| aphrodite's garden volume 15 part 2 - 1992 october-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
14 October 1992 A turquoise feather I find in my bed, rumpled, when I wake, looks like cotton threads. I see other feathers fastened above my head. Some are turquoise, some turquoise with gold marks like small triangles. We are looking up at a grassy cliff, brown grass. People standing on a knoll. Tall trees with large birds perched and arriving. Black ones like rooks, some large white bird I see landing behind its upper branches, a stork maybe. And there, over there, in the other direction, the one with wide spread-out wing-tips, an owl. Sailing. Lands on a man's wrist. He tosses his arm as if to toss the bird up toward the cliff. The owl lifts fast but it drops backward and down at my feet. I set my wrist next to it and it climbs on. I'm carrying the owl. Its man is jealous. But can I make it lift and hunt? I try. Toss my arm but it won't obey. We're carrying a camera. When we see the owl's face pass on the man's arm I say to L, Did you take a picture? And when it's on my arm I want her to record it. There's another man I speak to, I want to know where he's from. A name. Centre of China. And a message: not liking my body is something to do with hating my mother. - Colin's movie. Father and son. Doesn't ask women. There's a gay man who says the manhood standard is a scam that depends on gender hierarchy. Making sure they aren't in the camp with the women. And what his father says is: "You come in and they treat you as something special. It has to stop. It has to stop." But Ignatieff says his grief for his father is the central loyalty without which his life would be empty. He's the man who says, in his daughter's hearing, that the birth of his son was the happiest moment of his life, and that anyone could die (his wife, his daughter) and he'd survive those deaths, but not the death of his son. The little girl interposing her foot in the frame, wriggling in his lap. He looks at her, holds her hand, doesn't see her, continues. Colin sets his naval uniform upright on a raft. Stands in the water up to his neck. The uniform dummy on fire in the Strait. His head and its shadow a knobbed oblong on his left. The camera drifts sideways 'til there's naked reflection. Very lovely. He says he's come clean but no. There's further to go. These men are still flattering themselves. In the dressing room rigging up for a father-son hockey game, the codpieces. A fat man with his pants falling - I gasped. Colin Browne 1992 Father and son National Film Board of Canada 88min. 15 Came up with something about why they resist seeing procedures as the minute clicking-along of on's and off's - it's the feeling of will as hovering above in a physical but transparent space. 16 Beside David Rimmer in a junior high classroom, Mrs Christiansen's maybe. We're there as artists. It seems we're supposed to let her teach her way but David (on my L) gets excited about something the kids have done on the board - rolled chalk so it's like rows of vibrations. At one place rolled it again vertically so it's crossed lines. There are two other people who seem to be artists, they're kids, play boogie on two pianos. This one's reminding the other one to cue in. Her class has come to a stop. I'm in two minds, it seems better for the kids to have lively people being themselves around them. Also a dream about picking up things at a camp left in great disorder. Someone else has already moved in. Many rows of expensive cosmetic bottles. Last evening at the Kam Yuen Gok a sudden turn. She's come from Co-op Radio, I'm meeting her before we go to Shoot for the Contents. I say I'm thinking we should have an understanding that she and Michael shouldn't meet each other when I'm babysitting. She says he phoned her last night and said he doesn't have Rowen on Sunday night and would she like to meet him. She agreed to have supper. Oh fury. That's it, I don't want to eat, I don't want to go to the film, I want to stare into space collecting myself. Etc. We go to the film. She says she's sorry. We'll try to talk to the book somewhere in the theatre slowly filling. What do I want to ask. What made Michael think he could take her away? Imagine you are walking on a beach. What are you looking at? it/she says. It isn't going to work. What I saw first was M and L walking on a beach. It's going to either try to distract me or else tell me to look forward not back. I don't trust that Louie's interests won't be speaking to me. I won't sit with her. I'll sit back here. She can't stand to leave it be. Etc. Whispering over the back of my seat, "Ellie ..." She goes home. I see the film and like to see it. Pots, baskets, brushstrokes, calligraphic forms of dancers, two women's voices speaking English as if it's Chinese (is that right?). A Caribbean black man lit blue being the male political expert. A woman translator being the moon coming out from behind the male film director. Their voices alternate. Looking at goose tails wriggle. Looking their pillars up and down. Now she says she's woken in a rage. What's her rage. Then we spend the day. It's seven thirty. Where did we go. I had questions. 1. Why does M think he can take L away. 2. I'm worried that she isn't vigilant and goes along with him. 4. I wonder whether Dave Carter phoned. 3. Thinking of having Rowen while they flirt and schmooze and feel delicious possibilities. 5. This is connected to 2 - feeling L is going to take a long time finding out what she wants with a man and until she does I'm in so great insecurity. 6. My book says I'm not going to have sex anymore. It says 3 isn't going to happen that way. 1. M doesn't feel he can, though he did after I exploded when I had my dreams. 4. You've been avoiding the phone, is it you're afraid to be disappointed. 2 and 5 she knows what she wants from men, it's for them not to take her away from women, take her but not away. Take her where? Into knowing them. I'm still worried about 6 but she wants a turn. You be the book. I'll try. It sounds like me and is, and she's suspicious. She's furious. What doing. Hitting bricks with a metal pole. "Don't you ever control me. You control me and you know you're doing it." That gives me a clue. "Turn around and look behind you. There's a double door, burst in through it. You find yourself in a room. There's someone in the room who's trying to control you. Look and see who it is." "I'm not looking I'm just rushing through." "Stop then. Over here by the wall there's someone sitting in a chair. A throne." She doesn't want to say who it is. I say she doesn't have to, but go on and speak to that person. Silence. "Tell me what's happening." She's kicking them. She's afraid she'll kill them. "Kick them some more." "Don't tell me to kick them." "I only mean go on until something else happens. They're looking at you. What do they see?" "They can't see me." "They will be able to now. They're opening their eyes and looking at you." "It isn't like that, they're lying on the floor." "Can they open their eyes." "Very weakly." "Alright, there's a beam of light that comes in through a bit of the top of a window. It falls on this person and makes them strong enough to see you. What do they see." "I don't buy the beam of light." "You don't have to, just imagine something is making this person see you. What do they see." Eventually I get something. A lot of stalling, tears. "They see I'm other. Just that." [After I've been there, she pees, peels yams, make tea, we go back into the room. She feels I'm someway. I say from stopping. The simple expression comes to me, she approves. "There's so much resistance and personal hostility during the process that afterwards it needs to be fixed." She knows how to fix it: by telling me it was well said and then pressing into my spine above the heart. It cracks. Her confirmation. We go on to the conference in the dark room. - This belongs here but actually came at the point *] I've lost some of the progression but what happens is she has to kick this person some more and then I say we have to sit together, me and the nonmystery figure and Louie's self and Louie and she has to tell us in what ways she doesn't want to be controlled. 1. She wants her anger, which she thinks they've taken away from her forever. 2. She doesn't want her sex controlled and she doesn't want to be controlled with sex. 3. She doesn't want her body compared unfavorably with others. 4. She doesn't want judgments of her intelligence and she doesn't want to be bribed to use it in ways that are more useful to the other person than to her. I think that's it but she's seeing something else. An artist in a cage. We must all go and look in the cage. It's silver. It's a crib. She's furious. Smashes the crib. Keeps smashing. Now what. She's kicked us all out. Out, out. Just her and some paint. Slides. Someone comes in and fucks her. She fucks them too, throws them against the wall, is strong enough. Out. Just her. What's the work? Brilliant colors. Red and green. "Red for anger and green for love?" "Green for love and red for love too, the kind with anger in it." "Yes." "Do you think you know who it is?" "Yes." "That's you." She may be bluffing. I say why I think so. "Your mother's the one who controlled you and knew what she was doing. The second reason is that you wouldn't want to tell me because then whenever you feel control I'd say it's really your mother." "And" (she says) "I don't want you to stop giving me the kind of mothering I like." I answer like a real mother. "I'm not going to stop. I'm just learning to be a mother and you're just the kind of daughter I like best." She looks at me then and says she thinks she'll invite me back in. "Are we going to have tea in the studio?" "I do want to go back into the dark room because I have something to say I want them all to hear." "A speech." "No." I want to be wild too, and if I am going to have to be thinking all the time about not controlling her in any way how can I? We agree it's time to ask the book. Book says we both have to follow our instinct. "What if my instinct says I should stop her?" "Not those instincts. It's dangerous" (it says). "We're in danger of losing each other" (I say). "Yes especially because she is so inexperienced. She'll do things and then freak out." * What I left out of the first part of my story. When we've been talking about whether she knows what she wants from men I start shaking. It's a dry pale hoary shaking. "Why are you shaking." "I don't know." "Do you know what you want from men?" Good guess. "No." (Then what was it -) My turn again. Lying on the bed. I'm still worried about question 6. My book says I'm never going to have sex again. It's as if something in me is screaming when I hear that. "It may not mean forever, it may mean through a transition. You've had a groove, there's been a way you've been about sex you want to change." "Do you mean Rob?" "It's broader than him." "Fantasy?" "Like that." I've lost track of the sequence then, I'll just say what I do remember any way it comes. (But how did I come to that crying?) The blank misery of there never being any sex again. It says reasons for chastity, "Maybe you want to take it somewhere else." She says "You don't have to stop sex." I say I want a new life but I don't know whether I'm choosing a death where I'll be ugly and weak and old and sick. She says I won't be ugly if I find what I want. And besides, all of us are going to be ugly and weak and old and sick. There are times when people have to choose. (Now I remember.) I say I'm afraid everything will go away from me. Last time I took that road everything went away from me. Here's where I cry aloud, so hard I'm gasping, I lose my breath. On and on. She tries to head me off it seems, I'm crying and rolling, kicking the covers off, gasping. It's a crying that doesn't know anything but crying. Then I stop and blow my nose. (Here I remember the blue butterfly from earlier.) "You won't want to hear this but I'm going to say it. You may be able to have open sex with Louie." (It's true I'm suspicious. She wants to be wild as her fancy while I'm being chaste and/or wanting her. Would the book give her so much and me so little?) "You're in a dark hole in the ground and looking up, what do you see?" "Once I dreamed I was down in a well and a woman leaned over the edge and kissed me on the mouth. I think I came. " "You may come again. What's swinging?" I know immediately. "It's a crystal." I feel her nodding. "It's the crystal Jam gave me. I was living in the pink and white house. I couldn't stand that she'd given one to Sandy too." "I think you lost something when you threw it away," she says. "I didn't exactly throw it away. I think of it as still there. I think of it as a radio." "You're holding it in your hand," she says. Which hand. My left. I keep holding it. (She had seen it shining in a tree.) "You look at it. What do you see." "A bit of pink." "Look around and see where it's coming from." "I know where it's coming from. It's from what I'm wearing. A Tibetan blouse I used to have, it was red but after it had been washed a lot it was a beautiful soft pink." "Write a story about the shirt and see what in that time you want to be again." "I know already. I see myself the way I was for a while - I was very open, I felt sex very much. I was in a lot of pain but I liked the way I was. I was quite beautiful." "You can be like that again, except the years." "The way I wanted sex was humiliating" (thinking of Sarah saying 'You're running away from wanting it so much'). I know she understands that. - When I'd been crying (about what exactly?) the first time she ended it this way. "What color is the butterfly?" "It's blue." "Yes. Why is it landing on your forehead?" "It wants to move its wings on both sides." "Yes. You are going to be given a third eye." (Was it that? Or: We want you to have a third eye.) "I don't know what that is." "You will know. It wants to go into your forehead through the first bone, between the two temples, to its home, where it came from before." I don't know why that was making me cry. Trinh T Min-ha dir 1991 Shoot for the Contents 101 min - And that we'll get ----? Something by fighting a lot with long thin poles like the one the octopus hangs from. Two people balancing on a bridge. I threw the crystal into a tree after desperate days, Jam not writing, a horrible parting. "Everything is going away from me." The crying for loss of sex as if sex/men have been what keep me away from the grief of everything going away. But then when she wakes at four insight isn't making me want it. Do I ever have fantasies of her touching me, she asks. It never occurs to me. Tonight reading with Rowen. We'll do that more. 18 This morning thinking - it's the black night rain of winter - how determined Louie has been - how shrewd and unrelenting she is in her cultivation of a wide net of people - how ape she goes when thwarted - how my body even now does not trust her, lies miserable uncooperating - really I don't give myself a strong enough account of her ways with control. And when I read her this she will take offence at having it noticed. - Depressed and ashamed. It's to notice. The way I can't concentrate in seminars. And even less because - is it I saw right away he wasn't there - or right away I didn't dare, I turned away. I didn't remember what I was there to do. That it's crucially personal and at the same time I'm to take it as impersonal. And how I'm feeling everything is gone. 19 Tuesday, cold and silver. Not knowing what to do with dejection. What's it like. A child cast down at the bottom of a room giving up hope. Hope of what - that there'll be sweetness. It's looking ahead at iron days, cold, electric light, stuffy rooms, poverty, duty, helplessness, tears, muffled intelligence, envy, pain, resentment, philosophy that barrenness. I woke at four so sore in the solar I couldn't want to be awake. Say, say - In the philosophy gatherings the way I don't concentrate, miss the points, am bewildered by the byplay, can't move fast enough to be in it. (Don't want to continue.) Wonder whether it's the age of my brain. Is overriding control the only way to stay out of collapse? I'm like a defeated person today - crashed. There's something would fix me and I'm not going to take it. Two pianos, the one on the left is a painted antique but wrecked, the one on the right is newer and will play. They stand against the wall together, grand pianos much smaller than baby grands, between two doors. They were brought by men who've left them behind. Ocean, warm ocean. I wanted to swim out toward the haze on the horizon. Keep stroking without tiring. (I'm crying about sweetness being gone.) I want the warmth and rhythm. Turn on my stomach and look below. Deep sea, sifting particles in the great weighty green. Go down, turn, drift upward lying on my back. The shaking silver, one-way mirror. I realize coming near it that I am going to approach my reflection. This is a moment of struggle of some kind, reluctant and carried forward. I see myself brown and pink and plastic and am carried through myself to the world, the sun, the horizontal extent. Haul myself out of the water on the round rock edge, enter the rock, go down through round chambers. One after another stepping over thresholds. Down there's another sea, the black one, black and bright. I can step into it, I can lie in it, black and silent, a black mirror. I can sink through it to a tube, a pit, far down. All uncertain. Uncertain it's there but I'll take the prism, a flat diamond, into my palm, and bring it up with me. A basin cut in the rock. I want my hands on the black water or near it. The water I'm thinking is to be a black mirror. But I don't see on it, I see instead a black mirror hung above it. It doesn't speak to me, I have to give it an image. I'll give it his, if I can form it. Now speak to it. What do you want - not you, the person, you the image. Nothing. I'm the one who has to say. I'll take your image and turn you, put you into my chest so you look outward with me. (A howl of grief.) The flat diamond goes into my forehead. And then. How do I look at you when I see you in the world? Does beauty look gladly at beauty, not afraid it will see indifference or worse? Even when it sees indifference or worse? (Like crying out -) This is where it catches - grief at liking - fear and hiding - shame - fantasy. Is that where I have to leave it for now? Helpless in the hands of a process that may be change. And the grief in the work, where I'm in alien mind studying the enemies of earth and women. [To find the soul one must step back from the surface, withdraw deep within, and enter, enter, go down far down into a very deep hole, silent, still; and then down there is something warm, tranquil, rich in contents and very still, and very full, like a sweetness. This is the soul and if one persists and is conscious in oneself a sort of plenitude comes which gives the impression of something complete holding unfathomable profundities, and one feels that if one entered there many secrets would be revealed, like the reflection in calm, peaceful waters of something which is eternal, and the limits of time are no more. One has the impression of having always been and of being for eternity. Satprem. Sri Aurobindo or the adventure of consciousness a white flame along with its support the black light the beloved blue pearl, the ground of all the conscious light of chiti The cosmos appeared in the conscious light and in the conscious light in the cosmos like threads in a cloth and cloth in threads. beautiful conscious light calmly throbbing just as a diver descending into water C. Luk The transmission of mind outside the teaching Everything was dripping with white-hot light or electricity as though I was watching the whole cosmos coming into being, constantly, molten. Layers and layers of light upon light.] 21st Then, working. I find Newell's history of issues and with it the pleasure of tracking. At Manufacturing consent with L in the evening I don't want her touching me though it was okay for Rob to. I say it's depression but today, though it's not depression, I notice I'm for the first time in a while imagining myself rid of her. Newell, A., 1983: 'Intellectual Issues in the History of Artifical Intelligence'. In F. Machlup and U. Mansfield (eds), The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages. New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1983. Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick dir 1992 Manufacturing consent: Noam Chomsky and the media - When his image visits me how to speak to it - 22nd It is still dejection - Last night I tried this: go to the rock room pool and lie quiet in the position I found. Have him come into the pool with me, thinking of it as the well of truth. Try to see him. He's inert, as images are. What shall I do. Confusion, hesitation, indecision. I should show him myself. I'll stand naked and let him see. (This morning I'm trembling at the heart. Hearing rain.) Here, look at the thin leg and this one, and look at how I am. I can't see people, I wouldn't be able to see you. He's inert still. I am not really finding my own feeling in the same place as where he is seeing my body. I try telling him what I know but all of the story is dim unfocused unpersuasive unsatisfying. This morning I want sex and try to find another kind of story. I'll be in the rock pool showing him my body and I'll imagine I'm wanting to be touched and fucked and he's inert as before and another man comes, taller, stronger, more of a man, who sees my longing and other things about me, my hands and skin, and says Come here and holds out his arms to me. After writing this I try sitting to see if I can go further. Still indecisive, uncertain. Lie down on the sea. Yes it sighs. Looking down, rocking. I want to burrow somewhere with my forehead, I want pressure against it. Tunneling. Yes. Now I want to go up - up toward a light very high above. Makes the top of my head bright, but a bit off center. Keep rising. Feel the brightness at the crown when it's there. Solar plex chest throat and forehead are clear. Then the top of my head feels the slipping-down of a softening, like silky pudding. It's pleasant but my back's still stiff. Now I want to work with his image again. At the warm pool? No, up. The gold-grid glass platform. I'll be there and bring him, we can stand in the place where there's only the strong slanting light. Now. Sit with him. What should I do, I don't know. There needs to be a third. Someone like a god who knows. No one forms but I have a sense that I should connect my chest to his with a bright cord and ask what he's feeling. The reply if it is that is my own heart hurting in quite a broad sharp way. Now what. I'll just feel it. When I move into it the soreness disperses. I'll ask again - what are you feeling? The soreness again. What can I do. Put my hands on his chest. Want to rest my forehead on them. 23rd In Chaos and The dispossessed a quality of joy, arrival - seeing I might be able to feel my way forward to someplace where my visual work can come together with this labour in men's brains. Reading it again seeing I'm finer in the detail, intuition and expression are closer. It is as if I see a research program that can take me to the end of my life - from this grubbing down into an academic base I can go to geometric rep - to seeing and intuition - to 'seeing' and what mind is. What I should do in visual work is just go play with the optical printer, follow hints, not be theoretical in any way. But cultivate my standing in some ways so I can still have funds. 25 Monday How doing. Oh the grad student meetings. What am I doing there, looking at Dave, two hours writhing with lack of interest in anything else. I feel his face in mine sometimes, getting into the elevator, emerging onto the mall in the dark. I could this moment. But what the day was like was little social disappointments, I'm lonely there, faded. Want to be central and lively and am dull even in myself. When I was running direct into his eyes there was bright and dark space in my head. Giving up is dangerous too. Apart from that I want to report that six weeks after beginning I am walking with a lean belly in loose jeans, not sore, light, feeling my shoulders in the right place above my hips, arms with bone showing. Not needing heavy food to keep me going. 26th "Ayurvedic" when I woke in the night with solar fiercely sore guarding the heart, not the first time. Where's the mental energy to write here. Was it my friend coffee. Dreamed Peter with a new horse. The horse is testing him. I'm watching him circle in the living room. His gaits get more complicated. The rider is faultless. I'm not surprised that I only see the horse. He dances into the dark bedroom. I don't see the last of the contest there. I'm sitting at a school desk, Peter sits on his heels next to me and puts his head on the desk. It's damp. He's happy he proved himself with his horse. "... in the dark cave" he says of the bedroom. Our heads move together. A sweet moment. He looks at the clock, "I have to go home." Nine o'clock. And about Maggie, that I should check the time I knew her. Margaret. Haven't said anything about the weekend, as if I haven't the energy to remember it. Horrendous night. Louie determined to act out her worst. Joyce may call it her child but it's a crushingly malign dwarf. I'm crushed by it to bare endurance. It hasn't the flow of child feeling, it is a pigheaded density like a rind, massive insistent stupidity. It talks on and on. Pries, pokes, tortures, wants to comb out of me every smallest shred of threat. A monster of insecurity, a big blocky head full of obstinacy. It wants me to fix it. My instinct is: no. Fix yourself, find your free position. We got to something else next day, sex even, but my aftertaste is bad. She's withholding the book because she wants to trade it for something. For what exactly - I'm supposed to love her monster. Don't know what to say to that. In fairytales it works a wonder, but she will not become a prince in any case. A rapidly aging fellow woman appears on the pillow beside me. Who was never the choice of my heart. No, she was, when she went away and we wrote and she came back. But the one who went isn't the one who came back. Is that true? The one who came back thought she'd made a sacrifice and wanted payment. And where am I. Smaller. Kind of small and sore. Near the places of fear and grief but without the fast wind of inspiration in it. When I'm with other people shame is convolved with all I do. Giving up on him is making me give up on her - I want to say yes, it's true, I'll always want something else, go free while you can, I'm alone with my horse. Maybe I could travel, maybe I could be somewhere with roads and skies and leaves falling. Is that why the monk put his head next to me so lovingly. Ayurvedic - 2nd millennium BC medical treatise, Hindu Veda knowledge - 1685-1750 last page of Art of the fugue, he wrote b-a-c-h, died. 27 Behind the farm, to the north, a road I didn't know was here. Due east, a long stretch, really two roads close to each other, the one on the left a track. We're sloping up to a mountain, the track on the left is the one that will get us onto it. At first I only see an indentation, a platform, like a gravel pit, where we could camp. Then I see the white gravel winding up around the back, it will be possible to drive to the top, where there'll be a view across the country. I didn't know there was this height so close. As if seeing from it already. Two families and babies in a van, and me. Off the road on the right a village. Driving through liking it. Old buildings well restored. There's a railway station! It's the station they brought me to when I left that time. Looking up at a window, it's dark now, a high ceiling painted blue with clouds in gold lamplight. The hotel, I've been there before, we asked for a room there once. Louie says I don't feel her, I'm not seeing her, I'm doing what I'm doing without caring to make a bridge. What does this mean. I haven't adored her in a while - I've gone to the book wanting to be opened, but the opening doesn't open to her. Two weeks fasting - David at the party - film festival - yoga - five hours rule - leg shame - bright and dark - you can have all that you had before - where is what I will lose - remembering touching the feeling, cut - what it wants that my nature doesn't, to impress fathers - solar plex - wants you to notice - all that during the fast - D's paper - Louie's nosebleed, she feels crazy - she starts threatening to leave - whether I'm giving up instinct or fear - the black cap and the tweak - I felt it and it was sadness, as if the wish can't come without its disappointment - what L got from pursuing it - the wanting seems to help me - the thought of cutting that feeling - of being a soul and loving, loving from the center of the soul - having these things together with a man's arms - offering Michael - her please and mine - you want it through this time - heartbroken feeling David McAra doesn't exist - cards say sex is going forever - the warm pool and the man covered with sand - body without body, arcing backwards, undersurface, breaking through - her journey, ribbons - turquoise feathers, owl dream - not liking my body something to do with my mother - shock about Michael - she beats up her mother, says what she wants, out out, someone comes in and fucks her - whether she knows what she wants from men - shaking - everything will go away from me, crying so hard I'm gasping - the crystal and Tibetan shirt - still don't want to touch her - then crash with him - go on feeling everything is gone - thinking how shrewd L is - speak to the image - grief at liking, fear and hiding, shame, fantasy - grief at work - show him myself - trembling at the heart - top of the head bright - bright cord, heart pain - weekend much heart and sp and forehead pain, L holding out - giving up on him makes me give up on her - the monk's horse - she will not become a prince in any case - a rapidly aging woman appears on my pillow - the two roads, mountain and village. - It's only the last ten days that I haven't been with her, as if I feel she spoiled it for me with him - not wanting to touch her - I felt her using the book to campaign against him and for sex for herself. 30 Some line to Seattle being closed off. He explains buried circuits had been releasing dyes, they'd been made of fetal fluids. At the electrical headquarters a photo of the men who worked there, the photo I see being taken has been arranged so there's a face reflected in the water in front of them. The reflections of yellow light from two windows behind them are the eyes - this isn't quite it. I was amazed he'd arranged the photo so it would happen. Moving down a long finger of water through the mountains between there and here, I'm seeing on the right many mouths like the mouths of streams, but they're thin sheets and shards of bluewhite ice, sheared off as they enter open water. We couldn't walk here could we, I say. I'd like to see these interesting things more slowly. There aren't banks. Later. Our father is going to take us on a trip at night, to someplace in the wild, something spooky or menacing about it. How shall we dress? (We're kids.) Is it going to be cold? Is it going to be wet? Wear boots. Pulling socks out of a drawer looking for long ones. I'm feeling I should think about not going. If I suspect something should I stay behind but let the others go? I try to find a place to ask the cards. There seem to be spies everywhere. Holding the pendulum surprised at the weight of the pack of cards hanging from it. My father goes through the room carrying a rifle. While I'm bridesmaid at a wedding my car is towed from the parking lot. My boots have been impounded somewhere else. I need the car to fetch the boots and vv. Flipping through a catalog trying to find the department to phone about my boots. At Joyce's. She spends the session gabbing idly. I look at the clock. Time is up. I go crying under the piano. Now I'm supposed to pay but I haven't brought anything. Do you have any blank cheques? A complicated ledger which after a while I notice is the wrong date. I'm blotting the paper. I'm having so much trouble signing because I don't want to pay, I say. Two nights ago cleaning floors, want to clean all the floors very well. The store manager went ahead and cleaned his beautifully, it's a wing of my house. 3 cats like Rowen's. - What to bring Joyce: what I asked for at the wheel. To get clear with L, to settle the long struggle with them, to work and have will, to not lose mobility, for depth, to be thinner. Should I have said too: to lose shame and see into other people. "The last time I took that road everything went away from me." What road - not being with men, being devoted to Jam. Whether she knows what she wants from men. I'm never going to have sex again - screaming Feeling everything is gone A child cast down at the bottom of a room giving up hope that there'll be sweetness Grief at liking - fear and hiding - shame - fantasy Shame and not seeing into people Dream of the monk A.
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C.
D.
[with Joyce] Give up addictions, you feel more. Not being able to see people has to do with feeling - you've had feelings like explosions, brilliant and then they're over. Jung said the neglected faculty is the numinous one where your gifts are waiting. You promised yourself you'll never be that helpless again. "The funny thing is that when I feel that I want to go away -" "It isn't now, now there are people who'll run to you." "They all have their own agendas" I say bitterly. "Don't give me any of that head stuff," sternly. Anything that comes in I'm just supposed to feel it, not do anything with it, just feel it. Feeling is a field, there are rocky parts and flowering parts etc. "I don't know about a promise but what happens now is I say to myself, I'm alone, I have to look after myself now." "Men have saved me - it was men who saved me from that long dying spiral the last years with Jam." "When did men save you before?" "When I was fourteen." "From what?" "Isolation. Is this making sense to you?" She thinks so. The way L does it differently, not by closing off the other person, but by making herself the master of knowledge of what's happening. - If I were feeling would I have to have somebody to look after me? Someone who needed my capacity. What sort of picture is that. A rosy young woman, a man like Olivia's Chris. I do feel, why does she say I don't? Waiting for something to make me feel, don't I have to go find something difficult? Like them. Feeling is what got me into those hells, humiliations. Thinking and intuiting and sensing don't. - Example of Louie on the phone, I felt dropped, etc. Not ignoring or overriding brings me to weaknesses=sensitivities directly, they don't get patched around. 2nd November After the weekend. There was another piano, this one was standing to the ankles in seawater on the other side of the finger bay. I'm supposed to stand on it in my red bathing suit and jump off, like a wave to the boys on the other side of the shore. Visit starting Saturday five o'clock. She's distressed I don't see her. It goes on. We're in bed. I say finally that I don't think our connection is going to be sexual even though we change. I can't want to go on forever in the stress of feeling it isn't right, it isn't true. She turns her back. My love for her comes back instantly. She's heard the shift in my tone. I've gone from being off-center to speaking from a circle of knowledge. I hold her forehead and don't pursue her. She says she should go home. I know to wait. She falls asleep. In the night she wakes once crying. I put my forehead along her shoulder. We talk to the book. (What did it say?) Is there a way of making love without touching the genitals? We lie alongside with our breaths close. I see the light and air of Melbourne, feel Australia. We ask for another instruction. It says put words with the breath, "Ellie-Louie" inbreath and out, imagining my consciousness going into her with my breath. There's something I'm sensing, another kind of home than ours was, more public and maybe with the smell of tobacco smoke. A brown armchair, smooth, maybe leather. Marveling at the difference there - is this her atmosphere? Then I see an image hi-con black and white of the heads and shoulders in a crowd. A bit of color. It jumps or flips, startles. I come to - realizing now it's Louie on the inbreath, Ellie on the out. Try that. Shift it back again, wandering though, lost concentration. We've come to with our mouths on each other's. There were moments I noticed also where a bit of her flesh touching me had a melting quality, something tender as if it were meat but semitranslucent. That's not exactly it. & yesterday. For her it's breaking up, for me not. Don't you see that Ellie is trying to be close to you? says her book. For her it's breaking up because she wants sex too. For me, if it doesn't have to try to be sex I can't imagine breaking up. November 6 is when she left before. Thursday last year she was in England, just about to come back. 3rd Is it dangerous to tell about him at all? In the elaborating way - I wasn't slain, I was in balance, I wore nothing special, took off my boots and showed my feet, avoided the chat groups, had no intention. I did go rigid when he showed up next to me on the sofa. Was holding onto myself in the corner. Feeling how quietly he sat. But he was connected - I noticed that first. Sitting cross-legged when I did, then opening up with his arm on the back of the seat confidingly, quite still. But then - this helped me - when Tim saw a chair empty next to me and crossed to it and I smiled at him when he sat down, he snapped shut like a sea-thing. Instantly. Both legs forward, arm down over his belly, shoulders forward. Ah - I thought. Now I have to reassure him. I'll sit the way he was. I'll have my palm open on the seat. Somewhere in all of this I could see him sitting with naked thin chest and ribs, and his hair down (he had his hair down - it's the length of mine). Then we both got interested in the discussion. He started gnawing on his hand. Gadamer and understanding. The hermaneutic circle. Prejudice and art. You bring what you are. I got interested because I had things for the topics, I had a sense of having my experience touched, though everything they said about what he said seemed wrong. Then Mikhail's outburst about the Greek temple on a hill and Being stands revealed in it, and that art that doesn't reveal Being isn't really art. Then Lou says no he'd say being stands revealed in everything. Mark is the very quiet modest voice of authority. Ray and Martin keep their mouths shut. Mikhail reveals the formation in his passion, something like an English accent in the shapes of his vehement Russian sound. Shari looks at Dave with a sad sober hunger. Martin in his silence (and higher up, on the arm of a chair) is looking around carefully, stopping on faces, a long time on Sam's, his eyes larger, more a (hairy) rabbi and less a red-eyed thug. Lou a sealed surface, I could imagine him older in a red gown and little hat making blessings over bent heads. I look up and find him staring, but he doesn't address me. Dave Sturdee dismisses us. There's Mikhail leaving. I'm putting on my boots. "Mikhail, what you said about the Greek temple and Being revealed, do you mean that personally?" He takes his opportunity, stands in front of me with his legs apart and his pelvis tight, "Yass in epistemollogie I am aunti-realist but. In metaphysics or so. I am realist, I beliyve in matamatical objectss." "We'd have to know what he means by it," I say. The Greek temple on the hill and mathematical objects and Mikhail's tight pelvis have something to do with each other. And Mikhail tries to get points with the men by putting down the women. And he does get points from them, they collude, they're comfortable. He as outsider volunteers to take flak. There I am with Dave. "Have you read this guy?" "Yes but in a different context completely." Literary criticism. 'Understanding.' That people should understand each other. "It takes years," I say. "Mostly it just goes past. Like in this room." "But sometimes tonight it was connecting, it's nice to watch," he says. I can see it too, his look of taking pleasure in the life of the room. "But do you really think the relation between people is more important than the relation between people and things?" "Yes I couldn't last a month without people." This is astonishing to me. "A month? I dream of a world without people." "Could you really want to live forever without love?" - He uses the word so freely, I'm thinking. What does it mean about his life so far, that he's confident of liking to be loved. "I got thrown to the wolves very young," I say. Consideringly, what am I broaching by telling him this. "I found out I could have a relation with the world, I grew up in the country, it's different there, the world is so beautiful and responsive and it loves you back, too." There Shari knocks and comes in and we talk about thesis proposals and writing papers. - Beautiful squealing of a train, the rails are cold enough again. A computer scientist saying there should be ways to talk about procedure and data in the same way. That meaning in language also has to do with procedure, triggered.
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