| aphrodite's garden volume 13 part 1 - 1991 june-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
11th June 1991 Start again. So far a dark summer. What there is and what there isn't. 14th "A bluewhite flash and the delightful crumbling of the sky." "The adventure of his unsuitability, the downy aura of my hand on him anywhere, the downyness of his resting aura I guess." The way I feel about lines like these, that I don't write them about Louie. What passes with her. 17 That I don't write at all. Sitting here in blank exhaustion. Days given to nothing but emotion. She says there's something she wants to pursue and I'm part of the way to it. A sensation I had touching myself in the other bed, when I woke kinked in the middle, very uneasy, of there being a deeper part of sex, like the bottom of the bag, I'm longing to have opened. That I can get there but she can't get me there. That her hands are small chill light and don't make effective contact. How much it would cost me to have said that. That it's her response not her temperature I touch her for. The time it was perfect and then her touch was more intelligent in every shading, than any large dry hand, than his warm dry hand, would ever be. The way I'd have to be careful not to be there for the detail of his touch because of the stupidity it would betray. That these items don't add up to certainty her exhausted moments want. I have no privacy to feel my contradictions. If there were smudges in a day of imagining the giving-in moment with him she will crash on their account, have to know. Who gets to be the girl. My extraordinary gift she says, that she can be her girl as not before. I believe that. But do I have life apart from mine. The way not being able to talk to him lit up touch by itself. Is that enough of that? Can I go on to other thoughts? What I didn't want, to be tethered again to a you. 18 [DAT recording notes] "Used to sleep behind there, we got kicked out, behind that big tree there, about eight of us, and then we started losing things, blankets, food. I ended up in the hospital, another guy ended up in jail, another guy in detox and disappeared. Used to be good." "If you make it too strong and light up a cigarette ... You have to watch, you can't smoke, if it's mixed too strong, eh, and you light up a cigarette." "Looks strong." "Let it cook for a while." (Laughing.) "An old Indian trick, you know, you tell people ..., you tell people you learned an old Indian trick, if they want to drink Lysol ... ah you know ... where's that can. It's empty?" "No." Airplane. Blackbird. Very loud truck. - 78 Ford Fairmont, dark red. A radio. Red interior, strong thick red stuff on the seats. Big trunk. And I can drive it. Louie likes it. Gas miles 17. $1500 + 195 tax + 650 insurance = 2350. She said, I like its color, I like its voice and I like that it flies. But buying a car is feeling unfaithful to the Lark, like having Rowen was unfaithful to Luke. The same quality of shift of feeling. 22nd Getting through the works and days with vigor and competence but always a certain heedlessness, as of one whose center is somewhere else. Crying with Odo. Ursula Le Guin 1975 The day before the revolution in The wind's twelve quarters: short stories Harper & Row As if I don't know what I'm feeling and that's why going so well it's also going very badly. And she doesn't know what she's doing though she knows what she's feeling. I hear her creeping in the hall, begging her to creep past so there'll be time today to feel myself collected. But there she stands in her white teeshirt naked below, ordering me to abandon myself. 23rd A mountain near home, blue white and black delicately whiskered, a local mountain standing between roads to the east-southeast. Much later as I drive east along the river valley the ripped flank of a mountain across the south so beautiful rust red with gold glints. In the town looking for a route south, or will I have to go back to get around the mountain. My small backpack doesn't have most of what I'd usually carry - a sweater or something to sleep in. Somewhere in the sequence a shop - other women trying on Syrian dresses. I come out in a long hooded cloak that gives me gold earrings. The cloak is a nuisance in the next while. I get to the end of the road, the end of the valley, probably - asking people about a road on the other side of the river. A man says, Why don't you take the middle road - not exactly that. He means the river. Gesturing to the huddle of boats below. Would they take me? A young woman says something in French. What? They're looking for companions. You mean prostitutes? Not necessarily. Another young woman says my mom says it's alright. My cunt flushes at the thought of a seaman. I go on along a track on the south side of the river looking for a dock. The track isn't obvious. There's a place where I have to step through the porch of a small house. I sense a woman and child in the house. The door isn't locked - a door, a porch, a screendoor and another door. Closing them behind me. Yes there's a track, reddish, slightly muddy, crowded and obliterated with wet weeds. This is the spot I remember most though it's not well-remembered either. A narrow shelf along the river which passes very rapidly in a narrow channel here. Small wooden houses stained brown, longer than wide, very plain and poor with a Japanese feeling. A train of tugboats or tugs and grain cars hurtles past. Then a tug with a man on deck who sees me struggling on the wet slope in the bedraggled long cloak that nonetheless is making me attractive, I feel. But looking after the boat thinking could I manage on anything pitching the way that does, hurtling over the hardness of this river. Much more in this night. Swimming in a pool where suddenly a very large wave comes towering from the other end. Once I ride on it, next time I trust to ride under it with my eyes open onto the dim green. The sense of touch is excluded from dreaming, mostly, and there'll be a reason. There might be thoughts about touch. - Yesterday reading Le Guin's commencement/conclusion address at Bryn Mawr thinking about school that it's wanting to teach - wanting to intervene with the better young minds in those questions, the love I could make. And as if, for that, I have to go to Grande Prairie where I have ground to defend. Bryn Mawr 1986 - published in 1989 Dancing at the edge of the world: thoughts on words, women, places Harper & Row - But reading L.G. also the yearning toward a more worked living (='writing'). And then the facts of garden, school, Luke and Rowen. I don't know whether to say also the ephemerality of my lovers. So seen, stupidity could be defined as failure to make enough connections, and insanity as severe repeated error in making connections. [Pat Churchland] Quite stringently in pain. I'm going to blow it - I'm not going to be able to sustain having a - what - don't know what - what other people have - someone they're with. How not - the oppression of it - the guilt, uncertainty, fear, anguish. I'm caught at the end of the valley, yes. Try it this way: I was buying a car and flooded with how beautiful she is outside and in. Tuesday. Wednesday morning Jam phones her. I'm plunged into terror. She says, There is not enough love in Jam, on any level. I know it's true. But that night in bed tho' I put myself into her hands my labia stick together in blank refusal. She wakes me at 3:30 sobbing because my body doesn't want her and so she shouldn't let me touch her either. That's the end of our possibility of going on together. I don't want to feel it then, I want to sleep, but I'm feeling it now. There is nightmare associated with sexually loving women. - 1. Raging at Rowen last week. He ate all the raspberries left for L. I found him replacing them with green ones. Yelled. He went away soberly, came back in tears. "I'm sorry for what happened." "Oh Rowen come here. I'm sorry I yelled at you." Etc. But that he should have to creep back so carefully spoken. 2. Raging at Chinese boys stealing strawberries. "You scum! You've just lost your welcome here." I heard myself amazed. Scum? 3. Bitterly haranguing Gay about slashing the wild area corner where trees were being "strangled". A moment when I let something out I didn't expect and with it really a flame - a distinct chemical jet - of hate. "Why don't you talk to Oliver and Rob who also know something about the wild area, maybe you'll believe it if you hear it from a man. What do you think a tree is? Trees have evolved to come up through undergrowth." 4. With L feeling a big nasty tiger whipping my tail on the floor. Look out little mouse I might not be able to control my claw. 5. What is it? I'd like a big nasty fight, but why? 24 A drawing of some tin cans, a jar with blob of jam on a jelly brush. Slice of bread? But a beautiful drawing. Pencil lines doing the can's oval end very perfectly with a flanged line. Trudy draws over it. It's a crit. "There's this here, this here," a parallel between layers. Then I'm looking for my beautiful drawing in her place, her big old place with assorted old furniture, does she go through all these rooms vacuuming? I don't recall that it's the same drawing I'm looking for. L.G.'s description of an empath. Should I make something of my squabbling with Gay? Sunday night there she was with Sean hacking in the wild area. I'm in pain to start with and that sets me going. She's doing it for reasons she doesn't know, she's doing it to be doing it with Sean and his machete, and for territorial gain. The trees are being choked she keeps saying. Trees don't choke I keep saying. It's the trees in her own wild area that are choked. Yesterday I told [wild area coordinator] John she'd done it, remembering not to mention names and realizing the advantage of speaking to him first and also knowing territoriality will dispose him to use those of my arguments I want him to be more persuaded of. Half an hour later I see Gay leading Betty to show her their work confident she'll be vindicated. John comes back blowing his breath, "I'd like to kick their heads off!" Then Gay following Betty who is looking impassive. I'm beside the potato edge. She's red and wet. Aggrieved with me. "Why did you talk to them when I said I was going to?" She's understood that I got the advantage (what does she expect) but not that she's not in a position to make much of an evil of it. "Fuck off, Gay." "No I won't" she says like a child, "You want everything your own way and I'm not the only person who thinks so." I get to enjoy the chance to shoot fast. "In fact Gay the truth is you'd like a little more of that yourself." "That's not true! Everything I do is for other people!" Oh well with that last word ringing in our ears I don't need to say more. When I'm putting away the wheelbarrow she arranges to intersect at the shed. "You have no right to tell me what I think. You don't know what I'm thinking!" Boiling with resentment. From inside the shed I can be laconic after her. "I don't think you do either." Oh unjust. "You're vicious!" Sloping away home, knock-kneed and retarded. So that's the story as I like to tell it. What else? That I'm still yelling at her and rejoicing at how easy it is to confound this louche thing, red, moustached, pig-eyed, stomachy, ignorant, famished, self-choked, stupid with envy. And? What's more to do than recognize shadow when it's apparent? Feel myself her? Yukk. 26th Working with the clench of solar plex thinking this is pain and fear, I'm waking every morning in pain and fear. Dreaming I'm thinking all my loved places are gone, not only the places but the loves too. Maybe the capacity to make that support. (The morning telling her this dream crying at the window.) 30th As if now I should speak seriously with myself. What's happened. Who have I been with, what have I done. What should I be preparing for. The night she went out in her white shirt - she or you, I erased, rewrote, erased - and I waited in agony. The whole of the week she was here I couldn't touch her. Then sitting on the floor in the doorway of her room, Luke's/Rowen's room, speaking blackness with my hand over my mouth. "Sex is never going to work. And I'm not willing to harm you." Feeling: have I done something? Do I intend it? Does she complete it by accepting it? Then does it mean she'll soon be gone? Was it my one chance to join up with someone? I'll have to wait to know how it feels. Then the next day talking all day. Sitting in the red chair holding her in my lap feeling her beautiful warm shape under the shirt she came back in. The story of Antoinette, which I hadn't wanted to know. So hard a story. She said, Why don't you come to Greece with me? Why don't you come to Montreal with me? Antoinette goes to work cleaning houses. L goes to work illegally, looking after kids. At night they get into the same bed. Antoinette no longer wants to make love. Eight months of winter. L goes to Amsterdam for a year. Teaches English. They write letters. Antoinette visits twice. The second time she says, Why don't you come to Vancouver with me? Louie does. Finds her way in Co-op Radio, is happy there. Unhappy at home. Antoinette willing to fuck again. Two and a half years. They know a lot of political people. Antoinette is passionate and blind. L is terrorized at home but popular in the world. Cries a lot. Leaves. Comes to see Jam's attic and says this is exactly what I'm looking for. Is there two years. Small affairs, Laiwan and Lily. She'd have joined up with Jam but J says she doesn't want it to be sexual. When she comes back from Zimbabwe they see she has changed. Jam starts to court her but she's tracking me by then. What does this tell me. That L is devotional. Dark difficult older women. The necessary edge to her own obedience. The way I'm moved but not satisfied by her devotion: I don't like to lose it but I don't trust it. - Tracks me for a year. Is wonderful company but hidden. Forces the question. I say no, no, no. Alright, yes. A few months before she leaves. She's gone six months and keeps in touch with her devotion. Has good job offers but comes back. Two months of joy and pain. She waits for the axe to fall. I'm cheerful and patient mostly. She goes through hells of apprehension. I seem alright but I'm not writing. I'm emptying, I'm growing a death fear about not being able to find the reassuring depth of sex. Harassed by the way whenever I settle into joy she crashes into pain. Worried about not working. I say, with great pain, The sex is never going to work. In every other way I'm still with you as I was. I don't understand the contradiction. You've been in so much uncertainty you'll accept this time. You have your own place now. This is what I want to salvage. I want us to separate less damaged than we met. "She could have such a caring too." Then I cried on the phone lying on my back, for the two of them I thought, that they couldn't though their intentions - She's not born with what it takes, she says. I'm certain for once. If being an artist is what she's here for, then she has to take a desperate stand anywhere. Then she cries silently. The bewilderment of someone glancing through eight windows she says. "Liking someone so much and seeing it making them unhappy." "I feel that too." Twins. That they die apart though they were born together. 1st July
Following feeling and anchoring to an aim. What aim: July and August, get it done. Thesis after. - What's going on today - waiting for L - not concentrating - it's what all these days are like - I can't do that yet - alright stop and breathe. 3rd Then it's passed. We tape Monty, sitting with Lance on the south slope of the kids' hill in the quietness of Monday holiday. Yesterday morning L's little yellow vest, I creep into her bed to wake her and we lie there two hours glowing bright yellow. I'm touching her with every surface I can. There are columns of light standing in my palms. It is so blissful I wonder whether my revolt was about getting to this parity in bliss. Dizzy with happiness to be able to be with her again if I want, more days. 4th Her mantis. - What we have. Beautiful tapes of Monty. Frogs with the curves of motor sound rising and falling in the dark. There has to be a night scene, a neighbourhood scene, a vegetable pleasure scene. Happy to be doing this - - L dreams about Jam. A farmhouse. J squatting by freshly turned earth of a garden outside the kitchen invites her in. She won't go in but she'll eat an orange. An old soft one but good. She eats it all, turns it inside out. Thinking she'll tell me she did eat an orange. Now she's leaving by a farm gate. Jam says, My relation with you has changed. Fresh thick air with earth smells. Miles of brown earth. Looking back at Jam seeing that she's seeing her smaller and lower. Then the next part. She and I coming out of the library meet Jam coming in. She looks friendly and open. We're all beautiful. We're the same age. She greets L who says How are you as their paths cross. When L realizes J hasn't greeted me she shuts off the dream side to centre like a television image. As soon as I hear about this dream suspicious and cautious. Barbara [Joyce's booker] earlier this morning offering a time tomorrow. Suspicious cautious what? Power struggle? Both. Now she's got Jam. I've got Rob. "I don't throw my weight, I lever it very carefully." What does it mean that she's fantastically ready in sex and my body doesn't trust her. What do the moments mean when I'm finding her obvious, or dumb? 5 Jam lurking Hades. They with her. Shaitan's black light. What realm is it. Paranoia. Spirit battle. Is spirit power always won by defeating someone? Do I have to kill to win? Killing L is like killing me. The way fear roused me. Durchhauen. And closed me. She's using me to get Jam's interest. ("It has FUCK-ALL to do with it!") Under us the unknown strategies and motives. I have to watch her. And to get even with Jam. There's a reason my body doesn't trust her. There are two stories I'm telling. One's hope. The white story says L and I are working, are able. We're going to open the frightened door and get me back into creation, her forward into it. As if the time between us. That we have a way of sex. The white story is a Buddhist story about bliss, opening, learning. The black story is a Coast Native story of shamans alone in black wind battling rivals whose intent is murder for the sake of power. A smarter soul controlling the stupid by fear. Dreamed I open my eyes and see Terry looking at me - he's Terry Power - I'm going to be sleeping with him it seems. What's power. Pouvoir to be able to do. I am both: afraid she can't look after herself and afraid she is acting helpless to disarm me. The younger wants to preserve openness. The older wants her to preserve it too, because of seeing it as younger self. But it's not own openness and that's an instability. -
Monday 8th Monty, Paul, Michael Cleghorn, frogs, us. [sound recordings] Yesterday the chairlift silent over trees seen the way a slow bird would see them, tilting layers of spread round skirts. Brown tarns up top. The place we sat on rocks seeing kinds of reflection. A ghost of lace standing underwater beside the submerged half of a rock. The way I'm not with her and we're working. Sunday 14th At the beginning of the week an exasperating knot. Louie's desperate. I'm pushed and furious. We fight it through 'til the moment we start laughing. I think it's done but still don't want to touch her. Evening going to interview Leslie, she's still in it. I say You're still mad at me. She cries. I can't think in the presence of it. So then later the phone. I say she's pushing me to refuse her. We say it's talking that doesn't work. But then she rushes in hugging me because she's going to find out about it, the bad part. When she's happy I'm happy again too. Thursday part of an eclipse unnoticed, Friday I work in the herb garden, come back at suppertime. Monty's slashed across the abdomen and dies. Detectives sitting together on the kids' area bench looking at the spot under the wild apple tree, talking about sports. When it got dark L and I talking in the kitchen suddenly say, They'll be gone now, let's go down there. A CKNW car and voices at the bench. A reporter with Ruby. He hasn't told her. Five large cops looming up the path, D'YOU GET YOUR STORY? "Have some tact!" I snap at them because of the way they move in blindly grabbing all the space. Ruby goes with them. A better cop in beige stays to check us out. "Ruby's no stranger to the boys in blue." We go up to the herb garden. Sit on the small step looking across over the pool. Two posts completed on the water hovering across the line. It feels safer with Monty gone. L on my right. Her squarish head with earrings quivering. What was she talking about -. I was looking at her admiringly. Someone walking fast up the long path we see between the far posts. He comes into the herb garden carrying a coffee pot. Hi, I say. He's the guy who was looking after Monty the night before. Comes sits down with us crosslegged on the gravel. The cops just released him. He was picking butts, Monty said Here's eighty five cents. He was gone five minutes. He came back and saw Monty lying on the ground with what looked like a piece of wood on his stomach. A little blood around his mouth. When he touches the wood it's wet and warm, his guts are out. He tears away to the firehall. My friend is sick! Grabs a fireman's arm. Ambulance on the firehall parking lot. Saline, suction, abdominal packs (we found the debris). He's gone, he's gone, says the paramedic. Doug as he tells is unobtrusively releasing the pressure on a Lysol can. A long even hiss, goes on for minutes. Shakes part of the can into the pot of water. L and I taste it. It's very strong, tastes like shaving soap she says. It's beautiful sitting with Doug. The beautiful night. City stars not many. Quiet and mild. Doug's simple laughing and crying. Louie is perfect. Tues 16th Start yoga, say for work, say 5 months through to see. What am I after - the kind of intent that can work. Something about a roof - flying - I can just rise up if I want - up past the branches - was visiting Rob - dropped in - there was Catherine's black hair passing the door crack - I'll fly away - above the poplars I feel a touch on my wrist or ankle - he's flown after me. The roof of a big house - we're meant to go up there and, what? Look carefully at the whole of the roof? Black tarpaper with a many-thickness pad of roofing paper or carpet folded over wires where they slope down into it. Another woman. I'm hanging back. Lying in bed touching myself. Is it our house? As if we're considering it. Sunday 21st Luke said 4:15 Air Canada 4th Aug. 22nd When he phones he doesn't say his name. Oh it's you! Weekend cleaning up the h.g. for next weekend. National Geographic photographer a thin medium woman from Washington. Annie Griffith Bath. Last week simmering with L. Wednesday morning waking happy in her place. I'd known when to stop. I'd known not to let her zoom ahead. I'd been sure what to do. She said Let's go pick up my envelope. The right day, because of how I look. Driving across Hastings on Commercial. Get out of the car leaving the windows open. She knocks and finds her envelope in the porch. Is turning when the door opens. Jam in thick new flannelette pyjamas and an undershirt like a rich old man in Hong Kong. "HI ELLIE!" She's bluffing. I'm gesturing at her pitiful garden, "Used to be high in this corner." She signs snip snip. "The lilac!" "It's here." An amputated trunk lying at the foot of a very plebian floribunda. "I like your fence." When I say that a gleeful flash escapes me. She sits down on her step. We get into my dark red car and drive away. That night in Rowen's room L gets to come. The next day again. But then it had gone too far and I want to be alone. Thurs 25 This morning thinking about how to go on with school work - computer imaging and imagining. 29th What it's like today. Cranky. Looking across the room to L's polaroids. Rowen in the tank. E in green shirt laughing down into the green water corner. Rowen behind standing in an indistinct fairy garden. How, cranky. No I'll ask what it's like being hot and cold with L. When I'm 'with' her she looks wonderful. The way she was holding her neat beautiful body standing on the pedals next to me riding back along the wharf last night in her jeans and yellow shirt. I follow the precision of her mouth when she speaks. Her hand holding my hand is conscious in all its joints. Her senses in the same way take fine strong note. There's some way she is, there's an aether I'm starting to notice - like the night of Monty's death - I can't afterward remember what we say - but the quality is like clean warm water. When I'm away from her, her face is swollen. She grins. She strokes or rubs me somewhere, stupidly and insistently as if trying to hypnotize an animal. I feel her mired in feminine concern for people, far too many people, a lifetime's geniality thickening her air. I hear it in her accent, a blunt voice, not cursive, a voice I don't want to hear. What happened last night. She said, I'm so happy you don't want to leave me yet. I said happily, I was just thinking how much I like going hot and cold with you, I get to find you again and again. She mentioned a plan that has me able to switch in briefly while switched out, and I felt backed against a wall, attacked, silenced, wanting her instantly gone as if she wanted me to give up something I have to have to be alive. I thought it might be my intelligence. But there was something else going on. "Separatedness" I said. What men have that lets them work. 25th Can I bring together these themes:
- Whether there is any question particular to this stuff or whether any question I come up with is a genuine question not illuminated here - whether it's an illustration. Computer imaging and imagining. 31st Blue and black bathing suit. Won't describe the body I saw trying it on. Luke on Sunday. Early mornings, Juan, Mrs Hsu. This morning the herb g, what we saw upside down on the pool, which is like a table of water, very still morning in the yellow light, the way complex brushes of leaves, stems, were symmetrical around an unmarked line across the real plants. 1st August Then while I went to the bank she opened my book to the sentence that would damage most - and then she goes into her sucky whiney hurt self - and that always makes me angry - and then I think, she's hurt I'm angry? No - she's angry. Let her be angry. I say beat up the bed. She doesn't want to. Playing about that makes me laugh. She hits the bed, I yelp. She says, You can't make noise you can't look at me. I turn around and hang onto my knees. She sounds like she's cracking the bed. She stops, straightens up the bedclothes. There she sits, still looking angry. Do you want to tell me now? No she doesn't. Thick congestion. What were you thinking as you were doing that? Silence. "I was thinking, why do I have to be the one that's crazy?" That's a good question. But it's still thick. I'm starting to feel sore in the solar plex. Why? Is she doing something to me? (This is where I lose it -) I go over into the defense huddle. Inside the look of - what? - withdrawal? - is quite a cheerful curiosity. What will happen if I do this. I'll just cut off. Is this boredom, I'm wondering. I do really want her to go away. Enough. I was working today. I want to work now. She has to be obsequious, can I come over there, can I touch you, etc. That's not the way. I go out. Leslie looks waterfat (period) and stands silent. I went to a sundance, she says. A small poplar tree, if you put your ear to it a sound of rushing water. She put her ear to other trees, no sound. This one is standing amid a grassy plateau. No food or water for four days except a glass of medicine on the evening of the second day, some fruit on the third. Were you thirsty? Yes. They pour water over your head that you're not allowed to drink, it makes you respect water. Sweat lodge in the morning. The drum all day. Dancing on the spot. Some of the men pierced their chest skin. Some dragged the buffalo - four large buffalo skulls tied in a series and dragged from wood pins through the skin of the back. Four times around the circle. They say men do it to make up for the pains of childbirth. Women they say are negative, men positive. Women whose period comes must stop dancing. Their charge becomes neutral when they're in their time and they can damage the ceremonial objects. Drums can snap. But women nonetheless (in spite of this social handicapping, I say) last out the ceremony in equal numbers. I'm in the garden looking at images. Find a squash in the compost. Rob arrives at the shed (not allowed to say that name any more). "I'll give you half of this if you want." "What is it? Turban squash?" "Turban squash crossed with pumpkin?" Is there something in the shed to cut it with? A big secaturs. Try it on its side. Coming up the stairs. Is she still here? She would be. Talking business is fine. So do I know more? After she beat up the bed my s.p. was feeling her, likely. That's the point where Joyce gets me to cry but I didn't feel either how to or the right. 2nd Getting up at six for the light in the herb g. Working 'til 10. Notes in origin has a booking problem for September/October. Rose Lawder has booked the CFDC copy for a Canadian retrospective touring show in France. The CFDW copy is booked by Cinematèque Québequoise. And Paul somebody wants to take it to Japan. I'm saying this in astonishment. Combing tapes for phrases. The shapes of life in the voice. Finding which part of the paragraph says the whole. Why are there paragraphs? Sometimes there's a search. It's the last sentence. Sometimes everything after the first is weak. Are they sentences that describe the person? Can I have them sounding their secrets and still pass on the warm strength. 7th The sense that what I think, what I see, can, if I say it anywhere, damage any of my relations finally. Louie will never be as free with me, because I wrote what I felt. Now I'm going to risk it with Luke. I won't give my freedom to discretion as people do who keep connections. That is a hopeless feeling, that I don't like them enough to be bearable to them for any while. They will have to give up. I will be relieved when they do, free and uneasy. And now I'm going to have to fight for my liveness. It's pouring. 8th On Sunday it was hot and bright. I washed the car, packed the Coleman, assembled stuff in the corridor. Louie at Hilde's logging DATs. Luke on the plane. Michael and Rowen in their house getting together the cornflakes box, ketchup bottle. At the airport it was Sunday afternoon, a thin crowd. I knew I didn't want them waiting with me. I wanted to be able to see who was there and to be able to ramble away. Louie went off and watched where I couldn't see her. In her concentrated blue shirt. Many short dark young men came through and then a Luke looking different. What is it about him. The next two days staring at him, what is it about this. Black leather and a long narrow face with the jaw set forward. Something strangely disassembled at the hip when he walks, as if the body does not start at the feet and press up in a wedge the way it does with narrow-hipped men. As if what should be the compression of the bum has flattened sideways. And why do I think that means an erasure of will? It's a strong hard body, Egyptian above the waist, long head, long neck, long arms, shoulders very wide and waist narrowing extremely. (His step in the corridor.) And then white below the belt, cut off. And sitting in serious technological conversations looking, sometimes not looking, at the technological haircut, low forehead, smooth brown skin, small eyes, soft valentine mouth and jaw carried like Roy's tho' he doesn't have an underbite. Daphne said "The smile is the same" and yes there is someone in the smile other than the held-back hauteur of the young man who came through the International Arrivals doors with a NASA pen and a racing bike. What's missing is eagerness, the united energy that comes through the face in a bright band of intention. What a good family would have given him. Or a necessary struggle. It's still raining. Have to comb DAT tapes. Saturna. Luke running up the last slope onto the cliff with Rowen on his shoulders. Walking on grass completely dry, three-inch soil baked over bedrock, little grasshoppers shooting up criss-crossed with every step. Louie walking away east along the ridge. Michael and Rowen crashing in the fir undergrowth "going for a hike." Coming down the Zane Grey trail and finding the camp so strangely quiet for midsummer. A fat woman says it's private property. We pretend to leave. My cabin locked. "They're going to bulldoze it all down." Around toward the point, already the sure trail is vanishing. The point with the clamshell beach. Louie takes Rowen to wade on it. Luke disappears with them. The tide rises over their shoes. I lie there long enough to start to see: an earth packet in the lichened rock, gold grass, short stalks, oval heads nodding against the turquoise sea, and a few back-lit small ferns intensely green amidst - three colors burning in so beautiful array. And then an arbutus tree - either you see this - a net of descending kinks, grey, the dead branches rippling down in the shapes made to lift leaves in the characteristic arbutus way - or this - new leaves bright green raying from a couple of dozen centres high in the tree - or this - a litter of dry red leaves caught messily among the live branches, also red. Douglas firs, corrugating downwards, from deep deep blue sky. O my Greek headland. There was a tenemos under a large juniper a bit further along that coast. Goats sheltering in bad weather had tramped out a little theatre floor, the inner half raised a few inches behind a long root. Juniper is something in itself, and the way its shade was held in a shelf over the rockfall was archaic. Dusty earth with blue juniper berries, dried goat beads. At times a slight smell of goat. The new owners picked this place to bulldoze a sea view. What they did was level the crevasse that drained the pasture in a small seep through nettles, windfall giants, silted pockets. So now there are no goat paths down into the soak and through the tangle and up again to the floor under the juniper, which is still there but so dislocated it was hard to find. I saw the man with money whom we allow to own it, stand there oblivious with the cat driver saying Bring it down through here. I'm orating because I want to challenge that man, I want to shame him and raise a crowd against him. - Temperance: left pours into right, foot is in the water. Full spectrum tie across the sides. The pour seems to be across the s.p. Heart marked with a [triangle], forehead marked with a [dot in a circle], iris on left, a path and crown on right. The lovers: left is male body and flame-tree, right is female body, wound snake and fruit tree. An angel joining them has its head attached to transcendent sun circle. These are the only events taking place in or on gold. In Temperance the whole sky; in The lovers an upper sphere, only the angels. - Call it digital/analog confusion. Phil would participate and so would Andrew. An image of particles in a sea. "A sea alive with countless particles which occasionally cohere into more complex bodies and then dissolve again." Saturday 10th Sorry. With Louie at breakfast, seeing her across the table, seeing her. What do you want to do today? Go home and fool around. When we get home Tony Gordon-Wilson comes to do his interview. When in the end we get to lie down together I'm all over important. 11th Language and land. Land is location, everything is in its place and it's common. The languages are not common. Re-hinging mind by acts in common space. (I said Roy had been shifted off his foundations.) The coextension of persons and their space. The unborn: liberation is the nervous system without conceptual activity: "egoless." Visitational marriage in the mother societies. The husband is a strange man, a guest, an alien. "It opens and closes like a door in the wind." Desire, will. The science of state - gradations of hal - states and physical happenings - objective art based on laws of effecting of states. Or by loving someone and finding the soul where it is. Friday 16th What's at stake. Whether it's going to be real or not. We watch each other to discover whether the friend is dominated or autonomous. I'm talking about us of earlier time. Those who're still competing. If the friend is autonomous then the times together will be times that (can lead to fame) anyone envies. This saying is very blocked by the unease of claiming porch space in the morning. The sun's moved from behind the lime tree and I have it on the side of my face. The grey and white cat curled between pillars. The fit of this table into porch corner, and Louie's Namibia postcard holding the beginning of this time. When she was born through the International Arrivals gate. 19th Gorbachov's end inscribed into seeing it with Luke. A sunburnt man with black whiskers whose face has the kid light again. And I feel it at times too, like the joy of having him asleep in the Valhalla house. Oh Luke it is you still. And then more. Louie sad about Rob is lying on my bed reading about computers. I lie down next to her and read her last year's journal from this time. Parts about Rob too. There is such love and recovery in the writing that I think she'll see she's safe. She says The writing is so good. I say, Isn't it really good. We imagine it in a book. (My father looks into it, puts his hand over his eyes, says Oh mein yammer.) Rob is embarrassed having his penis described. But does he like it too? Louie doesn't mind because she likes how it's written. I wouldn't like notoriety but I'd like being finally out. The worst cost might be that I couldn't write anymore. Even thinking of it makes me feel the kind of free run I like won't come again.
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