| aphrodite's garden volume 8 part 3 - 1988 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1st February 1988 Joyce experimenting in a little room with 'awnings.' "Salt-water shrimp, you mean?" We were out in the harbour flowing a distance away from the mark and then back beyond it. The room with her tank was in the hotel I was living in. Then there's her bed, wide, 5, 6 pillows? Wanting to hang up some clothes for her, "I have a kind of dressing room in there." Bins full of clothes, some washed-out green sweaters, a bin full of scarves on the way out. I'm sitting and she brings in a plate of little dry cakes. "You own this hotel?" She's washed-out and at ease talking to staff at the register in the bar. [Opposite: Native plants we don't yet know anything about. People whose clairvoyance takes strangely other forms, amusing all, but trusted, someone who, what do they call it, computes from signs. A tech for euphrase, good-mind. Arrow living there imagines it. The two worlds are the actual and the euphrase.] If I want to know more about compute from signs there's Ed Epp who knows some. Have to phone Jill tomorrow, say I want May. 2nd Light dry warm snow - a silky sheepskin - railyard file boxes. It's Candlemas. What am I organizing. notes in origin [the performance]. Write out script, get images. Stricken in Love of knowledge recognizing where I was. Is there going to be a way to be alive like that again? I have been going back on it in so many ways. Is it the tide in the harbour? Forward and then back and then forward again past the mark. Tarthang Tulku 1987 Love of knowledge Dharma Publishing 3rd The immersion notes are part of notes in origin, that I couldn't put in before and don't yet know how. 4th M craven yesterday, today speedy and bright. Hours of basketball and then his discovery. He lay down keeping himself in a simmer (used my image) rubbing his thing, "But don't go too far," and didn't think much was happening, but after, had so much energy he didn't want to sleep. I can't get him to be very specific, he doesn't think he can say things, but he says he tries different kinds of breathing. "I found there was a different world." 5th [Stan Brakhage, Marilyn, Dave Rimmer and I at CFDW looking at Rimmer's and mine and some Lipsett films David wanted Stan to see] He's a whiney pontiff and courteous and generous and I saw my work with him, Trapline a bit crude in cut but as he said a sound film, wonderful connections of sound and surface that I made blindly. Then notes in origin I could easily say I wasn't sure of, he said bravo for the moon's entrance! And then we all went into the whitening, we seemed to stop breathing. He was, as I, really whitened by the cloud, and at the end too. "I've never seen a film anything like it." "It's brave yet serene." "It's not at all like Barry Gehrson, you've been seeing it with the wrong people maybe." I could tell him the marvel of the ice membrane. He said the fly image looked cold. "The, what is it" (I said), "specific density of the air." His simplicity helped me, he was so willing like a big grey blotter and at the same time hanging his head and repeating old themes about being so tired of poets dying of neglect, Lipsett, a brilliant cameraman like him. It's true Lipsett was marvelous to see, the little girl waving as she's attached with guywires and next picture you see her on top of a balloon half a mile above ground. In it all Lipsett's saying, I CAN'T BELIEVE WHAT PEOPLE WILL DO, I can't believe how people live. Meantime a big fly rubbing its hands on the paper bag with light in it. [Opposite page: I saw into the darkness, saw down into the earth where all around me, as if the dark were silvered like a mirror - widening in clangorous circles came the waves of terror spreading from the brute bell There is a frequency at which terror and ecstasy are the same and any road may be taken in the brightness of the shadows the strangeness that is (mercury), the strangeness that makes everything here and gone at the same time their god, god of roadways and journeys a mode of event, a shift in the relativities of the moment, a frequency of probability where complementary equivalents offer and anything can be anything Truly this atman - the poets say - travels on this earth from body to body. He said first, "I am." Thence came the world "I". Thus even now when one is spoken to, he first answers simply, "It is I," and then tells whatever name he has. To put it in another way, it becomes vividly clear that I have no other self than the totality of which I am aware. And ztt! I felt I was standing in the center of the cosmos. I spoke, but my words had lost their meaning. action on any level without trying at the same time to observe the action from outside simply a quiet awareness without comment of whatever happens to be here and now most vivid sensation of nondifference stress on outbreath and from belly In this role he is a living symbol of everything that makes one afraid to be spontaneous - find enough nerve to be natural in front of this archetype and you're free.] I bring home a lot of novels in the old red daypack. The one I start reading is Russell Hoban and right away it's Orpheus and "the particles of time past coalesced into sunlight on the" - an electronic composer - green dancing of the phosphors. Russell Hoban 1987 The Medusa frequency Atlantic Monthly Press What we call world is only that little bit of each moment that we know about - underworld is everything else that we don't know but we need it while still moving forward, seemed never to depart; other shapes configured themselves to it in a moiré that shimmered in my head like a watered silk of sound. Walking back and now in R Hoban feeling a steadiness at the base, I've taken my fences, yes I've been taking them. Then today at the laundromat two of the most debased beings (last night on the bus two others). Both the man and the woman had small maybe scarred faces. They were drunk, squabbling, stupid and very loud. The worst was that they were proud of each of the stupid things they said. Their voices were saying specifically to us, We're tough and smart - WHY DON'T YOU FUCKIN TAKE YOUR FOOT AND PUT IT UP YOUR ASS. I went and sat in the corridor reading the Globe feeling it was not the best way out. I was afraid of him, I felt he was so worthless he could kill for any provocation. She was worthless too, called him babe - ie he was a man in her eyes - and was rebelliously subservient. Sunday 7th So, what's on top. The move I found to make, the little act that came to me. Downstairs she has a party, I'm in bed thinking what shall I think about this music, it's very aggressive and they're yelling and laughing above it - who? - Diana certainly. I listen at the vent. Rhoda's shouting The eye mixes the colors, it's very interesting. And then they go on and are raising the roof. I will not like myself if I don't find something to do. After a while I know. Cassette player down the heating vent, a tape, the one of T and I being sugary in early times. It's a brilliant weapon because it injures only the target - and has the largeness of being risky also to me. So I send it down with blankets muffling it on this side. I'm in Rowen's room in the dark. They'll hear it between cuts and at the ends of records. What I hope is that T is down there seized with nervous dread and R is dimmed into an old anger or sadness and the oblivious ones hear more or less nothing and my neighbour who in her goody way hoped to strike me is struck by a tone she'll never achieve, and treacherous Diana too, comprehends and grins. I don't know how much of it carried, and I'm not sure how much of it carried back into me. Dream was a party of theirs I'm at. They're in a room at the end of the corridor, Jam with her hair in an ugly way. I have put on something I found there, a wonderful sari, white silk with gold and colors. Jam at the end of the party says it's a sari designated for some superior caste, brought by an Indian man there. I don't know if I've taken a bold privilege or been pathetic. So what was the tape like - interesting - mixed - I told a would-be charming story like Mary in a seductive voice. She showed herself evasive and rather thin and reduced and very implicated. There was quite a lot of real glee and sweetness. The most embarrassing to me an enthusiasm about harming Roy. "You're vindictive, it scares me." "I am! I delight in it. What you do, you do it on the spot." She laughs. "Roy will never get old," I say, but he did. I saw how I used them to vanquish him. And then I saw that Jam's crazy fit in Alberta about 'coming' was a delayed fit about hearing the tape's voices. I saw T was being Roy Kiyooka, partly, saying there was nothing to be learned - a wise pose. Alright and beyond all that, what - what's the truth - a rather faithful relation - which seems alright. - And then, Hoban's book and what I think is implied. The whiney lines like a brake on the corner being sent as a counter-spell, what are they? A pin in the right eardrum. What else? Her call to Jam which can't remind me of what I haven't forgotten. - Hm it's from downstairs, Tina is playing Trudy's birthday present. That will need another move. 8th I went to Joyce's house when she wasn't there, she'd said she leaves the door open. It's not clear whether she's actually invited me to come in this way or whether I'm exploiting an uncertainty. A little girl who's not her child, maybe her neighbour's, challenges me, then a young man, her son, and others, all five, different ages. I want them to like me as if maybe I could fit into this family if they did. Still waiting to see what happens when Joyce herself arrives, a different age from them (as I am) rather white and frail. Writing this feeling the frailty of therapy. "There's something wrong with me." And it having to do with what Laiwan told me about Rhoda and Jam reading together tonight and Jam and Hélène on Wednesday. Rage at Tina for bringing them into my house. SHIT I shouldn't have - why didn't I feel the rage in time - they've found a way to penetrate. [Hoban: 1. Shortwave radio at night he says - the sense of common sources as if he's been listening in to me or vv or both or all of us to each other - the Orpheus frequency - this book's 1987 and he looks out of the photo as if he sees me at this moment - and when I look back his look softens - his forehead pulled very contrary, it's a conscious pose - thick glasses mean something - a frightening face unless it softened personally - pain - it stands for experience the way I feel myself it now, not being nice, struggling and at a guilty remove from innocence - there's the needle whine again - it's like a point traveling out toward a target, a laser line - the way our fates as we go around in a day are as if intercalculated. This is common knowledge to me, at least a constant interest, but I'm trying out saying it. 2. The Kraken/Pluto/Hades at the bottom of the sea, a bodiless head frightened and missing someone - it floats out and is pale green - Robert and love afraid of itself. 3. "The girl's look that makes no attempt to avert anything," innocence - he looks for her and gets to the dead head - ROBERT in his tent listening at night - is the one who passed Orph on to me, in fact, and misfortune after. 4. The rotten old head is writing. "Perhaps the universe is a continually fluctuating event that configures itself to whatever is perceived as center." 5. He feels the pain of the innocent he killed and with that he's in the moment under the moment, under-world - in the weeping of Euridice - what is this - it's his own pain and it's under the false moment. 6. Wide justice. 7. What was the idea of her? "You really are a fish." Fish-motion. What's the idea of him? Body. What's the idea of Jam? Emotional falseness. 8. "I don't think it actually moved stones and trees; what it did was put them in a new place for those who heard." 9. The filmmaker whose film he's sort of following in - the Phillip Dick about Titania and Lucifer was like this one - the Titania frequency - something to be known in this - centers for the universe to configure around - but loosely, more than one - if it was empty because it was Godness - we worship Thee meaning we configure around godness, in this case maybe Coding. 10. "The stone of me cracked and I came out of myself quite clean." 11. The girl idea he promises to look at is the gorgon and he un-stones by looking steadily. "She opened underworld for me" - who did - well there I'm Orpheus too. She's singing now in the simplest way there is. 12. Bees, buzz, many moving points. 13. Robert. "Euridice is all one wants to be faithful to but can't, and the loss of her is the punishment." When there was love and happiness there was no story. "You have wanted only the sweetness of Euridice to love and to betray. This is the face of what cannot be betrayed." Who's Medusa. My old mother. 14. Because the blughole is where the mothercode is transmitted from and the transmission mustn't stop.] Philip K. Dick 1981 The divine invasion Simon and Schuster 11th Working prose - the Environment Canada application for money for bird-trees and a way to learn their names and the plants'. Tonight a letter for the midwives. "You certainly know your way around this business" says Hugh. Laiwan's father dying. I hardly dare know my love for Laiwan, because it seems to work better if I don't. She is thinking of him but I'm thinking of her mother's freedom. We met on Main as she came for her bus and we were untying our bikes at the hitching post, Row in the saddle and whining. At times these last days I see Michael's naked forehead shining next to me and have a jump of joy. 12 I was passing through a red desert waiting to come to Henry's red earth garden. It was desert still, and then a hill of red silt and I knew I'd soon be there, and then Henry sitting inside a dark red adobe wall, with another enclosure by it, but I'm flying, being flown, too fast to see. I want to stop but I'm being rushed on. I look back at a dark red adobe village, and I manage to turn. I'm trying to get back there but I'm veered wide left over flat fields. I wake. Henry is in the hospital with a tumor in his brain. Why do I want to get to him? [Henry is one of the gardeners.] (And again I dreamed of Joyce but don't remember.) I sit up in bed. Something soaks out, quite a lot of something: my pyjamas full of blood. I get up and realize I'm ill. Am I ill? I think I'm faint, I have to lie down on the bathroom mat. It's because of the spotting I'm worried - what have I got in there, is there something growing in the womb? Why would that polyp bleed. What will I do about meeting Jim at Cineworks. I put my finger in honey and lick it - it seemed to want that. Count weeks. It is my period showing up unusually. The spotting confused my signs. Brian at Cineworks dispatches my envelope to Environment Canada. How lovely to have him do it, in such a pretty friendly capable way. Jurgen lurking. Jim and I go photograph the optical printer. I'm busy and decided and behind it somewhat marveling that I can do this, say what I think and take up the doing and have time to notice a physical purr. And when he's getting snappy and I can't concentrate I hear myself saying personally and simply, Are you getting to the end of yourself because of needing to eat? Intimate but in the way of efficiency. "I haven't seen anything of yours for a long time but Trapline is one of my favorite films." Nose and earring and a stretch between. And Brakhage has booked notes. 13 Yesterday his breath was four counts between, today, eleven, and he died at noon. The nurse said when the breath slows like that it is an almost invariable sign. "Were you there?" "Oh yes we were all there" - the African children. He was fifty years in Zimbabwe, a Canton village boy of seventeen when he arrived. His eldest daughter is Minister for Education and has six bodyguards. She sits in Parliament by a black woman, the rest are all men. His wife married him when she was 18, his older daughters near her age. They were married 39 years. She is in a house she owns, with her mother. They are in a safe city in a safe country, with furniture that came with them from Africa. What I'm thinking is how she's far from the necessity that brought her to marry him. She supported her mother - not that he supported them, she always worked in the store. The daughters of the earlier marriage looked after her children. 14 Has been a Sunday inside with Rowen. R-is-for-Rowen. My Rowen he says many times in a day. I say, You're a lion. My Rowen he says. My Rowen my ouchie. Luke at his age had beautiful grammar. But rubbing OUT - writing like a writer - start again. I want to record A is Adam, Bottle, Door, and he calls the squared O's Door, E for Ellie, Foot, (C and G will have registered by tomorrow), House! (laid the I on top of the H for a roof), apple Juice, Leg, M is for Michael, Nose, E is for Perry, R is for Rowen, Sit down, Table. For O he said circle. The red double-you is for Water he's very sure of. Today it was a lot of that formality he likes. Mama Ellie please more juice. Mama Ellie help please. Not formality, mastery. What kind of person is he. Gusty. Springing with pleasure of confidence. Rough. But if I stop him with the smallest smack on the leg he crawls into my arms crying pitifully. Perry pushing him off the mat sent him into a fit. He begs for books - Margaret was telling me how much he likes it when they have a circle and someone sings or tells a story ("I thought I wouldn't give him too much of that cultural stuff but he's crazy about it.") - and now he's finding the letters on them, Tiny A for Adam. He says tiny as if he's looking in wonder at a speck of a bug. Am I writing like this because I don't write Mary anymore? It would be an irony. Should notice that I got through the weekend laughing with him, did not get mean. I like his mouth corners and I like his bright brown eyes and his newness of combination. Curiously, I'm feeling turned around about Mary as if the person who was worst about him abstractly would be most interested to hear his particulars. Middlemarch today. Repulsive too, though I was as intent as ever to get Dorothea and Will into each other's arms and had a catch of breath thinking of the man in the library who was like every beautiful hero of 19th century writing - not of him as that, but of his look at me - that crying pleading look I have no explanation for - a soul in a life I'll never know. Though if he wanted something he could have spoken to me - and if he was looking like that - well, maybe that was it, a meeting set up for me. I'm thinking of what I was dreaming on the way there. At least the dream is transferred from mean Robert MacLean. No don't think about him. In sum: womb fired up - is it womb when it's quite high in the belly, Did George Eliot have that when she was writing? What's interesting in her - see, no one to talk to, the journal could be less like this when there was. Her sense of noble behaviour which is behaving apart from your material interests, and which is easier everyone knows to people with advantages, ie what makes them superior is they can act at times without regard. What's interesting about it is how it is both superseded and not. I was thinking of reading-people like Jam and me and Robert whose sense of noble behaviour makes blind and attractive. Her plot is too Dickens, mysteries and misunderstandings. The sense of Lydgate's one mistake bringing him to the end of himself is frightening. It's a lot about vocation - I've just seen - that's the best thread. [Opposite: Permanent rebellion, the disorder of a life without some loving reverent resolve, was not possible to her. The grotesque of Causabon - Jam and her thesis. Carrying on her thoughts as if they were a speech to be heard by her husband] 15 Asked to sit with Laiwan's grandmother while they're at the funeral - a small misgiving I don't know the value of - as if a racial suspician, would she sacrifice me to her family? Yes if it were useful to them. A sickening note from Mary. Last night it was an invasion dream again, the lock off downstairs, signs left, nails or spikes, two of them driven part of the way into a notch in the floor and bent together, something like that. Coming in annoyed and worried looking for signs. What I really think - sometimes - is that Einstein and McClintock and some others have for some reason, the way Kepler did, a natural perception, and I have it too. The puzzle is why others don't. The next motion is out to (it's the trains sighing that one note that hurts my ears because I thought it was witch spite): but there's a standpoint where it can't be so. I can't see it now and never have seen it clearly, only felt it over in that direction. It's to do with seeing it organized as if branches around a lamppost, as if I don't see unless I see the whole in my own light. 16 [Opposite: Venetian blind, look at the white wall, see red and blue and green stripes form more distinctly, first a light drizzle, gaps in the stripes. Have to unfocus. The drizzle is a lovely amount. Drizzle is when I unfocus so stripes are on part of the field. Opal glass. Prefogging neg - expose to clear light before or aft, affects the blacks more. Color to b/w - orig color neg to color interpos and b/w fine grain pos - then put these through one after the other on same intermediate color neg linked by long dissolves - or double expose the two for diff ratios.] What's different is that she expected people to want to hear and I've always had a sense of when it's hopeless - "This is my best sense of what's valuable for people to see and be." When I set up the new notes in origin show I'd like to spell out the working principles and forebears - what's wrong with what other people do. What have I been after - something like a unified perception - start here - this writing is shorthand, that's ununity - it is squeezed in and then unanamorphic - no, it's conventionally indicated and reading is like piano reading - you put yourself in - alright. Then everything that comes. The plastic monkey with vinyl fur - the 84-pound grandmother gettting up to check through the house - reflection in the TV screen of crocheted lace, sound of the eraser rubbing, foot, foot, on the carpet, hand against the page, airplane - in that I hear the rolling of the air - silence of the baby's sleep - quick heartbeat of the clock - grinding of neck vertebrae when I turn my head - they say there is no I but what can make that so. She isn't sleeping but she sits on the hassock with nothing to do. Is that the reply. What's the question. It's what should I show in film. It means the unified field is a state of attention and it isn't the only state to enjoy - no - it means a state that sees its state change is - all this is stupid. 18 Falling asleep imagining writing about Jam. Imagining a hard job, writing misgivings with it - I'd be up against the nonsense - but it's interesting, it wasn't marriage, friendship, an affair, it was school and ordeal. First question who is it written for. I haven't found a better ear but her ear was mine - if I dwelt in it could I remember conversations. Go ahead and sue me. Daphne maybe - yes there are better ears. Annote a phantasmagoria, annote a form of struggle common to many, who in me can I find to judge it. I could fabulate - "She will approve that I have also told some lies." A struggle of two people moving around two positions. Trying to write what actually happened rapidly dissolves my ground. A kitchen community. There are pots going to be fired. I paint the inside of a vase with what I take to be a yellow glaze, outside is painted with oxides. There's a long piece of clay scored and hinged like an unstapled cardboard box, that comes apart as I'm putting it into the oven. We just put all the pieces in a roughly torn end. We take them out not long after - beautiful lively slabs with colors boiled up through a greyish cracked glaze. Sitting peacefully in the kitchen feeling how I like this community. A later dream on a clear lake. I'm on a raft, Rowen on the quai has a stick he's using to measure an arc from wharf to raft. I want to prevent him doing that, paddle the raft a little to move it off. He's caught holding on with the upper part of his body. The raft suddenly shoots out from under him, he's left face down in the water too far from the person on shore, too far from me and I can't swim back. Shock wakes me. - Our present creation story is a story of space and grain, currents and straight lines, attractions and repulsions, expansions and contractions, intensities and rarefactions. If-then stories. [Opposite: certainty, diamond body, dilation, completion Snyder and sense of place Jane Harrison and Prolegomena "Olson at least gets back to the Pleistocene." You know whether or not a person knows where [she] is by whether or not [she] knows the plants, or by whether or not [she] knows what the soils and waters do. What's the function of the work - planetary overview - seeing which parts of the symbol system are no longer applicable. Something is triggered by being a witness to that most paradoxical of human situations, witnessing the dark and the light side of the mother simultaneously. He means aggressive but what he says is "If you only see the dark side you probably go crazy." "Most people only witness the light side of the mother. Literally." - the 17th century tremendous in the study of light without feeling anything but that long grave mutual gaze which had the solemnity belonging to all deep human passion "My whole soul has never consented." I understand her sense of it but I haven't lived that way - I've smashed things. "Substitution of wayward choice for the adherence to obligation."] 20th Garden, because it was warm, grabbed me and held on the way it can. I start to ache, need to eat, but don't leave. The bees were awake and flying like my delight. Eric said, "I guess it's starting to speed up. We're into the fast stretch." I started talking about the ellipse being a sum of two or more forces, "but what's the second one?" "It's inertia," he said, "otherwise we'd fall into the sun." "Ooo, let's go." I had spun around to hold my arms up to it. Standing there with him as at other times a loving joy in his company. "I could tell you something about bees not many people know." (It was that the reason they are buzzing around stinky things is that they're carrying bacteria.) "But what's in it for them?" "Oh it's part of their deal with the plants!" He woke one morning last week with that message from the bee-mind. Looking at him, even the china teeth, he looked an elf, the way his mouth corners go into thin wide crooks and his tall light frame and peaked ears. Then in the aft he was talking a long time with a Jewish truck driver young woman over across the path. I heard him saying in his warm bright way, You must be a very special person, and (it was because I heard her talk about filming) I jeered irresponsibly, He says that to everyone. Last night M and Rowen were going home from Carnegie, I was at the bikes with them, Row was buckled into his seat. M was saying, Something came over you I think, about the way I'd run to hug him by the women's washroom door where he was waiting for Rowen to come away from putting his hands in the toilet water with the large little girl. I said it was dinner and he said Feed this girl and she'll .... Etc. And then walk-walk-walk, "Look who is here, she's going to find the door locked" (and have to turn and face us). I've registered that she's wearing her work boots (why's she going to this poetry reading - because they are - because Gerry is reading) when she turns and we're all smiling obediently. I see she's fat like a padded coat, frumpy in perm frizz. I'd like to know what she sees. Hello, hello, hello. It's Rowen she wants to look at. He's redcheeked in his earflap hat, stalwart in his bossy brown eyes. Michael has on his farmer daddy green chore jacket but he looks like young Henry Fonda long in the cheek. Sweet and clear. Me - I don't know, tired and elderly but there's the coat she hasn't seen and hair like her young mom. We go on smiling. She leaves down the ramp. Looking at her, besides the knowings and questions, what I saw was: this person is nothing to me. "She had to come along just at the moment you had your nose in my ear." "And it's years since I've had my nose in your ear." [Opposite: The face of a young girl with golden hair, like Niamh Chin-óir, or the young queen of a thousand vision poems. And the Cailleach.
- improvizes from dots. After that I dreamed: I'm looking at a rather rough young man on TV, a young rocker, a bit of a lout and not a pro. He looks at me so steadily I assume he can see me. I smile to sense his body. I wake lying listening to someone breathe, is it me? No, because I feel a warm arm under my pillow. Without knowing who's there I turn and put my arms around the man's hard triangle of chest. It's Michael. Then I really wake. That was falling asleep after long waking in full moon stress.] 21st
In the hotel on the corner. His note says, come for lunch. When? 12:30. I wait at the end of the row. He collects his papers. We walk out without speaking. The tension is very high. Outside the gate we pause. We stand facing each other for the first time. The look staggers us. He puts out his hand to the front of my shoulder. He looks wide open. I turn my chin and kiss his hand. He takes my other arm and starts to move me west on Museum Street. We ask for sandwiches and coffee to be sent up. He takes off my coat. I take off his corduroy jacket, and his shirt. In his bare chest he goes to fetch the sandwiches from the door. He puts them on the suitcase rack. Comes back and takes off my shirt. A light goes over his face. I roll down the bodcovers. We take off our pants and get in and pull up the covers not too quick for me to see. He puts down his finger to see whether I'm wet. He comes straight in. We don't close our eyes. He laughs, I laugh. He puts his hand on the side of my head. We look in each other's eyes. Touch what we can reach, watching it register. We laughed because at the moment he came in we saw fear depart. We go on slowly, beyond visions to the chasms. He rows, I create the river. Never a wrong motion. We come out in a long sigh of light, a crackle of water, a flowery mead. We have our eyes open on each other's faces. How did you know how to do that? It's the first thing I say to him. We eat the sandwiches lying on our backs looking at the ceiling, talking. The curtains are green chintz with pink cabbage roses. Taxis idle below. What do we talk about. First, to make use of this intelligence, our work back in the reading room. We're in the process of finishing it. It takes us half an hour each. Second, beginning while we're doing the other, we're testing (very lightly, we know not to talk it out) our correspondences. Third, because we know not to waste it, we ask ourselves what's next. We know we're married. Do we know what to do. We say let's be like Christians and ask the universe. I say I'm feeling we should walk to the little area beyond Westminster. We find a flat on the top floor of a Victorian tenement. We find it by talking to a young man in a café. It's a sublet with blankets and car. Then we go home separately. I look awry. Does fantasy do that. Dreamed I couldn't get to my room upstairs. Thought I'd go back to Kingston but wheeling through one of the little Ontario towns I must have missed the turn. I find myself out in the country with three roads to choose from all thinning out. 22nd Elizabeth Gaskell 1810-1865, Eliot 1819-1880. Story with railway surveyors walking to a farm where the minister and his daughter read Virgil together. The two interesting young people not destined for each other, and genuine men liking each other's minds, is very charming. When the story is subtracted - did young women really get meningitus when they lost hope of marrying the one they wanted? (What's the attaching-to that's so decided in bodies? I still don't know. I can be fond of Michael and go hold his hand, but if I kiss him and he comes back with that pushing motion, I'm gone. Why. Say it. What do I want. Him there me here kiss kiss sentient and dry. But haunted by two times, with Roy and once on a gravel shoulder with Nelly, when hunger came up directly and I pushed and liked it and wanted to be let for once, and they pulled away. So I know, maybe I know, what his push is - but it feels like a calf or dog, and I get ready to leave knowing he'll be in submerged fury.) Avoiding the optical printer handbook. On the sidewalk in Chinatown feeling the sunlight itself is happiness. I'm trying to think whether bubbling is right, gurgling was what I thought first, the water sound. When I was digging I heard the first blackbird gurgle of the year - the first I heard - but I didn't hear it, I listened to it after it was over and I realized what it was. (So short-term memory is close to being the event, itself - no, that's already modeled: I heard the blackbird sing but it was not the blackbird singing until after I'd heard it. Then I didn't hear it again but I heard it back there in the accomplished - I saw it over on the other side of the garden a dark line eight or nine feet off the ground, over there, back there, at that much of a distance. 23 Elation and clarity are always present and will show through whenever and as soon as I don't affirm myself as separate from the rest of the field of the moment Abandoning the critical approach to every situation and turning into full relationship with everything, every moment Looking at another, I'm seeing myself as Being in another aspect The Alkali Lake film. Upstairs in Carnegie crying away, Andy Chelsea's smile like light. Dinah crying as she presents it. It's related to Four Worlds which is Judy's organization. Phil Lucas dir 1986 The honor of all: the story of Alkali Lake doumentary narrated by Andy Chelsea 160 min 24 Expanding in the light so I feel myself stretched at the skin. 27th The cards aren't dismissing this fear. In the last maybe two weeks when the death fantasy comes to mind, in bed as I'm falling asleep, body has sighed - it says yes. Last night so direct, "I'm going to die." SIGH. It's coming from the polyp and infrequent brown spotting, usual armpit twinges. What do I have to be afraid of - Brakhage taking up notes in origin, Cineworks attachment, show in London, young men saying, Oh you're Ellie Epp, learning the computer, talking uncarefully to any one. Very often dreaming of Joyce - does it mean I should see her. Is my soul dying cause I'm being bad to Mary and Michael? Is somebody else sick? Is it Laiwan's father? Are they hexing me? I have bin feeling the beginning of being able to work - write and make films - freely just as I am. "Just as you are among the small company of people who come to mind in the dark lonely hours of working, I'm hoping you will know Marilyn and I are 'with' you when you are going on with this good work" says the man who made On seeing with your own eyes. "Dear Ellie Epp." [It's The act of seeing with one's own eyes.] 1st March Ripped up Mary's cheque. She said Women and nature was so black, "Couldn't the writer have found something brighter?" I am seriously on strike with her. It has taken me 'til now to discover her as a philistine. It feels artificial, nervous and necessary - nervous in the way of having no touchstones of goodness from my young days. Mr Mann relieved to be rid of my letters. Nervous to know whether I'll get ugly with no foundations in ideality - what did I dream - the home place, where I went to see my parents. Went out to shit at night, there was no toilet and it had to be on the ground. The little first house full of derelict Indians sleeping and not. Another cabin full of them. I'm saying I want to dig another hole so there can be a toilet. My face is showing all-over little creases for the first time - a little bed of them under the eyes - a new coarseness - and yet how black and bright and delicately wise I look, more than ever, as though I've gone a marvelous dangerous route alone, and am still on it, and will be as passionate when I'm old. Something else feeling how she the monster of complacent fear wasted his life by forcing him to keep account of all the bad she doesn't want to know. 3rd Passing a mountain on the right, seeing stone outcrops in tiers of three, beautiful shapes like clouds. Marveling that I've made them. Another flying. Figuring out how I can move up or down by bending at the waist. Stressed days without daycare. It takes only a few before I'm evil with him. 5th M notices tremour. Nights lying with my claw foot twitching. Is it career speed? Wrote letters to Rumsby, Jill, Lis, Luke, filled out passport, tax refund and driver's license forms. The Women's Day march was piling up at First United as we walked past. Laiwan in yellow looked bright and clear but oh the rest of the worn poor dull things smiling smiling in solidarity. They're not my friends, they're repulsive strangers. Sharon/Astarte had a nice bright look. Horrible large dogs. There's a voice that says these things. 6th Coffee in a little café bench with M's arm warmly around, Rowen driving a dumptruck on the table in his moss-green bouclé cardigan, the menu card hangs off the back of the box. In the aft making trips with Eric, a load of celery for the compost box, another of bean sprouts. He gave me a board to edge the long bed. There was sun too. Rob working alone in the orchard, Lois planting bulbs like crowns on the little hills. Anne berserk. Phone rings and who do I think it is. Now I have to get through this conversation without giving in and confiding anything. She presses. She wants letters like she used to have. She knows something is up but not what. I tell her the book was nice. What about the socks, she wants to know. Oh Rowen doesn't notice what socks he has on. That's blunt but she pushes past. She walked a sentimental journey to Johannah's. Rudy talked to her coherently for twenty minutes. What was he on, I didn't ask. Where does it turn. She asks greasily what I'm going to buy for my present. Alright since you're putting me to the test - I'm not going to cash it. You're going to be stubborn? Yes. What can I do for you? Test again. I'm not going to tell you, I've told you lots already. "Nothing." Then she says she loves me and I swear. She's never heard me say FUCK but we both hear it now. She isn't going to have a clue what I'm angry about. I'm furious. She's pushed it. I don't know myself whether I have a reason. What's after that. I say if you love somebody you don't say it. "You say it if you'd like to love them or think you should. It makes me sick." "I think of it differently, I like to be told," she says. I'm out of control of my tongue, we'll see what comes. "I know you do, that's why you don't get told." She has a dignified pathetic sound, is she crying. I hang up and go see Michael. On the bike laugh at the story. My mother said she loved me and I said fuck. Rowen is calling from his bed. He's lying on the sheet looking calm and lovely. More appuljuice please with a shovel and bucket at his head. I'm tired, turning his head. Light out, but he calls me back. Kiss through the bars, See you to-moi-oh. But talking to M about it, looking at the embers, doesn't quite do it. He justifies me and I need to know something I don't already. He says I'm like her when I'm in distress and feeling like I should look after someone - Rowen he means - and that I look depressed when I'm with her. 7 Dreamed I'm on the street wanting to go to an art show --- (RCA). A taxi with sharetaxi written in German (starts with W) on the side, is pulling up, someone else has flagged it. Can I get in too? Two men in the back. Young German woman driver I sit beside. We get to talking. Where am I going - I can't remember what the show is, drawings I say. She's interested. (300 bus route I said when I didn't know exactly where I was going.) We're arrived at the square. She has her face up against mine so I think she wants to be lovers. I'm wondering how long I've been in London, I've spent a week's money, have I been less than a week. I'm at Stepney (?) Green. It may be near the show. A grocery store looking for a Time Out magazine, it's like what I think one of the modernized punkish suburbs would be. Yesterday morning the fright dream of coming up under a train, wheels start to move, can I get my head down. Fear wakes me out of it. - Evening, don't know what to do. Avoiding the show. Don't know where to start. It doesn't need work, much. What can I do to be in the mind of it. Comb through the stuff separately? Fix it? Make film out of it? There's Jim King. Find something to shoot. Test. Start at the peripheries and sort slides. I'm afraid of the immersion. If it were new work - if new work could come, a book - a screen - a latch on the door - throw on other images - could learn images in fade - a line moving and fading fast - fixed projector and hand projector - white imps hand thrown from a flashlight, a flashlight itself, the book of techniques put into slides - a vocab - a way to see into corners of slides. 8th Next day there's quite a lot to interest. 10th The way when I meet Rob at the garden there's a moment before one of us starts talking, that is like a little shock of love. Is there a better way to say it - it doesn't zap, or I don't know whether it goes from me to him, we look at each other and it's there - when I first see him - a gentle intimacy, that then jumps into some business message. He's a funny-looking anorexic thing but he stands well in his boots, long hair in a thin loop at the back of his neck, a hair arrangement unique to him, and forehead pleated with old apprehension. His garden is messy but he comes to work all day on the orchard, raking back the hay to see the drainage, and he always talks sense, though, at meetings, with hunched embarrassment. Curiously, it is a sexual love. It takes in the whole body, as if just by seeing it. I like his rectitude. What else, he's courageous in the way he presents himself to much that someway invades him. That's how I take his creases, anyway. 12 "I need more milk." Maybe the first sentence. Dreamed I was with Greg again. Seeing in a mirror up my spine at intervals rivets or else pimples, rivets lower. His room is an inside wall with outside shell. A lot of big books and records. He's a nice lean intellectual with rusty beard and lean cheeks, dry, distinguished. Bin noticing a wish to sing jazz. 16th Yesterday Joyce and what came of it. At the end when she said what would you be like if you had that freedom (of not having to be careful not to be Mary), I said, The way I am now, quite a lot, etc. But then a real fetch from across a space, "I'd be more mobile, on drugs sometimes I found myself that way and it seemed so much my home. She's quite fixed." "Like her hands," said Joyce. "Yes." We got there by her asking what I depended on Mary for. Then I turned to no-body until I said Nothing and we laughed. Then I said I needed her to see how I am. "And then what would be different?" "I wouldn't have to insist on it so much." "When you're having to guard yourself all the time it makes you immobile." "Yes." "But she isn't going to see me so I have to do it myself." Joyce pounces - "Do you see what you're doing?" "Not really." "You're saying she isn't going to do it." Then going to fetch Rowen and find Michael, limp, exhausted, and wanting to be fucked. "I said, she's exhausted and she wants to be fucked." Michael has been looking like such a clean bright boy, when I see him across the room at Carnegie making his off-the-wall airy little jokes I want to eat him. I can't believe my luck. And somehow also it doesn't turn out to be true, because the man I take to bed isn't that clean bright boy - though oh my I liked the bulge of his warm arms and I liked being buttered oyster and feeling his confidence goin' in and out solidly. But it doesn't, didn't, get to sex. Oh mean little Jam who had suspense and timing. The opiates didn't manufacture. 18 Reading Walden. I don't remember anything except maybe the line fishing upward, but I seem to have reiterated it in the meantime, not so meticulously and in another texture (I'm seeing wing feathers). He is my friend in admiration though over-tidy in his arrangements, and I wonder if he died young of purity. He likes an elegant social step - gailliard. Emily D had that neat finish too, but her smaller steps. As if in both of them the one who saw was what he says, un-local, and the one who spoke was trained to parlors. Horrible hopes. He got rid of furniture but went on alluding. A white light in the garden, shadowless glare. Shirley Carr competently cheerfully stepping through Music in the life of - Bread and Roses and Jerusalem - like when I was a kid, oo what life has in it. It's free Friday, clean house, Walden at the table in the garden, Rob a man from Annares standing like a spirit in brown light in the midst of his new plot. What it is, is he's sentient. I've got self-conscious with him now, too bad. But there's a way, sailing said Joyce. 19 Urgently suddenly - Friday 1st April for B grant - 13 days but I don't need that long. - It's possible that what I've been tracking in visual/imaginal is toxic or disordered perception and not the larger use I want to find - from what Dewdney says about scintilla, mosaic vision, "temporary windows into the neurological substratum" as migraine effects. Visual flooding and paravisual flooding - thrilling idea of using the brain model to experiment. Dewdney C 1986 The immaculate perception Anansi [Opposite: consciousness is the ground in which the nervous system is discussed a virtual image like a virtual sound or like a color illusion is a spirit confirmation of the physical model We cannot stand outside consciousness to discuss it: consciousness discusses consciousness and yet, in consciousness we can separate a physical from a virtual image. What is my longing for the virtual image? The virtual image is like the photographic image - ie an image. An imaginary image is a virtual image. Signified ideal consciousness: (working on) mosaic signal hypercognition - being able to take in immediately structures that have taken a long time to make. It's a special condition of (dilated time) cross-modal transfer, "This ability to operate with internal models is felt by Eccles to be synonymous with imagination." visual flooding - fix at fovea centralis, disengage selfawareness. He says it imprints without intermediacy of language. "screen of the striate cortex" paravisual flooding - Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. However mean your life is, meet it and live it. Walden 1845 at 28, died in 1862 at 44. Had all his teeth pulled and replaced by dentures at 33. A higher perceptual faculty - the power of one's imagination which spontaneously intuited the invisible spiritual reality underlying natural phenomena. George Eliot was the only one to review it, 1856. Moby Dick 1851, Leaves of Grass 1855, Dickinson 1830-1886. His mother and sisters were deeply involved in antislavery activities.]
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