| aphrodite's garden volume 17 part 2 - 1993 june-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
5th June 1993 This morning a sweet light, it's her birthday. There is a phone message saying Jamila. Now I will start the retrospection. I couldn't trust her. The stresses of loving, the stresses of loving while being loved, unsustainable. The kinds of loving that are stressed. Means body produces pain in the course of them. "Louie has left the garden." Do I want to feel it now or later. There is Bjorn looking about twelve, innocent and sober. Did he need to be that age to write this paper. The voices of these older men, emphatic barking. Painful if I attend to it. Nasal means what. Head tones. (I yawned and looked up and Bjorn was yawning.) Jam said one thing I was satisfied to hear, that she realized later how open I'd been. "How could you have missed that?" "I didn't understand it was compatible with feeling for men." 6th I wasn't ready for the conference, didn't have my intent organized, didn't have my possibilities in front of me, got grabbed by social need. If I want to work I have to learn what to do with conferences/departments. I have to drop every other kind of attention - feminism - looking at physical persons - and then I have to be able to go to the myth/image/suggestion world and reconfigure fast. And do I keep the garden mind? - Where do I have ordinary enjoying? More interstitially. Mind and soul. 7
Ani di Franco "You had time" in Out of range Righteous Babe Worked at NFB. She didn't come. She's gone. I worked on fire and night, logged it because I wasn't very interested in any of it and couldn't see what to take. Later Rob. Louie has left me and I'm not undone. Did I unbind myself slowly over the year? Did I make a real decision a year ago, that took this long to complete? I made something she'd hate, a record of how I dote on his eyes and hands - man-girl sexiness - the reach of his arm in blue - his weeding dream - the delicacy of his surround, pale green with individual borage blue. I was with her too, knowing I'll make it with her even if I finish it alone. I was fighting you off all the time, you have to go. But so far (there are still things you can do) I'm sending you in love not hate. Regretting you're furious you didn't get your way. Glad I didn't let you slay me, glad to have got out of it alive. Saying, willing to say, to friends and enemies, Louie and I have split up. We're both very stubborn, can be proud of that as an end, a draw. 8 With my little boy, coming over the ridge onto the plateau of snakes, stepping very fast and surely, seeing below on the rocks live snakes moving, snake skins stretched straight down the path. Lying still feeling snakes moving under me by a sensation very strong and trailing off like a slim tail, intense electrical vibration. I concentrate wholly, watching for whether they're biting me, which they may if I move, so I have to wait until there's nothing moving on me to get up. They may be up inside my shirt. I'll go to the room at the end, where there are snakes known to be nonpoisonous. Go to bed in a small room, with a book, wait for the snake to find me under the covers. On a roof, how am I going to get off, someone below has been warning me, I am not impressed but the distance to the ladder at the far edge of the slope seems impossible to cross. But I have a method I remember suddenly, I just do it with a rope and a little canvas room around me so I don't see where I am. 9 [summary recaps of earlier journal: It is as if I see a research program that can take me to the end of my life - from this grubbing down into an academic base I can go for geometrical rep - to seeing and intuition - to 'seeing' and what mind is. What I should do in visual work is just go play with the optical printer, follow hints, not be theoretical in any way. But cultivate my standing in some ways so I can still have funds. (That was 23rd Oct.) I felt her using the book to campaign against him and for sex for herself. Eros has carried you this far, but after this point your will determines whether you continue to find the other and let yourself be found. There is no limit to this finding and revealing. Soul needs to go on this adventure regardless of how much the other side of the personality fears and resists union. When it comes to the inner nucleus, the door is shut. Eros then departs and a new search is started. The generous act of integrity opens the way to the real self. Three basic pseudosolutions, aggressive, submissive, withdrawal. The moment you go through the movement of opening up and have the courage to want the truth, your gauge is always what feels most uncomfortable, what you feel most tempted to look away from. False marriage is possible with her and you feel the danger. If you find your way into true marriage you will know it. You must be totally committed to the truth. "I will not take cover, I will go through it." What you most want from the other is how you stop yourself. Dependent unity. It must speak and ask and write and eat, but not necessarily with Louie. Feel what dependence can feel like but find it in your own place too so your dependence doesn't depend. Not a fluid border. Merging and unmerging. 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. 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 it 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 to your list - and whole feeling, whole intelligence. - Emotional brutality, cold, obstinate, inaccessible. Convictions. King of the dead. A cocoon of dreamy thoughts, desire, which cuts a woman off from reality. Cold reflection that invades a woman when she has failed to realize some obligation of feeling. Calculation, malice, intrigue. Animus whispers "you are hopeless." Possession. Animus says 'one,' 'they.'] 10th I saw Louie on the Drive, day before yesterday. Yes that's her, small, dressed in black, turning away, walking south. I've driven up to the produce store to buy cherries. She looks like a child, so small and insignificant. It is uneasy, saying that - my indifference. How I am with her, having left. Relieved and sorry, wonder what really happened. Am with her inevitably in the video. Relieved that I'm not demolished with pain. Loving her sensibility insofar as it is mine. Wondering about my brutality, whether it was necessary. What happened. Why did I hate her. 11 After the Shaughnessy women - that strangely uniform bunch, the postmenopausal dullness of gardening women who look like old lesbians, arriving in couples as they do, but are Mrs something, his initial. I'm at the Princeton, an empty bar, old, warm, quiet, sitting in a corner with the Australia notebook, drinking whiskey waiting for my beautiful young man, who has finished his thesis this very day. Happy. Strangely quietly certainly happy, not frightened. Sipping, not drinking. The happiness there before I began. Leave a message saying where I am. There'll be a moment I look up and it's him coming across the room. It's a floating peace. Men I can't see are talking about train shunting and the union. I have on my red underwear teeshirt. I'm ready to say sit here so I don't have to stare at you. He's holding his arm across himself at first and I know to back away into my corner so he can feel I'm not going to push him, I'm very fine tonight. It works. He opens up with his arm on the back of the seat. I see him in sideways brushes. Old black teeshirt with paint on it. His bony shoulders. He braids his hair. Takes it down and braids it again. An elastic like mine. I look at him with what I can feel is a soft face. Satisfied that I'm with him and can see him there sometimes. We look at the room together. Stucco from hell he says. Slathers. Painted tan. He tells a dream, early morning, cool air through the window, warm in his bed, he dreams big solid geometric pieces floating together into a perfect join. The barman comes to say time. It's only eleven-thirty. We walk across to the parking lot, I drive him home very vaguely talking about house dreams, he very distractedly directing me. Park at his house in a position he knows expects nothing. 'Bye. Will do the concrete this weekend. Saturday. It's only two days from now. Come home sweetly but don't sleep. Dream he's touching me in a certain way, rubbing my torso up and down maybe, a furry dim dreamy excitement. There's more. Three women in his household, one is the one he's involved with. They speak to me. Everyone going to a scat concert. Will I come? No. Carrying something and having to step out of a harness that goes between the legs. Having to step out of it backwards in a complicated way because of the package in my left hand. He's doing the same. 12 Yesterday 1. death worries about the mole on my right leg 2. Jam finds me in the garden and tells me that 3. Michael's house [on Jackson] has come down. Today my period comes, first one since my defense. Wake before light and need to sleep again. Dream I'm telling Michael his house is down. We're on the way to look. Two little boys. A red house. Where did this come from. We walk into his house. Very clean. It's here again. Two aboriginal men with designs painted on their skin. A taller blacker one and a paler fuzzier one. They want to dig up Rowen's tree. I say it's my little boy's tree, etc. Not impressed. I seem to be having to struggle with them. Poking on the roof for a spade. The roots seem to go down next to a stainless steel flue. Might as well look in the basement. A spotless tiled basement floor, shining furnace. Roots must go down further. hard to get out. They are upstairs up to something. The younger one gets under the bed when I talk. He's saying it's going to be tedious. I peel off mattresses, quilts, many layers. Feeling something, like some sort of object, in my vagina. I think maybe they are sending it. I'll override them by ignoring it. Between layers I see first a little aboriginal boy and then some layers down a small woman. Then some transition I don't remember. I'm coming toward the group again and now there's a woman with them. Their heads are glowing and changing colors. I say I can see they are magic people. It's making me think the rowan tree has some power I didn't know about. 13 Hello all alone. What to say in you. I ate last night until my belly hurt, lay down in the barely felt beautiful evening and hid until morning. The way she struck at me even when gone. I was managing with him tho' from the instant of his voice on the phone I knew it would be wrong, by falsely confessing a bad mood. "I saw her last week at the Calabria." From that instant I'm gone, removed. Hopeless I suppose. Hopeless of being able to manage. Hopeless of him, he won't be willing or able to know me when I exist in distress. He doesn't know me, wouldn't be able to want to. Long while later he apologizes - that isn't right - for making my worlds clash. I'm verging on tears, in the Calabria. Sunday morning. Crashing glass, Italian heartbreak music. "She knows you hang out there. She has no other reason for being there." Giving up pride but giving him up at the same time. When I do that where am I? Waking through the night. Maybe I can like it here. Years from now maybe we will both know what happened. Maybe I could write you until then, a long letter. From her letters to now, what she got. Writing and a line to an overmind. From getting what she wanted in not getting what she felt she wanted. And what I didn't get. I've come to a bunch of losses. Rowen, the life in having a child, innocent joy and balance in sex, garden power and pleasure, writing lightness and speed. A flow of money. And what I got - an MA, a car, a video, Luke here. The night at Rumsey Wheel. Oh years of telling and showing as if at home. The hardness of hating what loves me, or claims to, of safety requiring that, or seeming to. The winter of letters, their mood of sad true love. What would I have liked? For the love to go on and convince me, to be able to convince me. For someone who both loves me and knows her own ways, so I wd not have to stand guard in misery knowing alone. For a convincing knowing touch I could trust myself into. That's quite a bit. Dear larger one. I'm here. A deep breath, does that mean you are? What you said you wanted. What she wanted from me was the book? Yes what she wanted from you was to be wise and true. You are crying. The wise and true she got loves you as one among any. The one who loved me as the one one is a mistake and I always knew it. But you've got me to cry like her book could. I love you as one among any but it is love that reaches you. As long as it knows me it doesn't matter how many it loves? Why? It's a touch that lets you out. Can I ask you why she had to go? She isn't gone. You know she isn't gone. Where is she? Self and soul negotiating. Talking. Okay is it alright to cuddle Rob? It's alright. What am I supposed to be working on? Ask that another way. It's nice here now. Let me concentrate again. Why did I have to hate her? "If you want to get rid of someone make them hate you." Because she was oppressed? Yes. More than one way. But wasn't it my hate that oppressed her? "Strategy to get rid of her." Both. The force needed to break out of an attachment. (Rusty black cat.) You mean sex? Yup. Why am I saying no to going to Rob? For him. What's going on with D? Deceleration. He's your transit. Is it okay for him? What's your worry? Involving him. He's not involved. He's mildly flattered. What am I supposed to be doing? 'Supposed.' Imagining futures? Imagining. Glad. But what? Doesn't so much matter, but Orpheus is alright. Knowing it's to learn seeing. - Kim Campbell (winning the Conservative Party nomination). I was more oppressed than I knew by the way newspapers and radio were ganging up on her. Sure she was going to be refused. A smart woman with a catastrophe in her childhood. Refused because she was smart and a woman. - Burst into tears just now. 14 Two things - first is, everyday I'm talking to and about her, to try to know what happened, second is this beautiful exciting wall of color [we made this stills stuck up on the kitchen wall], a wealth of beautiful images, nothing minimal, people, close, middle, plants, paths, posts, lights of day, the life I thought has dropped away in this material and now I have it to make. The last nine years. - And then I wonder if I ran Louie off the project because I can't think it right if I'm pretending to share control with her. I could have said from the beginning, Do you want to assist me? And she would have, probably, and I would have been able to say how I wanted to be helped. Maybe that's it. And why didn't I? Because I couldn't separate guilt about subordinating her as a lover from qualms about subordinating her in work. Worried about whether she'd let me use the tapes though. And ways I did it with her, because of the way we loved the parts together. 15 Sick/sore because (it seems from Walter's tone) we didn't get the BC Cultural money. It means I'm still in trouble with money. Owe Louie seven hundred, would have five hundred a month 'til I do something else. Failing because our edit was so sloppy I assume. Owe Visa 950. Can't go to Joyce, can't go to Ingrid Pincott [naturopath]. Can't gas up the car. But what else. If they fix the edit recorder at NFB there's that, I can go on with visual edit, put on a spoken track for other applications. It will take longer. 16 A dream that wakes me is that Cheryl has died. She's died of old age, I understand accelerated aging. Both T and R speak to me, it's as if we're gathering for a wake. A driveway. R has said to me "I like you." I'm wondering whether I should be staying away from them for their treatment of Cheryl. R says Louie made it possible to speak to Jam. She could make a relation between them and Jam by understanding both. At Customcolor - slides on the light table - one of the slides from the corner outside Hythe, the 3-sided little ditch that was gone the next day, a perfectly beautiful perfect slide. And other of the last days in the Valhalla house, looking into dry stinkweed, brome pink in the underlayer, white wild oat heads, grey stalks thrown down between brown. All of it has you in it, looking at it with joy feeling I couldn't get that roll until you'd gone, and you are utterly in it and I could tell the story of being with you, any of the stories, but that one, being there fighting with you, the beautiful ride. That I couldn't stand the stress of having you to lose, on and on. 18 Traveling with L. One day she's riding behind a sort of strawy indifferent man, we're going to separate. A hotel where we've been before. Two magazines, hers the quality of that man. (Kim who I identified as Francois.) Mine a young woman's magazine. See the two magazines put into the garbage together by the maid after we've begun to leave. I show them to her. Will I stay in this hotel tonight when she's gone. I'm with my little boy. We're deep in the States. Are we going on in California before we turn back. A lonely slightly forlorn but accepting sensation. Then a second day I realize she has been traveling not with that same man but with her new lover a taller woman in soft black leather, big dark eyes, Paula? Maybe. Works on women's issues, somebody from that women's community which is not mine but is hers. This goodbye is harder because of it. The hotel I'm considering is a poor one. What's different because. Lower heart. Bitterer sense of what it might take to negotiate present danger. She got angry and frightened them: "It is never going to leave me now." "You set it up very carefully." "It cost me a year" - that one has me still indignant, it should cost her a year, she got me into it, it cost me a year too. VanCity gave her five thousand. She's been cruising the forbidden people. I say it was overdue. But there needs to be a process for getting through things quickly. Other things I noticed - hearing how she'd edited, liking what she'd done and not wanting her anywhere in my process, wanting no end of time to find it my way, seeing she'd make it lively. Feeling I'd get left out of it. Want the tapes, might need the five thousand if BC Cultural doesn't work. Wd be nice to have a sound engineer. Is she going to want back in. I can say, You keep the five thousand, buy her off. Or let her keep it and never say so, so I can get VanCity to call it back. That's something I can hold. Do I need the tapes? Could start again. Thought to offer her the visual stuff but could she finish something and get it out? And then we'd have a war of versions. Does she want it. Apart from wanting me, which is something else. That depends on her options. The video in exchange for her option with Rhoda. Am I imagining that? I don't think so. She's armed for it now. And then, she gets to be an artist at the black edge. Terminator. Whether I mind depends on whether I'm working and whether I'm satisfied with where the work locates me. Roy [Kiyooka] walked past the park, we sat staring at him in the dark. His head turning, he felt but couldn't see us. A beautiful walk. She noticed how he held his head. She noticed how the Indian woman said thank you when we said we didn't smoke. I saw and heard neither. Feeling she has perceptual freedom in my presence I don't have in hers. That's anxiety. That's for me to find. Do I want to leave company delight to them and her? Or only keep it by flattered control. She can make it there, I can't. Yet. Maybe ever. There's no evasion. What do I have instead. Can I do real work without it. I'm documenting. Dear larger one, is this old or new? I thought it was finished, I thought I was out of danger. What was the danger? Being swept into memory of shame, inner lameness. Not memory. Being swept into feeling I'm less than, I'm lame-brain, I am left-out, denied, unable, paralyzed, self-abandoned. Self-abandoned. The way I was with DC when pain slays me in the presence of my enemies. You are abandoned by the other. The other doesn't owe me anything. You leave them the field, you say you should have been able. You abandon the field and say you abandon yourself. Are you saying there are other strategies? Imagine someone with you there. What would you have done? What was needed. He said he'd seen her, I fell into shock, fear, inner talk, I encapsulated. I lost information, I hid, I was gone. Amazing exit. "Just when the most exciting things are about to happen." I got that far and set back. What let me feel it that freely? She saw you. You were more energized by bold moves. You were new to it. I've let fear. Start again. There's a moment that needs courage and quick wit and I freeze. Sometimes. I don't go for broke. Broke is not what you want. What would you have done? There was a young man there who saw you. Why am I crying? That he was there. For you he was obliterated the moment your confidence went. Go on please. There was a young man who doesn't know you but is willing to feel you. The degree of his willingness and reserve are visible. You could say, "I have to say how frightened I am. If I don't say so I will encapsulate." What happens every time points you to what happened then. What would you have done if you had been there then? Who do you think I am? If you had been there then you wouldn't have been gone? But tell me. What would that presence give you? Safety is pleasure, that fullness I know from some times, acid. Safety went away and you thought, what part of safety do I still have? That characteristic turn. What part of safety do you still have? I have my ability to find myself alone. I'm alone, what's it like. There is a lot of therapy in this air. Find the thread. Envy. She would do this better. And if? But I have what I have, I am here alone. Do you mean I am alone is a phrase that works in more than one place? I am abandoned, I am outdone. What other reply is there to being outdone? Relax. This is hard to keep clear. You're feeling something and the other person is still there. The other person is still there. Look at them. Take a breath. It isn't that you have to say something ... some way to stay in touch with them through the moment. It's a bridge. Practice it. Yes that time too. You need to see the reaction. Okay. the unique thing they have to offer at that moment "I'm trying to unconceal our common fears" Get the best of the people around you and help them understand their strengths. You're seducing everybody into giving away their protection. They're unprotected but they feel safe, that's the art. You can comfort by the commonality of experience. Past the point of boredom you can sometimes reach anguish or awe. A Kathakali dancer who could weep with one side of her face and smile with the other 19 I meet L coming from a day in town, holding hands with her young man, walking in grey high heels. This in a dream where I ask strangers advice about a woman who I think is planning to set herself on fire. A green sari. Explaining to them, I feel I'm making up the story. About Louie, that her face was different. It had lost its bland broad pillow and was leaner and more mobile. What she said about the one who presses holding barriers too. A stupid language this morning. The long day closes last night. As the audience was getting up over the credits, a man's voice behind me, the smooth spoilt centre-of-the-culture soulless whiny urban voice of someone situated at the easiest possible point of race-class-gender-appearance and sensibility, saying (to a woman) "It's very slow." "It isn't a bit slow" I say in an uncontrollable flash over my shoulder, not looking at him. "Ellie!" Rob is shocked. He has no idea. Wonderful work, oh wonderful work, so brave and new, someone so in touch in touch with his childhood, the pace of it, faces held in their emotion, seeing it feeling it's possible to make something of one's own, it's possible to declare. Everyone in the film is going to die, the camera moves, the light moves, he's crying in the coal cellar. It's the silences in childhood, when there isn't too much of things, people are lit that way, particularly solid, like doorknobs - talk and action hasn't thinned it out. It's like The waves isn't it, the blind-pull dragging on the floor. Much more to say about it. (Looking at slides finding four of Rob on a morning after, they thumped me, such an instant power of sex, what I have there - then picking him up yesterday finding a starved red-eyed disarray, a floppy thing, not weak but weak-looking, creased and worried.) Terence Davies dir 1992 The long day closes - Walls of pictures, why do I want DC to come and see them. 20 A Sunday. What to do with the editing. It's been the high week of the year, very glittering. Don't know what to do. 21 Rob's mom's last night. Waiting for Walter Quan to phone me back, yes or no. I forgot how to go there other than helplessly - helpless in the face of what I would see - the grotesque. It means what - grotto, excavation. With ref to works of art found in excavations of ancient houses - grit, grate, greot - great, grate, pleasing - gretan, greet. Bobby shocks me, the look of a monster, tight sac of fat around her chin and little mouth speaking isolated in an expanse without muscle, little eyes squeezed on all sides. She's talking about transition house work with children. The thought of children being trained to say HI BOBBY, WE ARE GLAD YOU ARE HERE TODAY. Oh Walter still won't say. Today it's cold and blowing. Trained not to see she chooses herself as a monster denying she is a monster. On the glass door there I am, red shirt and a shine along the cheekbone. And Nan like an egg on sticks, what does she have collected in that stomach bulge, and red welts on her face. The boys going mad like seven year olds with water guns. Nan's pile of photos from a tour of Austria, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, a day and a half per capitol city, the most painful record of pretending to travel, a waiter uncorking a bottle, a white-haired woman smoking in a hotel room, many churches, city squares, markets, a young woman outside a tour bus on cobbles. Here two coast women, mother and daughter, pass with the soft short-legged tread that makes me see a path in a forest. Then, going the other way, the rigid narrow small body of a greyhaired woman in pigtails, a long skirt, her shoulder blades immobile, cigarette in her left hand. What to do with the grotesque. What about it? Not to be paralyzed by it. Say what happens. I meet Bobby, she says hello, I'm struck with dismay, I have to cover it, I'm fascinated by it, I want to stare but I don't want to pretend, the whole of what I have in meeting her is wonder and what else, moral disgust? How can you want to be this, how can you accept being this. There are quite a few emotions together, the emotion of ignorance: What is this? What's my relation to this? Isolation, not being able to speak to her to find out. What do other people do. Why aren't they in this same intensity? Am I like this because I can see and they can't? They can't because they don't want to see this? They give up seeing so they won't have to hurt her? Allowing herself to be like that causes them to shut down, it's a choice of violence? It is itself simply oppression and it calls for help and I cannot be in right relation to it unless I'm taking responsibility on the spot? My seeing takes responsibility but my action/decision does not, and what I feel is bad conscience? Can I help? What I feel is that I am that and hate feeling it? I feel I'm unsorted, yes. What category to accept, grotesque or beautiful. It has given me both. Can I be both at once. If I am, are they? In the video, beautiful and grotesque. Not: beautiful is grotesque. Not: beautiful is not grotesque. What's under both. Both are present. Is there a way to do this? She entertains herself with analysis on the spot. What can I know, here. Is that it? It's something to give them. But she falls for beauty too. Guilt finding someone hideous. Fear finding someone beautiful. 'Feeling' is feeling value. 'Thinking' is thinking what I can know about this, it brings mental action, and is that the look I don't like in Louie, village rapacity? What wd seeing the moment's being, be? Seeing the moment's relation, the whole thing? It wd be a point of action organizing all of it. Sensing is what. Intuiting is what. If I'm mistaken about where I feel, when I see her am I seeing her distress? If I were not implicated wd it be easy? Is anyone not implicated? What do you think?
What do you want? Will you tell me the best way to be when I meet Bobby and similar?
Could I say, Bobby why are you so fat? What would I be if I were fearless?
I wouldn't have met her at all, I wouldn't be killing time. She belongs, they all belong, in the land of killing time, I'm ashamed of having nothing better to do.
Interesting though.
A drug?
Could I reclaim?
Taking Rowen and Louie would help.
You mean it's genuinely hard not to.
Okay. And now money. Louie has $5000 for the project and doesn't need it personally, is going away all July. What can I do. Work on it with her. Work on safety with Joyce. - Or give it to her, as long as she promises to finish it, and do what myself?
Style. Whether it is going to head for TV documentary. What atmosphere.
We don't have war drama, what makes the attention.
I think that has to be something about how the image works with the sound. Which means not much sound. What is it about the story?
Whether to tell the story of it. I think so. Story of access to land and then people being at home on it. A certain kind of people. It's a look of a certain kind of people, not owners. 23rd Evening when I come home from the Film Board, can't work any more, empty. It's then there needs to be personal feeling, somebody - Then I eat too much, read junk. What can I do with that state. What have you thought? Write letters, set up meetings with various, try meditation evening at Heather St, walk on beach, etc. They all need what I haven't got, sexy company maybe, either confident energy or soft attention. Excitement or bliss. You fastened your wish on somebody who didn't agree and so you've got a blank, there's no way around it, that's where your romance is docked. It's a cost. How long and does it have to? Is there a way to have the effect without the cause? I'm stuck. Image of a whoosh of fire up from the crotch where I have it locked tight. What will happen if you let it up? I'll fancy DC and be driven to chase him. I'll fancy Rob and go back on my tracks and reinvolve him and keep myself from finding better. I'll fancy Louie and reinvolve her and be miserably disappointed. Aren't I waiting for the real thing? For something? Image of lying on the hill at the wheel. It's a gesture of surrender to peace, but peace was there, a warm live wind. A warm live wind that was an answer to desperate questions. Okay. 25th Dream I'm working up the fence line from the corner to the church, at night, against a herd of cattle going home to sleep. I'm sticking close to the fence in case I have to slide under it if the bull comes. I do slide under it but I'm not sure one fence is enough. I'm in a room with a door onto the hall where the cattle are passing. Light through the crack around the door. I'm holding the door against a horned steer who's pushing in. I'm surprised his weight isn't more than I can hold back. Cheryl appears when I'm further up the trail at the foot of the stairs. I say I want you to go upstairs because maybe Joyce can tell me where Rowen is. She's there just for a moment to tell me where I am. This is limbo. Then someone asking her to come and walk in the thin shift of many people in the corridors. Her graceful agreement, she goes, it's her community. When DC phoned yesterday I didn't hang up on him, I didn't lie to him, I told him the truth, agreed to meet him on Sunday. Then sat in the big chair saying "emotional mistake," crying. Limbus, a border. A place or condition for the relegation of unwanted or forgotten persons, things, etc. A region on the edge of hell. A prison. I can cry now, saying "emotional mistake." Smell of roses, these wonderful rich things, shades of pink from white to purple the last ones together in a jar. I can leave him a note saying I won't. I can see him on Sunday and say goodbye - show him what I want to show him, make him supper, say, now listen, this is it. Don't come back. If I cry, I cry. It was a kind of accident, you couldn't help it, I couldn't help it. If people agree, a wide life opens up for a while. If they don't, there is the grief of not getting to that wide life. No use hanging around at heaven's gate without a ticket. Or I can go on letting it happen to me with its alterations, until he actually goes in August. A Friday noon with birds. Crying. There I am on the wall, I want him to see this wall. I want to say 'my wealth' but it's former wealth. Is it his fault I'm in the corridors of limbo? A fairy king who lured me out of life into fantasy. And even that is fantasy speaking. What to do with the reservoir of love and desire and wonder: soul which has no use but in fairyland. Le Guin uses it. Soul wants to love its image. She makes it in order to love it. Can I say goodbye to it without saying goodbye to it in me? Yes. I will go on making its image. I'm married to a king of fairyland who is there in the images on the wall, mine too. Rowen's too. And this fancy talk gets me to present desire, a white body that forks me up the middle. And what does sanity say? What does insanity say? I'd like to shock him and myself, it might work. It would get even for his not coming after me, he'd have to feel what he missed. That possibility of revenge seems to do me good. Set him up with love and wealth and then whisk it away. He responds to rejection. I could tell Louie I'd done it. Look through that, what would it give you. I could feel he's gone and I made it happen this time. Yes. The satisfaction of preempting it. Alright I see that. Alternative is having it happen and being taken into a voided heart of pain. Either way they have to go, that's the axis. Now what? You saw the way I was holding myself. The way you went blank after. What do you want to know? Is there an alternative to living like that? I don't want their marriages either. Their marriages don't make them what they are, it's the other way around. I want to know whether there is anyone who wouldn't be wrong. I don't know whether there is anyone. You can't attract them when you're on that axis. A good one would feel it. A ready one would feel it. You're charming but you aren't marriable. Can I be? You only very partly want to be. You don't want to be turned down by beautiful young men. But also you don't want to take on a life that bores you. You want to go on having affairs every two years. Has that come to an end? Evidently. Are you saying I deserve to run out of lovers? That voided heart of pain has other possibilities. You can't see them from here. Marriage and blankness are not the alternatives. How to get on with the editing, I don't know what sort of film it is. It's a neighbourhood, that's all. Community of persons and plants and lights and skies. Commonality of place and commonality of names. They should be set in black like slips of presence. Sunday 27th Catch up. At Rob's last night, cuddled in front of the TV, biting his armpit, growling. Holy cow! Stop that! he says. I'm lit up. Ticket to heaven, I've got it and he's got it. Natural happiness I say. When I get home, Louie on the phone. Plunge into fear and pain. She's doing it uncontrollably, she has cooked up a reason to phone. She was fine all weekend. Taking possession of Michael and Rowen, holding back in a principled way so Lise will not be threatened, having exquisite perceptions on the water. "He can trust me not to interfere with his life." And my plan for tonight, a generous dinner and then I say goodbye and draw a line under the story where that figure comes and goes. It's called taking back my power. Yesterday morning early, 5:30, the sort of morning that has high small clouds reflecting diffused pink ivory light before the sun rises. In the car outside the Calabria writing in the passenger seat waiting for Frank to open. - An iron ship, a grain ship, Pioneer Star. Goosequill rattling on the helicopter pad. A man in a plastic leather jacket hunched rocking in some stoned misery yells as I describe him. It's beautiful here, young cottonwoods. Train bells. Cumulus charged full of light, sizzling. This bit of ocean pouring like a river. Pigeons over the massed machine of the grain terminal. Wind makes the grass heads quest. Pigeons are wind of their own, flapping bits in a complicated curve that drops them slowly onto a row of structures like boilers. The big leaves of the small poplars rattle. There's a play of light on the black paint next to the Pioneer Star's anchor, thin white light faster and more ethereal than firelight, light like a rapture. There go sixteen Canada geese up this narrow inlet beside the tracks, five more rocking on a backwash. What it is about them is that their paddling is invisible, they look as if they're riding a current. The drunk man got the two ends of his jacket zipper together. Twenty yards down the road standing with his legs apart to stabilize the ground. There was a patch on his right eye. Black fringe flowing from his arm. Wracked skeleton man. Am I steady? Am I light enough to turn on a dime? Going to meet an occasion. I wanted to say a death, but that's dangerous. Neither of us will die. You look like someone, is all. You're somebody, a traveler I'm going to thank and set on the road. That's one story. Another says, I have to say no to you so you'll feel it, and that will get me back something you took. Why does this stilty bird squash down on the gravel. Seagulls keening, willows blown silver. 28 Did I turn on a dime? I knew the moment to say it, I knew how to push through the thickening of the air that says, you can't do this. Say the first word and the rest will fall out after it, and then you have only the consequences and not the deed. We were the doors on either side of the table. He had loved the induction of the sides. I think we went into a trance together, he came out of it softer. When I was asking I had the same dark soft time around me that he did. I found my intent, I had time to. Do I have to? I didn't know showing him the photo would be the test. Got up when we'd sat down to supper and brought it. "Is this your family?" "I'm ten there." He looked, he put it down. He doesn't love me, the plainest fact, it was pain and comprehension together. I saw it, I didn't stagger, I kept moving, I didn't pick it up and take it away like someone whose feelings are hurt, I left it on the table between us knowing I was on the way to action responsible to it. Calm certainty. Action well prepared, beautiful pictures, Rowen, Michael, Rob behind him, my own face. The wind turning poplars' coats. My kung fu jacket and red sneakers. Hypnotic trance. Beer. More than I'd need for one so young man. I was making sure, now I'll be able to love you without anger. "You've given me a lot" he says. "I wanted to." "Can't I just call you when I get back?" Trying it out, why. Shake my head. "That's fair enough." Hopes he's given me something too. What's he imagining. "Amazingly so, though I don't know whether you intended to. Mysteriously so." The energy of finding the word. We laugh. I don't like writing this, I like recalling it, I don't like he said, I said. I can say the surge of rightness that came with the word mysteriously, it came out on a wave of delight, relief, humour. Can't see his face, he's big eyes and hanging his head, doesn't like being said no to. He's felt it. But it's partly vanity. Do I get a hug before I go? He's making a try at getting me to say yes to something. Will I give it to him? I can afford to. Better not, and not really felt. That sensation I don't like, of my face on the chest of someone too tall. How did he feel. Natural. Solid. Neutral. Maybe that means unpresent. There were things we could have done. Still feeling the swell and hearing waves. The sensation of sinking backwards, wallowing. Do I have the energy to write what it was like heading out around the point, biting through the swell, ignoring the danger, driving through with the power of my shoulders, reaching at the same time as sliding in three dimensions. Like cantering, hanging secure from my elbows as the water humps up and falls away underneath. No time to think of you, but you come like a spirit when I'm silent on the rocks. This is the far side of the ordeal, Sweetie, now we'll diverge, and you'll take me with you in the right way. Once I knew a woman who was beautiful and had a bad leg and was smart and liked me and wouldn't hang around when I said no. She was the one who told me about this book. She gave me seeds for this plant. And you, and you. I'll forget the sound of your voice. You were valedictorian and read a letter from your young cousin that told the story of an old woman folding a paper, throwing it away. She said, It's garbage, like me. "I thought people should hear that." In your suit in the wealthy suburbs, alienated. "What was your worst year?" "I think grade twelve. My friend was moving away. I wasn't in the in crowd, I was still a nerd. I was so bored." Right hand is grasping, gripping. It builds. It said, you've been with me these days. Left hand holds, like this, it's the other sense of building, homes and spaces. It said, don't forget to be with me too. It's gentler. Then I dream I'm writing down the name and address of the man I'm leaving. I get it letter by letter. R. Mills. 30th What I have to register here - things about DC I don't want to forget. Yesterday's book work. Throw out the pain. Take the words good and bad out of the questions and rephrase so it is not the outcome that matters. [Opposite, notes from library books on editing: "keeping them alive" "it doesn't play" first cut 10 or 1 percent over When you don't talk properly to people they get closed up. That's all part of the job. You have to deal with just terrible frustrations. The tail end of a word over the cuts looked faster and better a click track The eye has to follow motion. knowing where the eye is You cut ahead of the beat, one or two frames because your ear is instantaneous and your eye takes three or four frames. optical - 100% - as many as 5 different images the master shot I cut a sequence, then I put it away for 3 days, 5 days, sometimes a week. I'll cut 7 or 8 sequences and then .... single take vs coverage "It holds." So the colors went from one shade to another and the shadows matched brave holding onto shots direct cuts vs opticals presound, pre-laps the sound the first cut-down Bounce sound forward or backward to propel something cut out and fade in, vv, gives an energy eyelines You go where the performance is. someone who thinks silently with their ears Once the shot registers you reinvest ... there must be another reason. After you edited the details you see the whole piece doesn't work. Then another kind of thinking. a very slow push-in 4-frame retention of the eye decelerating and accelerating edits choreographing motion through cuts rhythm of eye movements You followed his hand, you went with the cut to the other side. I try to get out of an actor where they're focused on ... where the audience should be.] 1st July Abandon Ed. Ed abandons me. I'm at the dinner table and I see he does not love me. I see I must remove my feeling from him. From this two ongoing emotional lines. I can be confident in my strength, that dark light of proud autonomy. And passion goes underground into fantasy. That's how I am both Orpheus and Euridice. The king of hell. I am in limbo, I don't want to live there. Hell's king. Shadow king: that is, the non-father, the figure built to keep passion alive though misgiven. Uneasiness of missed giving ongoing. When the shadow king inhabits someone in the world, oh then there is contrary knowledge. Yes I have been writing the book of love. The voided heart of pain. Contrary: this is him, this isn't him. The real young man of this time helped me make a fire platform. Was patient with misgiven passion. Did give. Loved rocks and forms and order and is a woman too, thinks and feels. Was lonely in high school, was smart, wanted the truth. Said "I want to know you." Aphrodite can give more than a lover. What about that end of the story, he lets her slip back because he looks at her. Looks at her instead of takes her into his body. Ovid's end of the story is his own, maybe. Who could anyone be looking for. Someone is looking for another one. Someone is looking for her state of love. The story doesn't have the mother in it. Hatred that is concomitant. Whose invasions, hers. I insist I want him. She does abandon me. With him I give up feeling. With her I feel the loss of feeling. With him I feel giving up the feeling. With her I feel feeling abandoned. You thought, what part of safety do I still have? I have my ability to find myself alone. I am alone is a phrase that works in more than one place. Relax. You are feeling something and the other person is still there. The other person is still there. Some way to stay in touch with them through the moment. It's a bridge. Practice it. Where something is lost again. Where is something lost again. When I said goodbye to him I was no longer looking at him, I wasn't looking him in the eye. Having taken it through the cycle again partly seeing partly blind, what? It's difficult to do, feeling is convinced of its object, feeling has to be allowed and at the same time knowing has to know this is not the object, or in what way it is or isn't. 3rd Saturday. A week is the time it takes to start missing him. Take Rob to see the glass wheatfield. The drive is melancholy. Not wanting to wake this morning. 4th Gave him seeds. Poppy cases in envelopes. A plant. A rock. Names of books. With what dream was there an eight-inch wasp? [At this point I turn the book upside down and start from the other end.] So choppy a year. Thesis work and emotional work, if it is work and not just hanging off the horse's neck. Drawing a line under it, David Carter or whatever he is. What was that. What's left. What's next. Two nights with dreams about Michael. Yesterday in a bed with him. Morning daylight. Sucking his smooth tongue, pulling it further into my mouth. Beautiful desire below. Thinking Lise will come. Last night I wake realizing I've slept in his house. Naked looking around. He's taken eveything out. Hidden some pillows where I can only see them lying down. Is there someone in the hall, I see a flash of a naked body, it's Michael's, he's in town. Etc. A sort of farm or base with machines, plants, stuff left behind. Looking at flowers and a white eyelet christening skirt, seen in detail etc. 5 Hi larger one, noticing the music. Is it inferior feeling?
It goes back a long way you mean, a long story. What to think about it.
A kind of mediating? Thinking is in a complicated position. I say to thinking, get rid of it, boost it and help me win at it, help me transcend it, make out of it, get me laid by whatever means including unawareness, get me lucidity at any cost. Is this kind of thinking a long way around? Slow. Stupidish.
Dear thinking, what would you like to do?
Dear feeling what would you like to do?
Dear larger one, what came then?
The other woman is you?
We are afraid of the man we see crossing the yard. We're hidden beyond the gully, we can travel without lights until we're out of sight, we turn on the lights after some little hills we travel blind but confidently. When the lights are on we turn left and partly around. All I remember is a sort of pasture with tall trees, color, maybe a sort of brown orange. I know there was more. Something reminds me of the field next to the creek. That area northeast of the yard is a new direction that's come up this year. I'm stuck.
?
Surprised. Wonder. That it's another kind of place. Is that feeling's answer, a new place, not hiding from the man/men on the yard?
Dear feeling, do you want to be a woman in love? Do you want to be around the corner in a new place?
Body: knees tight closed. I'm confused! Is it repeating the same old stuff? Does feeling feel thinking is gunning for her? Same old structure, feeling will get madly into trouble, thinking trying to forestall her. "You think like your father." Feeling, what sort of thinking would you like?
Thinking, what sort of feeling would you like?
Is thinking stuck?
Thinking, are you stuck?
What do you want?
You're angry, why are you angry?
What should I do?
Thinking, what should I do?
I don't know how, I don't know what to do with your anger, what do you want? (Legs clamped.) Large one, what do I do with this contempt?
(Looking T in the eye) I'm not afraid of you. I would like to know you. I'm surprised you're angry.
Alright, tell me what I can do for you.
I'm in trouble with teenage romance.
Why should I?
T really doesn't like me! What should I do? T won't tell me. I'm confused.
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