| aphrodite's garden volume 5 part 5 - 1987 may-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Thurs 28th May Your main squeeze is lookin' great, Mr Smith to Michael. That's almost the whole of the time, body, feeling the silky handful of bum that when I was young was big and pimply, seeing in Benny's meat counter mirror an up-to-date movie star head. It's when the skin is brown. Yet I'm sickly, tired, achy, suspecting deadly diseases (cancer and kidney or liver), empty of work or mind, but having these 3 lucks, dry hair from garden work standing in spikes, broad-shouldered charcoal well-cut coat, and three months without starvation, by borrowing when I need, from garden funds. M with his black tooth broken - army bloomers and wider green hat - body (in clothes) like 17 - and not that we don't do things, he's mother all day, I run a community garden and inspire it - but what - "There is no meaning anymore" - no distinction, I've leveled a system that high-lighted. Reading Llewellyn again seeing the system he could write because he was on the edge of. But he elegized and I feel good riddance. No, I liked what I could be in that order, Ordnung, ordering, an activity, giving and taking away emphasis, church and house and field and school. Where else, yes, VW. Her sister in an order with her. I have given you a new book, she can say to London because it has been in her family so long, she's on even terms with it (not without working but she has it in her range). Is it only books make me long for England. The written orders are all gone. What would it take to be a member of a future. U le G is a member of something, the societies of mind, Ans Hos. Alright, but where is the entry, and what relation to the garden with its debris standing to bore me 'til I duck. London is already and has been for long a capital of the world. Grapple - Not having the energy to keep up a big network, even Mr Mann by his second letter is boring me. Let everything fall. It's worrying to lose interest in Mary - fight, fight. Going in a bookstore seeing there are ideas the libraries don't have yet - fight, fight - from present ground but keeping the memory of grasshopper's immense leap from a standing tight spot (and down over the roofs from Hong Kong cemetery) and anytime I can still phone Jam, when I'm reading to bring up nothing cranky. What now. The materials of making new. More access to new materials. Even the new clothes do it. What it means to a woman putting food into her mouth that she must immediately fear this food will turn her into a woman like her mother. in reality a pervasive worry about our mothers' lives this problem of surpassing a woman who must perceive the daughter's movement into the world as a betrayal and abandonment of the identity they share the sustaining sense that what she does with her life, as a woman, will implicitly and symbolically benefit her mother stricken with a form of survivor guilt Are you saying that's why I can't become independent? Because I need to give her this gift of my life? They are all deeply preoccupied with making some return to their mother. The embryo eats the mother Then, the real self of the mother has to die before she'll 'love' the child, ie treat it as if herself The food instead is used to swallow the memory for which it stands The strength of feeling that tries to return to us through our hunger Food is the archive Kim Chernin, probably The hungry self: women, eating and identity 1985 - Fighting [with my mother] about food I'd steal [when they were away], apples, citrus peel, dried cherries. 29th It feels like the ducks are scared up in a flurry but they don't come down in a row. Reading it I felt a blur, unusual, I wasn't grasping the way I usually can. It says 1. snagged on not passing the mum, 2. eating craziness. Separately yes. The connection is uncertain, there's more to it. Other principles not uncovered. Start with now. Sitting in a restaurant having needed to spend money on meat meals cooked and served by someone else. Body by work lean enough so I can eat freely. Surprised noticing every day I haven't already eaten too much. "You eat like you're making sure it's dead," an absent crazed way. "Does she always eat like that?" [Jam's sister says of me] Starvation. In eating needing to exceed the given limits. With Judy and Suzie ice cream globs. In Kingston loneliness not feeling like it's that. Changed on the road. Other people steadily shop and cook, contemptible and admirable. Poor food measured to the limits. She says she'd rather eat more than I do. "I sometimes wonder if I'll go through my whole life with the only thing I achieve being that I don't get fat." Proud Judy is still fat when I'm not. Oma's was alright, Solch' eine runda Oma werd' ich auch sein. Wanting to be extravagant but not inflated. That means alternating plenty and famine. It makes sense because the middle way doesn't get to know the road. It isn't only the mother, it's the rest of the world, obviously. She leaves that out, that this generation knows by seeing, that people elsewhere are starving. There should go on being food provided. I liked cooking when I got money to do it and had freedom of materials. Fighting with Luke who didn't want to eat my burnt food. - Asking Mike this morning not to smile - it being almost unbearable - is it different with others - strange always - but with him why the smile changes it - unsmiling he looks unfledged and brain damaged - he didn't like the scrutiny, protested that he had the look of someone doing what they don't want to - his own idea just look in the eyes, says he does it with Rowen, something happens. Then he retreats to crying. If we lived together we'd get to know each other he says. There's nobody I want to know I say. It means, I don't want to know you and if necessary I won't want to know anyone else. Do you want anybody else to know you? [he asks] I don't think anybody else is capable of knowing me, or wants to. And that part is true. I could seduce various ones to think they want to but it isn't worth the trouble except in a practical way. Knowing when we talk that way that M is thinking he can and does. When he gets evidence otherwise, like how easily I could take the week away from them, he has a burst of grief but I can trust him to have no persistence in a knowledge. He has a boy's confidence that his mother loves him, is that fair? He works hard for it, he is the mother, our pleasure is when we create me as a spirited beauty. He wants the high-class beauty to his credit but she's the one who bends him like a wire. Still, he's alright. Mr Smith in the front room bent over colorings on the floor. A happy house. Tom on the steps waiting for the mailman. "Tom said there was a Yooman Aira in the post office." Then Diana in marigold yellow trots back with me to the house to get something to read and to tell me she is involved in a relationship; naughty smile; Barb from years ago (Ano went back to men); and that was why Claire looked old yesterday and invited me to her office. So why'm I wanting to be looked after - why not - Second question - can I get it - Third question, if I had it, housekeeper, then what - Was thinking this morning about habit, the body's fantastic minute adjustment, why it would resist change, so many little resettings that on that scale it must be a massive effort. And then, maybe it just needs kind careful instruction, belowstairs an intelligent reasonable staff. Why body is confused - because our language is - I said that straight off without knowing what it means. Smarten up in relation to body. After leaving home - I'm in charge of my body and don't know how to be - inexperienced - they demanded to be in control of it 'til then. That's a discovery - I don't know how to be in charge of it. Given enough money and no guilt - start from there and approximate to it. As if it's a new world - yeah, yeah - as if I'm waking up in heaven and my good is no one's ill (but is it). 30 What else she leaves out, a less protection from knowing dying.
That other music I had heard, that universe I had created of myself, that was my own yearned to have again, wide and strange and beautiful, about me 31st ouch, bed, hot, open door, oh-oh, drop, all fall down, apple juice, more, milk, orange, bottle, porrich, outside, downstairs, go bye-bye, bye-bye goin', truck, ucky-ucky, who's there, what's that, down bird, kitty cat, dog, horse, mommy (= I want), baby, i yi yi o, body, mine, no, don't, coffee, fish, banana, soup, cookie, bike, boy, hat, coat, shoesh, cocks, foot, where, mouth, daddy, shit, water, jump, boom, there, back, thank you, pee, all gone, watch it, book, drop it, wash it [Rowen's at 2] - What do I think of Llewelyn's family feeling. It's young like I was before having times of my own. Passionate and coherent. Somehow he was careful not to erode himself, as I feel eroded with my own family feeling. His [people] die like VW's die, but not the feeling for them. Michael last night saying the fun his parents had in their loyalty. It's true I see black like my father does. It's crime against my lifetime, and why. Living in a sulk. I used to love whatever was in my story, and that was a strength. Now, there's really a question, what is the difference between that strength and this debris. Like standing in the splinters of a house. Confidence. I want to see the doubleness here. It's really a loss. But I'm not in dismay, more like gone-into-a-seed, contraction to endure until heart can be a generous muscle again. Dismay itself is contracted to worries about twinges, twinges themselves, a weak feeling. Richard Llewelyn 1940 How green was my valley McMillan The is and isn't of my life with Michael. I tell Daphne, Diana, Laiwan, Cheryl, I don't do anything with Michael - but I do in a way, and I even want to have him turn into the true mate - which he is in his jokes - oh if he were only a better carpenter. I have never wanted to accept that there are deaths before death - that's been the dread - that Mary and Ed and Judy and Paul and Olivia and Roy and Tony and Sarah and Cheryl and Janeen and Al and Paul K and Trudy, Rhoda, Jam, can be dead alive - and if they can, then I too. And what is the use of starting to make anyone real, Rowen or Michael, Laiwan, or anyone else, if I will have to see them die and be unable to keep them alive no matter what passion generosity study and truth I give to keeping them with me - crying for Ulysses' companions. If I knew their dying wouldn't mean I am also dying? (I alone to tell the tale.) Then it would be not knowing when to abandon them (I was abandoned when I wasn't dead). It's wanting to make a solid space (as Llewellyn does, start to finish, but that's sculpture), which isn't the way it's going. To him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that are sometimes made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. [Heart of Darkness] 1st of June In the last volume he's rich, dispersed, incoherent, can order anything done but has no life to write because in this while since he was the writer, it's only his. Then I see what 'roots' means. That happened to Updike too. Llewellyn 1975 Green, green my valley now Rowen is a more interesting age, this morning standing in the corridor between two walls of poppies higher than he, staring at a bee in a flower, pulling bud pods apart, had a beautiful intent look on his face. His upper lip was standing in a serious marveling pull. M and I watching from behind the peas. He sees the bee ram across the path to another poppy and a sound comes out the shape of his feeling, as later when M and I are carrying Henry's greenhouse up the path and he coming behind screeching (and Fiona by her sieve). Seeing from my plot M moving on the path, too good to be true. He squeezes adoration out of his face, unfailing. "You like the scenery?" 3rd Waking alone this morning, jumping up, making tea, reading the autobiography of a girl soldier, going out to breakfast, making it a U-turn and over the many tracks to the fisherman's café. Realizing abruptly I must go do the orchard research or Yarrow will be plunking them in [the trees]. Get to Burrard from the waterfront road, and there, towers and another kind of people, sharp women. My loved kind of day boring through a yard of books, diamond bit, high speed no waste and I come out knowing how the orchard should be, surface-planting in hard-pan, clover and mulch, grass to self-seed, hexagon plan for the large trees, smaller net interposed stone fruits, (total comes to our $1000), room for potatoes beans pumpkins. Has to be mown. Come out into a hot afternoon, go see Alan Storey's pendulum in the blue and brown tower, a wonder, a beautiful crystal elevator by dark blue carpet, like a glass altar. And Rowen from Crabtree red-faced, overheated, brisk and happy. We go to the garden and water plants. He runs in the aisles, muscular, very short-legged forward-leaning bustle. 4th I ask Michael, The only people in the garden who say I'm too bossy are Paul, Eric and Michael Lev, why is it? They're the people who want to be bosses, he says. They don't know as much as I do, why do they want to be bosses? They're in the habit of it. 8th The sun is Mithra the goddess of light, energy, fertility and love: our ancient religion worshipped the goddess of the sun. Old Persian goddess of light and truth Followed Gretchen through the grass to three men. Many questions for the orchardist. Then standing looking around seeing an interested look, more than one, but this one from an interesting whole, brown manly face with a surprising small point, simmer when he's nearer. What it was like as attractions are now, rare, and then firm and specifically sexual, liking his manliness, and as he was too, acknowledging it, straightforward, not impressed but businesslike. What makes an attraction different from a neutral something. It's a willingness to absorb - the gaze is sopping him up. An exchange is more conscious. I liked the specific coming-alive. It's quite dense and active at the same time. Gretchen was a bit flapping I could see because he was going to meet the American Navy in his boat. [a Greenpeace action] - I mean the attraction is prior to his qualities (except this time, and maybe always, there's a sensitizer, the way he looks like Colin). [notes on Arabic: The language made in hard times on a sandy plain by nomads. Rich development of language in the realm of material life. Synonyms. "Every physical thing, however minute, every separate activity, is given a term proper to itself." The language of the early poets is something else structurally. Largely uniform in vocabulary and absolutely so in morphology for principal clauses, and a delicate modal system operated by case-ending, superimposed on the original autonomy of the component clauses in a scheme of logical subordination, perfectly uniform in its application and capable of expressing every relationship between the clauses. How this linguistic instrument, rich and flexible beyond anything known in other Semitic languages, was evolved, and how it was related to the spoken dialects of the tribes, remains unsolved. A standard of cultured speech which came to be called al-arabiya, the Bedouin dialect. High Arabic. The road leads him to the site of a former encampment of his own or a friendly tribe National Geographic October 1985 Sufis were the shift from fear to love A shift from He elsewhere to It present The sources are Christian teachers (ascetic practices, wool, silence, litanies), Greek/Oriental pagan mysticism (emanation, illumination, gnosis and ecstasy - alchemy is Greek too), Gnosticism (Manichaean, "the freedom of light from darkness means the selfconsciousness of light as light,"), Buddhism in eastern Persia. Sufism is to possess nothing and to be possessed by nothing A traveler, stages and the path, the psychological states, hal
The universe is the outward visible expression of the Real, and the Real is the inner unseen reality of the universe. The sensible world resembles the fiery circle made by a single spark whirled around rapidly. I is a figure of speech. My Being draws near me and I love it; and when I love it, I am its ear, so it hears by me, and its eye, so it sees by me, and its mouth, so it speaks by me, and its hand, so it takes by me.
I saw, then, that there was something like an overturned cup within me. this being set upright, a sensation of unbounded happiness filled my being. 'union,' concentration ('jam')] 10th Wrangling with Michael again, Ro's squalling an ongoing pain in the ears, no breakfast, exacerbation. I want to hit him when he whines, am speaking like a machine helplessly, shut up, ashamed, repetitive, trying to hide under the moment until 9 o'clock. Then go lie in bed until it's time to go to the food bank and there I stand reading, hidden again from the moment, the ugly ground. Young women with children bloodless, pocked Indians. My eyes fill with joy, six oranges into the bag. Hungry and going to a café and then wrongly stuffed, ill, yawning, holding Michael's hand, Rowen whining (but there's fruit in my bag). I demand a week-on, week-off system. M doesn't want it because he says it will be more taking-care-of for him, and it will, because it's true he won't be able to let him alone for a week. He's grieved we'll be less a family. He yells the old stupid forms about custody and permission, his worst stunnedest ignorance and timidity. And what I know, I go on holding. I am being bad, but something essential depends on holding to this one point like a rail, if I 'give' custody it has to be entire custody and I have to really go; and for that I have to have more money. If I go on helping with Ro, being in relation to M, I have to have a whip hand. Why he says. I have no reason but I know it. I haven't wanted to know the reason but it's as if formal equality would push me off a knife edge I'm treading. On plate glass I've been seeing a handsome woman, impressive and hard, experienced, unveiled, honed, supple. Yes I like her, Ed is being added in me, rage, spite, bitterness, solitude, calculation, an open sneer, open lust, indifference, opportunism, arrogance, fatigue, pragmatism, susceptibility, the many veils, and ruthless leadership and ruthless creation, success by doing what's necessary in the rung one down from my real front. Fighting with Michael a weariness. He'll do anything to save himself from the strain of feeling bad. I feel bad and am cut off from love and pleasure and know something essential depends on getting through this partnership lightly tyrannically and without eating death's bread. It means I'm in death (tho' looking prospering) and can be nowhere else in transition from where I was killed, but will be able, if I do nothing to make it possible for Michael to hold me in death, to open my heart again when I have passed through him into the upper world again. So I believe. Knowing I could be wrong. But certain. No pity or reason can change it. It's Ed's purple room maybe. But I do test Michael sometimes to see if I'm wrong, I have a heart movement toward him and it's always stopped by what he is, his weakness. I don't have it thought out, there's always argument, it always comes again: no, I can't rely on him, I can trust him only when I control him. 12 In Kingston. I'm going to have the upstairs room again that I had then, twenty-one years, half my life ago. I'm explaining to someone. A dormer room, and Olivia is going to live downstairs again with Don. As I'm telling, she comes in. Slim again, she's beautiful, it's because she had a swimming pool in Don's house, her beautiful long black smooth hair. Talking to myself, I'm sorry she's passed me again, from the heavy old one. A book called You. The way it would be addressed to each. What I'd want to tell RM. Janeen. Judy. Paul. Luke. C and T. Don and Olivia. Frank. Mary and Ed. Jam. This morning I don't feel them. The book of letters from them, more so. - Film sections maybe yes, again. Make the thing. The print color isn't at all bad - print the slides in a black frame - find out how to do it at NFB. Meg [at Cineworks] said, Get this one out and then you can do the other one. Kari said the text was what was compelling ("We were both overwhelmed," she and Catherine)[after the multimedia notes in origin show for Amnon's class]. Meg said feminist archeology, excavation. The other one [forget her name] said More erotic, a less precious attention. Northern Alberta. Spring breakup, April. Moon's diameter two and a half minutes. Ice transmits heartbeat through the tripod. Last flies late October slowing down. Rapid front passing from the southwest. Nettle, August. Window, October. Then the other material, voices, text, and off the slides, in close to spirits, use some of the NA notes 1978-81, and slide through. The text, the text, what will we know. Grain, grain and sound. What will we know, and hand peeling off, and screen and other, and performance in. Paper etc. (Other side of.) The slides treated out of focus, in part, sliding through. A script for the mass. Has to be sections. Voice titles. 13 Saturday evening. The house in its bright clean self. Ro's room clean because he won't be there for a week. Bright floor, flowers in the rooms, doors and windows open. The sky open too in late afternoon, air moving in the leaves. It isn't yet the time when trees show the season tipped. Crows are scolding or fighting. I lie down into a sweet semiconsciousness, these nights, images. Last night a glint off a gold tooth in the mouth of a man squatting beside water. VW in this tone, her pull of attention. I wanted to say something about what I hope for the new time. I imagine a week where I'm free and then a week in which I'm subsequently free to be mumsy. I thought of real cookies with nuts, provisions stocked, forethought expeditions and learnings, birthday plannings; and then in the free week first rest, then friends, walks, earnings, and days and nights with the optical printer. Letters, cross-contacts, movements kept going. Meantime M is like always when I go away unnerved, grey, pathetic and guilting. 14 The house in summer mornings raked with lines of light from the northeast, shouts in a diamond. Balcony door stands open, pigeon's wings in a turbine, the stream of sound from some unknown fan, a car on Hastings. Hastings is our river, and beyond it the docks. A divine morning, lonely, with my hair around me, own strong solid body. I woke hardly later than when Ro is here, but with my own border making it this way, divinely quiet. J-M's brunch. Talking. Not at all in pain. Not keeping much double consciousness or interest, leaning on repertoire as people do, surprised it works. Julie - name doesn't stick to her - the surprise: fearful grin and fawn, but then brings out her file, when I talk about the Pythagoreans, on Mandelbrot fractals. Her secret life at night sitting participating in the network I know (but didn't know it was a nearby net). In the beginning was an abyss, a boundless sea, a limitless chaos. In it there came to be, by and by, and for no particular reason, a bubble, which began to grow and become firmer. It sucked in the surrounding pneuma, its skin became hard, and soon there floated on the sea of boundlessness a glittering sphere: the world egg. In this there developed a living creature, like a sphere in shape, winged, bisexual. It broke the egg and appeared in radiant brilliance: Phanes! Then the two halves of the broken shell fitted themselves together harmoniously, while Phanes took position at the utmost boundaries of the heavens, a secret, spiritual light; and from the procreative content of the egg arose the realms of the world. Orphism and Pythagoreanism 5th c BC pre-Socratic Kirk is the one most like me. Bothers me when I see the way his nose and chin are nearing each other. J-M is less translucent than last year, making do with a pretty student boy. But she wanted to make food for people: here we are in grace. Beautiful children, cherries and flowers, owned house and safe lawn. Doors open. Women and men. - There were two cats singing. I can hardly believe my ears. In their voices they are people. Enthralling comprehensible singing. I listen so close, there's far more to hear than I can hear. Thinking of taping it. Choy's boys fire a stone. The two shoot out from behind the plum tree and walk away in opposite directions not looking back. The one I can see is a matted pale orange, walking stiff as if maybe old. - No way to know whether it was the contralto or the treble. The contralto was leading and had a strong scraping inner buzz like a wise self-enjoying baby. The treble was a small frail replying voice not as assertive as a baby, less bodied, I mean blond or yellow. 15 Ellen [Tallman] said, You look well. I said, I'm much wickeder than I used to be. Then later I turned from Marion to find her looking at me, she wanted to know what the wickedness was. At that moment I couldn't remember but later at home I remembered it is real wickedness and I wd'n't've wanted to tell her. Want to say the wonder I feel about the way now I have reflexes. I put the open book across the gap from bath to table with my left hand; it starts to slide; my right hand that was nearer shoots out and is there for the book to fall into. Have a square-sided plastic flower pot in my hand, cleaning up at the shed. Want to set it into the little tower of pots inside each other on the ground. Drop it. Marveling watch it fall corner-for-corner precisely into place. Seem to be out of the grip of the garden. There was a frightened vacancy yesterday, looking for Ro and M, later following them to the garden. M in pain looking angry. I thought to briefly assure and then stay quiet, and did, and as always he came and sat, this time on the rail of my kid pit. A Pierrot said Fumiko. Yes, stretched elastic arms and legs (comparing him to J-M's younger pinker white-toothed regular young man) (with thick hair), comic nose, worn-out hair, starvation on back roads. Buoyancy, that soon brings him to grin. He has Ro, as always, dirty, in purple plush pants without diapers, that fall off his bum, and he so close to the ground having to stop and pull them up. (I couldn't remember who it reminded me of, but it was David Cooper.) [British anti-psychiatrist of the 60s] We have to find a string to keep them up, and then with orange bale twine from the manure piles tied onto a little bunch behind, reins, one in each of our hands, we walk on Malkin and the Kelly Douglas loading platform. M holds my hand and I always like that. Something about VW. What's different about her. What's different about now. I can say her training, how hard she likes to work. I could say her position, how there were receptor sites ready for everything she did (thinking of Julia yesterday grinning and fawning and then what I find in the packet she gives me, the Julia plane, a mathematical model of anyone's viability as a cell in the culture body) so she could keep moving at the rate that made me pink when I had the garden brief to write. I could say her know-how that kept at retincturing her surroundings to have the right receptivity to her, ie the press and all her socializing and review writing. Cells can live or die. If they live they continue to iterate: grow and divide. If they die they stop iterating, usually they die while trying to grow. The purpose of creation is to trade in expressions of discovery. Cells that do not discover how to iterate by trading stuff properly with their environment are selected out. It is hoped something would be selected in, that would iterate forever. The progress of a cell and what it becomes can be plotted on the inside plane as a red dot jumping around. If the red dot goes to infinity, the cell dies. Survival is no change or some change with no bounds. Infinite change is death. As long as the cell keeps jumping around in a finite arena it lives. As a cell grows and divides it changes its own environment. As long as it changes its own environment to one that is supportive of its functioning it will continue to survive and iterate. If it doesn't it will be selected out in a finite number of iterations. The outside plane is the collected set of all possible environments that a cell could be in. Assuming that as the cell divides it does not change its environment, then the starting cell can be place in each possible starting environment and allowed to grow and divide until dead. If it dies then that spot on the outside plane is colored according to the number of divisions the cell made before it choked. If the cell never dies in a particular constant environment then that position on the outside plane is colored black. Color means how long to it died, black means it never died or took so long we could not wait to find out. Since a cell does change its environment when it divides, as the red dot jumps around on the inside plane, a green dot is jumping around on the outside plane. The position of the red dot on the inside plane specifies the entire inside state of the cell at that moment: specifically, whether it is a blood, skin, brain or dead cell. The position of the green dot on the outside plane specifies the entire outside state of the cell at that moment, specifically the environment the cell is growing in immediately after division. The cell changes because of its environment during the grow phase. The cell survives because of its insides during the divide phase. The red dot is allowed to go anywhere but infinity, the green dot is allowed to stay in the black forever or wander in the colored areas for a while but not so long as to cause its own fatality. If the green dot spends too many iterations in the colored area the red dot will go to infinity and so die. If it takes ten steps to get from one black area to another by walking through an area that will kill you in 15 steps, that's okay. You made it. The red dot goes to infinity because the green dot stayed in a colored area too long. [About the Life program, i think - HWS c1986] - Want to do the packet publication again. - Was wondering why not worried about 10 days to cheque and five dollars in bank and little garden money coming. Smiling to unfold the CFDC letter and find $56. Betsy's face in unusual shapes (we're standing laughing beside her plot, talking about how her mother took the news of her baby) - goggling but large and clear eyes, large buckled teeth but beautiful pale rose porcelain skin, wide quirked mouth, eyes so pale blue it makes an evenness of tone across the whole face so the darkest thing (as I see it at this moment) is the corners of her mouth. Makes her seem bleached. - It's VW giving me permission to say such things about nice people I also like. A woman's body has given birth to a friend. Planning ahead is a measure of class. 17 Other people work through pain, sickness, deaths, poverty, war. I've lost spirit with no large reason I can see. At the food bank, reading, want to crawl under the carpet and don't know why. Knowing the corner I've got into with Rowen is wrong and I can't escape it without more wrong and maybe calamity, and simultaneously saying there has to be a way, I have to find a way - in panic - thinking of my grandmother when they were poorest and she most worn out, who still had someone with her who knew how to raise them quickly again to comfort, respect, and beautiful order. I visit at Michael's and find Ro dirty in bare bum stinking faintly from shit not completely wiped off. He runs forward and later has long hugs but they come to eye-poking, lap-trampling. M is worn out, quite dead tho' he's made fire and has a nice rug. Giving me tea as always cold in small cups. R stuffed the library card back into its envelope and I clapped and then found myself in a spirit of experimental malice going on clapping, throwing my arms out, clapping, watching him standing in front of me go from pleasure to laughing to twisting his finger into his belly button, hysterical. I went on because I was wanting to see him be something interesting. He was around the bend - but even when I'm mean Michael will betray him to get an extra ten minutes of my company. 18 It's eleven o'clock, an exciting smell of ash in the air, street voices, a live night, and I'm awake in it, rested, ready to go on and begin to work. Oh summer night (not quite) when there's going out like walking into deep water. Something wakes up. It's more than two years since I could. The livest nights, time all open, spirit can essay and be frightened. And what would it find. The doubleness that for one self no doing or saying is right or real, and for the other making and saying are permitted and necessary creation of right and real. And ah this finally is the marriage (says the one). Then I take a breath. The lamp shines down out of its red hood onto nasturtiums so vivid in color, so gentle in scent. Little shivering divisions of coriander leaf. California poppies in wound sheets. Looking into any of these flowers seems almost forbidden I notice. Standing by the shirley poppies in the garden, like staring at the sun - they are so active, they are so creased that they shade and tint themselves and the multiplicity of near colors seems dangerous. And then I went out to see the fire. Even now the white smoke in procession pouring across my window. blue black night, stars but like city stars just a reference to really seeing them. There was a man on the sidewalk, a young Jew, high-bridged thin nose, week's whiskers, baseball cap, big canvas jacket with 66 on it, baggy pants and feet my size in quite good but dirty tennis sneakers. Slight and graceful with an acute hawk's face. I liked him and went to stand by him. Then the fire spread to the smaller building and they moved the fire line back. We were both pushed to the other side of a grey newish car. The street man, as he looked, opened the passenger door and came out with a walky-talky. Was a while getting its cord set up. Stood there with the wire through the car window, red light on. The car inside, immaculate grey nylon velvet. This hawk is undercover? I go stand by him and ask, What are you going to say. He is going to as if not hear but I stare into his face. Ain't goana say nuthin'. Who'd talk like that? It's like the costume, acting by cliché. You're going to hear something? Yuh. Like duh. You can listen in to their radio? Yuh. Terry on his bike. Black James. I ain' on thuh side uh thuh fire, I use to live aroun' here. It was pouring smoke a long while, two Firebirds with spotlight watching from over the roof, crowds of firefighters in their heavy clothes standing by, the chief by himself with a radio. When the flame finally broke twisting out of the elevator head it was like imagining a solar flare, something close up that should be far. We were standing behind cordons adoring and its priests were riding machines, jetting on motorbikes, kneeling in formation pointing hoses, even. They understand what will happen. At a certain moment and not before, they sweep the cordon a hundred feet back. Strangely also, the fire itself was silent, four story brick warehouse like an open firebox, all the crackling down inside it. I liked that we were consuming the fire. 19 "I think you're going to lose out in the long run, that's why I let you get away with it." M berserk, like Ed's berserks. I have to see a livid face screaming. Same reason, an economic stress, but with this one I say what I like and walk out not quite when I want but not long after. But sick the same and wanting to be done with it at any cost. There's myself frightened and myself valiantly looking after myself as if it isn't an ordeal, but it is. I say, You can have the house, the money and the child, just get off my back. I was realizing, even now when I think I'm so valiant, I don't have my position in near words. I said, "I don't understand why you have no idea how much I've given you. When I made the decision to let you know Rowen I understood that it meant I was giving him to you (here he breaks in) - you don't know what I mean - no, I can tell you don't know what I mean. It's because I knew I couldn't want to have an open heart with you. If you were going to be there I have to keep my heart closed with him too. I know all my bargains, I know what I'm giving up and what I'm getting, I knew I would have to live without my heart, and I was willing, because I wanted to help you with the beginning, but I can't stand the way you don't see that I've given him to you. And that is how I justify keeping the money and the control, as long as I'm helping I'm going to have at least that, because in the end you're going to have it all." Then I had to press him more until finally he admitted. 19 Starting the week with Ro. What I'd like is to start making it intelligent. What's good to do with him, anything, making and doing in the house. His room, a table, lamp, drawers. Little chair. The green carpet if he'll give it. Dark curtains that open. Untippable flowers. Things to take out of the cupboard and learn. Shelves. Weekdays he can be outside early morning and late afternoon. I can make notes, study up, take his picture (gave him a radio), tape him, give him a plant. Doing this household stuff a nervous fussy feeling. The worst - dragging him back from a walk - by the arm, he screaming, meeting Tina's concerned expression with a swipe of hate. Kazuo Ishiguro Pale view of hills. What was it about it, pale, yes. I kept the image almost undescribed of a rutted yellow grassed piece of waste ground seen from a concrete housing project apartment. A woman alone in all her relations on the other side of calamities that have left her in a riven silence. Child-killing. It's very near me, it isn't the safer beauty of Sound of the mountain. A bleached view. I know calamity now. Her calamity so deep he shows it reflected. The way I know though I try for myself to. What did I see. A structure from some vision, a division. Say it in the brutal way to have no escape. How could he do it so well. It's sublime. Faber 1982, he was 28. The sound of water, I'm in bed listening to the country music station. If he at 28 can make something faultless like laminated rock, what are my years good for. 21st So many white hairs I don't know if I can pull them all. The worst with Ro, when I'm doing something and he climbs on me or claws at me. I grit my teeth and pinch him. Hearing myself insipid speaking to him. He fell off the chair on his head. I said in the bathroom, Serves you right you little bullock. That sounded fine. By Sunday four o'clock I'm very old, more than if I'd cleaned house for two days, from boredom and confinement. M young again but I don't want to see his face. I don't know how to make the weekends alright. Rainy weekends, that can be my task to figure out. I hate his monotonous few words and the task of attending to getting him more, it's a labour. Very seldom pleases me in any way. Has his uneasy smile and flirtation and then into my eyes with his dirty claws. I hate the constant watch for something he can spill, a knife he's grabbed, things he can wreck - two of my tapes. There are so few. Poverty so deep, my sandals have been crippling my left foot and are nearly gone. Only the black pants left and they're fading so they show dirt. Deep fissures in my skin. The suddenly much more grey hair. My breasts are really gone now, I don't see that there will be any more lovers, who could I stand. What I know is, there has to be a jump out, it's a slide whose signs are - the way when - The difference at the party. It's drizzling but he sits on the sand with an interested look, Sabrina and M in the pen with him. Gladly jamming with the musicians, seriously jigging from the knee swinging a rattle in a sock. A lot to say about the party. Tired. Having to make T and R leave, holding a solid silver stare on Rhoda, next thing I see her wagging 'bye to Ingrid. The brick stove with one kettle on the chimney, two on the plate, steam puffing under the lids. Tony in cowboy hat up on the rails with me lassooing the canvas round the kids' teepee, Lois suggesting from the ground. She in her day recklessly dumping more coffee in the coffee pot. Many lesbians wonderful to look at, striplings. Rowen on Tony's shoulder being borne through the high wet grass on a long circuit so they return from another direction. Tony rushing to patrol a smoke signal from the waterfront holding up for a second to thank Lois like a nice boy leaving a party before loping away to the berm. Many strangers being fed. Boxes of fruit. A strange hard sharp woman liking the garden. Ro going up the ladder in his awkward boots fearless though he's next to falling, I right behind him the instant he's looking over wet black roof and billow of orange tarp, oh wow, calm courageous interesting child. 24th Reverberations of a dispute with L. She comes with a sentence she says is a bad one, "Laiwan works from her position of marginality as a woman, as opposed to distance in time and space." A startling outright beginning [to a critical piece]. But what is L making of it. [passage removed] And I'm sitting in a familiar bog but one I think I know the way through. Behind it is Rhoda consulted about my manuscript saying, without reading it well, It's sad and lonely. Casting me into grief so sore I have to feel it as a knifing. - And now is Laiwan going to be mad at me and go over to them. Sad and lonely, self-comforting, hypnotic. What about that couldn't I know. That they were taking, had taken, Jam, that it was over, that I'd never had a chance. No, it's deeper, a deeper habit of self-comforting. - One thing I've learned is that qualitative charges in the colours and sound of things signal the entrance of the underlying. Reds and greens sparkle, blues burn, sibilants overrule other sounds, all you have to do is look and listen. It would comfort me to think that it was merely a question of frequency, of wave-length, quite explicable by science. I'd like to believe someone has the answers. I am touching myself. The charge builds. I suck in deep breaths, for the fear has leaked in and is adding electricity, almost too much: it is like a mixing of atoms, a confusion of incompatible chemicals. I see myself prickle with a strange glow like the aura of the candle flame, an alarming blue shimmer. Rubbing with my thumb I hook a finger inside and tickle firmly. The current leaps, crossing ridges, and all the time I am moving higher. I rose and rose, then, as the cold moon climbs, I was beating hard, to reach the top. The risk was the icy-blue place up there, just ahead, I was nearing it don't turn, I told myself. On and on, I propelled myself. The electricity bolted through, spinning me off-course. I convulsed once or twice, and then I was dropping, drifting to earth, no longer weighed by flesh and feeling, but clean and clear. Light and whirring, like a moth. [not sure who - Alison Fell's name is in the margin] A child in the café screams out, tea dumped on his lap. Will they know what to do? They are minutes fussing with the leg of his trousers. "Put cold water on it right away; cold water" I say and sit down again. The manager comes at last with a cold cloth. Father with the baby lying quiet on his lap. I'm overwhelmed, sit writing to calm myself. How many times these years I've sat in cafés holding tears. These two days reading over this volume. What do I think? Selecting from it put me partway into the mind of the blue pages. Like being on its margin and looking across the width of the desert I was surrounded by, crystalline detail in encompassing light. No. Start again. Reading through is the flight over many patches of land. Handwriting on one page a small precision that doesn't recur. Many figuring-out minds I reject now. I'm often frightened and rebalancing myself. Often repulsive in false unusual words. My novel style is working sometimes, I'm doing it without intention but there seems to be a training in it, to be able to write inside the ordinary tradition and take the experimental as subject and not style. I'm suspicious of that - subspicious it said - watching whether it's giving up knowledge I haven't been able to share or whether it's learning means to bridge without dying to my best. In either style, rational or gestural - is that what it is - explicative or indicative - the pull of focus is what rewards. It's always a second thought, the first language to come is a vague paraphrase, the anyhow-compromise for blunt ears. That's interesting too, what is the first voice and why doesn't it try. Why is trying added like trained behavior. Why doesn't the common repertoire want to know? I have to be so many years teaching myself by picking shreds out of reading. Detoured. In the garden at nightfall, after sunset, after the luminous clouds, in the time when the west is a uniform incandescent pale yellow. I said I was patrolling. It's Eric who asks. I put myself in Mr Li's garden to look across mine at the compost box lids. There was the brushing up of stalks, leaves and all colors of flower framed in the trellis, in that light, paths clay white, every other color without glare burning its own lamp. What I can't say, the straw wave of the slumped poppy stalks, the way all the growing stuff peaks at that end of the frame. I goggle at how marvelous it suddenly looks, a whole shape. Eric comes and stands as he does straightening himself so his waist sags, preparing himself to be heard, under his sandbox hat, grinning his china corncob smile. Wants to tell me he did something to protect us from vandalism. "In that case I owe you a sweetpea, do you want one?" "A sweetpea is just what I need." Well, I hope he didn't read that, I say whatever comes into my head these days. 27th Moving Laiwan's folks we come to the corner of 16th and I'm recognizing the store. I say, I worked on some houses just here. [abt 1981] Watching for them to come up on the corner. I've hardly seen them finished. One of them is the very place L's mom has bought. It brightens me (L bored, she doesn't see) to think of that winter labouring alone in the damp (and now I'm remembering the closeness to myself of the hours with 2x4's and lathe) coming out now to a finish: I was building it for her, that bright woman. L didn't like me talking about her mom either. That I enjoy looking at her, her really unaged ivory face with blue smudges over the eyes, pencil eyebrows, L's strange nostrils almost flat to the face like ventilators, and her neat well-dressed universal little body. It got dark after the many loads, George and I loitering on Broadway waiting for L and her mom to come down. Undressed transparency of people in the heat, something sweet and penetrable all afternoon seeing the white poor of Broadway and Main, darkness like fluid (odd it shd be so), lights like encyclopedia fishes. I'm on the bus bench dreaming into a restaurant window. L in her rich child whites and Mrs Chung so much lighter, come and invite me into the alley to be paid. Many pleasant little paw pattings. L disgusted. 28 Flirting at the garden. Remember dreaming I put my hand along Eric's side and took it back again. Then Tony in his cute shorts raving about the slaughter of the innocents. I say, cutting across it, "Tony you're very shapely you know that." "What?" he says. "Thought that would get your attention." Then both of them pour their mad talk onto me. Do you enjoy your eyes? I say flirtatiously, cutting across again. All around, the grass splendid, broom hung with black sickles, gloss and heat and sky zooming with radiance reflecting out. Ha, that one he caught, and bundled in right up to me and took off his glasses laughing, I bet you do. We're on the mounds. Eric has come competing. In his word by word responsible way Eric is saying he's not interfering with the plots. I wouldn't dream of you ever interfering with any plots I say. I think I detect a double meaning, says Eric. I got a triple, says Tony, which is more than I did at the time. 30 Baking on the bench giving in and listening, being curious. He was four when he was sent away, ten months when his dad was killed. His mom was close to the border. When she sees him now it starts her drinking. When he tells about powdering an MHR door [Ministry of Human Resources] I'm feeling, my hero. And yet I see how he won't give me equal time or anywhere near, and I can't compete with his speed though I'm all the time wanting to kiss him (the old captain). "These days I come down here to talk to you." "I take it as a quality of the time. I love these days." It was maybe wrong to say. Having said it I was going away angry. I was angry he didn't acknowledge the way he grabs my time. Maybe he thinks it's the way to please me and partly it is. But I don't know how to be pleased and yet make him give me the floor. More.
aphrodite's garden volume 6
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