| aphrodite's garden volume 2 part 6 - 1986 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
8th February Now he wakes only a little before 7. Lay and talked till the clock beeped. Then I keep my promise and come get him. He lutches what there is. We sit in bed, he looks at the window. Michael wrecked in the mornings. Says it's from dreams. Yest he said he'd respect my line. I that I won't use him to talk ideas. Imagining going to ag school, imagining making a useable front. The way warring with T and M I'm overriding what also seems to be myself. It's more intelligent to identify with the whole set, but the result of this hardness is a bigger space. I'm not fastened in relationship pain. Have I lived in the raw human enough. Going public would I go ugly and dead. [affirmation] I'm powerful, effective, dedicated to the good of all creatures, live and work freely in many places in the planet, strong, healthy, loved, vital, brilliant, in full enjoyment of doing and being, beautiful, open, intense in being as well as doing. Adventuring in spirit as in world, in harmony and creating harmony, simple and complex. Integrated to have use of all faculties, for the good of all. When M goes into passing gear, aimed interrogation, I get pushed against the wall. He says why're you getting angry. I find a leap. He breaks down.
Plants - planetary consciousness - women - ceremonial B says [to M], You're hung up on her and you don't want to hear what she's saying. What he's suffering is defeat. And T's face in pain and appeal. I'm wondering if it's what will make it possible to come into the world again. Jesus said absorb pain and die. Michael is offering. When I did was it that I can't help it. Truly justly defeated or offering strength in exchange for spiritual power, power in art. Why was I defeated. Was I defeated.
[tarot study notes on individual cards]
9 Squabbling with Joyce. She complains I want too much, do too much in an hour, twice as much as anyone else. "You don't realize how much homework I do!" passionately. "Fifty dollars is a lot." Some jealousy about my other recent advisor, an old woman. She, resentfully, "She tells you your writing is alright, go ahead, doesn't she." "No! She tells me the same as you." I tell her I want to come in every day, I want to learn about dreams. With some others getting on a train. Club car, big armchairs, nearly empty. The car in the front is parked with people standing. We got on at the end and we're much better off than people who came earlier. Train stops. I go to the front of the engine to look. Lay my head on its side on the tracks to look. Fighting with strangers who've come into the dorm and are reading people's journals. They're casual but I'm belligerent. They don't understand. Resist. But my guess at German is right, drives them off.
12 Garden. Pool. New cast [?]. Setting it. Ugly tile trough. Upstairs in our apartment T having a children's class. At all the windows little boys drawing. She leans out in belly dancer costume, skin painted, so gorgeous I brace myself and jeer, "It's hanging out." She goes away. Jam's van. She's up there. Later on when I think the class is over I go up. Quiet. Many rooms. A few little boys. My room - one of the children seems to have moved me out, him in. Jam in the corridor. We're wrangling. Telling her just not to come to my house, it makes me her slave. Down slippery steps long outside rank. In the big empty house. Upstairs bedroom, the homeless sleepers don't come up here, our bedding still here, 3 pillows, my quilt, one of hers? Going to take out a red and white patterned one. Arab check, but looking closer it's something else. Going out closing the door, have to open it again. Lots of identical black fuzzy kittens, let 'em out, chase 'em out. Down below in the more public big space. Rubble. We're saying they're going to gradually make it a market. A girl juggler already setting up a small ring stage. Someplace with kids squatted. Pull down my pants. Kid behind me hoots. I turn and lecture. "Haven't you ever seen hair before, it's just hair, you'll see lots more, it's like armpit hair, like yours. Look at your arms, you're very hairy." He flees. I'm seeing he's she. "You live together in your apart-ment."
"Gravity is not an important force." When we are very young we can recover from being mashed up into a rubble of cells. 13 A sandy-haired solid man sitting next to me in this gathering of young families is nice to me. When I'm holding the baby lifts me up, sets me closer. It's warm. Attention. He's a friend of Don. I don't notice him much at first but like him more. Suddenly start up talking about the movement of slime mold images. He liked them too. A blaze. Interrupted by his wife maybe, they're going somewhere. I say I'd like to come too. The van as I'm coming toward it slams doors. It starts fast down the mountain road. A desert, adobe architecture and light soil. The wives have contrived to leave me out. Two strawberries and an onion. Stupid aren't I. A message. Her pool cue. Now I want to put 'em in a paper bag and take'm back. 14 time / people / way / water / words 16
17 Sorry to have bawled out Laiwan when she was - not sorry, worried because. Compulsive and hateful. 19 Daycare in the bank. My little boy and little girl, why haven't I paid any attention to the little girl, she's taller than the little boy. More and more children in the daycare. Do you know Ina Dennekamp? Doesn't
look like her, skinny. The women's community made this daycare while I was away. 20 A house moving into. Attic is insulated with water. Luke, Luke's there, why haven't I been noticing him. A corner of the house, old. Attic is big, wide, high. Big, wide, high, perfected work - insulated with kindness I haven't been noticing. Daycare in the Open Dome building, an art show earlier, my present baby and the young judgment that defeats ego, why haven't I been noticing I have her. The last judgment comes when the need to defend something or win something dies. It might be when the body is actually about to die. It is the mind that loves Being and is, and refuses the programs that prevent it. Maybe I'll stop smashing Trudy now, and Michael. Is it I'm happy about Mr Engel. Vigilant, acute, active, subtle youth. 21 In the bath I bring him in, clamp him between my legs so his don't shoot up and he fall back under. He stands holding onto the side. We're in a warm pool playing. This morning sky colors because of the snow. When he woke early he lay and talked. Happiness in a war calm. And I in my talking too between two lights in the clean new blue room with polished floor. Blue calcine plush. Perfect blue-black band. Band box. Yellow on the door like light. Lamp too. Handwork rug red. Still everyday force and defiance with Trudy. Still peaky for Jam. Oh, I could see you. So respectfully. Still hooting with Michael, proud of the kid, liking the sort of warmth there was in his palm, like the warmth instantly created between my hand and real silk discerned in a box of scarves. Drought-stricken sub-Saharan region where women are being pushed off productive land by male farmers who want to grow cash crops for export. Assistance in the form of training, advice or new technology is primarily directed at men. Development projects have also tended to place land ownership into the hands of men. To ensure women's equal opportunity and access to land within land tenure and agrarian reform efforts.
Imagining Elfreda Salt, red thread of women warriors, green field clothes, strong boots.
Earth warrior. No longer stopped by fear and doubt. Knowing what is important, she is free to enjoy the path. Highly colored presence, liveliness to take on anyone, congenial strength. To love all created beings so much that you want to become perfect so you can be of help. Something like inflation. 22 I think they're getting it on and why is it bubbly - in this night I dreamed a postcard on the floor, turned over. It was in green handwriting. At the same time as opening the door, she leaning on the doorpost, worn and real. Just come near and look. If women own land and can't deed it - a share can only be given to one child - there's lifetime ownership and beyond that collective. I say "in this room there is no fear." [visiting Robert MacLean] "You were afraid of me because you knew I fancied you." "And now you don't fancy me anymore." "Right." At the moment he was talking about nuclear war I was mesmerized like looking at the mouse's fur. Seeing was closed down to his face. Impressed. Caught, maybe. Laughing and warring on. I dream I take him to my workspace at the Cinemateque. I have an illicit key, we're there gabbing in the fluorescent
light. An organizer woman comes in cross that we've been helping ourselves to the place. There's going to be a screening but they're postponing it an hour, so few people, The fountainhead. He says why don't we lie down. Bed in the dark beside the screening room door. He's under the cover taking off his clothes, I have on only the pyjama pants and am thinking what could happen if I take them off. From the foot of the bed out of her bag pops our little girl. Wake up shaking my fist 'cause his seducing blather got through. 'Overtones' little voices flitting across the curtain of the voice. Bison brought by truck and released on the Indian reserve. "In this room there is no fear." Fertility to bring being. Fire; precise observation. The ability to leave the body, trance journeys, a bird companion. A very lively companionship with animals. The occasion of birth a rapturous journey into the spirit world of intense experience. The marvel of being in thingness.
duality splitting the ---- to avoid ambivalence then making one dominant, one subversive stable dualities or two-spirit being integration by repeated marriages/identifications relativity: two observers "by tempering of energy opposites in the body" living water, vivified by fire The real living one is the one who is only there in knowing itself and in managing itself moving among states. Sometimes wen wer boath lissening hy / 1 of us wud starve the other. In a time without drawings, things are the images of other things. Crescent horns, horned animals and the Lady Artemis. 24th Mirrors in shrines - the mirror of Venus - look at earth and know yourself. Michael on Sunday morning showed up in his good duds, wool silk houndstooth sports jacket and vintage shoes, and I'm startin' to swarm. He says, I guess I shouldn't ask questions. I say, That's right. Today after the morning typesetting slogging home drained, counting my money. Restore spirit with applesauce ice cream coffee and Great Goddess stuff in the tarot book. Michael when he brings pink baby in rain wet blue snowsuit "You're as horny as they come." "How did you know!" 25 What does it mean, I ask if he's able to come through to actually getting to nook, it says Death. Twice. What should I be concentrating on. Universe.
Corazon Aquino by almost non-violent uprising, newscaster floodlit, smiling in a bank of jubilant citizens. 26 In acid night heart shock because of thinking maybe the letter was from her - [with Joyce] First I see she has Journey in Ladakh, and then her glorious son. I thought I'd evoke the panic frenzy in her presence. Saturate into it. She calls it to a stop. "Hypnotizing yourself." "Why you're saying those things to yourself." It was a trance in that I was only with it, a space inside the head. Speaking to him [my dad]. I don't even want to look at him. "There was one time, when we were in Grande Prairie ..." A story but I feel her feel the shock. Back at shaking hate. "You're a creep. You're a creep of creeps." Tremour. In his seat. [she asks] "What did you feel when he said that?" Big puffed man voice, "I'm not jealous about her." "I think you are jealous about her. She's live, quick and she knows what you're thinking. She's attractive and very seductive." Big hollow pomping: "I want to break her spirit, you can't get along in life like that." "That's because your spirit is broken - when you're pushy it isn't spirit. Spirit isn't pushy, it shines. She shines." Shining because she said that. "Actually I know what broke his spirit. The whole community did." 27
28 Dopey. Warm. Walking out in big blue shirt and cowboy boots, the brandy stroller and pointed baby to Diana's. She liked asking the cards. M brought small R from the nurse. Weight and height and doin' well on the development questions, by M's proud reckoning. Saturday 1st of March Young Michael loved and pink in a jacket with armhole seams rotted out, hanging on a prime straight
frame. Laiwan's piece.
[untranscribed tarot reading notes]
2nd March Oh sun. And music again. Isolde. Wo sind wir. Ask Strength. Bride of Ireland is Titania and the Courtesan, Calypso Saturna and tells me to proposition it there. The page poems. We raise the gate we ride throughout It wasn't her gave the plants. It means: does it mean she's clear now? The jacket with cuffs turned, boots, dreaming courtesan zings. Someone's house, country-living people down and upstairs. Packing their things, some of ours, the blue snuggli and old snowsuit, green toque.
3rd every detail of local landscape preoccupation with death, ancestors learning and beauty, rather than material shortage geas taboo the two sights sacredness of the stranger, hospitality to traveler soul as a small insect, bee or butterfly salt the emblem of incorruptible spirit stale piss against evil spirit juniper, stale piss and rowan, iron, silver trick someone into violating their taboo a large caudle of eggs butter oatmeal and milk (sugar spices wine - a drink) - Whether the little people are also the animals, whose being spirits we don't know because we want to eat them.
Beltain summer grazing begins. Cattle protection, drive through fire. Lughnasad Lew 1st August blessing beginning of harvest, games, assembly, sickles (Lammas fairs) High Michael and Mercury lead souls to the next world. Samhain running a torch around the perimeter to guard from spirits loosed. - A woman about 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest. we think back through our mothers if we are women fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is her business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that
effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile. I would see from my bed the tall crowned queen carrying a stick walk slowly Bridie's peeled wand that brought plant life again Earth elder - she keeps to the path and is not deluded. The task taken. Knowing what is important she is free to enjoy the journey. Sure footed on the mountain trail. Grounded in work and service.
or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power? it calls for confidence in oneself. How can we generate this quality most quickly? it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. The looking glass vision charges the vitality, it stimulates the nervous system. They had money and power at the cost of the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition. of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the other was glossy, bold and big. What food do we feed women as artists upon? if ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded. [From Woolf A room of one's own] A meanness in the time. [with RM] Impatience. War. Don't do that! when he starts. Right away on the Japanese have an erotic - poor bent body - poor frighty one - "nothing doing." An immodest proposition - I know it's not the time, he's frighty but I will say what I have to say and you better take it or leave it. I can see you won't, because I propose it. The worst is your skittishness makes me try to manage. But liking the basking monastic walk around the park. Mesquite, jack pine, sparrows, Tibetan lama coat matted like night in a bush. 5 D and C and I at one table. Talking gets to seem stoned I say. C, "Because they are there at another table smoking." "Does it really work that way?" Shouting to C that they're living with Jam in my childhood place, not the Valhalla house ever but my hill place, that house. They're playing badminton with the local albacore. It means kids' badminton. Then they're going somewhere farther and then somewhere farther again. D and C and I shouting loud together being interested, watching society being confusedly churned out. Ghosted by RM's shadow face - a collapsed dark
look, gibbon. A cave man with a "bronzed body." So impeded hostile around-the-corner down at the mouth black look and in it I'm the silliest woman prepping my house struggling with his weight smi-i-i-ling against his pomp animating away incredulous and actually curious but not allowing it. What is this. The ghosting is his truculence, I don't like it he says unimpeded. Tarot and babies. What's my struggle. Mirror. Is that me. Then coming to M's brightness. Hurling it - fury robot, thumping boots, bossy jacket. The woman and her animal. She wants him. Actually not. She wants him. She comes to a turn she's seen before. Getting quicker now. I'm going to slash him before he has a chance to say no again. Just scram will you. Have I done it this time so it stays done.
The namb eave
fires up.
Did I slash him to get even and now we can go? On. FIRE! I say to Michael, Is that the fire engine coming to put me out? My desire songs, my siren. "Like a man walking in the water" "Like a man ashamed intently." Start with the beginning. Where are we. The blackness and all the directions of suns. Earth awake and asleep, awake when she faces her world. Jam I love you so much. Asleep when the sun turns her to lateral concern. You, I love you because you're starving hungry. Here's the way having hurt him I'm in the force of the gale of love again. Raptor's balance, wings like sheets in a gale. 6 I was up before the kid, looking at woman and nature roaring inside, morning thunder, "that radiant crystal body" conscious enduring of the conflict not allowing either to disappear again no matter how much pain an image comes: to release life energy again c does not identify with the body's I: they call self attracted to the one who reflects the condition of her soul marriage is death when parents stop it: images of mother-grandmother Old Woman relation to mother unbroken: love means I am loved needing encouragement in projects He was reborn as a little child. But strange to relate, within a week he died in an accident. Points at issue, that make controversy and attack self-feeling. Emotions angers fears anxieties. If it's faced, emotion (energy) is released that can be resolved into 2 lines of force at right angles. The part of the energy that was entangled is released. The parent one decides to repudiate Honey scraped out of the shard of jar I broke in disorder last night, standing at the table looking at the cards. How's he this morning. The Moon. Looking it up, far wane. Then I remember to see it's the 6th. Fancying the world wanted to give me a poet daughter. Lines of force love and anger Afraid to be accountable for Open his sheets, ripping through seeing I'm not in them, she is, the 3 years he was so much in me. They're better finished, my attention is in them unloved. Blazing into anger - no I won't love you in these. A level neutral says, best if I don't muck with these, they're alright. Mama pity says, he can't help it, it will be malice from a clear sky, he won't be able to see the love in the scorn and come stand at the door so I can take him in, he has nothing in him to meet me. So afraid for his little bone. Seeing maybe something of Rhoda not wanting to read. Maybe Jam. Then I go out and with Rowen sliding ahead of me meet a lean black person spiky and interesting - oh, Rhoda - smiling, Happy birthday - echoing - Tha-ank you - on the way to Welcome Café. All day party, the numbers added, down one side, onto the back, waitresses laughing. Young R sits peacefully on her lap with creamers in his hands. M arrives "all the right parts in the right places." Faces with a same laugh turned together. Their birthdays two days apart. At home, the phone, the tone I know, It's Paul Epp, seeming like Cheryl too, because maybe I am. Young young. Urbane. And knew the family of rowan trees, rosaceae! Sorbus aucuparia. The electric blue light astral. "We've been in the land of the dead" she'd say. [pages of tarot notes]
self-c and sub-c, establish harmony is to have clear unmixed desires "let observation and attention be faulty, superficial, negative or fearful, and ..." "accurate profound courageous positive" "weave our desires together, coordinate, reject, to direct life energy" self-training in right interp of experience, in concentration, in management of sub-c you really know only when you've acted, balance means get rid of excess silent reversal of one's own way and complete tolerance of others' - it means instead of battling, accepting the direction given by life - "makes us intensely positive in relation to other persons and our conditions" - it works always toward good and can't be defeated the change from the personal to the universal viewpoint, fallacy of personal isolation test theories and statements in practice not only senses, understand "the hidden side" emotion, telepathic invasion through subc, concealment and division between c and subc - overcome by right knowledge the structure of philosophy based on "superficial observation, traditional race-thought, false reasoning, and wrong theory of will" is destroyed meditation, fishing, the chakras, "stop thinking" "largely the use and direction of powers of deduction and imagination"
"sound is the instrument of final liberation" 7 basic tones Realizes that personal existence is relation of self-c and sub-c, that they are not personal but modes of universal c. "Thus he knows his personality has no separate existence." - 'Timeless.' Yellow-green over the woman's throat meant she was sick there. Zoe at 2 months. C took acid to try to follow Don who was going away. Breastfed. The baby screamed, for years after in nightmares the same scream. 7th Does she see the body of St Michael, they ask her. Did he come to her naked. Woman speaks with earth nature. She is informed by sensation moving in the darkness of her body. The wind seems personal to her. She listens curiously to the past life preserved in her place. She understands what the infant is saying. He ignores what he can't turn to a profit. His manhood is that decision. He prefers to be alone so that nothing but acquisition can claim his concern. They like to say: the idea of matter existed before matter and is more perfect, ideal. That the real life is not this one, but another. That motion and action are extrinsic as is the male principle of abstraction. We have discovered that neither the sun or the earth are the center of the universe. Even the universe itself is not the center. There is a center in every eye.
That there are women who claim the forbidden parts: the sentient forest, night, the anus. The color black that absorbs all radiance equally. Shit piss and blood. Strong rhythms. Tabooed foods. Nakedness. Communal and rapturous sex. The same women may claim: the crystalline, the bright, the clear, the tenuous, the abstract, the mathematical, the geometrical, the optical, the ether, the fine and dry. What sensation can know is called unreal. All the species are named according to their sexual parts.
It is argued that nature is cruel and blind, that only by distance from desire can human have self respect. That woman's thoughts are filled with "special and personal experiences" but not "general causes." A man it seems is that being most blinded by the intention of feeling itself more able than any other being in the "rage of competitive battle." Susan Griffin 1978Woman and nature: the roaring inside her Harper and Row If it were true that survival is only by ability in war - When a little girl, I built towers - a spaceship to reach Venus - with my 3 companions - we were 2 couples - to journey, to make landfall, to rule and marry in glorious ritual.
That in the id all wishes and memories still exist, unchanged, "immortal." "That the nature of the universe is not accessible to the untrained mind, nor the nature of the psyche to the uninitiated." She could do all they could do, and she could do more. She could speak their language and she spoke her own. She knew this land they had never seen before. She told them she had lived in this land as a child, that she had been taken from this place, from her girlhood. What it was then to be part, to be part of our beauty. "The father transference is the only battleground on which we conquer and take the libido prisoner."
Aphrodite's garden volume 3
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