aphrodite's garden volume 20 part 3 - 1994 may-june

work & days: a lifetime journal project

May 4th 1994 Almost have the outline. What I feel seeing it is, where's writing? Where are lovers and what I know that nobody knows? Personal writing has to be there - the discipline to do it, a way to present it, concentration to make it good, time and passion to find it. 5 It is six in the morning. I have until eight. What is it these days - compared to winter it's dull as if the force that was in me is out of me spread in the light making leaves grow. There is no one in me. I'm not smart. Even the pencil is very faint. Try a different one. The sky has gone shiningly opaque to enclose us for the day. A sweet smoky pink in the clouds I see in the small triangle between roofline and window edge. I hear a gull and a songbird and a motor. I dreamed the last day of a class. A boy lying on his back kicking his legs imitating a baby. He has the cry exactly, it's impressively observed. He and another boy walk out. The teacher calls after them. They know she is irrelevant. In the bus one of the teachers is handing out mimeographed sheets. She is hesitating to give me one, says there was a man with my name who traveled between ---- and Nebraska. I say I don't know him, looking at her thinking she looks like a lesbian. In a room with her reading the sheet. It's amazingly interesting, her play like nobody else's. Numbered lines. Like definitions or puzzles with other numbered lines corresponding below. I work slowly down the list. Is this number three again? One of the lines has a raised ridge along it. The definition was something like, somebody tells you to put something here and you do. I need a light, I say. Have to go next door and buy a light bulb. Will I go as I am, barefoot in my old terry robe. To the co-op like the La Glace Co-op, a store where they know me and haven't seen me for years. I have to find money too, she helps me look thru a drawer. Nothing. But I have change in my pocket. Run out the door. Her girlfriend just arriving not liking to see me intimate. In the co-op they are as they would be, dry. The woman says asparagus boxes have kept the fire going for her son who is sleeping in an alcove. I say Judy will probably be here this summer too. Etc. The woman was like Marina, who was in the garden two evenings ago photographing me for the Strait. I liked to look at her, a boy woman with Roseanne's sort of bumless titless body, an undeveloped body, and a strong austere face, nose and jaw and cheekbone like a hero, a greybrown hawk look. Greek. 6 Friday. I said - standing together with that challenged amused bright look of people whose auras are clashing like cymbals invisibly in the space between them (they are not holding hands oh no their auras are up to something that makes them individual and bright) - Come on, Beautiful, clash with me so that the effect of the invisible is highly visible and makes women look at me with hatred. I've discovered polarity with you - we could stand together gleaming and that's our wedding picture - we could have a big fight - a big fight a battle royal where we are secretly admiring each other - I'd like it like that - get up the fight and have it ready - say sorry after - alright I've called you in your jungle whipping thru - come on - where's your venture where's your sense you've met your match - let's get on with it. So now I'm roused and have ten minutes and the birds are cheeping in ways that can't at all be called song. Then it has this to say. He's gone to that safer woman with husband and kid, he'll be there all summer, it works for sex, she isn't interesting but he's recovering, if he hadn't failed with me sexually, but. May. Summery May. Hawthorns were in the street yesterday. 7 Woke sad saying [to Rob], I must talk to you about decadence and speech. We woke unconnected. "So that was different last night," he said. Instant affection, I'm next to him holding his shoulder with a sweet-feeling palm. What does that mean. "I was a mare. You seemed to want it that way." "I did?" "I let go." "Yeah you let go, I always like that." I want to know about the cost of his speech. And I'm missing you. Saturday morning on the Drive and I'd like it if you showed up. But this missing is getting unconvincing. It's a general worry. Is it? There's a parade of men and they are irrelevant. They aren't furry or literate or sharp. I'm sad. Could look at the linden leaves hung thick and live like skin and soft like clothes on a line. The voice behind me the kind of voice that only wants to hear itself on top of the conversation. Wrong faces. The way a little mouth in a bloated face snapped shut on the end of a word. The soft lindens leaning and tossing in a breeze from the north. I do still miss you. I'll stop after a while. 9 Gail Angen. Leaning back against her in an elevator, my head against her stomach. I'm in a wheelchair. What a nice soft feeling. We exit onto the street. Where will we go. It seems she's going to stay with me. But there's a flight of stairs down. She's not stopped. She rushes them. They're padded. A fast bump bump bump in the wheelchair. We're in an alley. She goes into a washroom. She says something to me. Her face has come through the boards on the floor. Did I see that? Or did she have the door up like a garage door? I look at the wood. There's a damp print on it. An oval. She comes out. Do you know what you did? I'll show you. I go into the little room. Look out to see if she's watching and she isn't. You know this already don't you, that's why you aren't watching. The wild area pool filled much too full. Hose is still on. It seems to be in commotion, I can't tell whether it's it or a storm wind. There's a house on the far bank that keeps having stuff washed out from under it in waves. Looks like old seaweed. Rocks below the houses grinding together ferociously. She's left the hose on too long. I find it attached as if to a piling under a wharf. Eric had something to do with it. The woman from the house says her lattice blew over. Oh that was what I saw falling. Looking at a magazine in an armchair. A tall actress with big breasts looking at a young man who's a head shorter than she is. The first few pages have the story of some event when they were shooting, maybe a sudden flood that swept them together. His wife is tenacious but she lost out. Then the rest of the magazine is nothing but grey: columns of tiny figures. It must be his currency trading magazine. While I looked at the magazine he's been across the room dealing with people one by one. They show him a card, he says ninety cents or some other low figure. Jam's father. He's still doing it. I'm trying to figure out how currency trading would work: they are cashing in their cards. If they'd held onto them longer they might have got more, but they need the money I guess. Last evening I was in the garden planting small things, watering them, covering them with pots, then scooting alongside the middle beds on my bum clearing space taking out what there's too much of. Was going to go home when a young woman came into the south gate. There is a nervous moment when strangers arrive. It's my garden and they are coming into it not knowing it's my garden. And beyond that it's a created thing which is its own gallery, and they are going to judge it in the presence of the artist. Each time I have to decide how to behave. I went to wash my hands in the tank. Sat on the edge of it like someone on the rim of a well, feeling the allusion unknowingly. She was coming around the far side of the tank and said something. A very medium young woman dressed in a crocheted jacket and sheer trailing skirt - sentimental in her dress but not in her face which was practical round smooth and uninteresting. I said something back, decided to say more. That moment when I decide I'll be a host or guide. The few things I have to say. Try them out. She likes things. Touches the leaf of the great burnet. I show her the roses and give her leaves to smell. When I show her a moss rose bud she says, Look at you. Just what I say to strange buds in botanical gardens. I've never heard anybody else say it. We have a last bit of conversation at the sill. What was the retreat you went to in France? She says something I don't get - there's somebody the white brotherhood, the master somebody else, the initiate, Christ was an initiate and we can all be little Christs. The sun. Male and female principles. Nature spirits. She read a book that explained what Christ meant and she was thinking of course, why couldn't I see it? When I say what does it come from, esoteric Christianity? she doesn't know. It's Truth, it comes from Truth. At the retreat in France she went to, there was a garden with Bulgarian roses that had the most amazing smell. She's a driver for the movie industry. Now I have to spend the day writing the doc application all day. Yesterday mapping it on sheets. - Tomorrow stacked with duties and frights. Get up early to prepare to see Barry. Strip the house. Social worker at 9. Re-dress. Rush to Simon Fraser, photocopy papers, copy to Phil and Centre for the Arts. Barry at 11. Joyce at 1. Garden meeting at 7. Change sprinkler at the herb garden early and then late. No time to stop and cook. 10 A woman instructing us in folding our sheets to wash them. Throw it up, catch it folded. Again. It should be in a six foot square. Now throw it up and catch it folded by opposite corners into a triangle. Then it wraps around like this and you tie it in a bundle. She said all this by demonstration. The early tosses I did very easily but the diagonal fold I missed and it's falling apart. While she's instructing other things are going on, men rapidly and neatly folding themselves into yoga positions, a child running through with a large bubble ring, square I think, that the woman is scooping through the air so a long rectangular bubble is formed like a tube behind her hand. There is her story too. She is a large solid unfeminine competent woman like Cornelia Siebert, talking about having had a baby who died. Pictures of a toddler in a yard. I'm calculating she must be fifty, had the baby when she was forty. At a party at Jam's house I pick up a book she's made, self published. Three titles on the cover. It is photographs, very little writing, small paragraphs. Traveling with a lover who is in the photos as a womanly woman with classical hair. I'm looking mainly to see whether she took the woman to Valhalla, Is that the corner of the red and white house? Probably not. Photos toward the end of layouts of classical piles of some sort. Symmetrical concentric foundations. Cheryl in a white shirt comes and puts her head against my sleeve - I'm on an upper bunk. She's here? Daphne somewhere. I go into the basement which is the kitchen. The party food on the table, cheeses. I take a chicken leg from a bowl and bite into it. The bowl is taken by someone. Where is my chicken leg? Taken with the bowl. I want it back. I'm insisting it has a bite out of it. The woman who took the bowl offers me a webby nothing of a piece of chicken. No. My piece had a bite out of it. For Joyce - talk about competent persona and reluctance. - [with Joyce] I said the fear is disproportionate, when I put my hand on the phone. She said, "I could write a treatise, you could too, on all the things that are behind that fear. When you lift the phone it is a courageous act." "Not disproportionate!" I say. "I'm afraid something will be left behind." What did she say about that. She thought it was romance. I had to go on explaining. She had a story about a point and a pearl, point is truth-seeking, pearl is personal connectedness. Sometimes when she launches theory, which she did today too much, I see where she's limited. "That isn't how it is for me, the pearl quality is interested in truth too, very, but it has it in a different form. It's more to do with the person who makes and the person who sells not being compatible states." "A marriage" she says. "But a marriage like Darby and Joan where they can't both be on the porch at the same time," I say. She's seeking around. "Maybe on the phone they could both ...," but then she gets it. "No, look at the fear not at them." Silence. I think I see how fear is different in them. Love woman true to her nature feels it, the business woman is holding herself above it, I say. I show my chest arched up. "It's in her body" she says. "She's holding herself up away from her solar plex" I say. "Even just having sorted that out is something" I say. "More than you think" she says. The implication is that fear is interesting - 12 Only the second work day - not caught up, a few unusual events in the week and I feel disordered. Leah and José last night, Barry and Colin, Cheryl at work. - I can say I knew it would be on the cover. How do I look. My eyes penetrate, I'm a woman far into middle age, a conscious intelligent pained mouth, a real look somehow achieved in an unreal way. She said look at the camera, and it isn't a person looking otherwise than she is. "I've had conversations down here at midnight with people drinking varnish thinner," Epp says. "It doesn't keep anything out." Our myth. The story of our weekend with the Stirlings, the Stirlings left out. Twenty-two truckloads of gravel. "'Elly never doubted we could do it,' Sigurgierson says." And then the moment on Sunday afternoon of sneaking back and standing on a path watering. How quiet it was. Muggs what a brilliant storyteller you are, unscrupulous simple lines vivid and catchy. "'We've done this,' he says, looking over the entire garden. 'We designed it. We fought for it. We built it. We care for it.'" [Rob quoted] Thursday evening. It's 8:30, I'm in bed. A crow at the tip of the hemlock. Pink and blue, still air. What shall I do. 13 Barry's music and its process [Barry Truax] What it can give me as images What it looks like What world this is where sound and sight are the same thing - that is a careless way of saying I don't know what My starting image like steam a stretching surface visibly made of shining grain - an image of what's happening in the brain in a different register - the classical figures a woman descending - something similar done with sound 'A woman descending' - she's just a shell of light - suggested the shape of her outline - says she lives in muthos - sounds of words - her outline could be the shape of a sound and what sound does - suggests what her image does, dwindles evenly away It is the unification of sight and sound that I am hurrying toward - she is - she is going down into to the lake of mist - the sea within a sea that penguins found under an iceberg (you see how Luke's intuition is like mine). 16 I am inventing doctoral courses and imagining beautiful work, and have my face all over town for a week, and I'm dragging and have bought A woman's worth in paper with a Maxfield Parrish cover. When a woman remembers her glory, a man of good will can scarcely contain his joy. His real self arises in the presence of her own. I'm telling you, it works, this thing, this looking within to attract what is without. Make room for love, and it always comes. Make a nest for love, and it always settles. Make a home for the beloved, and he will find his way there. I read that sad in the way I was looking to be sad. She touches the hopeless hopeful quick. My system just said it's true. What follows? What do I have to do? Work with pain, it says. Work through this pain right now? Yes it says. The world despises you. We use whatever our business is as a front. Our real work was taken away from us. When a woman has owned her passionate nature Acceptance of personal power. That means something like staying in touch with larger self and acting it. That we deserve love and approval and support. We have dressed to hide ourselves and spoken to misrepresent ourselves and worked to change ourselves. To reveal, not to recreate, for instance adoration. Every story of her life played out against a panorama of resistance to female confidence. The power we already have. But perhaps we can give joy. "We will make love an art and we will love like artists." I read that and start to cry. Ask her to show you what she has in mind for you. Ask her to bring you what will foster it. the denial of emotion through suppression or withdrawal. I did what I had to do to let them up and out. Female power means not fearing punishment. He doesn't want my strength. That means I have to look for someone else. No. It means he has to change. A friend and a spiritual companion and a sense of home. A prepared virtue - calm, clarity and rectitude. A woman who has opened her heart and allowed it to hurt, for herself and for him. Attract love by an intensified self-connection so that the one who comes forward comes with a similarly right intent. There it is and says don't be cynical, you're acting for a reason. I hear the Valse Frontenac when I'm closing the car door, waiting for tea water, now. Marianne Williamson 1994 A woman's worth Ballantine Chris Norman 1994 Valse Frontenac on The beauty of the North Dorian Recordings I am still confused in the relation of love and work. If I succeed at work he won't love me as a woman. To succeed in love I would have to give up work. Succeeding in work is the only thing that will make me loved. Being loved supports me so I'm viable in work, otherwise I look too shamed. But maybe it isn't success that disqualifies me, maybe it's something else. I believe contradictory things. To be loved I'd have to be helplessly emotional. If I'm helplessly emotional I won't be accepted in work. If I'm helplessly emotional I still won't be accepted in love. Then I'll have neither love nor work. These contradictory things are all true. Then what? Something about speed and directness it says. Look for the contradiction in childhood. Succeeding is the only thing that makes me more than a cripple. When Frank likes me I conceal my grades. Is that what you mean? But what about now? It's what I'm working on. 17 Woke with solar very intense. Woke once before, very hot. Dreamed climbing to a bed high on the mountainside. Lying there not comfortable. I see the gamekeeper's stone house below. There he is walking, but he's too big to be that far away. He's on a ridge just there. Duck. He's seen us. Next day he comes up the path. Has things to say about animals. Isn't telling me to go away. Maybe after I wake I have a post-dream. The other people go away and now that I'm there alone, after a few days I begin to be able to see. I see him. He keeps me. He's a tall young man with dark brown eye, short brown hair. Needs a shave. He's gentle. What shall I call him. Not Brad but something with four letters. On the street with a girl who was with him and is following him and plays street music - I think. I arrive with him at Sara's, have forgotten her name. Call her Christine maybe. The boys come in after. In a house looking at people on the street. Her father standing handsome in morning suit. We are with the kids. A bride steps out of the car. I feel it for her - it's a betrayal. We go out toward them. The father something like Stan Brakhage. He says he can't stand her - Nina. She seizes a crosscut saw, a long logger's saw, and begins working a long broad plank. He's interested, it's as if something he taught her and was proud of when she was a little girl. Hello day - a lidded day. Dark. There's a bird, definitely singing. There are the tipped-up flowers on the chestnuts, sharp waves all over the tree. Pile driver over across the tracks thumps all day. Chinese people taking the park for their half hour, Joan Meister with them in her wheelchair. Anti-clockwise. It's seeing people I know are living in another country. The pile driver is two sounds, an engine and the knocks - what about it - it's like hearing the heart's motor that makes it beat. There is that woman I avert my eyes from. Can I say why. No. She is ordinary and unbearable. 'Complacent mediocrity.' More than that. The word I have is congestion. Maybe it's a cloud of fear. Louie would know. The poppies that open first are the red ones. This is like talking to her. Or rather - Now I have to get ready for the associate dean. I lose the sense that there is work I want to do - I lose it remarkably totally. I take it as hearsay. I have to re-hypnotize myself to find it. Does it live in an envelope of fear? Simple being is afraid of being displaced, it says. It's a true fear though not necessary. I hang onto romance because I am simple in it. She experiences work as abandonment: no one is feeling me, no one knows where I am, I am lost. Oh little. I have a zip from breastbone to belly button and when I work you can be in there like the baby girl carried looking outward from her mother's chest. There's your small round head the size of the pain at the heart. Your bright black eyes will look everywhere, or sleep knowing I'm there. If your arms reach for something I will be able to know. Oh simple inside complex. That's it, isn't it? A core that knows itself a core. How would I like to live at school. Can I know this separately from what I've said. I'd like there to be a man's love at home so I'm not looking for it there. I'd like to meet the guys eye to eye for what they're worth, for fun and trade. I'd like to be respected and liked and interested. I'd like to be working steadily on my central interests. I'd like not to have to read slog. Would like to be writing all the time, keep organizing, not have piles of notes, be keen the way I am when it is coming together. Would like to work the way I do at the garden, eager, not holding back. Would like to be simple with it, presenting exciting stuff. Have the right entry with film. Talk to people from the centre of the structure of intuition which really is myself. - I went to school and met Sang Mah who runs the graphics lab in the Centre for Systems Science, a young woman very smart and free and at home, who introduced me to a tall person with a face as smoothly oval as an animation, round bush of hair, great slow dignity of manner, "Did you see my vid?," who said we must get together. And that her supervisor wants the place to bubble. There is a place called Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics. Phil met on the steps like a friend, warm. And then driving back, looping the long greeny loops on Sperling, I felt something I immediately marveled that I hadn't felt sooner, I felt lonely. I don't feel it now. I felt lonely to be seen and liked and known personally. So many things I've felt this winter, the kinds of missing that weren't missing that. Leslie Bishko dir Gasping for air 3 min 18 Wednesday evening, bright open evening, the leaves are active, the light is yellow, there is the rolling road of an airplane, live sound that says open windows. I reread his letter. I say, I almost say, what would be normal for me to say - this is dumb, the handwriting is dumb, there's not a well-felt word in it, there's not a moment in it where he feels me, and more than one insult. And I've been clinging to my feeling for him, as if he was my destined true love. I'm crazy, I couldn't bear how stupid he is - I forced myself to say that - isn't it interesting how hard I find it, I've easily pronounced people stupid who were smarter than he tho' not much - you - Book - have encouraged me - I have been crazy - It would desolate me to give up this craziness - I'm willing if I can be sane - what would sane be - it would be to love with this generosity someone who is my equal and wants to love me back and is that too - a mannish man with otherness - who'd like to fight, who wouldn't be afraid to throw plates. I'm casting myself down saying I give up and at the same time, behind, I am jumping for joy saying When you give up that's when it comes to you. Which cancels it. I want to take my head to Joyce and say fix me. But here's the hitch. She fixes me. I don't long for him, I don't light up when I see him, I have the length of conversation that could interest me with someone so self-absorbed, he doesn't hurt my feelings 'cause I'm gone long before. And then. What would be good instead. I thought of the feeling at Nyingma. Beauty and rapture, pain that is good for something, voices in the wheel. But that isn't the alternative. She fixes me. I'm cured of him but there is no one else. There goes on being no one else. Because there's no one possible I resort to the impossible again, because I want to feel. I unfold myself hopingly and have to be fixed again. Alright what have I noticed - a sense of no alternatives. No men are wanting me. I don't know any men, I say. Of course I do. Three nice men, smart men, I'm courting for my committee. I don't imagine fancying them. They're married. They're too straight. And so. I'm only fifty. I'm everything I can be to be wanted and am not wanted. That is the fact. Do I have to get used to it? And why doesn't Rob count? And why am I sore again? What's going on? I'm crying. 19 Sharon Butala has written something about the country around Eastend - she married a big silent rancher and walks the hills. Feels a charge, she says, meaning maybe what we felt at Rumsy Wheel. I think - my time up north, could I write it now? Also: something about a silent husband who's as other as a tree. The privacy there'd be with someone who had his. Chilcotin. Sharon Butala 1997 The perfection of the morning Ruminator Books Last night with Rob in my bed. My bed's a prairie. The room extends to its edges and out the windows. There was a breeze he was liking. He'd had a rum and coke at home, hours before, and was still loose so I could see just a bit - he'd say something about the current of air and I'd ask him and he'd be tongue-tied but I'd have a moment to imagine how he feels it. "A wild night of sin" - goofy, he said. Exactly. Like you. We were fucking and I could hear K's bear grass clicking in the kitchen - it is not even in the window but hung under the cubbies, and the wind reached deep into the room so he was speaking to me from far - I loved that. Meanwhile Rob's brother-sister body so light so warm so sweet and friendly. We got there. I'm still there. This morning my skin tuned and he at the beginning of the sequence substantial and reaching so I'm fast. And then frightening him with joy. It's such a switch, he complains. He eats out of my hand. We're successful lovers. We get to passages new to us. (- Oh am I going to write somehow.) How am I going to say that one - something about a region, his first four inches and mine - that is physically impossible but it's what I remember, as if the deepest part of the passage and the base of his penis were rooted together. Beyond that it's dim. Something. A transposition. It was simple there. Too complicated for me I said to him, so this morning he gave it to me simple. "Why shouldn't I be happy, you gave me something, you put life into me." A little girl and daddy at the next table as I write. That sort of confident affection, except that he's not a dad, he's a kid too. A going away present I said. Something to make sure you come back he says. Meantime to K I'm saying with calculation, you don't want me so I'm settling for gorgeous sex. You don't let yourself go. But is that so? Yes it is. Now I've been there will I be satisfied and spend the day as I must, business. 21st Yes I was satisfied and ran all day and now it's six on a silvery morning and I'm in the ferry lineup at Horseshoe Bay. Across the divider there are buddleia rooted in cracks of very fractured silver rock. They are stirring like all the trees, like the little fir, no not like the little fir, they have their characteristic motion, the little fir jiggles, the buddleia quests with its weighted branch ends, the larger firs on the sea-side of the road flow north and then spring back. Even that's too general. The fir next to the one I just described was doing something else. Can I remember what. (We've moved half a mile down the hill.) It had shorter branches in a thick bundle. A commotion, contrary motion. I'm writing on the steering wheel. We drive ahead between phrases - just there. Swooped through the empty business core this morning onto the bridge, frightened of the height and speed, the iron walls, more frightened of driving when it's a journey. - Gosh the sights on the ferry - are animals like this, if we could see them? Even the kids. Is there one to like to see? Read Island, 22nd Here there are many birds who reply across the clearing and across other clearings I'm not in. Dreamed so many sorts of things. A building had brown-leaf trees on the roof, both corners of the roof, and then as I look down I keep finding more trees, all single and in corners. Something to do with the old woman. Her building maybe. She was a small old landlady - I think - the kind who seems to have nothing in her, thin, thin-haired, painted, poor - but I see sheets of her notes and they are contemporary - I'm suddenly completely interested - something in the dream I see so fast, something therefore that is made so fast - and is so fine - new in tone - that hardest thing. I keep looking down at my hair, at its shine in the light, iridescence, strands, unhomogeneity, focus and out of focus. A wind begins to sound its near instrument the thick, thick-leafed band of young alders this side of the forest. It's a day with access - I said - a robin clicked down on the bench. There was a beast who screamed in this clearing soon after the baby was born. Mother and father stood in the house in the dark and saw - one from the door, one from the window thrown open - an animal leap thirty feet with the dog in its mouth. Not a small dog. I have a long dress, plaid, with an electric transformer dangling from the hem. Can I wear this coat with it. Is it plaid too? Imagining plaid with plaid. The dress red, the coat, which is maybe a foot shorter, a pale oatmeal color, so pale it's hard to see whether there is a pattern. The woman's notes - the way a dream will give what is too big for the non-dreamer to recover. Be bigger be more alert so you can carry this out with you. I'm aware of my work, 'my work', I mean the project, in this work, for the first time. What can I say about dreams. What will dreaming want to say about dreams. First thing is this - look first at which I is saying - not that there are I's, what quality of I, in a quality space with so many non-axes. First thing, the dissolved sense, Wittgenstein who showed how to shred the question. The cougar got Scratchy. Nobody on the island has cats anymore. I'm sore for Scratchy's death under a pounce on a rainy night. Oh it's quiet. Not simple, so many thing-bits, but the nonvisible is simple. Is that Rowen sneezing in his bed? What's creaking, a dead tree on another. A boat motor, a fly. I'm enlisting people in this project I notice. "Ambitious and fun" Martin said in his fortunate tower, with Kathleen who was 6' tall and soft so his macho looked quite different beside her. "This is a wonderful story altogether" [I say of their connection and their housing]. Green carpet in the lobby. - Michael can play the fiddle! Six years later, is it. I'd never have thought. Elfreda was a fiddler wasn't she. Little branches lifting and sinking. 24 After that I sank into sleepiness, why. At first surprised that I'm here angry with Louie - alright next time that's what I'll deal with - they have her picture up - I wanted to complain to Michael about her poaching - she was here writing in Hjorth Bay. There's Michael's strange walk, short flat step like walking on ice. Sun is burning through soft cloud. I'm so dopey - what is happening in this house - they keep saying Rowen isn't bothered [by Hank's birth] - Michael growls at Rowen all day, a hateful tone - Rowen is the outsider and knows it and knows he mustn't know it - he's careful, does what he can to fit in. This is his dream. There is a little girl with a lot of dolls. She lives with her father. There is another man who helps in the shop. He's dressed all in grey with a grey cap. A flood comes, a really big flood that covers the shop. The little girl is distressed about her dolls. The father dives down for them. Someone hands him the last one, he turns and sees that it was the helper, who is hanging dead in the water. The father swims away as fast as he can. I speak to Michael on the trail back from the school boat. He denies. I say I think Rowen is bothered more than he shows. He says Rowen doesn't hide much. I've seen how careful he is. Michael says he likes how Rowen is much better since Hank was born. How do you mean. He's more independent. He isn't so hurt if I don't speak to him just right. This confirms what the dream says. "Did you have this dream before or after Hank was born?" "Way after." Why didn't I take his picture. I was so dopey yesterday like someone in the forest of sleep. Yes it is beautiful. Something about the food, it's not quite good. Couple collusion. I imagine bringing K here and mediating his irritation. I am doing that already putting myself to sleep. The ugly way the Hjorth Bay house is built, dropped in the wrong spot in a bay where a settler built beautiful unnecessary rock walls to define a scoop of grass up from the scoop of the beautiful bay. An orchard up the hill, a bing cherry tree spreading wide over the neck of the orchard clearing. New tips on the firs pines cedars hemlocks draw the trees on the hill slope, draw the set of the branches, sharp and stacked in triangles, curved like clouds, staggered and padded like small shelves of mossy rock. Vancouver 26th Barry's show - Phil's Beethoven - being famous - what should I notice about that - people say they like the photo - people say it's a good article - but the significant fact for people seems to be just that I had my picture on the paper - it is an instance of prototype activation - see? The question is what is fame. The answer in this case is that fame is like being famous, suddenly I'm routed through respect circuits. It is the same phenomenon as being invisible - it is automatism. Then the next question is, is it better to be famous than to be invisible? The answer I had so far is that being invisible is a strain and being famous is the absence of that hardship, but the look on people's faces - imagine seeing that everywhere you go, that would be miserable. But then you're in a position to relieve them. And also you could look across the heads of the people with abject looks on their faces to the people who are looking at you straight. And then there is the test of whether fame otherwise is worth having: are there people looking at you straight who can see you, and who didn't see you before, and if they didn't see you before, why didn't they, if they are people who can see? So I ask the system: what is fame good for? It says love woman likes it. Do you mean the child wants it? Yes. What effect does that have on the whole? It makes you more capable of action. Less inhibited? Yes. Do you want to say more about that? It makes you more sensitive. How so? More intelligent. Do you mean people give you something? Yes. Somehow in the whole you're allowed to be smarter because you've shown that you're working for the whole? YES. They give you something in encounters? They also give you something psychically? YES. Is there a best way of handling it? Don't take it as directed at the ego. What is it directed at? It's support for the work, it's confirmation of the work. Is it confirmation of the academic work? No, only of the garden work. Is the garden work my most important work? Yes. I would like something in film or writing or philos to be my most important work. They temper each other. Will I be able to have the same kind of confirmation for my other work? Why do people like the garden? It's magic. Do you mean it speaks to the unconscious? Yes. What does it say. (Hierophant.) It says repression?! Sublimation. Powerful impulse toward pleasure powerfully redirected, that's why I call it garden wank? No - you do that to say you're above it. But it is wank? Yes. So I'm contemptuous of people's liking. Yes. Am I contemptuous of myself for doing it? And exploiting it. YES. Is that why Joyce hasn't been there? Am I right to be contemptuous of it? And do what instead? Deal with conflict - the conflict between desire and safety. But does that fame support the real work? With resolving a conflict? - Beethoven. C Minor Variations. When it was slow he sang right into my body. When it is fast and loud he jerks and pounds and loses it. I was afraid to look at his face. It was a look I would love, like a look in bed, his best and the boy, staring and jerking his mouth, showing everything. And his feet in furry slippers on the pedals. I brought a shopping bag full of wet roses of twenty kinds, unpiled them and named them. She took them and was distributing them into vases on the dining room table while he bored me with Bach. She - oh another sight than I expected. At the party she was a beautiful girl in a miniskirt and I hated her on sight. Three years later she is a pinch-nosed worn thing with no bosom and a bow from crotch to knee. In charge of the refrigerator. It's hormonal, it says. I instantly didn't hate her. - Is Song of Solomon as bad as I think it is? Pictures and music compete. Oboe and background compete. It is pretended love. The voices are false. Her tones are false. The images are like a woman turned into a car. A wrong relation to women. The wings of Nike is better? No. Also a wrong relation to women. The night of the magician was dreadful. He does prefer his image of the woman. Undeveloped relation to - he's trying to make a relation to love woman. Arras is good. So-so. What's your criterion? Relation to the unconscious. What does the unconscious want it to be? Conscious and unconscious sharing pleasure like being on a date together. Is being moved a sign of that? No. What is? Being bereft. So pain is the pleasure they share? Yes. You are surprising me. (The lovers) It's a sign that they are in touch rather than split. Pain in the maker is a sign. Yes. Pain in the experiencer too? No. Barry and Goldberg make these things without enough pain. Trapline was made with pain, does that mean it's good? Yes. Is Rebecca right that it has to do with resolving a conflict? Is there more you have to say about Barry's work? (Silence.) Should I talk to him about it? No. He has a blind spot, does he want to work with me because of that? Yes. I work on his blind spot, he gives me technical help, it will be a struggle. Yes. Should I write out what I think of Song of Solomon? Yes. Bruce Baillie was direct and right. Marilyn. It was adoration. These guys are afraid to be seen adoring. (All my life is the same.) They are not responsible to their impulse. They want adoration to be disguised as various kinds of mastery. Precisely they are saying "That's sucking off the tit." The charged, simple voice of adoration. Is it always simple? Bach. Mozart, Beethoven. Skill is built in conflict. - I saw the beauty of the structure and sighed. A tension endlessly fruitful. Can it still be fruitful if I begin to love it? People's quality depends on how much of the conflict they 30th It's Monday and I haven't spoken here since Thursday. I've zonked when I wasn't doing business - a novel, short stories, Arctic bears on TV with Rob. Forcing myself to phone and ask for things, lists on folded sheets of paper. I'm weary and shabby - wd it be dangerous to say I'm not a soul? I looked up from reading something at the worktable, Beethoven biography's index, and caught a face in the mirror collapsed with misery, not what I'd thought I was feeling. - Now it's evening - roses, the scent - the day - still trying to track Kathleen - I got Barry signed. Came into the Centre for Experimental and Constructive mathematics and there was a woman who'd been described, long black hair, nose ring, black clothes, but who was not who I expected to see. A little girl with clean new teeth and pale skin, a smile that bares her gums. Not the sharp city French look, a round smooth unaggressive look, and is thirty and a business woman. And Loki who looks his name - a long nose tilted up, large bright wide-set fox-red eyes. A computational physicist he says. He shows me pictures. The one I like is a three-dimensional smoke - and there's the one that's a granular ring that comes up from a few dots (Nathalie is a gorgeous resource - Let's have an office together and we'll try to get the department to buy us an Indy, we need it for our work, she says.) And Phil looks at me with liking, and we meet Leslie in the cafeteria, just after we come in - as it happens - the three of us women Special Arrangements docs. (Leslie says the graphics lab will help. Natalie says she'll help. Loki will help.) Leslie shows her vid and says how she did it, three minutes in three years. A muffler and a cooking pot gasping for air. She's a filmmaker. What else - Kathleen isn't calling me because she doesn't like my proposal, she's rationalist. 31st Yesterday there was this odd moment: I opened volume 1 of the Coleridge notebooks I'd brought back from the library. It had markers in it. I was suddenly staring at my own name. A check written to Muggs. I turn it over. Muggs's signature. Cancel stamp. Look at the face again. 1987. I do not at all remember having this book out. Then I find another marker, a photo of a brown mountain bare in a field of snow. There's an airplane wing across the left edge. Did I leave the photo too? I have no idea. Was it left by someone amused at collecting readers' personal traces among writers' personal traces? Then I should leave it and add another piece. One advantage of white houses - their shine in the moon. I won't labour it but there's more in that than the picture. Shine and moon rhyme by means of the picture. What did I dream - is it gone. A few nights ago my turn to be the camera operator on the feature film. Have to figure out quickly how it works. The assistant opens it to wipe dew off the sheet of glass. He doesn't take it all. Halation effect he says. What to talk to Joyce about. That look of collapse in misery. Who feels when I don't. Louie? It said that. I was driving to school yesterday in anguish squinting against the light. University is hell, not to me but to her. I rode out the day and came home vacant and filled the outside of myself with roses and was still vacant. (Imagining an office pink, carpeted, with plants and a green teapot.) - Love woman talking about university - pink walls and plants she says and then sinks - What is that, Joyce says - sadness - I tell about the depression of the successful paper. "What success do you want?" "I don't want success, I want being, fullness. Doing seems to abandon being." And then feel a curious - is that the word - electrical tension up the back of my legs thru the small of my back up into the nape of the neck and over. She says circulate it. Now feel what's happening. "The dark spot is here." I touch the forehead just at the root of the right eyebrow. Breathe into it she says. "It's about the right eye." Like an electrical wash of the right eye. Then the lower rim of the forehead starting to twitch. Spot jerks in a series across the breadth of it. I let it go. Is it opening my eyes? Maybe. But still letting it be. A charged blank looking at the wall with my mouth open. "What's happening now?" "There's a spot here." Below the ribs on the right. Breathe into it she says. A current up the back of the right side. "Bring it up through the chakras. Just report, I won't ask." I show the open cone at the crown. "I thought about the university that maybe I could keep a connection with the sky through the top of the head." She likes that. I drive to school with my dossier. Meet Sherri in an upstairs corridor. She has ditched her weak boy and looks different - couldn't say how. As if she'd lost a sort of hidden sneer. Then Chris [Welsby] at the hamburger line. Whole body blown up with beer, sad little red and blue eyes. Something about defeat, I don't know what. We praise Lis Rhodes and David Larcher who never will be stopped. Coleridge says genius is sanguine, we're grouchy only if we're less than that. - The silence of Newton's mind for 20 years - & what a beautiful object even a single wave is! and I particularly watched the beautiful Surface of the Sea Are not vivid Ideas themselves a sort of pleasure, as Music 2nd June A man somewhere in the big attic-like space has said a kind of puffer fish is good to eat and dangerous to touch. I've picked one up. I happened to pick it up in the middle of its body and tho' it is swelling to enlarge its spines and writhing to try to hook my fingers it isn't able to hurt me. I immediately notice some little emblem embedded in the skin of what might be its chest. It is so protean in its swelling and writhing that I am not able to think of what shape it is. Head and tail there and there, I think. I'm considering cooking and eating it, as if seeing it cooked, a small flaccid beige mass. How is it cooked? At some moment I've set it down and picked it up again. Not at the right spot. It is able to nip me with one or the other end but there's less harm than I would have thought. I reposition my hand in its middle. It has become more desperate. There's an instant in its writhings where it is a small golden dragon. It seems to feel that now it's doomed, because it suddenly shrinks and releases eggs which as I notice them are followed by hundreds of scurrying babies. I let it go. 3rd the ---- of each appearance from the recollections of so many others subtly combining with it .... Ideas of full sail modifying the impression of the naked Masts .... How much of the pleasure derived from the countenance of an old friend or woman long beloved - at least, continually gazed at may we trace it to this in Dreams - so very strangely do they instantly lead to Sara as the first waking Thought / no recollection giving a hint of the means, except only that in some incomprehensible manner the whole Dream seems to have been - about her? nay - perhaps, all wild - no form, no place, no incident, any way connected with her! - What then? Shall I dare say, the whole Dream seems to have been Her - She. Does not this establish the existence of a Feeling of a Person quite distinct at all times, & at certain times perfectly separable from, the Image of the Person? I seem to see, tho' darkly, that the Inferences hence are many and important Biographia Literaria and Notebooks at the same time. The finished work is very finished, stately trampled grass. Reading it for historical view of imagining is duty reading. In the notebooks, anything on character or politics is quaint. But there are observations of sea-color or imagining phenomenology that are new - what that says is there's a kind of attention that in these 200 years is still unworked. Fat constipated Coleridge's eager brain. He wouldn't seize on materialism because it seems to diminish the prestige of ego/God and so his speculations about association hang in some mentalist air I'll look at more, the air of experience but thought of as causal. I'll find out what 'mentalist' means. What kind of fantasy causation is, that allows it to transfer - Oh, half an hour. My time has changed, the application's date is past, the gate is open into summer. It's June, 4-day [work] periods at intervals. 13 of them if I work through [the summer]. 4 attachment of the affections to generalizations Do not words excite feelings of Touch (tactual ideas) more than distinct visual Ideas - i.e. of Memory? that Proteus Essence that could assume the very form, but yet known and felt not to be the Thing by that difference of the Substance which makes every atom of the Form another thing / - that likeness not identity - an exact web, every line of direction miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk - that on difference of Thing & Symbol 3 distinct classes of psychological facts: We feel 2. we perceive or imagine, 3. we think She, she herself, and only she Shone in her body visibly Those Whispers just as you have fallen or are falling asleep - what are they & whence? They have not the Heart to understand the answer; but I trust that if I have virtue enough to live, that I shall instruct the good to put the feelings of their own Souls into a language, that shall kindle those feelings into a tenfold heat & blaze - so that finally whatever is really & truly a part of our existing Nature, a universally existing part, may become an object of our love, & admiration - yea, that the Pressure of the Husband's Hand or swelling chest on the bosom of the beloved Wife shall appear as strictly & truly virtuous, as Actively virtuous ... O best reward of Virtue! to feel pleasure made more pleasurable, in legs, knees, chests, arms, cheek - all in deep quiet, a fountain with unwrinkled surface yet still the living motion at the bottom, that "with soft and even pulse" keeps it full - & yet to know that this pleasure so impleasured is making us more good, is preparing virtue & pleasure for many known & unknown to us The beautiful Milk Thistle -   part 4 aphrodite's garden volume 20: 1994 march-july work & days: a lifetime journal project