| aphrodite's garden volume 8 part 1 - 1987 november- december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
It's November 11th, dark late afternoon. I'm with yellow lamp, heater and candle. Water drops tick on the page from my hair. I've told Michael I'll give him money and a legal paper, and that, and maybe the rain, and going back to work at the steambath, are making me sullen. Angry. I want something new, faster, sharper, not so poor and lonely. But not just new, I want to be digging into something central, my way. I'll give up leeching on Michael but what I want in exchange is to be able to be out of the structure of the time with him. The alternative was going to be weekly with Joyce, and now I feel on my own without a possibility of intervention from outside the confused circuit. I want the journal to be different, not to have blocks of quotation. What's it like, sullen - like a baby sitting on a lump in its diaper frowning. What's the baby feeling. Fed up, inert - I don' wanna - Alright, what do I want - I'd like a real relation again yes! yes! And I'd like to be equal to it. Man or woman? Man. And is it an inner man? Or both, I don't know. I want it to be a real one but when I am deep in the image of being-with it is always a state of certainty, diamond-body, dilation, completion. I want to live in the longing although it is dangerous. Alright, live with the longing, don't exactly be it. What did I just see - maybe - longing is itself a presence. Now I want to get through the cloud. If I think of Robert or the man in the reading room I'm directly in sweet longing, but I instantly forbid myself to give it a real name. I've learned to do that but it immobilizes me. Everywhere I've loved I've ended up stopping myself and it's a forest of stumps. Or I can go lie down and rub myself and make a story. Next: I feel in the presence of the image, and need to feel, but don't believe the feeling is a true relation to the person, and yet feel it must be. I'm sure it's really that one I'm feeling and want to be with and simultaneously I don't think so. Is there a difference in the two believings. When I'm believing yes I'm thrilled in hope and fear, I'm vivid, what I write has heart and is beautiful, it's a shift into a soul core. When I say no, it is more like saying than believing, I talk myself out of it, it's like restraining a child. Yet it isn't like the second person of writing, who takes more care, because the correction in writing is satisfying and agreed on, and the correction against desire leaves the other protesting. In writing the correction is making the sentence closer, that's why. So is there a way the corrector could make desire closer? Maybe more in doing than in understanding. Don't stop her from finding out. Help her investigate. 13 Dreams since I've been back have been long tangles I haven't wanted to trace. 14 A handicapped boy competing in Special Olympics conducts a ship around the rink. He stands at the prow weakly and partially performing the motions she indicates behind him. She is a broad-shouldered deep-breasted blond and though her movements are out of competition they are stellar, she is really performing but by convention the attention is on him. It's not clear whether he can see what she does. She lifts her arms and swoops, he does his best to lift his halfway. She's really a glittering eagle. When she swoops, the ship swoops around the corner, too much speed for the arena I'm thinking - it's small like a country rink - but it docks neatly at the judge's stand. There seems to be another person, a man crouching in the bow perhaps responsible for the fine steering. What it means for there to be a woman behind every man, even in women. The Irish boy who's paralyzed and given a life by his sister. Other stories, a rich girl given a life by her maid. What do I want with this stuff - [Norman] Malcolm on dreams is moronic assertion of somebody w/o experience - or Wittgenstein's descriptions of stuff I have no experience of and am repelled by - or Sartre so dislocated I can't find a foothold in the first sentence - Jung vastly interested and interesting and near to own concerns but in volume beginning to seem arbitrary as if not his method but his intuition is giving him what he knows. What I seem to see is that I like the computer model better than the others - circuits with and without access to each other - more and less comprehensive. - I'd have to take on philos. There's no question of settling into the middle of it. M complaining that he can't be himself when he knows I'm in the neighbourhood, I make chances to reject him. I yell that he in the most pigheaded way sets himself up so I have to reject him. It's true that I set him up and it's also true that he sets himself up. I'm tempted to think that if I scrupulously didn't cheat (lie steal snoop) he'd be alright and we'd be in friendly balance; but what I also suspect is that he'd be worse, and have more leverage in his complaint. He'll be ugly as he is when he asserts himself, he'll still see me as the other of his either - he'll still be mad at me for being LANGUAGE that realm of hate. And what I really am toward him, what I do, how much I know what I do, why I'm doing it, he could learn if he wanted to know. How much it has to do with what I was before him and how that failure is being emptied into him because it can be. And does it mean Rowen is his? Is that the trade? This weekend I've imagined going on with him (Rowen). 15 Two more nights of many dreams I haven't caught up to. Reading Jane Roberts, parts of them dimly present. Talking to M this morning I imagined a video I made of/about his work, a way to keep us going, and it had an immediate place in sweet lover looking for someone who knows how. More, the black and white rain and what it's an image of and how it cd be placed. 17 Fear from seeing M in the Welcome unhappy again. Something cheerful, a buoyancy, with Rowen too, like coming into his room now when he cried harder and finding his pillow soaked - he'd unscrewed the nipple - and starting to laugh so he laughed too. Turned the pillow over, refilled the bottle. At the garden Eric happy to bring sprouts to bury with leaves in the seedbed, the stuff in the compost box heating. Laiwan unsatisfying in the way she doesn't draw out, changes the subject back to herself like a man, and I don't want to know about her dyke adolescence, feel I know it already. Behind these a morning pink and frosty of the best, dawn light so intense even the wrong colors of the new houses glowed transcendently. There was first new snow up there yesterday and the mountains of tinted cloud that loom against it. Pink and blue and that pear-yellow of single leaves on the street cherries. Mashed fox-brown leaves coated on the sidewalk. Nervous pleasure of riding M's bike with the high seat and weak right hand brake. Rowen in loved earflap hat and warm duffle learning to put his hands in his pockets now it's cold. Letter rejecting me for sound mixer training. Don't want to tell yet about the travel I tried last night. That's too dramatic. Rhoda on the street, bundled in ugly shoes unlike her, both of them looking ugly as if mourning. 18th Before waking thinking to go out in a rowboat, climbing stairs on the broad boardwalk. The sea is not at all rough but relentlessly rolling at its edge, and the day is lead grey under a grey mist. A very wide plain openness with a sheen, but I think I won't take the boat out today. I liked jumping from level to level on the dock. It didn't have a rail but it was wide enough so I could jump without fear of falling off. The fear like excitement. The sense of running incoherent programs and wanting to clear them out. The sense of building / being built as a whole picture from the given time, motions, qualities, values - the soul as a many-chambered crystal means it's spatial (I think it is) but not material - I wd want to say it's a program (why was she sad, is she still) but that leaves aside the questions of what a program is without hardware - the hardware I say immediately is this it. In one sense the I am is just an I am here now that can go anywhere without necessarily knowing how it got there; in another sense it is the whole of an organization, map, competence. A is looked after by B. A is like a point. The hardware is to be found out, it has to search out its own programs by finding them contradicting each other - has the feel of computer games. I like philos in the first two paragraphs where it says it wants to correct inaccuracies that make us think wrongly. But when it goes on to the traditional philosophic doubts I think this way of speaking is itself mistaken.
A mind is a psychic pattern. You have more than one. They work together to keep you alive. - Going from there to the sense of an I learning to move from pattern to pattern w/o reference to an other, for pleasure in mastery. That going right to Satan and usurping and falling. When you use them all you comprehend brilliantly and directly. Complementarity - needing to see something in more than one frame - "when you can move from one to the other you are at another level". An archetype wd be a (hardwired) part of the program. They seem to say that when you can see opposites or maybe just more than one you're in the program that can do paranormal things. The crystalline state of transparency - you can see the relations of parts. Set theory - you see the set of sets. Being interested in fractal geom. Hoping for pictures of, phrases to suggest, Philosophy not an attempt to produce a logical system composed of concepts - it's an art of making something of oneself - they are trying to make the diamond body. 19 I feel the possibility of a suppleness in philos. 20 I understood the obvious one day, that grain is (by one model) inherent in the structure of cellular perception. Then, where is another direction to come from - there's always that shorted circuit and it must mean something. The short circuit is that we describe how we perceive (optic nerve etc) by the same procedures as we describe what's perceived, and the actual perceiving is still outside the loop - it takes place in another terminology. If you start in the dot matrix - if you imagine a dot matrix - a code coming in gusts of disarrangement - standing patterns already operating inside the matrix - a transformation of color etc - a twinkling change at the intersection as value jump - and then? We have the chora of jumping rainbow bits, we have intersections of invisible currents - we have the bits in the pot - yes here's brain pan - and they're still in code - what reads them? I believe I can send field & field to Lis. If language and gender ID (as x) form together, and language deals with objects already formed as such, then unnamed experience wd have maybe the quality of non-x (which isn't therefore 'y') and cd be thought of as the contrasexual - and if what is left out of the y-programs is attention and what's left out of the x-programs is assertion. The 'body' wd start out with its usual load of both. Here - Ahsen and eidetic, a paravisual component. Questions I cd do a PhD on. The unc and other left wings of a polarity. Polarity itself. Maybe a workbook - I'd hope that if I lined them up well, they'd show another side. Organize the orthodox literature so it's covered.
Sunday 22nd What would the thesis be - a way of making what I've done in my own way present itself to the academics - a way of making myself learn to bridge them and so come out bigger than both - and it's a way to reconnect with who I was before Roy. I'm assuming the actual thesis will be easy but keeping inside my own while succeeding in the male canonical will need utter effort. Telling Diana abt Luke bringing the soup and hot water bottle, both of us with our eyes pressured with tears. Betsy telling how her baby was born and wrapped and put onto her abdomen without anyone noticing its gender. She says she'll look when she's ready. Her intention is to welcome the baby without prejudice but meantime her hand from feeling the little round bum is surreptitiously sneaking under the blanket and finding she thinks a little penis. But it's the cord. Then feeling the perineum for testicles, there don't seem to be any. I think it's time to look now, she says. I was google-eyed listening to the story of the lesbian's hand creeping toward but not arriving at her daughter's little crack. (Of course it did arrive but she isn't telling.) Cheryl's wanting to write philosophy, she told Laiwan!
The most interesting thing in any system wd be its mistakes. Outsideness is going to be my best resource. I like to work by going from one written system quickly to another - this aft it was Casey, Jung, Olson, etc - it's the strange mind of the 1st page or two that sees most. - I was going home on a bus, more than once, having smoked dope at a party, and understanding, in the lighted travel through darkness, that I am a soul making itself, like a computer gathering programs and uniting them in a more and more comprehensive structure, and that, at the end, the computer will stop, something of the structure of programs, the unusualness of a crosslink, will have spread locally to other programs - and then I see I could say it this way - I am a program organizing programs, the computer is elsewhere, it's the earth maybe; I'm a program, the programs I participate in are not only my own, they're running throughout - but what am 'I' in this picture - (a voice writing) a local printout. 'Persons' as images copresent in a scene are modes of being conscious. In my waking condition I operate at many levels of consciousness at once, deal with different systems of knowledge. In my dream condition I form links between these various levels. Waking again I use the new links to expand my experience. What I learn is transmitted automatically, to others like me, and their knowledge to me. Subjectivities (souls) visible in images This means immediately what's happened in dope, looking at images in art mags - seeing the quality of the image as a person's quality of being - it's like becoming the quality in looking at it, and then knowing it as that, by moving to another - the becoming it is like a process of deduction, but it takes place <behind the screen.> 23 Playing with a black man, there being another black man not so included. 26 As if in the bottom of the question about what's a mental image is the question what is any seeing. Not last night, yesterday: Freddy Dyck. I was posing with his support, that's one way to say it - more like a gymnast than a dancer, an airplane extension on his bent-over back, and more I don't remember - it was him, also the little Romanian at the Slade - physically juvenile sexually-dissmissable men. A kind of lively sense of having come this far on an intuitive yes and no that meant I could navigate safely and swiftly, but invisibly, and now standing and fighting for space in the world. Writing that, a swift dialogue with Joyce. Why don't you approve it? It's unreal. Yes, but I can do it, I have a lot stored for it, I've been doing it so long and need to complete it, I'm happy doing it, singing, it makes me goodlooking, maybe it will take care of me in my old age. "Today it is ambition, tomorrow sexual love." Okay I'll take the turning as it just turned. Shock and accusation. The discounted ugly dwarf. [Opposite page: Everything we know and feel and every statement we make are all fantasy based. Hillman what a preference for the imaginary ... it is not only this or that image that is chosen, but the imaginary state with everything it implies: it is not only an escape from the content of the real but from the form of the real itself, its character of presence, the sort of response it demands of us, the adaptation of our actions to the object, the inexhaustibility of perception, their independence, the very way our feelings have of developing themselves. If the schizophrenic imagines so many amorous scenes it is not only because his real love has been disappointed, but, above all, because he is no longer capable of loving. Lacan?] 27 Eric. The visions scold him, they showed him blind running down the street, the cottonwoods saw him as a scabby seal with crusted eyes. "Again and again people tell me I'm blind." I say, "You idealize your motives." He says the blindness they mean is that he fails to remember to see it as a dream. I say "Stop, stop, stop, there is another kind of blindness, when you don't see the other person as a being." I was bragging about roofing, he said, "Is your name Eddie not Ellie?" 28 Hegel on the simple relation with objects, I and it. "The one is put forward in it as existing in simple immediacy, as the essential reality. The other, however, is put forward as the nonessential." That seems crucial. McLintock and seeing the invisible, I have something gathered to say about central input, what I see is a slide put across the center of the brain - there's a model I'm coming to - that's not saying it, I'm tired but I can see it. Want to say I'm reading philosophy in the light of it's being men. That computers are deductive, that what I'm interested in is related to inference; that the 'other' behind the eidos is communicating inference - something else I've lost - Rowen first drawing forms and then drawing symbols - 'likenesses'. A woman in a secondhand store backroom, M and R in the other room, I'm stroking her slit thinking I haven't done this in a long time, there's another woman in a red nylon g-string, with acne on her bum - but my woman likes her better and puts on her clothes again. The big abandoned building I used to camp in - it's sort of Peter Epp's place - one winter I lived in some large middle rooms in the upper floor, I just went and lived there, there was no one to stop me. I know something of the east wing too, there were always good apartments there, artists', I've been wanting one of them for years of dreams - the building has been filling up - when I open one of the west wing doors I see the stairs are decorated, shut the door quietly, go on toward the center, talk to a woman, the feeling is that it's yuppifying and I have no place there anymore. The introduction to this room is that I arrive looking for Cheryl and Trudy who were camping there and find them gone, two newspaper mats on the ground (garden in front of east place house) with a note to Earl thanking him for the use of them - at the end of the dream I'm outside with some others (I and a child but not M and R), we're going from the east wing to the west via what's now parking lot for a franchise restaurant, garden as if for a resort hotel, they walk, I step on a cart like a raft and scoot, surprisingly strong whizz even uphill, around the corner and into the tight drive - we squeeze ourselves out of the jeep, noticing treeplanter plants - going toward the west wing door I'm asking about my friends and noticing that the dream is replaying from the beginning at another location. 30 Wo-wen, he says the same way he says Ah-lee, as if he's learning it for the first time. Michael mommy-daddy he has been saying from the beginning as if Michael's kindness is the one essential name. I hear him in the bath and in his bed thinking of it. He has never needed a name for me. As if he struggled and whinged the whole time he was in me, having to endure me as a prison as his only way to get to Michael. My magic was impotent in my transaction with Michael - the many small meannesses I've perpetuated to not feel that I lost the match. Is this what it meant? What would it take to get me back in the game? Anguish. What pain do I need to go into? (5s) Which defeat? (Emperor) The other voice presses to say, you were mean from the beginning, you hated him, no wonder he doesn't have a name for you, he knows you're always escaping from him. A person organized around an early defeat - community well-being was defeated - my recovery by other means is crossed by male privilege - the foundation is loss in principle - crown is recovery in principle - past is hope, insight - future, heartbreak - I feel about it beauty, love, success - resource, vision, imagination - hope and fear, courage and brilliance - outcome, justice. Jaw skin hanging today, Rowen awake with earache, I took him into my bed and held my hand on his ear. He went far enough into sleep so I could carry him back, but I'm old today, and only have today and tomorrow before it's the steambath again. A rough east wind, cold. Light filtered through a blue-grey wad. Rhoda's burlap tied hand and foot struggling. Le Guin seems only fortunate, how does she know so much about exclusion and oppression? She gets me in the heart, punctures me and a cry escapes (then it self-seals). Maybe she is so fortunate she can go to meet other people's pain. The way with Lis I could simply tell her what had happened to me. 1st December Early waking in pain - Trudy has moved into the next door apartment with R and I see she's left a big space under the wall so I can see her floor and feet - I sweep up grains and take them to throw to the birds - they tell me they always feed the birds and it will be too much - I'm distressed to see the wall transparent like black nylon, it's as if I'm actually living with them. More I don't remember - a jolt of solar plex pain keeping me awake a long time 'til I fantasy-fuck myself to sleep, quite sweet unfold.. Rowen last evening, horrible evening with M staying too long and me not chasing him, Rowen shouting at me BED! pulling my shoulder wanting M to himself, these last days in candid preference. Thinking T is the image of rivalry defeat. 3rd Want to say, on the garden video ("There's Ellie!" "There's Ellie!" murmurs in the circle) she was dark strong straight slim and curvy, the best body I've been, and how satisfying. - Looking at that word, how satisfied. And speaking quick and sure without reserve to anyone. Lying down feeling out the soreness at throat and forehead, I said I could do that philosophy work without so much muscular push. It said YESSSSSSss. - What do I have so far: samples of Malcolm, Sartre, Hegel, Jung and Hillman, Le Guin, Casey, Bachelard, Jane Roberts, visualization tech. 5th Commercial preconditions of language power. "Cultural courage we associate with the Elizabethan." Language change does something in a different way and at a different pace than political change. Anyone's language instinct. My father in bible school hearing Mary recite, decided on her, and I came of it. "My own son came to be because of the care in the wording of a room-for-rent notice." - When I'm going to see Akira I imagine I'll get the straight goods on computer theory but his blurred English and swollen moistness of self pity mean we talk instead about his need for love. He came to the door like someone's mother in a brown Sunday coat and thick side-parted hair, feet turned out, pink-tinted shades, a slumped helpless look with soft paw set on his belly, telling me about his heart attack - "arrota." "Aorta?" "Arrota." Hapless, a kind of disgusting softness, like the swelling of his face around his mouth. It took a marriage councilor to tell him his second wife wasn't interested in him and only wanted a child, and maintenance too. A professor in poverty by child support to two exwives, and then the Polish woman who had an affair with him, "It wasn't really sexual, it was just to be even closer." She gave catastrophic birth screaming in the violence of medical induction. He in tears but not having the sense to save her from the doctors or anything else, drove to pick up her husband from the airport two hours later and hasn't seen her since though she sobbed on the phone. A disgusting idealism, raving about the too-competent evil of computers. And me in my electric prime he gives no sign of enjoying, so I played with the waiter and Phat Phil who shut me up when I challenged him, with a fast sexual phlat. "Hey beautiful come up on the roof with me, if you come on the roof it's on the house." And this was all lost on my matron date. With Rowen and Michael and the bike the other night standing at the new hoarding looking down into the excavation for the Ukrainian old folks home, M says, "Our new home ... it's not at all as I imagined it," so lightly fit I kissed his hand. But then as always, always, it's his heaviness of hand that puts me off. It's satisfying to write like this, worrying too, public language, it's mediative, I'm ashamed of that in it, but able too, and makes me able on the phone. 6th Eric last night - speaking very slow - "As you've expressed interest in these things ..." says he's drunk enough to get into the telepathic state and offers to share the experiment. I was in bed, sore throat, reading a novel about Mary's Darrell in Radway, jeered like I do. Phoned again just now, Sunday afternoon (Pat Ranch, then Laiwan), saying it again, "As you've expressed interest ..." "Do you know you phoned me last night?" "I did?" Mysterious pain last two nights, diaphragm jerking when I woke from dreaming T and R were moving out of my house, I would have to find a new way to pay the rent on the whole, a room that had been Luke's, a sunroom with glass doorknobs I could make my study, possibility, I could have student renters, it's large and empty, many rooms. Why do I wake scared? Something is going on I don't understand, haven't worked these days, sore throat, what is it. Lay down and got into a second of another texture, darker, closer, that now I can't remember. It was the answer, realer. Yuh it was the spirit stance, not itself but a memory of it - how to say it, I hear Eric's voice, "If I could only remember ...." What I saw sitting down with my papers is the way secondary process/the object model necessarily makes an I imaginary. If I can see the larger work the philos is a section of - [Hold someone in a meditative focus, seeing how they are different from you and others. It's a creative exploring state. Through cultivating the clear experience of your own consciousness and being with time and with the moment as you feel it, you can draw upon the greater vitality and power, rely on your immediate sense data not on secondary information. If you allow secondary experience to overcloud your present actual intersection with reality you speak and act from a position not your own. Authentic existence, in its resoluteness, always has time. Any section of land has an identity. Such identities represent the combined organization of consciousness of land, human, animal, plant. The new notion of space as being an active structuring medium which cannot be separated from objects in space. Tarthang Tulku As if psyche as JR imagines it is space - that's not it but something in there - Hillman saying imagination is maybe the ground of the faculties rather than one of them. Crimson and violet ones, raised and angry, concrete universals] Morning of the 13th. On a liner turning in a harbour or more like a basin, the liner is moving so fast we wonder if it can get itself turned before it crashes, a strong braking at the rear so the front swerves left as from a pivot midship. A hostel with host girl from a family, first in a kitchen or seeing a kitchen, sinks constructed with slope to drain, large sheet metal surfaces beyond, what for. There are white lines above it, clothes drying but - etc. Then the host girl, plain Europeans will take me to see more of the rooms. Oh - I forgot - standing in the kitchen, I found I could lie back on the air without falling and would be powerfully pulled (north it felt) past the sheet metal into the corridor - I show them what's happening - there's a vertigo I don't exactly recall. The girl says it's maybe because I feel the presence of the many other rooms. She takes me to see, like houses adjoined, with canals, looking interestedly at a Dutch or Gentish sort of scene, clean whitewash, distinct joins to the canal path (a Chinese feeling in that ). 300 rooms she tells me. I'm beginning to think they are a royal family. A museum room full of people, across the room another. In the mill I've lost the host girl and am looking for her. It's as if they use the 300 rooms to accommodate and instruct groups of their subjects, but they keep the groups separate. I can pass because I'm in a dorm group with one of the family daughters.] 7 When I told Ken Driediger my name was N-n-nothing I meant that I didn't have a name in the same way he did. [I was abt 10.] What's the difference between people who go into their own developed imaginary experiences and people who go into other people's only - what do I want to know about imagination - imagination and fear - thus the rituals of intoxication. 9 Some minutes I was wrapped up in fetal position, my legs were up against my chest, my arms wrapped very tight around his shoulders, his around mine, his knees up under my bum. He was fucking steadily but not deep, I was in a simple joyful state, what I was seeing was just the round tip of the penis advancing and withdrawing in the rings. I was somewhere grounded in worship, not in bliss as I've known it. Thought there was sensation gathering as if subliminally, under the floor, that I thought would come if it kept up. That and also the endurance of his idiotic struggles trying to get his thing into holes he can't find. He goes witless, doesn't stop and investigate, rams away brutally, and on my side, knowing he's two inches low, I'm wondering what my friendly patience is going to cost, specifically whether it will be the end of fine tuning. I imagine the fine ones keeping themselves fine by sharp intolerance, and on the other side of it there is Michael in his dirty bed (with his black tooth fixed at last) fine too and not hedged in refusals like Rhoda. I liked finding in Eden Gray that what they mean in my dreams is convention. But that doesn't finish the question. If I accept Michael more, does it mean the end of the one who came back from London. 11 Book from the public library on cognitive science. Do I dare say something about what it's like negotiating it. With this exercise there's the picture of University College London's shabby department house and the vulture-necked philosophy professor in his attic room [Ted Honderich], myself in my overcoat and interesting head at a seminar table speaking from an established clarity of view that masters them without setting rancor in motion. Now I was away gracefully describing my father's mind. What's happening is my image is performing to be praised by established men. Should I take that as a regressive betrayal or as information about what another self thinks of this revived academic self, or as an energizing plan (it is energized) to get into a better context. The cog sci book summarizes some of what I had seen should be considered. Those thoughts have decades of other people working on them (I didn't know about) - I'm holding for instance Descartes against Tulku, thinking there's likely some very simple way to slash through epistemology - those generations of men with their careers invested in not solving too much must have set themselves up in a confusion easy for the outsider to see through. What I say now is that experience and explanation are incommensurate. Explanation is a subset of experience. Explanation (scientific or other) is always (I see an armature) lines ('geometric intuition'), as experience is the space the lines are drawn in. Space is not divided into physical and mental. There is no outside inside. I'm going to test this sense against the philosophers. Howard Gardener 1985 The mind's new science: a history of the cognitive revolution Basic Books 12 What Laiwan said about field & field, that it has an ambience. She liked about it: 'stupid spirit' - 'not a figure but a few lines and a sense of figure' - 'I don't want there to be anyone else in me, I want to be alone in this work' - 'that delicate seeing' - 'I talk to myself.' There was something else I want said about it that can't be seen by anyone who hasn't felt comprehension jelling around her. I said no one so far had seen it. (She expected me to say she saw most.) - That she liked the ambience, yes. Where to put it so the very few who will jell in it can find it. A film to cover it visually, but I don't see it, except first those brindles of vapour off the cup, stretching, close, the silver grain of dots, stretch that pulls me apart in the middle. [Opposite: Laiwan's dream. She's in a large open space with trees in it, like an orchard, and in the corner a fair. Upper right. In the fair she is holding a little cage-like box with mirrors. She asks whether it's a musical instrument, the bars to be plucked. In the orchard, somebody says something and the trees drop all their fruit, peaches and strawberries. She take off her hat and uses it to gather some. It gets red stains inside it. A large eagle, bigger than a person, drops down among them, eats the fruit. They're frightened it will want to eat them. They pull out a tail feather and it flies away. I stood in a tremendous place of light and wind. Under my feet was only light and wind. I fell. I was like a feather. There was no need to fear. As I began to feel this and understand it, I began to know the greatness of the wind, the brightness of the light, and joy. That all my senses could perceive was themselves, that they were making the world by casting shadows on the bright void of the wind. We live in this house that makes itself and keeps itself. Le Guin from Flicker's story in Always coming home. The contemporary image is a time-image, even a speed-image. Until the invention of photography, there was only an aesthetic of appearance. Images only persist because of the persistence of their medium .... Those are an aesthetics of immersion, of the appearance of an image which becomes permanent. With the coming of photography, followed by cinematography and video, we entered the realm of an aesthetics of disappearance: the persistence is not only retinal. I believe an aesthetics of disappearing is another world, another link to the real. It is a link to the real as fleeting, as uncertain. The real in an aesthetics of appearance consists of being the solid, durable, hard real - hard in both senses of the word, ie hard and aggressive. So I believe that reality was a reality of solidity, of real presence, as they say. With cinematography, with photography first of all, reality is shown as fugacious, but, I think that we, too, are fleeting. Paul Virilio] 13 Thinking that the proficiency of dreaming is what makes it philosophically interesting, and then this quote too. We've been learning to see cinematically - that's true - Cheryl's face in the drug - in experience an actual puzzlement - am I seeing confusedly, am I seeing more. Why - how does it happen that so many deny image experience - I can imagine that as soon as they had a model, a computer doing it, they'd decide it was possible. The phenomenological intentional account makes sense if you're thinking of a central switch - 'real' or 'analogic' or both - ? I would like to make it possible for women to cut through men's debates. 17th My friend Rowen in his bed next door singing and kicking. He's lying under his green featherbed (he was) with baby near and a bottle but with water in it. Suddenly this week he pees in the potty, wears underpants to school and brought me a puhp like a cutlet in a pan. Leaves his car train and duhdor on my desk. We came in this evening, running the bath I said, Where's your garbage truck? He remembered he'd left it in my room. (Suddenly he's crying, ouchie, ouchie - that's new too, many little whines). I was impressed. This morning coming outside to the bike he tripped and fell on his bum, and then came to me the way he does when he's going to faint, soundless, holding up his arms desperately. I picked him up and he arched back. Then his head falls forward and he has a stunned look as if he's been away. He collapses, blinks. I kiss-kissed him and strapped him on the bike and took him to Michael the madman. He goes about in his little black dufflecoat and the wool hat with earflaps down and blue mittens. He likes sequences and remembers them. From the bath, wrapped in the towel, he must be carried to his chair at the table. Beans on pancakes. He finally understands not yet. Not yet, he says. This week he calls A-llie from the bathroom. He repeats the names of everything, 'kytrain. He lets me stay in bed 'til eight if I give him a morning bottle. He can jump. He can throw a ball so I can catch it. He lets me brush his hair. Yesterday morning when his hair was stuck down with shampoo I suddenly saw, in the mirror, his ears sticking out like Michael's. Then as we stopped on the doorsill to tie his hat Rhoda on her porch waggled her fingers at him, those two things, and Jam's party tonight that Laiwan is going to, put me in a fury. Pearl mornings, very cold. Sara in London saying she missed me. Is it true? I was happy talking to her. [Opposite: "The physical light of kemmer" 1805 Wordsworth in Prelude
He uses his line ends to say what he means also:
Coleridge: "asking a symbolic language for something within me" Le Guin, from The left hand of darkness: Sometimes as I am falling asleep in a dark, quiet room I have for a moment a great and treasurable illusion of the past. The wall of a tent leans up over my face, not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound, the susurrus of blown snow. Nothing can be seen. The light-emission of the chabe stove is cut off and it exists only as a sphere of heat, a heart of warmth. The faint dampness and confining cling of my sleeping bag, the sound of the snow; barely audible, Estraven's breathing as he sleeps, darkness. Nothing else. We are inside, the two of us, in shelter, at rest, at the center of all things. Outside, as always, lies the great darkness, the cold, death's solitude. In such fortunate moments as I fall asleep I know beyond doubt what the real center of my own life is, that time which is past and lost and yet is permanent, the enduring moment, the heart of warmth. - Educed. One cannot bespeak until one has been bespoken, a sensitization. The mind must exist on a certain plane of complexity first. In mindspeech proper the speech centers are activated.] Saturday 19th I'm sheltering in Ursula the way I do, marveling - "to Charles without whom none of it" - the life she is - Michael when I showed her picture said, She's like you. I think she is the perfect life of this time. Saying it, I hear jeering, but I think it's wrong - she is what I might have been able to be if I had had a platform of freed intelligence in my family, and if I hadn't had the complication of a taboo'd body. She would say, you must be faithful to the family you have, but I think first they have to have been faithful to you, and my family for generations has been faithful to cowardice - am I wrong? Am I bad? What she assumes, but still defends, she isn't the first in her family to know. Before I worshipped her, Doris, and Dorothy and Virginia. I know it's shameful to worship anyone, it means I am not myself, I'm not yet up against myself, I am not in my full life - it means also that I am them in comprehension but not in expression, I am handicapped in action the way many people are. And still thinking I'll break through, I'll form it. Seeing what she does in philosophy, she gets a view and sets it in a phrase or paragraph and it's done. She is at home cooking, a middleaged housewife she said, fifty-eight. A master of whatever can be known, wholly honoured though not publicized, three grown children, Charles she married at 22 in Paris, an ordinary old house, many expeditions, and some sadness fuelling her enough to take her into more worlds than anyone, a morally privileged intelligence. Maybe she's lonely in her intelligence, she seems to say so, but at least she knows it is intelligence. She loves her being. Maybe her sadness is that she doesn't see it take effect. And she compares herself of course with some much higher standard. She hints at love lost when she was adolescent, her brother maybe, and beyond that in the equations such intuitives overwhelm themselves with, the womb-brother who in this passage I see is the mother as well as the placenta. She was forty when this one came out I think. It was the beginning of her big power, she had to be little with her children up to then. - Wordsworth and Coleridge and Alberta slides. Wordsworth I find (in Mary Warnock) is reliable. O Mary Warnock if I could work with you - how different it looks - real eager discussion. She wrote Imagination ten years ago. Interesting what happened when I thought of her (Mary -), I thought I could spill the beans, all the actual parts, as myself, and not be handling double books as I imagine with Ted Honderich or any other men. (She's at Girton and is boss of many women fellows.) - Akira in the sushi café saying of my slides, "They're master-piece, I don't know how you could do it." "I did it by a very great discipline, all the time, and a great ease in the moment ..."- I said in a rush. A smell in the air like horse's skin, horse's sweat. 21st I dreamed about someone maybe a man in Cambridge (a street with grey terrace houses and perhaps yellow plane trees), saying - this will be hard to get back - levels of explanation - a sense of fields with lumps - I'm tending to make this Tarthang. 22nd As always meant to be and teach perceptual pleasure and presence. Ecliptic! I've just got it - sun moon and all the planets are on it. In sequence away from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn. This is a horizontal floor on which all the stars stay put! 23 Robert kissing me, it's the chaotic kind, tonguey, I'll focus and see if he will too. We're in a room like a boxcar. When we look out the window it's the land on the other side of the highway. Bohn's field is partly asphalted on top of the fescue (- brome? the wiry grass newly up) and I'm surprised to see directly to the snowy foothills as if they were starting just there. The top window is loose in its sash, almost falling out. We're gabby. I go in my red dress to stand near him brushing my hair. His shell collection is little flat ones, mine is spirals. He was at the chiropractor. He's talking about going somewhere; So it's going to be another year and a half before I see you again? It was as if really him, not the romantic one, a level ordinary one. Seeing on the cover of a book. Today it's looking like an ocean of drowning men and what would I want to join them for. (Honour and money.) [Opposite: The stupidity which, in a society, accompanies the assimilation of scraps of science, theory I happen to care little what men in general think of me individually, but I care very much what they think of human nature. Henry Sidgewick A dim mist that was exuded from her body, weaving intricately within itself in a rhythm that was without agitation, tension, strain, or pressure. My glowing, dancing world, which interlaced itself with another world that seemed to be its own reflection. Cancer is a disease people have when they want to die and don't want to admit it. Trusting impulses. If at first they're all aggressive, see whether behind them is a very ideal impulse toward a love or understanding you don't think you can reach. It is the occupation of the male that determines the social priorities of the whole.]
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