| aphrodite's garden volume 8 part 5 - 1988 may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
DR b. 17 May 1873 d. 19 June 1956 7 Endsleigh St I suddenly realized that I couldn't go on in the usual way, talking about Miriam, describing her. There she was as I first saw her, going upstairs. But who was there to describe her? It came to me suddenly. It was an extraordinary moment when I realized what could and what could not be done. Then it became more and more thrilling as I saw what was there. Everything available, all past experience, seen while I sat writing, for the first time as near clear permanent reality. Vincent Brome A last meeting with Dorothy Richardson in London Magazine 6 (June 1959):26-32 May Eve 1988 Rose and Crown, Baldock, Hartsf'rdsheer, eleven in the morning, seven at night, on a claret plush window seat [by] an 8' brick wall, oh country delight, Queen Anne's lace and hawthorn lace, new wheat on gravelly red round hills, some kind of tree, oak or elm shape, planted in boscs with unnative-looking towering pines, bare spots in rape or wheat like worn carpet - regally traveling high up beside a sheet of glass in a motor coach. The sky has opened and rose branches astir, why do I love brick, the color, when evening light touches it, moves up to its second power. Michael had new clothes, a coat too big for him, linen shirt yes but yellow with stains and pants in some hard material, and his feet stinking so I sank in dismay. Rowen quiet watching the town and then in the airport café the flat long trucks shooting across each other's path. Michael in the bus put his arm around me in a claiming way I cdn't stand, I was trying to get out of it by sitting forward, not wanting to make an issue. Angry he won't go to the trouble to organize clean socks, but worn out by war and advertising too. We ate a more expensive meal together than we've ever, Rowen dreamily fraying a hot dog staring out with his beautiful eyes. I liked to see the two of them in the departure hall, tall one in drooping coat, small one holding his hand in light nice rabbit sweater, both of them looking interestedly at a little girl - lovely people but on their own, two of them. I was lonely. M wanted to masturbate himself with emotion, having so little sense of how to do a parting I'd be able to be in. Rowen a hyper unfriendly kiss, too much yelling in these tired days. Then I knew M wd want an avid cling, he'd have no idea when to stop. I didn't want it at all. "But not too long, okay" I plead. "Just shut up and be nice" he says, come on feed me. "Michael I can't bear it." I get up and limp away alone. We both look back indecisive, he doesn't know if I've left, he'll go home righteous. But I cdn't start my trip, I cdn't be myself until I'd got away from him. I wanted Rowen to see me off to the airport so he'd know I was on a trip. Maybe he will. What else to report is the council meeting and its after meetings. Some moments of flooding happiness to be invited to use my powers, loved for using them. Lois on the phone "Goodbye my d ..., Ellie." Eric singing in his solitary self, "I will miss you, Ellie, really." Muggs saying a goodbye at the end of phone calls that's like the pat of a velvet paw. Rob's timing bringing him across my path at the moment I was going to cross Hastings to leave. Jan, "I thought your presentation was quite courageous." Even cool Tania. Muggs when I said how we could send postcards - she was the only one I was looking at - seemed to be rising up in a dazzle of glee. With Rob it's more the straight-ahead colloquy of agreement in first principles. We make our plans as if there are no limits. "If you hadn't been there that day I might never have joined." I know that I wove our structure cunningly generously very carefully in many details of welcome and placement and information, and I was wise in public structures I got my way on. Last week Anne and the Crabtree kids letting themselves loose like birds, into the leaf piles, paths, the kid pit. Grace left the kids to Anne and just made beautiful beds and there they are. Margaret stood by the shed and said "It feels wonderful here," and I know it's my sorted design, I did it, but what I mean is, oh joy I was given to be able to do it. And these people who found their way to it. And this is the way I always knew social life should be. They're offering scallops wrapped in bacon, Yesbury duckling in black cherry sauce, and I'm feeling the cost in organization to this woman bound in tight clothes and handicapped in her shoes. The delight Thursday, buying back Jamie's book at MacLeod's and Don handing me back the markup. "In view of our long association." A beam like a lighthouse flash came out of me toward him. These happinesses made me afraid the plane would fall. The cards said death and my heart shocked. The first time the pilot said we were entering turbulence his voice seemed squeezed with fear. The big jumbo rides much more sensitively, hanging juddering from its long wings, and so high. All night squashed in the seat, oh I am alive and here, not exactly sleeping (that moment I felt the pub move, sleep being evoked) but suddenly I was awake like a child all bright and rested, and went to look out a window, and there were clouds like seraphim in rows. Such lively curled beings perfectly alight in the high paradise of open air. That doesn't say how they are shaped, because I don't remember, though I've seen them in a painting. What I remember is the delight, which is their shape in another way. Suddenly the sounds in the pub made a leap. 2nd Not being able to sleep these nights has bin the moon I guess. Quite a wide track led to a place still much higher than the water, reeds growing among nettles, black ground very spongy. There wasn't a way through, it was more difficult backing out than walking in, nettles stung slightly through my pant legs, fresh clumps blooming white like other of these early things - white nettle flowers, white wild carrot, hawthorn, wild apple or he said plum with beautiful red on the bud. There was something purple close to the ground, looked like germander, leaf and flower both bluer than mine. What else, willow, elder, oaks? not out yet. Poplars in orange wash. Grass, a lot of the same green, as if the ground couldn't be richer. I was coming toward the wire into a pasture and saw a hare and some more ears - four hares when they moved. The pasture belongs to a horse who moved like he was getting shocks through his feet. - [day in Cambridge] Evensong in the little Trinity Hall chapel, so intimate with two rows facing two rows across the aisle. Young women in the choir. I and the young women interested in each other - but why are these people folding themselves over so their hair hangs down on the rail like a row of wigs begging forgiveness for transgressions to the father. I stood singing PRAISE HER! PRAISE HER! / PRAISE HER! PRAISE HER! and the Norman girl? Irish? black and milk with a conscious mouth, looked and smiled but I doubted she saw, though she seemed delighted. I think it was religious euphoria. Students in their gowns. A Saxon girl was overcome in the canticle and had to sit down. Amazing, amazing. So right that people should sing together, so appalling they're giving it to a He when it's the great It that reigns loves forgives and kills, life everlasting, what is it they are believing. I could love the music with them and yet feel them like Martians a culture I can't imagine. Praising salvation from the dark of winter I can sing loud as they. "Do you believe in God?" "There is something in the heart of reality that reigns and loves and forgives." Child on the phone talking to his friend. He's perfectly at ease though his father shouted from the kitchen "I'm going to put a lock on that phone." So what is there in the heart of reality - first, where is the heart of reality. For them, the sensation of worship is the heart of reality. For me too, the realest moment worshipping (with) Robert on the kitchen floor. Joyce wd say the most unreal. What I was most with, there, row facing row, was my own unknown image, what do they see, what have I made, have I made myself a strong complex face they would want to follow, or a strained crazed thing old and lonely. Try again - in the beautiful college courts, in Granville and Caius with the lane of trees, the scent from a white flowering bush, wallflower in every quad, the placement of any bush so perfected, I feel I deserve to be welcomed. Here in Ans Hos the place of the mind, but it isn't, though it looks to be, the place of the mind, it's the place of vested sex and class and I wdn't be welcome and must scratch with Michael at Hastings and Main. But now that I'm loved at Hastings and Main couldn't I be loved anywhere? Even by these smooth little English. - [From here on, notes are written in the British Museum Reading Room] [Opposite:
- What was the flash. As if 'self' is a central program made by lines of inference, strings of numbers crossing - that scrambled pictures - first the program - then how it's made. "There is always a third who listens and this third is silence." Ie two speakers but only one listener between them - if that were true! The gifts of premonition and clairvoyance which sometimes come in love come in the strength of silence. Supratemporal. Silence is like uncreated everlasting being. It is space completely present. It does not belong to profit. When basic phenomena are revealed to our senses we feel a kind of shyness or even fear itself. Silence sex love loyalty and death. "The silence that precedes speech is the pregnant mother who is delivered of speech," etc. As though silence itself were speaking. Speech is opposed to silence but not as an enemy: it is only the other side. But music is not opposed, it rides in the space of silence. But slowly, in a way that returns, so the travel can be fearless. In language decisions are made. A bright cloud over the placid lake of silence.] 3 Cold, trembling and sweating with fear - what does it mean - he looks worn out, sleepless, thin, shy, smaller, younger, peaky. 4 Hello day. Cold. What's different this time. They [Canada House] picked this image that a line in the Wordsworth book has made me see is a rotation into another 'dimension,' ie material. [invitation photo] As hard to do as jumping from a plane - "I'm translating you see." [I invited the unknown British Museum man to tea.] I'm preparing myself to meet a divided one, ie to be alone in what I'm together in. Does J.M.Fletcher still exist? [When everything said aloud in words has already happened in silence. "As though he wanted to begin where he himself was begun" he could speak only in fragments Like a river receiving water from new springs, after each word a new spring of silence runs into the stream of the sentence. Substance of silence itself orders things. Contradiction doesn't need discussion. Substance of silence has the undeveloped possibilities in What is lacking in such a face is the silence that demands and creates silence in the observer.] All right let it clear. There was a crossover, now maybe I'll find out what it was. Kingston, German, University College, PhD philos, Vedanta, Daniel Deronda, Tufnell Park, it's true his folks are in the north but not in the way I imagined - it seethes, it's seething - it was after I did it that I opened Moskvitin (is that where Dewdney -) and he in the stiff East European way (not in that chapter) tells how he learned to see grain sparks discontinuity swarm nets and then in them figures and stories (that's why REM), and how, when he was learning, it made him blissful and acute. A still component and a moving, and if he kept himself from thinking at all he could see it. And seeing small things is different from seeing large. This morning Jill [at Canada House] showing me the invitation. I walked out as if London had accepted me, as if bus drivers smile on me. [metrical tradition a prior existence "a source of geometrical thought" "the charm of ideas such as preexistence and immortality" This poet's interest in geometry, astronomy and correspondences between the forms of mind and nature. Geometry is god, 'abstraction' The golden section ratio in a 2 part poem, 'continuous proportion' Imagination is "Reason in her most exalted mood." Care for all the gradations on the scale Forms of external nature experienced by the poet in childhood and early youth condition his sensibility and eventually become one with the innate mathematical forms of mind which are recognized by the mature poet and applied to his perception of the material universe.] 5 Moony and sleepy - firm but not rebellious is what I'm asking. Embankment Park and then the river and then go put my hand for it to lick. Squatting on the steps. This layer of fresh air just above the water and a willow whip caught in a rail. I hung over the embankment wall and began to see the water - by colors, white, blue, pale olive, darker olive, under the curl a very bright khaki - then the silt clouds slow and ponderous under a glassy clear skin of choppy motion - then the movement of the whole near shape like unworn mountains of pushed up and sucked down rock - then the skin plaid of fine wrinkles crossing - then the primordial constancy of unmaking by making, its visibility - as if god came in front of my eyes because I asked it to - standing by the river with other pilgrims. Did he know what I was seeing? He sat on a bench to watch me see - I think. The city is very stiff, it's made stiff; the river god is not so. 6th Long time in the back room upstairs. 7 Sedna or Arnaquapsaluk who was once human and now lives on the bottom of the sea. They are entangled in her matted hair and do not come to the surface. A spirit quest to ask what law has been broken. [The analytically fragmented and broken geometry of the Solitary's major utterances reveals that his excessive attachment to isolated parts of the scale is accomplished at the expense of the whole. A daily wanderer among woods and fields. Visionary power attends the motions of the viewless winds, embodied in the mystery of words Poetry and geometry the two foundations of imagination Because it can be applied continuously up or down the scale - constant transformation of extremes into means - it eludes numbers and exists visually with ease. Equiangular spiral Ineffable or irrational Fibonacci is: adding together successive pairs, the ultimate and penultimate esp as they get larger are in continuous proportion] A man, an old man wrapped in coats, sitting on a box, so that he's a raggy box at the open head of the arcade, facing into it and sending his music like the softened long breath of old lungs down into the arcade corridor between shops with Scottish sweaters, perfume and chocolates. He was playing the accordion without jerks, like a breeze. I went back to give him 50p (the daimon said to), came up facing a face almost not a face, a red eye, blur of whiskers, some existence, very worn out and slumped, still breathing. The canvas bag for money was attached with a safety pin to the corner of the keyboard, lined with cardboard to make a pouch. He held it for me to put in the coin and then when I was walking up the arcade again he hit out with a jerkier effort. Before he had been dreaming. Il n'est pas la, I say, coming past the row. He's not observant. Under a bank canopy on Shaftsbury Ave the street artists embanked. The one whose heads I like invites me. On the way back he's doing a young girl, frizz, blank sad look, charcoal, very deft, and he's cute, he has on an old leather jacket and jeans and has black and white curls like men should. "Eight pounds" with a transparent look straight in the eyes, observant, I believe. Little and sweet. [pluck out the sieve and have a look certain nuclei, mutative points in hallucination the ability to sustain impressions situations where there is no escape from conflict and suffering memory belonging to afterimage archetypes "grains of eternity in the soul", Leibnitz preface New essays on human understanding a part of the light is ejected from the eye this bundle of rays, small elements, have a grainy structure retina - pigment epithelium - light goes through several layers of neuronal connections - ie it goes through the switchboard to the sensitive layer Jirij Moskvitin 1974 Essay on the origin of thought University of Ohio Press
a series of recursive movements before it is "absorbed and emitted" as if a film in the background, a screen or mosaic several layers or permeable screens moving behind each other like an embroidery of small interconnected swasticas, sometimes combinations of triangles and meandering ornaments, small crosses or squares pleasure and an outburst of most remarkable and vivid thoughts learn to hold it and then saw 3-d! exclude the static part and see only the moving patterns "no thought activity whatsoever" nearly invisible ghost-like or smoke-like forms floating in the room exact relation between the sparks, the traces, the smoke-like forms, which on close and intense observation became the elements of waking dreams forming persons, landscapes, strange mathematical forms like integral nets the sparks were the contours or edges of the moving forms appearing as sparks only because without the traces they did not give the impression of three-dimensionality compared to the glitter on waves The forms came floating out of anything I looked at, lying like cobwebs around all objects, and from these stretching into my eyes as if the objects emanated from me.]
8 Later it was pain. In the forehead of the bus going east on Mile End Road such a painful pain. Jill drunk stuffing envelopes beside me unexpected stabbing. "My aunt had polio, she walked like you. She never married." Telling me what a terrible thing had happened. "Is it so terrible?" I'm checking through files trying to get through the list, handling her with half the left hand. "Permanently damaged" she says. This always comes up here, I stride in the body I've accomplished, the plate glass has her right and bold in everything but the way the right foot sets down with a helpless look, like a flipper, and the entire body drops when it takes weight on the right leg. It is worse than I imagine. It's a haunting understructure in the walking around town. Michael has me walking around like a gorgeous thing and I claim the place I would have had. A program running on the as-if, living well in imaginary circumstances. In the night I was awake in time to hear a roaring tear. It's the earthquake in California I thought - a black [sketch of dense zigzag], then there was a small flash and rain began. I lie in this bed looking north and the elements come at night and scare me. The moon is in strength breaking. I was in pain because it was time to see each other and he didn't accede. I dreamed we were in the country somewhere. He was lying on me. I was watchful to see what he meant, he seemed to be meaning friendly pleasure because he went on. [sankara We're concerned to know how far our perception can be trusted So far as mere representation or illumination of objects it is a patent fact Our inquiry is thus restricted to verification or contradiction They must therefore be the same as knowledge So it is knowledge which is self apparent in itself, that projects itself in such a manner as to appear to be referring in the beginningless series of flowing knowledge beginningless potencies of desire Knowledge moments are at once the knowledge, the knower and the known A self determining series Brahma sutras 2nd c BC, summarized in Upanisads which are part of the Vedas Sankara 788-820 Monistic tendencies of the Upanisads in a bold and clear form All cognitive acts presuppose the illusory identification This Brahman is the immediate consciousness which shines as the self, it is the self of us all The true self which is one for all advaita / nondualistic "That art thou." At once he becomes the truth itself, which is at once identical with pure bliss and pure intelligence. It is no doubt true that these experiences show us an established order having its own laws.
- a moment of seeing through - a hinge moment "It is the work of one flash like the work of the light of a lamp." "This veil is removed." the glaze of the object - It is as if the personal mind, which selects words but is largely oblivious to pattern, were in the grip of a higher, far more intellectual mind which has very little notion of houses and beds and soup kettles, but can systematize and mathematicize on a scale and scope that no mathematician of the schools ever remotely approached. 'Governor' programming a conceptual limit into the thought processes, a blind spot. The English language is a separate intelligence he says. "The living language slowly invades the brain and arranges its house." Interpretive cortex - dorsal surface of the temporal lobes on both sides. Works with speech centers. He says inventive writing reorganizes chemistry so one functions beyond one's own capability. - I am vision-loving and I create by the vision seeing faculty within me I gaze within and the figures of my material world take being as if they feel from my brooding. And this is the true end set before the Soul, to take that light through the Gate of Horn leading into the realm of the dead, came nothing but truth
Who alive, sensing, doesn't love more than all wonders of wide space surrounding the omnijoyful light - with its rays and waves, its colors, its gentle omnipresence in the day, like life's innerest soul. It's breathed by the giant world of restless stars, that swim in its blue sea; it's breathed by the sparkling stone, the peaceful plant, and the manyformed animals, breathed by the manycolored clouds and airs and above all by the glorious strangers with comprehensive eyes, swaying walk, and resonant mouths. Like a king of earth nature it calls every power to uncountable change, and its presence by itself reveals the splendour of earth's land. I take myself off into the holy ineffable mysterious night - the world lies distant, as if sunk in a deep rift - how barren and lonely it is. Profound sadness rocks in the lungs. A long way to memory, young wishes, child-dreams, the whole long life's short joys and inconsequential hopes come in their grey clothes, like evening fog after the sun sets. The world lies distant with its bright needs. In other spaces light struck the airy tents. If it were never to come back to its faithful children, its gardens in its heavenly house. What flows so cool and enlivening, so suggestively under the heart and blots up the weak air of pain. Have you too got a human heart, dark night? What are you keeping under your cloak, that invisibly potently presses against the soul. You seem just frightful - expensive balm seeps from your hand from a bundle of poppies. In sweet drunkenness you unfold the heavy wings of being and give us delights that are dark and unsayable, secret, as you are yourself, delights, that let us suspect heavens. How poor and childish the light seems with its bright things, how joyful and blest the day's goodbye. And only for that reason, because night withdraws those who serve you. You set in space's breadths the shining torches to declare your omnipotence, your return, in the times of your absence. More splendid than those blazing stars in those wide spaces, we feel the infinite eyes night opens in us.] [plant list from Chelsea Physic Garden] 9 Hello One - what is it with you - it - work on it now - go home - who's missing? A sick lack - either unreal or real - what's the real lack - concentration - flux - In an extreme move to gain what he variously called a dictation, the unknown, an outside. Trying to distinguish between you and the poem. parce que c'estoit luy parce que c'estoit moy 10th Rhoda was getting married - is that why I'm urgent to - go up in high heels and glitter to a room where maybe her guests are assembling - a second floor partly my space, heaps of lumber and iron pipes Roy K seems to be clearing away, I wd've, but he seems to be doing it for her. Many dreams after nights with nothing to recall. I've woken with a fierce shaking in the solar. I said fierce for fear and there was an image it might have been with. I came in very sick into the hospital, pulled back the covers for myself to be laid in but when the doctor came I told him it had taken so long for someone to come and take care of me that I was well again. We were wrapped in each other's arms at the foot of the bed, talking. Maybe the same man from a dark auditorium, we're in a cloakroom holding each other, I have laid my cheek on his shoulder. "You were wanting to be faithful?" "Yes." But we are meant to be together and are together. Earlier: Paul K is moving in the street a group of spruce trees. I'm climbing with (Rowen) up a steep roof toward an apex, R is dragging on my right hand, the angle of the slats as we get nearer the apex is difficult for him, when I come to the ridge I feel how the balance is unreliable because of how Paul has stacked his cut spruce against the left. If we venture onto the ridge the whole structure can fall, there isn't a way R and I can make it. We have to turn around, but as we're coming down on the right the slope curves under and I see we're going to have to fall. I'll hang on as long as I can to shorten the distance. The second-hand packsack I took had in it the clothes of the young man from the military academy, but at the bottom what he'd been making in his travel in Europe, lace. There were loops of cord, lace on long cards, the last thing I brought out an exquisite small hanky square. Crashaw, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne Virgil Descent into Avernus Franz von Baader, JW Ritter, GH von Schubert, ETA Hoffmann, Nerval Aurélie 12 "Who is the mum that had him born?" "I am." [Elliot Wyman] 13 [meeting Luke's first girlfriend Suzanne] Dark inwardly the way I am, love at first sight (I like to say), she came up the sidewalk really looking, powerfully beautiful, collected, in a man's jacket and narrow shoes. He hurries her into the kitchen, I stalk in bravely. He's in a dither, good! Dithers away to get his phone book. I have, we have, a few seconds - what do I do, lean myself next to her on the counter, excited, I'll jump right into this moment. "You'll do." That's irony, but to make sure she knows it's not patronage, "You look quite wonderful, actually," blurting and beaming. "Who, me?" in a voice like Judd's, East London is it, light. "Yes." "He's always talking about you," pause, "nice things." I make a face, among the things I could choose to say. "I suppose I could say," pause, "likewise." Then he comes in like a puppy quivering. To her, "Would you like to come to my show? I'll get you an invitation, you could come with Luke." That part was jumping out. Then I went up the street intoxicated, exaggerated, I don't know. I had one of my blazes of liking. Why. Because of her reserve as if she knows pain, and the delicacy of polish with it, the way she met my look. What to do:
[show outline] A snake slipped away into a hole in the wall. At the same moment Plotinus died. Thus he was able to live at once within himself and for others. He kept his own divine spirit unceasingly intent upon that inner presence. - In my fantasy she looked like one of the dancers, a sprig with big eyes, but there she was by the column holding my photograph, Jackie Roddick and Maria Insell, a root vegetable dressed up in women's things - those pink-banded stockings must be meant for comic, but long fingernails, and lipstick, does it mean she has a picture of herself? She wrote a screenplay about a woman who went to Yorkshire to live by herself, and she didn't do it, and her appearance shows the excess she hasn't stopped to take off, and yet Falling under couldn't be better. Jill dreamed I am an aristocrat who lives above the law, but it is not easy for her to agree not to have booze. This morning in the grass showing off and happy; last night at the café table warm midnight on the sidewalk, many people out, getting Andy almost to good company by stories of the war with Trudy, home late like a girl on a date, sleeping well, sun when I woke, coffee, the kids and Roy quiet, Roy doing laundry, country book to read, but then waiting too long for Luke, and by the time he came getting into fret and pain, not wanting to go out. It's by not eating well too, not having the money to go down and get our heads drawn, and then I get sore about the he that refuses and Andy drove past the place without asking why - an expensive road - this morning free like a breeze, it is so and it's no trouble - why gnaw. What's it like - it's gnawing - it wastes the city looking for the one, are you my husband, and holding myself to look like one who'd interest the unknown one. What it's like is a sulk, a pressure, constraint. Ask for a husband, ask for freedom, then I see him, for whatever reason - "I'll see you again." "Yuh." [Berkeley and Hegel, Novalis and Goethe does not acknowledge anguish complete attention and perfect consent the intelligible and sensible worlds "3 principle hypostases which mark the grades in its structure here found in embryo" on vision Let us speak, first, of the earth and of the trees and vegetation in general, asking ourselves what is the nature of Contemplation in them. III.8. They act from the desire of seeing their action and of making it visible and sensible to others. The charioteer gives the two horses what he has seen and they, taking that gift, showed they were hungry for what made that vision. Action, thus, is set towards contemplation. So long as duality persists, the two lie apart, parallel as it were to each other ... hence the Reason-Principle must be made one identical thing with Soul ... once domiciled within that Principle and brought to likeness with it becomes productive, active ... becoming, as it were, a new thing and it sees as a stranger looking on a strange world. has gone through a process of reasoning when s/he expounds her act to others, but in relation to herself s/he is vision so love too is vision with the pursuit of ideal form a living thing in a life of blessedness: this, too, must overwhelm with awe any that has seen it] Plotinus The Enneads trans Stephen MacKenna Faber and Faber 16th It's Monday noon. I have to decide (The book comes in front of my eyes. "That's it" I say. "You want this one?" I grab for it. He pulls it back, just a little, toward his pelvis. Oo playing in the temple are you, grinning over the divider.) whether to phone Canada House for news of money, whether to go there and transcribe the summer writing and try to record it. (That sitting here racked with loneliness and suspense still I look like I can be played with.) The shreds of notice. - If I record it the voice won't be right - the voice is right in it now though the recording isn't.
17
When I came in the door at the film libe the phone rang - a friend of yours called John Harrison said Trisha. [with Lis] "Had another look at Trapline. So very beautiful and something the opposite." "There is a man's voice." I hadn't tuned before I went and she rumbled me. I make my American voice mock hers. "An anxiety." I stumbled before she did that, one of those Rhoda moments when I look at my mistake and don't know why I did that. But I liked touching her goodbye, down-up on the arm. I know it was accurate but not how. Renny's remarkable teeth skin hair and eyes - and long sharp nose. Sitting down with him was like being with James Bennett, a friendly giddiness. 19th A small fast bull with sharp horns, a long old heavy bull; cocksucking and grabbing a thick penis in a bed on the sidewalk, with people passing in daylight. The little bull reddish brown, the big one darker. The women duck into the church and I go in there too but the big bull comes right into the aisle. The women leaving by a higher balcony. At the end he's being driven away in a schoolbus, but I'm not sure I'm safe yet. Then after it was the little man in the bed. I said I wanted to fuck him, we couldn't because of contraception probably so I was sucking away at his little loose thing. How did the clothes get spread across the sidewalk?
[Dewdney notes:
20th Crying on the day after, why, because it was bad or because it didn't make John Harrison love me. Thinking of going back to Michael and having nothing but business from now on, no love on pillows, just doing and blanking, being alone in motion. What was it. Ros [de Lanerolle] saying Luke is beautiful. Mike [Dunford] turned thick and square. Mark Nash's head thickened too, Tina Keene with lipstick. Luke and Andy exchanging jackets. Sitting around a table with Jill [Chisholm] Luke Andy and Sara, they being with each other like people who'd been living my life in my absence. Lis giving off a smell of dope, which is like her moles and pallor. Mary-Pat projecting teeth, what else, friendly offering a handle. They liked the chairs scraping but not the slides. "Fixed." I said icons but what could Akira see that they couldn't. And why. What it's like is being bent over a bar at the midriff. He came in amid people. I signaled a twist of a grin but it was his little woman I had to look at. Little frail spirit girl with dilated eyes and frightened shoulders about one foot wide. They went timidly to a seat after standing about waiting for me I suppose to come welcome them. They were beautiful together, like souls in a worldly stew, the back of his head, the nice manly way he holds it. Now I'm crying again. I want to say firmly something. The superstition and diffidence and coming-apart don't seem to work. Nicola and Luke saw soldiers, troops, all the armies in the world, in the flow of steam. She told a man the story of her woman alone and he quoted her that from Vaughn.
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