| aphrodite's garden volume 6 part 1 - 1987 june-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
June 24th 1987
30th Yest I get Joan to phone M. Lev [Michael Levenson] to ask what plans he has for the staff in our 6 weeks. Board meeting fixed for tonight. This morning I phone the UIC Top-Up office and ask his supervisor questions, what's their budget, what's his salary (he doesn't say but he gives me the rest of the figures so I can add it up), how much is budgeted for materials and tools. Michael in the first call evades Joan but talks nice. After he hears that I spoke to his boss he calls back in a rage and says I have emotional problems. Telling Diane and Joan I start yelling. Joan says "I never realized until this moment how bad it is." Diane says she wants to take the call tomorrow. I assume both of them when they talk to him will betray me about 50% but the margin of support left after is still enough to make me feel I don't have an emotional problem. It's fighting, I'm anxiously telling Joyce, learning to fight - being what I don't like people to be (and yet maybe there are cleaner ways I can come to). What else I want to say besides the uneasiness of fighting effectively is how unconsciously I lined up this sequence, yesterday saying not now, this morning saying now and asking the questions that will put heat on him. He's panicking that his funding is in jeopardy though for this year I can tell them it's not. (And when I saw him scurry I knew I was even.) What is the question under it. It's what does it make me when I wage public power struggle. Curiously having relations - 1st July There was a small snake under Gretchen's rock pile. We were jubilant. Gretchen's origin patch is hers now for good. "For this year." "For next year too. You can be the experimenter, which you are already." And then she had a real smile. People in the garden when they are mad at me complain to me about someone else. Romance like a rim pulling but resistable. It's a pull to say idealizing things belonging to a form. I am careful about saturating in the image, wisdom sez yr stronger when you don't, curiosity sez let's not waste this v. interesting specimen. A way of knowing for sure the 2 people are speaking from different maps - a sort of spread of lines lit up - and there isn't a small chance (there might be) of being understood, it's done in generous lack - issuing from a wide open vigilant black SPACE. Let's go on watching and yes yes enjoying. [Tony] Like a cartoon cat, maybe from his nose and the whiskers under, a salt with interesting colors in his carefully carved beard, a faint grooming smell, very strong clean teeth, thin body with a touching hollowed belly, not bulky except his hands. Deep creases in his face but no loose skin on his torso. Smart foundational everyday food he makes grinding beans rye oats etc, bakes with currants, cayenne on a griddle. "Traveling grains, can I have a bite?" Making a clown act of his pickup bike. Yarrow (brightening by him, surprising fast fun, I feel outclassed) liked it when he said "I'm getting carried away here" and I picked him up, turned round in a circle, put him down. And this morning Ro in yellow, M okay at Oppenheimer, in the quiet of Canada Day morning. "I had a lonely flutter in my solar plex this morning and so I thought I'd come intercept you."
3rd The little doctor, fine gold chain and kissy mouth, there she is under the porchlight when I open the door, a thin smart small dyke without rings on her hands. The way it feels being in a room consulting with such. I wish it were like that all over the world, sane and warm, not polite, exact. I liked her clean new wellkept clothes too, saw from them a life where clothes are in closets and sent to the cleaners, replaced before they're faded and not especially loved. Then Captain Cat in the garden. I notice how spruce he dresses, he raves but shoes go with the day's choice. Today after I walked away from a snarl he came by to sit in the pit behind the green rock. "Do you think I'm terrible?" "No I don't think you're terrible." Kiss kiss kiss kiss. "Don't get romantic, you have a romantic look on your face." And in the old house Michael and baby and Mr Smith, green Michael in divine lengths, the yellow room with many paintings, rug, famous avocado plant and brass lamp. Swedish house and sky, baby (when I look shyly round the corner) to be seen on Jim's knee, feet hanging down, eating a peach. And Pythagoras. Blood-orange beanflower, bean seed attached in the pod, the way reading scholars I can see through them into the rapture in a beanfield, whose image is passed on, as he knew images are, in a mash of language. I was working with a pick breaking the clay and other very hard subsoil, already tired I think from giving Ro electrical support in his illness. He was wanting to sit near me, hot, flushed, wet, and today I didn't have endurance though I ate steak. Then would sit with my legs in the excavation looking up at the flowers in the center bed. Then that strangeness marvel sets in, the color of the field poppies and their grey blue green seed heads, and of the white/red shirleys against the overcast very luminous sky, backlit I suppose but also the otherworld unfamiliar complete shocking beauty. I stood by the post and sang I dream of Jeannie with the light brow-own hair / Floating like a vapour on the summer air. It was for the second line, I needed to voice it. And then also felt Eric in his heaps nearby hearing a siren. Well he'll have to look after himself. 4th I came into Jam's mansion and lay down by her, she asleep, looking over her head at her corkboard where she has birthday cards, one I take out of its envelope and am looking at when she wakes. I knew it was from Hélène, Happy birthday to a grey haired .... So I think I know the structure, and that's why Jam warns me not to show intimacy, and I'm as if buttoning my shirt before the young woman comes in. Jam laying her cheek against the child. They're going to church, Rowen running ahead, a cabin on an alley, new little house among similar, something of the feeling of an altar in a small room, then a room without windows and the two facing lines passing people down them with holy kisses. A form of witchcraft I realize. Dollar Brand. [Abdullah Ibrahim at the Orpheus Theatre, Jazz Festival] What to say. From the left front row where cheap seats are empty by convention, for outsiders to come close under the firelight. Piano, sax, amplified highly refined sound, spirit metal tempered, clean, flashing, like copper, brass and steel - which they are and I hadn't understood - that I was hearing breath in through metal. Sonny Fortune wringing the breath out of his body with whatever it can carry of what the body is, screaming, the way I know, you have to unwind it from your feet up like a pitcher. His screaming, Dollar Brand jumping at the piano, shafts of light standing all around. I realize I'm in heaven, there couldn't be more joy, everything forgiven, my dears near. Moony. With Ro at home on a slightly rainy day. I ran to see, left a white marrow folded in burlap. When I came back the burlap was smoothed down I thought disapprovingly. What moony is, is silent and looking. Almost feeble. Feeling a pull to be with but only to be asleep with. I'm wanting to know whether it's breeding chemistry. It's willing to have the imagination flooded, for instance by the story I sat on a bucket of rocks to hear. He got into a rowboat in fog and rowed to the States to ask for political asylum. Five minutes in the hour wd tie himself down and sleep. "Those guys were my guide," pointing to a robin. Victoria to Port Angeles. "There's gotta be a way, I kept saying. There isn't, he kept saying." (It was about a group home with greenhouses.) "They put me on a jet. I was in a box with Mexicans, they were going one way I was going the other. I got off the jet and walked twenty miles home." "Was there still a home for you to go back to?" "I went to my mom's place." The mixedness, admiration and pity. I want to see how he's made. Reflection, Joyce is saying. He put his arm next to mine, 2 brawny barrels, mashed hands. Running all day saving rejected stuff. (Why I turned away the day he was raving that he'd operated on his little hen's leg and she wasn't going to make it. Even now a horror.) That that happened to him and he endures it on and on. Last day baking on the bench I saw a scar on his ankle and brought my little foot up to show him and told him about being three and sent away. OH! he kept saying. OH! OH! "But you're much faster than I am, I'm quite slow." "Not as slow as you think." Reflection, naturally, I'm wanting to know how an abandoned person is different from other people. I can see he's too far into his own branch - the way I am - to be able to join anyone. "I try to stay out of desire because anger is right behind it." When I was out blindly chasing a steak and met him beside the bike that night I knew I couldn't have dinner in a restaurant with him, be at a concert, do anything but intersect his busyness somewhere. Is having no lover a deprivation or not, stoically taken as normal. 6th Health he says is to be able to hold the floor for five minutes at a conference. Realizing part of what I like is his need in language. 7th There stands the lunatic like a Mennonite fanatic, pointed exaggerated eyes, teeth like chisels, body neat and hard, the kind who raved in High German from pulpits. But what is it I sense, he and I on the corner at Crabtree, meeting because we're meant to. He's not really angry, he's caught up in a pose, is that it? Uncle Willie. One, a pressure, two, a refusal. Somehow he's got outside himself. Three, what's he saying, always they. The eagle's angry look, turns his head sideways, a furious fowl, showing his angry look. I stare trying to see what raving has to do with masculinity. Also wanting to see what he was as a child. "You're in hell, what's it like?" The closest to it last time I saw Joyce. It follows a humiliation? When I see something contradictory does it mean I am not seeing it? The way he looks a self-formed self-commanding courageous experienced being and is a little boy who has no way to handle a slight. When he raves I want to praise and hold him as if it may have been a small refusal that has ejected him into complaint about the city, Catherine Gullin, the government. He raves and I'm looking him up and down. Who else raves. Ewald Epp like this one. It's a way of going away. Is craziness always a going-away from a slight? I tracked Eric yesterday. She was a mailorder bride, he but not (he believes) his father understood she had been a prostitute in London. The man sent photographs of his beautiful barn, house, cattle. She came, forty years old, and found the barn, the house, the cattle, and her husband the hired man. "So they were a match" I said. Eric was turning too-wet compost stinking like shit. The garden our goddess is laundering fortunes. "Whose life has gone away from the beginning." AS Byatt. Marcus the ability, Lucas the mad explainer. Interesting all the characters she makes to draw herself out. I can see her real family and real events fanned out into separated bands. Why not tell the story straight, one person, all those minds, as Dorothy was determined to do. Because she's deep in literature, DR wasn't. She's the advantage of literature and has to show it. Tells the story of getting her 90's and 95's as I wouldn't imagine. Shows her fright, I want I want. Reading her I want Cambridge and literature, a PhD on Dorothy or Hegel or both. I want to show my face in Oxford where somebody might see it. I want a bloodline in England, or English. Simultaneous vision, "surveyed them from no vantage point or all at once." an ordered cube of ribbons and threads of soft, crossing light, bronze, cream, dark pink, pale pink on pieces of graph paper, a pattern of spirals moving through concentric diamonds to avoid, yet indicate and deal with, the point at the center where all the lines converged on infinity A place. A kind of garden. The forms, mathematical forms, were about in the landscape and you would let the problem loose in the landscape and it would wander amongst the forms leaving luminous trails. I could see the answer. It was important to see only obliquely, out of the edge of the eye, in the head. The kind of thing it was, the area it was in, never to look directly. To look away on purpose and wait for it to rise to form. When you'd waited and it was there in its idea you could draw the figure or even say words to go with it. Forms. They changed shape. They weren't exactly solid or not. Plane geometry, and surfaces floating sort of, and things not exactly like trees or flowers. Or you might walk in a field without thickness amongst series after series of planes - all dimensions - shifting. Bits were landscape - any old field or wood - bits not at all remembered now ... those lost and shining fields. Not with words, but as a floating shadow, how sensuously delightful the place had been, how clear and clean, how bright, airy and open. Turning geometry, spinning graph paper with the squares decreasing in size on some almost definable geometric principle and simultaneously rotating so that somewhere in the center, on the periphery of the field of vision, was the vanishing point, infinity. When he remembered it his body remembered huge strain and oppression. The fear of being changed completely and the fear that this was only a fantasy. And even at this moment he heard a cheery inner voice The light then changed. There was too much in front and all around him, light almost tangibly dense and confoundingly bright The light was busy. It could be seen gathering, running and increasing along lines where it had first been manifest, wild and linear on the railway tracks, flaming, linking, crossing on the tennis court mesh, rising in bright intermittent streams of sparks from glossy laurel leaves and shorn blades of grass. It could also be seen moving when no object reflected, refracted or directed it. In loops, eddies, powerful direct streams, turbulence and long lines proceeding without let through stones, trees, earth, himself, what had been a condition of vision turned to an object of vision. Beyond its linear movements it could be experienced as sheets, or towering advancing fronts, like crested waves miles high, infinite or at least immeasurable, like walls and more and more walls of cold, white flame. It had other motions not measured by measurements available to humans or separable in the experience of humans, yet there, so that he had to know he could not know more than that they were there. He was confined by their closeness and ubiquity, stretched and distorted by his stressed, distressed sense of their continuous operation beyond any attention he could fix on them. So he came to see this as a presence, and a presence with purpose. It was a presence wholly outside his scale, conducting its work with a magnitude and a minuteness at once too grand and too precisely delicate for him to map. Stretched and contracted he sensed it lap round him and through him and for the worst moment he was almost concentrated on its passage through his own consciousness. He was both saved and prevented by a geometric figure which held as an image or more in that glare and play of light. He saw intersecting cones, stretched to infinity, containing the pouring and rushing. He saw that he was at the, or a, point of intersection, and that if it could not pass through it would shatter the fragile frame to make a way. He must hold together, but let it go through, like the burning glass with the gathered light of the sun. The rims flared and flared and flared. He took a step and a step and a step and the fields of light swayed and roared and came and went and sang. Stephanie: This inner world had its own clear landscape. It grew with precise assurance, light out of dark, sapphire rising in the black red, wandering in rooted caverns, glassy blue running water between carved channels of basalt. And coming out into fields of flowers, light green stalks, airy leaves, bright flowers moving and dancing in wavering tossing lines to the blown grass of a cliff over a pale bright strand beyond which shone the pale bright sea. They had their own lights, Virgil said of his underworld, and this too, however bright, with the clarity of more than a summer's day, was seen in its own light, knowing it was seen against dark, had risen out of dark, was in the warm dark. It was seen, not with memory's eye for recollection or recognition, but with the blind boy's vision, and the light came off it, was in it, shone through flower stalk and running water, in the rippling heads of the flowers and corn, a sunless sea brimming with its own shining, white flowing sand with a night sky just beyond vision. She was of this world and walked in it, straying lingering and rapid between the line of leaves and the line of sand and the line of the fine water, the line perpetually glittering and falling, perpetually renewed. AS Byatt 1978 The virgin in the garden Chatto & Windus 12th
[version of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus trans Karl Siegler] It isn't prenatal I'm seeing, it's newborn, marveling at open space and movement in space, but seeing them still in relation is what it knew from movement in the cell. Then what is Orpheus, goes back into the dark to fetch her bliss. Plants, breath and air, space, elegy for the girl, Orpheus ref and invocation, taste, cellular and organ feeling, personal wonder, sound as structure, seerish proclamation.
13th Working in the garden I thought of applying to University College to finish the degree, write CC to find out why I didn't get the grant [in 1973?]. Thought I could handle it now, find people to work with. It was one of those wishes that's distant (Oxford) and then is suddenly seen to be quite near. In the same way that it occurred to me dimly and now with a nervous excitement, that maybe the herb garden is already made. 15th [Building a tori gate in the Carnegie Centre's woodwork shop] Tod's long legs, he wears good shorts and has light strong legs like a stork. There's a stop describing him I'm noticing, as if people will describe me? As if I might be adding to his pain. But I want also to say how he looks to me, because it isn't unpleasant. Touching rather. Making caution though. His spine leans deeply left, humps up, is it a crane he's like, and with his curving crest of soft white hair, grizzled whiskers and glaucous eye. Working at the drill press with his long arms he seems wrapped around the wood, spiderish, or like a car assembly robot sideslipping above the work. Akira with his two-edged saw, zzz zzz zzz zzz, straight across, angled down, up from below. The other edge is the ripsaw. He medium, plump, quietly bred, a brief likeable voice, sexy by reserve. And she, what was it like. Responsible uneasily taking on being the facilitator, 'female', too much so. Mike ("looks like a liddle Eskimo") in charge giving me minimal address. Tod's fragility was costing me. I was feeling I had to be there to carry the beams without seeming to cancel his manhood, and irritated at the nonsense implicit, and knowing it could be circumvented if I didn't embody it. 17th Alive waking in the afternoon, a soft body, the ivory color of sunlight through closed eyes, in a stream of the sound of an Alberta west wind. 19 The gate is up and a fine thing but in the wrong place. Responsibility is exhausting, I went to bed at 7. There was a dream about music, earlier. Fine bubbles - as if - I can see but not hear it - white dots in black like coke bubbles bursting - a composer name starting with H. Falling asleep one night by imagining myself with the loved one. Each time I feel for where we are. Just driving together. It was plain, a state of completeness and balance, happy attention - on to the whole of the life - everything is accepted at the 1st level, seen, felt, the 1st feeling is endured and then changes, it rights itself, nothing binds. I'm thinking of Jam and the way we each brought an unendurable sticking place. Tues 21st Row these days glad and peaceful. Won't say 'bye to daycare people or us, even. Long attention span on trips they say. Has three word sentences, bike fall down, doyouwantadrink. Sings on the bike and otherwhere. Will sit down and look or fiddle with a grass stem. Hates coming through dry prairie grass in shorts. I have little to say, little energy that is. Need it from outside. This aft after M whining and begging in his self-canceling way I got a stiff pucker in my brow, stiff pucker what shd I make of that. "Please Ellie just for half an hour" in a faint conventional voice. I'd like to fuck but he's pressing me to say no. And then comes with pitiful eyes, yuck. I had half an hour before I had to pick up R, lay down and felt the forehead as a pull, then with some fright thought, be the emotion, anxious and young, a childish anguish, what they called 'worry,' recognizing and lying back into it and at the same time feeling a pressure increase on the whole skull it seemed. Go on sinking into it, almost to the dream state, and suddenly the forehead opens with an elastic whup like a blind springing up. Thinking (kn.p.) is skill. What I want in sex is skill and he'll never have it. And that's that. And I can have it if I'm (p.s.), shrewd. And that's that. 22 To fall asleep I tried imagining myself with the One/companion in a grass field watching waves. Who, a presence like McNab (McCrum!). (There, does that explain it? Imprint.) The ready steady skilled compassionate one. Imagining him beside me, feeling my temples stretch open sideways. 23 This morning thinking of writing the story of C and T and I from outside it. What I thought was that it would take me into the heart of writing, it would be where I couldn't glide, and it would be the story most useful to women, and if others read it it would let them know me. Learning to do it would most assemble me. I would have to make a form of fiction to tune me to tell the most exact truth. There's the ecstatic truth like Peter Lake's white horse galloping in the first chapter, what it was in the speed of hope released. The reduced truth of our separation and aging. What would I want to say - Trudy's touch. The learning to look for essence (as in this moment). Devastation of feeling outrun by another culture. False reductions. The drug states. Mind. Being able to go into that span of minds to write them. What's the starting place. An imaginary platform. Try it. It's like a transparent Persian carpet. 24 Tired, worn down, seeing rosy five o'clock and turning away. How can I go on alive without love or adventure, as if missing Jam, missing interest. I take Ro in his baseball pyjamas to the garden where Wendy Aphrodite is digging a nursery bed. Last night I wanted a big freckled woman, imagining opening her knees dissolved me out of an aching skeleton. Then I overhead Sheila telling Wendy that Robert's coming from Tokyo - "Bobbin MacLean" - three weeks from the first of August. That's the kind of person he goes on writing to. Then Maria phones about Lis Rhodes. NFB funding. - It is like a harsh hunger for love - hunger - yes - the five week month, four and a half days to go. I cleaned the house, here it's bright and ready and no contact to come into it. I found a child under the plum tree and yelled in adult's anger and fear of anger, so conventionally. Seeing Rowen, what a torture it is to him to be confined, how happy he is learning, how can I bear so minimum a life. After cleaning house there is nothing to do. I get into bed. kwalen torture, a wringing [Buddhist notes: Karma is the idea of the laying of tracks for experience To see the motivations of this life it is necessary to enter the womb again. After that, one can go through the womb and enter into transcendental experiencing; one can explore many other dimensions. Psychic phenomena become rational after knowledge of the womb has been accomplished. Establish the practice of ongoing choiceless awareness Experiment: the color square red green blue yellow The 4 foundations mindfulness of body, feelings, mind-states and phenomena. Practicing awareness in that order. The way of morality, ie calming, overcoming 'lust' - the way of concentration, ecstatic absorption, overcoming 'anger' - the way of intelligence, overcoming 'dullness' Morality is not killing, stealing, lying, slander, hurtful speech, frivolous speech, not taking someone else's lover, not coveting, not wishing harm, not misusing sexuality, not being indolent in intoxicants. Basically it means not going against the human motive Arising yoga Fear center the solar plex. The line between aliveness and fear is very thin. Clinging to - physical form, feeling, perception, mental formations, states. Any trying to solidify what's in flux. Desire for sensation, desire to continue the same, desire to be alone in the universe. Body meditation - skeleton, flesh, skin and hair - to unlock sensual fixing Lotus sitting. Square sitting and right hand and shoulder, rt foot and hip, left side, bum spine back over head down to s.p. and there feel a stronger and radiating warmth like a sun. 20 min total. Classify according to defense, sensuality-greed, aggression or confusion-blocking. Given different practices. All the laws are already present in the body, ie intuitive knowledge So the order of the path is:
An intuition of human completeness or rightness
bija a seed syllable The right ear is binding, creating energy, the positive one. The left ear is loosening, dissolving, negative. Constantly using energy to keep things out The wise child figure, "such a figure is a herald of the integration process" Primary paranoia from the womb and birth Secondary from father controlling mother "abstractly present like god" Dearmouring positions [sketches] If you are actively investigating the other being you are in a state of love. There's energy love, being wrapped in an electromagnetic field, and exploratory love.
The diamond light Listen at the right ear and repeat the sounds you hear. Go through the alphabet investigating. Sometimes at the heart is visualized a wishfulfilling crystal, a pomegranate, a crystal rose. Your work is to come to realize the diamond light in the heart.
The deepest symbols are the bindu, the tube or stalk, and the cakra. These three make up the coding of the being. Therefore meditation on related objects will likely strike the deepest cords in you. Belief in inner work "Contemplation meant the life of direct experience."] Saturday 25th notes in origin 1977-80 northern Alberta What order. Which is the best brake. The field. Which is the first in order. Moon. Which is the last and most complex to see. Cloud. [Notes on Lis Rhodes' Pictures on pink paper: You could say simply, that it is a woman at home, thinking, and the film is her thoughts and statements, a continual crossing from one to another, visually and audibly. Abstract and concrete, formalist and anti-formalist at the same time The multiplicity of visual technologies; workedness Effect one of overflowing abundance The argument that they take place in different universes: (Stein's) experimental play and demonstration of skill; and women's oppression like a battle between circumstance and imagination, but not completely separate experiences Three voices - an old countrywoman - a protean sophisticated woman mimicking - the filmmaker One voice an anchor and the other two making the film move from one position to another; they never settle. Rephrasing, skeptical questioning and possible answers A gate, a lane You don't see women (you are made to be their voices), you do see 'nature' She is refusing the witches' club as an escape, this dream of all women together. Celebration (of 'madness', as a release or freedom from restraint, or 'essential' femininity) is checked again and again by an almost common-sense voice which warns that these are other forms of our gender oppression, and must not be taken too seriously. Appropriation of 'anonymous' voices by an author - the 'other' voices ultimately serve the owner of the means of production. What can I both yearn for / refuse when I am confronted by a semi-mythologized background so different from my own, yet which can be identified with partly because it is attractive and also because it has roots in a particular English tradition of personalized rural histories: this is dominant culture. We do not want to follow in patriarchy's footsteps by excluding working class, black, lesbian and disabled women in the same way that masculine culture does. A structuralist-formalist of-its-timeliness in relation to insisting that all images are representations. The image itself is not a location of meaning or truth but can only refer associatively within the context in which it finds itself. It seems that what happens is that society does not alter, but women do become more visible, resulting in more women entering the professions; some women capitalize out of the women's movement while others do not, though we never achieve liberation. To represent women's and women-centered pleasure She complains of "the suppression of political and material realities." Undercut collective, Penny Webb and Susan Stein. - How did you first become interested in film? When were you first absorbed in looking and listening? When did you discover the effect of holding a camera on that looking and listening? How old were you when you first looked carefully at images? How are images you've 'taken' or made different to you, from images other people have made? What do you learn from the repeating that a recording technology makes possible? How are you affected by the breaking-up this kind of information makes on your habits of flow? When did you learn to see in an image a reflection of the person making the image? A: I'm not very interested in film. I haven't had teaching jobs because I didn't want to be professionally interested in film. What are you interested in? Perception. I want to learn to perceive. How is that related to making and showing work in some particular medium? I make a lot especially in writing that no one sees. Also I make things many people don't like to see and a few do. There's a sadness in not being seen or in having people not like to see what I like to see. I show what I like to see and what I'm just learning to see, as a way of testing and strengthening it. A lot of what I've made is never shown. Or there is a gap, of many years at times, between making something and feeling able to defend it. Or even to know how to present it. Making and showing are separate. I make something as a way of learning to see something, it adds concentration. I'm always longing to have people see my work. I want them to be like me and delight where I delight, but also I want them to teach me, the other part of me, that doesn't yet understand. But showing work is something else. It's seldom really finding company for delight, or comprehension completed. It's more to do with seeing how many others there are, how other they are: and that makes the work itself strange, again and again, in many different ways. It's the puzzle about identity, how am I seen and does it have anything to do with what I am, but displaced onto an object the others and I can look at together. I have to say I'm aware of personal urgency in the question. My visible body is often counted against me, socially and erotically, and so I make something visible that will stand in for me physically and be more liked. In fact what I make is as often disliked. But I like to see it, I love to see it. It is a form of myself I can love to see. And if there are people who can't love to see me, and yet love to see what I love to see, at least we can do that together. That's the foundation. The childhood in it. In terms of the adult work of intervention in power-distribution it is also a defense of something. A politics. What it hopes to be is a demonstration that we can be in pleasure, in contact, in comprehension, outside the nets of social life, language and anxiety. We can go to heaven when we like, it's here, next door, available. [Opposite: Eradicating sexual division. A system of signs which create meaning (by) categorizing according to a system of difference, opposites. Notions of dichotomy and continuum "It isn't possible to think about human beings without gender" 'Meaning' she equates with being able to talk about something. Everything has got to be nameable. If something has got no meaning it doesn't exist. It is eliminated from the picture; it is not perceived, period .... If we couldn't name we couldn't know, we couldn't see. "We don't know how to get around this basic fact of our perception being dichotomous" or hierarchical. How image conveys the meaning of a less-than-full identity The only completely acceptable person in the USA is a white middleaged tall American man. A leaf is already an image. It is not interesting in itself. This new world where everyone participates with full responsibility and full importance.]
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