| aphrodite's garden volume 4 part 3 - 1986 november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
6 November At Jam's for a party, women I don't know, mothers talking about their children, Sandy is as if my sponsor, it's interesting and alright until Jam comes and then I'm frightened and want to leave or hide between other bodies. The big mother bodies. In the wash of party talk someone tackles my relation to Jam. Surprised, it's direct, friendly. Mei-lin maybe, sitting looking pretty in wreath and brown shoulders, twining and posing. Looking at her I'm thinking that's how distracting I used to be in tulip-leaf green and polished shoulders. I don't remember what she said but it grabbed Jam. More talking I don't recall and then Jam pecking on the perforated line of a plastic bag on a roll, the transparent plastic. The beak, and a tear falling beside it. She's pecked the bag off and sets it open in front of me, a childish appeal, I'm to put something into it maybe. I say Let's just leave it open a while. There's some looking around her house, a room with a window into it, peering up at the dim ceiling expecting to see a skylight. A commotion. The two little East Indian boys have been brought unnoticed and have been standing in the rain. We see them run across the drive, two thin little boys with their little suitcases, more cases standing on the asphalt. The young women brought them and left and they were too shy and inexperienced to ring the bell and now they're chilled. I'm saying get them under a hot shower right away. - Sitting last night. First that the processing is alright and when done clears the presence and that's what's meant by watching the thoughts. Second, lying down seeing blue sky. Anguish forehead. I could suddenly bring the sky forward right into the forehead. Was an instant opening. - Telling L her image bit me. She laughed. 7 Very faint imaging "Image intensification," photon counting, a contrast enhancement. Image amplification, to get rid of fog/noise by selecting grains lying nearest the surface. "Latent detail on top layer." Rutherford - a nitrogen filled chamber with a fluorescent screen at one end - alpha rays let in - a scintillation. Cloud chamber. Emulsion chamber. Cosmic rays - very rare - come into the atmosphere and are of so high energy they break up a molecule What is aurora Electrons and protons of the solar wind, charged particles Electrically conducive wind across the stretched boundary of the magnetosphere - makes a dynamo The particles are caused to drift into the center of the tail where they form a plasma sheet Electrical discharge from this feeds ions down into the closed field lines anchored on an oval band at twenty degrees around the magnetic poles So the aurora is like a horseshow in the ionosphere around the poles, the earth rotates under it An image of it in ultraviolet taken in light of atomic oxygen emission A solar flare makes it intensify and swell Electrons discharged from the plasma sheet strike atoms of nitrogen and oxygen in the tenuous ionosphere exciting them to energy states attainable in thinner air. As each atom returns to base it emits, neonly, green for nitrogen, red for oxygen Shapes are from the "interplay of electric currents" "atmospheric turbulence" - Storytelling. "One senses in him at all times sanity and spaciousness." "The first thing he did was to converse with his wife and indulge in loving pleasure and affection with her." - A meeting [with Laiwan] at the Hong Kong, doesn't go well after Michael shows up all in loose green, but when I tell her about open sky coming into the forehead she tells me something that has happened to her since childhood, at times when she is ill. She is standing before a very high double door that opens and lets her look into as if a barn, but vast, a vast space, with as if potato sacks piled. She feels herself somehow submit to it. Today! New air, free light potent air hatching into clean, radiant, fantastically tinted piles of cloud, red splendour on the old hotels, a glorious red marble tower with turquoise glass; enamel hardness, water-brightness around us on Georgia Street (in the block with its south side open), in the block with the fairy lights, slow cars and clotted pedestrians, home time, spilling. A woman was coming toward me, so well dressed; a rippling skirt, over it a rippling cutaway cloak, fine boots, hair like blond feathers. I was thinking of the Mabinogian and looking at her as if she were walking in fairyland, not aware I was visible. There's a little confusion, she has drawn up, I see her face. I'm startled because she was looking at me. smiling? I dart back to see if it was that, a late grin too, and carry away the look I see then, a smile like teeth barred, a red rectangle, the finish of very expensive well judged fashion, but a face really out of Celtic fable, so fine it looks crazy. I couldn't tell her look. After that - yes. Last night dreaming the smoothness of the brush-hair girl, touching how sleek, pale flank, allowed to, saying it's because you grew up with money, it's your good bones and teeth. 8 I meet him on the street. He's silent and certain. Leads me to the blue truck. We drive out through the leaves. Seeing the leaves. The poplars ripple. I don't speak because I'm at home. We look at each other small glances that carry away a profile against leaves. We're somewhere in the valley, on valley roads with wet asphalt. Then we're stopping for a gate onto a gravel drive. There's a small house with leaves twirling above it. A grassy space and a little slow river and beyond it a whole wall of poplars turning their leaves. We walk and look. We go as far as the fences. There's an orchard with old and a few new trees in blown-over grass. A flat plain silty garden in a hedge. A barn with truck tracks into it. No animals. (Jersey cows on the other side of the fence.) The kitchen opens simply onto the grassy space. There's a checked tablecloth and blue-green tongue-and-groove half-paneling. A bench. Deep sills on long windows. Tomatoes to ripen. Geraniums. Wood stove. I walk through to the front room, that's empty though it's wide and has a south window too. The stairs go up the middle of the house. He's making supper. He's gone to the garden while I'm looking in the front room, at the fireplace. I cut carrots, tear lettuce, put it in a blue bowl with olive oil and salt. He has old plain silver spoons. A few good things. What does he cook - rice and vegetables. Still in agreement not to speak. There's enough to do meeting all this in each other. It's falling dark. He hands me a warmer coat. We sit on his river seat with our hands in our pockets. It's west-facing and in a willow screen. We see birds. Ducks, ordinarily. An owl. But we're seeing their beings. We're understanding what they say. Something sails past on broad wings, over the river. It's inscrutable. We watch the dark complete itself, stars unveil. Smells are clear strands of colors winding into our noses. We walk pressing our tread into the ground. We come into the house. He opens the fire box, pokes up the fire. Sets a chair where I can put my feet on the fender. Puts the kettle on an open ring. Does all this without a lamp. There's no electric light. Goes upstairs. Music comes surrounding in the dark. He comes down in his socks. (Our shoes at the door with mud on them.) It's his music. He pours good coffee. Cream from a jar. Sits opposite the fire in an armchair. The music goes on for an hour. Particles pouring, a blue-violet wind of tune. A red line. Scintillations. A spirit head talking. Leaves talking. He's in his chair looking into the fire. I'm looking into the fire. We feel the space stretch between us. We feel the space warming as its atoms open. The music stops. He lights a candle at the washstand, pours hot water for me, goes outside. When he comes back I go out. When I come back toward the door there's a light in an upstairs window. The fire door's closed. I go upstairs. The light is on the right, in the room above the kitchen. I see a white bed, a plain table, a chair by the window, a blue cupboard. It's a small room. On the other side of the hall the door is open. Firelight on a wall of books, table, reading chair. Out of sight, I presume, a bed and he in it. I go into the small room and sit a moment at the table. I look at the cotton blanket, the careful repair, the oiled table, the cupboard, the floor's polish. I blow out the lamp and look out the window at the yard, poplars, further fields. I take off my clothes, lay them on the bed. Walk naked into the firelight in the other room. His bed is set in the air from the wide open window. It's very large, with fanciful posts. He's under a humpy quilt. His head's on the pillow seeing me come. He opens the bed. We're lying there excited, looking at the ceiling, at the transparent sky. We close our eyes and enjoy trembling. I touch his ribs. I want to feel his shape. He gasps and lets me. I touch him everywhere, not to affect him, only to feel him. In the end I touch his penis the same way. It has been standing up thumping all the while. It's good and big and strong. When I lay my hand along it, just exchanging heat, he suddenly sits up, touches the labia to make sure of them, takes my leg on his arm and brings himself into me. Resolutely and directly but studying every quality of the terrain. Coming up to the end he kisses me. I kiss him. Dryly. Then he sits back and greets me the way I did him. His hand is a warm dry edge. My breasts swell toward him. He doesn't stop moving his penis just a centimeter, like a pulse. I'm starting to be in the deep purple ache. He's intent now, not frightened, working as he does in music. When I am suddenly involuntarily lunging for a longer stroke he takes my heel and sets it on his shoulder. Kisses around my nipple and starts to fuck. Long streaks of neon. Wet streets. A drag against the inner skins of a rose. A very dark red. A vast prairie in moonlight. Skimming martins. A gasping dip. Many bird cries. A turmoil of staging swans. So clear a lake. Skimming. An ether air. Pink and tenuous. Darkening. Falling silent. Rocking against the outer shell of earth's magnetic field. A river of white spirits. A mist clearly seen dissolving in transparent night. They're gone 'til nearly morning. Icy air moves on their faces. He's still in her. This time it's sex, kissing, sucking, laughing, talking and oh absolutely fucking. Very blue-violet and deep. Taking it to the edge and backing off. Taking it forward experimentally to the edge of dreaming and then telling the dream. They wake established companions I mean to say. There could and would be children, fame, travel, and always, immutably, steadily, wrenchingly, crucially, work and its collaborations. His green dressing gown and her right to come anytime in need and plug herself into him. Her black dress and his freedom to come anytime and plug himself into her. Hardly a night or morning they don't go to the well. - After that, Carnegie lunch with Michael and Rowen, we're sitting in the toy room, he on the floor, I on a little train, Rowen running with another kid. I say, I had a fantasy and it wasn't you in it. Tears jumped into his eyes. Such a young boy. Held his hand until Francoise came in. And then in the garden ditching with Peggy who seems decorticated because she slurs her words. Jean Waite telling a story as we stand on the wet ground, the sun gone, full chill come back, of being on the ferry deck in her old toque, perfectly happy, and a man coming by saying it's a fine day or some such. Going on, and then coming back and sitting down. "He was such an interesting man." She liked how he was dressed. They talked all the way to the terminal. "I expect I'll see him again." "It was a Scottish man, from Argyll." "What does he do?" "He's a psychiatrist. He's well aware of these strange things too." Listening back over it as I'm piling Peggy's beds and she dragging buckets of sand, I coveted him and imagined him the beautiful man with a creel. But strange looking, she said. Herself in greenish tweed coat and walking shoes and thick stockings, blue-ish water in her eyelids and eyes with brown veins across them. 10th Monday She served as a merger figure to whom he could confide his most disturbing thoughts and whom he could rely on for support during periods of intense creativity especially in its early phases certain creative persons need a specific relationship with another person which is similar to what establishes itself during the treatment of narcissistic personality disorders Toni Wolff 1909 came to him as patient. He destroyed their letters when she died 1953. Jung's crises after the break from Freud. 1914. Bizarre fantasies and visions. He held conversations with them. Female voice in him said it was art. By 1918 it had abated. A male figure, a female figure and a pure self. Narcissism refers to the task of forming a cohesive self, primarily in relation to a significant other whom the self has previously idealized or with whom merged. A struggle. "Until it was completed I could not appear before the public." Can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a you. Soul bird "turned back to the world and to the future" If you ruin your conscious personality you deprive the self of its real goal, namely to become real itself. About god: only by intellect has anything to do with tao, etc, but not by living thralldom. This is local, barbaric, infantile, and abysmally unscientific. Welcome bridegroom new light - chaire nymphie neon phos - as Dionysus was greeted. 10th A sense of confusion pressing, wanting to be writing my way through it. It's the pressure also of my privacy with Michael. This is come out of a murky broken-up self-speaking. I'm guilty. He walks around in grey slacks and white shirt a divine body, slight, straight, loose, the most desirable man's body there could be, we sit together in the chair, his arm is perfect, we get in bed, he's rubbing my nipple, it's crude but it's working, pinching them, I'm quite well stoked, it was goin' good, but then he gets lost in licking my nostril, and that because he wanted kissing and I didn't, and I call him off. That breaks his confidence. Slow down there's lots of time, I say but he's speeding in fear of going wrong. And then when he's putting himself in he gets the angle wrong and that puts me into contempt, I'm thumping over to get it right, bang my head on the gas pipe, annoyed to have to take charge but enjoying the contempt, then he's humping and pinching and rubbing away but wildly unfocused. After a while I say, Are you afraid? Because you're all uncoordinated. And get off and soon he's crying and I'm far away, far away. Stay far away for the rest of the night, like this, broken thought. In the morning when he's soggy I brighten him by rastling and cuddling looking at the beautiful naked baby. Cook them porridge and clear them out ruthlessly at 9:30. M was in the bathroom looking at himself, such a young boy in a hat, young cried-out sweet face, looking at himself looking sad. What were you thinking? "He's nice but he's useless." I told him how it used to be with Jam when I was in love with her body and wanting to adore it and she'd do something to contempt me and I'd be in an agony of shame at my helplessness. "But in fact it was that for some reason she didn't want me to make love to her. I shouldn't have taken it personally and I should have respected her not wanting it." "Most of the time I don't know you're there and I don't want to either." He says, You should open your heart. (And Joyce seems to say that.) I say: When I'm in good hands my heart opens. It's simple. I'm visually attracted to you but we don't like each other's choreography. He protests this way and that. He's right to disagree. It would work if I wanted him. I'd love the body because I loved the soul. With him I fancy the body but it disappears in the dark leaving the soul I don't want. The poet's house in a new story. This time it's his house. I got up Saturday morning and wrote it, Rowen ran through the rooms doing his own work. Robert was really Orpheus, I saw the yard and poplar from the beginning, but was surprised to learn he's an electronic composer. Lying down with him or listening with him, it's my movie. My music. 'His' perhaps for me to make. Jung that evening giving me heart for my heart's insistences on gods and stories. That she in Jung's arms in the field of waves of grain was in god's arms, earth's. Marie-Louise seeming in anguish clenching her hands, that all the plants, that all the animals which have been evolving for billions of years, should be destroyed, by 'us.' Jung's illuminations so astonishingly rich; and that he had a female Jewish guide Toni Wolff who took him by the ear. He and Emma and she in collaboration forty years. Marie-Louise in the tower by herself now. "But then the unconscious comes more." Toni Wolff an austere long nose, eyes, eyes, smoking a long cigarette. "Only the artists seem real." [Probably Mark Whitney dir 1986 Matter of heart: the extraordinary journey of CG Jung written by Suzanne Wagner] What I'm imagining in film, is it something other than what V Woolf does in a phrase, "Then up in the air across the meadow one sees the handful of grain flung," of what bird she doesn't know. "All crepuscular, but everything bright as fire in a mist." In Jung, a plant is "inner, spiritual growth." Thinking of M's love for his avocado. Avocado plantation. He joked to Rowen, All this will be yours one day. With a ping of a tear, I am giving him something. "The development of a tree of life and knowledge." Suddenly seeing the dream of the exiled royalty (Russian) and their distinction. And I have a vehicle for them. I take them uphill. What about their bird. Stranger: his swimming. Looking for their vehicle. Black and silver. 'Coach.' 17th century witch said Kirk [Tougas]. A flare of. What. I couldn't tell. Hair and face well knit. Hate. Jan-Marie who could be beautiful and there was Ellie with an unrecognizable knife, behind the honoured pretty one, incomprehensibly crooked, falling apart at the waist, either falling apart or showing like that flaring hate for the event I can't be normal in. Anyway, looking at her what did I think. I've never seen anyone like that. Maybe not hate. [Kirk took a picture at Jan-Marie's birthday event on Kits Beach.] 13th Jake Kroeker. Like arm wrestle but it's our whole bodies locked against each other. I feel I can win. He's my size but a square solid male. What is so satisfying, an aura, familiar but not usual now, of completion, like a smell of family home, pressing him back. After, he's saying gladly, I gave you everything I had. He means he came, I see it like a white fan over the belly under his clothes. I'm going away filled up with joy, want a new thing to do, get on the train, the car's scattered with dried rose petals, I'll go one stop. It's as if west through the slough, the road west of where my folks lived. I'm anxious to make sure it stops at the next station (approx at Nijlands), push the door button too soon, the door opens right there at speed over the willows. Then at the station it's confused and doesn't stop, people's heads turned up, some running persistently alongside, a woman who asks me to give her a hand up. I do, tall thin whitehaired woman, but they're calling after her, something not fair, four men on a traffic island sitting with clipboards. She jumps off again. I wake. What else, someone telling me, I take it in, people stay waiting at the place where they were abandoned. I see a kind by the road. Waking, thinking of how I go into a party, in a covered despair at all these people none of whom are the one I want to see. Comforting myself telling Joyce, I understand, Michael is a good mother for an abandoned two year old, when I'm older I can have a more grownup mate. Who were the imaginary sisters. Sitting before the party (lying down), stuff flying across in the dark very fast like straws in a wind. 14 Sitting with my phrases, love, excitement, but in a dither, what to do with them, what are they, where do I put my ice axe to start the climb in. 15 Amnon Patricia Donna Tony Meg Peggy Campbell Jan-Marie, Praxis reception and open love. Oh Amnon. Solaris. Laiwan and how easy it is. (Thank you.) 16 Yesterday waking. Jam's family giving a party maybe in a warehouse, wares spread through it, crockery, the party's a sale but is the stuff cheaper than other places, more expensive rather. Jam comes and takes my arm cheerfully. Solaris. Three men and a ghost woman, a couple of elusive children, amid the real - streaming weed, streaming smoke, house material. He travels through black space and is at the space station where it's corridors circuits cells and his body much more visibly ugly and aggressive. And there, it's three men, a dead friend, a ghost woman and 2 elusive children. The ghosts say they are extracted in sleep by the ocean (I'd say the soup) and materialized in immortal neutrino stuff. The scientists are there in ugly Soviet-made patri-archal solid bodies holding themselves real in suppressing their revenants, which are and feel, and the woman having to kill herself again because she's unreal to them. But he's been turned around. His mother bathes his right arm. They tell him he's going home. Face pressed to the window. His father but half-baked. He has accepted a simulacrum, now it is where he has to live. An island of memory in the great ocean all undiscovered. Solaris probe, artificial satellite. The answer to this gibbled fiction seems to be Hail Mary. 17 Phoning unheard-of cities in California tracking a withdrawn worker feeling my brain squeezed - like really Sophia descending into the finangling bottom layer where I'm feeling uncouth. Downstairs a bird like an unremitting portable typewriter rattle. I'm in the music envelope and blowing fuses. Have to back off and go downtown to look at fine things and the Pan Pacific atrium. Orpheus I adore you. (I lii-ke whatcher doin' now / fii-er, singing in Gastown walkin' the bike.) [music envelope, ie file of notes] Rowen and Michael. Rowen in orange pullover and little overalls, large green coat, coming toward me at twilight on the corner of Hastings, bundled in the pushchair with little cold hands on the bar and a pale smile seeing his mum tethering the bike onto the lamppost. Then I find Michael closeup arrived unnoticed a bare keen sweet-humored cold red plane of jaw. 18 In a dream traveling with Greg again, a big glassroofed bus etc. What I want to note, a notion, that being with that sort of kindly man is like white threads - lying loose a bit crossed. Yesterday in the Globe a story about two women in an interior cubby of a highrise in New York who from 13 in the Old Country were reweavng holes and rips. The threads are taken from fabric in the hem maybe. Each bit threaded individually into a needle. Invisible they claim. Celebrities come in with their clothes. I saw it New York late afternoon electric lights, people with access to the whole world come out of cold twilight shining from the end of the street, come up the elevator. The old sisters sit in heaps of stuffs. Signed photographs of succeeding egos. Hm I know what they are. The weaver's house. Tistre. Connects levels. Orpheus. Tubules. Melodicule. Bottom's a weaver. With animal's sensitivity to sound. Karen the weaver bleeding herself, why. The danger of the ether. The looms of vegetation. He knits. The lace of the atom. An unregulated love. [Karen the weaver - Chapnick] The calm I'm also feeling in my heaps of stuffs. There being two. The celebrities come for more than their moth holes. In the story. They're side by side. I had to go far into the world to find the song for my partner. "I want to hear it." Moth holes. The little winged things. Oh country. The reeds. In October, in red light, the whole of the air flapping and red. Longing for Jam. "Can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without the other side, which is always found in a you." (Narcissism) "refers to the task of forming a cohesive self primarily in relation to a significant other whom the self has previously idealized or with whom it has merged." "She served as a merger figure." "To whom he could confide his most disturbing thoughts and whom he could rely on for support." During periods of intense creativity especially in its early phases certain creative persons need a specific relationship with another person which is similar to that which establishes itself during the treatment of narcissistic personality disorders. 19 Partner parcener who's equal heir in undivided estate. Going into the arena again, I have to remember in enthusiasm I tend to be banal. Looking at the primal love in this work and the imagined: they're the great gods Space or Medium, and Tension or Pattern, that imply each other in Being or Self or Cosmos. Film and projected light, the dream ether, spatial air and sound, body and sensation (atoms and things), imagining working in several mediums -
And there was Jam passing on Pender as I came out of the Green Machine bank. I watch her pull up and park in front of Ming Wo. Here is the meeting arranged. She looks fat, grizzled. Her eyes redden under the horrible cap. Hélène. "What is she like?" "She makes me try again." She teaches learning difficulty kids. Later she says it easily: "She's young and dikey." "How dikey?" Shoulder wag. "A real lesbian." (I don't ask, Do you come?) Sheila's baby is Robin James, split her from notch to notch. "Are you relieved I'm not with them?" "Yes, I'm relieved you're somewhere else." Relieved like a river running easily again. It's over. (I saw threads turned back at the end of the seam) The crossing has been made. Rosemary for remembrance and my letters back. "Has anyone come to you yet?" "I don't think that's going to happen for a while and I'm satisfied that it won't. I have to go further in what I'm doing first. I don't have anyone to talk to. I miss that. Surprisingly I don't miss sex very much." Then a silence. In a straight painless level.
Rebecca West. [quoted at her memorial service - from Thomas Traherne (16371674) "The salutation"] So Orpheus, what's a composer - Music, acoustics, perceptual biology/psychology, mathematics, computers, astronomy and cosmology, physics of electromagnetism, engineering, cellular biology, embryology, optics, "a realization for the ear of Kepler's astronomical data" 21st [I phone Robert MacLean's parents in Delta] His mother is a thin unconscious voice, undeveloped, indiscreet and eager to please. A farm girl's twang. His father is slow, pondering, formal, and inward. When I phoned I was coming from that accurate letter and so I wasn't frightened. But startled - he's in Vancouver? In better days. How would he be if I wrote? Stubborn. What's the way to be optimal together? Lifting our cups in good company. What's the quality of the 21st of the month - 3:4 - autumn - 9 months. It's a very young old age, 63. Steady and knowledgeable. I mailed my apology because I feel strong. Maybe better to have sent a joke. I can do that too. Is animus explanation. And somehow also the fire in a mist. Well yes. Writing. Hong Kong café blowing my nose in paper napkins at the counter. It's safe here among the talking men, to go any distance away. Crabtree [Crabtree Corners daycare] around the corner with Rowen having his diaper changed. His voice yesterday on the phone, sweet little marks. Remarks. (I want to show how I see sound.) Maybe animus is a word needs replacing. There's Orpheus soul singer. And the other, raving Reason, explanation, is (hierophant). Is there a god for that? I asked, what do you say about Orpheus. It said lovers, the lover. Then (hierophant) is the mask of the lover. Sweet sex and prohibition, together in the father. Orpheus torn up because he doesn't give. Dark at four. What do you suggest? Dorothy so hard a life. Virginia with so much help. Virginia speeds boldly, trusting her soul to come up with true new interesting stuff undercover of the social display. Dorothy tries to be the soul itself with a kind of silent engineer at her elbow cantilevering the logics of exposition. That's a sentence of Virginia's. Dorothy is more depressed Jam would say. Virginia has the foundation of fascinating privilege. She takes us into the exclusive cream - mobile, praised, rising, competent, oily, central, and at the surface of a massive body of history. Dorothy takes us to out of the way dugouts, rowhouse in Finsbury Park, dentist's office, Quaker farm. She has little unshared connections. Rootlets. She doesn't have a chance so she takes the big risk, a revolution, dilating the unsuccessful. Dalloway, Lighthouse and waves, speeding lights. Waves is heart in mouth glorious fabulation. A work. Dorothy is bidding for a whole life to be seen from outer space and outer time. But the immortals would like Virginia too. A court lady. What this is about is Joyce working to get me more egotistical and ballasted, which seems to mean more social. Not that, differently social. Not acting the aboriginal. L last night fussing about her VAG show. She said sad. I said I don't think so. Alright, angry. Yes you're angry. The light went out. She was in the big chair. [passage removed] Then the downstairs door and Diana in her claret accessories. What is the truest criticism of the show? Vain regret. What's the conflict in the confusion? Two cards. Can we do that? Sure. Disillusionment and shared pleasure. Yeah. What's the bottom half of Diana's painting. Shared pleasure. So what in L is mistrusting her success? They were saying, Be less successful. I'm saying, Be successful but be it in conscious division. There's a point of view somewhere objecting. Is it mine? It might be. But what exposure was she afraid of, if not that? "That it's irrelevant. That it's feminine." I said "You don't have to worry about that one. It has machines, a concatenation of machines. You're wily and cautious." I interview her trying to hear how it's done. Her fetch with earthmother - the gardener - me - climbing evaporation, solar flare - the root shown - a hedge of pointed leaves and cloud and sky - the silence of our presence - a potato and taught me to taste the soil in it - the physics of balance, dominations of left and right - the chemical language of ants - I imagine her in the garden at night preparing the seedlings and their beds - I imagine her intense in labour - the chemistry of silver particles - she packed my wood box with a garden - actual Gaia - her own mom, those lovely. Her hand washed my face in motions that kept my eyes clean and my heart direct. Her heart taught me my heart was a muscle. My hand held her dress as we waded through the shallows of the sea. Within air she showed me her land on which to walk firmly the direct line of the mercurial compass. North south east west shrouded by fog She gave me birch bark to draw from: silver line and varying shadow. Then we made it tea and drank it in separate cups. Alone she silently drew chalk from the earth and molded it into colours with light: into earth she buried these to dye foliage and fruit for spring. I saw the flames of her skin. I held out my hands again, palm open, and she breathed on them to harden and flex their labour and endurance. Each day she gave me a word which I was to record and return. From these trees I imagine her collecting sounds in a box and labeling them according to species. 23 Toothache. A glass wall with sound in it. Cloudy patches I'm dissolving out. Imagination - is the soul - (animus the projectionist) - Orpheus - an inferior Orpheus - a synthetic Orpheus. Okay, where is it. I said to Orpheus I'm sorry, it was very wrong of me to abuse my muse. I'm very frightened of you, not of you, of the voltage and confusion of what I have had to feel toward and for and in you. I can't handle it. I have to fight it off, in me, and outside me, toward you, too. How do I abuse him. I interpret him. I revise him. I comprehend, surround and explain him. I withhold. I bluff. I'm ironic. Suddenly nasty. I don't allow myself to feel the whole of his power. I cut him off and then call him back. I scheme to impress and reduce him. I laugh at him. I want to marry you. I won't marry you because I think then it will be all your work, I'll make you, I'll be only a helper, I'll give you all my power I've so carefully painfully built. I'll die. I'll make you powerful and then you'll desert me and I'll be unable to regather myself. There's Robert MacLean, and there's Orpheus-Dionysus - Celts and Greeks and Gaels - Antlerman, Turquoise Boy - Nepal Zen Blake Thoreau Christian religion shamanism sunlight plantlife prenatal life - music, animal contact, art, science. 24 This morning Michael in black and wine red, shaved, comes confidently for a kiss. That's nice until he's pressing it on for seven or eight and they push so I push back. A balance he won't learn. I've just seen what the equations of motion are and why I sent it to Don. Laiwan did that too, push. "I don't like his work." It implies that lovemaking quality is crucial and there are only a few who'll match, and those ones fight for top cat. What's it crucial to. That's what I have to find out. But I'm barmy as if it's on the way. I take pictures of red and black Michael, waiting, outwaiting that overweened look he get. He keeps pushing and enclosing. I make him cry by telling him I want to be in love. You don't have to explain he says but he means he doesn't want to hear. I say my imagination locked onto somebody. He says his imagination is locked on me because of the way I am in desire. Yeah, is that it? I'm seeing Orpheus the way he'd come in from the bush haggard and crosseyed from his push to be a god. Talking to L bringing the story of Paul Sylvestre and how I didn't trust him and should've. What is a soul. It's what I was when I was going into the OR alone. Why is he, why is he, so lonely. What has made you so lonely? 25 [I run into Jam] "I want to make the little grains of the emulsion do things by themselves." "A visible model of what happens already." "An invisible visible model." "I sense you're near being able to do it." The way there'll be no economic. And then she says she doesn't make plans anymore and has got pleasure instead of caring. A delightful fear of the free air. (It's going to come to the door - it says - sometime when I don't expect it.) Emulsion grain is a screen. What I want to do has to be done by interference I think. Quintessential would be five. I say to (soul) I'll go anywhere with you if it's right. We also said, looking out the window at sea water surface pocked all over with speeding rain circles, that it's seeming as if everyone is present in any one. I say the picture of space full of silver Christmas tree ornaments reflecting each other - that's all they are, their position in relation to the others. There's nothing inside them. She kept looking away. Here this afternoon humming, boiling, potential, with book and table under the lamp, in an order, clean, through clean windows, such a mute pale daylight, park trees stripped, (but a kite), even the grass swept, cars and roofs in color only relative, and in here, pink cyclamen by terra cotta, red frame, green frame, clean wood, colors and black and whites and paper strips, and here by my shoulder the photo brought back of Rowen newborn sleeping in scalloped blankets like the bud centre of a rose. Spinoza 1632, Leibnitz 1646 26 He says it's Mozart but it's the Dance of the blessed spirits surely, vapour and glass, the island range peaking up, the starling nets drooping down under the south end of the bridge. In False Creek the rock seawall was standing in ambiguous space ribboning, indented, squared off like a demesne - keep, glass-clear in the horizontal light but slightly bulged and stretched in the centre as if dipped in an electromagnetic field. What I felt, looking at it, circling back on the bike to look again, but didn't know until this describing focus, was that it looked like a boundary. [Joyce says] 1. You and he are mirrors pointed at each other. 2. Yes that is really love and homecoming but you have to get to be so he can't take it away from you if he goes away. 3. That's a wonderful dream, the female and male energies pressed up against each other strong in opposition. 4. In-love is an illusion. It has a lot of energy but it can't last. It's the hottest drug on the market. 5. In love is always animus projection. 6. Do you know the difference between you love yourself and you're in love with yourself? 7. You're very passionate. What did I say as him. Pulling myself up: I'm here, sober and plain (a kind of flatness or fatigue) If I let you do the explaining and talking and asking I don't have to, I have other things to do (bigger fish to fry she said mischievously) to be the Blake of the Twentieth Century but I'm being gnawed at, because I need something, I need something real. Now I want to push on fast. 8. "But I feel as if I can be more with the other things I do, like Michael and Rowen, if I'm in touch with this other thing here." Then she sat forward and said fast, How can I explain this to you: . And then what was it. Tonight the first story on the news, most of the fish in the aquarium poisoned through their reservoir. She and Jam imagining splendid worthy developments from the pagan garden. Wednesday night under the sound of water. Electric heater and feet on it. Out there the little houses shedding rain. Black and bright, another storm. The fishermen haven't been able to bring anything for two weeks says the fishseller with galvanized trough empty. "Hi, lady!" The estrogen storm I think is passing. Though I marveled at the music synchronicities today, Produce City muzak while I'm pinching papayas, For the longest time, with its key shift like stepping oblique right and back onto a platform. Dance of the blessed spirits, yes in the otherworld Orpheus and Euridice are threading alongside through the gardens of shade hanging in wisteria triangles - in silence, in interest, in the space. The music is the pressure under the diaphragm that's supporting their calm and lightness. They are visible figures; and they are the twining lines of smoke unwinding out of a vortex, parallel, in unremitting tension. Orpheus I adore you. In this world one is at a table holding the tension of a line cast and hooked but unlocated. The other is somewhere in a stranger's life. Ow - unknown in an unknown kitchen - ow. Billy Joel "For the longest time" on An innocent man originally released in 1983 27 You are both using it to avoid - what? I can't remember. What is a soul. Gives images. In writing and other time whether the relation is faithful. The way VW trusts what's given. A bright outline floats up. That isn't exact but yet it's what's given. No. That shows how it's fluffed; because what was given was the image of a big black area and in it a small, as if medallion, patch of light lines, almost a seal. Like a Chinese stamp in an oval. It's got more defined as I define it. What VW was learning in her journal was to follow very fast but very close the image and also her relation, her reflex. I think that's it. Today at Sikora's buying Orfeo ed Eurydice, standing galvanized holding onto the record shelves. Showing Rowen to Maggie [Dr at REACH Clinic]. Laiwan's opening party. 28 Robert with me in some house, staying. I'm surprised he's been drawing. He's pleased. Some very round-square simple line drawings of ducks or swans. Very patterned. So now are we going to bed? We get as far as putting our necks together. I squeeze his crotch with my foot. We're laughing. Then he says he has to go. I say, I was expecting that, I think I'm getting to know you. Something else very complicated in a holiday place where a lot of gay men go, like Brighton. There are six levels but it's hard to find any elevators or other connections between the levels. I try going over the roofs. There's a canal rapid transit the young men are getting onto but I don't know that it comes back or around. I see Jam in passing and maybe it's her friends. Thinking now of dividing the enthousiasm into Orpheus and a vanishing one, the flit - is that the way it was. Ducks. She is annoyed by his refusal to explain, hurt by the way he averts his eyes. She hesitates to leave Elysium for an unloving husband. He can't bear to hear her reproaches and turns to look at her. She dies. Lying down with a storm wind blowing through my belly. Almost intolerable. Came when I imagined him in an armchair across a room shabby remote gentle and him, himself, that one, that one. 29 When once a traveler through eternity
Or like a friend with whom he liv'd benevolent
They conversed together in visionary forms
All his lovely changing colours mix with her crystal clearness
Terrified at each other's beauty
Envying each other, yet desiring in all devouring love
They put forth their spectrous cloudy sails
For though I am dissolved in the bright god
Kindling, she led him into the shadows
Outstretched upon the immense like a bright rainbow
An aged, pensive woman astonished, lovely
She took a moment of time
Drawing it out oblique across the Atlantic
She also took an atom of space with dire pain opening it a centre into Beulah
I already feel a world within opening its gates, and in it all the real substances Blake (written 1795-1804) Vala, or The Four Zoas [Opposite: Soul was complete with you in silence; soul was there complete with the drug. Soul is peaceful and excited. No matter how desperate the circumstance, I want eros to stay connected to soul. I'm obliged to trust desire. How can I live well without believing in the rightness of my movement of love. Creation is the union of eros and psyche, Orpheus and Euridice, desire and soul. I realize this is what I have come for: to find soul for my eros. (And eros for my psyche.)] James Hillman 1979 The dream and the underworld Harper and Row 30 The fox is Orpheus too. Under a blanket in my parent's living room waking with Jam, making love to her smallest sweetest Oriental girl with shell mouth and little arms. The as-if supernatural beauty - is she the one to be rescued; same story as Eros and Psyche. How to live with soul. Give her pleasure, range, work; meet her ever returning interest in death. Transference ends when she realizes this is what she has come for: to find soul for her eros and love for her psyche. Dove andró senza il mio ben? Psyche is forbidden to look at Eros; Orpheus at Euridice. But they do. Then they have to suffer and chase after and go into the otherworld. I'm wondering whether what's forbidden is to speak.
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