| aphrodite's garden volume 5 part 1 - 1986-87 december-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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14 December 1986 Sunday aft, under water with a point of fire breathing and casting spirit form. It's darker. I saw suddenly - I so often need to say - the inside of the glass astir. In-tuit. 16 The voice of so many - light and stretched - would come in Jam's area, rarely. Can the notebook bring it. This one shows tuning. Rowen working in his closet. Gohtha gaigo gaigo ai na na mum m muh, running after the bottle to his bed. Schuff schuff the leather slippers. Beautiful photographer, I mean you, subliminal one, I'm understanding who it is I love. Last night sitting in the arms-around chair watching TV I was thinking of the dream being - thrilled - like sex and death, dark - I can be that. Paula Fainstat today testing, rubbing a bit here and there, retesting, asking me to lie on my left side and draw up the right knee and then kneeling on it, jumping. Crack-k, vertebrae at hip level. Leaving and since, where I feel it is base of the skull, right temple, one shooting spark at mid-back. Recalling the cracking is feeling again a magnetic fuzzy spread. 17th Something I'm supposed to do today, oh yeah - the calm young man, math and physics, likes to talk about his two 85s and all the rest 75s. A National Geographic every night. Started to have a reach in his voice only when he asks where I am speaking. "In an armchair in the kitchen you know. The sun is shining through the window, it's about noon, a bit after." "Do you still have the wooden cupboard?" [I phone Luke on his birthday] Daph at Paula's talks about Tracks. The woman with camels in the desert describes coming to see what tracks say. We were in the café half an hour and had got to our mutual edge. That, but the wildness too when I said Atwood should be assassinated and D having a responsible response that had me ashamed like when I smashed Herbie's pumpkin to please Ernie. It betrays unquiet and hustle. But it's the hustle that jumped in warm and instant to say [to the receptionist] "It shocks people like us when you ask if we're dependents." The pretty creature doesn't get it, "I'm just asking." "You should be able to tell by looking." Cariboo stags growing, to show their vitality, marvelous useless racks. The males are principle of winnowed seed and have to try to win. Females have small effective antlers and are all adequate when they're young. I was reading it in the waiting room wondering what is a female who gives her resources to the edge of exhaustion to growing a rack more marvelous than the stags'. And what is the male who gives his entire vitality to his fabulous rack and contests and refuses to breed. Davidson Robyn 1980 Tracks Pantheon 19 Big loopy I's she says. I can't do that. [I take Joyce my home country slides and a projector.] Slide show. She doesn't know what to do so I'll get fifty dollars worth. What I want is for her to love to see what I love to see. She did love them and see the creatures and I could tell her about clairvoyance but she had religious instruction to insist on. My family's in awe of me, she says. I see what I see, and the implications, and in tree planting camp I'm seeing in the other person what he doesn't see in himself, and so I'm sorry not to have him seeing what I see. But if I see all I see I can only be happy. Etc. 20 Go into the south pasture across the road, there's a track into it now. I come on the Bohns who own it, but many others too are taking the road into the center because there's a camp meeting? A revival meeting? in a clearing in the bush, with wood cabins. Marilyn/Anna Driedegar gives me a ride further, fast on mountain curves. I can see her but not remember her name. I get off in a settlement or camp much higher up and am walking through a dorm or inn, looking in the rooms. I'm looking at the clothes, packsack, of someone, a thin man asleep hidden in a sleeping bag, wondering if it could be Robert. The corridor, which is also the end of the road because out the window I see the high bare peaks, is a bedroom with a man in bed naked, sleek chest and fine erection, on his elbow looking at me. Rough and ready, large, not my type, brawny, padded, a moustache. I say are they mountain climbers? Yes. I sit down naturally and simply, get in with his skin, I'll take him up on it. He touches into me a bit. I sigh. He's pleased. I want the big penis too. But he gets up, gets dressed, shakes his black hair, he has to go. Before sleeping making a story in Orpheus's house, a couch upstairs in the firelight. He understands me too well, fear thrill. Roll your sweater up over your breasts and sit there in the firelight reading, and I'll look at you sometimes. He's over there with his legs on the couch. As he's reading without seeming to notice he lets his penis stand up outside his pants so the fire can light it. He comes over to me, lifts my skirt, tucks it into the waistband, lays one of my knees over in the armchair so there's black hair and a pink frill. Goes back to writing in his notebook. What's he writing. He looks up steadily at times. The breasts get hard. I'm stewing. Get up and walk around he says. I walk around the couch. He's behind it sitting on the back. I walk past, lean over, brush him with a breast tip. He seizes me at the waist, spirals and presses. Only a little but I'm in the other land, do whatever you like. Bends me over the couch back, opens up the little doors, puts it in a little. Uh - uh - uh and then deep up into the belly UH and picks me up against his chest, spreads his hands on my stomach. My head's leaning back beside his. He rubs my belly, himself in it. Then what - breasts, the whole torso, the wet part. He's not so much moving it inside as swelling larger and solider, and the cunt swelling too, not accepting but repelling, an interior swollen to push him out and in that mutual push making fires of contact, streams of fire. Then we slow it down and look around. It won't leave us, we'll see together. 21st Fried. The fairskin imp in the café spilling sugar salt and pepper containers on the napkin dispenser, any second they're going to crash, Michael barely in charge, I can't stand it. This month's ovulation onslaught, Mayfair and fantasy and all the while this romantic waiting that puts me out of pleasure with Laiwan when she calls, and in struggle with myself, writing and stamping versions of invitation, hiding them, going on jumping if I might have heard a knock. Last night unbuttoning my pyjamas wanting to love my breasts and then seeing the skin around them when I push it crease up in thin dry folds like an old granny's. It's just this winter I don't have my never failing sleek oil anymore, and even if I boldly could bring him-you into this night room wouldn't my boldness fail seeing what I have to offer? So what's going on in the willow bush? It belongs to someone else, who. The neighbours have bought it. Bawn. I meet them but pass them. Many people are going toward the center. Many people traveling are: the spirits. It's a time when spirits are gathering for re-vival. But I wind up, fast, by means of Anna/Marilyn, at an explorer's camp, the peoples' camp at a higher altitude, and I'm looking for Robert, who if he is there at all is asleep, hidden, unrecognizable. A camp is a culture. The mountain driving was like the convertible on the way to Cultus Lake. I'm in an explorer's culture, and the end of the road, where the bare rock is visible, is a man in his sexual body, awake and erect, not at all cultured, who I accept, but who doesn't accept me. Imp enphyein, in to produce, to implant; emphytos, impotus a shoot; impian to engraft; impa a graft; obs: offspring, plant shoot; young small or minor demon; to imp feathers into a falcon's wing to restore or improve flight. The dense bushy place beyond the road, the wet, flooding place, the place with trails, the dark, muddy, impassible place, the animal place, the place raided by hunters, the place with a warm curve in the creek, the place he knows his way into, the place to find cows, the place where a bull roars hidden beyond the thickets, the place infiltrated by the dump, the place children make houses in willow brush, the place with salt at the gate, the place with hind legs of steers and heifers marching under a caked tail, the place with yellow moons thick on the ground, the place with mosquitoes and flies, the chill place, the tunneling place, the place rarely entered, the place netted with paths that all lead to water, the place whose paths before they come to the water fall apart into hoof holes in deep mud, the place whose paths lead to a periphery of impassible muck where we stand seeing the water unable to reach it, the place where I confessed to my mother that I loved Ken and she said I had good taste, the place with an entry precinct of tall poplar columns with grass and light between them, the place we got into by rolling under a fence, the place (I'm told) I toddled away into when I was two, the place with a mud floor, ground dry enough for grass only on the humps around willow trunks, the place I ventured into with a small boy and girl whose leader I was, the place seen from the house on its hill but unable to see it back, the place of feeling direction, the closed-in place, the place with unseen inferred horizons, the shadowed place, the place under a living roof, the place with a completely unknown further extent, the place with other sides not belonging to us but to Kinderwater, Friesen, Hiken, the place that could be seen from the other side but was never entered there, the south place with more south beyond it, the flooding and drying place, the place with invisible animals, the place inside a willow fur. Earth's fur, earth's vulva, earth's mysterious map, earth's high-hearted entrance, earth's venture and curiosity, earth's intense curiosity, earth's labyrinths of curiosity, earth's obscure extent, earth nearly blind. - [bookwork about Robert MacLean not transcribed] You have developed a sort of substitute for the companionship not coming from your father you simply must try again to convert the archetypal fascination into a childlike simplicity. Jung What my dreams say about this being 1. I find him in a schoolroom in fertile farmland, not in writing but in images. A young girl lying on her mother under a sack. The head showing beside her of a little newborn. 2. following the two fine women with my wildflowers. RM gives me his. Liking the women and the other men better than this shriveled dark soul I've chosen. 3. lying somewhere with RM. The way he gets up and leaves 4. I'm in bed with M. R comes ragged blackened from the world. I don't hesitate, I grab the overcoat derelict, kiss him, touch him. sometime hearing his poems. The kiss got boring because he was a swelled embryonic head, autistic. You're so unhappy because you think you're better than other people. 5. place the tree planters were earlier. Book to teach small precise drawing. (She had to feel her calculation in it, identifying with counting aloud to be sure a counting is there.) 6. back from tree planting looking in drawers for clean clothes. Only baby clothes. Get mad, all my good clothes burnt. 7. Robert as sometimes in these days in work so strong a love in his passion and being, "a cell of fancie my internal sight." 8. mails me his dirty shirt, work shirt, sperm stains. Reading the flip side of it, ruby red record. A neutral message. 9. the way in relation to you there goes on being the opening into love terrified of itself. A self I have to struggle against. 10. 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 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. 11. with me in some house. Drawings of ducks or swans. He has to go. The leveled holiday place without connections. 12. when I imagined him in an armchair across the room, the storm wind blowing through my belly. 13. when I want and invite, oh that's crucial .... So different from this free zone when I enjoy easy power that defeats desire. 14. dear Orpheus let's go to bed. Only at night. We don't talk. If there's someway you need it to be, tell me and I'll do it. Wear a dirty shirt. - Then, at the solstice party at Carnegie what do I see to make me dance and roar. A girl three and a half with bangs and ponytail, purple teeshirt, who calmly dances the round dance. Her adult men partners lift her to their height. Her father is the man with squared head thin hair a lump of turquoise hanging from his ear, pale eyes. The band is jamming on a blues pattern. She sitting on the stool bringing the balloon mic closer is improvising without a hitch. He's playing guitar near her, blushing at her command of the mic but supporting her, keeping an eye on her to see she doesn't get past her capability. "Your daughter's really good!" "I think so." Bringing out the stuffed raccoon for her when the set's over. I went to sit with her on the edge of the stage when they did the cleanup jamming, he came and sat on the other side. 22nd With M in the café talking about antlers, the little girl singer, beauty. "I've felt it more than seen it, once when we were lying down, a dark space" he says. "It's something I can do, I'm afraid of it" I say. (Then I wrote Mr Mann) I'm afraid to talk about it in a grandiose way. To talk as it, in it. I said what is that beauty. It said (4w) completion, graduation. Talking grandly would be: the goddess came, for some reason or none. What is it like to be living a life that has seen the goddess in the mirror. The slides are my photographs of her. Many other times I've seen in the mirror someone else, she is away. There's little written. Olive Shreiner when she says goodbye in the canvas wagon. [From man to man 1926] Is it when she is there or when she's away I see her in the other? I need to know. Robert's tall god of air, Jam's fairy empress. Coming along the street with Michael, this is mysterious, in the dilation of his knowing the dark space, I said, I can't understand why you aren't more confident. But then he explained and the explanation was so much the old ugly stuff I couldn't stand to hear it. Then he wanted to go on with more and I had to run. Black evening. A paraffin candle fast sharp and white, a beeswax welling down slowly yellow fire yellow pool. Lit air sways. Around the fire the blue and then violet envelope and outside that a thin black line? Flame's tip the loftest lightest softest dissolving tongue. Cyclamen. It's thin like what's between skin touching skin. What can I do. Say the parts in order. Wolfman come to the door. Be standing there Christmas Eve and let me invite you. I want to be in a bed in the dark and touch your shoulder and arm and rib and flank and bone hands and bring you in and warm you up. But you like to be yourself, which is your loneliness. And Michael at the table: I could feel my hand wanting to soak up the current from his, and I did and it lit the oven. And then the passage and then the crash. 23 Goddess fairy paradise, alright, they all mean love eyes, and it's called these things, why - . The eyes said: white foam on wave edge, white cloud in air trough. A difference of medium and level. 24 There is work. There is and will be longing. I accept. I'll live the longing as complete and true as I can. - All the wicks at the bottom of the thimble, when the candle had melted down to them, seven branches piled, all in one flame conducting wax into fire, as I feel in bed when my womb blazes. I'm given Michael to be body's help. The other waiting will be itself, Robert as much as it is, true or mistaken as much as it is. Without my having to know, somewhere it is known, and I'm with the knowing even when I don't know. In these ways it is as if someone is already there in the companion's place on my further right. I speak, it can say ye-e-s-s in a sigh. I ask. It chooses from the surroundings I haven't seen, an answer in sight. She says: don't make it separate. But I want it to be separate so there will be someone for me. The rest is to understand gradually. I like her hair, the honey wax, rose, freesia. The different colors of flame. Green ice glass spirit on the wall. Mary unhappy, a birth night. Birth nights. A topic. Last night I was walking with Catherine to her church back in Hampstead. Sunday dress. Luke had a gift from his old school, a box opening he thought only on a toy toilet at one end. but I could see further in to a whole bathroom with tile and space. She there - looks like a queen, admirable. In the Pan Pacific women's room mirror a bloodless malnourished neglected face, eyes in black hollows, intimidated, drab, worn and ill. From bad coffee getting a sore liver that's still sore. Lonely. Laiwan here with impressive lego, entranced seeing insects and flowers, both of us, but I don't like to look close and am faded out of interest. Michael righteous because he's banned ("I do cooperate; but I don't sacrifice myself") though the banning has made us friends. In this season what's most to me is the color and scent of flowers, candle and mirror light, my room, myself in the mirror, black dress and green vest. The lamps and colors under them. In each room the lamp. No one's born in this black crisis. We're reduced to our little light's survival. We fuel the kids to fuel us. 25 Hugh the musk-ox our worst self-preoccupation, Steven with what's left of a competent head, and John-the-void: skeletons. Tom gently bewildered, heavy jaw hung from little eyes. Becky blue-eyes with Eddie her underworld Indian. Michael graceful, size and shape and hang like a man, since last year even his head is tidy. In the skid row house (where so few) he's host and prince. Impressive looking after them, conjuring the light branch for them. I was in pain to be having this dinner in skid row, working in his kitchen piled with rubbish, frayed. What was it for, it was because it's right. It was right Michael should do that and he couldn't on his own have organized it. The flowers looked wonderful with yellow wall behind, and with the spirits' chorus and John-the-void hearing. From the other room quite beautiful. Was it existence. Making the stuffing was. Eating turkey. Conversation left to flap. I like Tom's talk but there's no hope of following it. Hugh has to be ignored like a rock in a stream. Eddie's come for the grub. Steven knows how to act but he's compelled to talk about his wife and kids in Toronto. I don't want to hear about their wives who all had reasons to quit. I'm there in pink Hawaiian shirt and hair down for a treat but haggard in the confusion. Rowen grabs anything on the table, eats nothing. Whines an hour at home, clearing it. I'm whining now. 26 Rowen crying, dark, rain. I've just torn up Mary's horrible letter. I can answer it - yes - eloquently - and why isn't that enough - because I hate her - thick white-fleshed cow - face dough hanging off her bones - greedy wormy hands - safe, safe, insulated in the white dough of righteousness and harmlessness letting the rest of us take the risks. Deaf. What do I feel about Christmas she asks. I can tell her every year and still she'll ask, she's treading her little cowpath having thoughts suitable to the season. Getting senile by lack of existence. You who were born intelligent and passionate, you've become a parasite. You want to hear me explain once more what's wrong with your religion and your marriage, so the truth will be said but not by you. There's mirroring in this but what's the way out. If I scold she gets to hear the worst without owning it, if I write strong and happy she can love to identify without having earned. She gives me - money - seasonal wishes - memories - for that I'm supposed to - hm, let's try reversing - I give her what I want, she gives me what she wants. If I gave her ---? I should give her presents and filial duties and understand that what I need comes from Joyce. It turns my stomach. I could hire someone else to? That would be right, because the seasonal duties are about adherence to their time. Robert: starman. Is everyone that? But the starpeople can't congregate. 27 Rain on my head at the garden. Did you hurt your leg? sez John loading garbage bags into the black Continental's trunk. We peel up slimy cardboard with earthworms scrawled very small and bigger on it and on the garbage bags. Set up the sign again outside the berm. Plan ditches. It's too long dark. Saving work is out of stride. In spite of Paula two sneezes, yesterday began another cold. I'm beaten down. Pulling out. Phone rings and I know it's L. Leave me alone. Two days in a row even. And M grabbing always. Handle a gracious vanish. Something I want instead. Not mental. Garden work is stopped at too much ditching. Romance quit. Smooshy brilliant oil paint maybe. What it's like to draw/play. Anxious not knowing. Satisfying and un. Wanting the textures without having to draw them. Presence of them, as if they're standing in a territory forbidding. Some learning was violently forbidden. 28 Then listing memories from 6 and before. Seeing I can engage with her where she wants to stay.
And other structures where a subsequent has the previous still overlaid (and autonomous to the extent that the subsequent is false, maybe). Systems wd have to compete or be suppressed. What was the image. The underlay curling up in impotent storm under an iron sheet. Child's rage. Try again. Canceling or reinforcing pulses. Traveling invisible knit meets another and is damped, dies like noodles, or gains crimp and speed outward into vitality. I want to get into the Alien Soundtracks archive [CBC] and learn everything.
- Sunday afternoon. I phone Epps. He answers - is it him? Sounds like Rudy, a cross between Rudy and him. Slow like a beast with a large heavy head. "Is Mary there?" Grunt. "Is Mary there?" "Nope. She's gone for a walk." "Do you know if Elizabeth had her baby?" "Who is speaking?" "Ellie." "Yes she had it." "What kind was it." "Boy." "Do you know which day it was?" " Twenty." "Is she alright?" "Yup. I've only seen him once." "Tell Mary I called." "You mean Mother?" "Yes." "Very good." Silence. "Bye." Hang up fast. It must have been Rudy but what was he doing there. Emotion compressed in his voice. Before I wrote this I said, trying it, I hate them both. Body said deeply yes. Can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a you. What does that mean? It's relational, it only comes into existence when recognition hits? The long work of finding the I in many you's. By recognition. An I that exists already as a you. Is that a deformation? 29
30 Sun. Digging the bottom row. R is some better. M fussing about the ban. I hang up twice, "I don't want to do this." "Don't yell!" He's still grabbing. Back off. That people don't want to swallow cockroaches even if sealed in plastic. The fear in disgust, Rozin say, is of harm to the psyche. Not wanting Michael or his house in me. He would eat cockroaches and then have nightmares. Is that wot they call self-punishing. Or maybe a cockroach's sort of surviving flexibility. Thinking of Jam's fits about butter on the quilts. It is fighting off invasion. His house and yard and all the rotting things and the traffic noise and whores and drunks and lunatics and wrecks and his demons and fornications and distortions and jungles. I've gotten to think of him as unclean. He always was that and it's why he can look at my foot and crookedness and not want to keep it out of him. It's that: when I see his piles of rotting stuff I feel myself garbage he's too lazy to clear. Christmas, what did I do it for, it was like eating a cockroach to repay some other debt. Hope I don't do that again. "pure ideal vision" Tired. Tired. Miss the work joy. Desire's gone with it although I dreamed a Sufi man asked me to be his roommate. I blushed with pleasure. Alpenkreuter for his daughters. - Oh, you're German? We're at the counter washing up bumping each other. I'd better say I can't stay out here in the country because I have Rowen to look after, "I took it sexually," and would he like to visit in the city. What is this bump on my left midfinger that doesn't go away and is tender if bumped. Diana says a horrible holiday. Cheryl has her B [grant]. 1st January 1987 Rowen crying at night again and again. I can't go see to him. He's feverish in the morning, sits on me. I'm at the end of my go. Michael wants to give me a hard time because he's banned. I know I have to get tough or he'll learn to be mean. I hang up. Then he overdoes coming around. Don't hang up, I'll do anything you ask, cry, cry. With Laiwan at the Chinese movies. Beautiful men's bodies in the best dress they could have, kung fu jackets and folded-over trousers, shining bare chests. Long silk dresses. Whup. Whup. Whup. Glorious dancing. He leaps very high and is rolling over when he sends the knife. Thirty to one, an unexpected ally, and at the end they stand bloodied looking at one another with the traitors fallen across each other in piles. In the street in the dark we step off our sidewalks at nearly the same time and have only an instant in the middle of the street to see each other's face. Will I look away. No. Will I make her look away. [Rhoda] No. She looks folded down angry. I look imperious grim. What's she got to feel persecuted about. But I'm satisfied to have made her look at me that way. Why. As long as she's mad at me I have the upper air. Then I come home and write Sarah. A month without coffee and tea to stop looking haggard. 2nd [Goddess notes: The womb "from which grows everything that is intuitive, contemplative and natural."
Aphrodita is pink and gold, pink space and golden light leaves the responsibility of truth to the one who listens is a liar "of the beautiful eyes" "of the beautiful bum" of the dove is artful to give delight which belongs to the goddess and not to the ego what she punishes is disdainful refusal, indiscretion she protects knows how to induce the other to please her, teaches skillfully when she meets the aggression of Ares both are in courage for they produce harmony, fear and terror Artemis, Athena and Hestia, these are the three minds she is unable to persuade, that is, to seduce, but nobody else meeting with Ares is one kind of power vs another Adonis when he meets with her dies young. He can't fight the big bear or compete with other men. That's why the gardens of Adonis belong to the dog days. Go through the whole of their cycle in 8 days, there can be no deep root. The withered gardens thrown back in the water. gardens and flowers and babies. salt water. - Hestia hearth, sacred center. The vestals keeping the fire. But there has to be fire or it isn't a home. "To Vesta" they say with the first bite. It's the earth's central fire too, fire from the mother's hearth. Hestia and the womb. Hestia and the key to the storehouse (vigilance, foresight and present supply) Artemis of spring water, running and jumping, clear water trees and wild animals "One may hear or sense her but it is dangerous to look, though she is very beautiful." forest or prairie the relation of a woman to her own Artemis she shouldn't speak of it, implicate it in seduction, exploit it in relationships Artemis presides over the possibility of the self's death in childbirth, and brings the wild animal that takes over the body. "The rhythm must be followed or one falls." Human sacrifices, the lunar and related to Hekate risks, those who offer themselves to death uncompromising purity is simplicity, chastity, fasting "What is detestable is the pride of those too sparing in their friendships" priests of Artemis castrated themselves an equilibrium in monasticism of manual work, contemplation, intellectual work, nature, solitude and silence. The real monk has loved and goes on in loving relation to those who arrive in her thoughts. abortion is sacrifice to Artemis Of the children one doesn't want, who are marked with that not-wantedness. One aborts an impossible love. It is taking a share of the powers of death the bear festival of young girls Wen-do the body which Artemis wishes to be strong and energetic. aggressivity, "to have tension toward" Amazons founded the temple of Artemis at Ephesus And there's Athena of battle in men's territory with intellect and self command - That's the Pagan Meditations
Want to say, to defend myself, how it was yesterday, Laiwan on my lap a soft heavy squash with an inner chill. - To defend against the improperness of having done that. 4th Pet femme. The telephone and telepathy. I'm reading about shamans. "Talk to animals, summon spirits, sense weather, handle fire." Think of RM's thesis bursting out at the end. Is that what he is and I wanted. Etc. Phone rings. M's small pink-orange voice saying he was at Carnegie, opened a book to the myth before the one about Orpheus, and it really hit the spot. 5th At the library looking at color vision books repelled by the grey plastic man-metal burrow of the world they make. I only love the saints of science, they're out by themselves looking into no horizon. I'm far from being able to get into it and see something I can pull. All that work now has a feel of resistance, stiffness. Non-necessity. Wait. With Laiwan last night I finally pushed. I'm in lack too, as much as anyone, people demanding something that isn't there. It's not that I won't, it's that it doesn't exist. Feeling her shocked and insisting on. Angry she's inflicting me with this invulnerability. Hello 6th Two days pink Nepal mountains again. Down in the squeezed streets E on her bike in riding boots and herringbone and kung fu white and black and red scarf is half starved on rations all this month, but carrying $5 worth of roses in green paper. Meeting, on Granville, an English man with goggle eyes, but English. And other eyes. In the bicycle basket Steady attention reel 2 in a metal can, and other small cans in the army bag. The little films each as they come on make me suddenly soften. I'd come into the good place. Last of the light by itself. Swan in beautiful blue white and yellow tranquilly turning her neck. Flies in the last sun on the wall leave and rejoin their shadow. A moon that creeps in slow and clear gets a push and then rides fast forward in red chorion. Cloud and nettle flicker. They aren't what they were in the original but there's still a soft transit when the light changes color. Green shadow in blue shadow. The parts that are still, like the floorboards, are running with grain. - Twelve stones in a circle, ancient of days Rhiannon's birds the old tribes, the ancient harmonies Keridwen dark queen of the lake she-that-brings-forth that sea-cold sea-grey look that had been Llyr's Grey man - Irish glas meaning grey or green In the grey twilight he had made the grey man was changing. Strange lights and colors were playing over his face and body that seemed to shift and unshape and reshape beneath them. - In the mirror I'm seeing skin droop under my beautiful chin. Jaw skin slumped against the mouth crease and a rumpled pit around the eyes. Then comes Eliz's letter. Mary and Ed interfering. I was phoning to find a midwife when mucus plug went. Phone rang between phone calls. Mary. Of course she came over which was o.k. but when I looked out the window there was Ed coming in. All labour stopped dead I couldn't imagine what an effect I thought she'd come alone. I guess the surprise or what anyhow they took K and L. I felt robbed empty and angry we were going to do this all together kids and I were looking forward to greeting babe together. Mary's "what if you screem it will scare Kane." I told her they'd seen childbirth films and that it would be o.k. She figured not their own mother. Of course the delivery went great easy no pain I was totally relaxed and very determined this time no one was going to rob me further. Rudy of course had to come on the scene and take my keys and take me to Beaverlodge but was good and kind to me which I've never felt from him before. More later I'm going to snuggle in w babe. I've mailed the films and the apprehension isn't over. Why. As if I haven't done what I could and sabotaged it? 7th SFU. Push and fear. A stake-out. Donna Zapf seeming to suddenly cut me and I start sniffing my sweater's old sweat. Did I speak too straight out. "What are you doing up here!" "I am trying to get a foothold on this mountain." She seems to swirl round. On a day like this I have to keep myself from floating, I have to come inside. Nosing for Martin Gotfrit, thinking I'll recognize him, and then finding him in the soundroom, and having to weigh myself down to keep his busy busy from sweeping me out again. I don't know how I look, in front of a younger man in an institutional keep I feel him seeing an old mother. In all the crossings and meetings that's a form of the worry: what do I look like to these people. 8 advised me to spend most of my time alone, have a separate room in the house to be used for nothing but inner work, never to join any organization or collectivity. ... told me the unconscious would protect me, give me everything I needed for my life and that my one duty was to do my inner work. All else would follow from this. Not important whether I accomplished anything outwardly in this life since my one task was to contribute to the evolution of the collective unconscious. One must not seek happiness, one must not avoid suffering. When one distances oneself too much from suffering one loses depth, and happiness comes from depth. Don't insist on a quality. When one has neglected a feeling, an animus attack sets in. When you have repressed, neglected, contradicted your feeling it works like a time bomb. When you think that it is a real feeling you must never neglect it. The shadow is evasive. I study it by the reaction of those around me. Always the fourth is apart. Always three, and what is the fourth like? There are three functions one can locate, the fourth is exceptional. A man needs a lot of humility to acknowledge his love, but if he doesn't acknowledge it, it is a wound that can't be healed. He speaks of the unconscious as the other side. People must know they are in conflict. They must be able to carry the conflict. That is consciousness. They must stand between that which is in opposition. The unconscious is nature. Because music is dealing with such deep archetypal material and those who play don't realize - So easy this afternoon to go on digging until I come to the stone under the corner. It's a nice stone. What to do. I'm thinking, raise it. It was grey, a soft cold, there alone. Blue distance and Henry's brussels sprouts having autumn underleaves blue, green and yellow. The annex like a field on the hillside, plowed land and prairie. Barn on the ridge. 9 Sunday. Little Ro sick again. Throws up a blob into my rag, comes arms out into distress. I go out into falling water in M's hat and black slicker with drenched sleeve ends. Yuh it's refilling the oceans. Yesterday devoted to imagining garden work. February. I didn't tell about having soup with Daph. Her hair like duck feathers fluffed up and still in order. Under it the pink face and bright small eyes I don't quite like to see, why. Its narrowness, like Goofy. Loving to tell her about reading VW. We both like the strength of the grapple. Trying to grasp reality she said came to an end with Woolf. I say no I don't believe that. Daph speaks in what I know from other times is her faith: now language turns on itself. I say language always did that but it was implicit, it didn't take itself for the whole. I said suddenly, more positively than I would to myself, I think when she's at that level she isn't describing reality anymore, she's making it. Do I mean it? (Knocked the pencil off the table off the mezzanine. Says the black teeshirt back, Nobody gets off this island alive.) What do I know. Reading her journal in the hot time. I know her eye, I know some and some not. What she makes is a program. Yes of course she makes reality and of course we still have meeting work. The mind you make when you write, do you take it outside? No she says. I have work and it is in and out of any medium, and oh let me live in it constantly. Diana's painting. No, first the way it was with her having tea. Tepid. Like I shd'v gone immediately home but I wanted to sit there in her house, so full and organized, wealthy and interesting. The painting with its most beautiful air level, which is flowers, then grass and leaf level, then not-earth streaks, then a lower level of more pulled-apart streaks. Talk about underworld, Innana and the bad woman. I say, why is it under? It's the column fault, equating ends of polarities. The chaotic is below the formed? No, it's coextensive, it's a difference of focus like the grass field. The earth goddess as she painted it too thing I said. Above the little woman's head v rich painting (poppy capsules but I said Bohemian bird) and by her trunk the locoweed white, and red nylon paint down the right side but on the left such an unpleasant snarl. And why the hard turquoise around her head. A touch on the arms ignorant or careless. I knew a lot but is it right to say. (I have so much to say here. In this accounting voice that's one of the mid-mortal I can precipitate a lot of daily suspension as knowing, but it's only a mid-air formation. And that, that's the chaotic, in making. It isn't underneath it's latent. Going out of knowledge to get knowledge. The dear fright saying this is what makes you real and unreal, be careful - Because so much I don't know of what it is for, for her. The left foot snarl. The unbridge between the top and bottom. 2. Laiwan's panic last night. But M today going home with just one light kiss we could both like, and sitting on my lap in the chair, ten minutes of the best silence. 12 On a slope seeing a branch fall. It's a steep logged-off mountainside. When it lands it's a Christmas tree. I see a giant tree, yellow, dead (spruce), hung in the air very high. I think it's coming down, it's headed right for me. Hits the slope and rolls, happens to bounce over me, trunk as deep as a truck. That was one in a ranging night broken often by Ro crying. I heard the kind of crying that means he's vomited. Plugged in his light and found him sitting beside a pink spread in his pillow. When I had honey water for him and pulled the plug he was standing crying to come out and in the dark stayed standing but with his head tilted back and eyes fixed so I wondered if he were in a seizure or asleep. Laid him down, there he was with his hands crossed on the bottle on his chest. So unlike him to go to sleep by simply fading. I went to bed with fear in the solar plex. Anne's card with Blue jar and fifty bucks. Anne Konrad 1985 The blue jar Queenston House 13 Ev at UBC. Is she a man? No but she turns away when I want to look at her skin. She's young and old, because she's so thin. I like her voice. "Please, be very careful with your fingers." "I love my fingers" I say. "Me too" she says very fast. Later, standing pushing grass into the Wiley Mill, I think what I may have said. Mr Smith's secret handshake. Paul saving himself on hints of messages from the universe. He dreamed the woman in agriculture, a head taller than him, was everything he would have wanted to be, to marry years ago. 14 Lying in bed last night in the time when I was beginning to see things there came the feeling of a quality of a time. This one was Eton Street when I was new in Vancouver. It's a feeling of the background of a time, no the time itself, which is not the background but the medium. It's like a tint of feeling tho' I don't think it's on a spectrum. Only the reverie state can recover it. It's like taste smell and color but imperceptible in any present. It seems to be unspecifiable. I was able to stay feeling it a while but I can't get it now. I was wondering if it is the body chemistry of the time and recovering it wd be recovering younger tissues. That was after 2 hrs listening to TV weeding the white hairs out of my forelock and seeing under it grey skin hanging in creases, so ugly I don't look at it, I can't look at it without saying there must be a distortion in the mirror. The face is not only old, it's sick and old and starved, not old like a prosperous person, old like a derelict, grimy, ugly like tissue barely alive. Dirty pores like my mother's. I see myself turning into an old mother and don't want it. And then recognizing the desperate compromises that come with trying to evade living as an old body. Vampire attempts, meanness, thoughts about whether contact with young bodies or putting the squeeze on young spirits works for or against clearer blood. Starting to give money to professionals who live off us worrying about getting old and sick and detested. Michael managing me with it. Rowen backing off. Luke next time I see him pulling back inwardly from my decay the way I do from Mary's. Imagining regimes, yoga, juice fasts, and then thinking regimentation is an old grim state in itself and the real way is to do it by being in the bright spirit. And so on. I see I have the ready spellbinding pleasure in this, which enjoys saying in order not to feel. Then I send a rope out to Joyce and say help! I have to deal with this. What else is there. Comparison. Daphne is grey but she's pink. Trudy isn't grey at all and she looks like a kid. Rhoda has old and young times like me. Cherly is grey but she looked after her teeth. I bet Judy looks worse than me now. Diana doesn't look baggy and she's 10 years older than me. Etc.
15 January fear. Thinking of the first January I knew it, with Roy in the purple room. I was in very free emotion, agony broke through me. Last night in Michael's house, Rowen asleep in a stink of sick shit and humped up with the cold. The electric fire couldn't keep up with the thin walls. Reading The voyage out in the hard armchair pressing my feet against the side of the stove, and then when M came home not wanting to look at his weak evasive face that can protect me from nothing. I have to be responsible, he won't imagine any illness might be serious. He heaps dirt and poverty around me. I can see the relation between responsibility and sex. Contemptuous knowing he'll flatter my bum and face for years, agonize wanting sex, draw his horrible sexual demons, and never make a safety I can be sexual in, or bend his mind to discover what would make it possible. This month in a money fright all month. I was on $5 a day, and already three days ahead, until Anne's fifty dollars. What was it last night. Looking for my room in the Y, is this even the right building, trying another floor, the views from any of the balconies are unfamiliar. My companion wants to go around and see my sick premature baby, I'm not interested, how did I have that one, a contraceptive accident when Rowen was a year old, I don't want it. I rattled in the alley last night coming home from changing Ro, full moon, Trudy was standing in the shadow of what was her porch waiting for me to get past, she was one shape of black I saw for a second, but quite wonderful straight and slight, collected and well-proportioned. I felt headlong, uncollected, short-legged like a pony galloping around the corner. Then in the night I dreamed she came into a room at ground level I had at the back of the house, or I come into hers, and we were reconciled. Daphne's invitation yesterday to write for tessera. In bed these mornings I wake in the dark with the old ache in the solar plex, that I thought was grief. Might be hunger or liver stress. Laiwan a faint sad voice. 16 Taking the camping dishes to the shore to wash them I drop a brown tin cup and it begins to float away. There are five people sitting on the bank with their legs over. I'll ask them to hold me by the leg and I'll grab it. I go over and make them hold my leg by just launching out over the water and I get wet to the elbows, maybe more, but I have the cup. It's somebody else's, loaned. When I go back down the trail later the man who was one of those on the bank hits me lightly with a willow switch. What's that for? I don't think you should have done that. You mean it's below my dignity? Yes. That's really silly. No. He's a tight-curl grey haired man, looks like an East European, John Meisel, tight-mouthed like an academic, Jewish probably. I came into Sieburt's house to return the dishes, am at an inside door before I slightly knock, Mrs Sieburt and some sons, soapy water and dishes in the sink, my own younger brother (like Prince Edward) washing up, I put the camping dishes in with the others. It's as if they're harvesting, a crew, that's why there are so many plates in the water. My brother doesn't like me putting in more. I say they were washed in seawater. There seem to be some in the old cream rose-hip scalloped edge pattern of my mom's wedding gift set. The brother goes. My mother's there. I tell her about the man. She's standing too near with her arm on my shoulder. I make her get farther off. Haven't you heard of the Tawaj (not quite that) - the proud ones? - like a Sufi name. Imagining what the proud ones might be about. - On the SFU bus I read over his shoulder, Stephen Purcell: deep sea waves, thin film, crystal array, nice language! Who sent you to this seat. (Hunting, why not.) My language takes care of itself. "I want to see pictures of atoms" (I want to see stars!). "We'll do it sometime for sure." "You can get quite deep into crystal patterns without math." He was doing it as much as I was. What am I going to make of how sexy physics is. Tsunami. Ride it and pay attention. Then I got pink learning a field fast. Sound generators, waveforms, modulation coming. I like the layers of work when I learn a new territory. It's solid, premade. I'm learning it, learning how to learn it, sorting it, refinding the method of working between two texts. At the same time keeping myself steady to not be ill, looking at his lattice diagrams on the bus just about cracking with nausea. Was reading The diary of the rose on the bus. There was pain and fear of course but it does not come out pain in the end. He has not forgotten or repressed it but it is all changed, by his love for his parents and his sister and for music and for the shape and weight and fit of things and his memory of the lights and weathers of days long past and his mind always working quietly, reaching out, reaching out to be whole. Her sentence doing it, keeps putting her arm around more. A dart into the true self quickly sealed but letting two small rushes of water out into the eyes. With the ugly bus, the despair and self removal of the ugly bus, the ugly students, in cold shadow under the university gate. A luster in the sky, pewter blue with firm fine wisps. Le Guin U 1982 The diary of the rose, in The compass rose: short stories Harper and Row 17 In bed this morning, stirring with work. Getting up slants me past the window. Pomegranate red on just the top rock of the mountains. Hi Booksie! Pink boy lifts his arms, flies up. Wet pyjama flannel at my waist. Fits his legs. I take him to the hall window to see the mountains. He says Oh! But looking at Mr Lui in electric light at his kitchen table eating. The red light is faded. I go start bathwater crashing into the tub. Saturday. Robo-tech. Two hours later in the Loong Foong I don't remember the stir of work. Thinking of charm, value, ethic tactic [for tessera]. Before I send it I have to write a relation to it.
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