| aphrodite's garden volume 18 part 1 - 1993 october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
14 October 1993 A winter lamp. It's called a piano lamp, brass. How many years have I wanted a lamp. The big man who works downstairs at Pilgrim's Market said I could not buy it, see how it looks, bring it back. I said I'd have to imagine it. I came back on the way to Joyce, it wasn't there. I ask him, Did you sell that little brass lamp? No it's in the window display. Oh - I need it. It's my winter reading lamp. He says it's in the window display. I position myself waitingly next to the window, where he's got something set up to look like a department store furniture window. I stand looking at him while he fusses putting a plate into a locked cabinet. He comes over. "I can't take it out of the window." "Don't you want the money? It's twenty bucks." He can't take it out of the display. I can see he has something else going on, he doesn't want me to have it. "Why don't I buy it and take it home when it comes out of the display?" "No I can't do that." "I've seen you put sold on things, why can't you just put my name on it?" I've got him. Twenty-one forty he says going to the till. A woman behind the counter is kidding about voting for those fundamentalists the Reforms. He says do you want to ring in twenty one forty, twenty dollars furniture. He's writing my name on a strip of masking tape. The woman says, Why don't you just get it out of the window for her, she needs it. She came to look at it earlier. He says No, I was thinking about using it for the window display yesterday. I wink at her. She says, Come on Leon get it out of the window for her she needs it. Oh if you'll go down and get me another lamp he says grumpily and goes off to get it. A little power battle, I say to her sotto voce. And I won it she says. He comes back with the lamp. Thank you (to her). She winks. Thank you for getting it out of the window for me (to him, sweetly). And then Joyce back from the Tibetan mountain. She's very pinkfaced and has big glasses on. They drove ten days in Landrovers to get to the place where the walk begins. I said did she take us all with her, it's been very intense. She said yes it was very intense. Fortuitous. The morning after they arrived, the first day in two months the mountain was visible. It took three days to walk around it. I'd brought her nasturtiums, said I was feeling thankful. She showed me photos. What did I say to make her offer me the bowl of rocks. This is mean, she says to herself. Pick any one of these. There's one that looks like a mountain. This is the one that's talking to me I say. How are you? Well, I think, but a bit euphoric. I think I need to steady myself. A lot has happened. And what is my story. Strong enough and weak enough for me, both in ways that I sort of know. (What was it she said would be difficult for me? I rushed past it.) Can I tell you a dream? Please do. I am looking at water, a very wide river or the sea, at a boat the size of a little fish boat that is foundered. It's full of water but it's still floating. Suddenly I'm on it looking at the big grey waves wondering how I'm going to get off, the water is very strong. I can't swim this. What I'm afraid of is that I'll get swept out to sea. But then the boat is on land still moving very fast down a road that is wet. There's water running on it. Maybe it's cobbled. It is still moving too fast for me to be able to get off. Up ahead I see a turn in the road. There's a very green grassy mossy bank. Maybe the boat will run into it, but it doesn't, it turns the corner and now is moving down more of a trail. It's more countrified. Then the boat is stopped and I've gotten off. In front of us is a canal, a channel, with water moving very fast and clean between the sort of banks there are on canals sometimes, cut stone. There was something else about a man who'd been on the boat before, quite a large man. Now tell it as the boat, she says. I'm out in the water, swamped - but I'm not really telling it as the boat, if I had I'd have talked about what it's like to be swamped. I had in mind that he might be the swamped boat Ellie lands on. The boat at the end faced with a channel that may not be wide enough for it. It's man-made, she says. You really don't like this little channel do you, I say. She says no it's my rebellion. Well there's nothing to say it can't open up into a larger body of water further on, it IS clean and fast. If you could re-dream this dream how would you do it? I guess I'd row out to the boat and pull it to land and fix it. Why didn't you just find this beautiful sailboat and step onto it and fly away to wonderful places? It didn't occur to me. That's the interesting thing, she says. (Later, Well, if I saw a boat like that I'd want to fix it too.) What's in charge? It seems the boat is. No, not the boat, it's more as if the road is. Events are. I thought I'd better know what I'm doing. What are you doing? I'm wanting to take on somebody like my father and get it to come out differently. You know the danger when you do that is you'll get it to come out the same? Yes. So should I just drop the idea? Why should you? Well, if it isn't going to work - We don't do things because we know they're going to work surely, she says. No. Laughing. It's not the outcome, you'd better remember that. Both laughing. I know, I know. What do I know - my cheeks were hot coming out of it, are hot now retelling it. I'm wanting to forgive people, as if I feel I've gone round a corner, be nice to my relatives, write letters. I've been looking for womanly men, I say. This one is not like that. He has men's sorts of vices. He doesn't listen very well, he's not empathetic, his idea of doing something for a woman is to fix something for her, paint her ceiling. She picks it up right away: Protective you mean. Yeah. With that slant of satisfied irony. Yes, so. So the energy is an energy of feeling I can make him be the father who changes into a good father. A strong energy, very dangerous. I couldn't see that boat enjoying the channel, it would need to be sent back out to sea. It's an energy also that turns against me in a second. What are the dangers. Somebody's secret plan. Danger for me is it glamorizes so I don't have that easy rebalance into critical sight. Unbalanced I bail out. Bailing out terrorizes the other person. Must do something to me too. Other danger. I think about it too much (what do you expect, taking on something hard), am impulsive and get it wrong and am mad at myself and mind too much. What's the best I can do with it. I like the idea of a test. How can that strong primal energy get - it suggests - channeled? Where does the channel go? Having ridden the boat that far and unswamped it . - River is marriage, I wrote that down. The two banks that are rivals and have life racing fast and clean or sprawled flat and murky between them. Oh, and he's impotent. Frightened, that means, she said. Well yes, but he says he's frightened and keeps coming. But it's his body that's frightened. Yes. And so is mine, I didn't say. 15th Six in the dark, rain. My new room - the green blanket - green yellow orange dark red, Moroccan hotel room blue. More from yesterday. The swamped boat. "Swamped, that's the word." That it reminded me of the boat at Read Island they are using in the breakwater. "It has a woman's name and it's full of water." "Oh that's wrong," she says, very definite. "It was sinister," I say, "people have to see that every time they arrive and leave." Her definiteness helps me as if I'm being shown the existence of a secure body of knowledge where I have only inklings. - Last week a moment in the Calabria where I wanted to turn around and see both of us in the mirror, have a picture we are both in. A moment at the cinema, I'm late and don't find him and wait for him outside. The sensation of waiting at the door, the way I've seen him wait. The way eyes catch right close. We're standing each with one arm around the other holding a jacket over our shoulder, he with his right hand and I with my left, just on the threshold with the open door behind us. I notice Jennifer and Catherine from the Film Board coming past looking at me both with the same look on their faces, extraordinary interest and dislike. They're furious with jealousy. Amazing. Will I have to appease them. Alright, all of this is telling me what's up. Now work. - What happened after I wrote the note and left it. A kiss-off with two kisses. Next day, wracked, I figure out the SSHRC schedule on the phone. Then lie down. Track stresses. Forehead, solar. Learned last week about hands and back. And this time I melt. I'm only very lightly there. And coming out of it knowing things. It assumes I'll go on and tells me what to do. Wise as if it's the book. I go to the garden and just sit. I'm there at nightfall sitting by the edge of the pool looking at the reflection and the sky, a small band of rose light. Rob in the vinewalk comes and sits by me, has his hair down and his leather jacket on. Sits next to me like a girl, with his legs to the side. I want him gone. I like his nose. The limpness of his spine appalls me. But I can see that between choosing to try to fix a man with a strong spine and a limp penis, and a man with a limp spine and a strong penis, is fairly arbitrary. The one way is harder for me, more conventional, more foundational. That's the one I'll take but the other will tempt me every time I collapse. Backup. -
What am I thinking about the video. The subtext. A woman makes a garden, she makes a place, everything she does is symbolic. She asks people to do things for the garden and they like to. She gives herself to it without asking for security. It gives her a lover. A friend comes to her from outside. She takes that friend into the garden, invites her to work with her in the garden and under the garden, in the understanding of it. They are struggling against each other to bring each other to the same change, the beginning of their lives as women with men. The struggle is built into their work. A seeing of the garden: video is I see. Is it we see? (The strategy that wants to capture the mother's sexuality to keep her from him - such a determination, such a fake.) What we find in the garden, a furiously determined little girl, her propulsion. (Women keep limping past this morning, that was the third.) Her strategy different from mine. (Trudy's strategy because it worked.) Mine to give up on him because her vengeance is so extreme, her ignorance so terrifying. She has had the power of her wish, I have not. My solar trembling with, what is this, the rush of fast clean water through a narrow channel (here's another, with a cane) - comprehension and change. What is the garden in this. Common life, where people are figuring in these extraordinary stories. The place is its own whurlu. 16 A Saturday morning, wintery. In my bed with the green blanket. That means my new bed. What I've had to do to be in this new bed, if it is a new bed. Beautiful dark green bound in red. A torrent. I drove to UBC to find a book, lay on the sand at Jerico and saw the day. What I've been living isn't writable. A dark haze over the city, trees in yellow bits but with air before them a color I've never seen. What was it, a metal, gunmetal maybe, a blue in a dark grey. I lay looking sideways at the sea, a loose quite flat surface stirring stirring stirring, and its thin edge a clinging brightness running up the hollows in the sand. I'm saying to him, I let you in. I let myself see the possibility in you that is what I am really interested in. Then my belly feels like a sea in motion, a strong chop. I'm not calm, though I keep stopping. I'm saying to her, You are so proud, rather than feel you have lost any of your importance to me and control of me you will give me up altogether. We will not laugh together any more. Then I feel a clamp at the heart. And these days feeling the clamp around the cunt. Lying down beginning to track it. I wander but begin to know it's more than cunt (which feels like a hard ring), it's circulation into the legs. Tight ring around the temples, and then I'm into seeing. Yes. And more I know about sex. Treat them like baby genitals, touch them with the least possible action. Consciousness by itself. Is it the season. People cracking. Rob phones and hearing him I am so near to him I can tell him anything. He tells me too, he's living in emotion, his hands and arms are streaming, he's lying and getting into it, images, cards, dreams, a woman's way. Louie doesn't sleep and phones me clear and tired, she wants things in suspense but not forgotten. Now she's spacing, she says. I clean house, ritual preparation. Buy food. Hang my black camisole in the window to dry, the lace is a flag to the neighbourhood. Careful with symbols continuously. Seeing the hidden material in the video photos, a stream of light bits flowing across the image from the head of the baby on Frank's shoulders. (Walking these days, I haven't said, in so light a body feeling shoulders, hips, waist, independently, and weight meeting the ground as if on the sole of a hand.) Getting Koo to check the brakes - he reset them. Writing this in the crosslight from the western window. 17th Soft. I did a lot. Made a kitchen with a gold light over a plate of bacon and eggs. I knew to talk to him about Sylvia, and when I did he came present with me across the table. In bed in his green shirt with his arm behind his head beautifully happy. I was so mobile. There would be a little snag and I'd pull loose and get downstream into some new feeling. Standing behind him at the table, with my arms around his neck, I said what I had to say. "I got more real in relation to you. I took you into me a bit." He didn't say I love you too; he would change the subject and I would not be offended. My hands accepted him no matter what, not as policy but because they did and I was not in pride. Under my green blanket, under the lamp. If he goes into a spin I keep touching him. He talks. I stroke his shoulders. The rule was, none of the sexual parts. Late in the night I, we, something, broke loose - we were moving fast and hard over across around. I was nipping and pressing, using tension, opposed by his shoulders and arms and thighs and feet, pushing, making some kind of noise I can't remember. Coming to the end of that lying on my back across him, damp, perfectly satisfied. And then we went to sleep. He settled me in his arms in a beautiful way he knew. I was wrapped in fur, even my knee between his legs. And then maybe an hour later, maybe more, I woke very suddenly from a deep sleep. The force of my waking woke him too. I thought maybe he'd had a dream. But maybe some self in me woke in fear of where I was. This morning I took him through his left and right sides and found a man and an elf. Community-family man, what he tried to be in Labrador. Would that one like to settle down with Sylvia? "Would you hold me, I feel hurt you didn't say it wanted to settle down with me." "It was because of the way you put the question. But you wouldn't want to settle down anyway." I watch myself say "I would, actually" and silence fall. "You've been declaring yourself all night and I haven't." "I'm not like a person waiting for a telegram. I've declared myself, take it or leave it, there's no hurry." "Would you like to live in the country?" "Which country? I have to sometimes be near academic centers." I can hear that my talk about my work daunts him. He hasn't got his own, he's feeling. I say maybe he needs relationship first and then work will come to him. He dithers in his old circuits - I need to be happy in my work and then I'll attract a woman. Well, if the ones you've attracted are not women. Two of us safe for our work because we can't have children any more. Meantime (I said last night) You are in relation to your penis the way your mother was in relation to you, nagging it to be a success, and it rebels. Why don't you find out what it wants? "I'm finding your judgment really questionable." You say. Irately. "My judgment about you is not questionable! I know you're a bad bet. I also know my relation to a bad bet." - Yes I do pound him down with articulate discourse and though I listen to his wanderings I don't listen with the love there is in my hands, I don't build his unspoken system around myself any more than he does mine. There is my weakness. But listen to this Kenneth (who the cards say will choose Sylvia, my swamped ship sunk to the bottom) and if not you then someone who likes the offer more than you do: I want to be loved and fucked, I want to be fucked with such love both of us are melted sexes and with them flying in the black wind. - I'd give you something that could make you, and if you aren't able to want it, it is my openness itself that will throw you out of my way. I'm saying to myself it is wonderful how being naked I am safer than when I am hidden. Other things. Leah's flower arrangement - I won't describe it - and the exquisite green and brown ruffles of hazelnut still in their wrappers, that she had with her candlesticks on the mantle. And the woman called Mtombe at Louie's South African event, whose slow soft delivery, from a body dressed in high western style but showing a lot of tit, bore final authority. "I make these suggestions thinking they may be useful." The empty judge discounted in his armchair and his wife in her president's wife clothes watching with her aged, Jewish, girl's face that bore one expression all evening. 18th Rob this morning, up against it, has come to the end of thinking propitiation is going to work. I've said I wanted to work something out with a normal man. "I always believed in myself, now I don't any more." "You will again, you are feeling sorry for yourself." "I'm not feeling sorry for myself, I'm pissed off." A look on his face I've never seen - a man's look. His jaw had come forward maybe. Hard enough to walk out. Anger is visiting with gifts. Off he goes in his ugly clothes with woman hair spread appealingly on his shoulders. But he's wondering about transformation. He says of my arrestedness, it's what you are. "It's not what I am, there is something behind it that is what I am." "But it made you what you are, there are good things you wouldn't want to lose." "I won't lose them, I've got them." Ken. Con. Known. Kin. Cunt. Cunning. In my ken. Ways to flush a woman out of cover. You don't know what you are doing but you know how to do it. Daddy things - offer protection, hold her in your arms to sleep. Slant your voice, smile your smile. Talk about sex as if you know it. Tell traveling stranger stories. Hint that you want something serious. Use your injury to disarm. Tell us women leave you not you leave them. They've worked on me but they haven't caught me - they've given me knowledge. They are true falsities. Your mother made you a man who doesn't ignore women. You've worked as hard on your dowry as I have on mine. See what I have now. It will be enough to hold you. Maybe. But no. I will have to go through your next move. Today you love Sylvia because she is refusing you. You will not want to tell me. You'll avoid me. Then she'll start to say yes again. Then you'll think how old she is and not a femme fatale. Then you'll want to talk to me, hoping I'll refuse you so you can love me and escape from her. But I won't refuse you. I won't even say choose. I'll say you need to find a way to have us both. And then you'll go to Europe to escape us both. And then you'll take yourself on. And then you'll feel abandoned. But not yet your true abandonment. And so on. I have called your bluff. But I haven't finished with my own. My cunt is clamping hard. I am talking too much and not in pain. Full salvage. You save the whole boat. He made it up. There was an earlier mother and then an earliest mother. It's complicated for him. There were three. Three mothers and three sets. His mother Nell who's Ellen. (His father Alec (he thinks) Rendell.) His birth mother gives him to her sister Ann, with whom he lives until he's three. His birth father is nowhere, he's sunk out of sight. There is an uncle-father with the same name, also Alec. He gives these people his child-heart, is his elf with them, right-handed maybe. When he is three his birth mother secures her life. She marries upward, a kind, frozen man, and exerts her right to the child. The child resists her. She is furious, tries to compel him. His sister Ruth is born. Penelope and William over a span of twelve years. The battle never stops. He has left his child love with his foster parents. He is angry with his birth mother in two times at once: the earliest time in which she abandons him, and the later time in which she tears him away from the parents he now has. Three times at once: because there is her ongoing onslaught. She demands he give up his loyalty to himself. He is stuck with having to resist her, both her seduction and her ambition. There is a larger loyalty he cannot reach. He is impotent and a dilettante. Lost on coasts where he may run into his father. He will have to find a woman who is all of his mothers - the womb mother who abandons him, the love mother who loses him, the later mother he resists for his life - but he cannot sort them out, or find them in one place. Now to Sylvia. She has been his love-mother, a woman he veils. He is not allowed to know he loves her. His conscious self is formed in relation to his strife-and-seduction mother. He erects a false man, but it falls. Women are not taken in. My story is less complicated but more brutal. I have two sets who are the same, and a gap between them. Mamalie, Papalie, with child-love to nearly three. A gap where I'm at random among strangers who don't attach. Then the same two people again but without child-love. I no longer trust them. Strife-and-seduction father. Pride risen to carry me isolated through years. I learn I can get by with men who aren't men to me. I am impotent with them until I learn I can keep control for myself. But that is heart impotence. I see my valor in him. He is not a success but he has brought his spirit through. You - you are not a success but you have brought your spirit through. 19th A story about a boy in blue sailcloth trousers whose mother has given him permission to dabble his toes in the sea. Down in the whale cupboard he dances cunningly so that the whale wants him out. He's in a position to bargain and what he asks is to be set down on his native shore. Leaving, he props a whale's gullet and takes his jackknife home to his mother. Kipling 1912 Just so stories Doubleday What was the raft I dreamed, Louie and I and a boy? It is two logs fastened across the top. She thinks we can propel it across the water. I'm not seeing how, just sitting astride the log I'm not able to keep from rolling. His tone in the reading put me off so much I didn't attend, the false hearty tone it was written in, by a man for 'children', but for boys, a story loved for reasons neither child nor reader can know. The refused social knowledge is in it spoken and still concealed, with the noise of a 'charming' reading powerfully distracting some part of attention so that the story may be told. Whenever he came to "a man of infinite resource and sagacity" he stumbled - that was too true and too false to be easy. And it was his stepfather whose voice he called. It is Samhain. What is the whale that swallows him and that only his resource of cunning can extricate him from? What can both devour him and bring him home? Start by asking what's home. Something about his mother, some feeling state. So the whale is something that can keep him away from that or take him there. A woman who can make him fall in love? Not exactly. Something in himself? Overall yes. The unconscious? Yes, the organization of his mind that is not linguistic. Moby Dick. It is a story about the adventure he wants. Down in the cupboard he dances. He doesn't lose his head, he's a boy who is a man being a boy. It is my story too. Do I also want to be taken home to my wish for the mother? It says yes. Louie woke me at 2:30. She had been white with anger. "I want you to help me say goodbye." "Oh Louie - ." Dragged up reluctant. Five hours on the phone. I worked, she worked and saw the birch convulsing in a wind that had stopped when we stopped. Not a wind I could see here. We worked more closely, I thought, than we ever had. Like taking turns moving up a braided cord, coming to different kinds of stop. One would doubt what the other said, one would be angry, one would insist on a mutual admission. I would stop, turn on the light, ask my implements. Turn off the light and find her in the phone. She would have spoken to her voice. We'd have moved forward everytime, accepting and denying with authority and together. The one thing she sticks on is the deep one: that she did not see what I am because she needs her wish to fail. And is there one I stick on? Yes - and here it amazes me. Michael. What about him? That he was my real husband. What about it? I should feel my loss. That I can't find it here? No. That I can find it here but it won't be as good. How can I feel it? By liberating myself from the spell of masculinity. Louie didn't see it because she didn't have an overview, but she made me look at it. Can I work this story without Kenneth? Yes but it's better with him because it gives him something too. Her love letters. I love the love in them. I didn't want to be separated from them. "I don't know how I will live without you." And she: "That I will never have that again." And I: "That I will never have that again." Oh cunt why are you clamped so tight so sore. - Three reasons why she freaked about men: control, defeat, and strength of reserve - in order not to know how well things were going. - Then I make phone calls, sort bills, move granite dumped on Hawks to be the last gate [in the herb garden], the south. Last gate of four. Find Sharif measuring with his father [first move in designing the garden house]. Buy stamps in Chinatown, food. Go back to the herb garden and read the paper on the step. Come home and find Zócalo. Seeing that at this moment I have in suspension the full four of Venus flight - a Ken, a Bobbie, an Edith and myself. 20th Is it calming down? No it got wilder. Louie pretty from another of her nights is so full of confidence she imagines she can get the famous cellist. I imagine it too. I say: You could get a better man than I could. We have to go home and get it through. It's true she could get a better man than I could. It's true she doesn't want to know it, she is frightened of disloyalty to her mother. What we haven't admitted, that she chased David to test her power, and that she knew she won, she could have got him. That she could have got what I wanted so much. I cry blindly with my hands surrendering on either side of my face. How are you? he says. David imagined. I don't know how I'm supposed to go on forever without you. To be so much less in my love than I could be. Now what. I go on working with masculinity it says. I'm shaking. Louie was stonewalling for the last hours. I felt defeated. The man I can have is not a good man. What should I do? Use my judgment. Yes. Do you mean give him up because he is not good enough? No. Know him for what he is. And marry my larger love in my work. What Ursula did. How can such a marriage be good for him? By the bare fact that it persists. What would it give me? Continued losses. Losses of what? Delusion. Oh sore heart and loneliness. I have brought her to be able to have what I can't have. She will live in love and sex and a child. She will abandon me for them. I had it but I evaded it. I couldn't bear to belong to people. But I can bear it now. She will not be able to bear to abandon me. That will make her abandon me. This separation will be final. I am sore that she is going but I am glad too. Her inability to accept me costs me so much time. But I will have no one to talk to. It will be like when I was a child. I will be alone. It is my fault for wanting a man too. This is childhood structure speaking. Wanting the man makes me lose the woman. Am I lost? Lossed. This isn't a time to write well. This year I have lost Rowen, Michael, Luke, David, Rob, Louie. Is it my fault I have lost everyone? No. Is it her fault I have lost everyone? Yes. I don't understand. Persist. Do you mean it was my mother's fault I lost everyone, not mine? Yes. I took responsibility in order to be able to go on loving her? Yes. It was the best choice in the circumstance. But this time it is my fault they are gone? No. Why are they gone? Because my work with them is done. What do I have left? Action. Action in what area? End of delusion. 22nd The Pro Tools program yesterday. Rain today. Walking in the garden hearing the rain on Luke's umbrella, liking the small unwet moving core in which I could turn my head and look at the shadowless light everywhere. Everything bright. The wood of the benches, the scarlet rags of the sumac. Yellow grass in the orchard. The gravel. The concrete of the herb garden tank brown with water, rain impact on its surface a thousand little jets. Unquiet in several directions - murderous hatred toward Louie, K in suspense. Remembering anything in a day thinking I won't be able to tell Louie things anymore. And not Rob either. The ease of his voice, my ease too. I'm going from wealth to no one. Meeting Esshin the monk unrecognizable in an anorak hood. He says it happens that he breathes out of himself into it, not him doing it, and inward to himself a column straight and strong up his middle. 23rd Duncan McNaughton yesterday in the Kootenay School's room above Hastings where the Artropolis opening had lines around the corner - Woodwards full of art people and art community people, my friend over there with his friend and me alone with the ugly poets. So surprisingly ugly. McNaughton wasn't ugly and said women need to be saying what they have to say. Alice Notley. The descent of Alette in which her dead father is an owl helping her in the levels under the subway - helping her know how to come up and defeat the tyrant. He wore a pink sweater and would come stand against the wall with his arm out along it. Came to sit next to me, a large man in his early 60s [51] maybe, a soft grey thatch and quite a soft frightened look. I took advantage, leapt, said - should I be embarrassed by this - "I have something to show you." He caught it but I didn't stagger. I was thinking of giving him the piece I tried to send Robert Duncan. This happened because while he talked to some local beer bottle poet during the break and I was listening - repelled by the tone and wondering unconsciously what he was making of it, unconsciously staring trying to read him - it was only an instant - he caught my look very sharply and I stopped it before I had time to be aware. Strong on both sides. The way he dropped down beside me when he could was a measure of his presence I thought. His talk was no organized discourse but full of touchings-on. Is this the men's writing it means? No. Which then? Persist. Do you feel all writing is men's? Strongly yes. What is women's relation to it, then? The sword. They should fight against it? Not quite. They should do something else. Yes. Things with images? Strongly yes. Music. Structures like the garden. Staying with language keeps women from their capability. Then why should I talk to this man? To get an overview. There is something he can tell me. What's the question. Something about what men are fighting in themselves, what they are ruling. The fourness of completed self. He has some experience of the unconscious. He was talking about possession. Does he mean they are fighting possession? Should they allow themselves to be possessed? Yes. (Are you possessing me? Yes. Is it possession by a part of oneself? No. By a sort of god? Yes.) They resist possession by women? Yes. When men are possessed by women are they mad? Yes. When women are possessed by men? Yes. What is possessing me now? Abandonment. Am I mad? No. What is one's relation to abandonment? Temperance. Intelligence in relation to feeling. Is one possessed by feeling? Yes. Is there an intelligence that stays stable? Yes. It isn't resurrection? It is. Of what? Manhood. I don't understand. "Perhaps someone might discover that original mind inside herself right now." A manhood in the womb? Yes. Is a womanhood in the womb different? Yes. Manhood's preparation for earthly power. Womanhood's preparation for psychic mediation. Strongly yes. Male poets possessed by male poets. - Trembling at the heart. They possess themselves with male poets so's not to be possessed by women. Trembling. "As my muse / accumulation of / electricity spent by poets." "Onslaught resurrection." Possessed and so resurrecting. "My soul is Chichester and my origin is a womb whether one likes it or not." No, my soul is a womb in Chichester. - Hours later. K bored me and calmed me. Sleazy today, looking sleazier than he has. He's lying about the welding party - he's taking Sylvia to it presumably - and was I smelling cunt up his nose? No it says. But that yes he is lying. So why shouldn't I ditch him? He'd feel abandoned. Wait a bit. - And Duncan. Calling me from the balcony. Jam's Ralph Maud's house. Sitting on a sofa, cold and trembling, come with my package. Notes from this morning. I wrote the bridge between his work and mine and brought it and watched it dawn on him what I was. What will we know. He said, "Do you have another copy with you? Will you read it?" "I don't know if I can, I'm quite shaky today." Then I read it. "That's quite an amazing little piece, I don't think I've ever heard anything like it." And other things, so that at the end I could bring out the immersion piece and ask for comment. He wanted to go for a walk. We were on the beach, Rob's beach, he asking what else I do. The garden. "Would you like to go see it?" Rain. It's standing in its beautiful colors. "I've never seen anything like it." His slightly fish-like profile slightly gaping next to me in the car. He had a nervous breakdown, his wife didn't want him anymore, he couldn't teach. He got a job as a teaching assistant in an elementary school. "The kids put me back together again, slowly. There was one little girl especially. Alisha. I fell in love with her." "Have you always been like this?" "No not at all, but what aspect do you mean?" "Your energy." What did he mean? My judgment. I was direct, faced with someone who had worked his way so far on his own. He was direct too. Personal. The way experienced people are when you bespeak them. And then we came back to Ralph's house and found three pretty women, makeup and skirts, fixing party food. I came in old, shaking, drab, big boots and leather jacket, frightened of them. Then it's K, whose back today had a cringe in it. He tells the story of a German writer's story about a woman with a deformed face. The first time they met it was dark. The next he sees her in her apartment. How am I going to get out of this. She wants a normal life with children. Crying at the window as he runs away. Hanrahan - dangerous little stories he says. Yes, they know him. Kicked out of Oona's house and wandering away. No mortal woman will love him, he refused the gifts of the crone, refused even to ask their meaning. "He was weak, he was weak." This morning, agony in the solar, I could speak to it, ask what are you. WB Yeats 1913 Stories of Red Hanrahan: The secret rose: Rosa Alchemica AH Bullen 24th A strong glint on the roof of a car. If I stare at it the air optics above it seem to strobe the way my solar is strobing. It is a good picture because of the way presumably it isn't there. Is the solar plexus in the brain? Look at that tree, a thin outer coat of few yellow leaves hung widely spaced in a single strip down its south-facing tips, catching sun and fluttering. Clean white and blue with it. When I'm at the Calabria am I always still with you? Another crowd on Sundays, Italian men. Smoke and voices. Dark busy air. The flutter. Which sadness is it fighting back today? Duncan asked good questions. How did you come to be at the reading? How did you get your limp? Where are you from? Do you also teach? Were you always like this? What can I do for my daughters? Is there anything else I can send you? Who do you hang out with? Did you really design all this? Will you write back? On the path outside the herb garden, affectionate, "You keep going like this, when you're older you'll be ..." - what? I was so pleased to be praised that I didn't register what he said. (Describing some such a thing, the way if I push a little I can find it more interesting than its impulse was. That's cooperation isn't it.) When it's the heart that flutters instead, what is different? Higher even, up into the throat. (If I look at it the solar clamps again.) - K was wearing a good green but I didn't want to see him. There he stands on the sidewalk talking about welding, the little things they make with plasma welds. I pick up my groceries. "I'm going home now." "I'm boring you." "You are boring me, yes." Touch his arm, "See you." Go away with my heart banging. The extraordinary weakness I have in relation to competition with women. I'll bail out rather than live that stress. Many things I can't do because of it. My strength with Duncan yesterday was sham, if I'd stayed in that house with those young women I'd have crashed like I crashed today. It's not jealousy so much as the stress of jealousy. Give me a name for it. Loss of love. What I want to know about it is how to come through it. It is crossed by the childhood I had. Founded in large loss. Immediate past with it is Louie. It expresses itself as anger. In the near future I'll have more skill. I'm feeling it as being about K. Hope and fear is that power is the answer. Sexual happiness would help. Outcome: intelligence, it said. I'll restructure? Large yes. Then I said sorry and why and he moaned that he goes away and doesn't like himself and feels he does things wrong and is clumsy - that we are only in angst and don't do things - that he hasn't met any of my friends - what else - that he didn't dare interrupt when I was talking to Pat - that we aren't spontaneous - that I shut down at ten o'clock - that I'm just subjecting him to an experiment - that I don't call him - that he feels confined - that I don't invite him during the week - that I am exclusive in my tastes - that the two times I've cooked for him are the only good times we've had - that I'm making him lose interest sexually by giving him limits - there must be more - that I'm too demanding sexually and too authoritative generally - that my mind is too well organized - that I cast a spell on him when what he wants instead is for me to be compelling - that we're too cerebral - that I'm abrupt and unpredictable - that there's always tension - and those are only the ones he says. Yeah - this man so readily backs himself out the door with his whinging. "I feel sorry you don't like yourself with me, that's very wrong, shouldn't we give up on it?" Meaning, if you don't soon find something to like and want about me and us, out you are. No, really, you have to want to learn, that's what Hanrahan's story says. Knowledge, power, courage, pleasure, crone gifts you are too self-absorbed to take. Then a new turn. Louie at Ja-Min's house phones to ask about tomorrow. She's sounding suspicious. She was at Kits Beach walking in the rain when I was standing there with Duncan. She saw the house he ran up into before we drove away. I didn't see her. What does this mean? What is arranging these conjunctions? Loss. Is loss telepathic? No. We're simply connected? Yes. We're connected and sensitive to the possibility of loss. That sensitivity can be used for the work, with work. What else can it be used for? Shared pleasure. How? By balancing in threat of loss. It is more that she is more threatened than that she is more sensitive. She's very worried I might get together with a good man. Why does that worry her? If I have a relation that's intelligent I won't need her. Is that true? Yes. Why does she want me to need her? To raise her fortunes in the world? Strong yes. What I needed from Jam, and got. (And Jam knew it.) Because she has enemies. Who? Men? No. The men in her family? No. The men who challenge her right to have women lovers. So the structure comes from the father? Yes. The need to get the mother is stronger than the need to get the father? That is more true for me than for her. With her the need to get the father is stronger than the need to get the mother. But she also needs to get the mother. And she has suppressed the need to get the father, because it's more dangerous to her. With me they're both dangerous. When she spies on me it's primarily to get my men. She wants to learn from me how to get men. It began with Alexander? No it was there from the beginning, in her anxiety about Rob. (She was looking for that in my journal, but it was mainly esoteric stuff she wanted to know.) My main anxiety was - why don't I get this? - that I'd find someone else to dominate? I'm stuck. She offers her pleasure as power to the other. The sentence it gives me is something like: her mother represses/binds her assertion in the world. She thinks of me as the mother she can win against. Does she want me to be liberated too? She hasn't gone that far but she will. 25 "Oh joy that in our embers" I said. Losses it said. Tell me three things I'll lose. Withdrawal, loss, self-restraint. Tell me three things I'll gain. Free energy, loss, the unconscious (emotion, betrayal, but not enemies). Tell me three things I'll have to give. Vision, persistence, patience. Do you mean the things I make will teach? Yes. Tell me three things I'll be given. People will give me their vision. People will need to get even. People will dominate me. The way I dominated Louie? Yes. Give me a clue. (Kw) I'll be dominated by masculinity? Yes. This takes my breath away with fright. Slow down. Help me. Something about an overview. If I'm dominated I'll have an overview? Strong yes. What is domination? (Kc) I don't understand. Rest. My body is frightened of men. My father and Roy and the doctors. I had that fantasy because it took me around that fear. It is frightened of women too, but less. It is my spirit that is frightened of women. My spirit isn't frightened of men. Body is unconscious, spirit is conscious. Is he emotionally married to her? No. Could he be, to me? No. Because I don't like him enough. If I loved someone as much as I loved David could he be married to me? Yes. I don't love him because his spirit is too crooked? Yes. Is my spirit crooked too? Yes. Am I straightening it? Yes. Does loving a straight spirit make me a straight spirit? No. Does Louie love him enough so she could marry him? No. Does she love me enough so she can marry me? Large no. She thinks she does. Because of Michael?! Yes. How does that work? She always wanted Michael/her father. Her love for me was a ruse. If I am persuaded she loves me I'll let her get near him. So why didn't she go through with grabbing him? She held herself back because it hurt me too much. That was guilt. She did really want David. She held herself back? No. He held her back? Yes. For my sake. It is true that Louie doesn't love me? Yes. She does love her mother. She wants something from me. No. She wanted something from me. She got it. Do I love her? No. Did I love her? Yes. I stopped loving her when I saw what she was up to. (Did Jam ever love me? No.) When she looked in my journal. It meant she had given up on the real thing. It is because she doesn't love me she has been so jealous. She has persisted because it is her stubborn nature. When she feels she loves me is when she feels she is fooling me. Will I be able to see all this clearly? Yes. This structure is basic to her psychology? No. Are there structures basic to a psychology? No. There are competing structures? No. There are structures evoked at certain times? No. There are structures evoked between people? Yes. This structure evoked between us: she needs to hold the woman to get to the man. I need to hold the man to get to the woman. I'm more of a lesbian than she is. It is only my holding men that has held her. It is only her holding me that has held me. What is the end of this story? I understand my relation to masculinity and she understands her relation to femininity. In both cases that it has been a means to an end. Joyce knows all this. Is Louie going to understand it? No. So what is the truth of my emotional affiliation? My emotion is affiliated to power. Everyone's is. I loved David's power? Yes. What do you mean by power? Assertion. When I loved Louie it was her assertion I love? Yes. Love is always childish. When I assert myself I'm loved and have power. When I do not assert myself I love. Isn't there a better game? No answer. I have to see through it to leave it. Is my game with Louie nearly over? Yes. I have been as blind as she. I was blinded by her need, I thought it was a need of me, ie I needed a woman to need me so she wouldn't leave me. It has been a gigantic hoax on both sides. Yes. I'd like an end of delusion. 28 Did she take something away from me last night? Yes. Your relation to masculinity. She did it because she worried that I'll get free. Will I be able to get it back? No. Joyce will be able to get it back. No permanent damage. She battles against what I need to do to grow. I don't battle against what she needs to do. I've worked to make her an artist, and it has been for her not for other reasons. She uses anxiety about the relation to avoid something in herself. (I've done that with other people.) She has not worked to make me an artist. She doesn't work against it but she puts her need first. Whenever she doesn't talk to the book it's because she wants to hold onto the strength there is in reserve. Being able to justify anger for instance. Why was she crashing yesterday. It was about her father. Her body is becoming more womanly. I would like that kind of sex too. No. I wouldn't? No. Why not? Because if you lose the man you feel it too much. I would like to have the sex and be able to bear the loss. Yes. Will I be able to have it later? No. Is it true I will never have deep sex with a man? No. Would I have to be married to have deep sex with a man? Yes. In that sense I don't want to be married but I'd like to be able to want it. There is a fantastic greed in the way she demands my time. What should I do about that? Be careful. She does get more out of it than I do. I want her to go away for six months and she will. I have been giving her my time because she has been standing in for my own spirit. When she has that feeling sorry for herself tone it is really anger. It makes me angry not because that is its content but because it tries to guilt me. 28th What happened yesterday. Coming to Joyce compacted, she said. "It's been very stressed." "Show me with a pillow. Flutter it, press it. Press against something. Breathe, Ellie. Make a sound. How does that feel?" Energy through trunk and head. "Bring it up from your feet and through your head and down though your feet again." "I don't know where to put it between my head and feet." "You don't have to know that, just feel it. Put your father in the chair. Speak to him." "I can't see you but I want to take you on, I want to see through you, I want it to be over, I want to be out from under your spell. I feel ready to get to the bottom of it." "Now see him. No, not the old man, he's the safe one. See the other one. What do you see?" "He's at the head of the table. Young and straight. He's angry." "Who's he angry at?" "Either my brother or me. He wants to crush our spirits. I am the only one who is standing up to him, so much is depending on me." Then more I don't remember. She is saying "You have been standing up against him everywhere, let it go." "If I let it go there is no one to look after me, she won't, he won't. I want there to be someone." I'm shaky and rushing. She says "There is someone, Ellie now can look after you, ask her to." I look at the chair and say "Will you look after me?" Holding onto the arm of the chair to take two steps. Sitting in that chair saying "I will look after you." (I think - this part isn't well remembered.) She gives me the cushion. "Hold the little girl. 'My darling one ...." (She's prompting). I'm tenderly holding the cushion with my wet face on its shoulder. (Where was the crying, I don't remember that.) I open my eyes and see the photo opposite on the wall, a Tibetan young mother's face. The baby on her back has so direct and secure and clear a look. "The mother can walk where she likes. The baby and she are together and free." "Is it three o'clock?" "Almost. You can talk to that little girl anytime. She's your spirit. Write to her. She'll write back with her left hand." I get up, arms and legs rushing amazingly. Stagger out laughing. She's rubbing my shoulders.
Calabria, 29th Dear you, it's further into the year, a dull mist in this corner. A day I don't want. Something I want isn't in it, what thing. Sweetness. What if later. Oh you. What if I were meeting you tonight at the Princeton. It's the beginning of the long dark isn't it. How are you doing. Walking in your boots. - That moment I saw you. It scared me. I saw your eyes. Gone. There I am, a crooked face today. Left side staring; the other eyebrow's level. That's what this panic looks like. There's never going to be sweetness again, no arms, no sun, no inner light, everyone is gone, everyone in whom I can feel you. A strong confident child, a running girl; a shocked silenced spirit who doesn't want the day. I've liked semicolons for this reason. Have been saying it's so wrong to begin the second clause with a capital, the continuation must be internal. How should the sentence go, what sentence would I like to hear. A sentence addressed to me. You would say, Dear you too - I miss you so much, I think of you every day. Walking in this city I remember your face, I remember every time I ever saw you, I remember you coming around the corner in your car. I think of the way you looked at me wanting to see the color of the air in the room I am. Seeing it. Wanting to sit with me in it. - Tell me about (temperance). Nature and consciousness interchanging. Question is about early loss in relation to it. Crossed by my managing self. Founded on reservedness. Recent past what happened with Joyce. At its best it's conflict. Near future conflict. I feel I'm getting through it. Hope for and fear of emotional happiness. Resource is solitude. Literally having no lovers? Yes. Outcome a turn for the better. Do I really need to be alone to have that proper relation to my left side? Yes. I'm at my best when I don't confuse that relation with other lovers. R: Do you agree that I'm better without lovers?
So am I in the middle a mediator, the I with something on either side?
The narrator. Who tells the story of a little girl and a man. Duncan is also a little girl who met a man. K is a dead explorer and a living explorer. The dead explorer has his potency. His elf has the hard-on but it's the other man I think I like. R: his elf challenges me and makes me aggressive. L: I bring his elf a turn for the better. R: his community man makes me feel losses, abandoned. L: I feel restricted with his community man. Community man to little girl. Sees it as me. Community man to old soul. Sees it as sad and subtle. Elf to little girl, a physical exchange. Elf to old soul. Gives him physical well being.
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