| aphrodite's garden volume 2 part 2 - 1985 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
21 August Yesterday crisis. I seemed to call on Joyce by thinking of seeing her. When I called back for an appointment for the copper T it was gone. Evening delight. The sobs and gasping when he said Laurel had given her son to the father. In the morning I sat on the floor and invited death. He sobbed and said they needed me. I came in seeing the whiskered man in winter dress at his table drawing. Rembrandt. Drawing of a man and woman caught in a cage of bent brambles. "You made me fill up with dark blue light. I was a hollow body." I said. He swift and happy says he knows it.
Tonight holding the little boy very close with both arms looking in each other's eyes as he falls asleep. After taking him to M's room flying to Produce City. Jump off and fly in. J at the checkout. Look. Look. Smile. Pass. Go stand by the peaches ripping off plastic bags. Buy something. She does come to speak. "I have some of what I want but not all, like you." She looks light and clear. What's it like with her - neutral kept but not forced. Nodding goodbye. - non-fertile; sticky and acid; cervix firm and low, closed; temp ongoing low or stable high progest
The way M was gleaming at me. "Behind my mother's little skirt." "Maybe I've never been so happy." Lying in the afternoon seeing wheels of colors. Drawing dreams with lines of plane. I'm a muse not an artist now. But my stories, he says. The sequence last night as the bodies lay together. The man in the car who stopped and looked at my big bum and tits. To Ad Varma and the afternoon out in the raincape. To Dennis Stamp's kiss and how I went upstairs and tried the hairbrush. To the Istanbul story. He tells about the prostitute's section across the river, where the women stood at the windows, they all seemed to have bruises, and the men stand in silence in the street looking at them. Don't they buy? One maybe, for 200 standing in the street. 23 From new writing colloquium. I think: I'm quite formed, I know how I sing. I write love poems always - in netzach - and they're hod. Emily and Dorothy my tradition.
24 Dear you white coat fleeing one. Held up today. What emotion were you. Lonely shoulders. A Chinese girl you'll get. T's phone ringing. Didn't like my smile, was it victorious. Sorry? Beyond possibility. What would I say. You and the little baby. Taking the little baby from the car. You need a baby. You need to think wrongly about how you need a baby. The grief of how you need a baby. The stress and disorder of how you must speak to yourself and to me and them about it. Your permanent hatred. The small ways I could heal it. Someone mysteriously hurt. I didn't give up everything for.
Sunday 25th Lacy rusted iron. A long sheet. Maybe given by my dream, I have it given at night. It's (as tall as a person and something like that shape) with a small head, a little hole I match to the side that folds over, could put a little bead (the turquoise) fastening the sides. Leaning it over, a deep tone, it will be waking her downstairs. It's midnight. I should tone it down, lay it on its side. As I move it, its bends (like a musical saw) changing the song, very beautiful singing. But stilling it on account of her down there disturbed. You invade my pleasure. The long field in three sections. I'm in the end one. A glass door between the last two. She on the other side says plum trees in the end one, I've said a garden.
Garden invaded house invaded friend invaded neighbourhood invaded self invaded.
Telepathy, technology, has her own friend and takes mine. Keeps others off hers. Oh good. This energy feeds you. How you doin' Sonny. Hey baby. 26
M:
26 Dreaming the city not like Vancouver governed so someone keeps an eye on the ditches. These old boots, a spoon, in the ancient newly uncovered mud. In this city only if someone in private life decides to unblock them. Woken as he wakes, sitting feeding him thinking it's my shadow. A voice says, Since what we think comes so much from positive reinforcement. 27
At noon when he brings the baby he has a letter [from his parents]. He sits on the edge of the tub where the baby does backstroke in water light. Cries better when I hold him round. I start him off. "He is in a life story like you are." Evening bannock and scrambled eggs, the baby asleep since 8. He went into a village in the Near East, a nothing place with a grey river. Bought a flatbread like this. "P.S. Mike Bogus wants you to contact him." At 4 when I take the baby to his room, he puts the gift baby towel on his head. I say, dance of the veils. He does! He knows the shapes! In worn-thin yellow-stained panties the little pointy bulge that wags when he goes up off his heels. Pelvis aslant and rocks his belly around. 28 The land on the north side of the home road. He wants us to clear it. All of it? All the beauty? Round-headed clumps of trees over all. Janeen's baby room she's fixing, we're going to stay in. Only she's painted it brown, even the Chinese green umbrella up in the corner. Her fat whiskered husband home from work. Is Janeen mad at me? No she's hurt about her wall. North wall peeling off a rubbery fungus. She shows for a sec fat with child in flower-printed pink flannel. We're sleeping in the kid's bed. Michael and I. He's whiskered too, pulling about with covers. A forlorn soul in the corner of the church basement needs to sleep somewhere. Here, you sleep on the quilt. Taxi at the door, phone message for you. Traipsed to the rainy door. Andrew Cooledge. Seeing her hallway, strewn with shoes now.
Cervix high soft very open. In deciphering Quabala, in each figure the separable intuited unknowns. Inside what seems to be a category, different areas that are duplicated or overlapped in other supposed categories. The description of the whole system has it: concepts repeated in different categories. I mean there seems to be the structure of the confusedness given in a description of the system as meaning something else. Is it the system betraying itself or people intending to plant the code formula sort of next to the actual code. Was seeing it as equally intuited, the content intuitions and the intuitions about their mistakes. The whole of it would be made by connected movements of the loom, gears. Feels like a side-by-side something. [diagram with L and R with a horizontal line between them, an arrow coming from below the line, crossing it and bending toward the R] L structural correctives R mistakenly registered. Looking at them. Not the real baby, not the real man.
But in the evening alone with small person. He's in the water. When he complains I take him out, get soap in his eyes washing his nose badly. Put him into the thickest white jumpsuit. Lutch him. So sturdy and expansive. Sit in the crib chair with him. He's lying back over my upper arm with his head on blankets. I find him smiling nearby. Small voicing,
mouth shapes. When I suddenly begin to sing, corners pull down. Then a little waa. I put him down on his stomach and he's gone without even turning his head. Afternoon trek to Andy's for rye bread. The nice solid feel of him in a bundle on the lower back squared off like a cockroach egg capsule.
29 I just get up and go with him in the limousine. It's evening. The two men and I lying down on a sheet in the back seat folded down. The one next to me breathing as if also afraid. Fear and sexual thrill. Do you want to sit up? Nods. I move over and sit up so he can. Going through night streets. I feel in my pocket, did I come out without busfare. Nothing, but then in the corner a quarter. A dime. I want to ask him - carefully - "It feels as if you're going on a hit mission?" Nods yes, amused. "Where did you say you're going?" "Harris and Dominion." (Nearly that.) "No wonder I didn't remember that, I've never heard of it, what's it like?" Red rocks and bush. "I'd like to go home and go to sleep." The stretch of space to the driver's head, doors will be locked from the panel. He says "You won't be sleep in my open closet." "Are you telling me you're going to kill me?" "You won't be live in the morning." While the baby is swimming in the alive water light Michael jumps at my neck, "Someday I'll kill you." I've come from the library with Margaret Epp. Joan Baez downstairs, It's just that the moon is full . You're right not to want to be in a wrong state for even a moment, but I don't want to have to be emotionally available every second. I'm holding off the real thing. I don't consent. Why. He's weak. He's good. The way he looks.
Yeah - I have to know what that starved sick look is. The nice baby Isa with me all aft. Crying on my arm. Laid down sleeping. Head on two pillows sucking while I read. Sitting on my thigh while I read. Sitting on the window sill. Sleeping now since 5:30 maybe, fingers spread on either side of his head turned toward the wall. The church as map, girls on the right side bright and light, men on the left are dark, women and babies in the cloaca behind the fire. When we recite it's from the left, choir singing from the right. Only a man can speak from top centre. The congregation divided into four voices is the god's body. South to north is foot to head. [birthday cake made for Michael]
Sleeping at noon: phone, long distance for Jam, I think it's her mom. She won't say. Just #32. Jam will know. Jam at a conference. It's somewhere near the La Glace road. I want to talk to her, she's hurt. She and I sobbing. I say it wasn't just as she thinks, J has been in love with someone else for years. Where's the baby, crying, someone holding him, I have to go. J ahead of me, her hair elastic. She's in a mauve evening dress, chiffon, web across the shoulders, thin red glaze on her mouth. Drunk. Goes to sleep on the engine near an engine vent. I go to tell her. Wake feeling how strangely we sorted: I'm doing what she wanted (me) to do, she's doing what I (wanted to be, wasn't) accepted into. 31st August
His birthday. A chocolate cake. Afternoon he walks with, holds, comforts the baby. I work at the cake. It's when we decorate it, two mauve anemones near each other - that's us - one stuck in at the sash - that's the baby sleeping in the other room - one left in my hand - I won't put this one on. Three violets, rose petals around us. He's putting on candles, one here, one here. Red rose petals between the layers and under the bottom one. Flounces, lips. Small blue fur flowers pressed in around the anemones. Gazing at the marvelous thing. A woman with a cigarette stuck in her lips, little violet eyes, and a flowery hat atilt. A skewy puppet man, goggle pink eyes, long red mouth. We're on the floor, it's on the couch. He has his arms around me, closes his eyes. Can we take the cake in the other room and lie down. I hesitate but then I tell him I used some oil and the
hair brush and brought myself in my bum. He brightens too much. Crestfallen. We wrangle about how I'm holding off. Listening to him I realize that's what whine means. Let me tell you something very very clear - I won't do it because you need it. Today whining again: I'm supposed to give up my thinking, face myself, I'm exhausted and crazy, I run away from myself, I'm like an alcoholic, eating, reading. I look after the baby but I'm not all there. I'm doing what I think I should, it's true. But the state I'm in is dependent. Tell me what to do. I come home. Wank hard. Face myself, what is that, what's to face. Face what I want, I want to fuck? Cul is sore as if - Could I go back to what I left then, when I let Jam stop me -
What was it - facing myself - it was not resisting or covering - maybe if Joyce were backing me - was it sugar poisoning - Only that, not resisting or covering. What's in my way now - them - their draw - having to not love them (back then). Compared to them I've been no count and it's because I've been refusing and posing.
3 September 3rd day when at noon he's in water with light, I lay the mirror over him. He seems to love who he sees - he stays aligned, thrashing, smiling. When first I set it over him he came on instantly. He goes on interested for as long as he's in front of it. Water light and the light reflected between enamel and mirror. Following making to speak. "Have you thought what you're going to do about the heating?" Registering that she's looking prettier, her labia look. That smile means something. "Do you need it now?" I'm not going to take much of that. "Not yet but it's coming soon." Upstairs sadder, there was something in her triumphant. "It's coming soon." Dream this morning. I'm lying on a hospital bed. Jam lays her arm across me to the clit.
4th
But the way his head's whittled. Riddley is 18 moon. When'll it be enough of this blip study and postwomb life.
A rare pale grey variety of Asian elephant held sacred by the Burmese and Siamese
5th
7th Aft of Saturday. J phones. I don't like her dark voice. I tell her I'm going to talk to Joyce. She says she's smiling. I don't like it. 8 Peter Lake. The white horse runs in the snow in New York City. Who's writing this. Mark Helprin 1983 Winter's tale Harcourt Clear blue Sunday. I like the baby. Michael now isn't the man with a hat, he's the green boy, so lovely a sight standing, a leggy boy, don't look too close up his nostrils though. The baby dressed in blue and white stripes to go out in Sunday morning. Wool hat with big rolled edge. I'm swart black. Afternoon again after some days of cold rain. The downstairs and balcony doors open, kitchen and hall window, cooler blue light, clouds today reflect washed air. Yellow rug in the white room now for winter. What is it, looking and speaking to M, the same delight and consternation. Baby in the water is doing something real that I don't see well. Loves me when I sing.
Today I felt recovering - that recovering with a whole sheath. Sound. 9 Helprin's metaphor. Works still so vividly. Last Thursday in desperation he came back in the evening dressed in his best. "Courting" he said. And how it's done, he knows from his sisters: dancing, grabbing his upper arm laughing like a kid. With a box of Sheik but I swear I'll hold on 'til I talk to Joyce, but how foolish to be giving the days instead to a novel and mouth craving. This morning it goes right to the ache. He says hot. This evening radiating too.
The aft in his room - so beautiful a one - you're so gorgeous - but I want to run. It is to look at and not one to be a soul with. 10 Headache and weakness. War day. Jam's voice yesterday freaked. The fight about thermostat immanent. Last night the VW motor at nine. This morning a physical stress saying no again, I'm not going to pay to move the thermostat. What about it. Consciousness of rationalization but it's really provocation, wanting to make her furious. Obstacles to her fame maybe. Make her less charming to J. But more as if I want her, like she was doing now., to close off her inner door into me. But more as if I want her. Paul warning M. And there it brightens.
When we concentrate on another person and make a connection, that connection remains. Something flows back and forth. There are ways to shut down. They're not necessarily reciprocal. Someone once contacted is more sensitive to everyone. confusion and conflict. Judgment and will affected. A sensitive - "impressions from the inner planes" - every change of feeling in those about. A method of closing - time limit and return to task. The difference between intentional sensitivity in intelligence and unintentional sensitivity in feeling: "treachery, changeability, malice" but can't help it. "Astral wind." "Suspicious and quarrelsome and because alive to unseen forces very afraid of black magic." Any force not understood and which seems strange is seen as evil. Knows own suggestibility and defends from influence by suspicion and resentment. Very easily goes to self doubt. Having no general knowledge doesn't know how to estimate visions. Any vision or hearing belongs to "astral" - there's a 'higher' Connection - is exchange - there can be useful married reciprocal. But: when one of the people withholds or is hurt, the drain is all one way. There can be involuntary drain into those who need it - 'leaking aura' - makes sickness. Broken by complete cut and then aura heals by contact with nature and by health. "Lowered vitality leaves an open gate to invasion." Sex as a battery. There can be great energy by concentrating on some 'ideal.' Another way is to attach someone else's energy, by making them very hungry. Ringed cormorants. Lefthand path - homosexuality doesn't complete the circuit and energy can be used to make mind, but with it "irritability, excessive sensitiveness."
Another way is for cruelty - "any strong emotion" - fear pain blood. She says blood can be used "for materializations." Others use "the ethers which are set free when certain volatile substances are burnt." Lefthand path - "greed, lust and desire for power and knowledge for their own sake" and drugs, hypnosis. People are got by theirs. "A very uncertain friend until wounds have healed," suspicious and treacherous. Right motives and right associates. The group mind. When we get into a group we take a share of its debts. We're tuned and lose discrimination. The tainted sphere. Wd disband, go over water, fallow the place and sow it with salt. Name the wrong. The person isn't condemned. Fallow: 1 to 7 years. Reconstruct with new things. Always try to get the upper air of your antagonist. Transmute a force into its opposite. See the spirit in the person and don't lose sight of it no matter what harm the personality tries to do you. Compassion and faithfulness to the best. [I think this is Eileen Garrett] 12 Moments of hurt with M, different than I've known. When he wdn't build the bed and about Beverley. This morning when he'd smoked. It's disappointment, I say he's weak and it's as if I wanted to be looked after. But he does. Is it a disappointment in my power maybe. I see a flash of what he is. Oh the one I'm with isn't a fine one. A weak character. With Jam I was - 13 T has undone my lock. Why has she, when yesterday she was barricading from her side? I go down to make a ruckus. Her place downstairs is bigger and lighter, in the corridor too, ceilings higher. Jump on her to pound her or threaten her. She says she could come upstairs some evening and we could . Hmm maybe - When I've gone upstairs with one baby I have to go back down for the other. She's on the stairs with
a bucket of plums and a beautiful bucket of blueberries among leaves. "Where we got the apple juice." The baby and my journal she must have brought up too. Tasting the blueberries. In the handful some good very little sour ones. Shadow - Another dream a café someone I think Jam runs. Young man comes in. She starts to fill the glass. He comes every day for water. There's another one. They say the baby of him is Rowen. I look at that baby, curly black hair, shadow beard. "This baby isn't Rowen." Am I sure? Can't remember what Rowen looked like. I'm turned away tying a hanky over my seat, 2 knots each side, pieces of white stuff tied over my breasts and waist. Have to retie it. In the mirror see it's veil, bride dress. Rag bride. - [first session back with Joyce] "What do you owe yourself? To step out of the mirror." "I wonder if you know how angry you were at Jam." Laughing, can't help it, about J's letter to her folks. Crying with sorry. "The biological drive." Enjoying the story of the hunt. About the card for her, birth-rebirth-transformation. She says she's honoured. Startled. She asks why am I trusting her and the process now? Dunno, only that now it's the time and I do trust. - The snails and geography when M and I sitting on the rug beside the tub creep tongues. M attentively: it was moving and relaxed but I come to a point where I get scared and move myself out of that state by going into a memory or
[images glued in this section] 14 In my grandparents' house as other times after their deaths. The willed property has been taken but nobody's looked much in the closets and bedrooms. I go through them looking for what I'll take. Uncomfortable recalling the details, why. A pillowcase and a bigger blanket sewn into a sac; some woven material with a patterned soft color like the washed cotton blankets. When I go out, a (tree planters') bus parked on the road. Night. Ask the driver if he'll wait. Rush in and grab the various stuff I've chosen, to put it into the big sac. How I'm dressed, layers of wools, plaids, I've assembled. Judy doesn't like it, "I like to dress more --- something," image of oilslick rainbow colors. "Sexy." Tearing at stuff, a radio unwired, to take with me, looking out. Has he gone without, I said I'd be a sec. Taillights still there. When I rush out at last with stuffed bag, the taillights are found to belong to a red pickup that pulls away just as I'm going to shout. But here I am at the dark road. Maybe I'll go somewhere else. Had been making a meal with relative couple like Jill and Sean, finding what we could in the fridge. The frozen stuff, corn, peas. A calculation of rage against J, since Joyce. Cold glad I got her for all her meannesses. 15 Push-kin suddenly much longer, legs off the side of the bathroom table. 3rd percentile to 97th in 16 weeks, is why he's been so horrible. Just these two nights [he has been] sleeping from 6 or 7 to 4:30. I go to bed at 9, have 7 hrs unbroken. Wake at 4:30 ready to stay awake. Ro cries again at 5:30. Then it's time to turn on the light, have tea. After an hour he kicks and crows in his swim and then direct to sleep. 8 am Sunday, daylight, cold, turn off the yellow lamp. Cold fog on the blue mountain.
The green ray - initiates of it open channels in the racial uncon and through these the elemental forces pour. Elizabethan, Renaissance. Or if restrained, the old forms. Wicca. Tides. The Celt "on his contacts" or when its lost, moody, depressed and droopy. The learning of it. Stabilize their physical nature, control their contact and prevent violent alternations from affecting them. A sexual teaching - polarity. Suggests Yeats was. The battle with Michael who always wants. Today the year day. He presses, bursts crying that I've ruined his life. Because he's open and I'm as if taking revenge on his happiness. All the while I hear her hearing that I'm wrangling about sex with that one who's less than what she's known me to want. He persists. I explain passive resistance. When he undresses he does it in front of the window. He puts on the safe backwards. I'm tight and sore as if there's a bone ridge. We'll see - but I'm in cold anger. You press me for this I'll give it to you in a way so you'll think it's your fault it's bad. 16 [My sister visits.] A maturity. Up the stairs - am I seeing - Judy is changed, she's fat. Her flash at my breast when I feed the baby, mine when her skirt rumples up, at a knee. Nylon and fat thigh. Truth would have been astonishment, Judy, that YOU would become a matron body, oxfords like Mrs Abe Sieburt.
She laughs and moves, a doer. And the relation is different: she informs. In her heavier face, ancestor movements. I HOPE YOU HAVE A CHILD JUST LIKE YOU!! Ignores our strange meeting. Paul [she says] isolated, the phone never rings, no one was ever there. So depressed he stays in bed all day. A slender responsive one, [now an] ample dominant one. Her laugh a strong spill. Has been finding out about the influence of life in the womb. 17 So what mind was she. Feet in the allusion of another age's competency. Illusory nylons that stop as soon as out of sight. Salmon velour looking still like straight clothes got second hand. Tweed jacket smaller than it should be on top of the big velour body. Scarf really magic: silver and blue star map folded. 'To detract attention.' Face lost in a long white oval. Mouth's motions isolated, nose veering even more strangely right. Eyes, just eyes, under the light bulb, sunk pockets. Hair thicker now, loose, not bleached, where the barrette holds it back showing a grey underlayer. Hands - that was what I didn't want to see - puffed, big puffed white hands, awkward Indian rings. I was testing her with memory as if to find how far this person is disconnected from her beginning, who had so close a route into it. I couldn't see whether she was in a new watchfulness, refusing to be led where I'd be in the old relation. Or in a heavier sea that doesn't let her out (is she in left brain to the Indian right). Wishing I'd asked more about the time after her miscarriage. The old balance didn't come back, she didn't feel like the same person.
Dyslexia - L brain less developed, linguistic and sequential logic, briefly too little testosterone in the womb. Right brain compensatingly grows so they're artistic. Less sequential connection. Sometimes concentration and memory difficulty, defensive passivity. Often not coordinated. Wondering if her visit tells me an unknown part of my entity, the parts unknowingly compensating. She's gone through the 32 initiation in a different direction than I. Whether I am less supported, and Paul too, because she's withdrawn something. Whether that change was always in her. - That's thinking of it wrong - it was not she - it was the whole swirl - her change was always in it. But then. Who thinks it. What push of swirl. I've been assuming the infinity of ways - still the bifurcation model. I want pictures of - (how much do I want - ) Deduction paralyzed
Frank Wilczec. "Highly personal excursions into a fantastic netherworld of visual imagery translated into the universal language of mathematics." "There is some kind of spatial sense which can be used to think about higher dimensional things even though you don't really visualize it." He has been able to imagine the surfaces of 4-dimensional objects and to see beyond their shapes to topological equivalences. "So that a person who can see far enough ahead will be able to see himself from behind one of the faint galaxies may actually be our own as seen from behind and billions of years ago as long as it would take for light to go once around." "qualities retained rather than acquired" - The way in a prose piece a further knowledge is suggested in a figure. Children hearing the story of mouse sister who gave away her eyes. "Her eyes - her eyes - her eyes - her eyes" and burst into sobs. "Through sacrifice to a much wider vision" Judy said. "Luke wouldn't buy it" I said. 18 [with Joyce]
I'm killing her and then I started screaming. I leave on a rush, still bubbling. Called on the street from the left and behind. It's J in blue jacket and hair down, looking all there and not. (Puff puff professor - delight of Joyce laughing with me at Jam.) She looks wonderful I say walking beside her. I don't want to be with her. Gloating? sez Michael.
Seeming that it's not the separate ----, it's the way they're associated. About Judy, "... the first time I haven't felt guilty with her, or envious of her." The deft way she says, "so she wasn't guilty or envious either."
19 In this night deciding to call her. "Would you like to make it this morning instead." I'm there at 10. She at 10:30. When I arrive the second time, I and the neighbour woman and her canline friends blocked by a shunting train. Put the bike against a post, climb over the end of a car. There's she, with black curve of hair. The warmer side of concrete and metal sheeting. Then up and down the railway tracks. Stone rubble. Wonderful yellow grass, white small bones. Creosote and tar. "I was always so proud of you." [she says]
"Trudy is married to dope." "Trudy is married to Rhoda and dope is the wedding ring." "Yes." "Your range." "Your bravery that makes me feel I haven't taken enough risks with my life." I try again to say what her brilliance scares me to, looking sideways shyly at a beautiful, light, black and freckled face, Ken and Dewey. "Everything else you can do and still do that, the mastery of your body." In birthgiving. She and Daphne hugging goodbye at a party. "Nice body." "Nice mind," touching the side of her little head. That there was admiration but not tenderness. Is that true? 20 Feeling now the way it galloped in its old way beating paths into false agreement. When I keep going over something is it saying look again you were blind at this point.
About Michael, "He read you well. He showed us up." That the women failed.
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