| aphrodite's garden volume 8 part 2 - 1987-1988 december-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
24th December Anything to say? Rowen in his bed, I wanted him in my house tonight, that was all, Michael at Carnegie, movies on every floor. Mary on the phone awkwardly ravenous says she loves me and wants to be my friend, which means she wants me to love her and knows I'm fed up. The mountains have been fresh and breathy in their whiskers these cold days. I've seen the day from the steambath door - I mean the real days with open sky. What it means to celebrate it or not - the songs with winter night in them, O holy night, the stars were brightly shi-ning - It came upon a midnight clear - it has the firmest songs. I want to go to Saturna to be able to look at the ecliptic. Night snow cold stars - good King Wensislas and the strawstack with thin snow, walking past it with Frank. From there to thinking about the depth of that memory and shallowness of others. He's indelible. What we made is. The land is in it, us and it. I could walk out now and it would be nowhere, why's that. Even the garden since it became people. 25th Laiwan and Diana touch in. 26th Very sick. 27th The slope, loose and grey. I'm at the foot of a mountain or just a slope, unstable, dodging under an overhang. I'm in a railway tunnel, an old track nobody knows about, like a mining track, an old dark. We're as if captured. A train runs unknown, a culture in the dark, people we never see, but a life we're annexed by, at first as outsiders. A cavern we lie down to sleep in, a social order I become more powerful in, people's names listed in symbols for flowering plants. Maybe they were herbal names. I've thought of escaping. The powerful train stops in sunlight between tunnels, the place where I entered. A satchel nailed on a post has empty envelopes and two letters I don't want to look at, the men in this darkness aren't powerful. They were making masks faintly white in the dark like masks of skulls. I say look in this one, there's a band of sky inside across the forehead. There's a drawing of the mountain made by a child, grey in scales or scallops with faces laid across it in profile like strata, very complicated. I escape with the child, Luke, Rowen, little boy, runs ahead. I'm shouting Stop, he'll fall over the cliff. He does but he's okay. We're in the little town going through the café or garage looking for a way to the airport. I can send the child on Timeair to my folks, then I'll sneak back as if I hadn't been away, and take pictures of the art. The garage man, an older man with grey hair, distinguished. I'm asking the sort of question that hints, and he does in the end say Come on, I'll take you. He and his daughter in the front seat, and then another daughter too, they're all beautiful, 'fine people'. The child and I in the back, seeing the upper world, a grey-green lake in choppy waves so alive at the shore. It's not certain I will go back under now that I'm out. 28th She, 'I' but someone else, hurried through the streets on a forklift, more like a telephone repair crane, a long neck, the pursuers close behind. My people pile flower pots on me, an old fence. I'm hidden when the Gestapo get there but I can see them. They are pushing at the French windows behind me but the weight of the rubble is holding them back. One of the little boys bursts through a door beyond the windows and that releases all of them. They're gone but when my friends are sitting comfortably, it's inside a living room now, some greyish men join them as if friends but we reckon they're spies, and not long after one of them drags me out nearly naked. They're taking me to a cupboard-like space under a sink. This time they'll wall me up, it will be final. Then as I was waking a long discourse, the kind I've had before, long Victorian sentences exquisitely organized, impossible to remember, like the preface annexed to A passage to India (I read yest). For the record - why is it hard to say this - I'm reading Ros Heywood on the Cambridge cross-correspondences - these nights I go to the red man, 'Fletcher' and not to RM or the father. I don't know whether it is dangerous to love in fantasy, in this case an unknown real person. It sweetens me to sleep but is it connected to illness and oppressive dreams. And I wonder also whether my sense of work, now, is his. Tarot seems to say don't be superstitious about it. Rosalind Heywood 1971 The sixth sense McMillan 29th Yesterday tried feeling the outline of sore solar plexus mass, saw it, brush strokes, was in dialogue with it, it cleared, became transparent - but then in my forehead a complicated mass of pressures and stabs, slabs, yellow needle, dark clouds, a wood-like slab down beside the inside of the right eye. Not easy to feel its outlines, they move and elude. I speak to them too, "abstract?" asking it what it means, and then begin to see/feel the bone behind the nose, its splintery netted fragile shape. I saw/felt very clearly and it was as if physically cleared too, an area often pressured I was seeing airy. This morning M made up the word ethmology. Next to where it wasn't in the dictionary, was ethmoid the name of those airy bones that carry, it says, olfactory nerves. Thin plates containing perforations through which - 30 Keeping Ro at home. M comes in the morning. Listen! Listen! I say to Rowen standing on the chair pouring juice. Daddy Michael down der! he cries before he looks, climbing down and running. Then Michael catches him, takes off his farmer coat, comes with his blue plastic razor to shave, agreeably flatters my pose in the water. "They are not so wonderful tits but still, they have tit magic" [I say] turning in front of the mirror. "I couldn't have said it better myself" [he says]. Then I go out, they play, but by evening the bright lightness, light brightness, is gone and I hurt his feelings telling him to go home, and then yell at Rowen for wanting yet unendingly more boring chat and play. Poor critter six days ill, foaming yellow in the potty. In the end it was a horrible Christmas, the Carnegie dinner another weight of shame so I was vomiting in the night. How it should be is I should be celebrating with my women confederates still. Then I think no, they don't want me, then I think I could have other women confederates who do. I want to say about Michael's boy form in his jeans, sneakers, white shirt, that it enthralls me, like a hawk silhouette on glass, the outline a releaser, an attacher. My eyes glue onto it though it doesn't make me want to touch him, usually. It is - there's something I want to find - like a gape - I want it in my sight but only in my sight - and then too I can't get enough of it, like when I was thirteen, BOY! BOY! I don't even mean I resent being mesmerized by it - (shd I) I don't - it's like a closure, as if it's what I'm hungry to see, as if, maybe, it feeds me body instruction. Thinking of the spastic bodies who need the power of walking to come from another. It's not like Robert MacLean where the body was like that, enough, but the soul got soul to be saying oh YOU .... I like with Michael the freedom to say it in its own responsibility, the brightness of my dark face over his shoulder (his not at all bright face) comparing biceps. "I look so pretty when I'm showing you my muscles." Not knowing what to do. Professional philosophy and cognitive science seem desperate repulsive discourses without a hope, I too without a hope of standing through them. I'd like my PhD. Is that true? I don't know, I have a little sense of wanting it. As if Michael and Rowen and Carnegie have me needing to prove something again from the beginning (Mary was going back at this age), but mostly, a new enterprise. [Opposite page Krishnamurti notes: At any moment what is there instead of perception? What am I identifying with other than perception. to discover what in us is afraid and to make fear dissolve When fear goes so do exploiting and managing. defending an image For you are not an image, but open living awareness, in which space appears. It is living without an ideal self. They say, when you live without the image you can see the others as open living awareness too. Accept and watch: breathing. Watch by feeling. Name interferences. If there's a panic be the blind person with an unknown something. The only thing to do is contact the problem and feel it. Feel the reaction as soon as it happens, or soon after. The skin exercise - come to a tension with respect - find the empty part and spread it like a liquid - fill a part of space around you with radiation-like feeling wherever you feel the body surface to be. constantly and with a mountain of energy tried to avoid pain the decision to accept pain and to welcome feelings The panic will be, I'm going to die. Then look for the I that would die.] 31st The mystery of WHY so much effort was put into constructing dominance for men. $100 from Anne makes me happy and uneasy. 1st January Second sight. Tired and discouraged, Rowen still sick, M in my house all day and ugly by the end of it, his cups, cigarette smoke, the drawings he makes of me all alike and not seeing - our liking doesn't survive it. I aimed for the future and read Molly Keane and newspapers through the day. Ugly from waking every hour all night. Now Ro is asleep, it's only six, I'm alone with table and candle, warm feet, what can be done. Imagining this work I feel flogged, pulped, and as if taking it on would commit me to exhaustion without end. - Can I say one of the foundations of this time, it's fear of Michael's violence, always - the times it bursts into saying he'll kill me, and just looking ahead to our differences about Rowen. I keep him equally afraid of me but my sense is that his threat is real and mine is constructed to contain it. His threat is real because he idealizes me to be able to hold me. The truth when he sees it makes him murderous. I've founded myself in knowing the worst, there's no truth that will make me murderous. No, I commit a little constant murder to keep me knowing the worst, so I will not give my advantage away as I have other times. But the strain is making me live away in fantasy. 2nd I must go into it standing aware in the one and from there deal with the false and the true dualities. Reading the yoga book last night thinking that releasing personality would also release gender training so I wouldn't have to be in resistance all the time. Big sigh. It was a sense of knowing what context to put livelihood and means into. What it's like, squeezed, and inwardly crying, fluttering. 3rd If I specialize it to second sight, the worst of the menfolk is circumvented. Then method - interviews like Spender, testimony. 4th What did I dream. For one, my house full of people who hadn't taken off their muddy shoes. I'm yelling, it's Judy and Michael's friends. I tell a group of them that I had nothing to say about inviting them but I'm the one who has to clean up after them and they're eating my food. I'm breaking into tears, the woman near me too, in sympathy. It's a drag to write this. I'm doing it because when I woke, this and others seemed suggestive. I can't remember how but the word rose is saying itself. Other people's language from everything I read. Now I remember - invasion - the kinds of invasion - whether the penis really does make a breach in some kind of integrity - from wondering why the penetration of a little girl makes her skip into another personality, why it's so catastrophic - what rape is. I NEED to understand (the relation of imagination and perception). I want to be with my depth, that was also my love for you. [Opposite: The space-time continuum represents our concept of eternity, and we are living in eternity now. It is to the universal order that we are constantly being called for accounting. The devotions that are basic to my own being Eileen Garrett the ruby light of love Why don't I remember my sisters? Their belief was that the earth was traversed in the dream-time by ancestral beings biologically different from contemporary man, some being a synthesis of man and animal, plant, or forces, such as fire or water The travels of these dreamtime beings formed the topography of the land, and their energies remained on earth embodied in the tracks they followed, or in special sites or landmarks where important events had taken place. Contemporary people receive part of these energies through a complex association with and duty towards these places. Identification of individuals with particular species of animals, plants, or particular rocks. People have some claim to the land on which they were born or conceived. Links with the special places we passed gave him energy, joy, belonging That to be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses, a vigilance that requires a moral energy most of us can't manufacture. We relax. To be free is to test yourself constantly, to gamble.] 5th Then I dream about Roy that he's rented an apartment he takes me to see, cramped place very expensive in a new building in northern False Creek. I thought we were in London, looking out the window. He says no he wanted to visit us. There's a woman with cheap white wine her child is drinking. She says she used to think it was delicious, now she can't stand it. Roy gives a glass to the baby, who drinks it straight down. I beat Roy's head feebly crying Don't do that. Feeling the shatteredness, fragments of systems that don't link. A tract offered on the street. I say, Is it Christian? Then I don't want it. A pleasant young Chinese man in a cap says, Do you know where you'll be after you go? I cry out against thinking god would spend his time or hers terrifying people about the afterlife. I hear myself out of control as with Rowen this morning, early, not wildly out, but marginally, in a way that makes me someone I don't like. Many nights' broken sleep, and with Paddy on the phone last night, getting patronized because I wasn't handling myself well. Wondering whether what's needed is more not less of an image - I'll think about that. What there is to have defense against: love humiliation, religious threats, patronage, seeing myself as ugly (in ugly and sick people), threat of future loss of looks and intelligence, pregnancy. It looks as if what's in question is simultaneity, analog/geometric representation. The immediate answer is that spatiality is a given: it's equivalent to being. Jan-Marie phones to ask me to a session [at Emily Carr] preparing for Lis, which would go into London Film Co-op in the '70s, women's movement, the writers, Englishness, Annabel, Sally, Dale Spender, the earlier wave (Stevie, Woolf), directions they've gone. Why Ursula puts her theory in a context of being, Dorothy too. 7th 'Seeing' - testimonies. 8 Walking through snow from room to room knowing the siren will come on soon, seeing how people are taking the end of their time together and alone. Standing at the river where they're gathered, we see a line of light sweep the ground. Are we burnt? We don't know. A painted van pulls up on the other side of the water. Black men get out. They say it didn't go off. We can go on living. But the woman in the office staggers sideways. The missile didn't go off but some of the small lighters did. 9 I keep seeing the van. 10 Tracks. She did it as a woman, that's her adventure. What I thought Daphne said was in the book, wasn't there. I'm not wanting to write what I saw is repulsive in this book, anxious self-reference. I mean I'm wanting to write it and then not be there. Davidson Robyn 1980 Tracks Pantheon Yesterday and today three biographies, easy straight-through books. The day before, on steak, most of the way through Warnock's Existentialism. (Yes it is making a picture of myself as a person-like person - it's 'image' - it's as-outside.) A blotto that I thought when I saw them walking together away from me each with a small child, very companionable at the shoulder, would be that again. Then what else. For myself, there isn't going to be another companion for - another year and a half, maybe not then. Yes I think it is Elfreda La Glace. That was writing Anne. 11 Sitting, a sense of being active and not blank or automatic in the dark, a subtle mobile dark, breath zig-zag, the shape-sense. That the philosophic method is argument is wrong. [Opposite: would have led away from the immediacy of inquiry into a realm where identities, orientations, definitions and descriptions played a large role an inquiry open to all forms of knowledge What happens in soma is that I become a marveling curiosity: what is this being? What is being? Knowledge so easy to come to, and so new, everything describing itself and its use and meaning, radiantly, simply. I do not have to chase understanding; I stand still, even moving, and it comes to me and I smile around myself at it, it's Eden, it's natural and my right home. Then: I am an angel and need no suitcase or shelter because I am so light in my body, I can walk the world in joy to see and know. Hunger comes to me dimly a far-off dinner bell, it is not there to torment me, only to remind. Greg's letters. Why does it seem to have been a horrible time? Or a time I have no affection for. As if the country and London are still present and Kingston was no life. And then to see it in my letters, how calm and clear they are basically. Greg says [July 1967] This evening was lovely - smoky dusk, and considerable silence across the park. And, you know, I always find you in the midst of these things, when I am not doing anything but perceiving experiencing. You have become my center. - Ordering all things and producing all things: pairing with each other they unite and manifest the middle distance. That which is manifested from them although being one is yet found as two. From letters to Jam: Before I left, and a reason for having to, waking up or during the day, sudden terror not of death but next to it, of the accounts being in and not amounting to anything. Do you know the molecules of the atmosphere 'scatter' (as they say) blue, by first absorbing that frequency and then radiating it in all directions so that day-sky really is what it (esp in the twilight suffusion) looks: a fluorescent lamp. It makes every molecule a sun. Your idea of sky as a computer. You've opted for power and I for an honest understructure. That's why in writing you have clever effects and I have syntax. You can't have syntax because you're built on a bluff. I can't have charm because I am too strict. streaming hiss points With the shovel to the field. Air isn't cold, I'm in a skirt, but the water had ice on it. Though it isn't midnight yet. Grass is metal, it is as if the moonlight has gone as frost directly into things, without intervening cold. Do you remember the separateness of grass leaves when they're frozen? How it is to walk in the gold-and-silver work. I started to find grain, I think, the winter before you. Last spring in sea meadows I was finding it in red cells. I still watch for it. Pollen in touching myself. In acid, the clouds overhead seemed to move in paces, melting not hard but even, and were granular. Why do you say grass/screen is with dream? When you respect me all the moments open to interest but when you're there and I have to arm myself against my love of you, oblivion, thrashing. The walls I'd patched became a screen without that kitchen otherwise changing. She says: A companionship I'm refinding that I've never had with women, that has to do with mind and language I think and some zones of that play that women disdain and fear. Some remembered sensation of having once been right, inhabiting itself happily, sans contradiction.] 12th This packet of letters [to and from Greg], the story they tell, like a screenplay. But (I realized in the bath) it's Ed who's the hero. Raw. Going to Jam letters. What's different. They don't have the springy youth. I can't see them with surprise. I just feel, how could she not love me? Like marveling to a father, how can you not wish me well? The writer I am in them is too much her and I'm not impressed. 13 In some ways the whole of Jam a waste as if after Cheryl I should have stayed alone in what I had so carefully built. With Jam so much sad trying, and giving her what I'd made to try to make her lucid, and she really preferring not to be bothered, and I dwindled. I lost ten years and the wrongness with Michael and Rowen will go on for more - I dunno when it will stop. These letters are sad sad frightened bullied boring precious clinging to specks. Strong sharp sweat. It's dark, raining a cold rain. I got lonely after this day with papers, tied up my scarf and went to see Ro at Carnegie. But there was the bike at Michael's house. I lock my bike onto his and go up. There's Ro beautiful in Christmas sweater. "A-dam soon." "Is Adam coming?" I know the rest. "With his mom?" "No with Lieth." I'm in a frightened voice and there on the cupboard doors the new goddess in the usual drawings. "I'll clear out. Rowen goodbye kiss." But I think of a wicked turn and go back, to his fury, and ask for my condoms. And now. - Should I change it to the concept of polarity. 14 If I did an MA in polarity. Friday 15th Out of a dream at 4:30 this morning. I'm leaving this room and clearing it for my parents. When I move the bench there are little aluminum strainers, Do you want these? And little lidded pots, like play things, little knives and spoons, and then some with porcelain handles. At the same time I'm hearing a boiling from over there in the trees, a wooded shore, is it swans? Something to do with Ingrid whose little heart-shaped chocolate cookies these are, shall I take a bite? They're soft, that means they're fresh. I take a bite. But are they poisoned? Spit it out. Pleasant not sweet chocolate taste. And wake with my solar plex fighting like a caged thing and an added rim of real pain. At daylight a little soft sleep. Ten minutes late to the chiropractor on M's corner rolled me straight into Leith's smile, Rowen in earflaps on the bike, M's dumb little head hiding under his hat. Old loose skin, tight seam in the forehead, lower half of the face too big, baggy eyes - awful loose flap under the chin. Last week dreamed big rats in the house. Last night - I can hardly remember now - was it last night? - yeah - just starting to see things - "I saw that" - men in Peruvian sweaters walking away. Before that a quite tenuous space black with invisible wisps. (That was with bringing current up from the toes and fingers.) In the Hong Kong café Laiwan showing her instant project. It's writing. "Aren't you a clever girl!" She hides her face laughing. I should do a film she says. Okay. And then bought Rowen a tricycle, "pin-kk bike." He pink and tearfully soft in the bike seat picking crackers out of the cellophane with red cold fingers, and the little bike being carried on the handlebar.
He cried in bed, I held his hand, surface to surface so lightly lightly alive and small. Hard gusting rain. [Opposite, from Kierkegaard: Most systematizers in relation to their systems are like a man who builds a prodigious castle and himself lives alongside it in a shed; they themselves do not live in the enormous systematic building. But in the realm of mind or spirit, this nonresidence is and remains a decisive objection. Spiritually understood, a man's thoughts must be the building in which he lives - otherwise the whole thing is deranged. Journals and papers 3308] 17th Being nice to Row as if he's all I've got, all weekend without being mean. A black dog licks his mouth, he screams. Do you want to pat her? See, she's nice and soft. His body clamps onto me, NO. We see breeding-experiment goldfish in the new shop by the new laundromat. I'm reading, he puts his teeth into my thigh, I yell, he holds out his arms crying. Poops and pees. A long romantic kiss stroking my head. Michael to-moi-o? Michael to-moi-o? Now I know what to say. (Allie tomorrow.) Asks to go to bed at six. Ni-nee on. It was smart to call the can opener scissors. Ah so tired. Dream two nights ago, Anne has had twin babies at VGH, says she's going to have another in July. I'd rather she were writing. [Opposite: I could feel myself walking out on the surface of Mars, he said later. Radiant in the control room. Her respect for the unfathomable workings of the mind was matched by her regard for the complex workings of the plant, but she was confident that, with due attentiveness, she could trust the intuition of the one produced by the other. - There it is. It was her conviction that the closer her focus, the greater her attention to individual detail, to the unique characteristics of a single plant, of a single kernel, of a single chromosome, the more she could learn about the general principles by which the maize plant as a whole was organized. She means - understanding - it understands. It is done with complete confidence, complete understanding. I understood every plant. Without being able to know what I was integrating, I understood the phenotype. Evelyn Fox Keller 1983 A feeling for the organism Yale] The distance between Mary and me is, say, 380 years - Galileo in 1609. Why were there so many stars too small to be seen with the naked eye? Stars had their own reasons for being. "For Galileo in a few nights the scope of the universe was enlarged, he said, a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages." 18 "I know every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them." 20 The kind of day it was today - I want to say - it's not easy - it was a 'spring' day, a light, open, day with air moving, clean air I think, very blue with few very white clouds, cold and warm - but I kept feeling, this is exactly a day of another time, what time is it? Walking with M I couldn't tell because we were acting as if we'd done something, we were acting as if we were having to act as if we'd done something, momentarily got to IT, yes we did, and that was that and wouldn't require politeness after, but did. London, I guessed, but what about it, smelling a cold daffodil, yellow and blue and white - but no - something else. Twenty-five minutes lying down with it outside and shining in (the clouds on the mountains reflecting light into this room, yesterday) I was almost transparent in it. Are colors intensifying maybe. 21 Dreamed I was dreaming a lucid dream. Thought, this is a vivid place, look at your hands. Looked at my hands and went UP flying. It was like a clean American east coast town, colonial red brick, sharp and clear edges and colors. I was as if looking carefully (but not really, remember little). Was higher and faster and then tumbled, grabbed something, did a jolting summersault into my (dreamed) bed. And then did it again, a peasant village somewhere. I know I'm doing it again, look at my hands, and then UP wobbling to the attic level of the village houses in the narrow street, looking at all colors and sorts of food drying. I put out my hand and touch a dark red dried pod. I'm seeing the food has a look of wax, unreal. Fall into my same dreamed bed again, this one a single bed in a small room, head north I'd guess, grey in dawn light. Cold daffodil - I meant something like unusual realness. [Opposite: mor the Danish word for mother the image proscribed testifies to the severe struggle which Judaism, in order to constitute itself, must wage against paganism and its maternal cults. This apparatus carries over, into the private lives of everyone, the cutting of the struggle that each subject must wage during the entire length of his personal history in order to become separate. Bataille I am the flash of a broken life, and this life - anguish and vertigo - opening itself up to an infinite void, se déchire, rips and spends itself all at once in this void. desire for the marvelous (which if it shows it weakly is weak art) - sacrifice in search of a sacred instant elsewhere than the profane where prohibitions insure life. dances with the time that kills In joy one forsakes the struggle to secure the death of time by remaining open to death's time. The human being arrives at a threshold: there he must throw himself headlong into what has no foundation and no head. transparency = the inclusive all the rest is the included about transparency there's nothing to be said it is (relatively) infinite and eternal, which only mean: not known by limits in terms of language it is not-that but in its own terms language is included it does not 'establish itself' it has no outside: BUT transparency is not self, which does have an outside] 23 Hello. What to do. Saturday night, dark at 5:30. There's Lis and the Em Carr lecture looming in three weeks, London show maybe in May, two months. Waiting for optical printer course. Could do an essay on polarity for Laiwan. What abt PhD, visual studies. Grain. What about grain. I love to see it. I like to barely imagine seeing it. Wind forms. Silts. What about the word. Silence - silica - silk - sill - silver - cell - sal - savor. Dust to dust. Sensation itself. Working these bits there's an uplift tone I must challenge. There's also a feeling of being wonderfully brilliant and with it. A suspicion of a fear of hell impending for going to bliss without waiting for those who WORK. Is my ugly foot payment enough. Induced a state seeing spirits - in the floor paint a horse head and a skeleton hugging itself, on the wall a little face - a spooky fear. Nights ago when Rowen was confusing my wakings there were dreams I don't remember, twice maybe, of being in a city keeping to a usual circuit and remembering other places. I'm remembering other times of this dream now. What I remembered was another part of town where there were cafes I liked. I remembered a sense of wandering in old parts of a city. - It's as if I am on a short stay in 'Paris' and have been occupied blindly somehow, and then recall a whole quartier where there's a hotel I've stayed in before, a street of restaurants with really good food, stone buildings and streets. I can go there. Last night in 'London' looking for Sarah, I take my bike on the train. There are three possible trains - her area is as I understand my map from other dreams, on the west outskirts of the city, but I have to get there by looping up to the north and down around. When I get there, it's a snowy place, heavy wet snow thick on the streets. The bus-train doesn't stop though where I think the station is, (this is referring to another dream, whose station I remember) it keeps going quite fast still further west to a new area of white cement highrise towers on a white cement parterre that continues under the river as bed and over it in beautiful little arched bridges, the whole clean and bright as a model, sheets of glass up the tower sides. I think of it as Paris maybe because of the apartment towers outside Paris, and so, now we're got to the terminus (found out about trains back to - where shall I say - Charing Cross - they go 'til ll) I go searching past the bistros behind the apartment cliffs, they're good food places, these towers aren't subsidized housing, and sit to look in Paris phonebooks, a shaggy pile, look in S for Sarah, no it should be B for Black, but this phonebook is not what it should be, has for instance 'blackbird' and a description. Forgot to say that looking past the towers toward the city what I can see is the white tops of the old section to the SE, white dome like St Paul's. [Opposite: a blue world in the light of a yellow star rich gifts of the crust 160 miles above Tibet, could on a clear day make out lamaseries, chimney smoke. "I could first see the dust blowing off the road, then could see the road clearly, and when the light was right, an object that was probably a vehicle." multispectral scanners, thematic mappers fire and rock and water, biosphere windshear virga a twig or streak - a shaft or rain or snow falls into warm air, microburst of wind down scier to discern, distinguish, know] 25 What I don't like, Cineworks - not the building or the people. The garden, I like the place and the people. Mike [Irish Mike] - the way he's taking on the ditch. Psychoscope. Could I make something that reads as a mind - someone else's - the color field - a pacer of some kind - but not necessarily like that, could be some cloud density or a sound - a light almost subliminal pacer - visible sound-parts of things. A spirit First move - saw the thing and offered to clean it [optical printer]. (I do like Meg.) 26 Lis's father's illness defeating $500 for me and what I wanted of change in the work community. Why did I miss the optical printer workshop and what about it. What about it is the material is something for me but I'm always in doubt about 'the film', don't know where to start, it has no bounds. What do I know, the tone. I register the best I've found. Lis's not coming does clear the month ahead. How to proceed. Like an excited gas. Need the straight lines of crystal structure to point me in it. I need - color fields - straight lines - an utter technical concentration - theoretical sidework - method - venture into vision without sidetrack - someway to dedicate it to true intuition. Intolerable vague excitement I want to escape from. A way to treat my gatherings so they inspire without forming. What looks good in the viewfinder is dirt, edges of stones, small amount of plants, orderedness of the way dead stems lie down, the row of onion tubes. Other things look too fussed. These parts are as if a revolutionary stretch I dread and escape. I feel them pulling into place but I can't yet reach the breadth they need. Grain of dirt, could be stepping and graining it / overlaid at different distance, yeah. A sky color, that sky yellow, and the yellow star, and intensity of the same. 26 Jam's at my house and I'm standing on my head to interest her - that seems to be the gist - though it's hanging on the back of the armchair - I'm at her house for a Sunday gathering, many 'third world' people and miscellaneous others - she asks do I have a new pain, meaning her and them. I say no I only have the old one, meaning it's the same basic pain and thinking of the ceiling painting I saw earlier, Lis's. It's a picture of my scar as a child, from the chest through down the abdomen and leg, but put into as if a kaleidoscope so it's a quite beautiful field of strokes butted at 45 degree angles in different ways - but standing under it I could still see the child's body, to make out what it was of. Max touches me from behind, I find I'm naked and sweaty as if I'd been sunbathing. I take it as an attack and jump up, but on the way I see what does hurt me, a photo on the wall of Jam, T and R on the floor with a black triangle drawn between them, naked drawing each other. I know it's the same house she's made to gather them. And here's a black and white drawing up that must be of them. I like the pretty bodies. I jump up and answer someone who's challenged me, must be T, then it's Rhoda with her hair cut in quite a rigid little cap. I stand my ground, why shouldn't I tap her on the mouth or does she tap me on mine, I can't tell because I feel it, but anyway, after, I untie my hair from under my chin and put it up wound around with a very long ('chain') necklace that later, looking at it, seems to be tortoise shell and that also I sort of eat. Anyway then the event goes on and they're no longer around, I think they've retired upstairs leaving the ordinary people who are there in some ways as a cover or fuel. - This was the belly fear waker. There was more about a black (grey) male witch standing saying things about Jews. I made my way toward him. From this dream, Lis's painting and the photo of the naked working triangle. - Lying down in the late afternoon, exercise of listening, sounds from the street, I 'saw' from somewhere further west on Pender Street toward the 800 block, in the going-home dark there actually was, a motorcycle headlight, white single spot, shift out from behind a car and as if pierce me. Shocked me awake. It was more dazzling black and white than if it'd been real. I got to it by saying I wouldn't try to hear, I'd just hear. Rowen in the café this morning put his arms around me and held me quietly with warm life through the whole belly.
[Opposite: Shakespeare 1564-1616, Basho 1644-1694 There is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. Indeed ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. And indeed all who have achieved excellence in any art possess one thing in common, that is, a mind to obey nature, to be one with nature, throughout the four seasons of the year. karumi lightness essay on the vision-inhabited house hyalos glass hyein to rain] Thurs 28 Hands on that beast and what will follow, the oppositions again. 29th Jill [Canada House] about whether to have it in September in a performance festival - May is sooner - oh I want to go in May - but for the work what's better? September is longer to work on it, longer before I can get the grant, I could get more material in Alberta, would it tie up the materials, 'more international,' maybe would make connections. I'd like Japan or - any case, make up [publicity] kit - see whether I could have a second piece ready by September? Is that possible? Equations of motion, about vision. How much of the slides is good now. Comb it for tech. An essay, stories about vision. Go for a B to do this one. Yes, it's essay on one track and grain on another. I write a theoretical piece and it has the heavy clarifications, the soundtrack just touches it and the visual track is there in ether acre. What am I remembering - imagining taking different people in London - a young man and some difficulty or failure. The oppositions will strengthen. It means judgment too, I will have to squeeze myself. Yes, with safeguards. I wonder about going to PRC this summer. Go in the garbage! sez Ro. R for Ro-wen. 31st Transilient leaping or passing abruptly from one thing or condition to another In the city's burial place going down the elevator to see someone's vault or cubicle (I don't think the word catacomb). It's like an underground parking, very crowded. We're out in a courtyard looking up, six storeys they say, reddish like adobe - but some of the six are above ground? There was seepage out of some of the cubicles. I was saying I didn't want to be buried in such a place, rather be burnt to ashes. Half waking thinking it was showing me levels of store, three categories I don't remember, like 'beans,' bins or baskets. Rowen this long Sunday a torture, pants down, pee, pants up, trample my lap, kick water out of the bath, fat bossy boy. Stupidity all day - mine draggy, blind protest - and he didn't sleep. Already the pressure of ambitious doing. It was cold and clean, clean mountains, clean cloud, clean ground with shafts of glass ice. Heavy writing like pushing with my brain. Just go to sleep maybe.
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