aphrodite's garden volume 11 part 2 - 1990 june-august

work & days: a lifetime journal project

1st June What a painter enquires into is not the nature of the physical world but the mechanisms of certain effects. Well, both, silly. A mind that knows more than I do - lives in my body - is called the unconscious - generally in conflict with another mind - assertion and attention, imagining and explaining - (Kw) and (10c) - would like me to be more disciplined in work. To be an artist I have to be more honest. Will and doing are the same thing. Wd I have to live the rest of my life in relation to helpless fear? Wd have to keep doing it again. It wd be really dangerous. Bull means fear. Am I still holding back that fear of abandonment. Is it possible for me to release it. 2nd As if what I'm trying to do with Rob is figure out what a man is. No. What I'm doing is working with his blankness in relation to me. That blankness is 'what a man is.' The men I found before, including Jam, were the hysterical men who were not blank to me because they were crazedly and falsely responsive to all women - Michael too. 3 Cheryl and T curled up with me, two sweet friends. I have my hands one each over their sexes, currents of heat curling onto my right palm from Trudy's. - Martins were pecking in the pool excavation, dipping and carroming over the marsh. I brought Louie to see the wonderful beautiful rose bush down by the compost. Dark green hard perfect leaves, bit of a blue light on them. Shell pink single flowers quite boxy when young, very very beautiful bunches of fringed crossed little buds. It's holding up a bramble, racing it. A huge pile, perfectly healthy. Bramble flowers coming out too. Broom's just finished blooming. A good quartered rose hidden by the entrance, grown large before we saw it. Smells wise and is not bland. Firethorn powdered over with bloom falling abt. Notice it comes out with the roses. Paeonies too. Excited this morning. St Teresa's room was the net settled into a crystal - global energy minimum. Why I've wanted slow cooling and fluctuations of nonsense. [This is Patricia Churchland.] 5th Stood at a corner in the orchard path, by the bees and apple trees and nut trees and fast-growing grass and valerian towers and oriental poppies sprung up out of my soil given to fruit trees and the martins excited by darkening land and fading sky and told Louie about the soul cooling slowly. An instinct I know she has too. Last week in the night in my bed with the phone I sang her I'm a pil-grim and I'm a stra-a-nger I can ta-rry I can tarry / but a while because she was there in her place upstairs from Jam's, the place with the wonderful sight, thinking to call a taxi after she hung up, put her boxes in it and depart. I was her age when I had my last night at Eton Street in that neighbourhood and where she's moved is here, up the street. Annoyed with Betsy's blind objects. Why have twenty teddy bears. And a noteboard on the fridge with Remember house insurance! 11 The discomfort of Phil in this writing, the way I feel him critical and myself dull. Large wide sigh and strong swing when I asked is he uncomfortable about my lameness. Very. Why, because it's important to him to be a winner? Yes. So the paper has to project health? Yes. What to do with that inf. I shd have had it earlier. Is there a way to use it now. No, not that way. Maybe 'it' can use it. Wd it have helped if I explained it to him Should I imagine I'm writing it for someone else 12th, Tuesday Australian invitation [the Cantrills invite me to do the notes in origin show at Experimenta 1990 in Melbourne] Then Mike Hoolboom. 13 Woke with the solar on and writing. Hm so is that kicking in finally I said, squirreled away under the light in the blue room. And there was Tietz too, having to battle him, like before all the other papers. Late afternoon I wrote that connectionist rep is on site and out of mind. Downhill it seemed had begun. She says on the phone, Hello, this is Louie. Why she does it and why I don't like it. "This is Louie" in a tone like setting down a polished object. She does, a lot, tell me how observant she is. Without giving signs of observing me. I like what she observes and tells, it reminds me of this and that I do know too. But. And the unnameable unretainable information in the smell of her acrylic sweater left behind. 16 Dreamed L hurt me. What do I remember. A moment of deep stab. $14,000 trade-in for Jam's car. Seeing pages in my writing in a box, with paperclips marking her analysis. She said my work was worthless. One of her passport photos a brilliant human girl with eyes like an own genius. In others she's a Dutch animal mug Louise Jacoba with little eyes and a curved snout. The photo I found in a teabox: she's 10, grinning from behind a painted beach lady, grinning with glee because she thought to hang a real towel around her neck to confound the painted bikini. The pastor's family. A broad freuwe with a volume of obedient hair confected backward, father a flat faded testosterone face, or whatever the mature power chemical is (my father never had), the boss gorilla essence. Six children piled on top of them. Three sons with the same warp. Louie quite a secure but falsely vivacious point. A little girl with her same face but clear. Hi summer. 17 This morning I'm in free time, biting thumbnails, thinking I cd make new work for Melbourne, I could talk to the image of the poet. The colors in black. Do you make it shimmer? someone said in a dream, if the colors could be colors over the black like self-lit clouds of gnats. Looking for faint lines of sound to curve down the stepped invisible trail. "We don't always have to talk about anxiety." Anything can be taken in the dark. Exciting. Is a rise up against the membrane of the throat. 18 What she wrote in the answer dream stunned me. It was written but she didn't have to read it. Two messages and then the postcard she wrote me after she leaves next fall. I said Stop, stop, I want to just shut up for a minute. Sat frowning looking around thinking nothing, and then said "Well you got a lot on a postcard", pleased to have known how to fetch myself up, pleased I knew to get away from her. Needless to say pleased with what we were making. Abt the genius girl photograph she said she knew she wouldn't come back and she thought to show all of what she knew to the studio photographer, so there would be a record. And she knew, she said, there'd have to be some kind of a crackup. Laiwan's young illness. Here feeling the stories that aren't told. Going under and uncanny light. People like Rob to whom it hasn't happened are unborn. He's never going to be born, because he hasn't the will. We were talking in the new little Vietnamese café on Hastings. A very composed little girl in an after church family turned around looking at women who were laughing so loud in public. I said I was dressing better these days, looked down and saw five inches of hairy leg between too short pants and a sunk sock. Yelled with laughter. She too, not knowing why - "Is it my feet?" The laughter was her and I knew it. This morning waking thinking why do people organize themselves around sentences. "Jesus died to save us." The answer was that it's how people can be social because the senses aren't. They need never find out they understand different things by them. This is from the connectionist simulation paper where I had a picture of nerves organizing in one way bottom up in triangles and language organizing from the other direction and the two nets not agreeing. Today I know where going under is going to. Why it's a poet who goes there. Why she dies on the way out. It will have stories by L and L and Josie and me. Cheryl maybe. Why it's grainy. Around him on all sides lie empty dream shapes, many as ears of grain, as leaves on trees, as sands cast on shore. The optical printer tests. Times I've felt I was dying and realized I had. It will risk fear. 19 smoke the other soul is the one from before (it sighed)   voice while working here, being sure to stay working in the world (YES) - for safety Emily D relations of relations = distillation a white line wave moves through it's a breath 20 Dreaming struggle with Rhoda. Her large old European furniture set in the yard. She's going to sell it she says. I say put it on the sidewalk and give it away. It's peeling veneer, wobbling wardrobes. I pick her up exasperated. Her little dress falls back and shows a naked child's body. Gave a sullen morning. Whatever you do, if you do it sincerely, will eventually become the bridge to your wholeness, a good ship that carries you through the darkness of your second birth, which seems to be death to the outside a light shell of a body - left side 21st Lying with Rob, dream I am leaving the hospital and must say goodbye to him and to Janeen. Him, it's regretful but light. I go on a bit further with her. Separate on a street or parking lot. Looking down into a channel in the mountain, people swimming L to R very fast. Are they racing? But regularly. Showing bare bums, or is it their bathing suits ridden up. Men leaning over the channel with cameras. The swimmers seem to have been swimming under water, under the rock, and to be going under again. It is as if the highest pass where it goes through the centre of the mountain. 22 Jane Harrison saying when she was old that she'd rather have given her time to languages than to art because language is "a wider, because more subconscious, life." Also she said she liked living in a community, ie Cambridge. "It seems to me sane and civilized and economically right. I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a great, silent garden around me." When light shells are led into light of course they are dissolved. "And something of an expert on mining" wind & leaves "ten years to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science" the bowing & stirring trees I was moving very quickly toward a bright shining net which vibrated with a remarkable cold energy at the intersecting points of its radiant strands. like a lattice light flickering increased to such an intensity that it consumed and transformed me like a transformer which transported me into a formlessness beyond time and space more than light, a grid of power Jane Harrison religion a confident statement about something unknown. Ritual though can find form not mistaken. The keeping open of the individual soul to other souls and other forms of life. Tues 26th The photo from years ago, international driver's license card. I saw it because I showed it to Louie. This aft thinking what it means. She said Tell me about this summer. I told her the story of Robert MacLean. We came out at the end, she said she was flushed, there was so much feeling. "He couldn't see what he could have had. I think he can't heal himself." On Sunday after Dennis Yeoman's roses. Skytrain, Rob's platform. We were lying in each other's arms in the sun. "You have such magic hands." "Sentient and warm." "I was going to say delicate and warm." Feeling the way it was contacting his head through his hair. "And the placement of this one too," on his wrist unconsciously placed, but conscious. He came to the rose garden with his hair down. Hello Rob said the quite alright gentleman, tall, tho' tilted and slow on new stainless steel hips. A liking from his not really old face, for looking sideways into one's eyes. His hair down is real honey hair, a warm streaked flow. 27 Roiled some. Louie came to the garden where I was working at the east rose bed, said did I want supper. I'm going to work 'til eight I said. Too late for me, I'm hungry, she said. Came to fetch me at eight thirty, having made but not eaten it. We sat in the dark. - I forgot to say: yesterday aft looking at that DL photo time, I as if stepped further into being willing to realize her, so when she stood there on the path in her work clothes I was whelmed in a bright wave, I needed to seize her, the impulse had piled me toward it. I was hesitating thinking do I have to. I couldn't do anything else, and grabbed her, and whirled round. I meant it as delight not romance, it was shyly done, like a centrifugal planet keeping distance and looking away. Laura D'Estante in an ancient house in Pisa. At the market she found Amnesty International pamphlets on South African prisons. Weekends in Tuscany walking and marveling. When I'd gone home and lain in bed she phoned. Having to I guess. Do I really still not think we're lovers. I'm crouched in the bathroom doorway in the dark frightened and thrilled. I say the truth. Not sexual, but physical. "I can't imagine making love with a woman, now. I don't know, it's as if it's on the other side of a divide." She's been so valiant and steady, showing not a flutter. But what. For instance the way I look at Rob wanting to eat him up. I don't want to eat her up. Rowen yesterday in the bath, being cooked. Singing about cheese - being cooked with cheese. Eat me, eat me, eat me Mummy! Standing in the water with blocks stuck in his underpants all the way 'round. He comes to stare at me in the bath. His lip goes up like Michael's. I tell him his birth story while he looks there and here. How the head comes out and then a pause and the shoulders rotate and he shoots out. Thought to tell him how jumpy he was - startling and making him laugh. 28th There are two fairy powers, heart's affections and fancy. Someone is looking for someone who is her state of love. As she travels she learns and works She leaves her work inscribed on the air   Wherever she finds again her state of love the grain of the air forms into place and person sharply focused. 29th These have roses: Zephérine, La Reine, Isle Krohn, Oberon, Celsiana, Königen, Souvenir, Blush Noisette, Roseraie, Lichtkönigen, Blanc Double. 1st July Long Sunday morning in bed with Rob shmoozing. No obvious way to get to come, so it takes a long time. Hard. Hard. Hard. I say touching his chest and belly. Hard. Laughing cause saying it made him so. I so much love when I have my arms around him, when we are in each other's arms. The glow in the chest, with breasts kissing him. In the end we came together each in our own hands. My left arm is off the edge of the bed, somewhere out there. I come and then in a few seconds I feel a large drop on my fingers. We both crack up while it goes on falling. I haven't done that since I was sixteen he says. He looks sixteen. The whole time was like an open gate, is it a solstice transform maybe, pink and confiding. I licked his little ridge and other things and asked how it was and laughed. He offered to reciprocate, I showed him Jam's in and up stroke instead. Told him what I'd like next time he's in, the pause for an echo, which he did understand. In the alley tilting my head to kiss him goodbye. Later in the garden he was watering and could see over the tansy to the bench where I was sitting with Louie talking about getting unsaved, I only saw one anxious glance and that may have been wondering whether to say something about the basils. She said she was at a missionary camp in the Homelands, fourteen maybe. They were saving the blacks, who had to go along with being saved to get medicine. They were in a circle praying. She shot out of her body to the ceiling and saw the little minister and the little circle of people and knew what they were doing was evil. So she said. And then went along with it 'til confirmation was over. And another story. In 1969 they were doing a school project on the moon. She turned the light back on after the rest of the family had gone to sleep and was cutting out pictures. She realized after a while that she was there on the moon. At the crack of dawn her mother was up as always, a green dawn with electric clouds before a storm. She wanted to speak to her. "I can still see the light on in the kitchen at the end of the corridor." "Aren't you afraid being awake alone when such things happen?" Her mother misunderstood. "She said - you can guess what she said." She was in the garden with me later, working on one of the middle beds. I was in the ditch under the west edge and heard a fireman on their balcony, "John come and look at this." My head shot up, it might have been the tone. The fireman when he saw me stepped back out of sight. "The firemen are staring down your shirt," disgusted and possessive and protective. The way they use it amongst themselves dishonestly to brag to each other that they're masters of the ones with tits, patting each other's cods. These days at times she has a blazing face. 3rd So what is it with Laiwan? Mad at her. Haven't liked her or she me. First she gives me presents that aren't for me. Goes on about her deals, dykes. Is holed up in a fairytale about Dian. Suffers of being sexually unwanted, says she wants to know and crumples and holds it against me if I say. Had me staying out of the house feeling in the wrong. Seems again to think I'm here to receive stories of her business success. As white oppressor? Yes. That's it. So she gives me stuff that says African, African. Louie gave me a leather seed pod and I love it, Laiwan gave me a photograph, a length of cloth, a rebel's book, and I love none of them. 4th The landlord had my stuff on the sidewalk, evicting me for immorality. Louie dreamed she and I stood at the north end of the garden as the sun went down. But it was an African sunset. Red and broad. The sun stuck halfway and turned to stone. The stone was in her heart. Last night wandering in the hospital looking for parts I knew at different times. Last night as she went home, at the top of the stairs, I put my arms around her. What I remember is her red and white print shirt, ie something I felt and something I imagined, round. She went stiff. That means either she liked it or she didn't. The white clover. The grass. A bat the other night clicking. Its flight seems a fight. I was sitting with L in the herb garden. Yesterday took my shining salmonberries in pots and planted them along the west edge. This week not very present. Last night in a wide sea a craft like a mango seed, just a light hollow pod which at first I'm afraid to ride. There is the light smooth pod, and a wide smooth sea to cross. I discover it is my way of swimming, I sit astride and my powerful arms pull me rapidly across. In early morning I come barebreasted on shore. I'm the woman who crossed. There was a hill of water to avoid, and on the way back, also, there's a direction I should pull away from. - "Two intertwining trees" of vessels. After menstruation, if dry, infertile. Evening after dry day, but not morning. As soon as wet, consider fertile. Estrogen peak is whatever is last wet day. Count three days after, evening of the 4th dry day is okay. Actual ov can be 2 days after, ovum can live 24 hrs. If bleeding between periods be sure it isn't 2nd peak delayed ov. Estrogen drop at midcycle is estrogen drop just before ov. May have breast tenderness. Infertile, progest, is acid, closed hard os, cervix low. Est alkaline, open os, high. Monday 9th Worried how the summer is passing and - I'm still not thin - and - I'm not doing anything but a little arranging in the garden - a slow stew with Louie - and how that's going - at supper in an apartment with a white sofa and a hundred plexisurfaced images imprisoning its family [Louie is housesitting] - we sit at a proper dining table having a talk about our relationship, almost as bad as that. No, as bad as that. She tries to persuade me. I am loud and eloquent about tail. She persists. I freak. In my way, shutting up and closing my hand over my mouth. Was trying to say something doesn't jibe. I don't believe it's sex she wants. Doubting maybe she doesn't know the difference between sex and whatever we are really doing. I don't know what happened. I wanted to flee. It was as if I'd had my ground taken away. What about her. Her head-girl net of popularity and deceit. The way Laiwan and I got decisively separated in her ambience. Weds 11th [*sketch of herb garden bench] Wondering if I could see where to go with school and visual studies. Computers and point generation. Seeing I could write an intro to notes in origin. Video screen One frog. Seeing and hearing. 12th Woke a couple of mornings ago hearing myself say, I'm dead for Louie. Yesterday her hard grin, her hard way of finding intelligent things to say about the sky. What makes her incredible. She's not saying what she wants. 14 Saturday early. Woke when the sun touched the poppies at the window. A couple of hours earlier than usual. The air flowing first in, then rapidly out, says the coffee steam over a jar on the sill. Quiet and birdy nearby, a traffic band in the distance. When the air's flowing into the house it passes bare foot or face like a little curve of live touch and I say fresh. A dream where Gerald sits down with Janeen and me and says in his straight crude way, I'd like to be your commensural. I understood he wanted to be my second lover. I said, I don't think I want a commensural at all, meaning I didn't think I had a first lover. I'm not in love with you I like the opposite too Janeen was going to have a minor in philosophy. Both of them sang in the choir. I speak to him on the way. What are you singing today? Don't quite hear his reply. A long Bach I think. In the church basement I discovered by an unstitching of the hem that my pleated skirt was on inside out. With L last evening I worked 'til close to dark, found her asleep on the bench with her feet in the white clover stems. We sat here in the dark talking about crosstrophobia. Joyce said claustrophic when they don't see the independence with the intensity. I had two different explanations, one was that she was forcing me into a position where I'd have to hurt her feelings. The other was that the ground went from under me - that's when I think she thinks she wants to make love and I don't think it's that. So maybe she does. She's a pretty body. So small. Came in the dark and squatted by the arm of the chair stroking my arm - see, that happens sometime, the word gets into the sentence before I've formed the right place for it. Saturday night, likely the word will get into me. But it was nice talking with her face a foot away with streetlight on it and her small hand stroking my big arm. I could suddenly say, "Do I seem large to you?" "Small to medium." One more thing, that rang and made a blank vortex after, and that I was understanding when I woke. "I said it's a pity. But I don't think anything about our friendship is a pity." The garden on a day like this, without cloud. Best is the grass, brome, vetch, St John's wort, white clover, all the heights, tipped east. Away in its far end the herb garden in so intense radiation. Rocks! I mean the beautiful east gate, sitting rocks, with lavender in gravel, and mountain peak rocks at the north inner gate. (Pine bush to the north, see -) Meadow to the south. A tunnel from the east. West closed with thorns. Small birds like the scrapes of irrigation. Puddle in the pool excavation. Two butterflies in flight together so exact and precarious a management of two large sails each. 22nd [We pour the kids' tank] Concrete yesterday. Cuts on my hands. "When I saw you in your white shirt I knew you were going to pull it off," said Muggs. The contractor man happened to pass. "Have you got five minutes to give us some advice?" Thinking he'll get interested. Having to call Ron to change the time, getting him to mention he knows concrete. Standing at the plumbing supplies counter smiling at the boss. I mean the pleasure of dealings with working men, their good humor and how brisk and effective these conversations are. We're both so good at what we're doing. I stand accurately in my ignorance and intelligence letting them know how they should explain - battling (talking with Louie abt phone conversations with strangers, how interesting work it is) when I should. There was the moment I'd called everyone to rehearse and we saw the truck had arrived five minutes early. Muggs ran to guide him. And then the amazing sight of it swaying and lurching very slowly backwards along the road we cut through the grass. The moment approaching. The way it is when the moment approaches that will make it work or not. I have to take charge and say what to do. "We need two people to be pourers" in a carrying voice. Etc. Like teaching, the first words have to be willed. "What's our best use of you, why don't you take charge of getting the concrete into buckets." "Ron is looking after the vibrator, we need one more person to tamp - we don't? Okay." The truck driver suddenly thought how to do it with wheelbarrows, our bucket pushers were about to be obsolete, it was going to be a show for men with tools. I was scattering to get ply but having time to think and decided to stop it and did. "It was going well, why don't we just go on." And they turned around and did it and the bucket pushers got to finish. And then I was up on the form carrying the motor for Ron and able to see. "Why don't we start washing buckets." Get them before they're gone. Joanna thinking and humorous. The pleasure of seeing Louie's keen face in the midst of the line, seeing everything and seeing me too. (That's the second part of this story.) "Add more water" to the mix. The truck jumping. ("Hey Kerr, why don't you drift over that way," ie toward the foxy babes. That's Rob and a beer. Sandy Cove with wet pants drying on gravel.) The truck driver slowly away through the grass. The Youth Corps lingers. They were high. "Now you know what the nervous tension was for!" I'm high. Tim is high. We forgive each other. 25 The form is pried off. Eric sobbing about his responsibilities for spina bifida, Haitian misery. - "That's only part of it, there's another part that's a rise of joy." "It might be true enough to be good." "Yes." Reluctant to say - the sheer strength of her teeth and eyes - I was turning my face away - she too, holding still and shutting up. I am so much larger than her, I hold her around like a rectangle of a box with soft breasts in. Not in her arms, but if we talk about it, I feel we're running ahead of the truth. - The garden tanks were slightly sloped along the long axis so that water very slowly overflowed from the lower end, whence it was carried away, more or less ornamentally, to do other work. Persian fr Egyptian fr Mesapotamian. All garden doorways shd be framed by clipped evergreens. 26 Last night with L I found myself in the bad thing I've made sure to avoid, five years safely competent. I saw I shd be talking to Joyce about that - called it demon but it is a stumble into an abyss. What? - the sense of someone talking over my head. Louie saying the shadow of the feeling in the room. I asked and couldn't understand still. It was Them - she's making me feel stupid - she wants to make me feel stupid. I wdn't say. Keep that to myself because I have to go away and find defense. She in my large arms pressing so tight and urgent, what can she be feeling? So strongly. I don't know. I say I don't know her at all. Today it hits her and she cries "a long time." Whenever she shows her emotion she becomes unknown. Was she wanting to get into me? Did I get it right? I ask. She says she saw her hand entering my shoulder as if the purple teeshirt were a cave. Maybe my wanting to know what she was feeling is a version of her wanting to get into me, it's the same. But no, putting a hand through a shoulder is dematerializing me isn't it? I was distressed and wanted her gone. She's going to be like Jam saying simple things in fancy impressive ambiguous ways. I didn't like it. Mystifying, so I'll have to be the dummy who asks for explanations. Violent dreams I'm not remembering though I said to. When I woke from them I said, this violence is Louie needing to harm me. Letter fr Abraham, so formal, not understanding. I like having floated scarves in front of his nose and pulled them derisively away, because of that blockiness and his tall man privilege. 27 Thinking, with all that, I'll have gone off Rob when I see him next. But I haven't. I liked his voice on the phone, I liked his nose, in just the same way. 30 Yesterday the open house. Saying that starts to bring things to tell. But I want to say first about Louie. The moment when my head dropped back, I gave in and kissed her and found myself at a loss. I just stopped. She doesn't have a mouth. There was a hard ridge and a wet ridge, don't know if they were the same, but nothing to roll on. I was thinking that was all along how I knew I cdn't sleep with her. It halted our soft dream. I knew it was halted. She wanted to forgive me, came pressing in with a concerned look. Intolerable. - I keep seeing the pale orange of her teeshirt. I wanted to be gone, because I couldn't say. Soft melon-colored concern pressing in on me. ENOUGH I'm shouting inwardly. That at the end of a week of cuddling. In conversation - that so-abstract transaction in hyperspace - encouraged by her quality, her so fine-tempered valiant intelligence - which keeps waking me up. I keep being about to let something go by, the way I let other people's vacancy by, and then catching the possibility in what she said, and tracking it. And then there is her generosity of faith, day after day to not lose time. But it's solemn isn't it. Wd coerce me if it can, to be not-mean. I've begun to talk to Rob when I'm with her. The last two days. Since he noticed her body is my guess. Presumably it means he's talking to me. Before, when I was with her he wasn't there. She said she felt him feeling her across intervening people on the bench. He there, she there, I stood in the social rectangle unable to know where to go. Rowen in pink surfer shorts all aft sitting in the tank. Happy and beautiful. He rode the boat. He is given communities in which his parents are centers. The tank with its bench held all the kids almost totally. They can't run in it. When they sit in it or on the edge they're on stage. They can see. Two lesbian baby-club little girls with their exquisite slits. "Like a bath" said Hannah. Saturday stopping at Michael's house to invite Rowen, we find them near the kitchen door, Rowen carefully cutting cheese with the cheese slice, Michael standing hatless with a fiddle in dim orange light like lamplight. Their boat finished and holding water in the yard. 31st The dignity with which she says, I have loved you for long. It seems wrong to say it here. 'Dignity' means her tone, which I can hear. Maybe a length in the back of her neck. We were in a slit in the coastline at Whitecliff. A rock wall brought the water's voices down over us like layers of covers. In the narrow end driftwood crammed. A root base, just wood like branches are, set with unremovable stones. On the damp above, a hanging garden of herb Robert, fern, ivy. Angles and mineral colors and fungal washes and moving white underlight. At times when we were still the rock wall strengthened into a beauty so ferocious (I want to say) that I thought I was in the privacy of the real coast, tho' motorboats and ten thousand cars and fifty thousand white people crazed with buying power were with us. My right boot ran away into the water. A wake wash grabbed one of our juice bottles. Louie was desolate with what I said. I was annoyed at having worried her. "It says chemical and smell and poison and Jamila." To Jamila: leave her alone. "Do you know what I'm saying to myself when you are touching me?" "I haven't a clue." "I'm saying how much I love you." Knowing she might be crying because I'd thought I had to say it. What. Yes she suffocates with love. Rob the yahoo leaves me free. No. But the uncertainties of a girl with a yahoo boyfriend aren't serious to me, they're long ago. Louie Louisa makes me worried about hurting her. 1st August The dark blood kimono with white strips and red and green. I wore it in the three-sided mirror and stood and looked. The right profile a woman with jaw and nose lean light sentient creative strong and astonishingly distinguished. Head-on, younger, brown, bright, with a brush of hair rising. Colored and pleased. On the left, the one I didn't like to see, an old woman quite heavy-boned with a flap of skin stretched neck to jaw. 2nd We were in Rowen's room, in electric light, with open window. Louie invented blowing the train whistle out the window to make people think a train was there. Rowen blew twice out the window and turned round skipping with joy. The day after Whitecliff she was moving and came late. Knocked when Rowen and I were back from the garden. Rowen, go open the door. He's flying down, Louie is that you! L yest in business clothes like a minister's wife (top half - black toreadors below) for the citizenship ceremony. There far down the second row I see the back of her head and a silver earring. I'm on the sidelines feeling amid the deadness of the proceedings (three ceiling vans slowly rotate) the writhing live nest in the solar plexus, of love for that one, her. I take her back to my house and my bed, because I've been all the time stunned with it. Looking at her stuns me. And how is it going on? Dreamed I was swimming in deep water alone, that way I come to ribbon seaweed that grabs me. I let go and grab onto an edge and pull out and am there so buoyant in the deep sea twilight. On land, passing by the accordianist's basement (Becky's John). I see Rob listening on the step, turn and he's gone with Muggs I think into the pub. Looking in all the booths for their meeting. He's not there. A new woman lover, her stuff, kids on a slope but is my child there? No. She after Monday had three dreams: One was her voice saying It doesn't have to do with Rob because Rob doesn't have to do with Rob. "The child is placed at the foot of the tree on an island in blue light." That's the message. The image is a zoom downward toward a tree on an island, the tree on the far rim. The child very relaxed. Blue light like moonlight but sourceless. She sees all the way round as well as down. She asking and I answering: Do you want to know my body? Yes. Do you want to know it inside or only outside? Only outside. Is it because you are afraid if you know it inside you will lose separateness? Yes. That's just fine, you can know it in any way you want. Do you want to know it without clothes, or with clothes? Both. 3 Hello loneliness - weariness - whatever you are - the dropping tide - what is it? My solidity is missing. No - it wants to work! 4 Open Saturday. Strong light in silent sheets. Great space permitting the marks and tracks of sound. Like a criticism halting what I might say. 5 It was trouble with Louie the fearful fearless warrior. Who must be intemperately faithful to her sense of value. I agree she should be, but was squeezed with anguish saying I hadn't meant to give up, but seemed to have given up pursuing who I'd like to like, so now I call no one. Why I can't be rough with her, see. After some of that I could ask her how it was at the stadium and she could delight to tell. Then soon I want to stop. She doesn't know why. Maybe I don't know too. Something hurts like my boot, too tight.   There's only a month left. Whether next term I cd do filmwork somehow. The rock screen at Whitecliff. Is at a fissure - 6th She wants an introduction to the ether. I don't call them because they are no company in the body of my work. Which is put aside waiting. That work is the look of the woman in the right-hand panel. I shrink from his language. In the house of solitary work I am making a fire in a new stove. In the centre of the room, a low brick fire, a bigger fire, for steak she suggests. part 3 aphrodite's garden volume 11: 1990-1991 february-january work & days: a lifetime journal project