| aphrodite's garden volume 11 part 5 - 1990-1991 december-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
22 December 1990 Korzybski. The way I've been interested in the way consciousness is misprogrammed. How it's unknown. How I could make social life interesting to myself by remembering that. (Not only asking but testing.) The different functions in language of invoking and abstracting. 23
Tonight after the aft working with Eric in the kitchen. The worst of the kitchen I'm fixing. Bange for Louie, wondering if it's safe to be. No, is it unwise? It just says oh LOUIE. Wanted to talk about her to Eric. This is what's called missing. When last have I missed anyone. I told Eric I was painting the kitchen because last summer I cooked and ate and talked with someone in it. And, the feeling is, sometime I might again. What worries me is coming forward like this I'll spoil her reason for coming after me. 25 A dream three nights ago. Seeing a little white rabbit run, fall, down a bank away from me. Yesterday Peter Epp's place, the downstairs is the Valhalla house wrecked, windows broken, my things taken. Is the table gone. As if they shot 22 pellets at the front of the house. Then I go upstairs to the long hall turned into rich artists' places. A woman comes toward me where I reach the top of the stairs, bends to pick up a bit of something. I walk with her looking north through windows in people's places, talking worried about men shooting at the building. She says it's because this is so beautiful - the fields behind the building, at the level of 2nd floor as if it's ground floor. They've made the land more beautiful, smaller fields, a curved cut with triangular stooks on one side, wild wheat she says sown in among grasses on the other sides. I am crying as I come to the end of the long space and look down a parking arcade ramp to where a car is parked across the exit. And wake. This morning: I'm running up a slope, a man I don't know running just ahead (but who does he remind me of) (it's John the topologist) boosts me by the arm just where I can't quite make the long leaps up onto a ledge and then a rail. It's night. At the top of the slope he jumps on me beside a car. We're pleased how we moved. But someone shows the sky with a long curdling cloud seeming to be falling, was it seeded with something destructive? We dive under a little roof but that building seems to be beginning to slide. I run across to another and look back at their roof fallen almost to the ground. The two men - we come out and stand together looking around - should wash off the curdy foam. Splashing water over our arms. 26 Day after. Eric helps with the kitchen, two days. It's new white, the greasy ceiling's gone. Eric put his mark on these days by coming for lunch drunk. Weeping, stupid, then belligerent. Rowen and I on the seabus, the ocean cold and heavy, ducks, gulls, flying very low. A crescent of snow on Crab Beach that Rowen recognizes by the cranes. The bus barn so cold. An anti-abortion billboard fascinating. I tell Rowen we're going to a house with four TV sets. Climbing the black hill in the dark, snow on the side streets. "I think it's there." Hedged so thick. We knock. In the light realizing I'll have to start moving my mouth. Chris in a beautiful hat, "What do you want to drink?" Brings sloe gin with cranberry, smiles. I can taste plums in it. Jeff making a fire. Pat says to Rowen nicely "I'm the mom in this house." It's a nice evening altogether, I have Rowen of my own and he's being wonderful. Look at him on Geoff's chair learning a game. The brother men aren't being drunk stoned kids, there isn't a desperate spirit, or if there is I'm not in its path. Chris lies down with his eyes closed. It's not desperate and not in my way intense either. I'm not stewed in sex as sometimes, the young men aren't hypervisible. I'm wearing a red shirt. It's not so long a time. Rob's hat looks like it's mine. I don't feel he's my link, mostly, but there's a while I'm wanting my hand down the back of his shirt, because of the warm shine in my chest and hands. Rowen so independent and poised. "I'm going to sit here and my mom's going to sit here." On his left. Geoff brings MacPaint and Ro learns to double-click an icon, single-click a color. I don't thank for presents I don't like. Natasha looks scared of me. Carole bores me with generalizations 'til I find reason to slip sideways. Loading dinner plate avidity. In the back seat of Chris's car, in the dark, Rowen speaking forward between the seats, "I'm so excited! What I like best about the kind of things that have wheels and motors and ----, like cars and buses and trucks" (is that you can go places on them) - something like that - a long sentence with nested clauses, that unfolds to my wonder as we're slipping down the Mountain Highway. There Rob was in the light of my Christmas tree last night folding himself naked down into bed with penis as in cave paintings horizontal and long. I wasn't needing to have it, not at all, evading and going to sleep. This morning, tho', after tea, I say I've been remote and I've been missing Louie, and when he touches my nipples I know I'm there again. I realize tho' it's the time of day Louie phones, if it rings I'll answer. It does. Two minute touch. "It's so hot here it must be snowing there." "It is." What can be done in a two minute touch. "How have you bin?" I say. "I miss you quite a lot." "Are you sleeping closer to the river?" "I'm sleeping by a cliff, the moon is so bright I can walk around." I go back to the real whole of fucking, have one arm around him in the affectionate way of companions. We go gently and thoughtfully in and along. Long later when I've collected him again and it's after a stop so I'm swelled up with sensitivity (my fantasy is, like a woman with a second husband, who whispers to the brother at dinner, I want you to be slow tonight) I come with so much laughing and blowing he says "Should I call the ambulance?" "You are the ambulance, you saved me." That, how deep and unknown it got, and the graces of what he does and I do, and yet the stupidity of conversation on the way. Looking together at the book of space pictures he gave me. 27 Louie's letter today. First I read for love and sex and threat and then the next time through I see and feel her open to land and night, and love with her, and eyes prickle saying so. Now check whether there's something to say I haven't said. I didn't feel the prickle of longing writing to her. "An unsaid of how I've been showing you your own loving as I feel it. How. The times I've said 'loving', I've said it feeling yours. Too. And how that's scary." So aware what I feel with/toward her is close to a very dangerous lie. Maybe close to a staggering truth I don't realize. In a way it's a lie of feeling because I don't realize the possibility of truth. What would it take to realize. I'd have to realize in all directions? Is that it? And what would it take to be strong enough to realize and still be able to work. And whether feeling love means something, I mean because of the way I can love Rob without wanting to, without wanting to look at him even, and without caring to be careful what I say to him. [Opposite, untranscribed self-improvement list] Then, dreaming. Mutilation. They want to cut off the little fingers of both hands. At sea on a wooden spool, storm, my things on the wooden circle, do I wait out the storm on the raft, get carried in, or abandon them and swim in. 30th Cheryl meeting T and R, similar hair. Confessing and crying. "I don't know why I've been so dependent." When she starts, I begin sweeping the rugs. Joyce I am interested to see is wearing nothing but sheer pantyhose in back below her waist, is that a thin right leg? They give me a picture they've had of me, one I remember Roy K taking as he or I rushed past on a bike. It shows a man in blue with gold grain maybe stooking. And the photo is a blur, he took it at a slant. Then this morning the powdering down of forgiveness. An ivory night, yellowish white as if under a very close ceiling. Self-improvement list embarrassing, why. - This morning before morning, in the ivory night of so much unsourced light, phoning Prieska, at first reluctant and then excited. A clip of her aunt, hard solid shiny voice, "Yes. I'll get her," but waiting for me to say something else. She comes from the porch, 5:30 on a Sunday afternoon. I don't want to tell her things, I want her to tell me things. "I talk to you such a lot. It's not pleasant." "Is it like being enslaved?" "No it's unpleasant because you're not here." No I don't know very much about how she was. "Just tell me what you're looking at now." "I can see my feet on this wooden stool, and there's a small edge of the window where I can see a dry pine tree and some roses." Not exactly that, but just my seeing some picture. Feeling it a quite empty conversation trying to be loving. I wasn't feeling her nor do I feel her missing feels me. As if feeling Rob again. - What prevents me being alone enough to tell the truth here without having to try? I've transferred back to him. Uneasy having written about him. Because what I said was about to become untrue, ie that it was soulless. "Because I don't want to enough. Stop." The way that said itself and then I heard it and the wire went silent with fright and we can't say and forgive it. Doubting I have the energy/speed or strength/ability to hold many parts clear at the same time. I need to be able to do this work. But loving these evenings, and feeling I have a better sense of what the task is. It's when I stop reading and stop writing that work really starts - I think - work on the working organization. "Work on my freedom." "I'm doing it for the excitement." I mean so as to be feeling and knowing in the moment. What do I know differently - to learn it in the midst of things - not in special circumstances - that it doesn't ask sudden sacrifices - but does ask that readiness to turn at any moment. 1st January 1991 Rhoda at the corner of the building asks if I ever adjust the ---, something like fuses or rheostat, for my TV. I realize I'm ready to answer her. She shows me in a room up the stairs a control I think for the energy circuits. Does she say turn it off and then on again? To tune the color balance. Duality, secrets, 2nd sight. Any cultural field can be so constructed as to defend the interests of some class of people - support their ways of thinking, present their capabilities as those more valuable - or as the only important capabilities - as universal values. Leah and José. Leah with well-cut hair beautiful and worried, so beautiful. José something else, the way he can't really speak English although he knows the words. How short his fingers are. That he married a woman of 35 when he was 20, and was married to her until he was that age. Their music and pictures. A house and dinner tasteful, but the music and pictures of a taste so accessoral - what does it mean that someone loves this Picasso and Danny Boy on the flute. Imagining him hoping I'll say something about his photographs. (I did: How do they harvest these sunflowers?) What do people do who haven't pushed the love of sight and sound. "My specialty is the generation of steam." Good wine though, such good crisp hot French bread and cheese. Crème brulée in her way perfectly made. Her professional hair and then her child profile quivering at the mouth. How brilliantly she makes the other person brilliant so I go away a little curdled at the edges, though it was fun being startling and experienced. [Eva Pierrakos notes: Use fear to get to what feeling it's afraid of. First anxiety and then what it's of. An image of the self as safe. Strain and an inner climate of holding on. Not admitting you've been hurt because it's not the scene you want. Commitment to being in truth with the self. Showing what exists now. Being in naked vulnerability. Check your god image. Blocking a monster but also blocking inner authority. It is an experience of immediate powerful presence, shocking. You can call on it. In dualisms say What is the truth of the matter? Disagreements where being wrong feels like dying. That you don't need to be special or separate from others. Your gauge is what's most uncomfortable, what you want to look away from. You'll feel pleasure to the degree you're willing to feel pain. When experienced emotions make intuition reliable. When you're afraid of losing control think of the image and what it stands to lose. The aim is to wake up to what the world and self and soul are doing. Forms of preoccupation are like being asleep, they are blind states. These blind states shouldn't be empowered. Any blinded emotion will be a blind spot now. Pain of unfulfilled legitimate need unfelt. Unreal demands and blames and punishments. Hard pain from false needs - locked, bitter, right, hopeless. Soft pain, acceptance, comes to energy. From the center of your solar plexus. Ways to get approval, ways to hide shameful submission. When you still need another person to permit you to experience pleasure ... dependent on others for being allowed to activate and express needs. Pleasure, safety and selfrespect. A you-must to others, an inactivity in self. The more you work on you must love me and give me what I need the further you are from moving inner life. Look at where you're most bound and anxious and there say exactly what you want from them. Ego: the part of consciousness that directs the will. Crisis = restructuring.
Pray to perfect functioning, diamond mind, and wait and trust with total commitment to the truth. "I will not take cover." Never lose for a second the sense of your intrinsic beautiful aliveness. Take the smallest shadows and ask what they mean. What do you not wish to change. When you don't investigate projections you can't recognize present hostility. Identify with the observing of your wish to harm, don't justify it or project it and blame. Every spite etc was good energy and can be again. Every anxiety is about being evil. "I shouldn't be like this." Look for the essence of the impulse. Pleasure is feeling love, which is certainty, peace, bliss, sweet excitement. The giving and receiving is indistinguishable. Feeling love also = confidence. Meditation as 3 organizations talking: 1. ego, conscious knowing and will activates and balances very alertly. 2. child self, unconscious, ignorance, anger, centrality 3. unconscious universe self that knows rightly. You can call the child self to speak itself fully. You can call the universe self to help overcome resistance, to see and understand accurately. Collect what the child says and study it. Ask about origins, results of acting out. You're investigating what the misconception and what its price. All the indirect manifestations. A denying, panicky, frightened perfection-demanding self can't itself do the work, it has to be identified with AND seen as other. What ego has to do is quite complex: be active in relation to the child, question and listen; be attentive in relation to the universe, wait. Hurry and hopelessness: look for the part that says, I don't want to change. 1. You can start by: what do I really feel at this moment about some XY, how am I dissatisfied, how do I disregard? 2. Then ask for help to know. 3. Something unfolds. You talk to it. Don't expect to teach until you have thoroughly listened. The child is afraid it can't cope with not having what it wants, therefore it denies that it wants. 4. Express desire confident that you can cope with both getting and not getting.
Shame of being nakedly oneself in the moment. You expose a false feeling over the real feeling. Find this shame. The difference of flavor between real and false. Don't be afraid there won't be any real ones. Making a silence to tune into the fullness that's very near. Contact fear without letting it stop you. Feel into a form of expectancy without notions of how something should happen. A light neutral specificity. Having to know your weaknesses so you won't fall for guilt-fear untruth or wishful thinking untruths. Willing, trustful, pliable, forever ready for another change, living without principles.] 3rd I look out the window, see T and R have spread the little garden with chopped wood, piles of sand or earth, a log beside the sidewalk moved back. They've taken it over, which is fair since I've abandoned it. But my plants are being buried. I go down to dig them up. Find them with a collection of very worn-down shovels with names on them. They're there with Choy and the boys, a collection of rifles, they were hunting before they came - digging in the upper right corner - bulbs, violets. R seeing me carry them out on the shovel says That's such a simple way of planting! I'm interested that I'm talking to both of them quite cooperatively. She has a very fine stemmed I assume rose but she says (----) blackberry it seems she was looking after all along. I'd wondered. Digging in my spot I find, past many bulbs, something like a large fetus, larger than a baby, buried in its bag-like blue-ish skin. I don't see it very clearly. Wake from this in the dark at six. Last night digging at Gott. Ironfaced closedness. Gott is anger. It's what I face him with. But when I took him on with feeling and mobile thought he turned into a little boy. Oh nimble mind and feeling please come again the way you were that time. Then I have a new good: transparency. But Jesus got killed, feeling and mobile mind and seeing got killed and even if it resurrected it's 'gone away,' it's become the face of grief. That's as far as I get and then try to investigate the line of pressure between my eyes. A face sleeping on the left and like a shell strained open on the right. Can I wake the left? And why'm I dreaming T and R. The brutality of their methods, it seemed to say. A floor they're going to cover. I remember finding it by scraping down to it, it's inlaid hardwood, exquisite. I say they could cut it out with a chainsaw (and I could take it to my house) and plant a lawn to put their old table on. R says it's too much work. I say (something like) hard complicated jobs are rewarding. "The poppy edge" - they're going to do that!? The floor is like a microchip. I imagined it like the rug in my house. Need to note how I'm so often strangely miswriting as if the thought-to-word connections are disintegrating. - At the department. I went with Rowen. On the way, with him, telling him what he'd see. On the way back, as I felt it, neurologically injured - shocked away into absence - feelings hurt by my student evaluations and by Resnick for some reason not wanting me. The shock compounding realizing I'll have to teach possible worlds logic - I think it's wrong - and for Norman the gross blind bully. How instantly the happy time switched. Have been loving the days of snow, math reading in daylight, deskwork here at night, Louie still with me and it doesn't matter who else. Australia accomplished. I have 1500 [Canada Council travel grant]. - Chasing my mom. When there's bad trouble she doesn't help. Thinking of her felt petulant. Does that mean childish? I said "I was in agony" and tears came. When I hate her I worry about being damaged. I see their damage, I don't feel mine. 5th Rowen. The little nobody. Have to get away from feeling I have to get away from him. Worried about feeling sth about the disorder and separation. I abandon. People must all see it's unreal. Thinking of him feeling mouth holding itself. What I remembered today about Ed, the feeling of his calculation. A mentat feeling. Not shrewdness. It's hard to recover. A kind of length under the cheekbone and concentration in the forehead. It borders on paranoia. I recovered it thinking of the spirit battle with him. The way he was aware of danger to his (pride) - I don't know danger to what - like someone alert in a knife fight. He's calculating in defense of his wit. It's a dark brightness. It's knowingly alone. What's important is that he comes out able to feel his wit is sharpest and fastest. I defeated him that time. He was feeling, it's a trick, she wants me to let her expose me; and it was a trick. He didn't fall for it but twice he turned and ran. Here it is again, the resolute iron face. He could see certain things, sexual things about women and aggressive things presumably about men. Lived afraid of being taken over by reading but was taken over too by too little reading. A native sharpness he found himself to be, seeing hidden things. Thinking he has to keep that special edge makes him a sitting duck for flattery. He likes the game of leading someone along, feeling his own nimbleness, so far ahead of the game. An unhindered opportunism, he has the wit to see that other people don't exist. 6 [Opposite: draft of the math paper] One of my landlord dreams. What are all these chairs doing here, piled upside down with grease globs on them. Landlord and his sons. "May we come up to see the repairs you did." "Sure, there's a little polyfilling left to do." But they've come to do things. The globs of grease are from cleaning. One is scraping the paint edge in the corridor. They've put a glaze of brown paint over the bathroom floor! Choy is dabbing at a cupboard in the corridor. It's not very clean, true, and there's a scribble across it. Why are they doing this? I'm getting frantic. Explain I've lived here all these years because I could have colors around me I feel are beautiful. There's not much response from him. I talk more desperately. They're spoiling my house. I say at last "Alright, I'll quit. I'll leave." Rush down the stairs but then up again, I want to get to the bottom of this. The boys are lounging around, lying on the sofa. Choy has his back turned. One of the boys I question is himself a tenant. Do they want us out so he can raise the rents to 600? Not especially. What is it then? Do they want all the tenants out, I just want to know. No they don't. Choy is removing himself still with his back turned but the boys are Canadian and will talk. "Is it because of my work at the garden and he a member of the Chinese business man's society?" "It's more that you're ... well you know that time you ... (took a strip off him for trashing the garden) and it's said you're not a good mother." 11th Trying to write Louie and not having the writing drive, not caring to tell. So is there anything I'd like to tell here? Gulf war news. The way Libby Davies and other women are organizing against the war and I'm feeling, good, I want it to happen and they do too. Missiles. Yes when I see missiles and explosions I'm wondering why I don't want sex and do want war - is war sexy? They say. I don't want sex because I think I can avoid feeling Rob's limits, the way it drags on my image to be tied to such a goof. I can be connected to a fine soul anyone wd admire. And feeling also my letter to L is a pile of straw. I'm trying it seems. Shd I junk it? Is that it, when I'm setting up an application to be able to work with her next summer? Does there have to be a crash? The elephant eyes so worriedly human, isolated and remote - Funny, yes, I'm angry. I ripped the 3 boring sheets across and across. I'm angry because she hasn't sent a letter in these 3 weeks? Why wd I avoid knowing I'm angry? She's more gone than she was. And what else. I'm angry at Jam. AND THEN AND THEN the phone rings. She was in a train awake all night looking at the changes of mountains. Had 3 letters including the last one. So little time it took her to get to me. I could say it the other way - I found the feeling just when the time had come she'd be able to speak to it. And train coffee. And what else tonight - breathing - yawning - drinking water - life came back. And still I'd like to know more about the night in the train. She went backward because the mountains became smaller, she backed away from them. She kept being tested with offers of a belief that evolution is wiping out people who didn't change quickly enough, whose chemistries aren't susceptible enough to restructure by prosthetic extension. Who are too close to home. And tempted by offers to believe that if whites are crazy the blacks must be sane. And seeing the night texture in flanks after flanks of hills made of grain. Is it that my girl soul comes and goes freely now? Says: I'm leaving for the winter, I'm going to the other end of the earth, but I'll be back. And travels at a window in a compartment. I saw that. Moon only at the edge of orange pink dawn, as they come to farms and towns. But in the dark end of the night the bulks of the mountains rotate past with the immense smoothness of their mass, accelerating with perfect evenness as their nearest side comes toward the center of the rectangle, and there a speed faster than light, which gives the immense armature of racing threads of light no time to attach themselves at the eyes, so that they cross and fall. (Seeing what happens - why not - because this is philos images and other fantasies and not - but yes it is - girl soul at a window the only one awake - traveling traveling south away from the sun away from wild Africa to an opulent rim. Okay enough. 12 What did I see. There were books of Australian women painters, four sisters. This book is by C, not by M. Jillian was lost in drink. C was a woman who didn't speak. A book of paintings, rust reds, a hill in gullies. The last one a woman at a window, curls of vapor fabric blown back off her body. In between, I don't remember, but the wonderful completeness and invention of my picture book dreams. And then at the end of the dreaming, I think, the sight so much admired of a foxred woman walking away - probably her - copper red hair, brown coat and longish skirt, russet ankles probably, so glossy - Copper Woman, now that I think of it - a conductor from head to shoulders, (sez breath) is how the images come to be. Help me to understand, I say, and I promise not to take credit. But help me to know how not to. - Elizabeth says Ed is grey, the cancer aura. Hatred, says breath. She phoned asking about contraception. It seemed maybe it was her worry. But she felt it last night as I was angry? 13 Electric body work in bed last night. Knowledge coming about teaching next week. I think, look what it gives me, it works on my tasks while I do other things. I say thank you. I go further, I say, I'll hug you. And do (not with my arms) and then what happens is a smile starts to break on my mouth - really it is as if my mouth is pushed from inside. And then, see it wants to go further, it's wanting to laugh. Aloud. And does. I keep watching how much is it wanting to laugh, more? And then I am lying in a glow of sorts but wondering, was it laughing at me? Or glad to be (so socially) appreciated? Other things I tried. A pang in the breast. I say let's go for the five vertebrae in the upper middle of the back. A pouring warmth up the arms and neck. Then the diaphragm comes on. I'm wondering whether digestive enzymes are in there too, being cut off. I feel I shd be digging in between the vertebrae with gold-light fingers, digging quite hard. There's some alarm as if a large wave is threatening. When I go to the toes I feel it immediately in my neck. More to know there. And then I found myself cold all over. Time to curl up, but too awake. Sex, alright. (Father fantasies don't work anymore) and then I'm very warm but can't sleep. - Between math essay formality and video application stretch I hear Louie's mom's tones beautifully placed, lightly and precisely. She swims in the pool and walks on the strand and frightened me with social excitement. I'd remember her class. At the betacam workshop David Rimmer further along the row. A grandfather look, thick at the belly, much sharper at the nose. The monitor shows us similarly dumpy. E looks plain and at the same time odd and exaggerated in expression. How it might really be for the video. I'm saying it for them before I say it for myself. I imagine a half hour video (could be longer) 'broadcast quality,' technically as well made as it can be. Some color transposition especially to black and white for talking head close-ups, but only enough talking head shots to establish who the voices belong to, otherwise a lot of non-sync sound, people's voices over shots of their gardens. Some of the crazy gardens. The utter individualities of order and disorder. Voice segments as personal, as little 'public' as we can get them. Shots from the wild area and orchard: starlings tear apart the compost, a woman stoned on varnish thinner lies story-telling in a nest in the blackberries, bees swarm, Dusan prunes pear trees. Eric tells about his visionary meetings with the poplar trees. Muggs brags discreetly about how she contrived a media visit. Joanne Zinzolin defends her rickety tower. Jack Wise is worried about railway unions. Anna complains that the board is overbearing. Tony Gordon-Wilson tells what happened when he rowed to Seattle and asked for political asylum. Artichokes, monster squash, duckweed, bergamot, leeks, grass. And shots of people working: in the compost yard, greenhouse, vinewalk, herb garden. The garden has had a lot of publicity of an official sort, and our own necessarily polemical material has been even worse. The intention of this video is to make something that gets at what's really, unofficially, interesting about the garden, the outrageous looseness and closeness with which it's managed, the love that's generated by access to land, the -
What's rust red. I thought too, cypris (kyprios). Copper oxide the color of thistles in red ground. Pennies to Aphrodite. Cun nung knowledge, cunnan to know, to be able. Cupa tub, cask. Cunt isn't in the dictionary. Morning of 12th the rust-red woman, flowing at the end. Two days later an early period. 15 I teach. Very tired. Video application gone. Persian Gulf deadline in the date. Come home to a letter and card on the hall floor. Put things away first, sit in warm water while turnips and carrots bake, read Tea at four o'clock. When the second cup of tea is ready I can read it, or not. A moment on the cliff when she can't see for joy. And the little social defiances that are her culture, unbeknownst. I read grateful she has a heart and not thinking what I don't have anymore, Jam's stretch. Do I have my own stretch if I want it? Something I do have. On the bus remembering how much I like to read the journal now, that it's a voice so close to me in any kind of turn. Not impressive and not a woman's. What I think about Louie is that I trust her sanity. When I think of what could happen the next thing I think is that whatever happens she'd be willing to know and she could know what to do to go on. I think that at moments like coming past the doctor's office on Hawks or standing in the bathroom. I am always willing to know but I often only know how to go on alone. I know my gladness is a danger to me. Not yet as much as it could be. Feeling uneasily observed as I say this. To say: how Ingrid's position in the department is changed so I can't patronize her anymore. She's jumped ahead of me because the paper she gave was liked. Larry picked her over me for TA because he wanted her. I think what's happened is right, she goes on thinking about philosophy in her car, she wants to do it and I'm a fraud there although in another way I'm genuine. 16 It becomes difficult to see. I don't know how to describe it. Sometimes when there's a certain kind of joy it's like that. Everything is there together around my face. Every stone I could have picked up. In all the red colors of brown. Might make it to where we cross the river again before the light goes. We do and cross in darkness. [Louie writes] Steps climb with my horse, at the top it's a very narrow table of rock and bushes. Wake in solar plexus fear, thinking it's the fear of rising. I dreamed also that I remembered months ago hearing or reading the elephant's are wanting war. In bed last night the sense of anguish as being squeezed from both sides, especially the skull. I move around seeing what'll happen electrically. Once, from feeling the second outermost toe on the left foot, a light electrical wave, that was blocked as soon as I knew it - not more than I would want to bear, the blocking was only startled reflex. Have to do the math paper this weekend but what am I wanting. Sun and light air. Something else. I can't quite see it - something like a fantasy but not unreal. 17 A second, smashing blow hit him on the ear, then all became quiet. There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly lifted him up. It came from afar and traveled sedately on, a shrug of eternity. He found out that those processes wrongly known as monologues are really dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you," in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions. Yesterday a grey miserable day, halfway through I said I won't work on the paper today, I'm going to go to bed and read Darkness at noon to be with Louie. Came back from looking at the garden with Mike Kaiser, left a message with Rob, turned on the radio. Today the largest headlines I've seen but it's not news, realizing headline size is like dress decorum. The way a war allows us - news personnel visibly, students and staff at school - to expand, have a larger presence with each other: a mutual topic. The long distance click on the line, her small voice says hi. Whatever she talks about, I'm feeling that voice has her body under it. I'm with the voice but I'm not with the body. When I closed Darkness at noon wanted to turn to her, my friend the revolutionary, and put my fingers into her so potently mortal cunt - her breasts are erections all the time. Teaching. Twice so far I've saved a class by right aggression. Schwartz said he'd teach the first one. I phoned him the evening before and said I'd like to ask a favor. What's that? he asks kindly. I'm forty-five years old and this is my fourth semester TAing and if I come in hanging onto the prof's coattails I'll look like an idiot, I say. We go through the answers, I've made sure I know them, and then that's that. My reward is a first class with beautiful Stewart Andrade gleaming superintelligently from right nearby, and Brendon Zrno the young Hun turning on down at the foot of the class. And today in a room crammed with Chinese business students Ari the Neck (a wrestler) tries out loud talk to his friend. But I've met that irritation before. He's put himself in the opponent position in the room and that means I'm in place to be his opponent too. I say, before he's aware I'm looking at him, "I have something to say to you, right in front of me - you. It's not really appropriate to be talking out loud in a class, it's distracting to the other students and it's distracting to me ..." (by now I'm wondering whether this is enough but it's marginally out of my control since I turned it on) " and ... it makes you look bad." His friend grinning embarrassed. I go on but there has been a cost, a slight fright or shock that I have to cover. But the class is good, as a first class. Half of them have spoken by the end. I love myself for how I can do that, make a live unfrightened room. It's midnight, Rowen asleep, Tina downstairs coming and going, new oven hissing with a different, sharper hiss than the old one. I don't very much like talking to you on the phone. It's specious, I'm wanting to say. I know you're gone but then you're there, or I'm supposed to feel you're there though you're not. I'm not saying don't phone, because after, I did go on talking to you as if I'd got in touch. I was saying yes I noticed too that I didn't hide from that goodbye. That was another gift. Luke's fear that he's rotten in some core. Is Roy's, is what I first thought. But if you know it? Does it have to do with lying? Or what? "No my hands have not always known to move as fast so slowly." Is this a psychic law, if you are bound to someone and want to be free, make them hate you. And if it is a law what does it say about Jews needing to make the Goyim hate them. And how satisfied I am when I see my half dozen enemies angry. There are other ways. It says yes. I dreamed I saw T give my dad a little piece of cake. I follow them down the stairs. "I want to say something to you, stay away from my father." And: a mathematical realm projected from mathematical language - imagined - using the model of world projections we have from natural language - it's a collective fantasy of intentional math. 18 Rowen is here. The Gulf War on so dangerous an edge. Missiles. A very slight damage but can they resist the taunt, man to man, again in Tel Aviv. What may be a fire on the horizon. I haven't gotten the math phil paper written. Rob looking red eyed red nosed, too ill to entice. 21st What it's like writing this paper - oh hello my friend me, here I am to talk to again. (Hello you too black haired girl.) It's an ordeal and there are instants when it's exciting as if I'm going to see something. For a month it has been like waiting on god or some such cloud of unknowing - reading, writing notes, tearing my fingernails off with my teeth, rewriting notes onto category pages, taking satisfaction in every accumulation of pages I can put into the paper recycling box, feeling stopped and reading more, (an interesting thing, a sad thing, is that I do not write as well when I'm writing for Louie as I do writing by myself), (what is sad about that is that I am also certain she'd like the version I write alone better), looking with fright at the new piles of notes, boiling them down too and seeing how large the pile of condensed notes has become, still thinking I'll organize all the material on all the pages but panicking at the amount of detail. Trying out taking a run at it, writing a line and being stuck looking at all the ways that line is untrue. The stuckness is quite stupid, it isn't able to fan out the meanings which are interfering with each other in relation to other meanings. At this point I try writing on the left side of the journal pages to see how the personal mind takes the question, whether there's a direct understanding possible when I'm not obliged to peg myself to the referents of the business. I can write ten pages quickly - I did write ten pages quickly - but knowing they're unusable I'm feeling it has to be done soon but still a slow working through a part of a pile of structured notes can take a day. It may be midafternoon and I know I can't do more. This is the worst of the ordeal. I'm longing to be done but I know I have to go doggedly through the detail of sheet after sheet. I try writing the beginning. I can make eight starts, spoiling pages. It can take half a day to write a paragraph. I type it and stop. Next morning I try writing some middle part of the paper. It goes faster. I have two typed pages and the opening sentence comes to me. I write it elsewhere, in pen, and go on. When I get stuck I just start somewhere else. When I am stuck again I take up my new opening sentence, which seems to dispose of the whole of what was already written. I work part of it back into the new opening, in a different order. I get stuck saying what I intend the paper to say. I don't know so I leave four dots and start somewhere else. I realize my eyes are fuzzing over, I can't read anything at a middle distance. There are five pages written, ten if double-spaced. Tomorrow I'm teaching. Wednesday I have to write the rest. Must take it to UBC Thursday. Bibliography and footnotes will take a long time. The last half is always faster, the ground is established and the writing mind is primed so that it picks up details, quotations, from where I'd given up on them, sets up interreferences that tie the thing together. One sweep through before final typing sets up transitions in the light of the conclusion, whatever that will be. Then there it is. Missed typos. Elegancies. Comprehensions I may not know how to say again without going through the whole sequence. 23rd Letter from Niew Bethesda. Mathematics is pickled - mathematics is a brine? Mathematics is a constellation or distillation. Fri 25th The ungenerous spirit in which he had met her frankness, his doubt of her word, of her good faith - his utter unreasonableness, in short - had left a cold patch of astonishment in her, which would not yield. Occasionally it struck her that he did not see as clearly as she did. So, seeing no other way out, she fell back on indirect methods. Now she saw it behooved her to have forethought for them both. With quickened faculties, all her senses on the alert, she watched, guided, hindered, foresaw. [Australia felix ch 25] Henry Handel Richardson. She uses all her false names in her fiction and has women characters change their names. "A cold patch of astonishment" when you see you're more than equal and will have to move to enclose. At that moment I refuse. Iraqis pumping oil into the Gulf. The way Saddam Hussein is using what's to hand and bewildering the Europeans who think he'll wage a European duel. He doesn't have to defend the prestige of rationality. At school yesterday came upon Andrew saying to Ingrid, "All my advisors have told me to be sure to steer clear of anything Eastern or New Age," and I smiled, we all laughed. And I'm thinking of it since - the community defending itself from what could change the terms or the style of talk to something they're unequipped for. The dream where I was with some man, Frank, going to hide a piece of bloody meat. Taking it to the swamp by the bridge to bury, hoping it won't be seen in the back of the car. If they find it they might think it a piece of moose. Scapula is the word attached to it, but it was from the chest area. Odd the anxiety to hide it, because it is a piece of my chest. Connectionism says to me that what we give time to builds itself into our brain, anything we think is thought in that abacus. And dreaming is a projection of the structures made. tigers, elms, apples, roses, water and gold
aphrodite's garden volume 12
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