| aphrodite's garden volume 14 part 3 - 1992 may-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
20th May 1992 It's been summer for a month. 21st In some lights she has the beautiful eyes of all of us distinguished women writers; the refinement; the clearness of cut; the patience; and humbleness. - That for the patience and humbleness. [VW on Rebecca West] In my dream crying I think because of writing, or because of not deciding what to do. (I'm here in the glitter and stir of the garden. It's messy and rich, warm wind, leaves scratching, a martin floundering across, skirl of fledglings, train at the Prior St crossing. It's a dry color-fading light running water is pleasant in. The strike of a hoe, rattle of ma jong tiles. Valerian and buttercup in the orchard. Fiery heat on the forehead. A robin on a tall stake stares south, leaves it swinging when he jumps away. Young man with his lunch in a bag coming happily to the apple tree bench. Motors at the produce warehouse. Blackbird dipping her beak into the long tank. Bees in the comfrey.) What is it about writing - could I know? What's happened this week is I've dodged away from writing the thesis proposal. But in it I'll be happy - ie in philos. And there are films but they're the furthest off, the remotest will; but offered another jury I work 'til midnight on an application book [BC Cultural Fund]. I can so easily accurately confidently decide what's bad in film and why. And this one Australia photo - the shadow the tree the cloud - it's good. And writing, the misery 'til I satisfy it. And the garden, which is. And teaching, which I can miss. And suspending them, all the days of empty time, haunted unease. So is there a decision, ever? Monday 25th Rowen's birthday party I'll leave to the photos. I was hardly there, though my making was its container, a room marked into the center of the garden - fire, water, wood. The people were Michael's making, 16 kids, little girls and their yuppie mothers from school, Terry and Paul, two strange souls from Carnegie who came because they had nothing else to do, the bug-hunting Chinese boy from the hotel up the alley from Michael's. I left them to him and sat empty until I could start burning paper plates. Louie in yellow. Luke silent on the hillslope. What are you thinking about sez Louie to him. That I've never seen Ellie with earrings before. What I actually took from the party: a snub from a yuppie mum, and three moments of the new circumstance, Michael's sharp look when Louie'd been glowing into my eyes, the way when she'd gotten up to unlock the shed for Gwen she came back and sat on Luke's other side, and my own flash at the two of them laughing by the fire. Yes she has found her method and what did I discover in last night's long heat. That I want to be there when they do it. We delivered the back seat full of presents and remnants and Michael and Rowen and David and came back with our box to my house, and then some hours of stupid gnawing, our usual. And then thinking where to sleep, she wants to be at my house, I don't, we'll go somewhere else. The BC accommodation guide, etc. (The thought of him fucking her so enflames me - I mean the thought of her wonderful slimy hole with his penis being put into it - I want to see it - I want to hold her and tell him how - touch her clit while he does - hold her on the table or off the edge of the bed - open her legs for him - look how beautiful she is my Louie -) 27th Etc, I want to say. Home from jurying. Loretta [Todd], Karen Pike, Ray from UBC, Tom Braidwood, Jeremy the administrator. 28 I was watching Karen and Loretta's method. We had a voting bloc. Three of five wasn't enough to get anyone in but it was enough to clear a lot of projects out of the list. O smart Loretta. And I was smart to nod her into the chair between me and Karen. In the last battle when we were trying for Claxton there came the moment when by obstinate persistence, by stopping dead, we'd got Jeremy to suggest reprioritizing from Maylone down - we'll look at those five applicants again, support material, budget, proposal. Why don't we just go through it, mutters Loretta. I pat my face without looking at her. Saving face? (Hisses, after a minute.) I nod. Who? I point with my chin. Ray? Nod. I look at her, she's rolling her eyes. What a comprehensive impious person she is, flexible, she'll vote for Cummins though his eye is dust, because his method will be alright for that old couple on a boat. (And who did we get - some young marvels, Katherine Sharp, Kevin Frazer, Dhillon, Claxton I hope. Don't know whether Ohama is young. Shum and Lee on not-so-good projects - Patricia and Corry - Cherenko.) What really interested me was her method with opponents, easy friendly eruptions. Karen's method too, you give them little personal pats betweentimes to keep the air from tightening up, and then when you want something you just keep coming. When one woman stops there's a considering pause and then another woman will start. I'd say the worst sometimes and then Loretta would say something wise and generous that nonetheless rounded off to a no. She's not polite though. Neither she nor I could help cutting Ray off whenever he spoke, there was so little personal life in his voice that we couldn't hear it. Both the men on the jury my height, eyes at eye level, an interesting sensation. Ray fifty? Sixty? Red-faced with the bursting look of high blood pressure. Small light eyes. Alcohol and very stupid sensuality was my guess. Lonely, never taken personally, but proud of who he knows, loyal to his kind and hanging onto the young like Lisa Binkley who'll go along with it. Tom not clear to me, a nice straight body and a froggish not-closed face with long dipping corners on his mouth. Liked to throw himself into the machinery. What mystified me was how he'd go blank and turn away if I said anything to him outside deliberations. On the phone worrying about taxes. His experimental work is far behind him. Industrialized. Script editor for Mom P.I. Duties have taken his structure so there's nothing left for curiosity. And a family man. Okay. Karen an instant physical antipathy. A just-seeming clear mind and a staunch voice - takes lunch breaks to milk herself in the washroom - round heap of postpartum belly - and what it was I didn't like didn't come out where I could see it. Something sly? A backbiter? Is what I suspect. (Louie would know - wouldn't you.) And Jeremy. I came into the screening room on the first morning and there was this big piece of red beef. I'm here to hold Walter's hand since it's his first time, he says. But he can't help running it. One of those quivering masculinities, instructing us sits clicking a ballpoint in his meat hand, stroking his tie with so long a stroke he sweeps right off the end. That he's there in an art admin position (where the Council has Ross and Sue) tells us what provincial means here. - Luke last night. When I come home and the door's not pulled to, I know he's there. One night in four or five. I'd brought a plant pot full of strawberries from the garden, Put it on the floor. It got dark as we sat. He in the throne. (How does that always happen.) What we talked about - dreaming, brain machines (he tried at a rave), whether the nervous system multiplexes, anger, Roy (to see him held by Roy, the way women were, even knowing Roy so long, thinking him intellectual-), Angela. I sat quite privately looking at him in the dark thinking I'm going to be able to like this man in the end. - A dream. I have a ticket to fly somewhere in the afternoon but this morning driving on ice I can't brake, fly toward children in snowsuits with sleds, hit the first group aiming for a hole and slamming one on each side, and then another straight ahead so I can't miss. Come around the block and see ambulances. Are those kids the men on the jury? No. Are they my shoulders? Yes. (Where was I going to fly, Hong Kong maybe, west.) What is it with my shoulders. At that point I get up and go see Dr Sylvia [Duccheschi]. Friday 29th Hung up not able to do anything, because of the philos. I should just do the video. Wait 'til fall? But no then it will drag on. Not necessarily. But it's money I could go away with. 1st June Rob looking beautiful, why so beautiful. Yesterday morning we were lying lightly warmly peacefully together and I was telling him I'd never had as banal conversations in my life as I do with him. That I like his temperature, it's like the light in a desert. (He last night after a day at work says his temperature goes up for a day after he's been with me, "I was boiling all day.") How the glee about sex would last me a week. And what else I like: the intervals are not sticky. He sez won't I drive him to work, I say no I don't want to. The way he has a vocation. His voice - its timbre, lack of importance. A very slow crystalizer. He'll age into knowledge. I'm beginning to understand his confidence. Also he hasn't been silly lately, or I haven't seen him being. Come to think of it. And now to say what I can't stand about Louie. That she doesn't have a vocation tho' she has skills. That she's seeming to make me her vocation. That emotion is her boss and she doesn't mind using it to control me too. Actually she harries and terrorizes me with her emotion. Last night desperate. I was annoyed, she's using it to blackmail me. Stop it. This while she's attaching Michael. And then the strange sequence on Candace's steps. Rowen upstairs in the bath. I decide to get her mind working to get her out of it. It works. You're jealous of Rob, it isn't complicated. It's how we're wired. The orange cat pushes her face against L's hand on the step above. A moth speaks in my ear - RRRRR, RRRRR. Rhoda walks out of the edge of the house, stops, looks at us, says Hiiii in a drugged intimate voice. Louie obediently says hi. I sit staring at her. She leaves, but when I go around the corner there's T standing on the sidewalk halfway along the house, R back on the steps. We stand staring at them. Are they imagining bad strange men. I laugh. We go back to the steps. But Rowen coughing. Is he crying. They're still there at the base of their steps with what's her name. I want to go up and check on Rowen. Don't want Louie upstairs, don't want to leave her with them down here. Mommy where are you she hears Rhoda say. What it is in this - I don't trust Louie to be able to resist those who can humiliate me. I don't trust her to know what she's doing. If she feels their appeal she'll be helpless in the feeling. What I knew last summer in relation to Jam too, she won't take a stand spiteful enough to keep them off, she's everybody's friend to their face. Weak like Mary. 2nd VW's journal again, 1929. I hurry toward the time when she begins The moths, because it's when I want to live her. And what would I write. I could get rid of Them by writing them, I could get rid of us by writing us, the credulous I. I could recover us by writing us. And how? It might take a long time. Whose style would prime me, what would work? Not my style of the time because it was blind. (More than that - what, I'd have to find.) I'd want to be outside all three/four/five. For now, when I'm frightened of them I can divert it into constructing their defeat. Writing scenes she says. What wd be part 1. Them. Part 2, up north. So much work I could put out if I were steadier and more willed - in philos a piece on the meaning of 'function'; a book called 'Seeing' on simulation; a book with the Alberta photos; my three written books; a suite of lovely grainy songs. 'Practical erotics.' The video. Something about plant simulations. Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall results are alike. Quine Word and object 8 Thurs 4th Roy's birthday, Louie's tomorrow, Judy's on the 7th. Rowen coughing keeps me awake. At 5 he turns on the cartoons. Take it to the kitchen I say. When I fall asleep then 'til eight I dream I've gone to see Michael who says "I'll be fucking soon." He means with Louie. In the end I'm punching him wanting to punch her. My breath can't keep up, I'm gasping. Yesterday it was Louie and I somewhere with criminal men who might be holding us. I go somewhere and come back thinking how the place is able to change so much between times. I go away again, just to the washroom maybe, and come back and the room itself is gone. It's like an airport bar with black stools. There are envelopes in a rack and one has my name on it but it's a brochure. WHERE IS LOUIE? I'm yelling, and wake. It's a grim morning full of the American navy. I seem to have three choices - I can resign Rowen and Michael to her, leave them myself. I can use it erotically and live in a hyped stew like last week. I can fight her out of my life and theirs. The last gets my blood up. The first would give me an escape and loneliness and would it give me another kind of work again? The one in the middle I don't know about. - I went to 'talk' to Michael. There in front of his livid face again, embroiled in the stupidity of his talk again, hearing his reports of how they two discuss Ellie as cohorts in helplessness. She's sharp he says (like the self I wanted her to be), empowered, I understand. He doesn't want to hear she liked how I fucked her. Everything I say I'm aware will be told her, stupidly. I don't neglect to sow thistles where I can. I'm candid where I think it will work. When I say I'm going to ditch her he's terrified. I decide I'll be sympathetic and patient. I need to know from him what point it's at. - Rage goes and heart is sore and will be. Thanking what still is, the garden, Luke. Rob at least in the interest of my story with him. I vow now to discover the solar plex. 5th Today it's softly weak and sad. She says she won't go that way with him. What she says has so different a sound from what he says. I feel beaten. Not angry. Not in fierce pain but abject. Like lying down underfoot. There is also a curious tickle like a little tendril of a current which is under the dejection, which is like laughter. 8th Monday Imagining another house in another neighbourhood, a ground floor facing south, back windows look toward the mountains. There's a garden, front verandah, worn hardwood, front room with a fireplace, dining room, not much kitchen, old bathroom shower, little bedroom or two. $500. Owner absent, agency. Can paint and plant. Good for years. Small town street like Eton, Cambridge. 9th Weekend with Louie, afterwards I think back to the not-liking in it. Work party Saturday. They're setting concrete blocks between the wheelchair beds, Rob, Rick, Brian, miscellaneous new members. I have Dan Tetrault helping build the kids' boat. Louie is cleaning up the fence bed alongside the coldframes. It's hot, we have our hankies on our heads. Muggs, Bob and Joanne turning compost. Maria in the tank. I ignore Rob mainly and stay in touch with Louie since it's her weekend. Yellow shirt over there. When Dan goes home I go work with her to finish the section (this is boring to tell), Rob tacking up vines comes territorially it seems to show his claim. My weeding buries his fern. Twice. Our squabble from her distance looks like people whispering with their hands together in the dirt. She vanishes to the anger bench. I start to go after her, come back to blast him, go find her. She cheers up (it is that) when I tell her how we've fixed John's labels on the map. But that's not the end. At home in my house she's angry I'm wanting to fix it with Rob, since I've clawed him without an explanation. Talk talk drearily on 'til it's become alright for me to phone him. I do, choosing my words as if I'm overheard. She's standing in my room looking furious. Wants me to report exactly what I said. I do, but loathing it. It goes on getting worse until I'm locked over my solar plex crying. So tired. She won't stop. A stony monster. First it seems to happen that I take on depression to get her out of it, then I go catatonic, I lock. We wake to the same ghastly spell. What shifts it is when she says suddenly, I do want to tell you I think your story with Rob is quite a nice story. I relax instantly. That's what I need, not to be asked to betray the goodness. Or to have to trade it off so its price is being hideously embroiled with her and Michael. Let me look at that. "I saw he wanted to be fucked. He saw me see it." Last night he phoned with a terrified voice. Not willing to say what he needed to know. He doesn't want us to hate each other he says. "That's simple, don't have an affair with Louie." "What does that mean?" "Don't have sex." "What's the definition of having sex, where does it start?" "Come on, you know that. It starts with kissing and running your hands up and down. Where does it start for you?" "It starts in so many different places." And more of the same esoteric stuff. "It's presence." "Well sure but - ." I talk to Rowen to get away from him. "Do you want to come over for the night?" They take a while getting here and when they do I see it's because Michael has shaved. That means he's going to look for Louie. After yoga he's likely to have found her. Will she have told him no? String says he talked to her on the phone, and that if she says no she can mean it. And then - she still has to balance power somewhere. ("Ellie will be furious" said Joyce and left it at that. "Why are you blushing when you tell me that?" "I don't know.") And get a baby maybe, an involved daddy. (I wrote daddy in Ed's hand) (maybe in Mary's). What was Sunday. I read Roethke on and on about she and birds and stones while L plucked white hairs off the top of my head. Don't want to talk about the fucking (in the sun patch in the corridor, with downstairs door bolted) but liked the sleep after. What about the fucking. It's not magnetic. She's right that I have a prejudice, I don't want it to be good. Why not. Mother, abandonment, fear, etc. The herb garden. E veramente una cosa. Its splendor's in the north end now. Seven foot mullein in the corner, hemlock frothy white, a loose toss of color corner to corner. Gobo flowered-out inconspicuously in burrs eight feet up. Russian olive silver-willowy in pink valerian foam. Orange daylilies craning on the green wild wall. Lavender's outburst at the sill. Lichkönigen pouring out more and more long whips that end in smoothest buttercup yellow high on the post. Blackspot victims recovered. Opium poppies' clear mauve here here and there. Claret great burnet. Scabious. Alkanet. Finish about Louie: it's past gaping magic, I'm in second phase, comprehension. Okay, I will. What else do I want. Work. New people. (Which new people. Artists. Smart people.) 11th Working on A-D [analog-digital]. Working enough so there's a time in the evening when I say, okay it's enough. But going to bed feeling what a barren empty time this also is. What would be better - 6 hrs by 3:30, morning yoga, evening labour, walks. 2" less. 12th Louie last night met in the last light in the garden (near-by blue spikes in almost black) tells a story (while we sit under the windshield on Malkin) of her week at work. Complete attention to the students, letting them take control, not supporting them by eyes or posture. It slows down frighteningly. And then a group mind forms, as if a cloud they're all under. They learn things in a way that integrates them directly, uses them immediately. And: she doesn't feel lonely in it, not any longer a lonely intelligence. Goes home strong. I have some trouble hearing this because it impresses me. It's esoteric and I feel a baby teacher, egotistic. And at the same time the mirror's shadow across her face is a near vertical penis and I'm wondering what it's telling me. Waking this morning with solar and womb working (whatever it is - frightened, I think). Is it that Louie scares me all the time, somehow intensely scares me, scares me unaware, so I need the shelter of my two weeks. 13 Di Brandt on CBC this morning: "I realized that the difference between an occupied country and an unoccupied country is that in an unoccupied country the occupation has been completed." She said this in a voice giggling with fear. Then one of her poems read falsely by an actor. What dreams. Children I'm supposed to be watching. I want to be touching myself in the other room. This little person yelling to be taken up. As I pick him up he pees himself with so much enjoyment - lifting his knees, squirming, soaking himself warmly to the waist - that I like him and go with him to the little group of Arab kids he belongs to, way across the playground, past other sorts of groups. The Arab kids tell me they are assigned to look after each other. This little girl is the one who's looking after the boy, and this older girl is looking after her. Behind them a trodden hilltop between roofs. I think to see what's in that direction (E) and find myself among back verandah people sweltering in evening heat. A marvel of strange detail, a fat man speaking to me, a glass roof on the right I can see down through. Grape vines. A glasshouse for grapes, I say. Have turned back to the playground but the fat man has gone to bring me grapes. They're in one of the children's hands, green grapes with a completely fresh young look. Does this have something to do with ovulation? This period mysteriously early and after no noticeable ovulation last month. I was with Rob when it must have happened. Told him I'm 28-day regular when I smell him. But if this is a miscarriage not a period I would have felt something in my breasts. So shd I assume it's menopausal disorder? And go see Rob tonight nonetheless. Raining in silver spits outside the glass door of the Golden Horse. Saturday morning. Europa last night. What about it. A scene with deep slush on a street. When have I ever seen that in a movie. Midnight mass in a roofless cathedral with snow drifting down. Lars von Trier 1991 Europa - [drawing] Shrunk to a point at the solar plex, have my back pulled over me like a shell the thinness of eggshell, she's got all the space on the outside, I'm in siege to a big zigzag. - The test of a book is if it makes a space in which quite naturally you can say what you want to say ... yes, it was the greatest stretch of mind I ever knew and, I think to myself as I walk down Southhampton Row, "And I have given you a new book." now that I am 48 - April 1930 Cold rain, dark late afternoon. Is that my car being returned, chill fear and misery. Is doing nothing that - yet - Monday 15th How she got me out of it. Quietly. By listening to how desperate I am about work and saying she'll help me. I lay my head on her knee. In the morning her nipples make me go ape. Her little tuckings-in-close. I say I'll go see Rob in the evening. She's forgiving how het I am. She's imagining us in a house (I like to hear her imagine that, and why) and as we're lying in the morning, which is clear after rain and has clean blue mountains, she tells the story of visiting an old man on a farm in the Karoo, so remote it's two hours from the village with no hope of a church. On this farm she sleeps in a small bedroom that has gathered a thick peace in its walls. Also we settle my vocation. I'll write philos to keep my brain going. We'll finish the garden video and things will come of that. I'll look for ways to publish what I've made already. We'll make Dame's rocket. Thurs 18 Then familiar sickness, the one where I have a sore throat, kidney ache, hurt all over, no mind. Go see Ingrid Pincott. It costs me $115 with desiccated spleen etc. Prospect of anxious eating forever. Pribram agrees with the connectionists, here's a book 1991 with the latest brain evidence, figural perception. Pribram K 1971 Languages of the brain Prentice Hall [Opposite page, hormone notes: Estrogen is women's feel-good drug: it waken the senses, make them alert and ready for love Progesterone has a calming effect, there are massive amounts during pregnancy Male juvenile monkeys much more chasing play, or female juveniles whose mothers had been androgen exposed Girls are twice as sensitive to sound ... gaze intently at a silent face twice as long as boys do Girls make out familiar faces from a photograph much earlier Ovaries are the source of testosterone Turner's syndrome, ultrafemale, only one X CAH girls too much androgen Male hormone rockets when animals fight Traffic accidents and high levels of testosterone Number of crimes ... lacked testosterone and were submissive Those neutered after the brain had been organized by testosterone responded with aggression to shots of testosterone DES children, androgenic, independent, self-assured, aggressive There is more going on in a resting female brain than in a resting male brain, looks as hot as the active brains of males Males focus on who's boss, females on global function of all group members] Fri 19 If Louie and I at 3 years are at an oedipal point, what it sez is I have to be smarter overall because what's happening is I'm being deeply frequently frightened, and it's paralysis. What should I do about how frightened I am when she talks about Michael. Should I go back to containing her in every other weekend? Strictly? Yes. What's the way to think of this. 1. Addiction is dangerous; 2. the storytelling feels like knowing and being known, she 'likes' my writing; 3. we don't handle each other's weakness well, that feels like not knowing; 4. there's oedipal passion pulling into structures on both sides, I don't know whether it's opportunity to be brave or poison to avoid; 5. the other will see better than most. What happens. It's in her presence. When she talks about it after a while I go silent. (What would it be like if she went away, away?) I start to be alone with the sensation of pain in the solar. It's like staring immobilized at an x. Encapsulating. (If she went away I'd be free of dread - see it isn't the dread of abandonment but of slavery, living on fastened to ...). There's a temptation alongside to blow it, get it over with, okay kids do your worst, I'm above it. But could I do it without cutting them off? My dreams said no. Cutting off him means anxiety about Rowen, cutting off her is 1. chemical cold turkey, 2. being thrown into abandonment survival encapsulation again without a new route out. 2. has a hope in it that if I did it with supervision I would find a route. Is it something like this: that I'm risking with Louie a mother-bond that I've done without since I was two, and it threatens to undo me to the foundation, and she's been wanting me to risk that at the same time as wanting me to give up the part of the foundation that I have, his safe arms. Really she hasn't the smallest understanding of what any of this is for me, a blind persistence in pursuit of her own reconstruction. Is it that blindness that scares me all along? In fact I was thrown to the wolves just at the time when (it's said) girls are figuring out how to live in the conflict of sex and love. And what about her? Her evil spirit means something - is it the motion that chooses hatred when it's either hatred or helplessness? Do I know anything about her? Is there a crux of the story? Something with her (letter writing and mother, and how I don't, now) father? She refused him. For what reason. Pride. And pride is always false and needing to be redone. What does that mean in relation to the mother. The preference is insistent and unstable. Too much depends on it. That much of her structure is like mine, if it is hers and not only mine. Okay if I put that much together,
Then there's a conflict with both poles refused, which means inaction. My strategy has been to try accepting both poles in limited ways, denaturing them partly. And what's dangerous about her. She offers so much without being in a position yet to give it. What should I do with that danger. What I have been doing. Taking care not to stay taken in. Keep saying my truth. Make connections in work, I have to have. Maybe go away during the fall. Check in with Joyce when I have money again. Keep some secrets. Have work in the world. Saturday 20th Pribram's book is going to bring me to the core of what I've been skirting these years in secret. I am going to take it on, take on the math and electronics and come out with another shape to think with. Monday 22nd Quick, process the weekend. Why isn't there much residue? I was being valiant about Michael more than I knew. We're watching each other minutely for moments of disaffection. I'm calculating more slavishly than I have, if I don't keep her here the whole weekend he'll phone her and press his emotion. Etc. What he's pressing: adoration, whole desire, the look of her own pain, perennial man-shape. But pressing is a mistake I'm glad to hear he's making, self-pity tears whose hideousness I know. - The way I say 'you' sometimes but not often - when am I saying you? I'll watch that. Tuesday 23rd Living uneasy. A constant ache. A threat of what? Of the same worse. Occupied by the ache and then strategies for escaping it. In a weekend I let myself go stupid. This is one thing I know and forget about her: the reason she doesn't say the negative is that 'loving' has been her weapon, knowing the worst has been an economic danger. Her sexual responsiveness has been flattery managed by mental work. And here's how she manages me, these are my weaknesses: she tells me I do not look old, she in no way registers my lameness, she listens to the stories I have been alone in, she reads the writing I've despaired of, she holds against my enemies (but her touch can't lie) (her handwriting can't lie, her hard grin can't lie). She is a shrewd whore, but why that and not some larger way. As if I have to have a double consciousness, partly do. What I need to watch. Her secrecies. I have to be more conscious (what word is hiding here - fusion - the mindless going-along-with) - invasion means something particular, it means a slow virus program creeping into sync with my perceptions and warping them, gradual isolation from my own world. (Paul's got away from Marie-Paule.) -
26 We hide them in a back room of the barn loft, a row of dead copies of her. They are stillbirths, something like that. Shall we have an autopsy? She says no. We'll think where to bury them. The east place pasture, I think. No, the beginning was we're checking whether she's dead, pulse, breath. When we come back one of them is here, outside, lying on the grass, sitting up, tho' skeletal and dried out. What shd we do, is she alive? Should we call the police? Kids running in the grass have found her. Running away. Now we have to notify. She has already. Two firetrucks. Looking at the body with the firemen seeing a <video> of a corpse jumping with rigor mortis, almost to her feet, falling back, but then moving around doing a performance. That's live surely? But shall we tell about the other four bodies in the backroom. We go look at them. They're between leaves of a magazine. A bit sticky. When I wake from this dream I'm struck by it being versions of her (as if we didn't mind because there still was one) and that makes me think we must notify the coroner. This is a hardened and wrongly ordered version. What's wrong with it. Identities don't follow through from beginning to end this way. At the first there might have been one dead being. 27 Mary's fingers all over my head, pry them up, Get off me! Swimming west across the field west of the farmyard, where the field was, straight west in black night water. A wide oil platform, very big thing like an American aircraft carrier. I and others, maybe Paul, coming alongside it and seeing the circles of white lights outlining structures on its side. It's giving off a poison we think. We climb onto it to investigate. A tone of dreams far from the tone of day. 'Dark,' lonely, more East European, I don't know how to say it because it really is a tone, an unnoticed background, unfelt misery and worry. And that isn't it either. East European is closest. Something offside. Anne yesterday. Why was I so dull in it. Oh so dull. Her body beginning to be like Oma's, a soft sac. Face spreading soft and white without muscular structure except around the mouth. She's less sardonic. When Louie arrived at the car we both livened. I was noticing myself telling her things to impress her, which I knew wouldn't impress her, as if I didn't have the energy to stay out of family mind. There wasn't a forward edge of concentration in it either between us or privately. Sitting with Harvey on the porch there was some kind of keenness again as if it might be worth saying things, which made me feel how little it had seemed worth saying things to her, except for a ten-minute burst in the restaurant. And what released that - talking about Mary. 28 An endearing name, Lieb. Big dense head, silvered eyes, sharp nose and chin, forehead under dead thin hair, skin thick and lumpy, an alpha male certainly but has her pointed mouth, taut angled lower lip that reflects light, her hands, slight with pointed fingers. Next to him she looks exquisite. Sleek, fine, blue under black, silver. Bright eyes with blue clear whites. And I liked her till she said she'd gone running to Michael with one of her gift improvs last night. Then I saw her method turned on him, the same. Giving him a taste again to keep it going. - She'll deny it. [Louie's brother Lieb describes her as a child] Managing large groups of people. An organized child. Never came out against the rules but manipulated until she had her way. Stubborn. Wherever she was people would do things that hadn't been done before, she'd make them think it was a good idea. Read a lot, tried to use reading to get into the first rank in the family. Did she succeed, she wants to know. She tells me about Michael when the visit's two-thirds through. I'm angry but wondering if she has a method. The tack I find is to ask him about chaos theory in mathematics. And while defending, say about Jam yesterday, and the physician. Jam with Rhoda coming out her door. They go down the back steps together, Rhoda humble and stringy, a grey virgin, Jam with frog jowls and a white tarbush looking theological, a pointy-legged imam. I rush to the hall window to see them paired up the alley. They're welcome to each other but I don't want them going to the garden. Put on my shoes and unlock the bike, will try to be there when they arrive if that's where they're going. It wasn't, but still a sense of having something to defend. Maybe L has invited them to meet her brother. The physician was a man eating lunch at the table in the garden while the work party was on yesterday. Young wife, girl baby naked in the tank, mother and aunt. Their sharp cautious faces, the wife's thick fertile hair, say Jewish. I'm on my way through from boat building in the kid's area. He's staring. I ignore him. A minute later they're behind me on the path. I pick up the brick pounder to get it off the path. Be careful carrying that, the nails are loose, he says. Okay I say and carry it to the top of the vine walk, set it down. He's telling me again, The nails are coming out, it could fall on your foot. I got it, I say, but annoyed, not looking at him. What does he want. He explains again, one syllable words. I'm saying to the wife, Why don't I just move this. Haven't liked to see the wet naked baby near the live cord. I'm flipping the cord further on, ignoring him. He tries again. I GOT IT! I say still not looking at him. He carries on explaining about the nails. There he stands and I let fury carry me. This is interesting. I stand staring into his face. Pale blue eyes with rings. Eye level. Do you have some kind of need to patronize women?! It has nothing to do with gender, I didn't want - . You wouldn't know if it did, I say, noticing my voice has a shake in it, furious. I didn't mean to offend you, I'm a physician and I didn't want to have to fix you up. This word 'physician' always riles me. You're a physician and I'm a feminist and I know things you don't, take it from me. I liked that, because it's to the point, he does think he knows more than I do about anything. He isn't going to win this one, I have battle fire going. He starts again to explain. Just take it from me, I say. Then he stops. His wife, aunt and mother have been invisible making of it whatever they must. Danny and Michael presumably embarrassed thinking this woman is flipping over nothing. I had it in suspense until I could tell Louie, because I knew there was no one who'd see a true cause. 29 Going to the trailer to light the stove, warm it so I can work in it. Maybe a winter maybe a night. Have to light gas pilots. Don't know whether there'll be something wrong with the stove, there was an explosion here last week. My father watching, there's a little thing he'll fix. Sheets of my writing he's curious about. I say it's about my mother though it looks like it's about other things. Clearing stuff away, empty some roses, see flowers in a meadow over there through the glass. Overhead to an open second floor. Then in another room some relation to this I'm not sure of, going to get something maybe, a girl asking me to come over and feel the mat. The little native girl doesn't wet the bed any more. I should bring the foam back to the trailer for her. I see something in the near dark on a couch in the corner. feel it - it's a face. Tell the girl to turn on the light. A thin face with closed eyes. Talking to it, keeping it there. It could decide to be gone. The part where I'm talking to her isn't clear. It's as if I'm frightened but valiant. Question it. Want to get to the bottom of who she is. As if scenes from her past life. Played music when she was a kid, a bass, her dad encouraged her. As if she was a tall lively girl, someone I knew of, and is in a near coma of something like fear. Who are you? She's me, maybe. Thin, faint, just a head and in danger of vanishing. But I'm talking to her steadily. Somewhere else, on rocks with water, someone says the diver's hurt. It's her, a body thin as an anorexic. I run down and take her in my arms to carry her, running down the rocks to the pool. It's a round cavity in the rock. People in the restaurant looking up from their tables. They have clothes on, we don't. I'm in the water with the thin girl in my arms. I think the water will give her life. It's beautiful water warm and stirring. Feels like life. I say to a man with a beard who's sitting in it with me, She's part of me. She's part of everyone he says. This made me remember another dream about Louie with a string of berries around her neck. They indicate the high water level of something. Or it's at her crown. As often, distress about Louie, Louie distressed. The oscillation in our days. Loving pride in the morning, bitter anger about Michael, then (when I've taken Rob home calculating it will unanger me) she's in shock. This is too hard, that she has to go on feeling this. I return to distrust every time. - What does make some sense, Louie is thunderstruck when she's in sex and left flat. I keep forgetting it's that. I keep leaving her flat. It occurs to me to touch her but it doesn't occur to me to fuck her. It's raining. 4 AM. 5th July Sunday At night in a hostel. Driving down the road to see Louie. I'll stop in the supermarket. The big clean Safeway in town? Or a smaller dirtier place with produce less fresh. Park in the lot and go in. When I come out I can't find my car. Walking back and forth, finally crying, it must have been stolen. Telling a young man, Louie at a console calling the police probably, we look up and see another car being stolen, an old beater being backed out of the lot very fast, two young men inside. But the cops are already there, half a dozen, jumping forward firing at them. We see the young men's heads enlarged in slow mo, watch the expressions on their faces before they're hit, knowing they're going to be hit. Police still firing. Two holes in the nearer young man's temple. He still has his stupid arrogant look but his head nods forward, back, forward. Jaw drops. His companion jerking too. They slump. Pieces of metal are being shot off the car, bursts of fire. This is a morning dream on Rob's lumpy pillows. What sort of visit was it. Joy. Lying down before dinner, He's got so wise he knows to rub my nipples on and on. I was there from the start. My breasts heap themselves up, even the drag of the teeshirt edge is delight. My idea is we should get ourselves fired and then make dinner so it's catalyzing away until we come back to bed. He says that was his idea too but now he's too far on. I revise my plan, "but you have to promise," I'll fuck him fast and then later I'll be preamplified. What he loves, lying on his back. "I'll come if you keep doing that." "Come if you want." Friendly. He comes rising up under me, wrapping his spider arms tight around. And later after two TV movies in the living room, after he puts his flowers in water, cleans up in the kitchen, after we lie together in the dark, no stars, no lights, no music, I touch myself to make him hard. He leans it against my arm when it is. I lay my hips over his lap and set the tip. He'll work it in. Slowly, I say. It amuses him to feel me smile. Sometimes I bring the scrap of the story where he (the other he) says kindly, responsibly, Come on sweetie, open more, give it to me, that magic sentence, and I do open more, and my knight goes on. I like it when he holds my right thigh on his hip and pulls. It isn't the sort of coming I had with Jam, a rolling light whose wave is clear to see. It's more of a tumult in the dark, inseparable from his broad sleek strokes. Michael on the phone verging on sarcastic. He knows I'm not having Rowen tonight 'cos I'm suspicious. Also he probably knows I was with my friend with the big penis. I say how about tomorrow night. It makes no difference to me, I know it makes a difference to you but it makes no difference to me, he says. Sourly. Good. Now about Joyce. Last Thursday and scary enough so I soaked myself for the rest of the day in Maeve Binchey, 500 pages. But scary of what. She's over-moved by the work, writing down the name of Pribram's book. I go on puzzled why she doesn't encourage me into art. Loving ideas she says is as good as loving skies, it's all conditioning. And then about Louie, she doesn't enquire. She seems to have her answer ready. The only way out is in, we're conditioned to think we have to solve things. Find out what I'm afraid of with Louie. But I know that already, afraid to be made smaller. Find out where that comes from. Driving backward very fast (knew Joyce would like that) afraid she'll drag me into the humiliation back then. Find out what I'm afraid of with her and Michael. Is she implying I should allow that? Is it she's more doctrinaire? Talking about previous lives now, losing patience with ego's worries. But it's ego's worries paying her 85 an hour so she can circumambulate the holy mountain. 7th What I knew on Sunday evening was to find Louie and fuck her. She's pale remote and in despair and I'm confident I know how to cure her. And it was true. I have to stand in my joy and then I have joy for her too. "It's the kind of girl I am." "What kind of girl is that?" "Quite a bit the same kind of girl as you." Lost out of mind kissing. "When I was younger I didn't understand how much grief there is when I don't get it." Her story: a man, in some way like Rob, a being made of pale yellow light, surprising love, laughter, a light thin quality. She does something sexual with him that she isn't telling me and doesn't like because it's as if Rob has got into her psyche, my view of him not hers. 9th Then when she comes into the house I see a ponytail kid who's no relation. The first night was my idea but a tension that made me hide in old stories about Tietz. Last night desperate for her to be gone. And why. No reason. But desperate. Working, is it that? 11 I didn't say how Sunday night ended. I fucked her up and down. She's happy. Now I want. Can I have the thing, I say. She will, but as it goes on I begin to endure, desperate and lost. I can't stop but this is horrible. I imagine the father at my head comforting me while an ugly old man jerks away. I'm doing it for him. I'm with you sweetie he says. I hold his hand. I come finally, it's over. How are you she says this morning. Very well! I say. She has her work week. I'm not making much of the event but she feels me turned off and is imagining the usual. I work. Yesterday she finds me at the garden. So bitter and nasty these days - bitter and nasty, or shattered. 13 The open house. A moment in the herb garden, on social automatic turning from one to another. Suddenly a familiar face I take an instant to recognize - a straight close gaze out of a broad youngish face, a real human. Oh it's you, I say. Him, the mayor. Well if he can be real so can I. Partly. No time to get behind myself. Do I show him stuff. The pineapple sage. Get him to smell his hands. He doesn't have time to get behind himself either but he's not bad. His private project is something on senses in the city. You go home at night and write things down, you mean? Yes. And then he amazes me (this shouldn't amaze me) by asking what else I do. He's not acting like a man (he did about the h.g. tank). And then something happens I can't make out. I say I make a living being a graduate student. That's where it happens, before I say where or in what. I tell those things already against a current. [mayor at that time was Gordon Campbell] Through the afternoon faces arriving, women gardeners I recognize right away and smile at, keen private faces. Something political going on. The event marked something. Very astute publicity, two pieces in Saturday's Sun. Five, six, seven hundred people. People pouring through, buying little plants, six deep around Rob, groups of ten in tours three minutes apart. News crews. A sense of being isolated up in the corner, fixed there, a revolving door, in the tizzy of my task, while Joann makes her move to grab a place in our post-success city presence. My job is close to finished and I'm handing it over to a tin-voiced bureaucrat who thinks we should wear nametags saying Hi! I'm ... A peculiar sensation, the global grassroots green fame to come won't have me in it, though it could if I wanted. Louie watching the kids' area telling me how solidly it was handling crowds. It holds the kids in a calm water-trance, adults and kids trade around on the boat-platform, grownups sit on it eating, then kids take it back to jump off. Politicians chose the height of land at its stern to speak from. The bench separates people staying still from people moving, is an edge where they can decide to sit down each on their own side. The table's on the edge of the center. Yesterday we saw how many people it can gather and disperse. It works intelligently as our agora. Our bureaucrats don't know it tho', or the psychologies of vinewalk and final pool, or the way the long path brings people around back on the flank of the grass orchard so they'll see it from a safe shore, or the side spill into greenhouse and nursery's yard, put where you can see it from the path and come in further only if you know what you're looking at. Our platform is two grassy bellies. That's quite good. The apple dictionary was pulling in older men of the factual bully kind - Rob's day to get a place in that culture, it was his premiere. And the herb garden is women's rapture. In fact many of the older women got to see the herb garden because their bosses demanded to inspect apple facts. And Jam, oddly. L ran to warn me. Her white imam hat, and hair cut off inexplicably, so sagged and swollen about the jaw, nothing of her level flash. She laughs stupidly at something said in a way I recognize as imitating their effort to be seen seeing behind. And then the moment Rowen dashes up, Hi Mummy! and we look at each other, and then Michael arriving to get him, and Rowen jumps up onto his waist, and Michael grins and there is Louie next by at the plant sale table.
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