| aphrodite's garden volume 4 part 2 - 1986 september-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
28th September 1986 A polaroid someone takes (after there's been trying on clothes and bras with my sister), blurred when it's pulled out. I'm small on one side, big blurred plant on the other. Surprised seeing how thin and ill I look. The moment in the Golden Horse café after galloping in hate stories with Cheryl seeing myself in the washroom mirror looking drained to a skeleton, like someone with AIDS. Writing the image I think I see what the worry is about being thin, "I'm thin on one side," and ill. Lorraine and her brother, a beautiful woman in a boy's dress; he killed himself not long ago, and did Cheryl capture her by guessing? Michael's red pants. Riding on my bike, he beside me running, liking to have so long-striding a hound.
29 Nina an eagle chick, imperial eyes (jewel eyes) and blond dishevel. "I could be so easily crushed." "If that's in the past ...." 10 cups, happiness, but if it was that he wouldn't have killed himself, Ekke. Her cup queen power, but fast and frightened tapping the Devil. But if Devil is Accuser, she is it already. The fireweed slide, fireweed and fire, a parrot, a sublimely stoned Titania world, brilliant like a parrot. Some dynamism about right and left: a flurring side and a pointed focus side. The flurring side having a road, two roads overfolded, the center where a flame waves, a flame under a storm column of black smoke, has three cypress trees standing bemused turning their wings. And what's the tree on the right, pointed, at Haney, peach leaves, more like elder maybe. The plants all alive like after sesshin, that world, the plant world, the elemental, is what eyes that look like hers should be seeing. And after it Cheryl holding out her arms, my old dark warrior with her beauty across the room, beauty and ugliness. My fighter for life comes into my arms, stilly making heat. When it comes into the crotch I start to laugh and back out and rub her cold back. We both heard her loud laugh forget and win. 30 "I've never done it this way before." What the difference is. Feeling a part, where, say on the right, right shoulder blade, right lung. In there, or, in the same relation in the cranium, a part is saying, this isn't right. As I learned with Jam, suspending and carrying on, experimental. It being social. I talk to hide him from myself. He goes along with me. The difficulty of concealing his head, that this is the head I'm with - It can be kissing but I have to be into the animal before I'll traverse refusal, not animal, what - I have to be into the limbs, flesh around a bone. Does it mean, I have to be in the lower body. My body now looking like his. I said, there's a primal satisfaction in it, just the stick going in and out, without it getting to bliss or visions, a basic, not tissue, limb. Flesh on bones, tones of grey, x-ray, and basic because it isn't in the throat, or heart, spreading to wrap him in, or, where is, the joyful liking of the other's timing, the joyful liking of the other, down the center of the brain, standing behind the nose. A while when I was the small twelve year old being safely affectionately fucked, hah, that was right, lying as if sitting on his lap, the thing not deep, going regularly in and out, his hand on the clit (teaching), other on the nipple, mouths little kissing, heads together on the pillow. 1st October "The king had evidently been greatly excited." He had a telescope built into the pyramid, only the tube-like channel aimed at the sky. "The lower end, where the observer would be, was in the burial chamber deep in the ..." Judging from the slope of the channel, the king was watching the pole star of that time. Doubtless he thought of it as peering at him through the telescope, and he was certain it would be waiting for him with its tiny but steady light when he woke in his life-after-life. - Egyptian settlers - goats, a basket of wheat and some leeks, garlics and onions - Staying near the river bank - Black glass, obstinate, glittering off a sealed planet. I remember the annihilation of calling toward that locked surface. Now, I know the lock. It says: I won't consider you but if you can further me toward the ones I will consider I'll take your consideration all. I'm alone. Alright, you're alone. I can speak to that. 2nd The happiness was also that Cheryl had said, I could have had a life with you. - The house these last days sensitive more than ever shakes so much under footsteps that I get dizzy. - "Sensitized." - Michael arrives as one of them at last on the outside. Coming into a room handsome in a hat, dressed carefully as the image of a man. Sitting in a room with him, if he takes off his hat, down falls his strange dead hair. His skull standing there frightens. His body shows under his clothes like a dog's belly turned over to be scratched. Tight belly, loose little genital. On the street the man in the hat puts his feet down inch by inch feeling the sidewalk through plastic soles of tai chi slippers. Curved lip, tipped nose, green eye, excellent wool suitcoat with its silk lining in shreds, vanity, virginity, pink blood pouring simply into his head a large gush unimpeded from the heart. The queen of swords is conflict, sometimes righteous, sometimes a bid for more space, aggressive. The decision to take space comes with banging heart, why should it, and is unpleasant, the body itself punishes it. Conditioned.
3rd Friday but only of the consequence of a process applied to the data color vision improves the ability to tell surfaces apart reflectance of a surface compared with reflectance of others Printing: magenta, cyan, yellow. Computer: red blue and green phosphors. A chromatic designation by red green blue pixels. Colors are determined at boundaries and vertices, where ratios can be taken. If an image is held steady on the retina it vanishes. Individual receptors must experience boundary crossings. Have to jiggle so each cone gets moved over. Running normalization. Adjust sensitivity of the system to the average level of input so that all changes are made to lie in the same limited dynamic range. "imagine a sheet of cones" 4th In the morning you will regret starting this because it will be boots and bangings / and you profoundly regret in your stinky bed that you started this relentless voice this courageous flexible inventive voice, that you started it saying rhythms into your head. I have the last win because it is mine. Now is my time to win and I do. Inwardly and outwardly I am rested and balanced and keen and fast. Every encounter I win. I win my time and space and energy and confidence and delicacy and delight. I win it all back. I win back everything I gave or lost to you or you or Jam. All of it comes back to me and I keep all I worked to learn. The story of my engagement with these enemies comes gently to an end, with my enemies moved to another place, another life. It comes to an end leaving me in possession of myself inward and outward. Profound, glad, delicate, wide, balanced, open, fearless, experienced, clean, beautiful, exact, loyal, connected, essential. Diana in a room with a side open on a woods, naked kissing me upside down. Rhoda on the back balcony whiskered in short hair speaking deaf and dumb language. Just a minute, you're saying you want to move but Trudy doesn't? We go downstairs. I'm on the road going to the dock to meet some royal refugees. Perhaps because of a past trip, and in some way not clear but having to do with a Russian man in a suit, I've been informed and given the coach to meet them with. They are standing silent together. I know them although they look like East European intellectuals, quite fine but worn out and distracted, a tall man and woman and a child. I know I must speak gently and humbly to them at first. When I tell them I'm taking them to a coach they believe me and will come with me, but first the man has to stop on the cliff and let go a bird out of his hand. They do this privately in what is see is a sad gallant and necessary giving up of their distinction so it can go on existing somewhere else. The bird flies up in the direction they've come from. Then we see the man below swimming toward shore strongly and visibly almost horizontal in the water. We are walking in an uphill curve between the parked cars looking for their coach that I haven't seen either. I'm encouraging them. Then we see it more than satisfactory a sort of limousine pulling two narrow airstream trailers (that look also like horse trailers). I'm asking Joyce if there's an archetype of the fine people, 'the gentry.' Why are they tall and blond, long-headed, long-handed, self-absorbed, fragile, north-east European, aristocratic, remote, exiled. Like fairies. What are they to me. Okay - so now I know. They're the well-bodied. The fine people. A sad gallant and necessary giving up of their distinction. The well-bodied are idealized because I didn't fight their disregard. 5th
7th Yesterday a landscape they were going to settle. Wide yellow desert, yellow rocks. Wicker buses. Something else, ruins. People coming in busloads to resettle them. Last night an instruction: there aren't many people required, by the globe or the human mass, to develop the inward, but many for the outward. And they're kept busy, diversified into the different religions. Images of animals, a donkey, in stone. I understood the inward as meaning that sense of the spirit in its own existence as such. The outward as interest in the garden of earth and sky. Then there's social struggle and explanation. I'm thinking of Yeats living so esoteric excitement comes to him. The astral world the devachan, abode of light Pineal chakra Undifferentiated space, the 'astral light,' ether Visualize as an emerald burning like a coal 8th The degree circle stood for the sun and meant 'day.' Sumerian religion and 360 gods Two guides; the one who stands at the prow, the other who keeps her head turned back - Projector breaks when I try to show Trapline. We meet J on Commercial. Have crusty words with L. They call me to get Rowen, sick. Cranky with M. Dry mouth, dark under eyes, sore liver, a little nauseated by smells, sore neck. 9 Slight sickness like a sick liver. The illness of two Octobers ago. Smell of paint, cooking, greasy thickness of the air. Michael's slowness too, I can't bear his talk. It was morning before light, misery of turning on the electrics. Rowen cold, soaked. Mid-October to mid-April. Vancouver poems. The sense I had at first. Can I remake winter? Steve is fixing the camera [the Beaulieu]. Daphne Marlatt 1972 Vancouver Poems Coach House Press 10 The way Rowen is walking. Toed out, flat foot, knees high leaning back from his big stomach. Jerky like a wind-up. Getting to the center of the room pivoting proudly and coming back. In his blue cord jacket and pretty grey hat. 'Bye he says in a little clear voice. Clams his fingers. Walking up the forest past the place they're camped. Maybe Laiwan and ... It's a big tree stump with a roof, a note on it I'm going toward, but then I see it's their site. I've passed it, and will go on as if I'm strolling without seeing them. Something about the camp. I'm very interested and curious and want to go see it when they're not there. Up top. A white seal in the water. I have to go touch it. It's a pup with a spot on its side. It goes under. I pick it right up. Something about the urge to hold it. A little fat slippy thing, innocent. As if I violate it by a lust. - It had a perfect poise with its flung out moons and moon shadow a dot. Poseidonus on the terminator, the Apennines three miles high satin mud grey. A double star Alazar in Andromeda. Perseus by Casseopiea. And the ring nebula, faint smoke ring at 7:30. - At night crying in his bed. Alright I'll give you a little more. He laughs seeing me pour it. I set it on his chest. "Ahunk-ah," cheerful. 13 I seem to be on Yeats' track not the Americans'. Consciously by the mastery of magic or half consciously by artists. "They act because Great Memory associates them whatever passions have gathered about." Simples with magical effect by some hypnotic suggestion. All sound, color, form. "impulses from the lowest of the 9 hierarchies" "mind liberated from the pressure of will unfolds itself in symbols" The sun is half a degree in breadth. It takes two minutes to traverse its own space. - If there could be a little stone world (or brass or etc) very smooth with latitudes marked, the line bisecting the arc would tell the time. It would show where daylight is. Would have to have the right polar angle. It could also have a round pool. To the threshold of sleep and over. The tower of ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted woods, the white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the Fool of Faerie with his shining cup full of dreams. A garnet unfolding pictures in its heart. "The laws of art, which are the hidden laws of the world." A rhythm "that only wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty." "a powerful and passionate syntax" "those traditional rhythms that have developed with the language" "I have been cast up out of the whale's belly though I still remember the sound and sway that came from beyond its ribs." "a rhythm that has the welcome ghost of instinctive rhythm in it" Lin phones me and booms, You're a strong woman, there aren't any others, but you're narcissistic. I say pertly, And how do you take that? Meaning does he like it. He doesn't. After waking I go back and kiss him and see Michael over there flinching. There's being, sez Roshi, and being-self. Respect: when unification breaks up, to realize the individual self which objectifies and bases its action on objectification. Then you are forever seeking the world. Endless self reformation is the only life that is possible to us: joining and separating. Two movements: negating and affirming. "You approach illumination as though an invisible mist was coming up behind you and enveloping you. Unless that happens you are nowhere near." 15th At last Joyce day. She encouraged me but when I said it goes against myself too she said, Just a minute! Just a minute! Divided us into chairs, three, and then another position standing behind reason: the overview she says. Sees patterns. Alright. Left hand chair says, Oooh - oooh - and, Its not fair to be mean to anybody, they can't help it. Right chair says, I don't want it, I won't have it, I want it, I'll have it, I demand it. It's just energy, she says. I say it feels artificial, from the third chair. I say it's my mother and father and his egotism was so ugly I didn't want to be it. "That's very interesting what you just said." Then it was interesting what she said, that I didn't decide it was ugly, that I was told it was ugly - and then afterwards projected that unwanted ugly onto him. Hm. Then I was to fall down a tunnel and pop out, but it was a pipe and I didn't pop. Hand on belly - [her] cold hand - [my] doughy abdomen - "there's a heartbeat" - where are we - that living room scene where I'm behind the door standing on the table and pop out performing and get flattened - and is it to do with my sister in her stomach. I dunno, though it's remembered together. She guesses I was playing pregnant with the breadpan maybe, "showing off." And that reason is a tyrant, "a fascist almost," trying to understand. She feels sorry for that one figuring out, from those two trying to figure out. That everything I do is in relation to the conflict between those two, my work, etc, and that clearing their relation "you'd have to change." There's I want egotism; self-restraint thinking of the other's good, deferring; and explanation trying to connect them. 16th "You'll only show it in your work and then it's this precious little thing that you're devastated if people don't like it or see it." - "Thoreau's earliest memories were of this pond." - Dwelling in, returning to, the sense of considering what Joyce intends. It seems dangerous and also something I can measure. I can go along with it and come out beyond. Supporting defense, being energy, evading restraint and directing it all, comforting fright, what about explanation? Giving her a companion. - My grandfather's house. Lesbians living where Jam and I lived. We were there one fall. I'm partly pleading they should let me live there again. A path across the fields to the road, close. We were together eight years. Feeling the vividness of the time. But I'm thinking too there's that larger hall upstairs (I dreamed before)(a giant animal daycare beside where T and R and J were moving out) I could live in instead. [The first space was lower left, the second was upper right.] -
Joyce and I undressing each other or ourselves, she's fatter and redder, a fleshier bum than I would have thought. My underpants are big and square thick cotton print. I'm interested to see hers - bikinis, green, lace, and (peering) bloody, she has her period maybe. The green lace, yeah. Like tossing something off a sailboat deck, her class, money. There is a tyrant: with other people: but it seems to be what prevents me from acting to understand. "that objectifies and bases its action on objectification" "He's what I got instead of Jam" What's today, irritation, wrote Don annoyed and plain, the sun, powder haze, To the lighthouse, speeding, yes but what can I do, wanting a great work, a good fight. I told Don I wouldn't mind if the last four years dissolved and that Rowen doesn't feel like mine because I got him instead of things I wanted more. 20 Emptiness of this loveless time, 1973 was the rich one, like I want again. I feel ready to have some years of thick and fast career. - The names of plants, the way there are so many unfamiliar, the way myosotis is Greek for mouse-ears, the way the language of plant names is in many languages, suggested the way plants, their variety, locality, inflections, developments, is a language. 21st Sitting on Friday night with Diana in this room in the quiet after a while I said, I will do the grain film somehow, now, and I'll write too, and will be like Virginia attentive to how to lead myself, for the sake of using what I've found. 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 constancy in it enough to finish. Here in the blue pages writing sky and glass, oh it endures and catches and is my companion, made with a companion, now in the new time alone. 22 Jean-Luc! The sun, the moon, annunciations all over, ceremonial basketball, Hail Mary is the love he gives us to feel for the girl's body. Puis-je te voir tout nue? In the genius of confidence. We're in the café, late. I have my head on the table. Laiwan is gold glass, ivory and horsehair. In equilibrium at the back of her head, in distance, courteous, telling me about her instructor who was years researching apocalypse and then showed her work in the form of a map of the world after it changed. "A lot of men came in and told her her world wasn't viable. She had a nervous breakdown and afterwards she was different. Her work was more conventional." What is a nervous breakdown? It's when you lose your confidence in everything you were, so that you have nothing left. He says to them be and loves their being and gives them for once a world they can be graceful in. Sit there in the light. In the midst of the love of the work. Seeing - I can press closer to the actual presence of my vision - the nasturtiums and heart's-ease say it. Want a big clean image implying an other world they can be graceful in. Intuited functional analogies like moon: white dog. Find the limits bright and dark of film response and audient interest. Jean-Luc Goddard dir 1985 Hail Mary - Choy cranky, dark under his eyes. I don't speak carefully enough. He's not willing to mend the ceiling or any other thing. Alarmed because he said unexpectedly that Trudy is moving maybe at the end of November. Fright from crossing wills (how did I do it?). 23 Blake - and him, him - the pastor's phone ringing unanswered, my heart shaken - as if I'm being folded at the midriff - does it mean you are the heart - the way in relation to you there goes on being the opening into love terrified of itself - where are you? A self I have to struggle against - a need to tell - why is it now? Closer again. Are you in town, maybe. - How M after a rant is happy again and says he looks at women thinking how much power they might have, "You can get anything you want from me," and that's what he likes. I love and fear creation's freedom. 25 I saw a fight and fall this instant: a voice of scorn from the right, a smother from the left: don't destroy what I'm standing on. Imorh death or sleep or insanity. The hard anger of the willful when they are dealt with and moved about. Alright, you, he; his mother was away insane briefly. Your mother. You have it inside, but you're careful not to crack. That I'm carefully feeling for myself in his form. Reading and notes, finding own feeling, taking own feeling down but not in. Sorry I can't see: sorry I can't stand and see: I want to say: I'm sorry to be confused. "In silence, in sleep, before action or breath, utterly and immutably, Nganon cries from itself." Joanne Greenberg 1964 I never promised you a rose garden Mass Market Paperback In church, at church, with a tampax or some such needing changing. She, someone, has the solvent or disinfectant it has to be changed in, in a bottle. We go on the porch. I see Maggie through the men's door, on the platform. Running with my sister to the toilet, was there one in here? in the Sunday school building, apparently, around the corner. I on the toilet she on the other thing, which is a tank. And she's caught crabs - red ones - how? she's taken an arm of that red tangle in there, stuck it down and comes up with a crab. Usually they're in the sea. Is this a tank that goes deep to an underground sea? My sister herself ducked down under the water. We can move, see, hear, feel somehow beyond our immediate selves. We can. We do. 26 For the [Canada Council film grant] project application, what am I stuck on. 1. A technical entry. What do I need to think out or research. Photochemistry. First talk to --. Chemistry of grain. Other experimental work from 70s. 2. A contemplative method of watching the images sprung in reading, by certain phrases. Beginning to notice them as a certain quality or world cohering quality or world, wanting to create in that world, wanting to create with the materials, qualities, of that world. Also wanting to make it possible to meet with other people in it. 3. It begins with grain. 4. It goes on to movement of fluids. 5. And the straight line (interaction) of light - geometrical - direct optical geometrical presence - actions of em radiation. 6. Sources maybe cellular intuition, maybe prenatal simplicity, memory of prenatal cellular life, maybe a direct intuition of atomic and subatomic, ourselves as atomic and subatomic. A magnification into ego self of what we are, universal, physical. 7. As always it is meant to be and teach perceptual pleasure, of intimate attention, non-verbal presence. 8. I need to build someway. These ideas can be still more sorted and coherent. 29th Don last night. Moving Laiwan on Monday. Joyce today. - [with Joyce] 1. I can love. 2. I choose ones who can't love me back. 3. Those are separate things and it doesn't mean I can only love if I'm not loved. 4. Is it possible to rewire? How do you know? Did you marry someone who was sadistic? Are you still married to him? Did he change? 1. Michael is nice, and he loves you. 2. It's a shame you have to be like your father with Michael. 3. Like his father too. 1. There is another road. 2. Is there passion on the other roads? 3. There is more feeling. You have a choice. (She says.) 4. I think of change as being toward more downtrodden. Binge reading: "You can still read but before you begin, take five minutes and write down everything you don't want to think about." - [Don says] Olivia has a baby called David born with a hole in his heart. Michael [his son] visits twice a year. Don thinks associate chairman is success. He's living away from Holly and wakes in a cold sweat. Not liking the way he suddenly says he's going. Afterwards remembering the image I had of him, a drawing in lines, planes and angles, constructivist. Feeling myself constructed too. He wanted a student in his bed and refused himself. That's where his voice went out of control. Otherwise a young, less-wiry voice. Like a bear about losing his children, he said. [I tell Joyce] I dream there is a black bear who eats garbage I'm evading. Put out some meant so I'll know where he is and be elsewhere. Then I tell a memory that is as if the interpretation of the dream. Judy and Paul and I in the camper looking through a little window at a garbage dump with a black bear our father goes up to. Our father seems bold until we realize she's dead. "Her cubs were still there - somewhere." Joyce says "You got too close to someone and you got shot." "And I'm still dead." "But the cubs are still here." "Where?" Looking around to the right. What was it the dream said. The black bear is death. It's an image of my father's connection with death. "If you wanted you had to not show you wanted. My first journal starts there. Because I wouldn't get anyway and if I showed I'd be ridiculous." "Yes," she says, "but there is another road." 30th Why it scared me to see her so pleasant with Ray today became clear. "It can't be renewal." A little fungal sideways move on slime. Garden still hostage. More war to do. And she in the hole, why? And Rhoda still more crowded. And someone down there who's in her pocket. - "Amanda King you are the best the bravest the smartest the most beautiful woman in the world." - I'm in the bathroom cutting the tops off carrots, Rowen is obstructing the lower space, Laiwan is blocking the door. I hear the mushrooms burning. Have to swing my hip over the bathtub to get round the kid, run up against Laiwan, who's running and gets there first. Handle-less pot on the flame. She goes for a chopstick but I have a carrot on either side and lift it off. She doubles up laughing. - Light is a condition of fire, a messenger, traveler, leoht, liht, a very light touch that can feel deeply. It's central form is the great god prime Fire. Light is a messenger of fire Fire is the great god of transmutation Light is not a being but a circumstance, and is infinitely varied in its The speed of fire's effect is c We understand straight lines by the way light travels A pebble is dull when dry because specular reflection is mixed with diffuse and partly absorbed (colored) reflection. Granularity: silver salts, halide, Gk hals sea salt silver halide grains or microcrystals silver halides are by themselves sensitive only to ultra-violet, violet and blue microcrystals in suspension the larger a grain, the more sensitive high contrast film: slow and fine-grained, grains more similar in size high speed: big grains, a wide range of size graininess reduced by underdevelopment in overdevelopment speed and contrast both increase to a maximum and then drop off visible graininess is from clumping of grain better lit areas will show it more a highly specular printer light produces an image which is very sharp AND very grainy, but also shows every speck and scratch N Brown Hermes the thief, C Kerenyi Gods of the Greeks, Jack Lindsay The clashing rocks, Jane Harrison Prolegomena and Themis I had driven the herd down to the shore when the high sun was midway in its course, beholding as much behind as lay before. A part of the cattle had kneeled down on the sand and lying there were looking out upon the broad, level sea; part was wandering here and there; while others still swam out and stood neck-deep in water. A temple stood near the sea, not resplendent with marble and gold, but made of heavy timbers and shaded by an ancient grove. The place was sacred to Nereus and the Nereids. A sailor told me, laying his nets to dry, the gods of that sea. Hard by the temple was a declivity thick-set with willows, which the back-water of the sea made into a marsh. From here a huge beast, a wolf, Iris in a thousand hues goes to the King of Sleep Near the land of the Cimmerians there is a deep recess Around him on all sides the empty dream shapes, many as ears of grain, as leaves on trees, as sands cast on shore Iris comes into the dark in her mist of color 1st November
- For the garden, painted columns with angled mirrors set to focus toward a spot. 3rd The poet's house as map - I saw - a small elaborated house on one side - the mother and child house at the back - the big garden - the native family over on the far front - public wall facing the road. Tank and wash house. The vividness of the poet's house. Sewell The orphic voice, Ovid Metamorphosis Book I, Monteverdi L'orfeo, Gluck Orfeo ed Euridice, Cocteau - Grayling moth looking for a mate darker than any there are, will choose an image - that's mythology, he said. I want to make to make to saturate the image of Orpheus in the leaves - 4 Pent, boiling, discontented with baby duties, wanting to be off to London and erotic adventure, or real transformation, fear and joy. Book X She was among the new shades and came with steps halting from her wound. They took the up-sloping path through places of utter silence, a steep path, indistinct and clouded in pitchy darkness. After he loses her there's the list of trees, and then a stag, antlers and necklace, with a boy called Cyparissus who accidentally killed his love (the stag) and asked to mourn forever. O Mother, blest in your husband! Myrrha - the married women were celebrating the Ceres festival. Thrice was Myrrha stopped by the omen of the stumbling foot. Forth from the chamber she went, full of her father, with crime conceived within her womb. She ran for 9 months. Even as she spoke the earth closed over her legs, roots burst forth from her toes and stretched out on either side the supports of the high trunk, her bones gained strength, and while the central pith remained the same, her blood changed to sap, her arms to long branches, her fingers to twigs, her skin to hard bark. And now the growing tree had closely bound her heavy womb, had buried her breast and was just covering her neck: but he could not endure the delay and meeting the rising wood, she sank down and plunged her face in the bark. Though she has lost her old time feelings with her body, still she weeps, and the warm drops trickle down from the tree. Pitying Lucina stood near the groaning branches, laid her hands on them, and uttered charms to aid the birth. Then the tree cracked open, the bark was rent asunder, and it gave forth its living burden, a wailing baby boy. Whom Venus later tells this story: A husband will be your bane, o Atalante; flee from the intercourse of husband; and yet you will not flee, and, though living, you will lose yourself. Gazed on him with softening eyes, being in a strait betwixt her desire to conquer and to be conquered. The apples thrown from Aphrodite's tree distracted her. (Gold is fascination. The tree was the fascinating tree.) But when they married their disrespect for source turned them into lions. Aphrodite and swans. My grief, Adonis, shall have an enduring monument. He became a red flower, "for the winds from which it takes its name shake off the flower so delicately clinging, and doomed too easily to fall." Book XI Those were Orpheus' songs. "See, see the man who scorns us!" and hurled her spear straight at the tuneful mouth wreathed in leaves, marked without harming him, another threw a stone, which, even as it flew through the air, was overcome by the sweet sound of voice and lyre, and fell at his feet as if t'would ask forgiveness for its mad attempt. The maenads first killed birds and beasts, as when the doomed stag in the arena is the prey of dogs. The poet's shade fled beneath the earth, and recognized all the places he had seen before; and, seeking through the blessed fields, found Eurydice and caught her in his eager arms. Here, now side by side they walk; now Orpheus follows her as she precedes, now goes before her, now may in safety look back upon his Eurydice.
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