| aphrodite's garden volume 7 part 1 - 1987 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
London September 25 1987 [Savoy supper room] It said - I think - look at power. I like my clothes. That's the closest sensation. Collar, bead rope, sumptuous coat, leather and red laces. Drifting hair. The city's dirty and packed. At the Savoy an old green and dark red with gulls and clouds on the ceiling, evening dresses crawl out of taxis, stand waiting to crawl in. The coffee spoons are beauties, cheese is good, waiter sez madam everytime he speaks. There were clouds under us almost the whole way across. During the little time everyone was stopped with their heads under their wings I thought about the silent evenings I'd have with the One, taking our bed into the overgrown garden, keeping private under the storms of exchange tho' we'd be gasping and crying out. And was drifting from that, lying with my head on the armrest and legs bent up; the old woman with dyed hair sleeping upright in her pink dress, I'm remembering not to kick her. Then it's the windows across the aisle that have the splendid band orange and yellow burning around the curve, and its counter band on my side arcing up dimmer turquoise and blue. The clouds over the entire ocean maybe, formed in a calm like a vacuum, hung in cells like florets. The first rim of the sun comes under the plane's belly and colors the jets rose and then, I'm looking through the viewfinder, is stopped by mist so the silver fades like breath held to immaterial white. We had late afternoon evening night and morning in 8 hours, but long enough. The light convinces. I was on Tottenham Court Road at what would have been 2 am but I was at noon, ahead of clock time even. And then the parquet, hall tables, worn out elevator (at the Y) are Jam. The live-er younger more agonized or transported other states of arriving. Some of the people who are cornering possibilities. 28 people 'worth' more than a billion. 1 child in a developed country using 6x the resources of 9 in an underdeveloped. Depressions occur when wealth is concentrated among too few people. Who knows how to prove that? The silver spoons are heavy, softly brightly reflective. I'm looking among the young women in party clothes for Rebecca West. The young men have short hair. They're people who don't know they're on earth but still earth prospers them. Four drunks coming off the plane, northern accents, loud, stupid, hopeless, offending. If you light that I'll sock you on the jaw (I said). He put it into his ear, Why pick on me becawse I've got a smokine problem. 27 The Y is Dorothy too. What a wonderful postcard. It sez it will fly. Like any blue envelope. Nancy Spero taking and printing what she likes, Artemis. Thinking I can use my collection. A feminist section, a hell section. Origin as ground, other things over, disappearing and melting. Learning how light changes. The new good print stock! 28 Wanting to say about Mary. It's 6:30 in a brown room over the sound of motors. Disgust and anger left from her visit. The sight of her hands. Swollen bundles at the ends of her arms, fingers sticking out of them like fractured things. She wrote to Luke "I hope you and I will be attracted to each other" and sent him a yodeling tape. Yuk. I ripped the letter across and threw it out. I'm in a strange halted mind, like syrup, slow-running. It thinned in the sun in St James Park sitting by the parade of people along the water. There were many of the blunt ones, and then there was a beautiful pointed face, a young hippy remnant woman with raspberry sherbet legs and feet flat as plates in sandals. And in a pouch on the man's back a curious baby in a little elf hat. And somebody's little girl, very little, in a tailored coat and hard shoes, walking ahead of her folks with a hurried efficiency as if she were ready to take charge of a nursing station. Two white-haired women dressed like sisters in plaid skirts and good bright sweaters and brown loafers. The repulsion with Mary has always bin there, but less acted on? More mixed with affection. This time it was almost unmixed horror. She's like the ugliness of the tearoom downstairs, a tasteless cavern hung with travel posters at random. Wanting to assume attachments for her old age. The fact is I've lost face with her by her finding out I'm on welfare and by losing Jam and getting Michael instead. And she won't know what else I do. She wants to attach me but she doesn't want to know me. It's as if the emptiness of her sponsorship those years shows now. Talking to her I burst out, You don't have a clue what I do, or what it's worth or how it's done. She says quite complacently that's true, she lives in another world. I say You could know but you don't want to, you want to stay in the world you're adapted to. And under, under, what is it happening. I'd like to outright contempt and ditch her but I'm afraid of the meaning of abandoning one's mother as if it means I abandon myself, or would on some level be taken as an instruction to abandon myself. Joyce would say, She has abandoned you. You don't want to know she has abandoned you, not just in the past but now, again. She has abandoned you as unprofitable. And then there's a lightening. If she's abandoned me I can get on with the second half of my life. And then there's that darkness under my eyes, the wear of Michael and Rowen. All day looking anxiously, am I recovered yet. - "One gives a mind to what has been left behind." Loyal trust and confidence. You experience your identity with the archetype in an unconscious way and so are possessed by it. Duplication when something unc is about to become c. The dualities are at bottom yes and no but they have to be held together - by holding unswervingly to the center, where action and suffering balance each other. A crisis like this, where opposites clash, is at the same time a moment when past and future open wide, synchronistic stuff. Salt the distinguished or elect being Love-desire or a Beauty of Colors The four colors symbolize four qualities The orienting functions, one of which is unconscious and thereby mixed with collective unconscious and can bridge 29th The streets of Old Town, brick, St Pancras Station like a natural grown thing, the terraced villas of Crouch End, yes they're terraces, made of earth, with stone roofs, and curbs and curves. The way they were from the air like cup and ring prints. I liked the borough. There are new parks and a community office like a heyemas. The Regency first floor with plants. Mr Patel newsagent. Coming down on the bus from home where Sara is doing her kindest. What does it mean that last night I finally cried, as if I've been two years holding my heart stiff. It was because this time when he came in to meet me he flinched. So I knew his open heart for me is gone forever, and is that the end of a unique chance. Sara got me crying in a distorted withheld way (with valerian tea). And then after, when I had the living room alone, I was kneeling in front of the fire lost in it, rocking and rubbing my face. The wrongness of everything I've done these years, the wrongness of having lost Luke, for Jam, and of having lost Jam in a sense for Luke. And being left with what I never wanted, dry opportunism duty and work. What's he like, the new one. A man. What do I have to do with someone who gets to be 6'3 and has the world laid out for him to walk in. He's going to be handsome (the brushcut like mine in Trudy and Cheryl's time - I came to England with it). At sixteen he talks like a university man, condor tone. I resent him. Bad, mean person you'll spoil what's still possible, it's your attitude that makes it hopeless. Too late, how can I not resent the condor. My son is becoming my father. And then. At least I didn't give my lifetime to raising him. Yes and no. "But they have to be held together." How. Keep to the edge. In Sara's house don't be Sara. - Opposites Fire and Night, which are equal and opposite. Any category of opposites is dealing not with elements or particulars but with qualities and averages. If you look at any pair of opposites you find them at another level to be the same ground. Fire and night are both conditions of the air. For the atomist opposites exist by convention. Presumably we're here in set theory. Anything can be organized according to many different sorts of set. "Divine and immortal and intelligible and uniform and indissoluble and ever constant and true to itself" I've never understood what he means by the world of Forms. Aristotle in Physics A, archai of change, principles eidos and privation, steresis. Substratum and moving cause. Sez that all happening takes place between opposites. As if mentally we feel more comfortable with something on either side. GER Lloyd 1966 Polarity and analogy Cambridge "The prototype of all opposition or contrariety is the contrariety of sex." Comford "The opposition of day and night, summer and winter, with their suggestive parallelism in sleep and waking, birth and death" Dualist classification - social organization - can for instance be described as dualist while actually something else Durkheim sacred and profane - "everywhere been conceived by the human mind as two distinct classes, as two worlds between which there is nothing in common" Among the Zuni the R and L are personified as brother gods, but the L is the older and wiser The sacred and profane distinction amounts to accepted and rejected, attraction and aversion There can be skepticism about the systems but they're still kept "as the plants feel the formation of a cloud long before it is visible" every obstacle must be the beginning of possibilities "Any two objects which form a natural pair tend to be divided up and placed in opposite classes" a table of opposites for instance will include different types of antithesis polar expressions "a stylistic trait from Homer onwards" The assumptions when opposites are used is that it can't be both or neither or both plus a bunch or intermediate - "obscure the differences between the logical relations between different pairs" Heraclitus sez day and night are one The kinds of opposite - contradictory if A then not B, if not A then for sure B - contrary if not A then maybe still not B "By attaching the name of x to different y's at different times I equate them in spite of many distinguishing marks." "The whole structure of language and the whole utility of signs rests upon analogy." "As this resemblance admits of many different degrees, the reasoning becomes proportionably more or less firm and certain." Hume 'magical' belief by analogy "Objects which have a superficial resemblance are often linked up by nomenclature and ritual." "The common sense of the race has been impressed by very weak analogies." Keynes I'm far from understanding the relation in the magic state between actions and events on different planes. A principle of nature unidentified by science - it appears to be generated within the earth, and to cause wave motion perpendicular to earth's surface; has great penetrative power; affects the nerve cells of animals and the growth of plants; forms spiral patterns; and is controlled by mathematical laws involving principally 3 and 7. Earth force manifests itself in lines of discontinuity, geodetic lines, a slight alteration in tone of muscles. Electric current of the underground stream flows opposite to the water, negative to positive. Water lines are negative, ie affect left side, left eye. aquastats and track lines are positive. Geodetic lines composed of triads of varying kinds. Places where streams come together he says have the form of spirals. Every aquastat spiral has two straight lines at the spring, one entering and the other emerging. Gnats dance over springs or nodes. Twisted trees inside loops. 30 On Seven Sisters Road a tall woman, heavy late fifties, walking with a schoolboy sulkiness in short trousers, yamulka, shaved head and side curls. From there to: when I said fractals ("Mandelbrotchen?") he swung round and his voice changed. I'm engaged in being his mother w/o being a woman (while being a woman to be friendly with S). In math he says it's boys to girls a hundred to zero. "I was always ahead of the boys in math." "All the boys?" "All the boys." He was telling me how he and Luke and Gerhard are bourgeois elite. "Look at these chairs, are they elite?" As if he doesn't see the house. Bourgeois without money equals bohemian I said, and that what he means is princely. What he means is he feels he's one of the few who has a chance. - As one follows the umbilicus one is going back in time. The mill that ground out peace and plenty, then salt, then, at the bottom of the sea, rock and sand, a whirlpool. The 7 stars of Ursa "peculiarly but systematically linked with those considered the operative powers of the planets" "a world of vast and firmly established complexity, infinitely different from ours" "feats of concentration and computing" marking the unity of universe and mind at their farthest limits "for the order of Number and time was a total order preserving all, of which all were members" "one is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned. This is a true edifice, something like a mathematical matrix." mythical knowledge: it was understood only by a few, it appealed to many "that the fabric of the cosmos is not only determined but overdetermined and in a way that does not permit the simple location of any of its agents" 1st October "Dizzy Lizzy why'r you so yellow and leaf-droppy?" she says. When we are going to bed he puts his face into the cat's fur, "Goodnight you beautiful thing." O bricks I like you. Lookit this railway embankment, street level papered and scribbled. VIVA. TELEPATHY. Windows broken, but all intact, arches, cladding, a buddleia springing from the corner of the gutter and another is in plumes out of the dripline. Grit on the page. Chalk Farm Road, the coffee is too expensive to have two. 2 Mihr the Persian angel of love and friendship Art News May 1987 Mary Frank "They're in the firmament probably. It's a substance or a place where people can be transformed - by color, by light, often by sound. By experience. By love." And that behind every human action, every human love, there was a divine one. I have seen it is the one complete love we will ever be granted. I'm prepared to live it. He who gave me these gifts believed in my power to endure them. of a sweet hunger for parting He's not well, Andy. His house is not right in shape tho' the garden is. He smoked two joints and put himself to sleep rather than take on sharpening what goes on with Jeanine. Went away into the music. Sitting with him alone I could feel the possibility of care of his stone. Listen to the tone. Change the light. Come out of speed-talk bub-bub-ba. I am not careful enough and make him defend and it gets boring. Hi Luke is that you - Today - got really live at Mary Frank, only then. Not her work but where she positions it. I'd better smarten up now. 3 I came over the railway bridge looking does he still live there, and a station wagon pulled up. I'm loitering frightened like a suspicious element at the bottom of the stairs. She has her hair the same way, cut off straight, and I'm pleased to see the face she is now is what it was going to be, a pinch-nosed kind of English wife face. I'm leaving and then from her doorstep she looks at me as if she heard my thoughts. The dream that Anne was leaving Harvey because she'd found out he'd been unfaithful. We were walking together toward her new unknown. There was something about my baby instead of reaching for the red chrysanth. Floating, jumping into the water together. And other stuff. I woke up anxious. (Later I thought of the pinchnose wife that she is his other half and why am I always willing to forget it.) luminosity of 'ghosts' For the length of maybe four frames I saw a flat snowy place in bright sun, a car maybe in the ditch and a boy in dayglow red plastic raincoat, on a bike, caught by a rut and just about to be thrown. (L) [extracted:
What I saw going up the stairs after them, there'd been the sound of hugging, was 4" of perfect calves and the hem of a wellbred plaid skirt. I don't know how to let it go without throwing it away. What's the truth. Pain is. Psychiatrist's daughter. 4th Sunday. Then the beaked jug singing triumphant on the stair, he had agreed to take her part, WE ARE THE POW-ER. How is he feeling. Apart. How is she. Valiant. How does he think I feel. Warpath. Why did she do it. Had strength in reserve. Why did he. Aggression. How does he basically feel for her. Star. For me. Valiant. I thought, in the music, not thought, but heard the little warning, I'll pay for this demonstration of crossing the line. Then in anger I ask what the war line demands. To shatter the structure. What's the best I can do. A new beginning. Shall I bring out the good cause of the anger. Keep silence says the (HP). Then how am I to shatter the structure. By truth (I take it (the fool) means). ELLIE she bawls, DO TURTLES HAVE TEETH? Here is a moment to do it in. One of the children doesn't reply. Then Annabel on the phone a loving voice. Coming to think of it (I was) the warning was about the yellow being off in daylight. Do turtles have teeth? Whether they do or not: Yes. Pause. But only little ones. Witchy Trudy this is the time to remember you (is it? 5th Sal [Potter] is a skinny little thing who has her hair in loose leaves so, when she has her head turned to the side, I could see a wreath on a Victorian angel girl in a nightgown. Big eyes and little mouth. and in another turn, a white skin like a film under exhausted eyes. O Moscow and the East European Jew. The counterstatement for a Jew wd be she said, Today everyone I meet is eager to be my ally. And for the one who meets the Jew - she has to find it - Whenever I meet you I am ready to be your ally. "That's really good, it means, actively to be an ally, not passively being not-dangerous." "Yes, actively." There was quite a lot to go on in, but saying goodbye to her, when she said "I presume we'll see each other again" something passed over my face - I don't believe you - tho' it could still be true - as if in her big town and bigger rep she'd want to give out a small share and I know it. - A family of shapes I call fractals. Most useful involve chance and both their regularities and their irregularities are statistical. Shapes are scaling. Implying their degree of irregularity or fragmentation is identical on all scales. Some fractals are curves or surfaces, others are disconnected dust. Many useful fractals are careful modifications of Brownian motion. Modern math began with set theory and Peano's space-filling curve Brownian curves are fractal sets and physical Brownian motion is a natural fractal. If to go further we attribute to matter the infinitely granular structure that is in the spirit of atomic theory. Let our spherule grow steadily smaller and soon it will become empty and remain so due to the emptiness of intra-atomic space - the true density vanishes almost everywhere except at an infinite # of isolated points, where it reaches infinite value. Analogous considerations are applicable to velocity, pressure, temperature. They grow more irregular as we increase magnitude of our image. The function that represents any physical property will form in intermediate space a continuum with an infinite # of singular points. Infinitely discontinuous matter, a continuous ether studded with minute stars. Indeed the conclusion we have reached above can also be arrived at by imagining a sphere that successively embraces - Function w/o a derivative / one that can be differentiated Weiner a nondifferentiable first model of Brownian motion Weierstrass curves, Cantor dusts The Brownian motion's trail is topologically a curve, of dimension 1, but being practically plane filling it is fractally of dimension 2 The notion that a numerical result should depend on the relation of object to observer A succession of different effective dimensions - some ill-defined transitions between zone of well-defined dimension are called fractal zones in which D>DT(opological) (an integer) Every set with a non-integral D is a fractal. Over a wide range of scales turbulence is decomposable into selfsimilar eddies - Outer and inner cut-off (both cutoffs are either present or suspected in Nature) But Plato's lost lecture on the good is known to have been based on geometrical demonstration. The strictly geometrical atonement that come with the abuse of force. "A way of leaving mystery alone while respecting reason as far as it can go" the tissue woven in the skies "Ultimately in Plato, space was identified with the nature of non Being, Plato called space the Receptacle. He had inherited the idea that Being was Time above all." (Sibylline language) "which continuously threw a rainbow bridge from the past into the future" Aiee! Here's the great book projecting uterus into sky in a most self-important way - gurges mirabilis the wondrous eddy - "the island mill pours out the blood of the flood". "It connects heaven and earth." "When he reached the narrowest circle of the maelstroem the water seemed to open below and he could look down as through the roofbeam of a house, and there on the bottom of the river he had seen a great company." What it shows is a homology between the blood coming in and leaving the navel, and the going-out of the birth funnel. "A number of subterranean rivers which rise in [the mother reservoir] and seek their courses thence in various directions, and after completing their courses they return thither." Roaring kettle. Navel of waters. The way of the dead to the other world has been thought to be the Milky Way. Whirlpool beneath the Saltwater Tree, someone chops it down, salt water gushes forth. 1. The connection of worlds of living and dead; 2. life giving or saving tree nearby; 3. whirl comes into being because tree chopped or pulled up. (Tree=pillar=mill's axle). "The opening of the navel brings the deluge." A hole in the ocean leading to the underworld, water in that hole called the water of life. I'm understanding the deluge, animals sealed in a cave with a plug, the ark with all life inside riding out a flood that subsides until one day you can get out and move around. But what does the pole star have to do with umbilicus. We're below it. In another version there is no ark, just a cubic stone on which rests a pillar reaching from earth to heaven. Here we are on a different plane of the misunderstanding: the foundation stone said (replacing the ark) to be holding down the waters of the abyss, on the analogy of ground water. Ie the stone is what covers the memory of origin in water, and it is the foundation of patriarchal mis-elaboration - in the interior of the Ka'aba also a well, used to be you could drink from it. This stone, the foundation stone, lies under a great tree, and under it a wave rose up to the sky. That we're living in a strange stupid age. - The whole sea is conscious of the rise of that star. Star and arrow, ie a line of light. Began to sing the 15 songs of ascent to bring the waters up again. - Now I see the extremely beautiful robin says (from its belly) robertus. It has fine little curls around it like song and the man imagined has his mouth open. A beautiful grainy ground, velum prob, showing through. Sherborne missal c 1400. 6 Tony [Gordon-Wilson] standing glaring in the Carnegie. What about it. First time I've dreamed him, also it was just the amount it wd be if it were a distance visit. Squatting by St James Park looking across at willows and other trees in brilliant floodlight, the isle of birds. He [Andy] was telling his walks in Cornwall and Parliament Hill Fields, "I was being pulled." He was telling, I was listening and staring across at an upper part of a willow where an arc of branch made a black hole in which large birds maybe pigeons, often four of them, were moving or sitting like parrots in a jungle. Parrot. He did have a rehearsed storytelling sound. Gurney Head. He was pulled, he ran, yelling What are you? out to the end of the headland, where the waves were crashing about. He was stopped, it was saying to him, Go back, this is more than you can handle. And he ran back. His offering to the place, books on hyperactivity in children. She was being driven mad, a dead woman, what killed her? The feeling came back and that was a visit from her. What she's like is a lurking squatting dumpy powerful thing. She had me scurrying not long after - hm, braid up my loins - on the cushion a bunch of Kali monkeys - is that what you are - clawss permission and malicious reptile eyes - Stevie Smith aslawnt. Annabel [Nicholson] the girl, I'm always looking at her with love, seeing her smile with her mouth corners pulled up against the bone, russet colors of eyes and hair. She wdn't let me wear her cardigan, the one she lent me was the man's and I was wearing it to hold her. "We had planned to have children together." Looking at her with a tear unexpectedly in my eye (left eye), I'm so sorry, I'd like to give you my child. Not knowing quite why I'm saying that. She came delicately to cry on my shoulder and I was interested when we unhooked to find an actual tear falling off my cheek and another that I'm not sure whether it's mine or hers falling off the right cheek too. Thankful she doesn't have children so she can be still this vivid reticent being who always gives me hope and newness. 7th A row with a man who was smoking behind me on the bus. What was interesting was how it persisted. I kept yelling and staring at him. He tried physical threat, ignoring, Greek swearing, firm instructions to stop looking at him. So then I knew to keep looking at him. And then another woman sitting at the back started on him and I began again from the front, and he got up and actually moved, trying to save his hereditary face and us fixing him between our eyes so he cdn't save it. You lesbia? he yells. Then it's over, the woman he liked to beat up in his mountain village gets a moment of vindication. Or else he goes home tonight and beats her more. Or maybe both. - anomalies of growth and construction, and a world-wide code of symbols Freemason an international builders' community Light was before human, and prepared a place. Light is the scope and symbol of Freemasonry. Medieval architects must have believed that they must make no permanent alteration to the surface of the earth unless justified by the esoteric signs The god Helith, Heil, Hegle, idol of the heathen Anglo-Saxon, Helios the red hot god Ways of marking the nature of the ground, ground raised, aquastats, lowered, water line Course of an aquastat mustn't be obstructed Track lines marked by lanes, tracks, field divisions and solifluction lines Aquastats by linear mounds, terraces, stone rows and circles, upper parts of lynchets, marks on stone Blind springs by stone circles, barrows, monoliths, dolmens, logan stones, rostra, stone basins, hut circles, pit dwellings, pond barrows, pits or ponds. Every religious site had to have a blind spring as its center. Seems to have been a worldwide system. Tracks made by animals Field entrance over a blind spring from which one or more track lines or aquastats, thus a natural signpost for cattle Giogio de Santillana and Hetha von Dechend 1977 Hamlet's mill David R Godine Benoit Mandelbrot The fractal geometry of nature What is the wood of its root? Gold is the wood of its root, the sky is the wood of its crown. The branches of this tree spread over the whole paradise, and it also covered the sun. Its summit touched the sky, and from its roots sprang fountains of milk and honey. 'Earth' is the implied plane through the four points of the year and this is why the earth is said to be quadrangular, with 4 corners. "The earth in this myth of Socrates is spherical and Tartaros the bottomless pit is represented in this geography by a chasm which pierces the sphere right through. It is the source and mouth of all waters. It is the way to the realm of the dead." Umbilicus maris. Generally one looks for it in the NNW. "We think the whirlpool stands for the ecliptic." Gates. Because the galaxy has its crossroads with the ecliptic between Sagitarius and Scorpio in the S and Gemini and Taurus in the N. A cascade small and large details simultaneously Self-similar is when each piece of a shape is geometrically similar to the whole. Others scalebound. He had a morphological understanding which he could express only in action Origin, excision, research, universe When the shaman goes over into the camp of those who know, s/he is exposed to hostile spirits and serious rivalries, can go into sky regions or underworld for information - have helpful animals - shift shape - job is mending souls and conducting souls Hindu, Buddhist, Tibetan Lamaism and Bon, also Iran, but further to "most ancient near east" 7 skies and underworlds or Pleiades on forehead the one-legged being, hurricane-umbilicus who brings weather the multicolored cover I want in it a glorious stretch of Milky Way, spacey sky And meal and dust and grain "the eight kinds of grain" female circumcision - the image - excision - custom and its relation to explanation - Kristeva (Jam) - it's a victory of explanation - it's a whole culture, how a culture does it without enforcement As if spheres - color and garden - social concern - child love - writing - learning eyes - actors or fiction Excision "You may not want to know." Luttrell psalter 1340, Eadui psalter 1020, monk's lines The Phaenomena of Aratus of Soli "an outstanding English artist whose work appears in manuscripts made on both sides of the channel" 990 Harley psalter 10?0 tiny David's soldiers John Siferwas int Gothic 1380-1440, Sherborne A mysterious ancestral person who appears nowhere in the tale
with the bear-stars on her forehead which brings things back to their actual beginning, to the deep origins - that the campo was nothing but heaven itself Gnostic knowledge of the way - upwards outwards past the watchtowers of the Zodiak to the desired timeless light above the Pole Star, where the unknown god "How does it happen that this Mill, the peg of which is Polaris, had to be wrecked or unhinged? What caused it to think that the axel jumps out of the hole?" the open hole of the pole of the ecliptic solar era sign is whatever sign the sun is rising with in spring the giantesses ground forth enemy action whereby the mill was carried away. Shortly after, ground salt and was wrecked. That was the end of Frodhi's Peace Saturn of justice and measure I call upon thee, great and holy One, founder of the whole world we live in, who sufferest wrong at the hands of thy own son, thee whom Helios bound in iron chains so All should not come to confusion. Man-woman, father of thunder and lightening, thou who rules also those below the earth. Go, lord of the world, first father, return to your own place, so that the All remain well guarded. Saturn/Kronos dethroned off chariot by Zeus, banished in chains to a blissful island where he dwells in sleep, immortal, life in death, wrapped in linen, some say to be reborn as a child "they thought the first substances to be gods" Aristotle Metaphysics Then, just as the fishes of the sea pop their heads up and see our world, so he would pop his head up and catch sight of that upper region; and if his nature were such that he could bear the sight, he would come to realize that that was the real sky and the real light and the real earth. What the air is to us, the ether is to them ... surpass us in sight and hearing and wisdom and so on, by as much as the pureness of ether surpasses that of air, ... moreover they have groves and temples sacred to the gods, in which the gods really dwell. A sort of pulsation within the earth ... one of the chasms is bored right through the earth. Okeanos was the primeval psyche and this would be conceived as a serpent in relation to procreative liquid. For Homer, the universe had the form of an egg girt about by Okeanos. Why in this Orphic version the serpent was called Chronos and why Pythagoras said it was the psyche of the universe Spinal marrow he suggests. Attributes of Okeanos in the literature are deep-flowing, flowing-back-on-itself, untiring, placidly flowing, without billows, silver swirling river with many branches, father of rivers, beloved end of the earth, ruler of the pole An ampler aether clothes the meads with rosy light Virgil Aenead "a turbulent jet dispersing in a laminar medium" - a turbulent dispersion of ink in water Peano motions, plane-filling motions, tile sweeping motions or tile-sweeps If a tree made of rivers of vanishing width is to drain an area thoroughly it must penetrate everywhere - ie plane-filling Curd, curdling for increasing concentration Cantor fractal dust, discontinuous event sequence The matter in each world sphere is proportional to its radius. This is the condition for fulfilling the laws of gravitation and radiation. Shape of the boundary of the region - clouds Topological properties of a region of dissipation - a dust? Or a vortex tube? Or a vortex sheet? Shear between fluid masses - resulting coherent structures, 'animals' - Given: the pale red man. Today, twice, first time as I'm coming in, he leaving, we look. Second time, I'm just exiting fast, he too from the men's, this time it brought us almost touching. Sorry, he sez. English, upper middle. What does he see. A witch. 10th So long as I kept a certain rhythm in everything I did, she was with me. At night when I slept I was with her in everything she did. Letting them rise like smoke into the rich atmosphere where there was room for all descriptions of the real we couldn't know. This time it's changed to a long-headed child red around the eyes as if he'd been crying. We look. It's softer. What else I saw was his mother, a tall pale intelligent woman looking at me in the same taking-in way, somewhere in the country, holding out her hand. I was frightened for a minute thinking of loving. Don't elaborate, stay with what's actual. What is actual - tiredness like illness, sickness of the tube packed with people, sickness from not eating. Wanting to be in bed, wanting to be in bed with him. Wanting it to be the calm strong love that founds me. I saw a boulder either in me or to stand on. As if I could leave everything behind. 11th A dream in the bush by creek. I and maybe my brother following my father into the dense brush and among the cattle. Is the bull among them, always my first thought. Yes, massive. We pass by, my father faces him, shoos him, challenges him. I'm skipping around the trees to always have one between me and him, my brother even more is creeping away. I go sliding from tree to tree out. When I get to the door as if out of the basement I pick up my good dark coat from a hook and go on to the road but while I was leaving I knew I was leaving a trail of the scent of fear and I wonder whether the presence of the scent of fear would have altered the balance of power against my father back in there with the bull. I woke in fear. Earlier I was on a taxi traveling by holding onto the roof rack, I was naked except for bikini pants and seeing the looseness of my skin was thinking this is too naked. Later in second sleep I think I was high up on a bank looking down at a road thinking if it was flooded it'd be deep (fifteen feet) underwater and wd the bank be as if a path, then saw a broad river mud brown as if in flood, different things being carried rapidly on top of it (R to L), a box, a man in a tan raincoat as if walking out to fetch something, a maroon-colored two-storey farmhouse. Yesterday morning Roy was droning in his automatic male-information way about neurotic categories, I came in half-conscious of subversion to show Sara garden photos, the kids were jumping and yelping, he yelled at Jedi and crashed his fist onto the table. I automatically gathered my photos and skipped into the kitchen. He and Sara throned themselves in the living room and there I was muttering out of sight amazed how a patriarchal dominance signal had got me out of the way in a flash. Then I ask whose dominance am I afraid of. It sez (the fool). - "Underlying mythology of polarized forces" Their spirits fly along threads of spider silk to the sky. When people sing, I dance. I enter the earth, I go in at a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far. When I emerge I am already climbing, I'm climbing threads, the threads that lie over there in the south. I climb one and leave it, then I climb another one. Then I leave it and climb another. And when you arrive at god's place you make yourself small, you come in small to god's place. You do what you have to do there. Then you return to where everyone is and you hide your face. You hide your face so you won't see anything. You come and come and come and finally you enter your body again. [Visiting Joann Kaplan] A Victorian house gutted and grandly refitted with a kitchen like a morgue - cold. She looks severe. I stay too long in the house, constraint isn't gone 'til we're in the car. They couldn't stand trying to make a baby. Being reminded of Lutz and hearing and seeing him. The way she has changed herself to be a director, like Sally, unlike Annabel, cooler and drier. "Incredibly handsome" (I said of Luke). "So are you - incredibly handsome." On the streets they look. [wishing for] An ordinary house with back and front and small garden. Fireplaces. Garden faces south. Front is full of rosemary cypress philadelphus. Back is like Andy's with high masonry walls. A central tree, espaliered ones. Border and velvet, a warm tank. The black and white china I saw, a store cabinet for work stuff, room that will black out, piano. - Vicious atmosphere of rivalry between shamans. Schools and initiation. The morality of shamanism is not of harm or harmlessness but of degrees of power.
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