| aphrodite's garden volume 3 part 3 - 1986 june-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
12 June Last evening lying in Michael's arms in the red armchair, my head on his shoulder, blue jean thighs up on the arm, near sleep in so unusual comfort, seeing the garden, images after a day in love working there. Clearing the south and making a seat and a wall. The wall's only suggested, by laying the green rocks up against the potatoes - lovely scales, the bit sift on the path, small rocks in the ditch running past, beyond it very small monument stones, buttercup heads floating, vetch rafts, sheen. If I turn sideways and look over the potato hill, it's down onto a cultivated field with fine individual beets, tiny carrot tops (basil buttons) effervescent California poppies. The cold frame like a factory over the road. In the morning making love with the imagined one who knows how, coming into a lovely soft mind, the early mornings with Jam. Self presence quiet to see the one speaking in me is my other, like any other. The gardens our homologies. Henry's long thin patch with malt barley seamed through. My neighbour's healthy altogether coherent effective square. Peggy's odd skimped little dust patch. Pam's half-used material. Tex's shallow abandoned hole. André's deep abandoned hole. Gretchen's broad social experiment with cute seashells and liddle piles of stones, patient green manuring and glorious crush of rye, vetch and field-pea purple eye. David and ---'s pit methodically planted with 2 kinds of bought seedling. 13 With the cowboy (since button jeans) (and black short sleeve shirt) (heavy socks, worn-out sandals) at the garden, Gretchen brings over the bee man in coverall, optical glass, woman's conical straw hat, looks ninety, had hives on his apartment building roof. "When one of my boys was about twelve he was just starting to be interested in bees and he asked me how you caught a swarm. I said you made a box and put it in a tree, that's all I told him." Michael with his mouth open. "We saw the old spruce with a lot of dead limbs. A lumberjack wouldn't climb that tree. I saw him down there with his nose poked in a swarm of bees." The kid complaining. Great open sky pressing hard. He's in Expo clothes we laugh at, 'summer wear.' But my blue silk kerchief on his head knotted at the corners, bare legs shown off in the buggy. We look at him outside Mrs Gomez's: when they're one your work is almost done. Big child. Yesterday climbed upstairs. But in the corridor naked pulled up by the banister rail, stretching pointed foot, curvy cupid - a little one - baby. Note: the roses by Michael's house, best ones around, small, so fresh a color, so climbing they're high in his holly, simple curves of the long whips and each rose on a single stalk just the length for taking inside - elegant and exceptional - in these days' sights of roses too big or too maroon. Worried at times, how garden love absorbs and is endless. Walking around, myself - oh I get to still be my own body I like. 14
The practice of making a mount 12 short chapters concerned with: the situation the seasons climate soil herbs fruits woods waters minerals beasts fowl & fish a system for existence full of secrets for human to discover interested in all that went on in the new chemistry but so far from it, eager for books and news and tools and trees and roses from his old friend - At this a knock. Michael and she and he. [M's parents] They're nice. Brown, bright-eyed and live. Two tall and thin. But oh heaviness comes down. Awful presents, Isn't this cute. They claim the baby and are not interested in me. The moment on the threshold his eyes straight to my little foot, mine say watch yerself hard and sharp. A zing. There's the liking for Michael's body and this one instant battle. I know his scrutiny. And the gone-away eyes. Walking to dim sum I feel him on the sidewalk herding me, trying, toward the center. Stick to my edge in front. And realize I've taken them onto a ground where they know nothing and I give the orders, coldly, and we're stupefied in the chicken house noise of the place. She a girl but not in a good way. Quiet thin brown dampered so I don't feel her there except when she said it was a meadowlark and she chased the song. With people like that being alone because the he is bent to stifle me and the she is too stifled to be interested. to behold the earth appareled with plants, as with a robe of embroidered work 15 [J-M Martell's 40th birthday party] Jan-Marie at forty, lovely, wide flat hips and wide flat face with thin skin stretched, taut little mouth kept taut in her pretty way of speaking. Tiny white bones, red willow, black cube with a barnacle. Narcissism I know from when, but room crammed so it's not easy to move. In a piece with her black and silver. She sets up a tripod on the beach. A red cradle with Odo's mark. A clear and a filtered pane. Two help her set it up. Her idea is to burn the thread that holds the window back. I hold the knife, that seems right, though we know I won't be needed. (When I offer the stone she ignores it, that's familiar too.) It falls in, where it's put, she follows her plan with the lead ear and mouth that by physics she could know don't do what she intends. And then the real event, I don't understand, of people helping her look for them - surely the sign shd be respected, but it's the ceremonialist who sticks to combing the sand as if it's once when she lost an earring. The Portuguese fishermen in rubber dungarees standing in a row looking like Portuguese fishermen, their net-floats showing in lines into the water, the nearest anchored by rope to a white plastic bucket of seawater. Georgina Chappell's over and over story of crashing in the Hudson's Bay. First cake broke. Kirk's gnomic nearness of nose to chin, as if the back of the head had let go its tension. All those people obediently taking pictures. ! Like slaves squirting the scene with MSG. Epp with her black collar and hair down, bare feet, the usual, exposed-embarrassed-embarrassing and black-magnetic-invisible-amazing. A family group with heart-rending smells of cooking, who turned out to be a theatre class. The big sad mother of last Sunday with smiling monkey girl and other daughter sat down by the horseshoe pitch, oh all the way from California, so lonely. I don't invite. The beautiful woman passing toward her girl in the water, Sarah, Margaret, looking. Darkening, covered sun moves north. Champagne and cake poison us, her undereyes have sunk delicately. The beach when we leave still crowded though it's cold. "It's the high point of the year." The tripod marked it, showed but didn't make its artificiality. She showed herself and implicated us in her not-doing what she said she intended. Presumably we were to cone her a power of keeping or hurting Tom. Ugly people see her beauty. Many strangers to add their stands. "You're talking to three people who don't need technical advice," that was Ellie using the knife, it made Saralee and I like each other. Ceremonial time is very deeply concentrated, I wasn't in it and I don't think she was. We enact but I didn't know if it was being failed at most of the cruxes or unconsciously met correctly, or haphazardly met and not, "I wanted to say we're witches making a brew." The nursing mother sat on the downslope.
I still don't know what ritual is - whether it does curse - I wd say it wd be best as listening - then I perform as led - in solitude among - It designates no more than any other time. Mary Webb, May Sinclair, Mary Austin, Elizabeth Gunn - who recently was saying something abt sacrifice, Mary Austin succeeding and dying of refusing to be a lady or a Jew. The landscape comes and goes. Jane Austin angry in Northanger Abbey. Significance - where was it Wondering abt Starhawk who wasn't sacrificed but so gross, that must be another kind of sacrifice In everything I think still something Jam - the story going: because I assented to her I was on my way to dying by her neglect, not only neglect, malice too. I had no way to rescue myself but by attaching Michael's goodness, and Rowen's. Now I am for a time rescued but by not being in love am less than I like to be, am not learning. Whose story is that? Serious girl. What's the question - is it necessary to be without her. What do I miss - the ear beyond mine - magic. Sword girl, what's her story - I hung onto J past time because I wanted to absorb the power of impressive writing. I violated my own time and hers and that brought illness I could only stop by rushing to an opposite state. I did what I could to kill her as rival and won't see her now because I don't want her to recover. Cupgirl sez, sex, I was dying because I was sexually bonded and she stopped. Michael and baby were my overrun, but the physical baby and physical Michael are a true new funny life. Running ahead girl - "spring warmth, spiritual integrity, confidence, possibility, natural joy," what's her version? Wasn't she there? No. Why not. She didn't like Jam. She didn't like them. She's brilliance, courage. An outdoor and country person. Luke sent away. Sent away from in me. She was there in them to make me crave. I'll fetch her home! I'll fetch you home. (Sent to Mary: the Russian girl sez: 4.) 16 Under a sky amazing with shapes of action, that I don't stop to see, in weather running change, undervest and jeans, setting stones, rain drops, screened heat, body pliable, narrow, stones surprisingly light (the green), from a little distance the part already done looks good and solid. 18 One of our Marsh Weeds, like a Dock, has the same Effect, & possesses the Party with Fear & Watchings. Frightened of witchcraft and vampirism, because of having hurt M's feelings not wanting him clutching me today. Tomorrow a freak maybe. When he gets strained or? toxic. Don't know if it's when I change chemistry or he. Memories of dope thinking and 'work': often puts me off, he looks a poor schuft, I distain. The Forest Mother, Rauni, was represented by the rowan tree, whose orange berries were used by women during childbirth. The rowan (also known as the mountain ash) was sacred to those rituals celebrated on Rowan Witch Day, May 1, of each year. Goddess images were also revered as Divine Mother, Queen of the Witches, and Queen of the Elves. - AP clipping about Mullerian inhibiting substance that makes the Mullerian duct shrink in the male fetus. "Boys stop making MIS between the ages of two and six. For reasons that scientists don't understand, girls begin producing the hormone in miniscule amounts during puberty and continue throughout their adult lives. - has immersed himself in the alien microtonal world systematically investigating a whole series of scales in theory and practice. "people in two places at once, on land and in water" The god is: asleep in milk, on a throne in heaven, the One, and at the same time is born, is given sacrifices on earth, becomes the many known by the many. What is the spirit world? Software. "Psychic perspective" metaprogram. Anything in itself as being Hillman and the psychopathology of the realm - sense of living by cruelty and conversely being in danger - coldness cruelty deception betrayal
Tissue experiences oxygen waves. What initiation is - innocence is ignorance of cost
What are the stances then:
Initiation is to take on the projected harm and danger is to descend into hell among the untouchables is to take on the knowledge of life by harm. Guilt and unsafety. mounted a magic horse and was carried away, galloping, slowly at dawn. He grabbed a vine and the horse sped away. When he woke, as if reborn into another life, he saw before him a new world full of beauty. He heard a voice singing a song and felt as if his past memories were calling him. He forgot his hunger - which burned in him like the underwater doomsday mare - as he listened in bliss and saw the beautiful dark young girl who was singing. Who was the lucky person she was singing for? I thought I heard her sing his name - Lavana.
He dreamt the world was his bed; his pillow the mountain. He dreamt grass grew from his navel to the clouds, that white worms with black heads crept to his knees, that four birds of different colors fell to his feet and became white, that he walked on a mountain of shit and wasn't dirtied hands and feet waving about in the waters of the four oceans shadows of darkness clearing away and a great umbrella the akha to maintain unbroken contact with their ancestors - the living sacrifice their present possibility traditional techniques keep faith with the ancestors every drop of water carried by the young girls due respect to life itself painted to convey a message to the spirits thought to inhabit the objects telling animals, diseases, bad spirits that inside is human territory powerful spirits live in running water once married the men leave manual for ceremonial work If a man dies without a male heir the family altar is thrown into the jungle, even the ancestors have died. If the child becomes a disbeliever his ancestors die a final death. - To realize they lived and died only to bring you into existence.
When the time came for her to learn, all that she had learned in her former life came back to her, as the rows of swans come back to the Ganges in the autumn. Don't you remember your old friend? You and I were two swans who lived together in the lake of the mind until you left me to wander on earth. I created the illusion that made you think you were a man or a woman. "the individual soul and the universal soul" Finally on the highest level we find the undifferentiated substance that is both mind and matter. [this was a summary collection pulled from earlier notes] - Wanting to go to England and be a philosophy teacher, teach epistemology and perception, dream theory.
22 Garden solstice and full moon and gush of ovulation. Sitting on the concrete marble pediment beside my potato hedge in strange-colored tailored silk & cowboy boots. M in pretty curls took the baby home. Young women came and sat and got liked, one with a trout on ice in her transparent bag and colored pencil lines across her left eyebrow. A small native man in catskinner cap and copper collaret used my tools for a Spirit Rising school plot. Muggs came to say about a garden rep for the underpass. Pious music, 'now, children' puppet show. Old salad, thawed zero salmon. Face to face with Marco in the dark, ego Semite, overridden aside, a soft keenness saying What part of London? Where in Kensington? Spirit circle holding hands to plant the tree but done too shallow nonetheless. Walnut. Nice paper fish lanterns as it got dark, orange moon came up out of the cloud bank in the SE. From Expo a laser war display. The beautiful walnut, the beautiful little girl walking in the dark holding Jim Smith's hand. California mother and monkey baby showed up again. Alice and kids. Gretchen stalking alone almost unseeable in the dark through the future orchard and then unthanked home with a Safeway cart of gear. The monk in orange and plum showing a lot of sock stepping off Mr Smith's porch, going to work. Berm - narrow ledge, shelf or shoulder as on a slope or the side of a road. Ridge hrycq OE. Dreaming I visited Joyce again. Maybe I was early at her house. A fair daughter puts out her hand very direct, I'm ----, the three year old the same, tells her name. She nearly drownd in the bath. I tell about Rowen, Joyce as I'm talking has her attention on the water where the little girl has gone under, holding her breath. They're privilege children, rich children, anyone's equal. Then there's more about swimming in a ditch, getting into the boy's field. On with maybe the girl who said she looked forward to meeting me again. [two pages of tarot questions obsessing about Jam and them etc] Alice Walker seeing that she could see the horse. Alice Walker 1986 "Am I blue" in Ms Magazine "Initially expression wasn't in language, which comes to replace the portion of love given up." "Every time I asked her something about you when you were younger she gave me an answer in moral terms. It made me feel for you because I don't think she could imagine you very well." Made him cry. [Mike's mom] The way she talked about sending away to a special school as if she thought he were retarded. Both in good sneakers and young clothes. "But I feel an alertness in him, like a social alertness. He has some idea of what's going on." "It's always been that there are things he doesn't have to talk about." Seeing how M denies his father's potency. The sog when I cuddled him some, trying for always more. You got a vein of custard in you y'know that. Monday 23 I suggest that brain activity involves an interplay between quantum mechanical physics and the classical physics of Newton and Einstein. But there is a major gap between quantum physics and classical physics. And you cannot simply derive one from the other. You need both. There is something mysterious about the way the two fit together - something very subtle going on in that borderline between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. My guess is the brain is harnessing this mysterious borderline part of physics. Penrose - In math existence means essentially that something doesn't lead you into a contradiction. We can't meaningfully say that one of these is one electron and the other is the other electron. According to qm they are just an entity that is two electrons. Empty space is the potential to have things in it. It's all there, in a sense - curve it and you produce gravity. In the twistor approach you curve it other ways and you produce electromagnetic and other fields. In the twistor approach you don't think of the point as being the primary object. The point is a secondary object constructed out of twistors . The point in ordinary space is an object in 8 dimensional twistor space. Those pictures produced by computers, the Mandelbrot set, give it an equation it calculates all the coordinates, pixels. "trigonomic and polynomial functions in addition to more common algebraic" the solution of the equation is fed back iteration: five to ten times video feedback, "a streaming mandala-like form" In fractal geometry continuous iteration of a basic formula that contains a fraction - because of math prop they look essentially the same no matter how many times magnified. There are some computer graphics images that use laws of natural phenomena to create realistic-looking, like Brownian motion to govern distrib of particles in a cloud. [reading James Gleick's Chaos probably] 24
Thinking identified with one term or the other - then seeing them both is the 3. Then it goes to seeing the model I'm thinking with, and that's a jump. Thinking in persons as points - or it could be a category 'men' - polarity - there's abstract and particular going together like the visible and invisible person. Reading and personal life. The place of the father - source of name and therefore insertion into the world of human relations - remained empty. "The bankrupt father takes others down with him." The image of the Writer that allows (every other) writer to exist. 26 Little by little there was woven in us a mesh of language, unconscious but effective, that rendered all other modes of thought obsolete. Love for him grew out of the way he made phrases. The essence of his work is spoken style, "Style is who I'm speaking to." Fought against meaning, the unconscious has no meaning. He was the only one to talk about language.
He is at first too far away, then too close. does not want to be satisfied in her true needs. She wants other gratuitous needs and in order to be sure they are gratuitous wants not to satisfy them because she identifies with another woman who also desires what she does not want identified herself with various doubles in order to destroy them story of what vanishes at birth, the companion taken away but then refound sort of in mirror image and own body function "desire does not seek out the subject, for which it cares nothing, but the object" - "a little thing" (imprinted on - ) "all the objects on the list have some relation to separation" mirror image a support but a misrepresentation of what one is like in relation to other people because of the reversal [Kristeva on Lacan?] Saturday 28 [for the rest of part 3 I experiment with transcribing as written] he sits & gapes at me with a look i don't like to see - starved, vacant - corpse-like thin white small-eyed stupid at the mouth - dressed up in his hat to placate me - we're in the park on the rim of a sandbox looking across to the houses, i am, he like a castaway on an island or a skeleton crawling in the desert, puts his face near me & fixes his gaze - 'it's not a consciousness whose company i like' - the same as his everlasting touching, he just sops me up - i complain - it's boring, it's passive aggressive - it is to prevent me seeing him - i can see by the way you look that you aren't seeing me - in his defenses so dumb i think his mother's right he's not just dyslexic he's retarded - "he used to say he wanted to be married & have children just like other people" - what a puzzle, i only get mixed up with retarded people, why haven't i found my way to the real ones - at oxford, a house with a stone wall & long established roses, family in comprehending - in the way they speak to each other - place & speech, what i read for - i keep battling & he gets to tears & declaring what feels real, what satisfies & pleases - "I felt you so much, that's why I had a child with you. I don't understand why you had a child with me without feeling me" - "I did a bad thing" - "I knew you didn't care about me the same way, but it was the best of my available possibilities & I took it" - "so don't guilt me" - "that's right!" - I liked it when he stood up on that ground - and, always, what is it in the other direction - i knew you weren't a really possible companion - when i think that there's a definite sensation, of being at home & safe in the other one's sanity - it's open space, where in the body, the middle - it's gazing at the other one quietly with the inside of the head unconsciously felt, a quiet, empty, dark, summery room with windows open - a little smile - you weren't a possible companion but you were the way my desperation took - i couldn't say the best of my options, as if there might have been another way i didn't see - they, i couldn't not go to them, roy, I couldn't not have luke - but jam - was it pride, hurry, panic - but then there was the moment in the white room sitting on the bed when she said will you marry me & because of something she'd said before, that did make me feel the wonderful level home, i was certain i would - but still i think it was a mistake, & oddly the same at the end as at the beginning, mis-taking to get out of meanness i thought wd kill me - the silver brown dry skin on the backs of my hands & forearms 'self-love, self-pity & self-preoccupation'
29 diana's painting! 28 the lake rises above the trees strong inside weak outside means it has to change to spread white rushes underneath means it's explosive, pad its landing the movement of heaven is full of power the superior one makes herself strong and untiring, the creative michael when I go for the kid is around the bend - a little yelling, r on the way home tries the sound - scolding - stood for a second
30 lying in bed on the morning of oct 22, 1850, when he perceived a unified world of thought, spirit, & matter, which conjoined his inner twins. Fechner always experienced as an inner struggle with a shadow twin who sees & would say everything differently liking hillman talking about soulmaking as the way to think of what's doing grieved in it that there's no companion for the work. jam found better seeing. or - jam was stuck & couldn't go further with me. or - i was stuck & couldn't - rage! she wants to pin it on me - michael loving without capacity. or - i won't again give my time to building someone who'll abandon me when i'v made him - no you have to build something to give me that will be equal to what you want from me 1 July judy friendly, with a nice big penis - we're against a wall standing on our heads with it in me when my father walks in bringing another man - i say to her fast he won't be able to tell and to him coolly will you give us a minute we aren't dressed it's as if her body is so exactly covered by mine he may not, or may, know she's there. maybe i shouldn't have said we picking up stuff before we have to go, a place where the tree planters were earlier in the story, maybe, i say i'd like to get some of the big guys to carry these things from the back shed inside, because i liked the house & want useful things not to be ruined - there's a push to sort thru, started as just looking for my case (of clothes) to put more things in, but there's this too - a long metal box like a geometry set but (4') long. inside, a same-shaped long book with many sections on each page, to teach drawing, hinged like calendar pages, paper very strong but translucent & grainy as if oiled - the drawing examples very detailed & small - i'm wondering why to learn to draw so detailed & small - a man over there showing maybe judy another box he sez is worth $500 - a drawing instrument set, very fine swiveling heads, brass, one i'd want, exquisitely jointed the hurry is that we have to leave any minute, the things could probably be taken but there's hardly time to decide hillman saying that for what we do now it's more sister & brother than parent & child. curious the judy turn in this latest story - michael & the way I am with him - her michael - rowen being r and gemini - the gemini and virgo stories - paul like judy & paul - her marrying bossy me - (luke brought something new, sagittarius tony & j) tupa-one -
what it has to do with cambridge / oxford in stone, in the established, in confidence founded, centuries deep, in quadrangle, park, in welcome success, in abbenay, mind, my spirit's place river. a river room. fire and casement. 'my rooms'
2nd sitting with - laiwan - in the garden - the trees are moving - if clouds were stones and fell - i'm not under one - if stones were clouds and we were falling - a small wind crashes the cold frame glass. oh! and the devon pitcher last week, was falling and still whole, i was whole with it, and then tho it seemed the fearful moment was already past, it was shattered - 'anything that can shatter' - coming toward the garden plot thru the grass, deep in coming along the forming path, that side the barrow, see the chinese man sitting on field stone looking toward my work - I am uneasy coming near - seeing she'll look like herself when I come nearer & not wanting to look - wanting to look at the garden - we were exchanging presents as we were preparing to leave - my head was turned giving her the peach - when the glass was caught - the shock of loss michael from my 3 days freedom wrecked - claustrophobia of the presence of my slave - frightened at the look - he'll be a madman to get me to undo my refusal - i don't leave him any methods - one touch it doesn't cost you anything - we're 3 days fr [image for dark of the moon] 3rd
4
she describes: a father to a mother: You've done all the hard work - you've got nothing for it; & there's nothing nothing nothing I can give you - I can't give you anything to make up for it. But by Heaven I'll see that Nell has a good time. It was my greatest ambition that you shall live, not merely exist; & live too in a way that not many women have lived before.
He felt strongly that he ought to be doing something that in fact he was not able to do, and his curiously inhibited and frustrated style - the phenomenology was written in a few months' time - made a woman in jena pregnant and knew it as he kept writing away, an 'abandoned wife' with 2 other illegit. "My wife and I are resolved to have Ludwig live with us now." "It would be truer to call it a stream of thought that moves from core to core" 5 in my bed feeling the shape of the muscles of my bum, walking without weight in sandals many blocks, fierce dark & bright turning on people who stare at my foot - a street warrior, using my eyes like weightless perfect knives - or walking a block, chinatown in proper heat & light, thinking of something & seeing no one til i'm stopped at the corner rowen in fever lying in my lap in the armchair, chaircover turned up so he won't feel an icy breeze, solid hot head on my upper arm, quiet, while I turn pages with the left hand, in oxford hearing of a good father - the monster is away & jam's hatred isn't in me either i don't care about an intimate what I wrote about peter epp was swift & unpredicted the little marrows i brought with a feather of dill, buddhist poppy, four little potatos, handful of radishes, when i cut them had a clear sound tok like a thing in perfect molecular order - now it's the evening light a black shadow inside a dormer window, the pear tree - hemlock - maple - blackberry screen is orange stems still, orange green & black leaf moving like rowen's hands when he talks, power post's shadow there too, from here, a strong straight line - then that fire-light was gone, it's in an ember wash still, subtler, the stems brown not orange, no shadow in the dormer - 6 sound workshop [at the film co-op] men, men's working ambience, us older women scowling, scrutinizing for gender balance, feeling the tenor - rick's fine performing body, tony reif never so thawed - ha! he's attracted to rick - beautiful marianne, black white south african, eyes to the sides of her skull - is the battle necessary? the way they speak over saralee - fraternal trading among the young men at lunchtime but the women have vanished, quietly gone off together it's alright speaking, not holding out for my mysterious-integrity presence, scrapping crankily, not being hypothetical - uneasy later, have I gone along with something, a false interest, is this the spreading out after falling back from a death at the leader bud, or a strengthening of the support for another try - it came w/o intent, i phoned meg at the right time - at the ukrainian hall they're two-stepping (i think) like la glace people, doors open, heavy light-footed families i've been letting the other fight for me, often not knowing what's being fought over - maybe i'll know later - like rick in the van telling too much abt esther paying too much for the apt block - i knew there was something between us in it, but not what - i knew what to say & that it was specific & personal but not what it was in reply to - the word 'fight' up there is egotistically but swashily cut sunday 7 at a table with someone i like, another woman we don't know. rising to & with her, keen - what do i remember, not quite her look, something she'd studied or knew, that i knew too - the other one, my older friend, is watchful, but only slightly - a procession coming up a long flight of stairs, natives, there's going to be a magic woman come up, in feather regalia, i know how she'll look, excited to meet her i've got a gush of water accidentally let out of the top of the door frame, but she arrives, glances in, passes, & is a dull face small dark person - then the instant of flash & laughing when we see the real beauty has materialized among us & in our bed - mouth & nipples, very sweet, passing circles, but i suddenly want to know whether it's true or a dream, & i begin to press up, thru a weight of immaterial shoulders & arms, to look around me in my dreamed bed & see i am alone. then wake. laiwan this evening distraught for another reason brings me the news that howard broomfield killed himself sometime this weekend - the frightened face he sent, crouched behind the percussion stand, when i wdn't applaud his solo imagining about a suicide - that the weak point in a community has absorbed too much of the wrong-doing / imbalance of the rest - tarot said 8s - indecision, crisis - that his ugly mouth & chin were there from an early curse, like murder-threat in the womb - that he followed a truth into the zone of perception where he could see everyone thinking in willful lies - that morgan had an abortion? both of them blind in the street, black-faced - v woolf & creation - what is creation = in relation to creation - what she does, she makes something of it - that is more than - by precision - the extreme compression of letting it run - the woman in the water hauled out in rage - she's the fisher & the worm - why forbid metaphor when it has the speed - amazing change of handwriting - uhh. now tighten. why cdn't i get into the middle of the balance with jam, or with t downstairs. a constant pressure sideways - which way - into minute judgment - but how's it done - l describing a visit fr rhoda paralysis and retreat to the back, incredulous, don't you see what you're saying - on her porch looking haunted by keeping herself in jail even when the jail is away 8th what happened last night? established strength a smooshy black velvet passage, new york night - roses, rose tunnel - a long art deco neon bar, crossed lines, fashion passage, clothes ads (thinking: is this how they are in it?) in heat, in heat - that completes him but made me, today, feeble & blank - dreaming choy sent immigrant chinese to evict me, they come again when I said they couldn't - had a key - a ripped letter from him not given, thrown on the ground, in crooked childish writing complaining abt me keeping my garden - thru it all rowen crying, and was actually standing next to me crying - laiwan in the garden - embarrassed not wanting to see her - the bean poles - then we sit together & see them - it's alright 10th rhoda standing before us in her perfect body closes her eyes & sings in hebrew. i hear that it's in the trailing ends of the phrases she shows herself. sublime face but lightless, hair & clothes loose but close, simple composed person, intending to be that. interestingly choosing a dead jewish man's funeral to come out of hiding & announce her presence in the heterogeneous community carole looked pared & fine - the way she read her piece about goodness - tone & pace, a dead march I guess short phrases with long pauses reminding herself to breathe - but it was in praise of her own goodness - now i'm shocked thinking of what happened after - when i came back, sticking with paul to defend myself from jam's being there with rhoda, watching paul's puffy evasion & implicated, i was having to cut the grass around the garden - changed clothes, have been feeling it urgent because of the dream about choy, by trudy's bush pruning it to the shape I like, hoping she'll be angry, the doom of her coming back today, & then seeing rhoda & sandy at the foot of the stairs, surely they'll go the other way, turning my back - there's the procession, rhoda the electric negative, sandy gone white haired, sez hi, opens her mouth to say how are you, shuts it again, jam's back obediently blind, renee the nothing at the end. what shocked me was realizing i'd stayed crouched, at the time wondering why the hi was so small - what i did inwardly also was turn my back - what i cd have done - ah - was stand in the middle of the path - what's the structure - before the service when j walked into my trap i was ready - after rhoda had sung she could lead her troop thru my territory without challenge - and j could come thru but in the ranks & turning her back & having a submissive wag to her rump - about power, is it that the place you're given in the community decides the strength of the mind you will have to work with? about the formal circle - joan. the way she was only the small top of her voice, is even more nasal in the induction, singy & southern american - nervous, profuse, but possibly, i was hoping, she knows something about what confuses me with people - at the end of the evening she tells me what the others already know, abt seeing me on commercial in the week before I showed up at UBC, & choosing me for her group. finding sharon there. having [sketch of a square] at home. (why am I afraid of [square]. or of saying her name. she has a german look. is there a gate thru her name, because of judy. the scar & a wateriness of her face - what joan saw about our clothes - matched crossways by opposites. a repulsion or blank with [square], color of her hair is fuzzy neutral. sharon my openness on the right. she's distinct. in the garden the compost box & bean poles complete the open corner & it's a room - rain washed the stones. people visit it, sit in it: josie & l. 11 at the start of sexual union keep attention in the fire of the beginning, and, so continuing, avoid the embers in the end when in such embrace your senses are shaken as leaves, enter this shaking even remembering union, without the embrace, the transformation on joyously seeing a long absent friend, permeate
this joy; when eating and drinking, become the taste of the food and drink,
and be filled, by the taste.
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