| aphrodite's garden volume 13 part 3 - 1991 november-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
17th November 1991, Saturday night Saturday morning, Rowen sleeping beside my bed, I dreamed L said she'd married Alexander "because he's a doctor." Her hair is red. Her face is a thin acquiescent face I've never seen before. I'm grieved. She's gone, I'll never see her again. I wake sore. Eat three bites of an apple. Go back to sleep. Ro and I are still in our beds when the door knocks. It's her with a pretext, defiantly chancing me. I'm glad to see her face. She's her beautiful self. Mouth corners, bright black eyes, hair lying feathered on her neck in a new way. Her black tee that shows the firm freckled slope to her shoulder. More to tell tomorrow. 18 Monday morning, thin sun through the misted pane. Misted because of apples baking in the oven. I was going to say something about the eucalyptus tree standing in the light but then I saw that a few of its new tips are shriveling and that frightened me. How it is. I'm waking early with shock in the solar. Teaching Randy's classes and my own today. Show at the end of the week. Luke and Suzanne sleeping in his kid room. Louie in her little room in Gastown. Rowen talking talking in Michael's kitchen. Last night showing slides to Luke and Suzanne noticing the slides look different than they have. A charge has gone out of them. The newborn slide is more powerful than ever, his face of a suffering mind. The ones where he's four and glaring. But the rest looked like the childhood of someone I don't know. The grown Luke looks like family. The ones the charge had gone out of were the ones that had been the icons of my feeling for him. I saw that the person in them was unknown. My unlove of the Luke of the present has made its way into the images of the past. I don't know what to make of that. Is it uncoupling, someone else has to adore him now? Is it the regressive undoing of my loves that I dreamed? All the loves of my loving young woman self. The structures of attachment in the brain simply erasing. I need the space for something else. Or it's a pathology. They died when I gave up on Jam, began to, and it took a while to complete. Or: its work is done. I woke L to complain she loves me in general but not in detail and so as soon as I feel her beauty I lack my own. Demanded she tell me some particulars. And they were all so recherché I had more reason to admire her and even less to feel myself presentable. Who else would need the flatness between shoulder blade and clavicle, or the bump of my tailbone when I bend from the waist? And my forefinger on the inside so smooth and strong she mustn't look at it when I'm not in the mood. The half hour she was sliding on my clit I was seeing pictures in the old way. 20th San Francisco A soda fountain, a poor street. Hey, flip that switch on. White neon. At that moment Elvis. Love me true, all my dreams full-fill. At the streetlight I correct myself staring at black people, Hispanics. Strawberry sundae is reviving, I'm not dragging now. A dark sky, very dirty sky. The hills look parched. In their cracks trees with grey heads. What did I notice about Steve Anker. (Canyon says Abraham rented notes in origin.) How pressed he is, pressed and unhopeful until the instant I said analog and digital. He said analog is sensual and wanted to defend it. I was noticing the effect of having something to say to boys. "Maybe you'd like to have lunch?" he said several times. Later I realized that if I did he could too, charge it to the Cinemateque. I was afraid of him in Toronto, but now I'm the guest artist. Will be, by tomorrow afternoon. What do I have to do to get there. Look at my work - Friday 22nd Parking lot with a little fennel plant. In the equipment rental place a young woman looking like the young Sarah Black, eyes the color of sage tea, broad cheek bones, strong chin and she's playing with sweet irony. People exist for her. She's the equipment rental counter. A woman buying gels says to me You're Laurie's mother! Then she looks at me in the deep taking-in way no one else here has. Our color changes. A blond woman also quite live shows up in the doorway. Something about lunchtime. I love you, Laurie says, aiming along her shoulder. No one acknowledges how she took the moment. "You've got a blotch on your shirt." Water spill on her left breast. "It's in the best possible place." 23rd Laura's torpor. I kept trying to get her to give off warmth, she reduced me to someone without characteristics. 24th An audience without live ones, except for the woman whose speaking was so damaged she would have to drag a breath into her to fund what she was determined to say. One young man in the front row I discounted wrongly, he had a bright face and said of Dorothy Richardson, Is she the one Joyce credited with inventing stream of consciousness? (Which is likely not what Joyce said, a generous version.) I'm duller myself and thought likely I was ugly, very black under the eyes. Disappointed not to be able to speak from out of the work, listening to the last ten minutes of tape not hearing anyone hear the accomplishment in it, the precision of interiority. As always thinking this should be the last time, I won't show my beginner's mind again. The gasping woman said "In the end you're born." 25 Yesterday shopping and not liking. The gimmickry of the Victorian fronts, a similar gimmickry in people. Boy with petal lips and spiked dogcollar. A woman in plastic leather and Farrah Fawcett hair (layered frosted cantilevered hair) turns a painted face with exactly the right features for the look but maybe twenty years past its moment, toward a man with florid slightly porky skin and an earstud, fine thin hair a too-even auburn, back seam of his blue suit jacket opening a one-inch gape under the collar. Old woman with complicated mask of symmetrical collapse. I don't like the way the house fronts rise directly from the pavement without gardens. I don't like the bumpy hills that obstruct and confuse, or the too many irrational streets. Or the way the tramline isn't serious transportation. Or the stunned tourists obediently gathering in tourist spots. Or the way relationship ads brag of and demand success. Or the bunker I'm housed in, artist apartment with unintelligent paintings and a TV that plays only one channel, America's funniest people and its like. I liked what I bought tho' - combat boots with high treads, beautiful red, green and dark turquoise socks, two Hawaiian shirts, these dark blue Gap jeans that walk so well from a high waist. ALL NU DE HAVE A PRIVATE TALK WITH A LI VE ON LY $1 NAKED GIRL
26th Panicking about what to do. Berkeley PhD's are GRE plus $40 to apply, 2 years of courses to a qualifying oral. 6 more courses, 6 more years. No fellowships past the first year. What do I want from it. Mental work. But not useless work. Frightened and undercut - don't want to go see Evelyn Fox-Keller, don't want to phone Dorsky. 27 In the corridor of Dwinelle Hall, the Rhetoric Department, writing E F-K a note. I just missed her says the unfriendly office. I think if I write her it will bring her. Looking at her colleagues, deformed men, why their left shoulders are high. Then she materializes as a witch. I look up. I look and she looks back, she doesn't recognize me but she sees somebody. She's many years older, old, long-toothed, very thin, draped unsoft cloth hanging from lumpy shoulder pads to bone ankles. Her eyes had that kidney darkness under them four years ago but she's much sicker now, she's juiceless, like a dying woman far behind tinted shades, harsh sardonic mouth. And she wasn't nice to me, no. I didn't forget there was no reason she should be, I'd showed up unmemorable at the crossroads where young women pay her court. She said to them, two of them, You look so well! meaning, I thought, you look so young. She was condescending about connectionism when she could be. I presumed to be familiar, You go talk to Bert she said pattingly. (I saw him in the philos department, a horror, a little orange-grey guy, tight, rigid, squealing with defended importance). And the woman at the Nyingma Institute, these unlicit visits in a town so barred and dead-locked, said she couldn't allow me to sit with the wheel, but she'd let me see the garden. Very beautiful, she said. Well - but the wheel tireless like the heart turning and humming. I sit down on the flagstone facing it, thinking of the university, my fear of it. I say, I don't want to be where it is so loveless, and find myself crying, sobbing. Cry and stop crying and see the hanging strings of the weeping birch in orange house light, and the beautiful folded colors of the prayer flags. And get up and leave. Buy Le Guin's Pacific Northwest novel [Searoad] at the bookstore by the subway entrance, just as the salesman begins turning off lights in the back. Sit softened facing forward as the train advances timelessly from light to light through the Bay tunnel. What work should I do now, the university so hard and lonely, should I go to Venda and make gardens? Could I write, now, would I be able to discover its entry? Or is it that I don't know about people and that's why I love the writers, who do know people and so don't need to love writers. Vancouver This is Sunday the 1st of December. Returned since Thursday. There was Louie at the airport turning her back reading, not watching for me. Saying I'd missed her, thought of her, thought toward the moment of seeing her again, walking through chilly night to my car, rattling the cart with horsie piñata, enamel cooking pots from Chile in a plastic bag with broken handles, student papers in sheaves, the little parts of my show, new clothes, feeling, but no, this isn't the homecoming I thought, she is no more home to me than anyone. And is it like this for Ursula, when she comes home to Charles after a reading in Vancouver? She has broken up with Alexander. She has a cold. She has been living her own life. Offered a good job. Thought I was with Rob the night before I left. Elizabeth [Grey, my sister in law] in a shelter house, pyjamas and eyes, pigtails, four kids she travels with. I've brought Louie to share. The dreadful moment when Liz says "What you said in your letter, when your body says that's the one." I go into shock for Louie. In the night I'm sleeping but she's not. There's a tone - she has to go on about Rob - I have to wake - maybe it's really sex when she's anxious that way - but all day Sunday I have to discuss - "I don't think you understand, it isn't him I would choose, it's my autonomy, my potency." Then really maybe she knows. But also she's woken with the decision to try Holden who isn't so cozy as sterile old Alexander. Last night among the beautiful kids I heard the part of Eliz's story that brought the sentence out of her. An arc of northern light from his house to hers, like the pink ray that showed her Rudy's driveway. Confirmation was a mudflap flown onto the road, "Beautiful BC." How Mary's hug gave out as well as sucked, "Ed sucks everything out of her so she has to." The eagle feather's beautiful vibrations. She speaks offhand of the miracles of her life. Two pixie children born two years apart but like twins. Kane keeping apart. Rowen among them looks a solid brown big thing. And her Luke - I like this kid, he's sexy, he likes me too and it's a recognition from long ago when he was two and we had our test of strength across the middle room floor. Tried it again. He challenged me to arm wrestle. I knew I'd better win. Also because we wanted to touch each other. The way he appeared on one side of me when I was looking somewhere else talking to Eliz on the other. Ten, eight, four, two. Rudy's handgun on the shelf with the condoms. A streptoccocal infection of the cervix. He threw Adam against the wall and then Levi after. Now beginning the winter work. 2 December The parts:
How computer analogy skews the questions. What the deep questions are:
3rd [Luke] We have a fight. He hasn't got the money for the rent. I fear he's Roy. He's offended. Sends out language in towering strata of male distance. He's chosen to vault over his own ground into plates of abstraction. L tells a skilled story of what she saw Joyce thinking and what she thought then and did next and how Joyce was wrong and how she was right and then how Joyce asked about her feet. She realized she was feeling a pressure from all sides of the white room equally, and lying in the air facing the window outside of which were children, their voices. And then reads a lovely improvisation on sitting in a theatre, the red plush, a man who comes from outside to pick an apple, and the moment when a she comes onto the stage and is balanced, is balanced, is balanced. I heard it wracked with suspense thinking I'm going to be hearing the whole story of how Louie is going to leave me with a man. Was that a story about getting pregnant? Yes it says. I say come to bed with me for half an hour. As if I wanted to get at her breasts. But then also didn't, knew how to begin but my hand got locked in her underpants. Before that the knowing tension had me but I lost certainty and then was finishing a task and she too I thought. Mouths together weren't personal. There has been something missing, I don't know since when. As if it's what she's recovered for herself that isn't in circulation in us now. (The image I have for it is a cracking of the solar.) I'm more socially attached, willing but thinking I'd better be careful not to make it a pleasant. Skin. "An outgrowth that's eager looking around, absorbing. Not vacant but full of live grain all alert." "It's something that has made itself not all at once but by finishing small parts and adding them onto other finished parts." I've decided to give her whatever I know and let her take it beyond me if she can. I also know she could still be rising as I feel myself dropping away, and that I have to be ready to feel that. No but there are limits to what I'd give her. They don't matter tho' because she has her gifts that are not taken from me, and what she's after is whatever I know about getting them out. She's careful not to frighten me because she knows what she wants. "I don't think you know how much I love you." I do know, I won't forget, how little that is a comfort. It's what sets me up to be surpassed like any used mother. What would comfort me would be to have free running grace in me too. And that's if I invite it well. Enough. And go where it is. It's about aggression and contact. Okay. Thurs 5th She's happier than she ever remembers being, she says. Why. The writing. That I'm liking her. And, she doesn't say, she's going to go fuck her hard man, her polarized, other man. And I'll go fuck mine. I'm not happier than I've ever been. I don't like the mucilage. Last night hearing her voice hypnotizing us both. I kept thinking glue. Mucus. Necessary slime she's pouring onto her passage. ("The kind of man I've always been attracted to and refused.") The slime for me is the hours I'm spending in discussion that's not yet true, "I love you best Mom, I'll always love you best. But oh, but oh, his smell of cigarettes and sweat." Her twin. Born a week later. And always will be. Hold-en. Black British father, Cree mother, behold-en. "He's very sexy, I'm amazed you don't see it." Not my type. A good name. Not a listener. Nervous. He likes her. She's frightened. I'm her cover story I just realized. She's busy telling people about me just now when she's going to risk the real thing. No use to say that yet. As she came to the corner where his house turned out to be there was Martina with her awful little dog. "Where's your friend?" "Ellie is such a beautiful woman." A brain-wiped scrag standing as my sign where the ways cross. What do I want to know. What I know already is that this move is necessary. What I want to know is whether the necessary pain will harm me, whether I can easily afford it. I will have a man for my girl there and here too. Sweet devotion can't hold me away. But it's tedious being used by her self-ignorance. What I've felt all along, there's a crooked exploitation pushing in this devotion of hers. I want it out, done. Danger she said was that there isn't an ultimate goodness. Which is soul. I said I'm haunted by that danger with her. "That's what you'd choose a mother for, someone who'd be good at getting you out." [untranscribed notes on set theory] To Marr: a function can be found to describe a physical process but the physical process is not implementing that function. Saying the brain is using functions is like saying the brain is a human artifact. Rationalism and god, that untold correlation. They imagine themselves to be the gods. The language of computation riddled with anthropomorphic metaphor. Goes both ways: a person reading is a machine, a machine is 'reading'. Saturday 7th Twenty four hours - tuning through - we went to a movie, agreed about Alan Rickman and the writing - "To be honest, I think I'm in trouble here" was not a bad line - couldn't find anywhere to drink tea - came to her house, Alexander's complicated teapot pours it cold and the highstepping cup stands there threatening to be kicked over - I don't feel well, worried about something - she isn't, she's balanced, balanced, when I say untrue things she has her facts ready, "But I remember you said exactly the opposite of that" - I think I'll go home, I'm dull company - she runs out to put more money in the meter - it's midnight in her cream room - unfold the bed - I open the curtains, she closes them, I say why are you closing them, she opens them - because the brick warehouse fronts are there showing the street and the town - a room so warm we can leave the window open and hear Friday night in Gastown - turn off the light and have shouts put moving markers into outside, so the bed's in a room that's in the street - a room off-square with a rectilinear pipe fitted to the ceiling, two chairs, a table, two windows with curtains the color of the walls. When the lights are off she tells a dream - she dreamed the arm of a fern and its shadow, in the background T and R, and also given, two S's that it says means self and shadow - I praise her brilliant dream - she says she asked her book why she doesn't have clear instructive dreams anymore - it said wait, you will again. It's lack of hope. I knew what that is, the way I don't hope for dreams now. Before we slept, the whole time she wanted to talk about writing - "I want to stop people in the street" - Canadian pathos, a short story - does she want to write like this? Amazed as she read. A smile she could feel the outside of as well as the inside. The second exercise beginning to be the story of the woman who stopped for a year - in a toilet stall in the Girls at this end of the school. Life is motion, to motion be true. Alan Rickman in Truly, madly, deeply 1990 dir Anthony Minghella Remembering how sore it was not to know what the writing was. ("You're nostalgic in a negative way, about what you were before her.") In her journal she says that before me she wasn't seen - and was crying next to her careful seeing. I thought I should question that, knowing how much I don't see. For instance, the story she tells, the last time she saw Jam, Jam was soft and clear with her in a way that made her relax. And after, she said, she saw Jam was being me, deliberately and experimentally, to discover which of us is the girl. I'm not sure about that, but Jam was calculating probably, many times I didn't notice, uncaught. I'd've thought criminal and not wanted to catch her. Morning. A story. He says "Come here." Her choice. She's not too proud, so deep an ache. "Ti voglio." "Did you say William?" Laughing. Later the story of the dream about my father. "I wasn't saying ti voglio, I was saying It's you." "That's what I was saying when I came back from England." "I don't think I've ever said it apart from that." That's as much as I'm going to tell except for this afternoon when we'd come back here and she'd got her car bill and we were in the red chair in each other's arms in one outline together, our bodies one texture of twilight grey, talking. The story there'd be in the story of our twenty four hours, a story with stories, the wealth. 12th Jam's voice on the radio a ponderous buffoon. Eliz "I had my flow back." L turned on Co-op Radio at midday, heard a song in Punjabi, a crow's cry. She thought, I must let Rani have my new phone number so she doesn't lose touch. Phones Co-op to leave a message. "Rani can't speak now, she's doing a show." Rani phones back. The Punjabi song calls to old friends to return, the crow's cry is that. The way she said to Alexander, "The sex didn't move me." I dreamed something like sex as a gynecological poke, an old man pouring oil on my perineum. She in the background. "Cream." The red carpet found in a hotel room in transit with kids. A slop basin overfilled like chamber pot with floating turds, pale plastic dildos, urine, spills over on my gatherings. The way I saw her this morning, 'bubbling' as she thought, but coarse, with her teeth set. As if I'm depressed at her joy because I don't have it. Let me investigate this. 13th A hateful fight with my sister. She's saying she wants me to die within 6 months. In the morning I blow up with Louie. She touches my packback. I yell at her not to keep touching me without invitation. There seem to be two events, my grandparents' anniversary and something with Laiwan's people - funeral - at my house where I'm inwardly berserk, tears, pages of my writing blowing into the door and window of the apartment across the way. 14th Maxine wants to see a film by ---- and ----. Turns on a tape recorder and closes her eyes. I watch it, red and black midshots grainy stretch-printed and out of focus, as if the people whose writing it's about. Superimposed is the writing. Handlettered very beautifully. Small drawings like letters themselves, flag's mutating downhill? Evidently a sense but a new ungraspable sort. 15 The day is dimming winter silver of late afternoon in December. There's sun on the wall but weak, horizontal. Night sweating, aching in cavities in jaw and forehead, lifting my head to blow my nose, thinking unrecoverable structure about language in Always coming home. In bed until noon, strong sun on frost on the roof, then on the black roof nearly dry, sinking and rising like the whole of the night. And isolated. Luke's at Angela's hiding from what he should want to know. Louie is learning to refuse her anxiety. I am living out the time of a flu, and this odd ache of the left shoulder that has no reason and doesn't mend. On the floor a spread of papers half marked. Other dreams, two nights ago. Light snowfall in blue light shows the chevrons of a truck tire. This looks just like a blanket I used to know, I say, looking at it - it's exactly the African blanket blue and white cotton. Something about clearing out the top floor apartment of the building I lived in years ago when Luke was young. What it is about that dream is I've had it before, more than once. Luke the morning - he walked in from mountains blue in a fine early morning, pale, red-eyed, still giving off beer fumes, and sat feeble in the big chair with Mary's knitted blanket. "I'm telling people this birthday is my seventh." That touched me. 17 Coming out of the cave - it's still there behind my nose - but I'm standing looking around and it's Luke's birthday - and what will I do with the rest of my years - I like this philosophical work - and I have writing now - and would like to try out living as if my opinion was interesting - and know there are still those paths into the back country. Last night in bed remembering the science of state, what I meant by it. A judgment of the air. - He's sleazing both of them and being agreeable to his mom who'd better not be fooled. And not by her own ready argument either. 18 Saying to Louie, If you saw me you wouldn't take it personally. (If you take it personally it's because you want it for something.) The times I'd love a screaming fight - as the light of nature cannot speak, it buildeth shapes in sleep from the power of the word Comments from students in Janis Crystal Lipzin's class at the San Francisco Art Institute after I'd done the notes in origin show there: "The source of action is hidden." a very descriptive quality also in feeling a reconstituted and helpless imaginary infant It was not remembrance but a direct example of the silence of childhood The narrative exploited the images It thrust a subjective subject matter at us as our own, which it isn't. I felt mass-produced, a substitute, a composite image, without my own origin.] 19 Her face lopsided big on the right retracted on the left. She's been waking sitting on my doorstep where I won't let her in. Her tears leave me cold. I'll be just as cold and nasty as I'm prompted to be. The end of trust she says. I don't care. Trust is supposed to be intelligent, if you have childish trust you'll have childish hurt. I say that. A garden down the lane of the first house. Roses are blooming early. January. I count, two months early. There's a place with a row of white posts or tree trunks, I could prepare planting holes there. A bulldozer back and forth over crushed metal compacting it. But what I'm standing on won't compact that way. I don't name them in the dream but they're fossil trees laid with their heads on the downslope. Redbrown rock. Anteroom to a garden. A man with a familiar particular look, I remember where I've seen him, we had brief exchanges a year ago at the graduate library. He or I say I'll hold the baby while he goes into the garden, it's as if a ritual visit. He's tall and some part eastern, not Asian but (Armenian, Iranian) strong in nose and cheek and narrow in the eye. Kinked hair partly white. I'm left with the little boy come unwrapped. Thinking he was getting married just as I spoke to him last, so they'd have had a child quickly. His family arrives, the young wife too, startled to see the child with a stranger. - I don't know what I'm supposed to do, I mean so it'll bring an open life and not more sad withering. [From Hillman The dream and the underworld: Nekyia "to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id" psyche speaking to itself in its own language It
fixed in their repetitions, unredeemable, unredressed that place of judging now and within, the inhibiting reflection interior to our actions If we search for the most revelatory meaning in an experience, we get it most starkly by letting it go to Hades, asking what has this to do with 'my' death.
compost - given to Hecate - garbage was placed at night at a crossroads - who brought harm and banned fear, had no brother or sister or any descendants red soul - whatever it wishes it buys at the expense of soul the specific hope that is abandoned desubstantializes, it no longer matters on its own terms but only in terms of the psyche across the Cinvat Bridge of Iran as Jung looked back to Carus and Paracelsus, Dorn and Goethe Hades' wife the psychic being of marriage with what is alien, different, and is not given dragging one out of life, the sweet sunlight Hekate Angelos, Phosphoros that shines in the dark and that witnesses such events because it already is aware of them doesn't mean escaping soul's work by identifying with it an archetypal person in human shape in some dreams the name of the thing itself that soul is found in the reception of its suffering when there is a riddle there is a hero eternally married to his mother we pay for life-soul with earth-soul if the dream-ego is a familiar of the underworld a dream tells you where you are not what to do "Without metaphorical understanding, everything is only what it is and must be met on the simplest most direct level." a apprentice learning merely by the gesture of the averted head opposition "a special kind of repetition, of two similar things that are mutually destructive in virtue of their very similarity" dreams are made by the 'persons' in them the soul is hungry for images the style of a dream to respond to its work with the likeness of our work, aiming to speak like the dream, imagine like the dream we haven't asked what does it mean, but who and what and how it is remembering a dream is a recollection of death repelled and attracted, beyond Hades as destroyer and lover there is Hades as incomparable intelligence worked souls, in contact with whom we get a sense of what matters whenever we take back a projection - what can't be seen through - something that had been clung to and lived from an insight that shocks and brings a sense of death who is afraid of the chthonic mind] 20 In a bathtub, father behind me, boyfriend over there. When he goes out of the room I narrate. She lies down in the water, she's herself again, puts her feet up on the wall. But feeling herself seen from behind. When I'm leaning back against the father's chest I see and feel my breasts in a mauve leotard pressed round. I'm utterly wanting and knowing it can't be had. He removes himself. But I liked the desire. Louie in her room a thinner whiter face with signaling eyelids, less the grinning boy-girl and more the suffering intelligence. Her fantasy is that I'm the Sufi teacher. Louie there's no teacher. I look like a teacher but I'm not one. Hades wife. If it isn't the hero's story but the girl's, then it's a story I know. The psychic being of marriage with what is alien. Mary's marriage. There isn't a word for her journey, it isn't nekyia. Philosophy is father hell kingdom of the dead. I go there to get money! Why my erotic fantasies have the father behind. The specific hope that is abandoned. 23 When I'm just settling to sit she phones. She's afraid that if she doesn't she'll close down. That means I'm supposed to be available so she can have what I can't. That's my rage. So she'll be a lovely writer and make charcoal drawings too. I said I want a structure to contain her so I don't have to do it in myself, so I don't have to be dismay and then think about why. 26 It's days later. What to say about yesterday. What to say about today. It's late aft, sky starting to shut. Saying that, I want to go out. What to say about yesterday. I could tell about Juan and the doll grandchild, Rowen with Kane and Levi along the wall in the corridor eating Christmas dinner out of bowls in a row. White Ammi the fairy baby in Eliz's lap suckling with one foot up feeling at the air. Michael without his hat being taken for the man of the house. Louie at the table peeling potatoes, I opposite peeling turnips, Eliz out with the kids in the park. Luke's voice from his room, a firm uncle over the spread of pennies to be counted with Luke2 and Kane. Rowen in my room when I wasn't, putting more things onto the tree, a bottle over a fir tip. Louie later doing the same. Luke2 being nasty when he couldn't be witty. The moment when we're sitting in the dim front room and Luke1 makes his appearance dressed like a court hairdresser, black with Italian shoes and a belt buckle and carefully judged three-days stubble. Louie the quiet daughter. And me not the cheerful mum, providing the place. Hearing a room laughing when I'm not in it. Dragging. It's Louie I have to feel it with. My lack of vividness. It's there for them, whatever they can make of it, but it's also as if I don't believe they can make good of what I give in such lack of love. - But what am I pining for. This morning Louie's head bigger, she wants to cry because I'm annoyed, the sweet dream she woke from and I wasn't there caring to hear it. I said what I want her to hear is that I exist too. A small wave of sadness followed that and I believed confirmed it. Whenever her feelings are hurt she has an opportunity to look and see that it isn't about her. I was being patient - oh - explaining when I could do it once or twice with Jam. Use the moment to look and see her distressed, crazy. But then in seeing that I'd have to find myself alone. I could see Louie didn't like to hear it. A look very fleet and slight of stubborn sulk. She knows that containing, she has done it all her life. Oh but this is what I've been saying, she's chosen me to be the one who rescues her into being the contained one. Alright, she agrees, she'll sometimes be that with me too. When she says so the sun rises into my face, and then I'm beaming too to be able to beam, to have an autonomous feeling come alive in me. But Louie. I saw your secret decision to go on refusing. What am I sure of. I'm not looking either. I'm bamboozled by guilt and obligation. There was a face that came forward into hers, it's an ugly stubborn demon, not a kid, more of a dwarf, an old malice with a grin set. Saying that, I'm on track, keen, again. A greed like Mary's. Being willing to see it I would see other people too. The seeing I was missing in yesterday's dullness. What I insist against her: that the half hour satisfied with Rob is true. It's true, it's true. Something else. Tuesday night when I'd been shopping doing and aching all day and we'd got into bed and I was sore all down my back she put three fingers on a pressure point on the right side of the spine a bit above the waist. When she said she was amazed at the suddenness and amount of current. I had felt it too. The right bum and up even around to the forehead and then the right heel. And then a sound sweet complete night. [opposite: learn to dock with their angel bhakti yoga, of devotion shrines and gestures conversation with the beloved d. Dec 17 1273 Konya in Anatolia alam-al-mithal imaginal body for traveling Avicenna, ibn Arabi, Attar, al Gahazzali, Sana'i 13th c courts of love]
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