| Volume 5 of Aprhrodite's Garden: 1986-1987 December-June | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Part 2 desperate times: a wet January, illness, oppression, poverty, anger, humiliation. I don't get the grant. Part 3 a grim two weeks without money and then the city writes saying they are going to give away the garden's land. Part 4 spring, garden politics take hold. Part 5 I give Michael more responsibility for Rowen. There is a lot of savagery in this volume. "I'm integrating my father, hate won't be the end of my story.""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." Reading notes: Aphrodite and other goddesses, Celtic mythology, Jung on conflict and the uncon, Le Guin The diary of the rose, the Mabinogian, electronic sound, Toni Packer, Coleridge, Newton's Optics, Neal Gunn The serpent, Maureen Duffy The erotic life of faery, summary on garden/nature love, Alice Miller, David Malouf An imaginary life, Kim Chernin The hungry self, Arabic and Sufism, imagining a film version of the notes in origin multimedia show, Orphism and Pythagoreanism, the computer model Life. Mentioned: Robyn Davidson Tracks, Daphne Marlatt, Diana Kemble, Virginia Woolf The voyage out, Walter Branchi, the SFU sound studio, Llewelyn How green was my valley, Kazuo Ishiguro Pale view of hills. |
Rowen working in his closet. Gohtha gaigo gaigo ai na na mum m muh, running after the bottle to his bed. Schuff schuff the leather slippers. 20 The corridor, which is also the end of the road because out the window I see the high bare peaks, is a bedroom with a man in bed naked, sleek chest and fine erection, on his elbow looking at me. Rough and ready, large, not my type, brawny, padded, a moustache. I say are they mountain climbers? Yes. I sit down naturally and simply, get in with his skin, I'll take him up on it. He touches into me a bit. I sigh. He's pleased. I want the big penis too. But he gets up, gets dressed, shakes his black hair, he has to go. Before sleeping making a story in Orpheus's house, a couch upstairs in the firelight. He understands me too well, a fear thrill. Roll your sweater up over your breasts and sit there in the firelight reading, and I'll look at you sometimes. He's over there with his legs on the couch. As he's reading without seeming to notice he lets his penis stand up outside his pants so the fire can light it. He comes over to me, lifts my skirt, tucks it into the waistband, lays one of my knees over in the armchair so there's black hair and a pink frill. Goes back to writing in his notebook. What's he writing. He looks up steadily at times. The breasts get hard. I'm stewing. Get up and walk around he says. I walk around the couch. He's behind it sitting on the back. I walk past, lean over, brush him with a breast tip. He seizes me at the waist, spirals and presses. Only a little but I'm in the other land, do whatever you like. Bends me over the couch back, opens up the little doors, puts it in a little. Uh - uh - uh and then deep up into the belly UH and picks me up against his chest, spreads his hands on my stomach. My head's leaning back beside his. He rubs my belly, himself in it. Then what - breasts, the whole torso, the wet part. He's not so much moving it inside as swelling larger and solider, and the cunt swelling too, not accepting but repelling, an interior swollen to push him out and in that mutual push making fires of contact, streams of fire. Then we slow it down and look around. It won't leave us, we'll see together. 21st The dense bushy place beyond the road, the wet, flooding place, the place with trails, the dark, muddy, impassible place, the animal place, the place raided by hunters, the place with a warm curve in the creek, the place he knows his way into, the place to find cows, the place where a bull roars hidden beyond the thickets, the place infiltrated by the dump, the place children make houses in willow brush, the place with salt at the gate, the place with hind legs of steers and heifers marching under a caked tail, the place with yellow moons thick on the ground, the place with mosquitoes and flies, the chill place, the tunneling place, the place rarely entered, the place netted with paths that all lead to water, the place whose paths before they come to the water fall apart into hoof holes in deep mud, the place whose paths lead to a periphery of impassible muck where we stand seeing the water unable to reach it, the place where I confessed to my mother that I loved Ken and she said I had good taste, the place with an entry precinct of tall poplar columns with grass and light between them, the place we got into by rolling under a fence, the place (I'm told) I toddled away into when I was two, the place with a mud floor, ground dry enough for grass only on the humps around willow trunks, the place I ventured into with a small boy and girl whose leader I was, the place seen from the house on its hill but unable to see it back, the place of feeling direction, the closed-in place, the place with unseen inferred horizons, the shadowed place, the place under a living roof, the place with a completely unknown further extent, the place with other sides not belonging to us but to Kinderwater, Friesen, Hiken, the place that could be seen from the other side but was never entered there, the south place with more south beyond it, the flooding and drying place, the place with invisible animals, the place inside a willow fur. Earth's fur, earth's vulva, earth's mysterious map, earth's high-hearted
entrance, earth's venture and curiosity, earth's intense curiosity, earth's
labyrinths of curiosity, earth's obscure extent, earth nearly blind. Then, at the solstice party at Carnegie what do I see to make me dance and roar. A girl three and a half with bangs and ponytail, purple teeshirt, who calmly dances the round dance. Her adult men partners lift her to their height. Her father is the man with squared head thin hair a lump of turquoise hanging from his ear, pale eyes. The band is jamming on a blues pattern. She sitting on the stool bringing the balloon mic closer is improvising without a hitch. He's playing guitar near her, blushing at her command of the mic but supporting her, keeping an eye on her to see she doesn't get past her capability. "Your daughter's really good!" "I think so." Bringing out the stuffed raccoon for her when the set's over. I went to sit with her jamming on the edge of the stage when they did the cleanup, he came and sat on the other side. 22nd With M in the café talking about antlers, the little girl singer, beauty. "I've felt it more than seen it, once when we were lying down, a dark space" he says. "It's something I can do, I'm afraid of it" I say. Talking grandly would be: the goddess came, for some reason or none. What is it like to be living a life that has seen the goddess in the mirror. The slides are my photographs of her. Many other times I've seen in the mirror someone else, she is away. There's little written. Is it when she is there or when she's away I see her in the other? I need to know. Robert's tall god of air, Jam's fairy empress. Black evening. A paraffin candle fast sharp and white, a beeswax welling down slowly yellow fire yellow pool. Lit air sways. Around the fire the blue and then violet envelope and outside that a thin black line? Flame's tip the loftest lightest softest dissolving tongue. Cyclamen. It's thin like what's between skin touching skin. 23 Goddess fairy paradise, alright, they all mean love eyes, and it's called these things, why - . The eyes said: white foam on wave edge, white cloud in air trough. A difference of medium and level. 24 There is work. There is and will be longing. I accept. I'll live the longing as complete and true as I can. - All the wicks at the bottom of the thimble, when the candle had melted down to them, seven branches piled, all in one flame conducting wax into fire, as I feel in bed when my womb blazes. I'm given Michael to be body's help. The other waiting will be itself, Robert as much as it is, true or mistaken as much as it is. Without my having to know, somewhere it is known, and I'm with the knowing even when I don't know. In these ways it is as if someone is already there in the companion's place on my further right. I speak, it can say ye-e-s-s in a sigh. I ask. It chooses from the surroundings I haven't seen, an answer in sight. She says: don't make it separate. But I want it to be separate so there will be someone for me. The rest is to understand gradually. She there - looks like a queen, admirable. In the Pan Pacific women's room mirror a bloodless malnourished neglected face, eyes in black hollows, intimidated, drab, worn and ill. In this season what's most to me is the color and scent of flowers, candle and mirror light, my room, myself in the mirror, black dress and green vest. The lamps and colors under them. In each room the lamp. No one's born in this black crisis. We're reduced to our little light's survival. 26 Rowen crying, dark, rain. I've just torn up Mary's horrible letter. I can answer it - yes - eloquently - and why isn't that enough - because I hate her - thick white-fleshed cow - face dough hanging off her bones - greedy wormy hands - safe, safe, insulated in the white dough of righteousness and harmlessness letting the rest of us take the risks. Deaf. What do I feel about Christmas she asks. I can tell her every year and still she'll ask, she's treading her little cowpath having thoughts suitable to the season. Getting senile by lack of existence. You who were born intelligent and passionate, you've become a parasite. You want to hear me explain once more what's wrong with your religion and your marriage, so the truth will be said but not by you. 1st January 1987 With Laiwan at the Chinese movies. Beautiful men's bodies in the best dress they could have, kung fu jackets and folded-over trousers, shining bare chests. Long silk dresses. Whup. Whup. Whup. Glorious dancing. He leaps very high and is rolling over when he sends the knife. Thirty to one, an unexpected ally, and at the end they stand bloodied looking at one another with the traitors fallen across each other in piles. In the street in the dark R and I step off our sidewalks at nearly the same time and have only an instant in the middle of the street to see each other's face. Will I look away. No. Will I make her look away. No. She looks folded down angry. I look imperious grim. What's she got to feel persecuted about. But I'm satisfied to have made her look at me that way. Why. As long as she's mad at me I have the upper air. 4 February Joyce was disapproving the schoolgirlishness of the rivalries, do I want that? Then I'm stopped and have to really fetch it up. After a long time: "I have to say this," about telling T an experience and having her hear it, "I've always had that difficulty, that there's no one with a quality of attention. It makes a possibility of transformation." And then Joyce is turned around right away agreeing. Hello 6th Two days pink Nepal mountains again. Down in the squeezed streets E on her bike in riding boots and herringbone and kung fu white and black and red scarf is half starved on rations all this month, but carrying $5 worth of roses in green paper. Meeting, on Granville, an English man with goggle eyes, but English. And other eyes. In the bicycle basket Steady attention reel 2 in a metal can, and other small cans in the army bag. The little films each as they come on make me suddenly soften. I'd come into the good place. Last of the light by itself. Swan in beautiful blue white and yellow tranquilly turning her neck. Flies in the last sun on the wall leave and rejoin their shadow. A moon that creeps in slow and clear gets a push and then rides fast forward in red chorion. Cloud and nettle flicker. They aren't what they were in the original but there's still a soft transit when the light changes color. Green shadow in blue shadow. The parts that are still, like the floorboards, are running with grain. - In the mirror I'm seeing skin droop under my beautiful chin. Jaw skin slumped against the mouth crease and a rumpled pit around the eyes. 7 Neal Gunn a companion. His wonderful balance in wanting to be true and useable. I stand here. Where. How is it. I will learn and say. He is wanting the world and the visionary to be continuous in one space, with a difference in texture maybe, you can tell them apart but you meet both in a walk around. He's not more impressed with himself for that kind of meeting. He's terrified but he recovers. DH Lawrence was more terrified all the time. But Gunn has a few happenings he goes on weaving. He's loyal to his shocks. It's a shock to be alive and going to die. The sweetness of the warmth in the light, the lightness of the air, the sound of birds in the mornings, have been the most certain spring I have ever know. I stand and thank like a bush. 11 It's still (I tell Laiwan) needing utmost sophistication to keep simplicity well. I don't understand why this long struggle in the foundation of work has been so mute in me, where with Gunn in the grandparent generation it was public energy. And while writing in this explicit way still feeling it's stooping into another generation's business and the way to do it now is the way I have before. But this one is a comfort of being able to do sturdily. "The other world is this world seen." I feel I haven't done my work but have gone years timidly taking notes about how to begin. 14 Lying in bed last night in the time when I was beginning to see things there came the feeling of a quality of a time. This one was Eton Street when I was new in Vancouver. It's a feeling of the background of a time, no the time itself, which is not the background but the medium. It's like a tint of feeling tho' I don't think it's on a spectrum. Only the reverie state can recover it. It's like taste smell and color but imperceptible in any present. It seems to be unspecifiable. I was able to stay feeling it a while but I can't get it now. I was wondering if it is the body chemistry of the time and recovering it wd be recovering younger tissues. That was after 2 hrs listening to TV weeding the white hairs out of my forelock and seeing under it grey skin hanging in creases, so ugly I don't look at it, I can't look at it without saying there must be a distortion in the mirror. The face is not only old, it's sick and old and starved, not old like a prosperous person, old like a derelict, grimy, ugly like tissue barely alive. Dirty pores like my mother's. I see myself turning into an old mother and don't want it. 16 Was reading The diary of the rose on the bus. There was pain and fear of course but it does not come out pain in the end. He has not forgotten or repressed it but it is all changed, by his love for his parents and his sister and for music and for the shape and weight and fit of things and his memory of the lights and weathers of days long past and his mind always working quietly, reaching out, reaching out to be whole. Her sentence doing it, keeps putting her arm around more. A dart into the true self quickly sealed but letting two small rushes of water out into the eyes. With the ugly bus, the despair and self removal of the ugly bus, the ugly students, in cold shadow under the university gate. A luster in the sky, pewter blue with firm fine wisps 18 Afraid of charm, value, ethic, tactic. It seems a closer theory than any - it isn't demagogic - it's the tactile - tentative - it tried for the true web under - the recognizable unspoken - it's my own idiom and there's the fright, it's closer to crazy: brave; if I put it out I have to be ready to turn arrows. When I read it now it is like bending back around to see myself, I haven't got the right sense of it yet. It's the close declaration of the one I was in the middle of the field of Jam and T and R - it's the person Joyce has been pushing me out of - she was terrorized, but was she terrorized in writing or was she acute in dissolve and bringing back a live vision. That's what I shd set myself to find out. 24 Free morning: the ground frozen. Later not knowing what to do and easily doing the entrance rock, grass paths. Turfs are blocks. Turfs and rocks used as they're got, I like that, same stuff, same ground, order it around. Cozy worms little and big waving from the mud a lost end. Such clean things. Ro when I come to Crabtree running in his red knickers hugging a dolly blanket under his chin. His way of greeting is to rush for something to show.5th February At the library looking at color vision books repelled by the grey plastic man-metal burrow of the world they make. I only love the saints of science, they're out by themselves looking into no horizon. I'm far from being able to get into it and see something I can pull. All that work now has a feel of resistance, stiffness. Non-necessity. Wait.9 I didn't tell about having soup with Daph. Her hair like duck feathers fluffed up and still in order. Under it the pink face and bright small eyes I don't quite like to see, why. Its narrowness, like Goofy. Loving to tell her about reading VW. We both like the strength of the grapple. Trying to grasp reality she said came to an end with Woolf. I say no I don't believe that. Daph speaks in what I know from other times is her faith: now language turns on itself. I say language always did that but it was implicit, it didn't take itself for the whole. I said suddenly, more positively than I would to myself, I think when she's at that level she isn't describing reality anymore, she's making it. Do I mean it? The mind you make when you write, do you take it outside? No she says. I have work and it is in and out of any medium, and oh let me live in it constantly. Diana's painting. No, first the way it was with her having tea. Tepid. Like I shd'v gone immediately home but I wanted to sit there in her house, so full and organized, wealthy and interesting. The painting with its most beautiful air level, which is flowers, then grass and leaf level, then not-earth streaks, then a lower level of more pulled-apart streaks. Talk about underworld, Innana and the bad woman. I say, why is it under? It's the column fault, equating ends of polarities. The chaotic is below the formed? No, it's coextensive, it's a difference of focus like the grass field. The earth goddess as she painted it too thing I said. Above the little woman's head v rich painting (poppy capsules but I said Bohemian bird) and by her trunk the locoweed white, and red nylon paint down the right side but on the left such an unpleasant snarl. And why the hard turquoise around her head. A touch on the arms ignorant or careless. I knew a lot but is it right to say. (I have so much to say here. In this accounting voice that's one of the mid-mortal I can precipitate a lot of daily suspension as knowing, but it's only a mid-air formation. And that, that's the chaotic, in making. It isn't underneath it's latent. Going out of knowledge to get knowledge. The dear fright saying this is what makes you real and unreal, be careful - Because so much I don't know of what it is for, for her. The left foot snarl. The unbridge between the top and bottom. But M today going home with just one light kiss we could both like, and sitting on my lap in the chair, ten minutes of the best silence. 26 O my other work what are you, two people in stride, no through road. If it isn't to be done what is it for? For what it is doing. I go on ephemeral. Sad. A person in dark clothes walks back up the hill the other way. Sad for lost fineness. I'm like an ox now. Panic. Big thigh a shamed thug. Distant inner crying, pressing to make, who is, what if nothing were pushing. It says yes. Listen to how the voices say. 28 Taking the war where it is, coming into Diana's opening. There's the constellation and Jam dough-faced heavily padded westernized and in pain in her short perm. Jeannie Kamins come with her lit up painted face, Nora's maternal grace, red albino Evelyn, and then Roy [Kiyooka]. Here's one I can challenge head to head without rancour. His porcelain teeth are just at eye level. Okay Roy. I almost got by without speaking he says. I feel drawn up clearly foot to head. You look well he says. I make him laugh so the room fills. But then at the end it does die. "The bodies leave each other, not the minds." I don't understand why there's pain again. Talking to Jam like trying to bend cardboard. She keeps looking around. This time I'll stand my ground: "How come you're so nervous." She confuses me being slow and fast. "Don't you wish you had a dog again." She's slow then but when I've riled her she gets suddenly faster and stops me. "The mafia that controls such matters" I say. "Why don't you stop singing that old song. Since you're working so hard it's making the blood go to your head." That was true, I cd feel it hot with determination. So she outflanked and edged away and went off with the mob. What I said was true too and she got out of it in her usual way. 3rd March The house is clean. And then frightening emptiness. Eating turkey at the Princess Café, hungry, but it will so soon be eaten and the taste will end. The taste of food a desperate need. In winter I'm afraid for my life. There's no freedom. Who's afraid in winter? An imaginary life. Light fires. Candle flame is shaking in every current, why, it's lighter than air, so stable. It has to go up from its wick, it makes a little wedge-shaped hole for itself. Rowen stared into my eyes signaling seeing something, maybe himself. How did he signal - looking alert, curious, enthralled even, and holding focus until I began to see too. A flamey subtle changing look. 4th Reading Lessing at 30, other people, puzzled how I came to this age without coming into that authority standing to know. I haven't taken things on directly so I could have them traversed behind me. I've gone around them feeling an orientation by direction, so everything in the wide center has been felt and oriented but not traversed. - The picture was of a center of a circle, everything in it but nothing mastered. What's in it is felt, not in emotion, but spatially. It's the chora, cauldron. I know it's another method but something else has to come of it, in it, a catalyst and then the whole broth will crystallize at once. That's how I fancy it. But another way to say it is: stand in the sorted broth and say anything and you will have your order around you. 6th Very short of money again. By next Wednesday I'll be broke for two weeks. Looking at my hair as if it could still save me. I go to bed at seven and lie there, and wake at four and lie there, and am wondering whether I've been six years grieving and struggling against the death of my young life, or the fact that death is gradual over many years. "Go into it with curiosity and courage." But curiosity and courage seem in many to be the first to go. As if suicide is up ahead not as a catastrophe but because it's a power to be claimed. One of the powers my parents feared. - Frightened looking at money. There are 17 more days this month and I have 12 dollars left if I can stop bank charges for overdraft. What do I have, some squash, potatoes, chard, onions [in the garden]. Rowen has to have another package of porridge, milk every two or three days for $2, fish for a dollar every other day. Later there's family allowance for $31. I thought if it were two weeks I could fast: eat 'til Wednesday, set up the heavy work at the garden and then shut down everything. Best would be if it were juice and greens. I can go to the food bank for Ro. He can be at Crabtree more. 10th What's the food bank like. Line-up back into the alley, pale drinkers, a few thin welfare mothers. The whites look bloodless. We're standing in a cold wind at the Indian Center. I put my scarf over my nose to filter cigarette smoke and factory dust, and to be able to have my own face behind it. I see people I know who don't seem to see me, Eileen with a false I'm-all-right-look. At the ID table there's a thin woman with brown eyes who looks me in the face so kindly I cry now remembering her. "Is it for one?" "No there's a baby." "Tiny? There's baby food." "No, he's two." "A food person," she says smiling. I smile too. She gave me heart. That's what it means. An hour ranked with the lowest debris thinking they should be lining up for a gas chamber and then her quality, in her thinness, poverty, long life of work, firming me in the chest. Starving is isolation too (I'm not starving, I had macaroni and an egg), I choose to deceive my friends. (But I am weak and low.) Half dozen eggs, 1 frozen fish, small can of peas, jar of green olives pickled, box Ritz crackers, white rice, 5 day old Woodward's baguette, tin of beef consommé. for that an hour in line at 10 and then another forty-five minutes in the rain at 1. Mike's story about one of his trips to Paris. He was going to stay in a cheap hotel, they were all booked, he was wandering on the mountain with a sleeping bag he'd bought, it was wet. He got under one of the city roadwork shacks and lay in misery and wet and cold. People came out of the church and pissed behind the shack so it ran downhill on him. "I didn't care, at least it was warm." And then sometime in the night something happened in him so that he was in a most wonderful state. When it got light he walked around in bliss and went and sat in a café. Everything was very much itself. 12 - Haven't washed clothes for three? weeks. At the laundromat there are many machines out of order, they're old. The thin Chinese man comes to check out how much laundry I have. Two loads he says, walks off with my token. I say he can watch me load and say when it's enough. The soap is in. At not even half a load he says it's enough. I don't have another dollar. I want my dollar back, I say and begin to take wet clothes out of the machine. I'm furious. He counts out four quarters and fetches me a garbage bag. Then what. The old pirate's laundry on Cordova. But now I don't have soap. I'll have to use the drying money for soap and dry it at home. It's raining. If Cheryl comes and the house is full of wet clothes? Bad enough with the house clean as I can make it (no soap or Comet). There's no coffee. I would go out and try to grab some mint, which hasn't begun to grow yet. So I basically can't afford friendship though I still have pickled olives. Even Joyce in a padded shoulder dress. At C's party people trying to look rich. I hate the clothes of the time. I can't imagine being current. I want to be something else. A furious sulk. I don't want eating to depend on joining a stupid consensus. I don't want to be hanging onto a stupid past consensus. I hate it when I see smart women in makeup. I don't like what's said by the clothes. The women artists in self-canceling shapes and textures. Still, 'I hate' is up against the wall and to be able to move it has to be curiosity and comprehension. A particular hatred for Kiku whose greased mouth and boutique clothes are the signals of her B Grant currency. 13th I've been thinking it might work if M wd pay me for sex. Fifty bucks, I said. He cried. Last night he left 20 under the cup in the kitchen. Soap, tampax, Vaseline for Ro's red bum, butter. "You can think about how to spend it later." 18 It's a soft white-blue day not completely covered over, soft cloud in tufts. A coat of mist over the mountains. The white side of the bank, east side of a telephone pole, cornerboard by the Liu's door, a clean creamy light, a real dawn. Smoke rolling out of a chimney with comical lightness, sideways, straight up, veering. The fish plant's long whistle, 7:30. Yellow-beak starling hunting on the roof. Jésus in his rat fur curled round at Rhoda's broom sleeping 'til he's let in much later in the morning. Sun you're all I have. Work all day long in the garden, hair baked dry, crazed bush over the forehead, cracked lips, dry cracked hands, slightly burned eyes. What am I thinking about, I'm the tiny kinds of weeds and seedlings, that ruffly-centered circular one I was pulling everywhere, emerald green sticky-thread veronica, chickweed. 30 Here's the real application: I'm in love with a piece of land. I make shapes of beds that fill with shapes of leaves, flower tissue, colors, lights that change. I love and work for and defend the integrity of the whole of the garden space. I work to make it a strengthening community. I don't have enough money for clothes, a car, food, travel, books, study. I used to get money for study if it's called art. Please give me a more prosperous year while I do what I'll do anyway. I still want to make beautiful image 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. 4th April 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. 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. 8th 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. 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. 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. 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. 19 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. 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. 3rd
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. 5 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. 7 Even violence and hate, don't dispute. They mean urgently. I feel a little wonder that I can make them good. 9th 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 21 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. 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. 31st 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. 1st of June 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). 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. 10th 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. 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. It's 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. - 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 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. - 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. 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 in 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. 19 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. 24th 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 *strave 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. 28 Flirting at the garden. 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. |