| aphrodite's garden volume 20 part 4 - 1994 june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
5th June 1994 Sunday morning I won't say it's your birthday Pork chop, asparagus, vitamin pills, tea, Luke's CD player with Wave edge, clean bed except for the blood leak, Coleridge, David Mac, This morning I want to copy my journal for him. That got to me. Yesterday still the bumper after work days, sore, junking. Today I'll begin. Begin with your image. As soon as I say that an edge almost too acute. I'm saying that in work, my assembly of men, I will be constantly and transparently seductive I will have to walk around in it knowing I am sending signals of a starved woman I - the I who can walk on ice unknowing tight diaphragm with the woman held down under the I who is yelling marry me. YOU marry her says Joyce. But is that what she wants? Yes she says. But if I marry her I am not her, and wasn't I born to be her? It's too late. You have constructed yourself other than her.
When I said that I saw or imagined having jumped from the position of the seeing to the position of the seen - I haven't said it - it was a sensation of being in an unfamiliar position held with effort, here, on the left, looking diagonally forward and right. Do I feel it the other way when I look toward her? Don't know. - How far away was 'he'? Twenty feet? Something like that. Later - I began [transcribing journal], I typed a page and a half and want to stop. The slog. What feels so live here I am afraid will be dead in type. I look at it narrowing my eyes. Beyond that. What's wrong with me today. As if all I want is love. Right now. Or if not, then maybe ice cream. 6th What changes if I find David C in myself again - I found him in Arras, an ideal space. So am I led by him or her - oh, see, he is the image, she is the feeling - how long will this exercise go on -
Convergences we feel. A brain theory that would give us a story of how some of us can sense the direction of the ancient common roots, the few, of the many worlds we have in our vast volumetric map. Hello. Am I in the midst of myself today? Almost? Is the love dream what it takes to get me there? Dear larger one I'm wanting him so much, what should I do
Wanting him is wanting him to want me back, oh it's like waiting to be able to get on with it
Yes, that, I am not sure whether it's true
If it's true, then I get ready, it's true for me even if it is not true for him (I wrote it's true for me even if it's not true for me). If it isn't true, what, could I suppress it? Replace it? Use it?
When I was a girl I didn't fight with it, I outgrew it.
Please tell me about the state of stretched which seems to say decide
Tight heart
Inconclusive, wandering
Phone graduate heads, Rowen's thing, phone Natalie, Visa card, David F, shopping.
Oh I'm bored with this junk! It said make conditions and mean them. Go for broke. Real marriage, real sex. Or not. Larger one, what do you think
I'm willing to give up but I don't know how to give up softly
7th Dear you, it is early June, I don't know where you are, I don't know when you are coming back, you've owed me a letter for months and you aren't going to write. I'm struggling this week, for some reason, as if it's beginning to be too long. I still have this thing to say: I want you, and I think you want me back. You might come to it in yourself and you might keep running away. I don't know whether I can influence that. I can't do anything with you unless you know you want it. If you did, we could do quite a lot. It would go deep, that's the possibility in it. A deep home. We'd shatter each other, I'm shattered already, and then we'd reconstruct each other. There is something profoundly right in this connection, which is so difficult too. It's difficult because it is profound. We can't fool ourselves in it. It's all or nothing. That's what I have to say. I want to marry you. Heart, soul, mind, body, I want to marry you altogether. I want to take on fixing your impotence so we can really fuck. I want you to find some form of emotional back-up so you can stop skirting the word love as if it were a pit full of snakes. I want you to give yourself up to whatever work you want most, so you can be happy with me. Those are my real conditions, what I think there'd have to be for it to work. And I would go a long way to meet your real conditions. I have already. I'm capable of a lot. I'm interested. I really don't know whether you are. Maybe you aren't. So far your messages are mixed. Will you let me know plainly? Don't think of kindness, if it's no, it's no. If it's maybe, it's maybe. Yes is the terrifying one. How's your nerve? Mine is good. It collapses but then it recovers. Love from E. I'll put the date again - June 7th. It's a good letter. I felt balanced when I'd written it. It says I want you but don't imagine it's because I'm weak. Now I know what to do. Put things away, put him out of mind. If he contacts me, give it to him. If he doesn't, let it go. When I've given it to him, put him out of mind. If he doesn't rise to it, let it go. Find out when he's coming back and then stay off the Drive. Avoid him at the garden. Find my independent pleasure. That. Freedom. Go for just that. See whether I can find a direct and simple knowing, not depending on Joyce, system, Rob. Ask for it. See what now there is everywhere. Look after what needs looking after. Say to the larger one: here I am. Say to the smaller one: here you are. Say to my friends: lightness. (That one - can I do that? That lovely thing? Not yet.) Okay. 8th Last night sitting I was going to say gently, this is a time when you thoughts should not come for a while, I promise I will do what I can, I am doing what I can, you could let me be for a while. It came to me a different way. I said oh, you thoughts, I see you are a way of being love, yes you can come anytime, I'll love you, you are innocent thoughts, as if my heart had its doors open, its little doors, and there was a warmth inside. That was right. Speaking to David too, saying thank you. I wonder who is really sane. Do I know anyone, probably many, whose judgment is under attack and steady. Maybe not many. The difficulty of making decisions without support. That is the aerial art of the wire. I want especially in that decision to have it destiny's gift so I'll know it's right. Imagine yourself on a wire and secure. Your passions are not heavy passions. They are storms around your lightness and balance. That's why he [Ondaatje] has that image. Here is today. A spongy sky. Grey. Quiet. "No one has ever seen Michael write." [Ondaatje] Why do I say that.
You call that putting him out of your mind? You were there all day - what was it like? - I kept wondering what it is for, what's it for? The answer is it's for more than one thing. It's not a conscious spell and it's not a telepathic conversation. It is a way other loves and joys speak. Listen to the tone. Widen the love to love the lover. I have to say that to myself how many times in twenty-four hours. Mrs Harris meeting me in her sewing room says it is twenty years since her husband died. "You lost him quite early" I say, warmly because I love her love for him. "Sixty-three. He was such a hard worker. He couldn't keep still. He built our house." There's a picture behind us, an etched line drawing. "He built this part first. It was going to be a garage, but he'd put so much into it when we were living in it, and materials were hard to get after the war, he moved it and built onto it." A family house, two storeys, a normal house. Porch, basement. "He'd put so much into it." That. She has very pale eyes, I couldn't see water in them but I realized she was crying and wanted to bite my lip. "You were lucky." I say that from where I am as I dust her things. Her jewel box has his picture pinned with a hatpin into the quilted lining of its lid. Malcolm Harris. This was true all winter: I come into her shabby small pale place and take secret shelter in her rectitude. 9 Louie's brother's children - many of them run into the room to meet me - a little black haired boy with a big head - I am at a writer's gathering - more behind that I'm not going into - Louie's mother is going to cross the desert with them - it is a plan I don't know much about but have pictures. I confront my mother at the end of a room. I'm yelling. As if barring her with a sort of pole held horizontally. I'm saying she hasn't wanted to recognize my happiness. I am often sad but I've had moments of exquisite happiness. This confrontation is because she has brought me a letter I wrote wanting to know what it says. There's a quilted saddle on a little pink horse appliquéd on it. I read what's written inside the curved padded edge of the saddle - it's about the time with Jam when we were transparent - not that word but - this is hard to recover. I'm feeling I should be writing the love book - something like exchanging small psychic packets. I yell at her - hear my father grumble behind a curtain. I ignore him. She protests back, she says I just feel sorry for her. We are seeing Oliver with his hair dyed coming out of a restaurant and washing the windows - scraping them with the wiper. He and someone are on a railway car. I'm pushing in the streets, it's night. The long end of the car swipes sideways so I have to dodge it. When the car is carried around a corner the tracks are on the black street. It might be after that I pick up the story of Louie's mother again. A large old van loading the people who are going across. They're saying one of the passengers isn't there. I know it's her. She can't get the children across unless she walks, but the children are among the people who are going. I'm trying to piece together the plan. A woman who is deformed whose hind legs are short so she is walking like a dog a woman who is a dog tho' I don't think of her as that, but as a woman with something wrong with her legs comes and wants something. Her sex is naked. We refuse because she is as she is. I am with two gay men who have taken hold of two male dogs and are washing their genitals in the station washroom sink. They say the wolves/dogs do what the woman tells them. Louie's mother must have had intercourse with a dog, to turn herself into a dog to get across the desert. On the other side how will she turn herself back. Is it something to do with the diagram I saw earlier where there were pictures of vegetables suspended over a stream bed. The children would be there and she should come toward the food which would strengthen her. Something like that. - Work finished early. I dressed up as if for a meeting, sat in the Calabria, sat, looked, suddenly wrote David. Phoned for his address, copied the poem, wrote fast and not counting syllables, he can think what he likes, I'm free. Rode on the bike to mail it. Went to the garden. Joyce came. Gushing so I suspected she didn't want to see me there any more than I wanted to see her. And now. 9 Vacuuming up a mouse's nest with babies. That was the last image in a long dark waking. Running off this morning this is what I find spinning my wheels - that I'm talking to myself about what 'marrying' means - there's the spinning and then there is with it the dialogue that is not quite conscious and that I bring out when I write. What is it about the word 'marry', it is like 'Mary' tho' also it isn't, homonyms have the same sound irrelevantly because there is as if an inner sound, a feeling, which is the partitioning feel a sweet-cheeked sound, it is not a sound of sex, it is a sound of innocence looking at someone in a certain way that says you - it's light. 10 The aching of the end of the week. Fine poison ache a thin acid in all the muscles that work. Waking dull before it's light, in this heart-dullness, I say, what is that madness, what was I thinking. Then I dream spectacularly again. But haven't the energy to write it. In a painted scene the roses are painted colors like old filmstock or a painted photograph. Blue-ish pinks. I'm there among those roses with a gay man and his friend. We walk under a lamp and there the color is full bright white daylight. I am moved - illuminated - flooded with feeling - that their artifice is so good it can turn real this way. That's approximate. Then something related, maybe it's their version, the big face of a whale, wide smiling mouth head-on. I don't like their version - there's a smaller fish I'm wanting shown. I see it thru water swimming fast a dark shape shrinking and stretching. There is an octopus, I don't know whether the same or different. A small octopus. A large octopus. The large one gets hold of me where I am on the wet rocks. How am I going to get free. I'd have to get off the wet rocks. Somebody maybe should grab me. That's more definite than it was. I woke loggy as if I was in fact being held by an underwater thing. Sleeping again fixed me. What am I learning when I note dreams these days. As if I'm learning an accuracy in the noting. It can be always more accurate. What aspect is intended. Probably there is a grammar. There are events, the ones where I want to say "suddenly it ...," and those are marked as a sort of verb. There are qualities before and after. States. Is it transactions of adjectives? There are features like the gay men that indicate what register we're in. Sorts of information the dream needs to give: paragraph grammar maybe. Some dream objects I think are there to carry qualities not important in themselves. Then there are the day-ego remarks on the dream that probably have to be disregarded or taken as symptomatic on another level. 11 When I is an unbearable place to be. Listen my dear I'm very troubled - I have such an impulse to love you and take you on - I can't see you without wanting you and feeling you and feeling for you - but I'd have to be a saint and I am not, I'd have to have unending strength and I do not. I am a hungry spirit like you and I don't know how to bear loving you if you don't love me back. 12th From below I see a window onto Daphne's bed. The tendon behind the knee, her beautiful long leg. A curly head. She has good-looking women bending toward her. Her literary success. I am up in her room. This has been a conference, I ask what she's doing next. She's going to New York. She'll be in a hotel next to Cheryl's. I walk out with her noticing she's wearing high heels. Thinking I couldn't wear those, I'm surprised she's wearing them, if women going to New York refused, it soon wouldn't be expected. We are sitting next to each other at Sieberts' kitchen window. A picture window looking east over fields. It is a deeply beautiful picture, two pictures I think, in their frames, side by side. Reds in the landscape. Sieberts come in, young and old men, I try to guess which ones they are and am getting it wrong. Riding on a bus. Michael with a baby on his back. When the bus stops I set a footstool next to the step for Michael. Hop on ahead. I ride upstairs with boy kids. Find a stash of quarters in the ripped front edge of a seat. Want to get them out without the kids noticing. Wait 'til they get off. When I get off Michael waiting on the platform with a pushchair.
- From the beginning use language for it that assumes the model I aim at, and say why. Propose to create a language in which unreal questions don't come up. Constellation / activation / perception ('image'). Body feelings and tensions ('somatic') 'meaning' Magic laws of imaging effect:
14th Tuesday, coughing and blowing my nose - these four days haven't been - I need someone to say, this is how you are, this is what's happening, this is what's going to happen. I see sharp strong lines like the caustic in Trapline - sharpen me - as if I can't sharpen myself just now - what have I been doing - I ripped through Leah's piles of books about imagery - hideous professional psychology, or New Age pleasant summaries. What do I want to say there - books written out of books, both types are. Pleasant female mind unreadable because it's textureless like lentil soup, unpleasant male minds in rubber gloves speaking English with the accent of a German machine. Test procedures. "A fifty-five year old female subject with depressive ...." 'The image' for both is like a petit objet a, a deified lump. There is no such thing anywhere, why are we putting it on a little cake-stand. Fantasies about magic pictures. There is magic, more than one kind - being able to give ourselves experience. Being able to do it. I want to talk about it in the way of being it. Also to say: this is what we need from a theory of imagining. This is what we've tried to get from it. This is what it has covered. Coleridge and the motion of leaves. Mind as. Today I have this radical idea: since loving is life energy, couldn't I consider it a resource and just enjoy loving and adoring and ardently desiring and dreaming and rehearsing and working toward, and stop being very very afraid that I will love somebody more than they love me, and stop being hurt if they don't. - Is that possible? A sad silence. The town's warriors defeated tonight. Maybe everyone in the city will prosper less and in New York, more. [Stanley Cup 1994 New York Rangers beat the Vancouver Canucks 4 games to 3] - Dear you, I thought I could just talk to you instead of about you. Your subtenant has moved, that means you may be back any day. I want to say I'm haunted by having been mean. I'm trying to go back and undo. I'm wanting to say, I understand you better now. I understand myself with you now. I won't be like that any more. I didn't understand how much I would have to change to understand you. More than that, I thought I had to show you how tough I could be, so you wouldn't be contemptuous of me for being a woman. So I wouldn't be shamed by being contempted. Preemptive strike. You weren't contemptuous, though I was. You were something else - thoughtless, abrasive, disappointed. Saying to me - you're not a woman. I wonder if you know you did that. I guess we're even. But those aren't good grounds. It looks hopeless when I remember that. You got my weak spot. Did I make sure I got yours? Yes I got it. 15 Oh Mary Watkins. Listening and telling. And loneliness. Dear you, I don't feel I have finished hearing your stories. I said that and grieved. He won't listen to mine. I want to be with him but to be with him I would have to only listen, never be heard, the way with others I have only been heard, and haven't listened. Ass-crawling he said. I am thinking what is really the sexual valence of listening. I have felt there's more potency in listening. It is brave, responsible, goes alertly interestedly sensitively perceptively willfully into an unknown where it is no longer surrounded by its own landscape. It sets keel. It bites into waters given, whatever the chop. Sees the storm through, if there should be one. It proves the spirit. But when he is the sea and when I listen he is the vagina listening to itself, he's the sea of his experience given to him again he is not the keel, he is remembering being the keel in another life. He is feeling himself being the keel in a time when someone else is in charge so he can leave the present to them while he vanishes. A being that was deferred while doing did. The way Louie would put herself into my hands and go be the sea. Or say it another way, go back and remember being born. 17 Leah said she's fine being the student admiring intelligent people "such as yourself" but doesn't talk well and fails at being a colleague. I saw a front rank of people standing looking at the sun and Leah preferring to stand behind them looking at their backs seeing them and their shadows. What would it feel like to go and stand in the line with no one in front and people on either side all looking in the same direction? She's afraid to trust what she knows because she's afraid of how critical she is. If she criticizes them they will criticize her. That is a stress, yes. Dear you, How have I been, while you were away? Struggling. I have been so puzzled. There is someone in me who wants to marry you. She's completely confident in it, it's right up the center. But that's not what you want so I have been left struggling to understand how I can be so certain of something that isn't so. It's like a rift, an uncoordination. 18 The way smoking makes breath visible. Makes air's motion visible, a marker. What she means by 'imaginal' could be everything the brain does, everything that is imaginable as electromagnetic shapes in time. The paradox of 'paying attention' to an image as if it were there as an image before attention is given. Mary Watkins 1976 Waking dreams Spring Publications Discriminate the way it changes if you say attention in part of an ongoing electromagnetic run. We don't know whether 'attention' is something extra in loco or whether it is a gating, exit picture. How 'mind' is imagined. Treading a line that is continuously surrounded by a sense of other lines that could be taken - I want it not positive. "To establish ties which then make the other unique in all the world." "But you will sit a little closer to him every day." Then I'm hurt because I think she is doing it and I'm not. "His loyalty to a flower - the image of a rose that shines through his whole being like the flame of a lamp, even when he is asleep." I left Rob crying this morning. I said, I feel there is nowhere for me to grow into. I have already initiated everything I have been inspired to. You feel possibilities but you aren't inspired to initiate them, so it's as if they don't exist. He weeps and lets me go. Last week when he was walking on Commercial a gang of young men jostled him, surrounded him, pressed him against a window. He thought, I have to stay completely still, if I make any sort of move I'll be on the ground and they'll be kicking my head in. His large heavy bag was hanging across his chest. He couldn't take it off without starting something. Suddenly a small young woman was ordering them off him, telling him what to do. Get the hell out of here, go, go. - "We need calmness and quiet, and time to understand each other well" Snake says to Arevin. Vonda McIntyre 1978 Dreamsnake (not lst pub) Dear you, I will give up sex if I have to, to be with you. I am frightened to have said that. It is a large loss. But I know I mean it. 19 Walking with a younger woman. An old car rusty red cuts us off by turning suddenly across the sidewalk. I thump its fender annoyedly. It is stopped in the middle of the parking lot, is a big old school bus that has run over my friend. Young men storm out of it, one with a spidery long machine gun. They order me to pull the young woman out from under the front wheel. Yeah alright. I have her on a cloth and with other people drag her onto the side of the concrete lot. Coleridge notes: imagination1 symbolizing ability, "perceiving and producing symbols," "imaginal perception that sees meaning," "self recognition of subject in object" imagination2 perceptual simulation, reactivation ability spirit "one in its radicals" with nature 20 Marching up the PRBI steps in ranks. [Peace River Bible Institute] I'm leading. He stops us and turns us onto another route. A wall of dolls? at the top. Or babies? I'm showing something. Haven't got this. We were going to show how the canoe slides into its place under the seat, but then she does it by herself. An older woman. Am I going to have an abortion. I say to a young woman, Everybody tells me to abort, there's nobody who doesn't. I don't know what to do. Something about Frank earlier. A same dilemma about the bees. I'm wanting and not wanting to kill them. It seems I have killed them though I thought I just imagined it. Spray can at the entrance. It's nice and quiet around here. Looking at the hole they emerge from. One last bee comes out. I'm thinking the queen will have to emerge. This one is the queen. She's black and furry. Look she's as big as the cat, which has bitten into her neck. People coming into the tent, an oldish woman my mother's age. Head them off, I don't want them near the queen. Now I have to explain to the gardeners. 21 Dear you, I've often written you this winter. I knew you didn't want the letters and I won't send them. The futility of my attachment makes my heart tremble. It is as if my best and nearest self is futile. There is no place for it. Dear you, I fell deep deep into love with you. I want to marry you. That is just a fact of nature. I can't protect myself from it. What I need is for you to know what you want. If it is true that you don't want to be with me, don't play cat and mouse. Don't give me wonderful presents and take me into your arms. Really let me go. Don't come to the garden. Don't speak to me on the street. If you want to know what kindness is, it's this: either take me on or cut me loose. A Monday afternoon. I crashed a seminar at Emily Carr and got thrown out. Not before a lunchtime conversation with an engineer, a large man with a grandmother face, who wants to study the circle. Trace Bond recording epileptic seizures at UBC. Today I'm sad, discouraged. Dear larger one, will you talk to me?
Do I ever stop talking to you? I'm saying, help me, I don't understand, it seems unending. I'm tired. I'm so sore. I'm sick of psychology. I want feelings to know what they are and be what they feel they are and not animus projection, second-stage birth reactivation, inner marriage, integration. I'm sick of looking at men homelessly. I'm sick of not making sense to myself. I'm sick of suffering that comes to nothing.
Don't ask that. It has no exit.
Skill is built in the conflict.
I saw the beauty of the structure and sighed. - I'm lying on the grass and it is very wide. I say, Please let this happen: I am in right relation to Ken Sallit. It is simply what it is, on both sides. If I need to be a home with a man, then there is a man I'm satisfied and excited to be with, and he is satisfied and excited to be with me too. And if I don't need that then I am high and peaceful without it. Ready to ask for a good boat not a swamped one, see. Okay, leave it and go shopping. Eat lunch properly. Go to the garden. Sit still at home. I love you. 21st Looking at Rob what's different about him? A small head. He's cut his hair. This brick surround, shallow steps in sets. The bricks set carefully so there's a slight gutter in the centre of every sidewalk to lead water away. White pointing and very carefully cut bricks. I keep seeing more and more steps and sidewalks. He did this by himself and how could he have done it so fast. - What she said [Joyce] sitting in a print dress. "I know it's endless. Yes you have been patient. All you can do when it comes is feel it. Use wanting to free yourself." I was on the spot and argumentative, not thinking first. I am feeling like going away in July, just away My dear, Edith Wiens, Strauss songs. I was hearing them with you. Their German and their mood. They are the only lieder I like, such honest longing. Look at this day. Leafy evening. I have my elbow on the kitchen windowsill, there's honeysuckle in the air, the little bite of footsteps in the alley. All the other sounds (no, writing there's the pencil - did you hear it? - the scrape of the dash) are quite far away and soft. When I said that a flurring in the right ear, like the sound of a moth. A man walking quickly skirting the park. It isn't you. I'm just going to keep doing this until I don't anymore. It is a necessity sometimes, a pleasure sometimes. You're going to settle for somebody with half the heart and soul and mind and bravery I bring you. Aren't you. But you haven't so far, not in all these years. That's something. What are you reading? When you sit on a rock outside the cookshack, after supper, in the solstice twilight. Slapping mosquitoes. Sunburnt and weary. Pleased with yourself maybe, if the day went well. Did you ever get my letter? The moon's almost full. Missing a one-day shaving off its self-side edge.
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