| aphrodite's garden volume 4 part 4 - 1986 december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1st December 1986 When I want, and invite, oh that's crucial, so different from this free zone where I take what's offered and enjoy easy power that defeats desire.
Primary phase. By attending to actual circumstance, to pry intelligence from the ideal. Service. Antithetic. By creative intelligence to get the ideal stronger than circumstance. "A double contemplation, that of the chosen image, that of the fated image." "To discover and reveal a being which exists with extreme effort" 4 South Africa the little shadow of all the hoarding countries Advertising the same for institutional discourses 'Meaning' the mechanical rabbit that ego is chasing while a mass of stuff is absorbed in the subliminal "Providing an optimistic innocence along with the guilty greeds" - what about that Subliminal reception/effect is: high speed, massive, low or high intensities, gestalt, homophone, symbolic, near-rhyme Can have delayed transmission into consciousness - can be like posthypnotic suggestion. Seems to determine speech and writing - ie consciousness saying or writing 7±2 words behind Can be at odds with conscious system Embedded stuff gives a 'magical' quality Dear Orpheus, let's go to bed. Here's a proposition: come and sleep with me, and whatever else is true, when you like, once or as often as we like, with no implications or attachments but with these conditions - that you come only at night and leave while it's still dark in the morning; and that we don't talk (at all - but we could write letters if there are things to say). The conditions are for mythology and self protection. If you don't want to, please don't say so or explain, just ignore. If you accept, phone before you come, 253 9618, and don't say anything, play a few notes of music so I'll know to leave the door on the latch for you to sneak in. If there's some way you need it to be, to feel you're in a room without fear, tell me and I'll do it. Love from E - There is a beauty praised but not loved. A jealousy directs love to lead her into humiliation. In the love realm there are two sources, one of joy, one of bitterness. This beauty was touched by bitterness and couldn't provoke love. The oracle is that she must be set at the top of the mountain, where a monster will marry her. They left her alone on the rock, a zephyr carried her to field of flowers. She lay down exhausted on a grassy bank. Waking, she saw tall trees in a grove. In the midst of it a crystal fountain, and near it a palace full of all the treasures of art and nature. Invisible servant gave her delicious food and wonderful music. When she lay down at night her husband came, and every night thereafter he was her companion in delight and affection. Only her jealous sisters stirred her to ask also to see him. If he is a monster, they said, he is biding his time to devour you. Provide yourself with a lamp and a sharp knife. Her fear and curiosity were stirred. She uncovered the lamp over the beautiful boy. A spot of fire burned him. He flew away. Love can't live with suspicion. Palace and garden vanished. Beauty found herself again near her family home. The beauty meanwhile wandered day and night looking for her husband. Coming to a temple, she finds heaps of grain and harvesting tools, she is compelled by a love for order and a respect for all the gods, and orders it all. The holy Ceres, whose temple it was, advises her kindly: Go my dear and surrender yourself to your jealous lady and try by sincerity to win her good grace. So beauty made her way in fear and doubt to the temple of angry Aphrodite, who set her a drudgery of sorting seeds. But love, her husband, sent ants to help. On the next day she was asked to bring golden wool from the formidable rams of the riverside. The reeds advised her as to timing and indirection. At last she was sent to Persephone in the underworld. "Take this box and bring back with you beauty paint." The beauty assumes that to enter death she must kill herself. But the tower by which she means to jump tells her there is an entrance by a certain cave, and how to avoid the dangers of the road, how to pass by the 3-headed dog, how to persuade the ferryman. And that she must not once in carrying from Persephone the box of beauty, open or look into it. She passed all hazards but the fatal curiosity to see the secret of supernatural beauty; and sleep felled her. But love came for her, regathered sleep into its box, set her back on the road of her task, and sped to intervene with the high gods. Mercury fetched Psyche to the assembly. She was given ambrosia and thus Psyche became equal to Eros, and in due time a daughter was born to them whose name was Pleasure. Or twins, Youth and Joy.
[Opposite, notes on conscious/unconscious:
Love, skin, pleasure etc, suppressed The perceptual defenses, threshold managing and circuit-switching
What ego is and is for: What does it filter in - stuff that helps it resist - familiar stuff - switching to competence moods - deception and bluff - as if ego is the arm of the subliminal computer that deals with presentation? The subliminal fights and manages too, is cunning, but ego adds what? Distraction, dazzle. "Exists in a perpetual selling posture." Whose unconsciousness makes it also a perpetual buyability. Can be bought by someone pretending to see me in a wished way. Ego = needing to be seen favorably. What about symbolic family/group structures: He says A. Private, supportive, 'spiritual' leadership, physical care B. Government, strategy, bluff, neutral dealings 1. technical capability, talent 2. clown: laughter, provocation, pleasure 2 parents and 2 children - what was it in the Venus flight - king and queen and two subordinates] 4
But fighting with Michael who probably saw the page open to Dear Robert etc. He came at me with his body flattery line of goods, first; second, he's too close, clamming up against, that feels like being pinned to the wall. Then I yelled at him for denying what I have to deal with in the bum photo. You'd have more stature if you - and then he flew apart into tears and raves and I got silent and disgusted as we do. And Rowen trying to get him to go. I was complaining of what he complained of in the slides. "I look like a jerk." His begging grin. And he's obsequious with everyone. But I do play cat and mouse sexually. Subliminal comeon and contemptuous rejection. But where from there. I do want him saying my body's young, so I'll be strong in other meetings. I want his pheromones and body heat to make me actually young and not ill. I want him controllable in relation to childcare and custody. I want him seen to be attached but subordinate so I'll look potent. I want economic advantage and control. I want to be in free mind, unobsessed. Motherly support for daily troubles. I want the perkiness of seductive play. I want to enjoy looking at him. I want to evade being seen as his wife or girlfriend. Be free from jealousy and envy. Completely safe from hierarchy worries. The good jokes of easy times. Consultation about Rowen. What I want (elsewhere): verbal respect and soul - really interesting fights - learning - erotic respect and soul - interesting work and thought - social access and standing - emotional comprehension - technical concentration and care - integrity - emotional balance and justice - independence and acuity - dark solid loveable looks - mutual depth so I could clear myself - clear conscience - true loving vision w/o projection - accomplishment - practicality - initiative and action - cultural range and courage - a car and land - rooted preference and loyalty - family love and balance - not pompous and not obsequious - judgment - know-how. I sorted the cards quickly and it turned out to be romance and strife with competence in the middle. It's still what I want to marry because romance and trouble I have already. And Robert is very few of what's on the list. So now can I get on with it? 5 Thinking about a research proposal for film work, I outlined this and felt ready. I work in fringe perception: visualize the invisible, the latent (subliminal), subcortical vision for instance, 'visualizing' in the sense of imagining, technological and imaginal transductions.
"years of isolation for the making of the bard" "the way in relation to you there goes on being the opening into love terrified of itself" "a self I have to struggle against" The love is a joy, it turns quickly to rage and shame. So baffled, rapt, self absorbed a state because it mustn't. 2nd sight, the inner eye which is the speech of a silent accompanying knowledge "He's a naked bird in a tree, with those big eyes." "You look like a soul, you look like someone I was or should be." "Speaking isn't necessary, being in the same room, somewhere nearby, is essential. As soon as you leave I no longer want to be there." Enter (the pain of) hell to reclaim alienated circuit. "Physical distance from the center of pain." Euridice / Aïdes They stand looking at the photographer who doesn't see them there in the image. That something whose adventure in our field seems so short, is for a moment brought into the light of day - a moment, because the second stage, which is one of closing up, gives this apprehension its vanishing aspect.
In the course of the transformation of growth, the two systems are separated and take opposite courses to be reunited on a higher level. "mingling together with his spectre" "by the act of listening to the wind" The Orphic willow growing in wed ground outside the oracular cave helice saille S as from the stream snake "people in two places at once" Although I am the one who makes I am also the one who only sees that it is made. Don't you remember your old friend? You and I were two swans who lived together in the lake of the mind until you left me to wander on earth. I created the illusion that made you think you were a man or a woman.
Design of the Hindu temple. Outer periphery which represents samsara is rich in detail then a series of courtyards then wombhouse, garbha-grha which may be empty or contain a small aniconic image symbolic of the moksa - A winter Saturday in the garden with metal clipboard and helpers picking leaves into paper bags [for foliar analysis at UBC]. Muggs and Bob, Pam and Barry, Leslie, Ian. Clouds forming off the ground fog the sun, chills. At home Rowen has a day in the night rooms. When I get home I am not like yesterday wound to a tremour with M unable to stand the look of his head. He makes me tea. I hold his hand. The kid picks the hands apart, but doesn't insist. Lounges on my knee. Gets the stashed chocolate by watching with the back of his head. Prefers snatching off my plate. Feels himself the best prince. We look at him sitting in socks and diaper on the paper box as if a regular boy on a log, everyday adoration. I didn't write the Sunday in MacLean Park he was walking at his own will for the first time, came with his cold hand to take my finger in a solid grip and lead me back and forth over the grass. Our game on the bike coming home in the dark. He says -- --. I say it. He says it differently. I try to follow into vowels and consonants I haven't had since I was his age. When we come through the front door he goes in his duffle coat hood like a little cone to stand under the light switch. The box of little clothes sent to Elizabeth. Phone tonight with clunks on the line like only England's, Roy not drunk but lonely. Lauderick's script at BBC oh thank the fates. Catherine well, Josh following Luke, Jake buying a drum set, desperate Jake, Ezra four, Sara "neglecting the children" ("About time") since she read the book I gave her - he says. Luke standing well on the practice O levels, offered a glider ride and a computer programming job. Destinies I have my hand on too, in a final way, I mean an accomplished way, thread roots in outer world. [book I gave her: Nor Hall 1980 The moon and the virgin Women's Press] [Opposite;
Sunday 7th On TV a native painter makes the old man, the kids, come out into soggy snow, his baby, form out of strokes the same for space and head. I tell M; he's sitting on the arm of the chair so quick to understand, scuzzy, grey chin and grey wool undershirt, thin pointed legs like an elf, in his best quiet self so he stands weightless on one foot elfishly tipping his hip. I come put my hands under his diaphragm. He's a warm breather, at the window shown to the street. I'm playing the Dance of the blessed spirit, maybe he smells an absent presence, but the movement of liking was wholly for this boy of his. It's a good story these two meeting. Oh the dreams. Gardens underwater, ours and someone else's, just a skylight to be seen standing out of the sea, the garden is a concrete bunker down below. It began seeing renovations of a structure, the word was 'Roman,' columns, a wing like a museum, a narrow stairway in the back, halfway up I see it goes into the small bedroom where the yellow haired white skinned softer (of 2) woman is lying in bed in a bluish light but seeing me on the stairs. The first garden was a courtyard of this probably women's building. Seeing the second we were out on the water, then sailing back to land through marvels floating, a little furry thing we roll over. Other animals. We're in delight seeing always new things, a giant hippopotamus and some other animal we see over our shoulder on the right. They're live animals but have the boxy hollow quality of toys. Then what happens. I come back and am wanting him to go. He grabs me and tries to pull me onto his lap. I recoil. I say will he go home, I can only take the tension so long. The result is he goes on raving and I resisting all afternoon. He ends weeping on the stairs. What is it about. I have all the sexual power. He wants me to say what is my interest in having it. I say stubbornly that it isn't in my interest to tell him. I go wash the dishes, sighing. He roars righteously in the bathroom where downstairs has to hear everything. I think it's time to draw myself up. What do you want me to do different, do, do. He wants me to think and feel differently and that I won't. What's the shape of the fights. He presses and I resist. Then he digs in to hold my time. I explain reasonably. He third degrees with transparent intent to back me somewhere I will never go. I shut up. He gets wild. I pull authority to manage him out of violence. He breaks and next day he recants. His righteousness is always 'I want to keep myself open'. My inner resistance is I'm determined to stay in my own position and not sacrifice to a spirit not my own. What can I do different. Bring and fetch Rowen there. Phone ahead if I'm going to be brisk. Have another babysitter here. Not ever bring up anything sexual. Give him money. Find a counselor. Draft a contract. What's the doubt in resistance. Why won't I sleep with him. I say I don't feel that's what we're meant to do, we're meant to be friends and we are attracted too, but we aren't meant to sleep together. Inwardly the rest of the sentence is because then I won't find the one I am meant to sleep with. If I take it further, I say, with Jam I learned to open myself to a profound bond and I'm not going to open that way for a fool. Now I'm arguing with Joyce: interesting you want to adjust me to being resigned to a fool, don't you, you don't want me to have a real full manly hard-on of a real equal. "Michael is so equal." What voice says that. The one that says "it's not fair" and is nice.
Robert.
Because I want him, because it's my desire not somebody else's.
I doubt it.
The other qualities are extra, the basic is that I can be my desire and win its wish.
Let's try the other one first. If this position is wrong what's wrong with it. It would be that it's contradictory.
Michael wants me to give him equality. An equal doesn't ask that.
No he isn't either.
I imagine that if I were impeccable crystal clear I could make him so.
I'm afraid to find I'm holding out on him. I should find out whether I am holding out on him or whether that's just what he says. In fact I don't think I am. I think he doesn't want to know, and puts me in pressure so we can both feel I'm holding out. Every warming doesn't get consent.
This morning when M was quiet and not pressing I filled up with love and fantasy. I wdn't mind loving him but I won't give him by sacrifice the means to reach his balance. He has to win it.
I seem to be and exploiting it for what I can get to make me ready for my turn next time.
I'll learn with Joyce to be able to balance where I also fully choose, and be able to attract sanely and really without glamour a sexual friend in whose hands I'll feel at home. But whose is the voice that says, but Michael - Is it yours?
Between the sense of his hands in loving comfort and the way they are in sex.
Greedy and stupid, loutish.
I think yes. He's a sexual lout and it goes with his dirty bed and uncut fingernails and toe fungus. ? I looked up and saw on the wall plaster a horse galloping, on its back a fatcheeked man, maybe bald, quite old, and in front of him as if sexually on his lap a small person. Girl of three or four. I remember about Pete Schmidt being locked in his car, not being taken to pee, peeing on the floor - 5 or 6. He came back and, what? My wet underpants on the floor? The man looks like Grandfather too. With Ed in the outhouse [on a trip home from the hospital] dropping a glove down the hole - 3? 5? There's a sleigh. I'm sitting on his lap and holding the reins. It most looks like Opa. A hay wagon? The horse is like a Russian icon. Also like a charging buffalo. The man himself looks quite nice and loving. (Tension, going to eat, grind, an orange.)
Whiney.
I don't have to lie down for him to practice on.
I want it equal.
Yes!
Yes.
Now, yes.
Give him sexual independence and when he's got somebody, slip away.
Maybe by starting to play around but in an inoculated way. 8th Backhoe at the garden making a beautiful high berm this morning. Gap-teeth old-country men in shortlegged working bodies to stand consulting with on excavated ground. Joan of the Green Party samples around the fairy hill, strange opaque woman whose legs brace each other at the knee and then go off like buttresses to the side - questions like her look, obtuse, insistent, so I'd vacate control and leave her with a simulacrum like herself. (She's like the little girl in the park who says Whatsyername? Whatsyername? because she's abused.) Her boyfriend so ragged I wondered if he's a fake. Then the brightfaced small man arriving to look at the gardens looking across the mud at the woman carrying a baby buggy, "That's my friend Leslie," and then the young woman showing up with clear eyes and tufts of beard, organic farmers from Quesnel who cultivate with horses. This writing's hard like German humour stiff with the imagined other. Where am I. Fighting with Michael. Not wanting to bother. Beating him off. I won't be responsible for you, you're my little brother not my mate etc. Why's the programming declaration reminding me of dreaming about Desser in a literary house with other writer men. I'm in that relation to him of being the girl partly compromised by being some kind of erotically attached to a compartmented man. In another room, back room, looking at books, damp old encyclopedia. They're out of use and I could take one if I wanted. I see a piece of paper with a quotation from Ezra and under it something in Jam's handwriting, and that's what I gladly pick up and bring out with me past the staircase and around the corner to where the writer men have been while I rummaged. I can almost see the room - a dark tablecloth? Table in a corner. It's quite large and fraternity comfortable. - From Cheryl today a description of how to make completely illusory color. Varela's paper on no-foundation in neurobiology - (but it isn't really) - out of overlays of b/w screens, movement over edges. I can make something out of the dream about how a dream is made. Implicit in the tile edges in Trapline. That was one grid with a motion over it. Last night a construction spotlight throwing an intense white light on the wall through the west window showing all the motion of air and in the upper pane the inner crazing of the glass. Thought of running that amount of visual current semi-subliminally through any scene. Then I thought of the acid movie and I cd understand what it was and how to make it. Pribram belongs here too. Mor, what color is the sky? Oh it is and it isn't. The beautiful stew all sectioned like optics in a pearl. [drawing of sky colors after sunset] There's a noctilucent jetline crossing white afterimages of the wires, elusively traveling because it isn't a body. A stretch at leading end and fade at other, but not evenly. The towers showing breath. Trees showing smoke. [Opposite, notes from Varela: An interlock between internal coherences of nervous system operational closure and necessity paths resulting from natural branching, a history of internal validations of interactions by an autonomous entity. He says it means: let go of representations and information, causality, instructive interactions and optimal evolution. A no-foundation tradition, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Medieval Indian madhyamika when we follow this logic all the way through, we can understand the world in which we find ourselves as neither separate nor distant. But also, as one where we have no fixed reference points left. Our human life, our experience right now, is but one of the many possible paths of knowledge, where the immense background of our structure and social practice is inseparate from the regularity we discern in world and self.] He says it means we're creating ways in a free universe "a building of structures from the materials available" "a drift which follows one of many possible paths" It's a picture of a grainy field a cloud of various grains drift into. That grainy field changes its grains to accommodate some but not all of the grains of the drifting cloud. The consequence of interaction between cloud and field are in the way the whole of the field with its hill changes all over. "In the way the structure compensates for such interactions according to its dynamic landscape." creod, chreia-odos path of necessity. Imagining a path of change that will be taken inside a closed (circular causal) organization of (in embryology, genes and cytoplasm) Waddington 1960 He says he emphasizes the autonomy of the living. Varela 1979 "Change of structure in the continuous maintenance of the integrity of the system in its medium" autopoesis self making Self referentiality not as a nuisance to be escaped from but as the basic material from which the emergence of order and sense can be understood. Abrupt deviations from these summing values will be read as color. inside the boundaries of this sharp difference the colors will be seen as uniform. The experience of color is thus constituted through the sensitivity of the nervous system to edges. "There is the outside world we must get to know." "For each nerve fibre entering the cortex from a retinal cell there are at the same location fibers from about 100 other cortical and subcortical areas." "receptive field geometry"
"switch back and forth between 2 domains of description" as a system of internal logic and change as a system with a larger zone of interaction Wavelengths much longer than red won't kick electrons out of molecules, shorter than violet won't break chemical bonds. What it says is wavelength isn't color, it's an "occasion for multiple modes of dimensioning internal regularities across the animal worlds, all of them viable set within certain broad constraints of 1. animal bodies 2. light. Any one 'vision' is one of the possible viable phylogenetic pathways. Theory is a different kind of ordering than perception is Color demos Beck 1972, Land and McCann 1971, Land 1964, Maturana 1968 for checkerboards
They are liking to call something 'naïve' and discredit it. Color experience is a quality of an entire visual field. The color shadow anomaly (first descr. 1672) The effect of edges/discontinuities of retinal activity The two grey-white-black screens, identical. Project both, one with red filter, one with none. 1. different areas of pink 2. rotate either one 90o, polychrome What happens? The whites inside the pins have different white to white and red to red ratios across the edges of the little squares. RG and B retinas "three different but intermingled nets of cones", overlapping absorption curves with different sensitivity peaks R is 5x denser than B and a little less than G But also, because they connect there's some calculus effect so the value of every locus varies with values at neighbouring points. That generates internal reference values. Francisco Varela 1984 Living ways of sense-making: a middle path for neuroscience, in Disorder and Order, P Livingston ed, 208-224 ANMA Libri - We see ahead of us the most complex particulated something, dazzling and finely focused in every part, gathers of intensity seeming to give off another invisible color of light. Facing it in disbelief. Can I see something so finely multiple. "A standing wave listening to a traveling wave." Luminous dots that cause us to project a supernatural element. "Finally on the highest level we find the undifferentiated substance that is both mind and matter." "The dream ether holds forever the echoes of all the voices and images that have been transmitted over it."
Emulsion grain is a screen. What I want to do has to be done by interference I think. The dance of the blessed spirits surely. Vapour and glass. In each cone light bleaches a pigment - a transduction A cursive screen "Aware not of data but of the outcome of a process applied to data" reversal film a dynamic range over 100 to 1 colors are determined at boundaries and vertices
10th The night before I see Joyce. I'm lying heavy on a mat turning onto the left side and onto the right side and onto my stomach breathing through my mouth. Then a morning like these, the asphalt roofs are frosted, plumes from vents and chimneys are frosted too, there's opal powder in all the intervening spaces, and pink alighting. Stopped at a light putting hands in pockets she's dressed like an Old Country countrywoman in sloopy brown herringbone, green wool with Gordonhouse, white collar and cuffs, red scarf, black wool and riding boots. [Joyce] She agrees she hasn't wanted to hear about Robert but will. I say I want to tell the story. It takes the whole of the hour. And then what is the telling: I'm all the way into those landscapes trying to show them to her, the whole surrounding too, Edson Edmonton Slave Lake, the Mabinogian, the cauldron boiling and speaking and erupting, and the fox, and wanting to draw it. 11th The next move comes to me under the cover Thursday morning. The key! to the room without fear. And why it was the courtesan who met me on the road. I promise to never say no. Good 'til April. Wear a dirty shirt. If you aren't interested no need to be nasty. Don't say no, don't explain, just lose it. Please. 12 Sharp in the belly, is the application too confident. Eager - I could learn math and music - get closer under motion's curve. What am I seeing - (feeling) - middle age in love with the universe - gentle passionate integral elder soul - old cardigan baggy eye distinguished distracted delicate experienced head. Rowen at Michael's when a round-back oak chair gets brought in from outside puts the teddy on it, kisses him, picks him up, sets him down, stands behind the chair holding the bars energetically talking. I suddenly see it's pushchair and baby. Then he abandons the kid to fix things with a hammer. It's Laiwan in the corner armchair Epp yawning M pouring water from kettle to kettle on the stove all in the junky kitchen in weak orange light with wet four o'clock dark at the glass. I bring and deliver the kid. Try out what it's like remote. - I've reinvited it (him) and now have it to live with. Washing out the kimono. Buying a lamp for the bedroom. Thinking of oil in the bath. Anxiously asking. Being fedup the phone isn't him (it). The antithetical self / I was in love and drugs The description of him is a description of myself then - committed to spirit path but based unstably. The need for a companion brought me out. it was a state going from nature, bettering fortune. It was energy. Felt outside everything. Resource a childlike newness, hope and fear in ego death. Outcome meditation. I try to marry that state from outside. Based on worthiness. It's wrecked by my own and the other's escape. The love attempt has a past of power struggle working for sadistic triumph and is essentially competitive. I feel in relation to it: hopeful, inspired. Up. Its resource is fairness, equality. Its hope is (pw), outcome energy.
aphrodite's garden volume 5
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