| aphrodite's garden volume 8 part 7 - 1988 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
8 July 1988 The kind of morning that is like elation at a distance. If I were with someone I would be it. It's on the other side of the window. A sea scent brought up through the houses by a very gentle heat. O writing. The first pages of A guest of honour. But those hands were the lyrical, delicately strong, African ones that escaped the international blandness of businessmen's hands as Bray had marveled to see them escape the brutalizing of physical hardship. Convicts broke stones with hands like that, here. Nadine Gordimer 1970 A guest of honour Viking Today it's singing goodbye Jimmy goodbye - an unwholesome state - yuk - why'm I being like that - pushing stupidly - [Kathy Linden Goodbye Jimmy, Goodbye, 1959] 9th Heartsore at night lying twisting awake at three hearing traffic on Hastings. After a long time I realized it was my physical heart beating very fast and with a strained feeling as if I pulled it digging plant holes with the mattock. But it also felt like shame. I kept seeing R not in the beautiful way but as if he's working a power bid and is the only one smart enough to get his dart into my quick, but not smart enough at all to enjoy me and see me. I hate the conversations I've been having with him, bitter anger at the way I've gone hopefully into stupidity to try to be with him, like Mary barking up at a professor. He has a head like a shaved lightbulb and hasn't cleaned his teeth since he grew up, dresses like a beggar because he doesn't like to spend money, works womanishly to get what he wants by seeming inoffensive. I was wanting to decide a strategy - "It's not heart and soul and body like it was for Robert MacLean" (desperately talking [as if] to Joyce) - when I'd said that a pressure of crying between my eyebrows. Pressure so bad I go out looking for Michael to find out if it's coming from him. Sure enough the Irish girl is pulling support out of my support. Then what do I do. I tell but escape. It is bad and I leave Michael with a baffled wrong look. If this man could know me he would know me. What I have to do is stay out of R's way until it's better, and get ready for Caroline with my disciplines. 10 The chops of Margot Wentz's heavy white arms hung majestically over the dishes she served. Just as he was thinking how the girl never smiled, she smiled at him, the brilliant, vivid, humorous smile of deep self-confidence. What she has in her reservoir - the recall - she's writing from an immense reservoir of detail - that experience, I'd never have been in mind to recall it, though I've recorded it. Dear Journal, from Lonely. At night, first a smothered ring, as if under a pile of covers, then when I'm awake, after a pause, the real loud ring of here and now. Michael - "smoked some POT" - without a sense of the time, wanted to confide, what was it, his dumbness in that mode, lumbering sentences, wanting to say he hoped we'd still be friends, bursting out into enthusiasm about playing reversed parts with Rowen, his tone as if under a magnifying glass, as if the listener is stoned, stupidity in big slow fetches, like watching a cripple climb a hill, Sam dragging his leg and throwing it from the hip. I shrink away when he tries to talk the way people do, thoughts, experiences. It's only when he attends me that I can bear him. What am I fighting for, by lying, stealing, the rest of what I do to Michael because I can - to keep myself in the open where there might one day be a companion of another class. 11 How she's different from Le Guin - she's more physical, smells, bums, hands. This is the same territory as The dispossessed. Le Guin makes me cry, she's in cosmos; Gordimer's in the scrum, just delighting in the availability of every kind of moment. Le Guin beside her seems ethereal, but so close at heart. Gordimer is my garden politics, and I follow all the debate holding my breath. Women writing the political novels. Like Middlemarch, but how much more fluent a machine the novel is now. Gordimer and Lessing can write political novels because they've had a political existence; Le Guin writes stories about archetypal tyrannies but hasn't been in backrooms forming strategy out of coalitions of ego. Alright what is the structure of this time. Tension, the time ahead, one moment everything's being aimed at. If we lose or give up, then what - my garden will be gone. There'll be construction of a huge thing shutting out the sky. It's like feeling I can't win, the men in suits will beat me down cause I got large enough for them to see me. Then when they've won that - we're on the land wrapped around them - other people have beautiful gardens, I have nothing - my position in the garden is gone - there is the narrow side strip, the deep inner corner, the meadow. There's the Canada Council and what am I going to do with it. I don't know whether I'm going to go on in the garden anyway. I won't have time to reconstruct the garden. I'm afraid to let go of it. [Opposite: had always worn a feather, to show their heads were full of natural wisdom and inspired thought fasted a great deal and ate only things that would make his dreams white, that is, clear flocked to the man who could make white to them the things they saw hand above head with open palm, "I see you"] 12 Exec meeting. Crushed sense at the heart, of there being so many things to look after, that aren't delegated yet, and that even when they are delegated will have to be supervised and redone. I went on cutting Rob and at the end of the meeting when I addressed something to him and looked him in the face it was like seeing someone suddenly in another light. I mean the sight of him was twice as vivid as the others, but also the look was like a stiff beam of intention difficult for us both. I'm thinking I can tell him what's up. 16 Careful what I say - don't indulge - or you'll go into angry desire again - I thought of him a second before the door knocked - then it was an offside conscious knock and I rushed down from one night to another - the one upstairs outside the balcony door, the one downstairs on the porch - he does what I do at a door, retreat from it while he waits - seeing him there the possibility of taking three steps into his arms - I like the undercurrent because I don't do it but in some way it happens. It was all clear again - yakyak - sitting on the table in the dark - a light goes on in the apartment building to the east, he turns his head, a split second later another in the bedroom window behind him. "He didn't know how to talk to her, but I knew how to talk to her." "They're difficult." "You have to do it with love." All of it sinks into me and I watch it do so, admiring his know-how whether it's unconscious or not. I'm standing pressed against the door frame, he gets up and stands pressed against the other side. "I love you" I say not-aloud, that way it is not certain who is saying it. Not exactly a thick atmosphere as he's getting ready to say he's going, but very charged with the possibility of saying stay - to the last moment - and then a satisfied going. Yesterday [a piece in] the East Ender, this morning CBVU. We're into it, says Muggs. Five weeks [to the city council hearing]. You're in the army now / you're in the army now. Haven't said I'm reading Laurens vander Post between duties. The way it's his own story amended to the archetype. I see the awkward sentences and then I see the place. [Final draft of letter to mayor: Dear Mayor Campbell and Councilors Puil, Bellamy, Owen, Baker, Boyce, Caravetta, Price, Erickson, Taylor, Davies and Caravetta: Mayor Campbell wrote that you believe Council had come to a reasonable compromise in the conflict about rezoning Lot 1 of Lot 1 on Prior Street for residential use. I suggest that a decision which gives one side what they want and leaves the other defeated, demoralized and broken-hearted can't yet be called a compromise. A true compromise would recognize that there are more than two protagonists on the scene, and would in the best case satisfy them all. The Chinese seniors need to be housed, not just anyhow, but in a way that respects their wish to be included in the ordinary life of a neighbourhood - they need to be included in a neighbourhood, not set apart on its margins. They need safe, near, access to Chinatown shops. The Chinese Freemason's group needs to have a fine high-profile facility to its credit. The development company, Turnbull and Gale Associates, needs to recover its investment of time. City Properties needs the revenue. Chinatown merchants need an influx of Chinese residents to balance the outflow of successful immigrants who have moved to Kerrisdale and Burnaby. The Strathcona and Downtown East Side residents without means to ski, sail, drive to the mountains, urgently need contact with an urban wild area. Some of them also need food. The artists, musicians, architects, and landscapers who are the most recent wave of refugees to find a home in Strathcona, need to participate in making something marvelous. The Strathcona Community Garden membership needs to have its vision of the garden's potential recognized, and its years of volunteer work respected. More important, people of many different ages, nationalities, and economic circumstances need to be working together on a common project they know to be vital. And there are other interests, too, which will be familiar to you. If the political will exists, there are solutions that would please all of these interest groups. If, for instance, the Chinese Benevolent Society and its developer could have reserved for it part of the Concord Pacific development, the seniors would be in the heart of a beautiful and interesting neighbourhood; the Benevolent Society itself would be included in a prestigious community; the Chinatown merchants would have expanded their territory toward the west. City Properties could be satisfied also, if there were a land trade arranged with the Park Board, by which Lot 1 of Lot 1 would be included in Park Board holdings in exchange for Park Board holdings in another part of the city. By this arrangement the Community Garden would be entirely under Park Board auspices and could go on to negotiate formal recognition of SCG lands as a city park and urban wild area. The one drawback to this real, happy compromise is that it requires something from city staff and elected representatives - it requires your active, urgent, good will. Are you going to tell us it's impossible?] Excited bringing this draft to Muggs, Rowen in pink with his blue lunchkit, solar Paddy and Muggs giving off a warmth of confident fight. Sunday 17th Your kisses are / worth waiting for. From early a sublime day - northern pink and the coffee pot - I go down with Ro to the garden and set up the sprinkler and then ththo it's early there's the boy on the bike, hi sweetie [I think] across the middle of the gardens. "You were sneering! It hurt my feelings." "I wasn't sneering." "Alright what were you doing then." Pigweed, hypericum, thistle, brome grass, fireweed, broom, willow, poplar, bramble, rose, His discretion, and it admitted too: I was sitting against his leafpile looking at the Japanese mulch gardener's book. He got up abruptly and went to do something in the orchard. It was because he noticed a child's voice by the shed [and thought it was Michael with Rowen]. Masanobu Fukuoka 1978 The one-straw revolution Rodale Oh - is it pitiful to be noting like this. Sunk in bed in the afternoon, feeling the cavity of the midriff, beginning to remember what loves were, the way I loved Cheryl so I wanted to be in her room without talking, I was in love with her in the best way I could be and yet, by failure, or what? that feeling has become a zero. She's there somewhere and I don't think of her. She isn't who she was. I'm not who I was. I was tinder. 19 Woken at 2:30 by sirens swarming to a fire, waves of them, from so miserable a dream, a world reduced to a few melting houses. I'm not going to be able to focus it. It was so alien, as if a few houses left, melting down in the excrement of the remnant people with no choice but to die out with them. A man thrown over a wall into another of the dying places, maybe an animal with him. He/I feel it's better there than outside, but still there's no way out of the death coming to him with the place. More I can't recover. As if I am going into the land of the dead to fight for the soul of my place, but I have to take care to go there without dying permanently. There's my spirit-image boy dressed for it yellow and blue and silver bee bracelet taking the corner upright on his bike with his hands behind his back. I can see my liking making him happy though he takes it as natural. Terror yesterday at the welfare office when she threatened to cut off daycare. I'd better demonstrate some mental instability here. I'll give this child up for adoption if I don't have daycare. ROWEN DON'T DO THAT! genuinely and consciously. 21st Aversion, avertedness. The way eating with Akira I set myself twenty degrees off-angle to him and then saw the whites climbing past us on the sidewalk along Lonsdale as grotesque. One filtertip after another, poison smoke falling downhill at me. He was maybe fretting that I hadn't said anything about his unspeakable paintings. In twenty years, the psychic said, his paintings will be sold before he's made them, like Picasso's. The money will finance a research institute for higher mathematics. He sold a watercolor for a thousand dollars. What to make of it, is he crazed with some unaccepted failure? But then he drove up through many turns to a place where the air was ions and balsam, delight, the (hot) fifties concrete dam with three delicate fishscale spills down its long apron, a bitty tumult laundering the air above it - elder, salmonberry, flat hemlock, varnished cedar, foxglove, fox-red grit visibly ancestral to the sand under this house, spruce poles packed tight, sheeny. Sky going ivory and 5-day new moon lagging (I saw the first of it this month like a pencil line, two nights after still very slender). Evening coming back along Hawks, smelling jasmine from behind my ear, I find Jean and Lise on a carseat in front of their stoops. Stay on with them in the magic summer night, they talking to the cats and dogs and each other so free and light I feel my bureaucratic mind a stiff thing. Fascinated by Jean beautiful in red. She had her white VW van parked beside them like a sleeping dog (up on blocks). 22nd Finished letter to mayor, talked to Gretchen, retyped fact sheet on letterhead, biked up to City Hall in the heat, got greening propaganda to various planners, factsheets and copy of my letter to Max Beck and Spaxman. While I was waiting outside the alder-secretary's, Campbell wandered out of his office, "Hello." "Hello, how are you?" Smiling ironically, "Fine," pause, blushing, "and you?" - the pausing blushing and irony to do with being more than/his equal and yet a petitioner. Read newspaper in the City Hall cafeteria, thought of Muggs, copies at Strath Comm [-unity Center), watering west perimeter bushes with a long hose, buckets, Rob approaches my black kung fu shirt in his black teeshirt, he's in retreat and I will be too. 6 PM Philip Savage of Redeye [Co-op Radio], I tour him through and he does an eight minute interview. I give him pinks - his favorite he said, I happened to meet him with them in my hand. He looked at the berm and saw Nova Scotia. When I hear my voice interviewed it's the pacing that sounds different, that means the pace of thinking between words is silent differently. It's quite elegant. 23 Something that happened last week, by Rob at his garden talking, I fell suddenly into dismay, so I almost couldn't move my mouth, it was as if I'd been felled psychically. (This moment on the radio piano Let it be. I realize could learn rock and roll piano now, this minute, at the Carnegie piano and Diana could teach me.) Sat there dropped in silence. "Something happened, I don't know what." Glad to be able to say it like that. What it's like is the flying heart - yes that's it - my heart flies to you. That means a sensation of having my chest open and having you somewhere at a distance being sighted by the opening. Conception of love which considers it a lush force that does for human beings the things they are too lazy or greedy to do for themselves instead of the call to battle it is. A moment in the dark, the two faces looking at each other angrily. What are you going to do about it? - stopping on the path. I've got my arms around myself and jasmine behind my ear. He steps aside and lifts his arms, alright if that's what you want I'm gone. - What did it say, it said what can I do, go and stay - and then I go home alone and the beautiful night isn't there. 24 It warned me of the moon. A stretched agony. Yesterday afternoon John Parsons in a sane cycle came out of the bushes (with his bedding on his back) to court me in the garden. "I'm the impulsive sort of guy who likes to kiss a girl right away." "Never mind that!" "I know, that's why I have to go away now." Small birds on the bok choy seed stalks, bees creeping upside down on leek flower balls, pheasant child beats up out of the grass and planes down as if already with the tail. Small birds say weep - no not really - untraducible. Cabbage whites flounder. Motherwort in spires. Oh the hollyhocks. Fireman's window scraper squeaks. When I look at any of these plants I seem to see, if I give it a moment, a confidence that shocks me - like the borage with its arms out glazed in light. This moment a poppy set into another dimension by its own shadows. That's lazy - it's clear red and clear white on the petal and then two shadows of other petals overlaid making one two three other shades. Hollyhock leaves agitating on the page. When I touched myself in bed it was in parts so acute it was almost pain. This time it was him. (I understand why you don't want to - what was the dream, he lived somewhere, I was at his wide house. Even that's guessing.) Oh full and empty. The sense of compulsion. Lying on the lovely fine sand and Michael his best, the feel of his back under warm cotton, but still when the time came I had to be at the garden - Is he here? He shows up just where I'm coming into the garden from the far side, smile comes up but he bites it off when he sees my face. It's very difficult. Then I hulk in my garden like someone in jail sitting and pacing. I have to be here, I could go. But then going to tell Aidan and there he is coming up the path. "Howdee." (Sure.) Do I have to be mean? No. "Hel-lo," and past but going back oh shit he does it again, three polite exchanges, politely off. Cursing, I won't leave, I'll outwait him. Alright do I want to cut the connection or no. Hm. And why. Because it's foolish. [David McAra. Has long black hair in a knobbed ponytail, what kind of eyes, blue in flashes, he's a tall straight thing, but elastic, and has a live bum and chest, wide thin hands on the ends of long arms, a slightly creased reserved face, but he's funny, he's got a reservoir of sudden turns. He has that kind wise humorous look, glasses at times. How does he dress, goes buys good tweeds and good white shirts, sometimes a tie, boots or baseball boots, cardigans with pockets. What's he like, he's so near, so right there close, he knows and shows and lots he won't say in words, but does. He'll feel a hurt and say it right there. He's brave to fight for the quality of his moment, bright and dark. Sees me and sees through me and says you're the one I want and wants to know the whole story before him. Says come think with me. Come see with me. I see better with you. Says I have to see with you where you were a child, I have to have you walk with me where I was a child. How does he make a living. He's a musician. Does he have a British accent, oh yes some. And likes to talk, and sings. How did he get his music. As a child. So lively and private a child. He could play anything. House on the edge of the village. Does he have a family. I become it. There's the house with a stone stoop but who's in it. A grandmother. His father the parson. He loves the grandmother. His brilliant sister Ginger. He went to London to college, but he didn't study music. What then. Science. A serious curious confident child in love with the fields. So if he's wonderful why's he lonely. He hasn't wanted to join the university. There are so many people he doesn't want to be like. But is he happy. He will be so happy to be happy. How has he stayed away from all the women who'd want him. I don't know. I'll ask. He has loved them in their limits, never imagined past what was true of them. He's ready when he sees the chance. How does it happen. He looks. From the beginning he just says yes and sets out to figure out how to have it. He's ready to wait but not longer than he has to. He invites me for a walk and wants to know things. He's silent and then he suddenly asks something. He doesn't plan to impress because it's obvious to him that I'll like him. Does he want to tell things. At time he wants to tell something so we can see it together. Do we grab each other. Not until it's clear. But there's never any suspense about whether we're going to. And then we go away and drive north and stop at an inn. We let ourselves be led. As we'll go on. What do you think, here? Right. In the dark, yes I think so too. Some supper in the pub, by the fire. It's winter, raining. We feel the current between the sides of our legs, we bask. Go up and don't turn on the light. Walk around the room from the bath. One is in the shower while the other is standing naked at the window. The beating of branches in front of a streetlight. Rain runnels down the wall. A fire a fire made up while we're below. He gets in bed. I stand for him to see, stubbornly. Alright I've seen, come here now. Lying beside each other looking at the fire looking at the faces on the pillow. He doesn't explain but I know this time it's straight in eyes open. A sense that it isn't the meeting but after, everything to follow is the adventure. He was taught violin by a woman in the village, after that self-taught, he wouldn't become a technician, learned the simple-hearted swoops. Later it was clarinet and jazz. He's persistent. Knows the shape of the life he's responsible for. Where has he lived. In a room. He had a room in Grey's Inn, top floor of a shop, an attic he rebuilt. It's all open and has a rooftop south over the lane. Not very big. A curious personal little collection of plants, twenty kinds of basil, a single hollyhock with balanced core, blue hyssop, anchusa, leek flowers with mint and motherwort, old things from the country. A winch. A Jeep he knows how to fix. He doesn't forget it's the universe around him. Does he know about pain? Very great pain. What about? Loneliness and limits. What does he do in pain. Feels it out for a while by himself, comes in to me and sits down and shows it and says, I am so sore. Cries. Lets me back him up. Cries in a restaurant with steamed windows. After a while I hold his hand, loving its shape and temperature. He's a tall thin person sometimes a little stooping in a loose black suit and white shirt and DM boots. Far-sighted, good for landscapes. A rapid logical handwriting. What's it like to hold him - oh silver - he's thin but his body's open all over. He's of the gentlefolk. Puts on his specs in bed. His bed moves around the room. The day after he meets me he has to rebuild it, he has to go to Scotland for the wood and has to incorporate a stone in it. Puts little drawers on my side. Asks me for a walk, and then, Will you come to my house. Saying the essential. Stopping the Jeep in the alley and going around the front, it's over a coffee bar, offices on first, second and third - up onto the roof, flags in gravel, a big mop of jasmine. Three green doors, French doors rattle, opens and goes ahead to poke up the fire, comes back and takes my wet coat to hang beside it. He's going to go down and fetch something, make a phone call, but really to leave me to see it. (Phone calls in an office downstairs.) The books under north windows, three feet of notebooks. No art, no mementos. A beautiful fine rug of creatures. Piano. Blue-green wood. Heavy big rugs for curtains on the south. Candle brackets. He's lit some. He's gone to get Indian food! Books. Reference. I sit on the piano bench, he comes in, puts the bag on the counter, sits by me with his coat smelling wet wool, plays Beethoven. I am his key. Then we eat, then we drink whiskey like rainwater and talk for six hours, then he takes me home, smiling luminously. What's it like waking. Like waking to fancy. He's awake already, sensing and loving. Today we fought about sex. I would never, I will never, broach you when you don't want, but this thing you do, refusing when you do want, I WILL NOT have with you. I will suffer what's true but I WILL NOT I will not suffer what isn't true. Grabs me and fights me to the moment where I give in to what he has already given himself to. I cry on and on, he holds my head in his hands and keeps on like waves, reliable. It's the first time it goes into the frightened dark of the hold of desire, he knows it, he doesn't abandon me in it, he goes on steadily through my terror because he has accepted to be responsible while I am helpless, he accepts with joy because of what it will bring us.] Daycare by the skin of my teeth. Teeth on edge talking to Susie Tang. They took it personally - pushy white woman - and have done what they can to make me go on in suspense. What to do with the Canada Council, was wanting 3 months unaccounted to be able to save three thousand for something - is there another way - filmstock from the NFB. - When it was day enough to start phoning, enough of that. Then he was the last of the phone calls, much to hear and some to tell, the wandering cats. Peeler cores. "It went up to the vice president lumber sales and came down yes." [I asked a lumber company for wood for an art project] Strained ease and loneliness and fun. 27 In the flyer meeting, meeting his eyes sometimes as if normally and it being always a little shock, it's you. 28 Oh the dream - woke me so sore. I dreamed tessera was out and Jam's piece was in with one of Rhoda's but mine was left out. What's the way to make him stop hurting me? Love it says. Please explain. Shared pleasure. I don't know I don't know why it's so sore and lonely. I'm good on the phone I talk to anyone quick and close I'm good on the typewriter the letters speak right near in their ears I'm good on the street having something for everyone to know I'm brown and bright and my hair is lively and my bum too I know what we should do and how to do it, I lead the people wisely and have all-day daycare and am loved here and there all through the streets - but oh ow why am I crying to be able to adore someone certainly not necessarily you to have that standing-open of agreed-upon respect. I am stressed, pulled, in suspense, and yes it's easy to take it as unnamed. Going to the garden and wanting to go home because it isn't there, no no it isn't there, what I must do is stop seeing the him as maybe the it - that one, no, blank that image's brightness it's not the maybe so. Michael, I need to say, the texture of his hair when I held it to cut it (though any day is dear), the smell of his sweat, an inward revulsion like touching something made from a maimed first cell. I took Mabel in her golf cart [Mabel Richards in her electric wheelchair] up and down off the sidewalks to the garden. "No no certainly not, I know that isn't how you do it in Saskatchewan, you can't fool me," refusing pink two dollar bill for rhubarb. Canadian history, labour history, a steady cosmopolitan way, but she kept offering me a ride in her chair in a way that chilled me. Another haunt. The way it was talking [to R] about moving bricks. "I'm not going to do it." "I didn't ask you to." Okay kid, got it. Like a wildly beating despair, where am I going to go to get out of here. I see ahead the garden shutting down. I don't any more want to work on it. I don't want to be trapped in pain with his refusal. Michael's dreadful head and the baby I don't like and hunger striking me down as soon as my body's well and somehow no means anymore to come into agreement to love. Reiner's letters before I junked them, fourteen to sixteen before the gates let me out. Family gates. Red-lipped decent Reiner plodding through thoughts and emotions suitable to his little circumstance. Asks me whether I've been skating or dancing, I kept up a flim-flam of femininity in absence, my thin leg like a secret we both know but it's not in the accounting - the barest poorest emptiest romance to keep me barely in courage, and from that saved by Frank my real friend. And who'm I going to find to save me this time. How far can I take the life with David McAra McCaraeg seeing where the parts come from. A little sniff of what it would be like to - Wanting to leave Michael and Rowen while I have money. If I do give over custody and welfare, birth certificate, can he get daycare? Funny how the life of the council fight is gone. I don't care, I'm leaving. What's the relation to it of pulling heart out of RM? I dreamed the garden was going to be down at the bottom. 3rd August It's eased, though there's a lonely ache still. Michael on the porch cried a tear and wiped it with Rowen's little red teeshirt. I don't look at him, he says. I didn't say it's because of how he looks with his hair cut, burnt red with his long head sloping toward a point like a dope. I said would he have Rowen for the whole next three weeks. That dried his tears. I cleaned house and then this morning it's early, empty, lonely. When I see him come in in his diaper I say Hello little duck, he says You big duck. No gra-bbing ca-ndy he says as we dock beside the store. Then he doesn't do it, for the sake of 'grabbing' I think. Rob at the meeting came in dirty, red-eyed from work in the sun, more creased than ever, and though I intended to be remote, I found myself more than once with him, and the whole time aware he might be able to see my breasts in the purple teeshirt. The other women like him too, he's the one of the men who isn't a drone. When I saw him creased up and tired I was immediately wanting to put love into him again. But David McAra, his smile like Robert McLean with long black hair, Robert when he's been a Buddhist for some months, eye creases and - Yesterday the immediacy of Richard Tetrault's lovely sexy mouth! Talking about posts fixated on it. One hundred posts, aye. Red and spirit pinwheel for each. [Opposite: Artists - Strathcona Community Garden wants your help in a fight with City Council. We're on 4 acres at Prior and Hawks in the heart of the Downtown East Side - allotment gardens, community orchard and a small urban wilderness with grassland, marsh and blackberry thicket. The land has been 'waste ground' since Vancouver was founded. City Council in disregard of history and ignorance of spatial value, and in response to political pressure from the business community, wants to sell off the part of the land we're done most work on for social housing. Between now and the rezoning hearing on August 25th we want to surround the threatened land with one hundred 6' posts stained red. We need one hundred artists each to make some kind of presence emblematic of our commitment to the integrity of the garden space -- a mask, totem, spirit guardian, scarecrow - to be mounted on these posts. They can be in any medium - waterproofed - able to be mounted by two or three screws, and one to four feet in diameter. They are needed as soon as possible, final deadline mid-August.] - New green pants - a good high waist - Trapline prints - Abbott and Tincombe - shopping in streets of white herd people, the people I live here [in Chinatown] to ignore - with strange foot halting naked in sandal under the long skirt hem. Long heavy peeler cores, fir. Hastings at night, Peter's grocery across from Midnight Madness Bingo. John Turvey made me cry the way he reached in his pocket and brought out half a dozen condoms for the woman in leopard skin tights who passed us on the way into the store. 4th We're somewhere at the garden which is like a homestead, small shacks. Two of us, the other side a couple, have our feet on Rob's shoulders. I'm aware of the claw [foot]. He's made a joke about it, shoeshine boys aren't skinny. At the end of this part we somehow get our arms around each other, kissing too but it's the thin random weak kind of kisses, flabby. Then he says his say: there's nothing I like about you, you're everything I don't like - intolerant is the one I remember, it had to do with being pushy and brutal. "I always felt you physically, but there's nothing else I like about you," said it the way he does when he's made up his mind. We're walking across the east fields toward home. You haven't mentioned one thing I've done. I was saying I'd been brutal to be able to get things done. He says the way Eric did that I didn't really do anything, nothing really happened until two months ago, meaning when he got going. I see then that it's a male power issue for him too - that really hurts me I say, but it's hopeless I know. I go on ahead alone. His balance and fairness too have turned out to be competitive blindness. But still, I feel soberly told off. The way at the meeting they were asking him and not me about planting things. He's gaining stature without brutality, ththo he does cautiously lie low and keep his mouth shut. Tarot says he and Paige are back in love - thinking of the story of how he locked up his bike and waited for her to bring him the key, and then she didn't have one, but he wouldn't break the lock until she got back. A squeak from Joann, Did you walk past in your jack boots? I brushed it off as one of those flies off the wall. She asked it again. A woman addressing the garden holding her baby upside down above her head, screaming we'd signed something. Had to stand up and try and rescue us from an accusation I didn't understand. Going past a place on the main road, David Rimmer's, but it's more and more elaborated in the back, I can see dining tables, it's a hotel, I go in sit down. The waitress knows me, a bit of bread a sip of milk, a lot of young blacks charge in, like an African soccer team. I decide not to leave enough money to eat there, leave the sipped milk and bitten bread looking untouched. 5th Hello today - Sortilege. Stones. That there is for a question a ratio of yes/no. Does Robert love me? The no right up against the question. Does Luke, more yes than no by 4 to 3. I bragged of strategy but am finding what it is to not have endurance. I do one thing a day and stop. It's 20 days only. I can't face the tension. La Glace school. Chinese old people with impassive faces pouring kerosene on furniture. I turn on the alarms - that's the recess buzzer - but there's no sound. They must be timed for later. And now the school is locked from inside, it has to burn, I can't get help in time. Trying to write Suzuki. "How he fought for the primacy of his own understanding." That academic life would be fighting - What now. Stretched and nearly immobilized. David McAra fights for my frightened woman. I go out furiously handsome to a meeting supposedly with Joann K. The philosophy professor. In the aft at Muggs's party Esther and Tom, Rowen with Adam and Perry through the house on hands and knees meowing. Rowen isn't forgiving me. "Michael coming to get me" he insists. Looks at me with a cold eye. I wonder if we are both making the decision that it is time. Robert Scott hasn't been in the garden for a week - it had been my plan to avoid him - ha. Diana with an art haircut and one silver earring, beaky and decisive. I took a good picture of her skewed deer face [mask]. 7th The way my garden has a spectacular early show and then stands there bare and miscellaneous for the rest of the summer. Is it better? Yes because I said my mind. I was blind with fright sitting on the leaves - couldn't look to see how it was taken - had my back slightly turned even - no I'm not going to say what I said or what he said. "I was trying to look tempting." "The horoscope kept saying wait for the 3rd of August, wait for the 3rd of August." "I'm not very good at this sort of thing." "What do you mean you're not very good, all it takes is to not get frightened and to stay straight." "It's been so mysterious and unspoken." And then for the first time in weeks I could sit in peace hearing the band of rain swept back and forth across the leaves, and sort of see a tiny bird standing, turning, on Mr Li's pea string. 8th Park Board with Muggs - CBC TV evening news - outside the board room mics in my face, "Can we start again? I'm not used to having so many mics in my face." KISS and CJOR, and Rob listening against the wall. (Through the evening I'm listening myself, hm, I think it's over.) Something about seeing myself on the news a carefully spoken thin-faced woman with a young voice, fragile, not bossy and gusty as I feel. Sexy? No, lyrical. 10th Girl in purple sweat clothes wearing oil of violets. Beautiful giant X's red down through garden's green. [peeler core sculptures] A world apart with Laiwan, I began my crying when the black woman curtsied a little bob, why (I know why). Stalks on the porch table, handful, taking them upstairs feeling what I would feel if they meant what I imagined, though I am free and easy a quiet love can still seriously flood. They aren't rocket but unscented cruciferae, wilted, some pods - radish, likely. Who brought them? Knight of pentacles. Was hoping for king of wands. Laiwan's friend Louie. 12th Friday. What exactly it was like speaking to Carole Taylor [of City Council]. First a surprise, did I call her? Why don't I remember whether I left my number. She says she's had a terrible week. I say I would've thought they were all terrible, absently, covering a scramble to put together a context. Her voice is like ours, the women I talk to on the phone. She uses my name, she's pleasant, I'm remembering Muggs's conversation and thinking I'll go along with the pleasantness to keep her talking. I'm puzzled, I say - this is overtop a beating heart there's not time to attend to, just keep going. Ha, she has spent some time, she's been tracking that promise, it has no legal status she said, but. A promise of which there is no record - a promise that has no terminus? It seems improper of the last Council to do that. It will never happen again! she says with real irritation at the spot she's in. I want to get further on. If we found a better place ... "John Jessup is a nice young man and he likes to be agreeable," a sense of picking my words less than dramatizing a sense of picking my words, for what reason, because I'm in rehearsed things about protecting sources and they aren't useful in this and what I'm really slowed by is picking my way through the rehearsals, yes. Which of Jessup's bosses. My impression is that it was City Properties. Her maze, I'm trying to talk through it, what an interesting exercise, all the time I'm trying to feel through her tone, no not tone, I'm trying to calculate from what she says to where she stands. She's genuinely annoyed. "Can I ask you a question?" "Certainly." (She's being what must have got her this far, and how far can it take her, a friendly beautiful woman not obviously calculating, calculating for instance less than I am - I'm having to calculate an allowance for her pleasantness, while being pleasant). "That's true," she says immediately when I say we'd already been there eighteen months. What I must do, the most important, is plant the notion of saving the situation by getting them a better site. Etc. Saturday My boy yesterday when I ask him how it went tumbles out (oo - the money's in the bank) his stories, standing about a foot taller than me and lisping slightly through his buckled teeth. "Then we go, 'What is this place?'" The cat hospital where there's a consoling room, they come out (putting his hands on my shoulders) and say, "I'm sorry, your cat has died." Bemused, my cat hasn't died or why do you have your hands on my shoulders. But his cat got lamed he doesn't know how and had its leg bones pinned. Both of us in the garden watering 'til it's dark, an evening with woodsmoke over the whole of the city, the red giants stalking down the field so beautiful altogether, so beautiful a red. I was walking home through night, Mrs Hsu's dahlias in my hand. There was a transport truck pulled over next to the garden, at an angle that said it was an emergency stop, the cab tilted forward, a man looking under it, woman standing by. I was first checking to make sure they weren't after the posts, "Do you need a phone?" She likes the flowers, "Do you want them?" She shows me her two kids on the hood of one of Glen's cars, actually huddling, as if it were 1943, a serious brushcut boy and littler girl. Sun I was lying in my garden imagining my cabinet [Aphrodite box]. Rob called from the leafpile. I jumped up in my red socks. There was a horse in the meadow, who stepped into the far ditch, or maybe ran into the red string, turned and bucked up the field, four times clicked his heels above his head. Rob at my shoulder. The horse turns at the top end and wanders back, browses in the wild edge. "It was like seeing a fairy." - I'm leaving somewhere, I'll just swim home to England, time to rest, island, a grey clean room with simple window onto a slope, wild turkeys in a strong high-contrast light. Ardvaarks with wings, so on, complexifying, rooms with stuff left by gone people. Mon Laiwan's Ubiquitous China piece immaculately carved, as she does things. Impressive. I was standing with it in her bedroom feeling from the second voice, hers looking at him, that Laiwan in her new sleekness with black underwear will find her way to a real marriage, because she has all her parts. There in her house, family, so many things put up around the walls. Thinking what Rob said about my house, bleak. Bleak? When I see Laiwan's house or Diana's it means the way I've given up family, all sorts of nest decoration, and even now the few little things I have up I'm thinking, take them down, they aren't telling me anything. So how do other people's houses work. I know they're set to impress and instruct visitors, why should I, who is there to impress. (That's bleak.) But they must also do something to the one in them alone, Diana's gives her color color color, Laiwan's gives her culture culture. I'd like mine to be cleaner and painted, that's all, some of the parts fixed. I'd like a $150 cooking pot. Yesterday on my way to the garden to turn off the sprinkler that had been going all night, leaning on the fence with Sheila, bicycle around the corner, it's fat Jamila in green pants like mine. I saw you two blocks away! she shouts in her sickening false voice. Was it the red posts? I shout at her back. What's new. Puer aeternus. I think inferior function must mean the way I fall in love, childishly and deep into imagery, the function that has to be hidden cause it's stupid - the way I meet people, how ugly, how lovely etc, in the simplest way, except in the garden where I deal with them. No it isn't stupid (here comes Dance of the blessed spirits! "overcome the dreaded furies with his music"), it's smarter than its materials. (I did that, David McAra was my music.) A pressure, wanting to get to Joyce, feeling my loves all emptied as if there had never been / never will be (but look at that Aphrodita, if I can get her onto the glass with the cosmos inside, Orion and space lattice), and as if making up what I'd most want will cost me all the real possibilities. Forty more years of longing without arms. In a whole lifetime only twenty years when longing can have arms! Is that how it is? What's happening with Rob. It's shrunk back to disregard. You gutless thing, I deserve somebody with size enough to want me. 16 Write off those in their surroundings and write off themselves too, a suicidal tendency in the unconscious. Like many women who feel themselves unloved she has in her bitterness sold herself completely to the animus. Having lost the capacity for love she falls for the power drive. Father animus a sadistic demon distorting instinct. A tori through which you go into the beyond. He did not keep them alive. I am not keeping them alive. 17 Was that his idea of intimacy - finally asked how old I am. Astrologist told him he'd have a rather significant climax this week. Told me to keep my liberty until Sept 7. I feel sad sorry grumpy idle and as if our work in the summer has all come out too late, my political energy is turned to sorry withdrawal. I'm hiding out in this and that, not doing. Yes I see that's a mistake and I have to just work this week. With Gretch in cherry van smoking to UBC, Suzuki's maze, doing until evening, Muggs phones growling with excitement (I must go tell Ellie) about Jim Green offering the Fisherman's Hall. I put on my grubby silk jacket, go down to see it, [and with] Michael my friend dad and pretty Rowen to CRAB beach. We see after a while two seals who after we saw them dive surfaced close to look at us. A steady grey face with a baby. Michael seemed so sane and known and kind, Rowen lovish. I come home and phone and my boy-boy is blatantly flirting, "You looked like a teenager lying on the grass." "I'm going to bed." "You're going to bed?" letting me know he'd decided I wasn't too old. Now what. Mysterious. "I've proved I could catch him so now I'll let him go." Sé's serious son in the grey hat playing slanted Irish tunes on a half-sized fiddle. To the degree that we live generously and discreetly, exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts gradually assume virtual royal power. "Coolness is the correct way to present yourself as a human being." It's raining. I come back on the plane, staggering into the Y, intending to wait 'til I'm beautiful, but I go onto the wet pavement, past the caffé bar, standing looking. The Jeep's there, someone out of the offices lets the door close slowly enough so I'm in. Smelling the smell I know, up through 1st, publisher's office, occult books, 2nd, booking agent, 3rd, don't know what. His door isn't locked and I go up slowly - a heavy door with reinforced glass, a fire door - up the stairs, upper door propped open so I see pink rain sky at the top of it. His curtains are open. He's there in white shirt suspenders bare feet at his drawing board beyond the Pither. Cat sleeping. I stand looking, or would want to but he senses me before he can see me, sits staring at what would be just head and shoulders against cloud. It's like a light growing in both. Staying still to know it. And then he comes not to the door but to the sliding window, and opens it and steps out, and looks and turns his face away, and looks, his joy too bright to see all at once. He unbuttons my coat. I keep my hands in my pockets. A sharp pain like wanting to wail, tears of rain. He holds the edges of my coat and pulls me near to smell. I smell the rain on his shirt, something from under his arms, and the smell of his skin. What does he smell like. Like all the longings, which are by now the only lovers I've had. There's in both a melt of desire so powerful it makes us gasp. He's shivering. Alright, inside, and close the window, and come by the stove, and take off your coat and your wet shoes and walk all around looking at what's new in my house. Have you eaten? Have some soup, I'll heat it. French bread and butter. By his drawing board there's the pile of my letters. On it there's an electrical drawing, he's inventing a circuit. Brings a chair to the fire, eats with me. Wants to know the flight, what were the clouds like, who was sitting by you, laughs, sees it all, brings more from it than I knew before. I start to lie back relieved and tired. He puts bits of music on. Says what he's been thinking. Plays what he talked about in his letters. Welsh. He sings something. Has just the candles. Says, Sing this. I do and he does. Oh the Bach. He said learn it and I did. Silence. We sang it from opposite sides of the room. Sleep here, please please don't go away again he says. Makes his bed and lays out his pyjamas for me. The steam bath is still hot. I go sit in it, he paces and draws. I come back and get into bed and he lets me stare until I begin to fall asleep and the little sound of his pencil scratching goes through me as if I were becoming transparent. 18th By the dictionary and the green cullet, Rob's long thin arms in front of us. He strokes the glass talking about a mosaic garden. "You get into the middle of it and it's enchanting." He says enchanting as if he's never heard it spoken. It's a moment so buzzing with gold we are as if making love by an infusion through our sides. There's his enchanting arm with its beautiful precision, gold skin, and his hair and sun redness and sapphire eye and Greek nose. I go along cautiously letting him be so I can follow him into himself. He talks about taking a transit course. He keeps talking. I listen to anything while that beauty is coming into me through a tiny contact of thigh and arm. Can it go on like this 'til dark? No, I'm sick with the need to eat supper. He doesn't seem to ever need to eat, that annoys me. 19 Over the rim of the table he was reading
while I was saying something. I could feel him gape. Are you reading something?
aphrodite's garden volume 9
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