| aphrodite's garden volume 16 part 5 - 1993 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Tuesday 16th March 1993 There was a dream weeks ago. I arrive at the house of Louie's friends, empty. It's late afternoon. There is a desert just outside the yard. I walk out to see it. An orangey pile of rounded rock, a hill to the west. Above it I see large birds. A frigate bird with wide wingspan. An eagle, I think, sliding on a current, and then a large owl that comes from the north and folds its wings forward around its head. I know it is looking through the feathers. I'm at a distance but seeing it as if I'm close. I know when I look east I'll see dairy pastures, green grass with cows. Walking back to the house, thinking I've left it unlocked, etc. Forgot to say there were black caves in the rocks that looked like eyes or mouths. This night. With Tony Nesbit and his wife. 17th Yesterday Louie grieving and worrying in my arms. It dawns on me what it is about his sweater. Isn't it just like hers? She got hers from Gary over the holidays, he arrived at my door in his, after the holidays. Thick black sweaters with a few specks of color in the wool. Wool that mats into a blocky shape. Is he a version of her, her boy gemini? Created in the astral by my effort to get it right. It's raining and a bird is - singing? Whistling. Two crows on the wire. An airplane's drone carried underwater. Louie had so beautiful a dream. While she told it we were both far gone into the fairyland I feel with this man. She comes to my new place. I'm not there but a light is left burning and the radio is on. It is clean and white, an old-fashioned place. On the table is an open binder, my high school project about love. Images she finds beautiful. On the last page the teacher remarks that I've gone very deeply into the project and next time maybe I can try something that's not so hard. An old man and woman arrive. I'm with them. They are her parents and the landlords. Louie concerned they shouldn't think there are two people living there. She goes home toward her own place. The old people are yellowish, in their eighties. As if her parents had been able to grow old together, as if her father had not died. What else I want to say. Saturday night on the street outside the bar, watching for him, I see him a block away and step behind a van. He passes and doesn't see me and I follow him though the door. I see him looking for me, but I come forward quickly, it's a scruple not to spy on him. The way he looked on the street, narrow and straight, a narrow head. Something about his shape. His white, stunned look when I was telling him about the book. A very tiny child. We're talking to him marveling at how an articulate person can be so small. About a foot high. Later I am near his father at a dinner table. I have something I want to tell him. I go across the room and phone him. I want him to know that he and his son are inwardly the same sage green. I understand by it a color temperature of spirit that is like a desert plant, an arid vitality. He asks me about the Sufi sword, something about an origin. I say I know nothing about the aspects of war. Dear book, who is it that phones me and hangs up.
That's clever.
Is there more I should know about Luke.
What he needs.
I don't think I can give that to him.
How.
I don't feel like I give him anything.
Do you mean free rent?
I should kick him out?
I can't charge him more because I don't pay more.
Does he need his own place, is that what you're saying?
Can I do it in such a way that he doesn't feel rejected.
I think he will in any case.
Thank you.
Froth. Do you want to talk to her?
Not talking. There is a rumbling.
I didn't want Louie to need me today.
(L) Why am I angry at you.
Will you leave me and go to Ellie?
Yes. No. (E) I don't believe you will leave Louie.
(L) I am frightened to talk to you because I do not want to face any way. Is this the kind of sensation that would drive people to drugs?
(E) I'm kind of blank.
I want it for Louie.
(L) When will I recover?
(E) Can you tell us about that dream.
(E) I want to know what part of it has to do with me and what part has to do with her.
Are you a fan of altruism?
I thought it would help her to know more of it is about her than she thinks.
Yes.
(E) Why are the doilies starched?
Are they mind nets?
But they are something.
I almost knew, once, what they are. I saw some hanging on a line in the sun.
Whether I could have such a beautiful dream. (L wonders if we should stop.) (E) Book is there something you can say to Louie to unfrighten her? (L) It's as if the only thing that calms me down is to lie in Ellie's arms and as soon as it goes I'm going to panic. (L) I think we should stop. 17th continued A junky dirty old place where I lived with Jam. Heaters. The landlord comes in and makes fires. For some reason I haven't done that for myself. We're going to pack up and leave. I walk out and see Jam in a hayloft fucking a young Japanese woman. Later she's gunning for me. She's threatened to kill me. I see her in a red plaid shirt carrying a rifle. I'm behind her and she hasn't seen me. I know she's stalking me. Suddenly she turns and is friendly and humorous as if she had been playing. I had been trying to get witnesses to promise that if she shot me they would tell the police. They heard her threaten. I could tell they wouldn't. During the night, again, I woke with both arms sleep. I as if don't quite feel the fear. [recap of notes about DC] Bright and dark My missing part the active mind Specifically the love in the child, and how it was defeated The connection has to wait until reflection has been lost He is looking for originality and audacity Apprenticeship that will help him win his way among the established powers, who lie to him What I should do with my liking is dream, evoke Think of him as animus, inner marriage Literally my animal soul I marry animus by partial loss I give my intellectuality to him, he becomes effective, I become enlightenment I am going to be able to learn presence of mind in the midst of the unconscious Being secretive is just a way to be true to the love It's important to be If the one in you is projected it won't work out. Then it breaks the one in you. Unprojected he has your interest at heart. The way you are desiring now wants to find instead of shape To have a large open hope, not fixed An exquisite picture of an owl who is looking at consciousness and unconsciousness at the same time In my dream, making Seducing and enchanting my maker An anguish that feels like a soul. It says at the same time, I want him wholly, terribly, and, I must hold off because it is not real I said, 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 this material A slightly pulsing white light that is desire utterly satisfied to be desire. The way a hand on an arm is a contact that allows a flow o bright, so soft it must be fluid love In love with arousing a passion and restraining it Combat with the unconscious By working with vision The unconscious like a hidden enemy A hero when you go into the underworld A new relation to everything, a relation in construction If I dominate him I can teach him Have fun with him, put it into the keen, quick, intensely perceptive, subtle woman O but I long for it. Put it into the vision
18 Acceleration. Louie in bed hot and cold with flu is listening to the book tell her a circle of options. I am in the computer room changing hyphens to m-dashes and straight quotes to curly quotes. My default setting is you: I wanted to say 'you' sometime today. Walking my bike up Hastings in night that came as I was finishing in the windowless room. I come home and Louie phones. Two and a half hours with bathwater cooling. I lose benevolence suddenly into rage. Competition between women, a fierce structure she denies and I know I'm in. What do I know in my sullen privacy. Don't talk about him any more. She will use it to construct a web of her blind, own desire. Send her away before she moves into it, the clear. [?]
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[clipping: Tim Stephens' column on lust, Vancouver Courier for the week June 18-24: Sometimes we become consumed with lust. In lust, we never really know the other person, and usually we fail to gain their favour because when we want something too badly, we scare away the possessor of this something. But there is a very successful way to deal with such lust. First, be realistic. If you've got "no chance," forget it. Second, assuming realism, you must exercise "sexual neutrality" for (approximately) ten days. You aren't going to sigh, touch, make a romantic gesture, raise an eyebrow, stare, or pressure this person in any way. Third, make sure you have no resentment toward the object of your desire. (It is very common to feel some, and not know it.) If you have already built up some resentment, get rid of it. Forgive the person. Laugh at your own foolishness. Fourth, for ten days, become a true, real friend. You're going to care - NOT about their reaction to you, but about THEIR situation, their life, their needs and wants and desires. Then go away and think how you can help. Show, in a light, disinterested, small way, that you care. Do this again, and again, and again - never once exerting the tiniest bit of pressure. Fifth, distance yourself. Study the person you want - their social placement, their friends, relatives, lifestyle, house/apartment, clues of mannerisms, dress. See their ignorance, not to be critical, but to understand. View the world from their eyes. Be kind, supportive, and learn. This will not only teach you, but will also free you from their spell. That's it. That's all. At the end of ten days - perhaps sooner - several things are going to happen. You're going to start seeing this person quite realistically. You're also going to have discovered a brand new and somewhat surprising feeling about him or her: an affection that has little to do with lust. You'll discover that, whether they respond to your lust or not (remember, you still haven't revealed it) you won't really care.] 19 The points it fastens to are these:
Dear you. Yesterday I was seeing you all day. What else does that mean. A feeling that looks like you. Did I like it. In the way that I like to see you, yes. But it is a trouble, like being squeezed in a press. Riding the escalator at Harbour Center racked with change. Inwardly the moment when I stand with my eyes closed putting forward my palms toward you. Today it was different, I was coming toward your back, you were sitting on the floor. Today I was elsewhere and maybe you were too. I said we were people with dotted lines down the middle and arrows pointing both ways. I don't mind that you are. I think I could like to be in your company when you are in two truths at once. Do you like to see starlings? The many flecks of color in their black. They are the intimate exquisite birds no one mentions. 20 Woke at 6:30, got up and cleaned my house. Had to sit all day looking for references. Cold. Allergic sore throat from this aft. Want something before this day is over. The many flecks of color in their black. Sunday 21st This is what I think - my grain work is alternative to his image. I mean that I hang onto him as a way to be in the heaven of loving sight. He is the dot of it in this field of man-mind. I could romanticize that and say I follow him in through, I follow his image. Oh but - my grain work is not alternative to his body. 23rd [I show my films to the grad students in an SFU theatre] Phil after the screening. The way his face hesitates and jumps when he speaks, as if many things might be said and only a few are. That he liked the films. "There should be more films by Ellie Epp." Ordeal thinking about it before, then notes in origin coming through, as it does. They agreed to the silence. The last shot, whose breath is so slight. Dave Sturdee's wonder and pleasure hearing that the moon rises into frame. That he saw the venetian blinds. Phil seeing the heartbeat and testing it at his temple. Sherri wanting to laugh at the writhings of the boy in the change booth. Peter thinking of the men he saw on his father's fishing boat staring at the waves. Liking the silence. Barb saying she liked every minute. And Dave Carter was 'you' yesterday. From the moment I saw him, I was looking at him not so much to be with him as to check whether I was really not enchanted. The white intensity of the way he looks at whoever is speaking. The way he was looking at Sherri. When I was standing at the top of the amphitheatre being the guest filmmaker, he was there in the audience as that spot of white. The way notes in origin is about whitening. Then at the end of the evening I walk off with Phil and he with Sherri in her ugly professional clothes. Lou seeing current as lit crests of waves seen from above. These weeks working in the Mac room at Harbour Center. Often I see the same faces. We come in, sit down, press the on button. The machine says BINGGG. Light plastic clacking. Good chairs, adjustable. The seat sinks or rushes up, the backrest presses forward or lies back. In the afternoon when the room is full and the machines are slow we'll sometimes all have our screens frozen and then we wake up and look around and see each other. The computer young men who know everything reassure us in almost loving voices. We're like strangers in a big quiet bed together. They are sexy afternoons. Why so. Being physically close to the men and all of us in trance together, and then coming out of silence into an internal room with carpet and low light. Weak thin attendants friendly and available coming quietly to sort us out. Sliding gestures on the screen. The way highlighting magicks up a wanton but finely controllable bar of color. Turquoise. The steady unsystematic learning which has had no ambition in it and has simply relied on help. The really flattering competent obedience of the system, which produces this satisfying visible object as if with no trouble, over top of an invisible depth of complex labour. And also the company of my image, who was there today in the men passing behind my chair, seen in peripheral vision. The rest of the building just there outside the door. Money machine, food floor, library. Smell of cookies baking at the mezzanine door. Mountains in standing clouds, the harbour. Paintings changing from week to week. A flower stall with orchid plants under the escalator. A bathroom mirror that shows me a face I like, thin. And I'm walking thin. At home tonight, papers to mark, hyacinth scents, yellow, white, blue on the window sill. Table in the corner. Not saying anything about Louie. I've been with her in a way that later has had nothing to say. She is suffering again. Rather her than me, and is that what it is? It might be. She somehow lost Gary. That wasn't my doing. When I was out on Saturday night flirting with my young man in a bar, she was hallucinating, 40-degree temperature, sensing I was with him. Her idea is that we will collaborate to help her through. I won't sacrifice my instinct, which is to keep her away from him. And to be single in the department. Last night. This was coming back in the computer room too: a back garden with a shed at the bottom of it, letters spelling the child's name, who now is grown up and gone. For these many years the grown-up children visiting would see these large signs of their childhood, but now they are going to be gone. The back yards have gates that allow passage through the bottom of each to the road. Whether we can finish the video before she has to go. I don't know how she can. One evening soon I'll be with you again. Somewhere in orange electric light, in evening dark that isn't summer yet, in the last of the months of evening dark. Where is it lit. All the way up to the crown. Thursday 25th After a Wednesday, the way I want to binge - ice cream, two Viragos - in the novels for nothing but the maddest pursuit of romantic sex. Now it's noon Thursday, I'll come out of oblivion and look at my time, ten days minus three, for preparation. Pear buds in a brown cloud, a round cloud, in front of the stirring hemlock. It is saying, You've lost, give it up. I'm stuck at heart, frightened. The phone rings and I jump. Panic. What should I do. What's it like. A fuck would fix it. Fri 26th Then I try that. Here today. Still heart shaken. Very scared of what I don't know about content. Scared feeling there can't be a lover, the one I picked is unworkable emotionally. Beyond that - now I see - I haven't been seeing the violence I have ahead of me with the defense. It is like submitting - to Tietz, Schwartz, Todd - and if I carry it off as I know I could, in bravado pretending to be as I would have to be to make it work, then I participate as one of my own oppressors, one of those who say, I will pretend this is not a violent occasion, I will pretend I have not been invisible here. Sunday 28th At the garden yesterday, in spring Saturday morning. Rob hung about with his eyes blue. I haven't told the small story about John Jones. I ask Andreas to refer me to an engineer [to look over the engineering passages in the thesis]. Imagining a university engineer, I am imagining a lover. I like his voice on the phone. He's a Brit and self-possessed. Andreas says he's forty and rides to work on a bike. I write him a note carefully judged, small green writing. I picture a meeting at the defense. etc. Then I ask Andreas what he looks like. Beautiful Andreas says he looks like a little garden gnome. Beautiful Andreas whom I look at always and however publicly with soft, hungry eyes. The dream I woke from was a story about the departure of one of the people in a person. A beautiful woman is leaving. A dwarfish engineer sort of man is saying "I will miss her fearfully. I was the one who always looked after her." Also a dream where I have accidentally knocked apart the joins of an overhead pipe for smoke. I get onto a table to rejoin them. They are so flattened I wonder how smoke has been able to pass through. Stuck onto the chimney are pages of Louie's writing about some German people. I remember them from a while back. She must have stuck them up then. And much more. 29th If the beautiful woman in me who is departing is my feeling for him - if a dwarf engineer, a delayed mechanism, will miss her fearfully - if I love loving him for the beauty I am when I imagine him. That my feeling for him is a woman, I didn't know, but it's true - how much I miss being a woman - wants to be, wants to be, ah, pretty - I want to cry, feeling there is no way to it - at least, though foolishly, oh I did become a woman, wanting you - that's what it meant, the gestures - oh Joyce it isn't being loved I miss, it's the possibility of loving. The gesture of lifting my arms. 30 A dinner party. I've ground something orange. It is too watery but I can call it horseraddish. There are potatoes roasting I think. But the meat - the meat - is it already in the oven? I find it still frozen though the guests are waiting. Someone, maybe my mother, cuts off slabs already partly cooked, it will soon be done at this rate. Mad Murray, too, walks into the back room to lie down with me. I'll go out into the grass first, wash mud off my legs, maybe there's somewhere to pee. A cabinet of our things that she's opened up. Oh I want something - 31 Working on this deeper level of the thesis, a sense of sophisticated philosophy, ie holding a term's many senses in their sorted net. - I get home at 7, the last day with students, staggering. There's the day inscribed, and doesn't described mean I lift it off my surface and put it elsewhere? Steve, Lou and Paul at the philosophy table when I return one last time to post a copy to John Jones. Sitting with them, the three I've liked best as it happens, Ray coming by, something like feeling at home. "What are you going to do after?" "I'd like to have some fun." "You can't do that." Overlaid with my next thought, "get laid, work in the garden." Brent in class, holding onto me deliberately with his blue-eyed smile. Michael Dar's grin when I said I never used to speak at all in tutorial. Babby Tiong coming to say goodbye, a handshake so weak and small it was a wonder. Emile Esteves come to talk about his F - I won't see that face if I read this in a year. Paul Wong in the car in the dark talking about meaning and content, internalism and externalism. I'm listening sharp as I can because anything he's saying could save me on Monday. Bjorn's sideways grin passing by, overhearing me say it's fun when you get to the really hard thing in what you're doing. I was saying it to Dave Carter. I don't see him arrive but it happens I'm closing my office door to leave just as he's arriving at his. How's it goin'? So I tell him. I'm not bothered, is what I'm hoping to believe. But then lovely Lauren arriving says sweetly "I really liked your talk, I wondered if you could recommend a book on Foucault," and I'm inadvertently furious - I guess it's furious - at him for showing any sign of being taken with her - at myself for not already having flown - at myself for yapping at him like a little dog because he's pretty. Oh I'm angry still - at myself for neither catching him nor blowing it but consenting to this oppression. And under, under, she's crying 'cos I'm being mean about her love. Oh and I am too, I want to slap her silly head for humiliating me with this crush on a ladies' boy. At the end my irritation escaped, I said why doesn't he wear a skirt and a plaid bow in his hair to my defense, help me out. He offered to wear his baseball cap backwards. I said No not that, it's so vain I can't stand it. I was quaking, speaking to him. No, what I am is furious at feeling myself losing to another woman of that kind, the kind who has been my bane. Oh I am so angry at feeling that grief, that I would shut him off altogether rather than feel it again. It was not that he chose her, it was that he didn't commit himself not to. No, again, I was mad at him already - all those guys - I'm outraged at having them judge me at all - thinking as I'm saying it, why does this sound so personal? 1st April And then. Louie arrives in a taxi when I'm at this pitch of anger, and it does not go well. She wants me to want to enter her moments the way she enters mine. It is true the thought of having to hear the names of her students appalls me, but it is not as if she isn't massively demanding or as if I haven't entered and lived in her emotional territory and at her mental level for months and years now. Sitting across the table in her little Italian café looking at her blunt big face feeling I have nothing to talk to her about unless we enter our rumpled bed of Joyce, book, cards, sex and gender, gossip ('tho less), crisis, complaint. 2nd Now it is just about the 4th, working. On the round table a wheel of papers that are the boiling-down. Organization. Invited Leah and Rudy Voth. Louie leaves nice food in the car. Rob has left town. DC has had my flock of seagulls circling dropping slime on his head. Free to love Louie. (Although tonight he is not looking worse for it.) Laundry set up so shopping was done while it washed and yoga while it dried. Tackled Phil yesterday and am helped by the win. Wrote what I have to say to the department this morning. [outline for a doctoral program] 'Slovenly' is the word I'm satisfied to have found. Very persistent work on relations of content/code, language/nonlanguage, functionalism. Physical price - morning solar extreme tension. Tremour of tea speed. Heart tight and quaking. A stagger, strange muscle weakness in my arms, sometimes a blur on print. 4 Trudy says she wants to be able to talk to Louie. What about? Her dreams and esoteric things. So will I come out of my house and find you and her on the step talking for half an hour? She and R going over to a deli counter talking about god. I am pulling a comb through the back of my (short thin) hair. Two knots I tug through, they pull out, they are her work. A field, dry. Some rows of peas up, am going to plant soon. Across the road they've been active in the other garden. It is staked almost to this end. A woman writer/broadcaster coming down from the tower. She can't do it up there. They'll find her a different place. Summerfallow, was the thought I had. Seeing plants dried flat onto the ground. Looking around for a tractor to till it, it's quite hard.
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