| aphrodite's garden volume 5 part 3 - 1987 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
17 February Dreamed a young pointed breast where the left one is. Oh it's young now. And the both of them are the two middle side beds of the garden (plan I was working on last night) (but left is right as if mirror). No grant. Dream yelling at M and F, why don't you take her in. Neil Gunn. How I manage it with M. Not being able any more. Meeting M at the daycare. Fairies and Lacan. - And what it has to be about is money. Telling [Joyce] about 5 week months with tears, "There's so much shame attached to it, it's harder to talk about than anything." "I can see that." She says how does it feel to rage. Rowen raging. I'm stuck. Breathe, she says. When I breathe I want to curl over tight and squeeze the cushion, squeeze it and then relax. Left hand holding up my head. What is it saying to the head. I'm here. How does it feel. It's natural, it's what it's for. Says to the head, You can rest. From there to Support who's kept out by Control. There I lose it. Control says, Don't freak out. "What does Support say?" "If you don't freak out you'll freak out anyway." She says then she's going to give support some new lines. "You can freak out, you can do anything, I'm behind you. Support isn't in the head, it's in the heart." "But isn't it heart that needs support?" "I don't think Support knows what to say" - dryly - that was in another realm - I said to her, when she was dithering about the equal worth of jobs. "Guilt" I saw on the book; in fact supposedly hers though I thought so only later. Anyway she had to offer $25 and I too stewed to prevent the embarrassment. She had to offer, as I knew, and I had to refuse. On the way home tears of shame at having written Mr Mann, at Anne sending money, all the people I seem to beg from. The sense these years more, but since grade twelve (and before). Then meeting Mr Choy on the street, an absolutely feudal nod. "I think you're angry at your parents for not supporting you." "You'll show them the world will look after you." And then what. Tina wanting to talk about Rowen screaming at night. [Opposite pages: long section of notes from Lacan, Juliet Mitchell] - Barley and wheat, cumin and saffron. This city of beaten earth. A dome coated with enamel bluer than the sky. Men speaking a Persian from the Middle Ages greet each other, hand over he heart. "Women veiled the better to make men dream." Male partridges caught young and made to fight in gatherings only men and boys may attend, kept under blue veils in wicker cages, trained and toughened. Traumatized for two days and then ready to fight. Tournament. Lilies tulips and other bulb flowers, eulnek, the blossoming of the fields immortalized in dyed silk and threads knotted into rugs. [Joyce] Left side she said is the woman. How can that be? Right side I said is the child. Right thumb over left. How can the right side be dominant if it's irresponsible? That's it, she says. Then the dream that the left breast is young again, breast and garden. Okay, what's next.
Family love. confirming tear. 20 In the poplar bush behind the house, outhouse bush, coming from a dream where (see below) I meet Daphne coming from the back, tall Daphne, shyly as if I should have phoned her, but gladly. And she's angry, I've neglected the poplar bush, there in the center trees are dying of standing in water, here on the north side a tree is fallen, over there on the south side was a refinement she'd made in construction and polished wood. I'm surprised but not dumbfounded. I didn't know you could garden the poplar bush, I thought trees were supposed to fall down, that's how we got firewood, I didn't know you'd made refinements. She's running away and I'm chasing her. I won't let her go away angry. I won't have another long separation. She runs underground and I chase her, grab her, wrestle with her, and at a crucial moment another voice from the left side, Betsy or Cheryl maybe, 'a friend' but sounding like Daphne herself, intervenes to say something like, don't be years away from each other again. Her resistance collapses in my arms. I wake feeling it was teaching how to fight friendship wars. The dream before was a story very clearly drawn but in alien characters. A young woman crying among her student nurse friends about a man. They get her away. The man's image in the toilet with his arm out pulling at her. But she gets away and is led pregnant in wedding dress to an assembly. Who's going to do this? One of the student nurses steps forward. She's fairly silly, they've all got a sort of intelligent speech. She's going to marry them: the pregnant bride and her double. I'm dressing in black bra, garter belt, necklace, looking in the mirror, Jam watching. I lie down but with my head toward Laiwan, who when Jam takes it as an invitation jumps up, fights her off. There are the two of them and me, Jam starts laughing and then we do too. At a conference, lonely, the last stretch of it I start talking to an older man, South African. I'm asking him, there's some feeling maybe I can be his mistress. - What now. I go after a grant in multidiscip on plants and use it for equations of motion and herb garden. He quietly studied the movements of planets and stars. caldera the sun We are plants at first. Its form is its manner of intercepting. Gardening is an ethos where the unconscious knows. Has three cypress trees standing bemused turning their wings. That world, the elemental, is what eyes like hers should be seeing. the weaver's house. tistre. connects levels. lace. an unregulated love. ladye bright / in shirt of grass-green silk embroidered earth and ocean upon it, and giving it to Chthonie transformed her into Ge revealed to me this earth itself as Shiva, each plant a bouquet offered myosotis, mouse-ears. Plants themselves, their dialect, cover the earth with language. Ophruoeis, she's pink he's green, he is the poplar. Standing among leaves. Fairies are plants. The tall old man who's moving in. Grass stalks seeding, few slight wildflowers growing on the floor. He has arranged plant to delight him from his bed in the morning, put tiny plants together in a garden. He was wanting the house warmed so its humidity would leave. Walking with him excited, enterprising, undertaking the red acrobatic stand I'd wanted for a long time. When I look back he is wrestling and playing on the ground. - Weary and depressed. Can't tolerate the kid. We have labourers for the garden, good, but I'll have unpaid supervising and we'll all have urgent scrounging. Since the session with Joyce I'm low and weepy, tetchy, frightened, shamed, angry, worn right out. Ro's night weaning has worked but I lie awake. 24 For two days there have been real mornings and evenings, this morning my eye saw but I didn't, the white C in the bright southeast. I went back and raked over the space among telephone wires and found it strong and frail. (It would see a gibbous earth-waxing). Free morning: the ground frozen. Later, headscarf, football shirt, not knowing what to do and easily doing the entrance rock, grass paths. Turfs are blocks. Turfs and rocks used as they're got, I like that, same stuff, same ground, order it around. Cozy worms little and big waving from the mud a lost end. Such clean things. Little Ro when I come to Crabtree running in his red knickers hugging a dolly blanket under his chin. His way of greeting is to rush for something to show. A plastic basin he steps into. 25 In his smooth sociable handwriting, seventy, must be, like Jean in grace and goodness. Very forward slanting, bottom loops small and always come up. "Dear Ellie." Then he puts My in front. "There is so much more to be learned about our world and universe." Does he feel it? "Really it seems such a short time since I first knew you existed." It's making me cry to feel the real love and use he has for me and I for him. [Mr Mann replies to my letter] 26 O my other work what are you, two people in stride, no through road. If it isn't to be done what is it for? For what it is doing. I go on ephemeral. Sad. A person in dark clothes walks back up the hill the other way. Sad for lost fineness. I'm like an ox now. Panic. Big thigh a shamed thug. Distant inner crying, pressing to make, who is, what if nothing were pushing. It says yes. Listen to how the voices say. 27 Timid desire to tell about David Mann's letter. I wanted Trudy's mouth-open listening for that, L wouldn't take it in. Michael didn't want to know. A danger. I don't want to call him David, as if it would break the father dam. What I've been wanting is to ask him about his time. - Needs perfect concentration. You have to refuse so much and so much intrudes itself upon you that you do not want it, it is exhausting work. [Stein] And that fatigue produced by my artificiality. [Artaud?] 28 Pictures from yesterday. A tide so low the sea floor is revealed maybe twenty miles out, white mounts like a salt city. A car on what looks like a road is daring into it. On a breakwater looking east (right) in the bare seafloor I see a low escarpment with a wide thin curtain falling over it, and then two more very similar next to it, like doubles from a diffracting lens. A wave comes across the empty space and smashes over us, another coming. The other person is swept off the far side of the jetty but I hang on determined and it breaks over me. Last night. Worms on our bodies curl up together like snake nests to go to sleep. The nests are shapes themselves. The bigger ones are together, the small ones go down to eggs even, just pill-size. Alice Miller. Pain is the way to the truth. You were unwanted. By denying it you are not with your own truth. Then you go on trying to earn love. Avoiding pain you die. Guilt is really a protection against a terrible realization of your fate. In my paintings I am only compelled to work farther and farther into what is true. In painting I feel absolutely free. 1st March I'm awake at night saying what Trudy has done, she took Jam, she replaced me even in Jam's memory, she nullified my time and work, she cut off from me admiration from Paul even, Diana. She's put a circle of dead relations around me, people who are hers now. She took me from myself. By taking Jam she forced me out of viability into having a child I didn't want, who gets his revenge and will never like me, so even here in the place of the child, where Luke was, there's a spoiled place. Escaping termite dust into past and future, she's death. Saying this also as-if. I don't know whether it's true and I need to see it to have my bearings, or it's true but I depend on not seeing it to be able to rescue any possible part, or it's true but not important, what can be taken isn't essential. My usual way is to withdraw myself from all the areas that are lost, but isn't that the further final loss. A very low ebb, with some venturing in the barren place. I see water still alive and pouring elsewhere, one, but it's three alike. A wave comes from them to try to smash me off, someone on the left is lost, I hold on on the right. Seeing Michael in the chair humoring the bossy baby, the look on his face, "You just sat there and looked mature." I think if there were hope of love-making depression would be gone. I go sit on his lap, what does he do, compulsively pinches the muscle at the top edge of my breast, like milking. I talk to keep out of dislike, the wrongness sends me back to angry mutter about Jam and T, blank and then angry. But he knows to go. Though tomorrow morning there'll be a rage. 2nd
How can I get money for the herb garden - go on - would have to have drawings - understand the astronomy - cost it. 3rd Wanting a free making, and writing is sickening. Two flags moving in the grizzle, the Liu's towel on a line, Rhoda's faded flower rag. Specks of water materializing on the window. Soft unnatural primroses grown in a posy. A frightening light on the paper in the typewriter, metal on metal, flat and directional. The house is clean. And then frightening emptiness. Eating turkey at the Princess Café, hungry, but it will so soon be eaten and the taste will end. The taste of food a desperate need. In winter I'm afraid for my life. There's no freedom. Who's afraid in winter? An imaginary life. Light fires. Candle flame is shaking in every current, why, it's lighter than air, so stable. It has to go up from its wick, it makes a little wedge-shaped hole for itself. Michael drew me this morning reading Lessing. Rowen stared into my eyes signaling seeing something, maybe himself. How did he signal - looking alert, curious, enthralled even, and holding focus until I began to see too. A flamey subtle changing look. something that belongs to another order of being, and which I come out of the depths of myself to meet as at the surface of a glass What are the imaginary sisters What were they when I met them later Polar bodies "that separate from the ovum at maturation" Garden election - Joan, Diane, Muggs, Max and I by prearranged vote. 4th There's so much to say if I find the standpoint. Something about the mother and child, and something about the imaginary sisters. Reading Lessing at 30, other people, puzzled how I came to this age without coming into that authority standing to know. I haven't taken things on directly so I could have them traversed behind me. I've gone around them feeling an orientation by direction, so everything in the wide center has been felt and oriented but not traversed. - The picture was of a center of a circle, everything in it but nothing mastered. What's in it is felt, not in emotion, but spatially. It's the chora, cauldron. I know it's another method but something else has to come of it, in it, a catalyst and then the whole broth will crystallize at once. That's how I fancy it. But another way to say it is: stand in the sorted broth and say anything and you will have your order around you. the dark of the year's deepest place has been entered and the limit touched Hello Robert. Touching into the edge of the field somewhere. Putting together the wild boy and Ovid, and against them an old woman. Ovid and exile - I am raining, I am thundering and struck with panic as if in losing hold of my separate soul ("in shaking the last of it off from the tip of my little finger") I might find myself lost out there in the multiplicity of things, and never get back. But I know this is the way. Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back, as themselves. The plants. The spirit of things will migrate back into us. The true language I know now is that speech in silence in which we first communicated, the child and I in the forest when I was asleep. some memory, intangibly there but inaudible of our marvelous conversations. When I think of my exile now it is from the universe. David Malouf An imaginary life Vintage International - I have a real life with Michael and Rowen, the garden, the dirty city, my enemies, history, visible strangers, and, and, I have another life with you, and this life is real and substanceless, in ether. That's why you're a wind. It's a life substanceless also in you. If I say so the joy rising into my throat is real, a desperately necessary dimension. The two people - the one person - her - the dark inside of the coffee pot showing a little steam - softness of breath. I saw that when I looked away from the mirror. She there has wings and a veil of black hair. A mouth soft at forty-two. Her nose flares. Her eyes have deep lids. She has on the blue flannel shirt light likes, quilted silk, yellow-green. There are creased recessions under her eyes. I saw the steam when I just touched on taking her as other (I am drinking, she has the cup at her mouth). A rift in which I was wondering how much I could withdraw from. So go on. I thought what if I could love and speak to her, have her with me not obeying what I'm taught but loving her in the dimension where she is. Not identified, not an image myself anymore, something else then, really a spirit? No, she then is the spirit, imaginary sister. What do they warn. If you fall in love with your image you'll fall into it and drown. That has already happened. If I follow this I'll know more about all the imaginary sisters. 5th Lying there at night. Then she comes in downstairs and we go talking. How is she, black under the eyes, yellow around them, does that mean ill? The moment she was telling about putting a stop to Lorraine's friendship, really an ugly pounce. A crone's claw. We skid off asking what failure is. She says: accepting that one can have failed. "We were made to betray each other." "We left each other in a really awful way." "Yes." 6th Waking at 3 or 4 lying with, beside, solid continuous pain in the midriff. The time with Cheryl Crow yesterday was an awful miring into depression. I failed in marriage and because of it I lost my possibility in art. Look at that.
This is exciting. I go clear my deck. Ruthless. Away with anxiety and theory and uncertain writing. Seeing Trudy on Rhoda's porch, hatred. A solid shield of anger. They're meeting Jam at Joe's. Sun on the snow and cloud. A shower hanging down in this space between buildings. Mary holding onto other times. "I would like to know that what we have is shared enough that you would still care about me when I were damaged by illness or aging." And that's all she has. Twenty bucks. Old age insurance. What to do with this day. Very short of money again. By next Wednesday I'll be broke for two weeks. Looking at my hair as if it could still save me. I go to bed at seven and lie there, and wake at four and lie there, and am wondering whether I've been six years grieving and struggling against the death of my young life, or the fact that death is gradual over many years. "Go into it with curiosity and courage." But curiosity and courage seem in many to be the first to go. As if suicide is up ahead not as a catastrophe but because it's a power to be claimed. One of the powers my parents feared. Orienting between now and then. I see how I dislike my friends and hate my parents and siblings and am overwhelmed in all my contacts and in my relation to my image and to my deeper self, and only want to know people I can see still rising, and only want to be still rising. And want to go away so I won't have to be in company I've seen peak. And seeing the strength of the dread of decline, what can I know about what's next. Provisions in the lifeboat running out - I hate to live as if we have to hoard. - Frightened looking at money. There are 17 more days this month and I have 12 dollars left if I can stop bank charges for overdraft. What do I have, some squash, potatoes, chard, onions [in the garden]. Rowen has to have another package of porridge, milk every two or three days for $2, fish for a dollar every other day. Later there's family allowance for $31. I thought if it were two weeks I could fast: eat 'til Wednesday, set up the heavy work at the garden and then shut down everything. Best would be if it were juice and greens. I can go to the food bank for Ro. He can be at Crabtree more. There's no hope of going to anything. 8th Mary calls as I'm listening to Co-op's women's day. Will I send pictures of Rowen. "I couldn't do more than I did" she says. I disagree. Opa was a good provider, wanted to tell her what I'd realized about her family. Roy phoned. I was dreaming the phone rang. I woke and was lying there. Then the phone rang. Roy drunk, oily, South African in a way I haven't heard him, ignorant, vehement, crude and groundless. He begins one of his turns through dogma. I listen to the cracklings on the line, night sky with stars. "Are you still there?" He hears the blank. "Not quite." Haven't said about Cheryl. What. To say that I don't like: her leather coat with false shoulders, its smell. That she whines about Them and won't do anything. I said, unexpected to me, Let's just forgive them, meaning, Come on, let's you and I have a better time. She was askance. 9th What about Jam, Sharon Li, Lee Bob Maracle, Cynthia Flood [reading on Co-op]. Jam going to her stranger's place repulsive and charming, Lee's real friendship for her showing as free prose. "I like Jamila and she asked why women don't write about meetings." Cynthia saying she wants it to be simple and clear, and her account was that. Sharon Li wants to be the lark and is. And more than that, Lee took Jam's bluff and raised it and won in the real with the near. My struggle with J is in Lee's winning. But not more than the many others. When it was over at midnight my midriff was very sharp. Already not enough fire to be fitting and hammering in the wind [because of not eating]. Puzzling that I fall in love with fizz-outs who're just happening to have a high burn, "who need intoxication more than food." One of our garden workers said righteously, "I knew some people who were on welfare and they would rather spend money on coffee and a cigarette than go down to Chinatown and buy some vegetables and have a meal." I resented and have been arguing with what she said. "When you're starving all you care about is energy." Whether two years' health of normal eating cancels two weeks of not. No, don't allow it. There's a hopeful curiosity too. Impatience. Seeing Kiku and Walker, he in clean new stroller and she with hard rectangular smile - oh you have it all don't you, house, Chinese babysitter, grant, 80s clothes, civilized husband, transportation and very ugly smile. 10 Soft memory on the way out of waking. It's new memory, the memory of the real self. Near memory. Feeling it, feeling myself it, my time, I felt free. I don't need anyone, I don't need to do anything. I can be sweet. Then, clear too, losses don't brand me. I'll be that person again because I like to. Tina said "I'm hungry all the time." Cheryl with big black eyebrows, orange shirt, red face [opening of her show at VAG]. What about the work. Spectrum colors fastened on. Marion and Colin's radiance and baby with purple cap. A real man and a fat sleeping baby. A kind warm intelligent solid man with a blood-red face, big enough for large Marion. Daphne wearing protective fuzz. "Do you need protection here?" "Oh yes!" Now I've just understood the way I carefully looked when Rowen on the porch stood seeing Rhoda on her porch. He wagged his hand and she in spite of my stare was wagging hers.
Now the baby's back and he's not mine but I have to pay for him. What's the food bank like. Line-up back into the alley, pale drinkers, a few thin welfare mothers. The whites look bloodless. We're standing in a cold wind at the Indian Center. I put my scarf over my nose to filter cigarette smoke and factory dust, and to be able to have my own face behind it. I see people I know who don't seem to see me, Eileen with a false I'm-all-right-look. At the ID table there's a thin woman with brown eyes who looks me in the face so kindly I cry now remembering her. "Is it for one?" "No there's a baby." "Tiny? There's baby food." "No, he's two." "A food person," she says smiling. I smile too. She gave me heart. That's what it means. An hour ranked with the lowest debris thinking they should be lining up for a gas chamber and then her quality, in her thinness, poverty, long life of work, firming me in the chest. Ordeal. Taking what's dealt. A portion, blow, exchange, secret arrangement. Akin to dole 1. archaic, one's lot in life; 2. archaic, grief, mourning. Michael phones. Shaking voice. He has gotten the pain but misunderstood it. Laiwan phones. Do I want to meet. I'm canceling the sitting. She covers her retreat with an obedient cheerful tone. There's real ordeal and its speech. There is as if under it another spirit not in speech, a welling up, you can know it all and still be safe. Starving is isolation too (I'm not starving, I had macaroni and an egg), I choose to deceive my friends. (But I am weak and low.) I don't know whether I'm doing it or it's inflicted. Half dozen eggs, 1 frozen fish, small can of peas, jar of green olives pickled, box Ritz crackers, white rice, 5 day old Woodward's baguette, tin of beef consommé. An hour in line at 10 and then another forty-five minutes in the rain at 1. Just realized what I'm getting out of it: a trip. Hours on the phone with Mike, making him cry, hah. He offers me "a little money." I say no what I want is for you to make yourself another hundred a month. Then he's off - I'm holding the receiver away from my ear or it hurts. There were some other turns in the middle, his story about one of his trips to Paris. He was going to stay in a cheap hotel, they were all booked, he was wandering on the mountain with a sleeping bag he'd bought, it was wet. He got under one of the city roadwork shacks and lay in misery and wet and cold. People came out of the church and pissed behind the shack so it ran downhill on him. "I didn't care, at least it was warm." And then sometime in the night something happened in him so that he was in a most wonderful state. When it got light he walked around in bliss and went and sat in a café. Everything was very much itself. And that night again he was tired and went into a cul de sac on the mountainside where he found a ruined house and went in. There were things growing on the walls and hanging down, a hobo nest, not a lot of garbage. He got a door and lay down on it. Was it raining still? No, I was comfortable. He tells that story and I see him in his young innocent head and light body and quite love him, and then twist him around to see where devotion comes to its limit at money enterprise. 12 - Haven't washed clothes for three? weeks. At the laundromat there are many machines out of order, they're old. The thin Chinese man comes to check out how much laundry I have. Two loads he says, walks off with my token. I say he can watch me load and say when it's enough. The soap is in. At not even half a load he says it's enough. I don't have another dollar. I want my dollar back, I say and begin to take wet clothes out of the machine. I'm furious. He counts out four quarters and fetches me a garbage bag. Then what. The old pirate's laundry on Cordova. But now I don't have soap. I'll have to use the drying money for soap and dry it at home. It's raining. If Cheryl comes and the house is full of wet clothes? Bad enough with the house clean as I can make it (no soap or Comet). There's no coffee. I would go out and try to grab some mint, which hasn't begun to grow yet. So I basically can't afford friendship though I still have pickled olives. Even Joyce in a padded shoulder dress. At C's party people trying to look rich. I hate the clothes of the time. I can't imagine being current. I want to be something else. A furious sulk. I don't want eating to depend on joining a stupid consensus. I don't want to be hanging onto a stupid past consensus. I hate it when I see smart women in makeup. I don't like what's said by the clothes. The women artists in self-canceling shapes and textures. Still, 'I hate' is up against the wall and to be able to move it has to be curiosity and comprehension. A particular hatred for Kiku whose greased mouth and boutique clothes are the signals of her B Grant currency. Is it different somewhere? 13th Morning after and a lot of turning in the swirl above the drain. M told a story about Beverly in her hotel. The big fat man like a Nazi who hangs about in the corridor wrote her a letter intimating he had money. She wrote him a nice letter back thinking what she could do with a thousand dollars. But what he had in mind for her fresh pretty body was fifty. Second story told to Cheryl by Bill: Diana Davidson's boy is a rapist. He's 21. Raped thirteen young girls in Toronto and here. Teenagers? And younger. She's a family lawyer, "the best." "The women's movement has failed" she said just like that. The women who didn't wear makeup for ten years are wearing makeup again, I complain. It's a signal they're available for the game with men she says. "I don't mind anything they have to do to feel good. I used to be able to wear used clothes, but now my body is wearing out I can't do it anymore, it would be too -" grim, sad, dim, unnoticed. She asked Josie why she'd cut me off. "I'll tell you what she said, she said she had a dream. But Josie does that, she's cut a lot of people off." Cari at CFDC with hair constructed, feather-bleached in the front, in a look like pure money. Court life. I've been thinking it might work if M wd pay me for sex. Fifty bucks, I said. He cried. Last night he left 20 under the cup in the kitchen. Soap, tampax, Vaseline for Ro's red bum, butter. "You can think about how to spend it later." The deal was: all night; I don't feel bad about anything, he can do anything he wants but only on condition that it really is what he wants. He isn't able. He doesn't know the state that can stop complying. But relatively it's alright. There are moments I put my arm right around him. It's very far back from the best I know. That's what "the women's movement has failed" means. They're starving us out. They, somewhere. Or what? Or is it time now for sure to have a trade. It's fun watching Ro together. Studying the cassette player turning its wheels, near it the picture of himself a baby sleeping. Shakes his head, blows on his finger ssh-hh. B Grant application first of April. I dreamed next door the neighbour boy a blind mongoloid is cutting grass in the rain with a push mower. Long grass flies up, water slumps down, he pushes over cobbles same as grass. Goes suddenly to the small lilac bush in the center of the lawn, proud to be able to do this more complex task, and snips off the leader bud. Brings it to us. Two flower clumps on it. I can root it in my garden I think but the flowers have really no scent. I'm remembering the lilacs in Sexsmith. Sitting in a sort of bleacher with my family. When I was with Jam I'd be sitting in relation to her, always knowing where she was. Now I'm at loose. In my young days I loved all my experience because it was my experience. It was like those intense lilacs. Now I don't honour what comes to me. It says it's Kiku's control more than success [ie her smile]. Unsex wearing the signal of it. L about C's work: the concept of dream without the feeling of it. And then the way when I wake at night the diaphragm was jerking, vibration. "Oh poor thi-ing, I can feel it through your back" [M says] where for months since I didn't send the key it has been stiff and sore. "It's probably loneliness." Yes. 16th Tina dreams I come downstairs with many, many people dressed up in trailing laces and so on, they're all women, seem to be going to a performance. Money comes. Reserve of love that has had to separate itself from individual attachments and then categories 17th Apprehension like sickness. Money and food. Facing the B application. Eating macaroni. Apprehension like wanting to hide in the corner of the bathtub. Terror of finding out my expanding days are over - the small inside person screaming. What's the worst it can be. I'll never get another grant. There'll only be routine, the garden, I'm stuck in Vancouver with always more careful poverty, I'll never have the means again to learn and expand, I'll get uglier stupider more shamed less able to attract friends, dressed worse, housed worse.
18 In the aft lying down electric movements in the forehead. Suddenly a decisive whu-up like a shutter flying. Went and dug 'til it got dark, on not enough food. Drained, chopping. Beginning to sit, at night, wrought up to cry and cry. - It's a soft white-blue day not completely covered over, soft cloud in tufts. A coat of mist over the mountains. The white side of the bank, east side of a telephone pole, cornerboard by the Liu's door, a clean creamy light, a real dawn. Smoke rolling out of a chimney with comical lightness, sideways, straight up, veering. The fish plant's long whistle, 7:30. Yellow-beak starling hunting on the roof. Jésus in his rat fur curled round at Rhoda's broom sleeping 'til he's let in much later in the morning. Sun you're all I have. - You're meant to focus on increasing your income all year ahead. The last of a human period. From here on in the pursuit of money and possessions becomes a serious constant and a lucky one. Start something Friday and Saturday. [Tim Stevens in the Courier] At Joyce's in sulk, rage, forbidden honesty. "You could look at me even." "I don't want to, I don't want to look at any people." I think the session was useless and possibly the last, she was frail, an old lady, cracked her tailbone. Wanted me to smarten up. Spirit of destruction in me wants to mow down all the friendships and connections of this time. Don't see them dying, don't see them distorted, don't see them sleazing by, fitting in, playing safe. There's hate anger shame misery mourning. Who I'm reminding myself of is the real Robert. The path goes there but is there any way out other than suicide. It skirts suicide. Judy saying You wouldn't waste a good depression. 19 A great bite of pain looking at Luke's word list from 22 months old. Yesterday on the seawall I saw Joan and Jennie walking. Joan's same face had old-woman lines, but her hair was the same, back, bushier, her walk and shape were the same, she was speaking the way she used to, looking at the path, a loving humor describing something to her tall daughter who must be thirty. Looking at the journal of 1971. [Those days I] forgave myself in the instant, didn't press, was full full of love. I kept myself at the point of love. Joan about a letter from the city wanting to erase my garden and Henry's, Mr Li's. I write Michael Lev[inston] in rage. Michael Vos[kamp] counsels cunning ass-kissing. Something to change - canceling Thursday sitting. What's the poplar bush. It's too thick. Take out the dead wood. Drain it in the center. Construction and polished wood. First thing about it, it's wild and near the house. Give M this house? The whole cheque? Live in a truck? [Bedford van fantasy not transcribed, floorplan not copied] Then L says Nina has asked for the rest of her money. "I'd lend you some of mine but I'm funny about that." It means I can't ask her for the [CC] reference letter, and then it means that friendship is over. What I think about now is that I take on my own certainty again. What's my relation to that blazing warm girl - I'm still me! But then with a falling wilting motion after the leap. The falling apart I learned in dope. What am I these years working on, say five years since what will we know. What do I want to go on to. Plant life, imaginal study, etymology. 21st Garden. I do that instead of the grant proposal. Speak fast and operationally without thought whenever there's speaking work. It isn't different from the attention in construction except that operational speech always has guilt beside it. Rowen having night misery and was feeble in the aft. Pain makes love (I was saying) holding his hand, lying on the floor alongside him. Bringing him into my bed to pacify Tina's 'concerned' [visiting] mother with her self-pitying voice. He turned like a weather vane NNE at my knees when he finally got sleeping. Immense withdrawal of the sea. I'm scouting over the floor gathering wonderful stuff, a worn green painted oar to put up in the garden, many other oars, a ping-pong racquet. The loveliest thing I come back to see again is the bones of a small boat laid out in sand like a fossil print, lovely little metal bones I start gathering but really I should leave them all together. The water will replace them. Then there are other episodes. I come to a cast iron stove I'm thinking to appropriate, but it has a fire in it. An interesting mystery, someone lives here and has withdrawn the walls. Nearby there are burrows with small amounts of the front ends of creatures showing, a crayfish maybe. Have a forefinger on its head trying to draw it out. Further on there's a deep cavity like a gravel pit. I'm looking at very large clean earthenware shapes, look like transformers or such hydroelectric hardware. Then I see the pylons and large structures at the far end and realize I'm in a substation where there'll be high voltages. I should get out fast. (Later on there's talk about whose power station it is. A rich man who'd been in a romance. She didn't trust such an intense passion because he was much older than she. A feeling maybe he's in hiding plotting to take over the world. There's a pamphlet or some writing suggesting a hidden force.) On the way back to shore when I get to the fire again it has the walls down around it, they in fact trap me. I see a sort of patch cord between two power outlets, and when I pull it the walls lift but then I'm inside and blocked by the far wall, have to get the patch cord through two small holes to fit outlets on the inside of the wall. It's too short. I have to use a thin extension. I don't know if it's before or after this I see the boat bones again and look at them carefully. Five or so buckle-shaped iron parts across the stem, the toothed cogs of an engine, then the little hand-length slightly wrench-shaped parts standing in for planks. They're a light metal with white corrosion, like aluminum or magnesium? It's a lifeboat. The talk about the man in the transformer station is somewhere in the country, like Saturna. They say his name. It's maybe Broad-something, Broadfoot? Dear life, the last years in London, times alone in the PRC, the 70s. Let's get wilder again. Dear life, I'm container and contained, work all day long addicted in gardens, hair baked dry, crazed bush over the forehead, cracked lips, dry cracked hands, slightly burned eyes. What am I thinking about, I'm the tiny kinds of weeds and seedlings, that ruffly-centered circular one I was pulling everywhere, emerald green sticky-thread veronica, chickweed. Maybe a ballpoint again no erasing. How come the time then was so packed and now four years can go by with less in than one. What am I going to do about the B application. Every day I just go work in the garden, drive myself, pouring my time into the foundation of a place for joy. It is connected to the time coming into personal power. It's that joy. I can make structures now. Gardening began then. I can be the agronomist now. I don't think it's the end of the personal tho', if I can imagine it coming again it's alright being an agent of community now. Needs getting used to. The stepvan dream is future soul. If I did nothing but the garden - the herb garden, my demonstration plot, fireplace, grove and mount - what's left out, anything? Seeing Luke is. Monday morning Sèmiotique. The books were called théorique, compiled in Los Angeles. She did 200. We're in a circle reading them aloud. Fun to read the shapes of oat seeds under plastic, words from any language, the shape of the mouth in the oat. Plant dialects, reading plant shape, scent and essence, reading and plants, projective geometry, color, plant shape and basic space. Part 4 quietly.
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Say this to get it said. Angry with Laiwan. At her house yesterday all she wants to talk about is her obsession, I'm not to exist although I'm there for supper. I get even by attacking her patriarch in the cave slides. She doesn't want to lend her own money, doesn't even want to write me a ref letter! - After all the use she could make of my discernment. I didn't want to look at her yesterday. Daphne jumping to offer her a place in tessera for the good mother writing and plant tissue slides. C says to her, You had a mother and Ellie had to find it out all by herself [meaning I was L's mother in art]. She doesn't like to hear she owes a debt. The shrewd dimension. Why I was mocking Chow to her, Some lan' cheap-o and a wallet full of money. Like Jam with a French girlfriend. L didn't like that either and I think the girl is the one from Cherubim Jam actually had her eye on. I'm annoyed her energy has completely left me to go be most boringly romantic with a projected female. I'm unwilling to hear about any of the predictable next crises, or to help her in any more work. The practical losses. Her contacts and technical know-how (I'm looking at these to see if they're real or false wares), light heart and contact with Rowen. Now it seems there isn't any more a difficulty about R and T rivalry, she can go and the inherent limits will look after it. Let 'em wreck her. I'm v angry. Off you go now. You have so little feeling participation anyway. And you're heading for mastery in a way I don't like. Now - what do I really want to do. See Luke. Get to live near him or in the love relation there was with him. Go on making gardens. Go on learning attention. Get a way into the beautiful grain work. Be useful in ground and also go as far as I can into the ether of learning attention. Do something with, stay in company with, the delicate writing. Go on learning the conscious and unconscious fetch of the lovely images. 25 [My brother visits from Toronto.] Paul Epp on the phone sounding as he did, a stronger voice but with the boy's brightness and speed in it. Then up the stairs comes Jake Konrad [his uncle] in tan business raincoat, a lively skewed man with bright eyes, whose face has taken a curl toward the right, nose mouth eyebrow and chin. He doesn't take off his wool jacket 'cause he doesn't want to show his business torso. When he puts his feet on the armchair arm he seems like Nina's André to be coming to a twisted point at expensive thin leather whose color is a bit bright and off. "I'd like to be neighbours with you again." "There's a side of me nobody knows." "You've been mysterious to me." I explain: "It was a mystery to me as well." My slides - when I show them to him two opposite things happened, they seemed shabby, dirty and mediocre, and then in the blown snow ones there were soft really absorbing galactic depths and subtle colors, vales, folds. Left to himself he went through them faster though. How it was. We both showed off our facility. He had a lot formed. "I play the game, sometimes it's interesting and sometimes it's boring." I suppose he meant to say, as we were. The sense of the different thickness of social east, Mennonite Library, Royal Academy, Clifford Wiens. But then. I'm thinking, since you choose success, am I to go on being the landmark of the spirit's viability? "It's just a part of me but I need it to be whole." I say "You can be it again, the story isn't over yet." I worked without rest - except for the organizing trips into bathroom, fetching, doing, a lot of that - to make a covering animation for us, to make it a breeze. Respectful I guess it is of the power we both have to damage the other's fragile crust of ground, in our slight knowledge. But there's the other, too, saying I know what I know, if you're getting to stay at the Pan Pacific you must be working for the wrong side and why should I fill into your left side what you've drained into the right. (Unless you put something also from your plump right into my atrophied - ) "A saying, you put on your attitude every morning like your clothes." "So what attitude do you put on, confident and positive?" "Something like that." - A big embrace for Michael this morning. "The nice triangle is still there," straight up and down and light an' bright. the heart-searching unhurried long talks which later became the techniques of political workers asymmetry of contradictions - take these opposites as living, mobile, conditional Whenever --- is alive in a person they become daring, inventive, searching, become interesting to other people, disturb, open ways. this holistic, this gestalt tissue, a broadly human preoccupation What's the trouble with this application. I don't want an artificial study. I found mor during the worst of 1981-82. In the worst of the time I started field & field. 26 Minute useless thinking. Stuck and panicking at the B application. 27 This afternoon giving up on the B application. Had been all day thinking about the herb garden, had to go look for a safe site. Paul was reserving a spot next to him (oh you do still like me), 28' only. What about the other side of the ditch, there's a total of 45' about. Sunday 29th Planting the start bed, very thick cross lines of nearly everything. Covering with plastic. Sore heel still. Ignoring the application. Sore foot and period make me go sit on Michael. Ro gets footholds on leg and chair, climbs on top of the pile. He looks like a Pete, brawny, fair-haired, everybody's fine big lad. Cak he says looking intently in books. (But so sensitive he blanched and gagged to see shit on his hand.) Where to put the herb garden. how the over-all plan should go. Looking at different ratios and shapes for it. Came back from the sun, ate rice crispies, very sleepy. Lie down with the clock set and almost immediately I'm in trance feeling the brilliant outside, the darkness in, the danger and marvel of being. 30 The way that word makes a greased landing. When the state described is far from the state describing. This book is so interesting.
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