| aphrodite's garden volume 6 part 2 - 1987 july-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
27th July 1987 I want to release myself in love, when I see Michael I am staring looking for a go-ahead, when he's remote or sad I can come at him hungrily, that in itself is the go-ahead it seems. His little head still has that minus look, but if he's away inside himself there is something to be hungry for. So I come at him - cautiously, always feeling for the inner nod, as if accepting him is dangerous like walking a goat trail on the side of a cliff. I can do it so long as I discriminate moment by moment - I like his nose and mouth etc - but it is a caution that's really about coming on the edge of the illusion. "That's not bad, it's quite acceptable" I'm saying. but then I say something a little outside his vocabulary and the way he says ha-a?, that stunned pitiful bleat and I'm out on the other side of what I can't take. And then the way I feel spelling out an explanation, behind it I'm aghast at what I'm acceding to. And I flee home to put something in my mouth, lie down in hot water, pour someone else's sentences through me. Why do his patches of dumbness take the floor out from under me the way Jam's more destructive patches of craziness didn't. When Jam was crazy I felt attacked. When Roy was raving I did feel the ground open, that was fear. When Trudy got into one of her manic dependencies I'd feel like escaping. But was it ever what this is, shame? What I'm wondering is if what I feel is the pure form of what the other is not expressing. Beyond this movement, the one I don't reach - wass ist das - a separatedness. What is this stupidity in front of me? Test it. A speed and mobility I haven't had in a long time but am being recalled to. It doesn't have an aim beyond. "Most people fall in love with the defense." 28 [local CBC interview about the garden.] It was alright on the radio. There was the voice light supple sexy humorous holding itself intelligently aimed while with the other hemisphere it danced through many slants of a long sentence, drew birds jumping in a hedge, a garter snake by a pile of rocks, the little hills and a shade grove, and came out singing a useable cap. So what do I think about succeeding in persona. Odd the way when I'm talking I don't hear the darkhaired seducer, who sounds like Marilyn Cox and who I like and who is not at all bulky. I have nothing bad to say about her. I don't see how she can be the real thing but she's a good creation. Sounds like she has long hair and an experienced mouth. You wdn't know she was lame, no. She doesn't sound like a farmer. She sounds like a - writer? Not quite the vocabulary. A courtesan, yes, she sounds like she's teasing a sexual friend. She sounds free and adventurous. She's not like Muggs clear and friendly, or Trudy springing in bubbles and gurgles. She's more air than water. A wiry breeze. I liked Yarrow too, standing eye to eye with Eric. I liked her lurk, she's smart. I could see her placing her tone and, what else, salting with the picturesque, knowing the words Margaret wanted in a repeat. I'm not phonier but I'm placing myself in a different class. 29 It's true that when I see my mother I feel I'm seeing myself. It is to defend myself from that image that I need a different image. Is that true? No. I have to defend myself from most images, and if people weren't images what would they be. It's fundamentally true that I take them all as my own image. Making something I can love to see. Thinking about the girl's film about her grandmother. There's the text about her grandmother and being taught to swim, not waving but drowning, being immersed in life and drawing the death breath. Then the coda Ave Maria with swimmer turned angel beating slowly away. The text is 'delivered' too externally - Ave Maria though beautifully sung is the Catholic government (it is sung at funerals!). I thought of taking just arcs and curves out of it, always too little to identify but spaced so it would subliminally form. It was on video, a tech of dissolving frame to frame that can be computed onto film at NFB Montreal. I'm thinking of a matte that could go over something ordinary, or the running field can be a matte. Anne Marie Fleming dir 1987 Waving M's new look. I cut his hair one evening on the porch. I left it in the ponytail and snipped oblique across the pull. He looks in his open shirt like a West End gay. But stands inhaling sedative molecules off my head. I look like a lesbian weightlifter. "Lemon shaped breasts" sharp in a small red shirt. Good green pants, red cotton flats. Fierce hair. Sprung back, clean-cut arms. One of the best bodies I've been, reprieve. And lay the side of my face into the warm concave between his shoulder and breast, men like me marry women like him very gratefully. Women like me what do we do. I could see Jennifer [at the NFB] didn't like the notes in origin footage and I explained it so smoothly I dunno if I cd even like it again. I could tell there was no point looking at it in her company. Instrumental relations, I'm suavely doing it. 30th I know now that a movie isn't what it is until some years after it has been out. This morning happiness is here. I look up and see the leafed complex space of the hall, banister, hall door open to the outside, light on the floor, strips of shadow, reflection, doors' angles indicating sun in the north. This is the summer of bangs and thumps. Last summer was the summer of the yelling typewriter. I was with Jim Campbell at the height of his island. We were talking about the view, water in the background. He said the masts were twice as high as the ---, I meant something else about water being the sky ground. He grabbed me, not surprising. It's a shame to waste this pretty body. I agree, I'd like to, I say (he's certainly stronger than I am), but I won't harm wives. - Between looking out from the very high viewpoint and falling to the floor wrestling I pumped up a test tube full of water, or glass? Poured it off, pumped up another, and all but the first had grass seeds floating. We called it dirty water, I imagined the water around the intake pipe disturbed. Then he grabbed me. "I couldn't look her in the eye, and I could never come back." And he doesn't care. I was seeing across the floor some stuff in the corner, some kids arrive at the top of the trail. We scramble up. Something the other night. A house with an upper floor I get into by an attic ladder. Ammi's house, he's showing me the house of his young marriage. In the center of his middle floor is the kitchen with thousands of cups hung around the walls. You have so many cups! I only have ---. Then we go up into the attic. On the left is where the artist sits and draws his mother, a bare artificially lit place with a curtain. The mother's picture shows her dimpled fat bum (like a Venus of Willendorf) big as a tub. And on the right where I have to go open a door to see in, is the little boy sitting on a bed, my little boy. 31 NFB will pay lab costs. Something unstuck. Thanks Meg. It's 3 o'clock on a Friday. I pick Rowen up in an hour. All day haven't known what to do. David Mann's letter says "disappointing because it hardly indicates to me, that you have really utilized the vast talent and intelligence that I know you have." Nervously drinking tea. Not having money and then having money have spoilt the week. [I sent my high school teacher what will we know] 2nd August Touring the dairy with my arm around the lovely black woman telling her I understand why she'd've been flirting with Michael. "You don't have to be your worst with him." We're going through a door. She turns around swiftly, kicks the white man who was about to kick her. "I didn't even know he was there." Gospel joy. Sitting by M seeing his bare naked head, kind eyelines, tears. Coming close holding his arm with both hands. The two people near the back, a tall thin whitehaired man, a tall younger woman, sitting with their shoulders overlapped and heads angled together, walking out holding hands. On the other side of me a young woman black with a honky family, one look over her shoulder as she goes home. Oh the joy all out of the whitetoothed black singing women. I'm with the two people in the back I'm with Michael I'm with the two young women seeing the old ones fly. [Say amen somebody at the Cinemateque - dir George Nierenberg 1982] 3rd Investigation. What about Buddhist exercises. The aspiration is right. I don't like the numbers and the glamorous gods. I like the exercises of colors. Don't want mantra in another language. Don't want to be colonized. Wd like the principles translated into a pure form, a non-mnemonic form. Don't want to take on a mass of inessential and then sort it. Want to be clear and interested, the best states. Want to see form color movement in grain in space. Want to be mobile as in drugs. Want to know how to go into the other. Want to know how it works. Want to know or decide about showing work as art. Want the surge of will and energy with courage and comprehension. A platform, like a sheet of glass in outer space. Big enough to walk around on. Green-tinted like sea-ice, wire reinforced, showing a faint grid of gold lines. It's out in the blackness, just a platform, strongly absolutely lit, in a complete absence of atmosphere. Shadows thrown by the person standing on it, by the folds of her clothes, by the fuzz on the back of her arm, are absolutely inky black. There is a near sun and its planets. Piercingly clear drifts of the further suns like sharp bubbles in a stirring sea. It is a location, specified, unlosably anchored in the gravitation web, the lines of sight, from all the distances of all the degrees of circumferential space. And something else. A cloud of particles, in black space too, but unlocated, not lit by a sun. The particles are self-luminous. They can be any color. They move as they do. They're watched. I take my position at the northeast window harrowed by opposition from the window across the court. I'd like to be here without her eye on the face I am as I work. I can't look out along my shoulder to the mountains in their blur, the gravel scree of her building's roof, without feeling myself presented as a target. At her window the lid is down. She's behind shades, a rolled blind more than halfway down, a picture stuck on the glass from inside, a crack across the lower pane. Even the small rectangle left uncovered is obscured first by specks of paint and then at another focal depth by the dull reflection of still another window, our mutual neighbour's, in parallel lines of shiplap siding whose interruptions show the glass around the crack to be slightly dished. Describe something. An anchor sinks into the present. I take a breath. It brings the scent, the taste, of nasturtium, orange; sweet pea, purple. The colors themselves, they say, the delicately veined wings of the sweet pea, the skin-like crushed velvet of the nasturtiums, are there on the windowsill by having come to me, inverted, twice, and then gone back by another medium to be where they are. The medium in which this hypothetical geometry is drawn is what interests me. I fear her, I love the flowers. She is fear, the flowers are pleasure. I reflect. Alright. Alright. There is a story. Eleven years ago when I was thirty-one and had been living in this city with my son, who was five then, for only a year, I found the people I had been looking for. It was legendary; there is that way of telling it; but I'm going to try to avoid that way because I can see that the sense of legendary patterning, so strengthening and delightful to me then, was also the dangerous weakness I brought into a deadly contest. Deadly, no. We are all still alive. But not as alive as we were. A platform, like .... 5th Steam bath. What can I do to make it less harm. Physical compensation. Vitamins. Steam. Yoga and sitting. Sun work. Stop tea. 6 Night aches. New neighbours' voices' terrible intrusion. Beef men and nice women horribly white, child's strangled crying. Falling asleep I was investigating the knot between the eyebrows. A woman's brown fingers dipped in warm oil reached in and stroked a vertical cord. There was a most elusive electrical shiver like a tiny orgasm in the astral body. Stroking the left side of the fissure. I started to wonder if it was the midwife's massage. But couldn't take that further. And then sinking away a bit, seeing my hands stretched, stretching them, and feeling the knot relaxed. Mary's obedient concern and tense hands. Veins. The way they go to sleep at night. Nerve damage from heavy work. High blood pressure. I woke scared from dreaming they were going to be amputated, arms and legs. Lay fretting about how it might be an answer to the question I left about forehead knot. Is it amputation anxiety? Something was cut off and something else will be. In diabetes they're cut off. Asked tarot about minimizing steambath damage, it said (5c) which I thought might mean feel bad about it, don't cut off sorrow. In Buddhism getting used to losing the whole body, is that a good idea? Then another anxious dream thought I was pregnant and would be eight months when I was in England. Oh no. Waking slightly; I'm not am I? Want to watch whether what he says is true, that dreams are a few frames and the story is elaborated by another function. And then: in a library sitting beside a man (on R). He comes sits next to me (L), shows a word in a book, -- ex----, a non-word, the ex in it is what's unheard of, I only see the top of his head but I know this is his way of saying hello, I tousle him firmly, thinking what did he see, me next to another man. 8th Akira yelling about computers. 1978, October maybe, a computer error, US military on full alert, somebody said let's wait 15 minutes. Mountain rescue, a woman he was with four hours while she slowly died. Jiggling his leg by the coffee table. 9th 4th is over, the way a time w/o presence still is a harvest of accomplishment. The gate, kids' place, pumpkin, arbour, fireplace, grove, and tonight's marvelous dark, moon rising, lids rapidly snuffed over flaming pots, smoke, Japanese man with a mane of black hair, a voice from the deep, watermelon as much as we could eat all afternoon, Rowen's short legs in long shorts, Me wa-lor, and did water most of the grove. Michael and I quietly planted the first rowan, Lois, Randy, Muggs, Joan, Max and Ian, Fiona, Eileen actually sifted dirt, and then Eric and Peter Imm havin' to dig out their own and it's in. Diana painting at home. Rhoda staying all day for her two little pots. I was sitting on the fence with M and threw a watermelon rind so's it'd just cut in front of Trudy's knees. Tod and Fumiko, Akira at the wrong time. A boy neighbour staying late to throw sawdust. I did it. My vision with people pouring through. [First annual garden open house, Sam's raku firing.] 10th Yest morning the dream of imagining I'm a seagull, a way to get home. Last night very thin worn-out sleep, Paul K explaining that Rhoda - amounts to sorrow about how they took everyone - anyone who admired me admired them more - Rhoda's presence yesterday took my ease away though I got it back later when I could come into the firelight and outlast her and be the one who'd been elsewhere. Receptor site antagonists, yes, I'm knocked out of art into organization and yet from their view what I made is so marvelous they want to join. Wanting to tell Joyce - the beautiful gate, the grove there will be with red and yellow and jumping crows and 9 people proudly rooted especially Eileen - kidpit full of little girls making sand birthday cakes, closeby and in their own territory - Tod's beauty marked by the entrance - my own preeminent - the shed roof and hills - a Lugnasad full moon fire feast fiery and hot and watermelons without limit - what else, rocks on rockpiles, wood on woodpiles - moon lifting in the east and an incandescent pot borne out of the hearth in the midst, my brick platform for the kiln, Michael painting a bowl, and I got a moony one, and Diane's kids - and Eric's accomplishment, and Yarrow's, and Muggs' friends from Carnegie, and Anne's and Chorhon's master gardeners. 13th A city house with garden, the BRAVA Foundation, best, real, adventurous, valiant and ardent, a core of brilliant women on London scholarship hand-rearing picked girl geniuses into universalist internationalists. Kristeva McLintock Le Guin Lessing. Women assuming science and standing in the present. - Medicine wheel in Majorville Alberta thought to be from 2500 BC contemporary with pyramids and early Stonehenge, is big wrecked cairn and circle. Mouse Mountain Sask is like Bighorn Wyoming. Ring of Brogar Orkney Islands, Callanish I on Lewis in Outer Hebrides, head of Loch Roag Morning sun was Hor or Horus, noon Ra, evening Atun, setting Osiris. According to Aristotle the Pythagoreans divided the universe in three: the ouranos, sky, in which everything changeable and corruptible, air and clouds; cosmos the place of ordered movement, region of sun moon and planets; olympos, place of pure elements, which held the stars. Beyond these, region of celestial fire, and finally apeiron the infinite space or infinite air from which the world draws its breath. To the Shoshone it was home to the little people who lived in the caverns beneath the wheel. Floor plan of a Cheyenne medicine lodge for sun dance 5 million teepee rings, loafsize stones 5-30" diameter and a few large figures and several large stone circles. Perhaps the sundance lodge modeled on these high ones. 28 days apart in succession, Aldebaran in Taurus, Rigel in Orion, Sirius in Canis Major In Canada, Moose Mountain, hilltop in Saskatchewan. Alberta, Dick Forbis at U of Calgary. Nearly always the spokes point to other medicine wheels. NW Europe Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, 3500 BC - 1500 Moon's movements during the month go through its whole N-S arc of rising positions, widest arc Major Standstill. Minor Standstill is the whole cycle of 18.6 years. Neolithic extent of mound burial A cursus, parallel banks of earth running for considerable distances across the countryside Neolithic short with long heads, Early Bronze Age tall with round heads, Beaker Folk Cursus, henge, stone row, circle Achnabreck 'cup and ring marks' in area of Arran Bruno 1568-1600, in De Monade he saw the fixed stars as suns freely suspended in limitless space, all of them surrounded by inhabited planets. The center of the universe was wherever the observer is. Copernicus Bruno Galileo Kepler Newton 15 as she looked into the bright pale eyes that were the color of the sea, that were cold as aquamarines, was thinking - I shall not be able to endure the agony of loving this man. - Black and white passage by overlayer pos-neg and occasional flower - voices, trance study notes, stories - archives of Lessing Le G etc, texture of voice qualities. Black and white with my slides flashing through their colors A structure of nukkeia, white rock in the underworld 17th Steambath. What's different. Narcissus' pampered hair. It's there to make the other friendlier but it catches. More of a cheerful good worker - ingratiating - worker know-how. I could cut it. Pubic curls in front. The way it's going with M, man dreams dying out, I'll look for a smart woman again. She's creased though. What is it about his shifting his eyes when I mentioned the sculptor. He's jealous about any man I mention. Why does that make me sick. The emptiness of the relation and still he can't stand a rival. He wants to own this zero. His blindness makes me sick, the way he won't add up the signs. And then one day when it comes to its conclusion and I quit he'll be shocked, maniacal, murderous maybe. He thinks that if he gave his badness I'd leave. And I would probably, because when he answers back I dislike the style of it so much I instantly give up and shut up. "I'm helpless" he says and begins to cry. I go in the other room and wash the dishes. And to leave him behind I have to abandon Rowen, who seems to know I'm going to do that, and hits me when he can, crash on the head. - Daph calls to say tessera 3 out of 4 in the end with her persuasion will probably take charm value ethic tactic though they find it idiosyncratic and don't see what it has to do with feminist theory. Then we'll see, will it bring ONE exciting meeting somewhere. But there was Daphne on the phone and I drove her backing off politely as she does, "I should get off the phone " because when she offers something in conversation, like a man I can't take it up. Harmonic convergence. She and Betsy got up and meditated, she felt a ground swell, she felt a silence in the city. Blank. Well she'd know. What did I feel. Hastings Street. What does she mean, meditation, is what I want to know and there wasn't time. She felt abandoned she said, Kit went back to Seattle, Betsy's teaching. I'd've thought you'd relish it I said. Who is everybody else, I'm so out of step I must be a genius - or a bitter cripple - or what? 18 "She's jealous about any man I mention. She wants to own this zero. Her blindness makes me sick." Who would be speaking if that's what were being said? It has something to do with how charm value ethic tactic is feminist theory. Ie not to stand in the position of lack. "Stand in the free position." Watching television, I'm scanning the men who talk about hunger - scanning for a husband. I'd like it if there were a fine acceptable - 19 Then an attack of the kind of pain I haven't been in. I miss Jam. I've noticed myself missing her, it went away and is back. I know, it's the steambath. A breath. It's making me want to see Joyce. Loneliness. If he makes a cup of tea it's slop. If he mends a bike tire it comes unstuck. He can't cook a meal so it's good. He can't touch me so I'll trust him. He can't organize Rowen's clothes so he knows there are clean ones in the drawer. He will sew his pants narrow but the green sweater has been ripped under the arms for two years. In a dream seeing my little poems, satisfied with their company. I want to work with Joyce on dreams, I still don't know what a dream is. Next winter once a week and get the money. 44 hours [at the steambath] for 4 hours [of Joyce], that's impossible. It has to be easier money. A thousand dollars. 20 If I can't go to England, then Montreal. Montreal and England. Row gets up at 6:30. I slap him for putting porridge on my cassette recorder. Exacerbated wanting to be in work heaven. Tack up a big sheet of paper and give him one by one my pastel crayons. It's not nine yet and we're crazy to get out. Phone Michael's house for Jim to wake him. We'll bring him a drawing. On the bike labouring uphill against a strong west wind. The air is completely clean, deep blue, brick corners like Edwin Hopper. "We've come to pester you." M in a chair smoking, with sleepy little eyes. Ro running in, grey shorts red teeshirt Hilda's pigeon sweater. I show how he was dancing when he'd finished the drawing. Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, -duh-duh-duh-duh. Steps the size of his feet. There are Michael's various little paintings, Jim's soft photos of the kid, a Thai boy in Asian wood, second stalk of the avocado pot, Jan Wade's beetroot gods, the yellow yellow with sun. We cross corners together going to the Welcome Café and then Crabtree. "We never know when we're going to be able to have fun!" R puts sugar in a bowl, seasons with salt and pepper. There's a Fijian maybe smoking a cigarette M says smells like the bidi's in India. I ask the small brown man what it is. He offers me one. Clove I think. M walking me to the steambath can smell it from his pocket. Colors are bright today but it's something else, a surge. Though my bones ache as they do when Ro leaches them. 22 Saturday. In the garden at the concrete table anxious hearing that Yarrow's collaborating with Ernie. Wondering why I immediately gave her knowledge she can use against me. Wondering what it is she wants to have. Sitting in my garden that's dried, wrecked in design by a saboteur, worried in power contests, coming up with more strawberries today than ever, tasseled with beans, rustling corn blades next to a sapphire sky, in progress with a bed still open and a boulder in it. Yarrow is linking up with the men who most want to level me. Ernie mustn't be in charge here. "I had fallen asleep in the arm's of Lipsha's jacket, in the cold wet wheat under the flashing sky." Used to be romances for excitement, without them it's stale - these years - oh how to change it - where's the source of intensity now - that's what to find out. 25 Cheryl said, lying in soft covers and clean sheets, in a washed teeshirt with freckled soft arms, that Trudy said that the night I improvised with Paul Kram I stole from her. The silence after, none of my supposed friends would acknowledged anything had happened. Roy did. I'd gone out into space and moved in a freedom found among a thousand considerations and she couldn't bear for it to have been someone else who did it. And then her and their weekly music and her embarrassing show with Roy and Howard. I'm here in the fresh current of air, the roofers have been banging since seven. Now I have to get C to stop trying to sabotage me. Alright, I do it myself with Michael. They. The root fright = it isn't I who will be in the center of possibility. What more is there to know about envy. Relativity. That in any group the being of anyone is their position in the group. This happens like cattle sleeping in shifts. I'm thinking of the way with C I take the position of being less affected. As I do it I watch the denial but at the same time I feel I'm defending myself from her effort to get me more into it so she could be less. Why we let someone into a position or not. Dear One, I think of you and feel my mouth swell, I remember all four kisses. It's fall, you've gone away again. Japanese maple trees with claws. Is that the culture you can be? I'm sorry you find me too smart. There's a connection between intelligence and dancing, as in Bach. Duets in heaven is how I'd like to think with you. One day are you gonna be up for it? I've tried to get around behind you, but I don't know you, I'm not around you, you're there unexplained on the other side of the surface of your eyes. I honor you as if my own life is in there with you. I'm drawn to surrender to its cold silver green light. 26 The Irish Girl. [Mike is involved with] 27 It's not very different from the light of meditation, the way sound moves in you to produce a certain effect which is like an effect of light. Passages in the Cantos that do it. Subtle juxtapositions of vowels. Looking upon the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Earth and its contents as materials to form greater things - that is to say etherial things. That which is creative must create itself. Straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness. This light of which the body is the ground. 1. Gnostics. "The spirit stood somewhere outside of this matter universe and had fallen into it." 2. Pagans. Sense that the universe is basically good, fertility is good, natural sexual rhythm is good, and ritual celebration. From 5th century AD Christianity is the Roman Empire continuing to expand. Your image form or ideal self out there in the spirit world comes and wakes you and reminds you who you really are and you begin to make slow progress back out of the concentric spheres. Practices by which, as you left, you dropped off the characteristics of each sphere so you could arrive in the Empyrean as it. It's told as a relation of two but as I know it Orpheus and Euridice are alternatives I am - one needs to search and one feels lost. Invoking him I got to the lost feeling - the fields of the blest I know - are they on the way - - [Drafting program notes] Lis Rhodes makes films with an interesting and abundant relation between visual and auditory tracks. Both are multiple, mysterious. Seeing Light reading and Pictures on pink paper I'm exhilarated in capacity simultaneity authority new form. Her art is editing. Made in the midst of reference worlds. Why it sounds like advertising - because it's identifying. When I saw Light reading and Pictures on pink paper I wanted to make films. Her work though it's authoritative and unusual opens capacious useable form. She stands in the midst of many worlds of reference, class and feminist politics, formalist research, the grand women' tradition of writing of the '20s, mystification and demystification, landscape and kitchen sink, and she opts for capacity: she won't identify with any of the arms of discourse: she will present, instead, a phenomenological accuracy of mix. I'm very interested by the way she sets out sound and visual tracks each rich and complex in a similar, layered way, but running independently like the two hemispheres of the brain dreaming each in their own medium. It is exhilarating then, as audience, to be given the position of a third term able to move freely, take in, move around in, this presentation of a simultaneous and non-polar two. The relation of two independent terms. This third term is a form of place hoped for, implicit, in our work on gender revision. I like, also, the way she takes up into film the radicalism of our grandmother generation of writers - Stein, Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Stevie Smith, and others who insisted on mobility, simplicity, non-polar inclusion, and a skeptical female intelligence standing firm among its own referents. Lis is the filmmaker who work I find most useful to my own. There has been a used-up feeling about experimental film these last years, but when I saw Pictures on pink paper I had a sense of being let loose on the other side of a barrier. I wanted to go right home and make films, because LR's work though it's authoritative and elegant opens a broad, coherent, useable form. She works in the midst of many terms of struggle - class and feminist politics, formalist research, landscape and kitchen sink traditions, romanticism and structuralism, and she opts for capacity. She won't identify with any of the arms of discourse: she will present, instead, and by feel, a phenomenological accuracy of mix. I'm very interested by the way she sets out sound and visual tracks each rich and mysterious in a similar, layered way but running independently like the two hemispheres of the brain dreaming each in their own medium. It is exhilarating, as audience, to be given the position of a third term able to take in, move around in, her presentation of a simultaneous and non-polar two. This third term is an achieved form of the place hoped for in our work on gender revision. I like, also, the way LR honours and takes up into film the radicalism of our grandmother generation of writers - Stein, Woolf, Richardson, Stevie Smith - who insisted on mobility, directness, non-polarizing inclusion, skeptical female intelligence standing firm among its own referents. LR is a minute editor but I feel her artistry most in an unheard of kind of balance she knows how to evoke. Her texture is mysterious but coherent as a genuine privacy should and would be. The coherence is felt as an exhilaration. I don't know what's going on exactly but it feels right. (Another person who has this quality at times is Godard.) - Talking to C, found out that what I forgot to say was she's a writer. She's a writer and a visual artist, both, in a way that's natural to many of us but not well expressed. She [arranges them] so their relations and differences can be seen. Bragging about how I wrote real sex with J (and Daph and Bets only write topography), maybe I'll set out Lake House. - There I look at it and see it needs filling out. It's very unwritten except in parts. Dear Ursula Le Guin I hope you still like to hear that your work gives wonderful pleasure. I read The dispossessed maybe once a year and cry every time. And feel my own home country in northern Alberta well revised by Always coming home. It's a delight to see your work grow. Friday 28th Buy a red current root in a plastic package, and then in a bigger bag, a yellow current, big strong wands, don't have much root on them, a little bristle at most. Maybe they're the kind of wood that'll grow if you put it into earth. I'm doubtful until I see the red buds opening to white flowers, like apple buds, and big translucent fruit not yellow but pink like gooseberries and hanging singly like little lanterns. These are wonderful, sturdy and vivid, I'll make the hedge with them. Not sure I have the money for them both. (Clothes shopping for London. I try everything on with London meetings around them. Black Harris tweed jacket, another bright an' dark one, this washed faded sloopy white greenish cotton shirt, good cotton pants, army green with wide legs to put an elastic ankle on. What else. I want good old-fashioned wool pants with big cuffed legs. Am even imagining myself in expensive off-colors - what does it mean.) C and I have dinner in the New Cambodge. She starts speedy and polite. Then we get into our area and zoom. There's little in memory from it. The swath of her hair in black and white stripes. Pink face. Not much image. We're computing and delivering, admiring ourselves. She has taken such good care of her white pretty teeth that the enamel is worn through and she can't eat fruit! At her door she reaches for me. 31st Up the mountain, the road darker than night below radiant fading sky. Tree giants standing in their idiosyncrasy of shape, a meccano tower with three red lights. Rowen on my lap with furry car seat cover over his bare legs points and turns his head. Contented quiet climbing and rolling down, he warming my lap, rescued from coldness toward his misery. The man drives, I'm aware that we're in his body, don't quite like the way he takes curves but am accepted in my and Rowen's tension and have in me the moments at the top, pearly everlasting along the roadside and rocks in the streambed getting most of the light by thin filtering, the cities below a gauze of fine greyblue and yellow lights, ships in harbour pointed all in the same direction toward the bridge like nails toward a magnet, silver wakes of invisible small boats in disorganized commas, the great sky a very powdered old orange, and nearer by, beyond the abyss, the black extraordinary line of the sums of the mountains - it has a few very plummy dark folds this side, shades of black, but what reaches us is the shape of natural stone - that over there, and at our feet on the steep road grade the pearly everlasting holding onto more light than the sky seems to give. Look at the skyline he says. "I saw, it's very strong." Today there's a note from Josie under a stone by the water jar. Two handfuls of strawberries. 2nd September Gritty pollen on my nose, evening primrose. Walking east on 5th Avenue in deep leafy Kitsilano. Arriving at a house whose living room shows the writers' walls of books, all quiet with a grey chair and golden light and latest model telephone and glassy framed art. And from the dining table such clean dry hydrangeas barely blue barely green in the black glass, and clothes outlined up in the sky starting to move. "What do you mean, sacred?" "Soul is when you feel yourself to be on a journey." "And destiny," Daphne says. Near death experiences Betsy brings in. "I don't know how the brain dies but if it dies from outside in, the tunnel experience and so on ...," I say. "You mean the column of light that asks you what you've done with your life is the brainstem?" Daphne very quick. "Maybe, but it's not less wonderful if it is that, than if it's Jesus or something." "There's a book by Olive Schreiner, not African farm, another one called From man to man, do you know it?" (Some scrimmage about the title.) "... There's a woman in it who's dying, there have been all sorts of disasters" - it's Daphne I'm telling, across the table - "and she goes out in the veldt and is lying in a covered wagon. She takes a mirror and looks at herself. What she's saying is, we've been together a long time and now we're saying goodbye." And then there's a long silence. A star of five. Twice Daphne tries to break it. We resist. I love the way we keep it. And then she tries again, the star unfixes and we lean forward and remake the focus and leave the presence of all of the outside. - Wanted to go on talking, Ro at home anyway, but it's contrary - how - I say the house was overwhelming - mixed feelings - she jumps on me about being held by ideals - she's pressing to get me, at times the old blank - I get sharp - in religion it's my turn, she wants to use words like worldly and otherworldly, the sacred, religion, mysticism, and I can see how to look at the thing and find a description of what it's like. What is it about comfort and coupling: what do I believe about it? That it prevents you looking through things and getting to the essence (like the difference between career feminism and living as a free female person, which is too direct to need discussion). What I mean is about the prenatal. Jam is in the same issue of tessera! What else: the way I was spurting at the garden meeting. The many dangers of the meeting. Peter saying the steering committee should be everyone who isn't on the executive. A moment when I really jumped, straight and hard. "Peter you're such a belly-acher, what do you GET out of it?" Aiee, was that too much, was that overspill of chagrin from having to give boss-ship to Eric? One day to the next, I can't say I'm the site coordinator at the community garden. (Now go to sleep Rowen so I can go see my own.) And Rowen sick when I was going to shoot titles. Frightened of the new movie, yeah. In dismay. Frightened of hating Rowen, using Michael, posing and bragging with my friends, spurting at the meeting, putting out an empty film. Frightened of the two weeks in which I have to manage to get it done. Cranky-fretty like he is, confined, raging. 4th Whether to apply for NFB sound training, I think so. I'm hurt at the garden, though as soon as I told Nathan it was less. But still. What is it. There's my own garden ugly and unblessed. There's the way I couldn't take a rest without Eric crowding in. Ways I can see there'll be room for other people now. And my creation is done. But I'll miss having an honoured place, people coming to make me wise. I couldn't do it and be at the steambath. Is it wrong to be knocked into art again? Winter for love images and learning. Doubt and tear of art again. Should I learn sound? Her bracelets on the table, package of Players. His painting in her room, hers stuck up above his bed. He's haggard and frightened. Jim's moving out. I'm afraid of being tipped into where I was before him. Laiwan says it won't be that. Having got rid of him I'll like him probably although saying that I'm thinking of reasons I won't.
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