3rd November 1992
Today - oh - hatred again. Looking at her angry face wanting to strike it. What's that like. Like a fast hard invisible arc past the left side of my face. Under the anger, it says, something else. But what? Seething frustration that I'm hedging my loves and likes and goods in fear of her rage. This moment I don't care, exasperated - so go, you viper, who tries to poison every love that's not for you. But I'm the one who's not self-loyal. I think I can hide from her without offending myself, but I do offend myself.
4
I'm going to be impeccable, so she can't say she's picking up my conflict. I love Rob, I love D, I love Louie (etc). I'm not sleeping with anyone and not because I don't want to. I'm not signed up to never do so. I don't want to talk to her ever again about my relation either to Rob or to D. I'm not willing to have her participation at the garden depend on my welcome. I want her to manage her own emotion more than she does, talk to her book first.
I'll take responsibility for saying when I've shut down and finding what happened. I'll promise not to sleep with anyone for some negotiated period. When she's freaking I'll immediately become the book. When I'm freaking I will show that I am. When I'm not willing to process I will say so and say when I will be willing to. I will keep account of my opposites in relation to her and expect her to do that too.
I'll do real things with her - sit, write and read, look at tapes, maybe sing. Lying-down meditation. Bookwork from both sides. Walk. Look at slides. Visit other people.
-
Start again. [here I'm experimenting with something like being the book myself]
Dear soul, dear larger one, what is true here.
You want Dave, you don't want Louie to prevent you, you don't want her to cause you the pain of leaving you or of going to Michael or your enemies, you are squirming in temptations to lie.
Why do I want Dave.
You want to feel the beginning of a love and you can. For you the goodness of love came to a stop after three years. You do not have experience of continuing.
What about Rob.
You want to know whether after all he might be your true mate. Your body likes the thought. You have liked his steadiness of love. But the two of you have not tested the difficulty of working together.
What about Louie.
When you are close you want to be close forever, when she pushes you, you want to be rid of her.
But what is the truth about sex between us, is my lack of desire real or is it a deep evasion?
It is a deep evasion, not a shallow one. It can't be changed on the level of 'wanting' it to change, because you will not want it to change until both of you have changed.
Am I right to say I am not going to make love with her or anyone for the time being.
Yes.
Is it like testing her?
Like testing both of you. She and Rob are genuine alternatives. You will test both of them.
What about Dave.
He is not a genuine alternative. But you will know him if you can, because he is the figure of the beauty you will not give up.
Louie will not like to hear that she is being tested and there is an alternative.
It is not Louie who is being tested, but your possibility of true relation.
Don't I have to make an arbitrary commitment and stick to it?
Your commitment will not be arbitrary, and you can't pretend to make it.
Is it true that I am saying no to sex with her because it's a way to get rid of her.
You are saying no to sex with her because your sex is saying no to you with her. There are reasons. False marriage is a possibility with her and you feel the danger. If you find your way to true marriage you will know it.
Will you tell me something about work.
Where are you with it.
I have two months to my deadline, many piles of papers, an unclear sense of what the topic is, and I want to know whether it is a real or a false task.
1. You can manage a draft by your deadline, get financing for the term after.
2. You won't need all your papers if you deal with 3. 3 and 4 are parts of the same question.
4. There is a real task in the task, and that is to learn to write something longer than you have, to learn to be trustworthy in relation to working discipline, to manage the levels of writing at once for yourself and a demanding institution, to manage physical energy in relation to sustained writing, to connect yourself to your academic self of other years in a way that brings your abstract intelligence into a less solitary person.
3. Your topic is anything you take it to be. Take it in parts. First be clear what the distinction is in its engineering and mathematical sense. Then look at the connectionist debate and see how it is being used. Then see what the real differences between connectionist and others are. Then look for the fantasy in the use of the distinction. Then talk about column fault and clarifying methodology.
What is the relation of ego and the book in Louie.
Make your question more exact.
I don't understand why she demands tribute to her ego, and doesn't just move right into the book.
Ego demands tribute, but what it needs is repeated experience of moving from its starting position into the book. You can help.
-
Dear soul, dear larger one, how is she this morning.
Sore, defiant. Why do you want to know?
Uneasy whether she'll cut me off because of what we said yesterday.
She will want to.
What should I do.
Let her go but don't take it as punishment for loving.
Punishment for not being entirely committed to such a good possibility.
She is not entirely committed either although she has needed to think so and you have needed to think so. You are equally weighing possibilities.
Tell me more about the way I've been guilty about not wanting sex.
Say more.
For instance when she first came back, I didn't want to make love but I did.
You knew you shouldn't have used the sex letter the way you did.
She said she'd come back for sure and I knew it wasn't at all sure and I didn't want the agony of the letter that says she isn't coming or the suspense of waiting for it.
You may just have postponed it.
She shouldn't have said it was sure when it wasn't.
No, she was doing the same thing as you, holding you where you were weak.
I'm wanting to phone her.
It's the suspense. Work with it properly first.
How.
Go home and do your five hours, respect her wish for time, feel the suspense as the cry it is.
Is her insecurity from guilt too?
She knows she holds you where you are weak, she knows she misrepresents.
How, exactly?
Ask her for the secret she's most afraid to tell you.
[Eva Pierrakos:
The adventure, the search for the knowledge of the other soul.
Eros has carried you this far, but after this point your will determines whether you will continue to find the other and let yourself be found. There is no limit to the finding and revealing; there is always more to be found. Soul needs to go on in this adventure regardless of how much the other side of the personality fears and resists union.
The choice of a partner who is unwilling comes out of the hidden fear of undertaking the journey yourself.
When it comes to the inner nucleus, the door is shut. Eros then departs, and a new search is started.
You already have, in your real self, a unified state of mind. But it is not on the dualistic plane. On the unified plane neither aspect is thinkable without the other. A deep, inner center existing in every human being. The truth is so far-reaching and so directly accessible that no further conflict exists when this truth is allowed to take effect. It is completely objective. The truth that flows out of it equalizes the self with others. The generous act of integrity opens the way to the real self.
The ego finds its whole existence on the plane in which it is at home. To relinquish this plane does not mean annihilation, but to the ego it seems to mean just this. The ego does not have to be annihilated. It will eventually integrate with the real self so that there is one self.
The real self cannot manifest as long as personal problems are not straightened out, but the process of doing this and the first inkling of self realization often overlap. Three basic pseudosolutions - aggressive, submissive, withdrawal. You will see what you evidently believe is required from others in order for you to exist.
The moment you go through the movement of opening up and have the courage to want the truth, letting go of the false need to win, to be separate, to be special, to be right, to have it your way.
Call on this inner center. Your gauge is always what feels most uncomfortable, what you are most tempted to look away from.
The more painful a crisis is, the more the will-directed part of consciousness is attempting to obstruct the change. Every pain is the result of a mistaken idea.
Every smallest shadow is a crisis, because it doesn't need to be there. What do you not wish to see and not wish to change?
You must be totally committed to the truth.
"I will not take cover, I will go through it." Then you will sense an awakening trust that the ego is not alone.
large motivation to avoid harm
dependent on others for being allowed to activate and express them. Shame at methods used to placate the person. You must thrown at the person secretly. Treasure of your own nucleus - all you need and long for can only come when your soul is fearless.
That area of your life where you are most bound and most anxious. Ask yourself what it is you want from the other when you are so bound, so resentful, so afraid, so weak, so unable to be yourself. Verbalize concisely. You will then know that this is precisely the compulsive need with which you enslave, waken and paralyze yourself. When you let go you will experience a new, resilient strength.]
7
In the night: "Look for more gloriousness." "I mean in meditative states." "Dependent unity." Wakes me at 5:30 very sore.
Dear you, dear larger one - I'm frightened I've let her take power and she is abusing it. I feel I can't trust the string, or maybe she's lying. I feel she found a squeeze with Michael and leaving, and now I have a chain around my neck, and that was what I was tearing at last night. Is it true? And that's why my 'book' sounds like her, and why I'm so strangely passive, without fight. I'm afraid to ask this and afraid you can't tell me and no one can. True larger one, can you help -
I can help. You're a little child and she has a chance to get revenge and steer you and she will try it. You're susceptible because you know you did it to her. But revenge is not what you owe her. What you owe is not to do it any more and not to let her either. But you are a little child for a while.
A wile is it? I heard that.
What could you have to gain by a wile.
What came is she'll lose respect.
And then?
She'll attach her passion elsewhere.
And then.
I'll have got out of it.
And then.
I see myself standing somewhere as if at the edge of a field, looking at the sky, looking at the leaves, new again, free.
When you see that picture you remember times when actually you were attached, but not unhappy.
Are you saying I want her to go?
Oh yes, you do. Under this passivity is a plan to wait it out.
Is it not true that I'm wanting to change? I can't see any way forward.
The way isn't forward.
Is it staying still and holding my breath and waiting? It feels like that. There's emotion but something so feeble and remote.
It is a mourning, a complicated one that doesn't know its death. You had a power time and it was vivid and quick and you lost patience with its cost.
I don't know who to be now, I seem to have carried one lover to the next for years. Did I 'lose identity' the way they said? Is there such a thing?
The identity that's given when you get someone to love you is not a true one. The identity you are when you love someone is, but in you it is so halted and young that it can't manage as an adult. That's why you are careful not to show. That's why sometimes you can love when the power person has set up safety for you.
What can I do with this love-baby?
Dependent unity. It must speak and ask and write and eat, but not necessarily with Louie. Don't close your eyes with her. Keep them open to see what you may not want to see. When you lose her don't lose your baby. Let me see with you. You asked in desperation to have truth in the relation. You'll get it. The truth is she's not your lost mother, she's not your dear daughter, she's a near stranger your love-baby is too young for.
Is that all?
For the love-baby it is.
But she sometimes is really with the baby.
You're both willing to learn new things, but your baby is not her baby and she has an urgency about finding a grown-up.
Yeah.
Feel what dependence can feel like but find it in your own place too so your dependence doesn't depend.
Please don't go away from me and take all your love and knowledge and beauty and perception away forever because I want to feel what I feel for him and for others who look like him.
Have I been trying to force L?
Yes.
Have I stopped?
You've stopped trying to get her to admire you but you still want her to take care of you and get you into emotion.
Can I get myself into emotion?
You avoid so many circumstances it must be that they've got emotion in them.
Look for emotion?
Why not.
And then what. With no one to help.
Start small, start with eating.
What's the nucleus of treasure?
Work, too. Images and feeling, like you were but softer, not at drug speed. Yes like that simple seeing. Fearless encounters. Yes! Yes!
How, when I've been so long away?
Start now, just a taste.
And to make money?
Just so long as you don't bluff you can teach.
-
Last stop of the New York subway, green carriages with gold lettering. This edge of town has cheap enough apartments. I see through a ground floor window what look like students at a table. Yes, this is the right area.
A small place in an apartment block. It's not warm and the landlord is saying there won't be more heat than this. Should we close the curtains in the day when we're out. As if Louie with me. Storage racks. She's moving some of her stuff out of them for me. Bottom rack green glass panels.
I look out the back window and see we're on the edge of the country. Like the Catskills, hardwood hills, blue haze. A field with vegetables, giant pea leaves with their clear-cut edges against the light. Small clouds above them lapped in the same way. Will I be able to take a picture.
Walking out in the direction of the city I hear a child yelling. There's a boy has his sister by the hair. I intervene. The mother won't like it, a white trash welfare mother.
I go on to a long hanging bridge, cedar splits hung on cable. But see ahead it's derelict, I'll have to take the asphalt alley to the left. The girl I rescued has come after me, wants me to take her along. I'm conventional, say no she has to go home. She persists.
In other dream places thinking I have to move to New York. Thinking it, already I feel the new life of curiosity and daring.
When I've been there longer I'll be able to live closer to the center.
In the last dream I'm approaching the edge of a mesa, looking down onto a long rich cut bank where the herd is grazing. Deep green grass. Dark bison. If I lift my head slightly and slowly I can peer at them. But no the bull is looking at me and starting to run toward the corner where he'll be able to come up the slope to me. There's nowhere I can go. I'll have to put my back to the cliff and stand my ground. He's quite far off, still, seeing this, turning and stopping in a long curve.
Western Front last night, Laiwan's opening. I was sleeping I think, came into the room thoughtless, pained, dim, taking in appearances without comment, helpless. Harsh light on people looking so corrupt, decrepit. There's Louie in good colors, a pretty girl I don't know. People don't know what to say. Laiwan comes in with her new lover, a tall brown young woman with thick hair on her cheeks. Laiwan looks beautiful, black and ivory. She's remade her body. Her words on the wall in all their distinction of love pain and carefully balanced weights. Images that aren't images but textured page layout blocks.
What happened again. What I'd say is I wasn't in a state balanced enough for that event, and she wasn't either. I took it into the dim blank of guilt and she into - what?
Dear larger one and dear younger one -
That's right.
Then what?
Talk to [curly E].
I'm afraid to.
There's interference. What else is going on.
Annoyance.
Speak what you know.
She lapsed into putting it all on me.
(cards)
We were in different states and couldn't meet. Why did I take it to guilt and pretending.
She didn't pick it up when you announced it. You hadn't been close to yourself during the day. You were terrorized by memories of openings with them. You were cut out of Laiwan's life and she's not. You had seen your age and limp in the mirror in the morning. Louie isn't supporting you and you are not yet supporting yourself. You went along with trying to seem to be close because you were afraid of her hatred. You easily forget your value.
What value was there in the day, that I could believe in?
Not so much your value as the value of the life you can come into.
(And he looks like it?
Yes.)
How would I be in such a scene, feeling that?
Partly the way you were, feeling people's distance from it, but not frightened by feeling it, not running away from it, not paralyzed socially.
That's what I don't understand. Young wild one how were you in it?
[curly E] I don't want to be ugly I don't want to be old I don't want to be lame and poor I don't want to look like them I don't want to be fat like Corey or spoiled like Scott or empty and dumb like the young ones or scared like Robert, I don't want this to be the useless audience for work, I don't want art to be so vain, desolate, conventional, socially ambitious. I don't want to be awkward and visibly lonely. I was in a roomful of freaks and didn't want to accept them. Thinking I look like a freak too, hating it. Laiwan didn't look like a freak but she was trading with the freaks as if she couldn't see they were that. Louie didn't look like a freak but she looked weak and pleasant as if she couldn't see it either, they both aren't willing to see it. It's a betrayal that they aren't.
Now you, dear wide one.
Oh a lot of energy in the protest. How long has it been that at social gatherings?
From church, from school, and still.
Do you know a better way?
At the garden where there's work and Muggs's skill and a sure place. An opening is a pure form of social hardness. What can I do with them?
You don't have to go but it's an exercise. You have to take it as that or you're sunk. You have to have projects and strategies and treat it as a place to find strangers in their own lives, however they are there. And treat the work as if there's some one small present for you somewhere in it. Don't stare at it. Use your nose. Talk to me. Go somewhere and talk to your young one early on. You panic. And you have to go deeper into the look of the freaks, individually. Pick one and find a careful way.
Why was Louie hateful about it?
She had an agenda. She needed a friend to help with how she felt about Laiwan's power. She's on strike about 'supporting' you because she thinks it's that that makes her weak. When she doesn't support you you don't find where you are, and so you and she don't find your sense of contact. Then you are both frightened. You have to find where you are independently of her so you aren't covering and helpless. She can learn to track the real cause of her weakness so she doesn't confuse you with blame.
Why doesn't she want to talk to her book when it's stuck like that?
She's right to resist being the book for you both, but before you talked on the phone you should both have been willing to talk to your own books.
-
1. She says she demands to have her weak one loved. I say I think when I see it in a pure form I do love it but when it hates me I don't know how.
2. Joyce says merging. L says ego unmerges naturally. It's not like that for me, takes a lot to get me there, and when I unmerge it's a long way away. Not a fluid border. The decrepit bridge. As if a little further out it had dissolved. The street I'll take instead has a bend I can't see beyond. The railway bridge behind Kings Cross, going south to the heart of that other new city.
-
Wednesday night visit after work and yoga, ten o'clock when I arrive. The last minutes of Ideas on the radio as I'm slipping up Main on slicks of black and white and red. Beautiful human voices of women who were nurses during the war, a Remembrance Day program. Louie had been joyful with her photographs. Laiwan and Lynn having their second day. I'm instructed to do nothing grabby. Hear the story of her visit to Farida's. The woman does nothing but write imaginary characters and then forget them. Her publisher rings about Mary who on page 215 . She can't remember who Mary is. She doesn't read, if she did she'd lose confidence and with it this life entirely elsewhere.
It's alright to ask the book about something like a dream. She goes into her book. Her breathing's changed. My dream has her in it, so I can try. She sees through me. I do so much want to know what the landlord is in dreams. A sort of overseer of some part of the subconscious, comes from family or genetic. The fact that it's the landlord doesn't imply it's something important. The landlady in this dream: we should insist she give us enough heat. It's circulation. And about the little girl, she wants to come along and should. Rebuild the bridge. Try the other street. Think how long it takes to rebuild it. Try the other one but only for half the time it would take to rebuild it. The two storage racks: things we're shelving. The sheets of glass: glasses, seeing. Both dreams have edges. The pea leaf and cloud scallops are edges too.
What else. Your face [Dave's] coming to me sometimes, when I was doing yoga yesterday. Seeing it I feel it in my own. Or the whole of you at the end of the corridor in black and white. The way sitting with your lunch at the faculty table you had a white look around the jaw like a powder or like a shave so close it lets through a white fluorescence. I was hedged, backed off, not taking it seriously. Miserable at the seminar, Heidegger and longnose John Tietz propounding him, woman the chaos beyond a curtain of habitual blindness of mastery. Shari succeeding with all her might, Sam's oily mouth, Barbara a good safe serious girl. You let me see you see me putting my boots on. I'm not in a good enough state to test myself with you again tonight. Another time. I believe you're a good one of some kind. All of them like opaque things and you like a moving light. Is it the time you're in or were you always like that?
"No I'm not tired, I'm overwhelmed, I'm down here hiding under the air." To Damian Dooley who came by the department when I needed to ask him about what the computer is doing at scratch. He grins with his small pointed teeth the whole time he's talking, a man in pain with intelligence, and had a beautiful long hand set forgotten between us on the table. "I wanted to know what pattern is by the time I was twenty nine."
16th
Going up the hill, it's Monday. Excited, frightened, in the wrong, defiant, worried. I'm going to see him. Hard to write that. Battle. Shall we sort it?
[curly E] He'll be there, I'll see him. I'll be thrilled. I'll see he doesn't care. I'll be hurt. He'll see that I'm hurt. I'll be ashamed. I'll pretend I'm not feeling anything and avoid him. I'll be disappointed, depressed, angry.
E: I'll be feeling responsible for this muddle and exasperated at being helpless to make it come right. Panicked seeing it ahead. Annoyed it makes me wrong at the department. Kind of like the excitement, it's young. Helper please help.
Deep breath. What's the best it could be? What's the worst?
The best is: my feeling's true - this is hard to say - it's an instinct or foreknowledge or destiny, his beauty means he's my one, I could be complete with him, my best love and best lovedness, best ease, best open body, best whole joy and hole joy. He sees me too and is just going through his own sorting and then there'll be a moment where we face each other and know it. The worst is: my feeling is foolishness and evasion, a late sputter of desire from a woman too damaged to marry. - I want to say this one from outside. He sees it and is kind and sorry for me. Other people see it too. Oh helper. String says the first is false and the second true. I wish you were really transcendent and could tell me what to do.
Wash your house. Do your work. Feel both sides, keep saying them. Don't suppress.
But what do I do at the department, to not make myself depressed and dumb?
Keep doing what you're doing, take notice of everyone, don't compromise yourself to be with him, he knows something is up but he doesn't feel sorry for you. What's happening is happening. You don't have the option to ignore it.
I want to indulge, to be in love, but it seems dangerous to name him in it. I could name David McAra but that's like tucking it away again. I want it a living possibility.
Large open hope. Sweetheart you want it in you every day. Tension, desire, bliss. Would you settle for the feeling not the person?
I would. And it disqualifies me from the person. Is that it?
If you loved the person you'd have confidence in your desire.
Yeah. That's better.
-
These two centers:
- Throat. The blue violet scarf. Saying your truth.
- Sex.
-
Didn't I write the night session two weekends ago when I woke in pain, went to the other bed, she came after me, made the decision to go into work rather than anger, wrapped me in her wings, said "Imagine my arms are bigger and stronger so they are just the arms you need" and I got wracked with weeping, rolling with pain and gesturing strangely around my throat as if I were strangling. I keep thinking something about copper. Last night her book's message, throat center is about ----.
Pylyshyn:
We conceive of space as a completely empty, infinite, three-dimensional, isotropic, disembodied receptacle distinct from the earth or any object that might be located on the earth, one that is capable of housing not only things but also such incorporeal mathematical entities as points and infinite straight lines. xv
geometrization of the world
reification of geometry
Pylyshyn, Z., 1984: Computation and Cognition. Cambridge, MIT.
Weds
Rob's flowering vines planted here and there among roots on a bank rising sheer above the garden.
A journey I thought was going to be by air but it's a seat sale on what they say is a liner. I spend a long time in a cabinet looking for the toilet. In the cabinet's a bed with a man in it. He says yes he does get a cheap ticket for having his bed where everyone has to wait on it. Looking in a book for the description of where the toilet cubicle is on this (I still think) airplane.
Then already a long way onto the (flight) I ask how to find my seat - no boarding pass. Passport in my pocket. A steward explaining about chemical leaks (I think) leading me past seats curtained off in drycleaner's plastic to a place in the center of the wide room. Nowhere near a window. I didn't know it was first grab when we boarded. And then my bed - where is it. He goes to look and comes back explaining it's been gone through. "But there's still quite a lot in it." My green bag with the straps undone. I take things out - the dark red jacket, black teeshirt. A big toothbrush that isn't mine. And so on.
Seeing people in raincoats, they're going outside. On an airplane? A deck railing and plowed dark water seen through the door. No we're at sea. One day from England to North America, though?
Where am I. Golden Horse. Wishing for a coffee. Choy across the aisle. Smoke dragged toward me from the man at the next table. Thompson the murder inspector with two other cops audible across the room. Visited Rob last night frightened to feel him, watched stupid TV on the bed. Came home safe and unmoved but then trying yoga found myself stiff, weak, unwilling the way I used to be. What do I want (Louie asks). "I don't know, I want a different life." I want pleasure, contact with daily streets, I want unbound welding arc love, I want beautiful work and to be so much myself that I am not ashamed in groups. Yes that. So I'm not ashamed with people at all. So I'm full of colors and they don't desert me.
-
Sitting down with Pylyshyn the jibbing before I catch into it, and sometimes all the way through. I think of personal stuff, fight to get away from it. What's the way to change over? This person, the personal person, maybe has to find its interest.
The way my attention springs up when I think of investigating dreaming - the phil sources, psych sources, own sources - and grain-computer models - as if I could have a theory and an art so close and motivated and systematic it would take me everywhere and still knowing where I am, making the systematic foundation as I go.
21st
Waking with Louie's head on the next pillow, her hair streaked over her face as if she's come up from underwater, a childy sleepy swimmer, waking happy and asking if I dreamed. We each have a sore shoulder. I say my dreams are endless trash, she says no they're interesting and proves it. Green jackets, a horrible man. A forest flooded enough so you can't see underbrush, only such clear spaces between green heads of trees, evergreens and hardwood, and mirror reflections of branches and sky. An academic who doesn't want to look.
She gets into the bath. I say You're so pretty - there, the way it goes there and there and there, the line from rib to thigh, in and out and out. Classic. The way it is these days, she feels her rebellions and waywardness and I keep calm household, you don't have to go away, you can have other things too, I'm not leaving, I'm steady, I don't know what's coming but I know my immediate way.
In work, in abstention, in yoga, with her, I feel my patience. It's being in an effort and saying to myself, don't bail out keep going be faithful to your intention time will unwind past this hardness and then something will be new.
Go walking in the rain. Where you are walking said the book. I was on Richmond seawall having been there with Jam, a pang. She traces it. An odd sort of crying as if I don't know how, really what is this. Breaking in pieces crying. The feeling of beauty isn't going to come back. There's a yell very choked. Confused crying. Does it have anything to do with that unrecognized pretension whose green jacket I want? The feeling of beauty is what made them want to wreck me. And they did wreck me. Now I don't dare feel in case they get power over me again. You do still have it in bits, it says. When you got together with Louie that's what they thought. They reported to each other, She's still got it, I'm afraid she's still got it.
- What is the green jacket practical ability
- Something in the direction of confidence
- Has Jam been trying to hex us
- Does she think we're broken up
- Because of a dream no
- Her logic
- Is she smoking dope a lot
- Is she in an unhappy time no
- What is she doing with her dope states trying to dominate
- Dominate what her feelings of loss
- Did she literally try to put a hex on us
- Has she done us any harm no
- Am I staying out of deep openness to beauty
- Because I feel vulnerable to her and them when I am
- Can they still harm me psychically
- Can I learn to be that in a way so they can't harm me no
- What should I do about it come through victorious
- By art
- Is that the best way
- What can you tell me about this (Qc)
- My sensitivity
- Also Louie
- What kind of harm liberation
- Harm my liberation
- Do I have to negotiate with pretension
- Other people
- Mine too
- What's mine (Qc)
- Sensitivity
- What's the truth (fool)
- I'm brash and audacious like at the garden
- I went wrong falling in with their pretense of sensitivity no
- They're really more sensitive than me?
- What am I that I should be instead liberated
- Something in the direction of confidence
Can you tell me something about crying about Jam and the ravel of birds on the seawall, and the threat of harm if I were open in beauty like that again.
It's crucial. How did you get there the first time?
I remember at Eton Street I was still seeing it there and unable to get open to it, and then it grew. Maggie. Did she have something to do with it?
You came alone with Luke to a new place. You had Sufis and yoga in you, a venturing life building itself. Speed. You'd built some speed and daring. You knew how to dart into opportunities and stay living on edges. Margaret was an opportunity and an edge but you didn't steal it from her. Get the young one to speak.
Young one young one will you tell me what - no I don't know what to ask her.
How do you feel beauty? How do you feel fear of your peers?
Beauty's there so normally. Sometimes in people too. Then I'm careful. The other kids - oh they're not like me, often I don't like them, I don't like minding that they don't like me. Sometimes the ones I don't like are beautiful. There's no way I can be with that beauty. I keep apart from it and see it. Fear. Am I afraid of them? Yes they can humiliate me. They stare at me when I speak. They can make me ashamed. - That's making me impatient as if I know it already and nothing to be gained.
You want to know whether your openness is still open to harm. When you get your longing you want to be beautiful with beauty, and you want to follow something recklessly and totally and be boiling in transformation. Very drastic. Very brave. Very unguided. You plunged into pain to give you fuel. Do you want that again?
I want to live full and passionate and deep in work.
Which work.
I've felt so long there's work on this beautiful border between science and pictures, I feel a whole stretch in there, such a stretch when I feel it, taking so long to get into - oh really it's work I want. Beautiful essential intelligent creation comprehension work. Do you hear the way I say that?
I do hear you and I like it and I'll help you but you have things to clear on the way to it and you need to see your whole picture and make your workspace. You need to be more organized than you ever have been, like someone going on a journey or getting married. A twenty year journey. What do you need for it?
Health, strength, money, time, focus, friendship, clean warm independent housing, new community, courage, organization, alright human contact, confidence, conviction.
I'll leave you with your list.
And whole feeling, whole intelligence.
24th
Tuesday night. I worked today. It has been frosty and clear two days, color in the sky, sweet blue and white on the mountains, blissful distance. At Harbour Tower with working crowds moving fast, people in the food mall brisk and odd in their person appearances. I sat with a large mug of decaf working easily under faint music and peripheral motion, calm elation. Knowing the pink and blue pleasure up there on the streets, not having to see it to feel it.
Rebelling. I've been in captivity to my demoness. What broke it. Sunday I made a joke about my real buzz that Damian phoned. "There's a whole new thing for you to worry about." Laughing, thinking if it happens oftener it's lighter, it could become her joke too. - I'm not wanting to tell this story I notice. But she took it with her own seriousness, exploded like some drama of girlfriend betrayed, yelled DON'T LIE TO ME and ran crying to her bedroom. It was so conventional a scene that I laughed again - this feels like complaining to an ally, conventional itself - I was left feeling like a man who doesn't understand women, scratching my head. But more than that it seems, repelled and offended, silenced. Quite silenced. I don't want to talk to her. I want to say I don't want to go on with her. And why. What I thought is that I saw an explosion about loss of control. She'd managed me out of Rob and Dave and was content, and then I threw in a new wrinkle. Now it's to do all over, she thought.
Her version is that I did it to bust up her security just when she was feeling ready to want to go on. There has been so much unsafety it only takes a hint to pop her.
[opposite page: notes on candida]
27
What do I need to say to myself. I fought - screamed, sneered, raged - in the car under trees broken up on the windshield. She wept quietly. Fought in her own way. I said I never want to hear 'loving to me' or 'open to me' or 'not cut off', or not loving or not open or not cut off - I don't want to be domesticated, don't want to be 'supportive'.
What I cried for was work. You're giving up a lot, she said. I feel there's so much at stake - whether I'll find what I can do.
Is it clear what I am giving up? Monumentally pissed off. What broke the long patience I had? I don't care. I do care, I will care, but I held the line. Why. There's this small woman in leggings and a new purple thing, with photographs, so-easy writing, so-easy contacts, so-easy sex, and the book, which is authentic and magic, and I thought if I cooperated those things would come to me too, back to me. What I hoped - we'd put my work out. But we don't, we wrangle - hisses in her bedroom - unending anxiety about whether I'm going to be 'open' - unrelenting demand - even now if she could say "If you need a month of course take a month" I'd be there at the end of the month like someone who's been on a trip, eager to tell many things - and we could go on - and she's been saying it since we got back, she wants a break - but she doesn't want me wanting it in the way that will get me away - and so I say You've been squeezing me and now I've cracked.
It's getting dark, still raining. All day with this.
What I dreamed. I'm holding a curly haired baby girl standing in the bathroom singing toward the wall. The housekeeper or domestic standing there. Strong vibrations combing back through us. A man comes in and stops. He's moved.
Next scene he's inviting me to dinner. A blonde woman I assume he's with but she's talking the whole time to the other man. I look at him with the shy awkward glances of someone who's thinking of considering a man she doesn't know, who might be putting himself forward. I see his big broad-palmed hands, an awkward head. What does he show me to show me who he is. Pictures I don't remember. I saw the scenes.
I'm in a shed next to a house. The woman who lives there a thin woman with frizzy hair. She may have heard me, lit a match. I don't see her. Go on waiting in the shed, other people on her yard curious about her. They start to run as if they've seen a dog. It's my mother and father and another couple. She does come out, turns and sees me roosting in the shed. I say they didn't mean harm and I don't either. Am talking to her. She gets up awkwardly against a cold stove and shits thin yellow stuff into the fire box as she listens and looks at me.
-
Louie demands (otherwise we break up):
- 1. I recant on saying the last three years were her agenda
- 2. support on her terms, ie no 'cutting off'
What I have to have is a sense it's taking me somewhere, in work or personally. We devour ourselves in issues of security and sex and compliance.
I'm not willing to live with the pressure against my sexual nature.
What I'll regret - having her to take to my family, spiting Jam, defense against envying them, evidence that I'm viable. But our dirty nest, that we don't have fun and love anymore.
28
I demand:
- 1. she give up minding what I do with men including Rob
- 2. she have, be able to have, faith and let some things go and let me have time off when I want
[the light of impermanence
to wake up
the structure, what is the structure of time wasting?
distressed because whatever is happening is a little unexpected
no attachment to being a certain way, follows truth
a point he says where you see you hold onto suffering
death, or present experience
a conflict, go into the center of it
the amount we don't know, and what we do
ungenuine is wasting
afraid of the greater responsibility that goes with totally committing ourselves to finding truth
as a way of looking after ourselves
give up the fog of past and future
blaming is a thick negative atmosphere within and around
responsibility is dealing directly with things, so you don't have to do it again
take responsibility for emotion by creating a light and positive atmosphere around ourselves creating an atmosphere of joy
the primitiveness of trying to get by demanding and grabbing
rejecting immediate experience because of deep resentment for yourself and others
gently and skillfully listen to the heart beat
listen not to thoughts and concepts but to the inner voice, the sound of it
What is this? He says 10 tones.
a sort of silent music between the thoughts
in time the heart center opens naturally and this is the beginning
a deep warmth in the center of the heart, which is our own home
then a spirit or intuition spreads through the entire body
integrate our minds with our hearts and our actions with our intentions
inspiration, insight, motivation, and strength
our egos were too vulnerable and our sympathy for others was not great enough
looking after ourselves
a humble and fearless attitude of openness and generosity
deeply experience own suffering, then maybe someone else's
joyful and fearless welcome of the feeling of the other
sacrifice and surrender of the heart to the feeling of the other
a candle, compassion as radiant as the sun]
It's early Saturday morning, black dark. I woke at 4:30 under the covers with winter outside the windows, talking to myself.
What must I do. The photographs I took of her, the most beautiful pale grey light from the side, her dark blue thin vest and ivory skin and black hair and the pale gold lace grass over the window - they don't exist. I cried. When she phoned yesterday my belly shook knowing she was going to say she wants to break up rather than let me go for a month.
aphrodite's garden volume 16
- aphrodite's garden volume 15: 1992 september-november
- work & days: a lifetime journal project