| aphrodite's garden volume 11 part 1 - 1990 february-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
20 February 1990 Ice in the small lakes and ribboned river a very beautiful sheer celadon with white edges and riffles. A surrounding plain marked with rectangles alternately dark and white, and dark combed circles set edge to edge, some (I take it) over a quarter section, others twice as wide. Through it the river in iterated branchy banks. Southwest winds have rubbed off the snow and streaked white fields next to dark fields with brown powder. That was Alberta. Now we're further inland and the snow lies where it dropped, softens the alternation not really like rice paper, and the streaks are laid out from the northwest. But see, the edges of the rectangles are always pointing south. The darkness of dark fields and river bank is uniform, a washed-out blue-black. Back a ways, where strong air was clearer, the ground showed black, brown, fox-red and some streaks of carmine. When we came out over the last of the Rockies and caught up with a front, for maybe two minutes the plane was fighting to stay up. I was staring down at the clear land of the foothills confused by the confusion of its motion and by the turbulence of fear - they were the same thing for a while. Now it's not chequered anymore, but oddly pocked with as-if drawings of one-celled creatures. As drawings it is all perfect. The ridge pocks aren't easy to figure, it must be prairie. No slope for cricks to be able to cut, water just sits and hunkers up local banks. Anywhere down there, it's millions of stubble stalks, rose bushes, rock piles, grouse burrows, mouseprints. - This side of the lakes, the snow is amazing glaze, subdivision blocks like microchip wiring each address a four-sided pyramid white only on one side, and between are the glassy strokes of white. Treetops a very sparse orange brush flowing transparently past the roots of their thin fine shadows, that were hanging in fringes from every copse. - Toronto When we were coming down over the city the sun was low: the ends of brick warehouses showed in red bars. Little cars on the freeway, moving trains among strings of stopped trains, flowed at the same speed as, maybe, the tops of apartment towers. The plane was so quiet after the movie stopped - engine very far away, babies and voices damped, just the evenly flowing silent glinty long-lit wondrous fall. And here are rice-paper blinds really like snow. And a wonderful painting of scissors and shadows. [staying with Maureen Paxton while I do the notes in origin show at Pleasure Dome] 21st Clean slides, call Ottawa Thurs. morning slides, tape, cues, program. Phil later aft Fri. set up early, interview/Mike 23rd And then, it's Friday. A fine little fear, where - the usual place, but is it fear - not really - it's the texture of white wine with fizz. Having to manage little things - having to carry things - holds it down. But it's lifting. Cheryl seen unknowing thru double glass and control room at the radio station, an East European woman of sixty, with a handsome magpie wing of black and white hair folded back over the ear. Maureen fillette, long legs and ballet face, aging directly, without going through the adult form - with her oddly pedantic sentences, a very alien form. She offers polite hospitality. Getting a present note into her voice feels a triumph of charm over hostility, I've no idea what she sees. But I take the scissors painting as her unpresented self, and its acquaintance is worth crowding her. And Jonathan - the not very liked voice become another person by having that sharp interesting face. Last night on Queen Street, dirty ice makes the streets shabbier, paying for things at a grocery counter, had my back turned looking in a hubcap mirror, absorbed, turned around, found the man amused, laughed, he laughed too, but more than that was his look, was it really that? Check again, yes - young Chinese face with a beautiful complete taking-in gaze. An amazed moment. Phil's movie. There's the narrative part. then take account of the rest -
It's a turn-on, love in the afternoon, warm shallow tea-colored river. One squeak of a woman's voice during a commotion in the boat. Lots of pure intuition. That means something precise, it means you're noticing a lot of things and you know you're noticing them but it takes more screenings or more time to know what to call them. Like the something that happens when the frame moves from water to include enough distant-enough bank so that there's a jarring little leap from being the space implied by reflections and being the space implied by trees reflected - they're moving at different rates at the shoreline - no, see, I haven't got it. Rich in pleasures. The camera sticks at an enthralling place. He has to pry his way off it. Philip Hoffman 1979-89 river, 16mm 15 min 24 Paul coming into the theatre. I strained to recognize him. It is so quick from assured 35 to the collapsing look of 40 - nobody says that, how fast - the bright brown boy. Ruthlessness could still save him. With Cheryl and Anne at the caffé bar. The Canadiens game was on behind us. Anne stared at Cheryl and talked for dear life. Cheryl's eye enlarged black and bright hearing and working, there was her spine straight and her sudden fetches of summary. And Anne was quite equal to it though inexperienced. Like seeing myself and Mary talking, talking. Hans in the booth was charming. That's all I'll say about him tho' at the end of the show I took a bold liberty and put my forehead along his arm. [untranscribed notes on Phil's river film] Vancouver 25th [volume cover] Back. Want to say how in Toronto I wasn't wanting to know what people thought of the work, as if I've taken myself away from it all. I was blabbing and getting along. There was Cheryl, there's my check, there's being able to say I was doing a show in Toronto. It was interesting with Maureen. I'm tired and having to read for tomorrow. - Holly Devor on the plane, a doc and a book, a fine, focused, prospering look. 26 School again. The thought of plunging into a hedge. A thicket. I don't want to be the friendly teacher or the doubted student. Or entangled in Rob's reluctance. What do I want instead. A straight run at the implications of net theory. To have time and feel smart and not stupid. Sex and beauty. (But think of Maureen's entangled scissors.) To make the grain net film. - Alright my friend, there's a way. I'm afraid of the wolf of pain rounding me up to do this again. I have to cut him off, it says, because he's being mean. But if I cut him off pain will hound me all through the summer. The only way to turn it off is another lover and that's dangerous. And then it eases - why. 28 This week at school the constellation analogy for eliminativism. Kim when I come up with one of my fetches looks startled, but he gives credit. "That point is very well taken." Luke Waidman getting his paper back, digging in his heels, "I'm right. If consciousness has no effect we wouldn't be able to talk about it." Why did that stump me? This week doing really difficult sessions on the physical-mental dichotomy. Objects are objects for consciousness, ie it takes a tuning to make them objects. It startled us when I said would there be objects on our scale if there weren't human-scale consciousness. 3rd March It wasn't good - in what way - as if, well, we can't get out of doing this, but it's kind of polite and heartless. I keep prodding to get a personal word out of him. Just to meet somewhere. It seemed the leaf had scarred and wd drop in its own time, I wdn't have to do it before I was ready. It takes a chunk of time so if it's not real it won't go on. The air today feels and smells like pure life. Welcome bridegroom new light. (Don't forget the blue notebook.) He saw me looking beautiful and pinched my cheeks. "You have cute cheeks" is what he said instead. "There's that grin again." And he hides behind me so as not to have to feel it. The pool - designing how the water comes up through - a rock - has to be a rock so it can have a fire on it - because it's a 'formal herb garden' but wait 'til they see what a pagan conflagration it will be. Saturday 10th I put my hand under the cover and felt him skin all up and down, caught my breath. The sound made his thing knock against my thigh. A good night, I mean. We read with the covers up, he compost application and I Chapter 5 Individualism and content. I would put my hand somewhere on him, for pleasure. Put down the pages and closed my eyes. The conscious fade I love. In the morning I was cautiously stroking the plane of his stomach anticipating the base of a tree trunk, is it up? Hundreds of vinca cuttings for the pines. Beginning to know about the grassy private place behind them. The nymphaeum. Quite caught again, because it was bright and sometimes warm. A rose order. Connectionist nets mean the cloud comes right into me if I stop with it. 13th Huckleberry, Indian plum, vine maple, alder. Brown open floor. There was the top third of a massive alder split off and thrown like a spear into the ground. The Indian plum a sparse light thing with green ears straight up, tipping a little spill of white flowers. Maples straightforwardly branched and tipped with little hooves. The huckleberry a frizz of thready bright green stems, red little buds that show as pink haze. Kim's so kind keen gaze. Friday 16th Twenty rumpled pines. David Tasch's Argentinian frogs. With forest behind the north edge, the herb garden square a complete thing lying on a tilt toward the sun. Bench has a wall behind it. Is it really so much made? The gravel paths. Steps. Forest. Posts. Lovely stepped squares. I thought it up, and said to do it, and it's done. Like walking on a moving floor. Forest should be carpeted with vinca, coming into blue flower as it is, now, under the plum tree. And then bulbs. Ripped up the rosemary and sumac this morning, bay laurel, and the cement table [in the Pender St garden]. That's shocking though in my doing I was passing the shock to T and R, officially gloating. 18 What about Louie? She says she'll talk about Jam if I give permission. Jam seems vulnerable and she's uneasy at feeling power. Jam wants to talk about how she feels me in Louie. "Primal." Land, she guesses. And travel and courage I say. [untranscribed notes for a paper on the language of thought hypothesis] Thurs 22nd Rhythm is not an extra feature that decorates an utterance, but a pattern that provides the slots into which other features are inserted. The left thalamus generates a six-per-second rhythm, that apparently serves as a pacemaker for speech rhythms and other communication rhythms . Correlations with the vocalization pause rhythm, the infant face-gaze rhythm, and the syllabic stress rhythm. JW Sowa Relation of prosody and syntax A metaphor does more than transfer a type label; it transfers an entire cluster of schemata to a new type. What I'm smelling is a male-rationalistic politics in functionalist/computational "higher-level" cognitive theory - shd say, in my dogged resistance. 24th Woke to a wide bright Saturday, sat in bed working 'til bank opening, square little box of seeds from the post office, skid row streets stinking, brilliant, empty, high. Let out into the street, so happy to be in the old city, my loved downtown. A beautiful old pruner at the pawnshop for two bucks, wrapped steel spring and leather catch, oiled old iron, bright crescent beak. Breakfast in the Hong Kong Café, fried egg and bacon sandwich at the counter, face to face with one of the smart old waiters. Reading seed packets. When R came into the herb garden where I was snipping rosemary I was rightaway lovily wanting to get my mouth and hands onto him - sweet ovulation valence like a velvet charge over the surface of the skin. Then afterward Louie in African shirt sitting on the gravel path while I clipped prunus lusitanica, told about a woman from SA, here two hours, traveling to tell exiles to come home and teach black kids. "And you're not even miserable and needing to lose yourself." Someway I don't like her - I don't trust her - but the way I worked and she told that staggering item and we didn't make hay of it but I saw it with her - that was native intelligence of our best. What I don't trust about her is a way she forms impressive things to say and declares them hard and dense like extruded blips of interesting sensibility. Sunday 1st April Frank's journal. Two men climbing into the high mountains, reach snow. One of them from the boat had held out the rifle with one arm and picked the spot on the rockface to frighten the guy. But I'm finding this journal at home. On the second line is my name and address. And after it something written in my grandmother's handwriting. Page after page, I'm amazed at the presence in the photos. It's as if his dream is of wild death. In the earlier years it was images of buffalo, later it's other animals. It's the cattleman's west, along with tender photographs of relatives. An old woman in front of a house I recognize, a movement of long light from the west over her face. The house is in Yarrow. Little sisters kidding in mock bras. I ask my mother, did you dream about Frank's journal? We discuss it. I dream that I'm thinking about what it was like to dream it. Experience moving forward left to right full of depth. If I tried to reread it there would be different images. This on a night when the thin man is pressing me toward the wall and I keep waking because work fright has kept me out of pleasure. 2nd Philly Lutaaya. [Ugandan musician d.1989] Watching TV in the dark in Rowen's room - being a given, public person - ways the public life is alive - I feel my students (so I say) but not my child - knowing things about how to handle the students, that Ingrid doesn't, and that having to do with being politically out. Good tutorials where the room becomes more intelligent as we go, and they're speaking as soon as they think so we're not noticing who - The LOT paper. At times I'm with the squeeze of writing. And fear. 5th Oliver's class [invited presentation in the film dept]. The way teaching made me know how to make them easy. It has been like garden meetings. We were laughing. The class with Kim [supervising me] heavy, heavy; and the one after so easy and normal, me and them. With Kim there I could hardly make sentences. A day of battle. Resnick. I saw that coming and knew what to tell him and knew what to tell her. And got in a complaint about Dominick. And had to improvise a class they hadn't prepared. Then had Luke Waidman badgering me to either raise him to an A or tell him how to do it right - he wouldn't quit - I outlasted him maybe, but he found a way to be satisfied, suddenly, and left, and there was Ray, and I said, It's taken me three hours to make that man satisfied with his grade! Like teachers together; and Kim came out of his office. Noticing that I am playing it with a mix of true heart and cunning. I betray my students in small ways and keep credibility and advocate them in small ways. And remember not to assume anyone there is on my side. And then Barbara Pratt looking red in the face said "That damn Tietz, I wish I'd taken your advice." And Louie had been to see him and sat with me on the bus and we told our wars. She wrote on Phil's evaluation very exactly what's wrong with his teaching. I speeded and pronounced and let anyone hear who would, unreeling. Forgot to say I sat down in front of Kim and said what I knew about cog sci people knowing nothing about art since 1900, so he would have a frame for the papers (and it doesn't have to be in them). 6 Falling asleep last night that instant of feeling I'm somewhere in another tone of time or being - so particular and ephemeral - not anywhere I've been - but as if a psychic address. I wdn't begin to be able to find it from anywhere else. What if it was someone else's past. I imagined it giving me the flavor that would have made the presence of someone, Kim, say. Once it seemed Jam's childhood, other times recognized as mine, and when and where. It gives something that is not remembered in day's memories. Oh - it's that other person, on the other side of the brain? Is it the frame? And how would I say that? Reading Tienson, Smolensky, five papers today, recognizing the right account. "I was saying this" - I was trying to say this - it's self-evidence and Kim holding onto the weirdly wrong account - I think, I must be brilliant to know this stuff without working in the area, knowing nothing about math, etc. I know the location of the right account. The direction. Tienson, J., 1987: 'An Introduction to Connectionism'. Southern Journal of Philosophy 26, Supplement, pp. 1-15. Smolensky, P., 1988: 'On the Proper Treatment of Connectionism'. Behavioral and Brain Sciences ll, pp. 1-74. 7 In the LOT theory I know nothing. After some morning work I get from the post office a long cardboard box, light enough to be carried on the bike basket, lengthwise between the handlebars. Inside a black bag, heavy plastic, with three bundles, five each, of roses with ancient names. I plant, with a wheelbarrowload each of rotted leaves: Blanc Double de Coubert, r.primula of ferny, scented leaves; Lichtkönigen Lucia; Zephérine Drouhin raspberry-colored and scented for a post; Lordly Oberon; Celsiana clear pink with golden stamens; Königen von Danemark; r.ptericantha with vicious translucent red thorns for the north. Tuesday 10th Distress of walking around fat. Worried about RM. Most worried about these papers. In these six days I have to write two papers and prepare two questions for an exam. 1st May Kim can meet a lot of what I say, but his theory is useless and unintelligible to me. 11th Their exam. Bill Castell's beautiful human face after it. What to say about it, no, only to continue seeing it. More keenly bright and live than the boys who write better papers - Bill Castell sparkled - he had a beautiful clean line around his acne-scars chin. A woman came up after the exam with her paper. The way she came, humorously, I started to say, and caught myself, and then let it out, What a shame you were wasted on Dominick. Thank you for saying that! she said. This night I dreamed Robert MacLean. I must just go talk to him, there in opulent formal dress, like a morning suit, grey and plum colors, and another man dressed the same on either side. I'm getting married, he says. You're getting married! To Penny. She wrote him letters all winter, with such a sweet heart that he thought .... When I woke I thought this time it means the other Robert. And Penny is the shape of the corner of the mouth Catherine is too. But I won't enquire until this work is done. - What is the issue between them and me. What I really think is, some kind of politics. As if: if thinking is like logical language, then men are superior. If thinking is brains sparking, then men are not so different from women and animals. Pat Churchland arguing for coevolution is like the smart woman begging to have her category let in. (I realized yesterday that she's the one I shd write to.) Controlling an area so it will use the abilities one can shine with. [draft of a paper] Saturday 14th Finished first draft of eliminativism paper. It's insightful and fluffy - evades, I think - shows it's learned the tone, heavy jargon plus throwaway vernacular. I'm with Kim as I write it, not half in love as when writing for Ray, but excited in liking him. It didn't use to be personal like this. My boy at the foot of the stairs coming for a bit before his birthday party. Bit of absentminded. Best was the instant seeing him so kiddish like a teenage son, overgrown and messy. I thought to rent him a room for a month. The thought made me happy. Not 'me' but it, her, 'the body' or someone. When the paper was written I went down in the still-sun to quick plant the last five. Such a day. The herb garden has a scent like maple flowers. I think it's the eglantine leaves. And it's poplar balsam time. Moved Lichtkönigen to come up from the other side of the gate and mix with jasmine offincinale. White Moss where it was, one end of an angle with Blanc Double that encloses two yellows, r.primula and Graham Thomas. Souvenir de la Malmaison by the angelica where it can spill onto the gravel. Lovage behind White Bath and opium poppies aside of it. Constance Spry on the second east front post and Roseraie de l'Hay in the dark, at the end of that row where it can sprout up intense enough to peg the corner. And Reine Victoria with other fat pinks in the west bed. 20th This morning a [sketch] in visual field, made of I think angles, black angles with diffracting edges, not possible to see because a bit left of the focal point. It seemed to get bigger - flowed and pulsed. A migraine effect with not quite but almost now a sick headache. Kim said my papers were A+ but exam not so good so it's an A. 22nd My own work in waking clairvoyance and telepathy begins with a breath that descends to the solar plexus which I consider to be the seat of the subconscious in a certain sense. Eileen Garrett 25 With the Cantrills sitting around a small table with a projector on it in the beautiful colors of PRC light bringing them into my best love. What a good way to conduct an interview. Arthur quietly moved, she by what will we know. "I think I like it as much as anything I've ever read." Looking at his narrow jugeared face thinking of the young man nine years younger than her who took her on. They began making films together. An autistic child was born. When I asked if they'd begun making films at the same time as Ivor was born he noticed what I meant, oddly as if he hadn't thought it before. A child who can't speak but is an artist slaps his own face hard with both hands when distressed. We were talking about wonders like frost plates loosely piled on snow. A good kind of apple. They said the park next to them has a zoo with lions. Can you hear them from your house? I was thinking of Chatterton Square [EH Young]. They both started forward with bright eyes the same way. Her eyes very liquid still. After supper Rowen fell asleep and I lay down too and thought of their old faces and their young ones, how creased and lapsed in so little time. Said "terrifying" and slept 'til the phone rang. - warm strong fine bright The deepest of the souls has this image: it smells of the underground, and is like a beetle, a mole, or a dark worm. 27 The downstairs door banging, I go down to see. The front door won't lock, Tina's door next to it is open too. Empty. The floor has been painted red. Trying different ways to close it so the lock will engage. Two baby mice head to tail on the lintel, coated with red. Waking I thought maybe last weekend's condom that inexplicably slipped at the last moment, the high estrogen I took to make sure, blood in the toilet last night. Have been needing to complain of Rob. He's lukewarm I say. He visited Wednesday. I didn't do what I do. If I don't there's nothing. 2nd of May This morning a very loud knock while I was in the bath. Maybe the roses from Pickering - a postman's knock. I struggle wet into my pyjamas and run down. Louie saying she wants to play with Rowen. I say he's here tonight. She'll come for dinner. Then I stand in my room. Have stripped the mattress, will I turn the room around? A defiant rage. Orfeo ed Euridice. Very loud. The room so dirty. Sweep from behind the bed dust clumps and the last condom packet. Out! I move the desk around to its dame's rocket mirror position - it's not the same desk though. Should the bed - at some moment I think I'll throw out the mattress. Birth bed, etc. I'll throw out the cover too. Oma's shredding quilt. The sheepskin, the pillow that loses feathers. All the paper and plastic saved in the kitchen closet. What I'm scouring out is my endurance of him. Exasperated. The way he never would make the move to put it into me. Making me ask. His spindleshanks. The way he hadn't a warm beam to send into me, the way he liked to think of it as doing me a kindness. The last weeks as if losing his house was making him hers, and he wdn't say it. Something he wdn't tell me. I closed up and could go through the meeting last night sitting beside him hardly noticing. If I can keep up small friendly rejections it seems to be alright. But Joyce: thinking of her today and Robert MacLean in the way of imagining what I'd want. 3rd Forgot to say, went out at five to get Row, leaving on the door a note that said è operto (should have been aperta). We came back, Rowen running up the stairs to look for her. Her things were there, she not. On the table the box from Pickering. She had barely arrived when there was a very loud knock. 5th Ed has dug a trench. Paul throwing pots, sorting evergreens into live and dead. Ed is planting a mixed hedge, big winged juniper maybe. His construction like a concrete block garage with display bays at one end. It's annoying, all these resources for his big empty shell. I'm seeing it with M. Yell at him that he doesn't consult us, it's just his. Ends with yelling at Uncle Willie, prodding toward his genitals. He strangely doesn't react. I'm telling him he's a little slime. Traveling with Rob in the southwest, we've stopped at Joyce's place, talking about where to go on to for the night. He and she at a little distance talking. He takes his bag and goes off. She drives me somewhere? I figure out that she's keeping him and hustling me away. Why? A horse told her to. I know that horse! I say sarcastically. At the time don't know really what I mean except that it's sexual. Then I have to set out back to find her place again. All I know is it's pink-brown adobe. There's someone with me. Different things happen. A little girl in a little sheer dress. I say she's Martha's little girl. Talk to her. She comes back in another dress. There's a big insouciant lesbian interested. During church she gets up, goes to write something on the mirror, breaks either chalk or a spot of glass, exits casually through the side door dressed in green, long green socks one fallen further than the other. Small episodes on the way. A child screaming. I look in the back of the van and can't see anything. It's a family in blankets, the child still screaming. Someone is guiding me. It's like the south of France. They say to go to some of Joyce's other places. I say no, the original house. But still she takes me to a cold stone one we can break into. At the foot of the steps, hear someone coming, dash down to hide behind the door. But it's a group of girls. One of them takes me across to the adobe house. Through a shallow rectangle of water. They're there, sitting together on the sofa. I take hold of the skin between her eyes and rip it. So she'll have to go have it fixed. Meantime Rob's breasts are pressing against my face very hard and full. It's as if breasts instead of faces. 6th Cranky. So cranky, cleanup day at the garden. Don't want to talk to people, I just work. The wind blowing hard. I feel ugly. Angry and old. Working in the herb garden. The new roses growing beautiful leaves. 10th With Joyce after a week only. Coming with complaints, the dream above puzzling us both. At the end I spill my whole paragraph about being almost too old to be attractive, being so interested in sex etc and annoyed at losing it now. Assuming I'm talking about her too. An oddly intimate session this one, saying with sparks of tears that I'm afraid the inner life will never come back. We make sure we're understanding each other. I say it includes landscape. She sees right away that it does. She wants to defend the outer world though, that's where ... and ... and Jam. I say thoughtfully that Jam was mostly over the border with me. She's quick to agree: "It was in the outer world that you foundered." "Yes." When I said I was afraid it would never come back she said slowly "Oh, I see!" I don't know what. I said when I was a kid I used to see that people weren't there, and that made me think it must be easy to lose. She said that was true. What was soft, near and airy in the session was (partly the time of day, one in the aft) having her see, having her company in those few things I need to say: she said, "You weren't recognized. You did all that and nobody recognized it." About how hard school is. Yesterday morning this dream: I'm seeing that a panel from the right front (brow) of the house has come loose. The landlord is there. It's a panel of cedar lattice against the solid wall. I pull some weeds from the crack of the join onto the wall. Sense of being high. Don't remember clearly enough. Something about being on a high pebbly plateau? Seeing the panel again this time padded behind with bundles of brush, cedar boughs maybe. The manuscript sent to Australia. Now I have to write the paper for Phil. Reluctant, hanging back. Don't want to go into the cramp. Quite bothered in the sense of uncarefully harassed by protests to Rob. 11 A restlessness like being hungry, and it is being hungry. It's lonely. For people to be personal with me, fond, funny. Shall I go in the world looking for friends? (VW and how many people she knew -). Or maybe it's addiction. It's addiction in the way it wrestles with itself. "I'll refuse to phone him." And then phones him. Tries to find an attitude. Imagines that it can stick to it. Turns away from sitting here at the table and working, because it's uncomfortable. Eats. Goes to have (I put away the TV) a nap. All right: addiction. I've been chasing Michael and Rowen on account of it. It's quite miserable feeling tied to somebody who's mean. If I try to get away it pesters me. What would I have to do to be free. When I surprise or hurt him I am free, but last time it only worked until he asked and I told him what was up. If I go away and have fun, it's free 'til I get back. Needs money. If the paper were finished I could go make money. 12 Why does it come when I sit down to philos? 13 What he always says is, "You just cut off. I don't know what you're feeling. I don't know what you like." I say seething with frustration "Why don't you observe and work it out?" "I don't feel supported." And comes back to how he doesn't remember who people are. "I have so many doubts." "I'm powerless." He says this always with a thin flow of tears. "Why don't you make the initial move sometimes, why do you always make me do it?" "I'm powerless." "I don't know what you're feeling." "You cut off." While he's stuck there I AM feeling it's impossible and I have to find somebody else. This morning - we slept in the narrow bed - when I was liking him moving against my stomach, he went on to take himself in hand and I plummeted into sadness and there we were struggling in discussion again. He has no use for my womanly parts I say. Other men like to screw. So I see it's hopeless, and also I think I'm seeing him better though I don't think he's seeing me better. I see that he doesn't like to screw because he doesn't really do it. He doesn't feel the skill and courage and confidence of Odysseus setting keel to the waves. In other words he is a child. I seem to think adoring his penis is enough to make a man out of him. But that's my confidence, he says. "I don't feel supported." I see that he isn't. Yesterday Rowen came to the garden in his green raincoat looking so beautifully pointed and bright to bring me a Mother's Day present. Envelope with yellow paint on it. Inside a 'skipping rope' and a card. "My dad and me driving the couch." "I forgot I was a mother" I said. "He didn't forget" said Michael. Both of us embarrassed because they'd come upon me standing with Rob comparing blue geranium flowers. And I'd been courting the two of them these days, and will again. What that discussion amounts to is that 1. he wants me to look after him like a mother 2. he has never got to the age of seeing his mother needs looking after 3. I'm getting part of what I want from him (to not be contained) at the expense of the other part of what I want (to be contained) 4. I don't normally see the part I'm getting except when it comes in the guise of what I'm not getting. I remember this with Jam - the times when you see the other person is damaged or mad or a child, and there's no grownup love possible except in the total separation of looking after them. He says I don't play. That is, I don't support his play. I can see that is dreadful. He doesn't support my play either. "I feel so worried." Time will sort it out he said. "But probably in some way that is better for one of us than for the other" I said. He'd move in, he'd get married, he'd have a kid, he'd pledge loyalty forever, but he wdn't gather up the courage to teach himself to know me. He'll never do that. Who would I have the courage to learn to know? Then it doesn't seem courage. You know someone or you don't. I'm not sure of that. You have courage or you don't. Joyce does it. For money so it doesn't waste her. Is insight going to go off with him and deprive me of sex? Then I think: maybe if I pass this test I can have Robert MacLean. A spasm goes over my face. For him I'd do it. Whoever he is. But what is it. It's not simply self suppression. (But the point about mothers is they get to sleep with someone else.) 14 There I go find the journal of six years ago, John Guri, Jam and Michael. And entirely forget the episode, until I see it here. Then Louie phones like an alarm bell ringing in another existence. We sit with a table between us in the oldtime Hong Kong. She says when she was in Victoria talking to Maputo about the sense of home, she was remembering a place in the desert, and at the same time - surprised it could be at the same time - having a vision that went like this. A picture of a landscape projected on the wall. She's seeing it. At the same time she's in the beam of light, as part of it, filling in parts of the image (indicates scribbling hand) moved about realizing she's completely in the doing, nobody is watching. Not god in the corner. An orange light. A sound she remembered to be the sound of a super-8 projector. Her father's colonialist experiences in Kenya. While she told I was stirring into many thoughts. Told them. Laughed as there were more and more. Then when I thought it was enough she still telling about recording her father. When it was "just testing the equipment" he talked about the birds in his childhood. When he saw the microphone he became the minister. Seeing him, seeing her crying with her sisters about him, I first saw not her but something like through her eyes. The family quality maybe. In the Rowen story I'd forgotten about John Guri, and that was where I saw the repeat now. The pages where I just sat and wrote down what Jam was saying. Incredible talk. Gorgeous as Lacan and all built to demolish me. I recorded it when I'd given up. I see she was fighting for her life. I see also that in all the seekings for signs, the desperate look-out, Rowen was not presaged. "Some part of my younger life came and rescued me. The price was that I gave him a child. That was what she wanted but she hadn't the slightest idea of how to pay for it." But Rowen all the same is a new leaf. And now. There they live in the old house. The pink room is Michael's woodwork room, shavings and tools. He is making a violin and a boat. It is a dirty poor marvelous place. He is younger and more ordinary. Very cautious with me. I'm saying this as if to then. Rowen will be five. Intact. "No, I want to" - he knew how to put his foot on the footrest and pull himself onto the bicycle seat like a man mounting a horse. Rowen is Michael's child, as if there had never been a doubt. 15 At the end of a day of it, gorged and flaccid. This morning I have a few things to note - the mass of notation, loveless piles of straw. Once it opened into heart truth - that was from Journey in Ladakh - once into shrewd comprehension - Eileen Garrett (?) on psychic damage. Laiwan's story about Rowen. I'd forgotten there was a quite close time with J before Rowen was born - that I was so long beating Michael off, after - that I saw Robert MacLean quite humanly before I shooed him - forgot most of what happened with Joyce. I'm annoyed with the confusion and delusion. Such yammering. Haven't said there's war again. [with Rhoda on the porch across from my window] As for you: what, truthfully? We aren't making lucidity. There's no we in that. 17 In my room at the desk alarmed. Yesterday for the first time she decided to stand her ground. I fought with the crashing smashing Orpheus turned up so loud it was producing a beat from somewhere in the furniture, like a heart knocking. Window and door open. Using the rage to sweep the house. She stayed reading. I went through the albums. (There was a thought I liked that has to wait.) An inspiration: happy fascist youth songs. I could do that at less volume and type, but so long as I typed (doubtful) war, she stayed. I tho't: I'll concentrate on a good place. She went. I wait to see she's really gone. Turn off the sound. Close the window. Now, this morning, it's cold. Not porch weather. My camera stands threatening her window. It won't be over yet. - If 'intention,' various experiences we take as 'willing' are parts of the net beginning the action. 27 Look how little to say these days. Like a droop'd sail without a gust. As if the erotic joy of the last years is not there to make a relation. Conversation on the phone with Louie made me suddenly sit up. "I'm going to tell you what I really think." So worthy and fine she is, but I leave it to her. She says a confidence. She came into my kitchen and felt relief. I like that but it's as if what I need is some warm bright eyes looking at me with open love and curiosity. Somebody who'd snoop and want to know everything and delight in me personally. 29 Two days working at Rob's [landscaping] site. Rick in the aft drank seven beers and Rob a couple. The Kubota ramming across the yard into piles of mulch. I stopped after a half thinking I'd be the one to save my head. Fighting with Rob on the phone. Demanding he shd say no properly not always insidiously as he does. He doesn't want to invest time in something that doesn't have a future. Invest! I say. Well, but that's not how he lives. He stays in one place and is there to collect dividends. Such as they are. Message teeshirts, Calvin and Hobbes books. People to help move. It's not just time he says. He invests his heart. He says that with a little choke. The whole of the conversation he's been flooding tears, that's usual. But when he says heart I say yes that's what he isn't giving me anymore. That's what it was all along. Thinking of the extraordinary light open shell of his chest. "I thought it was sex but that's what it was. I have a heart too but I think my heart depended on your heart." Getting there gave us hearts. A glow at least. But not enough to get us into the same house for the night. "You don't act like you like me!" "I can't afford to. I wanted you to embrace my whole life." What I don't know: whether it is better for his innocent young heart to be kept in reserve, or whether he isn't going to be able to manage his future marriage either unless he gets practice giving his heart in an uncertain thing. 30 Mary on her way to Russia. It was more fun than usual, 'cause she was on her way to something of her own. [untranscribed notes on 'representation'] melianthus major, pyrus salificfolia, prostanthera cuneata, alnus pendula, morina longifolia, bletilla striata, rosa bracteata 31st Puzzled. Looking for emotion it seems. Bit his earlobe very hard. He hid his eyes and wept. "I am intimidated by her power and intimidated by her vulnerability." "Spent the night with IN. And what about my charming E?" "I don't think she can be as delightful and joyful and easy-going as I need." [Rob's journal] "It is very hard for the kids but I think sometimes adults need to rage. It's only because they want to be alive." I'm happy when we get there, but it's as if there's no residue. It wasn't enough. We didn't get free. As if breaking out is what was hoped for. - More than that. Puzzled what is so reticent a person. What'm I doing with, etc. But that isn't the way. I am his lame woman and he does love me, my power and vulnerability, and doesn't think he can afford me. Is Joyce's art to impersonate wisdom for people? - What is most important?
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