| aphrodite's garden volume 20 part 1 - 1994 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
13 March 1994 I thought of separating workbook and journal, as if I could go back to the kind of writing I did for a while. Immediately I wanted to ask about it, and that would belong to the other book. - At that moment Ray [phones] introducing Nathalie Prevost - cyberpunk philosopher, Special Arrangements - Ray thrilled by her husband's program to show folds and dead ends and other motion of some set of sets he's interested in - five year's work in an afternoon, and a genealogy of natural language for disjunctives - Ray somehow shorter and greyer at the jaw getting down on his knee to put his pink sweater next to my purple pants - Steven Davis called me forward at the department table and I went for it - the new kid prof watching - I kept setting out branches and walking out onto them right to the end, experimentally - I was valiant - I said department full of guys - he said what's the matter with - I said they don't understand women - he ignored it - etc. It was risky but interesting; I felt I could take them on in the rush of showing up from outside and after (it seems) a good MA. Then in the mailroom he whispers that he's glad to see me there, he'll hope to have me around, I say making trouble, he says he hopes I do - that is Steven. A kind of village gossip isn't he. Is he? Yes but his danger is not that. And then I open The English patient and see how writing can make so beautiful a life - I read a love affair, a motorbike skidding across a bridge in sheets of rain, a man walking a tightrope during a lightening storm, a man passing his forearm across a woman's sweaty neck - a doctor carrying his bicycle down a few steps into his garden - oh - a life that makes from what is seen, oddments, what is given in days - I could do that, I say, as I read - the marvel isn't other than mine - this tenderness is what I like to live - should I do it? For pleasure. Should I give myself a body of facts? Yes. An electronic musician. David M? No. An electronic musician who is a woman. Can I put in the left-handed man? - there, I have crossed to the string. A love affair - when I read it I wanted first to say to the green man - oh, you coward, that you don't dare take on wars of desire with me, that you want to be safe and conventional - I thought you had some size to you, I thought you could want to do some blazing and burning and you always wanted me smaller, you hadn't the size to adore me - to drive impaired and bang on my door raving - and then I wanted to write him, I wanted to write his body and the way he takes off his clothes - his little penis, his jutting lip, the way he alternately blazes and cringes - write him to continue what he won't continue - write so I understand men differently. 14 Half an hour - night with a thunderstorm opening the roof - Ondaatje's texture and freedom, his people are always souls. He exploits glamours and flatters the reader and yet the being of the book is good - what sort of goodness - the sense of people given riches by their passions, dying full of what they've loved - People being wild when they are, there's permission. And smart when they are. Unsafe people. He only gives us what his sieve likes, he's not dutiful. I want to read the book to K and use it to say to David - you were wrong, it would have been a disaster but it would have given us to each other for the rest of our lives. See how much I still have to say to you - I heard your voice this morning. You are perfectly a fairy. How do I know. I knew by the shape of your chin, by your voice, by your step, by the way you would sit on the floor to put on your boots. By the way when I speak to you I am in a world where blackbirds and starlings enter my sentence. I say: oh yes I'm here, in the clean room with a picture book on the side table. It is never that I marry you, it isn't for armchairs, it's for legend, it's for wonder, it's a free air. Am I in denial? Yes, it says, you are denying real happiness can come. But it is coming. It says that, half a page, I come to the table having forgotten, the way I forget these trances - are they? People say when they phone, Were you asleep? I sit in the armchair eating rice and I'm talking to you - so intimately, with such a claim. I'm saying confidently, wondering at the confidence, this is the way it is supposed to feel, I know this about it, I'm not wrong, I'm supposed to be with you, I'm supposed to stand beside you, I'm supposed to be your home. Where am I feeling it - in the womb. Looking at you with warm eyes. Is it a madness? So-so. Not if you act on it. How it has been - oh strong pain - I don't rebel - it goes away and comes back. It seems to come back when I get to the weekend. And then only Tuesday is easier. But still it seems to be enough, it is like waiting in god - I wanted to say even the cleaning. Helen Harris the gentle diffident funny woman with a photo on her desk of a man with false teeth, white hair and a boy's look. Shabby little apartment, a white carpet like a worn-off bearskin. She puts twenty-four dollars on the sideboard so she doesn't have to hand it to us directly, and can see us out as though we were company. Olga Cameron a richer widow in her classic little house. Five pruned camellias coming into bloom across the front, large perennial square out back with a wide patch of oriental poppies come up like thistles, prickly. A walk lined with mauve primulas that could, over so many years, have been divisions of one first clump. She has a story - her accoutrements, the silver, the carpets, the Steinway, the rose books, engravings, glass, pottery - her house is English culture centuries deep, but she has Chinese eyes and the excitable manner of an odd girl. (There is always fresh baking under a glass bell, I am always disappointed not to be asked.) She comes to the door to greet us in a voice so high and small, a tiny frail thing bending back her neck to see us, jerking her hands not with palsy but with excitement. She is like another order of human. A voice so far out of the adult bandwidth she is like a pure emotion. We speak to her as if to some extreme foreigner who is also, whose house is, a satisfying epitome of familiar central culture. There were so many birthday cards on her big lumpy sideboard. I thought to all these unknown people also she is an icon of something she is not. Helen Harris is exactly what she is, no icon, a woman who is a lucid girl, Canadian, reticent, with family joy still fresh, stored in the oak table and in other things we don't recognize. She liked the man who died. In her closet are pink mules with narrow heels. Her back with its thin curve is older than her direct autonomous eyes. I'm saying there are loves in the work days. I take pleasure in working with the houses, beginning to know them well enough so I can see what else I can do. And today we found ourselves slipping down between ranks of pink flowering trees, many blocks, an almost unconscious ecstasy. And I am ready to mention Betty, who is beautiful and more, a delicate raucous spirit. Is there more to say? I don't have detail, I don't have how they speak and change. Yawning. It's nice. I'll go. 18 I come in at the bottom of the garden and see the soccer players he may be among. They're far away, could I recognize him - not him not him not him - that could be him on the far side, white shorts blue jersey a way of holding himself. He may have spotted me, the way he paused for that instant. I am on the end of a diving board, naked, sitting with my knees and arms covering me. There are two women sitting together I know from earlier in the dream. One of them is married to Leonard. There was some story of fixing a bicycle, getting a ride with them. On the table between us was a large envelope with letters collected in it. I could read a few lines. They were surprising, an intense personal world. I thought of sitting with Janeen seeing Leonard standing in the red light of a curtain next to the stage in La Glace Community Centre. The two women had big breasts, large Scandinavian bodies. Dark green cellular underwear. I saw I had on my red. What it was about them was seeing the edge of a world of intimacy and freedom, a freedom that was I suppose female and between people, relational. They were dishing out food, many kinds into each plate. So far only I and some of the kids had come in, but they were giving out portions without regard for keeping any for the others and everything into the same dish. Then comes the desserts, a lush custard with berries. Do I want it in with the lentil patties and all? They don't mind. I grab another dish. I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than your soul. I'd want you to live it. Saying that oh I love you so much. A surge at the heart. You weren't satisfied with less than that in me. 19 What does it mean, I have that surge of love and at the end of a fine excited day with many pleasures I drive past his van parked in front of her house. I talk and talk to my source - is source the right thing to call you? - sourcière. This morning I feel neither the love nor the worry. It says get ready. Say the fine day. We did Grant's strangely conventional house - so conventional - golf magazines, a whole room for his stamp collection, holiday photos in indexed folders - that I feel there must be secret depravities - with clear sky and piles of blue-tinted clouds outside the broken door. Broken door - is that the clue? Then had Alba Rosa's and got lost on the way to Denman. The bay a choppy deep blue - then the mountains a completely different blue - then the sky another completely different blue. Got detoured into Stanley Park, and there were the big weeping willows like embroidered trees, smallest bright yellow-green new leaves in swaying chains, long lines of little stitches, Chinese lines - moving amazingly, and then the streets around Denman - new leaves, hawthorns, as if it is warmer there. I heard my voice with that flirtatious sound I heard on tape with Louie. And then a coffee house with an alcove outside, sheltered for basking. Delany's. I was so excited to be having coffee in the West End, that I was quivering and frisking at the counter. Betty in her zippered army coverall and pink hair, elf face, saying she got Craig's journal after he OD-ed, and couldn't read it but opened it once to where he said "I will never be happy until I am in her arms again," meaning, she thought, her mother who abandoned him when he was a baby. At Alba Rosa's looking together at her fossil fish and then at the Annigoni book. She liked the portraits and I had glimpses of mythological landscapes, what I thought of as the Ovid style, that old Roman style with just edges. They paint the highlights. We saw holly trees glittering and I said, Like those, see, they just paint the light. (Library today.) And then Sylvia's [Sylvia Scott]. She looked suspicious. You're not Helen. Big, with a belly, fertility stuff everywhere, huge stretched shoes, baskets of seeds, plants and glass marbles, sprouting buckwheat, Asian spittoons, asthma stuff, anxiety stuff, baskets of logs of herbal substances, the house like a wave of effort to be interesting, full, fertile. I gave her five dollars change and said we had fifteen minutes left and would do windows in the workroom. I was polishing the long wing of a beveled dresser mirror and saw her in it having come upstairs. She poured us black muscat wine in the right sort of little knobby glass with straight sides - delicious wine. I said I'd bring her a Richter's catalog, and that I do the herb garden at Strathcona Community Garden. I was saying it looking across the room at a cupboard whose glass I'd cleaned, and came back to find her gazing at me as if she had been doing it for a while. "I go there all the time with Janna, I keep saying, Who does this?" Then giddy driving Betty home, then Ken's messy van in front of the Pofi Bar, a stab in the gut, fear, was it? Realization. Then I leave clothes and rags in the washers. Later put coloring stuff on my hair, black blotches on the rug in the bathroom. A manic gloss. No - it's not bad. But oh an old creased face, I didn't sleep. [Pietro Annigoni book - unfound large monograph in Italian] - It wasn't his van; but, but, why does this happen. I go to the library, have lunch, stop at the garden, stand staring at shrubs. Willem talks to me, ugly Willem of the long teeth. Then suddenly there he is coming in with bee things and someone behind him I don't see. It's cold and overcast. I'm surprised. One glance pure panic. I walk away, take another path, am going to the greenhouse, Hi Ellie! I flip my hand at him, she's many paces behind, a bitter look. Up the vinewalk path. His face was bright, he's better. Oh I am worse. What shall I do. I'm so stricken I can't stand my ground, I'm hiding at the herb garden. Do I have to stay until they leave, I can't bear it if he comes and speaks to me. It's cold, I don't want to pretend to work. I'm beaten. I'll go home. But it isn't over. There she comes in the bottom path just as I get to my plot, quick turn up through my path. Danny says cheerfully How are you doing. Very bad, I said. His face shocked so fast I have to try to absolve him - It's alright, I say clenching and then have to deal with Cathy at the gate. Don't ask. And come home pitifully asking and asking crying sobbing furious with frustration, what am I going through this for. Should I have let air out of his tires. Yes but too late now. I could leave his books pulping in the rain on the bees. I could hang his wind chimes there with every reed cut off to the 1" of his penis, and hang a little screw with them. That is satisfying, screw you. If you could screw anybody. That would reach him, he understands messages. He could do nothing worse than that. If he doesn't contact me this weekend I'll do it. - Then I lie down, and find my head tight in a vise. I say alright pain I give in to you. I say, if there is someone in me to whom this is not real, let them come and be me. I feel my head as if unwrap in a series of motions. I am lying no longer in pain, passing unconscious, into dreams. Now I wake, it is just after midnight, thinking life could be more terrible than I know, there could be terror on terror, I could have cancer and it could be his energy that would have cured me. It could be that I am trusting a helpless guide. The weather has changed again, it is the poisonous low pink of rain cloud over the city. I am seeing the photo of Jane in extremity. Every weekend I go to hell. It could be that generosity is final self betrayal, that guaranteeing Louie through to her gifts has cost me my life or strength finally. - It said 'love' and what I did was put myself into large hands and feel loved as if from outside, and then the elastic bandages slipped and I was peaceful and slept. And woke at seven in fearful pain. Worked with it 'til 11, the way it is, stopped, not understanding, trying to persist, exasperated, incredulous. Is it saying this, is it saying the opposite of what it said? And then stopping and going to the Drive for cleaning stuff, in the supermarket with my heart smothered with pain. And then bringing in a bucket from the trunk, standing on the table and starting to wash the walls. I am sitting in a room where clean books - Ibuse Waves, Pound's Cavalcanti - are lying on a table next to a glass jar with five yellow tulips. A scrubbed table. Cut carrots and apples and walnuts bright with salt and oil in a black bowl with red chopsticks. That is how I used to write in my journal in the first years of having my own things. It is Sunday. On Tuesday afternoon I'll see Joyce.
21st Sleeping in Rob's bed I wake in the dark, he's awake too, having dreamed, what - that I'm with K, he's touching me, my shoulder, in an established, reestablished, way. I'm lying on my stomach with my pants off, looking over my shoulder at my thin leg. There had been a baby and a woman. We had seen in the tree two small glasses full of delicious-looking red fluid. Our noticing them may have been what made the squirrels notice them. Two of them up there sipping it up eagerly. I say to K, I dreamed about squirrels. He says interestedly, as if maybe he did too, What did you dream? A little later, S setting more places at the table, or is it him. The first woman with the baby was her sister, she liked how I liked being with the baby. Here is a woman who is also his sister setting a book in front of me - she wants me to write down various things about myself and how long I've known him, etc. I don't like it tho' I don't know why. "It would be unseemly" I say. "Are you in here?" I say to Sylvia. She nods. I get up, I'm leaving. What I'm thinking when I wake is, this is how pride wins over love in me. I tell Rob about the struggle of these days. He doesn't panic even when I say 'marry.' We went to sleep over the sound of Paul's poker party, a smoky easy smudgy texture of laughing, over some music Rob has on in our dark, that has a spiraling line in the foreground and little patches of texture at distances behind it. In the morning, when we wake after having slept again, there is Mary at the table with Paul who's in his white terry bathrobe. They're smoking. Catherine in the kitchen. The kids are out on spring break. I'm at the Calabria, Frank is opening the window and I'll close it when he isn't looking. He's opened it twice as wide to punish me for having closed it. My heart, away from affection, is immediately sore. Is it sore because it needs to be loving all the time and I am afraid of action - could it be that what I have to do is let it love and not act? It feels so timid, strangled. It is as if he cannot stand - this morning it's what I feel, the way when I said I wasn't afraid of him, he said, I'll have to change that - my confidence when I have it. I thought my Ondaatje story would be Michael and Rowen, Rob and Louie and me the summer before anything bad had happened. Our pleasure, Louie's and mine, discovering we both eat our apple cores. If I were dying could I love everyone I've loved, not having to protect myself from betrayal. Oh Joyce you can love us, you can believe in love, because we are in no position to betray you. What is betrayal, what is harm? Someone says I want to be with you, a bright arrival, the other says no I don't want to be with you, I want to be with her. Or there is a safe zone where I know if I want to be with you you will want to be there too, and then she takes that safety away. It is competition for the space to be. It is the fantasy of that space that has brought adoration back into me those days when it comes back. It said - Can you bring it now?
Here I am in agony anyway. I might as well go for broke and take on all the loves I strangle out. As if I were dying, or as if pain were unavoidable and it were only a question of leading in joy as well. But I have had good times in this island of eight years of power defended. I have shone and loved and come into good lines of prose description. "Guido's precise interpretive metaphor," "Guido thought in accurate terms. The phrases corresponded to definite sensations undergone." I imagine this (and it seems to say): he tried last night to phone, again, drove by and saw my car not there, tried this morning, drove by again, feels betrayed, is maddened and will try again. As soon as I imagine that, adoration is back. I am looking at him with love eyes saying "I want you so much that I want to change so I can be with you. I have never wanted that before." I melt. Imagining him by the door. - In the second sleep dreams of flipping thru images, folding them. More than one thing at once. I had been looking for someone, looking for other people to try to find that one. Phil Jansen maybe. I don't know whether I knew if it was him or whether I was looking for him to get a telephone number he'd know. I did want to know what had happened to his mom. The pictures some of them were of trees - oaks? Elems (didn't mean to write that), the complex heady one. Others simpler, younger. Smaller stacks, not flat: vertical, vertical stacks of folded pictures like tall thin journals. Other pictures. Very rapid recognitions. A flyer advertising underpants for women who'd recently had babies - they've used models who really have had babies! Doughy stomachs. Then an image that catches my eye, a very fat bride, bridesmaid? in yellow, by a sink. I look again and see an image very detailed, like a Rockwell painting, the fat woman in a bright yellow dress standing by a deep sink that has in it a bowl of washing-up, an eggbeater, as if utensils used in cooking the wedding party food. She is surprisingly pretty, pink, has her head turned. There is another woman, maybe a bridesmaid too, whose hair is blowing sideways. She has put it into a wind. What wind? There's a fan pointing toward the right side of the picture, a large one. Then I see there is another, a smaller one. What are they directed at? Surprising - something that makes the dream a joke, a virtuosic thing, playful. - The way the picture is so clear and bright too, with clear clean picture space. The fans, and another little heater, are directed at thawing a large silver can of ale. - Look at that on the wall, a caustic from the piano lamp stretching into a figure. Caustics could be the spirits - 23rd Joyce was not consoling. I read her the three pages of the - what - the dilemma - and she didn't say, Oh my dear you are mistaken. She said, This is true, any woman will like to hear it. I am feeling I'd like to send it to him, and to her too, as if to say, I have nothing to lose, and nothing to gain. Would I walk free then? She said, I think what it's about is coming to love the world. A book in her waiting area said, Let longing be a stretch. This morning I feel this tempest is over, as if I had already sent them both the writing and held their hands at the wedding reception: fire animus and love woman. The mountains whited in all their crevices, a day with freedom later. 24 Such storm and now, none. And then this is the day when after work I go to Circling Dawn, and then walk into the library. Suddenly there he is a yard away. What strikes me is that he's without his coat. I haven't seen that since December. How is he - he has that rouged look, with strain under the eyes. The way he's holding his pelvis - something about it - and talking out the left side of his mouth. He looks strained, but he says he wrote three drafts. He jumps into direct address. "What didn't you like about the early drafts?" "They were unkind." I cave in hearing that. Yes, that's him, that's all he'd have. Then he pronounces the phrases from them. I register them. There's not much information. "Wasn't going anywhere." "I felt badly for a while but then I was alright. I had other things to do and so did you." "I wasn't inspired. You knew that, that's why you did what you did." I think he said that last, something like that. I've noticed there are phrases I don't hear. I'm holding my face I suppose contracted, tho' still looking, wanting to see whether he believes what he's saying. In any case I will accept it. But then - this is one of those moves I'm incredulous at - he needs to tell me the story of how his bagpipes have been found. "I did have some good news today." I am in that familiar shock - I don't believe this, I don't believe he's doing this. I touch his arm, a good touch, and go. And sit between the shelves staring, very shocked. The touch was like very gently closing a door. I need never hear the end of that story. I will never hear the end of his story. It was a meeting in which we faced each other in a library. I mean the two people just looked at each other. I could have looked the way he looked, quite drawn. It was hard for both. Not careless, in the end. - But the bagpipe story, and the way he wanted to make me listen to it - his desperation I suppose, saying I am viable after all, I am not lost, I was somewhere in my family all along. I want to say, what now? What now? That door is shut, is there another? Am I viable? Am I lost. 25 Then I dream I am saying goodbye to him on the street. Diana sitting with a man sketching in large motions of her arms. He says he is going to see some people off. I stop walking. He carries on. At a little distance he turns back. He moves his lips. He is saying, Write. Last night Rob phoned and offered skating on TV. I went for comfort. On the way to it, becoming sad as I hadn't been. I tell him the story. He accepts it, as he does everything. Then I watch him tell the story of rushing back into town with his mother's car to get it back to her by 4:30. In his enthusiasm he is flushing red and showing his folded brown teeth. Oh a painful sight. A man who phoned last night saying, Kari Green says you have a great sense of humor. Woke this morning with a feeling of iron at the heart. 26 And then [gifts from Kenneth left at my door]. Two novels, a letter, a postcard, a clipping about a book on East End, Sask. AL Kennedy, Looking for the possible dance. When I finish it at 11:30 in my bed I am hot at the heart. And wake dammed at the solar. I say, heart come back. It doesn't. 27 It is Sunday feeling like a Saturday because there was a work party - Rob, Muggs, Joanne, Brian, Rick, Belle, Ros, Ian, a new woman, Diane, Glen and Elaine later, Willem later. Light that is yellow and blue, the blue when you look sideways across bare earth in the herb garden, at small perennials coming back in blue-green clumps. Plants in their small compactness, leaves clean, showing bright especially where I've scattered manure that makes a more matte less mineral surrounding grey-brown. Small bright color: paeonies putting up red forepaws in clumps. Arabis. Little daffodils, violets. Wallflower buds just cracking, I can see which will be yellow or dark red. And otherwise the new green - even the pure greens taking a blue from the light. The space that is here with this light, more like a desert, clumps not overlapped, not run together. I worked the way I do, concentrated. I'm on this half of the strawberries by myself. Down that end five women talking and laughing - that tone, I'm thinking, is the tone you hear when little girls in daycare play store. Social pleasure. They are liking to hear themselves sounding cooperative. I'm glad I don't hear what they say. I like to be speechless weeding with both hands and a trowel, very fast, flinging weeds across the path into the orchard grass. Hacking the soil loose where it's packed at its edges, scratching gravel back into the path. We stop for lunch, which Muggs brings, making herself our mum. After lunch I spread manure on most of the rest of the herb garden plots. Two shovels at rose feet, satisfying. Poppy seeds scattered where there's space, chop them in with the rake. Later get Glen with his thick legs to bring the barrows while I spread. Last night the moon rose thru pink at twilight. I gave Rob the key and he came for me when he was done. We went to bed late, dozed under space music, woke. Tied back his curtain. He stroked my nipples and I felt as if my breasts were flat old paps, distressing. Is this what makes it end, I was wondering. Touching him got me through it. The hard shape under skin that slides on it. Velvet ridge. And then I didn't come for so long a time - he in a condom we'd put a hand down to check - I'm at a far plateau but not making it through. He doesn't admit to being bored. I wipe the damp off his forehead and hold his head to thank him. For some reason it is a father speaking in French who gets me through eventually. And then the moon makes us wakeful. We lie and talk surprisingly more intimate than we were. Surprisingly, because we hadn't asked to be, I don't ask for intimacy there. And wake in sun, and he makes breakfast. I go out in early light to buy milk, and a man in a car with a Washington plate makes me think of David Davies, which makes me think of London and traveling in the States. Being somewhere in a strange town where local people are still in bed. Is that it for today? Reading K's books yesterday and today. A serious honest woman writing a principled life, it seems to me. At sea with strangers. Her face on the cover: I think I know it, I think there's a scar.
And you - you, K - it is better since you've given me something. It is better since I used my hand on your arm to bring myself very gently beyond. I say that warm at sex and heart. This morning when I came home briefly to change and saw my journal on the table, I understood what I couldn't understand in Rob's atmosphere, why Surya Bonaly didn't want to stand on the second place podium. Why she took off the silver medal. Why she wavered and stood up on it after all, why she didn't know what to say to the press. It wasn't that she thought the judging was unfair, she said. [Opposite page journal summaries: "There is kinesthetic resonance from the seeing to the proprioceptive cells throughout your body." The way my attention springs up when I think of investigating dreaming - the phil sources - psych sources - own sources - and grain - computer models - as if I could have a theory and an art so close and motivated and systematic it wd take me everywhere and still knowing where I am, making the systematic foundation as I go. In Chaos (The dispossessed) a quality of joy, arrival - seeing I might be able to feel my way forward to someplace where my visual work can come together with this labour in men's brains. Reading it again seeing I'm finer in the detail, intuition and expression are closer. It is as if I see a research program that can take me to the end of my life - from this grubbing down into an academic base I can go to geometrical rep - to seeing and intuition - to 'seeing' and what mind is. What I should do in visual work is just go play with the optical printer - follow hints - not be theoretical in any way - but cultivate my standing in some ways so I can still have funds. I've felt so long there's work in this beautiful border between science and pictures. I feel a whole stretch in there, such a stretch when I feel it, taking so long to get into - oh really it's work I want, beautiful essential intelligent creation comprehension work. Do you hear the way I say that? I do hear you and I like it and I'll help you but you have things to clear on the way to it and you need to keep your whole picture and make your workspace. You need to be more organized than you ever have been, like someone going on a journey or getting married. A twenty-year journey. What do you need for it?] 30th Hello day - I went for three pages to Dorothy in a muddy lane in 1910 - that miracle of intervention - and now in my bed aching at ankles wrists and hip after a day cleaning, listening to unknown persons talking about the Rome of Palestrina. A house today with toilets stinking of the piss sprayed by Kathy Denikoff's wanton breeding. I'd like to write myself down a little road to something of my own before the day is over. But no, it's 9, the light goes out. [Dorothy in a muddy lane - from one of the volumes of Dorothy Richardson Pilgrimage, don't remember which] 1st April Sick last week, still aching. Five days free, and no passion - fretty about my mum's phonecall. "Family loyalty." I have things to say to her about loyalty, which are useless to say, and so I say I have nothing to say. A depressed sensation. Used to scold her and that was energy at least. How are you? Fine. What did you plant? The usual things. She tells me they are driving up north on business. Rudy phoned. She hopes Liz is alright. Hearing anything she can tell, a sensation of utter dreariness. Luke stopping by yesterday, large man in careful clothes and fussed beard - a look of utter control that puts me off when I am not in life. A hard week, cleaning oppressed me for the first time. Betty was dragging herself. I was disorganized and surly with customers. Coming out of the workbook disoriented - two weeks - is this a kind of resting? Is it alright to just rest? Did I do what I needed to do? Should I go to bed? I've been stuffing my mouth. Ice cream, lasagna, hot cross buns. Anything. 2nd Saturday morning. Today I begin to work. A monk's life I guess. It says, Promise what you have always wanted to promise, not to delude or to be deluded. Promise to work for good being. What I have tried to do brutally and promise to do skillfully. I do promise to work for good being. I do promise to become skilful. I trust what wants to teach me is manifold and intelligent. What's wrong with this? The wrong person is promising. Who should make the promise? - That isn't it. It's that you have to pass through difficulties first. "In this solitary form and manner of living, you may learn to lift up the foot of your love, and you may step toward that state and degree of living that is the perfect one." - The way what I do in the workbook is strange to me. I don't remember, when I look at it again. What it has been saying: There are characters acting something out, love woman, fire lover, red queen, hawk, blackbird, the writer. There are states of water: steep waves, flood, channel, and more. There' a relation between male images and writing. Instructions -
A goddess wants me to love, not to abandon love, to work toward free energy, to show transparently, not bluff, undo the vow against marriage because the wish is true, to love everywhere. To fight for love woman. The battle between feeling and self suppression, true self and withdrawal is endless. Marriage, the relation to fire lover, is about energy, polarity. Men compete but love woman doesn't. I'm looking for wise relation to strong energy. Adoration puts a chemical aerial into the brain, a complex tree. This is a skill more particular to women. Love woman has the gift of vision. A wide female intelligence hidden in branchy places. My project is to write about imagining, this skill, its psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, art. Fire lover is the right sort of male energy to welcome. The struggle against femininity, and its gift. It keeps saying, gain confidence. The particular difficulties of femininity and my leg. Social derogation, social differential, their competition. Implacable structure:
I have a particular relation of abandonment pain and disqualification pain. The crucifixion between adoration and distain is particular to me, I use it to bring something, the beginning of a culture. Difficulty about credibility as a woman. A smothered hope. My father gave it and then withdrew it. His anxiety, a masculine anxiety. Masculinity and what it is in me. Conventional. Related to English literature. Impotent. Racist, sexist, homophobe. The outside of me. The relation of love woman and fire lover and red queen. Saturday, a cold day, covered over. Balsam poplar bright sharp unrolling. 3rd What I see to the side when I think of writing my father - the situation of a spirit having to be in deep conflict with the idea of the father - an ethos that so praises fathers - that isn't what I mean - it puts me right into religion - the texture of religion - puts me right into being the spirit I was - the texture of my unrequited love for him. The question is: what was he in the life I was given? A silence. My sense of the symbolic - his handwriting - a story about reading, religion, landscape, silence, sex, inherited being. 4th Five in the black. Quiet with a few birds. Wet air. I dreamed a group of friends. I am on the sidewalk with my bicycle, hearing them in a pub. They are saying of Leah that she is remarrying him and moving back to Spain. - I don't know who this is today, this little writing. I go in to ask about her - people lined up along the wall. I remember Henry Olidam. Looking at a quite beautiful man remembering him as a boy. I lie down behind him. His friend says his lung is weak. As if he has inhaled something, as if he, that friend, caused him to inhale it. It is like saying he'll die though he looks pink and gold. Richard Tetrault has bought land in the south of France, a troubadour sound of place. Yes - that suits Richard. They'll have babies there. Have babies carelessly, I say. That's my advice. Don't worry about breeding. Just spew out a few, whatever they turn out to be. I ask about Leah. It is alright, they think. The women of his family won't be there. What worries me says the man is the barefoot financing. That means something I don't understand. Walking away from a party with an older woman. A man who is an artist draws his portrait on the wall in blue, when he wants to leave. Like a younger mousketeer, Tony's John. I leave the dream with the feeling of social grouping, people who gather and drink and talk. Yesterday when I was making my second cup of tea, Easter morning, I phoned Rob to say why don't you invite me for breakfast. He said, I was thinking I'd put the bacon on low and call you and say do you want to go out for breakfast and bring you back here. He cooked for me the way he does, lightly, precisely. Sets something good in front of me. Then said something goofy and took me to bed. A light hand he doesn't have in speaking, but could. I felt sad and lost. Oh why am I here. He did what he does, persisted rationally. I lie in his arm sad and inert and he puts his hand up under all the lengths of my blue sweater. I'm slow to warm, but when I get there, surprisingly sweet and wet. He's close from the first. Slips. We fold back the curtain. It's bright though not sunny. So bright that when we see only a little of it it looks like sun. I say I wish I could have more. You can get it back he says. It's rubbery, I say. Talking about it, pulling lightly over the ridge. This roundness here. That's the place he says. I know. Having it back when I've waited a while is even better. I'm lying in his arm on his right. Have my big left thigh up against his chest. Sometimes he pulls back the knee. Sometimes there's kissing tho' he always has a limit with that. Sometimes my right knee between his knees. He does the work. That's my preference. One-all. We continue but we're done. Let's get up. There's sun now on all his little seed trays on the balcony. In the Mount Seymour parking lot, in a chill mist, he starts the car and hears a flapping. I'll look. Fan belt. And so on. Parking lots. His and Kary's greasy hands in the engine together, their identical twin hands like teenagers' hands on their long thin wrists. Why does that always please me. And Rob's hair cut shoulder length worn down. Warm clean streaky teenage hair. I let him drive. You're doing a good job of raising him, said his mum. You did the first part well I say. At the end of the evening big Geoff on the floor by the fireplace holding and rocking Maggie, who is, and doesn't look, twenty years older than him. And Carole in purple yesterday, stomachy, a plum carrying her inflated chin with dignity it seems, pink, and the grey in her hair taking gold dye quite beautifully. The family, Chris especially, in their secularity and materiality, potholders and cotton parrots from Guatemala, chocolates, pistachios, 136 bottles of wine in the bedroom, a video for the cat, seem to me to tread paths in damnation. Chris especially because the way he throws himself into drug states, comics, anything, videos, has a randomness that from my straitness, the straitness of my family, seems hell-bent as well as purely intentioned. His left eye yesterday was smaller. He comes alone. Went home down the long slopes on his bike. Is forty and has silence behind his eyes in the way I am going to try to describe. Having that silence still there, it seems to me, at the same time, is the opposite of damnation, is still standing on the tightrope. I compare families. These people are 'the English.' A deeper or less deep culture, not living in the Reformation, not pietistic, if I know what that means, better adapted, party-givers, their mother better dressed, more at home than mine, living in a house with a deep fireplace, established somehow, commanding the city, I mean long ago located on the upper inhabitable edge of the slope. A name like Robert Scott Mills. Easy eccentricity in all the sons. A fringe establishment, and yet it is what establishment means. Money so easy. She toured Thailand in November and Guatemala just now. Brings back photos of retired white people standing in groups. Spending an evening with them seems spiritually so dangerous to me that I have to describe it for two pages. Does that tell me what I feel spiritual danger is? - Chapters [father]:
I have been finding him indirectly. When I find him indirectly, I find the soul of the little girl who lived with him. There is a paradox in the life I discover. I must resist him, but where I resist him I tear my gifts away from myself. I must adore him but where I adore him I set myself up to be contempted. "If I'm not mad at big good looking men I'll be a sitting duck." "I know you think that," Joyce says. Then I go into it. Fearsomeness. What should I be doing? I don't know how to work. It reminds me of Medusa - the way I have had to fight him. Seeing him in reflection. What is the danger of looking directly. I'd like to live to fight for something else. [Summaries from bookwork:
I see he does not love me. I see I must remove my feeling from him. I do. From this, two ongoing emotional lines. I can be confident in my strength - that dark light of proud autonomy. And passion goes underground into fantasy. That's how I am both Orpheus and Euridice. My Being draws near me and I love it, and when I love it, I am its ear, so it hears by me, and its eye, so it sees by me, and its mouth, so it speaks by me and its hand, so it takes by me. I saw, then, that there was something like an overturned cup within me. This being set upright, a sensation of unbounded happiness filled my being.] Monday night Dear larger one
Is there really something to happen?
I'm seeing an eddy, a worry with a therapy description
By change and joy
If at the end, at some end, I'd know what I was doing, I'd be alive with people without compromise and be working
I'd be interested
Haven't been interested today
In the love book, yes, writing him, yes, but apart from
Talking about writing and being afraid to do it
At this moment, the sensation of avoiding
Can I do that?
Do I say so?
Alright. - [with Joyce] What she said, when you go into shock let it take you back to the first time it happened. There's always fear of death, infanticide. He's a field of unsorted charge. "This man is sensitive too, very sensitive." "So should I walk away from this and try to take the feeling with me? Is that what I'm supposed to do? What are you saying?" That's when she said he was sensitive. The schtick about not taking that path again - "They say when you're attracted to somebody, walk away." She did explain the shock. "It's emotional abandonment. You're open, you're liking to be open, suddenly you see the other person isn't with you, you say how could I have put myself into a position where I let this happen to me? You take control." I say it's self responsibility. She says no, self responsibility is to notice how you feel. The last thing she says is about the drawing, that it's definite. "Look at those lines, the energy in the scribbles here." "Energy" I say. I feel I may have extracted her blessing for at least that. "Notice what you said: if you'd been more with it you would have gotten him back. That's control." What is the shock about? There's a blur here, the kind I should notice. Something like this: I have a hope of 'getting him,' getting it, something like that, and it is that that makes it possible for me to be shocked. Puzzled at first saying it's not that I'm surprised, I know he isn't wonderful. But yes there is a hope and that hope is like a belief and that belief can be surprised. "What is the hope of?" "Precisely that picture." Alright, and further: as if I believe that the picture is already true and only needs to be enabled. "Ken can't hurt you." "The way I feel about him can hurt me." "How can it hurt you?" "It can hurt me because it does hurt me." "Alright, if you don't want to do the work -" "I do, I do want to do the work!" She laughs. I laugh. This is the quandary - accept original feeling, she says. Leave behind the condition that gets you to it. Don't opt for control, stay with sensitivity, she says. But also - accept these loves where you have established control, stay away from the repetitions where you'll get hurt. How will I see my ways with control where they work? I've seen them with him. Even where I think I'm being warm I plant a burr. But I say true good things too: "I would want you happy." I love that line. It is not a barbaric love.
|