8th November 1990
- The smell from her armpit. Other parts will come back.
- she weathered me I whethered
- oh little spirit it hasn't stopped
- she weathered me I whethered
Herb garden sitting yesterday under rain with Marrin Smith, being interviewed [garden show for CBC TV]. David Leach at a little distance listening and keeping that distance because I told Marrin I would speak better to a woman.
The way artificiality freezes speech at the beginning and then it can be primed by the right sort and pace of question.
"I cared about my plot, so I wanted the paths to be right. When I cared about the paths I wanted the design of the rest of the garden to be right. When I cared about the whole garden I had to get into a fight with the city to protect it from developers, so then I had to care who was on the Park Board and who was in City Council, and it ripples out from there." Portentous and inexact and they were overjoyed.
9
I'm seeing sth about the coherence theory, that it says truth is about language, what else could it be about. An intra-language relation. I could say there's non-language knowing, and it coheres too. Differently. And truth is only about parts of language, an area of language. Correspondence is the theory of a divided person, with a gap.
Louie at midnight. Can still reach me. Soho and Westminster with Luke. He talking I can imagine. She was two days very sick lying in Jake's room sleeping. Speaking to her gladly but already at a loss, there isn't time to catch up. And I couldn't decide to say, Louie the way you were in my arms. What I knew she was thinking too.
10
Saturday, a Hindu voice. Lukks upon Rrama as a heerro. It's the week before I go, raining, Rob tonight. Rowen here last night and not wanting to stay over anymore.
Seminar on coherence. Don't have to force myself to read for it, it's on the track.
That Louie is gone. As if I should feel it sentimentally, as if the sense that I should feel it sentimentally might be covering sth I do feel. I liked hearing her voice but at moments I was making conversation with an anachronism.
I can always feel something by recalling her in my arms the last morning, the way she could be gathered into my left arm, close at the breasts and mobile below, with my right middle finger and most of my consciousness slipping in and out of the rings ripples ridges of her girl. The part of the finger finding a smooth walled room under the pubic bone. Now, girl, I have you, I'm going to pattern you, I'm not going to let you thrash. You're going to face the waves steadily one after another slow enough to see the ebb. I know she will and she does. I haven't time to see her face, one instant is all, pulled tight between the eyes, a little face with her living thinking mouth peaked. She doesn't signal and by now I know when she's coming through. That was once.
Then she wanted to do something to me, oh alright I'll take off my pants, but this is going to take too long, it's nice but here is your breast, the skin around the nipple as fine-grained as new, and the nipple to coax, first I have to tease it up, and then I can be quite tough, stroke, pull, pinch, and twist. It's tough itself, sending bolts of feeling into her womb. I know. And her back like a partitioned plum. (All the loving I ever gave out unwanted you brought me back.) And her belly a divided pad of muscle laid under the skin. I know what I will find beyond it. This discrete mouth never closed, marvelously silked, I can never say that strongly enough, what I feel about her wetness, what it's like, the pearliness of the fluid. More than that. All I can't say about the fluid trail she produces to invite me. It slides me into a vestibule, a little porch, a circular place, very wet but decisive. I can't go beyond it by accident, I have to decide. It takes a push. Now, Louie. I'm coming in. I might linger, you might not know how far or how fast I'm coming in. But you know I'm here, I'm going to fuck you.
12th
Louie phoning with quarters at midnight from Amsterdam.
I'm going to see the Australian plants and rocks, animals and birds too is more than I need. I'm going to be on an ancient isolated earth, in an ancient isolated earth looking about at rocks and their twigs of a kind I don't know. As if I might be able to meet a continent.
Melbourne 19th
Said I came for the trees, so far what's wonderful is the food on the street. Dragging, I'm lacking what they call fire. Not the flame but the pressure of the jet from the nozzle.
Say the Cantrills. Ivor and Corinne a pair of something. The house packed, stacked, with his blank portraits. Corinne's fuss. And the others around them, like Chris, a sort of type, but which, as if I've seen him in a legend. Indonesian. The Japanese man last night with a little curvy face under a pile of curls, and hands like a non-western fairy, with fingertips curved back. He said the middle finger is head down to throat. That my midriff is from the lungs. "Sadness, that's my diagnosis." Pressure point at the inside of the thumb, that seems to put a magnetic ripple to the top of the head. He read my pulse across the table, fingers on both wrists, reading at points upstream from each other. He had his head down between his arms listening. "I shouldn't say that" he said. "Say it." He didn't, which was bad of him. "It's healthy" in his light voice, no way to write his accent, but I knew he meant something else, I have no idea what. Takao Nakazawa.
I dreamed the Orpheus film, passages through color and Laiwan's otherworld voice reads words.
Having to know it won't be honour and pleasure among people, I'll have to suffer the Cantrills having pushed me through into a wrong context. Assuming I can ride that but its price is maybe this dislike all around. Knowing that professional ambition and cigarette smoke, London pride, come into the house tonight. A bitter decided fighter. [Tina Keene, who was also staying in Maggie's house in St Kilda's] I will need to call other refs.
Wednesday 21st
Lowan malleefowl, scrubland, heath, clay pan, waterhole, black-faced kangaroo, red-necked wallaby, Mooree Springs, Mooree R, Broughton's waterhole, Wimmera. Terang. Warnambool.
Th. 22nd
What's to say about sitting in a bar in Dimboola, midriff trembling. An ugly bar, carpeted, thickly painted, lino-ed, in yellow. Between the bar stools and the bar runs a gutter into which cigarettes and trash get tossed. They stand together staring up at the races on telly. It's a light cheap bar, glass doors onto the pavement. "The other hotel." Computer must be the bookie. Dripping glasses. What a culture.
So little to say on this trip. I'm here aren't I. The colors of dirt, yellow, red, white, pink, chestnut brown. Silver blue-greens growing next to it. Pitted red-brown rocks, disintegrating pocked rock, with the self-possessed towers of thistles rising from under them. I am five kilometers away from the Little Desert in a bare dry town. Stepping out of the train station door a dry slightly bitter air. Did Louie take my writing spirit away? I'd like a nap. Tonight at Horseshoe Bend, at nightfall, kangaroos will come to the Wimmera.
The way yesterday I walked into the state library and there was Simon, as if I'd followed an inaudible tone straight to the only person in Melbourne I can want to speak to. Mary-Lou at ABC asking good questions, when I finish an answer giving a very slight nod to say, Yes, I heard you. "How can there be an erotic film without people in it?" "Well, in actual erotics, at least as I know them, there are no people either."
They say of horses, by Lord Runner out of River Queen.
-
They can no longer visit the sites from which they derive the power to do such things as to send men up in a puff of smoke.
patterning law
father patterns, the dancers who wear the designs
mother patterns, singers and painters
singing about the origin that gave the land form, shape and meaning
burst into song and dance and go into trance states when they sight their country
Dreaming activity on a particular tract of land is assumed. If her bush name is also the name of a site. Often it is a person who is to assume responsibility for the country who has the reactivating dream. Recurring nature of the song which is derived from the country. Property dies.
The land was held as a trust, to be kept alive.
Victoria Hotel Dimboola, Sunday
The beautiful beautiful night, last night I was there. If I had been able to be in it. Most of the time retracted or inert, not able. If not the sight can I remember the feeling? Perfectly still and wide and clear. As if it went on for hundreds of miles as still as that. The trees resting. I couldn't raise will, I couldn't overbalance slightly on the side of will. I should have gone walking. I couldn't bring myself into energy. I did see but so much less than what could have been made. When I had the camera, or wrote Louie, I saw more. Have I forgotten, or does it take longer than I had, and have to go thru fear and sadness.
Yesterday walking out. Stiyve of the ears, boy scout, bringing out my stuff as I walked. Hot and far, alarming. The amazing clacking-pod wattle-tree. A very small cabin and outside its gate on the road an old tree half dead, a young one, small, and then across again a perfect full wide one, a lovely tree shaped out wide from the stem by stiff minute grey-green acacia leaves. Dry orange pods in wind-organized waves. Also bright green scented liveness of the pines, outside the park. In it the small bright green cypressy trees, and the dark-needled wood-flowered pine.
Squatted on the pink sand the very wide banksia bushes, leaves serrated very small-y, hard like holly. Long branches reaching wide then curving up, interior holding hairy balls the color of rabbit fur, grey with brown tips. Ants emerging from littered thickness, rabbits probably. A self-possessed bush holding land at least its own width around it.
Orange pink bottle-brush very beautiful and right against olive greens, actual olive color of the river. Banksia, olive-tree silver-green of its own leaves. From my bed site the last night an underlayer of rangy bottlebrush, spots of coral color in twilight pink-headed galahs dropping down among them from the white twists of gum trees. Then that color of pink in bands behind complex black lace, round-edged, and in streaks in the fading higher sky. The way each evening the wind stopped when the sun set. Blessed quiet. Birds' voices. And then they stop too. The ants carry on silently all night, crazed things, hinged robots. Earlier nights I heard large footfalls that would have been emus, which look good running. So do kangaroos. The small kangaroo that went on feeding on lowest leaves of a banksia. It saw me and tried to sneak away, did that on all four feet, the front feet/hands so small it's tipped forward into a comic evasive mouse. So evidently trying to move without noise. Then it gave up and just ate.
The bones I saw in the olive field, that I first thought a sheep's, had a long vertebrate tale.
Another hairy-ball plant which amid stiff dry grey bristles opens smooth lovely mouths a few at a time. There will be dead mouths, recently opened ones, a few hard swellings that will open later and in the dead hair still others completely hidden.
What I dreamed lat night in lambswool envelope in Dimboola. Brakhage had moved into Kinderwater's place, three babies. I'm thinking to buy a place in my country. It's future, Peter Epp's place built over with a restaurant, something like that. Huge towers up the road toward my place, warrens tho', small poor apartments in stacks. Further are round towers very high, square-round. As if the future is raiding the present for good stuff they don't have, like wool, wood, natural substance.
As I fell asleep a snatch of a view of (a woman with) long wavy hair a faded oval brown and grey moving away across a desert. After that v faint imprints of faces, half-faces v slight, banksia people.
27
Only a week more. Tonight it's night city, head out the train window, black glass office flashes. Conductor is wearing a self-conscious hat, they come to welcome you personally. Liked the glass of wine last night and am having riesling on the street, looking at young men.
Gardener at the Royal Botanical herb garden, two earrings and a secateur holster. Marilyn singing Heat Wave, Tony was talking across the table, leaning forward with his palm down reaching across to me. My hand was against the undersurface of the table unconsciously palm up against his. I dream I visit his sister, he comes home early in the morning dressed in a tux. Think I'll get in bed with him, I know he's gay, be nice to curl up with him in his shorts. Grew up in the back of a shop and wants animation to reach the kid he was. Not a good film. Corrine loudly, "Hisses and boos for a dreadful programme." Poor young persons in their social clothes.
28
Today is sad and worried. Lonely and neglected, as if. As if I don't know how I'm seen and think it might be as poor, ugly, old, inconsequential. It might be the weight of these boots, something else, my legs ache after any walking. Afraid of nerves dying. The way I stagger if my eyes don't hold me up. Heel cracked. Is it because Sidney said no in the end?
Looking ahead to doing the show, with dejected sense of how again I have to go through feeling how unlike me they are, so what is love and wonder for me is blank discomfort to them. "I'm wondering if I can say the films love me" said Louie. Michael crying when he saw Trapline.
"Do you really not think we're going to go on?" I said what I really thought was she would go on to someone better, I meant a man.
I'm indulging now, since I'm sad anyway. I didn't say these moments as they came. "There is something I haven't told you, but only because I haven't got round to it." She said she thought, now Ellie is going to give me something. It was a proposal to take on each other's social talk when we hear it, sometime, when there's time.
The last Sunday when we got roses from Dennis, then went on up the road to the Musqueam reserve, took a footpath to the river and around, came back to the bar seeing last ivory light on the poplars, the way a lombardy blew open and closed. She so cold, pulled up against me so I could put my hands around hers. Then we drove up and down Broadway looking for a restaurant, went to the Vine on 4th, had a glass each of retsina, ate half each of the other's plate.
I can see her body but I can't see her face. I can see her in windbreaker and her always well-fitted pants walking ahead of me in the slot between building and fence. Buoyant, a boy. Her grey shoes. I can see her bent over the tub washing her face, the hollow between ribs and belly, her solid legs. Her breasts transfixing me, anytime. I apologize to her for how much I loved them. I don't think a man wd dare love them as much as he does, but I did, and she could if she wanted hold onto me with them.
I was lying next to her on the last morning with my eyes closed going up and down her body to see if there was some part I didn't know well enough to remember. Your lovely face, she said. Something about how she said it, it was what she meant but was it the language she intended? As if not. That she can't speak to me is so much a loss, what's the point of writing her, it doesn't go from one thing to another laughing.
Her teeth. White square teeth.
Presence is joy I thought this morning. The way last night leaning out the train window was joy.
Chatwin and Diane Bell saying songs are line across a landscape. A line travels, a song is a line etc. That was 1978 or 79.
Friday 30th
At writer Gerald ---'s film, writing, horseracing, silks, marbles, and Catholic chasubles. Importance. But sitting next to John Anderson smelling him, underarm sweat, I was mooning up and down Louie's body 'til I realized it was likely his smell getting to me. Then I could steep in it and enjoy the pink. Drooping my head over by him etc.
1st December
"One of the maimed, the contaminating, she did not like looking at him." But she did like to and they do and don't. Alright, about the films: [the program I curated]
- All my life 1966 American Bruce Baillie
- current silent 1986 EE
- river 1989 Phil Hoffman
- Trapline 1976 EE
- Pictures on pink paper 1982 Lis Rhodes
- Dula 1984 Renny Bartlett
- No.5 reversal 1990 Josie Massarrelli
- current silent 1986 EE
Very uneasy after, anguish, films I love when I'm alone seeing them, are unbearable when I present them. Robert Nery gold line spectacles pronouncing so righteously, sen-su-al. There should not be beautiful images for horrific stories. Why not? Life regained would love the creep of light over a door frame. "This is a very old-fashioned story about the conflict between mind and the senses. We do not have to choose between them!" I exclaim. But how uneasy after. As if I was stupid in my answers.
Robert Nery is finely beautiful to look at and the woman with him persistent. She said, "To be concentrated, does it have to be slow?" "It comes from both ends, when you're concentrated it isn't slow. When you're tense it's slow. You make it slow to get the concentration. The state that makes one want to take images in the first place is that state."
The anguish is the exposure of my loves and meanings to dissent. The bodies get up in the dark and vote against. I was opening the door to them and closing it after.
Their values also are feeling my contempt - I should remember. Seeing the audience arrive, the gross, the red lipsticked, thinking, you'll weed yourselves, it's not for you, you manic smokers.
2nd Sunday
Last night walking up and down small tropical streets, small gardens packed with interesting stuff, small houses. Looking at them with longing, the little houses. It was evening light. Honeysuckle, jasmine, a lime tree, a lemon tree, red bottlebrush, palm, tree fern, scented geranium. After buying a book on psychic self defense, to learn to put an envelope around myself before tonight. Going forward helplessly knowing I will have to feel hated - here I'm stopping and battling, not liking my words, doubting - all thru these days feeling an insignificant spirit stiff and immobile, holding onto a past real life. Lonely, positioned wrongly, having lost everything I gained then,
3rd
[the notes in origin multimedia show] I saw faces in the audience I could have confidence in - a thin man who nodded, the man with dark hair back who I knew was a writer, the fright face forward, James Kalish. I went up and talked at the beginning holding myself on those faces. Said they could escape after 17 minutes, to weed out the people who'd make the rest uneasy. Some went out, some came in. Then we went on in the dark one thing after another. I was hearing the voice well enough so I knew they were hearing it, Peter Tyndall I thought was hearing the Hegel. I heard the voice shift (was it in night horizon) as tho' at a point where I had absorbed or matched Jam. A female voice that had taken long reaches without leaving behind girl's love of place and person.
I want to say how I've become a woman who likes young men and is liked by them - my technicians, the train conductors, like students. I look at them with a particular pleased openness they feel. It isn't only men and young men but it is mostly. But Lizette and Bridgit. The women's makeup and hair or their boring insistence put me off.
4th
After the show I dreamed - what I remember - my mother had had a cancer abraded off her forehead. Olivia and Don say I can join them.
5th
Last Wednesday sleeping in the high narrow hotel room at Orbost, window open to spiced moving air, I dreamed the large building on Peter Epp's land, that often returning variation. I am on a porch, have been working. Trudy comes out - I resist writing her name - and I think to go back in but I say, Did you know I just came from Australia? She knows. When I go to the large abandoned building kids and vagrants have been using, there's a phone ringing on the second floor. I answer it, it's for a man who also answers on another line. I see the place set up with electronic piano and other parts, cleaned up. A jumble of sleeping bags thrown down to the first floor. Yell at the man that he can't take the space away from the neighbourhood. He says their bid to have it for artists' space is just about confirmed. I make a yelling speech - an electronic piano, even, the kids and neighbourhood.
The men are wearing blue cotton singlets here, like the one I wore in my glamour days after Luke was born. There was only one in London.
Yesterday morning in Bairnsdale, on the river, the trees screaming, a sound so high frequency that if I turned my head I could find it in the shell of my left ear. Walking around the tree staring up. A big solid insect unmoving on a branch - big. A path along the river out to a place where there were flats planted with long row of potatoes, squash, and then a slope thick planted with fruit trees, native trees, and then some kind of a house. Lemon trees, beautiful lemon trees.
By the Snowy River last night, on beaten mud overhung by big willows, two goannas running on very wide-spaced short legs. Evening on the sandbar, lying on a grass hummock looking at a long oval cloud made of dabs, the river sliding in a brown sheet, voice of a man swimming with his dog, thinking of Luke and Mary.
Walking out in the aft, looking for forest, I find deep unified grass, bare curves of it. Orbost is not where I shd'v been, I missed a stop between here and Bairnsdale, it's summer, that's all. Last night after the hotel was dark I came downstairs barefoot onto the street, walking on grass, one more day of summer. And I haven't found a red earth bank. There was one from the train so red orange pink deep and furrowed, unpredictable, with grey or sand colored fields close by.
Vancouver 8th
Shaitan's black light is fear.
Hebrew enemy, adversary. sathanas to oppose, plot against
deofol Gk diaballein to slander, across to throw
Lucifer light-bearer, planet Venus as morning star
A white star in black space, turning slightly. The phosphorescence of fear in womb and solar plexus.
A hit of fear. Immanent danger, pain, evil, violence.
"deep reverential awe and dread"
faer peril, sudden attack. faerie fata fatum
Fear because I haven't been working - three weeks of the old sort of life but idle, not tracking something - picking up old interests feebly and dropping them - spending money - ashamed. I wasn't ashamed as the tape ran in the dark, I loved the shapes of the reading voice and I loved what was written - I loved giving the time I made alone - but I am not in my present a being I can love - the journal is dull like them, the dull people - like journals I've opened and closed - I wondered if my company makes me dull - no I have the company my dullness deserves - no I've looked for life in sex and got it and am live there but not looking out of airplanes or facing spirits or dreaming or writing - distaste, not liking how I write Louie or read her, distaste writing journal - ashamed of the piece Bob wrote, ugly compromised photo they used - "examining something" - ashamed to be seen participating badly and without distinction.
Dreams while I was gone, the built-over future of native land, the empty building at Peter Epp's, the electronic piano.
-
Aboriginal people walking a land for a long time
Side by side with the giant marsupials
incandescent horizon
swift flare of death fear
- next instant I'll die
- calm and watchful
9
Have to think about publicity, this photo, Bob's piece, the film program at the Alliance.
What is it about Bob's piece. Lies and inaccuracies throughout. What about this picture? I change my mind. It seems grim and old, then it seems uncompromised and strong. It's the old woman of the left side. I wanted to look amazingly unworn so I'd be assured of living right.
The film program. I was frightened introducing it because I hadn't gone through fear and realization before it, I knew I was unconscious in it, of its interpretation. Lying beside Rob last night realizing about Robert Nery and the woman with him, that they might have been in the initiated mind I learned and left behind with them, those people [T C and R]. Why does it have to be slow she asked. Is it appropriate to eroticize torture he asks. Not that they were clear but that I wasn't there to answer them as I could have if I'd prepared rightly. What did that mind know? And how do I not know it now? And what does it have to do with beauté du diable. I was remembering it in the panic and sadness of not fucking, and then having it wide and solid in me gave me cheerfulness back though not sensitivity. It's a state of realizing one's pretensions are covering inferiorities of desire. So the show was saying this is how I like to be fucked. But actually I know that. I said erotic is deep pleasured attention and political is intelligent value. So what was wrong with the show? I am not recovering the feeling, which was a memory. This Japanese something is a couple of phalluses, and I'm finding it prickles, well .... I do examine it with that look.
The Blackfoot napi likely from an expression describing the hue of early morning light before the sun rises. First light.
Chemical unsortedness. If body is structured to evoke 'conflicting' states, if light does that.
Louie's letters are solemn and mine too, horribly. Fergit it.
[Eva Pierrakos notes:
responsibility for the less-developed one
break up but only when you understand
blame, don't do it or you'll be unaware of it being done to you
Difficulties always signal something unattended to.
The moment a relationship is experienced as irrelevant personal growth will falter. At any moment the partner is a mirror to the inner state of the self.
the adventure of learning the other soul
whether past some point you use your will to search further, inner activity and alertness
The inner source supplies you with every smallest detail, rich feelings, everything.
Fearing new obligations.
Fearing it will not really be new.
You can make fear give way to aliveness by letting yourself be empty.]
Pierrakos Eva 1990 The Pathwork of Self-Transformation Bantam
-
What breath agrees to.
Learning comprehensive love with people.
The religious voice being an other to be heard - I mean the doctrinal, Mary's etc.
Worrying about spirit means something.
If the left hemisphere, symbolic mastery, is in us structured as a man, then feminists are in a difficult situation in relation to their own competence.
Doing something because of the disgust and revolt and observing how it goes. Like Xmas pres's for M.
Looking at light moving turns off the descriptive systems.
- Someone there on the left side
- sad because locked up
- 'old' because earlier - from before
- knows things I don't
- sad because locked up
More intelligence into teaching.
I'd like to not try so much to do men's things.
Dorothy Richardson is female intelligence.
Beauty is a relation to sex.
What is Elfreda's job? Deception. Of me.
She's a self image.
But this is a good description.
Could I see her.
Thinking of calling her before Joyce.
No one has loved me rather than her.
That's not why I've been so jealous.
She can take slides but not write.
She's a disembodied spirit.
Is Louie going to come back and love me again.
Age I was when I changed my name.
10th
Came out of yoga in grey morning light and saw a flame standing high over roofs to the south. The house of disorder on Hawks. Neighbours standing on the brick plaza, faces water-swollen from sleep, came out without combing their hair. Who's living with who, who is friendly with who. Firemen in wet stiff canvas. A grey-haired man coming from speaking to the fire chief says to his friends, She's still in there. It's finished. Her husband when he arrives from his job walks first to the ambulance, opens the back door, closes it. Stands in his letter carrier hat next to the fire chief both staring at his house. Men on the roof chopping holes, flames still appearing in an upstairs room. He looks the way I think I would - well, that's what's happened.
-
Frank's journal.
So particular and ephemeral, not anywhere I've been, but as if a psychic address.
It's that other person on the other side of the brain?
Begins with a breath that descends to the solar plex.
A mind that knows more than I do and lives in my body would like me to be more disciplined in work.
Would I have to live the rest of my life in helpless fear.
Today I know where going under is going to. Why it's a poet who goes there. Why she dies on the way out. 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.
Smoke. The other soul is the one from before.
Voice.
When light shells are led into light of course they are dissolved.
11th
In Edmonton cheap rooms downtown, an airy river. Some job I could take, work before it. An oilcloth cover on a table, small sprigs of flower on a lot of white. Ed talking to Mary, both on a slight platform. He sitting on his legs is toward her, they look quite interested in each other.
I interrupt to ask about the job, they wonder why I'd want to live in Edmonton, say I wouldn't be able to get funds for film much. I say I don't want to make anything too often because I don't want to be famous too soon, it's hell being famous. I like Edmonton because it's not booming. "I have a nice feeling about this place." And also I have no doubt I'll be famous in the end.
A series of photographs of open closet doors in Strathcona, like old houses, wallpapered eaves, old varnished doors. In each a beautiful Chinese case or wardrobe of some kind, red lacquer.
13
Jam has died. I'm sitting with her. For some of us, people can move and talk after they're dead. Others can't see it. What about her. I can't remember what I ask and she says. (A man, a DP with little people stuck into his hair at the back of his head, is saying how he used to visit her. She could understand him, "She make joke.")
There's a book she's published since I knew her, a 'she' in it of course, photo at the front, very bright and smiling, shorthaired, smiling mouth. I see it chagrinned, where's her dull bewildered man. Grainy drawings of a brown sandstone church she's known with the next woman, "a prairie." What it's like sitting with her, her slow movement (writing this against resistance - resistance to being awake). The way she talks from far away but with heart. It's her but she's not among us fighting for a place, that's finished.
I go to her funeral after most have left, Renee asks why I don't have anything to do with the community. Trudy large in a tight lace dress complaining I've been with Cheryl again says she's inviting them for a week, Don and Cheryl. I turn away feeling then that will be it for Cheryl. A young Renee with high long tits and high round bum, leaving. Oh it's Joey, over there being moved by a man from the funeral home. Kader? I see a thin curled body lifted, hair falling over the face, not Kader, Jam.
I find her in the corridor on a stretcher, sit with her there. She's farther gone, very thin. Can you still talk? Moves her hand toward me. (The way she's been living is partly present, I feel a house and women from other dreams.) As if what was there with us when she's dead is the feel of her. When I'm leaving someone tells me the last woman she was with was called Susanna, something unusual about how it's pronounced.
-
Once upon a time there was an egg and one day it was walkin' down the street and it met a dinner table. And the dinner table and the egg walked down the street (thumpity thump) and they met some plates. Then the egg and the dinner table and the plates walked down the street and they met some forks and some knives and some spoons. Then they all walked down the street together and they met some cups. The egg and the dinner table and the knives and forks and spoons and cups walked up the street and they were all so hungry that they just sat down in some chairs - this story doesn't have a happy ending for the egg - and then they ate the egg.
15th
Eating desperately, junking myself. Skipping through books in distaste. What's the application I should have. Not sex, I've hardly looked at Rob the times he's been here. Not the garden sunk and rotting in disorder. Stopping and asking like this is alright, but then I feel the cold in my right leg. I'm wanting spirit travel. A clean bright order in this room.
Look how brilliant the glass wave.
[Language notes:
Goldberg "descriptive system"
David Wright phantasmal voices and wind 1969 Deafness
Present sign in right visual space, "higher visuality" right eye
Gestures before verbal language, first signs at 6 mo
Bellugi induction of the latent structure of sentences, "the very intricate simultaneous differentiation and integration that constitutes the evolution of the noun-phrase"
Luria theory an ascent to the concrete, climbing a mountain, newer and wider views]
- he sang
- his way there
- home
- to the sense of
- travel
- my journey is
- littered with
- the particulars of
- other times
- how it's done
- nothing else
- free run and
- close care
- his way there
Dreamed last week unnoted, visiting Opa and Oma - but haven't they died? He's sawing away at a window frame, she's walking across the yard. It's nice to see them.
As if Jam who is dead was my ability to spirit travel, and Louie who stays in touch is my age when I began to learn it. (The books I gave her.)
16
In Australia the afternoon light in the workroom - white and blue bed, white orchid, sunporch doors open, the windy sea. Queen Anne's lace, blue morning glory, backyard weeds, seeing them from the kitchen, green teapot, dates dropped on the sidewalk at the MacDonalds.
Coming out into the warm night out of the station at Bairnsdale, dopey on the train and a stranger emerging with people who are being met. I'll just walk out and there'll be a hotel.
The afternoon in Terang, station platform, sitting on a baggage wagon putting on my shoes. Silence when the train is gone, birds and scent. First cross the tracks to the country road, blooming wattle with the smell of a room in London. Main street with an ash tree boulevard down the centre, my first sight of the form of a country town. Commercial traveler's hotel. Seeds in the hardware store, Queensland blue pumpkin. Countryside showing past the houses, pasture, hills. The shops are North London in Sexsmith, ice lollies and barbecue chicken. A library closed except Saturday morning and Tuesday night.
Being so excited that day to be going out into Australia. Thistles and red soil. A part of the country that's so rocky walls have to be made for miles, to clear space for the sheep. Pine rows quite black for shade lengthwise or crosswise or along the ridge of a hill. When the door was open between cars the relief of smelling the land, pine and grass. coming into Terang looking at a house beyond the tracks, curved zinc roof, water tank, bottlebrush, yard. Like the farm beside the tracks outside of Sexsmith. I say I'll jump off but is there time. Run for bag and boots under the seat, train's moving but not fast, I'll do it. In my red socks.
The girl who sat opposite me, freckled, with big teeth and a leg in braces. Stared. I'd seen her in the station throwing herself along on crutches. I'd stared inconspicuously but in the train I'd see her staring with heart and soul. Children in trains and trams often staring.
Lizette in her skinny leggy quick and hoarse ways. Brigit. Steve and Simon. Small-eyed Ivor competing. Steve at the show lying on the floor. The office and its elevator woman and Flinders Alley with curry and a green store. The early mornings coming up Collins feeling the downtown-street café sheet-glass cosmopolitan amenity of the place - Londonish. The alleys. England in the thirties said Ray. Yeah! The cottages are. Suburbs and their trams. Crowds along the rail at a tramstop in the middle of Swanston with flies trying to drink from their eyes and nostrils and the corners of their mouths.
Beautiful Tista at the Victoria Hotel. The wonderful grape vine dressing the verandah. "A dry ginger, please." Then the first people I meet are a black aboriginal who doesn't speak and a redhaired one who says "It's all different now. You used to be able to walk through there with a gun."
"I'll drive you out, later." I buy food. Am in behind the counter at the grocer's washing out the pineapple and butterscotch containers he's giving me for water.
Tista brings me past what he says aren't farms, it's too dry. I don't know where the Little Desert will begin, anything could be it. We come to the dip around the hut and it's full of birds. There's the brown Wimmera River. He says parrots. "It's wonderful here." Shows me where the kangaroos will be and where they were.
When I am coming up along the river before dark looking at banksia and bottlebrush, at a distance from the kangaroo plain still, are those figures or not? I have to wait to see them move. I see them run, tail to balance head in their flight, stop behind a tree seeming to think themselves hidden. Stare.
Then fire, burnt food, creeping down the log into the river, washing, wind, flies, cold, heat, boredom, retreat, ants crunching underground under my ear, louder than you'd imagine.
Whatever kind of seed brush that is, that opened its wood mouths in bristle, a few at a time.
It's Sunday early. First bluing of the air outside, inky and showing lights up around Broadway. Water sounded in the pipes and warm air in the vent. Oven hissing. I bring milk from the porch: a touch of cedar in the air, sawmill days.
Last night looking for life cleaned the work room, lit candles, tasted whisky, looked at KD in rapture, thought toward who looks for who, said I need you beside me to be able to journey, it's not that you're what I'm looking for. Are you someone there? Are you sad? Yes. Why are you sad? A pinching between the eyes. You can say how but not why. Are you sad because you're locked up? YES. The old woman of the left side, that I didn't like to see. But she's old because she isn't seen. And because she was there before, ancestral. Will you help me? Silence. You want me to help you? Alright. She didn't say her name is Elfreda though I could see it might be. Why don't I know how I look. Prickly tendrils moving on the right side of my neck and head.
-
Those friends had to possess a quality which he called 'spin,' a certain obliquity or irony of approach.
18
Nausea reading for math paper.
I want to know about the psychology of math, what kind of person is good at it and what else they'd be good at and what they wouldn't be good at. What kind of intelligence it is.
[Opposite, math notes from Howard Gardner:
mathematical reasoning ability, logical-mathematical intelligence
math ability goes with nonverbal and verbal reasoning, mechanical comprehension, spatial ability, abstracting ability, field insensitivity or detachment
unlike high verbal skill does not necessarily predict general intelligence
neuropsych of math talent, very high scorers on math-logical reasoning: left handed, myopic, allergic, first children or well spaced male
styles of calculating prodigies, visual or auditory-rhythmic-motor
Korzybski says: first-order abstraction is unspeakable, be aware of abstracting and from/at what level
Numbers are exact, specific, unique a/symmetrical relations abstracted from the unspeakable.
So correspondence notions think they correspond to a nonabstract and that's what correspondence means to them.
Analogies between kinds of analogies.
Von Neumann: "Your kind of visualizing mind is not right for seeing this. Think of it abstractly - what is happening on this photograph of an explosion is that the first differential coefficient vanishes identically and that is why what becomes visible is the trace of the second differential coefficient."
Given a knowledge of how to count and later a few definitions, any child of average ability can go on and construct practically unaided the whole science of arithmetic.
Mathematics begins when one finds proofs for mathematical facts.
The actions one can perform upon objects, the relations that obtain among these actions. The propositions one can make about actual or potential actions, and relationships among those statements.
Piaget: object permanence, classes of objects, counting as mapping sets. These are called concrete operations as long as for instance images are used. Then abstract operations on symbols.
"Almost no one is capable of doing significant mathematics."
- Is math ability something to do with masculinity
- Is beauty a relation to sex
- Is mathematics something like the opposite of sex
- Do erotic beauty and mathematics compete for the use of the brain
- What is the value of the intelligence of beauty (10c)
- Is beauty a relation to sex
Reading philosophy the incommensurability of systems.
Langer says math developed separately from language, comes from the feet - one-two, one-two - and then fractions being danced, and when it got to drumming got the use of the well-developed cortical hand areas. And then counting on the fingers took a leap into arithmetic when it got joined to grammar/logic.
Kinship structures as mathematical knowledge. Kinship logic. Sets.]
-
Reading Life of one's own feeling I'm on the other side of that kind of exploring time and am looking for how to be traveling though in maturity. Disgusted with that period. As soon as I write this I'm angry, like wanting to stamp my foot. Thought of being a teacher - I can enjoy it but what is it, I don't respect the tradition, it's at best liking and seeing the students, and that's random.
What I still brighten to is thinking of learning about consciousness. I don't have to do Kant next term. I can start reading wider. But then I have to not stop for the summer. The thing is I want to experiment not just read. If I could feel I was really launched .... I could make up a program in all excitement, find a supervisor, Guenther.
the sight of some gently moving thing
awareness of themata (held with obstinate loyalty) helps one to explain the character of the discussion between antagonists
Joanna Field 1934 A life of one's own republished 1986 Virago
21st
Thinking I could write here about doings, how-to, (instead of describing). Describing is past, project is future, invention wd be present.
-
Personal songs are also the embodiment of an acquired vision with great power for its fortunate owner.
Songs of special, highly personal nature evolved out of the consummate self - the self of open, calm privacy and centredness. Such songs are not shared.
Dream songs like songs of vision are sought.
The brave song or death song sung only at times of utter desolation.
- aphrodite's garden volume 11: 1990-1991 february-january
- work & days: a lifetime journal project