| aphrodite's garden volume 13 part 1 - 1991-92 dec-feb | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
28 December 1991 A little house among others, this one I can take over, I'm working on my thesis amidst family, there are wood stoves, one in this room that was like a boy's room and now like a kitchen. One in the next room, one upstairs in my room where, when I go to look in on the fire, a radio is playing and the window open to fresh air. There is an envelope of things I have to do for my mother while she's gone, I'm remembering it's still there to do. No one of this is the point, which was the feeling of interest and pleasure in coming to know the house. Thinking to take down some of the little things, noting hanging from the ceiling in front of the stove a string drying rack, and one from it and one from it all down to the floor. I'm elsewhere walking with a tall fair Englishman, coming across town back to where I expect my street to be. We're passing the general hospital I used to be in, I can see people moving in lit common rooms with their curtains. There's choral singing coming from the brick. He says he's known that about buildings too, they make music. That building has a strong majestic feeling to it. We're passing down through the basement of a lab building on the left, walking among pipes so our sides are pressed together. Etc. Come out walking south and see into what seems a classic courtyard with a weeping birch against the corner. It's nearly dark, just an impression of white columns and a dome. We both turn toward it and find it's a treed mound muddy and weedy but we'll climb it. I think my house will be just there southwest of it on the other side. We emerge over the top through the back wall of a fairground stall where a frizzy woman is hawking cheap clothes in the bright razzle dazzle of electric lights. And there, down the dark street, where I expected it, and recognizable from here (and interested that I can dream it this way, autonomous, in its own place, enough given so I could surely write it) is the open blue door of my house with lamplight on it, my mother moving next to the table. Introducing Tim. He says no his name is Lin, lying for some reason. Don't like him, eh? I say. That's good, in some ways. Thinking of taking him upstairs. She says ambiguously No just slow in adding up the pluses. It wd be likely she doesn't like him, he's lightweight. I was wondering earlier whether true company would straighten him. Then having to see to the fires, there's no more wood, the relatives who own all this yard will give some, chipped pressed poplar. An abandoned underground chute for placing short beams in a shaft. The man's mad project. Wood, tho', in baskets. I'll take some upstairs to my room from outside, up the roof's mat of leafless vine branches, down toward my window. But up here I can see into the neighbour's grand place, top floor a long room like a derelict ballroom, an old man asleep, an old Chinese man standing there seeing me, a collection of characters at one end of a long dining table looking up sociably, another style of story developing fast, southern grotesque. There I wake entertained. Another one back there. In a bed with Roseanne, have my arm around her, she does something I don't expect from a lesbian. She rolls over onto my father and plays with him, naked, with her big breasts. This made me ask is Louie after my father. - Woke entertained not dejected, and thinking the different antinomies are being overlaid, real space and objects, continuum and digits, symbolic space and symbols. Anthony Wilden System and structure the representative anecdote of a theory For Piaget, says Wilden, structure = wholeness, organization not aggregation, transformation, self-regulation neither the whole nor the part but the logical procedures by which the whole is formed topology is a mathematics of quality and relation neighbourhoods, continuity, boundaries says Wilden, look for a theory of relations between relations paradoxes of math from making math a closed system by leaving out the mathematician paradoxes from multi-ordinal terms sort the meanings and assign a single one in a context identification of orders of abstraction 'consciousness of abstracting' being able to use more than one frame, move from one to the other Take philosophy in the best way as trying to make the diamond body where you can see the relations of parts. I like philos in the first two paragraphs when it says it wants to correct inaccuracies that make us think wrongly That grain is inherent in the structure of cellular perception Then where is the continuous to come from Subjectivities visible in images Want to say I'm reading philos in the light of it being by men. She said she considered herself to be part of an international nation of women. I would like to make it possible for women to cut through men's debates. The new notion of space as being an active, structuring medium which cannot be separated from objects Space is not divided into physical and mental Explanation doesn't cover experience, it is a subset of experience The proficiency of dreaming is what makes it philosophically interesting 'Seeing' on the cover of a book (Aggressive impulses - see whether behind them is a very ideal impulse toward a love or understanding you don't think you can reach.)(To discover what in us is afraid and make fear dissolve.) Contact the problem and feel it.
Language is the gauge of our provisional reality, the standardized description of constant variability. 30 Materials to work on the house. It's a four-room house. I've bought them. Telling Choy. Long smooth boards to replace the skirting strips. I'm going to paint the kitchen white but with opalescent gleams of blue. Last night sore and tired going to bed and reading journals. Seen overall a chaos, seen in the detail of writing a precise venturesome passionate mind - that has made itself so finely capable of a work it doesn't find. I can't bear to think the journal will die when I do. That's something I never do think. Always, sometime I'll make something of this. Also thinking about Louie and what's different. Have I quit, am I done? There's not a thing I care to tell her. And if I am done, what's new. I can refind my own questions. 2nd January 1992 A short squashed person with big head, legs and arms resentful outbuildings. The outside of the body is oddly the part that is unconscious, while this dark bulky woman frowning under a weight, like a dwarf with forehead bulged, is the one who walks in public angry at being seen. Where a shadow would be is there between the inside and the outside. - My back breathed. The pleasure of feeling how the ribs where they hinge to the spine can lift and settle like the covers of a book. Usually the back is a wall for me to stand against. - "I've seen that" she said. Over New Years in New Westminster, east of here on the skytrain. A flat-topped brown house with a portal. A front door like the door into a stone wall, barred brass porthole under the spyhole, as if it would be fun to expect enemies. In this house - approached in wet twilight on a mill town street with moss grass to the curb, workers' houses which are small independencies, and then steps between a rock wall corner-faced with sharp molars (mortar-filled) - Louie answers the door. She's been suffering. She'll be formal for now. A fire later. I tell about Eliz saying "That's what's different, Ellie isn't moving the way she used to. It's an effort now." I need to be brought open to that dread but she doesn't see her opportunity. She's invariably blank there, changes the subject even. That astonishes me. When I say so, she's in the kind of denial that she should know; it's the opacity of defended privilege. My enemy Trudy was the one who looked at me once and knew. Earned something from me L thinks she should get for something she needs to give. It was a difficult fire having to be propped and vented, stimulated with bits on the coal bed under it. I said I don't think I'll ever be able to love in the actual way that has an other in it, but I think she might be on the way to it. Though nowhere near. The fire very strong at that. In the morning she reads me writing-group pieces. A basement. A man lying on the sand in the desert. There's a lovely light mobility of vision and a warmth about persons that can make it liked, interesting senses and nothing stuck. The [homeopathic] potion Ingrid Pincott gave her to bring feeling. Later aft we sat backwards on the couch looking through clear tho' wet air at a white house in the embrace of a plain privet hedge. New white paint and a new shingle roof, dove grey. A bedroom window sheeted over from the inside with something the color of cardboard. A front door and single step. Triple front room window pearlized with condensation looking like the worn-off silvering behind an old mirror. From the curb, dark grey, moss green, dark green, yellow green, new white, new grey. Behind this simplicity a reach of eighty miles: river flats, brush, log booms, roofs, mills, the river, a bridge-curve pouring lights onto the north bank, the futurist masts of a bridge further west, far west the shine of the sea and mountains stepped north a fogged dark blue like cloud bars. Across the south, the white Cascades. And vaguely, because sky-colored and too fantastic to take as given, the great pile of Baker with an overview of all. Eliz and her kids. Taking her to the bus last night. She's in gumboots, plaid jacket and braids, and stands staunch in front of the coffee shop cashier joking until he cracks. Rowen in new clothes, Luke, Levi, Kane, in the arcade; Adam underfoot. Does she work that hard because it makes them welcome - yes - Kane hauling a floppy doll his size, Adam in dirty pale aqua, herself dressed however, only her fast innocent wit to provide them princes' passage. From me too. And is she on the way to the cowboy? "A good man with horses," who didn't mind standing with the women. 4th I'm at a loss for a beloved. Elfreda there. Or was it Elfreda where. Monday 6th Frightened about this paper. Panicked. Getting slides ready for class tomorrow: think how I'd like to publish them. Then fund it. Weds 8th This morning the 4th years [at Emily Carr]. I woke before the alarm and was thinking about continuity. But what. This journal the dullest for years. Luke and Angela last night. I'm indignant this morning about having it assumed I'll cover for him. So I won't. There he is with a sleek beauty and a gold ring, £100 from Roy and an ugly new backpack (she has one), a playboy I'm subsidizing. The middle room in hideous disorder with worst color brown blankets lumped on the floor. He's off mooching and clubbing. It's the first time a girl has followed him up the stairs and I didn't like it. There I stood in pyjamas in my shabby house she was casting her cool eyes over. Little teeth slanted a bit inward. The kind of long-legged bosomy girl who'd have been an emperor's concubine, pretty little ways. And Luke will be womanizing all his life, there's nothing I can do. But I won't subsidize it the way Catherine did. - What it was like teaching. The man, Yun Lam Li, yesterday, a strong Tibetanish face, blocky front teeth with rippled edges, pinked edges I could say, looking a bit up into my face with a courageous endurance over human true diffidence. "The photographs are the same" he says. He saw the detail in them. Today the 4th years in the small screening room, more like company, I'm more like company with them, feeling how easily 'teaching' comes since TAing. I get to talk most if I want, be the one who's had ventures. 9th That ugly thing downstairs often plays her radio - harsh grinding men. Because of seeing L last night I wake cogitating her instead of work - saying - she doesn't use her head - if she used her head she could get what she wants - but it's her emotionality she wants. I drove away angry at her jealousy. It's a very steady anger. You want me to give up for you something that gives me joy. She dreamed another snake. The large brown snake she was in charge of because (vaguely) she's African. They've packed it in sand in a box and given it a sedative shot and are wheeling it on a cart toward the room where "it will happen." But their timing was off, the snake is able to gather the rage to lash its head this way and that and up and across and he's bitten her upper arm. It happens very fast. It's a minute before she figures it out. She's in a hospital (I forgot to say) but not at the emergency department. She knows she should stay still but she's in a panic. Sweating. Dashing. Yelling "I'm going to die." People not responding. The ambulance finally. She's in it. Lights flashing 'Emergency' and 'Ambulance.' There's a young man's shadow running after her. (I saw it, it was the part I liked to see.) He wants to be with her but didn't catch up. She's in another hospital and hasn't died. The next day she feels two things about it. One is grief for the snake. Saying so she cracks and feels it again. The other is glee that the snake still had a strike in it. She looks unlike herself, white, slow, a thin-mouthed shade, who looks at me with a hostile eye. I was liking to have my hands buzzing on her but knew how much time I give away even after I see her. Why I didn't want her at the work party, I couldn't say except that I need to know I have time open ahead of me. Then she was suspicious. That annoyed me. The truth is she's away among the shades where (she didn't know) she wants to be, depressed and working. - What I dreamed after, was this: I come home to find a broken chair tossed out the front door, then another, not broken, but hurled out too. My kitchen chairs. Written in small letters around the door handle is a note from Choy. It says don't worry etc. The roof has fallen in. I open the door onto heaps of lathe and plaster, the whole interior shell, two-by-four studs and cladding planks, up to the roof, stands visible. Upstairs where my place was, Choy and his boys have patched something together for me - they've gyprocked very crudely but so quickly, many jags in the wall, and plastered it over with paper patches, and there stands a shelf of their choice of crockery, a bunk bed assembled from 2x4s. My work - is it still there somewhere in the rubble? Did they just shovel everything out? I'm outside rocking and keening, Oh my god, oh my god, though feeling nothing. A woman living in the basement, Choy's relative, coming out to comfort etc. - And then - I go to the Welcome for congee - there's Michael in the back talking to L. Etc. Long story short, angry, sad, moved, glad. Pink comes back into her face. Live lip quiver. I tell about what I've decided about Suzanne. When I get home Suzanne phones. I jumble it out blindly. It's done. Consequences coming. Recommending energy. Which she's surprised to find arrived. [I tell Luke's London girlfriend he's cheating on her] 10th Michael over a table at the Welcome. Congee breakfast policy, best fuel for all day. I say girls must still be chasing him, he that he's running much slower than he used to and keeps looking over his shoulder but no one is catching up yet. I say but surely ..., he that I'm saying so because of the mood I'm in. Oh. Well. Caught. And then pleased and pink at having it still but thinking offside, Louie wd be offended. Also he noticed I thought to set him up with Liz even tho' I knew better than to try. - Suspense today abt when/how the shit will fly. An escalation toward one possibility or the other. He was acting the class enemy - isn't showing the slightest moral intelligence. "May I awsk why?" - At Ray's party a stroke of lust. My type. David, says Ray. Twenty-two. Bright black eyes, so black bright eyes. Black eyebrows straight across. A black pigtail in an elastic, a loose bunch escaped behind the other ear. Beautiful underlip and nose. Black jeans, old hiking boots he sat on the floor to tie, jean jacket inside an old leather jacket, black tee. Skinny chest. When he talked about Oakville a kid inflection from someplace in particular. A ring, which my David wd never wear. I kept staring to see whether he's like him or not. Younger, a nice goofy twist tho'. Not as substantial but stubborn - "You take one of mine and I'll take one of yours." 12 Two kinds of continuity, continuity of stretch and continuity of act? Mark? That's all I have tho' I reasserted it every time I woke. As if one was physical and one was representational. But that was interpretation. As if I understood continuity of stretch but the other's hopeless to recover. Some days ago the clue abut horns of elfland. 13 Monday, turning. Louie wakes at night in the rage I could distract her from by day. She's going to demand I leave her alone for weeks and maybe she'll go away forever because this weekend I didn't want her at the work party so I'd have the option of getting it off with Rob. It seems to be true I have been sleazy, defiantly, over the voice that says there'll be consequences, while I'm alienating Luke on account of his sleaziness. Setting it up, it seems. And see what it's like. Alright. No money too. "Louie and I are loving away but if we don't understand especially what the childish structure of loving is in each other it is delusion." Last year, 2nd of Feb. "She asked to live with me thru' a summer and winter and then go back to Africa, as if deciding to wear me out." Binding with briars / my joys and desires - Monday afternoon, all the little things done - sweeping, laundry, dishes, soup, newspaper - the gnawing - it's dark and lonely. 15 The ongoing sadness that's normal. The way I wake. Resignation of what. Joyce tomorrow with L. What's the truth of what I want. What's good. Times like telling her about Ray's party, support for a triumphant story. Glimpses of what she knows. Her child stories. Her skills. What's lacking. She supports my ego but she doesn't find my soul. I don't. Ostensibly I have it all my own way but all the same I resent. Joyce will say it's my fault, I control. Getting through the works and days with vigor and competence but always a certain heedlessness, as of one whose centre is somewhere else. "Quite stringently in pain. I'm going to blow it, I'm not going to be able to sustain. How not. The oppression of it. The guilt, uncertainty, fear, anguish." When it got close it brought those other closenesses, literally. Is it as tho' they're guarding an actual territory? Or in me. But where is it now. This day. Silver on the edge. Starlings drop from one branch to another, stand on chimneys. Water hissing in a pipe. Weak yellow light laid over blue daylight on the kitchen wall. Sharp weak whistles. Dark scuffle of letters hitting the floor. Wilden: Soul murder. Exploitation as the cultural form. What position any child takes in relation to it. Therapies that deny socio-economic context. Ways of organizing and manipulating insecurities. The different temptations of boys and girls. 16 Tuesday night. She saw something in the waiting room, the agitated soul who'd made the last Zen sand box, so we were laughing when Joyce came for us. And other moments in our formal chairs. When I said "I resent that you're such a crybaby" I was keeping a sharp eye on whether it was bringing tears. I'm liking that we cracked the fix too - not that the resentments were faked. I resent that I'm boring myself with this. What Joyce said tho' she sez it to everyone was true: our declarations are so indirect we're both hobbled. That's exactly my frustration, I said. Then we took the rest of the day going through it more. Something isn't what it seems. Why she allows what she does. And doesn't see what's weak in me and insists she does see. And the other why, why since she's back she won't invite childish feeling in me, the deep stuff. Monday 20th A long waking night. Almost blank today. Last night keeping going with The radiant way until it was done, turning off the light and seeing rooftops in blue moonlight. Lying there unlikely to sleep, the house very hot and noisy with more heat blowing through the vents, thinking of Drabble, some. Why this is an interesting book. "A man with no harm in him, or a man who had as cunningly as a serpent evaded his own powers of doing ill: at the high price of loneliness, Liz sometimes wondered." Sometimes a line interesting in itself, but it's more the lives of the rich and famous. A forty-five year old woman with a house on Regents Park, London children. "What is the nature of the effort required of me? If I knew what it was, I would make it" Liz says. I was saying to Louie. As if I could bring intelligent strategy to the puzzler about Luke. What was I imagining - that doing something for him would connect me to a hopeful ground. What do I know to do = fight on truly. But what I had in mind was something self-transcending. He wants to know whether I'll write him off and tries me with what would most provoke me. I do have a minimum demand. Margaret Drabble 1987 The radiant way Knopf 23rd
(The way getting to it I'm hostile to Lou. Am I jealous about Cheryl she asks. I'll act reasonable so she can't fault me but that enrages me.) Witt: making what is a determination of a concept look like a fact of nature differences in kind between two conceptions is represented as a difference of extension the natural history of mathematical objects This use is in a certain respect similar to that of a sign that has an object, AND it does not stand for any object. [more math paper notes] 24th Moschovakis's thick book contains various beautiful and persuasive examples. 29 Luke's back. Louie's got her man. Am I sore? In the heart, a bit. Thought it will make me freer. It hasn't been true for a while. Do people get finer-grained when they have sex in them? Is what I've wondered. The way I imagine myself coarse or dread it, the way I'm secretively dejected at a coarseness in her face and then other times enthralled by a satin shine. 30 Money showing up for some reason. I was broke at the start of the month. $240 subbing for Scott, UI came through just after welfare, a film royalty $100, GST rebate $90, the jury week will be something like $2000, and this morning Sylvia says $975, the Art Bank bought Trapline. What I could do - is travel in March. A small hotel in a Mexican town with desert mountains. - A dark sad obstinate feeling like a child who isn't understood. "Something is wrong." Waiting to find out what it is. She remembered Joyce said "The two of you won't stand being bored." I brightened right up. Understood. And what follows. Been wanting to talk to Cheryl as if that truth will come out. What follows might be that I take it as given the way I did with Michael and do with Rob. 31 So what is the range I like. Her languages, seeing performances with her, her fairyland visual sense, her actor's knowledge of what gestures and postures are saying, her tales of childhood, some of the flying writing, her reports of the deeps of conversation. And what stuns me with boredom is the style of her relation to me - glommed on - without challenge or fight or (some inspired exceptions) x-ray penetration. Homogeneous. With all your resources you give me so bland and blank an intimacy, there's something wrong with that. And this is part of it: the mediocrity of her thought in these negotiations, the way she's obedient to the lines and doesn't jump. I know the reason too, her net is formed so generally. And mine was not. - Political exponentiation. Each person makes two phone calls. In five stages is 2 + 4 + 16 + 256 + 512 = 790 women @ $10 a month is $8000 is $96,000 a year. This plan won't work, though, because women already don't buy this paper. [imagining a boycott of the Vancouver Sun] Sunday 2nd of February It's the brown day of Bride. Yest dream - the building where I lived with Luke when he was little - not the real one but the one I've dreamed before. Walking through the apartment on the first floor but upstairs. They've changed it but I can feel where the rooms were. Looking out the window south at a timber pergola that seems lacking in something. West down the slope of wide garden. if we moved back here I could . In the attic Choy has been moving his stuff. It used to be crammed. Now this long dry room is empty. A few picture frames hung on nails. That's all. Is he selling or demolishing but not saying? I was looking at a deck on a roof seeing I could move those casks back and have a bed here. - Rob sez with an altered voice that I'm adorable on the Knowledge Network show. What kind of voice. An amazing alteration as if the voice goes through a zone with a different viscosity and then carries on. 'Yellow' comes to mind, more light. More slip. It's not so much sexy as shyly fond. "And then you were on." A voice Greg had. Early childhood. What was adorable I ask. My smile and a way I move my head, my delight. 7th Yesterday and today I dug. It's bright, it's warm. Currents - fertile heavy/ compost, shallow-rooted but need air and drainage. Rock phosphate, 4' apart, wood ash. Gooseberries shallow but wide. Sunday 9th Lying in her room in the dark. Down at the bottom of the well. A branchy shadow on the wall. A brake light materializes, fades. Kenjii touched her accurately. "That is amazing" I said. "What I liked best was the first time. He moved me very much. His shyness and his confidence." A tiny dope-head, she doesn't fault him. He said "Can I come over" knowing what he wanted. "It was perfect." And grievous. That a stranger could give it to her. Next day Alexander said How're you doing. "I'm very happy" she said. ("It was Ellie who made it possible for me to be so direct.") I thought yes I'm backing her while she learns freedom. Very moved and wanting to hold her, hold her head. And yearning for it for myself, where now could I find someone for me. "I have to accept that you'll never be in love with me again and that you aren't going to make love with me again." I wasn't wanting to kiss her, no. What do I need. I said when I wake at night sometimes I'm in a panic thinking maybe it'll be like this until I die, the part of my life where I feel is over. Sometimes another person can bring me open. I'm telling her what it's like on my side and it seems she's taking it in, not hiding, but still it's as if I'm alone being the grown-up. "I was weak, I needed a certain kind of support." And how unforgiving if that was what shut me down. She's supportive and I'm not. And yet it's as if my support is the real support. The way I'm longing to talk to Cheryl because there'll be moments when she spreads her experienced courage under me. We imagine support, Louie imagines support, as willingness to adore, defer. Support is precisely not that. Support is Tony's clear sharp word. Le Guin saying she'd thought it was weakness she needed to let her be strong, but all along it was strength. Strength for what, beloved? Ah - to be on my edge as I'm not, éclose. Moving. As if what I want is to be sad. I am sad, this morning. At the forehead I think, not elsewhere. Today clouds are covering. I want out. Will walk to the garden, come back and work on Tiles. It's a week 'til Ottawa. Sober times, Louie. You're going to think of us as broken up ("I need to think like that"), study literacy teaching, and write with pictures. Go to Jam for writing. I wrote that without knowing if it's true. A dream told her to. I'm terrified thinking so. The difference by the end of the paragraph. Mary Tiles 1990 Philosophy of Set Theory Basil Blackwell Ottawa 17th International Telecom execs. One little sweet face woman in a dark suit, munching, face plastered over with orange. The streets are dull and dirty, gutters heaped with slush. Horrible hotel restaurant, pink tablecloth on white tablecloth, plastic flowers (pink poinsettias), salt and pepper towers, sugar packet file. Poor executives, poor executive bodies, necks sloped forward anxiously. And what a poor breakfast for twelve dollars, flimsy ham, and how meekly he's eating it with his back to the room and feet planted under the table. The beauty of the farmland drawn yesterday on snow, twiggy redbrown deciduous trees in loose fields, dark conifers holding snow, what we can see from above, a brush outcropping in the fields with loose loopy ravines emerging in four directions. Fencelines cutting aslant, with elms standing as if on the line of the wire. Opening the hotel room door: I don't like this, the life it's designed for, minibar and a selection panel for eight pay TV movies. Click through 42 channels. There's a snowed over vision of a woman's ass and a man's hand decisively tugging the panty up between the cheeks. Like working class sex, matter of fact, they keep their eyes open, breasts flop, fuck fuck fuck fuck. A hand affectionately placed on her flank. Abruptly change position. Faithfully suck. But they won't show us a cock or a slit. 18 [Canada Council film jury] Ross such a thin strip, with a hook hand he lives familiarly, sitting at table his warm hand touching his cold one, a smudge under his eyes, frailty like the little boys whose pelvis is the width of a hand. As institutional chief he's the least of the authorities. We're insisters, Gail in her empress coat, orange tiger plush that makes her twice as big as she is, promène avec chien, seizes the word and is going to defend the kind of comedy I hate. Those two guys today, I'll notice their names. A plush cinematographer who sweeps the ground with his moustache, passionate I think, struggles with English. Serge Giguère. Jean-Claude with sloped profile like a Mayan. Sandy looking thirty, better than when she was comfy. Et me voilà in the hotel mirror in my kung fu jacket and hair down, lamp picking out the steel threads arcing out of my hair at the crest - those I didn't weed. What's this. It's social. 19 Third morning. I've thrown myself into the midst. The way it is. Immediate thinking. I couldn't have done it before, tho' I still see what I saw. The sensation I'm not used to yet, of hurling myself out. And here it is not given to me - well, some - by the job's requirements. The changing lines of alliance. I'm going to have to prepare blocs of argument. I can see I'm going to have to have a reasoned or strategic defense for Lambert, Brynda, where there's evident heart. 20 The dream before waking. "Dubious boots." Somewhere in a restaurant, a big melee, go to my woman lover at the bar, put my arm around her, thinking why do we do this, press bodies in public. Her thin middle. A thin childish lover. Sitting at a table looking at something Louie's made. She found a sheet of woven plastic (like onion sacks, plastic jute) photoprinted with something simple, the edge of a table and a chair maybe, a color glow. The image disappears when a light from across the table doesn't shine on it. Moving my head to see it vanish and come back. I was sitting with Louie liking her construction, the way she set it up between two sticks, as if with a little campfire in front of it. T and R arrive sitting opposite me, I say to L Where did you find it, behind that building in ? But I'm staring at their laps covering annoyance, they've made new pants with black satin squares at the lap. They're quiet. I know what to do and do it immediately, lift my side of the table and push. They go over backwards, on their backs on the floor. Pick themselves up quietly and leave. I'm standing among containers of mashed red beans, Louie over by the wall drawing on a board on her lap. Sit down by her. She's uncharacteristically cold. She says I looked bad. I'm protesting that I wasn't doing it to be vicious, I just suddenly knew how to get rid of them. She says I looked dubious boots. Then the phone wake-up ring. Do I know how T and R visited yesterday? Certainly. They're the moment that wd'v been all the time, the misgiving that the others aren't impressed, that I'm not safely in the centre, that I'm off and out for some reason I don't know. 21st Anne-Marie Hogue comes from Alberta, Monique was sorrowing for her dog, Sue Ditta has a life at the crossroads and lives it skillfully, but what I want to tell is visiting Richard [Holden] upstairs in Explorations, shyly coloring in the office pen while he finishes a call, can I do this, but he's so warm I get all my confidence in a second. "I'm downstairs on a jury, I've only got a minute but I ..." His big gap-toothed black-eyed head beamed at me with what seems the most direct possible pleasure. "Okay now I'm going." He puts his hand across the desk. "Alright." But what he does is not a shake but a taking. Bold. He presses my hand onto the desk under a decisive warm palm. 22nd I was so valiant. Crying at the end of the week. 23rd Still crying this morning, waking this morning. It's a crash. And why. The way Sandy [Wilson] in white angora and greasy lipstick was stirring such liveliness in my francophone guys. That's not the way to say it. I saw them come to her to say goodbye with such open delight it was like school again, watching a popular girl from the bitter darkness of - whatever I am that's different. Seeing how smart is not as good as cute and willing although all through the week Jean-Claude was holding a line across to me, depending on my intelligence to hear him. 24th Chewing bacon in Montreal. All that's happened. I'm still a skin away from tears. It was very exposed on the jury. What was exposed was my difference - as always - intransigence - a desperation about holding onto difference. I'm tired still, trembling and slow, won't be able to fetch up the long breath I need for this. At Cheryl's house there's Jam in writing, a woman on the page so much lighter than her voice out loud. Last night what I dreamed was that I invaded T and R's café, T in waiter's apron tried to bar the door, R over on the right. T when she fails is on the left. I go right to the back, people around the bar, a family of rather freaky children, thick glasses, red mouths, bulgy foreheads. Their father like them. There's been an award (Paul has written a children's book). I'm wondering whether these people will be loyal to T and R but it seems they're friendly. I see Cheryl has come in. Surprising. She's stopped halfway, is looking toward R, is she speaking to her, I want to see. Then comes thru to the back. Is this a sign of decision? Maybe. What she said at the kitchen table, she so close to tears herself. "I should have run away with you." "I think that would have been quite a good idea." But I wonder whether we could have done it, I was so unable. Lying juicing in the sauna thinking I need to make a charm against those complacent ones who think I and not they are deformed. 25 Intellectual Anglos. Nell Tennhaaf whining that her students are politically correct nuisances who want color issues discussed at all times. Two young women stood up, put on their coats. "What are you doing?" "This is bullshit." Something about Gail Scott too. She's a bull. They put on their coats and stand talking about ----. Anne McLean says "Aren't they intellectual." No, what Gail Scott is, is opaque, like someone made of wood, solid right through, where lovely Jody [Berland] is moving darks and lights. Cheryl's new work! is that. You're the only one who likes them, she says. A box of beauties, but she's going to spoil them making them big. But I'm going away with a set and Ovid is going to come of it - singing and words. 'Allo Québec. It's blue-ish dawn outside, I think. Bin underground since the metro station. Men in fine black overcoats. The conductor could see that guy was Anglo. Québec, sir? Oui oui. I love the traveling of it. Mansard roofs and their dormers, the grand houses on Mount Royal. Gerard's Herbal in the Medical History Library. Its English has shoots and points like a leafy ditch (is what I saw). - Then that was my hour in Quebec. A doorman startled me, taxi door opened silently as I handed bills outside the Chateau Frontenac. A waitress with a worn pale face brought onion soup. The second taxi driver said he'd monté a Montréal this morning, it's cheaper by taxi than by air, counting the time it takes both ends. Centre ville est tellement loin. Gevirtz Susan 1996 Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson U of Illinois forthcoming [actually Peter Lang] Gerd Bonfert reprint the neg at a diff distance Cycle des yeux 1989 Andre Jasinski Holzweg 1991 series, spotlights in forests 26 A la Binerie, Mont Royale. Last night it was a deep dim Indian restaurant, the Tagore. I know not from what distant place you are coming ever nearer, the sound of your footsteps and all the rest I don't recall, but the great funnel outward of the longing it built. There was I with Cheryl alongside, beautiful food in front of us, saying I want to ask your advice - no I want to ask what you think - no I want to ask what I think. "If she doesn't command your sexuality," she says, "if she doesn't command your interest to the same extent ..." I said equality always feels like superiority to me. She couldn't easily imagine that, "Equality feels just like equality, that's how you know it. And the way it always turned out that in fact you were their superior. If we had that little girl in front of us we'd be marveling." "You talk as if all the good things come from her." "They do. What she could see, her music. She was the pharmakon, she was sacrificed, she was spirit." I say "You must have been that little girl too." "I was but not like you. You were really special." (This is interesting.) "I think you wouldn't feel like this about her if you hadn't been her." "I think we all have something we make the sign of our difference" (she says). "Is this very sensible description the difference they're always talking about?" Laughing.
aphrodite's garden volume 14
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