18 January 1994
Tuesday before Thursday, which is when it changes. Aching as if still from work. I said - the image of what you gave me is the face I saw in the washroom mirror at the Ridge, somebody shining with being loved. If I had that in my spine.
It said, Imagine you'll never see each other again. I felt: I've imagined that so many times already, that goodbye happened long ago. No, what she said was, Imagine you've never known this person, and you're never going to see them again. A face on the pillow I'd never seen - as if a Martian or an angel had embodied there and was studying my face out of some ancient and impartial and completely unknown being. Her face looked stable but melted as if its embodiment were incomplete. I felt: nervous, young, mystified, blank in the way of thinking something might be expected of me I had no clue of.
"I'm sorry there are so many things I'm afraid of." Crying slowly out of the corner of the left eye. As if: if I'd known it would come to an end I would have been able to stay 'til the last moment, but as it is I bailed out of innocence so long ago, I've been having to hold myself shut for such a long time, it has been a long cost. The gift of the person who gives the limits.
She said: I understood what you meant about sex and concentration. I didn't care before. I guess I know how much deeper it's possible to go.
I'm always feeling I don't know what happens between people, how it works.
The way her reading went: I said, Have a reading, people from Press Gang will be there, you'll get a book. I took responsibility to get her out. I did that. No one has taken responsibility to get me out. I'm crying. She said, if I were an older woman, a writer, I would know to say to you, This is your vein.
I worked with Jam to make her a writer. I worked with Louie, I didn't succeed with Paul though I tried. This is where my tears are.
Look at her sad and shriveled, writing but not a writer. (Is this a light on why I shut down on Mary after she demanded cards.)
-
What do I fear? I fear the act of writing because it is so exquisitely, supremely demanding. I fear not arriving at that standard I admire. I probably also fear entering that other world, the struggle on the threshold of that disembodied state is sheer terror. Once one has been living in it for a while, though, one wants never to quit that atmosphere. It takes quite a long time to push oneself over the threshold and to start breathing the air of the vestibule, then to move forward into the first corridor. When one enters the great central living room, so to speak, or the grand parlour of the work, one loses all fear, and then one is thrust into that freedom I spoke of before. [Cynthia Ozick in Eleanor Wachtel Writers & company 1993]
19
A girl in a family on the east place. Brothers and sisters.
I get up on the back of a chair, I mean I stand on the upper rail of the back of an ordinary small wooden chair, worrying that it will tip but it doesn't. I'm standing in a dress singing very loudly, a hum, and sailing quickly through or on the tops of standing fields of green barley, west. As I pass the open door of the hospital / the Jansen house I see a woman in a bed whose head has turned hearing me sing. I think, she'll see me flying past.
A set of small rooms where I'm working - I don't have this clear, it was a night with many wakings - a system I have, things on hotplate elements that are turned on, a bed in the next room. More. It's disrupted. They want to have lunch in it, plates set out. Anne standing on the bed, my mother and someone else standing at the other end. I see it is going to tip if they aren't careful. They don't know where the trestles are holding up the platform. Anne is too far left, she should be standing right over the trestle. Since she is standing over too far, my mother and the girl shouldn't get off the other end, which is balancing her, but they do. It caves in. The whole system caves in, both little rooms, the hotplates. There is a small brown man, a stupid Central American, who is trying to steal this and that. I'm having to stick close to him and grab things back out of his hand - a candle, a carrot. It's as if he's brought me the Guatemalan flu too.
Standing in the wreck thinking how to put it together. A guest who's a priest is excusing himself. Maybe he'll help after he rests. I wasn't expecting anything of him anyway.
- What is the writer's centre love woman
- What is the mother and little girl's centre the whole realm of betrayal
- Is love woman to do with sex and romance
- Is the writer centred in sex and romance
- Was that dream about the writer disturbing a balance
- What comes of that disturbance balance
- Table, what there is to do
- My writing development has to be balanced by that mother-daughter development so the writer will understand truly
- What is the mother and little girl's centre the whole realm of betrayal
-
This photo, that looked at me in a way I liked when I was going through the files yesterday.
-
Saying 'bye to Louie. Didn't feel like it, didn't feel like it did last time. She was wearing a dress, I wasn't looking at her so I can't say anything about how she was. I went to talk about myself, had to clear out before her lover got there, she had a night's packing to do, it isn't me taking her to the airport in the morning. Would that woman say any of this? What would she say?
That it didn't come through, that the goodbye kept seeming to have already happened maybe long ago, although we worked together since yesterday when I sobbed with my head against her shoulder on the floor in my workroom. Now you're going to be unknown, unheard, unwritten, gone. Really now, starting now. But is it only child-heart I can count as real?
I was lying in bed last night and said, Now you can find someone your own size, and my body sighed.
20
Two sensations: my car comes slowly to a stop in traffic. Out of gas. That one wakes me in fear. The other was earlier and more a sensation than a picture. A sealed envelope being handed to me.
This will be the panic, I have no one to tell things, so much telling I have. That's why I said don't write, don't phone.
Unknown, unheard, unwritten, gone. The root of writing.
"These lies of an ordinary girl." Her reading.
- How was her night with Nancy romantic
- Did she wish it was me no
- She really isn't with me anymore yes
- So it was a (good)bye no
- How not it wasn't good
- What is it I'm not understanding (tower)
- It's a catastrophe - for me?
- For her
- A catastrophe I haven't felt yet
- She's going to go on and fall in love with a different woman
- It's a catastrophe because it interrupted a process
- Can I go on with that process by myself
- Did she cut off something in herself
- Prematurely
- What's the consequence for her heartbreak
- Is she still coughing
- Has she gone away more closed
- Will that set her back
- How am I fool
- Did she take her letters no
- She wanted to stay closed
- Am I going to feel the catastrophe
- Is it really true she doesn't love me any more no
- Now she isn't in love she'll be able to love
- So why is it a catastrophe (10p)
- I don't understand end of illusion, end of projection
- How will she carry me into her new time she'll feel she took her power back, she'll feel like a success
- Is it true
- Did she take something away from me
- What your victory
- She feels like she dominated me
- And did she
- She used my weakness about writing
- I let her get away with it
- That's why you say I'm being stupid
- That's why there was such a deadness in the goodbye
- Why was I so stupid you had something to gain by it
- What your exclusion
- I need to get into something
- Was anything she said helpful no
- Does she know she was doing that no
- Is it a serious loss to me to have lost power over her, will I be worse off without it
- In what way illusion
- Her worst self won
- Lies of an ordinary girl
- Extraordinary girl
- Shall I send her that message
- Is Louie a vampire
- Am I
- She more than me no
- Was I victimized by her
- Was she victimized by me no
- Did my cutting off stop her
- Did she wish it was me no
She said, Look at the buts.
There are two impulses that weave. You want to tell what it was like and you want to explain. Look for the instance under the generalization. Imagine a scene.
Now I have more to say about that goodbye. It was dull because she was taking the upper hand and I was letting her. I was not on my instincts. Her upper hand isn't very good.
Oh what now. Go to work.
21st
Louie's video camera, slides, writing. Is this true, she took away from me filmmaking, femme attractions, slides, even slides of my country, Rowen and Michael's love, David's interest, every good book I know, journal work, Joyce, Laiwan. Only extreme fuss kept her from K and my neighbours. Any good thing I have, she got. Whenever I tried to get distance enough to find my own way she howled so pathetically I felt I must be victimizing her. She exploited me and set up a huge screaming screen that made me think I was exploiting her. Didn't I want to talk to Joyce about her? As if I'd lose an illusion. Louie is a vampire.
-
There was an impulse to say, I will have twenty households of the city that I see into. Alba Rosa and her mother and the absent gangster, Mark and Adeena with week old baby and circumcision party, the Colonel's little army house, Garth and Joseph's marble highrise palace, Sylvia Scott's orientalist dirt, drained Mrs Kaplan, bright Emily and her brat mother and sullen father, the bachelor doctor's spotless black and white, grease-mouthed Cynthia Pincott and her toyboy, the Jewish psychologist waiting to be married, the ex-nurse who married the fat man who left his wife for her, the guy with the mixing studio in the basement and mice in his couch, Mrs Cameron among rugs, Mrs Harris apprehensive.
22nd
The day after three work days, sick, blank, aching. Every love is away. I look at the passions of a month or year ago blankly. I feel none of these people. Marvel that I ever did. What I feel is forehead, back, wrist.
23
Waves coming into a beach. They tower surprisingly tall and sharp, tumble surprisingly close to shore, this little crescent of beach. I want to step into the edge and meet them. Someone - my mother - says it's too dangerous. I disagree. She says it's two feet deep at this edge, as if there is no tide, I think. I'm enthralled watching the waves tower and fall. I want to stand in closer to that power.
K has come back. Do I meet him in the top of a double decker bus. A moment when the bus swerves toward a bicyclist whose stilt-bike brings him eye to eye with us for a second. I marked that moment in the dream. K has brought me things. Several little boxes of plant fragments, many of them have shaken out of the boxes into the plastic bag they're in. I open a box that has what seem to be samples of a meadow - name them to Rowen - poppy, poppy, California poppy, and this one, campion. Another present is a cylinder with three marbles loose in the bottom, two alike and one different.
While I am watching the waves the sea assembles instead a towering dome with cavity at the top. It is performing another kind of form - a rounded heap varying into temple shapes, popping and quivering. It is as if a goddess beckoning me. I want to be sitting in face of it with K. He arrives there but he's talking about a picture on the wall over on the right. I've been ignoring what he's saying. Just glance at the picture. A sort of photo montage of people on a street with a space between them and a spoon superimposed.
In the last dream I was arriving at an estate on a mountain. I haven't seen anyone yet, am arriving around the back and standing to take a picture. Greg Morrison has married Sally Potter. I'm explaining who I am to a group of maybe Filipino house dependents, young women who are speaking Spanish. I tell them I'm fifty. A Tibetan prince comes round the corner - a prince of the house. He takes the real flowers I'm carrying but doesn't want the little glass ones. I seem to have put them in my mouth and chewed them up. He's walking out. I follow him, spitting out the glass fragments so I can talk. There's a new baby on the sill I pick up. Once we're out of sight of the dependents he'll talk as an equal. I say how unlikely a marriage it seems to me. He says it works, she is stabilized for her work.
-
While Louie is away. Memory - sometimes finding the child's actual sense, something like the unconscious of the time - sense of my father's intelligence. Knowing there's a 'self', a self-experiencing, a capability.
At that moment a girl on the street walking with long steps, swinging her umbrella, singing, lifting joyfully a pretty chin with a loose tuft of beard under it.
The air of that real memory. The greasy thickness of - I don't know what. The social self.
affect where adaptation is weakest - blame, criticism, revenge, love, admiration, envy, hate
because I was thinking of fighting as resistance not as penetrating exactness
each personality was born from a crisis, different EEG, hemispheric dominance, allergies, skills, handwriting
You get a little bit hurt and it makes you stupid. Your eyes aren't intelligent.
consciously enduring the conflict ... not allowing it to disappear again, no matter how much pain
24
A man driving a bus, school bus or city bus, has around his feet a pattern of very small Japanese maple leaves, like bird footprints, red. It's exquisite. Louie, or someone like her, and I, tumble in, talk to him, disarrange them so we can't see them next time we look. We're walking through the city talking to him, he knows things, I feel. I'm noting the confidence I have in speaking to him. He's like a middle-European man, not tall, non-attractive. Near the end of the dream I'm saying I sell my books, he says he put them into ----, something. My feeling is I'm taking him more seriously all the time.
We walked past the new university hospital. I was looking at the bilateral grand high-ceilinged second floor and third floor structures thinking they were sitting rooms, wondering whether I could get away with sitting in them. There was a disabled five year old lying on a stretcher. Rhoda had had a baby recently and there's T standing pregnant.
That shouldn't happen to my fearless, inquisitive explorer, my Rabbit, my black-eyed, raven-haired little Indian.
You were such a darling, so interesting a companion.
You didn't need to fear the cows - no, they were to fear you so you could walk where you wished. Your two-year old self had that clearly determined.
-
The energy I release when I see there is a possibility.
The energy I withhold when I see there is no possibility is anger, rage to live. Energy withheld is 'thinking.'
I often don't know whether I've left them or they me. When I'm abandoned I want to leave. The state is sudden and wild, I have to act - give something back, take something back. It tries to make good the self betrayal of an earlier time but it can only think of killing that connection in my feeling.
At the deepest level of feeling there is not that vibrant aliveness of knowing that I am I and you are you. It is only 'as if' the other were there while actually one is alone.
True differentiation keeps the tension of needing to negate and needing to recognize. Wholeness for each can only exist if the tension/contradiction is maintained. But it is somehow in the nature of a bond that the tension is given up into polarization.
Jung and Toni Wolff:
she served as a merger figure
to whom he could confide his most disturbing thoughts
during periods of intense creativity especially in its early phases
narcissism refers to the task of forming a cohesive self primarily in relation to a significant other whom the self has previously idealized or with whom merged
25
Notice this: what does it feel like to imagine Titania's glass. What does it feel like to imagine a goddess who is goddess both of love and of truth and light.
Sunflower stockade. Corn squash and beans fills up centre. Compost over winter. Red banners, zinnias. Sunwheel a lammas fire.
Talking to Sylvia tomorrow - I've avoided it - it's tricky - in these ways - I want to be honorable with her for my own sake - that means not lying - I want not to alienate her from him by some means that will make him mistrust me, like telling her the worst of what he says about her - I want not to cede any claim - I want to find out whether he's telling the truth, I want to vigorously check him out, but without making him feel spied on - I want to not be sleazy in any way I can feel seen through in - I want to seem a formidable opponent so she will reflect respect - but I want to be nice enough so she'll pull her punches - I'd like to think I'm cool enough to enjoy it as if nothing's riding on it - I don't want to seem to not want him because she will pass it on - I don't want to seem determined because it will make her work harder or smarter - I want her to get him if he's bad for me.
What I want to get from it - a true estimate of him, a true estimate of her, a true estimate of where they're and we're at.
26
First what's here. Nobody but me. The silent house of black early morning with its small lights on the table in the kitchen, on the page here. The ragged line of tires on water out there at some exact distance but no exact location. In this bed I'm between parallel walls, unconscious geometry. Windows east and west give me angles out, one on either side like wings. With each I am sky not at all dark. Dim but luminous pearly grey pink.
If there were someone to tell, what would I say about these days. What am I doing. Dipping myself into the minds of the last ten years. - What about this mind? It's a careful one, isn't it, holding itself. And what is this other one that's ready with contempt for that self-holding. What happened when I named it. The hand released and I was picked up by speed. Is the mind that goes carefully the one that is contemptuous of itself?
- Dipping into the minds of the last ten years without seeing them as minds, usually. Seeing their materials. Looking for materials. Alright. What am I doing. There is the love book, the writing book, a pile called Queen of Cups, a pile called subtle body and one called film. What I begin to see in the love book is a spread of, is it love minds, or positions I take. In the writing book probably - look, the sky has changed color, it's stronger, it's bluer - a record of other people's aspirations. What about this mind? It's the one I didn't like when I got into dope isn't it - cramped.
A dream, I go out to pee. I could do it at the doorstep but I'll take the trail up to the outhouse because I haven't seen it yet. Halfway up I see a child and hear voices below the bank. People in trailers, transients, who might use this outhouse. It's on a rise and has an apron thinly crusted with old shit. I walk cautiously - that's the connection - on the edges and where I hope the crust will hold. But the crust doesn't hold. I have shit on my clothes, in my hair. I'm smeared.
Where? In what way? My mother and children were in that house. I kept finding lost clothes under the mattress that was divided down the centre. Even before I got to the outhouse I was heating water to wash baby clothes.
Writing the crusted shit such disgust. What wants to say that. Where am I shamed. There, always. And it's two ways stuck together, shame at being a body they see as inferior, shame at loving unloved. A way they're the same - yes it is shame in writing too, that says impatiently, this is a mind that moves badly. The way they touch a shitty baby. The way a shitty baby is self-disgusted too. Rowen gagging when he had shit on his hand.
What can I take from this. Something simple: a patience to say what is contempt like? What is approval like?
Having come here, what do I know about meeting Sylvia. She will look at me with a cold eye and speak pleasantly. What will she be thinking. She'll be scrutinizing me wanting to know what I've got. I'm the other woman to her, and unlike her. What am I that she is and doesn't act out. Wild. She'll draw me out because it's her habit. I won't see her unless I draw her out and that won't be easy. She's strong. She's more conventional than I am, more gender-compliant. Not more feminine although she will want to think she is. What will I want to think - that I'm livelier and brighter. We'll both be thinking, what does he see in her.
-
And - how was it. Seeing her faces, many. She's doing the bee-keeping course with him. The moment she said her grandfather funnily enough is from Yorkshire and I said Oh really? in a tone that had caught on to her claim before I did. Horrible little hands, short pointed fingers. What she wants, a house and a garden and herself painting upstairs. "Maybe there'll be someone who wants to share it."
Was all of that false, I ask, and it says vigorously yes.
That she and her daughter scream at each other for hours. The daughter begs her to hit her.
"That sort of Englishman who has interests and just pursues them." "We do things together. I never know what's going to come up." "We were intimate very quickly." "I don't call him, except on his racism. I let things go by. I don't want to change him."
She liked her father tho' he beat her.
And him. Hypothetical. I'm not feeling him at all.
[Opposite, Tarthang Tulku notes:
1. Great knowing This inner source fills you with rich feelings; it stimulates and calms you; it shows you how to handle problems. It offers solutions that unify decency, honesty and self-interest, love and pleasure, reality and bliss, fulfillment of your duties without diminishing your freedom.
2. Fully experience the aggressive part of your consciousness, imagined helplessness.
3. Use your thoughts in a deliberate way. See how you have created destructively. Formulate what you now wish to produce. Observe how you use thinking processes. Look at what happens now, look for a fresh approach.
If you worry about what comes with what you want, a wish to not give.
Fascination in exploring destruction.
Ego is structure that guards from chaotic multiplicity of uncoordinated aggressions. It becomes unnecessary when consciousness can see through structure, to chaos and beyond.
The will to be happy and unfold in life.]
27
Just before the alarm I dream I wake in Michael's arms, we'd made love the night before. I say something like, I'm still wet. He says, Let's see, and puts his finger in. It's bliss, gathered close to his chest and him in me. I say dreamily, There are some positions that always make me feel like a married woman.
-
Saying to K, I feel unacceptable, how I dress, my house, how I read aloud, my age, my body, how I love, how I think, what interests me.
29th
Happy. The day it was. Work party. Sun. There was Rob with shorter hair and better clothes. Muggs with a crusted sore under her nose. Blackbirds singing in the poplars. Joann says she's pregnant. I rush around the herb garden clipping and weeding in blue weak-strong light, in a yellow teeshirt. Willem van Heet with long teeth talked espaliered-apple shop between the wires. The kid-pit got re-dug and sanded. Rita was given a plot. LaFarge brought gravel, sand, road mulch, and Rick had to deal with unloading it. The north path got fixed, firmed, weeded, graveled. Rick mended my tap. Death's-head Frank got drawn into the work party. He and Daniel cleared the clubhouse site. Ellen worked on the kids' area. We used the round table at lunch and later when we cracked the potato chips, Muggs, Ellen, Ros and I. Good lunch. We decided to make the work parties regular days every month. I sent out a Richters [rose nursery] order.
And - last night the fight I picked with Rob. Picked up and went home not unhappy but as if saying to myself, I've been bad and can't expect to be near to myself. This morning saw it was having no one with me who sees the same. And also that K's on his way, on his way .... Yet, when I came in, tired, just lying next to him with the top of my head touching his elbow, being restored. And his good baked beans.
30th
Sunday morning. Calabria, sun in the window, but have I got the energy to write a sentence. Dull. Money. Car and teeth will need some. I've counted every dollar 'til the end of March, and that is cutting food money. Can't imagine writing, hacking up goo in the mornings from the flu Louie coughed into my face. Vitamins running out. If I alienate Rob I have no borrowing possibility supposing the car conks out. Visa threatening to cancel. Insurance runs out, when, March? Owe Rob $10 a week, Visa $100 a month. Owe $45 in library fines and can't take books out. But also: paid up memberships in Cineworks and Video Inn, access to NFB, good boots, food in the garden, Louie is paid off.
31st
Awake at 6:30 saying I'm in a gap, then saying people build things, I haven't built anything, I keep going back to zero. I could say what have I built and list things. I could say what would I like to have built. What would I like to be living. That's the one that makes me sit up. Do I want to be a writer? Not today. Do I want to be at school? Sort of. Do I want to be making films? Yes. Theory and practice, in the midst - what am I seeing - that, in the midst - of what - see how it's loosened - something like pink screens though not pink screens.
- What is work in the midst balanced force,
ego does a certain kind of work, it investigates the uncon
- Can I do academic work in a way that has feeling and pictures in it yes
- I can make more space for myself yes
- Have a more emotional workroom yes
- Should I do the digital thing no
- Something on imagining
- Do it between philosophy and film
- What should I work on the practice of it
- But can I get funded for this
- Do I need to lie to get funding
- Because I'm dealing with men
- Will Phil help me get money
- The grain work is in this no, the grain work is related.
- Should I still look at mathematical films
- Can I do academic work in a way that has feeling and pictures in it yes
[Opposite, list:
I like to be -
- real sex, bliss, depth, givenness, takenness, boldness
- real contribution, relevance
- plants, country, color, weather
- music and motion
- natural form, skill, art, in language, objects and images, systems
- health confidence ease strength competence energy
- learning newness travel daring venture wonder
- effort commitment rest
- advanced mind, computation abstraction speed reach & range
- comprehension penetration grasp sanity
- expression originality
- liking admiration respect contact adoration love
- comic surprise lightness subtlety
- freeflowing deep self Being the soft state fearlessness
- reverie image vision
- any true perception
- being seen, liked, understood, enjoyed, adored, taught
- integrity bravery steadfastness resourcefulness focus
- purpose]
- real contribution, relevance
1st February
How do I want to be living - which I's want to be living -
Simple adoration - what's in my love book can call it, that deep dangerous one. He calls it.
The idea of making. Writing, films. Stoppedness. The sense that it could change and open out.
The academic way has money and discipline but it takes everything and leaves those cores aside.
The garden is contribution, community, construction, contact, and leaves me looking elsewhere for money, mind, marriage.
2
- First floor is emotional foundation.
- Second is competence.
- Third is love on a much higher level, mental life.
- Becoming will take me there when I'm ready.
- I can go there with meditation.
- Second is competence.
Reading Laxdaelasaga feeling a certain light of spring evenings - not a spring evening here. A northern light long and silver.
I lay down and found myself angry. Do I really want to take up with him again. He's cheap. He's boring. He's self-absorbed. Is that all? With him I feel too old, too emotional, too bold, too unconventional, too masculine, too poor, and as if I can like to be none of those things I like to be. So did I go mad? Was it an outbreak of love woman who is too young to look after herself? Was it an overshoot from Dave Carter, who really is worth something, worth being friends. Or were both of them an overshoot from mad Louie? Who in a way was overshoot from Rob. I'm telling Joyce it's like being split, my fine formed smart self doesn't choose my lovers, a younger woman does, and then I can't stand them and drive them off. And that younger woman doesn't even have my depth, or didn't.
I woke this morning saying the mmmmmmm of an aeroplane, hearing the droning tune. There was a voice saying "It's a mmmmmmm." Seeing it written, I see why it is.
I felt it had something to do with this clearing, which has begun to feel like light. Then getting sugar from the pantry I saw the painting I've had in the cupboard since sometime in the seventies. Richard Davis, Cold Front, I see on the back, b. 1947. I've taken it always as a portrait of a man I would like to know. Why so. There is the blue Volvo, the man in a red shirt seen from the back, just head and shoulders, head turning looking northwest at the darker cloud over the mountain. He and the Volvo connected by both a building and a tree, the tree a young maple without leaves I think. Now I see there is another connection, a parallel row of pipes painted green only where they rise from the first floor. Here I find his signature placed where it isn't obvious between the stripes of boards on the garage door. Richard Davis 1975. The D of the family name is a roof over the given name, so the signature is in structure like the painting; and the year is written in a separate typography, drawn so it looks like it comes from the world of numbers and not of names. It is an intelligent painting, loving and self loving. Where the building's individual shingles and the tree's many twigs are given without shortcuts, the drabness of winter and decay are lit with the light that comes from between clouds in the west, long and flat, lasts only a moment, and is joy on anything it touches. It is related to the light I felt yesterday. And the blue Volvo which as it is placed is genital, at the root, which gleams the way pewter does, as if there is a complete gleam with a fine skin containing it so the gleam is inward. I am not sure but I think that man has a moustache, though, and that is bad. Maybe he is the small man I saw in the Calabria one day, truculent, maybe; he was like a worker but had a portfolio with him, and looked at me with a keener eye than I expected.
The clouds in the painting are sublime, the sky is, the clean openness over the jumble of human housing. The man in the painting is there in it, and his being in it is given in the painting in such a way that only those who know will know it - reticently. The window he's looking out of is not shown, and neither is his eye. Only the angle of his head says it. The man who is painting is not the man who is looking at the sky. He is a man who is looking at the human warren as well as the sky.
I want to say: my life is going to change. My friends are going to change. The Calabria is not going to be my coffee bar. There are going to be summer mornings very early. I'm going to be quieter, more determined.
This is what else - what does that mean, the small hand and then the bigger one - changing inside the sentence - inside the word - this is what else it says - next time I want it to be the real thing - I won't find the right man in the art world but in the intellectual world - there will be no man to please both of us, it is not for her to choose. I must be her lover and my lover I have to choose for myself. Though he will work as an intellectual I will work as an artist. Is any of this true? No.
What I don't notice in the painting is that the middle floor is blank - he hasn't got social currency - and the life of the ground floor is offside. It's in those ways a picture of an unhappy person.
It's eight o'clock. I'm eating before I go to work. Seagulls milling in the park.
What is true is that I have 'a body of work.' I mean I have a formed net. And I won't be satisfied with myself unless I know I've brought it 'out', shown it, given it the work it's for, brought myself to say its say.
Do I also need to be married? No it says. Do I need a lover? Yes. To be healthy? No. To be happy? No. To be lively.
4
The sky is morning, the light, as I see in the steam rolling - no not rolling, something else there isn't a name for, propelled and growing - is pink; there's fog over the water; mornings are increasing and I will see them.
I'm thinking to write Dames rocket, to be with that life, and with the mornings as they grow, the mornings of the neighbourhood and the house. Feeling where I'd be if I had done that - what would be finished.
Early mornings. Go sit sometimes. Don't have a lover. Don't have Luke in the house. How to get money? Not cleaning. Not grants. Talk to J, T, and C again. R too. Can tell J but not T.
Take slides. Work from the journal. Remember exactly. Do it as a screenplay. Sort of. Model on Long day closes. The seriousness of that. Anything else to model on - doing. I'll myself be the doing one. I'll be tempted by the ideal. If I can't reconstruct the intelligence, construct an intelligence. I'm facing them now. How our subsequent work is relevant. The texture of the time, what the three women who met were - the refinement. Whose point of view. They're on Kits Beach. It says the limping is irrelevant - won't it be too glamorous? No, there's everybody's weakness. The characters of goddesses - Aphrodite, Artemis, Athena. I show the dope. And the goddess offside, the stricken one. Go to Praxis to see how things are written. Get Jane Campion to work with it. Money will come.
The most I know - I could be writing from and in and toward it every day.
The angel on the wall at Cineworks. Clairvoyances in the plaster. The fear of lostness. Go on speaking to Joyce about woman-depth, so as to get through it this time. It won't take more than a year. Aim for the academic after that. With support, not having to TA. If I wrote Dave would it derail me? No. But I mustn't touch K. I can be friends but lightly. Seeing his limits.
5
End of Friday, it was just Tuesday, I was just saying the three work days are about to begin. It worked with judgment, it pushed. I'm asking, what's happening in a month. I'll remember the judgments I dropped to be able to move easily. Fearing psychic harm from the sight of other people, believing psychic good from the sight of some.
6
"Whenever I am living over the lovely lonely landscape of the small"
From my high window I look across the flat plain landscape of moss and rock. Salt land. It's someone's view. Looking at it I see it's a field of large rotting logs with a skid-road for logs or boulders. Something about Louie, maybe that she is on that landscape, I think somewhere halfway in those miles. Then I see something move a long way away among the logs. Buffalo or cattle. My height is less, I'm standing slightly above them watching them pour slowly past. There's the massive bull. There's an outcropping of rocks with a worn boulder I see is being used as a step to jump onto the ridge to get away from the bull. I run to it but my running has made the bull run, and he knows what to do. I think this ridge is safe but he runs around the side to a cave in the rock, and bounds up. I'm faced with him. Wake in fear.
La Glace School is being disbanded. It's full of people, the rooms are either empty or set up with old clothes for sale. It's like a fair. I am carrying my left sandal. Haven't got my right one. I take it into one of several old clothes sales and put it onto a shelf beside another single sandal. No one will buy it, I won't have to carry it. But when I go back it's gone. I keep wondering about it through the rest of the dream. I go into a large room like a church. Janeen is speaking from one of the pews. I go around the projector to the other side, the right side, to find a seat where I can see her. I see Raymond and other people I knew, don't sit beside them, find empty benches.
Going through the rooms of piles of clean fabrics, looking for shoes. Above a cupboard, new shoes. When I take one down I find it has strange silly long toes. [small drawing] I'm not succeeding at drawing it, that's the third try.
Somewhere in there, a side dream, Rowen runs toward the front of a car with his penis sticking up out of a hole in the front of his pants. He's challenging the car. I'm standing outside it and can't see my father, who's at the wheel. The feeling is that there's going to be big trouble. But there's a last minute save, my father has fallen down dead. Apoplexy I suppose.
I find my way back into one of the other rooms that had been shut and hear a little girl crying broken hearted, Arnold Desser, Arnold Desser. I know him. I go back to sit beside her, touch her head, ask her what it is. She quietens. I understand her feeling tho' not why it is for him. Then Janeen is there, the three of us like sitting with our arms around each other on the floor. A song comes on the radio. It's a love song. Janeen says Oh I hate that song. But they sing it beautifully. I'm not singing, listening carefully to them. In the second verse Janeen, who's nearest me, sings harmony in a lower voice next to my right ear. There is a man standing nearby who has been wanting Janeen. I and the younger woman accept that she is the one who would be wanted. He's as if standing by for her.
-
I liked the salt land, moss and rock to the horizon. A fallow. Then a clearcut with a roadbed that's torn down the middle. A devastation with Louie in it. There's animal life - fear I don't escape tho' I think I can get above it.
My early ideas are being disbanded. It is second-hand clothes that are sold there. My left sandal is like all my left foot shoes powerfully deformed at the ball of the foot. When I take it off I am in direct contact. It muscles into the ground, which is not deformed though it takes prints. That left foot is the muscular intelligence of the left side, that dark lone worker. Her. In the meeting tho', I sit on the right with the men I knew, while love woman speaks on the left. It is her I want to hear. The meeting is in the brain not the body.
In the aside my young energy runs at my father's machine with a shocking display of naked small power. I see it happen. The tyrant dies simply of being challenged.
The new shoes available are too silly to wear. The old shoes don't fit. Many of them seem to be singles. I suspect they've put mine into the wastebasket, too idiosyncratic to sell. I'm going thru the back to the other side when I hear the little girl crying for an insignificant man who's gone away. I know the feeling. Will she trust me? She's crying now. She's crying for a quality, emotional directness. When I sit with her, love woman is there. Love woman is closer to me. Love woman is a personality who comes with the woman body, when woman body comes. Their strong beautiful love-feeling, that I feel as theirs. The I in this story is mature competence, who looks at romantic competence from outside. Ie she's not romantically competent. We're not as close as we seem, we three. I'm not singing. I could be giving them a better song: a song for three voices that praises women not men. The man will still be there but he doesn't sing, he's an image, he's the desire native to us - to love woman specifically but to me in being us.
In our set of three, a child a woman and a mind, a child a woman and an artist.
- If I understood the principles of that story I could make up people for it. I don't know how much of it is particular.
- the nerve tree an aerial
- antlers
Seeing the land stretching out bare as we've cleared stuff out, I want to sing differently - an African language coming out of my mouth - no I want to sing in relation to this beautiful clean distance of cultivated earth - taken by feeling - it's quickly getting very big.
The test of its accuracy would be if all three of the originals feel themselves in all three of the positions.
The question I go on with unendingly is, what is the relation between openness and death, and closedness and prosperity?
There was a self I came to, and when did it stop? I need to know exactly this.
How did I come to it before - over a while - really hunting it - into femininity and out through to being taken for a man - rigorously - writing -
-
What's happened is I flipped when Louie left and this one is unrelated.
I'm frightened when I see her power more.
- aphrodite's garden volume 19: 1994 january-march
- work & days: a lifetime journal project