| aphrodite's garden volume 16 part 4 - 1993 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
10 February 1993 Olivia. O like an olive. Thursday 11th Have to go type on and on through the dense pages. Tuesday I woke and thought of the love book. A little surge. Went down and learnt computers but there's a promise I made to heart-self, that I'll work from that impulse next. O look at the air shadows rising and mixing on the page. Window open. Starlings' bitty cheeps and whistles on the wire. I'm dopey. Don't want to go to the windowless computer room. Want what. Don't want. - And then do go. Ten hours later, home in the dark alleys so's not to be nabbed by cops for not having a bike light. There's my shadow, leather jacket, pigtail. Now in bed stunned with - both fatigue and tiredness are ugly wrong words - but stunned is right. Friday 12 My horrible mum phones. Wants me to bring Rowen. Jealous that Levi sent a valentine to Paul. Hangs on doggedly 'til I burst - "I don't want to come out there, I want to visit as rarely as I did when you lived farther away." I'm pretending it's that I don't want to see him but in fact I'd rather see him than her. Just don't expect me to take care of you in your decline, I won't. - [recap of talking to Louie's book] What makes the desire? Projection - something you wanted to be. So that you could be seen in a certain way. Not necessarily the same as animal but could be. I use animal to mean spirit of a certain kind, yes. Dark eyes that can see into dark eyes. It was mainly that you started making what beauty would be to you. The combinations you wanted to make. What's unseen and what's seen. A beautiful face showing what's hidden, yes. It's still your making. Why am I crying? You think projections are always false, which is not true. Feeling touching the feeling remembering touching the feeling. Feeling remembering touching the feeling. Cut. It's cut. It stings. You are jealous of remembering the touch. Hiding what the eye center said. The loss, helplessness. Hiding it with pride. Sensitivity. It's never-ending. You'll notice your sensitivity. It's all emotions, all lack of them. You'll notice you'll find what touches and what doesn't. You'll want to know why. You'll want to know how. You won't have time and energy for all. What I feel is your ego's pride as the core reason for your solar. Try to write what it says when it takes you there. What does my ego want me to be that it doesn't want me to be? Impressive to fathers. And what does it want to be? Its freedom. And disciplined for its own sake. I'm not suggesting no ego, but knowing them. About Luke. He wants you to love that one even when he's not there yet. Try to talk to me when you talk to him. As if the questions will be fair, unloaded, light. He's in dangers particular to him. A daimon is a point of reception without physical senses pervading all. Used to be physical. Louie's body. Does Louie have a spirit that travels around? Yes. You fear that it will be what you fear so you can't work openly. That's what I call resistance sometimes. Do you know the crow looking over leaves? Do you know it has a picture of swimming backstroke in deep water while the leaves are lying there, growing? The seal a kind of organization in the brain, that is meant to avoid pain. It gives and takes pain equally. Do you understand the danger you are in? You are in danger of losing what you're looking for. It's you, it's you who's bright and dark. It's a feeling of being a soul and loving with it. It's a hope of being able to love from the center of the soul, and to have those things with a man's arms and shoulders. If the one in you is projected it won't work out. Then it breaks the one in you. Unprojected he has your heart at interest. What is it that makes me need to project it then? Desire, the love in you. It's that the ways you're desiring now want to find rather than shape. How can I live at the same time with a hope that isn't little and the knowledge of its failure. To have a large open hope, not fixed. What is it I'm really scared of? That life is outside of you. I'm feeling that you are a person who remembers and therefore desires the other side of pain, having gone through it. It's not passive or aggressive-making any longer. It comes, then joy does. Creativity from both. Then another kind of joy. Then a new pain. An old way. An exquisite picture of an owl who is looking at consciousness and unconsciousness at the same time. Makes people cry unknowingly. Sit regularly. Only to see pictures. What do you mean by ego? What sees from the outside, like other people. Do you have a mission for me after that one? I have but I'm not telling. It's for you to find one. That's your mission. Sunday 14 The dream where fat Donna is courting me. She asks me two questions. What do you think of 'spouse'? And what do you feel about fat. I have never wanted to be a spouse and I can't imagine ever wanting to be one. And about fatness I am worried about hurting her feelings but I have to say the truth, what I don't like about fat people is the way they move. Thinking as I hear it that I'm surprised I didn't know it was that. Looking at her sideways, is she thinner? She is thinner. And then thinner again. A pretty face with a nice little nose. She puts on sunglasses and turns around with her arms out. A man across the room looking at her. Lying on my side facing Louie, with her behind me. Holding Louie's hand with my left and hers [?] with my right. Aware all the time of how she is feeling. Moving my hand, adjusting it, so she will not feel left out. Louie reads this dream very easily. What do I need to say about Louie - the way during the film there were four different times when she got something I didn't - the way next to her I can measure my brain damage, and it is quite bad - (but am I brain damaged that way when I'm not with her? Presumably.) A lot of errors. It says this is the time to look around. I need money for debts, need to decide what to do about the next academic step, finish figuring out physical tactics, and this is the large one, find the thread of life in feeling, again, where to work. Sema is to fight with oneself, to flutter, to struggle desperately. It is to be aware of Jacob's grief and to know it remedy, to know the vibration of meeting Joseph and the smell of his shirt. 15 Empty houses in the neighbourhood. I thought empty. They're clean. But in basement rooms derelict men. Someone looking after them. A sense I barely remember, of being in danger there. A strong dream but it's nearly gone. At the department, when I'm just about ready to leave, there's Dave Carter in a black baseball cap backwards and his hair down in curls. Mean of him to dress up what he's got. He comes stands in front of me making conversation so I'll have a longer look at how it sets the four points of his jaw - he is a vain boy and I am easy to frighten with beauty. He's visibly unashamedly keeping it going though he doesn't know what to say. Sherri jumps in next to him and I escape. He has my note in his hand and hasn't seen it yet. I go address Andrew's envelope. Oh this is from you, he says, still not looking at it. You have very wild handwriting for someone who makes lists, I say flirtatiously, but without the right lightness, because I go on and compound it badly. And I have very repressed handwriting for somebody who is so wild. He's still dealing with the first attack. It's a disaster, he's saying overtop of my second and worse, which he leaves hanging in all its awkwardness. What should he have said - tell me about this wildness, I've seen no such thing. So I go home and am sad in the car, the warm car, hot plastic though the air is cold. And am sad 'til my tarot notebook opens at 6 The lovers and my eyes are reading "to know the vibration of meeting Joseph and the smell of his shirt." And then, and now, my lively sense is back. I'm bearing myself more boldly than I thought and it is making me laugh to think of the note I wrote him. Long strong rhythms, indeed. [His note following on an exchange about beautiful sentences, it seems: Hi Ellie Here's a page (two actually) from Faulkner. Thanks again for the The dispossessed. The tea was wonderful. Dave These aren't mine - I wouldn't dare select out the passages, I've already set out the pages.] What else did he say - "I wouldn't dare select out the passages." You wouldn't dare select out the passages! I say. What carries one sentence to another. It's a powerful story. Men killing a bear by losing their dog called Lion. Nothing but men in this story. And my beautiful sentences are what - "My sentences have to do with vision." "All this suddenly rushed dazzling down the screen." "A long smudge of white, which broke into cubes, like spilt salt." And the scene where Shevek marches and sings. Do I think mine are code? No. But: wonderful tea anytime. That is a beautiful sentence. "Spilt salt" is code, yes. Yesterday at Pat's. The way the boys don't break ranks, stay in the mind they know. Are careful to exclude my powers. The journey it nearly was, up through the levels in dusty orange and blue, fading vapours and hard points of white light. And then, why am I there. Smiling in the last album with the charlotte russe spoon in my hand. Rob was happy. His small cream-yellow crocuses and snowdrops on the door's small window-ledge when I got home. 16 I had a moment of defiance at the dinner table. They're holding the space with stories of running around in hotels, Rob more than any - talk about birthdays, birthdays at Christmas. "Luke thinks it's about him, it was nice to have a baby at Christmas, when it was all about having babies." "And who were you, Mary?" sez Pat. "I was Mary but I wasn't a virgin." That is a cheap laugh but after it I keep going. "And then I took this baby home and got bashed." "By the baby?" "By Joseph." A moment of silence. They change the subject. Sunny Tuesday morning. Luke's arriving today. The love book. Yesterday thinking of it I put my hand on a spiral notebook and found another attempt, 1986, when it was Robert MacLean and Orpheus notes. Very scholarly, no steady feeling, bursts. And how much truer to love Robert MacLean than kid Blackbird. But. It is what it is. Come to terms. But how to work now. I'm at a loss. Oh I want it but I'm at a loss in the old way. Having to spin it all out of myself - not moving deftly over other people's fields and choosing. Why am I suddenly dropped back into grief at Patricia Churchland saying she'll use 'he' in her new book. Composing a letter to her. It's like a personal rejection. Deftly over her field. - Alright, I wrote the letter. [wrote Patricia saying why she shdn't do it] It's ten o'clock, it's bright. I have to prepare the lecture on evil for tomorrow. Bleeding. There is the garden. 18 Giving the lecture yesterday [prof away]. Frightened in the library, breathing, picturing it. When I'm there, no, I'm not frightened, though visibly pressing down fear with the strength of both arms on the tabletop, and disorganized by something that may be unfelt fear, so that I do not set up the parts carefully enough. What to say about it. Not much. Was I there? As well as delivering the material. 20th Sleeping next to Louie on a Saturday night, Sunday morning, I dreamed the phone rang and I got up and answered it. "It's Dave." I can barely hear him, but he's confused, crying. "What are you doing to me? I feel as if you've put a spell on me, you've been enchanting me." I say carefully, in a hoarse or sleeping voice, that maybe I have been overdoing it, I have been trying to seduce him but maybe I've done too much. We should talk about it. I'm feeling Louie in the other room and thinking let's have this talk tomorrow. A yellow taxi full of lesbians stops in front of me, a woman standing in front of me. I say someone wants the phone, can I call him tomorrow. He says I can talk to him between 1:15 and 3:30 in the morning. Lying in bed in the morning I risk telling Louie this dream. We talk to the book. It takes me seriously in so kindly a way that I feel myself in the midst of an extraordinary presence of feeling. It is completely real to me. I'm saying "I'm really terribly in love with this man." An anguish that feels like a soul. I say "My soul is here." The book says, "Where?" I say "here," rubbing my chest. I don't think I could find it now - as if his spirit, one of his spirits maybe, was there, and the whole of the blaze of my being taken with it. I'm falling asleep and won't say more tonight. 21 The intensity of soul was an intensity of conflict. Desire so real and strong, wanting to knock on his door. Hesitation so real and strong, this is nothing to do with him, my own dream, don't mistake it. Don't implicate someone who has his own real life to find. I said I feel such impatience, I want to eject from it. I'm impatient of the fear. It said but you have been patient, you have been beautiful with it. I love what - the life of finding in this immaterial. 22 This morning before seven I'm getting ready for work, he's getting ready for work, Rob phones, he says to explain what he was feeling last night. I say I think I do understand, but talk. He has a denial cooked up. My impulse is righteous: you chose your limits and here they are. I don't say: why are you feeling sorry for yourself. Mainly I've forgotten that I used to push for more. He has complaints: I only want his body, and then only one part. I tell the truth: there's nothing very interesting happening to make me want to come at other times. "You choose the kind of power you can have by withholding things. In the end it isn't a very satisfying kind of power, but it's your choice." In the neighbourhood. A used furniture store. I go into the basement and see used clothes. Clean used clothes tidy on racks. Try on a frothy dress. Fitted bodice, layers, a dress from the forties maybe. It's Monday evening, blue twilight on the grey house. Hello Louie. I haven't said how we spent most of Saturday in bed working at our organized list of questions. Began to see creatures in the Venus images [pasted on the wall] as she wrote and I waited. An anguished hare running with a human eye cast sideways, a bird embroidered on old quilted silk, a possum-lemur. Don't know what to do next, it's time to work. There is a knock. He's standing at the door. This time I don't fly over the moment. I look at him. I take a step forward and touch. And touch. Somewhere. In brave fear. And then. Come upstairs. Turn off the light. Sit in the kitchen. And then. You sit here. I'll sit here. We'll be voices. We'll hear space. I'll sit quite nearby. I'll feel the shape of the sound of what you say. I'll know where I feel it. The hour will be black open air lying quiet around us in all directions. We'll be at anchor in it, wavelets of invisible light will be running through our chests. Do you know the magnetic sensation? Sitting next to her, a current across a foot of space between our flanks. Lying with him in sun after looking at roses, body full of a slightly pulsing white light that is desire satisfied to be desire. The way a hand on an arm is a contact that allows a flow so bright, so soft it must be fluid love. Oh tonight I'm charged with it. It's like summer heat. What's the mind slow and strong like this - what else can it do - it can wait - it can listen - behind a waterfall, 25th Frowning in the red chair, worried between the brows. Rowen leaving on the weekend. We sat together on his floor last night emptying his drawers and toy basket, sorting. That is nearly eight years. Steven Davis taking me to lunch at the Faculty Club, saying it's because he wants to encourage me to go on and "enter the profession." "I was really extraordinarily impressed with your abstract." That puzzles me. Frightens me, because it is not what would impress me. - There I go fetch it and look at it and I suppose it covers the ground. Andrew's crit of the first half, covered with red anxiety, trying to make me sound less free. "Use a complete sentence here." He cannot abide the strength of the rhythms, and his advice tells me how he made it [in the profession]. I've been noticing with all of them that I'm allowing them to give me the confidence I had when I arrived [and they eroded]. San Diego or Oxford, he says. "Don't judge by this department." And something else I'm doing, hinting at deviance. Would a scandalous novel rule me out? No, he says, it would give you an edge. Oh do I want to go away at all? I'll be forty-eight. (What did I dream - Louie, walking through a field of women. On the other side she's crying. "I made a date." Something she's wearing on her chest, a papier maché amulet, she reversed it when she passed the blond woman.) What else. Stuart McCall's hysterical pitch to magazines, "which got a great response rate." And you, blackbird - starling - Oh and the way I woke at night with circulation to my right arm cut. I couldn't move it. 26 It's panic - what's panic - forehead and throat - she phones as I'm about to get into the bath - her book was flooding - I sit in the bath getting more frightened as she speaks - I'm so panicked I'm not knowing how to write - this is an anxiety that comes with the realm of the fathers - I am talented, the fathers will take me up, but among them I am sad and frightened and expect to be unseen. So I cleaned my room - Panic is not being able to attend - not being able to attend to rolling up my sleeves. It is like wanting to get up and flee. It's a tizzy. Unhappiness is included in happiness it says, happiness doesn't break. [David Whyte reads and talks about David Waggoner's poem Lost on CBC] "Couldn't live up to the grief of it I would imagine." "People are inside of us who never go away." "Having people understand what a quick path it is back to a life anyone would rather have." [LOST
27th Barry at his concert last night, a groomed head, jacket and tie, says why don't we have lunch, why don't we work on something together. I'd had it in mind. All I had to do was sit near and say hello. But then his piece was bad. L and I going to bed early and asleep fast. This morning talking about the video, why can't I organize myself in art. I say it to the book, who is there fast and deep. Saying it's that I evade the emotional work and have other sorts of tricks to keep myself alive. "Why are you crying" it says. "I was there and couldn't stay there and failed, and I was more driven then, and stronger, and I won't be able to get there again." It says "You didn't have support, you didn't have support in you." And that we'll talk more when there is more time. 28th Rowen and his transformer comic books. Fighting men with names like Hot Rod that turn into transport trucks and cassette players, robot sharks. Autobots and decepticons. Male types. Allegiances and weaknesses. I didn't feel him in this visit and have almost nothing to remember, except seeing his face with Louie's in the viewfinder. I'm off, and look rumpled. This morning waking very tight in the solar. Seeing her face tinted all over with smooth running life - pink, pink, blue on the eyelid, a bit of white tooth, lashes black to the tips struggling up, half a clean brown eye. The beautiful warmth of sleep. Later we're glowing with sex. What to do. The ring of ache I know, something else too, higher and deep under the belly, like a four-inch rod with a different color of sensation. "You were touching each other that way already" says the book. We try to mix touching each other and touching ourselves. She's pinching my nipples but it's going wrong, how, I don't know. When she is also touching herself it's better. Quality of the touch changes, it's deeper maybe. I say I'm confused, the story I need to bring myself through does not have a woman's kisses in it. What is the subtle misery? 1st March It was Monday and rain, I stayed at school. After the lecture, tired, I have to eat, get a book from the library, Tillie Oleson, do I know this one? Tell me a riddle. Then I'll go to the Students' Union and get soup. There's him in a purple teeshirt. "Purple" I say. "How's it going?" he says. We sit. It's not worth telling him anything, although I do, because it eases me to be by myself those moments. "Were you really unpopular in school?" "I was a nerd." Small, wore glasses, didn't like team sports either playing or watching, didn't play with toys much, built things. Swam. Stayed away from dope. Was smart. I stare while he talks. Wants to know his grandparents, visited a great-uncle. I can't enter that story though it would be wise - why - he's demonstrating his patient care for the old. That doesn't occur to me, all I know is I'm unaccountably silenced after. I am going to be bold to the extent I've already decided. I'll say I phoned and was shy. He didn't get the message. When was it? A couple of weeks ago. He wasn't in a great state, he says. Why? I'll push lightly. A relationship in Ontario, "I ran away;" another here, "I ran away too;" "I've been single for three months, it's a long time for me." And what does this mean. I say I had a dream about him and he was distressed. When was that, before or after you phoned? I can't remember. He doesn't ask more. Will think about whether he wants to. Confesses he went and looked at the garden, and he'll help with cementing in the pavers. None of this surprises me. (Coming home my car stalled on the highway and I knew what it was because he'd told me his truck does.) Soon enough of this story. "I don't thrive very well without roots." "What would it take to establish you?" Then the moment of confused pain when he says he's going back to Ontario in fall. The music comes on loud. That's our cue to stop but I let him prolong it, why. Walking out after him. It's the first time I walk somewhere with him, and see his shape ahead of me, shoulders. A sort of shape I feel I don't know, and haven't a description for. Other, other, like a fairy's shape. We sit in the cold on the steps and it's so dull I don't know why he isn't impatient. And this is his dream. In front of him an old woman, big and strong, like a peasant woman, who is wearing something low-cut that shows the yellow skin of her chest. Behind her a yellow wall. There is a tattoo on her chest, maybe a sailing ship, with an inscription arced above it. Skin becomes wall becomes the chest of an old man. The inscription on the tattoo reads "Thank you for letting me wear your breasts all my life." He likes the two of them very much, they're so strong and lively. 4th It was Wednesday night and no Rowen. - I had written that much - it is a wet Thursday morning - when the phone rang and I told the rest to Louie. It was a wealth to have the possibility of waking up with a child in the next room. The last months I would cook a good supper with mashed potatoes. After my teaching week I'd have his lively current. What I've done in nine years is much less than Michael but not nothing. The little kid he used to be, who would hold out his arms when his feelings were hurt. That it is nine years since I was looking at Michael in the Carnegie Center. I met him Tuesday coming toward my house with the stoneware dish and two teddy bears and his red shirt on. "Well Michael it has been an interesting nine years," meaning to say, only nine years, how can it be nine years when you're standing in front of me in the same shape, as light on your feet. The Gund bear in its little innocence does look nine years older. And other poverties. Money. I'm more pinched than I have been since Rowen was born. Sex. Last autumn's transcendences aren't with me any more. My attachment to the fairy man is making me sad not bright. On Saturday I'm forty-eight. Don't have the money for Joyce. Wanted to complain of all of this, but there's worse. That I'm forty-eight and haven't done what I'm able to do, have been satisfied to do just enough to stay floating. And that disability is threatening in ways I don't want to think. - Dreams. A railway tunnel I entered and followed, lit and clean all the way, 'til it brought me out near the place where I entered. Coming toward a sheep farm walking my bicycle with a book in the basket. A lot of women not eager to shake hands. I thought I saw Jim Campbell at a distance. Models of the railway system, spirals made of perfect tiny bricks. They say when I'm talking to country people, in ten minutes I know all about them. Something about Janeen speaking in a hideous way, religion got her, I remembered the fresh look she used to have. "Precepts and principles." Rises in perfect serenity, associated with the awakening of the senses, especially of hearing and smell. The man who cannot quietly close his eyes certain that there is vision after vision inside, simply waiting until nighttime to rise all around him in the darkness - he is an old man, it's all over for him. Rilke Sunday 7th There haven't been times like these, it's pain, it's crashing, hot forehead, cold hand, a dependency that kept me all day at L's though I have a lecture to prepare, wanting her to say something that would crack me or satisfy me, impatient, saying Come on, oh please fix me. Tell me what's happening. The book said, When you went away from everyone you didn't feel it but you felt it afterward, you're feeling it now, about Rowen and Dave and Luke and Rob and Louie, that you lost them before and you'll lose them again. It's a path in your brain. That was last night. This morning it said, What is it to you that I love you? I said, If you were part of me so that you couldn't go away, it would be something, but as it is you can't stop me getting paralyzed, you weren't there all those years when I needed you, why did you take so long? Bitter weeping. "I come when people want to know." "I have always wanted to know, there was a time it was all I wanted." I was thinking of the child who decided her mother's love was useless and still thinks so. 8 The way, in the women's washroom under some very loud electric engine I felt what I feel next to the elevator, jolts that are not displacements but maybe jolts of the electrical brain. It was dizzying, sick-making, as definite as a series of earthquakes. Next to the elevator it's just one jolt as it arrives, but under this engine it was continuous. I felt like I was on a pitching deck. Weds 10 A woman who was in San Francisco on filled land near the harbour when the earthquake came, saw the earth run like a river, she said, towering buildings swaying. After she had seen that she changed. She lost weight. A companion came. Joyce tells me this story when I tell her that the electric fan overhead in her bathroom gave me a jolt as if the earth jumped. She loves to hear this and looks very perky. I also tell her the line of a song I heard on the car radio - "knee deep in the river and dying of thirst." (That was rolling downhill yesterday after the lecture, seeing the city far and wide in sunny smog.) Am not surprised that she gets up and writes it down. What she said was: the panic makes sense, the crush on the young man was saving you from - what? - I've forgotten what she said. What I have to do is just feel the pain of all the times there was no support. So will I have to feel the pain for a long time, or will I just have to feel it very intensely for a short time? I ask. She giggles, I do not know, I do not know. I say last time I got attached to somebody it ended in poverty and sickness and incapability. She says, and this was the relief, it isn't about attachment, it is about love so full that it isn't afraid, it's completely self-balancing. And that that is my task altogether, not just in this episode. We seem to be done but the time isn't over. I sit glancing at the harbour and mountains, seagulls, behind her. It is very quiet. She's gazing at me. I'm feeling I could go out of focus and see lights. After, she says, what was the quality of the energy for me. I say peaceful and nervous. She says it reminded her of, she was on the edge of, a time with ayahuasca and datura. What? A shamanistic other universe. 11th Thursday morning, the school week over, the work week going on, marking, then thesis. I haven't told the lecture to Phil's 343 class on Tuesday. I rushed into the room and said hi in such a bright free tone that it seemed it would be good and it was. I talked fast, drew messy pictures. Some leaned forward smiling, a beautiful Japanese young man isolated on the far left pushing hair out of his eyes and comprehensively present, winked very slightly when I started to explain too much. They asked questions within the first five minutes that got me to the heart of what I wanted to say, it was fun, and then I found myself saying what I think about dreams and imagining. "Spilt salt" came up, as if I was having an excited conversation with a bright stranger. Next: Rob's dream. Tuesday evening there's a window where I could visit him briefly and when I've been discussing it with string and cards, he phones. I get into his room, take off jacket and shoes, make him move over so I can get the whole of the blanket, and get close to his body heat. We watch TV. He tells me he's managed a couple of lucid dreams. In one he's looking for women. There are some around but they "really aren't very attractive." They have ugly teeth. He thinks, "I know where there'll be attractive women." In the women's change room. It's a school. The way he knew he was dreaming was when he opened books and the writing looked strange. He'd open and close a book and every time the writing would be different. Since he's dreaming he should be able to place the change room wherever he wants it. It will be down those stairs. Circular stairs going down and around on and on, enough. It will be there off the next landing. And it is. Big men guarding the door, "really big," bulging muscles on their arms. He won't challenge them but they let him through. No wonder. The women's change room is full of men. He gets out in a hurry. The logic is obvious. There'll be women in the men's change room. He bursts in and there they are, but "they really aren't very happy." He tells this dream with so juvenile an agitation that I'm repelled, it's like looking into a spirit stuck in high school, helpless, titillated and passive, grossly unwholesome. I don't want him to touch me. Later, because I want the calm that comes out of his body, because I want the gesture of opening my chest and putting my arms up around his neck and bringing my knee around him, I ignore what I saw in him and accept what I can take from him. And realize later that it was two hours without evening allergies. Going there in the car, imagining what I'd feel if I were on the way to fucking, imagining telling Dave "there's a nice engineer I sometimes visit when I want to get laid," I was noticing the freedom and balance and play and lightness that I become when I refuse to be oppressed by sex and attachment. And then: oppression and attachment. I go to Trinh T Minh-ha's film, 9 o'clock screening where Louie will meet me. [Living is round at the Ridge] She's warned me on the phone that the Mafia will be there [Trudy and Rhoda]. I come early in case there's time to talk to her and it means I have to spend half an hour in the foyer with Jam, T and R lurking together at the other end of the room. A doorman sees my jacket from the back and calls me sir. Jam in her dreadful stiff hat smiles allusively. I am distressed and smile back and go sit on the floor near the screening room doors. I sit there reading the Ridge schedule holding myself together to feel nothing, thinking, I have my own one in there, Louie is my real friend, I don't have to feel them any more. When the doorman is elsewhere I flee into the screening room, she's down there somewhere on the right near the front. Still in the dark I spot myself along the wall and wait as people move out past. Don't see her, but then there she is in the row I've happened to stop beside. A pretty small woman in purple. Who's then being hugged by a very large black woman who makes her look like a little girl. We sit together and I start telling her about Joyce in the morning. When we're laughing I am aware of how we could look to those three sitting somewhere behind us. It's a satisfaction and an uneasiness. Louie's eyes as I talk keep sliding back toward the audience behind me. I say, "What are you looking at? Is there someone you know?" "Don't worry about it, I was just looking at your friends." The lights go down. I'm struck into profound pain and fear. So intense I cannot ignore it. I want to run. Put my head down between my knees and draw breaths like a person panicking. I know she won't know what's happening, will be panicking herself. Then I'm calm enough to sit up, and see it's because she's left. Beautiful images and Trinh T's matronly pedagogic rhythms over all. She comes back. "What happened?" "Panic attack." Whispering. "Why?" "It's a long story, I'll tell you later." I sit with a pain as intense as if she has actually gone away with them. Solar, heart, forehead. What should I do? "Paining, paining," that from a Buddhist instruction. A moment when I feel the crown open and electric fluid flowing up through. The intense pain of the forehead vanishes for an instant, and then it shuts again. Afterward she drives me home. I know she's angry and will deny having done anything. It may be the way it was with Michael, an indicator moment she will have to understand later, it may be only my conditioned fear. Joyce said stay with it, feel the pain of the times you were not supported, every time it will bring you a freedom. This morning waking in pain that's still here, a shaken heart. She doesn't like my enterprise and rebels. Midweek she is in her working mind, I realize today. To that mind my pain is a nuisance and an affront. We sat in the car and I said I think we'll both know more tomorrow. Then I dreamed. Woke from a painful dream poorly remembered. Louie and I fighting, I pick up the dirty plates, she leaves with Laiwan. My car was parked under the bridge and has been towed, maybe. Much more I've lost. Friday 12th I've been at my tacky round table looking at earlier pages seeing the scatter, findings I don't assemble. Tea intoxication. [conversation with Louie's book about a problem of hers] (E) Do you have anything to say to me about all this?
Is this why I feel Louie is bored sometimes in a way I haven't felt before?
Please say more.
What was your sense of what happened at the Cinemateque?
Was I feeling something real or true?
If I had been having a true thought what would it have been?
14th Unexpected. Saturday night, I'm in the bath, phone rings. I'm in so good a balance I seize bold opportunity and tell him I know he likes being beautiful. He says he's red. Will I come out either tonight or tomorrow? He was the one who left rock and rust next to the door. Not nature and culture, maybe geometry and roundness. In a room packed with people, close to a candle at the bar. A horribly amplified singer cutting into my left ear. White wine. We're closer than any other space would let us be. Yelling in warm candlelight. Physically in love, I mean simmering in magnetic touch. I'm facing his face and fully in heaven. Not frightened. He says he wants advice. He wanted that from the first. A woman in Toronto. "I never stopped being in love with her - I believe in true love and being happy together." She's a filmmaker. Break-ups and running away. A network of fear. Of being alone and - what was the other one? - inadequate. What am I this morning - swarming with love still. I say, "If that's what you want, go after it but do it altogether ... Did you like hearing that?" "Yes" he says, "but that isn't the whole of it. Sartre says ask advice of someone who will tell you what you want to hear." I have an imprudent rush and say "and I hope you know how disinterested it is." I say that with a rush of something like mischievous delight. I am telling him I want him. The joy is the joy it is and the joy it is to have a way to tell him. Oh see me loving to love you and no longer angry and not at the moment frightened and happy not to be frightened. And does he see it? I don't know. He doesn't accept it as if he is willing to know that he knows it already. I'm not sure he knows what disinterested means, he looks as if I've said I don't want him. We're confused. I do what I sometimes know to do, which is take charge of him with a gesture. I ask him to tell me what it means. He does know. So why is he looking hurt. It does hurt when somebody loves you. Alright, I understand that. But I didn't then. I was impatient, "Do you want me to spell it out?!" Indignant. But thinking it's a good tack to show an indignant moment. I tell him about Louie and the book. The mind that's larger and how finding it comes from being willing to stay with pain. He looks at me with a stunned white face, it seems. I just keep going. You got me at a good moment. The work and its decision. Much more I'm not telling you. Tea at his house. A cat we meet on the way. A black Abyssinian, ears moving separately. Like a kitten but nipples like a mama cat. Under both our hands. He finds them. She twitches her tail. Why do I forget to meet the signs. The sleek of that elegant little cat, who looks juvenile but is all the way gone into sex and out at night. Thirteen songs for a dark country. And so I see his room. You don't know you are a sculptor. Silver wood, shaped metal. Young women with their little mouths shut. A mirror frame. A rusty square. Not color so much as form. "Do you like being good-looking?" "It's only been for the past year or so. Before that I was cute. Fifteen-year-old girls would get crushes on me." "I thought maybe if you'd been a nerd it would give you pleasure." "I think I'll get hit by a truck or something. It'll be taken away again." "What is it about Nietszche." "Responsibility, which means becoming who you are." But historical contingency, what's that. Makes it sound as if becoming who you are is a matter of research. "Once I was terribly in love with a poet. It was a disaster. I thought of him as Orpheus going into the underworld. Maybe I thought he would rescue me. But then I found out I was the poet and there was something else I needed to rescue." Alright, enough. Aphros, froth. Monday, SFU He couldn't work yesterday either, he mooned all day in stories. There he is at the door. There is something to say about how it is, and it's this. As soon as he comes toward me at all I'm full of natural gestures, the way when we stepped into the elevator together we stood leaning back against opposite walls to see each other on the way down. When did I dream this? A man's bright face, bright black eyes. I say something, he says something. Snap - I'm thinking in a flare, if I've got this one I don't need to look further - he's bold dark and warm. We were talking about a painting of soldiers with lances, walking forward. Through or beyond the fairy lances, what I could see was just lacy-goldy towers. The inference was another troop present in the first. This isn't easy to get right - 'a fairy troop' was a way of saying something else. What the man said was 'hallucination' and what I took him to mean was what I imagine about the meaning of every event being different to the 'other side.' I like the way he sits during the seminar, like this for instance [drawing]
with his parade ground boots that won't pass muster up on the white couch.
I like the way he concentrates on the person of the speaker, he sees to
them personally, tonight smiling at Lou but it would be so for anyone. I
like how he's quick and bold and warm. He's instantly there and perceptive
and true, something about the way he positions himself physically is those
things. The way that moment when I turned away to the counter collapsed
into shame he was instantly there next to me, like something borne on the
wash of my turning away. The way it was in the elevator. The way I have
those instants where I don't say, but act, like taking his sweater from
him and putting it onto the back of the chair, I mean the moments when,
for all my diffidence, I just take hold of him. ("We put down our plates
to attend to it" Louie said.) He does it too. "The color in the
dream wasn't really yellow, I realized it was the color of your skin."
"What are you thinking about?" "I'm still with 'disinterested'
I guess."
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