Robert MacLean in the bush. I got to it by Gunn through the cauldron which for him was a still and is the boiling-out. The powdery night sky at Edson, Slave Lake, the nine stars of the Dipper. Then walked around and ate muffins etc and came to the thought that the story ends with finding out what his poems and my visions were about. And am going on seeing it's a story about vision, which is what I wanted to learn, and what he is, mythically. I sent him away because I was afraid of him. What I thought in the bath - see? "I thought" is like literature - was that not going after him was my wrong fork that's taken me to the miscellany. But. How is it done. Ordinarily. I write an ordinary novel. 15th Three weeks to school, what can be done.
Make a film was the one I liked. And then at Gastown Transfer oh wow, I sit in a waiting room and a secretary says would I like a drink and how do I take it. Half hour later when I'm sitting at the console she comes to offer another. And then the nice young man listening sympathetically and maybe not quite obedient. I get a lurid notes in origin but kind of like it. We sat in front of the swan and made apple green ice. He could touch it with a pixel and change only that color. There were graphs for each of the primaries, like flames showing for instance the water motion. It was costing $360 an hour and is called a Rank, and can switch back and forth from neg to pos to black and white and presumably overdub them. Then Mike Hoolboom's Independent Eye gives me charm value ethic tactic & gender, in writing where a few I like will see it. 16 A B in logic. 17
18 Welter. Don't know what to do with myself. Almost sick. Eating for something to do. Washing the front face of the house was right. Glomming onto television people, lonely, see. That is it, isn't it. 19 Clinging onto Gunn and Woolf and not writing. When as if all my life - not all - I've been in love with writing. Doing philosophy is a means of having to write. Is that what I want to talk to Joyce about? Then it was images, so direct, immediate a good - easier. Ask for intelligence. Walking in a body that feels so short and thick. 21 Come out of the weekend, two nights with Rob, unenchanted. The way he sits around reading newspapers, doesn't care to make a quality of time. Leaves me always to make the bed and do the dishes, is so impersonal, doesn't come at me with liking, leaves me to make the affection. These are his qualities. Then there are his enchanted qualities. Then there is his ugliness and stinginess. I seem to submit to a stupefying chemical in order to be able to feel love. It's sex or repulsion. Wanting to figure a polarity between talk and touch, not that his touch is good either. It's the crisislessness of this time that lets me come out of enchantment. The solution is just mine, fight for energy. 22 Smothered. 'Reactive." I mean the way I'm not fighting because he doesn't. 23 [Martyn] Estall's letter. The note and the recommendation. "If she now wants to do graduate work in your department you had better praise God and not pass up the opportunity." "Tanned and tired from picking tobacco." I made an entry it seems. Peering, trying to read the tone and the person. Something that makes me uneasy. Collecting myself to do it. A very large - 24 Pine needles dropped on the pavement in a pretty order I saw as prismatic though it was only a difference I think of green and dry ends. The whale [at the aquarium]. Among people hating and despising, thinking of Suzuki's show saying it's animal stress at crowding. The whale's white saddle patch outlined blue on one side orange on the other. A leaf was twisting down through the water, slowly, until the whale body moved offside and it twisted upward - the way it fell and turned through the concentrated ends of the spectrum was very beautiful and video. What else - the way waters pouring down the dorsal fin and down the back would clash just at the waterline in the connecting V and smash into a dust of refracted bubbles. 25 The way with Rowen something happens, like a humor, that squeezes the upper line of the solar. Last night I got into his bed and he wanted me to play I was having a bad dream. I'd play-sob and he'd clamp onto me as if he were the frightened one, but saying Wake up it's just a dream in a soothing voice. Fear. What's it of. Competition. What should I do about it. Feel it. - Augustus de Morgan And here the general idea of relation emerges, and for the first time in the history of knowledge the notion of relations and relation of relation are symbolized. And here again is seen the scale of graduation of forms, the manner in which what is difference of form at one step of the ascent is difference of matter at the next. Compare - sitting with a list for a PhD on imagining. Feeling competent and interested. As with two other projects in two weeks. What will happen next is anguish, disinterest, unconfidence. 26 On the way to the optical printer I see in the Globe Bron Wallace died of sudden cancer. Coming home I saw by a mention in the Sun RD Laing died Wednesday. 61. Mysterious why she died when she was having such a good time, it seemed she had found her proper rush. I compare it with my hanging back - in love and joy and proper compassion. Another woman poet who writes fast and dies though not in an apparent way by suicide. The photo of Laing showed a squashed bald head, not the beautiful guy of less than twenty years ago, transparent shirt and bare feet on the platform telling how carefully he eats. The emptying of social time. Laiwan. Eric not really forgiving me. The garden isn't a community anymore, we don't gather. My ditch lies with a rock buried in it. I was away from it while Rob was likely to be there, and hunting through newspapers when he might have been looking for me for Chris's party. It's the first weekend I haven't wanted him. Except that Rowen ... Rowen and I are growing on each other. Thinking of Michael, how his best art is verbal. Dreaming heavily these nights. Big shadow faces on the wall of the room where I'm sleeping, I feel them as projected from the street below, Carmichael somehow as if he might be sitting in a car. 28th Making camp on the back of a truck, weaving a little fir-branch roof, making a fire. Then abruptly the truck is moving down the road. "Who turned this thing on?" The accelerator pedal is unhooked, brake doesn't work. Zip through a close call, eyes off the road studying gear diagram on the shift, pull straight down is my guess. Then right. It's worked some, even the brake works a bit now. But I'm off the road on a track up through a frosty field. Seems to have got me back where I started. The last part not sure. Why when I wake up with what's his name (I know his name) is it the only time it's not fire of lonely fear in the solar? And don't itch and don't fart. I was staring at his shelf lonely thinking of going home and wd'v but he reached out his arm put me on his lap and unbuttoned my shirt. We fooled around some, not right through to coming, but there I lay contented, unlonesomed, not scared of anything. This morning (ha - Catherine thumping the wall accidentally) still together. He did what he wanted. "I'm contented" he says. His theory is, it's his heart, distributing blood all over his body. We come one after the other in the right order. It makes me chuckle. He doesn't signal he just shows his motion. "Good timing my friend." The way it is. "I feel so lucky we can do this." And today at SFU willing to learn the difference between formal and informal logic. Rested, does it mean? And then there's a Cambridge Aristotle writer whose sentence about his wife made me cry. "It was in attending her lectures on Thucydides in Cambridge and watching her live her life that I learned how theorizing about politics and actively living the life of a citizen in a polis might form a coherent whole." There's a book on logics and it's by Susan Haack who wrote Deviant logic. Hey! Mike Hoolboom phones to say come and do notes in origin in Toronto in Feb. [opposite page: fantasies of voyeuristic impersonality subliminal integration I sense the rush of etherial rains somatic unconscious the model of the depth of our proper relationship to the world there is evidence that the ears project supersonics to hear partly by echo reflection speech, sight, hearing and mind were known to the Greeks and Hindus as breaths, thymos - radiations "offering the spirit body to the gods by means of burning" what is called matter in the next world consists of molecules exhaled by the stuff on earth whose houses, built of brick smell, have the same form they had on earth what we chiefly call science, that part of science in the service of commercial industrialization the Romantics associated imagination with a mist or cloud "as it were asking a symbolical language for something in me that already exists" when looking at the moon through a dewy window pane now the imagination rides on the wind over the world ["rush of etherial rains" Lotus Sutra] 30 Laiwan in a train. Hi, Lai. She's not friendly. There's an older woman with lipstick and a dog on a long leash. Laiwan has three tall plastic bags of written notes at her feet. "Where are you living now?" "I don't want you to know that." Alright. I go off. Some idea of watching to see where they get off, but confusion, etc. Party at an art show. I see Nellie standing in the door, longer hair, very focused and pretty. I know I am too. We look at each other with pleasure. "Now I'd like to be able to talk to your mom," she says. "You can, she's here!" gaily. "And my little boy too, this is Rowen." - Optical printer - color is wrong - have to change something about colour - daylight film maybe - Fuji if it exists - what's deep is the b/w when it's very stopped down at the lamp lens. Because the space between fills in with grain like silted space - it's good in syrup brown or cyan grey - what else - focus - try the willows. 31 digital yes-no system, sophisticated but limited,; but it is the DC fields which are the more primitive analogue system, working by form and pattern as a kind of 'charged cloud.' horasis, knowledge obtained by sexual communication with an enlightened woman, horos limit, bound What is called matter in the next world consists of molecules exhaled by the stuff on earth. 3 October Journeying somewhere, opening a door without reason to, catching a woman in the midst of her doings, she's black and vivid, tall and capable, very much a soul, looking at intruders. Through a door behind her, maybe this is the door that's opened without a reason, is a man sitting in a rocking chair, lifting a baby over his head and putting it back again onto his stretched-out legs. This is as if across the city river. The baby is assumed to be his grandchild. We walk in the other direction, east, in a city wasteland. There's a river south of us. It's the sort of city river that's narrowly borded, thick dirty brown. Some kind of bridge. We're two women and a man walking confidently on the path through the waste ground, until we realize it's a zone where we could be jumped by hoods. We stop to consider if we should go back. Rob puts his arm around me, an unthinking protective gesture that moves me. We cross a river but north not south. Are we on the side of the river with the man and baby? Not sure it's the same river. Are there one or two. Eric says rivers are the union of men, I saw the baby lifted and brought down, the dark woman has shown up before. For a woman, two women and a man together mean a sexual relation as it should be (for a man the other ratio) [Eric says] where the man is the spectre formed of fantasy and thought, an energy which in intercourse is given over to the man, leaving the two women, one the social or ordinary person, the other the sexual person. Waste ground must be that. Joyce's office phoned. Tuesday at one. I said okay. 4 [Aristotle] First he posits a soul and then wants to categorize it. He acknowledges it's difficult to know how to talk about it. The most fine-grained thing. Analogy with motes - Brownian motion - soul is that which moves of itself. like the things in the air called motes which can be seen in rays of light through windows 5th "You must try to bring your evident talents to bear on some problems of more manageable scale," "so my reaction to this essay is that while it gives ample evidence of good critical and analytic ability, it does not go far toward a useful understanding of Plato." Disappointed in Jennings? He does not give one agreement. He says, Don't talk like an authority. I'm crying because because really I am not welcome. "I don't have any idea how I look." She says, That's because you're divided. You say the information is not all in yet. She, the dark woman, is not divided, standing in her little room with the door open, the door opened "without reason," the man beyond her, not their kind of man ("as far as we know"). How would she do in philosophy, Joyce asks. "She'd do great. But, you know, I don't think she'd be doing philosophy." I say that with a rush but she cuts it off. "Philosophy is anything." Being her, there's a dark silence. She says, What are you kids doing here? Joyce asks her how I look. "She looks like a kid." "Tell her." "It's odd, the way you look, you look as if you think you're a kid but you're not a kid, you're as old as I am. I'm a grandmother. I come from somewhere else but I'm comfortable here." 6 It turned out different but how. We sit in the libe and I don't look at him. He's giving me a B. "I liked them a lot," he says. "I'd never have guessed!" I say. "I wouldn't put that on a paper, that's something I'd say to your face." I don't understand that but he has my love for the way [when I said he was telling me not to run before I can walk] he said, "I don't mean that at all! You run very well!" Plato and Aristotle as first year students, you can't imagine where they're coming from. But some odd warning - was it? - about the rest of the department. "Graduate students take a lot of time, we want people who'll be good graduate students not mediocre ones, people we can talk to about our own work, equals." 7 A field in Ontario. I've taken it on with another person. It has changed since I first saw it, here are some trees I planted on the edge of the bush. The way I cd lose my bearings when the land is changed. Here the trees are submerged. He sez he'll give us some fill and we'll spread it in the hollow. It looks like the question this term is, what is rationality. 'Superior.' The alliance between rationality and power. What is its opposite term. What's the take. [Philosophy 100 student] Barbara Pratt's pink, thinking, diffidence. It's not diffidence, it's that beautiful quality some young women have but what's it called. It's her blooming open face eager to speak and slightly checked. She's looking out of a space full of intelligent feelings. Don Brown, what about him, he's very cute, thick white hair, a boyish old man, so brown and lean, in a rush cutting corners off his phrases, confident charm like Jennings, shows himself, the mensch quality they have or haven't. What gives it - currency, risk - it's native, probably. Man as a reasoning being is thus unique in the order of nature, and indeed, Kant holds, in so far as he exercises reason he cannot be included, cannot include himself in the world of appearances. Sunday 10th Jennings and Brown are attractive people - what does that have to do with their work - what does it have to do with how to take a tutorial. Beginning teaching prep. Blockheadedness means this selfconscious forcing. I have proud discoveries of method I want to use everywhere, and here have to absorb what I usually skip. - The tactile brightness of his skin especially on his chest. I was in heat and all over thrumming with love and then in open-hearted generosity said to him, "It's a feeling of love but I don't think it has any ethical implications." -
Pay attention even now, that's all. 11 My pigeon suddenly on the trail of prey zooms into the upper air. There's a crackle, a plucked bird falls, the bird he was chasing? Yes, caught by one of the high radio dishes. Has my pigeon got away? No, there he falls, shreds of feathers at neck and leg. It was microwaves maybe. Naked in a bath in a glass-sided railway car hurtling through the country. We're passing people in another train. I decide to just lift my leg at the woman. [notes for tutorial] 12 Second tutorial three or four times a martin looped into the room and out. Extraversion. This morning at the bus stop, 7:00, a young man with a book about Paracelsus going to his sales job at Brian Jessel Toyota. I come into 7003 and find a row of them already there, reading, with spaces between them. Figure out the overhead, arrange things. Beginning to talk is like pushing myself into an artifice. They write when the overhead projector fan stops in a sweet birdy silence. By the second group I've figured out that they need to say their paradigms. I encourage them to get the range of the concept by putting down what they think other people would say. Each of them gets a voice in the first class, that was my idea. The mousey women who think rationality is consensus. The maybe Mennonite young man who doesn't smile at Horban's jokes and said resentfully, Rationality is what they try to force you into. Science and religion, a set of beliefs. A certain kind of focused face that thinks it's logic and method. Quite a few say it's subjective, what's rational to you isn't rational to somebody else. It's a safe system for sticking with what you know. Somebody said it's ethical, it has to do with deciding to do what's right for other people. A causal sense, thinking ahead to consequences. Rationalization, giving reasons, demonstrating. Has to do with hierarchy. 13 Reading for Brown's, so much a matter of learning my way around in the context. - The word Satan with its sense of dark charged blank - Evil Epp - his head - don't look at it, it will get inside you - Hitler - you're safe with the name of it but don't look at the being or you'll be it. Suffice it to say that amidst the unearned emotion, facile ideas, undigested cultural tradition and slavish derivativeness of much of the work I saw, Epp's films stood out as works of bracing, resolute intelligence and purity. I would trade dozens of features I could name for the final shot of Trapline, which has the kind of heart-quickening beauty which makes you want to stop a screening session and be alone for the rest of the day. [James Quandt newsletter film notes mailed by someone in Toronto] Kant - rejoicing at the hang of it. In the Princess [café] reading bare language of morals for Brown's class. "Ethics is the logic of the language of morals." In comes a hoooker in black elastic with a baby, a thin man with quite a sweet face but bruised under the eyes and very pale, and a little girl. He whines at the little girl. The woman snarls, Keep your voice down. Aren't you eating, he says. No. She walks out, no goodbye to the kids. He orders. He's so wired I'm waiting to see how long it is before he hits the kids. He combs the little girl's hair, yanks her head back, she doesn't wince. He calls Pauline over, says, Bring me bacon instead of sausage, the sausage tastes terrible. They're yelling. He says, You Chinks . She says in her sturdy way, You're on welfare, your wife is a hoo-ker, you should be ashamed. When he walks out he lifts the baby by her arm, like a pot by the handle. Baby doesn't cry. From this scene by a practical syllogism not yet explicit I decide to dump Brown's course though he is so beautiful and subtle. It follows that I'll take Kant with Tietz, who says y'see gracelessly and looks like a long-nose Mennonite. Then the colloquium. Resnick's implausible spiel, Zimmerman elegantly topical, new Bigelow speaking up in a woman's voice from the far side, and then Jennings waves his hand. Resnick loves him and cuts the order of hands to let him speak. He says the idea was to unperplex us but we're still perplexed. The students laugh gladly. "There are still things to be interested in about private feelings." 14 Oliver on the bus says in the Film Department you can teach courses if you cook something up. Everything that has come since then. This morning the class, so easier and simpler and less rehearsed. A blond boy, long young hawk face, hair like chick pinfeathers, pale eyes, stands after class to tell me Michael Fox is his father. The rhyme was with Ingrid telling me an hour earlier that Thoth the twelve year old street flautist I've admired in front of Eaton's is her boy. Don Brown's class. There's the girl he likes, who's trained in his way. He doesn't like me. 15 At the top of the alley a shack between two parts of a house, I see as a bank, Paul K says, That house, where you look through the window and see a light switch? He means he knows what it is and it's not a bank. We bring to it, because it's a museum, a mummy or doll. The caretaker woman (there is a man somewhere) says we must take off her colored wrap and her shoes when she's inside in storage. My sense of her is like a gypsy Erzulie. More in the house, kids, upstairs, I don't remember. Leaving I see on the table a new issue of Common Ground about tantric sex. Outside, at the corner of the storefront, there are three newspapers piled. Something I picked up outside, a pulped red card cover, has in it a piece of writing whose style I know. Mine or maybe Jam's. It's the only piece they've given attention to - presumably the man in the house. Has highlighted certain words. I want to see the movie about the mother who goes along on the trip when her daughter travels with, sleeps with, her boyfriend. 16 The Kant class. A ping of realization. Why space is infinite and why it doesn't make sense - 17 "Joyful" he said. A very full love. We sit waiting together for my bus with our heads touching. He doesn't want to hurt me or anyone. He doesn't panic when I encyst. His rooms have no place on the floor to walk. He has notebooks thick full of observations of plants. He works. He's very beautiful in olive green. His pupils dilate. His nose is like mine. He cooks not badly. When he was screwing me (that's his word) I said I wd give him rubies and emeralds and diamonds and money and cars and boats, but actually I bought him a sundae. We found a tree, unknown, with little crabapple-looking berries that tasted and mushed like rosehips without the fuzz. Catherine is less beautiful than me, I said he could talk about her again if he wants. He sternly barked at me for answering the questions I ask him myself. "Are you cold? Yes." I sit among his piles of stuff looking at a garden book, ask him something and he brings books so they are piled around us on the piles of other things. What does it mean abt someone that they have such layers of strange curtains. 20 In the next office cubicle I hear a psychic reader, a small ordinary but confident young woman's voice, telling the two male TAs things about themselves. "Your head is disconnected from your body. Your body wants to move around, it wants you to be joyful. I see a lot of reds and yellows. Your head is heavy, it's really heavy, the word I get is sedentary." This to an older man with thin straw hair, anxious [forehead] ridges, a grabby false manner, pretentious jargon, who had worked me into detestation not long after he knocked and sat down. (I am using a mix of y'know and jargon, teaching - I notice.) This evening phoning, Rob and I, fifteen truckloads tomorrow on site through the housing project. Two classes - in the second one something sparked at the last minute. Mark the dancer and the determinist boy next to him said the positions from their real own sense of things and Mindy across from them suddenly saw that it depends what you make of the relation between body and soul. This after we endured a half hour of confusion I worsened by speaking before I knew what I meant - Mindy asked and another student's look said, What are you doing? I was frightened but went on in good faith and it was after that Mark and his neighbour started to argue. "What about creativity?" 23rd Saturday night. Rowen at the garden this morning, the kind of sticky whine that makes me yell Rowen shut up so the firemen can hear me being a bad mother. I was staking and stringing the herb garden, which looked too big before it was strung and now seems tight, not too small but needing the edge planting to widen it back. He stepped into muck, had to have his shoe washed. "Rowen it will be wet." "I want it to be wet." Etc. I take off his shoe, wash it under the tap, set it on end to dry, take off his sock. Then he sits on the gravel path half an hour saying nothing while I give people a plot and come back and go on staking. "My daddy is coming," first thing he says, in his bright little voice. It crazes me when I'm working to have him demand things. This morning I cleaned most of the house - do that while I have him. Then some hours after he went, working on 'topsoil' like old manure, past hunger and thirst. Then Princess Café needing specifically a Coke float. And then finished the laundry and went on and cleaned out the pantry-closet, manic. 24 I'm on the sidewalk maybe carrying the baby. There is suddenly a kingfisher flying ahead of me, at eye level, slightly to the left so I see its form, the blue, the big head hinged back so the body lines up. I call to the person on the other sidewalk, A kingfisher! It is - riding on its back is - a girl in a blue dress. I see yellow workboots, layers of shades of blue and white I'm just peering to discern, knowing it will soon vanish. When I wake it seems that was the vanishing I was expecting. My herb garden I notice has a hump behind the circle, north of it. I think I may have noticed that after I saw the giant Jerusalem artichokes revealed under the new soft dirt. I pull one out - there's an amphora like a mother root from which branches rise as roots into the whole of the underside of the herb garden, whose earth floats over a hollow space with many black roots hanging through into it. The jar is like something I've seen, Greek maybe, with an octopus emerging. That might be where I got the fat juicy baby - it's probably Luke, I'm thinking, as I carry him in my right arm over a steep tricky rise. I have to come down over someone's garden and I get caught for a moment on the doorstep. I know the owner wdn't like it and when I see the front door open I am ready to say to the tall grey-haired woman that I mean no harm. "I seem to be stuck." Then with the fat juicy baby (I keep saying that about him) get down someplace maybe home where we're given our mail. There's something here I don't remember about what kind of letters we got or wanted. There were letters for the baby. It was afterwards had to cross the road, slick, with headlights coming fast, I'm crawling, decide to throw the baby to the sidewalk and crawl fast after him. Then the kingfisher. A vestibule dream. A line along the edge of a highway. Marion's picture, a lean grey Marion like a French theorist. Her new volume of theory, homo-something. Banners across the road, a place that's been reported as disordered. They're sending the bossman to adjust it. Sculpture of a pair of men's legs from the knee down set as if he's sitting on the stump with his legs apart. Two women - somebody locked up - I think what I'd like is if they wd be free and available so I could live with them and just ask to sleep with whichever I wanted. But I'd just want to sleep with that one. The kingfisher girl is reason. They're reason and ----. Writing these remembering one maybe from yesterday. a house in disorder, an unwilling landlord. They're wanting me to take an uninsulated place like a garage, needs three airtights going all the time. Weeks ago. I'm thinking of buying a place in Clairmont, for when I'm teaching at the junior college in Grande Prairie. When I woke it seemed a good idea to be a philosophy teacher in some little place. 25 Fight with Eric and Rob about color of the greenhouse. Very outraged to think of it brown. Decided to be responsible for it myself somehow. Getting into mature pines for the upper corner. 26 The classes. Asking them for their instance of a free action. Both by the end cooking. I came out elated. (But did I do Ingrid harm?) I ask Mike whether he minds being - what is this reporting without perception? - [bossed by a woman] 27 The dope project of working on mind technically, directly, self-programming. From that mind looking at the one who teaches. I don't know but I see the faces around the table yesterday looking there and interested. And Mike Kaiser after I asked him about his independent resentment, able to look in my face with that open beauty. When I saw him standing with Rob I looked away as if I'd touched hot iron, I didn't want to see, but did, how malformed R looked in comparison. When Mary met him I was ashamed of both of them, she such a little old lady now. Rob thinks I don't know he's ashamed of me. I know he doesn't know I'm ashamed of him, as well as, not at the same moment, finding him thrillingly lovely. Leonard Cohen saying they press you to go out beyond for them, the few who can ultimately doomed, in that eventually they fall. He says this in his ripe voice out of romantic whiskers, and I think how firm he has that description which in the pain of actual search I'd never've been able to form. Also: oh why aren't I doing it still. Colloquium. John Bigelow shows what philosophers do. Two meaty suave Jews from UBC probably and Ray Jennings show they can do it too. Tietz's ribs move gently up and down. Resnick across the room, several of the boy students and I, feel the pleasant vanishing of place. What philosophers do is try calculating small models. If you start with these primitives, define this as this, can you calculate to x with large rather than small circularity. The guys give each other salaries for help in impressive conversation. 28 Thursday class. The purple-hair girl said nothing she does now is free but she feels that sometime she may learn to be not completely free but more free. Barbara said thinking is more free than anything else. Judy said it's free time. Tim said he agreed with the girl at the end who said you're free if you think you are. ---- said BOOGA BOOGA - free is something out of character but it's not out of character, etc. They were talking across the table. I said dropping parts of any formation. The boy who stared at my foot in the hall stayed behind sitting as the next class started to arrive. "What happened to your foot?" I'd given him a mean look as I passed. "When I was a young child I had a disease that's obsolete now. It's a virus disease, like getting the flu. It's called polio." I know to say that I don't still have the disease, only the effect, and that it doesn't hurt. Then he asked with his deadpan face - was it an innocent question? - it did nail me into a false smile - "Did it affect your life?" I am pushing off through the door and say over my shoulder with that angry smile, "More socially than physically." My freedom in the class could have invited him, if he was serious, to ask - but I don't know whether it was that. Tomorrow Horban inspects. I won't open them up like that when he's watching. What else - warn them. Sunday 1st October You dreamed that a bull came in and sat in the easy chair I occupied in making tapes .... Anyway, due to my cattle-fucking episodes I was the bull you saw in the dream. What you must understand Ellie Epicenter is that this world is not the world in which you grew up. This world is a WELL. Eric is the legendary Leader of the Host and when Eric tunes himself to the REAL world everything will shimmer for a moment and nothing will ever be the same again. But no, my dreams are not all about Eric - if Eric were a figment of my father I'd now understand the fear of the bull. - Chasing cows, his contempt of her, that I kept that scene. I saw the ugliness, the evil done you in our home, the insensitivity, the perverted example of fatherhood that you endured and I called it sinful. I was shown that this evil done you and me has been punished. Jesus died for this sin and I can leave it there at the cross. [letter from my mom] Dreaming: my parents living in the east are going to move. I have to get my stuff together right away. Sorting through details, afraid I'll forget something I still want. A shelf of lovely tiny things, bits of rock, feather. My pots. Anguish at the thought of some thing I've made and lived with being left behind, I say to someone "because they remind me of the time I made them in." There are used clothes I've accumulated. They can be left. Where are they moving? Winnipeg. She says she hopes the prairies again. Why don't you go back to Alberta? They had so much trouble with the other tenants in the building. Why don't you live in another building? The other question is where I'll live now. - This one has come before. Michael says Mary said, "Ellie is another person completely since she's back at school." 3rd Hoolboom says Quandt has programmed Trapline with Tarkovsky and Notes in origin with Fassbinder at Harbourfront. Viper and a Festival of Festivals retrospective. 4 Eating sickness - bus - weather change - rain. 6th Condom split Monday early, he hadn't come, but maybe leaked. Spermicide, Wednesday sick, Thursday spinn mucus, Friday still slimy. It seems unlikely but it's that kind of sickness. Now I have to be uncertain for two weeks. Last night wanting to have him sleeping in my arms, only that, after the trade show where among the shorthaired men standing around so ugly in man clothes, there he was reckoning and studying, gold and green, in soft old clothes, with his hair in wisps. It's easy for him to stand talking to some rep, he knows how to do that but not how to address a group. Flexilis pine; a Japanese lilac with this sort of leaf dark green and stiff. Eric when he's angry says 'everybody' at the garden doesn't get along with me because everything is my project. He sees composting being taken away from him and doesn't realize it's not by me. I do determine how the garden will look, couldn't if Muggs didn't abet me in exchange for political support. Am deciding things with Rob in a private way. Don't ask the membership where things should be. Am as if owning the land and getting them to help make it. I earn the right by bold moves and political instinct and staying power which the rubby contenders - it's the older men who are annoyed - don't have. If I didn't make the land use decisions would it be Eric? Rob should but he won't fight for his vision. I do block other people and also make something possible for them. Would they be democratic without me? Only if they were wrongly led. Otherwise the older men would squabble with each other and the women would be marginal. As it is the old men are marginal and the women mostly cooperate. It might be my despotism is good for the garden and called leadership. 7 I HAVE NO EYES I MAKE THE LIGHT MY EYES. I mean that to say, seeing is not as the theory says. It is this seeing in light. 8 What is so tedious about the imaginary examples [in philosophy] - they abstract to some limited model and then don't live in it. Our concepts aren't simple, but in the examples they are used as if they were. 9 Woke saying I won't go up [to his mom's] with him again, sad, in fear. Broke the fix by telling him. "But I think the hearts lose contact with each other." He says in his lucid way, "an overwhelming wave of sadness." Then the spell is broken and I put my arms around him and we come into kisses so well met he ends what I begin - he lets himself run. 10 During Peter's lecture I saw my sweater was inside out and had been through the first tutorial. What I came to was a sense of two standpoints, physicalist explanation and looking and seeing. They're both fruitful and maybe there could be other standpoints too. To the East Indian man: Where are you standing when you say that, are you standing in the causal theory? He saw it right away. So did Patrick when he said, One night I stood under the stars and thought, I'm not just .... I said, I don't understand what people mean by this just, it's not a simple machine, it's incredibly complex. Even if it is a brain process, it's still what it was, how is it reduced? 12 In acid "seeing space" smaller, being able to compare perceived space - what does it imply? [untranscribed Kant notes] "the wide gaze of that space" - a ground 14 Saturday. Sat in the bath this morning and saw gulls and crows on the roofs in sparking air shot through with leaf gold. Rowen Rowen let's go out. Leaning on my shovel, Dave McConnell with his hair in strings, "I'm just standing around in the daylight." "Me too." Worked without stopping, got rid of visitors. Alright, I won't try tonight. 15 Experience antedates the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, between interior and exterior, because it is neither subject nor object and has neither an interior nor an exterior. As a matter of fact, experience is not a thing. space is orientability with no fixed centre, time a retentional-protentional structure with the now as its unifying operation subject and object are later thematic constructions Herbert Guenther's introduction to Tulku Tarthang 1977 Time, space, and knowledge: a new vision of reality Dharma Publishing 17 Studying early, alone in a light with sound of rain at the black window, brought me to the winter months in Jam's house, writing before work. - Does a sentence this bad come from marking papers? What I want is to write poetry.
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