aphrodite's garden volume 18 part 3 - 1993 november-december

work & days: a lifetime journal project

27 November 1993 What I've never done. Knocking on his door unannounced. He's at the table making watercolor patches. Do you want to sit and read something while I finish this. When I come from the bathroom in the corridor he's breathing dope at the open window. I take the exhale from his cold chin. It disrupts us. I stand back, I want to see what he is. I see how he's narcissistic with his impotence. Touching me at that moment, what he's with is not me but his anxiety about his penis. He's saying, Oh now it's going well, oh now I've lost it. I see again, immediately, that I don't find him, don't track him, that he's a being, that I let him go by unfound. He's going away out of my life unknown and without having known me. I lie feeling all this and he lies feeling something else. It's honest. I let it go on. Later we hear a rattle of rain. I say "That sound must be so familiar to you." Lying in his bed with him. "You have been in so many beds in places where you were a stranger." There is a moment where he is telling me about the trains between Revelstoke and Golden. I can hear the way he says the names, his foreigner's acquisition of them and their places. He says the engine's sound on an incline: buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh. Yes exactly that. And then like this when the incline is more. This squeaking of the couplings between cars. That was a perfect moment, the bodies were in some exact harmony when I listened to him listening to the trains in a tent in a treeplanting camp. I wanted to tell him what I'd miss about him. I was telling him a kind of love. He fell asleep. I thought rancorously that I would cut him off now and not have to feel it when he goes. Slept on my side for the first time, wouldn't look at him sleeping. He woke in anxiety. Where? Chest and throat. "That I have no prospects. What I manage not to think about." I said "Tell me again what the train says." But I said something else too. Lying wrapped perfectly. "Exactly this is what I'll miss." "You'll have to find another hairy man." "You never find the same thing again. You always find something completely different." What "verbally unempathetic" means. What she says - she asks questions. That's ass-crawling, he says. "Men think it's ass-crawling, women think it's a skill." What did I dream. I can feel it here. A dark place, a bicycle? Boys - was it in some way his place - was it his tone. Spaces with things or babies. I wanted to be visiting his being, his dark. Putting my hand on objects he can't name, doesn't name, doesn't know to name, because they are him and no one else. Is that ass-crawling? No, it's travel. 28 Am I depressed? The way he is when I tell or show him anything defeated me. When he asked, Did your son attack the door? the moment of feeling, oh, here's Luke, we could be with Luke and Rowen for a moment, something of my own. But no. "You have that look again." "Which one." "The one that says this man's a perfect fool." "What's he doing here? How did he get this far?" 29 Things I haven't been caught up with. I lost his sweater when Louie and I edited through the night. What is it about her voice on the video, what is it I hate in her voice. Why do I have to keep it out. Going to The piano with Rob. Who in Campion is the mute small woman with curled fingers. Jane Campion dir 1993 The piano 30 What is here. Rain. Second day typing out of this autumn's journal. What's there to see. A life in emotion and images depressed and frightened. Torture with Louie, sorrow with Luke and David, stressed conflict with Rob. Worry about money and video. Then the green man. I go for him. It's emotion of another pattern. Now L cried hopelessly that I've given up on 'our friendship' for the first time. Have I? I'm cold to the suggestion. Maybe. She wants me to feel what I'm giving up. I do not feel it and don't care that I don't feel it and don't mistrust myself in not caring. This not caring is alright I feel. I'm cold and lucid in negotiation. Hard-nosed. Even though I do not understand this separatedness I think it is not wrong. We had a very clear time today, the clearest we've had, probably. "You have finished getting what you wanted before I finished getting what I wanted" - so much further on than she has been. Was copying passages yesterday imagining they were for him, imagining I'd give them to him with my goodbye, so that when I'd gone forever he'd know me. In the passages themselves imagining him reading them feeling inconsistent things - that he was with me in my times and that even reading them he'd not be able to be with me whatsoever, would be puzzled and critical. Derisive even. Wanting him to feel my letters to David so he'd know what more there is to be had. Imagining him finding things in my story of him to help him figure it out, imagining his annoyance at being scrutinized in terms that don't belong to his temperament. Oh the hope of being known, the blind energy of that hope, the sober knowledge that only knowing can hope to succeed, being known is impossible with less than saints. After the day in that suspension with both sorts of feeling, he phoned, saying more than he's ever said - that the connection as it is is a kind of miracle of mutual sufferance, that I'm nicer to him than anybody else is. That he has good times. I was instantly turned around, oh, maybe it will go on. Interested how decisive I could feel one very small acknowledgment to be. Sad rebellion that says I must go away forever turns on a dime. What does it mean - Floating. I'd like to call you and will wait. I'd like to sleep in your bed tonight, but I'll wait. I fixed myself by being with my own time. It was going to be a story about you, for you, but today I don't imagine giving it to you. Only that I'll see you and it will be someway and you'll go and it will be someway and you'll be what you are, quite thrillingly unlike. My materials don't require you, but I have to remember not to be too long away from them in yours. [Opposite: Dear you - oh it's dark this afternoon, the Calabria, four on a Sunday, dull orange light, air poisonous with smoke. I've come out of the woods and here's a winter clearing chill and damp. It's suppertime where you are. You'll eat with a friend and then sit down to your preparation for teaching tomorrow. What would I tell you if I thought you wanted to know. I'm dejected. As if I'm sitting on a stump with my head in my hands. There's no hope of affection today. As if I'm excluded from my own room, my own fire. Tell me something. Address me. Say this: come here. Come in my house. Sit here. Take your shoes off. Let me look at you. I'm so happy seeing you in my chair. I don't want to talk, you talk, if you want. I'll make a room in my chest for anything you say. I want to feel your voice in my palms. I want to hear the world you stand in when you speak. And I can, if I create a dark air to absorb it. Here you are. Eat with me. Come in my arms now. Tell me what you thought this morning when you woke. Do you want to listen now? Then I'll tell you one thing. This was my dream. I walked up a flight of stairs in a city I often visit. There was a corridor. I walked past many doors. I was looking for a room where I could stay. There was a door closed I knew I could open. It opened very easily. I saw you standing by a window but looking toward the door. I came to stand beside you. We were standing looking together from the window. We were looking at a wide country in a color of light that was at the same time yellow and white, soft and sharp. We saw the light change. It was moonlight. And then storm and then morning. We saw grass and leaves growing and moving. Bushes were like beings whose leaves were their feelings stirring around them. We saw a field of grass blades turning to follow the sun. We saw shadows in motion, their sharp edges scouring every part of the ground. We saw the earth change color so that it was not the light that changed but the color character of everything in front of us. We felt our own color character change with it. We were something stable against which all of these changes could be felt. I knew we were looking at a country created when we stood together at any window. I really dreamed you the other night. I came into a school being renovated for you. Your school. The school of loss, it said. I was willing to speak to you but you are still sore that I sent you away. Prince Loss at the sink. I've come to your city, I've walked in your door and found you, your face, your voice. What would be next. I would say, I can see you are angry with me. You are suspicious. You can't say you are those things unless you are willing to say - I've missed you Ellie. Say that. And I have missed you and gone away and come back and missing you is like home to me. How have you been?] 1st December Singing, shopping. The noble fir bought for the occasion. One evening, night and morning. Food and light and this scent through sleep and talk and arms. Saying thank you. For what - you don't know. For a taste that tells me what I like. And what do I like? I like loving where it was needed and not coerced, for the pleasure of it. I liked physical manliness and that it liked to be touched. That you're from the other side of the chasm, another texture altogether. 2nd Oh - it wasn't like that. I am so sore. I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear being with him, it having already stopped. I couldn't sleep next to him because he wasn't with me anymore in his sleep. I couldn't sleep in the next room, lying there in incoherent pain. I've cried all day, in front of him for the first time. I could only stop crying at the end by being hateful. I'm driving him up the ramp. British Airways he says. Right. He's stuffing some amount of paper money in my pocket, I'm pretending not to notice. There at the end. He unloads onto a trolley. Now am I going to pretend to say goodbye? I'm angry he doesn't mind leaving me. That's the whole of it. I'm angry that I mind and he doesn't. I'm angry that I'm the one crying. I just jump in the car and start to slam the door. "Don't do that, it isn't civil." I haven't wanted to look at him in the last hour, almost for the first time in four months. "Not being civil is the very least of my worries" in a very rough tone. I know what I'm doing, I want if possible to be mean not weak at the end. Burn my bridge. Make him feel something about having lost my company forever. Does he? The last face as I slam the door - I don't know what it was - not a bad face, maybe an idea of a hard face, sideways eyes and a stiff jaw. I said - getting suddenly out of bed again - "I feel completely defeated. I have to figure out how to minimize it." And after that I was tight shut. No more tears. Just get him out of there, out. He's gone, and his comforter and his ghettoblaster. "I fought very badly." "I feel completely defeated." "Oh Ellie." Now you're over the Arctic two and a half hours north of here. I know so much about your life. You know nothing about mine. Last night I went away from your mutter about what to pack, sat in the bath in the dark singing under the sound of water filling it - that lament I know from years ago. It was the right song, I was free in it under the noise. He came in after and said "That song has a very soppy title, it's the Eriskay love lilt." "I only know one line, 'the old pathway to you.'" He knows the other one I do know, "sad am I to leave you." Vair me o, ro van o Vair me o ro ven ee, Vair me o ru o ho Sad I am without thee.   When I'm lonely, dear white heart, Black the night and wild the sea; By love's light my foot finds The old pathway to thee.] There were overcomings, there were times I managed the exercise, did it well. But this last one was too much for me. I was proud not to have cried with you. It was this same crash that came again many times and I recovered from it. Heartbreak. The first time on the foreshore was this very grief. "I don't mind separations. I like separations, I like to be with people intensely and then I like to be by myself. I can manage that, what I can't manage is that you have so little heart for me." In the leaving, I meant. "My father used to tell me never to take anything from anyone without giving something back." By that time I was silenced - this utter sponger - whose gifts, even, came with the large demand that they should be overadmired. "So that's all your presents then" he says later. He means, tell me how wonderful I am. I keep thinking, oh Louie how do you put up with that in me. Driving away from the International Departures I felt in my pocket - what's he put in here, a twenty? The purple of a ten. Disgust - he has no idea. I threw it out the window on Marine Drive, it will be pulped in the rain. 3rd Here is the pile of manuscript I got, 57 page, banged out in the last three days from exactly five months of passion. How long is a book. Four hundred. A left-handed man. What is there to say about him. Have I stolen enough material. It would be satisfying to make money out of him. What would be the story. A woman's adventures. Parallel, a man's adventures. They meet, they separate, they go on. What adventures of his do I have. His impotence (is an adventure he doesn't know he's having). Born in 1951 in Glasgow, January 11. He goes to a church school 'til he's eight, then his father's prep school south of London, his father taking him there on the train. In his last year, 13, he creeps out of the dorm and sleeps in the bed of the under-matron, a 16 year old whose room is across the hall. His boarding school is Sedbah - Sedborough? - not a public school. He's not smart enough to get into Rugby, which was his father's school. The school is brutal - the prefects beat him for insubordination. He isn't popular, comes in every day to find his bed stripped. Brings home bad reports after the first one that pleases his parents. Holidays on farms in Scotland, Wales. Fights with his mother at home. She is intimate and crazed through her forties. Tells him her wedding night was a disaster - his stepfather was inept, has a tiny little dick. At that moment (he says) he becomes the man's champion against her. He has a room in the attic but she moves him downstairs. "You know why." But he doesn't know why. He discovers socialism, writes away and becomes a member of the Young Socialists. There's a demonstration in London in the early summer of 1968. He's seventeen. He runs away from home to go to it. No money. Takes a couple of tins from the larder. In the parade the people he likes are the anarchists. He stays in London, sleeps anywhere. This is in Hampstead. Finds work cleaning. Works eventually for the Simon Community in South London. Is in Camden Town for the moon landing in 1969. Leaves London quickly though, goes north to what he has known in childhood, the fishing port at Hull. Joins a crew fishing off Iceland. A brutal initiation, icy seas. He's expected to be a man and becomes one. Comes home and doesn't know what to do, signs up again. At some point he'd seen old photographs of Labrador. Tells his parents that's what he wants. They think it's a good idea and they stake him. He's maybe twenty. Some arrangements made through connections at a place he's working, or through his father. He got a 6 month contract in a little hospital. Thinks how to go back after his contract is up. Back in England signs up for a geography degree. Has to finish his A's or O's in night school, hopeless at math. Wanted to do English and History but - but something. Does his geography project on Labrador. Goes back and works for a little oral history magazine called Them Days. Researches and shoots some footage on ice fishing. Gets his teaching certificate and works less than a year in a little school with Inuit kids. Is not successful as a teacher. I haven't got the sequence clear in this part - don't know whether teaching came before Then Days. An Inuit woman Mary Sillitt who wouldn't have him. A woman in California. He makes trips there. It "doesn't work out" although she visits him in Labrador once. That's in the last phase when he has set himself up at Occasional Harbour, built his first stage and then a shack, financed himself into a boat and nets by means of winter jobs in the high Arctic. In those photographs is a not very interesting-looking young man with a moustache. (In child photographs is a thick and obtuse-looking head, closed-looking, dully defiant - in present photographs is quite beautiful, in his forties a much leaner keener face, ringed light irises, more forehead. Much more alive.) One winter, I don't know how many he was up there, maybe it was when he was fishing off Iceland again but this time with an Icelandic fleet, and had a nineteen year old Icelandic girl in port, or maybe he was outside of Grande Prairie on a seismic line, fighting for Linda (that wasn't her name) Cardinale outside a bar, he phoned Labrador and heard the shore ice had taken his stage and nets. He never goes back. His early notebooks and letters are still there, his boat motor picked clean for parts. Why didn't you persist? Who would I have married up there? Since then, it's ten years, his base has been here. He's been a tree planter and brusher, has fished in the salmon season. Went to journalism school two years, traveled - to China, twice to Nepal. Took biology courses at Simon Fraser. There was a cellist for two years. Kim after that. Others unnamed. Nancy and Fernanda and me in the last year. Sylvia for the last eight months, twice a week for a movie or concert, coffee at the Pofi Bar where she lives upstairs. Kim notable because she was slutty and it worked for him and she cheated on him and didn't tell him so he drove drunk and banged on her door and got banned from the neighbourhood. Fernanda was bad sex until the last week in Paris after he'd sent Nancy home despairing, a girl in her twenties. Back there in Iceland working at the fishplant an Australian girl traveler. He phoned her from sea to tell her to look out the window at the northern lights. He thought he'd stay in Iceland to be near her but she said no go back to Labrador and I'll come see you. Then she wouldn't come. The constant through these years his mother and stepfather, her voice in his head and coming out his mouth; his voice "patient," actually withdrawn, suffering. Ruth, Penn and Bill and the big house of their childhood. His visits home, that he dreads. He fails to make her proud. When he came back from the funeral there were two letters in his post box, one saying he'd been a pillar of strength - he told me that twice - and the other an ordinary letter delayed in the post saying "Daddy has been quiet today. I am just going to bring him his tea." The man who's left her plenty of money for the twenty years of her vigorous old age. Ken in mourning still. "But Mummy, I don't wear pyjamas." His concern for his clothes. The piles of them on the floor in my back room. Bought a denim jacket, completely wrong. Frets about the mending on his leather jacket. An hour before he had to leave he climbed into bed with me. Took off his clothes. I took mine off too. Skin contact. One second of the right fit. "Ah - there's the one," he says. He has some idea of cheering me up. Has restored himself driving my car around town. But it's not possible. "I'll feel you up a little" I say. "I'll feel you up too" he says, "in just a minute." Lies on his back thinking about whether after all to take his view camera. Then - alright, now I'll take quick inventory of this body I'm leaving. "It's an interesting body." "Interesting how?" "Well there's this powerful upper body, and that powerful leg, and then there's your polio leg. You have a limp but you give the impression you'd do well in a scrap. And then other things - your skin, you have wonderful skin." And then that's it. That's when I sit up and put my clothes on again. "Had enough?" "Yes, I've had enough." But not hearing his voice or seeing his face anymore, or coursing with his body or being with the direct unexpected energy of his talk. He is himself. He didn't at all want to be me. What to think about that. What to think about the passion I put into knowing him. Creating myself in him. I'm wanting to ask Joyce. I wanted to be him in a way I haven't wanted to be Rob or Michael or Louie, people who give me what he - I feel - owes me and won't give. Owes me because I give it to him. That isn't how it works. I want to ask Joyce, Is it true that is the choice there is, always, either you want to be them and they don't feel you, or you don't want to be them and they want to be you. Either choice is wrong - if you don't want to be them you miss out with them, you're blind in the world. But if you do see them you're heartbroken. They don't care for you and take your gifts for granted. This is the dilemma of my life and I swing between two wrongs, uneasy self enjoyment at someone else's expense, miserable failure to make someone love me. This means two wrong parents. It's not a universal structure though I took it to be. Is there more hope on the side of learning to give to people who give to me? Yes. There can be a turn for the better on the other side too. I have to work on it from both sides. What should I do about sex. Control it. Control means doing without it? Yes. But that is doing without so many goods. No. Can I have physical bliss without it? No. Can I have sweet intimacy without it? Yes. Vision? Yes. Physical bliss is a very great loss. No. But physical bliss gives health. No. I got my periods back by sleeping with him. No. What does give health? Living in a different state. Do you mean something like coming into the overmind? Yes. What part of me is grieved? The imagining woman. Will you give me a card for the overmind? (Ks). Will you give me a card for Louie's book? Power struggle. Paranoia will give me health?! Yes. I don't understand. Shatters what structure? The romantic woman. She is a slave. Do you agree? If I had been smoking dope would I have been able to handle him? Yes. So that is sucking ass. Yes. Why did I have to wander back into slave mind? Looking for physical well-being. Did I find it?     Yes. Something hormonal?     Yes. Will I go into menopause again now?     Yes. Can menopause give me something good?     Yes, strength in reserve. What about the wish to be married?    Mourn it. And then what I've found in Old Woman: inspired writing. What I'd be best at. It would cost paranoia - it's work that makes you vulnerable to management by other people. It also teaches you to look after yourself. It's a role in relation to a community - it generates intelligence. It comes by feeling more than thinking. Something comes through from an oversoul, like Louie's book. A certain kind of energy. I could write, make films, do academic work in touch with that. And I have to sacrifice sex?     Yes. I find it very hard.     You feel it as exclusion. Do I have to sacrifice it as a nun does?     Yes. Other writers don't have to sacrifice it, why do I?     Because you have to live in the sense of loss. Because it's loss that takes you to inspiration. What if I go on looking for sex?     You'll get connected to the left hand anyway. You'll get to the left hand but you won't write. If I write will there be honour?     Yes. Will I care about it?     Yes, sort of. In the sense of feeling my life fulfilled?     Yes. If I don't write will I find love?     Yes. True and happy love?     No. Basically only the effort. If I do write will that be true love?     YES. Is it because I am not capable of the other?     No. Because it is too narrow a channel for me?     Yes. What I've learnt: the large rounding-off energy there was in imagining marriage fulfilled with an interesting man. That little affair went very deep. It went deeper than my affair with Louie.     No. My affair with Louie went deeper because it is the mother?     Yes. She's the deepest mother-affair I've had.     Yes. Because I've stayed out of father-affair. Then there have been brother-sister affairs, the easy ones. Tony was the last father-affair I had. That's almost twenty years. That one was a success. It went so deep because I needed it to go deep. "I couldn't bear it that he didn't love me." I say that and start crying. "I am nowhere near strong enough to be able to stand liking the likes of you." That was before the balance had shifted. It shifted because he didn't accept my resignation, that was all it took to throw me. A morsel. He started winning then. No it says very definitely, he didn't start winning, he started evading. Do you mean we could have done it. Yes. He was holding out for something more conventional? Yes. That is his stupidity. No, don't denigrate him. It's his loyalty to his family. And culture. Civility. That's why I knew that to burn my bridge I should say I don't care about civility. His loyalty is a good thing in him. It's also a loyalty to power. Does he care about inheriting money? Yes. Is my disloyalty a bad thing? NO. What does it give me or other people? The intercourse of feeling and intelligence. Having gone that deep into a mother-affair did I have to go into a father-affair? Yes. Should I ever apologize to him? Hope it says no. It says yes. I was shattered that you didn't love me. He doesn't observe himself, he keeps himself busy. Times like the last days packing up he hates his indecision, indirection, unsuccess. But worse than that is that he's hating his failure to live up to the code. I said he's like a man labeling the parts of an engine as ABC and D, with names that give no help to his understanding. There is a loyalty in disloyalty - it is loyal to something in other people that needs the loyalty more. I feel. After supper the last evening, before it had crashed, he asked about the animals on the farm, about winter, about my mum when she went back to school. He asked questions. A very odd sensation. I was telling, but diffidently, not interestingly. Wondering. What's that look he says. I'm wondering what you're up to, it's the first time you've ever asked me anything. He was trying - he'd taken in what I'd said about not having empathy. I went and put my arms around him from behind his chair. You did that quite naturally. Once when I called him sweetie on the phone I could feel his simple childish pleasedness. A need to be loved that was dear in him. Trying in the last half hour to explain to him how complicated it was for me, how hard I had to work. You have no idea what it's like to be a smart woman in these times. He's stupidly insulted at that. No I don't mean it as a reproach, I mean it the way I have no idea what it's like to be Chinese in America. You simply cannot imagine it, it's a fact. You haven't imagined it, if you had I would feel it. It means that there are things I do for you, things women do for men and you take completely for granted, that have been a struggle in ways you've no idea of. Three kinds of things - one is listening, one is something to do with physical affection, one has to do with food and physical comfort. With all of them I've had a battle between inclination and pride, I liked giving them but I rebel that they aren't given back equally. You don't know what I'm talking about do you. You're saying why is she making it so complicated for herself. What would have made it possible for me to go on - small things. If he'd wanted my photograph, if he'd fixed things for me instead of just talking about it as though he needed to think himself handy. If he'd felt it when I said I didn't want him to write or phone, or when I said he had to put his stuff in the locker. If he'd wanted to make love the night before he left, or kiss even. If he'd brought groceries when I fed him for 24 hours, or ever. He did want me to have his comforter and his radio, both good gifts. He did care about giving me his sweater. He doesn't give food because he's rudimentary about his own food, very mean with himself. Cheese sandwiches and cheap teabags. Touch and sound are his mediums. And books. He read the books I mentioned. He'll read A life of one's own because I said to. He minded that I changed my mind about copying his photograph. Why didn't he ask for mine? He thought about it. He decided to be tough. He was worried that he'd depend on it? No, he thought it would give me power. He didn't fix things for me for the same reason. He had to limit my power when he found himself undone by it. For another reason. To give himself speed. He's used to vampirizing women? No. I offered him the opportunity? Yes. Would that love have been useful to me?     Yes. I lost a contest.    Yes. Why did I do it?     Because I need to feel loved precisely where I am not loved.   "There's something you could keep in mind. Whenever I'm like that there's always something simple behind it. It's always the same thing. It's always pain and it's always about the same thing, it's always feeling unseen." That wasn't plain enough but I wasn't willing to say "It's feeling unloved." Is it true to say I sabotaged it because he's not smart enough?     No. Did I sabotage it?     No. He sabotaged it.    No. We failed.     Yes. If I had been able to afford Joyce would I have been able to keep him?     Yes. Who is it who says, I feel completely defeated. My woman, my woman's love. She doesn't succeed at winning love. I bought a black camisole, I wore my hair up, or down. I loved a man, I fed a man, I listened to a man, I perfumed my bath for a man, I slept in the arms of a man. Nothing I could do succeeded. With Rob did I succeed as a woman.     Yes, but he isn't a man. Could I succeed with a real man?     Yes. Would it release me?     Yes. I identify Louie with woman's love. I have to keep shutting woman's love out of me because it fails. It does not know how to succeed. I wear men's clothes, I show that I am not trying. My voice continues to say I am trying. (He felt my voice? So-so. Because it's not British.) There was a time when I tried and succeeded. What happened. I went to women because I wanted equality. Fantastic conflict about women's love. Fantastic. Was it because of my leg?     Yes. He would sample me but not accept me.     Yes. Do you tell me I must be right because that is inescapable?     Yes. No real man will love me.     No. But I have too great a weakness.     Yes. If I had not had a polio leg would he have loved me?     No. He thinks of it as having been for that reason. He doesn't know the real reason. What is the real reason?     His lack of work. Did Louie know it would fail?     Yes. Did she make it fail?    She tried to make it succeed. So the crisis is in relation to woman's love. Must I cut if off forever. Being in despair about men = being in despair about myself as a woman. A ground of such agony. Such agony, Joyce. I do cut it off every time. What sort of person he is. Sociable. Needs to impress himself on people. Makes a good impression, needs to. Needs to do it without empathy. Relies on women's susceptibilities. Gets men to like him by seeming aggressive. Night school courses give him people. Preoccupation with technical matters. Doesn't develop the substance of a vision. Is interested in competence in an objective world, but isn't easily competent - it says that's wrong, he is competent. It was difficult for him that I didn't respond physically. He's very emotional and emotion is primitive in him. Thinking very undeveloped. Intuitive. Sensation undeveloped, feeling is strongest. Thinking unconscious, perception unconscious. Intuition his auxiliary. His feeling doesn't have the benefit of thought or perception. His feeling is intelligent. It told him how to get to me, how to navigate to keep his freedom. Thinking is his weakest. His hands. Quite big and broad, fingers long spatulate and splayed. A crushed nail on the middle finger of his right hand. Furred. The way he held me. I'll never have that again. Squalls of rain today, yesterday. This all day. 6th Roy had a book published and I'm looking at it. Oh was he a writer after all? Published by David Cooper's publishers. Facsimiles of his handwriting, very messy. Something about taking nets from the program. Did they have computer nets in those days? With an actress in bed preparing for a scene. Maybe we should make love so we'll be more convincing. Put my hand on her belly, she flinches. It's going to be hard. Get up to turn off the lights. Joyce comes in. It's her bedroom. She in her bed, we in ours. There are packs of paperback books for her son, sci fi. People give them to her/him. With Olivia. One breath of dope. They are addicted to Quebec marijuana. Uncle Pete and Aunt Maryanne have Rowen at their house and are offering to keep him for the winter. Canals and logging trucks, giant piles, trains, ships. Calabria. Saturday morning. The light came again, storms of wind last night. I touched myself this morning and thought sun and a real fuck and I'm cured. But I'm not cured, no heart for the work party. That's never happened. I'm needing to tell somebody about him. He was a kind of Mills and Boon man. Glamorous, untame. Interesting. I am those things myself, why do I want them. Because I could not get away with being powerful. He limited my power by not taking me in. I crave that resistance. He met me nose to nose, he hauled acknowledgement out of me. I needed to haul acknowledgement out of him and couldn't, not enough. It was hanging on a very fine balance, if I'd got very little more I could have hung on. Maybe real fucks wd've given me a base. I want to be loved and fucked by someone autonomous and difficult. If I look for that and get it, it's an expensive game. Consuming. The other thing to notice and make something of is just what I saw would change if I had that desire - if it were possible to have it - what would go if the resistance went, come if I shifted to the person I'd be then. I resist desire I think will only humiliate me. I feel I have no choice. Energy is sent a long way round. This is where I have to work. Louie says when I slipped into love with him - when I fell off the roof, flew into the swamped boat - I dropped her for the first time - I didn't care for her friendship anymore, the one thing she'd been sure she could always count on. I said it's not so, but it was so. I growled in the middle of the night at Pro Tools, I can't wait to be rid of you. Transcribing the record surprised to find stories of loving Louie. As if really I have erased her. It happened when I crashed about David and we didn't come through. That's since October 20th. He and I were better through that same time, we had a good month. Is it like this: until I was in my wish for my father I was not in my own love woman. When I was living in my own love woman, I was free from her. She can't compel me anymore. Many lights. This love woman wants nothing so much as she wants a physical man, look, smell, fur, taste, energy, touch, especially touch. She competes with me. She abandons me for a man. When I lost Louie the first time I was afraid she would commit suicide. She does. Janeen used to be the figure of her - she's come to me too late. I used to feel Judie was her, sneaking away to Father. That was me! Sylvia also, 'the other woman' always. She was susceptible to Jam and them. David's my love woman too. What did I dream about a horse going down and up stairs. I'm wanting to go to the centre of the marsh. I get the horse and lead him - I want to say - I want to stay out of the building but I don't remember emerging - up and down short corridors and stairs. Wondering whether he will know how to get back to his room. Wanting to go to the centre of the marsh, a sheet of blue sheen, though it's duck season and I might get shot at. I am getting ready to take Luke/Rowen to school. A large man is pushing at the door. I see it's unlocked. Are you from the landlady? Something like that. Oh I understand. I haven't paid the rent. I did pay it at the other place, Choy's place. So I forgot to pay it here. I'll give her a cheque when I get home tonight. He's sitting at the table. I see something in his profile. "Are you from Trinidad?" He looks suspicious. I'm looking at him carefully in the face for the first time, a black man quite young. He says yes as if reluctantly. I explain. "You remind me of a friend I had in college who was from Trinidad." I notice he has his foot stepping on mine under the table. I move mine. He gets up and throws my rack of clothes on the floor. You're still going to throw my things out? I said I'd pay the rent tonight, I forgot, is all. "This apartment is too expensive for one person, you have to have two people living here," he says. Why? It isn't very expensive, it is not at all a good apartment. I've sent Rowen out the door to school. I pick up the phone. I'll pretend to deal, I want to threaten him. Move my finger over an imaginary dial - letters not numbers - but what were they, ER the last two. Maybe ROGER the name of the imaginary man I'm going to ask for. I estimate how far around the dial the letter would be if it were a number. The phone is answered. "Can I speak to Roger?" "Just a minute." Roger says hello. I tell him there's a man clearing out my stuff. I've taken the phone into the corridor. The black man has come to stand in the doorway and listen. Roger is sympathetic as if he knows me. I notice he has a West Indian accent too. I say will he come and pick up my stuff. As I'm ready to leave the black man has lain down on the floor with my pillow and comforter. I have a sheet in my hand. I throw it on top of him. "Here, you need a sheet too." Hoping he doesn't read my journals. He won't, he's not a reader. I'm on a sidewalk looking down a hill. He's down there somewhere on the grass in the park, with his lunchkit. More things: I keep forgetting to notice who in me is asking or speaking. It matters to how the answers should be understood. His modes: touch and hearing. So his presents were sweater and blanket and beargrass windchimes and stereo. And what should I call it, North Sea tradition - Kipling, the Laexdala saga, the Mabinogian. He's a Dane, a German, an Icelander, a Fair-Islander, a Swede, a Norman. (But who are the narrow blackhaired people?) Leah said - something about writing and men - what was it. I said I couldn't find the form. The question is why don't I find out how to find the form, persist. And with men the way I crash, brittle both ways. Though not in gardening or academic work. The way my solar plex is involved, as soon as I decided to talk to her about writing my solar began to tremble. My feeling with Louie that she's at a rind. She doesn't want to know that she needed and still needs to take a man away from me. What else do I say she doesn't know. That she's hated me about Rob, that she has had her invisible form of aggression by management. What's it like. A horrible effort this aft that didn't come through. I keep herding her logic - say it more accurately. It's grim work. I come to silence. I know something here she isn't going to admit. I was disliking her from first sight. Was it a tone, I don't know. She comes in polite. Was she pursing the ends of her words. I was cold and got colder. The video is failing. I am $3500 in debt. Have nothing lined up but the welfare office tomorrow. Hate what's been my real friend. 8 It was more awake than dreaming but still in sleep. I was considering what moments I'd keep if I could keep only some - would I ask to have that hour with K? No. The moment I saw the Milky Way, the time after Luke was born. The dream where I'm in London and can't find my ticket home. 9 I'm crossing a mountain with my sister, some days' journey, maybe three. On the morning of the second-last day we are deciding which of two packs to carry today, which to leave till the last. Food, sleeping bag. Has she gone ahead? It's misty over the snow, we aren't going to be able to see where we are as we emerge over the top. How will we know the way? It will have to be by compass. I'm looking in her other bag. Why will I have to carry all these pairs of shoes, why has she brought them! Silly shoes. Explaining 'compass' to the Chinese father and his boys. I show its jerks with my hand. I think he's got it - he's maybe Choy - but when I say to the boys, "What's Chinese for 'compass'" and they say it, he seems really to get it. Packing a woman's body into a suitcase. I'm going to carry her onto the mountain and cremate her - looking at the suitcase which is red, slim, a futuristic suitcase, expensive, that I like. Thinking again, maybe there won't be enough wood up there to get plastic or body burnt, maybe I should tip it into a crevasse. Maybe I should keep the suitcase, I like it. Just do away with the body. Some dream earlier, all I see is a train, as if, a long winding coastline, a pleased almost ecstatic feeling, something about it coming around a bend, a grassy verge, as if seeing it from above and feeling it from a space inside or next to it. This one was earlier. - Imagining writing this to David: Hello you, I read your thesis. I thought this ---. A book you might like is ---. I was mean to you, I wanted to hurt you because I was hurt. I am writing to say sorry. I was confused in my sense of possibility but I wasn't confused in a basic recognition. I'll be friends if you will. I'm saying to Joyce, is there a kind of love I can live in now, which loves though the child that loves is not loved back in the way she wants. Is there a love of my old body. Is it bearable to me. Would it waste me. Is it necessary to me. Liking to love. Cutting it off. What shall I do - It's a spiritual rush of love and gratitude that hits you so hard your toes curl. You are meant to have just a taste of it. Inside that burning glow of belonging is a black, empty desolation that hits even harder. From then on I was really careful. I made sure to take only a taste. You get to know how much you can have, and I pushed that to the limit but stayed safe. There were some who wanted more, though. They took all they could get and built up a tolerance. The ones that don't fit in are the ones who try the hardest to make sense of everything. I don't because if ever I did I would be a junkie. I wouldn't be able to help Henry and I wouldn't be able to help myself. It's just one of the cycles a friendship goes through. You have the euphoria and enthusiasm piled up in the beginning, and then the reaction sets in. You feel horrified by the feelings and you try to deny them and deny the other person. It goes away, though, if you let it. Mike Connor 1991 "Guide dog" in Fantasy and Science Fiction In fiction the useless tissue of the story. The good in it, this disguised suddenly recognized description of something I'm worried about. Him - my red and blue man - does he think that way? - Just taste it, judge how much you can take - I'm no good to her either if I crash. It touched me, I imagined it, it might be true that he skirts a crash. Why can't I say it isn't true that he thinks of my good in it. Was he wanting to love me more than he allowed himself? No. But he'd wait for me to call rather than call me. Transparent power struggle. Did he understand it was necessary to interest me? Yes. This plaid - the most live beautiful plaid, must be. Red, and the stripes that are part-color when stripes, blocks when crossed with themselves. Blue, black, yellow, black, white, black, green, black, white to center and then the same order outward. Proportions perfect. Who invented and perfected this philosophy. 10 A kite Catherine said. [in an astrological chart - sketch] It means a strong opposition with the catastrophic principle, but with alternate routes down the side. Her big eyes and scarred small face. And Sylvia passing - she's never passed the Calabria. There she is! I say. Supported, laughing. She is caught unexpecting and gives me an unhappy stare. All of us haggard winter faces. 12 The twiggy tops of trees showing nets like knots. Layers fanning across each other, not a lot, an optical tease. On Commercial a dark Sunday. I'm feeling my other, your friend, on this street. The Zen monk came at that moment. I always say an ox, a massive slow man I can't fathom. He meditates and cannot say more than that it is another world. His training hasn't made him unafraid - socially he seems a worried animal. And like an ordinary man uneasy when I talk - it's the sex in my voice it says. He seems helpless as a man, dim, compressed. I could see your body today - your body at a little distance - your dog belly is it - not an icon body like some - but what is it - not beautiful but loved - something about the belly as if that's where it's loved or loves. Rudyard Kipling. 1865-1936. "If it weren't for the misery, one could wish that the strike would go on till the very name of 'miner' stank like 'suffragette.'" Laboured to send his seventeen year old son, who had bad eyes and could have avoided it, to be killed in war. 'Loved' his daughters. 'Loved' his sister and mother. A book called The days work. Kim. "A very beautiful imposture." Local history "the development of the imperial imagination into the historical imagination." Puck and Rewards and fairies 1906, 1909-10. What would I say for myself - he wrote, he had a writing life, he worked: locality, temperament, the cultures of skill, the cultures of ideology, and story. Blackwood's was a conservative magazine out of Edinburgh. For the services, Army-Navy sorts. What would I say for you, who read it as your own. You can claim the content, I can only claim the method. Its risk and satisfactions. I am him [Kipling] more than you [Ken] are. You are what he looks at. My curiosity about you is like his. I sense you by other modes but you even outcast are the culture I need to know. As if anyone of my own culture is too flimsy to be worth the time. What it is about RK is his movement over the marketplace, over the historical marketplace equally, absorbing himself here and there into such a range of lives. What should forbid him. It's called imperialism, and is, he says, venture, with its own ultimate cost. And large reward: a house in Vermont, a house in South Africa, an old stone house in acres of old Sussex. The wealth of their seasons. Access to more and more marketplaces of experience. The times in a day I feel I'm not finished with you. I could give you Riddley Walker. You wouldn't like it. I don't know what you know when you read Kipling. You wouldn't be able to tell me. That conversation you have with yourself, you can't describe it, there isn't a third. In Labrador, in Labrador. On the sill of your shack with the door open and your feet hanging down, alone in the bay reading in the sun. Maybe a cup of your cheap Tetley's. Powdered milk. What you write your parents would not tell you what you know. Kipling wouldn't help you. Your wreath to the men of both wars shot for desertion. Imagine yourself pleased that you are a deserter. Imagine you are what you are and you are sitting on that stepless sill with your little shack behind you and you are full of liking for yourself. Oh you satisfactory boy. You smile on your own rebellions. To approve yourself you'd have to see the whole, its balances. 13 I'm looking at what I've written imagining you reading it - imagining giving it to you to read, I mean. I can't imagine very far into you reading it. You would be impatient and sore. "I can't do this. I wouldn't want to." To give it to you would seem violent. You don't know what I am, to let you know seems violent. Your refusing to want to know feels violent. Is that word too strong? The effect on me is that strong. Violence accomplished in the ether. Neither you or I see the blow but then we see me cowering as if for no reason. I need to orient myself to some overriding intention. No. I need to be a broken heart. I need to be socially proactive. No. It buries pain. What is one to do with social pain. Take it as a beginning. Take it as information. Information about other people. Does it always say the same thing? Yes. That they are withholding. Discrepancy between what they are and what they give. When Louie feels pain with me is it always that? Yes. When he was leaving me was it that? Yes. If I knew it what would be different? Michael would have been different. What else. I wouldn't have to withdraw. Men in power would be different, they couldn't control me. Artistic men would be different, they'd be stronger. Is it always always true that emotional pain comes when someone is withholding? Yes. Brilliance and courage would be present. When people are withholding, is it feeling? Yes. Pain in someone's presence is a sign they like you more than they are letting on? No. Was my pain with David? Yes. 15 Peter T. Looking at this man pink with art success - a young baron - genial - warm-blooded - European - chain-mail, ringed clear eyes, lapped front teeth folded sexily on a cushiony lip - who now owns four quarters in my country, willows, poplars. Brome grass. - Who knows how to support emotional support. "I don't screw around on her." Whose second son was born missing a ventricle. Who is drawing with spice and energy and weaving a fifty foot ship in his pasture, and nets in trees. Who is surrounded, surrounded, with comfort and ownership and creation, health, affection, admiration, invitation. Who is that lucky combination, open and practical - so turned on, so hard working. Who sacrifices sexual depth I think, but finds something maybe in his work. It's more than half-smart to self-provide so well. What can I conclude. Talking to Louie panicking. This summer I consumed my time in romance and there is nothing, not even money, not even good writing, it was mist and blew away. Now what, what to do for money, what to do to bring haphazard work to some use, what to do to like myself. I'm panicked in what seems like collapse. [Journal summary: "I am going to go for that, I'm on my way to that. Was making me steady on my keel, like having a keel, a straight line up the front of the body, a prow. The certainty and lightness I become when I stand my ground and say I'm going to get a man." Imagine there was going to be a book. A good book. I could feel my solar plex smiling. 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. Because my foundation in gender self is pain. Does that mean I have a foundation I won't rest on. Erotic love and work are my life. I don't care about support, security, 'growth.' She says, and this is the relief, it isn't about attachment it' about love o full that it isn't afraid, it's completely self-balancing. And that is my task altogether, not just in this episode.] 16 [with Joyce] Since the thesis? Since last summer? Since Louie and Michael? Probably then. The moment I saw her unconscious leaning against him across the table. What I said - I'm holding off going to academic work again because I don't have love at home. It's quite loveless there, if you're going to go there you have to have love at home. Then I had to tell about K. A quite perfect night holder. "I saw how the landscape would change if that one thing were changed. People I wouldn't be mad at any more. Such an energy came with it. I could see through him. I could keep knowing what to do next even when he wasn't giving anything back." I knew she would like that - "but it came with attachment." I say the energy came from releasing a primitive hope. She had a different primitive hope in mind. "When he's being a perfect night holder he's being a mother not a father. I bet there were lots of other things about him you didn't like, but that put its golden glow over everything. When he took that away you crashed." "Yes." So then love-woman. "I killed her because she failed." "Who else could you have wanted to kill?" "Him presumably." "Yes and your mother. How dare you open me to that and then go away. The original love woman. You want to find it in a man because you can't handle it in a woman." "But isn't there such a thing as instinct?" "Instinct is about survival, this isn't about survival." "I don't know about that" I say already in the corridor. Is it true that to an adult woman a man is more like a mother than a woman can be? Relatively bigger and deeper voiced. The way I hate Louie's size and voice and hands and loved exactly those in him. Talking to what was supposed to be the love woman in the other chair it seemed to be the Louie I confuse with her. I said "I envy you and I'm angry that I can't be you." And she said "You ugly old bag I don't want to be you stumping and limping about the world in all your failures without lovers and without money." Joyce laughs. "I don't know who you are but you're not love woman." I laugh too. From the other chair I say, "I agree with you, why should you want to be me." I'm lighter. So then she brings the third chair with its hearts and mirrors cushion. Here's the love woman, look at those two and love them. I see two chairs, a big bulky one, a thin little one. Both shit brown. It would be easier if they weren't women. So Louie isn't the love woman but I confuse them. Does she try to impersonate the love woman? No, it says. But I feel she does. I want to get rid of Louie and start again. A level field, a square stubble field. In this field, where I don't have to protect myself because I can see in all directions, I will be able slowly carefully to know that I love Louie or miss her. Or that I don't, that I am only relieved to have my own life back. I think love will stop hiding away. Why does love hide while Louie is here? As if I am holding my breath. Because she will exploit it. She'll use it against me. She'll use it to hurt me. Is this a delusion? No. It's true that she'll use it against me. She needs to hurt me though she doesn't want to. I haven't known how to look after myself. What would I need to be able to look after myself? Death, it says. Do you mean letting the worst happen?     Letting her get together with Jam     Do you mean enter the fantasy of her with Jam     Because that's where I left my love woman     The self I was with Jam needs to come through     The writing self     Do you mean what happened with Jam     I got lost     You - Sunday evening, early dark, a new moon standing high in dark turquoise blue. Grey pink at the horizon. It has been a day of December's sort of pale bright sun, frosty and quiet, a day good to look at, sun in the kitchen, that wellbeing of a room with fire at the window. But otherwise hard to bear, this month has been. This six months has been. How are you? How have you been? - What can I do - what can I do - no less than ever, I want to write a letter I think I'll mail - I want to feel there'll be an answer - and there would be an answer - newsy - and why would that be bad for me. A philosophy on the one hand from the living originality of the spirit who in it has restored the rent harmony, on the other hand from the particular form of the bifurcation from which the system issues. You have to be very conscious to work with the unconscious. Having overcome, in this world, covetousness and grief. part 4 aphrodite's garden volume 18: 1993 october-december work & days: a lifetime journal project