aphrodite's garden volume 20 part 2 - 1994 april-may

work & days: a lifetime journal project

6th April 1994 Wednesday morning, an hour ahead - a wet day, a candle - I lay in bed until I thought what to do - write down what I want from writing - the sort of writing that has left the home of the journal - means to walk down public roads - say if I wrote about my lovers or what it was like with my father. I'd want the writing to give me discoveries, that's the first thing, I don't want to be labouring over what I already know. I'd like a sense of winging. I'd like to find a good mind that would continue good when I stopped. I'd like beautiful sentences that make me want to read them again for the way they hold me loved like a baby. I want the sense of setting up an inferential structure whose parts like the flat winnows of a threshing machine shake their material forward to an exit I haven't foreseen. There is a precision inviting me with any image given the way that one was given: I can rush past it or, seeing that I've rushed it, go back and try again. The image was this - winnows in a threshing machine were screens in wood frames. They looked like windows set horizontally and shaken so chaff would cascade from one to the next while grain falls through the screen. It's a separating process. There is a progress through the belly of the machine, and two kinds of exit: the real stuff, the formed, the live stuff, the grain, with its extraordinary sound - the continuous pour of thousands of minute scrapings of seed against tin, a sound like husks - the sound of the skin of the wheat pouring through the chute - a sound that has in it the fullness of individual grains, their tightness, tension, and the slickness of the cuticle that wraps them; and through the other chute, with the blown air that has to carry it since it has no weight, the storm of chopped straw and chaff shot from the blower and drifting down onto the haystack. Satiny gold stuff shot across the blue, not at all worthless: this isn't a moral image. It is a discovery of another ability of things the child knew in what was given to her. What the image, which came, not from nowhere, when I said 'inferential structure,' was suggesting, was that I could want writing to be a shakedown rather than an inferential machine. That there'd need to be some back-and-forth in it, to find the qualities of its materials, and that it isn't a question of what exits where, but of the staging of the sift, which happens anywhere, in the paragraph, the sentence, in the word. 7th Friday morning - Laiwan last night - interviewed me - clear bright liking. A red bicycle being stored on a platform and covered with an old shirt. Someone up there with me, in a hood I think, complaining that I leak pee. A room with narrow hard cots - public dormitory with sticks making a partition down at the end - each bed with a lamp. Someone sitting on her bed in the lamplight. Last night opened the subtle body file. What I keep marveling at is how I do the work and it isn't integrated, it's a well, I have been working on it for twenty years so slowly and inconclusively. Connectionism gave me some way to see it. Now I'm going to boil out the file into its parts. What else I'm saying this morning is that K is something to do with it, I'm learning something with him the way I learned something with Robert Mac. Also that Joyce is jealous and I have to be firm with her: this is something I'm going to see through and I want you to help me. 9 Yesterday morning, driving, Betty reading, I was talking to K, remembering what it said about obsession, and made an opening gesture of some kind, felt an extraordinary stretch sideways at the heart, very acute and very subtle at the same time, like a sensation of a non-physical body. It was like being racked, but pleasurably, an excruciating tenuous love. 10 A horse - I am the horse for a child, set my elbow up to be a step so he can dismount. I'm tired. Looking back as I walk away with the child seeing the white horse lying on its side with her neck down. I turn again to look, is it alright. A sheer cliff - something about taking a path through fields. There was a large black bull alone in a field. We saw it step through a stretched hole in the fence. The road is leading past him I think. There will be a climb. Colored cliffs or a bridge. I don't remember more. Oh Sunday. I don't know what to do. A silver day at this moment golding Chestnut on the corner hung with pale yellow-green thin fringe A street cherry in front of it a similar thinly scattered off-shade Anne Rice, Interview with a vampire. I know what bloodlessness is. Days like today when no love or desire is warming me. These days, the dejection that makes me want something in my mouth all day, a dull hunger refusing everything that hasn't the strength to devour me. Heart pain, it's silent, it isn't speaking. Heart - what's hurting you? Can you say? Loneliness. I used to say that. It doesn't occur to me now. I feel it is my fault that I'm lonely. I can't complain. The people who love me I send away. I don't answer letters. - Unexpected. What do I know. I hang about on Commercial and come late to the garden - four o'clock. A cream colored van with plaid curtains. No. And the side door open and he still there. He's just come, walks away. "I thought I was safe, I thought you were out of town." He says something I don't hear but looks vicious. Then I have to deal with Ted's idea of putting his bulletin board over the toolshed window. Will I fight it? I will. Personal if I have to. When I am [fighting him] - this big macho thug, I call him - the fact is, he is close to crying and so far outrun he doesn't know what to do. In all this I forget K who comes up the path in his green sweater smiling. It's cold to stand talking. What's to say. We're gentle. Cold and soft. He read the books. It will be weeks before he gets the letter. Puts out his hand to touch my arm goodbye. Commits himself to a hug. I put my left arm up around his neck. He isn't soon letting go. It's solid and dim, that dim solidness of a taller person's middle. I come out pinker whatever it means. Didn't he say, You're a big girl. I'm not! I say. Was it the airport hug delayed? No. A hug of forgiveness on both sides? Yes. 10 Went to Rob for heart poultice, his chest against mine for an hour. When I was driving home on Commercial I was looking for K's van and among Sunday night foot travelers between restaurants and coffee bars saw a man walking energetically south. It's him. Carrying a book. That's how he walks is it. Wanted to know whether he was parked at Sylvia's or where, and found the van on a cross street near Napier. He was being a stranger near home, walking the way he does in Glasgow or Bremen, energetically, with a book. Sloped forward leading with his nose. A particular glide I recognize even out the tail end of my eye. What I'm puzzled by is this: Joyce says, when you feel attraction walk away, it is all projection. He and I meet on the street or at the garden as if a puppeteer in the sky were arranging our intersection. It is more than a daydream, it is a physical force, and two people are involved. If I had walked away from attractions I would not have known Roy, Luke, Rowen, Cheryl, T, Michael, Andy, Rob, Dave. I would still have had all the aggro of Jam and Louie, Olivia. Attractions have been the twisters that bury me in wet snow and also they have been the invitations to the education I have given myself. They have been my curriculum, my family, fuel. And also: if I think of attraction in Louie I see that it was child's hunger, impossible to satisfy, that made her frantic though she was loved. I can see it was child's panic when K went away, that couldn't be comforted by the forms of love that were there: a duvet and a radio promising return. Alright: I crash because there is a specific hope I hold secretly. That hope, it says, has to be abandoned. But somehow the child who holds it must not be abandoned, is that it? When she says abandon the hope I'm afraid she means abandon the child, the life in her. Abandon desire, joy, energy, which have come with the hope. Is there vitality without hope? The hope is this: it is not true that they don't care about me. Secretly they do. If I am good, now, he will love me after all. And all along rebellion had its part: it is because I am difficult that he doesn't love me. I choose it. Otherwise he would. And here is another way: I will love the broken-hearted one in him so I can keep the hope in me and not know I am broken-hearted. Isn't it better to keep the hope and its joy and energy and drive and use it to live rather than die? Even knowing what it is? The alternative is to know I'm broken-hearted. But I am broken-hearted. It is a technical term, she said. It means a function is disabled - secure mutuality - safe withness. Behind this, behind all of this, I am saying - he loves me. I'm introducing him to Leah, Paul, Michael, my mother. It's hope springing. And so here is what I don't understand. Feel she says; it says. Live as love woman. But this hope is love woman's feeling, and you seem to be saying suppress it. Feel, but don't feel what you do feel - feel something else. The answer that works through is this. Self responsibility becomes hope's mother. First it informs hope of her losses. Dear one, you have been abandoned. Your parents are not strong enough to be loyal to you. They are not smart enough or honest enough. They have harmed your emotional foundation by their weakness. Your life will be almost wasted because of it. You will live in great pain. You will abandon your own children. You will be compelled to abandon anyone who depends on you. You will be lonely frightened and deluded. I'm here to help you. I am strong enough to name your abandonment. I'm strong enough to name their weakness stupidity and ill-will. I name your desperation loneliness pain fear and delusion because you can be free of them. Free in them. I promise that when you face them I will be with you. I will back you. I will be behind you, holding you. I will not abandon you to them. You will be able to grow up on a true foundation. You will be able to love the world with a true heart. You have lost a lot of time. I can help you with the time you have left. Come into my arms. Will you? And then I take her in my lap and put my hand over her sore heart. She says I called and called but Mama didn't come. The nurse just came and shut the door. When she says that the right response is tears. Oh my sweetie that makes me very sad. My mother would not have cried. I've never seen her cry. A stoicism so blank so hopeless. And what else - anger I think. A heavy cynical tone of heart. Hard. Their two hard masks: her cynicism, his self-admiration. What am I feeling. Moved. I know it is so. 11 My table at the Calabria and warm. Tuesday and what that means now. It's ten o'clock and I'm in the day, not cleaning a house. But sore. It's head not heart today though the topic isn't different. I worked last night and then lay down and there was love and longing somehow tumbled in the covers with me. Tumbled because I was dim but couldn't sleep and didn't know whether I should do something to send it away or lie quietly in its arms and be floated into fantasy. Bad fantasy, the kind where what isn't true is true. Maybe it's caffeine headache. There's a way to find out. People passing have so much the look of waifs. There are so few faces I like to see. Yours is a loss to me. How do they look. Wrong. - There he goes with his book on the other side of the street. I'm immediately frightened. Frightened means what. Quick, find it. Try this: it means excited, pleased, frightened of being disappointed. What does disappointed cost. Pain that besides being hurt has been fooled. Oh but what does it matter, pain of fear now or pain of disappointment and foolishness later. Love woman, where are you - what are you saying? - what do you want me to say. I'm saying (she says) what you know very well: oh! will he come back to this side of the street and stop here and then - but who is it that says, don't get excited, maybe he won't, maybe he saw you and will stay away, maybe he's in a bad mood, maybe it would be too much for you, maybe you'll be frightened and miserable. Alright: what do you want me to say, larger one, quick, I'm frightened of being frightened - "it could be the story of a killing, it could be the story of a rescue." Don't you want to know why you are here this morning? Be braver. You are here because there's this possibility of a meeting. You are involved and rightly want the story to move forward. You are connected and so is he. Resistance on either side is another matter, it's how the story has to move however it will terminate. He knows you're there. Maybe he'll stay away. The unwinding of such a vortex is not instantaneous, what do you expect. You are alive and he is, you are at a café table, he is on the street avoiding you. He is not your father. It is not a structure locked forever. It is windy. The music is fairground. A woman with breasts stacked up on her ribcage runs across the street. - You are the one to talk to, aren't you. Anytime. Shall we work? - And then worked, and now came home to a letter from CISR. It says congratulations. 12th Wednesday before work. I've liked this writing. I read it over. It balances. There is therapy conformity in it that doesn't always convince me. I want to read it to Joyce. Larger one's voice is better than therapy's but I will try those positions. It's cold today. I'm sick and blowing my nose. Worked in the herb garden yesterday afternoon after my hours with intuitive studies notes in cafes on Commercial. A perfect day in that way. The herb garden is a glowing order. Young greens and small colors in gorgeous relation, bog myrtle's pink with primrose and white arabis and red paeony stalks. Two velvet-red wallflowers in the far corner. I was cleaning one of the middle-angle beds, moving a false indigo clump that has spears coming up with traces of ink in their wrappings, and the bladder senna that's going to be a bush. Pleasure of sorting and placing: these pink things will go where the pink frills are, these orange poppies into the orange and purple corner. Viper's bugloss goes there too and into the red-blue-yellow-whites. Loosen this stagnant corner, put manure between the clumps I've left. There's room now for new things and direct seeds. This summer it will be close to perfect there. Not yet in the pine forest where it's weedy and random. 13 Dreamed about archetypes - a round-cheeked woman is all I remember but as if the message was that these figures are the people in us whose transactions are told in our dreams. What could that mean. A French Canadian roofing contractor. I hear his voice, never see him. Trudeau is coming to the worksite, one of the men is off, the woman who works in the office will have to go up. Looking at her legs and shoes. She's wearing nylons and flats. She's reluctant. Next a brief shot of her ankle, she's wearing one of those kids' work boots with a heel worn almost to the ground. What I feel about the scene is something like urgency about writing. What else I have - oh a whole tableau of longing. I'm saying to Joyce, it's the first time my intentions are honorable. I'm saying, I like his face, I could like to be with it for years. Hearing one of the Stirlings say the man should go with the woman who chooses him. I'm saying to him, it was going somewhere, it was going somewhere with shocking rapidity. I've never wanted to marry someone before. And what's the feeling. A longing to be with him, if not really then in feeling. Censored, or partly censored. Uneasy. How did I do it when I was a kid. It wasn't a problem. Was he sorry he hugged me? Yes, because it left a print on him. Me too. It's that isn't it. Having been in his arms and felt the fit again. Arguing with Joyce, why doesn't she say, You have been so unattached, here is your chance, I'll help you. Now I'm saying to her, why are you trying to nudge me into some wasteland of religious resignation? Larger one, is that what you or she want? Who wants what you say you're wanting? Can you go upstream? This is important. I'm not sure I can answer it eating chopped cod and beet soup watching for 8 o'clock. Here is your exercise. Alternate that wanting and the work self and in each feel back or under for who it is that wants. Dear you - I went to a movie with you tonight (where are you? somewhere in the dark in the rain on a logging road in the Kootenays, in your sleeping bag in the van reading by some sort of battery lamp) and now am under my own sleeping bag in my bed with a hot water bottle, writing and blowing my nose under my yellow anglepoise. I dressed up, not thinking why, black silk and an earring, and sat reading as the audience came in, the way you would too. It was a movie I only went to see because you talked about it. I wanted to feel you feeling it. There was a line near the beginning. Sophie says "My father was married to someone else and lived in another place with another family." Then I felt - oh. What else - the music. "It's Strauss" I said to you. What you wanted to talk about when you came away from that film, Sophie's having missed her chance with Benoit. You were more persuaded than I was, you were thinking of Sylvia I thought. I had to listen as if to someone I loved and didn't know. He's full of something, what is it, he has to say it before he can realize he's here. Claude Miller dir 1993 The accompanist You are a person who is full of love. Helplessly so. Bewildered where to give it and giving it in rushes all the time. It took me a while to understand that. I keep hearing how hard I was - fighting in ways I'd learned - fighting for what, to stay free - as anyone maybe should fight when they are in sight of the undoing of their hardness. Love from E. That means something technical you wouldn't like to hear. Sleep sweet. 16 Last week a bad week at work. Screwups. The lady Janice, Alba Rosa, Ruth Shell. Backing into a van. Vacuum cleaner broke twice. Being sick. Letter from welfare office demanding I come in next week. They are all harvests of things I did earlier, it was catch-up week. Another 3-week flooding period. 17th At a Chinese restaurant before the movie, with Dorothy Richardson in my hand, staring out at the many wings of two hemlocks, I thought, maybe Dorothy is here. Then what did the surge of heart mean - I was crying for her. This morning crying again. Yesterday Rob's shop opened with balloons jumping above the plant yard, Rob unnerved - how did I know he was - among crowds. His eyes were squeezed. His jaw was dislocating. [Figaro's Garden on Victoria St] In the evening his family at the Rubina, my suggestion, his people on my or our ground. He had a lot to say. Taking family place in the slightly too loud crudish way he does, as if he's pushing against his reticence. He wanted me at his house for the night. Fell asleep with his head against the sofa and my hand on his heart. I leaked bright pink blood in his bed overnight. Drove him to the shop. Commercial with no cars parked, sweet light, sweet pale grey shadow, sticky leaf on the street limes. And came here to the marble table where the window is pushed back. I can stick out my head to look up and down the street. Oh day. The way people all over the world - this certainly isn't true - will sometimes call a day beautiful. I mean choosing that word for the whole of it. In all of this - I can be lying with my arm around him and my palm on the quality of his chest that I feel is most him - I go on being with you. As if that belonging is all around me, distributed in fibres among my muscles. I'd like it if it were, it would be holding me. Hello you, nosing through bushes somewhere, rushing with good or else bad humor. Leah yesterday. She comes with lipstick and earrings like wind chimes, moons, a conforming woman, small, with her characteristic way of pulling the other in through a gap in the chest and watching worriedly over the too-much coming in. What does it set up in me. A confident pouring-forward of what I know, with its tone carefully rounded not to hurt. But something else happened yesterday. We talked in this order - her work, what it's like for her living with Tara, my personal work, the work on imagining, José's incomprehension and what I think it means. And then the imagining work again, when she had suddenly and I thought completely caught on. It was as if energy poured up through her head, she went bright pink and sat solid up the middle. As if she'd said, yes - I'll put a root into this, I want some of this. A spin-off, why not, I thought. If I'm onto something that would happen. Even the illusion of it would get her started. I saw what she wanted. What was it she saw. She put it together. Maybe more than I have. I said it is suggesting to me that there is a false hope that a certain false tree has built its branches from. That tree has consciousness in some of its branches calling itself I. To remove the hope is to remove the routing of life into that tree. It isn't a matter of giving up hopes in the present, there is no danger in that, they are shot off the ends of branches. Maybe there is another tree, built in the same space, built with some but not all of the same branches. Perhaps its branches have not reached into a certain zone, because there has not been enough life let through. (Oh where are you - the men on the street who aren't what you are - the men all over town who don't rush the way you do, who haven't your innocence and heart.) Maybe that is the tree meant by the body present if it were grown true. Maybe it has many contacts with the branches that say I. Maybe it comes on when daily fear is asleep, and leaves traces in the I that are there as if they have come by safe channels. Maybe paraperception is the way the tree designs itself in some upper levels, bypassing certain structural habits. Maybe the silent tree does work, recognizes, constructs whole shapes which are looms for possible comprehensions. Maybe loving you with this ardency is a structure building itself from a leader checked when I was three, maybe it is a beginning. What Leah saw was implications of calling minds structures, so that if José does not have the circuits to see what she sees, it is a question of engineering. The contribution of her own that she saw, was the way she can plainly see in people's mandalas the shapes of conscious and unconscious structure relative to one another. (Maybe loving you helps me know how to love the not-false tree, and maybe loving is a technical term for routing life into something.) 18 I am having two babies, why did I do that. I'll have no freedom. Both babies have mothers other than me - I mean both egg and sperm come from elsewhere. The first conceived is from Jane Downey sleeping with two men at once, the white man says he didn't come so the father will be the large black man. What I see when I wake from this dream in Rob's bed is the way the dream has both a represented meaning and the dreaming I's literal-minded response to the constellation. Many times there's that mix. I mean: the communication was about - I think - two sets of two, a 4-structure - the conception or carrying of that. - Try again, what are the parts. - brain theory. Call it structures. What set a structure. What turns a structure on. What relation do structures have to each other - inhibits, boosts, overlaps, potential ties-across. - imagining in brain theory. Circuits self-started. Intentional ties-across. (It is more a way of tracking than of making? - love and pain in brain theory. Large energy into structures, builds structures very strong. Pain same. Love -> pain circuits set. Imagining can set off parts, get in at some other level, circumvent, have bliss, release, lock. (Large energy in from below. Checks originally come from outside. Imagining works within the checks that are pain. The checking is a habit. Does mean life doesn't get into lots.) - childhood hope and the above. Strong circuit: Love - pain - betrayal - despair. That one ties in with much else built truly up to then. Deroute from pain/despair, deroute from much else. 'Forgot.' (She wanted to build it in such a way that she kept access to it all. Artists and self design. Mysticism and the art of self design. Artists who work for a fine tool. The instinct of self design. Giving oneself experiences and avoiding them. The passion invested. What has he wanted for himself. The wants that are leftovers unhandled by the want of the instinct of self construction.) They aren't included because of the checks. - gaps in this one. Checks are gaps in the swirling across? When I'm writing beyond the checking one, is it you? When that happens should I just keep going and figure it out later? In other words disabled by? Gap. Is it telling me this. Just now the sun came on, cherry petals swirled across the intersection as car and pedestrian crossed. See? Read it. You dear. Now read it. Two men in wheelchairs with mouths gaping. Read it when you've asked a question. As if your friend is with you when you ask. Then I say - life - because it has shown a loving depth. Go back. What I've been trying to do. It says see the hope that is not in impulse toward present life. (What is it replaced by? Leah asks. Energy I say positively.) What is that hope as a structure. An inefficiency. Yeah but. Where is it. There has been an effort or a push, something from somewhere else, a standing structure, a set of guards with spears who turn the current from where a strong structure has wanted it to go, toward somewhere not supported by earlier stronger more hardwired parts of the net. That standing structure goes on turning current disabling whole and exact takes. Call hope that set of guards with spears, and notice their presence by noticing what happens when there's current of a certain kind. Alright. This is where Leah sees the map. Draw a map of your structure. It may be a map of physical flow or it may be a story about it. (Is it true that mandala is a picture of what is strong and what is feeble in a mind? - mathematical visualizations. Maybe a map or a story. Seeing flows change. Images of flows. (Is there anything in math visualizations as accurate as that swirl in Trapline? No.) - grain. Elements registering change. Atoms as branching points. Set theory. There is no one scale of change but if it is space there is an exact point where direction changes, as there is an exact instant where something changes. Any grid we choose, that point may be between. But it is not, we'll say, a grid. Grids are for counting-off. If it isn't on the grid move the grid. We don't need infinity. Only measuring, which is finite, needs it Infinite is a concept that belongs to measurement? 'Exact point' also belongs only to measurement? But there are places in space. Are you able to tell me how the currents' consciousness of its shape finds matches? Were you telling me with the motion of the branches?     no Did you tell me already     Somehow overlaid     Are you conscious     (silence) Are you a silent consciousness     You are conscious in as much as I am silently conscious     - art, intuitions of own structures. Nothing we've seen but we feel it. The structure's self-consciousness finds pictures. The structure is self conscious. This means something different than saying a person is self conscious. A person is conscious of person's place among persons: that is a unit of scale. Structure recognizes itself (current recognizes its shape). At times depicts itself knowing and unknowing. Similarities and differences of structures. We like and dislike, recognizing. - "art, sex and religion, the same thing" Dorothy says. Ie there is a way to understand their relations within a unified deeper thing, which is structure. Sex maybe the design of original currents: you have to do and feel this, whatever else. Because it builds consciousness. And designed so it detours. - My application. Pribram's/connectionism's sense of structured physical visualization's recognizable pictures of current. Recognize some. Put them thru colored space. Orpheus is a story of recovering a circuit. See if I can make a picture of recovering a circuit. Doing it in recognition/intuition mode means I can go past theory. But work on theory too. Recovering free flow of love    I must look for pictures of flow that recognize     Put them through those video landscapes     Put in some meaning images     - perceptualizing. Endogenous. People represent themselves in perceptual materials, things that have to do with own structure or other. Ie it is done by machines. It is <endogenous representation. There is a private language>. Done by structure to person by current in person. It is done by structure to structure. In ways that balance the spirit in ways the person doesn't have to be aware of. - consciousness. Say a structure can be lit or not. We don't know what makes it that, or what difference it makes to function. Current is inherently conscious     no Something other than current is conscious     Something like a space in which the current is. something as subtle body?     - my work. To be in the deep sense of life, to release the structure, to understand, to get the most inclusive feeling understanding I can. No. Balance in the midst of change. My 'work' is balancing?     (silence) Should I be talking about our work     no My work is working with you?     What is our work together     valor, the strengthening and engaging of strength and engagements Yeah?     - making a living. By giving out what parts of this can be recognized and valued as work. What kind of day. A long one. Waking with Rob. Last night I read him what I'd written about visiting his family. When I say or read to him what I've thought or been when I'm with him, his silence, what is it, poverty or inarticulation, I don't know, his fear? unformedness? is like a blank. I've said it and somehow it's been heard but I'll never know. I do not know him. We wake. I turn toward his chest. He puts his hand in thru the arm of my undershirt. His breath changes. We'll go there certainly. Did you come a bit? Just a little bit, why? I can feel it. The thrilling drive had stopped. I went away from him into a story, and came without knowing I was going to. It was like doing even that without seeing him. Not right, but then we were both there in the peace after. He is holding something, isn't he. His chest isn't opening. And I know he won't fight for nearness, he'll say there's nothing he can do. "What are you thinking?" as we lay together. "What am I thinking? What am I thinking - round rocks. Plants not rocks." "You mean those little cactus?" "Yes." "There's a name for them, what is it, lithops." "I guess my mind was on standby." "It's not on standby, it's talking to you. What does that picture remind you of?" "It's peaceful, contented." "It's a picture of contentment?" "I guess." Went for breakfast to Bino's, walked up Commercial to the Calabria, stopping in used furniture stores. Looking at shabby loveseats. Home to business, set the phone on the table. What is it about phoning and fear. Alpha Cine, Yaletown. The library at CISR. Visual mathematics in Leonardo. A very quiet room with trees, warehouse windows, filter coffee, a long table, a phone. I've been taken into this institution, they have said they'll help me. They have identified me, have reason to recognize me when I walk past their doors. It's a warm clean large space served by three or four people full-time and others when needed. A research institute not a school. I'm not there as a student, I'm there as a researcher: a person who is looking for things and finding them, just like that. There was a list published and I'm on it. Tomorrow I'll go again, and when I take breaks I'll walk in Yaletown, have new tables in coffeehouses. I'll think about work process including social process. There's a community with more life than the philosophers have, there'll be people I like more, maybe there'll be office help. Jeff will put me in touch with people. It will be like making the herb garden, if I take it on with the same certainty. I'll ask and people will give me something. My other - you - will tell me what to look for, there will be constant inner help, which needs from me acts of voice, hand, that are always acts of strength, boldness: do this now, just do it, act on it, navigate it, feel your way through the phone call, enjoy it. 19 Says it needs from me the strength to carry something from the inner to the outer. Weds 20th Luke on the phone - I was writing Rowen - what an extra, what an unasked for luxury, to have him there laughing when I say You used to be so furious when I cooked badly. Sat 23rd Not settling. Came off work yesterday and needed a wildness, what's there to do. Not Rob, that's for tonight because of the plant sale tomorrow. Britannia library's closed. I could eat. Now I'll investigate this thing I used to do, fruit salad and ice cream. Read a book in the same zonking way. Is it an eraser - bulk eraser. The real week hasn't started yet. This is to start it. Four croissants, two lattes, summer at Calabria. The newspaper this morning says nipple stimulation found to prevent breast cancer. What I need after work is romance, the exciting kind, kissing. Dressing up, spending money. Dreamed three kittens with sticky eyes, the father or landlord said they'd be destroyed because the little boy hasn't cleaned them up - I take them up and wash them, innocent clean little faces. Much more. Waking at three with the moon reaching into the room through the hall window, a couple of hours from moonset. I read until it was gone. Too dopey to use it. That dopiness is what - it was there through the work week, couldn't sleep and then couldn't wake and had no work life in the morning and now - yes I'll find it. 25th A sea with soldiers. They've met. Rafts with bodies chained to them. Most are lying face down. I see one who is stirring. Four young men with plaid cloths wrapped around their heads. One with red hair. A cabin I come to across a river, by crossing a river. Looking down at logs that almost span it. Then I see a structure higher up, at my level, with walkways. I come into the cabin with pleasure. I'll live here and work. Down a few steps into another room. Through that window I see a village with a store and through this one - oh - it's the sea. I'm high over the green sea. I looked at the young men with some distress. They seemed to mean something about men and war. Monday morning. It says I have come to terms with love and have come to a place with a view of the sea and access to people if I want it. My soldier sensibilities are floating disarmed. A process is safely completed. When I hear that I feel as I do when I imagine him eventually coming to what I've come to. A flush of heat that isn't heat - it's like a fast fine vigorous comb through the solar plex - a thrill. Quick note. I said to Rob Saturday in bed "What are you thinking." "What was I thinking - I wasn't really thinking, I was in that state where your eyes turn in." I understood - it is a state I have never mentioned here although when I come out of it I am always amazed. It is so other that even the second after I was there I can hardly remember. It is like going to a place behind the eyes. "Black and gold?" "As if. Not really gold. Something happens in the eye sockets and/or eyeballs." What else. A fine high frequency vibe. Maybe. A particular I without any of this I's orientation. An I without an outside. 26 For Joyce in an hour: I have the world of what I call work, an academic mapping, a hope of mapping, a map of a map to be made. It exists in my relation to certain sheets of notes. On certain days, and today is one, I have skill among these notes, I readily organize, expand, refine. On other days I have had a world I also call work, an emotional sounding, conversation with a feeling state. The first work is my own relation to fields of public discussion. It offers a way to currency, also financial currency, in an arena which is historical too. I can do good and interesting work. I have a contribution. The second work is my relation to love and suffering, my own story of feeling. It could offer a currency if I took it into personal writing. I don't sustain thinking of it as offering money or community, although it could offer a community I might like more than the academic community. What is the relation of these beings? In the work with love and suffering I have an inner mentor as well as an outer one. Are you there for both kinds of work? Yes. Does one interest you more than the other? NO. Do you see them as a unity? Yes. What do I know about bookwork with feeling. The way I go into it and forget what happens. Do these happenings have effect? Do they change structure? Are they changed structure? - She said - if larger one is around I can play with him or anyone - it is an image of innocence and innocence is true but fragile. The Buddhist's say: grasping: figuring out how to control innocence into staying. I come out of her door. In front of me carved in wood a sign that sez Sunrise K. It is on a boat. She said, "What worried me about it in you is the way your life is on the line. I've had my curriculum. Bigger. Much bigger. I've lived longer than you have." "We're your curriculum." "No. My curriculum was before. That's why I'm here." "Who were you when you were talking to the little one?" Looking back through the writing, "Self responsibility." "Self responsibility being hope's mother. - It's you." "I didn't want you to say that." Hurriedly, "I think it's god. The way the Sufi's have that crying for the beloved and it's god." I'm dubious. Whatever speaks to me with the cards and string. Larger one. The application. [probably the CISR application] "This is so impressive. You're so bright." Why would I need to hear that. "You're such an artist. I'll tell you why I say that. You go into an area that to me is living hell, looking for beauty. - I do that here too. I take people to painful places and show them how to find beauty." "Yes you do! That's Orpheus too, going into hell looking for the loved one, the loving one." "Have you heard from Louie?" "No. I think she's alright. I think I'd know if she weren't." Worrying about Ruanda and Bosnia, computer games. She saw the possibility. "You've found a niche. You must be excited." Am I excited? No. I've always been excited about this stuff. "Your academic work has given you access." She saw the picture. I needed her to see the picture. She's holding the story. A hired mother. I say to my mother: I hire a mother. Somebody to see how it grows from a beginning and how far I come. She fell behind so long ago. Larger one knows the story and more. - Then Luke comes to the Soho and I take him to introduce him to and at the institute. Machines and young men. "Luke is my technical advisor." He recognizes two kinds of Silicon Graphics workstations, and has enrolled us in an introduction to the hardware next week. We sit by the sea in his neighbourhood. Below is a small bay whose pattern of small and then larger ripples is just the pattern of ridges on a clam shell. He says being a security guard relaxed him after the scare of ITN where he tried to be older than he was. Vancouver will be interested in him for less. We are seeing jet boats on English Bay. I say for myself it is wonderful that he is here although I hardly believe it and feel I don't deserve it. He wanted to hear that. He takes me to Angela's apartment. Green carpets and deep dark-varnished windowsills seen as the lift rises. A bay window over maple trees and eye to eye with whatever sky there is in a day. A tower of audio components. He plays music and I close my eyes in an armchair. Whales. "It's perfect music." The voices that sound and are heard through a thousand miles of salt water, he says. And then shows me the scale of atomic bundle machines, atomic sensors. Two microns: spit on the forefinger, touches it to his thumb and draws out between them a thread finer than a hair. (There - I did it too.) We both stare, feeling the magic of that materialization. I go home. "Give us a hug," he says. I would be too diffident to ask. Complete. Complete. When I say that I am feeling you too. And you, own. What I should say about my parents is that they made it possible - they helped in ways I don't know - for me to be where I am so glad to be, although they don't know I am there and don't know what they have been to make it possible. I'm struggling here - I know they tried to hinder. But from Russia and complete piety and women circumscribed, to this moment where I sit on the grass with my son and he loves me without condescension in an open world, there was a bridge and it was them. As if they took the brunt of the fear of the transition. Was that it? Do I know now what I can thank them for? 30 Writing less than I did - it means the garden all day today, a Saturday where I'm in the herb garden, Rob in the orchard and vinewalk, Brian somewhere, Muggs calling us to the table, Jack East with a wheelbarrow. I moved things, planted, took yellows out of the blue-purple-orange end. Saw things when I was sitting with Rob that I hadn't known were there. Little shapes. Purples to come. Orris's opal-colored buds jointed over three curved blades. Woad floating a yellow haze three feet above simple rosette feet, greyish. Celidon's gold ink in the palm if I break a stalk. Mrs Campbell's black-leafed violets. (-In bed with burnt eyes, lips, cheeks.) What else, rosa primula with round pale circles stuck onto bent wire stalks, next to the stronger yellow daylily. Put coreopsis back where pink Japanese anemone were. Rob got a flat of painted sage, another of hellebore babies from under the bench. Sell them, we say. So contented working. There from ten to seven staggering sideways, not caring, not distracted, googy eyes at Rob who had his happy kiddish look, a tall thing with hair in a knot at the back of his head. Put lube on him this morning and stroked like business, easy, and got on him, which he always likes best, clamped his knees with mine and raked up. "You better stop or I'll come." I don't stop. He comes. Laughs. "Or don't stop." "That's what I reckoned." My turn after. "Can I get you back?" I hold it close to the bottom where it's still lubed. Three-sided. Yes. And then it's for me. We doze together. We moved the curtain and saw wind and sun after rain through the night. I got into pleasure and am still there. May Day I was in the garden before 8. There was Brian too, and Stella far up the path. Cleared the greenhouse. Forgot it was May Eve yesterday, but it celebrated, didn't it. Light, content, an inner tremour, burning green, fire shapes of plants. South African election last week. (One of Louie's boys walks in and I am furious with Louie, cold hate.) What should I ask to be. Dear larger - hi - there must be something to know about 'hi' - high - hi-ee - something to put a tone to - anything short wd do it - no, h pushes a breath toward them and the vowel carries the tone - it's like an arrow with a trailing streamer. 2nd, Monday Spending. Photos. Wanting to put up pictures of my friends. Jeans for $50. Green apple soap. At Murchies half a pound of dark French, a quarter of English Breakfast and a quarter of Earl Grey. Garbage container finally the right size for compost. Breakfast. Fill the tank. Vitamin E. Larger one - I've given myself a deadline for next week, now I have to face getting the [PhD] application done. Frightened. What exactly do you have to know I have to say how it can seem to be philosophy and film Take a breath and say what you'd do if you could do anything I want to be in love and understanding and have enough money You're frightened you are bluffing and there is nothing there (Sigh) Yes. Is there truly something there? YES Can I design a program for it? It is feeling unreal You have established strength I talk about perceptualization as a notion? Imagining? I'm panicking. What does it have to do with making a film? I don't see how I can sell it. First see them separate A grain film. Swirling dots. Currents. Is there a way to make it make images? Yes. This is basic composition. Does it have to do with interference? Another way to talk about knowing Work at it from both sides?    Find your intelligence     Yoga     Discipline on weekends     3rd A man I am feeling I'll take up. A policeman who will be working on a bridge, building a bridge. I say, unbuttoning his shirt, I want him to show his chest. A working man. He will go tonight, we will all go, to another place. An image showing the pleasure of the night ride. There is a structure in the center of the picture that gives me an idea of it - it is like a plastic peak of a veil - looks like a gauze but is more of a gel. When I write a sentence like that, when in the dream I see an image like that, I get a feel, I have a feel and the feel for is what the language and picture both evoke. Woke at four with the answer to yesterday's question remembered. A constellation of things. A physical man on a bridge. Meanings in dreams. Meanings in events. Dorothy writing out of a body of knowing that hasn't been known to be knowing. Tone in language. Tone in music. Musicians and knowing. (Painters.) Working with Barry. What sort of collaboration already happens with Leah. Diana with Candace, my impulse with Ken, inducing someone into living as what they know unknowing. Sitting meditation to shift into it, needing to shift into it when I work with explaining non-explanatory knowing. Epistemology is the mutual ground. Explaining it, thinking how it changes talk about knowing, and demonstrating it living it. In the meantime he goes with my or his little boy down a path. I don't immediately see where they are going. I'm worried about shoes. What I'll wear on my feet. There is a plastic tube I put over my right foot that makes it seem a footless club - only the heel like a peg leg. Distressing. I see the red sneakers instead. Looks like a normal foot. They have gone to the river I see much further down a canyon than I thought. Buildings on the way, like Klondike Days stores with people in costume. Something about Tony and a part of town, maybe his part of town. The difficulty remembering what I find in these other searches. For instance that the time with Tony was quite smart in this way of knowing in situation - I have an image there - like being in a knowing that stands around me - it is a feeling of intelligence. There is in epistemology a picture of knowing that not only excludes certain kinds of knowing but that also leaves out something that is in any experience of knowing, the feel or sense of it, the experience that one tries to name so the name will evoke it. I like to work between knowing and knowing knowing. Things that happen in a day. Describing them. Reading descriptions to see what I've known. Recognize it. What reading and writing are. Barry generating music from math. He gets an experience that isn't socially organized emotion. The emblematic sense of daily event. The emblematic sense of experience in dreams. The experience of 'meaning.' Emblematic means it is acting suggestively. The work I see often involves saying what does ---- mean. What is a way to understand that term within an understanding that is a broader floor. Emblematic - wanting a lover who is building a bridge with his shirt off - I saw a penis in the shape of a woman, a man's image of - it is feeling for, sense of. Freud says there is no need of a separate encoding process, the uncon is already emblematic - I want that word instead of symbolic - it means one thing evokes another - 'by association' - one thing evokes another because there is no direct vocabulary - language use a tissue of evocation - what's evoked is felt meaning - people who talk about it and people who do it - many people in music, educated in music - people who talk about it in a way that does it - An intelligence that picks out what it is about a recognition. Something I've worked with. Pick out recognitions. Work with them until you know what they are. Certain kinds of intelligence have to do with that. Why. Blocked recognition. Incommensurate training. What she regarded as a mystical element in women ... a phrase, a scene, a name from it ... related images multiplied, people began to talk and think aloud, a whole world came into focus ... sometimes she stepped down effortlessly from one world to another. She would feel herself surrendering to the consciousness of what seemed to be another person. To look out on that brilliant world, until all signs of self consciousness vanished and she was no longer herself; and then disconcertingly it seemed to her that this other world had identities with a buried self dimly apprehended in states of reverie. Her plunge had become a plunge into her own unconscious. But once surrendered she could move freely and as she moved, write. Vincent Brome A last meeting with Dorothy Richardson in London Magazine 6 (June 1959):26-32 part 3 aphrodite's garden volume 20: 1994 march-july work & days: a lifetime journal project