| aphrodite's garden volume 5 part 1 - 1987 march-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
30 March 1987
Here's the real application:
- Really I'm doing not studying. I still want to make beautiful images and come into true intuition. In the background a city allotment garden. Voices, shovel strikes, water in ditches, squash leaves, politicians, pheasants, Saskatchewan oldtimer lighting a smoke, earthworms, derelicts in the blackberry bushes partying on varnish thinner. Nearer the foreground a pleasure garden in construction. Circle in square in rectangle, hedges, paths, reflecting pool, calendrical markers, fire stone, beehive, arbour, aromatic perennial plants. "Their visible presence is their discourse." Seeds, seedlings, roots, flower tissue, plant space and gesture. What can be known from shape, from smell and taste, from sound, from color and treatment of light. The language of the plant may well be related to that of the nerve cell. We are plants at first. Memory and intuition, etymology, magic and legend, what can be known from dream, from naming, from relations in language, a seme-iotique. "Gardening is an ethos where the unconscious knows." ysope, koriannon, popig, kistos, basilikon phyton Sources. Olive Whicher on plant spaces and projective geometry. EJH Corner on the marine origin of land plants. Barbara McLintock on visual induction. Digital sound synthesis. Lis Rhodes' handling of voice and image. Churchland's epistemology of trusted perception. Alain Chartier's technique for visual grain. James Hillman on underworld sight. Pribram on the cell. Etc. I'm (elected volunteer) site coordinator this summer on a 5 acre fill site on the southern edge of Vancouver's Chinatown, doing foundation work on paths, ditches, demonstration plot, common areas. My personal project is a 40'x56' astronomical herb garden, structurally formal, substantively pagan. This application is for support and material costs not for the garden-making itself (although it will continue during the term of the grant), but for parallel studies in images, taped sound, spoken and written language. I don't intend primarily a documentation, although document is inherent as background. What I want to do, as always, is to enlarge what I can see and know, this time in relation to plant life as such; and to clarify, in the fashion of what will we know, the imaginal cross-ties that delight and confuse perception. The work when it's finished will go out as a multi-media show. I see it as continuing and bringing into the urban present a long study of place and attention. 31st The relief after. Daylily leaf surge. I come in early dark from the corner store and see new moon white fingernail high up flat to horizon in ploughed cloud. 2nd April With Joan watching her frightened speed. I know there's some shock there to see: talk fast, keep your eyes closed, then the other one can be just a formal fraction there. She's invited me to the garden shop and doesn't at all want to be with me. I'm aware of putting a drag on to slow her, but not much more. What's she afraid of. Competition. Drains. 6-8" gravel. Tops of drains should be 18" down. Minimum drop 1" in 3'. 6" diameter main drains, 4" branch drains. Gravel over. 4th Garden heaven. Now we have heterogeneous molecules agglutinating from unknown blocks the far side of 41st, a small neat Italian woman tidying out her seeds into a good home. Sé Duggan the tinker was whistling a pipe tune following me into my yard. Got together with Tan. Finished Vic. We have a tyrant nervous of a kingdom in community garden. Very young women putting claws into land. Uneasy meetings, stiff at first, I'm laying sentences in despair of how often I've said them. Then later there's a spark and it becomes genuine. 'Service.' That's with young women usually, single men are breezier, I'm free to slightly move them around. M dressed up his best in blue jeans white shirt narrow black belt and little white tennis shoes is a goggling sight to seduce. From all sense of cultural value, I can't believe my good fortune to have this lovely horse stepping about in my stable. "Your bum looks like it's ... thinking" I say. We fall over giggling. The kid when we're sitting exchanging buzzes is at the window breaking up seeing the cat smell and scratch dirt. In the highchair yesterday screaming when M and I went around the corner to slow dance. It's daily slow simmer these days, no intention, no grab. Our long daily privacy with 15 minutes of cuddle to warm it up. Mr Smith in the pink room, they're looking after each other. M is drawing with crayon at the Carnegie Centre, Ethiopian woman in landscape. I was thinking, he's got all his love still, I haven't now (but some). He gets a very dumb dropped eyelid look still when he's worshipping, but so prancy a confidence with it in his patient low life. "I'm attracted to you because you look like Van Gogh and I'm afraid that's the truth" he said, though he's the one with the little green eyes. 6 Falling asleep the other night, going to Orph's arms, I was far enough so something happened, approximately turquoise flooded my body from his. In the zone I had time to feel the quality of turquoise, compare it with pink, think oh, turquoise boy. Does he know in this way? It's his zone of knowing. Other people know how to get here. A gold-eyed blackbird at the site, blue sheen on his neck, so sleek a thing. They hang out near the mound. 'orraich, cak, bird, cok, shooj, up, mumma (milk), bok, applejuish, hot, ouch, byebye, seeyoulater, 'ank'ou, oh-oh, don't, no, my, hat, uck. (And understands more, will say after when he's in the mood from playing with M.) Signs of poor drainage horsetail, buttercup, chickweed. Coffee grounds lower pH. If heavy metals high, grow rape to accumulate them and throw out. Mix soil 50-50 with fresh manure to stop lead up-take altogether. [drainage notes, work lists] 8th Ass in gear. Speeding drafting the brief to City Council. My handwriting becomes Ed's, the manager. Rosy and beautiful. Rapid friendly canny direct. People whirling faster beside it. James in giggles, Joan's hair curving toward her ear one side, away from it the other, Luke phones this morning, Max and Ian bringing a 3" t&g sample. Luke phones this morning! I come straight to Dian and then see Laiwan at dim sum, the goddesses brought me. "You have a bite on your neck." "Three people blushed just then." I tell Michael Lev we must have goals for the week (instead of complaining that his workers weren't there yesterday). Rowen tumbles, I put my finger in his mouth when he's whining and it makes him laugh. M got into a good state in the aft and did a felt-tip drawing in Japanese turquoise and dark green. Now slower. Sitting last night. At first v fast computing garden and grant politics. Let it go on for a while, then put a brake on the breath. Surprisingly complete drop into a particular quality of trance, black with white images very fleet and partial. I was thinking it was the astral because it was a zone of quite unpleasant images, an art rather than a nature quality, men's demonic creation, alien and frightening. I reassured myself the breath would hold me near myself. It did keep on steadily until I stopped, went to sleep. Was remembering the quality of some of Michael's doodles. We wondered if I took an imprint from sleeping next to him in the quite hellish room above Hastings. He has that hell quality as well as real sunniness and kindness. I also realized sometime maybe later how fuddled my comprehension has been by thinking either/or. Is Roy harming me or teaching me [for instance]. I could have instant sorted order by thinking he harmed me this way and taught me this way. Friday 10t [Tim Stevens says "a break-off or other eruption is almost guaranteed."] It was true there was trouble this aft. Michael Levinston in a rage that I was demanding work from his employees. "We don't have two workers for the summer, City Farmer has two workers for the summer." So I see I have to change my sense of what they're good for (but this aft in their anger they did get rid of the little houses), ie I can't have them for the herb garden. I'm pushing my design of the whole site far enough so there's a charming order around my own projects and then I'm going to quit. What it's like. And conferencing Laiwan this morning went okay while she was telling how to act like an artist, but turned wrong when she's wanting to know why we tease her about sex as if it's just sex. I'm tempted to tell her so she can't fail to hear that it's because it's just sex. Frustrations of public who don't recognize a stake and leave their rocks on paths and pretend to have shed siding to be able to grab my 12" boards! Aiee why's there so much of the same kind of work, drafts, applications, papers and talktalk. 11 A man from somewhere else. I'm a young woman on the farm still. He's a stranger like hired men were but he's better and more than other people. He has a noble profile, a dark color. He has some dark blood. He's educated in Greek. What I like is my relation to him. I admire him but I'm free with him. I always know where he is in a room. I'm standing with my back to him stretching for something or other on a shelf and looking into a reflecting surface to see if he's looking at me. He is but I don't feel caught, I feel we're together and wave gladly. The men are studying Hebrew, even Paul is joining. I say I want to learn Greek. There's discussion about me going away to university again. I say I've run out of scholarships, I'm not going anywhere. In a dumpster there's my beloved old doll dressed up in worn clothes, leggings, like a little girl. The garbage men are coming. I take the doll. The man from somewhere else says he'll buy it for ten dollars. He knows I can use the money but also he's saying he wants my little girl and I'm glad to give her to him. One night I'm looking south seeing car headlights pulling up behind the willow at the end of the driveway, but they don't turn in, they shut off. While I'm wondering, two red lights rise suddenly from their spot and arch over behind us. I know by the way they're moving it's a UFO, and a second later I feel an electromagnetic jarring, not a bump, an oval-shaped shock beside me. I know it's him arriving. I'm telling people about the lights in a conventional way when he walks in. I touch his arm to say I know. There are other passages, about Judy being slim again, saying I'm sorry I'm not still ahead of her. A stove pipe in the kitchen disconnected but the smoke still going approximately up the right place. Something about a kettle on a table. He comes in from outside through a curtain, dressed rough or looking a bit rough as if a shepherd, and folds down his tunic from over his belly. There are many large loose pages in it, handwritten by him. I see one page has XX at the top, looks like a poem in long lines, sounds like Yeats. He says, Here's your writing. Rowen wakes me. I wanted to stay in the sense of love and comprehension and mutual choice. The other side is the soreness I have after Michael Lev chased me off his girls, and some with Laiwan too. I feel the harpy wanting sharp cuts, withdraw the CC application, tell Laiwan I don't need the letter, tell ML they can do anything I don't care about and they'll be henceforth invisible. What it has to do with Orph is he's so outside I can pursue him from as if inside. In bed two nights ago a fantasy of Luke phoning to say he's going to commit suicide. I was fighting against it until I saw it's archetypal. I should discover more. Why is young success wanting to opt out. What does it have to do with community business battling. And is canceling the CC application young success committing suicide? 12th Good girl, he said and held me tight. I like his chest, round padding and warm fur. "I find a place in my belly. If I can get into it I have great energy and my mind is clear for twenty-four, forty-eight, hours after. But I can't just put my attention there." [Michael] This morning writing in speed. Mr Mann, Mary, the garden press statement. Wondering if the manic state is alright for what it has to do or whether it's a possessedness. 14 Love today was for the good looks of Amnon, Meg, Kari. Am's baby Ishai, and Am pretty, with flat feet strangely placed, so disarming. Meg a tart lovely thing all up and down. She and I and Kari breaking into laughing and blushes when I said sturdily, Let's not have Bruce Elder at all. Diana [Kemble] this morning [mediating a struggle with Tina] boldly penetrating, Are you wanting to have more contact with Ellie? As I see it partly is. "I hit one of your buttons" Ti said twice, hoping so. Open windows and doors, bell book and candle. We'll open all the door and windows all over the house and do it, before we seal it up properly. Brisk straight Diana, sometimes now she's brisker than me. 10:30 a link to the real as fleeting, as uncertain the material fray, a dreaded site philosophy and the action of image-communication cultural internment inspired photons washed up on open cinematic shores the material of the signifier over the meanings of the signified how we may design our freedom by the strength of our commitment the role of suffering loner, modernist male artist as purveyor of scientific rationality There seems to be fear amongst people of the naked image, a fear of the erotic power of the visual image. [Dave Rimmer] 16 [My mom visits] Mary. Who. A form of Mary. So odd a shape in pink trousers, like a little beet. A blanched head and then a blanched body, coming in timid force. The gale of emotion in her tone. I hardly look at her face - no, I must have - I hardly registered her face except when she told the story of the girl who wanted mothering. She ended with a strange set of her face, like an intention being unconsciously blasted at me. I looked away. What it's like with her. Defended. "She's so boring." Stories she tells in a storytelling voice. Her large didactic tones. I was hearing myself with her a much sleeker city voice like a challenge, hiding out, yes really, in the sound of my own voice. If I imagine such defense has its necessity (and is not badness as it feels) what would it be against. Her claim. I was saying this relation is over, this person doesn't interest me, as if she were any other ex-beloved. (And, "What do good people feel?") Hearing her on the phone with Jam, confiding, eager to tell like a little girl, enjoying her possession of a self. - Household arranging always a strain, if she sleeps in my bed, are there enough other covers for me in Ro's room where also he keeps me awake and I him. Is one big meal at noon enough for her. Will the pennies add up to milk and butter too. Rowen around because she is, zooming. The sight of Michael in the hall a refuge I go stand up against. Blessed lightness making us able to laugh in company. "What do you want for breakfast? Eggs and bread is what there is." The remarkable [first] meeting of Mary and Rowen. He and M up the stairs. He looks carefully into her face. When she invites him onto her lap he just goes and sits there calmly looking, touching both sides of her glasses. She decided she would do her best to enjoy what could be enjoyed but she couldn't get me interested. I wasn't even instructing her much. It was a feeling (I was watching) of having abandoned that interest without having to intend to. Uneasiness but decision organizing her to leave. Feeling in this organizing self more than ever, especially with her, like Father, his impatience with her laboured style. At the last, at dim sum, remembering to ask her about when I went into the bush. "You were younger than Rowen." "Was I eighteen months?" "No, you must have been two because it was April, the men were working in the fields." "What time of day was it, was it afternoon?" "Yes, or was it morning? It was bright." "I was doing something and when I looked for her she was nowhere to be seen. I looked everywhere, the child couldn't be found. I started to get into a panic. I ran to Ed's parent's place for help, three-quarters of a mile. Ed's father said he'd come help me look for you but I went back without him, I didn't wait until he finished what he was doing. I thought of calling the dog, the dog was always with you wherever you went, he was always with you. I called him and he came out of that bush. I said, Go find Ellie, and he turned around and went back into the bush and led me to you. You were quite a way into the bush but you weren't concerned, you were picking some flowers for me I think." "Was it wet in the bush? If it was April it would have been." "It could even have been May." "Were the leaves out?" "Yes, there were leaves, because I couldn't see into the bush." She started with an explanation. "Your father had gone to work, I guess you thought you'd go find him on your own." Omalie Opalie Mamalie Papalie - where have I heard that before. "You were quite fond of your father at that time." Writing this feeling disaffectedness cost me attention, and how closer it could have been heard with Jam. Telling her I think Jam's crazy I had that same challenging stare. 18 The cold wind. Slow and tired after a night with Ro, but in a stunned untangling of string, sighting of stakes, unknotting of orange and blue tapes, Alex arrives quietly with his large baby beside him. "We're Alex and Clare and we want to be gardeners." A slight darkening of the r's and a creel on his back. I don't ask further. He smiles for the first time when I say I have a two year old. Holds a tape for me, then the two of them sit together quite a long time on their own land seven feet wide. He brings things out of the basket. Nights holding Rowen's hand, no, he firmly holds my finger, hot twitching small hand. If I sneak away he's pawing for it along the crib bars. The pleasures of James and this morning bright Paul his friend, pleasure of his drive and concentration but also his tang and neat light embodiment. And of Yarrow the sea-captain's girl, who can't have babies. And lucid Lise and Jean. Even Leo Wolfe seeing where the path should go and carving off the woodchip. 19 Sunday the shed. I wrote it all in the garden journal, shed window and siding, Tod at his table, variant of Robert, grey eye and creases over bone, small tremour, speaking to him, running rapidly on faith, the inner one takes note for later (so as not to make me lose confidence when I still have to do) of the comment (it or something else also produces). "You're right it doesn't have to be straight." "There are lots of people who can do this and that but very few of them have a sense of proportions." "He's six foot two." "I like things to be proportioned to women's size, for my own reason." There was no staying away from it but I hoped my other actual love would cover it. (Joan with me was a long time before she gave a real smile. I noted it.) Conscious when I lead people on a path, as often. There's that and then there's common strangeness. Strangers approach and look. I see their presenting anxiety. After some time we thaw. Sé and his tinker boy. (I could find out what stock that is.) I grow in love for them when I can help them or find something they can do well. Ro fell backwards off the porch, end over. I watched and screamed eee eee eee with my hand over my mouth like a mother, conscious that the time it would take him to hit bottom was too short to do anything and yet a long time in completion. The scream maybe was to get Michael into motion, and did, two bounds. Rhoda came on her balcony. I said, It's alright, to send her back. 20 Foxglove. 21 I meant skin. 22 Over there in the garden the shed going up. Michael and his company hanging around. When I came after dark last night it was like a shantytown. Poplar at the edge, young bright thing I sit with, hold its hand. I'm tired with a toxic ache. There'll be less talking sometime. I can see Luke in fall. [Muggs offered to lend me the money.] 23 So tired. Is it really the talk. Should I have days off. And feeling I've become someone who doesn't anymore love friends. Do they at the garden see the desperate hard work of someone who's lost a first life and throws herself forward to create another. The careless talk, the quick abandoned thrown-forward social speech. Maybe only go slower. There's a quality of knocking myself out. It means: I don't really like something about it and am hurling myself toward the time when it will be done. Still there's an utter crater back there with Jam. Nausea. I don't anymore read Sag's horoscope. (I read Aries') but when I see Laiwan with a man's look I can't stand her. It happened that I'm large enough to include contradictions now, there's no one of the near I'm not also repelled by. Includes the one who speaks at the garden. (But not my garden - though the public garden has been getting some very ugly fat men.) I was so repelled by Mary it was like being crushed. I could understand the desperation. It's not only mine. 24 Oh here. Sitting in the oven reading English summer. Listening to Charlotte invent eloquence among women. Shirley the accessible ideal. Robert the inaccessible third. Caroline holy ghost creator spirit. Charlotte's loneliness sadness and sense. The drama of what she realizes, what she leaves conventional. How she's going to distribute fortune among those three terms. And why I'm missing my own Robert, who is whatever literature is, and that I want to be kissing tho' he'd be a bad husband and is in Japan looking for a woman who won't pester him. Charlotte Bronte 1848 Shirley 27 She resolved it by bringing in a 4th who's the softer twin of the hard one. Two of her and two of him. 28 All this day the cat engine, massive gravel truck. Paul distressed his pool is gone. The machinery itself distressing, being responsible for the volume of dirt, smoothing the City Engineering inspector, hoping there isn't going to be more city consternation. He saw an islet with water on both sides, but is far from doing it. I want to be sensitive to what's there, he says, and what's there is lovely as it is. But dry. What's the effect of the sand hills. Hummocky high ground at the level of what's there, a complete berm. (I daren't be on site now, groups of people conversing seem like they might be hostile.) By myself what would I think right. To fill it almost to the edge with dunes and have the pool more sheltered by a wider ridge further from the road. "I think it's madness" in his manly declaring voice. But meaning what - meaning he saw something. But more, meaning the violation of the place by gigantic machine noise, how quickly something happens that is very slow to undo at the scale of our wheelbarrows and shovels. 4 o'clock and still going on and I can't leave 'til it stops. May Day What's new. Wild phlox. The year's moment. Dark green in water in glass. Palest cruciferae pink on stalks off the stem. Breath suspended on the window like water masses standing around the summits. Open west after two days rain. The spice smell taken apart. I make the wild phlox my anniversary, the only one. What else. Fatigue going on. Dim ache. I don't know if it's two years of Rowen or an illness. Times I'm eating out of Michael's hand, laying my head down on his chest, accepting thankfully. The city told the Park Board we could stay for now. I'm satisfied we did our work. The shed is sustaining to see, it's perfect. I wore myself out this morning placating Paul in the old way. He was satisfied. I was disgusted. Wearing my hair in a glamorous mane, interested how easy it is to look like someone on TV. But what else. Wondering about the lack of life with Laiwan or C or any of the artists, now since I give so much, still less than most do, to strangers. And the heaviness here where there's no flying to tell. Again I'm wondering if I'm mortally ill. What does it mean. Hand's bright blue shadow under the pencil. Candle and phlox overlooking the north that in those days was unrestricted. They hedge my north. My north is hedged. Yes it's functioning but I don't have it as a companion. 2nd Where the herb garden should go. Beside the hill is too small now, would cut into the orchard. On the route downhill was good as an axis, but hard to begin by ditches and chip piles. And I want to spite Paul by withdrawing like the ocean. Right on the west border is high and nice but makes me feel isolated, I'd like it on a path with plots all around. On the edge I could use the stakes. But can't begin 'til later in the summer when this year's plots are taken. It means I won't have City Farmer help. What about near the wild on the center N-S path. It's low and dishes but I like the willow, and could sneak in poplar, and use fill to level it, and work in the last part of the summer. 3rd Among those who have trained themselves over the years to solve the most difficult problems of their craft, there are bound to be some of comprehensive knowledge and strong intelligence. Morning in hate with Rowen, beating him off, pinching him, jeering at him. He wakes twice at night and then at 6. In the morning there is the 3-hr stretch before Michael comes, in which I can do and feel and be nothing but that stupid little boy's slave, stupid but aggressive and willful, determined to use me to live though the whole of his life has no hope of being what mine could be. I say that against resistance. In fact I don't know whether there is intelligence he'll come to. When I saw him in the park yesterday he seemed a one year old. I don't enjoy him personally only generically in his Cupid beauty. I feel it's hopeless with him. He'll be Michael's because Michael is patient and loyal and if he's Michael's why am I giving him my lifetime. But if I give him up outright I've lost my income and would have to move into a room. Unless I had Luke back, unless I get an income.
It might be an opera with songs. It is like a gold-thread writing. Wherever she finds again her state of love, the grain of the air forms into place and person sharply focused. In these times she has crossed a border which she always crosses again into unrealized time. Color and grain and optics are themselves emblematic of the state of love. Why is the magnifying glass that. Because love is concentrated attention. A burning glass. I could tell the story. We lay (a man's voice says) early in the morning. 4th Remembering how with Luke it was week on, week off. It's coming to be enough of fuss push grab scream wreak smash. What it is costing (me - as if they don't exist) to be living expressed hatred as I am. Joyce didn't help. (Is it or does it make high blood pressure or other death.) At times love, other long times, pain. These years coldness, drive, I make sure not to be attached to anything that can be lost. Not the garden, not summer. Joyce I can see didn't give me heart. (But will.) 5 In a car with my father. We've come a long road down from the mountains to a city in Saskatchewan that's just at the rim of the plain. He came down that road years ago. There's a sense of a rocky track dropping in stages by bike with hard tires. He and I have become romantic, or we've closed the sexual distance. It hasn't gone the whole way but it's conceivable to. He's as if asking me what I think, we're in the back seat together while the rest are off somewhere. I say I don't know everything (but am pretty sure about most things). In a working gap I say the dream answers the question about hate: I'm integrating my father, hate won't be the end of my story. It's a long strain with Michael too. Unspoken solitary holding of will, every time his aggression rises I have to press it down. I am the control he doesn't wish to be. I have to patrol the man boundary to be sure he never crosses in. He says he is not violent but I believe he is waiting to be. This is another thing Joyce didn't touch. Myself now I'm on the edge of being violent, or leaving the window open accidentally. When Rowen grabs my legs I hurl him off. - And it's this day Crabtree closes because of pigeon shit washing - and Paul at the garden seeing me avoid him decides to press for more territory. There he stands fat and jocular in his hayseed hat. Goodbye Mr Rowen, waving and bellowing. Goodbye Mr Snotface, with more hate than I knew. And now I need to know for true what did he do that could get me so enraged. He unloaded and then showed his relief. That belongs to Eton Street bum-fuck. Let him do something that'll disgust me so much I'll be able to cut him. 7 Morning. Of itself. The second morning opens wide. I'm with imaginary people. Rudy's moving water in the tub. I'm remembering the poet's house and the mother and child house. I'm the poet. The other house is invisible to me. To be able to make even small moves like visiting Leah I seem to need to have a lot of empty time. I was wanting to talk to someone about the way Rowen is unreal to me. It never became clearer with Joyce. Is there something I can simplify in the good harsh way. I'm testing separation. I was frightened asking [Michael] for this week. Now I'm in my room with a breeze coming from the window like fresh life. I doubt what I say but there is the knife edge in writing that can make true. Even violence and hate, don't dispute. They mean urgently. I feel a little wonder that I can make them good. 8th I woke, I got up, went to the garden, made the first fire, had tea with Gretchen. It wasn't so early, eight. I cleaned up around the hill. Diane's friends take up all the rest of that bloc. (Where's Alec?) Victor gives me a pumpkin, it's for the rock pile on the corner. Then I thought of Jerusalem artichokes, sunflowers, yellow iris, dahlias, hot Central American aggressive things. And blue? Cleaning and planting and late in the aft moving the slab onto rocks. Sitting on it is too close as if in a zoom, then later Randy shows me through his binoculars a possible but other place. The rooks come in late evening. [T and R] I make them cut themselves on my eyes, if they keep coming I'll do worse. Comfrey. Joe stooping but liking us now, working the rest of Lois's plot, a crane's neck and hair. Eric making speeches much too slowly. I was there 12 hours, at times standing staring in the way I like. I gaze and then a line forms between the gap at the foot of the strawberry path and sweet william plants overshadowing little hollihocks. It was detail today. So much incubating time for such. What a lot of breeze-shooting there is too, slow ferment. I've been nervous about position. It's better for me with anyone before I see them having gotten to know other ones. 9th The soul in Sanskrit is called Atman, which means happiness itself.
Perhaps her true work would have opened before her if she had had more trust, more confidence and endurance. walking on water Last night lying down seeing plants in a certain dark clear light, when I saw what I was seeing, tried to see it more, it snapped off. Then I could release it again, but I realized what I couldn't do was hold it, because it isn't there. The sorts of seeing are very close, visionary seeing is real seeing but not actual. Then when I try to hold it what I can get is memory. I was wanting to learn to see it without fixing, and my idea was that I'd then have to be lightly watching all the nonvision debris (perhaps) between. What I have in memory is not quite an image, it's a slight shell of image. A reference fragment. When I think of the grain movie that's when I've felt the possibility of endurance, intensity, harmony, complete use. Finding out why it seemed right to stay away. It's five men and Michael Lev and the girls because they're willing to be girlish, Joan too - if it were women. Angry and why did it take so long and need talking to Muggs before I knew why: Michael Lev and his pretty girls, using the garden as if his creation, the fireman crew (wanting to talk only to men, or else women with children), impossible to arrive at a level and participate. [TV crew shooting in the garden] As if an actual hostility to what I am and represent. Eric choosing the day to oppose the herb garden. What is this! I say. Good for you, says Muggs. A male opposition: Eric, Paul, Michael Lev, Earl. Jamie, maybe I'm wrong to, I trust. 10 Muggs and I sat yakking where we'd been while M Lev placed himself on the little hill to be filmed dominating the garden. She seemed to know what she was doing, we were speaking actually against him as he sat in his white platypus hat. There need to be greasy politicians, if he does it we don't have to. I'm angry still. Finding the lens on me from the meadow, gave them the finger, the wrong one but still when I let it go anger flared out, as it does with but not before the willed gesture, as if it isn't anger until then. It's the way he's pulled his men's club, the way they could all go clubbing to the firehall, to make a record of and for themselves - of my creation, my hills, my shed, MY GARDEN even. The conversations between people who've given up, don't know they have maybe. In the garden I'm getting used to it, used by it, they talk as if it doesn't matter whether a thread reaches into an other mind, it's like tangles being made in the air in front of the speaking head, that then fall, messy and useless mats. Oh but if every voice is a spirit it is too many. I'm sore not to have stayed away or known what it would be. What was I hoping, to be let in. I go too slowly when something is new. Emotion is ahead of knowing and it's accurate but what can I do about the lag. I'm coming into the arena where there are always others who want to stop me, keep me out, take my work for their credit, diminish my flare, and I have been kept out. I don't know how to see what's my part. I speak when I speak like that identifying with everyone else who is kept out. Who is kept out. I know what it's like to be facilitated. Oh I'm angry I didn't take them on. 11
Two chestnuts in bloom in bands on either side of and between maples standing in falling water. Maple in tiers of drooping canopies, chestnut towers standing in outward rays. What I'm making up in the garden, a nine-tree grove of mountain ash, red and dark green, saplings closing to a canopy, kids' trails over the barrow, hearth beneath, in 30 years a fire tower accepting and releasing crows. 12th Oh Yeats the world you'd like. Thinking about emotion (standing by the phone this morning) seeing it is a body, that is, an organization of the body, one of them, with a tendency to motion. I was thinking of the different avoidances at the garden - Eric, Paul, Michael - emotion there means moving away. The division into separate 'bodies' is from the way I do what it indicates but don't understand what it's being done for. A sick feeling. I avoid saying my truth because I am afraid I can't justify it. I don't know enough. Follow on from here. What they have in common is to resent my initiative, don't themselves want to work but don't want to be led by me, are more ignorant, less handy, have less sight and vision but still have to feel themselves resist. I imagine it's gender but it's something else too, I am working for an order that cancels manhood. A rowan grove will be an atmosphere to strengthen something in opposition to them. When they challenge me I stop speaking to them. There are other strategies. When anyone pushes I've been giving them a responsibility. In all of this I'm sure what to do, how it's supposed to be, who to strengthen and who to freeze out. In two months we've made a marvel. It works. Her husband was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. A monument to the dark room left behind, veiled, as the women are. Before it was empty, there were gods as many as there are days in a year. Fairyland I imagine enamel colors in high or long sun, the plants I saw the other night were in a black light as he says. Bright like red green and yellow. The longing to be with You in the bright land. 15th What it was like with Daph. Telling her the dream. She takes it into saying how she was angry. I say about writing my mother. It's explanation but why wrong. What was felled. "What you were saying in the restaurant, about having lost love. Love, or romance?" "No depth." Speaking with sparks of tears held in the eyes, head up on a straight back like a post, oracular and blind, fixed in important pain. Holding the stage with it. No, what exactly. I'm seeing a log with a carved head and it's telling a story to a storyteller. A way of language coming slowly out of compression. The words are released. "Do you not like to talk about it?" "I like to talk about it but it makes me sad." Then at the end talking quickly so I'd not miss saying it, about what made me stay in it. "I wanted to learn to write." "But you couldn't write like her!" "I didn't want to write like her but I wanted her ear." Struggling. I think she should understand more easily than she is, but I want her to see it even if I have to struggle on and on. "As long as I imagined she was reading I could write." "You say imagined, wasn't she really reading?" " No." I want to know how she's really seeing it but I know she won't tell me. Meaning stands around it. "Those evenings at Carole's when I was sitting with Cheryl and Trudy and Rhoda, the intelligence, the humour, the fighting." "They took each other seriously." "Yes they took each other very seriously." I was angry to be left out. I knew I'd brought her out too. Noticing when she's talking about what she wants to write she's leaning back in the chair and shows a face I don't like to see, a complacent skull. Something I remember from Cheryl, not liking how she looks when she's looking at her project. Confessing about Rowen, that brought it. "A coldness. This is hard to say, a dislike." "In a way I feel I could write anything now, but I don't have the desire." I left the fire in the fire. "I know what I did to her, and I'm glad I did it, because if I hadn't I would have died, but the dominos are still falling. Joyce gave me my initiative back but there are things that are wrong she can't do anything about, they're just wrong." 15 What made me happy though, in the café, a flare of life, was when she said charm, value, ethic, tactic was the closest she'd read of what it's like to write and read. Flying past Trudy today, purple shirt, cube of watermelon in my hand, she intersects out of her door and I see in my speed and liveness just the top half of her face pained flat triangle eyes like an old hawk. Are her machinations going badly I hope. Rhoda otherwise when Rowen calls hello from the porch gives him her beautiful smile. This was the day of the beautiful coat. And then the beautiful posts. 21st What about Eric and Yarrow. This was Eric's day, arms and face blotched, standing speaking, "Say, Ellie ..." and then a disarming delighting story of the broom's view of him. Yarrow saying she's disappointed he didn't read the rest of the book. He saying he doesn't want truck with angels and lords of light, only with the collective beings of plant and animal species. ("The individual cockroach is not very intelligent but the collective mind is surprisingly clever.") My first sense of it, is it's his bid for his own and his kind's control - also I'm not alarmed, as if it's easy to meet. A mind I am that is playing with powerful maturity, also watching, is this how it is, competence. I won't go on only being this, I say in small fear in bed at night. The steel will against men pretenders has small fear at moments, has to defend inwardly, and is certain how - I can freeze M Lev until something changes, Paul too. When something does change it is easy and a pleasure to thaw, as with Sheila, and Max at times. Other people, women, I don't imagine freezing - coaxing - I wouldn't want to meet Ellie in a dark alley says Sheila. 24th The borage bush, the scarlet poppy bush, the potato hedge in three strong rows with orange woodchip under, new bed plonked in, and it clears the one below. Big garlics with red flush laid on the stone bench, where they were opened to a dry terrace, hyssop, the fine bush of red-ring pinks. In the middle, new root that makes it a bit grand, unfamiliar. I like it in lathe but, mm, it's too much of a building, isn't it? The bent panels of webbing are maybe opener. The garden, I don't know whether to talk about it this way, absorbs everything, all day. There's nothing else to do. Standing looking at the colors is a blankness and yet it's what I'm pulled to do all day long. So many people around, I don't often get into the place, but making the marvelous garden, finishing it, compelled, oddly driven. I'm too tired for this. 26th An evening off. The first thing I'm free to do is to lie down, maybe to sleep but then to lower my drawstring pants past my flanks and bring up the covers and see a young woman on a couch asked to undress and she does. My own rubbing isn't there although the sensation is (I've just seen how it goes under the images I make.) She takes off her clothes and it's easy to come sit beside her and touch her breasts. She's lying with her arms up by her head, sometimes with her eyes open like a transparent body showing every flush. Her body is her action, mine (is hers on the other side) is clear because hers is, direct to all the parts, pinching the nub, pressing in through the arch. She's the joy, I'm the doing. Then get sitting between her legs to put the member slightly in, she's as always virgin, she may shake or writhe but I give her a steady beat and keep her safe, her legs over my thighs, body where I see it and can touch here (round), down here, and later take her skull in my hands and press carefully up the whole length. She jerks to have it faster but I measure it to inevitability, so she has time to feel it gathering from all the outer corners, every color. And then - I seldom get to it now - surprises me how it releases the small of the back, even the arms, even up into the jaw. And then had nothing to do but took my $20 bill to Gastown looking for steak. Sat there a dark intense dowdy and glamorous unusual woman among middle Northamericans eating out, nice food but I can't any more be interested in this, thinking very little but supposing it's maybe time to smarten up. Meaning not indulging myself anymore with Michael, and then also meaning taking something on so I won't have these vacancies. Then stopping at Michael's on the way (down an alley stepping over cables from film vans showing lit wardrobes, toolshops, through open doors), chilly. Find him with Steven under a lamp, Steven confidently stumbling on about psyche womans [he's Russian], Michael coming to sit touching arms. We look at beauties he's accumulating with Mr Smith, rug, chair (beautiful chair!), embroidered picture. And I go home in my new coat.
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