| aphrodite's garden volume 8 part 4 - 1988 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
19 March 1988 [Dewdney notes opposite continued: Even irrelevant knowledge, if uncommunicated, increases the personal power of the individual. The somatic perception, kinesthetic self-representation, is extensile. It can move into something. aural space a perceptual allegory for quantum reality olfactory projections sensory by-pass, the by-pass conversation would be held entirely in connotation Language is the gauge of our provisional reality, the standardized description of constant variability. Its utility lies in its immateriality. Consciousness, though modeled on causality, is actually timeless. Language, particularly as it is manifested in the interior monologue, is the only thing that can keep as still as consciousness, ... a simulacrum of consciousness, which is why it seduces the individual into identifying (with) it as synonymous with consciousness. As the child learns a language, the speech centers are programmed by the living language as a sort of post natal embryology, ... through an attritional process, in which redundant neural pathways atrophy through lack of use the speech centers are imprinted with the abstract circuitry of language. The living language arranges its house with sure and precise hands. as if the tree above ground disappeared and the roots projected a phantom tree, its branches blowing in a nocturnal Paleocephalic wind Signifying consciousness in dreams - dreamed objects' substance breaks down under scrutiny - they are (to be) experienced more generally. This mutation can be viewed as a model for the narrative engine within all dreams. He's saying the signifying consciousness looking at the things in dreams makes them mutate. A perception which has been colored by an emotion will run as a loop in the paleocephalon even in the absence of a conscious note of it - it will run until an 'engram' is formed. Series of resonating loops can become narrative shells for dreams. The dreamer highly suggestible to the interior of the body - "night of the sleeping animals" A landscape with locales each of which had a flavor = "narrative shell," archetypal narrative. antedating of experience by the cortex, the resetting of the arrival of incoming sensory signals in order to make reaction coincide with the event Does this have something to do with micromovements "at the rhythm of the speaker"? Entrainment. Dominant hemisphere drugged - serotonin. by the action of serotonin on the thalamus, and then flooded by resonating emotive loops arising from the paleocephalon. The anthropocephalon is then submerged in the phatic (nonverbal, emotional) dialogues of the limbic system. The reflective/associatinal train, film-of-images, is still in a conscious mode but disengaged from monitoring the world. Dreams are perhaps the byproducts of a reflexive compensatory mirror flooding of opposite hemispheres. Possibly they are the companion of an equilization process whereby localized functional areas of two hemispheres are transferred contralatrally. contralateral mixing of the language centers of the dominant hemisphere with the spatial/somatic orientation centres of the minor hemisphere phatic or involuntary linguistic constructions montaged/overlayed on the perception of self in the contralateral parietal lobe anthropocephalon still functioning almost bureaucratically in conscious mode, vainly aligning itself with an external waking reality from which it has been disengaged Dreams could be viewed as a kind of noise, random interference patterns which are the by-product of the re-establishment of neurochemical homeostasis in the brain. A materialized dream object "will act as a context marker." Consciousness as vulnerable during aquisitional stages amphetamine and cities, gonadotropins by erotic advertizing, endorphins from jogging vs social conscience dominaton of human perception by idealized forms - template matching behavior - variance is seen as monstrous - "extension of symbolic logic acting in areas which are not properly its domain" phenylethylamine, limerance confluence of their ideas of each other Ideals are icons of arrested variation, hallucinations of permanence. When a mirror intervenes in our view of a thing, it puts us into a different position from our bodies.] From 1977 May or June: For friendship
seeks guidance as to the method, and permission, by contemplation. Then the necessary effect will follow instantly and continuously or subsequently and appropriately. who is related to fire and the sun. Pours the essence of life from the silver cup of the subconscious into the golden cup of the conscious, from the unseen into the seen and then back again. This depicts the entry of spirit into matter and the influence of matter upon spirit, as well as the flowing of the past through the present and into the future. diamond mind May I be able to work safely in the midst of illusion, may I have near contact with the true. Steady me, mend the disabled states. Clarify emotionality. Nourish me with joy. [my version of passage in the Diamond Sutra] - It's hard work. I can't read all of it. I am not it, far from it, seeing the way the handwriting's spaced on the page with thought in the white space. Reading it I'm feeling there's little record of the time, my visits with Jam that would be unprecedented stories. But I was working so hard, as if I was standing in my brain holding up bits of smashed lumber from the whole of the world's life, anywhere, and wanting to - what - a long pause. I was conscious of remaking my mind - mixing that mind with this one is making me unwilling to be suave. Monday 21st Cheryl with grey hair cut off too short. I'm irritated the way she seizes conversations asking something she knows there's emotion in. It is a way of showing herself in control at the expense of real talk. The other thing that happens is her hectoring about something, this time about my mother, I guess when it touches her sense of betrayal. I say something doesn't have life in it, she says block, mad at, etc. I say maybe the other way around. She insists, important to you, etc. Under it I think is our dialogue. I haven't liked her work in years and I don't like the way she's being swallowed into scholastic theory. I don't like the way she's devoted herself to being popular by 'listening well'. We wrestle in company. So much beating of the wings of fear. 23rd Cheryl's opening. Martha's prettiness, as if she was the only one in the tribe of middle-aged women who'd stayed vivid. She dazzled me. "I want to be able to touch them" she said of the photos. "You do??" Not understanding, how can she look like that with two kids and living in the country. Josie in the other way a shock, I didn't want to see, her face was so shocking to me I went on talking inside our common knowledge and inwardly divided away. I was muddled and distressed but today I can see how it was. I go into those soaks of visibility without knowing myself, as if I think I'm someone else. Who am I thinking I am? I'm thinking I am disliked, at bay, alien, angry, and it seems the one who is that is my perception, that I won't speak from. I rush out to tell Michael. He isn't obliging. A whine from the back of the head, Young people don't do that - they don't look back - when I said I was laying times against each other. I'm hurt and retract and then he's only fed-up cause I stop touching him. He didn't see he was being mean because of what I said about Cheryl, that I think when she failed in love she said that if she'd failed anyway she might as well be successful. What did she fail at. Her true self went away. That's why I don't like it, yes. He says, that's just a way of thinking that the false self has, and then goes on about basketball's concentration and how he is afterward, looking at people. He just sees them. Yeah, yeah. - Lois on the phone says yes she'll learn computing. WHAT ABOUT THE GRANT? Cold and feverish not knowing what to do - a brightness beside something? Beside love letters -
25th Writing still as if I'm saying it to nonhumans. - the black sky with stars the black pavement struck white with rain a grainy slice through the subsoil a field of grass blades leaning under a wind incandescent evening sky pure yellow with one point more intense of the same color the texture of the hovering aftertone of one note the sound of seeds pouring a thread of smoke traveling and stretching the silver grain of steam rising from the bath the sleek flow of bits you can see in a candle flame the white undersides of poplar leaves flashed in a wind a flock of pigeons when it veers the diamond dust, needles of ice that can float down out of a brilliant sky the flow of waking visions that can form around a rough spot on the plaster wall the shape and color of an intense physical pain the continuous arrival of light on a slightly moving edge If I had the most intelligent finest possible jurors what would I say - [Canada Council B grant application draft] 28th Monday and weekend with Ro, broke. By last night I was like a circular saw screaming with strain. Rob planting two-year-old pears with their thornlike jut of branch, Muggs helping him, Rowen with tight little underpants holding a stew of poop, and then peeing down his leg, insisting on watering. I didn't want to take him home, it was bright sun after a week of icy rain, but with a cold wind, so that, or for other reasons, he was in my and then Muggs's arms laying his head down sobbing. And they planted the apple trees without me. We took the bike to Carnegie to look for Michael, to scold him about laundry and borrow money and maybe get petted, and M wasn't there, hadn't been there, and my bike tied up outside must've been there all night, which means he was where? And I think we'd better go to his house, though I have to drag Rowen through the café once more and we pass Sunday supper meat pie and asparagus. When we walk in on M there's Beverly at the table studying John Gray. M jumps up looking guilty. I want pants. He's in shock holding up undershirts, I scold, he gets hard, Beverley is driven out casting speaking glances, and he too, and then he has the sense to ask whether I've eaten and propose Carnegie dinner. We count what's in his pocket. On the way we spot Jim Smith in time for M to ask him for two bucks. We miss Carnegie's dinner but take little green riding hood skipping to the Chinese place. Chicken and pepper on rice but they bring us the $7.50 version not the $3.75. I wait for M to do the explaining since I'm looking at him as if he could take care of me. But he doesn't and so I have to say We don't have enough money. She jerks the plate into the kitchen, tips the chicken over the rice on a plate, and brings it back and rewrites the bill. The food makes my face hot as if it's burning in famished cells. M is looking well and on top of it, turning his head on his virile neck and showing a lot of fur in the cleft of Hawaiian shirt. I go home restored and with a dollar for milk. When we say goobye at the bike he bends at the knee to be closer to my height. Roams his hands with a little freedom under my shirt back. "Your skin feels so good." "It does?" Today my bike is still there. I come by after steak and eggs, Cheryl and Diana, with $30 from MacLeod's Books, find him with Beverly doing an especially bad drawing. My bike still tied in front of Carnegie. I scold. He is belligerant the way he is when he's in the wrong. I raid his house to get even. It's necessary to just stomp through looking. Afternoon he phones. He's done the laundry. "Dare I ask where my bike is?" Not repenting. He neither. The way Beverly is, I think he is slandering me the way he does all his friends whom he butters. "Rowen scared." The word comes from Humpty Dumpty's anguish and the mouse's look at the cat. I don't know whether he means sad. I hear him just now saying "scared" in his room in the click of toy cars. When I began that sentence he said "Ell-ie." This afternoon he said "Michael here" just before the phone rang. Smell of hyacinth and poplar even at the foot of the stairs. Party on Saturday. Seeing Josie's manner with strangers, smooth and warm, patient. Her voice and how she uses it to counteract her face. Wesley silent and pretty standing about in a wonderful circle of hair. Diana's house, pleasures displayed. Cheryl smiling under her nose - I mean the one where she lifts her chin and her teeth spike down. Diana has a strange humor-obedience face too - a frozen silent haha. She puts her open mouth at the level of my eyes, quite startling though covered by social busyness. 'Humor.' Standard jests and willingness to join. The music. Mozart with real heaven for dwelling in but still a feeling as if it's not avant-garde enough to like Mozart, and Debussey is more alright - though I think it must have been not as well played, because it seemed out of shape to me. I think Diana in music is somehow angry - come on, show your heart of love, who's to shame you for it. Sometimes in painting she has, but then she dries back again. I don't know whether in this I'm ignorant. What do these people say to each other about me. (I'll never hear.) "Ellie is impossible" said D. She acts like that. I don't know which impoliteness she is holding askant. I'm wondering I guess whether I'm like Ed after all, blind self-congratulation, lust, aggression, oblivion, self-pity, greed, missing every nuance to just not have to feel my lack of skill or breeding. But that lot are boring too - their feminism sounds like village religion - they talk to each other or at least me in quite a hopeless way - I mean hopeless of themselves. And me too. Jam didn't do that. She spoke uncomprehended in a way hopeful of her own interest. I don't know whether by effort or by habit of rich spoiled kid. What about Cheryl's pictures - impressive in the worst way - why shouldn't they be big and have inkflush colors - they're skilled and they mark a progress - but they are, they are, designed to impress and succeed - in a way that is its own penalty. I should be looking for other contexts, is what it means. For the grant - I haven't got to the floor of sincerity. 29 Traveling on a ship, going away from the conversation when I see the color of the water. It's holding brown light under a very dark sky, and then I see the stars - darkness at noon. We go back to the trailor park in the day night. Frame houses in the beam. The woman has locked the chain. He threatens her and makes her open it. Henry [Jesionka] with his piles he says of references. He gave up being odd man out, 'dated.' Ten years boldly behind, but what I did with the ten years I am behind is my advantage. 30 Rubbing my eyes yesterday, split second of very bright fine-grain colored pixels moving a certain way. I can't quite see how, it was a small movement either up and down or in and out, an oscillation, tiny diamond colors. Dreams of wreckage. Trying to get to the airport in a strange country, San Francisco Air, open my bag looking for the ticket, there's a mess of porriage in it. Don't have a ticket, don't know where the airport is. Follow a couple, but the door they seem to finally lead me to, out in the country, opens onto an empty railway platform. A wrecked building - don't remember that one. (Talking to Henry scared me.) Caroline came back yesterday. - Midnight. Writing today and yesterday with pink fire in my face - clean steady burn of writing hour after hour without caffeine. Tonight after Rowen went to bed I simply from the top wrote what I want to do. I seemed to be beginning the doing. It was like achieving myself. The pink life in my face is remarkable, as if pressured writing is now my fountain of youth. It's the brilliant white light hydrangea bush springing from the cripple's broken bed. [grant application text] 1st or 2nd April A Cree (phone rings) woman from Alberta who loved notes in origin and maybe took it to Whitehorse. Reading Lopez a little dream of talking to scientists. Lopez Barry 1986 Arctic dreams: imagination and desire in a northern landscape Gothic - god is light, every creature stems from that initial, uncreated, creative light. Robert Grosseteste, the 12th c founder of Oxford U wrote that physical light is the best, the most delectable, the most beautiful of all the bodies that exist. People trying to rise above their poverty through dreams of light. That the erection of cathedrals was the last wild stride European man made before falling back into the confines of his intellect agape the expression of intense spiritual affinity with the mystery that it is "to be sharing life with other life" "like any parsing of a movement in time" Lopez is so much more persistent, asking what a fox would see. I give up quickly: that's something I can't know. I know enough of quantum mechanics to understand that the world is ever so slightly but uncorrectably out of focus, that there are no absolutely precise answers. the Eskimo curlew, the sea mink, the Laborador duck, Pallas' cormorant, and Steller's sea cow Their traditional philosophy is insistent on the issue of ethical behavor toward animals. They approach them repeatedly, overwrought and obsequious, sniffing the vaginal opening. veiny-leafed willow, diamond-life willow, tea-leaf willow, Richardson willow, blue, flatleaf and barren-ground willow mountain avens, woodrush, oxytrope, dwarf birch, cottongrass, mountain cranberry, sweetbroom, blue-spike lupin, alpine milkvetch, dwarf fireweed, bluegrass, willowherb, bladder campion, foxtail, cowberry, mountain sorrel, Laborador tea snow buntings, Lapland longspurs, plovers, jaegers, ptarmigan Hesperis it says is aphrodisiac! 4th "Your eyes are sad, why are your eyes sad? (waiting) Is it because I ate too much of your breakfast?" He laughs and colors dark red around his eyes, where the lines are deeper. It's five. I woke for the first time in this time with solar plex vibrating. Jam handing me a wallet through the car window. Why? Because you're driving to ----- (starts with M). A change purse with coins, I won't get far on that. The car is accelerating - hey she's put me in a car I didn't start myself - can I stop it - right foot on the brake pedal doing nothing, feeling with my feet for maybe another pedal. Coming up is a red light with cars stopped, their rear reds. One lane of the four is open. Both feet on the pedal seem to be slowing me but maybe not enough. Then I wake and realize it's the vibrating 4AM kind of waking. Put myself back to sleep by coming, dream a boat, resort, a street with viney branches of street trees filling it. More with Rowen's clothes, maybe, in a pile on a house being abandoned. They've parked up the street in the van. Rudy is telling me he's going into hospital, he's looking clearer and straighter like a lad, he's saying goodbye as if he expects not to see me again. I think he has a lump. I chase him down the street and around the corner. Have they parked here? I don't see them. Did he go into this house with doors open and lights in the windows? I stand around listening. He comes out with half a dozen bearded men like old Jews or Arab religionists, East Indians with leaflets they're not sure whether to give me. I say I'll visit him in hospital without the others knowing. Then a scene at the hospital with a feeling I'm making it up, of us relatives fighting in the lobby and a nurse coming down trying to tell us something. I'm the only one who notices. He's gone? Etc. Energetic crying. - Scared after briefing city meeting, by Chinese businessmen and by Aidan trying to take [being] the philosopher. Then at the Tallis Scholars concert: Tony [Rief], and noticing my shrinking into deference with the critical man, though I'm the one who's made the great film. Being embattled with the larger world isn't over yet - though I doubt he noticed I was shrinking into deference, maybe that's what equality feels like. But my thoughts felt observed - am I noticing as much as he. Knowing I didn't want to be noticing in the same way. How much difference it makes to be able to move, bring into my parts the parts of its tensions. And then the weave. I dreamed something done in the head weaving a mat quite thick and all one line for shielding the midriff. Two small worn plain women opening their mouths to heavenly treble arcs, steadfastly starting and finishing in perfection. There was a long-necked fair one too, holding her head in pretty ways, bringing novels into the row. Then another plain stout old creature. Then six men in bowties. All of them except the pretty thing had a crooked ugly look about them. Even Peter Phillips when he turned to bow had a shellacked smile like a painted soldier. Why would divine music not beautify its bodies? I wondered whether it's from living in the past, maybe. They don't have much present. [Opposite, more Lopez: expose what is insipid and groundless in your own culture Over time, small bits of knowledge about a region accumulate among local residents in the form of stories. These are remembered in the community; even what is unusual does not become lost and therefore irrelevant. These narratives comprise for a native an intricate, long-term view of a particular landscape and the stories are corroborated daily, even as they are being refined upon by members of the community traveling between what is truly known and what is only imagined or unsuspected. Outside the region this complex but easily shared reality is hard to get across without reducing it to generalities, to misleading or imprecise abstractions. The perceptions of many people wash over the land like a flood, leaving ideas hung up in the brush, like pieces of damp paper to be collected and deciphered. No one can tell the whole story. A Lakota woman named Elaine Jahner wrote that what lies at the heart of the religion of hunting peoples is the notion that a spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape. To put it another way, occasionally one sees something fleeting in the land, a moment when line, color and movement intensify and something sacred is revealed, leading one to believe that there is another realm of reality corresponding to the physical one but different. animal held in totemic regard because it is "good to think" Because it is alive it eventually contradicts the imposition of a reality that does not derive from it. A long-lived inquiry produces a discriminating language. Such people are attached to the land as if by luminous fibers: and they live in a kind of time that is not of the moment but, in concert with memory, extensive, measured by a lifetime. the polar basin organized like Australia around an inland desert sea, with most of its people living on the coastal perifery. It has the heft, say, of China, but the population of Seattle. from Bering Strait to northern Greenland speak dialects of the same language Inuit circumpolar conference Sky map, "a shadow on low cloud over open water, a soft white reflection over ice." "Ice blink." Snow-covered land appears yellowish white, field ice is lucid white tinged with yellow, pack ice is pure white, sea ice in embayments is a grayer white. an isumataq, a person who can create the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself understanding how to live a decent life, how to behave properly toward other people and toward the land. in such an atmosphere of mutual regard, in which each can roll out his or her maps with no fear of contradiction, of suspician, or theft One fluid, recurved sweep of ten thousand of them passes through the spaces within another, counterflying flock; while beyond them lattice after lattice passes, like sliding Japanese walls, until in the whole sky you lose your depth of field and feel as though you are looking up from the floor of the ocean. Most animals, even primitive creatures like anemones, possess a spatial memory.] Weds 6th [Irish Caroline arrives at Mike's house] Take a little stock - she crept in on us and wasn't fazed, rolled in the bed to signal, didn't defer with Rowen, that annoyed me. I went to get ready for the meeting, she told a story about a little Spanish boy's angry dance, M cried and from then it was established, they'll be sweet lovers 'til she leaves. I warred at the meeting, impressive looking but a little unleashed. Muggs with a thin-skinned flush sitting firm and true like a hero, "I don't think you heard what I said" she said to Mr Blackmore the Montreal Jewish developer with liberal long hair and humane power voice, who says his ging's with a glottal g like Cheryl. - And so on but I'll finish about negotiations with M - after the meeting when I had my pyjamas on I raced there, crept up to find Ro in his green duffle coat just come in chatting at the table, fire in the heater, electric wires red, Michael smiling, like a party in the room full of pictures. Ro drew in the squares on my back, M in his way accommodatingly friendly no matter what - condoms in my pocket - quite a wild scene, not dizzy but swaying - and so on, sometimes thinking I'm glad M will do anything, at least that, I know he isn't squeamish - but in the end I am - there's the banging which at the time I'm determined to have but it doesn't soften me, I intend to come and do but when for a second I open my eye there's his face with a look on it that so repels me I come into a remote dislike. The feel of his chest and neck and arms could not be better but the man without his hat, the man's visible soul, is like his drawings - which are there in front of my eyes whenever I am lying in his bed - this night I could see the quality of some - they are from an elsewhere, I mean he is really creative, they're made things, they're parallel but not about, they aren't at all my creation world but they're gnome's demonic, some stratum other people know - in their own terms he's getting them into authority - and she's for him there, where I don't want to be - this morning I'm bleeding, so I assume what I was doing wasn't pure calculation, but it was a turn afterward to find him so critical and set on her - I want to know something, what - why did I do something as if to gain power which actually lost it - and I impulsively gave him the $50 - her spinning it out this week drew me - And then apart from power considerations, where do I want to be - I want him to go on [emotionally] supporting me so I can be free in my business life - so I won't be dying - and not repulsive in hunger - as if I would drop back into the misery with Jam - but I might not, I might like it and be clearer. I have often used bluff courage and wonder whether I have real courage in the face of the thinning out of people wanting to get their hands on me, that currency. Am I meant not to have lovers anymore? With a spark of tear. (2c) it says, that so beautiful image of what I do know to want. I say, Who can I marry? Then it stops me - marry a new beginning. Thursday 7th April Waking at night I untied it, put a big piece of tape over it and went back to sleep. Today sure enough it's untied. Gotta go now gotta go now says Row, go Canini. Kiss through the banister. See you moi-o. See you moi-o says Mike. Little twinge. I clean up the kitchen. Find the Tallis Scholars on [the radio], it's late. At the garden 'til the sun went, cleaning up the entrance. Rob doing the orchard, Eric the sign, Joann Tania Paul K show up, Glenn hustles together the junk depot. At that I had to go phone Lois to get her to phone the list. Yesterday I went in my hat through the maybe rain to Laiwan's for supper. She wasn't expecting me for an hour, she was there at the counter with her sleeves rolled up and her lovely frail little forearms showing, thin square long-fingered hands, looking all-over frail and sort of enticing with her hair longer and no swelling, just a lithe little body that she made herself. The sun came out enamel on her laurel leaves and Radio's henna fur. She put on Greek music and I insisted on telling her about being in Athens in April. We didn't spark 'til after we had eaten tortellini with spaghetti sauce one of her few cooking items and I read the cards. The way we do it, she thinks a question, I cut the deck. What is Laiwan really wanting to know about? (10c) Can she and Dian still be friends? (3s) I invited her to walk me a ways. We went down the alley in wonderful April evening fresh strong light. The trees in bud. 8th Looking for photos I find 1-15. What's it like being an organizer. Slides to copy, CFDW with papers, look for Jim King, libe with overdues, up and down Robson, check stores for clothes, Customcolor to make prints, Sikora's to check cassettes, Women's Bookstore to check cassettes, see Ana Historic is out, buy fish, take bike home, read mail, turn around, walk to bank, 15 min to sit in café, Crabtree, take Rowen and clothes home, go to garden. Sun. Talk politics with Earl, see if we should lobby BC Housing, transplant 2 rows of broccoli, be nice to Sun photographer wanting pictures of Rowen raking (Rowen poses), go home put fish in the oven, run bath, read paper, 3rd today. Rowen in and out of bath, crying with fatigue, force him into nightclothes, bed. He's asleep before the bottle gone, crying now, find bottle for him. Daphne Marlatt 1988 Ana Historic House of Anansi [Opposite: beardless, Cro-Magnon over two hundred languages without resemblance to Asian They think of the new world still as having no people in it for a million years after the old world did. Bering Strait is only 60 miles Tartars/Mongols, Siberia to Indonesia They have hawk noses and no epicanthic fold. But Eskimos and Aleuts are more like, and more recent. Language similarities with Chukchi and Kamchadal. Ice mass lowered level of Bering Strait three hundred feet so the shallows were a bridge a thousand feet across - animals crossed. All the human fossils of the new world are of the modern type. The oldest finds seem to be mostly in American northwest. adobe pueblos, corn, beans and squash, blankets, pots They speak languages as different as Russian and Swahili but their baskets and tools cannot be told apart. Cariboo tracks will have led them into passes and the valleys will have led them south. Ice a mile thick from the Pacific and the Laurentians. Its tough hide tanned with the animal's own brains. Had cut out the tongue and eaten these delicacies raw while working. Wove the net pouch from fibers of milkweed stems. Change from hunt to forage, technological jump, boats, baskets, cloth, metal. 9000 years ago. Danger Cave Utah. Ground seeds and small game. The arid belt between Coast Mountains and Rockies. Dogs for 10,000. Coast the richest preagricultural culture - planked houses, war canoes fifty feet long, painting and carving, ceremonial life. 8000 years. People apparently related to the ancestral Eskimos. Baths, incantations, fasting, abstinence, contemplation. In winter the spirits are nearer. By the end of April the days are 19 hours long. Urges the whale's spirit, released by the severing of the head. She offers it a drink of fresh water, wife of the man whose boat succeeded, to return to the land of the whales and say it was well treated. Summer temp fifty degrees, enough to allow the topsoil to thaw. Oldest Eskimo artifacts only 4000 years. To supply illumination, a window of clear ice, and outside the window a block of snow set to reflect snow inside. They were disposed to inventing gadgets, and they experimented and observed. A people notable for the crudity of their tools are almost directly followed by the relics of an amazingly artistic group called the Ipiutak, ivory carvings. Eskimos invented skin boats, dog sled. - A more settled life, ritual with agriculture. Corn in ten or twelve plants to widely spaced clumps, outer plants shielding the inner. Their cities were influenced from Mexico, irrigation. Anasazi Mesa Verde in Colorado. Kiva was for men, small hole for speaking to the dead buried under. Sunflowers, cotton, corn, squash, lowbush beans.
They dared not catch fish. Sun priest decided when crops should be planted. Language comparison suggests the tribes that replaced the Anasazi were (Athapaskan) connected to tribes from the interior of Alaska and northwest Canada. 12th c. Zuñi, Pima, pueblos were peaceful but the Navajo/Apache were warriors. - Sunflower, goosefoot, marsh elder, amaranth. Corpses of young children were cast under the feet of the litter bearers. The children have been strangled by their parents who will improve their social standing by their acts. Wives and lower-class retainers, "Yes! Because in that land we shall not die again, the weather will always be fine, we shall never be hungry, men will not make war because we shall be all of the same people." - Lopez: The ivory and pearl shading we see in a polar bear's fur is caused by the refraction of sunlight (the same phenomenon that makes clouds appear white) in its guard hairs. The hair itself is optically transparent. Polar bears proved too well insulated to appear on infrared film. The only bit of black the film recorded was in the polar bear's tracks, which were warm for several minutes after an animal had passed. He next tried ultraviolet-sensitive film. Bears absorbed light in those wavelengths. Polar bear guard hairs work like light pipes funneling short wavelength energy from the sun to the bear's black skin. They conceive during the female's three-week estrus in April and May but the fertilized eggs do not implant until much later. radiating a small amount of heat, about as much as a 200-watt bulb, and by trapping that heat in the den chamber with a sloping entrance tunnel and an air dike, or sill. She wakes to adjust the ventilation. While they nurse she may put her head back and stare at the sky. and their assertive curiosity at the bottom of the sea or on the moon The bear helped the angakok get out of his or her body so he or she could fly. The ringed seal is the prey of both It is likely they learned some of their hunting techniques from the bear. And they are prey to each other. The overarching presence of a being held in fearful esteem, tôrnârssuk the one who gives power. a power of intercession Killing occurred in an atmosphere of respect, with implicit spiritual obligations. when an animal in a comparatively accelerated evolutionary development encounters another As I sat there my companions rolled the unconscious bear over on her back and I saw a trace of pink in the white fur between her legs. The lips of her vulva were in size and shape like a woman's. I looked away. For the remainder of the day I could not rid myself of this image of vulnerability. The native eye, Pisuqtooq the great wanderer They mean it covers the ground successfully and intelligently. respond with insight to new circumstances. Do the right thing at the right time season after season a strained life that favors people aware of the smallest details] 10th Sunday morning. The chestnuts over Koo's roof have what looks like a lumpy swarm in layers suspended on them, a yellow-green cloud of leaves in bud, I was going to say. The color if it were on a wall would be an unpleasant paint-remainder yellow. Oh a group walking fast downhill along the park, one in white like a woman walking fast in a sari - rushed me somehow. A morning like Pleasant Street. The sidewalk lies warming amid warm grass. Street trees are curly forms above the 1945 Mercury basking at the curb. Cherry Ames is putting on her hat in the kitchen. Her suitcases stand on the concrete stoop. They are cherry red like her hat. Her suit is grey. The kitchen is yellow and white like a fried egg, the curtain blows in morning slant of fiery light. There is a kind distinguished father who teaches at the university and has on a grey cardigan. He will put on his old tweed coat and drive Cherry to her new life in New York City. Rowen in the bath has his finger in a Canada Dry bottle he's bubbling. He has his head back looking at the ceiling singing about the spider. Go sly pider, something like that, A-dam where you-ou, o now my shadow, fall dow-own, o no all gone, go n'there A-dam, get all wet, Dory, lello Perry, E-llie comm'ai-air, see bubbles, shub'bo duck do dat! 11th With Cheryl at the Hong Kong, we both sang gladly, she was she said full and empty. I showed off as she seems to enjoy me to - but no time to describe. She found a book, Alterity. She didn't once this time mention their names. Now she's fighting with other people. Last night not long after I fell asleep I woke saying there's something the matter with my left breast. I thought it, as if I woke myself by saying it, and then afterwards felt it, a drawn-out pang. I can't feel anything wrong with it though. What else - nerves very on edge after how silky they've been. Shrieking at Rowen and between times a kind of love that's like a knife turning in the solar making me laugh. I'm hearing Aidan's voice, what does that mean. He's challenging me in the garden and out. We went through the lands together getting ready to defend it. He's conscious of not wanting to follow me around. 13 Hello own. Two seedy business men insisting to each other about making a fortune in Russia. "All kinds of um-ber-ella companies." When I look up there's one of them hoping I'm listening. Alright. An open hearse drives up with an open coffin, size of the back of a pickup, quilted lining. A bald Buddhist or Hindu monk in a coma but turning and thrashing. I assume they've delivered him to the hospital but they bring out another man wrapped in a sheet, also naked and in a coma, a younger devotee they put into the coffin next to him, head to foot. Both of them stirring. And then as if because I'm waking fast, the narrator takes over and spins off the end of the story - set next to each other their restlessness turns to joyous quiet, they are completing each other's circuits. [Garden] meeting last night - I hardly stopped talking - a dramatic reading of the minutes of our meeting with the planners - looking up to explain something and seeing faces on the far side of the table lit up laughing and interested - I entertain myself characterizing the speakers - "Then Jessup says, in a nice neutral tone ..." - insensitive yeah - "He's a big fat guy" I say of the Mason, not thinking of our worn poor Terry - etc. But aware of trying to make sure the structure of our situation is conveyed to all the levels, who understand so unpredictably, preparing them for the possibility of their having to get up and intervene. A short course. Ellie gets to perform. She just launched herself, a raring energy comes out. What I want to say is the quality of smiles I've found looking at me - thinking maybe that's what other people have ordinarily known and I've had to earn with my ferocious plunge into common usefulness. Also it's like doing childhood again and this time in a community and having a value and task and being childish and showing myself in egotism and bigotry and skill and actual leadership, which means I've lain at night listening to (myself) say what we must do next. Naturally it is not just 'myself,' overnight Ian, Eric, Aidan and I had all concluded we have to do the irrigation now. Oohh. What a storm wind I become. And then lie down and have to learn how to stop. Talk to myself as if there's someone else taking charge, who says, Alright you can stop now, lie down in the cloud. Bring the man in the corduroy jacket. - After: unsettled, uneasy. "It went well" but. I wanted him to be finding me beautiful and my garden beautiful - and I'm turning in my coffin (afraid to say that) feeling the judgment of a class living very differently may have seen me as pathetic - with my poor garden trying to look like a real house's yard. (The poppies are sick!) I'm in line to be turned down now on four different appeals - feeling that maybe since I'm not now in perfect sincerity in relation to myself, all my appeals will be seen through and scorned. Thurs 14th It says, get out of anxiety or your show will be wrong. 17 Maryanne Pengali phoned to give us the Environment Canada grant. Uneasy still. 18 M's show in the pizza place. He sold Paul a drawing for $40. Took off his hat and looked more mature with his hair standing crooked around his towering dome. He's wearing a greenish tweed jacket with a tight Hawaiian shirt and his green jeans with a pink diaper pin at the knee, sandals very sloped at the heel. I showed him the skirt. He wanted me to sit on his lap. In a flash I had lifted the skirt, his hand somehow intercepted with bum skin as I sat down, it was a flash of badness I have with him, but it was worse than I intended because it made him a spring bull, he pushed Rowen who was interrupting, Rowen cried, I put on my jeans and started rinsing sheets in the bathtub. M lay on the floor stunned (I don't know if it was that) and went away refusing to look at me. Nuff Al-lie, nuff All-ie, yes, nuff Ellie, beating on my back. Go climb on something else, you don't have to climb on me. It's the time when the trees are pale green scents. The maples across from VVI, at the garden the poplars. Yesterday in damp grey light the rowan grove feathered out catching breeze and swaying, large robin on a branch. A strange bird in Aidan's wattle (western tanager). 19 Another smell today, it's the broom. The poplars are out enough to flap. Pheasant hooter. The broom smells dry, I want to say yellow, but before I recognized it, it was just a plant smell - like a leaf not a flower. Wallflower smells like candy. 23rd Dark Saturday with Row. Third night lying aching at the tailbone and wrists. Head tight with green slime. Going over duties as it has been this month - have to appear before City Council Tuesday - have to organize people I don't trust to get things well done, to look after the Environment Canada grant work - have to ask Patricia to do my ref rather than Henry whose tone says he'll do a reluctant letter - have to decide on the parts of my own show - prints to Jill somehow, don't know which. - Then I got up and picked the prints, phoned Patricia. What makes some kinds of doing block. Tues 26 The city manager has recommended against us. What a harsh day. Michael's Indian who when I shook his hand pulled me up into his glare. It said, don't take me for naïve. The bicycle wheel kept grabbing. The cards say clearly, we will lose tomorrow (what I feel instantly about that, is, I will speak better because we will lose). We'll lose to Peter Tseng that steamed pork bun. Patricia in a nice way and from a shrivelled pink-painted face said people like me quit trying some years ago and are doing other things now. I won't get the grant because there is nothing in the writing to make them see it. And what about going to England. Bruce ran up behind me and tapped my arm. He wanted to say "I was trying to get it through to you, say you'll talk to them, but you didn't cotton on." Bruce and Libby knowing the vote would go against us working for a deferral. What do I mind, Bruce's sweet look and not wanting to speak with me only to let me know that I was eloquent but inept. Bob said we made enemies. You were great they said but (Aidan standing pink) did I do us harm by strength, or was all of that going to go that way anyway. Weds James and his book. Chaos for Luke, and Arctic dreams. Thurs Brakhage's support letter. Its 'master' triggers. I was cany guessing he would welcome this way of presenting himself to the Council. That accounts for the puff in the tone. What he says about current is the most wrenched, "sculpts light in a way absolutely rigid"! - ridged - "yet metaphors gem refraction." I can see that, it's quite nice, moving light source and a sapphire, ridges on the bottom of the water - "and achieves a lightness symbol throughout." ?? Exec meeting just now. Muggs sits up radiant. Maxine with her long bassett face without consulting phoned Carole Taylor and said we'd negotiate. Partly it's rivalry with me, she hopes for a coup but her instinct isn't good. Ian is showing better. It was best when we went around the room. Tania was shining with capability. (Eric phoned drunk and happy.) Oh Muggs you are so terrific. Moura told someone we were the best landscape architecture in the city. What to do about Aidan wanting to make little patches, oh, how to forestall him. I don't want to disenable him but if I don't hang onto the design it will go wrong.
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