| aphrodite's garden volume 13 part 2 - 1991 august-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Thursday 22nd August Having to decide about the camera. Wednesday 28 Betacam 505 SP recorder from Shooters, Brent Marchenski's fat-cheeked one-sided grin. Friday to Monday carrying machines, cables, setting up, taking down, legs aching, harried so I couldn't stand Luke or Louie standing near when I was searching through the lens. Sunday morning I'm at the bottom of the orchard after the greenhouse shot. Louie coming toward me slowly at a distance says Did you see the bird on top there? Exasperation jumps out. Louie on top of WHAT?! A crane flaps up from the espalier and away. Louie's hurt. I seethe with righteousness. Sorry it's happened but furiously annoyed I'm having to think of looking after her feelings. The way it is when I'm exacerbated, too, I can't stand the way she's speaking - her accent, but I think it might be something more than accent that happens when she's let herself be injured. Her words draw apart from each other and tighten into miserable black buttons. I want it not to be her accent because that would be irremediable hate. When I'm adoring her I don't hear it. What else to say about that. Say it here because it must be said so cautiously there. Her helpless tears and beleidicht voice make me want to hit her - make me preach, make me hard - look after yourself, don't make me responsible for you! I say, There's a way I can't trust you: I can't trust you to draw your own boundaries so that you don't get hurt. Seeing her yesterday welling tears because she used to be her best self when she was with me and now that happens less and less. I was disgusted, it is so long since I passed that mark. I want you to understand something, this is important, I want you to know that when you make sacrifices it's not for me, it's for that. Why disgusted. Because thinking and saying she's making sacrifices 'to be with' me she makes me falsely indebted for those sacrifices, when in fact she's offering them (I don't know whether unwisely) for the chance to ride on the verve of my less-safe contact with badness. Something like that. And what am I doing. I'm getting help breaking into video - just this passage we made last weekend, through the nerve-wrack of learning the camera. Earlier the DAT and the car. Next weekend the sound tools program. After that the off-line edit suite and then the on-line edit suite. Maybe the story is that I saw I could export her inexperience to get myself technologically viable again. And then do something beautiful of my own. (I said to Peg last night "I'm quite liking the technical boys these days, because they're really useful. I never thought the day would come, but it has.") And if that's what I'm doing, then what else do I know about how to make We made this. Before the first day of shooting I dreamed this: Rhoda running after me wanting to discuss my grievance, I ignore her, she persists, I burst out annoyed telling her what I think, she's gleeful, I've given her what she needed to make her video perfect. I'm deceived and defeated. 29 Waking today thinking I'm missing direct address. I want to say those words though they are not direct themselves. Louie though she 'loves' me doesn't see into me or speak into me. Rob will have me back but it will be no more than it was, passion without bravery. Luke stands there looking intense but doesn't say what he's thinking. I dreamed I was in a van with Jam driving into a building site. She says she doesn't attach herself to anyone, it's still me she thinks of. I agree it's that way for me too but I want to be sure to tell her I need to fuck men. The ceiling of the van is touching my head in an odd way - it's dark mesh like Remay. - What do I have to think out to know how to shoot next time? What I have already. How to set it up so there can be longer shots. How to put unintroduced voices over other people. [shot list] Suzuki doc: shots where s.th. happens 7-10 sec, static shots 2-4 sec, interview shots 15 max - long shots convey special respect. 1st September Gabriola Off on the edge of a lovely place afraid of the wasps and in anguish about something - Luke did what either've us wd have done, walked off to feel himself really here. Louie's purple shirt disappeared up a tongue of grass into the firs' darkness. In a bed and breakfast bed last night more of our misery about sex, I could want to slide two fingers under her panty edges but it's idle, I don't want to go on because even getting into it it's just diddling, no well opens, I don't go home. So am I also in anguish about her contemplating Alexander? She says it would take her away. So go. A lovely person. But the wrong kind of use to me. A corruption of my loneliness without shocks of truth to make gates. A large flock of rooks wonderful over blue and white. There seems an invisible white line around their cut against the sky. In the ditch a long roll of rose brambles with pale orange hips. Beyond that fence a strip of field. Bright green with its second crop. At the next fence the dark heaps and black forks of old orchard trees - cracked blue plums, red yellow apples, a grand feathered robinia, and beyond them a light ground of dead grass in a swath up to under a black row of firs. That grass is jumpy with grasshoppers. I can't sit in it for yellow jackets but here I am far off across the road in the back seat of my car. (Bought a jacket that color and it's also the red of the kimono I saw myself in last year when I began with Louie) - a hot dark red car. [math notes] 2nd Back from Gabriola, a hard weekend that ended with us at our worst, she hurt and wanting to 'talk', ie be reassured, I wanting to escape the horrible sight and sound of her. What happened she wants to know. Maybe something did but it's more a continuing texture of dislike of our ways. The way we haven't got a high ground together, it's gossip, malice, anxious talk about the relationship. The times I wait for her to say no or I'm not available, and she always says yes. There she stands enticing in her underwear, a perfectly kept body and an irritant. I'm disgusted with her. And am I disgusted with myself for not liking her? As if she does no harm and I'm just bad to be hateful. But I'm running away - no question - I'm running away from that little voracious mouth - that tells me anything I want to hear. She'll gladly corrupt me to attach me, a hideous companion. And have no idea what this means. And dejected that inevitably fun and liking are becoming hate. As if I could have known and did. 3rd Is there a conclusion. Whether to ride it out or take a side road into kind evasion. 4th What to say about fighting. The moment she said she'd been in a cappucino bar, looked up and saw they'd come in and were looking at her. She thought she'd look at them as if she'd never heard anything of them. "I really liked what I saw." Two women who came in together, worked separately, sat again together. That's indelible. 5th Cheryl at her show, a portfolio published. There's she, skinny again, thin fists crossed over her chest, long earrings, tight legs in flower print, feet grabbing the floor. The people who come to see her are fashionable I guess, unhappily presentable, scratching up things to say. "See you next time." "Let me walk you to the sidewalk at least." That is the thing to say. Bony thing. I liked that soft old-lady kiss. Camera again. What happens as it gets dark and there's more light in the monitor than in the natural eye - 10th What is this. It's very painful. She's going to let Alexander buy her a trip to England. That it's September and the summer has been so bad, so meager and unfounded. Rain, waiting, gossip, distress. Noticing I'm wishing destruction now. Let's really wreck it. I shdn't have got caught in what wasn't my own. I don't have to live in pain. 11th At an art fair. A tall thin English critic says he's curated a show of pictures from my film. Look at this. Some lines in the water. Soldiers. They've transcribed what was being said on the soundtrack, a line in pencil above a glossy photo, a line of bananas on a roof. I go find Cheryl and want to drag her over to see, they're going to do a show of these large, in 3-D. Cheryl doesn't want to look and is making excuses. Wednesday morning. How it stands. Luke's away. Louie's elsewhere. Joyce tomorrow. Paper Friday night at grad conference in Whistler. Shooting finished as finished as it cd be in 2x3 days. Rowen in real school, "Well, I always wanted a desk." Rob agreeable. Sore heart. New start. But what happened, what's the story. What's happening. It was her valor that touched me, yeah her beautiful breasts. Her breasts are still beautiful but I'd rather have joy of my own. And she gave up on her valor. What does the accounting say. What I've been given by this connection - little defeats of J, T, R - some fun with Luke, Michael, Rowen - faster induction to car, DAT, camera - salary over summer. What there hasn't been - sex - writing - garden - mind. The puzzle is, so devoted, loving, 'supportive' she is, why doesn't it support anything in me but bluffy braggy pretence? An hour with Rob lying in furry light supports me really for two weeks. Thursday Saying angrily, "She says I'm the one there's something wrong with, there's nothing wrong with you." Joyce missed the obvious, L hasn't a clue of it. Why I have to control people's perception. (When there's nothing wrong with them.) The way Louie says l and why I hate it. What happens if I don't control. Pain and fear. Pain and fear so bad I must do anything to escape. What does the pain say. I am less than these. "Dear little soul" - quivering and silenced, I can't speak aloud to it - "is there something you want?" Friday But quite a lot of this therapeutic thought is memory and speculation. Cdn't I just say, This doesn't work. Do I see Louie going on with me? No - she's like something spliced into the present, like Rowen, there isn't a true root. What do I have that does have a true root. My country, plants. Plant images - journal - sweet sex - reading - my life alone. There's something worth getting to know, tho' - how it happens I have to be so afraid of feeling less / than someone. Saturday What I dreamed. That Lee said in the gathering, I'd give it a D- in --- and an A+ in ---. I cancel the - and +, the actual grade is going to be very bad. Yelling. But the rest of them agree. I storm out. It seems I've done it. I meet them ambling somewhere. Say to Ray I have to resign don't I. The reason I haven't given a paper before is that I know I'm not good at this. An uncertainty in teaching, the little wave of protest, Tietz even - they all say, something too uncertain here, for you to go on in it. So I've quit, I'm out of a job. There IS UI. Walking away alone up the lane of the place where I have my room, a country house with a car parked. On the step three guys who might have bad intentions, but they're there on drug search. Pass me on to a couple of women who look down my collar, up my sleeves. And then I go on to the little room in the guest house. And wake next to a long window, dawn grey, in the guest house in Whistler. Startled. Now it's something else, sad. Monday Granular synthesis - takes it apart and stretches it out audible - separates sound so grain comes out of different speakers. [sound composition technique used by Barry Truax] What about the [grad students'] weekend. What was liveliest. Saturday afternoon debating Bjorn and Martin about preferential hiring. That was snappy, positive and on, a relief. Of sitting around while other people are on. What it is about 'listening' is that I shut down, want to get away, I'm not listening or able to leave. It's dull captivity. What to conclude. Tuesday L going "to the Lake District" with Alexander. All the reasons she didn't exactly want to go. Well. Who's calling whose bluff she says. I argued her into it. Ironically. She's the one who said I was missing a chance to get rid of her. Lying in the horrible bed and breakfast bed with her, had been playing with her panties, she said there was one of the nights sleeping at his house. She woke with his legs entangled in hers and wanted him "before she realized." Then she couldn't figure out why I was so terrorized, "running away," next day. Also that she was afraid it would take her away altogether if she slept with him. It was that. But now do I have to string her along until she goes. - I'm doing the right thing - how I know is - less oppressed - lifting even. What I've learned. That her reasons are not at all firm. Weds There's a lot I haven't told - and won't - I'm not really interested in why - as if it is her story not mine - the parts of it that are my story I tell her - what it's like in the fleet heavy car coasting down home between the dotted lines of Hasting's curvy currents - teaching Tuesday's last class, how they were bold and free - Louie last night at her car, 21st In loose white clothes, in a light fragile coherence quite beautiful and careful. This morning watching her mouth, one side smiling and then the other catches her upper lip hyperalert, there's her deer startling and anticipating a startle. I say if my bed weren't so dirty we could lie down on it and you could look at me. We change the sheets. The reason we're there is that Rob said he was going to have the house at Sechelt for ten days and I said I'd visit, thinking of more than one night and I work during the days. From having been there though, in the big chair after lunch, I get to hear these stories: crossing a street she saw a gash in the scene, a few inches wide, and seething thru' to somewhere else, sky and street too. She felt she could step into it but if she did she'd be in a world where pain never goes away. And, seeing Janisse on the street with her head shaved, an aura flowing from head to heart, heart pouring a heat of liking toward her. She couldn't speak. Panels slipped away sideways, sheets of tears slid down, she walked away. And, in yoga class, first it was the sheets of tears but invisible and then the top of her head dissolved. A transparency that when it has reached her shoulders is felt as acute but clear and impersonal pain. She goes to her car after the class still transparent. When she's driving the usual sort of pain comes back, the personal horrible kind. Last night at yoga four times she's close to fainting and then two hours are very stretched. And she has a system now like mine with the cards but she does it directly asking and listening. Sunday 22nd Oh if there were something to say - I wanted something - a moment I had it, she put her arms around me as if I were smaller. She stopped. Don't get cold feet. I am an infertile unlovely plain, persisting. What is this, forcing her through. I don't like to be it but still I know I'm going on until it works. Then in the aft she finds a music between seal voice and violin playing itself heart-rendingly against the space of the harbour, far gull, near swish. And I'm beginning the story of elements and space. 23rd "Seduced by a picture" Lacan - knowing by sight not feel A bed through an inner window, large bed on a light iron bedstead, window from another room in the house. The (be's) bed's isolated in a bare room, wide pinkish figured cover. 25th Reading Keller and others, work that funds itself easily, and it says this: an effective self made by aggression too, feels like it's a bad person but it's the one that gets love, sex, money, influence, a car, a son, a bright body, triumphs over enemies. This bad but triumphant self also remembers a time steeped in beauty, all day steeped in love, in pain, fear, revelation - only it was a re-entry still without a helper - the others had to defend themselves, so bare it was to see - no one was there. Then Rob who could contain without frightening, lets me adore and play, I'm effective all the way into feeling - easy to frighten tho', he doesn't betray but he could. I share power but it's a symmetry across unsymmetrical categories. The way we're equal is that I'm a best of the inferior category and he's a least of the superior category. So it has to be for me a private transaction. Uneasy. It has the mother very contained. I'm with her in his arms but nowhere else. A preverbal mother. Then Louie with her round arms round breasts and kind attention offers to be the mother, not contained, but all around in any conversation. The preverbal mother. Ah but the price - that the preverbal mother is gone. I'm hers and locked away. It's another stage. 28th Dream I read L's journal. Her wonder at the thought she's going to have a husband. I feel it as I read it. 30th Monday Rosepink had already made a plan to help with the fact I put on purple pants and a muscle shirt and was going to find horse for my horse. But still she cried and I was too big in the bench kidding her out of it. And then how was it? First such food - Goan curry and scented rice, a beautiful roti. An awkward gallop in the end, my big leg is wherever it needs to be, up against his shoulder - not fine writing, more hurry than either of us would think we'd like. What makes it real sex though - that it doesn't fail - I'm next to him reading and I want I want to touch him. His temperature pleases me. He's the right size and weight with it. "What's funny is that this doesn't feel at all unusual" he says. I don't sleep well, it's cold and I'm on a downslope, and dream that angels land in the form of schoolgirls in uniform, plaid skirts. There is a little girl I've found who's maybe one of them, a left-behind little girl. Take him to work at 34th and Fraser and it's near the cemetery. Misty. They shear the trees as if a natural branch would be unseemly, so there are stupid-looking lego trees on grass they're whipping with gas-motor appliances. A faint flat tower city suspended against the airy featureless blue of the north shore wall. Paul Epp. I said, This time of year is like you for some reason. He was happy to hear me and had so much to tell, as if he's alone in Toronto. A moment one night when he caught his reflection in a window and saw Ed, farmer's cap and moustache. I said Shave the moustache, you are already so far beyond him. Judy was superb, he said. "I'm not talking to you, Mother, I'm talking to Ed." That he still had to face terror and talk himself out of it. And was afraid to speak to him for fear he'd kill him. [my brother and sister on a car trip with my folks] 3rd of October Here it is Thursday and we're dumping tape at Video In, logging dubs today. 14 plastic books called 'master', and then a row of both large and small spines called 'dub'. Seeing our images again. Our some so-personal sights. Louie watching Rob listening to my long story about the kale panorama. "Oo I'm so tired, I'd like to just go home and go to bed." 7th Monday morning. Tea in the red chair. A train horn. Not seeing but imagining what I saw, bright mist. There is time around me. How. It lies in directions with its place, it's time of a place. In Edmonton forty years ago lying in a bed facing north, hearing a train miles northeast in a city I haven't seen. In London two weeks from now Louie gives Lis a letter. Eight years ago I'm here whining to Jam. Luke is asleep in the next room on a foam he's extended with a pillow. I can still walk tho' there are times I'll stagger suddenly. My grimy car under his window. Computer sound editing with Louie in the cold at Western Front. Doing it with her is maddening. "Put it on the top line there." "Louie these things have names!" She was beleidicht. I sat on the floor in the corridor and came to see what was happening. Don't take it personally, we're doing something that's quite hard, we're trying to talk, it's too hard and we're crashing. But she's really crashed, explanation won't get her out. "It is personal!" In her baby tone. "Louie it isn't personal! We're two computers who've crashed." She has to persist. "I'm not going to do this, we don't have to do this. Go away and have a break, or I will." She follows me up the corridor. She's in baby mode. I want to hit her, a flare of exasperation. "This is one of the moments where I know what I'm doing, I think you have to just believe me." She goes, I work, I get into the centre of it, I begin to understand how to move. Drive home downhill through the lights thinking what I've discovered. My father's pressure with machinery he didn't understand well enough. Chasing cows with Mary, her even-less capable interference. I took it personally in just Louie's way. There was no one in the overview that says look, both computers have crashed, it isn't personal, it's just a fact. And also the lovey state I was in during the Indian movie, the Aphrodite estrogen one, is not personal either. And then - is that what Joyce says - 'love' is not a feeling, it's an overview steadiness in chosen responsibility? And so would be war. But whether the states themselves, the full chemistry, are useful to the body, a drench of some sort of life. 8 Last night I'm vividly visiting a famous old woman, Isak Dinesen and not, a household, I'm thinking, oddly crude. But the woman's authority is unquestionable. It's crude in the way the walls and floor are slathered. She lives very socially with younger helpers, a social household with its systems, tea now, a sleep now. And yet it's just a room near the water, over the water maybe, an incomplete room with openings to the air, missing boards maybe - I'm as if officially visiting, she has other visitors but they're like tourists and I'm as if a less important colleague in whatever her art form is. I just sit in their midst, will sit there patiently all day. It's shadowy and busy, chatty. 14 Seagulls, the produce warehouse phone. Acacia on Keefer holding up yellow tatters in the level sun. What kind of day, it's still the beautiful last half of October, grape leaves on the neighbour's garage distinct with cold dew. Dimly achy. Louie is going tomorrow night. When she gets back will she be a fiancée. Is that really the question. No. But do I feel something. I miss her. The person I saw in the Ridge [Theatre] washroom mirror, a body with a lively mind in it - a lively wind - is the body she - gives or lets. At Rob's Thanksgiving dinner feeling how it is without a friend. It's perverse to want to hold onto his toes on the chair between us. Being pleased with so skimpt a man. Wednesday aft, 16th Windy and yellow. Things to do. Getting the garden cleaned up so it's beautiful in these colors. Mark papers for Monday. Write thesis proposal. Find out what's up for Gord. Rowen one night. Movies still. - Don't know how to speak here now. Know how to talk to Louie if she were. Why I asked her not to call. See whether I know how to balance. The way she has been to me is more ways than one. I don't understand why she wants to go for 3 weeks without her own money. And in the bed of someone. She seemed to want to but to want me to set her up in it. So I did ironically. And have been loving her quite close these weeks since my decision and hers. Was sick the day before she left. She too. We took Rowen's quilt and the sleeping bag to the baseball diamond. Lay there 'til the sun went. Fell asleep. I woke when the sky was incandescent yellow, as it's been, volcano dust. Wake up Louie! Then two bats beating circles above us bt bt bt bt bt bt bt bt. A dream last night of a place I was discovering, my former place, new place. Greg and Jam arrive. Greg looks brown and bright and strong. I take Jamila back to the door, she's not welcome. - Feels like I know what I'm doing. Analog has a femme feel, perception, analog in relation to a symbol system. It isn't just that women give birth it's that they perceive better. Sunday 20th WCPA. [Western Conference Philosophy Association] There were women giving papers even - ethics. Bjorn in a bright blue hard-washed cotton shirt, puts his long fingers thru' very pretty cut curls, says ü charmingly. Martin sits in a way to thrust his balls, talks like a fighter. Ray's classical pointed skull intelligently balanced on his spine. Philip Kitcher bloodless, fast and thinky with the look of an Edwardian religious. Our Phil with quite a nice modest style, loose and orderly, wears a leather jacket not a fine pale wool like Kitcher, jiggles a thin-leather mocassined foot, makes quirky jokes but does not fly facetiously into bits like the guy who said "I can't make my mouth dry - I mean wet." Rudy [Voth] briefly, his loving look. The suspicious guy from U of A, Pelletier. Couldn't imagine approaching the women. Oh a women's caucus at any of the meetings, what would it take. Just a way to know who's who and who's doing what. Tuesday early morning It's black still, tea, toast, the hiss of the oven. Teaching yesterday. Phil and Bjorn at the herb garden in the wind, Phil quite fluffy with pleasure at having envelopes of plant delight bits to bring his daughters. "Hemlock, don't taste," lovage, angelica, salvia farinacea, sweet briar rose, pineapple sage, woolly lambs-ears. Watching the guys come blind through the vine walk. But Bjorn imagined the streams of scent mixing in the wind. He asks numerical questions like a little boy pleasing the teachers. How long have you ... when did you ... how much ... Phil said all afternoon Sunday he'd had the scents of his hands. "You got imprinted." "Yeah." I did figure out Gordon. He doesn't know he's gay, takes off from the site because the condoms and hookers and glue drunks put him into profound unexamined distress. His dark glasses have to do with not seeing more than (as I thought) not being seen. And you, Louie (have to go to school now) I can feel you in my arms and am leaving it at that. "The dialectical play of form and matter is more deeply embedded in our thought than we might think." Mary Tiles. "Not abstractions from objects of experience, but abstractions from practices." Thursday 24th Louie phoning yest, dismay. Only a week. You can't just be away. Why. Disloyally thinking what is it with your chemistry. Little girl. And was it because you knew I was set up to see Rob. Trailing through the aisles at Granville Market starting to want to grope his upper arm. Laughing telling him my mouth swells up. And how is Rob. Coughing. Tight little black beard, eyes frightened I think. I fucked him - very pelvicly - as I thought he'd like and he did. Was willing to please him and not hurried. He was running cassettes he'd taped in the country, romantic and it worked. We were afterwards wrapped up sideways, he's a body so easy to hold. "What are you thinking?" (I know what you're thinking.) "That this is nice." "Yes it's nice." Garden. Walking on site flipping a bit. Beauty beauty. In bits there and there and here. Exquisite unanticipated color. From one day to another. The clethra at the foot of the long path. Multiflora. Raspberry leaves. Yellow asparagus plumes. (What's wrong with this. The TV's on.) Rosa woodsii. Red stem dogwood. Red potatoes found down in the dry light crumbly stuff in the east bed. Asparagus babies, seeds scattered last year this time, moved to their own bed. Raspberries shored up so their path shows leaf litter. Under the tomato vines bean stalks with pods dried. The soil's not very lively. 25th Today she phones back and says she's figured it out (a man in a field), her heterosexuality is scaring her. Scares me too but it's better I don't have to be the only one who knows it. Afraid she'll start lying again. 26th Nice room. It's for winter. Wintertime begins tomorrow. (Greenhouse plants in the kitchen, eucalyptus, hibiscus turning yellow, translucent green and gold tissue.) The winter workroom's blue-green glass, white wrap, bed in a new way. Last night I picked nasturtiums that are on the windowsill now, surviving. There was a frost. This morning with Ro, Saturday morning in the garden. He fixed his pies, concentrated for an hour on prying sunflower seeds out of their tight slots. I was setting out spare plants for Van Dusen, clearing the greenhouse, all in the autumn reach, the dear sun, powder, different things in the edges particularizing themselves in colors where all summer they've been unknown. As we're in our side by side beds, Row and I having a conversation. Rowen do you think you'll want to have children? Yes and I want to have a wife. What kind of a wife? A beautiful one. What kind of beautiful? Long hair. Hair up to here. What color? Pale. What else would she be like? (He talks about Myrie. Myrie is bossy.) Do you want your wife to be bossy? No, nice. How else? You know. Like you. We began this conversation when I was talking to the string. Ask more things about how I am like. Does Rowen want to have children when he's grown up? I asked, Does Rowen like Michael? He put out his hand and changed the motion when it said no. Yesterday tackling Luke about whistling. He says an influencible person defending himself. I say males holding onto space. It's our last week before something changes. Suzanne arrives. Louie comes back different. 28th Living in his mother and able to get out. And to something in this attitude he had to hold on, or the philosopher would altogether forget the particular in the general. She was a test that had to be met. And often indeed he felt that both Hume and himself were cutting pretty figures on the surface. She sat with her knees up and her arms round them, an intimacy with herself that was ravishing to see. Neil Gunn 1943 The serpent Faber and Faber Dreaming films, Phil Hoffman's, a new kind, transparent structures, like structures of thought or qualities of time - black and clear - that's all I can bring away. Next morning the wind was blowing on a bright day. Why's that so lovely a sentence. 2nd November [café] This is a nice place, an old fibreboard ceiling in panels, black tables. An unusual light, a beige light. Worn-out genuine plants stacked the height of the windows. Going to a movie cos I'm lonely. [Luke's girlfriend] Elle magazine and new bottles of eight kinds of lotion, démaquillant. An inflatable duck soap-holder. A sponge. They're petrified in dreams of class ascent. Don't do things, buy things. What is that. The way she hid in his room, didn't want to come find out about me or make herself known. Three towels of sizes suitable for ---, otherwise a pretty waif who doesn't at all want to be my daughter because I'm brave and smart. And him, buying something is his idea of adventure. That scandalizes me. What's happened to you guys so you don't realize there's things to do. My friend Louie over the ocean, who took one change of clothes. And puts her arms around skinny Alexander when she wakes. And doesn't forget me. Do I forget her? Yes. But logging tapes without her? That turned the corner. I should stay in with her for that. Now I have five nights on my own, clean windows, clean tables. 3rd Lightness, quickness, local exactitude, multiplicity, strategy, delight. Italo Calvino 1988 Six memos for the next millennium: the Charles Eliot Lectures 1985 Vintage International [actually lightness, quickness, exactitude, multiplicity, visibility, consistency] Saw that and thought, read Janis's class's journal stories from last summer. 7th It's the Thursday. L is at the airport walking around having left Alexander sitting with the backpack. Or she's cuddling on a chrome-plastic bench because the honeymoon's almost over. And I should look and see how I am. What I remember dreaming - I come to a house where I used to come. As if my uncle's house at UBC. Japanese people have it, who don't speak much English. I don't get far in. Sitting on the floor trying to speak to the women. She says they sing. American folk songs? Something like. Some of the men come in. We're in a dim night-lit room with one long wall a window onto a ravine. Bushes and grasses standing in red light from a low sky. They're speaking socially but I'm looking at the place they live with, so clear and keen and supernally beautiful I am crying with regret to be closed away from it. They do let me take a shower, as I used to, but that's not what I need. Everywhere on the streets, wet shreds. Reds. Crisis of dwindling light. Make sure to keep a fire in the house. A juncture, the border lies open between the dead and living, gods are vulnerable to the daring. It's an entry to pain, isolation, adoration, venture, religion, the company of my honoured dead, the tremour of contact. A black geometry. Felt dreams. There is a woman under the world he attains. Renounces the social person, turns toward spirit self, sex, grief, fear, dope, solitude, vision. Dies to the knowledge of control.
Sunday 10th Few nights ago. Andrew Irvine nuzzling on my shoulder, he and his wife. Another man, dark, and his wife. Two couples visiting in a large house. I am not bothering to set out the detail because I think it was a dream about math love. This was the night when Louie was sleeping in Luke's bed. After I'd found the geometry love in the lovely blue book. The dark man I recognize out of the dream is John the topologist. Last night I say to Trudy, Are you sick? What I thought to ask because of how she has been looking when I meet her on the sidewalk. Her face has been like tramped mud, dark. She points to her solar plex and to spots down from her shoulders but then she reaches across and tears something off my wall. This time I'm instant to grab it back and yell DON'T YOU EVER. (This dream I notice is an elaboration of a little daydream where she's sick and I help her but say if you ever pull one of your tricks that will be it, I'll stop.) And how it is with Louie. I was lying in the dark suffering, taking account of whatever pain I may have ignored, and then watching breath in the throat. A knock. Short thick shadow on the pane. I open the door to Louie and her pack. Have to laugh. Camie and Alexander have dropped her off. There she is in her winter jacket. Bring her upstairs but don't turn on the light, don't want to see her. Am feeling the beautiful world I made in pain will close me out again, the red sky winter land, if I trust her and speak. She has things to tell that I'm interested to hear, though, visited Ros, and Lis again, and chased a man on a bicycle in Kew Gardens to get a phone number for someone at Chelsea Physic Gardens, and with the help of Fiona got seeds out of butchy Sue Minter, and had observations of all these people that interested me enough so that in the morning when I was sitting in the red chair seeing her I was already holding her, interfused. And yesterday with Rowen standing on the pavement under her windows shouting Louie! Her head came through the curtain. A half dozen derelict men passing between us making jokes about bootlegging. She's in her sleeping teesirt and hair flattened on the side. We go to Stanley Park to look for breakfast. It is more beautiful than we'd thought to expect. It's Saturday morning. There are trees with leaves lost in just the amount to leave a floating lace. Yellow. And in another place, on a bank, a small cherry with a head like a yellow circle and at its foot another yellow circle, sloped. The shrubs sort out into kinds of different colors. Be very quiet says Rowen because of the black squirrels whose tail fuzz shows plainly the presence of the long rat tail inside. Rowen has pancakes, eats shapes in the toast while Louie tells the first day of her trip. 13th After this happy morning (the moment walking down a little flight of stone steps I put my arm around her shoulder and she put both hers around my middle so we were taking the steps as one hugged body) it goes wrong again. She shows up too often. I pull back to keep my own time. She oppresses me with her oppression. I think begone, I can't be bothered to be your oppressor. But we have to meet Richard together today. Yesterday's dream. Writing it in the smoker's cafeteria I could taste marijuana. A young man says "Have you been sleeping in the tent?" He means he'd like to sleep there with me. I say I'll lend it to him. It's the kind of charge I'm used to now, I'm in charge, he's cute. "Where do you go to school?" "I went to school in Tahiti." He's saying he's not so young. He lights a joint and draws it horizontally across our axis of relation. One strong fiery breath. He's a grown man. Trinidad. Might be darker than I thought, yes. Our powers are reversed. I'm panicked. A sudden truth of reversal and menace. Tears are springing from my eyes. I can't get away but how can I defend myself. Three kettles arranged on a heater so there will be boiling water. Unclear whether he'll use them or I. Wake with fear in my chest, it's got past the barrier in the solar plex. Feeling that dope is a gate directly into truth, that the relations I control are also that truth of reversal and menace. That my respect and fear of the dark them is that I think they live in the dark truth. That I'm negligible in art and teaching because I stay out of the dark truth. This after the falling asleep search of the night before, for a fantasy. Not wanting the sex sort or the love sort. Thinking in the end of a school room in a school, a large building, a school where I'd .... - She tells a story about Rowen: she is at Carnegie eating with Michael and Rowen, a bearded man she doesn't know and Mary McGuggin the lunchroom shouter. Michael goes to get a glass of milk. Mary is saying excitedly to the stranger, "Love really brings peace, I believe that, true love, not the sex kind there is now." "Like Ellie and Louie," says Rowen. L thinks no one hears. He's watching her take it in. "Ellie really loves you, you know," soberly. This morning she had a dope dream. We were in my car in front of Luke and Suzanne's apartment building sitting in the cold, my irritation rising. I'm yelling exasperated that no wonder she thinks I'm going to betray her, she's always betraying herself. There is her brilliant social self seeing and feeling and acting in its developed intelligence. Then she goes away and despises it for keeping her from work. I don't know whether what I'm saying is true but I'll go out on it. There is this brilliant person who takes such good care of you, and you're always threatening to kill it. Etc. After a while touching her arm, Do you know what I think - I think if you tell her how much you love her and are grateful to her and how brilliant she is, she'll help you with your work. I had a sparkle of water in my eye when I was saying that, and don't know whether it was true for her, true for me, or a hidden way for me to release that saying to her from me. - Martha Nussbaum. I like both her names and together. She says, one, I'm going to bring tragic poems into this discussion because they'll defeat your Anglo-American convention of ignoring complex conflict; two, I'm not only going to consider style an ethical issue, but I'm going to use different styles; three, I'm going to tell you about the times when feeling or sensing might be intelligent choices. Reason's art she calls it, leaving it to me to say, and its material is passion. I hope that the writing as a whole exemplifies certain virtues to which I am committed, and I have not, in thinking how to write, tried to give equal time to the opposite of those virtues, for example to stinginess and cautious retentiveness. Martha Nussbaum 1986 The fragility of goodness Cambridge
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