| aphrodite's garden volume 17 part 4 - 1993 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
16 August 1993 continuted [Opposite: I can't move my right leg. Everything that's happening now is happening on my right. There is my round leg that I can't move. There are the bars of a crib and beyond them the unseen shapes of furniture in a small living room. I'm awake before my parents. Puzzled that I can see my leg and not move it. I'm not frightened. I hear my parents in the next room. They're getting up. I'm excited. I jump up - no, I don't jump up. I collapse back onto the bed. My father strides through the room in his long underwear. He's going to make fire in the kitchen. He hasn't looked at me. My mother comes toward me smiling. I say informationally Mama ich kann nicht gehen. She is a woman who doesn't believe bad things before she has to. She is still on her way toward the crib smiling. He calculates bad things like lightning. The trip to town. The truck broken down. Ellie and Mary walking to La Glace. Next day the child is sick, fever and a sore neck. He knows what it means, and he sees not only backward but forward to himself, his handsome family, walking into church trailing a crippled child, his humiliated childhood not left behind but visible with him everywhere like a dragged leg. He's furious. He is a horizontal howl of rage pouring toward me through the bars of the crib, he's a beast's mouth snarling, barred, foaming. I can't move my leg and my father is screaming hatred. He is disowning me. My mother picks me up out of the crib, hugs me against her warm front, disowning knowledge. Says, Don't fool us Ellie. Sets me down on the floor. I fall against the couch. She is misunderstanding both him and me because there is one thing she knows she has to do, which is bring her voice down heavily over a fear, like a hand brought over a child's mouth in a marsh in Russia, while Menshevik bandits slash at the grass three feet from her head. I can't move my leg. My father abandons me to save his pride, which saves him from shame which would make him helpless. My mother abandons me to save her self control which saves her from fear that could kill her in a second. - I haven't been able to write my story because I haven't understood that this is the question I should ask: what happens to a spirit abandoned so young? Lifted out of everything it knows, taken away. There is nothing I can find by remembering. I feel helpless to find anything to say about it. But maybe there is something I can infer. The spirit I am, writing, is the spirit structured by that abandonment. It sets out, is halted in fear, inability. Sets out again, but alone, no longer what it was, so that it is no longer a person (made of Mamalie, Papalie, Opalie, Omalie, Bingo, the hidden baby, the house, the yard) but has become a spirit. Something that travels and talks to itself, alive but invisible and unattached. So that, when this spirit returns to the place where it had been a person, it is a spirit in the place of a person. In January of 1948, before my third birthday, I had polio and was sent away to a hospital in the city. I didn't see my family or anyone else I knew for seven months. Then I was brought home and was again my parents' child in a house on a yard. I was walking again, but with a brace on my right leg. Later I would walk without the brace, but I limped and had a thin leg. The fact that I had become a spirit rather than a person was so unnoticed that I myself did not know it. My parents and the others at church, in La Glace, later at school, thought a bad thing had happened to me which made me a partly ruined person, a socially ruined person maybe, a person whose degree of social ruin was still uncertain. My parents did not see that I had become a spirit because they were needing to watch something else: how other people were taking me. This confused me in more than one way. It taught me to ignore the facts of my actual physical damage, so that I learnt to manage it only in an averted, unconscious way. I never thought it out. I ignored it because I wanted other people to ignore it. I was also confused about my actual difference from other people. I thought it was that I was socially ruined and they were not. This was often their understanding too, and it made bad feelings on both sides, anger on mine, guilt on theirs. Bad feeling of this sort was hard to bear, and I often didn't want to bear it, so I learned very little about the people I knew. Because I did not know how they felt or thought or regarded each other, I did not know how to think of the increasing differences between my life and theirs. I did not know what belonged to social exclusion, what to intelligence or giftedness, what to pride and anger, and what to the difference of experience that came from these things. This was an important confusion because it meant I could not be confident of my gifts - I could not know whether I was strong or weak and so I often could not tell real social derogation from envy and jealousy. Under these confusions was the more important difference, the fact of a catastrophe built into my emotional foundation. A fact of structure and not experience, and so a fact that can't be recovered as experience.] Evening. I phone her. She says she's confused. She feels she's in danger. I have it to track her. "What color is your danger?" "Red." "Where is it?" "To the left, toward the sky." "Use your magic arm to touch it, what does it feel like?" "Sharp and round, standing up." "Use your arm to bring it closer to you." "It's a long way away." She's crying. "It's in my heart." That I said she was a brat. "Who used to say you're a brat?" "My brothers." "What does it mean?" "Spoiled brat. My parents give me more." "What does it mean to have more? Imagine it's true that you have something they need but they haven't got." "But it costs me a lot." "Imagine it doesn't cost you anything. This is just a thought experiment. What's it like?" I have something in mind but it may be something else she finds. "What if being in pain is a way to forestall some demand of guilt or pity or anger?" "Do you mean imagine I have a right to have what I have without the pain?" "Yuh, alright. Do you see how it goes back to the beginning of this?" "I don't see how it goes back to my asking how you were with me being like that." "No not that. Just from what it is about being called a brat." "What happens is true but it doesn't touch something else that I was feeling originally. The danger. That comes from what I was feeling about being so open. I need you to be totally honest." "If you were being totally honest what would you be saying?" "Can you do that?!" "You don't have to tell me, just notice what it said." [I continue] "I have often been totally honest in the way you mean and it doesn't take. I don't mean about men. In the other way too. That it [sex] isn't for me what it is for you, when I'm away from you that isn't what I miss, that isn't what I think of. At the same time it's there in some way." "Do you think the way you're working with Joyce will change that?" "Are you wanting to know an outcome rather than a process?" She wants to know whether I'm being patient with her to make up for not wanting to make love with her. Do I feel it yes. Do I regret it yes. Do I want to make reparation yes and my feelings are hurt that you think there's something wrong with that. Winnicott says the baby's knowing it has hurt the mother and wanting to make reparation are a good part of their connection. 17 Brother - it was dark at five when I got up and drove to your house. There were new lane stripes white on black, protected by orange cones saying don't cross the line. Your window was a black square of open air. I knew where your head was sleeping next to it. I wasn't certain that truck was yours, the canopy you've bought for traveling disguises it. I looked into the side window and saw your toolbox, and came around and put my envelope under the wiper. Star chips in the windshield. And drove home and went back to sleep. It's your thesis defense today. Once I left you a rock in an interdepartmental envelope. It said: I'd like to give you the living heart of what I am feeling for you all the time, but I am giving you instead what you might like to have, a green stone scribed with lines, shaped like a heart, the weight of my restraint. Today, to say I'm not abandoning you though I am going on without you, it is a small greybrown object you found for yourself in my house. Looks like a rock, looks like a little stone, but oh is light, is a light shell holding a live seed. I love you from the core. I saw you, I know you. I sight you from the center of my forehead. You are the one for me. That's all. 'Bye. 18 Yesterday: Dr Sylvia twists a little polyp off my cervix, I meet Kenneth Sallit at the garden, am rearranging beds in the herb garden, make supper for Luke and go to his goodbye party in a club on Water Street. Lie at night aching in my joints. It's the small end of autumn that'll widen as it goes. Luke showing a young face saying "I'm so pleased all these people like me enough to come and say goodbye to me." His international gathering. - What it's like considering Kenneth. What I am is curious. He shows up early and without hat revealing that he does have hair. Ruddy. I say I want to just finish this edge. He says he'll go read. It's a fearless mutually steady exchange, I notice. I go fetch him from my round hill where he's lying with his bare feet up on the bench. His weapon of destruction lying by his side. He's reading Conrad, Mirror of the sea, for a quotation he saw in German on the side of a monument in Bremen. A piety that remembers simple men and their ships that are gone. I'm guessing it's a key. Lost father he searches for in the engine room of an unlucky fishing boat. My curiosity is about the sort of man he is, old fashioned and displaced, carrying some mind of a Scottish town, wife and children and a shipping business. Handing him herbs, accidentally touching his hand, finding it very hot. A reader he says, not a writer, though he talks as if he is writing all the time. And in relation to me, is simple enough to think he will attract me by manly talk. I oddly don't resent it, because I am peering through it to see what I can find about his sort of man's life and being and also because he is presenting himself to me in so unhedged and responsible a way, like someone who thinks his intentions are honorable. I look at him thoroughly to discover his qualities - mashed hands of harsh labour with machines, a chest showing slight in his coverall, white fuzz like a tuft of frost in his ear. Louie's black baseball cap with jewels and studs, red green blue purple flashing messages from the stars. She loads me on her back and staggers up the path and I singing like a drunk We're mar-ching to Zi-on. Maryla laughing behind, coming from seeing the garden. I dream Rob's with Leslie, I throw insult and slop at his head but come back in the morning to talk to the lost young woman living in the room this side of the place where he is with her. 20th Tracking the sore ankle two nights ago. Occurs to me it's at a scar and might be memory. I lie down with my back flat and feel into it. Very sore. Pain moves around the foot to other scars, the one on the left side, one on the back. I don't remember the order but it goes also to outside of the hip socket, inside of hip socket, knee and especially shin, which hurt so much I had to talk to myself to stay with it - telling myself it will change, it will move away. Two more places, visits the spot in my midback briefly, and the second try, during the night when I wake from pain, gets as far as the left shoulder. The last place before (as I was thinking of it) it exited, a ring around the head. Sometimes between shifts I drift into a little dream. Is there anything else I know about it. First time quite active. What does it mean if a pain isn't local. - A horse I'm going to have to fight, a horse that is going to try to throw me at first. I know I'll last easily. A showy beginning. Then we're together like friends and lovers. My horse can waltz and we do. But it doesn't like passing through this church - religious junk and narrow aisles. Last week a ditch between La Glace and Valhalla, near Sieburt's probably, where I'm sitting picking flowers with my sister in a beautiful clear yellow light - a stalk of small fine yellow flowers like toadflax maybe - mainly the exquisite clarity of the outlines of the flower in my hand, the thin clear happy light. Louie and I leave my car for another older car in a different lot. I'm annoyed with her. It's a turquoise car, big American thing. A man gets in with us, it's his. We sit there. He'll drive. Hair on his smooth bald head in small round tufts emerging like bristles on a toothbrush. This after what I wrote on the 16th. It might mean simple-minded. That writing is. A swimming pool entered from above through holes in the street, swimming pool I've visited before, the one with banks tiers terraces of blue water. I've missed the stop on the trolley, ride it back to the top of the little street and start again. Driver says I have to pay again. This one is related to the horse dream, which also was related to looking down onto a map showing a packhorse trail along the rim of a canyon. Oh the many places seen in dreams. Luke's print of the slide Arnold took in the Gower Street bed and breakfast [Academy Hotel] - Luke at twenty two makes an image of me at twenty four to take with him on his journey into the rest of his life. What a dewy woman, look at her neck and her lips, the way her head balances on the top of her spine without a single wire holding it in place. After waking at night and tracking pain again though sleepy and fuzzy a small dream, a page of journal writing and something like an understanding that the tracking work and the journal work together are the writing I need to be doing. Published, light, going into short lines with hyphens, my new lyric. - While all the benefits of a temporary division of labour must be maintained, it is high time to claim those of the integration of labour ... we maintain that the ideal of society - that is, the state towards which society is already marching - is a society of integrated labour; a society where each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work; where each able-bodied human being is a worker; and where each worker works both in the field and the industrial workshop, where each aggregation of individuals, large enough to dispose of a certain variety of natural resources - it may be a nation, or rather a region - produces and itself consumes most of its own agricultural and manufactured produce. Peter Kropotkin 1974 Fields, Factories and Workshops of Tomorrow Harper [Opposite reading summary from journals:
21st, Saturday Luke smiling back from the automatic door at International Departures. Rowen and I standing by the car. On the way there, Rowen with his head down on the front seat falling asleep, Luke behind me a man feeling a child's journeys. I'm sore he's running out on his department store cards for the sake of new clothes. Put my hand back over my head and he holds it. A pleasant large warm hand. Slow traffic up Granville, I can drive with one hand. Then I can talk a bit. Your core of goodness is your child and you have to be the parent and look after it, whether or not your real parents did. - "It's your eyes. They're trouble, I feel as if I should draw a line on the ground. And stay behind it." [Ken on the phone] "You can do that if you want to." 22nd "This week people saying goodbye and turning their backs on me" Luke says in the car. Dressed in linen pants and a black golf tee. Suitcase full of style that looks like money. (David lucid and honest in rags, I'm thinking.) What Luke is like - now he's gone can I think about him. The impatient way he moves around not answering remarks, like Ed, don't bother me with your stupidities. The sweet kiddish smile he knows will erase his crimes - that's mine. He used it on me over his shoulder at the airport but I knew what he was doing. The sawed-off look of the back of his head, that was there when he was a baby. The way in the last month there was always washing in the tub. The consciousness directed onto his clothes, the way his room was his portrait in clothes, CDs, grooming stuff, books that are mementos not a working life. Oh. Am I wrong to think sleazing department stores damages the fierce lucid kid he was. "He's a gambler says Michael, "he is Roy and not Roy. He's you too in some way." Overcast. The middle maple with orange leaves. What to think about K who looks like a Nick not a Kenneth. I like the way he can see I'm dangerous and he keeps coming. What I'm liking to imagine is that I could try myself out with a grown man, not one of my girlboys, someone who does know about setting keel to the wave. Knowing also the blanks there are in man men. What's warm goofiness in Rob would be - what - manly obstinacy - in him. I like that he adventures to many ports and sits there reading. "You're a very attractive woman!" he says, indignant as well as flattering. Flattering certainly, adventurers have to know how to make quick hits. Gaps and terrors in him, also a long worried kind of study I know, serious interested conversation with the solitary knowledge of his own long story which is all he carries and earns. A house in Labrador, with a rowan growing from a crack in the rock. Carding machines that are frames with removable teasel heads. Shetlands, Ayrshire, Hull. Show chrysanthemums. A gentleman whose kind has gone forever, ex-army, a life of service. (Catherine's gentleness.) The rapid excitable rumble of his talk when he's nervous, setting himself forward not daring to listen in. 23 Louie doing what she does - talking to me about Luke so I feel my event instead of not feeling it. Telling her about looking into his papers and seeing his desperation. $850 on one card, $550 on another, job search exercises, I would be a valuable employee because I am cheerful, competent, friendly, I get on well with people. Oh Luke. That job search a kind of humiliation that has made him run in rich boy clothes to fantasy holidays and Roy's offer of easier money. 24th Oh look at the clouds crochet, curdle, set, judder, stretch, like shaken sediment and stretched fibre, clean white and blue in the open, shapes never seen, that say nothing is anything in particular. Mary yesterday a looser face, weak blue eyes staring enlarged behind lenses, standing with her pot forward under stained linen. Large lower lip and thin upper, twisting into grimaces. Fuzzy head. Little and blank in the park standing with her tail forward staring upwind. Rowen somewhere around. I'm standing in line for Church's chicken, taking up something to do with the two of them. In the afternoon, Rowen and Jim and the other blond kid in the sand at the garden, pant legs rolled up, wind and sun as if they're at the beach, bricks, sand and water. They're intensely happy. Mary Lewis comes by with her big-headed son, lies down on the slope of the grassy hill, 6'2, army boots and a dress, white sunhat and bright bush of brown hair, beautiful huge English girl lying with her big hip high and round against the hill. Early autumn, yellow in the light, a lower angle, and this wind turning the coats of the poplars. A sublime quietness in the garden grounds. Sit. Louie weeds her plot. Mary wanders. She wants to be loved, embraced, comforted, but I will not do it. For reasons I don't understand, I have a horror of her and am sticking in it, not growing out of it. Louie works under the white hat with her hair down, pretty. On the bench watching the kids, I sit up against her side. She is reading their characters and I am not. I'm wanting to be told how smart I was to make this space that works so well - trough, benches, sand, cement gutter, hill, to be here gathering these people in this light and wind with plant colors in all directions. Jim's dad, that idiotic man, talking to Mary Lewis, then Michael in straw hat and sunglasses, whiskers, lip beautiful as ever, kind eye corners for hungry Mary. The herb garden up there past the vine walk that is a tunnel for the first time this year has Graham Thomas in a second flush, yellow centres so intense they are funnels up out of points of energy, leaves light yellow-green so the whole bush stands forward in the yellow light. Stands forward on the front edge of its bed. Limpid warm water in the tank. Heat in the gravel path streaming up into the wind. Hot granite curb for sitting and seeing the poplars shipping wind down past the bees. Could I ever leave this project? Not saying the danger at the end of this week, the stranger who travels, reads, works with mashed broad hands, lives knowable and unknowable in a man's life. One danger I know, the turn where inner freedom is found to be gone. I felt it yesterday and can't remember it at this moment - it was like feeling a glamour. What freedom is like is saying maybe I'll see him maybe I won't, what glamour is like is saying maybe he wants me. 25 Louie and Mrs Kumar. Rowen and Michael last night walking away up the alley under Koo's light, same clown shorts, same thin calves, Rowen declaring in his confident way "You can see my grandma couldn't send it in the mail," carrying his big truck. This is my question today: other people keep attachments going year after year, why don't I. Years of letters I haven't answered. Don't phone anyone but the current lover. Reply that said itself: identity. With them it's identity and used to be with me. Now there's nothing it would give me to write Olivia, etc. 27 The stranger at the end of the week - I was clamping my knees under the table and overtop of it talking tough to put him off if possible. "You can't expect men to be like women youknow, they only pretend to be politically correct to get into your pants." He said. "And what do you want once you get there?" It was business-like checking out. A good answer then would possibly have got him in. But he said "Often that's all I want," as if I were asking about love prospects - which all along I also was - but as if love prospects would be all I'd be after. His answer told me he's stupid about what he'd want to do in my or any pants and would have no idea whose pants he was in. Mainly his checking out had to do with money and class - am I working? Am I getting paid? Am I mercenary? At the last possible moment, so I'd be left with it, he asks whether I hurt my foot, whether I'm very hampered by it. And when, standing at my gate, blanking, I say "'Bye," he says, nastily I think, in a kind voice, "You can phone me." I am confused by the tone and don't say no. No, what I'm confused by is the unspeakable question about whether what I've just told him about polio has switched him. And that is my large confusion, not a confusion about him. So in that large confusion I wobble, I say "Sure" in a way that might be saying no, but then, thinking I'm lying and meaning to say no more definitely, I say "Maybe." Crossing the tracks by the sugar factory, talking about studios, he was saying he takes 'portraits' of people, and I was being dubious about whether he could see anyone well enough for that. He clarified: he takes pictures of women "exploring the line between nakedness and eroticism." Then I went flat with refusal - understood what's flat about refusal - something about stepping over the rails - like having thrown him flat and stepped over him - someone so remote from touch he has to try to see it to be with it at all. Teaching Inuit children, in danger of being seen as a squaw man. What's a squaw man? Someone who marries a native woman. Knocked flat outside a bar in Grande Prairie when he defended his native girlfriend. He was working on a seismic crew, early eighties when I was there too. And when they landed on the moon he was in Kentish Town and I in Crouch End. And he's negotiating a Landrover, though not green. Why these useless bits of David MacAra - as if my wish cast out into the waves brings up whatever matches it can. A beautiful David; a Scot without a Landrover. What else do I have to say before he's processed. I've been singing Cryin' time since I woke, as if I'm, or something is, disappointed. Yeah. His stories. (He said I hadn't said anything - that was sitting on the rocks past the Rogers gate - I said, "There is something I can tell you. Sometimes when people don't tell about themselves it's because they think they won't be heard well enough to make it worth bothering" - and tho' I did tell some, it was not once worth having bothered.) "Did you ever look for your father?" I say, knowing that's where the quick is. And I saw it too, a flash of red up over his face. He went to the Fair Isles once when he was twenty-three or so, asked a few questions, was directed to an old woman who left a message that he should call in on his way to the ferry. Showed him photographs and gave him potted meat sandwiches. Said, with her head to the side, "The man yee'r looking for is not here." He was too well brought up to insist, or too much the bastard to feel he had a right. His mother says, many times over, she was raped on a pile of sacks in a garage. She traveled back, a long journey in those days, to speak to the man's mother. "Mrs Lawson, I have to tell you ...." "It can't have been my boy, he's engaged," crooned in the Scotswoman's way. And so she went away again. And Ken years later making the same trip in the same way and telling her and regretting it in relation to the Englishman who had no part of it but had tried to be a father and had been a father - though not a deep sea fisherman - "well-respected, well-dressed and well thought of." I'm looking at what I suppose is also his father's face, eyes close together, very blue, narrow upper lip, fine fair hair, sharp nose. A keen face, what they call boyish, carried as a type through Labrador, the High Arctic, Iceland, all the places he's been a good-looking Englishman. Oh, a lost man. Twitching. Screwing up his eyes, jerking his really stiff upper lip that carries fine line scars. What's that one? A dog opened its jaws and closed them on a seven-year-old's face. He was a child who'd been his mother's ruin, and is ruined. "One works with it, one works around it." I could see his ruin and my own with it. And this: as we were leaving my house, I was looking at the cars on Pender to guess which was his, I slid on catshit - zip - thinking here's catshit again, what does it mean. - The crow is standing on top of the tree eating an orange corn cob. Its eye is very black. It's noticing us and the corn in its beak equally. It has no thought of who will end in the stomach, us or the corn. It is the whole everything it is eating. It is the whole everything that will be in its stomach. It makes us part of the satisfaction of nourishment. If you are scared of losing the journal you are scared that when you have eaten the corn your stomach will be empty. I think that where there is fear there is pain and work and freedom. Once you experience 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. And 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." Imagine what would make you mind growing older less than you do now Could you hate it less if it comes with gain in capacity? [Louie's trance book]
Why I'm not attached: is like amnesia, my feeling for people used to come back. Now it's as if for instance my mother is erased. I can see her grey with shock about Rowen, shuddering with rage that I'd burnt my picture. I have that feeling instead, her thwarted will. 28th An anguish - my boy is really gone, I want to say - without saying goodbye. I am still crying after you, sitting in Calabria crying that you didn't leave me a pebble somewhere, to say you felt it when you left me. I haven't left you, I'm here in your working café blowing my nose. I want you living in me, I want to be the heart I am with you. Could I say the one I love is there, no use to look further, With everyone else I live outside that hope, they are only what they are. Could I marry you unilaterally? If I married a spirit would I live well after fifty? Or: I am already married to a spirit. - Afternoon. How did I set that up. Hanging out in front of La Quena. Looks like he wants to turn around and run. Looks good, I'm flirting again. Sleakit, yes, dodgey. I crack up laughing at him to get even for, whatever, his not being interested enough. Because I'm liking looking at this lively highcolored wedge of face. He wants away. 'Bye. Going off thinking that was not so bad, it would work if he enjoyed it when I'm rough. There's a kind of attraction that's like that, that I haven't taken myself up on. Maybe that's how I could do it with man men - sharpish. Now it's singing this - Yet in my --- shall I see god. Flesh. 29 Now I'm fighting with him. I'm saying how is it you are brave enough to work on a deck smashed by icy waves and smart enough to keep an engine going with bits of wire and neither smart nor brave enough to learn to listen to a woman when she talks. What do you think would enter you? What's worse than death or maiming? Q: What could I get from meetings with people I'm not intimate with? What could I be with them? 30 I say, David has gone from my life. Immediate tears are sparking in my eyes. As if I'm saying, How can I live without him, how can I love my own life if he has finally completely gone away out of it. It is simple heartbreak. And at the same time I'm saying, can any of that be true? So unlikely. Who can he have been to draw such heart in me? What can I make of what I am? Is there something I can decide that would make me congruent with my feeling for him? As if I could say, I'm married, my husband doesn't live with me but I am faithful to him. Would that feel right? I saw what I wanted. I couldn't have it. No use trying elsewhere, that was it. Then would my relations with other people be true? You are not the one, what can I do with you? Is that it? Would it make me steady on my centre, would it be some fantastic warp in my keel? Is it only a description of what is already true, that I am married to a fantasy? "This is as married as I'll ever be." No end of tears. Leaking this morning in the ABC family restaurant on the way to Dave Sturdee's defense. Felt a tear drop under my arm, inside the red teeshirt. 31st We take Maryla to the airport. Maryla has a glimmer and kisses me on the mouth. A laugher. Fuckk off andd diey, an accent with final consonants loaded. She looks me in the eye and improvises a redneck grandmother. It's magic to me. Louie is a pretty kid, compared. I drive taxi in the black muscle shirt. Under a grove on Queen Elizabeth slope, after, confessing crying about David, looking up at the branches lined with brownpaper blossoms. She stays sane. We go to the movies. I bring her home to sleep. This morning we sit together in the Aircare wait line. She looks at my slides. This is a holy slide. She says the right thing. Like knowing after a few paragraphs that Joann Greenberg is writing like Le Guin with less patience. I wake shocked from a dream that has me looking for her, looking for them, in a house with a party of exotic women and Commercial Ave young men. Is she upstairs in our room? T sitting on a desk. What are you doing here? Laconic: It takes a lot, looking after you. Louie out from under the bed, a small young woman with her. I hold her by the ankles, slam her against the wall. You've done it! You've done it! You've gone! You've done it! Ray's question about metaphor. A line of poetry functioning as code. Metaphor as such doesn't function but it is a nonliteral (stipulated) use of words. "Dog in the manger," "once in a blue moon." A metaphor referring to a French fable nobody knows, it would be like a dead metaphor, ie item of lexicon. You could say he's an Iago - that would be a live metaphor referring to a story people do know. You'd have to think it through: black, unreasonably jealous. A twist in his keel. She might have got it, or not. She asks, What do you mean? I find out too. The livest metaphors would be when you say it, the other person sees it, makes a jump. You have a sense of context that's common enough. That's analogy. So what is the question about metaphor. It's this: how do words work, and do some work differently. What's the relation between language and knowing: the experience of knowing and the structure of knowing. Some use of language is more perceptual and less rote and yet even where it's more perceptual there is the question of aspect. "A twist in his keel." I see it but seeing it doesn't tell me it would steer badly and you'd have to keep correcting deliberately. Yet I have a glimmer before I spell out the analogy. This is Witt[genstein]. VW sits writing, sees something, writes it, feels it, understands it maybe later. May not be sure till others accept it. It has informed her, drawn her attention. That and that, something. It's how can there be resemblance across modalities? 2nd September What is it now - a crazy woman. I'm on Commercial thinking of Dave and in the next thought, and waking, and falling asleep, I'm in suspense about K, he isn't going to call again is he, the way he said "You can call me" in a compassionate voice, what did I do that made good indifference leave, I'm seeing what I could like about him, no moustache, a bright face, good body for 43, no rings. If it's plain horniness Rob would cure it. - Then what calmed me down was the message that it will take time for him to come to it, when it does I should just go to bed with him, nothing to be done for the moment. - And then: work proposal - visualization, auralization - of 'data sets' from Venus - of behavior of functions in math software - more complex cognition via perceptualization. What does it do for perception/cognition dichotomy What is implied about imagining as animating, simulating Psych questions: what capacities are implied, what is known about these capacities Film questions - what body of work is there, what relation to impulses animating experimental film, what contribution to experimental film practices Cog sci questions Phil questions - perception/cognition dichotomy, modeling 3rd Fishing through thin ice. I bang the surface with a canister that shoots down a line and bait. See a fish immediately caught. Must break the ice to bring it through. Take it away to find a way to kill it. Cuts and blood. On the ground what I thought was a dead puffer fish, deflated, moves away and flows flat to the ground, blue edges like a tinted seep. Try again, another small fish. Try for a larger. I see it below, watch it circling down and around and up after the hook. Feel it on the line. Pull it up but only get a fin and a part of a flank, it's torn. Something about my father. A melancholy. How many times a day I say Oh David, meaning oh I'm not with you, I'll never be with you again, I'll never be that again, blown away in a white light. Crying I like because it is a way of being in a place where you are. 5 Dreamed I lay in bed in the dark and the bird spoke to me. Cried out that it was sick, spoke in a human voice. I took it next to my skin. Was writing in my journal that such things had begun to happen, other things had spoken to me. Was I concerned? Not at all. I felt myself firm of mind, I knew what was happening was good. A business just opening. I see well dressed foreign people checking their coats. A woman handing over a grey coat very smooth and plain, expensively cut. Is it a bank? We can just go in. A young man and a woman. I sit next to him. He likes what I'm wearing, plain everyday clothes. I'm not wearing a gun. Are you? I remember to ask. Seeing the polished butt of a revolver under his arm. I start to explain something, he is not listening because he is handing over the baby to the woman. Somehow it is the woman behind her who is opening her blouse. They are all tall, fair and rich, Russians or Poles who until now have been oppressed. They understand my clothes because they have worked. Outside between buildings. My mother is outside because she is offended with the woman. Why? She's so spoiled, she doesn't do anything. Ah! You're jealous. I laugh. Taking a bowl of water to a small room, a bath room, where I am going to maybe sit in a tub like a high-backed chair. - The way we are in relation to a lover's clothes. Looking at them unconsciously, closely, very interestedly, intimately. When Judy was talking about clothes we'd had, it was exciting as if she was inside me remembering what I'd forgotten. In the garden yesterday. Early autumn's extraordinary light. I forget what fairyland it is. I stood looking north into the herb garden and saw it as if there was an intense yellow spotlight on it. Looked around, is it in the orchard too? No - that's a whiter weaker light, this is like syrup, a yellow like fire, gravel squares and turning leaves, coreopsis, maybe the concentric order and open gravel, maybe the yellow leaves and the coreopsis flopped on either side, maybe my eyes dilate when I look at it like this. Very strong yesterday. Calabria in the morning, sorting the next thesis, speed and lucidity, oh want to work in the garden. Close the folder, put on Luke's old pants. I'll work on my plot. The raspberry wall, I'll pull out the weeds and old canes. I get in among the wall, right in, no one else in the garden. When I hear John's step on the gravel I startle, knew I'd been in a trance. Weeding with the left hand, that phenomenon. The pleasure of seeing it ordered, the proper ratio of plants and space. Asparagus gushers in the sidebed grown from seeds fallen last year, ready to plant in their bed. Mr Li and his wife cutting orange dahlias in the brown light after sunset, she in a pink sweater. That light. Sunday On the Drive. Down one side up the other, a delay in Octopus. You never run into anyone if you're thinking of them, is the law. But I left Octopus at a moment that ran me into him halfway up. He says, You should read this. It's Black lamb and grey falcon. I say, D'you ever wonder about coincidence? He says, What coincidence, and looks quite beautiful. He says he's a slave to little black numbers. My feelings are hurt. I get even, I say he dresses very straight and I'll tell him what I like. Monday 6th Something about a red book and a green book. As if they are choices of kinds of feeling. Something about a pile of boots at the tree planters' camp. Looking for a pair dry in the inside. There is a wagon whose thick traces are broken. I'm making suggestions for fixing it. They're taking me seriously although it's a tribe of men like the Brinkmans. Walking around surprised they're letting me supervise. I'm saying take this big beam and cut it down the centre for two parts. Then one of them has figured out a way of streaking downhill riding on the log, and it looks like the guys have taken it away from me. - [book conversation via Louie: A red check.
A door.
An inside, a red air with folds. Temperature warm, neutral.
There's a fountain.
Yes.
No it was there before me.
I like it, I like the way it's made, well-cut rock. Seeing a brown curve.
It's as if I'm remembering dreams.
There's a field from a dream I had once, a field like an auction sale without people.
Old things, like laces.
They're from lives that are finished.
It's as if they are different sorts of feeling.
The green book.
I can never read like this in real life but I want to say I'm standing.
There's a picture on the left, it's a line drawing but I can't see it, I'm looking as if from a distance over my shoulder.
There's a boy like a drawing in children's books. He has on a little tie and short pants and a pullover, he's kneeling on his left knee and has the other knee bent up. He's on the right side of the picture, I can't see what's on the left. Yes I can, it's a little girl he's talking to, she has blond hair, she's younger than him, she's wearing a dress and has her legs to the side. They are brother and sister. It is like some cozy scene with a fire in the background. They are talking together like brothers and sisters at their best. They have their entire context in common. They're serious and interested. It's such a conventional picture.
7th Her book said You will dream what is unforgettable and she dreamed an island where she was walking at night. Men following her. She takes a yellow cab driven by an honest man who will take her the short way. She gets out at the shore. Green turbulent water. Jean McGregor lying naked. Beautiful light like a painting she wants to lean into. There is a man like Brando in Last tango who is looking at her as if he wants her. She's thinking she'll test him. He leans forward and puts the tip of his finger into her directly, as easily as if he'd pointed at her. She realizes that was the test. It was the island of desire. Her crumble in the afternoon. "I'm never going to come back." "Say 'You're never going to come back.' Say it to your father." I feel that, a surge of pain. What does it mean when I don't feel it, that we haven't struck a real point? She sees her father young going away in a black suit. "Say 'You're never going to come back.'" "'You never did come back' to Hansi. Alright say it to your mother." "I'm never going to let you come back." What is that? Her mother saw that she had lost Hansi, she's humiliated. Her mother has seen her lose out as a woman. She thought that was all my nervous breakdown was about, she wouldn't see any of the larger issues, identity and South Africa. Gave up both of them at once. Through the weekend when a silence came I'd be seeing him. My loyalty to myself was taking the form of a loyalty to my decision, I'm going to go for that, I'm on my way to that. It was making me steady on my keel, like having a keel, that image I found with David, a straight line up the front of the body, a prow. Young Louie is still fighting the basic news. The basic fight we have is she insists I shd fuck her, I resist resentfully and guiltily. She says I'm afraid of love. I notice the certainty and lightness I become when I stand my ground and say I'm going to get a man. The adoring despair I became when I touched her, a despair that says, I am no body here. When she went into the book - in the car, in the dark, with my hand at the back of her head - so beautiful a woman she becomes, sad calm certain, beautifully older, deep eyelids and finer flesh. What she said about transformation, that we've gone through liking hope love sex hate fear love and we're coming to transformation. And what is transformation? "I saw a cloud changing shape. It doesn't stop being a cloud." Seeing I've been her guarantor. She looked at her room through the eyes of the sort of person who has guarantored her up to now, ordinary people, and was frightened and appalled, it was so esoteric. I saw that in spite of all I've done something essential for her. That was another certainty. On the warpath at Calabria, what's it like. The hair and its fusses. Braid it back. Herb garden interview. What do I have to say. Here it is. Anything she says is going to sound false. Tell her I'm a writer and don't want to be paraphrased. Ask her how she understands the assignment. Take it as an exercise. It is the well at the world's end. Vine walk. North, forest. East, common life. South, meadow. West, thicket, city. Past-future axis, forest-meadow is world-psyche, crossroads is occupied by mirror of consciousness, the source, which is the present bubbling in. Garden is. Long problem where to locate it. Herbs are essences. Historical. Essential observed plants, not domesticated. Herbal essences, scents, virtues. Perennials are colors but more messed up, less essentially plants. Strong plants. Concentrated plants. Light heat shelter intensity. How does it function in the whole. Psychic diagram that means orientation integration simultaneity, here I am, of all the parts.
[The Country Gardens writer] A biddy in black, tight little shoes she can't stand in, lipstick that default raspberry maroon. She doesn't grasp, has no gripping organ. Will write some untextured sludge all formula. "I can do it in my sleep." Didn't want to touch, taste, smell or look - couldn't see, is writing for people who can't see - and I didn't supply her with a grip by showing her how. Why not. Being impressed with myself. Looking at the graphite dust in the ridges on her front teeth. Sneering at her hapless look of trying to pass. Being pleasant to cover my lack of liking. She fell in love with her son all over again when he said he'd get his airbrake license to be able to drive truck three months a year and then make films. There was a cat they didn't much like. One Sunday her husband rowed her and the kittens to a houseboat empty for the weekend. The cat swam back, as many trips as there were kittens, angrily. That's what sticks. Pass over. 8 Louie said, You don't love me, you love my loving you. Is it true? (What does it mean?) I do love her loving me. Reading my letters from Strasbourg delighting to think of reading them to her. When she sneaked her hand over my breast I couldn't stand it, get off. Can I remember what it felt like. Same as when Rob tries and I'm not in the mood. When she pushes is when I get angry. What does she want, I should give it to her cold, twice a time and twice a week, a chore. As if being willing to slog at it would destroy the possibility of ever finding joy in it again. How can she demand it and then ask whether I can see it another way. What if I crossed the line again, what if I adored her breasts and cunt and had to feel my own ugly and inert and old, and lived vulnerable to fear that can strike me down any moment, they'll take her, she'll lie, I'll be helpless, I'll be ill, I'll be poor, I'll be in pain so great there'll be no world anymore. Is it true I took that branch of my love for her and routed it into David Carter? Look how my writing got bigger saying so. (And then what is K?) Missing him I didn't have to miss her. You and Ellie are not as deep as you are going to get, says her book. 11 Louie hearing the Strasbourg letters says what I would want said, That girl could be a writer. I pull my teeshirt over my head. It was so evident about her. She was working for that. But she did not find the way. Anguish woke me before dawn. L had been telling me Jam's writing successes, she was going to be reading with the symphony. I was hearing it with my back to the space, facing a closed door, wrung with pain, inwardly striking at panels screaming I can't bear it, I can't bear it. L had said, "Imagine you knew there was going to be a book - one book - you didn't have to worry about it" (a good book, I say) "what would you do?" I could feel my solar plex smiling. - Jam moving into her basement, old, slow, smoking dope, watching television, sleeping. Writing. Feeling her days, says L. An interesting person, an unusual person. Sore, hermetic. 12 Sunday morning. I go to bed straight from the car, want to carry the tone with me, last moments with our little heads together in the beam of lights creeping between parked cars in the alley. The quiet blurt of love whose tide had turned so it could originate in me - Oh Louie - because she confessed the independence she was afraid would justify mine - because she confessed the dependence that is in anguish feeling the other one can live does live will live in all their powers elsewhere. The way I didn't want to know I didn't want to know how she is with Francois, how intimate. Hours enduring language that traps and disgusts and contains not a word sharp enough to raise us into the relief of intelligence. 'Working it out,' the dullness and disgust of trapped mind. Even the moments of escape, laughing, have that disgusted ground of the quick unreached. She had it yesterday only when I said listening to someone is a deadly pain of feeling one doesn't exist. Here I'm going into more branches than one. The first was thinking it isn't true with a lot of listening, and it's listening where the other person is not impressive. Why seeing the other person's spirit should make us feel we aren't one. (Oh David.) The next was - I've forgotten - it is more than impressive, it's other, it's a system one sees one doesn't subsume, one doesn't exist in it. That's it. But this is the way it turns - which self doesn't exist in it? The self that can see it has to be there. It's our habit with objects - is it - but only a spirit can see a spirit. Alright, give me to see spirits, I'll pray that. I do see spirits (oh David). It's something else I should pray for, something I need to find or build. We were on the sand at Jericho Beach all day, bare morning to nightfall when foreign families string their nets out into the silver blue. The freighter nearest us had swung around off its anchor as if its magnetic pole had switched. Isn't it noisy here, men's voices lying across each other like tangles of logs. I wasn't hearing it. In silence with you, writing voice. The sand's reach on either side, the water alive all day. Louie unhappy wants to kill things, bop on the head. "Alright kill this." [sketches on the sand for some of these] "Kill tears. Kill love. Kill longing, kill art, kill writing, kill wanting to tell things from the past, kill house, kill car, kill breasts, kill solar plex, kill meditation, kill desire for travel, kill fear, kill complacency, kill beauty." There's a moment when we see what a drawing is made of - shadow that is an underlip given by a slash in the sand. The many grains in that shaded lip, sharp. I want to say how much I like how I look today, clean clothes, washed jeans, washed white shirt green belt red sneakers black braid shiny brown skin. Houndstooth jacket along for morning's cold on the bike. Look at my fingernails pink and quietly shining with inner order. I woke in such disquiet of impatience about the man. There I am broadshouldered round bummed looking over my shoulder - one to want to capture certainly, why are none of you trying. 13 Monday. Here I am. The blue line roiling off the cigarette in her hand is a line of substance of another world, both in its speed and in its touchiness, the way it splits, stretches, coils, shreds: self-lit. I wanted to say I need a way of handling the nag of suspended sex. I did something yesterday I liked. It needed preparation - cards, breaths, a wait with my hand on the phone - and then did the trick. I mean relieved the worst of the itch. Listening to the phone ring, waiting for the voice with the message I could read as meant for me. Liking his voice. "Tell me when I can get hold of you." The indelibility of phone messages. What I begin I'll have to finish. "When you can get hold of me is " - laughing, now I'm caught - " the question. D'you want to come out and skirmish?" In another tone because it's prepared, "This is Ellie." Letting you know I know I'm not the only woman who may phone, is how I thought of it, but I see it's something else, it's the signature on a bold move that leaves no question, it's your move, make it or don't. But then there's an internal thing I still have to arrange. How to wait without waiting. I'm having an appetite for the game, it's health to have it. What else is happening though. At noon yesterday, urged to leave dinner on the table and go to the garden. It was not the one, it was the other, Rob in his black teeshirt like a skin with holes, cracking with pain. Catherine in hospital with her kidney punctured. Her face flamed over with an allergic reaction taking a taxi to the doctor so she won't be seen on the bus. Last fall a scratched eye. All these calamities come to the body of the woman who loves everyone without judgment. Cheryl in a big house in Toronto she's bought with Jodie; her brother died suddenly at fifty, of no discoverable disease. Here's the woman like Rhoda as bag lady. She has a routine like a seagull's, north every morning with shopping cart full of blind packages, metallic eyes, aluminum. A weathered face, body quite young, pedal pushers and sleeveless shirt or good cotton dress, sometimes a straw hat. That look of dying intact. Oh a day. I'm happy.
|