| aphrodite's garden volume 4 part 1 - 1986 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[clipping about Mary Simon becoming president of the pan-Arctic Inuit movement] 12 August 86 [affirmation]
Masks painted flying into pale white light (as if from us) in open or forest nights. "She's thinking of moving." Alarmed at Paul's sympathy for her [Trudy], "You should both be able to live there." "No we shouldn't, it was a mistake. She cursed my existence in that house." It's true and the positive pressure is right; what's strange is how my fight all the same feels artificial as tho' my center is still partly in them. At the same time as the fight is bringing it nearer to me. I wonder if I'm going to learn as a technical manoeuver self-interest that's supposed to be native. Or what is it. When she's gone out of this house - I got up at the end of a movie saying to myself without realizing, now I can go home and fuck Robert. Then I heard it and said !! I want to find and be able to move in my depth again, and be able to listen to those voices without them being theirs. Sore throat. The winter sore throat. 13
How did he get into that sentence? 14 Walking into Po on the street, young man, walk with her in city meters uniform. A grey look and whisker stubble and talking about pop culture at SFU a programmed sound. A cat dragging a rope, hiding in a box in the bushes, starving she thinks. Should I go from the other side and chase her out? She doesn't want that. Wants to lure it with a piece of fish. Years ago I saw her after a love affair begin to look starved - who was an upright soldier with eyes, how, like a blue-eyed Arab - alien to her or us. The story of her and this house. She doesn't remember my name, I worry that I said she could go on forgetting it. She thanks me for what she has to think about, but I felt, speaking to her, she wouldn't think, and can't. Laiwan this morning phoned to say she'd seen lust isn't love and it's more interesting not to think so. Writing this morning, queasy. Notes of - some nights ago in reverie it saying in me, Paul's an enemy. Body takes a deep breath that means yes. Today with head muscles sore and tired from war typing, lying down in this room, putting consciousness into my feet, it setting up gold swarms in the temple muscles. Later, in an image, something moving, and then a rush from a point far right to a flood right here, the right side of the head - voom - fills up with light, empties to space, sensation so intense I have to hold myself still. It as if came out of dream ether into physical head - from far - a light cone. 15 A radio tuned to half static put over the vent. After quite a long time she thinks of the fuse. It disables her painting light too. Found out I can see [Trudy] through [a crack in] the floor. 16 To see the characters move by themselves and have it mean something. To find a character who can teach that. "I need the bond," she said, "the real one. Body and mind and all the years of life. Nothing else. Nothing less." 17 How to make her move is through Rhoda. What will make her move is exposure. The eisen. 18 Michael Michael, unshaved, bad dreams, has to yell and cry and we end in the Chinatown alley behind the parking lot where as I'm going to the bank and café I see a man sprawled, Indian hair, into a woman's puss, and (coming around the red car) her face with eyes open smiling like a gassy baby. Yellow pugdog downstairs grr to you. When I absorb my attack it frights me. When I do something outrageous it frights me a while and then relaxes into sweet own me. Sharon says, I like you! We walk out together. Next meeting here. I want to be honoured said Joan and recalled it other than I did, or anyone. What makes someone be sacrificed and what is taken away if she leaves. 19 I left my keys and money in her place and had to go back for them after escape. - An experiment with an embryo anxious in a bottle with just nose and hand above water. I drain it and take it out in my hand. It's very small, 3 months. A little cure. Will it be replanted to live to grow up? They say yes. [tarot discussions of what's happening in the Wiccan group] In these what-feel-like decisions, divining among courses, a sense of voting for or against the rule of power. If I vote for power it will aid me. I have voted for powers that exist already against me (when she votes for Nicaragua she votes for her embattled weakness). I don't want to vote for either: here's the great mobile mixer of contradiction. Joan is crazy left-outness; Sharon is young admiration; Jude, wisdom; Epp, scalding impatience. Time to type! Michael said that look of fear is someone in a web of explanation. Laiwan liking The dispossessed. We giggle on the telephone. She never talks too long. "It loosens the mind." will serve us as hashish I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if it were her In electing to follow this false genius he unwittingly chooses the path that is illuminated by the light of lost souls. her refusal to accept a happiness that is at the expense of others [George Eliot] 20 Sitting and looking. How easy to do. [I try sitting on the porch downstairs and staring in at Trudy painting] She does her best. I really look. Calm in a good idea. Maybe it outrages her. Maybe she gets used to visibility. I get to cross her always taboo. I see: where she's put her fat. That she sucks dope twice in a painting time. Cigarettes. A greyed candle. Black head to foot. Mud greys through the bathroom's bloody curtain. The greyed candle: that's the sinister. Blackness to absorb light as soon as it's given. The canvas crude like straws on a blackboard. How does she look at it: with narrow eyes, rabbit teeth, chin pad, neck bones. Rhoda can't stand the stare. They use the dictionary to divine. So they gave their great passion and their fidelity to no one, not truly to one another but to people who did not exist, and it was wasted, a gift to no one. My mother had gone out of her own being after that nonbeing, had spent all passion on nothing, now nothing was left of it or of her. Reading her [Le Guin], crying with love, I want so much to be able to do it. I'm talking to Joyce. I say, freedom is what she does. She says, You are free, you do that, in the garden, where it's easy and everyone says with affection, Ellie's is the best. I was happy with the giving that flowed in and out of our household now. I have lived in this place until I have become Stone Telling, and my husband Stone Listening, and my Quail has become Shining; and in this house Acorn and Phoebe have made me the grandmother weaving at the loom. Le Guin Ursula 1985 Always coming home University of California 21 Looking at ["I feel responsible to the one I started out with." "She'll still be there; you don't know that"], I say oh I can still put together the movie. Then singing washing dishes, so happy to take it up again. The materials, the titles, science - fictionalize with all I learned. The way Le Guin makes up people who can teach her things - the magicians. Make the existence of rats so uncomfortable in your area they will gradually remove themselves elsewhere. When I'm tirading to war myself up it, typing mistakes: You are the greediest/ you are the skyest You can'twin Dear self: it's not us I'm trying to beat down. As if by language? The unconscious can't distinguish self and other - or I uncommonly can't. Dear self, being harsh and sky still so deliberately, is that it? So deliberately is as if not-doing it. Or are the typos, is the unc, really the presence of the other in the circuits? Baby blows his nose now. I say Hhhhh, hold up the hanky. In the morning at six - oh - I let him yell - it's bad - he's really crying - maybe throws himself down and crashes his head - maybe teeth or diaper sores - or clots of slime (he rubs his eye) - or confinement with his feather cover that makes him stumble - or seeing me there turning my back. So much crying in a day. Always crying at Michael's when I fetch him. His gladnesses are any dog, cat, birds he sees. Little children on their own. Running with someone holding his hands and tottering over him. Play with the koala baby. Yesterday the long singing kiss. Hearing Michael come up the stairs. Bottle coming when he needs it. Blueberries. Or red beans (tonight dumped in his bath). Peaches. His miseries are the grass and sun at the garden, confinement, confinement so much, hunger (we don't remember), diaper, stepping in his dung, being left behind in a room again while I do any dumb poisonous thing to get away from him, the war climate in the house, being kept off a lap or chair (he will stampede, not cuddle). There was a song he didn't like. He said NO NO NO NO NO NO. Or to food. He'll always eat fruit, potatoes usually, fish sometimes. Likes beans and tofu. Got and ate part package of butter. Usually scrambled eggs with cheese. Sometimes, unpredictably, oatmeal, even day old. Carrots but not green beans. 22 Michael's repulsive assemblies, the old man and the prostitute, a chained dropped penis, a brush with a toilet seat behind. The way I don't like his art, that's the worst. Seeing what it is about the room upstairs. The look I sometimes see, Ted Voth. A waking night. Sick from his eruption. He has two states, one sucks, the other's a maniac. I mean livid, staring, crashing the swings, threatening to kill me, demanding I tell the people who count - welfare - demanding money then saying he doesn't want money. His way to try to get what he wants is, amazing to realize, like my father's, a tantrum. The second line is English-accented very crude sarcasm that clams me up. How are things. If I have $100 a month less, no Joyce this winter unless I find a source. So I have to find a source. But then he'd have $345 plus rent and I'd have $220. The foundation is that I don't respect. 24 I dream Robert mails me his dirty shirt, work shirt. I think it's got smells and maybe sperm stains. I'm in a house somewhere the people are away from, have it clear to myself, a feeling of the East Place living room and its outside, openness in space and light. I think to take the shirt into my bed, then I'm as if reading the flip side of it, grooves like a ruby red record. Wish I remembered what it was about. was thinking he'd sent it like a xerox or clipping, a neutral message, and that's how it should be, I should let him send two messages to my one, or a neutral message for every personal one. This morning about Rudy and others, whether the relation of the body and the soul is a happy one. Meaning Rudy's soul is angry at his body, Robert's for some reason too. (And then the body's very angry at the soul.) And those like Luke and Josh who are happy with - That Michael is to me: body. "If I found out I was in animal marriage with you I'd kill myself." And his liking for my body isn't much to me - and he can't draw it - because it's his narcissism. People who want to be other people. I want to be Woolf or Le Guin, used to want to be Lessing, or Jam or Trudy or Roy, Janeen. Rudy coming up the stairs toward our blackberry pie party. Jean, Laiwan, Michael, Rowen putting his face down onto the red plate. And Rudy sunburnt, three years older, a man. So desperately in pain I talk and talk. In comes Michael in pleated grey flannels, white shirt, ponytail, graceful drop from shoulder to hip. There's Rudy like a ribbon evenly wide through the torso, and shoulders collapsed toward the pelvis, big forearms, crushed hands, small, showing for the first time the Konrad swelling in the face, Father's sharp nose-ridge, brow clenched worse than Father ever, who at 31 was a loose high forehead and deliberate ease. What's the difference. Father had taken the sadistic decision? But Rudy looks, I don't know what, not like a Christian, like the hard-living men. 25 L says, photos of a path through grass and a sentence saying, I lust to be free, and am free to lust. Today very hot and scented, smells near the ground in the garden. I peek down through wicker into oriental afternoon lying on clay pots of aromatic twigs. - Your dirty shirt without arms and heart, like envelope with only a letter in - - I don't want one like that. 27 Her living room is clear - I wish - but hold on, maybe she's just shifting. With Joan Tayler thinking about the aromatic garden. She knew it's the Himalayan not native blackberry, and said "a native berry hedge." 28 Oh the rise, thinking of my landscape, and that in the ether I can build it on - She's made something of the loved, and I could too. "I used to have a little thing that I said to myself early on, when I was in Deer Hunter," Streep says. "I just didn't know how to be, y'know? When I'd finally get there, I'd feel too small to fill the space needed, or there was too much, much too much, and I just had to fit it into a small place. "So I was just casting around for anything to get me through, and this little thing that I've used all the way through came to me. I say to myself, 'Be who you are and know what you know, and that's all you have to do. that's the entire job.' Suddenly, I became potent. Oh! It sounds completely simple-minded. I told it to somebody else, another actor who was in terrible trouble, and he said, 'What the hell does that mean?' But that's all I'm doing, really I know that when I was in drama school the big thing was how to cry. You get to a certain point in a play and you're supposed to break down in tears. And I remember when I first came to New York I saw Irene Worth in Sweet Bird of Youth, and I went back and just kvelled, I made a fool of myself. I said, 'I don't know, I just think you're the greatest actress I ever saw!' I said, 'but you know, how do you cry like that?' "And she said, 'How can you not?' And writ in the lines on her face and in her experience. And you thought, the world as it is Yes, there's something to living." An actor is working as long as he's alive, and touched by the events of his life. "You just get more stuff, you just have more stuff each day," Streep says quietly. "Good and bad." Judy: "I always felt crippled in relation to you." What does that mean? Why my sister is my sex. Sister/little girl. "Married sister." In journal to notice the structures of hope and fear. Which are wishes to be important. Exaggeration. Finding the soul where it is. - [Yeats notes not transcribed] Saturna Island [with Michael, Rowen and Laiwan] In the quiet of overcast and air in equilibrium. I can smell rose leaves in the iodine, the rose-bush and old boards. Shabby blond ground. Orange kinks in the arbutus are luminous big wings and rub in the air. A heavy bird, not so big, raven. On Pender Hill an eye. All around the shore a chirruping pulse. The ear feels sore. Is the boat bringing my missing ones? It's a fishing machine demanding all the minutes for its engine. The cedars' springy tips, the wake's plumes, the oaks, the apples, the maple, the chestnut. The mist in the gap, following the slope down. Impulses on the water like telegraph signals. The apple tree has an outside and a black inside that shows between laces. The ground is blond everywhere, by the apple trunks upslope. The complex tree, the complex colors of lace. A pile of split wood. A crow's caw is dark grey. There is fire steady in the cedar tips. Something else in the dead boughs, moonlight. In a big city where there'll be a war, perhaps. I've had hints to leave Uncle Peter's place. They've set plants in the vacant room. I could go to a hotel with the kids. A building I'm looking over. The roof with flat dry grass - could be gardened, but the stairs are leaning, the brickwork has bent way out. In a taxi, it seems with Trudy. Because of the war should we stay, should we go. I piss out the side of the taxi, she doesn't like it. Hell with her, I'll get out and stay here and if I die I die, or maybe I won't. I'm singing very loud in a strong voice, on and on. How image conveys the meaning of a less-than-whole identity. I don't know what identity in that sense means, unless it's to be certain of one's own sense in everything and not ask confirmation or correction. In romances the man is that. So strong and sturdy a voice. In a café a woman singing. A man at a table offers her a job. She's saying yes, I could support my child on that. I'm thinking, still hearing the strong voice like a blues song, in this wartime there'll be better culture because people will be doing what they do well, not trying to do the next-hardest thing. Was last night reading Flicker's story aloud, hearing the reading at first bad and then in the vision starting to collect. My nearness to the story and listeners, knowing what Laiwan would hear and what Michael wouldn't, feeling, did I write this? After it feeling with my feet in sandals down the path in the dark with a pot of hot water, frightened of Michael's footsteps behind me, and then knowing what frightens me about him. And then on through the breaking into reflections - is there in me an unknown murderous rage at those who can do what I can't? I turn and see him behind me staring. The first night lying together discussin', comes the moment I want to kiss him and do and then feel his arms and chest and head tight coming toward me in a way that stops me with disgust. "I think you're very kind to Michael." "Feelin' like you hate me." "Why you're always wishin' you were somewhere else." Acting haunted, yes, three Harlequin romances to occlude them. Sunday. Skulking mindless. Overnight to Morning Bay. As I set out a little snake, oh laying a letter and slipping through it. But I was so tetchy beside myself in broken-apart systems, trying to make and not deep-in, unmeeting, remembering trance depth but far from trusting it (that brought me to disaster with Jam), complaining and anxious about Michael and Rowen, and Laiwan too pestering me about whether I'd fix her up. Haunted, ungiven and out of harmony. What is against. The image I have of getting to fullness by sinking into it like a bottomless jar set down into dark stuff. I feel betrayed that I went honestly and bravely into depth and the work I brought back was not liked - the way Michael reflects it puts me in a panic - his dumb way of saying Hu ahh h? Little Ted Voth eyes. The way he doesn't feel a gaze from a distance. Tactless clinging. My work that didn't hold Jam's company. But remembering high fire and the focus to turn it, question it, be with it. Lying on the shelf in the sleeping bag, I saw a bull's head, was saying Go away, working to save myself from fear. And then there was a cracking up in the trees. A greyness fell, bounced high, fell again, a branch it seemed thrown by the tree. Later I remembered that I know what the image of the bull is, it's fear. On the beach fucking Apollo, actually a small piece of driftwood. But the hunter is Italian. Yesterday the season opened. Laiwan telling a miserable tumbling with Jam in Hong Kong. J's photographs of what look like mutilated genitals. How it's beginning to be that she and her sisters can touch each other a little touch on the hair. I saw the swelled little confused man of her, that she's consigned to without me. Suddenly I saw what's what - the most powerful and interesting structure I've run into - I couldn't join it so I thought to create a nucleus of my own. They had to bust it up because there couldn't be two two's in a hive. Now I'm at loose ends because my years' work came to nothing and no one around has the power to make it with. [Rowen word lists]
The first shot I saw [for a garden video] was the savages drinking in the bushes. 9th September Here! In Philip Dick appear Athena and then Titania. 1981. He died 1982 @ 54. Philip K. Dick 1981 The divine invasion Pocket Books That realm, golden section, small bells, pink light. "I sense magic around us, a beauty to everything." "I know that pink: it is the human phosphene response to full spectrum white, pure sunlight. You are Diana, Titania, the Fairy Queen, you are Pallas Athena the spirit of righteous war, you are the Spring Queen, you are Hagia Sophia. You are Torah blueprint and formula. You are Malkuth of the Kabala, foundation of the Sephiroth. a woman sitting on a thrown the fall, when the godhead was torn apart you are myself, you are the Shekinah When the fall took place the universe split into the transcendent part separated, that was En Sof, but the other part remained with the fallen world. The Shekinah intervened in lives to assist. How did I wake you up? By your secret joy, to play like a child, to not be serious. accuser Yetzer ha-ra advocate Yetzer ha-tov The domain of the accuser insinuates the paucity of value Belial the goat: I accuse you of violating your own biological foundations. I will take you down into the cave of treasures under the garden, dark and small without air and without light, without real time and real space - walls that shrink and caught tight. In our desire to emancipate we have crushed the souls - we must return the goat thing to its container. Here we must intervene, to protect the small. My only clue is this dull music seeping in cryonic suspension soupy music The little goat - a view of Yah as the throat slitter - the terrorized small who becomes Beliel at the moment of deciding to do it to another. She will be a sacrifice in my place. I will see it cut as mine has been. I do not play. I am strong and I prey on the weak. Each person on earth will have to choose. The battle is waged for each soul individually. Put her on your radio station, help your protector. "The world will be our body and our mind the world's mind." Every creature that chooses the Yetzer ha-tov. the remains of a great luminous kite We called him the moth, the Moth that fell slowly, like a geometrical shape descending stage by stage until nothing remained of its shape. - Saturna. There was a man from ---- and he was wondrous wise - both his eyes - reason to complain - scratched them in again. And the commercial about having fun with people. Those tunes, the underspeech with Campbell always. "Occluded" he said twice. Why's he saying it twice. "Her life is completely changed." "How's it going down at the beach?" "It couldn't be better," dejected. "Did you see any whales?" "I didn't see much animals." Do you forgive me? Very easily. Dreams about him the last two nights, he caught me in the garden, I went back, among the tall potato plants, had my pants down shitting, he catches me before I can get them up. Yes occluded the whole time I was there, "I don't like myself in relation to either of you." But then with my leg hurt wanting to be cuddled the last day and Laiwan sulking because of it and because I showed impatience. Flattered and harassed by the two of them. On the swing shouting suddenly, breaking the spell, It's the dark, the dark of the moon, it's the breaking of strength. The question is, why, with her tact acuteness learning sweet play discriminating food discernment etc do I prefer Michael the fool. 1. Because I can say anything to Michael, he doesn't idealize himself. 2. Because I like his body to look at . 10 We are plants at first. But bramble and grass have not gone through the past experience that lead to the free-moving mammal. Its form becomes the manner of obstructing or interception the goings-on EJH Corner 1964 The life of plants Weidenfeld and Nicolson 12 [notes from calendar and plant custom books] Everything done in the agricultural year is already a ritual because it is specific, a cyclic marker, a mortal moment unrepeated within the cycle and sacred by its mortality. a mysterious breathing of the waters I often saw my mother bow and curtsey to the new moon. in the conjunction do entirely wither and fade plants most active in the morning hanging stones on trees to make them fertile, driving in nails or oak pegs Yorkshire gardeners like to sow when the land is in heat, steaming really the evil eye is the eye of envy uncertainty and sexual excitement purifying garlands: rue, fennel, garlic planting when swallows arrive setting any kind of offsets at winter solstice look at elm buds, when they're as big as a penny or a squirrel's ears, plant kidney beans watch for some trees that won't leaf before last frost pour boiling water over fresh-sown parsley seed call the butterflies by waving a sprig of lobelia the elder for instance isn't poisonous, the maids hang out white clothes to dry around the elder-skirted croft Plants and plant-uses in their silent omnipresence are for us an alternate history. Plant-life is itself the goddess. gardening is an ethos where the unconscious knows. plants that insects don't like: tansy, onion, tobacco, elder weathered soot, wood ashes for snails, aphids salt over cabbages elder twigs stick in broadbeans against blackfly stinging nettle humus for seedbeds store apples and carrots with maple leaves rhubarb leaf or stem in squash planting hold origanum the safe-guarding 13th First night of winter's black water. Last night our fire feast. Candles and curry. Nasturtiums, yellow flowers. We sat each to be alone first, heard each other breathe [Laiwan, Diana, Cheryl, E]. Ate food with earth pigments in. I dropped some into the candle; myrrh powder and flame yearned into each other. Onion, clove, chile, plum (red and yellow food, papaya, peach, purple grapes), cumin, ginger, tumeric, curry powder, garam masala, cayenne, carraway, raisins, black soy, brown sugar). Talked about a giddiness about powdered stones as pigment. Heard Cheryl speak the way I do also - onanism - she's alone with her play of words, withdrawn in. The loveliest moment Laiwan rolling to sit straight and tell the story of herself, Shannon and Rowen. Rowen at Michael's opening and closing the fire door. They say to Rowen, Open the door. He does. Laiwan says to Shannon, Give me something. Shannon picks something out of the air, "It was nothing, it was a nothing," gives it to Laiwan. Laiwan puts it into the stove. They say to Rowen, Close it, close the door. And he does! And then grabs his hands to his chest in excitement (the way he does now, and she did, sitting on her heels with shining face, the hands go clutch, clutch, like a radiant squirrel.) Shannon was happy, "We communicated!" Laiwan was like Demeter at the hearth suddenly showing herself bursting. Hey - it was Rowen's conception day, nearly. 14 'Estyn' in a book reminds me Michael in a dream asking for another baby.
That for Laiwan - her look when I left, viciously hungrily not with her, going like a wolf at intermission, starving and angry that she thinks she can offer what isn't there. Reading British garden and season lore, noticing the hunger, the leap of interest, in any story from that actual life. What is it to do with me. Hunger for richness and order in the unconscious of a life in space in world. An herbere grene A New England housewife paced her chores with the movement of shadows across the kitchen floor. "Satisfaction of making a device to simulate the heavens." Around Christmas days are half a minute longer, mid-September twenty seconds shorter. It's because of orbiting faster nearer the sun. Compared to mean time, the sun dial will run behind 25 Dec - 16 April (very), 14 June - 2 Sept (slightly), ahead 16 April - 14 June (slightly), 2 Sept - 25 Dec (very). perigee, apogee. ephemeris of the sun The shadow of any vertical object will lie on the meridian at the moment of local apparent noon, when the sun is furthest south. gnomon the one who knows 16 He's announced by someone, tall and thin, gladness, come from a distance into my room. I take hold of his hand and then the other too. Don. (Pain yesterday because I heard below: Thank you Trudy, in a love sound. And, You're very, very welcome, in a satisfied sound of having got the one she wanted. I'd like on the hill a big sitting goddess. What fascinates: the unbroken state of self-interest. What is the shadow. Willingness to harm, power to curse. What is animus. An idealized self, a self of idea. 17 What is the conscious. The agreed-on. What is the unconscious. Everything else. Thinking about religion and sacrifice. The way by warring on the admired, I unwillingly war on my wish. Indian summer with light like spring. In the garden bare earth again. I bring home sunflowers to stand in the hall. Poppies head down in paper bags. Hollyhocks' and marigolds' seed boxes nipped off other people's plants: generous increase. Hollyhocks' neat sprouts make me rich. Some tansy beads to keep bugs off'm. Yesterday: at the bridge was the meeting with the creek. This morning with a very shaking hand, an averting invention. Aluminum sink and M in wine beret a fine girl smiles at. These days noticing how hard I was taking any failure - a memory failure feeling like final unworthiness - freedom in saying defense first, fineness after. Then they have no barb. A weakness I was by wanting fine creation to exist where it isn't mine. I want to tell Joyce that. There's stomping and crashing at night. I know I get my turn in the morning, kick the marble toy across the floor, kick it down the stairs. Put on my boots, dance over her head. That's to say, Red sky in the evening / rhodents be leaving. Harvest home, moon energy, blood energy, war energy. Then we attack the rotten corner [in Michael's kitchen]. I tell my war story and the pleasure spreads even to George. We get floor plywood, and a skilsaw for the aft. That means we can attack deeper, through the wall and into the floor. Michael gets jump-started by three pushers and takes a speed and does the difficult parts. Laiwan is in the cherry yard sandpapering in the dark. Steven makes an electric heater from a toaster and a little fan. George walks with Rowen in the other room. I check M's work mercilessly pushing for a little better. L does it softer but she and George make the difference. In the end we are sitting with mackerel feast she spread on the new surface and we have tea by gift of fire in the cookstove. Little cats come just into the light from the door open onto the step. Rowen baby is sleeping on his stomach, in new overalls, upstairs. L's hair gets perked. M goes around in dancer's cling thrusting his legs against 2x4's. Rowen caught his finger in the stove door crack, and screamed, and when I took him, seemed to sway backwards and fade. I called him, "Baby!" and he came back, and I seemed to have at that moment fallen in love with him. 19 To note that Rowen's at home in a deep bath now, sits down and looks around. The way aggression makes certainty. From the yelling yesterday what did I find out. "You'll never know that kind of friendship" [T]. That that's her pride and difference. That she broke me and Jam because she wanted no one to else to have it, because she has it instead of so much else. That that's where to crack her. That that's where we've protected her against ourselves. Until I take action against someone I don't really believe they've done harm. Winter dark - waking from. I come back from somewhere and see them sitting in my large front garden. Yell. See more people beyond the ridge, and then more going upstairs. I go with them, women with babies. Rushing, want to take something from R's place. That's top floor. Little plants in shelves. Rush out again. The guests like people at concerts, a blond woman with folded braids, people with money, so many. Go around to get into my place. Basement door has strange lesbians with black braids half unraveled, black clothes like bikers, a fat one, a thin one, another. They're just looking as I go past into the corridor. There's the stovepipe up through the center with pipes going into different rooms. I've never seen it heated, never been here in winter. One of the pipes into a room is red hot. The center pipe is swelled steaming fit to crack. Almost fills the stairwell as it is. That's when I wake. Then there was them outside looking at the next door big similar house saying they're going to buy it, this and that; it was reddish. Tarot said: I'm worried about - heart. Suspecting Jam is getting her house ready, 6000 to heat the basement, hoping they'll come. Illegal suite, there's that. Incorporate them. Yeah.
A sense that I know how to crack her difference by looking into how it was with J, because we took the impattern. The inner one yesterday even in uncertainty and uneasy collaboration was like a jubilant young person throwing her arms up. An 'inner' joy not the complete dwelling-in joy but a sense of having made someone very happy. A sunniness. L's piece. 1. Greek and English, Sappho. In mother language. She's sad to be left out. 2. Hebrew translated into deaf and dumb and English. She goes through the motions of praising the father. 3. Light and English. The light goes out of language. She gives up. Light and English and image: she sez, I, I lust, I lust to be, I lust to be free, I lust to be free and, I lust to be free and I am, I lust to be free and I am free, I lust to be free and I am free to lust. She speaks up and then she has the world in front of her. She shows its picture and goes on quoting. Saturday 20 First. Sitting and then foot-feeling last night I came into a state that reminded me fear is still there, not to say whether it's mine, but it was of ...? Them, some way - no - of having brought Rowen into life. What don't I know I should know (Qs)
22 What else yesterday. Clearing the garden. Paul in his croft. Clover hay and filtered light. Sun without bite. The scythe laid down. At the end meeting Ellen Woodward with shopping bags, white teeth and grey eyes, a limpid look. You like it? I say [of having had Rowen]. I think it's wonderful she says with such truth. Someday, I say. Soon! She says. The imprint was on the color of her face and the light in what she said and the sense of being on the side of life for other people. And Michael looking sick with abandonment and I feel sick when I look at him. Kim Chernin 1985 The hungry self: women, eating and identity Times Books 25 Fighting to go on writing, and winning. Being stung between two fingers by a wasp in a pile of weeds. The hand swelling, and then at the garden when I'm standing violently scratching my head I realize it's allergic reaction and can be fatal. Then Michael for days spooked and crazy, and Rowen last night vomiting. Jean today with a lame ankle and toxic swelling and Ferron in men's stained tie and greasy hair showing alcoholic pores. And I'm very, strangely, thin, tho' only three pounds less than the old usual. 26 In both sexes the spirit can take the form of a boy or a youth. Positive animus or possibility of conscious spiritual effort. - Often duplicit, "if not outright malice." I must emphasize that the grand plan on which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia, and what good may very possibly lead to evil. Always a situation where insight, initiative, are needed but can't be got. "The uncertainty of all moral valuation" he says is the dark hazardous razor-edged path "to be trodden for god's sake only." Yesterday Laiwan staying. The whining music starts downstairs, she's trying it. I'll demonstrate my way - and am in defensive shock. Set the radio going down her vent. It covers her whine but she takes to drumming. I turn up the volume. She's crashing against my vent and I'm immediately pouring water through her ceiling. She flees. I unplug the radio. She comes back and yells for a while. Then there's quiet for the rest of the night and this morning. Body shock goes on, I lie at night woken by Rowen and fulminating mechanically as if it's a white noise set going to keep the other out. And in daytime every day along with returning happiness I have to give time to watching what aggression is and does. The little voice of protest that I speak to the way I speak to Michael. It'll be over after a while. The continuity, who is proud, to whom I say, She defeated you but now I'm defeating her and we'll be able again as we were. I work hard to shore myself. Conscious writing this that I haven't watched very exactly how these talkings go. Began this wanting to say it was cancer dreaming again, body fear. M resists irritation finally to figure out what he needs to know. Then that the garden's hurt. Wondering about the motor last night. And the footprint like a scalp. A house I used to live in, where T still lives, but it's dirty now, curtained, unswept, littered with art event posters. I'm going there to see Jam, who I'm not surprised to see in her open doorway. One on either doorpost looking at each other as if saying goodbye. But it's J who's crying quiet open-hearted tears. I've come out of love for her but I attack T. Yell and pull out her hair. Get interested seeing her scalp is that grey bland rubber holding her hair tight. But some comes out and with it flakes of dandruff. Going out when J does but where's Rowen. There in the hall behind me. Leaving with J knowing that yelling isn't the way to do it. Grab her. She's a changed body, slimmer, with longer more pointed breasts, taller, with white flats and capri pants on, a tall young woman walking toward - which of these cars, is it the MG again? - a small blue Toyota. She's in the passenger seat and an older man, her father? but younger, a nice man, driving. I grab the window for a last yell. It won't work, it's too double. "If you're feeling sad and left out be very careful." Laiwan angry last night and sullen this morning. Blue Toyota, drives away
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