| aphrodite's garden volume 9 part 1 - 1988 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
19 August 1988 Aphrodita kepoi sou boithi [written in Greek alphabet] [Aphrodite box made of mirrored bathroom cabinet painted red on the outside and dark blue inside] 7 stars of the dipper in windshield chips from the alley stuck on with Krazy Glue, painted clouds, a little box with poppy-seeds and pheasant feathers, two up, one under and a fourth in reflection on the glass shelf. How was it today. Sun reporter. Later the photographer wanting me peering through Max's big orange things. "Should I take off my shirt?" More feeling he says. "The feeling is embarrassment." Uneasy and euphoric. I did what I wdn't've wanted to do. What did I imagine. A real picture in my garden. He had ten minutes to grab a photo that looks like a newspaper photo. Stand here, get in a little closer, look through the flowers. He's trying for the backlight. 20th Saturday Hello little heart. There was doing all day, satisfying, interesting. Polemical letter this morning, flyer-delivering up into strange lives. Putting up red posts with Glen, Richard and Doyle. Aphrodita slanted on a post (feeling her there by herself in the dark). A little duck for the handle? "Now we have to bring her presents." Urgent, johnny jump-ups and some red ribbon probably. I began to say, Blue-eye, satisfying doing (sitting in Muggs' house as they fold Chinese inserts, Stan, Bob, Gretchen, the inserts pile, we get to be together in common crisis, in night kitchen) and you all day too. Last night falling asleep I was suddenly in the garden, my eye suddenly catching you in your plot and you looking up exactly so - startling so I jumped out of the vision. 22nd Monday Alright heart go on glad, but don't bug him 'cause Tim told him he was just sposed to work. Oh it goes on. I bring Muggs the $650 from Environment Canada. "You raised this money." "Marianne Pengali got it for us, I love her." The way we say things to each other. I'm at the garden in heaven's light, evenings the way we meet, he's moving a dolmen, the truth is I saw from far away a fall of hair behind the shed, boots and shirt set together. Eric keeping me with his story abt almost getting me a piano. ("Welfare bum looking for piano to give to single mother on welfare who's not a bum."). While I'm longing to get to him, smoke rolling from a new fire in the direction of Michael's house, sirens, one and then another. "Did you lose your elastic?" He shows his wrist. Then Jean and her beautiful friend, then the rabble of the marchers for killed hookers, a sound I hate, marching screams, and a yellow sky so beautiful it is like seeing aliveness. What was he talking abt, holy stones for tourist attractions. No I won't do that to your holy stone though I'd like to visit. It brings us near: Esther, Richard, James. 23rd Clear summer again, earliest dawn. Why am I so much with you? (You don't know.) "A piece of land to love." So much in the day. Phoning, Commercial, bike zipping, afternoon CBC 6 o'clock news, Province reporters, Carnegie to see it in the seniors' lounge, garden to tell Rob, Greek Maria and Sheila to show Aphrodite, Esther decompressing loudly, plump breasts bottled in a bodice, meantime the sky incandescing, Rob waiting is he for her to go. It's not a time when we can get nexted, no, but we see the evening all the way through, a meteor before it's dark, streaking spark gone out before we stop seeing its appearance, three stars summer triangle, that then became Cygnus in Alberta. Moon was white in pink, yellower and higher in dark blue, so on, the little mountain ash standing as they will all through the night by themselves. Enough. But are we playing chicken. As if I'd have to make the first move and I'm not going to. 24th This time my line on the news was given with head tossing and contortions, wildly, "The posts signify our commitment to the garden, to the whole of the garden, but also they are lucky Chinese happy red." Alright, this night I'm in the garden with Rob, as if getting ready to go on a journey. I've pulled up some of Michael's carrots and am washing them. Michael and Rowen show up, I don't want him to see the carrots I've taken, but he's as if announcing a disaster coming, nuclear attack maybe. And then, maybe then, some other time in the dream, I'm on the road looking for my friend and my child, I don't know whether they're behind or ahead of me on the road, I'm labouring both ways, for years, but it's hopeless. In it all I'm carrying the image of the one I love, a thinfaced man with an elfish French look, very fine features. After years of ordeal I come to an ashram where a western boy with an eastern name is sitting teaching, a crowd around him. I've come to be taught presumably but I'm looking to see whether the teacher is the one I love. But my one is there in the crowd. I stop and stare. The stopped face at the edge of the crowd catches him. He hurries out and holds me, something he's never done before. There's good order in the ashram, files. Outside a bier, it seems. In the court and at the bottom of a slide as if for water, large red box covered with a cloth. She lights it. What's in it? Only cardboard boxes she's getting rid of. They burn up and we find a child who hid herself there to sleep, a little girl with curly golden hair. She may be the child I lost, no way to know. I'll take it she is. We bring her in to the thinfaced man. There are a lot of children. I realize it's years later, she's one of them but there's another older daughter a serious girl who looks like her father, and about 4 sons. Then there are pictures of the people this story really happened to, they look Jewish, a heavy fish-mouthed woman with aggressive breasts, and a dark thick man. So what am I doing and what are we doing and is there a clue also about Agnes Thom, Puil and Bellemy's indignation. He got suddenly looser and lighter when he was saying, Some people are eating eggs and some people are saying, ugh I hate eggs. And the people who are nervous with our red posts. The way when I'm seducing reporters I offer them hyssop, bergamot, basil, jasmine. The merchants want to be let into our garden, is that it? We're saying go live in Chinatown, you'll spoil the garden, you'll take its openness. The frozen orange gay man who came yesterday, saying maybe they could be down there, where so many bad things are happening, hookers and drinkers and shit and fights and garbage being dragged in. I thought to say, Hey you could help us. R dreamed wolves in a cave, OO scary, he says, like a kid who likes to be scared. Wolves? I say, In my dream you said they were alright. Lupercalia Feb 15 fertility. Wulf, loup-cerrier, Canadian lynx, ruthless beings. 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. Soul being called Aphrodite because of the beauty and brightness and innocence and delicacy of soul. So that the soul by a kind of delight or intense concentration of the vision and by the passion of the gazing generates something from itself which is worthy of itself and of the vision. And is this love which they say accompanies each of us, the love, that is, that belongs to each of us? - Written love is like self programming, recursive, and does what. I know what. Alchemistry. By tonight it crashes. I'm composing my resignation. Then what's left. As if all links would go. I crate my plants and send them to Carole Taylor. Here, I have no further use - Is it punishment. I could dig in for the herb garden, move our night down there. What's the worst that'll happen tomorrow. Their side will be ugly and mine will be as ugly and bad arguments will convince. And the rich beautiful people will regret sincerely and the rich ugly people will sneer, the poor ugly people will insult, the poor beautiful people will hope ineffectively. 25th today
26th next day What's the headline. I went up to speak without knowing what I would say. Held a pause. That was interesting. I got silence. - Oh! The best was, like for Muggs, my lot applauded when I went up. That made it possible for me to stand there in silence 'til I knew what I was going to say, and then later, in the stream of speech, I was so little divided from what I was saying, was that it? that I only fractionally could notice the way it was. I can't recover it. I don't know if it was good but it was commanding. It was beyond anything I've ever done. I put myself at the mercy of silence and they were at its mercy too. And. Is this the same thing? It was so beautiful a one ("Does this run in the family?") and on so loving a one. What else, a sweet night not at all wide but very close, a face I didn't much like to see, or, a face I was loving while not liking to see, so rapt a patience of holding. "Ruthless hunger." There's something unreal and at a remove, maybe it was what came, the moment he found out it wasn't a right leg only shorter. A blank of pain. I don't want to face you. It was pain and also patience, whatever it is I'll want to know it. He didn't meet it there, buying time maybe. Oh supervisor how did you know that about him. "It's nice standing with you." "It's amazing." Should I talk about the hearing too. It was your fans says Michael. A room full at first, emptier later with the wild ones of us pacing. That will have to stand for it. I'm here in my bed mooning. You're industrious talking to bee people. Aeroplanes plowing the hills. Then it breaks another way, at the garden seeing the space wrecked, angry at the man who said we should give up, then angry at James for wanting the same. What's beautiful about it. It's straight flared broad doesn't fall over. Why am I going on about it. Because here's somebody who's clean and smells his socks before he puts them out the window, doesn't smoke, doesn't frighten me, says his own part, tho' in a squeaky voice, what else, lies so lightly in my arms I could hold him through an hour of sleep, in a passion of love, what he inspires is love, mysteriously. "How did he get my number?" At the hearing I was looking across the room at him saying [drawing of hearts]. What else, see it preserves me from feeling the loss of my garden. And the way the remainder is carried over from Michael. 27 Thinking about what we did and how. Music - Hello heart. So simply gladly the feel of you. Your hands are less interested than mine but your bone's between us like a parcel with a necklace in. I wdn't put too much language in tho' I will have my own as much as I like. 29 Frank's house a small field of pasture, house still unfinished, the never-finished farmhouse, furnace under it, two children with thick legs and heads like dwarves. The feeling - there I went to imagining myself with R in outside contexts - of smallness, deformity, wear, incompletion, being out of place, depression. Monday, what's to do. Jim Green. Steven. Write something. Set up a planner. Park Board. Alpha Cine. Libe. Enter Edmonton festival. But the secret meaning is, when a spirit wants to catch you, it'll first make you sick. Then if you take notice of what the spirit wants from you, and let it enter you and change you, it will tell you the right way of doing things, from inside, whether it's gardening or hunting or doctoring. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities, we will find our proper counterpart. Your heart tells you. Marriage is not a love affair, it is an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego. I read that in the library and went hot. Got money out of the bank and bought beautiful clothes, camisole, cotton sweater, black pants, such good things. This evening the hot yellow in a flare above sundown. I'm baking in desire, stewing. "A passion larger than its object." You're not doing this I know. Not as much. "Beautiful and intelligent and charming" as if you'd decided to assent to a reasonable asset column. So who did my math. The supervisor. My ache = your thing. Where are you, thing. I won't phone, no. A person describing learning to see auras. Turning bodies into colored light, I'd like - 30th Laiwan says carefully, You have a very fertile fantasy ... your delight childish but ... I could see it about you when you used to be with Jam. 1st September Which of the moments to say, from suffering fire and planning endurance, to the knock on the door and the high school boy in a jean jacket. And night's man. He can fall asleep and it's still there. Did I make it up, his man. More than I would've asked for. Hands light and warm with a deeply comforting dry rasp. And then it's today outside, NFB, the New York boy crosses over smiling and speaking. I seem to know a lot of Roberts. "You know where I'm from, Grande Prairie!" "Trying to write." Yaeger, a farm five miles out on the Fort Saint John road. Looking me up and down very frankly. 2nd Ways he's a goon. On the phone he says hey-lo, when he leaves he says baaa. He came in tired and sat on waiting for the garden to cool, nattering till I quit. And his hands looked childish. His nose and mouth are squeezed together into a rodent snout. And I hope the condom didn't leak. [Opposite, film notes:
what's passing now past a still point a medium of exchange Something staying still passing something on. Something accepted as an entity to exchange. Something is still / something is moved / something does the moving. The blue visibly passes through - points to something passing through - the black seems to flow oppositely - then what is holding still? The frame is.] 3rd [draft of notes in origin notes] As if what's read or said is held up on the left for a spatial gaze on the right, to judge - Spatial gaze means something like feel but it is a space that is empty, like a gaze - a spatial pattern registers in it - which is to say, it doesn't take the pattern in, it leaves it where it was, but it forms something in relation to it - and this happens in spirit, ie as a transparent form of judgment. Structural learning is done this way. It is the reception area for ESP stuff. The way I've held on to not specializing, wanting a brain of a certain kind. Reading this stuff watching for where the wrong sense of 'nature' is working. "Nature is messy." ! Is brain damage always. Why are we having to work so hard to be caught up with what we are? Why am I? Because consciousness isn't designed for comprehension? "The machine language of the brain." Electromagnetic field configurations. As if I have access to the machine language, which I learn by seeing nature move. Perception that doesn't generalize, although naming does. Ratios of generalization. Fineness of grain. The stone film isn't sandstone it's sand, ie two levels of grain movement. There needs to be a motion through, and maybe other levels. Now you are about to experience the clear light, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the mind is like a transparent vacuum. Ropes of sand. Black and fade out, v strong light, or a v grainy over, polarize water so only sand is moving. California. Ralph Abraham, U of C Santa Cruz, mathematician. "The current scientific revolution will synthesize the whole intellectual discourse of the species." Chaos cabal - Rob Shaw physics, iterations, SC dynamical systems collective, Shaw has movies of 'strange attractors' on cathode-ray screens. Doyne Farmer - a bunch of dots, over the course of time it makes a shape Cal Tech John Hopfield, biophysicist, math model of 100 neurons, memory and unlearning Arnold Mandell U of Cal San Diego, biological psychiatrist, Inst for nonlinear science Jack Cowan U of Chicago, computer simulations of symmetry breaking Ilya Prigogine [chaos] chainein to gape, yawn "A boiling matrix, a soup, the DEEP, Tehom, Temu, Tiamat, chaos, the dissolve between universes"
- Hekate and frogs Titania as crone Absorbed in natural motion - we are taking in the laws by which the universe is organized - we take them in by a faculty other than language. Nature self-organizing, the organism is a theory of its environment. The same mathematical laws apply to brains and to turbulent fluids. Perception can handle more complex wholes than naming does. Maybe perception at some level doesn't generalize. Feigenbaum numbers Electronics - math - acoustics - optics Hegel - Wittgenstein - tantra - Plotinus What I'm aiming for is probably a PhD in philosophy, a theory of imagination, advocacy of self-organized universe and intelligent perception, done in a way so body stays right and soul isn't stuck in argument but travels in space. 'A space' a quality of consciousness. [notes in origin notes: a profound intuition of physical motion rapt in face of natural motion of water, air, light a unique sensitivity to natural motion rapture in the - silence - stillness in the face of natural motion fine-grained sensitivity to natural motion a profound stillness in face of natural motion On a lake of ice tufted with white frost feathers, a swan left out of the migration floats downlight, flicking her wing, turning her head to look at the camera. Quietly, quietly attentive, and image of the mind of the film beginning. This image dies. A number 2. It's a demonstration, then; these are facts. Second fact. Is there going to be an image? Only an ember at the left-hand edge. Which shakes and grows. The moon climbing at its own speed of two and a half minutes per diameter struggles comically to be born into the frame. The filmmaker helps it in, lets it jump partway and speed the rest. Out in the open broadly confident in an envelope of incandescent air. 3. Fades and dies. Chalk, made of visible particles, as the images all are. Birds, like a handful of grain thrown up into the grain of evening pink. Birds there, and gone. Grain there, and gone. 4. The pink again, a ground of ice so white it's green, and a display of poplar showing how the whole stand is one bush of crossed branches, beating like a heart. The pink light and the poplar brush, are beating, why, because the filmmaker is showing in what she saw: the parts are there to see, but does anyone see them? This ice in the foreground is a membrane like a microphone's, attached by its edges and, at the center, where the tripod stands, it takes up the filmmaker's heartbeat through her boots, amplifies it, transmits it through the tripod into the scene, an invisible, a transmission. 5. Now the pink is the window frame, again we're looking at an equation - this window edge, through which can be seen a strip of the real outside, is being equated to these shadow prints of invisible windows, where a movement shows without its source, abstracted, is seen abstracted from its source. It is saying, Ellie Epp marvels at how much can be seen. 6. Again. 6 is 5 in another form, a wall on which is projected something from outside, the motion of spruce branches in a breeze, something from inside - the shadow of a wood stove and the finely turbulent shadow of warm air rising around it. And something on the wall itself: specks become flies when they suddenly rise, separate from their shadows. The way they huddle in the sun's warmth tells us what season we are in. This shot is the only one that divides in two. This is where we see the flies. 3. In spring's blue light a field is giving off its spirit, crowds of spirits, moving from a hub somewhere - armies, fluid armies of spirits flowing out of the ground. They come toward us, they flow past. Spring breakup. Snow melted by sudden heat sublimes directly into the air, is caught into the air so rapidly it shows as flowing armies of mist. 8. Ah. It's a formation of cloud traveling slowly down the screen. Not a cloud-signifier, an actual field of cloud showing how it moves and changes. This is a sort of knowing that impresses me. Inside the screen a love reshapes, becomes whiter, a whitening of bliss like other whitenings we've known. 9. Green, red, wood grey, in summer's bleach. Something is beating through vertical stations. It isn't seen, but it is inferred. A shadow is seen, which contains a reflection of green. There's motion in narrow frames, as before, the flowering nettle bowing supple-ly, long-dead wood of the porch floor swarming with grain. And in final 10. All this is taken elsewhere, we're up against those porch slats that have become vertical stripes, with something changing, the whole light. What was the image is nearly holding its breath, now consciousness itself is brightening, dimming, and in the end it dies. Slowly enough so the dark is briefly burnt with an after image. Physical intuition of - Not experimental, documentary, in that they want to see and show some real thing. What they want to show is the qualities of natural motion, and then beyond that the experience of how much can be seen, a state of speechless seeing. It has to be seen, it can't be thought, but seeing becomes intelligent. What I like in film is precision, slightness, economy of means, delight, inference, and a kind of motion that can be followed but not tagged, and makes seeing intelligent. Notes in origin made in and near a farmhouse in northern Alberta, takes the structural findings of trapline to a new edge. The way 8 is like 10 and 9 is different from 10. Porch porta gate] - a current of material current of energy - is a wave current of state contagion contact perfusion diffusion shells of an electron excitable positions quantized communications a magnitude/frequency ratio the constant h - hv - action and frequency a quantity of energy That an atom not only had a kind of localized heart of stable matter but also broadcasts an expanding pulsation forever in step with it and extending all over the universe. Individual constituent phase waves might move still faster, inevitably in some nonmaterial way. Psi the mysterious essence of mathematical space - The blue is passing right to left: it indicates something unseen passing right to left. The black looks as if it is passing left to right. What is standing still? The frame. Consciousness. A drawing back to see more of it. Reactance. In a circuit the opposition to an alternating current caused by inductance and capacitance, reaction. Matter is what's here, around. Soul is the same thing thought of as experience. It is not inside/outside, it's a difference of set between doing and being. It isn't alternate but relative. 'Biocomputer' parallel processing computers and computational networks Bronowski yes a brain can be a machine and a self, 'nature' makes the machine and experience makes the self. "The brain is a little saline pool." Action potential yes/no. Sodium and potassium that ultimately polarize and depolarize. Prefrontal cortex "only part of the neocortex that looks inward to the inside world." Three interconnected biological computers each with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory. "Partial representations." Vocalization, play and childcare. That maybe it's the limbic that gives the sense of truth and reality. Memories and waking dreams. Eccles "We can regard the minor hemisphere as having the status of a very superior animal's brain." "An underlying sense of statement arises in Wernicke's area, whence it travels to Broca's. There a vocalization program is formed and transferred to motor cortex." Anomie - temporal parietal. Inability to recognize faces, underside of occipital up into the temporal. Universal grammar. Chomsky. Deep structure of language is inborn. If there is a universal grammar it would be structured according to earth laws and thus universal laws. There's a topography laid down but the fine-grained map is not fixed - using something a lot extends it within the map. Making the maps more or less plastic. "I see memory as an extension of evolutionary development", ie they're both weaving by choices. Middle-aged rats same enrichment as very young. Arnold Mandell, deep error in computer metaphor. Opiate receptors in the limbic, emotion, yes, but what is it when it's in the visual system. Agonist mimics. It's the Newtonian view that you have to push the ball to make it move but much of nature, including this complex compression of bonded electrochemical jelly, the brain, moves by itself.
Damage to the limbic-cortical circuitry Frontal lobes are off - PET Machine language and programming language, "very complex electromagnetic field configurations, with v fine modulations in amplitude, frequency, waveshape, and spatial distribution." Signal processing to recover something specific from noise Stimulation of pleasure centre turns off pain center. Septal area. Can be done from cerebellum. Large amp waves vs spikes. Acetylcholine straight into septal - intense sexual Serotonin depends on rank among other males - it depends on submission from others. Within two weeks the male favored by the females will be dominant. Violence is connected to serotonin deficiency. Suicide. Serotonin is inhibitory. Connection of motion and emotion, through cerebellum. Women have richer connection between cerebellum and 'higher' centers. "A reality so fine-grained" perception doesn't generalize although naming does. Temporal lobes dreaming states, reveries, déjà vu, strangeness, time recovery flashes. It seems reasonable to suppose that the record is complete and that it does include all periods of each individual's waking conscious life. Hebb and cell assemblies or neural nets for specific memories. Episodic memory and language fact memory can be lost at different rates. There can be memory without 'memory' Procedural for instance, knowing how Imagining different memory systems, 'habit' that can be learned w/o awareness Blindsight, instrumental Because a synapse has a direction time order is built in. "We get these spurious things, which are produced by the correlations between memories. It just starts doing it." "If we built habituation or fatigue into the neurons, so they turn themselves off if they've been on for a while and turn on if they've been off for a while, the memories are no longer absolutely stable. The system starts going from one memory to another. It will just naturally free-associate." Right hem knows but can't say. Mostly this is experienced as not-knowing. A separated right hemisphere. It seems to be Eccles who insists. "A lesser consciousness dwells in the mute right brain, to be sure, but the absence of linguistic or symbolic communication at an adequate level prevents this from being discovered. It is not therefore self conscious." Gestalt perception, a synthesist Broca's and Wernicke's speech areas mirrored by areas for perception and expression of feeling Propositional - oppositional or comparative Meaning structure in right hem very rich - humor, metaphor, nuance. A general meaning but not usually the exact word. Left tuned to time, right to space Testosterone - stunted left hem, immune diseases, learning disorders Right hem to learn needs "exposure to rich and associative patterns" Left hem false explanations to perceptions of right hem Anxiety at times when the two hems have different judgments Is said not to be able to make inferences, a fast match/mismatch detector Most multiples are female - a child self, opposite sexual self, obsessive-compulsive self, depressed self, charismatic - one who is the link or bridge and has all the memories The child goes into trances and that consciousness becomes more autonomous and differentiated
6 Now I really am phallomedes. - [sketch of garden redesign] Dream to look at. Sitting with Rhoda quite friendly looking at something on the wall. It's absorbing. Something with a geometric press through it, coal color, bituminous. I see it's a tire tread. It had their quality of (saying any of this choosing my words as if there's danger of putting myself into the stupid category) mysterious source, something new to see, a new seeing. Jam looking ugly saying she doesn't like the Aphrodite painting's colors. I say staunchly I can imagine she wouldn't, meaning, it's because it's Aphrodite. She says she does like ----. Ditto. Looking at her repelled. Yesterday Ellen and T and R and Max in Max's garden path. Yes dreams do fan out the folded-up sore. Max smiled at me the garden comrade, Hi how're you doing, and I have the choice to slide under myself or to hurt her. A straight look seeing her feel the snub, and then that cold turning the head to Eric who was talking on without noticing. Today at the garden I feel the way she doesn't look at me. Sore on both sides. I could say, what? It's not discussable. It's not personal Max but you're bringing into the garden what should be kept out. Then his boot in the belly. Is that the way it's going to go on? 7 Meeting. The crisp people, Jean, Tanya. I come ring David's bell, a plastic button with a light, that upstairs is wired to the sound of a match drawn over sandpaper and lighting. He sees down over the parapet and runs down to let me in. One look. Someone's kicked you in the belly. Follows me upstairs, makes me a medicine tea. Come here. Lies on the carpet with me keeping his hand on my solar. The tea puts us nearly to sleep. Sun at the windows is gold buzz that comes into us all through, with other little lights that we see moving. We follow them through to the clear light, the great untinted open day light. What is it about the Edmonton show - I won't get in? 8 I seem to be a material easy to charge. The valence orbit isn't full, my electrons are easily stript. Or alternately I can easily take on excess. When I'm stript I'm 'positive' - the core overwhelms the shell, other people's shells are pulled toward me. What kind of people? People whose shell overwhelms their core. Or balanced people. Other people with more core than shell shd be repelled. There's a twist which is that a material can be balanced but unstable. The balanced state is by definition unstable. When I've inadvertently grabbed someone else's shell, I'm 'negative' and needing to find someone to give them to. That person will be either a neutral or a shell-stript. What's Michael. He's 'hungry' but does that mean too much shell or too much core. I'd say too much core. So he's 'positive' and needs to attract shell from me. Then shell is hardness and core is 'heart'. So balance would be inner love and outer refusal. Rob is 'negative'. In relation to me it means he has more charge in his defense than I do. It also means he needs to give out refusal. I wait for him to dispel his extra -- that he got from me, and I build up more -- of my own, but then it occurs again, my -- goes to him, he has too much, I have too little. It means he's maybe keeping himself in a state of starvation in relation to his core. And Michael would be keeping himself in a state of starvation in relation to his shell. That makes sense. These atoms can choose imbalance. Flow is always from shell, but pull is always from core. Choice means basically an override on homeostasis. It's the love in people that pulls you toward them but that pull is paradoxic because in fact their substance is flowing into you. 'Free' = giving off substance and attracting love. What is the substance given off, what is the effect of giving it off. It's physical energy and giving it off attracts more. 9 The coo and mutter of pigeons, no really doves. Rhodon was in fact a word from Persia. Alberta wild rose. Myrtus communis, murtos, in Rome offerings on April 22. Watermint. Quinces. Aphrodita skotia of darkness, melainis black. Wen to win, to want, to strive for. The force in spells and prayers, the force of achieving desire. Now, lady bright,
"My heart does beat for you. When you're at the garden I notice almost right away, and I notice hardly anything else after that." 10 I spend a night seething physically, my friend falls asleep, I wake him turning around, then there's morning still craving and far off, and then there's the sun in the chair, finally soft, my hair a light pile of rainbow filament on my arm. He comes into it too. I brush out his long bright mane, looking down onto the brightness of the skin on his nose and temple. We look into Canaletto's pictures. Doze. That's when finally I'm satisfied. Breaths come in and leave together. "I can't figure out why I love you." That was in the dark grey light of the open sky before dawn. "That's what I can't figure out either." But he knows it. Laughing joyfully at the three definitions of doting. Trees dote when they decay. Doty. Michael dreamed this afternoon: he meets me on the road and slaps my cheeks. It gets more violent and he says to himself, no, go away, and goes off into a building with complicated rooms. But it seems he's always arriving back at me on the steps being hit again. Somewhere else I come in with my face black and blue. The black and blue looks like makeup but the tears are real. I'm saying it was his fault. He was supposed to take me somewhere and didn't, and so I got beat up in an alley. He thinks it's a weak story, feels good, he's not really implicated. He finds Rowen in a wet marshy place and carries him to dry ground. - Rowen at Crab Beach peaceful, as I am, plays in a tiny stockade. I make a tent. Pieces of bark. Chips floated there from axework anywhere on the coast. Tiny chips are people. They go in the tent. The cook calls them for lunch. What do they have for lunch? Jelly fish. He wipes out the stockade. Catastrophe. Get them back in the tent, bring a boat. Lay them down in the boat and take them to the doctor. What happened? Did you get an owie? For once I wasn't raging, the water was there breathing calmly choppy blue. Toothache geese were swimming for pleasure near the shore, and then docked in a series and went up the cobbles on legs, except for one who first delayed and then had to help himself with scoops of wing, a bad leg. An Indian couple was sitting on a log when we came, with a little ruffled kitten. Rowen came carrying it against his rabbit sweater. It was trying to climb the chain link wool. He carried it back and they put it into a red daypack and went home. "For dinner" said Rowen.
I'm Aphrodite and Hephaistos. a yellow-coated pomegranate, figs like lizard necks, a handful of half-rosy part-ripe grapes, a quince all delicate-downed and fragrant-fleeced, a walnut winking out from its green shell, a cucumber with the bloom on it, pouting from its leaf-bed, and a ripe gold-coated olive - dedicated to Priapus friend of travelers, by Lamon the gardener, begging strength for his limbs and his trees 12th Uneasy about M's emotion, is he going to go ape. Wanting to smooth it out ahead. It's because he doesn't want to be in my mind because it's bad for him - he says - but cries. 13 [with Joyce] "I had a moment that I thought might be what you meant about loving myself. It was a sense of loving my destiny. I was saying to myself, isn't it amazing that I get to be this particular life." (That isn't exactly what I said, I don't have perfect recall anymore of what I or others say.) But it brought a flood of feeling into my face. "That moved you" she said. "Yes." After the stories of wonders and successes, "So where's the edge now" she says. "Is there an edge?" smiling. "There's always an edge." Then about not liking Rowen. "Does it still have to do with Jam?" Solar caught fire. "I'm a-tremble." "It's easy to be successful." "I flunked out when I loved." Etc. Squatting with Josie beside the hyssop in the dark. 14 A script in deep love. Voices. Continuing in the dark. So all the loves can be in one. It is to RM because that's where it's deepest, but maybe it transfers. The garden map and what it means. 'Social housing.' What everybody has to say, everyone's map. "One goes on existing at the cost of a shocking loss." How different ones are more willing to accept the loss. 15 This night - I brought myself first, through such acute genital feeling I had to hang on inwardly to keep going. Then was lying flat starting to dream when I heard the bicycle. Jumped to the window and smelled the fresh wet air. Good. Jumped back in bed. I play courtesan in a solipsistic way, little charms and favors I think he actually doesn't like, as if they're deferential, are they, they're 'cause I want to feel femmy, why, like twenty-four, it's balancing, I'll watch it but not stop it, for instance making my bedroom lovelier again, thinking of Camille feeling its strippedness as loveless and it was. And then this smooth long body, so skeletal at the hips that I'm embarrassed to touch him there. I love it when he comes. He suddenly grabs control and creaks and folds. I like it because he's suddenly himself. In his other fucking he is still waffling. I'm not complaining, no. For now I'm not complaining of anything. He did. As he left for work, I on the porch, he loading his bike below, he touched my toe to say 'bye. I got down on the dewy boards, he chinned himself holding the porch rails, for 2 kisses between the bars. "I feel like a prisoner. Let me out." But they were good kisses. I'd like to make the herb garden now, now - maybe the plans - The sandstone is in a way the brain - "has been faultlessly oxidized and covered with a delicate film" I want to know, what's the diff between subliminal and conscious reception. And that system is the looked-for lover "a mediator between ego and the total uncon."
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