aphrodite's garden volume 19 part 1 - 1994 january

work & days: a lifetime journal project

1st January 1994 Writing and love. I say that and come to a stop. [Opposite, 1986-1988 summaries: Catalogue of most significant dreams: Explorer in a sleeping bag 10 Dec 1986 Daphne and poplar bush Feb 20 1987 Bare sea floor 28 Feb 87 Second bare sea floor 21 March 87 The man who gives me my writing 11 April 87 Left, artist draws his mother; right, little boy sitting on a bed 30 July 87 Big abandoned apartment I used to camp in 28 Nov 87 Cockles and mussels Nov 27 1988] The pagan meditations The other world is this one seen. A wood of wild ginger, aconite, sweet cicely, fern and violets, sweet woodruff, primroses A meadow of strawberry, yarrow, daisies, cornflowers and poppies The wise child figure herald of integration I'd gone out into space and moved in freedom found among a thousand considerations She couldn't bear for it to be someone else who did it Avalokitesvara means space traveler Stones are the symbol of the Self But still, half an hour with her and the bushes curled their arms in Buddhist light And actually I look nice, a thin winter queen with antlered hair and an extraordinary cut of face. But only a distant king can love me now, I'm remote and dangerous. All the time I am in dilemmas of not keeping the person out sufficiently because I don't want to exclude the value. She calls that identification. In a garden the two vines to grasp each other in the centre tho' they've come loose. Put up again, they'll knot. They don't cover the whole length of the wire, maybe more on the left have died. I'll have to plant something else there. For problems in relation to ambition, power, climb a mountain. Mother attachment, stream to source. Imagine there are two of you. Imagine giving the hated feared one lots of good things. Everywhere I've loved I've ended up stopping myself. It's a forest of stumps. I'm understanding something. Who is it that exaggerates and mythologizes? It's a way of feeling images rather than feeling feelings. 'Hallucination' said the bright-eyed man. The only thing to do is contact the problem and feel it. Decision to accept pain and welcome feelings. The panic will be, I'm going to die. Then look for the I that will die. Spiritually understood, a man's thoughts must be the building in which he lives - otherwise the whole thing is deranged. At an opening, who am I thinking I am? I'm thinking I'm disliked, at bay, alien, angry. And it seems the one who is that is my perception, that I won't speak from. Fairy queen as a snake. Western occult tradition: Sacred sex, democratic structure, friendly to empirical science, many gods, creativity is divine, decision in favor of the values asserted by the myths, Alexandria, neopaganism of Renaissance, neoplatonism, medieval German mysticism, astrology, Asian/Indian esoterism, secret societies, classic infl in Romanticism Greeks soma, psyche, pneuma 19thc Theosophy, Steiner, Gurdjieff, Rosicrucianism, Golden Dawn, spiritualism, mesmerism Steiner was Order of Eastern Temple split-off Victor Anderson, Sara Cunningham founder of Fairy Tradition - a male god] 2nd Louie. I'll be alone with my own writing, again. Then I thought of Janeen. We read each other's journals. Emily of New Moon. Two girls at the beginning. I want to write disconnected autobiography. Love and writing, the way love has been the school. Dreams are written too, in a way they aren't in DR or VW. Thinking of this life I find myself wanting to set up what people have around them: a library of companions, photos from the story. My grandmother at the table, myself shining and sad in the pink dress. I love you - you over there - who will pick up any book there is on a table. Joyce - I have been at sea all my grown life and if there is something that will channel me I want it. I don't want to be an academic but there are things from that life I want to keep. (What it's like today - the loves are with me but there are a lot of them and I touch on them - talk to them - have them with me as I set up the work room.) I'm going to have to be technical in mind as I haven't been. A lame woman, a left-handed man. The self who has quested and come home. 3rd Pool in the basement of the hospital. A band of doctors coming down, the head doctor asking me to get onto the tiled edge and show them how I walk. I'm wet and close to naked. They are dry and not only not naked but given the extra covering of white coats. They stand and look while I limp back and forward in front of them. What I am doing is concentrating on limping as little as I can. I'm walking stiffly in a way that I imagine is more normal, pretending to flex my instep. And this story. She's young, maybe fourteen. They have had a day traveling. He says to her, We've had a beautiful day together and now we're going to have a beautiful night. What are we going to do? I'm going to fuck you. She's startled, frightened, and has felt a fire shoot up from cunt to belly. He has her in his lap. He's calmly certain, he intends it. He says to her, Your are frightened but you will like it. Slips her sweater up and touches her nipples. Looking into her eyes. Etc. She isn't willing but she's ready. One finger in, thumb and forefinger holding the clit with precision. Kissing, looking at her face. Then very directly in. This is all very fast. By the forth stroke I come. Arguing with Louie about Marianne Williamson. She [L] resists what describes her I say, but it isn't the whole person, Williamson is speaking as one of the gods. I'm noticing how 'soppy' is a word used by those more rather than less in its power. Averting in face of the sacred. Soppy: wet. OE sopp. Softened. sophos. sophistes. sopor. Mawkish. Maw. Jaws, mouth or gullet. Obs. mawk. ON mathkr. Maggot. More likely mother. Also we argued about gifts. I said it isn't a gift unless it works, unless it has understood correctly. Otherwise it is a request for a gift: give me your acceptance of this as a gift although it is not a gift. She says it's the intention that makes it a gift. No. If it doesn't work as a gift the intention was not to give a gift. Joyce said it more kindly: gifts are a way of loving ourselves. A cautious unfree tone I'm noticing. She is trying out sulking that I say I don't want her to write me while she's gone. Williamson is saying: women can use the power of the soppy. They are archetypally aligned to be able to. The way when I sat in the bath in the dark singing the love-lilt under cover of pouring water he came straightaway, it had reached him, who likes to be listening in one room while I am in another. And more: we and they adore to be in the power of the soppy. It' a bliss that floods our cells with you, with youth. Getting there and getting away from there, that's a power worth having. It's religion, Louie. Neither staying out or staying in. Known paths. What I've been working at in these piles of years. Now can I do it to show? A lame woman. What she is from outside. What she is from inside. What she is earlier, before she is lame or a woman. What she is to an impotent man. The love in a child and how it is defeated. Louie and I drive a transport truck in through the wall of an attic bedroom where a blowsy boy with breasts is sitting up in bed. It's him. His name is Sapientia. Coming down into the large house from above. Look out across its wide lands. May 3 1993 In Louie's dream a man I'm with called Sophie. Trying to sort loves I keep being puzzled about this: what is the relation between an emotional self and a 'projection.' When Louie's being love woman am I displaced from it or do I become it consciously. When David was being soul is that a different being, and am I more or less soul myself. When I love K the love woman I become is not him but maybe a complement. The resistant one I am alternately with Louie, is he there because love woman in me freaks, or because I'm being what she wants not to be. What's the way to think of these incompatible organizations. It seems to say: there are two organizations. They are happily married. When I fall in love with a woman the woman in me is jealous. She leaves. When I am in love with a man the man in me stops looking after my worldly good. When I love somebody - Louie - love woman goes away and then I need to love somebody else - David - to feel her in me again - is that it? [Opposite, notes from Gillian Hanscombe on Dorothy Richardson: Rebecca West on writing that researches memory: "The next person who tried it was Dorothy Richardson, and though she created interest by the power inherent in her method, she killed it by the relative insignificance of her internal conflict." Of any work, to discover what conflict it resolves. To notice whether it's by weak means like lying. And by his own attitude, his combination of an extreme appreciation of their qualities and an essential coldness toward them he reveals what it is to be a rake. It is their struggle that keeps me adrift, so variously interested and strongly attracted. A confusion between social role and artistic vocation, that the vocation is traditional, has canons, "alienated from the traditions which, as artists, they were moved to extend." Need to integrate the role of woman with role of artist both in practice of art and conduct of living. Richardson's merging of these two demands on her personality, her merging of art and life, and the resulting autobiographical fiction she created, become, in this context, of absorbing and particular interest. Richardson's gradual formulation of her problem, the problem of being a woman, took two parallel lines of development, the first consists in how she lived her life, the second in how she wrote her fiction. DR fought with everything that didn't fit. I ignore it. What difference does that make. It is like having an aggressive man beside a tremulous girl rather than having a silent man beside a sullen girl. "A peculiar integration of life experience and artistic realization." Her experimental technique modified the elements of her life not by changing how they come on in space and time, but how they are shown so their 'real meaning' becomes accessible. That's how to judge her artistically. It is important to perceive feminine self. That's her personal drive as Miriam. That's her writer's drive. But feminine self is role-conflicted. That's her tension and narrative. The love-independence conflict she resolved by marrying an un-man. "How Richardson manipulated her relationships with those people and then showed, in Pilgrimage, the meanings of these manipulations for her own liberation as a writer." "Agents of vicarious action from which the writer must desist." "that female creative energy may issue, not only separately in the production of babies on the one hand and books on the other, but also simultaneously in the production of both ... the influence at work in her is mysticism, not aestheticism." 33 foreshadowings and portents, memories "lives in the deep current of eternity" intellectual needs, romantic needs [women] "they share its configuration" a symbolic union of the masculine and the feminine Her prescription for female art: "She must separate, with the utmost scrupulousness, the component parts of her social personality - her sexuality, her emotionality, her professional persona, her intellectuality and her maternalism - but at the same time she must keep whole and coherent her synthetic, all-inclusive consciousness, which characterizes herself to herself in secrecy and isolation. She must guard her psychological autonomy with the utmost rigour, disdaining to endorse any structures of thought or of institution which are incompatible with her personal, intuitive perception of truth. She must consider real only what is real for her. She must accept total responsibility for her own life and none at all for any other life, even another life intimately connected to her own. She must accept, finally, when she has created her life and produced her art, that her vision may be judged an eccentric exercise in the annals of egotism." deploring the comparison of consciousness with a stream and suggesting that fountain What is there actually to say about 'feminine' language? They say unpunctuated. Climax of the sentence held off until all else even modifications are set down. Psychological veracity. Details of time and place to 'provide a framework.' Ie to provide the destination for the love arrow in the being described. It isn't Miriam's consciousness, it is Miriam's consciousness described by the writer, and only sometimes simulated by - "to identify Miriam's voice with that of the author" is a mistake of identity, since Miriam couldn't have written the earlier volumes No, precisely not, you identify as in any novel and you disidentify too, ie observe the author - she did that, there. Get more out of the separation and the distancing of DR from M that allows her to say "the sense of all she was leaving stirred uncontrollably". "She is more of a philosopher than a poet" or novelist. ¦ This is important and unseen. "a reader's dilemma" intends deliberately not to manipulate the reader's response according to any framework extrinsic to Miriam's consciousness We identify author with persona because explicit distinctions between them are not made. She thinks of it as going into life and coming back out. Her geometric/topological/abstract spatial sense: passing through not driving in. Life shown as a manageable space an indifferent distance   far below evidence and the clear speech of events   surging up and out over everything deeper self To turn what was riddle and accident into something more than riddle and accident is to redescribe the sort of values one has lived by, the practices one has engaged in and the experiences one has had, in such a way as to see all of those experiences and actions as necessary to oneself. DC father animus a sadistic demon distorting instinct Like many women who feel themselves unloved she has in her bitterness sold herself completely to the animus. Having lost the capacity for love she falls for the power drive. Writes off those in her surroundings, and writes off herself too. A suicidal tendency in the uncon. Challenge to - she calls it egotism - identity - which can be thought of as the fit of the net - that, if it's tinkered with by means of bit-revisions, loses energy and intelligence. Miriam and Amabel, and then Jean. "I am silent before the wonder of it." "To know that you exist, is enough." "The root of femininity is uncovered" by loving women. "The male could be excluded and a space found in which women's feelings could be generated and developed." [Amabel is] Veronika Leslie-Jones. Conflict between conscious and uncon: "unconscious experiences, conscious records it." A mirroring process. Something shared through identification and recognition. "As if she and the other person inhabit the same consciousness." Miriam meets love woman: "I am not sure I should have recognized you," said Miriam. At the sound of her own familiar voice a gulf seemed leapt. But of the one who spoke, come from afar to meet this strange girl, she knew nothing. Serenely she took the other corner of the settee, feeling as she sat down that she had embarked in sunlight upon an unknown quest. The girl reveals her quality to her. Isolated and virginal. A new role offered to her, that is, a possibility of action. Wisdom and authority, the marks of an artist. Realization of a role that leaves her to herself, only reached within the context of a relationship. Ie she made a recognition of a like kind but didn't cooperate with a like generosity. Relationship catalyzes but she doesn't want its claims. "I love you" across her own reflection, blurring it. Mirror is that very object which can be the bridge. Miriam's pilgrimage towards integration can now progress, to the extent that relationship can represent the accommodation of the external world to the individual consciousness without the loss of the integrity of that consciousness. She reads Amabel's letter and hears her voice "making her the medium of expression." This capacity for identification which seems to Miriam to issue from a complete recognition of the processes of her own inner life, is the one means of access by which Miriam can engage fully with the external world. The experience she has so long alone brought out into life. The experience I brought out with Jam wasn't enough mine for it to work. Jam tried to do to me what DR did to Amabel. Dawn's left hand: "Amabel is Miriam's left hand." A separation between love and sexuality to produce, diversely, both art and children. Ideologically anti-Romantic and culturally subversive The psychological conditions necessary for her to bear a child are quite other than those she projects for Shatov and Amabel. "& Dorothy loved Alan & I loved someone too - but it wasn't I know to either of us what we were - " She then married a man of feminine capacity for imaginative sympathy. Under this psychological condition she could work. Winter solitude and inaccessibility Avoidance of anything that breaks the momentum of the unconscious once it is set going "The human demand, besieging her wherever she is, for an inclusive awareness, from which men, for good or ill, are exempt." "'Unsophisticated' was the word for Dorothy at the time I first knew her." & that Alan, who did truly love and admire her and who was certainly quite as talented as she was and quite as cultured, provided her with a background - a setting and an atmosphere that were beyond price to her. After Alan died she was in a pretty bad way. But as you know from then on Dorothy never did any more real work - lacking Alan. The Self is a sort of impersonal condition that enables you to be in emotions and yet always yourself. You are sure you cannot lose yourself, you cannot dissolve or exchange yourself for anything else. My holes. There are 3. Them, Roy, baby. Them - competition, felt I couldn't. Roy - went into fighting rather than loving. Baby - shattering the structure, something like ambition, belief in effectiveness. Insults to the child's confidence     Do they stop me from being a writer     Can that confidence be mended     only by experiencing fear 5th 6:30. Black morning before first day of cleaning. When is the next train. In three hours. I'll walk along the track and flag it. Feeling my feet, how's the walking. But before the train comes I see a boarding house - is it? There is a glass roof I can see down into. People on the stairs. I have a note saying the rent is fifteen a week. That must have been years ago, what would it be now? Noticing rent can be paid in dollars, though it is London this is the outskirts of. Looking at the countryside. A forest to the southeast, the city is beyond it. Fields. Quite a good place to live, I can go into the city from here. Where is the manager? There's a bedroom on the ground floor, clean and good though some of the building isn't. My feeling outside the dream is that it's the place, or near the place, of another dream of the country outside a city. What would I like to write. Something about lameness. Something about dreaming. What I wanted to write academically. A love book. Something about L.M.Montgomery. 'Magic' and writing. Dear you, I'm speaking to you and will write it. I was mean to you and you minded. It was because I needed to see you oftener than I did, only that, and resented being in pain in ways it seemed you could fix if you wished. And it may have been right, because though I missed you I enjoyed missing you, once I didn't have to resent anything. But I am sorry to have been mean, tho' I'm glad you minded. I'll be friends if you will. Now that there's a safe distance. You were an intervention in my story, which I honor and think about and keep wanting to tell you about. There you sat in that department library amidst those closed men saying you wanted to talk about love and friendship. That was courageous. And I want to say this - I hope you laugh - I was lying when I said I didn't believe in love. There's nothing I believe in more. When heart stands up for itself and says I love, that's when I'm a soul. It's the most myself I can be. Always, ever, in any direction. But what you said is not quite that - what you said is that you believe you can find a true love, a person. That one is so painful it makes me gasp. I want to disown it. Like this: well maybe you can but I can't. I'm disqualified. Anyway the price is too high. Etc. It's extraordinary how hard it is to stand up for that wish unless there are circumstances that make it safe, ie unless it's impossible. Or else unless it has already come true. 6 Joyce in the dream said "Sylvia! She's a great fighter and she fights clean and fair. But - " and there a dubious sideways look, I imagined she was going to say she didn't similarly like K. A spirit who would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less to conceal it - but love it. To celebrate and embrace the historical contingencies one springs from, to want nothing about oneself to be different. [from DC's MA thesis] A lame woman Sister: I always felt crippled in relation to you. Little sister, married sister. "He's not whole, he's gimpy." The well-bodied, the gentry, the fine people. [dream Oct 4 1986]. The well-bodied are idealized because I didn't fight their disregard. A sad gallant and necessary giving up of their distinction. Joyce: 1. impulse energy, 2. repression, 3. explanation tries to connect them. 1. you can love, 2. you choose who doesn't love back, 3. it doesn't have to be that. There is another road, more feeling. You can still read, but first spend 5 minutes writing everything you don't want to think about. If you wanted you had to not show you wanted. Because I wouldn't get it anyway, and if I showed I'd be ridiculous. Yes, but there is another road. She was among the new shades and came with steps halting from her wound. Someone telling me people stay waiting at the place where they were abandoned. Waking, thinking how I go into parties in a covered despair at all these people none of whom is the one I want to see. The fear in disgust is people's fear of harm to the psyche. Cockroaches sealed in plastic. "Why he can look at my foot and crookedness and not want to keep it out of him." Kristeva on abjection. "The relentlessness with which her limping leg was emphasized. 'It was my mother's legs, the skinny one and the fat one.'" Celine Whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach, a blind man, or a lame, etc. Neal Gunn who lost an eye. Often the punishment for seeing the fairies was being blinded in one eye. Are cast out from their human place and are therefore identified as, acting as, what in other people is only symbolic. Mitta lame dancer. 8th Yesterday's dream. In Peter Epp's house. One of the yuppie couples on the second floor is selling, another moving in. Between them I can look into that apartment, walk around. I stand in the room where there is furniture that may be moving out or moving in and say that I used to live in that whole building, I was squatting it. I grew up half a mile up the road. This morning a baby daughter. 10 My cards in the dream enlarged, resized and disordered. Something frightened me just now. It was a fear I just glimpsed and lost again, but know has to do with identity. As if I remembered being unmoored. How did I remember it. Spirit's fear. What it has to do with Louie. I say no I will not anchor you when you go. A firm no I can't justify, only that I must be away from you. I say it has to do with identity. That's what I know. I have to be able to change, back or forward I don't know which. I take your pressure stoically. You say then it's goodbye forever - is it? I don't think so. But if it is, it's still necessary. When I'm rid of them then what. Action to disillusion. Who I am with lovers. Then what. Defeat. Then what. Childhood. Then what. Writing. Then what. Meditation. Then what. Vision. Then - power. Then - more vision. What about him. Marry him. Will he ask me? Yes. What is that marriage for? Inspiration. To? World. A way of joining it? Yes. I met Louie at A world apart 10 Aug 1988 just after I'd invented David MacAra 23 July. 11th Your birthday - somewhere. Louie's images. I dreamed her show was saying she loved Jam. She's leaving on the 20th which is exile day. Not so much the new images as the drawing from Wall Street. So free and full. That's the one like her writing. Oh - oh - what can I do. These days in the journals. She with breasts that can dazzle anyone, and mind free and fast enough to be loved through so wide a net, who now has - grain pictures. It's early before cleaning work. Sad and slow. Last night at her table I said, You worked all the way around it. It's a hole in my life, something happened to identity there. She said, Now I understand everything. I thought - you could, but you don't. You could understand why I mistrust. You haven't wanted to work with the core where I could have been released. You wanted to be released yourself, and you have been. That's all. My keys you haven't touched. You have evaded. What I'd told her was a gift. She said it was a blame. Oh you are evading now, not to see that even if it blames it says here is something I want. I was speaking in a retracted person - as it felt - thin, slow, remote, pained, nearly silent, like an old man rubbing his calluses. I do blame you. Alternately I fall into a blank. You claimed generous love but you did not care to see what it was I was longing for. You made yourself its enemy when it crossed your dream. In the school of women artists there are these, I want to say, crucifixions - if I mend the other, she will surpass me. I want to mend the other because she is myself, because she makes my common wealth. But if I am surpassed I have betrayed myself it seems finally, and I fall out of the school and am left at random among those who are barely persons to me. "What was I hunted by?" "Soul death was hunting and still hunts." Heaviness that is dangerous to the light spirits of children and comes by wrong actions. Psychological power and energy which draw their strength from falseness. Theft, complex denial. Multiples. Most are female. A child self, opposite sex self (Kw), obsessive self, grief self, charismatic self (Qc), established strength (Qw). Bridge self who has all the memories. 12th How to think about Louie's exit with the goods. Depends on whether I 'got' anything that wasn't opium in passing. If she is a thief I also am and was. She's hypocritical in ways I'm not. Whether the video is a dead end. Evidence: the way she's been irresponsible when we talk about any of it, ingenuous. It says, she didn't get more. I got slow growth and she got fast. Her fast growth will stop when she's out of touch with me, become slower. Mine will become faster. I got a foundation for faster. It was slow growth of what? Craft in art. She's panicking because she knows she'll slow. Does she feel she's been growing at my expense? Yes. Is that why she gave me presents? Large yes. She knows she's being evasive, she does it because she feels dominated. She's not asking her book because she's afraid of what she'll hear. Did she know I knew in that conversation? No. In the one in her house? No. She knows she flatters people, has a bad conscience about it. That bad conscience expresses itself in holding back on showing her gifts. It makes her feel she's dependent. Why do I hold back my gifts? Men hold them back. Literally? Yes. They're afraid of them. Could I practice with K? Yes. Love him and at the same time refuse to be curbed. It's important to her to feel she's controlling people. Yes. Because her brothers controlled her. Yes. She mostly couldn't control me, which made her feel what she felt for her brothers. Did my father stomp on my talents? No. It's present-day men. My usual response to that curbing is defeat. I fight but not well enough. I fight weakly because I have illusions. About the nature of masculinity. I think it has to do with prudence when really it has to do with sex. They have to be managed sexually? Yes. Women's wiles etc. Yes. Femmy dressing. Yes. Isn't that flattering their weakness? Yes. You really recommend it? Yes. Would it be bad for my intelligence? Yes. So what's it good for? Love woman. And what's love woman good for? Action. What do you have to say about that subtle body / 'seeing' stuff? Don't be deluded. There's danger of that. It's good for spirit battle. Why do I want it? Ambition. It can help. Aren't you already a form of it? Yes. Is there such a thing as the astral plane? Yes. Real nonphysical beings? Yes. Is contact with them dangerous? Yes. Safe if carefully done. Relevant to writing. I'd like to do those experiments. Shatters adaptation. I so much want image experience, change of state. Yes. Requires aggression. Like in England? Yes. [Opposite page: notes on will vs feeling There are two Wills in a being and the cause two principles. Boehme Access to a mind that knows more than I do - the unc Imagining and understanding - generally in conflict with each other - assertion and attention - explanation the brown horse, imagining and feeling the black horse I decided will was stiff and ugly, stopped because Roy said it was boring Will and doing are the same thing Will makes me more beautiful intelligent healthy What is my work with (Kw) supposed to accomplish     fulfillment, visionary writing, balance of feeling and intelligence, synthesis/success/change of place Is it that I'm supposed to mend masculinity in myself     (twirls) Understand masculinity in the world     Kw is my right side, Qc is my left?     no Is Qc the left side of a younger self     It has developed     (Qw)=(Kw + hermit)     Love woman is someone I used to be     Can still be     Is what I think I want to be less than I already am     Does left side change according to who one's with     no Are you left side     Would you like to take me over sometimes     Could I get to that kind of writing without drugs    no Use drugs sometimes in a controlled way     Is (Kw) frightened of the left side     Could Kw learn not to fear it     1) impulse 2) repression - R and L are different organizations of this tension L wishes to sacrifice ego for the sake of energy R wants to strengthen it and understanding limits energy Alternation on two axes: attention-assertion and other-self (sort of) Does shattered adaptation mean feeling lost?     yes What if firmly controlled   timed sessions, some sort of material signal What benefits could it ?     (hermit) inspired writing Anything else     something about betrayal I'll have to experience betrayal     yes Do you mean the fear I used to feel     yes. It is ordinary identity that is betrayed. It's like possession What can be done to reassure it     express love woman because she's a deeper part of that self Who or what is it that wants image experience     the self that has experienced losses, because it has lost some of its mobility My dreams of betrayal are about that?    yes   Expressing my love for him puts me in touch with a core self     yes What else does it do for me     oppression Is it worth the oppression     no Better alternative     (HP) female clairvoyance different than his system What's the way to do it     (Kw) Thru an image of a man     no Can you give me a hint     perfected work Feel him?     yes. Women need to do it through love. Bright and dark.   (Kw) is male archetype, is a useable organization of the mind. Use my wish to love a man to get to vision. Do you have anything else to say?     oppression Beware it    no, use it, work with it   Is academic work necessary to me     Why     (Kw) supports that in me Is it the other side that writes    both Is it the other side that has visions     Can in do creative work as well as academic     What about writing (Kw)     do explanatory writing What about beautiful flights    turn for the better Love affair for the left side     14 Now I should find out why, with my Louie leaving, I am dry-eyed, firm, resolved, while she is crying, saying goodbye forever, saying I mustn't take her to the airport. Like me when K left, and why, when she has been my closest love of ever. The bundle she was in my arms. The sequence then was: that was how a wife feels, that's how it feels to have an enchanting wife. Ardent companion, a feminist wife, rebellious and juicy. Rosy. Why do I have to wait 'til she leaves to understand this? Or if it's understood, to feel it. The woman in me was mocked and has to say, Go out of my house. But stuck with any man anywhere she'll long for Louie's company. And why do I know I have to be absolute about this seven months? Is it only for me, or for her too? I as if assume I'm like K saying reasonably, I'll see you again. I assume whenever I see her again we'll know each other and have stories to tell. Does she need to feel final separation for the exercise, or as a memory? Do I know she needs it? Why do I give K what I won't give a so-manifestly better being - smarter, deeper, more gifted, stronger? 15 If I make a film of what will we know - rock under water - it wd teach me about text and image. I feel like a filmmaker suddenly. Should it be black and white with some edge of color - cost it - record it - it's grain. Then another one with journal stories - illustrated - works and days - half an hour with pagan. Finish these before L gets back. Write between. - Unification/diversification. The unity is there and doesn't have to be made. The self cannot be torn by the pang of separation from what it loves. Fear of growing tension due to need. Handle it by repressing differences. Anxiety in relation to otherness, "fear of the otherness of the self." If you choose your own experience as your object, you have an object you can't lose. 'Truth' is similar, "extrication of an ideal self out of the empirical or contingent elf." The object needs to have accomplishment possible - doing - but not loss. Did he die of natural causes?   killed by their group of 3 Do they know they did it   so-so Unconsciously   What news did that event [Louie's show] bring for me?   news of your decision to choose control, that you are determined to get even. It tells me something about the size of my defeat, defeat of womanly pride?   no, of control - control of your own love woman. Love woman doesn't get defeated, only ego get defeated. If she doesn't get defeated why does she have to be controlled?   dominion, for reasons of power in the world Is it truly necessary to control her   And what else   perfected work. Control her and love her and work with her impeccably. Must she always be controlled?   not that - (Qc) must mature to (hermit), one has to help her grow 17 "These weren't high quality people, they were support people, but it was a start." Says Louie of her show. Louie had her show. Roy Kiyooka died. Louie and I sat in bed, had a fight, and she went home. We made a strange twist at the end. From one moment to the next we flipped from a gentle affectionate parting to a cold more final one, at the moment where she had had her graduation from the ranks of non high quality people. The way it twisted filled me with glee - there you are girl, now you've got it - but will you admit it? Not yet. She's trying to get me to admit I'm pleased. Oh I admitted it instantly but if I say so you will get away with something - you haven't admitted and I am not going to and we will leave it there at a standoff. What else. The evening had bored me, it was successful in terms of the room. Surprises make it. "She read them well," ie dramatized them, made them clear. I wanted to know what it was like for her to read them but we didn't get to that and won't. What would work now? For her to say, That was just, you had to do that. If she doesn't, it means she is trying to hold onto her gain. She needs to do that for practical purposes. Which practical purposes? Something to do with Ja-Min maybe. Amazing! I'm still smiling amid loss, to have seen her furious with worry that I'll captivate him any way at all - and something else too, if he sees my slides he'll see hers as less original. It was a bright stroke, it found her out in two places at once - ie she's as competitive about men as I am, and she has built on my work without acknowledging. I thank you Ellie also for traveling north together and for coming through with me to a (good) bye. She's thanking me for letting her go - as she should. July 89 - January 94. And I - isn't she giving me that too - she's abandoning me at abandonment time - am I going to be in it? Is very bad pain going to come? Not like it did. Can I recover something of myself? Yes. Money will be very close. I'll have to be careful physically because of work. It's January. The clouds are moving west today. The garden. I'll have Joyce. Now. What was it like. She stands in the midst in her sturdy childish look. Red boots, loose starling sweater with flecks, hair back with clips like a five year old. The image of a baby girl barefoot in a little dress, really a baby, not two, walking a wall with her father next to her. He isn't holding her hand, she has taken his arm. He is dangling two pairs of children's sandals from his left hand. She is in the midst of putting one baby foot in front of the other on the rock surface of the wall. I could feel the inexperience of her foot and her security in his regard, his face turned toward her, his arm crooked and proffered. I am braver and more lucid than she is. She is more tenacious and more mobile than I am. The delicious little girl standing at the green brown river smiling into her father's camera - four or five, and little - in a red and white dress that has the hem turned up a bit just at the side nearest the camera, revealing as if flirtatiously just one inch more of sturdy brown little legs. We would have arrived at understanding more of the evening if we had made it through the night. I am writing with the writer's expression on my face, which is the mouth held in a slightly suffering conscious tension. Having written that I would like to read it to her. That won't stop for years. Then I look up and see a young holly hedge across the intersection. The one nearest its building is filled out and has red berries in its upper several feet. The rest are juvenile in a way I hadn't known about hollies, bare and meager around their leading shoots. Will I be calm at bedrock now? The tension of having something to lose. Not bedrock yet and not only calm, swirls over the mud. What else I'm wondering - I see the temptation not to say - whether this withholding is necessary, whether it stops me, whether it ages me and makes me ugly where love and pain make beautiful. How was I with her. Dutiful. Unopen. But when was I last open. Sealed for endurance. There's a grief prickling close - what did it say - she took advantage. Whether there are times to melt and this isn't one, whether hardening is always a calamity but sometimes necessary, whether the way to be true and right is only ever sacrifice of safety. What's the look on my face - I don't forgive - stubborn. What would melt me - justice, I say. Is that it? No. Safety. But justice wd be safety, risky enough. The book could nearly always make me cry with its justice. And will you go on with the book? Who will you be, away? Will you see? Will you thank? Will you watch yourself schmoozing with both opinions present?   part 2 aphrodite's garden volume 19: 1994 january-march work & days: a lifetime journal project