| aphrodite's garden volume 5 part 2 - 1987 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
18 January Now I learn to do all this at once: my garden, herb garden, general garden, Ro, writing for Daph, SFU and sound generating, film research, meditation, B grant application, letters. Afraid of charm, value, ethic, tactic. It seems a closer theory than any - it isn't demagogic - it's the tactile - tentative - it tried for the true web under - the recognizable unspoken - it's my own idiom and there's the fright, it's closer to crazy: brave; if I put it out I have to be ready to turn arrows. When I read it now it is like bending back around to see myself, I haven't got the right sense of it yet. It's the close declaration of the one I was in the middle of the field of Jam and T and R - it's the person Joyce has been pushing me out of - she was terrorized, but was she terrorized in writing or was she acute in dissolve and bringing back a live vision. That's what I shd set myself to find out. 19 Has eight teeth coming and is screeching so I want to hit him. 20 [Laiwan's opening] I was holding my territory and thought I could. The first shock Jam in an ugly face. I didn't feel that, I say to myself. But when the two come in I have to hold this inner room. Then I don't see them, are they gone? But one comes back frightened, a raid, refusing to be kept out though I stare at her skinny shank. Then later big T comes in, near, turns and stands, looks at Jam. That was bold of her and made me helpless because then I was imprisoned rather than holding territory. And then they all three were an hour sitting animated by the door. I can't go home because I have to outstay them. I'm quite pierced. What's that like. Defeat. I didn't think of a return. Except for dipping them and everyone in darkness, in, out, and then the faces turned saying things. I was going to Joyce and Barbara says she's sick. Laiwan's green writing and beautiful moonlight and yellow-green made me uncertain too. She made such a large beauty and it has none of her mindy defense. This aft in the library finding the book of images of sound. Ah I'll leave it and go to sleep. 21 What does it have to do with the smell of cat, yesterday too. How did it get into the hall. (Does T have a key?) What makes me wake at night. And what did it have to do with having no money for supper and knowing I'm winter ugly, and being uncertain having put Laiwan off, feeling I helped her to that level of work and she's using me to get better terms with them. And then this morning the bank making me feel like a welfare bum. My clothes going. Ro's month of illness wore me out. So what did I dream. R and T moved into a room with me. R sits down next to me, says in friendly condescension "You're just a little girl." "Your fat little boy!" I say of T. Sure enough a little blimp with toy car. Oh I wish I had a room of my own. That was the first waking. Does the pain at night mean I didn't get the grant. I don't understand it coming back. Seeing the withdrawals of other people I don't comprehend, Diana and yesterday Jude. It's rejection pain but is it bad luck pain. Paranoia, says Michael laying his face blissfully against my head. 22
Being hurtable by them, why. It's waste. It's empty. 23 So through discord all things are steered through all. 24 I found the 4th branch story in Edmonton, still mobile I was then. It was only for the story of Gwydion's baby. The baby I should have stolen from Robert if I hadn't been fastened in another determination. Courtesan, cauldron and fox. But the misfiring is in the pattern too. An ancient word for light - but didn't I steal Luke earlier (sure hand Llew) - the way Ida [in Wales] said Llyu-kl. Bran of the glittering branches. Concentration action and will. Taliessin. Arionrhod the sea tower. White moon. We can call souls into the world. Evangeline Walton 1970 The island of the mighty: the fourth branch of the Mabinogi Ballantine - And joy of luck again, facilitated. With Laiwan and the soft boys last night, and talking to the one at Kootenay Loop. It's light and friendly. And then being in the VW beetle while L and the driver went to reconnoiter, the back seat person taking charge in the shyness, and on. "I'm a geologist." And noticing, facing him, it coming noticeable as a hum in the ether, he's attracted. I meant to write attractive. I still have to be deliberate in this relation. He's attractive, I'm attracted. When he got up out of the car liking that he's tall. The consciousness in the directness when he speaks to me across the table, a wide solid band, not warm but solid. Then he picks up the money and check. When I go to bed it's the solidness I have no trouble imagining in my bed, in a new position, both on our knees, ducking and sliding with free chests and hands. An assured equal solidness, steady mutual creation. Fast learner. The garden shed being built by the young man who wants to show himself a statue in a junk garden. In the Mabinogian the feeling that I was massively tricked and tricked into betraying Luke too, my loveliest tie, and that now I have again forms of what I was tricked out of, child, a leadership, a perhaps innocent freedom, discernment. 27 an undisturbed stream of vowels and their subtly changing spectra, unending light, a variously shaded beam of continuous vocal sound, transcending the limit of breath and the conventions of language 28 Taking the war where it is, coming into Diana's opening. There's the constellation and Jam dough-faced heavily padded westernized and in pain in her short perm. Jeannie Kamins come with her lit up painted face, Nora's maternal grace, red albino Evelyn, and then Roy [Kiyooka]. Here's one I can challenge head to head without rancour. His porcelain teeth are just at eye level. Okay Roy. I almost got by without speaking he says. I feel drawn up clearly foot to head. You look well he says. I make him laugh so the room fills. But then at the end it does die. "The bodies leave each other, not the minds." I don't understand why there's pain again. Talking to Jam like trying to bend cardboard. She keeps looking around. This time I'll stand my ground: "How come you're so nervous." She confuses me being slow and fast. "Don't you wish you had a dog again." She's slow then but when I've riled her she gets suddenly faster and stops me. "The mafia that controls such matters" I say. "Why don't you stop singing that old song. Since you're working so hard it's making the blood go to your head." That was true, I cd feel it hot with determination. So she outflanked and edged away and went off with the mob. What I said was true too and she got out of it in her usual way. - Then [at the Princess Café] Tony Gordon-Wilson at the table, magnified eyes and brow in ridges, railing against his unusedness. His carnelian. A sea-dog. I wish him a garden (not a plot). Inventors just holding on. He likes the herb garden. When I write my name in his book, "a philosopher's handwriting" he says. What is it in reading electricity. Resistance. Dislike of not understanding. On and on nothing but formed metals. And more, a feeling of pushing against the grain, as if I have to find another way to think of it, it feels hypermasculine. Two signals f and (f+x), if they're intense enough will generate a third, subjective, tone, no physical energy, the difference tone. C/f fundamental tracking, where a fundamental not physically present will be inferred, heard. 20-25 fps will fuse Sonic f over 20 Hz will fuse. When a sound comes on full, 200 msec to fully hear it. When turned off, it's heard for 50 msec. Maybe a sample-and-hold. 29 Lying awake I yell at T, R and J; asleep I was yelling at M and F. telling them with grief how much their division has distressed me. Yelling at him, Why don't you take her. It comes to me why Michael's house makes me desperate. The way he's stopped fixing it and lives in it damp and cold rotting and piled with unsorted rubbish. Now he doesn't make fire downstairs, takes Rowen upstairs in his snowsuit and lives in that one stinking room as if he's settled at his map. Most of January has been rain. Ro is sick again, has a cold. All his back teeth are coming through at once, I find him with water under his nose, under his eyes, crying with his fingers stuck deep in his mouth. He looks small and ill. Dark under his eyes and yellow over his nose. We've just got him through another very bad bum rash. His talking is down to hot hat doosh byebye. I'm lonely in the way I get, stoical, not noticing it's loneliness. Very pressured about money, this is a 5-week month and I don't expect any extra sources. Worried about the grant I guess. It's the gate to so much else. Belly pain waking and keeping me awake every night. Loneliness made me impatient with Laiwan. This is possibly a loneliness there'll be no end to. What hope for the companion now, my little pool is exhausted. I'd have to move to another. I'm saying to Jam, You were a real loss to me, and I'm a real loss to you too. We lost each other partly by our own great foolishness, but sometime maybe you'll understand that we were destroyed from outside as well. Lonely and worried about being looked after. Saying it, seeing yes it's January shock, abandonment. What now, the young one sailing high on work so totally supported by my courage (though the freedom in it is her own) asked worshipfully for references says Hélène Cixous, dada-dada a list of prestige theorists she's read in an anthology. I'm outraged. Outrage is keeping me cold in my room. 30 Neal Gunn and the sense of the threshold, I know such a lot of his material. What he knows about intuition. He's very plainly there. His tone - Rowen dumped a file: Jam's writing (and one note) I didn't know was there. The story of when she was two. Laiwan acknowledged. Then I instantly forgave though still quiet. You have to destroy other things, other people, in order not to destroy yourself, to protect yourself from self destruction. All that opposes him, that might expose the pathological inferiority in which he suffers, must be swept away so his prestige can reign. You only get to know the motive when you yourself have gone far enough in destruction. In the mirror she's wonderful looking. Holds down her jaw and that's what does it. At the concert sitting hearing streams and little rattles, seeing the guy on stage in a loose silk suit, I wanted to dress her beauty. Black forties crepe blouse dark blue appliqué hibiscus. The iridescent interpenetration A vocabulary of marks, a vocabulary of pictorially structural elements which brought together would evoke - If I have something moving in one direction on one level and another direction on another level, counteractions are taking place. Sometimes a situation may carry these statements two or three deep. In forces, in units, in elements, in energies? Each of these words can represent higher electronics or something else. The important thing is that I am using them visually. But I do also agree with Boccioni that even smells, noises, have a visual equivalent. His use of the word 'ambience' to describe this sort of inclusiveness of experience. evolution of visual knowledge Isn't it dependent on there being somewhere a constant against which other things will appear to move or vary? Sophisticated means arrive at a subtle primitive power. Confidence given in the affirmation of the units of feeling and knowing, intuition and rationality. 1st February Waking from a fear dream about meeting T and R on the sidewalk I remembered the blue-white circle of protection. Fell asleep and dreamed again something about plants. Sunday midday standing around in the sweet warm light. Walking around looking for dark or green rocks, looking at this and that, seeing what's shaping. Candlemas. Water running. Gulls quite high saying keeer. When I woke and realized the circle had worked I felt it was worthy opponent war exercise to learn self protection and other psychic moves. I'm feeling the presence of a sticky slow hippy concern. At the garden another woman like Brenda with water fat and grey fissures. What does it mean, pain? 2 This night people were on boats, buses, the end of the world. In it somewhere meeting Trudy, she's leaning on Michael's shoulder, M as if Jam, I have to see how easily. I push her under him, I'm crying out, Your fabulous body, why were you given anything besides that? See M's bone rise. I had sneaked a key and read her journal looking for parts about J. Then I was traveling alone without imagining otherwise, alone like usual, watching the ordinary people preparing to leave. Opa saying he'd been livelier than in years. Bandages, menstrual pads, have to find something. I'm on a bus full of people. Their mood is light, we're heading out of town. I see into a house full of Chinese things, white Mandarin coat embroidered hung over a fireplace, then a big glass-walled Chinese shop. We must be on Kingsway quite far south. When the bus stops I jump out, to catch another bus, it just seemed I should. A few other people do too. The one that stops ahead of the one I got off, is an old shell like an airport shuttle, almost empty. I get a woman who's sitting on a side bench with her legs up, to push over. Why this surge of T. What I felt in the dream was liking and love and envy and jealousy as if Jam was artificial and always unpleasant to me, and M and Rowen irrelevant accretions and my abiding love still Trudy and the curved space in which when she listens my experience is seen. I'm talking to Joyce trying to figure out. Last night talking to the diaphragm tension I say, What are you, are you fear? No answer. Are you sadness? In the end and near sleep, Do you have to do with not breathing, crying and screaming, speaking, in a Grande Prairie [hospital] isolation room, told by strangers to keep quiet. Second, the people all along I've thought more marvelous than me - Janeen, Olivia, Roy - who as they turn out are less marvelous. Is it going to turn out that way? This time it was ten years. Move somewhere and live with Michael? In a real house with nice things and good food. Or stay in 820A as a whole house with a lodger. L said about charm, value, ethic, tactic that it said things she knew and hadn't articulated. 3rd UBC with Evelina looking at numbers. Garden meeting tonight. Dirty rain. Nice baby Max. What I was doing today between those runs and skirmishes was brooding about witch rivalry. On the bus, the sore belly. Are you excitement? Deep sigh. I sit with candles flowers green silk black hair mirror and glass at the window where they may see. At UBC coveting an optics and acoustics text, they're $50. 4 Waiting about the CC [Canada Council] application. January stress. Angry at M. J and T pain. SFU electronics. Daph and tessera. The dark woman. Ro sick. - Why didn't I get the grant. Can I get a grant if I try again. - Joyce telling about being with her mother ("A very difficult woman." "Bossy? Domineering?" "Yes and very dependent.") when she died. "I was able to encourage her to stop breathing." - That put a cavity into my midriff. "I don't think you've lost it" when I said I wished I'd had her when I was first with those people. "I didn't have much experience really liking people." "And Jam with her poker face caught in the middle of that" she says. She was disapproving the schoolgirlishness of the rivalries, do I want that? Then I'm stopped and have to really fetch it up. After a long time: "I have to say this," about telling T an experience and having her hear it, "I've always had that difficulty, that there's no one with a quality of attention. It makes a possibility of transformation." And then Joyce is turned around right away agreeing. But she jumps up again in good support to say, "And you know when you're being heard too. Many people, you can hear them and they don't know it." - The important part of this train for us is the front bumper. This is the leading edge of reality where all the action is. Stuckness is running through the boxcars looking for answers that can only be found out front. Positive stuckness is when we don't try to run through the boxcars anymore but stand our ground and keep looking at the track open to all the infinite possibilities. The constantly forming edge of reality gives light, the cutting edge is nothing less than the totality. Exploring the uncreated dimensions of being within 2 years of starting to take <our religion> seriously. And that's a minimum goal. Toni Packer [Zen roshi] - What about saying what I could have done with 4000 - seen Luke, gone to England, taken a course at SFU, fixed my camera and taken film of the field, bought beautiful cookware, eaten at the end of the month, bought books, got berry plants and others, sent Ro and Michael to Ontario, got some clothes, experimented with sound into film and that beautiful work, taken Ro to Alberta to see Eliz, got a car for going to the country, got manure for the vegetables, paid rent to the garden, seen Sarah, Annabel, Ros, Judd, Sara, the boys Catherine, Jill, been sent on the way of work and learning, seen Joyce every week and been able to go faster in other ways, worked with Paula to be tuned, have the next three months without anxiety. 5 The woman yesterday in the middle of the back of the bus, brown skin, oval eyelids, high-bridged nose, sharp-cut mouth and a present look, like an Epp, Lily. I wiped my hand across the water on the side window. "Thanks," she said. A small person whose feet don't touch the floor. "You look so much like people in my family!" I say. "Oh - I'm pleased" she says. "Me too." Start stretching it out to her because she's leaving. "What is your heritage?" Nicely precisely said. "Mennonite, what is yours?" "Mexican, Roman Catholic. It couldn't be more different." Now she's at the exit and I have to stretch it even further, "But still -." That was on the way to Granville Island. I wd'v wanted to make a dialogue: What is it about you? Brown blood. Looking at her skin I was thinking maybe there's African. Peter Epp and Susanna both had a Mexican look, and what's that? Indian. And what's that. Asian. What was it doing in Holland? It was after sending the angry letter to Mary saying she didn't like him or his wild blood in us. Brown woman what are you. Jaguar. Sharp. Condensed. On the floor with a blanket around your shoulders searching among your branches. Copper and black hair. Black gaze knows without trying. What do you invite. Knowledge of Peter Epp. - Laiwan in an almost predictable way, as if my whining did it, offering to lend me the fare to London so I'll update myself and not be so old-fashioned about experimental film. 6 math. maeth. a mowing, a mat of crossed lines, reeds, grass, a pile in the corner. mathema learning. allegor, settings beside Because the writings of the chosen people have selected a place, in the most determined manner, on that untenable crest of manness seen as symbolic fact - which constitutes abjection. The relentlessness with which her limping leg was emphasized, "It was my mother's legs, the skinny one and the fat one." Céline What fantasies can the Jew thus precipitate to be the exemplar of all hatred, of all desire, of all fear of the symbolic? Power - he always has to be the one who gives orders He wants everything, he wants more We do not know what manners they've got Blessed by the father and by reliable families, he artfully manipulates the networks of social reality. It unleashes the excitement brought on by sibling rivalry His weakness will be held against him but very soon one will admit that his jouissance is what grates. As if he were that unique being, so different from the pagan, who draws his aura out of his weakness, that is, not out of a full and glorious body but out of his <subjectivation to the Other>. A contario proof of monotheistic power of which he becomes the symptom, the failure, the envier. The anti-Semite its demon, its dibbik. And I who identify with him, who desire to share with him a brotherly mortal embrace in which I lose my own limits. Jewish monotheism the most rigorous application of Unicity of the Law and the Symbolic, also the one that wears with the greatest assurance but like a lining, the mark of the maternal, feminine, or pagan substance. If it removes itself with matchless vigor from its fierce presence, it also integrates it without complacency. Kristeva 1982 Powers of horror: an essay on abjectiion trans L Roudiez Columbia University Press That world, then this one: A light in sound, a sound-like power in light Newton's analogies in the opticks between the propagation of light and of sound The vestigia communia of the senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially the excitement of vision by sound Who in infinite Space, as it were his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately ... wholly by their immediate presence to himself: of which things the Images only carried thru the Organs of Sense into our little Sensoriums, are there seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks Newton Opt. Query 28 the correspondent breeze - Rob Dunham writing a eulogy for Luis Posse. I almost stop breathing, his defense of me.
Luis Posse 1986 Free the shadows Talonbooks, Rob Dunham afterword - I saw the studio. Looking again at Walter's invention [electronic composer Walter Branchi], seeing him dream what I do, entry into the pink aether of the elemental. - He wants to project, from a center, play with ratios, ratios of ratios, and have them one day experimentally form the universe there is, with him in the center. And then: 7th Neil Gunn a companion. The serpent. His wonderful balance in wanting to be true and useable. I stand here. Where. How is it. I will learn and say. After seeing Joyce I found out about not getting the grant, but at Michael's I was happy, put my hands on his arms. We both felt the warm free-running current. Yesterday at Simon Fraser I was big and green and loose with red silk showing its poppy collar. Sat in the bookstore reading, copying here. High. Walked through the allotment garden like strolling in a cemetery. The ridges. Evening coloring. From the parapet, patrolling, coming up to oh the vivid plush uniform blue of the mountains across the north. Alder band alongside the pavement, perfect stuff, a perfect order of fuzz, rosy luminous grey. Being all the color keyed in the light, live intense green grass, yellow streetlights and yellow rectangles in the library building, alder fur dark red, mountains the color of thick air, peak snow pink, sky clear green. Then I was looking toward the sun a while. I came into a complete peace. I could look. There was in front of, or under, the orange cloud field a mysterious ripple of bars of violet light. The cloud like dunebuggy tracks along a shore and then ocean furrows aligned, but with the subvisible glow like another focus in front of it. Realizing I was seeing it, in peace like not for months. Then looking north again and seeing the colors had steeped. And then walking in the quadrangle, seeing sky rectangles over the city one way, over the mountains another way, and bright bright in the pond. Sitting on the steps hearing the building hum, one uniform band of sound like the concrete on stilts. Then I tripped and jammed my hand under a step, skinned my knuckles, ripped off a sliver of nail. The sweetness of the warmth in the light, the lightness of the air, the sound of birds in the mornings, have been the most certain spring I have ever know. I stand and thank like a bush. In the home garden today the soil was like wealth. Falling apart on the fork. The small white crocuses are there. Neil Gunn is wanting the world and the visionary to be continuous in one space, with a difference in texture maybe, you can tell them apart but you meet both in a walk around. He's not more impressed with himself for that kind of meeting. He's terrified but he recovers. DH Lawrence was more terrified all the time. But Gunn has a few happenings he goes on weaving. He's loyal to his shocks. It's a shock to be alive and going to die. And that the mountains were the barrier to a strange country. "But Tom was no longer a child, and that strange half-fearful, half-inviting country he now realized was the country of the dead." The sun "presently could be looked at, when it touched a destined peak, and slowly sank, amid the flowing of colors, of red, and saffron, and pale yellow, of delicate blues and infinitely remote islets of green, sank down beyond the peaks of time into darkness." As he sat on a ridge, a final ridge it seemed, separating him from the world behind and the world beyond the mountains, a quieting came on him, a premonitory feeling of liberation, and his mind at its core became single as a child's, and he wondered if he would go into that country of the dead. It was the calm sweet wonder of the mind that is already going. an ordeal like an adventure nodding here and there to tormentil and eyebright, cuckoo flower and primrose, milkwort, pink campion, lady's mantle, stonecrop, petty whin, trefoil, herb Robert and buttercup the nodding of tall grasses, with its literary (historical) associations for him, such as the passing of "the lordly ones" - There he made the grass lie down. And in current it's the lordly ones going the other way, yes. Suffering by itself brutalized. But suffering transformed by love - it was the ultimate experience, the ultimate cleansing. Then tentatively it poured some of its cold dark-brown body onto the palm, touched the wrist innocently with its mouth, You took a little earth in your hand and swore by that. The Serpent was the earth spirit. His mother always saves him. Next morning the wind was blowing on a bright day. "the serpent stone. About the size of the palm of your hand, with a hole in it." "And you put it in water, and the water cures." At the top what he comes to is the river "that for no particular reason always made him think of the belly of an eel or a serpent. He just loved this stream and that was all." He is Robert physically, maybe tribally, the sort of reticence, but warm and whole by his mother's loyalty, where Robert doesn't care to know the name of his pinecones. Hello solitude. I'm a bachelor. I'm free now. Neil Gunn 1978 The serpent Souvenir Press 8 In the morning there's Rowen bright in the bath. And Michael on the phone in his morning death in self-pity and demand. Now I need to find out why I hate him in that state and writhe when he has me trapped in it. I could be nice and he'd cheer up, what's unbearable in that? One thing, he's been like that when he's guilty and that disgusts me, him fawning to keep me out of my own position in anger. It's not for me to get it out of you and forgive you, you have to stand for yourself. What makes me cold is the untruth in it, I smell the con, I don't want to be bothered to find it out, I just want to leave. When he's like that I'm angry, that's my ground. Anger is the truth of the scene. Maybe his - does he have something to be angry? The fifty dollars? Gunn goes on marveling in a formed life, like Llewelyn. I go marveling in his images of a life formed by repeating again and again in one place, paths on a landshape that stays the same. Things forbidden in order to make them thrills. Tunes formed in the place. They go into the night for a sense of moving in spirit. Earth, mother that is behind all mothers, as the sea, the father, is behind all fathers. Nor yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all. For Kirsty had the rare quality that is called imagination, and her eyes had often to remain steady in order to let her imagination go to work. - From that imagining imagination as something some people do. He's often working to see imagination.
9 Monday in the garden, cos the green rock is out. First I moved the rough compost over behind some rocks, stomped it, blanketed it with chips and then wrapped it in plastic sheet so the sun as it's higher will cook it. Pegged out the corner. Filled the north bed as far as the mud would reach. Went away to eat and had to come back. Tony set up a workbench by the concrete platform. He's a bee. Henry standing loving his new bed. Can you guess how many pails of that stuff I put in? I don't know, twenty-four? Forty-six. Raw face and half deaf and half dumb and a sweet luminous affection. I brought 4x4's from the corner, Alan Storey drove by, a long 2x12 with Tony, and then - I'll try this - Do you think we could move that piece of concrete? - for the corner, the beginning of the entrance - and he rolls it in. When Ro's in bed and it's time for candles in the back room, yes it has to be tapes tonight, and I listen to the stories. They're clear, light, new. My friends who couldn't see these! extraordinarily failed me. It's work accomplished, I can set it out now, it will be liked. 10th The studio accepts me. [SFU sound studio] I set out accidentally the gain values that made near perfect storm waves first try. Then I couldn't reset them. Whin, skoo, pewit, grilse, brose, salley, sithering, blatters of rain. Going on with Gunn. He wakes at night when the wind blows in the door. He wakes and sits up before the door is fully open. He's in fear and he calls it a presence of a black electricity. That's nice. Why. I feel the clear transparent Valhalla night and invisible cold wind. The wind is spaced, it's sound in the trees before it's edge on the cheek. The sense of current in huge alertness. But the way he goes on to write it, an energy from space tries to disintegrate him. "Its purpose was to break up the tissue of what the good or creative principle has put together." "It touches the inner circle that guards the second self, the inner core." Something invades the womb, from the corridor. The embryo is suddenly awake. That by itself is attack. If it's sex the black electricity is certainly there and maybe the chemical flood is a disintegrating change the embryo tries to fight. 11th Here in the kitchen with feet in the oven, a light steam forming on the window in concentrations around the drops that are on the cold side. I was in Gunn's biography going on sounding, as I have been, something urgent to myself - what is a writer - because he's so close to what I was doing in the country but he was also in the center of male p----, a world made for his confidence, with Jesse Dallas Frew to be Daisy for him, silver spoons, coffee at eleven, supper for the boys and her house packed with interests not hers. He 'deceived' her for thirty years. She allowed him for 30 years to steal confidence from her so she throws her baby unborn and dies in constriction. - And that apart (my bitterness not apart), his entry into travel, politics, administration, literature, sport, manliness, besides the defense of my knowledge that I thank him for, as if none of my isolation and martyrdom in hard schools like the Jews and Jamila was necessary to that learning, though they seem to have been for me. Is it the puzzle then, why I have to learn the way I do so slowly and needing so much emptiness around it and always by identifying and sexually mixing with someone whose quality I need the use of - Thinking of Robert then - I needed the use of - against stronger resistance than ever before - if I'm a poet there'll be no one to look after me. And he's someone too who paid an eye. He defends the pagan. That for him is an actual civilization but he, and I too, come to it from another direction. It's the synthesis past for instance the book table at SFU - I hope - but I have to make it that or else it is a hideaway. Why he and Yeats go on interesting. They make themselves happy. VW too. Dorothy with only London for country. It's still (I tell Laiwan) needing utmost sophistication to keep simplicity well. I don't understand why this long struggle in the foundation of work has been so mute in me, where with Gunn in the grandparent generation it was public energy. And while writing in this explicit way still feeling it's stooping into another generation's business and the way to do it now is the way I have before. But this one is a comfort of being able to do sturdily. "The other world is this world seen." I feel I haven't done my work but have gone years timidly taking notes about how to begin. - I go for Rowen, ten past four, I'll meet Michael at the Welcome. (No - it was at Carnegie.) But at Crabtree I see Michael through the glass door, run through with anger, disappointment. I didn't want to meet him there. I don't want to be seen with him there. It shocked me. Then the daycare worker coming to say the nurse had been by and Rowen is developing now, for a while there he wasn't doing anything. And then M going on in his ugly tone and I keep quiet partly because I have to feel through how intense it is. I got a shock of humiliation and pain. The explanation I have is that it's his stupidity, that I'm seen married to a person who can't find his way through a conversation. "You look like you're freaked, you look horrible around your face." Yes I'm freaked, does it mean I can't go tonight? It's different being seen with him with a baby? Yes. But I felt what it's like being seen with him when he's at his blankest. (But wanting to hear Patricia.) Noticing these days how wrong it would have been to have a daughter with him. How crazy I was not to know it. Did Jam do it to me so I'd do it to myself? A desperate slope I couldn't stop myself on. Because I was being her, I lost my sense. I never thought I could do that. She did it to me only by being it. The small house off the lane to comfort myself to sleep. His taillights on the yard. I was waiting outside. Kisses and supper. Her house packed with interests not hers. He 'deceived' her for thirty years, she allowed him for 30 years to steal confidence from her, so she throws her baby unborn and dies in constriction. - So what are her interests. 12 Suffocating sitting with Paul while he stuffs cookies and adores his collection of equipment. Won't concentrate. A dream where he saw boys in nets slung under sails. It's the cover of a book by Yeats he discovers, Sailing to Byzantium. People in nets in ancient trees in Kinderwater's field, the unborn or descendents. "They're in suspension." He dreams ships. A liner much too big for him he's trying to steer into harbour. A mast is a tree too. Family tree. Our dreams are saying different things about family tree, but what. When he wanted to get off the scent he talked about being rescued from drowning by three girls with blond hair. But I'm the one who sails to Byzantium with Yeats and others. What he has suspended is boys and it's true I don't see the boy in him now. What I had suspended was that fine young woman who has some connection with the tall dark woman who sang with me in the grain elevator. The fine young woman I gave up on to go into lost teeth, losses, shame, etc. A sense I have now of being on the wrong side of the line. And have battled so much in writing. Mediocre being. [Long stretch of notes on elves and fairies: aelfthryth elf strength ferly which from 'sudden' in OE came to mean 'a marvel' aeluan alvisc ylfe ides elfscinn elf-shining woman elf-shot elf women who took Arthur away elfe In Marie of France's Lay of Yonec he arrives in the shape of a great falcon to become the lover of a lady shut in a tower. As the rest of the story makes clear, he is the fairy king. Second half of the 12th c for the court of Henry the Second of England. Two green children were found who would only eat broad beans. These men were of the smallest stature, but very well proportioned in their make; they were all of a fair complexion, with luxuriant hair falling over their shoulders like that of women. They had horses and greyhounds adapted to their size. They were vegetarians, took no oaths because of their great regard for truth and had no public worship for the same reason. Giraldus Cambrensis in The itinerary through Wales Al was this land fulfild of feyerye. The elf-queen Feyrie was first an adjective meaning 'enchanted'. "It is the whole world that is enchanted as if with a fifth dimension." Men and women who seemed real until suddenly, as if there were a gauze curtain hung before the whole scene which we hadn't noticed until that moment, time and space begin to tremble like a heat dance and we have walked through the border into another realm that is usually just below the threshold of consciousness. Lay of Gugemar, "a spotless white doe with antlers, and her fawn." "Intermingling of the two worlds is characteristic of fayrie." The fairy lover (for which women were burned) The Irish lovetalker "of the strange rectangular pool with the different sorts of fish - elves dug it" 13 Last night as L is starting to pack her satchel across the table, suede coat and glossy little tail, square rump on solid legs, I let out a spurt of affection that suddenly sees. "So, little pony, that was a good gallop." She puts her arms around me at the top of the stairs, "Thank you for seeing me through it." "Through what?" "My transference." "Oh you think you're through it do you." I meant, Don't you tell me you're done with me. But I was proud because I think it's true I was wise and generous. - Then came before me the fairest thing that ever was born, as if it were a tall knight, arrayed all in gold. This I saw in dream each night in sleep. This thing slid before me and glistened of gold; oft it me kissed, and oft me embraced; oft it approached me, and oft it came to me very nigh. There dwell in the sky many kinds of beings ... many a fair woman through their craft childeth anon. Follows a path to the sea where there is a ship waiting built of ebony and with silk sails. The ship puts to sea and he wakes in a strange harbour. It is the story of ego in pursuit of its ego ideal. The line is often the edge of a forest, a river, a shore. A hunt that crosses this line. His wound can only be cured by a woman who will suffer for him as dedicatedly as a mother would for her child. The green knight/night The tone of the late 13th, early 14th is deepening cynicism, with everyday jockeying for power, corruption of the church, bloodshed of holy wars Northwards into the Wirral, a forest home of outlaws. His guide leaves him at a wild ravine. A mound with four entrances. The branches of English in which it's written didn't become standard speech. Gawain and Green Knight circa 1375 Margan La Fee, the Morrigu, great Irish goddess, a shape changer, "a fairy woman since they always make the first advances" The adulterous, incestuous situation, its ultimate sophistication to be offered the queen by herself with the king's connivance and permission and to return her kisses to him, to suffer a blow in his place instead of the blow you would give him. 13 Fairy hunt after the souls of the dead Proserpine the fairy queen The probably slightly pre-Chaucer romance Sir Orfeo Wanders the world as a minstrel living in the woods like a wild man. Often he sees the fairy king out hunting. At other times the fairy ride and the fairies dancing. Follows his wife when they return from hawking "in at a rock". Inside is a country bright as the sun, a green plain. At night the stones give off a light. The porter lets Orfeo in because he's a minstrel. Inside are those "folk thither y brought. And thought dead and are not" who've died suddenly, choked, drowned, died in childbirth, in battle, sleeping; or gone mad. The king keeps his word. They return successfully to the upper air. The queen of the fairies transferred to Venus and the Italian stories. Malory from Geoffrey of Monmouth, 300 years later. A mythical 6th century of Arthur. The fairy foster-mother. She is barren. And then young Launcelot virgin little spear. Because of his devotion which never swerves he doesn't completely attain to the vision of the grail although as he knows, he would have done if his thoughts had not been always on her. His own son who is Launcelot reincarnate. The search of the hero for some marvel of fertility and healing. "They may be won back by the love of a mortal but if they are turned out by the fairies they are likely to pine and die." Another form of the god of the talking head A world of forbidden wishes surrounded by a wall of taboo which must be broken, "carried away" Lowered resistance, seduction Made to break a moral law, as abandoning a child The fairies may steal the real substance from things As long as you are obsessed by a dead love you cannot follow the life-giving instinct Unamh (weem) a cave, in Scotland, for an earthhouse. Why ants - "an ant was dry in my tent with me" Witches who steal a penis by making it invisible to the owner, kept in a nest in a tree, fed corn, waving like serpents. It's human vitality they want to draw. They're infertile. Assoc with bad luck. They try to steal human babies and they live a long time and don't get sick but they need something from those who do.
Maureen Duffy 1972 The erotic life of faery Avon - And Rowen throwing his bottle out of bed in this night weaning. Last night two hours screaming, I come in, instantly he's in hope, Bott? No, no bott anymore at night. Cries when I say it. I go back to bed. He rages. It's a battle between us. I for my sleep, he for his power to make me come to him. Tonight when he's tired and I catch him to put on his diaper, he struggles so much when I catch him that he knocks himself out and then has tremendous heat coming off his head. His bott is a substitute. It stands for life-essence. It's the cord. Not having it is like a death sentence. When it's empty he throws it out. It's to say he's also differentiating bott and what's in it. Then if he has bott and it doesn't empty? Bott empty at night. Bott full in day. Just then he cries, his 11 o'clock. I go and speak, I love you and you're going to grow up with me. Put the blanket over him and he holds it. Yes that's what to do, to give him something that will stay with him. That's it for now.
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