| aphrodite's garden volume 11 part 3 - 1990 august-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
7 August Rob uncouthly pursuing, Louie blasted. The EYC [Enviromental Youth Corps] again to be somehow shoved into action, the herb garden pool very hard to frame. 11 Frame made, outside placed, they worked these last two days. Behind that is my decision - Tuesday I talked - the last phone call, Dave Stevens, going carefully over the same points, and again feeling for the places where I can give him a substitute word. He says I'm pressuring. I say that's my job, I'm supposed to care about the work. Passion, he says. So it's passion not pressure. Etc. So inefficient a talker. Finally he gets a notion that was there too plainly spoken in the first minutes. Something he can do. Relief in both. Next day they actually distribute work so it makes sense. What else, Louie giving me time enough to miss her. A winding ardent body, I peek through the crack in her shirt at such a pretty swell. And stagger back when we hug, because of how little she is. And could I go after tail tonight? Woke two nights ago, an hour after I fell asleep. Far gone into lust, and tail was all I wanted. Nothing smaller than a banana. Seeing the man, tho', I have the option to see his rags and the hound thinness of his face and what a yokel he likes to be. [Opposite, Jakob Boehme 1575-1624 Now if that spirit dwells in you, then you may understand this author in the deepest ground, according to your creaturely constellation. It is a very clear gate of the great mystery of all beings. Dark and selfish dull Saturn. Prating Pharisaical hypocritical Mercury. Doubtful unsettled Jupiter. Venus, Mars. Eclipsed mutable Luna. Divine Sol. For with the sound or speech the form notes and imprints itself into the similitude of another, a like tone or sound catches and moves another, and in the sound the spirit imprints its own similitude. The signature or form is as a lute that liest still. As his instrument was set at the time of his incarnation. three worlds, and they are in contest about the form, and the form is figured according to the contest. as the vital signature, that is, as the form of life Everything as it is inwardly, so is it outwardly signed. Everything has its mouth to manifestation. Now every taste desires only its like.
thought or sparkle of the will The root desires only joy with the first will, and yet it cannot obtain it, except through the opposite source. the third will, spirit, which has both properties in it second principle, the light world The desire of the liberty is meek, easy, and pleasant, and it is called good; and the desire to nature makes itself in itself dark, dry, hungry and wrathful. First principle, the dark world And we are to understand, that is no divided essence, but one holds the other hidden or closed up in it The third form is the anxiousness which arises in nature from the first and second form. in the external birth it is called sal, or salt. the fire-root, the great anguish Without nature is the nothing, which is an eye of eternity, an abyssal eye, that stands or sees in the nothing, for it is the abyss; and this same eye is a will, understand a longing after manifestation. The free lubet, liberty, kindles love-desire For so also is the original of the eye or sight in the womb, when life enkindles like a precious stone A flash or glance becomes material Sunday 12th Eric sulking because I won't listen to him drunk. He's in alliance with Ernie, both of them with Leo muttering against the woman's takeover of concrete technology. Massive evidence. But what can they do. Rob's unusual searching look above the form. Louie elsewhere last night and today. Cheryl and Diana, and Diana and Sandy, and Sandy and Jamila gossiping about Louie and me. After a day doing nothing but drafting, seeing how to fix the herb garden pool, figuring the specs of the between parts of the kids' area. Rolling, did nothing else, then it was 7:30. Pink clouds in the tank. Uneasy feeling the way I'm shedding the countering patience with Rob's and Eric's spoilt boy ways, as if I'm farther into the lead than is safe, or defensible, or, I don't know if it's just more than I'm used to. It's Louie making boorish friends unnecessary. 13 When she took my hand away from her hard small triangle, cast into a grieving little soul with a tight neck. More I don't know. 14 But whether it will ever be real fucking. She hears my hands - chose me for them maybe, which I'd think is smart - the way they were on the bus, seeing everything. Isn't afraid of kissing, I mean she never stops before I do. What did I dream about Rob last night. These days he's not where I can find him. Cheryl had to see me saying "The line should cut here, the corner of the playhouse should be back here at the same distance as the greenhouse." We threw Thomas in the tank. Louie Louie oh Louie arrived a so sexy bundle all for me - I won't hedge that - in my head often I hear hallelu-u-ja, hallelu-u-ja, ha-le-lu-ya ha le lu ja! When I opened my eyes on the bench, the whole land was shades of blue like faded slide film. Poplars blowing their large leaves blue, with undersides that shd be white, elusive virtual pink. Next time I saw them they were green again. The shape of her touch can give me pleasure like the shape of mine. 15 Man struggling with a drunk, holding him down. He gets away running toward me. I've ducked below a hedge but can see both of us as if I'm on a monitor. I see him hurl a tree trunk that lands just beyond where I'm crouched. As he reaches me I see myself stand up. Wake frightened. Some mornings solar pours with fear again. Hasn't for a while. "Such a fine strong vibration." She didn't know if it was me or her. On the grass bench after the crew left. She doesn't waste me for a second. With my head on her lap staring through my eyelids at the fire sun. I was standing in a seeing but sightless place, with touch the same, acute touch down the unseeable arm. Then the red changed to blue, or more an unnamed color. She was touching my face and hearing me tell. There I began to say how I'd miss her attention and other people have missed mine.
Thomas Traherne "Love" 17 Trying out whether I still like getting laid. Well I still wanted to kiss him but the velvet attention wasn't there. Liked being in his house. In the bathroom mirror a girl's flushed glee - pink blood and bright eyes. It was poking not trance-fusing. I wasn't there except when we looked at his tomato basil boxes and talked about kinds of trees. But writing about it now I feel the clit fattened. (Not there the way he usually isn't.) Yest aft in the Chinese United Church park on Gore talking about why she was a popular child and I not, the different ways of handling how intolerable we found other kids' talk, she seizing it ('intelligent girls') and I removing myself to go read ('creative girls') because - this with a burst of agreement - I didn't want to be busy, I wanted to be able to see. Knowing all this and the much more is useable to make our company. 18
She doesn't - hard to know what to call it - judge me, call me down, though she has a cutting judgment of anyone else. That's a warning. Moments of a face I don't like to see, Boer, a frightening spread fat look, like an ancestral mother of ten. I stared carefully. It's night still, though nearly five. I haven't said what has been obvious here, the five weeks without rain - extraordinary pump of fire-life into our bodies and plant bodies - and that it gave me my summer body I thought might not come again - springing some days. - What is happening is unsolid in this way: at times with her I am convinced with love, stunned with how closely we're answered, but it's dissociated too. 19 I wake at three streaming with anxiety, lie beside her struggling. That's true. Hold to the moment of the three-sided mirror to be able to believe I'm equal to her. Watch her hoping to go on seeing signs she is uncertain too, dreaming those signs will stop. I'm glad to be saying this. These crumblings are familiar. I don't want to go analyzing with her but I want to shift if I can, and it's as if I could. The Rossini mass tumbling from the living room at Eton Street. As we lie together on the floor there has been accordion downstairs, European fairground music, a lacy line jiggling like the concentrated light lines above water, over laboured lungs of folk. Lines of joyous love reaching to him at the garden, other working relations, Thomas. [We do a complicated pour of the round herb garden pool, base and sides done at the same time] Rob in the midst of the pour. "... But I want you controlling the buckets" I say to him, knowing he's seen how badly Anna and Paddy were placing them. He's thinking in the middle of the job, he, Esshin, Thomas, Tim - the men powers. Because I knew I couldn't handle the wheelbarrows I took on the chute, hauling it down, holding it back. Louie too, I know, is thinking somewhere. Tim signals time out, Esshin is down in the floor shoveling to get a level, and then later he's starting to finish it with a trowel while they go on filling the walls. "Convinced with love" doesn't say - it's a sensation and silence - I'm not sure it isn't hers, because it's not like mine and it's how she looks - solemn and full - tight full of solemnity - inwardly I love you - really not knowing what else cd be done with it. "I want to know whether you know you could have everything you have now without sex." Silence. "I don't think you know what a virginity I still have in some way. If you give me a sniff of the possibility of broaching that virginity you can have anything you want." Silence. "That was an answer to my question?" "Yes that was an answer." Rossini 1863 Petite Messe Solonnelle 21st I can feel her look on my face. She was standing on the lawn in front of the house, with her feet together and head turned, waiting for the postman, in a long white teeshirt. Under it, everyone's classic woman. Round. Heat poured from the brushy gorge. Silk. Slip over the nub. There's nothing complete to do with how beautiful she is between neck and knee. That's what it feels like beside her, not sure I'd be less helpless if I had a lovely big thing to bliss her with. Not helpless at all if she had a lovely big thing to bliss me with. I know how to flatter that. No it's not the petting and adoring, it's the far end of pleasure I don't know how to get to, I'm worried about not knowing how to get to. The herb garden pool standing made and unwrapped. Yesterday blew the interview with Mike [Hoolboom]. "How did you get interested in film?" "That's another question that isn't answerable. I'd have to tell the story of what it was like to get interested in making images. And the story about what it was like to get interested in documentaries. And the story about realizing I could do something like that myself. And I don't really want to tell any of those stories. Not that I couldn't delight in them another time." "Can you tell me how you got from Alberta to London in about three sentences?" "No I can't." Hostile sentence. "What took you to London?" "A lover. What kept me there was London, and wanting to get away from that lover. I don't think there's anything very interesting to say about film. When I read interviews the thing I'm mainly looking for is the tone. It hardly matters what they talk about." I was in a mood to say what I thought, he wasn't in a mood to exploit it. He was wanting me to sound like Richard Kerr! "Funny and light." Boy talk, like he and Rob could set up instantly. 26 Sunday. Louie took my hand to where she wanted and it seemed like she came. Did you almost come, I ask cautiously. After, if I got it right, she came - three? - times more, and seems to like it when I go after her breasts. I had her waist in the crook of my arm, sliding my palm on her upper back or all the other sheets of cushioned skin, the sheets and crooks of. Sometimes her breasts either side of my neck, an unheard-of collar, unheard of but as if heard of, alluded to somewhere. 27 She likes to malign and she likes to adore. But the limit is this, she's thoroughly a girl, is it physical even? That the apricot velvet and blooming reaches disqualify her from picking up Chaos with interest. What I hung onto Jam for even Rob can give me traces of .... I'm at the home place. The man who's bought it and let us still live there has himself moved out of his large house and is living like Indians in a shack full of kids. They're leaving. My mother and I in a willow bench, home made. I take the black horse for a walk, it talks, I think. Out the door and let's run down the lane. While I'm on the yard I see an orange splotch in the sky falling as if shot out of a plane. Another. Passing a storefront hung austerely with old carpets, very beautiful. Shouldn't've mentioned because she's gone in to wake someone sleeping behind the wall. An old nun who works with manuscripts. Think I shd talk to her in German but she replies in American English. Looking at something she unties my dressing gown. Passing Sexsmith on the highway. Looking at toy outbuildings painted like animals or wagon trains. Looking down onto swimming pool tile laid beautifully before they lost the money for the house. "I can see tides have risen and fallen through this town." Walking up Commercial with L after eating in golden light, very smiling, two people who've spent Sunday in bed, feeling I'm forty-five and still doing this, how long? Since Roy, twenty years. What's it for. To notice, that these months I don't have reading energy or fine making. I earned L by organizing and talking. Rob said she's the reward for work I do at the garden. 1st September Hello winter, the cold wet dark and school next week. Already I'm trudging down the road. This summer was not inspired though so full of light. There I checked. It's been inspired some. 4th We went away [to Powell River] - not like traveling alone, I'd look with gentle wonder at the neatness and spark and soundness of the being next to me - into a hotel room with white curtains, red bedspread, blue windows, our things spread unnoticed on either side of the room - the sort of goodness of time that could be ordinary and also a saving both backward and forward. 5 Here's a Lordly Oberon, pink veins and classy air. Philosophy of math. Saturday 8th Last Youth Corps day. What's this. Tired. More than that, abandoned. I woke up with Rob. It is a physical distinction - becoming that - he has. Friday night, Are you free later I say to the machine. "That shy woman who leaves the briefest and quietest messages in the world." He gets here at bedtime. It's different. I get ready, gonna fuck tonight. It's girly. Get my hand on it pretty directly. Etc. Not so good but somewhere, not in me but in my foundation, right. He smelled of blue flame alcohol and was not jealous. "This is a strange relationship isn't it, I'm not going to discuss it but don't you think it's strange?" "I'd been thinking something like that." "What's strange about it?" "I'm not going to discuss it." Laughing. I come back from the garden, Laiwan's in the basement wrastling with her boxes, somebody's under the table, I'm bending under to see. I do something with my eyes I wasn't doing elsewhere, I noticed, holding close and long like I could want to see on and on - you. Glad. That hasn't said it. I loved to see her, she had begun to look like I knew her. 12 I tell her I know it's her talent in listening that gives me to be able to fuck her. Peaceful after she comes, as if I had. The way her dreaming works for us. We peeled off the stream forms last evening with Gary Gust. Turned it on. The water poured off its lip in a curve, a waterfall I hadn't foreseen. Looking forward to planting. Rocks too. Iris, astilbe, fern, Japanese anenome, daisy. File the cement? Paint it? Chisel. Turf. What trees? 14th Friday Excited like Rowen excited about school. And about the color of the weather, about my loves and booking a flight. 18th Mid-September. Mary was here Sunday. Took her with Louie to Bombay Sweets. Didn't see her - so strangely didn't see her at all, took away no picture. Her voice, yes. Willie Matties dying, dropped off the tree, said to them, struggled to say, die klina Apptches, struggled to bring his muscles to laugh. Her unconcealed hurry to get away from [Uncle] Peter's house, where the man without his man abilities stands unable to show himself present, like a ghost. He looked at me as if my integral effort were still in me and I might be the one to know how to do other than turn away. But I turned away. That's a failure I have to use. I don't know that I can work for money and still be ready. The way, last night by the herb garden pool, where a pink hotel stretched and shrank in its night garden, Louie talked about reading Africaans aloud in a park, hearing school reading slow, speech fast, and I felt my immobility in the face of other peoples' real life, the way I depend on them to be able to move with mine because I can only pretend to move with theirs. Louie. If I had years with you would I learn to be ready again? You too. You're as ready to drift into gossip. Separate corruptions and a cusp of alertness. The way I often don't have the rise of energy I'd need not to waste her. Erotic energy too. Last night before she went home getting into a long kiss that had all the direct precise powers of pressure, hands on her head, angles and windings, knowing she'd have secreted her abundant silk for them, but not willing to go into the time it would take. And also I hear myself speaking so badly and carelessly to her, and don't know why. 21 "Naming without language" was the answer to what does the universe call itself. L telling me the story of how I slept. This was the morning I took Rowen to school, came back and sat with Louie in the big chair, discovered my body all over was saying oh Louie - reaching for her. I find I know how to stroke and twist and pinch her nipple 'til I see creases between her eyebrows, and come to her beautiful unlabiated slit with so much assurance of welcome. What else. In the evening, seeing her unexpected arriving in the Vietnamese café where I was having soup with Rowen. While she listened to her friend I could look hungrily at anything about her. ("Your friend is sharp and gentle" said her friend.) And then seeing her with Laiwan dragging the heavy trunk down the steps - both of them. Upstairs in the kitchen the Last songs. Next door, the Chinese woman's security spotlight shining white on emerald bean vines and grey earth. Rowen's voice would come from the lane where he was excited to watch them pack the car. A brilliant unknown moment, from Laiwan, I thought. "You are not backing off as I come forward." I needed to say though it was embarrassing to announce it. As I write, the near wild rose smell of a Louise Odier (quartered, with mildewy bud). 24th A fuckable daughter, I was thinking. Watching the young way she was moving through the rooms when she'd come to stay. It followed that she quivered for an hour with the crisis of needing to know whether it is true that her mother's husband is more necessary to her than her child. She chose me I think because I am one of those mothers who are sometimes sexually complete. There are three things at stake - 1. whether the daughter is essential to the mother, 2. whether the daughter can grow up to be sexually complete herself, with a man, and 3. whether she can be both. The last question has the form of a paradox, because if the daughter identifies with the mother it seems 1. and 2. are incompatible. What I can make out from this is that I am asked to participate in a decision between being adequate to the mother and giving up satisfaction with men, or being helpless to satisfy the mother and looking forward to a satisfied but isolated life with men. It seems that what I'm also asked to do is demonstrate an existence that can satisfy the mother (I said if she let me do that she could have anything she wanted) who is also satisfied by the father, ie as a woman who doesn't sacrifice. Whether this works depends on my being in two places at once. In touching her I must be the successful child and also be the successful mother, ie I must represent the daughter who can, while being responsible enough to let her exist in the pleasure of the fucked child (which is what the mother is with the father). The mirror function twists it but also sort of works, as if in a teaching period. Is it going well? I get to be the child who can by not being childish, which I can tolerate by being childish elsewhere. She is hopeful that she will learn to be the child who can, but she's having to be childish to get the chance to try: that is a bind for her. It's the bind I was in with Jam. I'm more cooperative than Jam, though, and she's less in despair than I was, and we are quite smart together. I think yes it is going well. Joyce is smiling. And I must get ready for when she takes on the other part of her paradox, ie lonely satisfaction with a guy: so that it doesn't cancel what she gives by letting me be able. (I pay later.) How is all this different with a man? He gets to be the child who can by being the husband who can. So simple and automatic unless it's the father he needs to be able to satisfy. Etc. - My Saturday night fix. You're calm yes. - Then I crash with Laiwan. She does it again. I show the jostle of dismay and freeze. A feeble twig comes out of her mouth, I see she knows what it's about. She's going to leave. I know what I could say but I'm not going to chase her. You're angry aren't you. Yes, I'm furious. Feeling it more as I say it. She goes down the stairs and I look at the consequences. That's it for this time though maybe not forever. I won't be at her reading, I'm on strike. She's a spoiled brat in her way. I won't do her recommend either. 'Bye Lai. 25 Witt[genstein] sez infinity is not a magnitude but a way of talking about unfinished operations according to a rule. If it is not a magnitude the > relation does not work. [Greek w] is not a number. You can't subtract 1 from it and get a number. If Witt is right not math but metamath or higher math is phantasmagoric, and if that's so, the stronghold of male specialization falls, and it will have been that it was built in the first place because men have too weak a bridge between the subtilized spaces of natural language and the subtilized spaces of symbolic calculation. Witt had the sort of mind, say, women would have if they took on math without assuming their intuition is inadequate to it. Ie assuming, the way an aristocrat could, that the middle class establishment is fundamentally muddled. Laiwan said she went to a birthday party at a Jewish girl's house and felt she could be no part of rituals she didn't know. "It had no relation to home, your home life was primary reality?" "Yes." I say my home life could not be primary reality, either, because it was structured around the lie that my father was superior to us all. The primary reality was what I could do in books, and also the time between home and school, which never lied. 26 She mopes and sulks. I don't have to go along. 1st October
Two mornings ago, something about infinity and zero neither being numbers, and that gives a clue how to think of the others. 2nd A book of sand. A heap of sand, a congeries. Archimedes The sand reckoner. Of bright dots. Myriad myriad. With [Gk w] the ugly alephs, I feel revulsion like what I feel hearing an ontological proof - it's licensed squalor. 6th Saturday. A doubt. I began saying, Louie's gone home. Was here. I'm left with her music. Not yet but will be. Who tells us how we were sleeping. "Rowen do you know how you woke up? You had an itch by your eye and your finger couldn't find it." She shows it wandering around the socket and across the nose. This morning I went out in the long bright light to the garden, and came back with milk. They were in their beds still. I put the kettle on. There's Rowen in bed with her, two little heads. "Rowen, you pissed your bed! I can smell it. It smells like a mouse nest." Run the bath for him. "Not yet," he says. "You're cold and you stink, come on." "Two birds with one stone," I say, bringing her tea. Later when I get in with her, "Three birds," she says. So Louie, in your journal you talk to me, you say you. When there are so many days I haven't time to write them and so they are lost to this other person. I haven't even written Powell River. I could say how she was standing bare naked bent over at the sink. What does the body say. "You made it so well." She doesn't know everything, she doesn't know it looks like she could do what I didn't. Who's true here, she's the one who courted and waited. But she doesn't love to see me the way I love to see her. She loves something else. What. She loves her freedom that she knows in me. So social you are, so good with people. I woke her Monday getting in with her and she told me what she'd been dreaming with so warm an interest in herself, I was thinking it's the way she's with other people too. There she is tonight in another place making herself a traveler. At every place fewer things. What is it you don't want me to know? I'm pressing about her journal. How much I think about you, she says. In case I don't know she's free all the same. No, I don't think this is right. Writing about her. Why. I could write about the garden today. The blue scabious. Moving little speedwells. Digging beds, loose drained soil, not gluing. The fantasy color around. Planting leeks. Just find a seeded clump under the lavatera, dig it up, break it apart. Poke holes with the spade handle, drop them in. Dusan and I getting the table top on. Turf green after two weeks. In the herb garden the east rose bed lush with poppies as if it's May. Terry interested in thinking about the pool edge. As I'd imagined. Pines turning orange and dropping needles. Rob's apples. Himself in wool shirt and black boots and washed hair. Constant thought - should I move the buddleia, this is the place to put the Celsiana, but the macleaya? Not necessarily in words. In sun in the afternoon. 7th He and I at the big botanical garden going through coldframes or some such box putting our choices into paper bags. We're picking particular colors of some aquilegia-like hanging flower. We've walked in among a class group learning to weed. It snows a powder across the lawns as snow slants over. We're thinking of the beds we're making elsewhere as if by stealth in another botanical garden. Wondering about a white marble fountain with a winged god. Why don't I dream about Louie and often dream about him. She is connected higher. Seeing him from behind, a mysterious being. His beautiful hair, his narrow height, his autonomy, especially that. His hard will. Meantime I'm sitting in Louie's music knowing myself to be mended by her quality's affection. She mended me from Jam, and them too. If I say so. 8th A willow tree I took out and laid down, larger. Can I plant it somewhere along the college banks? We only own this ship he says. Who owns the riverbank? With mud shoals, wet beaked otters resting on a floating plank, a stepped little cliff. As if dreaming gives the seed of a place, I was thinking later. 9th "When I was a child, up until quite recently really, up until I was thirteen or so, I would stop on the street to talk to cats, I'm very fond of cats, I would be stroking them and I'd suddenly have the feeling they were you, and I'd say things that were meant for you." [Luke on the phone] 10th True facts about imaginary objects An objective reality that is neither subjective nor physical Objective - external to the consciousness of any one person Popper world 3, culture "modes of reasoning that are compelling and conclusive" A scientific theory is never proved, only not disproved, though capable of being tested. criticism of inductive foundationalist worries Lakatos local counterexample, global counterexample For formalized mathematical theories the potential falsifiers are informal theories. Identifying mathematics with its model in metamath = first order logic Study mathematically the consequences of an imagined ability to construct infallible proofs. Proofs established by consensus of the qualified. Metamathematics = proof theory The politics antiauthoritarian and demotic 11 She's making supper when I get home, I'm tired, the food is unpleasant, and it's worse knowing she shopped carefully for that horrible lemon pie with a crust, the dead lumps of gnocci. What else, the way I hear myself going along with social motions, a false smile of interest, a screech of false humor. I was touching her without any sense of her, feeling it as a black blank of otherness, thinking to say, I'm never going to know you. It's less than a month 'til she leaves. Wondering about not writing her. Sunday 14th Bob [Sarti] thinking about writing on the garden as art. We've got the [social area] table and bench in. Orange sumac, purple mint fuzzes. The turf is emerald green that was a shabby carpet. We could tile the stream top with slate I wish. What by the greenhouse, daisies? And rhubarb. A platform over the stream, steps up. Flagpole. Yesterday all day working with Eric on the benches. I measure, mark the wood, think it out. Eric makes the cuts. "I'm workin' with my dad" I say to Michael. "You're always workin' with your dad when you're doin' things in the garden" he says. Cantor and the scholastic base of set theory "I love you" sez Rowen. "I love you too" I say politely. "And I love how you look too." "That's very interesting, what do you love about it?" "I was just joking." Michael likes this joke very much. I was watching Street Legal, Rowen was stretching out my undershirt neck shining the kaleidoscope like a flashlight down my chest. Ro-wen! Woke thinking about the paper. What's to say. Moments I can hardly remember. Note this, scattered fear: what I knew isn't holding me together anymore. They were principles. Can I remember what they were? Refusals I don't hold to now. Which? Refusals to speak the way other people do. Is that the whole of it? Rob dislikes what he thinks of as my absoluteness of taste. "You say a plant is worthless. You say someone has no taste. You cut people out. If you died they'd probably name part of the garden after you." He covered his eyes saying that. I pry his hand up, "Why are you being so emotional when you talk about this?" "Because you're saying no one gives you any credit." "You're more arrogant than I am! You're a sexist jerk. You completely take for granted everything that's done for you." The way in the restaurant he was looking at anyone in front of him, she's cute, nice ass. I sucked him off, went to sleep, woke thinking about Cantor, made breakfast, got us out to move the sumac, kissed him goodbye absent-mindedly with a smack. I watch and compare. What happens when I tell him something I've told her? She makes something of it. He flattens it if it's mine. If it's 'objective' he'll make something of it, that is, he'll make something of his own of it. What his blindness must be good for, to allow me the ache it does. And I don't work with her though she works with me. 16th Woken by Melbourne. Talk to Lis. "I'm extremely well, actually. I'm deep in a new film." I'm going to Sydney too, was at midnight cold phoning and excited. At the Vietnamese café a moment I fell into fright. Why she dreams so much about me. Maybe a picture of the time this is, she guessed. An index. I saw myself suddenly taken by gestures - a global doubt - she brings up lemon pie - so she can say, Why did you go along with what was evidently bad? I was thinking too, the way she has never taken on anything I've said about the way it's been living with my funny leg. No one who doesn't see that is seeing me. 18 It's six in the morning, a Thursday before I teach, Baroque music. See how badly I'm writing. It's black outside, sounding wet. Yesterday in class [Andrew Irvine's philosophy of math class at UBC] thinking I liked Rudy, the way he hesitates when he talks. He says he'll take me home. Married. Too bad. I give him my phone number. Epp? he says. He's Voth. Would I be looking for a Mennonite boy? A manly guy with take-charge hands, which I'd doubt he has. I was looking at Peter's mouth too. Dreamed I was lying in a very cheap hotel room having agreed to take customers. I realized the sister who betrays me to the fathers is myself in heat. If Rob = Judy = my sister = estrogen body, then being turned on with him is like being turned on by being turned on. I'm not disapproving. Louie dreamed she was in strong water saving her sister from drowning. But then there was someone else she needed to save so she told her sister firmly to swim on her own, and her sister did. That was the conversation that depressed me as if I knew she'd said she was finished with me. Why I'd be turned on by being turned on. Why not, it's color, which is value. 19th Louie talking a long time, in the dark, on the pillow, about the intelligence she has that is no use to her. No use? What would she want it to do? She won't say. I say briskly I can see what it is - not being intelligent is her way to say she hasn't committed herself yet to do it. That's all. While we're talking I'm saying to her, within myself, Later I'm going to poke you sweetie, so that, when I do, I find myself very steady. The bodies alongside each other are rolling in the same motion, we have our mouths together in a nearly unconscious way. I'm acting and scanning, not roused but clear, listening to her but not for cues, for confirmation that she's there as much as I, noting how much further we've gone. It's interesting how my fantasy studies - loving fathers teaching lovely daughters - are inside out. I thought I was learning to be the raptured daughter. What I've learned about being the skillful fucker, is that it is not an excited state. She doesn't know how to do it yet, but she wd know how to imagine it. Teaching yesterday, the lit-up boys. The boys are liking me. "Why are you writing this down? You already have it in your notes." My students. The intense Thursdays. That boy at the far end of the table who said why shdn't he go to volleyball instead of Schwartz is last out of the room. He says "It's not you, you're fantastic, it's Schwartz," which I know it is. And like to hear him many times saying it. That was in Louie's form. We came back from school and cooked, she at the table cutting things, I moving around by the stove. Tea whiskey raw carrot chicken curry in the oven pot, basmati, so delighted a version of what people do ordinarily - make supper together while they talk about the day. Lemon pudding. - Misery to have Bob Sarti writing about the garden and a blind photographer shooting it, who spent ten minutes posing Paul Kinsella with camera bag at the water rim: East End Artist Creates Nature Park. 27 The seminar and then a Thursday, two nights sleeping in the same bed with L, and then a miasma. She gets into unrelenting tragedy. Why don't I like sleeping with her though I have liked being in bed with her. When I sleep it's as if I have to lock her out. Her black doom is when I don't want to fuck her. In fact it's time to see Rob. I refused to tell her. - Just remembered I dreamed about Evelyn, but what. I was visiting too long, hanging around, copying some writing, until she started indicating I shd leave. At my folks visiting, I'd flown in but there's nothing to do, read their new encyclopedia, math. Saturday, arrangements made. Vagina smacking its lips - though it's not comic but dramatic like having sat down over a volcano as it gets red. 28 When I woke at night, in Rob's nest, I thought Practical erotics is the name of the book of all the loves. It would be a coming out like nothing else. She didn't tell me in Powell River that seeing me walk alongside, wondering how it seemed familiar, she remembered being maybe eight, saying to her mother in the morning that her right leg was stiff and would stay that way forever. "'Why? Did you see another child? Did you hear something?' I walked that way all day. When I was walking downtown with my mother I noticed how people were looking at her not at me." "How were they looking at her?" "They were looking at her with pity and they didn't want to look at me." The way when I sat behind him watching 13 channels on cable my arms along his arms were fitted to sun. Dry heat he gives off - my arms and feet and hands shape themselves to it. I don't forget you hungry friend. It says: am I mad at her? No. Is she mad at me? Yes. Because I'm not physically moved? YES. Saying so it's as if I close the account. You picked me for it. This is your theatre. Then I think, what brutal truth do I owe her? What does it mean that I don't heat for her? You are always going to be unhappy. I owe you no. And then it will go badly. A bad loss. I will seem to have used her. In at least four ways. 1st November "Mirror image." I saw an image of myself with a shape of light over part of the face (upper L). 2nd Looking at something in a dream: creates more information surprising and contradictory. Looking at my hair a white stripe shows up. 6th HD, Le Guin, Cloud of unknowing, Wallace Stevens It's time to go to sleep, not to be washed out tomorrow, Knowledge Network interview, but this was the day, as if it's already been this day for weeks, she left. The gallant kid. Sturdy kid in a windbreaker. This morning in my arms. Like no one has ever. I had my right hand on the small of her back, my left hand on the small of her belly, feeling her move, so slight, so fine, so broad, so plump, so free, so given up, so mine. In her, the way we can, everytime I found the wet slick, nacre, in or not yet. How much, how fast, slow down, you'll always make it. At the bus stop with her, Granville bus. I had my hand along her hand
in her pocket, she put her cold pink cheek along mine, got on the bus. She
was smiling looking back, her false smile. I was looking at her with my
forehead pinched, a face I didn't intend and was glad of, true.
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