| aphrodite's garden volume 17 part 5 - 1993 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
14 September 1993 It's showing their route down across the map down down. And then this must be to say where they fell. Sections of the map, peaks and crevasses, torn away from each other. Falling south. Dark red. The surviving explorer in his tent is talking to someone, us, headquarters, about his friend's body. There's a down bag with sleeves laid on the ground, but here's this other sleeping bag to put him in. The living explorer gets in with him. It's as if we're getting him ready to die. The dead explorer it seems is in his sleeping bag for the warmth. But the living explorer is naked and has his torso uncovered. Put some sort of light blanket over you, at least. We see against the netting of the large tent's side a little girl with brown hair and a pink dress. Is she someone you know? There's another child. They pass through the walls to show they're ghosts. A dog, also a ghost, has a jagged tear around him where he stands. In noting, writing dreams these days, there's always the question whether to push to get it more exact or whether to leave it at careless indication. A sense of lack of energy as well as a sense of the as-if dimension in the dream. I mean 'the sense of': something not in the events but in the way they are felt, an imagining that accompanies even dreaming. Rhoda, Trudy. I see Cheryl standing looking at Rhoda. They've happened to pass each other on the stairs (that's as-if, I don't think there were stairs). I'm with Cheryl, I just notice this. Then when I'm in the truck by myself Trudy comes to speak to me. I open the truck door so I can hold her hand. She wants to explain something. When she was first with Rhoda, Rhoda used to dive to the bottom of the river and swim there. Trudy would dive after her and try to find her. The feeling is that it was lost and desperate. "So things you said would have an effect you didn't understand" (something like that). But then she rushes away. I see her in an Arabic dress black with small white shells embroidered on it. Leaving in a group of three. She's on the left, Maxine in the middle, all in dresses. Mending the roof. I'm up on it looking at aged wood. That crisped greyed kind of wood that seems to have had the substance evaporated out of it. Looking at the warp of shingles, loosening of small-headed nails, rot of the front rafter-end. One long ladder leaning from the peak very close under power lines hung from a metal pylon. Another ladder there at the bottom of this steep pitch. Should I call to Louie to bring me some nails? Would she bring them up? I seem to have lifted the roof and looked at it and replaced it, how did I do that while I was on it. Just to get rid of this before I go into the grant proposal: K phoning back yesterday, rumbling and mumbling about his night courses and any other thing with such blind insistence I went silent with discontent, and also because I couldn't understand him. Is it fright or what - leaving me out. 15 Council application. Squeezed yesterday getting it written. Do I still know how to pull myself down into the true/best intention of a project? If I don't I can't convince. The way it's an ordeal I put off, why - I thought maybe it's a lot to ask of a brain, to write my most original relation to work done in a very complicated context, at the same time as organizing into that writing various hooks that work because they're unconscious. I even wonder whether I'm [somehow esoterically] writing toward the actual jurors there will be. This isn't clear. It's a larger question about why public writing is so stressed. It might just be years' tension about livelihood that could only be won by extraordinary transcendences of ordinary mind. I'm thinking of the elegance of some of my academic writing when I was a young woman who in person spoke like a girl from La Glace. But there's elegance in the letters too. But the letters weren't unpressured, I'd write when I got into a state. This isn't solved. The question is, what could I make of the video? But first: two things about loves. A background jumpy happiness that comes from the feeling something is going on with K - going well in the sense that I'm seeing that what's unbearable in him is like Rob's goofiness, I'm indignant as if it's a power when in fact it's an idiocy that comes and goes and that I could speak to. And Louie on the phone yesterday so smart and clear I get a shock like the first time - who is this, right up here looking me in the face and answering back as if she'd got there ahead of me. A tweak of her own. Yeah. 16 Anything today? The curl of her small pink fingers, the hand she has lying next to her head like an object out of place. No one else does that - places a hand so it looks like another sentient thing next to the head. Something about the curl too, as if it's her quality, loose light pink clean and something else, the fineness of fibre the curl suggests. That's you. Your touch. chilly because it's reading not delivering heat. Delivers something though. I'm wanting to say intimidation. Is that it? Declares your intelligence. Curious about people today. Free it means. In the sun at Calabria. I could imagine Dave Carter walking in. Saw the directed way he walks, straight line down from the brow, advancing as a line, legs - what's the word, a technical word - in free motion as if there's no weight on them. How's goin', Black Beauty? Does my green rock look at you from among you stones? Does your windshield carry my envelope under the driver's side wiper for good? - And at that moment, K - who is K.S. - a kiss still there, how does that work, primed substance - he was alight - red and blue and yellow flashes - oh it's keeping on working - a tower room, gold fur, men and women kept before the eyes in pictures. He said "Your handsomeness and your weakness." "My physical weakness?" "Yes, I could put you under my arm." "I don't think anyone's ever said that to me." "I did have a fantasy about you but it wasn't sexual, (mumbles something) orchard." "So do you want to fool around? I mean not serious." "I get hooked." "I don't want to get hooked either." "I don't mind getting hooked if you get hooked too." (Did he say that?) Occasional Harbour. "So do you ever wear your hair down?" He was in my car and we were on our way to stopping in front of his house and so it seemed maybe the moment to add a spice. "I'll show you." Confident. "It's one of those powers kept in reserve." What do I know. That some of it is in my hand. I mean sexually. I could have need to be cunning. Waking at night. Solar furnace. It's only 2:30. The rest of the day yesterday dissolved in a sexy wash. Took my bedding to the laundromat. Got rid of the round table. Drove up Broadway toward red sky looking for someplace to eat and read under a lamp, to be out. Gogol at the miser's garden. He's stretching out in the middle of the book. A man in half a tent in Labrador reading Dead souls in a storm of rain that soaks the page as he goes, so there's a block of pulp in his left hand. That picture and another yesterday of a man going into an engine room, putting on headphones, tidying tools away onto pegs, touching up the engine with an oily rag. 18 Video, near streets. "I would like to see everybody come along," "Jeez that kale was juicy," "A lot of people did not have beautiful sunsets." The houses like people. They hold. It can introduce characters. Our laugh over old Mike. Get an infectious one. Names over houses. Maxine Gadd. Juan Echide de Tar. Names of people in those pictures. Maybe their names are most of the sound. Location sound in bursts not constant. near streets - what sort of graphic. Vroom, traffic at Prior. Shadow. Sound over long black. Black, slow fade in, graphic burn in over picture. Images that have and those that lack energy. [Sheila], [Janet and Elaine], [Joe], [Muggs]. - It's Saturday afternoon, phone rings, I'm not expecting anything, he's wanting to get me to one of his Fringe things, alright. No just tell me which you like best and then you can tell me what you like about it. I'm liking the sound of his voice. Etc. What to wear, he's so straight. Etc. Coming away from it sober. Remember the law of alternation. Sober means: who is this? What fantasy was that? 1. Improving on Rob, one I'm not ashamed of, show off at department, with Rowen, Mary, Luke, walking around being a woman who can get a man people wd think is worth getting. 'Presentable.' I saw today that his hips are wide and the top of his spine submittingly curved, hair on his back, oh forty-three and volunteering at the Fringe. Not established. I see. I come into the lighting booth and he talks. He's freaked, I can't get to him now, can I get away. Sassoon and Owen. Sassoon never stops being the actor I met on the way in, bland eyes, pretending whatever. Oh Louie would have things to say about them both. As it was, my stranger comes out after and there's nothing either of us'll say that will interest us, but his shoulder up against my shoulder interests me a lot. Fantasy 2. fearless adventures of sex, a man who wants to play, do anything, says You, come here. This one though isn't sure I'm young enough so he can get it up. "How would you feel about that?" 3. Female confidence a platform, imagining I know something about my relation to him. 4. He'll be a nice old man like Dennis, white hair red cheeks - Brit courtesy. 5. The line about putting me under his arm. Maybe he'll have a kindness toward my fragility, what my dad wasn't. But he doesn't even have a kindness toward my little fragilities of conversation, he abandons me from the first, he is too fragile himself to put a warmth around me. What I see sober is what I can choose to take on or not, something I would have to do as a moral exercise. Body says pick a man. Self says it will be lonely and dangerous. Body says, I give you joy and confidence, it's what I do if you don't starve me. Self says, what do I have to do? Body says sleep with the enemy, don't forget he's not your friend, be lucid. Self says, lonely responsibility. Body says, sweet times, deep times. Self says, this is how it looks, I see my father's weakness, I see there are no enemies, I see there's no shelter. There's adventure though, there's knowing I'm where no one knows me, no one sees me, and then stepping forward with kindness to both children and making them see each other. 19 Glum. Cold and dark today, the oven hissing. Season closing. What to do. Sunday. It says what the parameters are. I should give up shouldn't I. And if I did - no David no Rob no K - there'd soon be some other hope. Either way there are stresses. Dear larger one.
I was elated last week, squirming today seeing I could say no this won't work.
Okay, work means it would be sexual joy, the edge taken care of and not boredom self-uncertainty jealousy unlikedness loneliness, what I was feeling yesterday so unpleasantly. The way it worked with Rob.
This makes me cry, the way it worked with Dave, that I look at a man and love him from earliest days, love the way he comes up the stairs, love the way he feels my house, love his eyes.
Work the way it does with Louie so we rush together with things to say about anything.
The way it doesn't work along with all the ways it does. The way Michael made me laugh and didn't wash. What am I concluding?
Dialectic.
I watch it and write it, are you saying it's food and doesn't matter? Is there better food and worse?
I'm not at the end of beautiful sex and its minds. I like the material it gives me.
Always energy newness feeling.
Makes me imagine it one thing, me and the sheet of experience, isn't it too large a lover? And in what way don't I do it already? The community garden.
I worry about anxiety.
20 My apartment on the top floor, 3 flights, I have quite a few rooms, maybe 3 large rooms and the bathroom which has a rose-colored wool blanket over the ceiling. I take it down. The ceiling's higher. Is it alright? White wood. The room's nice. Could I put a chair in here and read. There's another door, more rooms, these rooms I've ignored for some reason, haven't needed them, but I'm in a mood to change my spaces. These rooms are as many as on the other side. Haven't touched them since I moved in, have hardly looked at them. There were children here, my kids maybe. Writing on the cupboards. There's a kitchen cabinet with some of the drawers intact, some missing, some of the veneer stripped. I could have a working cabinet there. Sinks, machinery, a depression in the floor in the corner as if some mechanical thing, elevator. Then I notice people in the rooms, how are they getting in? Ask them, they won't say. The rooms haven't been used, they are coming in for a bath, to sleep. Young women with babies, what look to be lesbian couples, two men writing in journals. I'm going to yell at the man stretched on the bed for being dirty but I see he's got good things neatly spread. I think of them as together. They won't tell me how they got in but I see a stream of them from the far end coming up the stairs and trace the flow to a door opening onto the alley. The outside lock has a key in it. There's another door that had been nailed over and has been pulled off. Should I put the key in my pocket? I protest to people that my rooms on the other side can be invaded if these are, and that's why I have to keep them out. Walking elsewhere in a school maybe, with Louie maybe, someone, I meet two of the young women who've squatted in my other side. Friendly. My friend and I lifting maybe a wheelbarrow down out a back door onto a concrete walk, a shortcut I'm proud of. When I get back to my derelict rooms there are streams of people come for a rave. Is that the word, might have been wave. A large gathering in the dark with orange lights. A song about getting naked. I'll do it, I take off my clothes to dance. They take theirs off, I thought they would. Is that it? This is a second sleep dream after a long stretch awake reading last autumn, the detox time whose tone I liked. Woke saying yes romance is a drug, David was, this one is. David pain is. - Now. Cold. Cold feet begin. Want a sofa, workroom, want K once a week through the winter. Plants and mirrors, want my house clean. Care with drugs. A heater. Books and vitamins. Joyce. Lamps. - Bought a green blanket with red stitching. Library books. Pain last night, this evening starting to be able to work. About Luke - it didn't occur to me to try to find the state I was in when he was little. 21st Going along a path with people I say, Look I can walk without legs. Have them bent up at the knees and I'm moving along the sidewalk as before. It's interesting that it takes muscular effort. Moving up stairs with people I feel it in my bum muscles. What if I glide up the steps and don't do it in jerks as if I were walking. I can do it but it's very strenuous like hauling myself along. In a corridor on the edge of a group of men, monks, wanting to be part of the beautiful service about spirit, feeling they'll say I have to leave. So maybe it's because he's impotent that he mumbles away in his grey cloud, three quarters of an hour he talks about welding. I mention editing, he says "That's interesting." But he comes out with it eventually, it's what's fogging him. I go do research at the library. There's a catch in it. Impotence is their calamity not because it prevents them from having pleasure or giving pleasure but because they feel they aren't men - ie no longer better than women. So does that mean their sense of right to privilege depends on sticking it in somewhere? It would mean they depend on us to give it to them, not love and pleasure, which I'd want from them, but the right to hold a place among other men. So if I play sexual friend with an impotent man am I helping him to stand on my head? Or standing on his head by making it clear that I am in a position to give him the right to join the men by stepping on my head. Pleasure is the only exit. But he's too frightened to attend. It is helpless of him, but at the same time not innocent, because he chooses to live in the assumption that what matters is joining the men. The assumption that is willing to leave us out. My question is - do I have to choose between strength and pleasure? 22 A woman at the garden, sitting at the table in the early aft. She's stoned - something in the way she's moving her head. She's raw. Amazing to look at, a beautiful mouth, beautiful head, silvered eyes, what look like cigarette burn scars on her face. Her motion overshoots a bit - is it that? I was so enthralled looking at her mouth moving, her jaw line, the glaze on her eyes, I didn't ask myself to notice what it was about her movements. She speaks in jerks: a story about a biologist and a government coverup. "Are you and he lovers?" "We have a sexual relationship but we're not lovers." Says her name is Jane. Likely not, but it suits her. "That woman who got contaminated with cobalt, she'd have to live 800 years before it dissolved or whatever it does." Talking about roses grown from cuttings. Strawberries multiplied by their runners. She used to live in a house with a garden, she said, but it seemed information she'd picked up somewhere and held onto, like other information she's taken on to seem intelligent, which she also is. A hyper child. Showed how her foot twitched. Thin. Someone when she was a child wanted that beautiful mouth around his thing, and her spirit got spooked - a horse with its eyes rolling, rearing over a snake - that was her motion, rearing and plunging while faking educated conversation. What was my stake. I was seeing Janeen in another life. Someone burning very fast, so evidently a being. Ruined as a life maybe, I don't think she could go on, but was she ruined in her moment? I couldn't tell whether she was lying in everything she said. I'm thinking of K at the same time. His sort of ruin. The way his scarred upper lip jerks when he's in his cloud. In the herb garden for hours. Cleaning up the east rose bed. Pruning Roseraie de l'Hay underneath so its legs show under a rusty canopy. Leaving hollyhock, California poppy, dames rocket. Moving centaurea. Loosening earth - it's a bed still sour after 3 years compost and manure, packs hard and stunts things. Working the way I do, from the centre of the forehead - what am I seeing, a vacuum cleaner, doesn't stop. A few hours at the Film Board. Stopping at Robson to pick up a camisole. Black silk with string straps. Walking fast downtown liking to feel I'm working. This week back with the video knowing things. Looking at near streets knowing it's that. last week of a five-week month is over old Mike, handwritten stories of hunger. Ends with his squash, his potatoes. Feeling Louie will get a lot when she gets credit for the video, which will take her over the sill on courage she doesn't have to have herself. When she phoned yesterday insisting I fix her she lost my good will for this weekend - when I felt what I was feeling, enduring her, I started to hear her tinny in the distance a small voice speaking current banalities. I started to laugh but it was not good nature, it was malice's escape. A genuine laugh, tho', good in a way. It says oh you can't hold me, next time I'll bore you from the start, I'll train you out of this habit of flogging me with dreariness, I'll be so tedious you'll learn a new trick. 23 Are my men loves always pictures of my spirit's state in a time, so David was beautiful emotion; Rob sex, garden work, a kind of integrity and a kind of hideous unease; Michael sexual fright and fun and a body; and then what would K be, impotence and bravery, lonely social doing, convention. The theory can't be right because my state also comes from the man I attach. The test would be was the state there when I found the man. Of all that what to pick out. How she looked when she was angry. White force shooting forward out of her face in a broad solid column. Features finer and tighter. She looked younger, like the twenty year old with the eyes. We'd cracked the issue. I didn't want to eat on Commercial because we would run into him. She's furious. I half lose it, lunge at a spot just short of her breast, kick the air next to her thigh. I DON'T WANT HIM TO SEE YOUR TITS. Barred teeth, the taste of pure hate. And then she's more than furious, a towering fury, a Greek rage. I know there's something. I'm thwarting something. She does want the moment she wins something from me by way of a man. She's far from admitting it. To admit it she'd have to admit her love for the mother conceals a poisoned knife. That's threat to goodness at the centre. Meantime my fury is gone. I'm thinking, look at this about her breasts, the mother's. First she uses them to keep me with her in life, then she uses them to keep him away from me, and that's a way of starving me of the other, energetic, life where I want and act. The way I go on feeling I don't have breasts. The way yesterday having been brought 'closer' to her, having come to open bodies, not altogether open but a glowing nest in the womb and cunt, I was so weak that her beauty in the bath, her breasts, had made my spine wilt so I was curled over my solar paralyzed and weepy. Dreamed I'm reading, not paying attention, a strong voice singing jazz, it took me a while to notice. Singing telegram for my mother. What's it saying? I'm standing behind my mother looking at the woman singing. A tear, one, sliding down her right cheek. My mom gives her a kiss and says You're crying because the dog died. I realize it was a telegram congratulating her on having gotten a dog. From Uncle John maybe. My mother has an owl. It's on the cupboard looking with two big round eyes. There's a cat on the floor. Then it's shut into the middle room. I go to look at it there. It has attached itself onto a roundish straw thing, maybe a hat. I'm right up beside it. It says in a tiny voice, like a two year old just hanging onto control, "My daddy." Oh - I didn't know it was a baby owl. What should I do, should I take it to see its daddy? It's like a slave that has been sold, will it be worse for it if it visits? 26 Night with the furry man, civil above the neck, bright smooth and narrow, with a gold tooth in the corner of a good white smile; civil enough from thigh to sole; and then between the cut lines of his clothes - neck, sleeve and shorts cuff - a fur deep soft and warm, muscles deep soft and round, breast and back deeply divided by hard faults between symmetrical pads. I dreamed I'd put on for him a dark red dress strapless velvet on top, like a valentine, long skirt buttoned from waist to floor made of stretch material so I could feel myself standing with legs apart pulling it tight. I woke finding we'd been sleeping on the sidewalk. A woman watching me stand the mat up against the wall. It was Tony Gordon-Wilson too. A nursery school teacher is nearby checking out a doll with a hole in the belly. Does this other knobby object fit in the belly? Can it fit its head-knob here between the legs? Yes I can use it to teach the kids. A little wire rig meant to be an obstetric bed. Much too medical I'm thinking. And what do I want to know about that night. I'm femming it up, wrapped up in his lap last night. He talks, I have a hand on his chest feeling the rumble. Yes it's daddyland. Something else. The rebellion of his penis a kind of integrity, it won't serve. My one like that too. It's equal ground. I must say go slow, bit at a time, don't overrun. What I feel like with him, girly, quite steady tho', say everything that comes to me to say. He saw the soul sneezed out like a little billowing sac and pulled back in, and the devil standing by to grab it. He keeps running off to Labrador. And talks about the people not the landscape. Their voices bubble up - his ear, that means, aural memory. Ken-by. Wants me to hear them with him. Betimes wants to please me. Wants to do manly things for me. Wants to pleasure me if it's not too tedious. I say, this morning, No, it's a matter of thinking how to get the best nooky out of someone. What I'm liking is, for all his tight lip and speeding away, he comes out with things straightforwardly. Is not scheming. Feels lots, is live in his fur, a very good cuddle, doesn't protect his failures. Enough. Only to add the hours in the big chair with the lights off, I'm curled in his lap, we're covered over with the green blanket looking out the window at the outlines of trees on the corner of the park. New uses for the furniture. I keep my palms on him, coursing and feeding quietly. The exercise Saturday with Louie. "Do you see a shadow?" A gingerbread man shape. "Put your forehead tension into it." I felt it dissolving out. "Leave it there, we'll come back to it." "What does the wall feel like? Go to the outside of the house, what does it feel like? Now see one of the roofs. What are you hearing?" (That was first.) Forehead tightening and dissolving all alone. "Now come back to the shadow. Has it moved?" "It's coming toward me. Big hands." "What do you see." "A bit of a brownish plaid shirt. It's my father's. The bit above his belt. I want to get away." "Go sideways." "I'm in the corner." "Look at his face." "I don't want to." ("The hands were not how his hands were, they were how he remembered the feeling after, you picked it up.") "Alright, don't look at him." "It makes him furious. It limits his power." "What do you want to do." "Go out." "What do you see?" "A poplar tree. A reflection in a window. Wind. The sound of wind." "Has the shadow changed?" "Yes it's a child's shadow, a little girl's. She has her hair cut off below the ear." "I saw a skirt." "I didn't want to look at the legs." "What is she doing?" "She's standing with her head to the side." "Do something to take the shadow into yourself." "I'll go out into the yard where there's grass, I'll stand with my back to the sun and then lie down on my shadow while it's still warm." "Have you taken it in?" "Yes." "On which part of you?" "The whole of the front surface of my body." - Oh and he was enchanted with Robert MacLean. "My best friend." And wanted most of ever an Inuit woman called Mary Sillitt. [Reaney & Wilson's A Dictionary of English Surnames says Sallett was originally a nickname from the Old English "saelida", which meant "seafarer; pirate". http://www.behindthename.com] 29 Phoned Paul yesterday. He was eating cake. [brother's birthday] Establishing an office in Bogota, a businessman. Two monitors, a modem, a printer. He has the house to himself during the day. Took his daughter canoeing over the summer. Designing and manufacturing park benches, garbage containers. Said: "When I came to see you after I came back from the West Indies I was wondering whether to go to Sheridan. You said, 'Your whole life has been pointing toward that. Like an arrow.'" Teaching a course at the OAC where they wouldn't have him as a student. [Ontario Art College] The evening after we'd woken up together K phoned me "to say hi," a courtesy call maybe, scandalized me. Then next morning showed up at Calabria both times expecting to be allowed to download anything he likes - his fencemaking job for a beekeeping Jew, his mother's comments on his sister's marriage breakup. Tells me people give him advice, he doesn't take it, but figures out what to do just from talking, "They don't do anything." "What do you mean they don't do anything - you figure it out because they are listening to you, you are feeling their grasp." I knew he was thinking of Sylvia, who I'm sure processes him days on end without his knowing. This is the worst of him, his unconscious sponging. He sits there freaked stiff declaring this and that needing to be heard and felt and tuned and brought up to the moment, the work I do for myself here, and Louie does for me. His habit is to do manly things in exchange - he'll help me paint the ceiling if I like. Hangs a show for her. What am I learning. My impulse is to lecture him. It won't work. And already oh the little penis he hides the way I hide my foot, keeping the covers over it. Uncircumcised and hidden under its own cover, a little knob. He wants to blame the feminists. Going to CISR to ask for Protools. That land: sophisticated machines supporting brute men. I was watching them set up a demo trying to say to myself, this sort of man exists to help me do beautiful things, only women's projects could redeem their brute lives. I'm not arrived at knowing how to speak to them believing that. It might be true. The video. Rob said a kind of love. Watching it with him, it played throughout. I'm beginning to see it made. Last weekend telling L what happened with them. "I had to understand there are things ego doesn't know. Ego comes back, it's still ego but it's enlarged. Now there's a dialogue with something else." Long sigh. We laugh. I kiss my left shoulder. 1st October A large airy shed, thought of as an outdoor room. Made of grey boards that have gaps. It's like a nice high machine-shed, very clean, and there's fine mesh stretched where a ceiling would be, maybe down the walls too. Like noseeum netting. It's so bees won't land my father says. It's quite open at knee level so it could be cold but there's a barrel heater blasting out heat, and then I see another one beyond it. This one they can cook on. Over by the wall where there's an entrance like a faucet where the bees come and go I catch sight of a shadow larger than a bee's, looks to me like a fairy. They say it's a spruce bulewah (close to that). I wonder if this is a known secret. My mother and father talk about moving. I like this room, I'd buy it for 900 (or was it 700) if I had somewhere to put it, I say. But then thinking its immaculate airy perfection wouldn't survive a move. I could imagine living in it though. Big fight blowing up at the garden. Our first internal fight in ten years. The young men see an opportunity. - And him. Friday afternoon in Yaletown, a wharf above the street, motor cars tied up at the foot of the steps. Sun flat onto the side of my neck, single hairs stirring along my jaw. Walking out of Calabria I said "Why don't you come around the corner and kiss me goodbye." "I was going to." Open the car door, stash my books, turn around. Arms up around his neck, loosely - what is it about that, setting my arms up onto his shoulders letting my forearms drop behind his head - something - and get kissed - one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and a peck on the chin to say that's all. He's not proving anything. His lip's cushiony. Awning edges floating. Goin' to see Louie. Looking uplight there's a haze and a gull. Movies. CISR's clean carpets and boardroom table in the library. Work coming true coming true. I like his face when I see it. It's bright and interesting. And the man on the phone, not the same man, a complex waveform intercepted somewhere midbody. Etc. But it'll be there for the rest of the day. Lookit these suits exchanging cards. Smiling, shaking hands. Smooth loose folds, repulsive sheen. 2nd What I'm singing this morning after the night in which I make violent contact with her face and she drives away righteous in my car is Let's fall in love and Lucky to be in love with you. Got up at seven and called a taxi, took back my car. But was locked out of my house. Read the Globe in Bino's 'til Koo's opened. Here I sit waiting for Gulf and Fraser [Credit Union to open]. Silver mildew on the Jerusalem artichokes, birds, acacias' yellow fringe between the roofs. Going to the garden where all day there'll be gains in color. Louie did good. She didn't cry or beg, she stole my car and went home and slept. And I slept too. Is she full of righteousness still? Likely. She'll be saying she's a battered woman. 3rd Sunday, so hot in the red chair at three in the aft. Today I can only sit. My brassy courage these days abandoned me last night. What happened. - Oh look at the mist, no, a dry dust, powdering the colors of the trees. It's quiet, there are birds, the days are running hot and intense, warm enough at night to lie uncovered with the windows open. I'd left the door on the latch for him, was in bed at midnight warm and drowsy, with my molecules in a goldy oscillation of anticipation. He stomped up the stairs, stopped in the middle of the room and said in a daytime voice Are you awake? Tramped into the bathroom and turned on the light to brush his teeth. Stood next to the bed and stripped off his shorts and folded them. Revealed black underwear that looked new in the dark. Popped his top button and pulled his shirt over his head, stood holding it in front of him unbuttoning the cuffs. Didn't fold it. Off with his underpants briskly and jumped into bed. - In all the long waking what were the many things he said to hurt me. Women who have breasts you can't take your eyes off, a way they hang. Women whose vaginas have a tight ring all the way around the entrance, so you feel you're in heaven. That woman across the park, he liked it that her sister was in the house and they were in danger of being discovered. The Argentine woman who . And liking women to have nice underwear. I went on valiantly like a child feeling the sting and keeping my courage but - That moment the phone and a voice I don't know says to me intimately, I've been trying to get you all week. Who is this? Young, firm, familiar. I'll just wait for him to say more, it will come to me. Then OH IT'S YOU IT'S YOU. It's my Luke way far over there so unexpected. Happy. He dreamed he was swimming with a baby on his shoulder, a long distance, on and on. Looking behind him. He was worried there were white snakes who would want to bite him. And there they are, covered with teeth. Do you want to bite me? Oh could do. Maybe not today. At midnight in a house with Roy and Hannah and Illie. He'd gotten rid of phone numbers today. The way he said "could do," a nice warm slant. It's beautiful out. I'll go to the garden for the rest of the day. First let me come to something about K. He's hurting me to disable my confidence I think. Because his is disabled. Penis like wobbly rubber. If I retaliate it will be worse. I have to support his confidence while he's wrecking mine. It's a bind. Have I seen enough to decide? I could say, we are not going to be lovers. You are mad at your mother, you refuse to give it to a woman. You are not friendly to a woman's satisfaction though you need to give them enough of it to feel you can if you want. Hostile impotence, Ken-by. A countercurrent of such hostility. Well I have it too. 4th I like your fur, I like your voice, I like the adventure of knowing your stories and being in beds with you and hearing your bank of memory voices. I like your face head-on through not in profile. I don't like your smacking kisses. I do like what you knew about nipples. That. Yuh. The solution I see is to sleep with someone else too. 5th Luke said nostalgia in him is like magnesium flaring, nothing is as intense. 6th Editing near streets. The pictures make a culture of what I see in the neighbourhood, houses say idiosyncrasy, intensity, assertion, economic minimalism, attention to air and light (free attention), historical continuity, valiant self-presentation, vigorous participation (windows), fantasy, independence and relation (variations of). The people say humor, at homeness, affection, energy, pretension, isolation, home defense, curiosity, selfconsciousness, happiness, visible hiddenness. The cuts say houses as a row of people, another, another. Or: not another, something else. - Rob seen against K. Walking out onto the streets with him, leaves loose on the pavement, a light loose warm coat. I've known you for years. "I'm sweet on you these days" is all he says, after so much hardness. Not looking for a standard woman in white lace bra. A woman in gum boots maybe. Wouldn't be muttering about other women, even if there had been any. (But if K turned up this moment I'd like his face.) Has figured me out without saying so. What's it like in R's head? I see it pale silvery grey, a light air, stable currents, slow and precise, no wide curves, motions that don't bump his coasts but slide past sweeping up readings of magnetic fields. "You have the strength of a man without the pretence of the strength of a man" I said and he agreed. Privacy. Doesn't impersonate his hard-on. Oh here's the sun again. A woman in a black dress, thin black stretch stuff wrist to neck to ankle, a perfect line. Breast and haunch, loose brown hair, the kind of face that's right with that kind of body, thin-fleshed with a slightly humorous nose. What about her. A beautiful sight. Big black boots. I like to look at her. And at the same time I'm seeing what would get K's whole approval, or D's, though I didn't think that this time. Female-I'm-not. She has a base in the world, could have intelligence on top of it. Anything. As if I feel - it must be what they call sexual identity - everything I am has no foundation in the world, is a moving cloud, because I am not admired as a woman. Was not admired as a girl. Or could I say it this way: because my foundation, my gender self, is pain. Does that mean I have a foundation I can't rest on. So how does it work with K. He can't bear to be there in admiration's moments, he will admire later when it's safe. And so when he is with me and could adore he shifts into memory and adores remembered others in my presence. Something happened to adoration, he adored her and she couldn't bear to be adored in helplessness. - Then along he came, I was a glad eye, his was sea-green next to sailor's dark blue. The way blue jeans fit across a lap. I can't help brightening even as I'm saying it's hopeless anyway, and he is saying, stalwartly, "I'm disappointed," as if he is. "Why should you be, I'm not the sort of woman you like. I was shattered. You just keep tramping on me." "I must have trampled everybody else without knowing it. I've never had a successful relationship." "What do you mean successful?" "One that lasted more than a few months." Good-hearted willingness and good-hearted (somewhere) unwillingness. What do I want, he keeps asking. Knew I hadn't said it yet. "I want to work out something about ...." Then I don't know what to say. "It's the right kind of attraction for ...." Stuck again. "What are you grinning about, behind your fist?" Martha Nussbaum. "What makes them fall in love is a sudden swelling-up of feelings of kinship and intimacy, the astonishment of finding in a supposed stranger a deep part of your own being." It says to me, what you want is to play with what can humiliate you maybe to death. When did I learn to like limited minds for their safety. That's not how I used to be. A dream that my landlord and his sons come to warn me they are changing the house. I look out the window and see a deep trench along the west side of the house as if they are rewiring. I am not sure I'm not being evicted. The front of the house suddenly slumps, down maybe three feet, renovated at the same time, varnished wood of the sort I'd see in a trailer, cheap. Nothing I can do, it's been done to me. He looked me in the eye unsmiling, a straight unfrightened look I felt - was it at Aux pays des sourds, first time something, public appearance [Vancouver Film Festival 1993]. If I put my green bag on the ground to open the hood he picks it up for me. "Saying I walk with a limp is a euphemism" I say. "But other parts of you are not atrophied" he says, using and skirting the word in quite a graceful way. Sitting next to him in the dark feeling how I'm always wanting to be touching him and he is always wanting it back. 8th David is the day seen, beautiful. I teach or read the elf in a person, some sort of free spirit. How's goin' David? Fairy man. Why are you tears. I have you living at the base of the spine. It's the root. You're an address. If I name you I find myself in sorrow. It is that: myself, central, sad, and happy to be sad. This table. I can still hear your voice. Being sad is a way of still hearing your voice. Teaching spirits might mean educating a circuit. Fairy world of isolated love. Saying any of this I keep thinking of a book or film. Maybe she finds a beautiful father, a face, body crossing the yard. Maybe a two year old hears and sees in a way I could recover, maybe 'beautiful' began there. No, surely. Use the image, Orphée. It's at the wedding something goes wrong. Oh colors in the dark. We know the place, the marriage fails at the point where it is meant to begin. She falls backward. What am I doing. Oh breath. Falls backward. Orphée is a poet as well as a gold fairy. I'm not Orphée. I go away into the land of dead time, maybe not down but sideways, I can't assume the direction. I look for the loved one who is hardly more than an image, we don't know each other. It means reconstructing circuits. I stand in one spot constructing the web that is a sequence backward of dead times. I am not in the land of the dead, I am the streaming passage and the land. I am constructing it, I am experiencing it. I am Orphée in that I am the traveler. I am Euridice in that I am there, the point of arrival where the traveler says, this is as far as I need to know. I track a man's image to find a woman. That is true. I am a woman traveling as a man, tracking a man's image in order to find myself a woman. I see a tunnel that feels, and the feeling at the first deepest ring of the tunnel is Euridice. The other mouth of the cave. The cervix from inside. There are babies whose circuits are capable at birth. At marriage she springs back into the womb and must be brought out with consciousness. Once brought out they are a poet. Missing him is the thread in my hand. What is love in the emerging child. That baby is in love. Now I'm shaking. I'm ending by saying to K: We have a chance but I will not put up with a soft cock. And I will not have you expecting a woman to give you a hard one. You must take on your own quest and find it. 10th After this weekend I'm saying to him, I'm going to fight you up the block and around the corner. Now I know who I'm dealing with, I saw him on the pillow last night. Seventeen years old, angry, hard and soft, mother's favorite in a way that makes him cynical, another rotten at the core boy. Gorgeous. It's not a gorgeous body, thick at the bum, thick through the middle. A snooty nose, what a lowering brat. That he is gorgeous from now on I think should be a secret. I came into the cinema row, he behind me, and saw a gay man who looked at him. Saw them look at each other. Last night, breathing his marijuana smoke. Lying in the dark thinking, I'm performing with this man. I am not seeing his moment. He's irrelevant, Rob's irrelevant. Is Louie? Louie's book says, "He does see you but it's the difference of ability and talent, his seeing is included in your seeing so you wouldn't be able to find it. When you are hurt imagine a child inside you from neck to feet and use your body to wrap arms around it. Don't talk to him about it as if you're saying You're impotent, you don't fancy me. Ask what he felt when he looked at the picture. You might not like what you hear." "Look for patterns, the one that says I want to have fun, the one that says I'm here to serve." "What I always say to you - let go of results." "Do I have to be careful not to love him?" "You answer that." "Depends on what you mean by love. If it means glamours of the sort I'm susceptible to, I absolutely have to stay out of them. If it means intelligent concentrated attention then loving is the only thing that can save me." "I would change 'intelligent' and 'concentrated.'" "You mean attention to feeling?" "Yes your feeling will tell you what to do." "What do I do with him while I'm concentrating on feeling?" "He has to do things of his own." Here is Louie's new story, which has moved in fast as a cloud. Sunday morning, two weeks ago? At the garden. a cardboard box near the corner rosebush, a canvas leaned against a post. Oil paints, who left these here? I lock them in the green shed and am leaving. A Chinese young man in a beret. I understand. Follow him back and show him where I've put his things. He asks to leave his large canvas in the shed. I scratch the combination on his box with a nail. He says his name is Ja-min. I say I won't remember it but I do. He's there later. I see his painting from a corner on the next path down. It's quite beautiful - he's found something with stakes, bent sunflowers, a red bit, a purple bit, yellow, blue. He's quite beautiful. Charcoal dust on his teeth. Thin moustache. An unusually symmetrical face. Some days later I see him at another position with a larger canvas. I skirt him, a further path, but looking to see what he's doing. Bring him four strawberries and go off to the compost. Sometime in the week I think Louie would like him. Tell her about him. She says she'll meet him. Last Tuesday morning he phones me. He can't open the combination lock. I rush down on the bike. He comes in shoes unlaced from his house back of Atlantic. I can't open it either. I say I'll get a message to Eric. Louie phones. I tell her. She says she'll deal with it. I go off to my own stories. She walks to the garden Wednesday morning to give him a key. A moment of unaccountable euphoria coming over the rise. They meet, they like each other, he tells her that just before she arrived a robin was hovering in front of his face beating its wings. They talk. Thursday he visits her house. He stares, she says, for ten minutes at her family picture. Loves her African stones picture so much that he weeps. Says of her wake water photos what I say, they show something not seen before. In the morning he makes the bed, says Do you want the sheets changed, changes them. Goes outside to ride home on his bicycle, finds it mysteriously padlocked, a lock not his. Louie walks over Granville Bridge to the NFB to meet me. We look at video. See the Fassbinder movie, sit with Colin Browne, like the movie. At the beginning of the next film I say, So did you like the painter? We go to her house. She wakes in the night, starting to rage. I say "golden light." We calm instantly. I say You are a hell-cat but you are adorable. Take her in my arms and fuck her for the first time in a year. At breakfast look at the Festival program. The Gaelic film I want to see with him, the Indian one I want to see with her. I say, At two o'clock I'm going to see a film with him because it's from his country. At 4:30 I am going to see this film with you. It works. We drive to the theatre, she walks ahead to buy her ticket, I see him waiting on the side, walk in and hug him. Tell him the schedule, say she's sitting down on the right, can we sit on the left. Hold his hand throughout, with both hands. Liking the film, liking seeing his places. He whispers this and that. Movie finished I say, Are you busy later? I'll come see you. You'll come to my place? I was thinking that would be a good idea. He hasn't made up his mind about movies. I say, Call me later if you're at home, I'm going now. Sit with Louie various places on the right. Settle on a place close to the back. Rob comes and sits in the middle. L says I have three lovers in the audience. She, it turns out, if we count Rani, also has three. Forgot to say the confidence that came with yesterday's fast moves. Went to K's house in plaid shirt and hair up, pleased with myself. Then his dope, etc. He gave me a Guernsey sweater, hand-made fisher's blue. Complained that I'm so overpowering out of bed, so authoritative in it, that he's reduced to rubble. "I know nothing." "I never know where you'll come at me from." "You can't criticize my kissing! That's off-limits! I do what I can." (That one fills me with glee.) Yes I like his voice, I'm hearing it. His eye when it's straight. 11 Not quite finished with these stories. Louie's dream. Five people, Louie, Jam, Ja-min, Laiwan and me. Two men spirits and three women spirits. Ja-min is wearing a large complicated hat with several peaks, Jam wearing her usual. Ja-min walks straight ahead into the garden, Louie thinking she will meet him there later. Laiwan understands everything and wants to give it space, takes a path toward the right. Louie and I take another path on the right. Jam, though she doesn't notice it, stays behind. Ja-min, the book says, a magician who goes straight ahead. Louie hearing it weeping, what she as felt about being the conduit of other people's relations. Ellie saw Laiwan and connected her with Jamila. Laiwan saw Louie and connected her with Ellie and Jamila. Ellie saw Ja-min and connected him with Louie. Louie, oddly, is worried that Jam will take Ja-min. That means something. Other moments in the night. I tried to find him. You're always vanishing. He says it too - When you're in my arms you don't give yourself to me. You keep me at a distance don't you. A signal for if he hurts my feelings, and he too. This book is about to meet the place where D left and I turned it around. Want to say: walking yesterday. Feeling I'm in contact with the ground. That blue sweater. I had red sneakers then too. Stella Polaris. Another place I was with him. Silent. A life. Pity and terror. Heavy seas. How bait is set. Knut Eric Jenson. For his mum. Knut Eric Jensen dir 1993 Stella Polaris Norway A dream where I am drawing the plan of a garden, back garden, house, front garden, a high wall, something divided in three perennial beds with an edge like this maybe. [sketch] It seemed important. 12th Sorry friend, I'm chickening out. I was overconfident, in fact I'm not remotely strong enough to handle liking the likes of you. Don't give up the bees, I'll duck if I see you. 'Bye sez e. xx
aphrodite's garden volume 18
|