| aphrodite's garden volume 8 part 6 - 1988 may-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Ottawa 22nd May 1988 [in Ottawa invited to the opening of the new National Gallery] Here it is the money world of gross language, robot behavior and things signifying quality without having it. A room costing $165 a night without a window that can open. Hard foam pillows. Towels a color I wnd't want to steal. Letter paper I wdn't write on. No waterfalls in the lobby. But Marilyn [Cox], what's this intersection, with a shaped bush of grey hair and otherwise perfectly unstrained face and light immortal body in tasty clothes of the right kind for the lobby. I was easily unnerved coming in from the long journey, more unnerved by noticing how unnerved (asking two men in dinner jackets to get my bags upstairs), and then dealing with her smooth surface I felt myself jut out into grotesque edges. Her smile deflected me. Now it's morning, foggy. The plant on the table is chosen because it looks like plastic. Oh London plants were so beautiful yesterday, the shapes of the trees made of the shapes of their leaves. The aisle of plants in a protected space between the terraces. Even what I could see from the train to Heathrow, buddleias' wonderful confident shapes erupting out of cracks beside the concrete embankment, snapdragons, all of it is eruption of beauty out of holes in the ground. Coming down into Toronto into a wasteland, the fields around the airport seemed as if uncivilized in their own terms - brutish and bare - and the flats of factories and primitive shingled roofs - it's the whole texture of London that thrills me. [plant list from the Ottawa agricultural station] 23 I came out of the elevator and found two of them with thin straw hair, hers white, his a thin drizzle from the verge of his deep red scalp. The distress of fear in his hidden little eyes. The whole of his powerful body slumped, shoulders and gut. He wdn't have to be that, why is he. Her it wrote. A little brown-eyed biddy with not one flash of interest. Interior design meant a table with a long skirt of Wm Morris, valences! And show dogs, huge dogs, a black and a white and a cute lil squirrel called Foxy. They spoke looking at each other, nothing either of them hadn't heard before, in a beseeching blank. They don't ski anymore cos they might get hurt. Peter. He's a slow bulk too with eyes encroached on by swelling in his face, but he looked more a raptor, yet another woman by his side, wary. With him and the others I hear myself speaking as if I'm presenting cards - here too - using the meetings to absorb an image and process it, while I pay them in plastic money - no - to absorb them as an image, as if behind, back of the head, while I make my phrases at the mouth. Michael Snow looked nice but old. David [Rimmer] goes elsewhere but smiled when I told Kay Armi-tahge of the yellow fingernails I was on welfare. Seated figures - making fire of gravel and grass. White museum some of what I wanted to do with language, and the poplar flicker but used to another intention. A nice pink raw guy, young. [Mike Hoolboom] Women saying they like Trapline. A young woman scrubbing the bath as I write. Thurs 26 Then I read steadily, not the best, and watched my hands shake, divided attention but knowing the writing can take care of itself. A girl asking about narrative. "I'd like to know if you saw a story," [I say to her] warmly so she smiled as I was climbing past. Brenda [Longfellow] coming to help when she thought I was nervous. They variously had their fear in their voices not their hands. [I read what will we know from Laiwan's printed card.] - [visiting Mike's folks on the chicken farm near Belleville] My grey green cowboy climbing on the train, ideal template and glad eye. Sitting with little boy on the railway lawn wall, stepped relatives and mine looking through tinted glass meeting me. He's clean and rested, brown, bright-eyed, has soft live hair. He's the most beautiful thing I've seen in a month, week, who more, Longfellow was good. Rowen's little, a little silly thing putting his arms around my neck holding our cheeks together. The schoolbus route and the way across the fields to the white clay dugout. Yesterday the mixed forest from a lookout. Fires of grass, cranes, Limousin bull with a neck like a bison. Roads cut in two tracks. The magic parts and in it their enclave like a domed station on Mars, aluminum deckchairs, TV dumber than I can stand, a freezer motor grinding, my copy of Dewdney, very telling food, and a rec vehicle with a bed like a high altar raised above the trailer hitch. What's the truth - I said to M that it isn't real time. Was it real time in each other's arms, no, nowhere near. It's something animals have to do once in a while (he said). If it had been real I wd be sounding different. What has been real. Hanging my shirt to dry in the hotel niche, the hour slowly falling asleep on sheepskin under quilts becoming myself taking account of small realizations, in physical bliss. Looking at Pete [Voskamp], seeing the farm on the Ottawa River and realizing I could take the big risk of reading what will we know, the seafood caesar I knew I wdn't have to pay for. Bellboy picking up my pack strap in white glove, I say so warmly, "You'll get your gloves dirty." "Do you need a taxi?" "A taxi is what I do need!" I so much enjoyed being helped by staff, being helped at all. Joyful with my helpers. And coming into the train station and jumping into the queue and getting a window seat and seeing the landscape sunless through tinted glass though it was sunny across the aisle. M's painting of cowboys with beautiful purples and oranges, kid painting. A for Allie, come out too? 30th Much more happening at Anne and Harvey's than at Paul and Cathy's. At P-C's blanks and genialities, the fixedness of his objects and mobility of her voice, the baby-baby, or no, we hook our eyes on him when we've nowhere else to put them. Paul doesn't very much like his boy, the woman is no longer interested in his work cause she has work of her own. At A-H's there's a quarrel, he has a thousand little ways of containing female challenge and doesn't know he does. She's moving her face so much more like my mother, the same slant of eyes looks at me over the same upperlip crevasses. When I talk about shifting perception she holds herself tight, but this morning I saw her left eye gleam out strong for a minute. Then when we changed the subject it had shrunk again. Elizabeth somewhere maybe closer to a free edge, her cute voice could be a freedom or a servility, I couldn't tell. And it's the boy who has the science fiction collection, stars drawn on the ceiling, and the doctoral program. Anne is saturated with family, works it, is held by her best position in it, and hypnotized by the recital. "I know more about La Glace than I know about myself" said Harvey. "It's what people do when for various reasons they can't be together in the present." He laughs most at things he says himself, a big clap of laughter. O bodies. Young greyhaired men in suits. Is there really an opening among the particles. Only for those who are willing to go in person. [Still at this point the feelings that arise and the sensations are attributed to the external objects; the moment however when the transition takes place, when the selective forms released from within take the upper hand, is quite naturally indicated by a sudden silence. The story, which is a kind of psychological thriller
The forms came floating out of anything I looked at, like cobwebs around all objects and from these stretching into my eyes: as if these objects emanated from me.] 31 Above the water, higher there's blue so deep it's dark, lower there's haze and then water, graded series. Sandstone dissolving makes the particles pull apart. Silent? So, the rocks might want to speak. "When he began telling me things I started to shudder." Gave me a kiss at the end. [Phil Hoffman] Navigating the cross-charged meetings. Imagining Stan and Peter talking about me. "Your ears should have been burning." I can imagine Peter - can I? - rabbiting in a gush to make Stan admire him - yes but Peter works and feels - they would have interested each other I mean more than I, erotically. [Brakhage and Harcourt] What does it mean that Stan's such a moaner. "Light or light-like substance" that pools in hollows. A light shape shot up ahead of the plant's growth. Busy bees in the air. Reich's tube. "I'm good at seeing them from airplanes." I don't see any now. Vancouver 3rd June Rob sat beside me looking at tree lists, in such a way that the sides of our arms and legs were firmly in touch. I couldn't imagine him unconscious of it and thought to listen for distraction in his voice. I was distracted by the quality, warm and steady. 4th Nervy, not liking Rowen underfoot or wanting to pee or any of his little helplessnesses, wanting to work in the garden though it looked better overgrown. Screeching at the kid in Maxine's strawberry bed. There he goes crying at an owie, the first sound of it I want to hit him. "Rowen shut up." "Say don't do that" he said at the table, "Rowen don't do that, say don't do that," etc. Hadn't come to the end of it. I said, "You say Rowen don't do that." He said it. I tried again. He got the real anger that time. Tried again. "I want to eat now." Haven't said about the last week away. Parts of it come back but I'm not often resting. The stiffness of Paul's objects [brother] and similar polish of our talk. The first sight of him at the train station, a thick Konrad body, fleshy long torso on short legs, bumless, smaller-eyed and longer-nosed, with walls of books, a wall of records, a baby room with every baby appliance and bathroom with Clinique skin lotion for men, pore cleansers, eyelash conditioners and more. How daring and dirty it felt to say to Anne, All this sheet-changing seems so middle-class, and then sleeping in the sheets Alexander had used. I liked and was scandalized at liking, and would like to buy, some hexagonal glass plates and cups and a stainless steel cooking pot for $185, but buying, or this sort of buying doesn't seem to work, or most of it doesn't. The Dr Martin boots do. But the expresso coffeepot uses too much coffee, makes it too strong, is too assertive visually, and the coffee makes my heart flutter. A week's tour through materialism, I was scandalized at Paul's though not at Anne's. With Harvey it was interesting, some little thing happening every time. "I was going to be a professor, it's what anybody would want before they found out what else they could do." Said that to Anne without forethought, said a lot to her, not always gauging how far it would have to go to reach her. We caught the airport bus at the last moment, laughing when she took a short cut and a squirt from the accelerator brought her ahead of the slow Samuri. 'Bye! Found myself making notes about class. Seeing Mary and Ed's wish to use us to jack up their class position, and Paul does that, and Rudy and I don't. Anne saying she never felt poor - ie they were, in Clearbrook, always in the schoolboard class, and she easily married the principal's son. And Paul is still proving his class membership, and Harvey has approved him, and I am telling everyone I had a show in London, which is hardly true, ie the 'show in London' was the lot who walked out at the intermission. I had a party in London and a show in Ottawa. And Paul's books are there on the walls to certify his class, and the baby paraphernalia too - a six-months little baby wearing little shoes to go for dinner. At Anne's it was the way the bathroom door would be closed when they were in the den. But seeing Michael with a safety pin on his shirt and his slopping sandals again, I squirm away from his hands. Lean and bright yes but dirty. I liked him when his mom bleached his shirt and he had a bedroom he could sleep in and meals to fill his desperate hollow temples. I liked Rowen being able to run out of a door onto grass, and having own rabbits a dog a tractor cows cousins a car a truck fishpond sandbox. So is the difference between one class and another something to do with translation of real value into symbolic objects: instead of beautiful perception, beautiful objects; instead of sexual feeling, sexual objects; instead of complex apprehension, complex ritual; instead of perception, art. The one I wrote thank you to in a wave of love was Sara, whose valor, whose valor and realness, dirt, screams, fat and color and really used books and music and freedom and friendships and flounced skirt and marvelous house and uses for me - I lost (John Harrison) him. After the day crying I didn't miss him, it was over. I could maybe revive it by looking at his face but it was never John Harrison I was after - was it? - only those staggering meetings and a PhD maybe. I'll look - he had more than one face, his young one and the much more balanced head - maybe I was seeing a class too - classics - is there an alternate life pressing to exist (the one I say she wants me to have). "She would have wanted me to marry a professor and have a house like this and a family like this, that she could be part of." 5 She remembered the hidden court of women. It would have to be invented and have beautiful music in it, beautiful simple spaces. Chris Williamson. Audacity. Best if it had the real women but they no longer exist. Early morning and the hesperis. The women's duets. Lascia qu'io piango. Or one of the women sings it. Hesperia land of the west, Hesperides. Daughters of Atlas who with a dragon guarded the golden apples given to Hera by Gaea. The garden where these apples grew. Hesperidium citrus fruit, hesperis evening star esp Venus, hesperos, hesperis matronalis, dame's violet. Alien, in plantations on waste ground, by waysides, riverbanks, etc. May-July. Cruciferae are four. Any of the several ornamental old world herbs genus hesperis especially the dameswort, MF roquette ult eruca colewort cal cawl caulis cabbage, dames' rocket. Rosalind Turek. From behind sweet rocket camera creeps to see three women kissing. 5 AM light in a lilac and green bed. Definitions on voice-over, camera crawling over waste ground seeing it grow. 6 Waking in a hospital, that's my bed with bloodstains on the undersheet. Top floor of the building, 6th. Supervisor sends me out for a while. This beginning of it I don't remember in order. There's something about trying to take the elevator up, going to eat - so on - what I remember is coming into a room where Rob is. He takes my hands directly into his, without speaking, and I put my head against his neck. He talks about the animals around us, altogether himself in excursion. There are a pair of wolves in a pen standing in shadow with yellow eyes. They seem sinister to me but he says they're not, I get one out to play with like a relaxed puppy. There are other times I leave work and find myself in a room in his arms. It's a great naturalness. Once his sister is in the other room. I come out past her walking aggressively in a narrow skirt and Cuban heels. The children's ward is a place they say is like Cuba, a curved stretch of land falling off into curly groves. Rob says (I just realized his name) to Michael, You always build your house in the same place. ---- and ---- and northeast of Sharon's place, meaning his and Paige's. Of course what I take from it is the moment and way he claims me, and then the way he speaks with the same confidence like traveling on a line of smoke and showing me the cut of his angles. There's more with a woman supervisor. She says, See I knew you needed to go somewhere to meet something. Not that exactly, but a sense of friendship. "We took down the sign that said Ellie's Garden and put one up that said Strathcona Community Garden." "You did that last month when I was away!" Laughing at a crossing of paths. The park politician who shook hands with me twice because he didn't remember the first time. Saying to Margaret Mitchell [MLA for Downtown East], "Do you want to see my garden?" "I'd love to." We're standing together in it and I say "The women are very strong in this garden," and she, in a familiar tone, "I noticed that," I mean a tone like ours. "There are other times I leave work and find myself in a room in his arms." I can steep in it when I want. But what I'm doing instead is roaring at Rowen. 7 Don looking young. 17 I say. What do I most like with you? Cuddling. Rowen or Luke is there, a top bunk, somebody's temporary place, I detect a different woman in his speech, German with an English accent. What happened with your wife? He holds my face forward so I don't see him crying. [Opposite:
he fills himself with gazing like the radiance around any star soul, being called Aphrodite because of the beauty and brightness and innocence and delicacy of soul since each intellect is accompanied by a soul, in this way But Eros himself runs on ahead and before he gives the lover the power of seeing he fills himself with gazing, seeing before the lover but certainly not in the same way, because he fixes the sight firmly in the lover, but himself plucks the fruit of the vision of beauty as it speeds past him. So that the soul by a kind of delight and intense concentration of the vision and by the passion of its gazing generates something from itself which is worthy of itself and of the vision. Love came to be as an eye filled with its vision, like a seeing that has its image with it. Because he derives his real existence from seeing And is this love the spirit which they say accompanies each of us, the love, that is, that belongs to each of us? The individual soul longs for what corresponds to its own nature. And since life has appeared, and is always there, in the world of realities, the gods are said to 'feast.' [presumably Plotinus "On love" in the Enneads III trans AH Armstrong Loeb Classics] 11 On the back of a tall soldier watching the lights of the war, singing powerful climbs and drops ending in a squeak. I sang it and then I was the one having watched it. Three funny girls climb to sit on the window ledge. They've dropped the man's veily blanket. If those stories are all mine - well, no, not more than, as much as, the stories I've read. We were standing in the section of the shelterbelt that he's put native plants in. Wind gusted up, bushes were beating, the grass ran up against our legs. He placed himself to stand directly behind me. It was as if he was holding me in his own way privately. romantic / shame 13 This morning intense. I took it through part of this book - longing not knowing what to do. Sunday morning at the garden, fire, one of our savages and Paul in his flat hat, and me pouring it into reading, liking to read myself. After that it was Jan-Marie's anxiety like a refrigerator motor, or a sine tone through every moment - except a few. The so-pleasant guests, each a version of themselves, scrutinized and phenomenal but not less mysterious, their paralyzing visibility and my invisibility. [Jan-Marie's birthday party] Then Rowen to the garden. I ignore him. Then back at the garden planting Rob's little shrubs, labouring. Then Eric tells me stories, clans, deaths that shift to have been a non-death. In all this, longing went away. 14 What's the matter. Went to bed early, nothing to do. Wake these mornings anxious in the solar, don't know why, lonely, draggy, in a tremor. The house is broken and dirty, bare and poor. Waiting to have money. It's fiery summer through clean windows. Love-time and no arms, though the blackberries have many, flowering like roses. At the south foot there is a rose all over a blackberry hummock, and beside it a cave. Too much the garden. Monty washing clothes by the fairy hills with knife scars dividing his face. His pal on the pallet. They roll their bedclothes to put them in the plastic sheeting box. Eric said he'd knocked me from one clan to another. I used to be in the clan of women who capture men, whose counterpart is the men's clan called Army, in which Michael is. Now he says I'm in the clan like Tania is, whose counterpart is his own, the Wandering Clowns. How he knocked me from one to the other, he says, was the night he scolded me about the wheelbarrow. (What happened that night was he pressured me to do something I didn't want to do, I in the end did it by dumping my dirt and flaring at him). "If a bus came as you stepped off the curb and squashed you ...." "Don't do that, don't do that Eric," pointing my finger and looking stern, "don't do that," and once more. It was an in-case, like in my wars, I don't feel this but I'll apply a counterforce in case. I think it was also taking the chance to speak against his fascinating classifications. I wanted to ask, what clan is Rob in? There were reasons not to but when I had (he hardly knew who I meant) it was easier. Record store jubilation, the idea of Eno. 15th In Dewdney - I used to like making mind brain - now I think of brain and nervous system as religious/ideal (he would say) explanatory entities that are as if already superceded. But I don't know what they're superceded by and don't know why I don't still like them. And what that has to do with what they meant in religion. I as if believe 'the nervous system' is interesting, exciting, generative, and yet wrong. On the mountain the grass field, black heads moving in a small arc. Through the viewfinder what happens is I could get a lot of field in focus at once, as the eye doesn't. 16 A little cry from the lower end of the (dream) field. Rowen at the top of a high ladder, 40', very high, realizing where he is. Woke me at four. It is looking as though the Freemasons may have got the housing allocation. Eric tells me stories about things I do with him in his visions. Tonight I rose up and said, The truth is you're attracted to Tania and you're attracted to me and you make up these fables about it. He said my non-sexuality is keeping back various people from the paths they should take. What do you mean non-sexuality? That I don't live with Michael. He seems to be saying I'm attractive and he doesn't like it. What I jump to worry about is whether I'm being seductive. (What about it - I'd worry about using sexual signals to cover something else. Why would you worry. Because it's bad. It's bad to mesmerize people. They should look after themselves. Yes.) What if being magnetic means I'm a person without true being. It's two possibilities. Magnetic means that one is in true being or magnetic means one is eating people because of a lack. There was that and the way I talk to Rowen, every sentence from the servant robot and so not wanting to be serving him that I crack into snarls and bruises when he makes it more difficult - at the garden when I want to work - daycare down to four hours a day - all the little tasks, pull up his zipper, "I want to do it," he bends over so I have to wait, like a completely unintelligent workmate. His talk so stereotyped. I feel it's my fault he bores me. For him it's incomprehensible. I don't like to do things for him but when he does them I screech. I don't want him by me but when he goes off to the end of the field I'm yelling to have him back. I hit him and want kisses. Waking before dawn. There's no one to call for calm. The red man is blank, the man from Anares I won't violate, but when I made even a sketch of a man in a suit, with a dark ponytail, who took off his glasses, I started to dream. I'm brown and handsome. My hair has a shape like broom and blackberry growing together. Plaid jacket black white and blue for wearing in non-Canadian cities. Blue the color of the Mali necklace. It's pouring after a week of heat. The poppies this year have with them many roses swarming up the rigging, spiring blue, hollyhocks halfway up, waist high. Roses the cleanest pink, on long stems, from the philosopher's garden that's better because I've left it. It's closed in, all humps of the taller things. The rosemary is swamped. From what Eric is saying, the spirit world, his world where everything is a dream, the world he survived into, is his wish world, where he knows everything no one else knows. Mike Hoolboom wrote for a copy of what will we know [for his magazine]. Came home and missed RM, last initial too and similar hand, but this version likes me. [Rob Mills] "It's starting to look quite nice now," contemplating over my shoulder the roses and red and white poppies. He jumped at my throat, "It looks ver-ry nice," like a boy who hits you because he wants to kiss you. Poked me with a fork, struck me with blades of grass. Monty my last free night made the fire - I'd been going through shrubs with Rob - after sunset - asked if I wanted tea. I fetched R. Monty used a couple of teabags and brought out sugar from a bag of café envelopes. We drank the tea as if it were whiskey, getting silly, yakking. I was cold. Monty offered his blanket. I shared it, and that brought shoulder and leg, like kids. No wish to go home. A drift of scent from a flower. Stayed out 'til midnight. Our bikes went different directions without the kiss there should've been. Then a thin light night arranged so he'd phone early. Sat 18 Early morning. Imagining a hunger strike at City Hall, Maggie coming to do checks, cables and phone calls from film departments. Wondering whether I have to take on the fight all the way. Garden people come to sit with. What it would take to make you hear people who don't speak the language of money. Whether I have to feel shattered about losing it before I can fight. 19 When I wake there's tremor at the heart. I've been taking it as a worry and this morning realized it's like solar plexus flutter. A little curious self from dreams. It was 'up north,' a different place on Henry Sieburts' yard scything a long perimeter thinking of doing another film up there with saskatoon leaves. Another car. I mean a soft alert quality ready to work. Think of funds for Cambridge. There was a xerox of skyscraper grid with blue and clouds that spelled out E. I thought why haven't I used this, it's good. 21st Was it the drumming chanting circle in the lower orchard that calmed us down about Monty Jones? Beatrice saying, Mohn-ty I no scare you. I chased after Rob in a way that made me angry after, only to say I was chasing because he was retreated and now I'll avoid him and that will be over. I have to think it should be, because it's another one of my foolishnesses like John Harrison. But it's only foolish because I'm not succeeding, if I were it would be live absorbing learning mental energy visible fire and not going to sleep before ten out of boredom and trying to stay asleep in the morning because there's no drive into the day. Reading about the monkeys who kill other males' infants, thinking Ed hated us as if we weren't his, in the way Rowen isn't mine - we weren't the children of the self he wanted to be. 24 Don't know what to do. The photos Luke took in London, a heavy dull person, suspicious blunt and old, face hanging like Mary's. It means what -
- Tempted to adore. Then it says, that one isn't worth adoring, wait 'til it's more suitable, you're just charged to go off at the first chance. But: look at all the ones it isn't. It is specific. Alright, what do I like. Your blue eye, your stubbornness of hair, your hands' (I remembered to dare to look) joints and grime, your voice, your way of placing yourself near, your body's timidity (folding) and balance, your nose, chasteness, is it. At the garden, what's happening is the site coordinator is a man who's not doing the job. I gave it up because Eric pestered me. I'm giving Rob authority with the endless plants I don't know and it makes me susceptible. [Opposite:
Tuesday 28th Grassheads with light behind them hovering like a cloud of crystals. Bindweed cables with Christmas lights. The way he sits down near and finds a way to touch me. We look the other way downlight to see what grass will be there. Purple we both say. I find ways to look. It's an innocent gentle proceeding with islands of pleasure in a surrounding of uncertainty. My last dream was anxious. He argued that he wanted time to talk to himself (something like that). As if I was a demanding girlfriend. I was driving a road I wasn't sure of, in thickly falling snow. It was starting to be standing timber like the lodgepole pines in the Pine Pass. Rowen or some baby girl was at home waking up alone. Or would the servant girl be there. We had driven through a museum house. I'd left behind the person I'd been at the fair with. - There's something I can feel but not see, about getting ready, packing to leave my old life forever. I was going to do it in the evening, take the baby, who should sleep before we left. But someone came, was it Jam? Someone made me unsure I was still going. And I hadn't packed the pictures. [Opposite: And if they come from this beauty here to the recollection of that archetype, this earthly beauty still satisfies them as an image. It is much more firmly held than the sun holds the light which shines out from himself around him. And with this child of hers she looks towards him; her activity has made a real substance. The beautiful love who has come into existence as a reality always ordered toward something else beautiful, and having its being in this, that it is a kind of intermediary between desiring and desired, the eye of the desiring which through its power gives to the lover the sight of the object desired. For that higher soul was, certainly, a substance, which came into being from the activity which existed before it, and from the substance of the world of real beings, which also looks towards that which was the first substance, and looks towards it with great intensity. So that the soul by a kind of delight and intense concentration on the vision and by the passion of its gazing generates something from itself which is worthy of itself and of the vision. And is this love the sprit which, they say, accompanies each of us?] Have to say alright alright whatever the truth is that's what I'll have. 29 The dinner invitation was nervous and formal. I was happy ththo', cleaning the house, saying look what's released when I imagine I'm going to have a romance - it's dreams of loving - being sweet to Rowen - changing his room around - it was feeling what it would be like to have a loved man around, specifically, someone with a formal distance enough so my dreaming can expand. Then there was Rowen in pink nightie down playing with Trudy, I could hear their voices, I am upstairs leaning over the balcony edge waiting, and I see in a pane of glass at the back door across, that Rob is standing on the porch combing his long hair forward over his shoulder - movements of his fawn-colored shirt, the pink comb - that was magic - and then it was stiff, he was contemptuous about my invitation card, uncurious, Rowen intervened and it was a long stretch before half an hour of quicker friendliness on the balcony. So what do I know - I gave it a test, as I should. 30
[Opposite, Sturgeon's dreaming jewels: A crystal is a program the utter lightlessness of oblivion. It was a place of flickering impressions and sensations of pleasure in an integration of abstract thought, of excitement at the approach of one complexity to another of engrossing concentration in distant and exoteric constructions. He felt the presence of individuals, very strongly indeed: the liaison between them was non-existent, except for the rare approach of one to another and, somewhere far off, a fused pair which he knew were exceptional. But for these, it was a world of self-developing entities, each evolving richly according to its taste. There was a sense of life so long that death was not a factor. No hunger, no hunting, no cooperation and no fear. The self-sufficient abstracts of ego were the crystals, thinking with logic and with scales of values impossible to a human being. They dream when they're ready to mate, but some are too - young, or undeveloped, and maybe some just don't find the right mate at that time. But when they dream that way they change molecules. No - this is my guess - when two crystals mate, something different happens. They make a whole thing. But they don't make it from just anything the way single crystals do. First they seem to die together. After that they begin a together-dream. They find something near them that's alive, and they make it over. They replace it, cell by cell. Then it can change itself - if it ever thinks of changing itself. It can be almost anything it wants to be. He hunts around, hurting the crystals until their pain leads him right to them.] Theodore Sturgeon 1950 The dreaming jewels Gollanz 1st July I write a word and look at it surprised. Is that who I am today, that sharp flattened person. Have been reading stories in the bad voice, the writing voice. Eric phones and this time tho' I fight dutifully my solar is tight with fear of something - to say that, seems dangerous, even - it's fear of his threat, which is this, you're part of my dream he says, and I can see he is dreaming someone he calls me. He says it, what others if there are any do without saying. Don't catch hold of me with your dream system. Don't catch hold of me with your blue eyes - I mean - [Rob] - catch hold of me with your blue eyes if you can - the way his spine sags at the belly, and the way he's unconscious of a pain he shows. "The only person I know who's more powerful than I am and can make me do what I don't want to do" [he says of his boss]. "You think you're powerful?! Oh, stubborn, you mean." A grubby look around the mouth. Other times after work a red brightness. It is rarely I see that blue, yesterday it was after his two beers - a very intense blue. And Michael yesterday coming up the stairs smiling to say (I think) I know - a warm grace. A stressed time - oh a sensitive stressed time - did Joyce just say, give in - "the only way I know to exorcise a spirit is to unify with it" said Eric, and then a story of being Monty, wanting to kill - Aidan and Anne say Monty hit him - Eric says no - Maxine (Eric says) says Eric grabbed her - etc. And the Chinese writing [Mayor] Campbell a pile of letters to say there should be housing not gardens. Reluctant responsibility, like the CBUT reporter who didn't seem right, what was that? Is it being caught in a siphon feeding energies that are rich already, like Campbell himself. (Should we instead of fighting threaten to quit - alright, sell it off, turn it into playing fields, that's the end of what I give your city.) [Draft of letter to Mayor Campbell: This is in reference to your letter about compromise. There hasn't been 'a compromise,' the business interests have won what they want. There has been no compromise, there has been no effort at all either by the Freemasons or City Properties to find another more suitable site for Chinese seniors. There has been no admission by City Properties that there was a mistake that has cost people three years work. I was working on that garden with a pick digging ditches in clay on weeks that were the last week of a five-week month (do you know what that is?) when I had no food. Another gardener brought a bag of cooked clams he'd found outside the back door of the Only seafood café - angry. That anger made my garden. When my garden is rubbed out I am not going to start again, another three year's work. I am not going to teach and welcome people who don't know what to do with a shovel. I'm not going to concern myself with keeping paths straight and the thousands of thoughtful, true and tactful connections that have made the garden a live hope. What alienation means - it means people have no hope that their initiative can come to anything. We'll lose it altogether not because it is unsuccessful but because it is extremely successful in a manner that is not earning money for anyone - that may be visionary, may be environmentally sustainable, is government participatory, beautiful, inspiring. I am not going to be part of that gradual erosion of good people giving their only lifetime and best gifts to a struggle in which they have no chance.] Here I was so raging I screamed at Rowen, Go do your bloody pee then I don't have to do it for you. He hesitated and opened his mouth and cried with his eyes full of big tears and I said I was sorry. He with puddles in his eyes still sang Go see Michael now? A crying smile. We had gone through the three floors [at Carnegie] and out again and then saw Michael at the bikes. Had Victor's supper with him. He said, What time did he get you up this morning? Yes it was brutal being dragged out of deep sleep before daylight, faint, heart clamouring, staggering in the corridor to get bottle milk. And Eric on the phone praising my intelligence, a long story about getting rid of the woman who owns a thousand drinkers, Cauldron a big fat woman with male genitals, who slapped around the pretty plant fairies, De Bush the place they go to get drunk, a violent mind. He challenged De Bush. And then, the evening's movie, Haiti and Voodoo power, a story possessed by the evil spirit of fear of the actual. We watched it with Rowen, that was our possessedness, daring him through snakes, spiders, charred corpse faces, torture chair, blood, knives, screams, fits, which seemed to interest but not frighten him. Time to wake up! Big snake! His clear loud voice in the dark. 2nd Gordimer. Reading it again in wonder ooh what she can do, what she can say in words. So much she has found a use for - "orange searchlights of rising sun pierced from window across to window in the prostrate humming silence" - no it isn't a wonderful sentence but it knew how to use my mornings over the North Atlantic. It's supernatural what she can know, where does she go to know it - "her masterpiece" - her certificate. Gordimer Nadine 1983 The Conservationist Viking 3 It's still there? - it is - what is it? - he's here! a jump of joy - a small jump of joy - seeing a bloom in his face - absorbing it curiously while I do what I hear people do, ask some little thing. "You didn't go to your mom's today?" - "I should check on the bees" he says. I am curious and he is not. What I'm curious to know is, what's the life that's having this effect on me, of all the lives that don't. After, I think, I could shift level with him, I could try, but at the time, when we're sitting on the rail making formal conversation, letting the curious love go its own way apart, accumulate secretly, it doesn't occur to me. I'm functionally divided, the speech self is criticizing him. It is the way I'm either in social division or else if I want to speak from what I am I have to do it everywhere. What would I say. No, it would be do, I'd go touch him. I'd like to feel the temperature of his hands, and unknot his hair, and see what he'd talk like if he were warmed up, kiss him not French but brief and dry, and put my hands on his shoulders. Would he know what he's doing? No, more likely than that would be he's never done it and isn't going to. Is that what his thinness means? "I have two accounts, when I've put money in them it's dead, it's gone, I don't know about it." The way something said will repeat itself to me after, the way "it's dead" did. It always means, look at this, it means something. But I don't hear it at the time. I have an ache in the cunt, is that for him, and is he telling me he locks himself in the bank, maybe. "Is it because you want to buy land?" "I want it to be there when I want to do something." He brings his hand out of his pocket with beans in it, white black and brown like polished wood, from the old house. 4th Rowen's first day at regular daycare, now we have every day 7:30 to 5:30, no phoning in the morning, but no Margaret or Phyllis. That's probably the only mention to bring their faces and love, Margaret's highbred London intelligence of kindness, and Phyllis and Grace themselves, and how much I loved Crabtree for making me possible. And Rowen in a bloom of contentment. I don't want to wake but when I see his perfect face I'm grateful not mean, the outer points of his eyes and mouth, and his little fish teeth and redbrown color and the push of his solid clean eyes. I'm going daycare now? His voice thrills me, what kind of being has a voice like that. (Please I want to go to Michael's house. His door thumping. I chase him back into the dark and lie down with him, hold his hand. He comes close with his spermy smell and licks my nose. "Why are you sucking my nose?" "I making you outside." "What do you mean" - imagining in a flash what he could be saying. His Michael this aft fixing my bike in his undershirt, grease on his hands fitting little rusty nuts with a serious young nose under his hat and then the bulges on his arms, enthralling, and warm shoulder skin. What a young thing you are. What makes it so Steven has zero sex appeal? He doesn't have any consciousness in his body, that's Michael's theory. Comparing Rob's frame that has got opposite consciousnesses in it, shame and pride in zones, is it, shame around the belly. The face I took a print of but can't see now. A girl's radiance - that doesn't say how rosy and open, with blond wisps. 6th Western Canadian Wilderness Committee. More use to describe Paul George, pale big stout male with similar silver of hair and eye, and the office like Dirk's, family, papers, lesser men tensely trying, food for everyone to take, males on urgent phones, females keeping a helpful eye. They were urgently saving trees. See, starting to tell it I like to tell it more though I began yearning for YOU who by today I needed to see ththo last time a little was happy enough. 7th In the warm water thinking of the drama of computation finding its way. Something occurs, like my attachment to Rob, and the whole of the occurrence can be handled with one phrase (I saw a motion of the shift lever), and in anyone's time it is constantly being handled by other people's shift phrases, and when these shift phrases are incorrect what happens to the top of the pile. The overseer has to be correcting, and does, making allowance. And that's the drama of computation finding its way. The overseer being the oversight function. I see it as if coming from the other end, a top-down branching of generalization. Though it is not top-down but side by side. So what I mean is the shape sense as it did just now comes to meet the verbal sense and if the pile is crooked it can tell. Oversight is in the middle because it's seeing the overlaps.
- In sexual pressure lying down looking for what will do it. She's on the grass in pyjamas, young. The father has her standing by him, there's another man over there by the trees. She leans her head back on her father's chest. He sets her arms back around his neck and unbuttons her pyjamas. Look how beautiful she is. Stroking down her breasts. Long slopes to the point. A stroke and a little twist so she's rosy and dreaming. Hand down her pants, in and past and in and past. Her legs are spread along his, she's laid down and the young man comes and kisses her, and is kissing her, while the father fucks. Then I come. It's not all the way allowed but it's strong. In a while I do it again. And then I come out slower wondering about the political frenzy. Was I coming on to Jessup [city planner] wanting to fuck some power, am I raving out of control with hunger to be taken over the moon. The way I was talking to him was a bit that, off guard, crazy, chaotic. "I'm going to send you a postcard of my garden with poppies in bloom, so there." "I like it down there, actually," he says. As if I don't know what I am and could be making myself foolish.
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