| aphrodite's garden volume 6 part 3 - 1987 september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
5th September The yellow current? 6th [Notes on fractals] Showing Akira the slides - how wonderful they are - I'm in awe of the floating rock, adoring it, making plans for it, and it's fusing, the fan is off. "So much has broken this week." The TV, the record player, Michael's support, garden ease. Now these, that marveling time. "Another dimension," intuited structure. He said he felt Rowen's insecurity. A blurred garble of talk. Yelling about how "oo-man extremists" have made fascism in the States. First look [in this meeting] fantasies went. Though there was a heat. More than I wanted to know about the German violinist. "A question about lo-ove." No, if you want love it won't work. 7th Recursion theory. Looking for a description of how functions behave when they are turned back on themselves. Some, for instance, don't change. It came from trying to get around inconsistencies in set theory and it became the foundation of computer science. He said there are inconsistencies in the foundation that make (some?) computing impossible, but the knowledge is being suppressed. By whom? Reagan. - Michael. It's heavy now, he says he has to get away from my language. Tarot is saying he's going to take Rowen? Or I have to feel the anxiety? Anyway that I have to accept distress. Having to go to England this way, in strain, and not having ease with people, every - etc. I stand in the free position, I know how to bear myself in relation to Michael's other. I look after myself. I transform strain. I am calm and real. I am in true assessment, clear, resourceful. I take it truthfully but lightly. I stay out of anxious talk. I look after my body. I find ways other than attack to disperse pain. I am calm and light with other people. I stay out of elaboration of pain, I support myself lovingly. I break through into joy and reality. I use the changed time. I'm mobile and open. [Opposite, Buddhist notes: The principle is releasing energy so you'll have more in perception. Taking energy out of fantasy objects and putting them into presence. "You should be aware of when naming precedes form and when form precedes naming." Watch where the visualization is, it moves around. Start with breath counting and when there's enough calm a sign arises - bubbles, wisps of smoke, sparks. Then the practice deepens. Sparks moon sun blue planet thunderbolt clouds pillars of crystal or fire. All you have to do is develop calm awareness and get out of the way. Start the unitive life from the first moment of your practice. When you feel that unity, a marvelous healing comes, not only in your body but in feeling, in states of mind and even in the things that surround you. Breath meditation changes by itself. Experiencing the whole body, "I breathe in" as energy body. Counting, following and placing. 'Mind' or seeing reference place shifts. Count in the gap, watch the patterns of breath, watch the gaps. 55 minutes and 5 review. A question, the calm state, a symbol rises. One starts by
A call to the part of your being that wants to explore. Then you work on seeing the body to counteract sensual stuckness. Meditate on death to get energy. Meditate on lovingkindness to get over anger and frustration. Start off your practice with the assumption that within you there is an intelligence seeking out intelligence. Verbalization always turns to negativity. Arriving at meditation, the signs are: verbalization is dropped, rapport joy and clarity, breathing slows. The actual textural sense of the mind should somehow be crystal. A world of experience beyond, jumping from bliss to bliss. Hindrances: craving for sensation, result, rejecting the actual and wanting something special; aversion to practice; sloth and dullness; depression and skeptical doubt. Clear understanding has an active quality like the mind of the hunter. Not the mind in the womb. Human types needing different meditations: analytic/angry or hating, negation/not-wanting - beautiful meditations faithful/greedy sensual - unbeautiful, death meditations intuitive/overview/dullness (not affirming or rejecting because it sees all aspects) - breath meditations Glimpses of a thousand-chambered mansion each room a universe. There isn't time to learn it all so you must make a leap into a dimension of fundamentals. Body, speech and 'mind', clarifying or sorting. Basically undoing set. Learn what one can do about what conditions. Visualizing exercises to find what you need to dredge up. 4 foundations - mindfulness of body, feeling, mind states, phenomena. 4 noble truths - suffering, cause of, cessation of, path to cessation of. Body - nonverbal awareness. Just watch what it's doing without correcting. Become aware of the states you express. "Skeleton, flesh, hair" visualizing - check state. Be aware of s.p. Trusting body, entering carried fear. Spine straightening exercises, hatha, dearmouring, mantra with prostrations etc, chaotic med "get into some type of energy streaming experience" Lives contemplating the body in the body, ardent, clearly comprehending and mindful, having overcome, in this world, covetousness and grief. The feelings in the feelings, consciousness in consciousness, mental objects in mental objects. The experience of the hundred thousand eyes is the meeting with the intelligence of the cells of your body. The depth of the psyche is healthy. What you're afraid of is not the depth, it's the past. Seeking out certain kinds of food to build a particular kind of body and being. Be in the middle watching how mind and body ("name and form") feed on each other. Develop awareness of the body in an orderly methodical way, then you may be able to sort out what is hysteria and what is not. After you know the body as the body, you can get to feelings as feelings. Fasting and fluids, and then slowly solids, watching their effect. Total for 1, 3 liquid, 3 rice with sea salt and oil and purifying tea. Walk a lot. Then introduce stuff watchfully, vegetables then meat and oils, against the background of your staples. Ignorance: hatred, dulled. The being has decided to dwell in a shrunken state, tired, because the energies have been used to maintain the non-interested non-changing state. 2nd kind is indecisive, flighty, safe in no decision, desire but lack of conviction or energy. In absorption the mind is clear, lucid, energetic, interested and one-pointed. You can get out of it by concentrating in any one of your senses. Family. What can be communicated and what not. Sharing of merit: by the power of this wholesome state may everyone's state .... To have the force necessary to get you through to enlightenment you need to be doing it for others too. Maitreya: loving kindness. First love, physical care. Second love, help to investigate. Try doing physically whatever you can't do emotionally. Getting hold of something, letting go of something. Like working to get love if you have to. If you can't help it, see it then drop it. They don't love you, so reach out with your hands and do. Use your will. The meditator starts with the most manifest level and by paying attention to detail trains the mind to greater degrees of subtlety. By practicing this way you will come to understand the quantum theory of energy. You need the awareness of fear, the motivation of desire, the energy of hatred. 'Speech' ie sound, mantra, ie vibration OM in forehead A vibration that restructures. Enter the body and repeat the alphabet, see and hear. Cursive writing and energy suggestion. 3 realizations: seed, network, wheel. Imagine leaves on a tree blowing in a wind. The roots, the spread of energy, form the pipes: energy, spreading out or turning in, forms the stalk, the flower and the seed. Sometimes the dharma of energy spreading out is referred to as the fountain experience. Rosary mantram to drum up energy, get unstuck, get out of fear, penetrate, fight illness. 1. conditioned clinging - interference with awareness
2. choiceless awareness The 8-fold path begins with
Precepts. I undertake to train myself to abstain from killing and harming, taking what isn't freely given, wrong sensual conduct, false speech, intoxicants. Factors of enlightenment: mindfulness, concentration, investigation, tranquility, energy, balance, joy. The Diamond Sutra "When you see the diamond in the iron wall" I ask you to guard me. I ask you to stay near me. Steady me. Bring me into joy. Enrich me. Brighten me. Give me every comprehension. Make me clear in everything I do. "The modes of materiality" The 5 aggregates "Each atom has each of these" space/ether rupa cutting/drinking space fire vedana weaving of pos and neg earth sanna perception, redistribution of something, 2 weavings come together, there's a displacement = new shape air sankhara self identity, memory, self resumption water vinnana cohering space adjustment, communication, 'consciousness' According to one way of understanding these five are emanations from the 6th element, consciousness. Three 'bodies':
Visualizing Levels of absorption:
When you look into that you will come to a point where there is no meditator and nothing being meditated. Any signal you have to test. It has to be a tangible real-feeling thing. You feel it, you are mind-as-it. Patterning - eg spirals, the basics. The western mystery tradition transmitted through geometries. The hemispheres are balanced when you can bring a detailed dream into consciousness and you can take consciousness into the dream and change something. Then you know the bridge is crossed. Learning to see a crystal in the mind's eye and then being able to see it in space - projecting visualization is the work of the R hem. Not the uncon, because it isn't - but they are self-canceling. Trouble comes not from the other hemisphere but from conditioning which cripples. Then how to get the strength. One's afraid of going through again the child's shocks. Studying the elements like film a frame. A crossroads is where you can see them separate and you can see them as each other. He says the elements will present themselves symbolically as colors or geometries. A crystal network There are parallels between the major symbols that rise in meditation and the forms and patterns that create in the depth an orderly formation of your being. Something with a geometric quality, you should think of state of mind but also somatic statement. The origins of life are equal to the origins of meditation. 4 levels of dreaming
The unconscious mind is only unconscious to you, and 'you' in this case is the left hemisphere. you have to know about the other, but not by putting it within the frame of reference of your conscious mind only. You have to open to the other way of seeing. The left hemisphere is prone to making judgments, explanations, but the language of the two sides is not the same. The ego self must die, enter the lower states, and harrow hell. Long dialogues about failure, about other people versus you. First you stop ego clinging, then you come to all the states of sin in yourself and bring them to light. Full recall of the dream, know the events that caused it, how the story was built and why. Analyze the factors. Communication with the other hemisphere will very quickly change the ego. "Just an appearance." That means, there are millions of ways to see the same moment. You first work to know the lights. Then there are certain tasks. "Overcoming the fear of the elements. Once you have experienced the light, you will order the consciousness to walk into the heart of this fear. Then you can go through the rainbow that arises when you have completed that first task." Contacting the various levels of intelligence in your being, after having transcended the womb.
The full energy body of your being contains all the secrets of arts and sciences, all the hidden teachings of all time. You must be able to do both, manifest and dissolve. Avalokitesvara means space traveler. The experience of the four lights in waking is more subtle than it is in dream states. "When this is accomplished the clinging to time/space is overcome." All the fears you are subject to have their origin in the womb.] 8th Tuesday Shooting again with Eric [at the NFB]. Colin in purple shirt. No I wasn't injured. By noon. Brought money to buy land sea and air. And then the boots. The pretty girl selling them, though I take my strange foot out of the dirty cotton shoe with a hole, is nice to me. Boots I've dreamed, hiking boots in soft leather on a wide tread, dressy hiking boots for my tweed coat - yes! - and London streets. Softer since yesterday as if I will be able to be better friend. Trudy picking dead leaves off her poplar. She looks wrecked as I (this was yesterday) so it's easy to say "You should transplant it." "I know." "I can get you some larger pots, larger than that wooden one." "That would be great." And even Paul. I am no longer holding up the dike. In the garden, I water every day. Making the south bed, rows of leeks for the blue bed in the east. Door unlocked, as it happens. Mr Mann. 10th Something different when I touch myself, last few times. It's not the deep blue well, it's shallower and more spread out but it's so acute I have to be careful not to clamp it, and last night as it was beginning to let go, though I was holding the clamps open there suddenly was a black bar jumping on top of it blocking I don't know what. Yesterday I slept without waking but last night because tarot told me I'd be in anxiety next week I woke in the black and then again too early, with light on in the solar plex. It doesn't have emotion with it (though I presume it is emotion). Cheryl at Diana's yesterday morning saying goodbye, says why am I discriminating myself from body. I say, because I don't wish it (the pain). You identify with your wish? Maybe. I'd like to have mastered pain so well I wouldn't be afraid of it. The way last night I was instantly in pain about being in pain later. This morning I cut the cord and tucked it in. Already have been freer to remember lovely times with lovely Michael. (No use to speak to him though, he is grim and monotonous now.) Is it wrong. What do I mean by that, does it bring me less into life, to hold back while I have the possibility of him and then when the line is drawn across, to love the achieved good? Like his good heart chest, bone and fur. Holding his hand in the big chair. The safe drifting in his arms. Delight seeing him stand with his weight on one leg. The Keefer Hotel room, the stranger he was then, crimson light on his red man skin. The ragged quilt in his Jackson room, he cooking sausage and potatoes on the hotplate, the baby in his hammock. That hotel, the light on the green floors, oxblood doors, polish and scented geraniums with dried leaves in old aluminum pots. The sound of his careful tread on the steps. Most himself at first. It's thin pickings, I remember little of Rowen. And then the dream of coming back to my house finding Choy had been remodeling, house is overrun with his relatives, he's put in a lot of boilers, knocked open a wall to the neighbours, changed stair to a ramp. The kitchen has ugly little windows. Outside in the bit of front garden there are long spindly roses stuck in, some pink some blue. I'd say (Choy=) insecurity is remodeling and has stuck artificial flowers in the front. - Having to imagine the [notes in origin] rhythm with titles. Home, home. It's cut - checked, cleaned, tomorrow. Lab. Application. Rowen. 11th This morning dry and worn I opened Always coming home to the middle where Flicker is cracked, and I cracked. That's where I want to be, in love and vision not managing circuits for clients (she manages circuits), the way my slides are. But I liked the [NFB] building. Other people looking after it, marble and oak, the waste paper basket emptied, three elevators discretely opening and closing, a night clerk saying goodbye. All the surgical implements at hand, filtered air, editing paper off a roll, projector with a console. I realized sitting in the marble Ladies that the hospital was actually a security. I liked it as a building. I liked standing in the foyer hearing the mighty elevators approach. I liked the way the floors were marked, bands of terrazzo, with a wide skirting curling up for a cornerless meeting with the wall. Heavy slow doors on huge piston springs. I didn't know I liked it. I walked in it the way I saw Luke walking, looking looking at the building and feeling the space. There was a Chinese word in broken twig on the garden table, Laiwan said it wasn't her. 12th Wanting to write Robert, as if I could now. Dear one, to begin in the middle of no where, I want to be sharp in love again, I want to see you in front of me thin as the moon, bones eyes and nest of hair absolutely driven to be. I want to be in a room with the air like soft water between us. When you signal I want to go with you into the other room. I want to kiss your hands, I want to feel the doors standing open and love brightening the whole. I want you in me, I want your ribs in my hands, I want your bone, I want it ferociously. I want it bringing you next to me, arms, shoulders, shoulder blades in my arms. Your hair confused. Your eyes. I want one kiss after another. Dry curved brief ones that go on after they stop. I want to hold your arms in my hands and fuck you like the sea ahh - khhh ahh - khhh I want to lie in images with you, I want your breathing, I want the pulse in your thigh, I want the dry heat in your palm, I want your thinness, your dry skin, the hollow over your liver. I want to want and have you, adore and study you, withstand and give in to you. I want you in a chair across the room, reading, in your glasses, many years from now. [his letter from May 24 1985] But why so sharply defined, why not circulate back and forth, why can't lovers meditate within each other's crystal? The precise activity I suppose doesn't matter, it's how we perceive, receive. The dragonfly's shimmering crystal wall is pure optical. Is it enough simply to discover the precise area of seeing which is uniquely human in a physiological sense? I'm not sure I agree with you that a cross-fertilization with mind helps much irradiate seeing, or vice versa. Or if it does, what's lost is just as piercing. Ideas, language, needs are like leeches, filters - between our sight. An idea floats across the tree, blinding us. To be real as any dog is all we can ever hope for; we don't want it, (and do), so we settle for concepts. The real bones. But what did I want to say to you, about sight. Not that you don't already know it, I'm the beginner, here, I sense. Well anyway to approach the territory it is evident that the sense of betrayal which is implicit in sight is caused by it flickering from object to object and never pausing to look at any single one intently. A kind of visual promiscuity. Fidelity is to remain wedded with one object, which is to say, move together with it, mesh rates of decay, orbits, breath-waves as we move, we change, the one be --- ---; but this metamorphosis seems to be radically different from the volitional and arbitrary one caused by the eye flickering from object to object. The flickering seems to be occasioned by confronting (sooner or later, usually immediately) a deadlock within the object, that place where it starts to speak itself to the eye, unravel, open itself to admit us, and at that territory point we tear ourselves away to an innocuous new object before encountering the same dilemma. This movement between objects is motivated by fear, confusion, superficiality and a mass of erroneous assumptions; the movement within and into an object must indeed contain even more terror - of course, it is explicit now, the fear unhooded --- and even more confusion, chaos denied the luxury of synthesis, but it's the place to begin, I think, the place where known meets unknown. The amazing thing to me is the multiplicity within singularity: it is completely possible for me to learn everything there is to be known (perhaps that should be stated, all which we need) 'simply' through gazing at any single object. It sinks its taproot back into the first seeing; it hasn't changed, but our subsequent historical rings of conceptualization and optical distortion have changed and need somehow to be shed before the secret, the naked object, can be given, bequeathed. We've projected our sins upon the object, until everything is contaminated, or seems so, whereas the real has never ceased to exist at every instant around us, but our eyes have played the ultimate sadistic trick and disguised the object to seem locked into a rigid pattern as we now perceive it. It wears our history, itself has none. So it is as it seems, except for those (rare) times which we spoke of, when it shivers and steps out of its shape, it strips, it enters itself, one little chink makes the whole foundation tremble ... so simple, then, what needs to be done: stare at something for a very long time. It will suddenly change. Because the eye has become empty. Emptiness makes clear sight possible. Distance. To open spaces up in things means loss, Los (Blake's blacksmith hero), being lost. To be lost in the object, because you have lost what it used to be for you, and it exists supremely shimmering in loss, the dead-center of absence, where hands are only to let go of. The object says goodbye to itself continuing as it recedes, shedding images. The eye discovers this simply by looking, an act of faith, courage and fidelity. When it leaps across the abyss between it and the object, what enables it to survive perhaps is its own intrinsic emptiness, it's merely moving from one lostness to another, different shades of dark, as you can navigate at night by looking up at the treeline where dark of tree meets dark of sky. I betcha the leap is great fun, sheer delight, orgasm, because it is pure disorientation, total loss even of body and self: to see you have to let go of your eye. The emptiness is the sustaining medium, pulsing, sensual as silk or touch: to fall and then to come to rest (or violently collide) with an object (resting place, nest, entity, fusion) makes the double delight. The more intensely we can focus upon the one object absorbing its nutrient particularities ie details the more it generates or frees a field of emptiness which swathes us when the object opens. Enough talk. Hope your pregnancy goes well. I'll be here until July. Bob 13th Thin pain, trying out gnawing an old bone, Carolyn attacked by Al [Razutis], how can people be in any trust when they have to live by harming each other. Describing Al to her feeling I'm describing myself. "He's got so little of his innocence left he has to vampirize other people." Second day with Rowen, woken three times at night. When he clawed my face this morning the way he does I slugged him on the side of the head. I feel bad to find so little interest in his company, when he approaches I'm like a giant who can only think of eating him, there's nothing else occurs to me to do with this pink pretty vicious inarticulate little thing. Who strews the house, damages my goods, needs constant cleaning up, and squeals and cries and is unhappy with me. 14 About the sound mixer's job - I'd like a salary, I'd like a challenge, I'd like to get into the heart of a technology, I might not have a place in the new time if I don't, I'd like to be the master behind a console, I'd like to have an institution supporting my work, I want anyway to go deeper into sound, I want to be able to see sound, I want in the grain work to see sound moving the grain. I'd like to have new streets. It would be nearer to setting Michael up in his country place with Rowen. I could have a car and the country. Luke could be at McGill. Against: I'd leave the garden and the mountains I haven't even begun to see. Montreal winters. - Wrote the application, between two and four got it into and out of Hugh's wordprocessor. Used the green card for expensive money, was five minutes late at the post office, shown the old grump leaving with poste prioritaire envelopes, yelped, pleaded, please, please, got it on the way to Montreal for the deadline. Went to buy plums. Oranges, fish. Fetched Rowen, sitting clean and quiet and goldy on a mat, looking at a book. A calm ticking drip from the eaves. Is it going to be goodbye to Vancouver? I'm buoyant as if. 15 But having got into bed, feeling the aridity of the speedy state. M said, Your eyes are a bit wild. Wild? What does that mean? Seeing a horse's eyes rolling as he rears back from the top bar. Oh, it means speedy and spooked. Does speedy mean spooked? That worry itself. If I got the job would it mean a year of the speedy state, being like everyone, caught in a buzz? Dreaming something like a double agent story, not exactly that but two men outwitting each other in complicatedly staged ways. What I remember is being in a concrete underground in danger and then having a light go on like artificial sunlight in a museum, showing the Arab enemy behind a display window impaled, in his robes, beautiful curly hair, on an incline, dying or dead with beer cans around him. He'd been as if roasted by solitude, starved maybe. In those kind of stories the familiarity of the ghastly feeling of having been sold out. It's the dream of being sold by the big Arab I'm remembering. Seen like that - Sufi's, Turks, Rasheed, Jam, Ed the Arab. She calls the making of a solstice point primitivisation but it is contemporary. It has to do with getting a physical experience/understanding of physical world, which is the actual god: the explorable enormous. On a balcony with Eric, Michael tells me he's been bragging that the cones in charge of the park hypnotized me to get me to leave. I grab him by his white hair yell at him about his masculinist insistence, "If you were a black man and ...." (There is actually one black man at the end of the room.) I look to see whether his roots are in gauze. He is revealed as a square-headed thuggish man with most teeth gone. I leave with Michael. We pass Rhoda's place. She has been building garden structures, a screen with her little clothes hung behind it. Inset in the corner a booth with Yarrow MacDonald in it. Then on the other side a circle of sunflowers like a stockade with colored cloths flying between them, quite marvelous and I'm uneasy, where did she get this hold on the territory that was mine. Seeing movies. Mine. Is it anything? I can't absorb into it in this state, it's nothing but this time I know to wait. The window strips much too short. It chops around, has no nerve, doesn't reach the other land. Swan, moon, field, birds, heartbeat, window, stove, cloud, nettle, bars, end. Kirk's Return to departure, being a male painter, a lucid thing all in one light and one thin artificial voice. The wake is melodramatic. Clouds is melodramatic and achieved. What would look good today. Notes in origin coming out now is retro and will sink, putting doubt onto Trapline (no), onto my currency, but also it has got me into motion and I'll use the breeze. I wonder whether having this heartclosedness toward it will injure its gel. - Looking at the beginning of this book in Welcome Café this morning, yet it's interesting and fine and close. I can make something there. I have made something. Nervous - there's London. 17th A tenuous feeling. The film tonight. (Who left the word on the table?) A filtered light. I brought her a shock. She asked What have you been reading. The second I thought to say was Rob Dunham's essay. She had refound him. How it was, she with her hair back in a band, garden unseen and house too. But as I was leaving (she plunged suddenly to the basement and I understood it was that she'd had enough) and stood waiting for her to notice, I SAW the way I used to, curly cypress, straight cedar. What are you looking at? Those bushes. What about them? The way they are holding themselves, no? And now the garden. A grasshopper hanging clicking above Mr Li's bed. The particular way the dill is standing in wide antler branches. The light is thinner, the sky much darker. Corn like a single plant holding up its pointed shelf. 18 Support. Rowen so excited when suddenly his pyjamas are coming off and clothes going on that he started to talk in sentences. He sat back to front on Michael's lap on the bus. I sat next front and would turn and see and smile. Bright blond boy with beautiful sweater on. We get there one on each side holding his hand (as he wanted) as a family, which as soon as I'm talking to Laiwan I betray. And then inside find I can make hay with this pretty child. He's taking popcorn from Cari without shyness, making his way through the knees to the counter and somehow making himself known to come back with more popcorn. Meg as if drunk looking wonderful in Ioti clothes asking personal questions. Maria's program notes tell me I'm an Indian. What?! Fussing with Rowen. It's nerves. Michael holds him actually still and watching but my film bores him and I take him out. It was intolerable in there waiting for the shots to end. But in the intermission I find out, Persimmon liked it, the Saskatchewan girl cried for her own clouds. That's enough. And then I see the young man coming for me, he's aimed. I don't at first recognize him, he's less a kid. In fact he's a man and as soon as I see it I want him. He puts out his hand and then he goes for a kiss on the cheek and nevermind Michael standing with Rowen in his arms, I put up my hand to his head, someway, a confused way, I don't remember even which hand. It's the look on his face. "It must've taken guts to put that out in 1987." "Yeah, I had to get up my nerve." It's a kindled look. [Henry Jesionka] And then curiously at the end of the evening Michael and I and David Rimmer having a chat about babies, David looking like a beer drinker, puffed red flesh, a pad on his stomach. What made him beautiful then, and do I look as bad as that? The times when someone shows up looking like a star and you have to catch them then, because - I didn't know this in other times - it's just a moment of them and they'll diminish. The way being in love with Robert I was in love with an earlier face he lost in Montreal. But don't say, Oh the one I love, the one who looks like love, is not here now. Like Jam's place in the West End. I fell in love with a harmony made by someone else and her in it. And her present place, with her teenage daughter leaving shoes all up the stairs, is a disorder of willful parts, cute little unusual windows, wasteful invention. But still, half an hour with her and the bushes curled their arms in Buddhist light. Now the next one. A lot on the track. 19th Saturday A dream woke me, I've been light and sweet with Michael in his unfaithfulness (and he with me) but his handsomeness yesterday, the color in his face - "What've you bin doin' you look like you've bin riding the range." - got me in delayed exclusion shock. I was dreaming our garden plots were just little things now, concrete with slits for the plants to have to be seeded into and set in a row. One is up against a chopped rosebush. I see dried beans hanging like plums, am under branches picking them, a tune comes to me that I know. I'm singing it and Lucy's voice joins me. There's more of a feeling of Mary's family's disintegration. Sitting up in the black, calming myself with tarot. What is this? (Pc) Page of cups means abandonment, polio baby. What was the dream about? Page of cups. I'm a pil-grim / And I'm a stray-ain-ger / I can tarry / I can tarry / but a /while. Will I soon have a lover too? Losses, reverses. What's the cost to my body? Failure, loss, dishonor. Is it better for the body if I'm mushy or if I'm tough? (7w) Valor. Okay. I get home, there's a message from Lucy. Searching in the sound of her language for some island of mind. It's all muck, mhm mhm mhm. It's lard, nonexistence. A soul can't be this disgusting. Offering another sentence to see what'll come. The burst of greasy feeling about the letters she wrote me during her courtship. What was her actual position? She wrote romantic letters to a seventeen year old, they are read in public, the family hoots and applauds. She likes the applause, she is applauded for being betrayed, there is no ground to find her standing on. The Irish Girl answers the phone in a finecut colonizer's voice. Then I have to witch Michael enough to tweak her, by putting grapes down his back. I'm giving him a bit so she'll have to feel me. He's exploiting it in as if another personality, not one I like to see, very restless greedy hands. Disillusioned. More male but not in the way I'd want, a male for her maybe. [Landscape notes: Numbers, motions, measures, overall frames, schemas, the structure of numbers, geometry ... this code was revealed through colors, plants, forms, music, verse, and visual structures as well as through stars and numbers. ... surrounded by strict secrecy and could be passed down in everyday language even through people who did not fully understand the knowledge they transmitted. It could then be picked up again by initiates, generations later. an act that diminishes fear of destiny not information about but a point of contact with their source that the sun spends every year making that drawing Early Bronze Age a sensitive and intellectual time. 1850 BC. Builders of the megaliths knew the earth was round. Carnac, Menec, Er Grah a grid by which to check data and solve extrapolation problems English landscape "It is the greatest creation of perception and art of the Western" etc. "I like sensibility without technique." "A walk expresses space and freedom and the knowledge of it can live in the imagination of anyone." a ley is a clearing in the woods "the sighted track", a road system is a value system The shamanistic function that magnifies human gesture to make it assume archetypal or collective importance. The labyrinth's center, place and opportunity for a perception so fundamental that it demands a basic change in direction. November 1, feminist new year, Celtic. To hear the living voices of prehistoric people saying "This low-lying swamp is our mother's groin, this dry upland is her head." The Wild Man, the Leaf Man, Dionysus Hill reclamation, sunrise Little girls modify the space in imagination. A bush becomes a wall. Boys build walls. The Pleiades associated with seeds The mothers phallus when she sees the head emerge Snake "constantly associated with wedding motifs" Snake is Mother Earth (I know why!) Antlered snake When they say 'fertility' what is that word standing for, prenatal life "snake disgorges its twin in a pattern of stones as seeds" representing rain Horned serpent! I see is the veins coming off the head of the umbilicus. "In pagan times the snake belonged in gardens and was a good omen." Who worshipped Adonis by bringing him little gardens symbolizing their private parts, their femininity. In Sanskrit paradesa meant otherworld or death, and Persian gardens were essentially erotic enclosures. The Old Saxon word for paradise was meadow, a clearing in the wood, a ley, a light place. The technical mind The sacred societies view the unnecessary proliferation of artifacts as a form of blasphemy, provoking a loss of meaning. Park is the most effective public art form Mastery not of nature itself but of the relation between nature and human How <art> is different is it doesn't try to control through explanation Fighting and being bought out by multinational giants which have mass media and whole governments at their disposal. Reclamation artists] [sketch] Lammas piece, sun wheel, fire mound: sunflower stockade with red banners enclosing a mound with corn, beans and squash, zinnias. Compost overwintered and everything from own seeds. 20th Northern California. On the way through a town, there are people who're similar, they're a bit hippy but harder and sicker, strange haircuts. Women with children on the sidewalk, a family on a cart has a son dressed in tattoos. I check downward, is that really all he has on, yes. He looks unhappy. I find out it's a convention of people who believe in molesting their children and then I'm given as if a lesson in what they are. Photographs of stainless steel implements to put into them, both ends sharpened. A story with pictures of a man who takes his daughter into the pig shed, the picture of him holding the boar's pizzle into the little girl's vagina. Reading this pamphlet I'm wondering at the contradiction of text and picture. I'm investigating as if objectively, what is sadism (not that word), and what's its effect. Rowen wakes me from it, first light of dawn. News story yesterday a man made a woman simulate intercourse with her child, and then beat her for doing it. Wondering whether I've stayed out of my father's function because I know he's patterned me in it in a crude way, an 'inferior function,' and an instinct to keep Michael out of his. What's Jam's inferior function, thinking? "I like them rich, reckless, confident and totally in love with me." This night and morning what's happening is I'm talking to Irish Girl. She has got into the ring with us, I'm not sure that's not alright and part of what it's for, but sad too like losing a round. But Irish Girl is a form of myself and that means I don't fight full out, I let her be with him as the part of me that has fun with him, so I can go on and rejoin a part of 'him' who'd know how to be with my depth. Curious. A fantasy of leaving behind what had me so in conflict. But of course I don't want to leave the Celtic princess behind. I want her in with me at wish. And so the question, is she going to be on the plane with me (I don't wonder but she made the game) going to England. And actually I look nice, a thin winter Queen with antlered hair and an extraordinary cut of face. But only a distant king can love me now, I'm remote and dangerous. to let go into the event of loving, and then they will begin to build together the divine body of light, the vajra, diamond body an entity that begins to have a life of its own Imagine yourself suspended with someone in trust. Tell the universe you're letting go of tension, control, dominance, fear, doubt, hatred. You become full of light. The soul needs harmony and connectedness. It wants to feel loved and truly known by others. 21st Captain Rooster at the Carnegie steps not raving and beautifully fitted up. "I was making love to you last night." "Good." "Do you ever really do that?" "Yes." "In real life? Are you good at it?" Coming on like brass. He starts ducking. "Yeah, sure, yeah, well, as good as it is." "Every time I've gone the love route ...." "Nevermind love, how about sex?" "There has to be love." Batting palms, "The love looks after itself." 22 [My mother visits.] She tells me Judy is in joy to be more bonded with her mother. I'm snarked to have lost the edge but also, it's her turn, she always needed it (but is it still effectual, Isaac's blessing?). Two out of four, isn't that enough for you, I growl. There she sits with her gut on her lap a greedy old herd animal. She explains herself, "You see, as I get older I need more contact with family." I see her with the whole net of brothers and sisters and wives and husbands and children around her, compulsively discussed and 'contacted' and she says she wants MORE, she wants me, and I'm supposed to be another receptacle for all their little doings. Maybe it's time to stop cashing the cheques? Or start turning them back around to her. The night on the kitchen floor not sleeping because she's in my bed. Rowen is coughing. My solar is hurting because of Irish Girl. And then there's breakfast and she reads Rowen books and I go clean his room and don't want to look at her, flee as soon as I can to go get Vicks from Michael and get petted too I hope. He doesn't wake 'til I open his door and then he jumps straight out of sleep, creased like a potato, shirttail and flying balls, and will pet only as much as he can get away with in case she's looking somehow from upstairs. And yest evening as I was writing his meeting the captain phoned, brass himself, calling my maybe non-bluff. And how's that. A pleasant excitement in the womb, even in the miserable night. 23 He'd rather talk. He talks and undercover I have time and safety to be in my touch. All by myself on the back of his hand, the inside of his arm. It wasn't plowing but it was something. I was grateful just for it, the bone, oddly grateful, watching the body have feelings obscure to me. Knowing I'm not there with him nor he with me nor his body with me, but my body in some way with him, or with itself. Next to talking self she becomes quite safely but not yet anything like totally body. 25 Blah blah. What happened yes. At the steambath this morning, hours standing cuddling with M at the counter, his knee between my legs, sayin' goodbye as should be. I was thinking, we've been together all the time for three years, it's quite hard for us to be separated. And he in tears of course. "That's the longest I've been with anybody since I left home." He was in his scarecrow thin mode, his coat stank as he used to. Irish Girl had taken off. What else. Rumsby and Nat Gal maybe going to buy notes in origin. He said it was funny. It is possible to attract soul and to keep it, by constructing an object fashioned so as to be influenced by it and to receive a share of it. It is possible to attract love and keep it, by constructing an object while in the state of it.
[Other bibliog at the end of the vol]
aphrodite's garden volume 7
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