| aphrodite's garden volume 3 part 4 - 1986 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
13 July "There she is. Looking younger than ever." Mary when I came up the stairs sitting at the table writing her journal. What is it in the light - there, the red-brown grey and cream house with a dark green tree, shadow on the grey, shadow on the red, a white light, that at the green and yellow house is yellow. There was a growling out the window and it was the paper airplane shape of the beautiful Concorde, tracked like the first sight of a real flamingo. O Mary's dumpy middle, finally grey hair, death sickness, senility and memory. 14 A cloud sitting on us. It's the roofs I see, parallelograms' silver scales, grey black green and red with mercury creeping between the grains. A house woman, a crazy man, a traveler. London 1925 What a lark! What a plunge! The trees with smoke winding off them, the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking wrapped in the soft mesh of the blue-grey morning air being part of it. She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. And yet to her it was absolutely absorbing, all this, the cabs passing, being laid like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her in their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist. And how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses. Still ruffling the faces on both sides of the street with the same dark breath of veneration. Tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky, and bestowing upon him, in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness, one shape after another of unimaginable beauty. And went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death. Made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing car. How little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones. So that she filled the room she entered. A sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus. With the rooks flouting up and down in the pink evening light. Pausing on the landing and assembling that diamond shape, that single person. In gratitude to her servants for helping her be like this, to be what she wanted. As her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking, the dog barking, far way barking and barking. Overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon. For she was a child throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" Like a Queen whose guards have fallen asleep and left her unprotected (she had been quite taken aback by this visit - it had upset her) so that anyone can stroll in and have a look at her where she lies with the brambles curving over her, summoned to her help the things she did: the things she liked. Even tho', it admits, there may be no goal for us whatever, still on, on, this indomitable egotism charged her cheeks with colour. Actually had felt his face on hers before she could down the brandishing of silver-flashing plumes like pampas grass in a tropic gale in her breast. And down his mind went flat on a marsh. He woke with extreme suddenness saying to himself, "The death of the soul." - A sort of ease in her manner to him, something gentle explained how wicked people were; how he could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. Until only the nerve fibres were left. It spread like a veil upon a rock. Up here it cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive. Saw Regent's Park before him. Long streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet. The dead were in Thassaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. As in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on. Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air. Nothing could be fresher, freer, more sensitive superficially than the snow-white or gold-kindled surface; to change, to go, to dismantle the solemn assemblage was immediately possible. He was drownd, he used to say, and lying on a cliff with the gulls screaming over him. He could feel her mind, like a bird, falling from branch to branch, and always alighting, quite rightly. And if he should say anything, at once she smiled, like a bird alighting with all its claws firm upon the bough. Sitting beside him, he thought, as if all her petals were about her. It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was opening long windows, stepping out into some garden. Had once seen a fog slowly rippling out from a mast when she stayed with her aunt in Venice. Came to her through the bedroom door, rain falling, whisperings, stirrings among dry corn, the caress of the sea, as it seemed to her laid on shore, strewn she felt, like flying flowers. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide. Virginia Woolf 1925 Mrs Dalloway Harcourt Brace Being timid to address her, as if it would place me in a sight that would correct me to a few threads. 16 Longing to do it as she does - afraid - the soul given its freedom will want to die - the relation, the relation, of mother and child - you'll fall. This afternoon in rain, darkness, thinking of the offers of beginnings, dragging, I don't want those people larger than me. She's back downstairs, is that why spirit has shut down. 17 At the deepest level of feeling there is not that vibrant aliveness of knowing that I am I and you are you. It is only 'as if' the other were there while actually one is alone. A false differentiation. So that when the other is really there for me, I'm not. It sharpened, it refined them, the yellow-blue evening light. They looked as if dipped in sea water. Having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman's dress, unhitched it, laughed. She had once thrown a shilling in the Serpentine, never anything more. A thing wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Had he plunged holding his treasure? Some indescribable outrage - forcing your soul. There was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one's parents giving it into one's hands, this life, to be lived to the end. - True differentiation keeps the tension of needing to negate and needing to recognize. Wholeness for each can only exist if the tension / contradiction is maintained. But it is somehow in the nature of a bond that the tension is given up into polarization. My puzzle with Jam why shd pleasure be disgrace when it's won by skill and study. Some notion of symbolism: if the body is territory and you breach it. But pleasure is my territory and you are strengthening it. It's complicated by this difference in meaning, what's mastery to you is a gift to me. I want to experience pleasure, is it a loss of control? In the way that a voyage is. I'll navigate it. If I can experience pleasure only in ways you experience as my submission, do I go ahead? Why not? Fire in the sex - it happened to be - when he spanked us - and reading. It starts with sexual feeling being stopped. I follow the things that bring it back. What is actual 'self' - self is there anyway - enjoying doing seems to be what they mean by it. "Mediated by calculation", she had to feel her calculation in it, identifying with counting aloud to be sure a counting is there. Seeking recognition from the father the boy who aspires now to prestige not nurturance repudiates the mother as visibly as violently as possible. "A primary sadism," desire for mastery which is indifferent to the outcome for the other. There is still some question about whether I can obliterate people or whether they are somewhere else. They have to provide the boundary. A willed openness. Exploited by the desire to be known. Punished not for wanting to act but for the other's having to be acted on in it. It is the master's rational, calculating even instrumentalizing attitude that makes it possible for the other to feel. - Is that true? With J and me was it that I got her to be the guardian of our erotics, and she got me to be the guard in our poetics? Wanting reciprocity is stopped constantly by - what - it was - being afraid to make her unlovable - so I'd have no one to admire love aspire to - no one to say if I'm working well. Instrumental reason - repudiation of recognition between persons. Economic worries, status worries, moral ambition. "You couldn't accommodate or enjoy my initiative except in working class tasks." 18 I can't accommodate or enjoy my initiative except in gardening work. At the circle I propose going into the sky. Joan waylays us with goodness cards, nose and mouth stiff with fear. She saw herself a fetus and her mother's face in that terror mask. It was her sister dying. Now she carries she says eight pounds of water on her belly, which tells her it's a protection against going out into the world. But she's telling it sprawled across the corner with her legs on the couch. Mary answers my letter about fear with an explanation about Russia. Her neighbours said she was a daring girl. There was in Moscow such a terror in the time before they left. "Something with Joyce about the belly, my mother's, its fatness, fat belly woman's heaviness." What else happened was that I asked Jude about disappointment in love, Joan nodding, nodding. A kind of disappointment that a child doesn't come. Big strong legs and cheeks the same color as beet-red sweatpants. Brixton squatting. Knife scar enfolded down the left side of the face. A war bride sturdy self. Unblanked. Women's strange small hands, little pointed tender fingers that do seem inferior to me. The schwatz! That I can't stand. "Obedience." Carole and I turn in a drunk. She notices his laces aren't done up, "That didn't seem like a biker." It was a pleasure. "That was a good bit of civic duty." 19 This tremendous spirit wallowed and wove, slowly deliberatingly, making use of unfamiliar links, laying from two sides a branchy pattern that confronts itself in contradiction and, accumulating strength, breaks through to a knit which, circling back, takes up again an earlier path and follows it exuberantly into a new ripple of such simple truthfulness those who could grasp it felt they had thought it by themselves. From my own experience, I know this mood of mind, or rather of reason, once it has entered with interest and its intimations into a chaos of appearances and, though inwardly sure of its goal, it has not yet come through, not yet into the clarity and detailed grasp of the whole. I have suffered a few years of this hypochondria, to the point of enervation. Indeed, every human being may well have such a turning point in life, the nocturnal point of the contraction of his nature through whose narrows he is pressed, fortified and assured to feel secure with himself and secure in the usual daily life; and if he has already rendered himself incapable of being satisfied with that, secure in an inner, nobler existence. - Continue with confidence; only science, which has led you into this labyrinth of mind, is capable of leading you out and healing you. Letter 1810, Kaufmann Reint 328 Walter Kaufmann 1965 Hegel - a reinterpretation Doubleday & Co - My discovery, how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want, humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment. The clear water was very moving to me, with the pale stone showing under it. & write perhaps 50 words a morning. This I must rewrite someday. I feel I can use up everything I've ever thought. It took me a year's groping to discover what I call my tunneling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have need of it. Virginia Woolf 1977-1984 The diary of Virginia Woolf, ed Anne Oliver Bell Hogarth Press - probably vol 3 2 days away, naturally, Michael again, the small shrinking from, what I keep staring at, as if I could decide to escape when I see clearly enough, what he is. Mystery of the cycle, where I see his grace and then only his, what, simpleness, but it's not that - it's crookedness, evasion, shame, rubbish picker's shame, Mary not wanting to see him. "Maybe that's the only kind of man you could get along with." Since she was here the speed of the journal-copying from great brain to leave that visit behind. Why I was stupid with Diana yesterday, confederate with Carole - ah. Is Laiwan, I wondered, wanting to give me something to partly redeem me. I avoided giving Mary Jam's phone number and she obediently didn't ask again. Why when I talked about her did I hear and feel my voice indicating that it was lying, really as if no undertones just a plain pipe, saying I felt I'd have died if I'd stayed with Jam. "But you're such a strong character." "She's stronger than I am." And the whole visit unfelt, like that, pipes and wires extended to a conventual other. 20th On the radio Rudy Wiebe, Adam Vee-beh the great genius sailing to Danzig. Carole Dyck - is that his wife? The beautiful beautiful singing, soprano and tenor. He said his parents sang that across the yard. Like Bach, maybe not, harmonies not quite - Writing strained at times, but I was feeling his givenness, he has taken up his circumstance willing to live, it seemed to me. The music, I don't know why, cuts me like being wrapped over a knife. Sitting on Friday night with Diana in this room in the quiet after a while I said I will do the film, the grain film somehow, now, and I'll write too. Those two things, and will be like VW attentive to how to lead myself, for the sake of using what I've found. 21 Should I read the whole of literature to join it? Learn Greek and math and music. What - No. Think of it like grade twelve. Film, Lis Rhodes, a line from writing, we can patch anything together that we want. But I have to earn England and then go in self possessed not any more being aboriginal. Sophisticated and primitive. How - She - when I go among my notes - it's that lightness - it's the glass with small colors - achieved. What I have to do is make something in that. Titania's glass. How to get a constancy in it enough to finish. L tells the story of coming from here with Saturna pictures to bring R an electric plug borrowed. R in sudden fury "This isn't the plug, this isn't the right plug." L by surprise force knocked into dissolve and terror. I say "She lives so close to not knowing what is real and what's illusion, when she didn't recognize the plug she suddenly felt she didn't have a leg to stand on, her anger wasn't at you it was the force she had to give to get herself out of the terror, she pushed it into you so that you would be the one without a leg to stand on." 22 And the life that always dissolves, leaps apart, and is not united in one mass but eternally moves on actively. I am very well disposed toward dances. - Suppose one thing should open out to another - doesn't that give the looseness and lightness I want: doesn't that get closer and yet keep form and speed and enclose everything, everything? No scaffolding, scarcely a brick to be seen; but the heart, the passion, humor, everything as bright as fire in the mist. Then I'll find room for so much - a gaiety - an inconsequence - a light spirited stepping at my own sweet will. Is one pliant and rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself? My hope is that I've learnt my business sufficiently now to provide all sorts of entertainments. A woman's pink glass cups, thin opal-glass (I say it's called) shells, a fine small slightly deco pattern, couldn't be more perfect. On glass shelves the rest of what she's gathered, tumblers etc, but the teacup is best. She's assembling them toward her marriage. "But what if your husband doesn't like them?" Seeing what he might like, moulded stoneware with thick rabbit's fur glaze. "You'd have to have two complete sets." Running up into the rest of the house, big rich rooms, a successful professional artist man, fur parkas, native art, big bedspread - grand and repellant - empty, a spare house, they're elsewhere. I know my small live rooms are through there, in front of, to the right of - I should be able to get through, by the small fur-lined closet maybe - at the extreme right - but it seems blind - there may not be an opening. A washed windy feeling in the downstairs hall. T has yanked both doors open, I can see into her space, washed, emptied and windy. But she has broken the locks and I have to drive her back. By yelling everything I say in my defenses - you destroy creation and innocence! Do you know how many people you've wrecked. Etc. The feeling as in all my acts of war of speaking crudely only a part of the truth - of puzzledly having to side with a crude self of village power struggle. It's an impersonating feeling. I'm not completely behind it, I project it like a whirling sword at a distance in front of me. A remote control. "This is stupid but I have to do it." Because for some reason it works. Something else I'm noticing in my wars, the contrary voice that says oh, but . I hear the voice but I'm not sure it's conscience. I override it, like father overriding mother I think. The overriding is abrupt, no, just like that. It seems to me that in the pain days I was that voice, or maybe more as if I gave myself to that (Christian) counsel. Am wanting to hear the relation of those voices better. Not sure war is a voice, yes, an angry one, ie a projecting-force like a firemen's hose, ie a masculinity. ("Women haven't been so aware of the sadistic-masochistic axis." "Because their views of conversation are formed in circumstances where resisting dominance is not a big concern." "One posture over emphasizes self boundaries, the other, relinquishing self boundaries." "Attains subjectivity by leaving her rather than by recognizing her." "If she individuates she feels herself to be her father." "But it is the child's independent acts that need recognizing and thus are dependent.") What I'm wondering suddenly from this, is whether there have to be two inner mates. Instantly to imagining a book of the history in me of loves - that is right - the loves and their times and places - together in parts without much explanation. Was because two inner mates took me to Edith and Bob and Ken and the Venus flight. Love and writing. Imaginary lovers and real. Lameness is in it in its right place. Luke too! I show my bravery and adventure. It catches interest scandalously but destroys the manipulable mysteries. There can be lies in it deliberately.
- Glass can be astonishingly attractive, which by the way is its most dangerous quality. It is almost corrupt because of its beauty and sheen. This aspect can be used to heighten the tension, but it demands the utmost care. With lead (pliable, absorbs light), neon (mix of colored and natural light). Eno: This beautiful random mixture of things like the raindrops, with little flurries of things within it like icebergs. The sense of hearing the tip of something, knowledge that there was more beneath it. and I wanted my music to do this. Texture, the one innovation that really characterizes this period. There is a point in making a piece where I suddenly get a sense of where I am - I can begin to sense the geography, the light, and the climate. I was really moving into a kind of landscape sensibility of music. There are foreground events, events not so close to the ear, ones that become misty and indistinct and then occasionally a hint of something out of earshot. I like this idea of a field of sound that extends beyond our senses. where they continually drained and filled with slowly graduating colors. traveling a lot, 4 or 5 cassettes to create a certain condition. What you begin to notice are not the repeating parts but the sort of ephemeral interference pattern between them - until you're hearing what seems like atoms of sound. Art a false reality that prepares us by way of a rehearsal. To endure uncertainty is an acquired skill. One of the motives for being an artist is to recreate a condition where you're out of your depth, no longer controlling yourself. Surfing. Rehearsal - to give an account of the envelope of. Today speeding from the opal glass cut to the love book, large format prints, infrared b/w, glass sculpture, Eno and sound space. High synthesis. 24
Textures close. Soft shiny precisely woven suit silk, sand pink. Blue flannel washed to show thread and pill, whitened edges, turned cuff; bright skin. Heart frightens me, shaking me because the French father is rude and stupid with the Chinese waitress; Café mon dieu because he doesn't know Hong Kong coffee. I'm frightened because I rise up to attack. 25 A woman sitting near me talking to someone. I feel I should break in to say I need a job. There is one teaching logic to blind children in Durham (maybe). Lists of jobs on a blackboard. I say I'll take it. She: You'll have to live in the dorm. I: The pay is probably very low. Wondering about Rowen (where is he - rummaging in the other room), whether he can live there. Then, Michael, nearby? She: Tell me, have you had intuitions about what you should be doing? I: I've had an intuition I should be teaching philosophy, for about the last (hesitation) 6 months. Waking: I hold myself stable by being my surroundings, and that makes me empty, like Michael too, and that makes me uninteresting and unloved. 'You" the nearest was two: [erased] Expresses himself for the most part in images and metaphors. Autonomy means that one has given laws to oneself, one is self governing. "Who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom." Plants, optics. But they have never learned to weave. Who would study and describe the living starts by driving the spirit out of the parts: in the palm of the hand he holds all the sections, lacks nothing except the spirit's connections. What he wanted in science as in poetry was Anshauung. [likely Kaufmann on Goethe] The many dictions. 26 "I noticed this foot looks like it's mummified - like it's been buried in the desert." "It's very mysterious and beautiful to an old art lover like me." Erase their selves in order to be spared. Women are encouraged to confess, "repeated acts of linguistic self annihilation and reconstruction." 27
What happened today. The shocking strangeness of Laiwan's face creasing between the eyes in a way I've never seen. Mixed pain sitting in a chair seeing her stand up, close the door, take off her shirt. Skin. And under-flannel. When I close my eyes the little slide - but as if she wants to do something - yes she does want to do something - hurls herself at my mouth. "Slow down." I have no idea. Touching the skin is nice, it's curious what will she want to do. She's shocked the way I know at feeling she doesn't know how, being the little child helpless to know what to do with this body. In her dignity too in a way I don't understand. For myself, ah, yes, feeling the way at lunch she couldn't listen with me to anything I would have wanted to expand. It kept hopping. I wasn't warmed. She wants me still to be something for her. I'm sorry there'll be hunger and failure now, so she won't be my giddy friend. I was lonely. Curled around over my gut protecting it, so reluctant, going blank. "It shouldn't be painful at all!" 28 Dreaming that Jam understood how Trudy had enticed me with sweet nearness, opened me to the heart, planted contempt to spoil me, and then lost interest. Having said it like that I put it together with the question how is L today, what reciprocity will harm her least. She says she dreamed: a crowd outside Eatons, maybe waiting for a sale, "but I'm not waiting for a sale I'm waiting for my mother. She's going to take me to school. I'm waiting a long time and when she comes I say I'm late. She says, I still have some things to do, don't worry about it. Then I'm talking to my second sister, the one who lives in Australia and has a daughter called Laiwan. I say I'm late for school. She says don't worry about it, come in and have a bath. (She said it very nicely.) I say, but I should be at school and she says alright you can come with me. But then I have to go back through the crowd to get my jacket because I didn't know I would be going with somebody." The other one is a math class that goes on a long time. They sleep, she has problems with small geometrical pictures, wind speed and a balloon. She doesn't figure it out she just draws a lot of balloons. She's looking at them pleased how real they look. The other students have finished their problems and handed in their books. The teacher says, Yes Laiwan is an overgrown child. 29 After the dream, morning in the workroom. A dumpy person climbs Rhoda's stairs, knocks twice, manoeuvering to keep her back blind but has to turn to leave and finds herself in my mean stare. Does her ugly finger waggle, departs out of sight. RRRumm. So my hands on the typewriter are missing letters with furious shaking. The war with downstairs is going at the same time though Trudy behind the canvas doesn't see J not knowing R is away. She wants to paint, ha, I want to type, she turns on the radio, ha, snatch away the folded towel, I'll type text, I type a rampage against her. So when she tells me what to do next I'm fully wound up and without scruple and will say fast anything. "You don't have the simple guts to go out in the world and find your own place so you parasite on my place and my time and my life and my work. You're a stupid tyrant." ("I don't want to be like you" she says.) "You don't have a chance to be like me, you don't have the brain - or the heart - or the guts." (You can't hear and you can't see.) "You can't hear and you can't see and you don't have the simple brain to put it together even if you could." Etc. "Simple brain," that bothered me, bothers me. What did I betray. OO I haven't seriously prepared the worst true things about her, it's still pulling punches to make war with untrue insults. The truest was, that she doesn't have guts. It's just hurling rocks to drive her off - and it did, she went away, I went on to write the sky gazing. Telling the 4 the story, saying how there's always a voice of my own that objects. Joan says it's the subjective and the universal - yes exactly! Welcoming the names. What's wrong is that when I speak from subjective I don't really, I parody it. Having to synthesize an egotistical when there is? a real one. And what happened with Joan, who crashed out in panic at Share being wry so excessively I jumped in. "We're gathered together to hear Joan's voice going on and on with that compression in it. I feel attacked by your voice, it puts a rasp into me." What about it. She says things in such a crashing wave, desperately. I feel abused at having to endure the disorganization of her sentences, as if there's a basic time-grabbing she does. Beyond that the nasal, what does it mean. Jude comes out the good person, very responsibly alert and ready in method. I like being opposite her. The way she said, I feel terrible, I feel like crying. Cried. Said, Okay I'm done. Laughed. And Sharon admiring. At the end, Joan saying How about a hug. I, Are we ready for that? Looking in her face breaking apart. Thinking how my gratitude and dislike for voices determines - and what to do with it - in the lab. Dreamed: I come back from tree planting, look in my drawers for good clean clothes surprised to find only baby clothes like Rowen's grown out of. Get mad at the tree planting organization, all my good clothes were burnt, my raingear, my sleeping bag, my fine fitted jeans. I was wearing just anything I could pick up, a nylon sleeping bag. Walking these days proudly in very good clothes and body, jeans, beautiful shape of green sweater, sandals - and sleeping in the beautiful pyjamas - and having bright black hair - and being proud and being uneasy in hubris. Now seeing yesterday was last quarter.
Going from this to the garden, where there is such a strength of yellow pink blue. And such coming alive of the path under the diamond arch. And the pheasant's horn. And blackberries. And Hey you guys at the Indian men leaving with a plastic bag. And sickening dismay seeing Laiwan frightened smiling, knowing I have to tell her to go away. And R with averted face sitting where she could watch her little bush. Someone oddly strewing the dead tree, how does that answer? The little bush I know: you say, I want a root here, as I did. I answer with violence as you did. Heart strains in it. 30th Money. Baby in peacock blue, shorts and singlet. At Keefer and Main he blue I blue we are half a street crossing away from, run up against white oval, still in the horrible green pants, Jam. The right reflex a fraction of a sideways nod. Turquoise circle, granite bench, cowboy M (these days). Cosmos moved where they throw shadows on the new water. Round stones. He saw, last night, a hill with two people in blue dresses. Went home and drew a soft look. "Poppies are such sexy things." Their little dresses. 31 There's a little girl too, I'm looking across at J saying We got three children, how did that happen? Anne and Harvey's place with the little kids. Looking for them, looking for a bathroom to bathe them in. Marveling at what a big place and equally what a strangely planned warren, all the little rooms and nowhere for a guest to sleep, and no bathroom and kids' rooms unusable and a vast hall in red velvet for clothes on hangers (Harvey shows me behind glass), all these tables, painted wood, but they're having dinner at an ugly one over there. "Grand and repellant." The war. How to finish it faster. When we lie down in the garden meadow we see ahead of us the most complex particulated something, dazzling and finely focused in every part, certain gathers of intensity seeming to give off another invisible color of light. Facing it almost in unbelief, in unbelief, can I see something so finely multiple. Reading Prigogine. In my Blake notes, Robert, as sometimes in these days, in work, so strong a love for his passion and being, perhaps of another time. Dear muse. "The cell of fancie my internal sight." 1st August Christiane's suicide a few weeks after Hegel's death. His enterprise - the idea of trying to be all the minds of a development. That's Dorothy. It would have been clearer for him to do it her way, her voyage of discovery. Referring back to the book as a realm of spirits. Spirit knowing itself as a spirit, has for its way the recollection of spirits. Wanking away at the idea of writing the cellar and love book. I'm not enough there. 2nd But here in the blue pages writing sky and glass oh it endures and catches and is my companion made with a companion, in the new time alone. How would you say glass or transparency. Apprenticeship. I can go to the best formed and hover until the skill is around me again. 3 She is waking early and painting before I start to work! The joyful speed also when I come to the Greek festivals and fairy abduction. The division of parts now into Titania's glass and You, work them separately and see. What would be recovered with her? A devastating thing. Something about my father. He wants her.
4th This: quickly yesterday reading Michaux. a look that thinks gives me the right and the facility to look anyone straight into the eyes to function at perhaps free speed hundreds of lines of force combed my being which could never integrate itself quickly enough I persisted in offering the best I had Frightened me, with the old fear. I want to drive her out, as long as she's here I have to lock myself out of myself because if I'm here she'll kill me. Why don't I move? Because this is my place from before her time. I have to stay in it until she's gone, then I can move. Fright of escalating battle again. What is it like actually (in this I'm dodging out - to eat - to book). What it's like living in this house, my self, with Trudy downstairs and Rhoda across, apprehensive always, is she in, is she out. She made that at the beginning with complaint about my footsteps, someone who'd made herself already the deadly undercutter. Why is my heart strained thinking of pressing the war. What's the war for - my natural joy. (Cards.) Going to the window looking to see into Rhoda's, curiously, how is she living, the little qualities. How would it be if they left. I'd be safe at home. I could test and criticize myself and watch myself or not, with Rowen and Michael and friends. What do you have against them. They defeated me. Are you still defeated? I am until they go. Then they are defeated. What would make them go - 5 He is now a man of 65 - I am 48: and thus he has a right to be so much more vital, supple, high charged and altogether seasoned and generous. The intricacy of the art; also of its meanings, its seriousness, its importance, which wholely engrosses this large active minded immensely vitalized man. He seemed to live at the centre of an immensely intricate briar bush; from wh. he could issue at any moment, & then withdraw again. & every twig was real to him. [VW meeting Yeats] Rowen yest morning standing by the armchair in his pink short sleeves in sun and clean air through the windows hearing starlings says eagerly wuff. 6 I love the Peter Epp. It's the beginning. Girl at Crabtree saying she watches Ro. Something about him. "He cuts my heart." The way he cries at sudden noises. They put him in the enclosure to keep the others off him. He likes to observe. Flattened failing to be able to like Laiwan's dad. Instant dislike, bad trying, false questions, pegged smiles. Peripherally she a near light and color. Centrally, he an ashy bulk taking, given, precedence. I when I see what he is instantly hiding and useless after, offending her by yakking over dismay. (What was it, Len Voskamp, is he the only father I've liked - he's there, visual.) The speed of proliferation of confusion, from the first covering move out to shake his hand. (Stud-light said M.) 7 Two paintings I'd done, black and white, hand and man's head painted so the left side of both has a sidelight. [sketch] T comes in stroking down the little finger that's solid black on the other side of a line. Another bigger painting in colors of two men's heads. A dabby blue space behind them and in the centre. In front of these paintings we're talking fraternally. "It seems I'm always doing paintings of two heads, one blue one orange. I guess I have to keep doing that." Something I don't remember well, but as if maybe I'd eventually get to the alphabet of it. Mrs Thatcher's little finger. - Seeing a page from the crystal book, geometry in sea-blue lines behind, through, a page of gentle drawings of crystals grey and pink. Looking at it thinking of a movie on the other side of sight, where something is known that can't be known to be known. Here's the eisen piece and I up the auntie. 8 Lying down, going into my feet, sleepy and image suddenly of the cellar with light on the underside of floor joists and diagonal floorboards - I thought candle, but steady. It was an image of reaching for the love book in that orange light.
- Rowen crying at night. I brought him into my bed. He'd crawl away crying, try to lay his head down, sit up, try again folded over himself, lie backward onto the pillow quiet, close his eyes, breathe as if sleeping startle up crying. Struggle away if I held him, crash his head and feet into the wood if I laid him in his bed. Endless. I was in patience, an open night. A small voice probably downstairs yelling Shut up! In patience the way a mother is, this is our night today, I can't do anything, I can't know what's wrong with him. Rubbing his eyes, rubbing his nose. Just now the image of him underwater, was the wading pool yesterday a subliminal, already, death fright in him? Or a headache, or -. The way he'd seep and cry and sleep only a few minutes and cry was so unending I felt he could be in meningitus or some other brain destruction. And I don't have work energy like I do when I've slept through the night. At eight he was as he is these mornings walking himself along my bed coming to look lovingly at my face, with his face at the level of mine on the sheet, beautiful goldy pink head laid down next to me as he does on my shoulder saying hello when I come for him in the aft. Laiwan at the Hong Kong yesterday, waiter with a flop of white hair like side-parted blond delighting in her way of Chinese. We were looking at her VAG piece. I said, Should we take on this language? "I felt the ground open again." We raised a wave in the booth yesterday, I could. What I'm wondering today is whether the spring I've had of war and work is gone today or for good. My lean bum makes me, that's how it seems to be, anyone's equal, and winter fat takes away all my rights. Knowing how I'd do it, place the Devi on his eyes and hands. Ritual making it secure for him. Devi goddess, bright or shining one "The cult of the Girl in America," a Baptist theologian's worry. 9 Ammi at the park when I come touch his shoulder tips back his face like a curly haired girl to kiss. That he married an Elyse who limps on her right foot. "I spotted your mom right away." She asks me to dance. Very confusing and interesting, little soft hands, bare feet and shoulders and dress with a lotus at the V. Big intense head, someone, but frightened too. Felt a lean-hipped cowboy but worried about the way we were smiling. We go to the garden through a magicked neighbourhood with such trees, such lit doorways throwing color onto flowers, and cross the road, Ammi boldly, the women timidly in such light from yellow sky with yellow new moon line and Venus point, picking out the tansy heads beside the path. We're on wet grass and clover and Elyse sees the sunflowers coming. Judith sits down on the sea. Elyse likes to smell the lettuce with roots. Ammi goes to the edge of the meadow and sees the shades of "shades of shades" of sky. With blimp. "This is the most beautiful garden I've ever been in." Yes, yes. A white summer squash like a baby to carry home. Then Michael knocks because sky moon and blimp were too much for him. "Just stay here for a moment and be quiet" in the big dark quiet wet rectangle of park grass with keen blissful porchlights. His eyes seem to roll. "What happened to you." "It's impossible to say." "There's a nice smell." "It smells like an old farm." "Haying." "Yes haying." Have I ever said the glad comfort of being with Michael somewhere. A thin scrap of a dark woman talking a language not English with a foreign sound says her name is Epp. She writes on the brown paper in front of her "Trudy is ." Trudy at the blackboard the instant her name is written turns to try to see. Isn't she fast and psychic. I throttle her from the back to keep her from seeing what's said. " inspiring." Ie her power is that. "When I wake early I say to myself, Fight, fight." Seeing T on the sidewalk looking very bad. What did I want to look at. It was on Pender coming from the café in our cloudless hottest day, in the new shirt M found, that weave with turquoise necklet, Mali glass - Ethiopian brown black and blue. Something from every day - what is it like to - something about Trudy - fighting - I saw it, language came, it went. The boy? In Produce City at the watermelons. Seeing through storefront glass a boy like Luke at ten having his hair combed, finger combed, by his dad. The look of perfect human, body and being, steady and clean, long armed and serious clean skin and eyes. I'm pulling a plastic bag over the watermelon cut, trying, look up at him staring at me, smile, say hello. He goes on looking, is it a dignity. I say, he can't hear, You don't want to smile? He looks away. I go on to the avocados. He's staring again. At the cash-out with pile of fruit looking for him. There's his father but not him, he's beside me, shining seriously, beautiful thin shoulders like Luke's, his small brother frisking around him, to be pretend-seen. I see the boy look at my book. It's power battle too. "Do you like to read?" Slightest nod. He does speak English. Paying, getting change. He with 500ml homo. "Goodbye." The way it's going with Cindy Siu-wai who wouldn't say hello. It's not my baby, my aunt grew her." Some realization, yes about foot, the way these days I remember as I walk that I can wear it as a fact. Rowen's doll. Stands her up, lays her down, pats her head while he sucks his thumb, murmurs as she stands up in front of him between his legs. 10 Marion Barling wanting me to shine her a love and marveling, what has she become, my big lean fighter is an Oma body. And Jan Martell her first night at home on McLean showing a shrunk tight face, another spirit (2 months ago was a girl) visible as a possession. Looks native but spirit (mask) rather than person. At the morality play these summer night. Last night the Indian drummers were next to the dragon dancers. Both dragon and Indian children danced to exorcise the neighbourhood, as it felt. Air dancers on stilts. ('The' at the beginning of a phrase is an inward motion preparing the space for an image, preparing me to see it - that's why after it's written I want to take it off - is that all? Afterward I'm ashamed of it. There's more to know about articles, they're part of our grace. One of a class of auxiliary words inserted before a noun or a word used as a noun, or, in some languages, prefixed or suffixed to it, to limit or modify it in some way. L said patriarticle.) What's different in this season of fighting. It isn't intimate and isn't in yelling. It's more like spirit battle. I trust my map to have calculated the field, then I move in it tho' body alarms. I feel Jam, is she warring too? (Whether we've split up to be able to fight without hostages.) "How much better Rhoda's looking than she has been." Energy transfer. 11 I came in, thought the door locked but it was open (has she a key) and wasn't surprised to see the locks off both downstairs doors. I walk in, it looks like yes she is moving, but oh she'll have done something upstairs, cleared it out. There are two people, working class, hired by her. Woman in a plastic leather jacket when I ask her name says "I don't remember." I get suspicious then, talk about calling police. They say it'll cost me a lot to get my stuff back if I find it. Goes on to looking for a police station with a train of little boys maybe, their toys. I had been doubting too, second look, whether she really was moving. Looking at the stuff now it seems exaggerated self entertaining in superstition. With L and other people a sense of talking like writing, alone hearing my voice. She saying how she battles herself about phoning. Since they would use to terrorize her. [summaries of tarot notes]
aphrodite's garden volume 4
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