| aphrodite's garden volume 17 part 3 - 1993 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
6th July 1993 [in Victoria for a BC Cultural Fund film jury] Sealink is a good name. 6:30 sun and chill, a palace liner of recent design, wrapped like a Honda, perforated white, is - there's no word for the weighted smoothness of that entry into port, so heavy. [hovercraft Vancouver-Victoria direct] 8 Landlord has given me a different stove, the new one taken away, this is bigger, an old stove quite decrepit and worst there are animals escaping out of it. I say cockroaches but they are big black things [sketch] something like that scuttling with two legs, the size of a small hand. We're being rapidly infested. The stove used to belong to an old woman who didn't clean is my guess. What about Luke. Looking at stuff today [our footage]. The deadness of some of the images without sound, the liveness of cuts that are sound cuts in a similar stretch of time with things happening - train, siren, motor throb, birds before you see birds. - I was reading Sunflower in a hotel in Victoria in such a bed - a bed like a pillow or envelope, nothing but white, no public spread, a white duvet with its puff pulled tight so I went first to release the sides. Reading at night under a bedlamp, saxophone down in the alley, warm black air, stage lights in strings on the façade across the way shining in through the nearer of two long windows. A perfectly set-designed room, #30, door opens onto green carpet and a dark red armchair, tough old velvets. Large writing desk with a brass lamp. The simplicity of hoistable valances, no curtains confusing the sides of the windows, no mechanical blinds. A sliding door into the bathroom, white and green tile, a mirror that in the morning on the euphoria of West's acuteness shows me a body quite possibly lovable by the man I have in mind - cut off at the top of the legs, a classy animal not cow but lion, breasts not flat but sharp and brown, power all over, broad triangles meeting in a twist at the waist. [Bedford Regency Hotel] Have I ever been less interested in looking at a town. Have I ever cared less what people thought of me, or what they were, than in that town. The smell of piss in public places, as if a saboteur goes everywhere secretively dribbling and no one notices. Talking to a quite wonderful Diane at Swann's I knocked half a glass of white wine onto my lap and after a while said I was cold and wanted to go back to the hotel because that room and the book were the delight of the trip - that and leaving the city by the harbour, seeing the long green arm of Stanley Park with its clean shore-finish stone seawall, and back there by the white wings of the convention centre the beautiful clump of magic towers distributed like poplar trees that have climbed up from common roots and then out toward the edges. Rebecca West 1986 Sunflower Virago 9th [dream] Luke says he's going to buy a Mazda/motorcycle. He announces it at a table where Martin and other gayish men are encouraging him. I sympathize with the urge to blast free but I'm very annoyed he's going to be like Roy. - This morning thinking out names of our visual styles - intimate realism, baroque minimalism, male experimental, normal documentary, elfland/surreal, fairyland/romantic (including luminous background), dynamic synchronicity/expressionism, formal realism - and their mental styles - female love, rigorous meditation, anger, socialization, fantasy, sex, wide focus, solidity/logic. Corresponding sounds cd be clear and in your ear, voices as person-texture, loopy Cleghorn fantasia for baroque but not minimalism, silence for minimalism, information talk for normal, singing-muttering for elfland, clean clear resonance for romantic, wild sync for dynamic synchronicity, silence for formal realism. The energy crash this afternoon, not dislike, fascination with the beaver pelt shine of her hair, but desperate need to have her go. Needed to lie down and read something junky. Should I say - looking together at the way people walk - he leads with his shoulders, she's lagging with her upper back - I was suddenly remembering watching him coming from the end of the block at night - seeing how he walked, straight and light - (yes I can still hear his voice), straight and light, leading with no part. Francisca Duran Cuentos de mi niñez 1991. She's two pages from me. I found her name in the [distributor's] catalog in a silence like coming upon an item of personal fate. I showed him what I was, it wasn't that he didn't see it, but he was not taken with me. 10 Then I dream a large space, I'm not remembering this, as if a very large space, black and clear, with only a bed. Like an abstract plane with one iron cot. It's about myself and him and her. A complicated ring that wraps many times around the little finger. Here on a Saturday morning, what do I want before this day goes off into garden cleanup. A bit of personal adoring. Night's trouble with heart, what is it. 13 Dull and hopeless, sad, resigned, averted. If once you experience a great fear, it never goes away. A small animal is plucked up into the air. Later it is set down again, again it is walking in its life behind its mother. But now it knows the air is a place you can go. What it is saying as it is plucked up, just that first moment, it is saying "This is life." [Louie's book] Dear One, what is it?
Droopy. Congested. Pressed down. Slow.
An emotional explosion? A change. An intention. Focus. To move. 14 If I imagine working at capacity, what could be done in 30 years. Three years of doc as basic map. 15 Venice with my face near the water, a beautiful sheet of calm silver, evening, maybe a simple red line on the horizon. Boy baby sleeping on a raft nearby, wrapped in blankets. Various dreams, bad men, chases etc. I see the level of this nearby pool is lower than the larger ocean, a lip with water pouring over. Going to swim in this lower pool. It's warm but sludgy. Too thick to swim in. The upper water will be more cold, more open, but do I dare swim in it. A house next to the water. Taste a piece of cake on the piano, color of spice cake. I've left Rowen somewhere there, now I can't find him. Other boys. Ask if they've seen him. There was something I can't remember, but the last image as if there were graded steps to it, a woman singing very loud, black woman's face, something like I can feel my child or I am going to feel my child. 16 July [This was in another notebook, year not noted but I'm guessing it goes here] I said there's such a lot of stuff She said Follow your breath down into your body, see what it feels I said a shaking around the heart She said show and sound it out further Jerking and loud breath I could begin to hear with it Alright now just let the chair hold you. Is something resisting? Yes there's a little worry Just put it somewhere aside for now. There's nothing you need to be doing I think: yes I've been so busy. My shoulders settle She says What was that? I can't remember Alright come back. Before you come back touch your thumb and forefinger together. Whenever you do that you can go back to where there's nothing to do It has been so turbulent I say It, or you? I have been so turbulent After your thesis? It has been mostly another story Why doesn't she ask what the story is? I say there seems to be one thing I am not allowed to talk about. She doesn't ask what Silence. I will have to say. Begin. Begin again, halting. It's something about sex. Specifically how I feel about young men If you were imagining it what part of you doesn't want you to talk about it? I can tell you what I imagine you think. You think it's unreal, it's a deflection from something else. I have the two voices myself. The one says it's unreal, the other says it's the realest thing in the world Imagine if you had your desire, what would you have? I dreamed that once. There was a man with black hair and black eyes. He was bold. Bold and warm. I said in my dream, If I've got him I have everything I need Be him. What are you? Centred. Straight up the middle. Say, I am I sit bolt upright What do you see when you see people? I see them She's laughing, she's lit up, Look at you! How did you do that? You look beautiful. How do you keep all that energy banked? It's true I feel streaming, I might be beautiful, but she's got ahead of me. She's streaming. She seems to be saying I did it but I don't think I did see her But why do I think it's a man? Oh, why - there's no end to why. She's still laughing, crossing herself, meaning to give me a blessing. Is it like warding, though? "Go and do thou likewise." What is that? Do I really have to go? She shows her watch, it's two. Putting on my shoes. Ellie ... She gives me her failing yellow rose whose name I knew. Scatter the petals. I scatter them violently on the steps where she'll come down. Bare stalk. What will I do. Set it upright next to a post. Get in my car. What was that, what does it mean? Will I want o impersonate the one I felt? As centredness, what would I do? What do I know - clean my house. Eat thoughtfully. Don't turn on the radio. 18 What I did was go put myself into the hands of my physical friend Rob. Lying down soft in the current of desire, surprised to be secure. What is there to say about it except that it carried me all the way through to Saturday morning's friendly affection after I'd sucked him off. - Lesbian filmmakers. Seeing their film I go up to the booth where they're filming it. Goofy stuff, why am I liking them. A woman seeing me, handling herself with brave transparency, says she'll give me a cup so it will have her love in it. Plants rolled in newspaper. As if I'm going to move in with them. Open a door onto an upstairs room near the projection booth, what a beautiful kitchen! Peach-colored, perfectly clean. I love institutional kitchens! Seeing a big bank of clean stoves. Thinking I'll move in there. They don't seem to use it. My little boy is around. 20 Going on a quest with Liz, onto a mountain, fasting and sleeping in face of the stars. Something early in the dream, are we getting our sleeping bags packed maybe. I'm picking up layers of dry bones, then next to the ground I come to a layer that's still frozen, still has the fur on the bones. What state am I going toward, what state am I in already. Climbing the mountain, going back down to get my stuff, looking for her white van, not in the parking lot halfway down, further down. This searching is just going on, as if I'm crying every step. It's snowing and heavy footed. Climbing again, at some moment I imagined the sharp stars in their black sky, what I'm going to see - 21 I still miss you. Every day. What do I like about my voice - the way I talk to Rowen - it's light, it's flirty, conscious, dancey as if a little body is on its feet balancing in it, performing enjoyingly for a fond watcher. What was your voice - fear and bravery - putting yourself forward without abandoning the quiver of fear of the other's existence. What I don't like about our interviews. There's nothing for a subtle ear. Except Tony the story teller. 22 Honoring it with simplicity. Crying at Dutch Pannekoek. Don't interpret it. Don't evade mourning. I did recognize you. I might never find you again. 23 A turning-around time.
I mean you enjoy everything, food, spring, me, rivers. I can make you do anything by showing you a river. It's all shining in your eyes, that greed which is so generous it isn't greed, it thanks so nicely for what it takes. And you have the quickest reaction time of any human being I've ever known. You see every field in a landscape, you see every detail of a tympanum over a church door as soon as you've lifted those deep eyelids of yours. Every time that Nicholas had kissed her she committed herself to something she could not name. To a sort of obedience. That obligation which Nicholas laid upon her and which she accepted was to go with him out of life, to the place where they went when they made love. I won't make you walk along that passage. You won't have to face the fact that you want to be loved and bruised and turned into a quivering little animal and then have to be brought all the way back to being a serene and dignified human being again all by nothing in the least like magic. The many things I think reading Rebecca West. > Of Louie, the way reading novels is the nearest I am to her, feeling whenever I'm enthralled with Rebecca's rightness that Louie is enthralled in the same places - and more, with West, that Louie is her. > Of my young man, not of him but of the life significance of the event of him, as if she lends me an intelligence to see it with, what I wanted, what he was, what sort of loss he is. > Of my life with women writers, the continuing life I have with them absorbed as if they are the love story I should write, Montgomery, Lessing, Richardson, Dineson, Le Guin, Gordimer, Woolf. (Early Updike, Yeats.) It's writing lives though, not books. The way they live among all the years of their own two-handed work. (Why Rose is a pianist.) What I wanted when I was a kid reading Edna Ferber. What if I chose it. What if I did what I told Luke to do. What if I married it. Forsaking others. 24 What I can take from her biography, that what's intoxicating in her writing is that it frees me in a way it freed her - "living well in imaginary circumstances" - from the bewilderment of her own incoherence - it kept her moving maybe. "Every document of civilization is also a document of barbarity." At this moment Wachtel speaking to Saïd quotes Benjamin. "Do you try to hold it in your mind that they are both?" She kept moving. "Imperialism is connected with a certain kind of creativity." "A society that is expansionist in an essential sort of way." - This in answer to a question about the relation of imperialism and the development of the novel. "Part of the structure of identity." "Possession of the rest of the world enters into the imaginative life." Writing and struggle for territory. And what does one need territory for, to exercise energies rather than not. [Victoria Glendinning 1987 Rebecca West: a life Virago] So no it does not free me 'in the same way', since I am using her fantasy to immobilize myself and she used it to claw in an astonishing empire, an empire of action that energized her writing for her other true and correct enterprise, speaking women's intelligence (and now it's Wallace Stegner reading from Wolf willow). Does it mean that if I were going to write I'd have to go stand my ground in Alberta, and throw myself into an effort to get social speed? And then there's Dorothy Richardson, who didn't get territory, or support empire obviously enough to be made a dame - "for Stegner every time you remove a myth you get closer to the bone" - though she lived long. Jam said "acknowledgement," and then what she thought of as acknowledgement was this: 'Rowen' has two syllables like 'Ellie,' like 'Michael' and it is an ash. A mountain ash I say, and has a symbology for me quite different than 'ash.' Listening to her in the privacy of my end of the line, in the despair I came to with her, I am still saying, She's crazy, there is no understanding I can come to with this baroque structure of indirection. What I am doing speaking to her is something she may understand well enough to harm me, I don't know. She is obtuse and pretends to be, she is acute and pretends to be, and so do I. I have more than one intention. I want to make sure she harms me in no way, but I do not want to be so frozen that I don't learn what I could by my own feeling. I say I don't trust her to know what she's doing and that is to say I don't trust her. I don't see anything I have to gain by knowing her now. That's when she waves 'acknowledgement' under my nose and I bite enough to find myself in the state I think I should look at elsewhere - the despair of those years, the emotional silence. "When I say despair I mean erosion, I mean deadly." I was crying as I said it. A discipline I had in those years, that I'm grieved not to have anymore. But risky she says. No that was the discipline I say, knowing she doesn't understand. There's a long silence. "Do you speak Dutch together?" She did that well I'm thinking. "No. But sometimes we understand it together. There are songs we know each in a different language. It's religion more than language that is the common culture." Then she goes on inconsequentially. She may have learnt what she was worried to know. But she still has a question. And it's one I know not to answer. "What I thought when I heard is that you won't have to fight about gender." Silence. "You're curious about my relation to Louie and I am not going to tell you." I was a friend to her, she says. I think of her as not having been a friend to me and not being able to help it, I say. And I don't think of myself as having been a friend to her. She learned about friendship when I was pregnant she says. Oh that (I don't say) - her watershed of noble manliness. This day: early, puffs of northern cloud I don't jump up to see. Waking later, a circuit of my own and then I remember there's the last of Rebecca's life on the floor next to me. The phone rings. I sit in the bath with it. Go back to Rebecca and finish it. "A service of thanksgiving" at St Martin-in-the-Fields. That writing is a thing one can still do in through the eighties. 'Til the eyes go. Doris Lessing her last new friend. Then Saïd jumpy and stammering with Wachtel, commenting on both Jam and Rebecca. Then Wallace Stegner slow dry and miked so his voice is closest to the ear, implying the prairie isn't London. Dorothy is a prairie writer. "Dorothy Richardson the American writer"! (said Fay Weldon). Some prairie of the far future. What I do know: "The circumstances life has handed me" have gone by unwritten, I've stopped worrying that I haven't written them. I haven't known them well enough, because I haven't written them. For instance Jam. I had a phenomenon there. When bulk of painful emotion is gone: release. When engram bank is exhausted: clear. For instance Louie and I in dry land. Would we know it better after a novel? But I wdn't be able to write from the beginning the way they do. I'd have to write backwards toward Jam. The kitchen table is at the window now. A day of the trees. [Scientology notes: loss of a sympathetic person - encysted despair - each loss taking away more remembering - returning - reliving
basic-basic
an engineering science recover all the force, pleasure, interest, persistence and tenacity in life engram not touched at source is a push button engram touched at source 7's held down by physical pain, emotion survival conduct along four dynamics inversion, self consciousness the dynamics have a certain potential aliveness creation of engrams keying them in restimulating them necessity level rises and surmounts them high survival activity, pleasure keeps them unrestimulated as opposed to pseudogoal of the engram energy not available as free feeling or for free action caught in a manic, prosurvival engram 'assists' engrams with greatest discharge life force augmented by success and pleasure creative and constructive work overcoming goals contemplating past goals reached contrasurvival engrams lie across the dynamics of basic purpose (clear purpose formed by two years old) misdirects dynamic, disperse prosurvival engram pretends it is the dynamic channel that grabs an ally computation, sympathy prosurvival engram run it out and discharge its emotion encysts free feeling, places in apathy body cannot fight its friends friends can be kept only by approximating the conditions restimulator for prosurvival engram means life restimulator for contrasurvival engram means death or being the ally sympathy prosurvival and health largest drain carries forward the injury, perceptions, speech, emotion, physical structure at the time growth processes bring body up to genetic blueprint get as early as possible as fast as possible and find basic-basic try just returning and finding it or else release painful emotion captured energy from prosurvival engram scout the person's life in reverie If process slows down to where early engrams are not reducing or are without emotion, look for allies. Find out if they were lost. Discharge sorrow out of the incidents. If charge holds look for an earlier moment. Loss is equivalent to some loss of the person. Reduction of that loss restores that much life. Pseudoally death loss or denial by these too. Sorrow charge. Slide back down its sorrow track. Primary moment of sorrow in the basic area. Moment when lost ally first became ally. The place to enter ally computation is start recent and go early. Late ally or pseudoally losses. Prosurvival chain. To release physical pain start early and work through late. Contrasurvival chain. Moments of loss suppress earlier engrams. Painful emotion keys in earlier incidents. Suppress a person to level of early engrams and so then they hold energy. Return encounters areas where person is outside own body. Go into someone else's viewpoint. Just go out. Recounting takes them back in. The engram begins the moment it happened. The end is the moment consciousness is turned on again. Just moments of it most severe. If the emotion can be contacted in 4 or 5 recountings each time starting at the beginning, making sure person is in contact with all perceptions. Recount until person is bored with it, all emotion gone. If after 4 or 5 the person is still exterior, not emotion, then emotion is suspended earlier or later, elsewhere. If physical pain engrams stop go to emotional pain and vice versa. 25 Lying in bed this morning talking to myself about moral intelligence. I meant by it, I said, knowing what's good for spirits. One's own and others. Rebecca West's atmosphere of being aware of it. The way I'm not certain about Luke, the way what I used to have of it came from Mary. The way I'm lost now, I think, because I don't have it, and don't know when I lost it, except it was in the last years with Jam. The way Dave Carter has it, or has it in a way I can see it. Now I'm crying about the way the air around him was full of finesse. I look up and see the pictures of Rowen's gestures. In her atmosphere I am saying I'm thinking of Jam in her grandiosity; my parents in their dull mopping-up where the goodbyes may go on for twenty years; Rob hideously too weak to fix the silliness of his talk. She and Dickens had a way I don't have, and Dave Carter does, and Louie does, of accommodating the minor characters. "Her tone was horribly greasy, and her phrasing always sounded like a stupid grown-up explaining something to a child." What can I guess about RW - her crimes - Cordelia is her crimes. Who are Rosamund and Richard Quinn. It's four people and the I is a twin. Rosamund is a strategist of the uncon. Cordelia is ego insofar as it has to be stupid. "There was nothing, absolutely nothing, in her performance but the desire to please." "Wait and if you are good enough you will play to audiences who really know what good music is, it will help you to have them listening to you." 26 Richard Quinn is where she lets herself praise herself. Richard Win. Her biographer women adore him, which means it works for them. Her father is political writing, her mother is music, Mary and Rose "everything that art can do." Rosamund and Richard Quinn and their mother "the work of the spirit." Substory. Dark sexual woman poisons her silly husband. As if the other couples in her story are her parents too. "Rose marries a composer, who nearly gives her what Rosamund gave her, but not quite." She couldn't finish the story of Rosamund because she doubted it. What does that blind Rose have to do with Hitler and Jews and good and evil and redemptive dying in Belsen. An evil double of good Richard Win. Rosamund marries/sacrifices herself to a man who is short and dishonest. "This fiend out of hell was a better composer than I am." "I thought of the person I loved as being the same as music too, and all my doubts seem doubts of music, too." "He is the negation of love, he is hatred, he is nonsense, given time he would uncreate the world. She had to win his soul from Satan." "Why did she leave Oliver? To go into a room with Jasperl. Why. You know you cannot help but know it is the ugliest thing for a woman to know, for such pollution spoils women to the destruction of their essence, they become rubbish. All this rank stuff, that made one remember stenches." Little men and tall men. "Oh my dear, I would like it if this dark water was flowing over me, if the meadows on each side were far above where I lay." Then Marpurgo knows what she wants. A string of men who don't fuck their wives but philander - her father, H.G., Beaverbrook, Henry in the end, Anthony presumably. Why they don't - because they've wanted to be their wives' children, or they've lost face so much that they are their children. Their wives can't be their children because they have to look after the kids. So she did without sex after her early 40s sometime, and wrote beautiful heroines etc. Conjuring as if she kept going by staggering. DR so otherwise.
27 A chair on the street, next to water, energetic rain. Detonations jumping on the pavement, on the cab of a red truck. When I look at Vito's across the street, Vito's with its lights on, the smell close up of a fresh crust. Four days devouring Rebecca, I thought of it shamefully as hiding out, but it's been an energy that takes me through the whole of a day, I put out my hand to the book when I'm still in bed and am there again sixteen hours later reading with sore eyes. What is it? (I'm looking for you as always on this street.) - It's being with the exercise of astonishing spirit capability, that's the fiction that can't be false, because of the skill it takes to fake it. It's imagining being that capability myself, which is true in several ways, ie to the extent that' I'm able to see through it and to the extent that I am taken by it. It's imagining I could or will do it myself, which is dangerous. It's being taken by my own form of what drives her - it's the pleasure of imagining times of day and year and place, seeing what I'd see of white swans in the dark, birds in a hedgerow in a mist on a morning in December, a boy standing in a doorway at night with moonlight on a chandelier behind him. Reading and dreaming. Just before I woke, walking toward a room where a very deep bass voice was holding a note. Interpreting and composing. What sort of composing it is. How it's done. The way reading has been a core of my life as it has been in no other life I know. The way Louie has done something like reading but out among people (which makes it composing), enough so she can imagine me reading. Seeing, perceiving, really is other than speaking, saying. Speaking faces perceiving across a space. But listening, reading, is having perception welling up in among the fibres of the net. And what's the fibre. But what do I want from all this! Dear larger one, it's as if I'm quite lost, it must be some tremendous anxiety to make me junk the way I am, is it Louie being gone?
Raw at the fingertips, scared of myself, that I'm not working, stuffing my mouth, will get fat and sick, that I'm isolating myself, don't know how to edit the video. Do you know what's happening?
Is it something?
I often lived in anxiety.
29 Then went and picked a fight with Rob so I could scorn to see him founder into his worst pathetic chinlessness and came home and this morning with a slight rattle on the window I have spent more hours perversely in a worse book. What am I hiding from. What do I think I can't face. The obvious things, usual things. I'm physically excited by someone it shames me to acknowledge. He's the only offer I have. This moment thinking of him I'm turned on all over. Touching his chest last night aching directly and keeping myself away from the sight of the lower half of his face, which appalls me, his brown teeth throwing themselves into a huddle escaping from the dreadful possibility of being present when someone challenges someone else with a difference of opinion boldly stated. Able bright Louie in all her energy so interesting a friend and so interestingly dangerous and so not able to touch off my womanly deep. (He says to the young girl in my story, You are a beautiful, beautiful, deep woman.) - At that point I go to my room and lie down with the thing and tell myself the story I tell these days. So muddled and troubled these days, such good sex I have with myself in that story - so soft and fast I have to stop moving it while the story goes on, to be able to get past the beginning. Today I thought I'd put it down plainly and publicly - father and daughter fighting day after day. One evening mother says, Don't you two know what's going on? David (that happened today), your daughter is very beautiful and you want her. To the daughter she says, Your body is new to you and you love your father and when you smell him in the house you go crazy. She has her hands on their shoulders, she's lucid and light. She says she's going away for three weeks, she has something of her own to do. The daughter goes embarrassed to her room. The mother and her husband in bed. He says, Do you really want me to fuck her? Wife says, It's you who want it and I think you should do it. She'll be frightened and embarrassed and this is how you should go about it. The husband is enflamed in truth, he and his wife fuck all night. Silver floods in her breasts and belly. She gets up early, stops at her daughter's room to say goodbye on the way to the airport. Sweetie, you're a beautiful, beautiful deep woman. You must say no to anyone whenever no is what you feel, but when it is yes you must say yes. Daughter flushes and nods. A sweet goodbye. That night daughter comes in late. Father is watching TV, she avoids him, goes to bed. Keeps avoiding him day after day. The last Thursday evening he comes into her room, sits on her bed, says, We don't have very much time sweetie, when we've gotten the beginning over, you'll be sorry you held it off. She doesn't say anything. He says meet me downtown after work tomorrow. We'll have dinner. She meets him in a new dress, red, short, off the shoulder, she looks beautiful. They play over dinner. Dance afterwards. He teaches her to jive. They walk home. On the doorstep he kisses her goodnight. A real kiss. She lets him do it again. They go into the house and turn on the TV. She lies back against his chest. Through the news he strokes her hair her arms her neck. She nestles. There's a movie. People kiss. She indicates with an angle of her head that she wants him to kiss her. He does, on and on. Every commercial break. He begins to add something to the kissing. His hands down the shoulders of her dress. She's nervous but he implicates her slowly enough so she keeps relaxing. Her skin is bliss. He rolls the dress down past her breasts and strokes the nipples as he kisses her. She arches her back. She keeps starting to resist and scrupulously remembering what she promised her mother. He instructs her: Admit what you want, be honest, show it to me. He's stroking her belly through her dress. Next commercial, next kiss, she timidly boldly draws up her knees and lets them fall apart. He slips his hand into her panties and holds her clit between thumb and forefinger and squeezes lightly. It is a hot bright pleasure she has never found herself, astounding. He gets up lays her on the cushions takes off her panties, kisses her nipples and fingerfucks her a little, just a touch. He says Give it to me, don't keep anything back. She unlocks her pelvis, feels his touch shooting up in gold flares into her womb. His finger all the way in. She's close to coming. She jumps up, tears off her dress, says Show it to me. He takes off his shirt and pants. She puts her mouth over his penis and holds the shaft, a light inexpert touch that's exquisitely sentient. The way it's round on her tongue, tight hard under the skin. She says, Give it to me, don't keep anything back, knowing it means something different when she says it to him. He takes the challenge. Comes down to the floor with her and turns her onto hands and knees with her cunt behind like a pony. Opens her lips with both hands so that she has to feel herself exposed as all and only cunt. Puts in three fingers, says If you don't trust me now it will tear, puts his penis to the hole and shoves. It's huge and hot. Feeling her come he comes. She falls forward. He wraps his arms around her. They lie quietly in the flicker of the test pattern. Then he carries her to bed. Again, she says. The night after, the mother comes home. When the daughter is in her bed and they in theirs and she is crying, he, having loved her mother, comes in and pushes up her nightgown and puts it in and strokes her face and kisses her and says, Sweetie you didn't think I would take it away, did you? You can have it whenever you want, I promise you, I promise you forever. She pulls the nightgown up past her breasts and puts her arms up over her head and smiles and cries and he fucks her and her mother comes in and sits on the bed and holds her hands and kisses them and smiles into her father's eyes and into hers. 30 I'm on a lake or sea in another country, looking around at so many kinds of birds, naming them. They're in lines of four or five, on the surface or flying close to it. 31 [With Joyce] "What do you want that you aren't standing up for?" The little voice-flash through the head, "I want Dave Carter. That's what it said, it's all I know." "Why don't you just go after him?" Etc. I say why, leaking tears (as now). She says it has gathered feeling from other times. Shame is what we need to talk about. "What's made you ashamed of wanting something? Babies don't come out like that." I feel a deep blank, this will never come through. She wants to know what I've got in my body. Pain between the eyebrows. She says press it. "How does that feel?" It's better. She presses it. A weaker hand than mine. I move it lower so it's against the bone ridge. She grasps the back of my head too. "Make a sound Ellie." I have it immediately, a wail that grows and breaks into sobs and goes on sobbing strangely without content, there's no self in it, I'm listening to it without feeling it as pain. She rubs my neck and the weak place in my upper back. (At that moment out the Calabria window, a brownhaired young woman pretty in an ordinary way, wearing closefitting dark turquoise skirt and shirt, walking in strong sun with a large yellow and green parrot looking wise on her palm.) Cooing and murmuring that I'm a deeply passionate person, I've been very brave - all that passion so carefully controlled. I'm watching the critical voice that's like a visible line of sound in the right side of my head. Controlled passion is what gives me my noble look, which might be the main thing I've achieved. Her softness here might be stopping her from going for what I can feel is still unfound. In the unwinding, she says what she says. "Don't tighten against it, you don't have to do anything. Do you feel yourself resisting? In your neck I think." Then she reads me a Rilke poem I can't take in, god before we're born tells us we will have to forget everything and take life seriously. I don't pretend not to resent it. But praise her elephant head belt-buckle that spreads wings across her womb in heavy silver. 1st August Twist movie last night. Empty Plaza Theatre on Broadway. Marveling the way I did in 1960 in La Glace - o dancing - the girls' legs - what we got from African bodies - not knowing how we got it, jiving at recess in a school very far from New York. 'A generation,' an age group given something they could recognize though they could never have invented it. Does anybody write about that ability to recognize a good thing, a bad thing? "We don't know enough about the conditions of our existence" - said Rebecca. The principles implied by those recognitions, the way they don't work though they are correct, held. They don't work because other people have given up on them because they don't work because other people ... Rebecca a sort of jitterbug of free feeling. Ron Mann dir 1993 Twist But what's Dorothy, I was reading Rebecca anxious for Dorothy. Louie saying she was happy reading Rebecca, as I was, elated. But I was elated reading Dorothy too, 29 in the bedroom in Burghley Road. And there is something tedious about Dorothy, her glows and radiances cast by something or other, but she's doing something Rebecca doesn't attempt, she's becoming a third in the relation of mind and world. It's what I said, phenomenology. Philosophy in the form of an account of a lived time. Rebecca is the whiz of metaphor. Something social. Dorothy asking what is it to be conscious. Rebecca is asking what is it to feel. Rebecca's embroiled in sex and Dorothy is not embroiled but poor and obscure where Rebecca dies a millionaire and packing St Martin-in-the-fields. Meaning that Rebecca doesn't scorn tricks, allows herself to be tricked, plunges through and offers an energy useful to those who aren't independent of social form. "You're seen as staggeringly independent" said Louie. Dorothy sends ether waves, strong and abundant but from the brow and to the brow. Her constituency is maybe only the few women who by some very deep catastrophe have learned to live alone in their foreheads. What does it mean that she can be read again and again. Her mechanisms aren't assimilated and they're local to the sentence. I'm seeing springs, wrapped clockwork. She doesn't invent said someone who preferred Virginia. Rebecca is brilliant at making situations. Rose goes out with Len to stoke the church stove, frozen December midnight. She's good at moonlight. Rose and Mary in the Chicago hotel room. Dorothy - I haven't got it yet - I feel she's further into the future, finer-spun, harder-working, would be sitting in different company in heaven. But no, it would be like me at the Council, Dorothy with Einstein and Dante sitting on the grass, Rebecca comes along and they perk up in a way she can't understand. Hegel, though, sticks to Dorothy. In fact Dorothy doesn't notice Goethe's wandering eye. And where's Virginia - sitting with Bloomsbury scrutinizing the crowd for talent worth inviting to tea. (And why aren't these women talking to each other, if rivalry is done with?) Ovid would like Rebecca. I saw that reading the story of Baucus and Philemon, where the meal and the house are so loved. They would be like Rebecca and Andrew telling about places they'd been. I sat down to discover what the video would be like if we intended to make money with it. - This evening, twilight at the garden. I've come to turn off the sprinklers and find people in the herb garden, Swedish farmers with a prairie look, grown daughters and a dog, on the benches facing east. Couples converging on both paths. Turning off a tap says I'm a stage manager here. Sit there on a rock, see the colors have changed, brown light is picking up the pinks whites oranges. Startling salvia patens turquoise blue. Some of the yellowing leaves shine out. The sky's pale at zenith, white pink blue in bands down to the eastern edge, round white moon a flat floating thing over Burnaby. I was going kayaking with John Rowley. We came to the ocean he intended, wind had been gathering waves, I'm looking for a plastic bag to put socks in, see a green wave eight feet high, crests foaming all around. I'm not going out on that I say. We drive (is the direction given?) east probably and I see much quieter water. boats like painted wood boxes, different sizes, a fishing fleet on the canal I think. Just looking curiously out the truck box window at those bright boxy unexpected shapes. The direction isn't given because there isn't a frame, what it is, is to the right. Waterways crowded and idiosyncratic. Other agreements today: that what happened on Friday says this grief is built on top of birth pain, that being happy in the back garden tonight, being able to stand and see it, is partly being away from Louie - that something was a reactivation. It's like a second summer crest, this holiday weekend's beautiful nights. Lammas. West Indian girls in Brighton Park strutting bums and breasts amazingly. With you still. Look for you when there's a footstep in the alley. I answer every knock in case it's you. I know a walk that isn't yours from half a block. I drove past your hydrangea fence that rustles in winter. You won't hear it rustle again. (Isn't this a dream from early in the garden? Or before that?) 2nd "No one would live with him in his early childhood, and keep it alive in him. He would leave it with her, without knowing he had left it." What would a Dorothy film be like. A film about reading. These random times must be times when I renew my variety. The way you would speak to be making a contact, not caring what you say, visibly present behind these acknowledged pretexts - that's Dorothy's way of saying it. Your beautiful self is there facing me and you are speaking and I am speaking and what we are actually doing is standing and smiling at each other in silence, and I'm admiring the way you know how to do that and know you are doing it. The moment when I can't remember your voice hasn't come yet. Then I cry, then I stop crying, then I go out. "Starlings will imitate the sound of doors opening, feet scuffling, grain being poured." [Opposite: 100,000 years on the same terrain. We lost their long-evolved knowledge of plants, weather, animals. Processes from geometry in which one does not think in terms of "this equals that" as we do in equational logic, but instead "this is similar to that in the same way that something is similar to something else." The things we see in space are like the conscious mind. What is in between them, the so-called empty space, is the unconscious. Everything has a creative interiority. Forms of the earth are the memory of the creation of that earth. If we disrupt them we can't remember. Any disturbance of the earth obliterates understanding of the nature of reality. 100,000 years of Aborigines in Australia. A system of enclosed places Boundary ideas and having to rise up out of them Place is also a subtle energetic milieu, plants and animals of the place embody its characteristics He knows that choosing to love something means losing something else A human who chose to live for a time in the underwater path of a spirit, with no responsibility but to see Suddenly within the stillness there is a breathing that isn't mine or any other human's. It's a tranquil breathing, like the sea in its ebb and flow. Faint at first, it grows in intensity and volume; it's all around me, permeating the room. Then it is within me, breathing me. My perception of space and time alters and I am incapable of reasoning or analytic thought. If I resist, god will keep trying, and will reassure me through impulses of love and tenderness. If I accept, fear and doubt evaporate and I become unified in the all-encompassing moment. A monastery garden is a metaphor for contemplation, a labour of the present moment which is where we can be found. [- No memory of who this is - de Chardin in Le milieu divin?] 4th Driving back from the airport yesterday, a taxidriver with forearm baking in the windowsill, slipping through the lane changes with hand signals, what is it I so much like about the left turn's indolent reach of arm out into common space. It's always an occasion, it says how much it's pleasing me to feel the car as my body carrying these people in my easy will through this California crest of freeway summer. And last night on the steep grass bank opposite Louie's building, snug, holding her round, with a tree over us defoliated to small few leaves, thin spring branches showing through to dark sky simple with two bright stars and one white cloud. The birch on the corner not simple, layers and flounces and billows of small leaves astir, a cumulus rising out of sight. So peaceful and satisfied an hour. Louie grieving and fretting and I know to hold her snug and love the night. Sitting on the toilet in Leon Trotsky's house she saw a square of light and leaves on the floor and knew what it would be to live there and imagined writing, page after page, "I miss you," like lines at school. - Say to myself about the video: I am much earlier on with it than I thought. The preliminary work has to be done now. I have to write and read, do editing exercises. We have to make a demo tape for the Canada Council and write up an application. I have to write personally. Is it going to be ecofeminist discourse? Which except for [Susan] Griffin is dull pious stuff like Prairie Bible Institute conferences. The true drivenness as I knew it - should I try to recall it? 5th Where we go today. Conflict. Sex and shame. Shame she says always superego. Superego always comes from outside. "Who was the intellectual in your family? Your mother?" "In a way. It's one kind of conflict with Michael and Rob and a different one with Louie, I'm not ashamed of Louie." "That one is love and - hate?" "Yes." "In what circumstances do you hate her?" "When she tries to take men away from me and when she's invasive." "So it's competition and possession." "Yes. But you know I think I gave up on my father so early I didn't compete for him. I said this man doesn't love me I'm not going to compete for him. I was like that with Dave at school." "You won't compete because you don't want to lose." "Yes. It's true my mother keeps me away from my father but it's complicated by the way he really is so creepy." "Unfortunately it's not so simple" she says. "I have thought of going up to Abbotsford and getting to know him." The beginning of the hour, edginess went away when I opened my legs and showed the stain and she understood I was needing to brag. Question on the table (as she goes away for 6 weeks): what is the urgency of the competition with my mother, what does it cost me to try to win it, what emotion is there to find in it, what is her part in it. - You defeated me then and I am defeating you now. 10th Locked up anxiously with Louie again. Since Joyce five days ago, lost again, reading, wrangling. I'm frightened now of alternating and was trying to be nice but secretively bored. Thinking of some common thing to say, going off into it hopefully, washed out by the insipidity. Really only want to talk to her about him. Want to grieve and praise him the way I would be able to alone. Want her company in it, because it's where my interest is. Panic-struck about video and money. 11 Rowen on the phone. I say I miss you a lot, I'm glad you're coming into town. He says with what seems to be cynical contempt, That's very thoughtful of you. Luke leaving on the 21st. I'm sunk in grief, worry. Crumpled. I looked in the journals 1985-89 for garden stories. There were also stories about: Rowen, Michael, Laiwan, Jam, Robert. Meetings with Joyce. Dreams. Buddhist psychology. Film. Pagan psychology, Orpheus. The sense of lines of interest I work intensely but don't have available at other times. I don't round them up. Think of them as capabilities not topics. Oh I'm seeming piles of rubble, struck down in my piles of rubble. Eight years that let me start again, energy, charm. Now what, what to do for money, what to do to bring haphazard work to some use, what to do to like myself. I'm panicked in what feels like collapse. What is it? The supports I didn't deserve taken away, maybe. 12th Car to Koo's to have the turn signals fixed. There's the black Ford truck with tool box and Ontario plates, hood up in Koo's yard. Frightens me. Louie and I set out in evening traffic on the Trans-Canada, to Sumas and the border. Evening light on the table-top surface of fields of corn. We drive into woods and darkness together, Baker not visible anymore, hairpin curves rising fast, and then Louie says, Pull over for a minute, look over your shoulder, and there she is, her giant face very near. The place we find to sleep is a wide level platform facing the right direction, northeast. A mealy sky, in which through the night the thick-sprinkled band of the galactic horizon rotates. Fireballs like torches thrown thick and brief. Wake when the sky is lit just enough to show the sharp ridges of surrounding peaks seeming all the same distance and a continuous line, and this side of it another ring, seeming also to be at one distance, of single firs at intervals, sharply cut also, uniformly black and laid against the mountain's line so that the peak of a tree coincides sometimes with a peak sometimes with a trough. Three colors only, yellow, black, powdered dark grey. One more if I count the owl's call. I've wasted a lot of time. It's a task I have no choice about, I have to do it. Thinking this sentence, that Louie recognized, is the first sentence of something: What happens to a spirit abandoned so young? Writing about that, if I could, would be making the frame in which I could understand people and they me. 14 People like a book for more than one reason - because it helps them see something clearly or it helps them go on seeing something unclearly. Not knowing what people are like, or how they are together. Social ruin, intelligence, giftedness, isolation, pride. Not eating to control feeling. Writing to present a beautiful person. This is a kind of sobriety. Only this work makes me able to incorporate the other sorts of work - the chiropractor who said the damage was all over. 16 Yesterday the work I did with Louie. She reads me her counting piece. We say she must have a reading. Renee will give her one. I fall into terror. At Renee's she will be in their territory, they will like her work, see her and want her and offer to make her an artist. I'll be unable to move. She is able to say, When were you unable to move? They knew how to paralyze me. When there were two. Now you have to ask, What do you see? Where are you? I see my leg. I'm in a crib. I see the living room beyond the bars. There is something over there, it's like anger, an area of fury. It makes me think of my father when the truck wouldn't start. He was like an animal, snarling, growling. He would be foaming. I see fangs. I say Ich kann nicht gehen. Ich kann nicht gehen. She's digging around my spine. I don't see more but there is something I know about my father's anger. My mother said he was angry because he thought I was fooling around but what I see is that he was angry because he understood instantly. He knew about polio. He saw the catastrophe. He saw that he was going to have to drag a crippled child around in the world, his childhood humiliation would never end. What I see with this is the connection between not being able to move my leg and something about men. He wasn't able to be my father and help me with it. He abandoned me at that moment. And she abandons me too by refusing to know what was happening. He won't take emotional responsibility for weakness, she won't take responsibility for knowing bad things. I said to Luke, Therapy is finding a friend for that core of goodness. Tears in my eyes.
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